Reposted by Drake Long
Really speedran your way into the "Please tune into our taxpayer-funded livestreamed public execution" timeline, huh?
Drake Long
@drmlong.bsky.social
890 followers 2.1K following 1.2K posts
PhD Student, War Studies, King’s College London. Senior Associate, China Warfighting Initiative, Marine Corps War College. Focuses: China’s territorial disputes, Taiwan. Writing a book on the seabed! Opinions my own.
![It was a burst of momentum that the
Biden
administration, working to slough off all the breathtaking corruption and abuse of power of the Trump years, eagerly built upon. A few months into his tenure, President Joe Biden issued a formal memo "establishing the fight against corruption" as a "core [U.S.] national security interest." For the first time in American history, a U.S. president had elevated corruption alongside terrorism and great power rivalry as central threats to American security, and even
American stability. "When leaders steal from their nations' citizens or oligarchs flout the rule of law, economic growth slows, inequality widens, and trust in government plummets," Biden announced. Corruption had now joined things like the Confederacy and communism among the pantheon of great anti-American threats-
—and it would now be treated as such.4
Not long later, Biden's administration published a thirty-eight-page strategy document laying out the president's vision. As the text outlined, "By effectively preventing and countering corruption and demonstrating the advantages of transparent and accountable governance, we can secure a critical advantage for the United States and other democracies." It was a wide-ranging view of all the things the administration could, and should, do: ways to launch anti-corruption programs across government, to pressure and strong-arm international offshore havens, to patch up all the rampant loopholes shredding the U.S.'s anti-money laundering efforts. It was, in many ways, the single greatest document the U.S. had ever authored about the threats of corruption, both internal and external-and a blueprint for what an administration with a competent president at the helm could accomplish.-
Nor did the Biden White House stop there. Almost overnight, new task forces popped up, directed by the White House to target all facets of modern oligarchy.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:xqupx7osei456mawzwxxlmvo/bafkreihxdxtriihcslpt363lux5y7kywvjkyt56ehwmttqmk5vls4bzk74)
