Category Archives: Banana republic

On the Poor Definition and Measurement of Corruption

Sadly, we’ve entered into a world where the word “corruption” has become inadequate to describe the many and varied practices of profitable abuse by the powerful and connected of their inferiors. Like the popular (and sadly apocryphal) accounts Inuit with their numerous words for “snow,” we need more refined and granular terminology to describe various types of corruption. Hugh uses “kleptocracy” but that’s a name for a system of governance, not particular behaviors within that system.

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“Immigration Reform” = “Surveillance Reform” as Military Tactics Move Inland From US Borders

Yves here. The latest post at TomDispatch, Creating a Military-Industrial-Immigration Complex, How to Turn the U.S.-Mexican Border into a War Zone by Todd Miller, describes how the US border with Mexico, which is being defined more and more generously, has become an R&D lab for US security operations, as well as a new profit opportunity for defense contractors, who are looking for ways to repurpose combat equipment for domestic use. To put none too fine a point on its, the police state will be perfected on illegal immigrants or in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time Americans mainly of color, and then deployed on the rest of us. The 17 city paramilatary crackdown on Occupy was just the warm-up act.

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Will Snowden Revelations About Spying on Foreign Governments Undermine the European and Pacific Trade Talks?

Despite all the consternation in the US about Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent and intensity of snooping in the United States, it isn’t clear that the surveillance industry is even breaking a sweat. But the government and public uproar in Europe about US snooping on its supposed allies may change that pronto.

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Corruption, EuroStyle: ECB Chief Draghi Fudged Italy’s Books to Secure Eurozone Entry, Italy Stuck With Derivative Losses

As readers of the financial press may recall, there was a kerfluffle over the fact that Greece had used a currency trades designed by Goldman in 2001 to mask the level of its indebtedness and secure Eurozone entry. A much bigger and more costly shoe of the same type has dropped in Italy and it directly implicates the current ECB chief, Mario Draghi.

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Gensler Staring Down Administration and Banks on Derivatives Reform

Yves here. Readers may recall that Gary Gensler, the head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, is being pushed out by Obama. His planned replacement is so appallingly lightweight (oh, and formerly in a very junior role at Goldman) as to assure that all she’ll be able to do is take dictation from financial firm lobbyists.

But Gensler may be having a last laugh before he leaves office.

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Chinese Interbank Markets Having a Heart Attack, Repo and Shibor Skyrocket, Could Trigger Bigger Unraveling

The Chinese central bank is playing very high stakes poker. China’s interbank markets have been highly stressed for the last two days. An effort by the central bank to tighten in order to put a crimp on shadow banking activities looks to be spiraling out of control as one-week repo rates hit nearly 8.3% up 144 basis points in a day, and one-week Shibor has risen from its June 5 level of 4.8% to just shy of 8.1% today.

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NYU Administrators Create Student Debt Slaves to Subsidize Summer Homes, Ginormous Pensions

When union members demand decent pay levels and work conditions, they are charged with featherbedding and overmanning or the new neoliberal catchall, “demanding uncompetitive wages”. But when the upper crust loots institutions, the mainstream media is typically missing in action.

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Robert Wade: Elite Denial of Corruption and Inequality – World Bank Case Study

Yves here. While readers may think development policy has limited relevance to US and advanced economy readers, the IMF and World Bank have been and continue to be vehicles to make the world, particularly smaller or otherwise more influenceable regimes, more friendly to the interests of US multinationals. And at the same time US companies are taking down a record share of GDP in profits, the country’s ranking in inequality is worse than that of many developing economies. New York City is more unequal than China, and as the chart below shows, is also more unequal than Russia, famed for its oligarchs, and India, which still has hundreds of millions living in abject poverty.

So the World Bank’s efforts over time to exclude issues like corruption and inequality from its analysis have direct and obvious parallels to policy discussions here. Wade’s anecdotes of the way the World Bank refused to even allow the “c” word to be acknowledged are striking.

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