20 years on, #BushVGore is back in our discourse - an election stolen by mobs at the polling places, a media blitz, and a Supreme Court at its most antidemocratic and antimajoritarian.

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When they write the history of this era, one of the strangest chapters will be devoted to Uber, a company that was never, ever going to be profitable, which existed solely to launder billions for the Saudi royals.

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From the start, Uber's "blitzscaling" strategy involved breaking local taxi laws (incurring potentially unlimited civil liability) while losing (lots of) money on every ride. They flushed billions and billions and billions of dollars down the drain.

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But they had billions to burn. Mohammed bin Salman, the murdering Crown Prince of the Saudi royal family, funded Softbank - a Japanese pump-and-dump investment scheme behind Wework and other grifts - with $80B as part of his "Vision 2030"

Vision 2030 is a scheme to diversify Saudi wealth away from hydrocarbons by attempting to establish monopolies that will allow the family to control entire sectors of the global economy.

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These schemes are longshots, and the fallback position is to unload failed monopolies - with staggering debt-overhangs - on investors who've been suckered with the promise that really big piles of shit surely have a pony buried underneath them somewhere.

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Despite the massive triumphs of the world's largest corporations and most rapacious billionaires during the covid crisis, neoliberalism is in ideological retreat: more people are more critical of the idea that "free markets" can solve big problems than at any time in my life.

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The Democratic nomination race was a fight between the neoliberal wing of the party and the Democratic Socialists, with the candidates representing a spectrum between those two sides (and the odd outlier on either side).

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Supposedly, the party grandees brokered peace between the two main factions, but the left is rightfully suspicious about whether Biden - and Republicans-who-sit-as-Dems like Joe Manchin - will deliver anything beyond symbolic gestures.

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One bright spot: Bernie Sanders is finally chairing the Senate Budget Committee, giving him enormous power over muscular covid relief packages, Medicare expansion, and rolling back Trump and Bush tax-cuts on the

This is where Sanders' long experience in the Senate, and his virtuoso work using its procedures to advance his position, will serve him well. As we saw with McConnell, the ability to wield procedure is a powerful asset in getting stuff done.

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We are in an extraordinary moment, but not an entirely unprecedented one. Since the earliest days, societies have had to cope with disasters that wiped out the ability of everyday people to service their debts and thus threatened to destroy their societies.

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If you've read U Missouri econ prof Michael Hudson's writings on the subject, you know that for millennia, rulers in these circumstances simply wiped out the debts, declaring a "jubilee" that allowed people to rebuild after disasters rather than being trapped in debt spirals.

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In a new essay on @NakedCapitalism called "How an 'Act of God' Pandemic Is Destroying the West: The US Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the Economy," Hudson reveals the abyss on whose brink we are balanced, and what we must do to pull back from

Hudson's oft-repeated golden rule is "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." That is to say: making it harder to declare bankruptcy, or binding debtors over to arbitration or wage-garnishing won't actually get them to pay debts they cannot afford.

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This is a very sharp observation in the US context. The 2008 crisis was "solved" by bailing out finance, not people - and so the finance sector was able to lend to consumers to buy things again, while consumer debt mounted to spectacular levels.

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NEW: @SidneyPowell1 radio interview w/ @toddeherman "The new report has a truckload of evidence of foreign interference in the election in it. That's what people seem to want to deny, even though the FBI & CISA ... issued an advisory and alert back on Oct. 30th & updated on

2/ Nov. 3rd, so for them to deny that now is absolutely absurd. Plus, we have an affidavit from an expert cyber-warfare [individual] who even shows the diagram of all the attacks coming in. We know that the VPN ... the Dominion people left those open and unencrypted on the night

3/ of the election, so that anybody could get in. We know that the packets of information went to Serbia [note: over 100 Dominion employees scrubbed there LinkedIn profiles of any affiliation with the company after the election, many of whom were in Serbia], Liechtenstein,

4/ Spain, Venezuela, Hunan, China & Hong Kong. There was traffic all over into our election system that is supposed to be self-contained, not accessible by the internet at all. We have witnesses who document that it was connected to the internet. We have a study out of

5/ [the Dominion voting system in Antrim] MI, they know that it was connected to the internet. They erased their audit files & their adjudication files, where they dumped over 68% of their ballots into a bin that they call "adjudication" [that would've been thousands + thousands

Trump on climate: I don't believe it. Trump on Khashoggi: I don't believe it. Trump on Russia: I don't believe it. Idiocy? A canny game? Doesn't really matter as much as the underlying intellectual autocracy. In this administration only one opinion matters.

It's an assault on facts and reason. It's an assault on good governance. It's an assault on the bureaucracies that are being discounted. It's an assault on science and history. But it is also an assault on one of the underpinnings of democracy.

We live in a system that is grounded on the idea of collaborative government. Leaders may have a final word but even then, there are typically checks and balances. Hopefully, in this case, such checks and balances may work. But they also are being tested.

The president's position that he is smarter than all the world's scientists, than the entire intelligence community, than experts who have studied any issue all their lives, is, of course, asinine. But his belief that government turns solely on his opinion, is monarchic.

Louis XIV reportedly said, "L'etat est moi." That he was the state. Trump asserting that he knows better than all, discounts all advice, that his brain is enough to chart the course for America alone, is essentially saying the same thing.

Thread on elections:

1) Only CPIM can compete with BJP in hypocrisy and shamelessness. I mean they are calling the opposition coalition (Muslim League + Congress) communal in Kerala, equating Muslim League with RSS and subtly consolidating Hindus using Islamophobic

2) campaigns while in West Bengal they're themselves in alliance with Congress and a Muslim party ISF, founded by an Islamic cleric. In West Bengal they are appealing on the lines of social justice, Dalit emancipation and Muslim empowerment.

3) Their candidates in Bengal, most of whom would distance themselves from anybody visibly Muslim and would leave no chance to demonize them, are now flaunting pictures with Muslim men and women covered in skullcaps and Hijab. In Kerala, they once disowned their own party leader

4) because he performed Umrah. Meanwhile, their PR agency called NewsClick is publishing pieces suggesting how TMC's violence helped BJP make inroads in Bengal while ignoring that it was CPIM's vote that shifted to BJP and hence it should be them who should be called out for not

5) being able to keep their votes intact. I am not in support of Mamata in Bengal or Congress in Kerala. I only hope and wish ISF, IUML, SDPI, AIMIM, AIUDF, Welfare Party and other Muslim outfits win as many seats as there are! #ApniQayadat

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