"It'll Be Fine. . . "

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 that voters "now have the reality of Bernie" and it would lead to "the possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party — down whole."

At that point, the Democrat establishment focused on Joe as the best alternative to Sanders. By March,

The Democratic empire is quickly aligning its forces to strike back at Bernie Sanders.

First, billionaire Tom Steyer dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination after former Vice President Joe Biden romped to victory in the South Carolina primary Saturday.

Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., exited in quick succession Sunday and Monday and were expected to endorse Biden at a rally in Texas on the eve of the Super Tuesday contests that will pick roughly one-third of the delegates to the Democratic convention. Amid the candidate dominoes, a legion of current and former party officials threw their weight behind Biden, who had all but been left for dead by party elites a couple of weeks ago.

"It reflects the urgency of what we’re going into on Super Tuesday," said Adrienne Elrod, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton's bids for the presidency. "That's a big show of force that the left-of-center wing of the Democratic Party is consolidating around Joe because they understand what’s at stake, they understand the urgency, and they don’t want this to be handed to Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday."

This narrative suggests that Democrat insiders were fully aware of Joe's weaknesses, but the alternative was Sanders. The problem wasn't that Sanders was a red diaper baby -- they were all for that -- the problem was that the voters knew it, and Sanders couldn't win in November. In fact, it would be a repeat of 1972 or 1988; it could put the party's future in jeopardy.

So they decided to dress Joe up as a centrist and use Covid as an excuse to run a basement campaign. while also using the health scare to curtail Trump's ability to hold rallies. This covered up Joe's weaknesses as a campaigner while limiting Trump's strengths. Meanwhile, the deep state was used to discount issues like Hunter's laptop while planting the idea Trump was a Russian agent.

Finally, the Democrats could rely on big-city machines to manipulate the vote counts in key districts. This put Joe over the top, barely, that November. Once he was in, the people who really ran things could implement a program that was little different from anything Sanders could have imagined.

What puzzles me is that the Democrats on one hand were fully aware of both the weaknesses of their platform and the weaknesses of Joe as a candidate, but they never seem to have seen the need to adjust their strategy from the 2020 model, especially to find a replacement for Joe.

By 2024, Covid was no longer an excuse either to run a basement campaign or to claim Trump's rallies were a health risk. The Republicans had also learned a major lesson from 2020 and had teams of lawyers ready to challenge any attempts to delay counting, which paid off in places like Pennsylvania and Arizona, which had had those problems in 2020.

But the biggest question is still why Biden was allowed to run for a second term. It appears that behind the scenes, to make himself more attractive as the 2020 candidate, he was unofficially making it known that he would be a one-termer. According to The Hill, which was asking about this just this past June,

[T]he report most cited by those who believe a one-term promise was in place was from Politico in December 2019. “Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term,” reported Ryan Lizza. “While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.”

Lizza would go on to quote “four people who regularly talk to Biden” who said “it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024.” One “prominent adviser to the campaign” said explicitly, “he won’t be running for reelection.” That same advisor said that by signaling this one-term run, it would make the candidate a “good transition figure.”

That “transition” line is important, because it’s one Biden himself used publicly and on the record. “I view myself as a transition candidate,” Biden said at an online fundraiser in April 2020. In March of that year, at a rally where his eventual VP pick Kamala Harris was by his side, he used similar language: “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.”

As we now know, that turned into a bridge to nowhere. By March 2021, Biden was saying something entirely different. “My plan is to run for reelection. That’s my expectation,” he said shortly after he was inaugurated.

Well, this is the Joe Biden we've come to know, manifested most recently in his pledge not to pardon Hunter. But the question is still why powerful figures like Obama snd Pelosi allowed this to happen. After all, if Obama, Pelosi, and Harris could show Joe the door last June, they could just as well have done it a year earlier. They could have organized a donor strike in 2023 as easily as in 2024, for instance.

Barring other developments, I'll speculate about this tomorrow.

They're Shocked, Shocked!

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 gender. And finally, it’s now perfectly clear that Joe Biden was lying about never pardoning Hunter Biden.

But this neglects all the dream images that extend farther back, the Kafka-like prosecutions, the delusional E Jean Carroll having rape fantasies about Donald Trump in his younger days, Fani Willis and her boyfriend, the Red Queen penalties and the threats of Rikers Island, the Butler assassination attempt and the visuals of rebirth -- it's been quite a year, not just six monmths, and we're still assimilating it. This tweet comes a little closer to the issues:

There’s a ton to be said on the Hunter pardon, but for now:

The real worrisome part about the undeniable fact that the First Family (not just Hunter!) was so flamboyantly corrupt was that the entirety of the government legal and intelligence apparatus worked overtime to let it…

— Mike Howell (@MHowellTweets) December 2, 2024

There are other good questions:

The timing of the pardon is also notable. It comes before Hunter’s sentencing and hours before Joe exits the country for a few days with his numbskull White House Press Secretary who, just a couple of weeks ago, assured us Hunter would not benefit with a pardon.

. . . Joe obviously wanted to pardon Hunter before his sentencing. This trip to Africa was likely planned in advance to get Joe and his dim-witted press secretary out of the country at the same time. . . But here’s what I’m most curious about.

What about Joe Biden? What about Joe’s brother James?

. . . You see, by pardoning Hunter, Joe made himself and his brother even more vulnerable to prosecution. Because there is no longer any legal jeopardy for Hunter, Hunter cannot plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination.

. . . In less than a month, the media misinformed their residual customers on two of the biggest stories of the last few years: Trump’s comeback and this appalling pardon. Will these residual customers ever get tired of having absolutely no idea what’s going on or what will happen? Kamala’s in the lead. Joe will never pardon Hunter. The border is secure. Inflation is transitory. Violent crime has decreased.

There's a whole frammis that's collapsing here -- but there's even potentially a lot more. I've been posting that we know almost nothing about the discussions that took place among Obama, Pelosi, and Harris about Joe's cognitive decline -- not that it was any surprise to them, but that even with the help of the media, it could no longer be covered up.

It's hard to avoid thinking that for whatever reason, they planned on the basis that the coverup could continue as it had indefinitely, but maybe down the road, after Joe's re-election, they could invoke the 25th Amendment and put Kamala in without any fuss. That had probably been wired in for quite some time.

Once it became clear the coverup wouldn't work any longer, but it was too late to have primaries, they had to cobble up a whole new Plan B from scratch. I think Kamala was in on this, and she knew she was the planned successor all along. The need for an actual campaign and election caught everyone by surprise. Will we ever learn more?

Who was actually running the country while Joe was doddering at the beach? We know next to nothing about this. Who's running the country now, for that matter, once Joe has skedaddled to Angola?

By the way, what happened with that whole 2020 election? Seems lile a big part of the past year was almost a national recognition that we got things wrong in that election, and we got a do-over. Maybe the J6ers had a point, huh?

This is going to be a long process.

Conserative Treehouse And The Finpolity

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 Board member, already had invested money in place, but that wasn’t the motive on this move. In hindsight, Ellison was brilliant and intensely strategic.

Sundance linked to a Wall Street Journal article behind a paywall, Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Is Now the Worst Buyout for Banks Since the Financial Crisis. It begins,

The seven banks involved in the deal, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, lent the money to the billionaire’s holding company to take the social-media platform, now named X, private in October 2022. Banks that provide loans for takeovers generally sell the debt quickly to other investors to get it off their balance sheets, making money on fees.

Let's recall that Musk's takeover of Twitter prompted widespread efforts to boycott Twitter advertisers. Clearly there was a sense that Musk had misjudged this move, and it would fail. It looks like the banks that had made the loan weren't gping to be able to lay it off to the other investors. Sundance continues,

Ellison pumped money into the problem, relieving Musk of the cash flow problem created by his inability to divest shares (Musk was max-limited by Board). Ellison also helped make the $1.5 billion loan made by SpaceX, (unknown at the time) go away.

Ellison essentially positioned Twitter for the same dynamic reason that Bezos bought and used WaPo. This is the world of high finance, and these moves are all about influence, leverage and ultimately positioning. Ellison wanted a vessel for influence, a friendship and common ideological alignment therein just made sense.

Let's just back off and refer to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. As of November 22, it listed Elon Musk at number 1, net worth $347.8 billion; Jeff Bezos as number 2, net worth $218.5 billion; Larry Ellison as number 3, net worth $206.1 billion; and Mark Zuckerberg as number 4, net worth $198.1 billion. Over the past couple of weeks, Musk himself has been camped out at Mar-a-Lago, presumably keeping his silent partner Ellison abreast of developments. Zuckerberg came to dinner at Mar-a-Lago the day before Thanksgiving.

Earlier, Jeff Bezos notably told the hired help at the Washington Post that they wouldn't be making an endorsement in the presidential race. The wealthiest men in the world -- that is, the finpolity -- are adjusting to the changed conditions. Sundance continues,

Oracle, specifically Larry Ellison, is now positioned as the biggest benefactor of a second Trump administration, with a very specific group of technocrats in close alignment.

. . . It should be emphasized up front that no one is a bad guy in the framework of what took place; however, neither is this altruism.

These are essentially self-interests in a common alignment. As long as the alignment is for good purposes, then the network of billionaire allies is in a very cool place.

. . . In August 2023 President Trump understands that Twitter will survive. Ellison will not let Musk fail and will underwrite whatever is needed in order to ensure success. Everything candidate Trump does from that moment forth, carries that baseline.

Now, in August 2023 Larry Ellison was not saying, hey Trump I support you; instead, the reality of what the Oracle billionaire was saying was that Twitter would survive.

. . . In the spring of 2024, the broad outline of a technocratic team falls slowly into place. By summer 2024 we see Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, David [Sacks], Peter Thiel all in common alignment. The technocratic team bring in the RFK Jr element along with the Vivek Ramaswamy element, and Peter Thiel’s background seeding of Senator JD Vance blossoms. The rest, as they say, is now history.

However, it is important to remember, this is an alignment of common interests. Insofar as those diverse but intertwined interests are good for the USA, then this is an extremely powerful coalition. There is a great deal of commonality, but there is also the opportunity for some disparity – especially if the technocrats push the Office of the President too hard.

Thiel, by the way, is #146 on the billionaiure index, net worth $15.3 billion. David Sacks, not on the index, has a net worth of $200 million. Vivek Ramaswamy's net worth just recently reached $1 billion, but he doesn't yet seem to have been ranked on the index. We may definirtely assume, though, that these lesser figures are allgned with Musk and have interlocking interests with him, Ellison, and Zuckerberg.

None of these men is an altruist. They are finpols or finpol wannabes, looking to form political alliances as part of their goals for their own aggrandizement. This requires that they have access to the levers that control public life, and it's no surprise that Musk made a major (and very risky) investment in media, while Zuckerberg's wealth comes from media almost entirely. For now, it looks like their overall purposes may have a positive effect, but they are not primarily altruistic.

But John D Rockefeller, after all, saved the whales.

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.