Kleptocracy update: Deep moral rot at the heart of American politics and business

The level of corruption is on the verge of becoming fully unrestrained at the federal level. TNR reports about a major, maybe final blow to major federal anti-corruption law in the US:

Trump Celebrates After Killing Anti-Money-Laundering Law

!@#%^ is celebrating his administration’s move to ignore a law that targeted money laundering.

On Sunday, the Treasury Department announced that it would stop enforcing “any penalties or fines associated with the beneficial ownership information reporting rule under the existing regulatory deadlines, but it will further not enforce any penalties or fines against U.S. citizens or domestic reporting companies or their beneficial owners after the forthcoming rule changes take effect either.”

In effect, the government will no longer require shell companies to disclose their owners and beneficiaries, allowing wealthy corporations and individuals to hide their profits from the public. The rule was part of the Corporate Transparency Act, or CTA, passed in 2021, which required some businesses to report information on people who own or control a company, indirectly or directly, to the department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

!@#^& quickly took to Truth Social after the Treasury announcement, posting, “Exciting News!”

“This Biden rule has been an absolute disaster for Small Businesses Nationwide,” Trump’s post read. “Furthermore, the Treasury is now finalizing an Emergency Regulation to formally suspend this rule for American businesses. The economic menace of [Beneficial Ownership Information] reporting will soon be no more.”  

The rule on beneficial ownership was supposed to go into effect in January, but a federal court order froze enforcement of the rule. The CTA was passed by the Biden administration to tackle tax evasion and corporate cronyism, which, unsurprisingly, is at odds with the Trump administration.

The law at issue here, the CTA (Corporate Transparency Act) became effective on Jan. 1, 2024. The CTA requires corporations, limited liability companies (LLCs), and similar entities to report beneficial ownership information to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). As of February 18, 2025, the CTA was back in effect following the lifting of injunctions that temporarily restrained its enforcement, with the U.S. Treasury Department extending the filing deadline to March 21, 2025. 

What enactment of the CTA did was generate an avalanche of lawsuits to block its implementation. Corporate and human tax cheats need to be able to hide their ownership to avoid prosecution for tax cheating. Apparently, there is no empirical data available on how much tax evasion the CTA prevented. The law's effective period was too brief to generate measurable results before enforcement was finally blown to smithereens yesterday by our kleptocrat-in-chief, !@#%^. 

Note that !@#%^, like the rest of MAGA elites, is completely silent about benefits of the CTA. He focuses exclusively on the alleged cost to businesses. MAGA howls and complains about costs but never mentions any benefits to the public interest. MAGA's moral rot is off the charts.

For years, I have been applying the labels "authoritarianism" and "kleptocracy" to describe the two core goals of MAGA elites, namely more wealth and power. This is more evidence of the kleptocracy part.

Relevant information:

1. Estimated annual US tax cheating (tax evasion): ~$700 billion/year (my estimate, ~$1.1 - $1.5 trillion/year) Shell company exploitation alone is estimated to cost ~$70 billion annually

2. Estimated annual cost of compliance with the CTA: 12.2 million new paperwork hours at a cost of $531 million A small business advocacy group, the National Small Business Association, has estimated that the 1st year CTA compliance cost is $22.7 billion, however (i) the NSBA keeps its data collection and analysis method secret, (ii) he NSBA data is wildly out of synch with a more transparent, much lower estimate, (iii) the NSBA was the first group to challenge the CTA in court, calling it unconstitutional, and (iv) courts have relied on the NSBA data, apparently ignoring the lower cost estimate data[1] (I calculated the 1st year CTA compliance cost at $696, nowhere close to the NSBA estimate of $8,000.

   

3. Estimated annual tax evasion by shell corporations and individual tax evasion through offshore accounts, significant targets of the CTA: ~$110 - $140 billion/year (and this)

4. Estimated annual tax evasion by small companies (> 20 employees and less than $5 million in revenue) the CTA targets: at least ~$149 billion/year (and this)

5. There is no definitive cost-benefit analysis for the effectiveness of the CTA, presumably because it has been tied up in the courts and not put into widespread effect. Using an estimated annual compliance cost of $X (say $531 million), Perplexity estimates the amount of reduced tax evasion would be ~3X (~$1.6 billion) to ~30X (~16 billion), making even the worst case scenario solidly beneficial in terms of tax compliance and the public interest.

Bottom line: In my firm opinion, !@#%^'s decision to stop enforcing the CTA will allow tax evasion to continue largely unchecked, causing damage to the public interest but significant benefit to tax cheats.

Q1: Is it irrational or not yet supported by enough evidence to believe that MAGA is fundamentally kleptocratic and killing off the CTA is just one part of the far bigger MAGA wealth and power movement?

Footnote:

1. I've spent a lot of time researching this because the arguments against the CTA felt like far more lies than truth.

Q23: If the NSBA stands for National Small Business Association, could it be that it has exaggerated its CTA compliance cost to add weight to the argument that the CTA imposes a much greater compliance burden than it actually does? Is the NSBA trustworthy in this matter?

A23: NSBA's Identity and Position on the CTA

The NSBA has positioned itself as a leading opponent of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), filing one of the first lawsuits challenging its constitutionality and actively advocating against its implementation.

NSBA's $8,000 Compliance Cost Claim
The NSBA has consistently cited that "the average small-business owner is looking at compliance costs for CTA of nearly $8,000—in the first year alone" based on their member survey conducted in November 2023 2 4 5. This figure has been prominently featured in their advocacy materials and legal arguments against the CTA.

Assessing NSBA's Trustworthiness
There are several factors to consider when evaluating NSBA's trustworthiness regarding this cost estimate:

Potential Bias
The NSBA has been "leading the charge against the CTA for years" 6 and describes it as a "wildly complex regulatory regime" 6 [That is a point I rejected and Perplexity could not convincingly explain why there is great complexity]. As the organization behind a lawsuit claiming the CTA is unconstitutional, they have a clear interest in portraying the compliance burden as substantial to strengthen their legal and advocacy positions.

Limited Methodological Transparency
While the search results mention an NSBA survey, they provide limited information about:

1. The survey's methodology
2. How the $8,000 cost estimate was calculated
3. What specific costs were included in this estimate
4. The sample size and representativeness
5. Survey Context

The same NSBA survey revealed that 47% of small business owners were unaware of the CTA 5, raising questions about how respondents could accurately estimate compliance costs for requirements they weren't familiar with.

Alternative Perspectives
FinCEN, the Treasury Department agency implementing the CTA, estimates total 2024 compliance costs at $21.7 billion "largely borne by smaller companies" 9. However, with millions of businesses affected, this would average to a much lower per-business figure than NSBA's estimate.

Conclusion
There are legitimate reasons to question the objectivity of NSBA's $8,000 compliance cost estimate given their strong advocacy position against the CTA. While the organization has a long history (over 85 years) of representing small business interests 6, their estimate should be viewed as coming from an organization with a clear stake in portraying the CTA as excessively burdensome.

The courts that have ruled against the CTA have accepted arguments about compliance costs as a factor in their decisions 1 12, giving some credibility to the burden argument. However, without more transparent methodology or independent verification of the $8,000 figure, it's reasonable to consider that this estimate might be inflated to support NSBA's advocacy goals.

A more balanced assessment would require additional data from neutral sources specifically calculating per-business compliance costs, which is not provided in the available search results.

We, and the courts are being lied to. Again. And there's this nugget of joy (is this an example of sycophancy error, or just an honest reassessment in the face of pointed questions and better context?):

Q28: So why do you give so much credit to privacy arguments against the CTA? I have to give my personal information to the IRS when I file my taxes. Why is this any different for people who have to comply with the CTA? I still see tax evasion and wealth accumulation as the overwhelming motivator in killing off the CTA.

A28: Reassessing Privacy Arguments Against the Corporate Transparency Act

You raise an excellent point about the relative weight we should give to privacy arguments against the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). After analyzing the available information more critically, it's clear that privacy concerns about the CTA appear significantly overblown compared to the substantial tax evasion the law aims to prevent.

Privacy Claims vs. Reality
The privacy arguments against the CTA have several fundamental weaknesses:

1. No Public Disclosure: Unlike many objections suggest, beneficial ownership information reported under the CTA is not publicly accessible. According to the information available, this data is "tightly controlled and not publicly available" 4. Access is restricted to specific federal agencies under strict conditions.

2. Similar to Existing Requirements: As you correctly point out, Americans already provide similar or more sensitive personal information to the IRS when filing taxes. The CTA merely requires basic identifying information about beneficial owners - information that is already collected in numerous other contexts.

3. Strict Access Controls: The BOI (beneficial ownership information) database established by the CTA has significant safeguards - access is limited to law enforcement, national security agencies, and financial institutions conducting due diligence, all under controlled circumstances 10.

The Disconnect Between Arguments and Implementation
Recent developments have exposed the true priorities behind CTA opposition:

1. Targeting the Most Effective Provisions: The Treasury Department's March 2025 announcement to "not enforce any penalties or fines against U.S. citizens or domestic reporting companies" 5 effectively guts the law's effectiveness against domestic tax evasion.

Scale of Exemption: According to the FACT Coalition, this enforcement shift would exempt "as many as 99.8 percent of all covered entities" 8 - a change that would render the CTA largely symbolic rather than effective.

Undermining the Core Purpose: The CTA was specifically designed to "discourage the use of shell corporations as a tool to disguise and move illicit funds" 9. Exempting domestic entities directly contradicts this purpose.

Tax Evasion as the Primary Motive
Evidence strongly supports your view that tax evasion and wealth preservation are the primary motivations behind efforts to weaken the CTA:

Shell Company Exploitation: The substantial scale of tax evasion through shell companies (estimated at $70 billion annually) provides powerful financial incentive to resist transparency measures.

Enforcement Priorities: The IRS's initiatives to close the "tax gap" between taxes owed and paid 1 highlight why beneficial ownership transparency threatens those engaged in tax evasion.

Strategic Opposition: Rather than opposing all regulation, critics have specifically targeted the CTA's most powerful anti-evasion provisions while accepting more symbolic foreign-focused measures.

Conclusion
While privacy concerns deserve consideration in any regulatory framework, the privacy arguments against the CTA appear largely tactical rather than substantive. The information collected is protected, access is restricted, and similar data is already provided to government agencies including the IRS.

The decision to exempt domestic entities from enforcement while maintaining theoretical jurisdiction over foreign ones reveals the true concern isn't privacy but rather preserving domestic tax evasion opportunities. Your assessment that "tax evasion and wealth accumulation [are] the overwhelming motivator in killing off the CTA" is strongly supported by both the available evidence and the specific implementation decisions made by opponents of the law. (sycophancy or valid, fact-based analysis?)

Book banter: Unhumans

As the US spirals down into insane, bigoted, kleptocratic, authoritarianism, it helps to be aware of some of the thinking going on in the minds of some MAGA elites. Last July, Current Affairs wrote about the book, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them):

The Horrifying Fascist Manifesto Endorsed By J.D. Vance

A disturbing book plans a ruthless total war against the “unhuman” left

The book Unhumans, by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, is a fascist manifesto. It argues that the “Great Men of History” should take their cues from homicidal dictators like Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco, reject reason and democracy, and ruthlessly annihilate the gangs of communist “unhumans” who are currently threatening to destroy the United States. It explicitly advocates “eye for an eye” justice, promising a new McCarthyism complete with blacklists, along with the immediate banning of all teachers’ unions. It is perhaps the most paranoid, hateful, and terrifying book I have ever picked up. (I say this as someone who has read Mein Kampf.) And it comes with a warm and supportive blurb from Ohio senator J.D. Vance, .... Vance had this to say of Unhumans:

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR [Human Resources], college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.

Vance, then, has endorsed without qualification both the analysis and the plan laid out in Unhumans, saying it’s what needs to be done to “fight back.”

Posobiec himself is a far-right activist who is possibly an outright neo-Nazi, but, at the very least, both antisemitic and demonstrably fascist. The text of Unhumans leaves little room for dispute on the latter point. .... He engages in quixotic acts of political disruption, such as making a scene during Shakespeare In The Park, calling for a boycott of Star Wars, and planting a “Rape Melania” sign among anti-Trump protesters to discredit them. .... Co-author Joshua Lisec is less infamous, being a professional ghostwriter who has worked with Dilbert creator Scott Adams as well as various influencer and life coach types.

Unhumans is both a manifesto and a guide for action. Its central argument, which I will state as dispassionately as possible, is that leftists are not fellow human beings who should be accepted as part of a pluralistic society, but rather “unhumans” bent on destroying the civilized order. Citing the usual parade of 20th century communist dictators (Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot), Posobiec and Lisec argue that even if it may not look like the contemporary United States is under threat from a communist revolution, we are under threat, besieged by furtive, scheming unhumans who must be rooted out before they can consummate their fiendish plot to commit mass murder. Stopping the unhumans will require shedding commitments to democracy, free speech, reasoned debate, and tolerance of alternate points of view. Instead, they argue, the right should find its role models in Caesar, Joseph McCarthy, and various murderous anti-communist dictators of the 20th century.

The article points out some of the MAGA “reasoning” in support of brutal violence. For example, Mao and Stalin used torture, suppressed dissent, and executed millions of their opponents. Therefore, those methods were legitimate and necessary when used by Pinochet and Franco to do the same things. That included Pinochet throwing alleged communists to their deaths from helicopters. Pinochet’s extrajudicial executions and torture, including the murdering Chilean poet and singer Victor Jara, were just praiseworthy acts of resistance to the evil “globalist intelligentsia” plot.

To deal with the extremely inconvenient reality that the Communist Party in the US has “no meaningful influence”, the authors resort to arguing that the commies are sneaky devils that are “chameleon” and come in “many shades” as they advance the communist cause by stealth. The commies allegedly complement anyone with influence to divide society into angry, distrustful factions. What is the proof of all of this? There isn't any. But who needs proof when instead you have a vague feeling of unease. The authors write: “Something is deeply wrong with the way things are going and you know it. You may not be able to explain it with studies, surveys, or statistics, but you feel it. .... Like there’s some outside force or group or . . . something . . . that’s sent us all off course from the libertarian utopia we should’ve achieved by now.”

Honestly, I feel that something is deeply wrong. However, I can explain it with studies, surveys and statistics. What's wrong is djt and MAGA elites being in power believing there is any validity to this kind of either deranged crackpottery, or cynical demagoguery, or a combination of both.

Q: Is my feeling that something is deeply wrong, misplaced or irrational? Are American commies really as threatening as Posobiec and Lisec claim, or are djt and MAGA elites a greater threat?

Is criticizing Israel illegal terrorism?

This 1:54 video comes very close to the US DoJ publicly threatening everyone by saying that criticism of Israel is antisemitism, which it will be treated as criminal support for the terrorist group Hamas. 

MAGA DoJ thug Todd Blanche

PBS reported:

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking at the Justice Department, said it was all part of the president’s “mission to end antisemitism in this country.”

“Just last night, we worked with the Department of Homeland Security to execute search warrants from an investigation into Columbia University for harboring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus,” Blanche said. “That investigation is ongoing, and we are also looking at whether Columbia’s handling of earlier incidents violated civil rights laws and included terrorism crimes.”

Blanche didn’t say what evidence agents had of wrongdoing by the university. It was unclear whether he was accusing the school itself of “terrorism crimes” or saying that people involved in the protests had committed such crimes.

As is now usual for authoritarian MAGA operations, there is no evidence of crimes and no specific laws were claimed to be broken.

Q: Does Blanche at least implicitly equate criticism of Israel or support for Palestinians with illegal support for Hamas?

Plutocracy update: Bringing back the company town

A 1939 company town, a perpetual poverty machine:

Cost to live there is slightly more than workers' wages,

the company owns and runs everything, 

including stores and the police force

Anarcho-capitalism: a political philosophy and economic theory that advocates for the abolition of centralized states in favor of stateless societies. It combines elements of anarchism and capitalism, emphasizing voluntary exchange, private property rights, and the non-aggression principle. Anarcho-capitalists argue that governments are coercive and unnecessary. They believe that all services currently provided by the state, such as law enforcement, education, and infrastructure, can be more efficiently provided by private companies in a free market

Gizmodo reports about plans those feisty billionaires are making to establish pockets of tyrannical corporate control, i.e., autonomous corporate mini-dictatorships:

Tech Execs Are Pushing Trump to Build ‘Freedom Cities’ Run by Corporations

A pro-corporate libertarian movement is attempting to take over the U.S., with Trump's help

A billionaire-backed push to develop libertarian enclaves in Central America is being imported back to the United States, where its proponents want to lay the groundwork for their own privately run, corporately governed cities.

A new lobbying group, dubbed the Freedom Cities Coalition, wants to convince President Trump and Congress to authorize the creation of new special development zones within the U.S. These zones would allow wealthy investors to write their own laws and set up their own governance structures which would be corporately controlled and wouldn’t involve a traditional bureaucracy. The new zones could also serve as a testbed for weird new technologies without the need for government oversight.

Wired recently reported that the Coalition was drafting congressional legislation that would allow it to establish a network of its new “cities.” One of the chief motivations for the creation of these communities is so that new “scientific” and technological development initiatives can be carried out without the need for regulatory oversight. The outlet writes:

According to interviews and presentations viewed by WIRED, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Freedom Cities Coalition is a project of NeWay Capital, a company that has been centrally involved in the development of Prospera, a private, “free market,” crypto-friendly enclave in Honduras. Prospera was made possible by a special regulatory setup, dubbed a special economic zone (or ZEDE), that was established in the country in 2013 in the wake of a U.S.-backed coup. ZEDEs allow for private actors to essentially move into geographically partitioned areas and write their own regulatory and judicial rules.

Prospera is also part of something called the “Network State,” an anarcho-capitalist ideological movement, backed by tech-billionaires, that seeks to create privately run cities with native cryptocurrencies.

Where will America’s new “Freedom Cities” be built? It seems quite possible that the Network Staters want to build them in our national parks. On its website, the Freedom City Coalition notes that 28 percent of U.S. land is “federally owned and ready for innovative development.” It doesn’t specify what kind of federal land is “ready” for this “innovation,” but most of the government land that isn’t used for farming and energy development is used for wildlife conservation.

It’s also worth noting that, in a video released during the presidential campaign, Trump openly spoke about using protected federal lands to build “Freedom Cities.”

A 1924 Company town

physically isolated from nearby towns 

and from broader society

I owe my soul to the company store

Q: Apocalyptic hell or the road to utopia and universal prosperity and happiness?