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Why Corruption Always Breeds Tyranny: Lessons from Trump's Second-Term Playbook -- Thom Hartmann
https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-corruption-always-breeds-tyranny-551The chilling similarities to past tyrants—and why America can’t look away anymore…
“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.” — George Orwell
It’s axiomatic that dictators are corrupt. But understanding the inevitable relationship between corruption and dictatorship — and how it flows in both directions — is essential to understanding the direction the Trump Crime Family is taking America.
First, it’s important to know that there’s no such thing as a dictator who’s not corrupt. Every dictator in world history, with the possible exception of Cincinnatus, has been massively corrupt.
To defy public opinion while skimming wealth out of the state’s coffers and public commons, national leaders must use the typical tools of dictatorship to intimidate good government advocates into silence: violence, threats, capture of police agencies and courts, intimidation of the press, cowing politicians, and prisons.
I’ve worked in and negotiated with governments in multiple countries where this was the plain reality: Uganda under Amin, Haiti, The Philippines under Marcos, Thailand during the military coup, Colombia, Peru, Russia, South Sudan, China in the 1980s, and a handful of others.
In every case the media was cowed, courts were run by sycophants loyal to Dear Leader, and the police were largely unaccountable to the people while kleptocrats shoveled fortunes into offshore banks and American or British real estate (we are only one of two developed countries in the world that allows anonymous shell companies to “invest” in real estate).
Less obvious, though, is how politicians in functioning democracies become dictators in order to protect their own corrupt attempts to profit off their leadership roles and loot the national purse.
. . .
First, it’s important to know that there’s no such thing as a dictator who’s not corrupt. Every dictator in world history, with the possible exception of Cincinnatus, has been massively corrupt.
To defy public opinion while skimming wealth out of the state’s coffers and public commons, national leaders must use the typical tools of dictatorship to intimidate good government advocates into silence: violence, threats, capture of police agencies and courts, intimidation of the press, cowing politicians, and prisons.
I’ve worked in and negotiated with governments in multiple countries where this was the plain reality: Uganda under Amin, Haiti, The Philippines under Marcos, Thailand during the military coup, Colombia, Peru, Russia, South Sudan, China in the 1980s, and a handful of others.
In every case the media was cowed, courts were run by sycophants loyal to Dear Leader, and the police were largely unaccountable to the people while kleptocrats shoveled fortunes into offshore banks and American or British real estate (we are only one of two developed countries in the world that allows anonymous shell companies to “invest” in real estate).
Less obvious, though, is how politicians in functioning democracies become dictators in order to protect their own corrupt attempts to profit off their leadership roles and loot the national purse.
. . .