[panarky]

I don't pretend to know their playbook.

All I can see are the visible actions on the surface and try to infer from that what the underlying rationale and strategy are.

But if a new regime took control in another nation and did everything the Red Hats have done, you could infer that they had a coherent strategy that explains their actions.

When the stated rationale for an action like tariffs doesn't make sense (preventing fentanyl from Canada?), the reason it doesn't make sense is not that the action itself is "dumb", it's because the stated rationale for the action is bogus.

So they're doing tariffs for a reason and they're hiding the real reason. If you're on the inside and know the real story, you win. If you're on the outside and keep believing their stories and thinking they're just ignorant, you lose.

Then you see the largest physical movement of gold into the US in decades, and now you guess that insiders are already positioning themselves for what's coming.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-31/jpmorgan-...

If it takes a hoard of gold to protect yourself, then what's coming is not good.

The last one to figure out the real strategy will be left holding the bag of devalued dollars and repudiated Treasury paper.

[thiht]

After the first 4 years of Trump you should have understood there’s no deeper plan than "let’s destroy shit and burn bridges", because it’s too woke or too socialist or whatever.

Trump is not a genius posing as a dumbass, he’s just a dumbass. He wanted to nuke a hurricane ffs.

[georgemcbay]

Personally I think the truth is somewhere in the middle of the vast conspiracy and your take on it.

I agree with your take on Trump, its just that I don't believe he's the one running the show this time. Watching his EO signing bonanza it was pretty obvious he had no clue what like half of them were and was just rubber stamping other people's plans.

The more interesting aspect is which faction of the people that are handling Trump (the heritage foundation folks or the techbros) will end up on top because I don't think their interests are aligned beyond the short term.

[chudstudley]

> he’s just a dumbass.

Which is precisely the point. In a plutocracy, a monarch serves at the behest of the plutocrats. He is the CEO and they are the Board of Directors over the country.

Trump doesn't need to be smart, he just needs to have sway over the single-party Management, which he does. The "destroy shit and burn bridges" is the job of Management, who ensures the security of investments made by the Board.

What the comment above you is pointing out is that major banks are stockpiling gold likely because a major crash is around the corner.

Now, what they haven't said is that these current events are actually a part of the NRx (Neo-reactionary) manifesto proposed by Curtis Yarvin at BIL in 2012. Yarvin's playbook served as a major piece of the guiding philosophy behind Project 2025. People like Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and yes Elon Musk, have all been taking notes from Yarvin's proposals for a hard-reset on the U.S. government. Even DOGE is an implementation of Yarvin's RAGE (Retire All Government Employees).

Likely, the plan is to sunset the FDIC (another New-Deal safeguard that slows corporate gains) and replace the ACH with with a new and private system backed by plutocratic investment. In order to do this, the plutocrats must take control of the Treasury's payment systems, and the FBI must be neutered to prevent investigation into this. These two things are happening now.

Next, the economy must be destabilized in order to set the precedent for either legislature or emergency powers that dissolve the FDIC and reroute ACH transfers through the new system (likely Musk's X). This destabilization is what the tariffs are for.

When all forms of cash-flow are under plutocratic control, it becomes very unlikely that domestic funds could be raised to oppose them, no matter how politically or socially motivated the masses may be. Elections can even continue if the people want, but the funds won't make it to the opposition, the news of that won't make it to the majority of the general populace, and there won't be an organization that is able to investigate why.

Trump doesn't need to know or understand any of this, however. All he needs to do is sign off on what the Board of Plutocrats tell him to. Whether they can actually pull off this switch-over is the real question.

The top 10% of the U.S. controls 60% of it's wealth, and 813 of it's 345,000,000 people are billionaires. You and I aren't rich enough to do anything but wait and see what happens. But hey, in a couple centuries, Rome will spit in two again, so there's that at least.

[panarky]

Maybe they'll replace ACH with Tether. It would suck to extract even more public wealth to oligarchs, but no tears will be shed for ACH.

Zoom out.

If the goal is to stop cooperating with other nations to remove any restraint on oligarchs, imposing punitive tariffs on your closest allies makes perfect sense. So does trashing all multilateral institutions from the UN to NATO, the EU to the World Health Organization.

You know that other nations will fight back so just as in conventional warfare, you reserve an unconventional capability.

The nuclear option in trade war is to renege on your debts. Congress probably wouldn't go along with selective default on Treasury bonds, but if your engineers control the Treasury payment system, you have fine-grained control of who gets their interest and principal repaid and who doesn't. Declare an emergency and wage economic war.

Sure, interest rates will skyrocket and the dollar will devalue, but that's what you want, right? A lower dollar helps you win the trade war and you can blame the "terrorist" countries for it instead of taking any responsibility for breaking the financial system.

Disaster capitalism at its most exquisite.

[fzeroracer]

I think you're wrong.

Not on on the oligarchs attempting to rule, that much is obvious. It's that the oligarchs we have are extremely stupid. Elon Musk has exposed how little he knows about anything multiple times, and the same goes for the other billionaires attempting to wrest control.

They're attempting to follow a children's playbook as if it was an engineering manual for how to become kings. I think they will absolutely crash the economy, but I don't think the plutocrats will survive or be able to pick up the pieces.

As I've mentioned before, Romans already figured this out. Bread and circuses. But the plutocrats are not willing to maintain the flow of bread, nor are they willing to create circuses. They aren't even willing to follow the typical fascist playbook of empowering the military and bribing them off with additional benefits and loot.

This kind of situation can only lead down two roads if they keep attempting a smash and grab hostile takeover: Either a American-style French Revolution or a military coup.

[chudstudley]

The thing is, Musk doesn't need to be competent either. He only needs to follow the playbook by throwing money at single-party Management long enough to ensure that systems are brought under plutocratic control. What all of this is counting on is that up to now, nobody has been able to do anything about their illegal acts. The Supreme Court has been giving the green light, and the American people voted to enable this situation in November. The Military is not going to stop what the majority of American people have either asked for or deigned to vote against.

The Plutocrats don't want or intend to "destroy" the economy; that would be foolish. They want to laterally move it out from under checks & balances and into systems under their more direct control, at a pace that the already compromised DoJ and FBI cannot keep up with.

The Military is an expensive operation and the Plutocrats actually are willing to maintain the flow of bread to the right places. When the cash-flow is under plutocratic control, their military budget can be used to ensure no disruptions to the new system. Enough service members will still get their paychecks as to not incur any wrath over the switch. Military High-Command might be in political trouble, sure, but where it counts is the vast numbers of Low-Command, who are a mix of those directly loyal to Trump or those duty-bound to the orders of the compromised and rapidly replaced High-Command. When both still get their paychecks, both will hesitate to interfere with that cash-flow.

Adherence to the Constitution was based on an honor system that we did away with in November by not showing up to vote to continue it. At the end of the day, what drives the function of the Military is money. "No bucks? No Buck Rodgers."

All of the American people, from rich to poor, have survived terrible economic crashes before, and this one probably won't be any worse to the top 10% than 1929 was. But consider this: If you made $1000/hour, working 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, 52 weeks/year for 100 years, you still wouldn't make enough money to even compete with the upper end of these guys. The average American is desperately trying to maintain a life that is so utterly insignificant to this wealth that bribery isn't even necessary; a return to the currently declining status quo continues to suffice. The allowance of entry into the middle and upper classes are their own benefits and loot. It's a suffocation strategy. And social media is the circus.

Ultimately, the way this coup works is that Americans will not be bothering to risk their livelihoods to rise up for a French Revolution. The Plutocrats are counting on the same incompetence in us to assure their success as we are in them to assure their failure. But they have all the wealth, and now the power. Do gamblers ever actually defeat the casino?

For all our sake, I hope you're right and I'm wrong, but it doesn't look like it this time around. No empire lasts, though, so there is indeed hope after our lifetimes.

[fzeroracer]

> The Military is an expensive operation and the Plutocrats actually are willing to maintain the flow of bread to the right places. When the cash-flow is under plutocratic control, their military budget can be used to ensure no disruptions to the new system. Enough service members will still get their paychecks as to not incur any wrath over the switch.

They're already working towards cutting military benefits, so this doesn't hold up. It's more than just keeping the paychecks moving but also keeping or improving quality of life. The moment they gut military healthcare and tell them to find private health instead it's not gonna look good for loyalty if Trump orders them to shut down protests.

As for the flow of bread, they're not willing to make short term sacrifices to solidify control. The fascist play would've been to use the power of the government to artificially lower food prices and create single payer healthcare to placate the masses until the takeover is total and complete. But tariffs will continue to raise food prices, eggs will spiral out of control and people will blame the person in charge.

> All of the American people, from rich to poor, have survived terrible economic crashes before, and this one probably won't be any worse to the top 10% than 1929 was.

This is true, but a key point is that the far right has fostered an immense level of anger and hatred. An economic crash would be met with unprecedented violence from people that suddenly can no longer afford basic healthcare or food. One of the key indicators of this issue is that the multiple attempts on Trump's life didn't come from anyone on the left, but from the right. The assassination of the healthcare CEO wasn't a communist plot, but rather from a person that followed along with the conservative mindset until the medical system radicalized him. An actual Great Depression event triggered by the looting of the federal government would send these individuals into overdrive.

[chudstudley]

Actually, it does hold up; they're not cutting serving military benefits, but veterans benefits and resources. If you're young and useful, the Plutocrats still want you working. If you're discharged or retired, they don't need you anymore. They want to incentivize competitive hubris, so if you didn't use that time and service to secure a spot in the upper classes, you are neither necessary nor going to be a problem for them anyway.

The Plutocrats aren't running a hearts-and-minds campaign here; they neither need nor want to placate the masses. The masses hold far less power than businesses and corporations do. This is about subjugating the only citizens who matter: those businesses and corporations that might be able to sway the masses through pay. Egg prices soaring are not a concern for those who are too rich to notice or bite the bullet. It exclusively matters to you, me, and others at or beneath our level, who cannot effect change.

A return to 1880s or 1930s levels of crime is not a fear of the Plutocrats, but an expectation. It is part of those short-term "sacrifices", the memetics of disorganized in-fighting they anticipate to solidify their control. The 20th Century was just a Golden-Era short reprieve from this status-quo. Now, some will blame the person in charge, and a few of those will even march, and it will effect as much change as it has in the last decade. Others will blame the scapegoats, and a few of those will even march, and it will effect as much terror as it has in the last decade.

The amount of anger and hatred that any dissenting masses can foster against the Right is still not enough to even match the sway of the wealth of the Plutocrats who use the Right as a tool to secure their wealth and mobility. Those assassins were not Leftist, no, but they didn't lead to any sustained or organized movements. Neither did they inspire more people to turn up and vote against the man they attempted to relieve society of, nor were they considered a part of the Right by its plebeian loyalists. Both of these outcomes are the goals of the Plutocrats who use their police and information networks to rapidly suppress such disorganized violence and set an example.

When you and I can't afford eggs anymore, we will just stop buying eggs, while still showing up to our jobs. I hope this pisses someone off enough to spark a domino-effect, but Nazi Germany didn't fall from within, and the U.S. Plutoracy is not likely to during our lifetime either. But hey, after the Trade Wars, if we indeed still have our jobs, things might reach a normalcy similar to life in the PRC, so after the dark period there's at least that to look forward to.