In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The public dialogue has been all about Trump's cabinet nominees, but the question that still won't go away for me, and nobody's talking about, is why the Democrat leadership never came up with a Plan B over Biden before the time to reoplace him was long past. The suggestions we had last summer were that at least by the start of the year, insiders were shocked at Joe's cognitive decline, but as far as I can tell, nobody did anything about it. Isn't that where the history of the 2024 campaign should start? But that means we should go back to 2020. From February of that year : Former Vice President Joe Biden's poor showing in the New Hampshire and Iowa primaries this week — and Bernie Sanders' strong performance in both — are terrifying the Democratic party's top managers and fundraisers. We got to taste that fear when Obama-era Secretary of State John Kerry was overheard on a phone call in a hotel lobby in Des Moines, Iowa, telling someone t...

Last night I was stuggling thbough one of those dreams where I start to suspect I'm dreaming, but the dream keeps going on so long that I decide maybe I had it wrong, maybe this is real life after all. When I finally did wake up, I realized with a start how many of the quasi-realist Edward Hopper's paintings, especially those with people in them, are actually dream images. Forget Salvador Dali, check out Edward Hopper. Then it occurred to me how many people seem to be reacting to Joe's pardoning his wayward son Hunter a little as though they're waking up from a dream . It's been a strange six months. First, Biden wasn’t “sharp as a tack.” He was sick and diminished. Next, Trump wasn’t a Nazi: He’s the president-elect of the United States with a majority mandate. Record numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and 65% of Native Americans supported him. Kamala Harris was a lousy candidate, wasted billions of dollars, and owes her #2 position to her ethnicity and gende...

I've been using Ferdinand Lumdberg's model of the finpolity that he outlined in The Rich and the Super-Rich (1968) as vehicle to understand this year's political developments. It turns out that Sundance, the blogger at Conservative Treehouse, has a parallel explanation that doesn't reference Lundberg or finpols , but it assumes a very similar theory of the wealthiest actors working to advance interlocking interests. He outlines what he thinks is the current state of the game in this post : In late summer 2023 not only myself, but several insightful analysts in the world of high finance, had come to the conclusion that Musk’s financial effort with the purchase of Twitter was unsustainable, unless something changed. Something did change. In early August of 2023, understanding the dynamic at stake, and also having a strategy for his own interests, Oracle’s Larry Ellison said, ‘he would not let Elon Musk fail with Twitter’. Billionaire Larry Ellison, a Tesla Bo...

Last June 17 , White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday dismissed speculation that President Biden froze while standing in the stage lights and had to be guided to an exit by former President Barack Obama at the end of an A-list Hollywood fundraiser on Saturday night. /p> “Let’s not forget President Obama, President Biden have a relationship. They are friends. They’re like family to each other, and I think that’s what you saw,” she told reporters during a press briefing in response to a question posed by The Daily Mail in reference to a viral clip shared by The Hollywood Reporter. “You saw the President put his hand … on the back of President Biden and they walked off the stage after taking questions … from Jimmy Kimmel. That is what you saw.” According to Reuters , Joe "drew cheers from the audience at a packed Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles, where Hollywood celebrities George Clooney and Julia Roberts were among the guests". It's star...

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...