Trump Unfriends America's Largest Trading Partners––Friends Express Concern

[President] Trump is engaging in a worldwide unfriending. People formerly close to the White House are puzzled and concerned. Asked if Mr. Trump has access to weapons, they said "Yes. Lots of them.”

In a phone call with America’s most reliable ally [President] Trump loudly berated the Australian president and then hung up on him.

Reported in The Age, from Australia

In another phone call Trump threatened Mexican president with US military invasion.

“You have a bunch of bad hombres down there,” Trump told Pena Nieto, according to the excerpt seen by the Associated Press. “You aren't doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn't, so I just might send them down to take care of it.”

From the LATimes and the AP

From MotherJones

Earlier this week the White House blamed the shooting in Quebec on Muslim terrorism when it was Muslims at prayer who were murdered… by a white Christian nationalist…

From the Intercept

Canadian President Trudeau demanded an apology. Canada is our #1 trading partner

From The Guardian

The largest percentage of America’s foreign trade is with the European Union. The Head of the EU stated this week that President Trump is a threat to Europe’s future.

From the Wall Street Journal

America’s #2 trading partner is China. Donald Trump has entrusted our national security to Steve Bannon, who believes the US is definitely going to declare war on China.

From the Guardian

Bannon also favors “a major shooting war in the Middle East” in the coming years.

“To be brutally frank, I mean Christianity is dying in Europe, and Islam is on the rise,” he said in January 2016. “Some of these situations may get a little unpleasant,” Bannon said. “But you know what, we’re in a war.”

From Foreign Policy Magazine

Bannon is a big war enthusiast, a war hobbyist you might say. His big idea is that chaos causes good things to happen. He is predicting––and now is in a position to precipitate––major catastrophes and crises. Why? Unlike Dick Cheney, the shadow president from 2001 to 2009, who had to have a war to rescue his Halliburton retirement package, Bannon is planning a war or wars just because he likes blowing things up.

From TIME magazine

Bannon loves war. He gets a thrill from the thought of sparking a major global conflict.

In a speech he delivered to the Liberty Restoration Foundation in 2011, Bannon said this:

"I'm actually energised...You've all read history books since you were kids. And you all think hey, if I was there during the Civil War, I'd be right in the middle of it. Or if [it] was the Revolution, I would be right there. On World War Two...I would be there. I'd be in Normandy, I'd do all that. We have that opportunity today...There are so many people who believe in what we believe and understand when you start talking to them, and engaging them, that we're not cloven-hooved devils. We're not nativist, homophobic, racist, right. But they understand that we believe in what made this country great, and they believe it too.”

In a 2014 speech to a conservative conference at the Vatican, Bannon said this:

“We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that's starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we've been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years...we are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.
"[It is a]...global war, and it is, unfortunately, something that we're going to have to face, and we're going to have to face very quickly...there is a major war brewing, a war that's already global. It's going global in scale, and today's technology, today's media, today's access to weapons of mass destruction, it's going to lead to a global conflict that I believe has to be confronted today. Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn't act."

From International Business Times

This is the man who promoted himself to the chairmanship of the National Security Council, after firing our top military leader, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and our Director of National Intelligence. He is merging media, propaganda, national intelligence and our military, transforming them into a personal toy.

If a foreign enemy, say Russia (just hypothetically) wanted to isolate the US and create debilitating chaos that would bring us to our knees, they couldn't have done a better job than President Bannon and Make-Believe-President Trump have done in under two weeks.

Human Misery = Great Profit Opportunities!

A conservative columnist for the Chicago Tribune says Hurricane Katrina was a blessing in disguise. I’ll let that sink in. What does she mean?

Conservatives are pleased when bad things happen to other people. Hurricanes create investment bargains! Human misery = profit opportunity!

Which explains why Rick Santorum drew applause from the conservative base when he said rape could be a blessing in disguise. Bad things happening to other people can be translated into good things happening for you if you are paying attention, if you're right-thinking and sufficiently heartless.

It’s happening in Greece too. Crisis and misery tends to draw vulture capitalists eager for quick profits and easy bargains. If you discover someone is down for the count. Why help them? Why not use them as a stepladder to a better life?

This is the core idea behind Disaster Capitalism. Disaster = Profits

Republicans, conservatives, the 1%, venture capitalists. They all view terrible events happening to other people as great business opportunities for themselves. The Guardian wrote about this bizarre investment class cheerfulness while New Orleans was still underwater.

Because the ups and downs of fortune are just the natural course of events. The downturns may seem awful to those nobodies experiencing it firsthand, but they are too shortsighted to see the bounty being reaped by the blessed few God has put in a safer position. The investment class is wiser and more able to view these ups and downs philosophically. “Let things unfold as nature intended. Let the weak fail. It makes America stronger to weed out the less deserving and the unlucky." That’s a common view among the 1%. Disaster for others represents a windfall for them.

But their opinion changes when the disaster happens to them. (Through no fault of their own, of course.) When they face difficulties help must be sent immediately. Because they hold hostages. We are all hostage to the fortunes of the rich. If they fall they fall on us. Here's a list of the huge corporate bailouts working Americans have paid for, and corporate CEOs have put in their own pockets. Still, it had to be done. The alternative would have been worse.

Timely help in New Orleans might have been a good thing too, but it would only have helped regular people. Most of whom had negligible net worth.

The important thing is to rescue property. And in New Orleans what the money people discovered was letting the poor drown made it possible to scoop up bargains. Property on the cheap. Blocks of soggy historic downmarket houses ready to be cleared out and replaced with warehouses for Walmart and other corporations, or with more attractive apartment blocks suitable for new, more prosperous citizens more likely to be Republicans.

Profiting from Misery, Privation and Disaster

As families huddled to worry about jobs, food and rescuing the family home, Goldman Sachs was gleefully talking about financial crisis as profit opportunity. Who are these people? Are they the type who go through victims' pockets at the scene of an accident? It isn't limited to Goldman, or Wall Street. Many of the vultures lurk in hedge fund compounds in Connecticut, picking the bones of the fallen––when possible helping them fall before picking their bones. This story from BusinessInsider is particularly chilling.

This paragraph from the Guardian caught my eye.

"But a new theory is emerging among traders and economists. The same banks, hedge funds and financiers whose speculation on the global money markets caused the sub-prime mortgage crisis are thought to be causing food prices to yo-yo and inflate. The charge against them is that by taking advantage of the deregulation of global commodity markets they are making billions from speculating on food and causing misery around the world."

In other words, crisis is more profitable than stability. If that's the opposite of what most modern economies base their prosperity on, that's fine with the speculators who profit. Picture a cat playing with a mouse.

Real Economics describes the center where global food speculation takes place, the Chicago Board of Trade. Some will point out the necessary mechanism of the Chicago Board; it gets food where it's needed in an efficient fashion through the market system. But what happens when the market makers realize they profit more from inefficiency, from shortage, from panic? Markets need to have a superego to rule their id, an Apollonian side to keep the Dionysian under control. We need responsible, humane governing institutions, which is exactly what Republican radicals in the U.S. Congress are trying to shut down and disempower.

The World Food Programme paints an ugly picture of the profitability of global hunger.

The role played by speculator manipulation of supply is no secret in the fuel category (from McClatchy News)

What is the result? More of our limited consumer dollars are locked into chasing fuel and food, leaving less for other areas of spending. It works like a heavy stone tied to the ankle of the economy. What makes it harder for 300 million Americans fills the pockets of the speculators, which means hedge funds, banks, Wall Street, the folks who fund the Tea Party.

Do market makers actively precipitate disaster in order to profit from it? There were plenty of shills pushing the profit opportunities in the BP oil spill––even if they didn't cause it.

But you have to wonder sometimes. In the week Dick Cheney's memoir hits the shelves this question should strike all of us: what influence did Dick Cheney, the former chair of Halliburton, have on the awarding of billions in war contracts to his old firm? Did he want the war to happen for private business reasons? Iraq was a war virtually made for Halliburton. The U.S. protectorate supervised the collapse of the Iraq system, the destruction of all its institutions and their subsequent privatization. Is Iraq the perfect model of Disaster Capitalism? (This Amy Goodman-Naomi Klein interview caught the drift as it was happening in 2005, but the reporting never reached the mainstream press.)

The ruling ideas behind what Naomi Klein called The Shock Doctrine aren't conservative. They are the opposite of conservative. They are radical. They are anti-patriotic. They are anti-institutional, anti-national, anti-citizen. They are against the notion of functioning societies and economies because breakdown is what makes these operators rich. Wide public failure is their opportunity. Your hunger is their feast. And increasingly, these are the people at the controls at the centers of the so-called Free Market.