Imagine working for Pete Hesgeth. I’m sure he has some kind of handler that keeps him from getting too drunk at the office, but he’s still a woefully unqualified moron.
You spend your life trying to keep your country safe. You turn down the cushy jobs with giant paychecks that your old colleagues took. And now, you have to watch this dumbass fratboy and his idiot, traitor bosses destroy the national security of your country in a matter of months with plans to do much, much worse.
”No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue," Garber wrote
Harvard is on the right side of history. They kind of have to be. Imagine if their alumni couldn’t talk about graduating from Harvard anymore out of shame.
Seriously though, I hope the rest of the Ivy League is taking note. History will remember who caved to the mad king.
The good thing is that there’s a steady hand on the wheel exercising unprecedented levels of power. He clearly has a plan to do things, undo them, redo them, undo them again, etc. according to a clearly defined plan.
Imagine if the guy claiming dictatorial powers was just winging it from one moment to the next. What a nightmare scenario that would be.
They used to say not to fight newspapers, because they bought ink by the barrel. Clearly outdated now. But owning the corrupt Supreme Court isn’t the same as owning the entire judiciary, federal and state.
The Trump administration attacking law firms works when they capitulate. When they fight back, those fights can get very messy and very expensive.
Forget Gaza. The West Bank won’t exist in 4 years. It’ll all be Trump hotels and resorts.
Republican Jesus said, “Gather the travelers in need of hospitality, then kick the door in and send them all to a gulag in El Salvador. Also cut taxes for the people who already own everything. Maybe kick a puppy while you’re at it. Good way to start the day.”
Blaming Nader for the Supreme Court handing the election to the Bush Dynasty is the kind of thinking that paralyzed American politics on the “left.” Nader spent his career working to help the people.
Bush having the governor of the deciding state be his brother and having the Supreme Court in his pocket sealed that election.
Democrats should win every election by massive landslides. Instead, they spent the last several decades bowing to billionaires and providing controlled opposition that suppressed any actual reform.
The illusion of choice between neoliberals morphed into fascism, and it’s now difficult to discern neoliberals from fascists. They have the same interests: Big number goes up for billionaires; nothing else matters.
A terrorist attack might be coming. It doesn’t even take a conspiracy, just confusion and ineffectiveness. 9/11 happened in the early days of the Bush administration, while confusion caused threats to be ignored.
The federal workers everyone takes for granted and the administration is actively trying to get rid of are the people who protect everyone from systemic failures, especially catastrophic ones.
Japan has figured out how to play trump. Be nice to his face and feed his ego, then go hard against him with actual policy. He doesn’t really understand the policy outside of it being a grift for temporary gains and is a nightmare to deal with behind closed doors with his ego and diminished capacity.
The best part is that when they manage to fuck up on an industrial scale and crash their insider trading money printer, the taxpayers end up bailing them out.
The whole world suffers, and they use the people’s money to buy the dip and profit even more when the fixed game comes back online shortly.
These cases make the headlines, but they must be casually searching electronics and getting all kinds of private data, photos, videos, etc. They unlock your phone and download everything for their amusement and to violate your rights later. The fact that they’ll fuck with a lawyer to get his client’s info says volumes about the restraint being shown.
It might still feel like everything is normal in the US, but realize that you’re living in a fascist state in its infancy. The rule of law no longer applies.
IIRC, RFK’s stances on health issues were mostly based on a conspiracy theory that the institutions he now leads were deliberately burying studies and mass amounts of data. If that were true, he’d obviously be crowing about it at every opportunity.
Instead, he found out that his conspiracy theories are bullshit, and that he’s now beholden to Trump and MAGA fascism. He’s going to accidentally say something against the narrative from time-to-time. I’m sure Trump or Elon or whoever is in charge will make him do something humiliating to atone for it.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not defending RFK, Jr. it’s extremely sad that the apple fell so very far from the tree.
His motives may be unclear, but his actions are crystal clear. He’s tried to enact tariffs already and been stopped before they were implemented because everyone knows the level of damage they cause. He’s moving forward this time. He’s deliberately crashing the global economy.
Why? Who knows? His Silicon Valley overlords demand it? I doubt it’s Putin, because Russia’s economy is hanging on by a thread, and the last thing they need is a global downturn, especially when it craters oil prices. Is it just that Trump is stupid, maybe senile, and ultimately in charge?
Regardless, the leader of the biggest economy in the world has decided that it’s time for a global recession/depression, so unless that course is changed, that’s probably what’s going to happen.
It’s a good time to get out of the US anyway, before you end up in an El Salvadoran gulag. At least until they build the same gulags in the US. Those might even be worse.
What level of bullshit can the right wing tech bros maintain when ordinary Americans are priced out of bread and circuses? Even the most unfair social contracts have rails.
More to the point, how many Americans have maxed out their credit cards paying bills and basic necessities? What happens when making the minimum payment on the maxed credit card balance makes them unable to afford food and housing? Are millions of people going to become homeless in the next several months? Is the credit system going to collapse?
Honestly, the solution at the citizen level is for everyone to file bankruptcy. It ensures a roof over your head, paused payments on debt, and it shifts all the financial losses to the banks. Banks taking actual losses and being threatened with insolvency puts their skin in Trump’s game to destroy the global economy.
Part of me wants it all to burn to the fucking ground. Maybe something better comes out of the ashes.
Bullock continues: “[Bukele] brags about the ways that they use cruel and inhumane treatment in CECOT and our organization has documented amply systematic practices of torture generally in the prison system. So the United States, in doing this, is generating a point of inflection for the international human rights system. The outcome of this is basically the creation of this transnational penal colony where a president, a head of state, can make a deal with President Bukele and disappear undesirables indefinitely.”
Right now “undesirables” are technically limited to Venezuelan immigrants who may or may not have tattoos. Does anyone actually think that definition isn’t going to be expanded? All non-white immigrants, trans people, gay people, those who speak out against these Nazis?
Eventually, they’ll just start building prisons in the US off of the El Salvadoran model. They’ve already adopted the same practices for imprisonment without cause and without any right to a defense once an accusation is made.
If their masters tell them to vote against tariffs, they’ll do so. These politicians hold no actual power. They are the mouthpieces standing in front of the monsters who hold actual power. And they don’t give a shit about anyone or anything.
I’m wondering if Trump’s corporate backers are tired of winning yet. Who knows what other wins are coming from the mad king in the future. I’m sure they’ll get tired eventually.
I sometimes think about what would have happened if Biden stood up to the DNC bosses in 2016 and ran in the primary. He probably couldn’t do much against the Clinton machine, but maybe just enough to make it more competitive. Divide the corporate Dem vote just enough…