Waiting for the anti-Christ, pt. 2.5

I've been following the daily revelations of government waste uncovered by DOGE, the repurposed/rebranded U.S. Digital Services outfit headed now by Elon Musk. Formed by Obama in 2014, it was given a new mission by Trump in January and from what I've read, it's completely legal even if its actions draw the ire of lawyers, communists and the like.

News junkies like myself have known for years that there were trillions missing from the government outlays, funds that could not be accounted for using standard practices. My recollection goes back to at least Shrub's SecDef, Donald Rumsfeld, who announced around the turn of the century that the Department of Defense could not trace $6 trillion over a span of several years. Catherine Austin-Fitts has claimed for many years that there is north of 20 trillion unaccounted for by the payment systems, sucked into the dark abyss of psyops and CIA slush funds. My understanding is that the Pentagon fails audits every year and no one cares anymore.

As a senior leader at HUD, Fitts first discovered that government accounting did not work at all like it did in the private sector. I'm sure she is feeling vindicated by DOGE's discoveries. Her story is worth knowing if you are interested in what real democracy looks like. She ended up legally persecuted for years and was drained of millions in legal fees defending herself from frivolous, revenge-based investigations. Democracies love lawfare, reducing good men and women to penury if they threaten to expose the corrupt underbelly of society.

In the days of monarchy, you could always point to who was responsible for corruption and decline because power and authority were visible. Sure, you had men in the shadows but even these had a connection to the monarch and could be sussed out given time. If the secret police disappeared you, everyone knew it was the tsar who was ultimately responsible. In democracy however, you've no idea who calls the shots. DeTocqueville warned of this hidden danger when he explored the psychic fabric of the American republic. Democracy makes every man a petty tyrant and when they combine out of mutual desires for gain, there is no limit to the evil they can do. They also become a biological mass lacking a locus of power and authority. They are the mob of millions of petty tyrants, far worse than a single one.

Like all things democratic, there was no reckoning or correction of the practices leading to Rumsfeld's missing six trillion. In the years following his declaration, there were no reports issued explaining where the money went, or what safeguards had been introduced to prevent such a staggering amount of money from disappearing again in the future. We can assume very reasonably that even more money is missing now, untraceable, lost in the recesses of the blackest void. Trump threatened a few days ago to sic DOGE on the Pentagon, so maybe we will find at least part of it. I fully expect that to be a very long engagement for the DOGErs since the Pentagon is the pinnacle of all waste and fraud.

This doesn't mean all the untracked money was sent to offshore accounts. It's likely much of it was diverted into black programs as Fitts claims, or used to buy $16,000 toilet seats. Of course, with the amounts involved, one can be sure that there were kickbacks and gifts given. These will definitely never be traced. Hookers and coke dealers don't issue receipts.

Samantha Power, former head of the international crime syndicate known as USAID, reportedly has a net worth of $30 million while making $180K as a government employee. She has a book deal and no doubt some lucrative speaking fees, but the numbers I saw for these would not get her to her present value. I watch Ross Cameron's recap videos and the guy has been making around $1 million per year for the last ten or eleven years trading stocks. He can make anywhere from 10-100K per day chasing the hot stocks in pre-market, but it would take him another 18 years to catch up to Power if his only source of income was day trading (he has a business and long term investments, etc.). She of course was not mo-mo trading stocks like Cameron since she was busy earning her government salary in service to the people, so it will remain a mystery how she became so wealthy. I do not expect DOGE to crack the mystery of the pols and bureaucrats whose net worths have skyrocketed while in power. This sort of meddling gets into the most sensitive areas of our precious democracy.

Sam (as I call her) is like Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton and the other women I covered, a war pig who literally sat at the center of the deep state, aiding and abetting evil. Women in power were supposed to make us all gentle, wise and compassionate, but ended up being as bad if not worse than the men they replaced.

The average citizen in a democracy doesn't care about the mathematical impossibilities behind Sam's fabulous wealth nor do they worry about who will pay the public bill when it comes due. The beauty of democracy and its love of debt is that the decline is very gradual at first and only gets fast at the end (to paraphrase Hemingway about personal bankruptcy). The ruling class have had a good ride and the rest don't care and just get poorer and sicker. Hopefully, our betters converted their gains into harder assets which will survive major shakeups and devaluation. No one wants to see Samantha Power or Nancy Pelosi tossed out onto the streets.

Sam's USAID is especially interesting since it had 10,000 employees and of those, none of them ever said anything publicly about the misuse of funds. Think how hard it would be to get that many people together and then have none of them leak information about the awful stuff being done in the name of the American people. To be fair, most of them were probably not able to access every part of the system to see where money went, but still, you would expect something to come out. Had Trump lost, the USAID grift would've continued until the final death rattle of Ye Olde Republick. The claim that conspiracies are implausible because someone always squeals just took a big hit.

The Social Security (SS) office is also interesting but I don't think Musk and his DOGE nerds have discovered vast amounts of money being paid out to people 120+ in age. Color me skeptical. Having worked with a lot of poorly designed information systems over decades, it takes some time to figure out just how bad the system is, what it's supposed to do, what it actually does, etc. Let me stress that it can take significant time to reverse engineer data and understand its domain rules. Recall that there are many thousands of regulations around SS and that these have to be reflected in the IT systems, most of which are grossly outdated technologically, lack accurate (or any) documentation and were never properly tested. LLMs do not fix this.

Are there people in the SS databases who are 150 years old? Very likely yes, but as historical records. It doesn't mean they are alive and getting paid checks – to claim that there are lots of them out there still receiving direct deposit is frankly impossible. From what I've read, SS stopped mailing checks a long time ago to most of its recipients, so if Wilma were to keep getting the same check as she had since 1961, then she would need to still be at the same address. To think there are many thousands of scammers jinking with addresses and converting existing accounts to direct deposit is a little farfetched. The direct deposit alone is traceable and easily identified when the recipient is 150 years old.

However, it is not impossible that the Deep State set up lots of fake accounts and uses the funds to create dark pools, slush funds, etc. for spreading democracy all over the place. But if they were going to do this, they would probably be smart enough to make the data realistic. No 150+ year old vampires.

Another issue with the SS "scandal" is that one would have to assume that all the people working with the data would have kept quiet about the oddities for decades. That's not how IT works. Snooping through data is done by dozens or more people on a daily basis in a shop like the SS; some of those folks would've had a full view into the systems owing to their tenure and clearance. No way all of them would've remained silent while many millions went out the door everyday electronically to Musk's vampires. If you think IT people don't look at data in order to understand the domain or to analyze it for any number of reasons, you probably think Musk and his crew are prodigies.

And in the end, that's what this is really about and then so much more. Musk has convinced many Americans that he is a genius, probably one of the smartest men to have ever lived. When you look more closely, it doesn't really hold up. What does however is that Americans love the story of the kid who got off a boat from South Africa with nothing in his pocket and then turned himself into the richest man on the planet. Musk understands the myth and is very happy to exploit it for all its worth. This blog is not about the flaws of Musk and the worship cult he has in the United States.

What is happening here with DOGE is a dismantling of old corrupt systems and part of me is grateful to see the sewer being unclogged, allowing all the foul gunk to flow to the sea. On the other hand, the growth in the federal work force is part and parcel of post-industrial capitalism, where service jobs and clerical work are the only means to maintain a semblance of a middle class. The federal labor force consists of people who do very little of anything meaningful apart from getting a check that keeps the economy going. Musk showed with Twitter that you can downsize a private corporation by 85% and still get the same performance. Most jobs now are bullshit jobs and they have the pay rates to show it. But when your whole system depends on bullshit jobs paid in bullshit fiat to buy bullshit consumer goods and grossly inflated assets like houses, then messing with the jobs part leads to significant economic structural changes.

I will give one example from my career of how inefficient capitalism and its bullshit jobs are. Lots of people think the waste in the federal government is vastly different from the private sector and it is, but only in degree, not kind. Crippling waste can be found in even small corporations.

I was hired at a company and my manager explained that the website was almost completely redesigned and ready for deployment. He went on to explain that the project had taken five years to do. I was like, "Holy shit, what exactly does this website do?" This was a small division of a much larger publicly traded company, one with a share price well above $100. Total revenues were like $30 million per year for our modest little division, so a five year capex project to rebuild a private web application was a big freaking deal. We weren't contributing a lot to the parent company's overall performance.

The answer to my question came within a few months as the new beast was rolled out to the private paying clients who used it. It was very unimpressive and had lots of gaps and flaws. Logging of application errors was deliberately left out so when they happened, it was very difficult to track down the problem without detailed information available. The clients of the application were banks. The development manager made it his personal mission to evade, obfuscate and confuse any questions or probing into the piece of shit his team spent five years working on.

There were something like seven software developers on staff so I got really curious as to what they had spent five years doing. I calculated roughly that on average, they were making $100K in salary and there were seven of them, so we were looking at $3.5 million just for labor for a shitty website.

I began going through source code commits and noticed that two of the women on the team had a custom of checking in their changes once per month, usually the last business day thereof. This is not normal at all in software development. When I began looking more closely, their commits were very small and had little to do with core functions. The pattern was consistent over months and years. The answer to my question of why it had taken so long was that they had at least two incompetent developers who had been allowed to sit in a corner and do nothing for years on end while getting a check.

My manager was fairly clueless and had switched off, letting the team kind of run itself, usually not very well. Nice guy, but had lost any passion for his work and needed lots of unsolicited advice, prodding and, um, direction. I sat him down and walked through the commits and he apologized. A few weeks later, the two women were let go.

The rest of the staff were almost as bad. The manager of the developer team had ended up working long hours for years on end writing code to do the work that his staff couldn't or wouldn't do. It never occurred to the managers at this business to look at what was being produced for five years, or to ask if it was normal. The point was to make work, make paychecks, make the economy go. Or, that's how it felt. The leadership wasn't even to the level of mediocre, but they were part of larger company and were just used to doing things the same way as they had for twenty years. A kind of apathy settles over any kind of large organization, whether public or private.

So a big part of me sympathizes with Musk because I've seen this kind of waste over the years in the private sector and can only imagine how much worse it is in the shovel ready world of federal work. Poorly run companies can stay around for a loooooong time, but they eventually have to improve or sink to the bottom. The middle way is elusive for mere mortals and dumb companies.

In parts 1 and 2, I laid out the case that the financial system we have is bust and that humans have become largely obsolete. The human things like marriage, community and family are now dead for a large swath of developed societies, East & West. Billions of years of sculpting by Mother Nature produced a thinking animal whose natural proclivities have been thwarted completely by the rise of technology. Work is now also (almost) obsolete, with make work jobs in both corporate and public sectors there to keep people busy instead of burning down cities and terrorizing one another. Pay is so low, the jobs so demoralizing and the costs of homeownership so far beyond what most people can afford that many have given up. Yet until this point, the oligarchy has needed useless eaters to keep the economic machine going.

The Trump tariffs have been praised as a catalyst for reigniting domestic industry as America uses this barrier to retrain its people to become designers, builders and maintainers of everything from high tech factories for semi production to consumer goods. Heavy reliance on China for everything has made the U.S. incredibly vulnerable and weak. While that country is producing STEM graduates and skilled laborers, American youth are working on their pronouns and playing video games. Or at least this is the unfair stereotype used to avoid explaining what exactly they are supposed to do when the ladder to the middle class was kicked over. Capitalism doesn't answer for its crimes, it just shifts the blame to the weaker people. It's these damn kids with their iPhones! Ya can't do anything with them!

Capitalism took over the educational system a long, long time ago. Yes, the Department of Education was created in 1979, but capital has always defined the curricula used in schools and those have always been aimed at keeping the populace at a level where they are just smart enough to follow tv commercials. If one thinks that all of the powerful Fortune 1000 companies in the U.S. are innocent victims of poorly run schools and the DoE, then he is naive. Corporations rule politics and don't think for a second they do not do the same with schooling.

So the death of work, the family, the community, educational opportunity... it's all very depressing.

And this is where a depressed and anxious society can get caught looking for a hero or even better, a savior, to step in and fix things. Is Musk that hero? Probably not. In fact, it's safe to say that his DOGE is very much a self-serving enterprise like all of his lucrative engagements, going all the way back to PayPal. My theory and one probably shared by other observers is that the radical downsizing of the federal government blitzkrieg-style is a practice run for the roll out of advanced AI agent systems very soon. The mass layoffs and buyouts we see – as of now 275,000 people have been pulled from the hind teat of the federal government – are a shadow of what will happen very soon in the corporate sector. Musk is in a prime spot to observe first hand how massive systems function when their labor force is disrupted.

Today, we were told that American taxpayers will receive a DOGE "dividend" as the result of the cost savings brought about by placing 275,000 Americans in the unemployment line. Fiscally speaking, it would be better to use that money to pay off the debt. Most of the newly furloughed will find nothing close to what they had in the private sector as the employment market is dead. Deader than I've ever seen it, including going back to the Dot Bomb bust. These folks will be drawing unemployment for the maximum duration before ending up in more desperate straights. The DOGE dividend will be pathetically modest and taxed as a bonus, meaning you get to keep 50% of it. It will feel like UBI, or what UBI will be when it is rolled out in a couple of years. A paltry welfare check that keeps you from starvation and prosperity.

The tariffs offer a whole new incentive for American companies like Apple to relocate their factories from China to the U.S. The argument goes that this creates new jobs which, unlike government ones, are actually productive, contribute to the national wealth and raise the quality of life for the middle and lower classes. There is some inflationary pressure at first, but as in the 19th century, the purchasing power of the dollar or pound stabilizes and eventually increases over time, unlike with the fiat we have now. Of course, the 19th century had gold-backed currencies in addition to tariffs, so I would not set expectations too high for a rebound in the dollar's purchasing power.

Problem is that we are on the cusp of humanoid robotics going into mass circulation. Musk in a recent interview has predicted a huge number in circulation by 2035, so the relocated factories will not be staffed by American workers but robots. Yes, there will still be Americans hired for a few positions, but not enough to offset the massive downsizing in the public and private sectors. Apple is currently facing a price hike on its devices despite already having high margins on them to offset the China tariffs. American car makers like Ford are in much worse shape since they make garbage in Mexico, which now has a tariff.

The problem with tariffs is that they can go away overnight. Trump is correct that they are of great benefit and necessary for converting from a zombie to an actual productive economy like we had decades ago, when the middle class was prosperous and had more leisure. But Trump is also old, looks very old and may or may not make it to the end of his term. Tariffs are his thing and are not supported at all by the Uniparty, which has profited enormously from open borders, free trade and globalization for decades. When Trump goes, the tariffs fall and so there are big questions in the minds of oligarchs like Tim Cook about the value of breaking ground on new factories. All it takes is a fall down the stairs, a sudden debilitating illness or an assassin to make the problem go away for the super rich.