Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Shut the fuck up. Stupid.

Warren Buffett’s Response to President Trump’s Tariffs Is a Lesson For Every Leader

Buffett knows what every leader should learn: saying nothing says a lot.

April 21, 2025

President Trump shared a video on his Truth Social account that said Warren Buffett called Trump’s economic moves “the best he’d seen in 50 years.” That would certainly be quite the endorsement from the world’s most famous investor.

Berkshire Hathaway issued a statement in response. “There are reports currently circulating on social media (including Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok) regarding comments allegedly made by Warren E. Buffett. All such reports are false,” the statement said.

https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/warren-buffetts-response-to-president-t
rumps-tariffs-is-a-lesson-for-every-leader/91178877

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, April 21, 2025 12:53 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The United States is turning itself into an emerging market. There are set patterns that we associate with mature democracies. There are set patterns that we associate with developing countries, for which some people would use the term “banana republic.”

In mature democracies, it’s institutions that dominate; in banana republics, it’s personalities that dominate.

In mature democracies, it’s the rule of law that governs interactions between businesses and between business and government; in emerging markets, it’s personalities, personal connections, and loyalty.

In mature democracies, the central bank and finance sites are independent relative to politics; in emerging markets, that is much more in question.

In mature democracies, the goal is interaction, openness, and prosperity along with the world; in immature democracies, in emerging markets, it is nationalist economic policies tied to particular interests.

Trump is transforming the United States into Juan Perón’s Argentina.

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/04/larry-summers-on-harvard
s-showdown-with-trump.html

There is a huge amount of confusion inside Argentina about how its economy crashed, but it is very simple from outside Argentina. The vast majority of the poorest voters have been deluding themselves all of their lives. They went completely Trumptard but for Perón, not Trump. They even called themselves Perónists.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68126858

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, April 21, 2025 3:40 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump’s Cultural Revolution
The first thing we do is we kill intellectual inquiry

He clearly feels rage toward people who, he imagines, think they’re smarter or better than him.

And he and the movement he leads, composed of people possessed by similar rage, are seeking retribution. Retribution against whom? Yes, they hate wokeness. But three months in, it’s obvious that the MAGA types want revenge not just on their political opponents but on everyone they consider elites — a group that, as they see it, doesn’t include billionaires, but does include college professors, scientists and experts of any kind.

It took no time at all for the Trumpists to move from trying to purge government agencies of DEI to trying to control the content of medical journals.

Don’t try to sanewash what’s happening. It’s evil, but it isn’t calculated evil. That is, it’s not a considered political strategy, with a clear end goal. It’s a visceral response from people who, as Thomas Edsall puts it, are addicted to revenge.

If you want a model for what’s happening to America, think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

But wait, wasn’t Mao hard left while America has been taken over by the hard right? Well, why do you think there’s a big difference between the two? I’m a believer in horseshoe theory, which says that the extreme left and the extreme right are more like each other than either is like the political center. For example, among Britain’s unions there is a hard-left faction that has no counterpart in the United States. Some of its positions, notably making apologies for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, look a lot like MAGA.

And in America some leftist commentators have effectively become spokesmen for the tech-bro right.

Once you’ve seen the parallel between what MAGA is trying to do and China’s Cultural Revolution, the similarities are everywhere. Maoists sent schoolteachers to do farm labor; Trumpists are talking about putting civil servants to work in factories.

The Cultural Revolution was, of course, a huge disaster for China. It inflicted vast suffering on its targets and also devastated the economy. But the Maoists didn’t care. Revenge was their priority, never mind the effects on GDP.

The Trumpists are surely the same. Their rampage will, if unchecked, have dire economic consequences. Right now we’re all focused on tariff madness, but undermining higher education and crippling scientific research will eventually have even bigger costs. But don’t expect them to care, or even to acknowledge what’s happening. Trump has already declared that the inflation everyone can see with their own eyes is fake news.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-cultural-revolution

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, April 21, 2025 4:57 PM

Krugman citing Mao.

I've seen everything now.

Don't Democrats have any mirrors in their houses?

Bet you wish you didn't lie all the time before now, huh Paul?

Ain't nobody listening to you anymore.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, April 21, 2025 5:57 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Krugman citing Mao.

I've seen everything now.

Don't Democrats have any mirrors in their houses?

Bet you wish you didn't lie all the time before now, huh Paul?

Ain't nobody listening to you anymore.

Parallels between now and then:

Hitler’s Terrible Tariffs

By seeking to “liberate” Germans from a globalized world order, the Nazi government sent the national economy careening backwards.

By Timothy W. Ryback | April 20, 2025, 8 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/nazi-germany-tariffs
-trade/682521/

From almost the moment Adolf Hitler took office as chancellor of Germany, tariffs were at the top of his government’s economic agenda. The agricultural sector’s demands for higher tariffs “must be met,” Hitler’s economic minister, Alfred Hugenberg, declared on Wednesday, February 1, 1933, just over 48 hours into Hitler’s chancellorship, “while at the same time preventing harm to industry.” Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath was concerned about lumber imports from Austria and a 200-million-reichsmark trade deal with Russia. With several trade agreements about to expire, Hitler’s finance minister, Count Johann Ludwig Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, insisted that “immediate decisions” needed to be made. Hitler told his cabinet he had only one priority—to avoid “unacceptable unrest” in advance of the March 5 Reichstag elections, which he saw as key to his hold on power.

Hitler had what one might call a diffident, occasionally felonious disregard for financial matters. He owed 400,000 reichsmarks in back taxes. His understanding of economics was primitive. “You have inflation only if you want it,” Hitler once said. “Inflation is a lack of discipline. I will see to it that prices remain stable. I have my S.A. for that.” (The S.A., or Brownshirts, were the original paramilitary organization associated with the Nazi Party.) Hitler held Jews responsible for most of Germany’s financial woes.

Hitler relied on Gottfried Feder, the National Socialist Party’s long-serving chief economist, to develop the specifics of an economic program. Feder had helped concoct the strange brew of socialism and fanatical nationalism in the original 25-point program of this putative “workers’ party.” In May 1932, Feder outlined what would become the first Nazi economic plan, in a 32-page position paper designed for ready implementation were Hitler to suddenly find himself in power. High on Feder’s agenda for a Hitler economy were tariffs.

“National Socialism demands that the needs of German workers no longer be supplied by Soviet slaves, Chinese coolies, and Negroes,” Feder wrote. Germany needed German workers and farmers producing German goods for German consumers. Feder saw “import restrictions” as key to returning the German economy to the Germans. “National Socialism opposes the liberal world economy, as well as the Marxist world economy,” Feder wrote. Our fellow Germans must “be protected from foreign competition.”

Even though Hitler’s own foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath, was concerned that the strategy would spark a trade war, and could drive up the price of imported eggs by 600 percent, Feder’s tariffs fit into Hitler’s larger vision for “liberating” the German people from the shackles of a globalized world order.

The crash of 1929 had plunged Germany, along with much of the rest of the world, into an abyss. Markets collapsed. Factories were idled. Unemployment soared. In the early 1930s, one out of three German workers was unemployed. But Hitler had inherited a recovering economy: In December 1932, the German Institute for Economic Research reported that the crisis had been “significantly overcome”; by the time Hitler was appointed chancellor, in January 1933, the economy was on the mend.

Thus Hitler’s main economic task as chancellor was not to mess things up. The German stock market had rallied on news of his coming to power. “The Boerse recovered today from its weakness when it learned of Adolf Hitler’s appointment, an outright boom extending over the greater part of stocks,” The New York Times reported.

But rumors of potential tariffs and the abrogation of international agreements, along with Hitler’s challenges to the constitutional order, sent alarm bells clanging. The conservative Centre Party warned Hitler against “unconstitutional, economically harmful, socially reactionary and currency endangering experiments.” Eduard Hamm, a former economics minister who served on the board of the German Industry and Trade Association, dispatched a stern letter to the new chancellor instructing him on the “legal, economic and psychological prerequisites for building capital.” The free-market system, Hamm reminded Hitler, was based on trust, the rule of law, and adherence to contractual obligations.

Hamm went on to explain that even though Germany imported more agricultural products than it exported to its European neighbors, these countries provided markets for German industrial production. (At the time, Germany imported on average 1.5 billion reichsmarks annually in agricultural products, while exporting an average 5.5 billion reichsmarks in industrial and manufactured goods.) “The maintenance of export relations to these countries is a mandatory requirement,” Hamm wrote. If one were to “strangle” trade through tariffs, it would endanger German industrial production—which, in turn, would inflict severe self-harm on the German economy, and lead to increased unemployment. “Exporting German goods provides three million workers with jobs,” Hamm wrote. The last thing Germany’s recovering but still-fragile economy needed was a trade war. Hamm urged Hitler to exercise “greatest caution” in his tariff policies.

But Hitler made no effort to reassure the markets, insisting that the tariffs were necessary and that he needed time to fix the ruined country his predecessors had left him. “Within four years the German farmer must be saved from destitution,” Hitler said in his first national radio address as chancellor. “Within four years unemployment must be completely overcome.” Hitler provided scant details as to how this was to be accomplished. By this point, he had broken even with the tariff cheerleader Feder, and had abandoned most of the action items for developing a nationalist and socialist economy. These items had included increased taxation of the wealthy; state supervision of large corporations; and the prohibition of “new department stores, low-priced shops, and chain stores.”

As chancellor, Hitler left his own plans for the German economy intentionally vague. His chief priority, as he told his ministers, was to secure an outright majority in the March 5 Reichstag elections. Hitler calculated that he needed between 18 million and 19 million votes. “There is no economic program that could meet with the approval of such a large mass of voters,” Hitler told party leaders.

But although the average voter may not have cared about the details of the Hitler economy, the markets did. The initial surge in stocks that greeted Hitler’s appointment halted then dipped and flattened amid the political and economic uncertainty of Hitler’s chaotic first weeks as chancellor. The German Industry and Trade Association issued a public warning on tariffs. “Germany has the largest export surplus of all major trading countries,” the association reported. “This situation calls for double caution in trade policy measures that could lead to countermeasures.”

Hans Joachim von Rohr, who worked at the Reich’s nutrition ministry, went on national radio to explain the logic of Hitler’s tariff strategy. “The products that Germany lacks must be made more expensive; then farmers will produce them in sufficient quantities,” Rohr explained. “And if foreign competition is kept at bay by tariffs and the like, city residents will prefer domestic production.” Rohr offered lard—“Schmalz”—as an example.

If Germany raised the import duty on Schmalz, a staple of the German diet, the German farmer would be motivated by the price increase to raise “three-hundred-pound pigs,” the main source of lard, instead of the more common “two-hundred-pound pigs,” the major source of bacon. The problem, as one critic observed, was that bacon was more lucrative than lard, even as “lard pigs” consumed more feed than “bacon pigs.” Switching from bacon pigs to lard pigs, this critic calculated, would ultimately drive the pig farmer into bankruptcy. He noted further that the international trading system had been in place for 200 years and proved itself beneficial to all parties. Hitler’s proposed “national economy,” with its self-defeating tariff policies, would plunge the country into a “severe crisis” that could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. And that was even before any damage wreaked by retaliatory tariffs.

The Hitler tariffs, announced on Friday, February 10, 1933, stunned observers. “The dimension of the tariff increases have in fact exceeded all expectations,” the Vossische Zeitung wrote disapprovingly, proclaiming the moment a “fork in the road” for the German economy. It appeared that Europe’s largest and most industrialized nation would suddenly be returning “to the furrow and the plow.” The New York Times saw this for what it was: “a trade war” against its European neighbors.

The primary targets of the Hitler tariffs—the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands—were outraged by the sudden suspension of favored-nation trading status on virtually all agricultural products, as well as on textiles, with tariffs in some cases rising 500 percent. With its livestock essentially banished from the German market, Denmark, for example, was facing substantial losses. Farmers panicked. The Danes and Swedes threatened “retaliatory measures,” as did the Dutch, who warned the Germans that the countermeasures would be felt as “palpable blows” to German industrial exports. That proved to be true.

“Our exports have shrunk significantly,” Foreign Minister Neurath informed Hitler in one cabinet meeting, “and our relations to our neighboring countries are threatening to deteriorate.” Neurath noted that informal contacts with Dutch interlocutors had been “bruskly broken off.” Trade relations with Sweden and Denmark were similarly strained, as were those with France and Yugoslavia. Finance Minister Krosigk anticipated that the agricultural sector would require an additional 100 million reichsmarks in deficit spending.

Hitler launched his trade war on the second Friday of his chancellorship. That evening, he appeared in the Berlin Sportpalast, the city’s largest venue, for a rally in front of thousands of jubilant followers. It was his first public appearance as chancellor, and it served as a victory lap. Hitler dispensed with the dark suit he wore in cabinet meetings in favor of his brown storm-trooper uniform with a bright-red swastika armband.

In his address, Hitler declared that the entire country needed to be rebuilt after years of mismanagement by previous governments. He spoke of the “sheer madness” of international obligations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, of the need to restore “life, liberty, and happiness” to the German people, of the need for “cleansing” the bureaucracy, public life, culture, the population, “every aspect of our life.” His tariff regime, he implied, would help restore the pride and honor of German self-reliance.

“Never believe in help from abroad, never on help from outside our own nation, our own people,” Hitler said. “The future of the German people is to be found in our own selves.”

Hitler did not refer specifically to the trade war he had launched that afternoon, just as he did not mention the rearmament plans he had discussed with his cabinet the previous day. “Billions of reichsmarks are needed for rearmament,” Hitler had told his ministers in that meeting. “The future of Germany depends solely and exclusively on the rebuilding of the army.” Hitler’s trade war with his neighbors would prove to be but a prelude to his shooting war with the world.

About the Author

Timothy W. Ryback is a historian and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. He is the author of several books on Hitler’s Germany, most recently Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power. Download for free from https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Timothy+W.+Ryback

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, April 21, 2025 7:52 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Lech Walesa Letter to President Trump

Angry Bear | April 21, 2025 5:08 pm

https://angrybearblog.com/2025/04/lech-walesa-letter-to-president-trum
p

. . . We urge the USA to stand by the promises made in 1994 with the Budapest Memorandum. At that time, the USA and the United Kingdom guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for the country giving up its nuclear weapons. Those promises were unconditional – nowhere does it say that this support should be considered a financial deal.

Sincerely,

Lech Walesa, former political prisoner and president of Poland

Original at
https://www.facebook.com/lechwalesa/posts/1205977244231523?ref=embed_p
ost

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, April 21, 2025 8:27 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Lech Walesa Letter to President Trump

Angry Bear | April 21, 2025 5:08 pm

https://angrybearblog.com/2025/04/lech-walesa-letter-to-president-trum
p

. . . We urge the USA to stand by the promises made in 1994 with the Budapest Memorandum. At that time, the USA and the United Kingdom guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for the country giving up its nuclear weapons. Those promises were unconditional – nowhere does it say that this support should be considered a financial deal.

Sincerely,

Lech Walesa, former political prisoner and president of Poland

Original at
https://www.facebook.com/lechwalesa/posts/1205977244231523?ref=embed_p
ost

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Go get some fucking nukes. See how that works out for you.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 6:53 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Lech Walesa Letter to President Trump

Angry Bear | April 21, 2025 5:08 pm

https://angrybearblog.com/2025/04/lech-walesa-letter-to-president-trum
p

. . . We urge the USA to stand by the promises made in 1994 with the Budapest Memorandum. At that time, the USA and the United Kingdom guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for the country giving up its nuclear weapons. Those promises were unconditional – nowhere does it say that this support should be considered a financial deal.

Sincerely,

Lech Walesa, former political prisoner and president of Poland

Original at
https://www.facebook.com/lechwalesa/posts/1205977244231523?ref=embed_p
ost

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Go get some fucking nukes. See how that works out for you.

Wow! It was only one short paragraph, but you completely misunderstood it, 6ix. Once again, I see why Trumptards struggle in America. How can they understand more complicated ideas if they can't get the simplest idea, such as that Trump should not steal money from Ukraine? Here is another idea Trumptards don't understand: Do as promised (in this case, keep the promise of guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity).

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 7:02 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Trumptards I know at work can disassemble complex machines easily, but reassembly is very hard for them. Machines repaired by my Trumptards never run right until a human undoes the Trumptards' work and puts the machine back together properly.

Breaking the Conveyor Belt

Motivated perhaps above all by culture-war grievance, in the past month Donald Trump has tried to radically reshape a century-old system of global trade.

By Nic Johnson | April 20, 2025

Nic Johnson teaches in the Law, Letters, and Society program at the University of Chicago. https://llso.uchicago.edu/people/nic-johnson
https://nic-johnson.com/

On January 26, less than a week after his inauguration, Donald Trump took a break from a day of rest and relaxation at his Miami golf course to post on social media that Colombia would face vicious “emergency” tariffs unless the country accepted two planes of deportees. President Gustavo Petro initially balked before giving in—but even that initial hesitation had by the end of the month made him less popular among Colombians than Trump himself. The country depends on access to American markets; it can’t afford even modest brinkmanship with the US.

This early victory no doubt swelled Trump’s confidence, not least because he was shooting from the hip. At the time, most of his cabinet had not even been confirmed. His commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, and US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, wouldn’t be through the nomination process until late February, and his chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen Miran, not until mid-March.

The next six weeks of policy reflected the same scattershot impulsiveness. In February Trump announced tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China, only to delay those for Mexico and Canada once Mexico promised to send troops to the border. In March, two days after the tariffs were finally implemented, Trump revealed that there would be exemptions for “USMCA goods” from Mexico (i.e., all goods covered by the free trade deal Trump negotiated in his first term) and auto parts from Canada, one of the country’s largest export items to the US. The tariffs on China targeting de minimis imports (those worth less than $800) were rolled back when it turned out that the Post Office might not have the administrative capacity to collect them. It was a confusing time for everyone, and apparently for the Trump administration itself, full of reversals, delays, and exceptions.

Then came “Liberation Day.” Working from the assumption that the US’s trade deficit with a given country represents the “sum of all cheating,” on April 2 the administration imposed tariffs on all its trade partners, using a by now infamous formula: simply dividing the US’s trade deficit with each country by twice its imports from that country—with a minimum of 10 percent. The resulting policy was far more extreme, and far crueler, than almost all observers expected. Cambodia was hit by 49 percent levies, Serbia by 37 percent, South Africa by 30 percent. Stock exchanges all over the world immediately panicked. Only under the looming threat of a bond market meltdown and a Depression did Trump temporarily lower these “reciprocal” tariffs to 10 percent across the board—even as he escalated his tariffs on China, which as of this writing remain at a staggering 145 percent.

Should we expect a gale of chaos to continue blowing through American tariff policy for the next four years? Yes, we should. By imposing punitive tariffs and threatening to retract America’s security umbrella, Trump hopes to coerce the world into sharing what he sees as the burdens of providing public goods like the global dollar system and military protection. Within Trump’s White House, at least three factions are vying for influence on these matters. Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, holds the most aggressive and hawkish views. The titles of his books, like The Coming China Wars (2006) and Death by China (2011), give a flavor of his approach, as does a document he circulated within the White House during Trump’s first term alleging that a “weakened manufacturing base” would cause a “higher abortion rate,” a “lower fertility rate,” and “increased spousal abuse.” The administration’s more technocratic figures, such as Miran and J.D. Vance, have a clearer set of goals and a more coherent, but still predatory, worldview. Their thinking rests on a nationalist critique of global finance, which they blame for deindustrialization and the long-term unemployment left unaddressed after 2008. Both camps are in tension with Elon Musk, the South African industrialist, whose multinational corporations will suffer from trade conflicts. At the moment, however, Navarro seems to be ascendant.

The global trading system that Trump desires to radically reshape has a very long history. It took more than a century to build, and has provided the US with a unique place in the world economy. In the late nineteenth century republican farmers built a strong protectionist state that nurtured powerful financial markets and internationally competitive industries. Liberal businessmen took over that system in the middle of the twentieth century and forged a global free trade regime to win the cold war. Now, more than three decades after the end of that conflict, Trump wants to renegotiate the system yet again. What does he hope to achieve? What tools does he have to do it? And is it possible?

1.

Imagine a great conveyor belt stretching between the United States and Germany. In the factories of Stuttgart and Munich, German businesses manufacture vehicles, machinery, and pharmaceuticals, which they export to America at a profit. They deposit those profits into American banks for safekeeping, leading to lower interest rates, a stronger dollar, and profits for American financial institutions. Those financial institutions, in turn, lend money to American consumers. The consumers, finally, use that money to buy German goods—and the conveyor belt comes full circle.

German exports are competitive in the US for two reasons: German unions committed to full employment hold wages down relative to productivity, making products cheaper to produce there; and the strong dollar makes it easier for US consumers to buy German than the other way around. The financial sector grows, even as American factories decline. Dollar assets accumulate on German balance sheets, while dollar liabilities accumulate on American ones. The elites in both countries gain; the masses in both countries face wage stagnation as the price of keeping the conveyor belt going.

The conveyor belt both depends on and generates inequality. In Germany, wages need to grow slower than productivity so the country can remain competitive on exports; in America, workers and the government alike need to borrow to keep consumption and employment growing. The most spectacular way to break the machine would be for German and American workers to unite and force a new, more equitable economic relationship among laborers, factory owners, and banks, above all by raising wages. Germany would consume more and add to—rather than subtract from—global aggregate demand, while America would be less addicted to debt and less in thrall to Wall Street. But in the absence of a global labor movement, there are coordination problems. Fragmented and divided by national borders, nobody wants to make the first move. In any case, until very recently German workers felt secure enough with the status quo that they didn’t want to risk high levels of unemployment just because of America’s self-diagnosed problems with debt and deindustrialization.

The image works with many countries in Germany’s place. Each has its own local twist on how it works: China’s one-party state, Saudi Arabia’s oil deposits. But any country with an export surplus that it recycles through the dollar system participates in a version of this conveyor belt.

The part played by the US, however, is unique. According to the World Bank, Americans spent $22.5 trillion on consumption in 2023, out of a global consumer market of about $77.5 trillion. Comparisons like this are tricky, since translating between currencies isn’t straightforward, but by any calculation America’s roughly 29 percent of global consumption far exceeds its 4 percent share of the global population. In global debt markets, too, America plays a wildly outsized part. Anyone looking for reliable stores of value that are easy to buy or sell will find a ready supply in the US dollar. American household borrowing ($18 trillion) outruns European household borrowing (€8.4 trillion), and sovereign debt markets show a similar disproportion, with US federal debt ($36 trillion) swamping European debt (€13 trillion issued by individual countries, plus less than €1 trillion issued collectively). American consumers and finance organize and add to global aggregate demand like nowhere else on the planet.

When Donald Trump looks out at this system, he sees the US as a victim. The nation’s cyclopean size gives it leverage over its trading partners, and by failing to use that leverage against them, Trump believes, it has been allowing itself to get ripped off. In 1987, when the hot topic was rapid Japanese growth, he took out a full-page ad in The New York Times for an open letter saying exactly that:

Quote:
For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.… Over the years, the Japanese, unimpeded by the huge costs of defending themselves (as long as the United Sates will do it for free), have built a strong and vibrant economy with unprecedented surpluses. They have brilliantly managed to maintain a weak yen against a strong dollar. This, coupled with our monumental spending for their, and others, defense, has moved Japan to the forefront of world economies.

His target changes as US trade deficits do, but his answer is the same every time: the US just needs strong leadership willing to use that leverage to extract rents from other countries. “Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend as allies. Let’s help our farmers, our sick, our homeless by taking from some of the greatest profit machines ever created—machines created and nurtured by us.”

This is the logic of a protection racket. Trump was largely diverted from acting on it in his first term: Gary Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, and Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, both alumni of Goldman Sachs, were widely reported at the time to have steered the president away from reshaping global trade and toward passing new tax cuts and deregulation. Cohn resigned when Trump finally did put tariffs on steel, while Mnuchin stayed on and pressed for exemptions. Now his top advisers all seem unable or unwilling to constrain him.

*

Unlike a real conveyor belt, this one wasn’t designed; it evolved across a century and a half through a series of unintended consequences and shifting coalitions. In his book Clashing Over Commerce, the economist Douglas Irwin identifies three distinct periods of American trade policy. 1 From the Founding to the Civil War, the federal government used tariffs to collect revenue in the absence of other forms of taxation; from the Civil War to the New Deal, it used them to restrict foreign competition and protect domestic firms; and from the New Deal to the first Trump administration, it lowered them strategically through negotiated reciprocity agreements with allies to create a free-trade world.

The protectionist vision that dominated the late nineteenth century was first articulated in the 1850s within the precincts of the then-emergent Republican Party.2 Its architects, such as Henry Carey and Justin Morrill, argued that tariffs designed to protect America’s infant industries would allow urban firms to grow, thereby creating demand for farm products. As long as the “home market” was booming from industrialization, farmers would be better off selling to it directly rather than relying on fickle and unaccountable foreign markets.

This set of ideas was so successful that, by a century later, it had undone itself. Initially Southerners objected, since they sold slave-grown cotton to European textile mills and would therefore be hurt by any retaliation to US tariffs, but the vision of a self-sustaining domestic economy had mass appeal in the North. The Civil War decided the issue: tariffs were raised, and America did indeed industrialize. Econometricians think that, far from being strategic and targeted, the tariffs protected inefficient producers and led to waste—not surprising, since they were the product of Congressional horse-trading. Yet protectionism allowed millions of Americans to experiment with industrialization, raising the manufacturing sector’s output, employment, and number of firms. The national market remained competitive for many other sectors too, though, and within that crucible some businesses became technological leaders. The most successful grew up to become capital-intensive, export-oriented firms, and by the 1930s they were joining cotton planters in the Democratic Party’s crusade to shift away from protectionism and embrace free trade.3

Northern farmers, too, were victims of their own success. Despite booming demand, supply grew even faster, crashing agricultural prices all around the world. That made it harder for farmers to make their mortgage payments. Small farmers failed, medium and large farmers consolidated, and the world urbanized. Two great deflationary waves, from 1870 to 1900 and 1920 to 1940, drowned farmers in a sea of debt. Governments in continental Europe tried to use tariffs to protect their farmers against American grain and compensated industrial workers for the higher food prices with a welfare state.

The same formula wouldn’t protect American farmers, however, since they were the source of the excess supply. Instead American farmers demanded and received government intervention to secure better access to credit. (Sociologists such as Sarah Quinn have pointed out that it is much easier to expand access to credit than it is to make explicit political decisions about reallocating resources.)4 Federal credit policies made American financial markets some of the deepest, safest, and most liquid on the planet. These were the component parts of the great conveyor belt.

*

What started as a republican nationalist alliance of farmers and infant industries generated, over the course of a century, a liberal internationalist coalition of financiers and big businesses, anchored by capital-intensive, internationally oriented firms in the Northeast. Their international orientation meant that these firms cared a great deal about global developments, while their high capital-intensity widened their room to bargain on labor issues. European fascism and bolshevism were graver threats to their bottom line than were minimum wage laws.

Over the 1930s this coalition was therefore able to recruit a broad base of workers by making concessions to the labor movement, such as the Social Security and Wagner Acts. In the 1940s its leaders supported the US entry into World War II even before Pearl Harbor, and favored a confrontational stance toward the Soviet Union that quickly turned into the cold war. Whether out of fear that European governments would retreat into economic nationalism if left to their own devices or out of concern that the threat of communist subversion would take away their foreign markets, the internationalist coalition was willing to pay for extensive military buildup and foreign aid—in the form of the Marshall Plan and NATO—if it meant keeping global capitalism intact. Indeed they were eager to, since military Keynesianism solved the domestic problem of underemployment, too. The historian Tim Barker quotes Paul Nitze, an investment banker–turned–planner in Truman’s State Department, gushing: “Korea came along and saved us.”

The internationalists didn’t go unchallenged. An alternative coalition of smaller, labor-intensive, domestically oriented, often less technologically advanced firms—and the workers who depended on their success—objected first to the New Deal and then to foreign entanglements. “America First” was their slogan. Unionization and the Marshall Plan might make sense to investment bankers in Manhattan, but what did a construction company in suburban Cincinnati care about whether Germany was divided one way or two?

At the head of the nationalist republican bloc was the Ohio senator Robert Taft. Like Trump, Taft thought European businessmen could—and should—pay to defend their private property themselves against the attacks of domestic socialists and Russian communists. If America had an obligation in world affairs, he believed, it was in Asia, where weaker states actually needed help against communist subversion. But in the main Taft thought the US should maintain moderately high tariff walls and stay aloof from world affairs that didn’t directly concern it. Liberal crusades beyond our borders would require a standing army—itself a direct threat to classical republican principles—which in turn would require high levels of taxation.

Taft worried, too, about other measures for which liberals were calling to make a high-pressure mixed economy work, like price controls and the socialization of investment, on the grounds that they threatened private property. Meanwhile, he argued, if the US became the global police, it would eventually be transformed into a “garrison state.” The best way to prevent that was to preserve Congress’s traditional prerogatives over the budget and war. Checks and balances, filibustering, and logrolling—and the gridlock they produced—were features, not bugs, of America’s constitutional system.

*

Taft’s wing of the GOP lost the fight over tariffs in the course of the consolidation of the New Deal. The turning point arrived with the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, which granted the president the authority to negotiate tariff reductions directly with other countries, bypassing the legislative chaos that had defined earlier eras. A generation later the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 further empowered the executive branch to lower tariffs, and in the 1970s a series of laws did still more to expand presidential discretion over trade barriers.5 At the time, few imagined these laws would be used to raise tariffs—but the result was a legal structure that, decades later, enabled Trump to unilaterally do just that.

One consequence of all this was that the US did become a “garrison state.” World War II’s high income taxes stuck around, the dollar became the global reserve currency, the military went to Korea and Vietnam, NATO permanently committed the US to European defense, and those free trade powers were used to lower tariffs and cement cold war alliances.6 Favorable American trade policies toward Japan and South Korea, for instance, were meant to strengthen anticommunist allies in Asia so they could serve as a counterweight to China and North Korea.

Whenever military spending surged, it led to full employment, chronic inflation, and wage gains, which eroded the international competitiveness of America’s exports and put pressure on companies that relied heavily on low-paid workers. Taft was hardly innocent in this drift away from republican liberty and toward militarism. His major legislative victory was the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), which suppressed organized labor—the one social base that might have offered a realistic alternative to cold war liberalism prior to the McCarthyite purges (which Taft also supported).

On the other side of the Atlantic, Europe built on its welfarist and corporatist traditions to offer workers a deal: keep wage demands down in return for full employment and social insurance.7 With low labor costs and high education levels, exports boomed. Other countries joined the export bonanza, most notably Japan, whose companies—Toyota, Nikon, Sony—became household names. Throughout the “development decade” of the 1960s all sorts of states hopped on the conveyor belt.

For more than two decades after World War II, the Bretton Woods system ensured that almost all noncommunist currencies had their exchange rates with the dollar fixed, giving investors a degree of predictability. After that system fell apart in 1971, however, currencies began to float according to supply and demand. American military buildups led to a stronger dollar, which made imports cheaper for domestic consumers but made American exports more expensive for foreigners. Each time America’s military adventured abroad, domestic production of consumer goods was squeezed. As a consequence, industries hit by import competition like textiles, autos, and steel made increasingly loud calls for protectionist relief during wars, but they were defeated each time.8

The American industrial base slowly eroded. Multinational corporations’ foreign subsidiaries built factories abroad: General Electric in western Europe, Tonka Toys in Mexico.9 Vertically integrated firms dis-integrated, keeping their intellectual property while relying increasingly on complex global supply chains to avoid labor strife at home. The countries that ran an export surplus with the US then recycled their profits into the dollar system, raising demand for the dollar, appreciating the exchange rate, and thus further eroding the international competitiveness of US industry.10

The system didn’t work automatically; it required constant attention and management. In the early 1980s, having resolved to maintain the dollar’s value and fight inflation, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker dramatically hiked interest rates. This strengthened the US dollar, since high rates attracted foreign capital. By 1985 dollar strength had gone far enough, and the Reagan administration negotiated the “Plaza Accord” with its major trading partners to coordinate depreciation against currencies like the yen and Deutsche Mark. When Japanese growth slowed in the 1990s, a “reverse Plaza” agreement between the US and Japan followed, driving the value of the dollar back up.

The 1980s Latin American debt crisis that followed from Volcker and the 1997 Asian financial crisis rocked the system yet again. The IMF stepped in to help only on the condition that countries go through brutal “structural adjustment programs” to liberalize their policies on finance and trade. In response, and to avoid such painful episodes in the future, central banks in emerging markets sought to bolster their reserves, increasing demand for dollar-denominated assets like US Treasury securities. Organized labor groups defected from the internationalist coalition’s push for free trade, but they weren’t strong enough to overcome the bipartisan consensus in favor of it. Negotiations for what eventually became the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization began under Reagan, continued through Bush, and were completed and passed by Clinton—the capstone to decades of momentum toward free trade.

Americans got something magical: easy access to cheap goods and assets from abroad in exchange for nothing more than paper dollars. A French finance minister dubbed this the US’s “exorbitant privilege.” But by the late twentieth century Taft’s nightmares had come true. Income taxes and debt paid for a standing army to act as policeman for the world, and a free-trade world order pushed by corporate internationalists had created a global dollar system that facilitated the deindustrialization of America.

That wouldn’t have been so bad if postindustrial labor had been organized, but thanks to Taft-Hartley it wasn’t. And it wouldn’t have been so bad if America had a welfare state. But such a state would require redistributing resources, and the American constitutional system is so riddled with veto points—legislation can fail in either house of the bicameral legislature or die under filibuster, while presidential candidates have to clear fundraising hurdles, not to mention the electoral college—that well-funded opposition groups have had an easy time shooting down such proposals. As industry declined, wages stagnated, and to fill the gap Americans borrowed money.

2.

The Biden administration tried to take on this system in a productive way. It accepted that America’s function as financial center meant channeling global surpluses, and yet it wanted the conveyor belt to lead not through consumer debt and asset bubbles but rather through public investments in public goods. The original vision of Build Back Better was public investment in the service sector, finally orienting our politics around the economy of the future, with funding for childcare, community college, and nursing-home reform. It was defeated in Congress, unable to get past Joe Manchin’s veto despite all the contortions and concessions Biden was willing to make. It was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as Andrew Yamakawa Elrod has argued, that “put spending back on the agenda.” What passed was what Elrod calls the “national security synthesis”: strategic investments in manufacturing to enable more aggressive confrontation with Russia and China. It was a convoluted system with many intermediaries that voters evidently didn’t understand or appreciate. And it too was defeated, this time at the polls.

Now it is the Trump administration’s turn to monkey with the conveyor belt. What do they plan to do with it? The Washington Post has reported that even his advisers didn’t know what Trump would do until the last minute on “Liberation Day.” Starting in January, Trump had set his team to work figuring out various tariff plans to reduce the trade deficit and restore American manufacturing jobs. Miran, Greer, and Lutnick drew up detailed schedules for country-specific tariffs.

In hopes of preparing for what might be coming, media commentators and corporate decisionmakers fixated on Miran’s nationalist critique of global finance from last November, “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System.” It was, in effect, a technical elaboration on Trump’s 1987 letter to The New York Times: use tariffs, dollar dominance, and security arrangements to extract rent from the rest of the world. For now, however, it represents a road not taken. Just three hours before the announcement on Liberation Day, the Post reported, Trump instead chose to pursue a more simplistic deficit-based formula, which matched one that Navarro had proposed several years ago.

Trump didn’t have a political mandate for such an extreme move. Polling shows that the top issues on swing voters’ minds were inflation, immigration, and Kamala Harris’s alleged preoccupation with “cultural issues” like transgender rights—not trade deficits or manufacturing employment. Trump’s platform in 2024 called for 10 percent universal tariffs and “up to 60 percent on China.” Perhaps extrapolating from his first trade war with China, which ended when the PRC promised to purchase more American energy and agricultural products, voters underestimated the impact of his second. In any case, Trump’s initial tariffs on Canada and Mexico immediately went far beyond what he had proposed, and the current 145 percent tariffs on China are more than double his most ambitious promise during the campaign. Nor is the party willing to control Trump: Republicans in the House blocked attempts to reassert Congressional control over tariff policy.

The hard core of Trump’s elite support comes from what the historian Patrick Wyman calls the “American gentry,” a class of “salt-of-the-earth millionaires” who derive their wealth from asset ownership: “a bunch of McDonald’s franchises in Jackson, Mississippi; a beef-processing plant in Lubbock, Texas; a construction company in Billings, Montana; commercial properties in Portland, Maine; or a car dealership in western North Carolina.” This cohort is in a sense a throwback to the Taft nationalists, but the most that can be said is that their interests permit reordering global trade, rather than require it.

All of his other elite constituents are suffering from his policies. The Trump administration has been particularly brutal toward the oil industry, home to some of its biggest supporters in the business community: Trump has broken the sector’s once-unassailable profit margins by simultaneously pressuring OPEC to raise supply and shocking the world with tariffs. Large retailers like Walmart, Best Buy, and Target, which depend on cheap foreign products, were among the most vocally frightened by the tariff plans. Musk, meanwhile, has extensive business in China, with a new “megapack” battery factory that just opened next to his Shanghai gigafactory. His business plan also depends, for that matter, on AI and autonomous cars, and therefore on microchips made by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. For Musk, then, conflict with China—whether in trade or over Taiwan—is disastrous.

Nor is there a good economic reason for Trump and his team to be so fixated on manufacturing. Much as productivity growth in agriculture eventually led to the decline of the farm economy, since fewer farmers were needed to satisfy all the demand for their products, so productivity growth in manufacturing has led to a falling share of industrial workers in global employment. The United Nations estimates that in 1991 more than 14 percent of workers were industrial; by 2014 fewer than 12 percent of them were. The trend is slow but the implication is clear: service work, not industrial work, is the future. The Trump administration’s fixation on raising manufacturing employment is the twenty-first-century equivalent to a twentieth-century government desperately trying to keep its workforce agrarian. They are fighting over shares of a shrinking pie.

And yet even if his obsession with manufacturing made sense, Trump’s monomaniacal commitment to using tariffs to achieve his aims would be irrational. By 2024 the Biden administration’s subsidies and investments in the manufacturing sector were leading to a construction boom for new plants and equipment. They were famously targeted at traditionally Republican districts to make them more bipartisan and harder to roll back. But Trump has unilaterally canceled large swaths of that agenda, arguing that tariffs will achieve the same aims. The only result has been a sharp decline in constructing for manufacturing and uncertainty for investors.

Most importantly, the only way America has a chance at competing internationally in the most advanced industries is to train enough engineers to develop new technologies. By turning the biomedical complex over to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promising to abolish the Department of Education, and attacking universities over free speech, in large part by withholding research grants, Trump has set back American science by generations. The only explanation for these moves is personal grievance. Indeed, on the whole, Trump’s trade war is better explained not as an economic endeavor but as a culture war, grounded in right-wing resentments and driven by his uniquely personalist form of rule.

*

Trump is operating independently not just of the voters and the donor class but also of the traditional economic experts. Those who do have his ear have enabled him rather than held him back. In the first administration, nationalists with credentials like Navarro’s Harvard economics Ph.D. were hard to come by. (At the time, Vanity Fair reported that Jared Kushner found Navarro not by networking or reputation but by browsing Amazon.) Moreover, they were balanced by representatives from the traditional business-internationalist wing of the GOP, like Cohn and Mnuchin. The equilibrium between these factions has shifted dramatically since Trump’s first term. Last year Navarro was willing to go to jail for refusing to testify under subpoena to the Congressional committee investigating January 6. He became one of Trump’s most trusted advisers, apparently able to overrule the more technocratic elements of the administration (not to mention its vestigial internationalist wing, Musk).

That technocratic faction, meanwhile, has also tilted toward nationalism. In Trump’s first term his Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) was chaired by Kevin Hassett, a mainline neoliberal straight out of the American Enterprise Institute, focused on cutting taxes and willing to defend the economic benefits of immigration from the alt-right. Although Hassett has returned to the White House for the second term, the Post has reported that he was not even in the room when the final decision on tariffs was made. Trump selected Miran, by contrast, in part on the basis of his arguments about reshaping global trade and finance, which drew criticism from the likes of AEI.

The result of these realignments was that “Liberation Day” was much harsher than anyone predicted. Soon many of Trump’s advisers began running away from responsibility. “I wasn’t involved in the calculations of the numbers,” Bessent told CNBC. “CEA was involved in calculating a variety of means of estimating approaches to thinking about non-tariff barriers,” Miran said at the Hudson Institute. “The president chose to go with a formula relating to closing trade deficits suggested by someone else in the administration.”

Trump was willing to countenance a stock market decline and even a recession. “He’s at the peak of just not giving a fuck anymore,” one insider told the Post. It was the bond market that seems to have shocked him out of complacency, finally moving him to enact the ninety-day pause on everything but the universal 10 percent tariffs and an escalation of those on China. Typically when investors flee stocks they go to bonds; as equities decline, Treasuries rise. This is dollar dominance in action—when investors want safety, even safety from a US recession, they go to safe assets denominated in dollars, like US Treasury securities. In this case, however, the shock was so huge that both fell simultaneously in the week after the tariffs were announced.

Indeed, even the value of the dollar against other currencies fell in foreign exchange markets, indicating not just a recessionary shock to trade patterns but perhaps something even more unsettling for the global financial system: the dollar may no longer be the safe haven for investors in a crisis. Investors weren’t just ditching American stocks and Treasuries, they were ditching the dollar itself. It is too early to say for sure, but these patterns are unprecedented. By simply making America unpredictable and untrustworthy, Trump may be eroding the safety on which dollar dominance depends, even if all the tariffs were to disappear tomorrow.

*

Still, ditching the dollar is easier said than done. What stores of value would everyone use instead? Consider the case of Russia, one of the countries with the greatest incentive to try to find ways out of the global dollar system. After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the Russian central bank shifted its reserve holdings out of direct dollar holdings in the US and into dollars held in other countries and other currencies. But even this “Fortress Russia” strategy couldn’t avoid the dollar completely. And what replaced those dollars? Mostly yen and euros, the latter of which are now frozen as the EU debates whether or not to fully confiscate them so they can be channeled to Ukraine. Not much of an alternative to the dollar system after all, at least for the West’s geopolitical rivals, who would be the first ones out the door if dollar dominance truly did collapse. More to the point, the yen and euro, as attractive as they are, don’t exist in sufficient quantities to replace the dollar as the world’s preferred safe store of value.

At least, they don’t yet. That might eventually change as a result of the new nationalists’ other plan for global reform: European self-defense. Continental rearmament will require deficit finance on an enormous scale. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s “ReArm Europe” plan proposes €800 billion in new defense spending; German conservatives, traditionally the bulwark of European austerity, have already made preparations for issuing additional debt. In the short term, Germany’s shift away from austerity will move the global trading system toward balance, especially since so much of that spending will be on procuring arms from America rather than additional defense production in Europe—a boost to American manufacturing. Over the medium-to-long term, however, a more geopolitically independent Europe issuing large quantities of safe, Euro-denominated public debt would start to reduce dollar dominance, opening the door to a world with realistic alternatives to the dollar system. Significant hurdles remain: Europe would need to manage a stronger currency, rising debt, and exporter pushback—issues that its own veto-ridden constitutional structure may struggle to resolve. Still, security is a powerful unifying force, and Trump has impressed on European leaders that they need to provide it for themselves.

Meanwhile Miran is taking the lead in attempting to open up new avenues for the president to exercise his will on the global economy. Miran’s diagnosis is that the dollar is structurally overvalued, a problem that tariffs are ill-suited to solve; a far simpler solution would be to cut the Gordian Knot and pursue devaluation directly through monetary policy. Ditto for fears that the bond market might malfunction in response to high tariffs: if the executive branch could control monetary policy directly, Trump could use those tools to stabilize markets when they react badly to his policies.

This is not traditionally an option because the Federal Reserve has operated as an independent federal agency since the 1950s. Presidents appoint the Board of Governors with the approval of the Senate; twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks elect their own presidents, and they take turns serving with the Board on the Federal Open Market Committee, which determines monetary policy. Once appointed, the Board has autonomy for decisions about interest rates and lending. According to the Supreme Court, in a 1935 case known as Humphrey’s Executor, the president can’t fire the heads of independent agencies except “for cause”—that is, he can’t fire them simply over disagreements about politics or policy, only due to “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

And yet the courts have recently been chipping away at Humphrey’s Executor. Major cases in 2010, 2020, and 2021 have narrowed the scope of the protections it provides; and in the most recent case, Consumers’ Research v. Consumer Product Safety Commission (2024), the fifth circuit court explicitly expressed doubts about the rationale behind Humphrey’s Executor, inviting the Supreme Court to review the precedent. Upon assuming office, Trump fired members of the Federal Trade Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the National Labor Relations Board. After a lower court ruled that Trump’s actions in the latter two instances had been illegal, on April 9 Justice Roberts issued a stay, allowing the firing to go ahead while the case makes its way up to the Supreme Court. If the Court does overturn Humphrey’s, then the way will be cleared for Trump to take control of the Fed and use it as an even more powerful lever for commanding markets in nationalist directions.

Between precipitating the tariff shock, damaging the dollar’s reputation for safety, inducing deficit-financed military spending in Europe by abandoning and humiliating allies, and possibly creating a politicized Federal Reserve, Trump is radically rewiring the global political economy, all without a mandate or clear constituency, by sheer force of personality alone. The last time a Republican tried to withdraw from the burdens of empire and remake the global order, his name was Taft, and he lost. Trump may yet succeed—not by building a new consensus, but by breaking the system until no one can hold it together.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 7:11 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Larry David is not equating Trump with Hitler. He is writing about seeing people for who they really are and not losing sight of that.

My Dinner With Adolf

By Larry David | April 21, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/opinion/larry-david-hitler-dinner.h
tml

Mr. David is a comedian and writer who created “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and was a co-creator of “Seinfeld.”

Imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. “He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.” But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side — even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.

Two weeks later, I found myself on the front steps of the Old Chancellery and was led into an opulent living room, where a few of the Führer’s most vocal supporters had gathered: Himmler, Göring, Leni Riefenstahl and the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. We talked about some of the beautiful art on the walls that had been taken from the homes of Jews. But our conversation ended abruptly when we heard loud footsteps coming down the hallway. Everyone stiffened as Hitler entered the room.

He was wearing a tan suit with a swastika armband and gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard. Frankly, it was a warmer greeting than I normally get from my parents, and it was accompanied by a slap on my back. I found the whole thing quite disarming. I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.

He said he was starving and led us into the dining room, where he gestured for me to sit next to him. Göring immediately grabbed a slice of pumpernickel, whereupon Hitler turned to me, gave me an eye roll, then whispered, “Watch. He’ll be done with his entire meal before you’ve taken two bites.” That one really got me. Göring, with his mouth full, asked what was so funny, and Hitler said, “I was just telling him about the time my dog had diarrhea in the Reichstag.” Göring remembered. How could he forget? He loved that story, especially the part where Hitler shot the dog before it got back into the car. Then a beaming Hitler said, “Hey, if I can kill Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, I can certainly kill a dog!” That perhaps got the biggest laugh of the night — and believe me, there were plenty.

But it wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation. He was quite inquisitive and asked me a lot of questions about myself. I told him I had just gone through a brutal breakup with my girlfriend because every time I went someplace without her, she was always insistent that I tell her everything I talked about. I can’t stand having to remember every detail of every conversation. Hitler said he could relate — he hated that, too. “What am I, a secretary?” He advised me it was best not to have any more contact with her or else I’d be right back where I started and eventually I’d have to go through the whole thing all over again. I said it must be easy for a dictator to go through a breakup. He said, “You’d be surprised. There are still feelings.” Hmm … there are still feelings. That really resonated with me. We’re not that different, after all. I thought that if only the world could see this side of him, people might have a completely different opinion.

Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. “I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.” “I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.” And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.

Larry David Spoofs Bill Maher’s White House Visit With ‘My Dinner With Adolf’ Essay:
‘Private Hitler Was a Completely Different Animal’

By Jack Dunn | Apr 21, 2025 6:07pm PT

https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/larry-david-bill-maher-donald-trump-d
inner-with-adolf-essay-1236374517/

Quote:
Maher had once been an outspoken critic of Trump, and Trump of Maher. In the past, the Commander-in-Chief called the comedian a “low-life” with a show that is “dead.” Even still, the White House visit was enough to change Maher’s mind.

“A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House,” he added. “A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there, which I know is fucked up. It’s just not as fucked up as I thought it was.”

David mimicked Maher’s tone, writing, “I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.”

Larry David is arguing that during a single dinner or a private meeting, anyone can be human, and it means nothing in the end about what that person is capable of.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 7:24 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

A “sudden-stop” crisis comes to America

By Paul Krugman | Apr 22, 2025

Source: xe.com

Yesterday Bloomberg posted an article titled “Markets Are Discovering the Real Trump Trade Is ‘Sell America’.” That’s about right. Look at the value of the dollar on international markets, shown at the top of this post. For a while after the election investors loved Trump, not wisely but too well. But in the face of one idiotic policy move after another, they’ve gradually fallen out of love, and now seem to be capitulating. I think they still haven’t faced up to how bad it is, but they’re figuring it out.

What we’re seeing now is something familiar to those of us who have studied economic crises in other countries, usually but not always emerging markets. For this is looking more and more like a “sudden stop.” That’s what happens when a country that has relied on large inflows of foreign capital loses the confidence of international investors. The inflow of money dries up — and the economic consequences are usually ugly.

Much more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/stop-in-the-name-of-trump

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 9:06 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Lech Walesa Letter to President Trump

Angry Bear | April 21, 2025 5:08 pm

https://angrybearblog.com/2025/04/lech-walesa-letter-to-president-trum
p

. . . We urge the USA to stand by the promises made in 1994 with the Budapest Memorandum. At that time, the USA and the United Kingdom guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for the country giving up its nuclear weapons. Those promises were unconditional – nowhere does it say that this support should be considered a financial deal.

Sincerely,

Lech Walesa, former political prisoner and president of Poland

Original at
https://www.facebook.com/lechwalesa/posts/1205977244231523?ref=embed_p
ost

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Go get some fucking nukes. See how that works out for you.
Wow! It was only one short paragraph, but you completely misunderstood it, 6ix. Once again, I see why Trumptards struggle in America. How can they understand more complicated ideas if they can't get the simplest idea, such as that Trump should not steal money from Ukraine? Here is another idea Trumptards don't understand: Do as promised (in this case, keep the promise of guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity).

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Nah. Just giving your posts the seriousness which they deserve is all.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 6:27 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nah. Just giving your posts the seriousness which they deserve is all.

Elsewhere today:

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Why anybody in the world gives one single shit about the Pope in 2025 is just beyond me.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=36983&mid=12171
77#1217177
6ix, you wrecked your health because of your general stupidity about other people's lives and even your own life.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 6:33 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Jerome Groopman on the Measles Outbreak

The New York Review of Books https://email.nybooks.com/t/y-l-ckdojl-dllrtujkjl-j/

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has for years been one of the most prominent vaccination skeptics in the United States. As Jerome Groopman documents in the Review’s May 15 issue, he has campaigned against mandates—calling the effects of vaccines on children a “holocaust”—and once said “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective.” And now, during a measles outbreak that has spread to nine states and infected more than eight hundred people, three of whom have died, rather than advocating empirically effective epidemiological measures, Kennedy has recommended “the use of cod-liver oil...and steroids, although there’s no scientific proof that either is an effective treatment” and, moreover, “proposed prescribing clarithromycin, an antibiotic, as a treatment for measles, although antibiotics have no effect on viruses.”

“In the midst of an outbreak of a contagious disease,” writes Groopman,

Quote:
it is seductive to believe we can control it with something simple and easily available that the medical establishment has neglected or dismissed. Ivermectin, an antiparasite drug that has demonstrated no benefit against Covid, is still touted by right-wing influencers as an alternative treatment offering miraculous cures. HIV was falsely alleged to be not the primary cause of AIDS but an innocuous fellow traveler as the immune system is degraded by sex and poppers (amyl nitrate). Cod-liver oil is promoted as a prophylactic against measles despite the proven efficacy of vaccination. We are moving into a parallel universe where those who oversee public health want to take us back to a time before...the development of antibiotics that combat microbes and vaccines that prevent infection.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 6:34 PM

You don't know shit about anything, let alone me.

Worry about fixing yourself, because you are completely broken, just like your dead political party is.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 6:39 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You don't know shit about anything, let alone me.

Worry about fixing yourself, because you are completely broken, just like your dead political party is.

The only reason Trump and you aren't as dead as Rush Limbaugh, the guy who said smoking doesn't kill and who died from lung cancer, is purely accidental, and that typical Democrats believe it is evil to kill evil people. Someday, the Democrats will realize that evil Trumptards must die screaming rather than be allowed hospice care and morphine to gently ease their passage into Hell.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 8:30 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Hundreds of scholars say U.S. is swiftly heading toward authoritarianism

By Frank Langfitt | April 22, 2025 5:01 AM ET

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/22/nx-s1-5340753/trump-democracy-authorita
rianism-competive-survey-political-scientist

WASHINGTON — A survey of more than 500 political scientists finds that the vast majority think the United States is moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism.

In the benchmark survey, known as Bright Line Watch, U.S.-based professors rate the performance of American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After President Trump's election in November, scholars gave American democracy a rating of 67. Several weeks into Trump's second term, that figure plummeted to 55.

"That's a precipitous drop," says John Carey, a professor of government at Dartmouth and co-director of Bright Line Watch. "There's certainly consensus: We're moving in the wrong direction."

Carey said the decline between November and February was the biggest since Bright Line Watch began surveying scholars on threats to American democracy in 2017. In the survey, respondents consider 30 indicators of democratic performance, including whether the government interferes with the press, punishes political opponents and whether the legislature and the judiciary can check executive authority.

Not all political scientists view Trump with alarm, but many like Carey who focus on democracy and authoritarianism are deeply troubled by Trump's attempts to expand executive power over his first several months in office.

"We've slid into some form of authoritarianism," says Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, and co-author of How Democracies Die. "It is relatively mild compared to some others. It is certainly reversible, but we are no longer living in a liberal democracy."

Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton sociologist who has spent years tracking Hungary, is also deeply concerned: "We are on a very fast slide into what's called competitive authoritarianism."

When these scholars use the term "authoritarianism," they aren't talking about a system like China's, a one-party state with no meaningful elections. Instead, they are referring to something called "competitive authoritarianism," the kind scholars say they see in countries such as Hungary and Turkey.

In a competitive authoritarian system, a leader comes to power democratically and then erodes the system of checks and balances. Typically, the executive fills the civil service and key appointments — including the prosecutor's office and judiciary — with loyalists. He or she then attacks the media, universities and nongovernmental organizations to blunt public criticism and tilt the electoral playing field in the ruling party's favor.

"The government would still have elections and would nominally be democratic," says Rory Truex, a political scientist at Princeton who focuses on China. "But those elections would no longer be free and fair."

While the vast majority of scholars surveyed say Trump is pushing the country toward autocracy, other professors strongly disagree. James Campbell, a retired political scientist at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, says Trump is using legitimate presidential powers to address long-standing problems. Campbell points to Trump's use of tariffs to try to push companies to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. In recent decades, economic globalization led to catastrophic layoffs of everyone from furniture makers in North Carolina to auto assembly-line workers in the Midwest as firms sent work overseas, especially to China.

"I think they've done an excellent job," Campbell says of the Trump administration.

Campbell adds that he thinks many political scientists may see Trump as autocratic because they don't like him or his politics.

"I think most of them are coming from the political left," he says. "There's a comfort in all of them getting together and saying, 'Oh, Trump's a bad guy. He's authoritarian.' "

NPR reached out to the Trump administration, which has yet to respond.

But many democracy scholars say the Trump administration is using tactics employed by autocrats, and they point to specific actions. For instance, Trump's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is investigating all the major broadcast outlets — except for Rupert Murdoch's Fox, which owns the pro-Trump Fox News Channel.

The FCC is questioning how CBS edited an interview of Trump's 2024 rival, Kamala Harris, and whether NPR and PBS are complying with regulations on corporate underwriting spots. The FCC can revoke local broadcast licenses, which could damage the networks financially.

Princeton's Scheppele says this is reminiscent of Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán took aim at the business model of Hungarian media, which heavily relied on state advertising.

"Overnight, [Orbán] cuts all the advertising to the independent and opposition media," Scheppele says. "They all have a hole blown in their budget."

In another example, Trump has withheld or threatened to withhold billions of dollars from universities, including Harvard, Princeton and Columbia, citing concerns about antisemitism. Scheppele says Orbán also targeted universities that had been critical of his government.

"In the first two years, Orbán cut the university budgets by 40%," she says.

Another way to measure authoritarianism, according to Levitsky, is whether publicly opposing the government comes with a cost. He says — under Trump — it does. For instance, Trump has issued executive orders barring lawyers with firms he doesn't like from entering government buildings and representing government contractors.

Fear of government retribution is now spreading through society. A scholar who spoke to NPR for this story later asked not to be quoted, saying he feared the Trump administration might try to punish him by slashing research grants he's working on. In a recent NPR series on free speech, many people did not want to be identified by name.

But even some scholars who say Trump has autocratic tendencies think the American system should be able to withstand them.

Kurt Weyland, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, says that so far the lower courts are checking Trump. He also says Trump does not have the overwhelming popular support that autocratic leaders such as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and El Salvador's Nayib Bukele enjoyed and that was crucial to their ability to change their country's political systems.

For instance, Bukele, who met with Trump at the White House last week, has seen approval ratings over 90% and won reelection last year by a landslide. By contrast, a recent poll showed Trump's approval rating falling to 43% and he was reelected with just under half the popular vote.

"These populist leaders managed to engineer new constitutions that seriously concentrated power and that were the breakpoint that put those countries on the path toward competitive authoritarian rule," says Weyland, who wrote Democracy's Resilience to Populism's Threat: Countering Global Alarmism. "In the United States, that is out of the question."

Bright Line Watch conducted its survey in early February. It plans to put another in the field soon. Carey, one of the co-directors, expects political scientists to downgrade America's democracy even further.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 8:44 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Yeah, right.

And they never noticed the Covid lockdowns, mandatory vaccinations, widespread censorship and "official" disinformation (lies) about ... well, everything? From the source of the Covid virus to Hunter Biden's laptop to inflation to Biden's mental competence?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 12:15 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yeah, right.

And they never noticed the Covid lockdowns, mandatory vaccinations, widespread censorship and "official" disinformation (lies) about ... well, everything? From the source of the Covid virus to Hunter Biden's laptop to inflation to Biden's mental competence?

Al Gore says "Fuck Signym, who is a goddamn Nazi mixing truth and falsehood, creating a poison."

Al Gore compares Trump administration to Nazi Germany

The former vice president said the administration was “insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality.”

By Debra Kahn | 04/22/2025 12:16 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/22/al-gore-compares-trump-admini
stration-to-third-reich-hitler-00302348

Gore cited German philosophers’ “moral autopsy on the Third Reich” in the aftermath of World War II.

“It was [Jürgen] Habermas’ mentor, Theodore Adorno, who wrote that the first step in that nation’s descent into hell was, and I quote, ‘the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power,”’ Gore said. “He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, ‘attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.’ End quote. The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality.”

“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement,” Gore said. “It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it. But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 12:59 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Wow, now you're using Al Gore?

I can't tell you how seriously I take that!
Really!

BTW, I'm getting money-begging texts from Al.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 7:26 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Wow, now you're using Al Gore?

I can't tell you how seriously I take that!
Really!

BTW, I'm getting money-begging texts from Al.

Are you implying that Signym has superior judgment of people, ideas AND the news? Just asking because I get the impression you are a Trumptard. They don't do better than average. They are worse at everything, except for lying, bragging, and cheating. That's why the rotten behavior of Trumptards doesn't repel other Trumptards. The Trumptards I know act evil every day and don't see anything wrong. (The Trumptards side with Russia over Ukraine. They think that cutting USAID to starving people is efficient. They think tariffs will cause factories to be built in the US. They think white people can't get ahead because of blacks. Etc. Trumptards have an endless supply of stupid ideas roaming in their heads, which they are convinced are wisdom.) Trumptards are kind of like drunks who deny they are drunk and get angry at anyone who points to their huge consumption of alcohol. How you Trumptards squander your lives is NOT normal, but it is typical.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 7:27 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Cronyism, Capitulation and Utter Chaos
And what the hell was Scott Bessent doing briefing Morgan clients?

By Paul Krugman | Apr 23, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/cronyism-capitulation-and-chaos

Hitting the road today, but I have time for a note on the news that moved markets yesterday. Bloomberg reports:

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told a closed-door investor summit Tuesday that the tariff standoff with China cannot be sustained by both sides and that the world’s two largest economies will have to find ways to de-escalate.

That de-escalation will come in the very near future, Bessent said during an event hosted by J.P. Morgan Chase in Washington, which wasn’t open to the public or media. He characterized the current situation as essentially a trade embargo, according to people who attended the session.

Investors liked this report, but it was, if you think about it, deeply disturbing on two levels.

First — and why aren’t more people saying this? — what the hell was the Treasury secretary doing giving a closed-door briefing on a significant policy change that hadn’t yet been officially announced? Isn’t that a setup for large-scale insider trading? Indeed, attendees at that conference surely made market bets before Bessent’s remarks became public.

And since when are major policy announcements by government officials made off the record to closed private-sector meetings? One even wonders whether Bessent was announcing policy or making it: Did Trump back him up only after the fact?

The content of his remarks aside, what was Bessent even doing at this event? Senior government officials aren’t supposed to be helping investment banks entertain their clients.

Was Bessent paid for his appearance? That would have been inconceivable under any previous administration, but now God knows. Or are we now entering an era in which companies that do favors for Trump and co., either in the form of money or support for their policies, get lucrative insider briefings?

Put it this way: New York Times conflict of interest rules would have prohibited me, as an opinion writer, from talking to a closed-door session at J.P. Morgan. For the Treasury secretary to do so — especially when announcing a major policy change — is a huge ethical breach.

Let’s also talk about the substance of what Bessent reportedly said. Namely, he declared that the enormous tariffs Trump imposed on China will soon be reversed. Those tariffs are indeed crazy, amounting, as Bessent said, to an embargo.

But this is an extraordinary reversal — a capitulation equivalent to surrender. And bear in mind that the damage being done by Trump’s tariffs comes not just from how high they are but from the uncertainty they’re creating. That gigantic China tariff was announced just two weeks ago. Now Trump says, “we will be very nice and they’re going to be very nice.” How can any business make plans in this kind of environment?

Oh, and it seems likely that Trump will announce trade “deals,” possibly with China, probably with other countries, that aren’t actually deals — just “memorandums of understanding” that offer few specifics. He and Bessent will try to spin this as a policy triumph, but all that will really have happened is a confirmation that you can’t trust anything this administration says, including its threats.

As the same time Trump has made a humiliating climb-down on Jerome Powell.

While news media and some investors may still be credulous enough to believe Trump’s boasts, harder-headed players will look at his U-turns and conclude that he runs away when confronted. Why would China be "very nice” now that it knows that Trump can be rolled? On the contrary, China will be even less likely than before to make concessions. And other countries will be more willing to stand up to Trump and more likely to make deals with Beijing.

We are, in short, in a worse position than we were before Trump began his tariff bluster. Being a cowardly, loud-mouthed bully presiding over utter chaos is not an effective negotiating strategy.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 7:50 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump's Psychological Vulnerability And the Destruction of the American Economy

By Timothy Snyder | Apr 10, 2025

https://snyder.substack.com/p/trumps-psychological-vulnerability

Trump has an obvious weakness that makes America weak. He places the American economy at risk for the sake of a personal foible, a visible vulnerability.

All his adult life, Trump has been ripping people off. That is his modus operandi. Rather than a conscience, he has the habit of displacement. It is not that he is ripping people off. Everyone else is ripping him off.

As he has aged this has grown into an vulnerability. He actually seems to believe that everyone is ripping him off. He makes no distinction between himself and the government. And he has no grasp of how any significant policy actually works. This means that anyone who has access to him and understands his vulnerability can generate a self-destructive American policy.

An easy example of this, before the tariffs, was Ukraine. Somewhere Trump got the idea that Ukraine was ripping off the United States. And once the idea was in his head, he was its slave. He kept repeating that the Ukraine owed the United States $350 billion.

This made no sense. The assistance in question was aid, not a loan. The value of the aid was about a third of what Trump claimed. Most of the military aid came in the form of spending inside the United States. And of course the Ukrainians have paid. They have fulfilled the entire NATO mission by themselves in holding off a Russian attack. They have suffered enormous losses of all kinds. And they have shared intelligence and innovations with the United States. But none of that matters to Trump. Once he is told that he is being ripped off, he is helpless, and others must suffer.

We don't know now, though it is not hard to guess, who told Trump that Ukraine was ripping him off. The Russians have a keen sense of psychological vulnerabilities, and they have been paying close attention to Trump for a long time.

Trump also cites the made-up number of $350 billion to justify tariffs. He claims that Europeans, curiously, somehow "owe" the United States that exact same amount. Trump believes that if Americans buy more from another country than residents of that country buy from us, that is a loss, that he personally is somehow being ripped off. And so when the United States formulated tariffs on the whole world last week, the operating principle was that all trade deficits -- cases where we buy more than we sell -- should be eliminated.

This is nonsensical. There is no state of nature where countries buy and sell the exact same amount from one another.

Imagine a party where people are freely talking to each other. Then someone jumps up on a table and insists that in every conversation each speaker should use the exact same number of words as the person with whom he or she is in dialogue. What would happen then? Every conversation would grind to a halt, because an artificial planned equality of words is not how conversations work. An artificial planned equality of the value of imports and exports is, by the same token, not how trade works.

There is a much injustice in international trade. And there is much to be said for a thoughtful trade policy that protects or encourages certain industries. Manufacturing is of inherent value. But none of this will arise from the hurt feelings of an oligarchical president.

Because Trump's policy is based on personal vulnerability, it is erratic. If someone makes him feel more vulnerable than he was already, he will stop. He will not, for example, impose tariffs on Russia, because he is afraid of Russia. On the other hand, if someone convinces him that he has won, then he will also reduce the tariffs, as has just happened. If he no longer feels that he is being ripped off, then he yields. Until the moment when his feelings change.

To a person which such an obvious vulnerability, everything seems out of control. And so control is the only answer. Everyone is acting to rip me off. And so I must establish control by calling them all out, and making them deal with me from a position of weakness and ridicule. And so now the United States -- so goes the theory - will now negotiate individually with every single country of the world. We have broken agreements with many of them, and now we will sign new agreements, which will probably be worse: we lack time now, and patience, and focus. And we can never get back the trust of our closest trade partners.

The same is true in domestic policy. By establishing the tariffs, Trump thinks that he is creating leverage for himself against American companies. They will all have to come to him personally to seek the "carve-out," the exception, that will allow them to continue to trade in world markets and function as they had before. And so Trump can enjoy feeling less vulnerable as he tries to bully companies. But this amounts to central planning, and of a particularly irrational sort: one that depends upon one man's feelings. Investing inside the United States no longer means what it once did. And this will not quickly change.

We all have our foibles, our whims, our vulnerabilities. But when one person has unchecked power, irrationality becomes unchecked. Donald Trump thinks that everyone is always ripping him off. If he were the president in a normal situation, this would be a minor problem. But in a situation in which he has gotten away with an attempted coup, in which the Supreme Court has told him he is immune from prosecution, in which members of his own party rarely challenge him, in which Congress no longer sees the need to pass laws, and so on, in which too much of the media normalizes him, Trump's vulnerability can bring about the destruction of the country.

We have thousands of years of political theory and indeed great literature to instruct us on this point: too much power brings out the worst in people -- especially among the worst of people. As the founders understood, the purpose of the rule of law, of checks and balances, of regular elections, is to prevent precisely such a situation. Allowing our republic to be compromised has many costs, for example to our rights, and to our dignity. But it also has costs in a very basic economic sense. When you elevate the mad king, you elevate the madness.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 11:39 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Wow, now you're using Al Gore?

I can't tell you how seriously I take that!
Really!

BTW, I'm getting money-begging texts from Al.
Are you implying that Signym has superior judgment of people, ideas AND the news?

Superior to who? Al Gore?
Yep!

To you?
Double yep!

I don't confuse myself with lies, and I try to keep personal bias and pecuniary interest out of my analyses.

Quote:
Just asking because I get the impression you are a Trumptard. They don't do better than average. They are worse at everything, except for lying, bragging, and cheating. That's why the rotten behavior of Trumptards doesn't repel other Trumptards. The Trumptards I know act evil every day and don't see anything wrong. (The Trumptards side with Russia over Ukraine. They think that cutting USAID to starving people is efficient. They think tariffs will cause factories to be built in the US. They think white people can't get ahead because of blacks. Etc. Trumptards have an endless supply of stupid ideas roaming in their heads, which they are convinced are wisdom.) Trumptards are kind of like drunks who deny they are drunk and get angry at anyone who points to their huge consumption of alcohol. How you Trumptards squander your lives is NOT normal, but it is typical.

More inaccurate "mind reading"?

And you can hardly accuse others of evil, bc you're a lying sociopath who likes to kill people and who fantasizes that he's morally superior.

BTW I noticed WTI $ is dropping. Too bad for you.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 11:52 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
And since when are major policy announcements by government officials made off the record to closed private-sector meetings?

I don't know. Ask Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 11:59 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Yanno SECOND, this could have been an interesting thread. An intelligent and relatively non-partisan discussion of Trump's policies: What he's done right, where he's gone wrong, what we think will result, what he could do otherwise.

Instead, you've done your usual burying of threads with tons and tons of lies and bullshit.

How about you take a break, STFU for a change, and let the grownups talk?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 1:30 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You don't know shit about anything, let alone me.

Worry about fixing yourself, because you are completely broken, just like your dead political party is.
The only reason Trump and you aren't as dead as Rush Limbaugh, the guy who said smoking doesn't kill and who died from lung cancer, is purely accidental, and that typical Democrats believe it is evil to kill evil people. Someday, the Democrats will realize that evil Trumptards must die screaming rather than be allowed hospice care and morphine to gently ease their passage into Hell.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Say hi to Kevin Drum for me. You're time is coming very soon.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 1:41 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yanno SECOND, this could have been an interesting thread. An intelligent and relatively non-partisan discussion of Trump's policies: What he's done right, where he's gone wrong, what we think will result, what he could do otherwise.

Instead, you've done your usual burying of threads with tons and tons of lies and bullshit.

How about you take a break, STFU for a change, and let the grownups talk?

Signym, google Nazi supporters in America. Those supporters stopped identifying themselves once Hitler declared war on America. As Trump supporters realize he is at war with America, they will pretend they never supported Trump. Unlike Hitler, Trump is not foolish enough to issue a declaration of war, making it easy to identify hostility to America.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Nazi+supporters+in+America

PUTIN

This is everything he could have dreamed of. America tearing itself apart, declaring trade war on its allies and everyone else except Russia, installing a Fox Weekend News host with a drinking problem to head the Defense Department, disbanding the teams tasked with combating Russian cyber aggression, degrading its ability to fight disease, attacking its globally admired colleges and universities, politicizing the Justice Department and the FBI, surrendering its “soft power” . . .

. . . taking a wrecking ball to our flawed but indispensable 250-year experiment with democracy, the rule of law, and “due process.”

Putin and his fellow kleptocrats are in seventh heaven.

https://andrewtobias.com/putin-yourself-in-his-shoes/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 1:42 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump Kills the Firewall, Musk Lights the Match

The Trump administration’s baffling attack on American cybersecurity hits a new low, gutting vital programs, punishing experts and empowering Elon Musk’s shadowy government tech squad—now accused of letting Kremlin agents poke around federal systems.

By John R. Schindler • 04/17/25 1:03pm

https://observer.com/2025/04/cybersecurity-crisis-unfolds-as-trump-cut
s-cve-and-russians-hack-doge/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 1:47 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yanno SECOND, this could have been an interesting thread. An intelligent and relatively non-partisan discussion of Trump's policies: What he's done right, where he's gone wrong, what we think will result, what he could do otherwise.

Instead, you've done your usual burying of threads with tons and tons of lies and bullshit.

How about you take a break, STFU for a change, and let the grownups talk?
Signym, google Nazi supporters in America. Those supporters stopped identifying themselves once Hitler declared war on America.

You guys are the ones burning everything down and putting swastikas up on everything.

What's left of you.

Your party is dead. It will never come back.

You'd better start that Civil War now pussy, or you're going to lose everything forever.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 2:18 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You guys are the ones burning everything down and putting swastikas up on everything.

What's left of you.

Your party is dead. It will never come back.

You'd better start that Civil War now pussy, or you're going to lose everything forever.

You and Signym won't read the following, but that is because you both are poor, uncomprehending and will stay that way until you die:

Trump is crippling the tax police

By Matthew Yglesias | Apr 23, 2025 at 5:07 AM

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trump-is-crippling-the-tax-police

The late Donald Rumsfeld had a funny bit where he would send a letter to the IRS stating that he had no idea whether his tax return was accurate because the correct number is essentially unknowable, and scolding Congress for bequeathing to the public a tax code so complicated that nobody really knows what anybody owes.

It’s funny, and I think it resonated with a lot of people who have complicated tax situations.

But that’s not actually most people.

Most people have a job, and that job pays them a salary. Taxes are withheld from their biweekly paycheck based on a rote formula, and at the end of the year, they get a modest refund because that’s how the withholding defaults work. For most people, their income is their salary, they take the standard deduction, their investments (if any) are in a 401(k), and calculating what they owe is pretty simple. It’s true that filling out the forms is annoying and the whole process can generate a fair amount of anxiety. But the underlying taxes are actually simple, and for most taxpayers, the government could easily send most taxpayers a pre-filled form with their income (employers have to report how much they pay as part of their own taxes) and what the IRS thinks they owe. Under the Biden administration, they moved in this direction with DirectFile, but of course the Trump administration killed that program.

That’s most people’s taxes. Then there’s me.

I co-own a company with my wife. She and I are also employees of the company. We derive income from our salaries, but also the company’s income “passes through” onto our individual taxes. We get a statement from Stripe indicating how much money they paid to us as Slow Boring subscriptions, less Substack’s cut and their own. But that is not income in the way that a salary is income — it’s revenue. The income concept, in a business context, refers to profits. So the money we pay to Google for Google Workspace software and email accounts is deducted, and so is the rent we pay for our office. So is my subscription to Riverside for podcast recording software. So are our computers.

It’s this stuff, the handling of business expenses, that makes our taxes complicated. If you read “a simple guide to claiming software tax deductions in 2025,” you’ll see that it’s not simple at all.

And it gets more complicated the deeper you read. For example, the “necessary” part of “ordinary and necessary” does not require the software to be literally indispensable. I could do my job without Claude Pro, for example — I was doing this work long before it existed — but I do think it meets the standard the IRS has articulated as “helpful and appropriate.” Is it ordinary? I think obviously yes, in terms of how this has been enforced in practice. But by definition, brand new products aren’t literally ordinary. On the other hand, “helpful and appropriate” and “necessary” all mean different things in ordinary language! The tax code is very complicated in its details. We have statutes and regulatory interpretations and case law, but when a complicated system meets a common law legal tradition, it results in a lot of ambiguity.

It also generates opportunities for everything from aggressive claiming of business expenses to outright fraud.

But part of the genius of America is that while tax cheating happens, most business owners act like Rumsfeld and make a good faith effort to pay what they owe. This is what’s known as voluntary tax compliance, and the fact that the United States maintains a high level differentiates it from places like Greece or Nigeria.

Of course, voluntary compliance is not entirely separate from enforcement. With a high level of voluntary compliance, tax officials can check up on a higher share of shady-looking returns. And the sense that a shady-looking return might be scrutinized motivates voluntary compliance. If enforcement capacity plummets, though, people will notice and voluntary compliance will fall, forcing us to rely more on hard enforcement, even as hard enforcement capacity has evaporated.

This is a totally normal crime dynamic that conservatives understand and appreciate in most non-tax contexts.

But the Republican Party has developed a perverse affection for rich tax cheats and as a result, Donald Trump is axing America’s tax enforcement capacity and risking a collapse of voluntary compliance.
Business owners have a lot of ability to cheat

One thing about business expenses is that the facial legitimacy of a given expense hinges critically on what kind of business we’re talking about. It would be ridiculous of me to claim power tools as a business expense, and that’s completely obvious if you are aware that Slow Boring is a political newsletter. But Slow Boring could be the name of a home repair company.

On Monday, I met someone who told me I have a very self-deprecating name for my website. I didn’t want to get into the whole explanation, but there’s nothing self-deprecating about it! The name is a reference to legendary German political theorist Max Weber, who compared politics to drilling holes through hard boards of wood. You could imagine a pretentious carpenter giving his business the same name, though. And I’m not going to insult anyone’s intelligence by pretending to know what kind of tools a carpenter might buy for his legitimate business, but I feel pretty confident that there is some overlap between the tools a home renovation professional would buy and the tools that an enthusiastic hobbyist or generally handy person would own.

And the world is full of “dual use” technologies like that.

Kate and I bought furniture for our office, and that’s a business expense. We also bought furniture for our house, which is not. But it’s not obvious just eyeballing our records what’s a lamp or a coatrack for the office versus what’s for our home. We have kitchen equipment in our kitchen at home. We did not buy any kitchen equipment for the kitchen in our office, because it’s already fully stocked. But not every office is like that — a toaster oven or a coffee machine or a SodaStream absolutely could be a legitimate office expense. If you know the details of our particular office setup, you’d know that it’s not for us and that anything like that we purchased would have to be a personal expense. But you couldn’t just scan the paperwork and see something obviously amiss; you’d need detailed information about our situation.

Similarly, I’m flying to Nashville next week for a work trip and I promise the airfare is a 100 percent legitimate business expense. That said, the last time I flew to Nashville, it was to hang out with some friends.

If I got audited, I could easily demonstrate that I had legitimate work there on this upcoming trip. But the point is there’s nothing about “plane fare to Nashville” that constitutes an obvious red flag, and you could try to get away with some scammy stuff.

I wrote two posts about Jamaica when we went on a family vacation there, and I suppose I could have tried to represent that as in part a work trip for tax purposes. There’s a lot of potential for shenanigans. But a healthy society pairs high levels of voluntary compliance with reasonable odds that shenanigans will be detected and is therefore able to maintain a high level of tax revenue without absurdly high tax rates. Of course, voluntary compliance isn’t perfect, and America’s ability to audit rich business owners’ tax returns has been declining for the past couple of decades. This is one reason that Democrats enacted a higher level of IRS enforcement funding. Some people wanted to judge the success of that based purely on the direct revenue raised by enforcement actions. But just as the job of a police department is much more to prevent and deter crimes than it is to solve them, the purpose of tax enforcement isn’t so much to catch tax cheats as to get people to voluntarily pay what they owe.

Trump is dismantling the tax police

Enter the Trump administration, which between layoffs and resignations has the IRS on track to lose about a third of its personnel this year.

Amidst that personnel bloodbath, Trump has had multiple acting directors of the agency resign because they keep getting asked to turn tax data over to immigration authorities in a way that IRS leadership believes is illegal.

I think a reasonable person could argue that the US tradition of siloing information for privacy reasons goes too far and is counterproductive. On the other hand, reassuring people that their tax information will not be illicitly shared has a certain value. Either way, immigration enforcement is pretty clearly peripheral to the IRS’s main job, and there’s something disturbing about Trump’s monomaniacal focus on this edge case while collapsing the agency’s basic customer service and revenue functions. The new acting director is a guy Trump likes because he went after Hunter Biden. Trump himself, meanwhile, keeps running around claiming that he can replace all income tax revenue with tariffs.

The short-term upshot of this is going to be less tax enforcement and more people getting away with cheating.

But the point of this whole long disquisition on voluntary compliance is that cutting enforcement by a third doesn’t just mean you catch fewer tax cheats. It means that next year, more people are cheating because they realize it’s easier to get away with it. The more people cheating, the lower the odds of detection, so yet more people cheat. The next thing you know, anyone with remotely complicated taxes feels like a sucker if they follow the rules and revenue is collapsing.

I’ve heard friends speculate that this is all part of some bonkers version of class warfare, whereby the GOP has decided that highly paid professionals earning W-2 salaries are the enemy, but high-income small business owners are the good guys.

I doubt it’s anything as complicated as that. These are careless people, and they’re smashing up things and creatures and counting on others to clean up the mess.

That’s most obvious in what they’ve done on trade, most evil in what they’ve done to foreign aid, and perhaps most consequential in what they’ve done to scientific research. There is absolutely no reason to be enforcing immigration law by denying due process, assaulting free speech, punishing innocent people as if they were violent criminals, or kneecapping the American tourism industry. Republicans don’t like taxes and they don’t like federal employees, so they’re wrecking the IRS without thinking through the consequences. These “starve the beast” tactics don’t really make sense; every dollar spent in 2025 is going to need to be paid for one way or another, no matter how low tax collections drop. Forcing additional borrowing in a period of rising interest rates is only going to increase aggregate spending over the long-term, while raising financing costs for everyone who gets a mortgage or a car loan.

I know this fiscal policy stuff — like the deficit-increasing, Medicaid-slashing budget resolution wending its way through Congress — isn’t as exciting as Pete Hegseth’s antics or the latest legal standoffs. But the interest rate situation is one of the huge differences between Trump’s first and second terms.

There was this infamous moment in George W. Bush’s first term when Dick Cheney said, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” And for most of the 21st century, they really haven’t. But that stopped being true during Joe Biden’s term, and it remains untrue today. If we cripple the government’s ability to collect taxes, it’s going to be a very real problem for the country.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 4:03 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You guys are the ones burning everything down and putting swastikas up on everything.

What's left of you.

Your party is dead. It will never come back.

You'd better start that Civil War now pussy, or you're going to lose everything forever.
You and Signym won't read the following, but that is because you both are poor, uncomprehending and will stay that way until you die:

We don't read your propaganda.

I bet you're really scared right now, aren't you?

How could Kevin Drum have possibly died? He voted Democrat all of his life!!!

You're going to meet that God you pretend exists only when it serves as an argument for you soon.

Tick Tock

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 4:09 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Trump "Final" Proposal For Ukraine

By Phillips P. Obrien | Apr 23, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-trump-final-proposal-for-uk
raine

We have now, from the news service Axios, a list of points that make up the Trump plan which has been presented to Ukraine as a take it or leave it offer.
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/22/trump-russia-ukraine-peace-plan-crime
a-donbas

This is what Trump has been pressuring the Ukrainians to sign, using the threat of the US walking away from the negotiations. The plan that Axios has seen is arguably the worst possible deal for Ukraine, far worse than most were saying Trump would try to impose. Here are the salient points.

What Russia gets under Trump's proposal

1. "De jure" U.S. recognition of Russian control in Crimea.

2. "De facto recognition" of Russia’s occupation of nearly all of Luhansk Oblast and the occupied portions of Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.

3. A promise that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO. The text notes that Ukraine could become part of the European Union.

4. The lifting of sanctions imposed since 2014.

5. Enhanced economic cooperation with the U.S., particularly in the energy and industrial sectors.

To understand the most terrible parts of the deal, and where the US is bending over backwards to help Putin, you have to start with points 1 and 4.

Point 1 on Crimea ends the strategic world that the US has tried to institute since 1945, and in particular would end the European settlement that has governed the continent as well. It might come as a shock to you, but not a single European state has expanded its borders by conquest since 1945. Yes, there have been countries dissolved (Yugoslavia and the USSR), but they broke up into constituent parts. However, there has been no case of a country expanding its size by militarily seizing the territory of another for 80 years.

This will end that world, and establish a new principle that basically puts every European state on Russia’s (and Belarus’s) borders in real jeopardy. Now, if you invade, ethnically cleanse, and hold—it's yours legally.

I will write much more about this later, but if Ukraine gives up legal claim to Crimea (which would require a constitutional change in Ukraine), Ukraine is establishing a legal precedent that could be used by Russia to take over the rest of the country eventually.

It is the thin end of the wedge in the Russian plan to end Ukraine.

Point 4 on sanctions is almost as bad. This lifts all the restrictions on trade with Russia that have been in place since Russia invaded Crimea—it's a permanent Russian economic victory. It would allow the USA and China to help rebuild the Russian military and economy rapidly (China, as I said on Monday, could flood Russia with finished military production). Sanctions have been one of Europe’s continuing pressure points to try and moderate Putin’s behavior—they would now be gone.

The other devastating thing that point 4 implies is that all Russian assets are unfrozen and returned to their owners, so Ukraine and Europe have no access to these funds to help Ukraine rebuild.

The other points are either concessions to Russia or things that sound like they mean something when they do not.

Point 2 and “De-Facto” recognition of the occupied territories (with not a single Russian withdrawal, it seems) basically starts the process of them eventually becoming de jure parts of Russia.

Point 3 on NATO and the EU is the USA and Russia basically dictating the future of European security, and in one case, where they clearly have no right to do this.

When it comes to NATO, this is just clear evidence of what Trump believes—and it accepts the Russian lie that the war started because of NATO. I suppose the real change is that this seems to be a permanent ban on Ukraine in NATO.

As for the EU part of Point 3, Ukraine is a sovereign European state and its membership is not something to be decided by Trump and Putin. The US and Russia have no right to say which states can or cannot join the EU. The fact that it's even in the text of point 3 shows how they were looking for things to seem like concessions, which are not.

Frankly, the EU should tell the US to stuff itself on this.

Point 5 on enhanced energy cooperation is just a restating of the arm-twisting minerals deal that the US has been trying to foist on Ukraine. It's meaningless as is, there seems to be no investment amounts, agreements, etc.

What is not there is almost as important as what is. There are no security guarantees for Ukraine, no reparations that Russia will have to pay to help rebuild Ukraine, and no US commitments of any kind for Ukraine.

Under this proposal, the US has become formally an enabler of dictatorship and a supporter of the expansion of a dictatorship in Europe, and the enemy of freedom and democracy. I hope European states have the courage to stand with Ukraine in opposition to it.

People Should Have Seen This Coming For A Long Time

A short I told-you-so. This Trump plan should not be a shock, though undoubtedly many people will probably say that they are. He has been pushing for exactly such a plan for years now. In July 2024, when some Trump backers were saying that he would try and get a good deal for Ukraine, I rather lost my cool and tried to say exactly what kind of agreement Trump would try to foist on Ukraine—and it was not pretty. Here were the salient points.
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/this-is-donald-trumps-actual-pe
ace

1. Trump will move very quickly, maybe trying to enact parts of his plan before being inaugurated.

2. He will start with an immediate cessation of US aid for Ukraine.

3. He will pressure Ukraine to cede large amounts of territory to Russia.

4. He will either partially or even totally lift the sanctions on Russia.

5. He will negotiate respectfully with Putin and suspiciously with Zelensky.

What Trump has never said, which a number of the proposed Trump peace plans argue he will do, is:

1. Promise more US aid for Ukraine if Russia rejects a peace deal.

2. Make Russia cede any occupied territory.

3. Allow Ukraine into NATO.

4. Give Ukraine another type of security guarantee by the USA.

5. Press for Ukraine to be let into the EU.

It's all there—Russia keeping the territory, Russia getting sanctions relief, no new aid for Ukraine, no NATO for Ukraine, no security guarantees for Ukraine. Even the negotiating respectfully with Putin and suspiciously with Zelensky was exactly what we have seen.

Trump is what he has always been. The sad thing is still, even now, not all Europeans understand this.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 4:36 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
you both are poor

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 4:42 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yanno SECOND, this could have been an interesting thread. An intelligent and relatively non-partisan discussion of Trump's policies: What he's done right, where he's gone wrong, what we think will result, what he could do otherwise.

Instead, you've done your usual burying of threads with tons and tons of lies and bullshit.

How about you take a break, STFU for a change, and let the grownups talk?
Signym, google Nazi supporters in America.

Hey stupid, most European nations had significant Nazi support before, during, and after WWII. Where do you think Ukrainian Nazis came from?

And AFA Nazi in the USA ... ppl like Nuland and Freeland have Nazi heritage. Insurprisingly, they tend to be Russia-hating neocons.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 4:48 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
you both are poor

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Going on year 6 without any income. Still not worried about where my next meal is coming from or how I'm going to keep the lights on.

*yawn*

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 4:56 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
you both are poor

However did you get THAT idea?

From you. The same place I got the idea that you are convinced Russia deserves a victory in Ukraine, but I don't have your delusions about yourself. Being around people failing at life who are not as magnificent in reality as in their imaginations and their resumes has made me despise Trumptards. Trump is a great example: not as rich as he claims, not as smart, not as capable at business, not as good at golf, not as religious, etc. So many attributes Trump claims but doesn't have. One thing he has is that he is the biggest hot air balloon.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 4:56 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Losing A War Before It Started
Trump's Trade War With China Is A Strategic Catastrophe In The Making

By Phillips P. Obrien | Apr 15, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/losing-a-war-before-it-started

What we see in Trump is a persistent, almost pathological, drive to weaken the USA internally and externally. Internally, he is disregarding unanimous decisions of the Supreme Court (which if allowed to stand will destroy the whole concept of the rule of law in the USA), has hobbled Congress by compelling it to give up its powers, and is trying to break the independence of America’s press and universities. Far from being “conservative” this is the most radical set of destructive policies he could follow—and it is very hard to see how the genies that he is releasing will ever be put back in their bottles.

In terms of international relations he is just as destructive to America’s world position. Under the guise of making America “great again”, he has pursued a set of policies that is weakening America’s influence, destroying the relationships on which the American century was based, and strengthening those countries which see themselves as America’s adversaries.

The trade war that he has unleashed against China is arguably the best example of this. Trump has started his trade war without any preparation, against a target that can almost certainly outlast him, while deliberately antagonizing states that would be crucial to giving the US any chance of emerging victorious. He has most probably lost this war before it started.

I published a piece in The Atlantic yesterday talking about one of these points—how Trump is forcing what should be US partners into China’s economic orbit. Here is a gift link if you want to take a look.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/trump-tariff-china/6
82427/?gift=BQHDq1p24LRO8cUUEyLQ66zldN7kgfL1xbYrv_baQ0g&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

As a bonus for paying subscribers, I will include the whole first draft of the piece (much longer than the published version) at the end of this post—so you can experience the true vitriol. The Atlantic always makes me sound more statesmanlike than I really am.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 6:12 PM

New York Times compares Trump to Hitler. Media allows an ugly double standard.

It's extremely insulting to the 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump for The New York Times to publish an opinion piece that compares the president to Adolf Hitler.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/04/23/larry-davi
d-essay-hitler-trump/83209680007/

Yup. Go fuck yourself, Lefties.

Just one of the many, many, many reasons why the Democratic Party is dead and will never come back.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 7:00 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
you both are poor

However did you get THAT idea?
From you.

I've posted next to nothing about my finances. Not claiming to be rich, not claiming to be poor, not claiming to be in the middle. So I guess, like usual, you pull your "facts" out of your ass.

Goes in the trashbin along with your "Russian troll" name-calling.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 8:53 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
you both are poor

However did you get THAT idea?
From you.

I've posted next to nothing about my finances. Not claiming to be rich, not claiming to be poor, not claiming to be in the middle. So I guess, like usual, you pull your "facts" out of your ass.

Goes in the trashbin along with your "Russian troll" name-calling.

Signym, you posted your story here, from a disappointed PhD candidate for a Daddy coming to America to Dear Daughter to health records to a strong affinity for Russians to an inability to understand simple concepts, which you try to hide from yourself. You are too late to take it back. Signym, you are a known quantity, a negative number.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 8:58 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
New York Times compares Trump to Hitler. Media allows an ugly double standard.

It's extremely insulting to the 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump for The New York Times to publish an opinion piece that compares the president to Adolf Hitler.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/04/23/larry-davi
d-essay-hitler-trump/83209680007/

Yup. Go fuck yourself, Lefties.

Just one of the many, many, many reasons why the Democratic Party is dead and will never come back.

You Trumptards deserved your mild past suffering and are building toward future afflictions that will torture you to deserved death. See how Trump is setting up his own death:

Trump is upset by Zelenskyy not surrendering to Putin

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is boasting on the front page of The Wall Street Journal that, “Ukraine will not legally recognize the occupation of Crimea. There’s nothing to talk about here.” This statement is very harmful to the Peace Negotiations with Russia in that Crimea was lost years ago under the auspices of President Barack Hussein Obama, and is not even a point of discussion. Nobody is asking Zelenskyy to recognize Crimea as Russian Territory but, if he wants Crimea, why didn’t they fight for it eleven years ago when it was handed over to Russia without a shot being fired? The area also houses, for many years before “the Obama handover,” major Russian submarine bases. It’s inflammatory statements like Zelenskyy’s that makes it so difficult to settle this War. He has nothing to boast about! The situation for Ukraine is dire — He can have Peace or, he can fight for another three years before losing the whole Country. I have nothing to do with Russia, but have much to do with wanting to save, on average, five thousand Russian and Ukrainian soldiers a week, who are dying for no reason whatsoever. The statement made by Zelenskyy today will do nothing but prolong the “killing field,” and nobody wants that! We are very close to a Deal, but the man with “no cards to play” should now, finally, GET IT DONE. I look forward to being able to help Ukraine, and Russia, get out of this Complete and Total MESS, that would have never started if I were President!

Apr 23, 2025, 11:00 AM https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114388111141848447

Trump's comments come after months of discord between the two leaders, including a heated exchange in the Oval Office in February. The two men had a near-shouting match when Zelenskyy noted that Russia has broken previous agreements with Ukraine during a disagreement that included Vice President JD Vance.

The situation escalated when Trump raised his voice and pointed his finger at Zelenskyy, accusing him of "gambling with World War III" and being "disrespectful" to the U.S.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ukraine-talks-rubio-witkoff-london-
putin-zelenskyy-trump-russia-war-rcna202525

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 9:02 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
you both are poor

However did you get THAT idea?
From you.

I've posted next to nothing about my finances. Not claiming to be rich, not claiming to be poor, not claiming to be in the middle. So I guess, like usual, you pull your "facts" out of your ass.

Goes in the trashbin along with your "Russian troll" name-calling.
Signym, you posted your story here, from a disappointed PhD candidate for a Daddy coming to America to Dear Daughter to health records to a strong affinity for Russians to an inability to understand simple concepts, which you try to hide from yourself. You are too late to take it back. Signym, you are a known quantity, a negative number.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

You are a fucking creep.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 9:03 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
New York Times compares Trump to Hitler. Media allows an ugly double standard.

It's extremely insulting to the 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump for The New York Times to publish an opinion piece that compares the president to Adolf Hitler.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/04/23/larry-davi
d-essay-hitler-trump/83209680007/

Yup. Go fuck yourself, Lefties.

Just one of the many, many, many reasons why the Democratic Party is dead and will never come back.
You Trumptards deserved your mild past suffering and are building toward future afflictions that will torture you to deserved death.

You'd love that. Because then you can just keep being a pussy coward who keeps threatening the beginning of a Civil War he could never win.

Stop being a pussy, pussy. Come get some.

In the Meantime, Lifelong Democrat Kevin Drum died a horrible death of brain cancer.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 10:17 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
you both are poor

However did you get THAT idea?
From you.

I've posted next to nothing about my finances. Not claiming to be rich, not claiming to be poor, not claiming to be in the middle. So I guess, like usual, you pull your "facts" out of your ass.

Goes in the trashbin along with your "Russian troll" name-calling.
Signym, you posted your story here, from a disappointed PhD candidate for a Daddy coming to America to Dear Daughter to health records to a strong affinity for Russians to an inability to understand simple concepts, which you try to hide from yourself. You are too late to take it back. Signym, you are a known quantity, a negative number.

You mirepresent what I posted, of course.

Meanwhile, you posted that you were good at shooting people from a helicopter, that the failure of "good" people was that they never kill "bad" people, and that you never intended to be "good". Ergo ...

Oh, and lots and lots and LOTS of lies, semi- threats, defamation, virtue- signalling, and general nonsense and bullshit. You drag down every thread you post in, and add nothing here, or to your family (I know you're not married and have no children, so this would be to your parents, siblings, nieces and nephews), community, or nation.

Did you know, SECOND, that the first indication of a heart problem for most people is a fatal heart attack?

So, you take care now, you hear?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 11:03 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

You mirepresent what I posted, of course.

Signym, you are pure evil. I know it from your support for Russia murdering Ukrainians and stealing their land. Hey, Signym! If you can justify the murder of Ukrainians as Russia killing Nazis, you can easily justify this as necessary cost-cutting of a bloated bureaucracy, or something else totally fake you pull out of your ample ass:

Trump Laid Off Nearly All the Federal Workers Who Investigate Firefighter Deaths

The cuts, which are part of Trump’s slashing of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, will also halt a first-of-its-kind study of the causes of thousands of firefighters’ cancer cases.

By Mark Olalde | April 21, 2025, 5 a.m. EDT

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-cuts-firefighter-deaths

When a firefighter dies in the line of duty, a small team of federal health workers is often called on to pinpoint what went wrong and identify how to avoid similar accidents in the future.

That’s what happened after two firefighters died in California in 2020 while searching for an elderly woman in a burning library. It happened in 2023 when a Navy firefighter died in Maryland after a floor collapsed in a burning home. And it happened last year in Georgia when a career battalion chief died after a semitrailer truck exploded.

But President Donald Trump’s administration has taken steps to fire nearly all of the Department of Health and Human Services employees responsible for conducting those reviews.

At least two-thirds of the employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within HHS, were notified on April 1 that they had been laid off or will be in June. These cuts included seven of the eight members of the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program, the team that studies firefighter line-of-duty deaths, one of the laid-off investigators told ProPublica.

Most nonunionized NIOSH workers were given until the end of the day to clear out their desks. The layoffs were so abrupt, staff said, that lab animals were left without staff to care for them and had to be euthanized, and an experimental mine used to test protective gear beneath the agency’s Pittsburgh campus was at risk of flooding and polluting the surrounding environment.

“It was pure chaos,” another NIOSH employee said.

The fatality investigation team was examining deaths at 20 fire departments when the layoff notices arrived. Those probes are now unlikely to be completed, the investigator said.

“The whole intent of this program was that people would learn through tragedy — what happened to one person — so we can prevent it from happening to others,” the investigator said.

The administration’s moves will also halt a first-of-its-kind study of the causes of thousands of firefighters’ cancer cases and disrupt a program that provides health care to emergency personnel who responded to the World Trade Center terrorist attacks.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 11:39 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Here’s Andrew Sullivan:

“If the administration had wanted to, they could have hailed the quiet border and focused on deporting illegal immigrants by usual means. But nah. Trump decided he wants to go after legal immigrants and even legal permanent residents who have been charged with no crimes or immigration violations — because they have criticized a foreign country, Israel. He’s deploying a McCarthyite 1952 law to target any legal noncitizen who has criticized or demonstrated against the Jewish state’s wiping of Gaza off the face of the earth, proudly gutting the First Amendment for no good reason.

Wait, there’s more. Trump has also abandoned habeas corpus and due process by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to seize mere suspects off the streets and transport them instantly to a terrifying foreign jail in El Salvador. The law has only been used twice before in wartime, and, ahem, we are not at war. Anyone with brown skin and the wrong kind of tattoo is therefore now at risk of being carted off to torture by the US government, with absolutely no safeguards that they have gotten the right people. Or do you think that an administration that confuses billions with millions, and puts classified intelligence on a Signal app, is incapable of making an error?

We therefore have no way of knowing if a makeup artist who legally sought asylum was rightly grabbed off the street to face certain rape and violence. And when Tom Homan was asked about due process in this case, he actually answered: “What due process did Laken Riley get?” Unbelievable that this thug is in charge of anything.

Then the utter indecency. These wannabe fascists publicly delight and revel in their acts of domination in a manner that even despotic regimes avoid.”

More at https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/two-perfect-months-506

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, April 24, 2025 12:01 AM