#kleptocratie

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.

The inexorable rise of Jake Sullivan - POLITICO
▻https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/27/jake-sullivan-biden-national-security-440814

https://static.politico.com/e0/5b/445c30ef4f238b22a2bea3142976/ap20329686581196.jpg

He is similarly optimistic about one of his loftiest goals: “to rally our allies to combat corruption and kleptocracy, and to hold systems of authoritarian capitalism accountable for greater transparency and participation in a rules-based system.”

That effort will need to begin at home — as has been well documented, the world’s kleptocratic regimes depend heavily on money laundering networks that commonly extend into Western centers of global finance like New York and London, aided by lax incorporation rules in places like Delaware .

#kleptocratie #états-unis #blanchiment

Au #Liban, le parlement se barricade pour se protéger du peuple
▻https://twitter.com/LaraJBitar/status/1219260551404146689

▻https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1219260294066855936/pu/vid/636x360/ZbpFArdKaYEHgEEp.mp4?tag=10

#kleptocratie

« Les Libanais n’ont plus rien à perdre »
▻https://www.la-croix.com/Monde/Moyen-Orient/Libanais-nont-rien-perdre-2020-01-19-1201072698

https://img.aws.la-croix.com/2020/01/19/1201072698/manifestants-lancent-projectiles-alors-police-utilise-canons-Beyrouth-18-janvier_0_729_485.jpg

« Même si 500 000 Libanais manifestent, il y en a plus de trois millions qui restent assis chez eux. Et les partis ne se sentent pas réellement menacés. »

Même constat pour Karim Bitar, qui rappelle que les partis au pouvoir disposent aussi d’une base sociale et communautaire considérable. « L’oligarchie, extrêmement résiliente, a déjà résisté à de nombreuses manifestations par le passé », souligne-t-il. Mais, précise-t-il, « à moins d’un réveil soudain de la part de l’establishment, qui doit comprendre qu’il y a un avant et un après 17-octobre », le risque existe bien d’une radicalisation « des deux côtés, sur l’ensemble du territoire. Les Libanais n’ont plus rien à perdre. »

Pour Georges Haddad, « Nous allons vers plus de #détresse, avec des personnes qui affronteront la faim, n’auront plus accès aux hôpitaux, aux écoles. Pour eux, ce sera une question de survie. »

#Liban #kleptocratie

America Is Not a Democracy - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/america-is-not-a-democracy/550931

The subversion of the people’s preferences in our supposedly democratic system was explored in a 2014 study by the political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern. Four broad theories have long sought to answer a fundamental question about our government: Who rules? One theory, the one we teach our children in civics classes, holds that the views of average people are decisive. Another theory suggests that mass-based interest groups such as the AARP have the power. A third theory predicts that business groups such as the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America and the National Beer Wholesalers Association carry the day. A fourth theory holds that policy reflects the views of the economic elite.

Gilens and Page tested those theories by tracking how well the preferences of various groups predicted the way that Congress and the executive branch would act on 1,779 policy issues over a span of two decades. The results were shocking. Economic elites and narrow interest groups were very influential: They succeeded in getting their favored policies adopted about half of the time, and in stopping legislation to which they were opposed nearly all of the time. Mass-based interest groups, meanwhile, had little effect on public policy. As for the views of ordinary citizens, they had virtually no independent effect at all. “When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” Gilens and Page wrote.

#démocratie #etats-unis #kleptocratie «#élite»

The #Corruption Revealed in the #Panama_Papers Opened the Door to #Isis
▻http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/the-corruption-revealed-in-the-panama-papers-opened-the-door-to-isis

Three years ago I was in Baghdad after it had rained heavily, driving for miles through streets that had disappeared under grey-coloured flood water combined with raw sewage. Later I asked Shirouk Abayachi, an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources, why this was happening and she said that “since 2003, $7bn has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers weren’t built or they were built very badly”. She concluded that “corruption is the key to all this”.

Anybody discussing the Panama Papers and the practices of the law firm Mossack Fonseca should think about the ultimate destination of the $7bn not spent on the Baghdad drainage system. There will be many go-betweens and middle men protecting anyone who profited from this huge sum, but the suspicion must be that a proportion of it will have ended up in offshore financial centres where money is hidden and can be turned into legally held assets.

There is no obvious link between the revelations in the Panama Papers, the rise of Islamic State and the wars tearing apart at least nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But these three developments are intimately connected as ruling elites, who syphon off wealth into tax havens and foreign property, lose political credibility. No ordinary Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians will fight and die for rulers they detest as swindlers. Crucial to the rise of Isis, al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan is not their own strength and popularity, but the weakness and unpopularity of the governments to which they are opposed.

Kipling was right in believing that there has always been corruption, but since the early 1990s corrupt states have often mutated into kleptocracies. Ruling families and the narrow coteries around them have taken a larger and larger share of the economic cake.”

“#Élites” #kleptocraties

Ukraine Conflict Flares as Government Fights ‘Oligarch’ Crisis - Bloomberg Business
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-23/russia-says-ukraine-shooting-violates-truce-as-clashes-persist

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said his government would crack down on “total corruption and smuggling,” and the cabinet gave private security services 24 hours to disarm after a group of men seized state-controlled oil company Ukrnafta.
(…)
Ukraine’s government also vowed to tackle domestic dissent. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced tighter gun-control measures and referred specifically to Dnipropetrovsk Governor Igor Kolomoisky, who has served as a board member at Ukrnafta, Ukraine’s richest man Rinat Akhmetov, second-wealthiest Viktor Pinchuk, and other tycoons.
“A scenario of oligarch-supported political crisis will not pass,” Yatsenyuk, who dismissed the first deputy head of the fiscal service in charge of the tax police and the deputy head of the customs service on Monday, said during a government meeting. “We will not let anyone rob the country , which is at war.”
State Security Service chief Valentyn Nalyvaychenko said on Monday that Dnipropetrovsk regional government officials are financing armed gangs and threatening investigators.

Following his comments, four lawmakers in President Petro Poroshenko’s party left the parliamentary faction, saying that discrediting the regional administration was a violation of the ruling coalition pact, news service Interfax reported.

Du moment qu’elle se fait dans le sens des intérêts des #élites_délinquantes, y compris occidentales, la #kleptocratie dans les pays pauvres est un #métier_très_sûr.
▻http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e8fe02d4-c2b1-11e4-a59c-00144feab7de.html

In fact, argues the Oxford political scientist Ricardo Soares de Oliveira in his marvellous new book, “Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War,” we live in “an oligarch’s ideal world”. Western countries barely even pretend to disapprove of kleptocrats any more.

« #nos_valeurs »

#Algérie #Algeria #Sonatrach : poule aux œufs de la « #kléptocratie »
▻http://www.argotheme.com/organecyberpresse/spip.php?article1629

Nouvelle #affaire de #corruption algérienne, mettant en cause un #juge #international !

Mettant en cause encore une fois Sonatrach, une dépêche de l’ #APS -Algérie #Presse Service- du 12 février, rapporte qu’une #information #judiciaire est ouverte, suite à des #articles de presse, par le pôle pénal spécialisé du #tribunal de Sidi M’hamed à #Alger . Pour la même #escroquerie, l’ #agence de presse « #Reuters », a de son côté couvert aussi une autre #enquête judiciaire en #Italie , à #Milan .