America's Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired

The sole output of America's Establishment/Ruling Elite is self-serving hubris.

America's Ruling Elite is freaking out because a significant percentage of the American public is trying to fire them. The Ruling Elite has failed and deserves to be fired, and deep down, they know it--and this awareness of their self-serving failure fuels their panic and their loathing of the non-elite Americans who are trying to fire them.

If you think this chart of soaring student loan debt is a sign of "success," you are 1) delusional 2) protected from the dire consequences of this failure 3) getting your paycheck from this failed system. That in a nutshell is the state of the nation: those who are protected from the consequences of failure are loyal to the Establishment, as are the millions drawing a paycheck from systems they know are irredeemable failures.

Let's review the central institutions of the nation:

1. Healthcare: a failed system doomed to bankrupt the nation.

2. Defense: a failed system of cartels and Pentagon fiefdoms that have saddled the nation with enormously costly failed weapons systems like the F-35 and the LCS.

3. Higher Education: a bloated, failed system that is bankrupting an entire generation while mis-educating them for productive roles in the emerging economy. (I cover this in depth in The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy and Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.)

4. Foreign policy: Iraq: a disaster. Afghanistan: a disaster. Libya: a disaster. Syria: a disaster. Need I go on?

5. Political governance: a corrupt system of self-serving elites, lobbyists, pay-to-play, corporate puppet-masters, and sociopaths who see themselves as above the law.

In Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform, I explain why the only possible output of these systems is failure.

The sole output of America's Establishment/Ruling Elite is self-serving hubris.

In the open market, failed leadership has consequences. Customers vanish and the enterprise goes bankrupt, or shareholders and employees rally to fire the failed leadership.

In our state-cartel system, failed leadership only tightens its grip on the nation's throat. The Deep State can't be fired, nor does it ever stand for election. The two political parties are interchangeable, as are the politicos who race from fund-raiser to fund-raiser.

It's tempting to blame the individuals who inhale the wealth and power of our failed system, but it's the system, not the individuals, though a more corrupt, craven, self-serving lot cannot easily be assembled.

In broad brush, the Establishment and its Ruling Elite are still fighting World War II. The solution to the Great Depression and fascism was to cede complete control of the economy, the media and the social order to the central state.

Tens of millions of people were aggregated into vast industrial corporations or the Armed Forces. Everyone heard the same "news" and had the same limited choices of work and consumption.

It was easier for the federal government to control a handful of cartel-corporations and unions, and this cemented the state-cartel system that remains dominant today.

But the world and the economy changed, and this model was no longer efficient or effective. Sprawling corporations with captive domestic markets started facing global competition, and networks of interchangeable suppliers were much more efficient than vertically organized corporations.

Adding layers of government bureaucracy to manage increasing complexity was no longer effective or affordable as labor costs rose and the efficiencies of networks outpaced cumbersome hierarchies.

People lost faith in their government and their cartel-corporations because the truth broke through the state-managed propaganda. Industrial corporations were revealed as greedy polluters; auto manufacturers churned out vehicles with scant care for safety, and the federal government lied to the citizens about the war in Vietnam, and much else.

The Internet was the stake through the heart of this inefficient, ineffective state-cartel hierarchy. The Internet enabled a level of transparency that was impossible in the old state-cartel model in which everyone watched the same three TV networks and read the same managed "news."

Consumers could now access the experience of other consumers directly, bypassing the filtering mechanisms of a complicit state and the corporate PR/marketing machinery.

Governments were pressured to (very reluctantly) make public all sorts of material that was safely private in the good old days of backroom dealing and sweetheart contracts with pals.

The central state's resistance to transparency only reinforced the public's loss of trust. The more money and power the state grabbed, the greater the level of corruption and self-serving insider dealing. The more the state managed the private cartels of banking, Big Pharma, higher education, the military-industrial complex, healthcare insurers, etc., the more costs soared while the quality of the output plummeted.

The current self-serving Ruling Elite deserves to be fired for its abject failure of leadership. The nation desperately needs leaders who understand the economy and nation are in the midst of a new industrial/digital revolution that favors networks over hierarchy and transparency over state-cartel corruption.

Unfortunately, as I explain in Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change, the central state has no mechanisms for devolving power to decentralized networks, or surrendering either power or budgets. The central state only knows how to aggregate more power and skim more money from the private economy.

The last failed remnants of the state-cartel hierarchies left over from World War II must implode before we can move forward. Healthcare, defense, pharmaceuticals, higher education, the mainstream media and the systems of governance must all decay to the point that no one can be protected from the destructive consequences of their failure, and no paychecks can be issued by these failed systems.

Only then can we face the reality that failure has consequences.


Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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"Nothing Good Can Come of This Election"--and That's Good

We the citizens and voters have to stop being enablers of systemic corruption.

The overwhelming consensus of the punditry across the political spectrum is that "Nothing Good Can Come of This Election"--and that's a very good thing.The handwringing goes like this: The country is deeply divided by schisms that cannot be bridged, every institution from the two parties to the mainstream media to the Department of Justice has been tarnished by cover-ups, collusion or worse; whomever wins the election will enter the presidency without a mandate, and so on.

Why is "nothing good can come of this" good? Because ridding the nation of its political corruption will require hitting bottom.

Just as an alcoholic or drug addict is incapable of making any truly positive changes until he/she hits absolute bottom, so it is with our tolerance of a corrupt political system that is poisoning the nation, one injection of corrupt cash, collusion and pay-to-play at a time.

If our rotten-to-the-core politics as usual is indeed flying off the cliff to complete destruction, that is an unalloyed good.

Just as alcoholics continue down their self-destructive path with the aid of enablers, so too has the corrupt political order expanded with the aid of the Mainstream Media, insiders in the Department of Justice, K Street lobbyists and a veritable army of well-paid lackeys, pundits, academics, apparatchiks and assorted toadies in the organs of governance and in the big-money private sector and philanthro-capitalist dynasties of pay-to-play foundations.

The only way anything will truly change in the political order is if every Establishment insider politico loses every election, from the presidency to dogcatcher. Nothing will change until the mere existence of a private foundation like the Clinton Foundation triggers a landslide loss for the politico with ties to such corruption.

Nothing will change until the collusion of the mainstream media (supplying the insider candidate with debate questions, etc.) alone causes the colluding candidate to lose by a landslide.

Nothing will change until candidates who refuse to accept any donation larger than $100 from anyone or any entity beat the Goldman Sachs/Saudi prince-funded insider candidates by a landslide.

Nothing will change until candidates who fund costly negative TV advertising campaigns with millions in pay-to-play "contributions" from Goldman Sachs et al. lose by a landslide.

You get the point: we the citizens and voters have to stop being enablers of systemic corruption. We have to stop being bamboozled by insiders with promises of "hope and change" and the usual negative TV blitzes funded by corrupt big money.

It's easy to blame lax campaign laws or the corrupted candidates and their insider toadies, but ultimately we're responsible for enabling corruption, collusion, pay-for-play and a political and financial Elite that's above the law.

From the point of view of the corrupted, colluding insiders, MSM flunkies, Department of Justice lackeys and well-paid parrot-pundits, nothing good can come from this election because half the voters may actually cast off the shackles of the nation's corrupt and corrupting political and financial Elites.

This mass rejection of the politics as usual of corrupt and corrupting political and financial Elites is the highest possible good--a public good that eludes the hand-wringing corrupt insiders, pundits and toadies who have sucked up fortunes from the trough of putrid systemic corruption.


Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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Hillary Is The Perfection of a Corrupt System

Exposing the Clintons' perfection of a corrupt political system won't change the conditions and incentives that created the Clintons' harvester of corruption.

Let's set aside Hillary Clinton as an individual and consider her as the perfection of a corrupt political system. As I noted yesterday, Politics As Usual Is Dead, and Hillary Clinton is the ultimate product of the political system that is disintegrating before our eyes.

The corruption of pay-to-play and the commingling of public and private influence is not the failing of an individual--it is the logical conclusion of a thoroughly corrupt political system.

Given the incentives built into politics as usual, public/private pay-to-play doesn't just make sense--it is the only possible maximization of the political system.

Cobble together a multi-million dollar private foundation, millions of dollars in speaking fees from big-money contributors, conflicts of interest, the secrecy of private email servers, pay-to-play schemes and corrupted loyalists planted in the Department of Justice, and the inevitable result is a politics as usual money-harvesting machine that lays waste to the nation, supporters and critics alike.

All the Clintons did is assemble the parts more effectively than anyone else.Now that the machine has scooped up hundreds of millions of dollars in "contributions" and other loot, vested interests and corrupted loyalists within the federal government will do anything to protect the machine and its vast flow of funds.

The nation's political system needs a thorough cleaning from top to bottom.Exposing the Clintons' perfection of politics as usual won't change the conditions and incentives that created the Clintons' harvester of corruption.

That will require rooting out the incentives that made the Clintons' perfection of corruption both logical and inevitable.


Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

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Politics As Usual Is Dead

In terms of finance and communications, politics as usual--political candidates and narratives mandated by the parties' Ruling Elites and the MSM--is dead.

Hillary and Trump are symptoms of a fatal condition: politics as it has been practiced for 70 years is dead.

As my friend G.F.B. observed, the key development was not the nomination of insider-Hillary or outsider-Trump--it was the enormous success of Bernie Sanders' campaign, a campaign that arose outside a Democratic Party establishment that tried to suppress or destroy Sanders' campaign at every turn, a campaign funded not by the Goldman Sachs of the world that funded Hillary but by tens of thousands of small donations from the citizenry.

Who drew the mass crowds of enthusiastic supporters? Bernie, not Hillary. Who inspired thousands to donate small sums that quickly accumulated into millions of dollars? Bernie, not Hillary. Who won primary after primary despite a virtual Mainstream Media blackout and a Democratic Party establishment that relished plunging a poisoned blade into Bernie's campaign at every opportunity? Bernie Sanders, not Hillary.

Many observers believe an accurate accounting of votes would have revealed Bernie received more votes than Hillary did in aggregate. In terms of mass crowds and voter enthusiasm, there was no contest at all: Bernie won hands-down.

In a parallel fashion, Donald Trump's campaign succeeded despite the active resistance of the Republican Party establishment. By some accounts, Trump's campaign has received more small donations than any other recent Republican candidate.

As for Mainstream Media bias: Bernie was fortunate to only be blacked out, Soviet style; Trump has zero MSM newspaper endorsements and has been subjected to MSM bias that is laughably ham-handed, reminiscent of old-style Communist "running dogs of Imperialism" propaganda.

By the established rules of politics as usual, it wasn't supposed to happen this way. Hillary went out early and raised millions of dollars, the acme of campaigning success in politics as usual. Having banked millions for advertising, she was supposed to cruise to victory.

Instead, Bernie happened.

A mainstream blah-blah-blah Republican candidate was supposed to emerge from a bloodless primary, and the two Party insiders were supposed to engage in the usual polite jousting of an election that was pre-ordained to change nothing in the political, economic and social orders.

Instead, Trump happened.

Hillary's disdain for average Americans of all genders and ethnicities is not an outlier; it's the unspoken norm of the Ruling Elite. In politics as usual, Party bosses (backed by big-money contributors) ordain the candidate and then send down the order to the little people to support the candidate.

Accustomed to passive, unthinking obedience, the Party Establishments are recoiling in enraged horror that the little people are refusing to follow their orders. The Ruling Elite considers themselves the betters of the the little people, and their disdain for the "deplorables" (i.e. the bottom 95%) has sunk from mere loathing to barely-concealed hatred. How dare they reject Hillary and Jeb in favor of Bernie and Trump!

As G.F.B. observed, technology has leapfrogged the parties' reason to exist and the Mainstream Media's role of coronating the parties' candidates and policies.The political parties arose to fill critical financial and communications needs: a mechanism was needed to aggregate campaign contributions and to distribute party platforms and narratives to far-flung voters.

The parties took on a larger role after World War II, which transformed the U.S. from an industrial trading nation wary of foreign entanglements into an interventionist global empire. The foreign-policy differences between the Democratic and Republican parties shrank to semantics, as both party Establishments embraced the globalist agenda and narrative.

In the postwar era, the Mainstream Media of newspapers, magazines, radio and TV broadcast the Ruling Elite's narratives and agenda. Broadcast blanketed the nation, and dissenting views were relegated to the margins: I.F. Stone, Ramparts magazine, etc.

With the rise of the Internet and social media, broadcast propaganda is now competing with narrowcast: blogs, Twitter and Facebook enable self-organizing tacit tribes (G.F.B.'s term) with their own networks of communication, narratives and agendas.

Bernie Sanders' campaign showed that candidates no longer need the Party Establishment to raise substantial sums of cash. Stripped of the power to control the flow of contributions from millions of individuals, the parties have been reduced to bastions of everything that is corrupt, venal and backward-looking about politics as usual: big-money contributions from the likes of Goldman Sachs, Big Pharma, Saudi princes, etc.

Tens of millions of Americans are rejecting both the parties' Ruling Elites and their globalist, interventionist consensus. The technology of micro-payments has leapfrogged the party Establishments, and the Internet has leapfrogged the MSM and parties' control of narratives and agendas.

The MSM and the parties' raison d'etre has been dismantled by technology. As ownership of the media and the control of party insiders have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, competition from the many (narrowcast) has exploded.

In terms of finance and communications, politics as usual--political candidates and narratives mandated by the parties' Ruling Elites and the MSM--is dead. We will all look back in 2026 and wonder why the recognition of this reality took so long.


Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

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Hillary and the Ghosts of Watergate

If there is any lesson to be learned from the ghosts of Watergate, it is that the big-money support of a leader who has lost the ability to deliver the goods crumbles very quickly as the endgame unfolds.

The parallels between Hillary Clinton and Richard Nixon are not legal--they are political: specifically, how can a leader crippled by scandal and cover-ups govern?

In even blunter terms: how can a crippled politico deliver the goods to the special interests who bet their cash and political capital on the politico's ability to deliver favors?

Among the many ghosts of Watergate, one specter especially haunts Hillary:once the special interests and party stalwarts who defended you through every scandal and every cover-up--month after month and year after year, on the promise that you would deliver the goods upon ascending to the presidency--realize you are too damaged to deliver anything of value to anyone, why would they continue supporting you?

Once a politico has to declare "I am not a crook" based on legalese rather than a moral foundation, that politico's ability to lead has vanished. Hillary and her supporters rely entirely on legalese parsing of wrong-doing rather than on a self-explanatory, basic moral foundation of right and wrong.

Declaring "I am not a crook" because the wrongdoing escapes prosecution is the same as declaring "I am above the law." If the foundation of one's ability to lead is a reliance on legal parsing and allies in the Department of Justice squashing investigations while handing out immunity like candy on Halloween, the political capital required to lead no longer exists.

Ultimately, the President leads by moral suasion. Even the political act of delivering the goods to the special interests that funded your campaign and your wealth must be backed by the moral authority of personal integrity and a morally grounded appeal to the common good.

A politician who has effectively zero personal integrity is only as viable as his/her ability to deliver favors to the few (i.e. special interests) over the objections of the many. A reliance on cold-blooded horse-trading only works if the leader has enough political capital to arm-twist everyone into granting favors to allies and special interests.

But this political capital rests on moral suasion and support earned not by issuing promises but by leading the nation through thorny thickets to solutions that work for the many, not just the few.

Once the ability to lead has been lost, special interests can forget about getting favors. And once they realize their politico is a liability rather than an asset, self-preservation requires abandoning the liability as quickly as possible.

It's nothing personal, it's just business. Anyone who thinks Hillary has the personal integrity to build sufficient political capital to lead is delusional. Anyone who believes Hillary has the moral foundation to deliver the goods to the myriad special interests that have funded her campaign and her personal wealth is equally delusional.

Are Goldman Sachs et al. delusional? If there is any lesson to be learned from the ghosts of Watergate, it is that the big-money support of a leader who has lost the ability to deliver the goods crumbles very quickly as the endgame unfolds.


Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

Thank you, Terri P. ($75), for your outrageously generous contribution to this site-- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.

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