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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Oligarchy

Posted on June 13, 2025 by camelotkidd

The problem with oligarchy is the capriciousness. Under a system of laws, there’s a known quality of acceptable behavior, while with oligarchy everything can change in an instant, as demonstrated with the Trump/Musk dust-up.  The problem with Musk is not that he went from being a “good billionaire” to being a “bad billionaire.” The problem is that we have a political system that venerates billionaires and that facilitates their subversion of democracy–a system supported by both major parties. And, yes, the US is clearly an oligarchy. The fact that their presidential and congressional sock-puppets hold elections allows them to call their system a democracy for PR purposes.

The other problem with oligarchy–and it’s a big one–is the violence inherent in such an unequal system. It’s obvious in the way in which the Trump Administration is wielding ICE as a violent para-military in Los Angelos, while the deployment of National Guard troops and a battalion of Marines threatens a furthering of the militarization of American society. What began as a fairly small protest against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid at an apparel manufacturer in the Fashion District in downtown Los Angeles on June 6, led to an immediate response by federal agents in riot gear using pepper spray and “nonlethal bullets” to clear a path for vans to leave with detainees. 

The violence you are witnessing in Los Angelos in response to ICE brutality is tied to the maintenance of late stage capitalism. Remember kids–fascism is corporatism.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 7: Protests and confrontations between immigration rights supporters and law enforcement are seen taking place in Paramount, California, and downtown Los Angeles, California, United States on June 7, 2025, following recent raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents. Demonstrators are seen using blockades and facing tear gas, flash bang grenades, and pepper ball shots, as rising tensions lead to damaged property across the affected areas. (Photo by Taurat Hossain/Anadolu via Getty Images)

It’s a theatre of cruelty but there’s a certain capitalist logic to it. It’s notable that ICE is targeting immigrant labor organizers and labor members, while the violence against demonstrators is designed to deter other Americans from joining or sympathizing. Not only is the Trump administration not going after the employers of undocumented labor, but it is instead targeting union members who are legally living and working in the US. Unions are increasingly sounding the alarm that the ICE agents snatching people off the street is part of the administration’s wider crackdown on organized labor.

50 years of bi-partisan neoliberal policies have produced an oligarchy and captured state that resorts to violence as it’s legitimacy withers. The US government is a tool of corporations, banks, the war industry and oligarchs. It cannibalizes itself to funnel wealth upwards. Government, at all levels, serves corporate interests no matter who holds high positions. While there is some difference between Republicans and Democrats, when it comes to economic and foreign policies there is zero difference. The most revealing experience that we have of that harsh reality is when President Obama “foamed the runway” for the criminal banksters with millions of American homeowners in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s only gotten worse with Biden and now Trump-Part 2. Trump makes it obvious as he shoves the oligarchy in our faces, but the state of affairs has poisonous effects that go beyond the dominant influence of the rich on the nation’s economy and government. Nations and societies have a moral aspect, but oligarchy is setting precedents and modeling the unaccountability and irresponsibility that is pervading executive power throughout the society. Three successive presidential administrations and decades of rogue behavior by corporate elites have set norms now evident in institutions as diverse as universities and think tanks, the military and professional associations – even private clubs. The cumulative result is a widespread degrading of standards in the uses and abuses of power.

Meanwhile, it’s quite clear that oligarchy contributes to our endless wars as privileged insiders further the conflicts for wealth and power.

Sounds like Palantir’s business plan.

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Playing With Matches

Posted on June 6, 2025 by camelotkidd

I wonder about the national-security-state types who continue the dangerous proxy war against Russia. What part of don’t fuck with Russia do they not understand? Are are they simply historically illiterate? Or is it something larger–the loss of their proxy war signaling the end of Western hegemony?

The US empire has lost the proxy war it provoked in 2022, and is in a state of denial combined with a compulsion to prolong it well beyond the point of sanity. You can see the desperation with the latest PR stunt by the the Ukrainian SBU, crucially aided by the US/NATO intelligence and targeting data, attacking Russian airbases with drones and bombing railroad bridges, and now attacking the Kerch Bridge again. The Crimean bridge, is also a civilian target. Russia no longer needs this structure, which connects Russia with Crimea, for military purposes – military transports are routed to Crimea via the land bridge.

Much of the desperation is driven by the need to continue public support for the glorious proxy war. The corporate media is certainly all in, as are liberals. Russia-gate has succeeded in conflating Putin with Trump, so liberals are giddy with the Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian airbases while ignoring the potential for a nuclear war, so long as they own Trump. It seems that US foreign policy is driven almost exclusively by domestic considerations. (By the way, I hate to link to MSNBC, and Rachael Maddow, but the crazy is a sight to behold.)

The whole thing is so stupid that it makes my head hurt, but such is the level of political awareness and discourse in the US. Furthermore, the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has featured informational warfare on a new and frightening level, different from anything before, and public opinion is heavily influenced by mainstream media outlets that effectively operate as elements of the U.S. military-industrial-complex. This informational warfare, psy-op is aimed directly at American and European citizens, especially liberal members of the professional/managerial/class. The Western mass media continues to spin narratives favorable to Ukraine based on pyrrhic victories while ignoring or tardily reporting negative battlefield developments.

The lack of knowledge about Russian military history is a good example of the narrative fog. The historic pattern of Russia’s large wars has been that of a stumbling start, then a steady, grinding advance to victory. From Borodino in 1812, to Stalingrad in 1943, to Chechnya in 2000, to Georgia in 2008, whenever Russia has fully committed to a war, it has prevailed. This is especially so when Ukraine is utilized by enemies as an invasion route.

The shock, disbelief and denial caused by the pending defeat in Ukraine may explain the deep state retreating into unreality and propaganda. Yet, even as the battlefield situation deteriorates there is no sign that our elite are becoming more reality-based in their understanding. The poisonous combination of weakness, fear and aggressive rhetoric that a Russian victory will produce in the West is a more dangerous issue. Indeed, our putative leaders and their corporate media sock-puppets are ready to launch the bombers and ICBM’s. Maybe Saturday Night Live can do a skit where Rachael Maddow rides the thermonuclear bomb, like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove?

I’m not holding my breath.

And here’s where it gets murky. Who’s in charge of the American empire’s foreign policy? It’s almost certain that the US intelligence and targeting coordination was essential in the airbase drone strikes, which is further confirmation the US has no interest in peace. Worse, it confirms that we are dedicated to the neocon strategy of trying to bleed Russia and thus will never give up on fighting. The drone attacks, along with the attacks on railroads and bridges is also confirmation of the US and European determination to keep the war going no matter what, and that means among other things terrorism even after the Ukraine army and state collapse.

Ultimately, it appears that the Trump Administration is completely captured by the neocons, allied with Wall Street, and other deep state denizens. That’s who’s running it. It isn’t Donald Trump, who’s too busy feuding with Musk and living up to his TACO nickname.

What drives the American empires’s foreign policy is the craving to maintain global economic primacy. And terrorizing other states with US military might is seen as the only way to ensure such primacy. In that way, arming Israel is seen as no different from arming Ukraine to weaken Russian influence in eastern Europe. In the Middle East, it’s about containing Iran, who’s allied with Russia and China, who are all geo-strategic rivals, viewed exclusively through the prism of US/NATO “full-spectrum dominance”.

The ultimate aim of the proxy war against Russia, has been, paradoxically, choking off China’s rise by destroying their key ally. This aim effectively represents common ground amongst all factions of the American empire, by protecting the dollar system from collapse. The notion of the U.S. recovering its former position as a world-class manufacturing centre is largely a diversional narrative crafted for domestic purposes.

I think everything is getting crazy because the American empire, or the entire Western capitalist system, is a belief system and quasi-religion, maybe a cult, and the intellectual scaffolding that underlies the whole thing is collapsing.

We survived the first Cold War, where incidents and accidents brought us perilously close to Armageddon, and I’m not thrilled that the deep state is barreling towards planet destruction while well paid propagandists salivate over nuclear war. In the link to MSNBC, above, hosts Rachel Maddow and Nicolle Wallace, gush over Ukraine’s “audacious” drone attacks. Maddow confided to Wallace how they really weren’t that different from Leni Riefenstahl. “I feel like you’re, you’re one of my friends who understands how my brain works on this sort of thing. Like, it is an incredible war story about Ukraine’s capability and their resilience and their creativity and the way they have just done this, you know, like David versus Goliath… But it also does have international strategic implications for every country in the world… In Russia’s position, in terms of thinking about its own defenses, thinking about its own nuclear deterrence…”

Nicolle Wallace. That name sounds familiar? In her former political career, Wallace served as the White House Communications Director during the second term of the presidency of George W. Bush and as the Communications Director for his 2004 re-election campaign. Wallace also served as a senior advisor for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

That Nicolle Wallace.

But, when you think about it, inciting conservatives to hate on Muslims with the war-on-terror gig, while whipping liberals into a Russia-phobic frenzy with Russia-gate is the reason why Nicolle Wallace and Rachael Maddow are paid millions of dollars. That the invasion of Iraq was a monstrous war crime and foreign policy debacle, and that Russia-gate turned out to be a big flop, with Maddow’s ratings taking a monumental hit, doesn’t matter because there will always be another war to promote.

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Malpractice

Posted on May 30, 2025 by camelotkidd

Thanks to decades of neoliberal economic malpractice it’s difficult, if not impossible, to run a small business in America. The last election made it clear that this state of affairs is a political problem as well as an economic one.

Economist Philip Pilkington writes that Austrian economist and early neoliberal, Friedrich von Hayek’s delusion that markets equal ‘freedom’ has become conventional wisdom. “In polite company, and in public, you can certainly be left-wing or right-wing, but you will always be, in some shape or form, neoliberal – otherwise you will simply not be allowed entry to discourse. Each country may have its own peculiarities, but on broad principles they follow a similar pattern: debt-led neoliberalism is first and foremost a theory of how to reengineer the state in order to guarantee the success of the market– and that of its most important participants: modern corporations”.

Neoliberalism, unlike laissez-faire capitalism, demands a powerful state repurposed in the service of corporations and the apex predators that own them. Unfortunately, this emphasis on the wellbeing of corporations has had a deleterious effect on small businesses and workers.

I’ve argued repeatedly about the need for government spending on infrastructure to facilitate a true “free market”. Single-payer health care, quality public education, mass-transit transportation options, high-speed internet, clean water, sewage systems, etc. are all public utilities that make running a small business and employing workers possible and beneficial. Yet, neoliberal ideology postulates the privatization of all of these things, and you can see the results. The US is a high-cost economy with privatization tollbooths erected across key nodes of the economy. It’s not a productive economy but an extractive one. Rent-seeking has replaced innovation.

There has been a silver lining for the 1%, who pocketed 50 trillion, with a T, thanks to neoliberal economic policies that transferred the wealth from lower and middle-class Americans. Who says politics is boring? Nothing is more political that who gets what, and who gets stuck with the bill. Neoliberal economics has been the dominant ideology during the transfer, and the primary function of ideologies is to justify elite behavior, in this case, theft.

I suppose that a pleasant life with health care, child care, higher education, public transportation, and housing provided by the state at modest cost would make government popular. Likewise, it seems obvious that there should be a political party that represents my sentiments.

What’s ironic is that the the US never would have developed into a manufacturing and economic powerhouse had it followed neoliberal nostrums. It’s a historical fact that no significant industry, and no key technology, has ever been developed without some level of planning and government encouragement. If our young republic would have been overseen by the World Bank, IMF, and their neoliberal experts, the US would still be exporting cotton.

Conveniently, we have China for a counter example to neoliberal insanity. The Chinese have ignored neoliberal economics, and instead have embraced mixed state planning and market competition, which features state-led industrial upgrade programs, intense market-based competition and rapid improvement in industrial mastery. China has also invested heavily in infrastructure. Pull up some Youtube of Chinese high-speed trains, to remind you of what’s possible.

Here’s the truth. A society can’t be organized solely by the “market”. It’s hard to believe that we ever fell for such economic malpractice.

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