Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ‘Patriotism’ is its cult…Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.

– Erich Fromm

+ Here’s Theodor Adorno at his sharpest and most relevant to our current dire predicament:

As we know, fascist agitation has by now come to be a profession, as it were, a livelihood. It had plenty of time to test the effectiveness of its various appeals, and through what might be called natural selection, only the most catchy ones have survived. Their effectiveness is itself a function of the psychology of the consumers. Through a process of “freezing,” which can be observed throughout the techniques employed in modern mass culture, the surviving appeals have been standardized, similarly to the advertising slogans, which proved to be most valuable in the promotion of business. This standardization, in turn, falls in line with stereotypical thinking, that is to say, with the “stereopathy” of those susceptible to this propaganda and their infantile wish for endless, unaltered repetition. It is hard to predict whether the latter psychological disposition will prevent the agitators’ standard devices from becoming blunt through excessive application. In National Socialist Germany, everybody used to make fun of certain propagandistic phrases such as “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden), jokingly called Blubo, or the concept of the Nordic race from which the parodistic verb aufnorden (to “northernize”) was derived. Nevertheless, these appeals do not seem to have lost their attractiveness. Rather, their very “phoniness” may have been relished cynically and sadistically as an index for the fact that power alone decided one’s fate in the Third Reich, that is, power unhampered by rational objectivity. (“Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” 1951)

+ Like the Israelis in Gaza, the Trump kidnap-and-deport squad sure as hell isn’t trying to hide what they’re doing: “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said, explaining he wants to see a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

+ The Trump White House wants to spend $45 billion this year on facilities to detain noncitizens. Last year, the total amount of federal money allocated to ICE was about $3.4 billion.

+ I wonder if MAGA will be surprised that the noncitizens they accused of ripping off Americans by not paying taxes are now being haunted down for deportation by ICE using tax records provided by the IRS:

“The IRS agreed to share information with ICE to help locate people for deportation, court records show. This is a fundamental change in the IRS, which had gained the trust of migrants and encouraged them to file their taxes.”

+ Students are being deported for objecting to this: Israeli soldiers were ordered to destroy everything in the Gaza perimeter. “We’re not only killing them, we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs,” an Israeli officer said. “We’re destroying their houses & pissing on their graves.”

+ Only days after taking office as Columbia University’s new trustee-president, Claire Shipman personally terminated the appeal process of disciplined students and workers, including former union leader Grant Miner, crushing any hopes that she might at least allow due process for the students to make their case.

+ Martin Heidegger demonstrated more resistance to the Nazi takeover of Freiberg University than the Ivy League schools have shown against Trump–and he went so far as to ban his mentor Edmund Husserl from the library to curry favor with the Brownshirts.

+ Federal judge Paula Xinis’ order that the Trump Administration must return Kilmar Garcia from the El Salvadoran prison he was sent to through an “administrative error” back to the US:

“[Trump officials] do indeed cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike —to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the ‘custodian.’”

+ Photojournalist Philip Holsinger on Andry José Hernández Romero, the gay makeup artist, who was kidnapped, abused and deported to El Salvador by ICE for having a “Dad” tattoo on one arm and a “Mom” tattoo on the other: “He was being slapped every time he would speak up. He couldn’t help himself. Then he started praying and calling out, literally crying for his mother.”

+ In its report last weekend on Trump’s deportations, 60 Minutes could find no criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans the US sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador, meaning that 100s of innocent people have been incarcerated in a hellhole, perhaps for the rest of their lives.

+ The US is paying El Salvador at least $6 million a year to house in one of the world’s most notorious prisons noncitizens it deported–most of whom have no criminal record and aren’t wanted for any crime, many of whom have no ties to gangs. Why are those who’ve committed no crime being kept in prison? On what authority? What will El Salvador do with these poor people when the US stops paying the bill? If the US is paying the bill, why can’t it demand that El Salvador release the people it sent there “by accident”?

+ In a unanimous ruling handed down on Thursday night, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the El Salvadoran hellhole he was “accidentally” sent to by Trump’s ICE goons in violation of a protective order banning Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador, where his life is at risk. When you’ve lost Alito and Thomas…

+ A couple of weeks ago, Trump’s AG, Pam Bondi, gave a nationally-televised press conference fingering Henrry Villatoro-Santos as the East Coast leader” of the MS-13 gang. Now, the Justice Department is dropping its charges against him and planning to deport him without any judicial review of the allegations against him would violate Justice Department policy. “Historically, and consistently, if someone truly is a leader of a violent gang,” said Scott Frederickson, a former federal prosecutor, “we would always prosecute them first and convict them first and make sure they can’t get back into the country.”

+ On March 27, a mother and her three children were kidnapped by ICE in Sackets Harbor in northern New York, the hometown of Tom Homan, who’s commanding the immigration raids for Trump. All four of them were handcuffed, including a third grader, and kept in detention for 11 days. They were finally released this week after more than 1,000 people showed up to protest their baseless arrests.

+ The Los Angeles United School District said plainclothes ICE agents tried to question students at two elementary schools in Los Angeles on Monday but were denied entry by administrators. Superintendent Alberto Carvahlo said the agents falsely claimed they had parental permission to question the kids.

+ Here’s the declaration of Luis Alberto Castillo Rivera, who entered the United States legally from Venezuela, had committed no crimes while in the US, yet was kidnapped without a warrant by ICE and sent to the notorious Camp 6 at Guantanamo Bay, where he was fed wretched food, kept shackled in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, denied medical care, mocked and humiliated by guards, saw a prisoner beaten by guards for refusing to return a toothbrush, had their Bibles and passports seized and were denied phone calls with family and lawyers for two weeks…

+ NYT: “Trump has already invoked the Alien Enemies Act, absurdly, against a Venezuelan gang. There is no reason to think Trump would hesitate to use his extraordinary powers to deploy the U.S. military on American soil to put down protests he doesn’t like.”

+ Ian Boudreau: “If you abduct someone and send them involuntarily and without recourse to a country where they’ve never lived to be imprisoned, that isn’t deportation; it’s human trafficking.”

+++

+ Americans voted for their own version of Brexit, fully aware of how much British voters almost immediately regretted their own impulsive act. It’s a case study in the Missing Limb Theory of Politics. Many American voters long to be reunited with the aristocratic myth of life in the UK. They regret being separated by the Revolution and have an infantile longing to be trans-Atlantically reattached with the Mother (breast) country, no matter what the cost in terms of self-abuse.

+ Trump’s really emphasizing the poor in Standard and Poor’s, as if he wants to make Poor the new Standard…

+ Trump will eventually declare a new “national emergency” to consolidate more executive power because of the economic wreckage resulting from the tariffs he imposed after he initially declared a “national emergency.”

+ Under Trump’s latest tariff scheme (10% on everyone and 125% on China), the net increase in the effective tax rate in the US is expected to be 20%. The White House later clarified that the 125% China tariffs were on top of, not inclusive of, the 20% IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act) tariffs already in place, making the maximum rate on Chinese imports 145%.

+ William Huo, Intel’s first rep in Beijing: “America got conned by its own elite. And now we’ve got the privilege of importing our own poverty in shiny containers labeled “Made in China. When a politician promises to bring back American manufacturing with tariffs, ask them: who’s going to rebuild the ecosystem Wall Street torched three decades ago? Tariffs won’t fix decades of deindustrialization driven by elite consensus. Only massive, consistent investment in R&D, education, and infrastructure ever could. But first, we have to say the quiet part out loud: America was deindustrialized not by China or Mexico but by its own ruling class chasing yield.”

+ After weeks of passivity, as Trump seized one congressional power after another, some Republicans have been jolted into action by the economic chaos unleashed by Trump’s berserker approach to tariffs…

+ Don Bacon (R-NE) and Jeff Hurd (R-CO) introduced a bill in the House to require congressional approval for tariffs. Hurd: “This isn’t a political issue for me. I believe Congress must reclaim its constitutionally mandated authority, and I would support this measure regardless of who is in the White House.”

+ Chuck Grassley (R-IO) has introduced a similar bill in the Senate that would require congressional approval of any tariffs within 60 days of the president’s proposal. 

+ Trump, denouncing the measure: “Oh, that’s what I need. I need some guy telling me how to negotiate.”

+ Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-New York) on the increased costs of imported materials for American manufacturers: “I’ll bring up some of the real-life scenarios that some of the New York businesses are facing with regards to importing materials in particular,” 

+ Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): “There’s going to be an awful lot of collateral damage,” 

+ Sen. Thom Tillis, R-NC, to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on Trump’s tariffs strategy: “Whose throat do I get to choke if this proves to be wrong?” Anyone to the left of Larry Summers who said this would be arrested and sent to El Salvador…

+ As for Summers, when asked why Trump was pursuing his berserker tariff policy: “Why does anyone who commits extortion decide that it is the right thing to do?”

+ Rep. Steven Horsford, the Democrat from Las Vegas, to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer: “So the trade representative hasn’t spoken to the POTUS about a global reordering of trade, but yet he announced it on a tweet? WTF! Who is in charge? It looks like your boss just pulled the rug out from under you. There is no strategy … this is amateur hour! … is this market manipulation? … what billionaire just got richer? … WTF!”

François Villeroy de Galhau, head of France’s central bank: “Trump’s tariffs represent an unprecedented destruction of value by a democratically elected leader…rarely have we seen an American government score such a goal against itself.”

+ Bloomberg News:  “Vizion Inc., a tech company that gathers supply chain data, estimates global container bookings made between April 1 and 8 dropped 49% and US imports fell 64% from the seven-day period immediately before.”

+ Here is the full list of Trump’s proposed tariffs by country and percent:

China – 104

Lesotho – 50

Cambodia – 49

Laos – 48

Madagascar – 47

Vietnam – 46

Myanmar – 44

Sri Lanka – 44

Falkland Islands – 41

Syria – 41

Mauritius – 40

Iraq – 39

Guyana – 38

Bangladesh – 37

Botswana – 37

Liechtenstein – 37

Serbia – 37

Thailand – 36

Bosnia and Herzegovina – 35

North Macedonia – 33

Angola – 32

Fiji – 32

Indonesia – 32

Taiwan – 32

Libya – 31

Moldova – 31

Switzerland – 31

Algeria – 30

Nauru – 30

South Africa – 30

Pakistan – 29

Tunisia – 28

Kazakhstan – 27

India – 26

South Korea – 25

Brunei – 24

Japan – 24

Malaysia – 24

Vanuatu – 22

Côte d’Ivoire – 21

Namibia – 21

European Union – 20

Jordan – 20

Nicaragua – 18

Zimbabwe – 18

Israel – 17

Malawi – 17

Philippines – 17

Zambia – 17

Mozambique – 16

Norway – 15

Venezuela – 15

Nigeria – 14

Chad – 13

Equatorial Guinea – 13

Cameroon – 11

Democratic Republic of the Congo – 11

Afghanistan – 10

Albania – 10

Andorra – 10

Anguilla – 10

Antigua and Barbuda – 10

Argentina – 10

Armenia – 10

Aruba – 10

Australia – 10

Azerbaijan – 10

Bahamas – 10

Bahrain – 10

Barbados – 10

Belize – 10

Benin – 10

Bermuda – 10

Bhutan – 10

Bolivia – 10

Brazil – 10

British Indian Ocean Territory – 10

British Virgin Islands – 10

Burundi – 10

Cabo Verde – 10

Cayman Islands – 10

Central African Republic – 10

Chile – 10

Christmas Island – 10

Cocos (Keeling) Islands – 10

Colombia – 10

Comoros – 10

Cook Islands – 10

Costa Rica – 10

Curaçao – 10

Djibouti – 10

Dominica – 10

Dominican Republic – 10

Ecuador – 10

Egypt – 10

El Salvador – 10

Eritrea – 10

Eswatini – 10

Ethiopia – 10

French Guiana – 10

French Polynesia – 10

Gabon – 10

Greece – 10

Gambia – 10

Georgia – 10

Ghana – 10

Gibraltar – 10

Grenada – 10

Guadeloupe – 10

Guatemala – 10

Guinea – 10

Guinea-Bissau – 10

Haiti – 10

Heard and McDonald Islands – 10

Honduras – 10

Iceland – 10

Iran – 10

Jamaica – 10

Kenya – 10

Kiribati – 10

Kosovo – 10 Kuwait – 10

Kyrgyzstan – 10

Lebanon – 10

Liberia – 10

Maldives – 10

Mali – 10

Marshall Islands – 10

Martinique – 10

Mauritania – 10

Mayotte – 10

Micronesia – 10

Monaco – 10

Mongolia – 10

Montenegro – 10

Montserrat – 10

Morocco – 10

Nepal – 10

New Zealand – 10

Niger – 10

Norfolk Island – 10

Oman – 10

Panama – 10

Papua New Guinea – 10

Paraguay – 10

Peru – 10

Qatar – 10

Republic of the Congo – 10

Réunion – 10

Rwanda – 10

Saint Helena – 10

Saint Kitts and Nevis – 10

Saint Lucia – 10

Saint Pierre and Miquelon – 10

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines – 10

Samoa – 10

San Marino – 10

São Tomé and Príncipe – 10

Saudi Arabia – 10

Senegal – 10

Sierra Leone – 10

Singapore – 10

Sint Maarten – 10

Solomon Islands – 10

South Sudan – 10

Sudan – 10

Suriname – 10

Svalbard and Jan Mayen – 10

Tajikistan – 10

Tanzania – 10

Timor-Leste – 10

Togo – 10

Tokelau – 10

Tonga – 10
Trinidad and Tobago – 10

Turkey – 10

Turkmenistan – 10

Turks and Caicos Islands – 10

Tuvalu – 10

Uganda – 10

Ukraine – 10

United Arab Emirates – 10

United Kingdom – 10

Uruguay – 10

Uzbekistan – 10

Yemen – 10

+ According to the WSJ, two countries that don’t have Trump Tariffs: North Korea and Russia.

+ Yale Budget Lab estimates that Trump’s revised round of tariffs will cost each American household $4700. The average tariff rate will be 18.5%, the highest since 1933.

+ China, announcing its 85% retaliatory tariffs against the US: “The US escalation of tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake, which seriously infringes on China’s legitimate rights and interests and seriously undermines the rules-based multilateral trading system.”

+ Cornell econ professor Wendong Zhang on the impact of 125% tariffs on Chinese goods: “Many products that the U.S. imports are predominantly from China including 73% of smartphones, 78% of laptops, 87% of video game consoles and 77% of toys.”

+ Last week, analysts at Rosenblatt Securities predicted that the cost of the cheapest iPhone available in the US could rise from $799 to $1,142 – and that was when Trump’s China tariffs were just 54%; they’re at 125% now.

+ Who shot the tariffs? The bond traders.

+ In the end, Trump pulled out of his own tariffs (China, excepted) faster than he did Stormy Daniels.

Reporter: Did the bond market persuade you to reverse?

Trump: I was watching the bond market. It’s very tricky. If you look at it now, it’s beautiful. The bond market right now is beautiful. But I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy.

+ Trump isn’t alone in caving to the demands of the bond market. Here’s an excerpt from An Orgy of Thieves on Trump’s old buddy Bill Clinton coming to the same rude epiphany about who really calls the economic shots:

In 1991, the Clintons traveled to Manhattan, where they tested the waters for Bill’s then rather improbable presidential bid. At a dinner meeting with Goldman’s co-chair Robert Rubin, Clinton made his case as a more pliant political vessel than George H.W. Bush, who many of the younger Wall Street raiders had soured on. Rubin emerged from the dinner so impressed that he agreed to serve as one of the campaign’s top economic advisors. More crucially, Rubin soon began orchestrating a riptide of Wall Street money into Clinton’s campaign war chest, not only from Goldman but also from other banking and investment titans, such as Lehman Brothers and Citibank, who were eager to see the loosening of federal financial regulations. With Rubin priming the pump, Clinton’s campaign coffers soon dwarfed his rivals and enabled him to survive the sex scandals that detonated on the eve of the New Hampshire primary.

After his election, Clinton swiftly returned the favor, checking off one item after another on Rubin’s wish list, often at the expense of the few morsels he’d tossed to the progressive base of the party. In a rare fit of pique, Clinton erupted during one meeting of his National Economic Council, which Rubin chaired, in the first fraught year of his presidency by yelling: “You mean my entire agenda has been turned over to the fucking bond market?” Surely, Bill meant this as a rhetorical question.

When the time came to do the serious business of deregulating the financial sector, Rubin migrated from the shadows of the NEC to become Treasury Secretary, where he oversaw the implementation of NAFTA, the immiseration of the Mexican economy, imposed shock therapy on the struggling Russian economy, blocked the regulation of credit derivatives and gutted Glass-Steagall. When Rubin left the Treasury to cash in on his work at Citigroup, Clinton called him “the greatest secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton.” Nine years later, following the most significant upward transfer of wealth in history, the global economy was in ruins, with Clinton, Rubin and Goldman Sachs’ fingerprints all over the carnage.

+ Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant Tuesday on Trump’s refusal to back down from his tariffs in the face of the collapsing global markets: “Wall Street has gotten wealthy for decades. For the next four years, it’s Main Street’s turn!”

+ Me, on Wednesday, moments after Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs: “Hey, Siri, find the directions to ‘Main Street.’”

+ Siri, in her British accent mode: “Sorry, Jeffrey. It appears there’s a detour back to Wall Street.”

+ All those who were on Tuesday cheering Trump for his resolve on tariffs were on Wednesday cheering Trump for his lack of resolve on tariffs.

+ Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on the turmoil in the markets: “Up two down one is not a bad ratio.” (The markets had been down five of the previous six days.)

+ Far from Trump playing “four-dimensional chess,” as his acolytes contend, it’s not even clear Trump’s capable of playing checkers–Candyland, maybe…? “On the very same day the tariffs hit, Danish shipping giant AP Møller-Maersk bought a railway connecting ports at either end of the Panama Canal—undermining Trump’s other imperialist plan…”

+ Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney:

The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States.. is over. Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over. The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of economic leadership… is over. While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.

+ Overheard in the checkout line at ACE Hardware: “Those MAGA people are going to be so broke after Trump’s tariffs start to bite they’ll have to rent the libs instead of owning them.”

+ With three years and ten months left in Trump’s term, the question isn’t what more could go wrong, but what could possibly go right?

+++

+ What authoritarianism looks like. On Wednesday, Trump signed two Executive Orders targeting former government workers who he believes betrayed him. The first stripped Miles Taylor of any remaining security clearances and ordered the DOJ to investigate him. Taylor is the former top deputy to John Kelly at the Department of Homeland Security who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times under the pseudonym “Anonymous” describing the internal resistance to Trump. He later wrote a not-very-revealing book titled A Warning. Investigate him for what? According to Trump, “I think he’s guilty of treason. But we’ll find out.”

+ Trump babbling about Miles Taylor: “I had no idea who this guy was. I saw him on CNN a lot. He’d be on all the time, saying, ‘The president this. The president that.’ I had no idea. In this office, you have a lot of young people. And they’re here. I’ll see them for two minutes. I assume he was in the office, but I barely remember. Terrible guy.”

+ The EO targeting Taylor (so much for free speech) was followed by one targeting another of his own former employees, Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security, who oversaw election security in the 2020 elections. Trump weirdly blames him for everything from the Ukraine war to the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Trump: I don’t know that I’ve met him. I’m sure I met him. But I wouldn’t know him. And he came out right after the election, which was a rigged election. Badly rigged election. We did phenomenally in that election. Look what happened to our country because of it: open borders, millions of people coming into our country. Russia and Ukraine, that would have never happened. October 7th would have never happened. Afghanistan, the way that they withdrew, Thirteen dead, but so many killed. So many were killed outside of the 13 soldiers. Hundreds of people were killed. And maybe, uh, it’s never mentioned, but I mention it…42 or 43 people so badly injured, the legs, the arms blown off, the face. And, uh, it was all because of an incompetent group of people that preceded us, and that would have never happened, and this guy Krebs was saying, uh, ‘Oh, the election was great.’ It’s been proven that it was not only not great, but when you look at all these lawyers and law firms that are giving us hundreds of millions of dollars. It was proven in so many different ways in so many different forms, from the legislatures not approving to the 51 intelligence agents…from all of the different scamming operations. It was a very corrupt election. They used Covid to cheat. And we’re going to find out about this guy, too, because this guy’s a wise guy. He said, ‘This was the most secure election in the history of our country.’ No, this was a disaster. 

+ The Trump DOJ sent armed marshalls to try to prevent the Congressional testimony of fired DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer, who was fired for refusing to recommend the restoration actor Mel Gibson’s gun rights…

Oyer: Perhaps the most personally upsetting part of the story is the lengths to which the leadership of the department has gone to prevent me from testifying here today. On Friday night, I learned that the Deputy Attorney General’s office had directed the department’s Security and Emergency Planning Service to send two armed Special Deputy U.S. Marshals to my home to serve me with a letter. The letter was to be served between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. that night.

I was in the car with my husband and my parents—who are sitting behind me today—when I got the news that the officers were on their way to my house, where my teenage child was home alone. Fortunately, due to the grace of a very decent person who understood how upsetting this would be, I was able to confirm receipt of the letter via email, and the deputies were called off.

At no point did Mr. Blanche’s staff pick up the phone and call me before they sent armed deputies to my home. The letter was a warning to me about the risks of testifying here today. But I am here because I will not be bullied into concealing the ongoing corruption and abuse of power at the Department of Justice.

+ Trump at the National Republican Congressional Committee this week about his nemesis, Adam Schiff:

Adam Schifty Schiff. Can you believe this guy? He’s got the smallest neck I’ve ever seen. And the biggest head. We call him Watermelon Head. How can that big fat face stand on a neck that looked like this finger? … How we can allow people like that to run for office is a shame.”

+ Will Schiff be next on Trump’s hit list? He deserves it more than the other two.

+ After Trump went big into crypto (something he used to call a scam), he ordered the Justice Department to abolish its crypto scam unit.

+ NOTUS found the Venmo accounts of over three dozen White House officials, including Stephen Miller, Sean Duffy, and Karoline Leavitt. Almost all had open friends lists, and some had open transactions, which is its own security risk.

+ Dave Wiegel on the Deathbed Democrats: “The Texas one is special: Had Sheila Jackson Lee just not run for her old House seat after losing the mayoral race, it would be held now by a 43-year old Dem. But SJL jumped back into race, died, and Dems selected the elderly outgoing mayor of Houston to replace her; he died.”

+ Michigan governor and presidential hopeful Gretchen Whitmer, when asked by ex-FoxNews host Gretchen Carlson how she would have handled tariffs differently from Trump: Gretchen Carlson asks Whitmer how she would have handled the tariffs differently than Trump. “I haven’t really thought about that.” This is the best the Democrats can offer?

+ David Klion: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, and it’s easier to imagine both than to imagine restraining Donald Trump.”

+ An Economist poll shows Trump’s plunging net favorability since re-taking office.

Age / Net Approval Jan 20 / Net Approval April 5

Age 18-29: +5 | -29
Age 30-44: -6 | -14
Age 45-64: +12 | +1
Age 65+: -4 | -8

Trump’s Net Approval Rating by income group

Less than $50K a year: -12%
$50K – $100K a year:  -12%
More than $100K a year: -10%

+ Global executions have reached their highest level in a decade, according to a new report from Amnesty International.

Countries with the most executions in 2024…

China: Thousands (exact total unknown
Iran: 972+
Saudi Arabia: 345+
Iraq: 63+
Yemen: 38+
United States: 25
Egypt: 13
Singapore: 9
Kuwait: 6

+ Trump has vowed to move the US much higher up this list.

+ Historian Moshik Temkin: “None of this would be happening if the Democrats, first in 2016 and again in 2020 and 2024, nominated a compelling, popular candidate who was serious about addressing the real problems in American society and proposed a genuine alternative to the hated status quo.”

+++

+ Planetary Death Wish 2025: Trump has signed an executive order calling for the use of coal to power AI data centers.

+ More than 470 tornadoes have been reported across the U.S. so far this year, nearly double the historical average for the year to date. According to AccuWeather, extreme weather and natural disasters in America have caused a staggering $344 billion to $382 billion in total damage and economic loss so far this year. But let’s restart the coal plants to power AI data centers!

+ Hank Green: “A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200k/year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.”

+ As predicted, the Keystone XL pipeline ruptured in North Dakota. Rescind that judgment against Greenpeace!

+ Interior Secretary Doug Burgum (another billionaire) has employed political appointees to make cookies and serve meals and has used a U.S. Park Police helicopter for his personal transportation. Of course, the time top Interior staff spend baking and re-baking cookies (he prefers chocolate chip) to perfection to satiate Burgam’s sweet tooth is time not spent helping to plot oil and gas leases in national wildlife refuges and giving away tens of millions of mineral rights to foreign mining companies to gouge mile-deep pits into sacred lands…So be thankful for that.

+ A bill (HB 554) being pushed through the Montana legislature by the livestock industry would outlaws any protections for wolves in the future and takes away wildlife management decisions from professional biologists and the state’s Wildlife Commission.It also allows landowners to kill wolves on sight, with no proof that wolves were responsible for livestock deaths.The carcass of any dead cow or sheep could be called depredation without proof, even though 27,000 cattle die from weather exposure each year in Montana, while livestock depredation by wolves isa  miniscule 0.004%.

+ After 13,000 years, scientists using CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) gene-editing biotechnology supposedly created two Dire Wolves in their Dr. Moreau-like lab. Now, bio-engineer some sabertooth tigers and set them loose in the capital cities of the nuclear powers…

+ After the death of a second unvaccinated child from measles in West Texas, RFK, Jr. (or his press office) was compelled to issue a rambling statement on Twitter saying that “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” But you had to read down to the third paragraph to find it and when Kennedy traveled to Texas to meet with the grieving parents, it was another story entirely: “He did not say that the vaccine was effective,” Pete Hildebrand, the father of Daisy Hildebrand, said about his meeting with Kennedy. “I had supper with the guy … and he never said anything about that.” 

+ Indeed, even after the outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico, Kennedy has been saying quite different things. In a  March 11 interview with FoxNews’ Sean Hannity, Kennedy said that the MMR vaccine causes deaths:  “It does cause deaths every year. It causes — it causes all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, et cetera. And so people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves.” (There have been no recorded deaths from the MMR vaccine, which has been given since the 1970s, in healthy individuals.)

+++

+ White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote to a New York Times reporter, explaining why no one in the White House press office answered their queries: “As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios.”

+ Given the uptight demeanor of Trump’s press office staff, is it unreasonable to speculate that many of them suppress a secret fantasy to “engage” in a foursome at the Hay-Adams Hotel with He and She and They…

+ Number of NCAA athletes: 500,000
Number of NCAA athletes who identify as trans: 10

+ Why it’s getting easier and easier to manufacture consent: According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States now has:

• 41,550 journalists

• 280,590 public relations specialists

+ Move over, DOGE and make way for DOPE: the Department of Pentagon Excess…Trump, the Peace President, and Pete Hegseth announced this week they plan to increase the Pentagon’s budget to a record trillion dollars. “We have to build our military and we’re very cost-conscious, but the military is something that we have to build,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “And we have to be strong because you’ve got a lot of bad forces out there now.”

+ You’ll want to read Andrew Cockburn’s take in Responsible Statecraft on the Next Generation Fighter contract awarded by Trump to Boeing. Yes, Boeing, which coyly named the drawing board fighter the F-47 after the big man himself. Given that the fighter will almost certainly prove to be an aerodynamic flop, it’s an honorific Trump might (if he lives long enough) come to regret.

If and when it finally comes to be written decades from now, an honest history of the F-47 “fighter” recently unveiled by President Trump will doubtless have much to say about the heroic lobbying campaign that garnered the $20 billion development contract for Boeing, the corporation that has become a byword for program disasters (see the KC-46 tanker, the Starliner spacecraft, the 737 MAX airliner, not to mention the T-7 trainer.)

Boeing, which is due to face trial in June on well-merited federal charges of criminal fraud, was clearly in line for a bailout. But such succor was by no means inevitable given recent doubts from Air Force officials about proceeding with another manned fighter program at all.

“You’ve never seen anything like this,” said Trump in the March Oval Office ceremony announcing the contract award.

Well, of course, we have, most obviously in recent times with the ill-starred F-35. Recall that in 2001 the Pentagon announced that the F-35 program would cost $200 billion and would enter service in 2008. Almost a quarter century later, acquisition costs have doubled, the total program price is nudging $2 trillion, and engineers are still struggling to make the thing work properly.

Thus, succeeding chapters of the F-47’s history will likely have to cover the galloping cost overruns, unfulfilled technological promises, ever-lengthening schedule shortfalls, and ultimate production cancellation when only a portion of the force had been built.

+ A Taliban leader in 2008 predicted the ultimate defeat of the US in Afghanistan: “They’ve got the clocks. We’ve got the time.” (From The Afghanistan Papers by Chris Whitlock)

+++

+ Last week, I predicted that the epidemic of Republican parapraxis might be the thing that saves the Republic from ruin. The repression of their instinctive reactions to Trump is reaching its limit, and their long-buried true feelings keep leaking out. Right on cue, here’s Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN) speaking at the National Republican Congression Committee:

President Cunt…uh…President Donald Trump is counting on us. The American people are counting on us, and our friends in this room and grassroots supporters across the country are counting on us.

+ Most of you know I’m a baseball fan and that my favorite team is the Orioles of Baltimore. But now that the Carlisle Group has assumed ownership of the O’s they’re featuring merch like this.

+Where are the people of Birdland supposed to wear this garb, Abu Ghraib Night at Camden Yard?

+ It’s not just their liberated sexual lives, pacifism and communal social structure that makes one wish we were living on the Planet of the Bonobos rather than the humans: “The way bonobos combine vocal sounds to create new meanings suggests the evolutionary building blocks of human language are shared with our closest relatives.”

+ If I could be reincarnated backward in time as one of the white rockers from the 60s, it would have to be Donovan. I don’t know if he had access to the most potent LSD or if that psychedelic state of consciousness just came naturally to him, but who else was greater than both Superman AND the Green Lantern?

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine
Chris Hedges
(Seven Stories)

Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash
Alexander Clapp
(Little Brown)

Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis
Nick Bano
(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Horror
Mekons
(Fire Records)

Life, Death and Dennis Hopper
The Waterboys
(Sun Records)

Out There
Hiromi’s Sonicwonder
(Concord)

Only Cleopatra

“When the choice lies between the ultra-feminine and the virago, Shakespeare’s sympathy lies with the virago. The women of the tragedies are all feminine—even Lady Macbeth (who is so often misinterpreted as a termagant), especially Gertrude, morally unconscious, helpless, voluptuous, and her younger version, infantile Ophelia, the lustful sisters, Goneril and Regan opposed by the warrior princess Cordelia who refuses to simper and pander to her father’s irrational desire. Desdemona is fatally feminine, but she realizes it and dies, understanding how she has failed Othello. Only Cleopatra has enough initiative and desire to qualify for the status of female hero.” – Germaine Greer, Shakespeare’s Wife

The post Roaming Charges: Who Shot the Tariffs? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.