There looks to be a lot of truth to this take:
🚨 ALERT: What the new US Administration is doing is very clear and strategic: it is called psychological overwhelming. Hitting us every day with XXL doses of baffling rhetoric and erratic policies serves to “control the script”, distracting and dishorienting us, normalising the… pic.twitter.com/QfHbMZozAf
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) February 26, 2025
So I’d like to make an attempt to cut through a lot of the noise and take a closer look at a question many seem to still be wrestling with: does the Trump 2.0 administration represent anything other than a rebranding of empire?
I do not believe it does, and that’s what I’ll argue here.
The larger rebrand underway is seeing elite “reconciliation” under Trump and plutocrats line up behind the repackaging from a “woke” empire to a more old-fashioned version focused on race, religion and more brazen exploitation. In the interests of keeping this post manageable, I’ll look at this on Wednesday and focus here solely on the transition form Biden’s “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” to America First, how they complement one another, and how these narratives are nothing more than just that: stories used obfuscate the fact that policies are only concerned with further enriching American oligarchs and extending their ability to extract rent to every corner of the globe.
America’s “Enemies” Are the Reason You Can’t Pay the Bills
In many ways the Biden administration’s Foreign Policy for the Middle Class (FPMC) and Trump’s America First are similar. They both seek to present a veneer of solidarity with the US working class through the scapegoating of foreign bogeymen for Americans’ ever declining standards of living. In reality those bogeymen have little to nothing to do with your $100,000 medical bill but they do always happen to be the enemies of American oligarchs.
While Team Biden still paid lip service to the human rights-democracy-feminism-LGTBQ tools of empire, they’ve largely worn out their usefulness. Trump discards these subtleties. Both are a might-is-right approach, but the latter is just the empire at its most honest.
Regardless, both are involved in the generation of narratives intended to obscure the fact that these evil countries are branded so because they resist the same oligarchic forces bleeding Americans dry. (This isn’t meant to romanticize these nations as they have their own issues with neoliberalism and oligarchy.)
Let’s start with Biden’s FPMC. National security advisor Jake Sullivan, largely credited with being the brain behind the failed tech war against China, also was the chief architect behind the narrative that wed a rebuilding of the American middle class with the Biden foreign policy. Here’s Politico back in 2020 describing Sullivan’s philosophy:
…the strength of U.S. foreign policy and national security lies primarily in a thriving American middle class, whose prosperity is endangered by the very transnational threats the Trump administration has sought to downplay or ignore.
That term “middle class” was a red flag from the start, as it has always been part of a project of making the working class disappear.
But it did try to lay blame for struggles of the aggrieved working class on nefarious foreign forces. Not decades of neoliberalism, not Biden yanking away Covid assistance, not the fact American life is a marketplace as opposed to a society. No, of course not. The real culprits are Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran and all those who refuse to bend the knee to Washington. If you must be angry at your lot in life, be angry with them, was the message of FPMC.
The two political parties in the US, which are unwilling to take on the plutocrats, are therefore forced to contrive these hackneyed sales pitches to the public, but the real campaigning is going on behind the scenes involving ideas on how the administration will expand the reach of American capital. This is evident in the actions of the Biden administration and the direction America First is already taking.
Let’s quickly review what Collective Biden did for the “middle class.”
A proxy war against Russia coupled with an effort to strangle China’s tech sector, thereby making sure the US reigned supreme. After yanking away Covid assistance, Team Biden passed the CHIPS Act, which subsidizes semiconductor manufacturing in the US, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes billions for clean energy tech. And they threw in a genocide in Palestine for good measure. What were the results?
The end of Covid assistance decimated the working class. Project Ukraine has successfully walled off Europe from Russia but it’s been a military disaster for Ukraine and NATO. Russia has turned eastwards and looks to be only strengthened by the empire’s efforts to cripple it. China’s tech sector is doing fine and in the absence of Western imports it used to rely on is learning to make its own.
The IRA+CHIPS has invested $388 billion so far which has reportedly helped support 135,800 jobs in the US. That’s a small blip on the radar when considering the 3.7 million jobs sent to China from 2001 to 2018.
The CHIPS push has already stalled due to a shortage of qualified workers, and the fact remains that no matter what slogan the Biden, Trump, or next administration comes up with, it’s not going to bring back jobs that were offshored or remove the economic vise from most Americans without addressing the country’s advanced-stage neoliberalism. As Micahel Hudson writes:
[The US] has built too high a rentier overhead into its economy for its labor to be able to compete internationally, given the U.S. wage-earner’s budgetary demands to pay high and rising housing and education costs, debt service and health insurance, and for privatized infrastructure services.
And as James K. Galbraith writes, “The Biden economists had overlooked a fundamental fact, which is that the ultimate benefit of any “stimulative” policy flows to those with market power—to land and to capital—regardless of how it may be distributed at first.” That’s a fundamental fact conveniently “overlooked” by every administration.
Naturally, Biden’s FPMC of course did not help the “middle class.” Here are real wages:
And there is evidence that the majority of those miniscule gains are at the bottom for the working poor due to their need to sell their labor in unsafe Covid conditions.All other economic indicators — from credit card and medical debt to homelessness and economic inequality — continued their downward spirals under the “new FDR”:
Sanders said today again that Biden is the “most progressive president since FDR.”
This is a total lie. The workers’ share of national income has plunged to its lowest level on record under the Biden administration.
Biden was a bonanza for Wall Street. pic.twitter.com/NDjrk7JUWY
— Joseph Kishore (@jkishore) October 27, 2024
So how about “America First”? Well, it’s still early, but the question is, as always: whose America — the working class or the financial vultures and Silicon Valley oligarchs bleeding the country dry? And will the Trump administration do anything other than make this fact worse: the US wealth inequality is now on par with what it was on the eve of the Great Depression, which was the highest level in the country since its creation.
The Trump administration’s America First bullet points are here, but are broad, e.g., “On the President’s direction, the State Department will have an America-First foreign policy.”
A more detailed take is helpfully broken down here:
As we can see from the administration’s actions so far, like with FPMC, an emphasis is placed in winning new global struggles and blaming others for Americans’ economic struggles.
There are ulterior motives in every case of blaming foreigners. Let’s take just a few examples.
- China is responsible for the fentanyl. (Allows for more aggressive posture towards Beijing. More tariffs incoming.)
- Whites are under attack in South Africa. (A pressure campaign on South Africa that targets a BRICS founding member and a location the US desires a naval base in order to control shipping lanes and maintain naval dominance in order to contain China.)
- Muslim terrorists are on the march. (Let’s ethnically cleanse Palestine, increase presence in Somalia in fight over Red Sea and maximize pressure on Iran.)
- Latinos stealing your jobs. (Militarize the border and provide testing ground for surveillance and population control tech but of course not go after the root of the problem: American companies that want cheap exploitable labor. )
This part of Trump’s appeal for the oligarchs: he’s fostered enough anger and assignment of blame for the deterioration of American lives to foreign actors and enemies at home that perhaps enough immigrants shipped off to Guantanamo and public shaming of DEI supporters can suffice while the looting of America can double its pace. Trouble is, the oligarchs envision a world in which everyone will become as vulnerable as the undocumented immigrant.
Blaming the foreign also helps enlist Americans in the fight against all these enemies around the world, including accepting propaganda like the idea that we must bow down at the altar of AI in order to win a race against the evil Chinese.
[AI] Arsenal of Democracy
As their FPMC floundered, Collective Biden was also busy redistributing an historic amount of wealth from the public to weapons companies — $1.3 trillion over four years — which Biden bragged about in his farewell address (military spending is set to soar higher under Trump). They resurrected talk of the “arsenal of democracy” to defend this. Probably best summed up by former Under Secretary of State and wrecker of worlds Victoria Nuland:
“Vemember, zee bulk of zis money goez vight back into zee economy.”
— Herr Nuland explains self-licking ice cream cone theory to CNN’s last remaining 500 subscribers.
The neocons made a stupid, clumsy play for imperial conquest over Russia, now the whole world is witnessing… pic.twitter.com/diHiE1pGhZ
— Chebureki Man (@CheburekiMan) February 25, 2024
Collective Biden also tried to jumpstart the US chip industry, which is necessary to “train” AI, while at the same time preventing advanced chips from getting into the hands of the bad guys in China.
Building on that, there are now calls under Trump-Musk for the US to become the “AI Arsenal of Democracy.” What does that mean in practice? Here’s Jack Burnham, a research analyst in the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, providing a nice summary of the recommendations emerging from think tanklandia and Trump World these days:
- More export controls in an effort to restrict China’s access to certain technologies.
- Separate the world into opposing AI blocs
- ”Preparation to deploy and scale future private sector innovations that will further tilt the future balance of military and economic power in Washington’s favor.”
- More data centers even if that “frustrates” housing and community development and federal lands for data center construction.
Of course. This last point highlights how these FPMC and America First divert energy and attention away from what John Maynard Keynes really advocated for (spending on social programs) and instead propagates the idea of “military Keynesianism.”
And the US can’t even do that all that well anymore. One problem that the Biden FPMC ran into was that the US doesn’t even have the workforce anymore to build enough bombs to keep up with all those raining down on women and children in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and various other US proxy wars.
It means that the Pentagon contracts General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems (a US company) to build three 155mm projectile metal parts lines in Texas, but the company needs to call in Turkish subcontractors. As the Department of Defense itself notes, the “advanced weaponry and supporting equipment necessary to dominate in modern warfare require highly sophisticated manufacturing, yet the domestic workforce has suffered for decades.”
Maybe it’s a skills shortage, maybe people don’t want to make bombs, maybe they don’t want to work in a poorly ventilated factory during an ongoing pandemic, or maybe the jobs aren’t as attractive as they used to be. As Taylor Barnes points out, “…[the defense industry] dropped average salaries, and battered its unions in recent decades, meaning that, from a labor perspective, a job in the military-industrial complex just isn’t what it used to be.”
That means the US currently relies on components made in China for aircraft carriers and submarines. It means a trillion dollars in defense spending helps enrich China – the very country which is supposedly one of the points on an axis of evil behind the increased defense spending in the first place.
But that’s nothing that more neoliberalism can’t solve at the AI Arsenal. The Trump administration is now working on bringing in more “skilled” foreigners for the AI workforce. Trump already sided with Silicon Valley over his MAGA base in the H1B visa fight, and now we get this:
JUST IN: President Trump announces a new immigration “Gold Card” that will be sold to immigrants for $5 million.
The Gold Card is a premium version of a Green Card, according to Trump, and will provide immigrants with a pathway to citizenship.
“We’re gonna be selling a gold… pic.twitter.com/U3Bx3Nogfd
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 25, 2025
Much of the reporting on the “Gold Card” focused on the possibility that a bunch of wealthy people will flock to the US, but a closer look at the transcript reveals that’s not really what the order is designed for (wealthy could already buy their way into the US anyways). Here’s Trump:
A person comes from India, China, Japan, lots of different places, and they go to Harvard, the Wharton School of Finance. They go to Yale. They go to all great schools. And they graduate number one in their class, and they are made job offers, but the offer is immediately rescinded because you have no idea whether or not that person can stay in the country. I want to be able to have that person stay in the country.
These companies can go and buy a gold card, and they can use it as a matter of recruitment.
So this is a tool for US companies to bring in the workers needed for the AI Arsenal of Democracy. And what a democracy it will be. A bunch of hierarchical South Africans still stewing over criticism of their daddies for their role in apartheid recruiting for their hierarchical AI project.
AI and Monopoly “Guardrails” Vs. Government for AI and by AI
Let’s look at one noticeable shift.
If we must give the Biden administration any credit, it was the staffing at the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and Lina Khan and company at the Federal Trade Commission. And of course the plutocrats revolted. Even these minor protections for Americans were too much, and the shift of Silicon Valley money to overwhelming backing of Trump has at least been partially explained by the desire to punish Democrats for the Biden team’s gall at thinking it could regulate them.
It appears the issue of antitrust is still not completely settled in the Trump administration.
There are forces in the administration — represented by the JD Vance – Peter Thiel wing — that favor some level of enforcement. They see some monopolies — such as Google — as purely rent seekers. Others are useful when they create new products and help American capital spread its dominance around the world. Vance, Thiel, and the pronatalist movement want less economic burdens on Americans so they can produce more offspring for the civilizational war to come (and who knows, maybe more pristine blood for Thiel’s longevity?).
On the other side are venture capitalists like Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen who are more classic libertarians who want to abolish government and privatize some of its functions. They and others like Steve Bannon believe that almighty unfettered American capitalism won WWII (it’s an interesting thought exercise to imagine how the US would have fared against Nazi Germany with no government intervention in the economy and without the USSR doing all the heavy lifting) and that any government interference would have lost the Cold War and will lose the New Not So Cold War. This ahistorical view ignores how the government has been foundational in almost every important modern tech advance.
But most of all, they believe people exist to provide them profit and be used as lab rats in their AI experiment. They don’t believe in a public commons and they don’t want any of their money touched for it.
The Biden administration’s modest proposals on antitrust, regulation of crypto and AI and taxing unrealized gains, were destroying the venture capital industry, according to Horowitz and Andreessen. And in their telling that means destroying America itself and condemning it to lose the New Cold War.
For them Trump is closer to Obama and Clinton than Biden and represents a great leap forward on the country’s neoliberal road to victory over labor and anyone in the world that oppose domination by American capital. Under Trump 2.0, all’s right with the Silicon Valley universe again:
The Obamaians outsourced much of their thinking to Silicon Valley power amid a transport of enthusiasm for how tech would liberate us.
Now many Trumpians are doing the same.
— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) February 26, 2025
The American elite are in almost universal agreement that their US requires a powerful economy, technological supremacy, and a strong military. Any debate is largely over whether the government should do anything more than shovel money to self-declared geniuses in Silicon Valley and then get out of the way. One can see why the likes of Horowitz and Andreessen view this style of war capitalism as the key to American supremacy. As Malcolm Harris wrote in Palo Alto:
War Capitalism could put on a blindfold and run into a maze of horrific, absurd plans with confidence because it had class power echolocation for a guide: As long as the rich strengthened and the working class weakened, then things had to be going in the right direction. It didn’t matter that capitalists were investing in finance sugar highs, monopoly superprofits, and an international manufacturing race to the bottom rather than strong jobs and an expanded industrial base. The twenty-first century was going to be all about software anyway, baby. The robots will figure it out. Silicon Valley leaders sat on top of this world system like a cherry on a sundae, insulated from the melting foundation by a rich tower of cream.
It’s all so stupid, it would be funny if it weren’t going to be devastating for so many. Here’s just a brief summary, courtesy of Blood in the Machine, of America First’s embrace of Silicon Valley simply becoming the government:
But, stupid or not, it’s a powerful fiction. It joins the echelon of other AI projects helmed by Musk and his cohort, like the “AI-first strategy” DOGE is implementing, the government chatbots they’re building, and the systems designed to automatically remove pronouns and DEI verbiage from government websites. The very idea that DOGE’s AI can streamline and automate the government is already being used to justify the hollowing out and the reshaping of the federal workforce. Leaning into the reputation of generative AI, which has been touted as the so-powerful-it’s-terrifying future by Silicon Valley and the media, and into his meme-agency’s mission of locating efficiencies, Musk has sold his operation as the future, and he has done so emphatically enough that GOP is more than happy to run with the charade.
So we’re moving towards the automation of government on crappy hallucinatory AI, “AI coding agents” writing government software for different agencies and being trained in part on existing government contracts. Ai huckster termites are eating away at everything like the DOGE staffers at HUD who are from an AI real estate firm.
The goal appears to be a US version of the neoliberal shock the US directed at Russia in the 1990s, which led to a collapse of real wages and life expectancy worse than the US Great Depression.
The US capitalist system and those who run it are making great use of Trump. A large chunk of the population worships him and believe he’s leading a rethink in US foreign policy and rooting out waste in government. The other half thinks he’s a moron controlled by Moscow. Silicon Valley is laughing all the way to the crypto bank.
But he has drawn Silicon Valley “effective accelerationists,” conservative and libertarian think tankers, and both financial and industrial capitalists to his side (which helps explain the deafening silence coming from Team Blue). The Democrats are now likely hoping for dissatisfaction among a faction of the oligarchs to arise.
If some plutocrats circle back to Team Blue, Democrats will be there waiting. They won’t roll back the great AI looting experiment, but they might provide a band aid for a flesh wound as they rebrand the same plutocratic policies under some new version of FPMC so the whole “world’s greatest democracy” show can go on.
This post is deep and wide, thank you. In the frame of global systems collapse, what Empire means is changing, and ‘as they rebrand the same plutocratic policies under some new version of FPMC’ is clarifying as to what is within-system versus external-to-system.
A couple of reflective quotes:
Anthony K Wikrent: Depressions are how we harvest the wealth accumulated by the lower classes.
Pandit, Pradhan, & van Schaik: Intriguingly, at lower σ [skew in power] we expect to find more classes.
Tainter: Inequality may be thought of as vertical differentiation, ranking, or unequal access to material and social resources. Heterogeneity is a subtler concept. It refers to the number of distinctive parts or components to a society, and at the same time to the ways in which a population is distributed among these parts.
So: ecosystem collapse, global government collapse, national level collapse. It now matters what state you are in, for preferences between ‘abortion on demand’ and ‘track my menses’. That’s national collapse, and happened under the previous regime. And the immense skew of power of the larval trillionaires, in this frame, should squeeze out distinctive occupations. AI is a hammer for that nail.
Thanks, Conor, for your insights here.
I will pull this observation as a basis for my comment: “The larger rebrand underway is seeing elite “reconciliation” under Trump and plutocrats line up behind the repackaging from a “woke” empire to a more old-fashioned version focused on race, religion and more brazen exploitation.”
I argue that the differences are not all that noticeable. In the case of religion, the U S of A is oscillating from “woke” evangelical testimonials (and testimonials to one’s pronouns) to a kind of Calvinist gloom, in which the Elect like Andreessen tell the Damned that they are indeed damned. It’s all late-stage evangelical Protestantism, now reduced to empty rituals of Salvation through Faith Alone.
With regard to race, I’ll align with Adolph Reed. Nothing to see here. Obama and Kamala Harris were remarkably alike: White academic mom (yeah, I know, Kamala’s mom is so much more exotic) plus immigrant black dad. What is missing? A connection to ADOS, that is, black Americans descended from those enslaved who have to deal with the legacy of slavery, mistreatment, and segregation. Obama and Harris are perfect candidates for either party because they do not challenge race.
Speaking of white people, I’ll argue that under liberals, there were plenty of functional white people reinforcing the imperial idea that white is right: The Biden administration was particularly perverse in placing Linda Thomas-Greenfield at the United Nations, where she then voted over and over to allow the slaughter of Palestinians to continue. Her potential replacement, from the Calvinist Trumpiverse, is McCarthyite Elise Stefanik, who is simply another dollop of white is right.
Your introduction to the related post today on gutting the USDA includes the now-notorious graph that the U S of A is a food importer. Why do I place stress on that graph here in an article on rebranding the empire?
I am reminded that during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the looting of Russia in the 1990s, Russia had serious agricultural problems.
I am also reminded that when I was in Chicago last September, I went to a food store, a major chain, in my former neighborhood only to discover — in the third week of September — that there were no tomatoes grown in the Great Lakes States or even the U S of A. The store featured Canadian and Mexican tomatoes.
It isn’t only agriculture that is going to be crippled. The U.S. food distribution system is obviously creaky and neglected. This strikes me as a symptom of a hollowed-out empire awaiting the barbarians.
Let the rebranding begin! People can subsist on Cool Ranch Doritos.
Well done, Conor~
I’ve oft mentioned the Bizarro World comparisons between the collapse of the USSR and the USA, and most everything is diametrically opposed in our respective going out of business sales, for instance Trump similar to Gorbachev-wants openness, but for only selfish reasons and completely going against any prior President’s action in that regard, just like Mikhail.
Its gonna end badly, we’re already seeing diminished lifespans and unlike Communism-which a lot of people under its grips wanted to go away, nobody really wants Capitalism to depart, and yet here we are on the precipice major change.
Trump doesn’t need to lead anyone. My kid isn’t Sgt. York. Let the Europeans slaughter one another and pay for it themselves.
Intriguing article.
That appears to be an incomplete sentence. Please add more insight. What might labor become even?
I suppose that it does not matter if it was Biden in charge or Trump in charge, the aim remains the same – US dominance in the 21st century. Biden wanted to collapse Russia and then go after an isolated China but that did not work out. So now Trump wants to create a North American power block from which the US can dominate the world using their financial position (with tariffs & sanctions) as well as their technology (with chips and AI). But I do not think that it will work as the majority will not buy into it as all it leads to is impoverishment at home and insecurity as a way of life. Lots of Americans were shocked that the whole world was not like that when RedNote allowed Americans in sowing other possibilities. I guess though that people like Musk and Trump think that they do not need the people to go along with them so long as they have all that tech. But it will make for a very unstable country as pull yourself up by your own bootlaces will only go so far in the face of daily reality. If the wheels start to come off, it will start to get ugly real fast.
From my vantage point at the Street level, it is now “when the wheels come off, fully.”
“…, the aim remains the same – US dominance in the 21st century.”
Possibly. The question: is the guiding light in the T admin the Monroe Doctrine or the Mackender “doctrine.” The US has been sucked into the UK- western Europe Mackender doctrine for the last 110 years, imo. At this point, the ‘Mackenderites’, including OZ, are still standing with Z no matter what. The T team seems to be pulling away from that and back toward a Monroe doctrine-type geopolitics, imo. Just a guess.
second question: is the fight between the Davos/WEF crowd and the crowd opposing the WEF’s aims: less democracy, open borders, increased public-private partnerships on a global scale?
Maybe this is the First WEF World War. / ?
The Wings of the Eagle
Are Albion and Oz
.
Hemispheric dominance = Monroe Doctrine. Do missiles obviate the need for a Navy? We have a nice ocean.
It does matter who is in charge in Washington. The Biden/Deep State combo was a Gollum. No way the goals stated by the Biden gang could do anything other than enrich, one way or the other, the Bidens and their friends. With Trump you have a chance because he is doing what he should have done during his first term but couldn’t because he had no powerful allies. Currently he has found allies so the America First project has a chance. Whether Trump “succeeds” or not is an open question but his throwing some wrenches into the toxic federal government can only result in good coming out of it. What replaces the current power-arrangements will be interesting.
We will, no matter what is happening, be living in an oligarchy or, hopefully, an aristocracy moderated somewhat by democracy as the Founders seemed to have hoped for. The Democratic Party way leads to some version of totalitarianism much like the direction Europe is heading towards, i.e., Vance was right in his speech.
I’ve been looking at various stories about the decline of the British Empire. Considering the USA and Britain’s history together, there a plenty of similarities to see. I think the variations in outcome are largely due to geographical factors and those effects on the mindsets of people.
Asset stripping accompanies decline. (People also witnessed this happen to the Russia of the 1990s). It’s as though global oligarchs and others of their circles, shaking their fists at the nation no longer projecting power their power and expanding their wealth as easily as in the past, mark the people and the place for liquidation for faster money and their only ideal is cynicism. Power and wealth become even more about power and wealth for its own sake.
Anyway, back to Britain. It’s with those thoughts that re-watching the short documentary below (largely about experiences that began in 1960s and 1970s) hits so differently now:
The Mayfair Set (1999) Episode 2 – Entrepreneur Spelt S.P.I.V.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0DkrxddAn8/
(Note: something that had particular “knock me over with a spoon effect” was seeing the asset stripping preceded by a stock market bubble and the part about a housing bubble that papered over the destruction.) There’s also a familiar tale of entrepreneurs capturing the government and all the claims made that turned out not to be true.
It’s also with all of this in mind that I would be alarmed by any “multipolar world older” that is only trade blocs seeped in economic ideas from “the West”.)
That video just cost me an hour but it was great! None of it was new to me in isolation but it was interesting to see it joined together. It’s an Adam Curtis documentary, which I guessed from the symbolism of the title sequence and confirmed in the credits.
LOL. Yes, I said short because it’s one vid of a series and at least it alone is not feature film length.
I’d seen it before and was familiar with de-industrialization in Britain, but seeing it again now…hits harder.
Like a playbook being run over and over again.
It also seems timely since Z, after the confrontations in the USA, flew off to London for salvation for Ukraine.
Oh yeah, Curtis’ voice is unmistakable. Especially his pronunciation of his favourite word, paah. From context it becomes clear he means power. Very occasionally he slips and vocalizes two syllables, which makes me wonder if it’s an affectation.
He’s actually able to do more interviewing some of the participants in the events. Something different from some of the collages of his more recent work.
Agree. He’s done loads of interesting interviews. In my opinion those are the best bits. The collage and voice over is quite good fun if I’m in the mood for a bit of “But then something strange happened.”
I have a feeling that power and wealth on that scale are like the most powerful feel-good drugs ever to these people. Might make them feel like gods.
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Pete Townshend of ‘The Who’ optimistically named the song that line came from, “Won’t get fooled again.”
As many here and adjacent point out, what is needed is not a tweaking of the inputs of the extant system, but a complete redesign of the system under which we toil and suffer.
Paradoxically, the present administration’s policies of reaction and retrenchment will be “positive” in the long run by accelerating the changes that will wreck the present system. As a former docent in this Museum of Terran Human Folly used to remark: “Bringing on the Rapture is a good thing.”
Now for the hard part. Rebuilding.
I believe this sentence got cut off?
Thank you for the interesting article.
The U.S. corporate sector is not monolithic. Greedy capitalists may have conflicting interests. RTX, Northrup-Grumman, and Lockheed-Martin want to ramp up hostility against China, but Apple, Amazon, and Walmart may not want their supply logistics shredded. The U.S. defense sector is only about 5% of GDP; it is dwarfed by the size, and potential lobbying power, of the biggest U.S. corporations. If DOGE and Hegseth start cutting through the Pentagon budget, it will be evidence that the majority of the plutocracy has decided that the methods of the neocon war machine have become unsound.
Exactly! We have to understand here that we have a major power alignment of the powerful–they will determine the future not the disinterested narcissistic “citizen” of our country whether it is the USA, the UK or the rest of the West.
Trump has already been president for four years so the fact that he is not going to challenge the financial oligarchy is not exactly news or news to the people who voted for him. What is new is his direct challenge to the foreign policy oligarchy which is of course at the heart of this or any “empire.” That said, if Trump does follow Biden and gins up a major new overseas war–proxy or otherwise–then he’ll be a fake on that as well.
But I don’t think he will. To be sure he’s horrible on Palestine but even there at least a bit more open minded (or just “minded”) than the Bidenistas.
Trump is president because a majority of the public do want change and decided they would take any change they could get. The real issue is the lack of choice in a political system that has been over the years shaped to the needs of oligarchy–and some might argue was always shaped that way. When the powerful trip themselves up–a Civil War or a Great Depression–reform slips in but even FDR was out to save capitalism, not replace it.
There is no mechanism to shift power from the powerful oligarchs/aristocrats to “the people” mainly because the people are not interested in “power to the people” so our only hope is that the right power-elite factions run things–this one appears to be better than the Democratic Party aligned ones.
Republic, aka US constitution or empire aka goings on since 1898.
If we decide empire we have constitutional convention
Not sure on the other elements of CHIPS funding and how successful that has been, but on the Intel CHIPS front, things are not looking so hot. [Feb 28 2025] Intel delays $28 billion Ohio chip factory in New Albany again, to 2030 or 2031
Keep in mind, the Ohio fabs were supposed to be producing chips this year. Delaying things to 2030-2031? Might as well be Intel-speak for ‘never’. So with these delays, as well as the delays for Fab 29 in Magdeburg Germany and the Poland packaging plant , that leaves only Intel Fab 52 and 62 in Arizona as actually getting completed and going into production this decade.
Astoundingly, there is enough teeth (or perhaps lack of any faith in Intel’s BS?) in the CHIPS act that Daddy Warbucks has said, no money for you!
[Oct 2024] Intel CEO is “frustrated” with CHIPS Act payout progress — Intel has received $0 from the $8.5 billion that the US government promised
[Sept. 2024] US government to delay Intel CHIPS act funding until company hits milestones
And to top off the absurdity, Daddy Warbucks might be incapable of even signing the cheques now due to being casualties of Musk’s goons: [Feb 23 2025] CHIPS Act dies because employees are fired – NIST CHIPS people are probationary
One difference in foreign policy is that Trump seems frightened by the prospect of nuclear war. He raised the prospect of WW3 several times during his spat with Elensky.
Maybe this is because of his real estate background. He genuinely doesn’t want to see his hotels and casinos destroyed.
It isn’t much, but I prefer his attitude to the angry nihilism of the Biden crime clan.
I also think Trump knows he only has around six more months before the American people turn on him if inflation is still running rampant.
I wonder how his team will respond. My guess is tax relief for workers while he continue to pillage the economy. But maybe I overestimate him.
On Feb. 27, NC featured an exciting conversation entitled “Capital as Power in the 21st Century.”
Jonathan Nitzan argued that what he called CasP is a different way of understanding and studying political economy–“that we should understand capitalism not as a mode of production and consumption as mainstream and Marxist political economists tend to do, but as a mode of power.”
Today Conor assures us that, under Trump, the Empire is simply rebranding itself and is just a more honest form of the same old American imperialism.
It just may be that our individual ability to predict the future is shrinking and increasing uncertainty is now the name of the game.
Congratulations Conor for your approach to this article. Excellent, and waiting for Wednesday delivery!
This is either completely ignorant of how hiring foreign nationals works, or deliberately misleading. Companies wanting to bring a non-US citizen on board have a few options:
– H-1B. Always the first choice if available since it’s easy, quick, and ties the employee to the employer for not only their job but their continued presence in the country, which grants the employer a great deal of power.
– Employment-based green card. Typically the next option after the H-1B period expires. You do have to ‘prove’ that you couldn’t find US nationals to do the job, but that’s easily finessed by a competent lawyer – just post ads that are highly tailored to the individual role, to the point where you have to have been doing it for years already to qualify. The backlog for these is very long and they can take years to process, which suits employers just fine as well, since pending status gives the right to work in the interim and ties you to the employer just like the H-1B does (in fact, the longer the better as far as employers are concerned).
– Extraordinary ability category. This could be used for Trump’s example (#1 in class at Wharton or similar). Probably a quicker/easier path with a shorter period of dependency on the employer, and likely less attractive to them for that reason.
The idea that an employer might use the proposed Gold Card in preference to any of these makes no sense whatsoever. Granted, all but the H-1B are time-consuming and expensive, but not $5M expensive (or even close) and as noted, the time-consuming part is a feature and not a bug.
Trump’s example is spurious – I guarantee you that if foreign nationals are graduating #1 from the schools he mentions, they are having absolutely no trouble finding employment in the US under the current legal framework. I had no trouble, and I was nowhere near #1 or at a school as prestigious as those.
I have no idea how Trump thinks this is going to help anything, since (as Conor says) people can already buy green cards under the investment category. I suspect that the ‘Gold’ rebranding is the main point.
It’s about who with credentials will be excluded more than included.
Branko Marcetic with Democracy Now –
The Billionaires’ Government: Branko Marcetic on Trump’s “Complete Betrayal” of His Base
15 min. / transcript
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/27/branko_marcetic_ukraine_trump_doge
Great article–confusing but great. Just want to emphasize that, at this time of change and upheaval (badly, badly needed) the determiner of where we go next is what we used to call “the confidence fairy” or something like it. We need cultural change more than political change–our values must change, not because I don’t like our current national values, but that our long-term survival depends on it. Dominance/Submission is only fun when both parties enjoy it. Dominating the world which has been our national mission in establishing an empire in the first place has to be replaced by cooperation and just enjoying and loving the beauty of life and fellow humans. I think Trump, particularly after the assassination attempt, is about that in his confused on unclear way unlike the waste material that dominated the previous administration.
Grim but probably accurate assessment.
As Conor says: whose America are we talking about? The workers or the oligarchy?
A “good” imperial power needs both to be fully integrated, as in the Roman Republic at its beginning.
We are far from that right now. And shouting “America über alles” will change very little, if anything.
I had reason recently to venture over to YouTube for content consumption (a certain rap beef) and to my great dismay, I discovered a whole new genre being promoted in liberal circles – #FAFO.
Every day, a slew of content creators pump innumerable shorts and videos that are basically reveling in the pain being suffered by Trump voters who are losing jobs, benefits, family/friends to ICE deportation etc. There is even a sub-genre directed at Muslim/Palestinian voters … ugh! What this tells me is that there is effectively NO rebranding. In the midterms and certainly in the 2028 general election, the Democrats will simply double down on:
• GOP being the party of “deplorables”
• Effectively knee-capping any real left political entity
• Support for Israel
• Support for Ukraine (can we hope Putin ends this emphatically before 2028?!)
• Fiscal “responsibility” – we can afford $1T defense, Ukraine proxy and Israeli genocide, but no domestic economic benefits like raising minimum wage etc (“benevolent Blue billionaires” will see to that!)
Voters will be told again to “vote like their lives depend on it”; Democrats will fully expect that Trump chaos is all that is needed to send flocks into voting booths to pull the blue lever; don’t bring up real tangible benefits to any of your VBNMW liberal acquaintances, or you’ll be called names!
The U.S. is a uni-party state providing the illusion of choice. To wit:
Both parties exist to serve the plutocracy. The result is a pluto-kleptocracy that uses identity politics as a quasi-permanent wedge to maintain discord. Nothing matters but maintaining power, but only ever providing crumbs to the bottom 99%. The Good-cop/Bad-cop metaphor is appropriate – they’re both cops! Or the same cop! (LOL, via YouTube).
To those of you
bravecurious enough: FAFO at YouTube (Trigger Warning: TDS)