Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Alternative history is always a weak argument. Always.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

I also would like a pony to improve my balloon juice experience.

The choice is between normal and crazy.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

The willow is too close to the house.

Motown is Joe-Town!

Peak wingnut was a lie.

T R E 4 5 O N

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Consistently wrong since 2002

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Late Night Open Thread: “Our” Mainstream Media Owners Are Objectively Pro-Chaos

Late Night Open Thread: “Our” Mainstream Media Owners Are Objectively Pro-Chaos

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A century ago, Rudyard Kipling (former journalist) complained that the people who owned the press demanded “Power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” For all the improvements in media delivery since then, some things don’t change, and an ownership preference for novelty remains among the strongest.

Politico guy wishes to Speak to the Manager, though:

From the print interview, “We Are the World Power.’ How Joe Biden Leads”:

… On June 6, Biden will travel to Normandy, France, to memorialize an event that has served for eight decades as a focal point of this vision. He will arrive as the 12th—and certainly the last—American President who was alive on that day in 1944, when 73,000 American troops led the largest amphibious invasion in human history, accelerating Nazi Germany’s defeat and Europe’s liberation. For generations, D-Day has been a hallowed anniversary. The President says commemorating it is as much about the future as the past. “We’re playing [that role] even more,” Biden says. “We are the world power.”

Whether this view of America’s role in the world will outlast Biden’s presidency is an open question. Voters face a clear choice this November. Biden calls America’s democratic values the “grounding wire of our global power” and its alliances “our greatest asset.” His presumptive opponent, former President Donald Trump, called for withdrawing American forces in Europe and Asia and has promised, most recently in his April 12 interview with TIME, to cut loose even our closest allies if they don’t do as he tells them. By his own account, Trump sees all countries as unreliable, the relations between them transactional. That sentiment has spread throughout a Republican Party that once championed America’s values abroad. J.D. Vance, the Ohio Senator in contention to become Trump’s Vice President, tells TIME that the D-Day story has become a sepia-toned distraction. “The foreign policy establishment is obsessed with World War II historical analogies,” says Vance, “and everything is some fairy tale they tell themselves from the 1930s and 1940s.”…

… American Presidents must earn a mandate from their fellow citizens, and it’s far from clear that Biden can. In surveys, large majorities say that he is too old to lead. As he walked TIME through the West Wing and sat for a 35-minute interview on May 28, the President, with his stiff gait, muffled voice, and fitful syntax, cut a striking contrast with the intense, loquacious figure who served as Senator and Vice President. Biden bristles at the suggestion that he is aging out of his job. Asked whether he could handle its rigors though the end of a second term, when he will be 86, he shot back, “I can do it better than anybody you know.” Age aside, Biden’s handling of foreign affairs gets poor marks from voters, and not just for the bungled withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan or the ongoing war in Gaza. While 65% of Americans still believe that the U.S. should take a leading or major role in the world, that number is down 14 points from 2003 and is at its lowest level since Gallup began polling the issue two years earlier…

This avuncular politicking remains a Biden trademark, one that has helped with allies overseas but failed to unite Americans at home, as Biden pledged when running for President. Not that he has stopped trying. Biden ultimately persuaded Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson to move a roughly $95 billion supplemental aid package for Ukraine, the Middle East, and Taiwan. To build support for his Middle East peace package, he has worked both sides of the aisle. On Nov. 8, 2023, Biden sat for two hours in the windowless Roosevelt Room with a bipartisan group of nine Senators who had just returned from the region, asking for impressions from the trip and moderating a conversation between them, Sullivan, and Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk. At the end, he pulled Democratic Senator Chris Coons and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham into the Oval Office for separate 10-minute conversations about next steps in the effort, says Coons.

Biden may be right that despite the partisanship, a consensus exists for a values-based, pragmatic role for America in the world. His challenge is to get Americans to focus on that rather than on other issues driven by foreign affairs, like inflation or immigration. Biden denies that his expansion of Trump’s trade war with China will increase prices, and says his only regret about lifting Trump’s anti-immigration measures is that he didn’t do it sooner. His goal in a second term, he says, is “to finish what he started.”

At stake is the direction of the world for the coming century. At Normandy, Biden will make the case for what historian Hal Brands says is “the 80-year tradition of internationalism that has been quite good for America and the world.” The alternative, says Brands, would be a “more vicious and chaotic” world where Americans ultimately would be less safe, prosperous, and free, but only after everyone else suffered first…

The Wall Stree Journal is fiercely paywalled, but apparently its owners felt called upon to publish an even more dishonest “interview”, presumably lest their allegiance to Chaos for Oligarchs be doubted…

Reader Interactions

76Comments

  3. 3.

    NotMax

    Did someone say treats?

    Revisiting the ad brings back the, shall we say, unique aroma each time the box lid was opened.
    ;)

  4. 4.

    Gretchen

    OMG. They quibble about whether Biden was accurate in saying Russian troops had been decimated. The literal meaning of that is that they lost 10%. They lost nearly 90%, and the conclusion isn’t that Biden was over-the-top correct. It was that yeah, I guess he wasn’t wrong. These people are hopeless.

  6. 6.

    gene108

    Has Trump finally fulfilled his life’s dream and appeared on a “Time” magazine cover?

    Irritates me because it might make him happy, and I want him to suffer.

  7. 7.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    Speaking of chaos I am stating here that I believe that we are going to be seeing unprecedented levels of fuckery after the elections in November. I would not be surprised to see county clerks refuse to turn over results in their states, constitutional sheriffs stepping in, legal challenges across the states for a variety of made up bullshit.

    I have no problem believing that conservatives are planning shit on a scale similar to their Project 2025 plan to take over our country. This is all or nothing and they want it all. They have a complicit media behind them, the best that money can buy. Wealthy people realized long ago that owning the big media outlets and hiding behind freedom of the press was the best way to mislead and misinform the lower classes, tossing them chum to keep them at each other’s throats. It’s hard to strangle that rich prick you hate when you have your hands around the throat of someone you view as a bigger enemy because of the shit you’ve been fed by another rich prick.

    Freedom of the press will be the death of our nation.

  8. 8.

    Rusty

    And I still have friends on Facebook posting memes that both parties are the same.  If you can’t tell the parties apart, and can’t tell the differences between Biden and Trump at this point, I just don’t know what to say.  As far as as the press, the continued animus over the Afghanistan withdrawal I still find mind boggling.  We were burning vast amounts of money, losing soldiers at a steady clip and regularly killing civilians, and accomplishing nothing, absolutely nothing.  But the press thinks we should have stayed and brings it up as a negative every time it can.

  9. 9.

    WereBear

    But aren’t most trad-media losing more and more viewers/readers all the time? Magazines used to be a big deal, too.

  10. 10.

    Tony Jay

    Just a swift glance through the framing and word choice in that whiny TIME piece pretty much nails how right Biden is to knuckle-rap them.

    “Why can’t this snippy old fart break through to Americans about his so-called ‘successes’? It can’t be because the people who trust us to provide them with honest information have been told he ‘bungled’ the Afghanistan withdrawal and is responsible for the economic collapse that everyone knows is happening in the next town/district/city over, if not to them personally, so it must be because he’s soooooo ooooooollllllld. Luckily, I’m here to confirm for our readers that he is, in fact, super old, really ancient and exactly like your crotchety old great-grandpa who everyone knows would be better off in a home where he can’t leave pots on the stove or piss his pants watching Matlock.”

    Less use than a wind-up vibrator. VDE the lot of them.

  11. 11.

    Ksmiami

    If god forbid Trump gets in, I will not care when they haul off the journalists. The Main Stream Media is bothsidesing us into fascism

  16. 16.

    Brachiator

     “Power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.”

    I swear I first read that as “Power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the orgies.”

    For all the improvements in media delivery since then, some things don’t change, and an ownership preference for novelty remains among the strongest.

    Hmm. You can’t just blame owners of media. Many consumers demand novelty and want nothing more than to be entertained. 

  17. 17.

    Jay

    @Tony Jay:

     

    @NotMax:

     

    It was “interesting”

    Wound up getting the anal beads too, Colonist era India, with sanskrit engravings. Ivory,

    Had to get a CITS

    Got her old morphine needles and vials too.

  18. 18.

    Nukular Biskits

    Good early mornin, y’all.

    Not that I doubt Speaker Emeritus Pelosi or Senators Reed or Murray, but would love to see some additional confirmation.

    Anyway, obligatory:  FTFWSJ.

  20. 20.

    Nukular Biskits

    @Rusty:

    As far as as the press, the continued animus over the Afghanistan withdrawal I still find mind boggling. We were burning vast amounts of money, losing soldiers at a steady clip and regularly killing civilians, and accomplishing nothing, absolutely nothing. But the press thinks we should have stayed and brings it up as a negative every time it can.

    Agreed.

    I have yet to find ANYONE who claims Biden “bungled” the withdrawal explain exactly what he SHOULD have done instead.

  23. 23.

    Nukular Biskits

    @Baud:

    Sorry. Still working on that first cup of coffee.

    Confirmation that the WSJ conducted interviews of prominent Democrats concerning their working relationship with President Biden and their assessment of his fitness to be CiC; i.e., calendars showing appointment name-dropping the WSJ reporter, etc.

    What would be awesome if the transcripts from those interviews could be had, directly contradicting the WSJ’s narrative. Yeah, I know that’ll never happen.  Makes me wonder if Democratic leaders should refuse to provide “on-the-record” interviews without an agreement up front they get a copy of the interview itself.

    Unrelated:  Do you ever sleep? LOL

  24. 24.

    Nukular Biskits

    @Brachiator:

    Hmm. You can’t just blame owners of media. Many consumers demand novelty and want nothing more than to be entertained.

    Sadly, yes.  This is  not to lend blanket forgiveness to the supposedly liberal MSM, but, to a large part, they’re only delivering what the public wants (which isn’t news and analysis).

    Bread & circuses.

    This is why it’s important to patronize non-profit journalism outlets, IMHO.

  26. 26.

    Baud

    @Nukular Biskits: WSJ would have transcripts, and I assume the reporter is the same one on the story.

    I don’t think they’re lying about talking to the WSJ. That would be a pretty dumb thing to make up.

  28. 28.

    Nukular Biskits

    @Baud:

    Perhaps I’m not being clear. I believe each of them.

    But, these days, you have to go the extra mile to demonstrate malice aforethought and/or incompetence on the part of malefactors like the WSJ, otherwise you get the bothsides defense.

    Well, strike that.  You’ll probably get it anyway. The point here is to establish beyond any reasonable doubt and any cockamamie excuse that the WSJ intentionally published a hit piece.

  29. 29.

    Nukular Biskits

    @Baud:

    I’m mostly a non-consumer these days because they don’t want to put out a product that I want to pay for.

    Ditto.  That’s the #1 reason I refuse to subscribe to the local mullet wrapper down here, The Sun Herald.

  31. 31.

    Brachiator

    @WereBear:

    But aren’t most trad-media losing more and more viewers/readers all the time?

    Yep. Magazines are dead and traditional newspapers are dying. I had almost missed stories about the recent shakeup at the Washington Post. They are trying to deal with declining subscriptions and a loss last year of $77 million.

    The Washington Post said Sunday that its executive editor, Sally Buzbee, has stepped down after three years at the top of one of journalism’s most storied brands.

    She will be replaced by Matt Murray, former editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, through this fall’s presidential election. Following that, Robert Winnett, deputy editor of the Telegraph Media Group, will take over as editor as the newsroom restructures its operations.

    No reason was given for Buzbee’s departure. She wasn’t quoted in the news release announcing that she was leaving, and did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

    The new staff include a bunch of Brits with ties to Rupert Murdoch media properties. From a recent piece in Politico:

    But it doesn’t take much in the way of divination to predict that the team Lewis has assembled will Wall Street Journal-ify and Rupert Murdoch-ize the Washington Post, and that the remodeled newspaper will be guided by British attitude and experience. This transformation was quietly beginning even before Sunday night. After Lewis came on earlier this year, he hired fellow countrymen Suzi Watford as its chief strategy officer and Karl Wells as its chief growth officer. (Winnett is a Brit, too.) Murray, Watford, Winnett and Wells have all worked at the Journal or at the U.K. Telegraph, overlapping with Lewis, who has held top spots at those places. Lewis once hired Winnett at the Telegraph, making the new team a bit of a fractured family reunion. Murray came to the Journal in 1994 and rose to editor-in-chief in 2018 before being replaced in 2023.

    Big changes are promised to appeal to new readers.

    The Post also announced that it was launching a new division in its newsroom dedicated to reaching audiences who want to pay for and consume news in a different way.

    What does this mean? According to AP… video! And AI!

    In an email to employees late Sunday, Lewis said the new department will focus on more video storytelling, will embrace artificial intelligence and flexible payment methods. It will begin this fall, he said.

    About the only thing that they have left on the table is a WaPo video game.

  32. 32.

    raven

    More vets than I would have thought. Mike Barnacle is full of shit, “they were all volunteers”. Yea, there was no draft in WW2.

  33. 33.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Rusty: ​
     

    And I still have friends on Facebook posting memes that both parties are the same. If you can’t tell the parties apart, and can’t tell the differences between Biden and Trump at this point, I just don’t know what to say.

    The chasm between the parties these days makes the Grand Canyon look puny, it’s more on the scale of the Marianas Trench.

    The Dems would protect abortion rights, the GOP would even take away the Pill. The Dems want to mitigate global warming, the GOP refuses to believe it even exists. The Dems are solidly on the side of labor in general and labor unions in particular. the GOP would like to see an end to unions and an economy where people have to scrape and beg to hang onto the job they’ve got. The Dems want equal rights for LGBTQ+ persons, the GOP wants to take that away. And on and on and on.

    Yeah, exactly the fucking same. How does anyone think that?

  34. 34.

    WereBear

    @Nukular Biskits:

    Steely Dan named themselves after an object in that staple of Beat Literature, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. The “Steely Dan” in question was a steam-powered, mechanical dildo. Right away, the name suited the music to a T. Apr 5, 2022

  35. 35.

    Gloria DryGarden

    Isn’t this a kind of catch and kill?

    I’ve seen a lot of journalistic malpractice this last 4 years, but the @WSJ having Democrats sit for on the record interviews with them and not publishing any of them because they dispute their agenda on Biden’s age is a new level disgraceful that really shouldn’t be ignored.

  36. 36.

    TBone

    Today it finally dawned on me that Wisconsin-indicted fake elector Mike Roman is the guy behind the fake Fani Willis “scandal.” Which I already knew because of Fani Willis’s indictment of Mike Roman, but somehow 😂 forgot in the turbulence that is our news cycle.  So, thank you again Wisconsin!  Way to go!  Pennsylvania AG, can we talk?  Where are the PA indictments?

  38. 38.

    Jeffg166

    The media has been pretty much right wing for the last 40 years or more. They are corporations. Their only real interest  is the bottom line.

  39. 39.

    TBone

    Mike Johnson needs Nana’s dildo, covered in sulfuric acid and shoved straight up where the sun don’t shine.

    He put Ronny Jackson AND Scott Perry on the House Intelligence Committee.  Petty, devious, outrageous.  My other comments🖕are not fit for print.  Perry has oversight power over the FBI and ALL of our intelligence agencies?  Really???

    https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-5-2024

    Perry is more problematic than Jackson. Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol that Perry played an important role in the plan to keep Trump in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election. She told podcast host Scott Lamar in October 2023 that Perry was “central to the planning of January 6,” and she has said repeatedly that Perry asked Trump for a pardon before he left office.

    Federal authorities from the FBI seized Perry’s cell phone in 2022 as part of their investigation into the effort to seize the presidency; he is the only member of Congress whose cell phone was seized. Like Trump, who has attacked the FBI since then-director James Comey refused to drop the investigation into the connections between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives, Perry has complained bitterly about the FBI’s investigation of him.

    Now, Perry will be on the committee that oversees the FBI. In a statement, he said: “I look forward to providing not only a fresh perspective, but conducting actual oversight—not blind obedience to some facets of our Intel Community that all too often abuse their powers, resources, and authority to spy on the American People.”

  40. 40.

    Tony Jay

    @NotMax:

    “Now, Boys, hear me out. The band name, shocking but family orientated, love it. The eponymously titled debut album, hits the know thine own audience button, it works. All I’m asking, all I’m begging you, can we please not use the late Queen’s face on the album cover? Yes, she looks like she’s enjoying it, but there are laws and the family still has a lot of pull.”

  42. 42.

    NotMax

    @TBone

    Could be misremembering but a difference is that the PA fake electors documents, unlike in Wisconsin, included an “only to be deemed valid subsequent to state legislature shenanigans. Void in all other cases.” preamble. A CYA clause, if you will, making it that much more difficult to craft equivalent charges against them.

  43. 43.

    TBone

    @NotMax: yeah but you don’t rob a bank by handing the teller a note that includes “Never mind if the cops come.”

    The documents themselves are forgeries, so that little “get out of jail free” clause is invalid IMO. I’m biased 😆

    I declare these guys are the Emily Litellas of criminals.

    That clause is proof that they knew they were committing crime!

  45. 45.

    NotMax

    @TBone

    Therein lies the rub. Forgery charges are of a lesser magnitude than are the state and federal election violations. Almost a legal afterthought.

  48. 48.

    TBone

    @NotMax: I don’t want solely forgery charges, I want them indicted on the same charges used in ALL the other states that indicted fake electors plus!  But our current acting AG is a “former” Rethuglican appointed by our Dem Governor, which mystifies me.  She smells bad.

  50. 50.

    frosty

    @TBone: I read that the PA electors gave themselves an out. They would only be appointed if a court ruled that the election was fraudulent. So technically they didn’t break the law like the ones in the other states.

    If I have this wrong, please correct me.

    ETA I see I was late to this and nobody needed to be educated.

  53. 53.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @Brachiator: Yeesh. I subscribe to the Post digital edition because it’s my local paper. I don’t know what Bezos is thinking…TFG fucked him over and he could run that goddamn paper well with what to him is pocket change. Like can’t you do one nice thing with all that money? Instead we get another Murdoch lite rag that nobody around here is going to read.

    Really don’t understand the business model here. Hire a bunch of folks who will churn out content that the vast majority of the local readership will find objectionable and then what? You think that’s going to draw new readers in? From where? The right already has plenty of “news” organizations that cater to them and you’re never going to be pure enough to crack that market. Meanwhile you’ll keep pissing off the locals to the point where they unsubscribe. Why don’t any of these papers try tacking to the left and seeing how that works out? Reflect and inform the perspective of the vast majority of your readers? Seems like that might be the path to more readers or at least keeping the readers you have. The Times is the same way…they beat you to the contrarian punch. You’ll never catch up. Your best play is to be a high quality liberal foil to them rather than another imitator. So frustrating!

  54. 54.

    TBone

    Jared Kushner has a real estate deal pending using his dirty, filthy, bonesaw coverup oil money investment firm to build some bullshit hotel in Serbia.  He promised to build an anti-NATO MONUMENT memorial in exchange for said deal that uses language approved by the Kremlin.

    https://digbysblog.net/2024/06/05/oh-jared-2/

  55. 55.

    trnc

    @Gretchen: They quibble about whether Biden was accurate in saying Russian troops had been decimated. The literal meaning of that is that they lost 10%.

    The literal meaning is to end up with 10% of what you started with, but the word is often used much less accurately so anyone getting stuck on 13% is just being an asshole.

    ETA: Oops, sorry, I was wrong. Decimate does mean to remove 1/10th.

  57. 57.

    BellyCat

    @Brachiator: The press world I would like to see involves the creation of a new, easy to use micro-payment method. Pay a small amount to read articles of interest by any writer.

    This would motivate better reporting, reward better writers regardless of the journal (as they could get a percentage of employed by a news outlet), and prevent subscription reliance and managerial distortions.

    Ideally, amount of payment would be indexed to one’s income (but that’s never going to happen).

  58. 58.

    trnc

    I have a new DT sentence proposal. Prison with the exception of Friday-Saturday if he has a campaign rally scheduled, plus other days if approved (eg, debates). No event, remain in prison those days. Event cancelled, return to prison immediately. Failure to return by 8am Monday or after cancelled rally means he has to remain in prison the following weekend, regardless of campaign schedule.

    This nullifies the “I can’t campaign” claim, and we get to see him report to prison every week.

  59. 59.

    Another Scott

    @Brachiator: I see “flexible payment methods” and I think Bitcoin.

    And payday loans.

    And blood plasma….

    Murdoch is a monster and a danger.  Prosecutors should be looking into whether his properties (and ones run by his acolytes) are actually making money the way they claim, or whether they are fudging the books and worse…  Bezos isn’t stupid.  Of course, Bezos makes bad bets too.  But if he’s losing money, and just about everyone else is also, but Murdoch isn’t, well…

    (Yes, I haven’t had my morning caffeine yet.)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  60. 60.

    Eyeroller

    @trnc: It’s from the way the Romans punished a mutinous or insubordinate military unit.  “Decimus” means “tenth”. They’d randomly select 1/10 of the soldiers and execute them. Now it just means “to kill a large number of something.”  Merriam-Webster has a kind of blog entry that has a nice discussion of why the English usage is perfectly proper since we have many words originating in Latin that don’t retain their strictly literal meanings.  One of the more amusing examples was “Missiles: “Gifts thrown to the crowds by Roman emperors.”

  61. 61.

    Geminid

    @trnc: Yes, “decimate” did have a specific meaning, but now it is used as shorthand for “suffered heavy losses.”

    I don’t think this usage will change. The horse has been out the barn so long that pedants and Roman history buffs will never corral it.

  62. 62.

    trnc

    @Rusty: ​
     

    And I still have friends on Facebook posting memes that both parties are the same. If you can’t tell the parties apart, and can’t tell the differences between Biden and Trump at this point, I just don’t know what to say.

    Try these: “If democrats are the same as republicans, then why do republicans screech about them so much?”

    “I’m a democrat. Tell me how what you know about me lines up with republican policies.”

    “Describe each party’s position on abortion, contraception, taxes and regulations.”

    If you don’t get any satisfactory answers, just tell them they’re fucking idiots and walk away.

  64. 64.

    Barry

    “Hmm. You can’t just blame owners of media. Many consumers demand novelty and want nothing more than to be entertained.”

    This is false.  If they were after novelty, they’d be covering Trump’s dementia in great detail.

  66. 66.

    Eyeroller

    @Another Scott: ​A major way they’re (Murdoch Inc) making money is by extorting cable companies. I don’t know how much cord-cutting has impacted them to date. But I do agree that media owners see right-wing outlets making money so think that is the way to profit. I don’t think it’s going to work for WaPo though the FTFNYT seems to be doing fine under that model.

  67. 67.

    trnc

    @Nukular Biskits: Makes me wonder if Democratic leaders should refuse to provide “on-the-record” interviews without an agreement up front they get a copy of the interview itself.

    No reason to rely on the media outlet for a copy. The interviewee can stipulate their right to record as a condition of the interview. I don’t know why anyone would fail to exercise that in at least the last 20 years.

  68. 68.

    lowtechcyclist

    The problem I have with the notion that the newspapers are the way they are because they’re in service to their corporate overlords is, Trump and the GOP are chaos agents at this point.

    Most businesses don’t thrive on chaos: they want reliable markets of people they can sell stuff to, and reliable supplies of materials and workers to produce the goods and services they’re selling. Forget about civil war or any of that: if Trump gets elected and implements Project 2025, the supply of labor will get a big hole knocked in it as ICE rounds up all the Hispanic-looking people, and since those people were consumers as well, demand’s going to drop as well. Trade wars won’t exactly help either.

    The media used to equate the Dems and GOP with the Mommy Party and the Daddy Party, the idea being that while the Dems could put a band-aid on you and take care of your scrapes, the GOP was the party that knew how to keep the country running. We’re so far from that now, that reality (if it ever was reality) might as well have left the solar system with Voyager. The GOP has turned into a party of howler-monkey performance artists who’d drive a one-car funeral into the ditch, while the Dems are the only remaining party that knows how thing work and can keep them working.

    So you’d think the billionaires, from their perches on the commanding heights of the economy, could see this basic reality. But apparently they don’t have any more of a clue than their howler monkeys do. I’m sure one motivation is that they want a subservient labor force, but who knows if they’ll even get that under Trump, as millions of workers get rounded up for deportation.

    I don’t think the economy under Trump, Round 2 is at all predictable. It will be chaotic, but that’s what happens when you hand over the keys to a bunch of chaos agents. And our billionaires may be smart in whatever field made them rich, but outside of their area of expertise, they’re dumb as shit AFAICT.

  71. 71.

    RobertS

    This all reminds me way to much of the mean girls pile-on that took down Al Gore.

  72. 72.

    Eolirin

    @lowtechcyclist: Excessive financialization has flipped this on its head though. Chaos creates more opportunities for vast wealth creation for some and massive losses for others. The current crop of right wing billionaires aren’t railroad magnates and oil barrons with actual product that’s mostly limited to a single country.

    They’re tech, and private equity, and multinational. They’re more insulated and benefit more from chaos than previous generations of rich assholes. And a lot of them have ties to Russia.

    But yes, most of them are also stupid. And especially the small business owner support for ring wing politics is driven by that. Unfortunately, so is the US electorate, broadly.

  74. 74.

    linnen

    @lowtechcyclist:

    “Reality” show entertainment thrive on chaos.  And if reality is not entertaining enough, chaos is written in to make the scripted result more ‘surprising.’

    For all the news media’s boasting of just reporting facts, they are offering news reporting as if it was happening on a reality show.  And chaos offers the “best” way to increase their share of the ideal market that is being pursued.  A stable market base that actually exists be hanged.

  75. 75.

    SteverinoCT

    @trnc: ETA: Oops, sorry, I was wrong. Decimate does mean to remove 1/10th.

    This right here points out the differerence between Us and Them. Willingness to admit wrongitude and correct the error. That’s why I trust Paul Krugman, too.

  76. 76.

    stacib

    @Baud: they talked about this on MJ yesterday.  A lot of the quotes came from Kevin McCarthy although several other Republican House members went “on record”.  They couldn’t cite a single Democrat.

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