Saturday Report 1/3/26 — Trump’s invasion of Venezuela & kidnapping of President Maduro is following the Putin Doctrine...

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— Well, that sure ended discussion of the Epstein files: welcome to the Putin Doctrine. Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife is the latest example of his following the explicit doctrine of his mentor. In this new multipolar world order — what we might call the Putin Doctrine — the great powers no longer pretend to follow a single rules-based international system but instead openly carve out regional spheres of influence, each claiming the right to dominate its own neighborhood.
In this model the United States treats Venezuela as part of its unquestioned backyard, Russia asserts a claimed historic right to absorb Ukraine and the rest of Eastern (and eventually Western) Europe, and China prepares to reclaim Taiwan, all under the logic that geography and power outrank international law, democratic self-determination, or global norms.
Putin has repeatedly called for this “multipolar world” and his assault on Ukraine embodies a return to a 19th-century great-power carve-up where might makes right and each empire polices its own hemisphere. What we’re seeing now is not random chaos but a coordinated erosion of the post-WWII order, replaced by a world where the strong take what they want, the weak endure what they must, and democracy everywhere is left in tatters.
From the CIA-engineered coups in Iran and Iraq in the 1950s, through Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and 70s, the invasions of Grenada and Panama and the covert wars in Central America in the 1980s, the bombings and occupations in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf in the 1990s, to the catastrophes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and across the Horn of Africa since 2001, Americans have watched presidents of both parties lie, rush, and swagger their way into foreign bloodshed only to leave chaos behind while democracy at home gets progressively more and more hollowed out.
Grabbing a foreign head of state after bombing a sovereign capital without Congress’s approval is the behavior of a wannabe emperor drunk on his own power. That Trump’s bragging about Venezuela having the world’s largest stash of oil that he claims was “stolen” from American oil companies who are huge Trump donors adds another dimension that’s impossible to ignore, just like Trump not seeking the approval of Congress or even notifying the so-called Gang of Eight for an act of war.
This isn’t about democracy or drugs or enforcing the law, it’s about America embracing the Putin Doctrine while grabbing trillions of dollars worth of oil for Trump’s fossil fuel industry donors. As he told Fox “News” this morning: “We have the greatest oil companies in the world – the biggest, the greatest – and we’re going to be very much involved.” And now we’re going to “run” Venezuela for our oil companies? What didn’t we learn from all our other efforts at regime change?
Regime change operations rarely turned out as planned, and there’s a good chance this particular train is also being driven by Marco Rubio, who lied for years that his parents were Cuban refugees (they came to the US 2 years before Castro took power) and his goal is to end Venezuelan aid to that country.
This is getting very dangerous, and Trump appears to be reveling in how successfully he’s ignored and violated the Constitution and international norms of behavior as he tries to turn America into Russia, complete with secret police, economic collapse, trafficking children, and now regional war.

— And then there’s Iran: so much for the “peace president.” Is Trump going full “emperor of the world” or is he just trying to help his fellow war criminal and Kushner family friend Netanyahu (with whom Trump met last week) start another Middle East war to insure the Israeli Prime Minister’s political survival? Yesterday Trump issued a threat against the Iranian regime, writing on his Nazi-infested social media site: “If Iran shots (sic) and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” Across the political spectrum and around the world, commentators of all stripes are noticing and pontificating, wondering if it’s a hollow threat or how he’d carry it out, although the one observer whose opinion always carries the largest weight with Trump — Putin, who’s explicitly allied with Iran — has yet to speak on the issue. Stay tuned.

— Surprised? Trump goes shopping for Italian marble as health insurance rises 114% and he freezes all childcare money to all states. Congressional Republicans, who’ve fought against any sort of a national healthcare system ever since FDR and Truman first proposed them in the 1940s, refused to renew the Obamacare/ACA subsidies so insurance prices spiked this week on over 20 million Americans, some by hundreds of percent. This will cause millions of younger, healthier people to drop out of the system and, since their payments underwrite and stabilize our jerry-rigged healthcare system’s ability to pay for sicker people, rate increases will spread across the entire health insurance marketplace. (To the extent it is a marketplace: there’s really no logical reason for primary health insurance to exist. It doesn’t control or reduce costs, cover every American, expedite delivery of healthcare, or serve the nation’s needs; instead, it’s a wealth extraction scheme supported by bought-off politicians whose bribes were authorized by Clarence Thomas and four other on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court.) Meanwhile, in a shockingly tone-deaf moment, Trump decided to take the day Saturday to go to Arc Stone & Tile to shop for Italian marble to refurbish floors in his White House residence and armrests at the newly- and illegally-renamed Trump Kennedy Center. As millions of Americans are cutting pills in half or postponing chemotherapy and struggling to pay the rent, Trump’s going all gold-and-marble. Grifters, after all, gotta grift, sometimes even with gilt and marble…

Speaking of grifters, a racist 20-something MAGA YouTube influencer showed up at a bunch of Somali-run daycare centers in Minneapolis, leading Trump to cut off all childcare funding to all 50 states. You can’t make this stuff up. This kid shows up at daycare centers when they’re closed and says their being closed is a sign of fraud. He shows up at others that are open but refuse to let some random man in off the street to ogle the children and that’s more “proof” of fraud in daycare. Rightwing media amplifies the message because it vilifies their their two most hated groups, immigrants and Black people, provoking Emperor Trump to declare he’s cutting off all congressionally-mandated funds for childcare all across the country. It seems like every six months or so the racists and haters on the right require a new moral panic, and the outcomes always seem to hurt poor people or racial/religious/gender minorities. But they make billions for the billionaire families that own Fox “News” and other rightwing media (now officially including CBS) and crank up the GOP’s base, so it’s all good from the point of view of Congressional Republicans.

— Is “Tax the rich” coming soon…let’s hope so! As any European can tell you, taxing rich people not only generates revenues that improve the standard of living of the entire country but also doesn’t much hurt the rich people themselves. Most would argue, as a German businessman once said on TV, that they pay taxes because, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.” A handful of greedy, OCD/hoarding-syndrome billionaires in America, however, have captured so much of our media and bought off the entire GOP, that whenever “taxing the rich” gets mentioned they all hysterically threaten to leave the state or the country. Massachusetts, for example, put a 4% “millionaires surtax” on incomes over a million bucks two years ago and billionaires and rightwing media freaked out, but nobody appears to have left the state; instead, as Bostson NPR affiliate WBUR reports: “[T]he number of ultra-wealthy residents in Massachusetts — those with at least $50 million or more — has actually grown since 2022, from 1,954 to 2,642 in 2024. The millionaires' tax also greatly surpassed its projections in the first year, generating S2.46 billion for the state in 2023 alone.”
California is now contemplating something similar, only with a tax on wealth rather than income, and already rich sociopaths are squealing, threatening to leave the state. Billionaires in his district are threatening to pay to primary Congressman Ro Khanna, a regular guest on my SiriusXM/Free Speech TV program who represents Silicon Valley. Billionaire Jeff Bezo’s Washington Post editorialized: “Many progressives think of taxation the way teenage boys think about cologne: If some is good, more must be great. California, already reeks of overtaxation, but it’s thinking about trying out its most potent scent yet: a wealth tax. Just a whiff has some of the state’s wealthiest residents fleeing.” How condescending.
But if history is any guide, it’s all bluster. Meanwhile, American billionaires (who generally pay less than 4% income tax already thanks to Republican loophole legislation) are doing great. As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams: “Led by Big Tech billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Elon Musk, the world’s 500 richest people added a record $2.2 trillion to their collective wealth in 2025, Bloomberg reported as the year ended on Wednesday.”

— How’s Project 2025 going? The billionaire-founded and -funded Heritage Foundation famously handed Reagan his “Mandate for Leadership” in 1981, calling for massive tax cuts for the morbidly rich, gutting federal support for colleges to drive up tuition and student debt, cutting social programs, and kneecapping anti-discrimination efforts. They did it again with Trump’s second term with their Project 2025, which recommended gutting programs that supported women, queer people, racial and religious minorities, education, and pretty much anything else that must be paid for with taxes on billionaires.
PBS did a good summary, and it looks like Trump’s about halfway through his neofascist punchlist with more to come. Having oligarchs write policy for governments invariably produces a single predictable outcome: oligarchy for our nation, leading to increased poverty, a gutted middle class, and a spectacular eruption, a virtual geyser, of wealth for the morbidly rich. When Trump was lying to his voters during the election by denying he even knew what Project 2025 was, it nonetheless became remarkably unpopular. Will voters punish Republicans for their fealty to America’s billionaires this fall? Or will Republicans succeed in preventing enough people from voting that it won’t matter?

— Billionaire Trump is destroying Social Security on behalf of his billionaire peers and the 13 billionaires in his Cabinet. First, he laid off around 8,000 employees of the Social Security Administration, throwing wait times for phone calls to be answered or appointments made into hours and sometimes even days. Now they’re shutting down field offices as 12,000 Americans age out and become eligible for benefits every day while the SSA website is browning out with greater frequency. The GOP’s goal in this first-ever serious assault on Social Security is to make so many Americans pissed off with its lousy service (the result of the layoffs and closures) that they’ll accept Republican legislation to transfer Social Security’s trillions in assets and functions to the largest Wall Street banks, who generously slather those same Republican politicians with cash every election. Given that the average age of a Fox “News” viewer is 71, it’s surprising Trump and his billionaire and bankster buddies are getting away with this, but reporters who watch Fox for a living point out the network only rarely reveals uncomfortable truths like this.

— What you need to know about Jack Smith’s deposition. Jack Smith wanted his testimony before Congress to be public, and now much of it has finally been released. He was unequivocal: Donald Trump committed multiple prison-level felonies while trying to overturn the 2020 election and stealing top-secret documents, and Smith still thinks he can be successfully prosecuted, along with multiple criminal co-conspirators. He didn’t back down at all in the face of extremely hostile Republican questioning. If a Democrat is elected president in 2028, he or she damn well better make this guy our next Attorney General.

— Geeky Science: Want to know what a longevity expert eats in a day? A group of researchers who specialize in aging, working at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in Southern California, have been following 1,400 adults between 85 and 105 for years and have discovered, to pretty much everyone’s astonishment, that, as The Washington Post noted, “genetics played almost no role in their exceptionally good health and longevity.” While there are several major variables they’ve found — regular easy exercise like walking a mile or two a day, good sleeping habits, family and friend support networks — the biggest one is diet. And the optimal way to eat, they’ve found, is the Mediterranean Diet with its emphasis on daily fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, nuts, seeds, olive oil, and the occasional fatty fish while avoiding red meat, sugar, salt, processed foods, and chemical additives. Not only do these four simple lifestyle changes produce a longer life, they also dramatically increase the odds that quality of life will extend, too, and chronic diseases like diabetes, cancer, and hypertension are less likely to arise. This is spectacularly good news for anybody interested in a longer, healthier, happier life.