The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[Belacqua]

We have an Office of Government Accountability to investigate fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. There's no reason the president can't aim it at what he considers priorities.

I'm sure there are a number of agencies tasked with keeping an eye on the money. For example, the office that audits the Pentagon every year, and fails every year. There is reason to be skeptical that the agencies are effective. 

I haven't been following the Office of Government Accountability. I don't know their budget or remit, exactly. In your experience, have they been effective?

For example, Elon has been alleging that USAID paid for Chelsea Clinton's wedding. And then bought her an expensive house. This should be the sort of thing that could be checked fairly easily. Is there a reliable government web site which lists this? Did any government agency make this public? Did anyone try to justify it? 

Given the revolving-door hiring policies between government and the private sector, and the fact that watchdog agencies may have incentive not to watch very closely, I feel it's best to be skeptical about all sides. 

If Trump ordered the OGA to be more open and more aggressive, do you think they would do it? I don't know.

We have known for decades that a lot of USAID projects are CIA or State Department political missions, intended to support regime change or other political foreign policy goals. If you see a trivial-sounding project with a huge budget in a volatile part of the world, there is a good chance that the real goal of this project is not what's stated on the public announcement. So there is still another layer to be uncovered here -- what USAID says it's doing, vs. what it's really doing. 

Here is what Julian Assange wrote about USAID, over 10 years ago:

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The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the “private sector,” leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech, and accountable government.

This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades.

Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.

It is not just obvious neocon front groups like Foreign Policy Initiative. It also includes fatuous Western NGOs like Freedom House, where naïve but well-meaning career nonprofit workers are twisted in knots by political funding streams, denouncing non-Western human rights violations while keeping local abuses firmly in their blind spots.

The civil society conference circuit—which flies developing-world activists across the globe hundreds of times a year to bless the unholy union between “government and private stakeholders” at geopoliticized events like the “Stockholm Internet Forum”—simply could not exist if it were not blasted with millions of dollars in political funding annually…’

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Assange has an extremely good record for accuracy.