Big Money Stalls Key Dodd-Frank Corporate Transparency Rule

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/31346-big-money-stalls-key-dodd-frank-corporate-transparency-rule

The reality of U.S. politics is that good ideas don’t win and take effect just because they’ve “become the law.” Yes, to get even that far, they have to have somehow threaded their way through a campaign system ruled by money instead of people; passed a House of Representatives overflowing with members from bizarrely gerrymandered districts; and made it past a filibuster in the anti-democratic Senate. But that is often just the start of the truly bloody trench warfare.

One case study is Dodd-Frank’s Section 1504. Congress, on July 21, 2010, gave the Securities and Exchange Commission 270 days to issue a rule on how exactly to implement it. Today, 1,821 days later, there still is no rule.

Section 1504 is intended to address a terrible problem, one so common it has two names: “the paradox of plenty” and “the resource curse.” Countries with lots of oil, gas and mineral wealth are, oddly enough, very frequently poor, corrupt and polluted.

What happens is that big multinational corporations have enormous incentives to bribe government officials so they can get the right to extract and sell the country’s natural resources. That, in turn, leads those government officials to spirit away vast sums of money that rightfully belong to the people to London or Zurich. Not only do ordinary citizens miss out on the looting, but they tend to suffer from the ancillary corruption, wasteful spending, military adventurism and instability.

Section 1504 requires corporations traded on U.S. stock exchanges to publicly disclose the payments they make to governments for natural resources on all of their projects around the world.

People in, say, Angola would learn exactly how much money their government has received from big oil companies, making it harder for their leaders to hide and pocket as much of it.