Tyranny and corruption hide in agreement, disagreement reveals it

It may seem counterintuitive, but right now in the US policy agreement, including false perceptions of agreement, helps hide tyranny and corruption. Conflict reveals authoritarianism and kleptocracy. That is the heart of the message from research by Martin Gilens and Ben Page. 

Their work, and that of other researchers, helps explain why a country like the US can retain elections, produce some popular policies, and still undergo serious democratic degradation. Majorities remain highly visible, but their power to get outcomes they want against bigoted authoritarian wealth, racial hierarchy, organized politics, and authoritarian influences disappears over time. Power and wealth quietly, usually unnoticed, flows from the people to the elites in control. 

That is what is happening right now in the US under Trump, MAGA elites and their major donors and enablers. Their agenda is kleptocracy and authoritarianism, the latter being mostly a mix of dictatorship, oligarchy, white-power nationalism, and virulent Christian nationalist theocracy. Such corrupt and authoritarian politics translate into core goals of concentrating wealth and power with a few trusted, mostly above-the-law elites, and their major donors, allied corporations and special interests. Except for the theocrats, it's almost all about wealth and power for themselves, almost always at our expense. 

Digression: The theocrats? They and their divine vision of God demand culture war. It's waged largely by attacking, hating, slandering, and/or oppressing immigrants, LGBQT people, women's equality, secular law, and transparency in government. For the most part, Christian theocrat elites are a very nasty bunch of hypocrites, liars, bigots and racists.

Anyway, public majority does not exercise governing power when because it sometimes receives policies it favors. If it receives those policies because affluent citizens and/or powerful organized interests also approve, that is not majority political power in effect. In those cases, the majority benefits from elite consent. Democracy is truly tested when preferences conflict. Unfortunately, research indicates that American policy has most often been tilted toward wealth and organized power. The wealthy and organized interests have systematically disproportionate influence, especially when preferences diverge on consequential economic questions. Wealth and power flows to the top, not to the rest of us.

The relevant test is not whether ordinary people ever get what most of them want. The real test of democracy is whether the majority prevails at least equally as often when their preferences conflict with wealth and organized power. For the US, the empirical truth is no. When the elites oppose, the American majority usually loses. That is exactly and inextricably how authoritarianism and kleptocracy work. Frighteningly, that ugly truth about Trump and his MAGA elites, is mostly or completely hidden from millions of demagoguery-deceived Americans.

MAGA's big new gift to tax cheats and grifters

MAGA's new gift

A new MAGA finance rule to reduce reporting burdens on businesses is in effect. Tax cheats and criminals all over the US are cheering. A WaPo article, Treasury ends ownership reporting rules for U.S. companies, reports about reporting rules that MAGA is gutting. The rules were put in place to combat and reduce money laundering and other financial crimes. Now, tax cheats and criminals can better hide and keep more of their assets, legitimate and illegitimate.

Trump's Treasury Dept finalized the new rule yesterday. It exempts US companies and individuals from ‌reporting beneficial ownership information to the Treasury Department's financial ‌crimes unit. That obliterates reporting requirements established under a 2021 law aimed ​at combating illicit finance and tax cheating.

Not only is Trump gutting the reporting rule, he goes a big step further. Trump's treasury will delete the information previously reported by Americans. The gutted rule was simple in principle. If a person ultimately owned or controlled a corporation or LLC, federal financial-crimes investigators could identify that person through a confidential database. The information was not a public registry. This isn't a minor regulatory tweak. This is deliberate removal of a fundamental state capacity. The government's ability to determine who owns what in a state-created corporate entity is now gone. Here's FinCEN's FAQ page to bring tax cheats and criminals up to speed on the new layer of secrecy that MAGA is giving them.

The size of the burden that MAGA claims existed under the old rule does not remotely justify the scale of this new rule. For an ordinary small business, disclosure meant entering the names and identifying information of the people who actually own or control it, using a free electronic system. FinCEN estimated that a straightforward initial filing would take about 90 minutes, with more complex ownership structures taking longer. But complexity is often precisely what investigators need to untangle who owns what. An honest government concerned in good faith with efficiency and reduced paperwork could have simplified forms, extended deadlines, funded free assistance, etc. Instead, Treasury chose categorical exemption to obliterate the targeted beneficial ownership reporting. That's real deregulation of special interests at the expense of the public interest! 

How much is this gonna cost us?

This one will have some bite. The consequences cannot yet be measured precisely because Trump's administration dismantled the reporting system before it could generate years of enforcement data. The IRS projects a 2022 gross tax gap (owed but unpaid taxes) of $696 billion and a net gap of $606 billion annually. Those official figures are conservative, not a full census of sophisticated tax evasion (tax cheating). The IRS and outside analysts acknowledge major measurement difficulty involving foreign and illegal activity, complex pass-through structures, digital assets, and corporate non-filings. Research on top-income evasion indicates that conventional audits miss a lot of hidden offshore and complex-entity evasion. A cautious estimate is that eliminating ownership data could cost the Treasury ~$5 billion annually in additional uncollected taxes. That does not count undetected fraud, laundering, corruption, sanctions evasion, or other non-tax violations.

Now, tax cheats can put a business, investment account, real estate holding, or other shielded asset in the name of an LLC controlled through nominees or layered entities. The cheater can then claim that income or assets belong to a separate company, not to them. That allows things like (1) business income or capital gains to be withheld from a personal tax return, (2) concealment of property and investment income from tax authorities, (3) shifting and laundering of legal and criminal money through an entity owned by another entity, e.g., in a secrecy jurisdiction, so the human owner is difficult or impossible to identify, and (4) frustrate collection of tax debts, civil judgments, child support, or restitution by appearing to have fewer assets than the cheater/grifter actually controls.

In addition, MAGA's new secrecy shield helps people who need to hide a conflict between their official or fiduciary roles and private financial interests. A public official, contractor, executive, politically connected intermediary, or grifter can use an entity to disguise that they are on both sides of a deal. A government official can steer a contract, permit, subsidy, or asset sale to a company they secretly control. A vendor creating a hidden related-party company can send out inflated or fictitious invoices. A donor, lobbyist, or politically exposed person can conceal their financial stake in a recipient of government action. The possibilities are just about endless!

Impacts on the rule of law

This new rule is part of a broader MAGA governing strategy. MAGA's authoritarian and kleptocratic policy is to weaken or eliminate the federal government’s capacity to regulate, investigate, tax, and expose powerful but corrupt private actors. MAGA's demagoguery calls the resulting transfer of power “freedom” or “relief from burdens”, but it relieves only special interests at the expense of the public interest and average individuals. 

That policy design reveals MAGA priorities. The administration here did not just lower a compliance cost. It privileged and sanctified anonymity for domestic wealth and corporate power over the public’s interest in enforcing tax law, tracing criminal proceeds, detecting conflicts of interest, and holding the real beneficiaries of corporate activity accountable. The beneficiaries are not ordinary citizens trying to run transparent businesses. They are people and institutions for whom concealment is extremely valuable. They are precisely the people and interests that a functioning rule-of-law state should be able to easily scrutinize, not shield.

Q1: Is it credible for MAGA elites to tell us this new rule was too much of a burden on businesses to report who owns what?

Q2: Can you see why tax cheats and criminals will love using this new way of doing business?

Update: MAGA’s ongoing war to enhance global warming

Starving polar bear -- not adapting well to 

MAGA's efforts to increase global warming

The effort by Trump and MAGA elites to obliterate public concern for global warming continues. New MAGA policies continue to expand the power and unaccountability of special interests that profit from polluting. As always with Trump and MAGA policy, profits, wealth, and power are privatized and trickled up to elites and allied corporations, while the public eats the costs, absorbs the harms, while its wealth and power melts away. By now, this pro-global warming effort has caused vast damage to America’s ability to adapt to global warming. Despite constant MAGA efforts to make the issue go away, majority public opinion is still concerned about global warming. For the most part, most of the public wants the basically the opposite of what Trump and MAGA elites are doing. Not surprisingly, Trump and MAGA elites don’t care enough about public opinion to stop doing what they are doing.

Helping the ice melt faster

An article, ‘Truly Devastating’: Trump Ends Federal Funding for Key Arctic Climate Report, exemplifies Trump’s effort to block research. The goal is hide and downplay data showing broad and deep impacts of global warming. Here, Trump just shuts down funding for important research that policymakers would need to help them deal with the issue. But as most reasonable people know by now, informed policymakers working for the public interest is absolutely not how MAGA governs.

Here, Trump stopped federal funding for an annual National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that examined and reported on the state of the Arctic. That part of the planet is warming significantly faster than other regions as continued fossil fuel extraction and carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase global temperatures. For context, the last 10 years have been the 10 warmest on record for the Arctic. Trump stopping this research, which has been ongoing for over years, cripples our ability to track and assess Arctic region changes from year to year. Affected people and communities around the world are kept ignorant, as MAGA elites intend.

Past perspectives on the present era of abrupt Arctic climate change

Deregulation by disempowering regulators

AP reporting in an article, Trump EPA moves to repeal landmark ‘endangerment finding’ that allows climate regulation, hits squarely on the core MAGA tactic of gutting federal regulatory agencies that often worked for the public interest. MAGA policy has been to subvert and corrupt federal agencies into entities that serve special interest wealth and power concerns. MAGA simply guts wealth and power serving the public interest and individuals. The public interest includes reasonably protecting the environment.

The proposed EPA rule rescinds a 2009 finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The “endangerment finding” is the legal basis of a slew of climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet. Trump’s and MAGA’s goal is to obliterate those regulations. That would allow and foster more pollution for profit for elites, with morse costs and damages socialized onto all of us.

MAGA’s cynical liar excuse is that environmental regulations were intended to regulate large sectors of the economy out of existence. Yes, regulations usually impose costs, but reasonable regulation is part of the cost of serving the public interest. We get the shaft while a few elites get our wealth and power. Trump and MAGA elites are deregulating the public interest out of existence.

Q: Based on evidence including that discussed or cited here, is Trump’s and MAGA elite’s efforts to (1) hide inconvenient environment research, and (2) get rid of environmental regulation, mostly beneficial for the public interest or for affected special interests?

Global warming, it’s partisan

Info sources:

Government Pulls Funding for the Arctic Report Card

A look at false claims made by the Trump administration as it revokes a key scientific finding

Trump Administration’s Unified Agenda Suggests Major Reversals on Climate Safeguards

EPA Repeals Legal Basis for Regulating Greenhouse Gases. What it Means for the US — and the World

Book review: Captive Minds

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.  

Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley, 1958

Nah, that's not for the first time. The few have always sought to rule the many. What's new is the reach, speed, and intimacy of manipulation machinery available to the elite few. 

Germaine, 2026

The May 2026 book, Captive Minds: A Study Of Manipulation, was written by two Israeli philosophers, Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon. Sharon is a professor  at Tel Aviv University, and co-founder and senior fellow of Molad, the Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy. Margalit is a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

A schizophrenic, academic read

This odd book is schizophrenic. It's boring to read too. It's too academic and often too attenuated from its core topic of mind manipulation. On the one hand its primary message truly could not be more important to politics and the human condition generally. The message is simple but subtle: To maintain democracy and fight off authoritarianism and deep corruption, citizens must be able to form and revise judgments without their reasoning processes being covertly distorted and hijacked by sophisticated mind manipulators. In short, mind manipulation is a powerful and common form of mental domination that damages cognitive freedom, which threatens democracy. 

But on the other hand, the philosophers fly off the rails by focusing on other philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, the Bible, Shakespeare, etc. They gloss over two major aspects of the modern world and knowledge  One is the book says little to nothing about Donald Trump, Xi Jingping, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. Those are among the modern world's most powerful and effective mind manipulators and cognitive freedom destroyers. That omission is striking for a 2026 book arguing that authoritarian mind manipulation is a central threat to democratic freedom.

The other blind spot is that the authors barely deal directly the modern situation. Captive Minds is conceptually serious and morally critically urgent, but its delivery is far too allusive, historically cluttered. The writing is too indirect for readers seeking a persuasive, science-grounded diagnosis of authoritarian mind manipulation in present-day democracies. The authors are the wrong messengers trying but failing to deliver a critically important message. This book provides a sophisticated conceptual vocabulary but leaves the reader to do the hard and complex, but essential work of connecting it to how organized contemporary authoritarians gain and maintain power. That work is just too darned hard. Most people cannot or will not do it. Total bummer. This book is for academicians and academically-minded lay people, not a general audience.

The core messages

According to the authors, mind manipulation is not simply lying, persuasion, rhetoric, or nudging. It is influence that exploits human mental vulnerabilities such as fear, vanity, resentment, desire for belonging, bigotry, racism, or intellectual shortcuts, to gain control over how that person reaches decisions. That is as a form of domination because it can impair personal freedom without overt force, legal compulsion, or even explicit deception. It often exerts power unconsciously. Many or most people never know that they have been manipulated.  

The authors posit that manipulation is the subtler counterpart of coercion (threats or brute force). They describe authoritarian manipulation like this: "Subversive power doesn't bully or punish. It doesn't break or crush you but instead harnesses your [intellectual] powers to its own aims. ..... 'Manipulation, unlike coercion, does not interfere with a person's options. Instead, it perverts the way that person reaches decisions, forms preferences, or adopts goals'. .... The essential point, we contend, is control over the will. ..... By viewing manipulation through the lens of power rather than truth or rationality, we highlight the centrality of control and the affinity [relationship] with coercion. ..... both coercion and manipulation are forms of domination."

You can see the academic-speak in that.

Fundamentally, mind manipulators pervert the process of judgment in other people. They influence what people think they see, whom they trust, what emotions frame an issue, and what alternatives are mentally accessible and seemingly reasonable. The authors point out that demagogues, propagandists, and conspiracy entrepreneurs create cognitive mind traps that corrode civic and rational deliberation. Public manipulation often works through agenda control and attention capture to push aside in order to crowd out truth-seeking, rational reasoning, open-mindedness and good will.

In short, the book's main weakness is its failure to translate authoritarian mind manipulation insights into a sufficiently concrete analysis of the institutions and actors now destroying democracies worldwide and precisely how they are doing it.