In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The New York Post reports , JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been communicating with Donald Trump in recent months through secret back channels, helping the president-elect hammer out a policy agenda before and since his decisive White House victory, The Post has learned. The 68-year-old Wall Street titan — who, like 78-year-old Trump, grew up in Queens in New York City — has acted as “a sounding board” for the incoming commander-in-chief’s economic manifesto, four sources close to Trump’s transition team said. But let's test what might be going on here. The Post refers to Dimon as "JPMorgan Chase CEO", but as we saw yesterday, Ferdinand Lundberg, who invented the term finpol , made the point that mere corporate officers, no matter how well-publicized, are just the hired help unless they hold an ownership stake in the same corporations. Is Jamie Dimon a finpol ? According to Wikipedia , James Dimon; born March 13, 1956) is an American businessman who has...

Stephen Miller confirms Mark Zuckerberg meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago: “Mark Zuckerberg has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter of and a participant in this change that we’re seeing…” pic.twitter.com/tzvCDS2std — The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 28, 2024 Finpols , a term invented by Ferdinand Lundberg in his 1968 The Rich and the Super-Rich , looks more and more relevant as we look at Trump's return to the White House with Elon Musk literally at his side and figures like Mark Zuckerberg making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago. Finpol is a combination of financier and politician . As Lundberg put it, Although not recognized by the general public as politicians, . . . much of the daily activity of the biggest property holders--the finpols -- is identical with the work of government leaders. They are, first, diplomats--so much so that they can be quickly shuttled into the highest formal diplomatic posts. They are, too, manipulators of public se...

We have a great deal yet to learn about July's soft coup that forced Biden out of the presidential race. A so-called megadonor, John Morgan, has been talking lately, although I'm not sure how much he actually knows, or if he was even involved in that process. On one hand, the conventional wisdom for now is that the Democrat megadonors were responsible for pushing Joe out : On a Tuesday in early July, 75 wealthy Democratic political donors gathered on a Zoom call to discuss the path forward for President Joe Biden after his calamitous debate performance against Donald Trump, according to a person on the call. Only one of the donors said they thought Biden should stay in the race, this person said. All the others made it very clear that they believed Biden needed to drop out of the race, if the party wanted to defeat Trump in November. . . . Many of these donors laid their positions out in stark terms: If Biden refused to drop out, they would not be giving money to h...

Over the weekend, there was a flurry of posts suggesting pro-war diehards were going to try to force an escalation in Ukraine that would give Trump no choice but to continue the war, which he's asserted he can quickly end once he's in office. For instance , With around 50 days remaining to stir up as much trouble as possible, and with around 50 days of strategic activity left in order to Trump-proof the UE coalition of the NATO alliance, the U.K and France are in “classified” discussions about sending their troops into Ukraine before President Trump takes office. Or this : According to the New York Times, US and European officials have discussed a range of options they believe will deter Russia from taking more Ukrainian territory, including providing Kiev with nuclear weapons. The outlet reports that Western officials believe the Kremlin will not significantly escalate the war before Donald Trump is sworn in as President in January. Following the election of Trump...

In yesterday's post, I brought up Ferdinand Lundberg's incisively Swiftian term finpol , which refers to a person wealthy enough to control the levers of public life. In 1968, he was referring mainly to people like the Rockefeller brothers, Averell Harriman, Henry Ford II, J Paul Getty, and Sid Ricbardson. Times have changed, these people have passed away, and a new generation of finpols has come onto the scene. By coincidence yesterday, I found this piece at The Atlantic via Real Clear Politics, What the Broligarchs Want From Trump . Let's not be misled here: The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs's widow and the heir of his fortune. Laurene Powell Jobs is a finpol , or at least she thinks she is. We must assume this piece is speaking for her, and it at least recognizes that it's speaking from within the world of finpolity : After Donald Trump won this month’s election, one of the first things he did was to name two unelected male pl...

One of the big conundrums of the woke interlude just past is A&E's cancellation of its top show, Live PD , in the wake of the George Floyd riots. According to Wikipedia , At the time of cancellation, Live PD was the most watched show on A&E and the most watched show on cable during prime time on Friday. After the cancellation of Live PD, A&E's viewership went down 49% in the following months. On June 10, 2020, A&E canceled the show. Over succeeding months, the host, Dan Abrams, wko is also a News Nation anchor and the host of other programs still on A&E, put out vaguely worded statements about efforts to restart the program. Variety reported that A&E executives felt they had no choice after Paramount Network canceled Cops , even though they thought Live PD was a very different show Abrams appeared in several media outlets after the show was canceled, defending the show and its portrayal of police. He said he was "shocked & ...

David Brooks, a somewhat dimwitted apologist for the status quo, has suddenly decided the status quo doesn't work. I signed up for a free trial subscription to the Atlantic so I could reach his latest piece, How the Ivy League Broke America , behind a paywall. If you don't want to do this, he summarizes it in this YouTube interview: Let's recall that in his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise , he was all for the elites. The bobos were bourgeois bohemians, whom he defines as postwar Jews beginning with the baby boom generation, who benefited from the advent of the SATs, attributed to Harvard's President James B Conant, which caused elite schools to drop their Jewish quotas and admit high-achieving Jews in greater numbers. Brooks, who got into Chicago, cited his own example as part of this positive outcome. He found the students at Princeton, which he visited as part of the book project, admirable in that they scheduled their days in 15-minute increments to maximize t...

Almost exactly a year ago, on November 26, 1963, I posted: It was never a secret that Zelensky had only up to the end of this year to win the war, and he clearly hasn't done it, with the new added factor that the Israeli-Palestinian situation is bleeding attention and resources from Ukraine. The new circumstances simply compound the general miscalculation over Ukraine's prospects. This brings me to Roman Catholic just war doctrine as outlined in CCC 2309 : > damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; there must be serious prospects of success; the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition. "These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the '...

Predictably, I fouynd this at Real Clear Politics this morning: Were the polls right? It’s complicated. One of the most frequent questions I get about this election is some version of, “why were the polls so wrong?” . . . RCP’s final poll average gave Harris a lead of .1 (that is, one-tenth of a point) nationally. Trump is now winning by 1.7 points, yielding a miss of 1.8 for the national average — pretty close, by any reckoning. And it could get even closer when the final tranche of ballots is tallied. The biggest miss in the swing states was Arizona, where the poll average missed by 2.7. In four of the seven swing states, the difference between the average poll margin and the vote count was 1.7 points — even better than the national results.  Turn now to the seven battleground Senate contests: In three of them, the miss was less than 1 point. It averages 1.6 points. The biggest miss was in Nevada, where the polls had Jacky Rosen ahead of Sam Brown by 4.9 points in a race s...

What I'm beginning to notice about the dual Gaetz-Hegseth not-quite scandals so far is that, unlike the sort of allegations that go metastatic, these both seem to have stalled. It's beern roughly a week since news leaked of a memo written by an unnamed woman who claims to be a friend of another unnamed accuser that was sent to Trump's transition team. That memo claimed Hegseth raped a 30-year-old conservative group staffer in a hotel room in Monterey in 2017, the [Washington] Post reported. Police investigated the incident but Hegseth never faced charges, the memo said. And so far, we've basically had clarifying information regarding a non-disclosure agreement and Hegseth's version of events, which seems to have been confirmed by a subsequent police investigation. Let's contrast this with, say, the timeline of the Monica Lewinsky scandal : Jan. 7 : Lewinsky signed an affidavit stating that she never had a sexual relationship with Cl...

As I've been saying, the affronted ingenues who come out of the woodwork with steamy allegations against Trump and other Republican nominees soon enough turn out not to be ingenues, whatever else they may be. This is starting to look like it's the case with the as-yet unnamed woman who, through a friend, has passed allegations against Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth to the Trump transition team at Mar-a-Lago, which in turn have been leaked to the press. It appears that the fullest accounts are in Vanity Fair , behind a paywall, and the Washington Post . The Post's version goes like this: The alleged incident is said to have occurred when Hegseth attended a California Federation of Republican Women conference in Monterey, and allegedly took place between just before midnight on Oct. 7, 2017, and 7 a.m. the following morning at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa, according to the police statement, first reported by Vanity Fair. The allegation to ...

This morning's headline at The Hill: NFL stars celebrate big plays with dance moves inspired by Trump : Players across the NFL celebrated big plays Sunday with dance moves inspired by President-elect Trump. Raiders tight end Brock Bowers, Titans wide receiver Calvin Ridley and Lions defensive end Za’Darius Smith all followed San Francisco 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa in celebrating big plays with dances inspired by Trump. After a 23-yard touchdown, Bowers shook his arms and hips in the end zone similar to how Trump famously dances. Following the game, he told USA Today that he’s seen “everyone do it.” “I watched the UFC fight [Saturday] night, and Jon Jones did it. I like watching UFC, so I saw it, and thought it was cool,” he said. . . . College players have been doing the move for weeks, and now it’s gone international, the AP noted. This confirms the words of General Patton : When you were kids, you all admired the champion marb...