American Kleptocracy: How Fears of Socialism and Fascism Hide Naked Theft

Kleptocracy -- now, there's a word I was taught
to associate with corrupt and exploitative governments that steal
ruthlessly and relentlessly from the people. It's a word, in fact,
that's usually applied to flawed or failed governments in Africa, Latin
America, or the nether regions of Asia. Such governments are typically
led by autocratic strong men who shower themselves and their cronies
with all the fruits of extracted wealth, whether stolen from the people
or squeezed from their country's natural resources. It's not a word
you're likely to see associated with a mature republic like the United
States led by disinterested public servants and regulated by
more-or-less transparent principles and processes.

In fact, when Americans today wish to critique or condemn their
government, the typical epithets used are "socialism" or "fascism."
When my conservative friends are upset, they send me emails with links
to material about "ObamaCare"
and the like. These generally warn of a future socialist takeover of
the private realm by an intrusive, power-hungry government. When my
progressive friends are upset, they send me emails with links pointing
to an incipient fascist
takeover of our public and private realms, led by that same
intrusive, power-hungry government (and, I admit it, I'm hardly
innocent when it comes to such "what if" scenarios).

What if, however, instead of looking at where our government might
be headed, we took a closer look at where we are -- at the
power-brokers who run or influence our government, at those who are
profiting and prospering from it? These are, after all, the "winners"
in our American world in terms of the power they wield and the wealth
they acquire. And shouldn't we be looking as well at those Americans
who are losing -- their jobs, their money, their homes, their
healthcare, their access to a better way of life -- and asking why?

If we were to take an honest look at America's blasted landscape of
"losers" and the far shinier, spiffier world of "winners," we'd have to
admit that it wasn't signs of onrushing socialism or fascism that stood
out, but of staggeringly self-aggrandizing greed and theft right in the
here and now. We'd notice our public coffers being emptied to benefit
major corporations and financial institutions working in close alliance
with, and passing on
remarkable sums of money to, the representatives of "the people." We'd
see, in a word, kleptocracy on a scale to dazzle. We would suddenly see
an almost magical disappearing act being performed, largely without
comment, right before our eyes.

Of Red Herrings and Missing Pallets of Money

Think of socialism and fascism as the red herrings of this moment or,
if you're an old time movie fan, as Hitchcockian MacGuffins -- in
other words, riveting distractions. Conservatives and tea partiers fear
invasive government regulation and excessive taxation, while railing
against government takeovers -- even as corporate
lobbyists write our public healthcare bills to favor private
interests. Similarly, progressives rail against an emergent
proto-fascist corps of private guns-for-hire, warrantless
wiretapping, and the potential government-approved assassination
of U.S. citizens, all sanctioned by a perpetual, and apparently open-ended,
state of war.

Yet, if this is socialism, why are private health insurers the
government's go-to guys for healthcare coverage? If this is fascism,
why haven't the secret police rounded up tea partiers and progressive
critics as well and sent them to the lager or the gulag?

Consider
this: America is not now, nor has it often been, a hotbed of political
radicalism. We have no substantial socialist or workers' party.
(Unless you're deluded, please don't count the corporate-friendly
"Democrat" party here.) We have no substantial fascist party. (Unless
you're deluded, please don't count the cartoonish "tea partiers" here;
these predominantly
white, graying, and fairly
affluent Americans seem most worried that the jackbooted thugs will
be coming for them.)

What drives America today is, in fact, business -- just as was true
in the days of Calvin Coolidge. But it's not the fair-minded "free
enterprise" system touted in those freshly revised Texas guidelines
for American history textbooks; rather, it's a rigged system of crony
capitalism that increasingly ends in what, if we were looking at some
other country, we would recognize as an unabashed kleptocracy.

Recall, if you care to, those pallets
stacked with hundreds of millions of dollars that the Bush
administration sent to Iraq and which, Houdini-like, simply
disappeared. Think of the ever-rising cost of our wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, now in excess
of a trillion dollars, and just whose pockets are full,
thanks to them.

If you want to know the true state of our government and where it's
heading, follow the money (if you can) and remain vigilant: our
kleptocratic Houdinis are hard at work, seeking to make yet more money
vanish from your pockets -- and reappear in theirs.

From Each According to His Gullibility -- To Each According
to His Greed

Never has the old adage my father used to repeat to me -- "the rich
get richer and the poor poorer" -- seemed fresher or truer. If you want
confirmation of just where we are today, for instance, consider this
passage from a recent
piece by Tony Judt:

In 2005, 21.2
percent of U.S. national income accrued to just 1 percent of earners.
Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and
benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker.
Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his
average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family
in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the
bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population: 120 million people.

Wealth concentration is only one aspect of our increasingly
kleptocratic system. War
profiteering by corporations (however well disguised as heartfelt
support for our heroic warfighters) is another. Meanwhile, retired
senior military officers typically line
up to cash in on the kleptocratic equivalent of welfare, peddling
their "expertise" in return for impressive
corporate and Pentagon payouts that supplement their six-figure
pensions. Even that putative champion of the Carhartt-wearing common
folk, Sarah Palin, pocketed a cool $12
million last year without putting the slightest dent in her
populist bona fides.

Based on such stories, now legion, perhaps we should rewrite George
Orwell's famous tagline from Animal Farm as: All animals
are equal, but a few are so much more equal than others.

And who are those "more equal" citizens? Certainly, major
corporations, which now enjoy a kind of political citizenship
and the largesse of a federal government eager to rescue them from
their financial mistakes, especially when they're judged "too big to
fail." In raiding the U.S. Treasury, big
banks and investment firms, shamelessly ready to jack
up executive pay and bonuses even after accepting billions in
taxpayer-funded bailouts, arguably outgun militarized multinationals in
the conquest of the public realm and the extraction of our wealth for
their benefit.

Such kleptocratic outfits are, of course, abetted by thousands of
lobbyists and by politicians who thrive off corporate campaign
contributions. Indeed, many of our more prominent public servants have
proved expert at spinning through the revolving
door into the private sector. Even ex-politicians who prefer to be
seen as sympathetic to the little guy like former House Majority Leader
Dick
Gephardt eagerly cash in.

I'm Shocked, Shocked, to Find Profiteering Going on Here

An old Roman maxim enjoins us to "let justice be done, though the
heavens fall." Within our kleptocracy, the prevailing attitude is an
insouciant "We'll get ours, though the heavens fall." This mindset
marks the decline of our polity. A spirit of shared sacrifice,
dismissed as hopelessly naive, has been replaced by a form of tribalized
privatization in which insiders find ways to profit no matter what.

Is it any surprise then that, in seeking to export our form of
government to Iraq and Afghanistan, we've produced not two model
democracies, but two emerging kleptocracies, fueled respectively by oil
and opium?

When we confront corruption in Iraq
or Afghanistan,
are we not like the police chief in the classic movie Casablanca
who is shocked, shocked
to find gambling going on at Rick's Cafe, even as he accepts his
winnings?

Why then do we bother to feign shock when Iraqi and Afghan elites, a
tiny minority, seek to enrich themselves at the expense of the majority?

Shouldn't we be flattered? Imitation, after all, is the sincerest
form of flattery. Isn't it?