Quotes About Kleptocracy

Foreign aid breeds kleptocracies, or governments of thieves.

In a strange way, I expected Russia to become more like America since the Soviet Union collapsed, but the reverse is true. America has become more like Russia: a kleptocratic society.

They are sick of their country's being seen as nothing more than a mafia-ridden kleptocracy—even though they are the first to complain about corruption.

I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand.

Wrack and waste, the Kleptocracy actually did it.

We have reason to believe," he said, "that the object indicated by that icon is a sublight colony ship from Earth which has been lost and presumed destroyed since the time of the Kleptocracy.

Every kleptocratic network I have examined, from Afghanistan to Honduras to Central Asian or African countries, has included a skein of outright

That is a wonderful state of affairs for kleptocrats. Waving a red or blue flag, they hold on to camps of ardent loyalists while betraying them to serve the network instead. Most Americans disapprove of policies that benefit the superrich at everyone else's expense. Both parties pursue such policies. We find reasons to vote our colors anyway, or opt out of the conversation.

Members of today's kleptocratic networks who incorporate companies under fictitious or borrowed names are using a modern screening allegory on law enforcement and the public. Only initiates learn where the money comes from, how much there really is, and how much is being stolen from fellow citizens in the form of unpaid taxes. One entity has been particularly effective in its use of secrecy: the Koch network.

There's much about the British Raj which I think is disreputable. It was rapacious; it was a sort of kleptocracy, and it was also racist. Indians were not treated as equals.

Putin himself is a character out of fiction, an uber-macho former Soviet thug running a massive, expansionist kleptocracy. The man stages photographs riding horses barechested and hunting tigers. His enemies find themselves on the wrong end of radioactive poisoning.

The Magnitsky law has proven to be a powerful tool. While asset freezes and travel bans against corrupt officials may sound incidental, they have shaken the Putin kleptocracy right down to the core.

We must always remember that the fossil fuel era began in violent kleptocracy, with those two foundational thefts of stolen people and stolen land that kick-started a new age of seemingly endless expansion. The route to renewal runs through reckoning and repair: reckoning with our past and repairing relationships with the people who paid the steepest price of the first industrial revolution.

The kleptocrats—and, now, those they con—have no interest in the flowery words of inclusivity, multiculturalism, and democracy that a bankrupt liberal class used with great effectiveness for three decades to swindle the public on behalf of corporations.

Bulgakov and Roth understood that there is no real political ideology among decayed ruling elites. Political debate and ideological constructs for these elites are just so much absurdist theater, a cynical species of public spectacle and mass entertainment. These systems, like our own, are organized kleptocracies.

the chief principle of banana-ism is that of kleptocracy, whereby those in positions of influence use their time in office to maximize their own gains, always ensuring that any shortfall is made up by those unfortunates whose daily life involves earning money rather than making it.