Kleptocracy
Kleptocracy (from Greek κλέπτης "kléptēs", "thief", κλέπτω "kléptō", "I steal", and -κρατία -"kratía" from κράτος "krátos", "power, rule") is a government whose corrupt leaders (kleptocrats) use political power to appropriate the wealth of the people and land they govern, typically by embezzling or misappropriating government funds at the expense of the wider population. Thievocracy means literally the rule by thievery and is a term used synonymously to kleptocracy. One feature of political-based socioeconomic thievery is that there is often no public announcement explaining or apologizing for misappropriations, nor any legal charges or punishment levied against the offenders. Kleptocracy  is different from plutocracy (rule by the richest) and oligarchy (rule by a small elite). In a kleptocracy, corrupt politicians enrich themselves secretly outside the rule of law, through kickbacks, bribes, and special favors, or they simply direct state funds to themselves and their associates. Also, kleptocrats often export much of their profits to foreign nations in anticipation of losing power. Characteristics. Kleptocracies are generally associated with dictatorships, oligarchies, military juntas, or other forms of autocratic and nepotist governments in which external oversight is impossible or does not exist. This lack of oversight can be caused or exacerbated by the  ability of the kleptocratic officials to control both the supply of public funds and the means of disbursal for those funds. Kleptocratic rulers often treat their country's treasury as a source of personal wealth, spending funds on luxury goods and extravagances as they see fit. Many kleptocratic rulers secretly transfer public funds into hidden personal numbered bank accounts in foreign countries to provide for themselves if removed from power. Kleptocracy is most common in developing countries and collapsing nations whose economies are reliant on the trade of natural resources. Developing nations' reliance on export incomes constitute a form of  economic rent and are easier to siphon off without causing the income to decrease. This leads to wealth accumulation for the elites and corruption may serve a beneficial purpose by generating more wealth for the state. In a collapsing nation, reliance on imports from foreign countries becomes likely as the nation's internal resources become exhausted, thereby contractually obligating themselves to trading partners. This leads to kleptocracy as the elites make deals with foreign adversaries to keep the status quo for as long as possible. To some observers, a thievery society allows the politically connected to redirect wealth to those  deemed worthier by state apparatchiks. According to some pundits, one reason governmental bodies subscribe to theft-prone policies is to lay the groundwork for the socialization of labor and property in an effort to permit thievocrats to make the populace "subservient to an institutionalized authority." Newspaper columnist Paul Greenberg, in writing against the idea of the United States sending large amounts of foreign aid to Poland in 1989, argued that Poland was emerging from "40 years of a Communist thievocracy that has obliterated not only economic progress but also the idea of a modern economy." A specific case of kleptocracy  is "Raubwirtschaft", German for "plunder economy" or "rapine economy", where the whole economy of the state is based on robbery, looting and plundering the conquered territories. Such states are either in continuous warfare with their neighbours or they simply milk their subjects as long as they have any taxable assets. Arnold Toynbee has claimed the Roman Empire was a "Raubwirtschaft." Financial system. Contemporary studies have identified 21st century kleptocracy as a global financial system based on money laundering. The International Monetary Fund has suggested it could be a consensus of estimates, that money laundering made up 2–5 percent of the  global economy in 1998. Kleptocrats engage in money laundering to obscure the corrupt origins of their wealth and safeguard it from domestic threats such as economic instability and predatory kleptocratic rivals. They are then able to secure this wealth in assets and investments within more stable jurisdictions, where it can then be stored for personal use, returned to the country of origin to support the kleptocrat's domestic activities, or deployed elsewhere to protect and project the regime's interests overseas. Kleptocrats abuse the freedoms found in Western countries by transferring funds out of a kleptocracy and into Western jurisdictions  for money laundering and asset security. Since 2011, more than $1 trillion has left developing countries annually in illicit financial outflows. A 2016 study found that $12 trillion had been siphoned out of the kleptocracies of Russia, China, and developing economies. Western professional services providers are taken advantage of by kleptocratic Russians and Chinese, exploiting legal and financial loopholes in the West to facilitate transnational money laundering. The kleptocratic financial system typically comprises four steps according to one opinion. In a 2011 forensic study of grand corruption cases, the World Bank found the United States was the leading  victim of illegal incorporation of entities involved in money laundering schemes. The Department of Treasury estimates that $300 billion is laundered annually in the United States in violation of US law. This kleptocratic financial system flourishes in the United States by illegally abusing the United States' liberal economic structure for two reasons. Currently, there are only around 1,200 money laundering convictions per year in the United States and money launderers face a less than five percent chance of conviction. Raymond Baker estimates that law enforcement fails in 99.9% of cases to detect money laundering by kleptocrats and other financial  criminals. Other Western jurisdictions favoured by kleptocrats include South Africa, the United Kingdom, and its dependencies, especially the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Guernsey, and Jersey. Jurisdictions in the European Union which are particularly favoured by kleptocrats include Cyprus, the Netherlands, and its dependency the Dutch Antilles. Political and corporate kleptomania. Other forms of a thievery society that can induce a "culture of systematic fraud" has been described as "political and corporate kleptomania." In this case the plunder and looting enriches not only high government officials, but a narrow class of plutocrats, who usually represent wealthy individuals and families  who have amassed great assets through the usage of political favoritism, special interest legislation, monopolies, special tax breaks, state intervention, subsidies or outright graft. This type of economic system of political spoils is sometimes referred to as crony capitalism. Effects. The effects of a kleptocratic regime or government on a nation are typically adverse in regards to the welfare of the state's economy, political affairs, and civil rights. Kleptocratic governance typically ruins prospects of foreign investment and drastically weakens the domestic market and cross-border trade. As kleptocracies often embezzle money from their citizens by misusing funds derived from  tax payments, or engage heavily in money laundering schemes, they tend to heavily degrade quality of life for citizens. In addition, the money that kleptocrats steal is diverted from funds earmarked for public amenities such as the building of hospitals, schools, roads, parks – having further adverse effects on the quality of life of citizens. The informal oligarchy that results from a kleptocratic elite subverts democracy (or any other political format). Examples. According to the "Oxford English Dictionary", the first use in English occurs in the publication "Indicator" of 1819: "Titular ornaments, common to Spanish kleptocracy." In early 2004, the German  anti-corruption NGO Transparency International released a list of self-enriching leaders in the two decades previous to the report. They did not know if these were the most corrupt and noted "very little is known about the amounts actually embezzled". In order of amount allegedly stolen USD, they were: In modern times, several more people are added to this list (according to other sources): Philippines. In the Philippines, the Marcos family and their cronies looted so much wealth from the Philippines that, to this day, investigators have difficulty determining precisely how many billions of dollars were stolen. Estimates of  the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcos family vary, with most sources accepting a figure of about $5 billion–$10 billion for wealth acquired in the last years of the Marcos administration, but with some estimates of wealth acquired since the 1950s going as high as $30 billion. In a 1985 report to the United States Congress House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Stephen Bosworth estimated that the Marcoses had stolen an accumulated wealth of $10 billion "in recent years", in the context of the rapid decline of the Philippine economy in the early 1980s. The same figure  was cited by the Philippines' Office of the Solicitor General soon after Marcos was deposed by the EDSA Revolution in 1986. Bosworth's source, Dr. Bernardo Villegas of the Philippine think tank the Center for Research and Communication, noted that the figure ultimately cited by Bosworth was a conservative estimate, and that the amount probably came closer to $13 billion. The Presidential Commission on Good Government's (PCGG) first chair Jovito Salonga later said that he estimated figure of $5 billion–$10 billion, based on the documentary trail left behind by the Marcoses in 1986. Internationally, Salonga's estimate  has become the popularly cited estimate of the Marcoses' unexplained wealth, and it is this amount for which the Marcoses were cited by Guinness World Records as having perpetrated the "largest-ever theft from a government" in 1989a record they are still holding in 2021. However, Dr. Jesus Estanislao, another noted Filipino economist, pointed out that this figure reflected amounts taken out of the country in the years immediately prior to the ouster of the Marcos administration, and that there was no way to accurately estimate the wealth acquired by the Marcoses since the 1950s. He suggested that the figure  could be as much as $30 billion. Among the sources of the Marcos wealth are alleged to be diverted foreign economic aid, US Government military aid (including huge discretionary funds at Marcos disposal as a "reward" for sending some Filipino troops to Vietnam) and kickbacks from public works contracts over a two-decades-long rule. Zimbabwe. In the early 21st century, charges of thievocracy have been leveled against a number of corrupt African and third-world nations, particularly the 37-year rule of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. The situation in Zimbabwe became so dire that The Zimbabwean reported  in 2010 that a number of nations imposed banking and travel restrictions on Zimbabwe's government officials, to prevent "the thievocracy from stashing away their ill-gotten gains." In 2005, Wilf Mbanga referred to the confiscation of large tracts of privately owned land and other assets in Zimbabwe as both a textbook example of thievocracy and also a cause of unprecedented food shortages and misery. Narcokleptocracy. A narcokleptocracy is a society in which criminals involved in the trade of narcotics have undue influence in the governance of a state. For instance, the term was used to describe the regime of  Manuel Noriega in Panama in a report prepared by a subcommittee of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations chaired by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. In 2020, the United States charged the unrecognized president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro with Drug Trafficking, as well as many officials and head figures of his administration. References. Notes Further reading