Sarah Chayes > Quotes

“Corruption, it made plain, was not solely a humanitarian affair, an issue touching on principles or values alone. It was a matter of national security—Afghan national security and, by extension, that of the United States. And if corruption was driving people to violent revolt in Afghanistan, it was probably doing likewise in other places. Acute government corruption may in fact lie at the root of some of the world’s most dangerous and disruptive security challenges—among them the spread of violent extremism. That basic fact, elusive to this day, is what this book seeks to demonstrate.”
― Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security

“Criticizing the “corrupt, questionable, and unqualified leaders [placed] into key positions,” the argument rested on the principle of command responsibility: “The international community has enabled and encouraged bad governance through agreement and silence, and often active partnership.” Moving the issue away from the humanitarian terrain where it often resides, we made corruption relevant to war fighters by explaining its centrality to prospects of victory. “Afghans’ acute disappointment with the quality of governance . . . has contributed to permissiveness toward, or collusion with,” the Taliban, we wrote, laboring to stultify our language with a credible amount of jargon. In plain English: why would a farmer stick out his neck to keep Taliban out of his village if the government was just as bad? If, because of corruption, an ex-policeman like Nurallah was threatening to turn a blind eye to a man planting an IED, others were going further. Corruption, in army-speak, was a force multiplier for the enemy. “This condition is a key factor feeding negative security trends and it undermines the ability of development efforts to reverse these trends,” our draft read.”
― Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security

“The phenomenon we confront is the worldwide equivalent of a forest fire, of the Blitz. We must react accordingly—with that same impulsive solidarity. Or, to restate this idea in terms of the other metaphor that has threaded through these pages: the only way to defeat the tiny but powerful coalition of meat hogs that is imperiling our whole community is to join together in a far-reaching egalitarian coalition and confront them in unison.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Corruption is usually classified as a humanitarian aid problem, to be handled by donor agencies, not mainstreamed into overall foreign and defense policy. And while governments may support across-the-board efforts on a multilateral level, they almost never consider acute corruption as they shape their approach to specific countries. Human rights, religious freedom, protections for the LGBT community may enter the conversation, but corruption rarely does. Tools to raise the cost of kleptocratic practices exist—in abundance. It’s just a matter of finding the courage and finesse to use them. All the levers and incentives listed below can be further refined, and new ones imagined, in specific contexts. Particular corrupt officials or structures have unique vulnerabilities and desires; and timelines and windows of opportunity for effective action will be specific to individual cases and will suggest even more potential actions as they are examined. Many of the actions below can and should be routinized—folded into the everyday activities of relevant bureaucracies—so as to reduce the onus on leaders to sign their names to audacious and thus potentially career-threatening moves. But in other cases, a strategy may need to be carefully thought through and tailored to the specific conditions of a given country at a specific point in time.”
― Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security

“The analysis in this book does not just apply to the extreme cases it has examined, where the whole of government has morphed into a criminal organization bent to no other business than personal enrichment, and has retooled the crucial gears of state power to that end. To highlight the problem of kleptocracy only in places like Nigeria and Afghanistan is to reinforce a tacit superiority complex: those populations, of the global south, are somehow unsuited to rational government. They are culturally prone to predation. Reform is not possible, only containment. It is also to duck the significance of the global economic meltdown of 2008. The analysis here applies, and strikingly, to countries closer to home, where governments have been dangerously encroached upon in recent years—even partially colonized—by what John Locke would call “some party of men.”
― Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security

“There is no magic formula, no step-by-step method for bringing the hydras that are laying waste to our societies under control.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million,” wrote Sam Polk in the New York Times, “and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.” Polk”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Members of today’s kleptocratic networks who incorporate companies under fictitious or borrowed names are using a modern screening allegory on law enforcement and the public. Only initiates learn where the money comes from, how much there really is, and how much is being stolen from fellow citizens in the form of unpaid taxes. One entity has been particularly effective in its use of secrecy: the Koch network.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“In other words, development resources passed through a corrupt system not only reinforced that system by helping to fund it but also inflamed the feelings of injustice that were driving people toward the insurgency. Laboratory experiments over the past several decades have demonstrated humans’ apparently irrational revolt against such unjust bargains. The experiments, known as “ultimatum games,” allocate a sum of money to one player, with instructions to divide it with another. If the recipient accepts the offer, the deal goes through. If she rejects it, both players get nothing. Economists had presumed that a recipient, acting rationally, would accept any amount greater than zero. In fact, in experiment after experiment—even with stakes as high as a month’s salary—roughly half of recipients rejected offers lower than 20 percent of the total sum.7 These”
― Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security

“After fifteen years of trying other solutions, there was no alternative. The logic of Alliance thinking dictated a third party. And that is what emerged. The Populist Party was born on July 4, 1892, in Omaha, Nebraska, with Alliance members and thinking at its heart.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Systemic corruption, leaving no means of redress or civic appeal, drives citizens to extremes.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Every kleptocratic network I have examined, from Afghanistan to Honduras to Central Asian or African countries, has included a skein of outright”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“The individual ego is therefore both nurtured and submerged. A man’s skills are praised, his food is eaten, his pride is reinforced.” Sharing, not hogging or hoarding, is rewarded, and the meat taken with reverence, and shared, is sacred. Each such meal is a Eucharist.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“This is the real meaning of the myth of Midas. It wasn’t just that the king might starve to death through blind greed. It was that everything he touched lost its incomparable properties and turned into cold, hard cash.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules. Most of the members of that class run their operations and live their lives in ways that injure our communities. Most are trying to rig the system even further. These are not upstanding citizens. They are parasites and freeloaders—however they try to justify themselves. We do not owe them deference.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“A Nigerian once answered a question about the social significance of money with an enigma: “People use money to intimidate people,” he stated. I knew what he meant, but I made polite conversation: “Really? How?” “By giving it to them.” That was not the answer I expected. I waited. “Then they can tell them what to do.” Afghans said the same, I remembered: “When someone eats your food, he should obey you. You don’t obey him.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Brains and talent were sucked onto Wall Street, while other things that contribute to a country’s greatness were starved of air. That’s called an “opportunity cost,” and it was huge.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Lawyers make their living mincing words. Many devote their skill and hard labor to constructing the apparatus of justification.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“A third principle comes not from ancient Greece, but from the Farmers’ Alliance. It is the importance of ideas, the need for independent analysis, developed and transmitted in a constant exchange with and among neighbors, and the need to teach it actively. Too much dogma, unquestioned across the political spectrum—such as that unlimited growth is a sign of health—serves to reinforce the business model of the kleptocrats, or to distract us from it.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Our questioning—again echoing Ghazali—of the likely impact of development efforts (“prosperity,” in his formula) also flew in the face of received wisdom. For years, the notion had prevailed that the best way to sway Afghan “hearts and minds” was by giving away stuff: blankets, bags of wheat, wells for drinking water, schoolrooms. Among the conditions fueling extremism, commentators and policy makers often repeat, is economic malaise, aggravated by demographic shifts or such externals as drought. Foreign assistance is seen as a palliative to those ills. Evolving U.S. military doctrine even referred to “money as a weapon system.” But examination of extremist leaders’ sociological backgrounds casts doubt on these presumptions. Studies by such analysts as Andrew Wilder have found that in Afghanistan, infusions of development resources often exacerbated local conflict rather than reducing it, by providing new prizes for opposing groups to fight over.6”
― Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security

“Disaster on such a scale does more than spur personal generosity. It has effects that are relevant to the large-scale enactment of regulatory and social welfare measures in the 1930s and 1940s. Disaster “provides an unstructured social situation that enables…the possibility of introducing desired innovations”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“He wished, he said, to draw his listeners’ attention to “the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government.” But labor, the rail-splitter-turned-lawyer declared,”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Where the cutting has been wholesale, and has lasted, is in Congress—Congress: the first branch of government, closest to the people; Congress, which on our behalf keeps an eye on all those unelected bureaucrats. Congressmen and -women have sabotaged their own institution’s ability to do that for us. They have smashed the tools it possessed to help fashion laws in the public interest. They have crippled their own capacity to come to independent conclusions as to the nature of the problems such laws would address. Congress has been disabled from inside. Most of this happened in one of those revisions of the House of Representatives’ internal rules when an election flipped the majority party. It was January 1995, and a last-minute geyser of campaign cash had delivered an upset Republican victory two months before. Newt Gingrich held the gavel. The very first provision of the new rules he hammered through on January 5 reads: “In the One Hundred Fourth Congress, the total number of staff of House committees shall be at least one-third less than the corresponding total in the One Hundred Third Congress.” Congressional staffers are the citizens’ subject matter experts. Over years, these scientists and auditors and lawyers and military veterans build up historical knowledge on the complex issues that jostle for House and Senate attention. They help members, who have to be generalists, drill down into specifics. Cut staffs, and members lose the bandwidth to craft wise legislation, the expertise to ask telling questions in hearings—the ability to hold oversight hearings at all. The Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office all suffered the cuts. The Office of Technology Assessment was abolished—because, in 1995, what new technology could possibly be poised on the horizon? Democrats, when they regained control of the House, did not repair the damage. Today, the number of staff fielding thousands of corporate lobbyists or fact-checking their jive remains lower than it was a quarter century ago.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“When once free from the restrictions of extraneous authority,” hoped New York–based anarchist leaders Johann Most and Emma Goldman in 1896, men will enter into free relations; spontaneous organizations will spring up in all parts of the world, and every one will contribute to his and the common welfare as much labor as he or she is capable of, and consume according to their needs. All modern technical inventions and discoveries will be employed to make work easy and pleasant, and science, culture, and art will be freely used to perfect and elevate the human race, while woman will be coequal with man.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“The U.S. civilian leadership was shirking its responsibility to develop a high-level strategic approach to the most significant political and diplomatic challenge of this conflict. It was yet another example of America’s almost instinctive reflex to lead with the military in moments of international crisis. Civilian officials, as much as they may mistrust the Pentagon, are often the first to succumb. They seem remarkably adverse to exploring the panoply of tools they could bring to bear—let alone to putting in the work to develop a comprehensive strategic framework within which military action would be a component, interlocking with others. What is it, I found myself wondering, that keeps a country as powerful as the United States from employing the vast and varied nonmilitary leverage at its disposal? Why is it so easily cowed by the tantrums of weaker and often dependent allies? Why won’t it ever posture effectively itself? Bluff? Deny visas? Slow down deliveries of spare parts? Choose not to build a bridge or a hospital? Why is nuance so irretrievably beyond American officials’ grasp, leaving them a binary choice between all and nothing—between writing officials a blank check and breaking off relations? If the obstacle preventing more meaningful action against abusive corruption wasn’t active U.S. complicity, it sure looked like it.”
― Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security

“The point here is to do something. Not just anything, not waste our time just blowing off steam. Let’s all of us pick some part of our exploitative economy that especially galls us, consider our own assets and aptitudes, and change our behavior.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“The euphoria lasted only days. Chicago’s elites had been beefing up public and private security forces for years. On May 3, police shot strikers at the gates to the McCormick harvester factory.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“But leading lights of the Democratic Party and the businesses affiliated with them quickly embraced the new plutocratic ethos.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“If these men wished to influence ideas and public policies, why the secrecy? Isn’t that what people do in a democracy? In a 1997 speech, Charles Koch provided an answer: “We are greatly outnumbered.” Meaning, most Americans don’t want what they want. Democracy can’t work for them.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Laboratory experiments over the past several decades have demonstrated humans’ apparently irrational revolt against such unjust bargains. The experiments, known as “ultimatum games,” allocate a sum of money to one player, with instructions to divide it with another. If the recipient accepts the offer, the deal goes through. If she rejects it, both players get nothing. Economists had presumed that a recipient, acting rationally, would accept any amount greater than zero. In fact, in experiment after experiment—even with stakes as high as a month’s salary—roughly half of recipients rejected offers lower than 20 percent of the total sum.7”
― Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security