A large handful of billionaires spent several billion dollars to get Trump elected, and now he’s repaying — big time — the class into which he was born. Just the billionaires Trump has so far appointed to his cabinet boast a combined wealth, at $340 billion so far, that is greater than the entire GDP of New Zealand. And at the top of their collective agenda will be kneecapping the IRS’s tax fraud division while adding another $7 trillion to the national debt by shifting their taxes onto our children and grandchildren. It’ll be a government bought by billionaires and soon to be run by and for the exclusive benefit of billionaires. David L. Smith in his Cassandra ChroniclesSubstack newsletter notes that this is somewhat similar to what Herbert Hoover did in 1928, and likely to produce a similar result: a great financial crash that will throw control of our government to Democrats for a generation. That assumes that Democrats will succeed — as Congressional Progressive Caucus VP Ro Khanna demanded yesterday on my radio/TV program — at jettisoning the billionaires, big corporations, and neoliberalism that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama so fervently embraced (and Joe Biden largely rejected; his entire cabinet is worth a paltry $118 million).
The February election of a new DNC head will tell us a lot; two good progressives are in the running (my favorite is Ben Wikler). Trump is teeing-up what may be a great opportunity for Democrats and progressives; let’s hope the DNC doesn’t blow it again like Democrats in the Senate just did.
— Russian media is bragging that Tucker Carlson could be shuttling secret messages between Trump and Putin. This is the role that was apparently played during the last Trump administration by Senator Rand Paul. Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.
Senator Paul then often took Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Paul responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago. Most concerning, ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Timesreported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent.” Now it’s apparently Carlson’s turn. “While the former Fox host is positioning himself as a dove of peace, toiling to prevent a nuclear war, Putin’s acolytes say he is also acting as a carrier pigeon for the Russian president and privately delivering his messages to Trump,” wrote Russian media expert Julia Davis for The Daily Beast.
Davis reports that a Russian expert on American politics, Malek Dudakov, was blunt in an appearance on Russian TV. “What is important here is that the man [Tucker Carlson] who came to talk to [Russian Foreign Minister] Lavrov spent the last six months shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump. Obviously, he didn’t just come to conduct an interview. He has something to say. Apparently, he has a message that he is bringing.” It gets worse, and appears to be an echo of the message from Russia right after Trump’s election was declared in November when the Kremlin released nudie pictures of Trump’s wife Melania by way of threatening Trump and then, a day later, issued a statement that, “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”
On the Russian TV show this week, Dudakov bragged, “Yes, we currently see quite a few similar emissaries [to Tucker]. It seems Viktor Orbán is again planning to meet with Trump, and after that, he may come to Russia once again. There are people who are willing to pass messages back and forth, indirectly. Trump will understand what his plan is only after he personally meets with Putin.” Where is America’s mainstream media on reporting this stuff that’s right out there in public to see?!? And if the Kremlin is openly boasting that Trump must dance to Putin’s tune, America’s intelligence agencies must be freaking out. Which makes Trump’s appointment of Tulsi Gabbard, who’s been taking Putin’s side on various issues for years, a lot easier to understand. Trump must live in terror of Putin…and apparently our media does, too…
— Will Joe pardon “the enemy within”? Andy Borowitz joked yesterday in his Substack newsletter that President Biden has issued a blanket pardon for all 70+ million Democratic voters except for “Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, adding, ‘They’re on their own now.’” The humor references a very real discussion that’s going on in the Biden White House right now, according to some press reports.
Jimmy Carter issued a blanket pardon for Vietnam War resisters, similar to Lincoln’s blanket pardon of former Confederate soldiers; could Biden be considering a large pardon or amnesty (like for the hundreds of thousands of “Dreamers”) or specific pardons for a few dozen or even a few hundred people who may be in Trump’s revenge cross-hairs? Presumably that would include members of the January 6th Congressional panel, Jack Smith and the attorneys and FBI agents who worked with him, and some of the others who testified at his various impeachment hearings and trials. One hopes Biden has the guts to do it.
— Trump nominee for Ambassador to China once gloated about shipping American jobs to China. Former Republican Senator David Purdue was asked on Fox “News” if it was true that he had “bragged under oath about how he spent most of his career outsourcing American jobs to China.” Not only did Purdue not shoot down the allegation, he bragged that it had helped him get elected. You’ll recall that, despite Trump’s tough China talk for domestic consumption, he rolled over when that country gave his daughter millions of dollars worth of copyrights and other gifts. Get ready for our country to be sold out again.
— Republicans want Trump to sign off on throwing millions of Americans off their health insurance and raising the rates for the rest of us. A new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) notes that if Republicans’ get their desire to expire the “enhanced premium tax credits” from the Inflation Reduction Act that help people underwrite the cost of their health insurance, “3.8 million [people], on average, in each year over the 2026-2034 period” will lose their insurance and “insurers will raise premiums for the remaining enrollees.”
No surprise here; as any Republican will tell you, if billionaires don’t need help with health insurance, why should the rest of us get assistance? Cynthia Cox, vice president and Affordable Care Act policy researcher at KFF, told CBS News that if Republicans let the tax credits expire, millions of Americans “could go from paying no more than 8.5% of their income to easily paying 20% or more. I imagine a lot of those folks would drop coverage.” Democrats tried to warn Americans that this was coming in the run-up to the election, but apparently hating on Black, Hispanic, and trans people was a much higher priority for half of America’s white people.
— Will we face another pandemic under Trump and will it be “disease X” brewing in the Congo? A mystery disease that’s apparently airborne is killing people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); hopefully within a few days we’ll know what it is. Meanwhile, Dr. Peter Hotez points out that there are around 10 viruses that could become pandemic in the US, particularly if Bob Kennedy succeeds in crippling our vaccine-based public health efforts and redirecting government efforts toward diabetes and heart disease. Meanwhile, bird flu virus has been found in our milk supply and Kennedy apparently wants a raw milk producer who denies viruses in milk can cause a problem to head up the part of the government with oversight of that product. Don’t throw out your masks, and stock up on toilet paper; we could be in for another wild ride.
— Crazy Alert! Thanks to the idiots in the GOP, public school students in Ohio can now take classes in how to follow Satan! When will the followers of Thor and Zeus weigh in? The good folks over at Friendly Atheist point out that Republicans in Ohio succeeded in carving a hole into the First Amendment so public schools in that state can let students out of class to attend lessons on religion taught by churches. Which, of course, brought in The Satanic Temple to offer their own classes on logic, science, and critical thinking. The Temple doesn’t preach — or even believe in — Satan, but their name has Republicans in Ohio absolutely hysterical. What’s good for the goose and all that? Apparently not so much for the GOP…