July 14, 2025
All hail our blurt-worthy President! On a daily basis, he does his part to reveal the stained wife beater worn underneath the Empire's fraying costume.
The United States empire already consumes 40% of what we make, more if you consider its nonstop borrowing from future taxpayers. It regulates and controls much of the non-state economy, and is frenetically militarizing in every direction. Yet focusing only on these facts can reduce our recognition of the real and unlimited power of individual action.
Using billions in military force against a disarmed population, the US and Israel pursue a shared objective of genocide, land and gas field theft. They ended Syria in a similar way, eliminating Syria's defenses and "rehabilitating" CIA-created "ISIS" into the ruling party, elections always optional for our favorite allies. Gaza, Syria, and Iran today are seamless parts of the same Middle Eastern policy the US has wasted $6 Trillion and countless millions of lives in the past 30 plus years.
Trump stated in March that the US had flowed $350 Billion in arms and aid to Ukraine, much more than the additional $100 Billion from a host of countries. Trump's off the cuff accounting came under fire in Europe. Either way, that war, like the one on Gaza, is fundamentally a US and NATO Goliath power play against a Russian David. In terms of purchasing power parity terms, the odds are six to one against Russia, yet we're always the righteous victims of someone else's ambition.
US and her allies playing David against Goliathic enemies is not only a false narrative, it's a collapsing one. US encouragement and support for Ukraine and Israel illustrate the cold reality of the American military-driven economy, and the coming intersection of the American Empire with the edge of a financial cliff. Eisenhower's famous farewell speech, for all of its appeal for an alert citizenry, and for all of its cautions about the power of the military industrial congressional complex, might be summed up simply as " Follow the money." But following the money also contains some clues to how empire is resisted.
Two recent examples come to mind. First, the Malaysian-born, ethnic Chinese, American Presbyterian CEO of Intel, Lip-Bu Tan, is cutting jobs everywhere, including significant cuts in Israel. The other is Sweden's new law that bans buying sex via sites like Onlyfans, and makes "purchase" on such platforms a punishable crime.
Intel is a global company, interested in homing or rehoming more of its capability inside the US. The vulnerability of its manufacturing facilities in Kiryat Gat surely had little to do with the layoffs, nor did world popular opinion of investing in Israel, given its behavior and practices.
Likewise, Onlyfans is just an unintentional "victim" of a Swedish legal process inching towards consistency. Buying sex in person in Sweden is criminalized, thus buying it virtually from presumably at-risk sex workers, should also be criminalized. It can't be related to the fact that the owners of Onlyfans are major donors to Israel directly, and were the top donor to AIPAC in 2023. Nor could it have much to do with last year's movement by Onlyfans "creators - the sex workers Sweden wishes to protect - to boycott the platform because of its ties to Israel, and that government's longstanding policy of genocide.
While these decisions are state and corporate, this is how individual agency works. It operates in the "free market" of people, ideas, and communities. It's often like a shadow at the corner of your eye, or a sudden sound you cannot fully identify, ephemerous yet all around us. We know the world can be seen and heard far beyond the frequency ranges that humans experience, hence the popular term "dog-whistling." The contemptuous mainstream denigration of a dog whistle also tells us that "the state" doesn't like it. We have the 20th century example of misty poets, who wrote on two levels, one for casual observers, conforming to the state narrative; the other, secret and perhaps terrifying messaging for people ready to understand. No doubt, the Straussian idea of esoteric understanding falls in this category; one message for the many, and a secret hidden message for the few who can interpret it.
Happily, we don't need to huddle over obscure texts, incessantly monitor our political leadership for signs of sanity, or be lectured to about "4D chess" and "trust the plan." All of this implies a human-designed centralized control system. It conditions us to obey, to serve the state, and to accept proto-totalitarianism.
When a country, a business or a person exercises public independence from the US Empire and its cohorts, they become targets for destruction. Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, and Iran, Russia and China have all been on the bloody receiving end of the imperial drive to control and exploit. But Intel simply decided to follow a path of future prosperity; Sweden is simply aligning its internal and external code. Quietly, both acts subvert empire; brilliantly, any imperial response will be an own goal.
Just being ourselves, we the people are the primary threat to the state. Even when we simply ask it to do better, it becomes enraged! The best survival plan its luminaries can come up with is to cede the world to idiocracy-style programming, then run and hide in a bunker somewhere.
States and empires produce slavery at worst, and peonage as a rule. But as the center rots and its institutions hollow, the American Empire has unintentionally driven both its opponents and its victims to be tougher, more cynical, more perceptive, quicker to act, and more skilled and creative in the use of the world's greatest technologies than any of our politicians, or their allied billionaires and financiers.
The political education of Elon Musk took less than a year; hundreds of millions of people have spent decades "serving empire" and now realize there is a whole bright and wonderful world out there - and all of us calmly aim to make that part of the world even bigger.
Like blind men describing the elephant, we all know something different and unique about how the state operates, the crimes it commits, the secrets it keeps, and the lies it tells. Some would say this fragmentation of knowledge is why we can't "fix it!"
But do we really need a future strong leader to fight the state, a bold new party to compete for power under the rigged system that allows us to "choose?" Or might we instead - today, and tomorrow, and every day - simply try to align our own public and private values, and exercise our own personal sovereignty for peace and prosperity?