“Corruption is paid for by the poor” Pope Francis.

Backstabbing for Beginners REVIEW

“Corruption is paid for by the poor”  - Pope Francis.

Backstabbing for Beginners is a primer in global corruption. In this case it is at the U.N. but it could be about the impact of corruption anywhere. Based on the experience of Michael Soussan, a mid-level diplomat in the U.N. who worked in the U.N.’s Iraqi Oil-For-Food program, the film examines how a young idealist from Brown University (with its Baptist religious roots and liberal contemporary ideology) is drawn into one of the largest scams in philanthropic history. On its surface, the goal of the oil-for-food program was a simple one. It was an attempt by the U.N. to allow the government of Iraq to sell oil in world markets in a way that would require the money earned to go directly to the Iraqi people. The stated hope was that the U.N. would manage the sales and the distributions of the profits in an honest way and thereby keep Saddam Hussein from financing his brutal regime or weapons programs with money that the world wanted the Iraqi people to have for its country’s oil.

In practice, the program became a huge scheme to enrich people who had the smarts and the connections needed to siphon money out of the exchange. Few profited more than Saddam himself but hundreds of people and companies were involved in the process, either taking bribes or extending them. Some people got oil at cheap prices that they could resell at high prices and many received money from the sales in exchange for defective products or non-existant or deficient services. Take a million bucks for bottles of medicine for example. Send out boxes full of medicines that have expired long ago and no one wants. Its free money and since others are getting some, why shouldn’t you?

Something like half of the 4,500 companies involved, were discovered to have provided “kickbacks” to get in the oil-for-food marketplace. That is, in exchange for a lucrative contract, you agreed to give a certain amount of those lucrative profits to Saddam or to some bureaucrat who controlled the decision. Saddam was not allowed to have the money that the oil purchased but he was in control of who the oil was sold to and who products purchased for the Iraqi people were bought from. And he sold that control to business who saw a way to make bank at the Iraqi people’s expense. Perhaps they saw the kickbacks as the mere price of doing business in Iraq.

One branch of Ethics involves the intentional use of “purpose” in the determination of right and wrong. When something is created for one purpose (an oil-for-food program) and then used for another (enriching corporations), it is generally wading past some sort of ethical line into a morass of corruption. This particular scheme worked because of negligent or complicit U.N. oversight.

Question for Comment:  Have you ever used something or some policy to make money knowing that it was created for some other purpose? Explain.