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Kleptocracy

Anne Applebaum's and other scholars' term for rule organized substantially around the extraction and protection of wealth by a ruling elite, using state machinery as the extraction mechanism and international financial and legal systems outside the kleptocracy's own borders — shell companies, golden-passport programs, professional-enabler industries concentrated in jurisdictions like London — to hold, launder, and protect that wealth beyond the reach of any future domestic political change.

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