The sorry state of US soccer

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Preface: Many nations didn’t even allow adult women to play soccer back in the 1990’s. Muslim nations in particular. The US was the only country that allowed a large pool of boys & girls to compete together at a youth level. That helped catapult the USWNT to soccer dominance which lasted for 30 years. This is a follow-up piece to USWNT out early at World Cup 2023: no one cares

The USWNT trained at the sprawling Markham Woods soccer complex (AKA: Lake Sylvan Shores) in north Orlando, throughout the 1990’s and at least into the early 2000’s. It has multiple fields, and the USWNT shared this space with all the youth league teams, including my (then) step-son’s summer teams from 1998-2000. When looking in their direction (as every cognizant soccer spectator did back then), I immediately noticed it was men coaching the USWNT.

My step-son was a good kid and enjoyed playing soccer, though he never had any scholarship or professional ambitions, which helped him fit-in well with all the coaches he played for. His mom made him choose soccer over football in high school on my advice.

He actually liked band better, and played trombone during the football games, so he was much happier for it. I often remarked to her in the bleachers, “The Mount Dora football team sucks, but their band kicks ass– best in conference!” She would laugh, and was proud of that.

His summer coach was a good-hearted father whose son was the center-midfielder. Everyone got along well, and the coach would often admonish his young players for being lazy & unserious by screaming, “Do you see Mia Hamm over there?! She’s won two World Cups & Olympic gold, and she STILL gets pissed at herself when she fucks up! So why are you laughing at your stupid shit when you’re on the same field as her?!!” That was really good stuff from a boys summer league coach– I liked him.

After the USMNT made the Round-of-16 in World Cup 1994, MLS was born. I saw early MLS exhibition games at Disney/ESPN’s Wide World of Sports complex which had opened recently in Buena Vista. We were given tickets from a cousin, the head secretary of WWOS— which is nice. They were sparse crowds, so we always had a good view. Up close, I instantly recognized Lexi Lalas, Tab Ramos, Eric Wynalda and the rest of these hippies & high-strung pretty boys by their “free spirited” west-coast playing style.

I saw it for real when I played my 1985-86 high school year in San Jose. These kids were talented for sure, and they had skills, but they were afraid to be really great, and that’s why they never won anything. I saw it over & over from the bench my junior year in San Jose. I finally had a great coach, and he knew I needed to catch up on skills before I could get serious playing time, but I was ambi-footed & serious about putting the ball in the net for my team.

I was excited to play for this coach my senior year, and was ready to dedicate my 1986 summer to getting better per his suggestions, but my family moved back to Wisconsin before the Cali soccer season ended and that was that. The level of talent & coaching in Oshkosh, WI wasn’t/isn’t anywhere close to Cali, so I only played summer league for a two more years, then gave soccer up for academics. Sports taught me a lot, including when to quit.

Sports also taught me that rich, spoiled Cali boys are the kind of teammates who always yell at you or try to show you up in front of everybody and never apologize for it. You would think a few of these hippies would understand karma or team philosophy, but no, they only care about themselves. They do whatever they want on the field, and waive off any criticism. THESE are the stars, and they are fixed– nothing can re-align that.

These enabled crybabies get where they are by politics, influence & money, more than actual talent. I’m not saying they were terrible, but I am saying they really weren’t that good, and most of it was for the cameras. The 1994 USMNT didn’t even have to qualify because the US was the host nation– for the first time ever. The time had finally come, and these pretty-boy brats simply had the right backing. That only gets you so far on the world stage, and the USMNT has never made it past a Round-of-16 in any World Cup. No one fears them.

Soccer was a winter sport in Cali when I played, as compared to a fall sport in the Midwest. Soccer is a winter sport in Florida too. I feel like soccer skills & basketball skills go together, and that young athletes should be allowed to play both. I think Bo Jackson would agree. California & Florida are where many of the best athletes come from, but forcing boys to choose in high school limits their ambidextrous skill development.

Basketball requires ambi-hand skills, while soccer is ambi-feet. If developed correctly, the ambi-skills reinforce each other, producing a formidable athlete. But in Cali, FL, and elsewhere in the deep South, where there is perhaps the most money for soccer, boys have to choose, as hoops & soccer are BOTH winter sports. Climate has something to do with this, so it’s a complicated regional sports issue, that seriously impacts the quality of the USMNT, and it goes unmentioned.

I saw a few high-school kids in Florida who tried to play soccer after fall football, but often they were too hurt from gridiron action. In some cases, it took most of the winter soccer season for them to recover. Just in time for spring football.

Football & soccer often share the same playing fields in high school, which is another factor in good ol’ boys insisting on staggering high school football & soccer, versus competing head-to-head with soccer for young boys talent. Football coaches get hysterical about their home fields during their season. They don’t want to share it with anyone. This is just some of the politics I’m talking about.

This needs to change for men’s soccer to improve. Otherwise, the US is giving up on men’s soccer. Soccer needs to compete with football for boys. NFL fans don’t want to hear that, and that’s the root of the problem. If soccer acquiesces to football, and insists on competing with basketball, then US men’s soccer will continue to stink.

The talent pool in soccer needs to be enlarged, and you can get that from parents who don’t want their boys playing football. Stuff like this never gets discussed when American fans ask, “How can the USMNT ever become competitive at the WC level?” It requires a revolution in thinking & in deed, because rotten politics controls every game. Politics controls the funding, the coaching, scholarships, grants, etc. They own the huge complexes. They have deals with the corporate media giants, with the Star-Spangled Banner waving behind them.

As this actors & writers strike continues, sports programming will become more coveted by networks looking for fresh content. Sports affects many levels of our thinking & actions. People LOVE sports, they want their children to play sports. It’s nearly a universal childhood dream to be a sports star of some type.

The hardest thing to do is get control of all these emotions that go into our passion for the game, and make rational objective decisions based on all the facts, to come to a conclusion of what’s the best course of action for the good of the game. That requires revolutionary leadership to start, and it’s finished when parents, fans & athletes come together everywhere to get rid of the filthy capitalist politics that are ruining ALL our sports.

Wrap-up: By the late 1990’s, most of the best soccer brains in the US went into helping the women’s national team, as they must have recognized by then that the USMNT was hopeless. These brains were mostly male, but there were more & more butch lesbians working their way up the coaching, political & media ranks. It has been an American feminist agenda to make US womens’ soccer entirely female at its highest levels. All these major phenomenons in womens’ soccer (positive & negative) happened exclusively, or at least most sharply, in the US.

Most soccer-crazy nations in Europe & Latin America viewed fútbol as entirely a mens’ game back in the 20th century. Now the big money is everywhere, so other nations have built better womens’ programs because they have better mens’ players to instruct them. This is why the USWNT is in so much trouble. They have neither the coaching, nor the skill required to beat the best on an equal playing field.

Globally, women’s soccer is now equal, in the sense that the US women don’t scare everyone anymore, Furthermore, they aren’t going to get better– they’ve peaked for the historical reasons I’ve outlined. The USWNT has milked it for as long as they could, but now it’s over, and they have no direction back to the top. You’re not allowed to even whisper that truth on ESPN.

You need more than talent to win at team sports. You need organization, a serious work ethic, and a spirit of community & sacrifice for the greater good. In soccer, if it’s not being taught at the elementary youth level, then it’s hopeless, because every other competitive nation is doing precisely that. You can never win when you’re always behind from the start.

It’s not difficult to find reasons why the USWNT won’t regain its past glory. The US team is no longer formidable, but beatable, and the whole world knows it, so they’re going to get everyone’s best shot from now on. It appears the USWNT is too proud to admit they aren’t the best anymore, which is a problem. So it’s a losing combination of 1) the opponents burning desire to beat those loudmouth American bitches, along with 2) hubris & denial on the US end.

I’ve got online friends from HS, college, and beyond who have raised boys & girls that play soccer. I’m sure they’ve read what I’ve posted with great interest, whether they agree with my conclusions, or not. My job as a sports blogger is to make readers think outside of the corporate box. Soccer parents have been led to believe that they are part of a great social progress, but are they?

Today’s young American boys & girls are behind on soccer skills because the coaching is so poor everywhere. None of these girls are the next Michelle Akers, or anything close. The US men never win. There’s too much mediocrity & politics at the youth & HS levels, and that’s a shame considering the ever-growing American interest in soccer over the past 25 years.

Furthermore, many of today’s professional athletes didn’t play in youth leagues or high school, like we did in the past. If you are recognized early as a prodigy, and your parents have the money, then you are sent to a sports academy, such as ING. Here, kids receive top-level, sports specific training– the best that money can buy. This gives these talented (& privileged) kids an unfair advantage at the collegiate & professional levels, because most kids have never seen that level of competition & skill in their sport.

This ‘youth talent drain’ into the private sector hurts broader youth development for the same reasons. Normal-level kids can’t improve if all the best players are at private institutions. Soccer, tennis, golf, even basketball are now dominated by this private sports academy model. It has created an unlevel playing field for athletic scholarships, etc, and stagnated overall development in every sport– to the benefit a privileged few.

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USWNT out early at World Cup 2023: no one cares

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Is anyone going to miss these bitches? Megan Rapinoe misses a PK that would have won it (she didn’t even put it on-frame), and then she smiles & shrugs it off during the post-match presser. Is that a leader? Is that a role model? She’s too chicken-shit to put a GW PK on-frame [!], and then none of her teammates call her out for her shit. This USWNT totally mailed-it-in for World Cup 2023. This is so far from 1999, it’s pathetic.

This is what happens when a MeToo campaign takes over an institution. Megan Rapinoe is a LGBTQ+ activist, a pawn of the CIA Democrats. This 2023 USWNT had no soul, because their appointed ‘leader’ is soulless.

Her Subway ad campaign (which has been scrubbed from YouTube) goes down in marketing history as perhaps the most disastrous commercial blitz in TV/internet history. In 2021, loyal customers STOPPED going to Subway until corporate pulled all their Megan Rapinoe advertising spots, as they were killing local franchises EVERYWHERE. Subway needed Steph Curry again, and QUICK!

People just don’t like her, and it’s not because she’s a lesbian– it’s because she’s unappealing. She’s not nice, honest, or brilliant, and she’s certainly not pretty. It’s a universal male fantasy to turn a hot lesbian straight, but I (like many others) have no such desire towards her. I only mention that because it’s important to women. It’s a different standard when measuring women athletes. It doesn’t matter how many titles you have, if you are marketable, then you’re shit.

I was a soccer player in middle school & high school when the sport was in its infancy in the US. Boys & girls played together on summer league teams and in high school– on JV & varsity. I was a soccer step dad in the late 1990’s, and I remember our then-family watching the 1999 Women’s WC final, USA v China, live on ABC. It was maybe the most dramatic sports contest ever, with the US winning in PK’s.

Like many, many others, I still remember the players on that team because they are worth remembering. In 1999, a group of determined under-appreciated young women changed the sports world forever. This 2023 USWNT wasn’t a group of women coming together as a team for a greater good, but a bunch of self-serving bitches wearing the same-colored jersey. That’s why they lost.

I mention my personal history because that’s how girls soccer started in the 1980’s. Boys had to play with girls, and we had to play nice– even in high school. All the girls who stuck it out were better for playing with boys. It wasn’t easy (on all sides), for sure. Michelle Akers, Mia Hamm, etc, all had to deal with those circumstances. It pushed them, in a way girls can’t be pushed today, because there are now girls soccer leagues everywhere– as it should be. It’s all part of global sports progress.

Postscript: So where does the USWNT rank globally now? They finished 2nd in their Group, and lost in the Round of 16 in Australia 2023. That objectively means they are anywhere from 9th to 16th globally. The competitive edge the USWNT has had over their global opponents, starting from the inaugural women’s World Cup in 1991, has been completely eroded. What is the cause? Politics is always a factor in big money sports, and women’s soccer is clearly no exception. The wrong choices are being made for the wrong reasons, and this is what you get. I leave it to the experts analyze the details– that’s what they’re supposedly paid for.

No longer can the USWNT waltz onto the World Cup stage & dominate, or even win. They couldn’t even score this time around. Lack of skills, creativity, chemistry & poor player development are the reasons. Too many egos need to be massaged all the time, and that creates resentment for team players. This drains a team, and it’s almost always the reason a team loses, at any level. You might not expect this ugly pettiness from the USWNT, but then you would be giving them too much credit.

The resources the US sporting establishment has poured into girls/womens soccer since the 1990’s have helped keep the US women ahead of everyone else– through World Cup 2019 which they won. The USWNT had a huge head start by the process I described above in my personal experience. There were hundreds-of-thousands of other boys like me who played fair and (unknowingly) helped develop the original USWNT. I only mention this because I’ve never seen it written anywhere else, yet it surly had the impact I’ve described.

Now that it’s all-girls leagues, US soccer is going to struggle to recapture the glory of its early years. How are you going to make players better when it’s favoritism, enabling & cynical politics at every level? This is the reason why the men’s national team always sucks. I don’t ever see the USWNT team returning to prominence on a world stage. Other counties such as Sweden & China are far better organized at this point. The processes that have undermined the quality of women’s soccer run too deep in American society, and are also part of a global revolution to come.

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Orlando music & Ric Size influence

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Why does a huge sprawling metropolis like Orlando have no significant music scene? The biggest factor as to why there is no significant music scene in Orlando is Disney, which owns the town. Disney, like any powerful & ruthless corporation, seeks to eradicate all competition in its sphere. There is no way a creative & independent artistic movement will be allowed by Disney in Orlando. That’s part of Florida politics.

I lived around Central Florida for over 25 years. I arrived as a new resident from out-of-state as a practicing dentist, and became an independent musical artist. When I arrived in Orlando in late-summer 1994 as a fresh-out-of-school dentist, I was immediately besieged as a provider by constant requests/demands for oxycontin & Lortab for pain relief. Evidentially, Orlando was an early test market for huge pharmaceutical companies to dump opioids onto the market, creating legions of addicts overnight. No one taught us about this in dental school.

Drugs is what drove the mid-1990’s electronica rave scene in Orlando & elsewhere. This is when meth started becoming popular in the drug underworld, and as a practicing dentist I saw more than my share of meth mouth. It’s very tragic when you see a once-beautiful 19-year old husk in your chair, begging you to remove teeth in order to stop the pain. It’s even worse when they insist on narcotics for prescription-strength pain relief afterwards. Those CEO’s at Pfizer, J&J, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, etc, all made fortunes off the opioid epidemic they created, while healthcare providers in every field were stuck in the trenches dealing with this crap.

This, and all the problems it creates, is why so many providers have left healthcare since the COVID pandemic hit in early 2020. All the fields of healthcare have fallen under corporate control, where doctors, assistants & nurses no longer have control over their offices & patients. Today, it’s too expensive to compete with corporate, unless you are catering to the top 2%. That’s a tiny niche, but highly competitive. Most of the patient need (in medical & dental) is for ‘nuts & bolts’ care. This means: 1) proper exam & diagnosis; 2) preventive health procedures; and 3) basic care procedures. ‘Less is more’ in most cases.

You can see how this conflicts with our current corporate healthcare model, which emphasizes high-production & expensive elective procedures because they make the most profit. And when under-trained & unqualified providers don’t have good answers, they often write another prescription… No wonder America is so sick.

Back to Central Florida and its lack of a new music scene. This is where & what I came out of as an artist when I began writing songs in the late 1990’s. Orlando ‘music & arts’ is more correctly defined as a drug & party scene. It’s been dominated by drug-fueled LGBTQ+ activists long before I arrived.

The biggest Orlando rock band of that era was Matchbox 20, who relocated their home base to Atlanta after they broke through with “3 AM”. They did this because (as a straight rock band) they couldn’t get sustained local support from Orlando Weekly & Co. It’s mostly sniping, intrigue & backstabbing that drives their tabloids. Their identity politics today are widely despised.

So how did I overcome all this and make records? First, I was extremely fortunate to work with great people who really helped me and believed in the music. Jay Stanley was in Tabitha’s Secret, the name of Matchbox 20, just before they broke big. Jay had been amputated in the process. As my recording engineer & producer on Magnified (2012), he explained a lot of the Orlando music politics to me. Jay Stanley was forced to sue Matchbox 20 for songwriting credits to “3 AM.” which were worth millions of dollars in royalties.

Jay had won his legal case, and he had it made when we first met in Ocoee, FL in summer 2011. He had a great 2nd-story home studio, nice & private with everything we needed. We clicked right away, and together we blasted out all the songs– I sang & played all the guitars & harmonica, while Jay added electronic beats, studio effects & mixed. It was fast work & high-energy excitement the whole time. Both of us liked Magnified, and still stand by it. It’s a revolutionary rock album.

After shooting videos for “Mercury Rising” & “Talented” with local Lake County video producer Susan Cameron and her team at Wild Zebra Media in Tavares, FL, I had greater ambitions for my next album. Electrified! (2015) was to be a CD as well as a documentary essay film. Susan filmed, while I starred & directed. We edited & she produced it– as far as we got. We recruited as much local talent as we could, for as long as we could, and shot that fucker on a hope & prayer. I didn’t have the money to finish, or any possibility of major distribution, so the project collapsed at the end. Here’s the film, which still needs some editing & corrections, but it’s 98% finished.

Jay Stanley relocated to Apopka while I was working with Susan Cameron in Tavares. By the time I was ready to record my second album, he had just finished moving into his new house in the suburbs. Jay had converted the garage into his new studio, and I was his first client there. We has numerous sound & microphone issues, as you can imagine. We had barking dogs, along with an upset & needy girlfriend constantly interrupting the sessions. My management skills & patience were never more tested than during this period.

I had Tom Pearce on board with being my drummer. I wanted live drums this time, and Tom has no problem recording to a click track– which means he’s a real pro. Tom is a very sociable & likable fellow, in ways that I am not. Every veteran rock musician in the Orlando area seems to know who he is, because he’s drummed in many bands. Tom is a professional, so he does a lot of ‘fill-in’ gigs, where a band needs a drummer for a night or just a short time, for whatever reason.

What you learn from listening to people like Tom is that local live music is a community. Bands & their musicians are often interchangeable. Every singer-songwriter & guitarist is constantly looking for an upgrade, whether on drums or bass. It’s typically a fluid exchange of talent within a healthy music scene.

As I mentioned above, Orlando is just the opposite. Instead of healthy & thriving with creative energy, its juice has been sapped by drugs & cynical politics. In a word, Orlando is toxic. Remarkably, it is within this milieu that Tom Pearce was able to find & connect with the best rock musicians Orlando had to offer at the time.

On bass, Craig Roy is the best technical rock player in Central Florida. He has a sense of artistry that most professional bassists aren’t even aware exists.

Jessica Dauman (now Jessica Lynn Martens) was brought in for her violin. Her 2013 recording session only lasted an hour or so, and included “Anna Rex”, “Old Friends” & “Moneybug”. After “Anna Rex” became an underground internet sensation, particularly in the modeling community, Jessica earned a vocalist role on the FOX series Archer (2009-21), and also has worked with Kenny Loggins.

I required a real guitar player for “Tip of the Cap”, so I convinced a local two-bit redneck shitkicker I know named Bill Pelick to play for me. He did a great job, and then was willing to give it a whirl on “Just Because,” and it worked great. I’ll admit, this is one of my favorite tricks. I’ll invite someone in for one song, and then when that’s quickly done, I’ll say, “How about this song…?” That’s how records get finished.

One regret on Electrified! was that I didn’t ask Jessica to play on “Listen to the Woman”. What was I thinking?! Tom had everything else produced by mid-2015, but that song needed a woman’s voice, so he convinced Rachel Decker to add backing vocals. It was recorded on a laptop computer in my Mount Dora apartment. We actually has a better take a few weeks earlier, but Tom accidentally erased it. That’s how things went back then.

It took over two tears to finish Electrified!, from start to finish. After Jay recorded it, I decided to have Tom produce it. Of course, Jay didn’t like that, and there were hard feelings on all sides at the time, but today we’re cool. Tom has aptitudes that Jay & I lack. Tom is a drummer, an egghead & a computer whiz. He LIKES reading & learning all that technical sound science.

Tom took all the tracks which were recorded on Apple ProTools by Jay, and converted them to PC so he could work with better recording software. This, along with re-recording certain tracks, occupied Tom & me for two years. In October 2015, Electrified! was finally released online. I had already put the film online.

Since then, Tom & I have record live & acoustically. Hwy 19 & Main St (2015) was recorded in November in a tin shack at that location, and then Fully Covered (2016) in December/January. Over & Out (2017) was recorded in one session at my Mount Dora apartment in May of that year, also by Tom Pearce.

Tom then traveled to Sanford to record my last singles to date from 2019-2021. Bill Pelick & Rachel Decker each participated in a session. Both appear on “Patch Me Up Doc” & “Millennial Whoop”, Rachel on vocals & Bill on bass. Tom on drums & beats, also was the recording engineer & producer.

Tom Pearce also contributed mightily to the artwork for all of my projects from Hwy 19 & Main St, through the singles. He makes great suggestions and understands how to work creatively with a bold idea. He also knows when to set his ego aside, which is the mark of a great producer.

At the outset  of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, I self-recorded the Coronavirus Concerts (2020) on an Amazon Fire tablet in Sanford, FL, and released them as videos.  This was during the initial lockdowns, and well before any vaccines were available. The point was to prove a new & safe model for music recording & delivery during an uncontrolled viral pandemic.

I’ve used this career retrospective to illustrate many points. The title referred to the Orlando music scene, and that’s where I’ll conclude. When I say there is no significant new music scene in Orlando, that is a statement of fact. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t talented performers & artists who care. It means that the talent & creatively isn’t being allowed to flourish and there are material political reasons for that.

Artists & musicians need to stop isolating themselves and re-join the real world again. The real world works for its living, and in general it isn’t happy with its present compensation level. As long as musicians continue to endlessly party & get high, seeking only fame for themselves & vicarious pleasures at any cost, then they will continue to be isolated. They have nothing good to offer to humanity.

This downward spiral of despair & hopelessness can only be corrected when musicians & artists link together in solidarity. Hollywood writers & actors along with disenfranchised workers throughout the entertainment industry are now organizing & linking with teachers, autoworkers, UPS drivers, Amazon workers, etc. The entertainment industry can’t exist without all this coordinated labor. The current problem is that all the power is in the hands of corporate, backed by the state. Workers need to realize that THEY are the power. Without their labor, there is no economy.

Postscript: So where does Ric Size belong in the tradition of Florida rock music? While I love the Allman Brothers Band & Lynyrd Skynyrd, I’m probably closer to Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers as far as classic rockers go, but I’m not nearly as prolific. I’ve always considered myself a post-punk rocker, in the tradition of the Minutemen, Sonic Youth & Nirvana. Somewhere along the way I became a Trotskyist and it became revolution rock. You wouldn’t expect any of this to come from Central Florida, but that’s the story.

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Casino (1995), Martin Scorsese, and the American Mafia

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Casino (1995) is Martin Scorsese’s best film. The writer of an outline to his book-to-be, sold Scorsese on the idea. When word got out in the Hollywood trade magazines that Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Sharon Stone, etc, were involved in a new Scorsese film, that’s when real-life mobsters started opening up.

For example, according to Scorsese in his comments & extras to the film, Robert De Niro spent days with the mobster portrayed as Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein at his Florida home, getting him to tell stories about what happened in the Las Vegas underworld back then. De Niro tape recorded all the discussions which were invaluable in fleshing out the final script. All the names were changed in the film & book, but the essence of the story rings true.

When it all came together, Scorsese had a screenplay and was shooting before the original author had finished the book, which wouldn’t have been anywhere as interesting if it hadn’t been made into a movie first. I don’t know any other significant Hollywood film like that.

Casino has its flaws, primarily the glorification of the American mafia. All of Martin Scorsese’s mob films, from Mean Streets (1973) to The Irishman (2019), have a technical artistry that is marred by apologizing for violent criminal gangs which act as hidden parasites in the overall economy.

Waste management, construction, restaurants, the NY Port Authority, real estate, the police, etc, are areas the American mafia still exercises significant pernicious influence while skimming revenue & resources for itself. Mafia expertise in gambling, narcotics, prostitution, etc, ensures its eternal presence in management and in the trenches. Martin Scorsese never makes an attempt to add up these social costs from an everyday worker perspective.

To Scorsese, blue collar workers are dumb suckers meant to be exploited by his glorified mobsters. The sins of a mafia don can always be forgiven with an “Oh well” philosophy, that at least they tried for something great under American capitalism, emphasizing their spirit of entrepreneurship in their corruption, etc. These goombas ran casinos, they were big-shots! Better to live a short & glorious life of debauchery before dying in a pool of blood, than working hard and being honest. That’s for chumps.

It appears unlikely that Martin Scorsese has seriously read Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires by Selwyn Raab, first published in 2005, which is considered the definitive historical reference book on the subject. Raab documents a much different view of the American mafia from Scorsese.

In many ways, from Taxi Driver (1974) & Raging Bull (1980) through Goodfellas (1990) & Gangs of New York (2002), Scorsese keeps making the same movie. At minimum they’re very similar– same storylines, motifs, styling, and actors. The fact that gangsters contributed significantly in the creative process of making (what most consider) his best movie, says something. It means Martin Scorsese is void, artistically.

The bankruptcy of his ethics & political ideology limit him. Despite all his schooling & technical expertise in film-making, along with his experience & the resources made available to him, it mostly adds up to (what feels like) sequels that are sadistic, difficult to watch, and not rewarding on repeated viewings.

As Casino points out at the end in a De Niro voice-over, all the casinos & trade unions have now been corporatized, but mobster influence remains. Union bosses & apparatchiks have their share of goombas slurping up high-salary, no-show jobs & perks. Furthermore, whenever strikebreakers are needs to attack worker pickets and escort scabs across lines, that’s when the fascist thugs are brought in by corporate. The US government supports these attacks on workers, and always has.

So what does Martin Scorsese have to say to all the Hollywood writers & actors who are currently picketing for basic rights such as fair-pay-for-their-work & healthcare? Is Scorsese going to make a movie in a few years about how mobsters coordinated their goon-squad attacks on Hollywood writers & actors to break their strike? Personally, I’m not interested, because I’ve seen it already.

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Crypto security & securities

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According to The Hash on Coindesk, the next generation of crypto users want wallets that are easier-to-use & safer. Of course, this is impossible.

The risks of self-custody crypto wallets are user-error & hacks. The risk of crypto storage on a centralized exchange is FTX, etc. Do you feel lucky with Binance? The Hash recommends multi-signature cold wallets as best practice for crypto storage. To get into crypto, you need to be tech-savvy and know exactly what you are doing in every area, otherwise you’re a pigeon.

The SEC just announced their long-awaited lawsuit against Binance for (among other things) selling unregistered securities. Is crypto a security, as the SEC alleges? First, a few definitions. Commodities are basic goods produced by human labor which can be bought, traded or exchanged– such as grain, cotton, oil or gold. Securities are corporate wagers on yields & returns, such as stocks, bonds, derivatives, etc.

Crypto is a security with no legitimate use value, as it is a money laundering tool. Intelligence agencies & dictators around the world use crypto to fund their illicit activities, which gives bitcoin its hidden (but powerful) political support.

Warren Buffett represents a faction of US capitalism that sees the danger in crypto, defining it as, “rat poison squared.” Crypto is the most unstable ‘asset class’ because it really isn’t an asset. Venture capitalists poured into this Ponzi scheme for years, and then lost a bundle when FTX/Alameda collapsed last November. The entire crypto industry has essentially been on a knife’s edge since the Terra/Luna collapse of May 2022.

US banks have shut their doors to crypto since Silvergate, Signature & Silicon Valley Bank went under earlier this year, in the wake of the FTX bankruptcy. It is now widely recognized that the entire crypto market, from bitcoin to stable coins, is a fraud. That’s what the world learned in 2022, and it has created a permanent state-of-crisis for the entire crypto industry and the greater financial system.

There are ‘responsible’ old-guard capitalists such as Warren Buffett who advocate banning crypto entirely, and then there is Elon Musk who represents the new-age era of crypto billionaires. How everything works out politically (under capitalism) is that they both remain influential billionaires, while the rest of the world works harder to maintain this fiction.

That is the deeper meaning of all the anti-crypto rhetoric coming from Washington & the SEC these days, and then the hysterical responses from crypto fanatics. If your cyber-widget is listed on exchanges and its price goes up & down (causing people to make & lose money), while providing no use value to the greater population, then it’s a security.

There is no way the US government will protect people from crypto fraud, since its corporate-police-military-intelligence apparatus is so intimately tied into it. It is the working people of the world who must put an end to this crypto fraud. Crypto offers false hope, and is simply another capitalist gambling addiction. It’s message is: “Fuck the world & everything in it. Get as much for yourself by any means.” Does that sound like a future people want? These crypto libertarians just don’t care.

Bitcoin remains at ~$27K, despite the ‘crypto winter’. Crypto winter means it’s now very difficult to find new investors (suckers) of any wallet size. Bitcoin is being propped-up with hidden finance capital, because it is the most recognized crypto brand, with etherium & tether (top ‘stablecoin’) next on that list. These are the ‘assets’ which provides the CIA the means to funnel funds to fascists in Kiev, Al Qaeda in Syria, etc.

The recent US ‘debt ceiling’ debate was a politically stage-managed affair to force the working population to pay for all this militarization & fictionalization of the US economy. Permanent wars of aggression globally are the order of the day, with crypto/big bank bailouts as needed, and US workers & taxpayers are to foot the bill. The question becomes: At what point will the workers & youth revolt and what form will that take politically?

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Jets acquire HOF QB Aaron Rodgers from the Packers

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Monday evening, it was announced that the Green Bay Packers agreed to deal quarterback Aaron Rodgers and their 2023 first-round pick (No. 15) and a 2023 fifth-round pick (No. 170) to the Jets for New York’s 2023 first-round pick (No. 13), a 2023 second-round pick (No. 42), a 2023 sixth-round pick (No. 207) and a conditional 2024 second-round pick that becomes a first if Rodgers plays 65% of the plays this season.

This is a convoluted deal that doesn’t end until 2024 with a lot to unravel. In short, the Packers get a 2023 2nd-round pick, while swapping their 5th for the Jets 6th, etc. There was lots of haggling over the past months, but what we see in the final deal is that not much moved. The Jets were offering a 2nd-round pick and likely a 4th-round pick, while the Packers needed to get more. They only way that was going to happen was by getting conditional picks based on Aaron Rodgers’ performance with the Jets. The excessive haggling in the exchange of picks is a way of making the return for Aaron Rodgers look bigger than it really is from a Packers’ standpoint.

The conditional 2024 pick depends on Aaron Rodgers staying healthy & playing all season, and it’s the best the Packers could do with the mess they created for themselves. In essence, the Packers have to give the Jets their blessing in this deal, in the hopes of maximizing their return in the form of a 1st round pick in 2024. Meanwhile, Aaron Rodgers & the Jets will be trying to win a Super Bowl. Give Aaron Rodgers credit for protecting himself after the Packers moved up to draft Jordan Love in 2020. He played a tough situation beautifully.

There seems to be very little appreciation for what Aaron Rodgers did for the Packers among the Lambeau faithful. Players are never perfect, even though this is what fans often expect. Serious fans embrace their stars (warts & all) because they are rare and in the end it’s about winning. For whiners & complainers, that’s never enough. So to them, welcome to 5-12 for awhile, give or take a win or two.

The Packers ominously lost to the Vikings to start 2022. A dropped opening 75-yd TD pass loomed over their season. They responded by winning three straight before hitting the skids losing 7 of 8 games. At that point, Aaron Rodgers was the only one who still believed the 4-8 Packers could make the playoffs and stated it to the press. The Packers responded by winning 4 straight to put themselves in position to make the playoffs with a home win over the Lions in Week 18. Every Packers fan saw that result and felt the disappointment of all hope draining away. Every Packers fan felt that if they could’ve beaten the Lions then they could’ve made a run in the playoffs— woulda, coulda, shoulda.

But realize it was #12 that gave everyone that hope. He couldn’t deliver, largely because the Packers didn’t have #17, etc. The lying part about Packers management is their not admitting to Aaron Rodgers (and the public generally) that their plan has been Jordan Love in 2023 ever since they traded-up to draft him in 2020. Aaron Rodgers was the first to understand this.

Lying & deceptive management really cost the Packers here. Since their ‘secret’ plan was to go with Jordan Love all along, they should have kept Davante Adams and let Aaron Rodgers go (or traded him) last off-season. Davante Adams would have likely stayed for a quick rebuild, and everyone in the organization would be on the same page. Instead, Packers’ management wasted 2 MVP seasons from a HOF QB by planning for the future instead of trying to win it all when they had a chance. Special teams was particularly an Achilles heel.

The fact is the Packers never had a great player to galvanize their defense after Charles Woodson departed. Brett Favre had Reggie White. The Packers missed an opportunity to get J.J. Watt when he left the Texans a few years back. That’s the kind of difference-making player the Packers needed to get past the 49ers/Rams/Bucs. Just when a bold move was required for winning, Packers management was positioning itself for the upcoming rebuild.

Beyond this, Packers special teams were atrocious in Rodgers’ final years. Blocked punts & kicks, fumbled returns, allowing big returns, missed extra points, penalties, etc. That final playoff loss at Lambeau to the 49ers, which turned on a blocked punt, was emblematic & inevitable. It defies reason & credibility to blame this mismanagement on the QB, but it’s the easiest thing to do. Where’s the organizational accountability?

Many NFL fans are front-runners by nature. Do hardcore Packers fans realize how many ambivalent NFL fans just signed up with the Jets and how many they just lost? That’s a sad day for any organization. It hurts in all respects. The Packers entire future is now hinged on Jordan Love and there are unrealistic expectations which isn’t fair, inviting failure. If this kid isn’t the next Patrick Mahomes or Jalen Hurts, he’s a disappointment. This is all on management, not Aaron Rodgers.

Sat 29 Apr 2023 3:30 PM CDT

Packers fans are numb right now, so this draft is like, “Yeah, whatever.” The Packers, who have been in existence for over a hundred years and have more wins than any other NFL franchise, just traded way their most valuable player ever. Why? Because management never established a real relationship with Aaron Rodgers. Stars come with their baggage, which must be MANAGED, as no human is perfect. When it was time for Tom Brady to leave the Patriots, he did so quietly & gracefully with the blessing of the entire organization and their fan base. That’s because Bill Belichick had a relationship with him. None of that happened with Packers management & Aaron Rodgers.

My analysis of the situation is that Aaron Rodgers wanted to finish his career in GB, but Packers management had other plans. I understand most Packers fans disagree with that assessment, but I stand by it. I say that most Packers fans are too emotional to get this, because football is such an emotional game. But it’s also a business, which means there will always be people in ownership & management who want to run things their way, no matter the cost. That problem doesn’t go away until it’s handled.

Another disappointment in this trade is that Packers fans were looking for closure, and they haven’t got it. The conditional draft pick in 2024 ties the Packers to Aaron Rodgers for at least two-thirds of next season. It was bad enough they had to deal him, but they needed to finish it cleanly. Two 2nd-round picks in 2023 were the best they were going to get from the Jets, and that’s what they should have settled on, so they could move on. Instead, Packers management mucked it up again, and no one in Packerland is happy with this deal. I understand that everyone gets to keep their job until the season starts, but when the product on Lambeau Field pales to what it has been for the past 30 years, Packers fans are going to demand accountability in the front office. I’m merely articulating what most Packers fans are thinking and afraid to say.

Obviously the 2023 season is all about quarterback development for the Packers. It starts with preventing Jordan Love from getting too injured, too quickly. Concussions need to be a red flag. DON’T be like the Dolphins with Tua Tagovailoa. Jordan Love’s situation will probably be similar to Justin Fields with the Bears the past few years where he’s been running for his life most of the time.

All this begs the question, “Who’s the Packers backup QB?” Smart game-planning combined with an adequate backup option, can prevent a team from wrecking its young quarterback. From what I’ve seen from current Packers management, I’m skeptical they can do this.

Who is the Packers backup QB in case Jordan Love gets hurt? I can see the headlines now: “Love Hurts”. A washed-up starter would’ve been ideal for the Packers in 2023, but unfortunately they’ve all been signed. Unless they get creative with a trade or pull off some magical late free-agent signing, the Packers are going low cost on this which is risky.

As a final point. It’s ridiculous that only one team was in on Aaron Rodgers. What the hell are the Vikings, Colts, Commanders, etc, doing? This collective stupidity made the Packers situation much worse. Some people call it “collusion” but since these owners & executives all talk to each other regularly and it’s reported, it’s considered to be out in the open, so it’s more accurately understood as typical ownership/management stupidity.

There are always a minority number of franchises that are hapless and don’t know how to seriously compete. This is true in all sports, but most profoundly in the NFL. Too much owner/management stupidity is what allowed Aaron Rodgers to go to the Jets on their terms. It was Packers management (& their fans) who got squeezed. Packers management having no meaningful relationship with their franchise superstar made this drawn out divorce all the more messy & painful, with a bitter aftertaste that lingers.

Post Script: Sunday April 30, 11:30 AM CDT

In the NFL at any given time there are only a handful of franchises who know what they are doing. The Patriots, Chiefs, 49ers, Rams, Bucs & Eagles are among today’s teams. The Bills, Bengals, Jets & Giants are legitimately trying to get there. The rest include the (relatively few) up & comers (Lions), the perennial flakes (Vikings, Cowboys, etc), and the hapless (Bears, Jags, etc) to some degree or another. With Aaron Rodgers at the end the Packers were always somewhere in between, below this top tier while above the second. The NFC North has been by far the weakest division in the past 20 years, meaning with a healthy HOF QB the Packers easily dominated most seasons. Now they will be hapless. The Packers desperately need the right veteran backup so Jordan Love survives 2023. If Packers management is serious about what they are doing, then impress us skeptics by addressing this.

Aaron Rodgers has been remarkably durable over his career, only getting hurt enough not to play, twice. There’s only one Brett Favre. In 2013 the Packers were 5-2 when Aaron Rodgers went down against the Bears. They finished 8-7-1 and lost to the 49ers in the Wild Card. The Pack were 4-1, when #12 broke his clavicle against the Vikings in 2017. That season they finished 7-9 with a cast of nobodies at QB, when there was a free agent available who could have helped, but Packers management (like all the rest), blackballed Colin Kaepernick. That blacklisting was collusion. Following media reports from ESPN which stated Colin Kaepernick’s settlement was in the range of $60-80M, the former 49ers QB and teammate DB Eric Reid received less than $10M total from the NFL settlement, as reported by the WSJ in 2019.

The final take home lesson here is that you can’t naively believe the NFL’s reporting or the narratives promoted by any of their teams, from ESPN down to the local news, because it’s almost all fake. There are analytics sites with stats (old school & advanced) to help you figure things out if you need that help. Whatever metrics you use, it’s inferences & conclusions should match reality. Packers reporting on Aaron Rodgers has been filled with misdirections, deflections, petty criticisms & throwing their star QB under the bus. If you buy this, then you’ve been duped. Please seek help.

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Election 2024: the civil war election– a preview

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For a Trotskyist theorist, the task is to be on the cutting edge of historical events with the most precise analysis & revolutionary insights. History is being written every day, so Marxists use historical materialism in their analysis of events. Dialectics is the science of change & revolution. Only the wisest become historical materialist Marxists. The dialecticians in this group are the theorists.

For instance, Patrick Martin of the WSWS analyzed the 2018 US elections and noticed a remarkable increase in former military & intelligence candidates for Congress as Democrats. This was when all the media hype was about AOC & her squad on the fake left supposedly getting ready to take over the Democratic Party and be its future. Patrick Martin dismissed that fake left nonsense and theorized this right-wing militarist caucus was to be of decisive importance for them and thus branded them as CIA Democrats. Trotskyists have since used that correct political definition of this right-wing shift in the Democratic Party. CIA Democrats are all pro-war & pro-police, and so are AOC & Bernie Sanders, which is why Trotskyists correctly refer to them as the pseudo-left.

The value of the Marxist definition of the CIA Democrats is that it precisely explains everything. Everything in the bourgeois media is meant to confuse the masses and it is precisely targeted to your computer or device. It’s streaming live audio & video 24/7 365 to the NSA and the rest of the intelligence/military/police apparatus. We’ve known this ever since 2013, when Edward Snowden gave it to Wikileaks. Today, Julian Assange is still in a London maximum security prison, mostly in solitary confinement. He was abducted by the UK police at the behest of US intelligence & the White House in April 2019 because he told the world the truth.

Since then, things have gotten worse everywhere. A novel coronavirus pandemic which started as a wildlife-human crossover in a Wuhan wet market in late 2019, has now become a forever pandemic. Best estimates are over 20 million dead globally, over a million in the US, and these are acknowledged in the scientific literature to be vast undercounts. Excessive deaths are 50-100% higher than these mortality figures which have been skewed down to minimize the human impact of ‘let it rip’ pseudo-science in politics.

For those who don’t die, Long COVID remains, which means COVID-19 is going to be with us until we unite as a planet to stamp out this highly contagious & infectious virus. It’s possible to do this in 2-3 months with a globally-coordinated effort led by science. The capitalist markets will never allow this, so they must be overthrown. If this coronavirus is allowed to spread unchecked & mutate globally, in 30 years no one will be healthy enough to work anymore. The futures for COVID under capitalism are scary as they indicate that a virus is smarter than humans.

Humanity has to do better in applying science & rationality to every significant problem we face– political, economic & social. There’s too much stupidity & bad behavior that goes entirely unpunished because of privilege & inequality. This only emboldens the most reactionary layers to act even worse. History teaches us this is how world wars begin.

Both fascist Republicans & CIA Democrats want to start WW3. Joe Biden & his rabid anti-communists have their war with Russia in the Ukraine already. The MAGA fascists would prefer WW3 to start in China. Trotskyists reject this madness of MAD, and oppose an international perspective of worker revolution to take power out of the hands of the capitalists and organize a new & equal society on a socialist basis. This means abolishing the police, military & intelligence apparatus. The banks, corporate media & industries need to fall under worker control to have any progressive possibility. As it is under capitalist ownership & management these essential institutions are parasites.

Obviously, none of these realities can be uttered in the corporate media from NPR & CNN to FOX & Breitbart. All these tendencies share common traits: political ignorance, laziness & dishonesty. They all have talking points they stick to firmly, and have no flexibility or chops outside of their pampered bubbles. They embrace the fake media because it validates them.

Crypto is the libertarian expression of this intellectual & ideological poverty. None of the crypto geeks can explain its use value except in terms of laundering money & tax evasion. The FTX collapse in November 2022 led directly to the global banking crisis that has set upon us since Silvergate Bank collapsed & vanished earlier this month. Silvergate was all-in on crypto, and so was Signature Bank.

Silicon Valley Bank was over-leveraged in the bond market, which has collapsed since the Fed started raising interest rates for the first in 15 years. Both markets, crypto & US treasuries, relied on free money from the Fed. As soon as it gets cut off, these banks, venture capitalists, hedge funds, etc, are finished because they are so indebted as bond holders and/or they hold useless crypto– see Elon Musk.

It’s very important to take all this into account when analyzing & theorizing about Election 2024 being the civil war election. First thing to understand is that it’s already started. What have coming in 2024 is a reversed-role re-run of 2020, which sucked– as did 2016. Two right-wing candidates in reversed roles, with the CIA Democrats as the incumbent in the form of a senile & frothing anti-communist and Wall Street pillar, while the Nazis have Trump.

Trump consumed the Republican Party in 2015-16, and then spat it out on January 6, 2021. There is nothing remaining on the right that can compete with Trump, he is their fuhrer. Being from Florida, I can tell you Ron DeSantis doesn’t have a chance against Trump, and that’s why there is a fake campaign to take the Donald out of the running. That’s what the Stormy Daniels sex & hush money scandal is about. It will fail (it’s designed to fail), just as the MeToo campaign shipwrecked itself during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings in Sept/Oct 2018.

Donald Trump led the January 6, 2021 insurrection on the Capitol building where US Congress was going through the formality of certifying the 2020 election, which was their Constitutional duty. Hoards of well-coordinated & armed fascists overwhelmed Capitol police as Donald Trump & his coup plotters refused to send them help. Trump was helping the fascist barbarians. When this plan failed, Trump immediately pivoted to pressuring Republicans to vote “No” on impeachment in the hearings that immediately followed in January 2021. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell caved to Trump, cowardly fearing the backlash from his fascist supported if he didn’t.

Since then, no Republican or fake left Democrat has seriously challenged Donald Trump by insisting he be arrested & prosecuted for plotting a fascist coup to overthrow the US Constitution and establish himself as dictator. That’s against the law, and a most-serious felony offense. But the Democrats think a stale sex scandal makes a better case, and that’s why Trump is free to run for US President again in 2024, where he will surely defeat Joe Biden. The liberal Democrats & college kids aren’t going to come out for Biden in 2024, and that’s enough to swing it to Trump in the key states he needs to win the Electoral College.

What happens in the weeks after Tuesday, November 5, 2024 can be generally theorized as follows. No matter which side wins, the other side will not accept the result as legitimate. This all started in Florida in 2000, which ended in the Supreme Court voting 5-4 for Bush. Hanging chads, butterfly ballots, uncounted ballots, etc, were hyped to death, but never rationally explained. The Republicans stole that election, and most people didn’t know it, and still don’t. The Democrats made sure of that. The shock & awe of 9/11 came shortly after, and the US political landscape has shifted far-right ever since.

Election 2016 was pathetic, as Democrat front-runner Hillary Clinton was handed a rigged nomination, then lost to Donald Trump in November. She graciously accepted defeat early and hasn’t been heard from since, but her influence is still there. Hillary Clinton is the Black Hand behind the MeToo campaign, featuring Pussy Riot as agents of US intelligence.

I was the first to say fascism won election 2016, the night it happened, and also the first to identify the ‘MeToo campaign’ as a right-wing attack from the CIA Democrats. Its punk protégées were Pussy Riot. These fake rock phonies & CIA stooges never performed live or made any real music, but they do do NFT drops to fund-raise crypto to send to neo-Nazis in Kiev in the name of freeing Russia.

When Putin outed Pussy Riot as foreign agents a few years back on New Years Eve, this Trotskyist theorist was vindicated. The music business’ tie-in to state propaganda is always murky, but this is murky murky. Pussy Riot was a totally fake band (art collective, protest activists, etc) recruited & created by the CIA and hyped as real. They had an AllMusic biography & discography for years presenting them as a legitimate punk rock band. All fake. Since being outed as agents, AllMusic changed (updated?) all the Pussy Riot pages on their site.

Election 2020 was the worst US election ever. No real choice anywhere on the ballot. Just CIA Democrats & Nazis. Anyone with any kind of political sense knows that 2024 is portending to be an even bigger shit-show. It’s lesser-of-two-evilism, a political myopia, that compels so many despairing & politically disoriented people into voting for their favored party of capitalist exploitation without understanding these charlatans are really their class enemies. There’s simply too many clueless old folks who vote either Democrat or Republican and will do so every two years until they die. They can’t be appealed to under the strait-jacket of their two-party mentality because that’s all they know. They mostly need to be retired or put in hospice and get out of serious politics.

Serious politics means revolution. It’s going to be the working masses & the disenfranchised youth that intervene with a Trotskyist program to lead humanity out of this quagmire I’ve just outlined. If we don’t get serious NOW, then Nazis will surely take political power again, and they will never relinquish it until they’ve unleashed all their ugliness, hatred & venom upon humanity & our planet.

Liberals are too lazy & intellectually bankrupt to come up with any serious answers to any serious question, so avoid the DSA, Greens & Bernie in 2024. The Nazis are always ready to fight, in fact that’s what they prefer to do. MAGA fascists want Trump because he’s a perceived leader who enables their racist/homophobic pathological rage.

This is only 2-3% of the total US population, and surely no more than 5%, but they are very dangerous because they are being incubated & emboldened. CIA Democrats & Republican Nazis have created this sick society because it provides them the shock troops needed to attack the working class. They will be unleashed in 2024, and the working class better organize and be ready for them, otherwise… well, we have history to teach us valuable lessons here.

In November 1923, Adolph Hitler led his Beer Hall Putsch, which failed badly and he went to prison where he wrote his racist diatribe Mein Kampf. In January 1933, Hitler was handed the chancellorship of Germany as the Wiemar Republic was in its death throes, under an insurmountable weight of WW1 debt & global economic depression. The choice to the rulers of Germany were either revolution or fascism, and they chose Hitler. Joe Biden & the CIA Democrats will surely do the same thing with Trump in 2024 when push comes to shove.

So that’s what to expect politically in 2024 if there is no organized intervention from the working class. By this I mean mass strikes, economic shutdowns, and increased worker militancy with political class consciousness. This is what is happening across Europe & the Middle East right now in France, Germany, Israel, etc, and it’s coming to the US soon. The decisive question will be Trotskyist leadership within the working class ranks.

The Fed’s policy of raising interest rates is a ruling class strategy to induce a global recession and quell labor cost demands. In other words, the puppet masters want to unemploy tens & even hundreds of millions of workers to create a larger available labor pool, which reduces labor costs. The problem is, the banks & volatile tech industries such as crypto are hyper-sensitive to interest rate increases, necessitating taxpayer bailouts for them into eternity. This is being hidden from the public.

The fake economy is collapsing under mountains of unpayable debt, but it wants to keep plunging. There’s a pathological element of addictive gambling in play among the ruling elites. This aggression can not be allowed to stand, and must be met with a politically armed & united international working class with a socialist program.

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Sy Hersh strikes again!

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China, which buys 20-25% of Saudi Arabia’s vast oil output, just made a secret deal to pay in yen– instead of US dollars. Joe Biden, the US Treasury/Fed, Exxon/Mobil, etc, don’t like that. What does the Sunni kingdom of Saudi Arabia get out of this? China’s capitalist-Stalinist regime gets the Shiite Iranian regime to cease its support for the separatist Houthis, thus ending the war in Yemen. I’m not hearing about this anywhere in the fake media.

Sy Hersh predicts a dismal summer & autumn for Europe, with the consequences falling on Joe Biden’s head. His rabid anti-communism is what started & escalated the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, with help from Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan & Victoria Nuland. Biden desperately wanted to win the war in Ukraine, and lock-up the renomination & a second term. Sy Hersh predicts the failure in Ukraine will cost Joe Biden the Democratic party nomination in 2024. As Wikileaks revealed in 2016 (and we saw again in 2020), the Democrat’s nomination process for US president is rigged, so we’ll see.

Election 2024 will be the Civil War election. Neither bourgeois side will accept defeat, especially the MAGA fascists. It’s up to workers & youth to organize under the banner of international socialism by forming workplace & neighborhood committees to protect & defend the interests of the toilers in the face of economic & fascist assaults from the capitalist elites. Only revolutionary socialism can save the day, so read the World Socialist Web Site and join the Trotskyists!

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The NCAA Tournament & NIL rights

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The NCAA Tournament is more random than ever. This is because all the best high-school ballers either skip college, train in Europe, or are one-and-done. The game isn’t as good as it was from say 1979 through the mid 1990’s. When Shaq left LSU after his sophomore season, after he would have been the #1 overall pick after his freshman year, it seismically shifted the NBA draft standard for college kids.

Today, to win in the NCAA Tournament a team must grow through experience to play well TOGETHER when it matters most. Experienced teams with low seedings now make more Elite 8 & Final 4 runs. Miami was a good example in 2022. Virginia coached by Dick Bennett when they won it, etc. Please note that much of this pertains to women’s hoops too. It used to be a #1 or #2 seed was pretty-much guaranteed to make the Sweet 16. Not so anymore.

Smaller conferences have gotten more competitive, while the bigger conferences (blue bloods) suffered most from the talent drain. NIL rights changed everything too. If a state has laws passed for NIL rights, they ignore all NCAA rules.

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Crypto contagion triggers global banking crisis

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To those who say crypto was just a bystander in this now global banking collapse, they are lying. Crypto is entirely fake, and was the trigger for this banking meltdown. Crypto has been in meltdown mode since Terra/Luna last May, then FTX last November. Banks that were heavily involved in crypto are now the first to go under, which has set off an industry panic and crisis of confidence in big banking.

The greater issue of the insolvency of the big banks, who all hold devalued treasury bonds, has been caused by the same policy that crashed crypto– a decade of free money followed by a sharp interest rate rise by the Federal Reserve. There is a connection there.

The EU (and everyone else) follow from the US Fed, since dollars are the international exchange currency and have been since the end of WW2. But increasingly, dollar dominance is being called into question by many different interests, particularly the government of China, hence the constant US propaganda campaign to demonize China & embolden fascist racist filth.

What we are witnessing now is a complete breakdown of the post-war monetary system. The Bretton Woods system of US dominance was established in 1945, by the winners. Richard Nixon took the US off the gold standard in 1971, because Fort Knox was running out of gold to convert into dollars at $35/ounce. Since then, all currencies float against the US dollar. All international settlements, particularly oil, are done in dollars. This is what makes the US dollar almighty.

Stagflation of the 1970’s, then Fed chairman Paul Volcker’s interest rate hikes in the 1980’s, which reached nearly 20%, enriched banks. Big corporations even started their own lines of credit cards to cash in for themselves. It was the best of times to be rich, as Reagan/Bush are revered for their conservatism on issues like global warming, and their enthusiasm for corporate & banking deregulation, etc.

In 1987, the first stock market crash in America’s post-war era (which took every bourgeois economist by surprise) established the “Fed put”, which ensured a taxpayer bailout for any bank or corporation deemed “too big to fail.” Timeline ahead: Asian tiger crash in 1998, dot com crash in 2001, and then the big one– the sub-prime mortgage collapse in 2008. All caused by corporate criminality. All the big fish got bailed out.

By 2010, the Fed started printing money and gave it away to all its cronies for over a decade. Every other central bank in the world followed suit. By the end of 2021, after a few abortive attempts (Dec 2020 – March 2021, most notably) at quantitative tightening, the Fed has taken a hard line on raising interest rates to induce a recession and quell workers wage demands.

Inflation is caused by massively increasing the supply of money, without having the economic fundamentals to back it. By ‘economic fundamentals’ I mean, actual (real world) use value. The Fed, Wall Street, the White House & US Congress all believe that inflation is caused by workers’ wages going up. That’s the class war that’s always raging underneath the fake news.

With capitalism in its speculative death throes, crypto has emerged as the libertarian answer to the international currency question. As far a being real money, you can buy lots of black market things with bitcoin. Things you can’t do with crypto include: pay rent, pay credit card, pay taxes… pay for a Big Mac. It simply has no value to the vast majority, and therefore must be abolished.

Trotskyists are the only ones who have taken this intolerant policy towards crypto from the start. The SEC, DOJ, & White House have now pivoted to an anti-crypto policy since the Silvergate Bank collapse less than two weeks ago.

Slivergate CEO Alan Lane, second from right, rings the New York Stock Exchange opening bell before his bank’s IPO begins trading, on Nov. 7, 2019.

There’s been lots of talk about making depositors whole, making sure small businesses can make payroll, etc, in the wake of these US bank collapses, triggered by crypto’s meltdown. Everyone knows the FDIC guarantees accounts up to $250,000. For businesses with more than that, there is the Deposit Insurance Fund, which is a privately-owned, industry-sponsored insurance program.

The DIF’s purpose is to 1) insure bank accounts over $250K, and 2) resolve failed banks. If crypto start-ups like Circle ($3.3B in SVB) didn’t hedge with DIF and can’t make their payroll, etc, then the CEOs of these companies need to pay out of their own pockets– or else go bankrupt. Poor risk-management is on the CEO/CFO, and NOT the responsibility of the US taxpayers.

Why didn’t these smart tech companies with million$ & billion$ in venture capital money have a DIF policy to protect against a bank collapse? Corporate Leadership 101– FAIL. NO bank bailouts!

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