Rob
51.4K posts
@robertdolci
Have a laugh = E fatte na risata 🙏 If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise.
Trump and his family have already squeezed a couple of billion dollars out of his presidency, mostly by shaking down Gulf monarchies. For a normal person that’s an unimaginable fortune, but in the history of the American state it’s more like a pocket change. Halliburton alone pulled in roughly $39 billion from the Iraq War. Next to that, Trump with his luxury jets and vanity movie about his wife is just a small‑time grifter working the global cocktail circuit. And this, really, is a familiar story. By the end of the Soviet Union, members of the Politburo presided over flows of wealth almost beyond imagination: international property portfolios, closed‑shop retail networks, special clinics and sanatoria. The Soviet project collapsed at the point where the Politburo transformed itself from a governing body into a group of personal beneficiaries. The satirical magazine Fitil coined the term “nesuny” for people who unscrewed the light bulbs at work and carried home anything that wasn’t nailed down. In the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin’s family took large kickbacks for opening the door to the privatization of the largest country on earth, but even those sums look ridiculous compared with what the “serious” players made once they got institutional control of the assets, rather than suitcases of cash. That’s the rule: a crook is always a concrete individual, with a face, a family, appetites and weaknesses. A transnational corporation—or a state war machine—is, by contrast, deliberately faceless. We treat these are invented meta‑persons, like ancient gods or totem animals, if they had wills and character. That’s why a president haggling with a Saudi prince over a private jet makes intuitive sense, especially in the American rust belt, than a corporation lobbying for a war in which millions will die so that its market value can tick up by $39 billion. Petty human stupidity, greed, and vanity are one thing. The cold arithmetic of demonic bookkeeping is another. None of this means Trump’s war won’t produce real corpses and ruined lives. It does mean that someone running things the way Trump does has very few chances either to “win” such a war or to control its trajectory in any meaningful sense. Alexi Navalny, who branded Russia’s rulers a “party of crooks and thieves,” was, probably, just wrong. China, Russia, Iran are not just gangs of families mugging one another for loose change; they are structured bureaucratic regimes in which family and personal interests are, to a significant degree, subordinated to the logic of the apparatus. Contemporary Western financial capitalism, by contrast, increasingly looks like privatized sovereignty: chaotic, deeply personalized, with “state policy” appearing as the after‑image of private deals and family ventures. New Yorker Mag Reveals Trump Family's Frenzy to Cash In on the White House youtu.be/MpNe45_-XWY?si… via @YouTube
VIDEO | Wreckage of a US C-130 that reportedly attempted to rescue the missing fighter pilot in southern Iran. The US says the plane got stuck and had to be demolished, while Iranian state media says that the aircraft was destroyed.
🇮🇷⚡🇺🇸 È di fatto iniziata una corsa contro il tempo tra le forze USA e quelle di sicurezza iraniane, con entrambe le parti impegnate a trovare per prime il pilota dell'F-15E abbattuto ieri. 1/3
