Marble Falls        In the old days, maybe even as recently as a couple of months ago, countries might look to the United States as a guide to what might happen positively in their own country.  Now the tables have turned.  Americans can now learn about what is happening in their own country, by looking at what has occurred in other countries, that we never thought could never happen here given our history, laws, and constitution.  One scary thing that seems to be here now is “state capture,” as some have pointed out recently.

A recent op-ed offered a definition from political economists:

State capture occurs when wealthy private interests influence a government to such a degree that the can freely direct policy decisions and public funds for their own benefit or for the benefit of their ideological fellow travelers (or both).

Recently, we have had to come to grips with the realization that oligarchs are not just a phenomenon that we can frown upon in looking at Russia after the fall of communism where private interests and favored elites were able to cash in by taking over public enterprises.  Rather than looking down on other countries, we are now forced to look around at people in our own countries, especially the tech billionaires, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, but also many others, who clearly fit the bill of welding public resources into private wealth and businesses.  The targeted efforts at public enterprises from VA hospitals to weather and postal services, long the domain of the federal government, are now painted as targets for privatization by special, private interests, which will determinedly produce yet more American oligarchs.

Going further, the political scientist, Elizabeth David-Barrett “lays out three general mechanisms of state capture….”

…shaping the rules of the game through law and policy; influencing administrative decisions by capturing the budget, appointments, government contracts and regulatory decisions; and disabling checks on power by dismantling accountability structures like the judiciary, law enforcement and prosecution, and audit institutions like the inspectors general and the media.

Tell me this doesn’t all sound familiar and happening now in real time.  Examples abound, most recently in South Africa, where the role of the Gupta family in such state capture and corruption continues to be a central issue, as well as closer to home in Brazil.  The Car Wash scandal there involved a massive 30-year long bribery scheme to acquire public contracts by the Brazilian construction company, Odebrecht, and has now roiled governments there and in Peru, and a slew of other Latin American countries.  The emerging case against the India-based Adani group in India and its $250 million in bribes there as part of its standard operating procedure that may also have been practiced in other contracts and other countries seems of the same stripe, even if Adani is less capturing the state than an instrument of the state under the Modi government.

The role of Elon Musk dramatizes the efforts at state capture in the USA on the front pages of the remaining papers allowed to print such reports.  His group’s claims of savings have been regularly debunked and now in the face of such embarrassment are being alleged, but increasingly hidden.  His role continues not to be clarified, even if there are reports that it is being curtailed.  Regardless, the impact of his chainsaw policies won’t be found in his press releases, but in the damage done to people in America.

The Tyler McBrien op-ed demonstrates where such efforts end, when he shares a report by a South African political analyst, Eusebius McKaiser, about how such capture manifests itself.

When a 5-year-old boy drowned in feces in a dilapidated pit toilet at his school while wealthy businessmen were accused of siphoning money away from building things like school toilets, McKaiser simply declared that the student ‘died because of state capture.’

Think about it.  We already have a sense of the death count globally that will come from the termination of USAID public health monies to other countries.  Now in the United States that clean air and water are under attack, public health has been captured by opponents, supervision of police is ending, and other countless examples, it won’t be long before we’ll learn about the expected American death count from the Musk and Trump abetted state capture, and we will see children, veterans, the elderly, the poor, and more dying in our own communities from their policies.