The Doom Loop

Posted on September 15, 2026 by camelotkidd

The AI freakout is the latest doom loop where the sky is falling, the dead are rising and it’s the end of the world, this time because AI will kill us all in our beds at night. Or something.

I’m pretty good at pattern recognition and it’s fairly obvious that whenever our feral elite manufacture a crisis it’s time to bend over.

Of course, we’ve been here before. Remember after the 2008 Wall Street Crash when they were desperate to bail out the banks by passing TARP? Then, once they scared everyone enough, Obama foamed the runway with American homeowners so that banks and the rich people who owned them didn’t’ have to take losses in the wake of the financial disaster.

And before that, remember weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds? The invasion of Iraq was a charnel house horror that’s till convulsing West Asia, but all of the architects and the weapons companies and bankers who perpetrated it all made out like bandits, proving once again that crime does pay, as long as it’s elite crime.

More recently, remember how wealthy, connected but uninsured insiders were made whole by the FCIC in the wake of the run on Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). We’re not supposed to call it a “bailout” but I’m pretty sure that if the bank had served regular people it would have been a different story. The bank was known for serving the founders of tech firms, as well as venture capitalists, premium wineries, and private equity firms.

Rich people.

So what I’m saying is pay particular attention to upcoming actions around AI, because I’ve got a bad feeling about where things are heading. I’m envisioning federal actions, initiated by the Trump Administration, to subsidize AI in the glorious war against China, or “nationalize” AI–which is kind of the same thing–to protect the children from it’s runaway malevolence. All of this will be couched in some sort of patriotic rhetoric about national security but the real reason is that rich people must not be allowed to lose money or power.

They’ve been planning the heist for a while. Senior U.S. officials have held preliminary discussions with AI companies about the potential for the federal government to acquire some shares in their firms. AI proponents like Sam Altman have been quietly pushing the idea since last year as the costs of AI mounted. And now Altman is telling us that gaining a stake in AI is a way to “more broadly distribute the economic benefits of AI to the public.” The story is that the government will acquire “shares” in the AI companies, but don’t let that fool you because with rich people not being allowed to lose money, the costs get socialized by we the people, while the profits get privatized by the rich-fucks that control our country.

And, voila, suddenly there’s a coordinated campaign to scare the hell out of Americans over AI. I’m old enough to remember when Bush’s aide Andrew Card stated that: “You don’t introduce a new product in August,” referring to the effort to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American people.

Hey everybody–It’s September.

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Jersey

Posted on September 11, 2026 by camelotkidd

I saw this from Amy Walter at the Cook Political Report and laughed. “But in this era of deep and hardened partisanship, real world events don’t have the political impact that they once did, with voters more willing than ever to look past the sins of their team, while also refusing to acknowledge anything the opposing team has done to improve their lives. As one GOP strategist said to me at the beginning of this cycle: at election time, everyone just throws on their jersey.”

Americans have been conditioned to see themselves as political sports fans belonging to team blue or team red, with corresponding jersey’s. This is ironic since the Republicans and Democrats enact similar economic and foreign policies that have made life worse for average Americans no matter which team is in power. Elections can be consequential but only if they reflect what voters desire, instead of a choice between two oligarchic and war political parties, where no matter who you vote for you get John MacCain.

When it comes to the economy both teams promote neoliberal capitalism, now that the “new” Democrats have abandoned the New Deal programs where capitalism existed alongside strong government, organized labor, robust public infrastructure and regulations on corporate behavior. It was constrained by institutions that prevented economic power from being entirely concentrated in the hands of the oligarchy.

Neoliberalism changed that. Since at least Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, governments promoted privatization, deregulation, shattered trade unions, financialization and the ideology that markets should organize all aspects of our lives by undermining government. Team red has this down to a science where they run on government-bad, then in office make government-bad, but the Democrats are a quick study.

The result is a financialized, extractive economy rather than a productive one, that’s increasingly focused on speculation rather than on creating the goods, services and public infrastructure that make American’s lives better. The consequences are inequality, a failing real economy, failing public services, financial instability and growing political anger.

It’s the same with foreign policies. Both political parties support the endless wars the US has waged in the wake of 9/11. Total US military spending for the past 25 years has exceeded $21 trillion (in 2024 dollars), surpassing the combined spending of the other 18 largest military powers in the world. During that time, China has built a whole new civilization and infrastructure, and leapfrogged the US economy to become the world leader in clean energy, high-speed rail and technological sectors in which the US was once preeminent. That team blue and red are both responsible for the appalling number of people we have slaughtered in the countries the US has attacked, bombed or invaded only adds to the moral squalor.

Let’s not forget to mention the owners of both teams–the billionaires and corporations that have used their immense wealth to buy our government so that they can amass even greater wealth. They also own the corporate media and thus promulgate the official narrative so they can manufacture consent. They distract us with tribal rituals–cultural war BS and extreme xenophobia against evil brown foreigners and immigrants.

From the Cook Political Report article earlier, Walter lays out the grim reality for team red heading into the midterms–“On paper, economic backlash to Trump should be strong in America’s agricultural regions. The Iran war has driven up the cost of fertilizer and diesel fuel. Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff wars have negatively impacted everyone from soybean farmers to cattle ranchers and meat packers. Deep cuts made to Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill have had a disproportionate impact on rural hospitals, with many institutions being forced to close their doors or limit their services.”

It may not matter if team red simply throws on their jersey, but their cognitive dissonance must be roaring. And team blue is showing signs of waking from their slumber, with anger against party leaders over support of Israel and backlash against their embrace of AI and the tech-bros.

To both teams I say take off your jersey’s, look around and say hello to your neighbor.

You can do it.

Update: What are you going to spend your $5000 stimulus on?

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Instruments of Statecraft

Posted on September 9, 2026 by camelotkidd

On the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001 it seems an appropriate moment to examine how the US deploys terrorists as instruments of statecraft.

Before we get to 9/11 there’s some important contextual history. Modern American stagecraft emerged in the aftermath of WWII as the US assumed the role of a global superpower. But there was a problem. The war against fascism has been an interlude in the war against communism that began immediately after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Because of this the US faced a dilemma after WWII when the most effective fighters against the Nazi’s and fascists had been the communists, who were poised to take power in the liberated countries of Europe. The financiers and industrialists who manage US foreign policy, who also often shared convenient overlap with leadership in the CIA, needed the pre-war fascist industrialist back in power and were not about to let the communists rule. So the dirty little secret that you didn’t learn about in history class is that the US immediately put the fascists back in control of Western Europe and repurposed the Nazi’s as terrorists or a counter-terror force in the parts of Eastern Europe controlled by the Soviet Union, and nowhere more than Ukraine. Let’s recall that Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Russia via Ukraine in 1941, with fascist Ukrainians forming their own SS Division.

The employment of counter-terror as the evil twin to counter-insurgency has colored US foreign policies ever since. In Vietnam the US created the Phoenix Program to kidnap, torture and murder the civilian members of the Vietcong as a way of disrupting the insurgency. In Central and South America the US provided intelligence, training and material support so that right-wing governments could create death-squads to intimidate and murder teachers, doctors, labor leaders and clergy who supported the reforms entailed in Catholic “liberation theology”. In Iraq, this morphed into the “Salvador Option”, where the US armed and trained Shia death-squads to battle the Sunni insurgents who fought against the Coalition Authority in the aftermath of the US invasion. The terror is bipartisan, where President Reagan armed and trained the mujahideen and President Obama oversaw Operation Sycamore, while the terrorists are disposable. In a neat trick the US pivoted from supporting Shia terror to Sunni with the “Redirection” and, once again, began utilizing Sunni jihadists, culminating in the overthrow of Syrian president Bashar Assad.

All of it is profoundly evil and enough to make your head spin. Lest you think I’ve forgotten there’s the blowback from Operation Cyclone, where the US created a Vietnam for the USSR in Afghanistan by arming and training Osama bin Laden and Sunni jihadists, resulting in the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, the military interventions since have led to the deaths of over 900,000 people and cost the United States more than $8 trillion. Afghanistan and Iraq ended in failure. A majority of Americans believe that the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East were a mistake. Indeed, this was a major part of Donald Trump’s initial appeal in 2016: “They lied,” he said of the neocons who initiated the invasion of Iraq.

Using 9/11 as a pretext, the US waged a “war on terror” that was really a continuation of a decades long war of terror. Historically it’s clear that the US willingly works with Latin-American death-squads, Sunni jihadists, Shia terrorists and Ukrainian fascists as a means of maintaining the American empire. Furthermore, the employment of terrorists is sure to increase as the US military falters and weapons are diminished.

The latest peek behind the curtain of terror was provided by Trump, whose secret weapon is his candor. The Tump Administration is busy lifting sanctions and diplomatically recognizing the Sunni head-choppers who overthrew the government of President Bashar Al-Assad in December 2024 as part of their attempt to isolate Iran. When Trump hosted Al-Sharaa in the Oval Office in November 2025, playfully misting him with Trump Cologne and asking how many wives he had, it was clear the US was ready to lift the sanctions that had devastated Syria’s economy. Formerly known as Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani, Al-Sharaa is the co-founder of ISIS and founder of Jabhat Al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda. Two months later, Trump pitched a half-baked plan for the Syrian military to attack Iran.

Al Qaeda might have once been designated the terrorists credited with bringing down the Twin Towers but now, they’re officially our terrorists.

Similarly, Those aren’t just Ukraine’s Nazis, they’re ours. 

Update: Terrorists are useful as patsies as well as proxies and I have come to believe that bin Laden and his Sunni jihadist pals played that role in wake of 9/11. I’ve also come to believe, like other heterodox analysts, that Israel’s Mossad, with assistance from traitorous Jewish-Americans, carried out the attacks.

Ron Unz’s American Pravda series provides the best resource for validating my outrageous claim. Here’s a taste–“I find it difficult to think of any country in the world that clearly gained as a result of the 9/11 attacks and America’s military reaction, with one single, solitary exception. The 9/11 attacks changed everything. Suddenly the world’s sole superpower was fully mobilized against Arab and Muslim terrorist movements, especially those connected with the Middle East. Sharon’s close Neocon political allies in America used the unexpected crisis as an opportunity to seize control of America’s foreign policy and national security apparatus, with an NSA staffer later reporting that Israeli generals freely roamed the halls of the Pentagon without any security controls. Meanwhile, the excuse of preventing domestic terrorism was used to implement newly centralized American police controls that were soon employed to harass or even shut down various anti-Zionist political organizations. One of the Israeli Mossad agents arrested by the police in New York City as he and his fellows were celebrating the 9/11 attacks and producing a souvenir film of the burning World Trade Center towers told the officers that “We are Israelis…Your problems are our problems.” And so they immediately became.”

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Meritocracy

Posted on September 3, 2026 by camelotkidd

Our elite preach meritocracy but display everything but the morality and competence that equates merit.

Though the scandal has moved out of the news there’s a term for our unaccountable elite–the “Epstein class”. This is shorthand for the feral elite who’ve been responsible for: causing the Wall Street Crash; offshoring our manufacturing base; the K-shaped economy; starting and losing numerous wars for made up reasons; and manufacturing a completely dysfunctional political/economic system that has left an American society plagued by massive inequality and deaths of despair. All of this carnage while the Epstein Class eagerly participated in a sexual blackmail operation that compromised American security for Israel.

Nobody faced any real consequences for lying about evidence of WMDs in Iraq or for the Great Financial Crisis. After the 2008 Wall Street Crash, government funds were used to “foam the runway” for banks while homeowners were left to twist slowly in the wind. No banks or brokerages were broken up and no executives were jailed. Americans were told to suck it up lest there be a “moral hazard”. Mr. Hope and Change instructed us to look forward rather than back as he codified W. Bush’s torture archipelago, while ramping-up the post 9/11 war of terror.

When regular people fuck up, they see themselves restricted and punished, fired, their credit ratings dropped, evicted from their houses, embarrassed in front of their friends and peers. But when the wealthy or corporations fuck up, it’s a completely different story where the captured government and corporate media spring into action, informing us that while mistakes might have been made the system of financial capitalism that manages our polity is self-correcting. The system moves to damage control where the powerful are insulated against the fallout, even if it means simply acting as if no crimes were even committed.

Hypocrisy this blatant is noticed and acted upon. The failure to hold our feral elite accountable has had political consequences and is a fundamental underlying driver of the popular disillusionment with an economy that has for decades failed millions of people and has now eroded the social underpinnings of America to a breaking point. One of the stories of the last decade plus has been the lived realities of rising inequality, and of working class Americans becoming economically and politically disempowered that taps into a shared sense of resentment and powerlessness.

The problem is that all of blatant lying and gaslighting about how things should be vs the lived reality of average Americans has become more than obvious under the second Trumpian regime. Real life and the official narrative are increasingly divorced and every major financial crisis, disastrous war or sexual scandal coverup only deepens the distrust and nihilism. We’ve had fuck-up after fuck-up along with massive looting and corruption but no one is held responsible.

What’s to be done?

Ian Welsh says “If you want to dis-incentivize bad executive behaviour, you have to really go after the execs. The only way to restrain capitalists is real prison sentences or execution (Vietnam is fond of executing corrupt execs) and taking their money, and thus power, away. The idea of corporations being used to shield decision makers and beneficiaries of illegal or evil behaviour from liability has to go away. Corporate personhood has to end, as well, or they have to be given the disadvantages of personhood. Committed a serious crime? OK, the corporation is dissolved.

Government and business are two different things. There has to be some understanding between them, since government must regulate business, but government’s job is to make the people better off, not to make businesses richer.

When government operates this way it can control private enterprise so that markets work to the benefit of society. When it doesn’t, usually because it’s been corrupted by capitalists, it enables monopolies and oligopolies and exploitative practices and when there are crises, it bails out the rich, not the people.

All of this is well understood, really, it’s just that there’s a lot of money to pay for scummy intellectuals and journalists and experts to obscure the fact and pretend that there’s a trickle down effect or that what’s good for rich is good for society. (Hello Milton Friedman, you corrupt hack.)”

Preach.

What’s become apparent is that failing to hold our elite accountable has created a corrosive political dynamic similar to Gresham’s law–the economic theory that states “bad money drives out good” or fraudsters drive out honest businessmen. In political terms bad leaders, in concert with corporate media’s propaganda, have driven out the good and we end up with monsters like Donald Trump, Hakeem Jeffries, Mike Johnson, Chuck Schumer and MIA “Glitch” McConnell.

Update: Speaking of “Glitch”. Has anyone seen him? I’m thinking we need to put his mugshot on a milk carton.

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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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