The Great American Sell Off: Why Should Russian Oligarchs Have All the Fun?

The coming selloff of government will be wrapped in shiny paper with bows made of promises for cost savings on top.

I suppose it’s proper to start this post with a declaration of non-intent to inspire readers to commit acts of violence towards this country’s wealthy classes. I’m not willing to physically hurt anybody and don’t think you should either.

That said, fuck those people. They’re about to stage the greatest robbery of all time in broad daylight. The haul will be enormous, and it will be the theft that keeps on stealing.

Skipping past the Project 2025-style damage (for the moment) the next President’s appointees will do to the federal government, it’s important to note these deflated agencies won’t be left for dead. From the Veterans Administration to NASA to FEMA, these agencies all have tangible assets. And there will be (are) buyers waiting to pounce.

We’re on the verge of becoming like Russia was in the Yeltsin era. The key difference is that the post-Soviet oligarchs got wealthy off the fall of communism. State-owned major industries were auctioned off at predetermined bargain rates; the cash flow saved that government from financial collapse.

From National Public Radio: (Someday to be an affiliate of the Sinclair Broadcast Group?)

• Between November and December 1995, twelve of Russia's most profitable industrial enterprises were auctioned off to the oligarchs, including a mining company, two steel companies, two shipping companies, and five oil companies. The auctions were a complete farce. Chubais and his team had predetermined with the oligarchs who would get what and for roughly how much. And the prices the oligarchs paid for these corporations were a steal — almost literally. For example, Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, now well beyond his days of selling rubber ducks, got a large stake in the oil company Sibneft for about $200 million. In 2009, when Putin renationalized the company, Abramovich sold his stake back to the government for $11.9 billion. Talk about a payday.

Vladimir Putin put his boot down with the oligarchs, demanding loyalty in return for “opportunities.” Those who didn’t play along were arrested and stripped of their assets, which were passed along to the Russian leader’s in-crowd. Nowadays, the arrest part is often unnecessary as miscreants keep falling out of skyscraper windows.

America’s billionaires and their minions are creatures of another stage of capitalism. The good old days where entrepreneurs cashed in on consumer demand to acquire wealth but still felt obliged to the society they were part of ended about a half century ago. Acquiring wealth (and the power that goes along) is now a religion of sorts, where salvation will only come with widespread recognition that some people are just better than others.

The myth of government run like a business has been hailed as a cure all for economic and social problems. Now we’ll really get to see it in action. The public good will be considered achieved when more wealth was created, because surely it would trickle down throughout the populace.

Disappearing is the essential difference between government and business, between meeting human needs (social) and reaching capitalism’s goal (profit). Wanna run a government like a business? Get your priorities straight.

Elon Musk’s $277 million investment in the Trump campaign presages the Great American Government Agency Sale, wherein Federal programs like the Veterans Administration will go on the block. The VA has land and buildings, a substantial amount of institutional knowledge, and a customer base.

Jay Kuo:

• If both Hegseth and Trump’s pick to head the Veterans Administration, Doug Collins, is confirmed, we will likely see a strong push to privatize much of the health care that veterans now receive. But let’s be clear: Privatization means healthcare for a profit, and the only way for private providers to make money off our veterans is to deny many of their claims. This would leave many at the mercy of claims adjusters and a system now bent on actually limiting the amount of care they receive instead of providing for their needs.

I’m not saying Elon Musk or any one individual will be bidding on the assets of the VA. It won’t look like that, and Musk is probably more interested in NASA assets.

At each stage in the destruction of the social safety net, there is a hue and cry as people anticipate a disastrous outcome from “reforming” a particular program. There will be the promise of something “better” to take the place of the government’s role. In the case of the VA, I would expect that its productive parts would simply be privatized or outsourced.

Whereas the programs of the government-run VA have the making of productive people pursuing the American Dream in mind, the MuskCare™ version will be purely transactable.

You can extend this scenario to much of the government bureaucracy, except Intelligence and some parts of the Department of Defense. That’s because most of their operations have already been outsourced. I feel secure in saying that the Pentagon budget will never be successfully audited, not because sailors are shoveling cash off the stern, but because of the oddities baked into contractor deals.

We’ve tolerated or ignored the monopolization of the consumer products and services (Biden’s last minute antitrust moves aside), and it’s safe to say that the coming upheaval/selloff of government will be wrapped in shiny paper with bows made of promises for cost savings on top.

Here lies the problem for those of us that believe serving the people is better done collectively than individually: warning the public about the impending robbery will face daunting challenges.

Facts, particularly those expressed in print, don’t matter when it comes to influencing electoral behavior.

Low information voters were critical in electing Donald Trump. Parts of the US are without a local news outlet. And the challenges of just keeping their head above water make interest in current events a non-priority for many.

When polled, a majority of the American public favors the programs and aspirations of Democratic candidates. They just don’t know which candidate is more likely to act on those inclinations.

Further, their outlook isn’t aspirational. In California –a solidly Blue state– one in three people think the American Dream still holds true, according to the latest Public Policy Institute of California poll. Half of respondents said they used to believe in the American Dream of getting ahead if you work hard but no longer do.

Looking past the current debates over which parts of the Harris platform didn’t attract voters, an inescapable conclusion backed by post-election polling is that Democratic messaging didn’t reach a significant part of the population.

Kamala Harris could have had Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, and a dozen other religious super-entities come down from wherever, and the part of America that voted for Trump based on their gut wouldn’t have known about it. The voters who decided the election simply weren’t hearing what Democrats were saying.

Dan Pfeiffer posted some good analysis of the results of a Navigator survey of 5000 voters’ sources of knowledge.

• The main takeaway from all of this data is that legacy media is an inefficient way to reach persuadable voters and any communications strategy centered on those traditional outlets is doomed to fail. The Harris campaign did lots of innovative non-traditional stuff like the Call Her Daddy and All the Smoke podcasts. However, I look back at the time spent on legacy media, like the CNN town hall and the interview with NBC News, and wonder what the upside was.

• Swing voters are also more likely to have cut the cable cord and depend on streaming services. Only 27% of swing voters watch cable or satellite TV.

• Republicans have a significant messaging advantage. They have Fox, an array of Right Wing media outlets, and Right or MAGA-adjacent influencers tend to dominate on YouTube and TikTok. In recent elections, Democrats leveled the playing field by running more paid advertising. We have a better grassroots fundraising machine, so our campaigns have more money to spend. The GOP tries to balance the scales with billionaire-funded Super PACs, but because of campaign finance laws, campaign funds go much further than Super PAC money. An ad from a Super PAC costs five times as much as one from a campaign in many markets during the 2024 cycle.

Bitcoin is worth $100,000. It still doesn't have a single legitimate use case by Dave Karpf at The Future, Then and Now.

• We’re just going to have a wild era of speculation on unregulated securities, followed, eventually, by a stark reminder of why that’s a bad thing.

• Because make no mistake: The money has to come from somewhere. If someone makes $50 million on a speculative asset, then some other set of people must have lost that $50 million. They just don’t know it yet.

• This will end badly, for all the obvious reasons. But not yet, and probably not soon.

• The crypto guys bought a government. They don’t even need to make the blockchain seem like the future anymore. Bitcoin has reached $100,000 because the owners of capital like it, and they have ultimate power now, and everyone knows it.

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Yes, Luigi Mangione is attractive--that out the way, what comes next? By Alicia at Alicia’s Substack

• The truth is, people like Luigi symbolize something bigger than his Ivy League degree or his (still theoretical) folk-hero status. They’re a reminder that our rage isn’t just about wealth—it’s about exploitation.

• Truth be told, we all want a piece of the American dream, we just don’t want people to suck the blood out of us to earn their gazillions.

• I don’t think that is much to ask—do you?

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New Florida sex education curriculum excludes almost all information about sex by Judd Legum at Popular Information

• In Orange County's new 8th grade curriculum, there are no descriptions of the different forms of birth control and no explanation of which forms of birth control are effective in preventing the transmission of STDs. This is a particularly important issue in Florida, which is currently "reporting more HIV diagnoses than almost any other state."

• Previously, Orange County's 8th grade sex education curriculum included a detailed lesson about the importance of consent before engaging in sexual activity.

• Elissa Barr, a professor of public health at the University of North Florida, says that schools across Florida have also been ordered to remove content mentioning consent from sex education curricula. All discussion of consent has been removed from the new Orange County 8th grade sex education curriculum.