timelets | Entries tagged with corruption

One needs to be an idiot to believe that Trump's run at Greenland is driven by national security, rather than the good old greed for their natural resources.

Here's a guide on how businesses (of course only those who have direct access to him) can buy influence with Trump. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-ceo-playbook-trump-second-term

Corporate America is entering the second year of Donald Trump’s second term with a new, hard-won understanding: The president’s personal interventions can shape business as profoundly as any economic force.

5. Perhaps above all, the author of The Art of the Deal sees every interaction as a transaction. Urban, of BGR, cites a Beltway adage: “The first rule of horse trading is to have a horse.”

In Trump’s Washington, those transactions often hinge on what a company can offer—or surrender—to stay in the administration’s good graces.

This is textbook government corruption.

Remarkable, how hard Trump is trying to turn the US into a banana republic.

The Fed received grand jury subpoenas from the Justice Department on Friday that threaten a criminal indictment relating to Powell’s testimony, the Fed chair said in a video statement on Sunday night.

“This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation,” Powell said in the statement.

The investigation, which is being run out of the office of Washington’s U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro, a close Trump ally, began in November and is examining Powell’s congressional testimony and the Fed’s spending records, people familiar with it said.

https://www.wsj.com/economy/central-banking/federal-reserve-received-justice-department-subpoena-threatening-criminal-indictment-e9e3f84d

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Медуза дает подробный анализ перспектив добычи нефти в Венесуэле. Оставлю здесь вывод, чтобы через год вернутъся:

Chevron снова начала работать в Венесуэле с конца 2022 года, и благодаря ее проектам добыча с тех пор действительно выросла, хотя и не особенно сильно. Более реалистичными выглядят расчеты, предполагающие ежегодный рост добычи на 200–250 тысяч баррелей в день в течение четырех-пяти лет при инвестициях от 10 миллиардов долларов в год.

Все это в основном касается традиционной нефти. Перспективы расширения добычи сверхтяжелой нефти при цене Brent 50–55 долларов за баррель совсем туманны. Для окупаемости таких проектов нужны цены на 20–30 долларов выше.
...
Возрождение нефтяной отрасли Венесуэлы не обещает мгновенных гигантских прибылей, а значит, американские нефтяные компании оказываются перед непростым выбором. У них и без Венесуэлы есть подготовленный конвейер проектов. Ресурсы — технические, человеческие, финансовые — расписаны на годы вперед.

Переключаться на Венесуэлу в такой ситуации означает отказываться от каких-то других вложений. Причем делать это придется в обстановке низких цен на нефть, когда у компаний снижен аппетит к риску и сильно желание блюсти финансовую дисциплину.

Also:

Mr. Trump seems to view the oil proceeds as a personal executive account, beyond the control of Congress’s purse-strings, to dole out as he sees fit.

It elides U.S. national security interests with Mr. Trump’s personal power, much like his gambit to let TikTok keep operating in the U.S. in violation of the law on the condition that the Treasury get a cut of its eventual sale to American investors. To the victor go the oil spoils won’t improve U.S. standing in the world, and it sends a bad message to the world’s rogues about the way to buy U.S. support.
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U.S. companies are unlikely to invest in Venezuela until a political transition creates stability and respects property rights. Oil investment is measured in decades, not the next three years. Merely maintaining current output will require billions of dollars a year, and a hundred billion or more to return production to the levels of the early 2010s.

U.S. companies have other attractive opportunities that carry less political risk, such as offshore Guyana where ExxonMobil and Chevron are making big investments. Harold Hamm’s Continental Resources is expanding in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale formation. Don’t forget America’s own resources, including in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. Mr. Trump may be able to coerce Chevron to invest more in Venezuela, or dangle subsidies as he has suggested, but this is dubious industrial policy.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-venezuela-oil-tankers-nicolas-maduro-67c4775c

And on a lighter note, the 593rd night story ( The Lady and Her Five Suitors) is amazingly witty.

A woman of the daughters of the merchants was married to a man who was a great traveller. It chanced once that he set out for a far country and was absent so long that his wife...

I believe it is the precursor of this picture, but the original story is orders of magnitude deeper and funnier.

The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.
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So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death.

In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols, flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that quickly turned to dust. “The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems,” he said, explaining how he would tap his corporate connections to create drive-through testing sites. They never materialized.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/

Удивительно, насколько система предотвращения и борьбы с коррупцией в раннем Сингапуре похожа на систему в Пруссии в добюрократические (по М.Веберу) времена (17-18 вв) http://www.jstor.org/stable/2096226.

Во-первых, монарх лично нанимал всех налоговых инспекторов (3000 человек!), т.е. система не была иерархической в ее современном понятии.
Во-вторых, монарх лично занимался проверками.
В-третьих, проворовавшийся инспектор/чиновник получал, практически, волчий билет и из-за этого лишался средств к существованию. В Пруссии при найме предпочтение отдавалось инвалидам войн с сильными увечьями. Побочным эффектом такой политики было то, что при увольнении они не могли найти другую работу. У более знатных чиновников проводились конфискации имущества и, поскольку налоговый офис передавался, практически, по наследству, все последующие поколения лишались этой привилегии. (ср. с "номенклатурой").
В-четвертых, в борьбе с коррупцией не было исключений для высокопоставленных чиновников (и друзей).
В-пятых, система местных проверок была коллегиальной, а не строго иерархической, поэтому утаить воровство было необыкновенно трудно.
В-шестых, excise taxes, которы очень трудно собирать, применялись только в городах, где концентрация облагаемых товаров была самой высокой, что снижало потери.

Если учесть, что прусские монархи кроме контроля за сборами налогов занимались еще и войнами, реформами армии и системы образования, включая университеты, то работали они день и ночь. То же самое можно сказать и о Ли Куан Ю. Потемкинские деревни при нем были невозможны.

При Дэн Сяопине сохранение партийного аппарата при постепенном выхолащивании идеологии тоже сыграло положительную роль. Еще помогло сознательное снижение роли тайной политической полиции (эквивалента КГБ). Прусская система оценки роста среднесрочных показателей и опроса крестьян о злоупотреблениях схожа с китайской.

(Карты Пруссии из википедии)
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