Kleptocracy

I'm reading this book about germs and guns and steel and pre-history and human history, predators and prey, and people praying they won't be predatored. You know, light bedtime reading. So, this guy who wrote the book... No, not the Daniel Quinn thing. Quinn thinks the beginning and end of our nutritional civilization story is food production. He forgets we can also hear cooperative health and overly-rabid pathologies, like CEOs who promise to bleed the poor to feed those already too rich under the label of "tax cuts". I mean, I guess they are tax cuts if you happen to be in the top 20% US income bracket, but that seems to miss the healthier democratic point that Lower 80% Lives Matter Too. No, not Quinn, it is this younger guy, Jared Diamond, who probably never even met Thomas Merton. Diamond mentions "kleptocracy" where I would use "plutocracy" or "aristocracy" rather than "democracy" but this sounds too kleptomanic to nutritiously feed integrity of national health and personal and family and non-elite wealth. So I had to look up this kleptocracy word to see if it might be the economist's view of the political scientist's view of plutocracy. And, sure enough, here it is, right, but feeling very wrong, on dictionary.com: "A government or state in which those in power exploit national resources and steal" This sounds familiar from the Declaration of Independence, in which the original USA forefathers informed the British aristocracy that we are all done with the stealing of natural and human resources thing they called "taxes" and "fees" and the white male property owners (including slave owners) called tribute and extortion. Meanwhile I was listening to the Cohen testimony about some plutocratic kleptocrat racist extortionist buying and selling his white privileged way into our way too WhiteHouse extolling the unabashed value of WinLose capitalism, so long as those born into "Win" households remain unfettered from their colonizing and extorting and racist and homophobic and xenophobic lack of any semblance of traditional Christian virtues or Islamic virtues, or Buddhist virtues, or Taoist virtues, or Hindu virtues, or Jewish virtues, or democratic constitutional well-being and prosperity virtues. So, there you go, I've already learned my new word for this plutocratic day and kleptocratic nightmare. Who knew? We have words for everything someone might ever need to slice and dice and serve up, like food production to grow less healthy uncivilized undemocracies.