Neoliberalism and its accompanying austerity measures are shrinking local and
national government budgets, even though constituent needs remain pressing. In
desperation, public officials sometimes replenish public coffers through illicit
extraction from segments of the population poorly positioned to fight back. In
Detroit, for example, city officials inflated property tax assessments in violation of
the Michigan Constitution, leading to illegally inflated property taxes that many
homeowners could not afford to pay. Consequently, since 2009, one in three homes
have completed the property tax foreclosure process, the highest number of property
tax foreclosures in American history since the Great Depression. These
unlawful practices are not just occurring in Detroit, but also in other American
cities such as Ferguson, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.
Nevertheless, because corruption is universally defined as corrupt acts that are for
private or personal gain, there is currently no lexicon to describe illegal acts that
principally benefit the public treasury. I have coined the term “stategraft” to
describe this overlooked phenomenon: when state agents transfer property from
persons to the state in violation of the state’s own laws or basic human rights. To
establish stategraft as an essential theoretical framework, this Article elaborates its
definitional elements, demonstrates its conceptual value, and shows how it extends
existing discourses on corruption, state crime, and the predatory state.
