[Peace-discuss] FW: Home, Sweet Kleptocracy

[David Johnson]

Are We in Ferguson - or Kabul?

Reading Thieves of State reminded me that we're not living in the country
many of us imagine, but in something like an American klepto-state.
Corruption, it turns out, doesn't just devour the lives of people in far-off
nations. Right now, it's busy shoving what's left of our own democracy down
our throats.

 

 

 

Home, Sweet Kleptocracy 
Kabul in America 
By  <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/rebeccagordon> Rebecca Gordon

Well-paid elected representatives act with impunity, routinely
<http://www.citizensforethics.org/policy/entry/earmark-reform> trading
government contracts and other favors for millions of dollars. Meanwhile,
ordinary citizens live in fear of
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/10/report-in-lean-times
-police-start-taking-a-lot-more-stuff-from-people/> venal police forces that
suck them dry
<http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=print_disp
lay&article_id=2108&issue_id=62010> by charging fees for services,
<http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/09/384968360/jail-time-for-u
npaid-court-fines-and-fees-can-create-cycle-of-poverty> throwing them in
jail when they can't pay arbitrary fines or
<http://harvardlawreview.org/2015/04/policing-and-profit/> selling their
court "debts" to private companies. Sometimes the police just take
<http://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit/introduction/> people's life
savings leaving them with no recourse whatsoever. Sometimes they
<http://www.alternet.org/drugs/5-outrageous-cases-drug-war-police-corruption
-week> steal and deal drugs on the side. Meanwhile, the country's
infrastructure crumbles. Bridges
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge> collapse, or
take
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_the_San_Francisco
%E2%80%93Oakland_Bay_Bridge> a quarter-century to fix after a natural
disaster, or (despite millions spent) turn out
<http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Plague-of-problems-puts-Bay-Bridge-se
ismic-safety-6253577.php> not to be fixed at all. Many citizens regard their
government at all levels with a weary combination of cynicism and contempt.

What country is this? Could it be Nigeria or some other
<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/03/revealing-tunisia-corrupt
ion-under-ben-ali-201432785825560542.html> kleptocratic developing state? Or
post-invasion Afghanistan where Ahmed Wali Karzai, CIA asset and brother of
the U.S.-installed president Hamid Karzai,
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html> made many
millions on the opium trade (which the U.S. was ostensibly trying to
suppress), while his brother Mahmoud raked in
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/11/us-afghanistan-bank-idUSKCN0IV1X0
20141111> millions more from the fraud-ridden Bank of Kabul? Or could it be
Mexico, where the actions of both the government and drug cartels have
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175971/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon,_it_didn%2
7t_work_in_afghanistan,_so_let%27s_do_it_in_mexico> created perhaps the
world's first narco-terrorist state?

In fact, everything in this list happened (and much of it is still
happening) in the United States, "from fraud and embezzlement charges to the
failure to uphold ethical standards, there are multiple cases of corruption
at the federal, state and local level."

And here's a reasonable bet: it's not going to get better any time soon and
it could get a lot worse. 

 

 

Kleptocracy USA?

Sarah Chayes's
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393352285/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> Thieves
of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security . 

 

Chayes traveled to Afghanistan in 2001 as a reporter for NPR. Moved by the
land and people, she soon gave up reporting to devote herself to working
with non-governmental organizations helping "Afghans rebuild their shattered
but extraordinary country."

In the process, she came to understand the central role government
corruption plays in the collapse of nations and the rise of fundamentalist
organizations like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State. She also
discovered just how unable (and often unwilling) American military and
civilian officials were to put a stop to the
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176068/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_roads_to_no
where%2C_ghost_soldiers%2C_and_a_%2443_million_gas_station_in_afghanistan/>
thievery that characterized Afghanistan's
<https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/report/2015/03/17/108613/t
ackling-corruption-in-afghanistan-its-now-or-never/> government at every
level - from the
<http://www.voanews.com/content/bribes-in-afghanistan-last-year-reached-almo
st-four-billion-dollars/1599111.html> skimming of billions in reconstruction
funds at the top to the daily drumbeat of demands for bribes and "fees" from
ordinary citizens seeking any kind of government service further down the
chain of organized corruption. In general, writes Chayes, kleptocratic
countries operate very much as pyramid schemes, with people at one level
paying those at the next for the privilege of extracting money from those
below.

Chayes suggests that "acute government corruption" may be a major factor "at
the root" of the violent extremism now spreading across the Greater Middle
East and Africa. When government robs ordinary people blind, in what she
calls a "vertically integrated criminal enterprise," the victims tend to
look for justice elsewhere. When officials treat the law with criminal
contempt, or when the law explicitly permits government extortion, they turn
to what seem like uncorrupted systems of reprisal and redemption outside
those laws. 

Reading Thieves of State, it didn't take long for my mind to wander from
Kabul to Washington, from a place where American-funded corruption was an
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176068/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_roads_to_nowh
ere,_ghost_soldiers,_and_a_$43_million_gas_station_in_afghanistan/> open
secret to a place where few would think it applicable.  Why was it, I began
to wonder, that in our country "corruption" never came up in relation to
bankers the government allowed to sell mortgages to people who couldn't
repay them, then slicing and dicing their debt into investment "securities"
that brought on the worst recession since the 1930s? (Neil Barofsky, who
took on the thankless role of inspector general for the Troubled Asset
Relief Fund, tells the grim tale of how the government was "captured by the
banks" in his 2012 book
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1451684959/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>
Bailout.)

Chayes's book made me think in a new way about the long-term effects of the
<http://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/> revolving door between the Capitol -
supposedly occupied by the people's representatives - and the K Street
suites of Washington's myriad lobbyists.  It also brought to mind all those
former  <https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/top.php?display=Z> members of
Congress,
<http://www.duffelblog.com/2013/02/general-worried-about-finding-job-as-lobb
yist-defense-consultant-after-retirement/> generals, and national security
state officials who parachute directly out of government service and onto
the boards of defense-oriented companies or into
<http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/06/05/DOD-Retirees-From-4-star-
General-to-7-Figure-Income> cushy consultancies catering to that same
security state.

It also made me think in a new way about the
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/opinion/the-worst-voter-turnout-in-72-yea
rs.html> ever-lower turnouts for our elections. There are good reasons why
so many Americans - especially those living in poverty and in communities of
color - don't vote. It's not that they don't know their forebears
<https://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-mar
tyrs> died for that right. It's not that they don't object when their votes
are
<https://www.aclu.org/map/battle-protect-ballot-voter-suppression-measures-p
assed-2013> suppressed. It's that, like many other Americans, they clearly
believe their government to be so corrupt that voting is pointless.

Are We in Ferguson - or Kabul?

What surprises me most, however, isn't the corruption at the top, but the
ways in which lives at the bottom are affected by it. Reading Thieves of
State set me thinking about how regularly money in this country now flows
from the bottom up that pyramid. If you head down, you no longer find
yourself on Main Street, U.S.A., but in a place that seems uncomfortably
like Kabul; in other words, a Ponzi-scheme world of the first order.

Consider, for instance, the Justice Department's 2015
<http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2
015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf> report on the police in
Ferguson, Missouri, about whom we've learned so much since Michael Brown, an
unarmed black teenager, was
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/ferguson-missouri-town-und
er-siege-after-police-shooting.html?_r=0> shot to death on August 9, 2014.
As it happens, the dangers for Ferguson's residents hardly ended with police
misconduct. "Ferguson's law enforcement practices are shaped by the city's
focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs," Justice Department
investigators found:

"This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of
Ferguson's police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional
policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures
that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of
the Ferguson community."

The report then recounted in excruciating detail the extent to which the
police were a plague on the city's largely black population. Ferguson was -
make no mistake about it - distinctly Kabul, U.S.A.  The police, for
instance, regularly accosted residents for what might be termed "sitting in
a car while Black," and then charged them with bogus "crimes" like failing
to wear a seat belt in a parked car or "making a false declaration" that,
say, one's name was "Mike," not "Michael." While these arrests didn't make
money directly for the police force, officers interested in promotion were
told to keep in mind that their tally of "self-initiated activities"
(tickets and traffic stops) would have a significant effect on their future
success on the force. Meanwhile, those charged often lost their jobs and
livelihoods amid a welter of court appearances.

Ferguson's municipal court played its own grim role in this ugly scheme. As
Justice Department investigators discovered, it did not "act as a neutral
arbiter of the law or a check on unlawful police conduct."  Instead, it used
its judicial authority "as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees
that advance[d] the city's financial interests."

By issuing repeated arrest warrants when people missed court appearances or
were unable to pay fines, it managed to regularly pile one fine on top of
another and then often refused to accept partial payments for the sums owed.
Under Missouri state law, moving traffic violations, for instance,
automatically required the temporary suspension of a driver's license.
Ferguson residents couldn't get their licenses back until - you guessed it -
they paid their fines in full, often for charges that were manufactured in
the first place.

As if in Kabul, people then had to weigh the risk of driving license-less
(and getting arrested) against losing their jobs or - without a car - not
making it to court. With no community service option available, many found
themselves spending time in jail.  From the police to the courts to city
hall, what had been organized was, in short, an everyday money-raising
racket of the first order.

And all of this was linked to the police department, which actually ran the
municipal court.  As the Justice Department report put it, that court
"operates as part of the police department. is supervised by the Ferguson
chief of police, is considered part of the police department for city
organizational purposes, and is physically located within the police
station. Court staff report directly to the chief of police." He, in turn,
ran the show, doing everything from collecting fines to determining bail
amounts.

The Harvard Law Review
<http://harvardlawreview.org/2015/04/policing-and-profit/> reported that, in
2013, Ferguson had a population of 22,000.  That same year, "its municipal
court issued 32,975 arrest warrants for nonviolent offenses," or almost
one-and-a-half arrests per inhabitant. The report continued:

"In Ferguson, residents who fall behind on fines and don't appear in court
after a warrant is issued for their arrest (or arrive in court after the
courtroom doors close, which often happens just five minutes after the
session is set to start for the day) are charged an additional $120 to $130
fine, along with a $50 fee for a new arrest warrant and 56 cents for each
mile that police drive to serve it. Once arrested, everyone who can't pay
their fines or post bail (which is usually set to equal the amount of their
total debt) is imprisoned until the next court session (which happens three
days a month). Anyone who is imprisoned is charged $30 to $60 a night by the
jail."

Whether in Kabul or Ferguson, this kind of daily oppression wears people
down. It's no surprise that long before the police shot Michael Brown, the
citizens of Ferguson had little trust or respect for them.

Privatizing Official Corruption

But might Ferguson not have been an outlier, a unique Kabul-in-America case
of a rogue city government bent on extracting every penny from its poorest
residents? Consider, then, the town of
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/05/us/lawsuit-accuses-missouri-city-of-finin
g-homeowners-to-raise-revenue.html?emc=edit_th_20151105&nl=todaysheadlines&n
lid=65427895> Pagedale, Missouri, which came up with a hardly less
kleptocratic way of squeezing money out of its citizens. Instead of focusing
on driving and parking, Pagedale
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/05/us/lawsuit-accuses-missouri-city-of-finin
g-homeowners-to-raise-revenue.html?emc=edit_th_20151105&nl=todaysheadlines&n
lid=65427895> routinely hit homeowners with fines for "offenses" like
failing to have blinds and "matching curtains" on their windows or having
"unsightly lawns."  Pagedale is a small town, with 3,300 residents. In 2013,
the city's general revenues totaled $2 million, 17% percent from such fines
and fees.

Might such kleptocratic local revenue-extraction systems, however, be
limited to just one Midwestern state? Consider then the cozy relationship
that Augusta, capital of Georgia, has with  <http://www.sentrak.com/faqs/>
Sentinel Offender Services, LLC.  That company makes electronic monitoring
equipment used by state and local government agencies, ranging from the Los
Angeles County Probation Department to the Massachusetts Office of the
Commissioner of Probation. Its website touts the benefits to municipalities
of what it calls "offender-funded programs" in which the person on probation
pays the company directly for his or her own monitoring, saving the courts
the cost of administering a probation system. In return, the company sets
its own fees at whatever level it chooses. "By individually assessing each
participant a fee based on income," says Sentinel, "our sliding-fee scale
approach has shifted the financial burden to the participant, allowing
program growth and size to be a function of correctional need rather than
budget availability."

Such systems of privatized "justice" that bleed the poor are now spreading
across the U.S., a country officially without debtor's prisons. According to
the Harvard Law Review article, some cities charge a "fee" to everyone they
arrest, whether or not they're ever convicted of an offense. In Washington,
D.C., on the other hand, for "
<http://www.dccourts.gov/internet/public/aud_criminal/handlearrest.jsf>
certain traffic and a number of lower level criminal offenses," you can
simply pay your arresting officer "to end a case on the spot," avoiding
lengthy and expensive court costs.  Other jurisdictions charge people who
are arrested for the costs of police investigations, prosecution, public
defender services, a jury trial ("sometimes with different fees depending on
how many jurors a defendant requests"), and incarceration.

Watch Your Ass(ets)

Even Machiavelli, who counseled princes seizing new territory to commit all
their crimes at once because human beings have such short memories, warned
that people will accept pretty much any kind of oppression unless "you prey
on the possessions or the women of your subjects." So many centuries later,
while we women now tend to believe we belong to ourselves,
<http://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit/introduction/#citation_32> civil
asset forfeiture is still a part of American life. Unlike criminal asset
forfeiture, which permits the government to seize a person's assets after
conviction of a crime, civil forfeiture allows local, state, or federal law
enforcement to seize and keep someone's money or other property even if he
or she is never charged. If, say, you are suspected of involvement with
drugs or terrorism, the police can seize all the money you have on you on
the spot, even if they don't arrest you - and you have to go to court to get
it back.

Federal asset forfeiture collections have risen from around $800 million in
2002 to almost $4.5 billion in 2014,
<http://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit/introduction/#citation_32>
according to the Institute for Justice (IJ). Governments defend the practice
as a means of preventing suspected criminals - especially high-level drug
dealers - from using their money to commit more crimes. But all too often,
it's poor people whose money is "forfeited," even when they've committed no
crime. The Pennsylvania ACLU
<https://www.aclu.org/news/new-aclu-report-shows-philadelphia-da-seizes-1-mi
llion-cash-annually-innocent-philadelphians> reported that police take
around a million dollars from Philadelphians each year in 6,000 separate
cases - and not from drug lords either. More than half the cases involve
seizures of less than $192, and in a city that's only 43% black, 71% of
those seizures from people charged with no crimes come from African
Americans. If your property is seized, you can try to go to court to get it
back but,
<http://www.aclupa.org/files/1814/4526/3118/Broken_Justice_-_Montgomery_Coun
ty_final.pdf> says the ACLU, you should expect to make an average of four
court appearances. Most people just give up.

Reading Thieves of State reminded me that we're not living in the country
many of us imagine, but in something like an American klepto-state.
Corruption, it turns out, doesn't just devour the lives of people in far-off
nations. Right now, it's busy shoving what's left of our own democracy down
our throats.

Chayes documents how such corruption can lead to violent explosions in other
countries. Indeed, it was a final kleptocratic insult - a police woman's
slap in the face after he refused to pay a bribe to retrieve his confiscated
vegetable cart - that led Tunisian
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi> Mohamed Bouazizi to burn
himself to death and touch off the Arab Spring. As Machiavelli wrote so long
ago, people will put up with a lot -
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/cia-torture-report-docu
ment.html> torture,
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-
surveillance-revelations-decoded#section/1> mass surveillance, even a
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-gop-clown-car-20150812
> car full of clowns masquerading as candidates for president - but they
don't like being robbed by their own government. Sooner or later, they will
rebel. Let's hope, when that happens, that we don't end up under the rule of
our own American
<http://www.salon.com/2014/07/03/we_are_a_corporate_theocracy_now_the_christ
ian_right_seeks_cultural_and_political_domination/> Taliban or some
billionaire reality TV star.

 

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