“Industry does everything they can and gets away with it almost all the time, whether it’s the coal industry, not the subject of this hearing, or water or whatever. They will cut corners, and they will get away with it. ” Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D, WVa

“To ask why there is corruption is a pertinent question…Our society has been made by us – we are the architects of it. And because the foundation is wrong…it is bound to be corrupt” Osho

The normalization of dishonest and fraudulent acts – from the small dishonest acts to the systemic institutional ones, makes it clear that the constraints we have to prevent corruption are unable to control or compete with the manic pursuit of self-interest.

Doctors prescribe drugs to strangers that they would not give their own children. Hedge fund managers buy the rights to critical drugs and then hike the price up 5000%. Pharmaceutical industry’s PAC money funnels massive amounts of cash to every member of congress. Treaties like the TPP would extend Big Pharma’s patent rights to other countries. We have judges caught getting kick-backs for sending kids to for-profit prisons, prisons that push for 100 percent occupancy and charge exorbitant rates for phone calls, basic necessities and who lobby for longer sentences and the list goes on…are we all “sharks doing what sharks do?” How can we investigate the deeper, systemic problem within each of us where we allow corruption to exist on a personal level?

Working from the inside (ourselves) out (the world system) we could start with our general conditioning – the belief that equates survival with competition. This leads to justification, blame and lies – it is then that our personal desires come to dominate the principles we say we live by.

How can we correct our fear towards the very “system” we allow? What is the extent of control that money imposes on us and how can we gain control over our relationship to money? How can we change undermining beliefs such as “this is the way it is and it can’t be changed?”