Subject: The Billionaires' War
"...There is, however, something that is still puzzling me: To a large extent billionaires bought themselves a government friendly to their interests. Trump and company have granted many items on the tech broligarchy wish list, from tax breaks to deregulation to promotion of crypto and unregulated AI. But why the abject incompetence? Couldn’t billionaires find political allies who wouldn’t plunge the country into a potentially disastrous and historically unpopular war without considering the risks?

I have two tentative answers.

One is that no, competent allies weren’t available. Money buys a lot of influence, but to actually take over the U.S. government requires more than money — it requires politicians who are utterly corrupt. In his first administration, Trump learned that hiring people who were even modestly competent eventually presented barriers to his authoritarian instincts – for example, his former Vice President Mike Pence. Hence Trump learned that in choosing his political hires the more incompetent, the more venal, the more bigoted, and the more cruel, the better.

You might think that presidential pardons for scammers, money launderers and outright crooks are unrelated to the ill-advised war on Iran. But corruption is a key feature of a billionaire-installed regime, and corruption and incompetence go hand in hand.

My second answer is that the vast wealth of tech billionaires has made many of them unconcerned with the little people’s lives — and deeply unpatriotic. If Americans are being brutalized and murdered by rogue ICE agents…well, that’s not their problem. If the Justice Department and the FBI are totally subverted and operate as Trump’s enforcers, they know that vindictive, unlawful tactics will never touch their lives. If Republican budget cuts decimate rural hospitals and deprive hundreds of thousands of health insurance…well, they have their own private doctors and clinics. If Trump starts an ill-conceived war that doubles the price of oil…well, they can certainly afford the higher gasoline bills for their limousines and yachts. And it won’t be their kids hunkered down in a bunker in the Middle East.

So if you want to understand how this country has degenerated to such a state, how we can be spending nearly $2 billion a day attacking Iran without a clear endgame in sight, while children go without healthcare, nursing homes are understaffed because their workers have been deported, home electricity bills skyrocket due to data centers, consider who benefits and who isn’t hurt.

This is a billionaire’s war, waged at everyone else’s expense." —"Woke" Mathematics Enthusiast Paul Krugman