Corruption scandals form a network of complicities, not isolated incidents

Evidence

A whole ruling class, a whole mode of governance, stands accused. All the signs are that neoliberalism’s standard tactics of containment — offering an individual as scapegoat-trophy in order to deflect from a structural tendency — are now starting to fail. News International are trying to re-sacrifice a scapegoat they’ve already served up (Coulson) but the process is out of their control and now has its own momentum (which is sure to drag other newspapers into its wake before very long). What was made to look like a series of disconnected incidents now appears as what it always was: a worldwide web of corruption whose byzantine murkiness resembles something out of The Wire or a David Peace novel. A dark network comprising private investigators, the criminal underworld, tabloid newspapers, multinational media conglomerates, the police, politicians, the banks, and the bodies supposed to regulate them (who are at best impotent, at worst part of the problem) cannot now be kept hidden from public scrutiny. This is less a conspiracy than a network of complicities: fear on all sides, nobody trusting anybody else, the whole thing depending on who’s got the goods on whom… Cops watching hacks watching cops; threatened politicians looking for favours… — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1568

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Corruption can be mutualistic cooperation among partners. — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality: The…, 564; Institutional scandals are reframed as isolated individual failures to deflect systemic blame.; Institutional scandals are routinely blamed on isolated individuals despite systemic causes. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 603 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Institutional scandals are reframed as isolated individual failures to deflect systemic blame. #corroborates (0.85)
• Institutional scandals are routinely blamed on isolated individuals despite systemic causes. #corroborates (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 603
• Corruption can be mutualistic cooperation among partners. #expands (0.80) — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 564
• The Saigon regime’s corruption created a situation of universal complicity. #exemplifies (0.80) — Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, 1491