What MAGA wizard King Donny said at the start of the war:
What the befuddled demented agreed to as an a starting point now:
The MAGA's I know and read about are already bragging this up as another example of Trump brilliance. This demonstrates how completely brainwashed MAGA really is. There is a Trump Derangement Syndrome alright. It's what allows people who voted for no more overseas wars, lower prices, a return to (Calvinist) Christianity, and a deep belief in a conspiracy to keep the Epstein files hidden vote for a man who has now waged two wars, surrendered to a Muslim theocracy, caused higher prices, while hiding the Epstein files and living a life contrary to the Gospels to be worshipped no matter what he does.
We lost this war, completely. We not only lost it for us, we lost it for Israel too. Israel, which duped Donny into the war, deserved it. The American people did not.
Thirteen American servicemen died for nothing whatsoever, other than an attempt at the greater glory of Trump. Their lives were wasted. Their deaths didn't serve the nation, but one man. Six were Army National Guardsmen. Six were members of the USAF.
No Trumps or Musks, or the children of the rich, died. If you visited Epstein Island, your family wasn't fighting.
And by the way, the oligarchs grew richer during the war, due to timely made trades and a rise in the price of oil, which made regular Americans poorer.
Trump once claimed that veterans were suckers. The veterans of this war are. But more than that, those who voted for Trump were proven to be. There was no excuse to support him in the last election and there's no excuse not to remove him now.
Before the war Iran was a theocracy. It still is.
Before the war the Iranian people wanted freedom. They still do, and still lack it.
Before the war Iran could launch missiles and drones at their enemies. They still can.
Before the war Iran had 1000 pounds of uranium. It still does.
Before the war the Strait of Hormuz was open. Now Iran gets to charge a toll for its passage.
During the war Iran shipped more oil at a higher price than it did before the war.
The names of the thirteen known men and women who gave their lives, not for their country but for Donald Trump, are:
CWO Robert Marzan
SFC Nicole Amor
SFC Noah Tietjens
Sgt Declan Coady
Maj. Jeffrey O'Brien
Cpt. Cody Khork
Sgt. Benjamin Pennington
Maj. John "Alex" Klinner
Cpt. Ariana Savino
TSgt. Ashley Pruitt
Cpt. Seth Koval
Ct. Curtis Angst
TSgt. Tyler Simmons
Only some of the names of the 170 some Iranian girls the U.S. killed during the war are known. Those names, including a few of the names of their teachers, are:
1. Hana Dehqani, eight years old
2. Fatemeh Salari, 34 years old
3. Reza Habashian, seven years old
4. Arya Bahadori, nine years old
5. Ali Asghar Zaeri, eight years old
6. Zahra Bahrami, seven years old
7. Ahmad Soltani, eight years old
8. Hamed Par-ashegh-nezhad, seven years old
9. Fatemeh Yazdan-panah, young girl, age unknown
10. Mahdis Nazari, seven years old
11. Athena Chamani-nezhad, six years old
12. Amirghasem Zaeri, seven years old
13. Fatemeh Dorazehi, 10 years old
14. Arad Ahmadizadeh, eight years old
15. Saman Karimzadeh, seven years old
16. Fatemeh Shahdadi, age unknown
17. Nadia Shahmiri, nine years old
18. Parham Ranjbari, nine years old
19. Mahmoud Gholamyani, 35 years old
20. Fatemeh Rahdar, 10 years old
21. Amir-Hassan Rasouli, eight years old
22. Zahra Behrouzi, eight years old
23. Mohammadhatam Raisi, 10 years old
24. Asna Raisi, 12 years old
25. Benyamin Jangjou, eight years old
26. Mohammad-Sadra Zarei, eight years old
27. Maryam Pazark, 10 years old
28. Liana Mohammadi, seven years old
29. Mandana Salari, 29 years old
30. Sara Shayesteh, five years old
31. Zoha Pasand, eight years old
32. Esra Zakeri, nine years old
33. Salma Zakeri, six years old
34. Fatemeh Taherifard, 29 years old
35. Zahra Ansari, seven years old
36. Fatemeh Fadavi, 10 years old
37. Mahna Zarei, two months old
38. Athareh Zarei, 10 years old
39. Alireza Zarei, nine years old
40. Mohammadreza Shahsavari, eight years old
41. Samira Basarde, 38 years old
42. Ehsan Saleminia, six years old
43. Fatemeh Zahra Karimi, seven years old
44. Zeynab Bahrami, 10 years old
45. Mohammad Shah-dousti, eight years old
46. Reza Barani, seven years old
47. Athena Ahmadzadeh, 10 years old
48. Khadijeh Darvishi, nine years old
49. Roqayyeh Karimi, 42 years old
50. Reza Ranjbar, six years old
51. Marzieh Bashiri-far, 38 years old
52. Mohammad-Mehdi Chegini, 10 years old
53. Mohammadian Bahrami, 17 years old
54. Ali-Akbar Karyani Pak, eight years old
55. Hananeh Mehdikhah, seven years old
56. Fereshteh Sangarzadeh, 44 years old
57. Mohammad-Ali Karyani Pak, seven years old
58. Parsa Mokhtari-nasab, 12 years old
59. Arina Arab-Kish, eight years old
60. Makan Nasiri, 12 years old
61. Esra Farahi-Zadeh, young girl, age unknown
About half of the American lives were due to a mid air accident, but they're just as dead as they would be had they died fighting. All of the Iranian lives lost that are listed are due to a targeting accident.
What the death toll for anybody in Lebanon, which opened up as a theatre of war while this was going on, we don't probably really know.
May the perpetual light shine upon them.
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
None of these people had a choice in the offering of their lives for Trump's desperate attempt to have a legacy. American voters do have a choice on allowing him to continue to kill in an attempt to gain one, however. They'll have that choice in November, and through their members of Congress, they have a sort of choice now. The second it becomes clear to Republican members of Congress that their phony jobs are in danger by supporting a madman, they'll suddenly have never supported him.
April 9, 2026
Nothing is going through the Straits of Hormuz yet. . . a sign that shippers doubt the ceasefire will hold.
And it hasn't in Lebanon, where Israel continues to conduct operations arguing, logically enough, that it doesn't apply there anyway.
April 13, 2026
Well negotiations are going badly so now King Donny is threatening to blockade Iranian ports.
There apparently is an agreement for a ceasefire in Lebanon.
April 18, 2026
A suspicious package caused a lockdown on parts of F. E. Warren yesterday.
Related? I don't know, but then, I don't know.
The Straits of Hormoz were announced open yesterday, and then Iran announced that they are under strict Iranian control today.
April 20, 2026
The United States announced a second round of talks in Pakistan and even discussed the delegation, with Trump claiming the parties were close to a deal.
Iran said nope, it wasn't going to any talks.
April 21, 2026
Some reporters are indicating that the US and Iran were close to a deal to end the war and that it was blown up by Trump's tweeting.
April 22, 2026
Trump was going to rain down destruction if things weren't moving yesterday, yadda yadda, yadda. . .
On other matters related to Mad King Donald's War, there are persistent rumors that recently he asked for the nuclear codes and was denied them by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Did that happen? We just don't know. If it did, we are way past the point where the 25th Amendment needs to be invoked. But again, we don't know.
It's well known that Hegseth has the Secretary of the Army in his sights but hasn't been able to pull that off yet.
Interesting . . .
In other news, Iran is reporting that its Revolutionary Guards seized to vessels. Granted, that's not the Iranian Navy, but it does show that Iranian forces are more resilient than the US claims.
The United States Constitution actually lacks a budget provision. What provisions it has provide the following:
Article I, Section 8 (Spending Clause): Grants Congress the power to lay and collect taxes, pay debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare.
Article I, Section 7 (Revenue Bills): Dictates that all bills for raising revenue must originate in the House of Representatives.
Article I, Section 9 (Appropriations Clause): States "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law," ensuring Congress, not the executive branch, controls spending.
We need a specific set of controls on the budget.
For decades Congress has spent more than it brings in through taxes. It's at the crisis level presently, with Congress busing the budget and adding to the deficit at a monumental level.
At one time, pundits use to ponder if national debt and deficit spending were bad things. They are, but no credible person doubts that the current levels will actually destroy the American economy in the near future. Trump, listing to extreme pundits and having graduated from Wharton, which apparently is a preparatory preschool based on his level of lack of understanding of economics, believed that tariffs would fix this and everything.
Well, it hasn't, and it won't.
We are now at the point where we need a severe austerity budget, or a massive rise in taxes, or both. We have no real choice.
Anyhow, on fixing the budgetary process, it can be fixed. The Constitution should be amended to require a balanced budget, with a provision to retire 10% of the national debt as part of it, annually, save in the instance of a Declaration of War, or a Declaration of National Emergency.
To put this plainly, this would require ever budget to be balanced and the national debt completely retired within a decade.
Of course, what if Congress ignored that.
The amendment would provide that if Congress failed to pass a balanced budget, but passed a budget by a set day, taxes of all types and government fees of all types would automatically proportionally rise to cover the budget. Additionally, government payments, outside of payments for debts, medical obligations, and wages would cease. Payments of all types to Congress would completely cease, including payments for their staff.
Yes, that's harsh. The harshness would be the club that would put the pressure on to keep it from occurring.
If no budget was passed, say by February 1 of each year, the last balanced budget would come back into effect (it was during the Clinton era), with the additional provision of 10% of the national debt being paid for. If taxes had to go up to make that work, and the other provisions noted, they would.
Yes, this is severe, but the severity of it is what would cause Congress to actually take this seriously.
We know what a Declaration of War is. What would the Declaration of an Emergency be?
Well, predicting an emergency is tough, but I'd require 3/4s of the Congress to declare it and it could only last for one year. To renew it a second time would require 3/4s of the Congress and 3/4s of the state legislatures.
One final thing. No government assets of any kind could be sold to balance the budget or help retire the debt.
The day couldn't be more appropriate. A man whose made his political career, and he is a politician, of fooling a large percentage of the population hopes to fool you again, even as his mind descends into mush. Anyone listening to him and believing him at this point is fooling themselves.
Trump is not qualified for his office. He's a liar, and he lacks the legal, ethnical, moral and mental ability to hold his job. He only remains in office as his cabinet is packed with sycophants, and the Republican Party made up of cowards.
The topic will be the war. By now Trump's grown bored of the war and his back is against the wall. It's illegal, and Congress isn't going to vote to keep funding it. The Iranians have shown themselves to be far tougher than Trump, a bully, and all bullies are cowardly, can imagine. They're not beaten, and they're not cowed. They're actually winning.
Listening to Trump is nearly pointless. His speeches are streams of lies. He's going to lie. Why bother?
Or should one listen? I ask sincerely.
Would you have listened, if you were German, to Hitler's radio addresses in 1945?
Like Trump's there weren't many by that time.
If you were to, it'd be out of morbid curiosity, or to try to discern what was coming next. Was there going to be a surrender and what would it consist of. Or was Der Fuehrer going to take the country down into defeat with him.
Somewhat related, I had a conversation with my MAGA associate, whose been pretty quite recently (he has five boys that are all old enough to have his own views and who are sick of the US supporting Israel on everything. . . I bet this war has been interesting at home. . .). He noted, however, "I almost feel sorry for those mullahs, hiding in caves".
Now, he's never served in the military and doesn't know much about military matters, at all. I noted that must be pretty bad, and then the fortunes of war became the topic. I.e., how will this war end.
"We've already lost" was my statement.
He looked stunned.
We have already lost. When you launch a war with war aims that are based on your experiences as a real estate developer, you are a fool.
Trump has no real world experience in anything. He's just been a real estate developer, and that's not much. That's based on money.
An existential war, and that's what a war between Israel and Iran is, isn't based on that. It's based on two fundamentally opposed world outlooks. Israel's war aim is to end Iran as a military threat forever, and under Netanyahu, it's been willing to commit genocide in order to achieve security. Nobody is looking at Gaza anymore. Nobody is looking at Lebanon either. Basically, Israel is fighting the war, with the US as a mercenary dupe, quite frankly, the way the mob war is depicted in the Godfather.
Trump stupidly thought that the Iranians, who have a theocracy, think like he does. He'd give them the dope slap and they'd give up, or if they didn't, there'd be a January 6 type revolution in the streets. Nope, nothing like that has happened or is going to. Even the Kurds, who would like to be independent, have so little faith in King Donald that they're not rebelling.
Now a series of really horrific choices are before him. For one thing, under the War Powers Act, he's running out of time to submit this to Congress and it appears fairly certain that there's a real chance that Congress would say "nope". He's running out of money quicker that that, and is going to have to go to Congress and ask for $200B, with some Republicans already indicating they won't support that.
It's clear, moreover, that he can't bomb his way into victory. That's never worked, and it isn't working here. Indeed, not only is it not working, the limits of airpower are really showing. We've done a massive aerial assault and yet the Iranians keep hitting back.
And the Iranians have hit on the idea of waging an economic war, which is a strategic use of airpower, missiles in the air in this case, knowing that there's little support of the war anywhere, and that people now get to think about how foolish King Donald is every time they go to the pump. Indeed, an economic war against the US as an Islamic warrior concept has been around for a long time, and is actually what Osama Bin Laden had in mind when he staged the Twin Towers attacks. Bin Laden turned out to be an economic moron as that had no effect on the economy at all, but this is.
And the Iranians have shown themselves to be able to effectively close the Straits of Hormuz, locking up 20% of the globe's oil supply. Wharton School of Business graduate Trump (I'm now at the point where Wharton ranks in my mind with correspondence courses in the back of cartoon books) apparently has no grasp at all on how the global oil market works.** His stupid, and it was stupid, reply is "well we have lots of oil". Yeah., we do, in a global market.
J. D. Vance, or whatever his name is, had the comment "well other people are suffering more than we are", which is also moronic. That's saying that yes, you are suffering.
The only way to open the Straits of Hormuz back up is to land Marines on the north shore of the Straits and make a broad beachhead. A broad beachhead is subject to broad attack, which in turn requires a deeper beachhead. Choose the analogy that you want, but pretty soon you are looking at either Da Nang in 1965, in which we went from Marine beachhead, to expanded perimeter, to full intervention in the Vietnam War, or Anzio in 1944, which turned into a man eating mess. Optimistically, a Marine force to open the Straits of Hormuz would have to be backed up, in the end, by a two division commitment form the U.S. Army, and that would be just to hold on to some real estate, not to win the war.
Of course, it'd help in the current pseudo chief executive had cracked a history book from time to time, but Trump just isn't that smart.
Winning the war would actually require a full scale ground invasion. We could probably pull that off, but it would require an investment of manpower on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. The Korean War would be a good analogy, actually. It'd require a full scale call up of the National Guard and Reserves, and the standdown would not come for many years. It'd cost something like 20,000 men killed, optimistically, and accelerate inflation at an unsustainable rate under the current tax structure. In other worlds, unlike the Cold War in which budgets were less out of control, we couldn't keep this running long and would actually have to raise taxes, and massively, something that should be done in any event.
So, here we are. Israel got a a war that Bibi wanted, although winning that war now depends more on Dick and Jane in Hastings, Nebraska, than it does on anyone in Israel. The US got into an illegal war it didn't want at all, and which nobody can honestly state has a goal that makes sense. Pete Hegseth and his Evangelical friends got a fever dream in which they bring about the end of Islam, which isn't going to happen.
Well, if its any consolation, Trump gets bored pretty easily. Marco Rubio probably still wants to invade Cuba. There's a fairly good chance that Trump will just pull the U.S. military out of the war, effectively surrendering to Iran but without his pen on anything. We'll go on to invade Cuba with just as little grasp of what that will take. Republicans in Congress will still sit around acting like they're getting paid to do something.
Sic transit Gloria Mundi.
Footnotes:
*Recalling Æthelred the Unready, the terrible Saxon king, whom after his death was lampooned as being "unready", i.e., "ill advised".
Æthelred the Unready, whom in spite of being a terrible king, was the Saxon king for 38 years, a remarkably long time.
**A very respected cousin of mine went to Wharton and went on to a fantastic career in business. He was the sort of person who was simply a natural businessman from day one. Indeed, I always though him a fish out of water in Wyoming where he really didn't fit in.
Anyhow, we were all so impressed that he went to Wharton.
My mind has really changed on Wharton, and frankly a lot of the big name schools. Both Donald Trump and Wyoming's Secretary of State, Chuck Gray, are Wharton graduates which says a lot, and not in a good way, about Wharton. Gray, at least, is clearly smart, indeed smart enough to dupe a lot of Wyomingites into voting for him. Trump appears to me to have a very modest intellect.
Pete Hegseth is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard, which is even more amazing. Hegseth simply doesn't appear to be that smart.
All of this calls for a separate thread, but clearly the level of prestige these institutions have traditionally held simply isn't warranted today.
Donald Trump is systematically accelerating American decline making what might have happened over a two or more decades, had the existing trends remained and the U.S. not corrected itself, take place over a matter of months.
By the end of the Trump presidency, even if that end happens this year with him being taken out of the White House in a straight jacket, the US will not be the world's dominant economic power. China will be, followed by the European Union. The US will not be the leader of the free world, that's already ceased to be the case. The EU is. The US won't even be the moral leader of North America. Canada is.
And thanks to the war with Iran, the US is rapidly ceasing to be the military power it once was. Traditionally declining global powers lose that status last, and I suppose that's what's happening to us, but in a matter of months rather than decades, as is the norm. We are, right now, losing a war with a third rate power and we don't even know why we are fighting it, other than that Bibi Netanyahu wanted it fought while he had somebody he could coax in the White House. Right now, nations that looked to us since 1939 for help are quitting that, or have quit. Maybe only a few remain in the Pacific, but that will end within a matter of months.
Had Trump not pushed this all into high gear, it might have happened over a long period of time anyhow. The US hasn't been in control of its budget for decades and that was going to cause this to occur no matter what. We might have been able to arrest that with a major effort, but that would have required most of the current members of Congress to get new jobs. Now, however, things are so accelerated much of this is just going to happen all on its own.
Americans had better get used to it quickly and, for that matter, they'd better start planning for a post Trump world where we dance to the tune called by others, not to the one we called.
While we can lament this in many ways, not all of it will be bad. We will have to start rebuilding coalitions, but we're going to have to accept that we'll be regarded as a junior, and stupid, member of them. We deserve that. We're going to start building green energy and the like as people are going to tell us to and we're going to like it. People like Chuck Gray who run around screaming "not on my watch" will be looking at green power in California by the end of 2027.
We're going to have to look at reforming our tax and economic structure. A lot of the giant moneybucks people like Musk will be leaving anyhow. They love money, not the country, and the money will be leaving. We're going to have to pay for what we buying, and what the Baby Boomer and their parents bought, in terms of a government. Foreign countries are going to give us no choice. We're not going to be the world's banker within the next two years.
People who worried about "forever wars" and the like, after the war against Iran is over, won't have to so much anymore. They'll get what they wanted, just not the way they wanted it. We'll crawl back to our alliances, but we'll be a comparative minor member in many ways. As we can't pay for the huge military we have, we likely won't have it. I'll look at that in another post.
Nothing lasts forever and you don't appreciate the good things, in many cases, while you have them. Trump hasn't done the United States one single favor in either of his administrations. He'll go down in history as the worst President in American history. His legacy will be the acceleration of the end of the American Century.
Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced his retirement at age 60 due to what he knew was advancing dementia, although, in those years before this was as understood as well as it currently is, he cited physical and mental exhaustion. He would die in 1995, although his dementia never took fully hold.
The more power to him. Right now, in the United States, we have a demented President in a family with a history of dementia, who is sending people off to war based on his feelings. History will not forgive us for putting up with this.
John Thune, in the Senate, is too old for his job.
John Barrasso, in the Senate, is 73, way too old for his job.
And the people who will die in the current war can take no comfort in that, as Congress is composed, on the Republican side of abject cowards.
He is quite correct. The show of the State of the Union Speech, based on the reporting, would have been more proper for Baathist Iran, North Korea, or Nazi Germany. It wasn't a real State of the Union Address.
There hasn't been one for some time.
Television destroyed what was once a serious endeavor. If you look at old State of the Union addresses, particularly when they were still written, they were serious matters. Now they have all the dignity of a pole dancer performing at a strip club, and they're getting worse.
Any honest State of the Union delivered since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic would have to start off with "the State of the Union is grave" or words to that effect. An honest one now would have to start off with "the State of the Union is gravely imperiled" and go on from there. The United States is in really bad shape, not all due to Donald Trump, but with everything about Donald Trump making the nation's condition much, much, worse.
The nation is hugely polarized. About 40% of the nation have fallen under the spell of an unintelligent but effective salesman. Hatreds long thought in the past have revived in an aggressive form. Congress has completely failed to perform its job, something it started to do at least as far back as the 1980s. An attack on education and science that began under the Ronald Reagan administration has produced a drove of ignorant ill informed voters. Ignoring a growing immigration crisis that started in the 1970s fueled massive Rust Belt discontent. Over funding an all volunteer military has resulted in the creation of a post Cold War military class that's become an a danger to the nation itself. Ignoring global warming is imperiling the entire plant while lining the pocked of an oligarch class that's rapidly depriving the same Rust Belt class that's now supporting it of any middle class way of making a living. Ignoring science has also lead to a complete inability to understand basic human biological facts.
This country is an utter disaster, and it's lead right now by a stupid man whose intellect is crashing into dementia.
Trump is a mentally ill man to start with. Raised in a family that managed to avoid serving in times of war and whose wealth was started off by a German immigrant (ironically) who engaged in the sex trade, he's always been a self centered man focused on greed and engaging in lust. In his dementia, he cannot see the world in any manner other than acquisition, and believes his own propaganda about his having a unique understanding of the "art of the deal". He's the laughing stock of the globe, and at a some point fairly soon in the United States, he'll be regarded as the worst president in the nation's history and the worst human being to ever occupy the Oval Office. If there's anything redeeming to Trump's reign at all it will be that his profoundly bad occupation of that office has demonstrated how severely various reforms to the Constitution are needed.
Be that as it may, the nation is not going to emerge from Trump the nation it was. It will be a second rate nation, and that will be due to him, and those who served him. The US will crawl back to the family of Western nations, but it will just be one of them, not the leader of them. That's now fallen to the European Union.
When that occurs the millions who followed Trump will deny it, including some of those working for him now . Vance and Rubio will be two who will assert that they were never Trumpites.
On that, we digress. State of the Union addresses were once written and they were much better when they were. Those days should return. They were not intended to be an perverted administration's stripping performance while lustful inebriated fans cheered the stripper, which is what they now are. Today's state of the union addresses are embarrassing in the extreme and not something a mature dignified nation would do, but then, right now, we are not a mature dignified nation.
State of the Union addresses should go back to being written. If they are delivered orally, they should be given during the work day as they should reflect serious work. And, frankly, there should be a mechanism, and a severe one at that, that if they are dishonest, there should be an immediate impact. For example, although now it would have no legal impact, immediately after any oral State of the Union address there should be a vote of confidence. If a simple majority votes note, the authority of the President should be suspended until he can come back in front of Congress and the nation and not act like a buffoon.
That would require, of course, a serious Congress as well, which we also lack.
Movie poster for And Quiet Flows the Don. What on earth does this have to do with anything? Well, maybe more than you might figure, as the main character is a local Cossack trying to live a local, and not always all that admirable, life but ends up getting carried away with the tied of events which destroyes all of that.
So what, he must be thinking, is the freaking problem?
Well, people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the entire Trump family are the problem (and people like Jeff Epstein are as well).
In other quarters people like to debate whether or not the United States is a "Christian nation". Whatever the answer to that might be (I think the answer is yes, but that it's a Puritan country) it was definitely a small freeholder country. That is, the country was mostly made up of small yeomanry and small tradesmen early on.
Indeed, the widespread use of corporations was illegal in the 1770s and for many years thereafter. Part of the rebellion against the crown was based on what effectively were export duties, a species of tariff, on chartered businesses, i.e., team importers, that the colonist had no control over and they reacted by destroying the property. Ironically the very people who emblazon themselves with 1776 themed tattoos in 2026 would have supported King George III doing what he did, just as they support King Donny doing them through executive order. Shoot, Parliament had actually voted on the tea duties.
Nonetheless, teh country has always had some very large business interests that, when allowed to, operate against the economic interest of everyone else. They don't want to "share the wealth". They think their getting wealthy is sharing enough, and good for everyone. Up until 1865, or instance, we had the Southern planter class, a market set of agriculturalist who destroyed land and people in their endeavors, but believed in it so strongly that they'd argue for the perversion of the Christian faith to support slavery.
It wasn't just Planters, however. Coal magnates, industrialists, foreign ranch owners, the list is pretty long.
It wasn't until later that absentee merchants dominated "main street", both the actual one or the metaphorical one. The first chain store is claimed by some to be The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P), which was founded in 1859. Woolworth's started twenty years later in 1879. Piggly Wiggly, the grocery store, showed up in 1916, and proved to be the model for "grocery stores" that would wipe out locally held grocery stores, for the most party, in the next couple of decades.
Since the mid 20th Century this trend has continued unabated and unaddressed. Every Walmart represents the destruction, probably, of a half dozen or more locally owned family supported stores. The appliance section represents the closure of local appliance stores. The entertainment section of record and video stores. You name it.
None of this had to be.
There's been a lot of ink spilled on the rise of Donald Trump and what caused it. We've done that ourselves. Others have noted the presence of small businessmen in the MAGA ranks, but it's been underreported in contrast to the blue collar Rust Belt members of the MAGA rank and file.
It shouldn't be.
When I was young, which is now a very long time ago, the Democratic Party was still regarded as the part of the working class. Unions, which have never been strong here, were still strong enough to host the annual Jefferson Jackson Day that backed the Democratic Party. But by 1973 the Democrats started to board the vessel of blood that would end up causing thousands to get off the boat. By the mid 1990s the party that had been the one hardhats joined became one in you had to be comfortable with a focus on disordered sex and infanticide. The Democrats, for the most part, forgot the working class.
At the same time, the Republican Party was widely accused of being the Country Club Party, with good reason. If you were a member of a country club or chamber of commerce, you were probably a Republican or you were weird. The thing is, however that the economic outlook of the hardhat class and the country club class was closer to each other than they thought and the same neglect hurt both of them severely.
As early as the 1960s, successive Democratic and Republican administrations were really comfortable with exporting business overseas. Nobody ever outright admitted that, but they were. And both Democratic and Republican administrations simply stopped enforcing anti trust legislation. Aggressively applied, entities like Walmart would be busted up, but it just doesn't happen. Aware of what was going on at first, and trying to struggle against it nearly everywhere, local business failed to arrest the destructive march of the giants. In part, their efforts were so local that they were like those of Russian peasantry trying to arrest the Red Army. They tried, but doing it locally just won't going to work. You can't wait until the Red Army is in sight of the village. Nobodoy lifted a finger at the national or state level to help.
The march of progress (which it wasn't) and free enterprise (which it also wasn't) and all that.
So the small business class became desperate, and in desperation they turned to the guy who offered no answers but who seemed like he might help, Trump.
What an irony, really. Trump doesn't "shop local" and he doesn't have the faintest grasp of what small business is like. He's spent his eight decades around the wealthy and is more comfortable with bullying smaller economic interest than helping them.
Even now, the bones a small business economy remain. In order to advance that interest, however, small businessmen have to do something they really aren't comfortable with.
They have to be militant about it.
Part of that involves being militant at the polls.*
And that involves asking some questions, but first it involves waking up to economic and structural realities.
The first of those realities is that the United States does not have a free market economic system, and hasn't for a long time. It has a Corporate Capitalist economic system that favors state created economic creatures given fictional personhood which favors economies of scale. The goal is to make prices cheaper, and part of that is to make wagers cheaper. The consumers are expected to adjust to this by getting new jobs at higher wages, sort of like the protagonist in Kansas City Star.
So, in essence, if you have an appliance store and are taking home, let's say, $150,000 a year, and with that you are trying to provide for all of your family's living expenses, and Walmart comes in, well, you should have become something else, and now this is your chance to go and do that.
Except you probably won't. You'll probably close the store and retire, if you are over 50, or go on to another lower paying job if you aren't.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Okay, not facing that grim reality, what you need to do is find out if politicians are more interested in their super sized huge television having a low, low price, or helping you. And helping you means leveling the playing field with legislation, not "buy local" campaigns.
And I'll note here, the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which is trying to defend the Wyoming Business Council, is a prime example of people who are there to hurt you.
And so we begin.
1. Where is his bread buttered?
In other words, how does he make his money.
That may or not may not be a reason to vote for or against somebody. In Wyoming, fore xample, there are small businessmen in, and opposed to, the Freedom Caucus at the legislature, and voting for the WFC is a complete no go. So the question is informative, not determinative.
Having said that, there are certain answers that, in my mind, are nearly disqualifying.
One is a near complete lack of private business experience, even as an employee. Wyoming in particular seems to get a lot of candidates who cite "I was in the military" as a reason to vote for them, based on a lifelong military career. Well, that isn't like working for a private business at all. There's never been a time in the history of the U.S. military in which a soldier wasn't going to get paid, save for the government briefly shutting down. And almost all member of the military don't worry about overhead and payroll expenses. They also don't have to worry about the country coming to them and saying, "Gee, U.S. Army, we've really liked you here, but the British Army made us a better offer so we're doing to close you down. . . "
It's not just a lifetime of sucking on the government tit that should be concerning. People who have a lot of family money are in the same category.
I"m not necessary saying don't vote for somebody who is rich. I am saying you need to weight it carefully. It's hard to get politicians right now, at least at the national level, who aren't fairly well off, due to the Citizens United case. But if a person is rich because they inherited it, a pause should be made on the voting lever.
Of course, when you ask this, you're probably going to get the answer of "yes", because it includes the word "American" and nobody wants to be against the American canything if they're a politician.
So you're going to have to ask them some questions or question which shows what they know what the American System is.
Okay, right now I'll note that this included tariffs to protect American industry, and I've been hard on those. I also don't live in the first half of the 19th Century when industry had barely achieved a foothold in the U.S. And, it might be worth noting, that Clay didn't propose tariffs as people hurt his feelings. At any rate, post 1890s tariffs have proven to be a disaster.
What I'm really getting at is the use of public funds to assist local businesses.
A good example of the American System in Wyoming has been the Wyoming Business Council.. The carpetbagging Wyoming Freedom Caucus is attacking it basically because it uses public money. If you are in Wyoming, a good question is whether or not the pol supports the Wyoming Business Council being defunded. If the answer is yes, this pol doesn't care if you evaporate and is instead mindlessly adopting twattle that the WBC is "Socialist". First of all, I don't care if it is socialist, I only care, and so should you, about whether its effective in generating local businesses.
3. What actual legislation would they support to help local business.
By this, I mean concrete examples.
Chances are, you won't get any, so you'll have to press them.
4. What is their position on taxation?
By this, I mean the whole smash. Local, state and Federal.
The local press always asks this position of our pols, and they rarely give any kind of a detailed answer. Right now, most of them note that they aren't fond of taxes, but they don't support the WFC's effort to gut state property taxes either.
That's not specific enough.
5. What do they think of the out of staters buying up all the ___________and what would they do about it?
Here, and in much ag country, this would pertain to ranch land. But I'm sure it pertains to other things as well. Shoot ,around here it also would seem to pertain to tire stores, it's just ridiculous.
Expressing "concern" doesn't mean anything at all, even if you are Lisa Murkowski.
6. What do their employees, if they have any, think of them?
For some reason, this is never asked, but it should be. If the answer is that the candidates employees hate the candidate with the intensity of a thousand burning suns, that probably needs to be considered. If, on the other hand, the employees widely admire the employer/candidate, that says something else.
I'll note here that personally I had people come to me as late as the 2010s who had worked for my grandfather and wanted me to know how he had helped them out in tough times. He never ran for anything, but that says a lot about his character.
I don't think we've heard anything like that from any of Jeffrey Epstein's employees.
I'll also note that as a businessman myself, it seems some businessmen are willing to fire people the second they might have to take a little less home. That's a character defect that's disturbing, at the least.
7. Why are they in the party they're in?
Again, an honest answer.
Right now you can't be a Republican or Democrat and be 100% comfortable with either party. That would suggest that you are letting others do your thinking for you. Businessmen have a right to know what drew a candidate to the party, what ever it is.
They also have a right to know what a candidate disagrees with about the positions of their own party. If he doesn't disagree with any party position, he's an unthinking stooge.
8. What business related or policy related organizations are they in, or endorsed by?
This is often overlooked unless those organizations step out themselves, which they sometimes do.
Make Liberty Win is, in my view, a big no/go for a candidate. The Club for Growth is as well. The latter favors an economy that will screw you.
Footnotes
*They really need to be militant about it everywhere, however.
