Corruption: global emergency?

The Washington Post has just published an article by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former owner of the Russian company Yukos and currently in jail after having been arrested in 2003 and sentenced to nine years of prison for fraud (a new trial that risks to extend his permanence in prison has started last year).

Here is the link to the article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/25/AR2010052503973.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Khodorkovsky has been considered by many the scapegoat of a campaign started by former Russian president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin soon after the beginning of his presidential mandate. His arrest made the oligarchs (the class of Russian entrepreneurs that had been ruling the country during Yeltsin's years in power) the ones to blame for everything that was wrong with the Russian system. To show that the authorities were getting rid of them meant to show that the government really cared about Russia and its people. The problem is that the show turned out to be a farce. Oligarchs were punished, but selectively. Oleg Deripaska, Vladimir Potanin, Vagir Alekperov all saw their fortunes increase since Putin came to power in quite obscure ways.

In his article Khodorkovsky raises a few points:

1. Corruption is a bigger threat to global security than nuclear weapons are;
2. Corruption is becoming more and more widespread in the world;
3. Corruption is damaging to the healthy functioning of any political, social and economic system.

Now, it is clear that Khodorkovsky is not a saint, and his words about how he "worked for more than a decade to build Yukos into Russia's most successful and transparent global energy company" sound quite fake. But the way he emphasises the role that corruption plays in destabilising a system is quite interesting. Despite the fact that his argument about how corruption should become a priority in international security and replace the nuclear threat as the most important issue on the table is definitely weak, the alarm he launches should not be ignored. If we look at the 2009 corruption rankings in the World Democracy Audit (http://www.worldaudit.org/corruption.htm), we see how almost 100 countries out of 150 score more than 50 on a scale from 0 to 100 (0 being the country with no corruption and 100 the country with maximum levels of corruption). What is this if not a global emergency?