What is a "Captured" State? What is 'State capture"?

[Baobab]

State capture is a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state's decision-making processes to their own advantage through unobvious channels, that may not be illegal.

State capture - ( Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capture

One problem with recognizing state capture is that often the institutions that would in a non captured state be used to control corruption are themselves completely captured. So, NGOs might claim to specialize in fighting corruption but in fact be corrupted (often by corporate money)-

Grants may set up a web of "civil society" organizations that in fact do nothing to stop pervasive corruption or more likely even participate in it.

This is a serious problem that simple solutions never can solve.

Voting wont solve anything either in a truly captured state because all of the politicians and the entire political system are themselves captured, in a way that selects for corruption, because the environment is criminogenic.

In such an environment all change should be seen as defaulting to more corruption until the underlying causes are addressed and eliminated.

All politicians are typically corrupt unless they came into their office by some unusual reason, quite atypical.

Were they not corrupt they never would have gotten that far.

[OnyxCollie]

1. Taking Preferences Seriously

Liberalism is the mode of domestic political representation, which determines whose social preferences are institutionally privileged. When political representation is biased in favor of particularistic groups, they tend to "capture" government institutions and employ them for their ends alone, systematically passing on the costs and risks to others. The precise policy of governments depends on which domestic groups are represented. The simplest resulting prediction is that policy is biased in favor of the governing coalition or powerful domestic groups.

While many liberal arguments are concerned with the seizure of state institutions by administrators (rulers, armies, and bureaucracies), similar arguments apply to privileged societal groups that "capture" the state, according to assumption 2, or simply act independently of it. If, following assumption 1, most individuals and groups in society, while acquisitive, tend also to be risk-averse (at least where they have something to lose), the more unbiased the range of domestic groups represented, the less likely they will support policies that impose high net costs or risks on a broad range of social actors. Thus aggressive behavior-the voluntary recourse to costly or risky foreign policy-is most likely in undemocratic or inegalitarian polities where privileged individuals can easily pass costs on to others.64

This does not, of course, imply the existence of a one-to-one correspondence between the breadth of domestic representation and international political or economic cooperation, for two reasons. First, in specific cases, elite preferences may be more convergent than popular ones. If commercial or ideational preferences are conflictual, for example where hypernationalist or mercantilist preferences prevail, a broadening of representation may have the opposite effect.

Second, the extent of bias in representation, not democratic participation per se, is the theoretically critical point. Direct representation may overrepresent concentrated, organized, short-term, or otherwise arbitrarily salient interests.

Moravcsik, A. (1997). Taking preferences seriously: A liberal theory of international politics. International Organization, 51(4), 513-553.

[bemildred]

2. Washington warned us about "factions", that's what he meant.

We didn't last long without "factions" though. Not long at all.

[Triana]

3. WE ARE a Captured State...The Corporate Capture of the United States

American corporations today are like the great European monarchies of yore: They have the power to control the rules under which they function and to direct the allocation of public resources. This is not a prediction of what’s to come; this is a simple statement of the present state of affairs. Corporations have effectively captured the United States: its judiciary, its political system, and its national wealth, without assuming any of the responsibilities of dominion. Evidence is everywhere.

The “smoking gun” is CEO pay. Compensation is an expression of concentrated power — of enterprise power concentrated in the chief executive officer and of national power concentrated in corporations. Median US CEO pay for 2010 was up 35 percent in the midst of a lingering recession, while CEO pay over the last decade has doubled as a percentage of pre-tax corporate income. Yet there has been no justification for current levels of CEO pay based on economic value added.

When Lee Raymond retired as CEO of ExxonMobil at the end of 2005, after six years at the helm of the merged firm and another six as head of Exxon before that, he walked away with more than a quarter billion dollars in realizable equity. In his final year alone, Raymond received in excess of $70 million in total compensation — an hourly wage of about $34,500 calculated at 40 hours a week for 50 weeks. No metric can justify such a raid on the corporate treasury and shareholder equity, but Raymond is only a particularly egregious and early example of what has since become common practice. Little wonder that the driving concern of banks receiving TARP “bailout” money was to pay it back so as to escape any restriction on executive pay.

Retirement risk has been transferred to employees. During the same period that CEOs were doubling their own compensation, the “best” CEOs of the “best” companies abrogated the century-old commitment by employers to provide pensions to their workers. IBM has been the corporate leader in abolishing a “real” pension system for its employees. The 2006 elimination of on-going defined benefit plans will “save [IBM] as much as $3 billion through the next few years and provide it with a more ‘predictable cost structure’,” TK said at the time. Translation: The worker bees are on their own.

This is the essence of “capture” – CEOs are enriched, while all other corporate constituencies, including government, are left with liabilities. A relatively few autocrats have taken control over the policies and wealth allocation of the United States.

The financial power of American corporations now controls every stage of politics — legislative, executive, and ultimately judicial. . . .

. . .

THE REST:

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/01/05/the-corporate-capture-of-the-united-states/

[awoke_in_2003]

4. I don't think all politicians are corrupt

Just 95% of them. They allow a few to slip through, to point at and give people a false hope that the system isn't totally rigged. When one gets too popular, they are either taken out (old days) or made a laughingstock in the news (the way we do it now).