Trump's Military Dictatorship Budget

Historian Timothy Snyder: 

(Regarding) Trump’s proposal to increase the military budget by nearly 50%: it’s a bribe to officers and soldiers so that they will side with him when he tries to overthrow the Constitution and stay in power indefinitely. This is where all the evidence points. 

If there is any consensus about Trump, it is that he is “transactional.” There is zero evidence that he has a notion of US interests. 

There is abundant evidence that he understands politics as a matter of people being paid off. And that is the framework in which to understand his proposed military budget. He is paying people off. 

No other explanation fits the data. Increasing the military budget from about a trillion dollars to about 1.5 trillion dollars makes no fiscal sense. We can’t pay for it without destroying basic government functions and soaking the American taxpayer. 

It makes no military sense. It is based upon no doctrinal innovation or review of technology. The “Trump-class” battleships it proposes are archaic, nonsensical, and more than a little embarrassing. The budget proposal makes no managerial sense. The Pentagon has never passed an audit, and Pete Hegseth has proven himself spectacularly unable to manage organizations of any kind. 

Putting an additional half a trillion dollars under his authority annually is superpower suicide. 

The military budget proposal only makes political sense. But it does not make democratic political sense. It is not designed to be popular among the population at large. It makes authoritarian political sense. It is designed to popular among the people with guns who Trump imagines will help him control the population at large (and they should realize this, and they should be offended.) 

It shifts taxpayer money to soldiers and officers in exchange for their personal loyalty to an aspiring dictator. It is a bribe to stay in power as part of an attempt to change the regime of the United States. It is not a military budget but a military dictatorship budget. 

Very often, when people say that Trump is “transactional,” they mean something like “just transactional”; he only cares about money, so in the end he cannot be that bad. But that is not where transactionalism leads: it leads to the basic reality that Trump has no notion of interests beyond his own, and will find it natural to take your money and spend it for his power. 

Transactionalism, the conventional wisdom about Trump, leads to the conclusion that the military budget is a bribe for power. But if we need more evidence of the intention, it is all around us. Hegseth is purging the upper ranks of the armed services on the basis of politics. 

Both Hegseth and Trump speak about a future mission of the military against the “enemy within” in the “homeland.” It’s a military dictatorship budget.

The Coming Apocalypse Due to the Strait of Hormuz Situation

From "The Other 98%"--

If the Strait of Hormuz never reopens, the life you know starts coming apart by this fall. 

An actual apocalypse. Not as a metaphor. As a supply chain. And nobody in the media will walk you through what that actually looks like. 

So let’s walk you through it. For three months, a fifth of the world's oil has been cut off. You haven't felt the full weight of it yet, and there's a reason for that. 

The world had a cushion. Enormous reserves of oil sitting in storage, built up over years. We've been burning through that cushion to keep the gas flowing and the prices from exploding. Quietly. Fast. At a pace never seen outside a global pandemic. 

Here's the part the optimists keep skipping: a cushion is not a faucet. It runs out. And when you are near the bottom, you don't get a gentle warning. 

You lose the pressure that keeps fuel moving to every station, every truck, every farm, all at once. The experts who war-game this for a living have a name for that moment. The operational floor. And the worst-case estimates put it around this fall. 

Now picture it. The strait stays shut. The reserves hit empty. And the thing that's been hiding this crisis simply vanishes. Diesel goes first, and diesel is what moves the world. The trucks that restock your grocery store. The trains. The cargo ships. The combines that bring in the harvest. 

Translation, the supply chains we depend on to get our food and medicines disappear. Food doesn't disappear because we stopped growing it. It disappears because nothing can afford to move it, and because fertilizer is made from natural gas, so the next harvest costs a fortune before it's even planted. 

Translation. Grocery stores are closed. People will starve. Factories across Europe and Asia go dark. Entire countries that import every drop they burn get crushed first. And oil itself blows past every record in human history, into numbers with no modern precedent, because the whole planet is fighting over a fraction of what it needs. That is not a gas-price story. That is the machinery of modern civilization losing pressure everywhere, simultaneously. 

And this isn't a fringe nightmare. The Atlantic Council says strategic reserves are "no match for massive, sustained production outages," and calls this disruption "without precedent." And the oil shock is only the first domino. 

Modern economies run on cheap, predictable energy the way a body runs on oxygen, and when you choke it off everywhere at once, everything downstream seizes. 

Translation. Worldwide economic collapse. The Great Depression on steroids (and we will beg for the days of the 2008 recession). 

The scariest part isn't that this scenario exists. It's that the people who could stop it keep insisting everything is fine. The Treasury Secretary swears gas will be cheaper by the midterms. The reserves keep falling anyway. 

This is the bill a war of choice put on the table. And the men who put it there are governing like it can't come due. The cushion is almost gone, and the silence is the scariest part.

Once again-- MAGA IS A SICK HOAX AND ULTIMATELY A DEATH CULT