Trump's Warp Enterprise, America's Reality Star Trek.

The Trumpn Show: "You lookin' at ME?

The NYT was very timely this morning, as it posted an article about MLK. The same MLK, who, far from running for office against LBJ, merely said that, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

Unlike Black Lives Matter who have no such scruples, remaining silent as the state of Libya was invaded and destroyed, its ruler gruesomely murdered while their candidate of choice cackled in unabashed malignant glee about it, MLK saw the connection that the working class and disenfranchised the world over need to make with each other regardless of their nation of origin.

For voicing the above rather obvious opinion, Dr. King was placed under surveillance, a very heavy surveillance which he was still under even as he was gunned down, so it was fairly obvious it wasn't for his protection. Yet, presumably because Trump's just another Sta-puff marshmallow-physiqued fat rich White dude, he thinks he can accuse the Secretary of State and the Commander-in-Chief of the United States' Armed Forces of creating ISIS with impunity. The man who funded and supported a cabal of nutjob conspirators who, with no evidence whatsoever on which to base their absurd claim other than a debased, ersatz racism, all accused Obama of not being a citizen of the country that elected him president. The same people who claim President Trump's detractors should just quietly accept his winning of the election, even if he did need to play Russian Roulette, insisted right through Obama's re-election, that President Obama was an alien. In other words, after he served a full term as President, Donald Trump insisted he couldn't be president. As though he could retroactively change history. Yet these same people now insist the Resistance movement should just go ohm.

Yet this man who considered it his right to rail insanely as the number one member of the "Birther" movement for eight years (not surprisingly as anyone with any stature was too embarrassed to be a part of such a sour-grapes movement), which he later admitted was merely a front to get him in front of the TV cameras (vindicating my impression all along that the same MSM against whom the Donald rails were instrumental in pushing his candidacy at every turn by providing, as "news" free coverage he could never have bought, because it was eyeballs - views, not news - which, like "spin" in the Bush era, is just newsspeak (sic) for lies (eyeballs meaning advertisers dollars, and advertising, like "spin", is never more than, gussied-up/massaged lies)).

If the FBI considers it incumbent upon themselves to put under surveillance a Baptist Minister for making a speech against War (and this was during a time when War And Christianity weren't just accepted as synonyms, as they are today), then they would be being a tad remiss if they weren't actively monitoring a man who was running for freaking president who, purely for his own aggrandizement, declared that the country's Commander-in-Chief was a spy, a traitor, and a pretender to the throne. He accused President Obama of sending hundreds of US fighters to their death against an entity he himself actively created, all while working for a foreign power.

Martin Luther King did none of these things, he merely preached a sermon and for that he was put under FBI surveillance, yet the Donald spit out his hate-mongering rhetoric and apparently felt, despite the fact that we are actively engaged in a War against Terrorism, which his obvious aim was to inflame to his own advantage, that he should be able to spew all the treasonous lies he wanted, with no one thinking, "Ya know, maybe we need to watch this guy". If he wasn't a person of interest to them, they just weren't doing their job. He then used hired thugs to throw out and beat up protesters at his rallies, all while boasting to his cheering fans about what a good time he was having doing it. The RNC was investigating him for this, so why wouldn't the administration? Why all the pretended huff?  Yes, like everything with him, it's all a charade, a distraction, a part of the Trump legerdemain everyone falls all over each other to fall for first; ooh, it's "Breaking NEWS!" A Reality Show Star who goes all kerfuffle because he finds out he was being watched ... yeah right. 

 Even now, as we see the menagerie of thugs and hate-mongering shills he's surrounded himself with, such a cavalcade of horrors invites surveillance because the forces they stir up to do their dirty work for them are filled with unsavory characters far slimier than the swamp (their own description, its being far from drained) they're currently infesting, who feel no compunction about spitting venom and using the levers of power to squelch dissent and enrich themselves to enhance their Family's Value, government not being for the purpose of actually governing, but simply to be used as a tool of personal aggrandizement.

The last president to even come close to this level of cynical "Let's Party!" mania, as he turned the country into a war-mongering Ark of Instability, was GW Bush. And he started several Wars, inflamed Wall St into a cauldron of grift, graft, and toxic debt instruments that were then used to swindle investors, the Country, and the world of their future, while his cohorts stashed the stolen money into every tax-sheltered hole they could scurrilously lobby open. And it is the Bush administration's game plan, the one that delighted in destroying any regulation that would stop the mad romp of a depraved Capitalism Gone Wild, and start Wars whose sole end-game was the granting of reconstruction contracts to its cronies, all while granting them the biggest tax cut of the century, that Trump has boasted he is  using for his template.

And that regime left us embroiled in two unwinnable Wars, a destabilized MENA region, businesses hemorrhaging jobs, families being thrown into the streets by the millions, a financial system reeling like a drunk stumbling down a blind alley, its auto industry, once the crown jewel of the country's economy, pillaged by its executives to the brink of bankruptcy (while Mitt Romney made it clear that he'd not bail them out if he were president), while the price of a barrel of oil skyrocketed higher than it had ever been in US history, thus leaving the country in the throes of an economic downturn so severe it was dubbed the "Great Recession" (but only because economists and the press, the grannies of the Granny State, thought it might crush morale if we were to call it what it actually was: a Depression ... not a great depression, mind you, but it was indeed, by economic definition, a depression).

 And President Obama, despite being busy clandestinely creating ISIS and ferreting out and scurrilously burying all proofs of his alien origins, inherited this duplex constructed from the joining of Schrödinger and Pandora's box, and somehow healed it:

Do you see where President Obama took office? At the nadir of a plummeting Stock Market. Whatever you say about Obama, he is the President who left office (the only one to do so since the country abandoned the gold standard) with the country better off than when he swore that oath: Reaganomics gave us the crash of '87, and then the Bush recession followed, the Clinton's brought us the tech crash and Bush two, we won't redo. So that leaves, as the above chart so graphically shows, the difference leadership makes when it's sole agenda isn't untrammeled greed, a greed so ravenous it consumes worlds. And by a slew of metrics that, like the one above, often got ballyhooed by candidate Trump as rigged, or overvalued, or not reflective of the underlying economy, and he could be absolutely right, but which, as Trump has already shown since he claimed a rising stock market was evidence that "his" policies were working a mere two weeks after being inaugurated, now are all of a sudden relevant once they're possible to use to his own advantage.

What one can put good money on though, is that after Trump gets through with the economy, the DJIA won't look like this. Because the shocks he's purposely subjecting the system to will have their intended debilitating effects, both here and around the globe. Then, as he promised, he will run the country like a business, and you don't run a business for either the employees or the stockholders, despite giving lip-service to doing so for both: you run it for your own and your heirs' benefit. Period. And that's what we have been promised, so that is what he intends to deliver: Trump's Enterprise, America's Warped Reality Star Trek, powered by assistance from Ivankaka crystals. But the Presidency is not a business, where you can risk a loss, a bad investment, a bad assessment that did some damage to investors' portfolios and Your company. The damage you cause by your misjudgements and rant-like tweets is to  your country and your people, and no matter how small it might be - two people, ten people, fifty ... hundreds - the loss is unacceptable. That's when the psychological dynamics of what Naomi Klein called "Disaster Capitalism" begin to be brought into play and rule by surveillance gets a lot more personal until the day comes when UPS won't be the only brown shirts you glimpse skulking through your neighborhood.