Foreign Affairs
Related: About this forumThe Corruption Revealed in the Panama Papers Opened the Door to Isis by Patrick Cockburn
The message of Rudyard Kiplings poem is that corruption is always with us and has not changed much down the ages. There is some truth in this, but degrees of corruption greatly matter, as the Cheops would have found to his cost if he tried to build his pyramid in modern Iraq instead of ancient Egypt. The project would cost him billions rather than millions and he would be more likely to end up with a hole in the ground than anything resembling a pyramid.
Three years ago I was in Baghdad after it had rained heavily, driving for miles through streets that had disappeared under grey-coloured flood water combined with raw sewage. Later I asked Shirouk Abayachi, an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources, why this was happening and she said that since 2003, $7bn has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers werent built or they were built very badly. She concluded that corruption is the key to all this.
Anybody discussing the Panama Papers and the practices of the law firm Mossack Fonseca should think about the ultimate destination of the $7bn not spent on the Baghdad drainage system. There will be many go-betweens and middle men protecting anyone who profited from this huge sum, but the suspicion must be that a proportion of it will have ended up in offshore financial centres where money is hidden and can be turned into legally held assets.
There is no obvious link between the revelations in the Panama Papers, the rise of Islamic State and the wars tearing apart at least nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But these three developments are intimately connected as ruling elites, who syphon off wealth into tax havens and foreign property, lose political credibility. No ordinary Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians will fight and die for rulers they detest as swindlers. Crucial to the rise of Isis, al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan is not their own strength and popularity, but the weakness and unpopularity of the governments to which they are opposed.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/11/the-corruption-revealed-in-the-panama-papers-opened-the-door-to-isis/
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)bemildred
(90,061 posts)2naSalit
(86,048 posts)these cheaters and thieves how we don't appreciate them every time we have to provide a service or they want something from us.