The Klept: (07 Jan 2022 – Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow)
▻https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/07/the-klept
When I emigrated from the UK to the US in 2016, I explained my reasons in a post called “Why I’m Leaving London.” The basic reason? The increasing obviousness of a city that existed primarily to launder vast, corrupt fortunes, and only incidentally be a place where Londoners could live and thrive.
Since then, the UK – and especially the City of London, home of the nation’s finances – has doubled down on its role as enabler and concierges to the world’s filthiest money, and the psychopaths who come with it. (...)
Not all corrupt money comes from the former Soviet republics of Eurasia, but these countries – and Russia – embody a special kind of corruption: kleptocracy ("a political economy dominated by a small number of people/entities with close links to the state").
This form of corruption is closely related to the chumocracy that dominates British politics, and especially the ruling Conservative party. Thus it should come as no surprise that the UK, with its Thatcher- and Blair-era emphasis on finance, and its political compatibility with kleptocracy, is a linchpin in global kleptocratic money-laundering and corruption. (...)
The Made-in-Britain enablers of the klept will tell you that the fortunes they facilitate are not criminal fortunes, and the Home Office will tell you that its focus is on Eurasian criminal gangs. But as the Pandora Papers – and other vast finance leaks – show us, the criminal wealth of the former Soviet Union is minute when compared to the oligarchs’ fortunes.
The klept isn’t criminal, because the klept writes the laws.
This is how the Jackpot starts.
