Quote:“The two corporate parties have nothing to offer the people.”

Electoral politics in the United States has become more removed from reality than at any time in living memory. The two corporate parties have nothing to offer the people, because their corporate masters are determined to strip mine the public sector of everything that can be turned into profit, and to concentrate all effective decision making in the hands of the Lords of Capital. In the corporate game plan, those public functions that are not directly privatized will be placed under the control of quasi-public boards and agencies led by business executives whose mission is to tailor the infrastructures of cities and whole regions in the service of capital. That means moving resources and populations across the landscape -- or out of the region, entirely -- at the whim of the moneyed classes.

You should recognize important aspects of this scenario, since, to a very large degree, it already exists. Blacks have been expelled from U.S. cities in huge numbers since the dawn of the 21st century.

To the extent that the Rulers feel compelled to justify their capital-centric engineering of society, they will describe the dictatorship of the One Percent as “rational governance” – when, in fact, this period represents the final triumph of the irrationality of late stage, casino capitalism, with the fate of whole nations and peoples riding on the roll of the dice on Wall Street. Inevitably, Wall Street will crap out, but at every stage of the game, through speculative highs and lows, the impoverishment of the masses will increase in more or less direct proportion to the concentration of power and wealth among the ruling circles.

Quote:New details emerged Wednesday about the role President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, played in convincing the president to remove top political adviser Steve Bannon from the National Security Council.

The move was widely interpreted as a sign of Bannon’s diminishing influence in the Trump White House following a series of botched executive orders and the failure of health care reform.

But Kushner was a driving force behind Bannon’s demotion, according to Politico, which cited anonymous sources.

From the beginning, Bannon’s take-no-prisoners style of populism and his openly stated desire to “deconstruct the administrative state” have clashed with Kushner’s more technocratic approach to government.

Kushner reportedly told colleagues recently that Bannon’s nationalist agenda was hurting Trump. He was also concerned that the former executive chairman of the far-right Breitbart News brought out some of Trump’s worst qualities.

The president has struggled to gain traction in his first 10 weeks in office and has become bogged down by palace intrigue, multiple investigations into his campaign’s contacts with Russia and major policy failures.