The Corrupt Tour Travel Agency, which opened in February, offers a different look at the Czech capital: locals and tourists can visit the main sites of the country's biggest corruption scandals. The company's founder, theater director Petr Šourek, hopes to offer not just an entertaining tour, but also new insight into the widespread problem of corruption. Video by Lukáš Ballý and Bela Mamayeva, RFE/RL's Russian Service
You’ve heard of health and sex tourism before, but what about corruption tourism? A Czech company is offering tours around Prague, showing overpriced infrastructure projects and ostentatious homes of the city's rich.
From: CorruptArt in Prague: Occupy The Parliament and the Villas!
...The CorruptTour.com project, with its motto "Enjoy the Best of the Worst", uses a legitimate model of a tourist agency business that offers unique insight into the "nesting" sites of Czech cronies described as predatory birds, whose “social” skills they are asked to observe. This political fable and satire spawned from a business plan that aimed to merge corruption and tourism. The “Occupy Villas tourists” are creating a significant nervousness in the local political scene, partly because they are not typical activists but rather curious citizens, going on tours to have fun and satisfy their curiosity.
The unique connection between politics and theatre performance in the Czech Republic has a long history that starts with the country’s rather strange national anthem, which evolved from the question - "Where is my home?" - appropriated from a 19th Century musical comedy. It continued with Vaclav Havel's famous and subversive plays in the 20th Century and has found its most recent manifestation in these bus and parliament performances.
While the CorruptTour allows us to experience the ugly side of the "business as usual" of corruption and nepotism (with its attendant networks, lack of taste, and blunt arrogance) in the tourist mecca of Prague, revealing a parallel universe that people are unaware of, the Ztohoven Parliament puppet show explored the notion of alternative futures being influenced by some unknown moral force.
Both of these cases, however, reveal a new form of activist and "revolutionary" art, which is subversively opportunistic rather than openly confrontational. It uses business plans and extreme moral and religious discourse rather than critique, reflection or visions. It "reforms" reality by generating unexpected events that are closer to quantum physics and chaos theory experiments with butterfly wings than just simple provocations. The impressive effects of such actions can be partly attributed to the fact that they often leave a lot of room for individual interpretation and turn passive citizens into active actors by just physically witnessing and visiting certain sites...
CorruptTour.com offers more than tours:
A Deck of Prague-Chicago Corruption Cards
Not only are Prague and Chicago sister cities since 1990, they are also twinned in the culture of corruption. The Chicago Political Machine built by Anton Cermak in the early 20th century has continued to work quite smoothly. Well-oiled the Machine has never failed to produce case after case of venality equally as rampant as Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich who attempted to sell the appointment to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the resignation of now President Barack Obama.
For the last 20 years Prague officials have worked tirelessly to catch up with its American sister, culminating in Pavel Bem, under whose mayorship City Hall devised a number of pay-to-play schemes. And the scandal surrounding Opencard kickback would surely make sister Chicago proud.
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This financial instrument one can procure only in three countries in the world: on the tiny island of Nauru, in Marshall Islands and in the Czech Republic. The Czech government has been reluctant to ban this non-transparent security and the bearer shares are permitted under Czech law. Holders of materialized bearer shares may not only be unknown to the company but also be unidentifiable for state authorities. Ownership of materialized bearer shares is currently transferred with possession, in the same way as handing over a banknote.
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