If you thought neoliberalism was bad, just wait.

Neoliberalism was the owners of the country rebelling against the New Deal class compromise between capital and labor. Back when the US maintained a manufacturing economy workers possessed more power and the compromise with capital enabled the state to regulate safety in the workplace, educate workers and provide the assurance of well paying jobs and social programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

All of that is gone, not just replaced by neoliberalism, but now by post-neoliberalism, which is much worse. The US is effectively an oligarchy verging on a kleptocracy with elections. And with AI poised to eliminate millions of jobs, the billionaires might get the idea that they really don’t need us anymore. We used to have a state that provided social services and overall security and well-being, but in a klept, the state would mobilize on behalf of capital to manage or “neutralize” dissenters, which is what Trump’s counter-terrorism strategy effectively declares.

Much of this has been a long time coming, creeping up stealthily for decades, then accelerating with 9/11, the Patriot Act and the endless “war on terror”, where now any critic of capitalism is accused of “terrorism”. The changes are enormous. Under Trump, oligarchy and kleptocracy are everywhere because the centralization of power and control in the hands of the few is efficient while distributed capital, agency, power and control are inefficient. So we inhabit a world of overlapping monopolies and cartels, the marriage of state and private sector monopolies. In terms of optimizing profits, a monopoly is the most efficient. Nothing else comes close. We have an economy of overlapping monopolies and cartels, which is the perfection of a system optimized to maximize profits for the owners of the monopolies. All sanctified and protected by the US government

The rollout of AI in the face of profound opposition and even violence will be a litmus test of the power of the klept. We’ve been taught that our vote counts, that democracy means we have a say in collective decisions through the representatives we elect. We’ve been taught we the people have agency, but if the intense opposition to AI is ignored or even squashed by the state, we will know that assumption is past its sell by date.

College grads, booing commencement speakers mentioning AI, understand that the technology is a growing source of unemployment, both because increases in productivity justify reducing labor costs for firms and because corporations are using AI as an excuse to cut labor costs regardless of productivity implications. 

AI has a much darker purpose as a surveil/track/murder technology, that will be coming soon to a locale near you. It’s revealing that AI is expanding the surplus labor population at the same time that it’s making the policing and repression of surplus populations more efficient. The Silicon Valley tech-bros are not wrong to believe their version of late stage tech-capitalism is producing a “permanent underclass.” And while they are the key agents accelerating that problem, they’re positioning themselves as the solution for managing and profiting from it.

What’s humorous is that the same billionaires are aghast that the peasants oppose their grand schemes and don’t appreciate their superiority. I wonder where have we’ve seen this before?

Dark comedy aside, every day we see more signs of the klept becoming fully formed, where the billionaires wield state power while viewing their fellow citizens as a surplus population whose labor the economy doesn’t need, or the consent of the American people to function. To break the bad news-the capital accumulation will accelerate but increasingly through kleptocratic means.

I’ve been saying for a while that it’s impossible to run an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system, and our tech overlords appear to have gotten the memo. The problem for them is that the neoliberal looting has gone on far too long and the empire is a shell of its previous power and capabilities, as Trump’s disastrous attack on Iran has demonstrated.

However there ‘s a plan that most Americans will loath. The argument will be: We’ve spent so much on the attack on Iran–trillions of dollars–and we can’t afford both to maintain the American Empire and continue social spending at the same time. We are going to have to roll back Social Security because we supposedly cannot afford it. We are going to have to reduce social spending because we supposedly cannot pay for it. We are going to have to slash government programs.

Both political parties, Republicans and Democrats alike, will coalesce around the same policies: cut social spending, privatize public assets, and shift resources toward military expenditures and payments to the financial sector. The message to the public will be blunt: Taxes on the wealthy have already been cut. Therefore, the rest of the population will have to absorb the cost through falling living standards. Your standard of living is going to take it in the neck. Expect bankruptcies to surge.

This is why it doesn’t matter who you vote for because our representatives, senators and president all work for the klept. Meanwhile, Americans are fed distractions, red vs blue, identity politics, fake virtue-signaling, and a circus of entertainment.

But we are quickly approaching the point that Frank Zappa warned about—“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”