What Next For Iran?

 If the U.S. and Israel succeed in the announced goal of ousting the Islamic regime, what will happen is Iran will break up. The Kurds will seize control of a region, and the Baluchis will seize another area, and declare their own nations.

The only way that could be prevented is by a U.S. ground invasion. Otherwise there is no armed force on the ground to prevent that if the regime is destroyed.

The U.S. plan, in an idiotic echo of the Bush regime scheme to impose Ahmed Chalabi on the Iraqi people, is to make the son of the late and hated dictator Shah of Iran the new ruler of Iran. But what men with guns will back him on the ground? He will need the U.S. army (and Marines and Navy SEAL terrorists, who will want in on the murderous "action") to put and keep him in power in Iran. The Voice of America is broadcasting Son of Shah's propaganda (in Farsi) into Iran. As if anyone there is listening, or would be inspired by his guff.

Breaking Iran into pieces is most likely what Israel would like best.This would mean three smaller, weaker countries in place of Iran. Israel is fanatically intent on being the regional hegemon, with the other states and people prostrate and helpless at its feet.

But since the only armed forces in Iran are tightly aligned with the regime, it seems unlikely that the regime CAN be toppled, not without an ARMED opposition. Apparently the CIA and Mossad haven't figured out a way to smuggle large numbers of arms into Iran without getting caught, and training up Iranian civilians in their use, and organizing them into people's militias. Absent that, the U.S. will have to invade the country to oust the mullahs from power. 

As an atheist, and a human to whom human rights are important, the Iranian regime is loathsome. Just as the regimes of such U.S. allies as Saudi Arabia, a repressive, vicious theocracy, is loathsome.

But let's remember how we got here. President Dwight David Eisenhower ordered a CIA coup in 1953 that destroyed democracy in Irao. The following year he ordered the same in Guatemala. In both nations the result was about a quarter million murders by the regimes. Iran had a revolution in 1979 which brought the current theocratic tyranny to power. Guatemala is still a death squad, fascist state, but with fewer death squad murders than in the past.The U.S. finds indigenous fascist forces and oligarchs to use to create its preferred fascist states.

Israel assassinated the Ayatollah, Khamenei, on the idiotic premise that this would cause the collapse of the regime. The mullahs are not dependent on him. He was 86 anyway. The regime didn't collapse when Khomeini, the first Ayatollah who took power in 1979, died. Just as the Israeli government wouldn't collapse if Netanyahu got his just desserts and was assassinated, or the U.S. government collapse if Trump was eliminated. Israel's and the U.S.' behavior drag the world down into a more barbarous state. Of course both these nations have horrible histories of many crimes, but one hopes for progress, not regression. 

One more thing: Trump is pretending he wants to free the Iranian people. Of course that is bullshit. He is a self-centered narcissist who could give a rat's ass about the Iranians. Here's a hint to how much the U.S. cares about Iranians: either the U.S. or Israel bombed a girls' school during the during the current aggression- on the very first day. They slaughtered 153 people (according to the Iranian foreign ministry). Not a peep in U.S. media, and whichever nation did it, it's accomplice in naked aggression didn't condemn it or even say don't do that sort of thing again.

The U.S. doesn't care about the Iranian people any more than it did in 1953. And Israel wants to break Iran into pieces. It wants all other nations in the Middle East to be as weak as possible, so it can be a regional hegemon until the end of time.

A demented fantasy every bit as psychotic as the Third Reich's was. 

The Political And Ethical Degeneration Of The U.S.- From Nixon To Trump

 Nixon had to resign or face certain conviction in the Senate after impeachment, just because the burglars he sent to tap the phones in the D.C headquarters of the Democratic National Committee got caught. Senator Barry Goldwater, a reactionary as close to a fascist as one can get without being one, personally delivered the news to Nixon in the White House that the jig was up, if he didn't resign, impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate (requiring 67 votes, which would include Republican Senators) was certain.

But Nixon's crimes look like mere peccadilloes compared to Trump's.

Trump sent a violent mob to invade the Capitol to prevent the certification of Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, as winner of the 2020 presidential election. He refused for several hours to call off the mob, ignoring the entreaties of Congresspeople telephoning him and of his daughter Ivanka in the White House. When, hours later, he realized his coup attempt had failed, he finally messages the mob to depart, which they instantly did- proving he controlled them.

He was recorded on a phone call to the state of Georgia's Secretary of State telling him to "find" votes for him to change the result in Georgia. He initiated scheme to have fake Electoral College Electors cast votes for him.

Yet the Senate acquitted him after he was impeached in the House, and a combination of feckless and dilatory prosecution efforts by Trump's successor Biden and his wan Attorney General, Merrick Garland, who was denied a Supreme Court seat by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (who refused to allow nomination hearings to take place for the last 11 months of Obama's term in office, an unprecedented, outrageous political power move which the Democrats insipidly accepted) and interference with the prosecution by Republican judges, especially those on the Supreme Court, which effectively immunized Trump for his seditious coup.

So one guy is basically ousted by his own party for tapping some phones, while the other guy can openly foment a coup, and furthermore delegitimize U.S. "democracy" and undermine its elections by loudly braying, year after year, that he actually won an election he lost and that the election was "stolen" from him. Stolen in Republican-controlled states too! And no consequences for him.

This is an arc of political and ethical degeneration of a nation and its political system.

I Sure Hope The Deep State, Or The Trump Regime, Doesn't Assassinate Zohran Mamdani

 There's been plenty of character assassination of the winner of the Democratic Party primary for that Party's candidate for New York City mayor, the general election to be held in November. When character assassination doesn't work, often the next step is physical assassination. (U.S. euphemisms for such murders include "elimination" and the CIA classic, "termination with extreme prejudice." Such coy killers!)

Trump has already threatened to take over New York City (with his dictatorial powers enabled by the Republican Supreme Court and Trump's puppet Congress) and to "investigate" Mamdani to try and strip him of U.S. citizenship and deport him. And if that doesn't work?

Trump has a record of personally ordering assassinations. (He's not unique among U.S. presidents in that regard. Many have done so. For example, Obama ordered assassinations at least once a week. Every Tuesday, he would review a list of potential "terrorists" to be murdered, and approve them for "elimination" or not.)  In his first term, Trump ordered the assassination of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general, Suleimani, on January 3rd, 2020, 17 days before the end of Trump's term in office. (Which he tried to violently extend.) This was done in particularly outrageous fashion, by bombing the general's plane as it landed in IRAQ, at the Baghdad international airport. But the U.S. has over two centuries of violating the sovereignty of others. (It invaded the British colony to its north, the current nation of Canada, in 1812.)  

Trump also ordered at least one assassination of an American citizen on U.S. soil, the anti-fascist warrior Micheal Reinoehl. Michael's crime was killing an armed fascist in a street confrontation. Trump ordered a U.S. Marshal's death squad to ambush Michael as he was getting out of his car and murder him. Eyewitnesses described the summary execution. Michael was not holding a gun and was slaughtered without any words spoken or shouted.

Murdering dissident Americans is nothing new in the U.S. It goes back at least as far as the murder of Joe Hill in 1915, and is a common occurrence. Obama oversaw some of these murders by Federal government agencies, including the Black Lives Matter online commentator Sandra Bland, and journalist Michael Hastings. The BLM movement was deemed a "terrorist" movement by the FBI, and came under the usual repression that social, economic, or political movements considered threatening to the established power structure always are subjected to. The FBI organized the murder of Bland. 

 Michael Hastings was an honest journalist (already making him an outlier in the U.S. propaganda system) who was reviled by his "colleagues" for reporting accurately on the comments and attitude of the fascist army general Stanley McCrystal towards the Commander-In-Chief, President Barack Obama. McCrystal encouraged contempt for Obama among his staff officers, as Hastings accurately reported. At the time of his death, Hastings feared for his life, telling confidants that he was working on an explosive story. (Maybe having to do with the fact that the Bush regime, in a conspiracy with the Saudi rulers, arranged the attacks of September 11m 2001, I wonder. It has been proven that the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan were demolished in controlled demolitions by military grade nanothermite explosives.) Control of Hastings car was seized remotely (it has been demonstrated that today's computerized cars can easily be hijacked over their wireless connections) and a bomb planted in the car was detonated. There are videos and witnesses to the event which leave no doubt. A handful of journalists did honest reporting on his, just local ones. (The "hit" occurred in Los Angeles, a place with a history of political assassinations, including the CIA-LAPD murder of Robert Kennedy in 1968 to prevent him from becoming president.) 

As I mentioned, Hastings, even though he had worked for Newsweek, was held in contempt by other power establishment journalists for "ruining" McCrystal's "career." They are such fawning devotees of militarists that they privilege a fascist general over the need of the president of the U.S. to command the respect of ranking officers. That in itself is very revealing.

Obama also ordered the murder of several Americans in Yemen, at least four. One was alleged Al Qaeda "propagandist" Anwar al-Awlaki. Two weeks after that, Obama saw a need to "eliminate al-Awaki's 16 year old son and the son's cousin as they sat in a cafe in Yemen. But it's okay to murder anyone you decide to label a "terrorist" (as the U.S. and Israel are currently going to Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, Yemenis, and on and off, Syrians), and also anyone "connected" to these "terrorists:" family, friends, acquaintances.

Or just people living in the same building as the girlfriend OF a "terrorist." As was done a couple of months ago in Yemen. Remember the political brouhaha from a couple of months ago (I hope you do, it wasn't so long ago) when War Secretary Hegseth and then "National Security Advisor" Michael Waltz and others held a giddy pre-attack chat on a commercial communication platform, Signal, instead of on a secure government channel, and Waltz included in the chat the Zionist reactionary editor of The Atlantic Magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, who he's pals with. The Democratic Party's Congresspeople and the media aligned with the Democratic Party raised a hue and cry over "operational security" and how the lives of American military personnel were supposedly endangered. But there was no mention of what the mission was- to commit a crime of mass murder.

What happened was this. Since Israel's ongoing genocide and daily atrocities and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis of Yemen have fought to try and help the Palestinians by attacking shipping going to Israel. This of course is deemed "terrorism" by "Western" (i,e. white imperialist) powers like Israel, the U.S., European lackey governments and other lapdogs of U.S. imperialism like Canada. To fight back against Western imperialism is "terrorism," by the imperialists' definition. So a Houthi "militant" ("terrorist") allegedly part of the Houthi's military structure, was going to visit his girlfriend in her apartment building. Mossad, benefiting from the global surveillance network set up by and centered around the U.S. (which includes government entities like the NSA, and private corporations joined at the hip to the secret police state including Microsoft, Apple, Meta {Facebook Instagram etc.] and Amazon's cloud data operation) asked the U.S. to murder the "terrorist" and the other residents of the apartment building he was visiting. Which the U.S. duly did with an aerial attack.

Nobody in the alleged "opposition" party, the Democrats, or their aligned media, bothered mentioning any of this. To them, the Big Crime was allegedly jeopardizing the attack by using Signal, and by including Goldberg, who kept quiet until after the massacre of the residents of the apartment building, since as I said, Goldberg is a dyed-in-the-wool Zionist and U.S. imperialist down to his bones.

So in this incident, there is yet another in a never-ending series of examples of the deeply-ingrained immorality of the U.S. elite. And like all power elites, they have complete confident in their own virtue and righteousness as they commit their crimes.

Now, probably most Americans, or at least a large proportion of them, if they could read this, would reject it out of hand as alien, ideological raving. But it's just objectively factual. Having been indoctrinated from birth by a gaslighting media and educational system that substitutes a false reality for the real world, they are effectively brainwashed. But brainwashing can be undone. In this regard, the Internet has proven a significant source of information that has cracked the wall of establishment propaganda. But much suppression occurs there too. Unfortunately I have personal experience of this.

 

Trump Makes Good On His Gangster Threat Of Violence Against Iran

 Trump pretended to want a "deal" with Iran. What he wants is submission to his terms. So he has unleashed B-2 bombers carrying 14 30,000lb bombs on Iran, with a submarine attacking with Tomahawk cruise missiles for good measure. Trump brags that his violent aggression "has completely, totally obliterated" Iran's entire nuclear program, which is far from true. (As indeed is so very very much of Trump's obnoxious blather far from true.) His alcoholic rapist War Secretary, Peter Hegseth, crowed that "Iran's nuclear ambitions have been obliterated." Really? Their ambitions? Probably not.

Trump had tried to fake-out the Iranians, having said he would make a decision about attacking in two weeks. But there are reports that the Iranians prudently removed some enriched uranium and equipment from likely target sites before the bombs and warheads struck.

Trump is solidly in the tradition of U.S. imperialist aggression. The history of the U.S. is a history of expansion and domination through violence. Starting with the subjugation and near extermination of the native Americans, the invasion of Mexico in 1846, ultimately stealIng half of Mexico's national territory, the subjugation of Hawaii, the war with Spain in 1898, seizing Spain's "possessions" including Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and grabbing a chunk of Cuba for a naval base (and later prison and torture center) at Guantanamo Bay, the occupation of Haiti and the installation of the nightmarish Duvalier regime, the numerous coups that installed fascist (often times military), dictatorships, the war on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Obama coup in Ukraine in 2014, laying the ground for the eventual Russian invasion and war there- hey this is a long sentence and it is far from all inclusive! The point is, starting from day one, the U.S. has been an empire. Understand what empires are: they are criminal enterprises. Like the Mafia, they use force, violence, intimidation, and threats to extort wealth from others. In the case of imperialism, the labor and resources of other countries are unjustly exploited or outright expropriated.

Trump claimed he offered Iran a "deal." That is not true. He put forth an ultimatum. Iran is allowed NO nuclear program of ANY kind, AND must dismantle its ballistic missile program and destroy its missiles. It is already defenseless against constant Israeli aggression and war crimes. Iran was to be stripped of even its very weak means of retaliation against Israel's attacks.

"God Bless You All!"? What is up with the sick, phony piety? It's like Mafiosi attending Catholic mass. Wrapping criminality in the sham moral virtue of religion.

Trump As Netanyahu's Ventriloquist Dummy

Trump posted online this morning: "We [sic] now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran." A gloat over Israel's latest aggression against Iran. Presumably it's been Israel and Israel alone that has been bombing Iran and murdering top officials and nuclear scientists for almost a week now. Trump also says he wants a "total end" to Iran's nuclear program. (It's not a bomb program, it's a uranium enrichment program which creates fuel for nuclear power reactors. That's not an opinion, that's a fact according to U.S. intelligence and Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence/assassination agency.) Trump went on to boast about how great U.S. military weaponry and technology is. (Yes, with it, Israel and the U.S. can murder and destroy with impunity. Terrific. Lord Acton had a famous aphorism: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The corruption is both political and moral. The consequences are terrible for humanity.)

Trump has gone from resisting Netanyahu's demand that the U.S. join in a war on Iran, to threatening to murder the Ayatollah, Iran's Supreme Leader, and seems ready to bomb Iran's main uranium enrichment side under a mountain. Trump already sent B-2 bombers to the area for the purpose. 

Israel has been waging undeclared war on Iran for five days as of today. This has included murdering top Iranian government and military officials, with threats to murder the top ruler, the Ayatollah. 

A reporter asked Netanyahu if murdering the Ayatollah would escalate the "conflict." Netanyahu bellowed that "It would END the conflict!" How he figures that, I have no idea. It's typical Netanyahu supremacist bluster.

Israel has been drunk on its regional military supremacy for decades now. 

People seem to automatically, unconsciously even, have a simplistic attitude of Good Guys/Bad Guys, and one side has to be one, the other side the other, and whatever the "Good Guys" do to the "Bad Guys" is a good thing, including murdering them, because after all, they're "terrorists" and terrorists aren't humans, so it's a good thing to just kill them.

Of course this is mindless. Both Iran and Israel are loathsome political entities. I'm talking about their governments. But Israel is far worse because Israel has been committing the worst crime under international law and in terms of normal human morality, namely genocide, for over a year and a half now. (However, since 1948, Israel has been committing a lower grade genocidal campaign against the Palestinian Arabs, namely an attempt to deny and erase their identity as a people, which does constitute genocide under the international legal definition of genocide. Just as the Chinese regime is doing to the Uyghurs under its rule, brainwashing them in forced labor/torture camps and physically forcing them to renounce their culture, beliefs, dress, and family ties to make them into imitation Han Chinese. The Israelis of course have never sought to twist the Palestinian Arabs into Jews, but to banish them and kill large numbers of them, starting in 1948.

Trump cheaply and cynically evokes World War II, demanding "unconditional surrender" from Iran, and implicitly and not very subtly threatening the life of the Ayatollah by saying "we know where you are." 

Western propaganda ("news coverage") consistently omits the key fact that Iran does NOT have a nuclear bomb or warhead program, allowing people to be duped into believing it does.

Also NEVER pointed out, the key fact that if Iran HAD nuclear weapons, it wouldn't dare USE them against Israel, since Israel has hundreds of deliverable nuclear weapons, and the U.S. has thousands, some of which it would use on Iran if Israel for some reason didn't totally annihilate Iran itself if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.

The whole thing about the imaginary Iranian nuclear weapons is to make sure there is never even a possible challenge to Israeli regional military supremacy. 

                                                                 A cruel demagogue, and also a sad, pathetic man.

 

 

Kristi Noem Taken To Hospital After An "Allergic Reaction"

 What is she allergic to? Human kindness? Common decency?

Noem is the puppy-murdering Trump-chosen head of the Bush and Congress-created "Department of Homeland Security," a grab bag of repressive U.S. government agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which goes by the appropriately chilling acronym, ICE. ICE are the masked goons kidnapping immigrants and rendering them without due process to places like a supermax prison in El Salvador, where the policy is to never free any prisoners, to Djibouti, to Guantanamo Bay, on Cuban territory forcibly seized by the U.S. in the 19th century, to Libya, to South Sudan, to Honduras, to wherever. ICE has been arresting local officials on bogus charges, most of which are immediately dropped. Trump regime ghouls have threatened to arrest state governors. (Among those who HAVE been arrested are the mayor of Newark, NJ, Ras Baraka, New York City controller Brad Lander, and U.S. Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, who has been absurdly charged with "assaulting" two ICE goons.)

This ghoulish woman had herself videoed at the giant dungeon created by Salvadorean dictator Nayib Bukele, where the Trump regime has been imprisoning immigrants kidnapped at random in the U.S. and rendered to foreign countries. And when U.S. Senator Alex Padilla tried to ask a question at a Noem "press conference," he was assaulted by goons under Noem's command, forced face down onto the floor, handcuffed and hauled away. 

 

This is certainly a new era in U.S. history. Perhaps a throwback to the 19th century, when Senator Charles Sumner was savagely clubbed over the head by a racist Southern Senator. Here is Wikipedia's description of that attack:

 -Representative Preston Brooks, Butler's first cousin once removed, confronted Sumner in the Senate chamber and beat him severely on the head, using a thick gutta-percha cane with a gold head. Sumner was knocked down and trapped under the heavy desk, which was bolted to the floor. Blinded by his own blood, he staggered up the aisle and collapsed into unconsciousness. Brooks continued to beat the motionless Sumner until his cane broke, at which point he continued to strike Sumner with the remaining piece. Several other senators attempted to help Sumner, but were blocked by Laurence Keitt, who brandished a pistol and shouted, "Let them be!" [Sounds like a planned, premeditated, conspiracy to assault and cause severe bodily harm.]

Sumner was severely injured and suffered lasting physical and mental harm. The criminals who assaulted him were not prosecuted, expelled from the Senate, or even censured. Instead Sumner's colleagues advised him to tone down his anti-slavery rhetoric!

Then as now, the U.S. is hopelessly reactionary.

We've just seen a fascist murdering a Democratic State Representative in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, and the shooting and attempted murder of Democratic State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, both shot multiple times, by the same fascist terrorist. This happened on June 14. In the U.S., violence, particularly lethal violence aimed at individuals, is overwhelmingly from the right. Often the perpetrators have state protection, as was the case for the Ku Klux Klan for decades.
 

U.S. Stock Market Traders Easily Manipulated By Crude Grifter Trump

We hear a lot of chatter about how Trump's mad tariff war on the entire world has wiped out wealth that was stored in the stock markets.  But what I haven't noticed is media attention to how easily Trump causes sharp daily rallies in stocks with a mere feint, a head fake of a comment implying some fabulous resolution to the tariff war he's started with the rest of the world that's going to happen. (When? Don't ask.) Starting with announcing a 90 day "pause" in imposing tariffs (excluding, crucially, China), having his Treasury Secretary, Scott "The Stock Market Whisperer" Bessent play Good Cop and periodically claim that "talks" are imminent, or maybe happening, or going to happen, or "a lot" of countries have "called" (always refusing to answer the question, "How many countries have called?"), and Trump making various vague statements that stock speculators for some strange reason find reassuring, like crying babies being shushed by having a pacifier stuck in their mouths, Trump and his accomplices have shown themselves able to cause sharp stock market rallies repeatedly over the past month. The low point for U.S. stocks was on April 8th, but since then the S&P 500 is up over 8% midday today, and the Nasdaq is up 10%, over 1,500 points. So for just over two weeks stocks have basically been in an uptrend, with ever sharper up days. 

Bessent was at it again today, opining that both U.S. tariffs on China and vice versa had to come down before talks could begin. (Notice the U.S., that is Trump, hasn't actually LOWERED the tariffs to facilitate talks. I guess they want China, which has lower tariffs (125%) on U.S. goods versus the 145% imposed on China by Trump, to go first. 

Here's an example of what a bamboozler Trump is, and how utterly STUPID U.S. financial markets are- that is, the people trading stocks all day, every day, are.

Today, Trump at about 11:20 am East Coast time, spewed a spray of empty blather about how great everything is going to be, how rich America is going to be, how "happy" everyone in the WORLD is going to be. Stuff he says year after year, just shilling as this grifter con man always does. But here's the key tell, to use a poker term:

Trump: "We are going to have a fair deal with China."

Reporter manages to inject a question into the Trumpian stream of consciousness rave: "Are you talking to them actively?"

Trump: "Actively? Everything is active." And he keeps talking, but not about China or negotiations or anything at all, just his usual repetitive upbeat con man blather. Notice how he evaded the question. The tell is that he dodged the question. He didn't say "Yes, we are talking to the Chinese." 

The U.S. isn't even in negotiations with China while exorbitant tariffs remain in place. (145% tariffs Trump imposed on Chinese imports, 125% ones China imposed in retaliation on U.S. imports to China.) Plus, Trump still won't stop lying and claiming that the tariffs will be paid by Chinese companies. That's not how tariffs work. Tariffs are paid at the point of entry to a country, paid by the importer. That is, whatever comes from China will be 145% more expensive for the U.S. importing company.

But the people who trade stocks apparently don't understand any of this. They are pushing stocks up hard today, as they also did yesterday. Another "reason" is not just what is misinterpreted as a softening of Trump's position on tariffs, or progress (!) in non-existent negotiations, but the fact that Trump changed his tune on Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, who he had been publicly attacking for days because Powell isn't lowering interest rates. (Another Trump distortion of reality- the chairman of the Fed cannot raise and lower interest rates on his own. That requires a vote by the Fed Open Market committee, on which the chairman has only one vote.) Trump had been publicly threatening to "fire" Powell, which he does not have the legal authority to do, but as we have seen, Trump has been doing many illegal things since January 20 when he became president again, or rather dictator as he prefers, including firing officials illegally. Seeing that the stock and bond markets were upset, Trump stopped calling Powell a "loser" (the worst epithet there is in Trump's mind, a product of his pathological upbringing by his sick father, Fred)  and said he wasn't going to "fire" Powell after all. Or rather, he merely said he has no "plan" to fire Powell. Like he ever needs a "plan" for his arbitrary and vengeful acts. 

Yet for some reason, this typical Trump capricious (and meaningless, if you parse it like I just did) change of rhetoric completely reassured the financial speculators, and the stock market especially has been off to the races in an oingoing so-called "relief rally." (As of noon, the rally is off the highs but still up 2% to 3% in the major averages, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq..The DOW is a mere 30 stocks, so it is silly to use it as a weather vane.)

Given the relentless bias to drive stocks always higher, and the mindless chauvinistic optimism of American financial speculators, one must always assume that pushing U.S. stocks down is as hard as pushing an inflated ball underwater. It will always forcefully push upwards. The 1929-1940 stock market drought must be seen as an anomaly in the modern era. (The completely unregulated 19th century cannot be used for comparison. In that century, there was an economic panic or crisis or depression about every decade.)

                           "What, you BELIEVED that??"

Trump's Impossible Demands To Maybe Possibly Think About LOWERING His Globally Destructive Tariffs Somewhat- And the Trump Dictatorship

Elimination of U.S. trade deficits is the demand Trump has frequently repeated. That has been an obsession of Trump's for years.

He thinks trade deficits mean the U.S. is getting "ripped off." He constantly asserts that "We've been treated very badly for so long." No, trade deficits mean Americans get to live off the labor and resources of poorer (and not poorer) nations! Americans get to buy and consume products and food for much less than it would cost to produce domestically, get food that cannot be grown in the U.S. (like coffee and bananas), and American businesses get manufactured parts and products for less cost.

The other nations get dollars.

And what happens with the dollars earned by other nations? They go into funding U.S. budget deficits by buying Treasury bonds!

So how is the U.S. suffering? How is it getting "ripped off" and "taken advantage of by everyone for years," as Trump has complained for years, with great bitterness?  In fact, the U.S. has a great racket going.

Until wrecker Trump came along.

How will it be possible for, say, Vietnam, or Mexico, to NOT run a trade deficit with the U.S.? There is just too much that America as a country, as businesses, as people, want from those and many other countries, and not enough those countries can buy from the U.S. So it is an impossible demand. That means there is no plausible end in sight for the Trump tariff economic terrorism unless Trump suddenly flips his script and declares victory ("We won a great victory it's the biggest win in American history!" he'd brag in his run-on sentences style of speaking, or some such boastful blather.)

Trump has been falsely calling his punitive tariffs, intended to extort submission to his demands, as "reciprocal." Establishment media has been mindlessly parroting this fake adjective. They aren't reciprocal, because they aren't a response to any actions by the victim nations, and they are MUCH MUCH HIGHER than the tariffs those nations impose, which were in single digits until Trump started his economic warfare on the world. Trump imposed tariffs on every nation on earth, and on uninhabited territories as well.
 

A big "Fuck You!" to the World

Trump also demands that all other nations completely eliminate all tariffs on U.S. exports, and maybe he'll lower his tariffs, and on top of that eliminate all alleged "internal barriers" to U.S. exports in those countries as well as subsidies to their industries, be eliminated. (By the way, the U.S. does a lot of subsidizing of U.S. business. For example, the oil and gas business. Mining. Semiconductors. The list goes on.)

And it just so happens that a large proportion of the imports he whines about are imports by U.S. companies manufacturing their products in other countries to low the costs of production. Which is a good thing for Americans buying products and for workers in the producer countries who are provided income.

On the other hand, many American blue collar workers have been left in the lurch by this economic globalization of supply chains. To the shame of both U.S. parties of the ruling political cartel (Democratic and Republican parties) virtually nothing was done to help that class of worker.

The result is that they were ripe for the picking by a lying, deceitful, false-promising demagogue like Trump. Here's an example of the braying bombast typical of Trump, claiming he will deliver Great Things by his malicious, destructive actions: "We're going to become a wealthy nation again wealthy like never before." 

Nevertheless, even though Trump got around 74 million votes or so each time he ran, he NEVER won a free and fair election. In 2016, Hillary Clinton got about 2 million more votes than Trump, but the Electoral College, that anachronistic relic of post-colonial days, "elected" Trump president.

In 2020 Trump first tried to steal the election by getting state election officials to lie about the outcome after the votes were counted, then on January 6, 2021 sent a mob to invade the Capitol to prevent the formal certification of Biden as the victor in the Electoral College. The mob's mission included hanging Trump's vice president, Michael Pence, and murdering House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if they could get their hands on her.

Stunningly, and ominously, Trump was allowed to get away with this coup attempt by a combination of Democratic Party fecklessness and dilatory action, and the Republican Judiciary's protection of Trump, most crucially the Republican Party-controlled Supreme Court. These days Trump still bellows that the 2020 election was "stolen" from him, and now he adds that he should have simply stayed in office. 

And in 2024, as the journalist Greg Palast has documented with government data, several million black voters were either denied the right to vote at all, or had their ballots invalidated by Republican state officials. That made the difference between losing and winning for their Leader, Trump.

Trump has made himself a dictator, ignoring laws and court rulings about his kidnaps and renderings of foreign citizens legally in the U.S. to a prison in El Salvador, mass firings of government workers, shutting down entire departments and agencies created by Congress, impounding the funds appropriated by Congress, illegally firing key officials and purging the government of its internal watchdogs against corruption, such as Inspectors General.

So it is only logical that this dictator, Trump, and his accomplices, including the sinister Steve Bannon, are now saying that Trump will run for a third term, in blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution, which forbids it. Given Republican control of enough states to swing the Electoral College result, it seems more likely than not that Trump can accomplish his monstrosity.

If that happens, we will have to say goodbye to the illusion of American democracy. It's past time to wake up from that 200-plus year dream
 

Trump Threatens Again To Seize Greenland From NATO "Ally" Denmark

In his daily stream-of-consciousness rant today, King Trump threatened to send more U.S. troops to Greenland, obviously to affect an occupation of that sovereign Danish territory. And again, he insisted the U.S. needs to annex Greenland for U.S. "national security."  [1]

He also still says Canada would be "beautiful" as the 51th state of the U.S.

So the U.S. is threatening two members of the U.S.-created and bosses NATO military alliance with hostile seizures, in the case of Canada the complete extinction of that nation.

Yet media propagandists still refer to Canada and Denmark as U.S. "allies." Allies do not threaten allies territory, sovereignty, and continued existence as nations.

The assembled poodles pretending to be journalists meekly pretended all this is normal and reasonable.
Let me remind you, the U.S. has since World War II maintained military bases on Greenland. Denmark has been most cooperative about this. Also Greenland is inhabited by a civilian population. Of course what they might want doesn't figure in Trump's dictatorial mind.

Let me remind you, the U.S. has since World War II maintained military bases on Greenland. Denmark has been most cooperative about this. Also Greenland is inhabited by a civilian population. Of course what they might want doesn't figure in Trump's dictatorial mind.

It's about time the European lapdogs who run those countries stop pretending the U.S. is their ally and protector. Yet instead, they are racing to assure Trump that they will meet his outrageous demand that they spend the equivalent of 5% of their gross national products (their economies) on "defense." Which actually means buying weapons from U.S. weapons manufacturers. NATO requires "standardization" of weapons, which means for the expensive stuff, largely U.S. ones.

The U.S. doesn't spend 5% of GDP on the military (well, maybe if you count Veterans Affairs, part of NASA, the 2/3rds of the Department of Energy's budget that is for nuclear warhead assembly, disassembly, and research, and more here and there, it might approach 3%), nor should it. NO nation should mindlessly base its military budgets on a percentage of GDP. Instead it should evaluate potential threats, determine the military forces and equipment needed to deal with the threats and their costs, and appropriate the right amount of money. But to my knowledge, NOT A SINGLE POLITICIANS OR MEDIA JABBERER HAS EVER POINTED OUT THIS OBVIOUS FACT OR CHALLENGED THE % DEMANDS!! 

Just how mindlessly conformist are these elite jackasses?

Very conformist, apparently.

Trump can wave the "national security" magical wand to justify anything because that is EXACTLY how that phrase has been used for decades to justify U.S. aggression, U.S. repression inside and outside the U.S., and various U.S. crimes, AND the secrecy used to suppress awareness of these crimes from the American people. A good chunk of those people would support the crimes anyway, contrary to the delusions of leftists who think that if "the people only knew" the truth they would rise up in righteous anger blah blah. The fact that there are always large numbers of reactionaries, national chauvinists- aka "patriots"- racists, and fascists eludes leftists and is the reason that their favorite slogan, "The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated" is fatuous and dangerously misleading. The people are rarely united. The only times they are are during some wars.

"National Security" is NEVER DEFINED by those throwing it around. It really means U.S. POWER. Pure and simple, that is the real meaning. Whether talking about global domination, or suppression of domestic dissidents, that is what they do behind the veil of "national security." And only those with "security clearances," that is, those deemed to have the correct ideological mindset, get to know the details of the dirty crimes being committed behind the veil of "national security."

        He whom the Gods would make King, they first make mad. (Or maybe just drunk on power.)

1] Referring to Greenland, Mad King Trump said "We really need it for national security. Maybe we'll send more and more soldiers. What do you think of that Pete?" [Talking to Peter Hegseth, the alcoholic rapist Trump and the GOP Senators made Secretary of Defense. I did not hear an audible response from Hegseth.]

 

Stock Market Speculators Finally Get It Through Their Thick Skulls That Trump Isn't Bluffing About Tariffs

This afternoon U.S. stock markets suddenly nose-dived while Trump was announcing that ruinous 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada take effect tomorrow. Given Trump's oft-declared love of tariffs, and his use of them in his previous incarnation as president of the U.S., it was idiotic of the blockheads who drive stock prices hither and yon in manic-depressive fashion to have ever doubted him on tariffs.

One thing that needs explaining is why are the corporate bosses whose businesses stand to suffer greatly from the tariffs are so supine and acquiescent about this. The auto manufacturers make much of their car parts- like engines, rather important!- in Canada and Mexico. Their profit margins are below 10%. A 25% tariff means either they LOSE money selling cars, or the number of cars they sell drops by a lot because they have to hike the sale prices.

Then there are the high tariffs on imports from China, which Trump just increased. Many, many goods sold in the U.S., as well as parts for products, are still made in China. You just cannot erase a nation of 1.2 billion people which has developed a huge and extraordinarily diversified manufacturing base, from the U.S. economy.

Trump's fantasy is that the outsourcing of much U.S. manufacturing to cheaper labor sites outside the U.S., a massive movement that has occurred over decades, can be quickly put into reverse and thousands of new factories suddenly open inside the U.S.

It is an example of Trump's de facto dictatorial powers that U.S. corporate sector isn't in rebellion against this. Every other U.S. president has mostly catered to the whims of corporations and big capital. Occasionally they have to do things that displease that sector. Theodore Roosevelt had to break up some trusts. Franklin Roosevelt had to institute a thin social safety net (paid for by workers as well as companies). But there has never been such an assault on corporate interests as what Trump has been doing.

Very inconsistent of the corporations and their media propagandists. They used to scream "Socialist!" at the drop of a hat of any Democratic president proposed anything at all that tilted slightly progressive. But with Trump, it's grovel and kiss his ass.

But hey, that Putin is such an autocrat! All the rich "oligarchs" there tremble and survive only on his sufferance! How UNLIKE the "free and democratic" U.S.A.!