THE RICH GET RICHER

 

If you believe MAGA propaganda, you probably think Elon Musk made a huge sacrifice to be a uniquely autonomous part of the Trump administration, losing money hand over fist while helping Trump "make America great again."

But if that’s what you think, you would be dead wrong. Trump is no longer tweeting about Elon, and Musk himself is suddenly keeping a low profile. Maybe that's because year-over-year reports have begun to come out regarding just how profitable his time with Trump has been, while he has been busy putting thousands of Americans out of work and throwing state agencies into utter chaos.

Here's the lowdown: Depending on the source quoted, just since Trump's election in November of 2024, from which time Musk became an even more high-profile figure in the administration than his boss, Elon increased his net worth by an estimated $83 billion or more. Year-on-year between April of last year and April of this year—a year in which he was a central figure in Trump's campaign, election victory, and the first one hundred days of the Trump administration—his fortune increased by somewhere between $132 billion and $186 billion.

In fact, Musk, who was already the richest man on earth, has now broken even his own record for just how filthy rich one man can be. His net worth is currently calculated at right around $350 billion. Let’s put that amount into perspective: $350 billion is the annual GDP of the Czech Republic, one of the most advanced economies in Central and Eastern Europe, and one of the EU's most manufacturing-intensive economies.

White House reporters claim that, despite the sudden muting of his previously boisterous profile, Musk is still very much in the picture in Trump World. And he is still reaping the benefits of his close link to the Trump administration, and of the MAGA crowd’s infatuation with making billionaires richer.

Nor is he alone in garnering the benefits of the bedlam and confusion that is Trump’s trademark smokescreen for keeping America’s eye off the ball. Statistics show that, year-on-year since April of last year, the top ten American billionaires, including, Musk, have increased their combined net worth by between $365 and $500 billion (in other words, each of their fortunes on average has burgeoned by a hundred million dollars a day in the last year).

Meanwhile, average Americans have seen their 401(k) accounts ravaged and inflation remain out of control, despite Trump campaign promises to rein it in. To understand the inequality of accumulation at the top of the American wealth pyramid, it’s worth noting that ten average American workers—making $66,000 a year, which few middle-class workers actually earn—would have to work approximately fifty-five thousand years each and not spend a dime in order to scrape together the combined amount by which the ten top billionaires in country augmented their wealth in a single year.

And if the GOP manages to pass Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” into law, billionaires further stand to benefit. The bill, as it stands now, includes provisions that could significantly lower taxes for high-income earners and corporations. More specifically, it includes proposals to make permanent the tax cuts enacted under the first Trump administration, which included lower corporate tax rates and increased tax deductions on capital gains.

And although that tax bill presumes to lower taxes for average Americans as well, it is noteworthy that only the higher average wage-earners will benefit in real terms.

According to Professor Martha Gimbel, executive director and co-founder of the Yale Budget Lab, a research center that analyses government policy, "This is a bill where the positive impacts are really tilted toward rich Americans. It doesn’t really matter if people at the bottom are getting relatively small tax cuts if they're losing their health care, they're losing their SNAP benefits and they're having to pay more money in tariffs."

In other words, cuts that the bill proposes in Medicaid and food stamps will not only wipe out any tax-cut benefits to workers making less than thirty thousand dollars a year, but will also put an increased burden on their already strained finances.

In short, as the old song goes, “There's nothing surer /The rich get rich and the poor get poorer.”  And never has that been truer in the US than it is today.

THE DUNG BEETLE THEORY

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says Trump getting a luxury jet from Qatar is the same as the United States receiving the Statue of Liberty from France. 

In my opinion, anyone who can make that comparison with a straight face doesn't have the critical-thinking ability of a dung beetle.

ABOUT THIS DAMNED PARADE

 In a private group that I belong to, someone posted this query:

I have a question for any of the veterans in this group who would be kind enough to educate me. First of all, Thank You for your service.
And I am not making any judgment calls on this. I am just very curious. What do you think about the military parade that is supposed to happen in June? As a veteran, do you feel honored by this parade? I am not a veteran. And neither was my husband so I do not have a really good understanding of how this type of event would make you feel.

This was my response:

As a Regular Army vet (and former Spec 5) from the seventies, and as the son of a WWII sergeant who won four bronze stars in the fight against fascism in Europe, I feel angry that Trump is usurping the 250^th anniversary of the Army to celebrate, not the Army, but himself. It is especially upsetting when he is a serial draft-dodger, and someone who has repeatedly disparaged us and our brothers-and-sisters-in-arms both living and dead.

A man who said Navy pilot John McCain, held and tortured for years on end in Vietnam, wasn't a hero because he got caught; a man who referred to Army fallen in a French war-dead cemetery as suckers and losers; a man who stood in Arlington beside a decorated Marine general who had lost a son of his own in combat and said, "I don't get it. What was in it for them."

This man isn't fit to pronounce the NAME of the US Army, let alone be its commander-in-chief, and less still to hitchhike on an Army day of celebration and respect to hold a narcissistic, self-serving celebration for his own birthday, in which thousands of troops are forced to participate. This is especially true when the 250th anniversary of the US Army should be a celebration of democracy and of the hundreds of thousands who have defended it with their lives, patriotism and sacrifice, not a day of sadness on which he rubs our noses in the authoritarian regime that he has created.

 

That's how I feel about it.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S LATEST ATTEMPT TO RADICALIZE AMERICA

I saw this meme recently and decided to fact-check it. What I found out was that the news is even worse than it indicates. Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s supervision, more than three hundred eighty titles have been removed from the Nimitz Library at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. The titles all have to do with issues regarding race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, social injustice, and related topics.

While this move to suppress all progress made in the past century regarding diversity, equity and inclusion—in other words, civil rights—is one of the most detestable policies imposed by the pro-authoritarian Trump regime to date, what is as equally shocking as what the government has removed from the Nimitz Library is what it hasn’t. The cherry-picking nature of the administration’s raid on a broad cultural approach to forming future naval officers seems bent on stripping the academy’s library of an honest look at race and gender in America, while conserving works that promote fascist ideals and white supremacy.

That is not to say that those titles should be suppressed either. A place like the Nimitz Library, the idea of which is to help form the leaders of the future, should be an oasis of free expression. It is condescending to think that higher-education scholars should be directed to read only specific ideologies or authors. Reading broadly is how intellectuals develop critical thinking. You can't know what is behind Nazism, Marxism, fascism or any other political ideology without reading the original dogma. Otherwise you are only left with what you've been told by others who, more often than not, pretend to know because they too are working from second hand. 

Similarly, you can't know about the struggle for civil and human rights, the price of freedom and the cost of maintaining and extending democracy and ethnic equality without reading the works of those who have made those sacrifices. Nor can you understand why, in the face of such injustices, there is no such thing as reverse racism when compared to the overwhelmingly evil force of white supremacy. Unfortunately, that's the whole idea behind this regime's library purges.  

According to the Legal Defense Fund and LAMBDA Legal, an organization founded by Federal Judge and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1940, which sent a letter of protest and concern to Hegseth and to Vice-Admiral Yvette M. Davids, Superintendent of the Annapolis academy, “the US Naval Academy evaluated its book collection in Nimitz Library following the verbal order” (apparently by Hegseth) “demanding compliance with President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14190.” LAMBDA Legal reported that, “the Naval Academy reviewed nine hundred titles to screen for what it claims are ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ topics. The list of three hundred eighty-one titles removed from circulation almost exclusively touch upon topics pertaining to the experiences of people of color, especially Black people, and/or LGBTQ people, including:  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Stone Fruit by Lee Lai,  The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen, Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, and Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.

LAMBDA Legal and the LDF point out that, “At the same time, the collection retained other books with messages and themes that privilege certain races and religions over others, including The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan by Thomas Dixon Jr., Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad” (a novella considered a literary classic in which Conrad sharply criticizes the devastating nature of European colonialism, but in which his nineteenth-century view of Africans as inferior savages has been called into question by modern-day scholars as decidedly racist).

In their letter to Hegseth and Davids, Lambda Legal and the LDF make clear their objection to any sort of censorship imposed by the government as a whole or by any specific administration. They underscore that the fact that it is “the constitutional responsibility of the US Naval Academy to protect cadets’ right to receive information and the danger of censoring materials based on viewpoints disfavored by the current Administration.” They also emphasize the importance in intellectual development of reading and engaging with varying viewpoints from diverse authors, “particularly writers from historically marginalized communities,” as a key to developing critical thinking, empathy and intellectual agility. They point out that this is the only way to properly prepare future officers “to engage thoughtfully and responsibly with topics that reflect the rich diversity of our nation.”

In their letter,  LAMBDA Chief Legal Officer Jennifer C. Pizer and LDF Director of Strategic Initiatives Jin Hee Lee, warn that  “the decision of the Naval Academy to strip the Nimitz Library of diverse voices and viewpoints, especially those written by and/or about Black and LGBTQ people, constitutes unconstitutional censorship of politically disfavored ideas in direct conflict with a functioning democracy.” They add that, “such censorship is especially dangerous in an educational setting, where critical inquiry, intellectual diversity, and exposure to a wide array of perspectives are necessary to educate future citizen-leaders.” LAMBDA Legal and the LDF point out that the US Naval Academy “is tasked with educating and cultivating cadets to be leaders of a pluralistic nation,” and conclude that, as such, “it has done a disservice to cadets by preventing access to critical information.”

The complaint formulated by these two respected American legal organizations sheds light on the culture war the Trump administration is waging, mostly unspecified and behind the scenes. It serves to demonstrate that the warnings being issued since 2016 by journalists and liberal academics regarding a sharp turn toward extreme-right, pro-fascist ideals in the Era of Trump is not “fake news fabricated by the liberal mainstream media” or “lies made up by Democrats” to discredit what is clearly a white-supremacist cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump. Rather, it is hard evidence—in addition to such actions as the gutting of American public schools, bullying premier civilian institutions of higher learning, and the shuttering of the Department of Education—of an intentional policy by the administration to censor any but the most extreme far-right ideals within the nation’s education system.

As I’ve mentioned here a number of times, the Era of Trump is guided by a blueprint that, in the president’s previous term as, to a far more extreme degree, in this one would almost seem to take its cue from some of the most chilling dystopian novels ever written: notably, George Orwell’s 1984 (in which every aspect of society is dominated by an all-powerful dictator known as Big Brother), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (in which women are stripped of all rights and become the submissive wives, loyal jailers and brood mares of a patriarchal society), and now, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (in which “firemen” start rather than put out fires, and what they burn are books, and the homes and buildings where clandestine libraries are stored).

Considered a sub-section of “sci-fi”, this type of dystopian literature has proven prescient, escaping the bounds of the realm of frightening irreality, and coming home to roost as the new reality of the Era of Trump 2.0 in America. Only time will tell if Americans will rise up and rebel against the trend or, if like the beleaguered citizens of the grim dystopian worlds of fiction, they will submissively “wait and see” until it is too late to halt the organized destruction of a two-and-a-half century-old once-great democracy.  

 

 

 

 

 

CRIMEA: LET’S LOOK AT THE FACTS

When Donald Trump came to office last January, it was with the promise that he would have the war in Ukraine over with in twenty-four hours. Like much of what Donald Trump says and promises, this statement too was empty, hyperbolic and always undoable.

Since then, however, he and what I call his non-negotiators—principally Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice-President JD Vance and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff—have sought to quickly end the conflict by scandalously siding with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and vilifying Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. This approach ignores completely the fact that the Ukraine War is a war of aggression perpetrated by Russia’s totalitarian leader against a sovereign nation. It also disregards the direct challenge Russia’s aggression poses to NATO, and to the sovereignty of the nations of both Eastern and Western Europe.

The Trump administration’s stance further ignores the fact that Russia is a natural enemy of the US and of the West as a whole, engaged ever since World War II in an ideological and geopolitical struggle for worldwide influence and power that is opposed to the West’s own world leadership goals. There has only been one brief period of rapprochement following the fall of the Berlin Wall. But since the start in 1999 of the reign of Vladimir Putin, alternating between the offices of prime minister and president, the focus of the Kremlin has been on reviving Russian imperialism and on the reestablishment of a bipolar world.

Incredibly, considering this environment, the officials handling Trump’s virtual capitulation to Putin’s whims are now quoting a Russian talking point as the basis for their “negotiations”. Namely, that the war is not Russia’s fault at all, but Ukraine’s for seeking a place as a Western ally within the framework of NATO. Here, my friends, is where we should be seeing a huge flashing sign reading: What’s wrong with this picture?

What I mean by that, in case you’ve let yourself get confused about who Putin is and who the US is supposed to be, is that Ukraine’s wanting a closer relationship with the West is now, and should always have been, a good thing, not a fault. Ukraine is a key piece in the geopolitical puzzle, the very terrain which stands between Russia and renewed domination of Eastern Europe. In case you’re getting lost on the map, if Ukraine’s wanting to be in NATO sparked Russia’s war of aggression, letting Russia have Ukraine is the same as opening a gaping hole in Western defense against a repeat of Russian post-war imperialism, and of the czarist imperialism that preceded it.

In the manner of Herod making a reluctant gift to Salome of John the Baptist’s head, Trump administration officials conducting these non-negotiations are starting from a position of abject weakness by kneeling before Putin with Crimea on a platter. Their sorely uneducated notion is that Crimea has always pretty much been Russian anyway, and besides, Putin grabbed it a decade ago, so, hey, finders keepers.

But is that really the case? The answer is, no.

The fact is that prior to Russia’s original imperialist advances, Crimea was inhabited by various ethnic groups, but principally the Crimean Tatars. They were a Turkic people who established the Crimean Khanate in the fifteenth century. Indeed, the name Crimea is derived from the Turkish root word Qirim. Crimea was a vassal khanate of the Ottoman Empire from 1478 to 1774. The Ukrainian region was, then, part of the Ottoman Empire’s broader sphere of influence, not that of the Russian Empire.

It was only through conquest, not by legal or consensual means, that the Russian Empire annexed Crimea in 1783, following the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774).  At the end of that war, the Ottoman Empire had granted Crimea independence through the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774). So the Russian annexation nine years later was the first instance of Russia’s simply grabbing sovereign Crimea for its own strategic purposes. It was that annexation that marked the start of a Russian presence on the peninsula, but contrary to Putin’s narrative, that presence wasn’t based on any inherent or historic Russian claim to Crimea.

Crimean Tatars

The Putin myth echoed by Trump officials that ethnic Russians have always formed the population of Crimea is also spurious.  While it is true that Cossacks traditionally formed part of the Crimean population, along with the native Turkic Crimean Tatars, and while it is also true that Cossacks took part in Russian military campaigns throughout history, the Cossacks cannot be counted as Russians. They were a diverse group of predominantly East Slavic people. A mix of peasants, escaped serfs, and some nobility, they emerged as a nomadic society in the fifteenth century, banding together for mutual protection. They were a quasi-military and semi-nomadic society that primarily inhabited the Ukrainian steppes, venturing as well into Southern Russia. While the Cossacks still exist, with various levels of organization and activity, their communities have been reconstituted and adapted to modern society. 

Highly independent and of autonomous spirit, while not strictly mercenaries, the armies of the Cossacks often fought for a variety of regional powers, including Russia, in exchange for self-governance and a free lifestyle. They played a significant role in the history of the region, including participation in conflicts with various states in resistance against foreign invaders. But they formed part of no other nation.

Cossacks - quasi-military, semi-nomadic people

Nor is the term "Cossack" Russian. It is derived from the Turkic word kazak, which, literally translated, means adventurer or free man. Furthermore, East Slavs, the ethnicity to which the Cossacks pertain, were once part of a federation of principalities known as Kyivan Rus', a medieval state that existed from the late ninth to the mid-thirteenth century. It emerged as a powerful confederation with the city-state of Kyiv (today the capital of Ukraine) as its capital, and its territory encompassed much of what are today Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Russia. 

That said, the Cossacks weren’t indigenous to Crimea. Having taken  part in Russian military campaigns in the area, some of their number eventually settled on or near the Crimean Peninsula, but their presence does not give Russia a legitimate claim. Especially since some of the campaigns the Cossacks took part in where Russian efforts to subjugate and/or displace the native Crimean Tatars.

As for the Tatars, they were the dominant ethnic and political group in Crimea for centuries, and still formed the majority of the population until 1944, when Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin engineered their mass deportation. It was, then, through an act of what is today known as ethnic cleansing, rather than through any legitimate transfer of sovereignty, that the Crimean region’s demographic balance was tipped toward a predominantly ethnic Russian population.

Stalin's deportation of the Tatars

From a strictly legal standpoint, ten years after Stalin’s annexation of Crimea in 1944, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (governing body of the USSR) transferred the peninsula back to Ukraine in 1954. Basically, the Supreme Soviet removed Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and placed it once more under the original control of Ukraine (at the time, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). Ukraine’s claim to Crimea was never questioned after that, until Putin’s decade-long challenge to Ukrainian sovereignty—not by the Russian Federation after the fall of the USSR in 1991, nor by any international body.  

What is more, International law recognizes Crimea as part of Ukraine. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine inherited Crimea as part of its internationally recognized borders. Russia itself recognized these borders in multiple treaties, including the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arsenal.

Bearing all of this in mind, Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its armed invasion of other parts of Ukraine’s sovereign territory, using devastating military force, are violations of international law, and have sparked the largest major ground war in Europe since World War II—one involving a world-class nuclear power. Russia’s war of aggression on a sovereign country has drawn widespread condemnation in the international community. The United Nations has passed a resolution (R68/262) reaffirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity and declaring invalid a referendum held by Russia in Crimea to try and justify its annexation.

Crimean Tatar children in traditional dress

In short, Russia’s claim to Crimea and all other areas of Ukraine that it has usurped by military force since 2014 is historically, ethnically, legally and morally illegitimate, and the Trump administration’s attempts to justify Russia’s actions based on some “might makes right” theory that forms part of Trump’s authoritarian view of the world, fly in the face of international law, of respect for the sovereignty of free nations, and of America’s traditional role as the erstwhile leader of the Western world.

Worst of all, Donald Trump admires authoritarians. It’s a schoolyard philosophy, a bully’s attitude of joining other bullies in ganging up on the weaker kids in order not to have to stand up to the other bullies himself.  It’s a stance that not only makes the US Russia’s vassal, but which is also tantamount to appeasing a dangerous, megalomaniacal imperialist.

It is easy enough to understand if we stop pretending this is business as usual and start realizing that Trump identifies with Putin because Trump has megalomaniacal expansionist delusions of his own when it comes to our neighbors. There is all too obviously no difference between Trump’s feverish, openly-stated ambition of taking over Canada and making it a state, and Putin’s realized dream of invading Russia’s sovereign neighbors and making them part of his empire.

Appeasing bullies has never worked. There is no better example to quote than that of another megalomaniacal expansionist who invaded his neighbors prior to World War II. The US and Europe alike appeased Germany’s Adolf Hitler when he took over Austria. They turned a blind eye as well when he went on to invade Czechoslovakia, apparently hoping if they let him violate the sovereignty of a couple of nations, he would somehow get it out of his system. It was a fatal mistake, one with the most catastrophic consequences the world has even known.

Western Europe needs to stop appeasing not only Vladimir Putin, but also Donald Trump, if the US itself continues to fail to rein in its rogue leader. European leaders must stop hoping against hope that Trump will have some sort of epiphany and suddenly begin exercising the kind of pro-Western leadership the US consistently produced before the Era of Trump. For as long as Trump is leading it, the US is no longer a reliable ally, and does not have the best interests of the free world in mind. If anyone is to save Europe from the new wave of Russian imperialism—which, make no mistake, will not end in Ukraine if Ukraine is abandoned to its fate—it will have to be Western Europe itself, and the time to step up, sideline Trump, and draw a line in Ukraine is now.  

HERE’S A THOUGHT…

A universal rule of thumb I learned covering South American dictatorships in the nineteen-seventies and eighties: If a single person’s human and civil rights can be suspended, everyone’s rights are at risk.

***

A lot of people seem to think cutting out due process and just trusting the president, the attorney general or the secretary of state to randomly decide innocence or guilt is a great shortcut to getting dangerous criminals off the street and/or out of the country. Instead, it’s an ad hoc shortcut to making the Bill of Rights obsolete and allowing the government to arbitrarily accuse anybody it wants of anything it wants and to be the sole judge, jury and executioner, with no legal recourse to its decisions. (Case in point: The president is now talking about arbitrarily, and unconstitutionally, snatching American citizens off the street and sending them to a foreign gulag, where American justice is powerless). It's likely they will eventually be known as America's "disappeared".This is absolutism, of the sort prevalent in places like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, etc.

***

The arbitrary nature of the Department of Justice under the current administration is graphically on display when the attorney general obeys an order to try and find a way to jail and exile “homegrown terrorists” of Trump’s choosing, while justifying the president’s release from prison of fifteen hundred pro-Trump domestic terrorists convicted of attacking the Capitol in his name.

***

When you start dictating what both public and private universities can teach, suspending freedom of speech, punishing professors for exposing students to diverse ideas and teaching them to think for themselves, blackmailing authorities by threatening to withhold federal funds if they don’t align the syllabus with official government policy, you no longer have institutions of higher learning. You have “re-education centers” whose goal is to crush dissent, eliminate critical thinking, and create a uniform society in which everyone toes the official line.

***

There may well be some excellent reasons for private Ivy League schools with multi-billion-dollar endowments not to receive even more millions or billions in taxpayer money. But not agreeing to ideological and educational restrictions that a centralized federal government seeks to dictate isn’t one of them. Accepting political and intellectual strings-attached money from the government is tantamount to the prostitution of higher education, and yet another nail in the coffin of democracy.

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If you're interested in how a leader might transition into dictatorial behavior based on historical examples, these tendencies nearly always involve undermining democratic institutions, centralizing power, restricting freedom of the press, limiting political opposition, and using the legal system to maintain control. So far, with Donald Trump, we’re batting a thousand.

***

When a president who has already once tried to overthrow the government and remain in power even after decisively losing an election manages to create a rubber-stamp majority in Congress, hires a politically compromised attorney general, talks about returning to power after the current term is over even though he won’t be eligible to serve again (in accordance with not one, but two constitutional provisions), violates due process misusing federal powers, defies the lower and appellate courts and considers the opinions of the Supreme Court optional, as well as flirting with the future possibility of imposing martial law, perhaps it’s time to stop asking ourselves if there’s a possibility that the US could become an authoritarian regime. News flash, folks: It already is.

 

 

 

AUTHORITARIANISM DEFINED

Film documentary cameraman Duane Empey posted this excerpt (see image) from a Washington Post report. I saw it during my regular morning social media perusal, and was struck by what a succinct description it is of the Trump-MAGA mindset. And I was even more struck by how evenly it matches my own experienced definition of authoritarianism.

Yes, in a nutshell, that's Trump, and that's authoritarianism. 

Basically, doing whatever you decide to do while having your morning bowel movement, then going with it until some other whim strikes your fancy, and just not giving a fuck if the whole world burns to the ground because of it.

Nobody's mentioning this anymore like they did during his first term, but it’s worth recalling that this is the same narcissistic, psychopathic felon who remains in possession of the nuclear codes. 

Think about it.