Today's Belle

Means lift them up

Memes keep you down

Rich Man's War

... poor man's fight.

Let the Epstein Class fight the Epstein War.

Leopards Are Eating His Face

"You need a man's protection from the monsters. And never mind that men have pretty much always been the monsters you need protection from. But hey - you think it was bad before? You ain't seen nuthin' yet, sister."

Dude - the Plutocrats are the ones beating you down. It's the billionaire parasites and their coin-operated politicians.

This is not Men vs Women, any more than it's Red vs Blue, or White vs Brown, or Libs vs MAGA. If you'd figure that out, and stand up against it, you'd find plenty of women fighting at your side. Because women have been fighting that battle for millennia, and they've got plenty to teach us. So shut the fuck up and learn, dumbass.

Together

Americans have come to regard the word "collective" as a vulgar, unworkable concept.

But this country doesn't exist if not for the collective actions of the founders, and the governments that came after the founding - governments that got us together to talk, and to haggle, and to argue - and when necessary, to fight.

As long as we allow the plutocrats to keep us separated from one another, they'll continue to take away everything we need to live decent, successful, and fulfilling lives.

We have to get together.

Illustration

Today's Belle

There's trouble in MAGA paradise.

BTW - notice how MAGA loves to bitch about American kids not being taught the good STEM stuff, while they diligently avoid talking about the problems caused by 45 years of GOP attacks on public schools.

 

It's the same as their constant griping about the loss of the "nuclear family structure" while ignoring the fact that Republicans have stripped everything out of the economic system that made it possible for the average one-income family to survive.

Simple translation: Hey, MAGA, do y'all just never get tired of being played like a cheap banjo?

MAGA civil war breaks out over American "mediocrity" culture

A MAGA-world civil war erupted over Christmas when a social media post on American culture turned into a pitched battle over race, immigration and billionaires versus the working class.

Why it matters:

The fight exposes one of the MAGA movement's deepest contradictions: It came to prominence chiefly via the white, less-educated, working class but is now under the full control of billionaire technologists and industrialists, many of them immigrants.

• It also sets up a tense MAGA vs. DOGE moment that could infect the early stages of President-elect Trump's second presidency.
• While some want to make America great by restricting immigration and promoting the American worker, others want to cut costs and increase efficiency no matter who does the work.

Catch up quick:

The skirmishes started Sunday when Trump named venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as his adviser on AI policy.

• Krishnan's appointment triggered an anti-Indian backlash on social media, particularly given his past advocacy for lifting caps on green cards.

Vivek Ramaswamy escalated the conflict into a full-blown war Thursday morning with a post on X blaming an American culture that "venerated mediocrity over excellence" for the growth in foreign tech workers.

• "A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers," Ramaswamy wrote, calling for a 1950s-style "Sputnik moment" to prioritize "nerdiness over conformity."
• "That's the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence," he said.

Between the lines:

Elon Musk's X is the town square for the MAGA movement, and by stepping into that square and firmly criticizing American culture — while praising the immigrant work ethic and parenting model — Ramaswamy threw down a gauntlet.

• Musk spent most of the afternoon trying to defend his DOGE co-leader and explain his argument, framing it as using immigration to supplement, rather than replace, American workers.
• "Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning," Musk wrote.

The problem for many MAGA adherents, though, was accepting the very notion of immigrants telling them America needs more immigration to fill lucrative jobs in America.

• It revived old tensions around the H-1B visa, which is reserved for people who "perform services in a specialty obligation" but practically speaking has become a crucial tool of Silicon Valley's growth.
• In some recent years, as many as 75% of those petitioning for that visa came from India, from where Ramaswamy's parents immigrated.

What they're saying:

"The Woodstock generation managed to build out aerospace, the one before went to the moon, America was doing great. Underlying your post is that we were all living in squalor until being rescued by H-1B's. Then why did everyone want to come here?" right-wing personality Mike Cernovich responded to Ramaswamy on X.

• "There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture. All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers," Nikki Haley, the former GOP presidential candidate and herself a daughter of Indian immigrants, wrote.
• "I want the little guy to matter too. Not everyone has $1 million but they still love their country and want to MAGA and close the border," far-right activist Laura Loomer posted.
• Loomer posted a series of missives throughout the afternoon, calling out Ramaswamy, Musk and anyone else in Trump's orbit who isn't fully committed to closing the borders.

Zoom out:

The fracture was familiar to anyone who's seen a movement expand — early adopters criticizing the latecomers for bringing different ideas.

• "Tech bros who took 8+ years to figure out that President Trump is not the bad guy and is in fact, the solution to America's problems, are really out here pontificating to MAGA patriots who figured it out a decade before them?" conservative streaming host Brenden Dilley posted on X.

The bottom line:

For now the fight is mostly confined to X. But it's sure to raise difficult questions in the coming days about what Trump's administration will mean for immigration, labor and the American worker.

• It will also potentially settle a looming conflict over who has the most influence in Trump 2.0 — his historic base or his new-found techno-libertarian allies.

Maybe It's Not Red vs Blue

Maybe we can finally wake up and smell the class war.

Overheard

The race war

The gender war

The culture war

The shootin' war

The media war

It's all phonied up as a way to put smoke in the air,

and throw sand in our eyes,

so we don't notice the real war -

the class war

Overheard Revisited

Whenever I hear "conservatives" whining about "how do we pay for all this stuff?" - and how providing help for regular people is going to "ruin the economy" - I just substitute "rich people's yacht money".

"How can we possibly respond to the pandemic without sacrificing rich people's yacht money?"

"Saving the environment sounds great, but what about rich people's yacht money?"

"Medicare For All would complete destroy rich people's yacht money."

"Yes, we all want good schools and broadband for everybody, but all that federal spending will cut into rich people's yacht money."

Not So Deep Thought

It seems a little odd that $300 a week in unemployment is called "a handout", when $800 Billion in PPP Loans, and $1.9 Trillion in Tax Cuts, and Trillions more in Quantitative Easing to prop up the stock market  - all of that is called "stimulus" and "common-sense economics".

Rich People Problems

More like - the weird shit rich people think is how normal people act.

Reuters:

Court: Gore-Tex heiress can't adopt ex-husband

WILMINGTON, Del (Reuters) - F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that the rich are different, but that does not mean an heiress can adopt her 65-year-old ex-husband to increase her family’s claim to a billion dollar inheritance.

Delaware’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the unconventional adoption did not entitle the man to inherit a share of the Gore-Tex waterproof fabric fortune.

Heirs to the founders of W.L. Gore & Associates Inc of Newark, Delaware, have fought for years over how to divide their stake in the privately held company, which has $3 billion in annual revenue.

Their battle landed in court over the question of how the late Wilbert L. Gore, who founded the company in his basement in 1958, and his late wife, Vieve, intended to divide their fortune.

At the center of the dispute was the adoption nearly a decade ago by Susan Gore, one of Wilbert’s five children, of her ex-husband, Jan Otto.

According to the court’s opinion, Susan Gore and her son Nathan Otto began considering the adoption to even out the potential distribution from a family trust, which was meant to divide 26,500 Gore shares.

But because Susan Gore and Jan Otto had three children, while each of her four siblings had four, Susan’s children stood to inherit fewer shares, according to the opinion. Eventually, the court said in its decision, she decided to adopt her ex-husband, who initially assured her he wanted to be her son merely to benefit their children.

Susan Gore went to a Wyoming court and secretly adopted Jan Otto in 2003, when he was 65. A year later, Jan Otto had a change of heart and decided to keep the potential distribution from the trust for himself, according to the court ruling.

While Susan was considering whether to “un-adopt” her ex-husband in 2005, according to the opinion, her mother Vieve Gore died, releasing the trust assets and setting in motion the legal wrangling that led to the court’s ruling.

“The fact that Susan kept this adoption secret until Vieve died further evidences that Susan and the Otto grandchildren knew that they were acting to thwart Vieve’s intentions,” Chief Justice Myron Steele wrote in the 37-page opinion.

Attorneys for Susan Gore, Jan Otto, Nathan Otto and Susan Gore’s siblings did not immediately return calls seeking comment. W.L. Gore & Associates spokeswoman Susan Crow did not immediately return an e-mail seeking comment.
Now, tell me - seriously - why should we not pass a whole shitload of laws and just tax all these assholes out of existence?

On The Dole

BTW - "liberal" Dems like Dianne Feinstein can go fuck themselves too.

WaPo:

If the name of the Paycheck Protection Program didn’t make its purpose clear, its key sponsors spelled it out.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) explained that the program “was designed as an alternative for unemployment and to prevent unemployment.” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and the director of the Small Business Administration announced that the “overarching focus” of the effort was “keeping workers paid and employed.”

But a closer look at three large companies that received millions from the $517 billion program shows that some companies have not retained most of their staff on the payrolls.

The Fairmont Grand Del Mar in San Diego, a luxury hotel owned by a group led by Richard Blum, a private equity chief and the husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), received $6.4 million from the program. The hotel has been closed and most of its hundreds of workers are unemployed and unpaid, union officials said. To maintain their health insurance, workers send money back to the company.

- snip -

The companies say that they can’t rehire many people because they can’t fully reopen properties when a government pandemic order limits guests. But their decisions to withhold the money from payroll have left employees to rely on government unemployment checks, which in some states have been difficult to obtain and, for many, will soon stop when the benefit expires. Other furloughed employees are getting kicked off company health insurance because employers are not funding their premiums.

“It was a rotten move,” said Nazareth Reza, a 33-year-old mother who for eight years had been a banquet server at the Fairmont Grand Del Mar. “They have the money.”

“It makes me mad that the company got the money but we are still out of a job,” said Tomas Garcia, 26, formerly a server at Buca di Beppo in Albuquerque.

“It’s pretty cruel kicking people off of their health insurance in the middle of the pandemic,” said Christopher Cook, 47, who has worked 22 years at the Omni Providence in Rhode Island, mostly in the purchasing department. His family lost the company insurance on June 1. “If they received that [government] money — that’s mind-blowing to me.”

"Conservatives" are always yammering about "people won't work if you pay them not to".

They're indicting themselves, not the workin' stiffs who just want to make a decent wage so they can support themselves and their habits or hobbies or whatever.

And maybe I'm not supposed to want it, but right now, I want Wall Street and some of these company bosses to suffer - a lot and for a good long time.

The Root Principles

I'm a Capitalist because god's a Capitalist.

Capitalism is a close analog for how the world actually operates.

I have to establish a cycle of spending and profit and investment in order to stay alive.

I have to take in a quantity of calories sufficient to fuel the work I have to do as I go out and get my next meal.

That's the basic premise, and it works very well, but that's not all there is to it.

Unfortunately, way too any of us believe that is, in fact, all there is to it.

I'll forego most of the weird permutations and complicating factors, and just stick to me as an individual self-contained unit.

I think that part of my analogy makes perfect sense, but it lacks one vital consideration: Recognition of the absolute need for appropriate regulation - cuz god built regulation into everything.

Like I said before, I need fuel. Blood Sugar is a pretty basic fuel, and it's one thing I get plenty of from the food I eat. I have to have it so I can do the work.

So blood sugar is a mighty good thing, unless I get too much of it. So god gave me a pancreas to regulate my Blood Sugar levels. Without that regulation, I die.

I need a way to regulate my body temperature, so I have a hypothalamus.

I need to regulate my circadian rhythms, so I have a pineal gland.

I need to regulate my breathing and my heartbeat and my eye-blink and a whole metric shit-ton of other things so that all my different systems are functioning in a way that fits all the pieces together so I can go out and do the fucking work and sustain not only myself but everything else I need to sustain myself.

OK. So all of that micro thing leads in to all of this macro thing -

From Scott Galloway - Professor Of Marketing, NYU Stern:

Yet most successful capitalist systems acknowledge that without rule of law, empathy, and redistribution of income, we lose the script. The purpose of an economy is to build a robust middle class. We have, traditionally, elected leaders who cut the lower branches off trees to ensure other saplings get sunlight. There is less and less sunlight. It’s never been easier to become a billionaire, or harder to become a millionaire.

The uber-wealthy paid a tax rate of 70% in the fifties, 47% in the eighties, and 23% at present — a lower tax rate than the middle class. Taxes on the poor and middle class have largely stayed the same. We’ve exploded the debt so rich people pay less tax. If money is the transfer of work and time, we’ve decided our kids will need to work more in the future, and spend less time with their families, so wealthy people can pay lower taxes today. If that sounds immoral, trust your instincts.

It feels as if something has changed. Gerrymandering, money in politics, lack of a shared experience among Americans, social-media-fueled rage, and an idolatry of innovators have led to a faustian bargain: the innovators (lords) capture the majority of the gains, and the 99% (serfs) get an awesome phone, a $4,000 TV, great original scripted television, and Mandalorian action figures delivered within 24 hours. Everybody gets a taste of the innovators’ nose candy and can buy shares in Amazon. Everyone has heard about someone whose daughter works at Google and bought her parents a house.

The biggest losers of the decade are the unremarkables. Our society used to give remarkable opportunities to unremarkable kids and young adults. Some of the crowding out of unremarkable white males, including myself, is a good thing. More women are going to college, and remarkable kids from low-income neighborhoods get opportunities. But a middle-class kid who doesn’t learn to code Python or speak Mandarin can soon find she is not “tracking” and can’t catch up.

• I have intimate experience with being unremarkable:
• Graduated public high school with a 3.2 GPA and 1130 SAT (85%).
• Admitted, on appeal, to UCLA, academic probation 4 times, subject to dismissal twice, 2.27 GPA. 
• Landed a job at Morgan Stanley in Fixed Income Group. (How? I interview well and lied about my grades.)
• Admitted to UC Berkeley Haas (yes, with a 2.27 undergrad GPA).
• Have started several businesses since graduation; most have gone sideways or failed.

My wins were businesses that sold for between $28 million (Prophet) and $160 million (L2). The firm that was sold for $160 million, my VCs didn’t want to sell, as they felt there was an opportunity to go “bigger.” This is emblematic of our lottery / Hunger Games economy, where the gestalt is to go big or die trying. This creates a small class of uber-winners and many more people who wake up at 40 with no economic security or prospects. It’s “go big or go home.” Deaths of despair are skyrocketing, and the innovation ecosystem feeds it.

We have to understand - and never fucking forget - that once in a while we have to step in and rescue Capitalism from the Capitalists.

Something To Remember

Median Net Worth in USAmerica Inc last year was about $80,000.

Average Net Worth was about $180,000.

There are about 550 billionaires, and something like 10 million millionaires up in this joint.

Some basic arithmetic makes it pretty easy to imagine how fucked up American Wealth Distribution has become.

Bill Gates walks into a soup kitchen, and the average net worth of the people in that room goes up into the hundreds of millions.

But you've still got Bill Gates and about 100 stone broke homeless people.

This is not a particularly rich country when 99% of the people are doing all the work while the other 1% get all the goodies.

Bruce Bartlett

Farmers' Advance, Bruce Bartlett:

I know something about this subject. Forty years ago, while working for New York Rep. Jack Kemp, I helped originate the Republican obsession with slashing taxes that came to be called “supply-side economics.” While I believe this theory played a useful role in economic theory and policy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it has long outlived its usefulness and is now nothing but dogma completely divorced from reality.

It will be hard for many to believe, but once upon a time, Republicans genuinely cared about the budget deficit. From Dwight Eisenhower to George H.W. Bush, many of them were actually willing to raise taxes and oppose tax cuts to reduce it. And that includes Ronald Reagan, who cut taxes in 1981 but then supported 11 tax increases to offset a ballooning deficit.

And here's the crux of it all - this is what the GOP is all about.

The 1978 passage of California 's Proposition 13, which slashed the state’s property taxes, was critical in convincing Republicans that tax-cutting was more popular than deficit reduction. But to maintain some semblance of consistency, Republican intellectuals such as Irving Kristol and Alan Greenspan developed a theory called “starve-the-beast,” which says that spending will only be cut when tax cuts increase the deficit so much that there is no alternative.

If my goal is to dismantle the "welfare state" - to kill all that FDR Socialism Stuff - then the policy agenda pursued by Repubs for the last 60 years is almost exactly how I'd do it.

The short version is that we must be punished for not having the foresight to be born into better circumstances.

Short example: There will be about 5000 American deaths this year that will result in any kind of tax liability under the Estate Tax laws.

5000 out of about 2,600,000 in an "average year".

Less than 2% will pay anything in taxes on the wealth they inherit - and they pay taxes only on the amount in excess of $10,000,000.

If my estate is $50 million, then my poor pitiful survivors will have to figure out how to squeak by on a share of about $35,000,000.

I have no sympathy for legacy pukes who complain about paying the taxes that keep them from being roasted alive by the people who do the work and pay them rent.

Brain Wave Deficit

Another entitled-feeling over-privileged tin-eared dolt responding defensively to criticism:

Coupla counter-questions here, ma'am:

1) You don't really think you're supporting the system all by yourself, right?

2) How much more than anybody else are you benefiting from that system?

Fuck me - ignorant rich people. It's like they have no idea how these things actually work.

The Wealth Gap Just Gets Worse

Both Bernie and Hillary tried with this, but the message was never enough to cut thru the frenzied clutter of the Trump Chaff Machine, plus the Voter Suppression that the GOP has been working on for 20 years, plus the Kremlin, plus the FBI, plus the Rat-Fucking and the Fake News and and and.

From The Institute For Policy Studies:


Key findings

Just 100 CEOs have company retirement funds worth $4.7 billion — a sum equal to the entire retirement savings of the 41 percent of U.S. families with the smallest nest eggs.

This $4.7 billion total is also equal to the entire retirement savings of the bottom:

• 59 percent of African-American families 
• 75 percent of Latino families 
• 55 percent of female-headed households 
• 44 percent of white working class households

On average, the top 100 CEO nest eggs are large enough to generate for each of these
executives a $253,088 monthly retirement check for the rest of their lives.

Among ordinary workers, those lucky enough to have 401(k) plans had a median balance at the end of 2013 of $18,433, enough for a monthly retirement check of just $101.

Of workers 56-61 years old, 39 percent have no employer-sponsored retirement plan whatsoever and will likely depend entirely on Social Security, which pays an average benefit of $1,239 per month.

With nearly $3 billion in special tax-deferred accounts, Fortune 500 CEOs stand to gain enormously from Trump’s proposed tax cuts on top earners.

If President-elect Donald Trump succeeds in cutting the top marginal tax rate from 39.6 percent to 33 percent, Fortune 500 CEOs would save $196 million on the income taxes they would owe if they withdrew their tax-deferred funds.

Unlike ordinary 401(k) holders, most top CEOs have no limits on annual contributions
to their tax-deferred accounts. In 2015 alone, Fortune 500 CEOs saved $92 million on their taxes by putting $238 million more in these accounts than they could have if they were subject to the same rules as other workers.

Michael Neidorff, the CEO of Centene, a provider of health plans to Medicaid recipients and other low-income Americans, has nearly $140 million in his deferred compensation account, up 658 percent since the 2010 launch of Obamacare.

The retirement asset gap between CEOs mirrors the racial and gender divides among ordinary Americans.

The 10 white male CEOs with the largest retirement funds hold a combined $1.4 billion, more than eight times more than the 10 CEOs of color with the largest retirement assets and nearly five times as much as the top 10 female CEOs.

Haves And Soon-To-Haves

Try not to think about Logan's Run or The Island or Roller Ball or whatever.

What's The Matter With Wal-Mart?

The short answer, of course is, "Who fucking cares?"  but there's something that feels like a bellwether in this, from CNBC:

At the center of the discounter's domestic woes is its appeal among shoppers who are facing stagnant wage growth and simply can't afford to spend on discretionary items—or in some cases, food.

"They're lowering prices and they're still not getting the traffic," said Belus Capital Advisors analyst Brian Sozzi.

First, Wal-Mart is making all the right moves if what they're attempting to do is to drive a deflationary downward spiral.  They cut their prices which means they have to hammer their workers and their vendors to cut costs, which means their vendors have to hammer their workers and their vendors and on and on and on - until nobody's making enough to spend the few pennies it takes to buy any of the piece of shit merchandise available anywhere.  It's an obvious over-simplification, but that's basically how an economy works.

But there's a kicker - a delicious extra bit of irony.  From the comments at the CNBC site:

walmart can have it, went yesterday, stopped stocking three things we went there to get. no customer service, the place is full of third world village idiots who have no discipline with themselves much less five or six anchor babies in tow. Their prices may be cheaper, but I'll pay more just to stay away, or starve.............now car insurance?? whats next?? baby birthing stations for illegals??????

This rube has grown up believing the bullshit about how differences between people are all about ethnicity and skin color and everything except economic class. So the guy we tend to think of as the "typical Wal-Mart shopper" is now going to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart because it's filled with people just like him.

By The Numbers

Not that it'll matter one little bit, but hey - I'm in full Quixote mode, so fut da wuk.

The success of Costco, Trader Joe’s, QuikTrip and Mercadona, Spain’s biggest supermarket chain, indicate, [business professor Zeynep Ton] argues, that well-paid, knowledgeable workers are not an indulgence often found in luxury boutiques with their high markups. At each of the aforementioned companies, workers are paid more than at their competitors; they are also amply staffed per shift. More employees can ask customers questions about what they want to see more of and what they don’t like, and then they are empowered to change displays or order different stock to appeal to local tastes. (In big chains, these sorts of decisions are typically made in headquarters with little or no line-staff input.) Costco pays its workers about $21 an hour; Walmart is just about $13. Yet Costco’s stock performance has thoroughly walloped Walmart’s for a decade.