kleptocracies galore
Just an image what I stole from the net
So a little discussion between Anne Applebaum and other public intellectuals on the rise of kleptocracy, which I’ve been aware of for some time (it’s nothing if not obvious), has made me think I should know more, as always.
The USA has, supposedly (I don’t trust the process) elected a long-term capitalist criminal to be its elected monarch for another four years. No other WEIRD country would allow a person with his criminal record to hold such a position. Not only that, no other WEIRD country has such a quasi-monarchical position on offer.
But I’ve pointed out the massive failings of the USA’s federal political system many times, and I won’t go over it again. In this piece I want to home in on finance, something I know very little about, poor me. And I won’t write about Frump, because enough is enough.
So, it’s my very educated guess that the world’s biggest kleptocracy is Putinland, a nation that has never known democracy, and is as far from that seemingly ‘best of a bad lot’ political system as it’s ever been. Putin’s wealth is so poorly known that it can easily be claimed that he’s the wealthiest despot on Earth, and I’m inclined to believe it, but proving it is well-nigh impossible. Elon Skum is usually described as the world’s richest, and he certainly wants to be, but Putin – though he also wants that reputation, has good reason to need to be thought of as the ultimate servant of his nation, rather than a robber baron. So he’s in something of a bind, poor thing. Anyway, his net worth (I’m talking about money here, not any other kind of worth, haha) is one of the planet’s less interesting mysteries. Or as one news agency put it, ‘Tracking his exact wealth is described as one of the most difficult challenges in wealth management’. The late Karen Dawisha wrote a book, Putin’s Kleptocracy, published in 2018, but I won’t be reading it. I just hope we’ll be rid of him soon.
And then there’s Xi Xinping. the ‘anti-corruption’ President, apparently for life, of China. Corruption has for decades been endemic in China’s elites, as is to be expected in closed societies, but Xi’s anti-corruption campaign is about much more than wealth accumulation, it’s about what might be called ‘ideological’ corruption, deviation from the Party line – which is presumably whatever Xi says or thinks it is. There has long been, however, a disciplinary body called the Central Committee for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), which, presumably, Xi, as President, controls. This quote from an article from the Hudson Institute summarises it:
The CCDI investigates and issues verdicts on potential corruption cases before matters go to the courts (which are also branches of the Communist Party). For the CCDI, corruption encompasses a far broader range of activities than what the term usually refers to in the West. The anti-corruption campaign is more like a “party discipline drive” in which the party often punishes ideological deviance and managerial incompetence equally alongside conventional acquisitive crimes. Therefore, observers often cannot know whether China is prosecuting someone because of genuine corruption, or whether corruption charges are supplementary to the more substantive crime of having infringed party discipline—a term that, uncoincidentally, has become increasingly synonymous with fealty to Xi and his political agenda.
So, corruption and kleptocracy aren’t quite the same things, but – well, yes, they are. And of course it’s more likely to happen in closed societies like Russia, China and the USA’s gazillionnaire society, which now rules that country. Even when a US media organisation tried to publicise the Xi family wealth, the threats issued were so serious that they had to back off. What we do know, though, is vomit-inducing enough. After all, ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’, as Britain’s Lord Acton put it. It is this unlimited, un-scrutinised power that is the problem, more than the individuals themselves. So, if you want to know more about the Xi family luxury and corruption, read the relevant article in the references.
The Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, is another front-runner in the kleptocracy and corruption race. He’s just coming up to 12 years in power, which is itself an unacceptably long period in a supposed democracy, IMHO. His government repeatedly discriminates against Muslims, and has followed a neoliberal agenda, creating a much larger rich-poor gap, a rise in unemployment, a decline in public health spending etc etc. His government also bungled its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a second wave of infections that was more deadly than the first. His government has refused to accept the WHO’s estimate of deaths from COVID-19 (almost ten times that of the Modi government).
But back to kleptocracy. Modi hobnobs with the filthy rich, and I do mean filthy. And it’s not just Indian wealth moguls that have benefitted. It’s complicated, as this excerpt from a November 2025 article in The Wire shows:
Take India’s purchase of Russian crude oil. Consequent on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and precipitate fall in its crude prices due to sanctions, India ramped up Russian oil imports from 0.2% to 35-40% of its total imports. This resulted in huge savings of up to US $17 billion through discounted purchases. But the price paid for cocking a snook at international disapprobation was US President Donald Trump slapping an extra 25% tariff on Indian exports, seriously crippling our textiles, gems, carpets and pharmaceutical exports and rendering thousands of workers unemployed….
To put it plainly, the decision to import Russian crude oil has richly benefitted oligarchs but it has seriously damaged the interests of exporters and tens of thousands of workers who’ve lost their jobs. A textbook example of an oligarchic kleptocracy at work – but there’s no outrage.
One could go and on about this. In every country that prides itself on being capitalist – and even some, like China, who don’t – the rich are getting far richer and the rest are getting nowhere. I’ve focussed on some of the most obvious examples, but there are plenty more, known and, I’m sure, unknown to me. For the sake of our humanity, and the many who are exploited, ethnically disadvantaged and oppressed, we need to and we can do so much better…
References
https://www.hudson.org/corruption/six-myths-about-china-anti-corruption-campaign
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narendra_Modi
https://thewire.in/government/corruption-festers-in-india-but-no-outrage-in-modi-raj
Leave a Reply