Pipeline To Power: The Oligarch Wealth Surge

"In April 2024, candidate Donald Trump called on leaders of the fossil fuel industry to dig deep and contribute to his campaign. At this dinner at Mar-a-Lago, candidateTrump pledged to the oil, gas and coal executives that if elected, he would expand offshore drilling, weaken environmental rules, and scrap electric vehicle and wind policies and other regulations opposed by the industry groups. Trump vowed to reverse President Biden’s moratorium on new LNG gas terminals.

Present at the April 11th dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club were leaders of the American Petroleum Institute and executives from Chevron, ExxonMobil, Occidental, ConocoPhillips, and Continental Resources–along with fracking producers Cheniere Energy and EQT.According to several witnesses at the meeting, Trump told the assembled that the amount of money they would save in taxes and legal expenses after he repealed regulations would more than cover their billion-dollar contribution."

 Climate Research Accountability Project

This dinner with Big Oil was in the news. I heard about it. I don't know how it was spinned on Fox or social media to get half the electorate to buy into full-bore "burn baby burn" in 2025, with the promise of cheap gas I'm assuming, but, alas, it was. 

Democracies in history have always been vulnerable to internal factional struggles for power. Such factional disputes tore apart the Roman Republic. The people who wrote the Declaration of Independence and Constitution knew this. That's why they built in all the separation of powers stuff, to prevent one faction (or political party) from becoming too dominant, too hostile to other interests. It's worked, more or less (I mean, this isn't our first democratic failure), for nearly 250 years. 

Historians like to euphemise the problem, the threats to democracy, as Special Interest Politics. But one risk with this view is it tends to flatten comparisons between interests groups, and so obscure the overwhelming influence of Big Biz  and Billionaires as an interest group and their hostility to labor rights, environmental protections, health care rights, and generally community infrastructure of any kind beyond the police and military backup necessary to protect their private property and right to freely accumulate wealth. 

"Burn baby burn" might reduce gas prices in the short run but it will not reduce the cost of the transition to electric cars, nor will it reduce the ravages of climate change on working people's lives, nor will it improve our global position economically but, in fact, is ceding dominance in the 21st century global economy and energy transition to China. 

"The Whistle Song," Frankie Knuckles (1991)

Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, maybe most important DJs to expanding 1970s disco era experience into '80s House music and dance club music beyond. I read somewhere they used to hang out together in the classic disco era at David Mancuso's Loft parties, enthralled but also able to share a joke about the hippie vibe on the Loft's dance floor. In light of such gossip let's call "The Whistle" Frankie's LGBTQ+ hippie loving ode to the Loft. It's like a perfect Quiet Storm easy listening jazz flute fantasia, sandwiched between some hooligan-friendly men's whistling choir, and on the bottom an undeniably skipping and softly booming House music smooth dance club tempo. "The Whistle Song" feels like a perfect gay disco homage to the Loft. Even if Frankie had no such intentions, Mancuso had to hear the sincere compliment. First ballot 20th Century Dance Music Hall of Fame. 

David Lynch, Visionary Film Director and Artist, Dies: 1946-2025

"What I saw in him was an intuitive and enigmatic man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get in touch with," Kyle MacLachlan 

Or not! But still an awed appreciation for his disjunctive dream and/or nightmare-like imagination, and, yes, sly humor. "Legendary auteur" is right too, in both a positive and negative sense: His cinematic vision is unmistakable but also sometimes indulgent and inscrutable and often disturbing. As an aging Boomer myself the familiar obits are coming faster than I can keep track of but Lynch was especially important to me or so as much as filmmakers go, so worth noting. I saw Kyle MacLachlan throw out a first pitch at an M's game this past summer. He was all grey. There was a goofy pacific northwest vibe, that MacLachlan personifies, that ran through much of Lynch's film work. And Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, The Straight Story, and Mulholland Drive were all moving, if not shattering, movie experiences for me. I saw Mulholland Drive alone three times when it first game out just trying to make sense of what I saw. I can't say I ever did figure it all out (other than it is a horror story about how Hollywood ruins innocent lives of aspiring actors) but each viewing increased my respect for Lynch's creativity and craft. Now I need to take another shot at his 2017 Twin Peaks reboot. David Lynch was a true artist and cinematic visionary. R.I.P. 

NY Times

Also, nice writeup in The Stranger by Megan Burbank: 

"But Lynch depicts harm with the emotional intensity it requires. In the universe of Twin Peaks, the impact of Laura Palmer’s suffering is framed on a mythological scale. One teenage girl’s ongoing abuse is so incomprehensible and unacceptable that it requires a supernatural explanation. I have always considered this beautiful: Lesser directors would see Laura’s rape as a plot point, an edgy choice. For Lynch, it’s the end of all the good in the world."

Things For Working People Republicans Will Cut To Give Billionaires More Tax Cuts

"But hey! When they’re hungry or finding themselves without any health care, low-income Trump voters can take heart in knowing that they really stuck it to trans people, immigrants, and the concept of “woke” and definitely were not tricked into frothing at the mouth over these things in order to ensure they’d vote for people who would cut all of the programs they rely on in order to fund tax cuts for people too rich to even feel the impact of whatever small amount of taxes they won’t be paying anymore."

Robyn Pennacchia @ Wonkette

Grump voters and their relationship to Fox and conservative media is its own national dumpster fire all Americans, and the rest of the world influenced by our politics, will all now have to resist, dodge, and endure for the next four years. Pointing out the details of how republican voters, or other than the Billionaires, voted against their own interests is necessary but not new or surprising. Just like during the pandemic the redder the location the worse the health outcomes. If conservatives are not getting revenge against their avowed enemies, Dems, liberals, etc, they're cutting off their noses to spite their faces, usually both at the same time. This is how they roll, break stuff and then fall on their own sword. We've seen this movie before and, of course, the second installment is likely to be worse. 

But what about everybody else? Apparently, more eligible voters didn't vote than voted for either Grump or Harris. What about women, minorities, Muslim-Americans, families with LGBTQ+ loved ones, young people with college loans, health care workers and/or people who depend on health care services, and, really, any working class wage worker that did not see a clear and present threat to their interests in the election from Grump and the republicans or concluded Grump can't be worse than Biden or America isn't ready for a woman potus or whatthefuckever is a level of civic imbecility bordering on Darwin Awards stuff. Sorry. 

After all the postmortem allusions to the election results, and how various groups voted, I'm anxious to see the actual demographic breakdown, which I'm told should be out in February. I'm tired of the gloating about alleged 5-8% shifts in minority populations, women didn't show up, etc. 

Anyway, wrapping up my lament, so many eligible voters unable to recognize any important stakes or choice in the election is a crisis in civic education. Or looking at it a different way: to survive democracies have to win popular support, that's it or absolutely requisite to democracies' survival anyway.  And nearly 40% of the electorate decided democratic government wasn't worth their vote. What has democracy ever done for me, like that? Biden/Harris or Trump, what's the difference? I care about my community but national politics, Trump and all that, it's like a nightmare horror Hunger Games pro wrestling super grudge match. I'm not into the superhero stuff. Voting is just feeding the beast. 

But then amongst engaged voters, trigger warning, Grump won 49.5% to 48.5% over Harris because, testifies a Trump supporter on TV, "Because he knows how to deal with the "illegals" and he's easier on the pocket book." I'm taking this as suggestion that I need to read some more Jonathan Swift. 

"Everything Has Gone Green," New Order (1981)

 

New Order takes the synthpop plunge, never looks back. Synthpop, that is, with hopped up and punkish dance club tempos big in sweaty clubs. 

Bothsidesing, With a Republican Slant--

 "I found a lot to agree with in Jonathan Weisman’s big piece [in NY Times] on how Democrats lost the working class, although he barely mentions the extent to which Republicans have followed anti-worker policies, including attempts to privatize Social Security and kill the Affordable Care Act. Reagan, in particular, didn’t just do “trickle-down,” he did a lot to crush unions while cutting taxes on high incomes and raising them on most workers, and presided over trade deficits, deindustrialization and a huge surge in inequality.

Readers should know that the raw fact is that America didn’t have higher inflation than other advanced economies — yet Weisman not only doesn’t tell readers that, he slants the narrative by giving the last word to a Republican asserting that it was all Biden’s fault."

Krugman Wonks Out

The key distinction to me in the Dems "lost the working class" debate (in as much as they actually have, also debatable), which really only refers to the white working class anyway, is they were lost for cultural reasons not economic reasons long ago. 

When the voting rights act was passed in 1965, then potus LBJ is reported to have opined that the South would be lost to the Democrats for a generation. Turns out we're going on our third generation since the bigots began migrating to the Republican party and they're pretty much all there now, metastasizing into everywhere outside the major metropolitan areas. 

The racist and mainstream perspective, spread by Fox and conservative media, dictates an economic outlook in which everything is zero sum: If immigrants get ahead, natives must be falling behind; If minority civil rights are expanded, the majority population's rights will suffer decline and restriction. It's always a vicious Hobbesian all-against-all tug-o-war for the profiteering spoils of society, which conveniently reinforces corporate rule's "free market" austerity economics and political-economy.   

This take K describes as recent has been routine at the NY Times and WaPo pretty much since post-pandemic inflation first surged in 2021, and in a broader sense is much older. The media studiously keep the global and domestic inflation stories separate. They rarely mention that inflation after a disruption in global supply chains, a major war or global pandemic, is to be expected and to a degree inescapable. The more relevant question is how governing institutions respond to these economic pressures. And in the US, anyway, the Fed, and mainstream economics, responded by putting the onus for inflation entirely on common consumers, reflecting a blinding Wall Street and corporate rule bias in the Fed and mainstream economics. Larry Summers was blaming inflation on Biden for giving consumers too much spending money with his Covid relief bills before the universally expected major supply chain obstacles had even been identified, let alone addressed. 

Throughout the whole ordeal mainstream press accounts also studiously ignored the contributions of corporate price gouging to inflation and the cost of living surge, even though Warren was regularly quoting on the floor of the Senate CEO's promising their shareholders price and profit increases based on the favorable, for them, "inflationary environment." 

The goal in all this was to reduce the destabilizing extremes of inflation WITHOUT enabling any government interventions that might shift resources toward the laboring classes. Austerity economics, basically. 

The republican slant in the media is recognition that they can blunt the real economic interests of the bottom 50% by appealing to their racist bigotry and culture war stupidity. And they just succeeded in the last election, even if narrowly, spectacularly. That Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg will, reportedly, sit on the podium behind Grump at the inauguration isn't just an unprecedented clown show display of corporate greed but a crowning display of the neoliberal order and the catastrophically poor judgment of our new economic overlords and Big Tech broligarchy.  

Why "poor judgment" if they are only protecting their own class interests to freely accumulate capital and limit their labor costs? Isn't that what good capitalists are supposed to do? Because pursuing their own self-interests so single-mindedly increases poverty and homelessness, and more generally is always squeezing and lowballing the bottom 50% to inflate their margins, which is the Wall Street game pretty much running the economy. 

At this point it's fairly clear the Wall Street position isn't in any clear sense pro-growth so much as pro-Billionaire wealth hoarding. But, worse, it is spectacularly poor judgment because they have turned the government, and the largest and most influential economy in the world, into culture war reality tv with the constant threat of humanitarian crimes the dramatic click bait, meanwhile abandoning global leadership in the energy transition away from heavy carbon emissions and fossil fuels, burn baby burn. 

They are gambling that because fossil fuel energy won the 20th century it will win the 21st century. They are wrong but now we have to watch what terrible humiliations they will put the country through before some super majority surge in the electorate demands another course correction.

DAF and Robert Gorl (Sans Umlaut): The Origins of Gothic Synthpop Dance Music

"Beruhrt Verfurht," ("touched seduced") Robert Gorl (1984) sounds like Alan Vega's (Suicide) German cousin. Mumbly, breathy, inscrutably emphatic, especially in Gorl's case because it's all in German, so no idea what he's on about until I looked it up. Although touching and seduction as subjects wouldn't have been too hard a guess. The girl singer sounds like a dry sassy Dietrich update. It's a nice '80s techno pop period tune. 

But Gorl, more like Suicide's Martin Rev, I'm learning is really a pioneering maestro of creative synthpop tempos, goosestepping stomps, hopped up polka Oompahs, robotic Teutonic jamming with a minimalist's blunt appeal, and a widely revered pioneer of Techno music. 

Here's Gorl showing off his instrumental chops and drollery on this 1984 failed solo stab at the charts: 

But where it all started was Gorl as one-half D.A.F. ("German American Friendship") with Gabi Delgado, German post-punk innovators, pioneers of synth-pop and industrial dance music styles between 1978 and 1984. Gabi adds the punky mock Nazi authority vocals and lyrics, crucial to their radical origins fashioning an electronics and synth based analogue to 1977 London punk rock. 

Add Gorl's brilliantly propulsive and minimalist drums and electronics, some production help from Krautrock legend Conny Plank (Kraftwerk, Neu, Cluster), and the first four DAF albums are extremely listenable, a journey from art-punk to what they called "Electronic Body Music" or EBM, and was rarely exceeded in catchy proto-synthpop sounds from that period. 

And they are another secret treasure in the annals of postpunk music unearthed for me by Simon Reynolds postpunk book. Back in the day I'd admired DAF no further than "Der Mussolini" as a kind of punk era one-hit-wonder. But never searched any further until running into them again in Reynold's Rip It Up and Start Again. 

"Der Mussolini" (1981), an international hit and monster in the dance clubs, was my first DAF song. The electro punk edge was instantly grabbing, but I barely noticed the dancing to Mussolini, Hitler, Jesus Christ, Communism, and right/left rhetoric beyond punk provocation and sloganeering. The provocations struck me as mocking as the Sex Pistols. 

  

Anyway, a deeper appreciation of their postpunk electronic synthesis now comes as exciting news. Their punk rock incubation phase is viscerally charged, to say the least. Check out this performance of "Ich und die Wirklichkeit" ("Me and Reality") (1981). Delgado on the mic, Gorl at the drums, but not sure about the New Romantic help on the electronics? But key! An electro charged punk rock fit. 

Best translation I could find googling: 

Me and I

In real life

Me and I

In reality

I feel so weird

I feel so weird

I feel so weird

I feel so weird

Me and I

In real, ha, life

The reality comes

Reality comes

Reality comes

Reality comes

I feel so weird.

Delgado is a hypnotically effective ranter, his tortured sarcasm comes through without much translation. This one standard issue existential punk rock angst but crucially with drums and electronics, no guitar. 

"Sato-Sato" (translates from Japanese as "always active"?), DAF (WestBam Remix from 2017): Priceless original early '80s footage of punkers dancing to DAF's electronic punk montaged by contemporary mixmaster WestBam. Public service:  

So of course the more fully up to date music people as opposed to a Mr. Magoo dilettante like me have been onto my DAF discovery for at least twenty years. Here's DAF dominating the Wire Festival in 2003 with another one of their Techno punk classics, "Alle Gegen Alle" ("All Against All") (1981). Flirting with violent fascist imagery via Hobbes, but again emphasizing the power over the hate-mongering. 

There's more trigger warning talk online about DAF, about how they were out gays and their lyrics tended toward explicit sex and rough trade stuff. I can definitely see some of the gay leather thing in their album covers but until this late edition song I haven't encountered much explicit language. Again, not that I'd notice with the German, other than to observe a lot of German sounds like cursing to me, if not particularly sexual. But looking up a few translations of the DAF I'm sharing here this is the first song I've come upon with explicit language. So adult content warning but also an evolved example of their special combo of tricky beats and aggressive electronics and sarcastic humor. 

"Ich glaub ich fick dich später" ("I Think I'll Fuck You Later") DAF/DOS (1996): 

A lot more where this came from that I don't know but a previously unexplored synthpop fountainhead source of electronic music fans of the genre will want to know, I will insist. DAF are one of the key founders of postpunk electronic-based gothic dance music and if you like any one of those musical categories they are not to be missed. Invigorating.