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."

 

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..

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.

BREAKING – Protestors take over Sri Lanka’s national television broadcaster 13 July 2022Protestors have taken over the Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation, the national television network of the island, after they stormed its offices just moments ago.A protestor was seen addressing the cameras earlier.The network has now gone off air.Sri Lanka’s Road to Ruin Was Political, Not Economic

BREAKING – Protestors take over Sri Lanka’s national television broadcaster

 13 July 2022

Protestors have taken over the Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation, the national television network of the island, after they stormed its offices just moments ago.

A protestor was seen addressing the cameras earlier.

The network has now gone off air.

Sri Lanka’s Road to Ruin Was Political, Not Economic

 12 July 2022

Article Author: 

Neil DeVotta

   

Writing in Foreign Policy, Neil Devotta, professor of international affairs at Wake Forest University, explains that “the roots of the current crisis lie with ethnocracy” which has led a country from meritocracy to kakistocracy – governance by a country’s worst citizens.

Quoting a Sri Lankan newspaper, Devotta writes, “drug dealers, fraudsters, murderers, rapists, bootleggers and cattle rustlers’ control politics, and they have bankrupted a country with so much potential”.

In explaining the rise of Sri Lanka as an ethnocratic state, he begins with the premiership of Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike which saw the implementation of the country’s most divisive and racist legislation – the 1956 Sinhala Only Act.  

This ethnonationalism deepened in Sri Lanka and proved fertile ground for the Rajapaksa’s which oversaw the brutal ending of the armed conflict.

“Being anti-minority became patriotic, which is why the Rajapaksas could combine their Sinhalese Buddhist credentials with cavalier racism to keep winning elections for two decades. The role they played in defeating the separatist and terrorist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam only bolstered these credentials” writes Devotta.

Despite this popularity, a series of poor decisions saw the traditional supporter base of the Rajapaksas turn against them. As Devotta notes:

“What is striking is that it took the worst economic crisis in the island’s history—not a popular commitment to ethnoreligious tolerance and pluralism or the need to account for alleged war crimes committed against Tamils or baseless attacks on Muslims—that made the island’s predominantly Sinhalese Buddhists sour on the Rajapaksa family”.

He further adds:

“In that sense, what the aragalaya proved is that nationalist sentiment cannot overcome hunger and scarcity. The Rajapaksas are among the most recent autocrats to discover this”.

Commenting on Rajapaksa’s refusal to relinquish power, Devotta writes:

“Kleptocrats seek to stay in power because they fear being held accountable. Gotabaya Rajapaksa refused to leave for so long because he gave up his American citizenship to run for the presidency and because once out of power he and his family could finally be charged for their predatory past”.

He further notes that currently, “there is such disgust with nearly everyone in Parliament that the legislature may be pressured to dissolve itself so new parliamentary elections, which need not be held until 2025, can be held early”.

He concludes by stating that:

“The ‘Go Home Gota’ campaign has generated discussions about building a future for all on the island. Perhaps the common suffering Sri Lankans are experiencing could be the antidote to the island’s ethnocracy. But given the island’s sorry past, only a fool would bank on that outcome”.

Read the full piece at Foreign Policy

Canada's Foreign Minister stresses urgent political and economic reforms in Sri Lanka

 12 July 2022

Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Melanie Joly, stressed the need for urgent political and economic reform in Sri Lanka.

Referring to the protests on 9 July, Joly tweeted that “Canada supports a peaceful, constitutional path forward that supports urgent action on economic and political reform.”

On 9 July, demonstrators stormed the President’s official residence and set the Prime Minister’s home ablaze. As a result of the protests, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe agreed to resign. Whilst President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has attempted to flee the island.

 

 

Joly highlights that the demonstrations were a clear indication of a “desire for a better Sri Lanka.”

In the past few months, Sri Lanka has seen a rise in anti-government protests in response to the ongoing economic crisis. Activists have criticized the movement for neglecting the demands of Eelam Tamils. They have highlighted that without demilitarization in the North-East or accountability for war crimes, a better Sri Lanka for everyone will not be possible.

In a further tweet, Joly denounced violence against journalists and peaceful protesters, emphasizing that “the right to protest peacefully must be upheld.”

In a statement, the Sri Lankan army admitted to opening fire during the protests that took place on Saturday. Footage was also captured by demonstrators depicting security forces brutalizing both protesters and journalists.

Sri Lankan army admits to opening fire during protests

 10 July 2022

A statement from the Sri Lankan army admitted that soldiers opened fire during Saturday’s protest, after video clips of the shootings were widely shared, but denied there was any “intent on causing deliberate harm to the protesters”.

In a statement entitled ‘The army sets the record straight about Saturday firing’, the military said its attention “has been drawn to a few video clips going viral”.

Video footage shared earlier today shows heavily armed soldiers and masked soldiers, lining up, taking aim and firing at the walls of the presidential palace, with protestors clearly visible on the other side. Bullets and debris ricocheted just inches away from the demonstrators, who would go on to storm Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s official residence.

Sri Lankan security forces open fire before protesters storm President’s house https://t.co/o6zo8drtrp pic.twitter.com/djy7nxS38V

— Tamil Guardian (@TamilGuardian) July 10, 2022

“The Army categorically denies having opened fire towards the protesters, but fired a few rounds to the air and the sidewalls of the main gate entrance to the President's House compound as a deterrent,” it claimed.

“Firing into the air and sidewalls do not therefore necessarily mean that those Army personnel on duty were intent on causing deliberate harm to the protesters.”

Separate footage captured by the protestors shows several incidents of brutality by the security forces, with journalists among those assaulted.

Read more: Protesters shot and journalist assaulted by Sri Lankan security forces in Colombo

Related Articles: 

10 July 2022 : Sri Lankan security forces open fire before protesters storm president’s house

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.

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

Trump Vaccine Adviser Warns That Scrutiny Of Him Will Delay Arrival Of Coronavirus Vaccine

HHS assistant secretary Michael Caputo went even further, arguing the media doesn't want a vaccine to succeed before the election. “I believe that all the way in my aorta.”

Paul McLeod BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on August 3, 2020

Drew Angerer / Getty Image
President Donald Trump and Moncef Slaoui in the Rose Garden

The chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s program investing billions of dollars into discovering a coronavirus vaccine, says media scrutiny of his stock ownership may delay a vaccine or make its discovery less likely because it is distracting him from his work.

Moncef Slaoui made the remarks on the official Health and Human Services podcast, released Friday, while being interviewed by Michael Caputo, HHS assistant secretary of public affairs. The interview quickly descended into a lengthy rant about the media.

“The American people need to understand that the media often times are lying to them because they don’t want a vaccine, in order to defeat Donald Trump,” Caputo said at one point.

The two men took extensive issue with news stories about Slaoui. He is working as a contractor voluntarily, drawing payment of only $1. As news reports have outlined, this exempts him from ethics rules that would apply to federal employees.

Slaoui worked for 30 years in senior roles at pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. He still holds significant stock in the company. The HHS inspector general ruled that he can continue to own stock in the pharmaceutical industry and is exempt from disclosure rules that would apply if he joined the government.

After introductions, the podcast interview pivoted to the media’s treatment of Slaoui. Caputo said that by joining Operation Warp Speed, Slaoui put a target on his back. Slaoui agreed and said he was naive. He said the media attention has distracted him and hurt the development of a vaccine

“I’m amazed that I’m being attacked on a personal basis in a way that frankly distracts my energy and the energy of all the teams we’re working together with to deliver, and therefore decreases our chances or the speed with which we try to help humanity and the country resolve and address this issue,” he said.

Slaoui said he is convinced the press has only one objective, which is “to distort information in a way that allows them to shape an opinion.”

Caputo then praised Slaoui for working for free and ridiculed the notion of him trying to enrich his former company. “I don’t recognize the media anymore,” he said. “I’m convinced that the reporters don’t want a vaccine, sir. They don’t.”

As of Monday, 4.7 million Americans have tested positive for COVID and over 155,000 people have died. There has recently been an average of about 1,200 new deaths every day.

Slaoui said on the podcast that the news stories have been “insulting to the deepest of my personal fibers” and challenged the media on what they are doing to help during the pandemic. Caputo singled out one reporter who wrote about Slaoui in particular, Noah Weiland of the New York Times. “I can tell you, sir, I will not speak to Noah Weiland. He calls my phone, I don’t answer it. It’s unethical reporting.”

Caputo then turned to Democrats who have questioned Slaoui’s contract arrangement, saying they do not want there to be a vaccine until after the Nov. 3 election. “I don’t want to talk about politics here,” Caputo said before adding “they don’t want a vaccine now because of politics.”

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Slaoui said he also didn’t want to talk about politics and is focused on discovering a vaccine. “I am resentful for actions that knowingly or unknowingly curtail that effort. That’s inappropriate, that’s wrong, that’s unethical,” he said.

“It’s inhumane,” said Caputo.

Slaoui responded, “I agree.”

Caputo then outlined his theory that the media are writing stories about Slaoui to try to get him to leave Operation Warp Speed because they want it to fail. Reporters are doing this because they are “so deeply unethical and so filled with hatred.”

Lest anyone think he was merely being hyperbolic, Caputo stressed that he believes this worldview “all the way in my aorta.”

Patients Over Pharma is one of the progressive groups that has questioned whether former pharmaceutical executives should oversee a project that will dispense billions of dollars to the industry. Spokesperson Eli Zupnick said Monday that everyone wants Slaoui to succeed, but there’s no reason he can’t do that while adhering to transparency and ethics guidelines.

“Dr. Slaoui doesn’t seem to understand that what he perceives as attacks aren’t personal and they aren’t ‘fake news,’” said Zupnick. “They are about making sure that the public can trust that Operation Warp Speed is operating in the best interests of patients and public health and not engaging in the cronyism and corruption that is so pervasive through the Trump administration.”

Paul McLeod is a politics reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.

#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.