Introduction: Corruption in Corporate Culture

As bombs showered Baghdad in spring 2003, the spate of corruption scandals from a year earlier could easily have seemed a distant memory. In the context of an awesome war, corruption might have seemed a minor domestic affair no longer relevant to our "real" national concerns. Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, and ImClone could have been relegated to the arcane workings of business. Yet the question of corruption touches every fiber of contemporary sociopolitical life, linking "domestic" and "foreign" affairs in multiple ways. The war itself is haunted by hanging chads and a biased Supreme Court that helped select a president who has since dismissed numerous international agreements and institutions, including the major arena for global diplomacy, the United Nations.

The model of corporate organizational structure and modus operandi informs the management of the United States, whose CEO seems eager to establish a global power monopoly that strips international institutions of the power to make multilateral decisions and redefines the role of these institutions as merely humanitarian. Two decades after the Reagan-Bush campaign to tear down the gains of the New Deal, the Bush-Cheney regime has fostered further deregulation, enabling predatory corporate behavior. George W.'s reign, like that of his father, has resumed this vision of governing in order to undo government as the realm "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Government is conceived as a means to protect the free flow of business from so-called interest groups—a phrase the administration and the dominant media now apply to independent organizations, such as unions and environmental groups, that defend social welfare. George W. Bush has conducted his presumed fight against corruption by focusing public attention on a few "bad apples." Neoliberal efforts to rid the globe of corruption, such as that of the World Bank Governance and Anti-corruption Program, have tended to focus on Third World corruption embodied by greedy local kleptocrats. Meanwhile the bank's officers of reform are free to come and go, demanding ransoms in the form of cuts to the social economy in exchange for further aid to business, demonstrating that discussion of corruption always requires a look at the very individuals and institutions designed to combat corruption, since they can easily become facilitators of its machinery.

Bush's model of managing corruption, furthermore, has been enacted on the world stage. The new object of the eternally displaced war on terror, Saddam Hussein, returned farcically as threat to world security within a narrative seemingly borrowed from an anticorruption campaign whose key elements are containment, preemption, and purgation. When corruption is contained, the belief that the many are clean (be they governments or corporations) is sustained. When the corrupt are preemptively attacked, the capacity to act trumps the ethical basis for decision. When evil is purged from the bowels of doubt, we can return with cautious but grateful confidence to business as usual. The Bush administration seems to be moving among these three discourses about corruption while pretending that its own actions have had no effects. Bush joined the U.N.'s inspection regime as part of a containment strategy (disarmament) that he would soon dismiss—with the effect of degrading the integrity of this global body. A preemptive strike against Iraq not only is a violation of international law and the U.N. charter but forecloses consideration of other notions of global engagement precisely at the moment of their formation. In the context of this war, purgation requires a teleological narrative of Iraq's liberation from its aberrant master while it also installs a grand model for fighting world corruption.

This moralistic and binary model pits the corrupt leaders and nations—axes of evil—against those who fight them, be they presidents of the free world or the democratic nations. Within this discourse, corruption is always imagined as "outside," simultaneously eliding any links between so-called good and evil. One may cite here U.S. political and economic backing for...