If you have opinions about the subject matter of posts on this blog please share them. Do you have a story about how the system affects you at work school or home, or just in general? This is a place to share it.
Senator Lindsey Graham died last night at age 71, ending a three-decade career in Congress that started in 1995.
Washington is shocked. But 71 is roughly the life expectancy for a man in South Carolina, the state he represented.
Graham becomes the sixth “senior” member of Congress to die in office this term alone (assuming Mitch McConnell isn’t already dead), the other five listed below. But fear not: 78-year-old 13-term congressman Joe Wilson is reportedly interested in running for Graham’s seat.
Rep. David Scott (D‑GA) died at age 80 on April 22, 2026;
Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D‑AZ) died at age 77 on March 13, 2025;
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D‑VA), age 75 on May 21, 2025;
Rep. Sylvester Turner (D‑TX) died at age 70 on March 4, 2025;
Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R‑CA), died at age 65 on January 6, 2026
One might think this would prompt a debate about gerontocracy, but the FBI wants you instead to worry about national security.
“The FBI is assisting local authorities and has made every necessary resource available,” Director Kash Patel said in a statement after Graham’s death. Patel’s strange intervention has prompted the conspiracy-minded to go wild.
Laura Loomer, a prominent conservative activist and confidant of President Trump’s, cited Patel’s statement as evidence of foul play in Graham’s death. (There’s zero evidence for this.)
“It’s more likely that Russia or Iran poisoned Senator Graham, which is probably why the FBI is now investigating his sudden death upon returning from Ukraine,” Loomer said in a post on X/Twitter, where she has 2 million followers.
It’s a theme Loomer is hammering on, demanding that “the FBI should provide security to those who the Iranian regime is now promising to assassinate.” Loomer, an outspoken critic of Iran, thinks that she herself is a target of the regime as well.
Given her popularity among conservatives online, you can expect to hear a lot of similar talk soon.
Her fears echo messaging by the FBI that America faces a domestic threat from Iran — a line the media has amplified with its breathless coverage of every supposed Iran-backed assassination attempt on U.S. officials, no matter how harebrained or implausible they are.
As a senior Pentagon official once told me, the “intelligence” on any alleged Iran-backed assassination plans to kill Donald Trump amounts to far less than many imagine.
But Loomer and many others seem to genuinely believe this stuff, which is directly tied to the FBI’s constant invoking of threats to “national security.” Not only are we forbidden from knowing the factual basis for such claims, the rules of normal anythinggo out the window when it comes to national security. From UFOs to Graham’s death, the result is predictable conspiracy-mongering and panic.
And lest you think this is just some obsession of Loomer’s, Fox News also referenced Kash Patel’s statement in a TV news segment. “The FBI are at Senator Graham’s residence,” the segment said, adding that “FBI Director Kash Patel said that the FBI would assist local authorities and make every resource available.”
The FBI under Kash Patel seems to take its orders directly from the White House, which wants to turn everything — from Graham’s death to public protest to journalism — into some kind of sprawling threat to the country.
This week, the Justice Department subpoenaed several New York Times reporters for revealing that the Qatari jet Trump wants to use as Air Force One lacks certain protective features. This was already pretty well known. But the Justice Department says the story spilled secrets that imperil national security. That’s how a straightforward corruption story gets transmuted into a state security story.
National security might not be good at forecasting events or winning wars or making us safer, but it is very good at manufacturing threats that confuse and disempower people and, perhaps worst of all, forego discussion of more important issues.
Like, say, gerontocracy.
In fairness to Graham, I feel compelled to credit him for being a Senator more willing than almost any other to take phone calls from reporters of all stripes (including outsiders like me). In our age of media-shy members of Congress, I have to respect that. And though he'll be remembered as a Trump loyalist, he was willing to break with the president when he believed it mattered — on Ukraine, for example — while so many of his colleagues just went along.
Oh, and unlike so many of his male colleagues, no woman has ever accused Graham of sexual misconduct.
Subscribe if you’re surprised McConnell outlived Graham
The US Secretary of State has just told the world that Iran’s foreign policy is driven by “pure theology” and that “no one has ever been able to do a successful deal with Iran.”
Both claims are demonstrably false. Both reveal a man profoundly unqualified for the office he holds.
Abbas Araghchi is one of the finest diplomatic minds operating in the world today. A career diplomat of thirty years, he was the technical architect of the JCPOA — mastering every clause, every verification mechanism, every sanctions schedule across eighteen months of gruelling negotiation with the world’s major powers. He does not need briefing notes. He is the briefing note.
When Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner sit across the table from him to negotiate, the contrast is almost painful to witness. Here is a man who has spent three decades studying the granular architecture of nuclear nonproliferation, sanctions law, and regional security arrangements — facing two real estate developers from New York who cannot tell a centrifuge from a footnote.
Araghchi has every detail at his fingertips: the technical specifications, the legal precedents, the diplomatic history, the red lines and their rationale. His American counterparts are essentially improvising.
This is not negotiation. This is a doctoral examiner sitting down with students who have not read the syllabus.
Iran has concluded deals — repeatedly. The 2015 JCPOA was negotiated with five permanent Security Council members plus Germany. It was verified by the IAEA. It worked. It was America that tore it up.
And then there is Rubio himself. Anyone who has watched him testify before Congress will know exactly what I mean. What you witness is not statecraft. It is a man who has made a career of spouting propaganda and ideological talking points — recycling neoconservative slogans in place of analysis, substituting bluster for knowledge, and confusing belligerence with strength. He has never demonstrated a serious understanding of Iran’s political structure, its factional dynamics, its strategic doctrine, or its negotiating history.
The words in that image are not merely wrong — they are terrifying in what they reveal about the man now simultaneously occupying the offices of Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. That such extraordinary concentration of foreign policy power should rest in hands this ignorant is one of the most alarming facts about American governance today.
What Rubio is actually revealing is not Iranian irrationality. He is revealing Washington’s own incapacity — its inability to honour commitments, sustain agreements, or treat adversaries as strategic actors deserving of serious engagement.
The most dangerous diplomats are not the radical ones. They are the ignorant ones — those who mistake their own ideological blinkers for geopolitical insight.
In my assessment, Rubio is the most ignorant and incompetent Secretary of State the United States has produced since the Second World War. That is not hyperbole. It is a considered judgment from someone who has studied American foreign policy across eight decades.
The world deserves better. So, frankly, does America.
Lim Tean is Secretary General and founder of the People's Voice Party of Singapore
Congress has its own CIA and it’s sounding the alarm about anti-AI grievances
Dan Boguslaw and Ken Klippenstein
May 28 2026
The intelligence report this story is based on comes courtesy of freelancer Daniel Boguslaw. If you’d like to see more like this, please become a paid subscriber so we can hire him! — Ken
As rage about artificial intelligence and the data centers powering it grows, Congress is taking notice — not with any legislation or law, but by spying on public opposition.
A newly created intelligence agency of the Congress (yes, it has its own now) is warning that legislators are in danger from an angry public. The U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Services Bureau, created after January 6 and in parallel to the 18-member Executive Branch intelligence community, laid out the warning in an internal intelligence report produced in April.
“ISB has prepared this Intelligence Note to provide the US Capitol Police and law enforcement personnel with information related to recent threats and attacks likely linked to grievances concerning data centers,” the report says.
There’s only one problem: the report admits that there is no evidence of any actual threat to Congress.
“The US Capitol Police is not investigating any data center-motivated threats to Members of Congress,” the report says.
Nonetheless, it goes on to warn that artificial intelligence “related policies introduced on the Hill and in local communities are likely to continue drawing opposition, increasing potential concerns for public officials.”
The Congressional intelligence office that authored the report was formed in the aftermath of January 6th and justified to bring the congressional police force “in line” with federal intelligence agencies and thereby gain more access to the massive existing intelligence community. The “intelligence note” was also distributed to police organizations and state-level fusion centers across the country.
“We now have a world class intelligence operation,” then-Chief of the U.S. Capitol Police Thomas Manger said last May. “We are significant players in the intelligence community in the Washington, D.C., region and, frankly, all over the country … Whereas before, we were basically just — we were consumers of information. The FBI would give us intelligence, other agencies would give us intelligence. Now we are gathering our own."
The motivation for the report appears to be an attack on the home of Indianapolis city councilman Ron Gibson. Gibson, a supporter of a local data center project, reported to police that someone had fired 13 gunshots through his door and left a note on his porch that read “No data centers.” No suspect has yet been arrested.
The intelligence report reveals that the Intelligence Services Bureau is monitoring social media content critical of data centers, looking for potential threats.
“You can be damn sure there are thousands more rounds where this comes from, and if you keep voting for data centers, we will all begin returning to the early days of American freedom and express ourselves via violence over words,” one user posted.
“Threatening the politicians who actually make decisions is actually logical,” another social media user posts. “I would rather shooters shoot up the senate than a high school [sic].”
Neither of these comments represents an actionable threat, the Capitol Police notes.
The report also summarizes crimes associated with data centers, including one committed over five years ago.
One example is that of Seth Pendley, who was arrested five years ago in 2021 and charged with attempting to blow up a data center in Northern Virginia. The Capitol Police connect him to Congress by noting that at some point he claimed to have “brought a sawed-off assault rifle into DC but left the weapon in his car, before proceeding to the US Capitol building but not entering it on January 6, 2021.” Pendley is incarcerated 600 miles away from D.C. in Terre Haute, Indiana.
What is clear is that data centers have become an overwhelmingly unpopular issue for American voters. A Gallup poll from this month found that seven in ten Americans oppose the local construction of data centers for AI. Their concerns range from the environmental pollution to the increased utility prices generated by data center water and electricity use.
The Intelligence Services Bureau report briefly touches on these concerns and more, identifying “possible government use of AI to spy on Americans,” “environmental impacts,” “rising energy costs,” and “loss of jobs in certain industries” as reasons why Americans oppose their construction. The report does not examine why activism regarding AI and data centers is anything other than free speech.
Grasping for evidence of increased criminal dangers, the report dedicates a full page to threats made against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is neither an elected official, nor within the purview of the Capitol Police.
Altman blamed the attack on “incendiary” news media coverage, writing in his blog that “I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.” In other words, AI leaders like Altman see the problem as one of controlling what the public says.
Congress, now in the intelligence business, is responding by focusing on the threat of the American public rather than the threat to the American public.
Subscribe if you wish Congress would pass laws, not intelligence dossiers
Watch Gary Chambers speak and understand something: this is what defiance looks like. Standing against the deliberate redrawing of electoral maps designed to dilute Black voting power in Louisiana, he is not intimidated and he will not be silenced. And he is not alone.
A few days ago I posted a TikTok video making a simple point that the corporate media works hard to obscure — the American working class is not the monolithic conservative bloc they want you to believe it is. When Black Lives Matter took to the streets, the cameras and the commentators worked to frame it as a Black movement, full stop. That was a lie of omission. It was a multiracial movement. BLM had many allies particularly among the youth mired in student debt and other members of the community confronting the state in the streets. That truth matters because it points toward something they fear more than any single protest — the possibility of a united working class that knows its own power.
We cannot manufacture that movement from the top down. It will be built from below, as it always has been, and it will come. What is happening right now in Minneapolis, where communities are organizing direct resistance to ICE operations, is not an isolated incident. It is a glimpse of what is coming. Real political education happens in struggle, not in lecture halls.
Gary Chambers comes from a community that has fought one of the longest and most brutal battles in American history, against a system of racial oppression that stretches back centuries. That community is not going backwards. Not now. Not ever.
There are times when those in power get a little too cocky, when confidence becomes arrogance and they underestimate the anger their policies generate in society. We are living in such times. The American working class currently lacks the organized leadership and political party it needs and the movement against the capitalist offensive has not yet raised its head above the parapet. And as I was reminded more than once in my political education, consciousness tends to lag behind events and this is more so when it has been decades since a major mass movement has taken to the streets.
But what we are seeing with Gary Chambers, what we saw in Minneapolis, will multiply a hundredfold. A ruling class that is losing its grip on the global stage, that failed in Iraq, failed in Afghanistan, and is flailing across the Middle East, is forced to turns its aggression inward, against its own workers.
Trump's rise was not inevitable. It was made possible by the dismal failures of the Democratic Party to offer a serious alternative but in in large part, by the absence of an organized, united working class movement and a party of our own. That vacuum was filled by the ugliest currents in American life — white supremacists, Christian nationalists, the settler mentality dressed up in electoral politics, fascist mobs given permission to come out into the open. That is the honest account of how we got here.
But here is what is equally true. American history is a history of resistance. The Native peoples were never fully defeated. Enslaved Africans broke their chains and remade this country in the process. The millions of Europe's poor, shipped here to work the mines and textile mills, built a labor movement from nothing. Racism has been the ruling class's most effective weapon in its long war against working class unity — but it has never been a permanent solution, only a postponement.
It will not be easy for them up ahead. They have reason to be worried. We have reason to keep going.
Politician whose background is secret challenges one who released Epstein files
Ken Klippenstein May 17, 2026
Thomas Massie attends debate alone that challenger Ed Gallrein skipped
Relying entirely on subscriptions gives me the independence I need to write for you (instead of donors, advertisers, etc.) but it also means I depend entirely on you for survival. If you find value in this work, please become a paid subscriber
There’s a heated primary election for Congress this Tuesday that is nothing short of a referendum on “national security” — and fittingly, one of the candidate’s background is almost entirely unknown because, he claims, it’s classified.
His name is Ed Gallrein, a Trump-backed retired Navy captain challenging incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. The focus of Gallrein’s campaign (and one of the few things he seems willing to talk about) is his claim of having served in SEAL Team 6, the secretive commando group most famous for the killing of Osama bin Laden. He certainly knows how to operate in the shadows: I can count on one hand the number of interviews Gallrein has sat down for, and he’s skipped literally every debate, each attended alone by Massie. Gallrein’s campaign touts endorsements from unnamed military officers, their identities and other supposedly sensitive details redacted to burnish the security theater. He’s even called civilians “sheep.”
The strategy seems to be to let Trump's endorsement and the SEAL mystique do the work — and to avoid as much public scrutiny as possible. In the few appearances Gallrein has made, his message to voters is consistent: the most important things about him are classified, the president has seen the file, and that should be enough.
“The president is playing five-dimensional chess,” Gallrein told a local NBC affiliate, in response to a question about the Iran War’s effect on gas prices last week. By the next day, the game had mushroomed to “nine-dimensional chess,” as Gallrein later described Trump’s handling of the war to commentator Mark Levin.
See the trident?
By contrast, Thomas Massie is a vocal critic of the national security state — and it has cost him. He voted against Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill,” pushed for release of the Epstein files alongside Democrat Ro Khanna of California, and has been one of the most vocal congressional opponents of the Iran War. Whatever you think of his views, he's one of the few members of our pathetic Congress who is willing to defy his own party's leadership. For that, he's been buried in out-of-state spending and made a personal target of the president.
"We'll get a 100% vote except for this guy named Thomas Massie," Trump said while promoting the Big Beautiful Bill. "There's something wrong with him." Now he has escalated to calling Massie "the worst Republican Congressman in History” and demanding his ouster.
Into this fight steps Gallrein, whose pitch beyond Trump loyalty is a story he tells repeatedly about his first visit to the Oval Office. By his account, when he arrived, Trump had a leather binder containing his complete, classified “top secret” career file sitting on the resolute desk. The lesson, Gallrein told the Maywood Country Club:
“He [Trump] knows everything about me. He knows what I did for you in uniform. He knows what I’ll do for you in Washington. I’ll be your champion.”
The message here is as insulting as it is creepy: Trump has seen the classified record, the classified record establishes fitness, therefore voters need only ratify the commander-in-chief’s decision. Voters’ job isn’t to evaluate; it’s to trust the officials who have.
Ed Gallrein poses next to Donald Trump
Gallrein is pro-Iran War (and as far as I can tell, any other war) pro-Trump, and pro-“national security,” but that’s about all we’re allowed to know. If you’d like to know more about this figure that could well be representing the country next year, too bad. The campaign slogan might as well be Shut The Fuck Up and Salute.
He also rails against "politicians" who burned SEAL Team Six's cover by talking publicly about the bin Laden raid — but those politicians include the president and other democratically elected leaders who represent the only real check on the secret world that exists (at least in theory.)
His contempt for the public’s right to know presents itself almost like a verbal tic.
"Foreign policy and national security are inseparable,” Gallrein told a podcast called USA Cares. “You can't talk about one without talking about the other. If you are, you're an amateur."
In other words: what your government does overseas, from Gaza to Venezuela, isn’t any of the public’s business. Your only job is to perform gratitude. As Gallrein told the Optimist Club:
“You should be proud to know as Americans there’s units like Delta Force, our Army sister unit, and SEAL Team Six, that the kind of operation you saw to get Maduro, they’re standing ready 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year for you and your family. Mercifully and fortunately, all the things they do don’t hit the press. I’m sorry to disappoint the media, but that’s what I can share with you.”
Note the framing: they work for “you and your family.” Constitutionally and legally, they work for the elected president. Gallrein knows this (or should).
If you think I'm reading too much into his paternalism toward the civilian world, he literally calling civilians “sheep” and SEALS “sheep dogs.” Per his USA Cares interview:
“I don't know if you've heard this, the famous theory there's three kinds of people in the world. There are sheep, there are sheep dogs, and there's wolves. SEALs are sheep dogs. We don't care what letter jacket the adversary wears. If they're bad people and they mean, mean harm to our sheeps, we're on it.”
Civilians are the sheep. The special operators are the sheepdog, their self-appointed protectors. The sheep don't give the sheepdog orders. This is the worldview of someone running for an elected position in which he would oversee the sheepdogs!
And as for sheepdogs, it’s not even clear how much he really was one. Military sources tell me that Gallrein not only went to the Naval Postgraduate School as a young Lieutenant, but that he served in a number of educational and training positions, including the head of instruction at the Joint Special Operations University before he retired. He stresses in interviews that SEAL Team 6 isn’t just the combat operators but support staff as well.
I wonder what his job was!
Whatever the case, he sure loves to talk like some kind of shadow warrior. In fact, in just the few interviews he’s even done, I counted at least a dozen references to secrets he claims he’s not at liberty to divulge, including:
“I can’t speak to any classified operations I may or may not have ever been involved in.” — The Mark Levin Show
“SEAL Team six is different, classified, won’t go into it...” — Maywood Country Club Meet and Greet
“Let’s talk about Seal Team Six for a minute. This is all I can tell you.” — Maywood Country Club Meet and Greet
“…SEAL Team Six; can’t talk much about that, but it was an honor to lead those great Americans...” — The Mark Levin Show
“The only reason you know about SEAL Team Six is ‘cause politicians ran their mouth about it after we got Osama Bin Laden and Captain Phillips, didn’t they?” — Optimist Club Speaker Series
“I continued to be a senior advisor for what we would call s—uh, let’s just call them security activities and special operations, i.e., the black world...” — The Mark Levin Show
“Think pager bombs, black ops, and things that happen that don’t get divulged, mercifully, unless politicians talk about it.” — Optimist Club Speaker Series
“It just manifests itself in some very interesting activities and operations. Of course, we can’t talk about that, ‘cause that’s TS/SCI, it’s SAP [Special Access Program] information.” — The Mark Levin Show
“And I could go into some detail about that, but- Yeah ... there’s a movie about it and so forth and so on. But I will not disclose anything classified, ‘cause I still have a- I appreciate that, yeah ... a clearance and I, I will abide by- Yes ... uh, the, uh, the agreements I have made with our US government as they pertain to such.” — USA Cares Podcast
“I’m very familiar with it. I’ll say no more.” — USA Cares Podcast
“...many times we would deploy in the dark in the night- Mm-hmm ... and we would come back in the dark at night- Yeah ... ‘cause our nation asked us to. Right. And I won’t go into any further details.” — USA Cares Podcast
“I won’t share the confidential private pieces that are classified or otherwise I shouldn’t divulge...” — Optimist Club Speaker Series
A few things here are worth flagging. Gallrein refers to "security activities" — that phrase does not exist in military or intelligence parlance; the correct terms are "special activities" or "sensitive activities." He also describes a classification level as "secret compartmented information" — it's sensitivecompartmented information.
Anonymous endorsement
As if the whole Chris Kyle cosplay isn’t enough, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is en route to Kentucky to campaign with Gallrein, according to the local press.
There is one episode in Gallrein’s post-military career that exists in full public record — and it cuts against his vaunted expertise.
After retiring, he took a job as a Safety and Security Specialist at the Department of Energy’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the country’s most sensitive nuclear facilities. He was fired in May 2013. He filed a whistleblower complaint alleging retaliation for raising concerns about deficiencies in security training programs.
The complaint was dismissed. Among the reasons: he had reported his concerns to a fellow subcontractor employee — not a DOE official or his own employer’s chain of command, as the regulations required. The man campaigning on mastery of the classified world filed his whistleblower complaint with the wrong person and lost his job at a nuclear security facility. He has not mentioned any of this on the campaign trail.
This hiding behind national security is not a partisan phenomenon. Last year I wrote about the Democrat national security moms, officials like Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, and Elissa Slotkin. The political establishment loves these figures because national security is an official-sounding way to tell the public to shut the fuck up and let the professionals handle things.
Gallrein seems to think that “his country” or “the nation” is some disembodied entity that doesn’t have elected officials, that “national security” is what gives him orders, and that the secret world is an autonomous entity. Most important though, he believes that the people are sheep and that those in uniform (the pack of wolves) have some license to protect them regardless of pesky politicians, and that that license derives from some secret regulation rather than from laws and the Constitution.
What Gallrein represents is something both parties have been quietly building toward for twenty-five years: the national security state as its own source of political legitimacy, floating above democratic accountability, not answerable to the public it claims to serve.
The sheep vote Tuesday.
Subscribe if secret agent man’s routine does not impress you
Richard Mellor Afscme Local 444, retired HEO/GED 5-17-26
The System Is the Problem
Every political crisis produces its villains. Today, the dominant figure in that story is Donald Trump without doubt a distasteful, degenerate human being. The anger directed at him is understandable. But there is a danger in making any single individual the center of our analysis. When we do, we lose sight of something more important: the system that produced him, that accommodates him, and that will outlast him.
This is not an accident. In the political struggles between different factions of the ruling class, the focus on individuals is actively welcomed because it is a useful distraction from the root cause of the crises we face. That root cause is not a person. It is the system of production we call capitalism.
What capitalism actually is
In a capitalist system, the means of producing the necessities of life — factories, land, technology, financial institutions — are owned by a small group of private individuals. What sets those forces of production in motion is not the needs of society, but profit. The machine turns on when there is money to be made. It turns off when there isn't — regardless of what people need.
Marx explained it beautifully: "A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation." *
The point is simple: under capitalism, what matters is not what is produced or who benefits — it is whether the owner of the operation turns a profit. Education, healthcare, housing, food — all of it is subordinated to profit and the accumulation of capital.
What exactly is the state?
In my youth, had someone asked me to describe the state I would have said simply that it is the government.; I had never given it much thought. We are accustomed to thinking of government as a neutral institution — a referee that stands above competing interests in society and serves the common good. This is a comforting idea. It is also wrong.
The modern state is not neutral. It is an organ of class rule and the ruling class in our situation are capitalists and we live in a capitalist or bourgeois democracy. Its laws, its institutions, its police, its courts, its military — all of these have been shaped over time to protect and reproduce the existing order: the order in which a small class of people own the productive wealth of society and the rest of us work for them.
This does not mean that every politician is consciously conspiring, or that nothing can be won through political struggle. It means that the state, as a structure, exists to manage the affairs of the class that owns and controls the economy; Marx wrote in 1848 that, “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
When we watch the battles between the Republicans and Democrats (the two major capitalist parties) over which party gets to govern society for the next four years, we are witnessing different factions of the ruling class compete for control of the state apparatus, we are watching a fight over who manages the system, not a fight over whether the system should continue. When it comes to the working class, they are united against us.
Contradictions, not villains
This brings us back to the question of crisis. Capitalism is an exploitative system, and suffering, poverty, war, hunger etc. is integral to it. As capitalist crisis intensifies, we are told the cause is greed, incompetence, or the moral failings of particular leaders. If only we had better people at the top, the story goes, things would be different.
But greed is not a cause. It is a feature. Capitalism does not merely tolerate the single-minded pursuit of profit — it requires it. A business that fails to compete and accumulate will be swallowed by one that does. If individuals can’t pay for health care they don’t get it. If less developed nations, (the former colonies plundered by the advanced capitalist states) can’t afford the costs of infrastructure development, sewage, drinking water, etc.; they don’t get it.
In the global competition between nations, there is no such thing as fair trade. Trade disputes and tariffs are actual wars. When the competition becomes acute. When capitalist states cannot resolve disputes over trade and markets, they go to war. Both WW1 and WW2 were a product of the competition between nation states over resources, markets and global plunder.The system produces this scenario but the capitalist education system and mass media blames it on individuals.
The real causes of crisis are structural. Capitalism contains internal contradictions — built-in tensions between the drive to accumulate and the limits of what any society can absorb — that periodically produce exactly the kind of economic and political instability we are living through now. These crises will recur, under different leaders, with different villains, until the structure itself is changed.
Why this matters
None of this means that individuals don't matter, or that who holds power is irrelevant. It means that changing the individuals without changing the system is not a solution — it is a reset that leads back to the same place.
Understanding that the state is an instrument of class power, and that crises are produced by the system rather than by the moral character of its managers, is not pessimism. It is clarity. And clarity about the nature of the problem is the first condition for doing something about it.
* Marx Capital, Vol 1 Chap. 16 Absolute and Relative Surplus Value
Subscribed
