Luckily, ideologies like neoliberalism have a short shelf life, because no matter how hard the master of the universe wish, reality intrudes, forcefully.
The belief that Israel assassinated an American citizen doesn’t even have to be proven but the spell is broken. Israel is not a friend and many young Americans are starting to realize that Zionists are genocidal scum. Since October 2023, Israel has been carrying out a second Nakba (ethnic cleaning and genocide) in Gaza and the West Bank, where it’s obvious that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) doesn’t care about the laws of war. They’re just total murderers and terrorists who will kill anybody that moves: kill children, kill women, sport killings. We’ve seen the worst horrors that anyone’s ever seen in living memory, committed by the IDF.
Moreover, Israel’s has a long history of high-profile political assassinations, a record unmatched in all of world history, and Kirk’s murder certainly fit very well into that pattern. It’s precisely due to its history of political assassinations and false flag terror attacks that Israel has once again emerged among “conspiracy theorists” as a leading suspect.
In just a couple of days, an impressive amount of information has been brought to light pointing to Israel’s strong motive to take out Charlie Kirk. Kirk had been the most pro-Israel MAGA influencer, together with Ben Shapiro, visiting collages and attracting millions of young people. But his followers and others had started recognizing that Kirk was asking embarrassing questions about Israel, about October 7th, about the “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, about the Epstein files, and about Israeli censorship in the media.
Ruh roh!
In July, he had Tucker Carlson speaking at his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) event. Carlson said that Epstein was a Mossad agent, and encouraged Americans to ask questions without fear of being called anti-Semites: “you’re allowed to do that, because you’re not a slave.” The clip went viral. Other guests like Megyn Kelly and comedian Dave Smith spoke very harshly of Israel. Obviously, Trump’s decision to close and dismiss the Epstein affair created strong resentment among the MAGA youth, and Kirk could not ignore it.
I’ve found that one of the best sources on this theory so far is The Grayzone article, by Max Blumenthal, titled: “Charlie Kirk refused Netanyahu funding offer, was ‘frightened’ by pro-Israel forces before death, friend reveals.” Blumenthal says that after the event, Kirk was read the Riot Act by his Zionist donors. “Charlie Kirk was bombarded with furious text messages phone calls. There may have been meetings as well very tense meetings as well with his donors the people who built him up and they said we built you up, we can take all of this away from you if you don’t stop this and we are laying down the law.”
Heterodox journalist and publisher, Ron Unz provides more damning evidence–“Therefore, a few hours after hearing of Kirk’s death, I very gingerly raised the possibilities of Israel being responsible for the assassination with someone well situated in conservative circles who personally knew Kirk, and was shocked by his response. He unequivocally told me that everyone in Kirk’s circle, even including important Trump Administration officials, suspected that Israel had probably killed the young conservative leader. While such beliefs might not necessarily be correct, I was astonished that they were apparently so widespread without even a hint of those notions reported anywhere in the mainstream or conservative media.”
Presently, Tyler Robinson – a 22-year-old Mormon from Utah has been taken into custody after supposedly confessing to killing Kirk. So we officially have a suspect in the Charlie Kirk killing. Well, the third suspect to be precise because the FBI twice got the wrong guy. While Robinson appears to have been involved in Kirk’s killing, the details do not seem to be adding up, leading many to suspect we are dealing with another patsy or distraction.
The Kirk assassination has all the earmarks of a typical propaganda psy-op designed to stampede public opinion in the perpetrators’ desired direction. With Robinson, it seems dubious that an agitated 22-year-old pro-tranny activist whose grandmother claims may have never previously fired a gun shot Kirk in the neck from over 200 meters, no matter that the Utah governor proclaimed him to be from the “left”.
And there are so many unusual aspects to the investigation, so many mishaps by the FBI and such strange behavior by the Israeli government and Netanyahu himself since Charlie Kirk’s killing that it has fueled speculation by millions of people online that there may have been an Israeli role.
The public may soon learn the true motives of the alleged assassin. Perhaps they will fuel the narrative which Trump and his allies advanced in the immediate wake of the shooting – that a leftist radical was responsible, and that a wave of draconian repression must follow. But after the shooter’s initial escape and a series of federal law enforcement mishaps, a large sector of Americans will likely never believe the official story.
“United States of Israel’: Bipartisan US delegation draws backlash for largest-ever foreign trip
Criticism has poured in online as legislators from every US state participate in the Israeli-funded conference, ’50 States, One Israel'”
US lawmakers arrived just as the UN report confirming that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza dropped. “Never allow them to forget that as the UN concluded Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, hundreds of US legislators flew to Israel to show they were on board with this crime against humanity.”
Meanwhile–A video of a room full of US legislators being serenaded with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” circulated widely, with many commenting that the scene was “bizarre,” and for many, “humiliating”.
Have you noticed that Americans don’t pay attention to their surroundings?
Whether walking, biking, driving or skiing, people are largely unaware of what’s going on around them.
It’s the same with politics, where Americans are blissfully unaware of the political calculus. It’s team Red vs team Blue, where the problems facing our country get overshadowed by tribal war BS. The stark reality is that both parties are dominated by billionaires, who, thanks to Citizens United vs FEC, can spend unlimited amounts to gain the policies they desire. Politics, as I’ve endlessly intoned, is who benefits from enacted policies and who bears the costs.
Meanwhile, Americans maintain a child-like belief that the US economy is like their household. The notion that we need to balance the budget, tighten our belts, and cut spending, flows from this misperception. As modern monetary theory (MMT) makes clear, a sovereign country, like the US, that issues its own currency is not like a household. and that the only constraint they have on spending is real resources. Where did the QE to bail out Wall Street come from? Or, the federal largess in the wake of Covid?
Unfortunately, in one of the most effective psy-ops in history, Americans have been indoctrinated to view government activity as crowding out commerce, that the private sector is more efficient than the state, or that taxes are theft and to regard government in general with hostility.
Mikhail Kalecki’s seminal article, The Political Obstacles to Achieving Full Employment, illuminates the political/economy of a capitalist state. Unsurprisingly, class takes a leading role in the behavior of capitalists. Even though they would make more money under full-employment, they would lose the power of the sack, and the whip-hand over labor. They would also have less social/status difference with labor. On top of that, the state playing a more active role in the economy would additionally reduce threats of–a loss of business confidence, a “capital strike” or an exodus of the wealthy “job creators.”
Yves Smith elaborates–“The resistance to taking advantage of the flexibility of a fiat currency is in large measure due to campaigns to discredit the idea of government intervention, when oddly no one made much noise about the $162 billion sent to the Project Ukraine burn pit.
However, MMT proponents, IMHO, do themselves a disservice by not mentioning the role of tax in draining demand/checking inflation often enough. That feeds into the “This sounds too much like a free lunch” reaction. Even the policies that broke the gold standard are not framed well. You often hear commentators casually say that in the 1960s, the Federal government “spent too much” between LBJ’s Great Society programs, the Man on the Moon, and the Vietnam War.
The more accurate formulation was that even members of LBJ’s economic team, such as Walter Heller, told LBJ he needed to raise taxes, that running deficits when the economy was at full employment was too stimulative and would produce inflation. LBJ refused because he believed the public would perceive that they were being hit with higher taxes to fund an unpopular war.”
The corporate media bears much responsibility for the lack of political and economic situational awareness. An interview with New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, on CNN, revealed the acute economic bias. The host seemed to be arguing that any moves toward substantial redistribution of wealth from the rich to everyone else should be off-limits. Bracingly, Mamdani emphasized that these aren’t two separate, coincidental phenomena. Highlighting recent cuts to Medicaid and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits, which have coincided with tax breaks for the wealthy, he painted a picture of a massive transfer of wealth in the wrong direction.
Furthermore, there is famously no accountability for policy failure in Washington. One reason for this is that the officials responsible for those failures are the ones that get to explain away those failures with the help of eager corporate media stenographers. You might go so far as to state that the mission of the corporate media has been to prevent Americans from seeing and understanding the 21st century’s realities.
The American belief in “rugged-individualism”, likewise neuters a class-based comprehension of economics, and politics. “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
Another successful propaganda meme. Do I sense a pattern?
Elections, as the saying goes, would not be allowed if they made any real difference. The Democrats and Republicans share the same basic assumptions about economic policies that enrich their wealthy backers while impoverishing average Americans. Whether we should support extreme austerity that benefits wealthy elites, or slightly less extreme austerity that also benefits wealthy elites but slightly less so. But they can never, ever propose socialist policies, as the interview with Mamdani illustrates.
Our situational reality is that we live in a world of political and economic make believe. The corporate media, social media and Hollywood have spun a matrix of narratives designed to keep us ignorant, divided and squabbling. The enormity of all this is too grave, too terrifying for most of us to cope with.
I’m a skydiver, and situational awareness is paramount. I started as an Army paratrooper and during airborne operations, situational awareness was even more critical, with team leaders constantly updating their Sit-Reps, or situation-reports, to keep up with an unfolding reality.
Update: In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Americans are going to have to update their situational awareness, and start paying a lot more attention. I firmly believe that the political violence is a result of the abandonment of the social contract by the wealthy and corporations they own. From “there is no society,” to “greed is good,” our feral elite have embraced the law of the jungle, where might is right, and do what ever it takes to get ahead, other people be dammed.
In a nation awash with guns, the latest shooting is hardly surprising. Unfortunately, I fear it’s a portent of things to come.
It certainly doesn’t appear possible for the US to have a non-belligerent foreign policy. Instead, the US aspires to be Techno-Sparta, where a climate of fear, hostility and end-of-times preparation seems to have overtaken US politicians, elites and the corporate media.
Talk of war is everywhere, even if few people have much of an idea what they are talking about. War with Russia, war with Iran and ultimately war with China. Now it’s even war with Venezuela. The worse it gets domestically, with tariffs, inflation, corruption and Epstein, the more talk turns to war as a distraction. The debt has grown to such crazy levels. It’s not sustainable. Trust in this economic system is faltering.
China arouses a particular loathing because their economic model destroys 50 years of shareholder-value orthodoxy. They cannot acknowledge, for ideological reasons, why China is pulling ahead. They can’t acknowledge that a socialist/market, mixed economy works better than a financialized economy that’s running a chronic balance of payments deficit and of government debt as a result of its endless wars.
Going further, China actually uses credit creation and the economic surplus to invest in new production, research and infrastructure, not the creation of financial wealth for Wall Street and the assorted hedge funds that control the US economy. As you might have noticed, the product these economic vampires are pushing is debt. Their business model involves getting the rest of us into debt while furthering monopolies that extract interest, monopoly rent and all the financial overhead that characterizes the US economy. In contrast, China has embraced US economist Simon Patten’s 4th means of production, where infrastructure is subsidized to lower the economy’s cost of doing business.
I’ve said this before but how the economy is organized to whose benefit is the most important political question. US foreign policies reflect the domestic economic dynamic. Unfortunately, US elites seem unwilling to accept the loss of global hegemony. Thus the US seeks to disrupt, upset or destroy it’s perceived rivals, enemies and even vassals. It’s the Empire of Chaos, where all actions, fair and foul are in play, a strategy to devastate other countries to make them ungovernable, and therefore make the construction of multipolarity impossible.
From economic sanctions to cyber-attacks to proxy wars to terrorism to biological warfare attacks, there is nothing that the desperate managers of empire will not countenance. Indeed, for the neocons, disorder and chaos would not be an unfortunate side-effect but a sign that everything is going according to plan. Meanwhile all of this ongoing warfare is accentuated by a massive propaganda campaign, aimed at enemies, and, most importantly, at the American public. There’s been an ongoing media spectacle involving disinformation, fake news and permanent demonization of foreign leaders. Vladimir Putin, Nicolás Maduro, Xi Jinping, Ali Khamenei and Kim Jong-un, are described as monsters bent on evil who need to be eliminated.
Remember Bashar Assad?
The role model for all of this increasingly appears to be Israel, where the colonial-settler project is busy turning neighboring countries into charnel houses while carrying out a savage genocide in Gaza, all to further a greater Israeli homeland. US institutions have been thoroughly corrupted by Israel, from an Zionist occupied Congress, to a compromised internet and communications environment. Despite the media’s obfuscation, Americans are beginning to understand that Israel controls American leaders through blackmail . And that fact has everything to do with why the United States, the only country on Earth that has the power to quickly and easily stop the genocide of Gaza, refuses to do so.
There is a justifiable anger against the political figures who have led us into a series of disasters, and the corporate media who have encouraged them. For the moment it’s a minority view, but as reality sets in more and more Americans will see a kind of redemptive justice in the discrediting of the political and media class.
I’ve come to yearn for an unmistakable defeat for the American empire. Hardly because I’m unpatriotic, but since voting has proven to been ineffective, a military or foreign policy disaster seems to be required to galvanize the return to a constitutional republic. I say this in response to our feral elite, who will find that they can’t completely protect themselves from the demons their malign incompetence has released.
Remember kids–the Hamptons is not a defensible position.
Trump, in one of his crude yet honest bloviations, has proposed to rename the Defense Department, the Department of War. This sort of behavior drives the elite managers of empire crazy. Trump doesn’t keep it on the down low, he tears a hole in the matrix.
However, the renaming is appropriate, since everywhere is war
I had an epiphany watching the instructor for my continuing education class delineate all the expenses a small business incurs in the course of operation. It occurred to me that the US tax base has been shifted from corporations, banks and wealthy estates down to small businesses and workers. Furthermore, by transferring the costs from corporations and the wealthy to small businesses and workers, the right furthered it’s long running project of demonizing government, taxation and society. Indeed, for a contractor and small business owner, government appears expensive, overbearing and even tyrannical, all things the right accuses it of being.
Saving, investing and retirement offer other avenues for mischief. For decades corporations have been shedding pensions and offering 401 K plans in their stead, locking workers into a Faustian bargain with Wall Street. Since the 1970s, employers in the US largely shifted away from providing defined-benefit pension plans to offering defined-contribution plans, whose benefits are contingent on worker contributions and the rate of return. Traditional saving accounts have taken it in the neck since 2008 when the Fed slashed the interest rate to zero, in the process herding millions more Americans into the stock market. Once again the political effects have been pronounced. Instead of allowing for a healthy pushback to the ruinous corporate policies, Americans are financially dependent on the the corporate rogues gallery because our wealth, health and retirement are all tied to the stock market.
What should be the dominant political story is that industrial capitalism has given way to monopoly finance capitalism in the pursuit of shareholder value. The US moved from an industrial-focused capitalism to one where financial markets become central to wealth creation and distribution, leading to asset appreciation capitalism where value is increasingly generated and accumulated through the rising value of assets, such as land and financial instruments, rather than through production of goods. This sounds hyperbolic but it needs to be said a lot more often. The wealthy staged a massive heist and made off with $50 trillion, while amplifying the anti-government movement, and tamping down the populist sentiment for neutering corporations and their wealthy owners.
Most of us do not realize that we are in a constant battle with billionaires over who pays the costs and who gets the benefits from an economy. The wealth growth of the owner class far outpaces the income growth of workers, even highly skilled and highly paid professionals. The end result is an extreme concentration (or monopoly) of wealth and power as well as extreme inequality. Back in 2006 Warren Buffett told the NY Times that the rich had leveraged their wealth and power to secure a favorable tax code: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
If the voluminous literature on comparative social policy has taught us anything, it is that the US government’s avoidance of universalism and de-commodification, as well its preference for means-tested programs, low-profile tax credits, and indirect delivery of universal benefits, has tended to amplify the passive, anti-political character of American voters, even as in recent decades, public opinion has trended socialist, with broad swaths of the population supporting policies ranging from universal health insurance to universal pre-kindergarten programs. Nevertheless, “liberalism”, as practiced by the professional/managerial/class who control the Democratic Party, has become increasingly associated with paternalistic tone-policing “Karens” and technocratic or neoliberal policies that fail to deliver on promises of shared prosperity.
The result is in plain sight – the US economy is increasingly a rentier economy, beset with inflation, with the associated costs borne by workers, small businesses and consumers.
Why do you think a real estate grifter and game-show-host like Trump was able to get within shouting distance to the White House? John Michael Greer sums it up: “What the Democrats are refusing to deal with is that a substantial majority of Americans are bitterly unhappy with the results of what, until Trump’s rise, was a bipartisan policy consensus in American public life. They’re not flocking to Trump for no reason at all. They’re flocking to him because he’s the only figure in the political scene offering them an alternative to a state of affairs they find intolerable.”
Where the tax burden falls should be the overriding issue in US politics. The fact that we’re all brainwashed to believe the neoliberal economic fairy tales, should be next.
The way in which we create and spend money is political. The billionaires have convinced us that there is never any money for good things, only for bailing out Wall Street and war.
Update: History doesn’t repeat but sometimes it rhymes. John Maynard Keynes wrote this in the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street Crash–“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. “
The shit-show reaction to the Trump/Putin Alaskan detente has been surreal. To listen to the radio and television, and read the New York Times or Washington Post for a few days is to be subjected to an alternate reality. The corporate media is competing with Washington officials as to who can sound more stupid as they bray for endless conflict.
There’s a poisonous incentive in Washington, where to get ahead you must promote war. The corporate media is fully in lockstep. The bellicosity requires not a shred of policy or intellectual honesty or adherence to facts, in fact the more free with the truth, the better.
What is clear is that the reaction to the US negotiations with Russia are exposing the limits of Trump’s independence from the US deep state. He’s threatening a multi-year, multi-administration effort to utilize Ukraine as a battering-ram to regime-change Russia and seize her vast resources. They yearn to return to the 1990s shock therapy in Russia when the US’ best and brightest sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the country produced devastating results. The number of Russians living in poverty jumped from two million to sixty million in just a few years as workers were crushed.
By aggressively courting Ukraine as an ally and turning it into a military partner against Russia, Washington crossed Moscow’s brightest of red-lines. This was the culmination of a longer process of reckless confrontation by a generation of leaders who had only known the triumph of the end of history, where the same post-Cold War bipartisan consensus of invasions, proxy wars and color revolutions has now led the nation into a strategic defeat.
Yet, America’s bipartisan elites, out of hubris and butt-hurt, cling to the belief that Russia is losing the war and that any minute Russian citizens will rise up and overthrow the hated Putin, and so prolong a conflict they cannot win. To stifle dissent about the war and its origins, its bipartisan defenders deplore Trump and other skeptics as either ignorant, naïve, or somehow secretly beholden to Vladimir Putin. (See Russia-gate). Meanwhile, the grim reality that Ukraine, the Europeans and the hawks in Washington simply refuse to accept is that however long the fighting may drag pointlessly on, Ukraine is the vanquished in this war; Russia the victor.
Neither Washington officials nor their corporate media sock-puppets dare mention the reasons for Russia’s Special/Military/Operation, namely NATO expansion combined with a callous disregard for Russian legitimate security concerns. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, let the cat out of the bag when she stated–“Moscow needs to know that the Cold War is over and Russia lost.” Condi apparently took Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis literally, and Russia was supposed to remain passive as NATO wrested Ukraine away and advanced to their doorstep.
That’s why Washington was so invested in Ukrainian elections, protests, and changing the dynamics of Ukrainian domestic politics. Back in 2004, Charles Krauthammer put it plainly in TheWashington Post: The Orange Revolution “is about Russia first, democracy only second.” “The West,” he continued, “wants to finish the job begun with the fall of the Berlin Wall and continue Europe’s march to the east.” Russia needed to be driven back conclusively, and the place to do that was Ukraine.
Washington’s ambition for regime-change in Ukraine never wavered. Writing in The Washington Post in September 2013, Carl Gershman, head of the National Endowment for Democracy, described an intense competition for influence heating up all along Russia’s borders. Echoing Krauthammer, he named Ukraine as “the biggest prize” in this competition and called for a more assertive stance. By pressing Russia hard in its neighborhood, Gershman speculated, Washington might even bring down Putin.
It didn’t work out that way. Washington’s strategic error was that it had gotten America embroiled in a struggle of peripheral interest to it but of vital interest to Russia. By the time Donald Trump took office in 2017, the American national security establishment had already staged a coup, helped wage a terror war against the Donbas and built up Ukraine’s military and intelligence organizations to NATO standards, making the question of Ukraine’s membership in NATO meaningless.
DC foreign policy elites now know that Ukraine cannot win, but they would rather continue fueling a fruitless and deadly war than admit they were wrong and delusional about Ukraine’s prospects against Russia.
What should be understood is that the Ukrainian debacle follows a familiar pattern of inept destruction, and reveals a disturbing level of strategic illiteracy and incompetence among American defense intellectuals and their corporate media scribes. They can’t even acknowledge reality. They all drank the kool-aid. Yet no one has been punished or reprimanded. So far.
The sound and fury from corrupt politicians and media whores should be understood in this light. The Alaskan Summit and Trump’s overtures to Putin threatens this vast Potemkin Village of elite competence and must be resisted with all of their might.
Neoliberals and Libertarians love to exclaim–it’s a republic!–whenever someone is naive enough to wax nostalgic for American democracy.
But, what is a republic, and why did the founders chose this particular form of government? And, most importantly, how does understanding what a republican system of government is undermine libertarian/neoliberal arguments?
First we got to do some splaining. Language has been so deformed that it’s necessary to precisely define the words that I will be using. Republican refers to advocates of the republican mode of governance rather than Donald Trump and MAGA. Liberal and liberals will refer to “classic liberals”, who believed in free markets, rather than 1960’s free-love liberals.
Informed by the Enlightenment the framers of the early American republic rebelled against European feudalism and monarchism and formed a republic as a response with a Constitution that mandated a rule of law, where even elite would be constrained. The federal structure of government designed by the Founders – political power diffused to the local, state, and national levels, overlaid with an institutional superstructure of three branches of government intended to check and balance each other. The new United States of America of the founders was largely agrarian, a nation of small businesses and farmers.
Look, you can say that the founders were all slave holders and wealthy men but they created a political system that sought to constrain concentrated power.
Life is funny that way.
At first liberal and republican themes ‘meshed in the early American mind as market economy was viewed as liberation from the feudal order. However, the industrial revolution transformed the republican values that informed early US political thinking, and republicanism was overshadowed by liberal capitalism. This shift caused a raft of problems. Post Civil War, the burgeoning industrial economy of the first Gilded Age uprooted a society of small farmers and laborers, stealing their economic independence, while creating a new feudal order of “wage slavery.”
And here’s where we come to the crux of the argument. When neoliberals/libertarians disparage the republic/democracy connection they’re subconsciously associating republicanism with austerity and capitalism, while associating democracy with permissiveness and socialism/communism. But this idea is recent and badly mischaracterizes republicanism, because while liberals don’t see inequality as a problem, republicans do. Republicans argue that economic inequality can pervert society and that an economy should be subordinated to the political, where elected officials carry out the will of the people rather than the will of the billionaires.
Liberals came to conflate republicanism with capitalism, and rather than seeing wage labor as a new form of serfdom, liberals placed an emphasis on equality of opportunity rather than equality of condition. Moreover, the association of liberal capitalism as republicanism is due to to the dedication of a vast array of economists who saw that the road to prestige and riches followed this intellectual conflation.
Neoliberalism has turned it up to eleven, thanks to economic intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Friedman, of the Chicago school of economics, wrote in a 1970 essay, published in the New York Times Magazine, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” The idea that corporations owed anything to society, Friedman declared, was tantamount to “pure and unadulterated socialism” and a misuse of shareholders’ money.
Friedman amplified the intellectual argument that government control of corporations is communism, utilizing a populist appeal to liberty and freedom. This school of thought views capitalism not as an impediment to democracy but rather its full actualization, legitimizes the market as the sole value arbitrator and thinks of inequality as a small price to pay for progress and efficiency. Ideas, as they say, have consequences. Neoliberalism is now an entrenched ideology in US political culture and as a result neoliberal intellectuals have directly undermined republican values.
The oligarchy as a result is the mortal enemy of a republic. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is a well-known saying, but it is just as important to understand that wealth corrupts and concentrated wealth corrupts absolutely.
It’s about time we face facts: the United States is no longer a government of, for, and by the people. The American polity is no longer a republic; it is a combination of oligarchy and plutocracy, with political power based on the ability to finance political campaigns. In simpler words: political power is based on wealth.
The US endured one Gilded Age, with the rich dominating society and destroying it by their aggressive greed and ambition, and now we’re in the middle of a second one.
The simple fact is that a republic cannot survive the rise of oligarchy. A republic must have very high taxes on wealth and income, to disrupt the concentration of wealth and prevent the inherent despotism of the rich from ever emerging in the first place.
Therefore, our chief political problem now is that a plutocratic oligarchy has parasitically fastened itself on our political system and society and we need to dislodge it. Deregulation of banking and financial derivatives, the repeal of usury laws, restrictions on organized labor – all these are political actions, that can be, and need to be, reversed by new political acts aiming to tame the new oligarchs that stand astride our economy. We need regulations and taxes that encourage economic activity that society needs, and discourage economic activity that harms society, and so restore the vitality of the American economy, and the promise of republican self-government.
It all sounds nice. But we have our work cut out for us.
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.
To become a “made man” in the mafia the initiate is required to commit a serious crime, usually murder, in order to earn the trust of his fellow criminals.
What if the US political system operates in a likewise manner?
Deborah Blohm, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Gwendolyn Beck at a party at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Florida, 1995. (Photo by Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)
In the light of the Epstein saga, it appears that many of our politicians have also committed crimes in order to earn the trust of the deep state apparatchiks who manage the empire and of the billionaires who own it. Going further, I’ve come to believe that the made men who manage our empire enact the policies they do because of voluntary blackmail. Indeed, no powerful politician or billionaire is going to participate in Epstein’s honey-pot operation just because he was horny. When you’re powerful or a billionaire it’s not that hard to get laid. No. They flew on the Lolita Express to Pedo-Island to become “made,” and be part of the elite club.
Iconoclast writer and publisher, Ron Unz believes that our top national figures are merely “attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability.”
Hello Obama.
Unz writes: “An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence.
I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.”
The corporate media enables the utility of some blackmail, while minimizing or disappearing others. Unz elaborates: “Even if blackmail operations are successful at gathering powerful dirt, they can only become effective if those behind the effort also control or influence a significant portion of the media. Facts and evidence themselves are almost useless unless they are combined with a sufficiently powerful distribution channel to promote and publicize them. Thus blackmail operations and media control are intimately connected.”
So what are our compromised politicians busy doing? Across the Western world leaders appear to be “shoveling coal for Satan.” Austerity, bank and corporate subsidies/bailouts, endless wars and now up-front, out-in-the-open fulsome support for genocide.
The made men and women are all part of the elite network that manages the country and the larger American empire, that is justifying and supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Max Blumenthal reports that“when Tucker Carlson alleged that Epstein had ties to Israeli Intelligence [and that this fact explained] why Trump is covering up [the Epstein Affair], the Israelis seemingly took fright. Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli Prime Minister, was summoned to declare that he had dealt, every day, with the Mossad and that Jeffrey Epstein did not work for the Mossad and was not an Israeli agent. He then threatened Carlson, saying: ‘We won’t stand for this’.
And here we pose a question. Why are so few Western countries willing to take action against Israel? There are many possibilities—the power of Israeli lobbies in the US and Europe, Israel’s strategic role as colonial attack dog in the Middle East and the blackmailing of lawmakers through honeytraps like Epstein’s—but one seems to overshadow all the others: they are all part of the same criminal syndicate that views Israel as vitally important to the war and surveillance industry that is key to their continued dominance.
Have you wondered why nothing changes even as we elect a Democrat then a Republican then a Democrat then a Republican?
I’m pretty sure that the essential criminality of the American empire is a big part of it. Politics consists of the made men negotiating with each other about how to divide the wealth they’ve extracted. Think of it as the mafia and Donald Trump as Tony Soprano.
camelotkidd 