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mariacallous · 2 years ago

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Twenty years after the American-led invasion, Iraq’s seventh prime minister, Mohammad Al-Sudani, has declared corruption to be one of the biggest challenges facing the nation, describing it as “no less serious than the threat of terrorism.” Many of Iraq’s 43 million citizens agree with Sudani, as evidenced by both public opinion polling and by widespread protest movements, but few connect the crisis of corruption with the 2003 war and subsequent American occupation. Iraqis largely pin the blame on the power-sharing agreement that props up their government and on the obscenely wealthy members of the political elite.

However, Iraq’s struggle with corruption — and specifically public sector corruption — can be traced back to occupation-era reconstruction policies and to Baathist-era patronage. In reconstructing Iraq, the United States scattered unregulated and unmonitored money at many projects and, in the process, unleashed a thirst for graft and easy money at nearly every level of government, and even arguably in civil society organizations. As the Sudani administration seeks to improve public services and infrastructure to appease disillusioned citizens, it must break the patterns of post-reconstruction corruption.

Corruption and the selective distribution of public services certainly existed prior to the invasion under Saddam Hussein’s regime. In 1968, Iraq’s Baath Party gained control of Iraq through a coup, and subsequently invested heavily in public service provision fueled by oil revenues. However, the decline in oil revenue in the 1980s, the war with Iran, and economic reform measures greatly reduced the Iraqi government’s spending on public services. The 1990 Gulf War and ensuing sanctions further decimated state infrastructure, particularly the electric grid and water networks. By the end of the 90s, most Iraqi households did not have consistent access to electricity and rates of malnutrition skyrocketed, especially among children.

In these difficult circumstances, the “Oil-for-Food” program allowed for the sale of Iraqi oil in exchange for humanitarian support. The program was beset by massive fraud by Iraqi officials, international companies, and United Nations personnel. Within Iraq, Saddam and his circle reaped the majority of benefits from this program and new patterns of corruption emerged during the sanctions period. The massive rise in unemployment spurred an increase in Iraqi bureaucrats charging for access to public services during the 1990s, a pattern that continues to this day.

However, the influx of aid for reconstruction post-2003 and lack of accountability for contracting and spending brought corruption in Iraq’s public sector to new extremes. The invasion was followed by a large-scale reconstruction effort by the occupying U.S.-led coalition, the new Iraqi government, and a range of international donors. From 2003 to 2014, more than $220 billion was spent on reconstruction alone, including over $74 billion in foreign aid. In addition to violence and the exclusion of Iraqis undermining reconstruction, rebuilding efforts were hampered by massively wasteful spending and corruption at every level.

A significant number of aid project contractors, Iraqi officials, and U.S. personnel directly engaged in corruption while implementing reconstruction projects. Reports have documented cases of U.S. contractors and personnel committing outright theft of aid and implementing kickback schemes. Both international and domestic contractors were able to reap benefits from aid projects by overcharging project fees and engaging in waste and overspending. The U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction report estimated that at least $8 billion of the more than $60 billion for reconstruction was outright wasted.

While gains were made in rehabilitating destroyed or deeply undermined public infrastructure, such as the health system and electric grid, they took place over far longer timelines than initially planned and at far higher costs. Instead, the postwar reconstruction funding surge reinforced the perception that aid projects specifically and public services more broadly could be sources of individual and connection-based profit with little consequence. While many cases of U.S. contractor and personnel fraud were prosecuted, many were likely not due to poor record-keeping by the U.S. government that made knowing the exact extent of fraud and waste impossible. In Iraq, anti-corruption initiatives put in place following the invasion proved to be a weak barrier against government and ministry officials protecting individuals from accountability based on sect and party membership.

Iraqi officials within the public sector widely solicited bribes in crucial sectors such as health and electricity with limited accountability from either the government or the donors bankrolling public services. While this pattern predated the invasion, it was deeply exacerbated in the post-2003 period with the influx of funding. As Iraq expert Abbas Kadhim wrote in 2010, the U.S.-backed legal system enabled sectarian parties to protect corrupt officials at every level from accountability. Violence against and assassinations of anti-corruption officials proved another deadly challenge. In 2006, for example, Deputy Minister of Health Ammar Al-Saffar was kidnapped and killed by an armed group that controlled the Ministry of Health because of an anti-corruption investigation he was heading.

Key ministries in the post-reconstruction period were staffed on the basis of political ties rather than competency. As a result, aid-funded reconstruction projects were often mismanaged once completed and handed over to the government. Even many projects highlighted as successes were found to be nonfunctional or poorly maintained due to both corruption and the exclusion of Iraqis from decisionmaking processes. Over the years, Iraq’s public sector became a tool of patronage with the increase in the number of elite civil servant positions (“special grades”) for party loyalists. This has historical roots — political science research has demonstrated that in the 1990s, individuals from Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit were employed at higher rates in the public sector compared to the rest of the population.

Twenty years after the war, public services in Iraq remain deeply damaged by patterns of elite corruption entrenched in the postwar period. A PLOS study found that of the approximately 405,000 excess deaths resulting from the war between 2003-11, a third were because of failures of infrastructure such as sanitation, transportation, and health. A recent report by Will Todman and Lubna Yousef from the Center for Strategic and International Studies highlights how political factions receive kickbacks from public electricity projects. Already-common electrical outages are worsening, and the majority of Iraqis do not have power for half of the day. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund, 3.2 million school-age children do not attend school. Iraq’s public sector was ranked as the 23rd most corrupt in the world in 2022 — an improvement from when it was tied as the second-most in 2006. The situation has prompted protests in recent years, particularly among youth frustrated with corruption’s impacts on public services and the economy.

Today, Iraq has $115 billion in foreign reserves and the Council of Ministers approved a budget (now pending parliamentary approval) of $152 billion. These are the highest numbers that Iraq has witnessed in its post-2003 history and represent an opportunity for long-term investment in the country’s infrastructure and public services. However, these numbers also risk inspiring more graft. After all, it was only a few months ago under the Kadhimi administration that $2.5 billion went missing from state-owned banks in what journalists dubbed “the heist of the century.”

What can be reasonably done to protect Iraq’s wealth for its people? Fighting corruption is both a preventive and reactive exercise, and experts have long called for redoubled efforts on anti-corruption initiatives in Iraq. Research from other contexts such as James Loxton’s study of Panama has promoted ideas including the creation of “islands of integrity” that protect key public institutions even amid broader systemic corruption. The Century Foundation’s Sajad Jiyad put forth concrete recommendations including building an anti-corruption network of civil society members and politicians and strengthening domestic institutions such as the Integrity Commission.

Other Iraq analysts have recommended transitioning the country away from a cash-based economy. The Sudani administration has started to work on this under pressure from the United States — though the United States was directly involved in setting up Iraq’s banking sector and in organizing the dollar auction that later became a money laundering vehicle for neighboring Iran and Turkey. Finally, Iraqi governments have come to view Iraq’s oil wealth as unregulated and political parties and armed groups have actively fought against any regulation. This wealth, which has been used as a tool of patronage in Baathist and post-Baathist Iraq, must be regulated by the Iraqi people if Iraq has any chance of overcoming corruption.

As the popular saying in the Arabic-speaking world goes: “loose money teaches theft.” Iraq post-2003 is a prime example of this. The long-term effects of the flood of money during the reconstruction period were to help establish the public sector as a center of corruption. Understanding the patterns of corruption entrenched during reconstruction is an important part of helping Iraq undertake much-needed public sector reform to build functioning public services for its citizens.

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intothenoise · 2 years ago

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Prophecy vs. the Prophetic: A Mid-Lenten Reflection

It has become an unfortunate truism that so many of those who obsess over “prophecy” never truly wrestle with the words of the prophets. One might read the following text as predictive of what will happen:

“Someday, O Israel, I will gather you; I will gather the remnant who are left.” —Micah 2:12 (NLT)

Yet, wholly ignore its context:

What sorrow awaits you who lie awake at night, thinking up evil plans. You rise at dawn and hurry to carry them out, simply because you have the power to do so. When you want a piece of land, you find a way to seize it. When you want someone’s house, you take it by fraud and violence. You cheat a man of his property, stealing his family’s inheritance. —Micah 2:1–2 (NLT)

Though first proclaimed millennia ago, the above words of the prophet Micah present a stunningly accurate depiction of our contemporary realities. The passage presents us with an image of those in power conspiring to use that power to defraud others of their land, homes, and inheritance. It presents us with a social order built upon graft and exploitation in which the entire political-economic system is manipulated, “rigged,” to favor those who would use their power to expropriate the property of others. We might easily call these the vulture capitalists of their day and age. Yet, it can just as easily serve as a scathing rebuke of Israeli apartheid, of the settler movement and the entire institutional-legal apparatus constructed to support it.

The prophet, meanwhile, goes on:

“Don’t say such things, their “prophets” prophecy. Don’t prophesy like that. Such disasters will never come our way!” Should you talk that way, O house of Jacob? Will the Lord’s Spirit have patience with such behavior? If you would do what is right, you would find my words comforting. Yet to this very hour my people rise against me like an enemy! You steal the shirts right off the backs of those who trusted you, making them as ragged as men returning from battle. You have evicted women from their pleasant homes and forever stripped their children of all that God would give them. Up! Begone! This is no longer your land and home, for you have filled it with sin and ruined it completely. Suppose a prophet full of lies would say to you, “I’ll preach to you the joys of wine and alcohol!” That’s just the kind of prophet you would like! —Micah 2:6–11 (NLT)

It is crucial to see how the passage highlights the existence of a false religio-prophetic establishment working to provide ideological cover for the corruption and exploitative practices of the powers that be. As Walter Brueggemann tells us,

It was, in that ancient context, difficult to construe reality outside the blueprints that had been constructed by the powerful. That construed reality, blessed by establishment religion, assured itself of an entitlement by God as God’s chosen people that could count on security and certainty with no serious threat or vulnerability. But these prophets knew that that claim was not a given grounded in God; it was a self-serving construction.

Far too often in the course of ecclesial history, our leaders and institutions have stood with the status quo and allied themselves with the power brokers of the day. Not only this, our own "court prophets" construct ideological justifications for the violence of the powerful and of the privileges accrued to them in return. Listening to the voice of the prophets, however, and recognizing how often Jesus draws from them in his life and ministry, will dispel us of any notion that God stands with the status quo. And, as we reflect upon the way of the cross this Lenten season, we recognize that it is only by divesting ourselves of our complicity in the privilege that comes with power and its abuse that we can begin to understand the cruciform way of the messiah.

For this reason, I cannot fathom the twisted logic of those religious settlers or their Christian Zionist financiers who believe that this entire enterprise, built from its origins upon colonial violence and theft, somehow represents the will of God. It is this logic which leads to what we saw during the tragic pogrom in Huwara, when the settler mob paused its violent rampage to engage in evening prayers, as the village burned behind them. I can only imagine what the biblical prophets would say in response. Even so, an entire theo-political edifice has been constructed to extract wealth from churches, synagogues, and faith-based charities across the country and channel it to this violent settler-colonial enterprise. Two recent films, “‘Till Kingdom Come” and “Israelism,” dramatically highlight such realities. Of course, I must also consider the twisted theological logic of "manifest destiny" with which my own nation set out to conquer, cleanse, and colonize North America by way of fraud and violence, defrauding its natives and those abducted to work its land of their rightful inheritance.

Ultimately, it is our responsibility as followers of Jesus, or as anyone who would seek to stand in the tradition of the biblical prophets, to speak up and out against any and all forms of violence and exploitation—as well as their ideological enablers. It was so heartening to witness rabbis with Jewish Voice for Peace engaging in civil disobedience as well as the young women and men of If Not Now lead a Jewish prayer service, as an act of protest against the visit of Smotrich and of his genocidal designs, in D.C. this past weekend. For us, as a Christian Voice for Palestine, our mission at Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA) is not only to stand firmly against injustice but also actively work to deconstruct those ideological and theological justifications that prop up regimes of violence and dispossession. This, we do as we positively proclaim the authentic good news that is Christ's liberating reign. This is the way, al-Sabeel.

I close therefore with the following plea, adapted from the Book of Common Prayer:

Look with pity, O heavenly Father, upon the people of the land who live with injustice, terror, disease, and death as their constant companions. Have mercy upon us. Help us to eliminate our cruelty to these, our neighbors. Strengthen those who spend their lives establishing equal protection of the law and equal opportunities for all. And grant that every one of us may enjoy a fair portion of the riches of this world; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

*Adapted from: Wheeler, Jesse Steven. Serving a Crucified King: Meditations on Faith, Politics, and the Unyielding Pursuit of God’s Reign. Resource Publications, 2021.

**Posted originally at: www.fosna.org

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jangillman · 6 days ago

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Gee, what a surprise?.......NOT! 🤬🤬🖕

#politics #us politics #democrats are corrupt #democrats will destroy america #wake up democrats!!#democrat corruption #stolen election #voter registration #voter fraud #voting machines #mail in ballots #graft and corruption #political corruption #corruption #election fraud #rigged election #2020 election

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ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly · 19 days ago

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The NY Times

By Peter Baker

Feb. 12, 2025

Now that he is back in office, President Trump sees corruption everywhere — in the foreign aid agency, at the Justice Department, in federal contracting. But when it comes to his own orbit, he doesn’t seem interested in looking.

In this second incarnation as president, Mr. Trump is presenting himself as a born-again corruption fighter rooting out waste, fraud and abuse from all corners of the federal government — even as he is dismantling the government’s mechanisms for fighting corruption, as it has been traditionally defined.

The president is boasting that he and Elon Musk, his partner in the efficiency drive, have found “billions and billions of dollars” of corrupt spending, although they have yet to provide evidence.

At the same time, his administration is dropping corruption casesagainst political figures with ties to him, firing inspectors generalwho actually search for abuse and pledging not to enforce a signature anti-corruption law against major corporations.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are making accusations of corruption in the government ranks even as they ask voters to trust that they are not taking advantage of their own positions despite an extensive array of conflicts of interest unlike what any president or presidential adviser has had in modern times.

Dispensing with traditional ethics standards, both men are maintaining control of their private companies, which could benefit from actions by the government they oversee.

“I campaigned on the fact that I said that government is corrupt — and it is corrupt,” Mr. Trump said during an appearance this week with Mr. Musk in the Oval Office.

“I see a lot of kickback here,” he continued, without offering any concrete examples. “Tremendous kickback. Because no one could be so stupid to give out some of these contracts, so it must be kickbacks.”

He added: “When you get down to it, it’s probably going to be close to a trillion dollars.”

Mr. Trump often pulls numbers out of thin air and makes sweeping claims without regard to factual foundations. Likewise, Mr. Trump, the first felon ever elected president, regularly accuses anyone he disfavors of corruption and even criminality without proof. He cites conspiracy theories or distorted assertions to allege misconduct even after they have been debunked.

In his newfound drive against abuse in federal spending, he appears driven in large part by his self-declared war on the “deep state,” as he terms the bureaucracy, convinced that it sought to thwart his goals in his first term and set him up for multiple prosecutions during his four-year hiatus from the White House.

To the extent that Mr. Trump’s aides have identified objectionable spending in federal enclaves like the U.S. Agency for International Development, they are often rooted in policies he disagrees with rather than examples of dishonesty and graft. And his aides have at times misconstrued or misrepresented the details of what they have singled out.

Mr. Trump and his allies, for instance, confused ordinary subscription fees paid to news outlets with federal aid grants, leading the president to falsely assert that the government had given money “to the fake news media as a ‘payoff’ for creating good stories about the Democrats.”

Similarly, five of eight examples of purportedly misguided spending at U.S.A.I.D. cited by the White House press secretary were not actually expenditures by that agency, or were described misleadingly. None of them, as presented at least, involved theft or criminality, just priorities that Mr. Trump opposes.

“Nothing that they have identified via the DOGE social media posts is, to my knowledge, evidence of fraud or corruption,” said Jessica Tillipman, an associate dean at George Washington Law School and a specialist on government contracting. She was referring to Mr. Musk’s team, which calls itself the Department of Government Efficiency.

“Fraud and corruption are illegal and what DOGE has identified so far are payments that this administration disagrees with or views as wasteful, which are not illegal,” she added. “Calling these things fraudulent or corrupt misrepresents what they are finding.”

During their Oval Office comments on Tuesday, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk made vague and sensational claims that were hard to verify. Mr. Musk said his team had discovered that the federal government had sent out “a massive number of blank checks” and that “known fraudsters” were being paid. He said Social Security checks were going to people whose dates of birth would indicate that they were as old as 150. “We found fraud and abuse, I would use those two words,” he said.

Cryptically, he said that there were people working for the federal government who were accruing tens of millions of dollars while on the payroll. “Mysteriously, they get wealthy,” he said. “We don’t know why. Where does it come from? I think the reality is they’re getting wealthy at taxpayers’ expense. That’s the honest truth of it.”

But he did not offer any documentation to back up his assertion. A former inspector general from a previous administration, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said Mr. Musk simply had not had enough time to learn how agencies work and may be simply misunderstanding what he has seen in data searches.

Mr. Musk’s claims have excited longstanding critics of government who have long been disappointed by past efforts to weed out waste and fraud. Even if all of the details are still to be worked out, they said, at least someone at last is fearlessly scouring the federal government for improper spending.

“As someone who has been advocating for limited government for my entire professional life, I always instinctively knew that there was some level of graft and corruption,” Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government, wrote this week. “But the level being revealed in just a short amount of time and the elaborate networks to hide it are absolutely stunning.”

There is no doubt that fraud and waste can be found in any large organization, especially one that spends $6 trillion a year like the federal government does. The Government Accountability Office estimated last year that the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion a year to fraud, based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022.

Additionally, the G.A.O. said that federal agencies had reportedmaking an estimated $236 billion in improper payments in the 2023 fiscal year and estimated that the government had made about $2.7 trillion in such payments over the previous 20 years. Such payments rose during Mr. Trump’s last stretch as president, from $144.4 billion in 2016, before he took office, to $206.4 billion in 2020, the final year of his first term, when pandemic aid programs led to a surge in fraudulent claims.

Mr. Trump’s interest in fighting corruption is selective.

In a little over three weeks in office, Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has dropped a case against former Representative Jeffrey Fortenberry of Nebraska, who was charged with lying to the F.B.I. in an investigation of illegal campaign donations, and federal prosecutors withdrew from a campaign finance investigation of Representative Andy Ogles, Republican of Tennessee, leaving the future of the case uncertain.

Just this week, the department also moved to drop bribery chargesagainst Mayor Eric Adams of New York, who has cozied up to Mr. Trump since the election. Mr. Trump pardoned former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, who was convicted of a scheme to sell an appointment to the U.S. Senate.

The president has nominated Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, to be ambassador to France despite a conviction for tax evasion and witness retaliation. (Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Blagojevich’s sentence and pardoned Mr. Kushner in his first term.)

The re-elected president also fired as many as 17 inspectors general from around the government, purging the very officials whose mission is to uncover the kind of waste and abuse that Mr. Trump says he is out to eradicate. In so doing, he defied the provisions of law governing the dismissal of such inspectors, prompting a lawsuit Wednesday by some of those who were fired.

He has also fired the heads of the Office of Government Ethics and the Office of Special Counsel, two watchdog agencies that vexed his team during his first term by pursuing allegations of misconduct.

And on Monday, Mr. Trump signed an order directing the Justice Department to stop enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law that bars bribing foreign government officials to secure overseas business deals, arguing that such prosecutions make it harder for American firms to compete against international rivals.

“There is great irony with respect to their regular complaints about corruption while taking all of these extraordinary actions that undermine U.S. anti-corruption efforts,” said Ms. Tillipman, who has taught about anti-corruption efforts in government procurement for nearly two decades.

In their zeal to ferret out corruption and restore trust in government, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have expressed no concern about the impact of their own decisions. Mr. Trump maintains his real estate and promotional ventures that profit off his celebrity and appeal to potential business partners eager to curry favor with the president of the United States. A cryptocurrency venture he set up days before the inauguration has already steered $100 million in trading fees to his family and partners in the past month.

Mr. Musk continues to own and run multiple companies that receive billions of dollars in contracts from the federal government and are the subject of multiple government reviews and investigations. Even if he does not involve himself directly, the officials who make the decisions have seen that government officials who cross Mr. Trump or Mr. Musk in recent weeks have been put on leave or fired.

A White House official said this week that Mr. Musk, who is designated an unpaid “special government employee,” planned to file a financial disclosure report, but that it would remain confidential even as he has vowed to be transparent about his activities.

Asked on Wednesday if Mr. Trump had signed a conflict-of-interest waiver for Mr. Musk and if the White House would release it, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said she was unfamiliar with the law that makes it a crime for government workers to touch an official matter that affects their personal interests without a waiver, and did not address whether Mr. Musk had received one.

“Both Donald Trump and Elon Musk have massive potential conflicts of interest themselves and appear to be doing little or nothing to avoid those,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, and a former federal corruption prosecutor. “For them to be up there talking about taking steps in the interest of reducing waste, fraud and abuse, it is quite simply disingenuous.

“If they want to cut government spending because that’s what they believes is the right thing to do as a policy matter, then we have processes to do that,” Mr. Bookbinder added. “They can work with Congress. This seems like a pretext at best.”

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