Tag: government

Insane are guarding the asylum – Robert Reich

Friends,

It seems like an eternity, but tomorrow marks the seventh week of this despicable regime. I’d like to talk about coping with the stresses of this era.

A few people I know are coping by remaining in denial. They continue to normalize what’s happening in the familiar terms of Republican versus Democrat, right versus left, conservative versus liberal or progressive.

But they’re deluding themselves. There’s nothing normal about this. We’re in a different world now. Even calling this “Trump 2.0” radically understates what’s happening.

The choice is democracy or dictatorship. Self-government or oligarchy. Everyone must choose sides. Not to choose is to accept the forces now in control — to allow Trump to become even more of a dictator and his billionaire backers and cronies to siphon up even more oligarchic wealth and power.

Another coping mechanism that’s just as dangerous is giving up — succumbing to cynicism, believing everything is hopeless. Those in this defeatist camp think nothing can prevent us from an apocalypse — the end of America, the termination of civilization, the death of the planet. They’ve stopped reading or listening to the news. They’ve turned their backs on activism.

But defeatism is exactly what Trump, Vance, Musk, and Putin want us to feel. They’d like nothing better than for us to give up, so they can have it all. Cynicism and hopelessness play into their fetid hands.

It’s also a self-fulfilling prophesy. If we believe we’re doomed, we’re doomed.

The reality is that Trump, Vance, and Musk have done truly terrible things over the past seven weeks that are already hurting millions of people.

But the regime has not extinguished hope or resolve. To the contrary, it is igniting activism. It’s fueling courage. I see it all around me, as I’m sure you do as well.

Let me share with you my six coping mechanisms.

First, I’ve stopped listening to Trump and even stopped trying to analyze his warped psyche. I already know he’s spouting nothing but lies. And by now I’m familiar with his malignant narcissism.

Second, I no longer pay attention to the politicians, media personalities, political operatives, and pundits who are treating what’s happening as a variation on normal partisan politics. They’re tiresome and wrong.

Instead, I’m seeking out voices who understand the stakes, who give me reasons for hope and practical ideas for what you and I can do. I’ve already shared some of them with you and will share more this week.

Some are voices from the past — people who lived through Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin, or through Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” or Pol Pot’s “killing fields.” Some are keen observers of what occurred (Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism) or historians (William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany provides a chilling account that echoes today).

Fourth, I’m interacting with people whose average age is a half-century younger than mine — my students at Berkeley and my colleagues at Inequality Media. Their energy, humor, and commitment continue to buoy my spirits.

Fifth, I’m relishing my friendships and holding my loved ones tight.

Finally, I’m writing these daily letters to you in hope that they help you cope in all these ways — and inspires you to even more activism, resistance, rebellion, good trouble, and peaceful civil disobedience.

These are familiar terms to those of us who remember the struggles over civil rights and the Vietnam War. They are as relevant for what we’re going through now as they were then.

In other words, one of the best way of coping with this nightmare is to fight it.

Keep calling the White House: 1-202-456-1414 (switchboard). 1-202-456-1111 (comments). Jam it.

Keep calling your senators and representatives. The Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. The switchboard operator will connect you directly with the Senate or House office you request.

Organize and mobilize for downballot elections this year, and for House and Senate elections next year.

Protect the vulnerable in your community: undocumented workers. LGBTQ+ people. Vocal anti-Trumpers who may need protection from Trump vigilantes. Refugees from Ukraine. Others who need your help.

I’m sure you’ve found additional ways of fighting back. Please share them with us in today’s comments.

Take heart. We will get through this and be stronger for it.

Bless you and thank you.

RR

Send in the clowns -Glee Violette

This is going to be my most important post to date.

It is something I have been working on all week, to explain what is REALLY going on, and why, and who the real perps are, and what their end game is.

I am not the only one who has finally connected all the dots and got it – All of a sudden, very similar explanations are coming from all directions at once. Everyone is starting to get it!

This is going to be the Cliff Notes version. Very simply put, and using broad strokes to paint the picture. I am going to include links in the comments section so you can do deep dives yourself about any of the details.
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HERE IS THE OVERVIEW

America’s government is to be demolished, and replaced with structure run as a corporation. “The Free Market” will replace democracy. And the most successful capitalists will run it.
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This is not something new. It has been in the works since Ayn Rand wrote her novels that started the Libertarian movement in the 1950s.

Step by step, Libertarians have built an organization that usually masqueraded as something else, or used a different title.

Their most successful method has been to whip up anger against the government, through all forms of media, and manipulate voters into distrusting it. This is best done through causing fear and hatred against “undeserving” people, who seem to be getting rewards that are being denied to THEM.

People swept up in the anti-government movement have committed civil disobedience and even domestic terrorism in the name of “freedom.” Perpetrators of the Oklahoma federal building bombing, or the Bundy National Park standoff, have been a part of the same cause, even if they didn’t realize it, and thought they were acting independently as “patriots”.

MAGA is a totally Libertarian movement – and most members do not even know or care that it is. MAGA thinks of itself as followers ONLY of Trump. They are, for the most part, blissfully unaware of the principles of Libertarianism, and embrace just his own entertaining agenda of revenge against everyone he hates, and that is enough for them.

Same goes for the Religious Right. They are not openly embracing Libertarianism. But the leaders who have risen to the top have rewritten Christianity into a religion where money and power are the primary goals – Faith is mandated, obedience is rewarded with earthly goods, violent retribution is righteous, and judgment is THEIRS, not the Lord’s.

Such cynicism aligns perfectly with the principles of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of “Objectivism” – basically that people should be free to follow their self-interests and take whatever they can get. Her books praised the “independent spirit” of “rugged individualism”, and mocked altruism, charity and self-sacrifice for others.
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Libertarians have rebranded their political movement simply as “Captialism”, and go by the name “Republican” now. But whatever name they go by, whether it is “Christian Nationalist,” or “Tea Party,” or “Proud Boys” or a thousand and one other names, the agenda is the same.

The goal is what THEY now call “freedom” and “liberty”. Namely, no limits by government.

They want to remove all limits on business in particular. No taxes or regulations. No rules or penalties regarding working conditions or compensation. No rules or penalties regarding consumer safety.

But they also want to remove all societal limits as well – no rules or restrictions on speech or on actions that oppresses, separates out, culls, or banishes others.

Their goal is to create a country governed strictly by “merit” – namely, them.
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They envision a new type of government, run like a corporation.

The top echelon of the new government will be made up of the most successful capitalists. They will act like a Corporate Board, and will make all the major decisions concerning military and trade treaties, and approve funding for domestic necessities like power grids, and infrastructure to support commerce, and financial institutions.

Things that serve the population, like healthcare, education, social security, mail, and welfare support will be either privatized or turned over to religious charitable organizations. There will be profits to be made by both.

No more federal funding will be needed.

And, there will be a return to the class structure of the 1950s. Women and minorities will once again be financially forced back to “their place”, because nobody will be forced to hire them or give them equal pay.
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The Board will appoint their CEO. And as in business corporations, the CEO, although he will run the day-to-day operations, he will answer to THEM. (No, Trump has not yet figured this out, of course.)

Oh, there will still be elections. Just like stock-holders, the American voters will get to decide whether to approve or disapprove of the Board’s referendums and appointments. But the days of open elections will be over. The Board will put up THEIR slate of acceptable candidates.

We will have to take their word, though, on who won.

Trump made that very clear during his campaign, when he said over and over that we’d only have to vote this once, and never again. And when he thanked Elon for knowing so much about “those voting computers”.
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HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Just follow some of the most prominent Libertarians.

Ron Paul and Fred Koch were founders of the Libertarian movement. After his run for president failed in 1988, Ron Paul realized that Libertarian movement was being seen as a party of conspiracy theorists and cranks. So he and his son Rand (named for Ayn Rand) switched over to the Republican Party.

Fred Koch’s sons, Charles and David (The Koch Brothers), founded the Tea Party after the economic crash of 2008, and funded Libertarian candidates as Republicans throughout the country, winning many elections. The Tea Party is now known as the Freedom Caucus.

The Koch candidate for president in 2016 was Ted Cruz, but once Trump took the lead, they switched their support to him. Trump is not at all driven by patriotic, politcal, religious or philosophical values. He was in it strictly for himself. But that actually made it easier for them to work with him – all they had to do was play to his ego.

Meanwhile, the Mercer family, top Republican/Libertarian donors, financed Brietbart news and Cambridge Analytica, with Steve Bannon in charge. They had realized that spreading propaganda through the media was THE key to their agenda.

Conspiracies and supremacist propaganda flooded social media, radio, television, print – WHATEVER way possible – to inflame white working class people with jealousy, hate and fear, and motivate them to vote. Activists were sent into carefully chosen swing districts in both Great Britain and America to register people and get them to the polls.

To the entire world’s shock, Trump won the election here, and BREXIT won in Great Britain. Credit for both upsets were directly linked to Cambridge Analytica’s efforts.
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Trump’s presidency might have failed, but the movement went on. Rewriting, rebranding, and relitigating the past, brainwashing the population through the media to accept their new version of reality, and recharging them to fight for Trump all over again.

For four years they prepared to his return, writing reams of Executive Orders for him to sign on Day One. And the billionaire donors worked behind the scenes to entice, extort, and unify the Republican Party behind him.

The conservative billionaires funding the Heritage Foundation (creators of Project 2025) had found a new GURU in Curtis Yarvin, who preached that democratic governments need to be done away with completely, and become corporations instead, run by dictators.

Vice president JD Vance and his mentor, billionaire Peter Thiel, an advisor in Turmp’s first administration, are personal allies of his.
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WHAT IS NEXT?

To create a Corporate “government”, the OLD democratic government needs to be totally discredited and dismantled. People have to be manipulated to hate and distrust it, so they will not only allow it to be destroyed, they will cheer the destruction on.

In Europe, BREXIT, the withdrawal of Great Britain, caused great damage to the European Union. The same kind of “deep state” suspicions were circulated about the EU organization in Brussels, the economic growth in most countries slowed or halted completely, and the whole organization started to fall apart. Far right parties began to rise in power.

In America, “deep state” conspiracy theories became accepted as gospel. Trump’s Big Lie cause many people to lose faith in elections, and in just about every other institution of our goverment as well. The insurrectionists of January 6th were rebranded as patriots and when Trump was re-elected, we got Elon Musk.

Make no mistake. The destruction of our government departments and agencies is intentional. The cutting off of all humanitarian funding overseas and the demonization of immigrants and the deportation of “undesirables” is intentional. The antagonistic alienation of our allies is intentional, in order to blow up every military and trade treaty – and OBLIGATION – we have.

The chaos is intention – to distract us from putting all the dots together and see what is really going on.
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SO WHAT IS THE END GAME?

World-wide corporate governments, run by the elite captialists, who will carve up the world.

All the great Empires throughout history were no different. Same game, different name. The rich and powerful rule a rich and powerful elite class, and they in turn rule a vast underclass of obedient and well ordered workers, who live and die at their pleasure.

It does not matter if you call the ruling class a monarchy and aristocracy, or a premier and oligarchy, or a CEO with a board of directors, and top executives. The structure works the same.

Putin is a CEO. Xi is a CEO. Saudi prince MBS is a CEO.

Trump wants to be Putin’s equal and ally. He does not understand much. He does not even realize he is not the boss, that his Board of Libertarian Directors is totally in charge now, and that he is only their very useful figurehead, put front and center because of his cult status, to distract all of US.

But Trump DOES know at least that in order to stay at the top, he needs the most powerful allies he can get.

And our NATO allies just don’t cut it.

Putin and Xi together are much stronger. Trump wants Putin to be HIS ally instead.

And there you have it.
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Now that you know the basics, start paying attention to things that are coming out from credible, verified, documented, and corroborated sources. When you look at what is happening from this angle, suddenly everything starts to make sense.

LET ME MAKE ONE FINAL COMMENT

Libertarianism is not evil. Communism is not evil. Capitalism is not evil. But in the hands of evil people or organizations, ANY philosophy, religion, government, or economic system can become very evil indeed.
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This is the third and final part to my series of posts, “SEND IN THE CLOWNS”

I will repost parts 1 & 2 of in the comments section below.

We may not have much longer to share information like this. They need smoke and mirrors to distract us, so they can get their agenda done. The last thing they want is for all the confusion to clear.

There will be links to articles and sources in the comments section below. More will be added. You are most welcome to add what you discover as well.

The Retaliation of #47

Trump Promised Retribution. Turns Out He Had a Very Big Target in Mind

March 5, 2025

The New York Times

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

Donald Trump rambled, ranted and raved his way through the 2024 presidential campaign, but he was clear on one point. When he was elected, he would get revenge.

“I am your retribution,” Trump said to crowds of his supporters throughout the campaign.

This was not an abstraction. He had a few targets in mind.

“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” he said in 2023.

There were also the judges, prosecutors and politicians who tried to hold Trump accountable for his crimes, both the ones for which he was indicted and the ones for which he was convicted. He refused to rule out an effort to prosecute Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who prosecuted the Stormy Daniels hush-money case against him, and attacked Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over the trial, as “crooked.” Trump shared an image that called for the former Republican representative and Jan. 6 committee member Liz Cheney to be prosecuted in “televised military tribunals,” and he accused Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of treason, calling his actions “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”

To get his revenge, Trump would turn the I.R.S., the F.B.I. and other powerful parts of the federal government against his political enemies. He would hound and harass them in retaliation for their opposition to his law stretching and lawbreaking.

For once in his public career, Trump wasn’t lying. As president, he has made it a priority to go after his political enemies.

One of his first acts once he was back in office was to remove security protections from former officials facing credible death threats, including his former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and his former national security adviser John Bolton, both of whom Trump views as disloyal. Not only did he take away their protection, knowing they were under threat from Iran, but he also publicly discussed that he had removed their security, as if to entice their antagonists.

Trump fired more than a dozen government inspectors general at various federal agencies — most likely in retaliation for the fact that it was an inspector general who informed Congress about Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden. Trump has also tried to purge the Justice Department of any lawyers and officials who worked on the Jan. 6 investigation or helped to prosecute the Jan. 6 rioters (nearly all of whom, of course, he pardoned or released).

Trump has also placed a supplicant, Kash Patel, at the head of the F.B.I. A fervent Trump loyalist, Patel has promised to “go out and find the conspirators” who undermined Trump in office. Patel even published an enemies list of people he hoped to pursue and prosecute in a second Trump term, with names ranging from Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris to former Trump allies like Bill Barr and Cassidy Hutchinson. Now that Patel is ensconced at the F.B.I., we should expect him to wield his new powers against the president’s foes, whether in government or outside it.

You can even understand Trump’s deep hostility toward Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as part of his effort to punish anyone who undermines his attempt to gather and wield power. It is noteworthy that after his disastrous Oval Office confrontation with the Ukrainian president, Trump voiced his sympathy for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in a novel and revealing way. “Let me tell you: Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia.” He seems to identify so closely with Putin that he sees any scrutiny of the Russian dictator as an attack on him as well.

Altogether, Trump has done more to actualize his desire for retribution than he has to fulfill his campaign promise to lower the price of groceries or reduce the cost of housing. A telling sign, perhaps, of his real priorities in office.

Know someone who would want to read this? Share the column.

This fact of Trump’s indifference to most Americans — if not his outright hostility toward them, considering his assault on virtually every government function that helps ordinary people — suggests another dimension to his revenge tour. It is almost as if he wants to inflict pain not just on a specific set of individuals but on the entire nation.

Here, it is worth taking a minute here to talk about the psychology of Donald Trump.

Some of our presidents have been complicated men. Consider Richard Nixon, a nearly Shakespearean figure of great talent and ambition whose paranoia, personal demons and lust for power proved to be his downfall.

Trump, by comparison, is not a complicated man.

His every executive function exists to satisfy his ego. He is a covetous person consumed by an insatiable desire for acquisition, a man who seems to take the seven deadly sins as a seven-day challenge. He sees every relationship as a game of dominance and seems to reject the very idea of a mutually beneficial transaction. He treats everyone around him, from employees and political allies to members of his own family, as tools to use and then discard. To cozy up to Trump is to sacrifice your dignity to his cravings and desires.

Understand these basic traits about Trump — and there is not much more to understand — and you can all but predict his behavior in any given situation. Yes, he is erratic, volatile, capricious and compulsive. But the common conceit that he is unpredictable is belied by the ease with which even a casual observer can plot his movements from A to B.

For example, Trump will always reject the results and present himself as a winner if he loses a contest. This was clear in 2016 — he even claimed that Clinton’s popular-vote victory was the result of fraud — and it came to fruition when he lost re-election in 2020, a psychic wound so grievous that the only way he could attend to it was to try to overturn the result.

Trump failed — and spent the next four years stewing over his defeat. He made “Stop the steal” his mantra and organized the entire Republican Party around the delusional claim that he was the legitimate victor in 2020. And while Trump went on to win the 2024 race, even capturing the national popular vote for the first time in his political career, it’s not at all clear that his rage and resentment have subsided. It would actually be shocking, given what we know about his behavior and personality, if he could regulate his emotions well enough to turn his anger into something more constructive.

If this is his psychological state, then it stands to reason that Trump would want revenge against the public that denied him a second term as much as he wants revenge against the officials who have tried to make him answer for his illegal actions.

It is hard to describe Trump’s first month and a half in office as something other than a retribution campaign against the American people.

Under the cover of an audit, he has empowered Elon Musk, his de facto co-president, to take an ax to any and every program that helps ordinary Americans. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has stripped funds or personnel or both from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Park Service, the National Weather Service, FEMA, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration, among others. It has degraded the federal government’s ability to deliver critical services to tens of millions of Americans and is endangering direct payments to millions more. There is no apparent rhyme or reason to these cuts, only a nihilistic drive to cause as much damage and to make it as irreparable as possible.

One immediate response to all of this is to say that Trump is operating according to some higher-level political and ideological perspective. And there is a cottage industry of observers who have given themselves the unenviable task of transmuting the president’s tics and utterances into something like a calculated strategy — an intellectually defensible set of doctrines rather than the thoughtless patter of an outer-borough confidence man.

But this has always strained credulity. To ask anyone, for instance, to treat the president’s display of childish pique opposite Zelensky in the Oval Office as some return to Teddy Rooseveltian great-power realism — as opposed to the embarrassing tantrum of a grade-school bully — is to demand that readers administer a self-lobotomy.

Likewise, it takes willful blindness to Trump’s own history of explicit racism to treat his crusade against diversity and integration as an embrace of meritocracy (please ignore the people he has chosen to lead the government) rather than a function of the same bigotries that drove him to attack Barack Obama as illegitimate and unfit to be president.

There is no evidence that Trump is a figure of deep thought or serious insight. There is no evidence that Trump is anything other than what he’s been for his entire time in the public eye: an ego-driven creature of boundless envy and vicious, overlapping resentments. Those resentments have led him on a grand tour of retribution against the public.

And his envy?

Well, if Trump wants anything, it is the untrammeled authority of the world’s autocrats. He wants to be a Putin or a Viktor Orban or a Kim Jong-un. He wants to rule with unchecked power. And if his psychology tells us anything, he will do everything he can to make that a reality, American democracy be damned.

USAID terminated contracts

1. All malaria supplies protecting 53 million people, mostly children, including bed nets, diagnostics, preventive drugs, and treatments – terminated.

2. All tuberculosis programs, including the Global TB Drug Facility – terminated.

3. All supplies of US-manufactured emergency food packets for starving children on the brink of death – terminated.

4. USAID’s contract supporting deadly outbreak prevention, detection, and response, including Ebola and Bird Flu, in 50 countries – terminated.

5. All deployable U.S. teams for earthquake assistance – terminated.

6. All U.S.-backed development programming in Afghanistan, including maternal and child health services and girls education – terminated. (Estimated to cause >1,200 maternal deaths by 2028.)

7. Over 1,000 food kitchens in Sudan, a country with almost 25 million people experiencing acute food insecurity – terminated.

8. USAID’s contract for supplying essential medicines for maternal and child health in countries worldwide – terminated.

9. Services from the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation – just one organization – reaching 350,000 people on HIV treatment, including nearly 10,000 children and more than 10,000 HIV-positive pregnant women – terminated.

10. Every USAID program in the former Soviet countries in Central Asia, including health programs to combat rampant tuberculosis, along with agricultural programs – terminated.

11. Screening program with the Mexican government to identify illicit drugs like fentanyl being smuggled at the US border.

12. A project in the Democratic Republic of Congo that operates the only source of water for camps with 250,000 displaced people in camps located in the center of current conflict.

All ELIMINATED, just to give billionaires like Elon Musk ANOTHER giant tax cut. NO ONE voted for this, and it helps NO ONE.

Please like and share!

– Atul Gawande, Former leader of Global Health at USAID