Jeffrey St. Clair

Donald Trump's few remaining defenders are now reduced to explaining his increasingly erratic behavior as a ploy, that like Hamlet (I mean, the Don can play Jesus on Truth Social, so why not Hamlet on Fox News?), he is merely putting on "an antic disposition," and is only "mad North-by-Northwest.," not mad "true north," not truly insane, but only acting so, as part of some still obscure deep strategy. Yet imagine the state of imperial entropy the US must've reached that its $1 trillion war-making budget and 5,000 nuclear warheads no longer command respect or obedience from smaller, much less powerful nations, so that its leader must pretend to be deranged in order to frighten people into submission ... and even then, they still resist.

As Allied forces crossed the English Channel during the D-Day invasion of June 1944, some 10,000 intelligence officers known as T-Forces were right behind the advance battalions. Their mission: seize munitions experts, technicians, German scientists and their research materials, along with French scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis. Soon, a substantial number of such scientists had been picked up and placed in an internment camp known as the Dustbin. In the original planning for the mission, a prime factor was the view that German military equipment – tanks, jets, rocketry and so forth – was technically superior and that captured scientists, technicians and engineers could be swiftly debriefed in an effort by the Allies to catch up.

Cole Allen had been sold too many promises that didn’t pan out. The promise of hope and change. The promise of restoring the “soul of America,” whatever that really means. The promise of nostalgia restored, a reified America from the land of promise and dreams. But it’s the little annoyances that can loom large: the rising insurance payments, crappy cell service and internet too slow to stream, the damn heat, the traffic that doesn’t move, the commercialization of everything, even church, the bad TV, and the worse movies, music that grates and irritates, rather than consoles and inspires.

One day, I got a call from Peter Bahouth, a former Greenpeace honcho whom Ted Turner had swiped to run his grant-making operation. Peter said, “Jeff, can you hold for a sec? My boss wants to talk to you." I was going to say, "No," to Ted Turner? I waited longer than “a sec,” more like two or three minutes. Billionaires must be busy managing their billions, I thought. I was expecting to hear Ted's southern drawl. Instead, it was Jane, who babbled on for about 20 seconds, thanking me for mentioning the foundation in a piece I'd written with Alex Cockburn for The Nation, and then hung up without allowing me to say as much as "Hello" or "Damn, you had the greatest hair in Klute!"

Someone told me nobody knew Monsanto like Mitchel Cohen with the No Spray Coalition. I called him up. We talked. Well, Mitchel talked and I scribbled notes on legal pads. I called again. Took more notes. I kept calling, Mitchel kept answering and giving me an activist’s very informed view of the political machinations of one the world’s most malevolent corporations, a corporation that Mitchel and his colleagues beat the hell out of for the next 20 years, eventually forcing the embattled, litigation-hobbled enterprise to be sold to Bayer, which swiftly dropped its sullied name, if not all of its toxic products, like Round-Up.

The economic war on Cuba, which has been going on in one form or another for more than six decades, has increasingly become a war waged on Cuban children. Since Trump and Biden reimposed and broadly extended the economic sanctions and embargo on Cuba that Obama had eased, Cuba’s infant mortality rate, which in 2008 was lower than that of the US, has risen by 148 percent. This is infanticide committed through a policy of economic strangulation.

NPR interviewed a Trump voter in Georgia who said he thought the President was doing “an A+ job.” When asked how his family was dealing with rising food prices, the man replied, “My wife and I fast.” What’s the cure for this mass mesmerism that induces people to be willing to suffer extreme deprivations in order to enhance the fortunes, political and financial, of their billionaire leader? Trump’s like Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, without the medical degree.

Trump began his war on Iran during talks to prevent it. He said it gave him the element of surprise. His missile strikes killed much of the Iranian leadership, including some of the Iranians his team thought might govern the country after the bombing ended. One of his missiles hit a girls’ school, another hit the compound of Mahmood Ahmadinejad, one of the candidates Trump’s people had in mind to run Iran after they killed Ayatollah Ali Khameni, the Iranian religious leader who, austere as he was, preferred negotiation over confrontation.

Trump began his war on Iran during talks to prevent it. He said it gave him the element of surprise. His missile strikes killed much of the Iranian leadership, including some of the Iranians his team thought might govern the country after the bombing ended. One of his missiles hit a girls’ school, another hit the compound of Mahmood Ahmadinejad, one of the candidates Trump’s people had in mind to run Iran after they killed Ayatollah Ali Khameni, the Iranian religious leader who, austere as he was, preferred negotiation over confrontation. More

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin.