Let’s take a moment to revel in the wisdom of the great Jamie Dimon, speaking here at the Council on Foreign Relations CEO Speaker Series a few weeks back:
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on the lack of arms manufacturing capacity in the US:
We did not have productive capability to double or triple our Patriot missile production. No one’s willing to pay for it.
No cars were built in America in 1942, ’43, ’44, ’45.
We did build… pic.twitter.com/HwRjD00Z6A
— Clash Report (@clashreport) June 27, 2026
Yeah, man. After you and your pals spent decades cashing in on deindustrializing the country ruining millions of lives in the process, you now find out it’s tough to continue spreading freedom for American capital without the bombs. Just flip that switch. The problem is it’s not so easy.
It’s not that no one will pay for it. What’s Dimon smoking? The US drops a trillion-plus per year on its war machine. The problem is you outsourced the knowledge and capacity. And even while Dimon waxes poetically about the great Arsenal of Democracy (that’s currently supplying a genocide), they’re still selling out the country.
One silver lining is that these oligarchs’ own greed might be what ultimately forces them to retreat from ransacking the world. But let’s first take a brief stroll down memory lane before catching up on the latest in the great American sell off.
Thirty-Plus Years at the American Auction House
In the late 2000s and early 2010s JP Morgan ran a “Sons and Daughters” program that bribed Chinese officials by hiring their unqualified offspring of high-ranking Chinese officials. This helped grease the wheels of the dealmaking that would see China take over American industry.
Who was JP Morgan CEO at the time? You would not be wrong if you guessed Sir Jamie who took the reins in 2006. The “Sons and Daughters” program was expanded and institutionalized in 2009.
Why was JP Morgan doing this? Well, before China became enemy number one—or two or three depending on the day—it was a lucrative target for unloading American crown jewels.
JP Morgan and friends were the ones doing the selling. It’s good that Jamie is noticing the problem. That’s why he gets paid the big bucks. Lowly workers only beat him to it by…26 years. And Matt Stoller and Lukas Kunce warned about the breakdown in the defense industry seven years ago. From The American Conservative:
When Wall Street targeted the commercial industrial base in the 1990s, the same financial trends shifted the defense industry. Well before any of the more recent conflicts, financial pressure led to a change in focus for many in the defense industry—from technological engineering to balance sheet engineering. The result is that some of the biggest names in the industry have never created any defense product. Instead of innovating new technology to support our national security, they innovate new ways of creating monopolies to take advantage of it.
One way they took advantage of it—and allowed the US to be taken advantage of—was by shifting the supply chain to low cost China:
Two of Xiaoping’s sons-in-law approached investment banker Archibald Cox, Jr. in the mid-1990s to use his hedge fund as a front for their companies to buy the U.S. rare-earth magnet enterprise. They were successful, purchasing and then moving the factory, the Indiana jobs, the patents, and the expertise to China. This was not the only big move, as Cox later moved into a $12 million luxury New York residence. The result is remarkably similar to Huawei: the United States has entirely divested of a technology and market it created and dominated just 30 years ago. China has a near-complete monopoly on rare earth elements, and the U.S. military, according to U.S. government studies, is now 100 percent reliant upon China for the resources to produce its advanced weapon systems.
Wall Street’s outsized control over defense contracting and industry means that every place a foreign adversary can insert itself into American financial institutions, it can insert itself into our defense industry.
At an Armed Services Committee hearing in 2018, Representative Carol Shea-Porter talked about how constant the conflict between financial concentration and patriotism had been in her six years on the committee. She recounted a CEO once telling her, in response to her concern about the outsourcing of defense industry parts, that he “[has] to answer to stockholders.”
Who are these stockholders that CEOs are so compelled to answer to? Oftentimes, China. Jennifer M. Harris, an expert in global markets with experience at the U.S. State Department and the U.S. National Intelligence Council, researched a recent explosion of Chinese strategic investment in American technology companies. She found that China has systematically targeted U.S. greenfield investments, “technology goods (especially semiconductors), R&D networks, and advanced manufacturing.”
The trend accelerated, until the recent flare-up of tensions between the United States and China. “China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) stock in the U.S. increased some 800% between 2009 and 2015,” she wrote. Then, from 2015 to 2017, “Chinese FDI in the U.S. …climbed nearly four-fold, reaching roughly $45.6 billion in 2016, up from just $12.8 billion in 2014.”
Borders didn’t matter (still don’t for the most part). Transnational capital was all the rage (still is). Monopolies and sugar highs was where the smart money was (unchanged). And above all, thanks in part to rampant offshoring, the rich were winning that class war once and for all (same).
But now all of a sudden Dimon and friends find the citadel of American capitalism is constructed on quicksand. What have they learned? Precious nothing.
Neoliberal Industrialization
The World Bank, as a stand in for Western elite financial opinion, might appear to have changed its mind on industrial policy after decades of dismissing it, but what it is now pushing is oxymoronic industrial neoliberalism through militarization and police state surveillance.
This means a continuation of the war on labor and further directing of public spending away from the commons to so-called strategic sectors like weapons manufacturers, energy companies, and AI. Due to the nature of parasitic capitalism sucking up so much cash, it will take boatloads of public dollars to have any hope of flipping Dimon’s switch.
All the better for him and his friends as this late-stage capitalism militarization and police state push means a reduced quality of life for most, but will be very profitable for some. In short, we will suffer so their order might remain stable.
Nationalism It Will Not Be
Old industrial capitalism might’ve required stability; the transnational Dimons of today can prosper from instability and collapse.
As Dimon calls for a return of the Arsenal of Democracy, the US has taken multiple actions against China—too late, one might add— in a bid to kickstart some strategic production. It’s going to be an uphill climb, as the a missiles stocks inventory demonstrates:
Source: Center for Strategic & International Studies
Turns out flipping the switch is hard. And those timelines could get a lot longer if Beijing gets tougher on exports of rare earth and other strategic necessities.
The more optimistic US strategists don’t look at US industrial capacity alone, however; they include the vassals. From the Council on Foreign Relations:
China has four times the population of the United States, and its economy, while slowing, is roughly 25 to 30 percent larger than the U.S. economy when measured by purchasing power parity. Its manufacturing capacity is twice that of the United States, exceeding the next nine countries combined. China produces twenty times as much cement as the United States, thirteen times as much steel, three times as many cars, and twice as much power. It accounts for two-thirds of the world’s electric vehicles, three-quarters of batteries, 80 percent of consumer drones, and 90 percent of solar panels and refined critical minerals. It is pulling ahead in the next industrial revolution: it installs half the world’s industrial robots and produces more active patents and top-cited scientific publications annually than the United States.
The military balance is changing, too, largely because of that industrial strength. China fields the world’s largest navy, holds the largest stockpile of conventional cruise and ballistic missiles anywhere, outproduces the world in drones, and likely possesses the world’s most advanced hypersonic systems.
…But even though China has greater scale, the United States has a decisive advantage. Combined with its partners—Australia, Britain, Canada, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, and the European Union—the picture changes. That coalition has more than twice China’s GDP at purchasing power, accounts for roughly half of global manufacturing to China’s one-third, spends more than twice what China spends on defense, and produces substantially more patents and top-cited research.
The traditional American alliance model, designed in the Cold War, has treated partners as dependents—recipients of protection, providers of bases, and occasional contributors of industrial capability. What is required now is to transform the alliance system from a collection of managed bilateral relationships into a platform for pooled capacity-building across domains. Allies are not trip wires, vassals, or status symbols; they are cocreators of the capacity the United States cannot generate on its own.
Yet these same “allies” are also struggling to cope with China’s dominance in the strategic mineral supply chain.
Meanwhile, aside from with those currently on the US enemy list, the selling-America-out business as usual continues. One could argue the liquidation of America is actually accelerating. From Nikkei Asia:
For most of the past five decades, the assumed direction of cross-border capital between Asia and the U.S. was settled — American firms acquired Asian assets, American capital funded Asian growth and American consumers absorbed Asian production. The flow was so consistent that it was rarely interrogated.
Over the last year or so, the direction has reversed. The scale of the turnaround is now so sufficient that it deserves to be treated as a structural shift, not a cyclical anomaly…
Several transactions highlight the trend. In January this year, Mitsubishi Corp. announced a $7.5 billion acquisition of Aethon Energy’s U.S. natural gas assets, the largest such Japanese move ever announced in the U.S. energy sector. Toyota Industries was privatized in a $37 billion deal in March, the largest take-private in Japanese corporate history.
SoftBank Group committed $30 billion to OpenAI’s Stargate venture in January 2025 and completed its $6.5 billion acquisition of Ampere Computing later that year. In April this year, India’s Sun Pharma announced an $11.75 billion acquisition of New Jersey-based Organon, the largest Indian biopharmaceutical deal on record…
The Americas accounted for 60% of global M&A value in 2025, while U.S. deal values rose 55% year on year, according to consultancy PwC. Asian acquirers were among the most active buyers driving those figures.
What could go wrong?
Dimon and friends do not care about the damage it does to Americans.
They are now waking up to the fact, however, that their ability to shape the world through fire has been degraded. That is what the tears are about, and there’s never so much as frown about all the abandoned factories and towns. While it’s easy to cheer the oligarchs’ predicament, the downside to the great American sell out is that millions of Americans who just wanted a decent paying job are victims. There was once a day where all that industry and productivity could have been put to great social use building a country that elevated the quality of life for all.
It was not meant to be thanks to Dimon and friends who wanted to eat their cake and have it too. On the world stage, however, the Dimon class’ ability to use state violence to pave the way for the American capital is waning. That is no doubt a good thing. WIth any luck the greed and short-term thinking of the American capitalist class that resulted in the liquidation of the Arsenal of Democracy will eventually put an end to the unbridled arrogance of Dimon and his ilk.
And when that day comes, just remember they did it to themselves.
CG: ….if Beijing gets tougher on exports of rare earth ….
If?
Well there’s still room to get even more strict, no? For example, the U.S.-China Business Council said in a report last month that “some” rare earth elements remain “nearly unobtainable.” Replace “some” with “all” and delete the “nearly.” The number of blacklisted US companies also has plenty of room for growth.
Yep, Jamie. All wars are bankers’ wars.
“The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” attributed to Lenin.
And if they do not have the money, the capitalists will give them a loan.
All true, and yet as I sit here typing on my Chinese made computer I question whether ordinary Americans haven’t seen an upside by having their things made by meticulous Asians. America became the Arsenal of Capitalism by turning out the mostest and not necessarily the bestest. The total wars of the 20th were wars of attrition, after all, and the current retro craze of trying to revisit them does not itself make a whole lot of sense.
So it’s no wonder that those working class Americans seem far more worried about internal displacement by immigrants than China taking over the rare earths. Dimon’s fellow oligarchs have a paw in this too of course since a reserve army of the unemployed was the key to an earlier form of exploitation by the wealthy.
We are, sadly and unbelievably, at the point where we would see an upside by having a government run by meticulous Asians.
So after having destroyed by globalisation most of the social contracts which were essential for democracy, and after the realisation that such globalisation did not result in a global and uniform oligarch class agreeing on everything against the masses (of course not) obligues them to call for such “arsenal of democracy”. The democracy that they have been demolishing for decades converted in an oligarchic regime which now wants to go to war with the rest of the world. Not of course with Dimon et al or their offspring dressed in their military jackets riding in the horseback as former leaders did in the past but hidden in their bunkers in NZ or other remote places.
The may even believe they are reasonable people.
“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”
Ahab, in a rare moment of lucidity, one that the Dimons of the world apparently will never have, said it succinctly.
Who do you think Karp and Thiel are referring to when they say they’re goal is “power the West to its obvious, innate superiority” and “bring violence and death to our enemies.”
By West they mean themselves and enemies are us, the proles.
Saw this across my feed recently
https://thegrimhistorian.substack.com/p/has-america-crossed-the-asshole-threshold?utm_source=multiple-personal-recommendations-email&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true
and the reference to Turchin’s work is next on my reading. Not worth focusing on these “oligarchs” unless you’re into some kind of “equalizer” response. We have to save ourselves.
I suppose the bankers and the financial poobahs and the weenies who scurry about doing their bidding … that includes you congresscritter and you senator … think there is a place in which they can rest content, but who will mix the drinks? Who will guard the gates?
“I could hire half the poor to kill the other half”
— paraphrase of Jay Gould, Gilded Age 1.0
Great article. Thanks.
And not to be forgotten, Bill C.’s sell out to China. From Canada’s Foreign Policy magazine:
https://www.policymagazine.ca/the-tragic-legacy-of-bill-clintons-china-doctrine/
Of course, China was vewy vewy good to Bill, er, Bill’s campaign. / ;)
From CNN:
https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/04/04/china.clinton.money/
The US advantage in global wars has been geography and the forbearance of Mexico and Canada. I don’t think getting the vassals to produce more weaponry is going to make up for the lack of domestic manufacturing. Taiwan and South Korea – checks map – are quite far away from the US and a lot closer to China. If things get hot, is China going to sit back and allow those nations to produce weapons for the US to be used against China? And the US has done nothing but antagonize its own closest neighbors in recent years. The Council on Foreign Relations clearly has a leak in their think tank and someone needs to call a janitor to mop up the puddle on the floor.
America’s Oligarchs are turning their eyes on the American People and are in the process of making sure that the current power relations are strengthened.
Which is why we now have 20,000 ICE brownshirts, total information awareness, increasing censorship and centralized control of the narrative.
ICE/CBP now has more prison beds than the Bureau of Prisons, this is called a clue.
Protecting the Children from the threat posed by ANTIFA!!! and the COMMUNISTS!!! that have infiltrated American Society is their mission…
At any cost to the plebes.
If You Thought Obama Was Giving Less Military Gear to Local Police Departments, You Were Wrong: https://inthesetimes.com/features/obama_police_miltary_equipment_ban.html
Excellent Conor, thank you!
Does anyone think Jamie-boy actually believes, never mind understands, the crap he is spewing? Is there no one at CFR willing to clear their throat and correct him? Does he really believe that the loss of intelligence, skill, training — all human, not artificial — that accompanied America’s de-industrialization is no big deal and can be reversed in a few quarters or years, versus generations? Does he not understand this? Or is he really that ignorant?
This is what always takes my breath away when I read such unchallenged pronouncements by people who could not describe the real capital, intelligent labor, infrastructure, the network, that must exist to make a simple roller bearing, a machine screw, never mind a 10,000 ton forging press. This has always strikes me as a central difference between China’s policy leaders and their American counterparts: the former have real experience and training in science and engineering. The latter, not so much.
The former think forward to their country’s position in the world and well being years from now. The latter, not so much.
Thinking years ahead vs. thinking ahead to the next quarterly profits/loss statement from the stock market.
What was that title of one of Prof. Hudson’s books?
“Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.” ?
“Does anyone think Jamie-boy actually believes, never mind understands, the crap he is spewing?”
In a word, no.
It is hard to say and openly he would likely obfuscate. I do have though a datapoint for analysis and interpretation, albeit I am not sure if Yves will allow its publication. But I think it is very, very relevant on how our betters and the PMC servicing them think:
The thread starts here:
RE: Would Europeans fight, if it came to that? https://archive.ph/t3mCG#selection-1067.0-1067.42
Dear Professor Tocci,
I read your article in The Economist with considerable interest and considerable anger, and I am writing because I think you are a serious enough analyst to engage with a criticism that the article’s format did not permit you to address, and because I have a son of military age, and I am not willing to accept arguments about European resolve and the stomach for war without first demanding that the people making those arguments state honestly what they are asking for and why.
I am a Canadian environmental epidemiologist. Canada lost 61,000 people in the First World War because Britain went to war and Canada was a dominion of the British Empire, in a conflict whose causal chain was presented to Canadians with approximately the same honesty that the current European security debate is being presented to their descendants. Canada lost 45,000 in the Second World War for considerably better reasons that were still not fully honestly stated. Canada went to Afghanistan for reasons that were presented as clear and turned out to be considerably less so. I am not willing to send my son into another abstraction without the abstraction’s premises being named.
Your argument is internally coherent given those premises: European deployment to Ukraine would function primarily as a psychological and political signal rather than a military intervention, hardening European publics to the reality of the war and demonstrating to both Russia and the United States that Europe has recovered a genuine willingness to bear costs for its own security. I understand the argument. I understand why serious European security professionals are making it. What I cannot accept is the specific intellectual technique that makes this genre of argument possible: the conversion of living people, sons, specifically, the sons of parents who are reading The Economist on a Tuesday morning, into the abstractions of boots on the ground and European resolve and the stomach for war, without the argument ever being required to look at what a boot contains or whose stomach is being discussed.
The problem is the premises, and you know the premises better than most. The Istanbul Charter for European Security of 1999, signed by all OSCE members including Russia and the United States and every European signatory, contains in explicit terms the principle of indivisible security: no state shall strengthen its security at the expense of the security of other states. The Astana Commemorative Declaration of 2010 reaffirmed the same principle after the Baltic states had joined NATO and the question of further eastern expansion was already live. You drafted the European Global Strategy as Special Adviser to Mogherini and Borrell. You know these documents. The article proceeds as if they do not exist.
I am not writing to defend the Russian invasion, which is a war crime by any measure of international humanitarian law and has caused catastrophic suffering to the Ukrainian population. Both things can be true simultaneously: the invasion is a crime, and the causal chain that produced it includes specific decisions by the Western side that violated specific legal commitments all parties had made. The push to include Ukraine in NATO, the specific trigger for the specific sequence of events that produced this war, would have violated the indivisible security principle that all parties signed. Acknowledging this does not excuse the invasion. What it does is make the question you are asking of European parents considerably more complicated than The Economist’s format permitted you to make it.
The European populations currently electing governments that question the war are not suffering from insufficient martial spirit. Some of them are parents who have the specific suspicion that they are being asked to send their children to die for an arrangement that was not honestly explained when it was being built, and that the people now calling for European resolve were among those who built it without the honesty it required. That suspicion is not unreasonable. A deployment strategy designed to produce the correct feelings by exposing Europeans to casualties will not address it. It will compound it.
You cannot honestly ask people to risk their children for a security order without telling them how that order was constructed, what commitments it rested on, and which of those commitments were honoured and which were not. I am asking you to tell them. Not in a format that The Economist will publish, but in the honest account that a serious analyst of your standing owes to the parents whose sons are being abstracted into strategic arguments.
With respect for your work and firm disagreement about this piece,
Nathalie Tocci
Sun, Jul 19, 9:12 PM (14 hours ago)
Dear xxxxxx,
Many thanks for your thoughtful message and reflections. I understand the concern. Less the anger. My argument is not about developing the stomach for war for the sake of it, less still because I think we should go war mongering around. I say this, as the article concludes, precisely because I think that signaling such resolve would constitute a key element of deterrence. We may disagree about what happened in the past in Europe, but the question still stands, what would happen if such deterrence were not to work and Russia were to attack a nato member precisely as he gets bogged down in Ukraine (which is precisely what’s happening) ? I am fairly confident that Trump’s US would turn the other side, but I know European countries would not and I suspect Canada would not either. That to me is the scenario that needs to be prevented and which I believe is more than plausible today. Deploying troops in Ukraine would in my view make that scenario far less, not more, likely.
Warmly
Nathalie
Inviato da iPhone
Il giorno 19 lug 2026, alle ore 19:59
Sun, Jul 19, 9:50 PM (13 hours ago)
Dear Professor Tocci,
Thank you for taking the time to reply, and from an iPhone no less, which I take as evidence that the question at least warranted a moment’s attention between more pressing engagements.
I appreciate the clarification that the argument is about deterrence rather than warmongering, and I understand the distinction. My difficulty is with the specific deterrence logic, which runs as follows: the willingness to fight deters the adversary, therefore we must demonstrate the willingness to fight, therefore we must put people in harm’s way to demonstrate it. This is internally coherent, but it requires a prior assumption that the adversary is deterrable only by military signalling and not by any other instrument, including the legal frameworks that all parties including Russia signed and that were specifically designed as non-military deterrence mechanisms. You have not addressed those frameworks in either your article or your reply, and I am genuinely uncertain whether this is because you consider them analytically irrelevant or because engaging with them would complicate the argument in ways the Economist’s format does not permit.
On the scenario you describe, Russia attacking a NATO member as it gets bogged down in Ukraine, I note that the logic requires Russia to be simultaneously so irrational as to escalate to NATO Article 5 while bogged down in Ukraine, and so rational as to be deterred by the presence of a few thousand European troops in a post-ceasefire scenario. These two assumptions are in some tension with each other, and the tension is not resolved in your reply.
You are right that I do not know what Canada would do. I know what I would do, as a Canadian parent of a son of military age reading your Economist article on a Tuesday morning. I am already setting money aside to help him relocate to Thailand if a draft comes about to fight for what you describe as European resolve. I mean this not as a provocation but as a data point from the constituency whose willingness to fight you are theorising about. The gap between the scenario as it appears from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the scenario as it appears from a kitchen table in Canada, is the gap that strategic communication has consistently failed to close, and that gap is precisely where the political conditions for the deterrence you are describing either exist or do not.
I wish you well and I mean that sincerely. The questions you are engaging with are genuinely important and you are engaging with them seriously. I simply believe that the legal architecture that was supposed to prevent this situation from arising deserves more of that seriousness than it has been receiving from the people best placed to provide it.
With respect,
I think the Oligarchs are transnational… so, yes, they might sell out the USA, but they have dispassion about all of the many places they maintain residences and toe- holds.
I commented to a pal at the efforts made by a few companies and their aeronautical engineers to refine the flight paths of molded plastic discs… all tied to recreation (disc golf- great fun!)
He mentioned a similar deal with a bunch of Rogue river- rats that invented quick- fill, long distance shooting water guns for playing on flat stretches of river- squirt gun fights.
I never cease to be amazed at how much ingenuity and commerce humans devote to “better and better” more efficient ways of killing people or animals.
I think Jamie is bad news, but he isn’t the only one. We need to re-tool and repurpose- STAT.
What was that old saw about swords into plowshares?
Boy was Spain dominant!
Agreed about Oligarchs are transnational. It does not matter if they were born and raised in the US, their loyalty is only to other oligarchs. Being American is convenient to them but that does not stop them from getting passports to safe haven countries like New Zealand or build bunkers like Zuckerberg has in Hawaii. if they think about their fellow Americans, it is probably as a resource to be exploited. And you get the same dynamic in other countries as well.
Increasingly, the Oligarchs “fellow” Americans who are not resources to be exploited are annoyances and useless mouths to be disposed of.
Yes! They were. The savvy Argentines were able to keep it nil-nil into Extra Time. The fresh legs carried the day, in the end.
Reminds me of the aristocracy of old: they were all related to each other and they weren’t loyal to the riff-raff, only to fellow aristocrats and plutocrats. They were transnational as well. Even today, the British “royal family” is largely of German descent, The aristocracy/oligarchy/plutocracy has never given a sh*t about the unwashed rabble.
We are going back to Neo-Feudalism: Techno-Totalitarian Neo Feudalism. All the of wealth, power, resources are being concentrated into a smaller and smaller group of sociopaths and mass murderers. The sad thing is that so many millions identify with their oppressors. It’s like the mass media monopolies (owned by oligarchy of course) the governments, and Hollywood have conditioned people into Collective Stockholm Syndrome. Millions of people willingly comply with and facilitate their own oppression.
Will the “Guillotine Moment” ever arise?
“and when that day comes, just remember they did it to themselves.”
with the complete and effective bribing (aiding) of the legislative branch and abetting the executives branch.
For all the talk of tackling these Dimon demons… these TINA Trans-nationalist pimps pushing their pro-politicians…. not an utter on the campaign trails regarding anything to do with policies designed to reign-in the massive corrupting influence of money….like you’ve never seen before.
No talk of campaign finance reform. No real insider trading limits. No limits on emoluments despite the clear language in that old parchment. No real surprise considering this is how these Trans-national pimps foist their laced mutton (both ewe and wether) on the global streets.
I should have exited this rant on the last off ramp -lol
The “arsenal of democracy” spent four years hyping up war material production after the start of the Ukraine war and half a billion dollars later the new factory hasn’t produced any 155mm artillery shells. Meanwhile Europe just gave Ukraine permission to use EU money to buy Chinese drone parts it can’t get anywhere else.
It’s not even a hypothetical “what if China squeezes rare earths”, it’s now a historical fact that the west in the 2020s can’t ramp up basic stuff like shells.
Re “And when that day comes, just remember they did it to themselves.”
They did it to us … to line their fucking pockets. It is time to get out the pitchforks and torches and maybe a rope or to and put the fear of the public back into these assholes. (And I am a pacifist at heart.)
Re “And when that day comes, just remember they did it to themselves.”
In my circle there is zero acknowledgment of this fact.
Trump is a get out of jail free card.
Our American elites are unpatriotic, greedy, and stupid. They have re-made their country as their own reflection. They are now appalled at the state of their country, berate it’s “citizens”, all while somehow failing to understand that over forty years of their “leadership” has consequences.
As predicted by, according to a possibly apocryphal quote, V.I. Lenin: “The capitalists will sell us the rope we will use to hang them”.
He may have been correct in his prediction even if a little off in his timing.
This was always going to happen.
America is probably the most strategically secure country on earth; the MIC was built for jobs;* eventually, the ooh-aah weapons systems of the cold war gave way to expensive toys that don’t work.
Now it looks like there’s some question as to whether we can even build those. But we’ll definitely still be able to employ enough engineers to keep Richard Blumenthal in office.
Of course it would never have been tenable to use all those natural resources and all that human potential to make anyone’s life better (except in the most wasteful, lopsided, economic-Rube-Goldberg-machine way). Something adults in the room, something big-boy pants.
*Except perhaps in Vietnam, we could have done imperialism with a lot less.
Thank you for bringing up the Indiana rare earths mill. It was a big deal in the Region at the time with USWA and congressman Visclosky railing against the move and the naked hypocrisy of the Bush+Cheney crowd. I have been telling people about it ever since but it seemed to have been largely memory holed.