Tag: world war ii
Donald Trump

As Stocks Spike Upward, Rumors Surge Over Insider Trading

After one of the best days on Wall Street since World War II, fueled by President Donald Trump and his team's conflicting messages and actions on tariffs, questions are swirling over possible insider trading, market manipulation, and "pump and dump" schemes.

President Trump's announcement that he is pausing most of the increased tariffs that went into effect at midnight was met with glee by investors but with questions by critics who note that the President, just minutes after the markets opened Wednesday morning, had declared it a "great time to buy." Less than four hours later, upon news breaking of his "pause" announcement, stock prices surged.

The Dow closed up almost 3000 points, and the S&P 500 surged 9.5 percent, its biggest increase since 2008.

Some critics say the optics are even worse given that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, following the President’s market-shaking “pause” announcement, reportedly told reporters it had been the plan all along.

“Is this market manipulation?" asked Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV), in a hearing Thursday afternoon, questioning Trump Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.

"No," Greer replied.

"Why not? If it was a plan, if it was always a plan, how is this not market manipulation?" Horsford insisted, appearing to refer to Secretary Bessent's prior remarks.

"It's not market manipulation, sir," Greer added.

"Well, then what is it?" an angered Horsford demanded. "'Cause it sure is not a strategy."

"We're trying to reset the global trade system," Greer continued.

"What has that done?" Horsford interjected. "How have you achieved any of that? But to enact enormous harm on the American people, which was our concern from the very beginning, Tariffs are a tool. It can be used in the appropriate way to protect U.S. jobs and small businesses. But that's not what this does. So, if it's not market manipulation, what is it? Who's benefiting? What billionaire just got richer?"

"But meanwhile, the Speaker is rushing to the floor to pass a budget reconciliation to screw America by passing the biggest tax cut in history — on the backs of the American people? W.T.F.! Who's in charge? Because it's sure doesn't look like it's the trade representative. You just got the rug pulled out from under you."

Journalist Ahmed Eldin writes, "Trump tells followers to buy when market opens, then hours later, he pauses tariffs — stocks surge. Totally normal! Just your average day of legal-ish insider trading and market manipulation. Corruption is trading at an all-time high."

On Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) announced that he will be "writing to the White House to demand who knew in advance that the president was once again going to flip flop on tariffs —and are people cashing in?"

"There is just all too much opportunity for people in the White House and the administration to be insider trading and you can't put it past them for a minute," he said. "I think Congress should do an investigation into this, but we're gonna demand answers from the administration."'

"This will come out," Schiff vowed, "but an administration that has their own meme coins and has already engaged in self interested dealing with Elon is 'DOGEing' agencies that are doing oversight in his own businesses, and that kind of corrupt climate, you have to assume the worst, and we're gonna try to find out."

Attorney Jackie Singh, a cybersecurity, privacy, and cybercrime expert, posted a CNBC screenshot with the headline: "White House insists Trump's tariff reversal was his strategy all along."

"Yes," she writes, "pump & dump schemes were previously an exclusive realm of fraudsters, and considered prosecutable criminal activity–Now neatly employed by the President of the United States (also a fraudster)."

Political strategist Chris D. Jackson writes, "So he caved after he said he wouldn't. Was this all a big market manipulation scheme?"

International security analyst Matthew VanDyke insisted the Trump administration "is going to be investigated for market manipulation."

"Somebody just made BILLIONS off this tariff-based manipulation of the markets," noted attorney Tristan Snell, who prosecuted the Trump University case for the State of New York. "And it wasn’t any of us."

"Historian here," writes Professor of history Manisha Sinha, "while they are tanking the U.S. economy the White House and Trumps cronies are making millions from market manipulation and speculation."

SiriusXM host John Fugelsang wrote: "This isn't The Art of the Deal. It's insider trading with a bad comb-over."

Watch the videos above or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Harry Stewart Jr.

The Lost Boys Of Trump And Musk Shrink Next To Real Patriots

When, after his stellar World War II service, Harry Stewart Jr. applied for a job as a Pan American pilot, he was clearly overqualified.

The Tuskegee Airman had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroic actions, which included, on one mission, downing three German fighter planes, one after the other. His four-man team earned a “top gun” first-place trophy in a competition that Tom Cruise could only make movies about. His experience far exceeded the few hundred hours of flying time the ad said the job required.

Yet he couldn’t get an interview. “Just imagine what passengers would think if during a flight they saw a Negro step out of the cockpit and walk down the aisle in a pilot’s uniform?” the personnel manager told him, as recounted in his biography and reported in a New York Times obituary after his recent death at the age of 100.

Sounds a lot like the uninformed President Donald Trump and the minions who repeat his every utterance, who, reflexively and without evidence, blame diversity for the country’s every ill, including plane crashes.

Against roadblocks placed by those who believed African Americans lacked the mental fitness to be pilots, Civil Rights activism and the perseverance of the would-be pilots themselves pushed military leaders into initiating what would be a DEI program of its day, one that made Stewart’s exploits possible.

Stewart went on to a distinguished corporate career after years of night school earned him an engineering degree. But he never got that coveted job flying for a commercial airline. It would take a 1963 Supreme Court decision to make airlines stop discriminating against the ridiculously talented Black pilots who gave white flyers competition they had never had and support in the sky.

Eventually, the courts and, yes, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts forced airlines and a lot of other companies, sometimes kicking and screaming, to recognize and reward talent they were deliberately overlooking, to look beyond the white men who automatically had — and still have — the advantage in America.

DEI doesn’t discriminate. It’s one tool that fights discrimination.

How Republicans, with a straight face no less, can say eliminating these programs is about returning to a meritocracy is beyond me, not with the crew Donald Trump is appointing to important government posts.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth promises to rid his department of the DEI boogeyman of the GOP’s fevered dreams, perhaps forgetting that he barely made it through the confirmation process. According to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MI), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Hegseth promised to stop drinking if confirmed.

Imagine if you or I or most anyone, in a job interview, tried to convince the manager with a pledge to stop drinking if hired. I’m pretty sure that position as assistant manager at McDonald’s would be out of reach, though since the fast-food chain rolled back some DEI programs, the road to the grill might be cleared for Hegseth’s sort, the ones who might otherwise be laughed out of the personnel office.

Hegseth, whose own background was once scrutinized, has downplayed the influence of extremist groups on members of the military and portrayed the January 6 rioters as patriots. As part of the Pentagon’s DEI purge, military organizations backed out of recruiting at an engineering, science, and technology conference this month, one that traditionally attracts a large and diverse crowd and has served as a way to identify the best and the brightest.

And this is supposed to make the country safer?

The ascendance of mediocrity mixed with cruelty starts at the top, and yes, I mean the reality-show commander-in-chief and his unelected buddy Elon Musk, who have proven their lack of judgment and empathy just a few weeks in.

How far have standards fallen, now that opportunities for those once excluded, judged the wrong color, gender, age, faith or just not the “right” fit, are disappearing?

Well, rather than being a deal breaker, the new résumé booster is racism, the kind that squashed the dreams of American pilot and patriot Harry Stewart. Marko Elez, a 25-year-old software engineer, part of the Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency team working inside the Treasury Department, resigned after the Wall Street Journal surfaced racist posts he made last year.

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” is just a sampling.

Vice President JD Vance came to the defense of the Musk bro, writing on X: “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” leading Musk himself to post that he intended to rehire him: “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”

Taking responsibility is for other people, I suppose, not these white men who get to be Peter Pan, “kids” at 25. How comforting it must be for these “lost boys” to retreat into a fantasy world where you and those of like minds rule, not because the game is rigged in your favor but because it’s the way it’s supposed to be.

It would be sad if it wasn’t so destructive.

Their power pushed the U.S. Air Force, spooked by orders to erase anything touched by DEI, to remove training materials depicting the history of the Tuskegee Airmen and the World War II-era Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), until cooler heads, and backlash, prevailed.

For now, at least, new recruits will see the exploits of the airmen who overcame every obstacle thrown their way, and learn how small those in charge look when they try to stand in Harry Stewart Jr.’s shadow.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Joe Biden

Biden Oversees Booming Growth In Oil Production (But Clean Energy Too)

Donald Trump recently warned that Joe Biden would lead us into World War II, a conflict that ended almost 80 years ago. Another world event he may not be current on is America's boom in oil production — never mind the green energy revolution.

"We are going to drill, baby, drill," Trump said on a recent Fox News town hall.

Actually, America is now pumping oil in record amounts. The U.S. now accounts for one in every eight barrels produced in the world. Prices are coming down, too.

As for Biden's clean energy program, it foresees a transition away from planet-heating fossil fuels. It also recognizes we're not there yet.

An essential piece in the move toward green energy is a switch-over to electric vehicles from the gasoline-powered kind. This is a worldwide phenomenon that the Biden administration has joined through a variety of subsidies.

In China, EVs are expected to reach 38 percent of total car sales this year, versus 13 percent of new purchases in the U.S. China is experimenting with vehicle-to-grid technology that would, amazingly, enable cars to feed electricity back into the system when demand surges. America should take notice.

In Trump's backward ideology, clean energy programs are a "new scam business." Trump is bashing the new technology at a time when U.S. automakers have planned $100 billion in electric car investments. Apparently ignorant of new developments, he keeps saying that EVs are "too expensive" and they "don't go far enough."

Dan Neil, car columnist at The Wall Street Journal, acknowledges some past glitches with EVs but then offers an update on Trump's claims. People who actually drive one of the new models, Neil writes, are finding it "quicker, quieter, more refined and responsive, more efficient, more connected and cheaper to operate than its gas-powered equivalent. ... After a few miles in an EV, going back to internal combustion feels like returning to whale-oil lamps."

Charging has already become easier as Biden's program to build half a million public fast chargers bears fruit. Other carmakers, meanwhile, have adopted Tesla's charging standard, enabling their EVs to use Tesla's supercharging network.

"Pretty soon range anxiety will be returned to neurotics," Neil adds.

As for the prices on EVs, they are expected to plummet in short order. Tesla is expected to soon introduce a Model 2 priced at only $25,000.

But in Trump world, everything has to be turned into a culture war. U.S. automakers consider these attacks worrisome, and so should their workers.

"I never thought I would see the day when our products were so heavily politicized, but they are," Ford Motor Co.'s executive chair Bill Ford said.

By the way, Americans remain free to buy gas-powered vehicles. But many are looking at plug-in hybrids as well.

The boost in U.S. oil production is coming largely from the usual parts of oil country: Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Oklahoma. It reflects improved technology rather than an expansion in the number of rigs. In other words, companies are now extracting more oil from the same location, which means they can obtain it more cheaply. Oil producers are not complaining.

"Companies are making money and investors are making money," Bloomberg's energy columnist, Javier Blas, said. "So everyone is loving it."

The people who are not loving it are the Saudis. U.S. shale oil is growing and making money at the same time, Blas adds, and "this is what really terrorized OPEC."

Is it possible that America is reducing reliance on foreign oil while also addressing the planetary need to move toward clean energy? It is possible, and it's also happening. Biden's America is enjoying a boom in both.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Donald Trump

Confused, Stammering Trump: Biden Will Lead Us Into 'World War Two' (VIDEO)

On Friday, Donald Trump was in Washington, D.C., to appear at something called the “Pray Vote Stand Summit.” In a relatively brief speech, Trump repeatedly fumbled basic facts, made mistakes about his own elections, and devolved into what some observers accurately called a “word salad.”

In the middle of this, Trump attacked President Joe Biden, using the same hot button the media can’t stop pressing: Biden’s age. “We have a man who is totally corrupt and the worst president in the history of our country, who is cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead, and is now in charge of dealing with Russia and possible nuclear war,” said Trump.

He added, “Just think of it. We would be in World War Two very quickly if we’re going to be relying on this man, and far more devastating than any war.”

Here’s a snippet of that speech that shows both gaffes as well as others, including one in which Trump claims he’s leading Obama in the polls and that he won an election over Obama (before racking his memory and coming up with the name Hillary Clinton).

It’s worth reflecting on an older video that shows the second presidential debate between then-candidates Jimmy Carter and President Gerald Ford. It’s notable for a number of reasons, but it’s largely remembered for a moment in that debate in which Ford declared, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”

Whatever Ford meant to say, that statement was seized on by the media as a major mistake. Even decades later, there’s still debate about what role Ford’s gaffe played in the outcome of the election, with some feeling that it dinged the prevailing narrative of Ford as the knowledgeable, familiar Washington insider and Carter as the naive, inexperienced outsider.

Rightly or wrongly, gaffes can steer a media narrative around a candidate. They serve as a measure of how much someone understands a situation when not reading from a prompter, and whether a candidate can handle themselves when asked something unexpected.

Everything that Biden says appears to be run through a fine sieve, designed to catch even the slightest misstep, so the media can maintain its he’s-too-old narrative. In the past week, both Fox News and the New York Post have directed attention to Biden saying, in respect to the September 11 terrorist attacks, that he was “standing there the next day” looking at the destruction, when Biden actually visited over a week after the attack, on September 20. For Biden, this is the kind of thing that merits days of tsk-tsking concern about the clarity of his thinking.

Neither of these sources bothered to mention that Trump claimed to be at ground zero alongside firefighters and police. “I was down there also,” said Trump, “but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.” All of this was a lie. What Trump was really doing that day was going on the radio to brag that his building was now the tallest in Manhattan. Which was also a lie.

But Trump can seemingly say anything without raising more than a yawn from the media. Or he can not say anything for 40 seconds in the middle of a speech, and that’s also just fine.

This is far from the first time Trump has delivered a gaffe-laden speech. In fact, that’s pretty much the definition of any Trump speech. There was the time he claimed that the American army took over the airports in the Revolutionary War. The time he couldn’t recall the names of his own foreign policy advisers. The debate where Trump thought the “nuclear triad” was bombs, power, and who knows what. The statement where Trump said the solution to nuclear proliferation was more nukes. The speech where Trump declared his admiration for former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

On each of these events, Trump fills the spaces between gaffes with outright lies.

The media is still out there, hovering above Biden each time he appears in front of the cameras, looking for the first sign that he might have lost a step after 52 years in public office. But Trump … Trump gets a pass. He gets a pass on his age. He gets a pass on his health. He gets a pass on his lies. And Trump gets a pass on the one thing that was most obvious in both his time in office and his every public appearance—his staggering incompetence. That’s not due to his age. That’s just due to how his ego, narcissism, and hate leave no room for rational thought.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

Trending

World