Take the money, ask no questions

The Wilson Center held a discussion this week on “Democratic and International Impacts of Kleptocracy,” with Edward Melon, Kennan Institute Fellow, along with Casey Michel, reporter at Think Progress, and Jodi Vittori, a Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The panelists touched on kleptocracy in Asia, mainly in Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and its implications for democracy. They also addressed the implications of financial secrecy as practiced in some states.

Edward Melon diagnosed the political situation in Tajikistan as extremely corrupt, with one leader, Emomali Rahamon, holding a grip on the country for decades. Since coming to power, Rahamon has built an authoritarian regime grounded on nepotism and favoritism. His family controls politics and business all over the country. His eldest son is the current mayor of the capital city. His daughter is the chief of the staff. His sons-in-law and other family members monopolize the biggest companies and projects that render the most lucrative benefits. The also embezzle money embezzlement and export capital. Tajikistan is one of the most kleptocratic countries in Asia, with a highly unequal distribution of wealth.

The state apparatus silences voices of opposition and even, as Melon puts it, engages in “transnational oppression” by targeting its opponents outside the country. This strengthened authoritarianism could revive the civil war that tore the country apart from 1992 to 1997.

Michel focused on the US. It is increasingly a hub of explicit financial secrecy internationally. The small state of Delaware has been in the forefront of implementing financial secrecy rules. Friendly laws and a unique model of “take the money, ask no questions” has captivated myriad corporations. Big companies, embezzlers, traffickers and shady corporations moved there to cloak their money in secrecy. Michel claims, “Delaware now has more corporations than people.”

But Delaware is not the only state exploiting secrecy. Nevada and Wyoming have joined it. According to Michel, in 1991 Nevada loosened its laws to model itself as Delaware of the west. By 2001, it further increased financial secrecy to attract more corporations. The same thing goes for Wyoming; it has adopted similar policies to accommodate corporations. Shell companies find such states a safe haven for their money.

Michel argues the US is ranked as the second contributor to  financial secrecy in the world after Switzerland. Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of financial stanadards.

Vittori offered an overview of kleptocracy in Afghanistan. Corruption there has become endemic in almost all segments of the Afghan state. High level officials are involved in payoffs, embezzlement, and drug trafficking, fueling insurgent groups instead of combating them. The insurgents are readily recruiting, as they can provide protection and money. Vittori sees the kleptocratic environment in Afghanistan as becoming normalized, rendering the status quo more beneficial for some than reform would be.

Security sectors in a majority of Third World countries are maintained by loyal people, mostly family members or trusted individuals. Their role has more to do with defending the regime than the borders or citizens. Vittori says around 50% of the budget in sub-Saharan Africa goes to security sector. Transparency and accountability are rarely raised. Patronage and nepotism cover things up.

Bottom line: kleptocracy is inherent in weak states. It undermines democracy and the rule of law. It feeds grievances, terrorism, and criminal groups. But some democratic countries do not care about kleptocracy in other countries, as long as the money flows to them.

 

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The innocent don’t react this way

I’m glad the FBI opened a counter-intelligence investigation of President Trump. He had appealed publicly for Russian hacking of American emails and met with Russian diplomats without a notetaker, reportedly spilling the beans on an ally’s secrets. If any other government official had done those things, the FBI would open an investigation in a heartbeat.

Of course there are risks in doing so when the subject is the President. He is the commander in chief and is normally allowed great latitude in what he says and does. I doubt there were many counter-intelligence investigations opened on Trump’s predecessors. But that is because they were cautious in using their latitude. Trump is unable to exert the same kind of self-discipline. He says what he wants.

That is dangerous, not least because what he wants is always something he views as redounding to his personal benefit. So if he spilled the beans to the Russian ambassador, there was surely a self-aggrandizing reason. It might have just been show-boating. But it might also have been an expectation of something in return: financing for real estate, for example, or preventing the Russians from pulling the plug on his condos and golf clubs.

We’ll have to wait for Special Counsel Mueller’s report to find out, because he took over the counter-intelligence investigation. What we know now is that Trump’s assaults on the FBI were not unmotivated. He has been trying to back them off. My guess is the impact has been the opposite. FBI agents likely redoubled their efforts to unveil the full extent of the President’s relationship with Russia as a result of the Comey firing, the McCabe early retirement, and the tweet attacks. That’s their job: to discover whether Trump has been compromised, and if so how.

One thing however is already clear: Trump is not behaving like an innocent man. Most people subject to an counter-intelligence investigation they thought ill-founded would cooperate to the fullest, providing whatever evidence they could and resisting the temptation to blast the agents carrying out their duty. Sure you might get aggravated, but you would also want to make sure the investigators were not aggravated. Trump, to the contrary, has done everything he can to ensure their job is as hard as possible. Do the innocent do that?

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Pompeo pontificates

Secretary of State Pompeo took the occasion of his speech in Cairo today to assert what few in the Middle East believe: that the US is a force for good in the region. Offering little evidence for this assertion that would be convincing to anyone but Middle Eastern autocrats, he instead focused on criticizing the Obama Administration.

He criticized it for failing to respond adequately to Sunni extremism, to the Iranian crackdown on the Green Revolution, and to Bashar al Assad. He also praised President Trump for destroying the Islamic State (ignoring completely Obama’s role in that fight) and for bombing Syria when it used chemical weapons (to little effect). The message was clear: American foreign policy is going to be unfailingly partisan. No more non-partisanship at the water’s edge. That’s for sissies.

Iran, Pompeo suggested while vaunting his evangelical credentials, is evil. He reviewed the full array of US efforts to counter Tehran, ignoring US withdrawal from the nuclear deal and its negative implications for relations with Europe and its impact on America’s credibility in future nonproliferation efforts. He ignored the lack of progress in getting Tehran to renegotiate the agreement, which is what he has been pleading for.

While acknowledging President Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria and underlining that Middle Eastern partners will need to do more, Pompeo reiterated America’s maximal demands without considering the means available. The US won’t provide assistance to Syria until Iran withdraws and a political transition is irreversible. He also challenged Hizbollah and Iranian dominance of Lebanon, promised to work for peace in Yemen, and pledged an agreement on Israel and Palestine.

As Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass put it,

. articulated ambitious goals-to expel every last Iranian boot from Syria, to reduce Hizballah’s missile arsenal, to help build an Iraq free of Iranian influence-while backing reduced US presence in the Middle East. No policy can succeed with ends and means so divorced.

In concluding, Pompeo claimed that the US had never been an oppressor or empire-builder. That betrayed a serious lack of education on American history, especially in the Western Hemisphere, and insensitivity to how Washington is viewed in the Middle East, where US interventions are often viewed as imperial. Pompeo pledged allegiance to all the autocrats of the region except Iran’s and ignored even the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. How should Middle Easterners who want more open societies and freedom of expression feel about that?

 

 

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Up a creek

Last night’s presidential statement from the White House in defense of adding hundreds of miles to the existing wall along the border with Mexico fizzled. Trump hoped to excite the country in favor of declaring a national emergency. He failed because he used shopworn arguments that simply aren’t valid.

Trump is up a creek without a paddle. He has embarked on a partial government shutdown that cannot go on much longer without causing serious harm to his own fan clubs (especially in the agricultural sector) and to the country’s economy. Agricultural loans and subsidies need to be paid, food stamps that support agricultural prices need to be distributed, Federal courts need to remain open, data on the economy has to be collected, the weather bureau has to do its thing, and a thousand other services have to continue. Serious, unprecedented economic harm could result if the shutdown lasts another week.

The Democrats have remained solidly opposed to border wall funding, for good reasons: there is no evidence significant drugs or terrorists come across the border where there is no wall. When they come, it is mostly through the well-guarded ports of entry. There is no crisis at the border, where apprehensions are down over the past two decades and the numbers of ill children and other humanitarian cases are entirely manageable by a competent Administration. The Democrats see the wall for what Lindsey Graham said it was: a metaphor for border security (or maybe for stopping immigration entirely), but not a real factor in border security, which they have been willing to fund in substantial amounts.

Trump would do well to follow the well-worn path of Presidents who declare victory and retreat. It isn’t even hard: he can declare a national emergency and his intention to build the wall with Defense Department funds as well as announce that he will foil the Democratic plot to close the government by reopening those parts of it he deems vital to the American people. The wall won’t get built anytime soon, as he’ll be taken to court. Many of his ill-conceived initiatives languish there, but he’ll be able to get those parts of the government he likes operating again. Caveat emptor: my wife works at the Smithsonian, which however isn’t likely to be one of his priorities.

The Democrats, who are passing bills to reopen the government piece by piece, will object, but the debate would shift away from the foolishness of shutting down a large part of the US government to whether he can or cannot use Pentagon funding to build the border wall, which by now has become a glorified fence of steel slats because the Border Patrol has told Trump that his concrete wall would not be a good idea. They want to be able to see what is happening on the Mexican side.

I don’t know what the courts are likely to do with Trump’s national emergency scheme, if he pursues it. They are generally deferential to any president who declares what he is doing a matter of national security. Never mind that it isn’t.

When you are up a creek without a paddle, go with the current. The Democrats in the House are offering bills to reopen parts of the government. Trump would be smart to approve them, while declaring a national emergency that isn’t one.*

*PS: The list of “national emergencies” as of August 2017 suggests his won’t be the only national emergency that is not really a national emergency.

 

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The southern border crisis is a fraud

Here is the Department of Homeland Security basis for declaring that there is a humanitarian crisis at the southern border: from December 22-30

  • The United States Border Patrol has referred 451 cases to a medical provider. Of those, 259 were children. 129 children are under the age of five. 88 are between the ages of six and fourteen, and 42 between the ages of 15 to 17.
  • 17 individuals including six children are currently hospitalized with illnesses.
  • On average, the Border Patrol is referring approximately 50 cases a day to medical providers. December 26, 2018, Border Patrol referred 82 cases to a medical provider.

This is not a crisis: more like a minor perturbation that can readily be handled by existing medical capacity. Two hundred and fifty-nine children along 2000 miles of border is on average one every 8 miles or so. About 12 million people live near the border. Is DHS really trying to tell us that medical service capacity for 12 million people cannot easily handle 259 children, only 6 of whom require hospitalization? But it is worse than that, because these children could be handled in medical facilities throughout the US, a country of 326 million people.

This is not a crisis. Saying so is a fraud. It is also a transparent effort to distract attention from the deaths of two children who had been held in US government custody.

But what about unauthorized immigration, terrorists, and drugs? Apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants, which are generally viewed as indicative of the numbers of unauthorized immigrants, have declined sharply since 2000, from over 1.6 million to 310,000 in 2017. No terrorists are known to have entered the US from Mexico in recent years.* Most drugs entering the US do so through legal ports of entry, as do most unauthorized immigrants. This is only one reason why a wall on the southern border is useless. Most of the border not already fenced or walled is terrain that is difficult to cross, few try, and the border patrol is effective at catching them.

In recent years, more Mexicans have been leaving the US than arriving. There is however a surge of families trying to reach the US from Guatemala, Honduras, and Salvador. They have good reasons: poverty, gang violence, and political repression are among them. If you don’t want them to migrate, you’ve got to deal with those problems, a conclusion that led the Obama Administration to amp up development and rule of law assistance in Central America. The Trump Administration is threatening to eliminate those programs, in a misguided attempt to punish the governments involved.

President Trump has been backing off his demand for wall money for weeks now. It started out as a concrete barrier, now it is just steel slats, sometimes he claims it is already being built, and maybe it might be just a fence, but in any case one that will not have to line the entire 2000-mile stretch of the border, and maybe he is asking for only $2.6 billion rather than $5.7 billion.

But every time it appears the Administration might be moving in the direction of compromise, Trump yanks the rug out from under his negotiators, including the Vice President, and reasserts his maximum demands. Now he is asking for over $10 billion for the wall plus. In the absence of an agreement, the President is threatening to declare a national emergency and use the military to build the wall, but that proposition is a sure-fire way of ending up in court for years of complex litigation. He has also suggested he might keep the government shut for years. That is not a credible threat, but it underlines how desperate he is getting.

In the meanwhile, the institutions we use to prevent unauthorized immigration are not functioning. Immigration courts are at a standstill, border patrol agents are going unpaid, and the companies are unable to use the system that they are supposed to use to verify the immigration status of employees. Trump is claiming that the furloughed Federal employees support the shutdown because they want the wall, but he has also said most of them are Democrats so he needn’t worry about them. Trump’s own heavily rural constituency is uncomfortable: American agriculture depends heavily on government funding for both production and consumption. Those mechanisms are grinding to a halt, as are the Internal Revenue Service and other vital government bureaucracies.

The Democrats in Congress are clear and unequivocal: they have refused to provide money for any sort of extension of the physical barrier but are prepared to provide $1.3 billion for border security. The newly inaugurated Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, whom Trump once said was weak, seems to have rock-solid support in her caucus, and some Republicans are moving in her direction. She is not wavering.

No doubt a compromise of some sort that allows reopening of the government will eventually be worked out, I would guess next week if not this. But the political consequences of the government shutdown are yet to be fully realized. We can never be sure, but it is looking like a big loser for Trump, who somehow convinced himself he could get from a Democratic-controlled House funding for a border wall that he failed to get from a Republican-controlled one. The crisis is not at the border, but rather in Washington, where the ultimate deal maker is proving inept.

*Here is an update: six people on a US government list of “known and suspected” terrorists were stopped at the border in the first half of 2018. Seven times as many were stopped at the Canadian border, where no one is claiming there is a crisis. I needn’t comment on the likelihood of error in a USG list of the known and suspected.

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Motherfucker

Half the readership of peacefare.net, more or less, is non-American, and a large part of that does not have English as a native language. So it seems to me the furor over Rashida Tlaib requires some explication. She is the newly elected Democratic member of Congress from Michigan who called President Trump a motherfucker during a celebration of her election victory.

Motherfucker is not an obscenity that exists in the other languages I know (French, Italian and Portuguese–I never learned obscenities in German). Readers will have to inform me if I am wrong about that or if it translates to others.

I’ve lost most of my French and Portuguese obscenities–hard to remember the words if you don’t use them–but let’s take for contrast to “motherfucker” the Italian obscenity “cornuto,” which means cuckold and is just about the most offensive thing you can say to an Italian male, especially if you use the associated hand gesture. Italians also say “vaffanculo,” which is usually translated “fuck you” or “fuck off” but literally means “go do it in the ass.” They may call someone a “cazzo,” or prick. But Italians don’t in my experience call someone a motherfucker.

The word’s meaning in English depends on context. When Kanye West referred to himself as a “crazy motherfucker” in the Oval Office, the real meaning was in the “crazy” not the “motherfucker,” which was there only to attract attention to the adjective and magnify its significance:

He could just as easily have said “crazy son of a bitch.”

Tlaib used the word differently and in the more conventionally offensive sense. What she meant was that Trump is beyond her own ethical norms, in particular in bullying people:

America is a Puritan-founded society. The idea of sexual relations with your mother is pretty much the worst you can accuse someone of in that context. It is certainly much worse than “cuckold,” which is a word many Americans wouldn’t understand unless they were schooled in Shakespeare. Americans are much more likely to express disapproval of a wife who cuckolds her husband (calling her a slut, for example) than to criticize the husband.

I had a boss when I started my diplomatic career at the UN who was Hungarian, the Karl Marx professor of sociology at the University of Budapest. He called me in one day to discuss why Americans lack colorful obscenities like the Hungarian ones, which in his rendition seemed all to have to do with body parts of the Madonna. So I did what I could to convince him that “shit,” “asshole,” and “fuck you” merited consideration. He was unconvinced.

But here is my short lexicon of American obscenities, based on a childhood in Brooklyn and the New York City suburbs (English expressions can vary a good deal across the country):

1. Calling someone a “shit” implies they have done or said something offensive. It is also used as an expletive on its own, like the French “merde!” but somewhat stronger.

2. “Asshole” is close to “shit” but has the additional implication that the offense was committed intentionally and with malice aforethought.

3. “Prick” suggests a man who is habitually nasty. “Cunt” is the equivalent when referring to a woman.

4. “Son of a bitch” is someone despicable for any reason.

5. “Fuck you” is an expression used to reject as unacceptable something someone has done or said. It is almost never received well.

6. “Motherfucker” is even stronger and implies moral turpitude on the part of the person so labelled, unless used as Kanye did just to amplify the meaning of an adjective. It may also be associated with betrayal, as in “Those motherfuckers stabbed me in the back.”

I know that doesn’t complete the vocabulary, but it will be a good start for non-English speakers the next time Trump elicits an obscenity not taught in school, or uses one. But take my advice: don’t use any of these English words unless you are ready for consequences.

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