Quietly buried last week was the news that international corruption watchdog Transparency International has “disaccredited" its US chapter. Specific reasons for the move were not given by the Berlin-based parent organization, but it has been suggested that its American affiliate had gone rogue, and increasingly been seen as a “corporate front group". Its million-dollar annual budget is bankrolled by behemoths like Deloitte, Pfizer, Citigroup, Lockheed Martin, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's former company ExxonMobil, among others. Furthermore, its board of directors is a veritable roll call of national and international corporate lawyers representing private and state-owned companies, as well as sovereign wealth funds.
In theory, national chapters of Transparency International are meant to assess what is happening in their own territories. Researcher Sarah Chayes suggested in a 2015 interview, however, that the US chapter was more concerned with transparency in the “third world” than on its own doorstep. For 2016, the US ranked 18 out of 176 states on Transparency International’s perceptions-of-corruption index. It is unclear what its ranking would be if conducted by an outside chapter less beholden to corporate interests.
The US has had a better-publicized but equally rough ride from two other good governance indexes in the last week, both of which have rather less tainted credentials.
The Economist’s Economic Intelligence Unit recently downgraded the US from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy”. In this regard, it compares to nations such as France, Greece, and Japan, but also India and South Africa, and rates only one half-tier higher than Indonesia and Mexico. The UK-based group’s rating is based on a basket of 60 indicators across five broad categories: electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties. Meanwhile, the US-based Freedom House organization gave the US a “downward trend” designation on its ranking of civil and political freedoms. The rationale given for this rating leaves little to the imagination:
“the cumulative impact of flaws in the electoral system, a disturbing increase in the role of private money in election campaigns and the legislative process, legislative gridlock, the failure of the Obama administration to fulfill promises of enhanced government openness, and fresh evidence of racial discrimination and other dysfunctions in the criminal justice system.”
Crucial here is Freedom House’s admonishment of the Obama administration, because all three organizations are basing their assessments on data indicators from 2016. As such, it is not the case that these measures suggest that the US has had a cataclysmic collapse of freedom since Trump’s inauguration in January, or even that its fall from grace in the rankings is solely a reflection of a decline in confidence in the US since Trump’s election in November. Indeed, the EIU spells this out very clearly:
“By tapping a deep strain of political disaffection with the functioning of democracy, Mr. Trump became a beneficiary of the low esteem in which US voters hold their government, elected representatives and political parties, but he was not responsible for a problem that has had a long gestation. The US has been teetering on the brink of becoming a “flawed democracy” for several years.”
Put more succinctly, Trump’s election is “not the cause of the deterioration in trust but rather a consequence of it”. Promises to “drain the swamp” resonated precisely because voters perceived politics in general and democracy itself to be sodden with dirty corporate money.
Yet the prospects for improved governance seem dim. Trump appears to be doing anything but draining the swamp, unless “draining” is a synonym for “employing”. Trump’s picks for numerous departments have been dogged with allegations of cash-for-influence. Ex-ExxonMobil CEO Tillerson’s appointment, in fact, seems to confirm the long-held suspicion in many parts of the world that the US is really an oil company with an army. And there is a long and bloody history of oil companies enthusiastically pointing out that corruption happens elsewhere.
Trump also has little regard for the niceties of the rule of law. A flotilla of executive orders are not indicative of his desire to push through policy that a gridlocked Congress may stymie, but instead his willingness to short-circuit a Republican majority who, in normal circumstances, would be prepared to back him. The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that Trump is embracing a dictatorial, authoritarian, and discredited type of politics, in which corruption and poor governance is part-and-parcel of the game.
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