The corruption rollout that is now the characteristic of Trump's presidency continues today. As the FT has reported:
Donald Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to halt the enforcement of a US anti-corruption law that bars Americans from bribing foreign government officials to win business.
They added:
“It's going to mean a lot more business for America,” the president said in the Oval Office after signing an executive order on Monday directing Pam Bondi, the US attorney-general, to pause enforcement of the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
From 2003 onwards I spent a great deal of time for well over a decade fighting the abuse that takes place in tax havens around the world.
Some of that abuse was promoted by multinational corporations that used these places to reduce their tax bills by the use of artificial transactions that shifted their profits into those places. I created country-by-country reporting to tackle that issue. It is now a legal requirement in more than 70 countries worldwide.
Some of that abuse was by wealthy individuals. Automatic information exchange was the answer, and we won that in 2015 after long campaigns against many tax havens on this issue.
And then there was the third element to this issue, which was most especially linked to corruption, which the secrecy provided by tax havens facilitated. Much of this corruption came from the payment of bribes to government officials for the award of contracts. More came from the diversion of the benefit of these contracts to private individuals, again hidden by tax haven abuse. Precisely because of the pernicious use of tax havens in this way, I renamed these practices as secrecy jurisdictions, offering a definition of what that meant and why secrecy was the real issue of concern. Measures to crack that secrecy have been taken - although they have not gone far enough, and the abuse facilitated by tax havens and the accountants, lawyers and banks that operate within them (who I describe as 'the secrecy providers') continues to this day.
Now Trump wants to explicitly facilitate and encourage that corruption that has been so pernicious and such a threat to good government and governance worldwide, whilst fleecing many developing countries, in particular, of billions of dollars of funds that are their rightful property.
This is the encouragement of corruption happening in plain sight. I am sickened and appalled. One day I hope that those who are facilitating this might be prosecuted further doing so. In the meantime, tax haven operators must be rubbing their hands with glee. The age of cash in the suitcase being presented to the tax haven bank looks as though it is coming back.
I hadn't imagined Trump would sink this far. Where will he go next?
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I think it’s obvious by now that Trump doesn’t respect international agreements or US laws or even the constitution.
His greed, corruption and expansionism will only stop when forced, so the question is really: what will it take for Republicans to turn against him, and/or for the leaders of other countries to unite against him?
“what will it take for Republicans to turn against him”
I rather doubt that they will, the “party” has been completely captured – by “the leader of the gang”
for those that want a musical interlude/musical expression of Trump – in all his trashyness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyZ1YAHeec0
All I would say here is that Trump has just ratified what has still been going on despite whatever sterling efforts you and others have made to improve matters, I’m sure many more were trying this on somewhere because they would, wouldn’t they?
Unfortunately , money talks, people can be bought – look at the stories surrounding Trump and his links with organised Russian crime. Read Kleptopia by Tom Burgis (2020). You’ve called this age The Age of Aggression. It is also an age of corruption, and Trump has legitimised it so it will be less subtle and maybe more obvious which means that next time (if there is another next time) it will be easier to shut down. But it is the politicians who will be bribed too, lets not forget that.
I agree – an Age of Corruption
Could it backfire? Surely it means that any country that does not want contracts awarded corruptly will now make extra hurdles before choosing and American company?
How many of those companies are there? I once knew someone, a former RAF officer who moved on to BAe and was sent to Saudi Arabia as a salesman (whatever the right term is), who complained about efforts to stop bribery etc (this was early in the Blair reign). It would spoil their chance of doing business, he said, as everyone else was doing it. Of course, he also said, it was really the fault of the slimy Arab types, not the upstanding western businessmen….
That’s always the excuse.
It is, I’m afraid, a mistake to assume that there are no depths to which Trump will not sink. One (of many) reason is that he does not see them as “depths”. He sees his actions as necessary to pursue US global domination – thinly disguised as putting America first. Lacking any sort of a “moral core” as we might recognise it, means that Trump has no guardrails of any kind. We have known that for some years; continuing to expect that Trump will suddenly wake up and behave differently is a pointless exercise.
We may think and know that his actions and behaviour are an affront to all humanity and every single shred of decency, but our quite justifiable outrage is a waste of energy. Instead, we should be fighting hard to stop our Government following Trump’s path. They will do that by failing to stand up to him.
A headline in the Guardian this morning reads:
“ Respect Trump’s mandate, handle disputes ‘directly and privately’, says Peter Mandelson
Britain’s ambassador to Washington says Starmer government can influence president and UK’s economic future depends in large part on investment from the US”
F**king Mandelson was my internal dialogue in response to that.
Thank you, both.
Mandelson’s firm, Global Counsel and run by Ben(jamin) “Oofy” (sic, a nickname) Wegg-Prosser, ex Grauniad, too, often represents US firms.
One of the reasons for Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the US is to facilitate a trade deal with the US (and regardless of who’s president).
As we are governed by the uniparty, Camilla Cavendish, ex McKinsey and adviser to Cameron, has just been appointed adviser to Streeting. That’s another big hint that the NHS is for sale.
Indeed
Hannah, you are completely correct. Trump has been a corrupt, lying lowlife all his adult life. Irs not for nothing his fellow New Yorkers call him ‘Don the Con’.
Christ knows how his appalling reign will work out, but what we should do here in the UK, as you say, is oppose him and his rotten values and support his opponents around the world and promote honesty in trade, business and politics.
Fat chance of that with Starmer and co, as exemplified by the odious, slimy Mandelson’s sucking up to Trump”s government. The same Mandelson who said the left has nowhere to go other than labour.
Oh yes? When labour behaves just like Tory/reform? Come the next election and left wing voters desert labour in large numbers for the greens, and labour’s precious ‘hero voters’ vote for Reform he’ll look pretty stupid. F**king Mandelson indeed Richard.
That’s the least of it.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/trumps-biggest-corruption-yet
He is essential reading right now
The Robert Reich piece was in my newsfeed this morning; the scale and audacity of Trump’s actions are daily more staggering and concerning. Taken together, Reich’s piece and Trump’s issue of his own currency pose some questions: has the US Economy now been privatised? and if so a) what is USA going to do to protect itself?; b) how will the UK Gov react?; c) given the fragile state of the UK economy, what can be done to avoid negative impact here?; and d) what will be the global impact of Trump’s increasingly unsettling actions?
A crash is the only foreseeable answer. The system will fail under this stress.
Robert Reich plus Tim Snyder, Paul Krugman, Heather Cox Richardson plus of course Carol Cadwalladr and a few other. Substack proving to be a vital source. All convinced this counts as a coup. Project 25 from the Heritage Foundation being implemented in its entirety.
Hard to see how America gets back from this, without an equivalent revolt in the opposite direction but massive damage has already been done. Putin and his team will be laughing themselves silly. Those autocrats and oligarchs gotta stick together.
Much to agree with.
Richard, see this segment from Rachel Maddow yesterday evening, linking your argument about corruption to the wider spread of developments – especially ‘autocratic breakthrough’. As Rachel says, developments that cannot be easily undone (et la what Orban’s done in Hungary, and Putin in Russia).
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show
Thanks Ivan
What do we call the back pocket money flowing into Labour, the appointed lobbyists, corporate shills etc? Labour is massively corrupt already, they will sell the NHS and every last piece of the ‘family silver’.
U.S. papers are full of the rulings by judges halting Trump’s plans. There is genuine fear, I think, about what is happening. My take is that if the Judiciary tries to hinder Trump’s plans, he will simply sign an Executive Order dissolving the Judiciary. Trump has no intention of letting anything as trivial as the Constitution or the law get in his way. If Musk and Peter Thiel want it, Trump’ll deliver it. If not immediately, then during his third term – a scenario I’m now pretty sure is on the cards.
Huge amounts of personal data have already been siphoned up by Musk’s tech dweebs. That data can be analysed by Thiel’s AI, and used to deny stuff like insurance, take money from bank accounts and prosecute someone for anything true or false. People can be disappeared from the system.
This chaos will reach the UK, via the ever-fragrant Mandelson and the wooden spoon masquerading as our Prime Minister. I always understood that His Majesty’s British Ambassador to Washington was supposed to represent our interests to the U.S., not the US’s interests to us. Silly me.
We already have 80 SEZs. U.S. companies will be behind the walls of those, destroying the country from within those footholds. Footholds granted by Sunak and confirmed by Starmer. Add to that our pathetic acquiescence to Trump by our pathetic PM, and we, too, are halfway over the precipice.
And just a quick reminder that Peter Thiel owns Palantir, which is also sucking up OUR confidential medical data.
That’s true of NHS England but not of NHS Scotland. He/Palantir has no involvement in our NHS.
Emboldened by Trump, I expect he’s looking forward to selling English patients’ data to US healthcare companies at a vast profit.
Starmer can’t be trusted to stop that.
@Mike Parr, I have a slightly different attitude to Trump’s Presidency and his co-conspirators than you, while still agreeing with you (though I have to say I loathe Gary Glitter, who may be released from prison this March from what I can gather).
More fearful about what the hell is going on! Again expressed in music! From Buffalo Springfield (vocals included underneath this video). I particularly like this verse “Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp5JCrSXkJY
Did you see Musk at the White House yesterday? He and Trump have clearly “noticed” that wealth in the USA is sustained by a Government that creates vast amounts of money and doesn’t care very much what it gets spent on as long as it’s out there somewhere. It’s a loose thread tied to two trillion dollars of debt, and they’ve decided to pull it, as part of the coup attempt. Hold on to your baseball caps, everyone!
Correction. It’s more than 36 trillion dollars of debt in total. They might as well go for all of it.
I have no idea what you are saying.
Is this ironic? If so, it is not coming across. Sorry – but if I am not sure, others will not be either.
Apologies Richard. I probably ought to avoid early morning replies. I think what I’m trying to say is that the economy of the US is sustained to a significant extent by the large federal debt, and that the authorities have therefore arguably not cared much about how the debt levels are sustained and increased. Musk is pointing out the lack of controls, and if he succeeds in what seem to be his goals, the result will be a very significant reduction in debt levels with (and this is the bit he doesn’t mention) a consequential slowdown in the economy. That seems to me to play into Trump’s overall strategy to destabilise the US and further his ambitions. What did you think about Musk’s performance yesterday?
The economy is sustained by being the issuer of the world reserve currency.
That requires that it issue a lot of debt.
That’s not quite the same as being sustained by debt.