Alexei Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader and founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, died today as a complication of Vladimir Putin’s trumped-up imprisonment.
Reports indicate Navalny died of an embolism, though no independent autopsy has been scheduled. Putin had previously tried to poison Navalny with nerve agent novichok, the same poison used against former double agent Sergei Skripal in 2018.
Navalny’s work documenting Russia’s corruption tweaked not only Putin but his underbosses and capos.
The example in the video above, centered on the family of Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, offers a reason why Putin targeted Navalny: the Russian emperor is an organized crime overlord whose henchmen have hollowed out Russia.
This is a key reason, too, why Russia is engaged in a war of attrition against Ukraine. It can’t muster the military might to take out Ukraine because its defense department has been riddled with leaks siphoning off the resources needed to build a first world credible military, just as Chaika and his family have bled Russia’s law enforcement and tax revenue structure.
While we can thank this hollowing out for preventing an absolute blow-out against Ukraine, the Russian military as it exists continues to offer the corrupt regime opportunities to vacuum more resources out of the country.
Navalny’s continued existence was a threat to what was yet another of Putin’s war of attrition – the one of organized crime against the Russian people.
It has not helped that the Republican Party has been aiding and abetting Putin’s antidemocratic efforts against Russians by supporting Putin’s useful idiots, most especially Donald Trump.
It has not helped that useful idiots like Tucker Carlson have been so eager to kneel down before Putin and kiss his ring.
Though Navalny had been declared a political prisoner by Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Putin certainly did nothing to ensure the safety and longevity of Navalny, who had been transferred to high security penal facility IK-3 in late December 2023.
How convenient for Putin to have Tucker Carlson interview him the week before Navalny died out of the public’s view in thinly-populated western Siberia, providing a synthetic gloss of western approbation over Putin’s criminality.
Navalny may have lost this war of attrition but he was right: “Listen, I’ve got something very obvious to tell you. You’re not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.”
If Navalny had not continued to pose a threat to Putin’s regime, he would have been ignored.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Wikimedia_AlexeyNavalnyAnnaVedutaIlyaYashin-MoscowRally_12JUN2013_1500pxw.jpg9101500Raynehttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngRayne2024-02-16 11:23:172024-02-16 11:45:03Putin’s Other War of Attrition
It’s going to be a rather busy Monday. Grab your poison of choice — second LARGE cup of joe underway here — and let’s get at it.
~ 3 ~
It’s rather sad this needed to be said yet again in reference to Donald Trump:
“No matter how much money you think you may have, no one is above the law,” James told reporters before entering the courtroom. “The law is both powerful and fragile. And today in court will prove our case.”
The Trump campaign’s post-debate stunt leaving a bird cage outside fellow GOP candidate Nikki Haley’s hotel room likely encouraged the reminder, on top of Trump’s other egregious behavior including insults about New York AG Letitia James.
The stunt, which followed Trump’s insult on social media saying Haley had a bird brain, didn’t go over well abroad. India’s media took note of this trashy behavior unbecoming a former U.S. president and a current presidential candidate.
One can only wonder if Trump would be both stupid and arrogant enough to pull such a gag on AG James as a dig at the prosecutor.
~ 2 ~
California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom will appoint Laphonza Butler to fill the Senate seat in the wake of Dianne Feinstein’s death.
Butler’s appointment is a statement none of the other possible appointees could make. She’s been president of political action committee EMILY’s List since 2021; the organization’s mission has been to get more women elected to office.
Butler has also been a superdelegate for California during the 2016 election when she supported Hillary Clinton. Originally from Mississippi, Butler has worked as a union organizer, last with SEIU where she worked toward raising the minimum wage and taxing the wealthiest Californians.
In 2018 Butler left the SEIU to join a Democratic communications firm, SCRB (now Bearstar Strategies) where she worked on Kamala Harris’ campaign.
Butler is gay and married; she and her partner have a daughter.
So many boxes checked off by one appointment, so many marginalized and suppressed groups now represented. Worth reading Philip Bump’s graphic-laden piece in WaPo to understand what this means.
The failure to provide aid in spite of efforts by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is in part the result of ongoing influence operations by Russia targeting GOP members of Congress. Like Trump they have fallen prey to the idea that the US has no interest in Ukraine’s democratic sovereignty and that NATO and the EU likewise should play no role in rejecting Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
But the reasons why financial aid to Ukraine may not have passed with the CR isn’t solely due to hostile foreign influence. It’s also linked to ongoing corruption in Ukraine undermining the nation’s sovereignty while cannibalizing the resources needed to repel Russia and build back infrastructure destroyed by the last 19 months’ war.
Ukraine took a large move toward addressing corruption with its arrest of oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi on September 2. Kolomoyskyi, appointed Governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in 2014 after the Euromaidan, had already been blacklisted and indicted by the U.S.
This arrest is only one step Ukraine must take. The Biden administration has continued to press the Zelenskyy administration for more measurable efforts on corruption. Without making more substantial headway, it would be difficult for Ukraine to join the EU let alone NATO. Ukraine can’t become a means to drain EU and NATO resources in peacetime.
Zelenskyy will have to make considerable progress over the next 45 days – for this reason alone the near-shutdown and CR have a beneficial effect since both the Biden’s State Department and Zelenskyy can point to a date toward which both will have to work on corruption together.
It’s all the more important that the U.S. at state and federal level also address domestic corruption. The U.S. can’t make a demand of other democracies to tackle corruption without setting an example.
All the more reason why we need to demonstrate and not merely say no person in this democracy is above the law.
I’ve had this tune stuck in my head for days now while pondering existential crises in the U.K. and the U.S. as well as the full-blast firehose of news this week. Though a British band, The Who asked the right question giving me pause.
The capper in the course of my meditations — of all bloody things — was this fragment from a speech given late last November by that well-known survivor Rod Rosenstein:
… I visited the nation of Armenia in 1994, just as it was emerging from seven decades of Soviet domination. I gave a talk about public corruption at the University of Yerevan. After I finished, a student raised his hand. He asked me, “If you cannot pay bribes in America, how do you get electricity?”
It was a pragmatic question that illustrated how that young man had learned to think about his society. Corruption may start small, but it tends to spread like an infection. It stifles innovation, fuels inefficiency, and inculcates distrust of government.
We aim to prevent corruption. …
Both this snippet and The Who’s tune brought to mind another couple memorable exchanges I’ve had in the past with co-workers from abroad. One chap I’ll call PDV lived in the Netherlands and loved to visit the U.S., coming over at least once a year to marvel at the profusion of choices we had.
It was early 2000, well before the election, and I remember PDV telling me that one thing he really enjoyed about the U.S. was our freedom. I laughed because I thought he meant the myriad beers he giddily described being offered in one of our chain restaurants, or the ridiculous number of choices in dried pasta in an American grocery store, both of which he had remarked upon in our previous chats.
“No,” he told me. “Your society is free. When you go to the airport there are no dogs, no military personnel except travelers, no police armed to the teeth like military.”
And now we take our goddamned shoes off, allow our bodies to be scanned, tolerate the armed personnel with dogs as if we were sheep being herded.
The other co-worker from overseas I didn’t know as well. We communicated less frequently, I think in part because he felt less connected to the rest of the global business. It made sense; he was in South Africa, nearly half the globe away from my location. I tried to make him feel comfortable during his visit to the U.S. – this was in 2000 – but the smallish company town in which my facility was located wasn’t yet up to world standards.
Not a place one could easily find rusks for breakfast let alone crumpets.
What struck him as odd when he visited was our openness. Not just the manner in which we greet each other, especially here in flyover country where our passive-aggressiveness is well hidden beneath our Midwest niceness.
When I asked him to explain what he meant he said, “You leave everything out.” We didn’t take in our outdoor patio furniture or our grills. We didn’t lock up our personal effects. He said it wasn’t like that where he lived in Johannesburg at the time; if anything was left outside, it disappeared.
I didn’t have anything to say to that. I couldn’t imagine living in such a suffocating fashion.
And yet now years later I have to monitor everything I do with my electronic devices, hide my traffic with various tools, avoid cameras and Blueray and other IoT devices to prevent losing personal information. No one’s stolen my bike from my porch or my gas grill from my deck but somebody knows my age, name, location and they’ve sold it repeatedly without my express permission.
Who are you? the song asks. Somebody knows, and it’s worth a fortune to them; they’ve stolen that information.
~ ~ ~
It wasn’t The Who that entrenched the question into my brain pan. It was the other way around, a moral and ethical question which wouldn’t leave me alone as I watched miserable wretch after miserable wretch compromise themselves this past week.
The question may even have started to embed itself when I revisited Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations this last month and asked, What is Rudy Giuliani?
He’s not ‘America’s Mayor’ – unless America has become a bat shit insane and lawless place.
He was there at the scene in 2001 when our collective consciousness was hacked and we began to destroy our open society with a police state.
Is this who we are, weak-willed and servile, giving up our freedoms for the illusion of safety and security, failing to question to whom we yield these freedoms?
Because Rudy Giuliani is among the last people we should seek as an authority on security. He is wholly corrupt, the very thing we should be avoiding if we are a free and open society. He conducts his business in the dark, without oversight, which is appealing to a certain kind of client, abusing the faith and trust some have awarded him by simply surviving the demands 9/11/2001 placed on him as a mayor.
In retrospect perhaps he survived not because he was good but because he was so very bad. We have to ask ourselves what didn’t survive but should have had better leaders with integrity lead us through that time.
Did we really survive?
~ ~ ~
2000 and 2010 did serious damage to us; our country arrived at a fork in the road and it took the turn for the worse. Imagine if instead we had refused to accept the SCOTUS appointment of George Bush in 2000 as president. Imagine if our nascent government surplus had become a means for providing health care for all. Imagine if President Al Gore had been able to promulgate his intended policies to halt climate change.
2010 exacerbated the damage begun in 2000 with the aggressive gerrymandering of states so that the public’s true desires were suppressed at the polls in subsequent elections. We have become a nation in thrall to an oppressive minority, one which is willingly corrupted in order to retain its power over what was the largest economy in the world. Gains made for personal freedom have been few and squelched whenever possible.
We are not the government now in place; they do not truly represent America. They are what a rigged system created by corruption permits us.
What is left of us?
~ ~ ~
Which brings me to that question beating a tattoo in my head: Who are you?
By you I mean the person in the mirror. I mean the persons reading this post, which is in itself another mirror. I mean us, the plural you, the collective we, us.
Who are we?
We aim to prevent corruption, said Rosenstein, and yet I have no faith in this statement from him. I can’t see what he has done to prevent what is happening around us now, a steadily increasing occupation by a transnational organized crime syndicate masquerading as a political party, in league with other crime syndicates abroad which are proxies for hostile nations.
I can’t see how his boss Bill Barr is doing anything to prevent corruption, especially when he perverts and corrupts the First Amendment by claiming from a podium that secularism causes increasing drug use after meeting with the head of a pro-Republican media organization. Not to mention his own role in obstructing justice with his gross misrepresentation of the Special Counsel’s report and his lies to the Senate before that during his confirmation hearing.
I don’t see how our law enforcement is stopping a slide toward a wholly transactional society, when Trump can admit to soliciting foreign aid for his personal benefit on camera with an implied return and our top law enforcement and Senate leadership do nothing but blink like deer in the headlights, offering mealy-mouthed platitudes instead of adherence to ethics and faithful application of the law.
The easier question may be who are we not. I hope we are not these corrupt functionaries holding the places meant for persons with real ethics.
We aim to prevent corruption, Rosenstein said. Note how he didn’t say we stop corruption.
If you read the rest of his speech you’ll note he focused on disproportionate and inefficient enforcement, working on consistency to avoid “piling on” in relation to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
And yet here we are, nearly a year later, digging through a mound of corruption, staring at multiple acts of bribery or extortion as well as violations of federal election laws.
Does this look like we’ve aimed to prevent corruption? Had it not been for a determined and concerned whistleblower we might never have realized there was the possibility of rampant corruption here and overseas involving the White House.
Is this who we are, a nation whittled away down to one brave person who felt their personal ethics required more of them than to simply allow this to continue unchecked?
~ ~ ~
My social media timeline is filled with people who are upset about Trump’s agreement with Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. We do not know the terms of the agreement, only that Trump has consented to Turkey’s incursion into northern Syria to attack the Kurds. There is no apparent benefit to the U.S. and definitely no benefit to the Kurds obtained — The Art of the Deal at work once again.
We can’t rule out there was another quid pro quo involved in this agreement because Trump has properties and businesses inside Turkey, having failed to divest them to avoid conflicts of interest.
ISIS members have escaped because their Kurdish captors have been attacked.
There are atrocities recorded – non-combatants including multiple children killed, a human right activist murdered. Our own troops have been pinned down under Turkish attacks, ordered to stand down and not fire back nor protect the Kurds who have been our allies.
We are both collateral damage and party to war crimes. We have been led into this by a man who is corruptly compromised.
Is this who we chose to be?
~ ~ ~
Every day is a chance to make a new choice, to pick a different way forward. Most of us believe we choose every day not to be a society like the one Rosenstein alluded to in his speech, a place where corruption has infected our thinking and we accept it as a way of life.
(Though I refer to him I’m not at all convinced Rosenstein is above a banal form of corruption by complacency. Someone should ask him if merely surviving is enough, if that’s all he wants for an epitaph on his tombstone: He was a survivor – until now.)
I can’t imagine having to arrange to bribe someone to order a service or product, but we do already accept applications on our phones which direct us to goods or services based on payments those providers made to the application developer. When is this a service versus a system of bribery and extortion?
I can’t imagine bribing a school to obtain an education for myself or my children, and yet some people have and do though only a few have been caught out and punished for it, and nominally at that. When does it become commonplace for bribes to be paid in education, or to punish the well-meaning ineligible voter far more harshly than those who engage in bribes?
I couldn’t imagine compromising on the ideal of one citizen, one vote. Yet I know I didn’t get engaged to deter this ideal’s collapse until too late in my own state. It was like a slow-motion train wreck watching a GOP majority legislator elected to office only to trash the idea of a representative republic right here, up close and personal. It’s not as if they were brilliant; I participated in a debate with our local GOP state representative who proved he was as dumb as a box of rocks. But corruption isn’t smart – it’s persistent, determined, ruthless, and often has the money their ethical opponents don’t. Smart didn’t overcome this, expecting everyone to play by the Marquess of Queensbury’s rules in a bloody street brawl.
I should know better now, having become an activist while watching our slide toward fascism after 9/11; engaged in tracking the tech industry only to find it riddled with misogynist and hebephilic scum. And yet a lack of imagination kept me from seeing the big picture.
I couldn’t imagine living in a country where our leaders openly talk about their own corrupt practices on television, ask for foreign interference in our democracy for personal benefit, and the people don’t take to the streets like they did in South Korea or Romania.
Yet here we are – me, typing away at my keyboard, you reading these pixels. Neither of us in the streets as they are in Hong Kong, fighting to preserve what’s left of their democracy.
Who are we?
Who are you?
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Crash_HaoZhang-hharvey_Unsplash.jpg10271500Raynehttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngRayne2019-10-13 17:52:532019-10-13 17:52:53A Meditation: Who Are You?
I’m fried. I’m mentally and emotionally burnt right out, which is probably the aim of Agent Orange Chaos — to grind us all down until we roll over and allow this country to be a haven of corruption.
Imagine everything you need becoming even more transactional than it is now — systematically corrupt. Need a new cable TV line installed? Pay a bribe for access. Need to move to a different apartment? Pay a bribe to access a better list of buildings. Need a specialty item for your health, something that can’t be obtained through Amazon? Pay a bribe.
Sure, we’re used to paying fees for access in many different ways. But Americans are not used to the kind of petty and persistent corruption which is endemic in other parts of the world. Instead we pay taxes to support a legal system which is supposed to ensure fair dealing. Imagine paying these taxes and not having any expectation of justice AND paying bribes or extortion all along the way.
We’re so unused to and under-educated about the idea of corruption touching everything we do that I think we suffer from cognitive dissonance. It’s right there in front of us and yet we fail to recognize for what it is and for the slide in our ethical standards it represents.
Our country is drowning right now, staring at multiple crop failures across a huge expanse of farm land, and our fearless leader is surely off golfing on our dime instead of looking into how to help farmers weather both the affects of the deepening climate emergency and the fallout from fearless leader’s hacktastic tariffs.
Corruption. Skimming money off us while farms and farm land drowns.
And too many farmers who will receive federal aid are not universally single family owned farms but mega corporate oligarchs — like the crooked Brazilian meat packing billionaires who will receive $62 million in aid for distribution to the farms supplying them meat.
But you know in your gut this won’t happen. And it’s corruption.
Journalists have covered the Brazilians raking in cash from our tax dollars, fortunately. They saw the problem and reported on it. But the public hasn’t mustered adequate outrage because this hasn’t yet hurt them in the wallet.
Wait until winter when holiday baking begins.
I don’t need to wait that long to feel it. I’m plenty pissed off because it’s another Saturday, another day at the golf course, and we’ve completely lost count of that orange mooch’s sponging. Which of his courses is he at, with our Secret Service personnel renting more golf carts to follow him around while he plays another round cheating both at the game and at life?
Ah, and there it is, he’s leeching us dry yet again with each crappy swing of his club:
According to the pool report, Trump has arrived at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.
This is Trump’s 195th day at a Trump golf club and 261st day at a Trump property as president.
As of the end of the day he’s been in office 876 days — which means he has spent 29.7% of his total time at one of his properties, 22.2% of his time in office play golf at one of his clubs.
Corruption. Just makes me want to puke.
We’re just supposed roll over and let them grab our taxpaying pussy while they tee off on our dime. They’ll argue our legitimately-elected representatives don’t have the right to oversight when he’s manipulating our tax system for his own personal gain to our collective detriment.
Like the New York park land he donated after he was refused permits to develop a couple million dollars of property into golf courses — Trump org declared them worth $26 million to write off the capital loss and reduce the taxes paid.
What really pisses me off is the story no reporter has yet covered as far as I can tell: if Trump’s Bedminster NJ golf course is classified as farm land for tax purposes so he can avoid paying tens of thousands of dollars in property taxes, is Trump org going to claim federal relief for this farm, too?
It’s right there under our noses. So corrupt and he and his oligarchic sponsors want this to become the norm.
Fuck that. If this guy was your direct employee you’d have fired his ass already.
This is an open thread.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/GolfGrass_JonasWeckschmied-Unsplash_26JAN2019.jpg10001500Raynehttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngRayne2019-06-15 09:52:012022-02-14 21:40:39A Fine Crop of Golf
In Democracy Against Capitalism the Marxist scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood says that the driving force of capitalism is the urgent desire to accumulate more capital. As we know, and not just from Marx, capitalist only expends capital in the expectation of profit, and generally can be counted on to invest capital if profit seems likely.
In the US, it has always been the norm that those with access to capital should control every possible avenue that might lead to profit. The government has always been there to provide cash to support capital, with no compensation or justification to the government except maybe new jobs. As an example, the US handed huge tracts of land and direct subsidies to the crooks and cheats who built US railroads. I learned about this from Frank Norris’ book The Octopus, but Railroaded, reviewed here, looks even better. And here’s a sympathetic explanation of this monstrous give-away. There’s an obvious question that no one asks: if railroads were so important, why didn’t the government just build them?
In this post I looked at Wood’s definition of historical materialism and its use in the evolution of the separation of politics and economics starting in the middle ages. The comments add a lot of fascinating detail; thanks to all. What’s missing from Wood’s discussion and from economics generally is the motivation behind this evolution, namely greed and indifference to other humans. As the reviewer of Railroaded, the historian Michael Kazin, says:
The history of American capitalism is stuffed with tales of industries that overbuilt and overpromised and left bankruptcies and distressed ecosystems in their wake: gold and silver mining, oil drilling and nuclear power, to name a few. The railroad barons wielded more power than other businessmen in the Gilded Age. But their behavior revealed a trait they shared with many of their fellow citizens: too much was never enough.
That still true, and governments under both parties are as willing as they ever were to let the capitalists profit and to stuff their pockets with subsidies. As an example, look at the Democrats who run Chicago. In 2008, Chicago leased its parking meters to a group of investors headed by Morgan Stanley; investors today include the wealth fund of Abu Dhabi and other hidden investors. Mayor Richard Daley agreed to a front payment of $1.15 billion to the city.
In the seven years since, the meter company has reported a total of $778.6 million in revenues. It’s on pace to make back what it paid the city by 2020, with more than 60 years of meter money still to come.
There’s the incredible story of the city getting ripped off for hundreds of millions of dollars in derivative transactions. Chicago recently offered Amazon over $2 billion to put its new headquarters here.
That eagerness to coddle capitat has always been part of our culture. Maybe it could be justified in a society hemmed in by commodity money and weak financial markets, where there might be some limitations to the amount of capital available for investment. But there is far more capital looking for profits today than there are plausible investments. We’ve just run a huge real-life experiment. The Republican tax bill gave corporations billions of dollars in tax breaks for money stashed “offshore” to avoid taxes. The brilliant CEOS had no profitable use for it and gave it to their shareholders.
Here’s an example of the amount of capital available to waste, electric rental scooters. Much of that useless capital is employed in various kinds of direct exploitation like payday lending.
Beyond the factual reality of a world awash in capital, we don’t live in a world of limited money. Money is a commodity created by the state. It isn’t pieces of metal, and it isn’t limited by how much of the metal there is in government vaults. Government can create all it wants and needs. The Republicans just passed a bill slashing US revenues for the foreseeable future. Then they passed a bill raising spending. Where is that coming from? Stephanie Kelton explains in a quick and easy introduction to Modern Money Theory.
Returning to the railroads, the government could have built them itself, using a combination of taxes, revenues and borrowing. It might have taken longer; and it would have been corrupt though it would never have been as corrupt as it actually was. Why didn’t that happen?
Or look at oil. In some countries, oil is owned by the State, which employs people directly to drill and refine, or hires private drillers and refiners. We don’t do that. We just let the capitalists take the resources out of public land for a small fee which is rebated in the form of sickening tax breaks like depletion allowances.
There was never any justification for the US system other than the demand of the rich and powerful for greater profits with utter indifference to the rest of us who are left to clean up after the bankruptcies, frauds, toxic spills, nuclear waste and whatever other trash they leave behind. Capitalists won’t make society a better place, because that isn’t profitable. Capitalists believe that they should be able to expropriate all the profits from their investments. The point of making society better is that the benefits from that either can’t be monetized, or we don’t want to lose the benefits to the demand for profit. We don’t need capitalists to make society better and we never did. We just need to be able to control our own government, making it operate for our mutual benefit.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/100DollarsCash_PepiStojanovskiTimbatec-Unsplash_mod.jpg9371500Ed Walkerhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngEd Walker2018-07-05 19:23:362018-07-09 12:15:55Democracy Against Capitalism: Capital In A Fiat Money World
Economies fall into one of several categories: market, barter and gift. In market and barter economies, exchanges are made contemporaneously between the parties, in one case for money and in the other for acceptably equivalent goods or services. In gift economies transfers are made without an explicit agreement for a return, either in the present or the future. These economies rely on honor or shame or some similar non-cash basis that creates an obligation for the donee to provide something of equivalent or greater value to the donor at some other time. Bourdieu studied a gift economy in his early field research. He observed that exchanges are driven by self-interest like any other transaction. According to David Swartz in Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Bourdieu says that these practices would not occur if people saw them as motivated by personal interest.
“The operation of gift exchange,” for example, “presupposes (individual and collective) misrecognition (meconnaissance) of the reality of the objective ‘mechanism’ of the exchange.” P. 91.
Isn’t this a perfect description of our legislative economy? Politicians and their staffers do favors for rich people. That translates to giving gifts to rich people, gifts that only governemnt can give such as favorable laws and regulations, litigation positions, and choices not to prosecute. Politicians and staff do not see themselves as self-interested, and do not have enforceable expectations of a return. The rich do not see themselves as doing anything wrong. They don’t make a promise of any return of the gift, and there is nothing to force them to do so.
Then, when government officials retire, the rich give them lavish gifts , meaningless jobs, exorbitant speaking fees, positions in the non-profit sector. These gifts are justified on other grounds, such as expertise or influence. But they are still gifts.
Each side hides the reality of the situation from themselves and from their opposite numbers, and from the public. The task of hiding reality falls to third parties, mostly lobbyists, lawyers, and public relations firms, and a cadre of people labeled as scholars or experts. The lobbyists and lawyers come up with fake justifications for the favored policies. The scholars create rationales that fit some version of the conventional wisdom. The PR teams translate those into pretty words. These are fed to donors and staffers and the politicians who mouth them to the public as their positions and justifications.
The rich people get to pretend, and may even believe, they are doing the right thing, because after all their experts support them. The legislators and staffers get to pretend, and may even believe, that they are acting in the public interest. The media report these lines as if they constituted genuine public discourse. In so doing, the media helps conceal the gift economy from the public. And the courts pretend this is normal. There is no quid pro quo by definition, so therefore there is nothing illegal.
The whole thing depends on the misrecognition of what’s happening. The people who see through it, and there are plenty, are either attacked as naïve or stupid, or completely ignored.
Bourdieu says that the role of the sociologist is to detect the underlying principles of this kind of economy through statistical analysis. Maybe it’s time for someone to apply his ideas, or similar frameworks from other fields, to look at this form of corruption. Until then, we have an explanation for how people avert their eyes from Zephyr Teachout’s principle that corruption is the use of public position for private gain.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/PierreBourdieu_ThierryEhrmann-Wikimedia.jpg10041500Ed Walkerhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngEd Walker2018-01-08 18:44:592018-10-13 00:02:59The Political Gift Economy
According to a law journal article by Zephyr Teachout, the Founding Fathers had a shared understanding of corruption.
To the Delegates, political corruption referred to self-serving use of public power for private ends, including, without limitation, bribery, public decisions to serve private wealth made because of dependent relationships, public decisions to serve executive power made because of dependent relationships, and use by public officials of their positions of power to become wealthy. P. 373-4.
Of course, the Supreme Court doesn’t see it that way. The only form of corruption the politicians on the Court recognize is quid pro quo transactions, the formal exchange of value for taking a governmental action. This view carries over to the private sector. Only rarely are there prosecutions for kickbacks or other forms of corporate bribery because the laws are spotty, and anyway, who cares? The market, whatever that is, will take care of it.
The Ryan-Trump tax bill is an excellent example of of corruption in Teachout’s sense. A number of senators received personal benefits from a provision which applies low pass-through tax rules to passive investments in real estate. This clause will not increase investment or jobs. It only benefits equity holders, including Tennessee Senator Bob Corker. For details, read the articles by International Business Times’ David Sirota. Corker and Hatch deny that they are corrupt but do not describe any benefit to ordinary Americans from the changes.
Another beneficiary of changes in the law is Senator Ron Johnson, R-WI, who owns interests in a pass-through manufacturing business and several pass-through real estate businesses. Equity holders pay ordinary income tax on it at their personal rate. Johnson announced he wouldn’t vote for the bill unless it benefited him; as well as anyone else who owned investments like his. He wanted a deduction of part of the income. Senate leadership eventually made an offer, there was bargaining, and eventually they settled on 20% of a number based on a complicated formula involving wages and capital. Just as on the real estate side, this bill is just a gift to owners of unincorporated businesses. The value of their interests will go up and their taxes will go down, and nothing will change in terms of investments in the business. Johnson’s explanation for this is not his personal wealth but the fact that business income is treated differently depending on the form of business organization. But the reason people choose non-corporate forms is the personal benefit, and Johnson doesn’t explain this crucial difference or the impact of the changes.
It isn’t only government officials who can use public positions for their personal benefit. In 2015, 58 university presidents made more than $1 million. They must be really good at raising money. Fun fact: the ridiculous tax bill provides for a 1.4% tax on income from endowments greater than $500,000 per students at schools with 500 or more students. The insufferable N. Gregory Mankiw is perturbed. I say good. At least there is somewhat less incentive to raise vast sums of money at schools like Notre Dame, which estimates its tax at $6 to 9 million. Notre Dame spent $354 million from its endowment which garnered about $1.21 billion, if I read this right.
Corporate CEOs have reached even higher levels of compensation; so of course as a group they were proponents of this sickening bill. They’ll get billions to use to pay shareholders with dividends and buybacks, and they’ll benefit handsomely from both, because almost all of them are big shareholders. They also love huge mergers, and once industries are consolidated, they raise prices in excess of costs which increases corporate income and thus their own. I wrote this about drug companies showing the details. And here’s a disgusting recent example.
I’ve focused on economic corruption, but abuse of power goes beyond economics; the most obvious arean is sexual predation. Others can do a better job explaining that kind of abuse so I’ll just leave it there.
Many of the people in positions of authority in the corporate sector, the non-profit sector and the government sector use their positions for private gain. We can speculate about the reasons for it, and debate the extent of it. Maybe it’s no worse now than before; it just seems worse because Trump is president. And of course, we aren’t all corrupt, and we aren’t all corrupt all the time. For those with some self respect or some self control, there is this sickening feeling of collapse.
I think that’s because our public discourse is so barren. We have no vocabulary for analyzing the problem, or thinking about what we need to change. We think in terms of criminal law when we talk about corruption, and not the language of duty and responsibility. Let’s stop doing that.
Corruption is the use of public positions of authority for private gain.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-28-at-8.29.18-PM-e1514518265923.png110200Ed Walkerhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngEd Walker2017-12-28 18:01:382017-12-28 22:31:31Corruption Is The Use Of Public Position For Private Gain
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — he of the shaky memory and a massive debt in need of refinancing — met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman within the same week the U.S. withdrew from an anti-corruption effort and Saudi Arabia cracked down on corruption. What curious timing.
Friday 27-OCT-2017 — Reports emerged that at least one Trump campaign team will be indicted on Monday.
Monday 30-OCT-2017 — Jared Kushner met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, discussing strategy until 4:00 am. News reports didn’t indicate when exactly Kushner arrived or when discussions began. (Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopolous were indicted this day, but not Kushner; good thing “excellent guy” Papadopolous as a former Trump campaign “energy and oil consultant” wasn’t involved in Kushner’s work with Saudi Arabia, that we know of.)
Thursday 02-NOV-2017 — U.S. Office of Natural Resources Revenue sent a letter to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a multinational effort to reduce corruption by increasing transparency around payments made by fossil fuel companies to foreign governments. The U.S. had been an implementing member since 2014.
Saturday 04-NOV-2017 — At 7:49 am EDT, Trump tweets,
“Would very much appreciate Saudi Arabia doing their IPO of Aramco with the New York Stock Exchange. Important to the United States!”
Saturday 04-NOV-2017 — (approximately 5:00 pm EDT, midnight Riyadh local time) At least 10 Saudi princes and dozens of government ministers were arrested and detained under what has been reported as an anti-corruption initiative. Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a critic of Trump and a tech industry investor of note, was among those arrested this weekend.
Saturday 04-NOV-2017 — At 11:12 pm EDT Reuters reported Trump said he had spoken with King Salman bin Abdulaziz about listing Saudi Aramco on the NYSE. The IPO is expected to be the largest offering ever.
But wait…there are some much earlier events which should be inserted in this timeline:
Friday 03-FEB-2017 — Using the Congressional Review Act to fast track their effort, Senate passes a joint resolution already approved by the house, disproving the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Rule 13q-1, which implemented Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Section 1504, the bipartisan product of former senator Richard Lugar and Sen. Ben Cardin (now ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee),
“…a public company that qualified as a “resource extraction issuer” would have been required to publicly disclose in an annual report on Form SD information relating to any single “payment” or series of related “payments” made by the issuer, its subsidiaries or controlled entities of $100,000 or more during the fiscal year covered by the Form SD to a “foreign government” or the U.S. Federal government for the “commercial development of oil, natural gas, or minerals” on a “project”-by-“project” basis. Resource extraction issuers were not required to comply with the rule until their first fiscal year ending on or after September 30, 2018 and their first report on Form SD was not due until 150 days after such fiscal year end.” (source: National Law Review)
Section 1504 and SEC rule 13q-1 enacted the U.S.’ participation in the EITI’s anti-corruption effort.
From the earliest days of this administration, both the Trump White House and the GOP-led Congress have been ensuring that extractive industries including oil companies will not be accountable for taxes, fees, and other miscellaneous payments (read: dark money donations and bribes, the latter being a bone of contention to Trump) paid to foreign governments.
Some of the immediate beneficiaries are Exxon Mobil, for which Secretary of State Rex Tillerson used to work, and the Koch brothers, among U.S. oil companies which claimed additional reporting requirements under Rule 13q-1 would make them less competitive with overseas oil producers.
What’s not yet clear: How is this reduced openness supposed to help track financing of terrorism, which Treasury was supposed to be working on?
What of transparency related to arms deals involving Saudi money or Aramco? What of transactions between U.S. oil companies and other foreign companies involved in deals with Russian fossil fuel firms like Gazprom?
Can Trump, Jared Kushner, their family and minions, and members of Congress profit from this increased lack of transparency?
What happens to the U.S. and global economy when oil prices rise without adequate transparency to the market to explain price increases?
Also not yet clear: what happened to the 19.5% stake in Rosneft sold last year, allegedly bought by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Glencore (the same Glencore now embroiled in Paradise Papers scandal)? This massive chunk of Russia’s largest oil company has increased in value in tandem with crude oil’s rise, especially since the Saudi crackdown on Saturday. What’s to keep this massive amount of Rosneft shares from being laundered through stock markets as Deutsche Bank did between 2011 and 2015?
It’s all just so curious, the unanswered questions, the odd timing: Aided and abetted by GOP-led Congress, Trump pulls out of an anti-corruption initiative while Treasury Department appears to work on anti-corruption, and Kushner meets on the sly with the Saudi crown prince just days before an anti-corruption crackdown.
Hmm.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/USOilFund-ETF_GoogleFinance_06NOV2017.jpg10321500Raynehttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngRayne2017-11-06 13:01:132017-11-06 14:58:57The Curious Timing of Kushner’s visit to KSA and the U.S.’ EITI Exit
I’m not going to elaborate on MSNBC’s Maddow program last night, featuring David Cay Johnston to whom Donald Trump’s 2005 tax filing had been “leaked.”
It was two pages, revealing little more than adjusted income, income tax assessed, and the lack of any charitable contribution deduction.
One of the two pages was also marked CLIENT COPY.
Not going to get into the rambling statement issued by the White House before the show either, unusual from this administration only for its lack of spelling errors.
But I’m going to point to the calendar.
Today is March 15. It’s a little over a month to Tax Day when filings for 2016 income are due.
35 days until the deadline at the end of the night on April 18.
35 days until Donald Trump has yet another tax filing for which he has no excuse to share with voters and their representatives in Congress.
Non-Tax Filing Stuff:
Kushner family may get $400M from Chinese Anbang Insurance Group — This reeks, absolutely stinks. Anbang is linked to top officials in China’s government; it’s negotiating a stake in a Manhattan property owned by Kushner (read: Trump’s in-laws). There’s no end to the corruption with this administration.
Volkswagen toying with a Fiat Chrysler merger — This smells of desperation to me. Can’t imagine the largest shareholders of VW willingly giving up any control in spite of the financial damage from the company’s emissions fraud. Not to mention the whole Too-Big-Too-Fail size of this potential merger when Volkswagen Group is responsible for nearly 10% of all Germany’s jobs.
Trump may undo years of clean air by screwing with emissions standards — Speaking of emissions and fraud, Trump will be speaking in Detroit today where he is expected to propose undoing mileage standards and emissions regulations. Not only is the automotive industry finally headed in the right direction toward alternative energy after nearly two decades of R&D and implementation, but apparently the public needs to be sicker ahead of the loss of health care insurance.
Robot killed worker, spouse files suit — Horrible and sad; incident happened in 2015. Husband filed suit last week against five robotics companies he claims are responsible for the robot’s failure.
Energy Transfer Partners wants tribal plea rejected — Oil could start flowing through DAPL within the week if U.S. District Judge James Boasberg rejects Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes’ appeal based on religious grounds.
There. That should keep you busy for a while. Treat this like an open thread.
We’ve been rather busy around the emptywheel this weekend, but it looks like we need something for conversations about two big topics.
First, the Panama Papers — here’s a short and sweet explainer at The Guardian to get you started. It’s the biggest leak-based, multi-outlet, global journalistic investigation to date. The server where the papers are located is already ready flooded with traffic (or attempts at DDoSing).
You might be interested in watching the story’s impact on world media. Go to Newsmap (turn off technology, sports, entertainment, and health news in the very bottom toolbar if necessary). Then notice how often “Panama Papers” is mentioned. Australia and some of the earliest EU outlets have picked up this story. Watch for the story to roll westward.
Second, the Associated Press announced this weekend its style would henceforth use ‘internet’ (lowercase i) versus Internet (uppercase I) in all cases. Which is all groovy for journalists who write using AP style, but a misrepresentation of the existence of the Internet versus the internet, because the Internet is still very much a thing. In my opinion, this looks more like word guys not understanding the technology they rely on once again. Hello, future shock?
Have at it below. I’ll catch you tomorrow morning as usual.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.png00Raynehttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngRayne2016-04-03 18:21:322016-04-03 18:21:32Weekend Open Thread: You’re Gonna’ Need a Bigger Boat
![[US Oil Fund ETF via Google Finance]](https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/USOilFund-ETF_GoogleFinance_06NOV2017.jpg)
