Excellent insights, "Corruption is the point" should become a meme.
This resonates with Michelle Goldman's column in the NYTimes today pointing out that Trump and MAGA thrive on degradation. Also Paul Krugman's recent column explaining that Trump's people degrade themselves - with obvious lies and sickening sycophantic praise - as a proof of their loyalty. The video of Trump dumping shit on New Yorkers and the demolition of the East Wing are visual evidence of what's happening.
I fear that all this is only the eruption into daylight of a moral collapse that has been working underground in our society for a generation or more. (Personally, I first saw something had gone wrong when the Bush-Cheney torturers were never exposed and punished.)
It seems to me the economic base has been lawless for a good while now, with the deregulated globalization allowing companies to circumvent countries' laws and becoming global behemoths more powerful than states. In the progressive camp, the turning point was perhaps the Clinton administration abandoning anti-trust, tax and redistribution in favor of a philanthrocapitalist system allowing corporate fortunes to consolidate if they agreed to pay some due to public good, with subsidies and loans as a cope for the many (it was almost caricatural : Microsoft being let off the hook of an anti-trust federal law case with mostly a slap on the wrist, and a couple years later the Gates and the Clinton foundations teaming up to eradicate AIDS and malaria). Trumpism seems to be reaping the political benefits both of the insane corporate concentration and of the powerlessness and resentment it caused among common people. It may be the superstructure brutally adjusting.
Perhaps what's happening currently is a backlash to a scaling up crisis that happened both in the economy and in the (social) media ? The arenas becoming global rather than national/local, without the global level having the proper democratic means of government and control.
Good points. The US is only one of the players here, many nations have collaborated in allowing corporations to evade taxes and other controls, while ever larger piles of personal wealth circulate invisibly outside the legal system
Specifically the settlement the DoJ came to was under Bush's DoJ, not Clinton's, and had there been some directive from the President not to break up Microsoft as part of some secret deal with the Gates Foundation, evidence would have surfaced by now, and likely would have been a major scandal.
What you're describing generally in this post (outside of this nonexistent Gates-Clinton deal) honestly sounds more like how power was consolidated by the more bourgeious conservative elements contrasted against in the article, than the sort of moral rot core to these fucking scumbags.
I don't believe in a conspiracy with Clinton doing secret deals, and I'm aware that the settlement was reached under W. Bush, but you're right, I should have been more careful in my writing in that post (I should also have looked back more closely into what I knew about all this, and about the original verdict, before the settlement, which I remembered as much more lenient). My timeline is wrong about the moment the foundations teamed up, too : it's only in 2010 that Bill Clinton and Bill Gates make open calls together about AIDS, and the foundations officially team up together under Hillary Clinton's watch on other issues in 2014.
To give some bit of context : I got interested in this era because I was curious about the itinerary of a guy who was a cog in both machines, working as a Telecommunications Counsel in the U.S. DoJ during United States v. Microsoft Corp., then founding a boutique firm specialized in venture capitalism. It worked, among other things, in setting up DATA and other NGOs like this (including one by a telecommunication philanthrope, not Bill Gates, to raise money for Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria), did venture philanthropy for music and movie stars, and later also did lobbying (with little success) toward Democrat lawmakers he held ties with on the behalf of a Russian oligarch who was barred from entering the US. I read a lot of press articles on the boom of foundations in that era and on what venture philanthropy did exactly, but I have not found a comprehensive book on this subject which would have given a solid structure of analysis on it (I'll be happy to take any advice on this).
Still, I think there are analyses and conclusions one can pretty safely make : the fact that a lot of money was raised to provide drugs for AIDS, malaria or tuberculosis is unequivocally good, and there's no denying, whether you like his options or not, that Bill Gates seems to be taking the role and work of his foundation very seriously. But foundations are, at core, a very well known loophole to avoid taxes (there was an interesting exchange a few years back between ProPublica & Warren Buffett, who's supposed to be a pro-tax billionaire, about the fact he circumvented most of the taxes he was supposed to pay by turning most of the profits to his foundation. Buffett told answer ProPublica, among other things, that he thought the money would be better used by his foundation. Cf https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax). And philanthropy is also good public relations. So the boom in philanthropic foundations in the 2000s was also linked to the need to optimize fortunes : why pay tax when you can use your money through a personally rewarding and good for PR foundation ? Problem is, these billionaires were prone to think they'd solve the world with policies that were sometimes fads created by consultants cabinets (or venture philanthropy firm), and made for very bad public policies. For instance, there are crazy stories about the fad on charter schools. Here is a comprehensive story by Politico (with Bill Gates in ! https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/the-plot-against-public-education-111630/), here is a deeply disquieting one about New Orleans where the public school system was crumbling due to a lack of funding while billionaires were pumping up money in a parallel system with 0 local oversight (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/in-new-orleans-traditional-public-schools-close-for-good/2014/05/28/ae4f5724-e5de-11e3-8f90-73e071f3d637_story.html). Anyway. My main hypothesis is that after risking to have his company broken up, Bill Gates (and many others like him) realized that it was safer to generate good will toward him rather than being seen as the evil monopolistic guy, and fully embraced the long American tradition of high profile capitalist philanthropist.
Now, to go back to Bill Clinton : by creating his own foundation, and working alongside others within this boom, Bill Clinton fully embedded himself into this system and in the donor class, seemingly accepting philanthropy as a good solution to keep looking progressive while working alongside the biggest businesses. And when it came to him, there was an additional twist : Clinton had no millions of his own to put in his foundation, the money was raised among other people, through the interest generated by his name. When they did so, they funded the causes of course (many of them useful), but they also gave leverage and sway to Clinton himself, through the financiary and PR power of his foundation. Which is something that helped him and Hillary stay relevant during the W. Bush era. What's more, when the foundation came under closer scrutiny in the beginning of the 2010s, as Hillary Clinton was secretary of state while the Clinton Foundation was still operating, journalists realized that some donors were giving to the Clinton Foundation in the hope of getting easier access to the secretary of state (and would-be presidential candidate). There was no evidence of blatant corruption or wrongdoing, but we're in a very grey zone (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html ; https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/emails-reveal-how-foundation-donors-got-access-to-clinton-and-her-close-aides-at-state-dept/2016/08/22/345b5200-6882-11e6-8225-fbb8a6fc65bc_story.html). Of course, Trump fully tapped into this to help his own rise to power.
A lot of things mingle here and there may be more to the issue. But this asks for sharper knowledge, competences and analyses than mine. Questions includes the actions being bought in the companies working on drugs for AIDS by Gates and others : respectable action to ensure proper funding to research ? Market back deal ? The philanthropists also worked to cap the price of drugs in developing countries, another unequivocally good outcome. What's the takeaway ? A lot of the philanthropic donors are also political donors with Democrat sympathies : how does all of this works ? And there is the whole shady demi-monde of big business, politics and the like (why did so many people hang out with Jeffrey Epstein ? ...Because he was a donor !) Seeing the number of deranged conspiracy theories this has generated, and how complicated it is to actually understand these things unless good investigative journalists did the work for you, I prefer not to go in these directions too much.
The main problem all of this poses, in my opinion, is a democratic problem. By embracing the Foundation system, the Clintons watered down the need for taxes, anti-trust measures, not only to raise public money but also to keep in check the corporate fortunes. Even when invested in foundations with good intentions (and I'm sure most of these did so - in addition to escaping taxes of course), being able to use a huge amount of money gives an overwhelming sway to billionaires which is political in nature and as such should be much more widely checkered. The New Orleans schools are a perfect metaphor, with the new fancy schools escaping local oversight and being, ultimately, ill suited to the needs of the community, while the actual public school system with school boards and democratic control was crumbling. This is a kind of democratic disempowerment and in that regard, I don't find it strange that people made up conspiracy theories about these dealings, on which they have no hold and that are complex and hard to understand. And I was talking only about the "good" side here : now we're seeing what can happen when most of the big money goes rogue and the billionaires start throwing millions to fund a fascist project.
There, I hope I clarified a bit what I meant.
PS : I read a lot about this lately but did not follow the stories along, I'll welcome corrections.
What's striking to me is how innocence itself becomes a kind of crime to these people. The fact that the people they beat, kidnap and harass have done nothing wrong, and are simply living their lives and going to work is almost offensive to the bottom of the barrel types who are the most fervent soldiers for Trumpism.
To be innocent is to put on airs, to assert superiority to the people who are your designated social betters, and requires even harsher punishment.
I wonder how the more bourgeois, respectable MAGA people can stomach this. Maybe they are not even that aware of it? Or maybe the bourgeoisie has always delegated a certain amount of its dirty work to gangster-like criminals. Maybe, secretly, respectable MAGAs kind of wish they were gangsters. Maybe they admire them.
Susan Collins has been exploiting it for decades. "She's above it, and it concerns her" is a so far unbeatable performance that her colleagues might wanna try.
The Democrats are the party of the Bourgeoise in the United States. It is a core component of the Democratic Party and you can find bougie types who are enthused about Mamdani and also people like Sherill and Spanberger are super-bourgeosie. Liberalism might be returning to its 19th century roots as a political philosophy of the educated middle-classes.
When ICE raided that rundown apartment building in Chicago, they not only zip-tied naked children and put them in vans, but they also stole what little there was of value in the apartments. So they had fun and profited!
"A contradiction within the Republican Party is between the mob elements and relatively respectable bourgeois conservatives who are still uneasy with the overt presence of these disreputable characters."
It seems to me that Trump is able to keep the bourgeois conservatives and the business figures because he's essentially bribing them ? This seems to have been the reason why the Big Beautiful Bill Act was so unabashed in the way it removed taxes for the richest. Message is clear : society and democracy may unravel if you accept my reign, but your wealth will be spared ; while if you fight against me, my political enemies may ask you to pay your fair contribution to society. The fact they're accepting the deal is revelatory of a preexisting rot in the way they viewed their place in society and democracy. The corruption is the point ?
over on bluesky @utopia-defer.red routinely makes the point that ice operations are indistinguishable from cartel operations south of the border in territories they have partial control over--a squad of militarized unmarked vehicles rolling up in a neighborhood, masked men with guns in half-tacticool half-casual attire jumping out and snatching some people before scurrying off the scene
organized crime syndicates and terrorist groups are para-statal entities that exist on an organizational continuum with formal solidified states, thus we might see the burgeoning criminal economy and terroristic operations of the trump regime as the embryonic prerogative component of the dual state model of fascism
great piece. who can deny any of this? when trump said yesterday he is helping himself to the cashbox because of all the trouble we people cause him, i just dunno how anybody can't see it. there is no government. hasn't been for months. (the business in the courts is to conjure up a gov't on multiple issues. it's slow & ineffective, usually.) and whether it is "open" or "shutdown" makes little difference. Some thievery is a lot easier with a "shutdown."
It has always bothered me how some writers have insisted that the Nazis were some hyper-competant and highly-systematic force... and then used that false description to say why Donald could not possibly be anything of the kind.
One thing that struck me about reading the 18th Brumaire recently is the little aside about Louis-Napoleon’s relationship to the military. He has the Society of 10th December, which is a MAGA-like roving band of the déclassé, but most of the officers aren’t into it. So he has to make these bizarre politicised passes at them in parades and such, daring them to throw off the veneer of professionalism and join his mob, to the general outrage of the political establishment and many of the generals.
You can see the parallels with Trump, and in both cases it’s part of this broader campaign to slowly cannibalise any part of public life whose raison d’être does not begin and end with the executive robbery of the state. The anti-Napoleon parliamentary coalition fades away not as a rival political movement gains support but as individual members from all factions dissolve into the Bonapartist mob.
Yes, "corruption is the point." I guess as a clinical psychologist I'd like to reflect on the difference between sociopaths and traumatized people. I think it's safe to say that sociopathy and sociopathic narcissism is rife in the upper ranks of the Trump administration/gang. But I also feel for the poor suckers who lack education and responsible loving parents, who were likely abused or neglected, and who end up as part of the "scum, offal, refuse of all classes." We are rightly disgusted. But it also seems the left needs to find a way to speak to this group and offer them something other than contempt and disgust if we're hoping not going to drive them even further into the arms of sick ideologies.
This perfectly describes Buzz Windrip's supporters from It Can't Happen Here. The Forgotten Man who's too dumb to better himself and too proud to accept it. He so desperately wants to win but can only do so by cheating so when he finds a politician willing to cheat on his behalf, he'll follow him slavishly.
Yeah, the Santos pardon kind of distills this all down in microcosm. There isn’t even anything especially transactional - Santos is broke, the GOP even kicked him to the curb, and to the base he’s just an immigrant homo. His function for Trump is to transmit a message - “if you’re a criminal but you like me, you will not pay. I will make sure of that.” Every goon signing up to strap on an ICE vest to beat the shit out of immigrants knows this, knows they can do anything they want.
A lot of ink has been spilled on the question of whether Dems should treat Trump as an aberration from the "traditional" Republican Party or as its apotheosis.
But I agree with the conclusion here, the key issue isn't so much conceptually cleaving MAGA from the Republican Party, it's conceptually cleaving MAGA from its voters.
The 77 million people who voted for Trump are Americans like the rest of us and they too deserve better than to have our commonwealth looted and vandalized like this.
Excellent insights, "Corruption is the point" should become a meme.
This resonates with Michelle Goldman's column in the NYTimes today pointing out that Trump and MAGA thrive on degradation. Also Paul Krugman's recent column explaining that Trump's people degrade themselves - with obvious lies and sickening sycophantic praise - as a proof of their loyalty. The video of Trump dumping shit on New Yorkers and the demolition of the East Wing are visual evidence of what's happening.
I fear that all this is only the eruption into daylight of a moral collapse that has been working underground in our society for a generation or more. (Personally, I first saw something had gone wrong when the Bush-Cheney torturers were never exposed and punished.)
It seems to me the economic base has been lawless for a good while now, with the deregulated globalization allowing companies to circumvent countries' laws and becoming global behemoths more powerful than states. In the progressive camp, the turning point was perhaps the Clinton administration abandoning anti-trust, tax and redistribution in favor of a philanthrocapitalist system allowing corporate fortunes to consolidate if they agreed to pay some due to public good, with subsidies and loans as a cope for the many (it was almost caricatural : Microsoft being let off the hook of an anti-trust federal law case with mostly a slap on the wrist, and a couple years later the Gates and the Clinton foundations teaming up to eradicate AIDS and malaria). Trumpism seems to be reaping the political benefits both of the insane corporate concentration and of the powerlessness and resentment it caused among common people. It may be the superstructure brutally adjusting.
Perhaps what's happening currently is a backlash to a scaling up crisis that happened both in the economy and in the (social) media ? The arenas becoming global rather than national/local, without the global level having the proper democratic means of government and control.
Good points. The US is only one of the players here, many nations have collaborated in allowing corporations to evade taxes and other controls, while ever larger piles of personal wealth circulate invisibly outside the legal system
Specifically the settlement the DoJ came to was under Bush's DoJ, not Clinton's, and had there been some directive from the President not to break up Microsoft as part of some secret deal with the Gates Foundation, evidence would have surfaced by now, and likely would have been a major scandal.
What you're describing generally in this post (outside of this nonexistent Gates-Clinton deal) honestly sounds more like how power was consolidated by the more bourgeious conservative elements contrasted against in the article, than the sort of moral rot core to these fucking scumbags.
I don't believe in a conspiracy with Clinton doing secret deals, and I'm aware that the settlement was reached under W. Bush, but you're right, I should have been more careful in my writing in that post (I should also have looked back more closely into what I knew about all this, and about the original verdict, before the settlement, which I remembered as much more lenient). My timeline is wrong about the moment the foundations teamed up, too : it's only in 2010 that Bill Clinton and Bill Gates make open calls together about AIDS, and the foundations officially team up together under Hillary Clinton's watch on other issues in 2014.
This said, the Clinton Foundation is founded in 2001, with a focus on AIDS (cf https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-inside-story-of-how-the-clintons-built-a-2-billion-global-empire/2015/06/02/b6eab638-0957-11e5-a7ad-b430fc1d3f5c_story.html) ; and Bill Gates was in 2002 also becoming a major player in AIDS fight by being the first donor in the UN led Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (set up by the UN) as well as by teaming up with other foundations (Soros' Open foundation + tech entrepreneur who'd sold his company Edward G. Scott) to fund US's Bono's NGO DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade in Africa). The UN launching the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Fund_to_Fight_AIDS,_Tuberculosis_and_Malaria) was most likely the starting point for that interest for AIDS, but the similarities in strategies are notable.
To give some bit of context : I got interested in this era because I was curious about the itinerary of a guy who was a cog in both machines, working as a Telecommunications Counsel in the U.S. DoJ during United States v. Microsoft Corp., then founding a boutique firm specialized in venture capitalism. It worked, among other things, in setting up DATA and other NGOs like this (including one by a telecommunication philanthrope, not Bill Gates, to raise money for Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria), did venture philanthropy for music and movie stars, and later also did lobbying (with little success) toward Democrat lawmakers he held ties with on the behalf of a Russian oligarch who was barred from entering the US. I read a lot of press articles on the boom of foundations in that era and on what venture philanthropy did exactly, but I have not found a comprehensive book on this subject which would have given a solid structure of analysis on it (I'll be happy to take any advice on this).
Still, I think there are analyses and conclusions one can pretty safely make : the fact that a lot of money was raised to provide drugs for AIDS, malaria or tuberculosis is unequivocally good, and there's no denying, whether you like his options or not, that Bill Gates seems to be taking the role and work of his foundation very seriously. But foundations are, at core, a very well known loophole to avoid taxes (there was an interesting exchange a few years back between ProPublica & Warren Buffett, who's supposed to be a pro-tax billionaire, about the fact he circumvented most of the taxes he was supposed to pay by turning most of the profits to his foundation. Buffett told answer ProPublica, among other things, that he thought the money would be better used by his foundation. Cf https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax). And philanthropy is also good public relations. So the boom in philanthropic foundations in the 2000s was also linked to the need to optimize fortunes : why pay tax when you can use your money through a personally rewarding and good for PR foundation ? Problem is, these billionaires were prone to think they'd solve the world with policies that were sometimes fads created by consultants cabinets (or venture philanthropy firm), and made for very bad public policies. For instance, there are crazy stories about the fad on charter schools. Here is a comprehensive story by Politico (with Bill Gates in ! https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/the-plot-against-public-education-111630/), here is a deeply disquieting one about New Orleans where the public school system was crumbling due to a lack of funding while billionaires were pumping up money in a parallel system with 0 local oversight (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/in-new-orleans-traditional-public-schools-close-for-good/2014/05/28/ae4f5724-e5de-11e3-8f90-73e071f3d637_story.html). Anyway. My main hypothesis is that after risking to have his company broken up, Bill Gates (and many others like him) realized that it was safer to generate good will toward him rather than being seen as the evil monopolistic guy, and fully embraced the long American tradition of high profile capitalist philanthropist.
Now, to go back to Bill Clinton : by creating his own foundation, and working alongside others within this boom, Bill Clinton fully embedded himself into this system and in the donor class, seemingly accepting philanthropy as a good solution to keep looking progressive while working alongside the biggest businesses. And when it came to him, there was an additional twist : Clinton had no millions of his own to put in his foundation, the money was raised among other people, through the interest generated by his name. When they did so, they funded the causes of course (many of them useful), but they also gave leverage and sway to Clinton himself, through the financiary and PR power of his foundation. Which is something that helped him and Hillary stay relevant during the W. Bush era. What's more, when the foundation came under closer scrutiny in the beginning of the 2010s, as Hillary Clinton was secretary of state while the Clinton Foundation was still operating, journalists realized that some donors were giving to the Clinton Foundation in the hope of getting easier access to the secretary of state (and would-be presidential candidate). There was no evidence of blatant corruption or wrongdoing, but we're in a very grey zone (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html ; https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/emails-reveal-how-foundation-donors-got-access-to-clinton-and-her-close-aides-at-state-dept/2016/08/22/345b5200-6882-11e6-8225-fbb8a6fc65bc_story.html). Of course, Trump fully tapped into this to help his own rise to power.
A lot of things mingle here and there may be more to the issue. But this asks for sharper knowledge, competences and analyses than mine. Questions includes the actions being bought in the companies working on drugs for AIDS by Gates and others : respectable action to ensure proper funding to research ? Market back deal ? The philanthropists also worked to cap the price of drugs in developing countries, another unequivocally good outcome. What's the takeaway ? A lot of the philanthropic donors are also political donors with Democrat sympathies : how does all of this works ? And there is the whole shady demi-monde of big business, politics and the like (why did so many people hang out with Jeffrey Epstein ? ...Because he was a donor !) Seeing the number of deranged conspiracy theories this has generated, and how complicated it is to actually understand these things unless good investigative journalists did the work for you, I prefer not to go in these directions too much.
The main problem all of this poses, in my opinion, is a democratic problem. By embracing the Foundation system, the Clintons watered down the need for taxes, anti-trust measures, not only to raise public money but also to keep in check the corporate fortunes. Even when invested in foundations with good intentions (and I'm sure most of these did so - in addition to escaping taxes of course), being able to use a huge amount of money gives an overwhelming sway to billionaires which is political in nature and as such should be much more widely checkered. The New Orleans schools are a perfect metaphor, with the new fancy schools escaping local oversight and being, ultimately, ill suited to the needs of the community, while the actual public school system with school boards and democratic control was crumbling. This is a kind of democratic disempowerment and in that regard, I don't find it strange that people made up conspiracy theories about these dealings, on which they have no hold and that are complex and hard to understand. And I was talking only about the "good" side here : now we're seeing what can happen when most of the big money goes rogue and the billionaires start throwing millions to fund a fascist project.
There, I hope I clarified a bit what I meant.
PS : I read a lot about this lately but did not follow the stories along, I'll welcome corrections.
What's striking to me is how innocence itself becomes a kind of crime to these people. The fact that the people they beat, kidnap and harass have done nothing wrong, and are simply living their lives and going to work is almost offensive to the bottom of the barrel types who are the most fervent soldiers for Trumpism.
To be innocent is to put on airs, to assert superiority to the people who are your designated social betters, and requires even harsher punishment.
Duncan Black notes that the scum are also out of shape.
https://www.eschatonblog.com/2025/10/master-race.html
These are people who cannot or will not get jobs in lines of work that contribute to society.
I wonder how the more bourgeois, respectable MAGA people can stomach this. Maybe they are not even that aware of it? Or maybe the bourgeoisie has always delegated a certain amount of its dirty work to gangster-like criminals. Maybe, secretly, respectable MAGAs kind of wish they were gangsters. Maybe they admire them.
All three
Susan Collins has been exploiting it for decades. "She's above it, and it concerns her" is a so far unbeatable performance that her colleagues might wanna try.
The Democrats are the party of the Bourgeoise in the United States. It is a core component of the Democratic Party and you can find bougie types who are enthused about Mamdani and also people like Sherill and Spanberger are super-bourgeosie. Liberalism might be returning to its 19th century roots as a political philosophy of the educated middle-classes.
When ICE raided that rundown apartment building in Chicago, they not only zip-tied naked children and put them in vans, but they also stole what little there was of value in the apartments. So they had fun and profited!
"A contradiction within the Republican Party is between the mob elements and relatively respectable bourgeois conservatives who are still uneasy with the overt presence of these disreputable characters."
It seems to me that Trump is able to keep the bourgeois conservatives and the business figures because he's essentially bribing them ? This seems to have been the reason why the Big Beautiful Bill Act was so unabashed in the way it removed taxes for the richest. Message is clear : society and democracy may unravel if you accept my reign, but your wealth will be spared ; while if you fight against me, my political enemies may ask you to pay your fair contribution to society. The fact they're accepting the deal is revelatory of a preexisting rot in the way they viewed their place in society and democracy. The corruption is the point ?
over on bluesky @utopia-defer.red routinely makes the point that ice operations are indistinguishable from cartel operations south of the border in territories they have partial control over--a squad of militarized unmarked vehicles rolling up in a neighborhood, masked men with guns in half-tacticool half-casual attire jumping out and snatching some people before scurrying off the scene
organized crime syndicates and terrorist groups are para-statal entities that exist on an organizational continuum with formal solidified states, thus we might see the burgeoning criminal economy and terroristic operations of the trump regime as the embryonic prerogative component of the dual state model of fascism
I just really hope that if we're ever graced with a Democratic administration again, they won't keep ICE around because they're "government employees"
great piece. who can deny any of this? when trump said yesterday he is helping himself to the cashbox because of all the trouble we people cause him, i just dunno how anybody can't see it. there is no government. hasn't been for months. (the business in the courts is to conjure up a gov't on multiple issues. it's slow & ineffective, usually.) and whether it is "open" or "shutdown" makes little difference. Some thievery is a lot easier with a "shutdown."
It has always bothered me how some writers have insisted that the Nazis were some hyper-competant and highly-systematic force... and then used that false description to say why Donald could not possibly be anything of the kind.
One thing that struck me about reading the 18th Brumaire recently is the little aside about Louis-Napoleon’s relationship to the military. He has the Society of 10th December, which is a MAGA-like roving band of the déclassé, but most of the officers aren’t into it. So he has to make these bizarre politicised passes at them in parades and such, daring them to throw off the veneer of professionalism and join his mob, to the general outrage of the political establishment and many of the generals.
You can see the parallels with Trump, and in both cases it’s part of this broader campaign to slowly cannibalise any part of public life whose raison d’être does not begin and end with the executive robbery of the state. The anti-Napoleon parliamentary coalition fades away not as a rival political movement gains support but as individual members from all factions dissolve into the Bonapartist mob.
Yes, "corruption is the point." I guess as a clinical psychologist I'd like to reflect on the difference between sociopaths and traumatized people. I think it's safe to say that sociopathy and sociopathic narcissism is rife in the upper ranks of the Trump administration/gang. But I also feel for the poor suckers who lack education and responsible loving parents, who were likely abused or neglected, and who end up as part of the "scum, offal, refuse of all classes." We are rightly disgusted. But it also seems the left needs to find a way to speak to this group and offer them something other than contempt and disgust if we're hoping not going to drive them even further into the arms of sick ideologies.
Great Piece
This perfectly describes Buzz Windrip's supporters from It Can't Happen Here. The Forgotten Man who's too dumb to better himself and too proud to accept it. He so desperately wants to win but can only do so by cheating so when he finds a politician willing to cheat on his behalf, he'll follow him slavishly.
Yeah, the Santos pardon kind of distills this all down in microcosm. There isn’t even anything especially transactional - Santos is broke, the GOP even kicked him to the curb, and to the base he’s just an immigrant homo. His function for Trump is to transmit a message - “if you’re a criminal but you like me, you will not pay. I will make sure of that.” Every goon signing up to strap on an ICE vest to beat the shit out of immigrants knows this, knows they can do anything they want.
A lot of ink has been spilled on the question of whether Dems should treat Trump as an aberration from the "traditional" Republican Party or as its apotheosis.
But I agree with the conclusion here, the key issue isn't so much conceptually cleaving MAGA from the Republican Party, it's conceptually cleaving MAGA from its voters.
The 77 million people who voted for Trump are Americans like the rest of us and they too deserve better than to have our commonwealth looted and vandalized like this.
I like your 'repurposing' of Valerie Solanos' *Scum Manifesto* :)