Month: October 2025

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No Kings Day — With luck, it will become a national holiday

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 18th ,2025

I was watching a clearly rattled Trump tell a Faux News reporter, “No, really, I’m not a king. Not a king.” He somehow failed to be very convincing.

The “No Kings” protest is under way, with possibly ten million people turning up in at least 2,600 locations to protest the Trump regime. There are another 100 locations in Canada and across Europe. The people are rising, and the Trump regime is fearing them.

There’s a saying in America: “The government should fear the people. The people should never fear the government.” Millions of people across the country have remembered that lesson.

The final pre-demonstration note of the regime’s efforts to frighten, anger, gaslight and lie to us came yesterday when Trump commuted the sentence of the repulsive and disgusting George Santos, who emerged blinking into the sunlight this morning. Trump wanted liberals to erupt in fury, but he’s been to that well so many times that liberals didn’t take the bait. We already knew that Trump was a vicious, amoral, senile piece of shit, and nobody excepts him to be any better than he ought to have been.

He wanted anger and loss of control from the demonstrators. What he got was weary disgust, loathing, and contempt.

For the rest of the GOP, things are just as bad. The leaked emails from the Young Republicans, thousands of lies, smears, hate and self-pity, merely cemented the public perception that the GOP had not only lost its way, but was completely in thrall to the worst humanity has to offer. These aren’t young Ayn Rand idealists: these are the sorts of people who shot Jews in the back of the head and kicked their still twitching bodies into corpse-filled ditches. JD Vance did himself no favors with his avuncular chuckle and a “boys will be boys” defense; it just shows what an utterly empty and amoral vacuum this slick little opportunist really is.

ICE may have begun its campaign of terror aimed at undocumented workers, but as it became more and more obvious that the effort to frighten and cow was aimed at everyone in America, the campaign has backfired. People saw the images of politicians and judges being arrested and roughed up, innocent bystanders trussed and thrown to the ground like sacks of potatoes, and naked, bound children being herded into Uhauls to be taken who-knows-where, and recoiled in disgust. These pitiful, masked, vicious little Nazi cowards, some of them the desecrators of Congress on January 6th, were the antithesis of everything America stood for.

There’s a brilliant meme circulating on the web that anyone who believes the ICE propaganda should read.

It goes, “ If you’re using undocumented people’s tax records to find them and kidnap them, then it was never about them not paying taxes.

If you’re showing up at their place of employment, then it was never about them not working.

If you’re showing up at courthouses, it was never about getting them to do it the right way. If you’re kidnapping women and children, it was never about criminals.

If you’re not giving them due process, it was never about the Constitution. And if you’re spending billions of dollars to do it, it was never about the economy.

And if you’re doing all of this in the name of a 34-time convicted felon, then it was never about following the law.”

History has tales of such police state bullies, be it Hitler’s Schutzstaffel or Stalin’s People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (better known as the NKVD), or East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (aka Stasi). All eventually fell, and the members spent the rest of their lives hiding their gruesome past, living in constant fear of exposure, knowing friends and neighbors would spit on them, and children disown them, should details of their past emerge.

That is what the future holds for the strutting cowardly bullies in ICE. They will suffer for what they are doing now.

Decent people are repulsed by the scapegoating and cruelty of the Trump regime against immigrants, gays, and trans. Knowledgeable people know this is just the start, and they will come for the rest of us.

The Lord Ha-Has of the right wing media, oblivious to what eventually became of Lord Ha-Ha, continue to pump the party line that the “No Kings” rallies are “Hate America” riots, and that the demonstrators are all paid to be there, and that protest has become an industry. Let’s see: ten million demonstrators at $500 a head would be five billion dollars. About the only people who could afford that would be the over-entitled dirtbags who inflicted Trump upon us in the first place. Doesn’t seem likely, does it? Let’s face it: they aren’t about to return anything to the people who made their obscene wealth possible in the first place.

The shutdown was supposed to be the GOP’s final consolidation of power. The idea was they could use the shutdown to avoid any accountability to Congress, blame Democrats for the shut down, and use it as an excuse to further dismantle the United States. At the very least, it would be enough to keep their own followers in line, and they saw no need to give a fuck what any non-Republican thought.

But that’s disintegrating as the shutdown approaches its third week. They tried claiming that Democrats simply preferred to “waste a trillion dollars in tax money.” And of course the usual dim-wits tried claiming that if the government shut down, nobody would miss it.

Of course, tens of millions of people are already missing the thousands of services and programs, big and small, that have been halted by the shutdown.

And an unlikely ally has shown up: Health insurance providers. In thirteen states this week, they projected the increases in premiums people would face if the effort to dismantle Obamacare hidden in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” wasn’t rescinded—the main point the Democrats are fighting the budget update on. For the luckiest people, the new rates are horrifying. For most, they will be devastating, and may, for thousands, be a death sentence.

According to Health System Tracker, “Enhanced premium tax credits that make coverage more affordable will expire at the end of 2025, driving up out-of-pocket premium payments by over 75% on average. This is expected to cause healthier enrollees to drop their coverage and create a sicker risk pool.”

In some cases, out-of-pocket premium costs could quadruple. For some people, this seems a poor trade-off for richer, happier billionaires. The people who made who made Trump, the senile pederast, possible.

Family matters meant I had to stay home this morning. But it didn’t stop me from making my own voice heard through this piece, and to show my solidarity with the protesters.

As they say in Portland, “Ribbit!”

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Market Markers — How now down Dow?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 11th 2025

 

JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon said he is “far more worried than others” about a correction in U.S. stocks. In an interview with the BBC, Dimon said, “You see a lot of things out there, the amount of uncertainty and I put geopolitics in that category, fiscal spending in that category, politics in that category, the re-militarization of the world in that category. All these things cause a lot of issues that we don’t know how they’re going to sort out…[W]e should be stockpiling bullets, guns and bombs,” as the world’s a “far more dangerous place.”

But remilitarization, while alarming in and of itself, wasn’t the only issue on Dimon’s mind. It’s clear he’s worried about AI, which I consider a multi-trillion dollar economic bubble that could pop at any minute. (My words, not his, just to be clear). He said, “So if the market is pricing in 10%, I would say it’s more like 30%, and I’m not saying next year because the timing of these things is almost impossible.” He considers a “market correction” likely, perhaps in six months, possibly two years.

A “correction” is nabob-speak for a market slump of more than 20%, which in the case of the Dow Jones would work out to a drop approaching ten thousand points.

The very next day, Lev Parnas wrote this: “Trump’s Tariff Shock EXPOSED — The $1 Billion Crypto Heist They Don’t Want You to See. Minutes before Trump announced 100% tariffs on China, a secret wallet moved over $1 billion into crypto — triggering the biggest market crash in months and revealing […] insider corruption and market.”

OK, it was no crash: the Dow slipped 1,500 points over two days, about 3% of its value. But yes, the timing was almost prima facie evidence that the corrupt and venal Trump gave some insider traders a heads up before making his shock tariff announcement. It’s hardly the first time something like this has occurred—indeed, Trump’s seemingly erratic and capricious tariffs games have made some people, including Trump and members of his family—obscenely wealthy.

This entire administration is run by corrupt plutocrats intent on plundering the entire American economy. This collection of libertarians and fascists have managed to convince themselves that the economy can manage quite nicely without any economic involvement of the society that created that economy in the first place. They’ve spent so much time arguing that workers are nothing more than an economic outlay and to argue otherwise is communism that they’ve taken up believing their own propaganda. Most of them are corrupt, and the rest are delusional. And they are in charge.

Add the vindictive madness that drives Trump and his supporters, the desire to utterly destroy a fifth of the labor force for the crime of dark skin or accents, the sheer paranoia and xenophobia that is causing them to cheer the dismantling of the United States of America (and yes, the democratic constitutional government IS the United States of America, and without it, it’s just another big patch of land with lawless tribes)—combine all that, and the stage is set for an economic catastrophe.

Project 2025, in the form of White House Office of Management and Budget director Russel Vought, is manipulating the latest Republican-engineered government to dismantle huge chunks of the government, firing tens of thousands of experienced and capable government employees supposedly because of the shutdown. There have been a dozen shutdowns, some lasting weeks. Workers got furloughed, knowing their jobs (and in most cases back pay) would be there when the shutdown ended. Vought’s vision of a fascist dictatorship means he must do as much to destroy the government now while he has the opportunity. He is doing this to the open cheers of his senile mouthpiece president, who has openly cheered “the unprecedented opportunity” to dismantle “democrat agencies.”

Most of those supposedly Democratic functions: education, medical care, legal protections, scientific research, and public protection agencies such as the weather service, OPEC, and FEMA, disproportionately serve the people in Republican areas, where state services are thin or even lacking and the overall economy is either weak or exploited by plutocrats in the name of “supply-side economics.”

But make no mistake—we’ll ALL be hurt if Trump and his handlers pull this off. We’ll begin missing meals or end up in the camps just in time for the entire financial structure to to implode, possibly taking the currency and remaining national wealth with it, leaving America—and Americans—bankrupt and destitute. Then, and only then, will the malefactors in the top 1% realize that we were the tide that raised their yachts.

By then, it will be too late. Unless we move to prevent it now.

 

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The Battle to Keep America — A Portland in the storm

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 6th 2025

Trump is was sending some 300 National Guard from California to Portland, Oregon, a city that Trump describes as “war-ravaged” and Trump’s stooges in the Pentagon are claiming are being sent “to support US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal personnel performing official duties, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property.”

Trump had tried to send Oregon National Guard into the city, but yesterday, a Trump-appointed federal judge, one US district judge Karin Immergut, blocked the deployment, citing “a lack of evidence that the recent protests in Portland justified the move.” Governor Newsom of California has promptly filed a motion to prevent Trump from deploying his guard, citing the same specious reasoning.

[Note: this morning the same federal judge, US District Judge Karin Immergut, who banned deployment of Oregon national guard extended her ruling to include the national guard of all fifty states. It remains to be seen if the lawless Trump obeys this, and hope his vicious supporters don’t bomb her home like what happened in South Carolina yesterday.]

Portland is quiet and calm. There are no riots. There aren’t even any sizable demonstrations, and the demonstrations that have been occurring have been small, and sedate.

But the fascist provocateurs at Fox and Newsmax and similar trashy “news organizations” have been playing video of the disturbances from the George Floyd demonstrations five years ago over and over, apparently leaving a hopelessly addled Donald Trump convinced that Portland is in the throes of huge, violent riots. Obeying their masters at the Heritage Foundation and in Project 2025, they want to spark a casus belli in order to provoke martial law.

It’s the same thing they’ve been trying in Washington DC (where demoralized and idle guardsmen eventually were reduced to picking up trash in the parks because DOGE had laid off the federal workers tasked with that job) and Chicago (which has a lower violent crime rate than most cities run by Republicans) and Broadview, Illinois, where ICE thugs apparently shot someone yesterday. The horrific “Hup! Hup! Hup!” ICE raid which involved dropping masked and armored goons onto an apartment complex resulting in the grotesque arrests of dozens of people guilty of nothing more than sleeping in their beds was yet another provocation by an administration willing to risk civil war rather than have it’s dirty secrets and drive for dictatorship exposed.

Trump is a cornered rat, but the real danger are the vicious, sleek fascists propping him up, hoping he can drive the US into the more repressive dictatorship in modern human history.

To that end, they are employing the same tawdry tactics that every repulsive group of despots have used thousands of times to afflict humanity. Push people until they resist, and the call the resistance a “violent insurrection.” Far too often it works. Nearly all the worst, must murderous regimes in history have been built on the foundations of Horst Wessel murders (think Charlie Kirk) and Reichstag fires (something Trump has tried to provoke in Washington, in Los Angeles, in Chicago and now in Portland.

But there’s a reason it isn’t working as well here. Ordinary citizens have an absolutely unlimited ability to record and disseminate the actions and activities of the Trump regime and its thuggish troops. Trump is using the tactics that Hitler and Putin and every other dictator has used to gain power—neutralize and cow the press, rope in the support of fundamentalists, lie constantly, scapegoat and fear monger and falsely claim to be saving the country from nefarious activities.

But the government can’t control the images people are taking on their phones and uploading to the web. No matter how many time the Nazi provocateurs at Fox News put up five year old images of Portland in flames, there are thousands more images showing a city at peace, and with orderly and lawful gatherings to protest.

If Trump can’t control what people see and hear, he can’t win. For every captive news organization Trump controls, like CBS and ABC, there are thousands of voices, armed with evidence, telling different stories. For every Jesse Watters there are a thousand Thom Hartmanns. For every misleading image on Newsmax, there are a thousand more representative images of the same events on social media.

And this is how we defeat Trump and the fascists. Turn out and demonstrate wherever Trump tries to instigate, pull out your phones, and RECORD EVERYTHING. True, 95% of it will just take up disk space and be discarded later, but the other 5% may be vital evidence that helps forge public awareness and opinion, and defeat the propagandists and liars in their efforts to control and narrative and thus control you.

They want to write the history books. But you are the ones who will make the history.

Bear witness. You will win.

 

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