The man of integrity

Posted on September 1, 2026 by camelotkidd

Who runs the Department of War?

Well, it’s probably not the drunken rapist–Kegsbreath, even though his name appears at the top of the flow chart.

However, Kegsbreath does make a good foil for the true leader of the Pentagon, whom the Wall Street Journal, profiled with a provocative article, entitled: “A Private Equity Billionaire Mounts His Biggest Takeover Yet: the Pentagon.”

Even though Stephan Feinberg, the private-equity billionaire owner of the Cerberus Capital Management hedge-fund, is only the No. 2 Pentagon official he probably regards an idiot such as Hegseth as a very useful lightning rod. The tattooed, former FOX news host’s outrageous public statements and actions divert media attention, thereby allowing Feinberg, his nominal subordinate, to operate in the shadows he has always preferred. During his long business career, Feinberg had been notoriously secretive, even going so far as boasting to his shareholders that he would “kill” any employee who got his picture in the newspapers.

The line between finance and criminal behavior has become increasingly blurred. Feinberg originally got his start under “Junk Bond King” Michael Milken, who was later sentenced to ten years in prison and fined $600 million dollars for financial fraud. Feinberg then founded Cerberus Capital Management, which subsequently became the basis of his fortune.

Though he has flown under the radar, allowing Feinberg at the controls of the Pentagon gravy train is like letting the fox guard the henhouse. Soon after his appointment, Feinberg persuaded Trump to boost the Pentagon budget a whopping 50% to $1.5 trillion per year, more than the total military spending of every other nation on earth. And Feinberg is quietly putting Cerberus Capital apparatchiks in charge of managing this enormous gusher of government money by bringing in some of his top Cerberus Capital subordinates to assist him in the “bust-out”. Fineberg’s crony’s includes former Cerberus Managing Director John Gallagher and a deal team called the Economic Defense Unit led by Cerberus alumnus George Kollitides.

“This is a Cerberus takeover,” said Steve Blank, an adjunct Stanford professor of entrepreneurship and national security. “Private equity has just acquired its largest organization.”

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration’s massive, ongoing corruption combined with PR effort to transform the looting into an entrepreneurial effort has produced some unintended comedy. After joining the US government last year, Feinberg transferred his Cerberus holdings to trusts that benefit his adult children. Asked about potential conflicts of interest, Pentagon spokesman Parnell said, “The Deputy is a man of integrity who has conducted himself ethically throughout his entire career.”

Does this look like a man of integrity?

What’s ironic is that the private equity industry has eviscerated the productive American economy while saddling it with debt and now, with the Cerberus takeover of the Pentagon, it’s poised to do the same to the Department of War.

For an anti-imperialist it seems too good to be true, but I’m sure you can think of better things to do with $1.5 trillion than to turn it over to hedge fund weasels?

Update: Trump’s Iranian fiasco is proof that the private equity takeover of the Pentagon is already yielding the usual malign results.

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Go Away

Posted on August 28, 2026 by camelotkidd

I wish she would go away but it appears that we are cursed with the forever reoccurring specter of Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton on says the only way for Trump to end the war in Ukraine is to go all in and “much more forcefully” fund the Ukrainians to fight Russia

She claims he won’t do that because of Putin’s “hold” on Trump.

Uh huh.

Didn’t we go through all that with Russia-gate? It’s hard to believe that Donald Trump spent four years pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet.

Anyway, Mrs. “We came, we saw, he died” advocacy for more attacks against Russia is simply more evidence that US foreign policies of endless war are thoroughly bi-partisan. Not only that but has Hill’s not been paying attention to Trump’s Iranian adventure, where he had to cease hostilities because the US’s weapons cupboard is bare? I mean what weapons are we going to supply to Ukraine?

She must be drunk, or maybe she’s suffering from advancing senility? There’s a lot of that going around in Washington.

Unfortunately, too many of the professional/managerial/class still believe her and nothing I’ve ever been able to say can change their mind.

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The accidental anti-imperialist

Posted on August 21, 2026 by camelotkidd

I’m sure that wasn’t his intent but Trump is turning out to be the accidental anti-imperialist president. The turn of events is quite ironic since he based his second coming on emulating William McKinley, our first imperialist president. But Trump is notoriously uncurious, while being part of a ruling class that genuinely doesn’t care about truth and knowledge, so he’s probably forgotten all about it.

There are a myriad of reasons why Trump has run the American empire onto the rocks, and he’s had plenty of help from proceeding presidents–hello Joe Biden, George W. Bush and Barak Obama–but the chief cause is Trump’s idiotic attack on Iran and his subsequent behavior. He can’t admit that he lost because Trump is a bully who is used to having adversaries back down, and he can’t stand a lesser power like he sees Iran not doing what he demands they do. Unfortunately for Trump, the Iranians, who have planned for this eventuality for decades, continue to punch back hard.

“Tehran believes it has the military edge and is openly discussing going on the offensive instead of merely responding to American attacks.” Iran’s stated goal between now in the midterms is to break America’s will to fight Iran after the midterms and to do so by breaking the Trump presidency.

Surprisingly, the corporate media has been full of stories lamenting the scale of Trump’s Iranian disaster. Trump’s attack on Iran is turning into the biggest military disaster in US history, where even the neocons are admitting it. US radars, HQ’s, runways and bases have been obliterated by precision missile strikes. Logistics have been stretched past capacity. Naval crews are suffering from lack of food, while the DOD pretends that everything is fine and stories to the contrary are fake news designed to demoralize the American public. Weapons system that fail to perform as advertised. So-called high-tech artillery ammunition factories unable to produce a single useable shell, and on and on. It’s an empire that has been hollowed out by decades of neoliberalism, where the military/industrial/complex profits while the US defense base withers.

The story of Trump being hidden in a catering container and whisked away on a decoy plane, after Israel suckered US intelligence agencies into believing there was a threat from Iran, only adds humor to the slow-motion collapse. The loss of US soft power, respectability and predictability has been more deleterious. “America’s greatest strategic asset has never been its military alone. The US developed the postwar “rules-based” operating system, and in the process, created a global network of allies willing to align their security with Washington because they believed that American commitments are credible.

Trump has flushed all of that down the crapper. Not only has the US committed stunning military malpractice but it has also failed to exercise effective statecraft, obvious in the way that Washington has shifted between different approaches to handling Iran. The fish rots from the head down and Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he’s not credible. As a thought experiment–if you were a head of state or foreign minister would you believe anything that comes out of Trump’s pie-hole?

Domestically, Trump’s attack on Iran has been unpopular from the git go and the numbers are only trending downward. The only thing keeping it somewhat together is the non-stop propaganda. The way in which domestic and foreign policies are described has become divorced from reality. They’re mostly about image and presentation of the “official narrative”. History and context are most unwelcome, and frequently dangerous. Truth is what “Big Brother” says.

The victory language has been relentless. “After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated,” Trump told a police-academy audience in New York on August 14, “pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” Days earlier he had told reporters the US had “total control” of the waterway: “We own it, and at some point, maybe they’ll do something, and then they get blown away.” On August 18 he posted an image labeling the strait “New US Territory.” On August 19 he insisted the strait was open and the mines cleared — while, in the same breath, confirming that the naval blockade “remains in effect.”

Unfortunately Trump’s subterfuge cuts both ways. The American empire rests on the narrative of an omnipotent military, armed with high-tech wonder weapons, but Trump’s attack on Iran has knocked out that imperial pillar leaving a gaping void.

Reality is relentless.

Historians will point to Trump’s Iranian fiasco as an accelerant to the end of US empire, but I think that the end of empire is a desirable outcome. Politically, the task is to make it impossible for the elites to pretend that it never happened, as is their standard procedure for losing wars. When it comes to responsibility for the tragedy Trump was a symptom rather than the cause. I stated before that Trump has had lots of help with his empire demolition project which points to a much larger problem than another dementia addled president.

When asked what type of government, Ben Franklin retorted–“A republic, if you can keep it.” We haven’t been a republic for a while but Trump and his band of fuck-ups are doing great damage to the oligarchical empire that followed. Now we need to start planning for what comes next.

Update: In light of Trump’s ignominious escape in a catering pod, inquiring minds want to know if Trump’s beautiful, blond assistant–Natalie Harp— accompanied him and, more provocatively, if she’s a Mossad agent subtly guiding Trump’s agenda?

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The Sword

Posted on August 14, 2026 by camelotkidd

I was primed to be part of the professional/managerial/class like my parents. As a teenager I worked at a large amusement park, where they made me a manager. I enjoyed it and was good at it but soon came to the realization that a mid-level manager was capital’s henchman in an economy that was exploitive and cruel.

It’s only gotten way, way worse. Presently, across the political spectrum, Americans are anxious from concerns about the cost of living, precarious employment, and the dominance of monopolies in retail, tech, big-Pharma, and finance. This affordability combined with powerlessness is a crucial feature of our current political climate. This is manifested as alienation or Conspicuous Despair, and it’s clear that Americans are fed up with the ideological defenses of low wages and bad options for work, housing, and health. 

Our lived reality is that a small class of billionaire capitalists has consolidated an extractive economy to a degree that excludes a large portion of society from the productive economy. And the professional/managerial/class, or symbolic capitalists, were there every step of the way as allies, while they gave us “woke” cultural war bull-shit in lieu of class politics. Politics in the US has only served capital for decades. All policies were to squeeze as much wealth out of society. It started with moving factories for low cost labor, now we have a new word: enshitification, there’s the gig economy. And all of it is extractive rather than productive. This is coming to a head as things get worse and worse for the majority of Americans, because the cultural wars can only mask those deep-seated economic anxieties for so long.

Last week The Nation praised what they described as a “progressive insurgency” sweeping the US, caused by worsening economic immiseration, state tyranny, and the reactionary political culture.

But, there’s a problem.

“The truth is a two- edged sword, James Baldwin argued, “and if one is not willing to be pierced by the sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one’s intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud.”

This quote comes from an essay by Musa al-Gharbi, who wrote “We Have Never Been Woke”. He reminds us that working-class Americans view the professional/managerial/class or symbolic capitalists with justifiable suspicion. “To the extent that less affluent, less educated, less urban, less secular and less liberal Americans believe that institutions symbolic capitalists control do not well represent or serve people like them – they think we look down on them, we don’t exert much effort to understand what they want or how they think, they don’t have much voice or a stake in the symbolic economy as it currently operates, many policies that may be good for “us” are not good for the industries and communities they are part of – this is not “misinformation.” It’s true. Others mistrust and resent us, in part, because they correctly perceive some bleak realities about the prevailing social order that most of “us” decline to reckon with. 

U.S. symbolic capitalists are excellent at extracting resources from the wealthy and corporations in the name of helping working people – we do it here better than almost anywhere else. However, we tend to be much less effective at actually giving the captured assets to the people we’re ostensibly trying to help or listening to the stakeholders we’re supposed to be representing.”

Intellectual honesty is what Baldwin was talking about and sociologist al-Gharbi brings it forward to put the onus on the professional/managerial/class or symbolic capitalists to explain the situation the US finds itself in. That ‘s not the story that you will read about in the New York Times. This is not surprising. Every empire in history has responded to the crisis of elite malfeasance by blaming the victims. It’s always the character rather than the structure. It’s the only available move for the propertied class, because the alternative explanations implicate the billionaires and their symbolic capitalists apparatchiks.

What’s even worse is that the symbolic capitalists collusion with capital contributed mightily towards the election of Trump, who is the ultimate representation of the triumph of the extractive economy at the expense of the productive one. The PR term for this looting operation is “shareholder capitalism”.  Meanwhile symbolic capitalists still don’t get Trump’s appeal because they’ve never met Americans from flyover states whose livelihoods, marriages, communities, and futures were destroyed because of their self-serving behavior. I can’t prove it but my working theory is that to cover their betrayal, symbolic capitalists seized upon Russia-gate as an excuse.

The sword of intellectual honesty needs to pierce both ways. If America has any chance of reform the professional/managerial/class, symbolic capitalist apparatchiks will have to take responsibility for their actions and repent. They will have to cease their collaboration with the billionaires.

The political reality facing us is that the power of capital must be curtailed before reforms have any chance to be enacted.

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The Hits Keep Coming

Posted on August 7, 2026 by camelotkidd

Trump is really losing it, shit-posting AI manipulated pictures of him as Elvis in a white jumpsuit, and as Carey Grant pulling Netanyahu atop Mt. Rushmore, rather than Eva Marie Saint.

Then there’s Trump’s AI posting on his “Truth Social” last week, where he portrayed himself in full dress uniform flanked by World War 2 Generals Douglas MacArthur and George S Patton. Trump is standing in front of the two men and has four general stars on his shoulders plus a chest full of medal ribbons, a higher rank and more awards that either MacArthur or Patton in the AI photoshop. 

He just called Abdul El-Sayed, the winner of the Michigan Democratic primary for the US Senate, “a piece of shit”. On Wednesday, Trump said that Sayed is “a Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel”, but added that his win is also “great news for the Republican party”, suggesting that he will be easy to defeat.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has announced that Trump’s new battleship fleet was now projected to cost $275 billion, 50% more than a previous estimate. The controversial plan to build a new “Golden Fleet” of guided-missile battleships is drawing mounting criticism from budget watchdogs, defense analysts, and Democratic lawmakers, who warn the proposal would put taxpayers on the hook for what could be the costliest naval procurement in US history.

Meanwhile, the Economist wants us to believe that today’s billionaires are really, really productive, way more than their predecessors and furthermore they really, really deserve all of their wealth. In June, the Economist published a story about billionaires titled “The Rise of the Deserving Rich.” It claimed that “today’s billionaires are more likely than yesterday’s to have made their own money.”

Tell us another one.

Then there’s the mother of all deceits, where the MAGA media site 1945 wants us to believe that”Trump Won the Iran War“

Uh huh. There will probably be a parade any day now. Perhaps through the Trump Arch?

It’s all enough to make your head spin, and to further confirm that we live in the age of unreality, where truth is tenuous and algorithmic narratives rule the media universe.

Trump with his background in beauty pageants, pro wrestling and reality-TV, is the perfect president for our bat-shit crazy milieu. His ongoing dementia only adds to the mayhem. Two presidents in a row with progressive dementia. Not a great look for the greatest democracy ever.

Update: Now you too can have a hit of what Trump is smoking. For $100,000 per month a savvy investor can have first access to Trump’s “Truth Social” posts, in order to put those put and call options to good use.

“US President Donald Trump’s move to charge for early access to his often market-moving Truth Social posts is raising eyebrows a year and a half into an administration that has already seen unprecedented enrichment for the First Family. Trump — like his close relatives — is alleged to have made billions of dollars in his second White House term through cryptocurrency ventures, property deals, stock trades and payouts from lawsuits.”

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New Calculus

Posted on August 4, 2026 by camelotkidd

What’s going on with the billionaires that control our country?

Late-stage capitalism has made them richer than Croesus, but the lucre has only made them more greedy, where they seem unwilling to offer even modest reforms that would be pocket change for them.

There’s more than enough money to provide the sort of welfare state that characterized the New Deal/post war compromise between capital and labor. Homelessness, poverty, hunger, healthcare bankruptcy, student loans arrears and misery could cease to exist, but the decision not to spend it is political. The US has a fiat currency, where we spend money into existence, for fucks sake!

What’s illuminating is that Washington endlessly pleads poverty to explain why housing, schools and hospitals cannot be funded but then somehow discovers trillions whenever Wall Street crashes or a Third World country requires bombing. Austerity has become almost entirely political and the inability to provide abundance is not an economic failure but an ideological stance. The money is there, but the political will is lacking and the oligarchy that control our representatives have other economic priorities.

Like looting, and endless corruption.

Their greed and cruelty are still odd behaviors because even the oligarchs of the Gilded Age period well understood noblesse oblige, and sought to ameliorate the sorts of misery that plagues our present milieu. Going further, the oligarchs of the period were productive and employed millions of Americans to build things that modernized America, even as they fought tooth and nail against unionization and better working conditions. There has always been a conflict between capital and labor, yet nevertheless captains of industry of that era tempered the class conflict by building libraries, museums and concert halls, and increasingly understanding that workers had to be paid a decent wage to buy their products.

What’s different, I believe, is that we have a billionaire oligarchy that has gained their fortunes through extraction or looting, made possible by neoliberalism’s ideologies of privatization and reorganization of government. Privatization gives more power and authority to corporations, while deregulation removes checks on those same companies. Trade liberalization hollows out communities, while austerity prevents economic and social programs from strengthening them. So instead of libraries we get data centers and more intrusive surveillance, more militarized policing and the return to aggressive Red-Scare counter-insurgency policies.

The Trump Administrations surveillance, repression and controls are part of the new calculation, where our feral elite plan to keep everyone in a precarious situation where survival occupies every waking hour, while policing anyone who gets out of line. After all, history repeatedly demonstrates that revolutionary movements rarely emerge from absolute destitution alone. Political consciousness requires space within which consciousness can develop. Endless insecurity destroys precisely that space.

This may explain why our feral elite seem willing to sacrifice class stability in exchange for domination. Better a precarious proletariat $400 dollars away from disaster than comfortable with sufficient time to discover what Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote–“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” Better endless culture wars than class politics. Better algorithmic distraction than public assembly. Better loneliness than solidarity. Better anxiety than confidence.

It’s time to face the fact that our feral elite have abandoned any notion of their legitimacy, which shouldn’t be surprising since they are extractive not productive, and they now seek to protect their ill-gotten gains since they stole it fair and square. They are governing not through confidence but through counterinsurgency. Every expansion of surveillance, every restriction upon protest, every attack upon trade unions, every criminalization of dissent, every attempt to describe radical politics as “communist” expresses more fear than confidence. States genuinely secure in their authority rarely require populations to be monitored so comprehensively. Governments confident in public consent seldom criminalize inconvenience with such enthusiasm.

From passive neglect to active harm, there’s a new calculus. Whether it’s the American empire coming apart at the seams, the approaching financial tsunami or the accelerating global climate change, our feral elite are actively trying to harm us. We need to respond in kind.

The Iranians are not our enemies. The Russians are not our enemies. The Chinese are not our enemies.

Our enemies are the billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Miriam Adelson, Peter Theil and Alex Karl, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Our enemies are economists like Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Allen Greenspan. Our enemies are politicians like Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies. Mike Johnson and Nancy Pelosi. Our enemies are all of our elected representatives who have an AIPAC minder.

That should be our new calculus.

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number-
Shake your chains to earth like
dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many-they are few.”

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The Merger

Posted on July 29, 2026 by camelotkidd

The US House of Representatives just passed a bill merging the US military with Israel’s. The House on Wednesday passed its version of the massive $1.15 trillion 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which includes Section 219 (formerly Section 224), a provision to further integrate the US and Israeli militaries, a scheme Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described as “my plan.”

Of course it was bipartisan, even though the NDAA passed largely along party lines in a 216-212 vote. Seven Republicans voted against it, and two didn’t vote, meaning that the Democrats could have blocked the legislation, but six Democrats voted yes on the sweeping military spending bill despite President Trump’s continued war against Iran, which was launched without congressional authorization.

I’m sorry but what the fuck? How are we merging with a military that has been carrying out a live-streamed genocide? The Israeli’s train dogs to rape prisoners. They shoot children for sport, while Israeli civilians wear T-shirts showing a pregnant Palestine woman with a bulls-eye superimposed over her picture. Then there’s the danger of Israel surveillance, tracking and murdering technology coming to a neighborhood near you, due to the fact that Israel’s subjugation of native Palestinians has provided an open-air laboratory for dystopian technologies of control. Israel’s AI driven Gaza genocide has only supercharged this basic dynamic.

There’s a conservative argument defending Israel going and it goes something like this: “We have to support Israel, who else are we going to ally with in the Middle-East, Iran?”

I always laugh because, why, yes, befriending Iran makes a lot of geopolitical sense especially if we are truly waging a war against Sunni jihadists. Besides, we allied with Iran before, when the country was ruled by the Shah. We even provided Iran nuclear technology. What’s more friendly than that?

Of course, there’s a method to the madness of US enmity towards Iran. First of all, Israel, the country whose military that we are merging with, hates Iran and wishes them destroyed, all in line with Israel’s Yinon Plan for Middle-East domination. Israel’s control over US foreign policy has received much attention due to Trump’s attack on Iran but Israeli hasbara, AIPAC and tight media control ensure control over Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Then there’s a fact that the US isn’t really at war with Sunni terrorists, who are quite useful as proxies. What the US is at war with are states that are independent in their economic and foreign policies. There’s a whole genre of historical examples of US attacks on countries that charted their own path, but the empire chugs along due to the betrayal of the corporate media and the vast American amnesia.

Hopefully there are many factors could put a damper on the US Israeli military merger. Number one has to be the state of the US weapons manufacturing base after decades of neoliberal “reforms”. Like I’ve written repeatedly–It’s not possible to manage an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system.

CBS News reports–“The defense industrial base is not equipped to produce missiles rapidly enough to replenish munitions that have been fired or transferred to U.S. Central Command, which is overseeing the conflict, leaving inventories under mounting pressure even as military operations continue.”

Of course Trump denied that dwindling munitions are a problem, insisting in a statement to The Wall Street Journal that “we have far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need.”

Yeah, and you have big dick despite your tiny hands.

What’s obvious is that the merger between Israel and the US’s militaries has been in the works for a while, with the successful attack and dismemberment of Iran intended to present fait accompli.

Update: “Israeli officials know they’re losing the American public. Panicked that America’s political consensus on Israel is collapsing, they’re pursuing a long-term strategy to permanently enmesh Israel within America’s military, intelligence, and defense establishment – in ways future administrations would struggle to unwind – according to a new confidential U.S. intelligence assessment.”

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The Dilemma

Posted on July 22, 2026 by camelotkidd

The Netanyahu Administration is happy that the US is again attacking Iran. That doesn’t mean that they want to participate.

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has described the renewed US war on Iran as the ideal outcome for Israel, provided Israelis do not have to fight it themselves.“Israel has no interest in joining the campaign – the current situation is the best for us,” Smotrich said on Tuesday in comments carried by Kan news. Israel has stayed out of the war since the US renewed the bombing campaign despite the fact that, according to the official State Department rationale, the US launched the conflict “at the request” of Israel. Smotrich said that Israel still sought regime change in Iran, something Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told President Trump would happen if he launched the war.

The new phase of the attack on Iran is not going well. While Trump is planning a wider war, the expansion of US operations is limited by the dwindling stockpiles of air-defense and long range munitions and constraints on the ability to surge more troops and aircraft into the area because US bases in the Middle East have been decimated.

The US way of war is to use overwhelming force and high-tech stand-off weapons systems to avoid casualties. Political support for the attack on Iran has never been strong and US narratives to shore it up rely on overwhelming American superiority and a perception of the war presenting minimal risk. Body-bags, casualties and the loss of major bases and expensive warplanes flys in the face of this narrative and is eroding support for the war.

Iran is not playing along. After destroying much of the radar network protecting regional US bases in February, March and April, Iranian planners have now prioritized targeting fuel storage, drone hangers, refueling tankers, and barracks. The American response has been to relocate the US Air Force Mideast command center from Qatar to South Carolina and move aircraft and military forces further from Iran to bases in Jordan.

Iran has made upgrading its intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities a priority since the US and Israel attacked them in June 2025, and they have now demonstrated that Jordon does not offer sanctuary. Multiple US personnel were killed and as many as dozens injured two days ago in an Iranian missile attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. Subsequent disclosures from the New York Times revealed that this was the fourth Iranian attack on Jordan to result in casualties and major losses of air assets in the previous week. A strike on King Faisal Air Base days prior wounded five, and another attack on a base—unidentified by the NYT but confirmed by mappers to be Prince Hassan Air Base—damaged multiple Black Hawk helicopters on the ground. Then, 20 personnel were wounded in an attack on Muwaffaq Salti on the 16th. The attack that killed at least two US personnel occurred the next day.

The Iranians have thus forced American planners into an uncomfortable choice. It’s what Larry Johnson is calling–“DeBasification… A Fancy Word for Booting the US Out of the Middle East”. Jordan was the clear fallback point for assets that previously operated out of bases closer to Iran in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. But Jordanian bases are turning out to be deathtraps, with the US taking dozens of casualties and losing an unknown number of air assets in the span of just five days. Footage of Iranian MRBM strikes within Jordan reveals an appallingly low interception rate for US and Jordanian air defenses, even when interceptors are expended in 3:1 ratios and above against incoming projectiles.

The only retreat now is Israel itself. While falling back to Israel will bring US assets within the protective range of Israeli air defenses, officials like Smotrich have made it clear that the Israelis don’t want any part in this phase of the war. There’s also little reason to think they’ve been able to replenish their own interceptor stocks in the brief pause in the fighting, and the IDF was facing a crisis in that area before the pause. Even when interceptors were more plentiful, the Israelis were unable to fully protect their own airbases.

Iran seems to be herding the US air-force assets further west to Israel with the hope to operate under a more reliable air defense architecture. Iran, however, has already proven that it can hit targets in Israel and so any assemblies of U.S. fighters, AWAC’s and tanker air planes on Israeli air bases will become a bulls-eye for Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.

I don’t think the irony is lost on the Iranians. They are forcing the US to retreat to Israel, whose government wants the US to do all the fighting and dying. Then Israel will be the target while much of the rest of the world cheers on their destruction.

The Washington Post presents an even more astonishing revelation via leak from another ‘anonymous official’—that US stockpiles are in such bad shape that there’s not enough munitions to even sustain operations. The more shocking part: that Trump is apparently being kept in the dark about all this.

Military analyst Will Schryver lays out the brutal reality facing the Trump Administration. “The truth of the situation is becoming shockingly clear to more and more people in Washington. But the dilemma remains: withdraw and relinquish West Asia to the Iran / Russia / China bloc, or continue to fight and relinquish the entire empire.”

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Not Sorry

Posted on July 17, 2026 by camelotkidd

I’m not sorry that Lindsey Graham is no longer with us. Not one little bit. More than just a politician and Washington insider, he was the Senate’s most pro-war advocate. Caitlin Johnstone well sums up his blood-soaked legacy. “Ever since the death of Graham’s dear friend John McCain, nobody on Capitol Hill has been able to match his gleeful enthusiasm for the shredding of human bodies using high-priced war machinery. Wherever there was any debate about dropping bombs, launching missiles, toppling foreign governments, arming proxy forces, or imposing starvation sanctions, you could always count on Lindsey Graham to be the first and loudest voice arguing in favor of more death and destruction.”

While we celebrate the death of the neoconservative senator from South Carolina it’s imperative to examine the imperial American foreign policies Graham personified. The unprovoked attack on Iran is a good place to start, with the kinetic phase followed by the MOU and now back to bombing. This kind of flailing around to no strategic point is typical behavior of US foreign policy, and in particular the Trump Administration. Indeed, the clueless strategic planning and decision-making and aggressive, out-of-control gangster behavior is something that Graham pushed for right up to the end of his life.

Since 9/11 America has been on the dark side, with imperial forms of violence unleashed while adherence to international law, reputation and morality were heaved over the transom. Graham’s fingerprints are all over the murder weapon. He bragged about talking Trump into attacking Iran and advocated for direct US military interventionism in Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and had just returned from a trip to Kyiv promoting the US proxy war against Russia.

Graham was a tireless advocate for the military/industrial/complex and Zionist Israel, but ultimately he was part of a larger deep state that will continue humming along without him. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration’s flagrant disregard for international law and rampant corruption signal a rapidly decaying empire, lashing out as the world moves on. Actions, as they say, have consequences and as a result of the US egregious behavior other nations are increasingly treating us as a pariah, an entity that’s fundamentally untrustworthy and “not agreement capable”. If you were a leader, diplomat or official of another country would you believe anything Trump says?

Then there’s the international loss of credibility and morality. America has never been close to perfect but there was a sense that we should represent a higher purpose, rather than simply grubby mercantilism and savage imperialism. Since the war in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, unconditional American support for Israel has eroded America’s most precious resource: its moral/authority. It’s clear that Washington has renounced its own claim to uphold a “rules-based order”. Writing for the Cato Institute, Patrick Porter argued that Israel’s war on Gaza “has finally ended the myth of an American-led ‘liberal order.” The support for genocide was bipartisan, where Biden was terrible but if anything, the Trump administration has been worse, pairing a blank check to Israel with a war on Iran that critics across the political spectrum call a disaster.

Ultimately, the United States’ unconditional support for Israel’s Gaza and West Bank genocide and its ill-fated, expanding war in Iran have destabilized the Middle East, and more importantly, have severely eroded Washington’s credibility on the world stage. The attack on Iran, which was initiated in a large part by bloodthirsty neocons like Lindsey Graham is the stupidest war of my entire lifetime, even worse than the invasion of Iraq, which, unsurprisingly, was also promoted by Graham. The attack on Iran is a war of choice which the US has lost, won’t admit it has lost and is in danger of creating a decade long world-wide depression.

Burn in hell Lindsey.

“…I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead”

Update: Marjorie Taylor Greene just delivered the most honest eulogy Lindsey Graham’s legacy deserved:

“Lindsey Graham was a neo-con warmonger. A murderer. He wanted to wipe out innocent people in Iran, Gaza, Lebanon. He was a dedicated Zionist. He was the greatest lobbyist the military industrial complex ever had – with over 400 defense contractors in his state alone.”

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It’s a big club and you ain’t in it

Posted on July 14, 2026 by camelotkidd

Our feral elite may be oblivious but through their actions they are teaching us valuable lessons. From their unconcern during the Covid 19 pandemic, to their connections to Jefferey Epstein, to their commitment for Israel’s Gaza genocide, to their enthusiastic push for AI surveillance, to their hostility to progressive candidates, they are showcasing their vast sociopathy.

The Platner campaign and defenestration are a useful window in which to understand our feral elite and their priorities. Rebecca Traister on MSNOW says Platner was always disliked by establishment Maine and national Democrats, largely because he brought people real hope for change. The Democratic Party and elite operatives were eager to jettison Platner and his ability to electrify voters eager for a new politics and a new national direction.

Lately it’s become apparent that we can have phony “hope and change” or “make America great again” but anything that disrupts our flight into kleptocracy must be violently repressed. Donald Trump is the poster-child for our dystopia but, as I’ve repeatedly stated, he’s simply one of the more grotesque symptoms of our decades long neoliberal looting expedition.

At Naked Capitalism, Curro Jimenez writes–Winning Became the Shared Ethos of the US Oligarchy, and reexamines Joan Didion’s splendid political discourse.“People inside the process, constituting as they do, a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is,” wrote Joan Didion in her seminal essay Insider Baseball for The New York Review of Books in 1988.

By “people out there,” Didion meant the average American. The political discourse is built for them to hear, not to reflect reality. Its purpose is to manage them and convince them that “the process” is working. The only difference between Trump and other U.S. politicians is that he has changed the tune, but not the genre.

When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.“

Didion describes our feral elite as an exclusive club composed of politicians, campaign strategists, corporate donors, and elite journalists. They pretend to oppose each other on TV, print, or social media, but they live in the same upscale neighborhoods, vacation together at Aspen or Deer Valley, and share the exact same class interests.

The “process” as Dideon describes it, has become more sophisticated and thanks to Citizens United, way more expensive, where campaign donations are solicited from billionaires by the two political parties, candidates and PAC’s then funneled through elite consultants for television ads, where much of the money gets returned to the billionaire owners of the corporate media. Like I said, it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.

One of Platner’s best received lines was “I’m not afraid to name an enemy. And the enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it and the politicians who sell us out.” His campaign with its focus on this power arrangement coupled with the possibility of change threatened this cozy arrangement and that’s why he was ratfucked.

This is post-neoliberal politics, where the big club has destroyed the New Deal reforms that somewhat economically leveled and democratized our country. Now it’s faux politics, where they pretend to do things for us but in reality just do things for their benefactors–the corporations and banks owned by billionaires.

They are making clear that this process is off limits to democracy, and that trying to work within the system is a fools errand. The massive reforms that are required cannot be accomplished with the system we have. The institutions have been abused for too long and are now broken. Our elite are the enemy and have demonstrated that there are no limits to what they will do to prevent the kind of change for which Platner represented.

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