Apr 30, 2025
Apr 14, 2025
April 13, 2025: Mothers of the Disappeared, American Gestapo, Brown Shirts in Paradise
“Midnight, our sons and daughters
were cut down and taken from us
hear their heartbeat
we hear their heartbeat
In the wind we hear their laughter
in the rain we see their tears
hear their heartbeat
hear their heartbeat”
----- “Mothers of the Disappeared” U2 “Joshua Tree”
The last cut on the album The Joshua Tree is a song called “The Mothers of the Disappeared” in which U2 sings about the thousands of dissidents who were 'disappeared' in Latin America in the 70's and early 80's. When I first heard the song, images of Nazi concentration camps immediately sprang to mind, not knowing what had transpired south of the border.
I was to learn later, reading Naomi Klein's “The Shock Doctrine” of the horrors perpetrated by fascist regimes in Latin America during those years. There was Augusto Pinochet's Chile:
“Pinochet held power for seventeen years, and during that time he changed direction several times. The country's period of steady growth that is held up as proof of its miraculous success did not begin until the mid-eighties—a full decade after the Chicago Boys (here referring to Friedman's University of Chicago acolytes who now held high positions within these governments) implemented shock therapy and well after Pinochet was forced to make a radical course correction. That's because in 1982, despite its strict adherence to Chicago Doctrine, Chile's economy crashed: its debt exploded,, it faced hyperinflation once again and unemployment hit 30 percent—ten times higher than it was under Allende. The main cause was the piranhas, the Enron-style financial houses that the Chicago Boys had freed from all regulation, had bought up the country's assets on borrowed money and run up an enormous debt of 14 billion....
What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing the alliance's share of the national wealth.
That was—what many Chileans understandably see as a war of the rich against the poor and middle class—is the real story of Chile's economic “miracle”. By 1988, when the economy had stabilized and was growing rapidly, 45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent of Chileans, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent. Even in 2007, Chile remained one of the most unequal societies in the world—out of 123 countries in which the United Nations tracks inequality, Chile ranked 116th, making it the 8th most unequal country on the list” (1)
The experiment was repeated by the military junta then governing Brazil as well as the governments of Uruguay and Argentina, with strikingly similar results. And, as the reforms spread the people began to disappear.
“The newly declassified documents from Brazil show that when Argentina's generals were preparing their 1976 coup, they wanted 'to avoid suffering an international campaign like the one that has been unleashed against Chile.” To achieve that goal, less sensational repression tactics were needed—lower-profile ones capable of spreading terror but not so visible to the prying international press. In Chile, Pinochet soon settled on disappearances. Rather than openly killing or even arresting their prey, soldiers would snatch them, take them to clandestine camps, torture and often kill them, then deny any knowledge. Bodies were thrown into mass graves. According to Chile's truth commission, established in May 1990, the secret police would dispose of some victims by dropping them into the ocean from helicopters “after first cutting their stomach open with a knife the keep the bodies from floating.” In addition to their lower profile, disappearances turned out to be an even more effective means of spreading terror than open massacres, so destabilizing was the idea that apparatus of the state could be used to make people vanish into thin air.
“Night Hangs Like a Prisoner
Stretched over Black and Blue
Hear their heartbeats
Hear their heartbeats”
By the mid-seventies, disappearances had become the primary enforcement tool of the Chicago School (3) juntas throughout the Southern Cone—and none embraced the practice more zealously than the generals occupying Argentina's presidential palace. By the end of their reign, an estimated thirty thousand people had been disappeared. Many of them, like their Chilean counterparts, were thrown from planes into the muddy waters of the Rio de la Plata. (4)
In Argentina, Klein reports, prisoners were taken to one of 300 camps and tortured. And so it went, year upon year.
Sound familiar? This is the playbook our Maggots are now seeking to emulate. 14 billion dollars has been appropriated to construct hundreds of concentration camps in this country. People are openly and brazingly being disappeared with much fanfare. The Maggots, as any fascist worthy of the name, are proud of it. All in service to the newly minted Oligarchy that has seized power in the United States.
“In the trees our sons stand naked
Through the walls our daughters cry
see their tears
in the rainfall” (5)
----------------------
Klein, Naomi. “The Shock Doctrine” The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Copyright 2007 Henry Holt and Company, New York, New York. Pages 104-105
ibid. pages 109-110.
Milton Friedman was head of the Economics department at the University of Chicago. A staunch advocate of 'free market' economics his theories have been widely debunked. Friedman, the darling of America's Idiot Wrong spent his last days advising every tin-horn fascist dictator who would pay the freight. Thankfully, he is no longer with us.
Ibid. page 110
U2, “Mothers of the Disappeared”, from the album Joshua Tree.
Apr 8, 2025
Apr 5, 2025
April 3, 2025: Tariff the Penguins, Consider the Source, Idiot in Chief
Well, the fool has gone and done it. Yesterday our Caesar Disgustus demonstrated his breathtaking ignorance imposed tariffs upon the world, that is except for Russia and North Korea.
With unabashed and seemingly guileless ignorance, our erstwhile Caesar stood before a podium in the White House Rose Garden and before the cameras and the world shit himself to his socks.
Unaware that he was soiling himself and holding up a board which purported to show the tariffs imposed by the world's nations, the Orange Turd told the nation and the world with a straight face that we were being 'ripped off'. Citing astronomical tariff rates charged by nations around the world he presented his plan to retaliate by 'graciously' hiking U.S. Tariffs to roughly half that imposed by others.
Watching this unfold on television in real time and, coming as it did from the purported 'president' of the United States, I thought to myself “holy shit, I didn't realize that we were being charged so much.
Then I thought “remember your school lessons, son”; consider the source.
Consider the source. When, I asked myself, has this bastard ever told the truth? The answer is at once: never. I began to look suspiciously upon the presentation and then concluded it was all bullshit. In the first place we wouldn't be paying the tariffs. In the second place there was just something about the numbers that didn't make sense.
It transpires that instead of just looking up what is currently being levied by the European Union, or China, or Japan, or Vietnam, Disgustus had his staff do the calculating. Led by Harvard's very own Peter Navarro and other lights, they came up with a formula that took the total trade with a particular country and calculated the percentage of that trade that represented a 'deficit'. It went something like this. The trade with a country is say 10 billion dollars. We buy 3 billion more from them than they buy from us. Therefore, according to these geniuses, the tariff imposed upon the U.S. Is 30%.
No it isn't. The tariff, the real tariff is somewhere between 1 and 3 percent on average depending upon the country. What the White House staff calculated is not tariffs but the percentage of our trade deficit as compared with the total trade with a particular nation. Clearly, no one in the White House, nor in the Commerce Department, is capable of calculating such things, much less simply looking up the tariff schedules. And, more frighteningly, no one in this maladministration knows what the hell a tariff is, least of all the idiot in chief.
Hell, they made such a pig's breakfast of it, that they imposed tariffs on Diego Garcia, a U.S military base in the Indian Ocean, and two islands off Antarctica, Heard and McDonald Island, occupied by only penguins. Yes, the damn fool imposed tariffs on unsuspecting penguins.
He was going to staff his 'government' with “only the best, only the brightest”. In tRUMPspeak, where truth always lies at a bearing of 180 degrees from the direction he's pointing, this promise becomes frightening. Always believing he is the smartest man in the room, Disgustus has staffed his administration with people even more ignorant and stupid than himself. And, since he is the most ignorant and stupid man to ever soil the Oval Office, this is a terrifying prospect indeed.
What we have here is a dysfunctional and terminally incompetent maladministration in which the sycophants surrounding the Emperor must present him with data supporting his foregone conclusions, lest he shoot the messenger. To that end they present him with 'facts', “alternative facts” in the parlance of Kellyanne Conway, that correspond and support his woeful ignorance. That a staff could produce such garbage and, most disconcerting, that our Caesar would accept them as legitimate clearly indicates that this regime has long since become unhinged from reality. Dementia Don, never intelligent, does not have the mental acuity to evaluate the information he is being fed; and woe to the bearer of inconvenient truths.
And so, he stands before the world beshit, wholly unaware of how ridiculous the rest of the world looks upon him and the awful stench that surrounds him.
Impeach and Imprison.
Apr 1, 2025
April 1, 2025: Tariff the Earth, April Fool's Joke, A Pig's Breakfast
Our shitting 'president' threatens to play a nasty joke upon the nation and the world on this April Fool's day. Tomorrow, it has been determined, he will announce a tariff regimen upon the entire world.
I'm reminded of the old “Dutch Boy” advertisement in which the Hollander is pouring an entire can of paint over the globe covering it in a viscus mess. Sherwin Williams evidently bought out Dutch Boy for it now uses the artwork sans the caption “cover the earth” but Caesar Disgustus, who is old enough to remember the depiction, has no doubt been inspired by it.
The problem is that tariffs are, like all public policy initiatives, crude instruments.
Tariffs are best applied upon specific industries and are used to protect and nurture home grown enterprises. They can only be imposed if such industries are capable of meeting domestic demand, otherwise tariffs simply become a sales tax imposed on imported goods raising the cost of such goods.
And, since we have allowed the 'suits' to export our manufacturing, nearly everything on the shelves is now imported, such an action, by the most ignorant of current world leaders, will set off an inflationary spiral the likes of which this country has not seen since the 1970's.
Nevertheless, Donald tRUMP, convinced for decades that tariffs were the magic bullet, the act that could solve everything, “the most beautiful word in the English Language”, is hell bent upon the levy.
He campaigned on the issue. He nailed his trousers to its mast and will soon find it impossible to climb down without exposing his fat, ugly backsides. As is his wont, our Caesar Disgustus promised today to make a pig's breakfast of our national prosperity. We shall see what tomorrow brings.
Impeach and Imprison.
