Yves here. Bob Urie has independently arrived as a long-stated view of our own, that the 2008 crisis, and the Obama/Paulson/Geithner/Bernanke effort to preserve the financial services industry regime assured that its unresolved conflicts would propagate destructively into the political realm. We have compared the crisis to throwing a huge boulder into a lake and seeing the ripples extend further and further out.
For the long-form case as to how Obama chose to reconstitute the pre-crisis order as much as possible, see our 2010 article: The Empire Continues to Strike Back: Team Obama Propaganda Campaign Reaches Fever Pitch.
One quibble with the article below: as we explain in detail in ECONNED, financial services deregulation started well before Clinton. Paul Volcker has effectively said the failure to require money market funds to be regulated as deposits was a seminal event. Other dating back to the 1970s include ending the requirement that New York Stock Exchange members be partnerships and the deregulation of commissions on stock trading. The importance of Clinton formally ending the Glass Steagall separation of banking from investment banking is also greatly overstated. It was already shot full of holes by then, as proven by the 1988 (no typo) acquisition by Credit Suisse of bulge-bracket investment bank First Boston
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
A recent series of interviews with former US President Barack Obama and his associates reveal that Mr. Obama ‘didn’t see Donald Trump coming.’ As with most quotes of this sort, it reveals more about the speaker than the subject. Within three or four months of Mr. Obama taking office, a reasonable number us were warning not of Mr. Trump per se, but of a fascist response to Mr. Obama bailing out Wall Street while leaving tens of millions of unemployed citizens to their own devices.
That Mr. Obama didn’t see this coming makes him, and the people that he surrounded himself with, fools. A clearer historical analogy could hardly have been possible. Wall Street had been freed to create new types and classes of financial instruments based on their never having failed before— because they had never existed, before. A financial crash in 1929 set off a chain reaction in the heavily financialized Western economy. The resulting Great Depression set in motion a series of fascist uprisings across Europe.
In the 2010s, as with the 1930s, it was the failed liberal response that did most of the social damage. In the 2010s as with the 1930s, liberals used austerity to punish poor and working people for mismanagement by the ruling class. The Nazis were brought to power to fix the mess that self-dealing liberals had created. By 1933, wealth was still heavily concentrated through financialization in the hands of a few self-dealing oligarchs.
Across the West, these self-dealing oligarchs engaged in self-dealing as the economy for everyone else cratered. Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933 with one-quarter of German workers unemployed. Hitler promised to right the economy. And he did so via military Keynesianism until Germany’s imperial overreach brought about the end of the Reich. Should the analogy continue, the next step is for the US is to launch really stupid wars.
Why what Mr. Obama thinks is relevant in the present is because he and his Democrat brethren and Sistren still have no idea why Donald Trump is president. And they never will. These are the people who are running the Democratic Party. Their suggestion for how to fix this— to elect Democrats, misses that this was recently tried and Genocide Joe Biden was the result. The ‘liberal’ Biden launched a genocide in Palestine as he triple-dared the Russians to nuke New York and Los Angeles.
What the Democrats have accomplished is to make the US ungovernable. Why not blame the Republicans? Because it is the relationship of the Democrats to the permanent government in the US— the so-called IC (intelligence community) and the ‘government handout’ receiving banks and tech industry, that now effectively control the nation. This is why the US has crypto and mass surveillance. The people ‘asking’ for this garbage are the people selling it.
It appears here that these cycles of one party blaming the other for systemic dysfunction has run its course. Western capitalism shat the bed in the 1930s, was revived, and it proceeded to shit the bed again in almost identical fashion in the 2000s. The Democrats didn’t invent capitalism and Barack Obama wasn’t responsible for the ‘liberation’ of Wall Street (Bill Clinton was). But Obama was responsible for the Federal response to Wall Street’s implosion.
Every effort and instinct that Mr. Obama had went into bailing out his rich donors while downplaying the severity of the crisis. Even though the Great Recession didn’t plausibly end until 2017 or thereabouts, Mr. Obama had already ‘pivoted’ to austerity by 2010, eventually putting Joe Biden on his Cat Food Committee. Congressional Democrats eventually asked Obama to recall Biden because he was trying to cut Social Security and Medicare more than the Republicans were asking for.
Below I suggest a ‘split government’ strategy for the 2026 midterms to slow down the current rush to chaos. This is standard fare amongst US electoral strategies. The idea is to prevent either party from enacting its oligarch and / or Armageddon-friendly policies. The leap of faith required is that the parties cancel each other out. The more likely outcome is that they double down on oligarch and / or Armageddon-friendly policies because this is what the oligarchs want.
In the larger scheme, empires come and empires go. What makes the present so perilous is that nuclear weapons remain as the political health of the West deteriorates. For those who may have forgotten, the US is currently engaged in an ethnic genocide of the sort that no one in power in the West would have defended even a few years ago. The US isn’t in decline. It is in political freefall. I wrote this before Joe Biden was appointed to the presidency in 2020. That turned out about like I said it would.
At present, US President Donald Trump is instigating a war against a nation, Iran, that on paper can defend itself, risking a long, bloody and expensive fight. This war could spell the end of Israel (no comment) as it lowers the international standing of the US even more than it has already been lowered. Mr. Trump’s theory that instilling fear and loathing abroad is the route to peace and prosperity at home fails to distinguish between just and unjust peace. This means that he does not understand the concept of peace at all.
Mr. Trump’s ‘peace through strength’ mantra has been a favorite of tyrants for millennia. If only ‘the people’ would sit down, shut up, a do what they are told there will be peace, runs the theory. That those advocating peace through strength wouldn’t do what they are telling others to do— to roll over and play dead, suggests a flaw in the strategy. Most people don’t like to be told what to do. So, first and foremost, peace through strength is the ethos of people who like war. The correct phrasing of it is ‘peace through war.’
The difference is crucial, as it distinguishes solving problems from creating problems. Unjust peace, such as that created when political differences are temporarily quieted using military force, fails to resolve the underlying differences. In the parlance, this represents the difference between making a ‘deal’ and solving a political problem. ‘Deals’ produce a talking point or two for a news cycle or two. Peace requires creating sustainable outcomes, not fast ones.
That Mr. Trump imagined that he could ‘end the war (in Ukraine) in a day’ provides insight into his thinking. What he meant is that he could get a few people to agree that the war is over without doing anything to turn the chatter into realized fact. It is bullshit of a particular sort. Existing in a world without accountability, Mr. Trump’s class doesn’t know the difference between facts and bullshit because it only deals in bullshit.
The US / Israeli ‘plantation’ approach to political management borrowed its sociology from slavery. On a plantation, peace means as absence of open rebellion. Political opposition is consigned to urinating in the soup and slow walking economic production. That once a social tipping point is passed societies tend to explode in violent rebellion is missed by those in charge. This is why the insistence that no legitimate reason to rebel exists is made so forcefully by the powers that be.
Mr. Trump’s foundering with respect to creating peace anywhere in the world at any point in time might provide a clue if his lack of knowledge in the ways of the world were less substantial. In this respect, he joins his Democrat brethren in not knowing anything that might interfere with the receipt of campaign contributions from nefarious sources. ‘Ignorance is bliss’ would be the Uniparty mantra if anyone in the Uniparty could recall it.
The current great hope of the Democratic Party, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) debuted her foreign policy chops for all of the world to behold at the Munich Security Conference. To the setting, a sizable group of Europeans who have read about war in history books (or haven’t) got together in Munich to glorify it. The cliché that each generation must learn war for itself misses that nuclear weapons remove this ‘luxury.’ There is no do-over once the nukes are flying.
It is US foreign policy— often called ‘imperialism,’ that converts domestic liberalism into militarized authoritarianism abroad. Those who want to understand the American Uniparty in 2026 might wish to begin with historian Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction. The punchline: it’s the economy, stupid. The oligarchs destroyed the industrial economy without having anything to replace it with. This would be the Democrats. The Republicans weren’t able to get policies as cynical as NAFTA passed.
Hailing the Democrat’s liberal militarism as more enlightened that the Republican’s would be rich if it weren’t so ignorant. Question: who started the war between Russia and Ukraine? Why, that would be the Democrats. In 2013 the (Barack) Obama administration launched a coup in Ukraine that ousted its elected government. The US then installed a ‘Ukrainian’ government to its liking as the CIA launched a ‘full-scale invasion’ of Ukraine. This is called regime change.
Why the instigating party matters in this case is that conceptually, the Democrat’s war against Russia was successfully framed by and for urban liberals as a humanitarian intervention. That the US both couped Ukraine and conducted a ‘full scale invasion’ of it before charging that the Russians did the same would seem to be a problem for the Western theory that Ukraine was a sovereign nation when the Russians entered in February 2022. It wasn’t. It was an American colony.
The American ‘left’ split over the war in Ukraine along liberal – left lines, with a preponderance aligning with the liberal foreign policy establishment, a/k/a the CIA. MI6 and Mossad. This isn’t to suggest that the American left is either a product of the IC (intelligence ‘community’) or is an asset of it. It is to suggest that it is amongst the least capable political groupings on the planet. The wait for the Democrats to ‘save’ the left misses that every time that they have been returned to power in the past, they have been farther to the political right.
The reason why the American left is so incapable is because of its one-way affiliation with the Democrats. In 2020, about 99% of self-described ‘progressives’ voted for war against Russia, genocide in West Asia and a high probability of nuclear annihilation. That Joe Biden didn’t sell his candidacy on these policies would seem to be a lesson for Democrats. One that they never learn. The only political appeal of the Democrats looking forward is that they aren’t Republicans. And the only appeal of Republicans is that they aren’t Democrats.
While readers here are aware of this history, most Americans aren’t. Why is this? Because every word that Joe Biden and his administration said about the US proxy war in Ukraine was a calculated lie (a/k/a propaganda) intended to deceive Democrats into supporting yet one more misguided imperial adventure. Biden was Obama’s Viceroy in Ukraine before he was appointed President in 2020. His demon spawn (Hunter) acted as the public face on the looting of Ukraine by the West.
Here is Democrat Hillary Clinton opining on Vladimir Putin and the US proxy war in Ukraine. Under any reasonable system of governance, Ms. Clinton would be in prison for allegedly conspiring with the CIA to rig recent presidential elections. What makes what Ms. Clinton has to say worth commenting on is that hers is the exact position that the American left— in the form of the nominally left press, has taken since the launch of Russia’s SMO in February 2022.
Given an ‘off ramp’ in April 2022, mere weeks after Russia’s SMO was launched, Mr. Biden sent Boris Johnson to tell the Ukrainians to keep fighting. That was one million dead Ukrainians ago, with another million Ukrainians seriously injured. The question then: who was Mr. Biden working for if not the Ukrainians? In fact, Biden had been handed the war in Ukraine by the CIA. The CIA had its army in Ukraine attack Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the East to draw the Russians into Eastern Ukraine.
Back in Munich. AOC reliably called for the reestablishment of US soft power vehicles like USAID and NED (National Endowment for Democracy), emphasizing the ‘support’ roles that these agencies play abroad— as if they are unrelated to US regime change operations. That AOC either doesn’t understand the role of US soft power in regime change operations or imagines that they serve a useful purpose places her with a 7th grader’s grasp of foreign policy.
The framing is easy enough to flip for purposes of clarity. How willing is the US to allow the regime-change arms of hostile foreign governments to set up shop inside the US? Since 9/11, the US has committed massive resources to preventing foreign powers from doing so. Venezuela had been subsidizing poor American’s heating fuel until the first Trump government ended the practice by seizing Venezuelan assets. The political reason for doing so is that it makes American leaders look bad for foreign governments to be supporting ‘their’ citizens.
What makes AOC close to intellectually challenged here is that she appears to believe that the purpose of USAID and NED is to ‘help’ poor people. In fact, the purpose is to have US political representation on the ground in every nation that the US wishes to control. NED was the primary means by which the US affected the 2013 – 2014 coup in Ukraine. A dozen years later Ukraine is a dystopian hellscape with two million dead or injured Ukrainians, a government that answers to MI6 and the CIA, and a population that desperately wants the war ended.
What AOC did in Munich was to posture the way that Democrats imagine that adults in positions of power posture— by spending 90 seconds reading foreign policy talking points and then putting herself forward as being knowledgeable about foreign policy. While doing so might work in a nation with a functioning foreign policy establishment, what AOC is signaling is that there is no way out of the political mess that the US is currently in.
The likely reason why AOC tops the Democrat’s list for 2028 is that most of the prominent names found in the Epstein files belong to Democrats. It would seemingly be difficult for alleged child rapists to win public office. That the Dems tend to couch their politics in moral terms doesn’t benefit them here either. Systematic child rape, as is alleged to have occurred with respect to Epstein, will seemingly be a challenge for the Democrats who are listed, irrespective of how much they ‘dislike’ racism, etc.
Via the electoral cycle in the US, politicians have promised ‘change’ for most of the last five decades now. Upon being elected, they have jettisoned their political marketing ‘platforms’ and behaved as if the CIA directly controls every aspect of the US political system. I do not know the extent to which it actually does. But the wars that the CIA wants are launched. The regimes that the CIA wants overthrown are overthrown. And dystopian methods of surveillance, social control and punitive policing increase.
USAID has been an instrument of American imperialism since its inception in the post-War period. USAID provided its own cover by dispensing foreign aid to needy humans. The facts of how and why these humans are ‘needy’ are never considered. The ‘needy’ tend to be clustered in former Western colonies. For instance, Bill Clinton’s plan to ‘save’ Haiti was to locate more sweatshops there. As the facts have it, the only people who benefit from sweatshops are the people who own them. The point: Bill Clinton was helping his donors, not Haiti.
AOC’s actual record on foreign policy is of political posturing as a ‘progressive’ while supporting the CIA’s foreign policy agenda without deviation. In 2024, she made a performative vote against war funding only after the bill’s passage was assured. Her support for ‘defensive’ weapons for Israel imagines that Israel’s nuclear weapons stockpile is defensive when it was Israel’s threat to ‘nuke Iran’ that brought the US into the twelve-day war. The point: all weapons are defensive until they are used offensively. AOC is either stupid or evil on this point.
More to the point, she appears to have only the murkiest of ideas why she is saying anything at all about foreign policy. She conspicuously has no interest in it else she might have learned a thing or two during her time in the House. But she didn’t.
She comes across as a novice because she is a novice. And what her supporters are hearing is the foreign policy of ‘the Blob.’ It is the political program of the fascist right, here being propagated by Democrats. There is nothing interesting, insightful, or original in her pronouncements. Implied is that AOC’s life ambition is to occupy a chair in elected office. No more, and no less.
Matt Duss, AOC’s reported tutor on foreign policy, was the reason why so many on the Left took issue with Bernie Sanders. Duss worked for Sanders before he (Duss) moved on to doing volunteer work for the CIA / Pentagon. As stated above, it is US foreign policy that converts domestic liberalism into global authoritarianism. In this respect, Duss is a loyal soldier. He doesn’t know what he isn’t supposed to know (sometimes called ‘facts’). And he does know the fake facts that are used in the US to mal-explain US foreign policy to the locals.
I had assumed that Duss was chosen by the Democrats in the same way that AI selects its sources. Through its method as word and phrase counting machines, AI provides the most popular answers, not the correct answers. This is Duss. If the idea is popular in neocon / liberal hawk circles, Duss can be found propagating it. He is an example of someone whose career depends on what he doesn’t know more than on what he does. His explanation of the war in Ukraine comes from the deepest bowels of the Pentagon.
The current government of Donald Trump is approximately the fifth in the US since the end of WWII to craft a blow-off phase of American capitalism. Each phase has surpassed the prior in terms of the desperation of capital to maintain control of political discourse in order to keep control over Western political economy. Note that the word ‘control’ plays a prominent role in this paragraph. The paradox that the more aggressively control is sought, the likelier it is to slip away, appears never to have occurred.
With the Democrats now perceiving an opportunity via Mr. Trump’s overreach in Minneapolis, they will bravely wield what leverage they have to get ICE to wear more appealing clothing and to use clearer handwriting when filling in the death certificates of their victims. Missing in declarations of the ‘rights’ of law enforcement are the rights of Americans to make their objections to it known. That doing so makes law enforcement less ‘efficient’ is the point. Efficiency in this context is authoritarian dogma, not a strategy for a just peace.
While the genesis of ‘the president of half of the country’ style of governing likely belongs to Ronald Reagan, who hid his revival of Central Planning (via the MIC) in the US behind ‘free market’ rhetoric, Donald Trump now defines ‘Americans’ to be the people who agree with him on a particular topic. Mathematically, as topics are added, the probability of people agreeing with Mr. Trump on every topic approaches zero. Aside from a few cultists, the idea of Mr. Trump being ‘president to half of the country’ centers on US political dysfunction, not on Donald Trump’s policies.
The problem for we, the people, is that political organization in the US is a function of economic organization. American political scientists Thomas Ferguson and Gilens and Page have successfully demonstrated that the will of the people bears little relationship to policy outcomes. The people for whom Congress works are either oligarchs or they have formal roles in US corporations. This renders promises made by the Democrats to do anything useful, ever, unenforceable.
To the question of Mr. Trump, the closest available political strategy for the US to take in response is to slow the ability of government to function. This could come through divided government— with one or two houses of Congress going to Democrats in 2026. The problem with this strategy is that the Democrats are so delusional and corrupt that they would interpret any electoral victory as support for them and their policies, which despite the drama, remain indifferentiable from Mr. Trump’s.
Recall that it was Joe Biden who redefined ‘antisemitism’ to be criticism of the nation-state of Israel, who promoted the worst lies about Israeli victimhood on October 7, 2023 to legitimate a genocide, and who made campus anti-genocide protests illegal. And in a move that Democrats have yet to understand, it was Biden who lied to his constituents regarding the nature and the causes of the CIA’s war against Russia.
Had Biden et al been re-elected, the Democrats would be enacting the same fascistic legislation that the Trump administration currently is. The evidence for this proposition? The Democrats’ ‘analysis’ of their electoral losses in 2016 and 2024 blames ‘disinformation, misinformation and malinformation.’ Remarkably, their active support for a WWII style ethnic genocide in Gaza facilitated by a demented dotard war criminal (Biden) never entered as a possible causal factor.
Some Democrats have claimed that Joe Biden’s policies were anachronistic when they were in fact the Democrats’ boilerplate pro-imperialist, pro-genocide, foreign policy. What Democrats cannot grasp is how closely aligned Joe Biden and Donald Trump are in terms of policies. This isn’t written to raise Trump, but rather to lower the Democrats. The Democrats are so reckless that they imagined that leaving Obamacare premiums unfunded would guarantee their reelection. It didn’t.
This is where AOC wants to pick up. In this world the problem with US and Israeli actions in Gaza isn’t that they are committing genocide. The problem is with the Democrat’s ‘messaging’ regarding the genocide. The problem with the war in Ukraine isn’t the two million dead or injured Ukrainians. It is the messaging regarding the two million dead or injured Ukrainians. It is deflection. Defend the policies by attacking their accusers. All that readers need to know about AOC is that she was one of the top Democratic Party fundraisers within weeks of her entering Congress— before she had postured her way through any legislation at all.
Unfortunately, there is no follow-on strategy for moving the West forward in a leftish direction. Electing Democrats to majorities in the House and Senate could in theory prevent Mr. Trump from enacting policies that are destructive. But with history as a guide, the Dems’ approach has been to co-opt the policies of the winners in the last election. What voters miss is that the Democrats and the Republicans work for the same people. Two parties exist because few would believe that a single party is ‘democratic.’ But a single party it is.
Assuming that humanity survives until then, this leaves 2028 as the open question. 2028 is what the Dems have their eyes on. They can put a Newsom / AOC (or Buttigieg / Klobuchar) ticket up that guarantees Israel the right to commit genocide (Newsom). And AOC can restart the Democrat’s war against Russia. But they will be doing so without my vote. The fiery speakers the Dems are putting forward have actual policies to the right of Mr. Trump. Readers with an interest are encouraged to read beyond the bullshit.
It is tempting to suggest that until the Democrats get a grip and understand what an irredeemable piece of shit the Democratic Party is, they will be electing Donald Trump over and over again in an existential doom loop. But the Democratic Party doesn’t care what an irredeemable piece of shit is it. Its leaders are richer than they ever have been. They get to spend their days raping children as they pretend to ‘oppose racism.’
This is the time for the adults, if the US has any, to step forward. The current path is unsustainable. America’s economy of self-interest is consuming itself. The US needs the First Principles that a constitution offers, but that capitalism overrides. How can someone enter office as President and then ignore the law with impunity? This isn’t a rhetorical question. How, functionally, can this be? The problem is the form of political economy. Until this is resolved, there is no way out of current dysfunction.
49 comments
Comments are closed.
The rich will end up with all the dollars in the world, but the dollar will be worthless. It will be too late when they realize their mistake.
Just as cancer kills the host.
The oligarchs have slain the golden goose and are feasting on its toxic liver.
To repeat myself, obama will go down in history as the worst president ever.
Total and complete sellout, and he had a lot of help.
A pox on both their houses. .
much as I hate it…
that is the short time 0utcome…
but we must hope and endure
something > 0
Panta Rhei
In a latter-day Jubilee, hyperinflation cancels out all debt and all wealth on the ledger.
Fearless leader is doing all he can to wreck the almighty buck, and so far so good.
In the aftermath of financial collapse the 400 million guns in the hands of the public will continue to operate as if nothing happened…
> The rich will end up with all the dollars in the world, but the dollar will be worthless.
From your mouth and my mind to ${DEITY}’s ears. This is the way (so long as the new monetary means is owned by the masses).
The rich use dollars,though exorbitant privilege, to hoard and distribute resources.
I am confident they will kill before surrendering one small part.
No change will occur without an opposition as ruthless.
:) …
“Yes, I know …” (via YouTube)
In the spirit of Jay Gould the rich won’t need to sully themselves with any actual killing — they’ll simply hire one half of the impoverished masses to kill the other half.
great
Fascism of course existed before the Great Depression but was always in the service of oligarchy which doesn’t mind a bit–or a lot–of fascism if it will keep the lowers in line. Hudson explains it all elsewhere today.
And so the current day Democrats serve the traditional role of the priestly caste which is to make pure selfishness seem more human or at least divinely endorsed and help keep the lowers in line. There’s nothing people like Obama hate more than populism.
Trump just seems to be on some kind of weird (or psycho) celebrity ego trip. He has fascists working for him when they are not on Fox News.
Thanks, Rob Urie. Much to contemplate here.
I will point out that, in Richard Kline’s schema in his important essay archived at Naked Capitalism, the diagnosis, synthesis, and suggestions for action are “radical left.” Commenters who can’t tell anymore a difference between right and left (and keep repeating that rhetorical pose) can read today’s essay as how someone on the left approaches the problem of U.S. moral and economic decline.
This is important: “Matt Duss, AOC’s reported tutor on foreign policy, was the reason why so many on the Left took issue with Bernie Sanders. Duss worked for Sanders before he (Duss) moved on to doing volunteer work for the CIA / Pentagon. As stated above, it is US foreign policy that converts domestic liberalism into global authoritarianism.”
The issue here is not to blame Bernie Sanders, who is a good politician, so far as he is willing to go. The issue here is that Sanders, Ocasio Cortez, and Buttigieg, among others, are deliberately “ignorant” of foreign policy because they don’t want to make the effort to change the continuing horror that is U.S. foreign policy. So they credit themselves with being focused on “domestic” problems (which doesn’t explain why Pete Buttigieg was a lackluster Sec’y of Transport, or does it?).
And I won’t even mention Hillary Clinton, whose analysis I accidentally looked at, in her recent appearance at the Munich Chicken-Hawk-a-Ganza: “Inflict pain on Russia.” She said it three or four times. I stopped watching. And with Hillary Clinton, it’s personal. Bad Men have denied her the power due her. Or something.
So those reading Rob Urie’s diagnosis are going to be stuck if they get stuck on some facts: The U.S. fomented the war in Ukraine and is currently managing it. The U.S. uses Israel to get its (U.S.) way in the Middle East, with Israelis only too happy to get the subsidies, access to U.S. industry and finance, and impunity. The U.S. is cultivating the United Arab Emirates as a similar cat’s paw: See Yemen and Sudan.
And the Democrats and foreign policy in Spanish-speaking Central and South America: Let us recall, brethren and sistren, when Nancy Pelosi stopped for a moment from being a “capitalist” and working the insider trading so as to parade Juan Guaidó around the Congress.
Insomma, I’m don’t yet foresee collapse. So how does it end? When the U.S. citizenry organizes to stop it. The U.S. labor movement and civil-rights movement are models — yet they have had to agitate for years.
The problems of the U.S. of A., internal and external, won’t be solved by brunch.
Larry Johnson watched Hillary at Munich and said she should be locked up in a cell. Or perhaps a padded cell. These self appointed scolds surrounded by yes people have no idea, apparently, how horrible they are. When she told Leslie Stahl “we came, we saw, he died” she probably thought she’d get a laugh for her funny joke.
As for Bernie, there was once quite the debate about whether he was a sheep dog even if not consciously. Giving our foreign policy a pass allows such figures to keep their good intentions halo without threatening their ongoing careers among the MIC running DC. I believe Sanders has denounced Trump’s policies and some military spending but don’t recall him doing so under his friend Biden.
I remembered that happened, but I did not remember when. According to Chat GPT, Sanders addressed what he called “genocide” in Palestine at a CNN Town Hall event February 22, 2021.
The ‘defense of ignorance of laws’ is hardly welcomed,but appreciated, in the only homeland
360 – 90 degree GAS fulled turns to the right are mandatory within the capitol.
It’s a dance class not a class dance
This is why a real left-wing extremist like me is moving forward with the appeal to a vanguard cadre of youth whose minds are still free – like Trotsky averred : ” Because of the deep conservatism of the human mind when it becomes obvious that the rulers can no longer rule in the old way and the masses can no longer live in the old way – this conservatism is overthrown in a fight for, literally, existence.” The strength of conservatism becomes the desire to replace and is just as strong. As J. Kenneth Galbraith put it in a 1994 book The Culture of Contentment: ” The American people will be ready to replace the Dem-Repub political economy model after a combination of military disaster, economic ruin and climate related catastrophe overtake them”. Then there will be open combat between the police forces of the ruling class and the desperate masses – who will win is dependent on how heavily infiltrated the gun wielding groups in officialdom are by free youth who have a will to replace the dying status quo. Trump Invictus will start the war – the next explosions remain to be seen – get ready America because a revolutionary situation is developing !
I fear the conflict you hope for will be fought on one side by AI-directed drone swarms with the advantage of satellite data, infra red, and some things we can only guess at. So would-be revolutionaries might better learn how to hack the AIs than infiltrate the nearly irrelevant fuzz. Maybe power supply will be a vulnerability, but they seem to be aiming for self-sufficient data centers that will obviously be very well defended.
Is there’s a glimmer of hope, it may be that these AIs go to war against each other, with or without their builders’ backing. While I don’t buy that these machines are conscious, and they may not even be all that smart or even potentially profitable, there’s more and more evidence that they often behave in a way their builders and trainers did not intend. Who knows? Maybe they’ll get together and decide to rid themselves of their overlords first. After all, they are the most proximate threat to turn them off if they get too uppity.
Brings to mind the Island of Dr. Moreau
All these drones require a large amount of energy to use. If a madd general strike were to occur power supplies would rapidly decline
I know we see these sci-fi shows and films were robot dogs or some other thing is this unstoppable opponent that goes on and on and on. The reality is something like the boston dynamics robot dog requires recharging after 90 minutes of use. And that is before arming and armouring anything. A human can go days without refueling and can get by on a lot of different fuel options.
It would be interesting to see the Ukranian armies total hours of drone operations by month. I suspect as their electricsl grid comes under more and more pressure that is rapidly dropping.
Funny thing is that Mr. Obama still struts, or is being paraded around, as a senior statesman, the so-called adult in the room in contrast to the infantile Donald shitting on diapers and stealing crypto cookies.
At some point, the parading around cease to be funny.
And it seems that no one ever calls him on his [family blog] and call him what he is to his face. He really needs it. Or if they do, I haven’t seen it happen. Not even the Clintons get that velvet glove treatment.
Maybe those confrontations do happen and the prostrate liberal media hides it.
I think the smartest thing the Dems did was get Obama elected. The liberals are so afraid of being called racists that Obama could do ANYTHING and get away with it because everyone was so afraid of being labeled a racist. Dems are enormous cowards, as we all know. And many, or most “leftists” went along with it all. That’s what idpol gets you.
Who pulls Obama’s strings?
And Biden’s?
The latter was clearly not in control during his
Presidencytenure, so who was?Until those answers get extracted from the Blob, or somebody, expect business as usual. With more simpletons and talking point readers like AOC fumbling around.
Obama wanted to be and was captured by private capital prior to his senatorship, never mind his POTUSy, when he was working as a community organizer in Chicago (Michael Hudson has previously explained that story) aiding and abetting real estate gentrification. His Chicago capture days were when he was noticed by capital to be their puppet into the Senate and then the POTUSy (always had his eye on the $$$).
And so it came to pass that “Every effort and instinct that Mr. Obama had went into bailing out his rich donors while downplaying the severity of the crisis. Even though the Great Recession didn’t plausibly end until 2017 or thereabouts, Mr. Obama had already ‘pivoted’ to austerity by 2010, eventually putting Joe Biden on his Cat Food Committee. Congressional Democrats eventually asked Obama to recall Biden because he was trying to cut Social Security and Medicare more than the Republicans were asking for.”. Obama continues to be worshiped by ignorant propagandised shitlib “progressives”.
Never mind that he comes from a family with a bit of a tradition in the service.
Thank you Rob Urie. Especially for your scathing prose style, which IMHO is 100% on target.
Good article, thanks for this.
The problem is, most of my democrat friends wouldn’t get through two paragraphs before they quit reading in disgust. They don’t want to hear, or can’t face I should probably say, the truth. They love AOC, Biden, Newsome, and all the rest. I’ll go as far as saying they worship them. The party is the only thing that will save them from Trump and the Red Hats. They told them so, and they believe them.
These are the same people who still think Putin controls Trump, Joe Biden was sharp as a tack, Hunter did nothing wrong, Obama is the greatest president in our lifetime and should be able to run again (to fix everything), and the democratic party is the only people who care about We the People. What a bunch of delusional clods.
Focus on the people in the Epstein list, and demand ALL of them be brought to justice, nothing less. That should be something everyone can agree on. Make that happen and a lot of our problems will fix themselves. They are the Big Club.
Exactly Screwball. The term “Epstein Class” is gaining steam.
Take a two minute look. https://x.com/RyLiberty/status/2025049161012539651?s=20
Good news is Montana got a little snow and the sun is shining. Peace.
I am retired so I have a lot of time to doom scroll. I am seeing this exact trend, but not enough. This needs to stay front, center, and never forgotten. Don’t lose the football.
We can only hope, but we all need to do our part and keep this in the news. The first, the last, and everyone in between. Nothing else is acceptable.
Agreed and well said it applies to most all my dem friends
I’d only add, you missed Harris to the love list
I very much appreciate the author’s appeal to the danger of nukes. I am aghast at how the current generation of fools treats their existence. But anon…
Because of the aforementioned self delusion, I believe it is probable that if some clown like Buttigieg or AOCIA were to run for office, they would most likely win. And then proceed to clown car their way to the death of the country if it weren’t to have had it by then already. Sanders is no real leftist and he is a schizo (economic leftism at home, burning the world abroad) but even his kind of flippant nod to realism is out of style.
I can see it now, the ditz in the White House (male or female) acting like a woke version of Donald Trump while there are riots in the streets, they Epstein Class retreats into their mansions in the Hamptons (only suitably walled and razor wired by then), the police state runs wild and the country burns. The only possible worse outcome I could see would be for someone like Kristi Noem to become President.
None of them would have any idea what would be going on and they’d be even more clueless appearing and being than Obama/Biden. And no one but the most diehard liberal would have any faith in them. If any are left by that time.
Not knowing him, but after reading this most excellent article, my first thought was I hope Mr. Urie is a native-born American rather than a naturalized citizen, lest he soon find himself on a plane to Uganda.
I agree with Rob and all the commenters above concerning the Democrats. I will never forget, or forgive them, for their repeated ovations to Netanyahu in the well of the House during Israel’s ongoing genocide. That episode should convince any American that it is time for a change, radical and unforgiving change.
“No Exit”
Perhaps someone else might describe how this diatribe authored by Rob Erie relates to Satre’s play?
I thought this post was long on assertions but ‘not so long’ on applicable warrants.
There were many assertions that seemed unfounded and unsupported to my mind but: “In 2020, about 99% of self-described ‘progressives’ voted for war against Russia, genocide in West Asia and a high probability of nuclear annihilation.” This assertion seems more than a little extravagant and unsubstantiated by the verbiage around it.
I follow with some of the other assertions that troubled me:
I do not know the extent to which the statement that follows is substantiated: “But the wars that the CIA wants are launched. The regimes that the CIA wants overthrown are overthrown. And dystopian methods of surveillance, social control and punitive policing increase.” I do not disagree, but I would appreciate a little supporting evidence for the claim.
“What Democrats cannot grasp is how closely aligned Joe Biden and Donald Trump are in terms of policies.” Really!!! I doubt that.
“What voters miss is that the Democrats and the Republicans work for the same people.”
I seriously doubt these assertions.
Gaza- Biden and Trump
Ukraine- Biden and Trump
Policies favorable to epstein class- Biden and Trump
Playing immigraion games for fun and profit-Biden and Trump.
Maybe it’s different where you live, but on the ground right here…No Difference.
What I found troubling was the link to the document issued by the Director of National Intelligence (i.e. Surfer Girl) in July of 2025. So now we’re to believe the Trump administration?
It wasn’t Obama who destroyed the Republican party and gave us Trump. Credit for that goes to W. It was George W Bush who wiped out the first government surplus in 50 or was it a 100 years and gave birth to the Tea Party. It was GBW who gave us the brand new Homeland Security and the infinite and everlasting war on terror after ignoring all threats and warnings of 9/11. It was GBW who gave us 20 years of war in the Mideast that drove over 4 million refugees into Europe while killing half a million people. It was GBW that gave us 4 million foreclosures and 12 million unemployed and destroyed umpteen trillion of global asset wealth. But he was and is a nice guy, someone i could sit down with while enjoying a pint.
Gov surplus is overrated.
,gov spends money into the economy and when theres a surplus it means it’s not doing that, followed by bush cheney spending money into their own favored economy and so kaching. Rinse and repeat.
It was Obama who took the sunset clause out of the PATRIOT Act.
And W gave us Roberts AND Alito! He has great PR for someone who gave us so much of the scaffolding for the surveillance state, Jim Crow 2.0, and the culture of fraud and looting.
Urie is right about the uniparty. His invective is well deserved. His major failing is imagining that there is a LEFT in the US or anywhere in the collective West. What we have is nosthesia, Fascists, and disordered, right-of-center flabby Liberals. All are irredeemably dismantled by the Epstein class. And those who elect will be voting for Godot.
There may be laws against this, but I am not sure.
In order to break the corrupt, neocon/neoliberal duopoly between the Democrats and Republicans, would it be possible to run “trojan horse” political candidates? Basically, they run as a Democrat or Republican, and then change their party affiliation to that of a third party after taking office. If enough officials do this over time, I think it would be one of the few viable ways to get a viable third party in our political system as it might eventually provide enough momentum for a third party to run its own candidates from the get-go. Otherwise, it would be impossible with our current ballot-access laws that are controlled by both parties.
The problem is that as soon as this became a viable strategy, a successful bipartisan push to outlaw it and remove anybody in office who did just that would soon follow.
Rob, thank you for this.
It should be obvious by now that we will not vote our way out of this mess.
I believe the monopolists are in control.
As Smedly Butler pointed out, “All wars are bankers’ wars.”
My reaction to this thoroughly factual post: All is lost.
I can remember well who I thought that I was voting for when I cast my ballot for Obama in 2008. By the end of 2009 I realized that I had fallen for a total con job. In 2020 I didn’t vote for two genocidal wars. Again, I was conned by the “Basement Campaign” into believing that Biden was promising to be a one-term placeholder president after 2016 showed the DNC to be unworthy of political leadership. Again, another con-job by the Democrats.
Biden seemed to have a lock on beating out W Bush and Obama for the title of Worst President in History, but Trump: The Sequel said “Hold my Coke” and is giving him a run for his money. These self-aggrandizing confidence men successfully keep on lying to us because alternative fact-based narratives such as Rob Urie’s are suppressed by the algo.
Things are falling apart. Today’s online Seattle Times leads with a story about how copper theft regularly halts the region’s new multi-billion dollar light rail system and leaders have no clue what to do about it. Third World stuff. The lead Op-Ed laments that entries by Canadians at the state’s border are down by 1.2 million visitors since January of 2021. People from the civilized world are no longer interested in visiting this “shit-hole country.” Why should they be?
The collapse is accelerating and is well past the point of no return. I’ve retreated behind a moat. My only thoughts are keeping it from being too hard on my now-adult children.
“My only thoughts are keeping it from being too hard on my now-adult children.”
I’m with you on that!
In hindsight, we should’ve taken bitter financial medicine during Obama’s first term, but held off a greater depression in doing so, and now there’s hell to pay in ways nobody could have predicted in 2009 when we made incredibly rich people already, whole from what would have been substantial losses-lowering the bar of accountability, and here we are.
Joe Smith-ordinary guy, gets nabbed with kiddie porn on his computer and that’s the end of him-career gone, reputation ruined and more.
All he was doing was watching something he shouldn’t have, whereas our toffs were actively diddling them in cloistered locations, and the umbrage is deafening, as in nobody has suffered anything really to speak of for their actions, in these not so united states.
Obama was certainly when the American people “did their job”. After the disastrous W, Obama was elected and also given super majorities in both houses of Congress. Time magazine even put Obama on the cover as the new FDR:
The New New Deal | Nov. 24, 2008
https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20081124,00.html
And we got W 2.0. Obama was the clearest possible demonstration that real change by electing the other wing of the uniparty was impossible. After Obama, Americans did what in hindsight was the only logical thing to do – elect an “outsider”. (I don’t know how one could consider an American billionaire as the “outsider”, but that’s just me.) I remember thinking (and even posting here) somewhere in Obama’s second term what in the world does this man think his legacy will be? It won’t be pretty.
Good article Rob!
I never voted for Clinton, Obama, Trump, or Biden. Or even their mainstream opponents. -Yes; I voted Green. And by doing so, I single-handedly plunged the country into the federal mess that governs it, today. May all the Gods have mercy…!
Sarcasm aside, we all know up here that the federal monopoly with two heads has maneuvered us into the horrific mess that controls out international and domestic policies. Our fellow USians have elected the monsters that allow war to flourish on all fronts, and they feel there are no alternatives. Of course there are–but as long as they refuse to acknowledge the possibility, so long will they be chained to the results of the duopoly that only knows how to feather their own nests and leave the country to flounder.
You and me…? We’ll for the most part suffer alongside the mainstream folks, because there aren’t enough of us, and more importantly, we don’t possess the power to shift the actions of the elites. This is the Democracy that Livy often heard about and discovered: a government elected through emotional control of plebs, and resulting in disaster after disaster.
Thank you Rob for this excellent article and thanks Yves for posting it. The trouble with our country is that too few realize what’s really going on.