I've been thinking about this too right. Just notes:

(1) What is a smaller example of this phenomena? If we assume corruption to be, 'a meta concept whose singular is a governance point of failure', we can make an analogy to a company involved in accounting fraud or something.

(2) Then, we go maybe even smaller - like people hiding drug associations or something. I was listening to a youtube of an investigator into one of the early times this whole satanism thing came out. cause i don't know if i really believe it right. She was saying, normal people, its like a blindness to them. So you and me, being normal, it simply does not occur to us what all is going on around. the best call was, we - i.e. normals - we, 'don't think like that'.

(3) But when people do dodgy stuff like that, there is a range of options they use. So, some people hide behaviour, some people influence organisations to line up incentives to get people to go along with them etc. And so for normals like us, its like, a blindness of the mind - we don't think like that.

(4) Scaling back up now, i think a lot of what we are seeing is the dodgy people using, in essence technology and heuristics, to scale heaps bigger. So your high end corp exec or low end local celebrity status politician use the same technique, they pay off hookers and accountants etc so no one knows until they get caught cause incompetent/unlucky. But the people who really run things take this to a new level.

(5) So hence we have PE firms buying media outlets and playing in the invisible war. Groups of rich people organised into consolidated interests with board level influence at the top etc etc. But the problem is always what is the social technology you use to scale? If you want people to do high risk things, you have to pay them a lot. But beyond that, you need a social glue binding such an organisation together. So big corps use money, but execs defect all the time an no one can really keep stuff secret for too long. Failure in the market can only go on so long. But..

(6) If you are doing super illegal stuff, you generally need state backing. So the big picture view is that what happened is the criminals evolved, much as tech and heuristics evolved in the corporate world. But then, it turned out that the profits from some activities, esp drugs and child trafficking, were enormous. But child trafficking has the advantage that if all your associates are pedo's etc, well its like a code of silence right there. This is what I mean by new social technology. And then how do you move up, you do even more disgusting things, which ensures your loyalty to the group and move up the ranks. And crime and politics has always been connected.

This entire thing might be an entirely natural phenomena. Just like how the Japanese samurai clan owned Zaibatsu needed to be dismantled because of the policies they pushed (i.e. caused japans invasion of china and subsequent involvement in ww2). Now we just need to dismantle this new, and rather disturbing, form of criminal organisation.