279 - Thou Shalt Not Steal: The Perils of Greed and the Erosion of Democratic Bulwarks
Taking to the Streets
That injunction obviously is, but should not be, subject to interpretation and modification, depending on where corrupt dealings take place, under what compromising circumstances they occur, and how powerful or how protected an offender may be. Senator Robert Menendez is now a felon, following his conviction by a jury, just as Trump is also a jury-convicted felon. But, eventually, an out-of-control U.S. Supreme Court may well re-interpret precedent and common readings of statutes to let them both walk free. Elsewhere around the world activists take to the streets, notably in Kenya now and in Uganda next week, to attempt to oust corrupt governments and judicial systems that hew to the preferences of national chief executives. Need the U.S. go down that personalistic and autocratic road?
Across the globe, where persistent corruption by executives and other prominent politicians distorts priorities and largely goes unpunished, courts have less freedom and instrumentality than they traditionally possess in Scandinavia, much of Europe, and North and parts of South America. That is why the young people of Kenya in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, and Eldoret are trying to topple President William Ruto's regime, why South Africans reduced their support for the African National Congress in recent parliamentary elections, why Nigeria has had a hard time defeating the Islamist rebels of Boko Haram, and why the national army of the Democratic Republic of Congo has failed to bring order to its easternmost provinces despite massive firepower.
Nigeria has epitomized corruption at every governmental level and involving every private and public transaction with citizens for centuries. A recent official government survey reveals that Nigerians paid about $1.3 billion in bribes to public officials in 2023. A full quarter of all respondents to the survey had paid at least one bribe a year during the course of requesting some kind of permit, some kind of birth or marriage certificate, a driver's license, or even service at a government or private hospital. An American scholar long ago referred to such transactions as "lubrications" or as "speed" money. In Nigeria and in Kenya, bribes need not be in cash. They can also be paid over as bank transfers or, using M-Pesa and similar smartphone apps, over handheld devices. Such is the modern world, even adapting to illicit exigencies.
In an investigation revealed this morning, a South African printing firm purposely inflated its cost of ballots and other election materials prepared for Zimbabwe’s 2023 election by 235 percent. The proceeds were than redistributed to key officials in that country, likely including President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
According to the latest Corruption Perceptions Index rankings, Kenya rates 126th out of 180 countries scored, comparable with Mexico and El Salvador. Uganda is 141st (tied with Russia) and Nigeria 145th, just ahead of Bangladesh. Zimbabwe follows on this ragged list at 149, tied with Lebanon. In terms of corruption, these examples are among the worst of the worst. Are we slipping in their direction?
Corruption fuels Haiti's gangs and the disorder that has turned the Western Hemisphere's poorest country into a collapsed state. Corruption bedevils the Tatmadaw army's failure to defeat the ethnic and newly recruited armies of ex-students and professionals that oppose the military government in Myanmar.
United States' trial courts have a solid record in trying and convicting most straightforward cases of corruption -- elected or appointed officials abusing their positions for personal enrichment. Courts of Appeal largely sustain such cases. Only the Supreme Court, trying to reason superficial hypotheticals, since 2016 has complicated the jurisprudential record and overturned the lower courts in the critical cases of former Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia (2016) and Indiana Mayor James Spencer this year. The Supreme Court's rulings were contorted, at best. And we may experience more ad hoc and politicized rulings, particularly when Special Counsel Jack Smith appeals Judge Aileen Cannon's bizarre and wholly concocted false reading of the statutes absolutely permitting the appointment and funding of special counsels by the Department of Justice.
Tuesday, Senator Robert Menendez, once the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was pronounced guilty by a jury of his peers on sixteen counts of corruption, along with two of his bribers. Egypt, the jury agreed, purchased Menendez's assistance and considerable heft in avoiding Congressional human rights sanctions and in keeping military and civilian aid flowing to a thoroughly autocratic regime that denies human rights and oppresses local critics.
American presidential administrations going back a long way have modified their principles to support Egypt, a key sometime ally in the Middle East and North Africa. But our enabling Egypt's several autocratic leaders to oppress their people was part of a Cold War strategy and now, with a chance to bring about a truce in Gaza, essential to our still-frustrated efforts at peace making between Hamas (which Egypt distrusts) and Israel (which Egypt equally disdains).
Menendez may have told himself that he was an instrument of Biden's foreign policy machine but, as his trial disclosed, his actions were mostly intended to enrich himself and his wife. Plain greed. Violating the foreign agent prohibition was in fact the least of his infractions. More significant and more telling for others who might be so tempted were his convictions on charges of "honest services wire fraud," extortion, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy.
In the American system, Menendez will appeal the jury verdict, a higher court will likely support the jury findings and whatever sentence the senator receives in October. But perhaps a majority of the members of the Supreme Court will find some basis by which to overturn his conviction. Menendez argued that the gold bars in his closet were put there by his wife and that the bundles of cash found in his suit jackets and elsewhere throughout his house were stashed there because he was an insecure Cuban refugee who feared the use of banks. Perhaps the Supreme Court will buy such arguments or invent a new technicality on which to acquit Menendez. Perhaps the gold bars were just a "gratuity."
Russian courts convict whoever they are told by the state-- by Putin -- to convict. Chinese officials who oppose President Xi Jinping's dictatorship are tried and convicted for various kinds of corrupt dealings or actions of omission. They often vanish into remote prisons just like public truth tellers and other critics who are critical of Putin or a fleet of other personalistic rulers in countries like Saudia Arabia, Hungary, Cambodia, North Korea.
Recently, two British judges and one Canadian judge resigned from the Hong Kong Court of Final Appea, having realized somewhat belatedly that they had become enablers of Xi Jinping's usurpation of power in the one-time autonomous city state. Our own highest court is much more compromised than observers or critics could ever have suspected. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has initiated the impeachment of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito for their failures to disclose compromising associations and gifts. Her impeachment initiative will go nowhere, but the manner in which our own highest court's standing has been besmirched will remain, sadly and damagingly.
Kenyan protesters know that Ruto and his associates all profit personally from their lofty positions in charge of the nation. Those mostly young protesters have succeeded in getting most of the ministers in Kenya's cabinet discharged, but not in directly undermining Ruto's hold on power. Likewise, next week, demonstrations against President Yoweri Museveni's corrupt thirty-eight years in power in Uganda may accomplish little instrumentally except to express discontent.
Let us hope that Americans will not have to take to the streets to protect our democratic values, our Constitutional rights, and our hallowed ability to remain free. But with a dangerously tilting Supreme Court and the now again anointed candidacy of someone whom his own vice-presidential candidate once called a "loathsome idiot," an example of "cultural heroin," and an "America's Hitler" -- we are right to worry about the resiliency of the Republic. The lessons and consequences of wannabe fascism are frightening. "I will be a dictator on Day One" may simply be aspirational fantasy. But we cannot risk such fantastical strivings.
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