Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

[blindpig]

Trump and his distant forerunner
By Atilio Borón (Posted Feb 14, 2025)

Originally published: Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World on February 10, 2025 (more by Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World)

By glorifying the figure of William McKinley, president of the United States between March 4, 1897 and September 14, 1901, Donald Trump is trying to find a universally acclaimed precedent for his controversial policies in the political history of the United States. McKinley was assassinated, Trump miraculously escaped the same fate on July 13, 2024 in Pennsylvania. But unlike the New Yorker, McKinley was a man of the political class. Except for a short period of two years (1869-1871) when he practiced law, he spent his entire life in the world of politics.

At the age of 33 McKinley entered the House of Representatives for the Republican Party. In 1890 he proposed and succeeded in getting a law passed increasing import tariffs. Shortly afterwards he was elected governor of Ohio and, in 1897, president of the United States. It was during his term of office that the country became a world power: he achieved the annexation of Hawaii by taking on the local government’s four million dollar debt and the following year he took advantage of the defeat that the Cuban mambises had inflicted on the Spanish army to get involved in the Cuban war of independence and seize the island, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. The pretext was to “provide aid” to the Cuban patriots, even though they didn’t need it. However, in order to strip Spain of its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific, Washington needed to enter the war.

As the Cubans did not ask for their help, an incident had to be fabricated that would enrage U.S. public opinion and justify U.S. intervention. The self-inflicted attack on the battleship Maine, anchored in Havana Bay to evacuate the citizens of that country, which mysteriously blew up on February 15, 1898, precipitated the entry of the United States into a war that had already been won by the Cubans but was taken away from them precisely by McKinley. It was under his presidency that the United States went from being a regional power in Central America and the Caribbean to taking the first steps in the construction of a global empire.

And it is this man, McKinley, a supporter of economic warfare with his tariffs; of direct military action, as in the case of the war against Spain; or appealing to money to buy an island like Hawaii who, not by chance, has been repeatedly praised by Trump. It was he who, having defeated the Spanish monarchy in the Philippines and Guam, ordered Pentagon cartographers to include those two distant Pacific islands on U.S. maps.

This brief sketch allows us to decipher and put into perspective some of Trump’s initiatives. For example, ordering the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. His blind faith in import tariffs has its most notable precedent in McKinley, only in today’s highly interconnected global economy such a policy is doomed to failure, and Trump himself will pay dearly for it. As an unscrupulous businessman he believes that everything has a price, that anything can be bought or sold. Patriotism, honor or dignity are meaningless words to the tycoon.

If McKinley acquired Hawaii, why not do the same with Greenland, especially when Denmark and European governments are displaying a scandalous apathy in the face of Trump’s outburst? Why not use economic blackmail to turn Canada into the 51st state of the United States? And although for now there would be no need for a self-attack—the current version of Maine—the lies, fake news and cowardice or passivity of many politicians can have the same effect. If George Bush convinced the world that there were “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq”, which was blatantly untrue, why would the powerful media apparatus that the United States controls on a global scale not be capable of deceiving half the world when spreading a lie as scandalous as “the presence of Chinese soldiers in the Panama Canal”, or that his administration is surreptitiously run by the Chinese Communist Party? Or to convince world public opinion that someone who enters the United States illegally is a criminal, as the serial liar Marco Rubio claimed?

Beyond these parallels, the truth is that with his bluster and contradictions Trump represents a danger to international coexistence and a return to the most brutal and brazen phase of imperialism. Those naïve souls who thought that it had disappeared, replaced by benevolent globalization, are now silent. Imperialism exists, and will continue to generate pain and death everywhere, destroying the environment, promoting wars and sowing poverty with both hands. Trump’s illusory attempt to resurrect U.S. unipolarism, or “American superiority”, is a chapter closed under lock and key by the history of an international system whose current architecture has been radically and irreversibly modified in the direction of a multipolar power configuration, whose gravitation grows day by day.

Source: Cuba en Resumen

https://mronline.org/2025/02/14/trump-a ... orerunner/

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Is Trump planning a war with Egypt and Jordan? Don’t ask Huffpost kid

Martin Jay

February 14, 2025

Does Trump understand anything at all about international law? Does he really understand anything about the Middle East?

It’s the gorilla joke and Trump not only doesn’t get it but it no longer applies to him. Where does a 600 pound gorilla sit in the room? Answer, wherever it f—– wants. Trump’s upgraded latest version of bullying, threatening and making everything about him, is still not working on the international stage. We are so used to this style of his threatening before even talks have got under way, which is supposed to soften up his victims but for Trump to do this to both leaders of Egypt and Jordan is extraordinary. To both these countries, Trump said he might have to consider cutting the aid that the U.S. sends them which prompted Sisi in Egypt to cancel his White House visit; King Abdullah did in fact turn up but looked visibly shaken at the press conference when Trump continued to talk about the real estate option of Gaza, involving the dumping of the Gazans on neighbouring countries and now letting them back.

Trump’s style of course often gets him into trouble. He has no interest whatsoever using his own diplomatic channels, or indeed the State Department, to prepare world leaders for his whacky ideas. When Netanyahu was standing at the podium a week earlier during the press conference it was obvious that the idea of ‘taking Gaza’ was something that just entered his head, probably that day. Netanyahu looked like he was in a trance.

Because Trump has no patience for reading briefs or listening to advisers these situations are likely to occur often. A totally moronic idea, which has no chance of working logistically or legally, will dominate a bigger subject, in this case Gaza. Is this Trump’s ruse? Is he planning on giving the nudge on Saturday afternoon – 15th February – for Netanyahu to bomb the Gazans with even more ferocity than previous? Many analysts now are espousing that the Palestinians are being led into a trap with the final negotiations being dogged by their complaint that the deal can’t be a deal if there is no ceasefire. 92 Gazans dead during the ceasefire based on attacks by Israel would suggest that the Israelis have no intention of holding it. For the Palestinians to appear to play around would just be what Trump and Netanyahu would want.

Yet the interesting thing is the release of Palestinians who are all being sent to Gaza, regardless of whether they came from the strip or not. Clearly the deal the Israelis struck included slaughtering them after a few days when they enjoy a certain liberty, albeit in a place they’re not familiar with and is essentially a pile of rubble with some aid trucks turning up every now and again.

The bigger plan for Gaza is to continue with the ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, the whole world stays confused about how serious Trump’s plan is to “buy” Gaza, which was later corrected to just “take” it. Does Trump understand anything at all about international law? Does he really understand anything about the Middle East?

It’s not important. What is important is that Trump can only operate on a very simple level and he must be the one who comes up with the plan. His buffoonish ideas catch Arab Leaders off-balance as they all line up to now to block his Gaza idea and call for a two-state solution. What no call centre journalist in the White House scrum was able to ask though, when having the opportunity with King Abdullah present, was what could be the implications to both Egypt and Jordan having their aid cut? King Abdullah hinted very graciously that it would not be in America’s interest to go ahead with the outlandish plan. But what did he mean?

In a nutshell, Trump’s plan to dump the Palestinians in Egypt and Jordan cannot work not because those leaders have blocked it and have even gone as far as to threaten war. It can’t work because Trump doesn’t even understand the regional politics – bringing half a million Palestinians into Jordan might be the end of King Abdullah’s reign – but more importantly Israel would lose Jordan as a security partner. It beggars belief that no one in Trump’s team understands this and didn’t mention it to the Donald. Only last year when Iran was firing rockets deep into Israel, it was the air force of Jordan which was up in the air shooting them down. Is Israel going to throw away that kind of partner over a row over a trifling about of 1.5 billion USD of aid each year to Amman? Trump 2.0 is more about projecting his own unique ideas out there and using less and less the experts, replaced by nodding dogs. We should expect more of this as, for Trump, it’s a winning formula as it keeps the media contact permanent while he continues to keep on the front pages to the follow up explanation to the initial idiotic idea. And then the follow up to that. Our journalists in the West now are so young, stupid and servile that they don’t even know they’re being Trumped, although have a heart for the poor darling with the Huffington Post who Trump told “you don’t even know what you’re talking about” whilst having a huddle n cuddle moment on Air Force One. Just when you think Trump has run out of material to use in his act, he simply turns to ridiculing the rodents who follow him around and stenograph his comments, who probably think they are real journalists.

The point about the whacky Gaza real estate plan is that it is just a figment of distraction while the adults take over and work out what the real hard work is. But Trump’s idea of even moving the Palestinians to Saudi Arabia, to outwit Sisi and Abdullah II, was genius. MBS did not see that coming. Trump is still the 600-pound gorilla looking where to put himself in the room. And the Arabs will just have to put up with his quirkiness as the idea of them getting organized and taking the lead is about as likely as the Huffpost kid becoming a journalist when he grows up.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... fpost-kid/

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Curtis Yarvin is Among the Crazed Pseudo-Fascist Thinkers Influencing J.D. Vance
By Joel Sucher - February 13, 2025 0


Curtis Yarvin a/k/a “Mencius Moldbug.” [Source: maxraskin.com]

Yarvin is a cheerleader for “neocameralism,” a system where states operate like corporations, prioritizing efficiency and governance by technocrats or capable leaders rather than elected officials
Meet Curtis Yarvin: whose seemingly crazed ideas have found fertile ground among technocrats and oligarchs who have never quite shaken entitled Ayn Rand’s “greed is good” sensibility.

Essentially, the guy wants the world to be run by smart CEOs commanding Corporate States. It is a form of National Socialism without the pollution of the socialism.

Yarvin began “life” as a software developer with desires to be so much more, and what better way to attract attention than to go way-out-loony. So, in 2008 — not kidding — he proposed a paean to Soylent Green, suggesting a “humane alternative to genocide” to wit: convert unproductive folks to biodiesel where they could be used to power various modes of transportation in Silicon Valley.

When hell broke loose, he wisely backtracked and said — hahaha, just kidding— it was all a big joke.

But was it?

His blog, “Gray Mirror,” offers dense insights into his philosophy. Not easy to digest but if you have the time and focus, it does reduce itself to a critique of modern governance and social structures through a lens of historical and philosophical analysis. Yarvin, or Mencius Moldbug if you prefer, argues that contemporary democracy and political systems are fundamentally flawed. His advocacy of more authoritarian forms of governance falls lockstep into the activities of historical examples from Caesar to Hitler and, currently, to Hungary’s Orbán.

According to Mencius: strong leader = stability and order. Well, as history has demonstrated in the first two examples, this can be finite. For Orbán? That remains to be seen.

But what would an activist sort of philosophy be if you cannot find those who will put it into practice?

Well, for Mencius, along came the dynamic duo of tech billionaire Peter Thiel and the current Vice President, J.D. Vance, both of whom became fans.

During the first Trump administration, Mencius was involved in a 2017 celebration organized by his publisher, Erudite Press, and attended by various figures within the neo-reactionary and alternative right circles. Within these groups there was an excitement that a changed political terrain would provide new opportunities for a shift in political power and ideology.

But that would have to wait eight years…Now Mencius stands poised to see at least some of his ideas put into practice.

And, pray tell, what are some of his ideas?

His Gray Mirror matrix takes you down an ontological rabbit hole highlighting how political ideologies can distort reality and perpetuate dysfunction. His love of “elites” takes you into the broader neo-reactionary movement, which promotes the idea of a return to traditional hierarchies and monarchies as a solution to the perceived failures of modern democratic states.

Mencius posits that political order and stability should take precedence over the ideal of political freedom. He believes that, in unstable environments, the desire for freedom can lead to chaos and, thus, a strong leader or governing body is necessary to maintain order.

Mirrors, as I am sure Mencius knows, often embody the concept of duality, representing the internal versus external self. It is a theme prevalent in psychological and existential art, where artists explore the complexities of human nature, identity and the human experience.

Artists from Titian to Dali often played with mirrors to create dramatic effects and a sense of theatricality. In the 20th century, surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte used mirrors to delve into psychological themes and the subconscious. Mirrors became symbols of distorted perception, exploring the nature of reality and illusion. Dalí’s famous “The Persistence of Memory” features reflective surfaces that challenge the viewer’s understanding of time and space.

So, let’s mirror what is going on in the cranial corners of Mencius’s mind?

In short:

One of Mencius’s notable concepts is “The Cathedral,” which he uses to describe the coalition of institutions — media, academia, and the state — that propagate a progressive ideology. He argues that this coalition shapes public opinion and policy in ways that reinforce its own power, often at the expense of alternative viewpoints.

Mencius posits that political order and stability should take precedence over the ideal of political freedom. He is a cheerleader for “neocameralism,” a system where states operate like corporations, prioritizing efficiency and governance by technocrats or capable leaders rather than elected officials.

He has attached himself to the influential far-right neo-reaction (NRx) movement: “Dark Enlightenment.” Giving props to the superiority of dictatorships, he pushes the idea of dissecting governments and transforming them into smaller units called “patchworks.” Patchworks, according to his thinking, would be dominated by tech corporations.

“The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions,” “Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century.”


Cover of Patchwork, published in 2017. [Source: amazon.com]

Now it gets real Harry Potter with tech wizards trying to extinguish the light via clever use of their dark powers. The denizens in the patches could do what they liked but if the overlords were not pleased could easily unalive said residents. As a sovereign entity not beholden to any legal, regulatory or state system, they could, according to Mencius, get away with murder

Ruling over each patch would be a “realm,” i.e., a corporation with absolute power. My hands-down favorite — realm wise — is “Friscorp.” A San Francisco patch overseen by a Philip K. Dickish surveillance system which would require residents to carry Radio Frequency Identification Cards (RFID). [These cards use electrmagnetic fields to identify and track targets] Folks would be genotyped and iris-scanned. Movements anywhere and everywhere would be monitored.

NOTE: For more on this check out my previous CovertAction Magazine piece — ”Old Documents Reveal Roots of Modern-Day American Surveillance State” — where I detail how some of this technology — ubiquitous in China — has been employed by the NYPD.

Mencius reminds me of those intellectual outcasts at my high school — Brooklyn Tech — who thought they were too cool for school, all Napoleon Dynamites who harbored a “brilliance” they hoped would soon be embraced by the world. They were legends in their own minds.

The Mencius spin on humankind is obviously fascistic; it reverses a reality of the world Ursula Le Guin reveals in her anarchist novel, The Dispossessed.

To sum up: Mencius believes that political elites will see the path he has mapped out as a highway to infinite everlasting power (and, by extension, endless riches).

While Mencius denies that he is a white nationalist, critics have pointed out that his writing has delivered praise about some (“I’m not allergic to the notion”) and, furthermore, he does not seem to think slavery was so bad (as he told David Marchese in The New York Times).

It was Peter Thiel who provided the river down which Mencius could float his dark philosophy. In fact, he was soon labeled the “house political philosopher” of “Thielverse,” a group of sycophants offering fealty and support for the billionaire. Rewarding Mencius Thiel invested in Tlön, a 2013 software start-up he co-founded. By 2016 Mencius was whooping it up at Thiel’s election night victory party celebrating Trump’s first victory.


J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel, who have been influenced by Yarvin’s writings. [Source: news.yahoo.com]

Vance sucked up the Mencius philosophy but has not gone all-in with the Patches cum Realms plan. However, in a 2021 podcast interview, when asked about some of the ideas being popularized prior to Trump’s re-entering the presidential race—including how to deal with liberals—Vance responded, “De-Nazification, De-Baathification…I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left. And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”

Looking back at some of the great literary works of dystopia—say, Jack London’s Iron Heel and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here—the latter, no doubt, has been confirmed and the former, no doubt, may follow.

With Elon now dancing at his own fascist rave—rewriting a past that led the world through a brutal apocalypse—there is no doubt where this might be heading. Trump—to the chagrin of members of his own party—giving blanket pardons to the J-6 gang has responded by empowering his own Praetorian Guard, brown-shirt style. Daresay, Neo-Nazis the world over loved it!


[Source: x.com]

For my sarcastic friends and colleagues, yes, some of Mencius’s dreaming may seem to have been birthed over shots of absinthe, bloviating with fellow writers at an 18th century Parisian salon.

But — as we say in martial arts — never underestimate your opponent’s style and, for the current group in power, they may shortly take off the gloves and dispense with any adherence to Marquess of Queensberry Rules.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... j-d-vance/

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Prominent US Jews Reject Trump’s Ethnic Cleansing Plan
February 14, 2025

Jewish businessmen, entertainers, journalists and religious figures signed a full-page ad in The New York Times saying, “Jewish people say NO to ethnic cleansing!”



By Jessica Corrbett
Common Dreams

Over 350 rabbis and dozens of Jewish public figures on Thursday placed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times protesting President Donald Trump’s proposal to force all Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and take over the coastal enclave recently decimated by U.S.-armed Israeli forces.

“Trump has called for the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza,” the ad states. “Jewish people say NO to ethnic cleansing!”

The ad then lists the hundreds of people who signed on, including V (formerly Eve Ensler), Peter Beinart, Judith Butler, Molly Crabapple, Ben Cohen, Ilana Glazer, Tavi Gevinson, Nan Goldin, Naomi Klein, and Joaquin, Rain, and Summer Phoenix.

“Donald Trump—like Pharaoh in the Bible—seems to believe he is God with authority to rule, own, and dominate our country and the world,” said Rabbi Yosef Berman of New Synagogue Project in Washington, D.C., a signatory to the Times ad.

“Jewish teaching is clear: Trump is not God and cannot take away Palestinians inherent dignity or steal their land for a real estate deal,” Berman continued. “Trump’s desire to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza is morally abhorrent. Jewish leaders reject Trump’s attempts to wring profit from displacement and suffering and must act to stop this heinous crime.”

Glazer, a comedian and actor, similarly stressed that “we, Jews, and all of us who care about basic human rights, must speak up and stand up to ensure Palestinians remain on their land, so they can rebuild their homes and lives in Gaza after the genocidal destruction they have endured. All of our safety is intertwined.”



Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its 15-month military response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack. The Israeli assault killed more than 61,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to estimates by local officials. A fragile cease-fire took effect last month.

After Hamas threatened to suspend the release of additional hostages over Israeli violations of the deal—which prompted Israel to threaten more violence, seemingly backed by Trump—the group said Thursday it would free three captives this weekend.

The ad in the Times on Thursday is just part of the growing opposition to Trump’s proposal to kick Palestinians out of Gaza and turn the territory into what he claimed could be the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Polling published Wednesday by Data for Progress shows that a majority of Americans are against the United States seizing control of Gaza, and nearly 7 in 10 oppose sending U.S. troops for the takeover.

A coalition of over 100 groups led by A New Policy—founded by Biden administration officials who resigned in protest—and the Quaker organization Friends Committee on National Legislation said Monday that they “decry and oppose any effort or initiative, and any calls for, the forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, and support the joint statement of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, the Palestinian Authority, and the Arab League that similarly rejected any such steps.”

The Guardian reported Thursday that Cody Edgerly, director of the In Our Name Campaign and one of the organizers of the Times ad, pointed to Trump’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that it came at “a critical time as political redlines that were once thought immovable are rapidly shifting as the Trump-Netanyahu alliance takes hold again.”

It has been “heartening to witness such a rapid outpouring of support from across the denominational and political spectrum,” added Edgerly. “Our message to Palestinians is that you are not alone, our attention has not wavered, and we are committed to fighting with every breath we have to stop ethnic cleansing in Gaza.”



Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, said in a statement that “as someone who loves the American Jewish community, and lives my life in the American Jewish community, and could not imagine another way of living. It is utterly horrifying to see the degree to which people who enjoy great legitimacy and respect in our community are willing to support something that would be considered one of the greatest crimes of the 21st century.”

Another signatory to the ad, Rabbi Toba Spitzer of Congregation Dorshei Tzedek in Newton, Massachusetts, said that “it is vitally important that we in the American Jewish community add our voices to all those refusing to entertain this insidious plan.”

Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s “dream of making Germany ‘Judenrein,’ ‘cleansed of Jews,’ led to the slaughter of our people,” Spitzer added. “We know as well as anyone the violence that these kinds of fantasies can lead to. It is time to make the cease-fire permanent, bring all of the hostages home, and join in efforts to rebuild Gaza for the sake of and with the people who live there.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/14/p ... sing-plan/

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Trump Calls For Trilateral Arms Reduction - Party On 80th Victory Day?

U.S. post-cold war supremacy is unsustainable when countered by an alliance of Russia and China. The U.S. foreign policy swamp has no common opinion on how to handle this.

One faction is arguing that supremacy is unsustainable. It calls for accepting a multi-polar world in which the big three - Russia, China and the U.S. - agree to avoid fighting each other while partitioning the globe into dedicated zones of interests. Minor conflicts would proceed on the borders but there would be by and large peace.

A second faction wants to sustain U.S. supremacy by defeating Russia before taking on China. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, with their attacks on Russia, were pushing into this direction.

A third faction thinks that splitting Russia and China and to thereby neutralize (or even ally with) Russia before starting a conflict with China is the better way to proceed.

The Trump administration is clearly moving towards the third option but keeps the potential of the first option in mind.

The well choreographed events over the last days show that this is an operation with big aims in mind.

Trump started by removing the biggest roadblock for peace in Ukraine which was the threat of accepting Ukraine into NATO. That worm though is still wiggling.

Press conference by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine - NATO, Oct 03 2024

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte - Well, first on NATO and membership. And as you know, at the last NATO Summit, which took place in Washington in July this year, Allies agreed, and this is important, that Ukraine's path to membership is irreversible.
...
And I think the day will come that Ukraine is a full member of NATO. And let me add to that, if somebody might think otherwise, that Russia on this issue has no vote and no veto.

Interruption:

Hegseth rules out NATO membership for Ukraine - CNN, Feb 12 2025

Trump: not practical for Ukraine to join NATO, get back all land - Reuters, Feb 12 2025

Wiggling:

Rutte: Ukraine was never promised NATO membership as part of peace agreement - MSN, Feb 13 2025

NATO membership for Ukraine not off the table, US official says Reuters, Feb 14 2025

A senior U.S. official on Thursday said the United States had not ruled out potential NATO membership for Ukraine or a negotiated return to its pre-2014 borders, contradicting comments made this week by the U.S. defense secretary ahead of possible peace talks to end the Ukraine war.
"Right now, that is still on the table," said John Coale, President Donald Trump's deputy Ukraine envoy, when asked whether the U.S. had ruled out possible NATO membership for Ukraine. Speaking in an interview with Reuters in Munich, he added that a possible return to Ukraine's pre-2014 lines was also still on the table.

All the wiggling is just that. The Ukraine will never join NATO. The worm is dead.

Trump was already working on the next point:

Trump says Russia should be readmitted to G7 - Reuters, Feb 13 2025

"I'd love to have them back. I think it was a mistake to throw them out. Look, it's not a question of liking Russia or not liking Russia. It was the G8," Trump said at the White House when he announced new U.S. reciprocal tariffs.
"I said, 'What are you doing? You guys - all you're talking about is Russia and they should be sitting at the table.' I think Putin would love to be back."

A nice attempt to flatter Putin but Russia is not interested:

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov: "The current G7 has significantly lost its relevance... it unites countries that are not now leaders in global economic growth... this dynamism has moved to other regions of the globe."
That attempt to pull Russia towards the U.S. side was a dud.

But how about this much, much bigger move towards a multipolar world or should we call it shared supremacy?

Trump eyes summit with Xi and Putin, says he wants military budgets halved - AlJazeerah, Feb 14 2025

United States President Donald Trump has floated talks with China and Russia to discuss reducing all three countries’ nuclear stockpiles and slashing their defence budgets in half.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Thursday, Trump said he hoped to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin “when things calm down”.

“When we straighten it all out, then I want one of the first meetings I have [to be] with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia. And I want to say, let’s cut our military budget in half,” Trump said ahead of a summit meeting with Indian President Narendra Modi.

The Kremlin has invited President Trump to the 80th anniversary of Victory Day to celebrate the defeat of the Nazis by the allies. President Xi Jinping of China has already announced that he will be in Moscow on May 9 to take part.

This would be a superb opportunity to announce a trilateral arms reduction agreement.

Let's hope that this gets done.

Posted by b on February 14, 2025 at 11:08 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/02/t ... .html#more

Trump wants many things, they are often contradictory. He wants to make Amerika great again. He wants the big boys to halve military spending. He wants more military spending to ensure the US is 'the greatest military power in history'. He is blowing smoke, it's PR.I can imagine Us military spending halved in my dreams but not while the capitalist rule. Shafting veterans(always the first choice) wouldn't get close. I could certainly image the MIC putting a contract out on his ass if he really tried to do it. I also think some of the crap being spewed by some of his proxies, that the US is giving up hegemony in favor of a multipolar world are tales for little children. When has the Orange Man shared anything?

Halving military spending and nukes would be wonderful but if you think this blowhard really has the will much less the ability to pull those excellent ideas off I got a bridge for ya.

[blindpig]

Donald Trump claps as fascist billionaire Elon Musk prepares to depart after speaking at a campaign event at the Butler Farm Show, on Oct. 5, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]

Federal judge finds Trump defied injunction to unfreeze funds
Originally published: World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on February 12, 2025 by John Burton, Tom Carter (more by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)) | (Posted Feb 14, 2025)

Multiple federal judges, including at least one nominated by Ronald Reagan and another by Trump during his first term as president, have ruled that an action by Trump violated federal laws, the separation of powers, or specific constitutional provisions, including the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Since taking office on January 20, through the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) headed by billionaire oligarch Elon Musk, the Trump administration has attempted to seize control of the key machinery of federal expenditures. The assertion of extra-constitutional powers over government spending by Trump and Musk has already caused massive disruptions to social spending across the country.

In a case filed by 22 states and the District of Columbia to enjoin Trump’s freezing of most federal grants aside from defense spending, law enforcement and direct payments to individuals such as Social Security, the trial judge determined that Trump violated his order,but to date has not attempted to sanction Trump or any members of his administration.

The response of Trump administration officials has been to proclaim their intention to barrel ahead with their wrecking operation against social programs, potentially directly and openly defying court orders instructing them to stop.

On January 31, Chief Judge John J. McConnell, Jr., of the United States District Court for Rhode Island granted a temporary restraining order (TRO) over Trump’s objection, directing that the executive branch must release federal funding, as before Trump’s inauguration, while the parties file briefs and a decision can be made on the merits of a preliminary injunction.

McConnell relied primarily on Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the “spending clause,” which provides that Congress has sole authority to tax and spend. If a president wants to withhold authorized funding, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, passed after former President Richard Nixon impounded allocated money, requires a special notice to Congress that triggers a review and thereafter congressional action to approve the impound, a procedure Trump made no attempt to follow.

Applying these clear and unambiguous laws to the legal standards for TROs, McConnell found it likely that “the Executive’s actions violate the Constitution and statutes of the United States,” and that the 22 states and District of Columbia “will likely suffer severe and irreparable harm if the Court denies their request to enjoin enforcement of the funding pause.”

McConnell listed “highway planning and construction, childcare, veteran nursing care funding, special education grants, and state health departments, who receive billions of dollars to run programs that maintain functional health systems” as among the many programs threatened.

McConnell labeled Trump’s claim of unreviewable power “to align federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities” as “constitutionally flawed.”

That is a major understatement.

“The Executive Branch has a duty to align federal spending and action with the will of the people as expressed through congressional appropriations, not through ‘Presidential priorities,’” McConnell wrote, rejecting Trump’s claim that he has Führer-like power to express the “will of the people” independently of the federal government’s other branches.

Ten days later, on February 10, McConnell issued an order to enforce the TRO, finding that the flow of funds had not been fully restored to federal agencies, citing the National Institutes of Health and funding required under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Improvement and Jobs Act, among other programs. While issuing no sanctions, McConnell wrote,

Persons who make private determinations of the law and refuse to obey an order generally risk criminal contempt even if the order is ultimately ruled incorrect.

On Tuesday, February 11, the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Rhode Island, three other Northeastern states and the territory of Puerto Rico, denied Trump’s petition for an immediate stay of the TRO. As of this writing, Trump has not filed for emergency relief in the Supreme Court, which is dominated six-to-three by right-wing judges highly disposed in his favor.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (Republican-Louisiana) said Tuesday he agreed “wholeheartedly” with Trump’s freezing of federal spending without congressional approval. Directly contradicting Article 1, Section 8 and the Impoundment Control Act, Johnson said,

There’s a presupposition in America that the commander-in-chief is going to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars.

Johnson’s remarks contrasted with those of moderate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who told a college audience Tuesday,

Our founders were hellbent on ensuring that we didn’t have a monarchy, and the first way they thought of that was to give Congress the power of the purse.

At an impromptu Oval Office press conference, also on Tuesday, Trump threatened Judge McConnell with language reminiscent of King Henry II, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Trump mused,

It seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that,’ so maybe we have to look at the judges, because that’s very serious.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest individual and embodiment of the rapacious oligarchy, stood next to Trump, who sat at the “resolute desk.” Musk posted earlier on X that McConnell was “a corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!”

There is, of course, no evidence of “corruption” in regards to the TRO, and no federal judge has ever been impeached based on disagreement over a ruling. The constitutional remedy is appellate review.

While Trump intimated Tuesday that he will obey court orders against his administration while pursuing appeals, recent remarks by Vice President JD Vance suggest that the Trump administration may defy unfavorable rulings.

“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Vance posted on X.

Vance graduated from Yale Law School. He, like all other U.S. lawyers, knows that the judicial branch has the constitutional power to review actions of the legislative and executive branches, and to rule against them. This fundamental principle has been a cornerstone of the separation of powers and the constitutional system of checks and balances since the third chief justice of the United States, John Marshall, decided Marbury v. Madison in 1803.

There are issues such as battlefield decisions that the courts have traditionally ruled to be outside the scope of judicial review. But the determination of whether jurisdiction exists to decide the constitutionality of an action by another branch of government is itself made by the judiciary. Any other rule would collapse the constitutional system altogether.

The refusal of federal officials to comply with court orders is exceptionally rare in modern U.S. history, and in earlier periods it would have resulted in prompt arrest and incarceration, even for a high-ranking government official. But like their fascist heroes of the last century, Trump and his accomplices operate outside the boundaries of traditional parliamentary legality.

The Democratic Party, at both state and federal levels, has focused its energies on the filing of lawsuits seeking orders blocking Trump’s assertion of dictatorial powers. However, the Trump administration has responded to these orders by raving against “corrupt” judges and warning that they are prepared to escalate their ongoing coup against the constitutional separation of powers by ignoring the outcome of these cases.

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley School of Law and a leading constitutional scholar, stated the obvious when he said,

If President Trump ignores court orders and gets away with it, our constitutional form of government is truly at an end.

On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounced concern over a looming constitutional crisis as “fearmongering.” She said, “The real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges in liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump’s basic executive authority,” adding,

We believe these judges are acting as judicial activists rather than honest arbiters of the law.

Workers can have no confidence that their democratic rights and the basic social services on which they and their family members depend can be defended through court actions, because the fight against dictatorship cannot be separated from the fight against the system that produces it—capitalism.

The only social force that can ultimately defeat the White House is the working class. The collective power of millions of workers must be mobilized in the U.S. and throughout the world in an industrial and political struggle against the Trump administration and the billionaire oligarchs behind it, to create the basis for a society based on meeting human needs.

https://mronline.org/2025/02/14/federal ... eze-funds/

"Our founders were hellbent on ensuring that we didn’t have a monarchy, and the first way they thought of that was to give Congress the power of the purse." Well, mebbe so. But just like the Roman Senatorial class the bourgeoise so emulate some warm fuzzies and exemption from taxation go a long way in making tyranny palatable.

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Trump’s Art of the Con is accelerating the collapse of American Empire

Finian Cunningham

February 14, 2025

Dimitri Lascaris says Trump’s chaotic second presidency is hastening the demise of U.S. global power.



Dimitri Lascaris says Trump’s chaotic second presidency is hastening the demise of U.S. global power.

“Trump could turn out to be a godsend for the rest of us if we can avoid a catastrophic war,” says Lascaris.

Dimitri Lascaris is a lawyer, journalist and activist. He worked for many years as a lawyer for some of the biggest corporations on Wall Street. To say he knows a lot about deal-making is an understatement.

Lascaris says Trump’s acclaimed business prowess and “art of the deal” are wildly overrated. He is a failed real estate magnate who has been bankrupted and bailed out numerous times.

His 1987 bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, should have been titled The Art of the Con.

Trump’s proposal to take over Gaza and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East” is typical of his unscrupulous and brutish style. It is ethnic cleansing – a blatant war crime on a massive scale – dressed up by Trump as a wonder deal.

The 47th U.S. president’s stupidity, arrogance and criminality are fully on display.

As Lascaris points out, this does not bode well for Trump’s other big ambition – to produce a peace deal in Ukraine with Russia.

Trump and all recent American leaders have no credibility. They are seen as “agreement incapable”. During his first presidency (2016-2020), Trump broke the Iran nuclear deal and Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia.

It is doubtful that Trump possesses the depth of historical and political understanding to cut a deal over Ukraine. Especially since, as Lascaris notes, Russia has won the war and Trump has no leverage. He will be forced to accept Russia’s exacting terms, which means a humiliating defeat for the U.S. and its NATO proxies.

However, Lascaris warns that denouement could make for an extremely dangerous situation because Trump’s megalomania will find it impossible to accept such a debacle and contradiction to his boasts about “Making America Great Again.”

Lascaris says that Trump’s MAGA slogan will turn out to be MAWA – make America weak again.

His chaotic, irrational, impetuous and unscrupulous mode of business and foreign policy is alienating America’s postwar alliances and client-state relations. Trump is accelerating the demise of the American empire.

As Lascaris points out, Trump’s brutish and bullying behavior is a con to distract from not addressing the deep economic and social problems of the United States.

In Trump’s case, it’s not so much the Art of the Deal as the Art of the Con.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... an-empire/

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‘Going Against Trump Policies Is Not Fraud’: White House Panned Over Absurd Defense of DOGE
Posted on February 14, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Trump opponents are slowly regaining their footing at least as far as messaging is concerned. Here we see DOGE’s central claim, that it is rooting out waste and fraud, not holding up to scrutiny. The numbers tossed about as results are pathetically small, and the instances, as documented below, are not for fraud but merely for initiatives that were authorized and budgeted in the Biden or earlier eras. Musk and his minions are depicting their kneecapping as evidence of bad earlier action, when the reality in nearly all cases in the show of brute force in halting spending is a violation of statute or other provisions. Or rather, Trump is following Nixon: “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Another DOGE plan presented as rooting out corruption is to identify Federal employees whose apparent net worth is excessive compared to their income. That’s all well and good, but guess who is supposed to be in that business? The IRS, for the purpose of finding underreported income and collecting taxes, interest, and penalties. And what has limited that effort? Republicans blocking efforts by the IRS to increase staffing (which BTW would also lead to more agents to answer questions and process tax returns on a timely basis). And they would improve compliance and root out misconduct like money laundering across all America, not just Federal employees. So this is close to being asking for sympathy for being an orphan after having killed your parents.

Remember as Lambert chronicled in Water Cooler, Musk is setting up a parallel government. The Democrats are nowhere to be found in doing much about that. Better messaging is nice but falls way short of what ought to be happening.

By Jake Johnson, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made a show Wednesday of providing “receipts” to bolster the Trump administration’s claim that an Elon Musk-led advisory commission known as DOGE has already uncovered massive fraud at federal agencies.

“There’s a lot of paper we can show you,” Leavitt declared.

But a closer look at the evidence Leavitt presented to members of the press underscores the ridiculous sleight of hand the Trump White House is using as it attempts to justify Musk and his lieutenants’ lawless rampage through departments responsible for overseeing the nation’s public education system, dispersing Social Security benefits, and supporting lifesaving medical research, among other critical functions.

The documents Leavitt waved during Wednesday’s briefing were screenshots of contracts purportedly “found” by the Musk-led DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, which has dispatched staffers—many of them with close ties to Musk—across more than a dozen federal agencies.

One of the items Leavitt highlighted was a $36,000 contract for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Another was a roughly $57,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture for climate change mitigation efforts in Sri Lanka.

Neither of those examples, nor any of the others Leavitt cited, constitute evidence of fraud—a point that one reporter pushed the press secretary to address during the briefing Wednesday.

“Are all those things you just mentioned fraud?” asked CBS News reporter Jennifer Jacobs. “Or are they just contrary to the president’s policies?”

Leavitt’s reply indicated to critics that the Trump administration is defining as “fraudulent” programs which it opposes, a narrative that depicts the administration’s attacks on federal agencies and spending as commonsense efforts to rein in abuse—rather than a far-right demolition project spearheaded by an unelected billionaire with glaring conflicts of interest.

“I would argue that all of these things are fraudulent, they are wasteful, and they are an abuse of the American taxpayer’s dollar,” Leavitt insisted. “This is not what the government should be spending money on. It’s contrary to the president’s priorities and agenda.”

Journalist Aaron Rupar wrote in response to Leavitt that “going against Trump’s policies is not fraud.” (The Government Accountability Office (GAO), which has estimated that the federal government could lose up to $521 billion to fraud per year, defines fraud as “the act of obtaining something of value through willful misrepresentation, which is determined through a court or other adjudicative system.”)

Watch the press secretary’s remarks:

[youtube]http://twitter.com/i/status/1889745097593368796[/youtube]

Journalist and media critic Adam Johnson welcomed the growing push for concrete evidence regarding the large-scale fraud DOGE purports to have revealed during the first 30 days of Trump’s second White House term.

“Musk’s definition of ‘fraud’ is ‘spending priorities duly approved by Congress and previous presidents (including Trump 1.0!) that the richest person on Earth randomly decided he doesn’t like,'” Johnson wrote on social media. “This is obviously not a very honest or useful criteria for ‘fraud’ and thus reporters should frame Musk’s attack on the liberal and administrative state as an ideological project, not one concerned with some type of value-neutral ‘efficiency’ or ‘cost-cutting.'”

Reuters noted Wednesday that “of the 15 agencies Musk’s team have targeted so far, nine were singled out for elimination or downsizing in Project 2025.”

A former Republican staffer acknowledged to Reuters that DOGE’s playbook thus far “has not been for the dollar savings, but more for the philosophical and ideological differences conservatives have with the work these agencies do.”

Since the formal inception of DOGE at the start of Trump’s new term, critics have expressed deep skepticism over the advisory body’s stated mission of identifying and rooting out fraudulent federal spending and regulations, particularly given its leader’s ideological and financial commitments and motivations.

“It’s clearly a bad-faith effort rooted in ignorance and a knee-jerk desire to shrink the federal government, both for ideological reasons and the creation of space to preserve the tax cuts for the rich and corporations that will be locked-in later this year,” Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote last month.

In testimony before the House Oversight Committee earlier this week, Donald Sherman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that “if President Trump was serious about promoting government efficiency,” he would have “prioritized strengthening… already-existing independent government watchdogs,” such as inspectors general across federal departments.

Instead, Trump fired inspectors general en masse, a move that—according to Sherman—”substantially increases the risk that government waste and fraud will go undetected, and unremediated.”

Even when its stated objectives are taken at face value, DOGE has not lived up to the lofty rhetoric of its leader and boosters inside and outside the Trump administration.

Speaking to reporters with Musk at his side earlier this week, Trump claimed without a shred of evidence that DOGE has already found “tens of billions of dollars” in improper government spending. The president added that “when you get down to it, it’s going to be probably close to a trillion”—Musk’s stated goal.

But The Washington Postnoted that Trump’s figure doesn’t “come anywhere close” to matching numbers DOGE has posted on its X account.

“We added up all the figures posted, taking most of them at face value, though virtually no documentation was presented,” the Post observed. “The numbers add up to about $6 billion a year, though $4 billion comes from a proposed cap on National Institutes of Health research overhead payments to universities, medical centers, and other grant recipients. A judge has blocked that for now.”

The Post‘s Aaron Blake wrote in a column Thursday that “Trump would indeed seem to believe that many things he simply doesn’t like or agree with are fraudulent, which helps explain the White House’s posture right now.”

“But that doesn’t mean they are fraudulent,” he added. “And that’s a problem when you’re using that as your justification for dismantling large portions of the government.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... -doge.html

Interview: How Elon Musk Blurs the Lines of Free Speech
Posted on February 15, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Who’d have thunk it? The case of Elon Musk demonstrates that moving from a democratic republic to an open oligarchy is messy!

By Sara Talpos, a contributing editor at Undark. Originally published at Undark

Over time, social media has evolved to function as something of a town square, where Americans come to chat, share information, and organize. Unlike actual town squares, however, these platforms are private enterprises mostly controlled by a handful of billionaires, and they have become powerful gatekeepers for information, including about public health.

As private entities, technology behemoths like Meta and X are free to decide what content can and cannot appear on their sites. But what happens when the owner of a social media company also works for the government, as is now the case with Elon Musk, whose X bio briefly — and perhaps ironically — read “White House Tech Support” last week?

How does this affect First Amendment rights? If X, formerly known as Twitter, decides to suspend a user’s account, does this amount to government censorship? And does it matter that Musk is a special government employee, meaning he is subject to many, but not all, government ethics standards?

Legal experts will need to grapple with such questions, says Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE. The U.S., he says, is steering into uncharted waters, as the distinction between public and private actors becomes blurrier on our tech-mediated town squares.

Additionally, when it comes to public health, Cohn noted, the First Amendment applies — no matter which party is in power.

Our interview was conducted over Zoom, with follow-up via email, and has been edited for length and clarity.

Undark: Is Elon Musk a government actor whose ability to censor speech is restricted by the Constitution?

Ari Cohn: That’s a complicated question. We haven’t really been in this situation before.

Government officials do retain their own First Amendment rights, and not everything a government official does is acting on behalf of the government.

However, Elon Musk has held press conferences on Twitter. He communicates with the public about the work that he does for the government on Twitter. That does raise some First Amendment questions.

We saw reports that Musk was suspending accounts, and I don’t know if he was blocking people, but there were people who had their access restricted. When it comes to restricting people’s ability to a) hear from the government and b) engage with the government, that raises First Amendment issues. There’s a real question as to whether Elon Musk can prevent people from engaging with or reading his posts about government duties.

Then there’s another complicating factor: Blocking no longer prevents people from seeing things on Twitter. You can still see things, but you can’t interact with them. I think there’s still a problem because of the blocking of interacting with the government speech. It’s a thorny factual case that we haven’t really seen before, and it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

UD: Let’s walk through a specific example. On the morning of Feb. 3, the newly-appointed U.S. Attorney General for D.C. tagged Musk on X and posted a letter assuring Musk that the AG’s office would pursue legal action against anyone impeding the work of the U.S. DOGE Service.

Roughly three hours later, Musk replied to an anonymous X account that had posted the names of DOGE employees, which had been publicly reported in a Wired magazine article. Musk replied, “You have committed a crime.” The anonymous X account is now banned. Is this a possible violation of the X user’s free speech rights?

AC: Just to be totally clear: In no way, shape, or form is it remotely illegal to name government employees. It is, in fact, our right to know who is doing work on our behalf vis-a-vis the government. Elon Musk is just flat-out wrong that revealing the identities of people who are gaining access to government systems and shutting down an entire agency — it could not be further from the truth that that is remotely criminal.

There may have been some people who started posting threatening things. I didn’t see anything that would cross the line into a threat that could be punished by law, but I’m sure they exist because it’s social media and people are crazy. But simply naming the employees is protected speech, hands down.

I think there are at least First Amendment questions posed by his suspension of that account. It might come down to whether or not [Musk] was at that moment, in that action, claiming to speak for the State, and having authority to speak for the State. There’s an argument that he was. There’s also an argument that he was doing that as the proprietor of a social media platform. It’s unclear how exactly we will be able to untangle those two things.

UD: After that X incident, FIRE joined a letter to the U.S. Attorney General for the District of Columbia. The letter was also signed by the Association of Health Care Journalists. What do you think is at stake for health care journalists specifically, and journalists broadly?

AC: It’s a sad day, first of all, when one has to remind a sitting United States attorney that the First Amendment is a thing, and he needs to respect it. In general, we are perhaps in a perilous moment for journalism. You see President Trump filing lawsuits, extracting settlements from people who don’t want to be in a fight with the president of the United States, and Brendan Carr at the FCC going after, most recently, a radio station for broadcasting the location of ICE agents, claiming, ridiculously, that that violates their obligation to broadcast in the public interest.

UD: I reported last year on the Murthy v. Missouri case, in which the plaintiffs sued former President Joe Biden’s administration for violating their free speech rights. The government, the plaintiffs argued, had coerced social media companies to moderate certain content that it had deemed misinformation, including posts about Covid-19 vaccines.

Critics of the government effort dubbed it the Censorship-Industrial Complex. It’s interesting that, as far as I’ve seen, those critics have said nothing about what’s happening on X right now. And I wonder how you think about that.

The silence is deafening. It certainly is.

UD: If I recall correctly, FIRE was also concerned about the government’s pandemic-era efforts to persuade social media companies to remove content, including content that many people might consider anti-vaccine. Can you explain why?

AC: FIRE is deeply concerned about government pressure on private speakers and publishers to refrain from conveying disfavored ideas. The First Amendment exists to take the role of deciding what views and ideas are acceptable out of the government’s hands. Government efforts to persuade social media platforms to remove certain views and ideas are more often than not backdoor censorship attempts that rely on the coercive power of the State to force publishers to remove content that the government couldn’t itself prohibit.

And Covid illustrates why we should be deeply skeptical of such activity: Some of what was considered mis/disinformation was later shown to actually be true. The marketplace of ideas works by subjecting ideas to testing and debate, not by government edicts establishing orthodoxy and “truth.”

UD: Teams of federal employees appear to be operating accounts on Bluesky that are critical of President Donald Trump’s administration. See Alt CDC and Alt NIH, for example. What would happen if these employees wanted to use a personal account to post this same content? Can the government fire its employees for criticizing the government if these employees are speaking in a personal capacity?

AC: Citizens do not forfeit their First Amendment rights simply by taking a government job. While the government as an employer has some interest in regulating the speech of its employees made pursuant to their official duties, those employees still have the right to speak as private citizens on matters of public concern. And it is even more important that those who work for the government have the ability to engage in such criticism. They have more knowledge about government activities and often have particularly well-informed positions. Democratic self-governance requires that we be able to hear from those best in a position to speak on matters of government.

UD: One final question I have is about algorithms on X. I’m getting a lot of pro-Trump administration posts in my “For You” feed. Can I be sure that X’s algorithm isn’t prioritizing pro-government content while de-boosting criticism of the Trump administration? And is that a First Amendment issue?

AC: Can you be sure? Absolutely not. It’s a First Amendment issue, but maybe in a different sense. X’s speech is protected. Elon Musk and his company can promote just in the same way a bookseller can recommend books of their choosing. That is the platform’s First Amendment right.

UD: Do you or FIRE have a vision for these platforms going forward?

AC: That is a really big question. We do have a social media report that we put out. It’s on our website that we laid out some recommendations for platforms in terms of fostering a culture of free speech. But at the same time, we will fiercely defend the First Amendment, including platforms’ rights to make those editorial decisions for themselves.

Because if there’s one thing that’s worse than a platform deciding what speech is and isn’t allowed, it’s the government deciding what speech is or isn’t allowed.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... peech.html

Riddle: when was the US ever a true democracy?

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Billionaire Elon Musk seeks to slash the federal spending while saving government handouts for himself

Cutting spending is not “optional,” but “essential,” Musk pontificates, yet does not apply the same rules to government spending on his own corporate endeavors

February 14, 2025 by Peoples Dispatch


Elon Musk attends a press conference with Trump at the Oval Office (Photo: The White House/X)

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, though unelected, has somehow become one of the most powerful government officials in Trump’s administration, charged with slashing the budget for social programs and government departments that administer and support key services for the people of the United States.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative of the Trump administration, has been given an unusual amount of power to cut government services under the pretext of “efficiency”. For example, a federal research agency that tracks the progress of the nation’s students—the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences—has been cut to the tune of almost USD 900 million. DOGE has waged a very public war against the federal workforce, including by seeking to access the ultra-sensitive payment system for federal workers—a move which was blocked following a legal counterattack by organized labor.

Currently, Musk has cut or temporarily removed thousands from the federal workforce. At least 8,800 workers have been affected from agencies the Trump administration has targeted directly, across primarily USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but also the General Services Administration, which supports the functioning of federal agencies, the Education Department, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which coordinates disaster response nationwide.

Musk has set his sights against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, writing “CFPB RIP,” alongside a gravestone emoji on X. Some of Musk’s corporate initiatives, such as turning his social media endeavor X into a virtual wallet where users can send money to each other, have come under increased scrutiny by the CFPB. DOGE has combatted these efforts at government regulation and oversight by gaining access to the CFPB headquarters and computer systems.

Some have denounced Musk’s attacks against the CFPB. “It’s clear who Trump serves—and it’s not you,” wrote former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. “Without the CFPB, giant financial institutions—like banks, mortgage lenders, credit card companies, and debt collection companies—will have an easier time picking your pocket.”

Musk and Trump have justified attacks on government services and regulations as a way to combat fraud and boost efficiency. Cutting spending is not “optional,” but “essential,” Musk pontificates during a press conference with Trump in the Oval Office.

Musk’s ventures are subsidized by the federal government
But cutting spending does not seem to apply to the US government’s spending on Musk and his capitalist endeavors.

This week, Musk’s rocket company SpaceX was cementing a “supplemental” contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), adding USD 7.5 million to the company’s work with the government agency. The US government has already committed USD 3.9 million to SpaceX as part of a deal with NASA, which is expected to cost up to USD 4.4 million. DOGE has not announced any funding cuts to NASA thus far. Trump has nominated tech billionaire Jared Isaacman, who has close ties to Musk, to head NASA. Isaacman’s payment processing company has also come under regulation by the CFPB. As reported by The Lever, Isaacman’s company was fined by federal regulators belonging to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for not properly disclosing USD 4.7 million in payments to the relatives of the company’s executives.

Musk’s automobile company, Tesla, was forecasted to win a USD 400 million contract with the State Department, however, this appears to no longer be the case. Following the reporting of the latest filing of the Department of State’s Procurement Forecast for the fiscal year 2025 by Drop Site News, the Department quietly edited the public document to remove the word “Tesla”.

In responding to a segment on MSNBC by commentator Rachel Maddow on the contract, Elon Musk wrote on X, “Hey @Maddow, why the lie?”

In the last decade, SpaceX and Tesla’s contracts with the US government have been worth at least USD 18 billion. SpaceX’s federal contracts in particular skyrocketed by billions of dollars under the Biden administration.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/02/14/ ... r-himself/

******

So many contradictions, so little time...Contradictions between what is said, contradictions between what is said and what is done. Anyone saying they know what's really going on is full of shit, and that includes Trump. I suspect he is as addled as Biden.

Long time critics of the Biden regime swooned when Little Marco indicated that 'multipolarity is the coming thing. Some came in their pants when Trump proposed that the US Russia and China halve their military expenditures. How can any thinking person believe that those proposals are real and serious? Can any observer of the USA think for a second that the MIC and their pet congresscritters would allow such things, much less Trump's ego? People see what they want to see. As desirable as those statements are the reality of the USA renders them nonsense in the current context.
Ya can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

[blindpig]

USAID: the Empire Reinvents Itself
By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on February 13, 2025


Musk and Trump, photo: Aaron Schwartz, Bloomberg

Elon Musk, sworn in as Secretary for Government Efficiency, thundered: “The time has come for USAID to die.” His words resonated like the harbinger of an imminent storm. Shortly afterwards, Donald Trump, on his first day back in the White House, ordered the suspension of almost all US foreign assistance for three months, especially that of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

The closure was abrupt and forceful: dozens of senior officials were sent on forced leave, thousands of contractors were laid off and the USAID headquarters in Washington closed its doors without warning. As if they had never existed, the agency’s website and its X account disappeared from the digital world, leaving behind a vacuum that was soon filled with speculation and rumors on the Internet.

The confusion increased when, from the Dominican Republic and at the end of his first tour of Latin America, the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, announced that his department would take over the functions that the agency had been performing until then. Rubio, appointed as acting administrator of USAID, assured that Washington’s foreign aid would continue, but with one condition: “It must make sense and align with our national interests.”

This move, which some want to see as a mere administrative restructuring, is a strategic shift that augurs profound changes in US foreign policy aimed at greater efficiency and new repressive measures. The aim is not to park the objectives of the agency recognized as a front for the CIA, but quite the opposite, to adjust them and perfect the empire’s system of international influence. As Dr. Vergerus would say in Igmar Bergman’s film Das schlangenei, “anyone can see the future here, it’s like a snake’s egg. Through the thin membrane you can make out a reptile already formed”.

USAID, born in 1961 during the Cold War, had become a colossus of interference, covert operations and destabilization networks. While doing charity work in some countries, they tried to dismantle any opposition to Washington’s allies. It has also been the scene of scandalous cases of corruption. Without going any further, last week the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that it is investigating Juan Guaidó, the short-lived interim president of Venezuela, and his ambassador in Washington, Carlos Vecchio, for embezzling one billion dollars, managed between 2018 and 2020 under the guise of “humanitarian aid”. These funds, channeled through USAID, vanished in a whirlwind of opaque spending.

In the case of Cuba, the covert program known as ZunZuneo, the failed “Cuban Twitter,” is notorious. Funded by USAID and designed to stoke “dissidence” on the island. Millions of dollars were funneled into shell companies, while violating the legislation of several countries, including that of the US.

Trump, pragmatic and ruthless, seems to have understood that USAID’s covert operations are not only ineffective on the ground, but also difficult to control and counterproductive. It is foreseeable that the millions of dollars that fed these failed operations will be redirected towards more subtle and effective channels. For example, they will cease to flow to Spanish-language propaganda websites operating out of Florida which, although useful for spreading toxic content against Havana on social networks, lack the legitimacy and reach necessary to reach US public opinion.

It is likely that the money will be allocated to media and spokespersons with greater weight in US and international public opinion. It will also go to the coffers of private contractors, as analysts warn. In a sort of “Gattopardism”, the “regime change” programs do not disappear with USAID’s subordination to the State Department, but rather the immoralities of the interventionist and anti-democratic methodologies of USAID and other international “aid” agencies will deepen the control of the “deep state” and the austerity policies of the new Trump administration.

The closure of USAID and the transfer of its functions to the State Department are more than a bureaucratic maneuver. It is the prelude to a more aggressive foreign policy, more aligned with the interests of the ultra-conservative sectors of the US, and much more refined in communicational and political terms. In this new scenario, the manipulation of information and the use of funds to promote ideological agendas could intensify, with direct consequences in countries such as Cuba, where the media battle is just another aspect of the economic, financial and diplomatic blockade that the island has endured for decades.

Thus, the disappearance of USAID marks the end of an era, but also the beginning of a new phase in US interference, more sophisticated, more covert and, perhaps, more dangerous.

Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English

https://resumen-english.org/2025/02/usa ... ts-itself/

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Trump Wants Peace in Ukraine, But Why Not in Gaza?
February 14, 2025

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies on the contradiction of Trump pursuing an end to the war in Ukraine while supporting the genocide in Palestine.


President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday. (White House, Molly Riley)

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies
Common Dreams

As we approach the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a monumental shift is taking place that might just lead to the end of this calamitous war.

This is not a breakthrough on the battlefield, but a stark reversal of the U.S. position from being the major supplier of weapons and funding to prolong the war to one of peacemaker.

Donald Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine if he was re-elected as president. On Feb. 12, he started to make good on that promise by holding a 90-minute call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Biden had refused to talk to since the war began.

They agreed that they were ready to begin peace negotiations “immediately,” and Trump then called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and spent an hour discussing the conditions for what Zelenskyy called a “lasting and reliable peace.”

At the same time, the new U.S. defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, unveiled Trump’s new policy in more detail at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, saying, “The bloodshed must stop. And this war must end.”

There are two parts to the new policy that Hegseth announced. First, he said that Trump “intends to end this war by diplomacy and bringing both Russia and Ukraine to the table.”

Secondly, he said that the United States is handing off the prime responsibility for arming Ukraine and guaranteeing its future security to the European members of NATO.

Assigning Europe the role of security guarantor is a transparent move to shield the U.S. from ongoing responsibility for a war that it played a major role in provoking and prolonging by scuttling previous negotiations.

If the Europeans will not accept their assigned role in Trump’s plan, or Zelenskyy or Putin reject it, the United States may yet have to play a larger role in security guarantees for Ukraine than Trump or many Americans would like. Zelenskyy told the Guardian on Feb. 11 that, for Ukraine, “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees.”

After blocking peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022, the Biden administration rejected peace negotiations over Ukraine for nearly three years.

Biden insisted that Ukraine must recover all of its internationally recognized territory, including the Crimea and Donbas regions that separated from Ukraine after the U.S.-backed coup in Kyiv in 2014.


German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius and Hegseth in Brussels on Wednesday. (NATO, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Hegseth opened the door to peace by clearly and honestly telling America’s European allies,

“…we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”

Spelling out the U.S. plan in more detail, Hegseth went on by saying that a

“durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again. This must not be Minsk 3.0. That said, the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement. Instead any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.”

Neutrality for Ukraine

NATO membership for Ukraine has always been totally unacceptable to the Russians. Trump and Hegseth’s forthrightness in finally pulling the plug, after the U.S. has dangled NATO membership in front of successive Ukrainian governments since 2008, marks a critical recognition that neutrality offers the best chance for Ukraine to coexist with Russia and the West without being a battleground between them.

Trump and Hegseth expect Europe to assume prime responsibility for Ukraine, while the Pentagon will instead focus on Trump’s two main priorities: on the domestic front, deporting immigrants, and on the international front, confronting China.

Hegseth justified this as “a division of labor that maximizes our comparative advantages in Europe and the Pacific respectively.”

Elaborating on the role the U.S. plan demands of its European allies, Hegseth explained,

“If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. And they should not be covered under Article 5. There also must be robust international oversight of the line of contact. To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine … Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.”

To say that U.S. forces will never fight alongside European forces in Ukraine, and that Article 5, the mutual defense commitment in the NATO Charter, will not apply to European forces in Ukraine, is to go a step farther than simply denying NATO membership to Ukraine, by carving out Ukraine as an exclusion zone where the NATO Charter no longer applies, even to NATO members.


Zelensky at a NATO-Ukraine Council meeting on July 12, 2023. (NATO/Flickr,
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

While Trump plans to negotiate directly with Russia and Ukraine, the vulnerable position in which his plan would place European NATO members means that they, too, will want a significant say in the peace negotiations and probably demand a U.S. role in Ukraine’s security guarantees.

So Trump’s effort to insulate the U.S. from the consequences of its actions in Ukraine may be a dead letter before he even sits down to negotiate with Russia and Ukraine.

Hegseth’s reference to the Minsk Accords highlights the similarities between Trump’s plans and those agreements in 2014 and 2015, which largely kept the peace in Eastern Ukraine from then until 2022.


Feb. 12, 2015: Putin, French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko at the Normandy format talks in Minsk, Belarus. (Kremlin)

Western leaders have since admitted that they always intended to use the relative peace created by the Minsk Accords to build up Ukraine militarily, so that it could eventually recover Donetsk and Luhansk by force, instead of granting them the autonomous status agreed to in the Accords.

Russia will surely insist on provisions that prevent the West from using a new peace accord in the same way, and would be highly unlikely to agree to substantial Western military forces or bases in Ukraine as part of Ukraine’s security guarantees. President Putin has always insisted that a neutral Ukraine is essential to lasting peace.

There is, predictably, an element of “having their cake and eating it too” in Trump and Hegseth’s proposals. Even if the Europeans take over most of the responsibility for guaranteeing Ukraine’s future security, and the U.S. has no Article 5 obligation to support them, the United States would retain its substantial command and control position over Europe’s armed forces through NATO.

Trump is still demanding that its European members increase their military spending to 5 percent of GDP, far more than the U.S. spends on its bloated, wasteful, and defeated war machine.

Biden was ready to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian,” as retired U.S. diplomat Chas Freeman said in March 2022, and to enrich U.S. weapons companies with rivers of Ukrainian blood. Is Trump now preparing to fight Russia to the last British, French, German or Polish soldier too if his peace plan fails?


Putin during a meeting in St Petersburg in September 2024. (Kremlin)

Trump’s call with Putin and Hegseth’s concessions on NATO and Ukraine’s territorial integrity left many European leaders reeling. They complained that the U.S. was making concessions behind their backs, that these issues should have been left to the negotiating table, and that Ukraine should not be forced to give up on NATO membership.

European NATO members have legitimate concerns to work out with the new U.S. administration, but Trump and Hegseth are right to finally and honestly tell Ukraine that it will not become a NATO member, to dispel this tragic mirage and let it move on into a neutral and more peaceful future.

There has also been a backlash from Republican war hawks, while the Democrats, who have been united as the party of war when it comes to Ukraine, will likely try to sabotage Trump’s efforts.

On the other hand, maybe a few brave Democrats will recognize this as a chance to reclaim their party’s lost heritage as the more dovish of America’s two legacy parties, and to provide desperately needed new progressive foreign policy leadership in Congress.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Trump’s peace initiative is a gamechanger and a new chance for peace that the United States and its allies should embrace, even as they work out their respective responsibilities to provide security guarantees for Ukraine.

It is also a time for Europe to realize that it can’t just mimic U.S. foreign policy and expect U.S. protection in return. Europe’s difficult relationship with Trump’s America may lead to a new modus operandi and a re-evaluation (or maybe even the end?) of NATO.

Meanwhile, those of us anxious to see peace in Ukraine should applaud President Trump’s initiative but we should also highlight the glaring contradictions of a president who finds the killing in Ukraine unacceptable but fully supports the genocide in Palestine.


Trump announcing his plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza on Feb. 4 at the White House, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looking on. (The White House, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Given that most of the casualties in Ukraine are soldiers, while most of the maimed and killed in Palestine are civilians, including thousands of children, the compassionate, humanitarian case for peace is even stronger in Palestine than in Ukraine.

So why is Trump committed to stopping the killing in Ukraine but not in Gaza? Is it because Trump is so wedded to Israel that he refuses to rein in its slaughter? Or is it just that Ukrainians and Russians are white and European, while Palestinians are not?

If Trump can reject the political arguments that have fueled three years of war in Ukraine and apply compassion and common sense to end that war, then he can surely do the same in the Middle East.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/14/t ... t-in-gaza/

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'Maximum pressure' on Iran: real threat or negotiating manoeuvre?
14 Feb 2025 , 2:17 pm .


Donald Trump resumes the agenda of "maximum pressure" against Iran (Photo: Bloomberg)

The Trump administration has resumed its strategy of " maximum pressure" on Iran in an attempt to force not only the renegotiation of the nuclear deal but also to restrict its room for maneuver in the region, with the clear aim of undermining its geopolitical influence in West Asia.

This was established on February 4 when the US president signed a "Presidential Memorandum on National Security" in which he ordered the Secretary of the Treasury to intensify punitive economic measures to suffocate the economy of the aforementioned country.

Despite the harshness of the decision, Trump expressed his regret when signing the memorandum, saying: "I'm divided on this issue. Everybody wants me to sign it. I will. It's very hard on Iran." During the ceremony, he added that he hoped the document "will hardly have to be used."

This adds nuance to the Republican's stance because it shows that, although he is taking a hard line, he is leaving open the possibility of moderation or negotiation in the future.

The economic siege
Since the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018 , Washington has attempted to erode Tehran's ability to maneuver through increasingly aggressive sanctions. Now, the instrument underpins this strategy with three key axes: preventing the development of nuclear and ballistic capabilities, neutralizing its regional influence and suffocating its economy through the Treasury Department.

In practice, this could translate into the elimination of existing exemptions , the persecution of economic actors and diplomatic pressure aimed at reviving international restrictions. Even previous concessions such as those granted for the development of the Chabahar port are under review and will probably be revoked.

The emphasis on “zeroing out” the country’s oil exports both directly impacts its economy and also introduces a source of tension in global energy markets. States such as China, India and Turkey, which have maintained trade relations with the Islamic Republic despite these measures , will be forced to maneuver amid the pressures.

The presidential order also deepens the offensive against Iranian financial and logistical networks on U.S. soil, in an attempt to justify, under the pretext of national security, a policy of sustained harassment : "The Attorney General will take all available legal measures to investigate, disrupt, and prosecute financial and logistical networks, as well as agents or front groups within the United States that are sponsored by Iran or a terrorist proxy of that nation."

The measure is part of Trump's electoral strategy, which uses anti-Iranian rhetoric to secure the support of ultra-conservative sectors and the pro-Israeli lobby .

The language of the document reflects the intransigence of the Trump administration, which explicitly rules out any negotiations under the current terms. By proclaiming the end of "tolerance" toward Iran and emphasizing that it will never be able to develop a nuclear weapon, the White House aims to project an image of strength.

However, a closer look at the actions taken in less than a month of government suggests that this initial harshness is not just rhetoric but a continuation of the "maximum pressure" strategy implemented in the first term. Beyond the high-sounding statements of Mike Pompeo at the time, this policy sought to force Tehran to sit at the negotiating table under conditions favorable to Washington.

An example of this approach can be seen in the relationship with Mexico , as Trump imposed tariffs as a pressure measure but shortly after spoke with the Mexican president , Claudia Sheinbaum, which led to a pause in the restrictions and opened spaces for negotiation.

This tactic indicates that, despite its inflexible rhetoric, the US government is well aware that it must prepare the ground for future negotiations with Iran, once it has consolidated a position of strength.

Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian said that while Trump is trying to "bring Iran to its knees" with his "maximum pressure," any attempt at dialogue seems to be just a facade as the United States continues to fuel tensions through concrete actions such as sanctions. For his part, the president continues to emphasize that he will not submit to external pressure and maintains his rejection of the US policy of intervention.

On the other hand, "this is a step in the water, but not because Trump necessarily wants to tread carefully," said Tom Keatinge , director of the Centre for Finance and Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London. "This is a way of sending a message and putting everyone involved in the movement of Iranian oil on notice."

However, such a strategy also carries risks for its own agenda. If the Persian nation faces an increasingly aggressive encirclement , it could in the future choose to further strengthen its ties with powers such as China and Russia, expand its trade mechanisms to evade sanctions, and double its influence in regional conflicts , which would end up further challenging American interests in the region. Indeed, according to records , Iran transported 587 million barrels of oil in 2024, 91% of which was destined for China.

Ultimately, this executive action marks a resurgence of the confrontation between the United States and Iran, with implications that go beyond the bilateral. The extreme economic pressure will have destabilizing effects in the region, a geopolitical struggle that is only just beginning.

AGGRESSION AND NEGOTIATION
The first package of sanctions implemented under this new mandate has raised doubts about the seriousness and real impact of the "maximum pressure" policy.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced measures against a small group of ships involved in the Iranian oil trade, including the CH Billion , a 21-year-old Aframax, and two other vessels, the Gioiosa and the Star Forest .

This decision also affects several entities and individuals linked to the export of crude oil from the Persian country to China. OFAC explained that this new sanctioning attack focuses on vessels operating in international waters off the coast of Singapore, from where they transport Iranian oil to China.

Energy analysts , however, believe that this package of sanctions does not constitute a true "maximum pressure" campaign but rather a limited action with a marginal impact on the oil market.

Initially, markets reacted with uncertainty to the possibility of supply chain disruptions. However, the outlook moderated when, following the aggressive executive action, Trump expressed his willingness to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran that would allow the country to "grow and prosper peacefully . "

He also posted on his social media : "Reports that the United States, working in conjunction with Israel, is going to blow Iran to pieces ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED."

This softening of the rhetoric suggests that, although Trump maintains an aggressive rhetoric, he may also be exploring alternative avenues of negotiation with Tehran.

In short, the strategy seems to be aimed at weakening while leaving the door to dialogue ajar, in a game of pressure and political calculation.

Negotiation possible?
Concrete benefits and guarantees of compliance would be essential for Iran to consider dialogue with Washington. The unilateral US withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018 destroyed confidence in any long-term commitment. In response, Tehran has insisted that any new treaty must include safeguards to prevent US policy from continuing to impose arbitrary conditions.

In response, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said: "The Americans did not keep their side of the agreement. This is an experience from which we must learn. We negotiated, we made concessions, we compromised, but we did not achieve the results we sought. And despite all its flaws, the other side ultimately violated and destroyed the agreement."

Energy experts say that in order to significantly affect the Asian country's oil exports, Washington would have to widen its web of restrictions and sanction more related entities.

"Reducing Iran's oil exports requires widening the net and sanctioning more entities involved in the trade," said Matthew Reed , vice president of Foreign Reports.

Argus Media 's Nader Itayim believes that these sanctions could deter "the most cautious Chinese buyers," although their effect on reducing crude supply would be limited. To achieve a more significant reduction in exports, he says, it would be necessary to intensify pressure on Chinese ports, as well as on buyers, intermediaries and even the country's banks.

Iran has proven its ability to overcome harassment after more than 40 years of operating under creative triangulation schemes. A new package of restrictions does not come as a surprise to the government of that nation.

Ultimately, Trump's "maximum pressure" strategy, characteristic of his negotiating style, suggests that initial aggressiveness could only be the prelude to a strategic adjustment: if the siege does not yield immediate results, the White House could opt for a greater escalation or, on the contrary, for an offer of negotiation disguised as a concession. However, so far the tycoon seems to be leaning towards the second option.

The "almost never having to be used" that he mentioned in reference to the memorandum could be the Cartesian axes within which the Washington-Tehran relationship will develop in the short term.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/ma ... egociacion

Google Translator

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X post:

As for Trump, the source comments: “Look at what the dyed hair, the caked-on make-up, his wild eyes are signaling: since the Inauguration Trump’s decline has become more evident across the board. His repetition of the same points, over and over again, with one wild assertion after another, is also a clear sign that he is losing his mind. His condition is going to get worse, much, much worse, and soon. As that happens, the things happening in the name of ‘President Trump’s wishes’ will accelerate and grow worse. https://johnhelmer.net/modi-takes-his-b ... more-91104

[blindpig]

Trump Repurposes USAID to Technocrats and Uses ‘Ceasefire’ to Legalize Full Zionist-US Takeover of Palestine
February 19, 2025


Tesla CEO Elon Musk joins US President Donald Trump as he signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the WHite House in Washington, DC. Photo: AFP.

By Fiorella Isabel – Feb 13, 2025

I must have fallen down Alice’s tunnel (sadly sans psychedelics), because I’ve been sent back to 2003 during the War in Iraq, except this time the people who opposed it are cheerleading George, I like to draw stick-figures, W. Bush, as a hero. At least that’s what the “mainstream alternative media,” algorithmically pushed by Elon and other oligarchs say. Those who gate-keep analysis and journalism as if it’s only valuable if they or the same ten people who go on the same six major YouTube shows agree.

Why am I saying this you ask? Well it’s evident that Donald J. Trump’s presidency has been inorganically manufactured to convince everyone that he is the man to “save America” and the World from the “globalist communist elites.” The problem is one, the globalists are liberal and conservative capitalists, and two, Trump is a billionaire influenced by technocratic oligarchs and zionists. Thus, his foreign policy is nothing but a deep-state continuation of the next phase of US empire, one that’s increasingly dangerous for US citizens and those in its downward path of wrath.

In essence, the Biden administration oversaw the destruction of Gaza, the war in Ukraine, mass censorship of those against war and the increase of the surveillance state, while Trump will come in as the fixer to clean up “Biden’s mess” by legalizing the total ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, expanding Greater Israel, “ending” the war in Ukraine to move it elsewhere ( more on this in the next article), censoring the left-leaning, anti-zionist voices of dissent, and will effectively continue the same imperial foreign policy in its new phase. This isn’t real change but rather continuity with a new face, new brand and new facet. The harsh reality is you’ve been played. Now before I get called “black-pilled” or negative because you fail to believe me, I’m actually a realistic optimist, so here’s the how and why.

“Trump destroyed USAID!” Well, not exactly…
The problem with US politics is that they push people to take a red or blue stance with no nuance in between. Sensationalism trumps (pun intended), deeper, more critical analysis. Naturally when the news came out that President Trump called to dismantle the wasteful, liberal agency, most of the Trump-Musk chosen media sphere came out hailing it as a massive victory, especially when the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID website and its Twitter/X account was taken down. And it wasn’t just the right, but the newly formed alternative mainstream media and those wanting to be a part of it, because of the clicks and cash flow, hailing this as a total destruction of Washington’s liberal intelligence arm. The grim reality is far more nefarious but also more believable, than Trump doing away with an agency he and the vast majority of neocons have relied on for decades, because he is against the “deep state.”

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, grounded in the authority of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act which was designed to counter Soviet influence overseas, USAID was created via executive order by President John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War in 1961. Now, props for pissing off Samantha Power, former head admin for USAID, who recently penned an op-ed in the New York Times, crying about how killing USAID is a “win for autocrats everywhere” and yet admitting that this does undermine “national security and global influence.” A woman well scorned, is Power, who has been one of the key architects of covert, pro-democracy operations around the globe. Who can forget her rant as the then US Ambassador to the UN, “Are you truly incapable of shame?”, aimed against Iran, Russia, and Syria for the manufactured Aleppo attacks blaming Assad. Back then only a few spoke against Power’s narrative but today we know that behind this were the same terrorists and al-Qaeda factions they supported then to overthrow Assad, and who they welcome today into the halls of DC, as the rebranded “leaders” of the “New Syria,” currently harassing and killing civilians en mass.

Politico, Reuters, NPR, the BBC and most of the Western mainstream media stenographers, over 6200 of them across 707 media outlets and 279 media NGOs, have of course been upset as much of their funding came from USAID and it’s so far been pulled. In other words these networks were paid to spread pro-Western, pro-war propaganda especially against Russia, China, and Iran. It was also quite gratuitous to see the outlet The Intercept, which was already shady during the Snowden leaks, regularly doxed people and other journalists and weirdly managed to receive “leaked” material no one else had access to, with some of us (long) suspecting its government ties, be exposed as exactly that: a US-funded outlet, limited hangout, with a superficial anti-establishment veneer aimed at cosplaying as anti-empire.

Now much of this funding is nothing new though it’s caught the attention of those who had no idea, much of the funding has been on USASpending government site. But now that the USAID website is gone, tracking will be more difficult as all of this will be more centralized and without public access as well. So while it’s nice to see Power and others lose their handle and admit they want it back, Trump’s actions are not stripping the intel apparatus from power or “crippling” the US regime change network apparatus, but rather act as a trojan horse, transferring power into the hands of billionaire technocrats via centralized vacuum of privatized, overt operations. Marco Rubio has announced that he is now the agency’s new head in charge of all operations of USAID, and has said he always supported aid but it’s not “charity” and needs to be “reformed.” Essentially, it seems this arm is being repurposed into the State Department rather than dissolved like too many desperately claimed.

USAID has long been a core problem of our intelligence-run “government” by both “parties”
Before the right suddenly woke up one day 40 years too late and found out that the USAID is a money pit, intel cut out, the smart left and anti-imperialist sectors have long divulged that it uses the State Department and intelligence operations to finance soft-power imperial efforts to control and manipulate political influence in sovereign countries. This is nothing new and in fact has been long supported by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump, and others who said nothing until now when they could make this a hyper-partisan, “democrat” issue, when it is actually a core function of the intelligence apparatus we call our government.

According to USAID friendly, “Voice of America,” in 2019 Trump TRIPLED US support and aid for “pro-democracy” work in Venezuela or regime change ops, to $52 million, directly funding failed coup leader Juan Guaido to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro. In fact, it was Donald Trump who had publicly posed using a “possible military action” to deal with Venezuela and in 2019 his administration launched a covert CIA operation to hack Venezuela’s military payroll system.

When Guaido named himself interim president of Venezuela on January 23, 2019, Washington quickly recognized him and placed some of the harshest sanctions on Caracas, targeting their state-owned oil company, PDVSA or Petróleos de Venezuela, and freezing billions in assets. Before Trump came in, Caracas had been low in the priority target for the intel apparatus at Langley but this time they convened a “Venezuela Task Force,” which centered at hacking the country’s government networks and other infrastructure to gather intelligence. They managed to successfully attack the state-run payroll system in an effort to cause anger among Venezuelan officials paid via the system, and also upped their online efforts to “promote democracy.” I mention this because this was actually a covert CIA operation that was not using USAID but it was virtually indistinguishable from it, and more overtly relied on directly using Central Intelligence. The mission failed and it was one of the administration’s largest marked blunders in Latin America, but it did cause great harm to Venezuela’s economy.



The administration fully relied on USAID again when then Senator Marco Rubio actually led a delegation to the Colombian city of Cúcuta, at the border between Venezuela and Colombia that year, to “inspect” the status of “US aid” to Caracas, in the USAID ground distribution center. It is well-documented that Rubio was the central architect on the development of the Trump White House foreign policy toward Venezuela and Cuba. At the time Rubio said not allowing aid to fly into Venezuela via USAID would be a “crime against humanity.”

Cúcuta was of course the center of the migrant crisis where many Venezuelans had been crossing into Colombia and abroad. Rubio traveled alongside Carlos Trujillo, the US ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), and US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, whose congressional district in Florida hosts a growing Venezuelan exile community, full of anti-Maduro, pro-regime change Venezuelans, similarly to what we’ve seen with Cuba. “Seeing human suffering from afar is one thing; experiencing it firsthand and meeting the people while hearing their stories is another…What is happening in Venezuela is a man-made crisis of epic proportions,” Rubio stated upon arriving at the center.

Interestingly the crisis of Venezuelans is man-made but mostly by the sanctions placed by the US as well as the thievery of its assets. Sanctions exacerbate the migration crisis, which of course Rubio and others refuse to talk about but are well aware since that is their intent. Economic problems from sanctions force Venezuelans to blame their government, turn on it, immigrate, and then republicans fundraise off “ending” said migration, as they continue their sanctions and interventions which caused the problem. It doesn’t mean sanctioned governments are perfect without them and I know it’s circular but this is truly the problem here. And Rubio along with those fundraising to “stop immigration” or the liberals collecting donations to “protect” immigrants wouldn’t have money or careers if they actually tried solving the problem.

In 2019 Donald Trump authorized the CIA to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media geared toward turning Chinese public opinion against the government. At the time when Trump had supposedly “drained the swamp,” former intel officials told Reuters that the CIA established a small group of operatives who employed fake online identities to disseminate negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s administration while leaking unfavorable intelligence to international news organizations. The CIA team disseminated claims that members of the ruling Communist Party were concealing illicit funds abroad and criticized China’s Belt and Road Initiative as “corrupt and wasteful,” despite its role in financing infrastructure projects in developing nations. The efforts aimed to instill paranoia among top leaders in China, compelling the government to allocate resources toward investigating perceived intrusions into Beijing’s tightly controlled internet. “We wanted them chasing ghosts,” one official remarked. This may sound familiar if you know the regime change playbook, and this is exactly how the Trump administration will continue to operate.



Back in 2014 during the Obama administration, Democracy Now, which my Truthwire cohost Craig Jardula and I call “Democracy Later” for its now milquetoast approach, interviewed Peter Kornbluh who stated that USAID “is clearly in the job of trying to bring about regime change in Cuba,” having financed a “Cuban Twitter” program, ZunZuneo (circa 2009), which sent private contractors into Cuba to secretly set up satellite communications networks and “undermine the Communist Cuban government.” According to the AP, it was trying to set up a covert Twitter network full of secret bank accounts, shell companies, and full-access multinational platforms. There was also a murky office, called the “Office of Transition Initiative” (OTI), effectively competing with the CIA in building creative regime change programs in Cuba. The program focused on disenchanted youth, common in regime change operations, to establish a communication network among Cubans. This aimed to promote a political narrative and organize opposition through an independent communications platform once sufficient dissent was generated. USAID has always received money from Congress to push for covert operations via the guise of “democracy,” actions which are as American as apple pie. And as you can see the attacks against nations like Cuba for example, come from both the democrats and republicans, fully displaying their true identity as two sides of the same coin, that of the uniparty.



We’ve also known the intervention in Maidan, which eventually led to the War in Ukraine, our meddling in Eastern Europe, our regime change operations in Libya under Samantha Power and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, our numerous interventions and coups in Latin America as mentioned above and including Nicaragua and Bolivia (time capsule back to Elon’s infamous “We’ll coup who we want to coup!”), Uruguay, and Haiti, as well as our efforts to lie and say Assad gassed his own people, plus so much more, were all done with participation of USAID and the CIA. In 2023 Ukraine received the most funding from USAID out of anyone, gathering 37% of the pie, with other notable recipients including Afghanistan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Jordan.

We can add USAID funding as the culprit behind the massive censorship that took down multiple Youtube channels, including yours truly’s, which was when Google-owned Youtube was run by Susan Wojcicki. At that time they decided to attack those they deemed threats to the establishment narratives, suspending channels challenging the COVID, election or Russia-Ukraine narratives via “disinformation” policies. But none of this excuses the fact that USAID isn’t gone but is rather being rebranded into the State Department, full of neocons and now more technocrats with deep ties to the intelligence apparatus.



Elon and the technocratic-intel power grab via the controlled demolition of USAID
What happens when a covert US intel arm like USAID, disappears after decades of existing? It doesn’t. Like the energy that propels it, USAID cannot and will not be created or destroyed by the same universe which needs it to exist, but the vacuum that it leaves will be merely absorbed and transformed.

Billionaire technocrat Elon “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Boy” Musk, who the gullible in the world have come to hail as the “free speech King” of X/Twitter, and the guy wants to put a microchip in your brain via Neuralink, has been raving about his new baby DOGE or the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency. Elon, who is in charge of this department, said he plans to use technology to cut government spending by hiring staff connected to his companies, including Space X and Tesla. These staffers and Musk will have full access to sensitive information within government and payment systems.

Some lawmakers have already raised concerns as sensitive data from the Department of Education has reportedly been fed into AI software. According to the Washington Post, the DOGE team is utilizing AI through Microsoft’s Azure cloud service to analyze departmental finances. This use of AI allegedly involves personally identifiable information related to grant managers and sensitive internal financial data. While using AI in federal agencies isn’t new, inputting sensitive data into commercial AI software heightens the risk of leaks or cyberattacks. The fact that hyper-partisan nonsense may drive liberals against Elon’s DOGE or Trump’s government does not discount the problems that actually exist nor the worrying ties to deep state technocrats.

Several figures connected to Musk have been appointed to senior roles in government agencies, and they are not being forced to consider clear conflicts of interests. Tom Krause, former CEO of the Silicon Valley-based Cloud Software Group, was recently assigned to oversee the Treasury Department’s payment system, which handles trillions annually. Krause oversaw mass, quick, layoffs at his company for three consecutive years while implementing a return-to-office mandate and strict performance ratings. The Bureau of Fiscal Service distributes over $5 trillion annually for Social Security, Medicare, tax refunds, and various programs. Musk has called on social media for these payments to be halted unilaterally, labeling them as illegal.

Amanda Scales, formerly with Musk at xAI, is now chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), effectively the government’s HR department. Riccardo Biasini, who worked at Tesla and the Boring Company, serves as a senior adviser to the OPM director and is listed as the contact for a new email system implemented by the Trump administration. Former Tesla software engineer Thomas Shedd is leading the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services unit, responsible for developing technology for the government. Michael Ellis, one of Rumble’s top execs and former ex-Naval intelligence officer who served in the first Trump administration’s National Security Council and was General counsel of the NSA, compiling the House Intelligence Committee’s report on the Snowden leaks, has been appointed as deputy director of the CIA.



Then there’s Vice President JD Vance’s connections to Peter Thiel and the “Paypal Mafia.” Vance after all was recommended to Trump via Musk and Sacks, all members of this mafia who crafted the online payment company. Thiel, his hero, funded his Senate campaign with a $15 million donation. Trump’s administration is also entirely supported by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, a close associate of Thiel. Lonsdale has bragged about how great DOGE is and that many of his friends are involved and looking forward to cutting “so much waste” in government, emphasizing that when such efficiency occurs with money, (his) companies like Palantir and Andurill “win.”

But of course when technocrats boast of big-tech, silicon valley platforms making a huge profit, it should worry most since it means the average citizen is certainly not going to see any returns on the investments made by the 1%, especially those working in big tech surveillance platforms and certainly when the most zionist administration in U.S. history is taking all the alleged money it’s saving from DOGE, around $1 million, and giving it to Israel via a new arms package. Palantir’s software has been used for extreme data-mining at the behest of the Pentagon and the CIA, especially as an intelligence platform to fight the “War on terror,” making its debut rounds in Afghanistan and Iraq, and most recently in the FBI, healthcare sector, and the Department of Homeland Security, related to “immigration and border control,” among other sectors. Note that this is exactly why the immigration issue is not about immigrants at all, but about bringing in more mass surveillance and digital ID, using the excuse of the self-caused migrant crisis.

Going back to Musk, the company Twitter/X uses for the biometric collecting and sharing of user data is “AU10TIX,” an Israeli authentication platform which was founded by former agents from the Israeli Shin Bet security service. It’s the same platform used by Linkedln, Uber, Tik Tok, and others, which recently had a data breach leaking private info including names, numbers, license plates and even ID numbers. The leading chair of the company is Ron Atzmon, whose father is associated with Netanyahu’s Likud. Its parent company, ICTS International, is a Dutch firm also used in surveillance tech at several airports for ID and further checks via airport security. Elon himself co-founded OpenAI, the tech behind ChatGPT, with Sam Altman, and has been adamant about buying it, placing an unsolicited $100 billion bid which has thus far been rejected but he is persistent. Let’s not forget Elon’s goal is to have and control the everything app via X, which includes the app eventually replacing banks.

There’s a reason why Gates, one of the actual villains behind scary mRNA tech (via Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and founder of Gavi, suddenly supports Trump. Gates stated in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, that he had a three-hour dinner with Trump and discussed “HIV and vaccines,” and praised Trump for accelerating vaccine innovation. MAGA and MAHA supporters will point to Trump withdrawing from the WHO and Pandemic Treaty in 2019, slashing millions, but smart folk will also point to him also investing billions into Bill Gate’s Gavi. This shouldn’t be too surprising as President Trump led Operation Warp Speed (OWS), which his nominee and newly official appointment for “Secretary of Health,” made a career out of denouncing, only to fold at his Senate confirmation hearing, praising it as “an extraordinary accomplishment”. Like Gates, we’ve also seen META’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and many elite bankers cozy up to Trump instead of any liberal associations, further convincing us that Trump is not a significant threat to “deep state” in anyway.

Another issue is that while the anti-deep state mob that supports Trump think’s he’s clearing out a huge mess, the truth is he’s replacing the governments structures with technocrats who won’t give transparency on any money spent. We all know about Nancy Pelosi’s “insider training” which she denies, but refers to the buying or selling of a publicly-traded company’s stock based on non-public, material information about that company. It is illegal and can result in severe penalties, including imprisonment. But Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, have profited significantly from investments in technology companies that she oversaw as a regulator legally based on non-public information. However, Paul does not fall under the legal definition of an “insider” according to standard insider trading laws, which is why no prosecution has occurred. They’re hardly the only ones but it’s a reoccurring problem and in 2012, Congress enacted the STOCK Act to prevent trading based on confidential Congressional information and mandated disclosures for stock transactions by lawmakers. Despite numerous violations of this law by various members of Congress from both parties, enforcement has been lax, resulting in no significant repercussions for those involved. This lack of accountability highlights the challenges in effectively regulating such practices within government circles. But just like Pelosi, the incoming Silicon Valley tech bros do not have to divest from their companies nor acknowledge the clear conflicts of interest. Their newly gained powers will go to benefit themselves, their companies and their friends. Essentially the Trump admin is removing some of the crony government and replacing it with with centralized power, run by corporate, crony technocratic billionaires.

What’s clear is that money-eyed technocrats taking over for civil servants, however faulty they were, does not mean the government is rid of corruption or waste, but that the priorities of what that is may have shifted into an overt format. Congress will have little oversight on fiscal policies, giving room for Silicon Valley technocrats and big banks to fully dominate, including Zionists within the White House cabinet like Miriam Adelson, and within the DOGE corporate structure which includes Pentagon and DoD linked technocrats, Israeli intelligence and its spyware, and AI ambitions straight out of Black Mirror episodes.

The ceasefire used to advance Abraham Accords & Greater Israel
When the ceasefire came about I felt like there was a deadly catch, hence my earlier article. But very few caught onto the underlying nefarious intent to expand Israeli interests by dangling an agreement brokered by the treacherous Gulf states, who sat cowardly idle as Israel and the US pushed a ceasefire based on their own terms. Let’s recall how many made a huge deal out of the cosplay tiff between Netanyahu and Trump, swearing that Trump had Bibi on his knees, when in reality Trump has been servicing Netanyahu like a butler—a less vulgar comparison than what some have stated. The ceasefire deal was sadly a momentary pause to pacify an angry public via feel-good distractions, to eventually legalize the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

From the onset the deal was meant to give Trump leverage as the savior of the world, including Palestinians, positioning him in a positive manner, the same way we’re seeing this with USAID “dismantling,” the coming Russia-Ukraine “Peace Deal,” and other key issues. However, the real intention has always been to submit to Israel’s demands and cash-in on the major monetary cash cow that is Gaza for the US, not just because of luxury real-estate but also because of its rich natural resources, including rare minerals, oil and gas reserves.



US President Donald Trump has said the US WILL NOT BUY Gaza but are “going to have it and keep it,” without problems or questions from anyone. He’s been pressuring Jordan and Egypt to take some of the Palestinians he plans on displacing, with both countries initially denying his proposals. He also says they will absolutely be unable to return because they will have “much better housing” and there are plans to build a “permanent place for them.” Right on cue, as Trump plans to gentrify Gaza into a luxury real-estate waterfront property for the elite, Israelis, and Westerners to vacation in, which has been his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s plan for a while.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II later accepted his offer to take 2000 sick, Palestinian children but has reportedly once again refused to participate in the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, saying he “reiterated Jordan’s steadfast position against the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This is the unified Arab position.” While Abdullah supports an unrealistic two-state solution, a fantasy that’s ever-more unreachable due to the Zionist entity’s actions every day, it is true that Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are stuck in a quagmire. For one they all have strong relationships with both Washington and Tel Aviv, and to a very real extent most don’t care to admit, Israel controls much of their international agenda. However, they also have defended the Palestinian right of return and recognition of it as a sovereign state; a sentiment largely supported by their own people in the region.

Meanwhile Benjamin Netanyahu warned that if “Hamas” does not return hostages by Saturday mid-day, the Israeli forces will resume fighting in Gaza-this as Hamas announced a delay in hostage releases due to Israel’s lack of follow through. The overwhelming perception is that this breaks the ceasefire agreements, and it does since Tel Aviv has failed to comply with its obligations and failed to allow the return of displaced Palestinians to the north of Gaza. The group also says the Israeli forces have been firing on people and have been preventing agreed humanitarian aid from getting inside. Siding with Netanyahu, Trump’s threatened Hamas to continue as planned or all “hell will break loose.” It appears the ceasefire deal is not being taken seriously by Trump or Israel (and never was) and is once again being used for expanding the Greater Israel project and US power-holds in West Asia.

Trump’s actions toward Gaza sparked massive online fury, with even mainstream journalists wondering how or why Washington thinks it can just take what it wants (where have you been for the last 300 years), but the majority of “America First” believers see it as unfortunate collateral damage. Some US influencers, in fact most who made their fame by “standing with Palestine” and saw a meteoric rise in their follower count, have been pivoting toward the Trump Savior psyop and justifying Trump’s actions because of all the good things he’s doing “Ukraine, DEI, USAID,” etc, and it does pay on X and in general to join in on the trend. But there is no justification on Trump’s plan because Washington has no authority over a sovereign people, who are being ethnically cleansed by an internationally defined illegal occupation.

The Abraham Accords’ baby, the Abraham Shields Plan, coming to a city near you
It’s no coincidence that the ceasefire deal was implemented after the US-Turkey-Israeli orchestrated and manipulated fall of Damascus, which has Syria sliced into different partitions for the Western-Zionist-Neo-Ottoman sectors. This leaves Lebanon vulnerable to both Israel and HTS and allows Israel to meet less resistance as it continues to expand and occupy more of the West Bank, while Washington acquires Gaza for both of their strategic and financial interests. Although the resistance in Lebanon is fighting back and humiliating Israel and HTS in many ways, and I do not place doubt in its capabilities, it cannot go on forever without an alliance. Trump told Netanyahu before he came into power that he would support Israel including his decision to cancel the ceasefire if they saw fit and they will use Lebanon as they are now, to try and justify falling back on the agreed ceasefire.

This is all happening because the most Zionist administration in US history is tasked with expanding Greater Israel via the Abraham Accords and includes Israel’s new “Abraham Shield Plan,” created by the Coalition for Regional Security which was established a year after October 7, and says the attack was part of a larger “Iranian plan.” The Coalition supposedly, “represents a wide and diverse group of public figures and opinion leaders in the security, diplomacy, business, high-tech, and research fields” who joined together to “ensure the security of the State of Israel through the promotion of the Abraham Shield Plan.”

The first goal of this entity is to “close the front in Gaza,” and “establish a technocratic transitional government in Gaza, with regional backing that will provide all civilian services to Palestinians during the transition period.” The eerily Gestapo-sounding, well-thought out plan, also claims Israel “will declare victory in Gaza and the defeat of Hamas’ military forces.” In exchange for the return of all hostages, both living and deceased, Israel will also “advocate for a comprehensive ceasefire” and commit to withdrawing its forces from Gaza. The plan goes on to state that Tel-Aviv will establish a bilateral agreement with the US regarding future security operations and targeted raids aimed at preventing Hamas’s resurgence and dismantling “terrorist infrastructure” while allowing Arab police forces to deploy to Gaza to maintain law and order during this transition period. It also asserts that reconstruction efforts for Gaza “will be spearheaded and funded by Western nations and moderate Arab states,” primarily led by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, who will also initiate a process of de-Hamasification focused on deep de-radicalization of society and education, similar to “successful initiatives” in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Additionally, cash transactions in the Gaza Strip will be eliminated or “ZeroCash”, accompanied by an “advanced monetary supervision mechanism.” If this sounds exactly like the US-brokered ceasefire plan that exists, that’s because it is nearly identical and worse, it is a plan of what is to come not only for the entire region, but also perhaps for any future US acquired territory and US cities.

Another goal is to implement a “zero violations” policy in southern Lebanon, using the Lebanese Army to leverage military successes, pushing for a gradual withdrawal from southern Lebanon and the conclusion of Operation Northern Arrows. The plan is to back US-led efforts to “stabilize” the Lebanese government and reinforce its army while “distancing Lebanon from Iranian influence.” As I’ve stated before, Syria was the harbinger of Israeli expansion and normalization and in this plan, Zionists aim to utilize regional forces to create a buffer against Iran by pushing for demilitarization in the Syrian Golan Heights, and preventing armament in Syria from flowing into Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank. Israel’s Blockade Plan against Iran will involve military, political, and economic actions aimed at isolating it from the region, including the Gulf, stopping its connection to the resistance, and dismantling its proxy networks. The plan also outlines Israel’s reliance on US partners to hinder Iran’s reemergence in Syria, promoting a “stable” government, aka HTS, head choppers. As expected, this also details Turkey’s role in “shaping Syria’s future,” via Israeli plans to establish communication channels with Ankara, to “advance mutual interests in regional stability.”

In its goal of expansion Israel will prioritize establishing a normalization arrangement with Saudi Arabia, initiating the “Abraham Alliance,” which will foster security, intelligence, and political cooperation among Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Sudan, and other allies with US support. The alliance aims to control Egypt and Jordan while combating the resistance forces. The alliance will be used as a “special trade zone and global economic hub” through agreements in various sectors and infrastructure projects connecting the Gulf to the Mediterranean. We’re clearly seeing how the betrayal of the Gulf Arab states to the resistance has become an essential tool for Greater Israel.

In the entire plan, Israel does not commit to the establishment of a legitimate Palestinian state, and that is not something you can expect from any US administration owned by Adelson or Zionists. According to the plan Tel-Aviv will focus on a gradual separation from Palestine over the next decade, as part of a comprehensive agreement that includes no militarization by resistance factions in Gaza, supposed targeted Israeli security operations against alleged threats, the reform of the Palestinian Authority, new leadership recognizing Israel’s legitimacy, and the ending of all “payments” to those deemed terrorists. It also includes a form of brainwashing under the guise of education programs “promoting tolerance.”

In essence the Zionist entity outlines exactly what I and a few others have been trying to warn about, the entire end of the Palestinian people, without a state, and even under the semblance of such a government, a total apartheid, gestapo existence, where all movements are controlled, all welfare based on Israel’s mood, similar to what was before, only this time on steroids. Israel’s “raids” will mean more death to Palestinians but under a lawful excuse, while any defense by the resistance will once again be labeled terrorism. This time the ethnic cleansing will be legitimized by international law, governments, and rehashed as humanitarian advancement, as progress in the age of so-called “multipolarity,” as Palestine is turned into the land of Israeli and Western exploits. But make no mistake, that such a cashless, surveillance-soaked, fascist society may come for Palestinians now, but it is the exact plan for the rest of the world. Remember that Pfizer first used Israel as the “world’s first laboratory” to study the mRNA COVID experimental vaccine. “First they came for the Palestinians,” will not just be a quote but a reality, laid out for those daring to actually question beyond the brain-numbing sensationalist hopium online. It’s mind-boggling that as we’re seeing exactly what the predator class plans on doing, the sheep walk willingly to slaughter, wearing eye goggles showing them green fields and rainbows.

Pardon my so-called black-pilling or whatever word used to insult actual understanding in the age of ignorance, interrupting the seals clapping for the end of the “Ukraine war,” the “end of USAID.” I apologize for my hindrance in the celebrations for the “win” for “multipolarity,” the fence-sitting praising for the appointment of former psychological operations director, Tulsi Gabbard, as Director of National Intelligence, and whatever other thing Trump was literally mandated by the Deep State to do, promoted to the world as “revolutionary.” I repent for raining on the vapid little parades full of self-gratification at the sake of painting a more grim picture that may not be as pretty, but is certainly a far more accurate depiction of the reality we’re facing. Because I want the people under the constant boot of the hegemonic overlords to win but I will not pretend the world is anywhere near there when it’s indeed going in the opposite direction. The resistance factions, Yemen, and those actually clear-minded about what to do next deserve faith and understanding, as not all is lost. Israel was weakened PR-wise and morally, but right now it stands far stronger without Syria, and after this ceasefire, as well as with the US normalizing relations with the Gulf, Russia, and focusing on Iran and China. The wars are not ending, but moving theaters and pivoting toward new regions. Time to wake up in the real sense and fight, because what’s coming will need all to be fully ready.

(Fiorella Isabel’s Substack)

https://orinocotribune.com/trump-repurp ... palestine/

I doubt Trump was even much aware of USAID's role in regime change, and if he was that consideration was secondary to his desire to deny humanitarian funding to "shithole countries". That is the level he operates on.

*******

DOGEbag Roundup: Horrid Website, This Week’s Agency Targets, Sociology of DOGE
Posted on February 17, 2025 by Lambert Strether
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.



“You have great power inborn in you, and you used that power wrongly, to work a spell over which you had no control, not knowing how that spell affects the balance of light and dark, life and death, good and evil. And you were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is it any wonder the result was ruin?” –Ursula LeGuin, Wizard of Earthsea

“Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.” –Sam Rayburn

DOGE has become a sprawling story. In this round-up, I’ll look at how the DOGEbags butchered their own website, and this week’s assault on government agencies. I’ll conclude with a brief look at the sociology of DOGE. This week, I won’t be tracking court cases, or Democrat counter-measures to DOGE (readers, if you locate any, do feel free to leave a link in comments).[1]

The DOGEbags Still Butchering Their Own Website

The last time we posted on DOGE, we pointed that that its website was, basically, a placeholder (this after Elon boasted how transparent DOGE was). As if in answer, DOGE brain geniuses threw together a website hosted on CloudFlare the very next day, but left it open for anyone to edit, so it was promply hacked and defaced, but that was three days ago, and the story is now forgotten.

The site looks a bit more normal now, despite the (still) missing American flag. The home page (“Latest work”) purports to be an X feed — the squillionaire owner of X, Elon Musk, also runs DOGE as a “special government employee,” no conflict there — but in fact the posts shown on X don’t match those shown on DOGE’s home page. Here is the top “Latest Work” post there:



And here (to be fair, there’s a clickthrough) is the original:



Why on earth does DOGE remove the link in the original that supports their claim? And why remove the dates? So now, every time I look at “Latest Work” in the DOGE page, I have to check it against the original to make sure DOGE hasn’t edited taken anything out of context or omitted important data. Make it make sense. (Here is the story about classified information on the DOGE site to which Kaine via Rupar allludes; I haven’t much sympathy for squawking about classified material, but I’ve got to say that HuffPo’s sourcing is better than DOGE’s, which in the post was a Link, and on the DOGE site was nothing at all.)

Next, we have the Savings page. It reads in its entirety: “Receipts coming over the weekend!” Not, apparently, this weekend, although to be fair, the DOGEbags could be taking the Federal Holiday, President’s Day, off.

Next. we have the Workforce page. This in essence an org chart of the government, which is interesting, I suppose, if you believe that government should be run like a business, but it omits the White House, even though the chart is based on Office of Personnel Management data, which includes the White House. You will recall from last week that DOGE is setting up an entirely parallel government, with commissars in every agency, and so the omission of this parallel government is highly deceptive.

So much for the state of doge.gov this week. Perhaps next week they will improve it!

DOGEbaggery of the Week

Now let’s look at DOGE’s latest thuggery at the agencies (USAID[2] being so last week).

Centers for Disease Control. CDC’s “disease detectives” halved as part of DOGE cuts at health agencies (CBS):

Half of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention’s Epidemic Intelligence Service officers — a group known as the CDC’s “disease detectives” — were among the cuts made Friday by the Trump administration, multiple health officials tell CBS News.

The CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service or EIS officers are hired in annual classes through a competitive process.

As part of the fellowship, they serve for two years around the CDC or deployed to health departments across the country, often on the front lines of public health responses. Many go on to rise through the ranks at the agency after being selected for the program.

“The country is less safe. These are the deployable assets critical for investigating new threats, from anthrax to Zika,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, a former top-ranking CDC official and alumna of the program, in a message.

As readers know, I hold no brief for CDC’s performance on Covid, and they’ve been awful on bird flu. Still, it’s not like we’ve got any [cough] pandemics going on, or new ones [cough cough] on the horizon. What could go wrong?

Department of Energy. Trump administration tries to bring back fired nuclear weapons workers in DOGE reversal (Associated Press):

One of the hardest hit offices was the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, which saw about 30% of the cuts. Those employees work on reassembling warheads, one of the most sensitive jobs across the nuclear weapons enterprise, with the highest levels of clearance.

“The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, referencing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team. “They don’t seem to realize that it’s actually the department of nuclear weapons more than it is the Department of Energy.”

While some of the Energy Department employees who were fired dealt with energy efficiency and the effects of climate change, issues not seen as priorities by the Trump administration, many others dealt with nuclear issues, even if they didn’t directly work on weapons programs. This included managing massive radioactive waste sites and ensuring the material there doesn’t further contaminate nearby communities. The NNSA staff who had been reinstated could not all be reached after they were fired, and some were reconsidering whether to return to work, given the uncertainty created by DOGE.

While I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for the atomic establishment, I don’t want to hear “Whoopsie!” come from the Pantex plant, either.

Federal Aviation Administration. Trump begins firings of FAA air traffic control staff just weeks after fatal DC plane crash (Associated Press):

The impacted workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, one air traffic controller told the Associated Press. The firings hit the FAA when it faces a shortfall in controllers. Federal officials have been raising concerns about an overtaxed and understaffed air traffic control system for years, especially after a series of close calls between planes at U.S. airports. Among the reasons they have cited for staffing shortages are uncompetitive pay, long shifts, intensive training and mandatory retirements.

Impacts, eh?

Internal Revenue Service. Musk’s DOGE seeks access to personal taxpayer data, raising alarm at IRS (WaPo):

Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is seeking access to a heavily guarded Internal Revenue Service system that includes detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country, according to three people familiar with the activities, sparking alarm within the tax agency.

Under pressure from the White House, the IRS is considering a memorandum of understanding that would give officials from DOGE — which stands for Department of Government Efficiency — broad access to tax-agency systems, property and datasets. Among them is the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS, which enables tax agency employees to access IRS accounts — including personal identification numbers — and bank information. It also lets them enter and adjust transaction data and automatically generate notices, collection documents and other records.

According to a draft of the memorandum obtained by The Washington Post, DOGE software engineer Gavin Kliger is set to work at the IRS for 120 days, though the tax agency and the White House can renew his deployment for the same duration. His primary goal at the IRS is to provide engineering assistance and IT modernization consulting.

After Treasury, they’re doubling down? More on Kliger here and here; he was at DataBricks, now marketing itself as an AI firm. I don’t think 120 days will be enough even to make an assessment of whether IDRS can be ported to DataBricks (though that would certainly help DataBricks in its competition with OpenAI). And with that, let’s turn to AI.

Conclusion

What social structure does DOGE have? Leaving aside its extraordarily hazy place in the governement org chart, how has it come together as a social entity, at the (fluid) boundary between state and civil society? Josh Marshall writes:

First of all, there’s DOGE proper. The White House took the U.S. Digital Service, an organization which grew out of the botched launch of the Obamacare exchange system in 2014, and rebranded it as the U.S. DOGE Service. Get it? They keep the same initials, USDS. That gave DOGE a ready-made administrative shell, based out of the White House, to operate from. [Second, there are] a number of people who are part of the same operation have gotten appointments at various agencies around the executive branch. They’re not formally part of the rebranded USDS. But they’re part of the same operation, the same group of Musk operatives carrying out Musk’s plans across the federal government. On it’s face it might seem like the centrality of what we might call the feral/incel group was overplayed, or that as events have proceeded they’ve been joined by a more established group. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Each time we hear of DOGE showing up at a new federal agency it usually or perhaps always includes a member of that original feral/incel group in the lead. So for instance, when DOGE showed up at the IRS on Thursday that group was lead by Gavin Kliger, 25, part of the original group who said Matt Gaetz had been a victim of the “Deep State” when he was forced to withdraw his nomination to serve as Attorney General. He also played a lead role in the dismantlement of USAID. I could speculate as to why this is the case. But for whatever reason Musk seems to place especial trust in that group of seven or eight young men.

Sounds rather like a FlexNet to me. To these two elements — (1) feral/incel (harsh, but fair) + (2) “older heads” — I would add Elon’s (3) squillionaire associates, like Peter Thiel and (now) AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia. Interestingly, Trump relates to this entire network only through Elon (at least so far). Note also that older (RINO?) organizations have no place in this FlexNet whatever[3]..

I have written previously that the dominant drive behind DOGE — besides money, of course — is party power: Power for the Republican party, and more precisely for the DOGE faction within that party (and not particularly for MAGA, as shown by the whipping MAGA took from the Silicon Valley boys on H1B). As Madison writes, all factions represent property interests: In DOGE’s case, I would urge that the unifying property interests across the DOGE Flexnet include the symbolic capital of technical “genius” (as Trump has it), the social capital of AI skills, and the economic capital of Silicon Valley (whether as an owner like Thiel or a contractor like Kliger). For all three factions, the destruction of government is seen not only as a source of all three forms of capital — though it turns out that replacing everything with AI wasn’t as easy as imagined[4] — but a moral act. Ed Kilgore writes:

So don’t be too fooled by the smoke and mirrors of DOGE technological virtuosity in doing its job. At bottom, it’s the same approach to the federal budget that knuckle-dragging conservative ideologues have adopted at least since the Reagan administration. Like his low-tech predecessors, Musk regards even good government as inherently wasteful, which in turn makes efforts to improve what taxpayers get for their money a waste of time. What DOGE is doing could in theory be good, bad or just mindless. But it’s mostly a blast from the past rather than any sort of cutting-edge “reform.”

I am not a believer in DOGE’s technological virtuosity. It ought to be possible for an organization full of technical virtuosos to produce a decent website, especially given all the money in the world. I am a believer in DOGE’s political virtuosity: Going for the Treasury and the Office of Personnel Management was brilliant; like Trump, DOGE is very good at sensing weakness. However, if that parallel governement of DOGE commissars is going to be tasked with installing AI in every corner of every agency, there’s going to be a lot of wreckage. Of course, I say “wreckage” like that’s a bad thing.

NOTES

[1] I had to leave the most interesting ideas on the cutting room floor: Due to the proliferation of AI tools, this generation of coders doesn’t actually know how to translate business logic into programming logic. That will be a problem when dealing with Treasury, the IRS, etc., etc., with miles and acres of COBOL crafted to express business logic in a language and using concepts they don’t understand, and at a scale where they have never performed.

[2] To my jaundiced eye, these supposedly humanitarian efforts, with their tiny budgets, are transparently cover stories for spookdom:

Donald Trump Truth Social Post 02:22 PM EST 02/16/25



But perhaps I’m too cynical, and people with actual knowledge can comment.

[3] It is a truism in blue circles that DOGE is simply implementing Project 2025. I doubt that very much. Here is what Project 2025 has to say on USAID, in a lengthy part of a very lengthy chapter:

Branding. A deeply embedded culture within the foreign aid bureaucracy views public recognition of U.S. assistance as secondary to a larger philanthropic mission and is embarrassed by the American flag. Citing vaguely defined security concerns, USAID’s implementers—U.N. agencies, international NGOs, and contractors—often fail to credit the American people for the billions of dollars in assistance they provide the rest of the world even as they engage in self-promoting public relations to raise other donor funds. This approach has negative foreign policy implications as China relentlessly promotes its own self-serving efforts to gain influence and resources. Worst of all, malign actors sometimes appropriate credit for unbranded U.S. assistance: Houthi terrorists, for example, claim to provide for the people under their occupation with anonymous U.S. humanitarian aid. The United States is in a struggle for influence with China, Russia, and other competitors, and American generosity must not go unacknowledged. The next conservative Administration should build on the Trump Administration’s branding policy, which revamped ADS Chapter 320, to force the aid bureaucracy to fully credit the American people for the aid they are providing. The Senior Advisor for Brand Management in the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs (LPA) (discussed infra) should be a political appointee who is responsible for maximizing the visibility of U.S. assistance by enforcing branding policy on every grant, cooperative agreement, and contract. The LPA should liaise with counterparts at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) to ensure local media pickup of these activities.

Nothing about gutting USAID whatever. In fact, Heritage wanted to give USAID more prominence.

[4] I was going to write a much longer section on Doge’s push for AI. The stories were ubiquitous in early February. But then they stopped. DOGE is almost completely opaque, but I would guess that “AI everywhere” turned out to be a lot harder than the feral/incel team thought it would be. After all, they don’t understand government, how could they scope anything? Hence, perhaps, the 120-day contract at IRS, as a test site (gawd help us). And of course the Hoovering up of useful data.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... -doge.html

[blindpig]

CovertAction Bulletin: Will Trump and McMahon Dismantle Public Education?
By Rachel Hu and Chris Garaffa - February 19, 2025 0


[Source: AP]


CLICK HERE to listen on podcast platforms worldwide https://covertactionbulletin.podbean.com/
Support this broadcast: become a patreon!

Donald Trump has nominated Linda McMahon, a former executive with World Wrestling Entertainment and twice-failed Senate candidate as well as the Administrator of the Small Business Administration under his first term, to lead the Department of Education. Speaking about her nomination in early February, Trump said he wants her to put herself out of a job—to shutter the US Department of Education.

McMahon is wholly unqualified to run the Department. The nomination of this multi-billionaire serves the interests of those who want to roll back the basic right to an education for all people, a right that is steeped in working-class and especially Black history in this country.

We’re joined today by Nathalie Hrizi. Vice President of Substitutes for United Educators of SF and long-time public school teacher.

Later in the show, we discuss the threats posed by the CIA flying Reaper drones over Mexico, and we celebrate the release of political prisoner Leonard Peltier.


Listen to this episode and all CovertAction Bulletin episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and other podcast platforms. New episodes are distributed worldwide on all podcast platforms on Wednesdays at 9am EST.

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We also air a shorter version of CovertAction Bulletin weekly on Wednesdays at 9AM EST on WBAI 99.5FM in New York City, right after Democracy Now!

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... education/

The WWE and NY tabloids are where Trump learned all his political acumen<sic>.

******

Musk Is Lying About Waste and Fraud in Social Security to Have an Excuse to Kill It
Posted on February 20, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Please circulate this post on the Trumped-up attacks on Social Security.As more proof of what Musk’s and Trump’s priorities are, how many stories have we seen of DOGE finding waste and fraud at the Pentagon, which is a pork machine that has been unable to reconcile its books for over two decades? A favorite clip:

By Nancy J. Altman, president of Social Security Works and chair of the Strengthen Social Security coalition. Originally published at Common Dreams

The only efficiency Elon Musk cares about is how efficiently he can take your money to line his own pockets. Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign promises, Musk is coming after your earned Social Security benefits.

President Dwight Eisenhower, Republican and war hero, could have been talking about Musk when he warned in 1954of a handful of “Texas oil millionaires” attempting to abolish Social Security. “Their number is negligible, and they are stupid,” he wrote.

Musk has made no secret of his disdain for our Social Security system. In just the last few weeks, he has used his gigantic platform to spread outrageous lies about Social Security.

Unlike the extremely rich, stupid men to whom Eisenhower was referring, Musk is, unfortunately, not just ignorant. Trump is giving him the power to steal our earned benefits. Musk is drawing on an old playbook of claiming that the government in general, and Social Security in particular, is full of “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Then, when he steals your benefits, he will claim that he is simply cutting waste.

Both Musk’s ignorance and his anti-Social Security playbook were on full display Tuesday, when the shadow president talked to reporters in the Oval Office. In trying to convince us that our extremely efficient Social Security system is rife with fraud, he unknowingly proved how economical its administration is, when he asserted, “Just cursory examination of Social Security, and we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old.”

No one born 150 years ago is receiving benefits.. The hardworking civil servants at the Social Security Administration are extremely diligent in tracking the deaths of beneficiaries. Social Security spends millions of dollars every year to purchase the automated death data of state vital records agencies.

And Social Security provides a lump sum death benefit, in part to encourage the families of beneficiaries to report their deaths promptly. When beneficiaries die, their benefits are immediately terminated. Eligible survivors, if any, start to receive the benefits their loved ones have earned for them.

It is important to recognize that what Musk and others label “waste” is usually unavoidable because of the way politicians have drafted our laws. For example, Social Security benefits are paid in the month following the month that they are due. That means that if you die at the end of the month and are paid a benefit a few days later, at the start of the next month, that is considered an overpayment—even when the death is quickly reported and the benefits quickly cancelled. The law requires the Social Security Administration to claw back those benefits from the grieving survivors—which it routinely does.

Again, no one born 150 years ago is still receiving benefits. But here is where Musk is showing his ignorance: Let’s take the example of a person who is issued a Social Security card as an infant and dies at age 10, never having received a penny of benefits. Social Security doesn’t waste taxpayer dollars finding that information and cancelling their Social Security number—this would be prohibitively expensive and wasteful.

Moreover, most adults who die leave behind spouses and children, including adult disabled children, who may be eligible for benefits for many years based on the decedent’s earnings record. Therefore, that record may remain active for a very long time. For example, the last person to receive a Civil War pension was a veteran’s disabled daughter, who died less than five years ago—in 2020.

Disturbingly, the reason Musk was able to assert the ignorant claim about 150-year-olds is that he has accessed our personal data. Because Musk has access to the Treasury’s payments system, he has the Social Security numbers of every worker and Social Security beneficiary. He also has our bank account numbers, and other sensitive, private information.

Musk and his minions are reportedly now not just at the Treasury but also at Social Security’s headquarters in Baltimore. That means they may already have access to how much a person has ever earned, at what job, and when, how old they are, their marital status, and more. Musk may also have access to the medical records of every single one of the millions of Americans who have applied for disability benefits. No unelected, unconfirmed ideologue should be anywhere near those records, especially not the wealthiest man in the world, given his numerous conflicts of interest.

What is going on should be obvious. Musk wants to cut off your benefits and then have Congress use the savings to give himself a gigantic tax cut. But Social Security is incredibly popular, so he can’t be open about his intentions. Instead, he is trying to convince Americans that our Social Security system is overrun with massive fraud. The truth is the opposite.

Less than 1% of Social Security payments are improper. And remember, that already-low percentage includes all the beneficiaries who die immediately before their benefit is due.

Given that these and all other improper payments constitute less than 1% of all payments made, those that are the result of fraud are vanishingly small. This is in sharp contrast to private insurance. Indeed, the American Academy of Actuaries issued a report just last September about private insurance and concluded that “insurance fraud is widespread.”

Ironically, the best way to stop improper payments—including those vanishingly few that result from fraud—is to adequately staff the Social Security Administration. Face-to-face transactions at your local Social Security field office will catch fraudsters. Online transactions generally won’t.

Unfortunately, your local Social Security office will be closing. Musk has instructed the General Services Administration to terminate all federal office leases, including every Social Security office and every post office.

Musk will do whatever it takes to avoid paying his fair share and enrich himself at our expense. He has his eyes on our Social Security. Lies about fraud might shake people’s confidence, but they are unlikely to shake people’s support for Social Security.

His rummaging around in our private information is unprecedented. It is hard to know what he has in mind or how to stop him. But there is one thing we absolutely can stop.

We can stop Congress from cutting our benefits. We must demand that every member of Congress stand up to Musk’s cynical efforts to steal our earned Social Security benefits while giving himself and other billionaires a hefty tax cut.

Every single member of Congress must publicly pledge that they will keep the promises Trump made on the campaign trail. That means not one penny in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. Every member of Congress must tell Musk and Trump: Hands off Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... ll-it.html

Musk is also a libertarian ideologue which of course goes hand in hand with being filthy rich, a feedback mechanism if there ever was one.

[blindpig]

We’ve Seen This Horror Show Before
February 22, 2025

Joe Biden quietly sought to ethnically cleanse Gaza; Bill Clinton and George W. Bush deported millions; Clinton tried to shrink the state and Steve Bannon warned in 2019 what Donald Trump would do, notes Wilmer J. Leon.


Steve Bannon at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

By Wilmer J. Leon, III
New Pittsburgh Courier

“I don’t know who you are and I don’t know why you like this guy (Trump). I think what you like about him; he appears to be strong and the rest of us are weak… That’s what he’s selling…Here’s what you’re buying…He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for… He’s the ISIL man of the year.”

—Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on CNN 2015

There are periods in history… epochs, distinctive periods in time marked by notable events, that in many instances signal change.

Columbus stumbling upon the Americas where Indigenous peoples had been living for thousands of years. The French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of the semiconductor, WWII, the Civil Rights era, etc.

In many instances, one may not realize that they’re living in the historic moment. It’s only upon reflection that you realize the significance of the time.

There are other periods, I call them Oppenheimer moments, where you know that you are in the moment. The first atomic bomb was tested on July 16, 1945. The bomb, nicknamed “Gadget,” released 18.6 kilotons of power.

We are told that Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, upon watching the first ever atomic bomb explode, quoted a line from Hindu scripture; the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer knew he was in the moment.

As we look at the current geopolitical landscape, we find ourselves firmly in the grips of the second Trump administration. There is a dramatic decline in the status of America, both domestically and internationally.

The economic outlook is uncertain. America is funding a war in Ukraine and a genocide in Gaza. Homelessness, unemployment and incarceration rates are continuously on the rise.

One can only conclude that we are living in a historic moment. Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign and White House advisor calls it “managed decline.”

One of the ironies in all of this is we have seen this movie before: We are watching Trump Redux. We are not just watching the film; we are actors in it.

For those of us who are old enough to remember, watching the news and political programs today is analogous to watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show. We find ourselves constantly yelling at the screen, except this is unscripted.


Trump hosting a reception for Black History Month on Feb. 20 in the White House. (White House/Joyce Boghosian)

People are aghast listening to President Donald Trump attack Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies, firing federal inspectors general, threatening to close the Department of Education and pledging to fire F.B.I. agents who investigated Jan. 6.

Steve Bannon told us in 2019 what was to come,

“…we had a whole tiger team of the White House counsel guys, the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state,’ which is a huge element…we want less (government intervention). In fact, we want to start to take apart certain parts of the apparatus.”

America, you were warned.

Now, the authoritarian for whom over 77 million Americans voted wants to disregard the constitutionally guaranteed right of “birthright citizenship.” He is impounding funds, freezing nearly all foreign aid, federal grants and loans as if he has been magically granted the power of the “ex post facto veto.”

Almost none of Trump’s policies have gone through legislation or House votes. Trump issues his edicts through executive order. The American people are being subjected to a flurry or whirlwind of executive action. Bannon called it “flooding the zone and muzzle velocity.”

“Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

Some people may think Trump is crazy. If he is, he’s crazy like a fox.

Trump Is Not Alone

But it’s not just him. Trump is not alone. The racist suggestion of Trump saying, the United States should own Gaza and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East” by displacing the Palestinians from their homeland to other countries in the region, was first posited by former President Joe Biden.

The AP reported, “A Western diplomat in Cairo said Egypt rejected similar proposals from the Biden administration and European countries early in the war.” Trump’s major faux pas was he made Biden’s secret proposal public.

Trump is not alone in his racist deportation efforts.

“According to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute,” CNN reported, “more than 12 million people were ‘deported’ — either removed or returned — from the U.S. during the Clinton administration. More than 10 million were removed or returned during the Bush administration. Far fewer — more than 5 million – were removed or returned during the Obama administration.” Lest we forget, President Barack Obama was dubbed the “Deporter in Chief”.


People boarding a deportion flight in El Paso, Texas, headed to Ecuador, Jan. 28. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Flickr, U.S. Government)

Trump’s ideas of deconstructing the administrative state, cutting government agencies or his privatization-neoliberal policies via Project 2025 are not new.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed similar tactics with his “Contract with America.” Former President Bill Clinton thought he could make government more efficient, by employing principles from the private sector by “Reinventing Government as We Know It.”

The major problem with these schemes is very simple. The goal of private sector capitalism is the maximization of profit.

The goal of democratic/republic government is the protection of the people and the delivery of services.

Contrary to the beliefs of the oligarchs, government is not in the “business” of making money. It’s lucky if it breaks even.

Don’t let this context confuse you. Sen. Graham is correct, President Trump is “…a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.”

This is evidenced by his baseless rants about Mexican rapists, his proposed Muslim ban, his lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace, his attack on the Central Park Five, his baseless attack on DEI programs, removing historical videos of its storied Black Tuskegee Airmen from Air Force training modules [that were restored after public outcry], supporting genocide in Gaza, just to name a few.

Remember, all of this resonated with over 77 million Americans.


Gate of the Exonerated sign just inside an entrance to Central Park in New York City named in honor of five innocent African-American men whose deaths Donald Trump publicly demanded. (Jay Dobkin, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

So, what are we to do? Well, for starters do not listen to Rep. Nancy Pelosi. Anyone who tries to insist that the election was not a rebuke of the Democrats is delusional and anyone who argues that Democrats don’t need to change is clueless.

I strongly suggest reading Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail —

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

Then read Frederick Douglass’ 1857 speech, If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress —

“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

After that, read more and remember, when they tell you about their own, they are also telling you about themselves. Believe them.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/22/w ... ow-before/

The Dems need to change all right: change into orange jumpsuits. You might as well try to change a Great White Shark into a vegan.

*******

Trump and Musk’s next target: Social Security, the largest social program in the US

Workers are overwhelmingly against any cuts to social security. Could Musk be seeking to drum up opposition to the program based on false claims of widespread fraud?

February 21, 2025 by Natalia Marques


Elon Musk attends a press conference in the Oval Office with his son (Photo: The White House)

The world’s richest man has shown his determination to use his unelected position within the Trump presidency to wage war on the working class in the United States. Elon Musk’s latest accusation of widespread fraud within the Social Security system in the US could represent yet another major offensive against workers, who nearly universally rely on the country’s largest social service for current and future retirement plans.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an invention of the Trump administration that has pursued broad cuts to federal departments and regulations, has pursued access to sensitive information of millions of people in the US, held by the Social Security Administration. Both Trump and Musk have said they suspect that the SSA is making fraudulent social security payments to tens of millions of dead people, claiming that people as old as 100, 200, or even 300 years old are receiving social security benefits. These claims have been refuted by the SSA, which has a rule in place that automatically stops payments for people over the age of 115.

Musk’s claims began at his press conference in the Oval Office last week, when he said he found “crazy things” within the Social Security system, including people who were “150 years old.” Musk repeated the claims on his platform X, writing in one post that “maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”

On Tuesday of this week, Trump himself repeated many of these claims. “Now, the big thing is, how many of these people got paid? Where are they getting paid? Where are they getting paid? How many of them were getting paid Social Security, because that’s—if that’s the case, it’s a massive fraud,” the president told reporters.

Social security data shows that these claims of fraud are false. According to agency statistics, only 0.1% of those received social security benefits are over the age of 100. While the Social Security administration does indeed make erroneous payments, according to a July 2024 SSA inspector’s general report, these constitute only 1% of payments and are mostly composed of overpayments made to existing beneficiaries.

Trump and Musk’s plan
Given the false nature of Trump and Musk’s claims, what are the true motivations behind accusations of fraud?

Musk has attempted to get rid of millions of federal workers, part of a shrinking sector of the working class that enjoys somewhat safeguarded and stable employment opportunities. Musk has also attempted to gain access to the payment systems for those millions of government workers, with both of his attempts being thwarted by the workers themselves through legal counteroffensives by organized labor.

Trump’s administration claims that there will be “there will be NO cuts to Medicare or Social Security, and there will be no tax on Social Security.” Trump has chosen Frank Bisignano, a multi-millionaire who made USD 28 million last year alone as the CEO of financial services company Fiserv, to be the Social Security Administration commissioner, leaving some worried about how a Wall Street banker would run the program that provides retirement benefits to tens of millions of working class people. Trump and Musk’s plan to fire millions of federal workers would also have gotten rid of the very people tasked with administering these benefits. The SSA is already experiencing staffing shortages.

Widespread unpopularity of Social Security cuts
Any potential cuts to the largest social welfare program in the US should anticipate a massive popular backlash. Almost 69 million people receive Social Security benefits per month. There are few things that 80% of people in the country agree on, but 79% oppose reducing the size of Social Security benefits, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from 2023.

In fact, the AP-NORC poll found that a majority of people (58%) supported a Biden proposal to tax households making over USD 400,000 per month to pay for Medicare, the government-run healthcare program for those 65 or older.

Polling from Data for Progress from June of 2023 showed the enormous unpopularity of a proposal by then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy to “make some people uncomfortable” by creating a commission that would “look at the entire budget,” which could have opened up the possibility of cuts to both Social Security and Medicare. 72% of likely voters, including 65% of voters within McCarthy’s own Republican Party, opposed such a proposal. The same poll also indicated that only 3% of voters, (and 2% of Republican Party voters) support cutting Social Security in order to reduce the national debt.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/02/21/ ... in-the-us/

******

Cuts to U.S. Weather and Climate Research Could Put Public Safety at Risk
Posted on February 22, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Bob Henson and Jeff Masters describe yet another example of how DOGE slash and burn spending cuts are ending or damaging programs like weather research that are important to the public at large. Even worse, as shown below, they even have big payoffs…but one has to assume, not enough to plutocrats.

By Jeff Masters and Bob Henson. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections

One month into the new Trump administration, firings of scientists and freezes to U.S. research funding have caused an unprecedented elimination of scientific expertise from the federal government. Proposed and ongoing cuts to agencies like the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, could hobble efforts to keep Americans safe during and after disasters. Meanwhile, slashed funding for climate research risks blindfolding the U.S. as the dangers from climate change escalate in the coming years and decades, scientists warn.


Mass Layoffs at FEMA

When Hurricanes Helene and Milton – both made more destructive by climate change – devastated the Southeast last fall, workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, oversaw the government’s effort to rescue survivors and aid the recovery. FEMA has been key, too, in bolstering the country’s long-term resilience efforts, such as elevating flood-prone homes and installing drainage works.

But mass layoffs of probationary employees – a civil service classification that typically encompasses new hires but can also include military veterans, longtime employees who’ve switched positions, or those who were hired on a fast track or work with a disability – and sudden departures within the deferred resignation program put in place by Elon Musk’s DOGE unit have led to a loss of about 1,000 of FEMA’s 25,000 employees. The Washington Post reported that one of the agency staffers fired was a 15-year employee and a chief for the National Flood Insurance Program. According to the Washington Post, another wave of firings is expected, targeting employees who work in climate-related diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Such cuts could result in slower disaster responses, longer waits for payouts, and reduced implementation of resilience efforts, ultimately increasing the risk of damage from climate change-enhanced extreme weather. In addition, firings could hamper efforts to update the agency’s significantly outdated flood maps, which are critical for determining flood risk and insurance rates.


President Donald Trump has vowed to essentially dismantle FEMA, shift disaster money to states, and privatize the National Flood Insurance Program – all core suggestions of Project 2025, a plan for Trump’s second term that calls for the elimination of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, gutting of the National Weather Service, and axing the National Flood Insurance Program.

Potential Cuts at the National Weather Service
The National Weather Service is overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. NOAA scientists and meteorologists are bracing for hundreds of firings, the Boston Globe reported.

“There’s a lot of already critically understaffed local field offices,” Bradley Colman, a former longtime NOAA meteorologist and the 2023 president of the American Meteorological Society, told the Boston Globe. “You’re risking simply not having the bodies to fill the seat … that the right people won’t be there at the right time and in the end that puts people’s property and lives at risk.”

Project 2025 calls for the commercialization of the National Weather Service, or NWS, claiming that “Studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS.”

To support this claim, Project 2025 cites a 2020 AccuWeather press release. In reality, most private forecasting firms and broadcast meteorologists rely heavily on the weather modeling carried out by the National Weather Service, and the insights from NOAA’s online forecast discussions and other products provide value to the entire weather enterprise as well as interested citizens.

Public opinion polls consistently rank the National Weather Service at or near the top for high approval ratings among federal agencies, including in this Economist/YouGov survey from February 2025. Although funding for climate change research has gone through major ups and downs in Congress, the National Weather Service has traditionally gotten strong bipartisan support, including from emergency managers across the political spectrum.

One recent study found that the National Weather Service provided a 73:1 return on investment.


The last major restructuring of the National Weather Service – a massive modernization effort that took place in the 1990s – reduced the number of National Weather Service offices from 256 to 122 and the number of staff from about 5,100 to about 4,700, a roughly 9% cut.

That restructuring involved a careful, yearslong planning process, and nearly all of the job cuts took place through attrition – retirements and other voluntary departures. Along the way, the National Weather Service dramatically increased the share of its staff made up of meteorologists from about one-third to about two-thirds.

In a 2012 retrospective report, the National Academies concluded: “The $4.5 billion national investment in the Modernization and Associated Restructuring (MAR) was both needed and generally well spent. Overall, the MAR was successful in achieving major improvements for the weather enterprise.”

As opposed to a careful, multiyear effort, the current process involves cuts to federal science agencies being made in a matter of days at the behest of non-subject-experts, with the potential for serious impacts. With severe weather and hurricane season both approaching, the National Weather Service is already short-staffed; as of late 2023, it was down about 5% from its funded staffing target.

Slashed Research Funding

The administration has also moved to block scientific research funding across government agencies. The National Institutes of Health – the world’s largest funder of scientific research – awarded $35 billion in grants in 2024. Although a recent executive order that devastated university funding by slashing indirect costs paid by NIH was temporarily halted by a judge, the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, has figured out a technical workaround to continue to deny NIH research funds, as reported by Nature Thursday. Russ Vought, the new director of OMB, is one of the authors of Project 2025.


“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in 2023. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.”

Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation – which supports basic scientific research at thousands of U.S. institutions – has lost more than 10% of its staff and may face additional staff losses and cuts.

Large cuts at NIH and the National Science Foundation would devastate U.S. higher education, forcing thousands of layoffs and ending the education of thousands of graduate students.


In the long term, the elimination of resources for scientific research could leave U.S. residents more vulnerable to disasters. The National Science Board, in a report issued in 2006 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, found it would be cost-effective to increase hurricane research funding by $300 million per year, compared to the $20 million in annual funding that existed at the time.

The administration is also moving to decimate the research that municipalities, states, and others rely on to prepare for the escalating consequences of climate change. New Health and Human Services chief Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has ordered the dismantling of NIH’s Climate Change and Health Initiative, which, according to its website, “aims to stimulate research to reduce health threats from climate change across the lifespan and build health resilience in individuals, communities, and nations around the world, especially among those at highest risk.​” Its annual budget is $40 million.

Is it possible that crucial climate models or data could simply vanish? Most of the climate model code is held in distributed archives and thus probably not vulnerable to deletion. But budget cuts could eliminate the scientists needed to maintain the models.

In the words of NSF program director Raleigh Martin, “Science is the goose that lays the golden eggs. Unfortunately, the science goose is being strangled and those golden eggs are being lost. Our society will be poorer, sicker, and weaker as a result.”

Loss of Climate Webpages

Many government webpages that have the word “climate” in them have been removed in recent days, particularly at EPA, where on Jan. 27, all information about climate change was removed from its homepage and other prominent areas of its website, burying it deep in sections that are harder to find. A purge of climate webpages at NOAA has not yet occurred, and the climate.gov and Climate Prediction Center websites remain up. We’ve been downloading key government publications that we use, such as the Billion-Dollar Climate Disasters page, NOAA’s Global Warming and Hurricanes page, and the 2022 U.S. Sea Level Change report.

What you can do

(yadda yadda, liberal coddleswop... rather join a socialist party, get in the street, rise to your level of competence as a human. )

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... -risk.html

There ain't gonna be no fixing the damage Trump/Muck do in the short run. But besides making the rich richer and the poor poorer, making our lives a poison nightmare and reducing civilization's chances of surviving climate change what will happen is that the masses will lose all faith in the government which the capitalists own. Throughout history governments which provide no benefits to the masses but only take from them will inevitability fall, there must be some semblance of a social contract, however flimsy. No amount of coercion can prevent that end.

******

I do find some humor in Trump's newest hobbyhorse, Ukraine's '$10T' of 'rare earth minerals'. The greed which drives that man brooks no contradiction: that the Russians already possess much of the ground above these supposed deposits which they will neither surrender nor compensate for, that much of the remained is already legally owned by other capitalists and that according to the US Geological Survey there ain't that much there anyway, none of that matters. The man smells money, get out of his way. The 'greatest deal-maker of all time' is gonna buy a pig in a poke. Frauds are the easiest people to defraud.

[blindpig]

Figures clear up the cloudy sky of propaganda
In the data: Trump is deporting fewer than Biden in his first month
21 Feb 2025 , 5:45 pm .


The current president is focusing his immigration policy on toughening measures against those who enter illegally, but the figures show that it is less effective (Photo: Irish Times)

US President Donald Trump promised millions of deportations during his 2025-2029 term , but the numbers show a different reality. Data from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) reveal that, since January 2025, it is planning to deport 600 to 1,100 immigrants per day. In November 2024 alone, the Biden administration repatriated 48,970 people, about 1,600 individuals daily on average.

According to projections, the tycoon's administration has had to detain and deport some 25,000 immigrants during the first month, which would generate some 300,000 expulsions per year, a figure far from the million offered by JD Vance, current vice president.

Numbers versus rhetoric ?

An open source survey conducted by Misión Verdad reveals the following figures for deportees by country of origin:

Venezuela: 367
India: 104
Colombia: 311
Peru: 34
Honduras: 126
Brazil: 88
Ecuador: 80
Mexico: 4,884
Guatemala: 265
For a total of 6,259.

The Venezuelan deportees without criminal records or convictions include those who returned on the night of February 20 from the US military base in Guantanamo.

A comparison of deportations carried out in the first month, and/or the first year of government, by other US administrations offers the following figures:

Barack Obama (I), 2009 annual total : 582,624
Barack Obama (II), 2013 annual total : 178,371
Donald Trump (I), February 2017: 29,390 / annual total : 386,870
Joe Biden, February 2021: 92,010: annual total : 1,334,200
The numbers are consistent. Biden outperformed Trump during the first month of his term, but also during the first two years. He achieved 2.8 million expulsions compared to the Republican's 2 million in the same period.

Although Biden was perceived as more moderate in his anti-illegal immigration speech, he used strategies that placed him ahead of Trump in total numbers of deportations. The current president focuses his immigration policy on toughening measures and applying more severe sanctions to those who enter illegally, but the figures reveal less effectiveness.

One factor that helped drive up deportations by the Biden administration was Trump's implementation of Title 42 in 2020, before leaving his first administration. This instrument denied the right enshrined in U.S. and international law to seek asylum.

Another element that distinguishes the current president is the sensationalism of his rhetoric , which results in media campaigns, for or against, regarding the conditions imposed on detainees. For their part, illegal foreigners who are not deprived of their liberty face threats, harassment and fear campaigns.

The wall that Trump faces
Reality is knocking on the door of the American president due to the lack of funds , the insufficient number of immigration officers and detention centers, as well as other resources in general, factors that have impeded the deportation work of his administration.

In response to this, which is putting a damper on his campaign promise , the tycoon is putting pressure on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE and his advisers to deport more people.

The American Immigration Council projects that to detain 1 million people a year, ICE would need 30,000 new officers and staff. The study estimates that it would cost $7 billion a year.

According to NBC, the administration is considering using Department of Defense funds to bring in contractors, a move that would greatly expand the scale and scope of arrests and deportations. Congress has only given ICE funding for about 40,000 beds to hold immigrant detainees at any one time. It can work with private prison companies to provide more space, but ICE is still limited to paying those companies to expand detention space until Congress eventually decides.

Trump's pressure has led to changes in immigration enforcement since January 23. A DHS memo seeks to restrict the use of parole and expand expedited removal procedures. This has been opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups, who sued the government on the grounds that the policy violates U.S. law and endangers people seeking refuge.

The accusations against the immigrants, described by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem as "the worst of the worst," have heightened the debate. Venezuela, through the sectoral vice president for Policy, Citizen Security and Peace, Diosdado Cabello, has clarified that only six of the 190 deported in the first batch have debts with justice, but that none are part of any criminal gang. In the case of the second group, the official declared that only one has an Interpol red alert issued from Ecuador.

The profitable spiral of migration
There are about 48 million migrants living in the United States, of which 11 million are in an irregular situation. Some business sectors have announced losses because the contributions in investments and taxes generated by this population group are greater than the costs involved in expelling some 7 million undocumented immigrants, as Trump has promised.

Latino GDP is the fifth largest in the world — according to a report by UCLA and Cal Lutheran — and during the years of the global pandemic (2019-2022) it grew faster than any of the world's top 10 economies, including China and India.

Beyond the current government's fear campaign, or the "effectiveness" of the Democratic administrations (Obama and Biden), there are some structural aspects that force migration, such as inequality between countries caused by the application of neoliberal shock measures and the globalized plundering mechanisms of the "rules-based order" of the West. These contribute to impoverishment and subsequent emigration by the economically active population.

The cycle of forced emigration, criminal control of routes, labour exploitation and expulsion is part of an elite consensus and does not vary between parties. It is a circular economy in which the entire economic class, which governs the political system, benefits.

Furthermore, the stigmatizing and criminalizing discourse corresponds to the hegemonic pretension that it maintains from a geopolitical and economic angle. By continuing to establish unequal and tutelary relations over the countries of the Global South, the United States will continue to face the arrival of millions of migrants seeking to enter its territory, with the subsequent benefit of the sectors that profit from such a circular tragedy.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/en ... primer-mes

Google Translator

[blindpig]

Gimme, gimme, gimme …
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence 26 Feb 2025



A ‘wise’ guy’s got the power—
To treason away
With schemes of greed/The People end up
With nothing/Or nothing at all …
(Make you an offer you can’t refuse—
When ya got nothin, you got nothin to lose )

Gimme, gimme, gimme …
All the oxygen in the room! All the air time in the world!
All the New York Post pages! All headlines—all papers—
All the time!

Gimme, gimme, gimme …
All the narrow space in Fox-box foot soldiers’ heads—
Rent-free! All the cult-worship,
All the boot-licking, brown-nosing physically possible!

Gimme, gimme, gimme …
All the hubris, humbug, bamboozlement, tomfoolery, chicanery
Squeeze-able onto the back of the Wizard’s wagon—
Already overloaded with elephant excrement and donkey dung!

Gimme, gimme, gimme …
All your tax dollars in the treasury; all the gold in Fort Knox
All your Medicare monies and Medical information; All your
SNAP, Social Security, student loan funding and information!

Gimme, gimme, gimme …
All your passwords, your codes and clearances! All your checks and
Balances! All your checking and savings accounts—whatever amounts!
All your rights! All your amendments, especially 1st, 4th, 13th and 14th!

Gimme, gimme, gimme …
Greenland
Canada
The Gulf
The other 2/3 of Mexico
The Panama Canal
Pacific
Atlantic
Gaza, The Middle East, and 1/3 of Ukraine!
NATO moved Toronto
Too close to Buffalo—
Windsor too close to Detroit—
We have a right to defend ourselves—Gimme Canada!

Gimme Greenland …
Gotta have it—
Gonna grab it—
Like genitalia of some unsuspecting woman!

Gimme Greenland …
Gotta have those rare earth metals! Give ‘em up!
Gotta wet our beaks—get a piece of the action!
Gotta have it! Our borders are being overrun! We won’t be outdone!

Gimme Greenland …
Gonna claim it—And rename it— “Red, White, Blue Land!”
For The Well-To-Do Land; Bid Rights Adieu Land; Right Wing
Coup Land; Mobster Switcheroo Land; Reich Déjà Vu Land!

Gimme Greenland …
Gonna export remote-controlled, red nose, big shoe
Shows to its shores! Duct tape mouths of scientists,
And suck provinces into pandemic PPE bidding wars!

Gimme Greenland …
Gonna spit bleach solutions— as a million perish needlessly …
Gonna toss paper towels—Puerto Rico-style—hurricane aftermath
And bloviate about what a Chinese hoax climate catastrophe is!

We’re gonna get Great Again!
Don’t be so woke!
We’re gonna get Great Again!
Don’t be so woke!

Gimme Greenland …
“Drill, baby, drill!
Gimme Gaza …
Kill, baby kill …”

We’re gonna get Great Again! (Repeat and FADE)

© 2025. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.

https://blackagendareport.com/gimme-gimme-gimme

[blindpig]

Trump's Brain Goes "Back to the Future"
Stuck in about 2017 or much, much earlier
Roger Boyd
Feb 26, 2025

Parts of Donald Trump’s brain are so obviously stuck in earlier timeframes, perhaps 2017 or even many decades earlier, when the US was much stronger and China and Russia were much weaker, when the rest of the world had less options, and when the US oligarchs roamed free and the masses were kept poor. Marco Rubio may mouth the words that the unipolar period is over, but Trump’s brain is making far too many unipolar assumptions about the US ability to bully and intimidate others. When it comes to the duty of the state to operate for the benefit of the majority, and corporations to be a net positive for that majority, his brain is in a previous century.



Let’s remember that the bad guy BIFF in the movie Back to the Future was based on Donald Trump.

US Sanctions & Tariffs Strengthened China
Up until the US state attempt, in connivance with Google and Apple etc., to destroy Huawei and remove Chinese access to Western high technology goods under the first Trump administration, China was happy to buy huge amounts of such products. The US unilateral (and illegal under UN rules) actions forced China to reassess its relationship with the West and to rapidly accelerate its attempts to remove Chinese technological dependence. The results have been absolutely spectacular, with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) reporting that China now leads in 57 of 64 critical technologies and crucial fields in the period 2019-2023. China has most probably advanced even further with respect to the West since then. In the 2003-2007 period the US lead in 60 technologies, from 2018-2022 China lead in 52 technologies; in just one year that increased to 57. And of course, Europe has been utterly left behind when it comes to these critical technologies and crucial scientific fields.

As seen with the Deepseek AI models, US technology sanctions simply drive greater Chinese innovation. All the while Western high technology corporations suffer from lower revenues due to the loss of sales to China. While high levels of internal competition combined with state support drive Chinese corporations to take up the domestic market slack and then expand abroad. The recent Chinese export drive in mainstream microchips, with prices much lower than Western companies offer, will further revenue starve the Western chip industry. Huawei high-performing AI chips together with the performance characteristics of the Deepseek model (and now a proliferating number of other Chinese AI models) may also seriously crimp the further growth of companies such as NVDA. The Spectator held a good discussion on the self-defeating nature of the US anti-China high tech export controls.





At the same time, China has more generally reduced its dependence upon exports from the US. Those exports are now about one quarter less than they would have otherwise been if they had remained on the pre-Trump trade war trend, and their composition has changed toward lower technology goods such as agricultural ones. In the past decade Russia has both increased its agricultural exports, and reoriented its exports toward the east; especially after the 2014 Crimea-related and 2022 and after Ukraine-war related sanctions. This trend has, and will continue to, replace energy, mineral and agricultural Chinese imports from the US.

In 2023, the biggest US goods exports to China were oilseeds and grains (US$18.5 billion), and oil and gas (US$17.6 billion) & coal and petroleum gases (US$1.1 billion) combined. There were many other areas of easily re-sourced low-technology products such as basic chemicals (US$6.5 billion), meat products (US$4.5 billion), miscellaneous crops (US$2.5 billion), scrap products (US$2.4 billion), plastics (US$1.4 billion), pulp and paperboard products (US$1.2 billion), fruit and tree nuts (US$1.1 billion), miscellaneous manufactured commodities (US$2.1 billion) and soaps, cleaning agents an toiletries (US$1.3 billion). Trump’s technology sanctions accelerated the trend of China importing commodities and low technology products from the US and exporting manufactured and high technology goods in return. The 2023 amount of US$6.8 billion for semiconductors and components was most probably already lower in 2024, as will be the US$6.1 billion of motor vehicles given the collapse in the demand for US car brands; and China just slapped tariffs on large displacement US ICEVs to accelerate that trend. You can bet that the Chinese Party-state is also focused on the US$11.3 billion of pharmaceuticals and medicines as that is a dependency it should not want. The US$6.8 billion in aircraft products and parts could also be rapidly re-sourced from Europe (Airbus), Brazil (Embraer) and China’s own COMAC; Boeing would be a major loser.

US services exports to China are still well below pre-COVID levels, with especially Chinese tourism (including educational tourism of US$13 billion) which was US$14.2 billion in 2022 being substantially hit by the increasingly anti-Chinese sentiments of the US government. Such service exports can be rapidly reduced. Royalties make up US$8.2 billion, which may be relatively stable but also will not provide a big growth driver. Ocean, Air and Port services of US$3.2 billion are actually a product of Chinese exports to the US, as will be a chunk of the credit related and legal services (US$2.4 billion).



As for Chinese exports to the US, the majority of those exports are by US and Western owned corporations from their Chinese plants; all of which will be negatively impacted by the US tariffs. Those exports are also predominantly manufactured goods, with the largest categories being computers, broadcasting equipment and office machine parts. With the many decades-long deindustrialization of the US, and the rentier-driven rises in basic living costs, there is no way that the US can replace these Chinese goods at anywhere near the same price with domestic production. Even Mexican production would take years to ramp up and still not benefit from the incredibly efficient Chinese manufacturing supply chain. Costs will rise within the US, which will then negatively affect its export ability to all nations and reduce the standard of living within the nation. In addition, there are many Western corporations that produce and sell in China (e.g. Apple, Tesla, GM, Ford) or provide local services (e.g. MacDonalds, Starbucks) that could be severely hit by changes in consumer sentiment against US brands together with possible targeted Party-state retribution. Chinese corporations have very little such exposure to the US domestic market. The wealth of one of Trump’s major backers, Miriam Adelson, is mostly wrapped up in her Macau casino. Then of course, there is that Tesla plant in Shanghai.



China has the ability to rapidly re-source much of US imports from domestic and foreign sources at the same prices, while the US does not have the same ability with Chinese exports. In addition, US firms are much more exposed to a tariff war as they are responsible for the majority of Chinese exports to the US and other US corporations have a large dependency upon the Chinese domestic market. The goods balance between the US and China was in China’s favour to the tune of US$295 billion relative to a Chinese economy of over US$18 trillion at market exchange rates, and trade with the US represented only 15% of total Chinese exports. This can be easily offset by domestic fiscal policy and increased exports to other nations which may be happy to reduce dependence upon a sanctions and tariff happy US. In addition, China is rapidly reducing its reliance on imported cars and high technology goods, while also slowly reducing its reliance on imported oil; all of which will work to reduce its imports. The world in 2025 is much more in China’s favour than that of 2017, and quite the opposite for the US. Even the “60% tariffs” that Trump has bloviated about will be much more damaging to the US than China.



China is also a leader in the processing of many raw materials that are critical to high technology industries, and defence production. It has already started to cut the supply to the US of these dual use materials, with limits on the export of gallium, germanium and antimony already in place. These will slowly but surely starve US high tech manufacturing and its military industrial complex; next may be titanium. It would take a decade plus, at very high costs, for the US and the West to replace the Chinese exports. Russia is also a supplier of such critical materials.



At the same time, the two main US Asian vassals of Japan and South Korea are in absolute decline and relative decline respectively. With their core car manufacturing and technological industrial complexes deeply threatened by the onslaught of the Chinese manufacturers. The Japanese population has been declining since 2009, most recently at a rate of 600,000 per year, while its economic output has been stagnant since the turn of the century. The working age population is set to fall precipitously over the next decades (unlike China which will not see such a decline for another decade and has much more room for productivity gains). The birth rate has collapsed at an even greater rate recently in South Korea, which is standing on the precipice of an accelerating population decline. The nation’s GDP growth has also been on a deceleration track since the late 1990’s Asian Financial Crisis, now being in the range of 2-3% at best. The Japan and South Korea of 2025 are much weakened versions of their 1990s selves.

The Ukraine War Strengthened Russia
War has a habit of quashing domestic opposition, rallying the population around the state, and forcing long overdue economic, financial and political reforms. This is exactly how the Ukraine War has played out for Russia. The Russian leadership used the breathing room provided after the 2014 Western-backed Ukraine fascist coup (probably extended by at least four years by the first Trump administration) to make Russia as sanctions-resistant as possible, with much increased domestic food and other production hastened by the Crimea-related sanctions. The much lower oil prices of the 2010s also taught Russia an important lesson about the reliance upon oil and gas export revenues. The Western economic and technological aggression against China also provided Russia with a much deepened partnership with its massive neighbour.

Once Russia had successfully weathered the “mother of all sanctions” and outright theft from the West in 2022, the positive aspects of the war upon the Russian society and economy could then proceed. Many of the ever-traitorous “liberals” left the country of their own volition and the war-atmosphere allowed for the closing of many of the liberal media and political hangouts. At the same time, the Western sanctions and theft aimed at the Russian oligarchs spectacularly backfired by making them more dependent upon the Russian state; allowing the Russian leadership to further rebalance the oligarch-state relationship in favour of the state. Within the military-industrial-complex that had survived the depression of the 1990s, there has been wave after wave of cleansing of both the incompetent and the corrupt; greatly enhancing Russian military capabilities and the efficiency of the MIC. That MIC has shown its ability to produce munitions in much greater volumes than the corrupted and incompetent Western MICs and at much lower costs. The Russian war machine has also now had three years of large-scale warfare in which to hone its abilities. As the Germans found out in WW2, and Napoleon much earlier, to under-estimate the determination and resourcefulness of the Russian army can be a deadly mistake.







The colossal sanctions have also freed up Russia to deepen relations with other highly sanctioned nations such as Iran and North Korea, while also re-orienting economic and financial relations away from the West and toward Asia. The world outside the West ignored the West’s sanctions, dealing a large blow to Western prestige and soft power. At the same time, Europe has severely weakened itself economically through its self-harming sanctions and thefts. As well as on the domestic political stage, as increasing numbers of citizens question the efficacy of their nation’s ever increasing support for Ukraine. Trump’s proposed tariffs on Europe will only weaken it further toward geopolitical irrelevance. In parallel, Ukraine has been very significantly depopulated through emigration, territorial losses, falling birth rates and war deaths; and de-industrialized through Russian military actions and territorial losses. It is also financially destroyed, and suffers increasing levels of domestic unrest.

Trump’s musings that Russia can be “forced to the negotiating table” are utterly delusional. Here, his brain seems to be trapped in the first decade of this century or the last decade of the last. His more recent statements have shown some inkling of an understanding of the reality of the situation, but his brain still has a long journey to reach that reality. In Defence Secretary Hegseth’s recent opening remarks at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group the position that the US wants Europe to take up the slack against Russia to free up the US to focus on China was put forward.

Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine …

We're also here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe. The United States faces consequential threats to our homeland. We must – and we are – focusing on security of our own borders.

We also face a peer competitor in the Communist Chinese with the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity, and making the resourcing tradeoffs to ensure deterrence does not fail. Deterrence cannot fail, for all of our sakes. As the United States prioritizes its attention to these threats, European allies must lead from the front. Together, we can establish a division of labor that maximizes our comparative advantages in Europe and Pacific respectively.

This is a complete misreading of the relative strength of Europe, which is rapidly losing its industrial might due to the impact of the anti-Russia sanctions (loss of markets and very high energy prices), a China that is becoming increasingly dominant in the vehicle and capital goods industries that are the core of the German economy, and long-term structural and technological issues. The title of Wolgang Munchau’s latest book sums up the current German economic situation Kaput: The End Of The German Miracle.



As Tooze notes, since the turn of the century Germany has had lower levels of public investment than the US, and its vaunted train system is now more unreliable than the British train system. It is estimated that Germany needs an at least Euro 500 billion investment drive, not huge extra expenditures of the military. Germany has been resting upon it previous huge investments, many of them in now outdated technologies, while not developing into the newer technologies for at least three decades now. Of course, the US attempts to force German companies to localize production to the US will only accelerate the German industrial decline.

At the same time Italy and the UK are already effectively de-industrialized, and France is also quite far down that path. The base of European industrial productive forces has already shrunken so much, and will continue to shrink, that Europe is incapable of doing the military heavy lifting that the US is requesting of it. Any significant reallocation of resources to defence (i.e. purchasing lots of expensive crap from the US MIC and misallocating internal resources) would only accelerate that deterioration. This is the Europe of 2025, not the Europe of the 1970s. Perhaps Hegseth’s remarks reflect a wishful thinking driven by the relative decline of the US that now forces it to husband resources rather than act as the global policeman; a reflection of weakness.

Trump Thinks He Is Nixon And Its 1972
In 1972, President Nixon made a historic trip to China that lead to the opening up of China. But that trip and opening was built upon the already in place antagonism between China and the Soviet Union after Mao’s split from the USSR following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. In the present day, the relationship between Russia and China is as tight as it has ever been in the face of Western aggression. The two are also highly symbiotic, with Russia providing a cornucopia of raw materials and agricultural products for the industrial might of China, in addition to military (including nuclear) power. While China provides a vast market for Russia, and acts as a reliable source for needed manufactured goods. The relationship also frees each country from worrying about the huge border that they share.

Trump stated that “one of the most stupid things by the Biden administration was to unite Russia and China. I’m going to ununite them” during a recent interview with Tucker Carlson. Trump thinks that he will do a “Nixon” with Russia this time, peeling it off from its relationship with China. The Russian leadership very much understand that if China falls they will be next, and will treat the Trump administration’s entreaties of a “new partnership” as the simplistic and manipulative BS that it is. The US oligarchy and foreign policy bubble have made the mistake of underestimating their opponents again and again. Trump is underestimating the basic intelligence and memory of the Russian leadership.

Even Iran Is Stronger



Since 2017 Iran has established much deeper relations with both Russia and China, and has established a formal peace with its Arab neighbours. The fall of Syria is a setback, but will not fundamentally change Iran’s position. In fact, the increasing dominance of Turkey within Syria may very well produce a new enemy for the Israeli state to focus on. As was shown by the Iranian missile attack upon Israel, and the utterly failed attempted Israeli air attack upon upon Iran, Israel does not have the ability to significantly strike at Iran nor defend itself against an attack upon itself. Without the cooperation of neighbouring nations, including the Afghanistan that it retreated from, the US ability to strike Iran is also severely limited.

Iran is already under the “Mother of All Sanctions” so Trump’s flexing of that option would be pure performative propaganda for the domestic audience. In reality, the Iranian economy is growing (5% in 2023 and 3.7% in 2024) and its defence abilities are being significantly improved with access to Russian military hardware. Its increasing economic linkages with China and Russia also provide scope for further economic expansion. Things for Iran may not be “easy” but it can certainly sustain itself and even prosper somewhat in future years, while being more than able to defend itself. The US will not go to war with Iran, and Israel will have to be happy with its ongoing genocide of the Palestinians while it becomes more and more concerned about Turkey.

Perhaps by the end of his term, if he survives that long, Trump’s brain may have time travelled closer to the present day. If it does, it will be a hard reality to accept for such an arrogant, narcissistic man steeped in the propaganda of US exceptionalism and strength. The US is becoming a more normal nation, with its bullying, blackmail and political interference having less sway even amongst its erstwhile vassals and its Americas “back yard”.

Back To 1930 For Govt-Funded Health Research?
Trump, and his sidekick Musk do not seem to understand that state funding for research has been, and is, critical to the success of so many private high-technology sectors. In essence, the state carries out the riskiest research and through its expenditures reduces risks to a level acceptable to the private sector. In the US all the profits are then taken by the private sector, while in some other countries those profits are limited (e.g. pharmaceutical price controls) and/or shared between the state and the private sector.

Musk, who knows absolutely FA about the natural sciences and other research is ignorantly whining about the overheads assumed in the funding provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF). If he gets his way and slashes the assumed overheads, large chunks of the state funded research sector will be severely constrained; greatly impacting the future competitiveness of US high technology sectors. Naked Capitalism published an email from “KLG” detailing these realities.

One can argue there is a better model, but if this goes through without converting to that yet to be invented model, academic biomedical and other research in the US will crumble into dust. Even at Harvard and Yale (HMS is a piker but Harvard is huge in the NIH and NSF budget; ditto for MIT, Tufts, Brandeis, Boston University). Contrary to Elon the Magnificent, the better model is not for-profit Biomedicine in the form of Big and Little Pharma …

To pick an example, at 15% instead of 24.2%, Emory would have lost $34.4M in 2023 ($90.5M to $56.1M). That would probably put them out of business as a research institution. This is a very low-margin thing. Same for most of the other research medical schools on the list (the top-85).

Musk would end up forcing the defunding of a significant part of a US development state which is already seriously underperforming that of China. The Chinese must be privately egging Musk on as he ignorantly and impulsively works to destroy chunks of the US development state, as well as other chunks of the US regime change and propaganda apparatus. Truly a “bull in a China shop”, but that China shop is the US!

Back to 1890 for the Regulatory State?
If the oligarchs are to intensify their feasting upon the American people they must be freed from all the red taperequired legitimate regulations that get in the way of that uber feasting. The first to go it seems will be the Consumer Finance Protection Board, a weak progressive instrument of meekly limiting some of the more outrageous financial system scams, overcharging and profiteering. It is such regulatory bodies that place a legitimate gloss over the raw bourgeois greed, at little real cost to the oligarchs. But the feasting is getting down to the proletariat bone here and no such encumbrances can be tolerated by the late-stage Empire oligarchs.

This will not be the last of course, as even the thin pickings that have been left by Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden, together with the supineness of the Supreme Court and general legal system to oligarch interests, are scraped away. Perhaps they will even get out the power hoses used to strip sausage “meat” from the bone to get at the last ratty bits of regulation. Rivers will be fouled, citizens poisoned and cheated, whole towns and regions poisoned from poison trains, new buildings and products even more shitified, and nothing will happen to the culprits. Perhaps a few more whistle blowers will kill themselves with multiple shots to the head.

In reality, these fig leafs of regulation supported by such oligarch-tools as Elizabeth Warren do a great service to the oligarchs in covering up and misrepresenting their wrongdoings for the cost of some measly fines, as well as hiding the systemic nature of the oligarch beast. Without these fig leafs, the population will no longer have convenient lies and misrepresentations with which to hang onto a rose-coloured glasses view of how US society actually functions. The result may very well be a proletarian awakening and much increased levels of anger and violence toward the oligarchy and their courtier tools; one requiring greater state authoritarianism and fascist ideology to redirect the masses away from blaming the bosses and their owners. Such things do not an effective and productive society and economy make. The strength of the homeland will be further weakened.

Back to 1890 for Taxing the Rich
The rich have always had a tendency to utterly detest any move to take back some of their grandiose income and wealth to serve the good of the society upon which that grandiose income and wealth depends. Toward that end, they have bribed and controlled politicians to produce one scheme after another toward the end of the average billionaire paying a lower rate of tax than the average nurse or fireman, Such wheezes as capital gains (previously known as “unearned income”) taxed at a lower rate than the income of the poor working stiffs, the private equity “carried interest” ruse, the depreciation allowances for buildings that actually appreciate in value (a favourite of President Trump), the ridiculous depreciation allowances for the oil and gas industry, and a rebalancing of taxation toward retail taxes and tariffs that hit the poorest the most. The tax code has also been made intentionally complex to allow for an endless set of rich people tax dodges and giveaways.

One of the greatest gains of the rich has been the removal of the inheritance tax in 2010 (under the Obama administration), nearly a century after it was enacted. The rate of inheritance tax had already been incrementally reduced from 2001 onwards. The inheritance tax had been enacted in 1916, specifically to put a brake on the oligarchy-producing accumulation of wealth across generations. In a country supposedly built upon meritocracy, the building of a new class of inherited oligarchic families now has no tax limitations. Of course, the rich-friendly state had already made the inheritance tax look like a slab of Swiss cheese by allowing trust funds and other “tax planning” devices to undermine it.

But the rich can never have low enough taxes, no matter how low they go. During the trial of multi-millionaire Leona Helmsley, a former housekeeper testified that she heard Ms. Helmsley say words that the rich tend to only say among themselves “We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes”. Helmsley was a major beneficiary of the utterly ridiculous increases in real estate tax breaks enacted by the Reagan administration, which also benefitted Trump in the 1980s, later to be reversed.



So Trump and his drug-addled oligarch side-kick Musk are now working hard to find ways to slash any government spending that benefits the majority and foreigners (with some drive-by positive outcomes such as the freezing of spending by USAID and the NED), while also raising taxes on that majority (i.e. tariffs). All so they can stop the 2017 tax cuts for the rich from expiring this year while adding a few more. The rich will get richer and the little people will pay more taxes and get less state benefits in return. Trump has already placed a hiring freeze on the Internal Revenue Service and is cutting 6,000 jobs there, as well as focusing efforts on illegal immigration. Anything to reduce the number of IRS staff investigating the oligarchy’s tax dodging games.



Milei’s Argentina as the Oligarch Wet Dream & America’s Future
In a previous piece I covered the reality of what is being done in Argentina, an attempt at a full crushing of the social and regulatory state and the impoverishment of the majority of the population in the service of agri-business, mining, financier and foreign oligarchs and their courtier class. Such a state is the true wet dream of the oligarch class, a beaten down and subservient majority with the state only operating for the benefit of the rich. The very image of the state envisaged by the US Founding Fathers as they carried out their coup against the burgeoning US democracy. The only difference between the US and Argentina will be the need to keep control over a viable manufacturing sector; Argentina is a mere vassal to be exploited while the US is the imperial core.

The problem is that the sheer greed and avarice of the US oligarchs blocks the possibility of the policies needed to reinvigorate the US; a development state relatively independent of oligarch interests, a reduction in basic costs through the removal of oligarch profiteering and rentier activities, the breaking up of the monopolies and oligopolies that dominate the US economy, a return of the financial sector to the regulatory straight-jacket of the New Deal era, a slashing of the utterly wasteful defence budget, a re-orientation of the tax base back to unearned income, higher incomes, and wealth. The US is beset by an oligarchy of imperial decline, not one of imperial rise. The US is on the same track as Argentina, just not as far along yet; but Trump and Musk are trying hard to speed up the US train.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/trumps ... the-future

It's not "sheer ignorance and greed", those are symptoms, the causative agent is capitalism. Capitalism's evolution is linear, in the course of my life more and more, damn near every little thing is commodified to the max. This has not made life better, unless you thing 'smart phone' is better. If so I pity you.

And let us not forget that the base cause of the fall of the Roman Empire was the rich's refusal to pay taxes, resulting in ever increasing extraction from the rest of the populace who in the end abandoned that government, finding barbarians less onerous.

******

Trump and Musk’s false USAID claims backfire on BJP

The Narendra Modi-led government in India tried to use Trump’s lies to target the country’s main opposition, accusing it of using USAID to influence elections in the country.

February 26, 2025 by Abdul Rahman


PM of India Narendra Modi meets with President Donald Trump at the White House on Feb 13. Photo: Narendra Modi

Misleading claims made by both US President Donald Trump and his close aide and billionaire Elon Musk about USAID funds have created a political storm in India. The ultra-right-wing government in the country is using those false claims to target India’s main opposition party accusing it of using foreign interference to win elections.

The opposition was able to put the facts in front of the public in time, turning the political embarrassment around on the ruling party. The episode once again established the unreliability of the Trump administration, apart from exposing the true nature of USAID.

On February 16, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by Musk announced the cancellation of USD 21 million aid meant for “voter turnout” in India. On two occasions Trump cited the cancellation claiming that India does not need the money as it is very rich. He reiterated his claims about India being a high tariff nation, where it is impossible for the US to sell anything. He went as far as accusing India of taking “advantage” of the US.

Some BJP leaders used DOGE’s claims and Trump’s announcements to accuse the opposition of using foreign funding to influence elections in the country, calling it “external interference in India’s electoral process.”

Soon, media and social media was abuzz about how the main opposition party Indian National Congress (INC) has been using foreign support against the Indian government.

India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar pushed the narrative claiming that the opposition and civil society groups in the country may have used the US funds for bad purposes. He called Trump’s allegations as “concerning and worrisome” underlining that his government is “looking into” the matter, as if to legitimize the attacks on the opposition.

While targeting the opposition on USAID, Jainshankar ignored his own ministry which, in its annual report for 2023-24 mentions in detail about ongoing collaboration between the government of India and USAID.

BJP spreads misinformation while concealing ties to USAID and Adani
On February 22, an Indian Express investigation established that there has been no election related funding to India by USAID since 2008 and the amount mentioned by Musk and Trump was for Bangladesh.

The INC has since claimed that it was actually BJP which, when it was in opposition, used foreign funds including USAID to destabilize different central governments. INC member Jairam Ramesh has alleged that BJP deliberately used fake news spread by Trump and Musk for political reasons to target the country’s main opposition party, calling the act nothing short of “treason.”

He also accused the BJP of failing to respond to Trump’s repeated insults of India, suggesting that its silence may be related to the BJP-led government seeking favors or relief for Adani.

Adani, a close ally to Modi and one of the biggest corporate houses in India, and some of his associates have been accused of fraud for obtaining funds from the US. Arrest warrants have been issued against them.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat thanked the Indian Express for bringing the facts to the public which proved that both Trump and Musk were lying. She cautioned the media and political leaders about relying on the statements made by the present US administration.

Karat also accused the Modi government of deliberately using Trump’s lies to accuse the Indian opposition in an attempt to spread misinformation and discredit the opposition. The Modi government’s acts put India’s image in jeopardy, she claimed.

USAID’s checkered history
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) was formed in 1961. It has been one of the central agencies to fund various projects across the globe with a primary objective of promoting the US’s foreign policy interests.

Apart from funding development projects, such as in health sectors in poorer and developing countries, the agency has been repeatedly accused of interfering in local politics. It has been accused of being a means of indirect funding of regime change programs in countries with governments opposed to imperialist interventions.

The Trump administration decided to shut down USAID and now talks of merging it with the state department as a part of its attempts to cut the size of the federal government spending and reduce “wasteful expenditure.” Musk and Trump also claim that the agency is inefficient and has failed to promote the core of its agenda of furthering US interests.

The agency has “long strayed from its original mission of responsibly advancing American interests abroad” and most of the funds are not used to further the “core national interests,” the US State Department said in a post on X earlier this month.

Recent statements by Trump indicate that his administration is looking to pursue a more direct approach to push for US interests worldwide instead of relying on agencies such as USAID. The agency has, anyway, been accused of following a “liberal” approach to foreign policy.

Since assuming power, Trump has threatened several countries in the world of either direct interventions or outright occupation. Trump has threatened the overtaking of Panama, Gaza and Canada, as well as interventions in various other countries if they act contrary to US interests.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/02/26/ ... re-on-bjp/

[blindpig]

SHORT SHRIFT FOR PRIME MINISTER STARMER’S CRIMEAN-WAR HATRED OF RUSSIA



by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

In public, in front of the press, the plan of President Donald Trump on Thursday was to give British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer short shrift. Starmer made it shorter.

TRUMP: “You’ve been terrific in our discussions. You are a very tough negotiator, however, and I’m not sure I like that, but that’s okay.”

STARMER: “Heh, heh, heh.”

Trump’s “attitude toward the Russian leader could hardly be more different from the British leader sitting inches away in the Oval Office,” reported the New York Times.


12:20 at the White House, West Wing portico entrance – Prime Minister Starmer was running late: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22aD1erDlFk


President Trump arrives at the front door at 12:33. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22aD1erDlFk


12:34: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22aD1erDlFk

Trump was at the White House door to receive Starmer at 12:34. That was nineteen minutes later than the time announced on the President’s schedule for the day. Fifteen minutes were then assigned at the Oval Office before the two men and their officials went to lunch a few steps away in the Cabinet Room. At 2 pm, ninety minutes later, a press conference was scheduled in the East Room.

The published schedule of Trump’s time for talks with Starmer was a fraction of the time which Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron spent together on Monday. At the Oval Office Macron and Trump had answered press questions for 28 minutes. They then went into their luncheon meeting, and returned for a press conference in the East Room lasting 43 minutes.

By contrast, Trump and Starmer gave the press a 20-minute opportunity in the Oval Office to ask questions. This had not been scheduled in advance. The US television networks and the BBC were all taken unawares. It was the German state organ Deutsche Welle which broadcast the impromptu Oval Office session.

Trump took almost all the press questions, and invited Vice President J.D. Vance to respond also. Trump repeated the same slogans on the Ukraine war and the minerals agreement to be signed with Ukraine which he has announced before.

He allowed Starmer a few seconds to express himself.* Starmer called the special relationship with the US “the greatest alliance the world has ever seen.”

Asked to clarify what that meant, Trump said: “He [Starmer] loves his country and so do I, and that’s our common, ahhh, our common theme. He loves his country, and I love our country…we’ve had a longtime relationship, a long time, hundreds of years, and we like each other, and frankly, we like each other’s country, and we love our country. I think that’s our common thread.”

Trump added the US has three friends who are equal in his estimation – the UK, France, and Australia.

Asked what he anticipates for an end-of-war agreement with Russia, Trump said: “I have confidence if we make a deal, it’s going to hold.” Starmer added a compliment for Trump: “The deal if we get it is going to be hugely important. I don’t think it would have happened if the space hadn’t been created for it by yourself. But if there is a deal in, we’ve got to make sure it’s a deal that lasts… We need to make sure it’s secure and we’ve leant in and said we’ll play our part, and we’ve talked, and we’ll talk about how we will work with yourself Mr President to ensure this deal is not violated.”

“That will be the easy part”, Trump added.

On the terms to be negotiated for that “deal”, Trump repeated his past vagueness, including the notion that the Kiev regime may recover the territories it has lost since 2014. “They fought long and hard on the land, and you [Starmer] and I will be discussing that and we’re certainly going to try to get as much [land] as we can back… We’ll be seeing about that.”

Trump also repeated his vagueness on what forces — American, French, British or others — might be engaged to secure an end-of-war agreement in the Ukraine. “We’re doing the deal, and we’re going to be in there, actually in there, digging, digging our hearts out,” Trump said, referring to the minerals agreement with Ukraine which Vladimir Zelensky is expected to sign with Trump on Friday. “”He’s coming,” Trump added. “Perhaps he’s already on the way. And we are going to be signing the deal together, probably in front of the media… We want to work with him, President Zelesnky, and we will work with him.” Asked to remember his calling Zelensky a dictator, Trump replied: “Did I say that? I can’t believe I said that.”

Pressed by a reporter to say whether he means US forces would participate in a peacekeeping force as a “backstop” to an agreement, Trump said “Well, there is a backstop. First you are going to have European countries because they are right there. We are far away. We have an ocean between us. But we want to make sure it works, so when you say backstop, do you mean backstop psychologically or militarily or what? But we are a backstop because we are over there. We’ll be working in the country… I just don’t think you are going to have a problem.”


On Prime Minister Starmer’s right, David Lammy, Foreign Secretary. On President Trump’s left, Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W8D0t7_9IA A verbatim transcript of the session was published later here.

“If British troops are in Ukraine keeping the peace and get attacked by Russia,” asked a reporter, “will you come to their aid?

“The British don’t need much help”, Trump replied. “They can take care of themselves very well… You know, the British have been incredible soldiers, incredible military, and they can take care of themselves. If they need help, I’ll always be with the British. Okay? Okay, I’ll always be with them. But they don’t need help.”


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W8D0t7_9IA

It is unreported by the US and British media why the scheduled press conference in the East Room was delayed for almost an hour and a half. Part of the time was spent by the American and British staff in the delegations trying to minimize the differences which had emerged during the lunch talks and then between Trump’s and Starmer’s scripts for their public remarks. The British needed time also to get the Americans to agree to his promoting the superiority of the UK over France and other US allies in the present war.

“We remain each other’s first partner in defence, ready to come to each other’s aid, to counter threats, wherever and whenever they may arise,” Starmer read out of pages curling from the hand-written corrections which had been made and re-made. Earlier in the Oval Office, Trump had said the UK was no more of a “friend” than France and Australia.

The Financial Times and BBC tried to strike the positive note that Starmer had sought and possibly succeeded in getting bilateral trade relief from Trump’s threatened tariffs than against the Europeans. According to the FT lead, “Trump says US is working on trade deal with the UK.US President suggested that Britain could escape tariffs if agreement struck.” “’He was working hard,’ the BBC quoted Trump as saying.’ He earned whatever the hell they pay him over there.’ The president says he is receptive to Starmer’s arguments, and says that he thinks we can arrive at a trade deal where tariffs won’t be necessary.”

In fact, Trump was non-committal. “I think there’s a very good chance that in the case of these two great, friendly countries, I think we could very well end up with a real trade deal where the tariffs wouldn’t be necessary. We’ll see.”


Trump allowed Starmer a 32-minute presser; this was a quarter fraction less than Macron had enjoyed. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJSaNSSj_4c
Click on the verbatim transcript reported by RollCall here.

On the particulars of an end-of-war settlement, Trump claimed his priority at the moment is a ceasefire. “As I discussed with Prime Minister Starmer, the next step we’re making is toward a very achievable ceasefire. We hope that can happen quickly.” “This will lay the groundwork for a longterm peace agreement that will return stability to Eastern Europe.”

Starmer’s priority was different – he wants to keep warfighting with Russia.

Starmer was emphatic that the peace agreement “can’t be terms that reward the aggressor or that gives encouragement to regimes like Iran.” According to the Prime Minister, “we discussed a plan today to reach a peace that is tough and fair; that Ukraine will help shape; that is backed by strength to stop Putin coming back for more.”

Explicitly, Starmer went on, this means “the UK is ready to put boots on the ground and planes in the air to support a deal.” After reciting claims the UK will be boosting its military aid to the Ukraine, and increasing its own defence spending – “the biggest since the Cold War” – Starmer announced: “What counts is winning. If you don’t win, you don’t deliver.”

Neither Trump nor Starmer claimed they have agreed on any end-of-war terms. “Our teams will be talking about that,” Starmer said. A British television reporter pressed him to say “whether you can do that without a firm assurance that America will have our back in the form of some kind of security guarantee, were Putin to breach that agreement?” Starmer repeated himself without details. “Our teams will be talking about that.”

Starmer insisted on striking a final threatening tone which was not in the script on his lectern. “It’s really important that Putin knows that this historic deal – which I very much hope comes about – is there, is there, and it’s a lasting deal, and that we are able to deal with any inclination he has to go again, or go further.”

Starmer meant he is hoping to continue the British war against Russia.

The London newspapers editorialized in favour of that, and against Trump. “Conventional platitudes about a ‘special relationship’ and common values are of little use to Sir Keir Starmer in handling Donald Trump,” declared the Guardian. “History is not irrelevant, but on matters of substance – most urgently, a settlement to end the war in Ukraine – Mr Trump is behaving more like a mafia boss than a statesman. His method is to demand tribute in exchange for protection.”

“Sir Keir Starmer will enter the Oval Office on Thursday walking a delicate tightrope,” the Telegraph acknowledged. “The Prime Minister cannot be seen to simply bend the knee to Donald Trump, but nor can he afford to anger the leader of the world’s largest economy at a time when Britain’s economy is on the brink of recession.”

Starmer also revealed that in exchange for warfighting support and trade relief from Trump, he is prepared to betray Canada, constitutionally a dominion under the British monarch, King Charles III, by letting Trump take over Canada as the 51st US state.

When a Canadian reporter asked Starmer whether he had discussed with Trump his threat “to remove one of [King Charles III’s] realms from his control”, Starmer criticized the Canadian for asking the question. “You mentioned Canada. I think you are trying to find a divide between us that doesn’t, ummm, exist. We are the closest of nations, and we had very good discussions today. [Lowering his voice] but we didn’t discuss Canada.” Minute 18:54.

“That’s enough,” Trump cut off the reporter trying to follow up.

NOTE: Prime Minister Starmer’s hatred of Russia as British ideology was last on public display during the Crimean War of 1853-56. The lead images are from an animation of the British mentality in that conflict.
[*] The transcript of the Oval Office session records that Starmer spoke for a total of 220 seconds; this amounted to just 12% of the total time taken.

https://johnhelmer.net/short-shrift-for ... more-91191

*******

<snip>

(NewsNation) — Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, says the United States is hoping to make an estimated $20 billion from a rare earth minerals deal Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Donald Trump are negotiating. “I think the President’s vision is that not only will it help us with our national security to have the critical minerals, which are so important for putting computers together and everything else, but also, if there’s U.S. ownership in those places, that it will help secure those places, because you, of course wouldn’t want to be attacking U.S. things,” Hassett said in an interview with NewsNation correspondent Kellie Meyer on “Morning in America.”

Russians immediately deployed their superweapon--yes, a meme ... Yes, this one. You don't need "translation for that". For reference--Bacchus and Ariadne by Guido Reni.



Yes, $20 billion, no NOT trillion, billion. You know, a pocket change or Stewie from The Family Guy trying to "impress bitches" with his 0.2 inches dick. Or the dick of Bacchus. Yeah, $20 billion--a pocket change.

http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2025/02 ... larry.html

A note on 'packages': Greek gods were always depicted as hung like a chipmunk, the reason being that being hung like John Holmes implied an animal nature and the gods were as civilized as their creators.