The Trump regime’s flagrant corruption and obvious irrationality beg the question, ‘Are there any rational actors in power today?’
Let’s start with that corruption, because this scam is too obvious to continue and yet it has worked for Trump over and over again.
Truth to Axios to Markets
I’d love to spare myself and my more with it readers the tedious details of today’s scammery since this is about the 10th time Trump has pulled off the same thing, but decades of blogging experience insist I recite the facts.
Also this crap keeps working on Mr Market.
Sometimes Trump kicks off the party with a Truth social post claiming that peace is breaking out and the spice is flowing again, but this time ever faithful Axios “reporter” Barak Ravid was ready, willing and able to kick off the festivities with “Exclusive: U.S. and Iran closing in on one-page memo to end war, officials say” (archived).
I’m not going to quote Ravid’s nonsense because it’s (or should be) self-refuting but I will illustrate the impact it had on the markets this morning:
BREAKING: According to our analysis, ~$920 million worth of crude oil shorts were taken 70 minutes before an Axios report claimed the US and Iran were near a “14-point” deal to end the war.
At 3:40 AM ET today, nearly 10,000 contracts worth of crude oil shorts were taken without… pic.twitter.com/SZafvnZHHG
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) May 6, 2026
Oil Price faithfully live blogged the whole thing, including the almost instant collapse of Axios’ “reporting” and this time did a look back at previous incidents (although not the apparent insider trading):
7:01 am ET: Oil prices moved hard on the news. Brent crude fell 10% to $98 a barrel Wednesday morning, while WTI dropped 12% to $89.
Five minutes later they were posting this quote from Trump’s Truth Social account backing up Ravid’s tale but also threatening MAOR WARZ and using the hilarious phrase “already legendary”:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) May 6, 2026
"Professor, don't you find it curious that a new US-Iran peace deal leaks almost every time the 10y UST yield breaks 4.4% on the upside?"
"Actually, if I think about it, I don't find it curious at all." pic.twitter.com/aMqLenpJp8
— Luke Gromen (@LukeGromen) May 6, 2026
Back to Oil Price’s Michael Kern who posted the following fourteen minutes later, implying he had it ready in advance, I’m compressing this to only detail a couple of the six times this scam has run, readers are encouraged to read the whole thing:
Iran Has ‘Almost’ Made a Deal With the U.S. Six Times.
When the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, Brent crude was trading around $72 a barrel. Within weeks it was approaching $120. Two months on, with the Strait of Hormuz still functionally closed and negotiations going nowhere fast, prices have swung wildly on every headline — and traders are running out of optimism to price in.
Here’s how it’s played out.
February 28: The War Starts
US and Israeli strikes kill Supreme Leader Khamenei and gut Iran’s military infrastructure. Iran shuts the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation. Brent surges 51% in March alone — one of the largest single-month price jumps on record. The IEA calls it “the biggest energy security threat in history.”
Early April: The First ‘Deal’
On April 1, Trump claims Iran asked for a ceasefire. Iran calls the claim “false and baseless.”
…
April 11-12: Islamabad Talks CollapseVance, Witkoff and Kushner fly to Islamabad.
…Mid-to-Late April: The Revolving Door
April 15: Trump says he wants the war to end “swiftly.”
April 17: Iran briefly allows commercial vessels through Hormuz during a Lebanon ceasefire, then reimposed restrictions when the US refuses to lift its port blockade.
April 19: Trump calls new Pakistan talks Iran’s “last chance” and threatens to target power plants and bridges.
…
May 1: Iran’s Proposal, Trump’s Rejection
…
May 5-6: Project Freedom, Then the Pause
…
Where Things StandThe pattern is clear by now: a headline drops suggesting a breakthrough, oil sells off hard, then the details fall apart and prices creep back up. Markets have done this loop half a dozen times since February. Whether the one-page memo currently being negotiated breaks that cycle, or becomes the next entry on the list, is the only question that matters right now.
Thirty minutes after that post Trump tells The New York Post “it’s ‘too soon’ to prep for Iran peace signing.”
The rug pull, it burns!
Watching Mr. Market fall for this over and over again is like being a child in a bar watching their parent bet the rent money on a three card monte game every month of their childhood.
If you’re one of the lucky ones, dad somehow keeps winning these seemingly stupid bets in the fixed casino:
BREAKING: Several whistleblowers say that Axios coordinated news with market insiders, leaking CME order information via phone calls up to 30 minutes before market open and close prints. Crude oil short positions were also taken just before today's Axios report on a "US-Iran…
— The Hormuz Letter (@HormuzLetter) May 6, 2026
Full text:
BREAKING: Several whistleblowers say that Axios coordinated news with market insiders, leaking CME order information via phone calls up to 30 minutes before market open and close prints. Crude oil short positions were also taken just before today’s Axios report on a “US-Iran deal” and “14-point deal,” gaining substantially as oil dropped sharply on the news.
Iranian political analyst Mohammad Marandi also says Trump, Witkoff, Kushner, and their close associates profited heavily in the past hours from fake news provided to Axios.
Enough blow by blow of the daily scam, let’s look at some of the deeper patterns.
Holy Pattern Recognition Batman, There’s a Case for Corruption!
Isaac Saul at Tangle made a respectable effort at documenting the evidence for a unified field theory of the physics and practice of Trumpian corruption last week.
Here are some highlights:
in April, The New York Times broke the story that President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law are negotiating a luxury hotel with Syrian billionaires who are simultaneously lobbying the president to lift economic sanctions on their country. I’ll write that sentence again just in case it didn’t land the first time: President Donald Trump’s children are negotiating a luxury hotel with Syrian billionaires who are simultaneously lobbying the president to lift economic sanctions on their country.
I can’t explain why that story doesn’t have quite the same punch as, “According to The New York Times, Hunter Biden is negotiating a Biden-branded luxury hotel with Syrian billionaires; those Syrian billionaires are also lobbying President Joe Biden to lift economic sanctions on their country.” Yet I know that, for some reason, the real story we’re living through right now — the one where Trump’s kids are funneling money directly to their family fortune while the U.S. government hands out favors in return — just doesn’t seem to get any traction with the public.
After linking to his extensive coverage of the various Hunter Biden scandals of the previous administration and emphasizing his disgust at same, Saul then makes the inevitable comparison between coverage of the Trumps and the Bidens:
I’m disheartened and frustrated now to see that right-wing writers, Trump voters, and Republican politicians who cheered me on when I was investigating potential Biden corruption are now just ignoring the comparably gargantuan scandals of (alleged) corruption we’re witnessing now.
…After reviewing the evidence of the first 15 months of President Trump’s second term, I believe the president is profiting off the office and making foreign policy decisions based on business interests to a level we’ve never seen or even conceived of before, and apparently nothing is being done to stop it.
I can’t level that claim directly and unambiguously because we haven’t really had the basic facts adjudicated, since Republicans in Congress have opted for complete and utter fealty to Trump in every manner imaginable. There is no oversight, or accountability, or even the slightest inclination to ask about these actions in the majority party. The Trump administration has also dismantled many of the federal watchdogs responsible for prosecuting fraud, grift and corruption, so few of its actions have been probed in any meaningful way.
Instead of indictments, congressional investigations, or public hearings, the best we are left with is great reporting from journalists, the occasional leak from the administration, a right-wing writer here or there willing to say the real thing out loud, and then a whole lot of “Occam’s razor” questions like, “Which is likelier, that the person who made a massive financial bet on oil prices 20 minutes before Trump announced a ceasefire knew about it or just got extraordinarily lucky?”
Saul goes on to detail the biggest scams and self-dealing capers run by the Trump family during his second regime and I highly encourage everyone to read the whole thing, take hand written notes on flash cards and pin them to a physical billboard with polaroids of the major suspects and connect key nodes with string.
Now, if I may whip out Occam’s razor myself, I think the magnitude of the self-dealing forces observers to conclude that Trump is primarily motivated in his official actions by a desire for immediate personal profit.
Therefore if his actions are furthering the kind of grand imperial plans so ably documented by Richard Medhurst and Brian Berletic, that implies that someone is manipulating Trump to take actions that not only serve his personal interests but also those of the empire writ large.
How The Fox News Neo Con Got Back in Trump’s Head
Semafor documents who’s doing it and how it happened:
Donald Trump has increasingly, improbably turned to a former Bush speechwriter best known for defending the least popular elements of Bush’s foreign policy, the Iraq War and CIA torture: The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen.
The rise of Thiessen, 59, reflects a broader shift in Trump’s orbit away from media figures like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, who celebrated his efforts to withdraw American forces from conflicts around the world, and toward advisers linked to the wars that defined the Bush years. Trump has infuriated some anti-interventionist allies by increasingly boosting prowar figures like Fox News radio host Mark Levin, whom he defended against criticism from other conservative media figures.
And Thiessen’s rise began well before this year’s attack on Iran (which Thiessen wholeheartedly backed). Last year, Trump invited him to have dinner with their respective wives at the White House. Thiessen has told people at the Post that after one phone call with Trump, the president complimented the attractiveness of Thiessen’s wife.
I’ve got to comment on that last sentence which illustrates another type of personal interest that motivates the 80-year-old Trump as repulsive as the thought may be to sensitive readers.
Also I need to remind readers that Thiessen is the same Washington Post columnist who called for the assassination of members of Iran’s negotiating team.
Waders on people, we’re muckraking here.
Back to Semafor, which points out a major oligarch whose personal interests are very much involved:
Having a writer on staff with the ear of the president has been seen as a strength for the Post’s revamped opinion page. Since owner Jeff Bezos laid out the opinion section’s new organizing principles last year, the paper has looked to redefine itself as a more centrist, pro-free-market outlet with an often friendlier view of the president.
But even now, some inside the paper have rolled their eyes at Thiessen columns they feel are pandering. Within the office, one Post insider said, some staff would groan that Thiessen’s columns were being written not for readers broadly, but for one reader in particular.
…it’s also revealing of another Trump trait: the disproportionate value he places on the legacy outlets that constitute much of his media diet.
People at NBC believe the network has benefited from the importance Trump places on its signature political program, Meet The Press. Trump’s obsession with 60 Minutes has been a liability for CBS’ parent company, but it is rooted in Trump’s belief that the show is a uniquely important media institution.
Thiessen, Levin, and Keane have been featured increasingly since the war began on Fox News, knowing that Trump is likely watching. The president has surely been pleased that a friendly new Post opinion page has written columns so regularly praising his foreign policy acumen…
I’m going to switch away from Trump here because the sordid personal motivations of two other conservative architects of our current horrible moment have surfaced.
Reactionary Prophet’s Pederasty Revealed
As readers should be aware, the majority of zionists are neither Jewish nor Israeli. Rather they are American protestants, primarily in the south.
The three-way alliance between evangelicals, the GOP, and Israel was sealed in the George W. Bush years and remains a driving influence over the party and the actions of its presidents.
Evangelical zionists are also Donald Trump’s most loyal voting block.
There’s a money-go-round involved, one example is illustrated by today’s piece from Drop Site News titled “Prominent Christian Zionist Group Is Lobbying U.S. Lawmakers on Israel—Without Revealing It’s Funded by Israel.”
But I want to zero in on one incredibly powerful Christian zionist and how his deeply personal motivations have exerted an unholy gravitational pull on one of the most powerful congregations of all: The Southern Baptist Convention.
Texas Monthly’s Robert Downen tells the whole sordid story, “He Remade the Southern Baptist Convention in His Image. Then Came the Abuse Allegations.” (archived).
Some lowlights:
Paul Pressler helped ordain the marriage between white evangelicals and the Republican Party, all while accusations of sexual abuse piled up. Right-wing groups are still using his political playbook.
Chronicle colleagues and I ultimately wrote more than one hundred stories detailing the SBC’s widespread sex-abuse problem, prompting international headlines, unprecedented demands for accountability, and a Department of Justice investigation. Lesser known, however, is the brutal power struggle that broke out as a result—an ongoing fight that has pitted a new generation of leaders against the SBC’s old guard, pushed out some of its most prominent figures, and killed momentum toward major reforms.
For the past eight years, I have been ensconced in Southern Baptist life, with an inside view of SBC leadership and a community of abuse survivors as they’ve dealt with fallout from the crisis. I’ve interviewed countless SBC members, attended their meetings, and reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of letters contained in Pressler’s archives. What follows is a story of one man’s rise, rule, and downfall, and of two prolonged battles for control of a massive faith group. It’s a story about power and what those who want it will do for it. More than anything, it is the story of what happens to those left in their wake.
The article chronicles the role of Pressler as a “a clearinghouse for the cause of biblical inerrancy” who worked relentlessly over decades to drive the SBC relentlessly to the right.
He was equally relentless as a sexual predator and the piece chronicles “four decades’ worth of sexual abuse and misconduct allegations against Pressler.”
Given that Downen has carved out a worthy journalistic career covering sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, Pressler obviously wasn’t a unique animal.
https://t.co/mSj7oAa3xo pic.twitter.com/uw8T5T1WZJ
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) May 6, 2026
Obviously, this sort of conduct isn’t unique to any religious organization, or any organization at all for that matter, but organized and protected sexual predation is certainly a mainstay of the Epstein class and a commonality that unites Southern evangelicals with their fellow zionists in New York and Tel Aviv.
The Cosmopolitan Criminal Cabal
And as Dr. Aaron Good has argued, predators like former GOP Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert seem to be preferred by the power structure that has made unquestioning support for zionism, its wars and its war crimes a mainstay of American political conduct.
In fact, Good has recently expanded his arguments to claim that America is essentially ruled by a “nazified” criminal cabal.
Dr. Aaron Good: It’s the depravity of the class and their predilection for sex with underage children is very disturbing and it’s hard to quite know where that fits into the symbolic order that they accept.
That’s probably the key here since we’re just spectators in a system that rests on kind of exploitation and social hierarchy and you have to sort of enure yourself to empathy and compassion for those whose suffering makes your status possible.
That’s the sort of grim part of civilization in in general is that it’s hierarchical and based on exploitation. But if you don’t have those things, you don’t have the other good things in civilization.
But it also creates a dark aspect of not accepting the full humanity or co-equality of everyone else in this system especially those who are below you on the hierarchy and the higher up you go and the more power that you have and the more powerful a system is the more and the more exploitative it is in general then the top is necessarily going to be that much more depraved, corrupted and debased…
As Nick Corbishley ably covered yesterday at NC, the geo-politics of the western hemisphere are deeply intertwined with criminality at the highest levels as well as zionism:
The latest revelations of the Hondurasgate scandal suggest that Argentina’s Milei is now conspiring with the recently pardoned Honduran narco-president Juan Orlando Hernández, whom the US and Israel apparently want to return to power, to spread propaganda online to “eliminate the left” in Latin America, targeting Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and the left-wing opposition in Honduras — all apparently paid for with US and Israeli funds
And while the governments of the left are implicated as well, at the moment it is the forces of the right who seem more likely to be getting high on their own supply as they say.
Let’s look at the tragic example of a certain weepy right-wing influencer and a former mainstay of “the intellectual dark web” that helped drive Trump to power in 2016.
Say It Ain’t So Dr. Jordan Peterson
The New York Post has the scoop on the drug-related downfall of a man who shaped the thinking of millions in the nascent manosphere.
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) May 6, 2026
Tammy Peterson says her husband, author and podcast superstar Dr. Jordan Peterson, is suffering a “neurological injury,” which has taken him out of the spotlight.
The clinical psychologist and young man whisperer stepped away from recording his popular YouTube show and podcast recently, prompting questions from fans.
His family told The Post he is primarily suffering from a “neurological injury,” from previously taking psychiatric medications.
Peterson had been taking the benzodiazepine Klonopin when his wife, Tammy, was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2019. Getting off the medication caused nightmarish withdrawal symptoms.
According to Tammy, Dr. Peterson developed tardive akathisia — a chronic movement disorder characterized by intense restlessness and a compulsive need to move, a known side effect of stopping dopamine antagonist medications.
“The damage done from psych medications from over six years ago takes patience, time and loving attention,” Tammy, 65, said.
My point is, just as it’s wise to have some awareness of the median intoxication levels of one’s fellow drivers on a crowded New Year’s Eve freeway at 2am, we should attempt to be cognizant of the sometimes sordid personal motivations, delusional but deeply held beliefs, and likely drug and alcohol intakes of those whose decisions drive the events that shape our collective destiny.
Related stories:
- Delusion, Deception and Dipshittery: Hasbara on the 8th Front
- Who’s Delusional, Who’s Drugged, Who’s Disinformed in Trump 2.0?
- Generational Political War in a Hypernormalized Context
- The Personal Is the Political for Publishers and Presidents Alike
- Fake Ceasefire, Cognitive Dissonance, & Conflicting Agendas
- Mad King Trump Gets the Strait Slammed in His Face
- Palantir’s Manifesto Drops and So Does Objection
- Fraying Nerves, Nonsense Negotiations, Psyops, and Ominous Notes
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anyone else have less than zero sympathy for Jordan Peterson? This is like the second time I’ve seen one of his family members publicly whine about his plight.
This part got me:
So he got addicted to pills because his wife had cancer? Way to man up, there…
It’s especially amusing to see him (via family members) making public pleas for sympathy. Like you preach this disingenuous politicized “personal responsibility” nonsense and used your platform to spread hate against transgender people, and climate change denialism, among other garbage like that, then want the public to feel bad for you b/c you got yourself hooked on pills? You actively helped trash the world we all have to live in, pal. GTFO, man!
Reminds me of that other loudmouth Rush Limbaugh: goes on and on about drug users should be jailed, gets hooked himself, then suddenly claims they’re just poor victims who need sympathy.
don’t forget Rush ratted out his housekeeper for hooking him up and she did jail time.
Rush has always been a crass act, ratting out his housekeeper is completely in character.
Didn’t he get caught with a bunch of Viagra where the scips wer in other people’s names?
IIRC it was when returning to the US in a private plane from the Dominican Republic…
From DR?
You don’t need Viagra, they have LaPela and Mambo 36. Way cheaper DR brands.
And like all non-US countries you don’t need a scrip.
No sympathy from me for Peterson, he did it to himself.
But singling him out is disingenuous. The upper echelon of US elite society are basically drug-addled degenerates. Sex, drugs, rock & roll is embedded into the culture. Straight from the horse’s mouth, back when Matt Gaetz was a young, freshly elected US Congressman that just arrived in DC, he was invited to a party with bunch of other Congresscritters and their staffers. Gaetz said his eyes were opened when he observed these fine people all snorting lines of cocaine. And he was disheartened to learn what what kind of people these are. And that’s the DC swamp creatures who rule over us.
I remember there was a discussion involving Ron Paul a long time ago about the drug use in USA and why the War on Drugs failed. Ron Paul cited one big reason was because they refused to take all effective measures that were available to them, and only went after certain people while ignoring others.
To be effective at stopping an illegal activity, you would undertake whatever measures available to you that would help in your effort, if they’re not too expensive or too burdensome. Makes sense. So if you really wanted to stop illegal drugs, you would go after the suppliers of drugs, and also go after the buyers of drugs. Going after the buyers would definitely help curtail demand for the illegal substances.
But he said they could not go after the buyers, because if they did that for real in all seriousness, half of Harvard grad school would end up in prison and these are all the sons of senators and bank presidents, and this would not be politically acceptable.
And that’s the kind of society you live in.
> And he was disheartened to learn what what kind of people these are…
> the DC swamp creatures who rule over us.
Back in the ’60s, Lenny Bruce said something to the effect that the legalisation of pot was inevitable because all of the young lawyers were smoking. And here we are.
I think more types of recreational drugs will be de-criminalized, if not legalized, in the next few years.
Last time I was back in Ann Arbor, MI, I was surprised to learn there were shops openly selling mushrooms (the psilocybin kind) operating in the city.
I think, whatever else is behind this push, the bottom line is that a drugged-up population is a happy population, even if: 1) they’re drowning in record levels of debt; 2) professional health care is prohibitively expensive; 3) home ownership and a pleasant retirement are unrealistic and unattainable for most; and 4) social mobility is trending toward ZERO (unless one is good at thinking up new types of fraud to perpetrate on one’s fellow working class citizens, which the current administration is all too happy to issue pardons for).
Its also a matter of cost…
I can buy a nicely ground up ounce of sativa for fifty bucks, whereas that same ounce cost as much as an ounce of gold around the turn of the century.
I spent one year in DC during the early days of the Carter Administration. It left me hopeless about electoral politics for a long time. The main reason is that I found the top goal of DC denizens was not some advancement or improvement to benefit the American people. Instead, it was to remain in DC whatever it took, and the ideological motivations that might have brought them to DC in the first place were very negotiable if it meant staying in Washington or leaving.
The second reason was the level of personal corruption. A fellow a year ahead of me in high school was there working for the AFL-CIO, something that seemed quite fitting for a guy who was a Lefty in his teen days, but he was part of a group of young guys who did “poppers” and celebrated their cynicism. He considered those who had held onto their ideals to be fools. Eventually, he departed DC for Hollywood where he made a splash as an bigtime agent, making so much money he now runs an investment firm too.
I remember a friend of mine pointing out five or six years ago the irony of a man whose whole shtick is telling people worse off than him “You have nobody to blame for your life’s problems other than yourself.” falling into crippling drug addiction.
Same friend would go on to say regarding the Peterson vs Zizek debate “Imagine watching your surrogate internet father figure get made a fool of by three dumpster-diving raccoons in a trench coat.”
“Imagine watching your surrogate internet father figure get made a fool of by three dumpster-diving raccoons in a trench coat.”
Needed a laugh this evening. Thank you! I tried to watch that performance and had to turn it off after about ten minutes.
In his book (the one with the weird story about lobster social hierarchy) he tells another story about how he dumped a friend because he was smoking pot. It was weirdly reminiscent of that horrible new age thing about dropping friends “who don’t serve you”. Why does drug addiction seem so unsurprising for Peterson? I honestly expect stories to emerge that he went on road trips with Ted Bundy.
For those who haven’t read it Whitney Webb’s two volume “One Nation under Blackmail” is available to download without charge at Archive.net.
It is, I believe, essential reading for anyone interested in how America actually works.
I found a copy of “The Politics of Heroin in SE Asia” At the Shakespear and Co. bookstore on Telegraph Ave in 1973, I had some exposure to how things really work before then and have been paying attention to what came to light since.
Simply put, the US Political scene is more corrupt and more depraved than any normal person could imagine, and that has been true for more than half a century.
The big difference is how open the corruption has become, the sense of impunity by our “betters” is both astounding and (Unfortunately) justified.
Trump isn’t the only one saying it out loud, the Epstein class as a whole seems entirely confident that they can control the populace with the tools they have.
They have happily done away with Due Process of Law without pausing to consider that the Constitution and Bill of Rights was written by Oligarchs, for Oligarchs.
No due process for Me means no due process for Thee, the present group of Oligarchs had best keep the King happy or he will take their Wealth and their Liberty if not their lives.
I am somewhat surprised that none of these Master’s of the Universe” have realized this…yet.
https://archive.org/download/one-nation-under-blackmail-vol.-2-whitney-alyse-webb/One%20Nation%20Under%20Blackmail%20Vol.%201%20-%20Whitney%20Alyse%20Webb.pdf
https://archive.org/download/one-nation-under-blackmail-vol.-2-whitney-alyse-webb/Whitney%20Alyse%20Webb%20-%20One%20Nation%20Under%20Blackmail%20%E2%80%93%20Vol.%202-Trine%20Day%20(2022).pdf
Thank you very much for this comment, it was eye-opening
The juxtaposition between the Hunter Biden corruption and….”this” is about as perfect as one could imagine. Just utterly mickey mouse in comaprison to the size and scope of the market manipulation (and insider deals the Trump sons are enjoying) and yet feels completely dubious that anyone will ever have to answer for this.
To think that the corruption of Biden and his wonky son seems so quaint now, almost nostalgic even. Trump’s corruption is on an industrial scale and is now part and parcel of American foreign policy. By that I mean that yes, Trump continues American foreign policy in trying to steal gold, oil, etc., from other countries but now he and his buddies are profiting hugely in the timing of announcements as part of foreign relations. Certainly the Iranians have called him out on this type of corruption and noticed how it works. As that line from that movie goes, America is not a country. It’s a business – so ****ing pay me.
The Bidens were merely shady. The Trumps are brazen.
Watched BettBeat Media last time Nat posted one of their videos and read that book Aaron Good mentioned – The Money and the Power. I had heard vague gossip all my life about Meyer Lansky (a relative in a previous generation was involved with a minor player in the Jewish mob in Chicago, so knew about them from family history) but never realized the extent of the power of the “Chairman of the Board,” as his fellow mobsters called him. He heavily influenced national politics in the US from at least the late 1950s to the late ’70s (don’t remember when he died, buried in Israel) among other things. Book explains how we were always told much more about the Italian crime families & very little about any Jewish ones.
I love Dr Good and respect his analysis but as a long-time mob obsessive, I think he overstates the power of Lansky considerably. Lansky was a power from the 1920s to the 1950s alongside Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel but after the fall of Batista’s Cuba in 1959 he never really re-established himself as a first tier power.
There were other Jewish gangsters who more successfully assimilated into seemingly legitimate lines of work — Jules Stein of MCA comes to mind — and Lansky did outlast peers like Bugsy (murdered 1946), Lepke “Murder Inc” Buchalter (executed 1944) or Longy Zwillman (murdered 1959) but the 1991 Robert Lacy bio of Lansky “Little Man” argued fairly persuasively that Lansky’s power had been greatly overstated.
https://www.amazon.com/Little-Man-Meyer-Lansky-Gangster/dp/0316511684
The consensus had been that the Jewish gangsters who didn’t go legit by the 1960s were either pushed aside by Italian gangsters or had assumed secondary roles in Italian-dominated gangs.
But Good has been arguing that people like Les Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein point to a possibility that the Jewish gangsters only pretended to give up their power and instead receded into the background (or pretended to go legit). He may well be correct, but nonetheless, I think he overstates his case for Lansky’s personal power and sway over the mob past the 1960s.
I don’t know: the co-existence, if not loose fraternity, between Italian and Jewish gangsters extended well past the Golden Age of Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and that cohort. Morris Levy (partially fictionalized as Hesh in The Sopranos) was a music industry gangster – owner of the original Birdland jazz club on 52nd St and Roulette Records – maintained his prominence and close ties to Italian mobsters through the 1980’s.
On a related but outlying note re Mob influence outside of the rackets: urban theorist Jane Jacobs is often, and erroneously, credited with helping to stop Robert Moses’ Lower Manhattan Expressway in the early 1960’s. The road would have blasted a six-lane highway through the Lower East Side and Hell’s Hundred Acres (later re-christened Soho by the real estate industry). Apparently, more influential in the project’s cancellation was mob boss Carlo Gambino, who was successfully appealed to by neighborhood Paisans and opponents of the highway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtTPVcP5WLQ
Very true. I’m solely objecting to Good’s elevation of Meyer Lansky specifically as the boss of bosses when there is reason to believe he fell from power dramatically toward the end of his life.
Thanks for the information, I think. I’m going to wash my hands.
Thank you.
The time line is so important to remember as it’s easy to get lost in the flood of “news”. I know I’ve lost track.
And Trump probably just did it again today.
It made me think that for all the talk about the oil wells, I haven’t actually heard/read an actual oil geologist discuss what happens for the different oil fields being shut down in those countries.
If it helps, the first estimate by US sources was that the wells would start to collapse within 15 days. As that hasn’t happened the new estimate is that it will start after another 45 days. When we get to that point it will probably be revised to 45 weeks, then 45 months etc etc.
Iran has been under severe sanctions for over 40 years, they know how to maintain their assets.
My personal fave was the issuance of the $TRUMP memecoin. Brought to us by World Liberty Financial (wholly owned by Donnie Inc. LLC) or $WLFI if you have the misfortune to find it in your investment account. It ripped off at over $70 before Donnie had even wiped is feet at the portico. Followed shortly thereafter by the MELANIA meme currently selling at slightly over ten cents a pop. Followed quickly by the Bigly Donnie Rug Pull. They still appear to be drinking the cool aide.
The memecoin scams seem like the good old days to me now. Almost quaint.
Coincidentally, the businesses of America’s wealthiest individuals are inextricably linked to U.S. national security policy. In other words, their enormous wealth is a reward for their devotion to the empire. Trump is just another oligarch managing the presidency as a business.
Indeed, the only difference is he does it not as a ‘CEO’ but as a mouthy mobster.
NWT:
> As readers should be aware, the majority of zionists are neither Jewish nor Israeli.
> Rather they are American protestants, primarily in the south.
That seems rather a sweeping claim. In the world? In the collective west? In politics? Amongt the writers of op-eds and blog-rants? How does one ascertain such a fact?
Sorry, the edit window closed before I got around to the ’emphasis added’ tag (for majority).
Thanks for checking me on this. I was mistaken. The vast majority of zionists are Christians around the planet with only a small minority of them in the U.S.
Here’s a paper I was basing my thinking on:
What I left out of my thinking was the massive number of Christian zionists who live outside of the US.
This paper attempts to estimate that number but I think it is clear most Christian zionists live outside the US:
Either way, the fundamental point I was trying to make — there are more Christian zionists than Jewish zionists — stands.
Amazing piece, thank you. Even if I could write that well it would still take me a month to write it.
thanks, I’m just blogging, throwing together scraps from media into a collage.