Kleptocracy

It's hard not to think that our government has become a criminal enterprise, not unlike the old-style Mafia, siphoning tax dollars into their own pockets through the machinery of war and 50,000 pages of IRS tax code filled with loopholes, exemptions, and shelters - all while a corporatized media cartel spins up stories of noble and benevolent hard-woking plutocrats who supply all the jobs and stoop to drop a few pennies in our beggar's cups, but threatening to take that away from us too if we don't shut up and stay in line.

Belle

The current iteration of the GOP is there to serve the interests of parasite billionaires. If you think more than a handful of them are going to lift a finger to help you make your life just a tiny bit better, then you need to be paying a lot more attention.

They don't give one empty fuck about you or me or anything else - just power and money, and their vision of a Post-Government World Order - that's it.

Coin-Operated Politicians

Since the Citizens United decision, outside spending (Super PACs, dark money, etc) has increased by almost 700%.

They're plutocrats, and they're already talking in terms of a "post-government world order".

Billionaires are parasites.

If we don't tax them now

 we'll have to eat them later.

Futurecasting

We are the Plutocrats.

We own everything.

Rich Guy Privilege

The TechnoPlutocrats get to do whatever they want and everybody else can whistle on down the road.

I'm betting guys like Zuckerberg and Altman and O'Leary have plenty of room for data centers in their own fuckin' yards.

You want it? Fine - you pay for it - all of it. All the way.

Erika

Belle

Under-Babied

Mr Carlin, if you please -

Today's Belle

Means lift them up

Memes keep you down

The Plutocrats Know

The plutocrats have always known who Trump is and they've always been able to play him to their advantage. As long as they could pump billions into his pockets, they could count on him to let them get their own freak on for trillions more.

Trump mega-donor privately mocked his claim to have upper hand with China

Liz Uihlein sent staff email with cartoon of Trump saying ‘I hold the cards’ to which Xi says ‘the cards are made in China’

A top donor to Donald Trump and other Maga Republicans has privately mocked the US president’s longtime position that he has an upper hand in trade negotiations with China, in a sign that even some loyal supporters have been uneasy with the White House strategy.

Liz Uihlein, the billionaire businesswoman who co-founded the office supply company Uline with her husband, Richard, sent an email to her staff earlier this year that contained a cartoon in which Trump can be seen playing cards with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. In the cartoon, Trump claims: “I hold the cards”, to which Xi responds: “The cards are made in China.”

The email, seen by the Guardian, appears to have been sent in April by an administrative assistant on Liz Uihlein’s behalf. Uihlein prefaced the cartoon with a short remark: “All – The usual. Liz”.

The barb is significant because it was sent by an important political ally to Trump and his movement. Liz and Richard Uihlein were the fourth largest political donors in the presidential election cycle, having given $143m to Republicans, according to Opensecrets, which tracks political giving.

A Uline spokesperson said Liz Uihlein had no comment. A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Uline is a privately held company, and it is difficult to gauge the exact impact Trump’s tariff and other trade policies have on the office supply company. But people who spoke to the Guardian say Uline imports a significant amount of its merchandise from China and other parts of the world. It is not the first time Uihlein has weighed in on trade policy. Lamenting how the Covid-19 pandemic had hit the global supply chain, Uihlein wrote in a letter published in the Uline catalog after the 2020 election that “America sorely needs a coherent, largely united trade policy, if we don’t get it done, this century belongs to the Chinese.”

She is not the only mega-donor to have previously been critical of the president. Ken Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot and a longtime Republican donor, said in an interview with the Financial Times in April that the tariffs the White House had announced at the time – which have since been rolled back – were too high and implemented too quickly, adding that the president had been “poorly advised”.

Langone reversed himself a few months later, in July, when he told CNBC’s Squawk Box that he was no longer concerned that Trump could use his position in the Oval Office to engage in retribution.

“I’m happy to say that I’m comfortable he’s not doing that. He’s acting presidential. I’m impressed with the people he’s got around him,” Langone said.

Trump has touted the US as having an edge in negotiations with China as recently as last month. In comments in the Oval Office he said the US and China would have a “great relationship”, but also noted that he could “destroy China” by playing “incredible cards” if he wanted to.

Trump is due to speak to Xi on Friday in the wake of a deal agreed by both countries that would keep the TikTok app running in the US.

Both sides have for now suspended the toughest tit-for-tat economic measures lobbed against each other since Trump’s second term began, when the US threatened tariffs as high as 145% against China. The US and China reached a pact to decrease the tariffs in May and renewed the lower rate in August in the wake of a new round of negotiations. That extension will expire in mid-November.

"We've always been in favor of plutocracy

we just put the wrong plutocrat in charge"

It's Expensive

Trump appointees aren't ignorant - they're just not interested in anything that doesn't accrue to the interests of their plutocrat masters. Because they're in the pockets of very wealthy companies who have coalesced into very powerful cartels.

Horny For - Something

It sucks that The Daily Show gets better as the slide towards plutocracy accelerates.

What's Goin' On

The Brotocracy

"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible"

--Frank Zappa

"When two men in business together always agree, one of them is unnecessary"

--Wm Wrigley

"Conform and be dull"

--Frank Dobie

"The logical extreme is where even good ideas go to die"

--eVilleMike

Mr Roberts

via Sons Of Liberty facebook:

"Our revolution will remain bloodless - if the left allows it."

--Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation

That almost sounds fairly benign - like they're not doing anything that should upset us and make us recoil in disgust or anything untoward - golly gosh.

But it's an ominous threat - a very real threat.

What he's saying is that we all have to just lie down and take it, or they're going to fuck us up.

Republicans have always hated

this country's traditions of

democratic self-governance.

Their project is to

tear it all down

and replace it with

a corporate-style plutocracy.

Today's WTF

Paraphrasing Mr Hancock

and 49 of his friends

in the summer of 1776:

FUCK THE KING

The Central Conceit

The generic statement of MAGA-style "thinking" is:

The government can't be trusted

Now that MAGA is the government - and the fact that they haven't abandoned that sentiment - there's no doubt in my mind that what we're seeing from the rank-n-file movement and their leader is depression and self-loathing turned outwards, manifesting itself in hostility and aggression.

And that's typical of the authoritarian mindset.

Hitler didn't love Germany. He believed Germans had allowed themselves to be fooled and betrayed - and he hated them for it. But what he choose to do about it was to fool them in a different way, and in the end, to betray them just the same. He had to - he hated them.

He dragged his country into the abyss as a way to compensate for his own self-image of being crippled with shame, and a desperate denial that, ultimately, he wasn't worthy of the adulation that he sought and demanded. The more he gained, the more sure he was that he didn't deserve it, and that he needed to be punished for his ever increasing appetite, while at the same time, needing to demand more and more from his devotees in order to cover his inadequacies (which, of course, he couldn't allow himself ever to admit).

With Trump, it's not hard to see some very close parallels, but the problem behind the problem is that he's just the front man being manipulated by people who are absolutely bent on - and no longer shy about - tearing everything down in order to install a corporate-style plutocracy.

Trump has been named CEO, with Elon in the role of COO, all being overseen by a Board Of Directors (the cabinet), with liaisons from the major sectors of the economy - Finance, Manufacturing, Commodities, Transportation, Utilities, etc.

Welcome

We are

Paraphrasing Tolstoy

I sit on a man's back -

forcing him him carry me -

as I promise to do everything possible

to ease his burden -

with the exception of getting off his back.

Overheard

• Light rail is not profitable.
• High speed rail is not profitable.
• Bridges are not profitable.
• Street lights are not profitable.
• Public schools are not profitable.
• Traffic tunnels are not profitable.
• The US Military is not profitable.
• Cops and firefighters aren't profitable.

Good government is not, in and of itself, profitable - it's not supposed to be.

Good government promotes profitability fairly and equitably for as many as possible.

When government is directly profitable for somebody, we call it Plutocracy.

And that's bad.

Well That Sucks 2 - The Sequel

All things Russian = Trump. And Elon Musk. 

76 days from today, the American dictator takes power.

Because that's how we do things here:

The worst possible outcome flowing from the best possible system of government.

It's premature to say it's all over, but I'm holding out scant hope for anything better.

I can see a slow (at first), but then accelerating slide into autocracy and the implementation of Trump's vengeance-driven personal agenda, followed by "a time of adjustment" that will look like - and will be sold to us as - "a sensible solution to the terrible problems wrought by that poor unfortunate sick man, who BTW just suddenly went a little nutty - nobody could've seen it coming".

And then we'll be onto whatever the plan is for the removal of the dastardly Trump and the installation of kindly President Vance, who will continue to dismantle the federal government, and sell off the pieces to the friends of his billionaire benefactors, and eventually rewrite the US Constitution according to Project 2025.

And what're we betting that they'll enlist the willing help of Democrats in the House and Senate to impeach and remove? That should give them all the leverage they need against Trump, but more importantly, it gives them some nice political cover because they can say that whatever horrible thing they've turned the US into, they had help from the Dems.

Welcome to the plutocracy