Is the US kleptocratic?

I saw a post here, and it caught my eye because I wish to perhaps take the conversation in a completely different direction than the poster had intended, soo I began my own thread to avoid hijacking the origninal.
candidone1 asks what the common threads are between the following individuals, whether or not there was a "....a penchant for money, power or popularity?"

former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
former Indonesian President Suharto
former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos
former Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko
former Nigerian President Sani Abacha
former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević
former Haitian President Jean-Claude Duvalier
former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori
former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko
former Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Alemán
former Philippine President Joseph Estrada

As for "a penchant for money, power or popularity" my contention is that all of them are possible.

However, one could quite plausibly add former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, and likely, anypast American President (and quite reasonably many other past and present world leaders) to that list and conclude that the commonality is the quality and kind of kleptocratic policies and tendancies of each government.

The sole difference between the former eleven leaders and the latter two examples is the level of transparancy by which money is funneled into the appropriate and desired coffers and the explicit and implicit ex post facto motivations or justifications for having done so.

On a very superficial level, it seems there is an equivalence between kleptocracy/corruption and authoritarianism, that their function of one another is simply a truism--that one could not exist without the other.

That there is an equivalence between a dictator and his kleptocracy, one is then placed in the position to assume, wrongly of course, that democracies are immune or exempt from such conclusions being made about them. More specifically, the left in Canada and the right in the US abhor the thought of "their" government promoting policies that padded the accounts of businesses, the aristocracy and ruling elite of their respective nations, when in fact, there is nothing shy of a massive mountain of evidence indicating quite the opposite.

Is there any truth to the notion that western style democracies are nothing more than a kleptocracy with much less transparency than say,the Hussein or Marcos regime, with manufactured legitimacy and streamlined money channelling modes and devices?

I would be intrigued to hear what some of you think. As a long time lurker, I have come to appreciate the opinions of many of you and will probably be humbled by the responses that may be offered.