Venezuela Redux?

For years, my daughter-in-law has run a program she created from scratch that provides after-school enrichment, counseling and support for at-risk children and teens in DC. Some of her staff and adult volunteers are grateful former program kids. In one of her creative fundraising events, a pizza restaurant used the basil, cilantro, peppers, and other herbs grown by the kids on a downtown office-building rooftop to make pizzas for a gathering of supporters and donors. She works tirelessly to fund the organization, whose annual budget has never quite reached $2 million.

This year she was asked by one grantor organization to account for an apparent $57.10 discrepancy… $57.10.

Meanwhile, the FBI has busted a Baltimore group—Keep Encouraging Youth to Succeed (KEYS)—for taking $4.7 million in recent city (and state and federal) funds intended for youth counseling services. KEYS received that large sum despite having no employees and providing no services. Authorities say this conduct was part of a longer-running pattern going back years.

In California, after a rare, fully bipartisan vote by the legislature to require an audit to find out why $24 billion for homeless services cannot be accounted for, Gov. Newsom has vetoed that measure and denied the audit in a ringing victory for waste and fraud.

So, a provider who is actually providing services, trying to squeeze and record every penny, must account for $57.10, but stealing millions for years or sending billions to political cronies and unaccountable NGOs/political organizers has become the norm.

What is it about our politics that there is never sufficient, focused anger to make a difference and make grifters fear to grift? Or would attempts at reform trigger a revolution because a critical mass now depends on the grift? Venezuela, once the wealthiest nation in Latin America, collapsed into a deadening socialism precisely because the attempted reform to undo the web of cronyism and corruption actually caused grifters and fixers to unite across ideological lines:

This convergence of threatened interests produced an alliance of unlikely bedfellows, uniting groups with conflicting ideologies and interests against Pérez’s economic liberal reforms. Indeed, the alliance against President Carlos Andrés Pérez's comprehensive liberal measures included national business organizations, labor unions, prominent intellectuals, left-wing political parties, the main media, and factions of Social Democratic and Christian political parties, including President Pérez’s own party. That was the distinctive form the classic conflict between market and state took in Venezuela. See this excellent article on the Fall of Venezuela

Is it too late to resist the uniparty and the interests it has spawned? Or does the list of Venezuelan groups and interests who conspired to topple a free-market government too closely mirror our own corrupted social and economic order? (Add student loan debtors, former USAID-funded NGOs and grievance grifters to that Venezuelan list and the American version would be complete.)

Even a small fraction of what has been stolen in Minnesota alone could make an enormous difference for legitimate service providers across the country and for the people they rescue or serve. But are enough Americans angry, or are too many of us part of the corruption or otherwise anesthetized?