Lost in the Flood

Posted on May 23, 2025 by camelotkidd

In the wake of the 2024 beat-down, the Democrats and their various interest groups promised introspection–as in how the fuck did we get to a point where Trump could make it to the White House, not once but twice?

But, of course, it has never happened. They can’t even come clean about Biden’s dementia, as the reaction to the release of the Biden-Hur special counsel interview, demonstrates. According to Axios, which released the recording, Biden frequently slurred words or muttered, and “appears to validate Hur’s assertion that jurors in a trial likely would have viewed Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden certainly did not sound like someone who should be president, which immediately raises the question of who the fuck was running the country instead?

Asking us to believe that none of the senior members of his Administration, or ranking members of Congress knew anything about Biden’s condition is an insult. The corporate media deserves a lot of blame, because after the interview they insisted Biden was “sharp,” and slammed Hur’s assertions as politically motivated. And now, with Biden’s cancer diagnosis, we’re supposed to forget all about the dementia and sympathize with the “nice elderly statesman.”

Covering for Biden mental state is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a reckoning. I can’t be the only one who has read the Powell Memo, which was a to-do list for for the right-wing reactionaries, who are rampaging through government and civil-society. Jeebus! The corporate call-to-arms was written over 50 years ago. None of our political and economic elite can act surprised at what the second coming of Trump has wrought.

That brings up the elephant in the room. The reason for the lack of reckoning is simple. Every member of the “Resistance” to Trump has been cool with the policies that brought us to this point. It’s quite apparent that the excesses and depredations of neoliberal economic policy and unfettered capitalism and globalization and financialization helped break the country and contributed mightily to the present moment. But do you see a reckoning by liberals or the Democratic Party? Don’t be silly. You see them putting out statements about how important business-friendly policies are going forward.

The party that enacted the New Deal and Great Society reforms and champion of unions and blue-collar workers in the twentieth century, abandoned its economic program, leaving the US political scene without an organized opposition to neoliberalism. Liberals and Democratic Party have fully accepted the logic of neoliberalism, where the “market” is a mysterious, all-powerful entity, and if your job disappears or your company is offshored, then it’s nobody’s “fault,” it’s just the implacable hand of the market.

The incentives behind everything we do have been affected by decades of neoliberal thinking, and a flood of neoliberal propaganda has swept all counter ideologies away. Everything has been swept away, including common sense.

Accompanying the triumph of neoliberalism has been the embrace of neoliberalism’s cousin–Identity Politics (IdPol). IdPol rewarded and rewards the professional/managerial/caste (PMC), who largely make up the “modern” Democratic Party, which brings us to another reason why there hasn’t been a reckoning. The PMC “got their’s”. The goals of capturing positions of wealth and power by (educated and upper-class) woman, people of color and LGBT has largely been achieved, and so policies that benefit middle and working-class Americans languish. And because liberals have lost any inclination to frame politics in economic or class terms, they have no compelling counterargument to the Right’s seductive cultural account of lost American greatness.

You see it with the new Democratic-Abundance Caucus, where the fundamental problem with Ezra Klein’s Abundance, is that it carefully avoids taking aim at the usury, speculation and economic rent extraction of Wall Street and the corporatists that have eviscerated American communities. Abundance is acclaimed and well compensated precisely because it provides cover for the ongoing pillaging by the billionaires who fund both parties. Only by eliminating the usury, speculation and economic rent extraction that has come to dominate the economy over the past half century can you possibly hope to build an economics of wide-spread, equitably shared prosperity.

And, you’re really better off abandoning any sort of conventional understanding of the situation. Instead, view it as a crime drama, with competing criminal syndicates vying for power and control, with an also criminal corporate media covering it along party lines. See Matt Taibbi’s, Hate Incorporated, for a primer on the tribal aspect of the corporate media.

This works because a culture of incuriosity prevents any real understanding of how both political parties and the corporate media operate. Trump’s secret power is that he makes it visible. He’s like the party guest who spiked the punchbowl with Everclear, fucked the host’s wife, and lit the house on fire.

It’s a familiar dynamic:

“Hey man, did you see that?
Those poor cats are sure messed up
I wonder what they were gettin’ into
Or were they all just lost in the flood?”

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No Carrot, Just Stick

Posted on May 16, 2025 by camelotkidd

US diplomacy is significant for it’s lack of diplomacy. We don’t do diplomacy, we just issue edicts that if not obeyed lead to sanctions, covert-ops and invasions.

The imperial rational was articulated by Karl Rove, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

However, that was over 20 years ago and now the American empire has reached its sell-by-date.

Sanctions are a good place to start. The US has come to rely on a host of powerful sanctions based on its control over the world’s financial system. Unfortunately, the overuse of this economic black-mail has ended up undermining the American empire by forcing countries to de-couple from the dollar, hastening it’s reserve currency privilege.

Talk about blow-back.

Then there’s our record of covert-ops and invasions, which is not that great. There was the occupation of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the destruction of Libya and Syria, the Ukrainian coup, followed by the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Lots of death and destruction but nothing that one would describe as a win. Any honest appraisal would conclude that the US’s commitment of force over diplomacy has been an abject failure. Except for the military/industrial/complex (MIC) which views failed wars as an inexhaustible fountain of profit.

The freak-out over Cuba hosting Chinese signal intelligence, is illustrative of the Beltway zeitgeist. It’s also extremely hypocritical, considering the US’s ongoing proxy-war against Russia in Ukraine. Americans don’t see the hypocrisy, but the rest of the world certainly does.

All of this, and more is causing a sort-of mass-psychosis among Washington’s elite factions, demonstrated by Trump’s ongoing tariff cluster-fuck.

Trump’s actions reflects deeper realities within American foreign policy thinking. While his rhetoric may appear to break with the bipartisan interventionist orthodoxy of the past, his “America First” doctrine remains grounded in a belief in US global supremacy–as evidenced by his failed bombing campaign in Yemen and aggressive trade tactics. Moreover, the wars and covert-ops continue no matter the president or party. Since 9/11 the US has fully embraced military solutions and only military solutions, as the forever wars testify. When it comes to wars, there is a deep state fully committed to bellicosity. We can witness this dynamic in relation to Trump’s peace proposals for Ukraine, then the refusal to hear Russian grievances, and the ongoing hostility from the national security state.

For Trump, negotiating such a deal with Moscow was always going to be politically risky. The American national security establishment, as well as Trump’s own administration, is filled with neocons committed to prolonging the conflict to weaken Russia. While Trump and peace envoy, Steve Witkoff, may have been serious about reaching a deal, the internal resistance was overwhelming. Faced with this pressure, Trump appears unwilling to take the political risk necessary to follow through. 

To understand Trump’s dilemma perhaps it’s useful to paraphrase President Clinton’s advisor James Carville‘s famous pronouncement–It’s the end of empire, stupid. The end of the American empire and transition to multipolarity is coming no matter the deep state’s frantic efforts. The signs are everywhere if you care to look.

If there was any sort of responsibility among our political leadership, there should be a reckoning. And certainly for the corporate media, who is just as complicit with their cheerleading of the neoliberal economic and neoconservative foreign policies that have brought us to this point. What’s beyond doubt, though, is that the corporate media, which once saw neoliberalism triumphant everywhere, which once saw an American hyper-power bestriding the globe forever, which once saw liberal democracy spreading unstoppably through the Middle East, will have been wrong again.

Unfortunately, as the empire loses primacy, Washington continues to act as the protecter of western capitalism even as the US military staggers from one debacle to another. Something has to give. Due to the sort of short term thinking that has crippled American industry, the lack of effective diplomacy has lost what goodwill America has in the world and is now viewed, largely, as a rogue state that threatens international peace and security.

Empire’s don’t collapse; they commit suicide by destroying their primary sources of wealth: respect and industry, driven by elite malfeasance and corruption. All imperial powers behave like rogue states, but the cultural hegemony and prestige of America has had nearly as much to do with its global dominance as military strength or economic might. To instill obedience into an empire, a state needs mystique and the ability to seduce allies and partners to do their bidding. The US doesn’t really have this any longer, as the world has long seen the hypocrisy of American actions. 

The end of empire and multipolarity promises radical changes, including the US State Department abandoning the threats and sanctions and relearning diplomacy.

Or, not.

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Apostasy

Posted on May 9, 2025 by camelotkidd

To be an intellectual is to be an apostate.

In our neoliberal milieu, where everything has been commodified, intellectual thought, discourse and opinion has lost any of the verve that makes it precious and has thus become debased.

Therefore, intellectualism is only possible in a market-based society as apostasy.

The people we think of as public intellectuals in America have signed a pact with the devil, for when they attach themselves to wealth and power they surrender their freedom of expression without gaining any significance as political or moral actors. They are not critical thinkers, they are simply hired-hands, providing intellectual justification for greed.

As Irving Howe pointed out in his 1954 essay This Age of Conformity, “For it is crucial to the history of the American intellectuals in the past few decades — as well as to the relationship between ‘wealth’ and ‘intellect’ — that whenever they become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals.”

That was 70 years ago. Today, try and name a famous intellectual who is not a hired shill. Furthermore, why does someone like Thomas Friedman still has a perch on the New York Times, Op-Ed page? To ask is to answer.

Ideas, as they say, have consequences. The Republicans and Democrats sold the con of neoliberalism to deindustrialize the country, impose punishing austerity, eradicate the freedoms to organize and gut regulations to protect the public from exploitation. They empowered corporations to pillage and consolidate their wealth and power, giving rise to monopoly capitalism and some of the greatest levels of income inequality and wealth inequality in American history.

All of this was justified and cheered on by the bought-and-paid-for economic intellectuals.

Meanwhile, as funding for the arts dried up, artists and public broadcasting which was designed to give a voice to those not tethered to corporate interests, were left searching for grants and corporate sponsors. The result has been a withering away of artistic and journalistic integrity.

The banks, communications, oil, weapons, agricultural and food industries that sit astride our economy guarantee profits by fixing prices, skirting or even abolishing financial, health and environmental protections, and abusing their workers. This assault on New Deal regulations, soon to be entirely obliterated under Trump, disenfranchised the working class that in desperation voted in a demagogue to save them.

This is a crisis decades in the making but as I’ve noted before, Trump is simply an accelerant to the process. And now the neoliberal economists in Trump administration view every crisis as an opportunity to implement their far-right, “shock doctrine” theories about shrinking government, lowering taxes, and further strengthening the US oligarchy. 

If we are to make America great again, we must make markets competitive and where they can’t be, in natural monopolies like energy and water and so on, we must have regulations that directly control prices. This isn’t really a hard problem, conceptually. We know how to create competitive markets, and regulate non-competitive markets. We’ve done it before.

It is entirely a political issue, because the plutocrats with tons of money have massive political power. Unfortunately, they also have the resources to purchase the economic intellectuals who formulate policies justifying the pillaging of the commons, in the name of “efficiency”. The DOGE-bags are just the latest itineration of this process.

This is why I am dead set against neoliberalism, with its commodification of all aspects of life. Rather than a marketplace of ideas stimulating intellectual discourse, neoliberalism curtails and channels intellectual discourse into an acceptable product. You can witness this in the sorts of economic thoughts and ideas that are acceptable and which one are not. Orthodox economists like Larry Summers, who’s ideas justified the financialization, globalization and off-shoring that have produced the vast inequalities plaguing America, is lauded, while heterodox economist Michael Hudson, who accurately predicted the carnage of neoliberalism, is marginalized.

Update: This won’t end well.

“After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” That future may arrive sooner than expected when you consider what a short window college really is. Already, roughly half of all undergrads have never experienced college without easy access to generative AI. “We’re talking about an entire generation of learning perhaps significantly undermined here…It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”

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A Clockwork Orange

Posted on May 2, 2025 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

The cognitive dissonance must be deafening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Into the Fire

Posted on April 25, 2025 by camelotkidd

Vastly unequal empires never end well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Won’t Get Fooled Again

Posted on April 18, 2025 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I won’t get fooled again.

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

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

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

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

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Pyrrhic

Posted on April 11, 2025 by camelotkidd

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

They won and here we are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Given all this, a populist backlash was almost inevitable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Now They Tell Us

Posted on April 4, 2025 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Yeltsin Years

Posted on March 28, 2025 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here we are.

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

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

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

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MIGA

Posted on March 21, 2025 by camelotkidd

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

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

Including Israel’s ongoing genocide.

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

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

What matters are his actions, and his responsibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They don’t benefit you or me.

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