A ten-step program can close loopholes in the US legal system

A ten-step program can close loopholes in the US legal system, strengthen enforcement mechanisms, and generate broader momentum for an international war on kleptocracy. While I [the author] offer these steps with the United States in mind, they invoke general principles that all liberal democracies should rally behind.

End anonymous shell companies. Federal law should require the real ownership of all US companies and trusts to be disclosed and listed in a register, which would be accessible at least to law enforcement agencies and ideally to the public (as is done in the United Kingdom). Deception by owners or agents to mask real ownership should meet with serious civil or criminal penalties. Moreover, the United States should encourage other states to adopt similar laws requiring full transparency in business ownership.

End anonymous real estate purchases. Washington should require all real estate purchases in the United States to reveal the true owner behind the purchase. Real estate agents, lawyers, and other professionals and firms involved in these transactions should have to undertake serious due diligence to verify the true identity of the purchaser, with biting penalties for negligence or deliberate noncompliance. And a new law should forbid any US government agency (especially those conducting sensitive work) from leasing office space from unknown owners or from any owner or business linked to an authoritarian or corrupt government.

Modernize and strengthen the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). We should close the loophole that enables many agents for foreign principals to simply register under less onerous reporting requirements as lobbyists. We need an integrated system for reporting all lobbying and public relations advocacy on behalf of foreign interests. This line of work has exploded in recent years, with an estimated one thousand US lobbyists working for foreign principals, but almost no one is ever prosecuted for noncompliance with the law. The US Justice Department has a staff of only eight people working to enforce FARA; the department needs more staff, more investigative powers, and more painful civil or criminal penalties for violations.

Strengthen prohibitions and monitoring of political contributions by foreign actors. Foreign political and campaign contributions are forbidden in the United States (except by permanent residents), but only comprehensively at the federal level, and some foreign contributions could be filtering in through donations made by lobbyists and agents for foreign actors. Foreign contributions to all candidates and political campaigns, at every level of government, should be prohibited in the United States, and all political contributions by foreign agents should be monitored by a well-staffed federal agency. Other democracies around the world should also ban foreign financial contributions to their political parties and campaigns.

Ban former US officials and members of Congress from lobbying for or representing foreign governments. Soon after entering the White House in January 2017, President Trump signed an executive order restricting the future lobbying activities of his political appointees and banning them for life from lobbying for foreign governments or political parties. This lifetime ban should be embedded in law and extended to retired members of Congress as well. And the Justice Department should maintain a list of foreign businesses, foundations, and organizations that, because of links to their authoritarian governments, are also off-limits for representation by former US officials. We may even want to go further: do we really want to allow some future retired American official or member of Congress to work for a company effectively controlled by the Kremlin or the Chinese Communist Party? [read more]

Source: Hoover Digest Summer 2021 No. 3. (2021) “Exposing the Kleptocrats.”  by Larry Diamond.

Good plan but Congress won’t implement it because they benefit from the kleptocracy.

The rest of the steps:

• Modernize the anti-money-laundering system.
• Increase the resources that the United States and other rule-of-law states devote to monitoring, investigating, and prosecuting grand corruption and money laundering.
• Strengthen cooperation among democracies in fighting kleptocracy and ending “golden visas.”
• Raise public awareness about kleptocracy in Russia and other offending states.
• Increase international support for investigative journalism, NGOs, and official institutions working to monitor and control corruption around the world.

Whistleblower Warns: 'The FBI Will Crush You'

From Newsmax.com (May 18, 2023):

FBI whistleblower Garret O'Boyle, one of three testifying before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government Thursday, had a warning for any of his former colleagues who may be thinking about testifying against the agency: Don't do it.

"The FBI will crush you," O'Boyle warned, when committee member Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., asked him what he'd advise. "This government will crush you and your family if you try to expose the truth about things that they are doing are wrong, and we are all examples of that."

O'Boyle said he would tell colleagues that he would take their complaints to Congress for them or put them in touch with Congress, "but I would advise them not to do it."

He admitted that not testifying would not solve the issues the FBI has, or shine light on corruption, but based on his experience, he'd still urge them to turn away.

O'Boyle's words came at the end of a lengthy, often-heated hearing in which he joined two other FBI whistleblowers, Stephen Friend, and Marcus Allen, to testify about the retribution they experienced for coming forward with statements on several issues.

This included the investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol, the investigations of parents speaking out at school board meetings, and other instances that the Republicans on the committee say show the weaponization of the government against the American people.

In O'Boyle's case, he told the committee that he was forced to rely on charity after the FBI moved him and his family from Kansas to Virginia, but soon ended his assignment. He claimed he bureau blocked him for six weeks from getting his family's personal property back.

Chairman Jim Jordan asked all three men for their reactions to the FBI's activities against them, and all insisted they followed the oaths they had taken when they went to work with the agency. They agreed with Jordan that they felt the "full weight of the federal government" come down on them, particularly when the FBI sent a letter to members of the committee to inform them that the agents' security clearances had been revoked.

"Of course, they timed it perfectly," said Jordan. "It's in the letter to us yesterday. We knew they would. We knew it was going to happen that way."

They also testified that their former colleagues have not reached out to them to support them after they found themselves put out.

"I know for a fact that my former supervisor had a meeting with my squad shortly after I was suspended, and he told them that I was going to be arrested, fired, and charged. So if that's not chilling, I don't know what it is," said O'Boyle.

Friend agreed, commenting that those who have reached out to him "have used encrypted ways to do it because they fear retribution."

Allen added that he's been "ghosted by everybody."

Earlier in the hearing, Allen testified that he was targeted based on "unsubstantiated accusations that I hold 'conspiratorial views' regarding the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and that I allegedly sympathize with criminal conduct. I do not."

O'Boyle said the actions against him came after his testimony in another proceeding that the FBI prioritized investigations of anti-abortion activiy after the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned the Roe v. Wade decision on legal abortion.

He said Thursday that he was forced to accept a new position in another state and that the FBI ordered him to report when his family's youngest child was only two weeks old.

Friend, meanwhile, said he has filed a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel saying he was suspended after he raised concerns about the FBI's manipulation of crime statistics, the treatment of Jan. 6 defendants, and the agency's use of SWAT teams.

"The FBI weaponized the security clearance processes to facilitate my removal from active duty within one month of my disclosures," he said, also alleging the agency "initiated a campaign of humiliation and intimidation to punish and pressure me to resign" and refused his request for records so he could get another job "in an obvious attempt to deprive me of the ability to support my family."

He also accused the FBI's Inspection Division of having "imposed an illegal gag order in an attempt to prevent me from communicating with my family and attorneys."

The hearing was organized by Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and comes after the release publication of Special Counsel John Durham's report that revealed the FBI lacked evidence to open its investigation on former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.

The hearing also comes after the Judiciary Committee's Republicans released a 1,000-page report with the allegations of the politicization of the FBI and Justice Department politicization. [source]

Not good. Definitely an abuse of power. Good thing America has Kash Patel head of it. But in the future if a Democrat becomes POTUS who knows...

Biden Sues DOJ Over Release of Interview Audio

From Newsmax.com (May 26):

Former Democrat President Joe Biden sued the Department of Justice on Tuesday, seeking to bar the release of audio recordings and transcripts of private conversations with his biographer in 2016 and 2017.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington D.C., comes ahead of the department's planned June 15 release of ​the materials to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and the conservative Heritage Foundation. The foundation sought them after they ⁠were used as part of then-special counsel Robert Hur's 2023 ​investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents. Hur declined to bring criminal charges.

The ⁠department fought the Heritage Foundation's 2024 request for the records as exempt from the Freedom of Information Act until President Donald Trump took office, the lawsuit claims. It announced it would be releasing the records ​in response to the committee's request, which the lawsuit claims is meant only to skirt federal law barring their release.

The lawsuit asks the court to declare the committee's request pretextual and invalid, and permanently bar the release of the ⁠records to the committee.

Representatives for the Department of Justice ⁠did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The recordings, made in Biden's ⁠home, ⁠were part of the writing process for his 2017 memoir, "Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose," which detailed Biden's decision to pursue the presidency while his eldest son Beau fought brain cancer. Earlier this month, Biden sought to intervene ​in the Heritage Foundation's lawsuit against the Justice Department over the materials.

Last week, a judge allowed Biden to join the case but barred ​him from pursuing claims about the committee's request for the materials, according to court records. [source]

Why?  What's Briben worried about--or afraid of?

Trump Set to Slash Grocery Costs With EPA Fix

From Newsmax.com (May 21):

President Donald Trump is set to roll back two Biden-era EPA refrigerant rules Thursday in a move the administration says will slash grocery costs and save businesses billions of dollars.

According to an administration official who spoke with USA Today, the changes target federal regulations on hydrofluorocarbons, refrigerants widely used in freezers, refrigerators and air-conditioning systems.

The Trump administration argues the Biden rules imposed costly mandates on supermarkets and other businesses without meaningful environmental benefits.

One action would extend compliance deadlines under the EPA’s 2023 Technology Transitions Rule, giving grocery stores and other companies more time to phase out hydrofluorocarbons used in refrigeration systems.

Hydrofluorocarbonsare considered powerful greenhouse gases, though they remain in the atmosphere for shorter periods than carbon dioxide.

The White House estimates the rollback will generate roughly $900 million in savings, including $800 million for grocery stores, by increasing the supply of approved refrigerants available to businesses and homeowners.

The EPA is also expected to revise the agency’s 2024 Emissions Reduction and Reclamation program by exempting refrigerated trucks and other road transport refrigeration units from new hydrofluorocarbon leak requirements. The administration projects that move alone will save another $1.5 billion.

Trump is expected to announce the changes during a Thursday morning Oval Office event attended by executives from Kroger, Piggly Wiggly, Fareway Stores, and other grocery chains.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin blasted the Biden administration’s rules in a statement to USA Today, saying they burdened businesses with unnecessary costs.

"The Biden administration’s refrigerant rules didn’t protect human health or the environment and instead piled on costly, unattainable restrictions beyond what the law requires," Zeldin said.

"Our actions allow businesses to choose the refrigeration systems that work best for them, saving them billions of dollars. This will be felt directly by American families in lower grocery prices," he added.

The refrigerant rollback is the latest step in Trump’s aggressive deregulation agenda, which has targeted a wide range of Obama- and Biden-era environmental and climate policies.

The administration is also seeking to highlight efforts to reduce consumer costs as inflation continues to weigh on Americans ahead of the November midterm elections.

The Consumer Price Index rose 3.8% in April, the sharpest inflation increase in three years, driven largely by rising oil prices tied to the U.S. conflict with Iran.

Meanwhile, grocery prices climbed 2.9% compared with a year earlier and increased 0.7% from March to April. [source]

More stupid Biden regulations that needed to be undone. Another win!

FACT CHECK: Tulsi’s remarkable record at DNI…

From Revolver.news (May 22):

Tulsi Gabbard has resigned as the Director of National Intelligence after quite a remarkable run.

Enrique Alejandro had a remarkable rundown on X of her accomplishments:

Tulsi Gabbard’s Record as America’s TOP Director of National Intelligence❗️

– Referred Russiagate Criminals to DOJ for Prosecution

– Declassified “Russian Collusion” & Impeachment Conspiracy Documents

– Spearheaded the Investigation into Voter Fraud in Georgia

– Investigated the Dark Origins of COVID-19

– Fought the CIA to Declassify Hidden JFK Assassination + MK-Ultra Files

– Revoked Security Clearances From 37 Officials (Russia Hoaxers, Biden/Obama Holdovers, and Impeachment Letter Signers)

– Fired Officials Who Contradicted Trump on Venezuelan Gangs

– Moved CIA’s In-Q-Tel Under DNI Oversight for Greater Accountability

– Uncovered Ukraine Government Plot to Illegally Reroute Hundreds of Millions in U.S. Taxpayer Dollars to Biden’s 2024 Campaign

– Launched Declassification Effort to Expose the Truth About UAPs

– Slashed Bloated Intel Bureaucracy With 50% Staff Cuts at ODNI, Saving $700 Million

– Exposed the Intel Community’s Political Weaponization

All of this, even as the CIA breathed down her neck and tried to tie her hands at every turn.

THIS IS WHAT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE VOTED FOR.

We looked into Enrique’s claims below and they all checked out. [read more]

Hope her replacement does just as good a job. Prayers and thoughts to her husband getting better.

A Reminder About the Moral Difference Between the Christian and Muslim Worlds at This Time

From Townhall.com (Aug. 16, 2022):

About 30 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling for Muslims to murder Salman Rushdie, the Indian author was finally attacked and nearly killed.

Stabbed 10 times by a young Muslim living in America, Rushdie is in a hospital, where his prognosis as of this writing is partial paralysis and the loss of an eye.

What was Rushdie's "crime"? He "insulted" Islam.

Tens of millions of Muslims believe that if a person insults Islam, Muhammad or the Quran, he should be killed. Any Muslim who does kill a person deemed to have insulted Islam goes straight to heaven when he or she dies.

The most famous case of Muslims murdering people charged with insulting Islam occurred in 2015, when two French Muslims entered the Paris editorial offices of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and murdered 12 people and wounded 11 others. Charlie Hebdo had printed cartoon images of Muhammad, which most Muslims consider forbidden even to non-Muslims.

That same week, Muslims also entered a kosher supermarket in Paris and murdered four Jews. For many Muslims, Jews don't have to do anything to insult Islam; their mere existence is an insult to Islam.

It is instructive to compare Christian reactions to insults to Christianity with Muslim reactions to what they perceive as insults to Islam.

If Christians reacted to insults to Christianity the way Muslims react to insults to Islam, there would be daily murders in America and elsewhere. Christianity is constantly insulted in America and elsewhere in the West, and Christians are regularly murdered by Muslims in the Middle East and Africa.

Perhaps the famous example of the former is the "artwork" by Andres Serrano titled "Piss Christ," which features a crucifix in a jar of urine.

Imagine how many people radical Muslims would kill if a Quran or an image of Muhammad submerged in a jar of urine were displayed in museums around America. It would never happen because museums would never put their staff or their visitors in that kind of danger. Museum staff and visitors to museums that featured this work would be killed.

Why doesn't that argue for the moral superiority of most Christians relative to most Muslims at this time in history? After all, some scholars argue that Muslims and Muslim civilization were morally superior to Christians and Christian civilization at various times during the Middle Ages. Whether or not that is accurate, no one charges the scholars who make that argument with an anti-Christian phobia or with harboring anti-Christian bigotry. Yet, anyone who would argue that contemporary Christian civilization is on a more elevated level than Muslim civilization -- while of course acknowledging that this does not apply to all Muslims or to all Christians -- would be attacked as an "Islamophobe," lose his reputation and quite possibly lose his job and career.

This inability to judge the West -- which was created by Christians and has, with all its many flaws, been rooted in Judeo-Christian morality -- as morally more elevated than the Muslim world goes to the heart of the crisis facing the West: the Left's desire to destroy it. Western elites in academia, media, politics and the business world -- in short, everywhere -- are moral fools.

They claim to be unable to make moral distinctions between the two civilizations -- because of Western slavery and treatment of native populations, for example. Yet, they either do not know or simply ignore Muslims' far worse history of slavery and wiping out native populations. And they know but choose to ignore the fact that the worldwide antislavery movement began in the West and was founded by Christians. It did not begin in the Muslim world, which had no such widespread movement.

The Left has the same morally bankrupt view regarding Israel and its Muslim enemies. On the Left, Israel, with its robust freedoms that extend to its large Muslim minority, is not morally superior to its unfree, terror-honoring Muslim neighbors (e.g., Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Hamas).

It is true that it was only one Muslim who stabbed Salman Rushdie. But it is millions of Muslims who believe anyone who "insults" Islam should die. It was also one Muslim who murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh for "insulting" Islam's take on women. And it was a lot more than one Muslim member of the Islamic State who slit the throats and beheaded countless infidels -- that is, non-Muslims.

Author Taslima Nasrin fled her native Bangladesh, fearing for her life, after a court said she had hurt Muslims' religious feelings with her novel "Lajja" ("Shame"). Unlike virtually every Western author and leader, her reaction to the attack on Rushdie noted that the would-be murderer was Muslim: "I just learned that Salman Rushdie was attacked in New York. I am really shocked… If he is attacked, anyone who is critical of Islam can be attacked."

Exactly. [source]

The African Slave Trade Wouldn’t Have Been Possible without African Elites

From Mises.org (Aug. 26, 2022):

There is a revival in the study of the transatlantic slave trade. Several studies pinpoint the slave trade as the genesis of defects in African societies. Continuing in the intellectual tradition of Walter Rodney, these later works posit that the transatlantic slave trade underdeveloped Africa. However, there is no verdict on the transatlantic slave trade’s effects because scholars are still divided over its consequences.

But despite their differences, opposing camps in the literature adopt a lopsided stance by fixating on the implications of the slave trade instead of discussing Africans’ agency. Researchers tend to explore how the slave trade altered African societies rather than showing that European traders became embedded in Africa’s complex sociopolitical networks.

Africans were building empires and chiefdoms long before interactions with Europeans, so when Europeans arrived in Africa, they quickly recognized that their fortunes were linked to the benevolence of African elites. Without complying with local regulations, European traders could not engage in business. Frequently, it is taught that Europeans constructed forts in Africa, but it is rarely noted that such forts could not have been built absent the African elites’ permission.

In the Galinhas empire, the Vai adage “Sunda ma gara, ke a sunda-fa,” which means “A stranger has no power but his landlords,” describes foreign traders’ relationships with African rulers. Africans were unwilling to tolerate squatters, so Europeans had to pay for their quarters.

In West Africa, for example, the Akwamu collected rents from European forts and employed a customs officer to oversee trade flow. This excerpt from a report compiled by a Danish official captures the authority of African rulers: “The King of Akwamu charges customs duties here on all goods which pass along the river and to ensure that these are paid, he has employed an official to take care of his interest.”

Not only did Africans extract financial benefits by charging Europeans for building forts on African soil, but they also retained property rights to the land. In some cases, Africans invited Europeans to their trading centers. Renting space to Europeans became so lucrative that on the Gold Coast, African elites permitted one European group per trading town. Further, the intense rivalry between Europeans elevated Africans’ position and allowed them to benefit from lower prices and a wider array of goods.

The transatlantic slave trade was a harrowing event, but it was a business nonetheless and can be analyzed using economic tools. The trade’s victims were disproportionately African, but this should not conceal the fact that for many Africans, the slave trade was a legitimate venture connected to preexisting trading arrangements. In his new book, Slave Traders by Invitation: West Africa’s Slave Coast in the Precolonial Era, Finn Fuglestad avers that the slave trade was sustained by Africans who beckoned Europeans to trade.

Africans even formalized trading relations with Europeans by participating in treaties that governed the purchase of slaves. Moreover, according to the fifteenth-century reports of Portuguese official Diego Gomez, some monarchs were so inclined to their pursue economic interests that they demonstrated an “overwhelming willingness” to offer natives as slaves. Collaborating with Africans was crucial to the success of the slave trade and European trading centers like Liverpool.

According to David Richardson, Africans were instrumental in establishing the networking and institutional arrangements that enabled British slaving to thrive. “Without African agency and support, British slaving could not have reached the scale that it did,” he writes.

Other than downplaying African agency, historians usually argue that the transatlantic trade undermined African economies. But this assumption is a failure to understand economic utility. If imported items satisfied Africans’ demands, then we cannot argue that imports made them worse off.

Africans had the upper hand in trade negotiations and often determined the quality and prices of the products they obtained from Europeans. Before deciding to import copper, for instance, Daniel Cunha explains that Africans would check “the quality of copper by evaluating its material properties of redness, luminosity, and sound, which served to embed it into ritual and mythological systems.”

Due to African traders’ high standards, goods were in fact frequently rejected without even an explanation. Neither is there compelling evidence to indicate that imports impeded local production. Notwithstanding imports, the iron industry flourished in Cameroon and Bassar as late as the nineteenth century. Pieter Emmer in a classic article completely shatters the myth that the transatlantic slave trade had a substantial impact on African economies:

The value of the European imports into West Africa could not have been more than 5 percent of the value of Africa’s internal production and that is assuming that the Africans pro­duced no more than their subsistence…. In sum, there is no evi­dence to show that between 1500 and 1800 either quan­ti­tatively or qualitat­ively the Atlantic trade in goods could have made much of a differ­ence to the economy of West Africa.

Indeed, the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade evokes feelings of hostility; however, emotionalism should not deter us from studying the topic with an objective eye. For centuries, slavery was considered legitimate commerce; hence, Africans, like their peers, sanctioned it and were willing to participate in the sale of their people to advance economic and political agendas. Whitewashing Africa’s involvement in the transatlantic trade only succeeds in infantilizing black people. [source]

In other words, the powers-that-be sanctioned the slave trade—“trade” is the opportune word here because the slaves weren’t stolen—they were traded.