Dispatches from Bizzaro World
What, Me Worry?
Recent posts at Facebook:
August 12: To the comrades who think that the Epstein files are a distraction from the real politics of class struggle and economic programs, Fintan O'Toole has a retort at NYRB: "Trump’s political genius lies in his ability to embody these same realities of male power and economic abuse while simultaneously presenting himself as the savior of those who suffer under them. But Epstein is his all too obviously evil twin. He reminds Trump’s base what an exploitative elite really looks like. His network of friends and enablers brings back to their minds Trump’s original political message of 2015 and 2016: the idea that the true divide is not between Republicans and Democrats but between parasitic elites and ordinary people. His proximity to Epstein threatens to drag Trump back onto the side of that line where he actually belongs."
August 13: [Trump wants a 15% tithe from Nvidia, a “golden share” in US/Nippon Steel, and intends, he says, to choose the investments that come of the “contributions” from tariffed nations, e.g. South Korea] This ain't state capitalism. This is the crackpot crony kind that flourishes where the rule of law can't be taken for granted, where political organization in parties, parliaments, etc., is primitive, and where clearly stupid but "charismatic" leaders treat civil society, the fabled private sector, as if they own it China approximates state capitalism because Xi believes in the Party and its rational planning, not his own omniscience. Under Trump's feckless rule, the US is now regressing to the stage of development it supposedly missed in the epochal transition to capitalism--call it crypto-feudalism. Hell, call it anything you want, but don't mistake it for advanced or late or state capitalism. This is something new, and profoundly un-American.
I say "un-American" because this polity was founded on the recent discovery of civil society as the intermediary between state and family—it was already a society passing beyond a household economy. The American Revolution expressed the commitment to this discovery by insisting on the "sovereignty of the people," a principle that can be rephrased as the supremacy of society over the state. When a king or an executive or a tyrant personifies the state, or pretends to, and treats civil society as his fiefdom, that is, in these terms, profoundly un-American. Does that clarify?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/opinion/trump-ceo-nvidia-intel.html?
August 14: I don't care what you think of Obama, Axelrod, et al. This [overtures from the Obama camp, including a visit to Mamdani HQ by David Axelrod] is promising because the opportunists in the Dem leadership see that if you want to win elections, you go where the voters are, or are headed. In these times, that means moving left, not to the center, in accordance with every goddamn poll taken since 2016. Obama et al. are now in the position of the Whigs who saw their party collapsing because it lost the South between 1848 and 1852--the only way to make up for the electoral losses in the South (due to Whig doubts about the Mexian War, voiced by young Abe Lincoln among others) was to cultivate the large and growing anti-slavery constituency at the North. But that meant courting the probable secession of slave-holding states. At present, cultivating the large and growing social-democratic constituency means courting the probable secession of capitalists like Bill Ackman. OK by me. Let's see what the opportunists do.