The Gates of Hell

Stock Market is Up, Democracy is Down, What's Going On?

For the longest while, I kept thinking things do not make sense.

• How can people be struggling to feed their kids while the stock market booms?

• How can Democrats scream that billionaires don’t pay enough taxes and yet billionaires line up to endorse Democrat candidates and shine their shoes?

• How can Democrats want democracy when they object to actual democracy at every turn?

• And Liz Cheney? How did Liz Cheney wind up on the Kamala Happy-Happy-Joy-Joy tour?

Well, it’s starting to make sense to me now.

The Riddle

Many Americans are struggling to pay their rent, make the car payment, and put food on the table. These are people who just four years ago were doing fine. Now inflation is soaring, many people have lost their jobs, even those who have work have seen hours cut… And nobody much has gotten a raise.

• YET the stock market is booming. The Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 index has gone up more than 20% in 2024. That’s a whole lot.

Progressives in Congress and other communists are constantly preaching that billionaires need to “pay their fair share.” They target billionaires as greedy tax-dodgers and demand that their tax rates increase. (Ask them what their tax rate is and they don’t know—they only know it should be more, much much more!)

• YET most billionaires are true Blue Democrats and actively promote Democrat causes. Billionaire Taylor Swift is just one case in point. Mark Zuckerberg can’t dump money into Blue causes fast enough. The left demonizes the rich and the rich can’t endorse the Democrat cause loudly enough.

Democrats are always saying that Trump is a threat to democracy.

• YET they staged a coup to get rid of the incumbent (who wanted to run) and install Harris, who never got a vote. She even stole the incumbent’s money! Right now, ActBlue is being investigated for money laundering. Some pretty credible albeit local charges are being raised that Democrat operatives are trying to rig the 2024 election. Yet the Blue supporters act like guardians of democracy which would collapse without their iron hands on the levers of power.

And how on earth did Liz Cheney end up endorsing Harris and touring with her? They won’t even let Biden be seen on stage with Harris.

The Answers

Sorting all of these contradictions has taken a while and it’s taken me all the way to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is an eccentric country. Actually, it’s more properly called “a kingdom” or in Saudi parlance, “the kingdom.” They do things their own way over there.

• For instance, there are no music schools in Saudi Arabia. Why? While they do not prohibit music in the kingdom, they do not consider it a field worthy of study. 

• Women were only recently granted permission to drive a car.

• Alcohol is banned, as is bacon. It doesn’t matter if you are Muslim or not, no bacon for you if you are in Saudi Arabia.

• Same with the cinema: no movie theaters.

• If you go alone to a fast-food joint, men and women stand in separate lines. (Families have their own sections and the sexes can be together.)

• Men can marry multiple wives.

• Recently, a prominent Saudi cleric banned people from posting pictures of themselves with cats on social media. Social media is allowed—it’s just tightly regulated, and it prohibits cat selfies.

The monarchy in Saudi Arabia is not symbolic; they actually wield political power. No one outside the Saud family has any political power. The only people who have a say in Kingdom affairs are all members of the centuries-long dynasty of the Saud family. Unlike the British royal family, who can’t seem to stay out of the tabloids, the Saud family demands and gets a very great deal of privacy. It’s hard to know who they all are, except for the most prominent members who opt to come forward.

So why is Saudi Arabia so eccentric? Money! The extended Saud family is very large. To paraphrase George Carlin, it’s a big family, and you’re not in it. But if you rolled up all the bankrolls from all the Saud royal family members, it amounts to maybe $100B and that’s a conservative guess. In fact, if you were to include the Saudi Aramco company (which is also owned by the Saud family), their wealth is likely closer to $1.4T. That makes them richer than the British royal family.

Saudi Arabia is fabulously wealthy because of their oil. They do pretty much what they feel like doing, because they’re rich enough not to need anybody’s permission or agreement or support. They do what they want. And as a result, the Saud family does not endorse critical race theory, diversity equity and inclusion, and they are unlikely to join the pride movement. Saudi Aramco is not buying into climate change. They enforce strict dress codes for women. They don’t want to see your stupid cat videos. It’s a country where money rules.

The moral of the story: if there is lots and lots of money in the hands of a very small group of people who share the same interests, those people will dominate your politics and culture.

Big Tech Hates You

The United States is a lot like Saudi Arabia, because we’re rich, too. True, we have a lot of oil, but the amazing wealth of the United States rests on Big Tech. Just for starters, we have Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. That’s just starters. You could add in: IBM, Intel, Oracle, Adobe, X, Netflix, Cisco and doubtless many others. None of these uber-rich companies are based outside the United States. We’re rolling in the kind of money that not only makes you eccentric, it can make you downright stupid. And with stupidity comes hatred.

All of these Big Tech companies tend to be super-duper Blue, liberal, progressive, and woke. With a couple of exceptions (X comes to mind), they likely have more people in their DEI departments than in their customer service departments. Some of them have meditation rooms in their office buildings and serve free sushi to their employees. Big Tech does what it wants. And it has enough money to choose its friends and cultivate grudges. Big Tech is hateful. Google’s company used to have a motto which it has since abandoned or at least hidden better. That motto was: Don’t be evil. What kind of a motto is that? Anyone whose motto is “don’t be evil” is actively concerned about evil.

Big Tech moolah made Big Tech arrogant, self-righteous, condescending, elitist, and isolated. It allowed them to pursue elaborate grudges. And it made them liberal in the 2024 American sense of the word.

Why are all these crazy-rich Big Tech companies so ferociously liberal? You would think most rich enterprises would value conservative values like capitalism, but these Big Tech companies are so far past capitalism they don’t even remember it. Capitalism to Big Tech is the Model T to the space station. Just like the oil in Saudi Arabia, the money just flows to Big Tech without much threat of any competition. And capitalism, well, that might invite competition. Big Tech in America likes to thwart competition and it likes to talk to Congress while holding Congress in a headlock. It’s power mad.

Remember Parler? That was a free-speech social media platform modeled on X (then Twitter) that Big Tech pulverized. They don’t want competition. Some day they’ll write a book about the dirty stinking tricks they pulled to kill a fledgling company like Parler who was openly endorsing freedom of speech. Big Tech destroyed Parler, because they don’t like capitalism. They want power. If the economy was not rigged, Parler could have competed with the other platforms. True, Parler might have gone bankrupt, they might have done reasonably well, they might have dominated the market. Who knows? Big Tech couldn’t take a chance with allowing any other companies into the game of social media. Big Tech doesn’t want anyone else playing its sandbox.

This quest for power is the lingua franca that helps Big Tech harmonize with the Democrat Party and all things blue. So the first thing I realized is that Big Tech and Democrats speak the same language (power), they fear the same things (competition, integrity), and one of them, namely Big Tech, has a whole lot of money. Just like when former Playmate of the Year Anna Nicole Smith wed octogenarian J. Howard Marshall, it was a marriage of mutual interests.

Make It Make Sense

Why do we have inflation? Because the government spends too much. Why does the government spend too much? Because the politicians who support Big Tech need to be able to tap into a spigot of money, too. Government boondoggles are how we taxpayers unwittingly pay our government to destroy us financially. The government does not care about inflation, because inflation is a poor person’s problem. Big Tech and the Democrats have no clue what inflation is or what it means. With million-a-month salaries not that unusual in the Big Tech stratosphere, Big Tech moguls have no qualms about rampant government spending.

Democrats in government may not draw in mega-salaries but they can tap into the constant spigot of grift that flows through Washington, D.C., rather like sewage. So Big Tech and Congress all like trillion-dollar spending bills. That’s why we’re in debt to the degree we are. Big Tech and Congress profit. The only ones getting robbed are the taxpayers, and nobody looks out for us.

The stock market is booming because the government spending is all profiting Big Tech and other companies on the stock market. So the same money that is causing inflation is causing the stock market to rise.

This explains our stupid government spending (like spending billions of dollars to install about half-a-dozen car chargers and billions more to connect NO ONE to the internet). Find me a government program, and I bet you can trace the money from your tax-paying pocket into the pockets of the oligarchs. That’s why our politicians love big spending pork-a-palooza bills in Congress. Sure, it drives inflation, but inflation enriches their stock portfolios. Meanwhile, your kids are eating mayonnaise sandwiches.

Rents and home prices are unaffordable because Big Tech and the Big-Tech adjacent companies like banks and investment houses are buying up property. Blackrock has been written up in the news even, because it is so blatantly buying land, houses, and properties. First the government makes us poor, then Blackrock buys up our land and houses at fire sale prices, and finally Blackrock will rent them back to us at triple the price. One day, we’ll wake up and they’ll own everything we ever worked for and built. They’ll do in the dark with no one noticing.

Have you ever wondered why these big companies support woke agendas that their customers do not support? Remember the Bud Light debacle with Dylan Mulvaney as trans-woman spokesperson? Remember the Target boycott when they sold little kids’ clothes that allowed boys to “tuck” and dress like girls? Why do sports franchises allow biological men to compete in women’s sports when most people are against this? The reason is that these woke companies do not care about their customers. They care about pleasing the liberals, the Democrat party, and the progressives in Congress. Blackrock cares far more about pleasing their progressive Congress people than pleasing you. Progressives want Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and big business gives it to them. Progressives want little kids to go trans. Big business delivers products that express that value. Progressives wants transsexuals in exalted places; they give them high-visibility jobs in Congress, meanwhile big business makes sure trans people are promoted in media, entertainment, and advertising. The fact that it annoys you is meaningless to them. You don’t count, except to pay taxes.

Billionaires don’t mind being blasted for not paying enough taxes since they own the system. They know all of the loopholes. Our tax codes are so hopelessly convoluted and opaque for this very reason—the very rich can afford to hire the experts to navigate the system. The rest of us just have to pay or go to prison. So it’s true, the left scolds billionaires, but billionaires know that the left is not just “on their side,” the left is their handmaiden. The left works for them. Leftist scolding is just a bit of theater to make us little people feel like the political denizens of D.C. are looking out for our interests.

Besides, billionaires know that Congress exists entirely to protect them—together with the media. Bill Gates is on the Epstein client list and he has done terrible things with vaccine programs in Africa. He’ll never see the inside of a prison cell. Why? The U.S. government works for Bill Gates, not the other way around. So they can scold him a bit if they want—when push comes to shove, Bill runs the government.

Democrats and companies like Blackrock and Big Tech (also Big Pharma and Big Food) absolutely fear the first amendment. They don’t want a free flow of information. They don’t want educated citizens. If you have to be alive (and there are many, including the aforementioned Mr. Gates, who would rather you were dead), they’d prefer you either struggle and die slowly in poverty. Alternatively, you could stay at home, drunk or high, watching Netflix and they’ll help import the fentanyl needed to dispatch you to the hereafter. (A reminder: 300 Americans a day die of overdose.) There is no encouragement for the ordinary person to succeed, since success of an ordinary person challenges the Big Tech oligarchy. Only elitists get to succeed. If you try to get an education, you’ll be indoctrinated into the hall of mirrors were authoritarianism is democracy, freedom is slavery, and all that other George Orwell stuff. You’ll either go crazy or come out an elitist Democrat, which I am not sure are exclusive terms.

Big Tech wants to demoralize and destroy the middle class and small business; the media wants to help Big Tech; and the Democrat party and the progressives are their wheel men (they’re the ones who are driving us to destruction).

No politician and no alleged journalist will ever be a billionaire like Mark Zuckerberg, but look at them—Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Bernie Sanders, Liz Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez … these Democrat “leaders” would never achieve even a mid-level job in the private economy. Without government grift, they’d be poor and struggling like the rest of us. They became elitists because it was the best they could do.

Democracy has no place in this paradigm. The Big Tech paradigm is about raw power, which in this case, is money. Big Tech has money, so our alleged “elite class” is dancing to their tune. (It’s funny, we have a Big Tech billionaire class and an elite class; both think they’re on top. In reality, the elitists work for Big Tech, they just don’t know it.)

This is why a cognitively impaired president served for four years; it is why Kamala won the presidential nomination by defenestrating Biden rather than campaigning. It’s why Democrats openly try to rig elections. Their system works because Big Tech is in power and Big Tech pays their elitist thugs handsomely to sell out the country.

Last And Possibly Least, What About Liz Cheney?

Finally, what about Liz Cheney marching in lockstep with Comrade Kamala? Liz is one of those ironic political figures who demonstrate that you do not have to be even a tiny bit smart to serve in Congress. The Democrats have shifted far to the neo-con right and have become a party of war-mongers, so Liz Cheney feels right at home. I expect Cheney will become a Democrat soon—but that’s OK, Tulsi Gabbard just became a Republican and if that was a trade, we came out ahead.

The landscape is shifting. Democrats are now the party of the draft (it’s back—Selective Service has been quietly re-instated). Democrats are the party of endless wars, the party of the rich and the super-rich, and the party of collapsing integrity. The party of censorship, the party of authoritarianism. They want our guns, our money, our very speech.

No wonder Liz feels right in her element.

Republicans are the party of working people, the middle class, small business, honest media, the first amendment, the second amendment, and the American dream.

But it all is starting to make sense.

Most Republicans feel truly that the country is broken and needs to be fixed. Many if not most Democrats don’t think anything is broken. It’s operating exactly the way they want it to work.