Trump apparently said yesterday that he will personally take responsibility (eg ownership) of the oil. I proposed that it be delivered via heavy-lift aircraft from high altitude directly to his various abodes and golf course/money laundering properties.
It happened on planet Trump in a parallel universe. The fact that "news" agencies print or repeat this sort of delusional drivel without comment is why the US is probably doomed.
Yep. Trump announcing that he, personally, will control the gusher of money to make sure it "benefits the people of Venezuela" was a real LOL-Sob moment.
But he apparently loves Spanish speaking, "provisionally white" people like Micro Rubio and Enrique Tarrio-- at least as long as they are useful to him,
Since it’s not about the oil, when I ask myself what circumstances might provoke such a desperate act, the answer I come up with is Katie Johnson and the other Epstein survivors. Their stories are being eclipsed. Katie Johnson alleges that when she was a 13 year old child, she was tied to the 4 corners of a bed and raped, with onlookers ignoring her screams for help. I spent my career as a middle school guidance counselor. In 1994, the year this allegedly took place, the most popular Christmas gifts for 13 year old girls were Furby and Polly Pocket. Here’s her testimony. https://katemanne.substack.com/p/the-actual-conspiracy-theory-surrounding. https://katemanne.substack.com/p/they-tried-to-bury-the-katie-johnson?r=2g4u&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
Why are Americans sleeping through this? Will they wake up if trump invades Greenland?
There is letter writing, hand wringing and the occasional scheduled protest (with fewer than 5% of the population participating) but nothing near the scale of widespread disgust. Guess the leopard is still eating other people's faces.
Watching CNN briefly (before I switch to CBC or BBC). They seem to think this is normal
Love the Goldfinger reference! And, like Goldfinger, he cheats at golf, loves gold, and runs with a psychotic killer Stephen Miller. We can only hope for a sudden decompression at altitude.
Sorry, but he was never brilliant, watch any video of him from the 70's, he was never very smart, but he has a feral cunning to know who is a gullible idiot.
Trump has crippled psychological needs, twisted and met by sick behavior that is dangerous. He doesn’t acknowledge anything that contradicts his delusions. Reality is not what he deals with or responds to. . I keep trying to imagine a childhood that creates that. It’s like he never grew past the “terrible two’s”. He imagines himself a hero…. He really believes that. Somebody is pushing him to take Greenland, flattering and manipulating him no doubt. What mineral company… Exposing them might be useful. It would be a mining company that doesn’t follow the rules or contracts and has been rejected by the current government.
There’s another crazy one. Everybody needs some allies and most people choose allies that resemble their original families. He has recreated the crazy meanest of his racist family with these horrible people. It’s familiar. But he denies the reality that he is supposed to be dealing with in the process of recreating all the crazy crap.
The US military has very few assets to consider invading Greenland. For example, US has two(!) ice breaker ships and all sea ports in Greenland are now iced in.
Most of US military equipment does not work in extreme cold, and very few soldiers are trained to fight in such low temperatures.
Unlike, let's say Finland, Norway, Sweden and other NATO countries who regularly train and are prepare for fighting in extreme cold.
We need the other NATO countries to more forcefully denounce Trump's comments about taking over Greenland, Colombia and Cuba. They are trying to be too diplomatic right now.
From day 1 (and I mean after his first election), I've said that in a sane country, the only person who would vote for him or approve of anything he's done would be his mother - and she's dead. It doesn't take more than 5 minutes of listening to him to understand that he's an ignorant, deeply twisted (and stupid) bully.
When the tape of him bragging about “grabbing women by the pussy” came out I commented to my daughter the “surely no woman will vote for him now”, quite correctly she responded “why would anyone vote for him?”.
I was in the UK prior to the 2016 election and people kept asking if I thought the orange blob would be elected, after a while I’d respond “I don’t see how he could get more than five votes and that’s if all his kids vote for him”.
Once was incomprehensible, twice is beyond the pale.
There are lots of pundits explaining that our oil companies would see a bad risk/return ratio and sit this one out, but you're the first I've seen to mention that the oil may not even be there! Thanks!
Chavez cooking the numbers (pulling a Trump) of “proven reserves” was well documented back then, I guess all these talking heads don’t do research. I am sure Krugman remembered it immediately, but it’s an indictment of current coverage that this was not referenced before now.
It is much the same with rare earth minerals etc in Greenland. Yes, they exists, but the prize to extract them is heavy and the climate is very harsh.
If those minerals are so important, it would be much better to really help Ukraine to win the war and force Putin to back down. Ukraine actually has an extensive knowledge in mining and the ingenuity to improve the technology.
Yes. I very much doubt that it is possible to do mining on Greenland. The Greenlanders are a people of hunters and fishermen, living close to nature. They don't want any pollution.
Stephen Miller has said (in the context of the US acquiring Greenland): “We live in a world […] that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
The US seems to be run by barbarians, at the moment. This is Hobbesian (if I am polite) and Mafia-philosophy (if I am not). Nicely pictured: https://politicalcartoons.com/cartoon/293076
And not just barbarians, stupid barbarians even, as Venezuela's oil is a mirage and so is Venezuela as the source of much of the drug problems of the US.
Apparently it doesn’t spring to his mind that power can also be used to *defend* freedom and democracy. Power can be used for good and evil goals alike, however distasteful it may be to have to use it for good.
Stephen Miller: Yes, it was ok for us to shoot Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He was warned multiple times to do our bidding, and refused. What's anyone going to do about it?
This news junkie believes that Trump's attack was not really about the oil in Venezuela at all. It's about Trump's lust for power on the world stage, now that he has conquered America. He immediately pivoted to threatening Greenland after conquering Venezuela. And Greenland won't be the last victim. NATO is pushing back hard because they see the threat, even if we don't here.
Thank you Prof.Krugman , I did not read any other reporting on the Citigo relationship. The large oil companies are to meet at the WH on Friday , the grift continues.86/47✌️
And as the world (sans the US) turns away from oil, this move is the US trying to turn back the hands of time, to an economy that was dependent on the black gold instead of the clean energy that China is exporting to the rest of the world.
Thanks for this. Any thoughts re: the suggestion that many of the gulf coast oil refineries are set up for heavy crude conversion and thus potentially willing to jump on board?
Or the opinion that the Reason Behind The Curtain is China working the long game to decouple US dollars from the oil market?
It's false. Most of the Gulf refineries were designed to process "East Texas Crude." Most of the East Coast refineries were designed to process oil from the Middle East. There IS at least one refinery set up to process heavy oil - it's processing the tar sands oil from Alberta at the moment.
Re: dollar invoicing of oil - It's certainly possible. The US has benefited for decades from commodities being priced in the USD and anyone else would love to have that privilege.
The problem is that the capital markets outside of the US are not big enough nor liquid enough to support a structural change like this. The CCP will have to be willing to allow for more capital flows to truly wean the world off the dollar.
Tying our future to oil is as short sighted as thinking West Virginia coal is going to come back. The future is in renewable energy with costs (direct costs, not counting the costs of pollution, climate change etc) continuing to fall as technology advances and manufacturing improves. Trump is too stupid to recognize this, and too easily swayed by the oil companies. Someone above noted that we would be better off by helping Ukraine win the war and then helping them build their mining for rare earths. Trump wants to return to the past, but it’s a lost cause. Just look at the economics. I wish that Krugman would write about this.
and as for Greenland, we are safer with Greenland being a semi-independent member of NATO than having it as a colony. The situation in Ukraine is covered admirably by Phillips O'Brien (also on substack).
When this turns out to be an absolute debacle, losing billion, Trump will be out every day claiming massive profits due to his art as a deal maker and that's the story the MSM will carry ad nauseam.
I'll believe we're raking in billions from Venezuelan oil just as soon as I cash the $2,000 check I'm getting from the tariffs rebate, which will likely happen right after Trump announces the end of income taxes because the tariffs have replaced all that revenue.
he is getting exactly what he needed- has pushed Epstein out of the news cycle- he will continue to say (& if need be do) the most provocative & outlandish & terrible things we haven’t even imagined. that’s what this rat does when cornered. and the MSM readily obliges him.
Deranged demented Donnie thinking he controls another country because he had the leader kidnapped. And now I see the FNYT running an editorial that the judge overseeing Maduro's case in NYC should step down or be removed because there's a chance that judge might actually follow the law.
Remember: Trump can't do all this craziness without the Republican Party. The Republicans are completely responsible for everything lawless thing Trump does.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. Though I would delete "to repeat it." Shorter version: We're f**ked.
Trump inhabits a fantasy world where he simply declares reality to be whatever serves his interests. Paradoxically, this reveals he knows the truth—his statements are so consistently the inverse of reality that they function as a reliable counter-indicator. What remains baffling is how anyone with minimal critical thinking skills could support such transparent delusion, unless they've calculated that their personal gain from sycophancy outweighs their integrity.
It would be infinitely cheaper to give every US citizen a new electric car and convert trucks to electric, rather than go through this. We are going electric anyway!! So far, the cost could have bought 4000000, overpriced Teslas.
Goes to prove you don't need to be smart, to be rich.
I am very troubled by the indifference of the American people regarding their president's conduct. No demonstrations, no protests, no demands for an impeachment...
In Europe, a president who would start a war just for fun, just for the show, and without any plan for the aftermath, would finally end up beeing hanged by his feet, like was Mussolini - same kind of guy as Trump, by the way.
I do hope that the Democrats will wake up, much more loudly than now, and defend the most important issue to come this year (unless we have two or three new wars to deal with): the midterms. And I have a very bad feeling about this: Will they really take place ? Trump could without effort find a trick in the Constitution to suspend them ("national security", of course), or reject the results saying they were rigged.
If the Americans do not defend sharply the Constitution on this matter, then they will definitely live in a long lasting dictatorship, of which we already have some signals: the military against the population, the ICE-Gestapo chasing Latinos without any legal frame, the huge concentration camps beiing built now... We, in Europe, know well how it starts, and how it ends. It really isn't nice.
This is really a silly comment. Do you really understand what is going on here? I venture to guess your comments come comfortably from outside the country. Trump has managed to command the Congress and the Supreme Court. The RIGHT WING controlled Congress is not “checking” Trump’s lawlessness as the Congress was designed to do. Silly to push all the blame on the minority party. The Supreme Court has made Trump mostly immune from prosecution for any acts while he is in office even though there is nothing in the Constitution that allows that. Trump also doesn’t have to “find a trick”. He is using the threat of force and force to keep his Congress in line including behind the scenes militias and deranged loyalists to threaten lawmakers and activists. Trump pardons his friends and fellow criminals while prosecuting his “enemies” without cause.
Not sure how we are supposed to defend the Constitution more sharply when Trump has the use and command of the military. Maybe you have specific actions you could enlighten us with? Should we storm the White House? Take up arms? What? And more importantly Trump has managed to get his obedient Congress to swell the budget and thus the ranks of I.C.E., who like the brown shirts of yesteryear are lawlessly abducting undocumented people and sending them to private hellhole prisons before deporting them. As I am sure you are aware Hitler started the same way. Brown people are first here moving on to Somalis, other foreign born, then citizen blacks, libs, etc., etc. I go to 2 to 4 protests a week. By the way what are you and the rest of Europe doing to stop Russia in Ukraine? Isn’t it time for Europe to step up. Russia is on your doorstep. They are there! Time to stop waisting time. Don’t expect help from the US anytime soon! When Trump invades Greenland what will Europe do? Russia at your door and the US snatching Greenland.
I do not think that my comment is silly, but basically, you are absolutely right: what happens now reminds us so much of 1936. A fascist governement is buiding terribly fast. There are now the equivalents of Heydrich, Goebbels or Goering in the White House, for instance think of Stephen Miller. The difference, so far, is that Hitler had meticulous and long-term plans to follow his deadly attacks. Trump is only running a TV show, and hopes that thing will work out spontaneously - and cash flow in the pockets of his clique. As he often says: "We'll see what happens". To be sure, we will see, and we will not like it, in America as in Europe !
The democrats are in the minority. It's going to take an elite force to take out all of the top corrupt republicans. Mark Kelly is having his military pension taken away for advising rank & file military not to follow illegal military orders.
I think observers are missing the real reason why there is a focus on oil. There are three major oil producers selling oil for currencies other than the US$ or exchanging oil for goods and services in some other way: Venezuela, Russia, and Iran. This is a desperate attempt by the Trump Administration to preserve the Petrodollar, without which the economics of the US are severely impacted. The massive Federal deficit requires a continuing investment in treasuries and buyers are getting hard to find. Unfortunately it appears that the USA is losing this battle based on arm’s length negotiation, so it is resorting to force.
Story in the news today that USA will sell Venezuela’s oil in $ and remit the funds to Venezuela after taking a “vig” would seem to be consistent with thesis that this is being done to protect the US$
Trump apparently said yesterday that he will personally take responsibility (eg ownership) of the oil. I proposed that it be delivered via heavy-lift aircraft from high altitude directly to his various abodes and golf course/money laundering properties.
Personal responsibility?? From Trump?? That is very funny.
What’s even crazier is he said: “We’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago.”
I guess I haven’t been paying close enough attention… I must have missed that time when we owned Venezuelan oil.
It happened on planet Trump in a parallel universe. The fact that "news" agencies print or repeat this sort of delusional drivel without comment is why the US is probably doomed.
Exxon and Conoco Phillips are now suing VZ for nationalizing their former assets.
Hat-tip.
Yep. Trump announcing that he, personally, will control the gusher of money to make sure it "benefits the people of Venezuela" was a real LOL-Sob moment.
Yes, he just loves Spanish-speaking brown people
But he apparently loves Spanish speaking, "provisionally white" people like Micro Rubio and Enrique Tarrio-- at least as long as they are useful to him,
The oil is conveniently packaged in barrels that are shelf-ready for easy pick up and delivery. The 42 gallon drum is just the right size.
Since it’s not about the oil, when I ask myself what circumstances might provoke such a desperate act, the answer I come up with is Katie Johnson and the other Epstein survivors. Their stories are being eclipsed. Katie Johnson alleges that when she was a 13 year old child, she was tied to the 4 corners of a bed and raped, with onlookers ignoring her screams for help. I spent my career as a middle school guidance counselor. In 1994, the year this allegedly took place, the most popular Christmas gifts for 13 year old girls were Furby and Polly Pocket. Here’s her testimony. https://katemanne.substack.com/p/the-actual-conspiracy-theory-surrounding. https://katemanne.substack.com/p/they-tried-to-bury-the-katie-johnson?r=2g4u&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
the media makes it so easy for him doesn’t it?
Why are Americans sleeping through this? Will they wake up if trump invades Greenland?
There is letter writing, hand wringing and the occasional scheduled protest (with fewer than 5% of the population participating) but nothing near the scale of widespread disgust. Guess the leopard is still eating other people's faces.
Watching CNN briefly (before I switch to CBC or BBC). They seem to think this is normal
He’s quite mad, you know
Love the Goldfinger reference! And, like Goldfinger, he cheats at golf, loves gold, and runs with a psychotic killer Stephen Miller. We can only hope for a sudden decompression at altitude.
Either that or is a brilliant evil man playing the fool .
Um … I think that train has left the station, Angelo.
I’ll be happy to apologize and admit I was wrong if the autopsy shows his dementia was not physical. Frankly, I can’t wait for that autopsy …
I check the front pages for the obit every day.
If only …
Sorry, but he was never brilliant, watch any video of him from the 70's, he was never very smart, but he has a feral cunning to know who is a gullible idiot.
Trump has crippled psychological needs, twisted and met by sick behavior that is dangerous. He doesn’t acknowledge anything that contradicts his delusions. Reality is not what he deals with or responds to. . I keep trying to imagine a childhood that creates that. It’s like he never grew past the “terrible two’s”. He imagines himself a hero…. He really believes that. Somebody is pushing him to take Greenland, flattering and manipulating him no doubt. What mineral company… Exposing them might be useful. It would be a mining company that doesn’t follow the rules or contracts and has been rejected by the current government.
It's miller, the trumpy whisperer
There’s another crazy one. Everybody needs some allies and most people choose allies that resemble their original families. He has recreated the crazy meanest of his racist family with these horrible people. It’s familiar. But he denies the reality that he is supposed to be dealing with in the process of recreating all the crazy crap.
He has brilliant evil men pulling his strings.
👆🎯Like Putin.
The US military has very few assets to consider invading Greenland. For example, US has two(!) ice breaker ships and all sea ports in Greenland are now iced in.
Most of US military equipment does not work in extreme cold, and very few soldiers are trained to fight in such low temperatures.
Unlike, let's say Finland, Norway, Sweden and other NATO countries who regularly train and are prepare for fighting in extreme cold.
We need the other NATO countries to more forcefully denounce Trump's comments about taking over Greenland, Colombia and Cuba. They are trying to be too diplomatic right now.
Americans, by and large, don’t care unless this madness directly touches them. We have become a sick, sick country.
They are owned by right-winger Robert Malone, one of the men that gave us so-called "reality Tv".
trumpolini wants to give CNN to his buddy Larry Ellison of Oracle's kid who is busy buggering CBS into Nazi propaganda as we speak.
https://www.vox.com/2022/8/26/23322761/cnn-john-malone-david-zaslav-chris-licht-brian-stelter-fox-peter-kafka-column
From day 1 (and I mean after his first election), I've said that in a sane country, the only person who would vote for him or approve of anything he's done would be his mother - and she's dead. It doesn't take more than 5 minutes of listening to him to understand that he's an ignorant, deeply twisted (and stupid) bully.
When the tape of him bragging about “grabbing women by the pussy” came out I commented to my daughter the “surely no woman will vote for him now”, quite correctly she responded “why would anyone vote for him?”.
I was in the UK prior to the 2016 election and people kept asking if I thought the orange blob would be elected, after a while I’d respond “I don’t see how he could get more than five votes and that’s if all his kids vote for him”.
Once was incomprehensible, twice is beyond the pale.
The election was stolen in 1789 when the Constitution was ratified. Electoral College, 3/5, 2 Senators per state, etc.
They are ignorant. This isn't what they want.
Sadly, you're being too kind. True that they're ignorant, but they're also racist, bigoted ad misogynistic and this is exactly what they want.
There are lots of pundits explaining that our oil companies would see a bad risk/return ratio and sit this one out, but you're the first I've seen to mention that the oil may not even be there! Thanks!
Chavez cooking the numbers (pulling a Trump) of “proven reserves” was well documented back then, I guess all these talking heads don’t do research. I am sure Krugman remembered it immediately, but it’s an indictment of current coverage that this was not referenced before now.
It is much the same with rare earth minerals etc in Greenland. Yes, they exists, but the prize to extract them is heavy and the climate is very harsh.
If those minerals are so important, it would be much better to really help Ukraine to win the war and force Putin to back down. Ukraine actually has an extensive knowledge in mining and the ingenuity to improve the technology.
Rare earths aren’t rare. But extracting them creates a lot of pollution. So far, people have been content to let China do it.
Yes. I very much doubt that it is possible to do mining on Greenland. The Greenlanders are a people of hunters and fishermen, living close to nature. They don't want any pollution.
I believe the technocracy "networkers" prefer Putin's system over European democracy's regulations and social safety net.
It's like none of them remember any of the past, and have massive amnesia.
Why I follow. He is excellent at explaining, and has a very good sense of humour as well.
Should be widely read.
Stephen Miller has said (in the context of the US acquiring Greenland): “We live in a world […] that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
The US seems to be run by barbarians, at the moment. This is Hobbesian (if I am polite) and Mafia-philosophy (if I am not). Nicely pictured: https://politicalcartoons.com/cartoon/293076
And not just barbarians, stupid barbarians even, as Venezuela's oil is a mirage and so is Venezuela as the source of much of the drug problems of the US.
Apparently it doesn’t spring to his mind that power can also be used to *defend* freedom and democracy. Power can be used for good and evil goals alike, however distasteful it may be to have to use it for good.
Jesus is weeping
What you thought was thunder was Jesus slapping himself on the forehead saying “Why didn’t *I* think of that?”
Stephen Miller: Yes, it was ok for us to shoot Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He was warned multiple times to do our bidding, and refused. What's anyone going to do about it?
This news junkie believes that Trump's attack was not really about the oil in Venezuela at all. It's about Trump's lust for power on the world stage, now that he has conquered America. He immediately pivoted to threatening Greenland after conquering Venezuela. And Greenland won't be the last victim. NATO is pushing back hard because they see the threat, even if we don't here.
Thank you Prof.Krugman , I did not read any other reporting on the Citigo relationship. The large oil companies are to meet at the WH on Friday , the grift continues.86/47✌️
Judd Legum at Popular Information covered Citgo the other day.
Thank you will check it out.
Big Oil isn't going to jump out of bed, and risk jumping into the fire of an unstable political situation, when the price of oil is so low.
https://nuancematters.substack.com/p/is-big-oil-really-keen-on-jumping?r=1cwd5h
And as the world (sans the US) turns away from oil, this move is the US trying to turn back the hands of time, to an economy that was dependent on the black gold instead of the clean energy that China is exporting to the rest of the world.
https://nuancematters.substack.com/p/happy-national-sun-day?r=1cwd5h
Thanks for this. Any thoughts re: the suggestion that many of the gulf coast oil refineries are set up for heavy crude conversion and thus potentially willing to jump on board?
Or the opinion that the Reason Behind The Curtain is China working the long game to decouple US dollars from the oil market?
It's false. Most of the Gulf refineries were designed to process "East Texas Crude." Most of the East Coast refineries were designed to process oil from the Middle East. There IS at least one refinery set up to process heavy oil - it's processing the tar sands oil from Alberta at the moment.
Citgo's refineries owned by the billionaire Trump donor are set up to refine VZ crude, as even mentioned by Krugman in this article.
Re: dollar invoicing of oil - It's certainly possible. The US has benefited for decades from commodities being priced in the USD and anyone else would love to have that privilege.
The problem is that the capital markets outside of the US are not big enough nor liquid enough to support a structural change like this. The CCP will have to be willing to allow for more capital flows to truly wean the world off the dollar.
Tying our future to oil is as short sighted as thinking West Virginia coal is going to come back. The future is in renewable energy with costs (direct costs, not counting the costs of pollution, climate change etc) continuing to fall as technology advances and manufacturing improves. Trump is too stupid to recognize this, and too easily swayed by the oil companies. Someone above noted that we would be better off by helping Ukraine win the war and then helping them build their mining for rare earths. Trump wants to return to the past, but it’s a lost cause. Just look at the economics. I wish that Krugman would write about this.
and as for Greenland, we are safer with Greenland being a semi-independent member of NATO than having it as a colony. The situation in Ukraine is covered admirably by Phillips O'Brien (also on substack).
Petro oligarchs and their politician prostitutes are living the life in control...it's not about the future of the greater common good.
When this turns out to be an absolute debacle, losing billion, Trump will be out every day claiming massive profits due to his art as a deal maker and that's the story the MSM will carry ad nauseam.
I'll believe we're raking in billions from Venezuelan oil just as soon as I cash the $2,000 check I'm getting from the tariffs rebate, which will likely happen right after Trump announces the end of income taxes because the tariffs have replaced all that revenue.
You're missing a point: end of income taxes for revenues above 400k$ 🤷♂️
Just like he is doing with his talk of tariffs.
he is getting exactly what he needed- has pushed Epstein out of the news cycle- he will continue to say (& if need be do) the most provocative & outlandish & terrible things we haven’t even imagined. that’s what this rat does when cornered. and the MSM readily obliges him.
Deranged demented Donnie thinking he controls another country because he had the leader kidnapped. And now I see the FNYT running an editorial that the judge overseeing Maduro's case in NYC should step down or be removed because there's a chance that judge might actually follow the law.
Remember: Trump can't do all this craziness without the Republican Party. The Republicans are completely responsible for everything lawless thing Trump does.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. Though I would delete "to repeat it." Shorter version: We're f**ked.
and those who remember the past are condemned to watch everyone else repeat it.
Trump inhabits a fantasy world where he simply declares reality to be whatever serves his interests. Paradoxically, this reveals he knows the truth—his statements are so consistently the inverse of reality that they function as a reliable counter-indicator. What remains baffling is how anyone with minimal critical thinking skills could support such transparent delusion, unless they've calculated that their personal gain from sycophancy outweighs their integrity.
It would be infinitely cheaper to give every US citizen a new electric car and convert trucks to electric, rather than go through this. We are going electric anyway!! So far, the cost could have bought 4000000, overpriced Teslas.
Goes to prove you don't need to be smart, to be rich.
“infinitely cheaper” is a very big number. Try 600% cheaper. Millions more Teslas would save tens of thousands more lives too. What a bargain.
I wonder how much the Venezuela adventure has cost?
I am very troubled by the indifference of the American people regarding their president's conduct. No demonstrations, no protests, no demands for an impeachment...
In Europe, a president who would start a war just for fun, just for the show, and without any plan for the aftermath, would finally end up beeing hanged by his feet, like was Mussolini - same kind of guy as Trump, by the way.
I do hope that the Democrats will wake up, much more loudly than now, and defend the most important issue to come this year (unless we have two or three new wars to deal with): the midterms. And I have a very bad feeling about this: Will they really take place ? Trump could without effort find a trick in the Constitution to suspend them ("national security", of course), or reject the results saying they were rigged.
If the Americans do not defend sharply the Constitution on this matter, then they will definitely live in a long lasting dictatorship, of which we already have some signals: the military against the population, the ICE-Gestapo chasing Latinos without any legal frame, the huge concentration camps beiing built now... We, in Europe, know well how it starts, and how it ends. It really isn't nice.
This is really a silly comment. Do you really understand what is going on here? I venture to guess your comments come comfortably from outside the country. Trump has managed to command the Congress and the Supreme Court. The RIGHT WING controlled Congress is not “checking” Trump’s lawlessness as the Congress was designed to do. Silly to push all the blame on the minority party. The Supreme Court has made Trump mostly immune from prosecution for any acts while he is in office even though there is nothing in the Constitution that allows that. Trump also doesn’t have to “find a trick”. He is using the threat of force and force to keep his Congress in line including behind the scenes militias and deranged loyalists to threaten lawmakers and activists. Trump pardons his friends and fellow criminals while prosecuting his “enemies” without cause.
Not sure how we are supposed to defend the Constitution more sharply when Trump has the use and command of the military. Maybe you have specific actions you could enlighten us with? Should we storm the White House? Take up arms? What? And more importantly Trump has managed to get his obedient Congress to swell the budget and thus the ranks of I.C.E., who like the brown shirts of yesteryear are lawlessly abducting undocumented people and sending them to private hellhole prisons before deporting them. As I am sure you are aware Hitler started the same way. Brown people are first here moving on to Somalis, other foreign born, then citizen blacks, libs, etc., etc. I go to 2 to 4 protests a week. By the way what are you and the rest of Europe doing to stop Russia in Ukraine? Isn’t it time for Europe to step up. Russia is on your doorstep. They are there! Time to stop waisting time. Don’t expect help from the US anytime soon! When Trump invades Greenland what will Europe do? Russia at your door and the US snatching Greenland.
I do not think that my comment is silly, but basically, you are absolutely right: what happens now reminds us so much of 1936. A fascist governement is buiding terribly fast. There are now the equivalents of Heydrich, Goebbels or Goering in the White House, for instance think of Stephen Miller. The difference, so far, is that Hitler had meticulous and long-term plans to follow his deadly attacks. Trump is only running a TV show, and hopes that thing will work out spontaneously - and cash flow in the pockets of his clique. As he often says: "We'll see what happens". To be sure, we will see, and we will not like it, in America as in Europe !
The democrats are in the minority. It's going to take an elite force to take out all of the top corrupt republicans. Mark Kelly is having his military pension taken away for advising rank & file military not to follow illegal military orders.
It’s not being reported. See Robert Hubble, Today’s Edition Substack.
What’s not being reported?
Protests
According to Anne Applebaum, we are already in living in an authoritarian regime.
I think observers are missing the real reason why there is a focus on oil. There are three major oil producers selling oil for currencies other than the US$ or exchanging oil for goods and services in some other way: Venezuela, Russia, and Iran. This is a desperate attempt by the Trump Administration to preserve the Petrodollar, without which the economics of the US are severely impacted. The massive Federal deficit requires a continuing investment in treasuries and buyers are getting hard to find. Unfortunately it appears that the USA is losing this battle based on arm’s length negotiation, so it is resorting to force.
Interesting slant. What does Paul Krugman think of this?
Story in the news today that USA will sell Venezuela’s oil in $ and remit the funds to Venezuela after taking a “vig” would seem to be consistent with thesis that this is being done to protect the US$