Tocador de laúd grotesco, Jacques Callot,1621.
“If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments.”
– Steven Wright
+ What’s happening here?
1. A hunter-killer team raid in Fallujah
2. An ICE raid on a taqueria in Minneapolis, MN
+ We were told that the deportations would focus on criminals (not students, children, and people who cut lawns, scrub floors, pick strawberries, or work construction) in order to protect public safety. But that was never the point. They were never going to achieve “mass” deportations by just targeting noncitizens with criminal records. According to the conservative Washington Examiner, at a recent meeting with DHS and ICE officials, Stephen Miller, irate at the “low” number of deportations, screamed: “What do you mean you’re going after criminals? Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?” It’s not about “public safety” but a public spectacle of terroristic daily arrests of anyone, anywhere at any time…
+ Back in March, the Trump administration bragged about raiding a big Tren de Aragua gathering” in the Texas hill country outside of Austin. Forty-five people were taken into custody, including children. But they’ve said little about the big bust since. There’s a good reason: the gathering wasn’t a meeting of gang leaders, but a birthday party for a five-year-old boy. None of the people taken into custody by ICE had a criminal record. None of those arrested have been charged with a crime in the two months since their detention.
+ As Stephen Miller pushed immigration officials at DHS, Border Patrol and ICE to maximize arrests and detentions, internal ICE emails reveal that bureaucrats ordered officers to “turn the creative knob up to 11″ for arrests by interviewing and arresting “collaterals,” ie., people who ICE incidentally came across who were not the subject of any warrants.
+ Congratulations, ICEtroopers, looks like you took down a real menace to society: Martir Garcia Lara, age 10, and his father were detained and separated after they showed up for a hearing on their immigration status. “He’s alone and he’s not able to return home,” said PTA president Jasmin King. “We have not received any information on why they were detained. All we know is that Martir is just a fourth-grader who’s by himself, without his dad, without a parent, and just in a place that he probably doesn’t know, so we can only imagine what he might be feeling.” Martir has attended Torrance Elementary since the first grade.
+ ICE agents are posing as employees of electric power companies in order to gain access to people’s houses. (This is the crime of perfidy under international law.) Maybe this is the real reason the Trump administration wants more “electricians” instead of “LGBTQ Harvard grads”…
+ Real Community Policing…Bolt profiles a group in San Diego that patrols neighborhoods to identify potential ICE presence: “They keep watch for vehicles that may belong to federal agencies, and use livestreams, radios, and social media to keep communities informed.”
+ David French, rightwing columnist for the NYT: “Immigration has become so important in political evangelicalism that white evangelicals supported Trump more because of his stance on immigration than because of his stance on abortion.”
+ Speaking of evangelical support for mass deportations, here’s a photo of children being cuffed by ICE…(I’d wear a mask to hide my face, if this were my job, too.)
+ ABC News reported that Ken Schrader, the chief of the criminal division for the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville, resigned following the office’s decision to seek an indictment against Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Sources close to the former prosecutor told ABC News that Schrader resigned because he considered the case against Abrego Garcia to be politically motivated. Can you say, “Trump-ed up charges?” In any event, he’s out of Bukele’s concentration camp, back in the US (where only a month Kristi Noem said he would never be) and will have his vindictive criminal and immigration cases heard by a federal court.
+ On Friday, ICE injured and detained David Huerta, the president of SEIU California, for peacefully observing and filming an ICE raid in Los Angeles. SEIU: “ICE picked the wrong side. The wrong state. The wrong person. and the wrong union. David Huerta stood up. And 750,000 SEIU workers are standing with him.”
+ During a raid in Memphis, an ICE agent pulled a gun and pointed it at the daughter of a man they snatched off the street in his neighborhood, as she screamed, “What are you doing? He’s not a criminal!”
+ NPR has obtained a DHS memo requesting some 20,000 National Guard troops to help a wide variety of ICE tasks including “night operations and rural interdiction,” as well as “guard duty and riot control” inside detention facilities.
+ 220,000: Number of Chinese students in the US whose visas Trump has vowed to cancel, each of whom probably contributes $50K a year to the US economy and more to the intellectual and social capital of the country. Removing them makes the country poorer and dumber, both of which appear to be Trump’s objectives across the board.
+ According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the Trump budget bill allocates $185 billion for its mass deportation scheme, which means that Trump, the defender of the working man, wants to spend 80 times more on immigration enforcement than labor standards enforcement.
+ The Secret Service is the latest federal agency to be dragged into Trump’s “mass removal” operations…
+ “Should immigrants have the same right to express political views online as US citizens?”
Yes: 53%
No: 30%YouGov / June 2, 2025
+ “Hello, ICE? Lt. Ellen Ripley here, calling to report a little incident that took place on the space tug Nostromo…”
Still from Ridley Scott’s “Alien.”
+++
+ The final CBO analysis of the Big Beautiful Mass Death for the Poor/ Billionaire Tax Cut Bill…
+ Revenue falls by $3.7 trillion over 10 years
+ Spending falls by $1.3 trillion
+ Debt rises by $2.4 trillion over 10 years
+ Uninsured pop. Rises by 10.9 million in 2034
+ According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the House cuts to Medicaid could kick 15 million people off their health coverage.
+ In an analysis performed at the request of Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden, the Yale School of Public Health and the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania estimate that if the Republican reconciliation bill is signed into law, over 51,000 people will die annually. The estimate is based on the annual impact of four policies included in the Republican reconciliation bill:
+ 11,300 more Americans will die as a result of working people losing health coverage from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA);
+ 18,200 more Americans will die as a result of low-income seniors losing subsidies that reduce their prescription drug costs;
+ 13,000 more Americans will die as a result of the elimination of safe staffing requirements in nursing homes; and
+ 8,811 more Americans will die as a result of the failure to extend tax credits for ACA coverage.
Iowa Senator Joni Ernst reassured her angry constituents that, “We’re all going to die.”
+ At her town hall, when an angry crowd shouts that people will die due to Medicaid and SNAP cuts, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst responded, “Well, we all are going to die.”
+ Mehmet Oz–the “natural” health care huckster Oprah gave birth to–on the 13 million people about to be kicked off their health insurance: “We’re gonna ask you to go on and do something else, like go on the exchanges, or get a job and get commercial insurance, but we’re not gonna continue to pay for Medicaid for those audiences.”
+ Let the rich eat the rich!
+ This week, Elon Musk denounced Trump’s “Big Beautiful Budget” Bill:
I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it…It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden American citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.
+ Then the inevitable happened…
+ Causing already fragile Tesla shares to fall by 14%…
+ Which prompted a counter-counterpunch from Musk:
Whatever. Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk replied rather bitterly on X, the platform he owns. “In the entire history of civilization, there has never been legislation that’s both big and beautiful. Everyone knows this! Either you get a big and ugly bill or a slim and beautiful bill. Slim and beautiful is the way.
+ Followed by a Tweet…
+ Then Bloomberg News reported that Musk said he was going to retaliate by immediately decommissioning SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft that ferries cargo and people to the International Space Station for the US.
+ Mark Ames: “Billionaire Bum Fights!”
+ Will Trump respond by deporting the Afrikaner victims of “white genocide” he just granted visas to at Elon’s urging?
+ No doubt Republicans are returning their Teslas and Democrats are scrambling to buy back the ones they sold. (The Tesla Trump “bought” is still parked at the White House.)
+ Steve Bannon rebuked Trump, the House Republicans and Elon Musk on the Trump Budget Bill:
You want to stop the debt bomb, Elon and you guys on Capitol Hill? You’re going to have to raise taxes. The wealthy can’t get an extension of the tax cuts. That’s got to go to the middle class and the working class. That has to be extended and made permanent…the top bracket has got to go back to 40 percent. The math simply doesn’t work.
+ Bannon says he told Trump to cancel Musk’s federal contracts and launch investigations into his immigration status: “They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status, because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately.”
+ Still more Bannon, on Musk’s call for Trump to be impeached:
You’re going to tell me we should allow some fucking punk to sit there and say he should be impeached and JD should step in? Fuck you, dude. We’re going to go to fucking war, and I’m going to rip your fucking face off.
+ Can’t wait for the photos, Steve!
+ Meanwhile, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham chastised Trump for threatening Musk: “Musk is his own person. The government contracts that he has stand on their own merit. They shouldn’t be called into question. Threatening to pull them, that’s not wise when five minutes ago you were, of course, hailing Musk’s work in helping rescue the stranded Americans in space. Elon Musk is like the Thomas Edison of our time. He sacrificed for America personally and professionally.”
+ And then there’s House Speaker Mike Johnson: “Do not doubt and do not second-guess and don’t ever challenge the president of the United States.”
+ The Speaker of the House used to be one of the most powerful and feared positions in the US government. Presidents trembled before figures like Joseph Cannon, Sam Rayburn, and Henry Clay. It’s amazing that its power–which is, of course, the power of the purse–has been deflated into this wimpish little sycophant, who instead of exercising a check on executive authority serves an obedient rubber stamp–a kind of human autopen for the whims of the Trump autocracy.
+++
+ Mirror, mirror on the wall…
+ In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the Mirror Stage in a child lasts between 6 and 18 months. It’s been going strong in “a man known as Donald J. Trump” for 79 years and counting.
+ Percent of Americans who expect their household finances to be better in a year:
+ GOP: 56
+ Democrats: 17
+ All Americans: 34%
+ Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent: “We want the US to be more like Florida and less like New York.” Underwater?
+ In fact, turning the US into Florida means you’ll live a poorer, shorter and more crime-ridden life.
+ There’s a total of $698 billion worth of homes for sale in the US, up 20.3% from a year ago and the highest dollar amount ever. Redfin reports that there are a record 34% more sellers in the market than buyers.
+ Japan’s Prime Minister Ishiba reiterates that the country will not negotiate on U.S. tariffs.
+ Global economic growth is projected to slow to 2.3% in 2025, from 2.8% in 2024, due to the effects of tariffs, according to Citibank economists.
+ F around and find out, Scott…
+ The world now has a decisively more positive opinion of China than of the United States, with 79% of the world’s countries favoring China. The finding is based on a survey of 111,273 people in 100 countries by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, founded by former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. According to the report
+ 79% of the world’s countries favor China over the U.S.
+ This is the even case among countries classified by the survey as “democracies” (as opposed to “authoritarian”), especially in Western Europe
+ China is now the only great power among the three with a net positive image, while the U.S. and Russia are both viewed more negatively than positively
+ The U.S., in particular, has experienced a steep decline in its global standing over the past year.
The average American salary is approximately $66,600 per year; however, manufacturing jobs in the U.S. pay an average of only about $25 per hour, or around $51,890 per year.
+ Withdrawals from home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) during the first three months of 2025 reached their highest first-quarter level in 17 years.
+ The World Travel & Tourism Council estimates that the U.S. economy will lose $12.5 billion in spending from international visitors in 2025, which it describes as a “direct blow to the U.S. economy overall, impacting communities, jobs, and businesses from coast to coast.”
+ CNBC: You think that’s gonna go through — telling the Federal Reserve that it can’t pay interest to banks anymore?
TED CRUZ: For nearly 100 years, until the financial crisis, the Fed paid no interest on reserves.
Rep. Dean: What’s the tariff on bananas?
Commerce Secretary Lutnick: Generally, 10%.
Rep. Dean: Walmart has already increased the cost of bananas by 8%.
Commerce Secretary Lutnick: If you build in America, there is no tariff.
Rep. Dean: We cannot build bananas in America.
+ How can we become a proper banana republic without bananas?
+ Elon Musk: “The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year.”
+ MARIA BARTIROMO: What, in your view, would trigger 4% growth in the second half of the year?
SEN. ROGER MARSHALL: Number one is just an attitude.
+ The economy all depends on your attitude? Then over to you boys…
+++
Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawai’i’s Big Island peaked for the year at 430.5 ppm, 3.6 ppm higher than last year and the second largest May-May increase in the 67-year Mauna Loa record. In 2023, the CO2 peaked at 424 ppm. Just wait until you see next year’s numbers!
+ The top 4 countries phasing out coal the fastest
1. Portugal: Complete coal phase-out in 4 years, hitting zero in 2021
2. Greece: Complete phase-out in 7 years, will hit zero in 2026
3. Denmark: Complete phase out in 11 years, will hit zero in 2028
4. UK: Complete phase-out in 12 years, hit zero in 2024
+ You know who’s not phasing out coal (aside from the US, of course)? Australia, which just extended the license for the country’s biggest fossil fuel project in a landscape that is sacred to Indigenous tribes for its ancient rock carvings, some of which are 50,000 years old, and there’s evidence that air pollution from the project is already damaging them.
+ It’s June and Canada’s burning…
+ More people work for NYC’s Metropolitan Transport Authority (70k) than work as coal miners across the entire country (42k).
+ Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy on why everyone should ask Qatar for a private jet of their own: “If you’re liberal, they want you to take public transportation … the problem is that it’s dirty. You have criminals. It’s homeless shelters. It’s insane asylums. It’s a work ground for the criminal element of the city to prey upon the good people.”
+ Re: Duffy’s contention that public transport is too dangerous for most real Americans: The death rate for driving is about 60 times higher than for taking public transportation.
+ Trump found someone even less competent to run FEMA than Michael Brown: “Staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency were left baffled on Monday after the head of the U.S. disaster agency said during a briefing that he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season…”
+ I’m convinced that a random selection of 26 people shopping for groceries at Piggly Wiggly would prove more competent and serious at running the government than those Trump hand-picked for his cabinet.
+ Sen. Reed: I’m not a great mathematician, but I think you were talking about a trillion dollars in savings. I believe 1.5 billion times ten is 15 billion.
Ed Sec. Linda McMahon: I think the cut is 1.2 billion a year.
Reed: That would be 12 billion, not a trillion.
McMahon: Okay.
***
Sen. Mullin: What were we ranked nationally in math and reading in 1979?”
Education Sec. McMahon: We were very low on the totem pole.
Mullin: We were number 1 in 1979.
+++
+ Another late-breaking shot from Musk: Trump is in the Epstein files…
+ Trump fired back: “You saw a man who was very happy when he stood behind the Oval desk, even with a black eye. I said, ‘Do you want a little makeup?’ He said, ‘No, I don’t think so,’ which is interesting.”
+ Perhaps Musk refused because Trump’s personal makeup compact contained the wrong skin tone, Scorched Kumquat. Elon prefers a porcelain-like Goth pallor.
+ Linda McMahon may not know much about education, but she does know how to promote a Musk/Trump cage fight.
+ Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense: “The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.”
+ Only 22% of Americans say they enjoy using AI tools like ChatGPT, according to Statista. The more pertinent question is: How many Americans enjoy being used as tools by AI?
+ Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic: “AI can cause unemployment to go to 20% in 5 years, and Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen. It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it. [But] AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it. AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.”
+ Aaron Regunberg: “It’s so wild that Google one day announced “we’re going to replace the search function you’ve come to rely on with a new page that foists untrue made up garbage on you, oh and also we’re going to drain dry every existing river to do it” and we’ve all just accepted that.”
+ WH Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: “Electricians, plumbers — we need more of those in our country, and less LGBTQ graduate majors from Harvard University. And that’s what this administration’s position is.” Why is Barron going to NYU instead of getting an electrician’s certificate from Palm Beach County Community College?
+++
+ Rep. Chip Roy has some concerns, which he elaborated on during a speech in the wee hours on the floor of the US House: “Is anybody paying attention to what’s happening in London?! You’ve got a massive Muslim takeover of the United Kingdom going on right before our eyes… I’ve got some strong concerns about Sharia Law and whether that will be forced on the American people.”
I don’t know what Sharia Law entails exactly, but if it doesn’t involve masked government men snatching and cuffing five-year-olds on their way to school and making them defend themselves in immigration court, it might be an improvement…
+ Countries with the highest childcare cost as a percentage of a couple’s wages…
United States: 33%
New Zealand: 30%Cyprus: 29%
Czech Republic: 28%
UK: 25%
Ireland: 25%
Switzerland: 21%Australia: 16%
Netherlands: 15%
Canada: 15%
Slovak Republic: 12%
Belgium: 12%
OECD Nations: 11%
Israel: 11%
Finland: 11%
Denmark: 11%Spain: 9%
Romania: 9%
France: 9%
Slovenia: 8%
Poland: 8%
Norway: 8%
Lithuania: 8%
Japan: 7%
Hungary: 7%
Greece: 6%Sweden: 5%
Portugal: 5%
S. Korea: 5%
Iceland: 5%
Croatia: 5%
Russia: 4%
Austria: 3%
Germany 2%Malta: 0%
Italy: 0%
Latvia: 0%
Estonia: 0%
Bulgaria: 0%
Source: OECD
+++
Here’s a U.S. senator urging Israel to sink a boat bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza and kill activist Greta Thunberg. This is no idle threat, either. In 2014, Israel attacked the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza, killing nine people on board the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara, including an American citizen, 18-year-old Furkan Doğan.
+ Greta Thunberg, defying Lindsey Graham’s call for Israel to attack the unarmed peace activists on the Freedom Flotilla, standing “unbowed” on the bow of the Madleen, as it sails to Gaza: “We can swim very well.”
+ Juan González: “Greta, could you talk about how you see the issue of Palestinian freedom connecting or intersecting with the issue that you’re best known for, which is climate change activism?”
+ Greta Thunberg: “For me, there is no way of distinguishing the two. We cannot have climate justice without social justice. The reason why I am a climate activist is not because I want to protect trees. I’m a climate activist because I care about human and planetary well-being. And those are extremely interlinked. For example, when we see the genocide in Gaza, of course, there are some very obvious links–that ecocide, environmental destruction, is a very common method used in war and to oppress people.”
+ Statement from MIT Class of 2025 President Megha Vemuri on being banned from commencement for giving an anti-genocide speech:
“I am not disappointed that I did not get to walk the stage with my classmates yesterday. For two entire graduation seasons, over two years now, thousands of bright Gazan students should have been able to walk across a stage and receive their diplomas. These students did not get to walk because Israel murdered them, displaced them from their homes, and destroyed their schools. I see no need for me to walk across the stage of an institution that is complicit in this genocide.
I am, however, disappointed that MIT’s officials massively overstepped their roles to punish me without merit or due process, with no indication of any specific policy broken. These repressive measures are proof that the university is guilty of aiding and abetting genocide and is scrambling to quell dissent while hypocritically claiming to protect free speech. They want to distract from what is happening in Palestine and their role in it, and instead shift the focus to punishing students of conscience. MIT and all complicit institutions must know that they will have no peace until they cut ties with the Israeli Military.”
+ According to a report in the Guardian by Tom Perkins, the University of Michigan hired undercover operatives to spy on pro-Palestinian students and groups both on and off campus. They secretly recorded students, eavesdropped on their conversations, falsely accused them of crimes, disguised themselves as being disabled, hurled profane insults at them and drove a car at a student.
+ Columbia University did the equivalent of Stupid Pet Tricks to every crazy threat and demand from the Trump administration. And what did it gain them? Trump’s Education Department is moving to strip the university (ranked 13th in the US, between Brown and Dartmouth) of its accreditation…
+ Dan Sheehan: “AOC—a person I once greatly admired, arguably the country’s most influential progressive politician, and one of very few members of Congress not funded by the pro-Israel lobby—has not posted about Gaza since Nov 2024. Not one tweet in over six months.”
+ I’ll see your Bono and Thom Yorke and raise you with MS Rachel and Eddie Vedder…Vedder on Israel:
I swear to god there’s some people out there just ready to kill and go across borders and take over land that doesn’t belong to them, and they should get the fuck out. We don’t want to give them our taxes to drop bombs on children. No more!
+ I’ve watched many hours of Ms. Rachel’s show with the 3-year-old, who was absolutely enthralled by her. It took me a while to figure out what her almost hypnotic appeal was because it’s a very simple show with no gimmicks. But like Fred Rogers, Ms Rachel is able to project her gentleness and true affection for children in a medium that is full of phonies. Her devotion to the children of Gaza, who are trying to survive in a landscape of horrors, is authentic and genuine. And they’ve come after her with vile slanders and threats of retribution for defending the defenseless…
+ Kit Malthouse, a Tory Member of Parliament from Northwest Hampshire, and former Secretary of Education in the here-one-minute-gone-the-next cabinet of Liz Truss: “Gaza has become an abattoir where starving people are lured out through combat zones to be shot at. If the situation were reversed, we would now be mobilising the British armed forces as part of an international protection force.”
+ The Trump administration boasts that with its help, Israel delivered 7 million meals to Gaza this week. That works out to about 3.5 meals per person, not per day, but for the entire week.
+ The libertarian from Kentucky…
+ Meanwhile, the House is set to vote on a measure that would label the phrase “Free Palestine!” as anti-semitic hate speech.
+++
+ The Ukrainian drone attack on Russian strategic bomber airbases shows the complete futility of Trump’s Golden Dome boondoggle, which was never going to work as a missile defense system, but will serve its primary purpose of feeding hundreds of billions to Trump-favored military contractors.
+ The Economist: More than one million Russian casualties since the invasion of Ukraine.
+ I don’t know how Harvey Milk would have felt about having a ship (instead of a school or hospital) named after him, but he was a veteran of the US Navy. He served during the Korean War. He became a lieutenant and diving instructor and then was forced to resign his commission rather than face a court-martial, after his homosexuality was exposed.
+ And Milk isn’t the only one targeted for erasure by Pete Hegseth. Navy ships named after Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, Cesar Chavez and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are also slated to be scrubbed of the contagion of DEI. I think they should. They should re-name them all after Confederate generals, famous losers like Custer and Westmoreland, notorious despots the Pentagon came to the defense of and the CEOs of weapons contractors–all of them more accurate symbols of what the US military is really all about.
+ Trump is so desperate to strike some kind of a deal that he’s on the verge of signing one with Iran that is basically a photocopy of Obama’s original agreement, which he inveighed against for years. So, naturally, Chuck Schumer’s trying to kill it…(Schumer also tried to kill Obama’s deal and Obama, for once, showed some spine and did an end run around the Senator from Citibank.)
+ Support Among Veterans for a Military Parade on Trump’s Birthday:
Oppose: 70%
Support: 18%Data For Progress.
+ In a largely symbolic, but still provocative, move, the Pentagon is shifting Greenland from the European to Northern Command.
+ The new head of Homeland Security’s Terror Prevention Office, Thomas Fugate, is a 22-year-old former gardener and “Cross Functional Team Member” at a Supermarket in Austin, who has no background in counter-terrorism or much of anything, frankly, except being a self-described Trump sycophant since the age of 13. Feel safer, now? Maybe the “terror threat” from the border (or anywhere else) isn’t all it’s hyped up to be…
Thomas Fugate’s official photo from his LinkedIn page.
+ Canadian PM Mark Carney wants Canada to reorient toward Europe, especially on defense policy: ‘Seventy-five cents of every (Canadian) dollar of capital spending for defence goes to the United States. That’s not smart.”
+++
Mohit Sani, a volunteer on Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign:
I look at my past self and I see someone who watched John Oliver, watched The Daily Show, watched Hasan Minhaj, and I felt politically active. But when I look back, I did nothing. I was angry all day, but nothing happened from that anger. Now, I do not watch John Oliver. I do not watch The Daily Show. I do not watch Hasan Minhaj. And I’m a thousand times more politically active. And then I can go to bed at night and I’m not stressed existentially about it. (I hope he still reads CounterPunch!)
+ This week in Democratic Party follies…
The Democrats are moving sharply to the right on immigration and affirmative action…
+ Josh Barro: “When I look at policies in New York that stand in the way of Abundance, very often if you look under the hood, you eventually find a labor union at the end that’s the driver.” Who needs the GOP? The Abundance Democrats want to take right-to-work nationwide…
+ Lydia Polgreen: “Famously, when [Pennsylvania Governor] Josh Shapiro removed all obstacles to repairing I-95, the one thing he kept was union labor. It wasn’t an obstacle to getting the job done in 12 days.”
+ Derek Thompson speculating on how to transform Abundance theory (neo-neoliberalism) into a campaign strategy: “The far right has a story. The far left has a story. The center doesn’t have a story. That’s a problem. What I would say in response to that is, yeah, stories are for children. Americans need a plan.”
+ In a country that is obviously sick and tired of war, the Democrats keep running veterans and spooks for office…
+ The US has always been fertile ground for sleazy politicians, but it used to be that when their scandalous ways were exposed, they slunk back into the sewers from which they emerged. Now they wear their villainy like a qualification for high office: “The result is a case that lawyers agree is in many ways unprecedented, wearing down and financially depleting not only women who have accused [Andrew] Cuomo of harassment and brought their own suits but others who never planned to enter a courtroom at all.”
+ With the mayoral race tightening, NYC’s landlord lobby is sinking $2.5 million into Cuomo’s faltering campaign.
+ Former State Department spokesman Matthew Miller’s admission (that he knew all along Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza but lied about it every day because he was following orders) is a confession of complicity in the genocide he helped cover up…
+ Miller wasn’t the only Biden alum trying to cover his ass. Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre not only announced the inevitable tell-all book, but also that she’s leaving the Democratic Party to become an “independent.” Who could believe anything this professional (and fairly inept) liar says? After being a chief propagandist for genocide, and covering up Biden’s brain rot for two years, she’ll never be able to scam her way to the right side of history, even by ratting out her colleagues (which I sincerely hope she does)…
+ Jeet Heer: “Yesterday’s problem: why are young men, POC, the working class all fleeing the Democratic party in droves? Today’s Problem: Why are Biden’s minions all fleeing the Democratic Party?”
+ How Democrats attack “DEI hires”…
(Wu was Special Assistant to Biden for Technology and Competition Policy.)
+ (Neither of these guys have a very clear understanding of who ended the war in Europe or liberated Germany from the Nazis. Though Trump remains rude as ever to world leaders who visit the Oval Office.)
MERZ: Tomorrow is the D Day anniversary, when the Americans ended a war in Europe.
TRUMP: That was not a pleasant day for you? This is not a great day.
MERZ: This was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship.
+ Would that be the long-form birth certificate, Chancellor Merz?
+ To paraphrase Woody Allen on Wagner, “When Germans start talking about DNA, Poland needs to prepare itself to be invaded…”
+ Internecine Warfare is having its moment: Trump went to war against Musk and MAGA attacked the Federalist Society…
STEPHEN MILLER: “Democracy does not exist at all if each action the president takes…has to be individually approved by 700 district court judges…”
BROWN: “Some of them are Trump judges. Why did Trump put these crazy communist judges, as you call them, on the bench?”
MILLER: “You heard President Trump say that the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo have created a broken system for judicial vetting.”
BROWN: “Does that mean he doesn’t support picking Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court?”
MILLER: “We’re not going to be using the Federalist Society to make judicial nominations at all going forward.”
+++
+ Around noon on Thursday, the WIFI went down in my office, as I was writing up this Roaming Charges column. The system was out for nearly two hours. When I tried to reconnect, I found a list of available networks, none of which were mine, though one stood out as evidence that a possible prankster had infiltrated our normally sedate neighborhood of geezers and Orthodox Ukrainian exiles, none of whom had ever shown the faintest sense of humor, especially about the predominate state security apparatus….
Curious, I emerged from my basement redoubt and looked out the window, where I saw a white Xfinity van near the cable box. The FBI wouldn’t really be stupid enough to name their mobile WIFI hub, “FBI van,” would they? Surely not. Then I remembered who is running the FBI, these days…
+ I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of one of CounterPunch’s longtime contributors, Judith Deutsch. Judith was a psychoanalyst and peace activist from Toronto, whose first essay for CounterPunch landed in my inbox in July 2015, under the prescient title “Russia, Ukraine and US Hegemony.” Judith’s pieces were invariably thoughtful, clearly written, impeccably argued, and always humane in spirit. I greatly enjoyed our correspondence over the years and learned much from her about the pathologies of militarism and ways to counter it. You can read Judith’s writings for CounterPunch here. Her husband Jim tells me that her family will be hosting an online memorial for Judith on Saturday, June 14, at 2 PM EDT. Click here for more information.
+ Trump on Biden’s cancer diagnosis: “If you feel sorry for him, don’t feel so sorry, because he’s vicious … I really don’t feel sorry for him.”
+ Rep. Mary Miller (Bigot-IL) on why she introduced a bill making June national “Family Month:” “”The left hijacked June to present perversion, cause gender confusion, and basically to give license for individuals to be indecent to in public.”
+ Raven Harrison, a MAGA Republican running for a U.S. House seat in Florida, claims to have found evidence that the face of Joe Biden is actually a synthetic mask controlled by a robotic clone..
…even though old Joe’s face seems, to my eyes at least, less “synthetic” than Raven’s own.
+ Maybe Trump’s finally on to something! “There is no Joe Biden – executed in 2020. Biden clones, doubles, and robotic, engineered, soulless, mindless entities are what you see.”
+ Best line of the week: “I wish Biden were alive to see this.” – Gianmarco Soresi
They Call It the Earth, Which is a Dumb Kinda Name, But They Named It Right, ‘Cause We Behave the Same…
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
War and Money: The Imperialism of the Dollar
Maurizio Lazzarato
(Verso)
Ecocide in Ukraine: the Environmental Costs of Russia’s War
Darya Tsymbalyuk
(Polity)
Tearing Down the Orange Curtain: How Punk Rock Brought Orange County to the World
By Nate Jackson and Daniel Kohn
(DeCapo)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
DJ-Kicks
Quantic
(Retrofit)
Abstraction is Deliverance
James Brandon Lewis Quartet
(Intakt Records)
Possession
Ty Segall
(Drag City)
The Cult of Action for Action’s Sake
“[Ur-fascism depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore, culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.” – Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism” (1995)
