Nola

The only time people in the capitalist class are truly punished in America is if they defraud other capitalists or threaten the broader imperialist policies meant to protect US hegemonic capitalism…Enron, Savings and Loans, and Bernie Madoff.

So if he receives anything, based on history, it will be because of that and would be little more than a pyrrhic victory.

Certainly not a sign that suddenly healthcare CEOs will be dragged to the firing squads for denying cancer treatments to patients to boost shareholder value. Or that America’s institutions set up to protect this system are on the cusp of a reckoning over decades of imperialist exploitation.

I’m sure Kash Patel, the Trump DOJ, and an organization that has heavily functioned to preserve existing political and economic hierarchies will go thru the motions and corporate Dems will hold their hearings and make a pageantry of some things. And the result will be at best, a big wet fart, and at most, it will just be directed in a way that will end up advancing broader capitalist/imperialist interests.

Like say putting much stricter controls on the sale of AMD/Nvidia chips which will conveniently benefit all the AI companies who want China and even consumers to have less access to the underlying components of this tech. Which is the one area Jenson was at odds with AI. Open weight and broad access to AI is good for Nvidia, but not for the AI companies.

Please don’t give them any more ideas lol, what OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic want is exactly more stuff like this.

They want a “moat” around their services. Protected by the most powerful government in the world, the US.

Almost everything these companies have done has been an attempt to keep this tech and it’s supply chain as closed and proprietary as possible.

Hell, Sam Altman is out there saying the quiet part out loud that they don’t even want consumers to have direct access to things like ram anymore.

And frankly, I wouldn’t be shocked if the reason this is happening is for that very reason. A justification they can carve out to justify letting Nvidia stock fall as they simultaneously lock down the tech in a way only US AI companies will be able to easily use it.

I think like almost everything else America does it will bite us in the ass longterm, but this is directly giving the AI companies what they want. And I suspect we are on the road to that happening.

Honest question, why should I give a shit that some CEO wanted to sell GPU’s to China?

Of all the things I would want to see an American CEO put into jail for, selling GPU’s to China(which everyone knew was happening) and being semi in favor of China’s open weight AI development strategy that would be better from a consumer perspective is close to the bottom of that list.

Put the CEO’s in jail for systematically exploiting global south labor for decades. For colluding to bribe politicians and override democratic processes to force data centers into communities. For stealing more productive human output in a few years then all the labor theft in the whole history of capitalism.

Throwing it all away?

Even after losing his job and the divorce settlement he’ll be one of the wealthiest people on the planet and to ever live.

It’s not like this is China where they will actually jail or execute CEO’s.

Capital still runs the show.

TBH all this shit is so farcical and humorous to me. Just the sheer absurdity of how this is playing out in the face of all the larger contradictions and moral rot that is just normalized, ignored, or outright encouraged in this economic sector.

This is a company that’s core growth trajectory now is to melt the planet for quarterly profit to keep a bubble going on a tech sector that wants to deskill workers and put rent-seeking enclosures around knowledge and expertise itself off the back of the largest theft of productive output in human history. Built off a supply chain dependent on slave-like labor for it’s basic resource inputs. Led by increasingly fascistic psychopathic unaccountable tech billionaires. Thats part of a larger economic system that requires constant exploitation and violent imperialism to maintain. But the thing that produces scandal in the zeitgeist and crisis inside this monstrosity is the PR hit from their CEO getting his dick sucked by some CCP baddie and breaking their HR rules about workplace romance.

I feel the term is both overused and improperly used most of the time, but this is the sort of example I think is fitting of the term Late Stage Capitalism.

No offense OP, but that is a misleading headline given just reading the sub headline makes it clear they are doing a clickbait and switch:

Reddit disclosed user information in 69% of cases involving legal requests in the first half of 2026, but pushed back against Germany’s attempt to identify an activist and challenged US demands for information about critics of its immigration enforcement policies.

In its latest transparency report, the social media giant said it received 1,306 standard legal requests for user account information in the first half of the year, up 7% from the second half of 2025. The company disclosed data from 1,327 accounts in response to 906 of those requests.

So in reality, Reddit is actively complying with doxxing a majority of their users when the gestapo or Trump DOJ comes knocking. And it’s very unclear what the basis is for Reddit’s denials or that as the headline implies, their default is to protect users or to cooperate unless it exposes them to a potential greater legal harm, like with fraud attempts mentioned

Excuse you OP, don’t you understand that I am NOT aligned with US imperialism.

Must I tap the sign for you all AGAIN

Relevant supplement to this

Lawmakers Report That Some Democrats Missed Hegseth Impeachment Vote to Attend Event for ‘AIPAC Front Group’

https://www.commondreams.org/news/aipac-front-group-hegseth

This is missing the forest for the trees

The issue is not they missed the vote, it’s why they did and what that says more broadly about the party’s capture.

3 of those house members are explicitly on the board of this AIPAC front group, another 5 of them took money this election cycle.

In the first major symbolic vote since the election, these Dems were prostituting themselves for a front group advancing the interests of an ethno supremacist foreign government engaging in a genocide that just helped manipulate our nation into a war and is seeking to re-escalate it.

They made it very clear this election that many in the Establishment would rather lose elections than upset Israel or their donor class.

That is why I am perplexed by some of the responses to things like Alex Karp saying he is a Democrat.

It’s not the oligarchs scared of accountability, it’s them dabbing on us and using the public sphere to openly signal they are willing to shift their money in either direction as long as their interests are met.

In other words, bourgeoisie democracy

This feels like it needs a semester more than a few paragraphs lol. But I will attempt to answer some of it to the best of my ability cause I think if nothing else it can be helpful cause almost everything you said here I come across all the time.

1.) Communism is an end goal strived for after achieving sufficient social and economic transformation, not something you simply enact by decree.

Socialism though, broadly speaking, is understood as a transitional process of transforming the institutions, property relations, and class structures inherited from capitalism into one that serves the proletariat as opposed to the capitalist class.

And developing those productive forces can take a myriad of forms, including managed capitalism.

This is actually one of the fundamental misconceptions I see people fall into constantly.

And that process will necessarily look different depending on a country’s historical circumstances, material conditions, level of economic development, and position within the global economy.

That’s why Marxism is fundamentally a materialist framework rather than a strict blueprint for organizing society. The goal isn’t to immediately abolish every market, private enterprise, or capitalist institution regardless of circumstances. It’s to transform the underlying class relations and develop the material conditions necessary to eventually transcend capitalism altogether.

2.) China and Russia are not really interchangeable beyond their relationship as adversaries to the US hegemonic order.

First, Russia doesn’t even claim to be communist anymore from what I read(maybe nostalgia for the USSR). The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the Russian Federation that emerged underwent an enormously destructive process of capitalist restoration thanks to US shock therapy and Yeltsin’s government(which Putin comes out of). Which led to mass privatization and oligarchic consolidation. Putin’s Russia is an authoritarian capitalist state and the re-hardening of hostilities is it’s own chapter but the friction points came over perceived encroachment into it’s spheres of influence and economic protectionism America saw as acts of economic warfare.

China is a fundamentally different story, and the distinction is important because it goes directly to questions of class power and who ultimately controls the economy.

China has billionaires, private capitalists, wage labor, markets, and significant wealth inequality. That is all true

However, unlike Russia, where the post-Soviet transition transferred enormous amounts of public wealth into private hands and created a politically powerful oligarchic capitalist class, China’s proletarian revolution retained substantial state ownership of strategic industries, a state-controlled banking system, and a Communist Party that maintains ultimate political authority over private capital.

TLDR: Think of the words of lesser remembered founding father and first Supreme Court Justice John Jay:

The people who own the country ought to govern it

This gets to the heart of what separates Russia and China’s relationship to capital, property, and who holds power in the state and who that state is designed to serve and preserve. And I often find it a bit frustrating cause a materialist understanding of Russia today is more like a sneak preview of America tomorrow than it is of anything to do with communism.

3.) So why even pretend to be Communist?

The theoretical justification behind the Great Leap Forward and then Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms was that China, emerging from centuries of imperial domination, war, and extreme underdevelopment, needed to develop its productive forces before it could construct a more advanced socialist economy. And that in order to survive as a nation had to be reflective of the broader global economy, geopolitical realities, and historical context they existed within.

And attempts to go against that were met with what places like Cuba, the USSR, and any number of other attempted socialist revolutions(or even just unaligned nations) experienced in terms of economic isolation, sanctions, embargoes, political destabilization, covert operations, military invasions etc.

Market dependency, foreign investment, private enterprise, and class dynamics were therefore treated as instruments of development rather than necessarily being incompatible with a socialist transition.

China considers itself to be in primitive socialism.

And i think there is a pretty passionate debate about whether some of the same capitalist relations used to develop productive forces also reproduce capitalist class interests, inequalities, and concentrations of economic power that may ultimately undermine the socialist transition itself.

In summary, they want the world as it largely exists now but they don’t want the poor reputation, political backlash, civilian unrest, and for some of them, the personal guilt associated with the exploitation they built their fortunes off of and need to sustain to keep it.