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Rendered at 20:34:08 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-probes-suspicious...
Isn't the FBI already raiding the homes of political opponents for intimidation?
The famed US constitution with all its 'checks and balances' they would never shut up about turned out to be papier mâché and completely trampled by the first person that tried.
If we're being completely honest, the checks and balances in the constitution ended within the first decade. They were only designed to work in the case that the three branches of government were truly separate and adversarial with one another.
The creation of political parties largely eliminated them, both because they cross-cut branches and because the first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system virtually guaranteed the parties would have nearly even representation most of the time.
That it's greatest likelihood of collapse comes between 236 and 243 years later (depending on whether you count from the end of the revolutionary war or ratification of the constitution) is a goddamn miracle.
Plenty of other democracies have parties, including cross government branches.
What makes the US unique, and fragile, is that no party other than democrats and republicans can realistically exist.
It over emphasizes partisanship above anything (including honesty, morality) because career politicians in one party just have nowhere to go if they are dissident.
You can see that in plain sight currently, with republicans being in the total incapacity of contradicting their party line on anything, even the most obvious of lies.
In most other democracies, dissidents would have just created a new party and moved on, that wouldnt be "carrier ending" for them.
Give it time.
that is "too big to prosecute against extremely creative and well paid law firm" territory
They also allow some insights on future demand, which can help you plan production of your commodity.
The issue is that the odds aren't actually 50/50 on you buying either side of the trade; one half will look like a better deal (and given public information, it is a better deal) so you'll buy that half. Then when the market resolves, it'll turn out that insiders knew some piece of information that made the other half of the trade a better choice.
P(W | You're a sucker) = 0.5
hard to win at a game where 97% fail in the long run.
In the US, for some reason, if you are a danger to the President's friends, you can be fired/your department can just be shutdown executively and this isn't just about Trump, it is about a serious weakness in the systems of governance.
I would not rely on that. The Attorney General can withdraw prosecutions, and is a government minister (although not technically in the Cabinet).
Parliament can do anything, it just usually doesn't. This includes retroactive legislation to decide that you did not win a lawsuit that you actually did win (Reilly and Wilson v Secretary of State, although that itself was eventually ruled unlawful). The infinite delay of Bloody Sunday prosecutions is probably the biggest example in UK discourse.
No country is safe from this if enough authoritarian-collaborator political appointments are made (such as happened to SCOTUS). It should really be viewed as a form of coup.
What actually happened in the US is that "common norms and expectations" were thrown out the window, so instead of the question being "What is traditionally done?" it became "What can legally be done?" And, as it turns out, when you're only constrained by the letter of the law the executive branch is insanely powerful.
UK politics, more than most younger countries, is particularly susceptible to this. Norms, traditionally, and commonly understood standards make up a scary amount of constraints on the powers of government. If anyone gained power that only feels limited by the letter of the law (i.e. throws out norms, traditions, and standards), the UK is in serious trouble and Parliament hasn't moved to address it.
Somewhat ironically (given how unpopular it is), the Lords may be the best back-stop the UK has. Particularly the 30%~ which do not originate from politics.
It's not even constrained by the letter of the law. The current administration has done quite a few things which are blatantly illegal and unconstitutional.
Trump has done so, safe in the knowledge that the impeachment process can't work so long as the Republican party holds a majority in the House, and a conviction can't occur so long as the Republican party controls at least 41 seats in the Senate.
Furthermore, due to the presidential immunity power created out of thin air by the Supreme Court in US v. Trump, he is shielded even from investigation so long as it can be successfully argued any potential crimes were done as part of official duties.
Lastly, his advanced age virtually guarantees he'll die long before any such prosecution could clear the legal hoops required for conviction after leaving office (assuming he ever does), even in the rare circumstances a Democrat could be found with enough spine to actually move forward with one.
- our laws, the ones that supposedly keep society stable and safe, don't apply to particular groups of people
- we can catch them, and maybe, just maybe, we will hold someone accountable for those people, though often they just distract and trick everyone from holding them accountable
- the majority of people are getting stolen from, treated like slaves and tricked and abused, and they will tolerate this abuse because of <fear???>
Am I to accept this frame of reality in which the universe and the earth, and the leaders currently making decisions for me and holding influence over the worlds' military powers, are this hostile towards me?
I refuse. I think we have more power than we think. In America at least, we still have an amendment that has yet to be repealed (created for scenarios in which abusers hold leadership positions and refuse to be accountable): the 1st amendment and parading guns legally, safely, and responsibly is a powerful reminder of what accountability and dignity looks like.
edit: I advocate for parading guns peacefully with an intention and purpose: go with a group standing for rights, safety and dignity
It's like every time you see a poorly run business and you think, how can they stay open? The answer is it's usually a laundering operation, a tax shelter, and who knows what else. The message to us poors is, nothing these people do is as it appears; there's always a bunch of stacked, leveraged advantages.
https://newrepublic.com/post/192244/trump-celebrates-destroy...
Oil crisis: Trumps friends profit on insider info, US oil industry (also his friends) profits, Russia profits because they are another big oil producer, USD dominance is harmed (also helps Russia), everyone else in the world eats the costs
Ukraine: Russia bleeds, Ukraine bleeds, arms industry profits, politicians in general get something to grandstand on in front of the voters. Personally I believe that this conflict has been artificially prolonged just to amplify the effects
Tariffs: US public eats the costs, Trump profits politically by appearing strong, Trumps friends profit on insider info
What I mean is Trump and Co probably spoke to oil execs before making the Iran decision to ask if they would raise production. Then they lied and said yes, while knowing they would drag their feet as prices rose.
Trump is a stoog. The folks around him treat him like an idiot. There's no way they weren't involved here. They've been around his entire presidency.
This can be said about any negative price movement. You still get the same amount of oil you agreed to regardless of if the price goes up or down afterwards.
You'd buy oil futures at broadly the same price from someone else (maybe a worse price! Because the presence of the insider selling is already driving the price down). So how exactly do you lose?
The only people who lose out are those whose limit orders don't get filled because the insider outbid them. The counterparty benefits from trading with the insider.
If you think this tax is de minimis, great, glad to hear it, let's put a government tax of similar magnitude in there and resume the peanut butter rations to starving african kids that DOGE cut.
It also discourages speculators from entering trades if they suspect they’ll be run over by insiders trading on non-public information.
Fewer market participants leads to worse price discovery.
It’s probably bad.
I think this sums it up.
Needless to say, though I consider Krugman to have failed at practically every prediction he made in his NYT columns, his point is very valid.
No one should stand for this. Unfortunately a very bad precedence has been set by many politicians in the US.
I find it hard to see that this would ever change if the governing authorities are as tame and neutered as they seem to be.
Ultimately it is a question of how to root out corruption. And it must be a path 90% agree on. I don't see it as helpful to become emotive.
The real curious part to me is why there are such large reactions when neither the US nor the Iranians seem to be truthful and seem to agree even on what they disagree on...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-probes-suspicious...
Depends on what your brokerage allows, see timestamps.
Its a pre-requisite for the job
You missed "VC backed" in front of "founders". Most founders are good people.
https://www.newsweek.com/premier-law-firms-spy-ring-11920914
Yes. Also a klepotocracy
And then we'll do nothing anyway because the wealthy and corrupt run every single country on the planet. Money talks.
And people are too easily preoccupied with trivial policy squabbles to care about how badly we've all been fucked by the last 50 years or so.
Yeah that's because IT's HIM.
Jesus how much more proof do you people need that the Trumps themselves are looting the country.
The fact that he is talking peace again now is just because he cannot attack before the meeting with Xi in mid May.
The real issue is US energy dominance and control of the sea routes. Which Krugman does not mention, because the effort is bipartisan and he probably likes it. The US literally has a National Energy Dominance Council:
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook-rema...
It is designed to subjugate and increase EU and Asian dependencies on US exports. The EU committed to buying $750 billion in US energy exports. LNG terminals in Alaska are being approved to make Asia dependent on US energy.
This process is accelerated by the emerging forever conflict that will keep Hormuz closed. It won't be a full scale war, just pinpricks so that shipping companies don't dare to cross Hormuz.
Maybe China is able to pressure Iran in a way that the US can no longer pretend it has the right to intercept Iranian ships. But Russia is another factor:
The closure of Hormuz benefits both Russia and the US and the EU is too incompetent to negotiate Trump-style and threaten (it does not necessarily have to happen) to resume Russian imports. In an ideal world it would also block US vessels from entering the Baltic sea, because since the Greenland and now the overt Gulf energy threats the US is no longer an ally.
There's at least two other belligerents in this war who get a say, as well as a large number of other countries which count as victims (everyone from Lebanon to UAE). No US decision can stop Israel and Iran from fighting.
He has operational control of the armed forces. This has never been disputed recently; he can order whatever shots he wants. The armed forces funding is in one whole pot which is guaranteed even against a "shutdown". He also has total legal immunity for official acts.
Whos gona prosecute america? Germans ar still waiting for somebody to go to jail for Dresden, and rightly so
1. The size of this market manipulation can be measured by the gap between spot or physical oil prices (which generally aren't public) and the future or paper price [2]. Historically these have tracked each other so close it was a non-issue. Now it's a huge issue;
2. Part of the gap can be attributed to the financial markets being in denial [3] and the market itself being in extreme backwardation. That simply means the spot price is significantly higher than the future price. It indiciates some sort of market dysfunction (or delusion). We saw this in the silver market last year.
All credit for this wanton insider trading goes back to the Supreme Court inventing presidential immunity out of thin air [4][5] and a Congress that has completely abdicated any kind of constitutional responsibility.
You might think there might be some kind of criminal prosecution or at least investigation by government agencies of the players involved. Well, sycophants and crackpots have put in charge of those agencies (eg Michael Selig of the CFTC [6]).
And if that fails, just buy a pardon [7].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47955623
[2]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-interpret-wartime-oil-pric...
[3]: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Is-Reality-Finall...
[4]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/supreme-co...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
[6]: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/12/michael-selig-predi...
[7]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/04/donald-trumps-...
Whataboutism is not useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading
Supplying news as fast as possibles is also the business model of Thomson Reuters.
https://www.thetradenews.com/thomson-reuters-algo-news-feed-...
No they don't. They might have duties not to leak classified information, but not fiduciary duty.
> Amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to declare that such Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material, nonpublic information derived from their positions as Members or congressional employees or gained from performance of the individual's official responsibilities.
(Sec. 5) Amends the Commodity Exchange Act to apply to Members and congressional employees, or to judicial officers or employees its prohibitions against certain transactions, involving the purchase or sale of any commodity in interstate commerce, or for future delivery, or any swap.
Extends the meaning of "covered government person" (currently restricted to Members of Congress and congressional employees) to include the President, Vice President, an employee of the U.S. Postal Service or the Postal Regulatory Commission, or any other executive branch employee.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-bill/203...
https://fortune.com/2024/01/03/members-of-congress-profit-fr...
"Congressional Stock Trading: The Law, the Conflicts, and the Push for a Ban"
https://govfacts.org/accountability-ethics/ethics-conflicts-...
"The 2 ETFs That Track Congressional Stock Trades"
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/2-etfs-that-track-congress...
The insider trading on oil futures is just on much bigger scale.
People have been strung up for less than what counts as business as usual in contemporary, rotten to the core, American business & politics.
Not really. Paul Pelosi was a tech investor. If you were heavily concentrated in META, AAPL, AMZN, NFLX, GOOG, etc you should have crushed the S&P and Warren Buffet too.
Famously, Warren Buffet's recent outperformance mostly came from AAPL, which was <1% of his positioning when he put it on. Imagine if it had been several percent! Such were the delights of many tech investors over the last 20 years or so.
https://watcher.guru/news/congress-stock-trades-outscores-bu...
Don't put words in my mouth. Moreover I'm not sure how you can come to the conclusion that I'm "re okay with them doing what they’re doing", when I specifically acknowledged they have a duty not to leak classified intel.
>Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material
That's not "fiduciary duty". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary#Relationships
And I’m not putting words in your mouth, I’m just calling out your revealed preferences.
This kills the crab.
(investors are driven out of markets when it is obvious that they are being cheated)
> The truth is that any empire needs to pick off rivals and rob them, in order to keep the empire going.
This also kills the crab. (And most of us along the way: we're already in a limited kind of world war, the sort of thing that has a history of escalating)
Who else here is old enough to remember when Martha Stewart got jailed for insider trading?
The classic example is that sitting outside a factory and counting trucks does not result in insider information, but driving the trucks does. Even though it is the same information.
That is not an example of insider trading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_of_Jeffrey_Epstein...
https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/the-rothschild-dynasty-s...
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/epstein-files-show-...
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/02/05/j...
However, if your "lie" accusation concerns their frequency in the Epstein files, the data is easy to verify. A search on the JMail database shows 6,307 hits for "Trump" compared to 7,845 for "Rothschild."
We're all familiar with some of the "defund the police" experiments that went too far in places like Portland and San Francisco and resulted in things like epidemics of casual shoplifting.
Well, what we just did is basically the white collar crime equivalent. We now have a wide open free for all for all forms of white collar crime. You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.
But as usual when someone steals $100 worth of stuff on the street that's a national crisis and those people are scum, but when people steal billions that's fine cause they're wearing suits.
At my local CVS, they just started locking up the bulk candy. You don't take the the sales hit and the expense of those locking cabinets unless you have a real shrinkage problem.
They absolutely would.
Shrink has not gone up
The National Retail Federation, which publishes those numbers yearly, has stopped publishing those numbers to hide that fact.
There are real shoplifting problems but they are extremely local. Your local police department needs to stand up and do their fucking jobs to identify and take down the organized crime perpetuating it.
Like how Cloudflare wants you to think every unprotected website gets DDoSed.
Something I'd disagree with is... enforcement will not help against what causes people to turn out and steal in stores. Fix widespread poverty, get people out of homelessness, help people legitimately get off of drugs, help them get jobs even when they have convictions on the book, and then they won't need to become members of what is, essentially, small and hyperlocal crime networks.
In contrast, insider traders and billion-scale fraudsters - they do not have the need for survival pushing them to do crime. It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them.
The idea poor people are somehow criminal is a myth that needs to be eradicated.
There is not such a strong distinction. Organized crime groups often use poor people who have few alternatives as the pawns of their theft and fencing operations. People with other better options don't usually take up petty crime as a vocation.
There is not overall any sign that poor people, as a whole, have increased criminality; other factors like culture are far stronger.
Punishing crime and preventing it (like shoplifting) helps poor people, too. Poor people do not benefit from stores closing, or having the stores closest to them have everything locked up.
"Criminality" is too broad a characterization. It covers both assault and petty theft. I never said the poor are more criminal as a group than any other group.
People in poverty are more likely to commit petty theft out of need. Similarly, people who are very wealthy are more likely to commit large scale tax evasion out of greed. Both are financial crimes, but they are not committed equally by both groups.
> Punishing crime and preventing it (like shoplifting) helps poor people, too.
Yes, and so does giving people in poverty a step up out of life circumstances that make them more likely to commit petty crimes (like shoplifting).
Similarly, punishing large scale financial crimes by the wealthy (something that has basically stopped of late) would benefit everyone, from the poor to the wealthy. In fact, punishment may be the only disincentive for financial crimes by the wealthy, since they don't want for anything else.
Yes and no. Enforcement deters career criminals by increasing the cost of doing business. Improving society means fewer honest people have to turn to crime.
> insider traders and billion-scale fraudsters - they do not have the need for survival pushing them to do crime. It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them
Right, so career criminals. See above.
But it can and will massively help against large scale white collar crime. When you got dozens of millions of dollars in wealth, now you have the means to make more out of it (honest or not), the incentive to make more out of it - and also, a lot to lose, should they get caught.
I disagree. Career criminals also do petty crime.
I'm a fan of an idea I ran across recently. Instead of calling Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Ellison, etc the richest people in the world, we should call them the greediest.
"Greediest man in the world Elon Musk promises robotaxis" hits different than the "Richest man" version
Don't say "Billionaire Jeff Bezos does <thing>", say "Champion of Greed Jeff Bezos..."
- Paul Krugman, 1998
Excuse me if I take the Krug-o-tron's opinions with a grain of salt.
That personality type- highly verbal but able to produce talk to fit anything from a 5 second sound bite up to 2 hours, superficially bright but not actually thoughtful, full of spicy opinions, prone to predictions that sound interesting but don’t come true - is all over TV and now podcasts. Alex Jones is the same type.
https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-world/2005...
for a view of the internet's impact on the economy in 2005.
internet delivered massive value post 2005, but that is outside of the window K called out.
Good for them, I guess.
The losses of market participants and the gains from insiders is difficult for me to take seriously as a problem in commodities market
I read all of the cases in the article
There are people and institutions, such as oil producers, who will need to sell oil at a future date. They want to lock in the price today on those future sales. There are also people and institutions, such as airlines, who have a future need for oil and would like to lock in the price today.
Oil producers sell futures simply to ensure deliver of their oil at a certain date so that someone actually shows up to pick it up.
The rest of the market is speculation, and in particular short term movements have always been very speculative and also believed to be plagued by insider trading. Airlines and oil producers do not care about minute to minute changes.
https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/airline-fuel-hedging-iran...
Unfortunately they ditched the strategy last year, claiming the costs were no longer worth the benefits: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-southwest-airlines-finally-... and http://www.wsj.com/articles/airlines-pull-back-on-hedging-fu...
I bet they’re regretting that decision now.
Now the airlines simply raise fares in lockstep when oil gets expensive, or simply go out of business, like Spirit did last week.
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/jet-fue...
> While this figure might appear significant, it constitutes a mere 1.5 per cent reduction in total worldwide aviation capacity,
That said, I don't know a lot of people that book that far in advance, even when their travel plans are well settled.
Metals (miners <> manufacturers) and agricultural (farmers <> food makers) futures are still non-speculative. There are industries that still buy materials from these markets, for delivery, as in they want to see the physical product in their hands. I was surprised to find that out as well
Some markets don’t have a futures market like hay, so people have to buy at spot prices and store it themselves.
And every time an article like this is published, HN predictably goes into the same tirade.
What are you actually going to do about it? Nothing. So keep complaining and hoping things change without changing.
Discussing it is against this website's TOS and the law in most countries
So no you can't stop it, but knowing that does at least let you make decisions with more clarity in your own life
"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation" and all that.
We'll be watching it for the rest of our lives, mostly in slow motion with occasional rapid periods of decline like the one at the moment
edit: see my subsequent comment. I'm not saying corruption is good. The whole point of the article is that it's bad beyond just corruption, and that's the point I'm pushing back on.
Besides, as Matt Levine often says. In the US, insider trading is a matter of miss-appropriating information when you have a duty of confidentiality. Its not about trading when you know more than someone else. Its about trading when you know something your not supposed to share.
The article specifically argues that it's extra bad beyond just corruption. That's the part I'm pushing back on.
>The stench of corruption is overwhelming. Yet aside from the raw corruption, these incidents also raise a larger question. The insiders ripped off the parties who sold futures to them at what turned out to be very unfavorable prices to the sellers. What broader damage does this kind of unchecked insider trading do?
They are elected officials that are supposed to be working in our best interests, or at least the interest of their supporters.
Are they making decisions in our best interests or what makes their pocket book fatter? Poisons the whole system.
This is extremely basic incenive / money-flow tracing and "setting aside corruption" is a premise that has the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up. It smells like someone looking to force the framing. Everyone before me in this conversation was right to be suspicious of your motives in asking it, and I am suspicious as well.
That's still corruption. Your argument about other participants being "taxed" applies for other sophisticated counterparties as well, eg. hedge funds with armies of analysts and can fly helicopters around to gather intel. Unless you want to say that's bad too, the only difference between the two is that the hedge fund isn't engaging in corruption.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Again, if you read the TFA, the entire thesis is that the insider trading is extra bad beyond corruption. The corruption itself only gets a passing mention.
I did and that's not at all what TFA argues. It argues that it's the corruption that's the problem, which is exacerbated by the lack of legal enforcement by the current administration -- mostly because many in that administration are either actively involved in said corruption, or happy to cover it up/pooh pooh it.
I suppose you might think that some folks who haven't read TFA might buy your analysis, even though it's pretty much the opposite of what Krugman argues.
You go, girlfriend!
The wealthy can afford to continually leverage their wealth to accumulate even more wealth. This expresses in many different ways.
The wealthy man can afford the helicopter to get an edge at the global casino.
It's a structure designed to concentrate wealth and power and it won't end well for anyone involved, top or bottom.
Looking at my local tourist helicopter place, a private custom flight is $1k per ~15m. That seems like nothing if it allows you be make millions with the information.
Of course, this is the fastest way to lose your shirt and everything you have ever worked for, if there is any uncertainty.
This is allowed because you've gotten that extra information through your own methods that in theory anyone else can get access to. The problem here is they're using information that nobody else could possibly have access to, therefore its "insider" trading and it's been illegal for a long time.
Politician are servants of the people, for the people. This involves sacrifice and following the law. (I realize this is a naive statement, but shouldn't we be jailing these law breakers?)
If the market wants to incentivize pumping and dumping the American economy by releasing a stream of fake news from the US President, that's bad.
We should tilt the arbitrary rules away from the bad things and towards the good things.
Unless the helicopter is dropping a bomb on a school on the way there (or back) I am not sure that the comparison is fair.
Modern tanks have floating lids. The lid is as much for keeping the volatiles in as keeping water out. Water gets into all sorts of places in oil refining anyway. It wouldn't really matter anyway since oil and water being famously good at mixing. You can just draw water off the bottom, filter it or boil it off depending on the situation and amount. Obviously they don't want more water (you're wasting money processing everything that you can't sell) but some isn't a big deal.
Instability is bad, but when the cause of it is market getting new information, it becomes ok: it is bad now, but it is good in the long term. But when the instability becomes a source of profits, when there are incentives and means to create the instability, then long term benefits go away.
> The real issue is never whether the trading was unfair to the people on the other side; it’s whether the information was misappropriated from its rightful owners
In this case the rightful owners are the American public in whose employ the leakers are. They got this information from their position of trust, and sold that information, to the disadvantage of the people they work for.
It's not, when the article is specifically arguing that the insider trading is bad beyond just corruption, and barely touches corruption. You don't get to tack on a weak claim on top of a strong claim, and then when the weak claim gets pushback fall back to the strong claim and say everything's fine because you're directionally correct, or claim the person pushing back is wrong because they're directionally incorrect.
> Yet aside from the raw corruption, these incidents also raise a larger question....What broader damage does this kind of unchecked insider trading do?
That is what the article is about. It's saying that this is corruption, and discussing what the effect of this corruption is. "Beyond just corruption" is wholly your invention. I don't even know what it would mean?
Corruption is the cause. The article discusses the resulting effect.
Hell, being a congresscritter in charge of oversight of $industry allows you to cheat the public cause you know what's coming. How else do you see a senator making $174k/yr but net worth's of $100M? Its legal, only cause they carved their own exemptions and scam the public.
I hope that everyone responsible for this is enjoying every cent of what they get to pay at the pumps.
As if the people responsible actually feel the impact of their choices to that degree.
It should be mandatory voting like in Australia instead. You don't cast a ballot, you get fined, and voting day is a mandatory national holiday. If you really don't want to cast a ballot, you cast a blank or invalid one.
(Not to imply that many Democrat politicians aren't also owned by AIPAC and big business.)
He only stopped because of COVID.
Expressing a desire to take Greenland but not actually doing so was a move out of his book Art of the Deal.
You knew his idea of negotiating vehicle lease terms starts with "I will burn this dealership to the ground if I don't get my way!" (Art of the Deal).
What did you think was going to happen when he actually encountered serious people?
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/379717298296086529
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/399731975432728576
These were 13 and 14 years ago. His patterns became obvious in his first term and reaffirmed during his second and third time running.
Even more specifically, these examples were all before the 2024 election:
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-could-try-buy-greenlan...
https://www.wired.com/story/trump-cia-venezuela-maduro-regim...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-trumps-wish-for-more-f...
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/publications/end-f...
What politics do you listen to daily?
People absolutely predicted Trump military adventurism in the 2024 election cycle! It failed to break through in the media because of a deliberate reflection attack that leveraged a bunch of leftie memes about Biden/AIPAC/Israel to pretend that it was really the democrats who wanted endless war.
So that's what low info voters heard on their televisions. But the smart people in print were 100% warning about this kind of thing.
As always Europe does nothing
Now let's see how long until he invades Cuba, and how his voters will react.
This time around GOP has been flattened into his mouthpiece and the government is fully of sycophants. Its not that he's in his final years more like his yes-men are afraid of being booted out and replaced with another power hungry nincompoop sycophant.
If people fell for this "but this didn't happen in the first term" even then they are to blame for this mess, they voted for this person in the first place. Just like being ignorant doesn't let you escape from legal consequences, it should let people escape from outcome of their actions.
On the one hand he says Russia would never have dared invade Ukraine if he was President, yet he was also against military support for Ukraine before the full scale invasion, and says that Ukraine's plight is basically their and Europe's problem.
He was adamantly against bombing Syria in response to Assad using chemical weapons while Obama was president, then when they used chemical weapons as soon as he became President he bombed them for it.
He's advocated for the USA not getting involved in military conflicts, while also advocating for massive increases in military spending and capability.
This has always been his approach, say one thing while very often actively doing the other. Promote domestic manufacturing, while putting massive tariffs on the inputs on which American manufacturing depends, many of which are only available in the required quantities abroad even for current production.
Trump voters have been scammed by a self-professed scammer that's been successfully prosecuted for scamming, and they know it. They were quite happy for him to betray, backstab, double-deal and scam whoever he liked on whatever issue he liked, as long as it was people they didn't like or care about.
Given the rashness that he displayed prior to his second term, I don't see why it's at all surprising that he would start a war. To think otherwise just seems like wishful thinking.
Ordo ab chao in full swing.
The man is a pathological liar and nothing he says can be trusted, although it's pretty reliable to consider every accusation is an admission.
Last term he had grown ups in the room to contain him -- this term he's surrounded himself by enablers and acts as if he is now god emperor for life.
There were plenty of warnings about electing Trump and people chose to ignore them.
It was entirely predictable that he would fuck things up in some way. He's demented (although the press stopped caring about that sort of thing when Biden dropped out), deeply corrupt, narcissistic, and was never particularly intelligent to begin with.
We can’t just keep finger pointing at the other party whenever things go wrong. There are systemic issues and outside influences destroying this country. Some people think this will all be fixed when democrats take over again in November but they’re wrong and the cycle will continue just with a more presentable veneer of decency.
I'd just like to remind everyone that this guy got fired from Fox News for being too extreme an idealogue.
> I’m not defending their poor judgement of an infamous con artist
At some point you have to hold adult Republicans accountable for their actions. They were warned repeatedly; they chose to ignore the warnings.
> ask how it’s possible that such unpopular wars always seem to have bipartisan support
Americans love war and guns! This is like, #1 national characteristic as observed by other nations. Especially because America always wins in the movies! The reason Americans are complaining about the Iran war and not the illegal Venezuelan invasion or whatever is because they are losing.
(who on earth is Dave Smith?)
Well, he did win Democrat votes as well because the party put up such horrible candidates twice.
In the last cycle, the Democratic Party stumbled egregiously, no question; but the functionally binary choice was between a predictable, if unoriginal bureaucrat vs. a documented prodigious liar and adjudicated rapist. I suppose for some tiny number of self-identifying progressives that would be toss-up, but I would love to understand the value system that could produce such a decision.
The pnly unforgiveable sin in USA politics.
Do you have any evidence that this was the reason?
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/oct/31/tucker-carlson...
Very weird and defensive response.
How obtuse are you being?
The challenge is that with a 2-party system it was take a chance Trump wouldn't be worse than he was the first time, or continue with the Democratic platform, which is not necessarily in alignment with a LOT of people. My personal feeling is that this administration has driven the country off a cliff in a spectacularly fast order. I also think the Democrats positions had us heading for a cliff, but it was at least further away.
Trump ran on solving SOME of the right problems. He and all the Republican leadership unfortunately have NONE of the right solutions. I fear the Democrats will think that a rebuke of Trump this election would be a mandate for many of their polices. It isn't, it is a rebuke of the horrible job Trump has done.
Tax the rich, solve healthcare, take note that our country is in an economic battle with other countries, and realize the best form of freedom is when everyone has economic opportunity and stability. Both parties "say" they want these things, the Republicans outright lie about it and the Dems do nothing.
Education. Actually teaching people how to think critically about what they see and hear needs to start as soon as they get a phone in their hand, if not sooner. That education in critical thinking needs to come from family, school, social clubs and religious institutions. I don't think that'll ever happen in America though. Our economy depends on people not thinking critically.
Like when people used to say that "Schools should teach useful things like balancing a checkbook or paying your taxes". Which is funny, because the skills required to do those two things are addition, subtraction, and reading.
Americans don't learn because Americans are adamant that they shouldn't have to pay attention to learn, that school is a liberal scam, that broad willful ignorance is not something to be ashamed of, that they have more important things to care about.
Families who value education have always gotten a good education in the USA, and that isn't about choosing a private school either. It's about the person needing an education getting personally invested in gaining that education.
Meanwhile Bush Jr gave us an educational regime where schools cannot at all hold back someone who really needs to be held back. So the curriculum needed to be dumbed down to accommodate people.
That's why it can't just be school. It needs to be a societal thing that goes beyond schools to all the other places people get socialized and learn. I mean maybe churches, social groups, and families are all teaching the willful ignorance you're talking about, but if they are that's what needs to change. People need to hear the same thing from different places before they'll believe it sometimes.
US foreign policy is and has always been bipartisan. One side is a bit more restrained and has better manners, the other overtly says what is going on.
Yes, Tucker Carlson should have known what was going to happen because he has been in politics for so long. For the average voter who is busy with other things, it takes at least 8 years of intensely following one Democrat president and one Republican. The mainstream media is of little use, since they report daily statements and political theater.
You need to read the think tank papers and follow bipartisan hearings like the Senate Armed Services Committee where there is no difference between R/D except for blaming the other side for current events.
We all know how some cultures are violent and backwards to each other? some or like this, just different culture
That was just their nice-sounding excuse for voting for him. It's not like they are going to go out and say that they like him because of his jingoistic machismo authoritarian 'strong'-man bullshit.
They'll performatively grumble for a bit, but are all ready to vote for the guy a fourth time in 2028.
Rich people would rather the country burn than pay 1% more in taxes. It's purely ideological too, as they regularly spend tons to save a little in taxes.
The nuclear material is probably still buried in the facilities attacked in the earlier strikes (not the war this year). That is a delay on any potential nuclear weapons development, but not more than that.
It showed Iran and the world just how much damage they can cause with their control over the strait. And it removed any factor that previously led Iran towards not blocking the strait even when attacked. In the end the odds are that this whole mess will cause death and suffering, damage the world economy and we'll likely end up with an even more dangerous Iran in the future.
The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.
https://www.factcheck.org/2025/06/trump-gabbard-comments-on-...
It cites a publication dated March of '25 that must be compiled from information preceding that by a few months.
The US didn't go to war in or around that time period.
Aside from the fact that Iran and its proxies do this, you have to remember that Israel very likely has nukes and so if Iran gets a nuke what exactly are they going to do with it in the scenario you described? Nuke Tel Aviv? Israel would just nuke them back.
> And maybe the US would think twice about spending $10 trillion fighting pointless wars in the region.
Idk if your figure is right, seems too high, but you are incorrect here because if Iran had a nuke the US could still invade Iraq or Afghanistan.
And honestly maybe it wasn't worth the money but Iraq is doing much better, has a functioning parliament, &c. Maybe that's the problem - it's like Iran's regime is jealous that people can live in peace and don't have to be whipped up into a fury to go murder other people and Iraq is just showing them how it's done. It reminds me of the former Soviet countries where Russia sees they are doing much better without Russia and gets jealous.
I think if Iran acquired nuclear weapons the region would stabilize. Israel would be forced to stop the genocide and land grabs, because they would no longer hold a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the region.
Regarding the cost of the Iraq war it was at least $3T. Likely a lot more. My $10T estimate isn’t exactly mainstream but $3T is a solid floor: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/true-cost-iraq-war-...
“Maybe it wasn’t worth the money”
You say that casually. As of $3 trillion wouldn’t have dramatically improved the lives of tens of millions of Americans. As opposed to killing several thousand military members and a million+ Iraqi civilians.
Evil really is pretty banal I guess.
Well by your own logic this was a bad thing because it lead to the nuclear arms race and all that money could have been spent making the lives of Soviet citizens better instead. Of course, the Soviet Union just made the lives of millions of people worse for a long time, murdered millions of its own citizens, and the vestiges of that evil and stupid government are yet again today attacking the peaceful people of Ukraine.
> I think if Iran acquired nuclear weapons the region would stabilize. Israel would be forced to stop the genocide and land grabs, because they would no longer hold a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the region.
Iran is going to nuke Israel over some settlements? Yea no. Plus Israel would nuke them back. It’s a good thing though that Israel has nuclear weapons right? Seeing as you are in favor of nuclear proliferation. Once Iran gets them the US should give the Gulf States[1] nukes too so next time Iran thinks it can shut down maritime trade they can be on the receiving end of a nuke. Yay! But let’s pretend you care about the lives of others, in fact you care so much you want to make nuclear conflict more likely.
> You say that casually. As of $3 trillion wouldn’t have dramatically improved the lives of tens of millions of Americans. As opposed to killing several thousand military members and a million+ Iraqi civilians.
Sure it would have, not going to find disagreement from me there. But we did the war, and Iraq is much better off now. It was probably worth it from the Iraqi perspective. I think the long arc of history will prove that out. But, as an isolationist like you we could have better spent that money at home. Same thing with all the free stuff we give other countries for military stability. I’m sure you appreciate Trump’s approach though with beginning to charge countries money for our military protection. Have to ensure our people are better off.
> Evil really is pretty banal I guess.
Which evil? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine supported with Iranian weapons? Iran’s murder of 30,000+ civilians? Iran’s giving money to terror groups to murder people and destabilize countries like Lebanon? Perhaps it’s the banal evil of Maduro causing 1/3rd of the population of Venezuela to flee and ruining the country’s economy?
I’d recommend less pearl-clutching and more contact with the facts. It seems that you’ve become confused to the point where you are advocating for genocidal maniacs like Iran’s regime to have nuclear weapons. Mind you, the Iranian people don’t want this. Why is it you stand against America and the people of Iran in favor of the IRGC and Ayatollah. Does that not seem strange to you?
[1] If you want other countries to get nukes, the US can supply the following countries: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Argentina, Gulf States, Israel Ukraine, any anyone else we think we should give nukes to.
“Buy when there is blood in the streets, even if it is your own.” — Baron Nathan Rothschild
https://medium.com/@douglasp.schwartz/buy-when-theres-blood-...
That’s exactly what you’re saying in response to nothing more than a quote.
Little wonder that Zionists cry "Nazis!" whenever someone finds their child trafficking ring.
False dichotomy, circular blame-shifting used by a party that owns/is both.
Everyone always says as if it is obvious, go back in time and kill Hitler. That this would be a overwhelming good.
But, if you go back, and he was a baby. At that time, there is no indication of evil, so you would be a baby killer, but for good. You would look crazy.
So, extrapolate that to present. Killing someone today, might also be seen as a universal good, but nobody would know it yet.
Is todays crazy, really crazy? or just not obvious yet. And some would say, it is pretty obvious.