CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Roaming Charges: Go Down, Moses

Demolition Noir, Studio City, California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair

“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.” – Norman Mailer

“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.”

I don’t always read Heather Cox Richardson (because, frankly, one can hardly keep up with her, given that dishes need to be washed, the grass needs to be cut, the dog needs to be walked, a baseball game needs to be watched), but this pretty accurately sums up the current mental state of the person running our country…

Over the course of three hours last night, he posted on social media fifty-five times. Those posts accused a number of those Trump considers his personal enemies, including former president Barack Obama, of treason…reposted a fake quotation from Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) accusing Obama of making a personal fortune of $120 million from the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare…. He posted an AI image of Obama, Biden, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) apparently swimming in a filthy version of the reflecting pool with the caption: “Dumacrats Love Sewage.” Then he posted an image of himself on the $100 bill. And then he was back to calling House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) “Low IQ.” After posting a number of AI images showing the U.S. military destroying the Iranian military, Trump posted: “When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement. They are aiding and abetting the enemy!” Then he posted an image of a map with Venezuela overlaid with the U.S. flag. The caption read: “51st State.

Over the course of three hours last night, he posted on social media fifty-five times. Those posts accused a number of those Trump considers his personal enemies, including former president Barack Obama, of treason…reposted a fake quotation from Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) accusing Obama of making a personal fortune of $120 million from the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare…. He posted an AI image of Obama, Biden, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) apparently swimming in a filthy version of the reflecting pool with the caption: “Dumacrats Love Sewage.” Then he posted an image of himself on the $100 bill. And then he was back to calling House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) “Low IQ.”

After posting a number of AI images showing the U.S. military destroying the Iranian military, Trump posted: “When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement. They are aiding and abetting the enemy!”

Then he posted an image of a map with Venezuela overlaid with the U.S. flag. The caption read: “51st State.

And who is it that’s assembling and writing most of these deranged late-night social media posts for Trump? Natalie Harp, who looks as if she walked right out of Trump Central Casting: blonde, svelte, an adoring supplicant to Trump’s divinity on Earth. She’ll probably have an absolutely fabulous second career as a Fox News anchorette.

 To the mounting frustration of White House Chief of Staff Suzy Wiles, who has to clean up the mid-morning damage inflicted by these after-hours rants, Harp answers to no one at the White House other than Trump, who very personally approves each post.

Trump and his late-night social media helper, Natalie Harp, on a Marine One flight. Harp is the person who presented Trump with the Obamas as apes video and Trump as Jesus meme for posting on Truth Social...(I had to scroll through about 15 seconds in the video clip of Trump’s excitedly nodding head to capture that revelatory smile on Harp’s face.) 

As for Wiles, she appears to be slowly being driven mad by her duties keeping the Oval Office running. These are the eyes of someone you wouldn’t want to ride alone with on an elevator in a Brian DePalma movie…

Just five companies–Alphabet, Nvidia, Amazon, Broadcom and Apple–have accounted for half the S&P 500’s market gains since April…

As Wall Street is propped up by the flood private equity money into AI companies that want to replace human jobs with software and robots and health care companies servicing at astronomical prices an aging, sick and dying population, the real economy sucks at almost every measure, even that most American of obsessions (aside from guns) cars: in the first months of 2026, 30% of car buyers tradied in vehicles that were “underwater,” according to the Wall Street Journal, owing more on their loans than the car is worth, with an average gap of over $7,000.

Housing Market on the Brink: Home sellers now outnumber buyers by 630,000, the largest gap in US history. At the same time, home foreclosures have climbed by 18% over last year, with banks repossessing 42,000 homes a month.

This might seem dire, but on the other hand, the Wall Street Journal reports that the number of homes which sold for more than $100 million in the US has hit a new high. What does a $100 million home look like in these days of Trumpflation, something like this, perhaps?

Morgantown, Indiana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

$109 billion: the amount Americans spent on lottery tickets in 2025, more than they shelled out on movies, concerts, books, and sporting events combined. It’s the Crap Shoot Stage of Capitalism.

One of the greatest cons of American-style capitalism is beginning to crumble right here in the land of the protestant work ethic: In 2016, 67% of Americans agreed that most people can get ahead if they are just willing to work hard. Today, it’s 47%, in a new CNN poll, and free-falling. Is it any wonder? According to Harper’s, the average amount that a U.S. WORKER has saved for retirement is $955.

 The Consumer Price Index rose by 3.8% in April, driven largely by gas prices, which shot up by 28% last month. Food prices climbed by 3.2%.

Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit, on the soaring inflation numbers in the latest Consumer Price Index report:

Inflation is the key drag on the U.S. economy now. This is hurting Americans. There is a real financial squeeze underway. For the first time in three years, inflation is eating up all wage gains. This is a setback for middle-class and lower-income households and they know it.

Inflation is the key drag on the U.S. economy now. This is hurting Americans. There is a real financial squeeze underway. For the first time in three years, inflation is eating up all wage gains. This is a setback for middle-class and lower-income households and they know it.

AOC: “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that’s unheard of. You can’t earn a billion dollars, right? You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than they’re worth. But you can’t earn that. So you have to create a myth of earning it.”

The Financial Times reports that Amazon employees are “doing random unnecessary task automations to consume tokens and to show their bosses [who will soon be AI bots themselves, presumably] that they’re using AI more.”

As homelessness increases here in Portland and sleeping on the streets becomes criminalized, the city is set to close 450 shelter beds.

John Lancaster in the LRB on the world’s third biggest business, money laundering:

If it were an industry, money laundering would be the third biggest business in the world, behind commercial property and ahead of pensions. How did we end up knowing so little about something so big?  Money laundering is a little like drug cheating in sport, where the current state of legal enforcement always lags behind the current state of malfeasance. We don’t know what successful money launderers are doing in the present moment. All we do know is what unsuccessful ones have been caught doing in the past. We are drunks looking for our keys in a big empty space with a single torch, and all we can find is evidence of the rare occasions when other people lost their keys.

If it were an industry, money laundering would be the third biggest business in the world, behind commercial property and ahead of pensions. How did we end up knowing so little about something so big?  Money laundering is a little like drug cheating in sport, where the current state of legal enforcement always lags behind the current state of malfeasance. We don’t know what successful money launderers are doing in the present moment. All we do know is what unsuccessful ones have been caught doing in the past. We are drunks looking for our keys in a big empty space with a single torch, and all we can find is evidence of the rare occasions when other people lost their keys.

The models for the Super El Niño keep getting more extreme. The estimates for peak warming have increased by 0.5 °C in the last two weeks. There are now models showing off-the-chart warming of 4.3C (7F) above normal

With a super-charged El Niño and increasingly desperate political actors like Trump, Putin and Netanyahu, it has all the ingredients for a very bloody year… A study of hundreds of armed conflicts around the world finds that El Niño raises the risk of violent clashes.

Nearly a quarter of the games in this summer’s World Cup will be played under hazardous heat conditions, caused by climate change and the developing El Niño in the Pacific, according to analysis by World Weather Attribution, a climate modeling organization based in London. Five matches will likely be played when the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) is at or above 28° C. WBGT is a measure of what heat actually feels like to humans, factoring in air temperature, humidity, wind speed, and radiant heat. A WBGT of 28° C is a level of heat stress at which the Federation of Professional Footballers’ Associations recommends that matches be postponed. Despite nearly a decade to prepare, at least two stadiums–Miami and Kansas City–don’t have air conditioning or other kinds of cooling infrastructure. “Our findings show conditions associated with these physiological heat-stress conditions have now become more likely and more intense than during the previous World Cup,” Joyce Kimutai, a research associate in extreme weather and climate change at Imperial College in London, told Scientific American. “These changes are confidently attributable to anthropogenic climate change.”

Largely as a consequence of climate-driven droughts and intensive storms, water utility bills are rising across the country at twice the rate of inflation.

While the Tech-arcy and Trump keep pushing nuclear power as the energy source of the future, it’s renewables that are making the real gains on the ground…

This is the only snow we’ve received in a year and it’s cottonwood fluff…

I leave it to do its thing, but one of our tidy-yard-obsessed neighbors has taken to burning it off with something resembling a flamethrower, putting the entire canyon at imminent risk of immolation.

According to a Pro Publica investigation, the Trump Administration exempted the biggest polluters in the country from compliance with the Clean Air Act. How’d they achieve these exemptions? They simply sent an email requesting it.

The American Lung Association reports that almost half of Americans, 152.3 million people, now live in places with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution, two of the most harmful air pollutants.

From January through April, record-breaking wildfires swept across Asia and Africa, inflicting unprecedented levels of damage, according to the World Weather Attribution site. Conditions are expected to worsen dramatically in the northern hemisphere, as the super El Niño begins to dominate weather systems.

An Australian court has ordered the mining conglomerate Fortescue to pay $108 million in compensatory fines to an indigenous tribe, as reparations for lost cultural and archaeological value from operating an iron ore mine on their land without permission.

Water levels in the Euphrates River have dropped to record lows, leading Christian believers in the opaque prophecies of the Book of Revelation to conclude that the end times are finally approaching. If the Bible predicts it and it comes to pass, it’s a sign of Armageddon. If scientists predict it and it comes to pass, it’s just a slight change in the weather…

WSJ on monkey business: “The macaques steal belongings to use as currency to trade with humans for food. Some monkeys can distinguish between objects we highly value (smartphones, prescription glasses, wallets) and those we don’t…and will barter accordingly.”

The odds of having dementia at age 85 were close to 1-in-3 in the 80s; they’ve now dropped to 1-in-10. Good news, right? So then, do you explain the US being governed by two presidents in a row with dementia (and three of the last seven, with one village idiot thrown in for good measure)? Just our luck? Or do Americans prefer it that way?

Trump nodded off during a press event in the Oval Office again. This time, while a doctor was discussing maternal mortality in the US…

As Trump snoozed, RFK J took the opportunity to blurt out his Strangelovian views on the sperm-count gap: “In 1970, men had twice the sperm count as our teenagers do today! We are approaching the CATACLYSMIC rates that Japan and China are now experiencing, that is threatening their economy.........

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