Ever since maggots the gave my dog a second asshole I have lorded it over the flies. I kill them on sight. With a swatter, if I got 'er, with a tea towel, if it's available, with my hand I haven't planned. I'm not proud of this as a Buddhist, but buddy, it is what it is. As a corollary of this killing spree, I have a side deal with ants. I kill the flies and they cart away the bodies.

Thus today I saw a fly I just killed get up and start moving. For a second, I felt confusion, but then macabre amusement. Everything passes with death, into other things. Reincarnation, or simply carnivores eating things if you want to be vulgar about it. Fly Jesus (it is risen) was not moving, it was being moved. It shuffled off the mortal coil to become a sausage for someone else, soon to be parceled apart and devoured. It was the movement of a corpse into a mouth, nothing more.

It got me thinking, because I think too much. This is like the whole American economy. It looks like it's moving, but it's really just financial ants carting away the carcass for deboning. Fin-ants.

Fin-ants

Tom Wolfe described what a financier does, vicariously, in A Bonfire Of The Vanities. In that book, Daddy Finance cannot explain what he does for a living to his daughter, until the wife steps in. She says,

“Darling, Daddy doesn’t build roads or hospitals, and he doesn’t help build them, but he does handle the bonds for the people who raise the money.”

“Bonds?”

“Yes. Just imagine that a bond is a slice of cake, and you didn’t bake the cake, but every time you hand somebody a slice of the cake a tiny little bit comes off, like a little crumb, and you can keep that.”

That's broadly what it is, or was. Now financiers don't build anything, they just break things, get bailed out by the government, and break things again. It's all crumbs and no cake. It's as if Marie Antoinette said let them eat shit! instead, and people did. Bridges fall down in the middle of Baltimore and never get replaced, but if the private jet set gets threatened, it's immediate government intervention. It's like the old Third Worldist joke about corruption, which I'll repeat.

A Sri Lankan Minister is entertaining a Pakistani Minister in a beautiful home overlooking a bridge and he says “you know how I built this house?” Then he points to the bridge and says “10%.” Later, the Pakistani Minister re-entertains his mate and points out his own beautiful view, unmarred by any bridge at all. “You know how I built this house? 100%.”

This is a joke we used to tell amongst ourselves, now joke's on you. Much of the third world has better and certainly newer infrastructure than America, thanks largely to China, and our corruption looks like table stakes compared to unstable state of America. The killing joke is that America just legalized capitalism and built their whole economy around it. Rent-seeking healthcare, boondoggle weapons, payday loans, student loans, these things all raise their GDP in the same way that cancer makes you look swole. The American economy is driven by corruption and speculation and now they're literally speculating on clouds. Just ask Icarus how that plays out.

These men used to dare, but now they're just mendacious. Or as Logan Roy of Succession said more prosaicly, “When I arrived, there were these gentle giants smelling of fucking gold and milk. They could do anything. Now look at them. Fat as fuck, scrawny on meth or yoga. They pissed it all away.” America used to build (an abomination), but now they're just bullshit artists. Modern capitalists call video calls work and passing IOUs amongst themselves growth. A company that makes no money (OpenAI) can just make up $300 billion, pledge it to another crony (Oracle), and everybody else speculates on it like this is really happening. I call bullshit. The AI Bubble makes tulips look attractive.

It's all scam and they're all in on it. They even admit it. As Jim Covello of Goldman Sachs says in a negative report on AI that says buy anyway cause everyone's doing it, “Over-building things the world doesn’t have use for, or is not ready for, typically ends badly.. That said, one of the most important lessons I've learned over the past three decades is that bubbles can take a long time to burst. That’s why I recommend remaining invested in AI infrastructure providers.” Modern financiers have created crumbs as big as crack rocks and everybody's smoking it. It's all a scam, but you're a fool to not be in on it.

The courtiers in the market that replaced the court know that the Emperor is in his birthday suit, but they don't say anything because there's birthday cake and they're hoovering up every last crumb. What we're witnessing is not some magical resurgence of American manufacturing but a classic private equity like they did to Toys R' Us. Run up bills on the joint's credit and then bust the place out. The American economy is moving like the fly on my floor. Fin-ants are just carrying it off, to be stripped for parts.

Dead Flies

Nobody wants to say it, but what we have in the American economy is a dead fly. It might have flown once, laying capitalist maggots into all and sundry, but that's all done and dusted. The core American economy has been dead since 2008 at least, and it's been dying since at least the 1980s. They can cannibalize Europe and terrorize the Middle East a bit longer, but it's curtains for them. Exit stage right, pursued by bear market. The movement of the US economy today is just the movement of a corpse. Weekend At Bernie Maddow's.

After 2008 they literally just made up money and now they're making up an entire 'artificial' economy. The fact is that America effectively defaulted when they went off gold last century and they've been ruling by fiat ever since. But that only works as long as nobody points out that the Empire has no clothes, and I'm fucking pointing now. There's a lot of fingers out and it's only a matter of time before it's a crowd. The era of Naked Lunch is coming to a close. As William S. Burroughs said about that book, “The title was suggested by Jack Kerouac. I did not understand what the title meant until my recent recovery [from heroin]. The title means exactly what the words say: NAKED Lunch – a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” For America, however, there is no recovery from the everything crash to come (inshallah). Just fentanyl for their veins and finance for their brains. Hard to say which is worse. As Burroughs said about what he called ‘junk’,

I have seen the exact manner in which the junk virus operates through fifteen years of addiction. The pyramid of junk, one level eating the level below (it is no accident that junk higher-ups are always fat and the addict in the street is always thin) right up to the top or tops since there are many junk pyramids feeding on peoples of the world and all built on basic principles of monopoly :

1 Never give anything for nothing.
2 Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait).
3 Always take everything back if you possibly can.

It's no coincidence that Americans started slinging ‘junk’ bonds in the 80s, it's the same phenomenon, one pyramid all the way down.

Observe, Then

Observe, thus, the fin-ants of America, carrying the corpse of US military around Europe, getting paid on every overpriced bullet and even more expensive bullets to shoot at bullets (missile defense). It's really one last bust-out before going bust, and Europe is the hapless restaurant taken over by the mafia. Then see them flogging the old warhorse in Palestine, where it appears strong deployed against terrorized children. But even there they lose, as they've lost every war for generations. They've dropped the equivalent of eight nuclear bombs and Hamas are still heroes, standing tall. The American military is just a corpse making corpses now. A dead man walking, a fire sale of firearms, one last genocide for the road. They can print money, but they can't print bullets. The once high-flying US military is dead, being taken apart by finance capital in the last wars they finance, inshallah.

Observe, also, the fin-ants of America, profiting from the wild swings of Trump's trigger-happy tariff policy, while agriculture and manufacturing take the actual bullets. Trump's tariffs trash the economy later, but you can profit from the wild stock swings now, if you're in the know, and the US Congress is just an insider-trading club. It's corruption all the way down. The ensuing collapse of the real US economy is covered up by the rise of the completely artificial world of AI, which is a fun party trick, but completely unprofitable. The massive trouble caused by Trump is only being covered up by an even more massive AI bubble. It's double trouble. And I, for one, am here for it. The wretched beast that slouches towards Bethlehem to kill children runs on money, and only a financial blood-letting will cool its slaughter once and for all.

I think of this as I watching the Jesus fly on the floor (it is risen). Risen, but is it? It's a funeral march, and the fly is just its own mala batha (the traditional meal afterwards). What I'm witnessing on the floor of the kitchen and at ceiling of the US stock market is the same phenomenon. Ants (and fin-ants) bearing a dead fly aloft, before they devour him.