There’s a Huge New Corporate Corruption Scandal. Here’s Why Everyone Should Care | Hacker News Reader

There’s a Huge New Corporate Corruption Scandal. Here’s Why Everyone Should Care

huffingtonpost.com.au

110 pointspvnick25 comments

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.

> On Wednesday, The Huffington Post and its Australian partner, Fairfax Media — led by reporters Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie — published the results of a months-long investigation of Unaoil(http://www.theage.com.au/interactive/2016/the-bribe-factory), an obscure firm that helps big multinational corporations win contracts in areas of the world where corruption is common.

Thanks.

And see a bit of discussion in a slightly earlier posted item pointing to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388542

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.

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.

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.

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.

> The firm is obscure, so the name doesn't belong in the headline.

I don't see how that works. If the name is obscure, and we should know about it, put it in the headline.

That kind of headlines definitely turn me away. "Here's why we should care" is typically preceding a text which says nothing useful about why we should care. I just won't read articles headlined like this, because they feel like an insult.

I would like to see huffpo/buzzfeed/clickbait sites put on a "banlist" where their ranking is penalized heavily for being clickbait

There actually is for Buzzfeed at least: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11362796

Huffpo too; but that crafty .au suffix got around it.

Are click-bait titles a disease or a merely a symptom of a larger one?

>An incredibly irritating click-bait headline.

Click-bait headlines are marginally more irritating than people in the comment section calling out a click-bait headline.

We get it, they happen.

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."

Well, to be fair, the corruption has to be at least somewhat related to the fact that the US took over and was operating in a place where it didn't know anyone on an entirely cash basis.

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.

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.

Even so, I think it's an interesting development. It's a sign that the FCPA really is having an effect, in that Unaoil appears to be a bribery outsourcing firm, a way of creating plausible deniability. But its success at serving that market makes it a very attractive target to law enforcement.

Corruption, like cancer, always happens. It's inevitable when you build large systems out of individual pieces that have their own needs and agency. But as with cancer, as long as you can keep it to a minimum generally and deal well with the occasional flare-up, it's not fatal.

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"

There is always corruption, but it varies massively between countries and time periods, so something can be done about it. Cynicism is just useless.

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.

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

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com