Trump: Our socialism goooood, their socialism baaaaad

House Republican Rips Trump Admin Taking Stakes In 30 Private Companies: ‘Not the Conservative Position’

 

... In the clip Bacon shared, Lincicome fumed, “The reality is that, since last June, we’ve gone from the government owning zero shares in zero private companies to now owning equity stakes in 30 different companies. In some cases, the government is now the largest shareholder.” ...

 

It's pretty hard to run against Abdul's proposal for a 50% federal ownership stake in AI companies with a 50%+1 federal presence on their boards of directors when you do the same thing, which is probably why no one is talking about Abdul's proposal. 

Pete Buttigieg wants to go back to 1876

 

 

Pete Buttigieg's Case Against ‘Return to Normal’

Jonathan Martin, Politico

... There’s a risk that there’s an unspoken Democratic assumption that we’re trying to take us back to … I don’t know what, is it 2012, is it 1992, is it 2021? Whatever it is, we can’t go there. We shouldn’t try, we shouldn’t want to. What I really worry about is if we win — or when we win in November, which I’m working hard to make sure I support — is there this kind of muscle memory in the party? This powerful inertia that immediately puts us in the mode of “reverse the damage”? And I’m trying to purge my vocabulary of anything with the prefix of re- in it, anything with the word “back” in it. I don’t think now is the time to be talking about Build Back Better. Build Better — I don’t want to even talk about “back.” ...

 

This idiot Scott McKay calls Haley Stevens Heather, doesn't call on Michigan Republicans even at the last hour to vote for her in the Democrat primary to save Democrats from themselves

That's the only way this works, unless you just want to rest on the platitude that you can vote yourself into socialism but you’ve got to shoot your way out, which apparently he does.

Today is election day. These people have been silent until now.

The socialists are serious. No one else is.

If you can't bring yourself to vote for Stevens, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that you would ever pull a trigger. 

 You Simply Cannot Give Power to Lunatics

... [Hasan] Piker is also stumping for Abdul El-Sayed, who is now as much as a 15-point favorite over the more establishmentarian Heather Stevens in the Michigan Senate race. El-Sayed comes from an accomplished academic background and has apparently made a lot of money based on the properties he and his wife own, but we don’t know how he managed it. He’s an avowed DSA socialist whose speeches and pronouncements contain open rejections of the American founding and way of life, and it doesn’t seem to bother Michigan Democrat voters in the least. 

Because Michigan Democrats, like Wisconsin Democrats, are now made up of a majority of lunatics who think that abandoning American culture, economics, and politics and putting people like Francesca Hong and Abdul El-Sayed, not to mention Darieliza Avila Chevalier and Zohran Mamdani, in positions of power will create something better. ... 

Idiot Doug Bandow isn't paying attention to what Bernie & Co. actually stand for

America’s Faux Socialists Know Not What They Claim to Be 

 ... Nevertheless, no one of note is advocating the wholesale federal takeover of private property, including businesses and other enterprises. ...

 First, Do No Harm: AI Under Democracy 

... AI was built on our data and our labor; we should own a piece of it. Senator Bernie Sanders’s American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would transfer 50% equity from the largest AI companies into public hands. I support that effort and propose to take it one step further because Americans deserve a seat at the table. ...

 

 

 

Well yeah, but it wasn't for Bernie!

International socialism and National socialism have now split over a woman. 

The Nazi Tattoo Should Have Been Enough

Batya Ungar-Sargon, Substack

 

 

 

 

Two tier Keir calls it quits after the biggest Labour victory in decades in July 2024, had said he wouldn't and would fight

Joe Biden was once king of the heap, too, until his enemies to the left pushed him off.

That's the story in the UK, too, which CNBC doesn't tell you.

Socialist Andy Burnham led the rebellion against Starmer from within the Labour Party.

Burnham is a self-described enemy of British nationalism.

 

UK PM Starmer resigns as Britain faces its seventh leader in 10 years 

... Keir Starmer’s resignation comes almost 10 years to the day since the U.K. voted to leave the European Union. His successor will be the country’s seventh leader in that period, underscoring how political and economic turmoil continue to unsettle British politics long after the Brexit process was concluded.

 ... Starmer’s government was ultimately weakened by dwindling poll ratings, Labour infighting and growing public frustration over its failure to deliver quickly on growth and the cost of living. ...

The UK Labour Party is cracking up as socialist Andy Burnham is set to challenge Starmer

 UK minister says PM Starmer is considering ‘political realities’ amid leadership pressure

... The threat to Starmer’s position, which has been building for months, increased sharply on Friday when former Greater Manchester Mayor Burnham won a seat in parliament that will allow him to launch a formal leadership challenge.

Starmer’s unpopularity was laid bare by the ruling party’s heavy losses in local elections in May, and polls of Labour party members indicate Burnham would win such a contest.

... Starmer has previously said he would stand in any formal Labour Party leadership contest that sought to replace him.

Leadership contenders need to amass the support of 81 Labour members of parliament - a fifth of those sitting - to launch a formal challenge.

Democrat primary slugfest in Michigan for retiring US Senator Gary Peters' seat features three candidates unfamiliar to a third of Democrats, giving opportunistic Republican Mike Rogers another shot

... Each unofficially represents an ideological faction. El-Sayed is the Democratic Socialists’ candidate, backed by Senator Bernie Sanders and supportive of single-payer health care. McMorrow is the progressive populist, backed by Senator Elizabeth Warren and supportive of a public health insurance option. Stevens is the moderate, tacitly backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and, while nominally supportive of a public option, doesn’t lean into it nor mention it on her website’s issues page. 

And as I covered last week, the three are divided on Israel. El-Sayed would end all military aid to Israel (in fact, he “opposes directly funding foreign militaries” everywhere). McMorrow would stop selling Israel offensive weapons and has the support of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street PAC. Stevens defines herself as a “proud pro-Israel Democrat,” and is backed by AIPAC PAC. 

... Moreover, every poll taken pegs at least one-third of the primary electorate as undecided. The Glengariff Group poll shows at least 40 percent of Democrats “never heard” of any of them (for McMorrow, it’s 60 percent), and that number is probably higher among the general electorate. The more they attack each other, the more voters will be introduced to them in the worst possible way. ...

More. 

Stevens is the obvious choice of Michigan voters who are put off by the extremism of the Democratic left. She will complement Michigan's other moderate Senator Elissa Slotkin and help Democrats speak with one clear voice for sensible policies for Michigan workers.

 

US economic growth peaked during the Reagan administration because America is a debt-based economy and we turned our backs on the formula during it

 The trend for the growth of the total universe of US debt, TCMDO or total credit market debt outstanding, rolled over after 1985, one year after GDP did.

TCMDO is the real money, almost $108 trillion at the end of 2025. In 1985 it was $9 trillion.

M2 was merely $22 trillion at the end of 2025. 

TCMDO is the sum total of debt expansion throughout the sectors of the economy.

Historically, most people have experienced it this way.

You get a full time job, which itself was created by a business selling debt in the form of stocks and bonds in order to expand its operations and future profits, and you go buy a house, putting down $100k on a $500k property. The bank loans you the $400k through fractional reserve lending on a small portion of its reserves but secured by the house. That new money is created out of thin air but is actually represented by the "guaranteed" future income stream of your job for 30 years, because you're a smart, reliable guy who never misses a day of work. TCMDO expands, and expands some more each time this happens.

When the conditions disappear for full time job creation, the process slows down. You can see the decline in the growth of the economy in the decline of the growth of the debt. Yes, everything is still growing, but not as vigorously.

Full time as a percent of population peaked 26 years ago, in 2000, at 53.55%, but retested the 1975 low of 46.74% in 2010 and 2011 at 46.97%, back-to-back years in the Late Great Recession.

Housing strength persisted in the immediate post-Reagan period on the illusory basis of windfalls from massive ordinary income tax cuts combined with the demographic peaking of the 1957 Baby Boom turning 40 in 1997 driving demand, but the hollowing out of the economy had already begun with the move of 20,000 manufacturers abroad after the 1986 tax reform.

Early warning signs began flashing already during the Clinton era.

Clinton immediately raised taxes in 1993 after he promised not to raise them in 1992, began a long series of cuts to federal government employment, and gutted the US Navy.

Americans were already struggling at the time and ominously tapped housing equity to sustain their middle class standard of living. Owners' Equity in Real Estate averaged 70% 1982-1986 inclusive, but plunged ten points within a decade to 60% 1996-1999 inclusive.

Homes had become piggy banks, preparing the way for 1997, the year Clinton and the Republicans went further still and turned homes into mere commodities, which in turn prepared the way for the housing catastrophe of 2008. From 1997 a flood of 70,000 more manufacturers began moving out as globalization kicked into high gear and China gained admission to the WTO in 2001.

Almost no one today wants to say out loud how unpatriotic this whole business was. 

Reagan tried to convince us that we know best what to do with our own money, and we promptly turned around and staked our fortunes on foreign investment, not domestic.

Libertarianism is a lie.  

Today you will be hard-pressed to identify a major manufacturing concern with 100% of its operations in the US. Tesla is a standout (heavily subsidized by the federal government!), but other than that most of the businesses which remain patriotically committed to the American idea are pretty small beer compared with how it used to be. 

The formerly domestic debt expansion was exported abroad, creating middle classes where none existed before, especially in East Asia, and doing so cost businesses A LOT less, the key attraction for them.

As a result, enormous profits accrued to the owners of capital while wage earners here struggled to maintain the American dream. Wealth inequality soared, and now our children are 40 before they buy their first home.   

TCMDO grew at a compound annual rate of 8.355% 1945-1985, but at only 6.398% 1985-2025. The change from optimism to pessimism can be traced in the trend lines.

Continued growth of TCMDO at the former rate but after 1985 would have yielded TCMDO at the end of 2025 of $223 trillion, or 106% more "money" than we actually have.

$115 trillion is "missing", or at least something like that. We will never know for sure, but some of us can still imagine because we watched the great betrayal actually happen.

This is why I say socialism is the future, not because I want it or because I think it will work.

People are going to figure this out eventually, get angry, and do the wrong thing, just like we did during the Reagan administration. 

 

 

Because socialism is expensive

 Scarborough: How Did We Spend Trillions On Defense—And We're Running Out Of Munitions After A One-Month War?

The Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip observes America under Trump becoming more like China under Xi

The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics: President Trump is imitating Chinese Communist Party by extending political control ever deeper into economy

 Greg Ip Aug. 11, 2025 at 10:16 am

Recent examples include President Trump’s demand that Intel’s chief executive resign; the 15% of certain chip sales to China that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices will share with Washington; the “golden share” Washington will get in U.S. Steel as a condition of Nippon Steel’s takeover; and the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners Trump plans to personally direct.

This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises. 

China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.

We wouldn’t be dabbling with state capitalism if not for the public’s and both parties’ belief that free-market capitalism wasn’t working. That system encouraged profit-maximizing CEOs to move production abroad. The result was a shrunken manufacturing workforce, dependence on China for vital products such as critical minerals, and underinvestment in the industries of the future such as clean energy and semiconductors.

The federal government has often waded into the corporate world. It commandeered production during World War II and, under the Defense Production Act, emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It bailed out banks and car companies during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Those, however, were temporary expedients.

Former President Joe Biden went further, seeking to shape the actual structure of industry. His Inflation Reduction Act authorized $400 billion in clean-energy loans. The Chips and Science Act earmarked $39 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Of that, $8.5 billion went to Intel, giving Trump leverage to demand the removal of its CEO over past ties to China. (Intel so far has refused.)

Biden overrode U.S. Steel’s management and shareholders to block Nippon Steel’s takeover, though his staff saw no national-security risk. Trump reversed that veto while extracting the “golden share” that he can use to influence the company’s decisions. In design and name it mimics the golden shares that private Chinese companies must issue to the CCP.

Biden officials had mulled a sovereign-wealth fund to finance strategically important but commercially risky projects such as in critical minerals, which China dominates. Last month, Trump’s Department of Defense said it would take a 15% stake in MP Materials, a miner of critical minerals.

Many in the West admire China for its ability to turbocharge growth through massive feats of infrastructure building, scientific advance and promotion of favored industries. American efforts are often bogged down amid the checks, balances and compromises of pluralistic democracy.

In his forthcoming book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” author Dan Wang writes: “China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”

To admirers, Trump’s appeal is his willingness to bulldoze those lawyerly obstacles. He has imposed tariffs on an array of countries and sectors, seizing authority that is supposed to belong to Congress. He extracted $1.5 trillion in investment pledges from Japan, the European Union and South Korea that he claims he will personally direct, though no legal mechanism for doing so appears to exist. (Those pledges are already in dispute.)

There are reasons state capitalism never caught on before. The state can’t allocate capital more efficiently than private markets. Distortions, waste and cronyism typically follow. Russia, Brazil and France have grown much more slowly than the U.S.

Chinese state capitalism isn’t the success story it seems. Barry Naughton of the University of California, San Diego has documented how China’s rapid growth since 1979 has come from market sources, not the state. As Chinese leader Xi Jinping has reimposed state control, growth has slowed. China is awash with savings, but the state wastes much of it. From steel to vehicles, excess capacity leads to plummeting prices and profits.

The U.S. hasn’t fared any better. Interventions made in the name of national security or kick-starting infant industries lead to boondoggles like Foxconn’s promised factory in Wisconsin or Tesla’s solar-panel factory in Buffalo, N.Y.

State capitalism is an all-of-society affair in China, directed from Beijing via millions of cadres in local governments and company boardrooms. In the U.S., it consists largely of Oval Office announcements lacking any policy or institutional framework. “The core characteristic of China’s state capitalism is discipline, and Trump is the complete opposite of that,” Wang said in an interview.

State capitalism is a means of political, not just economic, control. Xi ruthlessly deploys economic levers to crush any challenge to party primacy. In 2020, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, arguably the country’s most famous business leader, criticized Chinese regulators for stifling financial innovation. Retaliation was swift. Regulators canceled the initial public offering of Ma’s financial company, Ant Group, and eventually fined it $2.8 billion for anticompetitive behavior. Ma briefly disappeared from public view.

Trump has similarly deployed executive orders and regulatory powers against media companies, banks, law firms and other companies he believes oppose him, while rewarding executives who align themselves with his priorities.

In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade. Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.

Trump is also seeking political control over agencies that have long operated at arm’s length from the White House, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. That, too, has echoes of China where the bureaucracy is fully subordinate to the ruling party.

Trump has long admired the control Xi exercises over his country, but there are, in theory, limits to how far he can emulate him.

American democracy constrains the state through an independent judiciary, free speech, due process and the diffusion of power among multiple levels and branches of government. How far state capitalism ultimately displaces free-market capitalism in the U.S. depends on how well those checks and balances hold up.

Anti-democratic airhead DHS Secretary ICE Barbie says Feds are in LA to liberate it from duly elected governor and mayor

 

 We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialist and burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor have imposed.

 

Imagine if the Democrats interfered like this in Wyoming or West Virginia. Republicans would throw a fit like they're doing in LA. 

Nowadays socialism is dressed up as billions of taxpayer dollars given to chipmakers

 

Tim Walz does not believe in free speech

 Here.

He's a neighborly socialist.

Or is he a socialist neighbor? I forget.

Kamala Harris has made her choice for VP, the Minnesota governor who let Minneapolis burn to the ground in 2020

 

This socialist got almost a million votes for the presidency from behind bars in 1912

 Just sayin'.

Catholic woman finally realizes Christian and Catholic NGOs fund the entire illegal alien pipeline into America and have been doing so for decades

Welcome to reality, sister.

The enemy isn't just without. It's probably sitting next to you in the pew.

I started doing some more digging. The entire illegal immigrant pipeline, from the airports in Turkey and Dubai that are sending them to South America and Central America, to the Darien Gap, across the border and into our cities is being funded by Christian and Catholic NGOs. When you learn about the betrayal Catholic and Christian NGOs have been committing, for decades, to the rights and privileges granted by America, you will go mad.

The recent failed federal “border control” [sic] bill included almost $2 billion to religious organizations to “help migrants,” which often means helping migrants break the law. ... There are many organizations like this, taking money from their parishioners and the federal government and funneling it directly to illegal aliens. ...

Catholic Charities is a socialist terror organization working to undermine this country, subvert our “sacred democracy,” and diminish our citizens. It must therefore be defunded, prosecuted, and banned from operating inside the United States. ... They are helping our enemies execute a silent coup right under our noses, and use Christianity as a shield, an impenetrable force field, to deflect all criticism and examination. 

Peachy Keenan, here.

I don't think Keenan quite realizes, however, how this would be all but impossible to pull off from cash-strapped parish donations alone. These religious NGOs are not simply incestuous conduits for vast sums of taxpayer money. They directly embody the progressive Democrat immigration policy of native replacement.

As the Center for Immigration Studies recently reported, a United Nations-led “Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan (RMRP)” calls for more than 200 nonprofit groups to dole out $1.6 billion in cash debit cards, food, clothing, medical treatment, shelter, and even “humanitarian transportation” during 2024 to millions of U.S.-bound immigrants in 17 Latin American nations and Mexico. ... the administration of President Joe Biden is directly footing the bill for at least part of facilitating the most voluminous mass migration crisis in U.S. history, now in its fourth straight year ... more than 30 faith-based nonprofits among those UN NGO partners — representing Jewish, Lutheran, Seventh Day Adventist, Catholic, and nondenominational evangelical organizations — shows that the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have been mainlining taxpayer funds to these groups, which then distribute them to keep hundreds of thousands of migrants comfortably moving toward illegal U.S. southern border crossings.

More.

According to Forbes, the NGO Catholic Charities USA received $1.4 billion from government support compared with $1 billion in private donations [for 2022]. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service reported more than $93.1 million in U.S. government grants in its 2021 financial statement, making taxpayer-funded grants more than 80% of its total support.

And that number would only climb as the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service would receive $182.6 million in grants in the fiscal year of 2022 from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Another NGO, Church World Services, reported more than $20.5 million in grant funds in its 2022 financial report, making more than 40% of its assets coming from taxpayers.

 Reported here.

 

This guy is the political analog to the slip-and-fall lawyer, turning up at every opportunity to exploit it for socialism

 

Bernie Sanders calls out automaker CEOs at UAW rally: ‘It is time for you to end your greed’

Yeah, but what about the domestic ones?

 

Trump: "We're Going To Keep Foreign Christian-Hating Communists, Marxists & Socialists Out Of America"

John Kass: "If we want to see change in crime, we must raise a generation that respects life"

 

Raging Democrats Mourn Their Lost Sacrament: Abortion

John Kass