Ukraine’s Fight Against Corruption

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Happy Monday! Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles on punching their tickets to State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona in two weeks.

Thirty-one teams aren’t going to win the Super Bowl this year. Only one of those teams has the first pick in the NFL draft. 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, increased 5 percent year-over-year in December, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Friday—the slowest such pace since September 2021 and down from a 5.5 percent annual rate in November. After stripping out more volatile food and energy prices, core PCE increased at a 4.4 percent annual rate in December. Consumer spending, meanwhile, fell 0.2 percent from November to December, after dropping 0.1 percent the month before. Federal Reserve board members will meet later this week to discuss additional interest rate hikes.
  • Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Friday the Justice Department had charged three Iran-backed individuals with money laundering and murder-for-hire in a plot to kill an Iranian-American journalist critical of Iran’s human rights record. The men—who are members of an Eastern European crime organization with ties to Iran—allegedly sought to kill Masih Alinejad, who identified herself as the target of the assassination on Twitter and was also the object of an attempted kidnapping scheme in 2021.
  • The Russian prosecutor-general’s office banned Meduza last week, cutting off the largest remaining independent Russian news site for allegedly “posing a threat to the foundations of the Russian Federation’s constitutional order and national security.” The move makes it illegal to “cooperate” with Meduza journalists or share a hyperlink to their website, under penalty of up to six years in prison.
  • Seven Israelis worshippers were killed at a synagogue on Friday night when a Palestinian man opened fire during worship. The attack, which took place on Holocaust Remembrance Day, is the deadliest of its kind since Israel’s new right-wing government took power in December.
  • The city of Memphis released four videos Friday evening—three from police body cameras, one from an overhead surveillance camera—depicting the events leading up to the death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols earlier this month. The footage shows five Memphis officers beating Nichols relentlessly after pulling him over on January 7 on suspicion of reckless driving. The officers violently pulled Nichols from his vehicle, subjecting him to a barrage of contradictory orders as they punched and kicked him for an extended time. 
  • Petr Pavel, a retired NATO commander, was elected president of the Czech Republic on Saturday, defeating billionaire and former prime minister Andrej Babis with 58 percent of the vote to Babis’ 42 percent on the second ballot.
  • In his first public remarks since classified material was found at his home in Indiana, former Vice President Mike Pence told Fox News on Friday he takes “full responsibility” for the documents’ presence in his house, adding that “mistakes were made” when he and his team were packing up in the final days of the Trump administration. The possible 2024 candidate promised to fully cooperate with any and all investigations. 
  • Members of the Republican National Committee (RNC) voted 111-51 on Friday to re-elect Ronna McDaniel to a fourth term as the party’s chairwoman. McDaniel defeated Harmeet Dhillon, the RNC’s national committeewoman from California, and Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who played a prominent role in spreading lies central to former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Ukraine Confronts Corruption

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky speaks during a meeting in Lviv, Ukraine. (Photo by Yan Dobronosov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)

Ukrainian investigative journalist Denys Bigus made his name uncovering the shady financial dealings of a former president who eventually fled the country, leaving behind an opulent car collection and private zoo. These days, Bigus has put his journalism career on hold to help push back Russia’s attack by operating drones. 

Bigus’ trajectory is just one example of how fighting off the Russian invasion has distracted attention from Ukraine’s ongoing fight against corruption. But the ouster of more than a dozen Ukrainian officials last week—several accused of graft—has put the spotlight back on the problem. While Western officials have praised Kyiv’s response so far and say there’s no evidence of the United States’ aid being misused, Ukrainian officials know continuing corruption could undermine the West’s goodwill.

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  1. Roni

    It's interesting that we're just now getting around to thinking about corruption in Ukraine. I have watched "Servant of the People" in its entirety. One of the central themes in the show is the overarching presence of Oligarchs and Corruption. And, of course, Zelenskii's character, Pres VP Goloboroko, was voted into his fictional office specifically because of tirade against corruption and inefficiency to the "high school" history class which he was teaching at the time.

    If you do nothing else, you should watch that first episode of Season 1. That rant is priceless. (Don't forget to turn on the English subtitles.)

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  2. Trichwages

    Former Government and Elected officials working as advisors and consultants to foreign nations is another area, like Classified Information that was covered by you so well, that needs a deeper dive. It’s curious that so many former Congress members and government employees act as consultants to foreign nations, too. Most shrug as if it’s no big deal. I think it’s ethically questionable. But I confess my ignorance. Was it actually illegal or was McGonigal caught and looked into simply because of his relationship with relatively newly sanctioned Russian oligarchs (he was on the radar), and that let to other illegal acts? There seem to be national security issues at play here. Would be great to find out what is and isn’t illegal, ethical issues, etc.

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  3. Hartzlk

    QotD: I think agriculture is underreported (and widely misunderstood) in general in this country. And it's actually really important.
    When it does hit the news, a lot of the ethical nuances and ramifications seem to get overly simplified. (Example: There's a whole lot more to the ethical treatment of animals discussion with livestock than this "go vegan or go home" message.)

    All kinds of agriculture, of both the animal and plant persuasion, is in the cross hairs of climate change activism. And while taking care of the environment should be a top priority for future-minded individuals, pulling giant federal levers for bans and fines in the agriculture industry should be done very carefully and should not be based on poor "napkin math". Because, shock, this will impact how much it costs for people to feed their families.

    I've seen news once in a while about Cory Booker introducing bills on agriculture, and I have wanted to hear more. The basic ideas outlined seemed good. Not sure who else in Congress is thinking about the topic.

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    DougAz

    Will Americans Even Notice an Improving
    Economy?

    Where the Morning Dispatch was off the mark on the Economy.

    https://nyti.ms/3Rkvn7N

    "Would you know that real gross domestic product has risen 6.7 percent under President Biden, that America gained 4.5 million jobs in 2022 and that inflation over the past six months, which was indeed very high last winter, was less than 2 percent at an annual rate?"

    I know Conservatives here just will dismiss Paul Krugman crudely without even a read. But try.

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    1. Ingenero.lux

      Great - my grocery bill is absolutely hellacious and most other things I purchase are still are more expensive than previously. Gas isn’t as bad - but it’s heading back up again. And those job numbers? We reopened from COVID. I will give Biden his due (if any, I don’t think Presidents have nearly as much impact on the economy as both parties assume), but for my family and the people we know, the economy is quite sucky regardless of the top-line numbers. Maybe it’ll improve. But telling me to look at those numbers when my bills are insane really won’t do much.

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        DougAz

        Egg flu. Dairy issues. Lack of workers.

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        1. Ingenero.lux

          I’m not saying it’s his fault (I also don’t think good conditions are due to the President either), but telling me the economy is good when I spend something like double on groceries what I used to won’t fly unless my salary rises more than it will.

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            DougAz

            I get you. Some things are higher for sure. And I see it. Eggs, bread, eating out on business. The rate of increase, to me anyway is nowhere near my 1970s experiences. I just hope we don't raise interest rates as I don't see that have an elastic effect. There are other components that are move "viscous" in movement. (I think a lot in my old polymer viscoelastic modeling... :) )

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    Ann-Marie Inglis

    I'd like to see follow up briefs (as its probably not long enough to be a story) on what happens to the lawyers and attorneys that work for trump or one of his companies that get fined by judges for bring bullshit cases before them. I often see news stories breaking that they have been fined, or disciplined - What I'm super curious about is what happens next - do they pay, do they appeal, if they pay, who pays it. what happens to the lawyer? are they disbarred or just discredited? or do they happily go on being an attorney/lawyer - or perhaps sadly, does it make them more infamous and rich

    team trump seem like they are always filing a case for some reason or another - maybe as often as cases are filled against him! apart from all the "winning" I'm interested in the follow-on story about the people involved in the legal action

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    1. Brook

      Hell yes! Thanks.

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      Sgrantsm

      Me too!

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    Azlefty

    Corruption is an incredibly tough nut to crack. Back in the 1990s, we all thought that the Internet would create sunshine that would make it very hard for governments to limit speech and falsehoods to persist. This now seems naive.

    One of the things that seems to keep corruption persistent is that it is embedded in culture. I'm Jewish but it seems that the least-corrupt countries mostly are secular but have protestant Christianity as a common religion. This includes Northern Western Europe and a small number of their former imperialist colonies, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong (now declining); and a couple outliers such as Japan, Estonia, and Uruguay. (source: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021) I don't know enough about Protestantism to understand if this is coincidence or causation.

    As a simple example of what I mean by corruption being embedded in Culture, a friend of mine in college told me that when she was in elementary school in Israel, if a friend of hers asked for help on a test, she probably would have shared some answers. She said this wasn't really thought of as cheating; it was thought of as helping out a friend and it would be rude not to help. This may seem innocuous but "helping out a friend" on a large scale effectively means that benefits go to people who happen to have friends in decision-making positions, rather than to people who can do the best job for the lowest cost.

    As an adult, I watched the Ken Burns documentary on Prohibition, which is terrific. It wasn't explicitly stated but there seemed to be an undertone during the Temperance movement that the "drys", who were primarily Protestants, and women in particular, had a problem with the "wets" not only because they were opposed to liquor consumption, but also because they associated wets with corruption and Catholicism, such as political machines in New York and Chicago. Some of this may have been rooted in anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment. I'm sure a big part of that was scapegoating, stereotyping, etc.

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    1. BPhillips

      Your comment made me think of Walmart getting fined by the US government for bribing Mexican officials to "grease the wheels" getting a new store built in Mexico. Apparently in Mexico if you don't bribe some local officials, the store will never get built. Seemed a bit ethnocentric on our part.

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    Ian Fillmore

    I hear a lot about fights on the right. What about the left? It seems to me that there's a big divide between the liberal left and the radical left. For example, while the debate over school curricula is now cast as a right v left conflict, it was originally a moderate-left-suburban-parents vs radical-left-educators conflict.

    Arguably, the stakes in the conflict between the liberal left and the radical left are larger than the stakes in the conflict between the liberal right and the radical right. The right will not be controlling any of the commanding heights of the culture anytime soon. The real contest for the commanding heights is between factions on the left. And hardly anyone is diving deep into what these conflicts are, who's in what faction, etc. I mean Sinema just got driven out of the Democratic party, and everyone acts like this reflects nothing more than Sinema's idiosyncratic brand of politics.

    In 2016, a non-Republican won the Republican nomination for president. Remarkable! But everyone forgets that a non-Democrat ALMOST won the Democratic nomination. If instead of the Clinton machine clearing the field for Hillary, the Democratic primary had been competitive, as the Republican primary was, Sanders might have won. Because history unfolded the way it did, opposition to Trump papered over significant divisions on the left. The civil war on the right has been raging for awhile. The civil war on the left may just be getting started. I suspect it will begin in earnest once it becomes clear that Trump is never coming back (whenever that occurs).

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    1. BPhillips

      I don't know - I really only hear about these culture war things from the Right. I think most of the things the far right seem to get upset about seem pretty trivial - like the term "LatinX". A few liberals tossed it out there & it didn't really stick, so what? Same for the dustup about the M & M spokecandies, the eternal "war on Christmas"....these aren't things I here friends on the Left discussing much but some on the Right act like existential threats to the country.

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      Citizen60

      Sinema wasn’t driven out of the Democratic Party. It was clear she’s behaved so drastically divergent from how she campaigned and claimed what her agenda would be that she’d lose in the Democratic and in the Republican primary.

      Her only hope of political survival was to go Independent, and hope no Democrat ran due to the risk of splitting the Dem vote and assuring a Republican win.
      It will be interesting. The AZ Independents don’t like her anymore than the Democrats do.

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        Sgrantsm

        Agree.

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      Pat Riot

      The only "fights" that really mean anything is between actual elected representatives who can make laws. What some professors in a university are arguing over this day or that isn't worth worrying about because it won't affect anybody's lives.

      When Democrats held the majority in Congress, they passed... what they passed. It wasn't "radical", but rather similar to the stuff we've seen passed in the USA for the last 80 years. They had a thin majority and passed a lot of stuff that the center wanted them to pass, so it doesn't exactly look like civil war.

      Sinema's problem is that, unlike Joe Manchin, she's not representing her constituents. Arizona isn't West Virginia: they have Democrats there. Lot's of them: to the extent that the Democrat just won a statewide election for governor.

      Bernie Sanders lost because most Democrats don't like Bernie Sanders, not because of cheating or whatever.

      Anything is possible in the future, but for the near term there sure doesn't look like there's any giant rift in the Democrats.

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        Stephanie

        Correct, both about Clinton/Sanders and about Kyrsten Sinema. There’s nothing that can be generalized about either of those situations either.

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        Sgrantsm

        Agree. All well said.

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      Aylene Wright

      There's a really interesting Cathy Young piece in the Bulwark about RDS attempting to make over the Florida New College into the "Hillsdale of the South" that touches on the existence of left-liberals who disagree with left-illiberals on the goals of higher education, but are also repelled by the right-illiberals such as Chris Rufo.

      Note that the right-illiberals actually agree with the left-illiberals that the goal is to indoctrinate students into a particular worldview, they just disagree on the worldview to be indoctrinated.

      However Young also concedes that although Rufo is involved in this project, others have a more nuanced approach and realize it's unrealistic to just instantly implement a hostile Right Wing takeover of the institution.

      (I don't even think that was the case at Hillsdale itself, though maybe it was, that new people came in and made it a politically conservative college overnight. I know it actually started out as a liberal arts college run by abolitionists, who were seen as idealist kooks, although I think that pre-Marxism the parameters for left vs right were a tad different.)

      https://www.thebulwark.com/ron-desantis-chris-rufo-and-the-college-anti-woke-makeover-florida/

      Also, I would appreciate a TD deep dive into what actually happened at Hillsdale, because even in the early years of Trump's presidency, I didn't get the impression the actual curriculum had been negatively affected by the Trumpiness of its president. Maybe that even is still the case? But they seem to often host lectures by eyebrow raising guests who hawk conspiracy theories regarding COVID and Stop the Steal.

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        Mudskipper

        I don't know what the curriculum is like for regular college students. But I do know that every day an ad for a Hillsdale online course shows up in my Facebook feed. One version of the ad blares "What happened to my country?" Apparently if you want to find out, you can take the course entitled “The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism” which "exposes how radicalism became mainstream in American politics and how we can combat these dangerous ideas."

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      2. Libertyforallusa2

        I think you might be conflating Hillsdale and Liberty in your last paragraph.

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    Magpie

    LUK: I don't think I've ever seen any kind of in-depth reporting on or analysis of climate change in TD. What are candidates' stands on climate change mitigation efforts, and how do those stands compare with polling on climate change issues? Is there a mismatch between what voters want and what politicians offer? And is there a mismatch between what politicians offer and what they actually deliver?

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    1. Ingenero.lux

      https://thedispatch.com/?s=Climate%20change

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        Magpie

        Thank you, I'll take a look at some of those. By the way, I notice that you can get better results by searching on "climate change" in quotes as opposed to the term without quotes.

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        1. Ingenero.lux

          Probably, good point.

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        Sgrantsm

        I scrolled down your list of articles. Did any of them address the questions Magpie asked? It seemed like they were more critical of what the Left is doing and saying, but I didn't read them all.

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        1. Ingenero.lux

          The specific questions, no - though I doubt you’ll get it here given the unreliability of issue polling for the first two, and a pretty clear answer on the third question (ie, it’s all mismatch). In-depth reporting or analysis on climate change, there’s been a decent amount. The third article down (in my search) gave a good deal of analysis (https://thedispatch.com/article/a-conservative-approach-to-climate/), and there were others as I went down. Criticism of the Left, sure (this is center-right after all), but the have offered analysis of climate change and offered solutions.

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    Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

    I adopted a little girl from Ukraine. Yeah, it's a corrupt country. We paid dozens of bribes to facilitate the adoption.

    My favorite was paying a judge $500 to hold a court session out of the regularly scheduled time. It was at 10am on a Tuesday.

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    1. Brook

      Bless you.

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    JohnF

    𝐵𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑣𝑒 𝑖𝑡 𝑜𝑟 𝑛𝑜𝑡, 𝑤𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑙𝑦 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑦𝑒𝑎𝑟 𝑎𝑤𝑎𝑦 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡 𝑏𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑜𝑡𝑠 𝑏𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑐𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 2024 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑦.

    𝐵𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑣𝑒 𝑖𝑡 𝑜𝑟 𝑛𝑜𝑡, 𝑖𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑎 𝑦𝑒𝑎𝑟 𝑎𝑤𝑎𝑦 𝑏𝑒𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡 𝑏𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑜𝑡𝑠 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑛 𝑐𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 2024 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑦.

    Everything in perspective

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