Tech Overlords to Oversee Their Investment at the Inauguration
President Biden’s admirers have often said he should be remembered alongside predecessors FDR and LBJ in terms of accomplishments. Democrats thought so much of his programs that even after Biden dropped out, his achievements formed the core of their 2024 general election campaigns.
The outgoing President’s farewell speech, along with a letter released earlier in the day, didn’t mention the incoming President by name, but it did invoke another past occupant of the White House.
Via The Associated Press:
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead," Biden said, drawing attention to "a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy people. Dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.”
Invoking President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex when he left office, he added, “I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers to our country as well.”
“I ran for president because I believed that the soul of America was at stake,” Biden wrote. “The very nature of who we are was at stake. And, that’s still the case.”
Too little, too late, I say in response. All those (very commendable) programs aimed at restoring some of the financial equity lost in the past half century failed to facilitate the public’s understanding of just how bad things were headed.
If you require proof, take a look at the record of Google searches for "oligarchy" that spiked the moment Biden warned that "an oligarchy is taking shape in America." The top search was simply "what is an oligarchy," and many of the other searches were also asking for definitions.
What would be even more helpful would be a chart showing just how much bi-partisan support has gone into creating the economic nightmare coming out from under the bed.
Via Malcolm Ferguson at The New Republic:
“In 2020, there was one person worth over $100 billion. Today at the end of Biden’s term there are 16 of them,” Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project wrote, with a meme captioned, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this,” insinuating that Biden was indeed the “guy.”
“It kills me that this is the message Biden is delivering in his farewell address,” said Josh Miller-Lewis of A More Perfect Union. “Why wasn’t this delivered consistently for the last 4 years?”
“Biden’s Presidential Medal of Freedom awardees, with net worth, earlier this month: George Soros, $7 billion. David Rubenstein, $4 billion,” wrote ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis.
The ultrarich have been deeply involved with modern presidential politics, even when it’s a Democrat in office. But Trump, with his billionaire Cabinet, corporate hobnobbing, and backroom hotel business deals, is openly flaunting the oligarchy. Maybe Biden is longing for the subtlety of the past.
Gosh, if only so many people didn’t know. Perhaps if the class component in media dissections on current events had been included…
You will need to look no further than the VIP section at Monday’s swearing-in ceremony (which is also national cheese day if you’re looking for something else to celebrate).
Seated in President Trump’s cheering section will be Xitter’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple's Tim Cook and Google's Sundar Pichai. Oh, I almost forgot, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. They’ll be huddling (the weather is forecast to be really fuckin’ cold) next to Trump’s Cabinet nominees and other prominent elected officials.
There is no word on whether CSPAN will have a kiss-cam at the event, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Meanwhile, both the current and future administrations are scrambling to find a way for a reprieve for TikTok, which is promising to shut down in the face of a ban taking place this weekend.
[Side Note: The Chinese government really doesn’t need to use TikTok to collect user info. What they couldn’t buy on the open market, they’ll have acquired through hacks of US telecommunications companies.]
Now, we’re facing the imminent inauguration of a man symbolic of America’s class divide. The oligarchy isn’t ‘taking shape,’ it’s here. The days of “nice” are over, being replaced by the era of “taking.”
Watch, as the nominees for cabinet positions sail through the Senate, with little to no Republican concern about their qualifications or abilities. What counts will be the number of times they genuflect toward their boss and display their bigotry by denouncing “woke.”
Lest any Republicans, like Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, waver in their loyalty, the symbiotes hanging out at Mar a Lago are projected to have a $500 million war chest for funding challengers.
Via Axios:
The donors run the gamut: from health care to agriculture, insurance, financial institutions, tech and cryptocurrency investors.
"The crypto guys are just blowing it out," the Trump adviser said. "It used to be $1 million was a big number. Now we're looking at some folks giving like $10 [million] or $20 million."
"If the tech guys are giving big, it makes everyone give," another Trump adviser added.
Lest you have any sympathy for our tech overlords, Hamilton Nolan says look around the world; What do you see?
The strongman president demands the loyalty of the oligarchs, and the oligarchs in turn are granted the blessing of the state to loot an ever greater share of the nation’s wealth. Why would you assume that America is any different from the many nations around the world that already practice this political method in earnest?
This is the system most conducive to the perpetuation of the oligarchs’ interests. They financially support the political revenge and repression that will flow forth from the strongman, and they themselves are insulated from its consequences, and granted license to get as rich as they want, however they want. The arrangement works for both sides. This is gangster capitalism in full flower.
If you want to do your homework on what’s in store, take a look at what's already under consideration for legislation in 2025.
Pete Hegseth is Right: We Have a Military Standards Problem by Jill Filipovic
Hegseth is correct that our military is not quite what it could be, and that’s because your population isn’t quite what it could be. Fewer than a quarter of young people are currently considered physically, academically, and morally fit to join the military without some special dispensation.
Academic fitness means that a recruit must pass the armed services’s aptitude test, which frankly anyone who earns a high school degree should be able to complete (reality is a different story). Physical fitness means that recruits need to have some baseline level of strength, endurance, and physical health, all of which will be tested and improved-upon during basic training.
And the moral requirement means people with a history of criminality, gang activity, drug addiction, etc are not qualified. It turns out that’s a lot of people.
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The Business of History Is Booming by Will Dunn at Bloomberg
(Eds Note: Yay!)
The Rest is History is downloaded 12.5 million times per month, making it more popular (by nearly a million downloads a week) than This American Life. The company that makes the show, Goalhanger, has signed a deal — to be announced later this month — with a Hollywood production company to develop TV and film formats based on it. At the core of the show’s fanbase are tens of thousands of paying subscribers, the most dedicated of whom meet socially and refer to themselves (in homage to both internet fandom and the first Anglo-Saxon ruler of England) as “Athel Stans.”
More broadly, the history business is booming. In 2023, people in the UK and Ireland spent more on history books than at any point since Nielsen BookData’s records began in 1998. Ancient history sales rose 67% from 2013 to 2023, while books focusing on “specific subjects” — individual stories of lives, events or movements — climbed 70% over the same period. In the US, where the overall book market is flat, history has grown by 6% in the past year alone, according to Circana. For the first time in an election year, history as a category outsold politics (by two to one).
Google’s Ngram viewer, which covers printed sources up to 2022, suggests a significant increase in writing about history over the past decade. Historians are reaching huge audiences via email newsletters — Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson is one of Substack’s most successful authors, with 1.8 million subscribers — and social media. TikTok’s year-long interest in the Roman Empire, and how often men claim to think about it, has been the subject of more than 85 million videos.
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Ancient genomes reveal an Iron Age society centered on women by Trinity College Dublin at Phys.org
When the Romans arrived, they were astonished to find women occupying positions of power. Two of the earliest recorded rulers were queens—Boudica and Cartimandua—who commanded armies.
"It's been suggested that the Romans exaggerated the liberties of British women to paint a picture of an untamed society. But archaeology, and now genetics, implies women were influential in many spheres of Iron Age life. Indeed, it is possible that maternal ancestry was the primary shaper of group identities."
Anthropologist Dr. Martin Smith, one of the project's bone specialists, added, "These results give us a whole new way of looking at the burials we are uncovering with our students. Rather than simply seeing a set of skeletons, hidden aspects of these people's lives and identities come into view as mothers, husbands, daughters and so on.
