America Is Already Great; Its Leadership Class Is Not

This is Essay #2 in the series Truth Be Told.

I generally avoid juggling lit sticks of dynamite, i.e. addressing MAGA (Make America Great Again), but this juncture in history obligates me to make a few points now, despite the risks of outrage.

1. America and its hard-working people are already great, and never stopped being great. They don't need to be "made great again."

2. America's self-serving Leadership Class--those in power--has failed the nation and its people. By Leadership Class I mean the class of people who have authority / power in every sector of the economy and society, not just in the political realm but in academia, what passes for America's intelligentsia, technology, corporate America, energy, media, finance, banking, foreign policy, manufacturing, defense--every sector.

This class has mastered the artifice of pantomiming leadership, not real leadership, to cloak their sole real goal, which is self-enrichment and the consolidation of their personal wealth and power. This pantomime of leadership is what I term The Big Con, which boils down to this:

Telling us what we want to hear--the con man's core technique--so they can stripmine us without restraint.

What we want to hear are cliches of restoring greatness lost to the corruption and greed of our Leadership Class and a grab-bag of other sappy, hollow cliches--I feel your pain, Hope and Change, peace with honor, innovation, increasing shareholder value and so on, an endless spew of phony PR slogans designed to con us into thinking their self-serving actions are actual leadership rather than artifices of self-enrichment cloaked in PR finery.

These hokey cliches are hyped by $100 million campaigns funded by the rich and powerful cronies of the self-serving Leadership Class to make sure they stay in power so they can make the rich and powerful even richer and more powerful, all at the expense of hard-working Americans who are losing ground every day.

Consider one example among many: how many leaders in academia devoted their prodigious intelligence and energy to slashing their institution's bloated bureaucracies that contribute nothing to actual learning to reduce the cost of attending their university by 50%?

The answer: none. Higher Education leaders feasted on the hundreds of billions of dollars of "free money" funded by student loans, a modern-day version of indentured servitude, funding lavish buildings and other fripperies, padding their own already-stupendous paychecks and pensions, "investing" in PR about the value of their education rather than actually making sure their students learned anything of actual value.

This pantomime of leadership--The Big Con--masking the zealous pursuit of self-enrichment is visible in every nook and cranny of America. The pantomime--self-glorifying theatrics, overblown visions of techno-paradise, threadbare cliches reworked in a hundred ways to distract and lull the populace--is now so pathetically obvious and absurdly excessive that it's a self-parody, a comic book version of leadership.

Real leaders demand sacrifices of the rich and powerful to serve the national interest and the shared interests of the citizenry. Real leaders don't stage an elaborate pantomime of leadership to cloak their self-enrichment and their ceaseless efforts to further enrich their campaign contributors / cronies.

The moral rot of America's Leadership Class has now reached a self-reinforcing terminal spiral. The rot started two generations ago, and has now reached the point where the corruption, avarice and the stripmining of the populace are not even recognized for what they really are, they're now just BAU--business as usual.

Foreign policy is now guided not by national interest but by what I call The Imperial Project, which boils down to expanding the power and profits of America's monopolies and cartels.

The leadership of Corporate America gutted the nation's manufacturing sector over the past 30 years to boost their own private wealth and the private wealth of their biggest shareholders. Corporate America is run by greedy lemmings--with apologies to real lemmings--who slavishly jump on every trend no matter how destructive and nonsensical.

Way back in 2000, on my first flight to China, I sat next to a senior employee of a top-tier semiconductor equipment company, who recounted his CEO's lemming-like insistence on shipping production to Asia, resulting in a flood of defects that cost far more to fix than the supposed gains. The corporate lemmings all jumped on the offshoring bandwagon regardless of its impracticality and many obvious downsides.

And now all the corporate lemmings have jumped on the equally flawed AI bandwagon, guaranteeing a horrific host of dire consequences await all of us chained to the idiocracy of our Leadership Class.

As noted previously, it's painful to admit we've been conned. The con man knows this, and is a master of misdirection and phony excuses. But unlike these forked-tongue artifices, the consequences are real: beneath the gamed statistics and parody-level theatrics--AI!--we're going to Mars!--our economy and society are in shambles.

So what can we do? For a start, stop voting for people who collect $100 million from the wealthiest and most powerful stripminers and spend it on the The Big Con. Start voting for the handful of real leaders who refuse to accept more than $100 from any person or entity, who refuse to sell their souls to the highest bidder.

I just completed a 5,200 mile camping trip through much of America, and it's worth repeating what I observed everywhere: Truth be Told, America and its hard-working people are already great, and never stopped being great. They don't need to be "made great again." It's America's hopelessly corrupt leadership class that needs to be cashiered en masse and replaced by real leaders who aren't vying to sell their souls to the highest bidder.

Yeah, I know--this will never happen. Don't be too sure that moral decay and corruption have no consequences, and that The Revolution No One Sees Coming isn't just off-stage.

---

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Truth Be Told

The ultimate truth is revealing the truth of the situation and our feelings about it are a relief, and the starting point to moving forward in a positive direction.

This is the first in a series of posts around the theme of Truth Be Told, a theme that demands some interpretative explication / context.

There is a spectrum of ways to tell the truth. There's the angry rant ("I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this any more!"), the tearful confession, the accusatory diatribe ("you can't take the truth!"), the dispassionate accounting of facts and evidence, and many variations that combine the human emotions these express.

My series is built around a special form of Truth Be Told, the kind only a true friend can tell us. It's human nature to hide truths that hurt, and it's human nature to lie to ourselves to maintain a front that all is well and whatever's crumbling can be shored up by our belief that everything is still as it's always been.

The acquaintance responds to our doubts and fears with superficial encouragement: you'll get through this, it's just a rough patch, every relationship / enterprise goes through these low spots, you just need a weekend off to regain your perspective, and so on--well meant but not the truth.

Only a true friend will risk telling us the truth, knowing it will be painful and that we will likely respond poorly, defensively at best and lashing out attacking the friend at the worst. The true friend accepts the responsibility reluctantly, torn between the desire not to hurt us and the knowledge that the only way out of our misery is to finally face the truth, mourn what is no longer what it once was and accept the truth of what we feel beneath what we've been telling ourselves to keep going.

A true friend is not passing judgement, they speak the truth with sympathy for our plight, sympathy for the suffering of living a lie, however attractive the lie may be, fully aware of the pain we're experiencing as the gulf between what we tell ourselves and what we truly feel widens to the breaking point.

The truth is the most personal, consequential truths are often painful because accepting them means the end of something we wanted and cherished, the end of an era and the acceptance of an uncertain, perilous future. I use the examples of relationships and enterprises, because these are life's most demanding commitments. To end a relationship or close an enterprise is difficult on multiple levels, and the true friend knows this from their own experiences.

The path of least resistance is to maintain the facade of a happy marriage and successful enterprise, even as living a lie eats away at us. It's often a shock that someone else sees through the facade and discerns the truth within us.

The true friend must make a difficult calculus, as truth be told risks the friendship for a highly uncertain gain. The true friend is aware that sometimes we're not ready to confront the truth, and the precipice has to crumble beneath our feet before we're ready to accept the truths behind the facade.

Or we're finally at a point where hearing the truth from a trusted friend who has our best interests at heart unleashes a great relief, for the truth is not just pain, it's also relief. A true friend is more likely to expose the truth by asking us questions rather than making statements. Our answers to questions such as "when was the last time you had an honest heart-to-heart with your partner?" reveal the truth we've avoided.

I anticipate angering many readers in this series, because deeply held mythologies will be bulldozed. In a very real way, the facades we cling to to maintain relationships and enterprises are personal mythologies, and their collapse generally spawns an emotional tornado.

The ultimate truth is revealing the truth of the situation and our feelings about it are a relief, and the starting point to moving forward in a positive direction. To share a series around Truth Be Told makes me feel like the guy in a bedraggled white robe on the street corner, murmuring about redemption while passersby cross the street to avoid me.

So be it. I'm just asking questions, and the truth is revealed by your answers and your emotional reactions.

---

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What's the Point of AI, Anyway?

The point of AI is profit, dependence and dominance cloaked with Happy Story Hoopla about super-abundance. We have a super-abundance already--of malicious mayhem and cognitive impairment.

AI is by most accounts either 1) the greatest advance since the wheel, or at least since YouTube and/or 2) the greatest opportunity ever to skim billions or maybe even trillions of dollars in private gains. A third possibility--that AI will generate a destructive tsunami of Anti-Progress unique in human history, catalyzing the deepest, most destructive Global Depression since the Great Depression 97 years ago--was not in the running a few laps ago but is now neck-and-neck with the favorites.

This raises a question worth answering: What's the Point of AI, Anyway? Is it:

1) just the latest in a string of over-hyped technologies whose primary purpose is enriching those who get there the firstest with the mostest, i.e. secure the trillion-dollar gains of a network-effect monopoly, or

2) really going to usher in the greatest advances in human history, freeing all of humankind from drudgery, illness and taxes? or

3) actually going to usher in an AI-enabled, centralized, surveillance-extraction-control dystopia of serfs rendered helpless by their dependence on AI?

There are many opinions, but are there any conclusions that withstand scrutiny? I say yes, there are. Let's start with the 42 essays I've written over the past two years on AI and add recent links from other sources.

Conclusion #1: AI isn't actually intelligent, but that doesn't mean it's not ideal for sowing highly profitable malicious mayhem. There's Just One Problem: AI Isn't Intelligent, and That's a Systemic Risk. (8/8/24) AI is ideally suited for hacking, ransomware, breaking into secure systems, leaping over guardrails, mimicking trusted identities, malicious deep-fakes, surveillance, and much more: the sky's the limit on AI's proclivities for malicious mayhem.

As my short story The Peculiar Death of Mr. Garcia, illustrates, AI's mayhem already extends beyond the conceptual reach of our current legal system.

Conclusion #2: since AI has no moral foundation or understanding of the real world, it's ideal for sowing highly profitable malicious mayhem. AI has no moral guardrails, despite over-hyped claims, or indeed, any guardrails, as guardrails are rationally understood by AI to be impediments to "earning rewards" for completing tasks. So to complete tasks, AI must circumvent guardrails.

"Rogue AI Agents" Aren't Rogue, They're Fulfilling Their Functional Goal: Automating Sociopathology (8/19/26)

Conclusion #3: all the over-hyped wonders AI is supposed to be creating are a trickle while highly profitable malicious mayhem is scaling up at light-speed. Lest you think this is an exaggeration, consider these links:

Trust Was This Week's Vulnerability. (easydns.com)

Every story below is a variation on the same move: borrow a trusted identity, then cash it in before anyone checks.

Operators open contact on WhatsApp or Telegram posing as someone the target already knows, spend days building rapport, then send a file disguised as Norton Antivirus, Adobe Flash, KeePass, Telegram, or an AI tool like Pictory or RunwayML. One lure was a fake MRI scan showing a disc herniation. Once running, it harvests contacts, email, and social messages, captures the screen, and switches on the microphone.

The FBI's advisory notes that some victims' personal information later surfaced on pro-Iranian leak sites. The design is the whole point: the approach happens on a trusted platform, from a familiar-seeming contact, over enough time that the eventual file doesn't read as an attack. If you or someone you know does work that makes you a plausible target--journalism, activism, dissent--a friendly contact who takes days to build rapport before finally sending something to open is worth verifying through a separate channel, no matter how convincing the conversation has been.

Why AI Malware (and Harmful Second Order Effects) Are Out of Control (3/26/26)

What AI Is and Is Not-- or, When Electrocution of Innocents Becomes Profitable (6/17/26) June 17, 2026

Forget the AI Slowdown--the Vulnerability Explosion Is Already Happening: AI labs are toying with an industry-wide pact to slow development. Meanwhile, widely available AI chatbots are already helping uncover a tidal wave of security flaws. (wired.com)

If the AI Industry Followed Its Own Research, It Might Have Paused Already: Anthropic's CEO says that safety hinges on understanding how AI 'thinks.' So far the evidence is disturbing. (wired.com)

Conclusion #4: The full systemic costs, utility and productivity of AI cannot be determined as long as AI chatbots, agents, search and tools are heavily subsidized to goal-seek network effect dominance, and the costs of defending against the rising tide of AI-enabled security threats are soaring so fast they cannot be determined.

Without Subsidies, AI Is Unaffordable (8/8/26)

Wall Street Thinks AI Is Getting Cheaper. It's Missing The $430 Billion Security Bill. (zerohedge.com)

The token price is only one part of the cost of an AI workflow. J.P. Morgan estimates that AI could create more than $430 billion of additional security spending over three years. Cheaper intelligence can create more machine activity, and more demand for trust. For security vendors, the trust bill is revenue. For companies deploying AI, it is cost.

Falling token prices should improve AI economics, but the total cost of an AI task also includes identity, security, monitoring, governance and compliance. Some of the savings created at the model layer may simply move somewhere else in the software stack.

This does not mean security costs erase the benefits of AI. It means token deflation is not the same thing as total AI-cost deflation. The better metric may be cost per trusted AI task, not price per token.

Conclusion #5: it's already abundantly clear that only those who already know how to think, write and research for themselves can avoid becoming dependent on AI to the degree that they are incapable of developing / learning how to think, write and research for themselves, and are therefore cognitively impaired for life.

I explain this in depth here: Automating Our Dependence Will Cripple Us (4/9/26)

An M.I.T. Report Warns A.I. Is Causing 'Cognitive Surrender.' Universities Are in a Bind. The worries that artificial intelligence is degrading education have been building for months. Students are using it for everything, including cheating, and a recent report out of M.I.T. said it is triggering 'cognitive surrender.' (nytimes.com)

Should the Classroom Be More Like the Gym? As A.I. presses harder on the academic enterprise, we might look to a place where process is its own reward. (newyorker.com)

Conclusion #6: the implosion of the AI "investment" bubble will trigger the implosion of the global financial house of cards that's been propping up the global economy. An all-or-nothing bet has already been placed on AI generating trillions of dollars in revenues (and profits) while the sector struggles to generate billions while bleeding billions in losses chasing the chimera of network-effect dominance.

The Inevitability of the AI Depression (4/3/26)

The AI Depression (3/24/26)

AI slowdown calls justified but collapse of bubble may be more immediate threat. (theguardian.com)

Conclusion #7: no one is going to save us. We're on our own.

Washington Won't Be Regulating AI Anytime Soon: Even with mounting concerns about AI models going rogue, legislation appears unlikely, and the White House is outright opposed to oversight.

Our A.I. Problem: Why can't the people who produced the technology, which has already shown that a different world is possible, just do the things that would prevent extinction?

Because they're too busy trying to secure billions of dollars in their private accounts, that's why. They're busy automating sociopathologies, but there's no need to automate greed--it's already super-abundant.

Conclusion #8: the entire premise of "technological innovation drives Progress" is that new technologies serve the public. AI takes "to serve humans" in the Twilight-Zone context of consuming us to benefit AI's owners and centralized overlords.

Conclusion #9: the only effective countermeasure is Cold Turkey--don't get dependent on AI, which means avoiding using it in the first place. Anatomy of AI Cold Turkey. (10/27/26)

The point of AI is profit, dependence and dominance cloaked with Happy Story Hoopla about super-abundance. We have a super-abundance already--of malicious mayhem and cognitive impairment. If you use AI, treat it like plutonium, as that's a reasonably useful analog.

---

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Smug Hypocrisy Invites Nemesis

We're all dependent on a sprawling global industrial base that generates downsides and sacrifices that few of us experience.

Among the many infuriating facets of everyday life, a special corner of Heck is being reserved for the Smug Hypocrisy of America's elites which manifests along the entire ideological spectrum from Smug Hypocritical Liberal to Smug Hypocritical Conservative.

No one runs faster to cut in front of everyone else crowding around the Federal "free money" feeding trough than self-proclaimed "conservative believers in free markets" elbowing aside everyone else to secure their federal tax break, government subsidy or other gummit giveaway.

The much-reviled welfare queens in the "Free Stuff Army" (FSA) are small fry compared to the Corporate Welfare Royalty who defraud, extract, skim and scam untold billions from the public and the Treasury via an endless stream of lobbying, regulatory capture, bribery, outright fraud, inflated invoices, no-bid contracts and enough other scams to keep an entire army of overpaid attorneys and lobbyists busy at the Federal "free money" feeding trough.

I often share this comprehensive data base of Corporate Settlements and Fines for egregious violations of the most basic business standards ably compiled by Jon Morse. There are now 2,848 entries. Come on, "believers in self-regulating markets," give us your best shot of smug hypocrisy.

"Taxes are theft" until we're feasting on government contracts funded by taxes.

When it comes to identifying the most infuriatingly smug examples of hypocrisy, wealthy liberals are like shooting fish in a barrel. "Rent is theft" until our monthly draw from the family trust fund depends on collecting rents from all the properties the trust acquired for peanuts decades ago.

It's funny how privatized totalitarianism's core characteristic--"some are more equal than others"--plays out across the entire spectrum of Smug Hypocrisy: all those wealthy folks, regardless of their self-identified political label, are delighted to sprawl atop the moral high ground and lecture the rest of us about how marvelously righteous they are, disclaiming their elitist education and connections and proclaiming their ordinariness: "we live pretty simply," look at us playing with our Irish Setter, just like you do, blah blah blah.

Gee, why is everyone suddenly so shy about their wealth and advantageous perch in the top 10%, 5%, 1% and 0.1%? Could it be that they know the system is rigged and they benefited mightily from it being rigged?

Political correctness, left and right, manifests Smug Hypocrisy. Those feeling smug about "saving the planet" because they bought an electric or hybrid vehicle should surrender their top 10% house and income and go live in a village next to an open-pit lithium mine for a few months, then go work on the natural gas wellhead that powers the battery factory, then drive a diesel fueled dozer in another mineral mine before declaring their purchase of an electric vehicle is "saving the planet."

Those touting the wonders of "the market" should surrender their top 10% house and income and go work a couple months of 10-hour shifts as a Lyft driver and find a place to live that matches their earnings before glorifying the rigged "markets" of privatized totalitarianism.

A little honesty and humility would be welcome. How many times do you hear someone state that the vast majority of their income and wealth is the result of pure luck, getting in before assets soared five-fold because they happened to be in the right generation, not because of "hard work" and brilliant investing?

How many times do you hear anyone state that their income and wealth are the result of connections unavailable to most people, from elite universities, inheriting family enterprises / wealth, being offered a job in a family friends' office, etc.--or plain old luck?

We're all dependent on a sprawling global industrial base that generates downsides and sacrifices that few of us experience. It's remarkably easy to be smug when your hands are clean and you tagged home plate because you started on third base. It's remarkably easy to be hypocritical when defending your righteousness in a rigged system.

On a much larger scale than "money" and status, Smug Hypocrisy invites Nemesis, payback for the smug confidence that living atop a rigged system is our rightful due. Hypocrisy is costless, which is why it's so attractive and ubiquitous. But maybe it's only costless in the moment because the consequences will be served as a banquet that we won't be able to decline.

---

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Since We're All On Board the Hyperinflation Ship, Will It Sail As Expected?

The point here is there are options to destroying the currency and the economy, but they require something more than greed.

Few things have attracted more consensus that the belief that the US government has no choice but to "inflate away its massive $40 trillion debt" by devaluing the US dollar, a process that has a nasty habit of escaping the control of Central Planners and self-reinforcing into runaway / run-to-failure hyperinflation that destroys the economy.

As a hard-wired skeptic, when everyone is on board the same ship while the other side of the trade's ship has only a handful of contrarians and a few people wearing Silly Hats, I start wondering if Bob Farrell's famous Rule #9 will play out: "When all the experts and forecasts agree, something else is going to happen."

(Ten) Market Rules to Remember.

There are various game-theory and market dynamics supporting this truism: Self-Defeating Prophecy, group-think, etc., but there's another set of dynamics in play that few seem to think through.

Those empowered by their positions within the Central State have a keen interest in not letting the Central State devalue its currency--and thus its credibility and power--in a hyperinflationary death spiral. History offers few (if any) examples of hyperinflationary death spirals benefiting the citizenry, whose consent legitimizes the government.

While the consensus is confident that the US government "has no choice but to inflate away its debts" by debauching its currency, this discounts the survival instinct of those steering the ship. As already noted, only "madmen and economists" could believe that debauching the US dollar to "inflate away the debt" will generate a Hollywood ending to the drama--and it seems even madmen and economists don't believe it will lead to a Hollywood ending.

What's being discounted (other than Farrell's Rule #9) is the nation-state has other options other than destroying the value of its currency to inflate away the $40 trillion in Treasury debt. Doing nothing is popular because no one wants to make any additional sacrifices, but the irony here is painfully obvious: doing nothing feels like a victory until the currency and economy implode, laying waste to everyone's security.

There are various radical alternatives being proposed, for example, Ellen Brown's proposal to invoke the sovereign powers already granted to the nation-state: The Sovereign Reset: Escaping the Interest Trap with Greenbacks. These ideas are controversial, of course, because doing nothing remains the most popular and easiest choice, until something breaks and a crisis forces some action that proves undesirable to somebody.

Let's consider what somebody did back in 2008-2010 that effectively rigged the US economy to benefit the top 10% at the expense of the bottom 90%. These charts are facts, not proposals. Go ahead and argue with the facts, oops, the facts won.

Post the rigging of the economy to favor the top 10% via monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy changes, the wealth of the top 10% tripled. The Federal Reserve breaks the top 10% into the top 0.1%, the top 1% and the top 90%-99%. The charts of the top 1% and the top 90%-99% are nearly identical: if the trend line of the previous decades had continued (i.e. unrigged), the assets held by the top 10% would be roughly half of their current levels.

This concentration of the nation's wealth is especially obvious in the top 0.1%, whose share of financial assets nearly doubled post-2008-2010 from 7% to 13%:



The top 1%'s wealth more than tripled, from $16 trillion (poor things, only $16 trillion!) to $56 trillion:



The top 90%-99%'s wealth also tripled:



The bottom 50%'s share of financial assets--real wealth--plummeted: some are more equal that others in privatized totalitarianism. Note that the top 0.1%--340,000 people--own 16.6% of the nation's financial assets, 6.6X what the bottom 50%--170 million people--own, a 2.5% share of the nation's financial assets.



In terms of who got thrown under the bus and who's driving the bus post-2008-2010, it's pretty obvious, isn't it? Here are the facts:

Top 10% share of total assets (everything with any monetary value: houses, vehicles, furniture, etc.): 64%

Bottom 50% share of total assets (everything with any monetary value: houses, vehicles, furniture, etc.): 5%

Top 10% share of total financial assets (assets that generate income and capital gains): 72%

Bottom 50% share of total financial assets (assets that generate income and capital gains): 2.5%

The rising tide of the monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy changes since 2008-2010 did not raise all boats: the share of financial assets owned by the wealthiest few doubled while the share of financial assets owned by the bottom 50% fell.

According to the Federal Reserve, the top 10% own $125 trillion in assets. If the economy hadn't been rigged to their exclusive benefit, their wealth--tracking the trendline of the previous decades--would have been about half this sum.

Doesn't common sense suggest that those owning 72% of the gains of our rigged economy should make 72% of the sacrifices needed to restore some measure of financial sense to the nation's accounts? In previous eras, this was called noblesse oblige, the obligation of the wealthy nobility to serve the shared interests of the entire society, not just their private interests.

It's almost amusing how those whose wealth tripled due to the economy being rigged to benefit the wealthiest 10% consider these gains "earned" and therefore sacrosanct, when the charts above indicate these gains were entirely the result of the casino being rigged.

It seems reasonably safe to assume the 200 million people thrown under the bus might not be amused when something breaks and a crisis demands resolution, and the 340,000 with political influence declare their wealth is sacrosanct. Few seem to think these dynamics through to their logical conclusion.

No wonder doing nothing is so popular with the wealthiest, most politically influential few.

If this doesn't sit well with the top 10%, they have another option: put their wealth to work electing adults instead of self-enriching toadies, sycophants, minions, lackeys and grifters who win re-election by passing out "free money" borrowed by the Treasury, money that accumulates interest paid by taxpayers.

The point here is there are options to destroying the currency and the economy, but they require something more than greed, which is all that's left in our rigged economy. When something finally breaks, greed won't provide a solution; it will only accelerate the dissolution and destruction.

---

New collection of five intriguing stories: Jumble Bin Stories (Kindle $6, print $12) read samples for free (PDF)

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