A Clockwork Orange

Posted on May 2, 2025 by camelotkidd

I live in a liberal neighborhood replete with Ukrainian flags, and wonder if the display is a sort of unconscious projection?

Liberals have been taught their whole lives that the Holocaust was the greatest crime ever and were instructed to always oppose evil and to never let genocide happen again. Yet Israel has been carrying out a live-streamed rape, torture, starvation and mass murder campaign for the last 18 months. The Gaza genocide is jarring, isn’t it liberals? You have been raised from birth to be hyper-sensitive to everyone’s feelings, with DEI taking it to a whole new level of “woke.” Every oppression of a “person of color,” every attack on a vulnerable minority, was seen as the gravest of social ills—until October 7th. Then, everything changed. In Gaza, the “people of color” are now terrorists, or terrorist sympathizers, or supporters of terrorism, and thus need to be shot, bombed, burned, starved and otherwise destroyed by the righteous Israeli Jews.

Liberals are projecting the horror of the Israeli genocide in Gaza onto Russia, largely because Russia is depicted as the enemy while Israel is endlessly described as the “only democracy in the Middle East”, and our closest ally.

The cognitive dissonance must be deafening.

Thanks to the amazingly effective propaganda media psy-op, liberals can’t condemn the psychopathological Israeli genocide in Gaza, and can’t acknowledge the US/NATO proxy-war against Russia, and the largely Nazi composition of the Ukraine regime, while any criticism of the Israeli genocide in Gaza will get you labeled as an anti-Semite. The corporate media keeps the Gaza genocide outrage on the down-low, while amplifying the outrage against Russia.

What Israel is doing on a daily basis is a horror, and sometimes I wish I could take every New York Times, reading liberal and go all Clockwork Orange on them, strapping them into a chair and forcing them to witness the carnage in Gaza.

We have known for some time, as repeatedly reported by the Israeli media, that the Israeli military has created undeclared “kill zones”, where anything that moves is shot — even children, aid workers and emergency crews. As has also been evident for most of the past 18 months, Israel is implementing a policy to destroy Gaza’s health sector, including its hospitals and ambulances, and killing or kidnapping medical staff —on top of wrecking the rest of the enclave’s infrastructure. The goal is to force the Palestinian population out of Gaza, driving them into the adjoining Egyptian territory of Sinai.

Just imagine how this story would have been reported were all of this happening in Ukraine and the soldiers responsible Russian? Not like this, I’m positive. The corporate media has become a good imitation of George Orwell’s 1984 complete with their dystopian versions of New-Think and the 2 Minute Hate.

Of course, the neocons that comprise Trump’s foreign policy claque are worse, and many of them maintain dual US/Israeli citizenship. Trump Administration has basically criminalized support for the Palestinians. The “crime” of anti-Semitism is the only thing that the Justice Department seems to think is worth addressing, to the point where people who have done nothing beyond protesting what is going on in Gaza are being arrested without any charges being filed and detained while being processed for deportation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has publicly announced that he has authorized the arrest and deportation of 300 students for their criticism of Israel.

The Republican majority US House of Representatives has obligingly passed a measure equating criticism of the racist, Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism with what they describe as the hate crime “anti-Semitism.” Then there’s the fact that the US is complicit in the arming of Israel and the killing and actually condones it even though a majority of American voters do not support the Jewish state.

But, as I’ve repeatedly argued here, the evil is bi-partisan and there is no way in which to absolve liberal complicity by claiming that the Biden Administration was better. Former Israeli ambassador to the United States Mike Herzog  acknowledged on Israeli media on Sunday that the Biden administration never at any time pressured Israel for a ceasefire in Gaza. “God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse,” Herzog said. “We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did.”

So all the officials and talking heads who said the Biden administration was working for a ceasefire lied. They lied the entire time. They committed genocide and lied about it, and then they said you were crazy and irresponsible if you didn’t support Kamala for president.

Decades in the future the question will be asked–what were you doing while Israel destroyed Gaza and genocided the Palestinians living their? And yet America, and especially liberals, says nothing. Mass murder and genocide before our eyes, and…nothing. 

Update: Veteran journalist, Chris Hedges well describes our liberal class. “Fascism is birthed by a bankrupt liberalism that has surrendered its traditional role in a capitalist democracy. It no longer ameliorates the worst excesses of the ruling class and the empire by instituting incremental and piecemeal reforms. It scolds and moralizes the disenfranchised workers it betrayed.”

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Into the Fire

Posted on April 25, 2025 by camelotkidd

Vastly unequal empires never end well.

In his 2017 book The Great Leveler, Stanford historian Walter Scheidel, demonstrates how extreme inequality has been “resolved” throughout history. Unfortunately, Scheidel found that so far the only thing that has undone such inequality—the only great leveler, so to speak—is violence. Plague, war, or violent revolutions. “It is almost universally true,” Scheidel writes, “that violence has been necessary to ensure the redistribution of wealth at any point in time.”

America might be on the cusp of a revolutionary situation, and public disillusionment with Trump’s policies could lead to this dramatic outcome. But it’s not just Trump. While he always acts as an accelerant, this is a process decades in the making ever since neoliberal ideology took over both American political parties nearly half a century ago. 

Trump and the DOGE-bags have created a climate of fear, with masked ICE agents shoving critics of Israel into unmarked vans, the illegal forced deportations, the firings of thousands of government employees and the Republicans who say they’re afraid to speak up because they will be primaried by MAGA.

But clearly there is an enormous rage as well. The Trump administration is aiming to tamp down that fury by instilling more fear: his Department of Justice is pursuing the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, and officially treating Tesla vandals as domestic terrorists, but we may have reached a place where the genuine populist rage is simply too vast to be silenced. The Luigi avatars are common on social media, and this is a nation awash in guns and ammunition. As the Trump administration ignores due process and the Supreme Court, there is a growing attitude among dissidents that if they’re not going to follow the law, why should we?

Even during wartime, our presidents have generally required authorization from Congress to enact major policies, but Trump has totally ignored this Constitutional framework. Not one previous president had established such one-man rule on foreign, economic, and domestic policies, essentially governing through a series of emergency decrees, and doing so in extremely erratic fashion. This seems far more reminiscent of the “banana republics” the US fostered in Central America than our own Constitutional system.

The assassination of the United Health Care CEO appears to have shifted Americans attitudes with regard to the acceptability of political violence against elites and their property. And now an artist has made a deck of cards with America’s oligarchs info, including their addresses, on them, similar to the decks of cards with Saddam Hussain’s officials handed out by Americans during the invasion of Iraq. Justin Caffier classifies his “America’s Most Powerful” cards as an art project and is selling an Iraqi Most Wanted-style deck of cards with the home addresses of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, John Roberts, Marc Andreessen, and 48 others printed on them, through a website online.

The sources of this hatred are not difficult to discern. We are witnessing the most nakedly oligarchic ruling class since the first Gilded Age, when Diamond Jay Gould boasted that he could hire half of American workers to murder the other half. While working class Americans can barely afford rent, groceries, and access to basic services like healthcare, the world’s richest man is firing civil servants by the tens of thousands. As retirees and veterans watch their savings and 401k’s shrivel up, Trump, our billionaire president, is capitalizing on world-historic crypto grifts.

I very much hope that we have not reached a point where violence is the only option, but it would be a mistake to ignore the currents online, in pop culture, and in the streets.

Even the Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, author and New York Times columnist David Brooks, is calling for a “mass civic uprising” against Donald Trump: “We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust. University presidents, big law firms, media organizations and corporate executives face a wall of skepticism and cynicism. If they are going to participate in a mass civic uprising against Trump, they have to show the rest of the country that they understand the establishment sins that gave rise to Trump in the first place… [that] this is not just defending the establishment; it’s moving somewhere new.“

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the thought of our feral elite leading the revolution, spurred on by David Brooks. Brooks does acknowledge the “establishment sins” that led to this point. What he doesn’t admit to is that the way in which the Bobo’s were able to gain enormous wealth was by looting the republic with their parasitic financialization, particularly  stock buybacks, share-price linked executive pay, and the outsized role and pay levels in asset management, particularly private equity and hedge funds, that have been at least as destructive to middle and working-class standards of living as globalization. The sinful include Wall Street, the new billionaire oligarchs and Silicon Valley tech companies, who have prospered mightily from the golden era of free-flowing, seemingly limitless, money-creation; those who were enriched, precisely by the policies that brought us to this point.

There’s a political aspect of all of this: when people feel secure, when they have decent jobs, health care, and a future, they’re less likely to fall for fear-based politics, or engage in violence. A fair economy supports a healthy democracy, which is why the billionaires, who have made out like bandits, are not interested in a fair economy, and certainly don’t want people to feel secure.

 In the past there was a sense of noblesse oblige among American elite, as common sense efforts to reduce the likelihood of pitchfork-wielding mobs, trumbils and guillotines. Unfortunately that sentiment was so 20th Century. The result is a seething anger at America’s elite that has turned our nation into a ticking time bomb.

Bob Dylan was writing about the turmoil of the 1960’s but his lyric is appropriate to our milieu. “It don’t take a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.”

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Won’t Get Fooled Again

Posted on April 18, 2025 by camelotkidd

Lots of friends went to the Bernie/AOC rally, and wondered why the one with the most radical politics, did not join.

Anyone who has read this blog and contemplated what I write about already knows but, in a nutshell, the Bernie/AOC traveling circus is simply perforative theatre, designed to “sheepdog” restless progressives back into the welcoming arms of the Democratic Party, whose poll numbers are in the toilet. According to a CNN poll released in March, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating has collapsed by a whopping 20 percentage points in just four years, and now stands at just 29%–the lowest in the history of CNN’s poll, which goes back to 1992. 

After Harris’s disastrous campaign and the Democrats ongoing capitulation to Trump’s authoritarianism they really, really need something to fire-up the progressives who are abandoning the party in droves. This is how the New York Times, frames the tour. “Bernie Sanders and his apparent heir, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have drawn enormous crowds on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, energizing a beaten-down Democratic Party.”

Apparently, some narrative management, with better messaging, is just what the spin-doctor ordered. As a nice bonus, Bernie and AOC’s perforative theatre thrills the professional/managerial/caste (PMC), who largely control the Democratic Party, because it requires little change in their policies and more importantly, zero sacrifice from their billionaire benefactors. I mean we’re not talking about protecting Social Security, Medicare-for-all, raising taxes or anything crazy like that.

I went to Bernie’s rallies in 2016 and really thought that he was offering up an alternative to the toxic neoliberalism and neoconservatism that is embraced by both parties. The way in which the Democratic party deep-sixed his campaign was disheartening but not surprising. But I’m still pissed that Sanders turned around and supported Clinton, even after after she red-baited him as a “Russian asset.” Then, rather than taking his small donation army and growing the Democratic -Socialist party, he herded his followers back to the same Tweedle-De/Tweedle-Dum bi-partisan cluster-fuck that has brought us to this point.

After again campaigning against oligarchy in 2020, Sanders proved his capitulation wasn’t a fluke. When the other Democratic primary candidates dropped out to fall in behind Biden, Bernie endorsed Genocide-Joe, even when his cognitive decline was an open secret in the Beltway. The Biden Administration was truly abysmal, initiating a dangerous proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and actively participating in Israel’s live-streamed genocide, while ending Trump’s Covid social welfare policies.

Jeebus! Am I the only one who remembers this shit?

The brutal reality is that the Dems can’t be bothered to promote universal policies that benefit average Americans but they fought like hell, in 2016 and 2020, to make sure Bernie lost, even at the cost of a Trump victory. What’s crazy is that Bernie Sanders is only a sort of warmed-over New Deal Democrat, but that’s how far we have descended in our flight into terrain. The Donkey Party did that even as the price of not backing Sanders has been Trump, since he consistently polled as beating Trump, and by a bigger margin than any Democrat pretender. What’s darkly humorous and emblematic of the crazy times we live in is that Trump’s erratic tariff economic policies are driving the billionaires, who were instrumental in Trump’s election, to pine for a Sanders presidency.

I’ve said this before but in a capitalist country like ours there will always be a political party that represents capital. It’s a real problem, however, when both parties do. The PMC’s that run the Democratic Party disagree. Furthermore, they understand that many progressives know little about political realities and will happily return to the Democrats warm embrace if an enticing narrative is presented. After all, our political opinions, ultimately, are what we feel about the world, not what we think about it.

It took me a while to realize this, and I probably wasted years of my life under the delusion that people could be convinced by rational argument. Having changed my opinions a number of times in my life on the basis of new information or better arguments, I thought that everybody did the same.

I won’t get fooled again.

Update:— It’s even worse than I thought.

Bernie Sanders has been repeatedly uttering the phrase “Israel has a right to defend itself” on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, which in the year 2025 can only be interpreted as blatant genocide apologia.

Israel does not have “a right to defend itself” against an occupied population in a giant concentration camp. Under international law it has a right to end the occupation, and that’s it. “Israel has a right to defend itself” is just a slogan people say when they want to justify supplying an ongoing genocide.

At one point in the tour Sanders stood passively watching as police dragged off rally attendees who draped a Free Palestine flag over the US flag during his speech. He just awkwardly continued monologuing as their flag was confiscated and they were forcibly removed, even as the crowd booed and eventually began chanting “Free Palestine”.

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Pyrrhic

Posted on April 11, 2025 by camelotkidd

The billionaires who own our country hated the New Deal and they set out to undo it.

They won and here we are.

Over the past 47 years, according to the Rand Corporation, $50 Trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of American society to the top 1%, primarily because a growing percentage of corporate profits has been flowing into the stock portfolios of the wealthy and the powerful.

And now, Americans elected a billionaire who blamed globalization and DEI for their financial devastation. Ironically, this billionaire has promised to help Americans by DOGE-ing social policies, cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy. It’s hard to see how this was a winning sales pitch to the US middle class, but it worked.

It worked because decades of neoliberalism have devastated the US and left Americans desperate for any kind of change.

What led to Trump’s election, twice, is that our political system failed. Not one politician or party thinks that the US political system can fix things, or that it should even try. The result is economic and social upheaval that has created a deep and lingering malaise.

The neoliberal shocks without safety nets devastated the middle class and workers, leading to outcomes never seen before: frequent school shootings, an opioid crisis, an obesity epidemic, medical bankruptcies, high maternal mortality rates, crushing student debt, world-leading incarceration rates, high rates of old-age poverty, a crisis of homelessness, rising suicide rates among low-education middle-class people, and other deaths of despair. Such social pathologies are unknown or rare in other advanced countries.

It’s hardly surprising that Americans grew angry – deeply, justifiably angry. Every four years, they elected a traditional Democrat or a traditional Republican, but none of them provided meaningful relief. They didn’t even provide credible plans for fixing America’s socioeconomic problems, since creating the necessary social policies would have require taxing the rich and the banks and corporations they own, and that has become politically impossible because the billionaires won and we are, for all intents and purposes, an oligarchy.

Given all this, a populist backlash was almost inevitable.

The billionaires had plenty of help in their endeavor, including foundations, think-tanks, captive intellectuals at numerous universities, and money, lots and lots of money to spread among the Congress-critters. They also had the able assistance of the professional-managerial-class (PMC), who John and Barbara Ehrenreich, first identified in 1977. From the beginning, the PMC was the intermediary and enforcer between the owners of the means of production, whether these were individual capitalists or large corporations, and the working class.

Unfortunately for the billionaires, their victory appears pyrrhic. The massive stock market sell off, precipitated by Trump imposed tariffs, is freaking out the wealthy investors who celebrated Trump’s second term. The movements of the market generate a feeling of panic and the world collapsing. For the wealthy investors who back Trump, and are feeling it directly in their portfolios, they are not happy. They must not have been paying attention to Trump’s tariff threats, but this isn’t what they signed up for.

Even worse, the intellectual rational for Trump’s tariffs appear dodgy. If Trump’s secret agenda is to crash the stock market to bring down long- term interest rates, the plan already failed. The yield on the 30-year Treasury is now above 4.75%, its highest since February 19th. So the plan to crash the stock market is now crashing the bond market too.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has reacted to Trump’s deliberate act of sabotage by sending the message that it will not buy US debt. The result is that the price of that debt is falling, and so the effective interest rate on it is rising very rapidly. This is the exact opposite of what Trump says he wants. He says he wants the US interest rate to fall by a lot. It follows the collapse of stock prices on the US and international exchanges, and the sharp rise in yields (borrowing costs) for the US Treasury’s 10-year and 30-year bonds.

The tariffs, and the rest of the craziness you see is the direct result of the end of the American empire. These are levels of extreme disfunction that are part of the decline of all empires when the enormous extraction that was occurring on the periphery comes back to the homeland, leaving a dilapidated, threadbare and deeply polarized country.

For the billionaires, they better use some of that ill-gotten loot to hire some serious security because this is the America they created with their unlimited greed and avarice.

One of Roman historian Tacitus’s, most famous lines, is pertinent to our story. “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

Update: Economic analyst, Adam Tooze, lays out the doomsday scenario. “But let us indulge the fin-fi impulse for a moment. What if providing liquidity does not cool the panic? What if investors, both American and foreign decide, that they no longer wish to hitch their wagon to the empire of the mad king? What if they decide that the US is indeed exceptional, but that it is exceptional in rather nasty ways? What if the report in the UK Telegraph is more than mere rumor and Germany’s leaders are seriously considering pulling its remaining gold reserves out of the USA, because of Trump-risk? Well in that case, holding billions in dollars newly created by the Fed does not give you the security you want. 

So you sell the dollars. You just want out of the mad house”

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Now They Tell Us

Posted on April 4, 2025 by camelotkidd

As the Trump Administration embarks on a campaign of domestic rendition to silence critics of Israel’s genocide it’s important to acknowledge that the Biden Administration and corporate media lied to us about the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Now that the dirty-little-proxy-war is going south the New York Times, regurgitates a massive expose, The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine, detailing the ongoing betrayal. Basically, the NYT just rewrote the entire Ukraine war story, admitting it was never Ukraine’s war at all. It was Biden’s. The article opens with an admission that the US was actively and heavily involved in equipping Ukraine with weapons, intelligence and plans to attack and kill Russians. Meanwhile, all of our elite political and corporate media lied about it for political reasons and after Harris’s loss in November, the Biden Administration, provided intelligence to Ukraine to allow them to lob ATTACMS and Storm Shadow missiles deep into Russia, risking a widening of the conflict. Ultimately, the U.S. military and C.I.A. were allowed to help with strikes into Russia. While the author, Adam Entous, admits that Biden and his team repeatedly crossed lines they had previously refused to penetrate, he fails to explain that Russian successes on the battlefield were the primary reason for Biden’s desperate moves.

For those of us who’ve been paying attention, none of the expose is surprising, although there are numerous details that contribute to the history of the proxy war. Entous, reveals that we were lied to on a continuous basis from the very beginning of the conflict. From Joe Biden down, they all lied about it, even as the risk of a nuclear exchange grew. If you compare this expose to statements made by US leaders and corporate media at the time, you’ll find the lies to be staggering in their implications.

The biggest takeaway for me is the hubris exhibited by the military and CIA officers interviewed for the story. They really believed that NATO tactics and US wonder-weapons would send the Russian Army fleeing in terror. It’s like they never read about the battle of Borodino or studied the Russian defense of Stalingrad at their command schools.

What part about don’t fuck with Russia don’t they get?

Of course, the lies about Ukraine were proceeded by the lies about Russia-gate, galvanizing liberals into a Trump/Putin-derangement-syndrome frenzy . Everything you see is the product of years of anti-Russia propaganda. Hence the years-long obsession with Russian collusion. For liberals, a Democrat president can be as tyrannical and murderous as a Republican but because it’s their team they will ignore it and saunter off to brunch. Of course they don’t really disagree with the bi-partisan warmongering, the Democrats are just the polite, woke face of the bloodthirsty US empire, while the Republicans, and especially Trump, are the empire unmasked. 

You will not be surprised that the Times, with their expose, seeks to blame Trump for the forthcoming Ukrainian defeat. Entous writes: “As President Trump seeks rapprochement with Mr. Putin and vows to bring the war to a close. . . . Now, with negotiations beginning, the American president has baselessly blamed the Ukrainians for starting the war, pressured them to forfeit much of their mineral wealth and asked the Ukrainians to agree to a cease-fire without a promise of concrete American security guarantees — a peace with no certainty of continued peace.”

What’s funny is that our elite believed the lies too. Entous’s narrative reflects the beliefs of the Washington establishment. This wrongheaded thinking explains why Trump and his national security team are unable to hear and comprehend what the Russians are saying to them behind closed doors. When you enter negotiations armed with a mountain of false assumptions regarding Russia’s economic and military strength, then the odds that you can secure a meaningful peace deal are slim to none.

If Trump is foolish enough to ramp up military and intelligence support for Ukraine, especially in the wake of the Times article–where a host of US officials confirmed they have planned and helped execute attacks on Russian territory and Russian personnel, he will find himself taking ownership of the debacle. Trump needs a serious adult capable of sitting him down and explaining reality to him, i.e., the US has limited supplies of HIMARS, ATACMS, Patriot missiles and battle tanks. And our manufacturing base is in China.

Trump will not secure peace by threatening military action against Russia. Not if he wants to have his war with Iran and then China.

The whole thing is so crazy that it makes my teeth hurt, but there’s a method to the madness. From the Gulf of Tonkin with the ghost torpedo boats, to the invasion of Iraq with its non-existent weapons of mass destruction, to Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion, the corporate media engages in a continuous propaganda PSYOP, manufacturing consent for endless war.

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The Yeltsin Years

Posted on March 28, 2025 by camelotkidd

I’ve recently discovered that the DOGE-bags have a plan, and it’s not simply to move fast and break things.

It’s called the Dark Enlightenment, and “seeks to implement authoritarianism with a combination of elite technocrats (as in the IT type, not the older notion of “high subject matter skills”) and AI in charge.”

Singapore is their explicit model for America’s future. During his reign, [Lee Kuan Yew, aka LKY, Singapore’s former leader] successfully fused pro-corporate economics and state socialism, creating a distinctly Libertarian ideals of social and political control. This is LKY’s model: economic development above all else—even human rights. A “soft” authoritarianism, as Fareed Zakaria has called it. “The exuberance of democracy,” LKY explained, “leads to indiscipline and disorderly conduct, which are inimical to development.”

While the idea of a US of Singapore sounds creepily dystopian, I’m pretty sure the DOGE-bags lack the competence to pull that off. Instead, it’s good bet that they end up turning the US into Russia of the 90’s, ruled by Boris Yeltsin and the oligarchs. Rather than a clean, orderly business environment, the DOGE-bags are more likely to recreate a looted countryside and plummeting life expectancy. A hellish dystopia, with armed guards, private militias, and gated enclaves coupled with vast slums.

At this point it’s probably a good time to talk about the elephant-in-the-room. Why the hell does some quasi-official organization have the power to wield a chainsaw to government agencies and personal? It’s hard to follow their trail of destruction, but DOGE appears to be the plaything of Elon Musk. The fact that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not because of his acumen of political or economic theory. He’s able to do it because the fuck-turd has several hundred billion dollars.

Because he has several hundred billion dollars Musk’s mad vision is our brave new reality. But Musk didn’t come out of central casting as an evil villain. The inequality, the decades of policy and regulatory failures that led up to Elon Musk’s net worth, were the precondition for all of the insanity that is now playing out. Rich people hated the New Deal with it’s leveling of the playing field between capital and labor and set about to dismantle it.

And here we are.

Decades of regressive wealth redistribution not only worsened the poverty experienced at the bottom of the class system but, at the top, produced a coterie of billionaires whose wealth allowed them to dominate our political systems, ensuring that they could only fail upward, sanguine that any act of excessive risk taking would be bailed out by the neoliberal state.

The billionaires have won the class war and that’s why Musk/DOGE is running amuck.

Unfortunately, bad shit happens when you loose oligarchs on the world,

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MIGA

Posted on March 21, 2025 by camelotkidd

Americans who voted for Trump must be wondering if MAGA meant MIGA, due to the president’s recent actions. Trump is arresting, sanctioning, censoring, threatening and bombing, all to advance Israel’s interests. What’s even more detestable is that Trump is doing all of it even as the “only democracy in the Middle-East” resumes its savage genocide in Gaza.

Did I mention primarying? Trump is calling for US Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, to be primaried and removed from Congress because of his lack of blind devotion to the state of Israel. Notably, Massie, in an interview, revealed to Tucker Carlson that he was the only one in Congress without an AIPAC babysitter. AIPAC stands for American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, and is a pro-Israel lobbying group that advocates its policies to the legislative and executive branches of the United States. Massie says the babysitters are part of an all encompassing effort to ensure no one in Congress votes against the complete and unconditional support for Israel. 

Including Israel’s ongoing genocide.

I hated the Biden Administration, and had faint hope that Trump would be an improvement, but the president is acting like a gangster boss, fronting a decaying criminal empire, yet obligated to provide absolute support to Israel. Recently, Trump signed off on the reignition of the Gaza holocaust. He spent weeks sabotaging the ceasefire and then agreed to the resumption of the genocide. He did this while bombing Yemen and threatening war with Iran for Israel.

I don’t know why Trump is doing this. Maybe it’s just money? He took hundreds of millions from the Adelson’s, whose sole focus is Israel. Maybe Mossad has Epstein sex tapes, depicting Trump fucking a minor? Maybe it’s because he is, after all, a real estate developer and his son in law, Jared Kushner, wants a beach resort in Gaza on top of dead Palestinians? Maybe he really believes the cover story about Israel being our best bosom-buddy?

What matters are his actions, and his responsibility.

In a nod towards bi-partisanship, Trump is picking up just where Biden, his genocidal predecessor, left off. However, Trump is proving even more zealous than Biden in his devotion to Israel. His administration is seizing control of universities and ordering them to shut down all criticism of Israel among the student body, and chillingly, abducting Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil for leading last year’s student protests at Columbia University and attempting to deport him for protesting the mass murder of children in Gaza. The White House claims that Khalil poses a ​“threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States” for taking a staunch stance against genocide.

Trump has now ordered the US military to conduct airstrikes on Yemen. The US is bombing Yemen again after Houthi leaders announced that their blockade on Israeli shipping would resume due to Israel’s siege on Gaza. While US officials have framed the bombing campaign in Yemen as a way to protect the US military and American shipping, it was really launched in response to the Houthis saying they would reimpose its blockade on Israeli shipping over Israel imposing a total blockade on Gaza, a major violation of the ceasefire deal signed in January.

Trump had a genuine opportunity to achieve a peace deal in the region that would have protected the rights of the Palestinians. But he has pissed that away and is clearly under the control of the Zionist lobby. Instead of making peace, Trump is pursuing war with the Palestinians, the Houthis and perhaps Iran.

The Houthis, or Ansar Allah, are the only entity in the world taking military action to try and stop the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. During the ceasefire, they stopped attacking ships trading with Israel. Recently, when Israel cut off all food and aid, they gave Israel four days warning: restore the aid or we start the attacks again. Then they did, and now Trump is bombing Yemen again. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, leader of Ansar Allah, made it all very clear in his March 16 speech: “Our decision to support the Palestinian people, including our move to block Israeli maritime navigation, that clearly targets the Israeli enemy and no one else, is aimed solely at pressuring Israel to open the crossings, allow the entry of humanitarian aid, and put an end to the starvation of Gaza.”

Biden deployed two separate Carrier Strike Groups (CSGs) to the Red Sea. Anyone remember Prosperity Guardian? However, the CSGs were compelled to withdraw when they ran out of anti-aircraft missiles. The Saudis tried for years to get control over Yemen and were defeated. Ansar Allah responded to the previous attacks with volleys of drones and missiles, closing the Red Sea in the process.

With the latest attacks, Ansar Allah has targeted the US aircraft carrier, Harry S. Truman, and it’s only a question of time until it hits a U.S. war ship and causes casualties. Trump has already blamed Iran for Ansar Allah’s attacks, and said there would be “dire consequences” (for Iran) if the attacks continued. It certainly appears that he’s dragging the United States into a war with Iran to repay the powerful Zionists who got him elected.

However, it is not at all certain that the US would prevail in a war with Iran. In fact—judging by the war games that have been used to simulate the conflagration—US Forces would lose. But these exercises only modeled a conventional conflict. Ominously,  behind the scenes, as the Pentagon prepares for a “major” regional war with Iran, the use of nuclear weapons is on the table.

To MAGA supporters, I ask–where are the American interests in all of this?

And, this is where we are going to talk about power relations. There are American interests in endless war for empire and I’ll bet you can think of a few? The military/industrial/complex, with all of the intertwined connections to Silicon Valley and Wall Street are key beneficiaries. In other words, the endless wars for empire benefit a small cohort of wealthy and powerful Americans.

They don’t benefit you or me.

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Mangione Moment

Posted on March 14, 2025 by camelotkidd

How long before we have another Mangione moment, when someone opens fire on a CEO, banker or politician?

How soon before some poor, desperate American, with nothing to lose, attacks one of the sociopaths who rule our country?

The Sackler family amassed a fortune by creating an epidemic of opiate addiction. The Walton family got rich by deliberately destroying the local economies of small towns so that everyone would work and shop at the local Walmart. Elon Musk is a Pentagon contractor who’s helping US intelligence construct a planetary surveillance network. Jeff Bezos got rich with the help of contracts with the CIA and Pentagon, and Amazon’s aggressive campaign to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy is destroying whole industries and creating immense suffering for workers. Larry Ellison’s Oracle is intertwined with the US intelligence cartel and the Israeli genocide machine, as is Peter Theil’s Palantir.

These are the kinds of people that American society rewards–scum. The more ruthless and duplicitous you are willing to be, the easier it is for you to become obscenely wealthy and powerful. Our system, with it’s perverse incentives, rewards and elevates sociopathy, which is why we find ourselves ruled by sociopaths.

Many in our society are increasingly aware that our economy essentially exists to victimize them. It deliberately promotes inequality, exploitation of the most vulnerable through abusive employment practices, and preying on the least well off by excessive charges for interest and rent. Concurrently, the non-stop advertising depicting beautiful, happy people enjoying products and experiences that the average American can only dream of simply reinforces the vast inequality.

And now the beatings will continue until moral improves. The DOGE-bags, with their savage cuts, mass firings and threats to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, are certainly stacking the kindling for the kind of conflagration that could turn the country into a war zone. In a move that portends future violence, DOGE is targeting the Veterans Administration (VA). Thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the VA now faces disruption of its benefit claims handling, health care delivery, data security, critical medical research, and stable employment for one hundred thousand former service members.

Maybe someone ought to explain to the DOGE brain-trust that it’s not a bright move to target a demographic that was taught to close-with-and-destroy-the-enemy. Especially not smart to fuck with special forces veterans who were trained in irregular warfare and insurgency. America is awash with weapons and you’re giving veterans a reason to hurt you.

Most Americans living through the second Gilded Age don’t remember, but the first one was replete with violence. Labor actions and protests were met with armed strike breakers and corporate militia massacres. The Pinkerton Detective Agency targeted labor organizers and fought pitched battles with strikers. Workers and Anarchists responded with bombings and assassinations.

It’s ironic that Trump idolizes President McKinley, who was president during the first Gilded Age and the beginning of the American empire, while Trump presides over the second Gilded Age and final chapter of the American empire.

McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. And while history doesn’t repeat, perhaps it rhymes?

Fredrick Douglas wrote–“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

Douglass’s statement, written in 1857 on the eve of the Civil War, is just as true today as then.  

What’s troubling is the glee some Americans are showing in response to the mass layoffs in government. The lack of solidarity among working and middle-class Americans points to the ease of divide and rule, but it will be interesting to see how MAGA-land likes it when the loss of the these government jobs impacts their businesses and local economies. Fifty odd years of neoliberal ideology has had a profound impact on Americans, but ideology certainly doesn’t clothe, house or feed you.

Nevertheless, I believe our future promises to be an era full of contradictions–where conservative, military types make common cause with leftist union members, in the face of poverty and destitution.

What’s clear is that the old Social Contract is being torn up before our eyes. Our feral elite no longer expect the co-operation and support of Americans, and are increasingly placing their bets on the national security state, with its surveillance and violence.

All of those militarized police are certainly going to be busy.

And this raises a larger question–Where is the inflection point, when Americans give up on politics and embrace violence as a solution?

John F. Kennedy wrote–” Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Update: Protestors from St. Louis to Charlotte, Tucson to Palo Alto, and New York City to Portland are raging against one oblong machine—and the guy in charge of it. In response to Musk’s growing power within the Trump administration—and that gesture he made at the inauguration—protests have targeted showrooms, dealerships, charging stations, and the Cybertruck itself in an attempt to meddle with Musk’s finances and highlight how he’s meddling with federal spending programs.

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Techno-Feudalism

Posted on March 7, 2025 by camelotkidd

The outlines of America’s future are coming into focus and it’s not pretty. Welcome to techno-feudalism, a term coined by Yanis Varoufakis to describe the new economic reality where the tech-lords that control platforms like X, Amazon, Meta, and Google, stand astride our economy, like the Robber Barons of the 19th Century.

And that points to a larger picture. The return to a pre-New-Deal economic order assisted by pervasive misgovernment is not an accident, nor the work of a few bad actors. The techno-feudalism, with its accompanying corruption and vast inequality, is a consequence of a triumph of a particular ideology–neoliberalism–that considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. Neoliberalism celebrates human capital and mandates economic concentration and the privatization of governmental functions.

Predictably, this state of affairs has a bi-partisan pedigree. It’s illustrative that the Silicon Valley billionaires were feted by the Democrats, who assumed they would remain loyal benefactors. Except they have now swung over to Trump and ripped off the faux woke masks and revealed the true hierarchical, eugenicist nature of the country’s tech capital. The Democrats wanted a kinder-gentler neoliberal disposition but paved the way for Trump by largely pursuing the same policies over the years–just at a slower pace. There’s a historical reason that you don’t allow great concentrations of wealth. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out. “The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”

At this stage I think it’s safe to say that neoliberalism, for all of it’s dressed-up intellectualism and economic jargon, is simply a looting caper, with Trump and Musk presiding over the final stages. In fact, the looting of the US by Silicon Valley and Wall Street is going into overdrive under the Trump Administration and DOGE. True to form, rather than mounting a defense of core New Deal/Great Society programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Democratic Party thinks criticizing Trump’s false statements and doubling down on support for Ukraine is a winning formula. Indeed, some Democrats even voiced support for DOGE’s mission of taking a wrecking ball to the government so that private corporations can profit off the pieces.

The larger reality is that the US is in irreversible decline. Everyone missed the key takeaway from Vance and Trump’s dressing down of Zelensky, but the US can’t afford Biden’s Ukraine adventure and, perhaps, NATO any more. We should not be surprised. I’ve stated repeatedly that you can’t run an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system. This dynamic is crystal clear in the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, where the US weapons cupboard is bare because the geniuses decided to offshore our manufacturing.

Ian Welsh lays out the graphic details. “Just like the collapse of the Warsaw Pact was a sign of Russia’s decline, so is the ending of NATO. US carrier groups no longer have a full set of supporting ships: America can’t make them run any more. America’s flagship aircraft builder can’t make reliable planes any more. Trump is starting a crypto reserve. Social benefits are being slashed, yet again, in massive ways. America is behind in 80% of techs and at the same time launching a concerted attack on research universities. It couldn’t build enough weapons and ammunition to fully support Ukraine and in a real war against China or Russia would run out of munitions in about two weeks, then get the shit kicked out of it. It’s also destroying the WTO and other agreements created by it: it’s dismantling its Empire because, simply, it can’t afford it any more.”

The dirty little secret and the underlying reason for American decline is that our elite have become divorced from average Americans, thanks to the individualism and greed-is-good neoliberal-sociopathy coupled with broad political and media support. The American state can no longer reliably win its wars, or produce broad-based economic growth, let alone claim some normative global leadership role. All it can do is insulate its elites from accountability and protect them from the consequences of their extractive depredations. American elites assert their power by not paying taxes, and avoiding prosecutions. We only have to gaze upon our president to realize that to be a member of the elite is to not be held to account. The absence of pretense underlying Trump’s actions, however, suggests an exhausted imperial sovereignty.

Liberals love to associate Trump with Putin but the Yeltsin era in Russia, with the oligarchs, corruption and organized crime, is far more fitting, and appropriate, because what went on in Russia during the 1990’s was just a practice run. Now the show’s coming home, with an already-created oligarch class poised to assume their techno-feudal role.

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Give War a Chance

Posted on March 1, 2025 by camelotkidd

The US political and media elite are having a meltdown now that Trump is poised to bring the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine to a close.

Everyone from Rachel Maddow to Bernie Sanders is freaking out over the Trump administration’s moves toward ending the war in Ukraine. David Hogg, now the vice chair of the DNC, said on Twitter that “If we abandon Ukraine — Poland is next. You know what’s going to be a lot more expensive than finishing this war and forcing Putin out of Ukraine? A third world war and a second Marshall plan.”

These histrionics are as depraved as they are ridiculous. I’m surprised Hogg didn’t invoke Czechoslovakia, Neville Chamberlin and Hitler, somewhere in there.

While Trump is being castigated in the corporate media for saying Ukraine started the war, he’s only somewhat truthful. Actually, it was the US who pushed Ukraine into the tragic proxy war that has decimated Ukraine and left millions dead and wounded. Ultimately, the US political, economic, and national security elite are all responsible. They only are able to amplify the outrage against peace due to their head-lock on the meta-narrative.

Going further, the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, has been accompanied by a ocean of lies, and a censorship effort the like we’ve never seen, where murderers can be transmuted into martyrs and villains into heroes. And, now, the only way the neocons and their liberal-international playmates can deal with the butt-hurt is to blame Trump and portray him as beholden to Putin and call anything that challenges their narrative–Russian propaganda. Not because the facts are wrong, but because Russia is saying it.  Essentially, Russia is never right, and the U.S. and its allies are never wrong. 

When the Americans hears these phrases like “unprovoked invasion”, “Putin is Hitler”, “beacon of democracy” over and over, day in and day out, week after week, they fall into a trancelike state, not unlike a cult or primitive religion. When the media repeated 24/7 the exact same wordings about the ‘unprovoked Russian invasion’ of ‘democratic Ukraine’, many viewers became like characters undergoing the 2-minute-hate, in Orwell’s 1984, where “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.”

Since Operation Mockingbird, the symbiotic relationship between the media and the deep state has never changed. The false narrative machine is constantly adapted to manufacture consent and serve political purposes for the ruling class. The objective is not to report facts, provide balanced analysis but to put adversaries of the US in a negative light and question their illegitimacy. Just to take one endlessly repeated slur–the idea that Putin is reconstructing the Russian empire is childish propaganda. However, it’s been lapped up by NY Times reading liberals, flying their Ukrainian flags. 

I know it’s the way-back-machine but the US’s regime-change machinations against Russia, by way of Ukraine, were never much of a secret. There was this RAND study, that advocated overextending Russia through NATO expansion and color revolutions on the periphery. And one of the earliest threats came from Carl Gersham, the long-time director of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Gershman, wrote in 2013, before the Kiev coup: “Ukraine is the biggest prize.” If it could be pulled away from Russia and into the West, he said, then “Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

I was blogging during this time and it was always obvious that since the Maidan coup in 2014 that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin and plunder Russia under the tender rule of a Yeltsin-clone. The Maidan coup in 2014 is what began the domino effect that led to the current proxy war.

What’s shocking and unknown, thanks to that censorship thing I mentioned, is that the 2014 Ukraine coup was galvanized by false flag event. The reason cited by the U.S. government and supporters of “Maidan” for the legitimacy of Yannakovitch’s removal was a sniper massacre that took place in Ukraine’s “Independence Square” where 48 protestors were killed and hundreds injured. However, newly released evidence researched by Ukrainian-Canadian professor of political science at the University of Ottawa Ivan Katchanovski shows that Yannakovitch did not order the massacre, Russian agents were not involved, and the killing was in fact done by far-right elements of the Maidan protests in order to give a justification for the coup against Yanukovych.

Again, we return to the wayback machine to recall State Department honcho, Victoria Nuland, bragging about the $5 billion spent to mid-wife the 2014 coup, and instructing US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt to “Fuck the EU,” while the US armed Ukraine in the civil-war against Russian separatists in the Donbass. With U.S. backing, the unconstitutional government on April 16, 2014 launched a military attack against those two provinces in the Donbass region. This is how Ukraine stated the war and the date they did it on. Trump didn’t mention the instrumental part the U.S. played in Yanukoych’s ouster and Kiev’s subsequent war on Donbass. The CIA, MI6 and the government they installed in Ukraine began covert operations against Russia from the first day after the coup, before Russia took Crimea and a revolt started in Donbas.

We should all be raging at the monsters who pushed things to this point, especially at the neocons and their corporate media mouthpieces. These psychopaths knowingly provoked an unwinnable war of unfathomable horror by first backing a regime change operation in 2014, and then amassing a proxy military threat on Russia’s border in ways the U.S. would never permit on its own border, then refusing any negotiations, both before and after Russia invaded.

Everyone who facilitated and cheered this on should be driven out of polite society.

What’s even more infuriating is that the architects of the tragedy will face no judgement or repercussions. Blinken, Sullivan and Nuland will still enjoy all the perks and status of remaining part of the foreign policy elite. Then there’s Trump, former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, NATO and the EU, who all helped throw Ukraine into the meat grinder while countless Western experts and analysts warned urgently that their actions would result in Ukraine’s destruction.

If there was any justice they all would be DOGED.

But of course we all know they won’t. None of the deep state apparatchiks, politicians, media whores, and think-tank denizens who helped destroy Ukraine will suffer any consequences of any kind for their atrocities. Nobody will even lose their career. And what’s worse is knowing that most of them will re-emerge like vampires from the grave to manufacture support with their media sycophants for the next war.

Returning to the matter at hand, Trump is deeply flawed, but he is exposing the deep state for all to see and they are not happy, as the reaction to the peace proposals demonstrate.

Restoring ties with Russia and negotiating a settlement of the Ukraine war would be big-enough blows to the deep state’s interests. Trump sought to restore US/Russian relations but was thwarted by Russia-gate.  Russia-gate also was central to the effort of drawing in liberals, whose antipathy towards Trump and Putin, made them willing participants. Trump’s proposal for a new détente with Russia was childishly belittled in mainstream media during his first term, and he was simultaneously gay-baited for his affection for Putin, and attacked for having raunchy sex with hookers who pissed on him. 

While Trump and his administration, with their actions, have taken a bat to the permanent bureaucratic state, we are still in the first innings, to overuse a baseball analogy. However, if the White House is really ready to discuss this with Moscow as part of the process of restoring normal relations between Russia and the United States, this is a truly revolutionary event for American foreign policy.

Meanwhile, all of this is quite fluid and extremely complicated, with multiple moving pieces. Trump may sound well-intentioned about ending the war. But it is concerning that his administration does not take any responsibility for starting it. He comes across as an opportunist whose lack of principles is problematic at best and treacherous at worst. However, he does have a good memory for betrayal. It seems that Trump learned some valuable lessons from his dealings with the deep state during his first term.

Geo-political analyst, Alastair Crooke, lays out the conflict–“The Deep State, it seems, were not paying attention to what a posse of ‘populist’ outliers, tucked away from the rarefied Beltway talking shop, were up to: They (the outliers) were planning a concerted attack on the Federal expenditure spigot – identified as the weak spot about which a Constitutional challenge could be mounted that would derail – in its entirety – the expenditures of the Deep State. It seems that one aspect to the surprise has been the Trump Team’s discipline: ‘no leaks’. And secondly, that those involved in the planning are not drawn from the preeminent Anglo-sphere, but rather from a strand of society that was offended by the Iraq war and which blames the ‘Anglo-sphere’ for ‘ruining’ America.

The MIC in concert with the EU’s ‘Brussels’ Technocratic State as nothing other than a pure offshoot to the American Deep State – and therefore very likely to try to torpedo and sink Trump’s initiative to normalize relations with Moscow. Then there’s the Ukrainian “tyrant”, Zelensky. As the Trump administration attempts to extricate itself from the proxy war there is a chance that Zelensky could go rogue and threaten to release compromising details of US involvement in the war.”

We need to temper our expectations for a comprehensive peace settlement. There are too many issues, including the president’s wacky mineral and rare earths demand, that threaten to derail the negotiations.

Update: The Democrats never fail to fail. Here’s Bernie parroting neocon orthodoxy. “Trump berates Zelensky, the leader of a democratic country courageously fighting Russian imperialism, while he allies himself with Putin, a dictator who started the bloodiest European war in 80 years. Sorry, President Trump. We believe in democracy, not authoritarianism.”

Can’t believe I sent him $25

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