Lawless

Posted on October 12, 2026 by camelotkidd

Why should I obey the laws when our feral elite openly flout them?

A country is only as good as the application of its laws. Are they universal in the way in which applied or are they situational? If an individual’s morals are situational, the individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon it’s a kleptocratic “banana republic”. That’s our situation in the US of A, where our laws are situational. There’s a rule of law for the elite and one for the rest of us.

Everyone knows and it’s deeply corrosive. One of the increasingly evident realities is that lot of Americans these days assume that if an official, medical professional or corporate flack spouts this or that claim, he’s not stating the truth to which the public must consent, he’s just telling another lie on behalf of his corporate or financial masters. That skepticism has gone viral, and is rapidly undercutting the our faith in laws and institutions.

Think of Sam-the-scam-Altman, who sounds increasingly deranged in his pronouncements about AI, but there are plenty of other examples, starting and ending with our fabricator-in-chief. By providing an ongoing demonstration our elite have convinced a growing number of people that all the benefits from the increasing bifurcated system of laws go straight to the billionaires, while the cost are borne by us.

The Trump Administration has turbo-charged this dynamic but both parties are down with the rot. And this provides more proof that we have two conservative parties, for Wilhoit’s law states that–“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Paraphrasing Leona Helmsley–Laws are for little people.

Justice Richard Posner articulated a neoliberal justification for elite lawlessness. In An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law, 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner states that the poor require criminal law to keep them within the confines of the “market.” “The major function of criminal law in a capitalist society is to prevent people from bypassing the system of voluntary, compensated exchange-the “market,” explicit or implicit-in situations where, because transaction costs are low, the market is a more efficient method of allocating resources than forced exchange.” The flip-side of Posner’s theory was that unlike the poor, the wealthy required only tort law to ensure their proper behavior. “This means that criminal law is designed primarily for the non-affluent; the affluent are kept in line, for the most part, by tort law.”

How’s that working out?

But intellectual hand-waves aside, neoliberal economists and judges have followed the Powell Memo blueprint to arrive at the present, where the US is effectively a kleptocracy. The second Trump administration is a preview of the model of governance that comes next: An indulgent, hollow-minded elected leader who gives billionaires and their companies carte blanche in exchange for their corrupt support. Eerily similar to the Weimar period in Germany before Hitler, the Democratic Party only helps create the conditions for the next Trump, but one who is more competent. Indeed, the Democrats are a second conservative business party. That party’s financial base is anchored by multimillionaires and billionaires that compose its primary financial constituency.

They are already testing out models as demonstrated by the parallel government created by DOGE. DOGE was an experiment in direct rule by an oligarch using Signal. This is illustrative in that instead of reforming the system of corruption what we’re seeing instead of any movement toward a rethink of neoliberalism is a doubling down on extractive models and repressive population control.

The bifurcation of laws extends to US foreign policies. I don’t know where to start but perhaps it’s that empires by their very nature are lawless. The US was pretty successful at keeping the terror and lawlessness on the down-low but the war on terror initiated after 9/11 abandoned any pretense where the “gloves came off”, to use Cheney’s infamous phrase. Torture, disappearances and murder followed.

There’s no greater example of lawlessness than the horror of Israel’s ongoing Gaza genocide, where the US supported and supplied and officially countenanced the Zionist rampage. Here again Wilhoit’s law applies where there are “…in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”. Think Zionist vs Palestinians.

But the lawlessness has only accelerated, where the recent American-Israeli sneak attack on Iran, begun with the assassination of most of its top political and military leadership in the midst of ongoing peace negotiations, was about as absolutely flagrant a war of aggression as has been seen in the modern world, and the same has certainly been true for Israel’s very numerous attacks against so many of its neighbors and assassination of their leaders over the last three generations.

We can’t forget Latin America, what Greg Grandin calls the Empire’s Workshop. Bolivia’s Attorney General was kidnapped after investigating MAGA’s Latin American fixer, Fernando Cerimedo, who faces drug-trafficking charges as well as the charge of attempted murder after allegedly ordering a hit on his ex-girlfriend Nadia Beller, after she alleged that he was involved with drug gangs and officials at the highest level. On Wednesday (Sept. 30), the country’s Attorney General, Roger Mariaca, was abducted by security forces, apparently without any kind of judicial order or due process, in the eastern region of Santa Cruz. That was according to Bolivia’s Public Prosecutor’s Office, whose headquarters in the southern city of Sucre, Bolivia’s constitutional capital, has been taken over by masked police officers.

No story of lawlessness would be complete without a MarA-Lago connection. A Wall Street Journal report last week about the corrupt and thuggish actions of U.S. ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was engaged to Donald Trump Jr. In March, at a dinner in Athens attended by Greek and U.S. officials, Guilfoyle got into an argument with Greece’s energy minister, Stavros Papastavrou, in front of the other guests. Referring to the impending collapse of the Romanian government, Guilfoyle told the group, “We can do that to any country we want. We can do that here,” according to a person who attended the dinner and others who were told about it. The conversation became heated, with Papastavrou retorting that the U.S. couldn’t replace the government of Greece, which was elected by the people.

It should be a new reality TV show–Thug-Life–where the camera follows various Trumpian apparatchiks as they swagger around making threats.

Like I started with–why should I, or any American obey the law?

Our elite have sowed the wind with their abandonment of the law and now they will reap the whirlwind.

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The Good Stuff

Posted on October 9, 2026 by camelotkidd

The best propaganda is aimed at the professional/managerial/class (PMC). A large part of its effectiveness is due to the fact that the PMC view themselves as too sophisticated to be propagandized. That shit is reserved for the mouth-breathers watching Fox News. Indeed, the most effective kind of propaganda is the kind where the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own.

The New York Times sets the tone but the rest of the corporate media contributes, from the Wall Street Journal to CNN, to MS NOW, to the Washington Post, the Hill and even Fox. The reason the good stuff is reserved for the PMC is that they are the decision makers and narrative managers, whose loyalty is paramount for the American empire. American propaganda is so good because it’s curated to a specific audience, whether the decision makers on team red or blue. It’s The Times for liberals and the Wall Street Journal for the conservative elite.

For example it was quite fascinating watching the propaganda effects that Russia-gate had on liberals in real time. There was a massive amount of Orwellian language justifying the new Cold War, but for liberals it was all about Putin who was associated with the Trump, who stole the election from Hillary Clinton. And for liberals–Putin is an authoritarian who hates the gays, or something. I’m not even sure, but I do know that Russia-gate was a master-class in propaganda with the corporate media’s enthusiastic assistance where sloppy, vague, and dishonest language actively corrupted many liberal’s ability to think clearly.

Narrative is how Americans are so effectively controlled mostly without their knowledge and our narrative managers are world-class. I’m constantly impressed by effectiveness of the American propaganda system. Talk to friends, co-workers and family members about any of what I’m suggesting for confirmation. I’m sure, you dear reader, know what I’m talking about. I’ve lost friends, family and co-workers over my apostasy over Russia-gate.

Here’s what I wrote in 2022– “It’s infuriating to watch how liberals have been transformed into little Nazi-loving, cold-warriors due to their intense hatred of Donald Trump. The joke was and is on them. It’s clear that Russia-gate was never about removing Trump, it was about making sure Trump played along with neocon regime change plans for Moscow and manufacturing mainstream consent for the escalations we’re seeing today.”

I love my country but hate the empire, like any true American patriot, and am lucky that I had an epiphany when I was young and realized the official narrative was mostly a lie. The good news is that once you glimpse the wizard behind the curtain there’s no going back. Listening to the music of my era helped. On Pink Floyd’s Wall album, Roger Waters sang–“When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look, but it was gone

Stay safe.

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The Capital Regime

Posted on October 7, 2026 by camelotkidd

The US has an oligarchy problem in that capital has slipped the leash of democratic accountability and control.

All of America’s problem flow from this reality. For the Republicans this represents a triumph, driven by large tax reductions for the wealthy and deconstruction of government, and for the Democrats something they would rather not discuss. The political reality is such that when capital comes into conflict with democratic aspirations, capital is supreme, and the rest of it purely perforative theatre. Like I’ve written repeatedly–voting remains useless as long as there aren’t meaningful differences.

After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 discredited capital, FDR enacted the New Deal reforms that leashed the wealthy. But they bitterly resented this state of affairs and set out to take back control of our country. Of course, this is nothing new. Democratic control of capital is a Sisyphian task requiring eternal vigilance. At the beginnings of the 20th Century, G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”

The 2008 Wall Street Crash should have provided political space to re-leash capital but Barak Obama was installed in the White House precisely to prevent this. Obama is hardly an oddity. The modern Democratic Party has been reengineered to prevent any sort of New Deal response to the capital regime.

But things, as they say, can’t go on forever. The capital regime has produced malign domestic effects, from the extreme inequality, to the monopolies astride our economy, to housing shortages and explosion in homeless Americans, to the burgeoning surveillance state, to the healthcare crisis and deaths of despair. Once the capital enhancing processes of neoliberalism were put in motion, everything inevitably moved in the direction of short-term rent extraction.

There’s also the injurious effects on American foreign policies, where the US has since WWII worked to ensure governments friendly to American capital and opposed to communism remain in power. The dirty little secret is that US foreign policy deters democracy in favor of capital, which is why the CIA overthrows any government that is faintly socialist or indigenously nationalistic, while enthusiastically supporting corrupt dictators.

Even though the corporate media has labored mightily to obscure much of these realities, thanks to Trump, the oligarchical nature of the American state has become impossible to deny. Americans are not happy.

Trump and Republicans are bleeding working-class support for obvious reasons, but the discontent has now spread throughout much of the white-collar workforce too. After decades of neoliberal policies that have undermined workers’ rights and standards of living, employment has now grown more precarious for college graduates and white-collar employees as well. At the same time, wealth has grown ever more concentrated at the very top. These trends have only accelerated in the second Trump era: while America’s billionaires saw their wealth soar by more than 30 percent over the past year, labor’s share of business output fell to its lowest level on record at the end of 2025.

The cost-of-living crisis has progressively worsened over the past two years thanks to Trump’s own harebrained policies, while the GOP’s signature legislative achievement–tax cuts–is perceived by voters as helping the billionaires rather than average Americans. Trump’s overt corruption and clear favoritism toward the wealthy have further alienated many working-class Americans.

Watch closely as the midterms approach. The opposition to the capital regime should be the defining issue and if it isn’t pay particular attention to the lies used to justify the poisonous status quo.

Update: And, no, AI, or super-intelligence, as the Trumpster refers to it, will not fix our oligarchy problem.

Caitlin Johnstone makes the obvious point–“Humanity’s problems are not caused by a lack of intelligence, our problems are caused by greedy plutocrats like Zuckerberg. It’s like a serial killer telling us we can stop serial killing by making serial killers smarter.

We’ve long had the ability to end extreme poverty, to stop destroying our biosphere, to stop waging wars, to stop pillaging the global south at unfair prices, to stop imposing starvation sanctions, to end genocides, to remove money from politics, to institute true democracy, to create a well-informed electorate free from propaganda brainwashing, and to provide everyone with a decent standard of living. This hasn’t failed to happen due to our lack of super-intelligence, it has failed to happen because the people with the power and the money actively stop it from happening.

No amount of added cleverness is going to make plutocrats less greedy, make warmongers less bloodthirsty, make politicians less corrupt, make empire managers less tyrannical, make imperial propagandists less deceitful and manipulative, or make capitalists less exploitative and ecocidal. Give them artificial super-intelligence and they’ll just use it to grab up more money and control, just like they’re doing with the AI of the present day.”

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Hauled it Away

Posted on October 2, 2026 by camelotkidd

On Paradise, John Prine sings. “And Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County? Down by the Green River where Paradise lay. Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking. Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.”

The song well describes the effect that neoliberalism has had, with its emphasis on privatization of the commons. Neoliberalism promised us prosperity, security and freedom through markets. Instead it has delivered precarity.

I always thought that neoliberalism was simply dressed up justification for looting and every day provides more evidence. A modern day version of the “enclosure laws”–policies that forced peasants off their land and into wage labor, resulting in the “primitive accumulation” beginnings of capitalism. And presently we have the modern version where the wealthy and well connected haul away the wealth of our country.

The US economy has been financialized, where the privatization of the commons has been accompanied by deindustrialization and off-shoring of manufacturing jobs. This shift has conveniently hollowed out the unionization of the American workforce. It’s been a 50 year class war where capital has decimated labor, because neoliberalism treats satisfying financial markets as more important than meeting human needs. Since the late 1970’s manufacturing has been surpassed by financialization. This was a deliberate policy made in large part to reassert capital’s power at the expense of workers. It has been a grand success from the point of view of America’s billionaire class.

This financial class operate as a shadow-government behind elected politicians. I’ve come to think of Wall Street as the beating heart of the deep state. Which is ironic because the looting has reached a stage where it’s imperiling the American empire. From the lack of high-tech munitions due to the offshoring of manufacturing expertise and processing of critical minerals to placing a hedge-fund honcho in charge of the Pentagon, neoliberalism has seriously weakened the US military. Emblematic of the milieu is Stephan Feinberg, the private-equity billionaire owner of the Cerberus Capital Management hedge-fund, who was recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal: “A Private Equity Billionaire Mounts His Biggest Takeover Yet: the Pentagon.”

The lack of any sort of strategy except short term enrichment is alarming, but don’t expect our soi-disant elite to change course. After all, there’s next quarters bonuses to be concerned about. Ian Welsh well describes them–“Truly, American elites, while vicious and cunning are some of the worst long term strategists I’ve ever seen.”

I guess the moral of this story is that they might have hauled it away but they disregarded railroad maintenance and the train is fixing to run off the tracks.

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Never gonna change

Posted on September 29, 2026 by camelotkidd

Our elite have been marinating in a vat of jingoism, ignorance and hubris. Of course, it’s a bi-partisan effort because the Democratic party does not represent a sane or credible alternative to the warmongering lunacy of the Republicans.

Let’s start with the Republicans, where the loony-tunes Republican senator from Louisiana–John Kennedy–put his foot in his mouth and started chewing. “I think that the people running Iran are reptiles. And they’re part of a colony of reptiles: China, North Korea, Russia and, as I said, Iran. The chief reptile, the quarterback, is President Xi in China.”

The more interesting and illuminating example came in May 2014, when the empire was still flush, Obama was president and little Vicky got out over her skis. Weeks after welcoming the ouster of Ukraine’s democratically elected president in the Maidan uprising, one of Washington’s most influential policymakers confidently predicted that a similar fate awaited Moscow. “Unless Putin changes course, at some point in the not-too-distant future, the current nationalistic fever will break in Russia,” Victoria Nuland, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “When it does, it will give way to a sweaty and harsh realization of the economic costs. Then, if they are free enough to think for themselves, Russia’s citizens will ask: What have we really achieved? Instead of funding schools, hospitals, science and prosperity at home in Russia, we have squandered our national wealth on adventurism, interventionism and the ambitions of a leader who cares more about empire than his own citizens.”

Americans could rightfully ask their representatives about the US’s very own “sweaty and harsh realization” in the wake of Trump’s latest West Asia disaster, “if they are free enough to think for themselves”, that is.

Reading shit like this makes me laugh.

But let’s recall that our intrepid Mrs. Nuland, then the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, was quite busy fomenting the Ukrainian coup. You might remember from the wayback machine when her mobile phone was hacked as she instructed Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, who they wanted as the next foreign minister. She said “Yats is the guy,” Arseniy Petrovych Yatsenyuk, who indeed got the job. There was also some naughty language from Vicky when she exclaimed “fuck the EU”.

Maybe there’s something in the water in DC, but it’s probably because the empire selects for sociopaths/psychopaths and if they’re kinda dim on team red it’s not much of a problem. After all representatives from Louisiana are all racist loons by default and that sort of diatribe just makes Chuck Schumer look progressive. Jeebus! Kennedy made Trump look diplomatic and magnanimous during Xi’s visit.

But look, there a precedent for cray-cray at the end of an empire. After an empire’s peak, its inability to adapt to declining power leads to increasingly desperate attempts to compensate, combined with an increasing inability to implement strategies appropriate to reality. Which brings us back to our feral elite who are never going to change because they are still wedded to the strategies from 1991, when the US was at the height of its post Cold War power. The money is good too because the inappropriate strategies continue to make these powerful stakeholders money. For Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the military/industrial/complex, these are the best of times.

Halloween is coming and there are numerous yards decorated with goblins, vampires, werewolves and aliens in scary poses. I’m tempted to decorate my yard with replicas of real monsters like Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, Senator Kennedy, Victoria Nulled and her monstrous husband Robert Kagan, Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, etc.

With monsters like these who needs imaginary ones?

Update: Nat Wilson Turner reminds us that it’s not just Donald Trump.

“Until Americans, particularly Democrats, reckon with just how disastrous the last three Democratic presidential administrations have been (yes, America’s neocon foreign policy starts with Bill Clinton blowing up Yugoslavia and turning NATO into an offensive alliance and has continued to warmonger ever since, regardless of which party was in power), we’ll keep getting stuck with more of the same “not quite as bad as the Republicans” bullshit; we will only continue hurtling toward the undeniable end of the American Republic.”

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Get on the Ark

Posted on September 25, 2026 by camelotkidd

With the 2026 midterm elections approaching prepare to be inundated with 40 days and 40 nights of deceptive corporate advertising, Zionist public relations and pro-war propaganda.

Endless amounts of money are being marshaled to try and convince a rebellious populace to ignore their day to day realities and vote for more of the same neoliberal-economic and neoconservative-foreign policies.

The Zionist Hasbara promises to be especially pernicious as American support for Israel plummets. I received a text the other day from “Sara” who asked my opinion of Israel. When I told her I thought the genocidal, settler-state was despicable, she came back informing me that they were the only “democracy” in the Middle-East, our staunch ally and a force for good in our glorious war against Iran. She went away after I told her that the IDF rapes prisoners with dogs, shoots children in the head and about the Epstein Class driven Hasbara that she was obviously part of.

The increasingly reviled tech-bros promise to spend untold amounts to promote AI and data centers in face of widespread opposition. In a blast from the past, the tech industry is following the same script as every other industry that needs to convince or force the public to support something that’s actually bad for them in order to profit has always done. It’s the campaign to promote leaded gasoline, the tobacco industry, the chemical industry, nuclear power, Big Oil. It’s the same propaganda playbook.

Then there’s the Trump crime family, where they and their crypto grifter buddies have already promised to carpet bomb the airways to pimp digital tokens and punish apostates.

The advertising, PR and propaganda blitz promises to be relentless. Caitlin Johnstone describes the propaganda system of carrots and sticks as the main adhesive holding the western empire together. “As westerners we are taught that we live in a free society which is far superior to the “tyrannical regimes” of the global south, because under the tyrannical regimes the news is state propaganda and the entertainment is heavily censored. In reality westerners are consuming tightly controlled propaganda every day of their lives, because all their most influential voices are being aggressively regulated by the carrots and sticks of wealthy capitalists…If you make the billionaires happy you get to be a millionaire, and if you make the billionaires unhappy you get discomfort and loss. If you please the plutocrats you get the carrot, and if you displease them you get the stick. This is true whether you’re talking about pundits, news anchors, musicians or movie stars.”

We’ve experienced 3 propaganda campaigns in the 21st century: the post 9/11 drive to invade Iraq; the scare-polooza after the 2008 Wall Street Crash to pass TARP; and the Russia-gate psyop to turn liberals into to good little Cold Warriors in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election triumph. Each one has been more desperate and more obvious.

Luckily, Americans are waking from their somnolence thanks to the push for AI and the frenetic build out of data centers. In addition to the concrete negative effects of more expensive electricity and scarce water, data centers have also come to symbolize broader worries about AI and the power and greed of the tech-bros, creating a public policy toxicity that focused voters and community members not just on the project at hand, but on the entire, corrupt economic development process as it currently exists. Data centers bring into Americans communities, in a very visceral way, the technology that is meant to eliminate their jobs, raise their prices, addict their kids, and bury them in deepfake slop.

Nevertheless, our feral elite are relentless in their efforts to sell Americans on policies that are antithetical to their well being.

Naked Capitalism, the best media source on the web, is holding a fundraiser, and I consider them an ark of sanity in an ocean of propaganda. Donate and get on the ark. Bring your animals.

Update: Matt Stoller explains the importance of Naked Capitalism: “But, I would say, that ideology is dying, and we are on the verge of great revolts. The Iran War, covered in depth here, the insane approach to Russia and Ukraine, U.S. transnational capital, the comically evil Israel lobby, the way that the military is now purposed for oligarchs across the world, it’s all here, in detail. And while not everyone reads Naked Capitalism, the optimistic take is that so many have stopped reading and watching the cynical and corrupt media establishment. They are more open to the arguments and writing here than they ever have been.”

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Flock You

Posted on September 22, 2026 by camelotkidd

The protest against AI, data centers and Flock cameras is an American revolt against corporate control, monopolies, elite impunity and the increasing surveillance of everyday life. Americans are rightfully furious at the political and economic conditions that are making their lives a living hell.

Matt Stoller details the anger–“…the public wants something very different now. Americans don’t trust our institutions or our leaders, and that’s the right attitude, because our institutions and our leaders are malevolent liars. Fortunately, we have the honor of living in a democracy, which means the voters have the ability to fire their leaders. And that is about to start, in a big way. So happy oligarch day. I have a sneaking suspicion that this loss doesn’t suggest the collapse of a democratic order, as that collapse happened a long time ago. I think it may actually represent one of many death rattles of an old order that Americans correctly despise.”

I think the protests are a modern day Tea Party.

No, not the one in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street Crash after Obama bailed out the banksters rather than American homeowners. That Tea Party was an astro-turf, faux protest where conservative activists highjacked anger at Democratic complicity in an extractive financial system, that morphed into a political movement that steered anger away from corporate abuse and towards the Obama Administration which they labeled “socialist”.

Such is the absurdity of American political consciousness, but of course the corporate media willingly played along. The whole thing still infuriates me, and is one of the chief reasons that Trump sits in the White House. If only Obama had used his historic mandate for change on something other than sanctifying the continuation of the worst surveillance and military policies of the Bush/Cheney administration, the biggest destruction of Black wealth in American history, the insurance industry protection racket–the Affordable Care Act–a fascist coup in Ukraine, genocidal attacks on Yemen, Libya and Syria, and ensuring not one bankster did a single day in jail for the historic looting operation.

The original Tea Party in Boston Harbor was aimed at the East India Company as much as at the British. It was a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest multi-national corporation then in existence. It was a revolution against nascent corporate power. And now we have a revolt against data centers, Flock spy camera’s and the tech-corporations predatory behavior. Some things never change.

In a year replete with protests against big tech, data centers, and AI, one company seems to be the most reviled–Flock. Over the past decade the surveillance corporation has been building out a massive network of spy cameras across the nation. The images those cameras record are uploaded to a central database, and can be accessed by law enforcement and federal authorities.

Abuse of the system has been rampant. Police have used Flock’s Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) to stalk exes and to track women seeking abortions across state lines. ICE has accessed. Flock data to assist in crackdown on immigrants. Innocent people have been wrongfully imprisoned after being flagged by the system.

So, ordinary citizens are fighting back. They’re flocking to city council meetings, organizing protests, and pressuring local officials to cancel Flock contracts. In multiple states, Americans are dismantling and destroying Flock cameras that conduct warrantless surveillance, and whose data is shared with ICE.

What’s gratifying is that the opposition the burgeoning surveillance state is bi-partisan. More than 60 percent of Americans, including 47 percent of Republicans, say they are opposed to the construction of data centers in a poll released by The New York Times last week. In August, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a private memo to AI companies sounding the alarm on how voters perceive data centers, warning that “campaign or party committees can not fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy.” Last week, GOP strategist Tony Fabrizio issued a memo to the party’s candidates claiming that “unqualified support for building more AI data centers is a losing position.”

But the GOP has a big problem: Trump. In recent weeks, facing mounting scrutiny on his policies and support for the industry, Trump has doubled down on his support for data centers and AI. Recently he wrote in a Truth Social post that only communities that wanted to be “backwards and poor” would refuse data centers coming to town.

I’m pretty sure this is not the winning formula the president thinks it is but I’m hopeful for a political awakening where MAGA comprehends that corporate power is just as harmful as government power; while liberals realize that the ongoing protests are a revolt against the Democratic insiders as well as one against Trump. Furthermore, I hope this is the start of a sustained revolution against an American government that has been repurposed by corporations and financiers.

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The most evil corporation in the world

Posted on September 18, 2026 by camelotkidd

There’s a lot of competition but I think we have a winner.

Evil is easy and it takes a lot to be number one but Palantir has it all. Created by techno-fascist Peter Thiel and now managed by psychopath Alex Karp, the AI technology and surveillance company has been providing Ukraine with data systems that control and accelerate the military “kill-chain” since shortly after the outbreak of war with Russia in 2022. The kill-chain, which aggregates huge amounts of data to track a target to the point of a strike, or death, is controlled by an AI system made by Palantir called Maven. Another Palantir system, Prisma, directs drone attacks, while a third Palantir product, Metaconstellation, assigns low earth orbit satellites to survey a designated area anywhere on the planet before calling in a strike. Palantir turned Ukrainians into lab rats and has helped destroy the country.

Palantir has also provided Israel with AI targeting programs which helped Israel commit the genocide in Gaza. Palantir, which has been active in Israel since 2014, held its first board meeting of 2024 in Tel Aviv to celebrate Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, and shortly after began supplying the IDF with AI tools to help Israel execute its mass destruction and slaughter. With enthusiastic support from Palantir Israel has turned Gaza into a dystopian hell of surveillance, repression and destruction. Palantir’s proprietary AI has played a starring role in the leveling of cities, the mass, indiscriminate slaughter of populations, the confinement and surveillance of the survivors, while enabling a propaganda effort to obfuscate the genocide and distract western audiences.

Palantir’s Maven AI system is also the core system for the US military and was used to massacre 120 children in Minab, Iran, on the first day of the US-Israeli attack on the country. Maven, was blamed by Pentagon itself for providing “wrong targeting” data that led to the “triple-tapping” missile attacks on the Minab girl school on the opening day of the illegal war. Nevertheless, Palantir leads the pack of Silicon Valley firms racing to supplant traditional weapons makers in the Military/Industrial/Complex (MIC) feeding frenzy.

And, what happens on the periphery always returns to sender. Here in the homeland, Palantir has been working with ICE and supplying it with AI and data tools for over a decade, enabling ICE to surveil, track and murder immigrants and activists, like Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. Palantir’s Investigative Case Management platform, is used by ICE to scrape and aggregate massive amounts of data on individuals including school status, family relationships, employment information, phone records, personal connections, biometric information and residential addresses. There’s a common thread between Palantir’s actions in Gaza in the US in that ICE’s operations increasingly resemble Israeli occupation.

What’s distressing is that Palantir’s psychopathic behavior has thrilled investors who watched the firm’s stock soar. In Ukraine, Gaza and the US AI war-tech firm Palantir has embedded itself deeply within military systems and civil society, turning the countries into laboratories in order to profit from its dystopian technologies of surveillance, tracking and murder. The billionaire tech warlords–Karp and Thiel–don’t care about the suffering of those who they are surveilling, targeting, bombing and murdering. All of the data gleaned from the campaigns will be fed back into Palantir systems and allow the company to refine and market future AI war-tech products. The war-tech complex profits from a real-world laboratory, and it profits from dead people, whether Ukrainians, Russians or Palestinians, or Americans.

Palantir is evil without a doubt but what does that say about Americans who invest and profit from their AI murder machine? I think that Matt Stoller is on to something with his “the number go up” characterization of the US economy, where precarious Americans have turned to the stock market in order to salvage their middle-class lifestyle. I know friends and co-workers, that I think of as descent, who are profiting from Palantir’s deprivations, and wonder if they are simply unaware or if they are caught in a cruel economic Faustian bargain.

Unfortunately, the most evil corporation in the world is the norm rather than the exception, and further evidence that the US is an increasingly lawless country where it’s everyone for themselves.

Welcome to Galt’s Gulch.

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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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