[kitchencabinetforum] OPEN GOVERNMENT PARTNERSHIP FIGHTS POLITICAL CORRUPTION

Hillary Clinton is expanding and mobilizing a global consensus in support of greater transparency – a global architecture, if you will, of anticorruption institutions and practices. Along with Brazil, USA launched the Open Government Partnership. It is a network of support for government leaders and citizens working to bring more transparency and accountability to governments. http://venitism.blogspot.com

Clinton is building this anticorruption consensus in other ways as well. In what is called the Deauville Partnership, we are working with our Arab partners on anticorruption, open government, and asset recovery efforts. At the OECD, we were pleased to welcome Colombia and Russia into the Working Group on Bribery last year. It will be an important milestone when both have become full parties to the Anti-Bribery Convention.

Michael Christoforakos, former president of the Greek subsidiary of Siemens, revealed some names of the 200 Graecokleptocrats, who shared two billion euros in kickbacks, to the prosecutor of Munich, where he escaped from Greece. He also deposited all names with two public notaries in Munich, in case he gets murdered by agents of Graecokleptocrats. This way he stays alive! But the Greek government has not pressed charges against the 200 Graecokleptocrats, because they are protected by immunity and they are in power in Greece, members and ex-members of the Greek government and parliament. You just cannot press charges against yourself! Moreover, the Greek government does not even reveal their names for the voters to know who they are voting for.

Christoforakos also revealed the names of twenty journalists who received many million euros in hush money to keep their mouth shut about the billion euro kickbacks to the 200 Graecokleptocrats. Needless to say, those Graecokleptocrats who did not receive kickbacks are also guilty, because they all knew about the bribery of their colleagues and said nothing about it. The suitcases with the cash were whistling around them. There is no way they could not hear all that loud whistling! So, in reality we are talking about four hundred guilty people! Since Greeks continue to vote for the same crooks again and again, they deserve what they get!

Clinton knows business cultures do not change overnight, but moves like this at least establish beachheads for reform. And through our bilateral diplomacy and at the G-20, we are encouraging major economies such as China, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia to join the convention as well. We support the follow-through that's necessary to enforce anticorruption norms such as the new review process that promotes implementation of the UN Convention against Corruption.

The largest kickbacks originate in the military industry. Military procurement is a corrupt business from top to bottom. The process is dominated by advocacy, with few checks and balances. Most people in power love this system of doing business and do not want it changed. War and preparation for war systematically corrupt all parties to the state-private transactions by which the government obtains the bulk of its military products. There is a standard 10% kickback to kleptocrats for military purchases.

Participants in the military-industrial-kleptocrat complex (MIKC) are routinely blamed for mismanagement, fraud, abuse, kickbacks, and waste (FAKW). All of these unsavory actions, however, are typically viewed as aberrations, malfeasances to be covered-up, while retaining the basic system of state-private cooperation in the trade of military goods and services and the flow of kickbacks. These offenses are in reality expressions of a thoroughgoing, intrinsic rottenness in the entire setup.

Clinton will launch an innovative fund to encourage countries to be more open about how they spend their revenues. It's part of a larger effort we're calling Domestic Finance for Development, an initiative to help developing countries increase their own sources of funding so they can meet more of their own needs. It's really quite difficult in many countries when we see that they either don't have any modern tax system or they don't collect what is owed with the result that they are often unable to meet the most basic needs of their own people.

We all know what happens at Olympics, an international competition of steroids, not athletes. People feel well during the games, but feel miserable after the games when they find out Olympics cost them ten times more than projected, and most of it went to kickbacks of kleptocrats! The Athens Olympics cost was projected to two billion euros, but it finally cost Greek taxpayers 20 billion euros, with all that extra money going not to the games, but to the private pockets of Graecokleptocrats.

Clinton has taken a strong stand when it comes to American companies bribing foreign officials. We are unequivocally opposed to weakening the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. We don't need to lower our standards. We need to work with other countries to raise theirs. Clinton actually thinks a race to the bottom would disadvantage us. It would not give us the leverage and the credibility that we are seeking.

So Clinton is looking to approach the issues that all of you are both interested in and committed to, and it does take everyone working together and it does take a lot of persistence and perseverance, but Clinton is absolutely confident that we will make progress. We are so aided by social media now. We have tools at our disposal in the hands of literally billions of people that were never even dreamed of before.

Licensure is a sign of slavery. All licenses of the kangaroo justice government of Greece should be abolished, including doctors, lawyers, and marriage. The kangaroo government of Greece licensure is an immoral exercise of force, an overly burdensome restraint on trade, a violation of the right to liberty, a mill of kickbacks. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of economic freedom.

One of the many reasons why the kangaroo government licensure is incompatible with
liberty, therefore, is because it is destructive to economic freedom. No other nation demands more licenses than the Cradle of Kleptocracy. Any Greek has the natural right to pursue any means of providing for his family, so long as in doing so he does not act fraudulently or otherwise violate the rights of others.

The kangaroo government mandated license turns the market of the Cradle of Kleptocracy upside down. It prohibits every Greek from producing in a given industry except for those who are granted the privilege of doing so by the kangaroo government, especially those who provide huge bribes to kleptocrats. The kangaroo government, in such a scenario, absorbs all individual rights unto itself and then divvies up some of those rights in any number of ways.

Under the licensing system of the kangaroo government, such as it exists today in the
Cradle of Kleptocracy, if some Greek attempts to exercise his natural right to provide for himself without the kangaroo government's nod of approval, which usually comes with bribes, that person goes to jail. Imprisonment for supporting oneself in an honest and non-fraudulent manner which does not infringe on the rights of others just doesn't seem right.

Preemptive protection is offensive in nature, and therefore, is itself a violation of natural rights. In a free society, it is only after fraud or another violation of rights takes place that the state has the right to intervene on behalf of the consumer. By means of the licensure power, the kangaroo government can permit a Greek to eat or it can condemn him to starve, unless he bribes kleptocrats. So long as the kangaroo government has the power to issue licenses to live in the Cradle of Kleptocracy, Greeks cannot claim to be free, and living without freedom is not much of a life.

Clinton has worked through the 21st Century Statecraft Initiative to get those tools into the hands of more people to make them more usable, to encourage channels for people to be able to report corrupt practices – anonymously if necessary – as well as criminal activity of other sorts. So we know old habits die hard. Human nature is what it is. But we think we have the potential to make even greater progress in the years ahead. http://venitism.blogspot.com

Hey! I wish to deliver the keynote speech at your conference. My speeches leave the audience thinking something new or resolved to act, stir the emotions as well as appealing to reason, and show a sense of occasion. I get away with elevated language because my liberty cause is a noble one. I practice a colorful rhetoric enriched with alliterations, metaphors, heightened imagery, emotional effect, and sound bites. Basil Venitis, venitis@gmail.com