October 16, 2026
Notes from an American environmentalist ✦ Oligarchy, fascism, and the living world
I'm trying out voice recording. If you're inclined to listen, please forgive the slightly scratchy voice through parts of it. Let me know how it works for you and if there are any other issues with the audio. Thanks!
Owl in America: Notes from an American Environmentalist traces the actions of the current U.S. administration from the perspective of an environmental lawyer.
Today's piece departs from the usual analysis of developments in environmental law to attempt to understand the oligarchic forces behind the Trump administration's assault on the living world.
What is an oligarchy, and is the United States one? The simplest definition of an oligarchy is "rule by the wealthiest." It's becoming undeniable that this is where we find ourselves.
Hello all~
I hope you are well. For myself, I find I'm walking a knife's edge, navigating the reality of living in the United States in 2026. I am daily horrified by the onslaught of madness and infamy emanating from Washington, D.C.: scheduling live-streamed firing squads, threats to 'annihilate' Iran, ongoing partnership with the genocidal maniacs in charge of Russia and China and Israel, the go-ahead to kill endangered plants and animals, corruption without bounds, and I could go on. You know it all. It's inhumane and it's cruel. I hope, as a nation, we can rise up in next month’s elections to throw as many roadblocks as possible in the path of this psychopathic juggernaut.
In my ongoing quest to figure out an answer to How the hell did we end up here?, I've been reading a lot of history and political analysis. I have taken an odd form of solace in reading about the machinations of two overlapping groups that opened the door wide for the rough beasts slouching around Washington, D.C. these days.
Journalist Casey Michel's new book United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy targets the first group and is a must-read for anyone asking the same questions I am. (The second group, the religious right, is the subject of Katherine Stewart's Money, Lies, and God, among other good books on the topic.)
Michel’s book walks through this nation's history as a fertile target for oligarchs and ends with the proposition that today's crop of billionaires is an outsized threat the likes of which our nation has never faced. It's not only that their proportionate wealth is so very much higher than that of the Gilded Age's robber barons or the Roaring Twenties' industrial plutocrats (and it is: John D. Rockefeller, the wealthiest man of his time, was 'only' worth $30 billion, adjusted for inflation). It’s also the interlinking and offshoring allowed by modern technology that has enabled the international oligarchic cooperation that has virtually dismantled all previous attempts by the U.S. Congress to limit their power.
I've quoted Sarah Kendzior's line that the United States is "a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government" many times. Michel's book makes clear that's not a metaphor but a description, and it goes a long way toward explaining how we got here. Historian Anne Applebaum fleshes out the international nature of the connections between autocratic governments and extreme wealth in her book Autocracy, Inc. But Michel focuses on how oligarchic pressures from both outside of and within the United States have almost completely eroded any backstops against wealth in power here.
What is most powerful about Michel's book, in my opinion, is that he makes crystal clear that the U.S. is a victim of the international oligarchy. How odd to state that the world's military aggressor—or maybe the world's erstwhile protector of law and order gone astray, depending on where you fall on the Chomsky scale—could be a victim. But either way, the United States has been the target of a coordinated assault over the past few decades on the part of the ultra-wealthy who wish to siphon off our GDP without contributing in the form of taxes or compliance with any protective regulations that might limit their profits. And they've just about succeeded, hollowing out any legal and enforcement structures that could limit them.
President Trump is the bad guy in chief, of course, but he is just a player, one that is conveniently unconcerned by criminal bribery and scandal. Anyone will do, so long as they are able to hold on to power in order to enable the transnational crime syndicate.
Another Kendzior quote comes to mind: "They are stripping down the United States and selling it for parts and trying to convince ordinary Americans that it was their own idea." Witness German oligarch Peter Thiel's companies Palantir and Anduril hoovering up government contracts for surveillance, military targeting, and god knows what else. All that, while running JD Vance in the vice presidency— a man who is "almost entirely a creation of Peter Thiel," according to Silicon Valley journalist Gil Durán.
See South African oligarch Elon Musk accessing the Social Security and Medicare data of all Americans through DOGE (to quote billionaire Mark Benioff: "Data is more valuable than gold"). All while diverting billions of our taxpayer dollars to Starlink and SpaceX. The great thing about Trump, from the perspective of these vultures, is that he's okay with them taking as much as they want, as long as his family gets a good kickback.
I am 100% in support of people from other countries immigrating to the United States and making a success of their lives. That is emphatically not what is happening with creatures like Thiel and Musk. They are using the United States for its incredible wealth-generating capacity without any actual allegiance to the greater good of this nation.
United States of Oligarchy describes how many billionaires take advantage of the wealth that can be built here in America, relying in large part on our legal and economic frameworks that allow for safe and predictable business operations. At the same time, they advocate for an exemption from democratic accountability—taxes, yes, but also worker-safety and environmental regulations—by buying elections, spending massively on lobbying, throwing their lot in with the rising fascists in D.C., and accessing tax strategies that most people cannot use. Peter Thiel and his cohorts practice "noblesse without the oblige," believing they deserve "representation without taxation." They do so, in part, by "barreling through the loopholes of the American financial system that the rest of the country will never have access to."
Here's a relatively tiny, but telling, example. How would you imagine Peter Thiel managed to stash $5 billion in his Roth IRA retirement account where it will grow without ever being taxed? Americans are generally limited to putting several thousand dollars of already-taxed savings into their Roth IRAs each year; those with high incomes are phased out altogether. It seems there would be no possible way for a wealthy startup founder like Thiel to accumulate billions of dollars in a Roth IRA.
Thiel got around these limits by keeping his salary as head of PayPal below the salary cap of roughly $110,000. Then he deposited a couple thousand dollars in his Roth IRA and used it to purchase (from himself) 1.7 million shares in PayPal at $0.001 each, which totals just $1,700, well within the Roth IRA limits. Of course, PayPal shares were then and are now worth much, much more than that. After PayPal became a publicly traded company, the value of the shares in his IRA skyrocketed. And he will never pay taxes on that so-called "growth" of $5 billion.
Decades of coordinated deregulatory work has made it possible for wealth like Thiel's to arise. In the tax realm, Michel says there are thousands of examples of loopholes like the one above. But beyond those kinds of strategies, the wealthy are just taxed less nowadays. The progressive tax rate for wealthy Americans collapsed from 69% pre-Reagan to 28% at the end of his term. It has remained around that level ever since. And, the IRS has been gutted in recent decades, starved for funding and bleeding expertise. It's no longer a meaningful check on tax evasion. Michel's book details the oligarchic forces behind each of these attacks on the government's ability to rein in extreme wealth through taxation.
Avoiding taxes, however, is but one piece of the strategy. Billionaires and their enablers have also pushed back hard against anti-corruption laws in recent years, with a near complete victory here in Trump's second term. One recent example is the demise of the Corporate Transparency Act. Passed over Trump's veto in 2021, it was Congress's attempt to limit anonymous shell companies. For years, according to Michel, the U.S. was "the world's greatest source of anonymous shell companies, open to any oligarch or kleptocrat or dictator who'd come calling."
President Biden created a registry of shell companies and a task force to collect data on them; Trump has since torched the registry and the task force and is no longer enforcing the Act, despite a clear Constitutional mandate to do so.
United States of Oligarchy is a great read, well worth anyone's time. But one chapter in particular stood out to me as a lawyer. Entitled "The Corruption Is the Point," it's the clearest explanation I've seen of Trump II's devastating assault on virtually every past attempt made by our government to rein in oligarchy.
Attorney General Pam Bondi in a series of 2025 memos demolished the following:
(1) The Foreign Agents Registration Act, by no longer requiring people lobbying American lawmakers on behalf of foreign governments to disclose their activities.
(2) The FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, which had been "dedicated to dismantling infiltration campaigns out of Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and more."
(3) The Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, which froze, seized, and repatriated assets linked to dirty money networks worldwide.
(4) The KleptoCapture task force, a Biden-era initiative that grew out of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and was aimed at capturing criminal oligarchs' assets.
Then in a series of executive orders, Trump set fire to the rest:
(1) He announced that the government would no longer enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Passed in response to Nixon's corruption, the Act had protected American corporations from bribery by foreign rapacious regimes and was "the very bedrock of America's anti-corruption efforts."
(2) As mentioned above, the Corporate Transparency Act, requiring all shell companies to register ownership. Trump not only announced the government would no longer enforce the law, but his administration also destroyed all the data collected in the shell company registry, a key Biden anti-corruption effort that had come online in 2024.
(3) Trump also killed proposed anti-money laundering rules for hedge funds and private equity firms.
Then he announced that any foreign kleptocrat could have U.S. residency—and access to America's resources and government—by purchasing a Gold Card Visa for $1 million. There's also a Platinum Card, for $5 million, in the works.
Then his One Big Beautiful Bill was filled with "multiple gifts to American billionaires," including tax cuts, gutting the IRS, and a permanent estate tax exemption, dismantling "what had once been one of the key tools for breaking up American oligarchs' estates, preventing the rise of a new feudal class of wealthy Americans."
And then there was Trump's self-enrichment: by taking investment into his real estate holdings through shell companies, by opening up a direct bribery link through launching his own cryptocurrency that any foreign government or kleptocrat could purchase, and by accepting a $400 million jet from the Qatari dictatorship.
And finally, Trump spiked the investigation and prosecution of former New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who had "crossed that reddest of red lines for an American politician: soliciting funding directly from foreign sources." The message is clear: American politicians are now welcome to solicit foreign funding. They won't be prosecuted. Michel says it's "a decision that, in years to come, may well be seen as momentous as Citizens United. . . . the final demolishing of any sanctity, any safety, any sovereignty of American elections."
Another important part of the right's long-term strategy was to emplace a Supreme Court that would do a few things: (1) allow the executive to dismantle anti-oligarchy and anti-corruption laws, (2) disempower left-wing voters who might have something to say about that, and (3) decimate the regulatory apparatus that had limited the negative externalities generated by wealth gathering: pollution, human rights abuses, destruction of land and sea, etc.
That Supreme Court is solidly in place and performing as planned; for the ins and outs of how that part of the plan was accomplished, read Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights by Lisa Graves.
In the middle of all this—both reading up on how we got here but also just living through the daily onslaught of horror—I keep returning to the first book I read as part of my Owl at the Library project. (That's a project I started a few months ago in which I am reading my way through the nonfiction section of my tiny rural library.) The Monuments Men by Robert Edsel is a pretty unabashed rah-rah recounting of American good-guy soldiers rescuing European art treasures stolen by the Nazis, and yet, it's stuck with me. (It's also a cracking good read.)
In interviews, American soldiers involved in recovering stolen art across the Continent more than once shared that in encounters with ordinary Germans (that is, not members of the military), they felt that their country had been victimized by the Nazi party. To them, Hitler had preyed upon the failure of their post World War I attempt at a liberal democracy by promising a return to a prosperous Germany before taking the country in a direction most normal people abhorred, both in terms of its belligerence and its genocidal racism. But until the Allied nations defeated Germany, regular citizens felt they had lacked any means to oust the Nazi government.
Some of that sentiment was no doubt a bit of post hoc justification. Still, there's the obvious parallel to today's United States. While plenty of ordinary Germans before World War II (as with Americans today) supported the rise of their fascistic governments, fewer continued in support once it became clear how bad those leaders would be. And once a certain threshold had been crossed, there was no simple way to remove the regime.
We're not quite there yet, here in the U.S., but the day is approaching. Still, I'm encouraged to see awareness rising that extreme wealth inevitably leads to fascism and that the existence of billionaires in a society is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. So I think plenty of eyes are opening to the danger.
All of the horrific environmental news coming out of D.C. is part and parcel of the strategy: (1) to deregulate, so no pesky rules protecting people, places, and wildlife can cut into billionaires' profits, and (2) to "strip down the United States and sell it for parts," not only through outright sell-off of our public lands, but through opening roadless forests to logging, through shrinking national monument boundaries so thousands of new claims can be filed by mining conglomerates, and by opening up protected marine reserves to industrial fish extraction.
That impact on the living world, and my nonfiction reading project, tracing through America's descent—from democracy's savior in 1945 to budding fascistic oligarchy in 2026—those explain why I keep returning to the underpinnings of our new fascism. The legal milieu I was trained in included a set of environmental laws that Congress passed in the 1970s after phenomenal public pressure, enforced in the decades after through a robust regulatory state buttressed by citizen litigation. That's now in shambles, perhaps never to return as we've known it.
Of course, the same goes for other progressive victories of the former century that now lay in ruins: voting rights, civil rights vis-a-vis law enforcement, women's rights, and so on. And, oh, the humanity: the Supreme Court has begun its new term as of last week. Lord knows what the justices will lay waste to next.
Still, as Gil Durán writes in his book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, we are currently blessed here in the United States with just under 1,000 billionaires. That's a pretty small number in a country of 340 million people. (Worldwide, around 3,428 billionaires exist.) Durán notes, "They constitute a tiny sliver of the human population, yet they do a disproportionate amount of damage to the planet and its people. We are destroying the Earth to create wealth for this small group of men."
He calls on us to imagine—and work to achieve—a world without the ultra wealthy. He writes:
As if to illustrate his point, the New York Times reported this week that Elon Musk has funneled $276 million—that we know of—into the midterm elections in support of the Republican Party. In the past two weeks, Musk has appeared at three events with President Trump. Seemingly reconciled, the two buddies swapped words of praise. The reporter writes: "The staggering amount of money makes Mr. Musk, the richest person in the world, by far the largest known donor in the midterms."
Vote accordingly.
Talk to you soon,
Owl
Notes from an American Environmentalist will remain free to all readers. Please share these letters, speak up where you can, and keep paying attention to the living world. 🦉