REVOLT AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT-CORPORATE KLEPTOCRACY

Washington has become a lawless, money-feeding trough for the Trump family and its Billionaire friends: the very definition of a kleptocratic oligarchy. Steve Smothermon, senior pastor of the nondenominational Legacy Mega Church in Albuquerque, and most evangelicals fully embrace this gluttony.

Smothermon’s net worth is hidden from the public (surprise, surprise).

View the must-see, short documentary: https://www.corruptionland.org

2 Comments (+add yours?)

  1. SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ's avatar SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ
    Oct 29, 2026 @ 19:09:02

    Dear Max T. Furr,

    I concur with you and would like to add that the situation facing us now is far worse, because whilst Pluto has been demoted to a dwarf planet, the planet of America has already ascended to plutocracy.

    In any case, it is going to be an arduous task to solve these outstanding issues, because saving and rehabilitating planet USA aside, we also need the political economy of saving planet Earth. Yet the entrenched and insidious issues of plutocracy have loomed even larger, thus continuing to thwart many efforts mounted to save both the nationalistic planet and the true planet. Social and economic polarizations can further exacerbate the issues of wealth, and such polarizations are increasing for the following reason: The planet USA is very much plagued in varying degrees by misinformation, disinformation, post-truth politics, demagoguery, plutocracy, oligarchy, ochlocracy, kleptocracy, kakistocracy, narcissistic leadership, neoliberalism and globalization.

    The underlying opposition is not so much between the Democrats and the Republicans as between the rich plutocrats and the rest of the population. However feasible or unfeasible it may be, the Democrats need to (re)form their party to unite the 90% of the people living at an entrenched economic and political disadvantage in order to deal with the Plutocrats, who have gained so much political and economic power that they have hollowed out the middle class, such that many people cannot even make ends meet by having two or three paying jobs.

    Plutocracy (Greek: πλοῦτος, ploutos, ‘wealth’ + κράτος, kratos, ‘rule’) or plutarchy, is a form of oligarchy and defines a society ruled or controlled by the small minority of the wealthiest citizens. The first known use of the term was in 1631. Unlike systems such as democracy, capitalism, socialism or anarchism, plutocracy is not rooted in an established political philosophy. The concept of plutocracy may be advocated by the wealthy classes of a society in an indirect or surreptitious fashion, though the term itself is almost always used in a pejorative sense.

    The term plutocracy is generally used as a pejorative to describe or warn against an undesirable condition. Throughout history, political thinkers such as Winston Churchill, 19th-century French sociologist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, 19th-century Spanish monarchist Juan Donoso Cortés and today Noam Chomsky have condemned plutocrats for ignoring their social responsibilities, using their power to serve their own purposes and thereby increasing poverty and nurturing class conflict, corrupting societies with greed and hedonism.

    Historic examples of plutocracies include the Roman Empire, some city-states in Ancient Greece, the civilization of Carthage, the Italian city-states/merchant republics of Venice, Florence and Genoa, and the pre-World War II Empire of Japan (the zaibatsu). According to Noam Chomsky and Jimmy Carter, the modern-day United States resembles a plutocracy, though with democratic forms.

    Regarding the effects on democracy and society, economists Jared Bernstein and Paul Krugman have attacked the concentration of income as variously “unsustainable” and “incompatible” with real democracy. American political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson quote a warning by Greek-Roman historian Plutarch: “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” Some academic researchers have written that the US political system risks drifting towards a form of oligarchy, through the influence of corporations, the wealthy, and other special interest groups.

    In the United States of America, income inequality and the effects on democracy and society had already become so severe that some modern historians, politicians and economists argue that the United States was effectively plutocratic for at least part of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era periods between the end of the Civil War until the beginning of the Great Depression. President Theodore Roosevelt became known as the “trust-buster” for his aggressive use of United States antitrust law, through which he managed to break up such major combinations as the largest railroad and Standard Oil, the largest oil company. According to historian David Burton, “When it came to domestic political concerns, TR’s Bete Noire was the plutocracy.” In his autobiographical account of taking on monopolistic corporations as president, TR recounted

    …we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.

    To be more specific, social and economic polarizations can further exacerbate the issues of wealth and power distribution. The underlying opposition is not so much between the Democrats and the Republicans as between the rich plutocrats and the rest of the population. The Democrats need to (re)form their party to unite the 90 percent of the people living at an entrenched economic and political disadvantage in order to deal with the plutocrats.

    I would like to conclude here by stating that the best and most dedicated amongst the likes of us are also inveterate teachers of everlasting, transcendental wisdom to save humans from themselves, their self-interests and their destructive ways. I often even have to coin new words to do so. The latest examples are my three neologisms “Misquotation Pandemic“, “Disinformation Polemic” and “Viral Falsity“, as discussed in my extensive and analytical post entitled “💬 Misquotation Pandemic and Disinformation Polemic: 🧠 Mind Pollution by Viral Falsity 🦠“. This post of mine has twelve major sections (plus a detailed annotated gallery) instantly accessible from a navigational menu, which can help you to jump to any section of the post instantly so that you can more easily resume reading at any point of the post over multiple sessions in your own time. The post can be easily located from the Home page of my blog.

    As discussed in the post, without proper education, the overall situation and trajectory of democracy and humanity seem to be rather bleak, and even science and politics can provide little comfort in reducing the severity and frequency of some of those outstanding issues, for there are two major Achilles’ heels: Viral Falsity and Paleolithic Emotions. In addition, my own multidisciplinary perspective proposes in the post with detailed analyses that four of the most insidious and corrosive conditions have exacerbated these issues dramatically:

    (1) The prevailing anti-intellectualism
    (2) The cult of anti-expertise sentiment
    (3) The politicization of science
    (4) The prevalent manifestation of populism

    Gathering all the diverse and important strands together in the grand finale of the said post, I have attempted to sum up and reflect deeply the state of affairs with hard truths, especially in the twelfth and last section named “Denouement: Democracy, Education, Legislation & Sustainability”, which even gives a very dire warning of what humanity is heading towards if there is still no concerted, meaningful and large-scale change for the better.

    Saving and rehabilitating the USA aside, we also need the political economy of saving the planet. Yet the entrenched and insidious issues of plutocracy have loomed even larger, thus continuing to thwart many efforts mounted to save the nation and the planet.

    In any case, education and legislation are the two major keys for ensuring effective democracy and good governance. However, it is often too late to educate those who have been poisoned for too long and too deeply by the “me” culture driven by self-interest and political expediency to amass power, influence and wealth by plotting control, intrigue, exploitation, corruption and social polarization.

    I have already mentioned that the salient issues of democracy versus autocracy (and plutocracy) aside, there are many sobering implications of authoritarianism, which is a very topical area for exploring the many outstanding tensions between (the sociopsychological states of) sanity/stability and insanity/instability, affecting even the very existence and survival of humanity. In recent years, many citizens have willingly aligned themselves with misinformation, disinformation, post-truth politics, demagoguery, plutocracy, oligarchy, ochlocracy, kleptocracy, kakistocracy, narcissistic leadership, neoliberalism, globalization, clerical fascism and Trumpism. We can also agree that the ongoing chaos inflicted by the Trump presidency finally culminated in the infamous riot at the Capitol. You and I can be justified for being cynical, snide, snarky and facetious in characterizing Trump as the symbolic messiah who is going to lead his misguided supporters, sycophants and funders to glory on Earth and the promised land! It is often futile to reason with such misguided folks. Perhaps only when the country truly becomes autocratic or fascist, or when it plunges into a civil war, will such folks wake up, but then it will be too late. Consequently, any reasonable person can conclude that the USA has been plagued by ignorance, dogma, falsity, blind faith, spiritual stagnation and epistemological impasse . . . . .

    To make matter worse, even those who are supposed to know better, who are in the most privileged position or at the highest echelon, have displayed objectionable conducts, caused much disunity, and/or generated unwisdom. We have been witnessing so clearly the insidious nature of Trumpism, Machiavellian conservatism and inimical illiberalism perverting democracy for nefarious purposes and for justifying, obfuscating or muddying the waters of systemic sexism, racism, historical negationism, discrimination, marginalization and curtailment of civil rights. In a similar vein, one of my latest posts highlights not just the various traps awaiting us from the fallouts of the main event regarding the SCOTUS’ decisions on abortion and its striking down Roe v. Wade, but also how the capacity of laws and legislation to be legally valid, binding and enforceable in different contexts is both contingent (acceptable only if certain circumstances are the case) and circumscribed (restricted to certain roles or situations), given that the content, relevance and quality of laws and legislation are fundamentally filtered and moulded by class structures, social stratifications, cultural reproductions and communication frameworks as well as by the interaction between legal cultures, and the social construction of legal issues, as discussed in my post entitled “🏛️⚖️ The Facile and Labile Nature of Law: Beyond the Supreme Court and Its Ruling on Controversial Matters 🗽🗳️🔫🤰🧑‍🤝‍🧑💉“, published at

    🏛️⚖️ The Facile and Labile Nature of Law: Beyond the Supreme Court and Its Ruling on Controversial Matters 🗽🗳️🔫🤰🧑‍🤝‍🧑💉

    I would be very delighted if you could be so kind as to bestow on me the honour of your visiting and commenting on my said post by submitting your feedback or critique to the comments section there, as I treasure your inputs and insights. Most of all, I am intensely curious about what you will make of my post. Thank you in anticipation.

    Happy November to you very soon!

    Yours sincerely,
    SoundEagle🦅ೋღஜஇ 音鷹

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  2. SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ's avatar SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ
    Oct 30, 2026 @ 17:52:12

    Dear Max T. Furr,

    I submitted a very long comment here a day or two ago. It is not appearing here for some reason.

    Happy November to you very soon!

    Yours sincerely,
    SoundEagle🦅ೋღஜஇ 音鷹

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a Reply

SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ

Where The Eagles Fly . . . . Art Science Poetry Music & Ideas

Religion in Public

exploring the mix of sacred and secular

THE ESSAYIST

The sage of Baltimore lives on

Free to express

thoughts, experiences, travel, feelings, stories, diaries and many more...

The Free-Thinking Human

Just Another Former Christian on the Internet

Lama Surya Das

Spiritual Masters of Asia

tripleclicka

perspective at the moment

Friend the Cat

Everyone Needs A Friend.

Toad's Great Adventure

"I will, then, be a toad." -- Stephen Crane

Notes from the U.K.

Exploring the spidery corners of a culture and the weird stuff that tourist brochures ignore.

BroadBlogs

A broad blogs broadly on women’s & men's psychology: sex, relationships, equality

العاب بنات ماهر

العاب بنات ماهر العاب فلاش ماهر ttt4 العاب سيارات ماهر العاب تلبيس بنات ماهر العاب فلاش ماهر 2015

Wary Wonderlust

by Maybe Zed

My Holistic Table

The Art & Science of Cooking. Recipes free of gluten, sugar, dairy, yeast

A Narcissist Writes Letters, To Himself

A Hopefully Formerly Depressed Human Vows To Practice Self-Approval

All Romance Reads

Get Your Swoon On

richardmarlowe236

Independence and Freedom Blog