Financial Transparency Coalition

A new online game, "Angry Anna" takes the popular smartphone game "Angry Birds" and replaces the titular birds with Indian corruption crusader Anna Hazare. Created by an India-based group, the game features Hazare and other anti-corruption figures being launched with a slingshot in an attempt to topple corrupt politicians. While the piece is largely intended as some light-hearted fun, it may well turn out to be something more than a way to pass some time on the internet. It can sometimes be hard to illustrate the importance of the issues the Task Force deals with, especially because these issues are...

Vietnam and the World Bank recently held the first Viet Nam Anti-Corruption Intiative, or VACI.  The Initiative encouraged the public—whether ordinary citizens, NGOs, or private business—to develop proposals to help combat corruption in their communities.  VACI then selected 34 promising ideas, and awarded a total of approximately $450,000 to help fund the implementation of these plans in the coming year.  It is hoped that this initiative will be repeated in 2013. In order for pervasive corruption to be combated effectively, public support for anti-corruption initiatives is essential, and this year has seen people around the world taking a stand against graft in their...

Yesterday anti-corruption leaders in India called on citizens to turn off their lights in the evening to protest the detention of more than 1200 anti-corruption campaigners in New Delhi, The New York Times reported. The campaigners were detained following the arrest of well-known activist and Transparency International Integrity Award winner Anna Hazare early yesterday morning. Local police arrested Hazare at his home, according to the BBC after he vowed to go ahead with a hunger strike in a public park against corruption despite local police denying him a permit to hold the demonstration. The New York Times said that the likelihood...

The powerless have few tools to use against the powerful. Sometimes the powerless are a minority. Sometimes they are a majority. Suffrage, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press are tools civilizations have developed to give powerless people more power. But the other side has its own tools, which the powerful use to perpetuate their power. Corruption and nepotism are the most obvious examples. These tools are not only used by theocrats and autocrats. They are used in democracies too, and they erode democratic systems by concentrating power in the hands of a few, depriving the powerless of...