Does This Make Sense?
Does This Make Any Sense?
Junious Ricardo Stanton
Looking at
the early events and developments of Trump’s second term we can see several
alarming trends and patterns emerging. First his bombast undermines reality. It
is one thing to say you are the greatest, that everything you do is going to be
fantastic and you will usher in a new American renaissance but in reality what
you are doing is creating confusion and anxiety. It is readily apparent Trump
doesn’t learn from history including his own experiences, mistakes and
missteps. For example, during his first
term he instigated trade and tariff wars with Canada, Mexico, the European
Union and China which backfired and blew up in his face; especially his
dealings with China who refused to be bullied and went elsewhere to find new
markets or expanded the ones they already had in Europe, Latin America, Africa
and Asia. Trump’s actions helped China spur its Belt and Road initiative with
the rest of the world!
In addition
to not learning from his own mistakes, Trump makes moves that are illegal which
in due course will cost him. Already his approval numbers are falling. Some of
his actions other than the securing the border are quite unpopular and upsetting.
Right now, Trump and the Republicans enjoy slight majorities in both houses of
Congress, but even with the Democrats in total disarray, some of his moves are
boomeranging back on him. For example, DOGE. While it is admirable to want to
cut the massive deficits, regain fiscal sanity, reign in government spending
and address the humongous government debt, how he is going about it are both
illegal and reckless.
DOGE is not
a government department even though the word Department is part of its name. It
was not created by Congressional legislation. At best it is an executive advisory
committee that doesn’t have the authority to fire personnel, disband government
agencies nor halt appropriations passed by Congress! His plans to cut taxes while
increasing military spending are going to blow up the deficits. Cuts in
Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are not going to bring the budget in
line nor balance it! Evidently Trump fails to grasp the fact this did not work well
under Rondal Reagan or George W. Bu$h; both of them cut taxes and
simultaneously increased spending which resulted in massive deficits and
government debt!
Trump’s on,
off, then on again tariff threats are making him look foolish, indecisive and
wishy-washy. Again, by not being a student of history Trump and his advisors if
you can call them that, fail to realize that in the past, trade and currency
wars and tit for tat tariff retaliation have led to major shooting wars and
military conflicts. His tariffs are not going to solve America’s trade
imbalances which are self-inflicted. These massive trade imbalances are not the
result of the rest of the world ganging up and cheating the US! That is utter
nonsense designed to dupe the American people and place blame on foreigners
when the culprits are the financers, corporations and their bought and paid for
elected officials who legislated and cosigned the offshoring of capital,
factories and jobs to Asia in the 1980’s.
They called it Globalization.
Globalization was the shift of capital, technology, factories and jobs overseas
in exchange for much cheaper labor, available raw materials and less regulation
and humongous profits! This closed US factories, sent well paying US jobs
overseas and hollowed out much of the US industrial infrastructure. The Owners
and Controllers of Globalized Financial Capital (OCGFC) major contributors
to both political parties, transformed the US from an industrial titan into an
economy of gig and service workers, a debt-based system of myriad financialized
casino-Ponzi boom-bust scams. CEO compensation soured while workers’ paychecks
stagnated and declined.
This happened in the 1980’s and
early 90’s and we are reaping the whirlwind of these disastrous decisions. The
factories that left are not coming back no matter how high Trump’s tariffs are simply
because OCGFC will merely transfer their capital, technology and factories to
some other country where they can exploit their cheap labor. Trump should know
this.
Although in
2016 he campaigned on draining the D.C. Swamp, promising he was going to lock
Hillary Clinton and her ilk up, he did neither. Business went on as usual. In
2024 Trump campaigned on peace, saying he would resolve the situation in Gaza,
bring the Ukrainian war to an end and establish better relationships with
Russia and China within days of his inauguration. Well, here we are going into
five months into his second term, and the situations in those places are
worsening! Does any of this make sense?
Avalanch of Lies
Avalanche of Lies
Junious
Ricardo Stanton
Almost
every day we witness the government and legacy media colluding and conspiring
to lie to us about everything. There is an obvious reason they are held in such
low regard by people, we know they are untrustworthy, we know they lie! They
omit telling the truth, they spin or obfuscate the facts, they manipulate the
information in such a way, the truth gets lost in the sauce. Daily we are
subjected to blatant propaganda and lies coming from the government, and
advertisers via the media.
During the last week or so we have seen prominent
networks forced to acknowledge they covered up Joe Biden’s mental decline,
despite the fact we saw it for ourselves with our own eyes! We recognized Joe Biden
was far less effective than he was prior to the 2020 election campaign and his
cognitive acuity had diminished during the run-up to the 2024 election when his
feeblemindedness was so obvious he was pressured to withdraw from the campaign. The media and Democratic Party gaslighted us
day in and day out while the Republicans stood silently by acquiescing to the
charade. Now they are forced to attempt to rationalize their disingenuousness.
In another blow to their credibility, it was
recently announced Biden is suffering from advanced prostate cancer. How is
this possible? Aren’t presidents supposed to take scheduled physical
examinations and aren’t the press corps supposed to cover them and ask relevant
questions about the president’s health? How is it this was not done; especially
when it was so obvious Biden was in both mental and physical decline? This is a
travesty but alas it is business as usual.
We see how the legacy media fails to call
Donald Trump on his wishy-washiness of his trade and tariff policies, his
bombast and bluster towards Iran and Assar Allah aka The Houthis or his support
of Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza! What’s up with that?
Covering the news doesn’t have to
be contentious or adversarial, however it should be uncompromising, honest and thorough.
We are not getting that quality of news
in the corporate media or their social media platforms. Why? Because they are in
cahoots, collusion and cooperation, they share the same goals and objectives,
to bamboozle us and keep us dumbed-down.
Elon Musk following his purchase of
Twitter now called X, admitted the social media platform practiced blatant censorship.
He even provided a huge trove of files as evidence. Twitter went so far as to
deplatform a sitting president and none of the media howled about this egregious
denial of First Amendment rights! Twitter was not the only culprit, they all
did it, they all censored dissent and any accounts contrary to the “official
government narrative”.
During the past few decades the
corporate media has served as stenographers and cheerleaders for the
government, except during Trump’s first term when the legacy media were in
lockstep attacking him on all levels, except for the Fox network.
Following 9-11, the corporate media
went whole hog in support of the trampling of citizens’ rights and liberties in
support of the bogus global war on terrorism. The media promoted the government
canard Osama bin-Laden was the culprit behind the building collapses in New
York and the hit on the Pentagon outside of Washington D.C. which he executed from
a cave in Afghanistan!
I won’t go into the myriad anomalies in these
situations; suffice to say, truth was not peddled by the media! Most recently
they did the exact same thing in support of the government’s COVID narrative.
In both instances a massive fear campaign was devised to disinform, traumatize
and manipulate us into going along with the government’s narrative and policies.
In both occasions it was round the clock, 24/7. Every effort was made to
censor, suppress and counter (fact check) any dissenting narratives or even legitimate
questions regarding the government’s actions.
We now know there was no actual
proof Osama bin-Laden implemented 9-11 from a cave in Afghanistan, we know
Saddam Husien had no WMDs and we know the COVID injections were not free, safe
or effective! Hundreds of studies are
coming out now proving the COVID injections were more harmful than beneficial;
and the harm surpasses and is longer lasting than the so-called benefits of the
shots. In fact, the FDA recently stated the COVID shots were no longer recommended
for people under sixty-five unless they are high risk. But we know for healthy
people COVID has a 98% recovery rate!
We know we are being lied to about
the economy. We know the escalating government debt is unrepayable, we know
cuts in social programs are not going to bring down the debt nor decrease the debt
service (interest we have to pay on the debt) especially as the government
simultaneously engages in massive waste, fraud and abuse in military funding/spending!
Speaking of waste, fraud and abuse,
Moody’s credit rating agency downgraded the US government’s credit rating from
AAA to AA1. Remember Moody’s, Fitch and
Standard and Poor’s credit rating agencies rated the sub-prime, mortgage-backed
securities that were basically high risk junk, that caused the 2008 global
financial collapse as AAA! Yet, we know the US debt is unsustainable and unrepayable!
We are experiencing a daily
avalanche of lies, disinformation and gaslighting by the government and the
legacy media. It is a bipartisan, multimedia multi-corporation/owner operation.
We are being inundated and overwhelmed by lies. Also with the advent of AI and high-definition
computer-generated imagery, the lines/membrane between discernable reality and
fakery are being blurred daily. This is having a deleterious impact on society.
We are living in an era worse than George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s wildest
nightmares.
-30-
What Have We Learned in The First One Hundred Days?
What Have We
Learned in The First Hundred Days?
Junious Ricardo Stanton
Much ado has been
made of the first one hundred days of Donald Trump’s second term. What exactly have
we learned, if anything, and what can we extrapolate from these first few
months of the Trump administration?
First, we see
Trump is much more active writing Executive Orders, governing by executive fiat
rather than going through Congress and the legislative process than he was
during his first administration. His bombast; his trademark narcissism and hyperbole
are still on full display for all the world to see. Trump to his credit, has
kept his word regarding securing the US border, his passionate crusade against undocumented
immigrants has not slackened.
Trump promised to
end the war in Eastern Europe and bring about a peaceful resolution between
Russia and Ukraine. Thus far this has not happened. Both parties are agreeing
to have negotiations but it was Putin who asked Turkey ’s President Erdogan to
host Ukraine and Russian representatives in Istanbul for peace talks. Meanwhile
Trump takes credit for pressing Ukraine and Russia to actually sit down and
hold serious talks.
Unfortunately, it appears Germany, France and the UK want hostilities
to continue as they continuously demonize Putin and Russia despite the fact
Zelensky has broken ceasefires set up by Russia. Trump recently signed an
agreement with Ukraine to access Ukrainian rare earth minerals and he has
resumed sending weapons to Ukraine which seems counterproductive to peace!
Regarding the
genocide in Gaza, Trump claimed he would resolve this situation as soon as he
was inaugurated. That has not happened. In fact it appears Trump has signed off
on the ethnic cleansing by saying the US would step in, develop the region and
turn it into a Riviera like environment on the Mediterranean. Yes, he actually
said that with a straight face. His administrations is also persecuting
anti-genocide foreign students and defunding US universities who allow protests
against Israeli massacre in Gaza!
Israel agreed to a ceasefire
but it was soon broken yet Trump said nor did anything to Netanyahu. The US is
still supplying Israel with arms and money to continue starving and bombing innocent
men women and children, in the name of “defense”. Is it defense to bomb
hospitals, water treatment facilities or prevent food and humanitarian aid from
entering Gaza? These are war crimes by even the most vague and lenient
definitions of the term.
During the
presidential campaign Trump said he was for peace that he wanted to stop the
wars, however; he has been bellicose and threatening towards both the Houthis
and Iran. Trump increased the bombing of the Houthis who support the
Palestinians by targeting cargo ships in the Red Sea flying the Israeli flag or
are bound for Israel. In retaliation the Houthis have fired on Israel and
several US jets. Are the open support of genocide and threatening nations the
actions of a man who supposedly want peace?
Trump evidently
didn’t learn any lessons from his first term when he started trade wars with
Canada. Mexico, the EU and China which blew up in his face. This time he has
doubled down and instituted tariffs without input from Congress; universal
tariffs not just on China but numerous nations! When the immediate blowback was
felt in the stock market and financial circles to the loss of trillions of
dollars, Trump backed off. He put a hold on some of the tariffs but he
subsequently doubled down instituting tripled digit tariffs on China and double
digit tariffs on a host of other nations.
Trump says his actions are bringing world leaders to the
negotiating table looking for deals. What he is really doing is sowing seeds of
uncertainty, angst and bewilderment among rivals and allies alike. Trump now
has been forced to backtrack and delay imposing the tariffs for three months
while he negotiates “deals” with world leaders. But his action aresn’t in a vacuum,
there are consequences and repercussions.
Instead of making
him look strong, his actions are making him look wishy-washy and inept. What we
are seeing are slowdowns in shipping, fewer cargo ships and containers coming
from China which will impact the inventories and bottom line of US businesses
for weeks and months to come.
The US has a huge trade imbalance with China. Americans are
addicted to cheap Chinese goods and labor, while China has no similar “Jones”
for American made products. Plus, the Chinese leadership has demonstrated they
can go elsewhere for the foodstuffs and goods they need. China did it during Trump’s
first term, they learned a pivotal lesson and they will do it again this time!
On the domestic
front we have seen Trump use lawfare to go after those who tormented him just like
they did to him. He is using imperial fiat to get things done. DOGE is not a
department created by Congress and has no authority to do anything other than make
recommendations. Yet Elon Musk, the chair is firing people and shutting down
whole governmental agencies! It remains to be seen how this will play out in
the long term in the courts.
The supreme irony is, thus far DOGE has used extremely selective
auditing. For example, DOGE has not investigated the humungous waste, fraud
and abuse of the Trump era stimulus money, the Biden COVID supplemental fund
programs or Elon Musk’s conflicts of interest as a government contractor! These
are just a few examples!
We are witnessing
billionaires who gave Trump huge campaign contributions holding sway over his polices.
Yet somehow the media, Trump’s MAGA groupies and acolytes don’t seem to mind
whatsoever. They continuously go for his bombast and okey-doke. I could mention
the blunders and infighting among his cabinet members and his fights with the lower
judiciary; but hey, we’re just in the first four months of his new administration.
I’m sure we’ll see more in the days and
months ahead.
-30-
