Kleptocracy in America: Russian-style corruption, driven by global oligarchs, enabled by US elites

As Naomi Klein documents in her classic and seminal book The Shock Doctrine, disasters and upheavals are the bread-and-butter of global looters, who use the collapse of civil society or the default of debtor states to privatize state assets at pennies on the dollar, then milk them into further crises, which create more chances for looting -- but the collapse of the USSR was different, because the spies and strongmen who rode out that collapse ensured that public assets were only given to domestic looters, not off-shore oligarchs.

This created a distinctly Russian form of failed state, in which the wealth that had been stolen from the country's people was still in the country, in the hands of the country's "leaders" -- oligarchs -- who then began to eagerly offshore that cash, understanding that their wealth was precarious and depended on the ongoing sufferance of the higher-ups in the mafiyeh state (Putin has a habit of murdering his super-wealthy rivals and redistributing their assets as an example to the rest of the oligarch class).

The oligarch money that poured out of Russia to be "invested" in criminal enterprises, laundered through western firms, or parked in huge swathes of real-estate flipped the script on the Shock Doctrine: when the USSR collapsed, it didn't open the doors for foreign looters to drain the nation dry, instead, domestic looters drained the nation and began to project their power overseas, using tremendous wealth to engineer profound shifts in countries like the USA and the UK that made it a juicy target for oligarchs of every nation. Read the rest