Innovating Brutality

By Rob C.

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TL;DR: The violence we’re seeing isn’t about safety—it’s about preserving an economic system that no longer works for most people. When capitalism fails to solve real problems, it innovates repression instead. As the middle class is systematically dismantled, the resulting unrest is being “managed” by Trump’s paramilitary thugs. If you’re still waiting for the market to fix fascism, you haven’t realized that for the “Epstein class,” fascism is the ultimate growth industry.

Let’s get one thing straight before the corporate media clears its throat and points at another scary graphic: the brutality unfolding in Minnesota and across the country is not a response to crime, chaos, or some mysterious external threat. It’s a response to failure. Specifically, the failure of an economic system that has spent decades extracting wealth upward while telling the rest of us to shut up and be grateful.

For as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been told that capitalism is the only system that works. Question it and you’re a “communist.” Critique it and you “hate freedom.” This didn’t happen by accident. As I’ve detailed in Democracy for Sale, and as Oreskes and Conway laid out in The Big Myth, this isn’t a natural consensus; it is a meticulously manufactured narrative paid for by the very people who profit off of your suffering.

In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke that spell. He looked at an economy rigged by bankers and industrialists, spit, and changed the rules. The New Deal didn’t create a socialist nightmare; it created the world’s first majority middle class. Workers got dignity. Families got stability. Communities got schools, roads, and hope. Naturally, Corporate America has spent every second since then trying to burn that progress to the ground. They’ve spent forty years deregulating, offshoring, and union-busting, all while telling us that the “rising tide” would eventually lift our boats. It turns out the only thing rising is the sea level and the net worth of the “Epstein class.”

Fast forward to today. Wages don’t cover rent. Healthcare is a luxury item. College is a debt sentence. Entire communities are hollowed out while a handful of people buy their third yacht and call it “job creation.” When people look around and realize their lives have become unaffordable and their neighborhoods are crumbling, they get angry. That anger is rational. What isn’t rational is how the system responds.

The fundamental failure of our current brand of “Capitalism” is that it doesn’t innovate to solve problems; innovates to maximize returns. The system has no interest in curing cancer because a healthy person pays nothing, but a person managing chronic symptoms for thirty years is a blue-chip stock. It doesn’t fix climate change; it invents carbon offsets and PR campaigns. It ignores pollution, poisoned food, and collapsing ecosystems because fixing them doesn’t produce the immediate, dopamine-hit profits that the Epstein class require. The most meaningful innovations - the ones that actually improved human life - came from public investment. Universities. Research labs. Science funded by all of us, for all of us. When we act collectively, we solve real problems. When we leave it to “the market,” we get apps, surveillance, and algorithms.

Instead of fixing the problem, capitalism does what it always does: it protects profit. And when profit is threatened, the answer isn’t reform—it’s force. Enter the police state. Masked agents. Militarized equipment. Untrained goons treating citizens like enemy combatants.

The “innovators” in Washington and Mar-a-Lago aren’t trying to fix the economy; they are trying to fix the optics of its collapse. They want you focused on the “tantrum tariffs” and the latest “woke” distraction while they liquidate what’s left of the public good. And let’s be clear: we do not need a masked, armed police force to subdue peaceful protesters. We need an economy that works for the people who live in it. If you only tune in when things turn bloody, it’s time to wake up and smell the fascism, because if we keep letting these “Capitalists” run the country into the imperial graveyard, the price of eggs will be the very least of our worries.

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Please like, share, and subscribe—because if brutality is the only thing being innovated, the system isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do.

—
Robert Cain
Author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet