331 - Making the World More Corrupt: Good Job, Trump!

plus Accusing South Africa Falsely

A headline in Nigeria's Premium Times on Tuesday starkly portrayed Washington's latest attack on settled law: "US Companies Can Now Bribe Officials in Nigeria, Other Countries." Why, readers might ask, should the United States officially facilitate the spread of corruption, the improper transfer of state resources to fat-cat kleptocrats? Is it because Washington has now become a facilitator of greed and theft?

Trump signed an executive order Monday directing the U. S. Justice Department to pause prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act FCPA). It prohibits American citizens and businesses from bribing foreign government officials to gain or retain business. Passed into law in the wake of the Watergate Scandal, it makes it illegal for any person or company listed on a U.S. stock exchange to offer or give bribes to foreign officials, or for any foreign national or foreign company to do the same while in the United States.

The FCPA, passed in 1977 and amended and strengthened in 1998, is the globe's most significant piece of anti-corruption legislation. It has enabled the United States to prosecute not only American companies gaining concessions and business overseas through bribery, but it permits the prosecution of any firm anywhere that uses the dollar, or moves its money through the U.S., to be held accountable.

Trump asserts, without evidence, that enforcing the FCPA disadvantages U. S. commercial interests, giving others opportunities to gain advantages overseas that American companies cannot enjoy because of FCPA. False, and misguided. Possibly, Chinese firms have bribed their way ahead of European and American companies in some special places. But, in general, the existence of the FCPA has not materially harmed American interests.

The FCPA in this century spawned substantial copycat legislation in Canada, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany. Now that Washington is halting the enforcing of its own path-breaking and powerful legislation, a likely result will be the legitimizing of corruption across the developing world. Big American concerns will be smart enough to refrain from bribing to gain concessions immediately, and will not want to be the first to poison global trade with unethical practices. But shady companies will jump in, perhaps many associated with Trump, his children, and his in-laws.

Permitting wholesale corruption overseas in this manner further eviscerates America's reputation and slashes at its vaunted soft power. There will be no stop to the facilitating of the theft of resources in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which gutting the FCPA does. Nor does enabling corruption make the world safer or better. Every world citizen will be less well off. Russia and China get the biggest pass, too.

Three FCPA prosecutions come to mind: the fining in 2009 of Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), a subsidiary of US oil and energy contractor Halliburton. KBR paid $402 million for bribing Nigerians. In 2017, Halliburton paid $29 million for bribing Angolans. In 2023, Glencor, the Swiss global trading and mining firm, paid $100 million for bribing Nigerians (and others).

Stabbing the FCPA in the back will only benefit competitors, not so much Americans. And Russia and China, very busy in Africa chasing lucrative mineral concessions, will also profit. Doesn't anyone in the Trump administration consider what will result from foolish policy pronouncements?

South Africa

Trump's claim that South Africa is harming its white citizens -- taking their land and subjecting them to cruel discrimination -- is characteristically based on a refusal to investigate the true position of minorities in South Africa, on hearsay (perhaps mouthed by Musk), and on Trump's usual biased presumptions.

Trump cut all financial assistance to South Africa. Nearly all of it was directed at improving the health of black and brown South Africans; now more will suffer from AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, pneumonia, and dysentery, thousands dying unnecessarily.

Trump has also opened a special path for white immigrants to come to the U.S. from South Africa at a time when needy immigrants of darker colors from elsewhere are being excluded from our shores. Fortunately, few white South Africans are excited by the prospect of entry to a Trumpified America.

What Trump could discover if he asked is that Cecil Rhodes and others took freehold land from Africans in the Cape Colony in the 1880s. In 1913, the new Afrikaner-run Union government of South Africa passed the Natives Land Act specifically to deprive Africans of freehold tenure throughout the recently created nation.

Apartheid (1948-1994) pushed the majority African population of South Africa into crowded bantustans (homelands) and prevented Africans from farming land outside of the bantustans.

Since independence and the transfer of South African political control from Afrikaans-speaking whites to Africans, Coloureds, and Indians in 1994, successive governments of South Africa have been attempting to purchase white land on a willing seller-willing buyer basis in order to boost the percentage of South African farmland that is owned by Africans.

Progress has been slow. That is why South Africa's parliament this year passed a new law that makes it easier than before to take land from whites, pay for it under judicial supervision, and transfer the new land to Africans. Very little will happen abruptly. The process of purchase and transfer has numerous safeguards. And the owners of land that is finally taken by the state will receive compensation, despite what critics allege.

If land in even modest amounts are gradually transferred, those transfers could put a small dent in South Africa's current unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity. Of the country's 64 million people, 81 percent are Africans, 8 percent Coloureds (mixed race), 3 percent Asians, and 7 percent are whites. The whites are both English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking, the latter more numerous than the former. In terms of the widely used Gini-coefficient measure, South Africa and Brazil are among the least equal nations on the planet. By the same metric, South Korea and Taiwan are very equalized societies.

More than three decades after the end of apartheid, about 70 percent of South Africa’s farmland is still held by white South Africans. Their Black counterparts own just 4 percent, making South Africa one of the world’s most unequal nations both in land use and income distribution.

Trump has parroted the falsehood that South African white farmers are being murdered because of their color, and disproportionately. He claims that they are victims of "unjust racial discrimination," something he also enunciated during his first presidential term. That is a canard that has circulated for at least thirty years. The facts are that some Afrikaans-speaking farmers have been robbed and killed in the rural areas. But so have numbers of African farmers and workers on the land.

Deaths of white farmers in 2024 were down by 70 percent from 1998. Furthermore, the majority of crime and the overwhelming numbers of homicides occur in South Africa's slums, among Africans. South Africa has among the highest number of murders globally -- more than 20,000 in 2024 -- and 99 percent of the fatalities were of Black and brown, not white, persons. Robbery, carjacking, and rape numbers are also shockingly high. But it is the majority population that suffers intensely.

As the New York Times' correspondent in Johannesburg explained, stories about retribution against whites on the land "are false or greatly exaggerated, but that hasn't stopped them from being widely amplified and repeated online."

Trump is quick to take the side of whites whose lives are, he falsely thinks and has been told, are at risk. And he is equally quick to end help for the people who are more genuinely in need-- South Africa's majority population. No whites are fleeing injustice; few Afrikaner spokepersons welcomed Trump’s initiative.

The South African accusation and the FCPA cutoff exemplify how a president who considers himself king and is determined to let rumor and falsehood guide his policymaking can produce results that are harmful to U. S. interests and dangerous to global stability. Nor do his appointments to cabinet positions change the dynamic of disruption. None has backbone. None will tell the emperor that he has no clothes, and tilts mostly at windmills.