 Pondo Troll, senior reporter with WAMU885 News, the NPR news station in Washington, the top-rated NPR station in the country, and on behalf of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I would like to welcome you to what is sure to be a very interesting and exciting conversation about corruption in Central America, the United States, and elsewhere. I will be moderating this conversation, and you will have an opportunity to ask questions once the panelists are finished. First, Sarah Chase, she is a senior fellow here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is the author of this report, When Corruption is an Operating System, and she is using Honduras as the case study. To add some perspective to this conversation, Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University School of Law. She is the author of Corruption in America, and she is also an attorney on the Emoluments lawsuit filed against President Donald Trump. So, corruption has an operating system. What does that mean? What, yeah, what am I talking about? Exactly. Would you mind, yeah, so we have a picture, but fundamentally what I'm talking about here is not corruption as some nasty practices that some members of government indulge in. In some countries, a lot of government officials might indulge in this. But, you know, the way we normally think about it is sort of like, I don't know, like a disease, right, that kind of creeps in and infects the tissues of a government. What I've been seeing, and Honduras turns out to be a really clear example of it, is a network, right? And a network that crosses boundaries that we think of as separating different sectors of activity, like the public and private sector, right? Here we are Americans, we love to fight about which one the public or the private sector is more pernicious, right? Worth for your health. And let alone the criminal sector. I mean, as we all know, Central America, unfortunately, is famous for criminal activity. But what becomes clear when you look carefully is that you've got a network that is made up of people at the top of the public sector, the private sector, and the criminal sector. And often they overlap, or they share competences, or they have a cut out, like a representative that they'll, you know, one brother will be in the public sector and the other brother will be running a drug cartel. So you span these different sectors. And that's what this picture is supposed to at least, you know, evoke in people's mind. And I do want to just say, well, I'll say that later. But David, if you wouldn't mind just giving me the next one, this infographic does try to break it down for you. So the public sector members of the network have a responsibility, and that is to distort state agencies or institutions, functions of government, if you will, to serve the purposes of the network, as opposed to serving their stated purpose, which is the public interest. Exactly, the public good. And so I'm not going to go through them all, but what this report does and what this infographic does is just pick them apart a little bit. But there are a couple of obvious examples that I've seen in Honduras, but also in a number of other countries. And one of them is the justice sector, because there's a bargain that holds these networks together. And it's that money flows upward in the network. And impunity flows downwards. There's a deal. You get, you know, for the part of the take that you're kicking upwards, you are guaranteed protection from legal repercussions. And that can take a lot of forms in different countries. In Honduras, it's particularly egregious. You had, you know, a midnight firing of four of the five justices of the Supreme Court. You know, this happened a number of years ago. But it can be the actual judges. It can be by capturing public prosecution. In some countries, I haven't seen it in Honduras, but in some countries where it's difficult to actually capture the justice sector, the network figures out how to work around it. So in Egypt, for example, where judges did retain quite a bit of independence, President Sisi has been focusing really hard on expanding the jurisdiction of the military courts so that more and more cases can bypass the relatively independent civil system and be funneled through the much more controllable military system. Then the next thing, let's just look at the next one. So the colors on this infographic are blue for government, green for private sector because that's money, right, at least to us, and red for criminal sector because that's bad guys, except they're all bad guys. But anyway, so we looked at the private sector and it's not the end. I mean, sometimes this can look like the entire system and you sort of say, who's corrupt? Well, everyone's corrupt, you know, but it actually makes some sense to try to drill down and look at what are the specific revenue streams that are being captured by the network. So some of it back to the public sector is public procurement. That's another way that these networks and in Honduras in particular, infrastructure, right, big infrastructure projects like road building, ports, things like that. So you'll see, you know, construction companies, but the banking sector is a classic. In this case, it turns out that the network or network affiliated families control about half of the banking of the financial sector. Energy is a classic. And in Honduras, it's interesting because it's not a country that has an extractive industry, right, there is an oil or gas, it's got a mining industry, and so that's part of it, but no oil or gas. So quite interestingly, it's been energy generation. It's been electricity generation that has been captured, including renewables. That was a big surprise. The solar energy sector has been captured by this network, and they're getting sweetheart rates, very high rates. Palm oil also for biodiesel, a couple others, interesting ones, nonprofit organizations, it's one to keep one's eye on because one of the important revenue streams, of course, is international development financing. And so if you can situate yourself to capture that flow, it's a pretty significant one. And then there is the criminal sector, and I don't think I need to belabor that in the case of Honduras, but we have a case going on in New York right now, the former son of the former president, is that who it is? I didn't want to ask you a question. I'm not trying to... So what makes it an operating system, as opposed to just a whole bunch of crooked people? That's a great question. And partly, you look at the personal relationships. So in this case, a piece of the private sector element is somewhat self-contained and it's culturally uniform to some extent. It's a lot of people who are descendants of immigrants from the Middle East, and they tend to live together, intermarry, go to school together, and exchange positions on each other's boards of directors. That self-containment is breaking apart a little bit, and we're now in the fourth generation, but it's the exchange of personnel and the clear... What's the word? I want to say... You look at the people who are making decisions and you'll see the same names popping up in the decision-making processes and decision-making bodies. And then, as I say, the exchange of personnel. So you will have this private sector group I'm talking about, they have had a number of top officials selectively appointed at different stages. And then in the criminal sector also, you can see... It's almost you have to do a social networking, and I would have loved to have done enough of these personal linkages so that we would have another graph which would really be the social network diagram. And I think that that's an important kind of avenue for further research on this topic. And what's the overriding goal of the system? Making money for network members. It really is revenue maximization. Now, we can get into a conversation about whether it's money or power, and does money get you power or does power get you money? But I think in this case and in general, internationally, I actually think money is the objective and power is more the means to that end than it has been in other times and places in human history. And the reason I say that in the Honduran case is the money people are bossing around the political people. And the money people and the criminals who have access to money and obviously armed force are often bossing around the political people too. You mean there's no ideological motive. It's really... That's increasingly my view and that's a whole conversation we can also have about how money is displacing other measures of social value in the period that we live in today around the world. That money increasingly is the exclusive way that we measure our social standing and therefore competition among elites is over money. Not over... And therefore kind of how you make the money doesn't matter as much. Let me just say... So criminal sector is pretty obvious. It's largely the narcotics industry. And then just one last... Two last points I'd love to make. All right, go ahead. One is networks are more resilient than individuals. And I think this is true of Honduras but not just of Honduras. I mean you've seen next door in Guatemala where some of the individuals committing some of these practices have been removed from office and prosecuted but that's not enough to really uproot a network like this. And I think we all need to think about this as we're thinking about how we interact with this overseas as those of us who are involved in trying to affect policy toward other countries but also as we think about the repercussions here at home. These networks are... It's like a fishing net, right? You can cut one knot out of a fishing net. That does not destroy the whole net. So that's pretty significant. And therefore we really have to think about... And this was important in Honduras was the positive organizations, the people fighting against this. We found we're quite networked. And we can talk about that further. But they are quite networked and they're quite holistic in their objectives. They aren't single issue organizations. I think partly because they understand, wow, this thing has infected a lot of our public space and we need to... And the effects are in multiple different domains. So I think it's a good time to open it up for questions, right? I mean, yeah. First of all, both Sarah and Zephyr have agreed to allow me to call them by their first names and not their honorific. So by calling them Zephyr and Sarah, I am not disrespecting them in any way. I just wanted to make that clear. Sarah, you've been sitting here patiently listening. What do you make of all this? Well, I think what Sarah is doing is really important. And I just want to put it in a few different frameworks. One is the framework of the last really 30 years of the global anti-corruption fight. And anti-corruption has drifted to the top of the global agenda. We put lots of money and energy and resources into anti-corruption. So it really matters what we mean when we say corruption. And a few things have happened in that area. One has been fairly technocratic. And there's also been a hunt for toolboxes to catch the corrupt actors or particular strategies that might work. If you think about corruption as this sort of sideline problem, an infection on an otherwise healthy body politic, then that kind of approach makes sense. It's like we have this discrete problem in one area and we can fight it by a few laws here and a few more prosecutions here. What Sarah is suggesting is that we should actually think about corruption in a fundamentally different way, not by looking at numbers of violations of bank secrecy laws, numbers of prosecutions on a particular kind of bribery statute, but rather when those in power use that power for private ends as opposed to public ends. And so that totally changes the lens at which we look at things. Then I want to return to how this affects the United States. Because then you don't start with asking what kind of behaviors are happening and then if these behaviors are happening, we know it's corrupt and if they're not. We start by asking, are those in power using public power for selfish ends or not? And then you start looking at power. And so one of the important things that Sarah does in this report is not say that we look first at elected officials and then secondarily at those who influence them because to do that assumes that elected officials are those in power. You start with a default assumption that it's the those who get elected or depending on what kind of government system are the source and the issue. Instead you look at like who actually controls things and that who actually controls things matters. Now what she's doing then is sort of harkening back to a more Aristotelian way of understanding corruption. As you may recall or may not, it's okay if you don't. Aristotle had a six tier system of government. There were three ideal forms and three corrupted forms. The ideal forms were the monarch, the aristocracy and we'll call it the democracy, although at the time democracy had sort of a bad name, the polity. And the corrupted forms were the tyrant, the oligarchy and again he would call it the democracy. So what's the difference between these two? The corrupted and uncorrupted forms. It's not the number of people governing. It's actually who they serve. The difference between the tyrant and the monarch is the monarch is publicly interested and the tyrant is out for his own ends. And so what she's describing in the Aristotelian sense is something closest to the rule by the few who are self interested, the oligarchic rule. And this may sound like everybody understands Aristotle, but this is not the way that we operate internationally now. We tend to operate by looking at particular crimes and trying to stop those particular crimes. I'd also say this has real resonance for our current situation in the United States. And we can talk later about the Trump administration, which is unique in its assault on the rule of law and unique in its disregard for any norms or laws, not any, but norms and laws around corruption. But set aside Donald Trump, prior to this recent presidency, we have a growing split between elites and the rest of the country, especially UDC elites, but that a split between what we think of as corrupt and not corrupt. And there's an incredible capacity of political elites to understand and rationalize behavior as not corrupt because it's not illegal. Whereas if you talk to most people in most places in the country, they'd look at the way we fund campaigns is profoundly corrupt. Not just the way business is done, but actually leading to those in power serving private ends instead of public ends. And I'd like to jump in on that and ask Sarah, because one of the points Zephyr was making is how you can get to what you call a kleptocracy through legal means by changing laws. So what used to be a democracy, what used to be a somewhat honest system becomes a kleptocracy, becomes a dictatorship through legally enacted means. And so what have you seen in Honduras that looks like that? And if you could talk a little bit about some of the other things in your report, how each of the sectors, the private, the public sector, the criminal sector, the sector that you call enablers, how all of those people are, according to your report, working in Honduras to make this operating system reach its maximization of money? So the legal question is a really interesting one because, and I'm going to stray from Honduras again for a second, but say that one of the things that these network elites, wherever they are, typically use to keep the population down, if you will, is legalisms. And frankly, a U.S. example that had my jaw on the ground was the eight to zero Supreme Court ruling last July that threw out the corruption conviction of Governor McDonald of Virginia, you know, it's in this area. And I could even have swallowed if it had gone that way on a split ruling. It was the eight to zero part of it that really blew me away. And the fact that nobody even thought to write, you know, like a concurring opinion saying, golly, okay, given the way the law is written, we had to vote this way, but and a couple of buts about what the indications are. But let me just spell out why that conviction was thrown out. It was thrown out not because there was no clear quid pro quo, there was one. It was the definition of what an official act is. So the guy had set up meetings for his business benefactor, right? He had set up meetings, maybe even in the governor's mansion, he had certainly used, you know, public instruments like his telephone and things like that. But an official act was being defined ever more narrowly that essentially, to the point that it seems like for something to be considered corrupt in this country, you almost need to sign a contract. At least in Virginia. No, it was Supreme Court of the United States. But wasn't the ruling based on the Virginia law and what the Virginia law was? U.S. law, right? No, this is a matter of U.S. law. And just to underline what Sarah's talking about, we have a Supreme Court who has narrowed the definition of corruption in two distinct areas. The laws that are prophylactic laws, the laws that make corruption less likely, like campaign finance law, in other words, the Citizens United. What she means by prophylactic, let me just stop there is like the upstream laws, the laws that upstream of an act actually being committed would, right, would prevent the series of events that would make corruption likely. So it's like, yeah. And so in those cases, what the court says is, we don't need these laws because we have bribery laws to deal with downstream. We can deal with the real problems else how? And then in the bribery cases, the court is also narrowing the definition of corruption, so making it harder for prosecutors to bring cases as in the McDonald case. So you have this sort of vice coming in. And the only thing that's left is, basically, it's for really fumbling criminals. It's the keystone. Yeah, you have to like so, you know, Armando's in office. And we're going to like sign a contract, right? I'm going to give you $500,000 and you have to vote the following three ways like and let's sign the contract and then you could have a case. This never happened. But I think that relates actually to honestly to sort of an elite and cultural approach that the Supreme Court sees people like Governor McDonald as part of a community that they recognize and understand. Did a sense of entitlement? We're entitled to it. We're entitled to act. And it's a splitting community and it relates to the incredible class split we have in this country. And Mark Twain, who you can go to for almost anything, writes about this in his novel, The Gilded Age, is the two different languages of corruption that happened in the late 19th century, where elites start to say, hey, this isn't really corrupt. This is just the way we do things. And everybody else says, you know, can walk like a duck, talks like a duck, it's a duck. Right. So in Honduras, it's quite clear the legalization process. So the first thing I found really interesting was just to look at the Congress building, you know, you've seen it, you know, and this thing is clearly devalued, right? The building is not a dignified building. I almost included in the slideshow a picture of the chamber, which kind of looks, doesn't look as nice as this room. I mean, and that's not because of lack of resources. It's an issue of the dignity of the body and the institution. Its ability to serve an oversight function has been systematically undermined, meaning, again, just physically the space, when I wanted to meet with members of Congress, they didn't have offices. They didn't have a conference room. There are two conference rooms in the building of the Congress, and they actually had to kind of camp out in the building to prevent any, I mean, sorry, in the room to prevent anyone else from, you know, taking our space. Some people might say that's a good thing, actually. I mean, just in terms of how you can conduct your business. So, okay. But then what we were able to do was catalog just a series of laws that all cut the same way, essentially legalizing, in Zephyr's kind of terms, legalizing practices that obviously violate anyone, any normal person's conception of corruption. So, for example, they create something called the Qalianza, which is the Council for Public-Private Partnerships, essentially. And it serves to move public money off budget for, quote, public-private partnerships on infrastructure projects that are the money is held in a trust by a bank and is therefore not subject to the public procurement law. So, again, it's a way of essentially disabling government's ability to perform its function in the public interest. Secrecy laws that have increased the ability to hide all of these types of practices. I mean, secrecy laws. It's again under the cover of national security, but there are all sorts of bodies that you wouldn't normally think ought to be covered by a national security secrecy law, like the Supreme Court, for example. All the proceedings of the Supreme Court are covered by a classification system that you would normally assume to be controlled by the military. You also have had the creation of a national security council that confuses, again, a lot of what you'd normally think of as separation of powers. So, you've got the justice sector, you've got the president of the Supreme Court, the attorney general, and the army interior ministry, the president on a national security council. And then you've got special units of the police reporting directly to that security council rather than up through normal channels. So those are some of the types of things. And then along with the bending, so the sort of capture of the justice sector, the legislative sector, you have the hollowing out of other government institutions. And I mentioned Congress kind of sits astride both of those. But environmental, the environment ministry, so there isn't a ministry here, but it really is remarkable to see how environmental oversight is, you know, it's been gutted. Does that look familiar? Does that sound familiar, Sarah? Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I want to be very clear that as somebody who looks at corruption in different countries, although mostly focused here, that it's always important to be context specific and to understand that each country is very different and that we actually miss a lot if we start making easy comparisons. But as an Americanist, there are some things that are very haunting in what Sarah is saying about law and about hollowing out. So not the same, but there's an echo. In the United States, we have the growing privatization of law. And this is largely done through arbitration agreements that people must enter into in order to have an employment relationship with big companies. And then those arbitration agreements, you don't have all the protections that you have in a court. The judge is not a judge who is either, you know, depending on your state appointed or elected through your public way. The rules of appeal are different. And it's actually been a bit of a revolution and really the last decade is a move from the public open courts to these private courts that you agree to, you know, you're contracted to, so it's okay, you might think. But when you see this mass shift to private courts from public courts, we ought to be very concerned because it's very different. It's not a thuggish takeover, but it is nonetheless a takeover of an essential feature of a self governing open democratic society to have privatized court systems. You also have a different kind of, I was fascinated reading her report about the role that public private relationships play in this, in this corruption. Because in our country we have might have heard about companies that offer for free. All right. Technology to police departments. You get free bodycams. And in exchange, those companies get a foothold in both the data and the business stream. And then you have an incentive to maximize certain kinds of development. You also have that in our public schools with companies like Google providing free technology to the schools. But in exchange, then you have a deep entanglement between a company, which whatever you think of it has at core, and has to have as a matter of law and ethics at core, a profit maximizing motive. So must be self serving. So that sort of seeing public private partnerships, there's always going to be some like you can't have a society without some private partnerships, but there's sort of been a rash and a move towards that in the last few decades. And I think it's something that we should all be wary of as a potential source of the corruption of our overall society. And so where I think Honduras is different or almost an exaggeration of this is we still think about maximizing, you know, the sort of self interest in the US business context is shareholder value, right? I mean, it's still not, you know, and so there is a notion that the business has to perform some function that causes people to buy its products or use it software or whatever it is, it is offering something that the market requires. Whereas what you see, you know, I mean, again, there's some blurry places like Fritos. One could argue, not Fritos specifically, but one could argue that a lot of processed food in the United States is not actually food. It doesn't serve a public interest, but anyway. Whereas I think there's the sort of white elephant syndrome that's also really important to understand. And the white elephant syndrome is you create an infrastructure, a big building, you know, a big infrastructure development that isn't actually meant to function. Hospitals that get built that don't aren't properly equipped or aren't accessible to, you know, populations because their actual function is to serve as a pass-through for public funding going into private pockets. And so that's the way, for example, the solar energy in Honduras. I mean, it's terrific that there's solar energy. And I certainly think that I'd prefer a green kleptocracy to an oil drenched kleptocracy for a variety of reasons. But you have solar electricity generation where the contract with the state is 20 to 30 years long. And a price is locked in at the beginning of that contract. And that price is 20, sorry, 10% above market value. Plus, what is it, David? A 3 cent per kilowatt hour, he dug this up, 3 cent per kilowatt hour bonus for the first X number of projects. So you are talking about locking in an inflated price for electricity for the next 20 to 30 years at a time when the cost of solar energy is going down by 10% a year. That is no longer even shareholder value as we can understand it. That's called looting. In this case, it's looting the customers because it's going to be paid in rates, but it's also looting the state. In other cases, banks are bailed, you know, I mean, anyway. There's this great corruption joke. You might have heard it. You hang out a lot of corruption circles. So one say corrupt circles. One new young kleptocrat is visiting his cousin in another country and he sees this incredible mansion. The kleptocrat shows him around. He got great pool in the back, great view. And he says, how did you do this? How did you make this? And the old guy points out the window and says, see that bridge? 30%. And so then 10 years later, the old guy is visiting his cousin in his country. Now he's old. I cannot believe the castle. He has three pools and incredible layout. He says, I know I taught you, but how did you do that? And the young kleptocrat points out the window and says, you see that bridge? And the old guy goes, no. There's different stages. And let me just add another element of this, which is sometimes private businesses can actually serve as white elephants in a way. So for example, Kabul Bank, let me put it that way. Kabul Bank in Afghanistan was floating on U.S. funding, the U.S. payment of salaries to the Afghan National Army. The thing was a Ponzi scheme. It was completely insolvent. But what kept it afloat was the cash flow going through it. Right? So you can think about real estate serving the same function. Or in Honduras, Banco Ficosa, which is the biggest bank in the country, bought out city groups, Central American Holdings. Now I can understand why city would want to get out of Central America, given what kind of money is sloshing around there and given kind of the ratcheting up of banking compliance that's been happening in recent years. If I were city, I'd probably, you know, de-risk in that particular way. But my question is, did anybody look at what money Ficosa used to buy them out? And so I had a conversation with someone from a development bank who said essentially the entire banking sector in Honduras looks like Kabul Bank. Or looks like the banking sector in Afghanistan, which is Kabul Bank was a Ponzi scheme, but the only ones that were actually solvent were the ones that were running opium money. Right? It was the same kind of flow. It's just that it was drug money keeping them afloat. And so the assessment is that's kind of what the banking sector looks like in Honduras. But it's so systemic. It's again a kind of too big to fail. Like what happened? So this guy is doing, you know, economic analysis for a big international development bank. And I asked him, well, how are you factoring in the dirty money? How are you dealing in your economic forecast and all that kind of thing? And his answer was, I'm not. Because you can't measure it. This is all dirty. Well, not quite, but you can't measure the dirty stuff. You don't know how much is sloshing around. And I'm like, oh, so then what meaning does your analysis actually have? It's not an analysis of the economy as it actually exists. And if the general understanding is that every single Honduran bank functions this way, functions as a white elephant, you know, I mean, they are providing services, they are providing banking services to people, but their bottom line is completely detached from the services that they're providing. How do you clean that? I mean, that helps explain some of the reluctance we all have, not just in figuring out how to deal with a system like this, but even acknowledging that a system is like this, because then it's like the whole country is too big to fail. And if we start pulling one of these strings, we're going to pull the whole country down. Well, let me ask you about that, because one of the one of the other groups, you talk about enablers, you talk about organizations, external organizations, that enable some of this corruption to continue. In the case of Honduras, one of the things you've been talking about has been the drug money, all of the cartels that are using Honduras as a trans shipment point. But there's also a lot of money that is destined to go to Central America and to Honduras from the United States to fight these cartels, to fight the violence. And yet you seem to look at this as yet another revenue stream that this operating system wants to capture, the USAID, the international aid. So how do you see that, especially in a country like Honduras where hundreds of millions of dollars really do have some meaning, right? Exactly. Exactly. So coming at this out of deep experience in Afghanistan, and I know a lot of the community here is very concerned about military assistance to Honduras. And when I look at the numbers, I'm like, that's kind of a drop in the bucket of stuff that I've seen. But in this context, it has a very significant impact. And it's both the military assistance and, of course, civilian assistance. And there's a kind of moral impact or psychological impact that it has. But I love the way you frame that question because it raises one of the... I want to say there's a kind of political trade-off that's often applied to these types of situations where... And it's one of the things that these network elites often use, again, to distract from what they're doing. They'll say, but if not for me, you know, the security situation. They always often use the security situation as a counter balance. So the heads of these networks will often pose as the people who can help you handle, get to grips with the security situation, be it drugs, be it insurgent violence in... Undocumented immigration. Or undocumented immigration, exactly. And so I feel that President Hernandez has really situated himself very effectively in this way. And he's done it on the one hand by indeed cracking down on some of the drug trafficking. And everyone that we talked to did say, you know what? There has been some progress on the drug trafficking front and the drug violence front. And I could experience it in places that we visited where locals were saying, oh, two years ago we couldn't have driven down the street. Two years ago. But how much of that is what you have seen in other countries where the cartels themselves understand that if we're about making money, let's not kill ourselves. Let's make money. Let's keep a lower profile. And let's maybe throw a couple of sacrificial lambs to the corruption people into the cops so that we can really continue with the business that we're about. It's a great question. It's a great question. And I have to confess I wasn't looking at that specifically. So I can't make an argument about how much the cartels themselves were sort of self-policing. But I do think Hernandez was policing to some extent in order to throw a bone to Uncle Sam and get himself in good light with the U.S. government saying, see, I'm helping you with your issue. And unfortunately a lot, particularly the United States, we tend to be a little bit single issue. And we get focused on one thing. And in the case of Honduras, it tends to be its two things. It's the migrant flow and its drugs. And so the other thing we found is a massive increase in incarceration. I mean, just dramatic. We didn't even find it. It's other people's statistics. And a lot of new, a lot of localized reports, people in neighborhoods saying they would see sweeps in the night. So that's one aspect of your question that I think is really important to think about is very often, in my view, it's this, and in my experience, it's this type of kleptocratic networking of the public space, the kind of political economy, if you will, that drives people toward violent reactions, be that insurgency in a place like Afghanistan or ISIS, or be it gang violence. I mean, people start setting up almost their own social structures in counter distinction to governing system like this, or they will lash out at it in extremely, in extreme ways. And that can be violent ways. It can be revolution. It can be insurgencies of one kind or another. It can be voting in bizarre ways. So and yet these people have, these people meaning the kind of kleptocratic network types are really good at persuading outsiders that they are the champion against the very violence that their practices are fueling and driving. So that's one part of the question. And in some of those countries, the people that own the security, the private security companies are themselves members of Congress and part of this. So it's almost like we're making money off of this. Also the security situation. That's a great point. And which raises another point about one of the instruments of state function that they always have, these networks, is an instrument of force. And then they almost also it'll be a particular battalion in the army, or it'll be a particular unit in the police or something. And there's a lot of that in Honduras where Hernandez is creating special units that report directly to him. But they also love to have informal instruments of force. And those can be the gangs. So you start seeing gangs that supposedly this government is fighting against, the government is also instrumentalizing as a plausibly deniable instrument of force. And you know, internet trolls in this country, you can almost start to think of in a similar way. But let me just, sorry, as you see, I'm not the short answer kind of guy. I don't even remember the question. So the question is enablers from outside. And I really think it does it. So that's the other part of the question that's really important to think about. I think too often, and I'm going to move away from the obvious issues of military assistance into development assistance. And too often when you look at any corruption, are there any USAID people here? Anyone who hasn't ever worked for USAID? Not a soul. One. All right. So often USAID gets, the United States government's anti-corruption mission overseas gets offloaded onto the shoulders of USAID. And then poor USAID has to develop some anti-corruption programming. And then internally, development agencies, when they think about corruption, they tend to think about corruption within their programming, meaning is any of our money getting stolen by somebody? What we found the issue to be is much more along the lines of Armando's question, that streams of development assistance are being captured by the network. And we looked in particular at development financing, which is to say development banks like the Inter-American Development Bank, or in the case of what, you know, or the IFC, the International Finance Corporation, or FMO is another important one in Honduras, which is the Dutch Development Bank. But I decided to pick on Finland partly because I know and I love the place and I feel so terrible because I really love Finland. And I really think it's a wonderful country that has its head screwed on straight. But the Finland does have a development bank. And it was fascinating to look. It's called Finfund. And it was one of the investors in a now very famous and tragic one of these projects called the Aglazarka Dam, which is the dam over which Berta Casares was assassinated. And that's what actually sent me into this whole issue. But how Finfund works, so the Finnish government puts money into Finfund, which is a bank, and it wants return on its investment, but it wants the investment to go into development objectives. But what I found was then Finfund will put money into, it'll either put money directly into projects, or sometimes Finfund or USAID will put money into a fund. At every layer in this process, the development objectives are more attenuated. The oversight is weaker. The guidelines are more general and less specific. And the oversight is at every stage along the way what we found was when I would say what reporting requirements do you have, they would say, oh, we get a report every six months. And then I would say, do you ever check the veracity? Do you go check the report against the situation on the ground? Have any reason to mistrust our clients? Exactly. So I hear a one laugh up here. And I was really stunned at the degree to which the presumption was that people are doing good. Whereas, and at the end, the Finfund official kind of turned to me and said quite passionately, I just want these people to have power. My grandmother didn't have electricity, and the biggest event in her life was getting electricity. And I think he really felt strongly about that. But what he didn't go down and look at was, is this electricity actually reaching the people? Or is the electricity a profit making venture that's actually for export, which turns out to be the case? And the presumption that, and the other thing that was really interesting was Finfund felt attacked by the civil society organizations that were protesting the dam. So when I asked, is there anything you do differently? A woman, a tremendous community leader, a breathtaking both organizer and activist, if you will, I kind of feel like she was Honduras' Nelson Mandela. I mean, when I went there and really understood the kind of action she had had and the type of impact she had had way outside of her own ethnic group or whatever it was. When I asked, would you do anything differently, they saw her organization as an enemy. And they said, yes, we now know that it's not enough to have a good project. You really need to understand the context within which the project is being developed. And I'm like, yay, until I hear the next sentence, which was, you have to know, is there some NGO out there that has a lot of international support that's going to blow the thing up in your face? So that was, and I was like, how did Finfund get into a position where the very people that they claim they're out there trying to support, which is local villagers who want electricity, they just don't want electricity this way? How did that organization become the enemy rather than the type of community that you're trying to support? And what was your answer? I'm sorry. No, no, no, you haven't said anything. Well, that's okay. This is fascinating. But I think what this goes to, again, which is the sort of source the whole project is that corruption isn't this side thing. It's deeply intertwined with self-government and freedom itself. And so when I look at the sort of founding of our own country at the constitutional convention, they talked about corruption more than they talked about anything else, not because they saw, they talked about corruption more than they talked about violence, internal insurgency, those problematic people in Massachusetts, more than warfare because they saw the fundamental task of figuring out a system of freedom is freedom from an inevitable pressure, whether you're in a monarchy, a single few or multi-rule, inevitable pressure towards corruption. It's kind of the reverse of the arc of justice bends towards history. It's sort of the arc of government bends towards taking. And so that it isn't a second level task, but a first level task. And so questions of government, who decides, who makes decisions about whether it's solar projects, can't be can't be separated from questions of corruption. You actually have to engage in all of them together. Sorry, we were just talking about time. Yeah, right. No, well, he wants to turn it to you guys. And I'm like, let me just have one more word here, which really what Zephyr just said connects to something else I heard from villagers in Honduras who said, you know, we have started to understand that this political party thing, this democratic contest between political parties is really just designed to split us up amongst ourselves. And if I were to kind of translate what they said to me into my vocabulary, they are seeing the political party contest as really a contest among or between rival strands of a imperfectly integrated kleptocratic network. I mean, the network in Honduras is not a single network, the way it is in Azerbaijan, for example. I mean, it is, you know, and there are rival strands that basically manifest themselves in the political party system. And I'd like to do the U.S. parallel here and say, I think that's a lot of the malaise we have here and why 50% of the electorate doesn't vote. And it's quite interesting that we're all focused on polarization and political party polarization. And I think we are very polarized on kind of social and cultural issues. But as Zephyr suggested in the beginning, at the top of our kind of party system, there's much more consonance than, I think, or I would say members or supporters of either of the political parties would like to admit in terms of these types of political economy issues. There's much more similarity at the top of the Democratic and Republican parties that is not really expressed in the polarization, the identity polarization down at the bottom. And so to some extent, the identity polarization becomes a distraction, preventing the people from holding those guys at the top who are kind of polluting, holding them accountable and responsible. Yeah, I can say that, I mean, this affects how people report. That in the last six years, seven years, since Citizens United, things were bad before that. But since Citizens United in contested congressional races, and I was in a contested congressional race last year, I lost, in the Hudson Valley in New York, the majority of money spent in those races is not from either political party but from outside super parks. It's still reported on by journalists because they're sort of a potential alignment with the Republican side that this is a Republican super pack or a Democratic super pack. But what that means, in fact, is that the main contest is happening not with the candidates and not with the parties and not with the parties ideologies, but with wealthy, extremely wealthy donors on each side. I'm talking about, you know, 400, $500,000 donations to these super packs. And that's just in the seven years since Citizens United. And I think people are not stupid and they feel that, that they feel that contests are contests between elites. And contest between elites leads to a lot of things. It leads to disaffection. And I think it's part of the story and the true tragedy of the Trump election is that Trump is probably the most corrupt president that we've had. And I use that term not in a legalistic sense, but in a sense of being willing to use the office for making money for himself and for his family, for his claim. But I also do think that many people voted for him because they were so frustrated with what they saw as a deeply corrupt system that they just wanted something to change. I spoke to a Trump voter that day after who said, I just wanted to put a stick in the stream because something... A wrecking ball. So yeah, so the tragedy is that people voted in part. There's a lot of other things going on, but in part as an anti-corruption moment. And I think we're still in a revolutionary moment in this country. People are feeling like they want fundamental change. And both for our country and not just in terms of the aid that we may or may not provide, but in terms of... In terms of the modeling that we provide, I think that really matters. We've spent 30 years after the wall came down trying to tell everybody to get on with this democracy program. We have a special responsibility to make sure that we clean our own house, deal with our own structural problems of corruption that are not just wound up in the illegality that we see with the Trump administration, but structural problems about how we fund campaigns, structural problems about how we privatize and allow for excessive corporate power right here if we want to continue this spirit of freedom and share that around the world. All right. And because we do believe that people are smart, we're going to let you show how smart you are by asking questions now. So we have facilitators on either side of the room with a microphone. Please raise your hand, and someone with a microphone will come and hold it for you. And then we would ask you to try to keep your questions brief. And because it is the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, try to keep your questions peaceful. All right. Have a question here up front. Perhaps for a Zephyral t-shirt. Is it not... Would you not agree that the founders of the country, our country, advised a process of governance which recommended a separation between the polity and the elite, aim of orderly government? Do they make a mistake? And just could I ask you to introduce... If you are affiliated with someone, if you wouldn't mind just letting us know, you know... Ed Berger, a physician who directed a program in Russia in the health field for 70 years. Wow. Thank you for your question. Let me see if I understand the question. Is RU suggesting that there was a mistake in not having a direct democracy as opposed to a representative democracy? Several parts of the... Electrical College is obviously an example, but there are whole series of others. The writings, I think, of the founding fathers. So I by no means think that the founding fathers were perfect. There's some sort of obvious errors. I'm a Langston Hughes patriot. Let America be America again. Let it be the dream that used to be America was never America to me. We'll sort of recognize the incredible wisdom in our past and also that there's flaws. But I would say that they're... That the spirit, the anti-corruption spirit is one of the ones that we should continue. So when designing the Congress and the Senate, one of the reasons they had a separate Senate and Congress was to contain different corrupting impulses that we have. The corrupting impulses of the elites and the corrupting impulses of what they saw as sort of the more unruly democracy. Hamilton argued for an executive, interestingly, on anti-corruption grounds saying that the executive is the least likely to try to use his position of power because he will so identify with the country that he won't steal from it. To which Mason and others replied, yeah, but look at the time that Charles took money from the King of France and was sort of bribed in various ways. So we need to have things like the emoluments clause to protect against an executive who is self-dealing. Actually, the Electoral College, which is now outdated, was initially designed as an anti-corruption tool because it was seen as too difficult, given the shape of the roads, to corrupt every different electorate if we had all the votes on the same day in this structured way. So I don't think that we should sort of stick with exactly the document. I believe in the importance of actually amending and moving forward, but I do think this kind of attention to every detail, the size of the veto, not just what, you know, who are we going to prosecute. That's sometimes how a sort of modern anti-corruption people think is who are we going to prosecute. But we think of the structural job of building a democracy is reducing the temptation to self-deal. Right. Next question. Next question. We'll take one from this side, please. And then the next question will be the person in the back. The person in the back will be the next question. My name is Cammie, but I'm with the Pakistan Inspectorate. And my question to Ms. Chase is I was just wondering that if Pentagon could play a role in reducing corruption in an important country like Pakistan, because Pakistan being a security state by a lot of American weapons, and these Pakistani genders buy billion of dollars weapon and they make million of dollars in kickbacks. So this is the reason they don't support honest politician like Iran Khan. Do you think Pentagon can use its influence to encourage Pakistani army to have an honest person like Iran Khan? Thanks. I'm not going to get into internal Pakistani politics, obviously, but the issue of how military assistance can play a role in this type of a situation is an important one. And I have a fair amount of experience with it in Afghanistan, not Pakistan. What I have found is the U.S. military in general is quite reluctant to engage in this territory at all. At a very senior level, when I was involved, senior officers got it and they did understand that the integrity of government was critical to them succeeding in their own mission. So I know a number of senior officers who really waded in to the importance of anti-corruption as part of the policy toward whatever country it might be, and in this particular case it was Afghanistan, but it could be Pakistan, it could be Honduras. On a lower level, the military is extremely reluctant to have this enter into or officers that I have known have been extreme and also the Palm Hill Department, the political military department in the U.S. Department of State is reluctant to see this as part of its job because essentially they see their job as we're there to train people how to shoot. I think that's a mistake. I think that the integrity of armed forces is absolutely critical to these issues everywhere and the U.S. role in training, mentoring, and equipping militaries in Honduras, in Pakistan, in a variety of other places is a really excellent environment in which to drive home some of these lessons. And for example, I've talked to people who know something about South Korea, which I don't, but they say that the gradual emergence of South Korea from, and now is not a great time to be saying that given what's been happening in South Korea recently, but South Korea used to be extremely corrupt and emerged out of it, and a number of people said that was partly because of the example that was set by U.S. forces when they were there. But... Sarah, let me ask you this. What is the role of U.S. military aid in pacifying generals and in that network being able to keep the generals in bay by using U.S. money to say, look, we're getting you your piece of a pie, behave? I think that's a great point. It's often used as a bargaining chip in a way. I mean, it's pretty amazing that the United States prosecutes businesses for bribing foreign officials. It's called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, while the United States sometimes seems to bribe foreign officials. We've also had some admirals that have just recently... Indeed, indeed. Question in the back. Question in the back. Raise your hand, please. We'll take two questions in the back. That gentleman and then the gentleman behind... There's one all the way in the very back. I think he's got a cap. Rick Messick, I'm with the Global Anti-Corruption Blog. And my question is, we spent an hour hearing about how terrible the situation is in Honduras. Could we spend a couple minutes on what you think might be done? And in your comment, could you sort of talk to this OAS commission recently established? Yeah. So I'm 100% with Zephyr on I'm not in favor of tools and sort of tool kits. And that's part of why I'm kind of promoting... It doesn't have to be this diagram. But to understand how to address a country, you need to know something specific about how its networks are structured. I do think there are about 60 countries in the world, or maybe more, that you can roughly describe in the way that I described Honduras. But you do need to know some specifics about how it's set up. There's a real, as I said, networks are incredibly resilient. And so you can't just hope to knock off a couple of individuals. So I would like to talk about two elements. One is the one that you mentioned, Masi, which is a kind of version 201 of the commission that has now brought down and prosecuted several top members of the Guatemalan government next door. And when there were broad anti-corruption protests in Honduras, it was give us a ceasing. In Guatemala, it's called ceasing. Give us a ceasing we want a ceasing, which was, or is, an internationally supported commission with investigative and prosecutorial mandate, which is made up of a combination of Guatemalan and international justice sector professionals. It's an extremely powerful tool, and you can bet that the Honduran government, once they saw what was happening next door, said, uh-uh. And so the Salvador also didn't want it. Of course, of course. Nor does Mexico. I mean, most of Latin America is clamoring for a ceasing now. Masi is different, but it's different in some interesting ways. So it lacks the independent prosecutorial mandate that ceasing has, but it does have an expanded mandate to address some of the, I want to say, institutional structural setups that allow this system to perpetuate itself. And that's a real potential upside of Masi, because they are looking at campaign financing laws, and they are looking at, you know, plea bargaining laws and corporate law, and some of the really important legal frameworks that allow this system to, you know, to perpetuate itself. There's going to be a very dramatic pushback, and already has been, and I haven't followed all of the details of it, but that's something very worth following. For example, in the Honduran Congress, there is a front in support of Masi. And it's a multi-part, it's a non-partisan front. Now, there are efforts to disable that front that are underway at the moment, precisely because of the danger it poses to the structural framework that allows all of this to go forward. So that's one thing. Yeah, go ahead. But if Masi doesn't really have any teeth, then isn't it just a distraction because the one that really has teeth is the one nobody's talking about, which is the CC, which is the CC. In other words, if you can't do what was done in Guatemala, then essentially it's just a shell game. I'm not sure that's the case, because what was done in Guatemala was some individuals were prosecuted. However, for the moment, the network survives. So the network can survive the removal of individual nodes in it, and CC does not have the mandate to address the framework, the structural elements that allow the network to prosper. So I think, frankly, the jury is out on Masi. I think the jury is out. Let's watch and see how it evolves and see whether it can grow some teeth. And there are some pretty dedicated people there who are not going to allow themselves to be clean rooms. Right, or just a kind of window dressing. None of the people involved in that institution, or most of them, are pretty ferocious people. But let's also see, is Masi able to convert its institutional mandate into something? And I just want to talk about something else in terms of a positive, which is the organizations that are fighting back, the grassroots movements, that are often described as environmental movements, or indigenous rights activists, or land activists. And so they're often, in the description of them, broken up into these little categories. And as I say, FINFUN treated these organizations as the enemy, rather than seeing that these organizations have a bead on this system in a very sophisticated way. And they're trying to network themselves. For example, one of the Milpa, which is in the kind of constellation of Bertha Kassarese's movement, wonderful people in La Paz's department. The head of it, or the coordinator of it, was on his way to Colombia, where he was about to meet a whole bunch of representatives from other indigenous movements across the region to discuss the problem of Monsanto, which is trying to patent, you know, seeds. And they're like, we invented potatoes. You're not going to tell us that you guys can patent, like Central America, that's where they come from. And they're working really hard to revive indigenous varieties of plants. They could all tell me they would go by their farms and say, oh, this leaf is a fertilizer and the bark of the same tree is an insecticide. And they're completely educating themselves, or re-educating themselves on those types of lore that is also part of their struggle. And so it was interesting. Finfund was saying, Copin, this other larger group, they have a, quote, other agenda. It's not just about the dam. What Finfund didn't understand is Copin knows that the dam is part of this structured and networked system. And therefore they have to address it in a structured and networked way. And those organizations are doing this at a tremendous personal risk to the activists, to their families. I mean, they get murdered. They get murdered. And disappeared. So, I mean, this is not a joke. That's right. It's not. So even though I, I just briefly want to say, even though I, obviously I'm not an expert, an area expert in this, that there have been successful anti-corruption efforts over time. It's not sort of a single direction. It almost always involves an incredible amount of civic engagement in this country. We were in bad shape in 1899. Took us several decades, but a lot of different efforts. And that my hesitancy about using toolkit modeling is I just think if, if you think of a background image of a car that works and a car that doesn't work, then you get a toolkit to fix the car that doesn't work, to make it a car that works. And then it will continue working. And I think what we need to understand is we can learn from different circumstances and different experiments, but that learning never stops. There's no sort of steady state, utopian, stable, non-corrupting world. It's just new methods will, will come around in which corruption can be used in new ways. And the, and the Monsanto example is important because I believe that one of the greatest global corruption threats comes from modern multinationals who engage in different countries in different ways, but again have a mandate to maximize profit. And we don't accuse them of that. That's their, that's in the law, if they're publicly traded. But that actually leads to figuring out how to not just not get caught, like Uber might, but actually how to take over the structures of law and change those laws in order to maximize profit. I'm going to continue with the sort of founder stories, but Thomas Jefferson was very worried about the corrupting power of monopolies. And he would certainly, you'd certainly call Monsanto one of those controlling 80% of the seeds and corn and soy in this country and in other countries, because he saw them as becoming many private governments that were, were essentially corrupt. Not that they're outside governments, but that they govern themselves. They govern behavior. And one strategy that I would think about in many countries in the world is thinking about anti-monopoly as a potential strategy to take on concentration of power, because that concentration of power enables the networks to extract a value for societies. That's very interesting because if you read any futurists, some of them go as far as writing that in the long run, there will no longer be governments. There will be corporations and they will act as governments. So if you read anybody, you know, even science fiction writers, that's certainly one stream of their writing as a downfall of governments and the, you know, the rise of these governments. Question in the back, I think. Yes. Adam Khan, Google, but I'm not representing them here today. So I highly recommend everyone buy a copy of Dark Money and paints an amazing picture of the corrupting influence of money and corporations and how elections are bought. So coming back to that idea of the concentration of power, gerrymandering, super PACs, what do you see as the future? Are we going to be stuck with Citizens United, which is euphemistically named? I mean, why don't we talk about the power of super PACs and how we are in the situation because of Citizens United? Great question. So Citizens United is not about to be overturned, which means that we in the United States, it can be overturned, but it is not about to in the next few years given the state of the Supreme Court. It's important to be realistic about that. And it means that more is required of us. You know, sort of we, if you think of this as a kind of battlefield, we just lost a lot in the last seven years have transformed, they have transformed politics. And I talked to you about my race. But basically, super PACs played checkers in the first year. They're playing chess now. They're about to play Go. They're deeply involved in data. Super PACs are increasingly doing the canvassing that parties used to do. It's a very quick takeover of our political system. I believe, and sorry to say this to you, Adam, but that one of the things that we have to do is take on, is say, okay, we've changed the way that campaigns are funded. Move, I'm not sorry to say that to you. Move to a publicly financed system in the United States and model that for other systems. In New York City, it has transformed New York City politics, led to a lot more competitive races, fewer incumbents being able to sort of sit pretty. And then we also need to bring about anti-monopoly laws. And I would say that Google and Facebook have enormous political power. And I felt that political power in my own race, not only as filters for news and information, but also in terms of the deep political connection to the political parties. We talk about law and non-enforcement. Google was deeply embedded in the Obama administration. And many people look at that as a reason why the Obama administration did not take on the wage-fixing scandal in Silicon Valley, where basically the Big Five agreed not to hire and poach each other's work or something sort of looks on its face illegal. So we have to look not just in the impolite company, but polite company for where there's concentration of power. Questions? Up front, please, lady. Bill Shoker, the OECD. I have a question for each of you. And, Zephyr, I'm glad you claimed a little bit more about your view of the toolbox, because I think toolboxes or tools in the toolbox with perfection work, or can work in terms of trying to deal with this issue over the long term. My question is the situation with one of you mentioned something about electricity, and instead of it going to the people, it ends up being basically ripped off for the elite, whatever. I mean, my concern, and I think a concern, or when the people get just enough, sort of Huey Long-like on the electricity, but there's still a rip off. So I guess my question is, which goes back to the question that might have been raised earlier, is what do you see as the enforcement mechanisms? What do you see in the toolbox that potentially needs to either be improved or can work? And I'm putting aside our own issues moment with this particular government. So that's one for you. We're almost out of time, so we're only going to give you one question, because it's 520. That's all right. Your answer will answer, if they can. The second thing, I turn to... Yeah, go ahead, because Zephyr is literally going to walk out the door at 530, so if you can... Okay, yeah, I'll get there. For you, Sarah, my question is the following. You made, I think, a very interesting point about too big to fail. That this can relate to a country. I think one of the prime examples that... And we're now with our third president who is being looked at, and perhaps... And my question to you is, how do you move from being a poster child for the good stuff, for showing that the government is strong to the possibility that it can basically be undermined? Loss of faith in no government that can operate? So briefly, I think in this country, we need... I've said some of this before, but change the way we fund elections, whether it's a constitutional amendment or overturning Citizens United is incredibly important. Actually enforcing antitrust laws, which we haven't since 1981, but then also introducing new antitrust laws to deal with the new monopolists that are really taking over and corrupting a lot of our government. And then some parts of that in this country are these questions about the incentives and culture in our prosecutorial offices, about why DOJ and FTC have been inactive. And I just use them as one example in antitrust, why other agencies have been inactive in taking on big banks. That I think that there's actually different ways that we can structure prosecutorial offices and prosecutorial incentives in as much as a prosecution is one part of what we should be doing. And the last thing, which is not a law, is cultural. Is actually expecting and insisting as a cultural matter. Not as a law matter with revolving doors and trying to... As a cultural matter that people serve in the public good and not in their private interests, not merely when they are holding office, but after they have held office. I used to play a game, and I'll turn it over, called What Would Oleg Deripaska Do? Oleg Deripaska has a habit. It's a Russian oligarch who's very involved in Bosnia, where I was studying the corruption there. In different countries, he would corrupt everybody differently. In some countries, he would bribe. In some countries, he would just get a no big contract. In the United States, he hired Bob Dole as a lobbyist. So that shows us where our weaknesses are, is the different strategies used in different countries. We have a real weakness in the combination between lobbying, campaign finance, super PACs, and our own cultural acceptance thereof. I'd like to add to that regulations. I hate to say it, and it is true that if you're a small business or a small bank, there's a lot of box-checking paperwork that strangles you. But what's interesting is people working on behalf of some very large, very self-interested private interests are using the travails of the little guys as a pretext to dismantle regulations on them that really are in the public interest. And so I recommend to everybody, the book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. It's about the savings and loan crisis, and it is fascinating about the role of effective regulators. The best way to rob a bank is to own one. On my question, I would say that the stories you're referring to reinforce the importance of what Zephyr's been talking about, and I can't even say the word prophylactic, whatever it is, the word about laws that help prevent corruption upstream of its taking place. And similarly, looking at this internationally, once you get to the point where it takes a year of public demonstrations to get a government to even think about something, you're going to be in a mess. You're going to be in a catastrophic failure, but it's going to happen. So for example, Mubarak looked great in 2005. Mubarak looked like it's stable, and he's delivering on the Camp David Accords just like we want, and he's a strong man, and it's a stability, and if he's a little corrupt, if his son's a little corrupt around the edges, that's okay. We can live with that in return for the stability, but you're going to get some kind of a systemic failure in that case. Unfortunately, what happened in the case of Egypt is another one branch of the network took back over. So now we've got Cece, who's the same thing, in fact, and worse. And we're saying, wow, isn't this great? We've got stability. We've got this strong man government in Egypt. It's not going to last. There's going to be systemic failure. So the point is too big to fail actually fails. It does fail in the end, as it did in 2008 in the banking sector. So the real question is, how do you then put in place a framework that will avoid getting systemic risk again? And we haven't gotten there yet in the U.S. banking sector, and we haven't gotten there yet in corruption in foreign countries, let alone our own country. And I'm afraid that's going to be it for the questions, but I would like to give both Zephyr and Sarah an opportunity for some closing remarks. So it's been a pretty wide ranging discussion all over the map, literally. And many levels of sophistication from countries like Honduras to the United States, different levels of corrupt activities. But all of them in many ways showing that if you can fix something in a country where the level of corruption is here, doesn't mean you're out of the woods. Because when you get to be a first world country, there are going to be corruption issues there as well. So anyway, so very briefly, three things. One is that decentralized private power is actually essential to protecting against corruption. The second, and here I sound a little old fashioned, but maybe that's my job, is that we have to engage in questions of virtue and morality, and not merely see this as a technocratic matter. And the third is you should definitely read Sarah's fantastic book. And I would like to emphasize a point that is that we didn't touch on and that is insufficiently. Let me let me touch on two points that we didn't touch on. One is I was hearing, I mean, you were covering this, the kids coming across the border and they're still coming across the border. And what I heard mostly was they were subject to gang violence and gang extortion. And I think that's probably what you found. That's what they talked about. But it took me about two days on the ground to realize that the police were outsourcing their extortion to gangs. So I don't want to kind of be the guy with a hammer and everything's in a nail. But believe me, you scratch the surface of just about any problem and you're going to find corruption underneath it. So just be aware that, you know, so this whole system was very instrumental in moving those kids onto those perilous roads that they took. And just to add, each one of those children represents thousands of dollars to the smuggling network that brings them here. So when you multiply 150, 200,000 children and family units that have come to this country over the last few years and you multiply that by four or five thousand dollars, that perhaps was not paid out at the beginning, but is being paid out now by those families sending money back through remittances, there is a huge flow of money because of the smuggling that's happening in Central America. And just to reinforce what Armando suggested before, the very government that we're relying on to stop these migration flows, you know, so this is true of corruption in general. When you say, let's not worry about, let's back burner the corruption issue because we really care about this concern. More often than not, it's corruption itself that's driving this concern over here so it's actually counterproductive in the long term to back burner corruption in order to focus on this. And the second point I want to make that is insufficiently developed in this report and I really want to turn to it much more in future work. These networks are, although it's important to look at the country distinctions, the networks themselves are not isolated within their countries. These are transnational kleptocratic networks and we're all used to transnational organized crime and we're used to multinational corporations. It stands to reason that if the networks are integrated in these ways, the kleptocratic networks are transnational and we ought to be taking a good look at that as we examine our current situation in the United States where we have a tendency to look again for specific instances of conflict of interest or specific laws that may be violated whereas if you look at the pattern of the business and other interactions by key members of this administration overseas, you'll it almost starts to look like a like an airline route map where you've got nodes in different countries but the lines are going like this and I think we're looking at Washington becoming or having become a node in a web of transnational kleptocratic networks. Sarah Chase, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Zephyr Teachout, a professor of law at Fordham University School of Law. Thank you for this very, very interesting discussion. Thank you for joining us on C-SPAN 2. I'm Armando Good night. That was great. Thank you. We got everything done.