Neoliberal capitalism doesn’t work for average Americans.

To paraphrase James Madison, if bankers on Wall Street were angels there would be no need for government regulation, but you may have noticed that there is a distinct shortage there. And neoliberal economists are basically sock-puppets for capital, where their prescriptions always involve lowering your wages, preventing labor unionization and letting the wealthy people run our economy.

Heterodox economist Michael Hudson keeps it succinct when he explains that every economy is planned, it just depends on who gets to do the planning.

By empowering banks and corporations, we’ve put the reproduction of American society in the hands of sociopathic owners motivated purely by profit. Today instead of a government that works for the average American we have an oligarchic government that enslaves the public.

The short version is that the wealthy hated the New Deal and succeeded in overthrowing it, while building a second, high-tech Gilded Age, complete with robots, AI and total surveillance. See the Powell Memo for their assembly blueprint.

Architect of the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned, “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.”

Last week I wrote that “we live in a world of deceit, hypocrisy and bad faith,” and it well describes the overthrow of the New Deal. You can’t have a world of honesty and straight dealing while carrying out a vast project that’s impoverished the vast majority of Americans. You absolutely require the deceit, hypocrisy and bad faith to accomplish such a project.

Not to mention propaganda and lots of it. Edward Bernays describes the thought behind American propaganda in his 1928 book – Propaganda. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …“

The most detrimental (and brutally effective) propaganda sells the idea of individualism rather that the social or collective. The insidious concept of “human capital”, where you alone are responsible for literally everything with the market as the ultimate arbitrator. All of this combined with the exhortation for endless competition represents the intellectual kindling for an oligarchy rather than a republic, and has had a profound effect on American society.

High marginal tax rates, vigorous anti-trust and high corporate tax rates with laws forbidding stock options, brought about by New Deal reforms, produced the best economy in US history. But now that the US has financialized its economy there’s no way that it can somehow rebuild industry without de-financializing the economy, without getting rid of the whole debt overhead and without raising the wages and the living standards of labor.

In other words, we’re talking about a revolution, which is precisely what our feral elite are determined to prevent, as the latest revelations from Democratic insiders reveals.

When Joe Biden was running for president in 2020 he told a group of wealthy donors that if he was elected nothing would fundamentally change. At the time many of us argued that the Democratic Party was less interested in stopping a second Donald Trump term and more focused on crushing the ascent of socialist Bernie Sanders and the movement behind him. Yet now, as the president fights for his political life, centrist Democrats are just coming out and saying it.

“I’ve said this over and over again,” Rep. Adam Smith, who had days earlier publicly called for Biden to step aside, told MSNBC last week: “Joe Biden was not picked in 2020 because he was the only person that could beat Trump. He was picked because he was the only person that could beat Bernie Sanders, rightly or wrongly. … That conclusion was made, okay? “Oh my gosh, coming out of Nevada, Bernie Sanders is going to be the nominee!” And people, just like they are now, said, “Ahhh, I don’t think that’s going to work,” so they were looking for an alternative.”

As the Democrats continue to show us exactly who they are, the Republicans are posing as the party of workers (go figure) with their change in economic rhetoric and with Trump’s selection of Vance to be VP, even as they are all in on the continuation of neoliberal capitalism.

There seems to be a pattern emerging from all of the background noise. Times, as they say, are a changing. Although we’re living in a time of normalcy bias, all of the previously inconceivable scenarios have come to pass. As such, we can no longer dismiss the possibility that literally anything can happen.