MAGA intent and policies coming into focus: Kleptocracy rising; Strange tales from Fantasylandia

In the coming months, the things that MAGA wants to do regardless of public opinion will become clear. One can reasonably think that MAGA elites will try to do their best to limit news reporting and propagandize MAGA goals and policies that most Americans oppose.  

Among the things that MAGA hates are transparency in government and taxes on elites and big corporations. Among the things that MAGA loves are opacity in government and huge amounts of corruption. A key target is the IRS. By gutting funding to the IRS, congressional MAGA elites enable wealthy tax cheats to commit their crimes with impunity. One source writes:

Republican lawmakers have now clawed back half the investment the Biden administration made in the IRS tax agency. Congress revoked an additional $20 billion from the Internal Revenue Service last week when lawmakers averted a government shutdown, a cut that may undo many of President Joe Biden’s efforts to improve customer service at the tax agency and train fresh scrutiny on wealthy tax cheats.

Biden and congressional Democrats gave the IRS $80 billion in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, but Congress rescinded $20 billion as part of a 2023 budget deal. Shortly afterward, Republicans vowed they’d be back for more IRS cuts. When Congress approved a stopgap funding bill, called a continuing resolution, all the existing policy from the previous fiscal year was carried forward unless new text was specifically added to the bill to change it. There was no language in the bill to undo last year’s cut, so it repeated in the new law.

Critics of the IRS were pleased.  

Biden administration officials said the additional cuts would add $140 billion to the national debt over the next decade by hamstringing the agency’s ability to audit wealthy individuals and large corporations.

Prominent critics of the IRS are authoritarian, government-hating MAGA ideologues and wealthy tax cheats in the form of rich, powerful human beings and huge, powerful human legal entities called corporations. Once in power, MAGA elites plan to fire independent federal Inspector General positions and replace them with corrupt political loyalists. That opens the entire executive branch to true, full-blown kleptocracy. As it sands now, tax cheats already illegally withhold about $428 billion/year from the IRS by one estimate and according to the IRS (which in my opinion is not trustworthy on this data point). My personal estimate is that the annual festival of tax "theft" amounts to at least ~$1 trillion/year. Whatever the true number is, tax cheating is probably going to experience a "healthy" increase thanks to MAGA's kleptocratic hate of taxes, collecting taxes and enforcing tax laws.

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Self-reliant pulling up before 

boostraps were invented

Nutty politics doesn't get much more human than this:

After backing Trump, low-income voters 

hope he doesn’t slash their benefits

NEW CASTLE, Pennsylvania — Lori Mosura goes to the grocery store on a bicycle because she can’t afford to fix her Ford F-150 truck.

The single mother and her 17-year-old son live in an apartment that is so small she sleeps in the dining room. They receive $1,200 each month in food stamps and Social Security benefits but still come up short. Mosura said she often finds herself deciding between buying milk or toilet paper.

It was all that penny-pinching that drove the part-time tax consultant to abandon the Democratic Party this fall and vote for Donald Trump.

“He is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich,” Mosura, 55, said on a recent afternoon. “I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.” (and there's the fantasy)

Trump carried the Pennsylvania city of New Castle by about 400 votes, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to win here in nearly 70 years. More than 1 in 4 residents live in poverty, and the median income in this former steel and railroad hub ranks as one of the lowest in Pennsylvania.

New Castle’s poorest residents weren’t alone in putting their faith in Trump. Network exit polls suggest he erased the advantage Democrats had with low-income voters across the country.

Now, low-income Americans who voted for Trump say they are counting on him to keep their benefits intact even while his Cabinet picks and Republican lawmakers call on him to reduce federal spending.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — whom Trump has chosen to lead a new nongovernmental advisory panel, the “Department of Government Efficiency” — have said they want to trim $2 trillion from the government’s annual budget, a cut that some experts say could be accomplished only by slashing entitlement programs.

What can one say in the face of that kind of irrational false belief? It was well-known before the election that (i) DJT and MAGA hate most government domestic spending and they plan to seriously gut social safety net programs, and (ii) DJT's proposed tariffs would very likely significantly increase inflation. Those low-income voters are probably in for a huge, rude surprise. DJT and MAGA could not care less about them. DJT holds them in open contempt. They are probably gonna need to do a bunch of bootstrap pulling in the next couple of years.

MAGA logic

(compassionate conservatism)

MAGA intent and policies coming into focus; Etc.

It is fair to say that a lot of what MAGA wants, most average people wouldn't if they were aware of it. Some examples are related to the temporary spending bill to keep the government funded until March. The final Musk/Trump bill was changed to retain the practice of “spread pricing” in Medicaid plans. That is where PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers, middlemen in the medicine business) charge a health plan more for a drug than what they pay to the pharmacies that dispense it. The PBMs pocket the difference. Its pure corrupt special interest sleaze, which is why PBMs fight tooth and claw to keep it. The original, pre-Musk/Trump plan required PBMs to pass along all rebates and fees that are based on a percentage of a drug price to their health plan clients. The idea was to eliminate incentives to promote expensive drugs over cheaper ones. And, after all, we would not want patients to harvest some of the cash the PBMs milk out of the system, would we? Course not.

Another example of Musk/Trump MAGA policy priorities relates to protecting hidden junk fees. The original pre-Musk/Trump version included two bipartisan bills that aimed to crack down on junk fees by requiring ticket sellers and hotels to disclose any service charges and other add-ons up front to customers, rather than waiting until the end of the checkout process. Got 'cha! 

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A leading US government agency that tracks foreign disinformation has terminated its operations, the State Department said Tuesday, after Congress failed to extend its funding following years of Republican criticism. The Global Engagement Center, a State Department unit established in 2016, shuttered on Monday at a time when officials and experts tracking propaganda have been warning of the risk of disinformation campaigns from US adversaries such as Russia and China.  The GEC has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who accused it of censoring and surveilling Americans. It also came under fire from Elon Musk, who accused the GEC in 2023 of being the "worst offender in US government censorship [and] media manipulation" and called the agency a "threat to our democracy." The GEC's leaders have pushed back on those views, calling their work crucial to combating foreign propaganda campaigns.

Welp, if MAGA elites like Musk attack it for censorship, then the GEC is very likely doing a good job at fighting dark free speech. As we all know, dark free speech is absolutely crucial to the rise and establishment of MAGA's kleptocratic authoritarian plans for American society, government and commerce.

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Texas Republican Proposes Public Executions of Undocumented Immigrants

A patriotic Republican in Texas

showing us how to do it

At Trump’s inauguration, reports of a pay-to-pray -- According to a report, you can pray with Trump and Melania. It'll only cost you $100,000. President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is reportedly planning an interfaith prayer service the day before his inauguration, where participants can worship alongside the businessman and his wife, Melania. But those who want to join need to weigh the price of prayer: Tickets to the service will be awarded only to those who donate at least $100,000 to Trump’s inaugural ceremonies, or who raise $200,000.

Biden signs 50 bills into law on Christmas Eve -- President Biden signed 50 bills into law on Christmas Eve, as the year and his time in office draw to a close. The bills Mr. Biden signed include socialite and activist Paris Hilton's bill to protect teenagers living in residential treatment facilities, a bill setting anti-hazing standards on college campuses, and a bill preventing members of Congress from collecting pensions if convicted of certain crimes. He also made the bald eagle the national bird. 

Hm, no mention of any laws that try to protect democracy from kleptocratic MAGA authoritarianism. Biden is apparently out to pasture. Bummer.

The great tea bag escapade; Feisty MAGA politics; Regarding free speech and MAGA

Researchers at UAB (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain) checked out tea bags. They found the bags release lots of microplastics bits into the tea. The UAB newsroom writes:  

The tea bags used for the research were made from the polymers nylon-6, polypropylene and cellulose. The study shows that, when brewing tea, polypropylene releases approximately 1.2 billion particles per milliliter, with an average size of 136.7 nanometers; cellulose releases about 135 million particles per milliliter, with an average size of 244 nanometers; while nylon-6 releases 8.18 million particles per milliliter, with an average size of 138.4 nanometers.

MNPLs = micro/nanoplastics

Caco-2, HT29, HT29-MTX = human gut 

cell lines in vitro

The particles were stained and exposed for the first time to different types of human intestinal cells to assess their interaction and possible cellular internalization. The biological interaction experiments showed that mucus-producing intestinal cells had the highest uptake of micro and nanoplastics, with the particles even entering the cell nucleus that houses the genetic material. The result suggests a key role for intestinal mucus in the uptake of these pollutant particles and underscores the need for further research into the effects that chronic exposure can have on human health.

So, it sounds like one might want to use tea bags made out of cellulose, which is found naturally in all kinds of human foods. Plants make cellulose naturally. Cellulose is generally safe to eat in moderation. It occurs naturally in plant-based diets and is used as an additive, apparently in most processed foods.

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Our feisty president-elect is being feisty at the LGBQT concept and community:

Donald Trump made sweeping promises at a far-right event this weekend to end trans rights in several areas, including education, health care, and military service.

Speaking at an event organized by Turning Point USA, Trump also promised to end transgender rights across the board on his first day in office, saying that it will be official policy that “there are only two genders, male and female.” He also said he would sign an executive order to “end child sexual mutilation.”

Trump’s promise to keep “transgender… out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools” likely refers to school curricula, which Republican state lawmakers have been legislating against for several years. Questions about curriculum are usually handled by state and municipal bodies, not the president.

“Child sexual mutilation” is an inflammatory way of referring to surgery associated with gender-affirming care, something that is almost never performed on minors in the U.S. It is not clear what power a president has to ban medical procedures through executive order.

“Child sexual mutilation” is not only inflammatory, it is deeply insulting to (i) the LGBQT concept and community, and (ii) other people who dislike overt displays of bigoted theocratic authoritarianism. But what the heck, MAGA doesn't respect the dignity or rights of people MAGA chooses to hate, attack and oppress.

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NewsGuard is under attack by MAGA because it rates the credibility of some news sources that includes some MAGA sites. Some of the ratings for some MAGA sites are low. MAGA is calling that censorship and threatening to attack. 

When veteran newsmen L. Gordon Crovitz and Steven Brill started their news site rating company, they were prepared for the inevitable cries of bias from both sides.

What they didn’t anticipate was that NewsGuard, their company of some 50 employees, would become the target of congressional investigations and accusations from federal regulators that it was at the vanguard of a vast conspiracy to censor conservative views.

Since 2018, NewsGuard has built a business offering advertisers nonpartisan assessments of online publishers — backed by a team of journalists who assess which sites are reputable and which can’t be trusted. It uses a slate of nine standard criteria, such as whether a site corrects errors or discloses its ownership and financing, to produce a zero to 100 percent rating.

Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a Republican, and Brill, a left-tending independent who founded Court TV and the American Lawyer magazine, engaged with publishers wanting to understand subpar ratings, sometimes wrangling for hours by phone over the details of a site’s correction policy.

But conservatives now question the company’s premise. Brendan Carr, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, accused the company of facilitating a “censorship cartel,” in a November letter to leading tech platforms. Noting that key legal protections depend on tech executives operating “in good faith,” Carr continued: “It is in this context that I am writing to obtain information about your work with one specific organization — the Orwellian named NewsGuard.”

NewsGuard, backed by legal experts, argues that Carr’s letter may violate the First Amendment by threatening the speech rights of private companies.

“The only attempt to censor going on here is by Brendan Carr,” Crovitz said in an interview.

Despite the battering, tech giants didn’t particularly want to play truth police on their platforms. Crovitz and Brill offered them a solution: Pay NewsGuard to sift the real news sites from the propaganda peddlers.

“We’re going to apply common sense to a problem the algorithms haven’t been able to solve,” Brill told “CBS Mornings” that year. “It’s going to be very simple … telling the difference between the Denver Post and the Denver Guardian, which is a hoax site.”

A “censorship cartel”?  “Child sexual mutilation”? One has to admire the toxic, deceptive, divisive rhetoric that America's radical right authoritarians constantly come up with. The MAGA wealth and power movement is 2nd to none when it comes to dark free speech expertise.

And FWIW, there's this: U.S. is ‘becoming a kleptocracy, oligarchy’: Sen. Murphy slams billionaires picked for Trump admin. It isn't often to hear the word kleptocracy used in politics, despite it being a gigantic issue, along with oligarchy and American authoritarianism generally. A peanut grumbled: Trump's inauguration is gonna be an all-you-can-pocket-tax-payer-money buffet. His whole term too!

I love it, a tax money buffet. That's a great way to describe kleptocracy!

And this too: DOJ officially decides not to charge Matt Gaetz in sex-trafficking probe -- The Justice Department has informed lawyers for Rep. Matt Gaetz and multiple witnesses that it will not bring charges against the Florida Republican after a yearslong federal sex-trafficking investigation. -- What a non-surprise. With Merrick Garland in charge, no elite gets whacked.

Judicial ethics, an oxymoron; The rule of law, another oxymoron

Balls & Strikes:

Court Order: It Is Unethical for Judges to Talk 

About Justice Sam Alito’s Unethical Behavior

In May 2024, the New York Times revealed that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had flags affiliated with far-right extremist movements flying outside of his residences. Alito’s conduct triggered widespread demands for higher judicial ethics standards and meaningful enforcement when those standards are breached. And last week, the legal system actually meted out some discipline in relation to the incident…but not to Alito. Chief Judge Albert Diaz of the Fourth Circuit issued an order on December 10 finding that a federal judge violated ethical rules by publicly acknowledging Alito’s clear lapses in ethical judgment.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that the target of the disciplinary measures was Michael Ponsor, a Senior Judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Ponsor published an essay in the New York Times over the summer titled “A Federal Judge Wonders: How Could Alito Have Been So Foolish?” This was a very good question. The foolishness at issue was an upside-down American flag—a symbol adopted by proponents of overthrowing the 2020 election on the false grounds that it was “stolen” from Donald Trump—which neighbors spotted in front of Alito’s Virginia home in the days following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Two years later, people saw an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—an obscure emblem of Christian theocrats—hoisted high at Alito’s New Jersey vacation home.

When a Supreme Court justice is exposed as a conspiracy-addled, antidemocratic reactionary, it becomes a bit more difficult for the Court to maintain its reputation as an impartial administrator of equal justice for all. Yet, somehow, Alito has faced no consequences for his misconduct, while Ponsor’s discussion of that misconduct gave rise to an ethical inquiry conducted by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The court’s determination that Ponsor violated ethics rules by publishing criticism of Alito shows that the judiciary is much less concerned with meeting ethical standards than it is with maintaining a myth that the standards are met.

 No wonder public trust in the US systems of courts is low. ~65% don't have much or any trust. That level of distrust was earned and is deserved. 

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At least for rich and/or powerful people and corporate people, the rule of law is fading away. The Lever:

The Biden Justice Department just handed a sweetheart deal to a global consulting firm with deep ties to the Biden administration, letting the firm off the hook for its role in helping “turbocharge” sales of the highly addictive prescription pain pill OxyContin.

The development is one of the Justice Department’s first major moves since adopting a new policy three weeks ago to go even softer on corporate crime, and will allow McKinsey & Company to defer prosecution for its extensive role in fueling the opioid epidemic that has devastated millions of American lives.

The new Justice Department policy is meant to provide leniency to corporations that cooperate with federal investigations and self-report crimes. But now McKinsey is benefiting from the new policy, even though prosecutors said that the consulting firm worked to obstruct their investigation.

The McKinsey settlement comes as federal prosecution of white-collar crimes hits historic lows, signaling that corporate malefactors can likely expect lenient treatment moving forward, no matter the extent and heinousness of their alleged crimes.

Although federal contracts with McKinsey for consulting work have shrunk recently, payments to consulting firms make up a massive portion of federal spending. The Biden administration requested more than $70 billion in federal funds for consulting work in the 2024 budget, with the Defense Department requesting nearly half of those funds, according to an analysis by antitrust expert Matt Stoller.

On Dec. 13, the Justice Department announced that McKinsey will be able to pay $650 million and enter into a five-year deferred-prosecution agreement in order to settle criminal and civil investigations into the firm’s role in helping Purdue Pharma “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin. According to prosecutors, the company was accused of “knowingly destroying records, documents, and tangible objects with the intent to impede, obstruct, and influence the investigation.” A former senior partner at McKinsey agreed to plead guilty to destroying documents and other evidence that investigators sought.  

McKinsey’s settlement comes just three weeks after a new Justice Department policy update allows corporations accused of crimes to receive lenient sentences for cooperating with investigators, even if those corporations are the target of multiple overlapping investigations and consistently break the law.

This new, fun-filled "law enforcement" policy stinks of Merrick Garland. He's the guy who successfully acted to protect DJT from federal prosecutions. Now he protects McKinsey and other major criminal operations.

America desperately needs a new political party. One that is honest, competent, transparent, pro-public interest and pro-democracy. Unfortunately, American is not going to get that hypothetical new party. We're stuck with the two odious beasts we have now.