Elon Musk did an interview recently where he moaned about not being able to go the the store or do normal things because he’s worried about security in the wake of the Charlie Kirks assassination and the murder of the United Health CEO, Brian Thompson. But that’s rich because billionaires like Musk helped make the world where the oligarchs are scared. Presently, the United States is a vastly unequal society where the average American lives an increasingly precarious existence.
Isn’t it interesting that Ghislaine Maxwell seems to turn up with all the worst people?
I just readSurvival of the Richest–Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff, where he explains that the tech bros like Musk would rather escape than simply make the world more livable for Americans. Rushkoff was the professor of media theory and digital economics, who was invited to to lecture 5 mysterious billionaires on how to survive the “Event”–the societal apocalypse they know is coming. They laughed when Rushkoff explained that maybe sharing their wealth now might preclude the “Event”, and instead wanted to know how to ensure the loyalty of their security guards in the aftermath.
Elon Musk has made it clear that he not interested in sharing the wealth, and with his spearheading the government-smashing DOGE, seems determined to make Americans more precarious. But even a sociopath like Musk feels something like guilt for the way in which he has gained his fortune, by fucking over everyone else.
Or maybe not, considering the sociopathy, but he feels something. Vastly unequal societies are not healthy places for anyone, even billionaires like Musk, for obvious reasons. While the rest of us grapple with precarity, the billionaires have to arm-up with guards and constant security. They worry that some bitter malcontent might try to murder them or kidnap their daughter or wife. They have to bunker down and can’t do normal things. Musk reportedly travels with a coterie of 25 ex-special forces guards. Think about that for a minute.
Unfortunately, if we’re to expect anything from the billionaires it’s them doubling-down on the sociopathy.
In Ayn Rand’s ponderous Atlas Shrugged, the billionaires withdraw their “talents’ from society, and retreat to Galt’s Gulch. I propose that our American billionaire likewise withdraw their “talents” and retreat. I further propose that they take their “talents” to Mars. Musk and Bezos have talked about establishing a Martian colony and Space X then Blue Origin could transport the billionaires in waves.
Under Trump the US has emerged as a kleptocracy, where the president has built up a system of private patronage networks that provide kick-backs. It’s a criminal enterprise masquerading as a presidency. I mean, the fact that Trump maintains a crypto-coin, that “investors” can purchase, is just one step removed from big sacks of cash placed on the president’s desk. For patrons looking to bend the presidents ear, it appears that gold bars also are welcomed.
Qatar bought Trump a fucking jumbo-jet.
The kleptocracy has bi-partisan participation and a neoliberal pedigree. We’ve heard it all justified for decades. This was the justification for deregulating Wall Street: the justification for free trade deals that wiped out millions of industrial jobs; the justification for permitting corporations to lay off workers to pay for leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks while avoiding taxes; and the justification for public-private partnerships that enriched the private partners at taxpayer expense.
I’ve said this for a while but neoliberalism, with its mantra of “no alternative” only took off with the demise of the Soviet Union and communism to provide an alternative economic order. As long as the USSR existed the capitalist bosses had to accommodate labor and communities, but as soon as communism collapsed capitalism began to return to its natural state, where society is divided into the rich and super-rich, without a significant middle class.
The USSR and communism forced FDR’s response to the Great Depression, with its New Deal policies which forced capitalists, plutocrats, and bankers to share their wealth with the common people. The state forced capital to invest in science and education, culture and art, infrastructure development programs, and the military-industrial complex. It taxed them, taking up to 90% of their profits to finance state programs. It was then that a huge middle class emerged, the pillar of stability and democracy. It arose not through the development of a free market and democracy, but thanks to the state.
That was a long time ago and now the corruption, looting and graft have reached terminal velocity, where Trump is pardoning drug dealers, crypto-swindlers and pretty much anyone who can offer a large enough bribe. South Park had a whole episode on the rank dealings.
Then there’s the ultimate klept endeavor–endless war for profit. What we are seeing today with Trump vaporizing Venezuela boaters is simply the new reality as the US militarized empire retreats to the Monroe Doctrine. The 2025 National Security Strategy, lays out the details, but don’t expect the masters of war to be likewise limited. Every change in the global battlefield has simply meant that the U.S. weapons industry grew richer with each intervention, lobbying for policies that kept the country in a constant state of conflict.
The “market go up” and the “rich get richer” has been the policy since Reagan, while neoliberalism is criminogenic so it’s perfectly logical that we ended up with a kleptocracy. The next wars were always there because we never confronted the political and economic system that made endless wars a profitable cornerstone of U.S. power.
Trump’s secret power is that he makes it all obvious.
In the 2016 presidential campaign we had one sociopath who boasted of “grabbing woman by the pussy” and one sociopath who joked in a television interview, “We came, we saw, he died” and laughed, after hearing that Gaddafi had been captured by rebel forces and sodomized with a bayonet. Hills complimented the sociopathy with some stupid, calling voters who disagreed with her a “basket of deplorables”
Trump is president, again, assigning economy crushing tariffs and turning Venezuela boaters into red mist, while Hills is at it again, defending Israeli genocide. Stupid and sociopathic. I’m not sure that’s a winning formula, but maybe they can’t help themselves?
Former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained at a conference hosted by an Israeli newspaper on Tuesday that young Americans were becoming sympathetic toward Palestinians because they watch “totally made up” videos of the horrors in Gaza on social media.
Totally looks made up. Those dastardly Palestinians with their AI.
Clinton said that when she tried to talk to young people “to engage in some kind of reasonable discussion, it was very difficult because they did not know history, they had very little context, and what they were being told on social media was not just one-sided, it was pure propaganda.”
“It’s not just the usual suspects. It’s a lot of young Jewish Americans who don’t know the history and don’t understand,” she claimed, adding, “A lot of the challenge is with younger people. More than 50% of young people in America get their news from social media.”
Kids these days. Meanwhile, the rest of us watch in horror as the Israeli terror state continues its genocide against the people of Gaza and escalates its savage pogrom in the West Bank.
Hills is following the Hasbara edicts to maintain US support for the genocidal country, and to extend the impunity that protects the Israeli terror machine in Gaza and the West Bank. Former Obama White House speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz made similar remarks about young people during a conference hosted by the Jewish Federations of North America last month.
“You have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza,” she complained. “And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they’re hearing it through this wall of carnage.”
Hurwitz also claimed that Holocaust education was “confusing” young people into sympathizing with “weak, skinny Palestinians” instead of “powerful Israelis.”
Hillary Clinton is like Sarah Hurwitz in that their actions and commentary are well received in elite company. Hills especially articulates the deep state policies of the American empire, and the history of her time as Obama’s Secretary of State is worth revisiting.
After overthrowing the Libyan government of Gaddafi using Sunni terrorists as proxies, the US turned its attention to Syria, where the Obama administration was already embarked on another regime change operation. Although Clinton led the public advocacy of the policy, then CIA director David Petraeus, who had taken over the agency in early September 2011, was a major ally. He immediately began working on a major covert operation to arm rebel forces in Syria. The CIA operation used ostensibly independent companies in Libya to ship arms from Libyan government warehouses to Syria and southern Turkey. These were then distributed in consultation with the United States through networks run by Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The plan went into operation within days of Gaddafi’s death on October 20, 2011 just before NATO officially ended its operation at the end of that month, as the DIA later reported to the JCS.
But the result of the operation was to accelerate the dominance of al-Qaeda and their Islamist allies. The Turks, Qataris and Saudis were funneling arms to al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, al-Nusra Front or other closely related extremist groups. That should not have surprised the Obama administration. The same thing had happened in Libya in spring 2011 after the Obama administration had endorsed a Qatari plan to send arms to Libyan rebels. The White House had quickly learned that the Qataris had sent the arms to the most extremist elements in the Libyan opposition.
The key to understanding US foreign policies is to ignore the tribal and focus on the continuity between administrations, where both Republicans and Democrats have utilized the very same Sunni-terrorists that they are supposedly at war with since 9/11. Liberals want to venerate Hillary and Barak and conservatives want to support Bush and Trump, but all them are just cogs in the deep state machine. Liberals in power turned out to be just as savage and repressive as the fascists.
Meanwhile, the sociopathy advances the American empire but I’m not sure the stupid does.
War spending is a bi-partisan sport in the Beltway, while the corporate media justifies it with euphemisms such as “the war on terror”, “human rights”, “defending freedom”, “promoting democracy”, etc. We spend $1.5 trillion on what we humorously describe as “defense”, when offense would be more accurate.
The elephant in the room is the military/industrial/complex (MIC), which makes massive profits on endless war. Again a useful comparison is China, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) employs market competition as a tool to achieve goals, in this case high-tech weapons that provide defense from US imperialism. This is “real” capitalism, something the US no longer practices. What this means for the MIC is the decay of American military ability, entirely a product of a now lost industrial and tech lead because of financialization.
American weapons may be overpriced and ineffective but they are extremely profitable for the MIC shareholders, who use portions of their ill-gotten loot to lobby for more war. Presidents come and go but the bi-partisan war party reigns supreme in Washington. And if presidents attempt to wage peace, the foreign-policy establishment will work tirelessly to sabotage any and all attempts as Trump is again discovering with his new 28-point peace plan to end the Russia/Ukraine war.
United in outrage, war hawks moved quickly to gut Trump’s initiative, and bray for more carnage. There was much talk of appeasement and treason in response to the Trump Administrations peace efforts, with the neocons plotting how to reverse what they claimed was “appeasement” of “Russian aggression.” According to the Washington consensus, the only way to support Ukraine is to continue feeding their soldiers into the maw.
The neocon’s aggressive posture toward anyone seeking peace in Ukraine is nothing new. Since the Maidan coup of 2014, any attempt by Trump or his predecessor Barack Obama to move towards a compromise with Russia, particularly in Ukraine, has met fierce resistance from the national security state and Congress. The corporate media has obscured the coup side of the story, insisting that there was no coup and studiously ignoring the presence of neo-Nazi militias leading the fight against the ethnic Russian east in the Donbas.
Obama attempted to broker peace by supporting the Minsk II peace plan to allow for Donbas autonomy but the deep state had other plans. Just as Minsk II was being finalized, Obama’s own senior State Department official, Victoria Nuland, met with some of his staunchest political rivals, including veteran Republican Senator John McCain, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference and discussed how to undermine the peace pact. Leaked details of the Nuland meeting caused a stir in Germany, but were widely ignored in the United States. NATO Commander Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove was quoted as saying that sending more weapons would “raise the battlefield cost for Putin.” Nuland interjected to the U.S. politicians present that “I’d strongly urge you to use the phrase ‘defensive systems’ that we would deliver to oppose Putin’s ‘offensive systems.’”
From the start, Trump recognized that hostility to diplomacy with Russia would cost lives. Russia-gate, he complained in November 2017, “gets in the way” of improving US-Russia ties, “and that’s a shame because people will die because of it.” Of course, Trump isn’t any more peaceful than the rest of our presidents. He sometimes likes to pose as an opponent of interventionist foreign policy, but when it matters he is every bit as much of a militarist as any of the neocons. The real story is that Trump’s diplomacy is transactional based on the fact that he would like to make some money off the Ukraine/Russia conflict.
Unfortunately, Russia is poised to settle the conflict militarily and that’s why there is such panic amongst Washington elite who had long dreamed of looting Russia. They truly believed they could cripple Russia’s economy with the blizzard of sanctions while using Ukraine as a proxy battering ram to defeat the Russian military.
It’s too bad that we can’t send the neocons off to the front lines. I think Lindsey Graham would look fetching in camouflage
Update: I’ve written about this before but the only way to break the power of the war party is for them to suffer a massive, obvious defeat. And, don’t look now but the US is poised to be defeated in Ukraine with their proxy war against Russia, and potentially in Venezuela if they are stupid enough to invade the oil-rich country.
Update 2: Wish I’d written this–“An enshittified military costs more, delivers less, and deploys for ever-more dubious purposes. Military contractors’ performance is unfalsifiable, judged on metrics that have nothing to do with outcomes that matter in the real world. It’s a sick joke that how quickly contractors get paid is a metric of anything but corruption.
More can be said about this, but US oligarchs have been facing a crisis of capital accumulation. The permanent war economy—national security Keynesianism—has been a way to manage that crisis without inadvertently strengthening the working class. And that means you have to have profiteering agents like Anduril to sop up surpluses of capital that oligarchs have no wish to redistribute to workers but that also have few profitable places to go in a world of low/negative growth.”
Israeli efforts at propagandizing Americans have taken a big hit as more and more people see and recoil from the ongoing Israel genocide in Gaza and pogrom in the West Bank.
In response, pro-Israeli’s are cranking the Hasbara up to 11 through their control of American corporate and social media while seeking funding from the Gulf States states to help.
Why do you think Donald Trump hosted a White House dinner for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. with all of the Silicon Valley heavyweights?
Fortunately for us, the Zionist are fighting an uphill battle to reverse the growing antipathy towards the Jewish state and they’re freaking-out because they’re losing control of the narrative. Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz made some very revealing remarks during an appearance at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly. “So you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us cannot have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they are just seeing in their minds: carnage. And I sound obscene.”
You are obscene, but that’s a topic for another day.
Meanwhile, Hurwitz, continued, even though she should have stopped, saying Holocaust education has begun backfiring, because it has been giving young people the wrong impression that genocide is always bad. “And you know I think unfortunately, the very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-semitism education in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism,” Hurwitz said. “Because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people. So, when on TikTok all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.”
I just love it when our feral elite say what they really mean.
It’s refreshing.
Caitlin Johnstone has been one of the few writers covering Israel’s Gaza genocide from a moral standpoint and she makes some insightful observations: “It’s just so fascinating to see a former White House speechwriter making so many of the points that anti-Zionists have been making for years, but taking the exact opposite meaning from them: People who learned from Holocaust education that genocide is wrong have been applying those same lessons to the genocide in Gaza — and this means they’re “confused”. The mainstream legacy media has always hidden anti-Israel views from the public — and that was a good thing. Social media has now given Palestinians the ability to expose the truth about Israel’s abuses — and that’s a bad thing. People aren’t falling for the Zionist spin and narrative-diddling anymore because they’ve seen the carnage in Gaza with their own eyes — and that’s a problem.”
Preach.
Meanwhile, Trump faces his worst ever approval ratings as the political fallout from the Epstein scandal, the US’ weak economic performance, and Trump’s unwavering support for Israel mounts. According toThe Economist, no recent president’s poll numbers have fallen so quickly.
Most alarming for the MIGA crowd is the shift among young Republicans, appalled by the videos and testimony relating to the Israeli genocide carried out in Gaza. The genocide is precisely what caused Charlie Kirk to break from Israel, and it is this departure from Zionist control that likely resulted in his assassination. The live-streamed genocide in addition to the dominance of Israel in Washington has also driven the pushback from prominent conservatives including Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Congressman Thomas Massie and journalists Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.
Time to double down. Israeli Hasbara has a serious purpose in that US support for Israel is crucial to their occupation and subjugation of Palestine. The 1,000th aircraft carrying Western military supplies has landed in the country since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, the Israeli Security Ministry announced, underscoring the scale of foreign support that continues to sustain Israeli occupation forces.
Americans are awash in propaganda but the Zionist Hasbara is the worst, designed to burnish a state that’s busy bombing hospitals, shooting children, raping prisoners, assassinating journalists and committing genocide, To make matters worse, the Zionist Hasbara has been aided by a corporate media that still slavishly supports Israel two years into a genocide where they’ve actively run propaganda cover for Israel.
But the spell is broken and people are starting to ask questions. Like the student at Auburn who questioned Eric Trump and his wife on President Trump’s unwavering support for Israel. The student went on to state that “Israel is a nation where Christians are constantly under attack in both Gaza and the West Bank. We talk about America first and defending Christians. But how can we do this if we align ourselves with a nation that does not do that itself?”
Update: Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has resigned. I wonder what they threatened her with? Maybe she and all of her family started receiving video footage of Charlie Kirks assassination, in slow-motion? For the Hasbara crowd nothing is off-limits.
Whatever you thought about our feral elite, it’s way, way worse.
The House release of the Epstein Files, brings together elite impunity, elite depravity, and Israeli influence over the US deep state into one simple and extremely shocking story. The new analysis by Drop Site News has some of the most mind-blowing investigative reveals I’ve ever read. As primary sources go, the documents that Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim got ahold of says so much more about how the world works than anything in the Snowden or Chelsea Manning exposes from the Obama years. It’s always been apparent that Epstein was connected to “intelligence” but their research provides smoking-gun proof that Epstein worked with Israel, and that furthermore, Epstein had a much larger role in global machinations. But he was only able to do this because US foreign policy used Israel as an East Asia proxy for its own global hegemony.
And profit. Epstein manipulated people, policies and events in ways that would allow for US banks and multi-national corporations to profit from national security decision-making. The Shock Doctrine, written by Naomi Klein, presciently describes Epstein’s disaster capitalism. Going further, the files clear up the mystery of why Leon Black “paid” Epstein $159 million for “tax advice”, and why Leslie Wexner transferred ownership of his Manhattan townhouse, originally purchased for $13.2 million in 1989, so that Jefferey could pimp out underage girls in the super deluxe honey-pot. This is the world that Epstein lived and operated in—his reach extended to the top levels of politics, intel, finance, journalism. Even after his guilty plea.
Trump richly deserves whatever happens to him as a result of his ties to Epstein, but this has always been a scandal about the ruling class as a whole, not one individual or political party. Epstein’s world was bi-partisan, with intimate connections in the deep state as well, where we see an overlap between Trump and the Republican Party (the reference to Peter Thiel) and the Democrat world of insiders, with references to Bill Burns. At the time Burns was Deputy Secretary of State for Obama, then he was Director, CIA, for Biden. What were our elite doing meeting with a known sexual abuser like Epstein, and what does this tell us about the feral elite that constitute our ruling class?
Thanks to the real journalism of two independent outlets,Drop Siteand Reason, we now have a much better sense of Epstein’s relationship with the foreign policy elite of the US and Israel. It seems that Epstein was not just a CIA or Mossad asset. Rather, he was a major player, an American oligarch, who played a key role in shaping Western policy, which brought him in contact with spy agencies, diplomats, and financiers. Epstein’s ties to American intelligence remain murky, but it strains credulity that an American citizen could be engaged in such high-level diplomatic work that involved negotiations with foreign countries without the knowledge and support of the US national security state.
What’s apparent is that Epstein was deeply entrenched in the foreign policy elite, a fact that gave him much of the impunity he enjoyed for most of his life. Powerful people felt comfortable around Epstein because he was one of them. He had the same worldview that has dominated the US elite since the end of the Cold War. He was a believer in neoliberalism, US military hegemony bolstered in East Asia by the alliance with Israel, globalization, the privatization of government functions, etc. Epstein was a pure representation of the American deep state. The one that controls the country as our elected representatives come and go.
The Epstein saga is a reflection on what’s wrong with our country. Trumpian corruption is unparalleled but his administration is the logical endpoint of the long-standing tradition of elite impunity.
The war on terror was always a sick joke considering the US’s history of using terrorists to carry out its foreign policies, but now that Ahmed al–Sharaa arrived at the White House to meet President Donald Trump it’s more obvious than ever.
Al–Sharaa is the type of savage, mass murdering Sunni jihadist that the US has been at war with since 9/11, and just months ago he still had a $10 million price on his head.
Thanks to decades of propaganda with it’s rotating cast of good guys and villains the corporate media has led us to a milieu that would have been familiar to Winston Smith in 1984. Here’s the headline in the Dec. 3 editions of The Telegraph: “How Syria’s ‘diversity-friendly’ jihadists plan on building a state.” Maybe they are employing the proper pronouns as they are chopping heads off?
I’ve noted repeatedly that Al-Qaeda and ISIS are as much creations of the US as the drug cartel’s, and serve the same purpose as far as USA policy is concerned, to excuse and justify intervention in pursuit of geopolitical/financial goals and resource control. The reason that Al–Sharaa or Abu Muhammad al–Jolani, if you prefer, is hobnobbing in DC is because of his efforts during Obama’s Timber Sycamore, a CIA extended covert operation against the Assad regime in Syria. After the CIA, with MI6’s able assistance, turned the “Arab Spring” protests in Syria into a bloody armed conflict starting in 2011, Al–Jolani helped form Jabhat al–Nusra, al–Qaeda’s front organization in Syria.
The longer version is that after the invasion of Iraq went south and it became apparent that the big winner had been Iran, America redirected and started working with Sunni terrorists. The US was following the British Empire in the employment of a divide and conquer strategy, where the tensions between Sunni and Shia could be exploited. Abu Muhammad al–Jolani, is simply the latest itineration of proxy terrorist that the US uses to carry out its machinations to maintain the empire.
We may never know exactly why Trump and his people had al–Sharaa into the Oval Office, but I’ll bet it had something to do with Israel. The key to the shift in alignments from terrorist designated enemy to good friend was certainly the declaration by the Syrian government that it would have normal diplomatic and other relations with Israel. Israel has long sought the overthrow of former Syrian president, Bashar Assad, and because they also utilizes terrorists on an ongoing basis, they are thrilled to have someone like al–Jolani as the ruler of Syria. The IDF has been expanding into Lebanon as well as into Syria and also appears to be heavily involved with Pentagon plans to create new US military bases near Gaza and Damascus.
The whole thing is so dark and sick that it makes my stomach hurt.
But seeing al–Jolani posing with Trump in the Oval Office is clarifying. These people are not aberrations or mistakes. They are the reflection of American foreign policy. America created most of them. Certainly it created the man who now names himself Syria’s president.
Let’s face it– terrorist ‘r’ us–and al–Jolani is merely the latest manifestation.
The question has come to the forefront now that Wall Street and big tech firms are inflating a massive AI bubble in the hopes that it will somehow work out, but if it doesn’t, well the government will backstop them.
As the reality of lost investments sinks in it’s notable that AI advocates are promoting a plan for the US government to back stop “artificial intelligence”, because “national security”, (of course), where they invoke the scary Chinese threat as a way to justify it. New York University professor, Gary Marcus has been saying it for a while what the end game would be. “The countdown until we are told that LLMs are “too big to fail” starts now. “We can’t afford to lose to China”, they will say, accepting their multibillion dollar bailouts.”
Wednesday OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went on the Conversations with Tyler podcast and openly called for a government backstop: “ When something gets sufficiently huge … the federal government is kind of the insurer of last resort, as we’ve seen in various financial crises … given the magnitude of what I expect AI’s economic impact to look like, I do think the government ends up as the insurer of last resort.”
That same day, OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar echoed the same message at a Wall Street Journal technology conference. “The company hopes the federal government might backstop the financing of future data-center deals.”
What’s infuriating is that the AI evangelists blame Chinese subsidies for their predicament but China has a much different economic model, where the Chinese government and average citizens gain the benefits from the subsidies while in the US, the government and we the people pay the costs while the billionaires make off with the loot. I know it’s the wayback machine but didn’t the US subsidize its too-big-to-fail banks with trillion-dollar bailout while turfing millions of Americans out of their homes recently?
Of course, the plea for federal largesse should be understood as another bailout of Wall Street and private equity who have massive investments at stake. Firms like BlackRock and Blackstone have invested nearly $200 billion in data center–related deals since 2022, driving a wave of acquisitions across gas-fired power plants, fossil fuel assets, and even retail energy utilities that millions of customers depend on.
Like I said last week, the crisis is that U.S. financial system requires enormous amounts of new collateral, as in, natural resources like oil, natural gas, water, etc. to underwrite the over-leveraged U.S. shadow banking system. A lot of the over-leveraging comes from investments in AI. An AI crash would take down not only the market but about 20% of GDP growth (which is roughly what datacenter construction accounts for these days)
There’s a pattern to recognize. AI, like the military industrial complex (MIC), funnels all of the profits to the wealthy while producing inferior products that produce mediocre results. Silicon Valley has embraced the same business strategy of cost-plus as the MIC. Soon, OpenAI could join the likes of Lockheed/Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and all the rest feeding at the trough in the name of national security.
Lets go back to those subsidies. Compare OpenAI to what Chinese AI creator DeepSeek did, build a very similar model for a fraction of the cost that doesn’t require massive amounts of energy. Maybe, just maybe, having an industrial policy that grows an economy plus one that benefits the populace is a good thing?
Crazy talk, I know.
Instead, here in the homeland the AI bubble is US industrial policy. Political/economy writer with a anti-trust beat, Matt Stoller, writes: “But whether generative AI is useful is besides the point. AI data center build outs are now American industrial policy. Five big tech monopolies have grabbed an increasing share of profits in the economy, and they are engaged in a form of central planning to force investment in bloated construction projects. Wall Street is following along with capital, and firms like McKinsey and corporate influencers are forcing every corporation to impose, top-down, AI on everyone, whether it makes sense or not.”
But look out. Another bailout of rich-fucks would not sit well with Americans who are already saddled with enormous debt and suffering from an ongoing recession. Especially a bailout of AI, whose purpose is to replace millions of jobs and stick Americans with outrageous power bills.
Indeed, the politics are moving strongly against the latest bubble. Even as Trump tries to explain how good AI is going to be for America, various big business leaders are explaining to their investors how AI is going to allow them to get rid of workers and raise returns on capital. The inconsistencies at the heart of these stories are obvious, and apparent to everyone.
The latest elections demonstrated that there’s massive anger at AI buildouts. Indeed, almost every week, “from Tucson, Arizona, to the the D.C. area, Americans are protesting, rejecting, restricting, or banning new data center development. Candidates won office entirely on rejecting data centers.
Whether these candidates can put together a coherent critique of the AI data center build out strategy, and propose an actual alternative will be a key political story going into the 2026 elections.
Is Trump the mad emperor who will bring the empire crashing down? His increasingly erratic behavior certainly doesn’t inspire confidence.
Any of America’s adventures could ignite a worldwide conflagration. Ukraine-Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan-India and Israel’s genocide in Gaza and West Bank pogroms, are just some of the hotspots. And with Trump and his merry-band of accelerationists, who-the-fuck knows what they will do next.
Especially now that leading members of the Trump Administration, including Secretary of State/National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio, top presidential aide, Stephen Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristie Noem, are bunking-down at military posts, in housing reserved for military officers.
Of course, it’s not just Trump. There are other more powerful forces and larger issues at play. Wall Street, private equity, big-oil and tech all have “skin in the game” too. Some of the Trump donors are also part of the Wall Street faction who, besides being pro-Zionist, have massive, world-wide investments at stake. The crisis is that U.S. financial system requires enormous amounts of new collateral, as in, natural resources like oil, natural gas, water, etc. to underwrite the over-leveraged U.S. shadow banking system.
What’s worse is that the rest of the political class, who would normally be an effective opposition, is useless. A large part of the discourse of the political class is the equivalent of tweets and posts, seeking “likes” from each other, with no obvious connection to reality. Trump is in a class by himself with his almost total disconnection from the real world but it’s a general problem. Politics has become performative: the actual result don’t matter, as long as it hits the PR high-points and is appealing to your fellow professional/managerial/caste (PMC) members. Killing “terrorists”/civilians and imposing austerity make you look strong and improve your status with the group.
How nice. Maybe that could be Trump’s campaign slogan when he runs for a third term?
But Senator Graham is correct in his ardor. During his first presidential term Trump used to at least posture as an America-First, anti-interventionist. In 2019 Trump said during a press conference, “Lindsey Graham would like to stay in the Middle East for the next thousand years with thousands of soldiers and fighting other people’s wars. I want to get out of the Middle East.”
Trump’s transformation, I believe, rests on two assumptions of influence: 1) The Epstein Tapes of Trump fucking under-aged girls. 2) The Zionist mega-donors, for whom fulsome military and financial support for Israel must be preserved at all costs.
Israel cannot exist without it. Furthermore, many, if not all Team Trump, have been imposed by these same donors and likeminded Zionist billionaires. Even as the corporate media neglected to cover it, Trump was characteristically candid about this reality during his address at the Knesset last month.
I guess Miriam Adelson is getting her 100 million dollars worth with Trump giving the Zionists everything they desire. He bombed Iran. He bombed Yemen. He’s poured massive amounts of weapons and ammunition into Israel to incinerate Gaza and to bomb Lebanon, while aggressively stomping out free speech that is critical of Israel’s war crimes. It’s been a stunning transformation. Trump has duped his base into believing he’d make peace, then turned out to be the biggest neocon since Shrub. It’s no wonder Lindsey has a boner for Donald.
People have noticed. Americans, especially young people, are souring on Israel, and Trump for his complicity in their ongoing genocide extravaganza. Even conservatives are in revolt over Israel. A major MAGA civil war erupted into the open in the last week, because Tucker Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes on his insanely popular podcast, where they mentioned that there are America-first Republicans and Israel-first Republicans.
Needless to say, this was not received well.
Naked Capitalism has a great blow-by-blow account of the conflict. “But the mess really hit the fan when Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, put out a video on X.com last Thursday defending Tucker Carlson from the “venomous coalition attacking him.” Roberts’ statement came after changes to their web site excising mentions of Tucker Carlson inspired speculation that they were preparing to disavow him…..These divisions on the right may be pitting one loathsome crew of racist reactionaries against another, but it is extremely novel to see the American Republican party and broader right wing tearing itself apart over whether or not to put Israel first.”
Mamdani’s election is a sign that the Democrats are primed for an overdue discussion of the malign Israeli influence on US foreign policy. All the better if it causes a civil-war
Update: Socialist, Zohran Mamdani overturned the New York power structure and was elected mayor, despite fierce Zionist billionaire opposition and fulsome spending. Mamdani angered them by criticizing Israel while sharing his pro-Palestinian views with supporters, who have become radicalized by videos of the deaths and destruction in Gaza. His election reflected a changed common perception of Israel.
Update 2: “Israel is a losing issue, signified when NYC, the most Jewish city in the nation, chooses a Muslim Mayor promising to arrest Bibi if he steps foot into the city. Israel is rapidly becoming a political pariah in America, and no amount of whining about it from the pro-Israel community will change that; only a reversal of policy by Bibi can mitigate this. Ackman understood this, which is why he spent the election panicking.”
Rich people don’t care all that much about chemistry, astronomy or archeology but they damn sure care about economics and political science, because political/economy is ultimately what determines the power structure of a society. Like I’ve stated repeatedly, ideas and ideologies matter, and the dominant economic idea for my adult lifetime has been neoliberalism. And neoliberalism has been very, very good to the wealthy who own America.
Unlike astronomy, neoliberalism affects the very foundations of the social and economic structure. It is the science of the ways and means by which the wealthy have come to their estate and how they go about enlarging it by corrupting the way in which we view the world. Any science that deals with the source of plutocrat power is going to be one that they really want to influence. Why are all the business schools funded by billionaires?
The bought and paid for economists and economic journalists praise neoliberalism and describe a best of times because for their benefactors it is. The concentration of wealth allows the ultra-wealthy and large corporations to pour immense resources into lobbying and political campaigns, giving them outsized influence over policy decisions.
Is the bifurcated economy the reason most Americans are so miserable? Indeed, elite calls for trust and appeals to shared values no longer resonates with a populace who has come to regard our economy as a vast looting operation for the insider billionaires, who are poised to become vastly richer under the hopelessly corrupt Trump Administration.
And this brings up an uncomfortable dilemma–the wealthy have little incentives to change US economic policies, especially since they control the economics departments, corporate media and government itself.
I would think that there might be a political angle here but, then again, I’m a dirty-hippy, anti-imperial, Hudsonist, who has never been caught.
Update: The push to implement AI offers a unvarnished view of the new economy, as the current AI development trajectory leads to an oligarchic concentration of power, where technology serves to optimize for capital accumulation rather than a broader social good.
camelotkidd 