KLEPTOPIA: How Dirty Money Conquered the World
For many in the conservation world, corruption is held up as a key driver of wildlife poaching and environmental degradation.
For those who have been looking, without London the industrial scale of this corruption would not be possible. The British capital had become the location of choice for oligarchs and corporate crooks to sanitise their ill-gotten gains. Tom Burgis catalogues the shady dollars that have flowed through Swiss banks, Mayfair mansions and the London Stock Exchange. Any government and country that enables secrecy jurisdictions and this scale of financial corruption are the key players driving the extinction crisis.
THE DIVIDE
Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms: rigged trade deals, tax evasion, and land grabs. The Divide tracks the evolution of this system, which has allowed a handful of rich countries to effectively control economic policies in the rest of the world; and explains the need for a revolution in our way of thinking.
On Corruption in America
Corruption is an operating system of sophisticated networks in which government officials, key private-sector interests, and out-and-out criminals interweave. Their objective: to maximize returns for network members. Chayes shows how corrupt systems are organized, how they enforce the rules so their crimes are covered legally [and] how they are overlooked and downplayed.
