Mangione Moment

Posted on March 14, 2025 by camelotkidd

How long before we have another Mangione moment, when someone opens fire on a CEO, banker or politician?

How soon before some poor, desperate American, with nothing to lose, attacks one of the sociopaths who rule our country?

The Sackler family amassed a fortune by creating an epidemic of opiate addiction. The Walton family got rich by deliberately destroying the local economies of small towns so that everyone would work and shop at the local Walmart. Elon Musk is a Pentagon contractor who’s helping US intelligence construct a planetary surveillance network. Jeff Bezos got rich with the help of contracts with the CIA and Pentagon, and Amazon’s aggressive campaign to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy is destroying whole industries and creating immense suffering for workers. Larry Ellison’s Oracle is intertwined with the US intelligence cartel and the Israeli genocide machine, as is Peter Theil’s Palantir.

These are the kinds of people that American society rewards–scum. The more ruthless and duplicitous you are willing to be, the easier it is for you to become obscenely wealthy and powerful. Our system, with it’s perverse incentives, rewards and elevates sociopathy, which is why we find ourselves ruled by sociopaths.

Many in our society are increasingly aware that our economy essentially exists to victimize them. It deliberately promotes inequality, exploitation of the most vulnerable through abusive employment practices, and preying on the least well off by excessive charges for interest and rent. Concurrently, the non-stop advertising depicting beautiful, happy people enjoying products and experiences that the average American can only dream of simply reinforces the vast inequality.

And now the beatings will continue until moral improves. The DOGE-bags, with their savage cuts, mass firings and threats to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, are certainly stacking the kindling for the kind of conflagration that could turn the country into a war zone. In a move that portends future violence, DOGE is targeting the Veterans Administration (VA). Thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the VA now faces disruption of its benefit claims handling, health care delivery, data security, critical medical research, and stable employment for one hundred thousand former service members.

Maybe someone ought to explain to the DOGE brain-trust that it’s not a bright move to target a demographic that was taught to close-with-and-destroy-the-enemy. Especially not smart to fuck with special forces veterans who were trained in irregular warfare and insurgency. America is awash with weapons and you’re giving veterans a reason to hurt you.

Most Americans living through the second Gilded Age don’t remember, but the first one was replete with violence. Labor actions and protests were met with armed strike breakers and corporate militia massacres. The Pinkerton Detective Agency targeted labor organizers and fought pitched battles with strikers. Workers and Anarchists responded with bombings and assassinations.

It’s ironic that Trump idolizes President McKinley, who was president during the first Gilded Age and the beginning of the American empire, while Trump presides over the second Gilded Age and final chapter of the American empire.

McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. And while history doesn’t repeat, perhaps it rhymes?

Fredrick Douglas wrote–“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

Douglass’s statement, written in 1857 on the eve of the Civil War, is just as true today as then.  

What’s troubling is the glee some Americans are showing in response to the mass layoffs in government. The lack of solidarity among working and middle-class Americans points to the ease of divide and rule, but it will be interesting to see how MAGA-land likes it when the loss of the these government jobs impacts their businesses and local economies. Fifty odd years of neoliberal ideology has had a profound impact on Americans, but ideology certainly doesn’t clothe, house or feed you.

Nevertheless, I believe our future promises to be an era full of contradictions–where conservative, military types make common cause with leftist union members, in the face of poverty and destitution.

What’s clear is that the old Social Contract is being torn up before our eyes. Our feral elite no longer expect the co-operation and support of Americans, and are increasingly placing their bets on the national security state, with its surveillance and violence.

All of those militarized police are certainly going to be busy.

And this raises a larger question–Where is the inflection point, when Americans give up on politics and embrace violence as a solution?

John F. Kennedy wrote–” Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Update: Protestors from St. Louis to Charlotte, Tucson to Palo Alto, and New York City to Portland are raging against one oblong machine—and the guy in charge of it. In response to Musk’s growing power within the Trump administration—and that gesture he made at the inauguration—protests have targeted showrooms, dealerships, charging stations, and the Cybertruck itself in an attempt to meddle with Musk’s finances and highlight how he’s meddling with federal spending programs.

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Techno-Feudalism

Posted on March 7, 2025 by camelotkidd

The outlines of America’s future are coming into focus and it’s not pretty. Welcome to techno-feudalism, a term coined by Yanis Varoufakis to describe the new economic reality where the tech-lords that control platforms like X, Amazon, Meta, and Google, stand astride our economy, like the Robber Barons of the 19th Century.

And that points to a larger picture. The return to a pre-New-Deal economic order assisted by pervasive misgovernment is not an accident, nor the work of a few bad actors. The techno-feudalism, with its accompanying corruption and vast inequality, is a consequence of a triumph of a particular ideology–neoliberalism–that considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. Neoliberalism celebrates human capital and mandates economic concentration and the privatization of governmental functions.

Predictably, this state of affairs has a bi-partisan pedigree. It’s illustrative that the Silicon Valley billionaires were feted by the Democrats, who assumed they would remain loyal benefactors. Except they have now swung over to Trump and ripped off the faux woke masks and revealed the true hierarchical, eugenicist nature of the country’s tech capital. The Democrats wanted a kinder-gentler neoliberal disposition but paved the way for Trump by largely pursuing the same policies over the years–just at a slower pace. There’s a historical reason that you don’t allow great concentrations of wealth. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out. “The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”

At this stage I think it’s safe to say that neoliberalism, for all of it’s dressed-up intellectualism and economic jargon, is simply a looting caper, with Trump and Musk presiding over the final stages. In fact, the looting of the US by Silicon Valley and Wall Street is going into overdrive under the Trump Administration and DOGE. True to form, rather than mounting a defense of core New Deal/Great Society programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Democratic Party thinks criticizing Trump’s false statements and doubling down on support for Ukraine is a winning formula. Indeed, some Democrats even voiced support for DOGE’s mission of taking a wrecking ball to the government so that private corporations can profit off the pieces.

The larger reality is that the US is in irreversible decline. Everyone missed the key takeaway from Vance and Trump’s dressing down of Zelensky, but the US can’t afford Biden’s Ukraine adventure and, perhaps, NATO any more. We should not be surprised. I’ve stated repeatedly that you can’t run an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system. This dynamic is crystal clear in the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, where the US weapons cupboard is bare because the geniuses decided to offshore our manufacturing.

Ian Welsh lays out the graphic details. “Just like the collapse of the Warsaw Pact was a sign of Russia’s decline, so is the ending of NATO. US carrier groups no longer have a full set of supporting ships: America can’t make them run any more. America’s flagship aircraft builder can’t make reliable planes any more. Trump is starting a crypto reserve. Social benefits are being slashed, yet again, in massive ways. America is behind in 80% of techs and at the same time launching a concerted attack on research universities. It couldn’t build enough weapons and ammunition to fully support Ukraine and in a real war against China or Russia would run out of munitions in about two weeks, then get the shit kicked out of it. It’s also destroying the WTO and other agreements created by it: it’s dismantling its Empire because, simply, it can’t afford it any more.”

The dirty little secret and the underlying reason for American decline is that our elite have become divorced from average Americans, thanks to the individualism and greed-is-good neoliberal-sociopathy coupled with broad political and media support. The American state can no longer reliably win its wars, or produce broad-based economic growth, let alone claim some normative global leadership role. All it can do is insulate its elites from accountability and protect them from the consequences of their extractive depredations. American elites assert their power by not paying taxes, and avoiding prosecutions. We only have to gaze upon our president to realize that to be a member of the elite is to not be held to account. The absence of pretense underlying Trump’s actions, however, suggests an exhausted imperial sovereignty.

Liberals love to associate Trump with Putin but the Yeltsin era in Russia, with the oligarchs, corruption and organized crime, is far more fitting, and appropriate, because what went on in Russia during the 1990’s was just a practice run. Now the show’s coming home, with an already-created oligarch class poised to assume their techno-feudal role.

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Give War a Chance

Posted on March 1, 2025 by camelotkidd

The US political and media elite are having a meltdown now that Trump is poised to bring the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine to a close.

Everyone from Rachel Maddow to Bernie Sanders is freaking out over the Trump administration’s moves toward ending the war in Ukraine. David Hogg, now the vice chair of the DNC, said on Twitter that “If we abandon Ukraine — Poland is next. You know what’s going to be a lot more expensive than finishing this war and forcing Putin out of Ukraine? A third world war and a second Marshall plan.”

These histrionics are as depraved as they are ridiculous. I’m surprised Hogg didn’t invoke Czechoslovakia, Neville Chamberlin and Hitler, somewhere in there.

While Trump is being castigated in the corporate media for saying Ukraine started the war, he’s only somewhat truthful. Actually, it was the US who pushed Ukraine into the tragic proxy war that has decimated Ukraine and left millions dead and wounded. Ultimately, the US political, economic, and national security elite are all responsible. They only are able to amplify the outrage against peace due to their head-lock on the meta-narrative.

Going further, the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, has been accompanied by a ocean of lies, and a censorship effort the like we’ve never seen, where murderers can be transmuted into martyrs and villains into heroes. And, now, the only way the neocons and their liberal-international playmates can deal with the butt-hurt is to blame Trump and portray him as beholden to Putin and call anything that challenges their narrative–Russian propaganda. Not because the facts are wrong, but because Russia is saying it.  Essentially, Russia is never right, and the U.S. and its allies are never wrong. 

When the Americans hears these phrases like “unprovoked invasion”, “Putin is Hitler”, “beacon of democracy” over and over, day in and day out, week after week, they fall into a trancelike state, not unlike a cult or primitive religion. When the media repeated 24/7 the exact same wordings about the ‘unprovoked Russian invasion’ of ‘democratic Ukraine’, many viewers became like characters undergoing the 2-minute-hate, in Orwell’s 1984, where “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.”

Since Operation Mockingbird, the symbiotic relationship between the media and the deep state has never changed. The false narrative machine is constantly adapted to manufacture consent and serve political purposes for the ruling class. The objective is not to report facts, provide balanced analysis but to put adversaries of the US in a negative light and question their illegitimacy. Just to take one endlessly repeated slur–the idea that Putin is reconstructing the Russian empire is childish propaganda. However, it’s been lapped up by NY Times reading liberals, flying their Ukrainian flags. 

I know it’s the way-back-machine but the US’s regime-change machinations against Russia, by way of Ukraine, were never much of a secret. There was this RAND study, that advocated overextending Russia through NATO expansion and color revolutions on the periphery. And one of the earliest threats came from Carl Gersham, the long-time director of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Gershman, wrote in 2013, before the Kiev coup: “Ukraine is the biggest prize.” If it could be pulled away from Russia and into the West, he said, then “Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

I was blogging during this time and it was always obvious that since the Maidan coup in 2014 that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin and plunder Russia under the tender rule of a Yeltsin-clone. The Maidan coup in 2014 is what began the domino effect that led to the current proxy war.

What’s shocking and unknown, thanks to that censorship thing I mentioned, is that the 2014 Ukraine coup was galvanized by false flag event. The reason cited by the U.S. government and supporters of “Maidan” for the legitimacy of Yannakovitch’s removal was a sniper massacre that took place in Ukraine’s “Independence Square” where 48 protestors were killed and hundreds injured. However, newly released evidence researched by Ukrainian-Canadian professor of political science at the University of Ottawa Ivan Katchanovski shows that Yannakovitch did not order the massacre, Russian agents were not involved, and the killing was in fact done by far-right elements of the Maidan protests in order to give a justification for the coup against Yanukovych.

Again, we return to the wayback machine to recall State Department honcho, Victoria Nuland, bragging about the $5 billion spent to mid-wife the 2014 coup, and instructing US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt to “Fuck the EU,” while the US armed Ukraine in the civil-war against Russian separatists in the Donbass. With U.S. backing, the unconstitutional government on April 16, 2014 launched a military attack against those two provinces in the Donbass region. This is how Ukraine stated the war and the date they did it on. Trump didn’t mention the instrumental part the U.S. played in Yanukoych’s ouster and Kiev’s subsequent war on Donbass. The CIA, MI6 and the government they installed in Ukraine began covert operations against Russia from the first day after the coup, before Russia took Crimea and a revolt started in Donbas.

We should all be raging at the monsters who pushed things to this point, especially at the neocons and their corporate media mouthpieces. These psychopaths knowingly provoked an unwinnable war of unfathomable horror by first backing a regime change operation in 2014, and then amassing a proxy military threat on Russia’s border in ways the U.S. would never permit on its own border, then refusing any negotiations, both before and after Russia invaded.

Everyone who facilitated and cheered this on should be driven out of polite society.

What’s even more infuriating is that the architects of the tragedy will face no judgement or repercussions. Blinken, Sullivan and Nuland will still enjoy all the perks and status of remaining part of the foreign policy elite. Then there’s Trump, former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, NATO and the EU, who all helped throw Ukraine into the meat grinder while countless Western experts and analysts warned urgently that their actions would result in Ukraine’s destruction.

If there was any justice they all would be DOGED.

But of course we all know they won’t. None of the deep state apparatchiks, politicians, media whores, and think-tank denizens who helped destroy Ukraine will suffer any consequences of any kind for their atrocities. Nobody will even lose their career. And what’s worse is knowing that most of them will re-emerge like vampires from the grave to manufacture support with their media sycophants for the next war.

Returning to the matter at hand, Trump is deeply flawed, but he is exposing the deep state for all to see and they are not happy, as the reaction to the peace proposals demonstrate.

Restoring ties with Russia and negotiating a settlement of the Ukraine war would be big-enough blows to the deep state’s interests. Trump sought to restore US/Russian relations but was thwarted by Russia-gate.  Russia-gate also was central to the effort of drawing in liberals, whose antipathy towards Trump and Putin, made them willing participants. Trump’s proposal for a new détente with Russia was childishly belittled in mainstream media during his first term, and he was simultaneously gay-baited for his affection for Putin, and attacked for having raunchy sex with hookers who pissed on him. 

While Trump and his administration, with their actions, have taken a bat to the permanent bureaucratic state, we are still in the first innings, to overuse a baseball analogy. However, if the White House is really ready to discuss this with Moscow as part of the process of restoring normal relations between Russia and the United States, this is a truly revolutionary event for American foreign policy.

Meanwhile, all of this is quite fluid and extremely complicated, with multiple moving pieces. Trump may sound well-intentioned about ending the war. But it is concerning that his administration does not take any responsibility for starting it. He comes across as an opportunist whose lack of principles is problematic at best and treacherous at worst. However, he does have a good memory for betrayal. It seems that Trump learned some valuable lessons from his dealings with the deep state during his first term.

Geo-political analyst, Alastair Crooke, lays out the conflict–“The Deep State, it seems, were not paying attention to what a posse of ‘populist’ outliers, tucked away from the rarefied Beltway talking shop, were up to: They (the outliers) were planning a concerted attack on the Federal expenditure spigot – identified as the weak spot about which a Constitutional challenge could be mounted that would derail – in its entirety – the expenditures of the Deep State. It seems that one aspect to the surprise has been the Trump Team’s discipline: ‘no leaks’. And secondly, that those involved in the planning are not drawn from the preeminent Anglo-sphere, but rather from a strand of society that was offended by the Iraq war and which blames the ‘Anglo-sphere’ for ‘ruining’ America.

The MIC in concert with the EU’s ‘Brussels’ Technocratic State as nothing other than a pure offshoot to the American Deep State – and therefore very likely to try to torpedo and sink Trump’s initiative to normalize relations with Moscow. Then there’s the Ukrainian “tyrant”, Zelensky. As the Trump administration attempts to extricate itself from the proxy war there is a chance that Zelensky could go rogue and threaten to release compromising details of US involvement in the war.”

We need to temper our expectations for a comprehensive peace settlement. There are too many issues, including the president’s wacky mineral and rare earths demand, that threaten to derail the negotiations.

Update: The Democrats never fail to fail. Here’s Bernie parroting neocon orthodoxy. “Trump berates Zelensky, the leader of a democratic country courageously fighting Russian imperialism, while he allies himself with Putin, a dictator who started the bloodiest European war in 80 years. Sorry, President Trump. We believe in democracy, not authoritarianism.”

Can’t believe I sent him $25

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Let them eat DEI

Posted on February 21, 2025 by camelotkidd

Democrats need to make a decision. They can either continue their decades-long accommodation of billionaires, banks and corporate interests, while deploying Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) to massage the consciences of liberal America without upsetting the power structure, or embrace an agenda that directly challenges concentrated economic power. But simply condemning the Trump government will not be enough. 

The material needs of working-class Americans continue to be obscured and co-opted by team red and blue. While Republicans and the right address some of these problems, they do so by luring people through bombastic rhetoric and culture-war BS. On the other side, Democrats and liberals police and enforce a DEI, cancel-culture paradigm built by elites that diverts working-class Americans from ever engaging in meaningful connection and change.

DEI draws it’s legitimacy from the civil rights movement but Martin Luther King Jr. was not just concerned with simply diversifying corporate or government offices with a few black or brown faces in places of power. His goal was to redistribute economic power to the masses of people who don’t have it, including white people. In the run up to MLK’s famous “I have a Dream” speech the civil rights leaders discussed their goals. They spent little time discussing the need to train racist white people out of their attitudes. They didn’t talk about their choice of pronouns or how they pined for a black woman as press secretary at the White House. Instead, they talked about the needs of ordinary people who were being denied the opportunity to live decent lives. For example, the full name of the famous 1963 march was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”

At the end of his life Dr King railed against American involvement in Vietnam and was organizing a Poor Peoples March on Washington before he was assassinated. I believe that his emphasis on economic justice and the American empire got him killed.

This story rarely gets told because any criticism of DEI gets you labeled as a racist or sexist or transphobe, but that’s unfortunate because Trump is doing liberals and the Democrats a favor in eliminating DEI and taking away their bogus cover story.

Now, instead of carping about Trump’s diabolical “populism” the Democrats have the opportunity to dial up an authentic economic populism and define themselves as the champions of working- and middle-class Americans against the oligarchs. The upcoming political battles with Trump will provide the Democrats a fresh opportunity for a resurrection of a New-Deal populism. Not just the extent of corporate power, but also over the wealth and influence of the 1 percent and oligarch class that will provide them an opportunities to declare a principled opposition to powerful corporations, condemn their lawbreaking, and put forward legislation offering concrete material benefits.

A capitalist country, such as the US, will always have a political party that represents capital, but it becomes problematic when both parties do. We desperately need a labor party in this country and presently the Democrats are not it. Rather than a liberal pejorative, populism is a political approach to thinking about the power big business and oligarchs like Elon Musk hold over our daily lives and finances, and addressing that power through policy and the law to ensure it is dispersed away from corporations and billionaires to workers, consumers, and honest businesses. It’s returning to the roots of a constitutional republic, where the present financial monarchy is to be restrained by the separation of powers and laws our founders envisioned.

It’s like politics for dummies.

Unfortunately, the Democrats are downright allergic to any policies their billionaire benefactors disapprove of, as the treatment by the Biden Administration of it’s amazingly successful anti-trust efforts. In one of the few bright spots, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Justice Department cracked down on corporate mergers and dusted off decades-old anti-trust laws as justification, but Biden and Harris treated this as radioactive. Billionaire Democratic donors Barry Diller and Reid Hoffman provided a clue for this behavior when they instructed presidential nominee Kamala Harris to fire FTC head Lina Khan for her successful efforts at blocking more economic concentration.

As a result of this and decades of such behavior, I believe the Democratic Party is too far gone to change course. It’s human nature, when the magnitude of your error is so huge, there is no way you can have even reach self criticism. They can’t admit they were wrong. Instead, as we saw with the Democrats treatment of Bernie Sanders, the professional/managerial/caste (PMC), who comprise the party, view left-wing populism with revulsion and project DEI as a magic-shield of virtue.

Diversity politics has long been an elite project–a way for major corporations or government offices to whitewash themselves with a few token hires or irrelevant seminars or programs that send the signal to America’s liberals that they’re the good guys. In the wake of de-industrialization and the off-shoring of millions of middle-class jobs the PMC sided with capital, preferring to kick down, while sucking-up to the billionaires it once despised.

In 2020 every Fortune 500 company in America was humping diversity, equity and inclusion, because it was painless. They certainly were not paying their employees more or urging the US government to implement universal paid leave and guaranteed health care. Diversity politics has given them a way to painlessly massage the consciences of liberal America without upsetting the power structure at all. There’s a reason that everyone from corporate CEOs to the leaders of elite school districts were so comfortable embracing Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Nothing these anti-racist writers said or did actually threatened the power structure in America. Instead, the focus on DEI is classic divide and rule, deployed by the PMC to maintain their status as the political and economic elite.

Leftist intellectuals used to recognize that identity-politics was a cul-de-sac. They properly understood that promoting ethnic chauvinism or racial set asides does little to solve the big problems in any ethnic community let alone the wider country. Today, this seems like something only Marxists and conservatives debate, as liberals have ceded the field to critical theory and DEI fixation.

The 2024 election made it obvious that voters comprehensively rejected this status quo which has been catastrophic for the majority of Americans, going all the way back to NAFTA, but also including Gaza and the proxy-war in Ukraine, and the neocon/Democratic foreign policy establishment that produced it.

Tellingly, the Democrats reject out of hand arguments that Trump’s victory signals a need to reconsider their neoliberal economic policies and continue to insist that redistributive social and economic policies are less meaningful to voters than cultural or racial group identities. For the past decade, neoliberal Democrats have been particularly insufferable in wielding it as a weapon to advance pro-corporate politics, whether it’s Hillary Clinton saying that breaking up the big banks wouldn’t end racism and sexism, or MSNBC anchors and politicians like Barack Obama endlessly complaining about Bernie Sanders being a white man who didn’t talk enough about race and gender.

It’s fitting that the Democrats reliance on DEI and identity politics as their virtuous talisman has backfired, but it sucks for the rest of us. Now that Americans are tired of the hectoring Trump and the DOGE minions have hit on what they think is a winning formula. Whenever they want to eliminate government agencies, fire staffers or allow one of their crony corporations to plunder the commons, they just say they’re fighting “Wokeness” or “DEI.” 

The Democrats and PMC supporters have been “Hoisted by their own petard”.

Update: Lambert at Naked Capitalism lays out the stakes. “I think it’s pretty simple: The Republicans are directly assaulting the economic capital of the Democrat base, the PMC, by taking their jobs away. This is true whether the assault be on NGOs (foreign and domestic), DEI administrators, or government workers, including scientists (with more assaults on teachers to come). In addition, the PMC face the ascendancy, indeed the formidable combination, of two demon figures: Putin and Trump.”

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State Media

Posted on February 14, 2025 by camelotkidd

The US has long maintained a largely invisible, highly effective propaganda system, described by CIA official, Frank Wisner, as the mighty Wurlitzer,” on which he could play any propaganda tune.

Back then the CIA maintained a network of writers, journalists and talking-heads, who operated as agents, disseminating an approved narrative, code named Operation Mockingbird. Mockingbird was a large-scale CIA program that started in the early years of the Cold War and manipulated domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes.

These days, they run the whole thing off-the-books, through NGO’s. President Trump’s decision to cut funding to USAID revealed the extent to which the US government has been financing so-called independent media, protests and other means to hijack civil society around the world.

It was Obama who codified the new construct. “In his last days in office … President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war, a war that fused the security infrastructure with the social media platforms – where the war supposedly was being fought”.

The collapse of the legacy, corporate media and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, had made it possible for the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party to sell a narrative, and reconfigure social attitudes, prejudices and policy preferences in entirely new ways.

Plus ça change.

Trump’s purge of USAID revealed the extent of Obama’s social-media Mockingbird. It turns out that the government organization had been funding numerous alternative media outlets. From Wikileaks: “USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, “Internews Network” (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and “training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives…“

Despite claims of “independence” these media organs amounted to a state media. USAID funded Politico, which was the source for countless other so-called independent media like the BBC, the New York Times CNN and NBC. In other words, in one way or another almost all of the western media is funded by the US government.

Something to think about.

Just like everything else in today’s “Newspeak“, the term “democracy” means the repression of dissenting voices, “peace” describes funneling more weapons to overt Nazi and genocidal regimes. Now, it turns out that “independent media” refers to an almost entirely government funded operation. The aim was for this “independent media,” funded by USAID, and armed with laptops and smart phones, to promulgate the latest inspired Party meme and to immediately repeat, and repeat it, across platforms, giving the appearance of an overwhelming tide of consent. And thus giving people the “permission structure” of apparent wide-spread public support to believe propositions that formerly they would never have supported.

If you have liberal family and friends, I’m pretty sure you understand what I’m talking about? Or, before Trump’s arrival, conservative family and friends mesmerized by Fox News?

In our post Citizens United world it’s more than apparent that with enough money, political operatives could create and operationalize mutually reinforcing networks of activists and experts to validate a messaging arc that would short-circuit traditional methods of validation and analysis, and lead unwary actors and audience members alike to believe that things that they had never believed; or even heard of before: Were in fact not only plausible, but already widely administered throughout the world by USAID, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the other alphabet agencies that make up the national security state.

Of course, the usual suspects chimed in to muddy the water. Liberals wailed that USAID was simply benevolent American foreign aid, administered by a cadre of dedicated public service workers, and that all the talk of USAID’s un-democratic actions abroad are conspiracy theories and Russian disinformation. while the right portrayed USAID as the second coming of the Comintern, busy spreading Marxism. Most Americans are only dimly aware of US foreign policy, leaving plenty of space for propaganda.

The reality is that US foreign policy has been outsourced to a bevy of NGO’s, funded by USAID, who operate a shadow government. Most of these NGOs were born during the Reagan years. While not all USAID and State Department funding flows through them, they control the purse strings for much of America’s global financial influence. Rather than altruism, the goals are corporate penetration, resource access, and a docile low-cost labor, in the countries targeted.

Matt Kennard in his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire,” documents how U.S. institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South. Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. 

The crimes on the empire’s periphery always return to the homeland. All of the regime-change mischief and color revolutions carried out in hostile countries, came back when Trump was elected in 2016. The NGO’s funded by USAID were instrumental in Russia-gate, the two impeachments aimed at Trump, and the false claim that the Hunter Biden story was a Russian hoax.

Liberals used to believe in the 1st Amendment and support a polity that encouraged debate, dissent, skepticism and free speech, but now they have turned on a dime and advocate narrative control and censorship. Since Trump’s election liberals have become more authoritarian, and more repressive of dissent. What ironic is that liberals have come to believe their own propaganda and they’re trapped in an echo chamber of which the USAID. support of “independent” media plays a very significant role. 

It will be fascinating to read Noam Chomsky’s reaction to the further confirmation of the ways in which the American empire goes about Manufacturing Consent. In their groundbreaking expose Chomsky and Edward S. Herman detail a propaganda model enacted through government and corporations and “powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”, by means of the propaganda model of communication.”

USAID funding and promoting “independent media” amounts to the a modern day manufacturing consent for the American empire. Moreover, the USAID exposure should call into question the campaign against “disinformation.” How is this not the biggest case of disinformation?

It’s also a blatant attack on the Constitution and represents a flagrant disregard for the role of an informed citizenry in exercising our rights and responsibility to freely elect to public office those whom we believe best represent our values, and to hold those thus elected accountable for what they do in our name.

Unfortunately, a state media can simply disappear such oddities and questions down the memory hole.

Update: USAID has many dedicated workers and engages in many charitable, critical activities worldwide: Social and economic development programs, health and nutrition programs, irrigation and drainage projects, disease eradication, environmental remedies. I would like to believe that if all the USAID did was dole out charity overseas, it would still be in business. 

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Thread the Middle

Posted on February 8, 2025 by camelotkidd

The next four years are set to be a wild ride, but I intend to thread the middle.

By that I mean that to defeat Trump we must scrutinize, modify and adapt our resistance. Furthermore, we cannot fail to acknowledge that the red/blue cultural war is a serious distraction from seeing the US economic/political/military reality, where both parties and their corporate media cheerleaders, not just Trump, are malign actors causing serious harm. I wrote this last week: “I despise Trump for totally different reasons than the average American liberal, but for the same reasons I despise Biden and the Democrats and hold them responsible for their series of disasters, crimes and genocides.”

I’m mulling this over as we make the transition from one evil to another. While a distraction, the red/blue cultural war is dangerous because ideologues on both sides are irrational, where reason is wasted and so there is a need to tread carefully. The tussle over Trump eliminating USAID is a good example. Liberals are defending a government entity they argue is spreading democracy and universal values but USAID is also a CIA cutout that facilitates color revolution regime-change ops, while propagandizing the American public.  The agency was created in 1961, at the height of the Cold War, by President Kennedy in order to administer aid programs that fostered economic and social development in foreign countries. It sounded nice on paper. In reality, the agency became a powerful force in America’s global pacification efforts. USAID quickly developed a reputation for savagery, where it trained death squads, schooled foreign police departments in effective torture techniques, and utilized black propaganda.

Naturally, the Democrats, who, with Russia-gate, have transformed into cheerleaders for the intelligence agencies that comprise the deep state, are opposed and have been protesting in front of USAID headquarters after President Trump agreed to shut USAID down. This is your Democratic Party, where there’s been no protest about Trump’s assault on the National Labor Relations Board, but they love them some spooks.

Nevertheless, Trump looks to cause serious disruptions in our world, not just with his actions but with the counter actions that will inevitably reverberate through the complex systems of our modern society.

It’s not that Trump’s actually popular, he’s not. After promising a populist revolution to help American workers it appears that he’s poised to govern like all of the Republicans since Reagan by reducing taxes on capital, on the rich, and increasing taxes on the labor on workers, especially the lowest income workers.

Here’s where we need to pause. Both parties and the corporate media have brought us to this point with their policies. The Biden Administration was mostly a continuation of neoliberal economics and one of the main reasons Kamala Harris lost was that the the Democrats were associated largely with an inflation driven by their corporate benefactors. Indeed, the interest of the donors who contributed $1.1 billion to Harris was always purely transactional and (as events have proven) they rapidly switched their allegiance to Trump. So the national Democrats have absolutely no one that can serve as a plausible opponent to any Trump policies, the Party’s historic pro-working class branding has been destroyed, and the Party totally lacks the money and infrastructure needed to move forward.

But Biden, or whoever was running the government, was just following a bipartisan trend of socialism for the rich and savage neoliberalism for American workers. This allowed the oligarch’s to loot the country, courtesy of their bought and paid for politicians. Critical mass was reached in the 1990s whereby the wealth of the oligarchs was increased to the point where it bought explicit political control.

It’s fitting that Donald Trump is a buyer and a seller in our post Citizens United world, as well as the most transactional president in our lifetime but what do they say about chickens coming home to roost?

The rise of neoliberalism brought a concerted decision made by capitalists with the explicit backing of the government that they would offshore and outsource US production to other countries because, of course, they wanted to exploit labor arbitrage. Everyone wants to forget this history in their zeal to blame Trump but the plutocrats who own the country hated the New Deal compromise with labor and have long sought to break the back of unions. Then there was the privatization of the commons, where American infrastructure was seized by corporations in the process erecting tollbooths and making the US economy high-cost. These were choices made by both parties, the corporate media, and all of the leading economists, who cheered the privatization and assured us that it was way more efficient than “big government.”

(Picture of a mechanical ratchet)

Trump seems set to exacerbate the problems with his ham-fisted tariffs. Because even if you put tariffs on everything, the US can’t produce anything because they’ve lost our factories as well as all of the manufacturing workers. It’s gonna take generations to bring back. And because the costs of production in the US are so high, because you have to give workers healthcare. You have to give workers education to their children. You have to give workers housing, but if all of that is insanely expensive because it’s all been privatized, it doesn’t matter if you have tariffs because those wages have to be higher to make up for the cost of education and healthcare and housing.

Then there’s the American empire. Democrats seriously seem to think all the outrage over Trump is going to magically erase Biden’s wholehearted support for the Israel genocide of Gaza, where the US provided the weapons, bombs, intelligence and most importantly deployed the whole of the western media/propaganda machine in an effort that Winston Smith would have recognized. I really don’t believe that everyone has forgotten the Democrats culpability. I think permanent damage has been done, especially in the eyes of young people. I think Americans will focus on Trump because he’s the president now and his abuses need to be highlighted and criticized, but I don’t think they’ll ever forget the way Biden and the Democrats showed us who they really were through 15 months of mass atrocities.

If that was not enough, there’s the US sponsored proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, where Blinken or Sullivan or one of the many deep state apparatchiks, thought it a good idea to lob rockets into Russia, while senile Biden nodded along.

The problems we face are bi-partisan yet there will be intense pressure to choose a side in the ongoing cultural war. A true intellectual critiques their country, party and themselves. The dirty little secret that none dare broach is that Trump is us. He represents and exemplifies what we’ve allowed this country to become, and we’re all culpable, myself included.

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 Authoritarian Conflict Management

Posted on February 1, 2025 by camelotkidd

Out of town.

So here’s a important article by Mike Whitney, detailing the ways in which Trump is responsible for Hamas’s bust out of Gaza and Israel’s genocidal response.

And a taste–“So, with a wave of his hand, Trump broke with all of his presidential predecessors, all the applicable UN Resolutions, and with traditional US foreign policy dating back five decades. And this was just the beginning because—as we know now—the Abraham Accords set the dominoes in motion leading inexorably to the flattening of Gaza and the displacement of two million civilians. As author of the Accords, Trump is largely responsible for the unfolding catastrophe. 

Keep in mind, the Accords really had nothing to do with peace or normalization. As senior fellow at the Arab Center Dana El Kurd said, “to frame the Abraham Accords as a “peace”(agreement) that increased stability between signatories is deliberately misleading….To be sure, Arab-Israeli normalization cannot be considered “peace,” but should rather be understood as authoritarian conflict management. Through this lens, it is possible to understand more clearly how the accords have changed the landscape of the region, and why pursuing such a policy makes for an unsustainable future…

“Authoritarian conflict management”?? What does that mean?

It means that the inducements for participation in the Accords had more to do with strengthening domestic repression than promoting regional peace.“

While it’s fun to laugh at the severe liberal butt-hurt caused by Trump’s re-election, it’s important to acknowledge the way in which the red/blue cultural war is a distraction from our comprehension of power.

I despise Trump for totally different reasons than the average American liberal, but for the same reasons I despise Biden and the Democrats and hold them responsible for their series of disasters, crimes and genocides.

Remember kids–follow the money, arms and resources, while disregarding the corporate media agitprop.

Stay safe out there.

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Gangster State

Posted on January 24, 2025 by camelotkidd

The US is a gangster state, where foreign policies mirror organized criminal behavior. Any cursory examination of post-war history reveals that the US operates like the Mafia, maintaining its empire through unceasing violence.

Liberals view Trump as a horrifying aberration but he’s the perfect mafia don for a gangster state. Trump’s re-election presents America with its mask removed. In a fitting reception, arrayed around him in the Capitol’s rotunda for his inauguration were former officials with more blood on their hands than any combination of serial killers in history. The gang was all there–the Clintons, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Joe Biden–all mass murderers yet with the gall to view Trump as an affront to decency and morality.

Like the mob, who maintains a legitimate front veneer to camouflage their criminality, our feral elite utilize patriotism as their cover, with Trump invoking Manifest Destiny as a Golden-Oldie. It’s fun to mock the ineptness of the neocons who manage the US empire, with neoliberalism as their operating system, but for our billionaire owners, it’s been the best of times even as it’s been catastrophic for the country. Maybe I’ve missed it, but while Trump may attempt to end some of the empire’s numerous conflicts, making America great again does not include a distribution of wealth from the top down, and at best there will be a shift in tactics on how to extort more wealth from the rest of the world. Gains are to be increased for American plutocrats at the expense of vassals and enemies alike seems closer to the real meaning of MAGA.

With that in mind, despite Ukraine’s impending defeat on the battlefield, are the US gangsters going to want to lose the lucre from splitting Europe from Russia? What about the bonuses of having a terrorist state in Europe funneling arms elsewhere and willing to do dirty work like trying to blow up the TurkStream Pipeline , all to benefit American energy companies. And in any settlement with Russia, will American oligarchs have any interest in abandoning their meddling in the Caucasus and Caspian where they are trying to control the flow of resources toward Europe?

And what of Gaza and Israel’s Yinon Plan for Middle East conquest? Trump may have engendered a cease fire but the he and the gangsters who make up his foreign policy claque are captured by Zionists, much like the Biden Administration was.

If the Biden regime made one thing clear above all others, it is that presidents and cabinet members are more like interchangeable figures, the deep state’s front men, whose function is not to affect policy but to present it to the public and the rest of the world. That Biden presided over a genocide and an incredibly dangerous proxy war with Russia just indicates the absolute bipartisan domination of Washington by the War Party. The imperium’s foreign policies do not change, one administration to another, if you have not noticed. Like a crime family, the business of plunder and murder goes on forever.

Syria is where we can most clearly see the gangster state in action. The Assad Administration refused to play ball with the capo and pay the Pizzo, so Syria was destroyed. The gangster state maintains proxies to do the dirty work–Sunni and Nazi terrorists. Arch-neocon Michael Ledeen spelled out the mob dynamic when he stated that: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

The best thing about Trump is that he makes the idea of the US as a gangster state completely obvious without pretension. He says the quiet parts out loud. He’s the only president who’ll openly boast that US troops are in Syria to keep the oil or lament that they failed to take the oil from Venezuela, or just come right out and tell everyone he’s bought and owned by Zionist oligarchs. He puts much less effort into disguising the true nature of the US empire than other presidents.

That’s pretty much the real reason various factions of America’s permanent government object to Trump. It’s not because he presents a threat to the establishment or because he’s trying to bring down the deep state, it’s because he is viewed as a loose-cannon. He either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about the importance of keeping a polite face on the imperial machine.

Thankfully, some Americans are recognizing the nature of our government due to the breakdown in the social contract, sky-high inflation, vast inequality and endless wars combined with ongoing psyops to marshal support. Alternatives to neoliberalism have been stamped out, reducing economic policy exclusively to making the labor market more flexible with temps or to cutting Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. That Americans are angry is now an open secret, demonstrated most forcefully by the assassination of the CEO of United Health

American propaganda is world-class but its effectiveness fades the more citizens see of the true face of the empire. We live in a gangster state run by gangsters.

Spread the word

Update: More evidence that the US is a gangster state, with heterodox economist Michael Hudson explaining how the Biden and now Trump administrations pulled a “bust out” on vassal, Germany.

“Trump told the Davos Economic Forum January 23: “My message to every business in the world is very simple: Come make your product in America and we will give you among the lowest taxes of any nation on earth.” Otherwise, if they continue to try and produce at home or in other countries, their products will be charged tariff rates at Trump’s threatened 20%.

To Germany this means: Sorry your energy prices have quadrupled. Come to America and get them at almost as low a price as you were paying Russia before your elected leaders let us cut Nord Stream off.”

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Traitors

Posted on January 17, 2025 by camelotkidd

Billionaires are traitors, actively sabotaging the general welfare of America with their insatiable greed, and yet we celebrate them. The only reason we don’t immediately recognize their betrayal is due to the mighty propaganda Wurlitzer that venerates sociopathic CEO’s in an endless loop. It’s Ayn Rand’s world and we just live in it.

In an ironic twist, the billionaires and their corporate media marionettes have realized that while they were busy extracting other nations were busy producing. In response, they’ve sought to shift the blame to a “foreign-devil”, hence their desire for a new cold war against China. I’ve written about this before but China has transformed into a industrial powerhouse, raising the standard of living for millions of Chinese by following the same playbook that America used to develop. Our billionaire elite have abandoned such a model for sustained policies of financial looting, rent-seeking, monopolization and corruption.  

The contrast between the US and China is where we can most clearly witness the treason. The US is falling apart around us, while the Chinese are building the future.

China is rapidly overtaking the United States in a number of areas that threaten to undermine America’s position in the world. Naturally, US leaders and their billionaire backers are concerned about this and have taken steps to remedy the situation. Of course, none of this includes looking in the mirror and acknowledging their own culpability in an economic system that allows Wall Street to siphon off too much of their company’s profits leaving insufficient capital to reinvest in productive activity, critical infrastructure or societal improvement (See Boeing for a how-to manual). Chinese policymakers have taken a different approach to this issue and the results speak for themselves. Standards of living have risen sharply, poverty has been eradicated, health care is universal, critical infrastructure is top-notch, and China is becoming a model for the rest of the world.

Don’t take my word for it. Read the economic data yourself. Or, better still, Google “Chinese cities” or “Chinese high-speed rail” or “Chinese ports” or “Chinese bridges” etc. See for yourself the miracle that is taking place in China today.

Someone forgot to tell the geniuses who want to have a war with China. Former Chinese Ambassador Chas Freeman, explains why a war with China would not end well. “Four decades ago, the United States bankrupted the Soviet Union by forcing it to devote ever more of its economy to defense while neglecting the welfare of its citizens. Now we Americans are diverting ever more borrowed and taxpayer dollars to our military even as our human and physical infrastructure decays. In some ways, in relation to China, we are now in the position of the USSR in the Cold War. Our fiscal trajectory is injurious to the general welfare of Americans. That, along with our liberties, is, however, what our armed forces are meant to defend.”

However, the US still dominates the informational battlefield and most Americans buy into the myth of Chinese intellectual theft, perfidy and villainhood. Incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio, lays out the charges–“We welcomed the Chinese Communist Party into the global order and they took advantage of all of its benefits… Instead they have repressed, and lied, and cheated, and hacked, and stolen their way into global superpower status.”

That’s one way to put it, but the plan was to neoliberalize China like they did to the US. Decades of “color revolutions,” Gene Sharp, “non-violent” mischief, and NGO machinations were supposed to prepare the ground for a neoliberal revolution, where the Chinese would surrender their traditional culture. Their entire society then becomes a void that can be filled. The American system is then able to fill this void with their own consumerist culture, which neutralizes any country, putting it in a position where it can only be absorbed by the World Economic Forum, City of London and Wall Street.

The plan failed due to the strength of the Chinese traditional culture and the competence and integrity of their leaders. On the other hand, it doesn’t say anything good about America and points to the hollowness of our own culture. Our leaders are on the take and America has devolved into a culture of narcissism where it is every man/woman for themselves. The political/economic/cultural affect of not caring about people but, rather, money and materialism has become a nightmare.

Still, they persist. Along multiple lines of attack, the US corporate media criticizes Chinese “overcapacity.”, coupled with complaints that many Chinese businesses are state-owned rather than private. However, this criticism seems logically inconsistent. America’s reigning neoliberal dogma had always maintained that government-owned enterprises were inherently inefficient and uncompetitive, so denouncing China for having many such state-owned enterprises that were successfully outcompeting private Western corporations merely demonstrated the bankruptcy of neoliberalism.

Then there’s the narrative that China is a totalitarian country controlled by the Communist Party, but it certainly appears that their government serves the the country and well-being of the Chinese people rather than a narrow elite. Here in the homeland the media informs us that we live in a free-market, liberal democracy, yet our government serves Wall Street and the billionaires.

Thanks to RedNote, young Americans are discovering the real China of today, rather than what the media portrays. TikTok influencers are going in RedNote and can’t believe how China has out achieved the United States. RedNote opened a window for Americans to learn more about China by directly interacting with Chinese people. These exchanges also seem to be sparking an even deeper appreciation among Chinese for their own systems. As usual, another epic fail by the neocon gang that can’t shoot straight. An all around massive PR fail for the State Department, USAID and NED.

But don’t expect our billionaire overlords to change. After all, they have won the class-war, the one that really mattered. Neoliberal economists, and their ideologies served their purpose of enriching billionaires. The ideology of neoliberalism promotes a fundamentalist free market concept, featuring privatization, deregulation, and formation of trusts. The resultant financialization of the economy directly led to deindustrialization and a crumbling of manufacturing and the real production and consumption economy. It featured such popular business practices such as asset-light strategy, offshoring and outsourcing which have hollowed out the productive economy. The current US economic system is a rentier oligarchic system where financial parasites feed on the real economy and will eventually subsume it. This economic system has led to unprecedented wealth gap and societal polarization.

The awakening of young Americans gives me hope but we have our work cut out. Neoliberal austerity needs to end, rents and housing and stock bubbles need to be drastically curtailed and it needs to be policy that if you want to get rich you have to actually make stuff and employ Americans. No more monopolies, no more financial looting, and no more rentierism.

The contrast between the Chinese quality of life and ours needs to be broadcast and the villains named. Billionaires are not role models and they are not heroes.

They are traitors.

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Pay the Toll

Posted on January 10, 2025 by camelotkidd

We have a tollbooth economy, where necessary components of modern life–education, healthcare, transportation and communication–have become prohibitively expensive, in the process erecting barriers to economic participation.

A major feature of the tollbooth economy is the increasing weight of rentier activities and how they drain income from workers and more productive sectors. The end result is a sort of neo-feudalism, created by privatizing and financializing transportation, education, health care, prisons and policing, the post office and communications, and other sectors that formerly were kept in the public domain of American economies so as to keep their costs low and minimize their cost structure. The result is a high-cost economy, where US workers are uncompetitive.

40 years of neoliberal “reforms,” have slashed or privatized essential governmental functions including vital infrastructure installation, implementation and maintenance. And now the Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.), wants to eliminate or further privatize infrastructure, even as they proclaim that they want to cut government “waste”.

The effort to cut “government waste” has a long, bipartisan, history. It was Democrat Bill Clinton who last balanced the budget, a feat that was rapidly followed by a deep and lasting recession. And Joe Biden dedicated his career to cutting Social Security, Medicare and Veteran’s benefits. And, who doesn’t want to cut government waste? Many Americans likely share the view that much of what the Federal government does shouldn’t be done. For instance, why are the FBI and CIA interfering in US elections? Why is the US funding and arming Israel and Ukraine, while meddling in dozens of countries worldwide? Why is the Federal government militarizing the police by producing military ‘surplus’ to supply them with? And why is oligarchy the only choice on the ballot?

It might surprise you to find out that none of the before mentioned governmental expenditures are on DOGE’s cut lists, but the furor over “waste” points to a larger issue. What’s been lost is the awareness that every economy is planned, with the salient political issue being who gets to do the planning. The recent dominance of financial capital over industrial capital was not an accident, and it’s operating system–neoliberalism–minimized state intervention in the economy, and has led to a situation where government influence is overridden by corporate donors and financial interests, not to mention the military/industrial/complex (MIC), sidelining public welfare.

What’s frustrating is that the history of US economic development has been lost or falsified in a deliberate un-learning. In the early 20th Century, economist Simon Patten demonstrated the importance of government expenditures on basic infrastructure to create a low cost economic environment, while proclaiming that infrastructure is the forth means of production, after labor, capital and land. Patten, who led the Wharton School during the Progressive Era, was a pioneer of the economics of abundance, and a theorist of the second industrial revolution, and intellectual godfather of the New Deal. Patten believed that to have a true free market the state needs to subsidize infrastructure to keep costs down, rather than having powerful monopolies enacting tollbooths at critical chokepoints. While Patten said that public infrastructure is the fourth factor of production, its role isn’t to make a profit. It’s to lower the cost of public services and basic inputs to lower the cost of living and lower the cost of doing business to make the economy more competitive.

The decades of elimination and privatization of government infrastructure, justified as “deregulation”, has been accompanied by a tsunami of corporate media propaganda, cheerleading the destruction. Our soi-disant elite never wanted voters thinking too deeply about politics, especially the populist kinds of politics, whether of the left or right, that risked disturbing the metastasizing corruption and the forever wars from which they profit so handsomely.

Partisan political frames detract from understanding the American political economy. The current Republican conceit that Elon Musk is a radical here to “move fast and break things” misses that every president over the last five decades has made a similar pitch. And while economic predictions are notoriously difficult to get right, this is a guarantee: should DOGE get up and running, the rich will be made richer and the rest of us poorer. This isn’t only because Trump and Musk are evil or singularly self-interested. It will because this is how the American economy has been set up to operate.

To point to a recent example, the debate over H-1B visa’s elides the real reason that the US is uncompetitive with China. By focusing on so-called American-worker mediocrity, our elite and their corporate media sycophants conceal the tollbooth economy reality that precludes any real competition with China, which is simply following the same path as the US in their development by funding infrastructure.

Here’s a thought experiment dear reader: see if you can recognize the “tollbooths at critical chokepoints” in your life.

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