American Kleptocracy
Intended to serve at our pleasure, the truth is, we the people are the ones serving them.
A reader recently criticized me for the post titled Joe Biden, American Tyrant. I was told it wasn’t constructive and that criticizing the president at a time of crisis was… how should I say it? Improper.
The reader also told me to spend more time offering solutions on the way forward. As if I’m in any position to offer a means of fixing problems that dwarf any one individual or institution in a country of well over 300 million people. As I said recently, I value my own opinions, but I realize everyone else has them, too, which makes them kind of useless, in the grand scheme.
I realize I come off as rather doomerish on this blog, but then again, there’s a reason why I gave it the name of We’re Not At the End, But You Can See It From Here. If I felt better about the future, I don’t know if I start a blog to speak in depth about the challenges we face. The scary truth is this is all way above our heads, but we’re still along for the ride. I can’t tell the government to start paying off its debt. I can’t tell the government to quit being the world’s policeman. I can’t tell the government to destroy the permanent bureaucracy which runs this country, because that’d be like telling the government to commit suicide. There’s no use to sharing my advice when that advice is going to fall on deaf ears. The people running this country have no incentive to listen to any of us. Therefore, my focus, instead, is to inform readers of what I think is to come and to prepare you to face it with courage and determination. We can’t fix these problems, but we can survive them and emerge with our families and communities intact.
Some might say, “What’s the use?” To that, I say, “What’s the alternative?” Bury your heads in the sand? Pretend everything’s fine when it’s not? Place our trust into people who have failed us time and time again? Would you prefer I tell you all to do that? Ladies and gentlemen, I’m a man of hope, but I’m also a pessimist. I refuse to deny the reality in front of us and I’ll always speak the truth, no matter how upsetting it may be. Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s also the refuge of cowards, same as cynicism. As times get harder, it’s becomes more important to speak openly and honestly about our problems, not lie to ourselves and follow the crowd in marching off the cliff.
As for criticizing the president, well, all I can say is, welcome to America. In theory, the president serves at our pleasure and his livelihood is financed by the American taxpayer. The idea the president shouldn’t be criticized is a non-starter and should never be taken seriously. After all, didn’t we spend the previous four years under Donald Trump reminding ourselves every waking minute of the importance of criticizing the president? What changed now that Joe Biden is in the White House?
I’ll most definitely criticize the president if I feel they’re doing something wrong and I feel there’s much President Biden is doing wrong. But calling for the jailing of political opposition is ergregious and the talk of an authoritarian. Doesn’t that sound like something Americans should be concerned about and willing to openly criticize the president about? If the media won’t do it (they haven’t), then by God, the American people should! Are we citizens or are we subjects?
But my animosity goes beyond just President Biden. Not only do I believe this president and those on his side are indulging their dictatorial impulses, I also believe these people aren’t “leaders” in any meaningful sense of the word. Instead, they represent a kleptocracy. The definition of a kleptocracy is:
: Government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed
The U.S. government has been alternatively described as an oligarchy (rule by few), a plutocracy (rule by rich), or, more recently, a technocracy (rule by experts). All these descriptors apply, but I think “kleptocracy” serves as an all-encompassing term. Intended to serve at our pleasure, the truth is, we the people are the ones serving them. That’s not too different from the relationship between state and society the world, proving that there’s nothing particularly exceptional about America. Somehow, that gives me no comfort.
Todd Gregory and Eric Gregory, over at American Thinker, explains what kleptocratic governance in America amounts to:
Most federal civil servants are neither civil nor servants. While posing as selfless, altruistic do-gooders piously promoting fairness, equality, and the common good, most bureaucrats are (and do) none of those things. Yet the myth of the well intentioned, if bumbling and inefficient, government employee inexplicably continues to endure in the public's collective imagination.
In truth, most bureaucrats view you, the private-sector taxpayer, as cash cattle or an unlimited ATM card, and they will squeeze from you every last dollar they can — for themselves, for government. No amount of money is ever enough, government is always allegedly underfunded, and so-called critical programs (think of the children!) might need to be cut unless selfish taxpayers are coerced and guilted into ponying up ever more.
Contrary to the taxpaying electorate's perceptions, government operates on the profit motive — but even the most profligate federal employees don't do results (at least not positive ones). With little or nothing of value to contribute to the nation economically or otherwise (and when they're not targeting law-abiding taxpayers), many federal employees spend their office hours viewing online porn or social media or looking for novel ways to maximize their astronomical pensions, benefits, and perks. All on your dollar, as you're working for them.
When bureaucrats in third-world countries steal money from the state, it is called graft. It is not at all different in America. Federal corruption is subsidized by the generosity of the same private-sector taxpayers whom most federal bureaucrats despise, mock, and ridicule. It is estimated that more than 95% of federal employees' political donations go to Democrats (recall Levin's truism about the party of government).
Government "work" pays very, very well. Glib sociopaths and pathological liars like James Comey and John Brennan were multimillionaires years ago, selling their federal offices for personal profit long before their current infamy and before they preened on CNN and wrote self-serving works of fiction that became bestsellers.
Consider just the property taxes paid on a typical 30-year home mortgage. On average, that will probably come to at least $150,000. For most individuals, $150,000 represents two or three years of gross income, and it all goes to government.
That's just one type of tax. How about the gasoline tax we pay to government? How about sales tax, and state and federal income taxes? How about the innumerable hidden taxes that drive up the cost of consumer goods and services? The various bond and tax increase measures sold to us as "temporary" programs to benefit us?
Bill Maher, no right-winger, talks about the total lack of accountability and how the government isn’t even good at spending money:
Going back to the reader’s plea for me to offer solutions, exactly how are we supposed to fix something like this? Our leaders, President Biden included, are a front for the managerial state, an unelected bureaucracy that operates almost entirely on its own interia, a state-within-a-state which remains in power regardless of which president or political party controls the White House. It’d be nice if we at least had a president honest enough to identify the managerial state exists, that it’s a problem, and that it needs to be wrecked. But wrecking it’s an entirely different matter. That requires a Caesar-like figure willing to fearlessly take on Leviathan, but no such figure exists yet.
Donald Trump was the closest we had to such a someone. Though he referred to it as the “deep state,” it’s basically the same thing as the managerial state. However, he proved unable and, frankly, unwilling to take on the beast and was largely handicapped by it, proving the managerial state’s supreme power. There are many reasons to dislike Trump, but there’s no question he was no friend of the managerial state, which is a big reason why he was never viewed as a legitimate president in the first place.
Meanwhile, President Biden is arguably the managerial state’s president of choice and he possesses a level of clout no president has had in at least a generation. Unfortunately, he’s using this power to further the managerial state’s interests and enrich himself and his family. Politicians are obviously no strangers to such practices, but we spent the last several years obsessing over the Trump family’s self-enrichment.
Here’s the difference - Trump’s self-enrichment came largely as a private citizen, though some of it happened while he was president. But Trump was president for four years. Joe Biden wasn’t only vice president for eight years, he’s been in government for 50 years! The idea that Trump’s four years in government is somehow far worse and more corrupt than Biden’s 50 years in government is, without a doubt, one of the most dishonest and ridiculous things a person can say.
How deep is the rot when it comes to Biden? Take a look:
With the election of his father as vice president, Hunter Biden launched businesses fused to his father’s power that led him to lucrative deals with a rogue’s gallery of governments and oligarchs around the world. Sometimes he would hitch a prominent ride with his father aboard Air Force Two to visit a country where he was courting business. Other times, the deals would be done more discreetly. Always they involved foreign entities that appeared to be seeking something from his father.
There was, for example, Hunter’s involvement with an entity called Burnham Financial Group, where his business partner Devon Archer — who’d been at Yale with Hunter — sat on the board of directors. Burnham became the vehicle for a number of murky deals abroad, involving connected oligarchs in Kazakhstan and state-owned businesses in China.
But one of the most troubling Burnham ventures was here in the United States, in which Burnham became the center of a federal investigation involving a $60 million fraud scheme against one of the poorest Indian tribes in America, the Oglala Sioux.
Devon Archer was arrested in New York in May 2016 and charged with “orchestrating a scheme to defraud investors and a Native American tribal entity of tens of millions of dollars.” Other victims of the fraud included several public and union pension plans. Although Hunter Biden was not charged in the case, his fingerprints were all over Burnham. The “legitimacy” that his name and political status as the vice president’s son lent to the plan was brought up repeatedly in the trial.
The scheme was explicitly designed to target pension funds that had “socially responsible investing” clauses, including pension funds of labor union organizations that had publicly supported Joe Biden’s political campaigns in the past. Indeed, eight of the 11 pension funds that lost their money were either government employee or labor union pension funds. Joe Biden has “a long-standing alliance with labor.” He closely identifies with organized labor. “I make no apologies,” he has said. “I am a union man, period.” And many public unions have endorsed him over the years.
Transcripts from Archer’s trial offer a clearer picture of Hunter Biden’s role at Burnham Asset Management, in particular, the fact that the firm relied on his father’s name and political status as a means of both recruiting pension money into the scheme and alleviating investors’ concerns.
There’s more where that came from. Then there’s the possibility Biden lied. My point is that if you can’t get over how corrupt and dishonest Trump was, but you have zero concerns about Biden’s corruption and dishonesty and the fact he’s been playing this game for half a century, you’re doing this all wrong.
But you know what? All of it would be fine. Okay, maybe not fine, but tolerable, if Biden had done good for the country during all his time in power. By “good,” I mean being an American president first, the same way Viktor Orban, a man I’ve come to admire deeply, is a Hungarian prime minister first, despite also engaging in corrupt practices. Rod Dreher explains why he so approves of Orban and his reasoning echoes mine:
He recognizes that “liberalism” is not liberal anymore, and that the left-controlled institutions have no interest at all in playing fair with those who disagree with them. And he doesn’t give a rat’s rear end what they say about him. He fights, and he fights intelligently. Which is why he’s effective.
He is socially conservative but economically more to the Left than Republicans. That is, he’s a real populist.
He believes in national sovereignty, not globalism. He’s not opposed to transnational alliances and organizations, but he believes that it’s important for people to keep and defend their own traditions and ways of life. That entails controlling immigration.
None of this describes Biden. None of it. He may have occupied similar positions in the past, but Biden has always been about staying relevant. You don’t stay in politics for 50 years without being a shapeshifter, fitting the mold of whatever comes next. That much is clear in his refusal to defend the integrity of the Supreme Court after they issued a ruling he would’ve supported decades ago:
People can change their minds, but there’s no explanation for how Biden became a far-left radical today, other than the fact doing so was what it took for him to still be running the country at the age of almost 80. At the end of the day, there’s nothing of value there, no love for country, its people, or its history. As Eric Weinstein, the smartest man on the planet, once said, “Joe Biden entered the Senate in 1972 at the age of 29. If he had something to say, I’m pretty sure we would know about it already.”
I’m not happy about the American state being an anarcho-tyrannical, gerentocratic, kleptocratic, plutocratic, technocratic, and increasingly totalitarian managerial state and neither should you. If we can’t criticize a regime of this character and its leader, what are we allowed to criticize? When was the last time you saw a president whose approval ratings were in the 30-40% range, yet the public focus was on the prior president (due to the January 6 hearings)? Something’s awfully wrong when a president who has so much to answer for still manages to escape scrutiny. This is totally unaccountable leadership and they deserve no respect.
One day, we may have an actual leadership class and people worth our admiration and respect. Today, we don’t. I don’t intend to spend too much time chastising the president, and other individual figures. But I won’t pretend like they’re not worth the criticism, either. If the president or anyone else wants respect, they can either earn it, or they can beat it out of us.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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