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#cronyism — Public Fediverse posts

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  1. A FOIA Update, Of Sorts

    Last week, a Government Information Specialist at the State Department emailed to ask if I would still be interested in records I requested in 2021 under the Freedom of Information Act. “The Department is undertaking a comprehensive review of its backlog of FOIA requests,” she wrote, and if (after failing to respond to my request for five years) she did not hear from me within thirty days, “the Department will conclude you are no longer interested in pursuing this request, and your request will be administratively closed.”

    The request itself concerned the Kalorama mansion purchased by Chilean billionaire Andronico Luksic Craig right after the 2016 election, where Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump lived during Trump’s first term. (I’ve written several posts about the situation over the years. This one is a pretty good primer.) When Jared and Ivanka decamped to Florida in 2021, the Kuwaiti foreign mission leased Luksic’s Washington, DC property; federal law required State Department approval. So I asked to see the Kuwaiti foreign mission’s written request and the State Department’s Notice of Approval.

    I was casting a wide net in order to learn what I could about Luksic, his influence operations, and his international network of business relationships, which now extends to the very edge of the Boundary Waters, where Luksic-controlled Antofagasta plc plans to build the Twin Metals copper and nickel mine.

    It was a longshot request to begin with. Is there anything to learn from these Foreign Mission Office records, five years later? Not likely, but who knows? So I replied that I am still interested. I feel obliged to see the thing through, or to see that the Department of State meets its obligation to the public. 

    While I had the attention, or at least the email address, of someone involved in the comprehensive review, I thought I should ask about two other requests I’d filed with the Department of State back in October of 2018, and which I’ve been trying to chase down ever since. These requests concern the use of the US embassy in Santiago, Chile as a business backchannel for Antofagasta: one asks for records of a 2017 meeting between Antofagasta CEO Ivan Arriagada and Carol Perez, then US ambassador to Chile; the other asks for embassy communications regarding Trump’s nomination of Andrew Gellert to replace Perez. Over the years, the Department has set and missed several estimated dates of completion for these requests. I detailed some of the back and forth in a 2023 post. Since then, or at least for the past couple of years, the FOIA Office has failed to respond to my requests for more information about the status of these requests.

    On Monday, this reply came:

    These requests remain in process and has [sic] a new estimated date of completion (EDC) of January 31, 2028.  EDCs are estimates and subject to change. You will be notified of the results of the Department’s search and review efforts in response to these requests as soon as that information becomes available.

    This is just boilerplate, of course; the subject-verb disagreement in the first sentence looks like a copy-paste accident. Still, a few observations. 

    The requests are said to be “in process,” but in eight years no “search and review efforts” have been undertaken. The new estimated date of completion falls in the last year of Trump’s second term – a year and a half from now – and the FOIA office is not even committing to a response when the 2018 request hits the ten-year mark. I am sufficiently annoyed by this delay that I have to wonder aloud (but without evidence) if there is some directive at State to push FOIA matters, or certain FOIA matters, to the end of this administration. 

    The FOIA office blames a backlog of requests, and that backlog is real. “The State Department’s FOIA backlog spiked by 6,000 cases to a total of 27,619” this fiscal year, reports Justin Doubleday. Back in June, Minho Kim did some great data analysis for the New York Times showing that federal agencies “accumulated the highest-ever backlog of cases in fiscal year 2025, raising questions about compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.” Not surprisingly, “the problem appears to have worsened under President Trump.” And the backlog problem has been compounded by cuts to FOIA staff, leaving “several key FOIA leadership and staff positions vacant” at State. One administration official quoted by the Times says the Trump administration chose to “hire ICE officers instead of FOIA processors.” That snide remark alone speaks volumes about this administration’s misplaced priorities, its refusal of all accountability, and its contemptuous disregard for the public interest. 

    To put it another way: the FOIA backlog is itself a symptom of bad government and corruption, a condition that is only exacerbated by the Trumpist dismantling and hijacking of public institutions and federal agencies.

    In 2019, William J. Burns warned against Trump’s “diplomacy of narcissism, bent on advancing private interests at the expense of our national interests.” The events that prompted my FOIA requests in 2018 – the meeting of an Antofagasta executive with Ambassador Perez and the nomination of Gellert, a Kushner friend – fit the pattern. The cronyism and self-dealing of the first term have gotten much worse and much more blatant this go-round. Charles Kushner is ambassador to France! Jared and Steve Witkoff are the faces of US diplomacy. The ambassador to Chile is Brandon Judd, a longtime Trump campaign stalwart and former head of the Border Patrol union. Judd’s main qualification seems to be that he spent some time in Chile in the 1990s, proselytizing for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. José Miguel Insulza put it bluntly: “de diplomacia no sabe nada.”

    AmbassadorJudd has not exactly covered himself in glory. He caused an uproar just a couple of weeks ago when he criticized Chilean cabinet ministers for expressing serious and legitimate concerns about the new 12.5 percent tariffs on Chilean exports, petulantly adding that there would be no agreement if they continued their criticisms. Judd went on to suggest that Chile’s business leaders should “complain to your authorities to prevent them from making declarations about the relationship with the United States.”

    “The ambassador,” said Juan Gabriel Valdés, “does not seem to understand that he is not part of the Chilean political system…. he does not have a role to play in internal Chilean political debate.” And this was not an isolated incident, Valdés noted. It was “the third or fourth time” that Judd had acted more like a colonial viceroy than a diplomat.

    For the moment, at least, Chile’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Francisco Pérez Mackenna and his team are handling Judd. Pérez Mackenna is a seasoned negotiator. Before joining the right-wing Kast government this past spring, he spent nearly three decades as CEO of Quiñenco, managing the global operations of the Luksic business empire. Make of that what you will.

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    #corruption #cronyism #diplomacy #FOIA #FreedomOfInformationAct #oligarchy #power #selfDealing #softPower
  2. RE: mastodon.social/@RonSupportsYo

    "The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs was scheduled to launch about 2,000 inquiries in 2025, all of which were derailed by Mr. Trump’s order. Among the companies spared additional scrutiny was Tesla, whose chief executive, Elon Musk, oversaw Mr. Trump’s initiative to shrink the federal government."
    #DOGE #racism #sexism #favoritism #cronyism #politics

  3. RE: mastodon.social/@RonSupportsYo

    "The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs was scheduled to launch about 2,000 inquiries in 2025, all of which were derailed by Mr. Trump’s order. Among the companies spared additional scrutiny was Tesla, whose chief executive, Elon Musk, oversaw Mr. Trump’s initiative to shrink the federal government."
    #DOGE #racism #sexism #favoritism #cronyism #politics

  4. RE: mastodon.social/@RonSupportsYo

    "The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs was scheduled to launch about 2,000 inquiries in 2025, all of which were derailed by Mr. Trump’s order. Among the companies spared additional scrutiny was Tesla, whose chief executive, Elon Musk, oversaw Mr. Trump’s initiative to shrink the federal government."
    #DOGE #racism #sexism #favoritism #cronyism #politics

  5. RE: mastodon.social/@RonSupportsYo

    "The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs was scheduled to launch about 2,000 inquiries in 2025, all of which were derailed by Mr. Trump’s order. Among the companies spared additional scrutiny was Tesla, whose chief executive, Elon Musk, oversaw Mr. Trump’s initiative to shrink the federal government."
    #DOGE #racism #sexism #favoritism #cronyism #politics

  6. No chance of a democratic second chamber for the foreseeable future in the feudal backwater known as the Untied Kingdom.

    #UK_politics #cronyism

    independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli

  7. No chance of a democratic second chamber for the foreseeable future in the feudal backwater known as the Untied Kingdom.

    #UK_politics #cronyism

    independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli

  8. No chance of a democratic second chamber for the foreseeable future in the feudal backwater known as the Untied Kingdom.

    #UK_politics #cronyism

    independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli

  9. No chance of a democratic second chamber for the foreseeable future in the feudal backwater known as the Untied Kingdom.

    #UK_politics #cronyism

    independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli

  10. No chance of a democratic second chamber for the foreseeable future in the feudal backwater known as the Untied Kingdom.

    #UK_politics #cronyism

    independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli

  11. #MissKittyPolitics
    For one they cannot be #Privatized. That has to be made #Illegal. So many functions that are the state's job have been parceled out for #Cronyism. This is the state's job. If there is to be any correcting it is to be done by the state not some greedy ass corporation.

    How to Fix Grievances in Feder...

  12. Good grief, what a clusterf*^%

    “The ICAC inquiry has heard former UOW governance chief Alyssa White celebrated recruiting former colleagues because the university was "broke" before later agreeing recruitment processes were compromised.
    Ms White accepted multiple candidates received advantages and agreed she had repeatedly breached university policies and conflicts of interest requirements.”

    Read more
    abc.net.au/news/2026-07-09/whi

    #UoW #UniversityCouncilWoes #TertiaryEducation #Cronyism #Managerialism #UniversityMarkets #NeoLiberalism

  13. Good grief, what a clusterf*^%

    “The ICAC inquiry has heard former UOW governance chief Alyssa White celebrated recruiting former colleagues because the university was "broke" before later agreeing recruitment processes were compromised.
    Ms White accepted multiple candidates received advantages and agreed she had repeatedly breached university policies and conflicts of interest requirements.”

    Read more
    abc.net.au/news/2026-07-09/whi

    #UoW #UniversityCouncilWoes #TertiaryEducation #Cronyism #Managerialism #UniversityMarkets #NeoLiberalism

  14. Good grief, what a clusterf*^%

    “The ICAC inquiry has heard former UOW governance chief Alyssa White celebrated recruiting former colleagues because the university was "broke" before later agreeing recruitment processes were compromised.
    Ms White accepted multiple candidates received advantages and agreed she had repeatedly breached university policies and conflicts of interest requirements.”

    Read more
    abc.net.au/news/2026-07-09/whi

    #UoW #UniversityCouncilWoes #TertiaryEducation #Cronyism #Managerialism #UniversityMarkets #NeoLiberalism

  15. Good grief, what a clusterf*^%

    “The ICAC inquiry has heard former UOW governance chief Alyssa White celebrated recruiting former colleagues because the university was "broke" before later agreeing recruitment processes were compromised.
    Ms White accepted multiple candidates received advantages and agreed she had repeatedly breached university policies and conflicts of interest requirements.”

    Read more
    abc.net.au/news/2026-07-09/whi

    #UoW #UniversityCouncilWoes #TertiaryEducation #Cronyism #Managerialism #UniversityMarkets #NeoLiberalism

  16. Translation: The con artist and his cronies don't make money from offshore generics, but boy, would they ever, if they could control the entire market, and jack up the cost to patients. These people are crooks, but media treats them as truthful.

    newsie.social/@STAT/1168858643

    #Trump #cronyism #corruption #generics

  17. Translation: The con artist and his cronies don't make money from offshore generics, but boy, would they ever, if they could control the entire market, and jack up the cost to patients. These people are crooks, but media treats them as truthful.

    newsie.social/@STAT/1168858643

    #Trump #cronyism #corruption #generics

  18. Translation: The con artist and his cronies don't make money from offshore generics, but boy, would they ever, if they could control the entire market, and jack up the cost to patients. These people are crooks, but media treats them as truthful.

    newsie.social/@STAT/1168858643

    #Trump #cronyism #corruption #generics

  19. Translation: The con artist and his cronies don't make money from offshore generics, but boy, would they ever, if they could control the entire market, and jack up the cost to patients. These people are crooks, but media treats them as truthful.

    newsie.social/@STAT/1168858643

    #Trump #cronyism #corruption #generics

  20. Wow. 👀

    "Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday that he will appoint one of his most senior advisers to the Senate, a move that could send shockwaves through the Red Chamber...

    ...In a highly unusual move, Carney will also name a sitting Conservative MP"

    #CdnPoli #Nepotism #Patronage #Cronyism

    RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:kstp56fjsymztwl5jppmn3vc/post/3mq2slkon7k2n

  21. Wow. 👀

    "Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday that he will appoint one of his most senior advisers to the Senate, a move that could send shockwaves through the Red Chamber...

    ...In a highly unusual move, Carney will also name a sitting Conservative MP"

    #CdnPoli #Nepotism #Patronage #Cronyism

    RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:kstp56fjsymztwl5jppmn3vc/post/3mq2slkon7k2n

  22. This is gross in multiple ways. Patronage nepo appointments, indeed.

    Carney's chief strategist. Ties to the AI strategy. A plum reward for 2 generations of service and friendship apparently.

    It's this type of thing erodes public trust in government.

    #GiftLink 🎁 #CdnPoli #Nepotism #Cronyism

    RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:o3wys2sczetxtmyv7fn7xzva/post/3mq2ffgmsac2g

  23. This is gross in multiple ways. Patronage nepo appointments, indeed.

    Carney's chief strategist. Ties to the AI strategy. A plum reward for 2 generations of service and friendship apparently.

    It's this type of thing erodes public trust in government.

    #GiftLink 🎁 #CdnPoli #Nepotism #Cronyism

    RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:o3wys2sczetxtmyv7fn7xzva/post/3mq2ffgmsac2g

  24. This is gross in multiple ways. Patronage nepo appointments, indeed.

    Carney's chief strategist. Ties to the AI strategy. A plum reward for 2 generations of service and friendship apparently.

    It's this type of thing erodes public trust in government.

    #GiftLink 🎁 #CdnPoli #Nepotism #Cronyism

    RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:o3wys2sczetxtmyv7fn7xzva/post/3mq2ffgmsac2g

  25. This is gross in multiple ways. Patronage nepo appointments, indeed.

    Carney's chief strategist. Ties to the AI strategy. A plum reward for 2 generations of service and friendship apparently.

    It's this type of thing erodes public trust in government.

    #GiftLink 🎁 #CdnPoli #Nepotism #Cronyism

    RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:o3wys2sczetxtmyv7fn7xzva/post/3mq2ffgmsac2g

  26. This is gross in multiple ways. Patronage nepo appointments, indeed.

    Carney's chief strategist. Ties to the AI strategy. A plum reward for 2 generations of service and friendship apparently.

    It's this type of thing erodes public trust in government.

    #GiftLink 🎁 #CdnPoli #Nepotism #Cronyism

    RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:o3wys2sczetxtmyv7fn7xzva/post/3mq2ffgmsac2g

  27. "Where do we go from here?"

    "Well, we've already fallen straight into the toilet like a slippery cellphone from one's hand, and the lever has clearly been engaged."

    "Centrists might debate you on this."

    "Glub."

    "Glub."

    #USpol #Republicans #Democrats #fascism #corruption #cronyism #economics #war

  28. "Where do we go from here?"

    "Well, we've already fallen straight into the toilet like a slippery cellphone from one's hand, and the lever has clearly been engaged."

    "Centrists might debate you on this."

    "Glub."

    "Glub."

    #USpol #Republicans #Democrats #fascism #corruption #cronyism #economics #war

  29. "Where do we go from here?"

    "Well, we've already fallen straight into the toilet like a slippery cellphone from one's hand, and the lever has clearly been engaged."

    "Centrists might debate you on this."

    "Glub."

    "Glub."

    #USpol #Republicans #Democrats #fascism #corruption #cronyism #economics #war

  30. "Where do we go from here?"

    "Well, we've already fallen straight into the toilet like a slippery cellphone from one's hand, and the lever has clearly been engaged."

    "Centrists might debate you on this."

    "Glub."

    "Glub."

    #USpol #Republicans #Democrats #fascism #corruption #cronyism #economics #war

  31. Jessica Riedl wrote about the end of #DOGE, the child of Donald Trump and Elon Musk:
    "DOGE created chaos, spread misinformation & incompetence, violated numerous laws, targeted minorities, killed lifesaving aid funding, likely leaked confidential information, and fed the myth that waste alone drives deficits - all to produce rounding-error savings."
    #WastedEffort #RuinedCareers #mismanagement #cronyism #politics

  32. Jessica Riedl wrote about the end of #DOGE, the child of Donald Trump and Elon Musk:
    "DOGE created chaos, spread misinformation & incompetence, violated numerous laws, targeted minorities, killed lifesaving aid funding, likely leaked confidential information, and fed the myth that waste alone drives deficits - all to produce rounding-error savings."
    #WastedEffort #RuinedCareers #mismanagement #cronyism #politics

  33. Jessica Riedl wrote about the end of #DOGE, the child of Donald Trump and Elon Musk:
    "DOGE created chaos, spread misinformation & incompetence, violated numerous laws, targeted minorities, killed lifesaving aid funding, likely leaked confidential information, and fed the myth that waste alone drives deficits - all to produce rounding-error savings."
    #WastedEffort #RuinedCareers #mismanagement #cronyism #politics

  34. Jessica Riedl wrote about the end of #DOGE, the child of Donald Trump and Elon Musk:
    "DOGE created chaos, spread misinformation & incompetence, violated numerous laws, targeted minorities, killed lifesaving aid funding, likely leaked confidential information, and fed the myth that waste alone drives deficits - all to produce rounding-error savings."
    #WastedEffort #RuinedCareers #mismanagement #cronyism #politics