A Sunday Reid: The Kleptocrats
Is the United States an oligarchy, a plutocracy, a kakistocracy, a kleptocracy or what? Because we've definitely become something awful.
What’s the best way to describe what the current regime has turned the United States into? Are we now an oligarchy? A techocracy? A “broligarchy?” A kakistocracy … or is it a kleptocracy? Or maybe a combination of all the above?
Here are some handy definitions:
• Corruption: "the abuse of entrusted power for private gain" (transparency.org).
• Plutocracy: "a government or state in which the wealthy class rules" (dictionary.com).
• Oligarchy: "a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes" (merriam-webster.com/dictionary).
• Corporatocracy: "a society or system that is governed or controlled by corporations" (en.oxforddictionaries.com).
• Kakistocracy: "government by the worst people” (Merriam Webster)
• Kleptocracy: "a society whose leaders make themselves rich and powerful by stealing from the rest of the people" (dictionary.cambridge.org).
One could make the argument that at this nation’s founding, it was a plutocracy, in which wealthy European plantation homesteaders broke from their kings in order to rule as kings themselves in the Americas; lording over their wives and children, their indentures and their slaves. These wealthy planters wrote the laws, and the constitution, ensuring freedom, in their words, “to ourselves and our posterity” at a time when neither African-Americans, women, indigenous Americans or white men without property had the right to vote. If that’s not a plutocracy, I don’t know what is.
Today, we clearly have elements of plutocracy, corporatocracy and oligarchy in our system, which is still mainly run by wealthy white men (and women). The rich of all races exercise disproportionate control over our government and society, though the 20th century put much greater power in the hands of the middle class. Still, in the Age of Trump, the kakistocratic elements of our crumbling democracy have come screaming to the fore, with Trump’s assortment of bunglers in charge of our federal agencies.
The kakistocrats
At this point, it’s barely safe to fly, particularly into Newark International Airport (now, complete with the measles…) Kristi Nome is reportedly reviewing putting the Department of Homeland Security in business with a TV reality show where would-be immigrants compete in assorted stunts to try and earn a chance at citizenship — call it “The Apprentice: Exploited Migrant” if you will, (though a DHS spokesmodel is now denying they’re down with the program.) And last week, Kash Patel (who sorry, truly has crazy eyes) arrived at a congressional budget hearing, without an actual budget to present, and then barked at Senators instead of acknowledging the screwup.
This, while our “education secretary,” the lady from WWE … whose agency sent a sharply worded letter to Harvard, demanding they take the knee, only to have it come back with corrections to the horrible grammar and spelling. (Whoever did this deserves a Pullitzer, by the way.)
Annnnd then there’s RFK Jr., who doesn’t seem to know, well… anything about anything related to the job he’s unfortunately been given by Trump, which is ostensibly to run our healthcare system (into the ground). Here he is on Wednesday, melting down under questioning by Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire) over his hiring of David Geier, a man who was fined by Maryland regulators for practicing medicine without a license.
By the way here is the letter that Senator Hassan sent to Kennedy expressing her concerns about Mr. Geier, here is an old National Library of Medicine article on the Geiers, and here is RFK Jr. imploding under questioning from Maryland Senator Angela Alsobrooks:
To review, as a measles outbreak continues to mushroom nationwide, the dilettante nepo, RFK Jr., our rather unhealthy looking and sounding Health and Human Service Secretary, is hiring fellow “out of the box thinkers” with zero medical or scientific expertise to “study” people with autism by sweeping up millions of Americans’ personal data from Medicaid and Medicare records so the conspiracy theory crowd can finally put federal dollars behind their fringe theory that autism is caused by the mercury in vaccines. Where is doge when you need them???
A rising (or sinking) oligarchy
It’s tempting to believe that the dismantling of the American experiment is happening solely because a group of would-be Commanders are trying to recreate The Handmaid’s Tale in real life, and clearly, that’s a lot of what the Heritage Foundation Project 2025ers are up to, including, apparently, what sure looks like a Christian nationalist-led putsch to eliminate pro-Palestinian protests and advocacy.
But besides the sheer incompetence of the cavalcade of reality show stars, Oprah rejects, billionaires and incompetents who are responsible for executing the regime plan, and who are impairing the basic functioning of everything from Social Security to the Veterans Administration, the live threat to gut Medicaid and food stamps to make room for a $4.5 trillion debt ceiling hike and a permanent tax cut for the super rich and corporations, the zeroing out of foreign aid, which could kill 25 million people around the world, and the viciousness with which the regime is dismantling the artistic and historical treasures of this country, what’s shoving its way to the front of the line in this parade of horribles, are the authoritarianism and elements of oligarchy. We’re now seeing, almost daily incidents of masked men snatching people off our streets and ICE agents raiding restaurant kitchens and threatening to spirit away the cook and the dish washers …
Maybe even, with political motives…
A Washington, D.C., restaurant owned by the husband of CBS News senior correspondent Norah O’Donnell was reportedly raided by federal agents as part of the Trump administration’s continued crackdown on immigration.
The New Mexico Avenue location of Chef Geoff’s — one of two D.C. restaurants owned and operated by O’Donnell’s husband, Geoff Tracy — was subject to a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the morning of Tuesday, May 6.
Local outlet Fox 5 reported that nearly a dozen agents from the Department of Homeland Security entered the restaurant at around 10:30 a.m. ET and demanded to see employees’ I-9 documents.
The agents reportedly stayed in the restaurant for around 90 minutes, though ultimately, no one was arrested or detained.
This as a small claque of American oligarchs rake in the dough, by way of federal contracts somehow just happening to fall into the hands of people like the doge king, Elon Musk, and his fellow South African billionaire Peter Thiel including sweet deals for Starlink, as well as David Sacks, who is enjoying an outsized role in government. Even members of the administration have been spotted picking off financial bennies for themselves amid the increasing rubble of the U.S. economy.
Every oligarch eats
Meanwhile, Trump seems determined to make good on his campaign boasts about boosting his billionaire donors’ wealth, including by letting them steal our national treasures.
Here’s the latest from the Office of Personnel Management, which is being de facto privatized as we speak, with its core functions handed over to a major Trump donor via a no-bid contract:
The Office of Personnel Management is hoping the sole-source, one-year contract it just awarded to Workday, a cloud-based HR services company, will help the agency manage what’s turned into a massive influx of HR work.
As OPM processes federal retirement applications, reductions in force (RIFs) and other rapid workforce overhauls under the Trump administration, the agency said the sole-source contract, awarded without an open competition, was necessary “due to an urgent confluence of operational failures and binding federal mandates that require immediate action.”
“OPM’s fragmented and outdated HR systems have reached a critical failure point, resulting in payroll errors, benefits disruptions and a manual workload that is no longer sustainable,” OPM wrote in its justification of the contract award, published to SAM.gov last week. “Simultaneously, recent presidential directives impose strict deadlines for workforce restructuring and merit-based hiring reforms, requiring real-time workforce data and integrated HR capabilities that OPM’s current systems cannot deliver.”
The contract with Workday will cover services for HR and personnel processing, payroll and benefits systems, time and attendance tracking, talent acquisition and performance management, all while ensuring compliance with federal requirements, according to the contract award notice. …
At the same time OPM made the contract award to Workday, it also told agencies in a new memo that those who use the National Finance Center (NFC) or Interior Business Center (IBC) for payroll and HR services will have to submit all retirement paperwork electronically starting June 2. After July 15, OPM will no longer accept paper submissions and will only take retirement applications through its Online Retirement Application (ORA).
The expedited move to Workday’s HR systems comes as OPM is attempting to meet other approaching deadlines. The agency is aiming to have the contract in place as close as possible to July 15 — the date that the current governmentwide hiring freeze will lift.
The Workday contract, worth $342,200, will last for one year, at the end of which OPM said it plans to conduct an open competition for the next iteration of the HR IT contract. OPM did not immediately respond to Federal News Network’s request for comment.
In its justification statement, OPM said without an immediate contract award, the agency’s current HR systems would require significant manual labor to develop RIF registers. The agency also justified the award by arguing that its current HR systems would be unable “to process the expected doubling of the retirement application backlog with the same quality of service.”
To review, a RIF is a “reduction in forces” order, meaning a bunch of people get laid off or pushed to retire. So who runs Workday? Here’s their CEO saying a couple of months ago that the federal government is “ripe for disruption…”
The company was cofounded by a guy named David Duffield, a New Jersey billionaire who has donated millions of dollars to Donald Trump and other Republican candidates and causes.
Duffield, who grew up in Ho-Ho-Kus and attended Ridgewood High School, made his latest charitable endeavor earlier this month when he gave $100 million to his alma mater, Cornell University. The donation, the largest in the history of the school's engineering program, will significantly expand Duffield Hall, which was named in his honor two decades ago.
Duffield, 84, made his fortune as the founder of six business software companies, including PeopleSoft and Workday. His net worth of $13.8 billion as of Monday places him among the 200 richest people in the world, according to Forbes.
He and his wife donated $1.2 million to Trump’s re-election campaign in 2020.
He’s not the only one getting ready to haul it in. Remember I told you Trump appeared to be setting the stage to sell off our federally owned lands? Well… according to New Mexico Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich, it has begun…
Bonding out
A word please, about the spokesbarbie of the now rather poorly named “Justice Department,” Pam Bondi, whose previous gig, after serving as a very Trump-friendly attorney general of Florida, was as a lobbyist for such relevant interests as the private prison industry and the government of Qatar.
Pam made a rather fortuitous stock dump sale just before Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs, raking in more than $1 million, while all the others suckers investors lost out, according to the fine folks at Pro Publica:
Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media the same day that President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that caused the stock market to plummet, according to records obtained Wednesday by ProPublica.
Trump Media, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, fell 13% in the following days, before rebounding.
Trump’s “Liberation Day” press conference from the White House Rose Garden unveiling the tariffs came after the market closed on April 2. Bondi’s disclosure forms showing her Trump Media sales say the transactions were made on April 2 but do not disclose whether they occurred before or after the market closed.
Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned through work could violate the law. But cases against government officials are legally challenging, and in recent years judges have largely narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading.
It’s unclear from the public record whether Bondi as attorney general would have known in advance any nonpublic details about the tariffs Trump was announcing that day. Trump, of course, publicly announced his plans to institute dramatic tariffs during the election campaign. But during the first weeks of his term, the market seemed to assume his campaign promises were bluster.
And Bondi’s not even the only regime member with financial ties to the Qataris…
At least six officials in Donald Trump's administration, including the president himself, have previously done business in or with Qatar.
Including podcaster and Trump fan fiction writer-turned-FBI director Kash Patel.
And the potential profit-taking extends to the nexus between the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security, neither of which seem particularly keen on the whole “due process” thing, and the private companies set to benefit from Trump’s twisted remix of the rule of law.
Remember the arrest last week of Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka? The private prison he and three members of Congress were attempting to inspect is run by the Geo Group, which happens to be one of Trump’s biggest donors, and one of the largest financial beneficiaries of his mass deportation fascism. And because you can’t have an oligarchy without theatrical punishments, Bondi’s “Justice Department” is now threatening to indict one of the New Jersey congresswomen who were denied entry to the Geo Group’s private prison. From the New Jersey Globe:
The Justice Department plans to bring charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark) following a scuffle with federal immigration agents last week at Newark’s Delaney Hall detention center, three sources speaking on the condition of anonymity confirmed to the New Jersey Globe.
Much is still unknown about the case against the freshman congresswoman, including the timing of when interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba will announce charges. McIver is set to be represented by Paul Fishman, the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey during the Obama administration, and Lee Cortes, the former Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney.
On Friday, May 9, McIver and three other prominent New Jersey Democrats – Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) and Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) – visited Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed facility in the East Ward of Newark that began housing immigrant detainees at the beginning of this month, for an oversight visit.
Partway through the visit, Baraka was arrested by federal authorities; they claimed he was trespassing, while he maintained that he had followed their directions and left when they instructed him to. Baraka’s arrest prompted a scuffle among the three representatives, ICE agents, and a group of protesters who had gathered at Delaney Hall’s gate; both sides have claimed that the other was the aggressor in the fight, which seems to have caused no reported injuries.
Video footage shows the fight to have been a general scramble. McIver in particular forcefully attempted to protect Baraka both physically and verbally as he was led away, which may be the basis for charges against her, though claims from some Republicans that she body-slammed or punched ICE officers are more dubious based on the footage available. (Menendez and the 80-year-old Watson Coleman were also involved in the melee, but there’s less video evidence of them physically engaging with agents, perhaps explaining the Justice Department’s focus on McIver.)
The three representatives have also faced threats of potential reprisals within the U.S. House, where Republicans have floated a number of options – including censure or stripping committee assignments – as punishment for their alleged “assault” on federal agents. House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Wednesday that he was considering all options on the table.
Threats of indictment and expulsion, intimidation, and outright lies from the regime and their sycophants in Congress, some of whom also appear to be trading on information gleaned in advance of the public, in order to enhance their own wealth … all clear elements of oligarchy… And as a reminder: the truth is discoverable…
what’s also discoverable is the gargantuan money hall the regime’s cruelty will unleash for companies like Geo Group. From The Appeal:
On today’s quarterly earnings call, for-profit prison operator GEO Group’s new CEO announced that this is an “unprecedented time in our company’s history.”
“We believe the scale of the opportunity before our company is unlike any we’ve previously experienced,” J. David Donahue said.
For-profit prison companies CoreCivic and GEO Group are primed to benefit from Trump’s white supremacist agenda to round up, detain, and deport millions of immigrants. In January, Trump signed the Laken Riley Act, which requires mandatory detention of undocumented immigrants who are charged with low-level offenses, including shoplifting, as well as more serious crimes. Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, is a former GEO Group lobbyist.
On today’s call, GEO Group estimated that based on public statements from ICE, implementation of the Laken Riley Act would require at least an additional 60,000 detention beds. Some estimates have put that number at over 110,000 beds. Executive Chairman George Zoley said the new law will also require a “significant ramp up” in electronic monitoring services.
Zoley said that they “expect the upside potential from all these opportunities could represent as much as $800 million to $1 billion in incremental annualized revenues.” The company is currently $1.7 billion in debt.
“This is a unique moment in our company’s history,” Zoley said. “We believe we are well positioned to scale up our diversified segments in secure housing, transportation, electronic monitoring to meet the changing needs of this new administration, and to continue to enhance value for our shareholders.”
Zoley said GEO Group is “the single largest contractor to ICE” and the “largest provider of secure transportation services for ICE.”
Oligarchy 101.
The Grifter in Chief
But perhaps the right way to really understand what this mess of a regime is, is “kleptocracy.” The way to know you’re in a kleptocracy is when the leader of the country and his family are enriching themselves off of what it supposed to be public service, in a manner so brazen as to be almost an insult to the average citizen.
Eric Lipton of the New York Times has been doing serious reporting on how Trump and his goober clan are doing just that. Here’s part of his interview about a week ago, with his news organization for their podcast:
Seems totally normal for the president of the United States to be enriching himself off of crypto currency that any foreign dictator can buy in bulk in order to bribe him. Also totes normal, is the fact that only a handful of the tens of thousands of people who bought the Trump financial Beanie Babies are actually making money, while the vast majority of his marks superfan investors are losing.
Days before he was inaugurated for a second term, President Trump launched a meme coin brandishing the words “fight, fight, fight." But most of those who invested in it might feel like giving up.
Of the 2 million accounts that have purchased the $TRUMP coin, 764,000 have lost money on it, according to data that blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis shared with CNBC. Most invested in smaller amounts of the token, the media outlet reported.
Fifty-eight accounts — known as crypto "wallets" — made more than $10 million apiece, totaling roughly $1.1 billion in profits, per CNBC.
Meme coins, based on internet jokes or fast-moving cultural trends, are a highly volatile form of cryptocurrency. Trump's token gained billions of dollars in value overnight — at least on paper — after he announced it. The value fell after Melania Trump launched her own meme coin a few days later.
By the way, Melania’s scam meme coin is called $Melania … which sorry… looks like “Smelania” when written down… perhaps a bit mean, but something here definitely stinks… and not just the fact that the first lady is almost never in the White House and snagged a $40 million bribe sweet deal from Amazon to sell her “life story” as a mystery documentary… well … and the hawking of the White House Easter Egg Roll to paying corporate sponsors…
And to be clear, it appears that some of the biggest buyers of Trump’s meme coin are either foreigners, or using foreign accounts, meaning that any foreign leader or interest could gain access to Trump, and score that private dinner and White House tour just by buying more meme coins, as Scott Galloway explained to a dubious Anderson Cooper on CNN.
It’s totally plausible, Anderson.
And while Trump is hawking Christian holidays to the highest bidder, selling junk meme coins to likely foreign bribers buyers and scolding American children to get used to fewer dolls at Christmas, while also commanding Walmart to “eat the tariffs” he has imposed on China, to the detriment of American consumers, he is also personally cashing in on the Liv Golf tournament, which is being held in part at his properties, which was perfectly fine when he was a regular civilian. But now the Saudi government is directly paying him and his family while he is president of the United States. More on how that happened, from CNN:
Trump, of course, has selfish motives for promoting the LIV Tour. His golf courses are scheduled to host not one, but two LIV events this year – a tournament at his Bedminster, New Jersey, course later this month and the final event of the LIV season at his Doral, Florida, course in October. [Emphasis added]
His involvement with LIV is about revenge too.
Trump’s Bedminster course was supposed to host the 2022 PGA Championship, a major sign that Trump – always desperate for the approval of the golfing elites – had finally made it.
But in the wake of the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, the PGA voted to strip Bedminster of the tournament, eventually moving it to Southern Hills in Oklahoma.
Speaking to Golf Digest earlier this year, Trump expressed shock that the tournament was taken from him, before touting the role he would play with the LIV tour.
And he’s not grifting alone.
His sons are spanning the world, inking lucrative money grubbing deals that should make the Hunter Biden obsessives blush (it won’t, of course.)
And golf is not Trump’s only Middle East folly. There’s also the now infamous “palace in the sky” gift from the country he formally labeled a terrorist enabler: Qatar. But that was before they offered him a luxury plane that apparently, they just don’t want anymore. Trump is the perfect mark, given his desperate need for tacky “luxuries” and praise.
SNL mocked the grift accordingly:
But the risks to national security are real.
Treating the aircraft as safe for the commander in chief with just a few modifications is "absurd," another former senior defense official said. In addition to carrying the president around the world, presidential jets are part of the nuclear command and control structure so the president can fight a nuclear war.
The administration has reportedly tapped L3Harris to modify the Qatari jet. But the project would strain an already overextended workforce, the official said, since the program would need to pull workers with high clearances.
In reality, Trump is unlikely to wait for the years of work it would take to make the plane secure, officials say. The administration will do what it can to make changes, but the jet could end up lacking classified systems, secure communications, and defensive capabilities typically required in a presidential jet, and the program might not have enough time to thoroughly strip the jet to sweep for bugs and other spy devices, they say.
In the end, I think we all know how this ends. The timeline and costs make it impossible for this jet to become Air Force One, so it winds up being a direct gift to Donald Trump.
Because the kleptocrat king must have his luxuries.
Idiocracy?
Thank you for your very concise look at the overall corruption and criminality of the Trump regime. Why did the American electorate vote for a criminal, is it because they were terrified of what might happened if they elected a black woman?