Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 4/8/2025

By AVA News Service on April 8, 2025

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Afternoon showers brought .13" rainfall yesterday. 41F under clear skies this Tuesday morning on the coast. Patchy fog, mostly cloudy & clear describes our forecast the rest of the week, take your pick.

CHANCE of light rain and gusty southwest winds are expected for Del Norte and northern Humboldt Counties today and again on Thursday. Otherwise, dry weather with a warming trend is forecast today through Thursday. Cooler weather, blustery northerly winds and a chance for showers and high mountain snow are forecast for Friday through Sunday. (NWS)

Springtime near Boonville (Elaine Kalantarian)

HUFFMAN FIELDS QUESTIONS ABOUT WATER SUPPLY, DEMOCRACY at Ukiah Town Hall

by Justine Frederiksen

Before addressing the looming dismantling of critical water supply infrastructure in Mendocino County during a recent Town Hall in Ukiah, both federal Rep. Jared Huffman (D – San Rafael) and state Assemblyman Chris Rogers (D – Santa Rosa) expressed grave concerns about what they described as the current dismantling of the United States government and the looming loss of American Democracy.

“There is a lot to talk about, and if I were you, I think what I would want to know is, ‘does my representative in Congress understand this moment, and what the heck is he doing about it?” said Huffman, speaking to a packed auditorium at Mendocino College on April 4, adding that he had “never been more worried about the future of our country,” which he described as “lurching toward Authoritarianism.”

As to what he was doing, Huffman said it was “everything I can as a minority member of Congress with every tool I’ve got,” explaining that he was doing as many town halls as he could recently because “this is a moment that we need to communicate better, because I know that people are afraid and they’re worried, and they want to know everything I’m doing on their behalf in Washington.”

And as to what the average citizen could do, Rogers said “the march toward Authoritarianism relies on people thinking that they have no hope and no power, on people thinking that they have no way to push back. But you do – your voice matters, and we’re seeing the impact of that right now.”

When the lawmakers began taking questions from the audience, the first was from a man asking how Huffman could support “the removal of the Potter Valley Project and be comfortable with stripping water away from 600,000 of your constituents… and when will you conduct a town hall in Potter Valley, the community that will be most (affected) by your decision to remove the project?”

“First, let me just tell you that an issue that is super vital to our region, to our environment and to folks in both the Eel and Russian River basins really should not be political, and it should not be politicized, but there has been a firehose of disinformation and conspiracy theories circulating, which are being circulated for very political reasons by very political people,” Huffman said. “Yes, there are 600,000 people in the North Bay who get some of their water through the Russian River system, and no one is talking about cutting off the water to 600,000 people. Nobody I know thinks that is a good idea, and I certainly don’t.

Rep. Jared Huffman, right, hosted a Town Hall in Ukiah Friday with Assemblyman Chris Rogers. (Peter Armstrong photo)

“I‘ve been working for eight years to get folks in both basins engaged on this subject because I knew change was coming, that this 100-year-old hydroelectric project was likely going away,” he continued. “And that’s why I engaged a very inclusive ad-hoc community process that included folks from all different perspectives, including right here in Mendocino County, including two of your previous Mendocino County Supervisors from Potter Valley, and including water managers from up and down the Russian River basin to make sure that people from both sides started talking to each other, so that if (Pacific Gas and Electric, which owns the hydroelectric plant called the Potter Valley Project) pulled the plug on this thing, which we could all see was a possibility, because they were losing $6 million a year on this antiquated project, and that was before they discovered the seismic risk, which means they have had to lower storage in Scott Dam. But all of these facts get lost in the politics that is coming at us fast and furious, all of a sudden, from certain folks.

“So look,” Huffman continued. “(PG&E) tried to give this thing away and nobody wanted, and we are now way down the road where they are under a (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) order to decommission the project and remove infrastructure. So, this is a moment of change, and a moment of peril for those of us in the Russian River basin if we don’t work cooperatively with the folks in the Eel River basin. And the good news is, we have a historic agreement where stakeholders in both basins support a continued, fish-friendly diversion into the Russian River that can meet the water needs of the Russian River stakeholders, (which) is all of us here, and I’m one of them.

“Right now, you’re getting a trickle through the Potter Valley Project, because PG&E hasn’t made power, or diverted the (previous) amounts of water in years, and they’re never going to again,” Huffman added. “So if you fight about this for another 10 or 20 years, or you try to blow this (agreement) up, that trickle that is coming into Lake Mendocino right now is all you’re ever going to get. But if we come to the table in good faith and support this win-win, Two-Basin Solution, you’ll get a lot more than that. You’ll get way more (water) than we’ve been getting for the last few years, and we’ve got a few years to plan and be smart, and improve our ability to store water, so there can actually be a lot more water than we’ve been getting in recent years.

“So that’s what I’ve been doing about this,” Huffman concluded. “And it doesn’t make for good conspiracy theories, but I think it’s pretty darn good water policy for this region, and I’m very proud of it. And in a few days, I will be at a signing ceremony at Lake Mendocino, because we are going to raise Coyote Valley Dam, and that increased storage is going to make all of this work so much better. This is a huge priority, I’m dedicated to protecting the water supply for this region. And I promise you, that if you weed through the hysteria and conspiracy theories, you’ll find facts that very much back up everything I’m telling you.”

Rogers then told the crowd he met with members of the Mendocino County Farm Bureau before the Town Hall and noted that during their discussion he mentioned he serves on a budget committee that is implementing “Prop 4, which the state of California passed just this last November, (and so there is) $10 billion there, (some of which) is for better water storage solutions… and I am happy to work with local folks on projects they are proposing to try and meet that need. We know that what this comes down to is making sure folks feel comfortable about how much water they have and when they have it. So working with local jurisdictions to find funding to advance projects … is going to happen, and I look forward to working with (Huffman) on that.”

When the woman given the last question asked how the lawmakers could stop what she saw as encroaching fascism from a presidential administration that she described as “not an administration, it’s a regime, clearly. So I think we need to start naming what it is. And also, I think a lot of people here want to know what is the most effective way to stop this? So what can we do, and what can both of you do to deal with a not-normal situation?”

“So, in terms of what you can do, showing up at town halls and being engaged like this is part of it,” Huffman said. “This matters, this is something. And I really want to thank you. This citizen engagement at all levels of government is how we show the folks who would do bad things to our Democracy that we’re paying attention, that we’re not overwhelmed, that we’re not distracted and fighting with each other. That we’re actually coming together as ‘Team America’ to stand up and fight for our Democracy … and all of it is serving notice to the folks back in Washington that Americans are not going to stand idly by while this happens.

“I did not want to be serving you in Congress during a rerun of 1930s Germany,” Huffman continued, describing the country as being “marched down the path to the dictatorship, but here’s the good news: We’ve got a chance to produce a different and better outcome than 1930s Germany, so that’s what this engagement is all about,” closing with a quote from “an Italian dissident from the 1930s as fascism was rising who said ‘We need pessimism of the intellect, and fierce optimism of the will,’ and that is my North Star about where we are right now: ‘Pessimism of the intellect,’ (meaning) eyes wide open, because this stuff is happening, it is real, and we can’t wish it away, we’ve got to face it for what it is; but also ‘optimism of the will,’ because we are not powerless to stop it.”

“And part of that creep toward fascism relies on people feeling that they have no hope, they have no outlet or ability,” said Rogers. “But sharing your personal stories makes it much more difficult for people to turn a blind eye to what’s happening. And another thing I keep preaching to people is, ‘Don’t allow people like Elon Musk to be a meat shield for everybody else who is enabling the terrible behaviors. He is the richest man in America, he doesn’t care. But the members of Congress who are behind him that have abdicated their authority … they’re the ones that need to feel the heat from you and their constituents.”

(ukiahdailyjournal.com)

A READER WRITES:

If the lake everyone cares about, Lake Pillsbury, would no longer be there whether from an earthquake or human deconstruction and removal, rebuilding the dam would cost too much. The result is the same no matter what. Earthquake or humans will take it out because it’s not supposed to be there. Potter Valley is supposed to be dry. It’s historically the driest valley in the county. Potter Valley’s historic dryness is NEVER brought up, because the steamy wetland that’s there now is so green and lush.

The Russian used to dry up completely in the heat of summer. That’s what is does. Has anyone ever thought that the fish aren’t there anymore cause we’ve created a constant unnatural flow? There’s build up and release in all systems, and that’s what’s messed up.

All that’s happened in Potter Valley since those dams is the creation of entitlement at everyone else’s expense.

PATTY LIDDY: AV VILLAGE UPDATE

I was just made aware that the Yorkville Spring Fling is for Yorkville residents only. I'm sorry for any confusion!

Also, I wanted to find out if people are interested in getting transportation for the presentation on A-fib care.

*Williams Minions Scheming* (Ted Williams)

JULIE BEARDSLEY

I believe Mendocino County would be administered much more transparently and efficiently if we returned to a Chief Administrator model. Under a CAO, the ELECTED Supervisors run the County, rather than what we have now with an unelected Chief Executive and her office of multiple Deputy CEO’s, who are effectively running the County government with the Board of Supervisors (BOS), taking what appears to be merely an advisory role. Under a CAO model the department heads would report directly to the BOS, and be hired and fired by them. The firing of several department heads over the past 10 years by the CEO, has resulted in making recruitment for upper-level management positions here a challenge. People are reluctant to work for an organization that has a record of suddenly firing department heads, given the effect that has on one’s career. Under a CAO model, the administrative functions of the county would be run by the CAO, but the elected BOS members would be much more involved in decision making and I believe would have much more knowledge and input about the internal functioning of the County government. Under this CEO and the former one, power has been concentrated in the Executive Office, to what I believe has been to the detriment of our county government. There is no mechanism for public input or dissenting opinions under the CEO model. For example, the draft by-laws for the Public Health Advisory Board have languished on someone’s desk for almost a year now. Perhaps they don’t really want advice. But there is no way to tell.

Mark Scaramella replies:

In the abstract, the “CAO Model” would be an improvement over the CEO model for many of the reasons Ms. Beardsley states. But as a practical matter, the problem is much deeper than the CEO/CAO model question. CEO Carmel Angelo took the position in 2010 when significant budget cuts were necessary which Angelo made, unsparingly, across the board, because the Supervisors at that time (a better group than the current bunch) being political animals just couldn’t do. If we are to believe the current CEO’s budget gap estimate, a similar situation exists now. But CEO Antle is not CEO Angelo. These supervisors have demonstrated that they have no interest in how the departments operate, have no ideas about how to close the budget gap, and probably wouldn’t do anything that had a political downside, even if they were inclined. When Haschak makes his occasional feeble attempts to address the budget gap, his colleagues haven’t even supported those. They can’t even discuss bringing the Clerk of the Board function back under the Board’s control, indicating that they don’t want any managerial duties or responsibilities. Also, there’s absolutely no reason to think that “transparency,” an overhyped and badly abused concept to begin with, would improve under the CEO model. Nor would the CAO model offer any inherent improvement in public input or dissenting opinions. Ms. Beardsley doesn’t specify which desk the Public Health Advisory Board bylaws has been languishing on, but we suspect it’s the County Counsel’s desk where there's no transparency, much less production. The CAO model wouldn’t address that either. The fact that they can’t even bring themselves to offer Cubbison a “let’s get this over with” settlement offer after having been thrashed by Judge Moorman leaving no likelihood of a successful defense, indicates that rearranging the org chart and the Deputy CEOs and department heads and such isn’t going to change much. PS. Have you noticed what new Supervisor Cline’s only specifically stated priority is? (Hint, it’s not the budget gap and not settling the Cubbison matter.)

YELLOW! AT PARTNERS GALLERY

April 10 — May 5

Second Saturday Meet the Artists April 12, 5-7pm

The many aspects and associations with Yellow comprise the theme of this show at Partners in April. For one artist the yellow is the bright and aggressive noontime sun full of energy and potency. For others yellow signals warmth and good cheer, a joyful moment when a fledgling swift rejoins its flock. It is precious gems of gold or a sparkling of ginkgo leaves on the asphalt or lichen glowing on a tree trunk. Or perhaps a cascade of confetti.

The exhibit is on view from April 10 to May 5.

Second Saturday Meet the Artists, April 12, 5-7pm

Gallery hours are Thursday through Monday, 11-5pm

The gallery is located at 45062 Ukiah St in Mendocino.

www.partnersgallery.com

Ginny Stearns, ginnystearns@gmail.com

PAGING CRAIG STEHR. CRAIG STEHR, WHITE COURTESY PHONE PLEASE.

Beloved Ones,

You’re warmly invited to a sacred gathering on the evening of Hanuman Jayanti, under the glow of the waxing Moon.

Let us meet in circle at The Shala on Wednesday, April 9th at 6:00 PM, to honor both Chandra’s reflective stillness and Hanuman’s unwavering devotion.

This evening will weave together:

Moon Circle Ritual — breath, mantra, journaling, and lunar embodiment practices to connect with softness, intuition, and emotional renewal.

Hanuman Jayanti Offering — storytelling, chanting the Hanuman Chalisa, and invoking Hanuman as the embodiment of prÄá¹‡a, strength, courage, and heart-centered service.

A space of collective reverence, personal intention, and devotional sound — where we balance the cool light of the Moon with the fire of Hanuman’s love.

Wednesday, April 96:00—7:30 PM

The Shala, 45121 Ukiah St. Mendocino https://app.arketa.co/theshala/checkout/XuVMNp3cZNFmwEiXZNzW

Please bring:

Journal + pen

Small item for the altar (flower, stone, fruit)

A shawl or cloth for comfort

Your breath and heart

Let us chant. Let us remember.

Let us hold each other in moonlight and mantra.

With breath & bhakti,

Justine Lemos, justine@at1yoga.com

TRUE HISTORY, MENDO DIVISION

(from "Off The Record," May 11, 2011)

GARY BALL died Sunday in Colorado, and immediately I get an e-mail saying, “I know you'll trash him like you did Richard Johnson but Gary Ball has died.” So here goes: Ball and his wife Betty were the ostensible co-founders of the Mendocino Environmental Center in, as I recall, 1988. Betty was the full time volunteer co-ordinator at the MEC while Gary, he said, worked as a bookkeeper to pay their personal bills, joining Betty at the MEC in the evenings and on weekends as they did whatever it was they did all day and into the night at 106 West Standley, Ukiah, an address law enforcement-convenient directly across the street from the County Courthouse. After the MEC began paying the Balls a monthly stipend out of zero visible resources, Gary joined Betty in working full time at 106's dingy premises. The Balls' primary focus was said to be forestry issues but, in the aftermath of the bombing of Judi Bari, they spent much of their time fundraising for Bari and, in my opinion, an opinion still not permitted on the PC Circuit, propagandizing and fundraising for the Bari defense, a defense co-written by Bari, her lawyers and the FBI, then hand-fed to “progressive” media at places like the severely dumbed-down KPFA and its outback sister stations in places like Philo and Garberville.

THE MOST EFFECTIVE local environmental work of that fraught period was done by people like the late Ron Guenther and Helen Libeu, to name two unsung heroes of the forests, who relentlessly but much less glamorously than the “direct action” preferred by Earth First!, spent hundreds of tedious hours challenging timber harvest plans on technical grounds for no money and no glory, if your silly mug occasionally appearing on the front page of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat can be considered glorious. Judi Bari's legacy, strictly speaking, is thousands of acres of stumps, but she was a brilliant organizer who did manage to get an amorphous mass of fagged out old hippies, unaffiliated lefties, several hundred mental cases, and miscellaneous others marching in the general direction of sustained yield, drawing national attention to the corporate onslaught then underway on the Northcoast's forests as she went. After she was bombed, however, she became her own full-time cause.

ORIGINALLY from Colorado, the Balls returned there after Judi Bari's death in 1997. In Boulder, the Balls founded the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, from which they immediately denounced the right-on arson fire committed by the Earth Liberation Front that wiped out a particularly gruesome ski resort in an otherwise pristine Colorado forest. Betty Ball announced she'd help find the perps who any righteous peace and justice person would have immediately recognized as heroes of the environment.

SO, HERE'S what I think because, added up, the Bari-Ball interlude in Mendocino County makes no other sense. I think the Mendocino Environment Center was organized and funded by the FBI because the feds were under huge pressure from extractive industries, particularly Big Timber, to do something about the industrial sabotage Earth First! and Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were advocating. I think the FBI set up a 60's-style listening post at 106 Standley to monitor the comings and goings of potential tree spikers and tractor-decommissioners. The FBI, as some of us will recall had, in that same period, lured people close to Dave Foreman, a founder of Earth First!, out into the Arizona desert to take down a power line. The feds had run that crude attempt as a set-up of Foreman but, when it all shook out, the FBI, for an event they'd encouraged and done the logistics for, had to settle for a few lesser personages.

JUDI BARI'S former husband, Mike Sweeney, maintained his office at the Balls' MEC. He was writing recycling grants, he said, which he could have done at home but….. These days a pillar of bourgeoisie respectability complete with a big house in the hills west of Ukiah that he shares with Press Democrat reporter Glenda Anderson, Sweeney functions as Mendocino County's lead garbage bureaucrat. But in his youth, and well past it, Sweeney was a Maoist cult guy, a little red book guy, a communist of the nutball type. That's how he and Bari hooked up. She was an East Coast Maoist cult gal. By 1980 Sweeney, who had been a foot soldier with the Stanford-based, English Department-led Venceremos that would segue into the murderous Symbionese Liberation Army, had married Bari, moved with his new bride to Santa Rosa where he soon shot his neighbor's dog, blew up one of two hangars at the old WW Two air field not far from his home because he was irritated by weekend air traffic, sued developers for profit, and hassled his first wife, Cynthia Denenholtz, (another former Maoist who, when that fad ended, re-invented herself as an attorney) to the point where she had to legally restrain him. Sweeney doesn't sue me for saying these things because (1) he says I don't have any money to sue for, as if he couldn't sue me himself for an honorable dollar or, (2) if he does sue me my rich nephew will pay my legal bills, assertions the PC brigades seem to find plausible.

I THINK Sweeney was off limits as the primary suspect in his well-known wife's car bombing because he enjoyed federal affiliations all the way back to Stanford, and that since 1988 he'd been conveniently well placed in Ukiah during the run-up to Redwood Summer to snitch off people suspected of industrial sabotage. Hence his free pass on the attack on Ms. Bari, a “mystery” event that can be solved via existing dna which, of course, is stoutly resisted by Cherney and the rest of the Bari Cult who claim to have been searching for the bomber for 21 years now, out there with OJ and Scott Peterson looking everywhere for the true perps.

IF your significant other gets blown up in the middle of a major American city or in downtown Philo, you are automatically front and center as Suspect Primo. Not Sweeney. He got waved on through, and he's still getting waved on through by that utter fraud Cherney and Cherney's co-dependents at the FBI. Cherney has cleared a cool mil for himself not finding the bomber. He literally can't afford to find out who did it. Sweeney, a rich kid from Santa Barbara, has since simply reverted to his class roots which, politically are the kind of patrician liberalism prevalent on West Side, Ukiah. Amnesia County is the perfect place for Mike because you are whatever you say you are, and history starts all over again every day.

SO THIS GUY writes in to tell me that Ball has died, adding that I will undoubtedly “heap opprobrium” on him as “you did when he was alive.” Which I did not because I didn't have strong feelings about the Balls when they were at the MEC, a depressing dump of a venue I always avoided because it more resembled an out-patient clinic than a political headquarters. Nope, I saw the Balls as simply one more pair of lib labs who labbed more than they libbed. Betty, a rotund earth mother type swathed in mumus, was always bumblingly pleasant, but I found Gar supercilious and snide, not that I ever gave the dude much thought. In those heady days Sweeney seemed to be the only fully alert person on the premises, which he undoubtedly was, and he's another guy I don't have personal animosity for; in fact, I rather admire what Mike's managed to pull off here as Mendocino County's very own Dos Equis ad, “the most interesting man in the world.” And as Bari herself often said, “My ex-husband is the smartest man I know.” I'd say Sweeney's about half as smart as he seems to think he is, but how smart do you have to be to get over on The PC Gang?

JUDI BARI? I think she did what she had to do. I think if she'd ever publicly admitted the truth of the bombing, as she would do privately to documentary filmmaker Steve Talbot, both she and Sweeney would have gone to jail for a long time, and Sweeney, in retaliation, would have had a whole lot of interesting things to say about FBI ops in Mendoland. Which is why Bari is dead and Sweeney is saving the Ukiah Post Office when he isn't at work making nearly a hundred grand a year screwing up County garbage policy.

MENDOLIB is pretty much incapable of discussing controversial issues in an adult manner. Invariably, someone will say, “What do you have against Mike Sweeney?” Or, “Why are you trying to destroy Judi Bari's legacy?” The person who asked the latter was probably in pre-school drug rehab in 1990, but out there in Feebville, then as now, every question is reduced to personalities, and any opinion that violates the catechism, well, that's an opinion you just can't have if you want to be a “highly evolved human being who speaks truth to power.”

MIKE MCPHEE:

In Honor of the NCAA Tournament otherwise known as “March Madness,” here is the AV Panthers Varsity Team for 1978…

Top Row: L-R Chris Hayward, Randy Yates, Charles Davis, Nick Rossi, and Chris Martin, Bottom Row, L-R: Kameah-Aki Barnette (Known as “Beaver”), Bryan Wyant, Gary Abbott, and Myself, Not pictured was Gene Waggoner, our Head Coach. We came in 2nd in League Play, losing only 2 games to the same opponent, Mendocino.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, April 7, 2025

JOSE CABRERA-INFANTE, 41, Ukiah. Taking vehicle without owner’s consent, stolen property, grand theft, controlled substance, suspended license for DUI.

RICHARD CAUCKWELL, 62, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation. (Frequent flyer.)

LEWIS DISHMAN, 42, Ukiah. Resisting.

KARL GAGE, 54, Ukiah. Burglary, mayhem, assault with deadly weapon not a gun, parole violation.

FABIAN GARCIA, 42, Ukiah. Domestic battery.

JOHN HOLST, 57, Boise/Ukiah. Domestic battery.

JEREMY KENYON, 44, Fort Bragg. Controlled substance, visiting where illegal drugs are used, county parole violation.

BILL KIMBERLIN: Starbucks, the famous coffee brand. But do you know where that name came from? It was the name of the first mate or second in command on, “The Pequod” in Herman Melville's “Moby Dick”. One of the founders thought that words starting with the letters, “St” had a certain power to them. I guess he was correct.

MARIE TOBIAS (Coast Chatline):

Re: The disturbing 60 Minutes segment on Trump’s deportations…

I honestly feel that Donny has so lost touch with physical reality that it occurs to him like ordering extras from central casting for his reality show “Merican Prezident.”

I need 200 brown guys with tatoos to play gang members for photo ops.

The fact he's snatching innocent people off the street, no hearing, no trial, no attempt to determine if they even have the right person. Then without any kind of due process dumping them in arguably one of the worst hell holes in the world with no recourse, and a very real likelihood they'll die there. Is nothing less than a crime against humanity.

A Federal Judge acknowledged actual Nazis after WWII being tried for war crimes were treated with greater respect and dignity.

He talks about these people coming from shithole countries, while feeling inclined to make America one of those totalitarian shitholes.

FISHING AND ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS SLAM $134 MILLION IN ADDITIONAL FEDERAL FUNDING FOR SITES RESERVOIR IN SACRAMENTO VALLEY

by Dan Bacher

The Sites Reservoir Project in Northern California, a controversial water project promoted by Governor Gavin Newson and opposed by a coalition of environmental groups, fishing organizations and indigenous tribes because it will divert more water out of the Sacramento River, recently received $134 million in federal funding from the Trump Administration.

Critics assert that the money was issued as Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom develops an increasingly cozy relationship with President Donald Trump — and has been interviewing conservative media stars such as Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage and Steve Bannon by featuring them as guests on his new podcast.

The $134 million brings the total federal investment in the project to $780.15 million. The money comes from the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act (WIIN Act) that provides funding to ”improve water infrastructure throughout the United States,” according to an announcement from the Sites Authority.…

https://sacramento.newsreview.com/2025/04/07/fishing-and-environmental-groups-slam-134-million-in-additional-federal-funding-for-sites-reservoir-in-sacramento-valley/

Danger - Rotating blades cut off arms and legs! (via Steve Derwinski)

THE PENGUINS SMILE

The truth lies

At the bottom of the well

Deep and dry

In the fires of Hell

Down’s not bad

Up’s not good

Camo clad thugs

In masks and hoods

Clandestine flights

To foreign jails

No civil rights

No hearing No bail

Protests build

As the people unite

The streets are filled

In this Hands Off fight

Tariffs on trade

With faraway isles

Have surely made

The penguins smile

— Elvin Woods

BILL KIMBERLIN:

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has said Trump's tariffs could lead the world into a “economic nuclear winter” as he called for a 90-day pause on the taxes.

Ackman, who is one of Trump's most prominent Wall Street backers, said in a lengthy post on X, external that the president was losing the confidence of business leaders.

Ackman added that Trump was “in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital”.

William Albert Ackman is an American billionaire hedge fund manager who is the founder and chief executive officer of Pershing Square Capital Management.

TIRED OF WINNING?

Editor:

Donald Trump has chosen Cabinet members based on loyalty not on expertise. Are you tired of winning yet?

Trump hired Elon Musk, the richest man in world, to take resources from the poorest families in the America. Are you tried of winning yet?

Trump started a trade war with our allies and closest neighbors, the effect of which will be higher prices for Americans. Are you tried of winning yet?

Trump has withdrawn from the Paris climate change agreement, with the effects mostly impacting our children and grandchildren. Are you tried of winning yet?

Trump has enacted on-again, off-again tariffs causing the stock market to take a tumble. Are you tired of winning yet?

Trump, though DOGE, defunded medical research, and our top scientist are now seeking employment in Europe and Canada, thereby resulting in a brain drain. Are you tried of winning yet?

Trump has alienated our neighbors and allies isolating us in the event of a major conflict with our enemies. Are you tried of winning yet?

In all of this, are you tried of winning yet?

Gene Colombini

Santa Rosa

GAZA HOSTAGES, AN EXCHANGE

Jorge Besada:

I am as distraught, ok probably not as distraught, as Jeff Blankfort is regarding this calamity that has been destroying the Western world for well over 100 years now…. But we must put aside our desperation. These women and misguided husbands that got killed did not “deserve” it. No one deserves suffering for simply being fooled into a disastrous ideology. We just have to sorta accept things and help change minds like you've been doing for a long time.

Jeff Blankfort:

I appreciate your thoughts but I have been dealing with these people for more than a half century, and twice, over a 20 year gap, up close in Israel, as well as occupied Lebanon in 1983, where one took a shot at me, in the West Bank, where in Hebron, I watched smiling Jewish mothers encourage their sons to harass much older Palestinian women while Israeli soldiers looked on, smiling. All Israeli Jews, of course, are not that way, but the top number in that category, a number of whom I interviewed and stayed with, are never more than 10%, the percentage of Israeli Jews that did NOT support the five wars on Gaza since 2008, according to Israeli polls. Watching them on Israeli TV enjoying a barbecue in Southern Israel while watching their criminal relatives fire white phosphorous rockets into Gaza on one of those occasions neither shocked nor surprised me. I have never encountered a more sadistic and proudly racist people in my life and I have widely traveled. They are the personification of evil.

JD JENKINS

Yes … it is a charmed, sometimes smudged, but always charmed life… for those with arms open to it.

Photo by me

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Melania, I know it ain't easy, Honey, but please - emerge from your NYC hide-out, and come pick up your husband. He's lost the plot. Immediate medical attention needed.

SAN FRANCISCO’S POTENT PROTEST, April 5, 2025

by Jonah Raskin

They did not come to the Civic Center in San Francisco on April 5, 2025 to speak truth to power. They know that power doesn’t listen to people, not the powerful but vulnerable demigods in the White House. They came to acknowledge one another, to build a community in the open air and to air their grievances. It was a defining feature of the crowd that numbered in the thousands that no two signs were identical just as no people were identical and no two people dressed identically. They were individuals, separate and autonomous and yet linked by their total rejection of Trump and Musk whose names were deliberately misspelled in the spirit of disdain and disgust.

I wandered from the edge of the crowd opposite the main branch of the public library to the heart of the crowd where it was so crowded I couldn’t move forward or to the side and had to go backward for room to breathe. I saw T-shirts that read “Gulf of Mexico,” signs that mention Greenland and Gaza, and just one that mentioned Ukraine.

I saw the word “FUCK” in capital letters dozens of times, signs that called for Democracy with a capital D, signs that called for money and jobs, signs with the capital letter X through the Tesla icon, and the world Oligarchy with an X across it. “Defund DODGE” I read and “we the people,” and a quotation from Benjamin Franklin, and passages from Isiah and Matthew and a T-shirt that shouted “Our Revolution California.” The signs were all hand-lettered and also drawn by hand. Not a single one was store bought. This was a DIY crowd who cared not a fig about Pelosi, AOC, Waltz, Sanders or Kamala Harris. It was a crowd that didn’t have a favorite politician, though one sign read “We’re angry and we’re voting.” The protesters were not waiting for the midterm elections to express their disapproval of the whole lousy political landscape.

I was there. I felt at one with the crowd, the most diverse crowd I’ve ever experienced with men and women wearing green hats, blue hats, red hats, black hats and white hats, big and little hats, angry people but happy people, too, happy to be protesting on a Sunday in the sun in San Francisco. My favorite two signs were held by the same woman who sat on a curb. Both featured American flags. One read “Fuck Nazis” six times. The other read “We the People love Democracy, Zelensky, Ukraine,” followed by “celebrate diversity, equity and inclusion” — three words that defined the crowd itself that care about inclusivity, diversity, fairness and justice.

MUST-SEE TV? KEEP AN EYE ON THE WARRIORS IN THE SEASON’S FINAL WEEK

by Ann Killion

The Golden State Warriors started Sunday in fifth place in the Western Conference. For a brief moment, they held the fourth spot. By the end of the night, they were down to the sixth spot, sharing identical records with three other teams.

Get ready for a wild week. Four games in seven days and where the Warriors will end up is a riveting mystery.

“I look at every score, I look at the schedule for tomorrow and the next day, and the only thing I know for sure is if we win our last four games we’re not in the play-in,” head coach Steve Kerr said. “We might get a little help, so maybe we don’t need to win all four, but you can’t worry about any of that. You’ve just got to worry about the next game and keep winning. Our guys have done such an incredible job to climb up to this point from where we were six weeks ago. What an incredible run.

“But you’re not going to win every game. We ran into a hot team that played a great game and you’ve got to just quickly move on. So I’m gonna go home and watch The White Lotus.”

The Warriors’ season has had as many twists and plot points as the HBO drama. They’ve added a new cast member who has complemented the familiar faces and made anticipation for the playoffs soar.

“I’ve always wanted to think that whatever squad that I’m on, we always have a chance,” said Jimmy Butler, who carried his Miami Heat team from a play-in game to the NBA Finals in 2023. “I know whatever squad (number) 30 is on, whatever squad (number) 23 is on, always got a chance.

“So I’d only like to think that all three of us together have a really good chance.”

The belief is strong. The swagger is strong. And these final few regular season games already feel like the playoffs. That was certainly true against Houston on Sunday.

In a matchup littered with playoff memories, hard feelings and even a Draymond Green flagrant foul, the Warriors played a feisty game. But they lost for just the third time when Stephen Curry and Butler take the court together. The game was the fourth straight against a potential playoff opponent and the sting of the loss was less because the Warriors had won the first three in dramatic fashion.

“We are still that team that is confident that we can beat anybody,” Curry said.

Curry’s line was the strangest part of the night. The man who scored 125 combined points in the previous three games, had just three points on 1-for-10 shooting and looked very much like a 37-year-old who had been hauling his team to the finish.

But even Curry was part of the game’s spiciness, having an animated discussion with Houston coach Ime Udoka as they left the floor at halftime. Udoka characterized it as “friendly banter.”

“He made a reservation at International Smoke and canceled it,” Curry said with a laugh, plugging his wife’s restaurant. “So I was kind of upset with him. We went back and forth on that.”

Udoka was one of several Rockets who know all too well what the Warriors can do once they make the playoffs. His lone trip to the Finals, as the Celtics coach, ended with the Warriors winning their fourth championship.

The Rockets roster included Dillon Brooks, the villain of past playoffs whose disdain for the Warriors is well documented. Fred VanVleet won a title at the Warriors’ expense in 2019 when he was with the Raptors. Steven Adams’ playoff hopes have been shattered by the Warriors in both Oklahoma City and Memphis.

Green helped create a new target for Warriors’ fans animosity in Alperen Sengun, the Rockets center, who tangled repeatedly with Green. Green picked up his fourth foul 75 seconds into the third quarter and his fifth less than a minute later. That foul was — after a lengthy review — ruled a flagrant foul, though the crowd at Chase clearly believed Sengun was flopping.

There’s obviously intense playoff history between the Warriors and the Rockets, though not between this version of the Rockets and the Warriors.

“There’s nothing from the past,” Curry said. “Just two great teams trying to win a basketball game. They’re a really good team.”

The Rockets did an excellent job of defending Curry, though Butler felt that term should be qualified.

“They did a good job of whatever you want to call it,” Butler said. “I’ve never seen an individual get fouled more than he gets fouled. It’s astounding. It’s crazy to say but he’s used to it. It’s been happening his whole career and he’s found a way through it, around it, under it … It really angers me that he’s on my team and he gets hacked like that.”

Emotions are running high. Feistiness is in the air. The playoffs are around the corner.

Kerr might have gone home to watch America’s most popular drama on Sunday night, but his team has become the drama that is truly must-see TV.

GIANTS’ WIN STREAK SNAPPED as Camilo Doval’s struggles resurface in loss to Reds

by Shayna Rubin

Since the team convened for spring training, San Francisco Giants reliever Camilo Doval showed signs of a bounce-back year. He was throwing strikes, impressing coaches with his demeanor and confidence and, when the season began, didn’t allow a base-runner in his first three outings.

Lately, though, Doval’s old bad habits have come back to haunt.

Coming off his second blown save chance of the year in Sunday’s walk-off win, Doval had another troublesome inning that was the difference in what had been a scoreless game Monday night. An inability to limit his walks led to Doval’s demotion to Triple-A midseason last year and bit him again in the Giants’ 2-0 loss to the Cincinnati Reds.

Tyler Rogers, having pitched in six of the last eight games, was unavailable for the eighth inning, which meant Doval was next in line to face the bottom of the Reds’ lineup. He walked Spencer Steer to lead off the inning and, not before throwing a pitch in the dirt, hit Jacob Hurtubise in the leg with a cutter.

The leash was short as he was pulled after facing the minimum three batters when Jose Trevino laid down a sacrifice bunt to advance the runners. Reliever Erik Miller couldn’t hold them in place as Blake Dunn hit a changeup the other way to score a pair that Doval will wear on his 5.06 ERA.

“When he gets ahead he’s throwing strikes. He’s a lot more effective,” manager Bob Melvin said. “Before the last couple outings, he’d been really good. We’re down Tyler (Rogers) today, that was his inning. But it got away from (Doval) when you walk the lead off guy and next thing you know he has a couple guys on.”

Doval’s bad outing was perhaps magnified by its context. To that point, the Reds and Giants were entangled in a pitcher’s duel between Logan Webb and Hunter Greene, a reprise of an Opening Day match-up in Cincinnati that fell San Francisco’s way with Wilmer Flores’ go-ahead home run in the ninth inning.

It had been less than two weeks since the Giants saw Greene’s stuff. Familiarity didn’t make things any easier.

Greene averages 99 mph on his four-seam fastball and that velocity wasn’t wavering deep into the game. Plus, he was keeping hitters off balance with his slider.

“He was throwing 100 in the ninth,” Melvin said. “Really I think it was the slider today that was even better than the last time we saw it. It was more of a strike breaking ball last time and now it’s strike-to-ball. When you’re throwing that hard, it’s tough to lay off that pitch, too. He has good stuff and it’s about as good a stuff he’s ever had.”

Because he limits his walks, the Giants’ approach was to attack Greene early in the count. A plan that backfired as Green was efficient and came one out shy of a complete game shutout.

The Giants’ best shot at a rally in the bottom of the ninth. Jung Hoo Lee hit a two-out single and Matt Chapman drew a walk to get Greene out of the game after 104 pitches. With reliever Tony Santillan on the mound, Heliot Ramos nearly kept the late rally going with a line drive to left field, but Hurtubise made a diving catch to end the game.

The brisk air put out what few scoring opportunities the Giants generated. In the sixth, Lee walloped Greene’s 100 mph fastball to right field with a 103.7 mph exit velocity, but the ball died at the wall. Statcast estimated that the drive would have been a home run in 19 of the 30 MLB parks. The long out also got Lee’s fan club riled up; The group of 50 fans, shown on the game broadcast in the third deck, was decked out in shirts reading “Hoo Lee Gan” (a play on “hooligan”) and wearing wigs shaped like flaming fire.

Though the group was hard to miss from the stands, Lee couldn’t see them from the field. He was surprised, though, that his drive didn’t get over the fence.

“I felt it was going to go over, but the wind was blowing in,” Lee said with Justin Han interpreting. “You can’t do anything about the environment.”

Greene’s near complete game overshadowed a strong start from Webb, who revived his changeup with a few grip tweaks he made between starts. He used the pitch to get strike three on five of a season-high 10 strikeouts over seven shutout innings. It’s the eighth time Webb has recorded double-digit strikeouts and the first time since July 9, 2023.

“It’s the most excited I’ve been about my changeup in a long time,” Webb said.

Being the ground-ball maestro Webb is, Lee said “there isn’t a lot to do” in center field when the ace is pitching, but he got involved when he made a sliding catch to rob TJ Friedl of a hit to lead off the first. In the fifth, he got dirty again to snag Jeimer Candelario’s line drive.

The loss snaps the Giants’ win streak at seven games and is the first time they’ve been shut out this season. It wasn’t enough to deflate a team with eight wins in 10 games.

“We’re playing great baseball. Tonight sucked — that we lost,” Webb said. “It’s weird to say, but if there’s any way to lose a game it’s like that. It’s a guy going out there and pitching a hell of a game against us. That’s baseball … We’re super excited in here. It’s only our second loss, but guys are patting each other on the back. I’ve been in clubhouse when you lose, it’s quiet. But guys are excited to get back out there tomorrow.”

(sfchronicle.com)

NEW YORK - 1966: Folk singer Tom Rush on the street in Greenwich Village in 1966 in New York City, New York. (Photo by Alice Ochs/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

“My children are all actually doing very well, much better than I did at their age.” And what productive activity do your children do? What do they make or build? How do they improve our society? As a boomer I never had it easy. So what. I can't complain. I am a first generation American success. I put in 10 hours a day sweat and toil and went home, Worked the foundry's and mills as a youngin'. Late 60's-70's' That was when we had factories around here. $4-5 bucks an hour + piece work + overtime. Good money if you wanted the work. Hard and dirty. So what? Second and third shift. The iron stack ran 24/7. Casting iron pillow blocks/ hydraulic cylinders by the millions. We built the world. Try to get some 21st century soy boy to do that in 100 degree July heat. He'd rather code for a living. Maybe play video games, or watch a little porn. Soft men /pansies/ destroy the world and I see them everywhere. These slugs are in for a rude awakening.

DAMON CHEN ON X: When the tariffs do their job…

pic.x.com/0rYyjNP02T

WHEN EVEN MAGA BILLIONAIRES START TO SAY, OOPS

Over the weekend Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, suddenly turned on his champion, declaring on X that “by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital.”

But Ackman refused to take any responsibility for enabling the destruction: “I don't think this was foreseeable. I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.”

Indeed. Who could have foreseen that the self-proclaimed Tariff Man, who posts crazy stuff on Truth Social every day, would impose destructive tariffs? Who could have imagined that the many economists, myself included, who warned that a Trump victory would be very bad for the economy would turn out to have been right? Or if we were wrong, it was only because we underestimated the damage.

OK, Ackman is a fool, but he wasn’t alone in getting Trump all wrong. Many wealthy people imagined that Trump II would be like Trump I, mostly a standard right-winger with a bit of a protectionist hobby. They thought he would cut their taxes, eliminate financial and environmental regulations and promote crypto, making them even wealthier. They expected him to back off his tariff obsession if the stock market started to fall. If he ripped up the social safety net, well, they don’t depend on food stamps or Medicaid.”

— Paul Krugman, Nobelist economist

LEAD STORIES, TUESDAY'S NYT

Supreme Court Clears Way for Venezuelan Deportations to Resume, for Now

Supreme Court Temporarily Blocks Order Requiring Return of Wrongly Deported Migrant

Stocks Whipsaw With S&P 500 on the Precipice of a Bear Market

Kennedy Calls for States to Ban Fluoridated Drinking Water

Trump Administration to Roll Back Array of Gun Control Measures

U.S. and Iran Will Hold Nuclear Talks on Saturday

Scientists Revive the Dire Wolf, or Something Close

“RICH MEN will always take the side of power. I have been around rich men my whole life and they will not lose. They will not lose their fortunes. Anything but their fortunes.”

— John Hancock

1956 LUNCH MENU IN ALCATRAZ PRISON

What are you having for lunch?

SUPREME COURT OVERTURNS LOWER COURT’S BLOCK ON VENEZUELAN DEPORTATIONS

The Trump administration asked the justices to weigh in after a federal judge paused the president’s use of a wartime powers law to deport Venezuelans it accused of being gang members.

by Abbie VanSickle

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday night that the Trump administration could continue to deport Venezuelan migrants based on a wartime powers act for now, overturning a lower court that had put a temporary stop to the deportations.

The decision marks a victory for the Trump administration, although the ruling is narrow and focused on the proper venue for the cases, rather than on the administration’s use of a centuries-old law to justify its decision to send planeloads of Venezuelans to El Salvador with little to no due process.

The justices did not address the question of whether the Trump administration improperly categorized the Venezuelans as deportable under the Alien Enemies Act, finding the migrants had improperly challenged their deportations in Washington, D.C. The justices determined that the migrants should have raised challenges in Texas, where they were being held.

“The detainees are confined in Texas, so venue is improper in the District of Columbia,” according to the court’s order, which was brief and unsigned, as is typical in such emergency applications.

(NY Times)

WHEN THE DEAN OF HARVARD LAW WENT DARK

by Ralph Nader

Tyrant Donald Trump, mega-violator of federal laws Wrecking America, has targeted Harvard University. Trump illegally threatens to cancel $9 billion in committed grants and contracts. One would think that the mighty Harvard Law School – loaded with professors having litigation and federal government experience – would be the vanguard of resistance and counterattack against the critical extortions of Trump, the fascistic dictator.

WRONG! The Law School is under the control of the University’s Board of Overseers and the University Administration. This exalted edifice of higher education is quivering with fright and bending to the vicious Trumpsters instead of fighting back in the courts and enlisting their vast influential alumni. Such a Law School would have turned a deaf ear to Paul Revere’s Ride on the 18th of April in ’75.

I learned this firsthand as an alumnus of the Law School when I co-sponsored the first Vigorous Public Interest Law Day on April 1, 2025.

Here is the story in brief. Last December Interim Dean John Goldberg returned my call for a substantial conversation on the need to address the various forms of corporate power and corporate coercion over the rule of law. As a former Tort Professor (tort law deals with wrongful injuries) his awareness of corporate abuses was greater than his less learned predecessors.

I mentioned articles written by me for the Harvard Law Record in recent years that urged more attention by the Harvard Law School to the systemic lawlessness of these corporate supremacists along with more study of congressional surrender to the Executive Branch. He welcomed me sending materials on these topics and said he would read them over the Holidays and we would have another conversation.

That was the last time I ever heard from him. Since that conversation came the second inauguration of Donald Trump and his tactics of winning through criminal intimidation. Many emails, voicemails, and requests in January and February through the Dean’s polite secretary for us to speak went completely unanswered.

Come March, my calls and emails became focused on informing him about the Vigorous Public Interest Law Day events, with speakers of great distinction for their contributions to a more just society. I wanted to invite him to greet the assembly and urge students and faculty to be part of this rare event at the heavily corporatized law school. After all the rule of law was under wholesale destruction because of Trump’s illegal, enforced executive orders.

No answers from his Deanship. Instead, the feedback from students revealed evidence of their anxiety, dread, and fear. Especially by foreign students and supporters of Palestinian rights against U.S. funding and co-belligerent support of Netanyahu’s mass murder genocide in Gaza. As April 1st neared, I sensed that the two large reserved lecture rooms would be too large.

What I saw unfolding was a quiet boycott, almost all the contacted faculty went incommunicado and those that showed some enthusiasm ended up being strange no-shows. The Law School has numerous student associations and over thirty legal clinics run by full-time directors. Students and staff overwhelmingly failed to attend.

It’s not that our organizers, a full-time person and several stalwart students, didn’t publicize these sterling presentations – some in-person and some by Zoom. There were posters and handouts everywhere. Emails, telephone calls, meetings, and word-of-mouth efforts were substantive. Burritos were provided as a free lunch. Requests to Dean Goldberg to meet with the speakers (mostly Harvard law alumni) with hundreds of experience years of pursuing and achieving justice went unanswered. The speakers wanted to share their views with him and the assistant deans as to how best to have the curricula, extracurricular experience, and admission criteria better reflect the law school’s own declared mission: “to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well-being of society.”

Sadly, there was not even the courtesy of a response from his Deanship.

What explains this crude and rude rebuff, unlike how the Administration lays out the red carpet for rich corporate alumni from Wall Street and other plutocratic venues?

The Law School is controlled by the overall University policy to shy from challenging Trump and demonstrate flexibility. Harvard retained Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with close ties to Trump. Astonishingly, the Harvard administration ignored antisemitism against the Palestinian slaughter, with U.S. tax dollars and military support in violation of the Leahy Law, instead adopting a definition of antisemitism closer to Netanyahu’s racist state coverup. Two leaders of Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies were discharged. This led the New York Times to report that: “To some faculty members, the move was more evidence that Harvard was capitulating at a moment of creeping authoritarianism.”

The Law School is part of this capitulation, notwithstanding its historical knowledge that yielding to newly installed tyrants emboldens their tyranny to move against other universities and colleges.

So here is what poor, frightened Dean Goldberg of the once mightiest law school in the world could have seen by looking at our program:

The first speaker was Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen which has already filed eight suits against the Trump regime’s illegal orders, such as the shutting down of serious humanitarian support by the life-saving U.S. Agency for International Development.

He was followed by John Bonifaz, president of Free Speech for People, who is starting an “Impeach Trump Again” national drive against Trump with more than 250,000 signatures. Then came Mark Green, a primary co-author with me of two books on Trump – one presciently called “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All.” Then James Henry, a strong advocate of justice for Palestinians, and so on. The Dean’s reaction was not to come within miles of this crowd. He made like this program didn’t exist. Follow the white flag of calculated surrender to Trump, a convicted felon, the most impeachable president in American history (See, Is any Member of Congress ready to impeach Trump? If so, we’ve drafted 14 articles of Impeachment, in the February/March 2025 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). Avoid strongly calling out Trump for his masked, ICE plainclothesmen kidnapping students and disappearing them to a Louisiana prison. Look the other way at this fast-emerging dictatorship and police state electing Napoleon in lieu of James Madison. Gloat over succeeding in keeping the audience down to about 40 people by going dark as if it never existed. Bruce Fein pointed out that the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence signed their death warrants on July 4, 1776, and we should be inspired by their example to rescue their handiwork from Trump’s mutilations.

Some Law School Deans are speaking up. A leader is Erwin Chemerinsky at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, who is networking with other Deans in standing tall and resolute. He wrote in the Washington Post that “… despite the risks of speaking out, silence itself comes at enormous cost. Giving in to a bully only makes things worse.”

It is not hard to feel sorry for Interim Dean Goldberg. He wants to become the permanent Dean. Toward that quest, you learn how to get along by going along with the wobbly Harvard president Alan Garber and his rubber stamp Board of Overseers.

A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy, wrote a best-selling book titled “Profiles in Courage.” I recommend it to the Dean and all the Harvard law faculty who looked the other way.

Former federal judge and now law professor Nancy Gertner did show up, did urge resistance and challenge to what she forthrightly called, on Democracy Now! Trump’s burgeoning coup d’état.

Aristotle would have liked Nancy Gertner. He once wrote that “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”

The entire Day’s proceedings were videotaped and will be streamed in due time for nationwide viewership. Watch it in a dark room, Dean.

TRUMP’S HAMMER

by James Stafford

What is a ‘trade war’? At this point, it might be better to ask what trade ‘peace’ might look like. This is not the same thing as ‘globalisation’ or ‘free trade’. It’s a legal idea, not an economic one: non-discrimination, or equal treatment. Import duties and other trade barriers in one country, whatever their extent, should affect all other countries equally (‘most favoured nation’ treatment); internal taxes and regulations should not discriminate between internal and foreign trade (‘national treatment’).

Pinning these fuzzy definitions down in practice is complicated. A lot of the international trade jurisprudence conducted through the mechanisms of the World Trade Organisation involves investigating whether trade discrimination between states is occurring or not, and deciding what remedies might be appropriate. Accusing other states of trade discrimination, while justifying your own as self-defence, is one of the regular duties of trade negotiators the world over.

In the text of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the 1947 treaty that serves, in modified form, as a foundation for today’s WTO, carve-outs from the broad principle of non-discrimination are limited, and require specific justification. The European Union is compatible with the GATT thanks to Article 24, which permits customs unions and other preferential agreements that allow select countries to trade more freely with one another than they would on WTO terms (provided they do not erect new discriminatory trade barriers against outsider states). The Generalised System of Preferences, a set of tariff reliefs offered by the rich world to developing countries, was a partial and ambivalent victory for the Third Worldist campaign for a New International Economic Order, launched at the UN Conferences for Trade and Development in the 1970s.

For a long time, trade experts have worried that carve-outs could undermine the foundational principle of non-discrimination. In 2008, Jaghdish Bhagwati described that decade’s rush of preferential trade and investment treaties as ‘termites in the trading system’. They exploited poorer countries and hollowed out non-discrimination by enabling states to conduct bilateral side-deals that bypassed stalled WTO negotiations, leaving outsiders to trade at a disadvantage. In the 2010s, the US flirted with preferential trade deals to contain China’s growing weight in foreign investment and export markets. During the first Trump term, and under Biden, it largely gave up on such efforts. Priorities switched from geo-economic bargains with allied states to direct trade conflict with China. At the same time, the US hobbled the WTO’s dispute resolution mechanism by blocking appointments to its Appellate Body, supposedly as a prelude to reform.

Last Wednesday, 2 April, Donald Trump’s ‘liberation day’, nonetheless marked a new departure. There’s not even a pretence at playing by the rules anymore. This was a carnival of trade discrimination: open, delirious, triumphant. The husk of the WTO system, chewed up for decades by termites of all shapes and sizes, has been whacked with a large hammer. It is unlikely to be replaced by an orderly transition to geopolitically aligned trading blocs. Some of the United States’ closest allies are now being hit with the biggest tariffs.

More striking still is the gratuitous punishment meted out to some extremely fragile economies, not least in South and South-East Asia: 49 per cent for Cambodia, 39 per cent for Bangladesh, 44 per cent for Myanmar days after it was hit by its biggest earthquake in a century. Not all the targeted countries have significant exports to the US, but the open disregard for the old verities of ‘trade and development’ still matters. Those that have cultivated a dependence on the US market – such as Vietnam (46 per cent) – are unlikely to profit, at least in the short term, from their sudden and unexpected ‘liberation’ from established, export-oriented growth models.

Economists looking to understand the likely impact of the latest round of Trump tariffs have done what economists tend to do: reached for the averages. Take the tariff rates for all the different countries, weight the average by how much the US imports from those countries, reach a percentage and plot it on a graph to show the historical trend line. The result of this procedure – that the average trade-weighted US tariff rate is set to return to where it was around 1909 – makes for an arresting statistic. But it’s also a strangely comforting one, suggesting that we’ve been here before.

Yet tariffs looked nothing like this in 1909 – not in the US, not anywhere. They were organised primarily according to the goods they were levied on, not the states they were directed against. They were also largely set by legislatures, not executives. In 1909, even the most aggressively protectionist states – like the US – had single, national tariffs, hedged around with surcharges on rivals and discounts for clients. States such as France and Spain developed elaborate mechanisms to allow them to negotiate trade deals without compromising their prized ‘tariff autonomy’: the ability to set rates nationally, independently of what any other country was doing.

National tariffs involved very, very long tables of commodities and the taxes levied on them: sometimes by percentage, sometimes with specific sums of money per a given corn bushel, beer barrel or iron rod. They were periodically revised in set-piece legislative debates, accompanied by acres of highly informed press coverage, furious debates among economists, and blue-ribbon commissions of officials and businessmen.

Nineteenth-century economic nationalism, in the US as in the French Third Republic, embodied a kind of democratic ideal. It proclaimed the ability of farmers, manufacturers and sections of organised labour – often from the provinces – to lobby for, and receive, the wages of political representation. Representation, in turn, functioned as an information-gathering system for the state. Industries argued for the level of protection they thought they needed, based on their knowledge of market conditions; politicians tried to give it to them.

Trade wars were frequent, but they looked more like they did under the first Trump administration: targeted at specific goods and specific countries, often as overtures to market-opening negotiations. Executives, first in Switzerland, Germany and France, then (by 1909) in the US, were granted limited powers by legislatures to levy retaliatory duties against foreign powers that they held to be guilty of trade discrimination. They could also negotiate – with somewhat more legislative input – preferential deals. National tariffs, however, were the baseline against which both trade wars and trade deals could be evaluated.

With Trump, there’s no baseline. The US has declared a universal trade war. Not by means of a new and more protective national tariff created through intricate legislative deliberation, but by a sweeping presidential assertion of economic emergency. Everybody is discriminating against the United States, Trump says, and always has been. The president’s power to respond is, consequently, unlimited. Nineteenth-century tariff levels are being implemented with the beefed-up trade powers of the 21st century’s imperial presidency. The US effectively doesn’t have a single national tariff anymore; it has something closer to 180 – one for nearly every jurisdiction in the world (including 10 per cent slapped on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, an Antarctic territory inhabited only by penguins and seals).

Except for a few gestures to steel and car production (members of the United Auto Workers were in attendance), Trump’s Rose Garden announcement made few references to specific industries that he thought that his measures would assist or create in the US. This isn’t surprising: the tariffs weren’t informed by any new research into the actual condition of US industrial sectors and the level of protection needed to revive or expand them. Trump claimed that what mattered in setting the ‘reciprocal’ tariff rate was instead the relationship between the US trade balance with a given state, and a mysterious calculation of the total extent of ‘tariffs … currency manipulation and trade barriers’ that a given nation had ‘charged to the USA’.

Online analysts quickly came up with a more likely story. The tariffs are what you get when you take the United States’ goods trade deficit with a given country, divide it by the total value of goods imported from the country, and cut the resulting figure in half. Screenshots circulating on X and Bluesky implied that the method was probably suggested to Trump’s team by ChatGPT or another large language model, which dutifully spat it out when prompted to come quickly up with a simple method for calculating reciprocal tariffs.

What sort of worldview does this calculating method suggest? Production and consumption are no longer perceived as a complex system of multilateral flows and global value chains, financed and organised by private actors (many of them American). Products are instead reduced, as crudely as possible, to a single country of origin. Relations of interdependence are redescribed as relations of domination. The US trade deficit is no longer evidence of the country’s ability to buy more from the world than it returns to it – a sign that it might, in the round, be profiting from the existing order of things. Instead, this administration sees the trade deficit as tribute paid to savvier, ‘tougher’ powers, who have colluded with a treacherous political class to reduce the nation to a condition of craven dependence.

From this perspective, any trade deficit with any country at all – no matter how poor or how small – is evidence of the ‘rape’ and ‘pillage’ being visited on the United States of Trump: the infinitely powerful, infinitely vulnerable father-hegemon, locked in a permanent trade war of all against one. ‘They do it to us, we do it to them,’ Trump says: or, to put it differently, what the US does is now determined by what others do. Trumpian protectionism doesn’t follow its 19th-century antecedents in building up tariff walls that define and cultivate an autonomous, self-asserting economic nation. It lashes out in all directions, dissolving its own coherence in a fruitless quest for recognition and obeisance. Threats and deals, deals and threats, with all the world – for ever. It’s like nothing anybody’s ever seen before.

(London Review of Books)

FAREWELL, FUGAZY!

by James Kunstler

That ruckus you hear in the capital markets is the sickening howl of the Fugazy Economy meeting its extinction. Fugazy means fake, unreal, dishonest, misaligned to what societies need to thrive. Fugazy means mis-using the time-value of things that purport to be wealth to multiply fake wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the many. The pernicious effects of that system are visible all across the ruined landscape of our country, a nation of broken cities, failed towns, and a demoralized populace.

Mr. Trump apparently aims to convert the expiring Fugazy economy into a production economy — yikes! — based on making things of value, and perhaps more importantly, of people at all social levels having meaningful roles in the making and moving of things. The Trump tariffs are the first big step in a process that is already generating a whole lot of friction, heat, and ferment. The aim of the tariffs is straightforward: the end of a trade regime that punishes and cripples American production.

The response so far is heartening. Many other countries suddenly seek new trade arrangements with the USA, correctly sensing that Mr. Trump means bidness. (This ain’t no Mud Club. . . this ain’t no foolin’ around. . . .) It’s even possible that these readjustments will happen so swiftly that the tariff differentials will be a wash before summer, and everybody will be, at least, on a firm footing, knowing what the clear new rules say. This new disposition of things required forceful incentives to change entrenched, harmful practices.

Another angle on this process is the dynamic known as import-replacement. It means exactly what it sounds like: where you used to get stuff from other lands, you now make it here. It should be obvious that this can’t be accomplished overnight. But the question is: okay, when are you going to start? Part of the answer is: we can’t afford to put it off any longer. There’s an awful lot of stuff, from machine tools to pharmaceuticals to military equipment that we had better start making again — or else slide into collapse, perhaps even slavery to other powers.

That process starts with deploying real capital — as opposed to Fugazy capital — to re-start businesses and industries. That will take money away from hedge funds and other rackets that exist to play games with evermore abstract layers of things that only pretend to represent money. As that occurs, a lot of pretend money will vanish. Don’t be too shocked by this. That’s what happens when a society bends back toward reality: you start sorting out the real money from the fake money. That’s why the price of gold keeps marching up.

I sense that Mr. Trump and his colleagues knew full-well that the tariff play would rattle the markets badly, that these “corrections” are an unavoidable consequence, and are better gotten-over as quickly as possible. What else would you expect in a system that has dedicated itself for decades to mis-pricing the value of just about everything? The snap-back is sure to be harsh.

The psychopathocracy that drives the Global Left lost more traction last week in its quest to keep all of its old rackets running. Their foot-soldiers in the USA have been defunded effectively by Mr. Musk’s DOGE, starting with the immense network of rackets that were run around the USAID program. The Woke NGOs are no more and the fat paychecks are no longer going out to the nose-ring-for-lunch-bunch who came to infest the DC Beltway — and their satellite offices in Democratic Party controlled cities. Hence, the feeble turn-outs in last weekend’s street actions.

The Baby Boomers have gone especially psychotic. That’s why there are so many old folks waving those Soros-made placards in the astroturfed crowds of the “Hands-off” protests. After an eighty-year run of the most mind-blowing comfort and convenience enjoyed by any generation in world history, America’s Boomers stare into the abyss of their fading Fugazy fortunes as their stock portfolios tank. Kind of too bad. Maybe you shouldn’t have gone along for the ride. Maybe you should have cared for your country a bit more.

Here’s your poster-boy for that: the retarded slob rock-and-roller Neil Young, performing in support of the US Intel blob, the Covid-19 vaccine campaign, the degenerate Democratic party, Senator Adam Schiff, and BlackRock. Neil Young’s estimated net worth is about $200-million. He could lose ninety percent of that and still live a life of luxury. In 2022, he inveighed against Covid vaccine “misinformation” and promoted the shots. Guess, what? You were dead wrong about that, Neil, and now a lot of people are dead and dying because of those vaccines. He has many compadres in showbiz who took the same position against reality.

The time is not far-off when they will be revealed as disgraceful tools — Public vaxx champions such as Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Oprah Winfrey, Howard Stern, Ryan Reynolds, Lady Gaga. . . the list is long and discouraging. Meanwhile, they’re all out there rallying the Woke troops against the Golden Golem of Greatness as the Left’s leaky lifeboat goes down, gurgle, gurgle. In the process, they’ve destroyed Hollywood, rock and roll, and comedy. The country will recover from that, too. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to laugh at them in the years to come as the obituaries roll in.

Meanwhile, brace and rejoice! Great changes are set in motion. Roll with the turbulence. You’ll come out the other end, stronger, wiser, steadier, perhaps even happier. And, mark ye, the silence emanating from the DOJ and the FBI these budding spring days. The New York Times is nervous as all git-out.

DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH: THE ECONOMY

by Matt Taibbi

In good times, companies lie about their stability, and analysts lie about markets. In a crisis, the press doesn't know what it's talking about. Where to find your own data

Nearly two decades ago, when charged to cover an apparent Depression-level event in the 2008 crash, I was stunned to discover how few resources were available to ordinary people hoping to make sense of the economy. The financial press was written by and for financial professionals, and every time I thought I’d found an analyst who made sense, I’d discover shortly after he or she was funded by banks or hedge funds incentivized to put lipsticks on pigs.

It also turned out that most of the statistics politicians used to represent the relative fitness or unfitness of the economy were and are weighted at best, and outright bull at worst, from the Consumer Price Index to the Unemployment Rate. Even LIBOR, the interbank lending rate that supposedly represented how finance companies thought about the economy, turned out to be a monstrous scam. The habit of tweaking stats became so ingrained, even Nobel laureates like Paul Krugman could unashamedly declare “the war on inflation is over” and “we won, at very little cost” using a graph that charted price growth excluding “food, energy, shelter, and used cars,” i.e. everything:

We’re again in panic mode, with front page charts full of down-pointing arrows, and the word “plummets” suddenly a ubiquitous headline term. However you feel about the new “reciprocal tariffs” program, we’re again entering a time in which most news consumers will need to know where to search for de-politicized answers to economic questions. I polled finance professionals, contributors like Eric Salzman, and reporters who cover economics to ask which sources are most accessible. Then I spoke at length with fellow Substacker Chris Irons of Quoth the Raven about the broader problems with finding reliable economic info, and some sites that short-cut the obstacles.

One quick note up front. Many respondents pointed out that a neophyte beginning a journey into sorting out what’s what in the economy may want to begin by familiarizing himself or herself with each of the twelve Federal Reserve banks. “They all pretty much report on different things,” says Salzman. “If you want to know what’s going on in the oil and gas business, the Dallas Fed issues a lot of research.” Irons pointed to FRED, or Federal Reserve Economic Data, put out by the St. Louis Fed. “It’s all there,” he says, noting for instance the multiple official unemployment rates that are often cherry-picked by financial media depending on the situation. “It’s just not what’s in the news.”

Data about Wall Street is found throughout the Fed system, but the New York and Boston Feds put out some of the most interesting numbers and surveys on financial markets. The Atlanta Fed prides itself on forecasting numbers like GDP growth, San Francisco is good for labor markets and Pacific Rim issues, and so on. You can find each bank’s site here, and all of them will have a notation reading “research” or “what we study” at the top.

A key thing to understand about economic searches is that governmental agencies (and quasi-governmental agencies, like the Fed) generally have a fair portion of the raw, unmanipulated data you’re looking for, both for macroeconomics and individual companies. The problem is learning to interpret the numbers, and finding convenient ways to locate everything you need in one place. If you’re following economic developments through the courts, costs can be a limiting factor, but as Matt Stoller points out, sites like CourtListener.Com can give you free updates about developments in antitrust cases or other lawsuits.

“If you want to understand important corporate economics,” Stoller says, “the place you understand them is when they’re fighting with each other.”

It’s a big topic, and future entries will probably feature separate articles for independent investors and people simply interested in learning what kind of shape the global or national economy is in from places other than newspapers proven to be unreliable. I asked Irons, whose “The Inevitable, Just Sooner” piece about Donald Trump’s tariff war expresses a lot of my own beliefs about the subject, how and where he goes to evaluate companies and the economy in general:

MT: Putting off macroeconomics for a moment, where do you start when you’re looking at a company?

Chris Irons: Well, the nice thing about Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reporting is that if you strip away all of the financial media, the sell-side analyst reports, and what everybody is saying about a given company, at the end of the day, everybody’s beholden to the same disclosure requirements. So there is always a way to make an apples-to-apples comparison of companies.

One company may be earning $20 million a year and be very pissed off about it, and Goldman Sachs might hate ‘em, and another company may be making $20 million a year, and it might be the hottest thing ever, all over CNBC, because they’re in AI or whatever. At the end of the day, if you’re just looking at each company’s 10-Ks.

MT: The annual reports required by the SEC.

Chris Irons: Right. So you’re looking at $20 million on either one, and then it’s up to you to determine where that sits within the industry that the company’s in. So one thing you can do is compare companies to their peers, obviously, which is what everybody on Wall Street does, and then kind of work your way out to the overall sector in general: “Okay, is this an auto stock? How is the whole industry doing?” Then work your way out even a little bit more to the macroeconomy.

MT: All of this is searchable at SEC.gov, right?

Chris Irons: Yes. You can go in there, there’s a search filings page, and just enter any company, if you want to use the official sites.

MT: There’s a nice clip-art picture of “you” frowning a little as you tackle the page:

MT: Anyway, there are all sorts of mandated disclosures in these documents. What are some of the most important?

Chris Irons: Literally reading a 10-K from start to finish is the best way to learn about a firm, especially if it’s just fresh off the press and you’re not two months into a new quarter. But when a 10-K or even a 10-Q [eds. note: the quarterly version] drops, that is really the best way to familiarize yourself with the basics of a company. They all start with, “What does the business do? What’s the name of the business? What’s the address? Where are they headquartered? Here’s the business that we’re in. Here’s the industry that we’re in, and here’s what the segments of our company are, so here’s where revenue is coming in.” So we may be Disney and we may have theme park revenue, video content, revenue, licensing revenue.

MT: They’re telling a story about how they make money.

Chris Irons: Right. How they make money, and if they don’t make money, how they expect to make money.

Now, the best way to cheat if you don’t even want to look at the financials, say you don’t know anything about accounting, is every company has a risk factor section. The rule of thumb with risk factors is you always put the most materially important risk at the top.

So if you have a “key man” risk where one guy knows the secret sauce and if he dies, you’re completely fucked, that’ll be up top. Or if it’s that you’re losing money as a cash burning biotech company that’s trying to push one drug through phase three, the first thing that they’re going to say is, our ability to operate is contingent upon our ability to raise capital. And that business could fail or be adversely affected if the phase three drug doesn’t go through or it doesn’t meet its primary endpoints. So the risk factors are often kind of overlooked as boilerplate, but they’re there for a reason.

I’ve been in the room with securities lawyers and executives as they write them, they’re worded purposefully and they’re written with great care because in essence, that is a way for the company to disclaim itself from future risk that an investor may say, “I didn’t see this coming.” So they do want to be forthcoming.

The problem is that nobody reads the 10-K. Everybody glances over it and they just say, okay, well this is just boilerplate lawyer bullshit. Well, it’s actually not. It’s actually the worst case scenarios that you can find. So that’s a great spot in an annual report to look at that. Most companies don’t look at that. If you turn on CNBC or you read a sell-side analyst report, they’re not going to go into depth about the risk factors.

MT: It’s one of the few places in America where people are required to be at least somewhat painfully honest in advance.

Chris Irons: Yeah. And some sites actually make it even a little bit easier. There’s a site that I really like that I’ve used for the last 10 years. It’s called BamSEC.

MT: Okay. Never heard of that. And it’s going to give you access to the same filings.

Chris Irons: It just organizes them a little bit. The SEC site is a bit convoluted, it’ll kind of give you a list of everything. In BAM SEC, you put the ticker in and immediately in one section of the screen you have your 10-Ks and your 10-Qs. Mostly they’re material events that occur to the business in between the periods of 10-Q. So if you just filed your quarterly and two weeks later your CEO resigns, that goes out in an 8-K, for foreign filers.

Then one section has insider buys and sells, which will be on Form-4s and Form-3s. Form-3s are your initial statement of beneficial ownership and Form-4s are when insiders transact in the stock. I think they’ll put the 13-G and D filings in there too, which is when you have outside investors come in and acquire a big enough stake in the company, where they have to disclose, “Hey, I’m a 5% owner.” This is actually what the SEC is going after Musk for right now.

They’re saying he didn’t file that when he needed to on Twitter. And then there’s another section of the page where you have the proxy statements and some other stuff. You’ll get a lot of the same information that you get in the annual reports, but you’re also going to get a lot of detail about the board of directors, the biographies of the people that are on the board of directors, the different committees within the board of directors.

So BAM SEC just lays that shit out. Everything’s dated, so you know what the most recent filing is.

Chris Irons: There are a lot of really nice features on this site. You have correspondence. These are comment letters going back and forth to the SEC. So you can read those and see kind of what the SEC is asking them about.

MT: Cool.

Chris Irons: Yeah, ownership, which is your Form-4s, and again, your 13 Ds and Gs, and then prospectuses and registrations, which are documents related to selling stock to raise capital generally.

MT: Like securities or bonds or anything of that sort?

Chris Irons: Yeah, exactly. If they’re going to go out and sell convertible bonds or they’re going to sell stock, some administrative stuff, prospectuses - also, proxies will have an immense amount of information in them. A lot of the information will be repetitive, so you’ll see stuff that is in the 10-K, but say two months later, a company wants to go sell a million shares to raise 50 million, they have to once again disclose all that shit so that people that are participating in the purchase of the securities are aware of everything that was in the 10-K. So you’ll get a lot of redundant information. But for example, if you have a prospectus that was filed yesterday and the 10-K was filed two months ago, you may get more updated information in the prospectus.

MT: So the average person, if they pick up the newspaper, the information they get about whether we have a good economy or not is going to be unemployment rate, inflation, where the stock market is, and maybe something like the consumer price index. What other things should people be looking at?

Chris Irons: Well, I think people at first need to understand that those statistics in and of themselves are gamed.

For example, the CPI uses things like owner’s equivalent rent and hedonic adjustments where they game the numbers to be significantly lower than they are, which is why you kind of notice things going up 10% a year price-wise, while they’re telling you they’re only going up 3% a year.

There used to be a great site called the CHAPWOOD Index, which looks like they may have stopped in 2023, but the idea here is to kind of show you the true cost of living increases. And what they do is they take a basket of items similar to the way that CPI does it, but they include items that CPI strategically excludes and they don’t make adjustments. CPI makes an adjustment like this: if the price of TVs goes up year over year by 10%, but your TV can now stream video when it not used to not be able to do that, they will go in and discretionarily edit the true cost of what a TV costs because you’re theoretically getting more than what you would’ve gotten last year.

MT: Because it’s more awesome now!

Chris Irons: Yeah, exactly. Those are the kind of bullshit games that are in these numbers. There’s a cool little link on this site that just says problems with CPI. It’s on the CHAPWOOD index site, and it just says the government’s been artificially deflating CPI to keep figures as low as possible.

And that’s because things like social security are all earmarked to the rate of inflation. So people would be shitting a brick if they knew inflation was 10% and the government’s cost of living increase for social services was trying to meet this 3% CPI number. And it’s the same with unemployment. There are huge differences in the way unemployment numbers used to be reported, versus now.

Unemployment used to just mean people who were out of work. Now the unemployment numbers are excluding the people who are actively looking for a job. They do shit like this. Peter Schiff has a great series on problems with the unemployment number. I’m going to see if I can find it. The U-6 rate is what? Prior to 1994, the U-6 rate was the official rate, and that’s what you should get in there because they don’t use the U-6 rate, they use a different rate now, the U-3 rate.

MT: So they went from a higher calculation to a lower one in 1994?

Chris Irons: Yes. It’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is how they fucking release the numbers. U-1 is people unemployed 15 weeks or longer as a percent of the civilian labor force. U-2 is job losers and people who completed temporary jobs. U-3, total unemployed as a percent of the civilian labor force, which is the official unemployment rate. And U-6, which is total unemployed plus all people marginally attached to the labor force plus total employed part-time for economic reasons as a percent of the civilian labor force, plus all people marginally attached to labor force.

So just cast the net a little bit wider, and it used to be the employment number that they use. Now they use the U-3 rate, which is a smaller pot of people. So they’re data-mining essentially.

MT: Gotcha. What other data might be of interest to an ordinary person? The Fed obviously puts out all kinds of papers.

Chris Irons: The size of their balance sheet. I find it fascinating.

The size of the Federal Reserve balance sheet, now down to almost $6 trillion. Since 2008, the Fed has been propping up the economy with its purchases.

When they started quantitative easing, the idea was they were going to buy some bonds and then they were going to sell ‘em back into the market. And that never happened. They just started buying bonds and now the Fed balance sheet is whatever, seven or 8 trillion, and at some point something’s going to give because they have 7 trillion worth of - I don’t know if they’re subprime assets - but they’re assets that if they went to go find a market to buy them now wouldn’t be there.

Monetary policy, the way that we’ve run it really since the 2000s, is just kind of this big unprecedented experiment and nobody really knows how it’s going to end. You have financial PhDs basically claiming that we’ve figured out the secret sauce, that we can twist and distort and micromanage the economy to get it to do whatever we want at any point that we want, and that this is the path to utopia. And then you have the free market people that say maybe it’s working now, but every day you fiddle around with this bullshit more, the worse it’s going to be when the reckoning comes. I actually just wrote an article about this last week that shows that one of the negative consequences of monetary policy now is this widening inequality gap. So if you go to my substack and you look at the dark secret behind Democrats’ economic policy, which should be the pinned number one, and just scroll down to the chart that says net personal wealth.

MT: Okay.

Chris Irons: So both parties are guilty of this, but I’m writing specifically about Democrats because they’re the party that sells equity and equality and not just equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome. This is the result of the monetary policy that this country has, which is not that the gap between the top 10% and the bottom 90% is widening, but it’s accelerated. And so it’s not just all of this wealth that they’re accruing, because with wealth comes power and influence. It’s within this very same system that Ben Bernanke once said we can print money at no cost, meaning it doesn’t cost anything to run the fucking printer. It costs 2 cents of electricity, but the long and short of it is there’s real cost and this is what the real cost looks like.

Looks like the fucking ultra rich that these dildos are railing against on a daily basis getting exponentially richer and at the same time bringing with them a quality of life by virtue of osmosis. Because as this is occurring, inflation is worsening. And so these people in the top 10%, they don’t feel anything. The people in the bottom 90% are being brutalized, brutalized because the people on a shoestring budget are going to the store. And when they used to get 16 ounces of Fruity Pebbles for $4, now it’s $8 and they only get 10 ounces.

That is a fucking big deal for some people. You know what I mean?

MT: Sure.

Chris Irons: That multiplied across all discretionary spending and especially consumer staples is where it hits these people. And so it’s no surprise to me that Nancy Pelosi thinks that the economy’s working fine or that any of these rich fucks throw a dart. They all think everything’s working. But that is this chart. If everybody understood what was in this chart, people would be raising a lot of serious fucking questions about monetary policy because this takes everything the Democrats talk about and all the virtue signaling bullshit about equity and bringing people together and we’re all going to sing Kumbaya and everybody gets a chance - and refutes it directly. And this happened under both parties.

MT: Alright, are there other sites like that that you can think of that might not be known to the average person?

Chris Irons: Another great site that I really like is called currentmarketvaluation.com.

MT: Sounds self-explanatory.

Chris Irons: It’s super easy. If you look at something like a price-to-earnings ratio, that’s essentially the most commonly used way to determine whether stocks are expensive or cheap. You have to compare them to something, whether that’s the historical average or the industry or whatever. But this gives you that in a couple of different ways to value to market. This makes things super simple because it’s telling you right up top that things are strongly overvalued. What it’s showing you there is how many sigma deviations it is away from the historical trend line. The Buffet indicator is market cap to GDP, which is what Warren Buffet has said in the past. It’s his favorite indicator, which is hilarious because three or four weeks ago, there was a big mystery, like, oh, why is Warren Buffet in all this cash? Why does Berkshire Hathaway have all this cash? It’s like the fucking indicator is called the Buffett indicator, and it’s two sigma deviations above the trend line. So his favorite indicator is screaming that the market is overvalued, and then you have your price-to-earnings model. You don’t even have to look at the rest. Those are two great ways to value the market. Market cap to GDP is perfect for the overall market. Price-to-earnings can be used for companies as well, and what I think is really important is that people see a stock go from 200 to a hundred. So they think it’s cheap because it’s 50% less than it was. Price means almost nothing. I mean, it’s a function of a company’s valuation, but when you’re trying to determine whether or not a company is cheap or it’s expensive, what you should be looking at is the multiple.

And the multiple is how many times the current or next year’s earnings does the market trade at. Now when we’ve been in very deep recessions, that number’s gone as low as, I think, somewhere eight to 12 times earnings for the S&P. It may have even gotten lower than that before when a market traditionally is fair to a little bit more aggressively valued. You’re talking 12 to 20, 12 to 22. And we’re talking about basic stocks here. Certain industries have different PEs. Companies that grow a lot will have higher PEs. But this is all just very broad generalization. When you look at the market now and you see that the S&P, which is a collection of all different industries, is trading above 30 times earnings, to me that says that the stock market is overvalued.

MT: Severely, right?

Chris Irons: Yes. Because in essence, when you buy a stock at a multiple, what you’re doing is you’re betting if a company trades 10 times earnings and it earns $2 a share this year, it’d be trading at $20 a share, take your full year EPS, and you divide that into the share price and that’s your price-to-earnings multiple, give or take some other bullshit. That’s not really important. That number, what you’re doing is you’re buying 10 years of forward earnings under the assumption that the company is going to either be enough or last long enough that it’s going to pay you more than 10 years worth of earnings because you’re paying upfront 10 years worth of earnings. The market’s a forward looking indicator.

So when you’re buying the S&P today, you’re buying 35 years of what the S&P is set to earn this year or next year. Now, because of inflation and because of earnings growth, that number usually does move higher. But if you get into a situation where, and that’s in general X-ing out individual company performance, but if you get into a situation where earnings start to stagnate or decline, that 35 multiple can become a 40 multiple or can become a 45 multiple, and you don’t have a lot of leeway there. Now you’ve paid for 45 years worth of earnings that at least now in the short to midterm may not be coming to fruition. You may have to wait significantly longer than you thought. So that’s why you always hear companies talk about price-to-earnings multiples. Tesla’s a stock that everybody talks about, right?

The debate on Tesla, which trades right now at something over a hundred times earnings, which is extreme, that’s very aggressive even for a technology company. Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, they’re between 30 and 45 times earnings because they’re expected to grow significantly. They’re branching out into other businesses. Tesla is trading at over a hundred times earnings. And the debate is whether or not the new shit that they’re going to bring to market, things that they claim that they’re working on, Robotaxis and the Optimist Robot and the AI and whatever other shit they say they’re working on, whether that is going to fill in the gap of these significantly aggressive expectations that the market is pricing into the stock now, because traditional automakers, people that are skeptics, say if you look at Ford, if you look at General Motors, if you look at Volkswagen, if you look at Stellantis and you go overseas, look at Renault, these companies are trading between five and 15 times earnings.

So somebody’s wrong: either the people that think it’s a car company are wrong because they have this aggressive new technology that’s going to earn them so much more money in the future. Or the people that are paying a hundred times earnings now are wrong because at its core, it’s really a car company and it’s aggressively overvalued. And so the question is, especially with all the volatility from Tesla, whether their legacy auto business, which generates their revenue and cash flow, will begin to decline. If that happens, that 100 becomes 150 times earnings very quickly. And so that’s a good example of how you could see people arguing over multiples, because I’ve seen people this week say, oh, it came from 400 to 200, so it’s cheap.

Well, if you believe it should be valued like a traditional automaker, it isn’t cheap. It’s 10 times more expensive than it should be. But if you believe it’s going to be the first company of its kind to have taxis all over the nation and it’s barely tapping into a hundred trillion dollars industry, well then it’s incredibly undervalued. So the multiple tells you how aggressive the market is being on a particular company or on the stock based on their forward-looking expectations.

MT: So everybody’s being too bullish.

[Ed note: this interview was conducted before the recent price drops]

Chris Irons: If you ask my opinion, I would say that’s a gross understatement. I would say that we are in a period of insane euphoria driven by a significant amount of liquidity that was put into the market during Covid. I mean, the speculation that’s out there is not like anything I’ve ever seen. You have entire industries, something like Fartcoin had billions in market cap at one time. What does that mean? That means there’s billions floating around out there in this asset that for all intents and purposes, everybody knows is a joke. It’s worth nothing. It serves no purpose. It’s not a product, it’s not a service. That’s how aggressive people are being. So in a recessionary environment or an environment where the market starts to cascade lower, all of that, what they call malinvestment dog shit, all of that has to come in. All of that money has to evaporate. All of that speculation has to evaporate.

So if you look historically where the market’s multiple is now, if you look at the Schiller PE, which is just a way to adjust the PE for growth, look at something like the Schiller PE of the overall market. There’s only been one time in history where it’s as high as it is now. And that was right before the 2000 bubble. So that’s the level of aggressive valuation we’re at right now. We’re at about year 2000 bubble aggressiveness.

MT: Back in a new paradigm.

Chris Irons: Exactly. This time it’s different.

DIVING INTO THE WRECK

by Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

18 Comments

Bruce McEwen April 8, 2025

The Frogs Who Wished for a King

The Frogs were tired of governing themselves. They had so much freedom that it had spoiled them, and they did nothing but sit around croaking in a bored manner and wishing for a government that could entertain them with the pomp and display of royalty, and rule them in a way to make them know they were being ruled. No milk and water government for them, they declared. So they sent a petition to Jupiter asking for a king.
Jupiter saw what simple and foolish creatures they were, but to keep them quiet and make them think they had a king he threw down a huge log, which fell into the water with a great splash. The Frogs hid themselves among the reeds and grasses, thinking the new king to be some fearful giant. But they soon discovered how tame and peaceable King Log was. In a short time the younger Frogs were using him for a diving platform, while the older Frogs made him a meeting place, where they complained loudly to Jupiter about the government.
To teach the Frogs a lesson the ruler of the gods now sent a Crane to be king of Frogland. The Crane proved to be a very different sort of king from old King Log. He gobbled up the poor Frogs right and left and they soon saw what fools they had been. In mournful croaks they begged Jupiter to take away the cruel tyrant before they should all be destroyed.
“How now!” cried Jupiter “Are you not yet content? You have what you asked for and so you have only yourselves to blame for your misfortunes.”
Be sure you can better your condition before you seek to change.

Aesop

Reply
- Mike Jamieson April 8, 2025
  
  I have confirmed the identities of two of the loudest croakers: Elon Musk and Bill Ackman.
  
  Reply
- Call It As I See It April 8, 2025
  
  I think Ol’ Bruce is hitting the bottle early today!
  
  Reply
  - Mike Jamieson April 8, 2025
    
    https://read.gov/aesop/048.html
    Bruce didn’t write that. Aesop did.
    
    Reply
    - Marco McClean April 8, 2025
      
      I’ve been playing with ChatGPT. I asked it to write an Aesop’s Fable about anonymous trolls. Here:
      
      The Tortoise and the Shadows
      
      A quiet Tortoise lived by a well-worn path in the forest. He spoke rarely, but when he did, it was with calm thought and careful words. The other animals respected him, for he never rushed and never quarreled.
      
      One day, as the Tortoise made his way along the path, hidden voices called out from the thickets.
      
      “Slow creature!”
      “Shell-backed idiot!”
      “Why not crawl back into your stone?”
      
      The voices had no faces, only echoes. Birds flew by pretending not to hear. A squirrel whispered, “Why don’t you shout back?”
      
      The Tortoise paused, then kept walking without a word.
      
      Each day, the voices returned—louder, crueler, and always unseen. But the Tortoise never replied. He walked his path, ate his leaves, and slept in peace.
      
      Eventually, the voices grew bored of silence. One by one, they faded, like wind dying in tall grass.
      
      A young fox, curious, asked, “Why didn’t you say anything, even once?”
      
      The Tortoise smiled gently.
      “When a shadow mocks you,” he said, “you gain nothing by chasing it.”
      
      Reply
      - Mike Jamieson April 9, 2025
        
        That’s pretty good.
        I’ve been using Grok lately. And. Got this (BTW, should I take them up on ending offer?):
        How expressive on social media are Trump supporters from Mendocino County California?
        
        25 web pages
        There’s no comprehensive, up-to-date study specifically analyzing the social media expressiveness of Trump supporters from Mendocino County, California, as of April 9, 2025. However, I can piece together some insights based on available data, local context, and broader trends to give you a reasonable picture.
        
        Mendocino County is a rural, coastal area in Northern California with a population of about 90,000. It leans heavily Democratic—around 66% voted for Biden in 2020, while Trump garnered roughly 25-30% of the vote, depending on the precinct. This suggests Trump supporters are a minority, which could influence how vocal they are online. In politically lopsided areas, minority groups sometimes either amplify their presence to counter the dominant narrative or keep a lower profile to avoid backlash.
        
        Looking at local social media activity, a Facebook group like “Make California Great Again, Inc. Latinos for Trump Mendocino County” has about 650 likes, indicating a modest but active presence. Posts from this group and similar ones often feature enthusiastic pro-Trump messaging—think flags, slogans like “Trump 2024,” and rally announcements. A November 2024 rally in Ukiah, for instance, drew about 100 supporters, with attendees like Mary Glanders and Linda Lima voicing strong support for Trump’s policies on free speech and patriotism. These sentiments likely spill onto platforms like Facebook or X, where supporters share photos, videos, and honk-worthy moments from such events.
        
        Broader research offers clues too. A 2024 Navigator Research survey found that new Trump voters nationwide relied heavily on social media as their main news source, with platforms like X and Facebook being key for swing voters. A 2022 study on the 2020 election noted Trump supporters on Twitter (now X) expressed “joy” and “confidence” more often than Biden supporters, who leaned toward “anger” and “disgust.” If Mendocino County’s Trump fans follow this pattern, their posts might be upbeat, bold, and unapologetic—think “Whoop!” from the Mendocino County Republicans after Trump’s 2024 win.
        
        That said, the county’s progressive bent might temper their volume. With 25,483 registered Democrats versus 12,577 Republicans (and 22,688 unaffiliated), Trump supporters could face pushback, like the “Hands Off!” protests in April 2025 that drew thousands against Trump’s policies. This could make some hesitant to post publicly, though others might double down, as seen with the “Fuck your feelings” flags at the Ukiah rally.
        
        Without direct access to real-time X posts or a deep dive into local accounts (which I could analyze if you provided specific examples), I’d estimate Mendocino County Trump supporters are moderately expressive—active in supportive niches like private groups or on X, where anonymity helps, but not dominant county-wide. Their style? Likely loud, proud, and image-heavy when they do speak up, mirroring national trends of Trump loyalty online. What do you think—want me to dig into specific profiles or posts if you’ve got some in mind?
        
        Reply
        
        Mike Jamieson April 9, 2025
        
        And, I take them up on their offer and get a positive take on CIAISI and the AVA:
        Discuss the presentation of anonymous commentator “Call It As I See It” at the Anderson Valley Advertiser
        
        5 web pages
        
        The anonymous commentator “Call It As I See It” is a recurring presence in the Anderson Valley Advertiser (AVA), a weekly publication known for its eclectic mix of local news, cultural commentary, and unfiltered opinions from Mendocino County and beyond. While there isn’t a singular “presentation” event tied to this commentator in the traditional sense—like a formal lecture or public appearance—their contributions are regularly featured in the AVA’s online content, particularly in the “Mendocino County Today” section. This section serves as a daily digest of news, observations, and reader comments, where “Call It As I See It” offers sharp, often provocative takes on current events, local happenings, and broader societal issues.
        The style of “Call It As I See It” is consistent with the AVA’s ethos: raw, direct, and unabashedly opinionated. The commentator’s anonymity aligns with the paper’s tradition of fostering unvarnished discourse, where pseudonyms allow contributors to speak freely without personal repercussions. Their posts typically appear as responses to daily articles or as standalone remarks, blending wit, skepticism, and a no-nonsense tone. For example, on April 8, 2025, “Call It As I See It” is noted commenting on the dismissal of the Cubbison case—a local legal saga—demonstrating their engagement with county-specific controversies. This reflects a pattern of focusing on issues that resonate with AVA readers, from bureaucratic missteps to environmental debates, often with a critical eye toward authority.
        The “presentation” of their commentary isn’t staged or formal but emerges organically within the AVA’s digital pages. The lack of a verifiable identity adds intrigue, inviting readers to focus on the ideas rather than the individual. This anonymity also mirrors the paper’s historical embrace of outsider voices, a legacy shaped by editor Bruce Anderson’s editorial philosophy of “fanning the flames of discontent.” While “Call It As I See It” doesn’t dominate the AVA’s content, their frequent contributions—sometimes multiple in a single week—suggest a dedicated reader-contributor who uses the platform to challenge narratives and provoke thought.
        Without access to the full archive of their comments (beyond mentions like those on April 5 and 8, 2025), it’s hard to pin down a comprehensive profile. However, their presence exemplifies the AVA’s role as a space for unpolished, grassroots commentary—an antidote to sanitized mainstream media. Whether dissecting local politics or broader cultural trends, “Call It As I See It” embodies the AVA’s commitment to letting readers call it, well, as they see it.
        
        Reply
Chuck Dunbar April 8, 2025

Spring is Here

“Springtime near Boonville,” by Elaine Kalantarian, a perfect depiction. I drove down 128 through Boonville last week, get to do it again later this week. What a pleasure to just drive along and take it all in, mile by mile. What a Spring we’re having up here in our oh-so-pretty land. You captured the essence of it, Elaine. Thanks.

Reply
Bruce McEwen April 8, 2025

Rumor has it martial law goes into effect 4/20; stand by for official denial (read “confirmation”) and, meanwhile, back at the ranch, liquidate your bank account and conceal that new assault weapon you got on sale from Sportsman’s Warehouse with the free ammo delivery contract—it’s all a gimmick to panic the populace and get them to spring for the guns and ammo— then send the military police around to confiscate ‘em. My advice is to surrender your arms peaceably and accept the fact the deplorables now own the libtards, and like Epictetus, we should each endeavor to find a kindly master to apologize to slavishly and get up off our knees like a good slavey and go wash the dishes….

Reply
- Chuck Dunbar April 8, 2025
  
  I am sorry, but I cannot and will not “surrender my arms.” I am an old man and need them still to garden, to drive, to pet my cats, to do chores and wash the dishs, and to hug my wife and others. It is an unreasonable suggestion, one I won’t agree to. So there!
  
  Reply
  - Jimmy April 8, 2025
    
    I couldn’t have said it better. Thanks for the good chuckle!
    
    Reply
- Mike Jamieson April 8, 2025
  
  Snopes is claiming there’s a confused conflating of activating the Insurrection Act with declaring Martial Law. In any event, it’s wiser to engage in massive non violent actions of the type that Ghandi organized. Even though rebels successfully execute a Trump-like President in a recent Civil War movie, a more realistic and effective approach wouldn’t be to either bend a surrendering knee or resist violently but to be fully nonviolent. Otherwise we won’t outgrow a pathological cycle of escalating reactivity.
  
  Trump signed an EO on Jan 20th requiring the DOD to issue a report on whether he needs to activate the Insurrection Act to control the border.
  
  Reply
  - Paul Andersen April 8, 2025
    
    And that “report” is due on April 20, one day after the next large demonstration. I wouldn’t be surprised if agents provocateur tried to start riots as a pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act. Which sounds like martial law to me.: “to deploy military forces inside the United States to suppress rebellion or domestic violence or to enforce the law in certain situations.”
    
    https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/insurrection-act-explained
    
    Reply
    - Bruce Anderson April 8, 2025
      
      Yup. They’ll seize any pretext, and there will be plenty of provocations this summer. The Magas aren’t leaving.
      
      Reply
Craig Stehr April 8, 2025

The listed event celebrating the birthday of the monkey-god Hanuman, who led Rama’s army in the successful effort to free his wife Sita from the clutches of an evil king, is certainly worth attending in Mendocino. And if you’re on this side of the continent, Saturday April 12th from 10a.m. onward, finishing at the Washington monument, is the Cherry Blossom Festival Parade…
https://nationalcherryblossomfestival.org/event/national-cherry-blossom-festival-parade/
Am constantly performing appropriate mantras, and rituals, which are tailored to banish the demonic.
Making America great again!
Craig Louis Stehr
Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter
2210 Adams Place NE #1
Washington, D.C. 20018
Telephone: (202) 832-8317
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
April 8th, 2025 Anno Domini

Reply
Jim Armstrong April 8, 2025

Kunstler (how I’d hate to be him):
“Here’s your poster-boy for that: the retarded slob rock-and-roller Neil Young…”

Reply
Jimmy April 8, 2025

I just wanted to say, in light of today’s board meeting, I noticed that the Deputy CEOs kept asking the board for direction and the board kept pushing it back on to them to bring back a plan. WTF?!? The board members need to do their jobs and make as informed a decision as they can make. There’s no excuse for this B.S. ! These people just voted to give themselves a raise!

Where’s the cart and where is the mule in this situation??? It’ll be interesting to read what others have to say tomorrow in the AVA. There needs to be some dramatic turn around in this county.

I won’t say that everybody that works for the county is bad. I know a lot of people that work for the county and they do it because they love the community and they care about their friends, neighbors & relatives. They’re good people who are vital to our local services.

It’s the leadership that’s terrible here. Or should I say “Where is the leadership? It’s (true leadership) so terrible here!”

Reply
Harvey Reading April 9, 2025

HUFFMAN FIELDS QUESTIONS ABOUT WATER SUPPLY, DEMOCRACY at Ukiah Town Hall

The growthers want it all…and that includes diversions, dams, and “off river storage (like Sites),” all detrimental to fish. Whadda greedy, self-entitled bunch.

A READER WRITES:

Well said.

Reply

Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 4/8/2025

18 Comments

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