A remarkable debut by one of America's premier young reporters on financial corruption, Casey Michel's American Kleptocracy offers an explosive investigation into how the United States of America built the largest illicit offshore finance system the world has ever known. "An indefatigable young American journalist who has virtually cornered the international kleptocracy beat on the US end of the black aquifer." —The Los Angeles Review of Books For years, one country has acted as the greatest offshore haven in the world, attracting hundreds of billions of dollars in illicit finance tied directly to corrupt regimes, extremist networks, and the worst the world has to offer. But it hasn’t been the sand-splattered Caribbean islands, or even traditional financial secrecy havens like Switzerland or Panama, that have come to dominate the offshoring world. Instead, the country profiting the most also happens to be the one that still claims to be the moral leader of the free world, and the one that claims to be leading the fight against the crooked and the corrupt: the USA. American Kleptocracy examines just how the United States’ implosion into a center of global offshoring took place: how states like Delaware and Nevada perfected the art of the anonymous shell company, and how post-9/11 reformers watched their success usher in a new flood of illicit finance directly into the U.S.; how African despots and post-Soviet oligarchs came to dominate American coastlines, American industries, and entire cities and small towns across the American Midwest; how Nazi-era lobbyists birthed an entire industry of spin-men whitewashing trans-national crooks and despots, and how dirty money has now begun infiltrating America's universities and think tanks and cultural centers; and how those on the front-line are trying to restore America's legacy of anti-corruption leadership—and finally end this reign of American kleptocracy.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Equatorial Guinea gained its independence in 1968, and was ruled by a dictator named Francisco Macias Nguema. His regime was brutal, and he allegedly killed his main electoral opponent. Teodorin’s father, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, was in charge of the National Guard and Black Beach prison, and he was tasked with torturing any dissidents. #2 Obiang’s regime is one of the most brutal in the world, and yet it has been able to stay in power because of oil. The country’s media freedoms are ranked worse than Somalia and Kazakhstan, and its people live in abject poverty. #3 Teodorin, Obiang’s son, enjoyed the celebrity lifestyle that came with being a rich young man in the 1990s. He dropped out of Pepperdine University and flew back to Equatorial Guinea, where his father had an assignment for him. #4 Obiang wanted his son to become Equatorial Guinea’s newest Minister of Forestry. Teodorin knew nothing about forestry management, but he was willing to learn. He was only too happy to oblige, and he proved he could run the portfolio as effectively as his father expected.

From Kleptocracy to Democracy: How Citizens Can Take Back Local Government provides students with a critical examination of the large-scale political corruption that looted Bell, California between 1993 and 2010. For 17 years, some city officials paid themselves more than a million dollars a year, using the police department as a "for profit" vehicle for collecting fines, and issuing over $100 million in bonds. They turned the city into their own private cash machine. Residents of the poor, immigrant community are still struggling to repay the city's exorbitant debt. The book draws on interviews with more than 50 people connected to the Bell scandal to provide a compelling, in-depth look at how waves of factory closings, economic shifts, and immigration pressures gutted the structures that are essential to civic health, opening the way for grifting politicians. The book analyzes the seemingly minor breakdowns in civic life that invite corruption, and offers students and interested citizens tools for analyzing the health of their own communities. Apathy killed democracy in Bell for almost two decades, but the press--and the dogged political activism of young Latinos and Muslims in the Dreamers generation-- brought it back. The book makes a clear connection between civil complacency and the resulting damage to American democracy. It demonstrates how citizens can actively resist political corruption by remaining involved and informed in local government. From Kleptocracy to Democracy inspires informed citizenship. It is an excellent supplementary resource for courses in local government, public administration, sociology, Chicano studies, urban politics, law and society, and ethics studies. Fred Smoller, a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register, earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington, his M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and his B.A. from State University New York, College of Fredonia. He is an associate professor of political science at Chapman University in Orange, California, where he teaches courses on public administration and state and local politics. His key area of professional interest is American politics, with a specific emphasis on media and politics, local government, and public administration.

The word "kleptocracy" derives from the Greek kleptes (thief) and kratos (rule), meaning literally "rule by thieves." While we might envision petty pickpockets, kleptocracy is far grander and vastly more insidious. It is the abuse of public power to enrich a ruling class at the expense of the wider nation. It is systemic, institutionalized corruption at the highest levels of governance. History teems with rulers who plundered for personal gain. But modern kleptocracy stands apart in its sophistication, globalization, and sheer scale. Advances in international finance, opaque legal structures, and the erosion of democratic norms have created fertile ground for the 21st-century kleptocrat. This book is a journey into the heart of that system. It dissects the tools, techniques, and players that prop up kleptocratic regimes worldwide. We will explore how illicit wealth is hidden, laundered, and funneled into assets ranging from luxury real estate to political influence.

Americans often use the words progressive, liberal, and radical more or less interchangeably, without reference to their place in our nation’s history. Kevin Slack clarifies the distinct aims of the movements they represent, and weighs their consequences for the American Republic. Each of the three movements rejected older republican principles of governance in favor of an administrative state. But there were substantial differences between Teddy Roosevelt’s Anglo-Protestant progressive social gospelers, who battled trusts and curbed immigration; Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson’s secular liberals, who initiated government-business partnership and a civil rights agenda; and the 1960s radicals, who protested corporate influence in the Great Society, liberal hypocrisy on race and gender, and the war in Vietnam. Each movement arose in criticism of what came before. Following the revolution of the 1960s, elites on both left and right turned against the industrial middle class to erect an oligarchy at home and advance globalization abroad. Each side claimed to serve the interests of disadvantaged or underrepresented groups. Radicals ensconced themselves in bureaucracy and academia to fulfill their vision of social justice for women and minorities, while neoliberal elites promoted monopoly finance, open borders, and outsourcing of jobs to benefit consumers. The administrative state had become a global American empire, but the neoliberals’ economic and military failures precipitated a crisis of legitimacy. In the “great awokening” that began under Barack Obama, neoliberal elites, including establishment conservatives, openly broke with the populist base of the Republican Party, embraced identity politics, and used Covid-19 and myths of insurrection to strip away the rights of American citizens. Today, an incompetent kleptocracy is draining the wealthiest and most powerful people in history, thus eroding the foundations of its own empire. This book traces the rise and fall of the American Republic.

Tax havens in offshore lands like Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas were once considered a rarity, the preserve of the super-rich. Today, they are big business available to the masses. Their goal? To avoid any form of accountability. Own nothing. Possess everything. Be answerable to no one. Where are these tax havens? What forms can they take? What future lies in store for them, and why should we care? An Anatomy of Tax Havens: Europe, the Caribbean and the United States of America answers these questions, and more, in the first comparative study in one volume of European, Caribbean and United States tax havens. It examines their simple origin to the extreme forms some take today, delving into the murky subculture that has deliberately made them impenetrably obscure. Uniquely, it combines detailed technical expertise (regulatory regimes, financial crime, legal and equitable structuring) with an analysis of their impact on domestic and global political, economic, environmental and social concerns. An Anatomy of Tax Havens is a fascinating, informative read for a broad readership; from legal, accountancy and tax practitioners to compliance regulators, law enforcement agencies, and students and researchers interested in business studies, taxation, and crime.

Popular histories of organized crime in the United States often look to the Mafia and the sons of early twentieth-century immigrants – such as Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Meyer Lansky – for their origins. In this second edition of Organized Crime and American Power, Michael Woodiwiss refocuses on US organized crime as an American problem. The book starts in 1789, with the birth of a new nation, intended to be run according to laws and conventions, with a written commitment to civil rights. Woodiwiss examines the organization of crime before the Civil War, which damaged or destroyed the lives of those excluded from constitutional protections: Indigenous peoples, Black people, and women. The book focuses on white supremacist crime and the pernicious influence of Southern leaders in alliance with opportunistic politicians. It examines the organized crimes of powerful business interests in alliance with politicians, as well as the corrupt consequences of the US moralistic campaigns against alcohol, gambling, drugs, and abortion. Organized Crime and American Power brings solid historical evidence and analysis to the task of refuting conventional wisdom that frames organized crime as something external to US political, economic, and social systems.