"The most tiresome aspect of the whole business is the pretense that Blair is speaking for himself and offering his deep thoughts on the state of the world, informed by his experience of high office. Even those who question the value of his ideas are only willing to say that Blair may be out of touch with contemporary Britain.

The reality, as everyone knows full well, is that Blair has offered his Institute for Global Change as a glorified advertising billboard for its wealthy funders. The tech billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison gave Blair’s vanity project $130 million between 2021 and 2023, and pledged another $218 million by the end of 2025.

That largesse enabled the institute to increase its number of staff dramatically, from two hundred to nearly a thousand. Every time Blair rails against net-zero targets or gushes about the virtues of AI, he is reading out a sponsored message from Ellison and his other funding sources.

That is just one of several ways in which Blair has sold his services as a mouthpiece to the highest bidder. It is a form of journalistic malpractice to report on Blair’s call for greater subservience to the Trump administration without mentioning his intimate role in Trump’s grotesque scheme to transform Gaza into a real estate opportunity for his son-in-law Jared Kushner and assorted cronies."

https://jacobin.com/2026/05/blair-british-politics-tech-billionaires

#UK #Blair #Neoliberalism #Cronysm #Trump #Starmer #BigTech

"Far from being “good on the economy,” there’s a lot of evidence that Trump is basically incapable of understanding abstract entities like “the market” or “the economy.” His entire notion of the world comes down to personal relationships and he personalizes every concept and event. If the market goes down, someone is trying to screw you, personally. If it goes up, and you benefit, it’s because you’re smart. Many commentators are pointing out that he’s establishing something like a patrimonial or personalist regime, which replaces the impersonal rationality of bureaucracy with a network of personal ties and loyalty.

His entire business is based on the notion that his touch is what counts: his brand, and, before that, his businesses worked through what I’ve called “personal arbitrage,” basically leveraging the advantages of an entrepreneurial small businessman against large, impersonal institutions like big banks, financial markets, or the state, which have consistently mispriced the value of his assets. It’s easy to understand why he’d come to the conclusion he’s got some special sauce: if you’ve been counted out so many times and then come back, you might start to think you have some kind of magic power to pull things off, too. He and many of his followers believe he can resolve all contradictions and problems through the sheer fact of his charisma, which, not for nothing, sounds like what a demented dictator and his acolytes believe."

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-juggler

#USA #Trump #Tariffs #TradeWar #Nepotism #Capitalism #Markets #Corruption #Cronysm