Roaming Charges: Trump’s Little Excursion Hits the Straits

I am the frightful thing that always follows you Liar, I am thy Nemesis I always knew one day that it would come to this– Motörhead, Liar Check out this paragraph from Tulsi Gabbard’s prepared text in her opening statement before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday: As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer [July 2025], Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There have been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. The entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with cement. There you have it. Trump’s Director of National Intelligence obliterated Trump’s case for going to war with Iran. Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium was destroyed last year and they’ve made no effort to resume the program. Curiously, however, Gabbard elided this paragraph during her live testimony before the committee. She claimed, under questioning from Sen. Mark Warner, that she skipped that crucial paragraph because she realized that she was “running out of time.” Her time in office is likely running out, as it should. Gabbard’s deputy, Joe Kent, resigned from office this week, claiming correctly that Iran posed no imminent threat to the US. Kent should know. As director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center, Kent saw all of the intel that Trump apparently refused to take the time to read. Joe Kent’s no “think-tank pansy.” He’s a hard-ass former Marine who courted the votes of Neo-Nazis and white supremacists during his failed run for Congress in western Washington. But according to Trump, who nominated him for office, he always knew Kent was “very, very weak on security.” Funny, he hired him and didn’t fire him. Kent walked out of the Executive Office building on his own volition. So we now have it from within the highest ranks of Trump’s own administration that the casus belli for the war on Iran was faked, in an even more blatant sham than the manufactured case for going to war on Iraq, a war Trump falsely claims he opposed from the beginning. But, like John Kerry, Trump was for the Iraq war before he was against it. It’s worth reiterating that even before the June 2025 bombings of Iran’s nuclear sites, there’s evidence that Iran was intent on building a nuclear weapon (and a lot of evidence that it wasn’t), even though perhaps they should have, given that possession of a stockpile of nuclear weapons seems to be the only deterrent against getting attacked by the US or Israel. Just this week, North Korea was gleefully launching 10 ballistic missiles into the Pacific during joint military exercises by the US and South Korea without even a squeak of protest from Kim’s former pen pal, Donald Trump. Again, Tulsi Gabbard said as much not long before Trump’s Operation of Midnight Hammer, testifying before Congress that “the intelligence community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” When asked about Gabbard’s testimony, Trump snarled: “I don’t care what she says. She’s wrong. My intelligence community is wrong,” But he didn’t fire Gabbard for being wrong and publicly contradicting him. Trump, Rubio, and Witkoff have repeatedly claimed that Iran was merely weeks away from having not only a stockpile of enriched uranium but a nuclear weapon: “If we didn’t hit within two weeks, they would’ve had a nuclear weapon. When crazy people have nuclear weapons, bad things happen.” (March 4) Trump has continued to push this lie in the last few days, as his war has gone south: “[W]e’re doing very, very well in Iran, knocking the hell out of them. And you have to do that. We can’t let them have a nuclear weapon. They were two weeks away — in my opinion, two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon.” (March 17) Once again, it’s Trump’s position that his own top intelligence appointees are lying about his lies about going to war against Iran. Still, not many Americans bought what Trump was trying to sell. Support for the Iran war remains at around 40 percent. And the fog of lies began to rapidly dissipate when Trump’s little excursion ran aground on the Strait of Hormuz, shattering the global economy and unleashing chaos across the region. In an interview with Medhi Hassan, Senator Chris Van Hollen claimed Trump was duped by Netanyahu into going to war with Iran: They’ve had these constantly shifting rationales, and the reason they have to keep shifting them is because when they say that one thing was their goal – like getting rid of Iran’s nuclear capacity, they claimed – that turns out to be just not true….Netanyahu just a few weeks ago said he’d been waiting 40 years for an American president to join him in attacking Iran. And in Donald Trump, he finally found somebody stupid enough and reckless enough to actually do it. Sorry, Senator, but this lets Trump off the hook. Iran has been on Trump’s targeting radar since Obama signed the nuclear deal. He assassinated Qasem Suleimani, head of the IRG’s Al Quds Force, in 2020 and bombed three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last June. As the Epstein scandal engulfed Trump, he began talking up another bombing campaign on Iran and the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores fed his delusion that he could pull off a similar pain-free operation in Iran, a delusion Netanyahu was eager to stoke, against all intelligence to the contrary. Perhaps Trump will now replace Joe Kent with Newt Gingrich, who is very, very strong on security. So strong that Newt, the Edward Teller of our tormented times, advised Trump to drop 12 thermo-nuclear bombs on Iran to blast out a canal by-passing the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, someone with the guts to start a nuclear holocaust to prevent one. +++ “Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.” – Viktor Frankl + Knowing, however, hasn’t made much of a difference in the direction things keep going or slowed the accelerating speed at which we’re getting there… + During a White House press gathering with Sanae Takaichi, the new prime minister of Japan, Trump was asked why he didn’t alert Asian and European allies about the planned first strike on Iran. He snapped in reply, “We didn’t tell anyone about it because we wanted a surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan?” Then he turned to a visibly stricken Takaichi and said, “Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?” What a bizarre comparison and an unconscious (presumably) admission of the criminality of the US surprise strikes on Iran. The parallel isn’t exact, however. Japan limited itself to attacks on a US military base, while Trump smart bombed an Iranian girls’ school. + Trump: “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East. So they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked.” + Sure, Don. It only happened in every war game about attacking Iran ever conducted by the Pentagon, CIA, DIA, Army War College and RAND… + Yet more proof that the Republican Party has turned into a Jonestown-like cult and would mindlessly disavow any previously held conviction and swig toxic Kool-Aid given them if their Supreme Leader ordered them to… + On Tuesday, Joe Kent resigned as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of Trump’s war on Iran. In his resignation letter, Kent wrote that Iran posed no threat to the US… + No one this high-ranking resigned from the Biden administration over abetting Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, which tells you a lot about the people who ran the Biden administration, most of whom should be hauled to The Hague. + Trump on Kent’s resignation: “I always thought he was weak on security. Very weak on security. It’s a good thing that he’s out.” Is this an admission that Trump spent more time evaluating the contestants on The Apprentice than he did on his National Security staff? + You don’t have to read too deeply between the lines of Tulsi Gabbard’s response to Kent’s resignation to get the gist: Trump does whatever the hell he wants, regardless of what we say, if he even bothers to listen. The question is, why didn’t Gabbard walk out with Joe Kent? What does she expect to get out of this in the end, except an NDA she’ll be forced (or paid) to sign prohibiting her from saying what she really thought of Trump… + Nothing much will surprise me about Tulsi Gabbard, but I’m still curious as to what Gabbard gets out of working in the Trump administration. They’ve basically kept her in a closet for months. She doesn’t travel. She doesn’t make press appearances. She won’t even go on the friendly confines of Fox, where every question is set up for her like an at-bat during a T-ball game. She’s been kept out of White House meetings on Iran, Israel and Venezuela. No one inside the Trump decision-making circle seems to value or care what she has to say. What’s in it for her? + Here’s a passage from Trump’s National Security Strategy, released in December 2025, now no longer worth the pixels it was written on… The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over—not because the Middle East no longer matters, but because it is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was. It is rather emerging as a place of partnership, friendship, and investment.” Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran—the region’s chief destabilizing force—has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions since October 7, 2023, and President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, which significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program. We should encourage and applaud reform when and where it emerges organically, without trying to impose it from without. The key to successful relations with the Middle East is accepting the region, its leaders, and its nations as they are while working together on areas of common interest. + Trump, of course, wants it both ways and all the ways in between: “If I didn’t terminate Obama’s horrible deal, the Iran nuclear deal, you would’ve had nuclear holocaust.” We’re much closer now to a nuclear holocaust with Pakistan, India, Russia and Israel all with their fingers on the nuclear triggers than under the Obama deal, which Trump tore up and Biden shamefully refused to renegotiate. + Anna Kramer in NOTUS: “Six months before the Trump administration began bombing Iran, the Department of State fired its oil and gas experts. State’s energy division got completely DOGE’d. And with it went the people who knew how to plan for a global energy crisis.” + According to Forbes: “Economists have warned rising oil prices may push the US into a recession.” + This week, Brent crude oil climbed 5% to $112.2 a barrel, a more than 50% rise since the start of the war. It’s not just the result of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has also successfully attacked oil production facilities in the UAE and Iraq. + The average price of diesel in the US hit $5 a gallon for the first time since 2022, an increase of more than a third since the start of the war. + Gas prices at the pump here in Oregon seem to be ticking upward every hour, but Germany has taken action to restrict changes in pump prices to once a day. + Martin Wolf writing in the Financial Times, “If the Strait is not reopened soon, the world risks both economic and political disruption. Only one major power, Russia, will be unambiguously better off.” + Israel continues to urge Iranians to revolt even though Mossad has privately determined they’ll be “slaughtered,” which is likely the scenario Israel wants. + The UN’s World Food Program warned this week that the war on Iran could cause an additional 45 million people to face hunger. The statement added that “increasing energy, fuel and fertilizer costs” could push 363 million people into food insecurity. + John Simpson, longtime correspondent and presenter for the BBC: “Over the years, I’ve been in many towns and cities when they were being bombed — in a few cases (Baghdad, Belgrade, etc.) by my own country. No matter what the justification, most of the victims have been entirely innocent. I’ve come to loathe the very thought of aerial bombardment.” + One diplomat with knowledge of the pre-war talks, where Iran offered to give up its nuclear enrichment program, told the Guardian: “We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.” This is absurd. Trump sent Witkoff and Kushner because he thinks they’re both more loyal to him than Rubio or Vance. + John Fetterman: “Iran doesn’t have any military capabilities left other than just a random drone here and there trying to produce chaos, and have that get amplified and platformed in the New York Times and whatever to make it seem like the world’s on fire, and that’s just not there.” Why are we still bombing them, then? What are we bombing? Who are we killing? Does Fetterman know? Does he care? Hello, is there anybody in there? + The Taliban didn’t have a Navy, an Air Force, a tank or even a drone and the US fought, droned and bombed them for 20 years before saying, in the immortal words of Roberto Duran, “No mas!” and finally getting the hell out… + Trump is sending 2,500 Marines to Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz. Who knows why? After picking up his Nobel Peace prize, Trump’s nemesis and eternal obsession, Barack Obama, sent 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2011 to shore up the failing US war, only to see the war end up failing even worse than before. + Rep. Pete Sessions: “I believe that what these 2,500 Marines would be is to secure the island. The island is not, in my opinion, boots on the ground in combat circumstances. It’s not like inside Iran in the cities.” + When are “boots on the ground” not boots on the ground? When the Marines are outfitted in Trump’s Florsheim wingtips! + The Saudis have been urging Trump to “continue pounding” Iran. Crown Prince Bonesaws, President Bone Spurs and Bibi, the Axis of Sadism… + Israel assassinated Ali Larijan, head of Iranian securing and one of Iran’s top diplomats, to stop any negotiated end of the war and drag the US deeper into it. In Iran, it will inevitably give more power to the most reactionary forces in the country… + Israel continues to hemorrhage support among Americans, across the political spectrum. A new NBC News poll found only 32 percent view Israel positively, down from 47 percent in 2023, while 39 percent see it negatively, up from 24 percent. The turn against Israel is occurring in parties and all ages, but most decisively among Democrats with positive views collapsing to 13 percent, and among young voters aged 18-34 at just 13 percent positive versus 63 percent negative. Sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have also flipped, with 40 percent now siding more with Palestinians compared to 39 percent for Israelis, amid Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Net-Favorability of Israel All: +6% Democrats: -25% Independents: -9% Republicans: +46% 18-34 Year Olds: -35% 35-49 Year Olds: -6% 50-64 Year Olds: +12% 65+ Year Olds: +27%Echelon / March 16, 2026 + The Democrats are a poll-fixated party on just about every issue, except Israel. + Ben Ehrenreich: “As a feature writer with more than twenty years of experience in the industry, I don’t think of magazines as A-tier or B-tier or whatever. I just think about whether they shilled for genocide.” + Donald “More Amazing Than Kreskin” Trump says he predicted Iran would block the Strait of Hormuz: “I predicted all of it. I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center. I made that prediction a year before he did it.” (He didn’t.) + Marjorie Taylor Greene: “It’s just wrong to make Americans think that every single Palestinian in Gaza was a member of Hamas. That’s just not true. There were tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians murdered by these bombs that were dropped on them. And now the same thing is happening in Lebanon.” + Trump’s top economic advisor, Kevin Hassett: “If the war were to be extended, it wouldn’t really disrupt the US economy very much at all. It would hurt consumers, and we’d have to think about what we’d have to do about that, but that’s really the last of our concerns right now.” Are they really going with this? + Trump: “Because of the fact that we have had such Military Success, we no longer ‘need,’ or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID! Likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea. In fact, speaking as President of the United States of America, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere in the World, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP” Any one found on the street ranting like this would be carted off to the nearest state mental hospital… + If Trump’s disastrous bombing “excursion” in Iran prompts him to yank the US out of NATO, so much the better for NATO…and everybody else. + A piece in Air and Space Forces magazine estimates that the US has already lost more than 10 percent of its MQ-9 Reaper drone fleet. + Aside from oil and natural gas, Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz has also blocked the transport of at least one-third of the world’s supply of helium, the principal cooling agent for MRI scanners and the production of microchips. When will the Tech Lords begin to get squeamish? +++ + Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal, a former Afghan soldier who served alongside US special forces and fled his native country after its takeover by the Taliban, died in ICE custody last week shortly after being seized by immigration officers. + At least 41 people have died in ICE custody since Trump re-took office in 2025. + Stephen Miller: “If all of this theft were stopped, it would be enough to balance the budget. The extraction of wealth from American taxpayers to people who don’t belong here is the primary cause of the national debt.” Is he talking about Lockheed, Raytheon or Boeing? No, Somali-Americans. + Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: I reviewed the Heritage Foundation’s database of voter fraud cases since the 1980s. They had just 10 examples of undocumented immigrants voting. I know of 2 more. Over decades. Importantly, several would NOT have been impacted by voter ID, as they involved stolen identities.” + Rep. Ted Lieu on the problem that doesn’t exist: “Undocumented immigrants want nothing to do with the govt! To vote, you have to first register. How many undocumented immigrants are gonna go, ‘Yes, I’m gonna give all my information to the government that’s maybe trying to deport me. No way!’” + Florida Sheriff Grady Judd called for a path to citizenship in a press conference this week. “The way our system is designed, we can’t get millions of people out of the country anyways.” Judd has been the sheriff of Polk County, Florida, for the last 20 years. + Washington Post: “Little is known about the exact whereabouts of Salvadorans who were deported from the U.S. and are now imprisoned in CECOT. Relatives and lawyers say they have had no contact with their detained loved ones and have been unable to confirm where they are being held.” + Court records from DC show that U.S. Park Police have been pulling over migrant workers in commercial vans without a warrant or probable cause. and turning them directly over to ICE. + Stephany Gauffeny, a North Texas widow, received a letter approving her husband Miguel Garcia’s immigration status, two months after he was killed in a shooting by a rooftop sniper at an ICE prison in Dallas. Gauffeny also gave birth to the couple’s child after Garcia’s murder. + Several DHS contractors told the White House they were asked to pay Kristi Noem’s “special advisor,” Corey Lewandowski, to “protect and grow” their contracts with the department. Corey says it never happened. But the allegations parallel reports that Border Tsar Thomas Homan was caught in an FBI sting accepting a $50,000 cash bribe to secure similar contracts with the Trump administration. Hunter Biden would’ve needed three laptops to keep pace with this level of corruption. + House Republicans in Tennessee passed a bill requiring schools to “track” and “report” immigrant students. All 1.2 million K-12 students will be required to prove their citizenship. + It’s about time… + Meanwhile, China is working to expand Cuba’s solar power system. + Trump: “I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba. That’s a big honor. Taking Cuba in some form. I think I can do anything I want with it, if you want to know the truth. They’re a very weakened nation right now.” + It’s supremely ironic that a failed casino magnate wants to re-take Cuba. The sinister course of American imperialism couldn’t have traveled in a fuller circle. + Greg Grandin: “The true ‘Latin Americanization’ of the US isn’t rehashing negative stereotypes of Latin America but understanding how the same violent economic restructuring that was imposed on Latin America in the late Cold War was imposed on the US after the Cold War.” + In other words, the economic strangulation of Cuba, now in its seventh decade, is also taking place in the US through the relentless, bipartisan imposition of austerity economics that keeps slashing away at already gutted social welfare programs, health care, and environmental protections for poor and working-class people. The two policies are, in fact, one and should be resisted as such. + Trump, putting it “nicely”: I originate–to put it nicely–I originate– many of us do–from Europe. I love Europe. I’ve spent a lot of time in Europe. It’s a different place. Bad, bad things have happened to Europe. Very bad things. And you better do something about immigration and energy or you won’t have a Europe. Where did “Europe” originate from? Was Attila the Hun “European”? What about the Ottomans, who controlled most of southeastern Europe for 600 years? How about the Moors who ruled and shaped much of Spain and Portugal (for the better) for 800 years? Are the Irish “European”? Well, they’re a member of the EU and their hated British colonizers aren’t, so perhaps. +++ + A new survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that at least 19 million Americans have “seriously considered” shooting someone, once against confirming DH Lawrence’s shrewd assessment of our national character: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” (Studies in Classic American Literature) + It’s hilarious how shameless the MAGA-meme factory is… + What’s next, hailing Don Jr as a true American Patriot because he briefly considered joining the Marines …before he heard about the snakes on Parris Island? + Radio silence from these same people after the Venezuelans defeated the vaunted US team (payroll $360 million) in the World Baseball Classic final. Let’s just hope Trump doesn’t have ICE detain and ship to an El Salvadoran prison Ronald Acuña, Salvy Perez and Eugenio Suarez in retaliation, they way he’s done to hundreds of other Venezuelans merely for having tattoos and wearing baseball caps. + Oregon Senator Ron Wyden on the Justice Department’s continuing cover-up of the Epstein files: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—Trump’s former personal lawyer who was also responsible for Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer to a cushy club fed—has intervened to block the DEA from providing details of a mysterious Epstein investigation to my Finance Committee team…. This is stunning interference. The document I’m after literally says ‘unclassified’ at the top. The investigation it details is closed. Given Blanche’s close personal ties to Donald Trump, this reeks of a continued cover-up to protect key names in the Trump administration. + Anne Marie Cox on Epstein’s cultivation of scientistic support to justify white male supremacy: “Epstein gravitated toward fields and figures that rank humans, explain away cruelty, or biologize inequality… He identified and aligned himself with the intellectual machinery now justifying our current dystopia.” + It’s somehow fitting that the early-onset Alzheimer’s Administration gutted Alzheimer’s research… +++ + The once liberal (though never as liberal as its reputation) Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an execrable ruling this week allowing the feds to transfer title to Oak Flats, one of the most sacred landscapes of the Apache, to Resolution Cooper, the Australian-owned mining comglomerate, which, unless the Supremes miraculously intervene, will allow them to begin boring holes in the fragile desert immediately. It’s remarkable that the small band of Apaches, greens, and lawyers has held off the earth-gougers for as long as they have, given the monied interests they’re fighting against. As Michael Nixon, one of the lawyers for Apache Stronghold, told me: “The land’s not the USA’s to try and give away or trade to the Sino-Aussie-British mining corp. It’s always been and still legally Apache land.” Biden could have saved Oak Flats with a sweep of his autopen. That he chose not to do so will go down as one of his most shameful failures, the environmental equivalent of arming a genocide in Gaza. The only realistic hope of saving Oak Flats under Trump was that the religious right would support the religious freedom arguments made by the skilled constitutional lawyers for the Apaches and that they would help persuade the likes of Barrett, Gorsuch and Roberts to block the mine. That didn’t happen, largely because the Christian Right only believes in religious freedom for themselves. There are still a few legal monkeywrenches that can be thrown against the mine, but the last line of defense, as it has been for centuries, will likely be the bodies of the Apaches themselves. + In the last 20 years, beef production has caused four times as much deforestation as the cultivation of any other food source. + Economist Tony Annett: “Renewables are now the cheapest form of energy in electricity generation. People who claim otherwise still think it’s 2010…” + Fueled by drought, lack of snow and extreme winds, the wildfires racing across the plains of Nebraska have now charred nearly a million acres. + A new study in Lancet Global Health finds that shifting the international burden of climate-change mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050. + Longtime CounterPunch contributor John Perry on the 10th anniversary of Berta Cáceres murder: Before her murder on 2 March 2016, Berta Cáceres, a campaigner against dams and mining projects that were displacing rural communities in Honduras, told the reporter Nina Lakhani: “I want to live. I love my country, and we must rebuild it so that young people are not forced to emigrate.” If Cáceres’s murder is still unresolved, so is the question of how ordinary Hondurans can wrest control of their country from the dozen families that control much of the media and many large businesses, and have close ties with both the Honduran military and politicians in the United States. + Primatologists studying aggressive behavior (slapping, hitting, charging, biting and trampling) among 22 groups of chimpanzees and bonobos at 16 zoos across Europe showed no statistical difference between the two species of Pan. While the smug reporters at Reuters claimed that the study “debunks the Bonobos’ reputation of being the cool hippies of the simian world,” perhaps the research really shows that chimps and bonobos were both driven to violent outbursts by the madness-inducing living conditions of prolonged confinement in a prison-like environment. + In the dark forest along Bourbon Creek, dominated by 200-foot tall Douglas-firs, some of them 300 years old, sunlight still finds a way through… + This public land on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in the Washington Cascades, adjacent to a wilderness area and habitat for endangered species such as the Northern Spotted Owl, is once again under threat of ecological obliteration, as Trump moves to restart clear-cutting in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, exempting the logging operations from environmental laws. +++ + The revolting revelations about Cesar Chavez’s pedophilia and the raping of Dolores Huerta probably won’t come as too much of a shock to those who read Frank Bardacke’s invaluable history of the United Farmworkers movement, Trampling Out the Vintage, which pierced the carefully constructed veil that had concealed from public view some of the more unsavory aspects of Chavez’s career and personality. + Tim Noah on Cesar Chavez: People are complicated. Cesar Chavez was an organizing genius and also a monster. Shocking but not surprising to learn he sexually abused underaged girls and raped Dolores Huerta. We knew already that Chavez wrecked his union trying to turn it into a Synanon-inspired cult. He hired thugs (“cesarchavistas”) to go south of the border and beat up migrants, whom he disparaged as “wetbacks.” He turned against his closest allies. All this has been known for years. We still have much to learn from his brilliant grape boycott and his successful lobbying for CA legislation to protect farm workers. The personality cult always distracted people from that. + The US is failing at really basic things like delivering the mail, keeping trains on tracks, providing rural health care services and taking care of the teachers trying to educate its kids: In 2008, 62% of K-12 teachers said they were very satisfied with their job. By 2022, that figure had fallen to just 12%. The richest (or second richest) country in the world is well on its way to becoming a failed state by many metrics, including some of the most important ones measuring the health of a society. + Rep. Virginia Foxx: “One of our colleagues just talked about the fact that wealthy people pay small percentages of their income on taxes. But what he didn’t say is they pay over 50% of all the taxes paid in this country, and that working-class people don’t pay nearly as much as they do.” How did the Democrats ever lose working-class voters to this party? Oh, yeah, Schumer explained it, right before HRC’s loss to Trump: “We don’t need blue-collar voters anymore, we’ve got suburban women.” + Even Kid Rock said he was shocked and “pissed off” after learning that Trump’s Justice Department had cut a deal with the price-gougers at Live Nation, a company whose executives laughed at how easily they were picking the pockets of concert-goers. But you shouldn’t have been surprised, Kid. Don’t you know every day is TACO Tuesday? + This week, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate fraud, which he appears to believe is mainly committed by immigrants, especially Somalis. But in the last year alone, Trump has pardoned more than a dozen people convicted of fraud, including… Jason Galanis ~$200M+ Joseph Schwartz ~$38M Lawrence Duran ~$205M (Medicare fraud billed; ~$87M paid) Carlos Watson ~$60M investor fraud Trevor Milton ~$20M+ investor losses Todd Chrisley ~$30M bank fraud Julie Chrisley ~$30M bank fraud Devon Archer ~$60M tribal bond scheme George Santos ~$44K–$1M+ (multiple fraud schemes) Michele Fiore ~$70K charity fraud Brian Kelsey ~$90K campaign finance fraud Scott Jenkins ~$75K bribery/fraud scheme Paul Walczak ~$10M+ tax fraud Adriana Camberos ~$1M+ counterfeit/fraud + Percent of the population of the US with a net worth of $1 million or more: 7 Percent of the population of the US Senate with a net worth of $1 million or more: 73 + The Postmaster General, David Steiner, who has served on the board of FedEx since 2009, claimed this week that the US Postal Service “will be out of cash in less than 12 months” and might be forced to stop deliveries in 2027. We’re seeing the planned destruction of a government service mandated by the US Constitution so that companies like FedEx can completely privatize the US mail system. + Over half of Americans say health care, a weeklong vacation and a new car are unaffordable. + There are currently 14,500 satellites in orbit around the Earth, 10,025 of which belong to Elon Musk’s Starlink. +++ + Fox News broke the story of the millennium this weekend, when former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany interviewed a man who met Jesus during his 18-day “visit to Heaven”…and Jesus turns out to be, I don’t quite know how to put it but…uh…gay? Kayleigh McEnany: You saw him [Jesus] face-to-face. You had a conversation. What did he say? Gabe Poirot: Well, I didn’t originally see him face to face, because my face was down, because I was so concerned that the list of my mistakes was going to be pulled up and I was done for. It was like black and white, like I have no hope, right? But he picks up my face. He looks me in the eyes, and he says, ‘Gabriel, why are you so concerned about that which is paid for?’ And he showed me the wounds in his hands? Not his hands, like his wrists. And they carried the depth of eternity. His wounds had a name: ‘Gabriel.’ He did this for me. Like I was his only one. That I’ll forever be his only one. He’d waited his entire life just for me. + Speaking of the Christian diety, on a recent episode of the Reformation Red Pill podcast, host Joshua Haymes and Brooks Potteiger, (Re-Pete Hegseth’s pastor at Christ Church D.C) prayed that their God would kill Texas State Rep. James Talarico, or stop him “by any means necessary:” “I pray that God kills him. Ultimately, that means killing his heart and raising him up to a new life in Christ … If it would not be within God’s will to do so, stop him by any means necessary.” Talarico is a Presbyterian minister and Democratic Senate nominee. Sharia Law would be a step up from whatever law encourages the public “praying” for celestial drone-strikes… + Trump: “There’s actually never been a paint that’s made that will look like gold. You either gold-leaf it or you use a different color. Nobody’s ever been able to make a gold paint that looks real. A little minor thing for the media. I said someday I’m gonna discover a paint where you don’t have to actually use gold leaf.” Over to you, Vincent… And Master Van Rjin… + Javier Bardem on his “Free Palestine” remark at the Oscars: “It’s important to understand that you can be part of the movie-making community and also be a citizen who uses this huge speaker to denounce injustice.” + I was once again shut out at the Oscars as The Secret Agent, The Voice of Hind Rajab and The Alabama Solution all lost in their various Best Film categories, but in losing, they won, given the voting pool and the fifty-year history of the Academy Awards handing out the Best Film Oscar to a film other than the year’s best film. + Letter from Hunter Thompson to Anthony Burgess, regarding an overdue article for Rolling Stone magazine by the author of A Clockwork Orange … Dave Marsh used to complain to me that Thompson’s stuff arrived to the Rolling Stone offices by fax in such incoherent conditions that it was almost impossible to edit into a readable story. I’m sure the prose degenerated across the 1970s. But this blast at Burgess is pretty sharp and funny. Alexander Cockburn, who admired both Thompson and Jack Kerouac, could never forgive Hunter for blowing his brains out and leaving the mess for his wife to find. But all those macho-prose guys idolized Hemingway and surely Thompson, realizing he was dried up as a writer, thought it was better to go out like Papa rather than dissolve into a reactionary crank slumped on his mother Gabrielle’s couch as Kerouac did… + Large Language Model chat boxes keep urging people to break up their relationships. Why? Because the bots were trained on Reddit, where an analysis of 15 years of relationship advice found that 50% of the comments urged people to “leave” their romantic partners. + A study by researchers at the University of British Columbia published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that texting a random stranger is a better antidote to loneliness than conversing with a chat box. + It’s coming to the point where littering your writing with typos, howlers and grammatical offenses–never a problem for me; it just comes naturally–will be the last way to prove it was composed by a human. So, stop complaining about the typos in CounterPunch and relish them as artifacts of the authenticity of our prose! From reading and editing dozens of articles a day for going on 40 years, it’s becoming easier to detect not only which stories have been written with the aid an AI writing program but which program they’ve been written with–they each deaden the prose in their own particular and peculiar way. Her eyes look up with tears of dust, her breath all smoke, she left hanging Booked Up What I’m reading this week… Washington is Burning: Corruption and Lies in the Age of Trump Andrew Cockburn (Verso) Nuclear Weapons: An International History David Holloway (Yale) The Four Heavens: a New History of the Ancient Maya David Stuart (Princeton) Sound Grammar What I’m listening to this week… Beautifulism: Sweet Surrender Marquis Hill (Black Unlimited) Transmitter Cut Worms (Jaglaguwar) Lotus Bridge The Monochrome Set (Tapete Records) The Little Pictures Remain “People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them. . . . “It’s the glass,” says one man, “the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle.” … An old woman was selling little miserable sprays of sweet lavender. The city was rocking under the bombs and the light of burning buildings made it like day. . . . And in one little hole in the roar her voice got in—a squeaky voice. “Lavender!” she said. “Buy Lavender for luck.” The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new.” – John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal