The Rot Is the Point

From ICE atrocities to Epstein cover-ups, America’s ruling class delivers cruelty, corruption, and economic despair served with a side of bipartisan indifference.

Good morning! It’s Monday, and as usual, the country’s swirling the drain while the ruling class holds the plunger. We begin, of course, with Congress, where Democrats are dutifully preparing their next grand surrender. With ten weeks until another shutdown showdown, Republicans are already sharpening their knives, hacking away at abortion rights, DEI initiatives, and gun regulations in their budget bills, while Democrats are furrowing their brows and issuing strongly worded memos. Senate Republicans, backed by Trump’s increasingly erratic tantrums, are ramming through brutal cuts and fiscal hostage-taking while Schumer and company are still daydreaming about bipartisan compromise, which at this point should be classified as a delusional disorder. Democrats aren’t even pretending to play hardball. No red lines, no shutdown threats, just the familiar chorus of “maybe Susan Collins will save us,” as Trump hoards power, slashes federal programs, and claws back billions Congress already appropriated. It’s the legislative version of bringing a sternly worded Post-It note to a gunfight.

Meanwhile, the private sector is busy proving they’re no better. Microsoft is at it again, gift-wrapping another global hacking disaster. This time, it’s SharePoint, with federal and state governments, universities, energy companies, and even telecoms in Asia all getting looted while Microsoft issues half-baked patches, blames customers, and shrugs. The Biden administration’s cybersecurity team is so gutted from Trump-era budget cuts that they were literally pulling overnight shifts to track the carnage. And Microsoft? They’re too busy calculating their next federal contract to bother securing the digital infrastructure of half the planet. Consider this the capitalist circle of life: tax dollars fund the monopoly, monopoly leaves the door open, taxpayers pay for the cleanup.

At the grocery store, we’ve officially upgraded from eggflation to beefflation. The cost of your backyard burger is up nearly 12% in the past year, driven by collapsing herd sizes, record drought, and corporate greed, while ranchers themselves are going bankrupt. Walmart, ever the innovator, is now running its own beef facility so it can cut out middlemen and pass precisely none of those savings on to you. America’s steak dinner is turning into a luxury good, while hedge funds gobble up farmland and agribusiness execs cry crocodile tears about “market challenges.” Enjoy your beef jerky, peasant.

On Wall Street, the week kicks off with the markets in a cautious bounce, propped up by a quick-hit dopamine fix from solid earnings reports. But behind the green arrows lies the same rot: Trump’s tariff threats loom, trade wars are simmering, and every CEO from Alphabet to Tesla is praying their quarterly report distracts from the fact that wages are falling and household debt is skyrocketing. As always, the market gods smile on those who sell misery at scale.

Across the political wasteland, the Epstein files are metastasizing into a full-blown panic. Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson spent the weekend stammering on Fox News about why Republicans must “move past Epstein,” which is Washington code for “our guy is up to his neck in it.” Trump’s approval is in freefall, the Epstein scandal polls worse than food poisoning, and MAGA leadership is trying to memory-hole the whole thing while Democrats play patty-cake. Alan Dershowitz, Epstein’s former lawyer and human cautionary tale, popped up to say Ghislaine Maxwell would “happily” testify to Congress if she gets immunity, which her own representatives promptly denied. The DOJ is stonewalling the release of grand jury files, the courts are dragging their feet, and America’s most radioactive scandal continues to rot in the shadows, exactly how the power brokers prefer it.

On the human suffering front, ICE has gone full medieval torture chamber in Florida. A gut-wrenching report from Human Rights Watch reveals migrants forced to kneel and eat like dogs, women denied basic hygiene, detainees left to rot in feces-soaked buses, and ICE guards flipping off security cameras before beating prisoners. Welcome to Trump’s immigration renaissance, where cruelty is the point and human rights violations are just another line item in the budget. Florida is already building its mega-prison in the Everglades, ominously nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” to lock up 5,000 more migrants because nothing says freedom like concentration camps next to swampland.

Meanwhile, the right-wing media machine is in a state of total meltdown over Zohran Mamdani and Brandon Scott, two rising progressive stars they can’t beat on policy, so they’ve resorted to good old-fashioned racism. Fox News is hallucinating about suicide bombers, Tucker clones are smearing elected officials as “communists,” and Trump is screeching for Mamdani to be arrested and deported from the city he was born in. Even the Democratic establishment is getting in on the cowardice, refusing to back Mamdani, because apparently universal healthcare and taxing billionaires are just too radical for modern Democrats. Baltimore’s Brandon Scott, who has actually reduced crime with investment in youth programs, is being slandered as a “DEI hire” while his city gets safer. When all else fails, the GOP breaks out the race card and the Democrats head for the fainting couch.

And just in case the American bootstraps fantasy wasn’t already dead, Trump’s latest budget trickles down a national expansion of Georgia’s Medicaid disaster. Pathways, Georgia’s “work for healthcare” program, has burned through millions in taxpayer cash, denied coverage to thousands, and proven that the only jobs being created are bureaucratic middle-manager positions to deny people care. Now Trump’s forcing every state to build similar bureaucratic torture chambers, because nothing says “land of the free” like earning your healthcare by navigating endless government red tape designed to fail you.

That’s the state of the nation this morning, a government that can’t fund itself, a corporate sector that can’t secure your data, a food system that can’t feed you affordably, and a political class that can’t stop covering for predators. But the markets are up slightly, and isn’t that what really matters?