Behind the CNBC headlines and White House photo ops lies a coordinated ruling-class campaign to digitize austerity, automate discipline, and recalibrate empire from within.
By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information
May 28, 2025
Part I – The Billionaire Whisper Network: CNBC as Propaganda Firm for the Ruling Class
On May 28, 2025, CNBC ran a piece with the headline: “Elon Musk says Trump’s spending bill undermines the work DOGE has been doing.” Written by Jeff Cox—an old hand at echoing whatever Wall Street wants to hear—the article tries to paint Elon Musk as some kind of bold truth-teller, pushing back against Trump’s latest attempt at empire management. But peel back the surface and it’s clear: this ain’t journalism. It’s PR for billionaires—another scripted act in the long-running stage play of capitalist crisis management.
Let’s call it what it is. Jeff Cox has never met a banker he didn’t flatter or a budget cut he didn’t call “responsible.” His job isn’t to question power. His job is to translate the will of the ruling class into language that sounds neutral, even reasonable. If Powell sneezes, Cox calls it fiscal discipline. If Wall Street starves the public sector, he calls it market stability. This man isn’t reporting—he’s laundering empire’s talking points for the breakfast crowd.
And then there’s his employer: CNBC. Owned by Comcast and NBCUniversal, this isn’t just any media outlet—it’s the communications arm of monopoly finance. Its real audience isn’t the public. It’s investors, CEOs, hedge fund operators, and political fixers. When the empire’s machine starts to wobble, CNBC’s job is to keep the screens calm and the herd in formation. They don’t report on power—they report for power.
So who do they bring on stage for this little performance? Donald Trump, that aging frontman of settler revanchism; Elon Musk, the messiah of digital privatization; and Musk’s child, staged at the White House like some sci-fi prophecy fulfilled. Three generations of ruling class spectacle: the patriarch, the programmer, and the posthuman heir.
But the real trick of the article is how it dresses up cooperation as conflict. CNBC wants you to think Musk is challenging Trump’s budget. He’s not. He’s fine with the plan—he just wants it coded better. His problem isn’t with austerity. It’s with inefficient austerity. He’s not trying to stop the knife. He just wants a sharper one.
This is how propaganda works when it’s trying to be clever. You don’t lie. You just frame the story so the truth gets buried. DOGE—the “Digital Optimization for Government Efficiency” program—is made to sound like a good governance tool. In reality, it’s a high-tech club being swung at the poor. It’s a digital version of the IMF’s old tricks: cut services, privatize everything, automate repression. Except this time, it’s not being imposed on the Global South. It’s being beta-tested at home, right here inside the empire.
So let’s not be fooled. This article isn’t about Musk vs. Trump. It’s about how the ruling class debates strategy—not goals. And it’s about how media like CNBC help them sell it to us like it’s policy, not plunder. This isn’t dysfunction. It’s design. And Jeff Cox is just the narrator for the looting.
Part II – Domestic Structural Adjustment in the Age of Imperial Collapse
Strip away the corporate fluff, and the article tells us just a few concrete things: Elon Musk made a televised comment criticizing Trump’s new spending bill, saying it undercuts the goals of DOGE—short for Digital Optimization for Government Efficiency. Trump, for his part, paraded Musk and his son in front of a Tesla like a prize bull on the South Lawn of the White House. That’s about it for facts. But even these scraps, when put under a dialectical lens, reveal much more than CNBC ever intended.
First, let’s deal with DOGE. CNBC says the program is about making government more “efficient.” But we know what that means. Efficiency here is a codeword for austerity—not in the name of economic survival, but to deepen capitalist control. DOGE is a digitized, automated attack on what’s left of the public sector. It’s about shrinking the state down to its violent core—surveillance, policing, and border enforcement—while outsourcing everything else to Musk, Palantir, and Amazon Web Services. They don’t want to govern society. They want to extract from it.
This isn’t new. It’s just the empire eating itself. What they once did to the Global South under the IMF—slashing health care, liquidating pensions, and turning entire nations into debtors—they now do to their own working class. This is domestic structural adjustment. This is technofascism—the merger of tech monopoly power, collapsing public institutions, and a digitalized labor regime meant to discipline the poor, automate the middle, and pacify the rest.
DOGE isn’t failing. It’s working exactly as designed. It’s recalibrating the labor market through automation and AI. It’s stripping away protections that workers fought centuries to secure. It’s enforcing compliance through apps, biometrics, and predictive surveillance. And it’s setting the groundwork for a permanent underclass whose lives are managed by algorithms but never protected by rights.
All of this is happening because U.S. imperialism is in crisis. It can no longer dominate the globe the way it used to. China, BRICS+, regional blocs in Latin America and Africa—they’re all breaking from Washington’s chokehold. The empire can’t extract enough from abroad anymore, so it turns inward. The same weapons it used on the colonized world—debt, austerity, and coercive governance—it now deploys on its own people.
This is why CNBC’s article matters. Not because Musk said something new, but because it reveals the continuity of empire. The shift is not from war to peace, but from global to local war. The battlefield is now the domestic population. The policy is recolonization. The program is DOGE. And the goal is to digitally rebuild empire on a smaller, tighter, more brutal foundation.
Part III – From Billionaire Budget Squabbles to Digital Counterinsurgency
Forget the scripted drama between Musk and Trump. That’s theater. What we’re looking at is not a disagreement between two camps—it’s the fine-tuning of a unified strategy. Both Trump’s “spending bill” and Musk’s DOGE agenda are instruments of the same class war. One swings the hammer, the other programs the algorithm. The empire doesn’t care whether it’s governed through a red tie or a black turtleneck. Its only concern is restoring control in a moment of unraveling.
DOGE isn’t some neutral bureaucratic reform—it’s a technofascist SAP, a digital structural adjustment program being imposed inside the imperial core. It’s the domestic rollout of a model long tested on colonized peoples: replace public services with corporate contracts, reduce workers to datapoints, and shift governance from elected institutions to private code. The fact that it’s happening on U.S. soil now doesn’t mean the system has changed—it means the empire is collapsing inward.
This is what imperial decline looks like from the inside: digital rationing disguised as modernization, austerity with a sleek interface, a welfare state replaced by an app. Musk’s vision isn’t a glitch in the system—it is the system’s upgrade. He and his fellow digerati—Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos—aren’t rebels. They’re the new architects of capitalist order. Their ideology—technocratic, hierarchical, colonial—provides the scaffolding for post-democratic governance.
What CNBC portrays as “efficiency” is, in reality, the infrastructure of domination. DOGE is designed to recalibrate the U.S. labor market: to sort workers by algorithm, to automate dispossession, and to impose a digital caste system where access to resources is mediated through biometric ID and surveillance compliance. It’s not about fixing government—it’s about hollowing it out and rebuilding it as a subcontractor of empire.
But here’s the crack in their plan: the same collapse that makes DOGE necessary also makes it fragile. Technofascism doesn’t work without mass consent. And consent is beginning to fracture. The working class is waking up—some slowly, some through pain, some through struggle. And as the digital chains tighten, more people will begin to ask: who wrote the code? Who benefits? And who is made to disappear?
Our task is to answer those questions not with commentary—but with class consciousness. Not with cynicism—but with revolutionary clarity. It’s not enough to denounce DOGE. We must expose its role in the global system of accumulation, name its architects, and fight its normalization in every workplace, every neighborhood, and every digital interface it tries to occupy.
Part IV – From Exposure to Action, From Awareness to Class Struggle
Let’s be clear: DOGE is not just a policy—it’s a battlefield. It is where data meets discipline, where imperial decline becomes domestic warfare. If we allow this digital austerity program to be normalized, it will harden into the operating system of the next era of capitalist rule: facial scans for food stamps, predictive policing for housing access, biometric gates to public space. The empire is not just collapsing—it’s recalibrating. And it’s doing so on our backs.
We stand with the working-class mothers denied benefits because of “algorithmic fraud alerts.” We stand with the public-sector workers being replaced by apps and AI without rights or recourse. We stand with the poor, the undocumented, the houseless—those who are first to be coded, catalogued, and cast out. And we reject the entire digital counterinsurgency model that treats poverty as risk, and treats the people as a threat to be managed, not liberated.
But solidarity is not sentiment. It is action. And our solidarity must be material. That means organizing against the rollout of DOGE and all its clones—at the city level, at the agency level, wherever it tries to hide behind the language of “innovation.” That means building tenant unions, worker committees, and neighborhood defense formations that refuse to be governed by machine logic and billionaire code. That means sabotaging the ideological machinery—the media, the think tanks, the academic collaborators—that manufacture consent for this technocratic nightmare.
We draw strength from the Zapatistas, who carved autonomy from militarized modernization. From the South African shack dwellers, who refused biometric rationing. From the Indian farmers, who fought back digital registration schemes with mass resistance. And from the Black radical tradition in the U.S., which has long seen every “upgrade” of empire for what it really is: a new mechanism of control. We walk in their footsteps.
We call on all who see the storm coming—workers, defectors, comrades in exile, and allies in formation—to link arms. Not behind any party line, but behind the shared principle that human dignity is not up for automation. That care cannot be coded. That survival must not depend on compliance with empire’s terms. And that no algorithm will ever be more legitimate than the will of a conscious, organized, fighting people.
There is no app that will save us. Only struggle. And we are already behind schedule.
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