403 - Calling Out Sleaze and Corruption in Every Corner of the Globe, even Washington

The world is increasingly corrupt. A decade or so ago, it appeared that the advocates of anti-corruption were beginning to win the centuries-old battle against peculators, embezzlers, influence peddlers, pay-to-play perpetrators, and those insidious culprits everywhere who grab -- misappropriate -- what is not rightly theirs. But the tides of reform have now been succeeded by a tsunami of kleptocracy that engulfs countries from Indonesia to South Africa to Haiti and even floods the once comparatively abstemious United States.

Corruption saps as much as 3 percent of annual per capita GDP across the globe. The World Bank once estimated that at least $1 trillion was lost across the world to corruption annually. Beyond the numbers, corruption is within nations invasive and unforgiving. It degrades governance, distorts and criminalizes national priorities, and privileges the personal skimming of natural resource wealth and the illicit pocketing of every financial advantage that belongs to a people rather than to a political elite.

Corruption is the conversion of a societal good -- a communal good -- into a personal or family gain. Corruption is the illicit “gaining of advantage. It is the obtaining of influence and rewards for influence through underhand payments or promises of reciprocal rewards. Little brown envelopes stuffed with cash change hands when a citizen seeks to receive a governmental service such as a birth certificate or license or wants to cut to the head of an interminably long queue. Bigger brown envelopes stuffed with serious money change hands when world class entrepreneurs and companies seek mining or fishing concessions, wish to avoid stiff environmental regulations, or desire to avoid paying laborers sufficiently. Some corrupters want to construct new golf courses across prohibited lands or to erect hotels in place of historic structures, as now in Belgrade.

Brazil’s state-owned petroleum company for many years kicked back hefty sums to politicians who authorized company actions and permitted massive over-invoicing. A powerful construction company profited from such contracts and rewarded those who made their contracts possible. They also used the same techniques throughout the rest of South America, gaining contracts and paying off presidents and legislators. This was the Lava Jato (Car Wash) scandal that ended impunity for kleptocrats in Brazil in 2014-2016.

When a major concern from Iceland sought licenses to fish in anchovy-, pilchard-, and hake-filled waters off Namibia, it bribed the government ministers who allocated concessions and harvested vast hauls of fish for sale in Europe. This was the Fishrot scandal. The ministers and the Icelanders are on trial in Windhoek.

An infamous steel mill in Nigeria was funded by the U. S. government as part of developmental efforts. But when U.S. State Department delegates went to visit the site, there was not even a hole in the ground. Nigerian officials had pocketed the proceeds and vanished.

This week, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau announced that businessmen and criminals had “built a large-scale corruption scheme to influence strategic state-sector enterprises,” especially Energoatom, the government-owned nuclear enterprise. Contractors were pressured routinely for 15 percent kickbacks, meaning that consumers -- even during wartime -- were paying more than they should have for electricity. Putin’s bombs were destroying generating facilities at the same time as Ukrainians were making electricity more costly. A former minister of justice was suspended from office yesterday as part of an investigation of an $100 million embezzlement scheme.

South Africa is still suffering from President Jacob Zuma’s leadership in the 2010s, when he allowed the state to be “captured.” What that meant was that Zuma was at the head of a gigantic criminal enterprise that allocated government services only to those who paid-to-play. As a result, Eskom, the state-owned electrical power utility was starved of maintenance and, over time, it lost the ability to provide power throughout the country. “Load-shedding” and blackouts became common. So did the reliance of the ruling African National Congress political party on proceeds from selling influence; South Africa, even under much more honest post-Zuma leadership, has been unable to eradicate corrupt practices. Almost every night I read about the police taking payments from criminal consortia and cabinet ministers selling off state lands or companies -- all for personal gain. (Nov. 12: “EMPD is ‘criminal enterprise’: Ex-official claims killer, rapist officers were shielded.”)

Russian generals have been sacked throughout the Ukrainian invasion for selling promotions or for stealing rations belonging to their troops and selling them for personal gain. Chinese President Xi Jinping continually discharges key generals and admirals for corrupt dealings, often for pocketing funds meant to modernize the military or better to arm their forces.

Trump paid $7.5 million recently to Equatorial Guinea, one of the most corrupt countries in Africa (ranking 173rd of 180 on the Corruption Perceptions Index), so that it will accept U.S. deportees. Its president and vice-president, both sanctioned by the African Union, France, and the U.S., will personally keep the money.

The U.S., once mostly exempt from such blatant cheating of taxpayers, can no longer consider itself exempt. Kleptocracy under Trump is alive and well, with money flowing strongly downhill to the White House. Indeed, Trump and his family are financially making the most of his second chance to pilfer the nation and the world from within the White House.

Even if gilding the walls of what remains of the White House with gold leaf and painting pillars gold did not fully betray his auriferous instincts, Trump over and over breaches the constraints of Article 1, Section 9, clause 8, of the U.S. Constitution -- the foreign emoluments clause. It prevents U.S. officials from accepting gifts, offices, or titles from foreign kings, princes, or states without the consent of Congress. Think 747s from Qatar, crypto investments from the United Arab Emirates, and hotel and golf course financing opportunities here and there. Capital injections into family holdings could count, too, as should high-priced sales at his one-time hotel in Washington, D.C. Sleaze spreads.

This year, Trump has protected his administration from anti-corruption scrutiny by unlawfully firing the eighteen inspectors-general responsible for detecting and deterring fraud and misconduct in major federal agencies. He eliminated the FBI’s public-corruption squad. The thirty lawyers in the Department of Justice’s public-integrity section became a mere five, and its authority to investigate election fraud was revoked.

No one is investigating Trump’s agreement to cancel environmental regulations in exchange for $1 billion campaign contributions from major oil companies. The executives raised the money, and Trump delivered on his promise.

Trump has since launched his own cryptocurrency, $TRUMP. In response, the Department of Justice promptly disbanded its cryptocurrency-enforcement unit. Moreover, when the top 220 buyers of Trump’s cryptocurrency offering dined with Trump, sixty-seven each purchased more than $1 million of the new coins. One, a Chinese national, purchased more than $10 million worth, plus $75 million from a crypto company controlled by Trump’s family.

Were these covert campaign contributions? If so, foreigners may not contribute to American political candidates and U.S. citizens are limited to $3,500 to any single candidate.

In part to alert Americans to Trump’s corruption, in larger part to comment on how Trump and the Supreme Court were destroying our nation’s hitherto much admired adherence to the rule of law, a courageous long-serving (forty-year) defender and adjudicator of American constitutional rights and freedoms resigned Friday from his federal district court judgeship in Boston and explained his decision, and his wish to speak out in defense of liberty, in a vigorous article in the Atlantic magazine. Judge Mark L. Wolf was once chief of the public corruption unit in the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston.

“Over the past 35 years I have spoken in many countries about the role of American judges in safeguarding democracy, protecting human rights, and combatting corruption. Many of these countries—including Russia, China, and Turkey—are ruled by corrupt leaders who rank among the worst abusers of human rights. These kleptocrats jail their political opponents, suppress independent media that could expose their wrongdoing, forbid free speech, punish peaceful protests, and frustrate every effort to establish an independent, impartial judiciary that could constrain these abuses. These kleptocrats have impunity in their countries because they control the police, prosecutors, and courts.” That describes our current situation well.

Corruption, Judge Wolf could also have said, now flourishes globally because Trump is not only corrupt himself, but is also enabling corrupt practices across the planet by letting our own country indulge in the same sleaze that others do, and that we at one time were determined to stop. As with so much else in the world, Trump abuses decency, morals, the rule of law, and endorses corrupt practices and influence peddling.

When and how will it stop? When will Presidents Washington and Jefferson rise from their graves to condemn the perverse suborning of our national heritage? When, we might also ask, will Republicans repudiate their erstwhile corrupter? Sen. Robert Taft, deeply conservative, would never have permitted such a Republican calamity.

PS Judge Wolf chairs Integrity Initiatives International, which advocates and plans for the establishment of a much-needed International Anti-Corruption Court.