“In the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election, political ethics watchers, an endangered breed, worried about the increasing number of ways in which Donald Trump seemed to be for sale. ‘Trump keeps creating avenues for people to quietly give him money’, ran a Washington Post opinion headline, referring to the glitzy, $100,000 watches that Trump had recently presented for sale: purchasable with bitcoin. Steve Benen, an MSNBC columnist, suggested a dark scenario: ‘A hypothetical wealthy donor wants to give the former president a $100,000 donation (far in excess of the legal limit) so he or she buys an expensive watch. At that point, the nominee could take his cut and write a comparable check in support of his candidacy, since there is no legal limit on what candidates can spend on their own campaigns.’ In the era of unlimited super PAC giving … these concerns seemed practically quaint.” (02/27/25)
“Corrupt politicians and bureaucrats are panicking. O, the prospect of any significant shrinking of the federal behemoth! Any significant rooting out of the corruption that benefits them. … Many combat this horror by flinging every fallacy in the book. Like the notion that Elon Musk and his team are unqualified. They ask, is Musk a certified public accountant? He’s only a mega-successful serial entrepreneur, not an accountant.” [editor’s note: “Serial entrepreneur?” More like “corporate welfare queen.” Direct beneficiaries of spending are not normally put in charge of auditing said spending – TLK] (02/27/25)
“It’s a weird time for the oil and gas business. It’s always kind of weird, of course — it’s a weird business, the unlikely offspring of swaggering Texas miscreants in big hats and nerds with doctorates in geophysics, gamblers and engineers, wildcatters and roboticists—but right now, if you talk to a Texas landman or a Washington oil lobbyist, you can’t help but see that the industry is being pushed and pulled in at least two ways at once: With Trump in the White House and a high tide for the kind of atavistic populism that loves cheap gasoline almost as much as it hates foreigners and college professors, oil and gas should be riding high, but that isn’t the case. Not exactly, anyway.” (02/27/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“President Donald Trump has shared a shockingly awful AI-generated music video envisioning a future Gaza that has been turned into an ostentatious resort town where everyone parties amid showers of cash while Trump and Netanyahu sip drinks by the pool. The video is intended to reflect Trump’s plans for a Gaza Strip that has been permanently ethnically cleansed of Palestinians. If you haven’t watched it yet you definitely should, because words can’t do justice to just how terrible it is. This video is simultaneously the most American thing that has ever happened and the most Israeli thing that has ever happened. Fake. Gaudy. Sociopathic. Genocidal. Emblematic of all the ugliest values that both dystopian civilizations have come to embody. They used the most artless art medium in existence to digitally dance on the graves of mountains of dead civilians.” (02/27/25)
“In his second term, Donald Trump has launched a full-scale attack on the Fourteenth Amendment. Rightfully, much of the attention has focused on Trump’s executive order purporting to limit the guarantee of birthright citizenship, roll back civil rights gains, and attack racial diversity. One development that has gone largely unnoticed is the administration’s effort to strip marginalized populations of legal protections in defiance of the amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws.” (02/27/25)
“Musk, an awkward rich try-hard who’s the supposed paragon of human brilliance or something, has in fact become so ridiculous that it is easy to imagine a scenario in which Trump generates great fanfare by publicly firing him. This would of course change little, although it would be a useful reminder that much of the absurdity and brutality on display today is neither new nor original, phenomena Machiavelli identified five centuries ago as keystones of the modern state …” (02/27/25)
“President in Name Only (PINO) Donald Trump and acting president Elon Musk might be able to bamboozle some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot bamboozle all of the people all of the time (to paraphrase Lincoln). And, hard as they may try, not even Fox News or the rest of the captive MAGA media can hide inflation, layoffs, and consistently bad economic news. That is a problem for a president who misled the voters by campaigning on how easily he would ‘bring down’ prices. … Unfortunately for the American economy and all of us who rely on it functioning, Trump’s illiteracy on tariffs, lack of management acumen in running the executive branch, and his utter greed (for himself and for his oligarchs, who are all licking their chops over another round of taxes) may well propel our economy into a ditch.” (02/27/25)
“With a trade war looming between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the nation’s governors are still in the dark about the battle plan after White House meetings with President Trump, his cabinet secretaries, and advisers. What they do know is that a prolonged disruption of North American trade will drive a stake into their states’ economies. That was one of the messages from Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) and Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK) at the National Governors Association’s recent winter meeting in Washington.” (02/27/25)
“Public corruption is never completely vanquished of course. Look no further than former Senator Bob Menendez’s gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in his bedroom. (He claimed not to trust banks.) Clean government requires constant vigilance from the police, prosecutors, and the courts. It requires a consensus in society that this is crucial, and journalists on the lookout for tales of venality and malversation. There are also tons of civil society groups dedicated to this. … In his first month back in the White House, Donald Trump is yanking the rug out from under open, honest government and signaling a complete reversal to a time of rank corruption.” (02/27/25)
