[AMERICANTHINKER] Kámala HarrisFormer Oakland mayor Willie Brown's former mistress, then a senatrix from California, former 2020 Dem presidential hopeful, and now Joe Biden's wing nut. She's displaying her level of competence in her hanling of the Biden Border Surge
got fact-checked on a junk statistic she cited in her big keynote speech about all that work on "root causes" she says she's doing to halt the border surge from Central America.
It's pretty embarrassing.
According to left-wing "fact-checker" PolitiFact:
For more than a decade, an interesting statistic about the cost of corruption has been bouncing around the global-economics community, showing up in statements and reports from organizations like the United Nations
...where theory meets practice and practice loses...
and the World Economic Forum.
Most recently, it came out of the mouth of Vice President Kamala Harris.
"Around the world, we know that corruption inhibits shared prosperity," Harris said May 4, at a conference on the Americas, where she touted the Biden administration’s plans to address the root causes of immigration. "In fact, the global cost of corruption is as much as 5% of the world's GDP."
"Five percent," she repeated for emphasis.
Politifact wrote that no one knows whether that figure is true. It was a figure cited several years ago by a United Nations official, averaging together the output of Western democracies, communist dictatorships, Islamist-fanatic dumps, and third-world hellholes and dividing it by the total corruption.
In her 13-minute keynote address on May 4 to the Council of the Americas, an establishment organization with a leftward tilt, but many knowledgeable people nonetheless, that was her big revelation.
It must have sent eyes rolling, given that it's highly irrelevant to the three countries she's supposedly focusing on: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. The denizens of COA would know the corruption in the Northern Triangle countries is a whole lot more. Honduras, for instance, has a president who's been indicted by the U.S. Treasury for involvement in the drug trade. That's a fish head that stinks from the top and goes all the way down. Harris hasn't exactly decided to have a talk with him.
But just for a moment, let's take Kamala at her word.
In the example of Honduras, GDP was last reported at $25 billion. Five percent of $25 billion is $1.25 billion. Joe
The Big GuyBiden
...46th president of the U.S. Former Senator-for-Life from Delaware, an example of the kind of top-notch Washington intellect to be found in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body...., however, is making much of that up with a $4-billion U.S. aid donation spread over four years for the three countries, according to his action plan. Combine it with the aid from the United Nations, the European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
, the foundations, and the big corporate investors Kamala cited, and all the corruption should be covered, right?
Actually, the corruption should expand, given that much of it flows from foreign aid, according to the sources of corruption listed by the 2020 annual Corruption Perceptions Index for Central America, put out by Transparency International. Harris might want to read it.