The Banality of the Deal: Casey Michel on the United States of Oligarchy

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. Back in January of 2022, we did a show with Casey Michel, a muckraking East Coast journalist who had a book out back then called American Kleptocracy, How the US. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History. Four years later, Casey has a new book out with an even more ominous title, United States of Oligarchy, How America's Wealthiest Ally with, Dictators, Weaken the US and Destroy Democracy. Over the last four years then much has happened and I'm thrilled that Casey is joining us. Casey, what's happened over the last four years, even back in 2022, at least according to Casey Michel, the news was pretty miserable. You were reporting on American Kleptocracy. Since then, we've had the second version of Donald Trump. What's happened in America over the last four years?

**Casey Michel** (1:41)
Yeah, Andrew, of course, it's great to be joining you today to be talking about some of these topics, including the new book. There have been a few developments, as I'm sure you and the listeners are all perfectly familiar with. And it is funny to think about the late 2010s and early 2020s when I wrote that very first book on the U.S.'s transformation into the center of international money laundering for as dire and dour as things were in the broader corruption, especially international corruption space at the time and its impact on American policy. It's funny to think that that seems a little bit like Child's Play at this point. The kind of things we were talking about then, some anonymous funding going to some real estate ventures connected to then President Donald Trump, concerns about maybe a certain anonymous shell company being behind a certain donation to whether it was the sitting president or other politicians in the United States of America. And of course, amidst the kind of broader concerns about campaign finance and who American politics is truly open to. Look, those concerns were all perfectly valid at the time. I'm happy I wrote the book. I'm happy, of course, to have spoken with you about it then.
But here we are in the middle of 2026 and things have changed considerably, not just in terms of the scope and the scale of what we're talking about, but also the kinds of technologies involved, the emergence of things like cryptocurrency, the emergence of things like prediction markets, of course, the emergence of things like AI accelerating so many of these things. But the real concerns about how corruption, both domestic and foreign, impacts and affects American policy, especially in Washington, but not only in Washington DC, that has only grown by magnitudes compared to where we were even just a few years ago. Frankly, it's funny how much can change in just a few years or if it wasn't funny, maybe there's a different emotion.

**Andrew Keen** (3:23)
Yeah, I was going to call you on that. I think it's funny. I mean, some people might be amused, others might be shocked, horrified and very upset. Let's just repeat the subtitle of the new book, Casey, and read it perhaps as clearly as I should have first time around. It's How America's Wealthiest, Ally With Dictators, Weakened The US and Destroyed Democracy.
So this is a book, at least according to its subtitle about quote unquote, America's Wealthiest. Who are these people?

**Casey Michel** (3:57)
So the theme of the book is relatively simple. It's examining oligarchy and it's examining what oligarchy is, how it operates, of course, how we got here in the United States of America and who we're actually talking about. One of the clear elements of the book that came through on my end in researching it is that there has been, not just for the last few years, not just for the last few decades, but thousands of years of contested elements of the definition of oligarchy itself. Frankly, we have none other than Aristotle to thank for that.

**Andrew Keen** (4:27)
Yeah, and we actually have an upcoming show later this month on a new edition, a new translation of Aristotle's Ethics, so we can get into it then. So you're right. So this word oligarchy, of course, I don't think Aristotle invented it, did he?

**Casey Michel** (4:43)
No, he did not invent it. He first popularized it about 3,000 or so years ago as well. So he was the first one that it was generally associated with, and he was describing some of the kind of political typologies in addition to monarchy, democracy, and a few others. And of course, he was commenting on Athens and Sparta at the time. And as he defined it, oligarchy, again, which he did not invent but we first popularized, as he thought, yes, it does literally mean the rule of the few, which is, of course, the root of the term itself. But as Aristotle also saw it, and this is where the confusion first set in, the kind of tension inherent to this term first set in was, as he thought, it wasn't just the number of people that you're talking about.