Know thy enemy, know thyself

Posted on August 21, 2025 by camelotkidd

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.

This strategic and moral confusion in foreign policy bred a combination of overconfidence and breathtaking ineptness that has secured not primacy but disaster for America and its allies and partners.

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 The Washington 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.

Update: In the aftermath of the Alaskan Summit, the unreality continues.

“Europe will spend $100 billion it does not have, to buy weapons from America that it does not have, to arm soldiers that Ukraine now lacks,”

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Lost Republic

Posted on August 15, 2025 by camelotkidd

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.

The Trump administration, with its turbo-charging of oligarchy, is providing a sober reminder that unchecked wealth produces despotism.

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Shoveling coal for Satan

Posted on August 8, 2025 by camelotkidd

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.

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Made Men

Posted on July 30, 2025 by camelotkidd

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.

The one that George Carlin joked: “it’s a big club but you ain’t in it.”

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.

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Running Man

Posted on July 25, 2025 by camelotkidd

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Alternatives

Posted on July 18, 2025 by camelotkidd

What if voting for Democrats to confront Trumpism doesn’t work?

I’m sick of constantly being implored to vote harder but nothing seems to change. The Democrats promise reform yet when in office they serve us up the same menu of austerity, banker bail-outs and perpetual war.

Recently, Chris Hedges interviewed former Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, who has a different idea. “At the end of the day, the Democratic Party is a party of capitalism itself,” Sawant asserts. “The working class loses out more and more and is subjected to more and more misery with every passing decade that you’re not going to stand up for working people.” After years of battles against entrenched power Sawant came to understand that the Democrats serve billionaires too, and while slightly different than Republicans, voting for them and expecting change is a losing proposition. Sawant relates– “The Democrats on the City Council here in Seattle opposed every single progressive measure that my office fought for.”

Kshama is a leader for Workers Strike Back and Revolutionary Workers. And as a Seattle City Council member, she battled against the established Democratic Party leadership and the city’s oligarchs who poured millions into campaigns to defeat her including an unsuccessful effort to oust her in a recall vote. Amazon alone spent over $3 million to defeat her run for office in 2019.

A fierce advocate for reform, Sawant, spearheaded a winning campaign for a $15 an hour minimum wage in Seattle during her City Council tenure, as well as the Amazon Tax, which helped fund affordable housing. She tell Chris–“It also requires understanding that the Democrats and Republicans, despite their differences, they both represent the interests of the billionaires of capitalism. And so you’re not going to sweet talk them either… And yes, there are differences with the Republican Party, but it’s like Chomsky said, that there’s a smart way to keep people passive and obedient, and that is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

Sawant has constantly defied AIPAC in defending the Palestinian people while continuing to object to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. She is now running for Washington state’s 9th congressional district, against a genocidal warmongering Democrat, Adam Smith, who has voted repeatedly to send tens of billions of dollars to the Israeli state for the ongoing genocide. He voted for the war in Iraq back in 2002, and he also voted to create ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].

During the interview with Hedges, Sawant discussed her fellow democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in the New York City mayoral primary and the obstacles to fulfilling his campaign promises he could face if he gets into office. She says Mamdani’s victory should be celebrated, especially because it shows the Zionist lobby can be defeated not just in the U.S. but in a state home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.

Sawant worries that Mamdani will try to accommodate the the Democrat establishment and their billionaire backers. “This has shown that it actually, that’s exactly what we should be doing. The outstanding question here is what will it take to win any of these demands? And that’s where I think we have to conduct a lot of examination. I mean, I think the experience that we had on the Seattle City Council, we, my fellow socialists and we, I had the City Council office for a decade in Seattle. And what it took for us to win the historic victories, many of which you enumerated, it took what I would call a fighting strategy. And what does a fighting strategy mean? A fighting strategy, first and foremost, means that you understand that capitalism is a zero-sum game and that you cannot hope to win any substantial victories. I’m not talking about crumbs, but substantial reforms in the interest of the working class by thinking that you are going to sweet talk the billionaires into agreement with you.”

Sawant relates how the Democratic establishment used identity politics in an attempt to derail her class-based policies. “The Democratic Party unleashed this whole group of Black what I would call misleaders, Black misleaders, to go around at these protests saying, you should not support Kshama Sawant, you should not support the Amazon tax because that’s not a Black issue. They tried to disrupt many of the rallies that we were holding in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement saying, you should be talking about Black issues and furthermore, you’re not Black so you don’t get to have this platform. And we refused to accept that gatekeeping.”

Sawant refused to allow the Democrats to use identity politics against her. “Rather than accepting their just destructive gatekeeping, we said, we’re going to go directly to Black working people at the protest. And it was phenomenal. The support we got for the Amazon tax demand was sky high. The clipboards were practically flying out of our hands with people saying, fuck yeah, I want to tax Amazon. I’m going to sign that. And it’s hundreds, thousands of people showing up to our democratically organized Tax Amazon action conferences. That is what put pressure on the Democratic party.”

About her success in raising the minimum wage, Sawant made an important point. “If the system is so fragile that by lifting 100,000 workers in Seattle out of poverty, just lifting them above, it’s nothing lavish, it’s lifting them above absolute dire conditions, is going to collapse the system, then why on Earth are we even defending the system in the first place?”

That’s a question I often ask myself. We live in a crazy, mean country that cuts aid to the neediest Americans to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, funds Israeli genocide and is constantly attacking other countries.

Voting mindlessly for Democrats is for suckers. Fredrick Douglas knew the score when he exclaimed–“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will,”

Read the interview with Sawant and spread the word.

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The hits keep coming

Posted on July 11, 2025 by camelotkidd

A bombshell new CIA review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] on Russian Election Interference” was conducted by career professionals at the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis and was commissioned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe in May. The review found that the Obama administration’s spy agencies’ assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were “excessively involved” in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a “chaotic,” “atypical” and “markedly unconventional” process that raised questions of a “potential political motive.” Further, Brennan’s decision to include the discredited Steele dossier, over the objections of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts, “undermined the credibility” of the assessment. The Steele Dossier was found to have been financed by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

This is hardly a surprise. I probably wrote more about Russia-gate than any other subject. Much better writers, such as Robert Parry, Yves Smith, Aaron Mate, Glenn Greenwald, Ian Welsh, Matt Taibbi and Caitlin Johnstone, all called bullshit early and often.

But now it’s official.

If you’ll remember from the wayback machine, Russia-gate cast Trump’s 2016 victory as the product of a Kremlin plot, setting off the all consuming Russia frenzy that engulfed his presidency and further poisoned Washington-Moscow relations. The FBI launched a surveillance operation against the Trump campaign based on unverified opposition research. Ultimately, Russia-gate was an unprecedented intrusion by the deep state not only into the electoral process, but into the foreign policy of an elected president. Russia-gate roped Trump into a much more hawkish stance against Russia and in the process turbo-charged the Ukrainian proxy war still raging today.

Ultimately, Russia-gate was a brutally effective psy-op, one that transformed liberals into rabid cold-warriors cheering on the CIA and FBI, while sabotaging Trump’s efforts at diplomacy with Russia. These intelligence agencies interfered in domestic politics in a successful effort to radically influence foreign policy narratives.

The idea that America is ruled by a secret government of deep state intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI is a right-wing conspiracy theory, the media has said for the last decade. Journalists at outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and NPR have portrayed claims about a “deep state” as paranoid fabrications pushed by Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters to discredit legitimate government institutions. They insisted that accusations of political bias or covert influence by agencies like the CIA or FBI had no basis in fact and served only to inflame public distrust.

Yet the hits keep coming.

In parallel with the report on Russia-gate comes news that there was no Epstein client list. There were no tapes of powerful men having sex with underage girls, and furthermore, Epstein wasn’t murdered in his cell, he simply committed suicide. This week, the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation released a memo closing the case. The agencies had concluded, notwithstanding widespread suspicions, that Epstein hadn’t blackmailed any prominent people. Additionally, they had determined that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,” the memo said. 

Nothing to see here, move along.

Despite Trump’s campaign promises to dismantle the deep state and hold elites accountable, his administration now appears to be protecting the same intelligence and law enforcement networks it once condemned. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude the fix is in. Senior Trump officials, including Bondi, Patel, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, all have promised total transparency on Epstein. Instead, we get insults to our intelligence and a memo that reads like a cover-up.

Strong evidence suggests that Epstein was part of a sex blackmail operation tied to intelligence agencies, probably US intelligence and Mossad working together. Epstein’s mansions were wired with cameras, and the powerful men who “visited” were captured on tape having sex. Visitor logs show that William Burns, who served as CIA Director under President Biden, visited Epstein’s New York townhouse multiple times. The Wall Street Journal reported those visits in 2023 based on Epstein’s private calendar. In 2017, Alex Acosta, the Justice Department official who gave Epstein his 2008 plea deal, told Trump transition officials that he was told to back off Epstein because he “belonged to intelligence.” The Justice Department later admitted that all eleven months of Acosta’s emails from that period had disappeared.

It appears that the Trump wants the Epstein case disappeared too. Unfortunately, there’s that little nagging detail of Attorney General Pam Bondi admitting to the existence of the Epstein sex tapes. Bondi also has not only acknowledged that Epstein had a client list but said in February that it was in her possession. After Fox News host John Roberts asked if the DOJ would be “releasing a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients,” Bondi answered, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”

This failure to follow through seriously undermines Trump’s explicit commitments to reform and shine light on the deep state. This is not just about Epstein. The Trump administration has not been particularly transparent about much else. It’s weird but the Trump administration has released very little, even on issues where transparency would appear to be in its political interest. The administration has kept classified large volumes of material related to COVID origins, the FBI’s role in Russia-gate, and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

I have read that Trump’s election proves that we don’t have a deep state because they failed to stop him but I think the opposite and that they simply have him under their control. It is thus hard not to conclude that we really do have a deep state, with an intelligence community that continues to operate in violation of the constitutional system of checks and balances by evading meaningful congressional oversight. If the Trump administration fails to act, it will confirm the fear that even the most populist and combative president can be captured or neutralized by the very system he vowed to dismantle. And Trump will lose much of the legitimacy he gained by surviving and overcoming the law-fare, censorship, and weaponization of the deep state against him.

Think about it. No one powerful suffered any real consequences for Russia-gate. Ghislaine Maxwell is the only one in jail due to the Epstein affair. Similarly, none of Epstein’s elite male clients have faced real consequences. There was a trial, but no victim was asked to identify who abused them. There was no investigation into allegations of intelligence connections.

Ask yourself why. It’s because the real system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed. These scandals aren’t isolated. They’re systemic. This is how control works at the highest levels.

Face it.

The deep state won.

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Narrative Superpower

Posted on July 4, 2025 by camelotkidd

I’ve been discussing the US’s decline in conventional military power and resort to terrorism or “dirty war” as a result, but there is another factor to take into account. The America empire possess overwhelming dominance over the global media, allowing them to shape the meta narrative, or reality of much of the world’s population, including the political, economic and cultural elite. In the process, America has turned war into a performative spectacle, with our president sounding more and more like an unhinged ringmaster.

This same narrative management is deployed inwardly at our own citizenry and ruling elites. Even after all of the lies spewed by the corporate media pushing war, and other policies that are deeply inimical to the interests of most Americans, there is a surprisingly cohesive and committed support for US foreign and domestic policies. What’s apparent is is that incessant propaganda works on an unintelligent, uneducated and ill-informed public, but also, surprisingly, on the educated elite decision makers. The upshot is that the corporate media has convinced the ruling elite that anything less than a permanent war against China/Russia/Iran is Neville Chamberlain level appeasement, while anything other than Wall Street/hedge-fund looting is communism.

It’s a site to behold.

My job in the winter offers conversations with a wealthy, educated elite, and I can tell you that they strongly believe the conventional wisdom and recoil at my apostasy when the conversation turns to Russia’s Special-Military-Operation. To them it was an “unprovoked. invasion” launched by Hitler-want-to-be, Vladimir Putin, and my detailed explanations to the contrary produces bewilderment.

Unfortunately, anyone on 9/11 who can watch three skyscrapers suffer sudden full-structure failures and fall smoothly into their foundations, any media that can promulgate the idea that Russia was responsible for the destruction of its own Nord Stream gas pipelines–these are willing and able to consider any narrative and to believe anything.

We can witness the effectiveness of the elite propaganda by the way in which US officials like CENTCOM commander general Erik Kurilla, explain military reality. “Iran is in a weaker strategic position now than at any point in the last forty years,” Kurilla told the House Armed Services Committee on June 10, the same day, coincidentally, that the US transferred hundreds of missiles to Israel for its upcoming attack on Iran.

Then, during the 12 day slug-fest Iran seriously fucked-up Israel with it’s own inventory of ballistic missiles, which penetrated Israeli/US air-defenses with ease, destroying a wide-range of vital military/intelligence bases, refineries, airports, military/industrial complexes and research centers. Somehow that doesn’t sound “strategically weaker” to me but I’m not a ranking general, like Kurilla, with access to highly classified intelligence. The CENTCOM commander is known for his close relationship with PM Bibi Netanyahu and his enthusiasm for the Greater Israel Project, but if he believes the cover story that Israel triumphed in it’s war with Iran, he’s as loony as his commander-in-chief.

Welcome to post-modern America, where proof just ain’t what it used to be. And making sense of reality without AI to assist? That’s like saying that two plus two is either four or twenty-two. No, we’re dealing with peoples and elites who don’t take reality too seriously. Or like Karl Rove explained–how they create their own reality.

However, narrative only goes so far and reality has a annoying habit of intruding no matter what “Turd Blossom” says. The accelerating authoritarianism/corporate propaganda we’re seeing in the US is characterized by the plutocrats’ war uni-party and burgeoning police state, and is a direct result of the ever widening economic inequality among other symptoms. While it gets a whole lot of attention when Trump is in office, it’s been a long time coming.

Obama led a nationwide paramilitary crackdown on Occupy after bailing out finance and turfing millions of Americans out of their homes. Biden oversaw repression of student protests against US-backed genocide. And let’s not forget all the ongoing global abuses of the War on Terror: illegal wars and drone death raining from the skies abroad while homelessness, surveillance, and deaths of despair surge. Both the Republicans and Democrats, or the uni-party, serve the plutocrats and moves evermore rightward to stifle dissent and expand the rapaciousness at home and abroad.  Trump is an accelerant in this regard, torching American diplomacy and what little remains of the social safety net, speech and due process protections, as well as collective bargaining law.

Trump’s secret power is that he makes all of the machinations obvious, while exposing the differences in narrative management between the two political parties. Democrat’s have a different way of selling empire than Republicans. The neoliberal Democratic Party emphasizes “human-rights” and “democracy’, while the Republicans favor strong neoconservative, muscular foreign-policies involving MOAB bunker-buster bombs as a way to compensate for their small penises.

Presidents come and go but Washington’s political class manifests less and less regard for the long-term strategic interests of its own citizens security and prosperity.

I don’t know what it will take to wake up somnolent Americans but I try to carry out my own little acts of rebellion to help undermine public perception of the official empire narrative and so should you. Because, after all: “To live without Hope is to Cease to live.”

Update: Caitlin Johnstone offers some words of encouragement.

“It’s hard to imagine how western governments could make support for Palestine look more attractive to western youths, really. Here’s this unimaginably horrific mass atrocity that they can all watch unfolding on their phone screens in real time every single day of the year, and they’re being told “You’re not allowed to oppose this. We, the stuffed shirts in Washington and London, command you to obey. If you think unauthorized thoughts and chant unauthorized chants, we are going to get very huffy and upset.”

I mean, can you think of anything more fun?

This is after all the generation who’s been told that they need to accept being poorer and sicker than their parents and grandparents and that they’ll never own a home no matter what they do, knowing full well that the crusty old bastards finger-wagging at them for opposing an active genocide are the same freaks who’ve refused to do anything to steer their planet’s ecosystem away from looming disaster. They have every reason to want to express defiance, and nothing to lose by doing so.

A real, politically meaningful counterculture has been born in the western world, and our rulers are already showing us that they’re afraid of it. This is a fascinating time to be alive.”

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Eat or be eaten

Posted on June 26, 2025 by camelotkidd

Amazon staff on Tuesday got an email from their CEO, Andy Jassy, who admonished them to eat or be eaten by AI, while also informing them that they should expect “headcount reductions” over the next few years.

Amazon’s corporate behavior is not out of the ordinary and reflects the logic of late-stage capitalism, with its callous disregard for workers and vast income and wealth inequalities. What’s notable is that this sort of savage law of the jungle is right in line with US foreign policies of empire with its concomitant violence and endless war.

Indeed, by bombing Iran, the US has openly declared that the only operative logic is that of raw, unrestrained savagery. The US has always made it a point to break international law in order to show the rest of the world that the rules don’t apply to it because nobody else was in the position to counter it’s military power. Meanwhile, as its conventional power has dissipated the US has resorted to terrorism, or what Washington Post writer, David Ignatius’ calls the “dirty war”, as its modus operandi.

Americans may remain ignorant or unconcerned about US foreign policies but the US’s increasingly unhinged behavior abroad is a profound threat to what little freedoms we still have left here at home. Make no mistake: the American ruling classes open embrace of Mafia-style gangsterism in Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Libya Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. also means that they will have no qualms about brushing aside whatever ethical, legal, constitutional and democratic constrains that still stand in the way of their frantic bid to preserve the crumbling order.  

Watching all of this unfold, I question our sanity. How is everyone not bat-shit crazy? I hover on the edge and writing this blog is my therapy but what-the-fuck?

Our president is certainly crazy. But Trumpism came into existence precisely because we live in a wildly unequal and increasingly economically precarious society, supported fulsomely by the neoliberal centrism of the Democratic Party, which to no ones surprise made them increasingly unappealing to voters. The real problem is that Trump’s right-wing authoritarian demagoguery is simply a particularly dangerous symptom of a much deeper malady.

Amazon CEO’s proclamation is a sign of what’s to come from the feral elite who rule uneasily over an increasingly unstable empire.

Stay safe out there.

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The Empire Strikes Back

Posted on June 20, 2025 by camelotkidd

We knew it was coming and with the recent attacks on Russia and now Iran, the US national-security-state is rolling the dice. It’s game-on.

As the American empire loses primacy, and as it’s major weapons systems turn out to be fragile and ineffective, it’s increasingly turning to asymmetric, hybrid-warfare, especially high-tech terrorism. We’ve already seen what the preferred tactics are: assassinations, drone and terror bombings, cyber attacks, sanctions, divisions by ethnicity and religion in the “enemy” country, the whole color-revolution playbook, etc.

The Israeli attack on Iran had all of the hallmarks of the Ukraine attack on Russian airbases. Israel’s initial strike included the use of trailer-truck drones — the same tactic that Ukraine used on June 1 against Russia’s strategic air assets. Moreover, the US/NATO, Ukraine effort to assassinate Putin while attacking Russian nuclear assets looks very much like the effort to decapitate the Iranian regime with its attack on Iran.

Israeli sources claim Mossad established a covert drone launch site deep inside Iran, that was built over several months. The vehicle mounted drones were then deployed against Iranian anti-aircraft missile systems, communication infrastructure, military commanders and nuclear scientists.

Like I said, it sounds a lot like the Ukraine drone attack against Russia, where both operations involved US intelligence, surveillance technology and military assets.

Trump’s comments and behavior after both of these actions only solidify the reality that the US regime is a rogue state and never a good faith actor. Iran just became the latest victim of its betrayal. Senior Israeli official disclosed to The Jerusalem Post that the Netanyahu and Trump regimes colluded “to convince Tehran that diplomacy was still possible after Israel was ready to attack Iran.” As the Jerusalem Post reported, “The round of U.S.–Iranian nuclear negotiations scheduled for Sunday was part of a coordinated U.S.–Israeli deception aimed at lowering Iran’s guard ahead of Friday’s attack.”

For the US national-security-state, the idea is to keep Israel as the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East so that it can project unrestrained military power across an oil-rich region the West is determined to control. What we have been witnessing over the past 20 months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, terror attacks on the leaders of Hezbollah and the destruction of Syria, is Israel and the US jointly remaking the Middle East through extreme violence. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz noted this week, in one of those quiet-part-out-loud moments: “This [the attack on Iran] is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us.”

There’s an economic as well as geo-strategic aspect to Israel’s attack on Iran. Military power depends on economic power. There’s the vast hydrocarbon resources, but Iran also is crucial to various trade and and pipeline plans, an ally of China and Russia, as well as a member of BRICS. Iran’s geographically strategic location has long positioned it as a bridge between East and West, as well as a key crossroads along the ancient Silk Road. In 2024 Iran also became a full member of BRICS, and in late May 2025 the first train ran on the Urumqi (China) to Tehran (Iran) railway, providing a direct rail freight link between the two nations; developing Iran as a transport hub with links to both China and Russia.

Viewed through this lens the US-Israel attack on Iran can be considered a front line in the war against China and Russia. The Ukraine war and the Israel-Iran conflict are not separate crises, but interlinked fronts in a stealthy world war — one that pits the US against a de facto alliance of of Russia, Iran and China. With the wars in Ukraine and West Asia now merging, the economic basis of the conflict is being revealed. The US is trying to destroy BRICS. The states standing in the way must be crushed.

The fingerprints of the US can be found all over the latest plot. As the initial attack was ongoing, the US Navy attempted to shoot down Iranian missiles as Iraq, under the control of the US, closed its airspace to Iranian fighter jets. Donald Trump’s claim that ‘he knew everything’ is because the US is uniquely responsible for the attack. At this point, claims that it was only Israel that attacked Iran are ridiculous.

Israel is our “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the Middle East and their policies of rape, murder, terror bombing and genocide are our policies. The US and Israel view this larger war a zero-sum game, and there is no act considered out of bounds. This is the dark-side of the American empire: the US national-security-state wages a non-stop terror war against civilians and civilian infrastructure, while deluding Americans with tales of democracy and freedom.

The US empire and their colonial implant-Israel-are following the same ambition that drove every colonial power since the nineteenth century: unfettered access to cheap labour and natural resources. And one where genocide and wars of aggression are normalized. For that vision to become reality, the Iranian government must be toppled for standing up to the empire and attempting to achieve economic and political sovereignty.

What we have is the battle between the US global order and those states intent on retaining their sovereignty in the face of an empire hellbent on maintaining control. It’s ironic that the actions America is taking and enabling are monstrous yet they are accelerating America’s decline. Unfortunately, empires do not go gentle into that long night.

Update: Seymour Hersh’s sources say the US will attack Iran this weekend.

If Trump pulls the trigger, the Jeffery Epstein/Mossad honeypot operation must have some explicit pictures of him fucking young girls. Maybe he has a small dick and doesn’t want anyone to know?

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