
There’s a Huge New Corporate Corruption Scandal. Here’s Why Everyone Should Care - pvnick
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/unaoil-bribery-scandal-corruption_us_56fa2b06e4b014d3fe2408b9
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ptaipale
An incredibly irritating click-bait headline. Why can't they say what
corporation has done corruption where? They could provide the essentials with
fewer words.

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wpietri
I agree that the headline is irritating, but your solution isn't the right
one. The firm is obscure, so the name doesn't belong in the headline. It's
also not really industry- or country-specific, so they can't mention that.

The interesting parts are the corporate corruption and its mechanisms, the
government corruption that causes, and the political instability that flows
from that. That in turn affects the world. But given the HuffPo's audience, my
guess is that "corporate corruption" is the hottest topic; it's certainly the
most obvious and most clearly illegal bit. So click-bait style aside, it's not
a bad headline.

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mikeash
There is an easy and obvious way to vastly improve this headline without
making it any longer. Delete the second sentence. Done. This removes no
information, while eliminating the shady click-bait tactics.

~~~
wpietri
I think that line is a gesture toward the complicated geopolitical
implications of bribery of this kind and scale. The goal is to personalize it,
so that people will realize its relationship to them. Often, business news is
seen as irrelevant to individual lives, but this article attempts to tie it
back.

That's not to say that the headline couldn't be improved. Just that from the
headline writer's point of view, there is utility in the second sentence.

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mikeash
I'm pretty sure the goal is to play with people's psychology to get them to
click. If the goal was to show the relationship to the reader, there are much
better ways to do it.

That last bit seems tautological to me. Of course there's utility in the
second sentence from the headline writer's point of view, otherwise they
wouldn't have put it there. The issue with "clickbait" is that the headline
writer's utility diverges from the reader's utility.

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nickkline
Headline aside, I thought it was an excellent story. The company, Unaoil, is
the least important point I took away from the article. I can't believe the
fundamental connection between corruption and radicalization isn't reported on
or discussed more frequently. It seems like the rise in extremists groups is
blamed on the 'vacuum' left by an invasion or an overthrown government. When
describing the gradual sympathy for the Taliban by "moderate, normal people"
in Afghanistan: >"At the top of the list of reasons cited by prisoners for
joining the Taliban was not ethnic bias, or disrespect of Islam, or concern
that U.S. forces might stay in their country...At the top of the list was the
perception that the Afghan government was irrevocably corrupt."

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tdaltonc
My biggest Takeaway from Heinlein's Starship Troopers was that a stable
society has to be very good at subverting the energies of ambitious people
into prosocial activities. And the only way to do that is to make sure
prosocial activities are the best way for ambitious people to get what they
want. Otherwise, marginalized but ambitious people will conspire to overthrow
the social order that spurned them.

This seems like a similar moral.

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cubano
Oh surprise.

Corruption at the highest levels of corporations and government.

Forgive my cynicism but after a full lifetime of this nonsense and many years
of reading about it through history studies, I just can't feel any other way.

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cowardlydragon
But but but, they made a subsidiary marketing firm to externalize the shady
deals so that the separate firm could be closed at will and plausible
deniability granted under the sociopath license of limited liability
corporations.

IF they do this, they do Deathsquad work the same way under Xe or other
subcontractors. "We didn't know they'd use such tactics to brutally suppress
the uprising, we thought they'd use McDonalds fries"

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zaro
Corruption is the only way things work in big business and governments. After
all its people that interact there and people go after their own interests.

Just because we have invented different names for it like lobbying, doesn't
make processes less corrupt.

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sosborn
Please explain why you think lobbying = corruption. Lobbyists can certainly be
corrupt, but there is nothing inherent to lobbying that equates to corruption.

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nekopa
I think lobbying equals corruption because although the definition of lobby is
_" the act of attempting to influence decisions made by officials in a
government, most often legislators or members of regulatory agencies."_ the
reality is to do this for special interest groups, and to use whatever means
necessary.

I get that to look at lobbying in a pedantic way there is no way it could be
corrupt. And of course, there are white knight lobbyists who are trying to
ofset the damage done by lobbyists whose clients are seeking change to
increase profits.

But on the whole (in the USA) lobbying stinks of legitimised corruption.

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dang
Looks like this is the same story as
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388542).

