Post by benson on Jun 17, 2017 13:29:17 GMT
Trump is pulling America back from the global fight against corruption
The United States has a president whose contempt for the well-established norms of our political system never ceases to shock the world. President Trump has refused to release his tax returns, ignoring a long-standing benchmark of financial transparency for political candidates. He has also declined to address a whole series of looming conflicts of interest resulting from his complex business empire. As a result, he now finds himself facing multiple lawsuits — including from members of Congress and the governments of Maryland and the District — on the grounds that he may have violated the foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution, which forbids U.S. officials from receiving favors from their overseas counterparts.
Yet even as Trump and his domestic political opponents spar over these issues, a key aspect of the new president’s stance has gone largely unnoticed. Both by action and example, the Trump administration is now directly undermining America’s past achievements as a leader in the fight against global corruption.
In 1977, Congress enacted the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which made it illegal for U.S. companies to bribe foreign officials. It was a landmark moment in the history of the global fight against corruption, and other countries, initially reluctant to do so, gradually followed the U.S. lead. In the decades since, successive American administrations have played a key role in advancing the anti-corruption agenda around the world, gradually winning over valuable allies and building vital coalitions.
Yet Trump’s actions so far suggest that he is keen to undercut this progress. On Feb. 14, he killed a bill designed to foster transparency in the energy and mining sectors. First enacted in 2010 as Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Act, the bipartisan Cardin-Lugar Bill would have required extractive firms listed in the United States to disclose their payments to foreign governments. Under Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil vociferously fought the bill, arguing that it would hamstring its ability to compete against foreign companies. This argument conveniently overlooked the fact that since the law would have applied to all U.S.-traded firms, foreign companies such as British Petroleum, Shell, and even PetroChina would have been subject to it.
More than 30 countries have enacted similar rules, which largely mirror those proposed in the United States by the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of Cardin-Lugar. In fact, U.S. leadership on this front was such that it was mentioned explicitly in a European Commission memo on its own requirement: “The Commission responded to international developments in this field, in particular the inclusion of a requirement to report payments to governments in the Dodd Frank Act in the United States.”