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2016 Postmortem
Showing Original Post only (View all)THIS... Right Here... Is Why I Want Bernie Sanders Over Hillary Rodham Clinton... [View all]
Were living in a kleptocracy: America robs from its poor while its infrastructure crumblesThe U.S. fancies itself the world leader in clean government, even as we methodically bankrupt our disenfranchised.
Rebecca Gordon - Salon
Sunday, Nov 29, 2015 12:30 PM PST
<snip>
A top government official with energy industry holdings huddles in secret with oil company executives to work out the details of a potentially lucrative national energy policy. Later, that same official steers billions of government dollars to his former oil-field services company. Well-paid elected representatives act with impunity, routinely trading government contracts and other favors for millions of dollars. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens live in fear of venal police forces that suck them dry by charging fees for services, throwing them in jail when they cant pay arbitrary fines or selling their court debts to private companies. Sometimes the police just take peoples life savings leaving them with no recourse whatsoever. Sometimes they steal and deal drugs on the side. Meanwhile, the countrys infrastructure crumbles. Bridges collapse, or take a quarter-century to fix after a natural disaster, or (despite millions spent) turn out not to be fixed at all. Many citizens regard their government at all levels with a weary combination of cynicism and contempt. Fundamentalist groups respond by calling for a return to religious values and the imposition of religious law.
What country is this? Could it be Nigeria or some other kleptocratic developing state? Or post-invasion Afghanistan where Ahmed Wali Karzai, CIA asset and brother of the U.S.-installed president Hamid Karzai, made many millions on the opium trade (which the U.S. was ostensibly trying to suppress), while his brother Mahmoud raked in millions more from the fraud-ridden Bank of Kabul? Or could it be Mexico, where the actions of both the government and drug cartels have created perhaps the worlds first narco-terrorist state?
In fact, everything in this list happened (and much of it is still happening) in the United States, the world leader or so we like to think in clean government. These days, however, according to the Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International (TI), our country comes in only 17th in the least-corrupt sweepstakes, trailing European and Scandinavian countries as well as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In fact, TI considers us on a par with Caribbean island nations like Barbados and the Bahamas. In the U.S., TI says, from fraud and embezzlement charges to the failure to uphold ethical standards, there are multiple cases of corruption at the federal, state and local level.
And heres a reasonable bet: its not going to get better any time soon and it could get a lot worse. When it comes to the growth of American corruption, one of TIs key concerns is the how the Supreme Courts 2010 Citizens United decision opened the pay-to-play floodgates of the political system, allowing Super PACs to pour billions of private and corporate money into it, sometimes in complete secrecy. Citizens United undammed the wealth of the super-rich and their enablers, allowing big donors like casino capitalist a description that couldnt be more literal Sheldon Adelson to use their millions to influence government policy.
Kleptocracy USA?
Every now and then, a book changes the way you see the world. Its like shaking a kaleidoscope and suddenly all the bits and pieces fall into a new pattern. Sarah Chayess Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security shook my kaleidoscope. Chayes traveled to Afghanistan in 2001 as a reporter for NPR. Moved by the land and people, she soon gave up reporting to devote herself to working with non-governmental organizations helping Afghans rebuild their shattered but extraordinary country.
In the process, she came to understand the central role government corruption plays in the collapse of nations and the rise of fundamentalist organizations like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State. She also discovered just how unable (and often unwilling) American military and civilian officials were to put a stop to the thievery that characterized Afghanistans government at every level from the skimming of billions in reconstruction funds at the top to the daily drumbeat of demands for bribes and fees from ordinary citizens seeking any kind of government service further down the chain of organized corruption. In general, writes Chayes, kleptocratic countries operate very much as pyramid schemes, with people at one level paying those at the next for the privilege of extracting money from those below.
Chayes suggests that acute government corruption may be a major factor at the root of the violent extremism now spreading across the Greater Middle East and Africa. When government robs ordinary people blind, in what she calls a vertically integrated criminal enterprise, the victims tend to look for justice elsewhere. When officials treat the law with criminal contempt, or when the law explicitly permits government extortion, they turn to what seem like uncorrupted systems of reprisal and redemption outside those laws. Increasingly, they look to God or Gods laws and, of course, to Gods self-proclaimed representatives. The result can be dangerously violent explosions of anger and retribution. Eruptions can take the form of the Puritan iconoclasm that rocked Catholic Europe in the sixteenth century or present-day attempts by the Taliban or the Islamic State to implement a harsh, even vindictive version of Islamic Sharia law, while attacking unbelievers in the territory they control.
Reading Thieves of State, it didnt take long for my mind to wander from Kabul to Washington...
<snip>
More: http://www.salon.com/2015/11/29/were_living_in_a_kleptocracy_america_robs_from_its_poor_while_its_infrastructure_crumbles_partner/
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THIS... Right Here... Is Why I Want Bernie Sanders Over Hillary Rodham Clinton... [View all]
WillyT
Nov 2015
OP
Raise the minimum wage to $15/hr and that'll more than make up the difference.
HerbChestnut
Nov 2015
#19
Get a Congress that would even *think* of passing that bill - one that would work with him.
BlueCaliDem
Nov 2015
#53
Simplest terms, yes every other country enjoys cheaper health care, in simplest terms
Thinkingabout
Nov 2015
#67
It's laughable: Bernie proposes something popular, you say Congress won't do it; he
merrily
Nov 2015
#7
Is that all you got out of this article? HRC is part of the corrupted Establishment.
rhett o rick
Nov 2015
#15
Join our banned club, same thing happened to me. Then they kept commenting about
Dustlawyer
Nov 2015
#50
And they have convinced their "followers" to blindly trust them as they loot the 99%.
rhett o rick
Nov 2015
#18
It's really a very simple and scary picture for me, in spite of our corrupt media.
DrBulldog
Nov 2015
#22
I agree that if Clinton gets elected it will set the Populist Movement back a bit, but it won't
rhett o rick
Nov 2015
#25
Don't worry, the energy that is pushing this primary toward outsiders didn't come from nowhere
Hydra
Nov 2015
#32
K&R The only thing worse than not working, in my book, is doing bad work.
raouldukelives
Nov 2015
#56
More than one expert believe we have already lost it. When the 1% can buy elections
rhett o rick
Nov 2015
#65