Remember That Hollywood Fundraiser Where Obama Had To Usher Joe Offstage?

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 starting to look like there was a lot more to this story, and we may or may not ever get the whole plot.

While the coverage played up Clooney's support for Biden, it looks like Obama was soon enough in the process of using Clooney to help usher Joe out of the race.

Activist actor George Clooney is outraged after being manipulated by former President Barack Obama into lobbying for Kamala Harris to take faltering Joe Biden's place in the 2024 election – and then getting thrown under the bus by his onetime buddy when she lost, RadarOnline.com can reveal.

"George is furious with Obama for disappearing after the election disaster and leaving him holding the bag for pushing the plan with his Hollywood pals", a showbiz insider said.

Clooney, 63, wrote an opinion piece in July calling for President Biden to drop his reelection campaign, citing his declining mental faculties.

"We are not going to win in November with this president", he declared. Biden, 82, heeded that advice 11 days later, ceding his campaign to Vice President Harris. And the minute Kamala's historic bid for the White House came up short, Clooney started taking heat! "Since I'm in a deep depression and feel like lashing out at someone, what's the plan now, George Clooney?" One of his many same-party critics writes on social media. "It's all George Clooney's fault!"

Meanwhile, Trump supporters gleefully taunted the uber-liberal star.

"Trump should not forget to thank Hollywood celebrities – especially George Clooney", cracked one poster.

Biden's apparent freeze-up at the June 15 Hollywood fundraiser followed a week of well-publicized episodes in France and Italy where his cognitive decline became unavoidably clearer. These events must have begun to focus Obama's mind on whether Joe could last through the election in that condition, buit I've always thought the real catalyst in the decision to force Joe out of the race was the July 13 assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, PA. This showed the estent of Trump's popular support in the key state of Pennsylvania -- Sen Fetterman saw the same thing -- as well as the Trump campaign's ability quickly to exploit the visuals.

Over the following week, a consensus emerged that Joe should drop out, led by Clooney. According to the BBC, on July 11, just before the assassination attempt,

George Clooney has issued a damning call for Joe Biden to quit the US presidential race, hours after senior Democrat Nancy Pelosi swerved questions about whether he should continue.

The actor and prominent Democratic fundraiser said the president had won many battles in his career, "but the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time".

The story mentions doubts from Michalel Douglas and continues,

The celebrities' comments came after Mrs Pelosi, the former House Speaker, joined growing disquiet in the party, saying time was "running short" for Mr Biden, 81, to decide whether to stay in the race after his stumbling debate against Trump.

In hindsight, it's clear that the campaign was orchestrated, with Clooney's op-ed following Pelosi's remarks, but Obama stayed in the background. It's much better known that Pelosi applied the final pressure to push Joe out over the weekend of July 20-21, but we still know very little of what other behind-the-scnes discussions took place, almost certainlhy involvng Obama -- but Obama has avoided any public blame to date.

Another question on which we're beginning to get hints is Kamala's activities during this period. In this post, I discussed reports that by June 23, only two days after Joe's withdrawal, Kamala had consolidated support for her nomination. Yet during the whole month between Joe's stumbles in Europe followed by the Hollywood freezeup, none of the potential replacements -- Harris, Newsom, Whitmer, and Beshear -- expressed anything but support for Biden. Newsom in particular said, after the disastrous June 27 debate,

“No, our nominee is Joe Biden,” Newsom told reporters, per NewsNation affiliate KTLA. “I’m looking forward to voting for him in November.”

Added Newsom: “I will never turn my back on him.”

It sounds increasingly to me as though much more was happening behind the scenes than we've been told. I especially wonder if Pelosi made it clear to Newsom all along that it wasn't his time. At the same link, following the June 27 debate,

". . . who else could beat former President Donald Trump? Who else would Biden pass the baton to if it ever came to that?” Alex Gangitano, White House Correspondent for NewsNation partner The Hill said on “Morning in America” Monday, adding that something like that happening would be ” extremely unlikely.”

Oh, baloney. The wheels were already turning, and he knew it.

Biden and sources close to him have said he has no plans to drop out of the race, and even said donations spiked following Thursday’s debate against Donald Trump. Some names have been floated to be the new Democratic nominee if he does, but so far, they pushed back against the need to choose a different candidate.

There’s been speculation about Vice President Kamala Harris stepping in to run for president. As she is Biden’s successor, Gangitano said, Harris would be able to take some of the funds he raised on the Biden-Harris ticket.

The Hill reports that a Democrat who served in the Obama White House said Harris “clearly has a purpose now to make the case for what they have accomplished.” A Democratic donor told the outlet that in the next 30 days, it may be up to her to make the case.

I'm getting the feeling the whole thing was gamed out weeks in advance. The only ones who were out of the loop were Biden himself and the US public.

More On The Finpol Realignment

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 been the Chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of JPMorgan Chase since 2006.

Dimon began his career as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group. After earning an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1982, he joined American Express, working there, under the mentorship of Sandy Weill, until 1985. The following year, at age of 30, Dimon was appointed chief financial officer (CFO) of Commercial Credit and later became the firm's president. He was chief operating officer (COO) of both the insurer Travelers and the brokerage firm Smith Barney from 1990 to 1998, when he became president of Citigroup. In 2000, he was appointed CEO of Bank One, overseeing its operations until merger with JPMorgan Chase in 2004. Dimon then became COO of JPMorgan Chase, assuming the role of CEO in 2006.

. . . He is one of three sons of Theodore and Themis (née Kalos) Dimon, who had Greek ancestry. His paternal grandfather was a Greek immigrant who had worked as a banker in Smyrna and Athens and later changed the family name from Papademetriou to Dimon. . . . Both his father and grandfather were stockbrokers at Shearson. Jamie attended the Browning School and majored in psychology and economics at Tufts University, graduating summa cum laude.

So he went to private secondary school, but he didn't go on to an Ivy, and he wasn't a WASP. This makes him prosperous middle clas, but by no means upper-class. But you can be none of these and still be a finpol -- look at Henry Ford, who didn't even attend high school. The key is whether you have ownership stake in your corporation. Back to Wikipedia,

Dimon is one of the few bank chief executives to have become a billionaire, largely because of his stake in JPMorgan Chase. He received a $23 million pay package for fiscal year 2011, more than any other bank CEO in the US. However, his compensation was reduced to $11.5 million in 2012 by JPMorgan Chase following a series of controversial trading losses that amounted to $6 billion. On January 24, 2014, it was announced that Dimon would receive $20 million for his work in 2013; a year of record profits and stock price under Dimon's reign, despite significant losses that year due to scandals and payments of fines. The award was a 74% raise, which included over $18 million in restricted stock.

For finpol purposes, the amount of his compensation is much less relevant than his ownership stake. According to The Motley Fool,

Dimon is the largest individual JPMorgan Chase shareholder, with about 7.84 million shares. Altogether, Dimon owns about 0.27% of the company's stock. Dimon earned $36 million in 2023, a 4% raise from the prior year. Dimon received a $1.5 million salary and a $5 million cash bonus. The remainder of his compensation was in company stock.

Considering that other JPMorgan Chase individual shareholders are company executives and board members who are allied with Dimon, even his 0.27% ownership stake amounts to working control. Thus he is an authentic finpol. As of November 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at $2.6 billion, which is at the lower end of the finpol range. But what makes his membership in finpolity signficant? Back to Wikipedia:

From 1989 to 2009, Dimon donated primarily to the Democratic Party. In May 2012, he described himself as "barely a Democrat." After Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, there was speculation that Dimon would become Secretary of the Treasury.

. . . Dimon has had close ties to some people in the Obama White House, including former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Dimon was one of three CEOs—along with Goldman Sachs Chairman Lloyd Blankfein and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit—said by the Associated Press to have had liberal access to former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

. . . In December 2016, Dimon joined a business forum assembled by then president-elect Donald Trump to provide strategic and policy advice on economic issues. The forum dissolved after Trump's comments on the alt-right political violence at the 2017 Unite the Right rally. During Trump's presidency, Dimon supported his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, but condemned the Trump administration's immigration and trade policies.

This reflects finpolity's general ambivalence toward Trump's first term -- but now, despite his previous objections to Trump's immigration and trade policies, he appears to be supporting immigration and trade policies that are even more MAGA than they were then. According to the Post story,

Three of the sources close to Trump said the secret back channel focused on plans for cutting government spending, banking regulation, taxes and trade.

A company insider added that Trump’s top aides set up the calls, which continued after the election, to “create a bit of daylight” between the two men and stop details of the exchanges leaking.

A spokesperson for the Trump transition team declined to comment. A JPMorgan spokesman also declined to comment.

. . . On Nov. 22, The Post broke the news that Trump was also consulting with Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, a major Dem donor, on policy issues.

What makes this particularly significant is, as Lundberg has pointed out, finpolity has been generally aligned with the New Deal Democrat coalition and the Great Society. It has been tolerant of Nixon-Bush Republicanism, and it tolerated Reagan to the extent that Reagan allowed former CIA Director Bush pere to temper his conservative instincts and indeed to succeed him. But at some point late in the Biden years, things changed.

There's a great deal we still have to learn.

The Finpols Are Closing Ranks -- But Who Are The Finpols?

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 sentiment through advertising, public relations subordinates and corporately controlled mass media in general.

. . . Presidents McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and Eisenhower were deep in the confidence of the finpols and, despite harsh words at times purely for public consumption, got along very well with them. Theodore Roosevelt demagogically referred to them as "malefactors of great wealth." But the finpols, always, despite harsh public language, managed to get their way, sooner or later. Corporate concentration for example, continues apace despite the hullabaloo of antitrust.

There was a brief period of disagreement between the politicians and the finpols during the Great Depression, which ended by World War II, when finpols like Averell Harriman and Nelson Rockefeller were brought into the policy levels of government. Relations by the 1960s, when Lundberg wrote, continued to be close:

In the 1960's the finpols remain restored to grace in national affairs. Most of them at the moment seem to agree that the government should be allowed to engage in somewhat wider social maneuvers than finpolity would ordinarily approve. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, seeking to rebuild Franklin D. Roosevelt's synthesis of electoral support, have been allowed to engage in much social-program maneuver. And the finpols have been conceded many of their demands--removal of price controls, lower taxes, etc. President Johnson, like President Eisenhower, has professed great admiration and respect for the finpols who are, after all, under the equal application of the laws entitled to as much consideration as, say, the ordinary workman. The finpols, then, are an integral part of "The Great Society," in which there is obviously a great deal of lucre to be made filling profitable government contracts for cement, steel, aluminum, copper, textbooks, rockets, space machines, tanks, recoilless rifles, schools, hospitals, sanitoria and bird baths.

Bringing things up to date, the US government is a major buyer of computer hardware and software, telecommunications equipment, and other high-tech resources and services. which finpols like Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Bezos, and others provide. It's probably correct to say that finpolity was in consensus bipartisan alignment with every administration after Lyndon Johnson until 2016, when the media, controlled by finpols, generally turned against MAGA, with the partial exception of Fox, controlled by the finpol Rupert Murdoch -- but Murdoch's Wall Street Journal was Never Trump.

Something seems to have changed late in the Biden administration. This probably was driven, at least in part, by the collapse of the New Deal Democrat coalition, which as Lundberg points out had the collaboration of finpolity. The very liberal -- and at one point finpol congruent UK Guardian -- somewhat belatedly takes notice:

From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, a growing number of billionaires, tech titans and venture capitalists are backing Donald Trump’s campaign for president, among them Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity fund, Steve Wynn, the casino tycoon, Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager, and Marc Andreessen, a leading venture capitalist.

. . . Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management, said it’s important to recognize a disconnect in the business world – while dozens of billionaires are backing Trump, not one CEO of a Fortune 100 company has given money to Trump’s campaign, according to public records.

But Lundberg makes an important distinction:

Corporation officers are of interest in this inquiry mainly because they are the frontline deputies of the rich and the super-rich when they are not themselves of the rich. They are the watchdogs and overseers (usually hired) of great wealth.

. . . [W]hen Ford Motor Company lost a reported $250 million on its hapless Edsel model in the 1950's, Henry Ford II did not walk the plank. He, along with other stockholders, simply took it in the pocketbook. He could not be fired because be was a chief owner. This simple fact revealed the source of true power in an executive.

. . . The hired top corporation man, then, as distinguished from the hereditary ownerexecutive, is much like the cormorant or fishing bird, still used in China. A strap is fastened around the birds neck, permitting him to breathe but not allowing him to swallow his catch. He dutifully brings the fish back to the boat. Now and again (paydays) the strap is loosened and he is allowed to swallow a fish. The bird is a percentage participant in the process, which was established by and for others.

So corporate executives, unless they are also owners, aren't finpols, so Dean Sonnenfeld misses an important point. But who else isn't a finpol? It appears that the so-called "Democrat megadonors" aren't either. I mentioned John Morgan the other day. Take this example, too:

Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman is reportedly weighing fleeing the United States as President-elect Donald Trump is set to embark on his second term.

Citing several anonymous sources, the New York Times reported that the LinkedIn founder and past Epstein Island visitor could potentially relocate to another continent following Vice President Kamala Harris’s sound defeat.

Estimates place Hoffman's net worth at over $2 billion. According to Wikipedia,

Hoffman has been an influential figure in political circles, being a member of the Bilderberg Group since at least 2011 and the Council on Foreign Relations since 2015. He has actively participated in political funding and advocacy, contributing to various campaigns and organizations, and has been a vocal proponent of democratic institutions and voting rights.

Even by Lundberg's definition, this could make hin a finpol -- but then, why is he weighing fleeing the country? That would make him a loser, not a finpol. But note that he was a visitor to Epstein's island. Musk has weighed in on this, saying billionaires such as Reid Hoffman and Bill Gates threw their support behind Kamala Harris for fear of Epstein’s "client list" becoming public, which Trump has threatened to do.

So some very wealthy people aren't finpols. Lundberg himself spent a lot of time in The Rich and the Super-Rich trying to determine who among the merely rich was an authentic finpol, and clearly this is still an open question. At the moment, though, we can probably say that the crop of industrialists who've aligned themselves with Trump are at least the most influential finpols. But this only scratches the surface of what happened in the finpolity to drive its support for Trump, when it had been far more ambivalent in 2016.

Democrat Megadonor On Disaffection With Harris

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 help his reelection until polls showed that he was a clear favorite to beat Trump.

The story dates from July 18, not long before Joe did withdraw, but it notes that even before he withdrew, momentum was building for Kamala:

In an unexpected twist, events that feature Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden’s likely successor should he step aside, have started to sell out.

An online seating chart for a concert event with Harris in Pittsfield, Mass. on July 27 shows it is almost entirely sold out. Tickets start at $100 and go up to just over $12,000, according to the invitation. Folk legend James Taylor and cello star Yo-Yo Ma are the headliners.

By July 23, only days after Joe dropped out, Kamala had become the consensus choice:

On Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the race for his party’s nomination and quickly endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. In a little more than 24 hours, she has consolidated the party around her candidacy.

The piece lists seven reasons for this, many of which were wishful thinking -- Kamala would already be fully briefed on the issues and ready to hit the ground running, for instance -- but it concludes simply that only Kamala had built a credible case for herself among the Democrat leadership, something that apparently had been taking place before Joe's final decision to drop out. It's hard to avoid thinking this wasn't a surprise, and the process was already wired.

Now we have John Morgan, characterized at News Nation as a "Democratic megadonor", weighing in on Harris's campaign. According to Wikipedia,

John Bryan Morgan (born March 31, 1956) is an American attorney. He is best known as founder of personal injury law firm Morgan & Morgan. Politico described Morgan as "the godfather of Florida's medical marijuana amendment and a Democratic fundraiser."

. . . Morgan has been an advisor and fundraiser for Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi.

. . . Morgan's estimated net worth ranges from $500 million to $730 million.

His net worth doesn't put him in the finpol range, but his relentless self-promotion makes him a wannabe. News Nation at the link above covers an interview he gave Monday night:

Biden stepped down from the presidential race in July, amid pressure from high-ranking Democratic figures. He endorsed Harris no less than an hour later, while former President Obama took five days to endorse Harris on his X page.

“He did not want to go gently,” Morgan said of Biden. “He nominated her, basically Obama did not want her. Obama did not endorse her for five days, Pelosi did not want her.” “I think it was to say, F you to Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and every representative that was pushing him out… and I think he was pissed,” Morgan told Cuomo.

. . . “Pelosi told her California delegation, there will be a conference, there will be a caucus, there will be a convention,” Morgan said, a point touched upon by many Republican politicians and commentators during the process. “We basically ran on this deal where ‘democracy, democracy!’ And then we didn’t have democracy in picking our nominee.”

Morgan, who admitted he did not personally donate to Harris’s campaign, criticized the way the campaign handled its funds, saying it could put her presidential future in doubt.

. . . Morgan argued that despite Harris’s performance in the presidential debate against President-elect Donald Trump, her history showed she was unsuitable to take on the Republican party this election cycle.

“We already saw what she looked like on the national stage,” Morgan said. “Look, she’s got to be talented to have done what she did in California. I’ll give her that.

“But she was not ready for prime time, and then they rolled her out in prime time, and she got destroyed.”

On one hand, Morgan himself suggessts he was out of the loop, since in his version, he didn't donate to the Harris campaign. But the sketchy information we're beginning to see from the other sources linked above suggests there was a behind-the-scenes campaign in favor of Harris even before Joe dropped out, while other potential replacements -- Newsom, Whitmer, or Pritzker -- apparently had no equivalent shadow efforts.

Morgan is basically griping about decisions that were forced on Democrat leadership in late July, when the real question should be why everyone waited so long that they had those decisions forced on them then. The question continues to be how aware those Democrat powers were of Joe's decline in the months and even years before his stumbles in June and his disastrous debate at the end of the month.

Now also, while Morgan says he didn't donate to the Harris campaign, if he was a Democrat megadonor, was he among the group that is said to have withheld its donations to Biden to force his withdrawal? Why was Biden's cognitive decline such a surprise to these insiders that they waited until July to make their move?

How much, specifically, did Morgan know? Nobody at News Nation seems to have asked him that. How much did the group quietly pushing Harris's nomination before Joe withdrew know? Surely Pelosi and Obama also knew which way the wind was blowing well before Joe withdrew. Why the big act, especially from Pelosi, that this wasn't what she wanted?

I think Morgan is running cover for the Democrat establishment here, which is trying to evade responsibility for Harris. Baloney. They got what they wanted.

Ukraine Escalation?

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 earlier this month, the US and its NATO allies began taking steps to rush weapons to Ukraine and give Kiev the ability to strike targets inside Russian territory with long-range weapons.

The problem is that Putin is already escalating in response to the West's own escalation:

Russia has a stock of powerful new missiles "ready to be used", President Vladimir Putin has said, a day after his country fired a new ballistic missile at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

In an unscheduled TV address, the Russian leader said the Oreshnik missile could not be intercepted and promised to carry out more tests, including in "combat conditions".

Russia's use of the Oreshnik capped a week of escalation in the war that also saw Ukraine fire US and British missiles into Russia for the first time.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for world leaders to give a "serious response" so that Putin "feels the real consequences of his actions".

Elsewhere,

Russia’s use of the weapon comes amid intense fighting between the two sides and after the U.S. authorized Ukraine to use sophisticated weapons to strike targets located further inside Russian territory.

President Joe Biden reversed his ban on Kyiv using high-precision Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, to strike deeper inside Russia after revelations that Moscow escalated the conflict by deploying North Korean troops. Some 10,000 troops from North Korea are now believed to be fighting on behalf of Russia.

. . . Former Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward detailed in his recent book “War” that the U.S. had intelligence pointing to “highly sensitive, credible conversations inside the Kremlin” that Putin was seriously considering nuclear weapons and scrambled at the last minute to deter it.

NATO will now hold an emergency meeting with Ukraine at its headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday to discuss the situation. The alliance confirmed that at Kyiv’s request, the NATO Ukraine Council will convene.

Any negotiation with Trump will have to consider Putin's current objectives, which are generally those with which he began the invasion of Ukraine in 2022:

In the first detailed reporting of what President Putin would accept in any deal brokered by Trump, the five current and former Russian officials said the Kremlin could broadly agree to freeze the conflict along the front lines.

There may be room for negotiation over the precise carve-up of the four eastern regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, according to three of the people who all requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

While Moscow claims the four regions as wholly part of Russia, defended by the country's nuclear umbrella, its forces on the ground control 70-80% of the territory with about 26,000 square km still held by Ukrainian troops, open-source data on the front line shows. Russia may also be open to withdrawing from the relatively small patches of territory it holds in the Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions, in the north and south of Ukraine, two of the officials said.

. . . Two of the sources said outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden's decision to allow Ukraine to fire American ATACMS missiles deep into Russia could complicate and delay any settlement - and stiffen Moscow's demands as hardliners push for a bigger chunk of Ukraine. On Tuesday, Kyiv used the missiles to strike Russian territory for the first time, according to Moscow which decried the move as a major escalation. If no ceasefire is agreed, the two sources said, then Russia will fight on.

"Putin has already said that freezing the conflict will not work in any way," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters hours before the Russians reported the ATACMS strikes. "And the missile authorisation is a very dangerous escalation on the part of the United States."

This strongly implies that Putin won't accept any sort of NATO-leaning government in Kyiv. I don't think this is an unreasonable position, considering the Maidan Revolution of 2014, which prompted the first Russian invasion of that year, appears to have been organized by US neoconservatives in the Obama State Department. An eventual settlement will need to accommodate the concern that the US will continue to stir up this sort of trouble.

For now, though, the escalation stories are takiong a holiday break. The best anyone can surmise is that as Trump's inauguration gets closer, Biden has diminishing credibility, while Trump is beginning to make his intentions clear. He's already beginning to outline what is post-January 20 policies will be:

🚨 🚨 🚨 pic.twitter.com/qwPmIpDqrQ

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) November 25, 2024

This gives Biden less anmd less room for last-minute maneuver.

War Among The Finpols?

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 plutocrats, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to run a new Department of Government Efficiency. . . . [I]ts appointed task of reorganizing the federal bureaucracy and slashing its spending heralds a new political arrangement in Washington: a broligarchy, in which tremendous power is flowing to tech and finance magnates, some of whom appear indifferent or even overtly hostile to democratic tradition.

Ferdinand Lundberg would insist there's absolutely nothing new here. In The Rich and the Super-Rich, he observed,

In their overlapping aspects, government and finpolities are almost identical, a fact most apparent in time of war and in matters of defense. The so-called defense industries are such an indispensable part of government today as to have given rise to the concept of the Warfare State. Company boardrooms are departments of the Department of Defense or, looked at another way, the Department of Defense is a special branch of the big-company boardrooms.

. . . On the whole, most of the time, the relations between the president of the United States and the leading finpols have been cordial. Actually most of the presidents of the United States appear to have admired and stood in awe of the finpols-- men who have mastered or have been put in mastery of the mysterious life-giving market.

So let's begin with the understanding that there should be absolutely no surprise that at Mar-a-Lago, which since its building in Palm Beach, founded by the finpol Henry M Flagler, has always been something of a palace in the Versailles of finpolity, there should be something of a party under way. Ms Powell Jobs's avatar at The Atlantic is nevertheless shocked, shocked:

The broligarchs’ ranks also include the PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel—Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance’s mentor, former employer, and primary financial backer—as well as venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, both of whom added millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign. Musk, to be sure, is the archetype. The world’s richest man has reportedly been sitting in on the president-elect’s calls with at least three heads of foreign states: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Musk joined Trump in welcoming Argentine President Javier Milei at Mar-a-Lago and, according to The New York Times, met privately in New York with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in a bid to “defuse tensions” between that country and the United States. Recently, after Musk publicly endorsed the financier Howard Lutnick for secretary of the Treasury, some in Trump’s camp were concerned that Musk was acting as a “co-president,” The Washington Post reported.

But Henry Kissinger rose to prominence as a retainer of the finpol Nelson Rockefeller, and we may assume that his China policy innovations during the Nixon administration, his settlement of the Viet Nam War, his continuation at the State Department after Nixon's resignation, when Rockefeller himself was named to the vice presidency under Gerald Ford, were all with the full approval of the finpolity. There is absolutely nothing new here.

So is there war among the finpols? Ferdinand Lundberg would suggest this is a logical impossibility:

National policy with respect to the finpolities has been paralyzed by ambivalence relating to two ideas. There has been, first, the strong national belief in competition. Without competition the national history itself would be seen as without meaning, simply a record of random activity. On the other hand, there has been admiration for advancing technology, linked purely by association with the corporations, and with bigness. Americans generally admire competition, advanced technology and pure bigness. The fact that one must choose between competition and corporate bigness has been evaded. It is logically impossible to have finpolity and competition, yet few are willing to make a choice between the two.

So what's really going on among the finpols in the wake of Trump's victory? This story at Page Six gives hints:

President Biden jokingly urged a roomful of Democratic donors and insiders not to jump in the White House pool at a weekend dinner to thank them before he leaves office.

. . . We hear that guests included big donors and Biden’s cabinet, as well as friends and others who have been super-supportive of the Bidens through the years. Former and current ambassadors came in for the elite event.

Spotted among the crowd was former Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz and his wife, Gwen, who were chatting with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo.

One source said some donors who’d given $250,000 skipped the bash.

“Insiders who were invited and didn’t go are calling it ‘the losers party,’ ” groused one source. “Many said they didn’t want to be associated with the Dems right now because of the embarrassing loss” to Donald Trump in the election “and anger over the $1.5 billion spent on the campaign that failed.”

It looks to me as though the finpols are getting in line behind Trump. Trump, however, is probably not a finpol himself, or if he is at all, he's a minor leaguer. Wikipedia lists his net worth in the $5-6 billion range, while lists of the world's richest men, true finpols, put them orders of magnitude higher, Elon Musk at over $300 billion, Jeff Bezos at over $200 million, and Larry Ellison, also just over $200 billon. All three are thought to be aligned with Trump, visibly or less so.

Trump had a career in real estate, then in media and entertainment, and he finally turned to politics as a retirement activity, where he turned out to be surprisingly successful. But he's a politician, not a caudillo.

In fact, it appears that finpolity was hghly skeptical of Trump in his first and second campaigns and was even somewhat dubious up to the time Biden withdrew from the race this past summer. As of now, though, it looks like a firm political consensus is building as Trump morphs into a mainstream politician -- but what this bodes for the MAGA agenda is up in the air.

A&E And Reelz Settle Their Lawsuit Over Live PD and OP Live

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 & beyond disappointed" about its cancellation and added, "To the loyal #LivePDNation please know I, we, did everything we could to fight for you, and for our continuing effort at transparency in policing. I was convinced the show would go on.

.. . On June 8, 2022, it was announced that a new program, On Patrol: Live, with a similar lineup of producers and hosts and a nearly identical format, would debut on the channel Reelz. The new program was universally described in media outlets as a revival or return of Live PD. On August 30, A&E Networks filed suit against Reelz and Big Fish, alleging that the new program violates A&E's intellectual property rights in the Live PD name and format

It's hard to attribute this saga to anything but the groupthink, short-sighedness, and stubbornness of legacy media. One odd factor is that Abrams himself appears to be a card-carrying member of the generally leftist media elite, but even he saw that A&E was simply leaving big money on the table.

A&E contended that although it had canceled the show, it hadn't relinquished its intellectual prolperty rights, and Reelz and Big Fish Entertainment were using them without authorization. A&E demanded punitive damages and a share of the profits from the new show. But as of Friday,

A+E Networks has settled its “Live PD” dispute with Amazon-owned Big Fish Entertainment and Reelz. As part of the settlement, A+E and Amazon have struck a new multi-year licensing deal on A+E programming.

“A+E Networks and Amazon have agreed to significantly expand their commercial relationship in a multi-year agreement that will amplify the reach of A+E Networks’ brands and content on Amazon’s Prime Video service,” A+E, Big Fish and Amazon said in a join statement. “In connection with that agreement, the legal dispute between A+E and Big Fish Entertainment and Reelz concerning ‘Live PD’ has been resolved.”

This is the first I've seen that Amazon owns Big Fish Entertainment and appears to have been the power behind the deal -- Reelz was likely a bit player, as was probably Abrams as well. While the terms of the settlement are typically confidential, it looks like A&E dropped any demand for punitive damages and a cut of the profits, and Amazon offered A&E some sort of business deal that allowed A&E to save face, while Amazon would still turn a profit on it.

I don't think it's a coincidence that this comes so soon in the wake of Trump's November 5 election victory. That victory might on one hand be seen as a win for the common man, but Ferdinand Lundberg of The Rich and the Super-Rich would, I believe, also see this as a realignment among the finpols,

a politico-economic elite of elites, which is a "closed" elite. It is closed because something other than personal ability is required to belong to it. The main although not exclusive qualification for membership, it is here contended, is money. This elite has been referred to as the moneybund-- the complex of finpolities. Its leading members, I suggest, are finpols. This moneybund is different from C. Wright Mills's "power elite," which is a somewhat fanciful and highly personal embroidery upon the old-established basic idea of a moneyed elite. Take the money crowd away and Mills' "power elite" crumbles into verbal dust.

The message being sent from Mar-a-Lago isn't so much that MAGA has taken over, but that the world's richest men are beginning to align themselves with MAGA because it presents a serious oporuntity to make money. This is why Elon Musk is cavorting with his kids in the halls there, other finpols like Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett are sending subtle signals that they're on board with this, and indeed finpolitan institutions like Comcast are moving to dump MSNBC, which is losing momey, while finpol Jeff Bezos reinstated Live PD because it made money.

I don't think Lundberg foresaw a realignment within finpolity. but I don't think it conflicts with his basic view, that there is a limited clique of people who can control public life. What I think is occurring is that an older generation of finpols, made up primarily of those descended from the post-Civil War robber baron families that had been primarily aligned with the New Deal, the Great Society, the Bush-Clinton uniparty, and neoconservative foreign policy, is being supplanted by newer money, exemplified in particular by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, which is now aligning itself with Trump.

TRhe finpolitan old guard at this point would include Alex Soros, Bill Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, and the Hololywood-legacy media establishment. I don't think it's a coincidence, though, that one small skirmish in this ongoing war was over Live PD.