So we have an ongoing genocide in Gaza. The death toll, as estimated by scientists, is probably north of half a million. (The official toll is laughable and obviously wrong, growth slowing over time.)
Trump was able to use oil piracy and a kidnapping to bend Venezuela to his will.
Now he’s cut off oil to Cuba, and because of how modern economies work, that means famine.
Deliberately causing a famine is genocidal.
This genocide creep. America could have done this to Cuba any time after the fall of the USSR. Sanctions were nasty and caused a lot of suffering and even deaths, but they didn’t rise to the level of “let’s just starve them to death. They’ll give in.”
Mind you, they tried to do this to Yemen, engineering a low-grade famine. Deaths were in the low to mid hundreds of thousands. Genocide. It was intentional, everyone knew that’s what was the intention.
In Israel a lot were killed by arms, but the cutting off of medical supplies, fuel and food I’m sure will have killed even more people.
Multiple times the US and/or its allies has engineered a famine. In Yemen with Saudi Arabian help. Israel with Israelis taking the lead, but the US supporting it all along the way, as when it cut funding to the primary aid agency, UNWRA.
Now Cuba.
This is the way it works. Whenever something evil is done by the powerful to the weak, they look to see if there were consequences. If not, they expand, moving inwards. Yemen is a place no one cares about in the West: there wasn’t a lot of coverage. Palestine got tons of coverage and even law cases, but in the end no one powerful suffered, and the genocide was and is pushed thru. Opponents lost their jobs, went to prison and were deported or lost their banking access (Albanese, for example.)
Since those responsible for the genocide got away with it twice, they’re now doing it a third time.
Everything the powerful do to someone else is something they are willing to do to you if they think it’s in their interest, or just fun.
In the US we have the ICE crackdowns. I wrote for years that if Trump went wild, ICE would be his brown shirts, and here we are. Substantially we have masked men in unmarked cars without badges or in most cases judicial warrants, terrorizing Americans. Not as bad as what Israelis do to Palestinians or America and NATO did in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the same sort of thing. Just call everyone an immigrant or a terrorist and do what you want to them. Refuse to obey the law, ignore judges (what can they do) and on your way.
Start internally with “immigrants” but sweep up lots of citizens and treat them abusively, without reference to their rights.
Set those precedents. And if you get away with it: if no one important winds up punished, then you can expand it. Go after the citizens next. Kick out native Americans. Keep people locked up for months on end without any real judge even knowing about it. Ignore health care problems, let them suffer and die.
Every time the elites of any country get away with abusing regular people, whether foreign or domestic, the line moves on what is acceptable.
We fight for other people to be treated well not just because we aren’t monsters, but because we know that it could be us. Every time we fail to make sure other people are treated fairly and well, we make ourselves less secure. What was done to them can now be done to us. It is for this reasons that even people accused of the worst crimes, like pedophilia and rape have rights, because an accusation isn’t proof and the government and police often get things wrong or lie.
The precedents are now firm that anyone who isn’t in the elite has limited rights: no free speech, no right to see an attorney, no right to security against search and seizure, and so on.
Genocide and ignoring the rule of law, even ignoring judicial rulings, are now the norm.
And the goal isn’t genocide of foreigners. The goal is to get to the point where they can lock up or kill anyone they want domestically.
That’s what American elites want. If an election is going to be lost, fix it. If a person is against a genocide, lock them up or deport them or de-bank them. Anyone who is inconvenient because they oppose what the elite group in power find the rule of law is increasingly no shield. It’s been broken too often, elites know they can mass murder, rape and traffic children and teens with few or no consequences.
What has been done to outsiders will increasingly be done to us, core Western citizens. By failing to protect others, we set the precedents that we were no longer protected.
Never think “it’s OK to do monstrous things to outsiders” because everyone who isn’t an elite eventually becomes an outsider.
This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.
Feral Finster
Yes, so what does anyone propose to do about it? The rulers know all that and they don’t care. Moral arguments are wasted on sociopaths.
Reward and punishment are the only language that they understand.
Like & Subscribe
https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/texas-gop-politician-don-huffines-plans-christian-retreat-at-zorro-ranch/article_2418e5c4-b30f-499d-a1c6-e2c81995f829.html
I want to fight this guy. Huffines, I mean. I challenge him to a fight. Do you think he will accept?
He is killing two birds with one stone via his purchase of Epstein’s NM house of horrors. He’s destroying evidence to provide cover for Donald Satan and they plan on doing it again considering it’s being repurposed as a retreat for, get this, children.
The genocides in play as we type are warm ups for the big one to come. Mark my words.
Christy & Chuck think they are immune. Protected. We’ll see.
NGG
More American citizens, and untold numbers of immigrants are going to be seriously injured and killed. The Cuba embargo is cruelty at its best. Unless of course, you think Cuba is a dire threat to American National Security. The Trump trajectory is truly frightening.
cc
Trump is seen by many as a golem serving Zionist interests. Is this golem regime’s attempt to strangulate Cuba – with early parallels to what Israel has been doing to Gaza – also at the behest of those Zionist interests?
Cuba has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s genocide, and has also been training hundreds of Palestinian students to be doctors:
“The real story? Hundreds of Palestinian students training to be doctors in Havana.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/02/mexico-warns-of-far-reaching-humanitarian-crisis-in-cuba-as-trump-tries-to-starve-island-nation-into-submission.html
Everyone can see that Israel has actively been trying to kill doctors, health workers, and paramedics in Gaza, along with attacking hospitals and trying to cut off funding. Is it also using its US golem to go after Cuba as part and parcel of this agenda?
Venezuela had also been calling out Israel’s apartheid and genocide.
‘Zionist Undertones’ – Venezuela’s Rodríguez Hints at Israeli Connection in Maduro’s Kidnapping
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/venezuelas-rodriguez-accuses-us-operation-against-maduro-of-zionist-undertones/
“Israel was among the few countries to openly welcome the US operation” and quickly commended the violent US night-time raid that killed around 80 people and abducted and disappeared a state leader and his wife. Where are they now and what’s being done to them? The Guthrie coverage has been perfect for making the public forget about that far more important abduction.
Didn’t the US deportations also start with those involved in anti-genocide protests?
A few weeks ago, Simplicius wrote:
“In the essay [called “The Jewish Stake in America’s Changing Demography”.], Jewish writer Steinlight makes a similar argument, but from the perspective of Jewish influence in the US. His argument is that the mass migration sweeping through the US will eventually alter the demographics of the nation to such an extent that it will pose a serious threat to Jewish-American ‘special interests’, given that the predominantly Latin-American and Muslim immigrants will lack the same inculcated sense of respect for Jewish values and guilt for the Holocaust that native-born Americans possess.”
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/erasure-of-compatible-values-trumps
So how much are the thuggish ICE round-up and deportations of Latin-American and Muslim immigrants driven by a Zionist need to stop or even reverse demographic trends that threaten continued their control over the US? Stephen Miller’s quota and goal of 1 million per year ICE deportations of Latinos/Arabs/Muslims (3,000 per day) would change US demographics to help preserve that hold
In the weeks before his assassination, Charlie Kirk had started to publicly question Zionist influence over the US. Given his tremendous influence on conservative/Republican youth, did his line of questioning about this have to urgently be stopped to preserve Zionist control over the US?
What caused Marjorie Taylor Greene, a highly influential American conservative congresswoman – who had urged Trump to release the Epstein files and was critical of Israel’s influence on the US – to abruptly and unexpectedly just resign her hard-won position in Congress? Was that also related to moves to preserve Zionist control over the US?
What about the huge jump in investigations and arrests in the UK and other Western countries to silence those critical of the genocide and the genocidal Zionist regime?
What about the seizure and transfer of TikTok USA to Larry Ellison’s Oracle as urgent concerns grew over young Americans, including young Jewish-Americans, rejecting Zionism, apartheid, and genocide?
Larry Ellison’s son David Ellison also appointed Bari Weiss to head CBS News, and the Ellisons’s, through Paramount/Skydance, are currently also trying to acquire Warner Bros.
So to what extent is the rising fascism in the US and throughout Western countries really a subset and tool of Zionist fascism?
When a parasitic organism feels like their hold over their host is being threatened, do they, like in the “Alien” movies, tighten and redouble their efforts to preserve their control over it?
Because of the constant attempts to conflate the two, it’s extremely important to underline that Judaism is not Zionism. A great many Jewish people are at the forefront of leading the fight against Zionism, apartheid, and the genocide.
Naomi Klein denounces “false idol” of Zionism at New York demonstration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2PIhGl2Z4k
Jill Stein speaks out against assault on pro-Palestine student protesters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM3wNcHIfQM
StewartM
The next step, as I predicted, is that Trump’s Big Beautiful Wall will be our Berlin Wall; not to keep outsiders out (who will want to come here?) but to keep the natives *IN*.
I was informed that in the Philippines something like this is already happening. If you have a plane ticket and are leaving the country, and the authorities think that you don’t have enough money or won’t be coming back, they deny you boarding on the plane. Of course, this only hits ordinary people and not their rich. The justification is “human traffficking” but like the restraints on money transfers, that’s a very crude bludgeon to hit a specific problem.
The current administration is stunningly incompetent. They justify their tariff policy based on the US 19th century (never mind that real per-capita growth only averaged a paltry 1 %, nor that there were several deep recessions with c. 10-15 % unemployment that lasted the better part of a decade, and bank failures and whatnot). But that 19th century US also had essentially unlimited immigration, which ICE brownshirts want to close off. The descendants of the people who came to Ellis Island with no papers now want to deport people who come here in the same straits as their forebearers.
So like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, brutality and incompetence are married. Germany’s success early in WWII was because of pre-Nazi legacy competence, but damn it, the Nazis sure got rid of that by mid-war.
bruce wilder
The legal rights and liberties of Anglo-American and French traditions were the by-product of elite conflict that led aspiring elite factions to reach out-of-doors for mass support against incumbent power. Mass support was available because of elite incompetence and negligence, long-standing grievance and desperation. The development and elaboration of ideological rationales for institutionalizing a settlement incorporating new means and standards of governance typically required a decade or much more of conflicting agitation, when it happened at all.
What I notice in our present is elite disinterest in having mass support. It is quite striking. Mobilizing mass support and neutralizing mass support are apparently the work of a moment and most of the effort focuses on antagonizing the “other” assembly of mass support, blaming the “other” MAGA or “woke” Libs or whatever the caricature — what I do not see are leaders dependent on mass support (and independent of the billionaires boys and girls clubs). It remains very top-down.
“Inverted totalitarianism” as articulated by Sheldon Wolin still seems to describe Western politics, just further unraveled. An information vacuum supplements the usual propaganda while economic pressure and precarity create the pessimism necessary to disable the possibility of mass movement. I think potential leaders are pruned away or co-opted very early in their development even as potential institutional bases of support are eliminated by neoliberalism.
There is still elite conflict but the masses are such easy pickings, so easily fooled by corrupt misleadership and so easily deprived of leadership competence or integrity, it hardly matters. No real alignment of elites with any conception of mass interest or general welfare is necessary. Populists can be distracted with shiny things as easily as progressives. Everyone has a bloody shirt to wave.
Brian
Can you elaborate briefly on the Albanese losing their banking access? I can seem to find any search results to educate myself on this. Thank you
Bob
Yes.
Mark Level
Of course!! A few days ago I had the not-so random thought, “It’s frightening how much genocide has been normalized since Oct. 7.” The point of the original Trump-Hegseth boat killings off South American shores was to kill just for shits and giggles (they’re foreigners, mostly brown, their lives “have no value”) and to see how far they could escalate that. The lie that these small speedboats would travel thousands of miles with no refilling stations and “poison” ‘Muricans with fentanyl was totally absurd on the face, denies basic physics and geography. But normalize, then escalate is the M.O. And they are currently claiming they have “saved” 170 million sacred ‘Murican lives with the piracy and terrorism on the high seas. The one time there were 2 survivors, they repatriated them to their own country, as there was no proof any “drugs” were on the boat, a trial would’ve failed.
Due Dissidence just today did a banger segment on the Berliner Film Festival currently happening. A small # of artists (a bit over 80) called out the German government for supporting the Palestine genocide and arresting protesters thereof, published in Variety. Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem & Mark Ruffalo (an actor I’ve always liked) were the bigger names among the signatories, which also included directors, writers, etc. A couple of panels were asked about this, and the celebs, not wanting to offend the big moguls in L.A., mostly played deeply stupid and tried to dodge, “Why are you bringing up a ‘political’ issue here, we are just dumb artists who exist to make the world prettier, you can’t ask us to be ‘political’.”
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/over-80-berlin-film-festival-alumni-sign-open-letter-urging-organisers-take-2026-02-17/
Ethan Hawke responded, saying the genocide was none of their business, and why do people want to get their opinions from actors? (I agree with the 2nd half of that statement, but it’s just a cop-out.) One of the luminaries who disgraced themselves most fully was Wim Wenders, who is 80 years old, made some good stuff (& some pretentious stuff) back in the day. The DD guys didn’t know Wenders’ background, but some years back I read a Harper’s piece in which he shared his earliest memory, when he was about 4 years old, the Allies were bombing his neighborhood and his mother carried him partway up a nearby mountain to save his life. Back to his Nazi roots in old age, I guess. Btw, in prior years these clowns made major “political” assertions and statements, e.g. on behalf of poor Banderist (fascist) Ukraine against “evil Russia” (not one word about Israel however) and also viz Iran!! I briefly wondered IF the Iran sympathy could’ve been for the threats from Israel and the West, but no, these dipshits were agitating for “regime change” by the Zio-West and re-installation of the Shah. Also Neil Patrick Harris, who’d done major agitation for gay rights in previous years basically said he knew nothing about and had no interest in Palestine, why would he say anything? (The Matt Taibbi defense.) “Good Germans” all the way down the celeb list, evidently. I get it, though, privileged rich people rarely are empathetic enough even to oppose open genocide, the system gives them all kinds of prestige and strokes, why rock the boat?
They did a 2nd segment which connects to what TrumpCo will likely be doing around the midterms in suppressing the vote and then stealing it, indirectly. So the Admin has been using an AI entity for the Pentagon called “Claude”, and Hegseth recently demanded that they remove one safeguard from Claude viz violence and killing people. Now, all the other big AI platforms had already said they’d remove that (Amazon, Google, Musk, Palantir, whomever else) but the company president refused to comply, said he wanted to retire to “write poetry” in the Scottish hills or something. (Someone with a conscience at that level, lucky break!!) As of press time, uncertain if the corporation will fold or not, but presumably somebody will, sooner, not later. And of course Asimov’s 3 Rules of Robotics smashed to pieces.
So just as Ian said, they normalize it with the “bad” victims, “illegals”, then expand to even good victims, (Rene Good, a white woman, she got mouthy with a masked ICE agent so had to die, “fucking bitch” the executioner quipped.)
I don’t know if the Trump Cult (we can’t even speak of MAGA anymore, a majority of them are giving up on him) will successfully steal an election, I know they will certainly give it their all, though. First test, the Midterms. Now I will agree generally with LaS (right nearly half the time), I don’t think the Dimmiecraps will come to anyone’s rescue (beyond their donors; recently read Cockburn’s “Are the Democrats Dead or Merely Playing Dead?” cover story in the Aug. 2025 issue. They will use the weaponized Trump surveillance and prisons (DD did another segment on the billion$ the Admin has spent on warehouses near train tracks in a prior share, it’s classical Reich planning), but perhaps lock up gun-owners, fag-bashers or others of their “enemies”.
Every day in every way, US Empire gets more scary, violent and unhinged. Is there a way out? Possibly, it certainly won’t be cheap or easy.
Ian Welsh
Brian: that’s odd.
Here’s a simple search to get you started: https://www.google.com/search?q=Francesca+albanese+denied+bank+account
cc
The attack on Francesca Albanese is of course also part and parcel of this rising Zionist facism in the West.
Here’s an article from Chris Hedges:
Chris Hedges: Attacks Increase on Francesca Albanese
https://consortiumnews.com/2026/02/18/chris-hedges-attacks-increase-on-francesca-albanese/
She’s being persecuted for speaking out against the Zionist genocide of Palestinians.
And this news on support from famous celebrities got zero mention from any Western TV news that I’ve seen.
https://www.anews.com.tr/world/2026/02/16/global-solidarity-against-zionist-smear-campaign
That’s censorship by omission by Western establishment media in service to this rising Zionist facism.
mago
What’s the saying? Money talks, bullshit walks? That’s pure bullshit, just like money and the power bullies who wield it to further their cruel and inhumane agendas are full of it on steroids.
Suffer the consequences little people along with your dogs and cats and livestock.
These abusers will pull the wings off flies, cover a cat with grease, gouge a puppy’s eyes and get off on it. What abuse gives rise to this behavior? It’s learned along the way and transferred through generations.
Hatred, scorn, contempt and spite brings suffering to perpetrators and victims alike, not to get all Jesus like about it. Just saying. We’re living in the slime and muck of the dark age and sinking in the swamp of unbearable suffering. Where is our protection. . .
bruce wilder
In other “news”, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-CIA) will deliver the Democratic response to Trump’s State of the Union address.
Opponents of the authoritarian surveillance state or a genocidal Israel-first foreign policy are a vanishing minority in the elected ranks of either Party.
Paul Harris
We are our protection.
Like & Subscribe
Pursuant to that, Bruce, I give you this. She goes out of her way to climb as far up Israel’s ass as she can.
https://x.com/RepSpanberger/status/1654199430583668743?lang=en
Can we get a candidate that says the following.
April is Palestinian American Heritage Month — a time to acknowledge and celebrate the achievements of Palestinian Americans throughout our nation’s history.
We also recommit ourselves to standing up for our neighbors and speaking out against genocide everywhere.
Is that “Edge Lord” enough?
How much you want to bet this Zionist bootlicker makes a run for POTUS? She’s being groomed.
spud
StewartM:
the long depression was not because of tariffs. lincoln was killed off, along with his greenback policy, and the bankers got their way and we went back on the gold standard.
the gold standard is massively deflationary, and causes severe depressions and recessions.
by 1895, someone in government kinda figured it out, and started to spend money, and we exited the long depression.
the oligarchs also figured it out, and started to look for ways to control the money supply and cage in government.
along came the worlds first true fascist woodrew wilson, and he obliged them with their federal reserve.
steve keen is very implicit about this, tariffs do not cause depressions. wolf street has done a very good job following tariff related inflation, and its quite low. its non tariffed products and services, is where almost all inflation is coming from.
bruce wilder
The economic history of the late 19th century as a distant mirror into which to read gross correlations of tariffs, immigration, deflation, and economic growth seems a strange choice to me, but it may emerge as a serious threat under a more right-wing, oligarch-phile regime.
There are some academic policy macro-economists, supported by hack economic historians, who have been working diligently to make the world safe for deflationary policy. Nutcases on the paleo right have long held the “deflationary growth” recession of 1873-8 up for admiration.
spud is correct in outline.
GDP (backcast guesstimates on patchy data, but accurate enough if not pressed too hard) total for the U.S. grew as both population and land under cultivation expanded rapidly. Birth rates were high, immigration was high and railroad expansion meant that more land was within reach of markets for farm products. The scale and efficiency of steam-powered shipping to Europe was increasing rapidly as well.
The paleo nutcases celebrate the acceleration of technological advances in productivity from the Second Industrial Revolution as the principal drivers of deflation. Everything was getting cheaper — a good news story — is their sermon. Reality on the ground was more distressing. The recession that followed the Panic of 1873 was the longest in American history. The post-Civil War boom in rail construction collapsed. GDP per capita declined and then remained flat — no productivity growth was happening; real wages in industry declined. Industrial unemployment was high — how high is difficult to estimate comparably to the 20th century. In a still predominantly agrarian economy, lots of people to survive apparently faded out into the countryside, in part to help in subsistence agriculture projects.
Contemporaries were arguing hotly over the deflationary effects of returning to the gold standard. The U.S. Treasury had accumulated enough gold to officially restore convertibility of greenbacks to specie, January 1879. A coincidental famine in Europe — an echo of the potato blight — drove up farm prices and incomes. The U.S. economy experienced a brief boom, followed by instability. Steel production under the Bessemer and open hearth methods exploded. The 1880s saw a national market form in the U.S. enabled by rail transport supplement by stream ships. The “Trusts” formed to control and organize business on the new scale.
In the 1890s, another deep depression was triggered by gold problems in the Panic of 1893, and continued in the secondary Panic of 1895. The effects west of the Mississippi were extreme: every railroad but one failed; almost every bank failed. It was in that context that the Republican Party put together a dominant coalition, founded on protectionist tariffs and “sound money” (the gold standard) and an imperialist foreign policy.
Protectionist tariffs for industry were often very, very successful in transferring economic rents from British incumbent leaders to growing U.S. firms. Germany and to a lesser extent, France, were doing the same thing to Britain, for which the 1880s and early 1890s were a thoroughly miserable time economically on top of a long agricultural depression that had taken hold in the 1870s as food imports brought down commodity prices and pressured land rents.
Those who fail to remember the past . . . blah, blah. The international dollar system is past its “sell by date” as Ian occasionally reminds us. Even if we dodge the WWIII bullet and Gog and Magog so devoutly wished for by Huckabee and company, encouraged by bibi, the U.S. financial system is too corrupt and obsolete to survive, and, worryingly, I don’t think anyone understands it well enough to serve as an architect or structural engineer. All kinds of strange ideas are floating out there. The Paleoconservatives are an oddity, having survived 1933 and the failure of gold somehow, but there are lots of conmen ready to go on stage. Trump’s gang may be comparatively sane — it is that bad. The economists who form the technocratic mainstream are worthless as far as I can tell.
Mark Level
To spud– I see this morning that the Supremes of all people just knocked over lots of Trump tariffs, he was overzealous and pushed it too far.
Will they defy this? Will they have to kick back money to the consumers from whom it was looted? Will this male Trump a paper tiger viz intimidating and cowing foreign governments?
The God-Emperor pushed everything too far, hubris (overcompensation for his actual incompetence and cluelessness) will drag him down . . . If Iran’s attacked this weekend it’s not gonna go well and be a massive “victory” except in he and his sycophant loser follower’s press releases. Beginning of the end?
GrimJim
Americans have always been just fine and dandy with genocide, provided it was against “others,” which meant anyone who was not a white, Anglo-Saxon heterosexual male Protestant of at least modest means (it was always open season on the Poors of any sort).
It never stopped, the US just exported most of it and adjusted to using slower methods.
Of course, it never really stopped for non-whites, it just changed form… no need for lynchings when cops can just summarily execute unpersons…
And for the rest internationally, propaganda hid what the US did while pushing the works of others in everyone’s faces.
Now, as with all the natural wickedness of this godforsaken nation, things are reverting back to the historical norm.
The problem for many, MANY whites is that their imisseration means that, as the Nouveau Poor, they, too, are now being targeted.
And if you think you are too wealthy to be a target, well, you are wrong.
And all everyone else can do is shake their heads and say, “We told you so.”
different clue
One might suggest that Lincoln’s big mistake was selecting a Southern Slave-o-crat to be his running mate. That way, John Wilkes Booth knew that if he could kill Lincoln, a Southern Slave-o-crat would become President.
Too bad Lincoln believed in a “balanced ticket” and “bind up the nation’s wounds” and all that other conciliatory crap. He should have selected a Radical Republican vice president. Oh well . . . another of history’s missed opportunities.
Feral Finster
-Different Clue:
The conspirators in the Lincoln Assassination Plot planned to kill Johnson as well, but the assassin, George Atzerodt, got drunk and lost his nerve.
Jan Wiklund
EU har decided that 59 persons with unwanted opinions about Gaza or rearmamanet should be considered non-persons, with no rights whatsoever. Not having a job, not having a residence, not having a bank account, not having a passport etc.
This is an administrative decision no court has been into. And, by the way, of course the 59 have no right to appeal to a court either since they are non-persons.
See interview with German MEP Michael von der Schulenburg at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDONtByqQX8
So it’s definitely not only US, even if they are further down the sloope.
spud
bruce wilder:
great over view. much better than mine, thanks!
what passes for brains in the economic and political world, is far far far below the hysterical accuracies of the three stooges.
here was germanies response to the great depression.
http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch16.htm
Instead of a left-of-center, socialist government, the president of the German republic, Hindenburg, selected Heinrich Brüning of the Catholic Center Party to form a government. This Party had received only 11.3 percent of the vote — less than the Communists. And Brüning did not have the majority parliamentary support needed to rule. As chancellor, Brüning ruled under Hindenburg’s emergency powers. It was the beginning of the end of democracy in Germany, with Hindenburg willing to do anything but give the government back to the Socialists.
Brüning attempted to restore economic equilibrium by a balanced budget, high interest rates and remaining on the gold standard — no emergency deficit spending. And the economy continued to slide.
—-
then in 1931,
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/weimar/
excerpts,
“The Depression and Weimar’s adoption of liquidationist economics gave
Hitler his opportunity:Bruening spent the 1st months of his
Chancellorship trying to balance the budget:The projected deficit
tripled during his first three months as tax collections fell.
Bruening tried “at any price [to] make the
government finances safe”: balancing the budget–reassuring investors
that Germany was committed to financial orthodoxy–was Bruening’s first
and nearly his only priority.
Thus Bruening spent the first months of his Chancellorship trying to
balance the budget, only to find the economic situation outrunning
him. The projected deficit tripled during his first three months as
tax collections fell and social insurance spending rose.
Government expenditures were cut
by one-third from 1928 to 1932. But fiscal retrenchment and welfare
state cutbacks did no good, and some harm. The German economy slid
further into the Great Depression.
…
keynes figured it out,
https://pulsemedia.org/2011/05/07/john-maynard-keynes-national-self-sufficiency/
John Maynard Keynes: National Self-Sufficiency
—-
and democrats just can’t figure out why trump won twice.
bill clinton wanted to hurt labor. The Democratic Party has always looked at labor as what Hillary Clinton said: White Labor is deplorable. Employers don’t like Labor. There’s a class war and Clinton —like Tony Blair in England—Clinton revived the class war against Labor. He threw all of his weight behind corporate industry. And the Democratic Party, ever since Clinton and Obama, essentially became the party of Wall Street and large corporate America and the oil industry and foreign investors. And their business plan is to make money as quick as they can, and take their money and run.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/11/michael-hudson-on-truth-jihad-radio-discussing-super-imperialism-rentierism-and-the-american-political-duopoly.html
—
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/08/unemployment-benefits-cuts
Recent Unemployment Cuts Made People Poorer Without Increasing Employment
By
Matt Bruenig
“The media breathlessly reported on labor shortages this summer, helping generate support for unemployment benefit cuts. But a new study shows such cuts didn’t do much but devastate poor people’s incomes. ”
“Yesterday, President Biden sent a letter to Congress saying that he believes it is appropriate to allow these benefits to expire on September 6, but this and other research clearly shows that it is not appropriate, at least if your goal is to avoid needless economic devastation that dramatically cuts income and consumer spending while having virtually no impact on employment.
At the start of the pandemic, 152.5 million people were employed. That number is currently 146.8 million people. If employment continues to increase at around 900,000 per month, the gap between current employment and pre-pandemic employment will be closed in 6 months. Cutting off benefits now is clearly premature and almost certainly counterproductive to the macroeconomic recovery. “
spud
Mark Level:
i knew they would. they to are creatures of the stock market. and wolfstreet.com has done a wonderful and accurate job tracking of tariff related inflation, its minuscule.
so who is paying the tariffs? why the rich of course. and its cutting into their massive profits that that have achieved. far outstripping what the companies they control can naturally produce.
so the policies of bill clinton has come home to roost, and demand for goods and services is plunging, well because if you gut your economic base, don’t be to surprised at the results.
so the obscene profits of the rich are being squeezed in two directions, tariffs and slower demand.
to goose demand means wage hikes, reshoring, and creating another new deal to rein in the rich. not gonna happen.
but removing tariffs was a no brainer.
wait till the tariffs are gone, and prices do not fall. the pseudo left will be stunned. that fake left is always trying to tax the rich more, than when the rich are taxed, they squeal like stuffed pigs when it cuts into profits.
—-
https://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/abraham-lincoln-in-depth/abraham-lincoln-and-the-tariff/
“The globe is divided into different communities, each seeking to appropriate to itself all the advantages it can, without reference to the prosperity of others.”
“Let us then briefly compare the two systems. The tariff is the cheaper system, because the duties, being collected in large parcels at a few commercial points, will require comparatively few officers in their collection; while by the direct tax system, the land must be literally covered with assessors and collectors, going forth like swarms of Egyptian locusts, devouring every blade of grass and other green thing.
And again, by the tariff system, the whole revenue is paid by the consumers of foreign goods, and those chiefly, the luxuries, and not the necessaries of life. By this system, the man who contents himself to live upon the products of his own country, pays nothing at all.
And surely, that country is extensive enough, and its products abundant and varied enough, to answer all the real wants of its people. In short, by this system, the burthen of revenue falls almost entirely on the wealthy and luxurious few, while the substantial and laboring many who live at home, and upon home products, go entirely free.”44”
different clue
@ Feral Finster,
Really? The plotters meant to kill Andrew Johnson too? I will have to look up the order of Presidential Succession in case of President’s sudden removal. I will have more time to do that after work.
Obviously, the great disaster was killing Lincoln. But will I find myself thinking ” if only they had killed Johnson too, anyway, then the outcome wouldn’t have been so bad”? It depends on if the next two in line of succession would have been Radical Republicans or not.
different clue
. . . ” The Democratic Party has always looked at labor as what Hillary Clinton said: White Labor is deplorable. Employers don’t like Labor. ” Always? I don’t think that is correct for the period between FDR and Eisenhower/Kennedy. ( Though Kennedy took the first step to restoring the Pluton Oligarchy by getting Overclass Tax Cuts passed).
Carter was probably pretty anti-labor as an unadmitted motive for his various de-regulatory steps . . . of trucking, of airlines, perhaps of other things. Large parts of the Congressional side of the National Level Demparty remained legacy pro-labor until the Clinton period, when they were undercut and finally reduced to minority status by Clinton’s militant anti-union deforms.
I myself have long thought that the emotional side of Clinton’s motivation was this: that he and Hillary were McGovern volunteers in 1972 and they were heartbroken by all the Union Member votes for Nixon. So Clinton decided to get revenge on organized union workers if/when he got the chance, which he got as President. So he worked to destroy the unions by destroying unionized industry to “get revenge” on all those workers ( or their descendants) who had made him so sad by voting for Nixon.
spud
different clue;
its a myth peddled by the usual free market cranks that JFK’s tax cut were for the rich.
actually the over whelming percentage of the tax cuts went to workers, not the rich, and by closing loopholes, the effective rate of taxation, that is the rate the wealthy really pay, actually went up, around 70%.
at the time, the rich hated it, knowing full well the majority of the cuts would fall into the hands of labor, whilst the rich would end up paying more. thus handing even more power to labor over their economic condition, and we cannot have that can we:)
http://www.slate.com/id/2093947/
different clue
@spud,
Thanks for this. I just totally believed it. Did the people telling this myth believe it themselves? Or did they make it up as kind of a way to soften up the public for accepting Overclass tax cuts on the theory that if the Sainted Kennedy worked for an Overclass tax cut, then Overclass tax cuts must be just and righteous? ( I would have to join Slate to see the article, unless I can find it somewhere somehow else. I may well try harder to find a way at some point.)
If that is indeed a myth, has it been traced back to its roots, including back to a nameable first perpetrator?
spud
different clue;
the right cares little about the truth. in fact, they can never tell the difference between a lie, or the truth. so they make stuff up and get it told as fact.
and when you catch them in a lie, they move right on to the next one, with the blink of a eye.
walter heller was from my home state of minnesota. he came back from washington one summer to make a speech at the university of minnesota.
i was in my early teens, to scared to go indoors with all of the adults to listen to his speech. but the doors to the hall was left open for those who could find no seating, and he drew a tremendous crowd.
i got to listen to that speech!
Like & Subscribe
The most notable feature about Kennedy’s tax cut strategy was the fact that it was a substantial departure from the New Deal. Kennedy, and Johnson, fully embraced Keynes philosophy whereas FDR tempered Keynes and preferred government spending over tax cuts and balanced budgets versus deficits.
It’s true that JFK’s proposed tax cut strategy was not just a tax cut for the wealthy. It was a comprehensive tax cut across all groups and it was actually also tax reform. Much of the reform was gutted though as the bill made its way through Congress and into law. Kennedy died before the bill was passed into law, fyi.
It, perhaps not intentionally but certainly consequentially, indeed paved the way for the Reagan tax cuts of the future and Reagan’s massive deficits as a result of those massive tax cuts.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/kennedy-johnson-tax-cuts-stimulate-us-economy
The impact of the tax cut was felt both before and after the legislation was passed. The congressional debate increased consumer and business expectations. Passage of the legislation then secured a recovery that was already well under way. The importance of the tax cut has more to do with the essential change in government policy that occurred. For the first time, tax policy was used deliberately to manipulate the economy. The government’s role as economic manipulator was firmly accepted. The Keynesian concept of planned deficits took root. The ideal of a balanced budget remained, but the business community, voters, and Congress became willing to accept budget deficits as part of the economic picture.
spud
Like & Subscribe:
the majority of the tax cuts, went to those who would need it, and spend it. that was the crux of the new deal.
paul craig roberts tax cuts, the majority went to the wealthy, and he used kennedys tax cut as a excuse to goose the wealth of a few, over the many.
he claimed, and rightly so that is was keynesian in nature, which was to dupe the UN-educated that did not know keynes statement that those who need it the most and will spend it, and it worked, they got duped.
now roberts tax cuts did do work as far as GDP goes, so some was felt at the bottom, but not much.
what helped was getting rid of volker, and tariffs and quota’s on japanese imports.