Who anointed the MeToo campaign as the morality police, judge, jury & executioner? Whether you like Marilyn Manson or not isn’t the issue. The guy worked hard to make millions of fans, and his relationships with those people has been poisoned by cynical politics & a dirty-tricks campaign. I know fans of Marilyn Manson (men & women) who say his music helped them get through a tough period in their lives, etc. Who is MeToo to judge all this with absolute authority?
In the case of Marilyn Mansion & Ashley Morgan Smithline, it’s Evan Rachel Wood who is the abuser. Evan Rachel Wood is a perjurer who (among other criminal activities) submitted a fraudulent letter from the FBI as evidence under oath in court. Commenters online are now calling Evan Rachel Wood “Amber Heard 2.0”, which is accurate. Evan Rachel Wood has the full backing of the CIA Democrats as Marilyn Manson has been the victim of a coordinated MeToo-style hit job because he’s an easy target.
The MeToo campaign and its fanatic adherents have no compassion & understanding for a man’s career ruined with lies. Just as they have no compassion for women who are teaching in classrooms with COVID, or female healthcare workers, retail employees, etc.
The MeToo campaign supports the criminal US/NATO-led proxy war in the Ukraine against Russia, nevermind all the women & children who have become casualties. The MeToo campaign still supports sanctions on Syria, even after a series of devastating earthquakes hit the region. Women & children buried under rubble doesn’t register on the MeToo campaign’s radar.
MeToo doesn’t care one whit about women autoworkers who have been unfairly fired for reporting sexual harassment & wage theft to the UAW bureaucracy. When a woman working on the line in an Ohio auto plant had a miscarriage last year, because she was doing work she shouldn’t have been doing, the UAW helped deny her insurance claim. And so on, etc…
MeToo doesn’t care about working class women, it is only concerned with gaining privileges for a thin layer of women in the upper-middle class. That’s the focus of all the identity politics campaigns (Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+, etc) which come directly from the CIA Democrats. This cynical attempt to divide workers & the poor only strengthens the hand of the far right.
Ashley Morgan Smithline has declared that Evan Rachel Wood manipulated & abused her. So why wouldn’t you believe her? MeToo (who claims women should ALWAYS be believed) is silent on this question.
The MeToo campaign, like capitalism, is exploitative & abusive to its core. The only way to end this nefarious, dirty-tricks MeToo campaign is by organized mass resistance to the capitalist system itself.
Music is such an important form of communication, perhaps the most influential as its primality touches & stirs our deepest emotions. The question of questions becomes: Who controls the music? Consider all music of the past in its historical materialist context, with a philosophical understanding of dialectics in revolution. These days, if the music doesn’t also stimulate the intellect, it’s crap.
Seymour Hersh is an investigative journalist of the highest caliber. He is one of my inspirations along with the writers of the WSWS. When you read “discredited journalist” next to his name in the fake media, that refers to the right-wing attack campaign from the CIA Democrats to silence all leftists.
(Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
In short, Hersh reports that Joe Biden blew up the Nord Stream pipelines last September, with help from US Navy/CIA deep sea divers who planted C4 charges on the pipelines which were remotely activated by a sound buoy dropped later by US military/CIA aircraft. This allowed Joe Biden to pick his time to execute this act of international terrorism.
This is now a January 6th moment for the Democrats, as there is a noticeable silence here in the US corporate media– on all sides. This is an international war crime by US President Joe Biden and it hardly gets a mention next to “spy balloons” and the Super Bowl.
The CIA Democrats have no plausible alternative to offer on who done it, only attacks on Seymour Hersh. This CIA playbook is run on all leftists through political & economic channels. This big lie technique activates all Nazis to join in the savagery, as they will take delight in trying to discredit this heroic work of investigative journalism.
If you are a bass player and you don’t sing or help with songwriting, then you need to shut up & play bass. If you want to handle management, booking duties, etc, that’s fine– but since you don’t write songs, you are NOT qualified to be the bandleader and therefore you are NOT allowed to dictate every creative decision by leveraging your position of advantage. That fucks up a band every time. There are a million guitar players out there & a zillion singers too, with a more limited pool of good drummers, but quality bass players are very hard to find. Many of the best bassists let this instrumental scarcity go to their heads, by taking the attitude that if they don’t get their way, they’ll simply take their bass & go home– leaving the band stranded. One of the biggest problems in rock music today is there aren’t enough bassists who are team players.
I’ve learned over the years that many of the top bassists do corporate gigs for a living, including tribute acts & such that play six nights a week and twice on Sundays. Any left-handed bassist is wanted for Beatles tribute bands, etc. That’s where the steady money is, as compared to forming a band and trying to be something new. My biggest criticism of professional bass players is that they are too rigid as a rule, which limits them. You can’t be a great band without a solid bass player, and you can’t be a serious bassist if you don’t work well with others.
It was reported last week that Silvergate Bank, the bankrupt crypto lender with FDIC affiliation (a rarity in the industry), received a $4.3B bailout from the San Francisco-based Federal Home Loan Bank, following the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, according to the firm’s Q4, 2022 filings.
US taxpayers, without their consent, have just bailed out this bankrupt crypto bank– and it barely made the news. Silvergate was the first, of what is to be many bailouts for crypto. As much as the crypto community howls about “de-fi, privacy & freedom”; it needs a bailout even more. Industry players have been angling for this since the FTX collapse.
To review, Silvergate provided banking services to crypto exchanges & investors, with ~90% of its deposits from crypto. Silvergate’s 10 biggest depositors, include bankrupt firms such as: Coinbase, Paxos, Crypto.com, Gemini, Kraken, Bitstamp & Circle. As a result of the FTX collapse in November, Silvergate was bankrupt, as it held worthless deposits for both FTX & Alameda Research.
Market manipulation is what is driving the current bitcoin bounce. This, along with venture capital, is what is sustaining the crypto industry on life support. Market manipulation through wash trading, and other pump & dump tactics are the rule in crypto. Wash trading is when a firm trades with itself to artificially boost prices, to give the illusion of liquidity & generate interest from investors. A recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that wash trades accounted for 50-70% of all crypto transactions, suggesting most trades on these platforms are fraudulent.
For example: bitcoin’s price had been languishing at ~$17K for weeks, but as of last week it has slowly been going up. Bitcoin currently sits at over $21K, and no one can explain why, as investors are leaving the industry in droves, lay-offs are everywhere, and hardly a day goes by without some news of another crypto firm, exchange, bank, etc, having liquidity issues. So where is all this money coming from? As it turns out, it’s now coming from the taxpayers.
Update: Sat 21 Jan 2023 5:50 AM CST
Silvergate Bank ($4.3B), Signature Bank ($11.3B), Provident Bancorp ($80M), and Ally Financial ($7.2B) have been bailed out by the Federal Home Loan Banks program, which is ostensibly meant to fund home loans. This is surely the tip of the iceberg as there are many others we don’t know about– yet. US taxpayers support FHLB financing, as their bonds are implicitly backed by Congress, which would not allow a default, hence their AAA rating from Moody. Should one of these crypto-friendly banks fail, FDIC accounts would be second in line, after the FHLB, in claims resolution. Banks always get bailed out first. Bloggers are the only ones reporting this story, as the corporate media is maintaining silence on this massive & secret crypto bailout scheme.
The conspiracy theory that SBF is now an agent of US intelligence is supported by the facts and his actions since pleading “not guilty” in a Manhattan courtroom. The DOJ normally takes no prisoners in its prosecutions, unless a secret deal has been reached.
From a historical perspective, the DOJ investigations of Donald Trump have been as restrained a legal action as you will ever see, because he’s so connected to right-wing militias (which intelligence agencies view as an asset), but the DOJ still went after him to some extent for his malfeasance. SBF has the same criminal credentials, but with even more value to US intelligence, so he’s been treated with kid gloves by the DOJ & the corporate media because they’re all tied-in to the CIA Democrats.
The dictatorship of finance capital can be clearly observed in crypto. SBF & Co. have surely made secret deals, as they are being integrated into US intelligence to help move dark money to Ukraine, etc. Thus, none of the defrauded customers will see a penny of the $5B in assets the US government has claimed to have recovered (so far) in the FTX fallout.
Republicans have now setup a new committee to bail out this distressed “asset class” known as crypto, and as a result of this activity, bitcoin has moved up by ~$2K in the past few days.
After Roger Goodell conferred with the top Vegas bookies & ESPN fantasy leagues for three difficult days, it was decided by the owners of football to be in their best interest to cancel the Bills-Bengals game. According to NFL records & the Black Hand, it never happened.
The NFL had cancel this game, but they REALLY didn’t want to. League officials & executives needed to confer behind-the-scenes with bookmakers & the biggest fantasy leagues for council on what to do, which is why it took three long days for the NFL to make it’s final decision, when it really had no choice from the start.
The fantasy leagues are a particularly sticky situation, because those are hardcore football fans who invested 4+ months in drafting, building & cheering their teams. The Bills-Bengals game was to be the final MNF contest of the season, and it’s the Super Bowl in most fantasy leagues. If this event had happened during a typical Sunday afternoon game, it wouldn’t have been as harmful to NFL interests. But it happened on Monday night, when the entire sports world is tuned-in, and not just any Monday night, but the biggest MNF game of the season.
Instead of being a nationwide football festival, the plug was pulled & the excitement killed. Most sports fans understand the situation and don’t blame the players, or cry foul, but there are interests that want to make sure this NEVER happens again. Docking wages for leaving the field would probably be bad optics for the NFL, so look for the owners to get together after the post-season and establish a “protocol” to prevent players from mutually leaving the field before a game is finished. Owners consider what happened as an unauthorized work stoppage, and that is strictly prohibited by the powers-that-be. This could become a CBA grievance if the owners take too much of a hard-line stance.
So how did Roger Goodell arrive at his judgement, three days after an on-field medical event stopped the Bills-Bengals MNF game, with the players refusing to resume the contest? First, the NFL Commissioner had to take heavy flak from all the East coast dweebs screaming in his ear about sponsors, ratings, fantasy leagues, etc– imagine a scene from Network (1976) and apply it here. After absorbing all this abuse, Goodell then had to fly to Las Vegas and stay at the Flamingo to take a meeting with Ace Rothstein & Nicky Santoro. After that, he had to hustle over to the Tropicana to see Moe Greene, and you know what that means— Don Barzini. Roger Goodell had to earn his paycheck this week.
Nicky Santoro: Hey commish, what happened?! I got all these betting slips and I don’t know what to do with them. I’m thinkin’ I’ll keep all the money. What do you think, Sam?
Ace Rothstein: You’re the muscle end Nicky, I just tell you the point spread.
Nicky Santoro: So commish, a player feints on the field, he’s taken-off, and the game just ENDS?!! Since when do we do THAT?!! Are we gonna put pink dresses on them next? [Lots of expletives…] I’m feeling like a chump for holding all these markers. The game was two nights ago!! [Lots of expletives…] I’m just trying to run a respectable bookmaking business here, I gotta pay the winners & collect from the losers to get my vig, you understand? How can I pay when there’s no game?!! [More expletives…] Since I’ve been holding this money for so long, I’d almost feel like a chump to return it. I’m thinking I’ll keep the money. What do you think, Sam?
Mining bitcoin became less profitable in 2022 as hashrate (the electrical cost of mining bitcoin) increased, while bitcoin tumbled from an all-time high of $69K in November 2021 to under $17K at present. Crypto is being propped-up with everything the US financial system has left. There are a lot of billionaires & multi-millionaires who are VERY upset at the prospect of losing a massive chunk of the portfolio invested in crypto.
In 2022, the stock prices of the five biggest public crypto miners by hashrate: Core Scientific ($CORZ), Riot Blockchain ($RIOT), Bitfarms ($BITF), Iris Energy ($IREN), and CleanSpark ($CLSK) traded down 99%, 85%, 91%, 92% and 79%, according to CoinDesk. What’s going on in the crypto industry is a massive restructuring, with a few big fish eating all the little fish. New rationalizations are needed to reassure venture capitalists in their support for the flagging crypto industry. If investors stop giving crypto money, then it’s lights out– literally.
Miners are hardcore crypto fanatics, so they tried to hold onto the bitcoin they mined, often electing to finance operations with low-interest debt, venture capital, blank check companies, etc. Perhaps pitch the idea on Shark Tank, which coincidentally appeared around the same time as bitcoin. The point is that bitcoin mining companies, who are in the business of mining bitcoin, weren’t making the BIG money in crypto.
Miners were contracted to make money for whales, who financed the mining of bitcoin. For instance, if Elon Musk contracted a massive amount of bitcoin to be mined from various bitcoin mining companies, the bitcoin would be delivered to him while he paid the consortium of miners for the service, presumably in bitcoin. This would support the industry as long as the price of crypto went up and money was cheap from the Federal Reserve.
Elon Musk’s financial Waterloo was his commitment to buy Twitter for $44B last spring. When his bitcoin empire crashed, soon after his takeover announcement, he began to back-off on buying Twitter. By summer, when Twitter shareholders threatened to sue & win in court, Musk was beaten. Elon Musk was heralded as the wealthiest man in the world by Forbes, with a value of $264B as of 2021. So here’s a modern economic question: Why couldn’t Elon Musk just buy Twitter for $44B, and be secure w/ $200+B remaining in personal wealth? Answer: Because his wealth was never real. It was mostly inflated crypto, and you can’t buy a publicly-traded company with bitcoin. Forbes is a central player in this fictitious accounting.
Elon Musk’s choices to finance his Twitter acquisition were to A) liquidate bitcoin; or B) liquidate Tesla. Tesla is WAY overvalued, and Musk knows this better than anyone, so him selling huge shares of his flagship electric car company tells the story there. If bitcoin recovers, Elon Musk is king again. If crypto goes to zero (which it must), then Musk is dust. When the stock value of Tesla collapses, as it must, Elon Musk won’t have any real money left. The more Tesla stock Musk sells, the sooner this will happen.
As poorly as Musk has run Tesla, his short reign as Twitter CEO has been qualitatively worse. Maybe Twitter was worth only a quarter of what Musk paid for it, say $10B. But that’s still an asset, and the second-largest social media platform on the internet. At least manage it decently for awhile, then take it public again, or sell it & eat the loss. That would be a rational business strategy after making a big mistake. But instead, Musk destroyed Twitter through a series of tirades, boneheaded ideas & tantrums. Now, Twitter isn’t worth $2B. These new-age millennial entrepreneurs have trouble producing value in the real world. They always need more money.
Turning to the unending crypto saga of Sam Bankman-Fried, the Securities Commission of the Bahamas has taken custody of FTX deposits valued at more than $3.5B as of November 12, according to a media release published last week. The November 12 date is significant, because the murky, murky $383M FTX hack, live-streamed in this video, happened during the evening of November 11, while SBF was in Bahamian custody. So where is the money?
The government of the Bahamas is in complete control of $3.5B in crypto, which the US government wants for itself. Bankruptcy trials take a long time, and this is largely a jurisdictional battle for the spoils which is to be hashed-out by lawyers, financial officials, opportunists, etc, on both sides until all the money is divvied-up to the right people. This is how governments steal for themselves in the name of their people & democracy.
The crypto community is facing an existential crisis. The vast majority, who have worked to build this industry, in mining, computer programming, sales & promotion, etc, have been shucked & jived by modern-day shysters. Calls in the fake media for regulation are a smokescreen, as crypto will never be regulated by US Congress. A few years back, during the Trump administration, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was compelled to testify before the US Senate for a regulatory hearing. The most memorable moment was when a crusty septuagenarian senator asked Zuckerberg how Facebook made money? The Facebook CEO smiled to himself & replied, removing as much condescension from his voice as possible, “We sell ads, sir.”
That’s typical of the level of fundamental cluelessness in elite politics. Crypto with its blockchains, decentralized finance, off-shore shell companies, etc, is much more complex than the nuts & bolts of social media. Not only is regulation unwanted by the industry (and Republicans), it’s unthinkable because no one in bourgeois politics has a clue how to deal with this mess. No politician wants to be seen as “impeding the free market,” and no politician wants to get dragged into these crypto scandals any further. You know it’s really bad when you see corrupt politicians insisting there are returning FTX money.
Calls for “regulation” in articles discussing crypto should be always interpreted as “bailout.” Eventually this crypto bubble will burst, and unlike the sub-prime crisis of 2007-08, there are no assets to recoup here. Millions of homes with defaulted mortgages were transferred into bank ownership in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown. This was done to make bankers & hedge fund investors (who caused the meltdown) whole again. They were too big to fail. But the soon-to-come crypto crash will leave nothing to be recouped, because it’s been a fake asset from the start. US & Bahamian regulators are fighting over custody of $3.5B in fake money, and who winds up with it is beside the point because it’s worthless.
Meanwhile, Sam Bankman-Fried is out on bond, living with his parents who are co-conspirators in the $32B FTX/Alameda swindle. The effectively altruistic boy genius came up with a better way to mine crypto. Instead of having a series of supercomputers mining the crypto by solving complex mathematical equations, SBF just made up his proprietary FTT tokens out of thin air. This saved energy costs, and the expense of contracting crypto miners. This way, SBF made super-profits! Crypto skeptics point to Binance’s native BNB token, and ask if Changpeng Zhao created them by the same process.
Sam Bankman-Fried has surely violated the terms of his bail by moving large amounts of crypto from hidden Alameda wallets after his release on bond last week. SBF denies this, of course, as his parents are there to punish him if he does anything wrong again. The problem with crypto isn’t SBF, per se, it’s capitalism & the flawed idea that you can create value from nothing.
Update: Wed Jan 4, ~8:45AM CST
SBF was allowed to be free on bond, and violate those terms by moving large amounts of crypto out of Alameda wallets to unknown accounts. Unknown to the public that is. The US government knows where the crypto is, because undoubtedly they have been monitoring his computer, but they aren’t revealing anything they know to the public which is normal. SBF is acting as a personal tutor for US intelligence agencies, etc, in how to move crypto. Notice how names are always redacted when his legal team requests it, etc. Since when has such a swindler been allowed such clout in a DOJ prosecution case? Normally, targets of the DOJ receive no mercy, unless they plead guilty– or cut a secret deal. SBF pled not guilty, yesterday, as expected. SBF should now be considered as an agent of the US state. It’s the only way he can save himself.
Final thoughts: Thu 05 Jan 2023 6:43 AM CST
The crypto community is learning the hard way, that BIGGER interests (such as the US-provoked war in Ukraine) override any claims of crypto theft. The most logical explanation for SBF’s ‘not guilty’ plea is that he made a secret deal with US intelligence to save himself. These demoralized libertarians are in WAY over their heads here.
Crypto believers have hyped bitcoin with an impressive amount of enthusiasm & bravado, but never answered any fundamental questions posed to them over the years. They display a staggering level of naivety & ignorance in the fields of economics & politics. And yet, in their collective moment of stunned disbelief over the reality of how quickly dreams can evaporate, they maintain they are correct. The Federal Reserve & US Intelligence are the primary forces keeping crypto alive. Crypto is a money-laundering tool, that’s it’s only use value.
Any talk of SBF being an asset of US intelligence will now be branded as “conspiracy theory” in the fake media.That’s the Big Lie playbook they run on the public. This conspiracy theory is backed by the facts and the events as they are unfolding, which strongly implies that it is correct. US Intelligence always lies & evades to minimize exposure of an asset, especially a big fish like SBF, who is teaching them new & better ways to move crypto. This helps Joe Biden work with Republicans in funneling funds to the neo-Nazis in Kiev in the name of fighting Russian aggression which keeps us safe from terrorism.
This is an irritating question I get asked, especially by family. Let me be clear: NOBODY can be truly happy right now. Humanity is facing existential threats on multiple fronts. This is the Coronavirus War, which is the revolutionary war to prevent WW3 & MAD. Trotskyists are on the side of rationality & science, while capitalism is about irrational greed & class dominance. The Coronavirus War must be won by Trotskyism, otherwise we all die. The only way someone can claim to be happy under these conditions is if they are smugly self-satisfied and/or deluded.
Happiness is a relative term. I’m happier than I was in the past, but I don’t claim to be completely happy & fulfilled. There’s still too much work to be done. Only trifling minds can believe in their deep happiness. We have a social system where there is a class of people who can check-out whenever they please because they are taken care of. It’s nice if you can get it, but it’s not for me. Historical materialists posit that eventually their bubbles & illusions will be shattered by reality.
Donald Trump is part of this parasitic elite, full of anger among other bad things. Every MAGA supporter is like him, so none of these people can be happy. Trump’s pathology is that he is a sociopath. Sociopaths have no empathy, they revel in meting out cruelty & abuse, always targeting the weak when they are most vulnerable. Soft targets are the lifeblood of sociopaths & fascists, which feeds their bottomless appetite for hate, violence & terrorism.
All this is constructed on a mountain of lies which include historical falsification, anti-Semitism, and the perpetual use of the Big Lie. Fascists have fully adopted the techniques of US intelligence agencies & military. Most of the shock troops from the 1/6/21 US Capitol assault were recruited from far-right sympathizers in the police, firefighters, military, etc.
US Secret Services agents subpoenaed to turn over their cell phone data from 1/6/21 deleted all their texts, messages, etc. Far-right sympathizers in US police, military & intelligence agencies were the organizers & foot soldiers in Donald Trump’s coup attempt on 1/6/21. The 1/6 Committee led by Republican Party war-hawk Liz Cheney sought to whitewash all this filth & criminality, by pinning the entire blame on the actions of a single individual– Donald Trump. The facts overwhelmingly prove otherwise. Facts are stubborn things.
The FBI monitored the entire planning & unfolding of 1/6, with agents planted & active at all levels, and they did nothing to prevent an armed assault on the US Capitol building when Congress was in session, going through the ceremony of certifying a presidential election. After the 1/6 insurrection fizzled-out, the coup-plotter-in-chief began his next campaign to deal with the consequences & political fallout. First, Donald Trump intimidated Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell into not impeaching him during his swift (second) impeachment trial in the weeks after January 6, 2021.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican whip who was initially shocked & outraged over being a target of enraged MAGA vigilantes, checked with his grassroots supporters, (who both said don’t cross Trump) and thus jelly-spine Mitch caved-in to the Godfather of the Republican Party. Mitch McConnell swallowed his indignation, as well as his sworn duty to protect the US Constitution, uniting his party colleagues in voting “No” to impeachment, when no clearer case of criminality against American law could be imagined.
It was the best chance the Republicans ever had to handle Trump once and for all, and possibly redeem themselves (somewhat) in the eyes of the vast majority of Americans who STRONGLY disapproved of Trump’s coup attempt. The Republicans couldn’t do it because the political fallout would have been too devastating for the far right, whom they must protect at all costs. It would have killed the Republican Party, because Trump the Nazi became the Republican Party in 2016. Republicans, more than anyone else, can’t endure short-term pain & long-term sacrifice.
For historical reference, Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial was part of the Democrat attack campaign on him for beating Hillary Clinton in Election 2016. If there is one thing Donald Trump is genuinely good at, it’s a legal battle. If you’re going to beat Trump in court, you had better have the goods on him– and the resources to outlast all his dirty-tricks. Trump is a maestro at appealing verdicts, delaying, deflecting, denying, counter-suing, buying judges, ignoring rulings, etc.
The ruling establishment grievance for his first impeachment trial was that President Trump held up covert military aid to Ukrainian neo-Nazis for a few months. That’s it. For a long, long time in top-level US military planning circles, Ukraine has been considered the leading front in the war against “Russian interference,” whose goal is regime change in Moscow. These olden cold warriors lead humanity recklessly into the 21st-century with their nuclear brinkmanship & empty bluster. All of them are hard-headed & senile, along with being sore losers. These qualities are widely considered red flags for serious leadership positions, but under elite capitalism being stupid, heartless & greedy makes you most qualified for leadership.
Of course, as the true reasons for the first impeachment campaign against Donald Trump became apparent, and with strong Republican Party support, he was acquitted in the Senate. The whole matter was considered bogus by rational observers, with the real issue of arming Ukrainian neo-Nazis stricken from discussion, thus feeding into President Trump’s hand.
The Democrats do that very well, and Bush v Gore is perhaps the best example. Conservative Democrats (always claiming to be vaguely liberal) never mention how Election 2000 was stolen by Bush/Cheney. In the end it was Democratic Party leadership, bowing not to the will of the voters, but to a right-wing US Supreme Court which ruled that since the Electoral College decides the election for US President, there is no need to count all the votes in Florida.
The final counting of all Florida ballots, particularly the Miami area which leaned ~85% Democrat, was stopped by Republican lawyers. Governor Jeb Bush organized his machinery, while mobs of angered right-wing supporters stormed voting precincts where tens of thousands of uncounted ballots remained in storage. They were never to be counted, as the Supreme Court ruled 5-4, in favor of not counting all the ballots. Antonin Scalia authored the majority opinion, which was a legal & democratic travesty– the ‘justice’ of a mafia don.
Having lived in Central Florida for over 25 years I can say that most people oppose the right-wing politics of Florida, but that will never be allowed to express itself at the ballot box. Republicans took over the governorship of Florida in 1998, and they will never give it back without it being taken from them. In 2022, the Florida political machinery is solid Nazi with Trump hunkered down in exile at his Mar-a-Lago luxury compound, and Ron DeSantis in the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee.
The Villages, FL is a key financial & political base for the far right, to counter the liberalism of Sanford/Orlando in Central Florida. Massive right wing capital went into building the sprawling retirement community known as the Villages out of swampland in the late-1990’s. Politically the Villages first came to prominence as the right-wing Tea Party in 2009, which was their reaction to Barack Obama winning the presidency, and then later as rabid MAGA Trump supporters. For instance, much of the racist ‘birther campaign’ against Barack Obama was incubated in the Villages, which brands itself as “America’s Friendliest Hometown”. Between fits of hysterical anger towards Democrats & anything vaguely left-wing, Villagers like to think of themselves as happy & enlightened.
For the Democrats, the ideological front lines of mainstream propaganda (since ~1972, and then Barack Obama for sure) has been identity politics as a tool to divide workers & youth. The Nazis have white supremacy, anti-Semitism, vigilante militias, etc, and that ugliness largely speaks for itself. Most working people are repulsed, and you don’t have to convince too many educated people that the KKK is horrible, and that the Holocaust was a massive war crime. The lunatic fringe of Holocaust deniers, Q-Anon nuts, right-wing militia groups, etc, are now all that’s left of Donald Trump’s political base. The political establishment is trying to put the Republican Party back together again, after Humpty Trumpty forever shattered it on 1/6/21.
The MeToo campaign under the banner of liberal feminism is also fascism, but of a different stripe. MeToo has the power of illusion (feminine beauty), claiming to be a force for progress, but in fact it’s a nefarious tool for political reaction. The MeToo campaign is a McCarthyist witch-hunt, organized & led by the CIA Democrats, targeting leftist artists & top talent. Artistically speaking, this has a chilling affect on those who remain. MeToo is not a movement, but a cynical campaign whose core message is vote Democrat.
Both major parties like nothing more than a well-framed debate in the corporate media. For instance, what always gets mentioned in every spectrum of the fake media are Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Here we have a madman completely turning facts, science & history on its head, which gives the Democrats ammunition. The Democrats then use that ammunition to attack Trump (and everyone else) from the right. Trump may still command an audience of supporters, but they are ever-dwindling. The window of opportunity for fascism to regain power is closing fast, but this is not due to the efforts of the Democrats.
As Joe Biden said after 1/6, “We need a strong Republican Party… We need unity with the Republicans [fascists].” Indeed he does. People are now starting to realize that the Democrats are just as fascist as the Republicans, maybe even worse because of how they lie about it.
Their fascism is perhaps most apparent in their dictatorial control over the trade unions, bloated with corporate bureaucrats assigned to sell out the rank-and-file in all industries. The Democratic Party is the party of the CIA, the leading purveyor of misinformation on the planet. Their covert deceptions provide fuel for the big lies of Nazis everywhere. It’s a self-perpetuating system of hate & inequality called capitalism, dictated & financed on Wall Street, and then veneered-over with debased politics & vapid pop culture.
International socialism is how to overcome all this ignorance, hatred & inequality foisted upon us by the madmen & madwomen who own capitalism. To all oppressed workers, youth & socialists: Keep organizing rank-and-file workplace committees, along with school & neighborhood safety committees– everywhere!! That coalesces international labor power politically under the banner of Trotskyism. That’s how to win. It’s also how to be happy.
Country music artist Miranda Lambert did it again with Palomino, which has plenty of crossover appeal. It’s my choice for the best mainstream album of 2022, in any genre. Conspicuously absent from most ‘2022 best-of’ lists, I’ve noticed.
Brian Eno & PJ Harvey are continually intriguing artists I follow. They endure & gracefully evolve by becoming multi-media artists. Thus they don’t fit so nicely on the limited ‘best-of’ lists published by most critics.
Beyonce, Megan Thee Stallion, Harry Styles, Wet Leg, BlackPink, etc, are production-heavy industry creations. These performers dominate most of the corporate media’s best-of-2022 music lists. These fans & boosters should credit the producers more, and realize what that means– particularly its limitations.
Mediocre & dull music is now precisely MIDI-ed, EQ-ed & compressed, which allows for better dynamics– yielding a cleaner & louder sound. Bass is boomier than ever, and distortion is crunchier in all ranges. Beats are mostly electronic, or at least enhanced by digital effects. That’s the sound of today, from pop & rap to punk & heavy metal. Much of this ‘excitement’ is achieved by computerized digital processing. It’s the same process in film, television & crypto.
Hillary Clinton w/ Pussy Riot_2014
The nefarious #MeToo campaign bears much of the current responsibility for this lack of excitement & innovation in popular culture. Many talented performers (in all fields) have been cancelled by a Democratic Party-led identity politics campaign in its feminist (Me Too), racialist (Black Lives Matter), and LGBTQ-activist incarnations. All are corporate funded, anti-science & pro-war. The “punk” spearhead for this CIA campaign has been Pussy Riot (pic above), who have been hyped in the Western media as a “protest art collective,” while being officially designated as foreign agents by the Russian government.
The list of performers who have been cancelled in music, as well as film, television & theater is staggering in terms of top talent, and irreplaceable in terms of art. You simply can’t replace a Kevin Spacey, Dustin Hoffman, or Bill Murray in film. In music, you can’t replace a Michael Jackson, Ryan Adams, or Roger Waters. If they can be attacked and taken down by cynical politics, resting on a mountain of lies & baseless allegations, then who is safe from this?
It’s nearly impossible to be an artist under these conditions. The industry hype machine allows nothing subversive (left-wing) to enter into popular consciousness. In fact, they censor it harshly. We are nearing the end of the ‘American Idol era’ in popular music, when a handful of industry big-shots & gatekeepers were allowed to control everything the public saw & heard– on the radio, television & online.
In 2022, most music fans are bored with Justin Bieber, Brittany Spears, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Adele, etc. No one expects any of them to age well. There’s not enough talent there. None of them come close to matching Prince, Madonna, Gloria Estefan, Chuck D, or Tupac in their primes. Anyone inspired by that is driven underground these days. I believe the best music of 2022, in every any genre, was underground. This means most people, myself included, never heard it.
Effective altruism has melted away and it’s been replaced by the slogan– make investors whole again! Especially the small ones, because they can least afford the losses, blah, blah, blah…
As a socialist, I feel very little sympathy for anyone in the crypto market. It’s been a scam from the start, and if you didn’t recognize that, then you deluded yourself. These fanatics are capitalists to the core, who do no productive work, and only got into crypto to make money for themselves. They look at all the odds stacked against them, while ignoring simple logic (AKA– FUD), to make themselves believe they can get something for nothing. People have to learn at some point, and while cases like Elon Musk (bitcoin whale) are beyond hopeless, those who can’t afford big financial losses in crypto are just as much part of the problem. Their fundamentalism blinds them.
These wanna-be’s envy criminals like Elon Musk, the fascist billionaire. Taking a look at his CV for just the past few weeks, Elon Musk has drained his core company Tesla, selling it’s stock at a premium before it goes bust, to finance his takeover of Twitter which has cost him tens of billions of dollars to date. He had to do this because all his bitcoin busted before he’d done any due diligence on Twitter, but after he’d committed to buying it. Some genius huh? So now, advertisers & users have abandoned what was once the 2nd-most popular social media platform, as Musk took it over and turned it into a toxic wasteland. Twitter has gone the way of MySpace, via Mein Kampf.
Even Donald Trump, who has 88 million followers on Twitter, won’t return to the platform after Elon Musk re-instated his account with much fanfare. Trump started Truth Social, his proprietary platform, on which he posts exclusively– to his 2 million followers. Donald Trump wants to be president again, yet he accepts 1/44th the social media reach, because more importantly he wants to make money for himself. Trump does this by pumping his brand. Every other industry he’s ever branded himself in has gone bankrupt, or if it’s still in existence, is under federal investigation for tax fraud or some other form of criminality.
So of course, Donald Trump has now launched his own crypto, a $99 NFT of trading cards in his image. It will be worthless in the near future, but you can still own those images & digits in cyberspace. Of course, if you keep them in a cold wallet with responsibility for your own keys, you will lose 99% of your crypto, according to Changpeng Zhao, the Binance CEO & crypto whale.
It’s tough to pass on crypto when you die because 1) the keys are hidden and hard to get to, because if they aren’t, you’ll get hacked and lose everything instantly; and 2) inheritors often aren’t familiar with the crypto world, and thus getting through all the online steps needed to liquidate can be an insurmountable task. Even with crypto exchanges such as Binance, this is an issue, but Changpeng Zhao didn’t mention that.
Some crypto industry leaders who got burned in the FTX collapse, are now calling for regulation. Crypto is deregulated finance by definition, hence the industry term “de-fi.” According to the libertarian economic model, de-fi opposes centralized finance, breaking the bounds of national banking by creating an international currency on the foundations of freedom & privacy– [* until it all collapses and they need a bailout]. What libertarians never strictly define are these emotionally-charged terms: freedom & privacy, which means they can mean anything. To SBF & Co., it means the freedom to embezzle everyone’s crypto on his exchange in the privacy of his luxury villa in the Bahamas.
That’s life in a post-modernist world, and it’s what happens when you are too lazy to strictly define important core values within the community. The ‘crypto community’ was built on vague altruistic ideals which could be changed or discarded at any time, by any actor, because those were the rules everyone allowed from the beginning. The crypto community isn’t the cooperative idealistic paradise it markets itself to be. Just about any crypto investor would steal a kajillion dollars of crypto if they thought the could get away with it. How can anyone regulate with these industry-wide ethics? Crypto has been around for only thirteen years or so, and yet its demise is imminent.
Crypto lacked a credible core philosophy to justify its existence. Ask any crypto believer, and none of them will take you any further than what I’ve just spelled out. It’s all about making money by doing no real work. These are lazy & privileged kids along with mathematical whizzes who learned computers, but got on the wrong track from the start. None of them understand the fundamental nature of money and what it represents. They just want to create an algorithm that makes money for themselves. Crypto-currency is anti-productive & anti-social to its core.
No more cheap money from the Fed, along with rising costs for electricity to mine crypto, means this fake industry is about to go tits-up. Only massive infusions of liquidity on a daily basis (from a central source) are keeping this crypto boondoggle afloat. The big hedge fund investors & venture capitalists are already lining themselves up for another bailout. Congress will have bi-partisan support for this, but the rub is the crypto industry has been so discredited in the eyes of so many people that another such corporate bailout is a tough sell politically.
The crypto industry is a joke because everyone in politics has taken money from these criminals, but none of them can clearly explain why crypto has value. The same applies to economists, industry experts, talking heads, etc. Tens of millions of dollars a day (minimum) is what is going into the crypto market to keep it “legitimate.” Cold wallets won’t save any investors because it is the crypto itself (bitcoin, ether, etc) that is worthless. Blockchains are becoming too costly to maintain due to rising energy prices. This inflation crisis has been caused by unlimited QE for over a decade, and accelerated by the disastrous official response to COVID-19, and the US-provoked war in the Ukraine.
Bitcoin’s value to the ruling classes is that it’s a tool for laundering large amounts of cash. Imperialist governments & their intelligence agencies have many uses for this, all nefarious & undemocratic. So the question of questions for SBF & Co. in the wake of the FTX/Alameda Research scandal is: Where is the money?
Where did all that crypto go? What about FTX’s ‘Aid for Ukraine’ campaign launched last spring? Where did all the aid money go? Who was/is connected to all this? Both the Democrats & Republicans have prominent figures in their upper circles who participated in this criminality. The first step in damage control is to silence SBF. His arrest in the Bahamas on Tuesday (Dec 13), after weeks of delaying, was timed to prevent his sworn testimony, via Zoom, to US Congress. Tens of millions of people would have watched that, waiting for bigmouth SBF to spill the beans on everybody. As mentioned in my last piece on FTX, this case has Jeffery Epstein-type implications, and must be handled very carefully by the ruling elite, otherwise the truth will get out and the establishment will be publicly discredited.
The crisis of capitalism has become an existential issue, so what is at stake is the ruling class’ right to rule. If politicians and their media apologists can’t convince the working people to bail out the crypto industry to avert an “economic collapse,” then the game is over. This is their greatest fear being realized, and their only answer is more lies, more attacks on living standards, and more hate & violence. That’s what happens when you start with no ethics and then become financially bankrupt.
For the ruling classes, any major wildcat strike or other form of labor shutdown can only be met with media hysteria & demonization, followed by physical attacks from right-wing goon squads aided by the police, intelligence agencies & the military. Workers & youth must organize into workplace & neighborhood committees with the goal of taking control over worker production & neighborhood safety. Uvalde proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that the cops have no interest in protecting teachers & children, etc. Productive workers & youth must organize & unite to protect each other from the propaganda & violence of all the world’s ruling classes.
The Coronavirus War concludes it’s third year with an increase in fascist propaganda & policy by every nation. In China, the origin of COVID-19 from human-animal crossover in a Wuhan wet market, the ruling bureaucracy has just ended its Zero-COVID policy which had been successful for its duration, but only within its borders. COVID-19 is a global virus that mutates constantly, and is increasingly evading vaccine immunity. US President Joe Biden has declared the pandemic over, when clearly it isn’t. Trump denied the pandemic was real, so Biden is merely following the fascist policy of his predecessor. That’s what Democrats do, as anti-science reigns supreme in the pseudo-academic, liberal, middle-class milieu that is obsessed with race, gender & sexual orientation.
This crypto collapse marks a turning point in the Coronavirus War, which up to this point the fascists (of all stripes) have been winning. Fascist ideology has long-since been rejected by the working masses of the world, while right-wing corruption rules over them. Now, fascist money is becoming increasingly worthless, which makes it harder for them to buy people. This weakness is being exposed daily, in the collapses of crypto exchanges & lenders. Crypto auditors (who love their big fee$) won’t even stand by their “all good” asset ratings anymore, deleting them from their sites, etc.
The leading industry site is Coin Desk, which is tangled-up in the FTX collapse in a myriad of ways. Fundamentally there is no honesty in their “journalism” because there are deep dark truths about crypto which they can never reveal– not even to themselves. When yet another exchange halts withdrawals, and Coin Desk reaches out to that company for a comment, it’s either 1`) No comment, unavailable, no response; or 2) public relations BS such as, “we’re working to make investors whole again… our fundamentals are sound,” etc.
