Every individual has a certain set of values that are non-negotiable.
In the case of politicians, this set of values must be relatively small.
Except for very few cases, politics is not a job for purists, the chaste, the upright, the morally sound and idealists: even if they do try out their luck and participate, it doesn't take too long for them to leave in disgust, or they are marginalised and rendered useless, to be used as puppets in a beauty parade.
Politics is by definition dirty.
To be involved in politics means getting dirty in varying degrees. Simply negotiating lame deals with the enemy. Or unashamedly entering a living room imbued with the dank smell of corruption, accepting dubious friendships, obtaining finance or benefits from obscure middlemen, bagging thousands of votes from mafia affiliated organisations, dealing with known wanted criminals (despite them being Parliamentary colleagues) sometim...
_OMISSIS_ ... callously destroying innocents.
Every so often you hear of financial scandals of enormous gravity, one feels bound task one's self how it can be that the top leaders of the affected parties could not have been au fait regarding such enormous illicit movements of capital, particularly when the movements have been utilised to finance the machinations and electoral campaigns of the party, and it must be asked whether it is feasible that the only responsible person was the treasurer (not unusually a victim of strange illnesses and pre-announced funereal absences such as to render it a particularly unsavoury occupation).
With all probability, at the highest levels of the party political machine the time for innocence has ceased a long time ago.
Of course some morally reprehensible acts are worse than others.
It's one thing to steal unashamedly for one's self, perhaps to allow the passage of a measure which is dam...
_OMISSIS_ ... health such as was the case in the Eddie Murphy film. It's quite another to find one's self having to manage the resources of the party structure and agree to receive crucial funding which will ensure its survival, without lining one's pockets. It's another thing again to build up a "normal" network of clients and another still to accept votes from the mafia.
None of this however is ethically wholesome.
Covert financing that is channelled to political parties always comes with a price, a return which would not have been possible to obtain by financing methods that were true to legitimate and democratic principles concluded under the sun.
There are those who claim that the problem can be resolved by recourse to the public funding of political parties which would wean them off the requirement to avail themselves of illicit relief.
However apart from the fact that public financing of political parties...
_OMISSIS_ ...and therefore difficult to achieve, experience demonstrates the opposite, namely that the more money parties handle, the more the needs and hunger required to be sated in an ever increasing spiral of excess: political parties are bottomless wells. And in any case it is not usual to point out that the availability of public finances causes the "treasurers" to become more squeamish.
The degrees and types of illegitimacy which involve politicians are too numerous to enable them to be traced and logged; however it still seems that the higher the politician is in the decision making structure of the organisation, the less immune he must be in the knowledge and responsibility for the large movements of covert funds that involve his party, the more so when one considers how infrequently members of the governing elite are replaced.
The more lucrative deals are made between people who can be blackmailed, between men of the world, fair weat...
_OMISSIS_ ... cover each other's backs, each one quick to cover up the secrets of the other, each one giving succour and support to their official enemy with the ultimate aim of dividing up the public offering.
The importance of knowing what skeletons there are in their colleagues and adversaries cupboards then becomes obvious.
Knowledge of the others scurrilous deeds is really the best guarantee for political survival and a great route for a brilliant career.
Each politician tries to hide their own misdeeds and to discover those of their peers, however ultimately, there is a secret dossier involving every politician.
Politicians know that those of them who have access to secret information, or as some would put it more prosaically to espionage, will have a great competitive edge, such that the more sought after positions (which are allocated with great care) are those positions which are close to both civilian and military ...
_OMISSIS_ ... and with the intelligence community.
Even more sought after are the fiduciary positions in the boards of large mobile phone companies that are today considered as being the most formidable centres for espionage (as we have occasionally seen from the various scandals), aside from the interceptions and the geographical locations, if one thinks about the microphones and video camera features of mobile phones which can be transformed - unbeknown to their owners - into localised videos and microphones.
Of course each country is equipped with systems that manage citizens' privacy and with rules that govern phone tapping. But it's not even worth bothering about this, only the naïve can believe that this is enough to stop politicians and avoid the scandals.