As I’ve opined before, when it comes to History and specifically the History of Political-Economy and Classical Economics, Trump and Musk are both illiterate, and likely most of the cabinet is as well.
It's not surprising. Australia embarked on banking reform immediately after the election of Bob Hawke, surprisingly Malcolm Fraser had been somewhat lukewarm on suggestions in the Campbell Report and with the able assistance of Rupert Murdoch Labor won the election and embarked on full neoliberal privatisation, including watering down Gough Whitlam's no fees university with higher education contributions scheme (Dawkins was education minister during this phase). Australian's have been "globalist" lab rats where many of these policies are trialled. Government assets were put up for sale for a one off budget contribution, and typical rentier behaviour ensued.
Hawke was a class traitor, and an agent of Israel.
I have an elderly uncle who rose to be 2 IC of a well known union. He joined that union in his 20ies, during the 1960ies.
He told this to me when I was just a lad: When Hawke came on the scene an old union hand told my then young uncle to watch "that rat" as he's an agent of Shitrael. He will be put in place as head of the ACTU and then will one day be selected as PM.
That old bloke lived to see traitor Hawke rise to the top ACTU slot, but died before Hawke was shoed in to the PM slot.
I haven’t watched that yet but I’d simply like to comment that since the GFC, the political-economy model of the US has been distorted by bad monetary policy. This policy (actually dating back to the 80’s and the birth of the FIRE 🔥 economy) has completely hollowed out the middle class to the benefit of markets and the upper class. No administration has dared to even attempt a fix, and certainly the graft, fraud and abuse of the government coffers has clearly grown accordingly.
I fully expect the current administration to make mistakes. OTOH, doing nothing but more of the same since the GFC has only made things worse, and to continue that process will lead to significant pain in the future.
Harvesting money via rents has existed for centuries. What happened with Thatcher and Reagan is it was made into national policy, although deindustrialization was already underway. The Western economies are now dominated by Rent Seekers having no desire to get involved with industrial capitalism because the returns aren’t high or occur fast enough. I recall the ad campaign run by the Paine-Webber investment firm where it was touted they “Made money the old-fashioned way: They earn it.“
As you know, Trump’s a member of the FIRE sector and thus a Neoliberal. Musk is a hybrid who now mostly seeks rents. Political attacks on Tesla property are now declared domestic terrorism.
There is something uniquely bitter and twisted about a burning Tesla. Consider the owner who, if insured, might get a full payout for a car that as of two days ago was rendered entirely a lemon by the release of he latest BYD model with its extreme performance batteries. The westies FIRE sector compensates the consumer due to a China technological achievement and a USA match.
This is a political artwork that would inspire any Luddite.
Musk so totally insisted on his 4680 cell format and against all sage advice from China's most expert manufacturers. Now he is stuck with a crappy platform for new models and world of people that have found a way to get a refund and blame a terrorist. So USA, so absurd and such good kharma in a flame.
Come on you musicians and muses, give us a song for the times.
Rage on comrade but consider that the tesla will peel apart faster than you can peel off the offending mask. Perhaps the mask protects the wearer from glue fumes ;))
The clever thing Reagan and Thatcher did was to convince people via IRA, Roths, and the British equivalents that they could also get rich (by selling their childrens' future for tiny slices of the rent seeking). Everyone gets excited that their house price keeps going up, not realising that the person who is going to have to wipe their arse when they are old won't be able to afford to live anywhere near them. Greed and lack of foresight make it easy for the 1% and their minions to turn rape into a voluntary act.
The forces at work behind the veil have operated similarly for centuries and have their act well rehearsed. The mantra of individual advancement versus promoting the collective good has been ongoing for about 150 years. Reversing that mantra will be hard to do where it’s so deeply ingrained.
However both Trump and Musk have been “builders” in their own right. Trump in property, Musk in tech.
Here we are today with the lunatic fringe intent on destroying cars they used to worship “for climate change” because the guy who brought them in mass scale wants to reform the grift and corruption of the US government. And every car they burn 🔥 adds to the “climate change”.
These are literally NPC Nuevo-Marxists without a clue, easily activated and agitated by propaganda and incited to violence that runs contrary to the best interests of the environment, and the country as Teslas are made in the USA. Which incidentally is what Trump is pushing, more manufacturing jobs in the USA.
I’ve watched every video I could find on Trump back before the 2016 election where he made any “political” comments. They never varied. He wanted more jobs in the US and to stop exporting them. Here he is actually trying to do this, and the midwits are all crying over it. I’m flabbergasted by the lack of critical thinking. However it seems the “progressive left” is genuinely incapable of thinking at all after decades of brainwashing.
Trump (and Musk) won’t get everything correct, as no one ever does. However after the nightmare of the Biden years, I can only see improvement headed our way. And yes there will be pain too.
Midwest Don found an extraordinary experiment that’s simply fascinating and helps understand the arguments we are a party to when we watch Wolff and Hudson on Thursdays, and is a boon for those who’ve never read any of his many works, https://pamho.medium.com/the-devil-and-j-d-vance-b3a815f03d24
Back in the 1960s, bras and cities were burnt, but the problems those acts were in response to still exist. What too few understand here within the Outlaw US Empire is there are other nations who’ve chosen different pathways, are performing much better and producing improved lives for their citizens than what’s happening here. And those that run the Empire can’t stand the threat of a good example, so they make war on it.
I am not in disagreement with Hudson on financialization, nor the rentier economy. I’ve been listening to him for years.
My issue is the belief that 1) you can simply change up an economy to some “socialist” model (the U.S. already embraces socialism on several levels) and no hat will come and 2) that socialism will necessarily be a better model. One look at the dysfunction in the EU, especially in business development, tells you this model leads to sclerotic “innovation”. Innovators are simply punished do they go elsewhere. (And on a side note, I look at the politics and believe within 10 years of digital euro adoption the EU will go full totalitarian).
You need the benefits of capitalism to move forward, and the “safety net” of socialism for those who cannot keep up. But BEYOND that, you need an effective gate keeping system in both areas — one that reins in capitalistic excess, while also holds social welfare recipients to some standard of accountability.
AI is going to hollow out many more jobs over the next decade. I don’t know what those people will do. They will need assistance, while at the same time that assistance will need checks and brakes. At the same time AI will also need checks and brakes. Who will determine these on both sides will be interesting to watch.
Dr. Richard Wolfe's D@W organization offers education on the original Marxist solution to your concerns with state capitalism (both to Western European Socialism and to Soviet Socialism), that the workers own the means of production, rather than the state (Soviet) or private capital in cahoots with the state(like USA and worse the EU). That's one reason he's often in the company of Dr. Hudson.
Hudson has always advocated a mixed economy with the sort of limiters you suggest. What I now see are two major models that will make “modernization and reform” an ongoing part of fine-tuning their political-economy as they aim to provide harmony and prosperity to their citizens. What both share is a very similar sociocultural ethos where all are a collective that works for all, and that every position in society has honor because it must be done—and no job/position within society has shame. IMO, the West generally has a long way to go to reach that level of maturity.
"But the real key in dealing with today’s Junk Economics is to understand why Marx’s work was so vilified even before the advent of Communism, and that what’s commonly attributed to him wasn’t his work at all—the Labor Theory of Value—which was first formulated by Adam Smith and then David Ricardo. What Marx did was to refine and polish the theory—note that it’s not a hypothesis: it’s a theory meaning it’s factual and can be replicated."
True. Hegel could be mentioned, as well. Marx's genius was to utilize a class philosophy to tie three areas of study together--politics, economics and the root, philosophy--into an unified revolutionary theory. Lenin, Imperialism, Hobson. The point isn't to generate the facts, but to make sense of them from the perspective of the overwhelming majority of the population: wage slaves. For anyone who wants to radically change society, that is your constituency. Not some race, gender or sexual preference.
A fascinating application of AI. Michael Hudson's economics is the focus. The same questions were asked to three different AI systems Title of the article posted on Medium. I joined Medium for free to go through this article. This is the first insightful use I have seen of AI generated responses to questions.
"THE DEVIL AND J.D. VANCE: Neoliberalism, Globalization, and Technocracy
"I asked 3 different AI programs the same questions about the recent speech by Vice President J.D. Vance to Big Tech elites about globalization and the American economy. The first answer sets the stage for the amazing dialogue that ensues by describing the speech, so I only asked the first AI Google’s Gemini, that question. After that is ChatGPT [go down] and then DeepSeek [go down]. The arguments by ChatGPT were the most forceful and enlightening, followed by DeepSeek which was a bit less forceful but still very enlightening, and then Gemini with the most neutral arguments but still informative to a lesser degree."
Thanks for sharing, to get through to the article you don't have to join you can click on the x to get through. What made me write it was I had been wondering about how the AI chatbots would respond to political questions. I tried Google Gemini first and when it answered so well I tried the other two which were even better, although they didn't include links to the sources like Gemini. I knew then it would be a great way to get Michael's message out to people in an easy-to-understand way.
Thanks for coming to the Gym and commenting! You conducted an excellent experiment. Have you tried sending your findings to Dr. Hudson? He’s one of my subscribers and reads all regularly. I had to rush the DeepSeek portion but intend to reread all three from bottom to top.
Living in a country that successive fascist regimes have handed over the citizen owned public utilities to corporations I fully agree with the following statement; "that profit would be derived from the much higher prices charged for their products...."
For example telecommunication is a mess, expensive, with abysmal customer service. It was for a long time in the top three world wide, until 1990 when it was stolen.
(As an aside, a nation's telecommunication industry from a security and strategic POV should never be owned by foreign interests.)
The electricity supply was sold off and is now expensive with increasing brown outs.
In both of these industries the maintenance is sacrificed for shareholder profits (theft of public monies).
And now the thieves are coming for the health system. First they run it down by reducing funding, then the public complain and out of nowhere a White Knight appears with billions of real dollars and hundreds of false promises.
Attempting to attach logic when logic is anathema to the powers that be is futile.
You have the best of the best former military strategists, CIA operatives, economists, Russia experts, all spitting out facts daily till they are red/blue in the face but are consciously ignored in favour of well tailored photogenic rank bumbling amateurs.
For example the scorched earth policy favoured by US forces in their conflict debacles when instructed by 'name the idiot' to unload everything they have, just fire, even if you hit the backside of a cow munching grass in a field or a wedding party celebration, it doesn't matter, newer more expensive and bigger bombs/toys are on the way courtesy of MIC share prices.
These malign practices are across the board, everything is bastardised in favour of the few in LaLa Land USA.
What puzzles me most is how a student/parents will submerge themselves in debt undertaking a Mickey Mouse college course and come out knowing next to nothing, with the only work on offer being nightshift at AMAZON, bring your own bottle to piss in.
I very much appreciate all the hard work you do, and I'm regularly enlightened by the translations you so generously produce for our consumption, so I hesitate to respond in a negative way, but I question your assertions and conclusions, with regard to both the labour theory of value - which has always seemed instinctively wrong to me - and the idea that a centralized and standardized form of education is in any way desirable. People develop in different ways, at different speeds, and with different talents and interests, and I'm not sure that any form of standardized education process can accommodate those differences.
One of my bugbears is the very idea of equality. As far as I can tell, no two things in the universe - let alone a multitude - can ever be equal. This is one of the strange contradictions I find in "progressive" ideology - the worship of both diversity and equality. Surely they're mutually exclusive. Equality or freedom - pick one. Some people want to make money and accumulate stuff, and some people don't care about money and baubles. Why should their life outcomes resemble each other in any way?
However I'm fully behind the idea of human harmony. I just wish it could be approached by accepting difference and the resulting "inequality", and finding ways to accommodate each others' different aptitudes and preferences without the desire to impose any one, "correct" world-view on everyone else. Not that I'm accusing you of that, in any way.
And again, thanks for all your efforts, which are greatly appreciated.
Differences in abilities will always exist. I was trained in education and taught a lot in my first career before that formal training and appreciate your critique of my admittedly very scanty description. I assume you’ve read some of my translations dealing with Russia’s educational system and how they’re attempting to improve it so Russia can maximize its people’s abilities. the hardest thing is trying to ascertain what a child wants to do, what it finds most interesting by the time s/he’s ten—hopefully without any developmental disabilities like ADD or ADHD. The total volume of information that ought to be taught from K-12 is staggering, close to double that when I went to school from 1960-1973. And that’s supposed to be accomplished in the same amount of time that was allocated when I was a student—nuts and impossible—but year-round school here in the Empire is taboo and Russia too. I could go on, but I’ve written enough to show that designing an optimal education system isn’t at all easy. But getting it as close to right as you can is vastly important for the national economy for your people are the ones that produce all value.
I find Hudson in his work on the deep history of debt cancellations in the ancient Near East to be useful when addressing questions of 'liberty' and 'equality'. He states that such cancellations were not about the creation of some utopian state of equality amongst all individuals but simply about the restoration of a status quo ante (stable) social order through the release of the (historically) self-supporting agrarian classes from the state of debt peonage in to which they may have fallen through crop failure, etc... The (divine) ruler's authority stems from their capacity to ameliorate the material conditions of the peasantry in the face of 'acts of god'.
The fallacy that what is good for the individual (or even some linear sum of what appears to be good for some combination of individuals) is also good for the society is nicely surmised by theoretical physicist PW Anderson's phrase 'More is Different'.
I would also like to second your shout out to Karl. I find his posts to be the most consistently useful and interesting abstracting service I have come across as I decrease the volume of samizdat coming my way.
I don't really think such a thing can exist. Equality is an abstract idealistic notion, whether wearing the lab coat of respectability in logic/mathematics/physics etc. or else as a fantasy, often used to manipulate people's behaviour. Like the idea of equal justice, or equal treatment. If people are different, then they'll be treated differently, no matter how diligently one might pretend to put prejudice to one side.
Western society obsesses about different treatment due to skin colour or ethnicity, but there are countless ways we're all prejudiced and although they may seem trivial they have massive effects - and no one seems to care. Tall people are favoured over short, beautiful people over ugly. Judges favour women in sentencing, honest teachers and even parents will confide that they have their favourites. Some people are just "likeable" for indefinable reasons, while others you can't wait to get away from. How does that affect their opportunities in life?
On the whole I think our prejudices are natural, normal, most likely of some evolutionary benefit, honed over hundred of millions of years. Jonathan Haidt's "Elephant and Driver" comes to mind - the elephant of our subconscious goes wherever it wants to, the driver - our conscious reasoning - tries to justify and explain why after the fact, desperately clinging to the idea that it's in control. Desperately clinging to cherished fantasies about how "nice" we are.
Judgements about whether we're "supposed" to feel guilty or virtuous is where the manipulation takes place - when we're told that our natural instincts are something to be ashamed of and despise... which takes me off on another tangent about the false separation between man and "nature", as if we're not a part of nature, something else entirely. But I've wandered off topic enough already I fear :)
Thank you for your thoughts. We obviously disagree - probably on many levels. At a fundamental level it might relate to your notion that, individually, we are 'drivers' rather than 'passengers' and that the conscious intellect always decides rather than reacts with a rationalisation of the results. We are not machines in the way that a car is, we are more akin to a chariot.
So, another question. I would appreciate more details of your doubts concerning the concept of 'surplus value' rather than the passing reference used in your original comment?
We may be talking at cross-purposes - possibly due to my error in describing Haidt's metaphor, which should have been the elephant and rider, not driver - more a passenger along for the ride than a driver controlling the direction of travel. My apologies.
I can't really comment on surplus value as it's not something I've thought much about, and I'll probably embarrass myself if I try. It's been many decades since I read Wealth of Nations (although I do remember thinking that Smith was overly deferential to the interests of land owners), and my Economist subscription was likewise cancelled many moons ago.
Having been, at various times, unemployed, employed, self-employed and a company director, I will say that I've never been more relieved than when I stopped having the responsibility of running a business. Maybe I simply wasn't suited to such a role, but afterwards I remarked to a friend that I would like nothing more than a simple, minimum wage job stacking shelves or driving a supermarket delivery van. The idea of being given instruction on what to do and then carrying it out conscientiously would be bliss compared to the weight of responsibility for my own family and others'.
I certainly wouldn't have cared the slightest that someone, somewhere was deriving some surplus reward for my efforts. I don't feel much of an urge to fix the world, or bring the universe into balance. I think it can handle itself.
The MIC is a perfect example of what privatization does. They charge astronomical prices for substandard weaponry. Pure unadulterated greed with no oversight because the politicians all have their hands in the cookie jar.
Hmm, not so sure that I'd necessarily agree with Wolff's statement that Soviet Russia from 1917 through to the end of the cold war was 'backwards and poor'. They were largely suffering from and recovering from extraordinary levels of material and demographic destruction following two global conflicts, which they bore the brunt of, and yet were still world leaders in numerous core industrial technical areas.
Yes, I have a few bones to pick with him over history, although they are often said in the spur-of-the-moment and might merely reflect faulty memory or an incomplete thought—the latter I see him performing occasionally during these sessions and relate it to age. Hudson has his own issues, but for 85 his mind is pretty sharp.
"Libertinism: Ultrahyper individualism disregarding all social responsibility while wanting everything for the Self to be provided by others/inferiors that makes the adherent easily prone to Pleonexia and Megalomania, almost always practiced by the very wealthy/powerful.)"
I thought it was one of their best so far and agree wholeheartedly with your assesment. It has certainly generated some good comments that reflect the quality of its content.
I enjoyed the difenistration of Musk by Richard Wolff - it brought back memories of Deputy Dawg and Musky, who was, if not mistaken, somewhat short-sighted and constantly asking 'what's happening'.
I think it's unwise to believe that Trump and Musk have no understanding of history or economics. I'm not saying they're graduate students in either, but they are both successful businessmen. To my way of thinking there definitely could be a serious plan behind the seemingly chaotic economic moves we're seeing. However that plan does not bode well for the American consumer in the short term.
Overview: The US government needs liquidity. Lots. Of. Liquidity. Biden already printed trillions of dollars so going further down that road courts disaster. The only other way to fill the government's coffers (without increasing taxes) is to tariff the massive amount of goods that the US imports.
This will have knock-on effects, no question. A slowing economy, inflation and a weaker dollar are all likely outcomes. But pay attention. Inflation and a slowing economy are already facts due to Biden's profligate money printing. That's on him. If the US dollar weakens, as it likely will, that will create the kind of conditions that Trump is aiming for. A weaker dollar will:
1. Encourage businesses and industry to relocate to the US.
2. Encourage foreign spending on US equities.
3. Encourage foreign purchases of US Treasuries.
4. Encourage domestic businesses to replace the foreign goods that are now more expensive.
5. Encourage other countries to buy American exports.
6. Increases the value of America's fixed assets like gold, if they're revalued.
All of the consequences of a weaker dollar would fit nicely into Trump's publicly stated intentions for America. But Trump obviously isn't going to come out and say he plans to weaken the dollar. The optics of that would be terrible. Nevertheless, a weaker dollar could bring about the conditions that Trump is aiming for. Then, sometime in the second half of his term, he would have the freedom to make changes that could conceivably supercharge the US economy. Short term pain for the longer term gain.
Obviously I have no idea if that's the plan. I just toss it out there as a devil's advocate. But I do advise against thinking Trump and Musk are stupid about economics.
Neither Trump nor Musk built their businesses. One could assume that their daddies gave them their businesses because their daddies thought they were too stupid to actually build a business. That seems to fit their experience of bankruptcies and reliance on money from government.
Moreover, we can safely cut 75% of our military spending - except we can't because the MIC owns our government and we must spend billions to support it.
Can I claim to be a successful man if I was born into a wealthy family and then inherited a vast fortune? In any case, I can say I'm a lucky man, but there's no personal merit in that. As for Trump and Musk, their illiteracy is so obvious (and I would say obscene) that it doesn't even need to be proven.
There has been a study done that showed if Drumpf had of invested his inheritance in the S&P he would be vastly more wealthy than he is. And speaking of how wealthy he allegedly is; there is no proof of his claims. Sure he has more money then he deserves, but how much exactly? No one but he and his accounting team know.
The USA has disemboweled itself. Or a nicer way of putting it is that it has disassembled the framework of successful economic/manufacturing development. The education system is shambolic, the social cohesion/future focus is trapped in a fog, the economic system is in top gear extraction mode and has no enthusiasm for investing in 'dirty' jobs like manufacturing as the rate of return is pathetic.
The financial owners of the USA are gluttons for quick bucks and they own the likes of Trump and Musk and the entire congress. They will never tolerate any admission that the capitalism practiced in China is more modern, more productive, more public inclusive than theirs.
So to redevelop the infrastructure behind a manufacture boom will take decades and the USA has neither the will or the patience let alone the ideology to do so.
The US government has been denuded of American patriots who should have been working for the wellbeing of the American citizenry. The money landers/Vampire Squids do what they can to keep the wealth of this nation (and other nations) coming to them. The supranational financial system relies on massive Looting which alone can maintain the existing Ponzi scheme and thus ensure the money landers/Vampire Squids' comforts. This is why the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and the approaching war in the Balkans are Bankers' Wars.
The City of London is a criminal Empire of Offshore Accounts for mega-swindlers, war criminals, war profiteers, thieves, and tax evaders. The bankers of the City are not interested in supporting research, education, and development of industries. Instead, the money landers focus their efforts on the Looting the weak. This is all that the money landers/Vampire Squid are capable of. All decisions are made by bankers. The ridiculous compradors playing roles of "leaders" of the EU/UK are nothing but obedient servants to bankers.
Banker bailouts by successive Presidents/PM's assures us that there can never be a level playing field in the WEST. I bet the same parasites are sitting there wondering why no one wants to hold their debt or their toxic exotic financial instruments.
It's refreshing to know that the Bank of England & British Government are having serious difficulty borrowing money.
France's debt to GDP I've heard is/was 110% , a basket-case which will rise even further now that they've lost access to Western Africa's cheap/free resources.
You gotta laugh when they accuse the Chinese government of subsidising companies and creating unfair trade practices when Blackrock, Vanguard and all the other parasites are bailed out for hundreds of $billions every duck shooting season or quarter.
No doubt Blackrock's Larry the Fink has his sleeves rolled up in the Oval Office pointing to various Ukrainian Assets on an IWS map which must be included in the Term's & Conditions of any Agreement with the Russians.
Trump's 5 bankruptcies are no example of success. What about the mob connections that bailed him out for future favours? What about the Trumpcoin pump-and-dump scheme?
I seem to remember that one of DT’s mentors as a youth (and good friend of his daddy’s)was none other than Roy Cohn - a notorious ‘fixer’ and consigliere to ‘the mob’. Donnit figger…….
Drumpf is not a successful businessman at all, at least not for the right reasons. He didn;t make the seed money, it was inherited from his slum-lord father.
He has always had Jewish Wall St banks to bail him out via his mentor Roy Cohn.
And his business interests have always underperformed compared to the S&P.
And Muskrat? He only thrives because of govt. contacts.
Sometimes safes are worth more than what they contain. The same can be said of their owners. It is said that Diogenes (Greek philosopher) was invited by a millionaire to his luxurious palace. Diogenes felt an overwhelming urge to spit. He looked from side to side. Finally, he spat in his millionaire host's face. "Why are you spitting on me?" he asked. To which Diogenes replied: "It's nothing personal, I just haven't found a dirtier place."
Diogenes Syndrome kinda sums up perfectly how I'm currently feeling Loam.
Still it could be a lot worse, NATO could be winning. lol
The satisfaction of knowing The European Crime Cartel are going bonkers, creating imaginary pools of money from thin air, well, we need a new Shakespeare or Monty Python troupe with all this comedic-tragic material going to waste on a daily basis.
I wonder if King Charles 111 has rescinded Trump's State Visit shindig or maybe just cut down on the pomp and circumstance.
I also wonder if his royal highness was very concerned about his rolling organic dairy farm and orchards spread across vast swathes of Romania if the brute Calin Georgescu had prevailed.
The TDS is strong in this group. Say that Trump and Musk are "businessmen" and that they may have an economic strategy and expect, against all reason, to be scoffed at.
People who engage in polarized thinking are the easiest to enslave.
Development is fucking bad, mmmkay. Even with all of humans scientific advancements humans have been regressing. Capitalistic "development" is suicide.
It's not surprising. Australia embarked on banking reform immediately after the election of Bob Hawke, surprisingly Malcolm Fraser had been somewhat lukewarm on suggestions in the Campbell Report and with the able assistance of Rupert Murdoch Labor won the election and embarked on full neoliberal privatisation, including watering down Gough Whitlam's no fees university with higher education contributions scheme (Dawkins was education minister during this phase). Australian's have been "globalist" lab rats where many of these policies are trialled. Government assets were put up for sale for a one off budget contribution, and typical rentier behaviour ensued.
Hawke was a class traitor, and an agent of Israel.
I have an elderly uncle who rose to be 2 IC of a well known union. He joined that union in his 20ies, during the 1960ies.
He told this to me when I was just a lad: When Hawke came on the scene an old union hand told my then young uncle to watch "that rat" as he's an agent of Shitrael. He will be put in place as head of the ACTU and then will one day be selected as PM.
That old bloke lived to see traitor Hawke rise to the top ACTU slot, but died before Hawke was shoed in to the PM slot.
There’s a pattern, he was a Rhodes scholar, I don’t know how much scholarship there was because he was also fond of drinking.
Same as Clinton, except his choice of drug was cocaine.
I haven’t watched that yet but I’d simply like to comment that since the GFC, the political-economy model of the US has been distorted by bad monetary policy. This policy (actually dating back to the 80’s and the birth of the FIRE 🔥 economy) has completely hollowed out the middle class to the benefit of markets and the upper class. No administration has dared to even attempt a fix, and certainly the graft, fraud and abuse of the government coffers has clearly grown accordingly.
I fully expect the current administration to make mistakes. OTOH, doing nothing but more of the same since the GFC has only made things worse, and to continue that process will lead to significant pain in the future.
Harvesting money via rents has existed for centuries. What happened with Thatcher and Reagan is it was made into national policy, although deindustrialization was already underway. The Western economies are now dominated by Rent Seekers having no desire to get involved with industrial capitalism because the returns aren’t high or occur fast enough. I recall the ad campaign run by the Paine-Webber investment firm where it was touted they “Made money the old-fashioned way: They earn it.“
As you know, Trump’s a member of the FIRE sector and thus a Neoliberal. Musk is a hybrid who now mostly seeks rents. Political attacks on Tesla property are now declared domestic terrorism.
There is something uniquely bitter and twisted about a burning Tesla. Consider the owner who, if insured, might get a full payout for a car that as of two days ago was rendered entirely a lemon by the release of he latest BYD model with its extreme performance batteries. The westies FIRE sector compensates the consumer due to a China technological achievement and a USA match.
This is a political artwork that would inspire any Luddite.
Musk so totally insisted on his 4680 cell format and against all sage advice from China's most expert manufacturers. Now he is stuck with a crappy platform for new models and world of people that have found a way to get a refund and blame a terrorist. So USA, so absurd and such good kharma in a flame.
Come on you musicians and muses, give us a song for the times.
Seeing a Tesla being driven on our roads triggers me.
Seeing a Tesla being driven on our roads by a twat wearing a surgical mask sends me in to a frothing rage.
Rage on comrade but consider that the tesla will peel apart faster than you can peel off the offending mask. Perhaps the mask protects the wearer from glue fumes ;))
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg2OaASllbo&t=192s
Pour a good drink first as this is too good.
Crap product. I recall my first impression—a homemade vehicle put together using scrap metal. Seems my impression was close to the mark.
The clever thing Reagan and Thatcher did was to convince people via IRA, Roths, and the British equivalents that they could also get rich (by selling their childrens' future for tiny slices of the rent seeking). Everyone gets excited that their house price keeps going up, not realising that the person who is going to have to wipe their arse when they are old won't be able to afford to live anywhere near them. Greed and lack of foresight make it easy for the 1% and their minions to turn rape into a voluntary act.
The forces at work behind the veil have operated similarly for centuries and have their act well rehearsed. The mantra of individual advancement versus promoting the collective good has been ongoing for about 150 years. Reversing that mantra will be hard to do where it’s so deeply ingrained.
However both Trump and Musk have been “builders” in their own right. Trump in property, Musk in tech.
Here we are today with the lunatic fringe intent on destroying cars they used to worship “for climate change” because the guy who brought them in mass scale wants to reform the grift and corruption of the US government. And every car they burn 🔥 adds to the “climate change”.
These are literally NPC Nuevo-Marxists without a clue, easily activated and agitated by propaganda and incited to violence that runs contrary to the best interests of the environment, and the country as Teslas are made in the USA. Which incidentally is what Trump is pushing, more manufacturing jobs in the USA.
I’ve watched every video I could find on Trump back before the 2016 election where he made any “political” comments. They never varied. He wanted more jobs in the US and to stop exporting them. Here he is actually trying to do this, and the midwits are all crying over it. I’m flabbergasted by the lack of critical thinking. However it seems the “progressive left” is genuinely incapable of thinking at all after decades of brainwashing.
Trump (and Musk) won’t get everything correct, as no one ever does. However after the nightmare of the Biden years, I can only see improvement headed our way. And yes there will be pain too.
Midwest Don found an extraordinary experiment that’s simply fascinating and helps understand the arguments we are a party to when we watch Wolff and Hudson on Thursdays, and is a boon for those who’ve never read any of his many works, https://pamho.medium.com/the-devil-and-j-d-vance-b3a815f03d24
Back in the 1960s, bras and cities were burnt, but the problems those acts were in response to still exist. What too few understand here within the Outlaw US Empire is there are other nations who’ve chosen different pathways, are performing much better and producing improved lives for their citizens than what’s happening here. And those that run the Empire can’t stand the threat of a good example, so they make war on it.
I am not in disagreement with Hudson on financialization, nor the rentier economy. I’ve been listening to him for years.
My issue is the belief that 1) you can simply change up an economy to some “socialist” model (the U.S. already embraces socialism on several levels) and no hat will come and 2) that socialism will necessarily be a better model. One look at the dysfunction in the EU, especially in business development, tells you this model leads to sclerotic “innovation”. Innovators are simply punished do they go elsewhere. (And on a side note, I look at the politics and believe within 10 years of digital euro adoption the EU will go full totalitarian).
You need the benefits of capitalism to move forward, and the “safety net” of socialism for those who cannot keep up. But BEYOND that, you need an effective gate keeping system in both areas — one that reins in capitalistic excess, while also holds social welfare recipients to some standard of accountability.
AI is going to hollow out many more jobs over the next decade. I don’t know what those people will do. They will need assistance, while at the same time that assistance will need checks and brakes. At the same time AI will also need checks and brakes. Who will determine these on both sides will be interesting to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyymgNTKnpM
An interesting explanation of a social(ist) answer to the problem of AI.
Dr. Richard Wolfe's D@W organization offers education on the original Marxist solution to your concerns with state capitalism (both to Western European Socialism and to Soviet Socialism), that the workers own the means of production, rather than the state (Soviet) or private capital in cahoots with the state(like USA and worse the EU). That's one reason he's often in the company of Dr. Hudson.
Hudson has talked about his upbringing and how he was exposed to Marx. It’s a fascinating story. I went looking for one of the several articles at his website that provide that info and instead discovered one I’d never read before, which isn’t unusual given the vast mass of archived material. This is almost 23 years-old but remains fascinating and relevant, https://michael-hudson.com/2002/04/i-meet-the-leading-authority-on-the-babylonian-and-near-east-tradition-of-debt-cancellation/
A little more searching and I found this excellent interview, https://michael-hudson.com/2022/06/economic-rent-and-exploitation/
Hudson has always advocated a mixed economy with the sort of limiters you suggest. What I now see are two major models that will make “modernization and reform” an ongoing part of fine-tuning their political-economy as they aim to provide harmony and prosperity to their citizens. What both share is a very similar sociocultural ethos where all are a collective that works for all, and that every position in society has honor because it must be done—and no job/position within society has shame. IMO, the West generally has a long way to go to reach that level of maturity.
"But the real key in dealing with today’s Junk Economics is to understand why Marx’s work was so vilified even before the advent of Communism, and that what’s commonly attributed to him wasn’t his work at all—the Labor Theory of Value—which was first formulated by Adam Smith and then David Ricardo. What Marx did was to refine and polish the theory—note that it’s not a hypothesis: it’s a theory meaning it’s factual and can be replicated."
True. Hegel could be mentioned, as well. Marx's genius was to utilize a class philosophy to tie three areas of study together--politics, economics and the root, philosophy--into an unified revolutionary theory. Lenin, Imperialism, Hobson. The point isn't to generate the facts, but to make sense of them from the perspective of the overwhelming majority of the population: wage slaves. For anyone who wants to radically change society, that is your constituency. Not some race, gender or sexual preference.
A fascinating application of AI. Michael Hudson's economics is the focus. The same questions were asked to three different AI systems Title of the article posted on Medium. I joined Medium for free to go through this article. This is the first insightful use I have seen of AI generated responses to questions.
"THE DEVIL AND J.D. VANCE: Neoliberalism, Globalization, and Technocracy
Pam Ho · Follow 47 min read 16 hours ago"
https://pamho.medium.com/the-devil-and-j-d-vance-b3a815f03d24
"I asked 3 different AI programs the same questions about the recent speech by Vice President J.D. Vance to Big Tech elites about globalization and the American economy. The first answer sets the stage for the amazing dialogue that ensues by describing the speech, so I only asked the first AI Google’s Gemini, that question. After that is ChatGPT [go down] and then DeepSeek [go down]. The arguments by ChatGPT were the most forceful and enlightening, followed by DeepSeek which was a bit less forceful but still very enlightening, and then Gemini with the most neutral arguments but still informative to a lesser degree."
The Medium essay is fantastic, and I’m only at the first appraisal. Thanks for exploring and discovery! I’ll need to thank Pam Ho also.
Thanks for sharing, to get through to the article you don't have to join you can click on the x to get through. What made me write it was I had been wondering about how the AI chatbots would respond to political questions. I tried Google Gemini first and when it answered so well I tried the other two which were even better, although they didn't include links to the sources like Gemini. I knew then it would be a great way to get Michael's message out to people in an easy-to-understand way.
Thanks for coming to the Gym and commenting! You conducted an excellent experiment. Have you tried sending your findings to Dr. Hudson? He’s one of my subscribers and reads all regularly. I had to rush the DeepSeek portion but intend to reread all three from bottom to top.
Thanks, but you know you don't have to join Medium because it is just like here--to get through you just need to click the x at top right.
Thank you for sharing, that looks fascinating.
Living in a country that successive fascist regimes have handed over the citizen owned public utilities to corporations I fully agree with the following statement; "that profit would be derived from the much higher prices charged for their products...."
For example telecommunication is a mess, expensive, with abysmal customer service. It was for a long time in the top three world wide, until 1990 when it was stolen.
(As an aside, a nation's telecommunication industry from a security and strategic POV should never be owned by foreign interests.)
The electricity supply was sold off and is now expensive with increasing brown outs.
In both of these industries the maintenance is sacrificed for shareholder profits (theft of public monies).
And now the thieves are coming for the health system. First they run it down by reducing funding, then the public complain and out of nowhere a White Knight appears with billions of real dollars and hundreds of false promises.
Attempting to attach logic when logic is anathema to the powers that be is futile.
You have the best of the best former military strategists, CIA operatives, economists, Russia experts, all spitting out facts daily till they are red/blue in the face but are consciously ignored in favour of well tailored photogenic rank bumbling amateurs.
For example the scorched earth policy favoured by US forces in their conflict debacles when instructed by 'name the idiot' to unload everything they have, just fire, even if you hit the backside of a cow munching grass in a field or a wedding party celebration, it doesn't matter, newer more expensive and bigger bombs/toys are on the way courtesy of MIC share prices.
These malign practices are across the board, everything is bastardised in favour of the few in LaLa Land USA.
What puzzles me most is how a student/parents will submerge themselves in debt undertaking a Mickey Mouse college course and come out knowing next to nothing, with the only work on offer being nightshift at AMAZON, bring your own bottle to piss in.
What's unsustainable shall not be sustained.
I very much appreciate all the hard work you do, and I'm regularly enlightened by the translations you so generously produce for our consumption, so I hesitate to respond in a negative way, but I question your assertions and conclusions, with regard to both the labour theory of value - which has always seemed instinctively wrong to me - and the idea that a centralized and standardized form of education is in any way desirable. People develop in different ways, at different speeds, and with different talents and interests, and I'm not sure that any form of standardized education process can accommodate those differences.
One of my bugbears is the very idea of equality. As far as I can tell, no two things in the universe - let alone a multitude - can ever be equal. This is one of the strange contradictions I find in "progressive" ideology - the worship of both diversity and equality. Surely they're mutually exclusive. Equality or freedom - pick one. Some people want to make money and accumulate stuff, and some people don't care about money and baubles. Why should their life outcomes resemble each other in any way?
However I'm fully behind the idea of human harmony. I just wish it could be approached by accepting difference and the resulting "inequality", and finding ways to accommodate each others' different aptitudes and preferences without the desire to impose any one, "correct" world-view on everyone else. Not that I'm accusing you of that, in any way.
And again, thanks for all your efforts, which are greatly appreciated.
Differences in abilities will always exist. I was trained in education and taught a lot in my first career before that formal training and appreciate your critique of my admittedly very scanty description. I assume you’ve read some of my translations dealing with Russia’s educational system and how they’re attempting to improve it so Russia can maximize its people’s abilities. the hardest thing is trying to ascertain what a child wants to do, what it finds most interesting by the time s/he’s ten—hopefully without any developmental disabilities like ADD or ADHD. The total volume of information that ought to be taught from K-12 is staggering, close to double that when I went to school from 1960-1973. And that’s supposed to be accomplished in the same amount of time that was allocated when I was a student—nuts and impossible—but year-round school here in the Empire is taboo and Russia too. I could go on, but I’ve written enough to show that designing an optimal education system isn’t at all easy. But getting it as close to right as you can is vastly important for the national economy for your people are the ones that produce all value.
I find Hudson in his work on the deep history of debt cancellations in the ancient Near East to be useful when addressing questions of 'liberty' and 'equality'. He states that such cancellations were not about the creation of some utopian state of equality amongst all individuals but simply about the restoration of a status quo ante (stable) social order through the release of the (historically) self-supporting agrarian classes from the state of debt peonage in to which they may have fallen through crop failure, etc... The (divine) ruler's authority stems from their capacity to ameliorate the material conditions of the peasantry in the face of 'acts of god'.
The fallacy that what is good for the individual (or even some linear sum of what appears to be good for some combination of individuals) is also good for the society is nicely surmised by theoretical physicist PW Anderson's phrase 'More is Different'.
I would also like to second your shout out to Karl. I find his posts to be the most consistently useful and interesting abstracting service I have come across as I decrease the volume of samizdat coming my way.
Do your doubts cover 'equal opportunity'?
I don't really think such a thing can exist. Equality is an abstract idealistic notion, whether wearing the lab coat of respectability in logic/mathematics/physics etc. or else as a fantasy, often used to manipulate people's behaviour. Like the idea of equal justice, or equal treatment. If people are different, then they'll be treated differently, no matter how diligently one might pretend to put prejudice to one side.
Western society obsesses about different treatment due to skin colour or ethnicity, but there are countless ways we're all prejudiced and although they may seem trivial they have massive effects - and no one seems to care. Tall people are favoured over short, beautiful people over ugly. Judges favour women in sentencing, honest teachers and even parents will confide that they have their favourites. Some people are just "likeable" for indefinable reasons, while others you can't wait to get away from. How does that affect their opportunities in life?
On the whole I think our prejudices are natural, normal, most likely of some evolutionary benefit, honed over hundred of millions of years. Jonathan Haidt's "Elephant and Driver" comes to mind - the elephant of our subconscious goes wherever it wants to, the driver - our conscious reasoning - tries to justify and explain why after the fact, desperately clinging to the idea that it's in control. Desperately clinging to cherished fantasies about how "nice" we are.
Judgements about whether we're "supposed" to feel guilty or virtuous is where the manipulation takes place - when we're told that our natural instincts are something to be ashamed of and despise... which takes me off on another tangent about the false separation between man and "nature", as if we're not a part of nature, something else entirely. But I've wandered off topic enough already I fear :)
Thank you for your thoughts. We obviously disagree - probably on many levels. At a fundamental level it might relate to your notion that, individually, we are 'drivers' rather than 'passengers' and that the conscious intellect always decides rather than reacts with a rationalisation of the results. We are not machines in the way that a car is, we are more akin to a chariot.
So, another question. I would appreciate more details of your doubts concerning the concept of 'surplus value' rather than the passing reference used in your original comment?
We may be talking at cross-purposes - possibly due to my error in describing Haidt's metaphor, which should have been the elephant and rider, not driver - more a passenger along for the ride than a driver controlling the direction of travel. My apologies.
I can't really comment on surplus value as it's not something I've thought much about, and I'll probably embarrass myself if I try. It's been many decades since I read Wealth of Nations (although I do remember thinking that Smith was overly deferential to the interests of land owners), and my Economist subscription was likewise cancelled many moons ago.
Having been, at various times, unemployed, employed, self-employed and a company director, I will say that I've never been more relieved than when I stopped having the responsibility of running a business. Maybe I simply wasn't suited to such a role, but afterwards I remarked to a friend that I would like nothing more than a simple, minimum wage job stacking shelves or driving a supermarket delivery van. The idea of being given instruction on what to do and then carrying it out conscientiously would be bliss compared to the weight of responsibility for my own family and others'.
I certainly wouldn't have cared the slightest that someone, somewhere was deriving some surplus reward for my efforts. I don't feel much of an urge to fix the world, or bring the universe into balance. I think it can handle itself.
Thank you for your affable reply.
It does seem to be less definite or seemingly authorative than'
"... the labour theory of value - which has always seemed instinctively wrong to me ..."
So, it was surprising to read,
"I can't really comment on surplus value as it's not something I've thought much about, ..."
Then there's the saintly or beatific statement of the acceptable working-class attitude.
"I certainly wouldn't have cared the slightest that someone, somewhere was deriving some surplus reward for my efforts."
You seem to be annoyed about something. I apologise if I caused it. I hope you find happiness.
The MIC is a perfect example of what privatization does. They charge astronomical prices for substandard weaponry. Pure unadulterated greed with no oversight because the politicians all have their hands in the cookie jar.
Fortunately, this greed and incompetence work to save Humanity, at least for a while.
Hmm, not so sure that I'd necessarily agree with Wolff's statement that Soviet Russia from 1917 through to the end of the cold war was 'backwards and poor'. They were largely suffering from and recovering from extraordinary levels of material and demographic destruction following two global conflicts, which they bore the brunt of, and yet were still world leaders in numerous core industrial technical areas.
Yes, I have a few bones to pick with him over history, although they are often said in the spur-of-the-moment and might merely reflect faulty memory or an incomplete thought—the latter I see him performing occasionally during these sessions and relate it to age. Hudson has his own issues, but for 85 his mind is pretty sharp.
"Libertinism: Ultrahyper individualism disregarding all social responsibility while wanting everything for the Self to be provided by others/inferiors that makes the adherent easily prone to Pleonexia and Megalomania, almost always practiced by the very wealthy/powerful.)"
The influence of AYN RAND
Yes, but who were the ones that influenced her?
I thought it was one of their best so far and agree wholeheartedly with your assesment. It has certainly generated some good comments that reflect the quality of its content.
I enjoyed the difenistration of Musk by Richard Wolff - it brought back memories of Deputy Dawg and Musky, who was, if not mistaken, somewhat short-sighted and constantly asking 'what's happening'.
I think it's unwise to believe that Trump and Musk have no understanding of history or economics. I'm not saying they're graduate students in either, but they are both successful businessmen. To my way of thinking there definitely could be a serious plan behind the seemingly chaotic economic moves we're seeing. However that plan does not bode well for the American consumer in the short term.
Overview: The US government needs liquidity. Lots. Of. Liquidity. Biden already printed trillions of dollars so going further down that road courts disaster. The only other way to fill the government's coffers (without increasing taxes) is to tariff the massive amount of goods that the US imports.
This will have knock-on effects, no question. A slowing economy, inflation and a weaker dollar are all likely outcomes. But pay attention. Inflation and a slowing economy are already facts due to Biden's profligate money printing. That's on him. If the US dollar weakens, as it likely will, that will create the kind of conditions that Trump is aiming for. A weaker dollar will:
1. Encourage businesses and industry to relocate to the US.
2. Encourage foreign spending on US equities.
3. Encourage foreign purchases of US Treasuries.
4. Encourage domestic businesses to replace the foreign goods that are now more expensive.
5. Encourage other countries to buy American exports.
6. Increases the value of America's fixed assets like gold, if they're revalued.
All of the consequences of a weaker dollar would fit nicely into Trump's publicly stated intentions for America. But Trump obviously isn't going to come out and say he plans to weaken the dollar. The optics of that would be terrible. Nevertheless, a weaker dollar could bring about the conditions that Trump is aiming for. Then, sometime in the second half of his term, he would have the freedom to make changes that could conceivably supercharge the US economy. Short term pain for the longer term gain.
Obviously I have no idea if that's the plan. I just toss it out there as a devil's advocate. But I do advise against thinking Trump and Musk are stupid about economics.
Neither Trump nor Musk built their businesses. One could assume that their daddies gave them their businesses because their daddies thought they were too stupid to actually build a business. That seems to fit their experience of bankruptcies and reliance on money from government.
Moreover, we can safely cut 75% of our military spending - except we can't because the MIC owns our government and we must spend billions to support it.
Can I claim to be a successful man if I was born into a wealthy family and then inherited a vast fortune? In any case, I can say I'm a lucky man, but there's no personal merit in that. As for Trump and Musk, their illiteracy is so obvious (and I would say obscene) that it doesn't even need to be proven.
There has been a study done that showed if Drumpf had of invested his inheritance in the S&P he would be vastly more wealthy than he is. And speaking of how wealthy he allegedly is; there is no proof of his claims. Sure he has more money then he deserves, but how much exactly? No one but he and his accounting team know.
The USA has disemboweled itself. Or a nicer way of putting it is that it has disassembled the framework of successful economic/manufacturing development. The education system is shambolic, the social cohesion/future focus is trapped in a fog, the economic system is in top gear extraction mode and has no enthusiasm for investing in 'dirty' jobs like manufacturing as the rate of return is pathetic.
The financial owners of the USA are gluttons for quick bucks and they own the likes of Trump and Musk and the entire congress. They will never tolerate any admission that the capitalism practiced in China is more modern, more productive, more public inclusive than theirs.
So to redevelop the infrastructure behind a manufacture boom will take decades and the USA has neither the will or the patience let alone the ideology to do so.
The US government has been denuded of American patriots who should have been working for the wellbeing of the American citizenry. The money landers/Vampire Squids do what they can to keep the wealth of this nation (and other nations) coming to them. The supranational financial system relies on massive Looting which alone can maintain the existing Ponzi scheme and thus ensure the money landers/Vampire Squids' comforts. This is why the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and the approaching war in the Balkans are Bankers' Wars.
The City of London is a criminal Empire of Offshore Accounts for mega-swindlers, war criminals, war profiteers, thieves, and tax evaders. The bankers of the City are not interested in supporting research, education, and development of industries. Instead, the money landers focus their efforts on the Looting the weak. This is all that the money landers/Vampire Squid are capable of. All decisions are made by bankers. The ridiculous compradors playing roles of "leaders" of the EU/UK are nothing but obedient servants to bankers.
Banker bailouts by successive Presidents/PM's assures us that there can never be a level playing field in the WEST. I bet the same parasites are sitting there wondering why no one wants to hold their debt or their toxic exotic financial instruments.
It's refreshing to know that the Bank of England & British Government are having serious difficulty borrowing money.
France's debt to GDP I've heard is/was 110% , a basket-case which will rise even further now that they've lost access to Western Africa's cheap/free resources.
You gotta laugh when they accuse the Chinese government of subsidising companies and creating unfair trade practices when Blackrock, Vanguard and all the other parasites are bailed out for hundreds of $billions every duck shooting season or quarter.
No doubt Blackrock's Larry the Fink has his sleeves rolled up in the Oval Office pointing to various Ukrainian Assets on an IWS map which must be included in the Term's & Conditions of any Agreement with the Russians.
Trump's 5 bankruptcies are no example of success. What about the mob connections that bailed him out for future favours? What about the Trumpcoin pump-and-dump scheme?
I seem to remember that one of DT’s mentors as a youth (and good friend of his daddy’s)was none other than Roy Cohn - a notorious ‘fixer’ and consigliere to ‘the mob’. Donnit figger…….
And Cohn had connection to the Maxwells, the Bronfmans, and Wexner/Epstein.
Drumpf is not a successful businessman at all, at least not for the right reasons. He didn;t make the seed money, it was inherited from his slum-lord father.
He has always had Jewish Wall St banks to bail him out via his mentor Roy Cohn.
And his business interests have always underperformed compared to the S&P.
And Muskrat? He only thrives because of govt. contacts.
No.6
What Gold?
Not that gold-plated tungsten stored in Fort Knox for it non corrosive values and resistance to rust.
Sometimes safes are worth more than what they contain. The same can be said of their owners. It is said that Diogenes (Greek philosopher) was invited by a millionaire to his luxurious palace. Diogenes felt an overwhelming urge to spit. He looked from side to side. Finally, he spat in his millionaire host's face. "Why are you spitting on me?" he asked. To which Diogenes replied: "It's nothing personal, I just haven't found a dirtier place."
Funny you should mention that!
Diogenes Syndrome kinda sums up perfectly how I'm currently feeling Loam.
Still it could be a lot worse, NATO could be winning. lol
The satisfaction of knowing The European Crime Cartel are going bonkers, creating imaginary pools of money from thin air, well, we need a new Shakespeare or Monty Python troupe with all this comedic-tragic material going to waste on a daily basis.
It's when they're losing that they most boast of being gods. They're not! They can be defeated, and they will be defeated.
I wonder if King Charles 111 has rescinded Trump's State Visit shindig or maybe just cut down on the pomp and circumstance.
I also wonder if his royal highness was very concerned about his rolling organic dairy farm and orchards spread across vast swathes of Romania if the brute Calin Georgescu had prevailed.
Charles The Turd; must be spoken and spelled with an Irish accent.
The TDS is strong in this group. Say that Trump and Musk are "businessmen" and that they may have an economic strategy and expect, against all reason, to be scoffed at.
People who engage in polarized thinking are the easiest to enslave.
Development is fucking bad, mmmkay. Even with all of humans scientific advancements humans have been regressing. Capitalistic "development" is suicide.