Russian-Style Kleptocracy Is Infiltrating America

True and it's true the title is a clickbait overreach without direct evidence in hand, however it's still true that America's decline has been a mostly gradual one and the rich have captured politics and media to lower their own taxes and make regulations favorable to them. As it gets worse, privatization, including public-private partnerships as just the beginning, comes in and takes the valuable and vital parts of communities and society, and sell them off to semi-corporations to charge people for what their taxes already paid for. With time and worsening conditions, vampiric, cannibalistic strip-mining of parts of civilization needed to function ordinarily are sold off, destroyed or replaced with more expensive, substandard substitutes. Today, you're hard pressed to find a water fountain or apart from a library, find anywhere convenient for a public meeting that doesn't require commercial activity. Parks are fewer and farther (except maybe the mandatory public spaces in NYC, that are often in/on top of sterile buildings).

I don't want to sound like a sky-is-falling doomsdayist, but when/if it gets nearer to such a perceived fall of empire, there will likely be overt theft of public and government resources committed almost exclusively by the ruling class, as happend in the Soviet collapse.

Beware the era when the politicians in countries like Brazil or the US, who listen almost exclusively to their rich supporters, stop listening to average citizens and many people stop voting. The French Revolution was also itself a failure of empire due to extreme inequality, and the Yellow Vests are a modern, more mellow resurgence "relief valve" release of dissatisfaction that is by no means an isolated occurrence: Occupy, Brexit, Trump, etc. And as the world becomes "flatter," there will be more and more similar situations happening across countries, and far-right autocrats, rising nationalism, rising xenophobia and populist revolutions are currently some of the most widespread phenomena. Nationalism is especially concerning because it's a leading indicator of another global war.