American Despotism

While not every member of the neoliberal order, which still employs well-intentioned bureaucrats, has agreed to support a despotic agenda, the regime’s character forces one to draw certain conclusions. Many neoliberals aspired to a global aristocracy, magnificent men and women flipping quarters to grateful peasants. Oligarchs brokered the outsourcing of U.S. industry in return for financial control under the dollar, even as they engineered technologies for a new information age. But today’s globalist American empire is a kleptocracy filled with princelings of the political and corporate elite who inherited—and now drain—the wealthiest and most powerful empire in history. It consolidates market share and outsources its technologies to foreign companies for its private benefit. It despotically introduces a permanent state of exception to the law to rule in its own interests. In fear of the subjects off whom it feeds, it assigns legal identities to groups to determine their privileges.

In this civil war between Western whites, the kleptocrats claim science’s authority to subdue the populace, and they enlist an identity politics priesthood to stoke racial hatred against middle-class whites, who suffer indignities, humiliations, and loyalty tests. Following the COVID lockdowns and unlawful 2020 election, the last vestige of legitimacy has collapsed, and the kleptocracy has revealed itself as an incompetent, corrupt class of degenerates. In their palaces at the center of a rotting kingdom, the despots surround themselves with harems, catamites, and vicious eunuchs to administrate a world of performance rituals and sadomasochistic fantasies even as their people and world hegemony decline.

The Globalist American Empire and the Kleptocracy

One can assess the globalist American empire using a classical framework. To be self-sufficient and thus unify a people and secure its happiness, a political regime requires agriculture (farmers), industry (engineers, artisans, and laborers), defense (soldiers and police trained in the arts of war), taxation (wealthy bankers and financiers to plan revenue and monetary policy and to fund public projects, private business, and war), care of religion (priests to manage the sacrifices, counsel the rulers, and educate the youth), and institutions for determining justice (political leaders to determine the public interest and what is necessary and expedient). As the United States abandoned republicanism for the welfare-warfare state and then began outsourcing its production, government-sponsored oligopolies assumed these functions.

Agencies manage and work with private business in each fiefdom, for example, in agriculture, food, and manufacturing (15.8 percent of GDP, 22 million jobs). The regime is guided by finance, which, along with insurance and real estate (8.8 million jobs), constitutes 20 percent of GDP. It is defended by a warrior class (military and intelligence agencies, spending one trillion per year, 4 percent of GDP, 2.8 million jobs). The priests of body and soul—health care (19.7 percent of GDP, twenty million jobs) and public education (5 percent of GDP, 11.2 million jobs)—claim the authority to define life and instruct the youth in “equity.” Finally, a ruling class uses the federal government (including contract and grant employees, 9.1 million jobs, 6 percent of the nation’s workforce), which provides 30 percent of state and local governments’ revenue (employing 7 million).

The information, media, and entertainment industries (6.9 percent of GDP, 1.87 million jobs) supply its propaganda and censorship and direct the leisure and moral indoctrination of subjects and their children. Depending on other nations for its consumption, the empire must expand its control over the world at the cost of faction at home and endless wars abroad. As the producing nations become self-sufficient, the empire must increasingly rely on openly coercive financial and military measures.

The upper echelons of the ruling class come from wealthy cosmopolitans (as opposed to the rich in rural areas), those in the top .01 percent (about 23,000 individuals, or .007 percent of the population worth over $10 million) who control each fiefdom, limit access to its ranks, and jockey for political influence and benefits. Almost 25 percent of those in the Forbes 400 derived their wealth from finance, especially hedge funds and private equity, which grows faster than the economy, while 15 percent came from technology companies and 10 percent from food and beverage. While the Rothschild, Walton, Koch, and Mars families manage and maintain their wealth, a significant number of the Fortune 400, such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Dorsey, rose through skills in the technologies that have globalized and enhanced business growth.

But one cannot simply look at profits. Wealth guarantees political influence but not political power—it is necessary but not sufficient. The wealthy seek to retain control of their fiefdoms by funding political initiatives, buying off politicians, and developing and maintaining close ties with the decision-makers who craft and enforce the rules they agree to play by. They must participate in the political framework shaped by a narrow class of insiders, the ruling class properly speaking, which uses wealth to gain and maintain political power.

3,000 Tyrants

While each fiefdom helps preserve the order and negotiates for its privileges, at the center are the 3,000 tyrants, a ruling class of kleptocrats who ally with, stroke, tax, or intimidate the monopolies they secure. It controls more than half of the nation’s industrial and banking assets and more than three-quarters of its insurance assets. These few thousand individuals, writes Thomas Dye, control the media and investment firms and “over half of all the assets of private foundations and two-thirds of all private university endowments. They direct the nation’s largest and best-known law firms in New York and Washington, as well as the nation’s major civic and cultural organizations. They make the largest political campaign contributions. They occupy key federal government positions in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.”

The ruling class is best understood as the hub that uses gatekeeping power to connect segmented fiefdoms. Those at the top are driven by ambition and rise by charisma, manipulation, and duplicity. Some, like George Soros, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Charles Koch, Tom Steyer, Larry Fink, and Warren Buffet openly purchase political influence for both profits and policies like open borders and outsourcing.

Billionaires like Zuckerberg, Koch, Soros, and Bloomberg have created “new activist models of political involvement that combine electioneering, issue advocacy, and philanthropy. They pursue influence through interlocking networks of foundations, grassroots organizations, tax-exempt groups, and super PACs.” Political elites—think the likes of Barack Obama, Mitch McConnell, John Kerry, the Clinton and Bush families—often depend on wealthy donors for their rise to power. But, when powerful enough, they gain independence from them.

“Annoyed and bored” with Soros, who gave economic lectures but little money, Obama told his campaign organizers, “If we don’t get anything out of him, I’m never f—ing sitting with that guy again.” To strengthen their power, the kleptocrats intermarry, guard their connections, and nepotistically secure positions for trusted friends and family, for whom they broker billion-dollar deals (the McConnells in China, the Bidens in Ukraine), often with foreign oligarchs, and hide the money in offshore accounts. Their greatest secret is each fiefdom’s internal operations: not just buying off bureaucrats and public officials but accomplishing anything in a nebulous fiefdom like the Pentagon or evading or passing investigations by the SEC, or accessing and using political operatives in the intelligence agencies.

The ruling class wields executive force to protect, milk, and extort the rest of the top 0.1 percent and offer it the cover of legitimacy. It secures billions in government contracts with pharmaceutical and defense contractors, from which it taps profit and influence. Every industry regulation provides kleptocrats information for insider trading (even while banning it). Using the myths of free markets and private corporations, kleptocrats spy on enemies and launder political favoritism through interconnected government monopolies. “Three companies control about 80% of mobile telecoms. Three have 95% of credit cards. Four have 70% of airline flights within the U.S.” Amazon controls more than 50 percent of online retail, while it receives a $1.46 subsidy from the federal government per package and more than $3.7 billion in government subsidies.

READ MORE HERE