Shoveling coal for Satan well describes our late-stage capitalist empire. Want to get ahead in America? Grab a shovel.

What are the jobs in the US that pay the most? Is it farmers, doctors, teachers, nurses, social workers or counselors?

Don’t be silly.

The folks making the big bucks are the most enthusiastic shovelers. The richest guys out there, and they are almost all guys, are Private Equity (PE) vampires sucking the life out of companies, workers and communities. Or MIC masters-of-war, advocating assassinations, bombings and genocide, while producing violence and terror for profits. Or the Sackler’s and Purdue Pharma slinging opium. Or corporate media owners disseminating propaganda and hate to sell products by pitting Americans against each other.

Everywhere evil is afoot.

From PE acquiring hospitals and health care institutions, to the gig economy, to the planned employment of AI by management to downgrade or eliminate workers, to the financialization of everything. The reason gig work companies misclassify their workers as contractors in order to abuse them, steal their wages, and deny them workplace protections is because they can. The dazzling Silicon Valley high-tech economy is a much better story than capital imposing it’s massive power asymmetry over labor.

Last year the seven biggest publicly traded health insurance companies collectively made $71.3 billion in profits. All while millions of Americans continued to skip their medications, rationed insulin and delayed care due to insurers’ out-of-pocket demands. And when a well connected pharmaceutical corporation can kill millions of Americans as a legal drug dealer somewhere a big red light is flashing.

Foreign policies are worse, much worse. During the summer recess, Republican lawmakers visited Israel, led by U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, where they met with Benjamin Netanyahu, and visited an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank. While Israel is carrying out a live-streamed genocide. The stain of Israel’s genocide will haunt the US for perpetuity. But, of course, while American slavish support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza is sickening, it’s wildly profitable for US corporations. Going further, Gaza serves as a kind of lab model for future counterinsurgency back here in the homeland.

In an ironic twist, the greed of our feral elite is starting to cause a major glitch in the system, because while shoveling coal for Satan is profitable for the corporations that control the US, it’s cancerous for the American empire. Thus as the empire falters we’re seeing more lashing out, more sanctions, weaponized tariffs, and more bombings with Trump on a record airstrike pace. The goal is chaos. Destruction. Fire and brimstone everywhere.

In his book Hayek’s Bastards, Quinn Slobodian offers a useful summary:”Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into … a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These would be decentralized archipelagoes: fortified nodes in a circuitry still linked by finance, trade, and communication. Think of the year 1000 in Middle Europe but with vertical take-off and landing taxis and Starlink internet.”

What’s infuriating is that the whole decaying empire is run for a bunch of whiny billionaire douche-bags, whose profound enlightenment came from reading Snow Crash. They’ve accumulated wealth and power through looting, but sanctimoniously describe the accumulation as meritocracy in action, while abandoning any ethical commitments to America. And the corporate media is there every step of the way, downplaying atrocities on our side (read–corporate America), while amplifying the crimes of our enemies. Remember, we’ve always been at war with East-Asia. While the corporate media is undergoing a vast transformation, and has never been less popular, the advertising and propaganda must endure to keep the rabble in line.

You might have noticed the ongoing neoliberal propaganda campaign aimed at convincing us that we are only allowed to fight the system by maximizing our “human capital”. Don’t like your health care? Shop around! Don’t like your boss? Quit your job and start a business! Under no circumstances should you advocate for either a union or socialized health-care. You’re supposed to internalize Margaret Thatcher’s mantra, “There is no such thing as society.”

They want us all alone in front of our computers or staring rapturously at our phones. Anything to distract us from noticing the flashing red light.

I’ve said this before but with Trump America finally got the president it deserved. Because who has a bigger shovel than the president?

Update: Conor, at Naked Capitalism asks an important question.

“As the US descends deeper into Dr. Strangelove territory and violence, decay, and lawlessness reigns supreme, the great question is where and how does this madness end? Here are two options. The crazy elites in the US need to be stopped or they’re going to kill us all—either slowly through a mixture of climate catastrophe, breakdown capitalism, and genocide or there’s always the nuclear option. Add to the equation that if the US plutocrats have gone as far as Gaza, is there anywhere they’re not willing to go? A notable percentage of our “elites” are deeply disturbed. There is a revelry and sheer joy in causing misery and death that I cannot explain other than people being on the spectrum of mentally ill to pathologically evil.” 

It’s apparent that they will only stop shoveling when we pry the shovel from their cold dead hands.