Who in the Above Gallery Has Caused the Most Political & Economic Damage to the United States?

   

Who in the Above Gallery Has Caused the Most Political & Economic Damage to the United States?

PETER ON THE WRITERS’ HANGOUT PODCAST!

Donald Trump was complaining about the deluge of nations begging him (they “kissed” his posterior) to negotiate a new tariff agreement with his administration. Heavy tariffs on big players – like Canada, EU and China – were quickly rebuffed and met with retaliatory tariffs and other trade restrictions. But after the US stock markets collapsed, and the deficit-financing treasury bonds were selling like a herpes infection, Trump “paused” most of the tariffs (except that 10% minimum tariff, which would have been our highest in recent memory, and an amped up tariff on China – excluding certain electronics) for 90 days. So given all those nations begging to be the first to work out that new tariff relationship with Trump, as of mid-April, how many were there? Oh!

None? In the above photographs, the only one who has not wreaked havoc with the US’ global political stature and our economy is that Bozo on the left (radical left?). It was interesting how looming and threatening Donald Trump’s message to all dissenters in his administration – you’ll be fired and might be prosecuted if you try and defy my orders – has managed to submerge legal ethics for most higher-ranking lawyers in the Trump administration. Let’s see, if the subject matter were foreign affairs, there were no systems in place, no guardrails or check-and-balances, to challenge Trump’s complete control over the relevant policies. The Constitutional checks were also nullified by “emergency” or “in case of invasion” statutes that were often centuries old. Did Richard Nixon’s dream “if the president does it, by definition it cannot be illegal” mantra rise from the dead ready to suck the life out of the country he betrayed?

AG Pam Bondi insisted the Supreme Court could not reach into El Salvador to retrieve a wrongfully (by the US) deported inmate incarcerated in a Salvadoran concentration camp/prison, even though the Trump administration was paying for his imprisonment. Trump and his coterie of groveling sycophants all but stuck their collective tongue out at the relevant trial court… AND A UNANIMOUS RULING FROM THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT. Salvador President “Oopsie” Bukele, a guest in the White House, stated he was not obligated to “smuggle” the inmate in question back to the US… but then NO ONE in the Trump administration even requested that Bukele repatriate that inmate. Adding insult to injury, thumbing his nose at the US Constitution (with Bondi and Rubio cheering him on), Trump stated he would be open to sending even US citizens, who were members of violent gangs, to the same Salvadoran hellhole. Not exactly legal.

Trump’s cringing acolytes expressed admiration for Bukele’s iron fisted arrest of tens of thousands of Salvadoran gang members, manacles, heads shaved, bent over and forced to sit jammed next to each other all day and sleep on concrete or wooden slabs. No trials. No hearings. No way out. No finite sentences. Funny, Marco Rubio used to rail at a vastly less repressive Cuba, from which his parents had escaped. As a member of Congress, he fiercely joined bipartisan efforts to decry regimes even less repressive than El Salvador.

“Marco Rubio has long been a fierce critic of dictatorial leaders who have stifled speech in their countries and crushed opposition. As a senator, [in 2019,] he spearheaded legislation and condemned ‘the ongoing repression of dissent’ in his parents’ native Cuba and repeatedly called for ‘expression not repression’ in countries like Venezuela.

“But now as secretary of state, he’s at the center of the government’s recent actions to deny visa holders entry into the U.S. or arrest and try to deport people, including a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen. Critics of the administration’s measures and those involved in the cases have said they were targeted because of their speech, their support for Palestinians or their criticism of Trump administration policies.’” Suzanne Gamboa, Carmen Sesin and Alex Tabet for the March 21st NY Times. Or simply if letting them rot without a trial, even when protected from deportation by court order, if they seemed bad (even without a shred of proof)… in Salvadoran hell.

Indeed, Trump lawyers played fast and loose with absurd explanations before federal trial courts, obviously lying or obfuscating the truth. Bondi was probably snickering to herself, since if there were to be any finding of contempt against any of her lawyers that could result in jail time, federal prisons and even the Marshals who escorted those sent to jail for contempt were under her jurisdiction. Even as brown-nosing members of Congress called for the impeachment of federal judges doing their jobs, even if their rulings justifiably were solidly against Trump’s insane policies, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court made short work of such efforts, stating plainly that impeachment did not apply; only appeals could reverse such decisions.

Legislation still pressed through the MAGA House to deprive federal judges of issuing injunctions against administration actions, but the very notion of an equal and independent judiciary – a constitutional basic – would seem to negate that effort… if it could even pass the Senate. While there is a solid 1/3 of the electorate that would follow Trump into the raging fires of MAGA hell, if he asked, signs of Trump’s inevitable fall from grace are rising fast. The level of his failures are staggering.

Trump smugly attacked that elitest university, Harvard, the school his MAGA minions hated the most… in a brazen attempt to control every aspect of that school, from admissions to curriculum to DEI policies. He promptly cut $2.2 billion in research funding and ordered the IRS to challenge their tax-exempt status. Harvard, more than a century older than the United States itself, simply said no… soon joined by a chorus of other universities who pledged to join in supporting the resistance. Donations from loyal Harvard friends and alumni poured it… but Harvard hardly needed the money to crush this arrogant upstart bully attempting to replace the Constitution with his blind, unfounded, anti-democratic edicts.

I’m Peter Dekom, but it scares me still that the GOP is beginning to realize that are very likely to lose their majority in Congress unless… unless… Trump can figure out a way to rig the midterms or declare some sort of emergency to delay or cancel them altogether!

What’s Due Process Done for Me Lately?

      Japanese American kids at a WWII internment camp

Purported Gang Members  in El Salvador

What’s Due Process Done for Me Lately?

Trump’s first 100 days tearing apart the federal government and marginalizing the Constitution 

“It’s more than unconstitutional — it’s anti-constitutional. It’s an effort to erase from our constitutional history and law one of the greatest struggles for human freedom in American history and reconfigure the Constitution into an instrument of domination.” 

Evan Bernick, associate professor, Northern Illinois University College of Law

“Dear marxist judges, If an illegal alien criminal breaks into our country the only ‘process’ he is entitled to is deportation.” 

Stephen Miller, one of the president’s most influential advisers, posted on X.

“We do not ask permission from far-left Democrats before we deport illegal immigrants. We do the American people’s business.” 

Vice President JD Vance in a Fox News interview.

Donald Trump’s goals, as he begins to implement his vision of a “correct thinking” nation, are reflected both in that 900-page Project 2025 treatise (which he claimed he never read and was not familiar with) and his executive orders over his first 100 days. It is in line with his most senior policy advisor, ultra-rightwing Stephen Miller. The effort is to eliminate dissent, corral those society institutions viewed as the incubators of “woke” concepts and shut them down, eliminate almost the entirety of the federal bureaucracy (“deep state”) replacing them with stern, lockstep and unquestioning Trump loyalists, and ensure that there are not three co-equal branches of government; the executive branch cannot be restrained from setting and implementing policy by unelected courts and a Congress that believes wrongly that it is a check on presidential power.

Virtually all of the President’s executive orders, seen as expedient substitutes for the cumbersome legislative process, are broadsides against the Constitution itself. This barrage is enabled by this remarkable document, labeled by former Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as “dead, dead, dead,” was written by men who simply assumed that those elected or appointed consistent with its terms would place “country” above “self” and protect the Constitution they swore an oath to protest. The lack of precise definitions, most notably in arenas of national security, war, invasion and national emergencies, were intended to allow the president to deal with catastrophic events that, without immediate treatment, would serve as an existential threat to the republic itself. But doctrinaire MAGA believers have a different vision of “America.”

Yet these dire “spikes” of threatening events, by definition, cannot be slow-build changes, over many years, simply by labeling them as emergencies, invasions or intolerable risks to our nation’s security. Many of the statutes that the President has used to circumvent constitutional limitations were enacted over a century or two ago and cannot, even applying the most rudimentary notion of common sense, apply to non-emergency situations. The president also is not the arbiter of the meaning of constitutional provisions, despite his and his AG’s claims to the contrary. The United States Supreme Court (and the federal courts) have been the last word in constitutional interpretation since the earliest years of the republic.

Donald Trump has not made any pretense of supporting democracy, claiming simply that focusing most national power in his hands and his hands alone was always the intention of our Founding Fathers. It clearly was not. Claiming there a path for his third term or that birthright citizenship isn’t what the Constitution says it is or that courts cannot interfere with the President in foreign policy decisions or his directive after he has declared a national emergency are the clearest evidence of the President’s total disdain for a piece of paper, the Constitution.

Where he has declared such an emergency to exist, with no standards set, he and his clearly uneducated Attorney General have declared a unitary and unappealable right to deport individuals to be tortured in foreign prisons without the very due process guaranteed in our Constitution. According to Trump this would apply not just to undocumented aliens that his henchmen declare to be criminals (without a trial)… but he believes that even US citizens could be so deported… to those same hellish prisons, which are poster-institutions for “cruel and unusual punishment” banned under the 8th Amendment to the Constitution.

Due process – defined under the 5th Amendment and carried to the states under the 14th Amendment provides neither federal nor any state government may deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law – is as American as the First Amendment, even if Donald Trump and AG Pam Bondi, proselytize to the contrary. And no, the president cannot use governmental agencies to implement his directive of retribution against those who have opposed his interpretation of the world, his own autocratic “alternative facts.” Writing an OpEd for the April 6th New York Times, David French writes:

“Last month a federal court of appeals judge made a startling assertion. ‘Nazis,’ she said, ‘got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act’ than people suspected of being members of a Venezuelan gang… You might think those words, spoken by Judge Patricia Millett, who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, are hyperbolic, an example of shamefully politicized language coming from a partisan judge. But they are not.

“At the height of World War II, when the United States was in greater mortal danger than at any other time since the Civil War, America respected the due process rights of people suspected of being Nazis more than it has recently respected the rights of people accused of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — an extremely violent criminal group that nonetheless poses no threat to American national security remotely comparable to the threat posed by Nazi Germany…

“Due process is different. No American right requires an underlying moral commitment to justice more than the right to due process. Very few American voters actually fear a knock on their door in the middle of the night. I’ve never met an American, outside of those from the most vulnerable and marginalized communities, who fears random arrest and indefinite detention… For most Americans, ‘Defend due process or you’re next’ is not a credible argument.

“Instead, the best arguments for due process transcend self-interest. They’re aimed straight at the inherent dignity and worth of every human being. They appeal directly to the idea that each of us is made in the image of God — that each of us is endowed with unalienable rights... If you read the Constitution closely, you’ll note that our national commitment to due process — so vital that it’s mentioned twice, in the Fifth and 14th Amendments — applies not only to ‘citizens’ but to ‘persons.’ That’s because each person is endowed with unalienable rights, not just each citizen. It’s our status as human beings that grants us this dignity.”

For Americans who believe that the most efficient way to deal with the mass of undocumented aliens who live here is to get them out of the country as quickly as possible, they gloss over the rising tide of evidence that significant numbers of individuals now serving what could be a life sentence in Salvadoran hell (see above photo) have no criminal past, are not members of Tren de Aragua, and have absolutely no recourse as long as there are incarcerated in El Salvador.

I’m Peter Dekom, and even if you do not care about those deported to Salvadoran hell, take a broader look at the overall assault by the Trump administration against the Constitution itself (well beyond “due process”) and ask yourself whether the United States would be better off with an autocrat with no guardrails or if there is a better way to protect our nation.

America, Land of the Free (for a while) and Home of the Brazen

   Bukele, Trump, Rubio & Bondi, 

   killing constitutional democracy 

   one executive order at a time… 

“oopsie…”

America, Land of the Free (for a while) and Home of the Brazen

PETER ON THE WRITERS’ HANGOUT PODCAST!

"The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not… Regardless, he is still entitled to due process. If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order… It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter, but in this case, it is not hard at all… The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order." 

Very conservative Judge James Wilkinson, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, writing for the very conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, April 17th

I am reminded of the tales of glory and adulation in North Korea over “Outstanding Leader” Km Jong-Un. Local praise relates how “born of heaven” Kim was repeatedly able to shoot holes-in-one as the played golf, how he is the most brilliant man in the nation, perhaps the world, how he is generous and kind – not a word of which is true… but contradict this mythology, and locals (and their entire family!) are instantly transported to one of many “no way out” concentration camps where death often happens as starving victims are used for bayonet practice.

Clearly, Donald Trump was jealous of this deification, as he stated in June of 2018 on Fox & Friends: “He’s the head of a country, and I mean, he’s the strong head, don’t let anyone think anything different… He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.” That was a wish expressed in Trump 1.0; by 2025, Trump 2.0 was making that a reality. The news reportage of Trump loyalists singing his praises, his brilliance – as our markets collapsed – was a Kim Jong-un equivalent… in English!

Under the guise of balancing the budget, Trump had appointed self-declared Asperger suffering billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE (a new “Department of Government Efficiency”) to implement Musk’s vision of cutting $2 trillion from federal spending, focusing on waste, corruption and fraud. The promised cuts resulted in roughly 60,000 federal civil servants fired (numbers may be mounting), staffing at the VA and Social Security pared to the bone such that these agencies were no longer able to run their agencies… but the benefits remained intact (many just couldn’t get them for lack of support). As time passed, Musk lowered his target to $1 trillion… and then $150 billion, but somehow the federal budget was increasing. Scratch the surface of that effort, and the Project 2025 goal of replacing the cadre of federal civil servants with absolute Trump loyalists emerged as the real goal. Media, universities, law firms and outspoken credible Trump opponents were next.

As Trump’s tariff-heavy plan for the economy – making enemies out of friends – was tanking the stock market, making US treasuries (which finance our deficit) decreasingly valuable, the fallout was dramatic. Trump believed taking on China was a home run… but then China apparently was not informed that they had to cave like a house of cards.

It wasn’t just retaliatory tariffs that China would use. For example, “The Pentagon discovered Chinese companies are aiding the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen to target American ships - a revelation that comes amid the fallout of President Donald Trump 's trade war… A Chinese satellite company linked to Beijing 's military is helping the rebels with imagery to target US warships and international vessels in the Red Sea, the Financial Times reported.” Daily Mail, April 17th. China’s President Xi Jinping was touring the world seeking to establish a new order for global trade, one that excluded the United States. The EU and Canada likewise did not bow to the Orange, self-proclaimed God.

Trump was failing dramatically, as the Trump-hated Federal Reserve suggested the nation was on a path to stagflation, and prices were sill rising for most ordinary commodities. Still, as the bird flu subsided, at least the price of eggs began to fall. Trump’s MAGA cult dug in, and while his approval numbers sank, most voters said they did not regret their vote. But Trump still needed a distraction over his horrific slam to the economy. And if there were one area where Trump voters were united, it was a loser-lose-all immigration policy. More than a few independents confirmed that was why they voted for him. Legal niceties were lost on a majority of Americans; they didn’t even understand that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which protect the rights of persons and property from arbitrary government actions, added a layer of constitutional substance to keep American residents from the very autocracy Trump was demanding be implemented.

Enter a lawful yet undocumented Salvadoran immigrant, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was accorded protected status by an immigration court by reason of threats in his native El Salvador by the dreaded MS-13 gang. Married to an American citizen and father to an autistic child, Abrego Garcia was summarily arrested and subject to instantaneous deportation to that notorious Salvadoran gang concentration camp/prison. ICE and the Trump administration, without a shred of credible evidence, claimed that Abrego Garcia’s was himself a member of MS-13.

Abrego Garcia’s removal last month, which the Trump administration described as an ‘administrative error,’ has become a flashpoint in American politics. The fight to bring him home has reached and earned a unanimous decision from the U.S. Supreme Court. As you can see from the above quote, federal appellate courts found that such deportation (and the many such deportations) to be a rather dramatic violation of the Constitution. But an increasing number of stories of Abrego Garcia’s violence and “unequivocal” gang affiliation exploded, almost always without proof. And anyone helping that poor soul was open to MAGA attack: “A conservative watchdog is demanding an ethics probe into [Maryland Democratic] Sen. Chris Van Hollen for allegedly ‘assisting a foreign terrorist organization’ by going to El Salvador to try to help free an accused MS-13 gangbanger.

“The American Accountability Foundation fired off a letter to Senate leaders Thursday [4/17] underscoring the Trump administration’s accusations about Kilmar Abrego Garcia having ties to the barbaric transnational gang and demanding that the Senate refuse to pay for the trip by Van Hollen (D-Md.)… ‘Mr. Abrego-Garcia is essentially an enemy combatant in the ongoing invasion of the United States by transnational gangs,’ AAF President Thomas Jones wrote to the heads of the Senate Ethics Committee and Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) in a letter obtained by The Post.” NY Post. April 17th.

In short, Donald Trump’s harsh and unconstitutional implementation of deportation without trial, even if that effort resulted in defying federal court orders (even of a unanimous Supreme Court), was a distraction that was working. Stories of a plunging economy, severe damage from retaliatory tariffs, soaring prices and federal agencies that could no longer serve retirees, veterans or feed the poor were buried under a deluge of local and international condemnation of deportation without due process, an effort that resulted in several US born citizens being swept up in this purge… were now buried by the press as old news. Trump joyfully deployed federal troops at our southern border to stop the “invasion,” except there was no one there to be stopped. Facts never mattered to Trump, and with the purge of federal agencies and the blind MAGA loyalist willing to spread falsehoods, Trump was smiling. Screw the Constitution.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if our judicial system is unable to stop what they have already determined is unconstitutional arrest and detention, the United States may well be near the end.

How to Verify Gang Status for Deportation Purposes without Due Process

    LA Times photo of Nolberto Rafael Aguilar Rodríguez

US deportees Marched to prison

Mass, all-day, Salvadoran gang prison cellHow to Verify Gang Status for Deportation Purposes without Due Process

If they have a tattoo that the examining officer thinks might be hinky

PETER ON THE WRITERS’ HANGOUT PODCAST!

If you listen to Immigration Tsar, Tom Homan or to Donald Trump, administration authorities have carefully vetted and objectively determined that those being deported to Salvadoran prisons are “clearly” criminal gang members, even if they have no recorded criminal convictions. And if you believe that, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I am happy to sell you cheap. For innocents with prominent tattoos, that is more than enough to warrant these harsh prisons, even if those tattoos aren’t gang related.

Yet, as CNN (3/25) reports, the Trump administration wants courts to be severely limited in ferreting the truth… since truth is in reality Trump’s number one enemy: “Top Justice Department officials told a federal judge on Monday [3/24] that the Trump administration is invoking the state secrets privilege to avoid giving him information about deportation flights from earlier this month that are at the center of a legal dispute over whether the government flouted his judicial commands.

“‘The Court has all of the facts it needs to address the compliance issues before it,’ Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top DOJ officials wrote in a filing to US District Judge James Boasberg. ‘Further intrusions on the Executive Branch would present dangerous and wholly unwarranted separation-of-powers harms with respect to diplomatic and national security concerns that the Court lacks competence to address.’… ‘The information sought by the Court is subject to the state secrets privilege because disclosure would pose reasonable danger to national security and foreign affairs,’ the officials wrote in the 10-page filing.” There is no such privilege when it comes to judicial review, and courts can keep national security interests from public release.

So, let’s examine the truth, particularly about the innocent young man pictured above with a non-gang-related tattoo: “Families say deportees’ only crime was having tattoos… They’re among hundreds of Venezuelans the U.S. sent to El Salvador… Nolberto Rafael Aguilar Rodríguez got his tattoo of cards and dice to cover a scar from a childhood accident, his sister says. The U.S. called it a gang symbol… [Another is] a former professional soccer player who, according to his lawyer, fled Venezuela after being tortured by the country’s authoritarian government.

“[Aguilar], also from Venezuela, is a onetime shoe salesman and social media influencer who documented his journey from South America on TikTok… Both were apparently among thousands of political asylum aspirants who entered the United States from Mexico legally via an immigration process scrapped by the Trump administration… Both were detained, one in California, and deported. Now they are imprisoned in El Salvador, according to their families, who have been left in the dark about their fates in a penal system widely condemned for human rights abuses.

“‘This has been a torture for us, an injustice,’ said Antonia Cristina Barrios de Reyes, mother of Jerce Egbunik Reyes Barrios, 36, the former professional goalkeeper. ‘My son is not a criminal.’… The social media influencer … Aguilar Rodríguez, 32… initially fled to Colombia, Venezuela’s western neighbor, out of desperation, said his sister, Jennifer Aguilar… ‘We’re campesinos, we come from the fields,’ she said. ‘We left Venezuela because we were starving.’

“Reyes Barrios and Aguilar were among 261 people — the vast majority Venezuelans — expelled to El Salvador this month after the Trump administration alleged that most were affiliated with the Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua gang, which President Trump has declared a terrorist group… The evidence of gang membership cited by the government is typically flimsy to nonexistent, defense lawyers allege, and largely based on tattoos and social media postings… Experts say the administration’s outsourcing of detained migrants to a nation with an infamously repressive prison system has no precedent.” Patrick J. McDonnell, Kate Linthicum, Mery Mogollon and Nelson Rauda writing for the March 24th Los Angeles Times. Had there been a constitutionally mandated due process hearing, these egregious errors would never have happened.

Our faith in the intelligence of the ICE deportation staff was doubly shaken when a bona fide MS-13 gang member, ready to provide federal investigators with detailed information about his gang and its connections in El Salvador, was deported to that Salvadoran prison. “As part of the deportation flights of alleged terrorists at the center of a legal and political storm, the US quietly dropped charges against a key alleged MS-13 leader and returned him to the pro-Trump leader of El Salvador.

“César Humberto López-Larios, an alleged top leader of the MS-13 gang who US investigators believe has information that could implicate top Salvadoran government officials in possibly corrupt deals with the violent gang, was deported on one of the controversial flights, according to current and former US officials and court documents.” CNN, March 24th. Sorry, I forgot, Trump routinely hands out “corruption exemptions” when it suits his interests. Salvadoran President Bukele is certainly grateful.

It does get worse, as attorneys for the government admitted that a Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, legally in the United States, had been deported accidentally. Court filings on March 31st stated: “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error.” Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring Abrego Garcia back now that he is in Salvadoran custody… a fierce reason why due process must be applied before deportation. The fed’s excuse is no excuse at all.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is little wonder that the United States is rapidly achieving the global hatred and decimated creditability levels once reserved for the Taliban, North Korea and Vladimir Putin.

If It Quacks Like a Quack, Duck!

 Child Suffering from a vitamin A overdose

HHS Secretary who suggested vitamin A to treat measles

If It Quacks Like a Quack, Duck!

PETER ON THE WRITERS’ HANGOUT PODCAST!

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary [RFK, Jr], but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” 

 Dr Peter Marks, now terminated (resign or be fired) top vaccine official with the Food and Drug Administration

“RFK Jr.’s firing of Peter Marks because he wouldn’t bend a knee to his misinformation campaign now allows the fox to guard the hen house… It’s a sad day for America’s children.” 

 Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. 

 “We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic… This Department will do more—a lot more—at a lower cost to the taxpayer.” 

 HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr. announcing a 10,000 HHS personnel cutback, including medical researchers and vaccine developers.

I am not sure how many American parents would prefer to go to a medical science skeptic, with no medical degree or certification, to treat their children, either preventively or for an obvious illness or disability. Perhaps those with religious precepts against using medications or medically advisable treatments… or blind adherents and lovers of conspiracy theories. That perspective may have changed when the President appointed, as the head of the nation’s Department of Health and Human Services, a medically untrained conspiracy theorist, vaccine skeptic. That appointment is a powerful endorsement. People believe in Trump. RFK, Jr is our medical tsar!

Yet, HHS Secretary, Robert F Kennedy, Jr (a disowned member of the powerful Kennedy family), had made recommendations prior to his appointment, followed in Samoa, suggesting skepticism over the safety of measles vaccines, that resulted in a major measles breakout (including fatalities) in that island nation… among unvaccinated individuals. As a result of a MAGA-sanctioned pattern, many school districts across America no longer mandate that list of vaccinations that most of us faced as a condition to entry to public elementary school so many years ago. As a result, diseases, which we believed had been eradicated here for a decade or much longer, are returning. Polio and measles are very recent examples. Among HHS discharged employees are NIH researchers seeking treatments and preventative measures for a whole host of diseases from new viruses to cancer and heart attacks as well as cutting edge doctors.

What’s worse, the few hired to replace some of the thousands of fired workers are the medically inadequate and science skeptics. Anti-vaxx champion Kennedy holds in disdain those who do not have “an open mind” to his skepticism, and if they express support without equal skepticism for even-well-proven vaccines, he fires them and replaces them with fellow skeptics.

Given hundreds of new cases of measles, particularly in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Ohio, etc., with fatalities including children, the lack of individuals getting vaccinated, particularly children, has been the direct and immediate cause of this outbreak and the speed at which it is spreading. RFK, Jr’s off-handed suggestions have including purposely exposing people to measles to develop “herd immunity” (potentially deadly advice) or to use vitamin A (beta carotene) to mitigate or prevent its effects. Exceptionally high levels of beta carotene are toxic, particularly to vulnerable children, as the above photograph reflects.

Indeed, this is the same RFK, Jr who stood with anti-vaxxers as they protested what they wrongfully claimed was a potentially deadly use of vaccines against COVID, which vaccines have absolutely been determined to have saved millions of lives around the world. One of those just dumped is most admired, Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration official who played a key role in the development of COVID-19 vaccines during the first Trump presidency and was the top vaccine expert at HHS; he quit after being told if he did not resign, he would be fired.

Marks’ letter to his immediate boss, acting FDA Commissioner Sara Brenner (who reports to RFK, Jr.), suggested a crisis of confidence in Kennedy – because Kennedy, a long-time vaccine skeptic who spread bogus claims about their safety and advocated unsafe alternative treatments for dangerous conditions – literally contradicting Marks at the top of the department he ran. To Marks, it was RFK, Jr. who was not “open-minded.”

Indeed, Kennedy has never let go of the disproven theory that vaccines are a principal cause of autism, so very soon after his confirmation as HHS secretary, Kennedy directed the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to plan for a study to determine whether vaccines indeed cause autism As explained by James Felton, writing for the March 27th IFLScience, the reaction to Kennedy’s appointment of well-known and highly controversial vaccine skeptic David Geier to lead the new study was strongly negative among medical professionals. Felton noted that Geier was once disciplined by Maryland regulators for practicing medicine without a license.

“‘This is a worst-case scenario for public health,’ Jessica Steier, head of the nonprofit Science Literacy Lab, told the Washington Post , saying that Geier, along with his father Mark Geier, had ‘demonstrated patterns of an anti-vaccine agenda…It’s a slap in the face to the decades of actual credible research we have’… Vaccines are an astonishing achievement of modern science, saving an estimated 154 million lives (including 101 million infants) over the last 50 years, according to a major study led by the World Health Organization last year. Of these, the measles vaccine (often grouped with mumps and rubella in the MMR jab) is the biggest contributor, accounting for around 60 percent of the lives saved by vaccination.

“But unfortunately, over the last few decades, skepticism about vaccines has risen, largely stemming from a now-retracted study that claimed there was a connection between autism and the MMR vaccine…In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a paper based on just 12 children that linked the MMR vaccine to autism. The results have not been replicated, and it later transpired that he had falsified data, for which his medical license was revoked.

"‘The Lancet completely retracted the Wakefield et al. paper in February 2010, admitting that several elements in the paper were incorrect, contrary to the findings of the earlier investigation. Wakefield et al. were held guilty of ethical violations (they had conducted invasive investigations on the children without obtaining the necessary ethical clearances) and scientific misrepresentation (they reported that their sampling was consecutive when, in fact, it was selective),’ a report into the case explains.

"The final episode in the saga is the revelation that Wakefield et al. were guilty of deliberate fraud (they picked and chose data that suited their case; they falsified facts). The British Medical Journal has published a series of articles on the exposure of the fraud, which appears to have taken place for financial gain." This is consistent with Trump’s pattern of appointing less than competent individuals, often with most obvious conflicts of interest, to administration posts seriously impacting the lives and well-being of vast swaths of Americans.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if playing fast and loose with our nations military secrets or tanking our economy at unprecedented speed were not enough, now we can see that Trump’s appointments can foment policies that can actually kill you.

US vs China, Both Lose, But Who Blinks First?

US vs China, Both Lose, But Who Blinks First?

PETER ON THE WRITERS’ HANGOUT PODCAST!

Almost every economic move Trump makes registers almost instant rejection by the financial community. Trump announces a tariff-driven economic policy. Stocks fall hard. Trump announces an electronic exemption to Chinese exports to the US. Stocks rise. Was that a “blink”? China sure thinks so. He announces a 90 day pause on the rest. Stocks rise. He still maintains that 10% minimum and absurdly high tariffs on the rest of Chinese imports. Stocks fall. Trump attacks the wildly respected Fed Chair, Jerome Powell. Stocks plunge. Trump stops pursing Powell. Stocks rise. The dollar reaches new lows against most foreign currencies. US treasuries, those bonds that finance our deficit, are being dumped into the marketplace, and interest rates on treasuries soar to maintain the market. Stocks fall. Powell and most of the top financial institutions predict an increasing likelihood of that dreaded “stagflation,” where the economy contracts but prices continue to rise.

Trump’s economic Rasputin, Peter “I love tariffs” Navarro, is uniformly rejected by the mainstream financial world, and it is clear that the underlying instability introduced to our economy by Donald Trump may be significantly irreversible. China’s President Xi Jinping, echoing sentiments from fellow autocrats around the world, has repeatedly stated that he believes the United States’ will self-destruct, yielding economic and political primacy to China. The United States, based simply on Trump’s policy choices, will, in Xi’s opinion, rapidly create a seriously damaged, also-ran, has-been, isolated US with a currency that will soon be rejected as the global reserve currency, the value metric that has government commodity and GDP pricing for decades.

And no, we have not been “ripped off” by getting quality cheap goods, any more than any US department store having a “sale” is “ripping” off American consumers. Consumers have been the big winners when goods are less expensive. We seem to forget that we have not been a manufacturing company for decades, and that our soaring mega-successful economy comes from the fact that 80% of non-government employment and value creation has come from our service sector (design, engineering, financial structuring, copyrights, patents, software design, etc.). The United States will never be primarily a manufacturing nation, and what little growth is even possible may well be mostly relegated to AI-enabled automation.

So it’s China vs the US. China has the autocratic ability to withstand pain a whole lot better than does the United States, but neither side is well-situated to endure the hardships that a trade war between these two nations will impose. In fact, it is this particular two-nation dispute that seems to be the primary motivation for Trump’s overall “fun with Dick and Jane” tariff battle. The second line, in Trump’s negotiations with smaller economies, is to force them to cut back trade with China. As for the larger nations, Trump believes his divide and conquer strategy – making even larger countries pick sides, and if they do not pick the US, retribution rises – will isolate China and benefit the US. But almost everything Trump embraces, from tariffs and trade restrictions to cruel and severely punitive immigration policies, is clearly isolating the United States and alienating its traditional allies. Writing for the April 22nd Wall Street Journal, Micah McCartney explains:

“‘The United States already missed a great chance to help form an anti-PRC [People's Republic of China] trade coalition when it left the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017,’ Sean King, Asia scholar and senior vice president at Park Strategies, told Newsweek, referring to a trade group Trump quit shortly after taking office.

“While many countries friendly to the United States hope to reduce reliance on trade with China, they may not trust Trump not to reach his own bilateral deal with Beijing and leave them in the lurch ‘especially, as he so often reminds the world, how much he likes and respects Xi Jinping,’ King added… ‘Until we stop picking needless fights with our friends and allies, I sadly think it's going to be every country for itself.’

“Independent economist Andy Xie believes China is better prepared to dig in for the long haul compared to during Trump's first term… ‘Over the last six years, I think people have become more and more confident because there are all these tech sanctions. Most were broken through. And in terms of software, the substitutes for Android, for Windows...are all there,’ he told CNBC….’[...] So that's why it's willing to negotiate, play hardball with the U.S. and it's willing to risk a complete decoupling with the U.S.’…

“To further turn up the heat on China, Trump administration officials are pressuring over 70 U.S. trade partners to scale back trade with the world's second-largest economy and even introduce their own tariffs, The Wall Street Journal wrote last week, citing sources familiar with the discussions… This strategy—reportedly backed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—is meant to be a force multiplier that could further bite China's economy—which has been grappling with slowing growth, lackluster domestic demand, and a long-running housing market crunch. That could force Beijing to negotiate…

“But rather than negotiating, Chinese President Xi Jinping is in the midst of a charm offensive, seeking to rally support from nearby Southeast Asia to Europe… After years of aligning more closely with the United States on China over concerns about national security and over alleged Chinese industrial oversupply, some U.S. allies in Europe are pushing back against Washington and even signaling they're considering a relative thaw in trade relations with China… ‘China is the second biggest economy in the world, and it would be, I think, very foolish to not engage. That's the approach of this government,’ U.K. finance chief Rachel Reeves told The Telegraph.”

So what now? On April 23rd, Trump suggested that the tariff war with China will be negotiated (perhaps such discussions have already begun). Trump took the first step, because Xi never would. But immediately following his optimistic trade statement, in an impromptu press meeting in the White House maintenance yard, Trump resumed his tough talk on stopping virtually the entire world from “ripping us off,” a riff that would make any company on Earth that had a sale or discount an equally “rip off” culprit. Donald: Manufacturing quality products and exporting them to the US so consumers can afford them is not “ripping off” consumers, particularly since we are primarily a service economy. It is a major part of Wal*Mart’s and Costco’s core business plan.

On a global level, and increasingly within the United States, by reason of Trump’s erratic economic policies, added to the particular failures of DOGE and RFK, Jr’s negation of medical science, Trump is seriously damaged goods. Can he recover? Can he avoid voter retribution through rising autocracy? Can the United States recover? Is China smirking through its own economic pain?

I’m Peter Dekom, and as Trump stumbles, mistake after mistake, I wonder and worry if Xi’s vision of America may actually become our reality.

Chaos Theory, Our American Cultural Revolution, One Man Rule

 

Chaos Theory, Our American Cultural Revolution, One Man Rule

A King, with his own Rasputin, Enforcer & Sub-Par Loyalist Advisors

PETER ON THE WRITERS’ HANGOUT PODCAST!

Can you guess the cast of characters? Outlier, mad-economist Peter Navarro is the Rasputinesque “tariff whisperer,” Elon Musk is the “deep state” killer and “I’ll Primary You Out of Office” MAGA $$ enforcer and the “screw the Constitution” litany of “we report only to the king” cabinet and sub-cabinet level appointees, led by a bizarre anti-science skeptic, an Attorney General who holds the Constitution itself in contempt and the clumsy Fox Opinion host with no discernible military skills, as the tip of the loyalist iceberg watching as the USA Titanic approaches. To think that the only significant resistance to this cadre of “America destroyers” are a disarray of courts fuming as their appellate-sustained orders have been ignored and a bastion of academic excellence that is vastly older than the United States itself: Harvard University.

I tried to articulate the growing list of what hates the most, and without any particular order, here goes: poor people, higher education, facts, science, anyone or any media that oppose anything he champions, taxes on the rich, federal courts, Democrats, “loser” members of the military, NATO, Ukraine, the European Union, China, California, NY courts, and once again poor people (the drainers of benefits that should be stopped to fund tax cuts for the rich). Whew! I am sure you can think of more, but that’s a good start. Trump defeat and humiliate China? Good luck with that Mr. Trump… as most of the rest of the world would now rather deal with China than you!

Even though there is zero chance that Trump’s tariff scheme, if it even sustains, would work as he envisions, that the cruelty evidenced in Trump’s unilateral determination who should be deported to a possible life sentence in a horrific Salvadoran prison will soon be forgotten, Trump has purposely positioned the United States as an isolated, go-it-alone nation with an unstable, non-genius in charge. He punishes those under his control viciously if they utter a sound against him.

Using flimsy reasoning based on centuries old wartime statutes, Trump has trashed the Constitution, abolished the rule of law, and become the sole decider of tax policies (relegated by the Constitution to Congress), the abrogation of long-standing treaties (from NATO and trade treaties to the Paris Climate Accords), all things “citizenship” and “immigration,” and the enforcer of mega-ambiguous (ill-defined) cultural concepts like “woke” instruction and books, “DEI” policies and “entitlements.” Trump as “Chairman Mao” with a cultural revolution?

Did this happen overnight? Even within the first 100 days of being elected, Trump has approval levels lower (at the same point in their administration) than any other president since polls have been conducted. Yet Trump is nothing more than an affirmation that this country is run by and for the “show me the money” mega-millionaires/billionaires (some of whom are in his cabinet). To the extent there are any challengers to that plutocratic vector, Trump is there to root them out. As King, Trump has named himself as the waiver granter, evidenced in exceptions to tariffs and regulatory statutes accorded disproportionately to his major campaign contributors. As he faced too much opposition to the outright repeal or significant benefit reduction of Social Security, Medicare, VA and Medicaid, the solution was simple: send Musk’s storm troopers to decimate the staffing, computer systems and supporting infrastructure that makes those social programs work. Musk the champion of waste and fraud reduction? Did I tell you the one about the Easter Bunny? Using chainsaws is not a particularly good approach to securing effective government.

The Supreme Court, until literally weeks ago, was most complicit in this attack on representative democracy. By elevating money above justice (e.g., the uncapping of SuperPAC campaign contributions in Citizens United v FEC), allowing politicians to exclude voters who might oppose them (e.g., Shelby vs Holder), enabling white supremacy (e.g., Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina) and empowering presidential rule (e.g., US vs Trump, which established far-reaching presidential immunity). Truly a sad unraveling.

Sure, post-WWII Republican President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation of the “military industrial state,” but today that massive lobbying effort (well-staffed with retired senior military officers) has a significant military vendor in virtually every congressional district… making cuts in the military budget close to impossible; the military budget is over 3% of our overall GDP, which is the functional equivalent of the rest of operational federal government combined. While the federal bureaucracy has, until Musk’s chainsaw, remained roughly the same for 30 years, the deficit and the military budget have grown.

Indeed, lobbying is huge business, particularly in a kleptocracy where individuals are awarded lucrative contracts – take a good close look at how much money Elon Musk’s companies generate from federal contracts… and how Tesla wouldn’t even exist today if not for massive government subsidies and loans early in that company’s history – and exemptions from regulations they do not like. With members of the House in perpetual pursuit of campaign contributions (they all have two-year terms) and the high stakes in Senate seats (where Wyoming with 600,000 residents has the same two Senators that does California with 39 million residents), that infamous K-Street cadre of exceptionally well-funded lobbyists has been calling political shots for virtually every moment since WWII.

Even before Donald Trump, the prestigious The Economist had relabeled the United States as a “flawed democracy” with an “unrepresentative” form of government. Trump’s implementation of his Project 2025 agenda since inauguration has resulted in disapproval levels that now exceed approval levels. Can Trump even afford to let the approaching misterms happen, where his MAGA majority in each house of Congress is at stake, unless he can: rig the election (through voter exclusion and redistricting) or, through some reliance on some inapplicable wartime emergency power, delay or eliminate that election? And exactly how will he exacerbate the current constitutional crisis by escalating his scoff-law defiance of federal court orders (even the US Supreme Court), to many the last hope of saving our American democracy. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and the seeming hope of keeping America as a democracy may just lie in more angry town halls and increasing the number of peaceful but very angry mass protests everywhere.

Is There a Shot the Trump’s Tariffs Will Elicit the Deals He Seeks?

  

Is There a Shot the Trump’s Tariffs Will Elicit the Deals He Seeks?

PETER ON THE WRITERS’ HANGOUT PODCAST!

As I have learned by over half a century negotiating high dollar and high-profile transactions in the shark-invested waters of the entertainment industry, if you start hard, you damned well better have the negotiating power to shove the deal down your opposite number’s throat. It is a whole lot easier to escalate from reasonableness than to try and sink your teeth into the negotiator on the other side at the beginning. For those who are not used to bullies, they may not take your fang-leading effort at face value… or they may believe you are all show but lack the staying power inherent in your initial hostile approach. I’ve enjoyed enough bullies to be able to smile.

It get’s worse if you have multiple simultaneous negotiations based on the same subject matter. If you have the bargaining power across the board, you can even tilt the numbers upon which the negotiations are based in your favor. Trade deficit values in tariff negotiations is like a dentist grinning and holding pliers and a power drill before a minor procedure, especially when the “patient” doesn’t want dental work and is equally as powerful as you may be.

Comparing apples to apples works only so far. But if one country makes tons of money from services-based businesses, digital platforms and financial/banking structures, if you just look at one sector of trade (like goods sold which may define the other party), you can create a case for trade deficit-based tariffs… but it obviously is a flawed basis. The more additional variables you can add, the more you can justify bully demands. But Canada as a major source of fentanyl? Huh?

And woe to those you are trying to intimidate who are powerful and willing to push back really harder! China has told Mr. Trump to “bring it on,” and the EU is contemplating applying the Anti-Coercion laws which contain the ability to deny EU access to the offending nation and its companies. How happy would Google and Facebook feel if they were banned from continental Europe… or if US banks and other financial institutions were banned from accessing the EU markets at all? Or what if China froze all the electronic components America carmakers and manufacturers of sophisticated electronic systems? Or began dumping lots of its US dollar reserves to undercut the value of dollar way below what Trump hoped for.

So let me answer the title question very simply. While a finesse player who really understood trade deficits, one not attempting to take on the whole world, began this effort with sensible goals, perhaps. But braggadocio Trump tends to burn his bridges before he tries to cross on them… so simply, while Trump may score a couple of victories, NO… We are now a global pariah facing a vast wall of anger and retribution. I suspect you will be able to book rooms for 2028 Olympics really inexpensively.

I’m Peter Dekom, and how would you like it if most of the rest of the world were furious and waiting to get you, your companies and your citizens; well, they ARE?

Federal Employees – Hard-Working Human Beings or Lazy Villains?

  OR

Federal Employees – Hard-Working Human Beings or Lazy Villains?

PETER ON THE WRITERS’ HANGOUT PODCAST!

Spoiler alert: My mother, my father, my stepfather, my uncle and my son were all federal employees who worked their butts off, both in their Washington, D.C. HQs and, when posted overseas, worked even longer hours. Each was specially trained, often highly-educated with advanced degrees and usually multilingual. The more senior they got, the longer their work hours. I admit to having a summer job at a US embassy between high school and college; I had to get to the local Beirut (Lebanon) airport by 5 am on Sundays to deliver and pick-up materials shipped to and from the local US embassy… and no, that did not generate extra pay or result in being credited against the rest of my work week. I met the US aircraft on the tarmac.

When my stepfather was on overseas assignment (which included the Austro-Hungarian border during the Soviet invasion in 1956), stints in Bombay (now Mumbai), Beirut, Antwerp (Belgium), and Saigon (Vietnam, during the War), he was on call 24/7. He spoke French, German, Hungarian and Hindi fluently. My mother spoke Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian (her native tongue), French, German and grammatically perfect English. My father (who worked as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill) was fluent in Italian, German, Hungarian and French. I once was fluent in French, German and could swear like a trooper in Arabic (and carry on a limited conversation in that language). My son was an investment officer at the US Department of Energy, an MBA/CFA, who spoke fluent math and was (is) an expert in business analytics. We just weren’t used to lazy, under-educated government sloths. And for those who worked with us who were in the military or the intelligence agencies, long hours were the absolute rule! Pride, commitment & dignity!!!

So, I watched with horror the demonization of the entire federal bureaucracy as if these civil servants did not care or did the least they needed to do to get by. Most do not work the DOGE “nerd ours,” but their efficiency at their jobs always impressed me. Through my experience with federal employees, most were certainly able to secure better-paying jobs in the private sector but chose public services as an honorable profession, tenured with job security and a good chance for advancement. The majority of federal bureaucrats were veterans, who simply wanted to continue their commitment to government service. My stepfather, who worked his way up to Army major working in the Office of Strategic Services, which led many to continue with the CIA or the Department of State… chose the latter and also transferred to the Air Force (newly formed under President Harry Truman) as a Lt Colonel in the Reserves.

Over the years, I came to realize that the federal bureaucracy created both legacy standards, continuity between and among political changes and literally served as a shock absorber to prevent political whimsey and unworkable political decisions that would have unraveled government efficiency, reliability and the predictability required of international relations. As you might guess, our allies came to count on a self-sustaining military and bureaucratic consistency to keep our alliances healthy yet flexible. What I am now witnessing is our allies’ and veterans’ worst nightmare: the hyper-accelerating destruction of our political state, the breaking of pledges and treaties that held most of our world on a steady path, one that fostered the greatest economic success the world had ever seen. What is left is a combination of oligarchs’ grabbing power, the destabilization of decades and decades of bipartisan policies and practices, and destruction without a plan for what was to replace the decimation of America.

We’ve been here before, even in my lifetime, but our wayward self-destructive urges were tempered by sober bureaucrats and stopped by a commitment to ethics and integrity that seems long gone today. It was the 1950s, and the “red scare” (the fear of the infiltration of communists into to every aspect of our nation, from government to our cultural enjoyment) redefined who we thought we were. It was the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). All it took to end a creative career or get a bureaucrat fired was a raw accusation of communist leanings.

Writing for the March 31st Los Angeles Times, Berkeley Law Professor, Catherine Fisk, reacted badly “at the callousness of Elon Musk talking about taking a ‘chain saw’ to agencies and Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, saying he wants government employees to be ‘traumatically affected’ and ‘viewed as villains.’” Among those fired without genuine cause was her mother: “Making trauma for government employees a policy goal is horrific. I know, because I grew up in a home where that trauma hung in the air like smoke from the cigarettes chain-smoked by my mother — a civil servant fired without cause in the McCarthy era.

“The ongoing mass firings of federal employees (over 100,000 at last count), arrests of activists and attacks on universities [today] have rightly been compared to the Red Scare of the 1950s… Now, as then, people are being fired without a semblance of due process on baseless allegations of disloyalty or incompetence. Now, as then, the firings are inflicting trauma for those who are fired. Now, as then, the goal is to instill fear in those who remain. During the Red Scare, my mother was fired from a federal job on false charges of disloyalty. She never recovered.

“Like many of today’s civil servants, my mother loved her job. She graduated from UC Berkeley at the end of World War II with a degree in international relations and a desire to help build the postwar order. She went to Washington, D.C., thrilled to work for an agency that valued her expertise in Soviet politics and facility with languages. A week before she was to depart for a two-year post in Berlin, her assignment was suddenly canceled. Someone accused her of being a communist because she had been seen with Russian emigres. She explained that her Russian acquaintances were anti-communists who had fled the country after the 1917 revolution, and she socialized with them to perfect colloquial Russian… The government rejected her and everything she had studied for and worked to achieve. She lost self-confidence. She succumbed to self-pity, and then quickly apologized for it. Her letters expressed anxiety, depression and fear about money.

“Her letters describe the struggle to find another job that valued her skills. Some of her skills could not be used in the private sector. Even the transferable knowledge was useless in an era when most companies would hire women only as secretaries. Plus, as her letters prove, she was a mediocre typist. Her savings dwindled. She gave up her apartment and moved in with friends. Finally, she abandoned her career, accepted my father’s offer of marriage and became an unhappy housewife in a small Southern California college town… Eventually she found a job teaching in a community college. But she never found another job that used her knowledge and training, and she never overcame the feelings of loss, grief and rejection. Her faith in her country had been shaken.”

Waste, the real government waste, and sadness were what was unwarranted. The corruption, then as now, was in the accusers. Lives were ruined. Today, the damage from the Trump/Musk cabal will take decades to repair, if indeed the damage is even reparable. Those early in their government careers are likely to find new lives, new opportunities. For those in the middle or later part of their careers, they have been abandoned in a flurry of wildly inaccurate conspiracy theories promulgated by those with a greedy agenda… or others simply looking for someone to blame for the decline in their ability to achieve their own expectations.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I find little sympathy for the insensitive chainsaw wielding sociopaths who are obviously not remotely going to deliver a better America, instead leaving a path of cruel brutality in their wake… destroying the greatest nation on earth.