“The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets”
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While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters' number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:
https://prospect.org/topics/maureen-tkacik/
Journalists like Wired's Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman are absolutely crushing it when it comes to Musk's DOGE coup:
https://www.wired.com/author/vittoria-elliott/
And Nathan Tankus is doing incredible work all on his own, just blasting out scoop after scoop:
https://www.crisesnotes.com/
But for me, it was Tkacik – as usual – in the pages of The American Prospect who pulled it all together in a way that finally made it make sense, transforming the blitzkreig Muskian chaos into a recognizable playbook. While most of the coverage of Musk's wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause, whom she memorably dubs "the Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (I told you she was a great writer!):
Krause is a private equity looter. He's the guy who basically invented the playbook for PE takeovers of large tech companies, from Broadcom to Citrix to VMWare, converting their businesses from selling things to renting them out, loading them up with junk fees, slashing quality, jacking up prices over and over, and firing everyone who was good at their jobs. He is a master enshittifier, an enshittification ninja.
Krause has an unerring instinct for making people miserable while making money. He oversaw the merger of Citrix and VMWare, creating a ghastly company called The Cloud Software Group, which sold remote working tools. Despite this, of his first official acts was to order all of his employees to stop working remotely. But then, after forcing his workers to drag their butts into work, move back across the country, etc, he reversed himself because he figured out he could sell off all of the company's office space for a tidy profit.
Krause canceled employee benefits, like thank you days for managers who pulled a lot of unpaid overtime, or bonuses for workers who upgraded their credentials. He also ended the company's practice of handing out swag as small gifts to workers, and then stiffed the company that made the swag, wontpaying a $437,574.97 invoice for all the tchotchkes the company had ordered. That's not the only supplier Krause stiffed: FinLync, a fintech company with a three-year contract with Krause's company, also had to sue to get paid.
Krause's isn't a canny operator who roots out waste: he's a guy who tears out all the wiring and then grudgingly restores the minimum needed to keep the machine running (no wonder Musk loves him, this is the Twitter playbook). As Tkacik reports, Krause fucked up the customer service and reliability systems that served Citrix's extremely large, corporate customers – the giant businesses that cut huge monthly checks to Citrix, whose CIOs received daily sales calls from his competitors.
Workers who serviced these customers, like disabled Air Force veteran David Morgan, who worked with big public agencies, were fired on one hour's notice, just before their stock options vested. The giant public agency customers he'd serviced later called him to complain that the only people they could get on the phone were subcontractors in Indian call centers who lacked the knowledge and authority to resolve their problems.
Last month, Citrix fired all of its customer support engineers. Citrix's military customers are being illegally routed to offshore customer support teams who are prohibited from working with the US military.
Citrix/VMWare isn't an exception. The carnage at these companies is indistinguishable from the wreck Krause made of Broadcom. In all these cases, Krause was parachuted in by private equity bosses, and he destroyed something useful to extract a giant, one-time profit, leaving behind a husk that no longer provides value to its customers or its employees.
This is the DOGE playbook. It's all about plunder: take something that was patiently, carefully built up over generations and burn it to the ground, warming yourself in the pyre, leaving nothing behind but ash. This is what private equity plunderers have been doing to the world's "advanced" economies since the Reagan years. They did it to airlines, family restaurants, funeral homes, dog groomers, toy stores, pharma, palliative care, dialysis, hospital beds, groceries, cars, and the internet.
Trump's a plunderer. He was elected by the plunderer class – like the crypto bros who want to run wild, transforming workers' carefully shepherded retirement savings into useless shitcoins, while the crypto bros run off with their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money. Musk is the apotheosis of this mindset, a guy who claims credit for other peoples' productive and useful businesses, replacing real engineering with financial engineering. Musk and Krause, they're like two peas in a pod.
That's why – according to anonymous DOGE employees cited by Tckacik – DOGE managers are hired for their capacity for cruelty: "The criteria for DOGE is how many you have fired, how much you enjoy firing people, and how little you care about the impact on peoples well being…No wonder Tom Krause was tapped for this. He’s their dream employee!"
The fact that Krause isn't well known outside of plunderer circles is absolutely a feature for him, not a bug. Scammers like Krause want to be admitted to polite society. This is why the Sacklers – the opioid crime family that kicked off the Oxy pandemic that's murdered more than 800,000 Americans so far – were so aggressive about keeping their association with their family business, Purdue Pharma, a secret. The Sacklers only wanted to be associated with the art galleries and museums they put their names over, and their lawyers threatened journalists for writing about their lives as billionaire drug pushers (I got one of those threats).
There's plenty of good reasons to be anonymous – if you're a whistleblower, say. But if you ever encounter a corporate executive who insists on anonymity, that's a wild danger sign. Take Pixsy, the scam "copyleft trolls" whose business depends on baiting people into making small errors when using images licensed under very early versions of the Creative Common licenses, and then threatening to sue them unless they pay hundreds or thousands of dollars:
Kain Jones, the CEO of Pixsy, tried to threaten me under the EU's GDPR for revealing the names of the scammer on his payroll who sent me a legal threat, and the executive who ran the scam for his business (I say he tried to threaten me because I helped lobby for the GDPR and I know for a fact that this isn't a GDPR violation):
These people understand that they are in the business of ripping people off, causing them grave and wholly unjust financial injury. They value their secrecy because they are in the business of making strangers righteously furious, and they understand that one of these strangers might just show up in their lives someday to confront them about their transgressions.
This is why Unitedhealthcare freaked out so hard about Luigi Mangione's assassination of CEO Brian Thompson – that's not how the game is supposed to be played. The people who sit in on executive row, destroying your lives, are supposed to be wholly insulated from the consequences of their actions. You're not supposed to know who they are, you're not supposed to be able to find them – of course.
But even more importantly, you're not supposed to be angry at them. They pose as mere software agents in an immortal colony organism called a Limited Liability Corporation, bound by the iron law of shareholder supremacy to destroy your life while getting very, very rich. It's not supposed to be personal. That's why Unitedhealthcare is threatening to sue a doctor who was yanked out of surgery on a cancer patient to be berated by a UHC rep for ordering a hospital stay for her patient:
UHC is angry that this surgeon, Austin's Dr Elisabeth Potter, went Tiktok-viral with her true story of how how chaotic and depraved and uncaring UHC is. UHC execs fear that Mangione made it personal, that he obliterated the accountability sink of the corporation and put the blame squarely where it belongs – on the (mostly) men at the top who make this call.
This is a point Adam Conover made in his latest Factually podcast, where he interviewed Propublica's T Christian Miller and Patrick Rucker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_5tDXRw8kg
Miller and Rucker published a blockbuster investigative report into Cigna's Evocore, a secret company that offers claims-denials as a service to America's biggest health insurers:
If you're the CEO of a health insurance company and you don't like how much you're paying out for MRIs or cancer treatment, you tell Evocore (which processes all your claim authorizations) and they turn a virtual dial that starts to reduce the number of MRIs your customers are allowed to have. This dial increases the likelihood that a claim or pre-authorization will be denied, which, in turn, makes doctors less willing to order them (even if they're medically necessary) and makes patients more likely to pay for them out of pocket.
Towards the end of the conversation, Miller and Rucker talk about how the rank-and-file people at an insurer don't get involved with the industry to murder people in order to enrich their shareholders. They genuinely want to help people. But executive row is different: those very wealthy people do believe their job is to kill people to save money, and get richer. Those people are personally to blame for the systemic problem. They are the ones who design and operate the system.
That's why naming the people who are personally responsible for these immoral, vicious acts is so important. That's why it's important that Wired and Propublica are unmasking the "pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" who are raiding the federal government under Krause's leadership:
These people are committing grave crimes against the nation and its people. They should be known for this. It should follow them for the rest of their lives. It should be the lead in their obituaries. People who are introduced to them at parties should have a flash of recognition, hastily end the handshake, then turn on their heels and race to the bathroom to scrub their hands. For the rest of their lives.
Naming these people isn't enough to stop the plunder, but it helps. Yesterday, Marko Elez, the 25 year old avowed "eugenicist" who wanted to "normalize Indian hate" and could not be "[paid] to marry outside of my ethnicity," was shown the door. He's off the job. For the rest of his life, he will be the broccoli-haired brownshirt who got fired for his asinine, racist shitposting:
After Krause's identity as the chief wrecker at DOGE was revealed, the brilliant Anna Merlan (author of Republic of Lies, the best book on conspiratorialism), wrote that "Now the whole country gets the experience of what it’s like when private equity buys the place you work":
That's exactly it. We are witnessing a private equity-style plunder of the entire US government – of the USA itself. No one is better poised to write about this than Tkacik, because no one has private equity's number like Tkacik does:
Ironically, all this came down just as Trump announced that he was going to finally get rid of private equity's scammiest trick, the "carried interest" loophole that lets PE bosses (and, to a lesser extent, hedge fund managers) avoid billions in personal taxes:
https://archive.is/yKhvD
"Carried interest" has nothing to do with the interest rate – it's a law that was designed for 16th century sea captains who had an "interest" in the cargo they "carried":
Trump campaigned on killing this loophole in 2017, but Congress stopped him, after a lobbying blitz by the looter industry. It's possible that he genuinely wants to get rid of the carried interest loophole – he's nothing if not idiosyncratic, as the residents of Greenland can attest:
Even if he succeeds, looters and the "investor class" will get a huge giveaway under Trump, in the form of more tax giveaways and the dismantling of labor and environmental regulation. But it's far more likely that he won't succeed. Rather – as Yves Smith writes for Naked Capitalism – he'll do what he did with the Canada and Mexico tariffs: make a tiny, unimportant change and then lie and say he had done something revolutionary:
This has been a shitty month, and it's not gonna get better for a while. On my dark days, I worry that it won't get better during my lifetime. But at least we have people like Tkacik to chronicle it, explain it, put it in context. She's amazing, a whirlwind. The same day that her report on Krause dropped, the Prospect published another must-read piece by her, digging deep into Alex Jones's convoluted bankruptcy gambit:
It lays bare the wild world of elite bankruptcy court, another critical conduit for protecting the immoral rich from their victims. The fact that Tkacik can explain both Krause and the elite bankruptcy system on the same day is beyond impressive.
We've got a lot of work ahead of ourselves. The people in charge of this system – whose names you must learn and never forget – aren't going to go easily. But at least we know who they are. We know what they're doing. We know how the scam works. It's not a flurry of incomprehensible actions – it's a playbook that killed Red Lobster, Toys R Us, and Sears. We don't have to follow that playbook.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Elon Musk and his DOGE team are tasked by President Donald Trump to find government spending inefficiency and cut federal spending.
Five former Treasury secretaries warned Monday that recent actions at the Treasury Department by Trump administration officials and Elon Musk’s DOGE team raise “substantial cause for concern” that the United States’ financial commitments are being “unlawfully” undermined.
“We have during our service in the Treasury Department faced moments of crisis, when the specter of an American default loomed,” the former secretaries wrote in a New York Times op-ed.
“Any hint of the selective suspension of congressionally authorized payments will be a breach of trust and ultimately, a form of default. And our credibility, once lost, will prove difficult to regain,” they wrote.
“No Treasury secretary in his or her first weeks in office should be put in the position where it is necessary to reassure the nation and the world of the integrity of our payments system or our commitment to make good on our financial obligations.”
But Kevin Hassett, a top economic advisor to President Donald Trump, dismissed the former secretaries’ concerns during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, he said, “has found that controls for spending of the previous [Biden] administration were unacceptable. They were sending money out without knowing where the money was going.”
Hassett also said the idea that Musk was acting as, in his words, “a puppet master” at the Treasury Department was “poppycock.”
“Elon Musk is in the office next to me,” Hassett said. “He’s not in control.”
The ex-secretaries who wrote the op-ed were Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew and Janet Yellen, all of whom served under Democratic presidents: Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, respectively.
The dueling narratives come amid escalating legal battles over access to the Treasury Department’s highly sensitive payment systems, which members of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team have sought and been granted.
As DOGE and other elements of the Trump administration move to slash federal spending and employee headcount, the government’s payment disbursement system, run by the Treasury’s Fiscal Service, has drawn their attention.
Their op-ed cites reporting last week by the Times that the Treasury Department’s chief of staff originally pushed for a member of Musk’s DOGE team, Tom Krause, “to receive access to the closely held payment system so that the Treasury could freeze disbursements to the U.S. Agency for International Development.”
Emails seen by the Times “undercut Treasury’s explanation” for why Krause and other members of Musk’s team were granted access to the payments system, which disburses more than $5 trillion in federal funding, the newspaper noted.
The Treasury Department has said Krause and his team “are conducting an ‘operational efficiency assessment’ that does not involve blocking agency payments,” the Times reported.
In their op-ed, the former secretaries said the access “upended” the long-standing practice of payment systems operated by a “very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants.”
“The roles of these nonpartisan officials have been compromised by political actors from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency,” the op-ed said.
“We take the extraordinary step of writing this piece because we are alarmed about the risks of arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments, which would be unlawful and corrosive to our democracy,” the former secretaries wrote.
Hassett, who leads the National Economic Council, argued strenuously against the op-ed’s premise and claims Monday.
“Can we talk about the Treasury letter first?” Hassett asked the “Squawk Box” hosts. “There’s so much misinformation in it.”
Hassett continued, “Let’s just make it clear the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, is in charge of the Treasury.”
Bessent, said Hassett, “has found that controls for spending of the previous [Biden] administration were unacceptable.”
“They were sending money out without knowing where the money was going. They were sending money out without flagging, you know, ‘what it was for?’ They didn’t check before they sent the money out, whether it was appropriated,” Hassett said. “And as we go in and look, we’re finding lots of things that shouldn’t have been sent.”
Hassett said, “There’s a lot of work to be done to clear that up.”
“This idea that there’s a puppet master telling the Treasury secretary what to do, and therefore all the Treasury secretaries need to be, like, alarmed, that’s just left-wing media, you know, poppycock.”
“Why are we making up fake things about what Elon is doing, because we’re trying to just see where the money’s going,” Hassett said.
“And I think it’s probably, in the end, we’re going to find that a lot of money went to bad places.”
A federal judge limited co-President Elon Musk and his army of teenage Department of Government Efficiency minions' access to the Treasury D
Emily Singer at Daily Kos:
A federal judge limited co-President Elon Musk and his army of teenage Department of Government Efficiency minions' access to the Treasury Department's payment systems Thursday in response to a group of unions’ lawsuit alleging that DOGE's access violated the Privacy Act of 1974.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s order said that Treasury Department employees will block Musk and other DOGE workers' access “to any payment record or payment system of records maintained by or within the Bureau of the Fiscal Service."
The order does, however, allow "read only" access of the payment systems to two “special government employees” who have ties to Musk: Tom Krause, the chief executive of Cloud Software Group Inc., and Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer who has worked for Musk-owned companies SpaceX and X. Krause and Elez were assigned to the Treasury Department through DOGE, and reportedly “passed government background checks and obtained the necessary security clearances,” The New York Times reported on Feb. 1.
The limit on access will remain in place until the judge hears arguments from the group of unions who sued as to why she should grant a more permanent injunction on allowing DOGE access.
Democrats and privacy experts have been up in arms that DOGE workers have been granted access to the Treasury’s payment system, which disburses trillions every year for Social Security payments, tax refunds, and government grants, among other things.
Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation Wednesday to formally block DOGE workers’ access to the Treasury payment system.
Glad to see the unelected coup leader Elon Musk get put in his place… for now.
