All of this has given the Silicon Valley tech-bros a boner. Most of them are quasi-fascists and they are really, really interested in surveillance, counterinsurgency and murder. This is why American tech firms partner with Israel, have veterans of Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, working for them, and buy up Israeli start ups. It also helps us understand why they have been willing to spend insane amounts of money on AI.
Some US tech companies like Palantir are already getting in on the action. Palantir works with Israel to enable AI to surveil and murder anyone who opposes their genocidal actions.
Israel, because of the business of war is incentivized to keep brutalizing the Palestinians and attacking neighbors in order to maintain its niche advantage in AI surveillance and AI-directed killing.
In Gaza, Israel is targeting civilian members of Hamas, the Palestinian resistance movement, through the use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. There’s also a particularly diabolical AI targeting program called “Where’s Daddy?” that tracks any Palestinian civilian, somehow associated with Hamas, home, then bombs and kills the whole family.
Palantir has also scored a $10 billion contract to update and refine an AI program called Maven, for the US armed forces. The military calls Palantir’s Maven its “AI-powered battlefield platform.” It has already been deployed to guide US airstrikes across the Middle East, including in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. Palantir has marketed its technology as shortening the process of identifying and bombing military targets — what the company’s CTO recently described as “optimizing the kill chain.”
Seeing the way Israel uses AI should be setting off alarm bells. Instead the esteemed leaders of Silicon Valley are competing to join the party. Some of these personalities are close to President Donald Trump including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, partner of Palantir with Alex Karp. and OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen helped shape the President-elect’s tech policy agenda. To “take the lead over China” on AI, campaign allies said the new administration will get rid of Biden’s AI guardrails and focus on autonomous weapons, intelligence, and cybersecurity.
The history of the development of computers and the internet demonstrates how high-tech can be used for surveillance, counterinsurgency and murder. Contrary to the feel-good stories about how the internet and computers were developed in Silicon Valley garages, in Surveillance Valley, Yasha Levine, challenges conventional wisdom and says that the Internet was actually founded by the US government as part of their counterinsurgency program in Vietnam. The US government wanted to build a connected computer system that could collect and share real time intelligence, observe the world in real time, and watch and analyze people and political movements–especially communist or socialist ones.
Presently, the US is using AI directed violence to maintain its decaying empire, but what happens on the periphery of empire always returns to sender. “I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,” Chalmers Johnson wrote two decades ago in his book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.”
Empires do not go quietly into the night. Any hope that Donald Trump would be an “antiwar” president went out the window almost as soon as he won the 2024 election, when he filled his administration with a merry band of neocons. I’ve come to realize that with our bi-partisan war party–No matter who you vote for, you always get Lindsey Graham.
Before kidnapping the Venezuelan president, Trump imposed a crippling blockade, seizing Venezuelan oil tankers in the Caribbean, under the flimsy justification that they had been “sanctioned.” Playing the Pirate of the Caribbean, Trump boasted at his press conference a couple of weeks ago that he planned to keep the oil or possibly sell it. Then at yesterday’s press conference announcing his triumphant seizure of President Nicolas Maduro, Trump declared that America will now control Venezuela and our country will “take back” the Venezuelan oil reserves, which he stated were rightfully ours.
Sounds totally legit to me.
All snark aside, Trump’s actions are unprecedented and signal that any adherence to a “rules based international order” has been deep-sixed. Unfortunately, the US looks less like a confident hegemon, maintaining order in the Western Hemisphere and more like an exhausted one, deploying the iron-fist of military force to maintain control after every other attempt has fallen embarrassingly flat.
If we are to suss out the reasons for the latest US attack on Venezuela and kidnap of their president, it’s probably a good idea to follow the money. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump is operating on behalf of financial capital. Wars, regime-change ops and sanctions are driven by the economic structure of the United States–oligarchy– and the role of multinational banks and corporations in the formulation of policy.
The attack on Venezuela that Trump laughably described as an effort to stop narco-terror belies the true objective of the kidnapping operation to remove Maduro, which is to secure the US control of Venezuelan oil. Remember kids, Venezuela has the world’s largest petroleum reserves. Although Trump’s boast that US oil companies would come in and invest billions to transform Venezuela’s petroleum industry seems suspect due to the immense costs involved, control of the oil is reason enough. The key is petrodollar-denominated oil. The US simply could not allow Venezuela’s oil to be sold in yuan, ruble, rupee or a basket of currencies. Only in dollars.
But oil isn’t the only strategic resource lying under Venezuelan soil. The country is also home to the fourth largest gold reserves on the planet and eighth largest natural gas reserves, as well as a treasure trove of critical minerals such as bauxite, iron ore, copper, zinc, nickel and even rare earth materials.
Returning to the role of multinational banks and corporations in the formulation of US policy–all of Wall Street’s fictitious capital–derivatives stacked on top of derivatives–are seeking a physical backstop. Former British Diplomat and MI6 analyst, Alastair Crooke has argued that US national finances are in very bad shape and this is leading to Trump’s seizure of global resources to prevent the collapse of the US dollar. “Today, with the U.S. in an era of unsustainable structural budget deficits, Trump is laser-focused on America’s financial core: The Treasury bond market (America’s lifeline) and the stock market (America’s wallet). Both are fragile. And any external pressure could trigger a chain reaction. Which is why Trump threatens war on anyone seeking to supplant or bypass the U.S. dollar trading monopoly. China was purchasing Venezuela oil and paying for it in yuan rather than dollars.”
While oil is the most obvious motivation behind the kidnapping of Maduro, getting rid of one of the hostile countries to Israel and Zionism in Latin America and returning Venezuela to when it maintained good relations with Israel and even purchased security technologies from it has undoubtedly played a role as well. Maduro, like his predecessor Hugo Chavez, was one of the few world leaders who stood in solidarity with the Palestinians and called out Zionism as a hateful ideology of terror. His removal is a coup for Israel and the neocons. On a recent appearance on Newsmax, the American Christian Zionist ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, boasted that Trump’s recent kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, was good for Israel.
Then there’s a school-of-thought that believes that the US is seeking control over Venezuela oil in anticipation of a disruption of the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf when Israel, with US-backing, launches a new attack on Iran. I’m sure it was simply a happy accident that the attack on Venezuela happened days after Trump’s latest meeting with Netanyahu. And I’m sure that the protests that erupted in Iran following Trump’s Monday meeting with Netanyahu were a coincidence too.
What clear is that the attack on Venezuela is the first real manifestation of the so-called Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Trump, as his usual, makes everything obvious, and echoes Thucydides, where “The strong do what they will and the weak accept what they have to accept.” He does not even try to justify his illegal attack on Venezuela with any of the usual propaganda. There is no talk of imposing democracy or saving woman or any other moral justification. It’s simply thuggish. Grab the oil–it’s ours–and ignore international law and opinion. The indictment of Maduro is just laughable.
The Onion sums up the absurdity.
Update: No expose would be complete without acknowledging the bankruptcy of the corporate media. The story of the attack on Venezuela and kidnap of the president, as well as all of the “war on terror” reporting, is also a story of a corrupt and captured corporate media. A media which does not speak truth to power, but which amplifies the lies and propaganda of the powerful. A media which deliberately omits critical context and manufactures consent for violence. A media which professes concern for international law, democracy and for the downtrodden, and then cheers on the regime-change ops and ongoing violence of the US empire.
Here’s a taste: “In November 2025, something extraordinary happened in Hong Kong that most people missed entirely. China issued $4 billion worth of bonds denominated in US dollars; a routine financial transaction on its surface. But when the orders came in, they totaled $118 billion. Thirty times oversubscribed. Investors from around the world were practically trampling each other to buy Chinese government debt.
Here’s the part that should make everyone pay attention: these Chinese bonds began trading at “lower yields” than United States Treasury bonds. Read that again slowly. Global investors were accepting lower returns on Chinese debt than on American debt—despite China holding a lower credit rating (A+ versus America’s AA). In the hierarchy of global finance, this is roughly equivalent to a challenger brand outselling Coca-Cola at a higher price. It simply doesn’t happen. Until it did.
One month later, the United States began mobilizing for potential intervention in Venezuela. If you think these events are unrelated, you’re missing the most important geopolitical story of our generation. This is about the slow-motion collapse of the architecture that has supported American power for half a century: the dollar’s role as the world’s dominant reserve currency. And Venezuela, improbably, has become ground zero in the fight to preserve it.”
The vast majority of Americans find the status quo poisonous. This is the inevitable blowback from decades of misguided bipartisan policies that have destroyed our country. From never-ending invasions, regime-change ops and sanctions, to ruinous financialization, to the steady outsourcing of American manufacturing resulting in the immiseration of American workers and destruction of the middle-class.
All of our recent elections have been protest ones yet nothing seems to change. Prices continue to skyrocket, Israel and the neocons continue to steer US foreign policies of endless war and, now, a national AI program supported by both parties that threatens millions of jobs. I joke to friends that we’d be better off if Putin and Russia, or Xi Jinping and China invaded and took over management of the country from the present bipartisan kleptocracy.
Hah, hah.
John Michael Greer sounds a message of hope but also peril –“As the last hours of 2025 slip away and 2026 dawns, then, I see the first stirrings of an unnoticed landscape of possibility. That is balanced, however, by certain equally unnoticed dangers. A crucial fact about the fascist regimes of the early 20th century that all sides have gone out of their way to suppress is that a great many of them seized power by offering electorates the commonsense policies that everyone outside the political class wanted and none of the established parties would discuss. That’s why the 25-Point Program of the Nazi party, for example, demanded such bland and reasonable steps as government food subsidies for pregnant women and children, reforms to make education available to all, and the expansion of old age pensions.
The bitter events of a century ago show clearly enough that if the elites in charge of democratic political systems insist on the preservation of an intolerable status quo in the teeth of widespread popular dissent, the people will turn to anybody who will overthrow the existing system—even if that means accepting jackboots and armbands. I can only hope that enough people in the political classes recognize what is happening in time to move to the center first, and prevent a repeat of that ghastly experience.”
I hope 2026 is the year when a critical mass of Americans change the status quo for the better.
Stay safe.
Update: Matt Stolleroffers words of encouragement. “It was during that time of great cynicism that the imbalances and corruption unmasked in the 1930s built up. Only when the public recovered its ability to be outraged, to believe in collective action, that Americans could once again see their society as a free people and act upon it. The actual economic collapse started in 1929, and it continued and worsened even as Brandeis became more optimistic. It was the public learning and regaining its liberty that had to come before the material part could be fixed.”
The best way to interrupt meaningful inquiry into government or corporate malfeasance is to infiltrate the narrative with wild opinions and theories. Our feral elite have determined that rather than denying the malfeasance it’s better to flood the zone with cray-cray.
The cognitive infiltration is in response to the new information environment where the corporate media has lost institutional credibility and has been replaced by social media and the internet. The availability of new and controversial information on the internet and social media has bypassed traditional gatekeepers and a new tool was required, and what has emerged is an effort to control the narrative by discrediting any non-official version.
In 2008 Cass Sunstein, co-authored a paper suggesting a strategy by which the government could disrupt and defeat the increasingly troublesome movement of “conspiracy theorists,” especially those who questioned the official story of the 9/11 attacks a few years earlier. Back then the Internet was far less channeled and regulated and few effective means existed for the political establishment to curtail this new free-for-all sharing of what they eventually labeled “disinformation”. Sunstein, soon to become a top Obama aide, cleverly suggested that all of this naughty “wrong-think” could best be undermined and disrupted by means of “cognitive infiltration.” Agents of the government or its close allies should join those online communities and promote a wide range of additional theories, often rather crazy ones, thereby stirring up internal conflicts, diverting the members into theoretical dead-ends, and heavily discrediting them with the broader American public.
None of this is particularly new, but the Wild West of the internet has proved problematic for the powers that be because it provides fertile ground for the dissemination of “disinformation”. Think of COINTELLPRO–with the FBI’s use of black propaganda and agent provocateurs. The purpose of COINTELPRO, after all, was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, anti-war protestors, and radicals in general. It’s notable that COINTELPRO was eventually declared illegal because it violated the rights of free speech and association.
InFalse Flags—A Template for Terror, Michael Collins Piper presciently described cognitive infiltration as a very effective means of confusing and frustrating all investigatory efforts by citizen-activists. Piper argued that a small group of establishment operatives have successfully manipulated social media and internet chat groups, that soon dominated the online narrative. But as Piper points out, the ultimate result was to “severely damage the credibility of all conspiracy theories”.
There’s much evidence that cognitive infiltration has been deployed in response to American citizens questioning official stories. Think the Sandy Hook shooting and resulting insanity. And the QAnon psy-op, that portrayed Trump as a real-life superhero saving trafficked children from the Pizza-gate pedophiles. Don’t forget the Epstein scandal where efforts to disperse the interest in the larger Epstein scandal were underway long before the pedophile was rearrested and “suicided.” I was not surprised to discover that QAnon itself and the 4chan /pol/ board where it originated were confirmed as Israeli intelligence honeypots, with half of all /pol/ posts originating from IP addresses in that country.
Presently, Zionism is the single greatest threat to free speech in the western world and cognitive infiltration is targeted against those who oppose Israel.
The EU and Western so-called democracies have simply resorted to mass censorship and outright outlawing speech that’s critical of Israel. In Great Britain, “journalists, human rights activists and lawyers face a a legal minefield” every time they try to talk about the Gaza genocide, the trials of people accused of belonging to Palestine Action, or the hunger strikes of those on remand over attacks on weapons factories supplying killer drones to Israel.
That is what authoritarian governments do.
The US, despite the Bill of Rights, is headed that way too. Censorship and attacks on free speech are nothing new on either side of the Atlantic, to state the obvious. The Biden regime was notable for its connivances with Silicon Valley and its assaults on free speech. These have worsened dramatically during the first year of Trump’s second term. Larry Ellison’s family has been buying up media platforms like CBS where rabid Zionist Bari Weiss has been put in command, and purchasing control of TikTok after Congress forced its sale to stomp out criticism of Israel. President Donald Trump has indeed repeatedly admitted to being controlled by mega-donor Miriam Adelson, the world’s richest Israeli.
Cognitive infiltration will continue where’s it’e expedient while outright censorship always remains an option. The Biden Administration followed the EU in their efforts to censor, while the Trump Administration is sanctioning EU officials over censorship, but don’t be fooled.
The late, great Frank Zappa summed up our dilemma–“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
I believe that’s because Epstein is the all-encompassing scandal. Unlike most political scandals, which are typically about corruption and sex, the Epstein case and cover-up offer a tantalizing glimpse into the deep state nexus of intelligence, finance and sexual blackmail. The revelation that a multinational intelligence operation connected to organized crime had for decades trafficked teen girls by the thousands as a means to secure global control not only of politics but of science, technology, industry, and the arts, with full knowledge and even cooperation of multiple law enforcement agencies, highlighted a reality that only “conspiracy theorists” had dared articulate.
The Epstein case and the ongoing efforts to bury its implications constitute a Rosetta Stone for the intrepid to understand how the US has been reduced to a servile, foreign controlled kleptocracy, an organized crime ring masquerading as a country. Only by recognizing the role of sexual blackmail and the powers behind it can Americans understand the betrayal that has rendered our republican form of government meaningless. Epstein represented the dark underbelly of US governance where ongoing support for an Israel is partially influenced through sexual blackmail. That and the Israeli lock on US politics through AIPAC is the key to understanding why both parties refuse to stop funding their Gaza genocide.
Epstein was ideally placed to recruit girls, and charm their wealthy parents, starting from his first job, having been installed as math and science teacher at the prestigious Dalton School despite lacking even a college degree in what was likely an intelligence posting designed to position him in New York high society.
According to former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben Menashe, Epstein began working with the CIA and by 1983 was working with media baron and Israeli spy Robert Maxwell. While the US and Israel were already running multiple trafficking rings that used underage children to compromise powerful figures as part of their Iran-Contra operations, Israel’s military intelligence directorate Aman had selected Epstein to deal with a more serious threat: the US was considering making peace with the Palestinians and had to be stopped, Epstein was told, with orders to set up his own ring and blackmail presidential candidate Bill Clinton with underage girls.
Through L Brands and Victoria’s Secret, owner Les Wexner, a Zionist billionaire with intelligence and mafia ties, Epstein was outfitted with a massive Manhattan townhouse equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance in every room. Epstein was also gifted a custom 737 private plane and vast sums of mysterious money. Wexner was the co-founder of the Mega Group, a secretive club where dozens of the wealthiest and most powerful Zionists, with unlimited amounts of power and influence, obsessed on advancing the cause of Israel. Epstein’s honeypot op was the backstop to Israeli Hasbara, where if efforts to promote support failed there was always blackmail. How many erstwhile moral Congressman, Senators, or Cabinet officials could resist the allure of beautiful underage girls?
Jefferey Epstein was a Zionist weapon and the ongoing sexual blackmail lasted right up to when Epstein was arrested after flying back into Teterboro on the Lolita Express. Many of Epstein’s victims report that he and Maxwell seemed to take as much pleasure in their fear and distress as they did in the sex itself. It seems obvious that the compromised US officials similarly experience fear and distress knowing somewhere in a Mossad video storage room sits evidence of crimes that could destroy them.
Even though Epstein is dead, and his sexual blackmail operation shut down, the pressure on US politicians is enormous to support Israel, their Gaza genocide and their regional objectives. Alon Mizrahi relates Israel’s dilemma. “They know they have limited time before the general distaste for Zionism in the world, including the U.S., gives way to new leaders, norms, and standards. So, they need to act with urgency. And this is what they’re doing: not damage control, but preparation for impact. They are not playing defense; they are playing offense”. For Israel, Trump’s assistance with the antisemitism is only part of the bargain, as Mizrahi argues. “They don’t want to be legitimate, they want to be able to force you to treat them as legitimate when you and they both know the extent of their criminality.”
Fortunately for us, Trump is either unable or unwilling to deliver on any of Israel’s Yinon Plan objectives. At the same time, he is becoming increasingly loathed by young MAGA voters as well as the rest of the world, and his close association with Zionists and nonstop performative service for them translates into strategic damage for Zionism. Epstein still possess the potential to fatally undermine US support for the murderous genocidal state. As the latest release demonstrates, the Epstein files won’t go away no matter how many Venezuelan boats Trump incinerates or tankers he pirates. Americans are realizing they do not have a sovereign country. Israel’s standing with the American public, according to numerous surveys, has been plummeting across the board. More alarmingly for the Trump Administration, among Republicans under the age of fifty, disaffection with Israel jumped from 35 percent to 50 percent.
Unfortunately for us, beyond the blackmail and massive financial support lies another reason why Israel remains sacrosanct. US and Western democracies are openly backing its genocide in Gaza because it’s a laboratory for control. These surveillance, drone and cyber war technologies have been tested and refined for at least a quarter of a century in the Palestinian territories illegally occupied and ruled by Israel. We can all see where Israel’s ethnic supremacist agenda has led for the Palestinians: to military occupation, apartheid and genocide.
I’m afraid that’s where we’re headed. Israel is creating a vision of the near-future, it is providing a blueprint for how our billionaire overlords intend to deal with surplus populations in a world of diminishing resources and radical climate change.
As Israel tries to exert more and more influence over American society and pushes the US governments to crush our freedom of speech and assembly, we should be doing everything we can to cast light on the parasitic relationship, while aggressively opposing the Trump kleptocracy and accompanying techno-feudalism.
The political choices we get are severely limited, bookended between globalist neoliberals and fascist neocons. That’s why every new election, at every level, is a protest vote against this poisonous status quo. For decades Americans have voted to turf out the incumbents and demand change. They get change from Republicans to Democrats and back again, but no real change in economic or foreign policies. If the Republican party loses elections, the Democrat party, which is merely another promoter of neocon and neoliberal ideologies, takes over.
That Barack Obama was named Advertising Age‘s Marketer of the Year in 2008, for his Hope and Change campaign well represents the con perpetrated on us. Obama bailed out the banks, and massively increased drone strikes, fulfilling George W. Bush’s Third and Forth terms, what with the “war on terror” and a turbo-charged oligarchy. Obama’s neocon administration continued the global war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, and elsewhere, especially across Africa. The US and NATO intervention in Libya, in 2011, resulted in widespread chaos and proliferation of weapons and violence, leaving Libya fractured with the return of slave markets.
Joe Biden doubled the number of billionaires on his watch and enthusiastically funded Israel’s Gaza genocide, while conducting a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Recently, one of Biden’s leading officials in Ukraine, Amanda Sloan, admitted that NATO provoked the proxy war in Ukraine, and that the Biden Administration could have prevented the war, destruction and massive loss of life.
And now Donald Trump has largely hewed to a pro-oligarch position and militarized foreign policy. Despite a populist campaign, he’s now claims that we have the best economy, while pardoning an endless slew of white collar criminals, assuming power over the media and pirating oil tankers. The reality is somewhat different with a struggling economy, inflation and growing unemployment as well as the ongoing wars.
Once again a political bait and switch.
Mirroring Obama, Trump’s 2016 adviser, Steve Bannon pulled off a Make America Great Again (MAGA) populist con on disgruntled American voters, burned by Hope and Change. Bannon depicted Trump’s populist campaign as a backlash against a “decadent, borderless elite” that supposedly preyed on children. Except newly released documents show Bannon’s so-called populist rebellion was reliant on Jefferey Epstein, America’s most decadent pedophile, and Israeli secret agent.
Israel seems to be a the center of much of US political depravity. Furthermore, it appears that Trump is owned lock-stock-and-barrel by Israeli billionaire Miriam Adelson. At a White House Hanukkah dinner he boasted that Adelson gave his campaign “directly and indirectly” $250 million, then jokes that it “is not what it used to be.” He then went on to admit to being the first Jewish president of the United States. All of this while Pro-Israel Forces Intensify Effort To Control American Discourse.
Don’t expect the Democrats to make an issue out of Israeli control over US government, since they’re similarly owned. Member how Joe Biden claimed to be a committed Zionist, as he armed Israel’s Gaza genocide?
Shamelessly, both political parties warn us that if the other one wins the country will be plunged into the worst sort of dystopia imaginable. Which is hilarious since both parties are hastening our slow motion disaster with their economic and foreign policies. There’s already talk of a Vance vs AOC showdown in 2028, as if that would change anything.
Unfortunately, the mental models our feral elite use to guide their actions have drifted disastrously out of synch with the real world, with the chance of catastrophic failure increasing by the day. The actions of our political parties simply represent a cognitive collapse. It’s not hard to understand why. Both political parties have become so divorced from the realities facing the average American that they might as well be Martians, which accounts for a good many of the indignities inflicted on us by our current corporate and government apparatchiks.
All of this is why I hate both parties with a passion. Ditto for the corporate media that produces the ongoing kayfabe, designed to keep Americans confused and divided.
Personally, I think that it’s cathartic to hate. Especially leaders and political parties that are actively harming us. We’re endlessly urged to hate Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or Kim Jong Un, when it’s our feral elite who are the truly dangerous enemy with their policies of austerity, endless war and casual disregard.
Update: They just released the latest batch of Epstein documents so I know what I shall be writing about next week.
The US is enduring late-stage capitalism where it’s more profitable to loot rather than to create or build. Even worse, the looters are celebrated as “makers” rather than the takers they obviously are.
Under Trump’s benevolent gaze, the financiers that control private equity are cosplaying as modern day pirates who exist to pillage and loot. Many of them make up the cohort of billionaires now driving the Trump Administration’s policies, where they’ve belatedly realized that the US global position is weakening and it’s a zero sum game and they need to grab as much loot as they can before the music stops. It’s the same mindset I described in my last post, what with the elites desire to escape rather than help create a better world for everyone.
Private equity or PE firms such as KKR, Black Stone, Carlyle and Bain Capital have found an exceptionally profitable model to use debt leverage to buy out retailers, utilities, and healthcare providers, aggressively cut costs, asset strip, and then force them into bankruptcy for breakup sales. It’s all legal and represents certain vision of the America, where powerful corporations can arbitrarily coerce Americans and damage them economically. It’s oligarchy.
The target companies include well-known brands such as Toys R Us, Sports Authority, Sears, Payless, Red Lobster, and Genesis Healthcare.
These PE firms follow a standard operating procedure with their predation model:
Buy out the business with debt that uses assets of the target itself as collateral
Pursue deep cost cutting such as layoffs, cutting employee benefits, squeezing suppliers, and reducing maintenance, quality and services
Raise prices to consumers
Asset strip by selling off the valuable parts of the target such as real estate, stores, equipment, brands, and profitable subsidiaries or divisions
Force the target to load up additional debt, often to pay dividends to the PE owners
Liquidate when the business fails, causing wholesale layoffs often without compensations
There are over 4,000 PE firms and 18,000 funds operating in the US, with over $10 trillion under management, that are actively engaged in the leveraged buyout (LBO) business.
Fuck! That’s a lot of looters.
As a result of such prevalent predatory finance, more and more US businesses are driven into debt-fueled bankruptcies, turfing out employees and destroying communities. I’m positive that the violence, suicides and “deaths of despair” that have plagued our country are directly related to the looting. Many Americans may not comprehend all of the intricate details of the vast looting operation but they understand that their lives have gotten worse and the realize that the lives of their children will be worse still.
Then there’s the monopolization of the economy. American corporations are not really interested in making things anymore and, like PE, have financialized too, while striving to ensure that there’s no competition in their field. They all want to be a monopoly or part of an oligopoly so that other companies can’t compete with them. All of this behavior ensures ever rising prices.
Trump can boast all he wants that we have the best economy ever but for most Americans, the economy doesn’t work for them anymore. I guarantee that by next November that will be the main issue influencing how Americans vote.
Whatever the fuck we’re going to do politically, the first thing is to stop the looting. Start with just outlawing PE. Get rid of stock buybacks. Stop pumping the stock market. Ruthlessly go after everyone deliberately raising real-estate, rent, food and other prices. (By the way, this possibility is why there was such elite hysteria over the election of Zohran Mamdani, who may or may not be allowed to reduce the prices of food, rent, healthcare and all of the other prices that are crippling average New Yorkers)
Unfortunately, at this point the US economy will have to essentially collapse and the looters will have to be driven entirely out of power and replaced by a more responsible elite concerned with building things, healing communities, constructing infrastructure and truly pledging to make America great.
Elon Musk did an interview recently where he moaned about not being able to go the the store or do normal things because he’s worried about security in the wake of the Charlie Kirks assassination and the murder of the United Health CEO, Brian Thompson. But that’s rich because billionaires like Musk helped make the world where the oligarchs are scared. Presently, the United States is a vastly unequal society where the average American lives an increasingly precarious existence.
Isn’t it interesting that Ghislaine Maxwell seems to turn up with all the worst people?
I just readSurvival of the Richest–Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff, where he explains that the tech bros like Musk would rather escape than simply make the world more livable for Americans. Rushkoff was the professor of media theory and digital economics, who was invited to to lecture 5 mysterious billionaires on how to survive the “Event”–the societal apocalypse they know is coming. They laughed when Rushkoff explained that maybe sharing their wealth now might preclude the “Event”, and instead wanted to know how to ensure the loyalty of their security guards in the aftermath.
Elon Musk has made it clear that he not interested in sharing the wealth, and with his spearheading the government-smashing DOGE, seems determined to make Americans more precarious. But even a sociopath like Musk feels something like guilt for the way in which he has gained his fortune, by fucking over everyone else.
Or maybe not, considering the sociopathy, but he feels something. Vastly unequal societies are not healthy places for anyone, even billionaires like Musk, for obvious reasons. While the rest of us grapple with precarity, the billionaires have to arm-up with guards and constant security. They worry that some bitter malcontent might try to murder them or kidnap their daughter or wife. They have to bunker down and can’t do normal things. Musk reportedly travels with a coterie of 25 ex-special forces guards. Think about that for a minute.
Unfortunately, if we’re to expect anything from the billionaires it’s them doubling-down on the sociopathy.
In Ayn Rand’s ponderous Atlas Shrugged, the billionaires withdraw their “talents’ from society, and retreat to Galt’s Gulch. I propose that our American billionaire likewise withdraw their “talents” and retreat. I further propose that they take their “talents” to Mars. Musk and Bezos have talked about establishing a Martian colony and Space X then Blue Origin could transport the billionaires in waves.
Under Trump the US has emerged as a kleptocracy, where the president has built up a system of private patronage networks that provide kick-backs. It’s a criminal enterprise masquerading as a presidency. I mean, the fact that Trump maintains a crypto-coin, that “investors” can purchase, is just one step removed from big sacks of cash placed on the president’s desk. For patrons looking to bend the presidents ear, it appears that gold bars also are welcomed.
Qatar bought Trump a fucking jumbo-jet.
The kleptocracy has bi-partisan participation and a neoliberal pedigree. We’ve heard it all justified for decades. This was the justification for deregulating Wall Street: the justification for free trade deals that wiped out millions of industrial jobs; the justification for permitting corporations to lay off workers to pay for leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks while avoiding taxes; and the justification for public-private partnerships that enriched the private partners at taxpayer expense.
I’ve said this for a while but neoliberalism, with its mantra of “no alternative” only took off with the demise of the Soviet Union and communism to provide an alternative economic order. As long as the USSR existed the capitalist bosses had to accommodate labor and communities, but as soon as communism collapsed capitalism began to return to its natural state, where society is divided into the rich and super-rich, without a significant middle class.
The USSR and communism forced FDR’s response to the Great Depression, with its New Deal policies which forced capitalists, plutocrats, and bankers to share their wealth with the common people. The state forced capital to invest in science and education, culture and art, infrastructure development programs, and the military-industrial complex. It taxed them, taking up to 90% of their profits to finance state programs. It was then that a huge middle class emerged, the pillar of stability and democracy. It arose not through the development of a free market and democracy, but thanks to the state.
That was a long time ago and now the corruption, looting and graft have reached terminal velocity, where Trump is pardoning drug dealers, crypto-swindlers and pretty much anyone who can offer a large enough bribe. South Park had a whole episode on the rank dealings.
Then there’s the ultimate klept endeavor–endless war for profit. What we are seeing today with Trump vaporizing Venezuela boaters is simply the new reality as the US militarized empire retreats to the Monroe Doctrine. The 2025 National Security Strategy, lays out the details, but don’t expect the masters of war to be likewise limited. Every change in the global battlefield has simply meant that the U.S. weapons industry grew richer with each intervention, lobbying for policies that kept the country in a constant state of conflict.
The “market go up” and the “rich get richer” has been the policy since Reagan, while neoliberalism is criminogenic so it’s perfectly logical that we ended up with a kleptocracy. The next wars were always there because we never confronted the political and economic system that made endless wars a profitable cornerstone of U.S. power.
Trump’s secret power is that he makes it all obvious.
In the 2016 presidential campaign we had one sociopath who boasted of “grabbing woman by the pussy” and one sociopath who joked in a television interview, “We came, we saw, he died” and laughed, after hearing that Gaddafi had been captured by rebel forces and sodomized with a bayonet. Hills complimented the sociopathy with some stupid, calling voters who disagreed with her a “basket of deplorables”
Trump is president, again, assigning economy crushing tariffs and turning Venezuela boaters into red mist, while Hills is at it again, defending Israeli genocide. Stupid and sociopathic. I’m not sure that’s a winning formula, but maybe they can’t help themselves?
Former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained at a conference hosted by an Israeli newspaper on Tuesday that young Americans were becoming sympathetic toward Palestinians because they watch “totally made up” videos of the horrors in Gaza on social media.
Totally looks made up. Those dastardly Palestinians with their AI.
Clinton said that when she tried to talk to young people “to engage in some kind of reasonable discussion, it was very difficult because they did not know history, they had very little context, and what they were being told on social media was not just one-sided, it was pure propaganda.”
“It’s not just the usual suspects. It’s a lot of young Jewish Americans who don’t know the history and don’t understand,” she claimed, adding, “A lot of the challenge is with younger people. More than 50% of young people in America get their news from social media.”
Kids these days. Meanwhile, the rest of us watch in horror as the Israeli terror state continues its genocide against the people of Gaza and escalates its savage pogrom in the West Bank.
Hills is following the Hasbara edicts to maintain US support for the genocidal country, and to extend the impunity that protects the Israeli terror machine in Gaza and the West Bank. Former Obama White House speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz made similar remarks about young people during a conference hosted by the Jewish Federations of North America last month.
“You have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza,” she complained. “And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they’re hearing it through this wall of carnage.”
Hurwitz also claimed that Holocaust education was “confusing” young people into sympathizing with “weak, skinny Palestinians” instead of “powerful Israelis.”
Hillary Clinton is like Sarah Hurwitz in that their actions and commentary are well received in elite company. Hills especially articulates the deep state policies of the American empire, and the history of her time as Obama’s Secretary of State is worth revisiting.
After overthrowing the Libyan government of Gaddafi using Sunni terrorists as proxies, the US turned its attention to Syria, where the Obama administration was already embarked on another regime change operation. Although Clinton led the public advocacy of the policy, then CIA director David Petraeus, who had taken over the agency in early September 2011, was a major ally. He immediately began working on a major covert operation to arm rebel forces in Syria. The CIA operation used ostensibly independent companies in Libya to ship arms from Libyan government warehouses to Syria and southern Turkey. These were then distributed in consultation with the United States through networks run by Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The plan went into operation within days of Gaddafi’s death on October 20, 2011 just before NATO officially ended its operation at the end of that month, as the DIA later reported to the JCS.
But the result of the operation was to accelerate the dominance of al-Qaeda and their Islamist allies. The Turks, Qataris and Saudis were funneling arms to al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, al-Nusra Front or other closely related extremist groups. That should not have surprised the Obama administration. The same thing had happened in Libya in spring 2011 after the Obama administration had endorsed a Qatari plan to send arms to Libyan rebels. The White House had quickly learned that the Qataris had sent the arms to the most extremist elements in the Libyan opposition.
The key to understanding US foreign policies is to ignore the tribal and focus on the continuity between administrations, where both Republicans and Democrats have utilized the very same Sunni-terrorists that they are supposedly at war with since 9/11. Liberals want to venerate Hillary and Barak and conservatives want to support Bush and Trump, but all them are just cogs in the deep state machine. Liberals in power turned out to be just as savage and repressive as the fascists.
Meanwhile, the sociopathy advances the American empire but I’m not sure the stupid does.
camelotkidd 