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In one of the most obscene segments ever aired on Fox “News,” yesterday morning our billionaire Treasury Secretary said the inflation Americans are suffering from is Ukraine’s fault because, in response to Putin’s criminal regime daily murdering Ukrainian civilians (a war crime), Zelenskyy has been blowing up Russia’s energy assets.
Stupidity? Hypocrisy? Owned by Putin? Or is something even more sinister at work here?
That same morning, the Financial Times revealed that for the past three years Russia has been helping Iran build a supersonic cruise missile capable of blowing our ships out of the water, and at an Iran/Russia/China summit with Iran’s president, Putin, and Xi in Bishek this week, Putin said he’ll continue to supply Iran with “the necessary goods” that can be used to kill Americans.
Europe’s policy chief told the world that Russia gave Iran the satellite intelligence they needed to target and kill and maim American troops while destroying billions worth of our military infrastructure in the region. A senior official confirmed to CBS that Moscow was doing this, with 13 killed and 380 wounded by Iran (official numbers) just in the first forty days.
Still, Trump invited Russia’s finance minister to the G20 meeting that was supposed to focus on punishing countries that are aiding Iran.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked about it all, he waved the question off as irrelevant, saying that Putin’s got his own set of problems.
Are you seeing the same pattern I am? Before lunch just yesterday, our Treasury Secretary scolded Ukraine for fighting back against naked, murderous Russian aggression, our Secretary of State shrugged his shoulders about Iran and Russia working together to kill our troops, and Trump issued a new threat against our closest neighbor and ally, Canada.
If Putin had sat down Trump, Hegseth, Kennedy, Bessent, Rubio, and Stephen Miller in a room and ordered them to hurt and weaken the US, exactly what would they have done differently?
Of course, it was Trump who gave the orders and created the environment for all this to help Putin and screw America. And his motivation may be even more disgusting than the simple treason that this Manchurian Candidate scenario seems to indicate.
Start with the war. Ignoring the Constitution’s requirement that only Congress can declare war, Trump has now bombed at least 8 countries, the most recent being Iran where we’ve now burned through air defenses that we could have used to defend Europe (including Ukraine) from Russia or Taiwan from China.
Our Patriot interceptor inventory has collapsed from 2,330 before the war to somewhere between 759 and 827 today, a drop of at least 65 percent, and our military has expended nearly four-fifths of its THAAD inventory. It’s going to take years to rebuild those stocks, and in the meantime we’re badly weakened on the world stage.
While Russia knows that the Patriot is pretty much the only weapon capable of knocking down the ballistic missiles Russia’s been throwing at Kiev every night — and Trump has refused to provide any more new ones to Ukraine for over a year-and-a-half — Moscow has kicked their own missile production into high gear to exploit that shortage. Their ballistic missile strikes on Ukraine went from 61 in April to 198 in July with an even more radical increase across August.
The war Trump chose to join against Iran in violation of our laws and Constitution, in other words, is directly helping Putin kill children in Ukraine and assists Iran in hitting our troops in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, a humiliated South Korean President Lee had to go on TV and admit to his country that he was incapable of stopping Trump from pulling THADD components and Patriot batteries out of South Korea at the same time North Korea’s brutal dictator, Russian/Chinese ally, and Trump’s “good friend” Kim Jong Un is adding to his nuclear weapon inventory and testing ballistic missiles capable of incinerating Los Angeles and San Francisco.
While all that’s happening, Whiskey Pete Hegseth is hollowing out the Pentagon from the inside in his crusade to get rid of women and Black or Hispanic officers. The Army’s top civilian leader, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, resigned this week after multiple disputes with Pete, who’d previously fired Army chief General Randy George.
The resulting disaster is that our Army has no Senate-confirmed civilian or uniformed leadership in the middle of a shooting war.
Morale has collapsed, just like Putin would want, as Pete has most recently blocked another six officers from promotion, forced polygraphs on his own subordinates, and installed white male MAGA-only officers in senior slots.
And when reporters at Stars and Stripes — published since 1861 and started by Abraham Lincoln — dared write about the hardships sailors were enduring aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Pete fired the paper’s editor and publisher. So much for a free and honest press for our troops.
There’s also, in no particular order:
— Ordering new carriers back to steam catapults on a ship already under construction
— Making the future drone-carrier harder to build because now the ship won’t reach the fleet until 2034
— Bombing boats in the Caribbean in what legal scholars across the spectrum call criminal extrajudicial killings
— Our national debt hitting $40 trillion because of Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s tax cuts, on pace to break the World War II record by 2030
— Interest on that debt is already exceeding all defense spending, money that instead could have given us healthcare and free college for the past two generations
— Handing roughly a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the top one percent last year while cutting Medicaid by about the same amount
— Cutting SNAP so hard that more than a million poor American children lost their food benefits
— Refusing to raise the minimum wage or make it easier to unionize
— Cutting the CDC’s parasite surveillance staff from eleven people to three and stopping surveillance for cyclospora
— Driving inspections of foreign food facilities to historic lows
— Cutting the childhood vaccine schedule from seventeen diseases down to eleven while discouraging Americans from getting any vaccinations
— Refusing to enforce our antitrust laws
— Firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for publishing a jobs number he didn’t like, so now we’re getting happy-talk numbers that must be corrected 2 months later
— Attacking our closest allies and trading partners, Mexico and Canada, with punitive tariffs
— Withholding $1.7 billion from NIH and canceling 2,200 grants for medical research and cancer cures while Europe and Canada recruit our scientists
— Moving nearly 150 programs out of the Education Department to kill it and our kids’ chances at a better future
— Killing Voice of America and smiling about it as Russian and Chinese state media move to fill the vacuum
— Weaponizing the DOJ against Trump’s personal enemies
— Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR because they told the truth
— Threatening the broadcast licenses of networks that offended Dear Leader
— Hollowing out our cybersecurity agency protecting our infrastructure and elections (CISA) so today states are freaking out that there’s no federal election security plan for the midterms
— Pausing enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, our main defense against foreign money bribing or otherwise corrupting American officials, including the president
— Handing our media to friendly oligarchs
— Deregulating the crypto underground that moved $104 billion to sanctioned entities in a single year, most of it Russian, Iranian, and North Korean
— Pardoning the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other cop-killers and then erasing their seditious conspiracy convictions entirely
— Sending masked, unmarked, armed federal agents into American neighborhoods
— Deploying armed National Guard troops into American cities over the objections of their governors, mayors, and citizens and in violation of posse comitatus
— Labeling “anti-capitalism” and “anti-Christianity” as terrorism indicators under NSPM-7
— Destroying faith in our elections
— Standing up an FBI and IRS joint effort to harass good-government and anti-corruption nonprofits
— Capping federal student borrowing in ways that hit aspiring teachers hardest.
In addition to hugely helping out Vladimir Putin, almost every thing on that list can be used in one way or another to put money (often government money) into somebody’s pocket.
At the same time Trump’s appointee at the CFTC is suing states that try to regulate the futures betting markets, Uday’s … er, Don Jr’s … 1789 Capital venture fund led a billion-dollar funding round for Polymarket, valuing that betting outfir at $21 billion. Uday himself told Republican attorneys general to back off.
Both Uday and Qusay now have major stakes in both drone and other defense companies that benefit from our Pentagon tax dollars (that are never audited), and a rare-earth firm Uday invested in just got a $620 million Pentagon loan after the White House intervened to make it happen.
Whatever happened to my father’s GOP that fought fascists in WWII, hated repressive governments like in Russia and China, and preached fiscal moderation?
Between the Powell Memo, Jude Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy, five corrupt on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court, and Trump’s ass-kissing embrace of Putin, it’s pretty much entirely dead. Nothing left but suck-ups, bigots, and cynical opportunists who figure the best way to win an election is to shut down polling places in Texas.
We’re now watching a government run by people philosophically (and often financially) aligned with Putin and other tinpot dictators, who view our nation as a resource to be stripped for their own private gain.
So make sure everybody you know is registered and ready via vote.org, and double-check your registration if you live in a Red state. And then this November, turn out and vote these greedy bastards out of office while voting is still available to us.
And if this is the kind of reporting and analysis you want more of, please subscribe to the Hartmann Report and share this piece with the people in your life who need to hear it. Getting this kind of information in front of one more voter today matters more right now than almost anything else we can do.
Louise’s Daily Song: “What if Putin Gave the Orders?”
Comments on Wednesday’s Daily Take:
Trump Brags About His “Brilliant” Venezuela Scheme While History Screams a Warning
What we have is an international crime syndicate that has taken over several governments, including ours, intent on preserving a petroleum-based economy. This is why we continually interfere in oil-rich Venezuela, as if it were our colony, and blow up nations on all continents, overtly and covertly, for embracing dangerous ideas like having sovereignty and independence from American business interests.
~ Jeffrey Hobbs
The worst problem facing United States citizens is the power of super-rich men and their corporations. These Robber Barons’ with their economic power have made most citizens poorer and helped place all life on earth in danger of extinction due to the possible unaddressed effects of global warming.
~ Edward Oberwiser
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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club
The September book of the month is Looking Backward, From 2000 to 1887, by Edward Bellamy. Buy a copy or download it for free here.
This is a utopian science fiction novel published in 1888. When Julian West falls into a hypnotic sleep in 1887 Boston, he awakens 113 years later to find America transformed into a socialist utopia. Through conversations with his guide, Doctor Leete, West discovers a radically reimagined society where industry is nationalized, goods are equally distributed, and citizens retire at 45. This bestselling novel sparked a political mass movement and inspired over 162 discussion clubs across America.
