AFTERWORD The Theft Continues — Systemic Blindness in 2025 W hen Theft at the Public Till was first written in the early 1990s and revised in 2002, the warning was clear: we are being robbed. Not by singular villains or dark conspiracies, but by the systemic design and operation of a public sector unmoored from any overarching goal, responsive only to inertia, special interests, and the short- term whims of election cycles. This book was never about corruption in the traditional sense. It was about something more insidious—something built into the architecture of our governing institutions and the ideological frameworks we use to justify them. That theft, I argued, was not merely one of money, but of opportunity, agency, and shared purpose. Now, in 2025, rereading those arguments feels less like revisiting a set of historical critiques and more like paging through a still-unfolding manual of systemic failure. The very pathologies diagnosed three decades ago not only persist—they have matured, metastasized, and in some cases, become cul- turally normalized. If anything, the twenty-first century has seen the theft become more abstract, more technologically cloaked, and more resistant to reform. This afterword is an attempt to revisit those earlier insights and apply them to the current moment—one marked by political polarization, economic precarity, and the hollowing out of trust in public life.
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