She described the U.S. Institute of Peace as “a bloated, useless entity that blew $50 million per year while delivering no peace.”

So, here’s the thing about Trumpworld. The critiques themselves often aren’t wrong.

The problem with Trumpworld is that you’ve got meatheads like Hegseth and Noem whining about how America’s Gone Woke with mushy liberal institutions, when what they’re complaining about is someone painting a rainbow flag on the side of a cruise missile.

The USIoP is practically sprouting from the hip of the IMF and World Bank, institutions notorious for their roles in global privatization of public commons, international arms dealing to US allies, and libertarian market-based propagandizing. They’re outgrowths of American finance capital and heavily geared towards commoditizing foreign markets and prying them open for US banks and businesses to lay claim to the interior at deeply discounted rates.

The USIoP operates as a diplomatic core that can try and rationalize and institutionalize foreign occupation after the US has entered a region. And there’s no better example of this than their role in authoring policy to pacify Iraqi resistance movements at the end of the Bush tenure.

A more objective observer might ask why we need Congress to continue to intercede in Iraqi politics five long years after we’d announced “Mission Accomplished” from the deck of a nearby aircraft carrier. But neoconservatives would sneeringly refute that Iraqis simply aren’t ready to govern themselves and still need Americans to guide them towards a liberal democracy.

Obviously, Trumpworld disagrees. They think the solution to every foreign policy dispute is to murder dissidents en mass. And that’s what we’re seeing in Venezuela.

But USIoP hasn’t done anything to keep us out of Venezuela. Or to expedite our exit from Iraq or Afghanistan. Or to prevent us from bombing Yemen or Iran. Or to avoid overthrowing the governments in Libya and Syria. Or to diffuse the conflict in Ukraine. Or to end the blockade and Israeli-induced famine in Gaza. So what role are they fulfilling?

You really think companies in America with monoplies would lower prices just because their costs went down?

So, theoretically, there’s a point at which induced demand through lower prices can raise profits. Having a monopoly on an elastic good only benefits you when you’re onboarding new clients at an escalating pace. Private energy companies looking to increase energy consumption overall may well take an upfront haircut on the retail price in order to encourage more people to adopt hardware that consumes the commodity.

But - over the long term - sure, the incentive is to capture more revenue in pursuit of higher profit. And that means raising prices faster than inflation.

That said, a public investment, could be pursued as a loss-leader. Public money invested in publicly owned utilities raises the availability of low-cost energy for private consumption. This is spent in pursuit of higher overall economic growth.

Our utility bills would be cheaper if the government invested

So much of the price of a thing is bound up in the administrative overhead and profit extracted at every step of the delivery process. You can pull a kwh of energy out of the ground, in the form of a lump of coal or a liter of gas, for pennies on the dollar when it is eventually sold retail. And that’s before we consider the pricing impact of artificial scarcity that occurs under the ERCOT model of wholesale electricity auctions.

By contrast, the TVA system has kept prices below (often far below) the national market rate simply by operating at-cost as a public enterprise. Energy companies in socialist states - from Sweden to Iran to China - can even retail electricity at subsidized rates (below cost of production) as a loss leader intended to spur high value domestic energy-hungry industries like steel manufacturing and chip fabrication.

Getting to green energy now that the global economy is flush with dirt-cheap high yield solar panels and market-competitive lithium batteries definitely cuts the raw labor / machine costs of fossil fuel extraction. And they defer the tail costs of fuel waste pollution management as well as the associated ecological and human health knock-on effects. But even sticking to the old fossil fuel economy is cheaper under a public system when the costs of operation aren’t inflated by the demands of private administrators and investors.

It’s not for people that build their own PCs

Internet in 2005: “Don’t trust anything you read in the newspaper, watch on TV, or hear on the radio. The real truth is here.”

Internet in 2015: “You can now read the newspaper, watch TV, and listen to the radio on the Internet! The real truth is here.”

Internet in 2025: “AI gibberish”

My company recently acquired another firm that tried to outsource the entire IT department and proceeded to shit itself to death.

Go ahead cowards. Replace me with a computer. I will become more powerful than you could ever imagine.

Nowadays they are maybe one tier above fast food workers.

:-/

Having worked both jobs, I could point to a few differences

We’re cutting directly to the Eugenics Wars, unfortunately

Her campaign started the Islamophobic birther shit against Obama

Technically that started during his Senate campaign. “You’re not a real American” is a very standard conservative attack against PoC candidates.

But boy was she willing to jump on it, and feed it along to her close friend sand perennial mega-donors Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump

glances at Kissinger and Cheney

This would explain a lot

Fool! This is the only folding phone any true man could need

😏

Same reason Gillette gave us that third razor

ARMs Race

You think your Democrat lords aren’t on the files?

I mean, we’ve got a video of Bubba topping the Cheeto somewhere out there. But also, Trump was a diehard Democrat until the Obama Era.

Ffs, half the Epstein email dump is him bitching to Steve Bannon about how all his favorite liberal sex pests are losing.

Corporate Headline: “Why you might not want lower prices or higher wages after all”

Me, waving a giant Abolish Money placard: “Bitch, I know!”

Or is she really just an islamophobic, genocidal bitch?

😏

Lesser of two evils!

Ghislaine Maxwell’s photo from Chelsea Clinton’s wedding resurfaces as Trump-Epstein videos go viral

Oh well, anyways…