{"id":9936,"date":"2016-12-15T11:12:48","date_gmt":"2016-12-15T16:12:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=9936"},"modified":"2024-09-11T17:17:28","modified_gmt":"2024-09-11T21:17:28","slug":"fff-obamas-fraudulent-war-on-corruption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/15\/fff-obamas-fraudulent-war-on-corruption\/","title":{"rendered":"FFF: Obama’s Fraudulent War on Corruption"},"content":{"rendered":"

Future of Freedom Foundation<\/a><\/h3>\n

The Fraudulent Obama War on Corruption<\/a><\/h3>\n

by James Bovard<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span>

The Obama administration wants Americans to believe that it is fiercely anti-corruption. \u201cI have been shocked by the degree to which I find corruption pandemic in the world today,\u201d declared Secretary of State John Kerry at an Anti-Corruption Summit in London last May. Kerry sounded like the French police chief in Casablanca who was \u201cshocked\u201d to discover gambling. Six years ago at the United Nations, Barack Obama proclaimed that the U.S. government is \u201cleading a global effort to combat corruption.\u201d Maybe he forgot to send Kerry the memo.<\/p>\n

Much of the teeth-gnashing at that summit involved tax evasion. Politicians pledged to share more data on tax records and corporate ownership to help boost government revenue around the globe. Summit attendees castigated hidden offshore bank accounts \u2014 ironically, the same type of accounts used by both British Prime Minister David Cameron and Kerry. A joint communique solemnly pledged to \u201cdrive out those lawyers, real estate agents, and accountants who facilitate or are complicit in corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kerry proclaimed, \u201cWe have to get the global community to come together and have no impunity [sic] to corruption.\u201d But the summit largely ignored the brazen corruption of politicians or how it is fueled by western governments, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Foreign aid has long been notorious for breeding kleptocracies \u2014 governments of thieves. Economic studies have revealed that boosting aid directly increases corruption. Fourteen years ago, George W. Bush promised to reform foreign aid: \u201cWe won\u2019t be putting money into a society which is not transparent and corrupt.\u201d (He probably meant \u201ccorruption-free.\u201d) But the U.S. aid programs \u2014 which cost taxpayers more than $40 billion a year \u2014 continue to bankroll many of the world\u2019s most crooked regimes (according to ratings by Transparency International) \u2014 including Uzbekistan, Haiti, and Kenya. There is no \u201cTyrants Need Not Apply\u201d sign at the entrance to the U.S. Agency for International Development.<\/p>\n

The Obama administration has valiantly resisted congressional efforts to stop the payouts to political bandits abroad. In 2011, when a House committee sought to curb the abuse, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that restricting handouts to nations that fail anti-corruption tests \u201chas the potential to affect a staggering number of needy aid recipients.\u201d<\/p>\n

Afghanistan<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since Obama took office, the U.S. government has provided more than $50 billion in foreign aid to Afghanistan \u2014 even though that nation\u2019s president, Ashraf Ghani, admitted that his nation is \u201cone of the most corrupt countries on Earth.\u201d Seven years ago, Obama gave Ghani\u2019s predecessor, Hamid Karzai, a six-month deadline to \u201ceradicate corruption,\u201d according to Secretary Clinton. After his re-election campaign was caught stealing more than a million votes, Karzai promised, \u201cFighting corruption will be the key focus of my second term in office.\u201d Obama\u2019s imperative only accelerated the looting by Afghan government officials and cronies.<\/p>\n

Pervasive corruption is a major reason that the Taliban is re-conquering more of that nation each year. At Afghanistan\u2019s premier military hospital, some wounded Afghan soldiers starved to death because they could not afford to bribe the hospital staff for food. Much of the Afghan army is practically bootless because of crooked contracts that deliver shoddy footwear that literally falls apart the first time soldiers wear it. Though Afghanistan has notoriously bitter winters, tens of thousands of its troops have not been issued \u201ccold weather gear,\u201d such as gloves and hats, according to Special Inspector General for Afghanistan John Sopko.<\/p>\n

Kerry promised that the United States would help fund a Global Consortium of Civil Society and Investigative Journalists against Corruption. But on the home front, the Obama administration has scourged persons who disclosed federal abuses. In Obama\u2019s eyes, leaking classified information to the media is the legal and moral equivalent of spying for a hostile government.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s Justice Department launched more than twice as many federal prosecutions for Espionage Act violations as all previous administrations combined. When Obama took office, the United States was ranked as having the 20th-most-free press in the world, according to the Reporters Without Borders\u2019 World Press Freedom Index \u2014 in the same league as Germany and Japan. By 2016, it had fallen to 41st \u2014 worse than South Africa and barely ahead of Botswana. Despite Obama\u2019s boast of running \u201cthe most transparent administration in history,\u201d his appointees have helped turn the Freedom of Information Act into a charade.<\/p>\n

Kerry joined foreign chieftains in calling for more transparency to fight corruption but he forgot to notify his own State Department. Three days before his speech, the State Department confirmed that it had \u201clost\u201d all the emails of the I.T. technician who set up the private email server that Hillary Clinton used to illicitly keep her correspondence secret (and to ignore federal law on classified information). Nor have we learned the shady details behind our former secretary of State\u2019s shoveling out scores of billions of dollars and special treatment to foreign governments at the same time the Clinton Foundation collected millions of dollars from some of the beneficiaries. Many of the oppressive nations that donated to the Clinton Foundation saw huge increases in approvals for weapons sales from the United States during Clinton\u2019s time as secretary of State.<\/p>\n

U.S. foreign aid is another area apparently exempt from the transparency mandate. AID makes little or no effort to disclose where its money goes. The Brookings Institution and the Center for Global Development reported in 2010 that the U.S. government was among the least transparent aid donors in the world, and that it ranked dead last in \u201creporting of delivery channels (i.e., exactly who received the money).\u201d Rep Ted Poe (R-Tex.) and former Rep. Jim Kolbe (R\u2013Ariz.) observed in an op-ed, \u201cMost foreign assistance programs operate in the dark. No one really knows how the money got there in the first place or where it is going.\u201d<\/p>\n

Police graft<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his London speech, Kerry boasted of U.S. government plans \u201cto put $70 million into additional integrity initiative [sic] to help with local police training\u201d to curtail \u201copportunity for bribery and graft.\u201d Unfortunately, the Obama administration plans to continue fueling police graft here in the United States. Obama\u2019s Justice Department recently resumed a widely denounced program to reward local and state law-enforcement agencies for confiscating the property of hapless citizens who have been convicted of no crime. Government agencies routinely keep most of the money they confiscate, sometimes using it to pay bonuses to the lawmen who plundered private citizens. This is one of the most brazen conflicts of interest in contemporary American life \u2014 but because it profits the government, the outrage continues. Federal law-enforcement agencies used asset-forfeiture programs in 2014 to seize more property from Americans than all the burglars stole nationwide.<\/p>\n

Each summit attendee issued a statement \u201csetting out the concrete actions they will take in order to tackle corruption.\u201d Among other pledges, the U.S. government promised to conduct \u201cStronger Security Assistance Oversight,\u201d including ensuring that our security assistance also addresses governance goals.\u201d Tell that to the downtrodden Egyptians. The Obama administration continues providing more than a billion dollars a year to the Egyptian military \u2014 despite its role in toppling Egypt\u2019s elected president in 2013 (a coup which Kerry bizarrely praised for \u201crestoring democracy\u201d) and slaughtering hundreds, if not thousands, of protestors. On the same day as Kerry\u2019s speech, the Government Accountability Office reported that the State Department persistently violates federal law by providing military equipment to the Egyptian government and totally ignoring the requirement to track Egypt\u2019s \u201cgross human rights violations.\u201d A few days after the summit, Kerry visited Egypt and had no complaints about the U.S.-funded crackdown on the Egyptian people.<\/p>\n

In his spiel before a friendly London audience, Kerry recalled, \u201cI used to be a prosecutor. I remember when I did the BCCI \u2014 Bank of Commerce, Credit International. We found [Panamanian dictator Manuel] Noriega\u2019s money linked with arms-control money, narcotics money, extremist money\u2026. That\u2019s why accountability under the law is so critical and that\u2019s why I view this discussion as the beginning of something that can help us in the battle against extremism, help us in the battle for strengthening the commitment to rule of law, and giving people across the planet a sense that leaders at the highest level are not, in fact, part of the problem; they\u2019re part of the solution.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Kerry was never a prosecutor against BCCI; instead, he was a U.S. senator pursuing the bank and its nefarious dealings. While Kerry proudly excoriated Noriega, he forgot to mention how much money the CIA and other U.S. government agencies had shoveled to that dictator \u2014 as long as he was behaving in ways that pleased Washington. Noriega spent several years as the head of Panama\u2019s intelligence agency before he took it over. When President George H.W. Bush invaded Panama to topple Noriega in 1989, many of the sordid details of America\u2019s propping him up suddenly vanished from American political memory. But Noriega is actually the perfect example for Kerry to use on the danger of corruption \u2014 except that Kerry did not want to mention the U.S. government\u2019s pro-corruption legacy. Nor did he mention the long legacy of U.S. interventions that subverted democratically elected governments in Latin America.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Americans should count their blessings that the London international summit is not likely to spur a new war. Kerry and Obama are correct that corruption is a pestilence ravaging much of the planet. But the administration\u2019s credibility would be boosted if it had not worsened the problem at home and abroad. It is folly to trust politicians to fight corruption that buttresses their power.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published in the August 2016 edition of Future of Freedom<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0On Twitter @jimbovard<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Future of Freedom Foundation The Fraudulent Obama War on Corruption by James Bovard December 15, 2016 The Obama administration wants Americans to believe that it is fiercely anti-corruption. \u201cI have been shocked by the degree to which I find corruption pandemic in the world today,\u201d declared Secretary of State John Kerry at an Anti-Corruption Summit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[42,83,293,82,202,931,962,849,38,959,960,961],"class_list":["post-9936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-afghanistan","tag-corruption","tag-egypt","tag-foreign-aid","tag-fraud","tag-freedom-of-information-act","tag-investigative-journalism","tag-john-kerry","tag-obama","tag-panama","tag-reporters-without-borders","tag-world-press-freedom-index"],"yoast_head":"\nFFF: Obama's Fraudulent War on Corruption - 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