KAKISTOCRACY

Chris Collins, First U.S. Lawmaker To Endorse Trump, Gets 26-Month Prison Sentence

A kakistocracy [kækɪ'stɑkrəsi] is a system of government that is run by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous citizens.

Paul Blumenthal, HuffPost•January 17, 2020


A judge on Friday sentenced former Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), an early and staunch ally of President Donald Trump, to 26 months in prison after he pleaded guilty last September to conspiracy to commit securities fraud.

Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, used his position as the largest shareholder in the Australian biotechnology company Innate Immunotherapeutics to illegally give other stockholders an inside tip that a test of the company’s main product had failed.

“You were a member of the [company’s] board ― that has legal significance. You owed a duty to Innate and you betrayed that duty,” U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick said during the sentencing, according to Matthew Russell Lee of InnerCityPress.com.

“It makes people believe the market is rigged,” Broderick added.

Federal prosecutors earlier this week urged a sentence of close to five years.

Collins cried as he spoke to the court shortly before his sentencing.

“I have no excuse. I tarnished my reputation,” he told the judge, as reported by The Washington Post.

“It’s hard to look at my wife ― she had her credit card canceled. My daughter had her brokerage account canceled. I apologize to the FBI for lying to them. I’ll be paying the consequence for that here momentarily,” Collins said.

Before the criminal investigation, Collins had used his Trump endorsement to raise his profile in Washington. He bragged about the clout he gained from his early backing of Trump, claiming it made him “significantly more visible.” And he was an early adopter of Trump’s bullying and blustering style, a copycat routine that has become popular throughout the GOP.

Collins, who represented a district that covers much of western New York, committed the crime that sent him to prison while he was visiting the White House for a June 22, 2017, congressional picnic. He received an email from the CEO of Innate Immuno announcing that the company’s main drug on which the company’s future hinged had failed a key test. Collins then called his son, another shareholder, from the South Lawn of the White House to tell him about the news and to plan for them to dump the stock.

The next morning Collins, his son and the father of his son’s fiancée sold their stock in the company before the drug test failure was announced and while a freeze on trading was in place for the company’s shares in Australian stock markets. They each saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling early. The company stock plunged 92% after Innate Immuno publicly announced the drug’s failed test.

Well before Collins broke the law, his odd position as the largest shareholder of Innate Immuno attracted attention. The Wall Street Journal and The Buffalo News both reported in January 2017 on suspicious trades Collins and other House Republican lawmakers made as Congress passed a bill that included provisions beneficial to Innate Immuno and other biotechnology firms. He also reportedly bragged to colleagues about how many “millionaires I’ve made in Buffalo.”

After seeing his political profile soar as an early backer of President Donald Trump, former Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) is headed to prison. (Photo: John Normile via Getty Images)

An investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics in 2017 found that Collins violated House ethics rules by providing nonpublic information to investors and visiting the National Institutes of Health in his official capacity to discuss Innate Immuno drug trials.

Collins, 69, was indicted and arrested for wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and lying to the FBI on Aug. 8, 2018. After his arrest, Collins initially said he would not run for reelection in 2018. But he reversed course, ran for his seat and won by less than one percentage point. He had won reelection in 2016 with 67% of the vote. His resignation from office became official last Oct. 1.

Collins was first elected to his House seat in 2012. A former mechanical engineer and business owner, he served as Erie County executive from 2007 to 2011.

Throughout the investigation into his illegal conduct, Collins struck a Trumpian pose as an innocent targeted as part of a “partisan witch hunt.”

He attacked The Buffalo News for “making up fake news on folks [the paper] can’t beat at the ballot box.” He called his then-colleague Rep. Louise Slaughter, a Buffalo-area Democrat who has since died, a “despicable human being” for filing an ethics complaint against him. And he attacked investigations into his activities as a “partisan witch hunt.”

In the wake of Collins’ guilty plea, his lawyers argued in court for a lenient sentence, saying that his actions were impulsive and that he has suffered enough by losing his political career.

Collins’ son and the father of his son’s fiancée also pleaded guilty in the case and await sentencing

Quickly joining Collins in early 2016 as Trump’s second official backer on Capitol Hill was then-Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) ― who also now faces prison time. Hunter pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws in December, gave up his House seat earlier this week and awaits sentencing. Like Collins, Hunter initially characterized the charges facing him as a “witch hunt.”

Reporter Carla Herreria contributed to this story.

Donald Trump's 'kakistocracy' is not the first, but it's revived an ...

https://www.theguardian.com › commentisfree › apr › donald-trump-kakisto...

Apr 18, 2018 - The first recorded use of kakistocracy was in a sermon, delivered in 1644 by Paul Gosnold. His audience was the “King's parliament” ...

PAKISTAN

Dial K for ‘Khakistocracy’

The fourth estate has a sacred responsibility to the people. It should not continue to be selective in its outrage when it comes to matters of principle.

Zain Siddiqui 

DAWN

Published March 17, 2023 

An age-old children’s tale has recently started seeming like the perfect metaphor for our latest experiment with democracy.

The story goes like this: A king was once presented with robes so fantastic that only the wisest people in his land could see them. The king eagerly clothed himself in these wondrous threads before presenting himself to his subjects to see whether they too were smart enough to admire them. As he paraded through their ranks, all he could hear was the people murmuring their praises. It took a small child to finally blurt out what the gathered crowd dared not say: “The emperor had no clothes!”

A year ago, the two main components of our political system undertook a similar change of clothes. While the army swapped khaki for a more ‘neutral’ shade, parties from across the political spectrum fashioned themselves as the Pakistan ‘Democratic’ Movement. Together, they would go on to overthrow the ‘puppet prime minister’ of the ‘hybrid regime’.

The return of ‘true democracy’ heralded the restoration of the primacy of the Constitution and the supremacy of our Parliament. We were told that the political system would heal as it slowly returned to its ‘Purana Pakistan’ normalcy.

Few among those in this country who consider themselves wise questioned the legitimacy of the incoming regime. The assurance that the PTI government was being ousted through a vote of confidence — in other words, parliamentary procedure — was enough. Short shrift was given to how the votes required for the VOC were actually rounded up.
In with the old

And so the country was returned to the wise old hands of Pakistan’s democratic elite. These were people whose sacrifices for our right to self-rule had no parallel — those who introduced ‘Democracy is the best revenge’ and ‘Vote ko izzat dau’ to our political parlance. We had been delivered, or so we were told. Turns out, we were once again having the wool pulled over our eyes.

There is an excellent Twitter account, titled ‘The Cultural Tutor’, which shares fascinating curations from the history of western civilisations. It recently shared a list of political systems to ask followers which one they lived in.




The list began with democracy — rule by the people — and had some rather interesting inclusions, such as isocracy, algocracy and ochlocracy. It ended with kakistocracy — rule by the worst, the least qualified and most unscrupulous citizens.

It was difficult, as a born and raised underseas Pakistani, to make an honest choice. After all, our political system isn’t exactly on the continuum of the various paradigms that evolved from the Greek tradition.

For example, no matter how loudly we may insist otherwise, our democracy’s most recent iteration does not even represent the aspirations of the majority. In fact, it does not seem to want those aspirations to be expressed at all.

The country cannot also be described as a plutocracy, and it seems unfair to dismiss it as a kakistocracy, no matter how strong the temptation to do so. More importantly, nothing in that list captured the role of our military ‘establishment’ in political affairs, which has either overtly or covertly ruled the country for much of its history and seemingly continues to do so despite all pretensions to the contrary.
The powers that be

Sharing that last thought with a dear friend proved greatly upsetting for their continence. They protested that our new government’s reversion to the pseudo-fascistic tendencies of the old regime ought not to be pinned on the boys.

I begged to disagree. No civilian government in its right mind dares defy straightforward, self-evident constitutional edicts with impunity, not least one that has squandered most of its political capital. No organ of the state risks inviting contempt charges by refusing their constitutional duty. You do not just bin both court and Constitution unless a greater force has provided guarantees to protect you from the consequences of doing so.

The institutions of our state are known for perpetual sloth, not the energy and enthusiasm with which they have recently sought to serve and execute warrants of arrest for cases predestined for the ash heaps of history. Such alacrity has usually been seen only in times when someone needs to be taught a lesson for defying the true powers that be.
Democracy with no clothes

The wise among us may continue not acknowledging the obvious, but it is high time someone pointed out that our democracy has no clothes. We are, in fact, being ruled by yet another khakistocracy, and one that would be little different from a full-blown kakistocracy but for that strategically placed ‘h’.

One wonders why this clever portmanteau hasn’t been used more often in the Pakistani context. Hybrid regime stopped being an insult the moment our civilian leaders started boasting about sharing same pages with their uniformed overlords. The sting got taken out from ‘puppet prime minister’ when it became evident that all our leaders are eager to give an arm and a limb to be marionettes as long as they can pretend to be kings while at it.

The normalised hypocrisy of our political class, when in power and when without, has eroded any sense of democratic propriety in our people. The decay is now getting worse. As many have persistently pointed out, you cannot save democracy by suspending or subverting it. Here, it is the means that must justify the ends, not the other way around.

There is little point lamenting the proto-fascism taking root in this nation’s youthful populace if our intelligentsia will continue to fail them in providing a working moral compass with which they can navigate their increasingly hostile world. The fourth estate has a sacred responsibility to the people. It should not continue to be selective in its outrage when it comes to matters of principle.

The author is a member of staff.

Trump commutes ex-Illinois governor's sentence

President Trump said he has commuted the 14-year prison sentence of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of political corruption. 

Appeared on 'Celebrity Apprentice' »

 

KKKakistocracy: The Texas Education System Has Daddy Issues

by E.R. Bills / February 14th, 2024

An undated photo of members of the Childress County Daughters of the Confederacy. Courtesy of the Childress County Heritage Museum in partnership with The Portal to Texas History, a digital repository hosted by the University of North Texas Libraries.

In 2022, a 15-year-old Virginia Beach girl named Simone Nied began a modest campaign to get the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) removed from the list of nonprofit organizations afforded exemption from real estate, deed recordation, and personal property taxes in the state of Virginia. The “White House” of the Confederacy is located in Richmond, Virginia, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis lived there during the Civil War. Nied’s efforts seemed Sisyphean.

But early this month a bill stripping the tax breaks of the UDC was passed in the Virginia House of Delegates and, on Feb. 6—with two Republicans joining all twenty-one Democrats—the Virginia Senate agreed. Now the bill goes to Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s desk for approval.

Will he sign it or veto it?

I await his decision with bated breath.

In the meantime, I also marvel at the preposterousness of the affair. How did the United Daughters of the Confederacy get tax breaks in the first place, and why have they been extended into the 21st century?

Is insurrection a religion? Didn’t the Confederacy’s insurrection comprise the exact opposite of a nonprofit campaign? Wasn’t the entire war waged to ensure the profits the Southern white aristocracy reaped from slave labor?

Does Texas have a chapter of the UDC?

I’m glad you asked.

I checked immediately and we do. And it’s also taxed just like a church. Here’s the first blurb on their site:

The United Daughters of the Confederacy is a non-profit organization formed by the joining of many local groups whose purpose was to care for Confederate Veterans and their families, in life and death, and to keep alive the memory of our Southern heritage.

The Texas Division UDC was officially organized in 1896.  Today, the Texas Division continues the work of our predecessors. We are dedicated to the purpose of honoring the memory of our Confederate ancestors; protecting, preserving and marking the places made historic by Confederate valor; collecting and preserving the material for a truthful history of the War Between the States; recording the participation of Southern women in their patient endurance of hardship and patriotic devotion during and after the War Between the States; fulfilling the sacred duty of benevolence toward the survivors and those dependent upon them; assisting descendants of worthy Confederates in securing a proper education; and honoring the service of veterans from all wars as well as active duty military personnel.

“… collecting and preserving the material for a truthful history of the War Between the States”?

“… assisting descendants of worthy Confederates in securing a proper education”?!

Talk about a prophetic “nonprofit”. Sounds like the perfect recipe for the current Texas state legislature.

But it begs a legitimate question. Do any brave teenagers reside in the Lone Star State?

And before any of you Bonnie (or Donnie) Rebs get your hackles up, take a wee gander of what the original incarnation of the UDC trotted out as a position statement on education in Texas in 1915:

Strict censorship is the thing that will bring the honest truth. That is what we are working for and that is what we are going to have. — Mrs. M.M. Birge, Chairwoman of the Textbook Committee, Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Convention of the Texas Division, United Daughters of the Confederacy

An answer before a question.

A dictate to ensure denial.

A mandate for seditious ignorance.

The current Red state agenda around these parts was baked into the proverbial cake, and now it’s too late. A legislature full of conservative feebs is pushing for more voucher programs for institutes of Anglo-centric propaganda, and the Texas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy is getting a tax break for the Lost Cause indoctrination that they engineered.

The latent term is kakistocracy.

Thanks to the UDC, the conservative playbook has been the script for Texas education for over a century. Because Texas conservatives want to preserve “the honest truth.” Because Texas conservatives don’t believe “the honest truth” should include the monstrous atrocities they committed or the regime of inhumanity they perpetuated.

The UDC has serious “Daddy” issues, and our tax dollars have been helping them sweep the truth under the rug for decades.

E.R. Bills of Fort Worth is the author of The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas and Letters from Texas, 2021-2023. Read other articles by E.R..

OPINION

How Huntington and Fukuyama got the 21st century wrong

A decided turn towards authoritarianism, to offset popular dissent, is arguably becoming a defining feature of politics in Asia, the Middle East, and South America, and indeed in the democratic West, as well.


Howard Brasted
Professor of History and Islamic studies at the University of New England

Shafi Mostofa
Assistant Professor at the University of Dhaka.

19 Dec 2020

ARYAN BRETHERN

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi hugs US President Donald Trump as they give joint statements in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, US, June 26, 2017. [Kevin Lamarque/Reuters]


What is going on in the 21st-century world of international politics? With very few exceptions, national elections are revealing degrees of partisanship and ideological polarisation among voters never seen before. It seems not to be a rare occurrence these days that the losers are either claiming that they are actually the winners or that the results have been rigged by their opponents and can therefore be disregarded.

This is the farcical game outgoing President Donald Trump is currently playing in the United States, despite there being little or no evidence that President-elect Joe Biden and the Democratic party committed the widespread electoral fraud he wildly accuses them of. As Republican Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland has openly lamented, today the US risks being seen as a “banana republic” rather than as the leader of the democratic world.

Despite this, hordes of Republican supporters continue to rally behind the anti-democratic narrative that President Trump continually tweets. As one newspaper article pointed out, the “United” States has become the “Divided” States of America.

If the recent examples of Belarus and Myanmar are anything to go by as well, it would seem that opposition parties have little faith in the mechanism of democratic elections reconciling alienating differences or bringing citizens closer together. Creating divisiveness seems to be the order of the day, even in established democratic countries.

In India, the largest democracy in the world, for example, Prime Minister Narendra Modi secured a second term for his BJP government in 2019 with a campaign that demonised the Muslim minority as enemies. “Divider-in-Chief” was how Time magazine labelled him on one of its front covers.

Everywhere, the volatility of public opinion has confounded the pollsters and seen political scientists searching for explanations.

None of these developments was foreseen by two of the most prominent political scientists – Francis Fukuyama or Samuel P Huntington – in their respective grand theories of how the 21st century would unfold.

Following the ending of the Cold War, Fukuyama confidently predicted in an article titled, The End of History – and later in a book that liberal democracy would sweep through the world as the ultimate form of human government. In his view, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that communism had failed as the obvious alternative, and political Islam as a political system was never likely to draw more than minority support.

Accordingly, the 21st century would experience, under America’s custodial guidance, the installation of a new world order based on a single global system of democracy, individualism, and free markets.

Although he drew on the same turn of events, the post-cold war world that Huntington conjured up in 1993 was very different. In his Foreign Affairs article titled, The Clash of Civilizations, he argued that international relations would be characterised not by consensus about liberal democracy, but by conflict between entire civilisations, particularly between Islam and the West. Huntington contended that substantial differences in culture and religion would propel the 21st century in the direction of inter-civilisational war. The fault lines between civilisations would specifically become the “battle lines of the future”.

As 2020 draws to an end, however, neither of these grand theories seems to be playing out the way their authors anticipated.

As early as 2006, when American forces were beginning to get bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, Fukuyama conceded that “liberal democracy” could not be imposed on people without their consent. By 2020, he was not even sure that “liberal democracy” existed in the US any more. For under Trump, he maintained, the US had become the epitome of “kakistocracy”, a government of the “worst”, not the best kind.

At a first glance, Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” theory may have been looked more successful. The 9/11 tragedy, the recurrent deadly lone-wolf attacks on non-Muslim targets, the ISIL’s (ISIS’s) proclamation of a new caliphate, and the “fault-line” tensions about the hijab and status of Muslim women in Western countries may lead some to think that there is indeed a major clash between the Islamic world and the West. In fact, even though Huntington died in 2008, his thesis has remained the standard reference point for thinking about the future direction of international relations and in just the past two years, it was cited more than 35,000 times on Google Scholar.

But a growing number of scholars (more accurate to say ‘the vast majority of scholars’. When thesis first came out it was roundly derided. It still is though less vehemently.) are simply not convinced that these happenings presage the kind of culturally-based religious conflict that Huntington foresaw breaking out on a cataclysmic. What collectively they take issue with is the reductionist basis of Huntington’s whole thesis. They part company with him over his key assumptions that Islam and the West constitute monolithic civilizations, that differences of religious culture will put them on a direct war footing, and that all Muslims will come to embrace the world order advanced by fundamentalist Islam. Niall Ferguson appears to be the only one prepared to countenance that Huntington’s prophecy could become “a real winner”.

Intra-civilisational fissures have undermined not only Fukuyama’s world system of liberal democracy, but also the cohesiveness of Huntington’s civilisational blocs. The erosion of the very hallmarks of American world order, such as open debate, the rule of law, and accountable government, have gradually devalued the currency of Western democracy, while bitter sectarian conflicts have set back any immediate prospect of a Muslim anti-West coalition forming.

What has arguably overtaken the envisaged ascendancy of “liberal democracy” and the placing of entire civilisations on a war footing has been the globalisation of neoliberal ideology and its concomitant by-product of populist reaction.

Neoliberalism, which nearly all capitalist societies have embraced since the 1980s, has verifiably resulted in the inequitable distribution of national wealth to the few who effectively exercise power and benefit most from the policies they promote. That the large majority of people acquiesces to a situation that ostensibly disadvantages them is due to the pervasiveness of neoliberal ideology and the difficulty of effectively questioning the global system it sustains.

Enter populism, a phenomenon that is changing political landscapes throughout the world, though in different ways. In the West, populism manifests itself as a groundswell of right-wing disaffection with liberal democratic governments and corrupt ruling establishments. Populism of this kind is driven by narratives that identify metropolitan elites and multinational outsiders as virtual enemies of the state.

In South Asia, populism has fed into top-down discourses that identify religious minorities as anti-national impediments to unity and development. In both Modi’s India and Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka, Muslims have been instrumentally targeted to garner populist support for policies that blunt opposition to their regimes and weaken constitutional checks on their use of power.

In Muslim Pakistan and Bangladesh, the omnipresence of India in their neighbourhood has always fed into populist narratives about the Hindu other and the role their respective armies play as the symbolic bulwarks of Islam.

While Huntington has been credited with incorporating a populist dimension into his “clash of civilization” thesis, he did not foresee that the trajectory populism might take would just as likely foment intra-state tensions as heighten inter-civilisational antagonisms.

A decided turn towards authoritarianism, to offset popular dissent, is arguably becoming a defining feature of politics in Asia, the Middle East, and South America, and indeed in the democratic West, as well. A political scientist looking into the crystal ball today might well project the remainder of the 21st century not in terms of looming civilizational war, but of increasing civil unrest.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Howard Brasted
Professor of History and Islamic studies at the University of New England
Dr Howard Brasted is the Professor of History and Islamic studies at the University of New England, Australia.

Shafi Mostofa
Assistant Professor at the University of Dhaka.
Dr Shafi Md Mostofa is an Assistant Professor of World Religions and Culture at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of New England, Australia.

KAKISTOCRACY

Judge rules Ken Cuccinelli was unlawfully appointed to head U.S. immigration agency

Deputy Secretary of Department of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli makes remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Friday, February 28, 2020, in National Harbor, Maryland. Thousands of conservative activists, elected officials and pundits gathered to hear speakers on the theme "America vs. Socialism". Photo by Mike Theiler/UPI | License Photo

March 1 (UPI) -- A federal judge on Sunday ruled that Ken Cuccinelli was unlawfully appointed to his position atop the agency responsible for processing U.S. immigration requests and invalidated a pair of his directives.

Advocacy groups last year filed a lawsuit challenging Cuccinelli's role as acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and asking that asylum policy he instituted after taking office be reversed.

The suit stated that Cuccinelli didn't satisfy legal requirements to serve in the role under the Federal Vacances Reform Act.

U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss ruled that Cuccinelli was not lawfully appointed as acting director of the USCIS in 2019 because the position of principal deputy he assumed before taking the role was not a "first assistant" job as outlined in the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998.

"Under that commonsense understanding of the meaning of the default provision, Cuccinelli does not qualify as a 'first assistant' because he was assigned the role of principal on day-one and by design, he never has served and never will serve 'in a subordinate capacity' to any other official at USCIS," Moss wrote.

He added that the acting secretary created a position that is "second in command in name only."

"Cuccinelli may have the title of principal deputy director and the Department of Homeland Security's order of succession may designate the office of the Principal Deputy Director as the 'first assistant' to the director, but labels -- without any substance -- cannot satisfy the FVRA's default rule under any plausible reading of the statute," he wrote.

Cuccinelli currently serves as acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees UCIS.

Moss also ruled that due to Cuccilenni's unlawful appointment he lacked authorities to issue directives reducing the time asylum-seekers in "credible fear" proceedings have to receive counsel from lawyers and barring asylum officers from granting extensions allowing migrants to prepare for interviews.

#KAKISTOCRACY

Fox News hosts Jeanine Pirro and Brian Kilmeade received priority treatment for PPE requests from Kushner's coronavirus team, according to a new report

Jake Lahut BUSINESS INSIDER 5/5/2020

Jeanine Pirro and Brian Kilmeade claim they did not know their queries were being prioritized. AP Photo
Jared Kushner's volunteer group charged with securing personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospitals nationwide reportedly prioritized inquiries from Fox News hosts Jeanine Pirro and Brian Kilmeade, according to the Washington Post.

Volunteers were told to fast-track any PPE queries from "VIPs" and conservative media personalities sympathetic to President Trump, according to a complaint filed by one of the volunteers.

Kilmeade passed on a lead to the administration on getting PPE "in an effort to be helpful," while Pirro kept vying for a specific New York hospital to get a "large quantity of masks," according to two sources familiar with the outreach who spoke to The Post.

The complaint was filed last month to the House Oversight Committee.

A Fox News spokeswoman told The Post Pirro and Kilmeade were unaware their tips were being prioritized.

Fox News hosts saw their PPE queries fast tracked by Jared Kushner's team of volunteers tasked with securing the equipment for hospitals nationwide, according to a Washington Post report on a complaint filed by one of the volunteers.

President Trump's senior advisor and son-in-law reportedly oversaw the team filled by consultants with no experience in health care or supply-chain procurement, according to The Post.

In a complaint filed by one of the volunteers to the House Oversight Committee, "VIPs" and Trump-friendly TV hosts are alleged to have gotten their tips on PPE fast tracked.

Fox News' Jeanine Pirro and Brian Kilmeade were named by two sources familiar with their outreach to the Kushner team.

Pirro "repeatedly lobbied the administration for a specific New York hospital to receive a large quantity of masks," while Kilmeade got in touch with the administration about where to get PPE, according to The Post.

A Fox News spokeswoman told The Post that neither host was aware their queries were being prioritized.

The report is another blow to Kushner in his outsize role dealing with the pandemic.

Kushner's loyalists have been mocked as the "Slim Suit Crowd" and a "frat party" by FEMA veterans.

#KAKISTOCRACY

The US was sick long before coronavirus
Trump putting his utterly unqualified son-in-law in charge of US's response to the pandemic should not surprise anyone.

by Belen Fernandez 7 May 2020

President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner attends a coronavirus response meeting in the Oval Office at the White House, on April 30, 2020 [File: Carlos Barria/Reuters]

At the end of March, as coronavirus deaths in the United States began to spiral out of control, President Donald Trump broadcast some important news on Twitter.

Displaying his signature pathological attachment to unnecessary capitalisation, the president boasted that - according to the New York Times - the "Ratings" of his "News Conferences etc" were so off the charts as to rival "Monday Night Football" and the finale of "The Bachelor".

Granted, car accidents also get a lot of views - which does not mean they are good.

As if things were not bad enough, Trump's coronavirus performance quickly became an even more horrifying spectacle with the ascension of Jared Kushner - first son-in-law and preferred presidential adviser - to the position of de facto commander of the US response to the pandemic.

And how are Kushner's own "ratings"? Well, at least he is keeping viewers on their toes.
'Shadow' taskforce

After initially reportedly assuring Trump that coronavirus was no big deal, Kushner was naturally deemed to be the best person to attend to the ensuing disaster - despite his own role in fuelling it and his utter lack of qualifications in any relevant field. (Judging from Kushner's numerous other assignments resolving everything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the opioid crisis, "qualifications" are perhaps no longer a thing.)

He is now heading up a "shadow" coronavirus taskforce, not to be confused with the official coronavirus taskforce headed by Vice President Mike Pence. Kushner's force involves his own former roommate - current US foreign investment tsar Adam Boehler - as well as a bevy of private-sector executives.

By all lucid accounts, the Kushner group's manoeuvrings have simply bumped an already chaotic government response up to obscene new levels of confusion.

Kushner is furthermore "essentially operating without accountability", as Jordan Libowitz - communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington - pointed out in an April 6 article for NBC News. The shadow taskforce is being run "off the books, with closed-door meetings and private email accounts" - which, Libowitz suggests, could potentially be a good way to "steer emergency government funds into your family's bank account without people finding out".

After all, there is no better time than a global pandemic to make the rich richer.
Kushner will 'get us all killed'

Kushner's latest enterprise has prompted news headlines like: "Lawmakers Want to Know: WTF Is Jared Kushner Doing?" As for his known activities, these include scoffing at New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's claim of a ventilator shortage (New York now has almost 20,000 coronavirus deaths) and throwing a hissy fit over the outrageous presumption by individual US states that they might somehow be entitled to access the national stockpile of medical equipment.

In a super-sketchy sequence of events, a health insurance company linked to Kushner and his brother was tasked with developing a coronavirus website for the US government - before the project was "mysteriously scrapped".

As it so happens, the Kushner family real estate business could also "be a prime beneficiary of a provision in the federal [coronavirus] recovery bill that allows owners of apartment buildings to freeze federal mortgage payments on low- and moderate-income properties", according to a Politico analysis.

In the midst of Kushner's coronavirus machinations, even the New York Times felt compelled to run an op-ed titled "Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed" (though the heading was later toned down).

But while this concern is certainly valid, we should not forget that the US has been in the business of killing people for a long time - and that the prioritisation of profit over human life far predates the existence of Kushner, as transparently repugnant a figure as he may be.
All sorts of death sentences

Beyond the matter of the US's predilection for waging wars that have slaughtered unthinkable numbers of people across the globe, it is worth recalling that the US military is also one of the primary polluters on the planet - and as such has made significant contributions to climate change, which was what was getting us all killed before the coronavirus interlude.

Meanwhile, the fact that the US throws gargantuan sums of money at its military killing machine rather than at, you know, domestic healthcare programmes or other more helpful endeavours is itself effectively a death sentence for many Americans.

It is also how we end up with US nurses wearing rubbish bags to protect themselves from coronavirus - and the news that uninsured Americans could be slammed with $75,000 in medical fees if hospitalised for the disease.

Of course, poverty - another defining feature of the landscape in one of the world's "richest" countries - has long been proved to be deadly. And sure enough, coronavirus has hit low-income communities the hardest. "Above all," a Bloomberg editorial notes, "it disproportionately kills black people."

Over at the Wall Street Journal, a short dispatch on "coronavirus capitalism" and its "darker side" laments that, in March, a two-pack of Purell hand sanitiser was listed on Amazon for $99.95. The author concludes that, while epidemics may come and go, "human nature, unfortunately, stays the same" - a rather sweepingly inaccurate assessment given that the history of the world shows plenty of good examples of non-capitalist human populations.

But in the US, capitalism is not just dark; it is a veritable plague.
Underlying conditions

Although Trump and his co-star Kushner are certainly committed as can be to the darkest sides of capitalism - eg, a willingness to throw countless Americans onto the coronavirus pyre to save the economy - it turns out they are not even that good at managing the system to effect their nefarious ends.

In a recent email to me, evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu, remarked that, while bourgeois political economy dictates that the state "act as capital's handmaiden", Trump & Co are dropping the ball: "A family who has had every underwear picked up by ill-paid staff can't even envision what's involved in servicing the logistics and infrastructure capital needs to accumulate from one side of the world to the other."

American power, he wrote, is "on the hook for cleaning up pandemics" that capital helps to create, thereby keeping the world on the same catastrophic developmental path. But as it currently stands, we are down to Jared Kushner, who, "reading a couple articles, is cleaning up the COVID fix with what is tantamount to mass murder."

Ultimately, though, Kushner's pathologies could be diagnosed as symptomatic of the US's underlying conditions. Long before coronavirus, the country was critically ill.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Belen Fernandez is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.

KAKISTOCRACY

'Conditions are ripe' for Trump's friends 'to loot the place from top to bottom': analysis

Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk speaks as Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump reacts during a rally at the site of the July assassination attempt against Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 5, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Brad Reed
November 15, 2024 

RAW STORY

The New Republic's Greg Sargent has written a lengthy article about what he believes will likely be unprecedented corruption within the second Trump administration.

In particular, Sargent notes that this time Trump didn't even make a pretense of obeying any kinds of ethics rules, which he believes he will interpret as a green light to blatantly enrich himself at the public's expense.

"There are several reasons to fear this could amount to a level of oligarchic corruption that outdoes anything Trump did in his first term," Sargent explains. "In short, conditions are ripe for right-wing elites to try to loot the place from top to bottom."


Sargent says that Democrats' loss of control of the United States Senate means that they now no longer have investigative tools to dredge up embarrassing dirt on the administration, and in particular will close up probes into the promises that Trump made to oil executives and into Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner's firm receiving a massive influx of foreign investment from countries such as Saudi Arabia.

“The next four years are going to be a smash and grab under Trump,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) told Sargent. “Special interests who put Trump back in office expect a return on their investment."

Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, pointed to the way that Trump is letting X CEO Elon Musk push a policy agenda as evidence that there will be no guardrails on corruption and looting.

"Trump is showing that he will reward people who help him by giving them tremendous influence over his administration,” he said. “This will encourage more people to direct their largesse Trump’s way. We expect government to look out for the public interest. Trump is open about the fact that government is meant to serve his supporters, business partners, and friends.”

'Blueprint of destruction': Experts outline 'chillingly clear' view of Trump's next term

Travis Gettys
November 15, 2024 

Donald Trump's political career has closely tracked the trajectories of autocratic leaders Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, whose rise to power offer a "chillingly clear" picture of where his second term could lead, according to historians.

The former president and his supporters are tremendously hostile to civic institutions like the judiciary, the media, universities, many nonprofits and even some religious groups, and Trump will likely follow the lead of those autocratic leaders in Hungary and Russia by sidelining experts, regulators and other civil servants, wrote New York Times columnist M. Gessen.

"When Orban was re-elected, he carried out what [Hungarian historian Balint] Magyar calls an 'autocratic breakthrough,' changing laws and practices so that he could not be dislodged again," Gessen wrote. "It helped that he had a supermajority in parliament. Trump, similarly, spent four years attacking the Biden administration, and the vote that brought it to the White House, as fraudulent, and positioning himself as the only true voice of the people. He is also returning with a power trifecta — the presidency and both houses of Congress. He too can quickly reshape American government in his image."

Magyar described the disorientation that accompanied Orban's return to power after eight years spent consolidating support from his base, and said he quickly unleashed an agenda that gathered autocratic powers for himself – which Gessen expects Trump to attempt from the start.

"We all remember it from Trump’s first term, this sense of everything happening all at once and the utter impossibility of focusing on the existentially threatening, or distinguishing it from the trivial — if that distinction even exists," Gessen wrote. "It’s not just what the autocrats do to stage their breakthrough, it’s how they do it: passing legislation (or signing executive orders) fast, without any discussion, sometimes late at night, in batches, all the while denigrating and delegitimizing any opposition."

Trump starts his second term with a sprawling road map for transforming the U.S. government to reflect his priorities, even if many of the policies conflict one another.

"Much has been written about Project 2025 as a sort of legislative blueprint for the second Trump presidency," Gessen wrote. "Consistent with Magyar’s theory of autocracy, the document is more a reflection of the clan of people who empower Trump and are empowered by him than an ideological document. It is not a blueprint for coherent legislative change, but it is a blueprint still: a blueprint for trampling the system of government as it is currently constituted, a blueprint of destruction."

FILE UNDER; #KAKISTOCRACY

‘Unfit for the position’: Acting BLM chief won’t get the permanent post — but he’ll stay on the job


By Sarah Okeson, DCReport @ RawStory August 17, 2020

Thanks for your support!
This article was paid for by reader donations to Raw Story Investigates.

William Perry Pendley, the embattled attorney who is acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, is out as a candidate for the permanent job.

Trump withdrew Pendley’s nomination on Saturday because it could have caused problems for three Republican senators in tough re-election races who would have voted whether to confirm him: Steve Daines of Montana, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona. He is expected to remain as acting director.

“President Trump’s Senate Republican allies appear uncomfortable voting to confirm such a controversial nominee,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “They should be similarly uncomfortable with allowing Pendley to keep working for the federal government.”

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat who is running against Daines, filed one of two federal lawsuits about Pendley’s appointment. Bullock’s lawsuit says Pendley is violating the Federal Vacancies Reform Act which prohibits acting officers from running agencies while their nominations are pending before the Senate.

The Western Watersheds Project, an environmental watchdog, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, also sued over Pendley’s appointment. Both cases are pending.

In July 2019, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt appointed Pendley acting director. Trump nominated Pendley to become director of the bureau in June.

The bureau oversees 247 million acres of public land, roughly the size of Texas and California combined, more land than any other federal agency. The bureau has not had a Senate-confirmed director since Trump took office.

All 45 of the Senate’s Democrats and the two independents wrote Trump in August, asking him to withdraw the nomination, saying he was “unfit for the position.”

Pendley previously ran Mountain States Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for private property rights, and sued the Interior Department, which he is now a part of, at least 40 times. Pendley also worked under James Watt in the early 1980s as deputy assistant secretary of the Minerals Management Service.

Pendley pushed for a fire sale of coal leases in that job which led to a federal probe in which he was referred for possible criminal prosecution. No charges were ever filed.

In November, he publicly undermined the agency’s rangers, writing in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that they should defer to local law enforcement. His words could lead to potentially violent confrontations with bureau employees who routinely face threats, harassment and violence from people upset about restrictions on public land.

#KAKISTOCRACY
'Don't You Have a Bat to Eat?' New HHS Spokesman Made Racist Remarks About Chinese People on Twitter

Michael Caputo deleted the comments on Twitter before he was named assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS last week.

By Emma Ockerman -VICE-Apr 23 2020

MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
Cover: Newly-appointed spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services Michael Caputo arrives at the Hart Senate Office building to be interviewed by Senate Intelligence Committee staffers, on May 1, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The Department of Health and Human Services’ new spokesman tweeted — and then deleted — racist comments about Chinese people in March, and accused reporters critical of President Trump’s labeling of COVID-19 as the “the Chinese Virus” of “carrying water for the Chinese Community Party.”

Michael Caputo’s since-deleted tweets, archived online and first reported by CNN, came before he was appointed as the assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS last week. (HHS hasn’t commented on Caputo’s tweets to CNN, and did not respond to a VICE News request for comment.)

HHS is among the agencies currently attempting to fight off the coronavirus pandemic. Caputo previously worked for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

In early March — just as COVID-19 was starting to sweep across the U.S., and shelter-in-place orders were being issued — Caputo responded to a tweet about the conspiracy theory that the U.S. government brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, where the outbreak first emerged.

Foreign Ministry spokesman and Chinese diplomat Zhao Lijian tweeted the conspiracy theory, saying “US owe us an explanation!”

“This virus originated in Wuhan. You own it, and you know why. Nobody believes your bullshit. Take your lumps and clean up your act so you don’t kill the world,” Caputo responded.

When another Twitter user asked how Caputo knew the virus originated in Wuhan, Caputo responded: “Sure, millions of Chinese suck the blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters, but some foreigner snuck in a bottle of the good stuff. That's it.”

He responded to other people critical of him, too, saying to one user: “Don’t you have a bat to eat?” And another: “You’re very convincing, Wang.”



Caputo was apparently referencing the fact that researchers believe coronavirus was transmitted from bats to other wild animals possibly sold to humans at a wet market in Wuhan.

And as Trump was being criticized for labeling COVID-19 as “the China Virus” — saying it wasn’t racist — Caputo tweeted “#ChineseVirus” 20 times in a row on March 17. He also tweeted that Democrats and members of the Media were acting too favorably to Beijing.

“The Chinese Communist Party has always been adept at lying to cover their murders. What's remarkable here is the US Democrats and their conjugal media repeating CCP propaganda because they hate Trump more than they love America. The Wuhan virus has exposed them,” Caputo tweeted.

The next day, March 18, Caputo said on Twitter that “leftists lost the true meaning of ‘racism’ long ago,” suggesting that people “double down on #ChineseVirus.” He then said that reporters were “carrying water for the Chinese Communist party.”

Separately, Caputo suggested several times that Democrats would celebrate coronavirus deaths and an economic collapse, because it would look as if Trump had failed to handle the crisis.

"How many Americans must die to feed Democrat powerlust? 100K? 1M? More??," Caputo said in a tweet March 22. "How much economic destruction is the Democrat goal? 100% unemployment?'"

#KAKISTOCRACY 

At least 15,000 US hotels have pitched in to help medical personnel amid the pandemic. Trump's properties are not among them.

Paulina Cachero BUSINESS INSIDER 4/18/2020

The White House praised hotels around the country for housing first responders and medical workers on the frontlines of battling the coronavirus. 

But cities where President Donald Trump's company operates large hotels have reported that none of them are participating in any assistance programs. 

The Washington Post confirmed with city officials in New York, Chicago, Miami, Washington, and Honolulu, that the president's hotels were not stepping in to help frontline workers. 

Though widespread coronavirus lockdown measures and closures have sent the hospitality industry into freefall, major hotel chains have pitched in to help including Marriott and Hilton. 

On April 5, the White House's Twitter account praised the hotels housing first responders and frontline medical workers battling the coronavirus. But President Donald Trump's hotels are reportedly not among them.
—The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 5, 202

Amid widespread coronavirus closures, the US hospitality industry has been sent into freefall. In spite of the financial toll, 15,000 US hotels — from independently operated businesses to large hotel chains — have pitched in to help medical personnel amid the pandemic, according to the American Hotel and Lodging Association.

The association declined to release the name of hotels helping essential workers, but city officials in New York, Chicago, Miami, Washington, and Honolulu claimed Trump's properties were not participating, The Washington Post reported. 

None of Trump's large hotels are participating in city programs to house medical workers

The Trump Organization operates 24 hotels and clubs around the world. Like other companies in the hospitality industry, the Trump Organization has been hit by the coronavirus lockdowns. At least 18 properties have closed due to government mandates, or by choice.

Trump's properties have laid off or furloughed more than 2,500 employees amid the pandemic.

The Post reached out to the Trump Organization and authorities in five cities where Trump's hotels are located, inquiring about their participation in essential worker housing programs. All but one in Honolulu have remained open amid the coronavirus outbreak, and none are included in the city's programs.

Ty Warner, the owner of the Four Seasons in New York, near Trump Tower, said he opened up rooms for medical workers because they "are working tirelessly on the front lines of this crisis. They need a place close to work where they can rest and regenerate."

Meanwhile, Trump Tower was not included in two lists of hotels offering reduced rates to hospital workers.

In Florida's Miami-Dade County, Trump's Doral resort continues to operate as usual. Miami-Dade has already rented out two hotels and is working with five more to provide rooms for a lowered rate of $35 per night for first responders and the homeless community. While other hotels offered to donate rooms, Doral was not among them, one official said.

"They did not volunteer, and we did not ask them," Frank Rollason, the head of emergency management for the Miami-Dade fire department, told The Post.

Chicago has reserved over 1,100 rooms at five hotels for hospital workers and patients with mild cases of the coronavirus — Trump's hotel in Chicago is not one of them. The hotel has remained opened and laid off 294 workers in amid the pandemic.

In Washington D.C., the Trump International Hotel is not among the three hotels being used to house frontline health workers, a city official told the Post.

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