Cocaine Decisions
While your accountants tell you, "yes, yes, yes" / You make expensive ugliness
If the goal was to arrest Nicolas Maduro for cocaine trafficking, then why spend months blowing up boats? That seems more like trying to provoke him into a military response, which would have led to the same extraction plan being executed, though with more brutality. Last reports say at least 80 people were killed on the ground, which is a rather large body count to accept for apprehending one “criminal.”
In other words, I don’t buy that it was intended to be a police action, at all. The “arrest” was a last resort for an impatient man, hungry to make his petro-sponsors happy before he leaves. As for the blowback—the morons in charge have never asked why the United States has chosen to run dozens of covert operations in Latin American nations, for the past century.
It’s because whenever we “make it safe for democracy,” it usually is a matter of a few election cycles, before the people vote in a Socialist.
Then you have to go back in and fund a new round of Freedom Fighters. And how do you do that? You sell cocaine.
As many others have pointed out, Trump pardoned one cocaine kingpin not a month earlier. I heard one hypothesis that postulated Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, was released as part of a deal to get him to testify against Maduro. If so, that’s strange protocol, giving the convicted their freedom before they say whatever it is they might say—or forget happened—when on the stand.
The Trump Administration is careless and sloppy, and are rushing themselves into even more carelessness and sloppiness, as they take on new tasks and expand existing ones.
The cooked-up Somali day care scandal (3 years old, already prosecuted) by a MAGA Mormon who has a promotional deal with Polymarket, a most un-Latter-Day-Saintlike gambling site became “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets” of the post-Holiday season. When the evidence of morally horrific, criminal behavior gets too big, throw down hard on the racism and xenophobia.
The Somali day care call-back and the kidnapping of Maduro took a lot of the heat off Trump. MAGA loves they have something to cheer (they are fans, after all), and the thought of annexing a dozen South and Central American countries was not one they would have had on their own, but why the fuck not? USA! USA! USA!
One reason would be the strong evidence that the locals are really fond of independence and socialism, and are likely to keep fighting for it. You don’t want to be inviting the people who birthed the revolutionaries of the Western Hemisphere: Bolivar, Abizu-Campos, Fanon, Guevara, Castro, Allende, Marcos, Mujica, and Chavez, into your hegemony.
Mother Empire has afforded a Labor Elite to this day. $15 an hour is half of the global mean daily income. American labor is expensive, even when it is subsidized by federal food and housing programs that cover for below-subsistence wages. There is not a heck of a lot of social class consciousness among the American working class. Hell, most of the working class still calls themselves “middle class,” though the only “wealth” they hold is the house they live in, which is actually debt on a 30-year mortgage.
As the American workers’ quality of life has declined, they are reawakening a bit, organizing in the service industry (30 years after the shift to a service economy gutted labor unions) and among gig workers. Bringing Central and South American social class consciousness to bear inside the United States would threaten to flip the script.
Trump annexed Venezuela with no real plan what to do next. Installing an opposition party (nation-building) is more difficult than kidnapping a middle aged couple. If he sends in an occupying force, that kills the claim to police action and exposes him to a third impeachment. As of now, the U.S. presence in Venezuela is being managed by Marco Rubio, Steven Miller, Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, Zoom call.
To his credit, Poppy Bush had the good sense not to get mired in Iraq. His son did not know how to be President during his first year, however, so Uncle Dick made the calls. W. Bush was the reverse of Reagan and Biden, whose Administrations ran themselves, while the man at the top became less capable of the office. It took W. time to learn how to be President, so his Administration ran him at the start. It seems we may be in a similar position today, as Trump continues to mentally and physically decay.
Trump brags of “acing” three cognitive tests in one year, oblivious to the fact these repeated tests indicate a diagnosis of dementia, and his neurologist is just marking the progression of the disability.
The mess in Minneapolis further illustrates the careless and sloppy approach the Trump Administration has to its authoritarianism. Both Trump and Kristi Noem’s descriptions of what happened with the shooting do not match the video evidence.
I have just viewed the clip of what took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is still alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. The situation is being studied, in its entirety, but the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis. THey are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE. We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate!
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said at a news conference in Minneapolis Wednesday evening that any death is a “tragedy,” but that the ICE shooting was justified.
“Our officer followed his training, did exactly what he’s been taught to do in that situation,” Noem said.
Noem alleged that the woman who was killed was trying to block officers with her vehicle, had been harassing them through the day and “attempted to run a law enforcement officer over” before she was shot.
“We’ll let the FBI continue the investigation to get it resolved,” she said, adding that the officer was hit by the vehicle, taken to a hospital and released.
But in the videos that have circulated, it is clear that the ICE officer not only was never touched by the car, but that when he first discharged his gun, he was to the side of the vehicle. Also, he never went to the hospital. Instead he got into his vehicle and drove away. Real cops, even when they kill an unarmed person, don’t flee the scene.
You’ve probably seen video of ICE capturing people from public places. You’ve probably heard stories about people wrongfully detained by ICE, some of them jailed. You might reasonably believe if you are an American citizen driving on the street, that you may make a three-point turn and leave the area. You also might reasonably believe that in 2026, if you obey the masked man, that you will have your civil rights violated and be put in danger.
I am not a cop, but I know goddamned well enough that I cannot stop a car by reaching in through the driver’s side window. If anything, I am going to get caught and dragged, as that person seeks to flee. But that’s what the guy who told her to stop did.
As she began to pull away, a second agent whose vehicle was parked to her car’s right steps in front of her car and stops. He drew his gun and fired a shot through the windshield, as he jumped to the side of the car.
When he pulled the gun, he was in front, she had turned the wheels and was accelerating toward her right, he jumped to the side while firing. As the car passed him, he fired two more rounds, at least one of them through the opened driver’s window, from directly outside it. The one bullet hole visible in the car did not strike the vehicle from directly in front of it.
The car ran about 100 feet down the street before crashing into a utility pole. One video I saw showed the airbag had deployed and the driver had been knocked sideways, toward the door.
The shooter fled the scene.
Both the Drug War and the War on Terror relied on racist tropes, and disproportionately pursued racial minorities. The War on Immigrants, too, is racist in its exercise, and the enhanced ICE presence in the area was follow up to a racist dog whistle.
In hunting Black Somalis, the first casualty was a white woman, and Trump and Noem are blaming the victim. But it doesn’t work that way when it’s a white woman.