Read this BBC article backwards. It spoils the punch-line, but helps clarify an official British perspective on trade with Africa:

Britain’s acting High Commissioner to Kenya, Ray Kyles, said it was not the job of foreign governments to encourage their corporate investors to pay tax.

“Matters about tax are a matter for the Kenyan government,” he said. “Our role here is to recognise the advantages to Britain of increasing its exports and in helping British companies look for opportunities overseas.

“We think there’s a win here.”

Opportunity in Africa. That sounds good. Unfortunately, the companies are not actually negotiating low tax rates or working for exceptions. It turns out the opportunities are actually hacks to evade controls:

In Mombasa, Kenya’s main port town, the tea board has an official working with customs officials to investigate some startling discrepancies.

Kenya’s official export statistics say almost 50 million kilos of tea left there in 2005 bound for Britain.

But the British import statistics showed 75 million kilos – one and a half times as much – arriving here from Kenya.

A former head of domestic tax for Kenya, Jack Ranguma, told the programme he believed the mismatch was created by customs fraud.

Opportunity for fraud? Something tells me this perspective might have some colonial underpinnings. But even if it does not, here is a sobering perspective on Mr. Kyles’ concept of a “win” for the UK:

The problem is not “African corruption” per se, or that Africans are stealing from their government treasuries or corporate entities than other peoples. Africa, after all, did not produce Enron and WorldCom. The problem is that the moral consequences of corruption are greater in Africa than they are in the West. In the West, the impact of government and corporate corruption, of which there is a lot, is absorbed by the sheer size of Western economies. The shock of corruption is therefore hardly felt beyond the media frenzy that characterizes the prosecution of culprits and the lamentations of individuals who lose savings and investments to corporate scandals. Such corruption hardly ever translates to infrastructural problems for society as a whole, much less cause the breakdown of political institutions. Despite widespread incidents of corporate and public corruption in the United States, for instance, public utilities like electricity, water, and telecommunications, and social infrastructures such as roads, hospitals, and schools are hardly ever disrupted.

In Africa, on the other hand, corruption kills, literally. The embezzlement, mismanagement, or misapplication of public funds often leads to a cessation of certain social services, or the non-completion of a road, school, or hospital project. The deterioration and scarcity of infrastructure and social services have worsened in direct proportion to the corruption problem. The loss of public funds to corruption translates inevitably to a lack of medicine in a rural hospital; a lack of access to education for millions of African children; a lack of potable drinking water and electricity for millions of Africans; and a lack of good transportation infrastructure. All these can, and do, lead to millions of preventable deaths yearly.

There is no liability to the companies cheating the foreign system. Easy to see how someone thousands of miles away might mistakenly confuse foreign tax evasion with a positive outcome — they do not measure anything but their own profit. On the other hand, with truly corrupt systems abroad, paying the taxes might end up with the same basic outcome than if they did not pay the tax and have accountants scratching their head. But the point is not whether fraud justifies fraud. It is that the UK appears to be condoning corporations that hack around foreign controls.

The BBC has uncovered a set of documents that put the Bush family in a yet another awkward light.

PrisonPlanet reports:

In 1933, Marine Corps Maj.-Gen. Smedley Butler was approached by a wealthy and secretive group of industrialists and bankers, including Prescott Bush the current President’s grandfather, who asked him to command a 500,000 strong rogue army of veterans that would help stage a coup to topple then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

According to the BBC, the plotters intended to impose a fascist takeover and “Adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.”

The powerful and rich businessmen apparently thought there was no need for Democracy, especially since it could interfere with plans for a “better” economy. The article suggests plans were perhaps foiled by Butler who uncovered and tried to warn the President. PrisonPlanet does not explain how his warning was largely dismissed by Congress and the media and yet the plot failed.

The US Ambassador to Germany gave his own chilling prediction in 1936:

When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions.

Or, in modern security terms, when executives believe there should be no liability from using their fortunes to transfer all risk to those less fortunate they will do everything in their power to create a state that enables their warped vision.

While it may be tempting to say the grandson of a clearly fascist Bush family man is succeeding where his predecessors failed, I think it is actually more complex. The younger Bush apparently has been a failure at everything in his life except avoiding responsibilities and gaining control. His work has led to a substantial undermining of Democracy through foolhardy and careless time in office, but the sloppy nature of his work may mean the overall decline in fortune could still be linked back to him by popular circles.

Some suggest the economy is dragging, security is as bad if not worse than the year prior to 9/11, innovation is failing, infrastructure is showing signs of neglect…all of which raises the stakes for any group that intends to spend resources to keep a larger and increasingly critical population at bay. Industry is perhaps most likely to join a coalition to back fascism if they think the arrangement has some kind of low-cost guarantee of safety from popular rule. It is unlikely the Bush administration can provide any such credible promise going forward given his hugely bumbling past. The path to fascism would thus be either staged for later or postponed again. The sign to watch for is Bush attempting to destroy as much of the system of rule as possible in order to plunge the country into further decline and force a period of “necessary” intervention by industry leaders to save the country from itself.

So is the direction of American politics inevitable, bad luck, or a carefully executed conspiracy (evil genius syndrome)? Regardless of the cause(s), the consequences of this recently uncovered Bush plan for America is not hard to describe. In risk terms, it would be called a predictable disaster.