Although there are are competing interests within the groups that make up the ruling class, I don’t see the contradictions as negative proof of collusion, so to speak.

I see it as individual ideologues and profit-seeking actors executing independently or as a cartel in order to create a kind-of mosaic institution. But, unlike under the post-FDR/LBJ era, I don't know how much of it is ten guys in a smoke-filled room deciding the fate of the nation. In the modern era, its a thousand smoke-filled rooms, with each group trying to get a leg up on the others often to the total system's detriment.

Wall St. has its own playbook but when shit gets bad they can get $75 billion a day from the Fed because they do so much good work turning people into feral hogs who want to eat money all day.

Until you're Lehman, at which point you're hung out to dry because Alan Greenspan needs to prove an ideological point. Or you're Facebook and Donald Trump has a bone to pick over internet censorship. Or you're Solyndra, and the folks over at Exxon want to cut you off at the knees before you can turn into any kind of rival energy producer.

There may be a hierarchy and jockeying for resources and power, but the underlying goal is to continue hegemony and white supremacy. That internal coherence, to me, outweighs any cross purpose.

I think the folks operating the hegemony are entirely too sure of its own success, such that undermining one another is seen as more pressing a concern than upholding the overall hegemony. This is what brought down trade deals like TTP, created autonomous space for countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia and China, and continues to undermine efforts at curbing greenhouse gas emissions, despite the obvious threat to trillions of dollars of developed real estate. Its why Donald Trump became President instead of Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. The 2016 Election and its consequences clearly illustrate what happens when agents of capital turn on each other with abandon.

Americans just watched their country devastated by a plague and now the big media message is “nobody wants to work!”

Big Media is increasingly fractured and incoherent. The NYT is bitching about people not wanting to work, because its echoing the interests of Wall Street. Meanwhile, right wing internet goons are tacitly encouraging pilots at Southwest to walk off the job over mask mandates, because they're echoing popular resentment at the current Presidential administration.

Time and again, conservatives have demonstrated divided loyalty on populism (particularly Evangelical Populism) versus corporate interests (particularly Big Blue State interests). That's what gave us elimination of the SALT Tax Deduction under Trump, for instance. And the closed US/Mexico border. You know that if Ron DeSantis thought he could become President by calling for a Florida-wide General Strike in 2023, he'd do it in a heartbeat.

The world is factually, demonstrably dying and people are just going with the flow as rent goes up 40%. Maybe capitalism is not working as well as it has historically, but imo it’s doing well enough.

The squeeze on cost-of-living is driving up wages far more rapidly than retailers would prefer. Efforts at unionization are seeing a renaissance. Boomers retiring en mass have drained the reserve army of labor, in no small part thanks to the huge surge in stock prices and home prices.

Capitalism is getting by. But we're a far distant cry from the Glory Days of the 1980s, when the Volcker Shock was disciplining labor and vulture capitalism was the fastest way to make money.

Without the Fed flooding the zone with money, none of this shit can continue to work. And yet the Fed flooding the zone with money is undoing all the work Capital did to constrain labor's influence over markets for the last 30 years.

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