One quibble with the article below: as we explain in detail in ECONNED, financial services deregulation started well before Clinton. Paul Volcker has effectively said the failure to require money market funds to be regulated as deposits was a seminal event. Other dating back to the 1970s include ending the requirement that New York Stock Exchange members be partnerships and the deregulation of commissions on stock trading. The importance of Clinton formally ending the Glass Steagall separation of banking from investment banking is also greatly overstated. It was already shot full of holes by then, as proven by the 1988 (no typo) acquisition by Credit Suisse of bulge-bracket investment bank First Boston
A recent series of interviews with former US President Barack Obama and his associates reveal that Mr. Obama ‘didn’t see Donald Trump coming.’ As with most quotes of this sort, it reveals more about the speaker than the subject. Within three or four months of Mr. Obama taking office, a reasonable number us were warning not of Mr. Trump per se, but of a fascist response to Mr. Obama bailing out Wall Street while leaving tens of millions of unemployed citizens to their own devices.
That Mr. Obama didn’t see this coming makes him, and the people that he surrounded himself with, fools. A clearer historical analogy could hardly have been possible. Wall Street had been freed to create new types and classes of financial instruments based on their never having failed before— because they had never existed, before. A financial crash in 1929 set off a chain reaction in the heavily financialized Western economy. The resulting Great Depression set in motion a series of fascist uprisings across Europe.
In the 2010s, as with the 1930s, it was the failed liberal response that did most of the social damage. In the 2010s as with the 1930s, liberals used austerity to punish poor and working people for mismanagement by the ruling class. The Nazis were brought to power to fix the mess that self-dealing liberals had created. By 1933, wealth was still heavily concentrated through financialization in the hands of a few self-dealing oligarchs.
Across the West, these self-dealing oligarchs engaged in self-dealing as the economy for everyone else cratered. Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933 with one-quarter of German workers unemployed. Hitler promised to right the economy. And he did so via military Keynesianism until Germany’s imperial overreach brought about the end of the Reich. Should the analogy continue, the next step is for the US is to launch really stupid wars.
Why what Mr. Obama thinks is relevant in the present is because he and his Democrat brethren and Sistren still have no idea why Donald Trump is president. And they never will. These are the people who are running the Democratic Party. Their suggestion for how to fix this— to elect Democrats, misses that this was recently tried and Genocide Joe Biden was the result. The ‘liberal’ Biden launched a genocide in Palestine as he triple-dared the Russians to nuke New York and Los Angeles.
What the Democrats have accomplished is to make the US ungovernable. Why not blame the Republicans? Because it is the relationship of the Democrats to the permanent government in the US— the so-called IC (intelligence community) and the ‘government handout’ receiving banks and tech industry, that now effectively control the nation. This is why the US has crypto and mass surveillance. The people ‘asking’ for this garbage are the people selling it.
It appears here that these cycles of one party blaming the other for systemic dysfunction has run its course. Western capitalism shat the bed in the 1930s, was revived, and it proceeded to shit the bed again in almost identical fashion in the 2000s. The Democrats didn’t invent capitalism and Barack Obama wasn’t responsible for the ‘liberation’ of Wall Street (Bill Clinton was). But Obama was responsible for the Federal response to Wall Street’s implosion.
Every effort and instinct that Mr. Obama had went into bailing out his rich donors while downplaying the severity of the crisis. Even though the Great Recession didn’t plausibly end until 2017 or thereabouts, Mr. Obama had already ‘pivoted’ to austerity by 2010, eventually putting Joe Biden on his Cat Food Committee. Congressional Democrats eventually asked Obama to recall Biden because he was trying to cut Social Security and Medicare more than the Republicans were asking for.
Below I suggest a ‘split government’ strategy for the 2026 midterms to slow down the current rush to chaos. This is standard fare amongst US electoral strategies. The idea is to prevent either party from enacting its oligarch and / or Armageddon-friendly policies. The leap of faith required is that the parties cancel each other out. The more likely outcome is that they double down on oligarch and / or Armageddon-friendly policies because this is what the oligarchs want.
In the larger scheme, empires come and empires go. What makes the present so perilous is that nuclear weapons remain as the political health of the West deteriorates. For those who may have forgotten, the US is currently engaged in an ethnic genocide of the sort that no one in power in the West would have defended even a few years ago. The US isn’t in decline. It is in political freefall. I wrote this before Joe Biden was appointed to the presidency in 2020. That turned out about like I said it would.
At present, US President Donald Trump is instigating a war against a nation, Iran, that on paper can defend itself, risking a long, bloody and expensive fight. This war could spell the end of Israel (no comment) as it lowers the international standing of the US even more than it has already been lowered. Mr. Trump’s theory that instilling fear and loathing abroad is the route to peace and prosperity at home fails to distinguish between just and unjust peace. This means that he does not understand the concept of peace at all.
Mr. Trump’s ‘peace through strength’ mantra has been a favorite of tyrants for millennia. If only ‘the people’ would sit down, shut up, a do what they are told there will be peace, runs the theory. That those advocating peace through strength wouldn’t do what they are telling others to do— to roll over and play dead, suggests a flaw in the strategy. Most people don’t like to be told what to do. So, first and foremost, peace through strength is the ethos of people who like war. The correct phrasing of it is ‘peace through war.’
The difference is crucial, as it distinguishes solving problems from creating problems. Unjust peace, such as that created when political differences are temporarily quieted using military force, fails to resolve the underlying differences. In the parlance, this represents the difference between making a ‘deal’ and solving a political problem. ‘Deals’ produce a talking point or two for a news cycle or two. Peace requires creating sustainable outcomes, not fast ones.
That Mr. Trump imagined that he could ‘end the war (in Ukraine) in a day’ provides insight into his thinking. What he meant is that he could get a few people to agree that the war is over without doing anything to turn the chatter into realized fact. It is bullshit of a particular sort. Existing in a world without accountability, Mr. Trump’s class doesn’t know the difference between facts and bullshit because it only deals in bullshit.
The US / Israeli ‘plantation’ approach to political management borrowed its sociology from slavery. On a plantation, peace means as absence of open rebellion. Political opposition is consigned to urinating in the soup and slow walking economic production. That once a social tipping point is passed societies tend to explode in violent rebellion is missed by those in charge. This is why the insistence that no legitimate reason to rebel exists is made so forcefully by the powers that be.
Mr. Trump’s foundering with respect to creating peace anywhere in the world at any point in time might provide a clue if his lack of knowledge in the ways of the world were less substantial. In this respect, he joins his Democrat brethren in not knowing anything that might interfere with the receipt of campaign contributions from nefarious sources. ‘Ignorance is bliss’ would be the Uniparty mantra if anyone in the Uniparty could recall it.
The current great hope of the Democratic Party, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) debuted her foreign policy chops for all of the world to behold at the Munich Security Conference. To the setting, a sizable group of Europeans who have read about war in history books (or haven’t) got together in Munich to glorify it. The cliché that each generation must learn war for itself misses that nuclear weapons remove this ‘luxury.’ There is no do-over once the nukes are flying.
It is US foreign policy— often called ‘imperialism,’ that converts domestic liberalism into militarized authoritarianism abroad. Those who want to understand the American Uniparty in 2026 might wish to begin with historian Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction. The punchline: it’s the economy, stupid. The oligarchs destroyed the industrial economy without having anything to replace it with. This would be the Democrats. The Republicans weren’t able to get policies as cynical as NAFTA passed.
Hailing the Democrat’s liberal militarism as more enlightened that the Republican’s would be rich if it weren’t so ignorant. Question: who started the war between Russia and Ukraine? Why, that would be the Democrats. In 2013 the (Barack) Obama administration launched a coup in Ukraine that ousted its elected government. The US then installed a ‘Ukrainian’ government to its liking as the CIA launched a ‘full-scale invasion’ of Ukraine. This is called regime change.
Why the instigating party matters in this case is that conceptually, the Democrat’s war against Russia was successfully framed by and for urban liberals as a humanitarian intervention. That the US both couped Ukraine and conducted a ‘full scale invasion’ of it before charging that the Russians did the same would seem to be a problem for the Western theory that Ukraine was a sovereign nation when the Russians entered in February 2022. It wasn’t. It was an American colony.
The American ‘left’ split over the war in Ukraine along liberal – left lines, with a preponderance aligning with the liberal foreign policy establishment, a/k/a the CIA. MI6 and Mossad. This isn’t to suggest that the American left is either a product of the IC (intelligence ‘community’) or is an asset of it. It is to suggest that it is amongst the least capable political groupings on the planet. The wait for the Democrats to ‘save’ the left misses that every time that they have been returned to power in the past, they have been farther to the political right.
The reason why the American left is so incapable is because of its one-way affiliation with the Democrats. In 2020, about 99% of self-described ‘progressives’ voted for war against Russia, genocide in West Asia and a high probability of nuclear annihilation. That Joe Biden didn’t sell his candidacy on these policies would seem to be a lesson for Democrats. One that they never learn. The only political appeal of the Democrats looking forward is that they aren’t Republicans. And the only appeal of Republicans is that they aren’t Democrats.
While readers here are aware of this history, most Americans aren’t. Why is this? Because every word that Joe Biden and his administration said about the US proxy war in Ukraine was a calculated lie (a/k/a propaganda) intended to deceive Democrats into supporting yet one more misguided imperial adventure. Biden was Obama’s Viceroy in Ukraine before he was appointedPresident in 2020. His demon spawn (Hunter) acted as the public face on the looting of Ukraine by the West.
Here is Democrat Hillary Clinton opining on Vladimir Putin and the US proxy war in Ukraine. Under any reasonable system of governance, Ms. Clinton would be in prison for allegedly conspiring with the CIA to rig recent presidential elections. What makes what Ms. Clinton has to say worth commenting on is that hers is the exact position that the American left— in the form of the nominally left press, has taken since the launch of Russia’s SMO in February 2022.
Given an ‘off ramp’ in April 2022, mere weeks after Russia’s SMO was launched, Mr. Biden sent Boris Johnson to tell the Ukrainians to keep fighting. That was one million dead Ukrainians ago, with another million Ukrainians seriously injured. The question then: who was Mr. Biden working for if not the Ukrainians? In fact, Biden had been handed the war in Ukraine by the CIA. The CIA had its army in Ukraine attack Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the East to draw the Russians into Eastern Ukraine.
Back in Munich. AOC reliably called for the reestablishment of US soft power vehicles like USAID and NED (National Endowment for Democracy), emphasizing the ‘support’ roles that these agencies play abroad— as if they are unrelated to US regime change operations. That AOC either doesn’t understand the role of US soft power in regime change operations or imagines that they serve a useful purpose places her with a 7th grader’s grasp of foreign policy.
The framing is easy enough to flip for purposes of clarity. How willing is the US to allow the regime-change arms of hostile foreign governments to set up shop inside the US? Since 9/11, the US has committed massive resources to preventing foreign powers from doing so. Venezuela had been subsidizing poor American’s heating fuel until the first Trump government ended the practice by seizing Venezuelan assets. The political reason for doing so is that it makes American leaders look bad for foreign governments to be supporting ‘their’ citizens.
What makes AOC close to intellectually challenged here is that she appears to believe that the purpose of USAID and NED is to ‘help’ poor people. In fact, the purpose is to have US political representation on the ground in every nation that the US wishes to control. NED was the primary means by which the US affected the 2013 – 2014 coup in Ukraine. A dozen years later Ukraine is a dystopian hellscape with two million dead or injured Ukrainians, a government that answers to MI6 and the CIA, and a population that desperately wants the war ended.
What AOC did in Munich was to posture the way that Democrats imagine that adults in positions of power posture— by spending 90 seconds reading foreign policy talking points and then putting herself forward as being knowledgeable about foreign policy. While doing so might work in a nation with a functioning foreign policy establishment, what AOC is signaling is that there is no way out of the political mess that the US is currently in.
The likely reason why AOC tops the Democrat’s list for 2028 is that most of the prominent names found in the Epstein files belong to Democrats. It would seemingly be difficult for alleged child rapists to win public office. That the Dems tend to couch their politics in moral terms doesn’t benefit them here either. Systematic child rape, as is alleged to have occurred with respect to Epstein, will seemingly be a challenge for the Democrats who are listed, irrespective of how much they ‘dislike’ racism, etc.
Via the electoral cycle in the US, politicians have promised ‘change’ for most of the last five decades now. Upon being elected, they have jettisoned their political marketing ‘platforms’ and behaved as if the CIA directly controls every aspect of the US political system. I do not know the extent to which it actually does. But the wars that the CIA wants are launched. The regimes that the CIA wants overthrown are overthrown. And dystopian methods of surveillance, social control and punitive policing increase.
USAID has been an instrument of American imperialism since its inception in the post-War period. USAID provided its own cover by dispensing foreign aid to needy humans. The facts of how and why these humans are ‘needy’ are never considered. The ‘needy’ tend to be clustered in former Western colonies. For instance, Bill Clinton’s plan to ‘save’ Haiti was to locate more sweatshops there. As the facts have it, the only people who benefit from sweatshops are the people who own them. The point: Bill Clinton was helping his donors, not Haiti.
AOC’s actual record on foreign policy is of political posturing as a ‘progressive’ while supporting the CIA’s foreign policy agenda without deviation. In 2024, she made a performative vote against war funding only after the bill’s passage was assured. Her support for ‘defensive’ weapons for Israel imagines that Israel’s nuclear weapons stockpile is defensive when it was Israel’s threat to ‘nuke Iran’ that brought the US into the twelve-day war. The point: all weapons are defensive until they are used offensively. AOC is either stupid or evil on this point.
More to the point, she appears to have only the murkiest of ideas why she is saying anything at all about foreign policy. She conspicuously has no interest in it else she might have learned a thing or two during her time in the House. But she didn’t.
She comes across as a novice because she is a novice. And what her supporters are hearing is the foreign policy of ‘the Blob.’ It is the political program of the fascist right, here being propagated by Democrats. There is nothing interesting, insightful, or original in her pronouncements. Implied is that AOC’s life ambition is to occupy a chair in elected office. No more, and no less.
Matt Duss, AOC’s reported tutor on foreign policy, was the reason why so many on the Left took issue with Bernie Sanders. Duss worked for Sanders before he (Duss) moved on to doing volunteer work for the CIA / Pentagon. As stated above, it is US foreign policy that converts domestic liberalism into global authoritarianism. In this respect, Duss is a loyal soldier. He doesn’t know what he isn’t supposed to know (sometimes called ‘facts’). And he does know the fake facts that are used in the US to mal-explain US foreign policy to the locals.
I had assumed that Duss was chosen by the Democrats in the same way that AI selects its sources. Through its method as word and phrase counting machines, AI provides the most popular answers, not the correct answers. This is Duss. If the idea is popular in neocon / liberal hawk circles, Duss can be found propagating it. He is an example of someone whose career depends on what he doesn’t know more than on what he does. His explanation of the war in Ukraine comes from the deepest bowels of the Pentagon.
The current government of Donald Trump is approximately the fifth in the US since the end of WWII to craft a blow-off phase of American capitalism. Each phase has surpassed the prior in terms of the desperation of capital to maintain control of political discourse in order to keep control over Western political economy. Note that the word ‘control’ plays a prominent role in this paragraph. The paradox that the more aggressively control is sought, the likelier it is to slip away, appears never to have occurred.
With the Democrats now perceiving an opportunity via Mr. Trump’s overreach in Minneapolis, they will bravely wield what leverage they have to get ICE to wear more appealing clothing and to use clearer handwriting when filling in the death certificates of their victims. Missing in declarations of the ‘rights’ of law enforcement are the rights of Americans to make their objections to it known. That doing so makes law enforcement less ‘efficient’ is the point. Efficiency in this context is authoritarian dogma, not a strategy for a just peace.
While the genesis of ‘the president of half of the country’ style of governing likely belongs to Ronald Reagan, who hid his revival of Central Planning (via the MIC) in the US behind ‘free market’ rhetoric, Donald Trump now defines ‘Americans’ to be the people who agree with him on a particular topic. Mathematically, as topics are added, the probability of people agreeing with Mr. Trump on every topic approaches zero. Aside from a few cultists, the idea of Mr. Trump being ‘president to half of the country’ centers on US political dysfunction, not on Donald Trump’s policies.
The problem for we, the people, is that political organization in the US is a function of economic organization. American political scientists Thomas Ferguson and Gilens and Page have successfully demonstrated that the will of the people bears little relationship to policy outcomes. The people for whom Congress works are either oligarchs or they have formal roles in US corporations. This renders promises made by the Democrats to do anything useful, ever, unenforceable.
To the question of Mr. Trump, the closest available political strategy for the US to take in response is to slow the ability of government to function. This could come through divided government— with one or two houses of Congress going to Democrats in 2026. The problem with this strategy is that the Democrats are so delusional and corrupt that they would interpret any electoral victory as support for them and their policies, which despite the drama, remain indifferentiable from Mr. Trump’s.
Recall that it was Joe Biden who redefined ‘antisemitism’ to be criticism of the nation-state of Israel, who promoted the worst lies about Israeli victimhood on October 7, 2023 to legitimate a genocide, and who made campus anti-genocide protests illegal. And in a move that Democrats have yet to understand, it was Biden who lied to his constituents regarding the nature and the causes of the CIA’s war against Russia.
Had Biden et al been re-elected, the Democrats would be enacting the same fascistic legislation that the Trump administration currently is. The evidence for this proposition? The Democrats’ ‘analysis’ of their electoral losses in 2016 and 2024 blames ‘disinformation, misinformation and malinformation.’ Remarkably, their active support for a WWII style ethnic genocide in Gaza facilitated by a demented dotard war criminal (Biden) never entered as a possible causal factor.
Some Democrats have claimed that Joe Biden’s policies were anachronistic when they were in fact the Democrats’ boilerplate pro-imperialist, pro-genocide, foreign policy. What Democrats cannot grasp is how closely aligned Joe Biden and Donald Trump are in terms of policies. This isn’t written to raise Trump, but rather to lower the Democrats. The Democrats are so reckless that they imagined that leaving Obamacare premiums unfunded would guarantee their reelection. It didn’t.
This is where AOC wants to pick up. In this world the problem with US and Israeli actions in Gaza isn’t that they are committing genocide. The problem is with the Democrat’s ‘messaging’ regarding the genocide. The problem with the war in Ukraine isn’t the two million dead or injured Ukrainians. It is the messaging regarding the two million dead or injured Ukrainians. It is deflection. Defend the policies by attacking their accusers. All that readers need to know about AOC is that she was one of the top Democratic Party fundraisers within weeks of her entering Congress— before she had postured her way through any legislation at all.
Unfortunately, there is no follow-on strategy for moving the West forward in a leftish direction. Electing Democrats to majorities in the House and Senate could in theory prevent Mr. Trump from enacting policies that are destructive. But with history as a guide, the Dems’ approach has been to co-opt the policies of the winners in the last election. What voters miss is that the Democrats and the Republicans work for the same people. Two parties exist because few would believe that a single party is ‘democratic.’ But a single party it is.
Assuming that humanity survives until then, this leaves 2028 as the open question. 2028 is what the Dems have their eyes on. They can put a Newsom / AOC (or Buttigieg / Klobuchar) ticket up that guarantees Israel the right to commit genocide (Newsom). And AOC can restart the Democrat’s war against Russia. But they will be doing so without my vote. The fiery speakers the Dems are putting forward have actual policies to the right of Mr. Trump. Readers with an interest are encouraged to read beyond the bullshit.
It is tempting to suggest that until the Democrats get a grip and understand what an irredeemable piece of shit the Democratic Party is, they will be electing Donald Trump over and over again in an existential doom loop. But the Democratic Party doesn’t care what an irredeemable piece of shit is it. Its leaders are richer than they ever have been. They get to spend their days raping children as they pretend to ‘oppose racism.’
This is the time for the adults, if the US has any, to step forward. The current path is unsustainable. America’s economy of self-interest is consuming itself. The US needs the First Principles that a constitution offers, but that capitalism overrides. How can someone enter office as President and then ignore the law with impunity? This isn’t a rhetorical question. How, functionally, can this be? The problem is the form of political economy. Until this is resolved, there is no way out of current dysfunction.