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Jason Hickel Profile picture
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29 Jan, 5 tweets, 3 min read
Transparency International has just released its corruption report for 2020. Once again it paints rich nations as innocent, ignoring their role in illicit financial flows, secrecy jurisdictions, arms trading, covert interventions, and self-dealing at the WB and IMF. #CPI2020
Corporations and financial institutions in rich nations are responsible for the vast majority of money that's lost to corruption in the global economy each year. We need to set the record straight. I've written about this here: aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/…
And I joined @CitationsPod for an in-depth discussion of this issue here: soundcloud.com/citationsneede…
In the first few minutes of the show @WideAsleepNima and
@adamjohnsonNYC deliver a devastating indictment of Transparency International and their ties to the US government and multinational capital.
Seeing the UK ranked as one of the least corrupt countries in the world is particularly galling after a year in which the government handed out unprecedented quantities of public money to cronies and politically-connected firms in the form of covid contracts.

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More from @jasonhickel

Jason Hickel Profile picture
30 Jan
Many scientists believe that the rise of novel viruses like SARS-CoV-2 is being driven by rising resource extraction. If that's the case, we will likely see many more pandemics in the years to come, until we flatten the resource use curve. Image
Look at the rate of resource use growth and ask yourself whether vaccinations are going to solve this problem. If we want to avoid living in pandemic misery for the rest of the century, we need degrowth.
We should think of degrowth as a public health intervention.
Read 4 tweets
Jason Hickel Profile picture
30 Jan
Some questions for Transparency International:

1. If you *know* your methodology is flawed (i.e., it ignores corporate corruption enabled by rich nations), why do you keep using it? Fix it, and until then stop publishing your misleading index. #CPI2020
2. You claim that "private sector corruption" is different from public sector corruption. But if private corruption is *enabled* by government policy (which you acknowledge), then why should governments not be held accountable in your index? #CPI2020
3. Are tax havens private entities or public? If they are public (which they are), then why are the biggest tax havens (i.e., the US, UK and their territories, plus Switzerland Luxembourg, etc.) not punished in your index accordingly? #CPI2020
Read 8 tweets
Jason Hickel Profile picture
18 Jan
Remarkably, Sri Lanka has a life expectancy that's similar to the USA (shy by a year and a half) with a staggering 88% less resource use and 94% less emissions on a per capita basis.
These metrics are consumption-based:

Raw material consumption:
USA: 32.36 tons per person
Sri Lanka: 3.88 tons per person

CO2 emissions:
USA: 18.35 tons per person
Sri Lanka: 1.03 tons per person
By the way, Sri Lanka has a free, universal public healthcare system.
Read 4 tweets
Jason Hickel Profile picture
12 Jan
This month US Americans got a small glimpse of what a coup might feel like, and they are rightly outraged. One might hope this would provoke some reflection on the *actual* coups that the US itself has perpetrated around the world. Here are some of them:
1953: Mohammed Mossadegh, the progressive, democratically elected leader of Iran, was deposed in a US- and British-backed coup because he sought to restore national control over Iran's oil reserves. Image
1954: Jacobo Árbenz, the progressive, democratically elected leader of Guatemala, was deposed in a US-backed coup because he sought to restore land to small farmers and Indigenous communities that had been dispossessed by US fruit companies. Image
Read 11 tweets
Jason Hickel Profile picture
11 Jan
Imagine a world where labour and resources in the global South were available to provide for local human needs, rather than appropriated for the sake of excess consumption in the global North.
For reference, the scale of net appropriation from South to North is staggering:

-10.1 billion tons of raw materials
-379 billion hours of human labour
-22.7 quintillion joules of energy
-800 million hectares of land

That's for a single year, 2015. All for Northern excess.
Source: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Read 5 tweets
Jason Hickel Profile picture
28 Dec 20
Economists and politicians lean heavily on the promise of "green growth" as a last-ditch defense of capitalism. But is green growth possible? This year brought a lot of new research to bear on this question. Here's a summary:
1. In this 2020 NPE review, we found that it is not feasible to reduce emissions fast enough stay under 1.5C while growing the global economy at the same time. Why? Because growth requires more energy use, which makes decarbonization much more difficult. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
2. To be clear: absolute decoupling of GDP from emissions is possible (renewables!), and some nations are already doing it. The question is whether we can do it fast enough to remain within safe carbon budgets, while pursuing growth at the same time. And the answer to that is no.
Read 9 tweets

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