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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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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