Good good afternoon, my name is armando Senior Reporter with wmu 88. 5 news, the top rated npr station in the country. On behalf of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace i would like to welcome you to what is sure to be an interesting and exciting conversation about corruption in sent tall america, the United States and elsewhere. I will be moderating this conversation and you will have an opportunity to ask questions once the panelists are finished. First, sara chase, she is a senior fellow here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, she is the author of this report when corruption is an operating system and she is using anguras as the case study. To add some perspective to this discussion we have a law professor at Fordham University school of law. She is the author of corruption in america and she is also an attorney on the amaluments lawsuit filed against president donald trump. So corruption as an operating system what does that mean . Yeah, what am i talking about . Exactly. Would you mind yeah. So we have a picture, but fundamentally what im talking about here is not corruption as some nasty practices that some members of government indulge in in some countries a lot of government officials might indulge in this, but, you know, the way we normally think about it is sort of like i dont know, like a disease that kind of creeps in and infects the tissues of a government. What ive been seeing in honduras turns out to be a really clear example of it. Is a network, right, and a network that crosses boundaries that we think of as separating different sectors of activity like the public and private sector, right . Here we are, americans, we love to fight about which one the public or the private sector is more pernicious, right . Worse for your health. Let alone the criminal sector. As we all know Central America unfortunately is famous for criminal activity, but what becomes clear when you look carefully is that youve got a network that is made up of people at the top of the Public Sector, the private sector and the criminal sector and often they overlap or they share competences or they have a cutout like a representative that they will, you know one brother will be in the Public Sector and the other brother will be running a drug cartel. So you span these different sectors. And thats what this picture is supposed to at least, you know, evoke in peoples minds and i do want to just say well, i will say that later, but, david, if you wouldnt mind just giving me the next one. This info graphic does try to break it down for you. So the Public Sector members of the network have a responsibility and that is to distort state agencies or institutions, functions of government, if you will, to serve the purposes of the network as opposed to serving their stated purpose, which is the public interest. The public good. Exactly, the public good. Im not going to go through them all, but what this information does and what this infographic does is pick them apart a little bit. There are a couple obvious examples that ive seen in honduras but also in a number of other countries and one of them is the Justice Sector because there is a bargain that holds these networks together and its that money flows upward in the network and impunity flows downwards. There is a deal. You get, you know, for the part of the take that youre kicking upwards you are guaranteed protection from legal repercussions, and that can take a lot of forms in Different Countries. In honduras its particularly egregious. You had, you know, a midnight firing of four of the five justices of the Supreme Court, you know, this happened a number of years ago, but it can be the actual judges, it can be by capturing public prosecution. In some countries, i havent seen it in honduras, but in some countries where its difficult to actually capture the Justice Sector the network figures out how to work around it. So in egypt, for example, where judges did retain quite a bit of independence, president sisi has been focusing really hard on expanding the jurisdiction of the military courts, so that more and more cases can bypass the relatively independent civil system and be funneled through the much more controllable military system. Then the next thing lets just look at the next one. So the colors on this infographic are blue for government, green for private sector because thats money, right, at least to us and red for criminal sector because theyre bad guys except they are all bad guys. Anyway, we looked at the right sector and its not i mean, sometimes this can look like the entire system and you sort of say who is corrupt . Well, everyone is corrupt, you know, but it actually makes some sense to try to drill down and look at what are the specific Revenue Streams that are being captured by the network . So some of it, back to the Public Sector, is public procurement. Thats another way that these networks and in honduras in particular infrastructure, right . Big Infrastructure Projects like road building, ports, things like that. So you will see construction companies, but the Banking Sector is a classic. In this case it turns out that the network or networkaffiliated families control about half of the banking of the financial sector. Energy is a classic and in honduras its interesting because its not a country that has an extractive industry, right . There isnt oil or gas, its got a Mining Industry and so thats part of it, but no oil or gas, so quite interestingly its been energy generation, its been Electricity Generation that has been captured including renewables. That was a big surprise. The Solar Energy Sector has been company captured by this network and theyre getting sweetheart rates, very high rates. Palm oil also for biodiesel. A couple others. Interesting ones, nonprofit organizations. Its one to keep ones eye on because one of the important Revenue Streams of course is International Development financing and so if you can situate yourself to capture that flow its a pretty significant one. And then there is the criminal sector and i dont think i need to belabor that in case of honduras, but we have a case going on in new york right now, the former right . Son of the former president , is that who it is . I did want to ask you a question, im not trying to deflect no. No. Of course. So what makes it an operating system as opposed to just the whole bunch of crooked people . Thats a great question. And partly its you look at the personal relationships so in this case a piece of the private sector element is somewhat selfcontained and its culturally uniform to some extent. Its a lot of people who are descendents of immigrants from the middle east and they tend to live together, inter marry, go to School Together and exchange positions on each others boards of directors. Thats that selfcontainness is breaking apart a little bit in that we are now in the fourth generation, but its the exchange of personnel and the clear whats the word . I want to say you know, you look at the people who are making decisions and you will see the same names popping up in the decisionmaking processes and decisionmaking bodies. And then as i say the exchange of personnel. So you will have this private sector group im talking about, they have had a number of top officials selectively appointed in you know, at different stages. And then in the criminal sector also its youve got you can see its almost you have to do a social networking and i would have loved to have done enough of these personal link wajs so that we would have another another graph which would really be the social Network Diagram and i think that thats an important kind of avenue for further research on this topic. Whats the overriding goal of the system . Making money for network members. It really is revenue max am i zags. Now, we can get into a conversation about whether its money or power and does money get you power or does power get you money, but i think in this case and in general internationally i actually think money is the objective and power is more the means to that end than it has been in other times and places in human history. And the reason i say that in had the honduran case is the money people are bossing around the political people and the money people and the criminals who have access to money and obviously armed force are often bossing around the political people, too. You mean there is no ideological motive, its really money . Thats increasingly my view and thats a whole conversation we can also have about how money is displacing other you know, like measures of social value in the period that we live in today, around the world. That money increasingly is how is the exclusive way that we measure our social standing and therefore competition along elites is over money. Not over and therefore kind of how you make the money doesnt matter as much. Let me just say so criminal sector is pretty obvious, its largely the narcotics industry and then just one last two last points id love to make. All right. Go ahead. One is networks are more resilient than individuals and i think this is true of honduras but not just of honduras. I mean, youve seen next door in guatemala where some of the individuals committing some of these practices have been removed from office and prosecuted but thats not enough to really uproot a network like this and i think we all need to think about this as were thinking about how we interact with this overseas as those of you see who are involved in trying to affect policy to other countries, but also as we think about the repercussions here at home. These networks are you know, its like a fishing net, right . You can cut one knot out of a fishing net, that does not destroy the whole net. So thats pretty significant. And, therefore, we really have to think about and this was in court and in honduras was the positive organizations, the people fighting against this. We found were quite networked and we can talk about that further, but they are quite networked and theyre quite who holistic in their objectives. They arent singleissue organizations, i think partly because they understand, wow, this thing has infected a lot of our public space and we need to you know, and the affects are in multiple different domains. So i think its a good time to open it up for questions, right . Well, i mean, what you know, yeah. First of all, both sara and zephyr have agreed to call them by their first names so by calling them zephyr and sara i am not disrespecting them in any way. Sara, you have been sitting here patiently listening, what do you make of all of this . I think what sara is doing is really important and i just want to put it in a few different frame works. One is the framework of the last really 30 years of global the Global Anticorruption fight and anticorruption has drifted to the top of the global agenda. We put lots of money and energy and resources into anticorruption. So it really matters what we mean when we say corruption. And a few things have happened in that area, one is its been fairly tech know democratic and theres also been a hunch for toolboxes to catch the corrupt actors or particular strategies that might work. If you think about corruption as this sort of sideline problem, infection on an otherwise healthy body poll tick then that find of approach makes sense, its like we have this discrete problem in one area and we can fight it by a few laws here and a few more prosecutions here. What sara is suggesting that we should actually think about corruption in a fundamentally different way, not by looking at numbers of violations of bank secrecy laws, numbers of prosecutions on a particular kind of bribery statute, but rather when those in power use that power for private ends as opposed to public ends. So that totally changes the lens at which we look at things. Then i want to return at how this affects the United States. Because then you dont start with asking what kind of behaviors are happening and if these behaviors are happening you know its corrupt and if they are not we start by asking are those in power using public power for selfish ends or not, and then you start looking at power. So one of the important things that sara does in this report is not say that we look first at elected officials and then secondarily at those who influence them because to do that assumes that elected officials are those in power. You start with a default assumption that its those who get i elected or depending on what kind of government system are the source and the issue. Instead you look at who actually controls things. And that who actually controls things mattered. Now, what shes doing then is harkening back to a nora wrist tillian way of understanding corruption. As you may recall or may not, its okay if you dont, aristotle had a sixtier system of government. There were three ideal forms and three corrupted forms. The ideal forms were the monarch, the aristocracy and we will call it the democracy although at the time democracy had sort of a bad name, the polity. And the corrupted forms were the tyrant, the ol garky and, again, he would call it the democracy. Mod rule. Yeah. So whats the difference between these two, the corrupted and uncorrupted forms . Its not the number of people governing, its actually who they serve, the difference between the tyrant and the monarch is the monarch is publicly interested and the tyrant is out for his own ends. And so what shes describing in the arrest tillian sense is something close to the ruled by the few who are selfinterested. The ol gar beginning rule. And this may sound like, you know, everybody understands aristotle, but this is not the way that we operate internationally now. We tend to operate by looking at particular crimes and trying to stop those particular crimes. Id also say this has real resonance for our Current Situation in the United States. And we can talk later about the Trump Administration which is unique in its assault on a rule of law and unique in its disregard for any norms or laws not any, but norms and laws around corruption, but set aside donald trump. Prior to prior to this recent presidency we have a growing split between elites and the rest of the country, especially you d. C. Elites, but that a split between what we think of as corrupt and not corrupt and there is an incredible capacity of political elites to understand and rationalize behavior as not corrupt because its not illegal. Whereas if you talk to most people and most places in the country they look at the way we fund campaigns as profoundly corrupt, not just the way business is done but actually leading to those in power serving private ends instead of public ends. And id like to jump in on that and ask sara because one of her points zephyr was making is how you can get to what you call a clep tok kraes through legal means, by changing laws. What used to be a democracy, what used to be a somewhat honest system becomes a dictatorship through legally enacted means. And so what have you seen that looks like that and if you could talk a little bit about some of the other things in your report how each of the sectors, the private, the Public Sector, the criminal sector, the sector that you call enablers, how all of those people are according to a report working in honduras to make this operating system reach its max zags of money. So the legal question is a really interesting one because and im going to stray from honduras again for a second but say that one of the things that these Network Elites wherever they are typically use to keep the population down, if you will, is legalisms and frankly a u. S. Example that had my jaw on the ground was the eight to zero Supreme Court ruling last july that threw out the corruption conviction of governor mcdonald of virginia. Its in this area. I could even have swallowed if it had gone that way on a split ruling. It was the eight to zero part of it that really blew me away and the fact that nobody even thought to write a concurring opinion saying, golly, okay, given the way the law is written we had to vote this way, but and a couple of butts about what the indications are, but let me just spell out why that conviction was thrown out. It was thrown out not because there was no clear quid pro quo, there was one, it was the definition of what an official act is. So the guy had set up meetings for his business benefactor, right . He had set up meetings maybe even in the governors mansion, he had certainly used, you know, public instruments like his telephone and things like that, but an official act was being was being defined ever more narrowly essentially to the point that it seems like for something to be considered corrupt in this country you almost need to sign a contract. At least in virginia. No. No, it was Supreme Court of the United States. Yeah. This was but wasnt the ruling based on the virginia law and what the virginia law was u. S. Law, right . No, no, this is a matter of u. S. Law. Just to underline what air ra is talking about, we have a Supreme Court who has narrowed the definition of corruption in two distinct areas, the laws that are prophylactic laws, the laws that will make corruption less likely Like Campaign finance law, in other words, the Citizens United what she means by prophylactic is like the upstream laws, the laws that upstream of an act actually being committed would stop it. Right, would prevent the series of events that would make corruption likely. So its like yeah, sorry. So in those cases what the court says is we dont need these laws because we have bribery laws to deal with the real downstream. We have real we can deal with the real problems and then in the bribery cases the court is also narrowing the definition of corruption so making it harder for prosecutors to bring cases as in the mcdonalds case. So you have this sort of vice coming in and the only thing thats left is basically its for, you know, really fumbling criminals. Its the keystone cops. So, you know, armando ask in office please dont use me an example. And were going to sign a contract. Im going to give you 500,000 and you have to vote the following three ways and lets sign the contract, then you could have a case. This never happened, okay . I think that relates actually to honestly to sort of an elite and cultural approach. That the Supreme Court sees people like governor mcdonald as part of an community that they recognize and understand. A sense of entitled, do you think . Were entitled to act this way . Its and lgs a splitting community and relates to the incredible class split we have in this country. Mark twain who you can go to for almost anything writes about this in his novel the gilded age is the two different languages of corruption where elites start to say, hey, this isnt really prupgs this is just the way we do things and everybody says if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck its a duck. So in honduras its quite clear the legalization process. The first thing i found really interesting was just to look at the congress building, you know, youve seen it, you know and this thing is clearly devalued, right . The building is not a dignified building, i almost included in the slide show a picture of the chamber which kind of looks doesnt look as nice as this room. And thats not because of lack of resources. Its an issue of the dignity of the body and the institution. Its ability to serve an oversight function has been systematically undermined, meaning, again, just physically the space when i wanted to meet with members of congress, they didnt have offices. They didnt have a conference room. There are two Conference Rooms in the building of the congress and they actually had to kind of camp out in the building to prevent any i mean, sorry in the room to prevent anyone else from, you know, taking our space. Some people might say thats a good thing, actually. I mean, just in terms of how you can conduct your your business. So, okay, but then what we were able to do was catalog just a series of laws that all cut the same way, essentially legalizing in zephyrs kind of terms, legalizing practices that obviously violate anyone any normal persons conception of corruption. So, for example, they create something called the council for public and private partnerships essentially and it serves to move public money off budget for, quote, Public Private partnerships on Infrastructure Projects that are the money is held in a trust by a bank and is, therefore, not subject to the public procurement law. So, again, its a way of essentially disabling governments ability to perform its function in the public interest. Secrecy laws that have increased the ability to hide all of these types of practices, i mean, secrecy laws its again under the cover of National Security but there are all sorts of bodies that you wouldnt normally think ought to be covered by a National Security secrecy law like the Supreme Court. All the proceedings in the Supreme Court are covered by a classification system that, you know, you would normally assume to be controlled by the military. You also have had the creation of a National Security council that confuses, again, a lot of the what you would normally think of as separation of power so you have the Justice Sector, you have the president of the Supreme Court, the attorney general and the army the interior ministry, the president on a National Security council that and then youve got special units of the Police Reporting directly to that Security Council rather than, you know, normal up through normal channels. So those are some of the types of things and then along with the bending so the sort of capture of the Justice Sector, the legislative sector, you have the hollowing out of other government institutions and i mentioned Congress Kind of sits astride both of those, but environmental the environment ministry, so there isnt a ministry here but it really is remarkable to see how environmental oversight is you know, its been gutted in honduras. Does that look familiar . Does that sound familiar, sara . Absolutely. I want to be very clear that as somebody who looks at corruption in Different Countries although mostly focused here that its always important to be context specific and to understand that each country is very different and that we actually miss a lot if we start making easy comparisons, but as an americanist there are some things that are very haunting in what sara is saying about law and about hollowing out. So not the same, but there is an echo. In the United States we have the growing privatization of law, and this is largely done through arbitration agreements that people must enter into in order to have an Employment Relationship with big countries and then those arbitration agreements you dont have all the protections that you have in a court. The judge is not a judge who is either you know, depending on your state, appointed or elected through your public way. The rules of appeal are different. Its actually been a bit of a revolution and really the last decade is a move from the public open courts to these private courts that you agree to. You know, youre contracted to so its okay you might think, but when you see this mass shift to private courts from public courts we ought be very concerned because its very different, its not a thuggish takeover but it is nonetheless a takeover of an essential feature of a selfgoverning open Democratic Society to have privatized court systems. You also have a different kind of i was fascinated reading her report about the role Public Private relationships play in this in this corruption because in our country we have you might have heard about companies that offer for Free Technology to police departments. You get free body examination and in exchange those Companies Get a foot hold in both the data and the business stream and then you have an incentive to maximize certain kinds of development. You also have that in our Public Schools with Companies Like google providing Free Technology to the schools but in exchange you have a deep entanglement between the company which whatever you think of it has a core and has to have a matter of law and ethics at core a profit maximizing motive. So must be selfserving. So seeing Public Private partnerships, theres always going to be some. You cant have a Society Without some Public Private partnerships but there has been a rash and move forwards that in the last few decades and i think its something we should all be wary of as a potential source of the corruption of our overall society. So where you think honduras is different or almost an exaggeration of this is we still think about maximizing, you know, the selfinterest in the u. S. Business context is shareholder value, right . Its still not so there is a notion that the business has to perform some function that causes people to buy its products or use its software, whatever it is. It is offering something that the market requires, whereas what you see you know, i mean, again there are some blurry places like fritos one could argue not specifically, but a lot of processed food in the United States is not actually food, it doesnt serve a public interest, but anyway whereas i think there is the sort of White Elephant syndrome thats also really important to understand and the White Elephant syndrome is you create an infrastructure, a big build it you know, a big Infrastructure Development that isnt actually meant to function. Hospitals that get built that dont arent properly equipped or arent accessible to, you know, populations because their actual function is to serve as a passthrough for public funding going into private pockets and so thats the way for example, the solar energy in honduras, i mean, its terrific that theres solar energy and i certainly think that id prefer a green clep tok kraes to an oil drenched clep tok kraes for a variety of reasons, but you have Solar Energy Generation where the contract with the state is 20 to 30 years long and a price is locked in at the beginning of that contract and that price is 20 sorry 10 above market value plus, what is it, david, a 3 cent per kilowatt hour. He dug this up. 3 cent per kilowatt hour bonus for the first x number of projects. So you are talking about locking in an inflated price for electricity for the next 20 to 30 years at a time when the cost of solar energy is going down by 10 a year. That is no longer even shareholder value as we can understand it. Thats called looting. In this case its looting the customers because its going to be paid in rates, but its also looting the state in other cases, banks are you know, i mean, anyway there is this great corruption joke, you might have heard it, you hang out in a lot of corruption circles, so you could say corrupt circles. One new young cleptocrat is visiting his cousin in another country and he sees this incredible mansion, the cleptocrat shows him around, a great pool in the back, great view and he says how did you do this . How did you make this . And the old guy points out the window and says, see that bridge . 30 . And so then ten years later the old guy is visiting his cousin in his country. He cannot believe the castle, the he has three pools and incredible layout and he says, i know i taught you but how did you do that and a the young cleptocrat points out the window and say, do you see that bridge . And the old guy goes, no. So theres different stages. Right. And let me just add another element of this which is sometimes private businesses can actually serve as White Elephants in a way. So, for example, kabul bank in afghanistan was floating u. S. Funding the u. S. Payment of salaries to the Afghan National army. The thing was a ponzi scheme, it was completely insolvent but what kept it afloat was the cash flow going through it, right . So you can think about real estate serving the same function or in honduras bank owe sicosa which is the biggest bank in the country bought out citi groups Central American holdings. Now, i can understand why citi would want to get out of Central America given what kind of money is sloshing around there and given kind of the ratcheting up of banking compliance thats been happening in recent years. If i were city id probably derisk in that particular way, but my question is did anybody look at what money sicosa used to buy them out. You know, so i had a conversation with someone from a Development Bank who said essentially the entire Banking Sector in honduras looks like kabul bank or looks like the Banking Sector in afghanistan which is kabul bank was a pons gee scheme which the only ones that were actually solvent were the ones that were running opium money, right . It was the same kind of flow, its just that it was drug money keeping them afloat. So the assessment is thats kind of what the Banking Sector looks like in honduras, but its so systemic, its, again, a kind of too big to fail. Like what happens so this guy is doing, you know, Economic Analysis for the big International Development bank and i asked him, well, how are you factoring in the dirty money . Like how are you dealing in your Economic Forecast and all that kind of thing . And his answer was, im not, because you cant measure it. [ inaudible ]. Not quite, but you cant measure the dirty stuff, you dont know how much is sloshing around. And im like, oh. So then what meaning does your analysis actually have . Its not an analysis of the economy as it actually exists. And if the general understanding is that every single Honduran Bank functions this way as a White Elephant i mean, they are providing services, they are providing Banking Services to people, but their bottom line is completely detached from the services that they are providing, how do you clean i mean, that helps explain some of the reluctance we all have not just in figuring out how to deal with a system like this but even acknowledging that a system is like this because then its like the whole country is too big to fail and if we start fulg one of these strings were going to pull the whole country down. Let me ask you about that because you talk about enablers. You talk about organizations, external organizations that enable some of this corruption to continue. In the case of honduras one of the things youve been talking about is the drug money, all of the cartels that are using honduras as a trans shipment point but theres also a lot of money that is destined to go to Central America and to honduras from the United States to fight these cartels, to fight the violence and yet you seem to look at this as yet another revenue stream that this operating system wants to capture, the u. S. Aid, the international aid. So how do you see that, especially in a country like honduras where hundreds of billions of dollars really do have some meaning, right . Exactly. Exactly. So coming at this out of deep experience in afghanistan, you know, and i know a lot of the communities here is very concerned about military assistance to honduras and when i look at the numbers im like, ha, thats kind of a drop in the bucket of stuff that ive seen, but in this context it has a very Significant Impact and its both the military assistance and of course civilian assistance, but and theres a kind of moral impact or psychological impact that it has, but i love the way you frame that question because it raises one of the i want to say there is a kind of political tradeoff thats often applied to these types of situations where and its one of the things that these Network Elites often use, again, to distract from what theyre doing, they will say, but if not for me, you know, the security situation, they always often use the security situation as a counterbalance. So the heads of these networks will often pose as the people who can help you handle, get to grips with the security situation, be it drugs, be it insurgent violence undocumented immigration. Or undocumented immigration, exactly. So i feel that president hernandez has really situated himself very effectively in this way and he has done it on the one hand by indeed cracking down on some of the Drug Trafficking and everyone that we talked to did say, do you know what, there has been some progress on the Drug Trafficking front and the drug violence front, and i could experience it in place that is we visited where locals were saying, oh, you know, two years ago we couldnt have driven down this street. But how much of that is what you have seen in other countries where the cartels themselves understand that if we are about making money lets not kill ourselves, lets make money, a lower profile and throw a couple sacrificial lambs to the corruption people and cops so that we can continue with the business that were about. Its a great question and i have to confess i wasnt looking at that specifically so i cant make an argument about how much the cartels themselves were sort of selfpolicing, but i do think hernandez was policing to some extent in order to throw a bone to uncle sam and get himself in good light with the u. S. Government saying, see, im helping you with your issue and unfortunately a lot particularly the United States, we tend to be a little bit single issue and we get focused on one thing and in the case of honduras it tends to be two things, its the migrant flow and its drugs. So the degree and so the other thing we found is a massive increase in incarceration. I mean, just dramatic. We didnt even find it, its other peoples statistics and a lot of new you know, a lot of localized reports, people in neighborhoods saying they would see sweeps in the night. So thats one thing it, one aspect of your question that is important to think about is that very often in my experience its this type of cleptocratic networking, if you will, that drives people toward violent reactions be that insurgency in a place like afghanistan or isis or be it Gang Violence, i mean, you know, people start setting up almost their own social structures in counter distinction to governing system like this, or they will lash out at it in extremely in extreme ways and that can be violent ways, it can be revolution, it can be insurgencieinsurgencies, voting in bizarre ways and yet these people have these people meaning the cleptocratic Network Types are really good at persuading outsiders that they are the champion against the very violence that they are practices are fueling and driving. So thats one part of the question. And in some of those countries the people that own the security, the private security companies, are themselves members of could think and part of this part of this. Bingo. So theyre making money off of were making money off of the security situation. Thats a great point. And which raises another point about one of the instruments of state function that they always have, these networks, is an instrument of force. And then they almost so it will be a particular battalion in the army or it will be a particular unit in the police or something and there is a lot of that in honduras where hernandez is creating special units that report directly to them but they also love to have informal instruments of force and those can be the gangs. So you start seeing gangs that supposedly this government is fighting against, the government is also instrument liesing as a plausibly dee niebl instrument of force. And internet trolls in this country you can almost start to think of in a similar way. But let me just sorry, as you see im not the short answer kind of gal. I dont even remember the question but thats okay. So the question is enablers from outside. See. So thats the other part of the question thats really important to think about. I think too often and im going to move away from the obvious issues of military assistance into Development Assistance and too often when you look at any corruption, you know, are there any us aid people here. That care to admit it. Not a soul. One. All right. So often us aid gets you know, the United States governments Anticorruption Mission overseas gets offloaded on to the shoulders of us aid and poor us aid has to develop anticorruption programming and internally Development Agencies when they think about corruption they tend to think about corruption within their programming, meaning is any of our money getting stolen by somebody . What we found the issue to be is much more along the lines of armandos question that streams of Development Assistance are being captured by the network and we looked in particular at Development Financing which is to say Development Banks like the Inter AmericanDevelopment Bank or in the case of what you know, or the ifc, the International Finance corporation or fmo is another important one in honduras, which is the dutch Development Bank, but i decided to pick on finland partly because poor finland. I know. And i love the place and i feel so terrible because i really love finland and i really think its a wonderful country that has its head screwed on straight, but finland does have a Development Bank and it was fascinating to look, its tauld fin fund and it was one of the investors in a now very famous and tragic one of these projects called the agwazarka dam which is the dam over which berta was assassinated. But how fin fund works so the finnish government puts money into fbi fund which is a bank and it wants return on its investment but it wants the investment to go into Development Objectives but what i found was then fin fund will put money into it will either put money directly into projects or sometimes fin fund or u. S. Aid will put money into a fund at every layer in this process the Development Objectives are more attenuated, the oversight is weaker, the the guidelines are more general and less specific and the oversight is at every stage along the way what we found was when i would say what reporting requirements do you have they would say, oh, you get a report every six months and then i would say do you ever check the veracity, you know, do you like go check the report against the situation on the ground. Do we have any reason to mist trust our clients . Exactly. So i hear one laugh up here. And i was really stunned at the degree to which the presumption was that people are doing good whereas and at the end the fin Fund Official turned to me and said quite passionately i just want these people to have power. My grandmother didnt have electricity and the biggest event in her life was getting electricity and i think he really felt strongly about that, but what he didnt go down and look at was is this electricity actually reach the people or is the electricity a profitmaking venture thats actually for export which turns out to be the case. And the presumption that and the other thing that was really interesting was fin fund felt attacked by the Civil Society organizations that were protesting the dam. So when i asked is there anything you do differently, a woman, a Tremendous Community leader, a breathtaking both organizer and activist, if you will, i kind of feel like she was honduras nelson mandella, when i went there and really understood the kind of action she had had and the type of action she had had way outside of her own ethnic group or whatever it was. When i asked would i do anything differently they saw her organization as an enemy and they said, yes, we now know that its not enough to have a good project, you really need to understand the context within which the project is being developed and im like, yay, until i hear the next sentence, which was you have to know is there some ngo out there that has a lot of International Support thats going to blow the thing up in your face. So that was and i was like how did fin fund get into a position where the very people that they claim they are out there trying to support which is local villagers who want electricity, they just dont want electricity this way, how did that organization become the enemy rather than the type of community that youre trying to support. And what was your answer . I think no. No. You havent said anything. Well, thats okay. This is fascinating. But i think what this goes to, again, which is to sort of source the whole project is that corruption isnt this side thing, its deeply intertwined with selfgovernment and freedom itself. So when i look at the sort of founding of our own country at the Constitutional Convention they talked about corruption more than they talked about anything else, not because they they talked about corruption more than they talked about violence, internal insurgen insurgency, those problematic people in massachusetts. More than warfare. Because they saw the fundamental task of figuring out a system of freedom is freedom from an inevitable pressure whether you are in monarchy, a single few or multirule, inevitable pressure towards corruption. Its kind of the reverse of the arc of justice bends towards history, its sort of the arc of government bends towards taking. And so that it isnt a second level task, but a first level task. So questions of government, who decides, who makes decisions about whether its Solar Projects cant be cant be separated from questions of corruption, you actually have to engage in all of them together. Sorry. We were just talking about time, but who is in housekeeping. He wants to turn it to you guys and im like let me just have one more word here which really what zephyr just said connects to Something Else i heard from villagers in honduras who said, you know, we have started to understand that this Political Party thing, this democratic contest between Political Parties is really just designed to split us up amongst ourselves and if i were to kind of translate what they said to me into my vocabulary, they are seeing the Political Party contest as really a contest among or between rival strands of an im perfectly i object grated cleptocratic network. The network in honduras is not a Single Network the way it is in azure buy shon, for example. There are rival strands that basically manifest themselves in the party system and id like to do the u. S. Parallel and say that is a lot of the malaise we are here and why 50 of the electorate doesnt vote. Its quite interesting that we are all focused on polarization and Political Party polarization and i think we are very polarized on kind of social and cultural issues, but as zephyr suggested in the beginning, at the top of our kind of party system theres much more consonance than i think members or supporters of either of the Political Parties would like to admit in terms of these types of political economy issues. Theres much more similarity at the top of the democratic and republican parties that is not really expressed in the polarization, the identity polarization down at the bottom. So to some extent the identity polarization becomes a distraction, preventing the people from holding those guys at the top who are kind of colluding, holding them accountable and responsible. Yeah, i can say that i mean, and this affects how people report, that in the last six years, seven years since Citizens United, things were bad before that, but since Citizens United in contested congressional races and i was in a contested congressional race last year, i lost, in the Hudson Valley in new york. The majority of money spent in those races is not from either Political Party but from outside super pacs. Its still reported on by journalists because there is sort of a potential alignment with the republican side that this is a republican super pac or a democratic super pac, but what that means in fact is that the main contest is happening not with the candidates and not with the parties and not with the parties ideologies, but with wealthy extremely wealthy donors on each side, im talking about 400,000, 500,000 donations to these super pacs. Thats just in the seven years since Citizens United. I think people are not stupid and they feel that, that they feel that contests are contests between elites and contests between elites leads to a lot of things, it leads to disaffection and i think its part of the story and the true tragedy of the trump election is that trump is probably the most corrupt president that we have had and i use that term not in a legalistic sense but in a sense of being willing to use the office for making money, for himself and for his family, for his clan. But i also do think that many people voted for him because they were so frustrated with what they saw as a deeply corrupt system that they just wanted something to change. I spoke to a trump voter the day after who just said i wanted to put a stick in the stream because something a wrecking ball. So the tragedy is that people voted in part theres a lot of other things going on, but in part as an anticorruption moment and i think we are still in a revolutionary moment in this country, people will feeling like that want fundamental change. Both for our country and not just in terms of the aid that we may or may not provide, but in terms of in terms of the modeling that we provide. Yes. I think that really matters, you know, weve spent 30 years after the wall came down trying to tell everybody to get on with this democracy program. We have a special responsibility to make sure that we clean our own house, deal with our own structural problems of corruption that are not just wound up in the illegality that we see with the Trump Administration but structural problems about how we fund campaigns, structural problems about how we privatize and allow for private power if we want to continue this spirit of freedom and share that around the world. All right. And because we do believe that people are smart were going to let you show how smart you are by asking questions now. So we have facilitators on either side of the room with a microphone. Please raise your hand and someone with a microphone will come and hold them for you and we would ask you to try to keep your questions brief and because it is the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace try to keep your questions peaceful. All right. I have a question here up front. This is for zephyr. Would you not agree that the founders of the country, our country, [ inaudible ] a process of governance which recommended a separation between the [ inaudible ] orderly government . Do they make a mistake. Could i ask you if you are affiliated with someone if you wouldnt mind just letting us know, you know ed berger, a physician who directed a program in russia in the health field for 70 years. Wow. Thank you for your question. Let me see if i understand the question. Are you suggesting that there was a mistake in not having a direct democracy as opposed to a Representative Democracy . [ inaudible ] the Electoral College is an example but there are a whole series of others [ inaudible ] by the writings i think of the Founding Fathers. So i by no means think that the Founding Fathers were perfect, there is some sort of obvious errors. Im a Langston Hughes patriot, let america be america again, let it be the dream that used to be america was never america to me, both sort of recognizing the incredible wisdom in our past and also that theres flaws. But i would say that the spirit, the anticorruption spirit, is one of the ones that we should continue. So when designing the congress and the senate one of the reasons they had a separate senate and congress was to contain different corrupting impulses that we have, the corrupting impulses of the elites and the corrupting impulses of what they saw as sort of the more unruly democracy. Hamilton argued for an executive interestingly on anticorruption grounds, saying that the executive is the least likely to try to use his position of power because he will so identify with the country he wont steal from it. To which mason and others replied, yeah, but look at the time that charles took money from the king of france and was sort of bribed in various ways. So we need to have things like the amoluments clause to protect against an executive who is selfdealing. Actually, the Electoral College which is now outdated was initially designed as an anticorruption tool because it was seen as too difficult given the shapes of the road to we ha votes on the same day in this structured way. So i dont think that we should sort of stick with exactly the document. I believe in the importance of amending and moving forward. But i do think this kind of attention to every detail, the size of the veto, not just what who are we going to prosecute, thats sort of how sometimes modern anticorruption people think, who are we going to prosecute. But we think of the structural job of building a democracy is reducing the temptation to selfdeal. Next question. Well take one from this side, please. And then the next question will be the person in the back. My question is, i was just wondering if pentagon could play a role in reducing corruption in an important country like pakistan because pakistan being Security State happens. And these pakistani have million of dollars in kickbacks. So this is the reason they dont support politician. Do you think can use encourage pakistani to have person like come . Im not going to get into internal pakistani politics, obviously, but the issue of how military assistance can play a role in this type of a situation is an important one. And i have a fair amount of experience with it. In afghanistan. Not pakistan. What i have found is the u. S. Military in general is quite reluctant to engage at all. When i was a senior officer, Senior Officers got it and they did understand that the integrity of government was critical to them succeeding in their own mission. So i know a number of Senior Officers who really waded in to the importance of anticorruption part of the policy toured whatever country it might be, in this particular case it was afghanistan, but it could be pakistan, it could be honduras. On a lower level the military is extremely reluctant to have this enter into or officers that i have known and also the political military department, the u. S. Department of state is reluctant to see this as part of its job because essentially they see their job as were there to train people how to shoot. I think thats a mistake. I think that the integrity of armed forces is absolutely critical to these issues everywhere. And the u. S. Role in training, mentoring and equipping militaries in honduras, in pakistan, in a variety of other places is a really excellent environment in which to drive home some of these lessons. And for example, ive talked to people who know something about south korea, which i dont, but they say that the gradual emergence of south korea from you know, now is not a great time to be saying that given whats been happening in south korea recently, but south korea used to be extremely corrupt and emerged out of it. And a number of people said that was partly because of the example that was set by u. S. Forces when they were there. But sarah, let me ask you. Yeah. What is the role of u. S. Military aid in pacifying generals and in that network being able to keep the generals in baby using u. S. Money to say, look, were getting you your piece of the pie, behave . I think thats a great point. Its often used as a bargaining chip in a way. I mean, its Pretty Amazing that the United States prosecutes businesses for bribing foreign officials, its called the foreign corrupt practices act, while the United States sometimes seems to bribe foreign officials. Weve also had some admirals that have just recently indeed. Indeed. Question in the back. Question in the back, raise your hand, please. Well take two questions in the back. That gentleman and then a gentleman behind. Theres one all the way in the very back. Rick, im with Global Anticorruption blog. And my question is, we spent an hour hearing about how terrible the situation is in honduras, could we spend a couple minutes on what you think might be done . And in your comment could you sort of talk to this Oas Commission recently established . Right. Yeah. So im 100 with zephyr on im not in favor of tools and sort of tool kits. And thats part of why i am kind of promoting it doesnt have to be this diagram, but to understand how to address a country, you need to know something specific about how its networks are structured. I do think there are about 60 countries in the world, or maybe more, that you can roughly describe in the way that i describe honduras, but you do need to know some specifics about how its set up. Theres a real, as i said, networks are incredibly resilient. So you cant just hope to knock off a couple of individuals. So i would like to talk about two elements, one is the one that you mentioned, masi, which is a kind of version 2. 01 of the commission that has now brought down and prosecuted several, you know, top members of the guatemalan government next door. And when there were broad anticorruption protests in honduras, it was give us in guatemala its called sisig, which was or is an internationally supported commission with investigative and prosecutorial mandate which is made up of justice officials its an extremely powerful tool. You can bet the honduras government once they saw what was happening next door said huhuh. El salvador also didnt it want it. Of course. Of course. As well is mexico. Almost all of south america. But it lacks the independent prosecutorial mandate that csig has, but it does have an expanded mandate to address some of the i want to say institutional structural setups that allow this system to perpetuate itself. And thats a real upside of moxy, because they are looking at Campaign Financing laws. And they are looking at, you know, plea bargaining laws and corporate law, and some of the really important legal frameworks that allow this system to perpetuate itself. Theres going to be a very dramatic pushback and already has been. And i havent followed all of the details of it, but thats something very worth following. For example, in the honduran congress, theres a front in support of moxy. Its a nonpartisan front. Now, there are efforts to disable that front that are underway at the moment. Precisely because of the danger it poses to the structural framework that allows all this to go forward. Thats one thing. Yeah, go ahead. But if moxy doesnt really have any teeth, then isnt it just a distraction . Because the one that really has traction no one is talking about . Which is . If you cant do anything in guatemala, then essentially its just a shell game im not sure thats the case. What was done in guatemala is some individuals were prosecuted. However, for the moment the network survives. So the network can survive the removal of individual nodes in it. And csig does not have the mandate to address the framework, the structural elements that allow the network to prosper. So i think frankly the jury is out on moxy. Okay. Lets watch and see how it evolves and see whether it can grow some teeth and there are some pretty tough individuals who are not just kind of window dressing. None of the people involved in that institution or most of them are not theyre pretty ferocious people. But lets also see is moxy able to convert its, you know, institutional and i want to talk about Something Else that too is a positive, the organizations that are fighting back, the grassroots movements that are often described as environmental movements or indigenous rights activists or land activists. And so theyre often in the description of them broken up into these little categories. And, you know, as i say fin fun treated these organizations as the enemy rather than seeing that these organizations have a bead on this system in a very sophisticated way. And theyre trying to network themselves. For example, one of them which is in the kind of constellation of movement wonderful people in la paz department, the head of it or coordinator of it was on his way to colombia when he was about to meet a whole bunch of representatives from other indigenous movements across the region to discuss the problem of monsento chrks is trying to patent, you know, seeds. And theyre like we invented potatoes, youre not going to tell us that you guys can patent like Central America thats where they come from and theyre working really hard to revive indigenous varieties of plants. They could all tell me they would go by their farms and say, oh, this leaf is a fertilizer and the bark of the same tree is an insecticide. Theyre completely educating themselves or reeducating themselves on those types of lure that is also part of their struggle. And so it was interesting fin fund was saying copin, this other larger group, they have a, quote, other agenda. Its not just about the den. What fin fund didnt understand is that copin knows that the dam is part of this structured and Network System and therefore they have to address it in a structured and networked way. And those organizations are doing this at a tremendous personal risk. Oh, my god to the activists and their families, i mean, they get murdered. They get murdered. And disappear. So, i mean, this is not a joke. Its not. Even though im sorry. I briefly want to say, obviously im not an expert an area expert in this, there have been successful anticorruption efforts over time. Its not sort of a single direction. It almost always involves an incredible amount of civic engagement. And this country we were in bad shape in 1899, took us several decades but a lot of different efforts and my hesitancy about using tool kit modeling is i just think if you think of a background image of a car that works and a car that doesnt work, then you have a tool kit to fix the car that doesnt work to make it a car that works, and then it will continue working. And i think what we need to understand is we can learn from different circumstances and different experiments. But that learning never stops. Theres no sort of steady state utopian stable noncorrupting world. Its just new methods will come around in which corruption can be monsanto for example is important because i believe that one of the greatest global corruption threats comes from modern multinationals who engage in Different Countries in different ways. But again have a mandate to maximize profit. We dont accuse them of that. Thats their law. Theyre publicly traded. But that leads to actually leading how to not just get caught like uber might, but how to take over the laws and structure of laws in order to maximize profit. Im going to continue with sort of founder stories, but Thomas Jefferson was very worried about the corrupting power of monopolies and you would certainly call monsanto one of those controlling 80 of the seeds and soy in this country and other countries because he saw them as becoming mini private governments that were essentially corrupt. Not that theyre outside governments, but they govern themselves, they govern behavior. And one strategy that i would think about in many countries in the world is thinking about antimonopoly as a potential strategy to take on concentration of power because that concentration of power enables the networks to extract a value for their societies. Thats very interesting because if you read any futurists, some of them go as far as writing that in the long run there will no longer be governments, there will be corporations. And they will act as governments. Interest. If you read anybody, even Science Fiction writers, thats certainly one stream of the writing, downfall of governments and the rise of these governments. Question in the back, i think, yes . Adam khan, google, but im not representing them here today. So i highly recommend everyone buy a copy of dark money, paints an amazing picture of the corrupting influence of money and corporations and how elections are bought. So coming back to that idea of the concentration of power, gerrymandering, super pacs, what do you see as the future . Are we going to be stuck with Citizens United, which is euphemistically named. I mean, why dont we talk about the power of super pacs and how we are in this situation because of Citizens United. Great question. So Citizens United is not about to be overturned, which means that we in the United States it can be overturned, but it is not about to in the sort of next few years given the state of the Supreme Court. Its important to be realistic about that. And it means that more is required of us. You know, sort of if you think of this as a kind of battlefield, we just lost a lot in the last seven years have transformed politics. I talked to you about my race, but basically super pacs played checkers in the first year, theyre playing chess now, theyre about to play go, theyre deeply involved in data. Super pacs are increasingly doing the canvassing that parties used to do. Its a very quick takeover of our political system. I believe, and sorry to say this to you, adam, but one of the things we have to do is take on is say, okay, we have changed the way campaigns are funded, im not sorry to say that, moved to a publicly financed system in the United States, in new york city its transformed new york city politics, led to a lot more competitive races, fewer incumbents being able to sort of sit pretty. And then we also need to bring about antimonopoly laws. And i would say that google and facebook have enormous political power, and i felt that political power in my own race not only as filters for news and information, but also in terms of the deep political connection to the Political Parties. We talk about law and nonenforcement, google was deeply embedded in the Obama Administration, and many people look at that as a reason why the Obama Administration did not take on the wage fixing scandal in Silicon Valley where basically the big five agreed not to hire and poach each others workers. Something sort of looks on its face illegal. So we have to look not just in the Impolite Company but Polite Company for where theres concentration of power. Questions. Up front, please, lady. With the oecd. I have a question for each of you. And, zephyr, im glad you explained a little more about your view of the toolbox because i think toolboxes or tools in the toolbox with perfection work or can work in terms of trying to deal with this issue over the long term. My question is the situation with one of you mentioned something about electricity and instead of it going to the people it ends up being basically ripped off for the elite or abroad, whatever, my concern and i think a concern is more when the people get just enough, sort on the electricity theres still a ripoff, so i guess my question is which goes back to the question that i think might have been raised earlier is what do you see as the Enforcement Mechanisms . I mean, what do you see in the toolbox that potentially either needs to be improved or can work . And im putting aside our own issues here in this moment with this particular government. So thats one for you. Were almost autoof time, so were only going to give you one question because its 5 20. Thats all right. Your answers will answer if they can. Thank you. The second thing i turn to yeah, you go ahead because zephyr is literally going to walk out the door at 5 30. Okay. Yeah. Ill get there. For you, sarah, my question is the following. You made, i think, a very interesting point about too big to fail that this can relate to a country. I think one of the prime examples that [ inaudible question ] and were now with our third president who is being looked at and perhaps [ inaudible question ] how do you move from being a poster child for the good stuff for showing that the government is strong to the possibility that it can basically be undermined totally. And basically have a loss of faith in government and in governance and no government that can operate. Thank you. So briefly, i think in this country we need ive said om of this before, but change the way we fund elections, whether its a constitutional amendment or overturning citizens unite seconddegree incredibly important. Actually enforcing antitrust laws, which we havent since 1981, but then also introducing new antitrust laws to deal with the new monopolists that are really taking over and corrupting a lot of our government. And then some parts of that in this country are these questions about the incentives and culture in our prosecutorial offices about why doj and ftc have been inactive, i just use them as one example, in antitrust, why other agencies have been inactive in taking on big banks that i think that theres actually different ways we can structure prosecutorial offices in as much as a prosecution is one part of what we should be doing. And the last thing, which is not a law is cultural, is actually expecting and insisting as a cultural matter, not as a law matter with Revolving Doors and trying to as a cultural matter that people serve in the public good and not in the private interests. Not merely when they are Holding Office but after they have held office. I used to play a game and ill turn it over, called what would o lig has a habit a Russian Oligarch very involved in bosnia where i was studying the corruption there, in Different Countries he would corrupt everybody differently. Some countries he would bribe and some countries he would just get a no big contract and the United States he hired bob dole as a lobbyist. So that shows us where our weaknesses are is the different strategies used in Different Countries. We have a real weakness in the combination between lobbying, campaign finance, super pacs and our own cultural acceptance thereof. Id like to add to that, regulations. I hate to say it, and it is true that, you know, if youre a Small Business or a small bank, theres a lot of box checking paperwork that, you know, strangles you. But whats interesting is people working on behalf of some very large, very selfinterested private interest are using the trivials of the little guys to dismantle regulations on them that really are in the public interest. And so i recommend to everybody the book the best way to rob a bank is to own one, its about the savings and loan crisis. And it is fascinating about the role of effective regulators, the best way to rob a bank is to own one. On my question, i would say that the stories youre referring to reinforce the word zephyrs been talking i cant even say the word, p look upstream and similarly look at this internationally. Once you get to the point where it takes a year of public demonstrations to get a government to, you know, even think about something, youre going to be in a mess. Youre going to be in a catastrophic failure. But its going to happen. So, for example, mubarak looked great, you know, in 2005, right . Mubarak looked like its stable and hes delivering on the camp david accords just like we want and hes a strong man and its stability and, you know, and if hes a little corrupted, his son is a little corrupted around the edges, thats okay, we can live with that in return for the ability sorry, for the stability. But youre going to get some kind of a systemic failure in that case. Unfortunately, what happened in the case of egypt is one branch of the network took back over. So now weve got sisi whos the same thing and in fact worse. Were saying, wow, isnt this great . Weve got stability, weve got this strong Man Government in egypt. Its not going to last. Theres going to be systemic failure. So the point is too big to fail actually fails. It does fail in the end, as it did in 2008 in the Banking Sector. So the real question is how do you then put in place a framework that will avoid getting Systemic Risk again . And we havent gotten there yet in the u. S. Banking sector, and we havent gotten there yet in corruption in Foreign Countries let alone our own country. Im afraid thats going to be it for the questions. But i would like to give both zephyr and sarah an opportunity for some closing remarks. So its been a pretty wide ranging discussion. All over the map, literally. And many levels of sophistication from countries like honduras to the United States, Different Levels of corrupt activities but all of them in many ways showing if you can fix something where the level of corruption is here, doesnt mean youre out of the woods because when you get to be a first world country there are going to be corruption issues there as well. So very briefly, three things. One is that decentralized private power is actually essential to protecting against corruption. The second, and here i sound a little old fashioned, but maybe thats my job, is that we have to engage in questions of virtue and morality. And not merely see this as a te technocratic matter. And the third is you should definitely read sarahs fantastic report. And i would like to emphasize a point that we didnt touch on and is insufficiently let me touch on two points that we didnt touch on one. One is i was hearing i mean, you were covering this, the kids coming across the border and theyre still coming across the border, and what i heard mostly was they were subject to Gang Violence and gang extortion. And i think thats probably what you found. Thats what they talked about. But it took me about two days on the ground to realize that the police were outsourcing their extortion to gangs. So i dont want to kind of be the guy with the hammer and everythings a nail, but believe me you scratch the surface of just about any problem and youre going to find corruption underneath it. So just be aware that, you know, so this whole system was very instrumental in moving those kids onto those perilous roads that they took. And just to add, each one of those children represents thousands of dollars to the Smuggling Network that brings them here. So when you multiply 150, 200,000 children and family units that have come to this country over the last few years and you multiply that by 4,000 or 5,000, that perhaps was not paid out at the beginning but is being paid out by now by those families sending back through remittances, theres a huge flow of money because of the smuggling thats happening in Central America. And just to reinforce what armando suggested before, the very government that were relying onto stop these migration flows so this is true of corruption in general, when you say lets back burner the corruption issue because we really care about this concern, more often than not its corruption itself thats driving this concern over here. So its actually counterproductive in the long term to back burner corruption in order to focus on this. And the second point i want to make is that insufficiently developed in this report and i really want to turn to it, much more in future work, these networks although its important to look at the country distinctions, the networks themselves are not isolated within their countries. These are transnational cl cleptocratic networks. Were used to multinational corporations, it stands to reason that if the networks are integrated in these ways, the cleptocratic networks are transnational. And we ought to be taking a good look at that as we examine our Current Situation in the United States where we have a tendency to look again for specific instances of conflict of interest or specific laws that may be violated whereas if you look at the pattern of the business and other interactions by key members of this administration overseas, it almost starts to look like an Airline Route map where youve got nodes in Different Countries but the lines are going like this. And i think were looking at washington becoming or having become a node in a web of transnational cleptocratic. Thank you for this very, very interesting discussion. Thank you for joining us on cspan2. Good night. Thursday at 7 00 p. M. Eastern, join American History tv for a live tour of the museum of the American Revolution in philadelphia. The museums president and ceo Michael Quinn and collections and exhibitions Vice PresidentScott Stevenson will introduce artifacts and exhibits throughout the museum including George Washingtons war tent and a piece of the old north bridge from the battle of concord. Hear stories about the American Revolution, and yan