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Foreign aid is never intended to help the people of a nation. It's used by high-income democratic nations to support autocratic policies and resource extraction
by djsumdog 6y ago
Foreign aid is never intended to help the people of a nation. It's used by high-income democratic nations to support autocratic policies and resource extraction.
I doubt very much of that 793M makes it to any of the people pulling these scams. It's typically used as legal bribes for the governments of those countries, who distributed it to all their cronies at the top, in order to maintain power and sell national resources to the US/EU and others at very low prices.
The Dictators Handbook by Mesquita and Smith go into more details on how this works.
- FractalParadigm 6y agoThat's kind of the point - hold the 'foreign aid' funds from the nation, until said nation does something to combat the fraud. You can't actively police your laws inside a foreign nation, but with some level of control (i.e. $793M/a in "foreign aid" held over their heads), you can tell the nation what you want them to do about things affecting you. Chances are good they're going to comply.
- foolmeonce 6y agoIf we accept the assumption that $36b really is in actual Nigeria based scammers, and the government were able to comply and threatened or started to comply, they could also tax scam income 2.5% for government to have the same funds from this one scam alone. But without taxing scams directly, there are massive trickle down effects that probably amount to more than 2.5% being siphoned off to taxes.
- CinchWrench 6y ago>It's typically used as legal bribes for the governments of those countries, who distributed it to all their cronies at the top Wouldn't those be exactly the people you need in order to stop these scams?