Introduction to Corruption - 101

Thesis statement to be developed and supported over a series of posts: Our problems in Lake Worth are not due to corruption as much as ineptitude, selfishness, incompetence and lack of transparency. These combine to produce a similar result as would occur from real acts of corruption. Real corruption often rises to a level of criminal activity. Falsely accusing good people of corruption is nearly as bad as the act itself. Using the term routinely can mask and divert attention from actual and real corrupt activity - something about which we need to be vigilant.

One should not throw stones in glass houses.

From Wikipedia:

Corruption is essentially termed as an "impairment of integrity, virtue or moral principle; depravity, decay, and/or an inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means, a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct, and/or an agency or influence that corrupts."^[1]

Corruption, when applied as a technical term, is a general concept describing any organized, interdependent system in which part of the system is either not performing duties it was originally intended to, or performing them in an improper way, to the detriment of the system's original purpose.

Its terminological usage possesses connotations of evil, malignance, sickness, and loss of innocence or purity.

Classifications

Specific types of corruption include:

• Institutional corruption, as corrupt actions or policies within an organization that break the law, serve to subjugate humans in unlawful manners, discriminate against humans based upon race, ethnicity, culture, or orientation, or serve to degrade other humans or groups for that institution's own profit.
• Political corruption, as the dysfunction of a political system or institution in which government officials, political officials or employees seek illegitimate personal gain through actions such as bribery, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, patronage, graft, and embezzlement. Political corruption is a specific form of rent seeking, where access to politics is organized with limited transparency, limited competition and directed towards promoting narrow interests (rent seeking is not to be confused with property rental).
• Data corruption, as an unintended change to data in storage or in transit.
• Linguistic corruption, as the change in meaning to a language or a text introduced by cumulative errors in transcription as changes in the language speakers' comprehension.
• Putrefaction or decomposition of recently living matter. This physical process is the primary model of the metaphorical meaning of corruption, so advanced states of corruption in, e.g. a political structure are said to result in their putrefaction.

References

1. ^ Merriam Webster Dictionary. Corruption - Definition of. Retrieved August 30, 2008.