It is a perfect metaphor for our age that the most corrupt president in American history has been accused of trying to corrupt the president of one of the more corrupt nations on earth, who had been elected on an anti-corruption platform.
The 20th century was all about collectivism. The Nazis and the Communists shared the word “socialism” in their ideology and sought to subjugate the individual to the will of the community — the volk or the working class. The state had a leading role in imposing the ideology and forcing citizens to conform to its precepts.
Social democracy, which took hold in the United States with the New Deal and in Western Europe after World War II, valued individuals but also saw a role for the state — to safeguard individual freedoms and human rights and to pool society’s resources in order to create opportunities for self-fulfillment.
By the final decade of the 20th century, social democracy had won and was declared the only ideology left standing. Yet, it was also the beginning of its decline.
With a number of authoritarian figures popping up around the world and trampling over fundamental principles of democracy, it has been said that we’re reliving the Age of Dictators of the 1930s. But, aside from the murderous zeal of the previous era, they also lack ideological motivation. Nevertheless, there is a unifying principle behind our emerging social order. It can be defined as stealing from society by private individuals.
After the collapse of its empire, Russia has been lagging world leaders in economic development, technological prowess, military strength, and other key indicators. But it has been in a champion in thievery.
In the 1990s, a handful of oligarchs were able to buy up cheaply Soviet-era productive assets. But, coming to power in 2000, ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin turned the tables on the oligarchs, placing government bureaucrats in charge and ushering in an orgy of corruption.
Thievery is at the core of the Russian system, it is multilayered and permeates society like a matrix. At the top are Putin’s cronies who hold key government positions and run state-owned conglomerates. They are organized into clans that control a variety of businesses as well as criminal enterprises.
Bureaucrats at a lower rung steal from the federal budget — “saw it down” as the slang expression goes — and run local businesses on the side, often stealing them from original owners. Below them thieving takes place on a smaller scale, mostly at the expense of ordinary citizens who are being shaken down for bribes.
This corruption is almost in the open. Corruption activist Alexey Navalny frequently exposes the most blatant cases on his YouTube channel.
Meanwhile, corruption in Ukraine is in its early post-Soviet stage, whereby oligarchic clans vie to control the government while the population of this immensely rich country sinks ever deeper into poverty.
The Chinese government fights corruption and executes culprits — perhaps in their thousands. Nevertheless, hidden capital flight from China has averaged around $200 billion over the past four years, jumping to $130 billion in the first half of 2019.
Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted for corruption and seems determined to explode Israel’s democracy to wriggle out of responsibility. Hungary’s Viktor Orban and his friends are also enriching themselves at the expense of the state. Turkey’s finance minister is the son-in-law of the country’s strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan. And so on.
Corruption is illegal practically everywhere, even in Russia, but thieving from society doesn’t have to be. The United States has created a system in which it is perfectly legal for corporations and high net worth individuals to pay very little in taxes or even avoid them altogether.
Just as in Russia, Putin’s corrupt misrule ushered in the 21st century, so in the U.S. it was ushered in by George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cut. It was passed the federal budget was in surplus and the tax cut was meant to distribute some of the forecast government surpluses going forward. The federal budget deficit, and public sector debt, have been rocketing ever since.
The 2017 tax cut no longer even pretended to be “by the people, for the people”. There are now over 600 American billionaires, a 50% increase since 2010. One is running the country, two are contesting the Democratic presidential nomination and one has toyed with the idea of running. American billionaires are far more productive than, say, Russian or Ukrainian ones, but their wealth also reflects the severely skewed system in which they are allowed to legally steal from society. The latest giveaway to the wealthy has resulted in a nearly $1 trillion fiscal deficit at a cyclical peak of the economy, which is, to quote Donald Trump “the greatest in history.” The next recession may be ruinous to the United States and the global financial system.
Trump has praised Putin, Erdogan, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and others. He does like authoritarians but, more to the point, his foreign policy could be viewed, by analogy with the Communist International of the Stalin era, as the creation of the Pilfering International. Just as half a century ago, LBJ’s pledge to end poverty in America defined that era, so our dismal times are symbolized by the Republicans spending at Trump properties and by the President contesting the release of his taxes at the Supreme Court.
