How to Say Something Without Saying Anything

It has become an art form. But, there's only so far you can get waving your hands around and saying things like 'bipartisan' and 'resilience.'

“It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those who get f---ed by it. By this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths so everyone likes us.” Sam Bankman-Fried

The word salad is everywhere

The actual challenges are unprecedented

Where are the common values?

The OECD hosts an annual Global Integrity Forum, drawing a range of government officials, civil society leaders, and corporations to its headquarters in Paris to discuss emerging trends, challenges, and innovations. Corruption is a wonky topic, and it can be hard to draw a direct connection to people’s daily lives. But in 2026, you would imagine a sense of urgency might prevail. If there has ever been a bigger opportunity to meaningfully recommit to ethics and integrity, to speak in plain language and take concrete action, I do not remember it in my lifetime.

Since January 2025, the United States has dropped to 29th on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. The government has brought no new Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement actions, gutted the relevant teams at the DOJ, and removed accountability mechanisms across government departments. Over the same period, the Trump family has secured enormous crypto business deals, notably in the Gulf, and pardoned hundreds of fraudsters and criminals, many of whom have gone on to commit more offenses. Trump is apparently about to pay himself US$10 billion in taxpayer money to settle a dispute with the IRS: this is more than the IRS annual operating budget. Given America’s role in the global order, this might seem a moment of reckoning for the anti-corruption community, as well as an incredible opportunity to reset the discourse, question longstanding assumptions, and adjust to a new world order.

I couldn’t attend the Forum, but I was interested to review the agenda, and to hear about the discussion from friends. I was also hoping to find inspiration for my own work, writing, and discussions with students. New initiatives to fight kleptocracy? A Carney-inspired recommitment to anti-bribery enforcement from other countries? Strategies for helping corporations manage political risk and retaliation? A substantive discussion on political spending? Guidance for a world of regulatory unpredictability and misalignment? Cutting-edge thoughts on how to drive activism with meaningful impact?

This was not what I found.

Here’s the overview from the OECD’s conference main webpage, exploring the 2026 theme, The Integrity Advantage:

The judicious use of public and private resources has never been more important to competitiveness and resilient growth. The 2026 OECD Global Anti-Corruption & Integrity Forum explored how integrity and anti-corruption efforts, which have been traditionally seen as safeguards, can also serve as engines for performance, resilience and innovation.

Hmm, the largest economy in the world has abandoned all pretense at integrity, but the stock market is booming, and the economy holding up—for now. Perhaps then, this should be addressed in the agenda? And, what about the gutting of all those public resources?

There was a plenary session on ‘insights on business and civil society’ featuring the chief legal officer of Oracle Corporation. This is the same Oracle Corporation whose CEO, Larry Ellison, participated in a 2020 Stop the Steal campaign, and who is a GOP megadonor, funding the West Wing Ballroom and the military parade. Oracle has also just laid off tens of thousands of employees to invest in AI. Perhaps insights on these topics were forthcoming, but I somehow doubt it.

A second session explored ‘significant progress’ in the integrity agenda, though pointed out “addressing gaps in countries’ anti-corruption and integrity systems is vital to governments’ ability to confront evolving challenges such as organised crime, to their efforts to develop the efficiency and reliability of public services, and to their work to improve delivery through stronger public procurement processes.” Whose job might it be to address these gaps? I have no idea, and it seems, neither does the OECD.

A fourth explored how “Case studies and emerging evidence will highlight how collective action can level the playing field, how ‘good corporate behaviour’ may correlate with stronger corporate performance, and how investors, rating agencies, and boards view integrity as a marker of sustainable growth.” This is both equivocal and vague. If we think corporate behavior correlates with strong performance, we also need to explain the overwhelming financial success of Meta, Palantir, and Tesla, for example.

Is anyone talking about how the direction of AI rests in the hands of a few obscenely rich CEOs, many of whom are overtly seeking favors from Trump? Or the current high-stakes dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon? No. But we are exploring how the “use of data analytics and AI can support governments to prevent fraud, detect wrongdoing, and recover money. This improves public finances and increases citizens’ trust that taxpayer funds are managed appropriately.”

Ok, there is one session on state capture. But it is focused on Hungary and Ukraine, not the United States.

The word salad is everywhere

I don’t wish to pick on the OECD specifically, where many brilliant people work and where much impactful, insightful work gets done. But it is striking that, at a time when all forms of corporate responsibility are under pressure, there is an implicit insistence that everything we’ve been doing is fine. There is no robust counternarrative. This is partly because such a counternarrative would mean getting specific about actors, harms, and consequences.

We have entered a world in which things just evolve around us, due to mysterious forces that can’t be directly named. There is just a situation, not caused by anyone in particular, that might improve if we finally prove our ROI.

The use of euphemisms to describe fiendishly hard ethics and accountability problems is hardly new. In interviews for my book, Higher Ground, I was surprised to find how many ethics experts told me they avoid using the word ‘ethics’ at all costs, on the grounds that it sounds punitive and judgmental.

In the introduction of Higher Ground, I also cite a study showing that corporate values statements converge around the same narrow set of terms:

It’s impossible to be all things to all people for long, and people change their minds. Understandably, companies default to bland statements that are hard to tell apart. Research at MIT found that most companies cite from three to seven values, with two-thirds of them avowing a commitment to “integrity.” A previous study found that corporate values statements converge around integrity, teamwork, and innovation.

But I wrote Higher Ground in 2022 and 2023. Which seemed fraught and chaotic at the time, but borderline idyllic in retrospect.

Never have specificity and courage been more important. Instead, equivocating language is everywhere. At just the moment when we need to innovate and call out the problems with the status quo, the best we can manage is another half-assed discussion on the business case. The context has transformed, but the rhetoric and arguments remain stubbornly stuck.

Davos this year took place against a backdrop of the American government’s seizure of Venezuela’s oil infrastructure and escalating threats over Greenland. What was the annual theme? A Spirit of Dialogue! Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum replaced Klaus Schwab under a cloud of controversy, only to see its new CEO pop up in the Epstein files.

What about the UN Global Compact, which is supposed to galvanize the private sector to support principles developed at the UN, which is about to go bankrupt, because America isn’t paying its invoices? Nothing to see here! "Responsible business is resilient business. Sustainability fuels innovation, strengthens risk management, and reinforces investor confidence."

We say there is an ‘integrity advantage,’ so we don’t have to talk about who is bribing whom.

We talk about ‘resilience,’ but not who or what is causing the harm that makes societies and companies brittle.

We cite ‘turbulence’ and ‘turmoil’ as if we are experiencing a passing tornado, rather than the result of specific choices with rather predictable outcomes.

We cite ‘job disruption’ rather than unemployment.

We say ethics isn’t ‘political’ but also that culture and leadership matter, without unpacking what ethical leadership actually is. Repeating the word ‘bipartisan’ like a mantra isn’t the fix.

We say ‘further implementation needed’ without explaining or accounting for failures in action so far.

We say ‘science-based targets’ or ‘transition plans’ without mentioning that these are self-reported and routinely missed.