This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

Ring around the rosy pocket full of posies.

Ashes, ashes all fall down.

The King in mighteous right calls the Chairman of the Federal Reserve a loser. The stock market takes that comment all too seriously and drops 1,000 points. Then the King being the King, doubles down and calls the Chairman a double loser and his mama too! Doubling down because the King will never back down to anyone anyplace ever, ever, ever! So today, the King will meet with big box retailers to discuss tariffs and their possible negative effects on profits.

Not being aware of the details of the King’s plan myself. I’m prompted to ask if this conversation might not have been better had before imposing the tariffs? But the King always shoots first and asks questions later, and his shtick is starting to wear a bit thin. Republican rumblings of redneck rhetoric rears its right-wing raucous righteous roar. The worm turns! The lapdog growls. It would seem there is a rising opinion among some in Republican circles that the King is quite mad.

And the idea rising that if left alone and unrestrained, the King will drive the economy off of a cliff. Republican Senator John Kennedy (Think: Foghorn Leghorn) A former devout Trumper is leading the charge. By saying what everyone already knows. The King is fucking up. Sending Mr. Garcia to El Salvador without due process was a mistake. Fix it and move on. But Foghorn isn’t really concerned with civil liberties. It’s a subliminal shot across the bow. I’m bitching about this, but it’s really about that.

Don’t say it’s about the Stock Market crashing! But it’s about the Stock Market crashing. They’d march into hell for the King, but they want to keep all their money too. And now, that is beginning to become a pressing issue. What exactly constitutes a Stock Market crash anyway? Four-, five- or six-thousand-point decline? Lafayette, we have arrived! They are not on board with this if this is going to cost them a lot of money.

Everyone, I mean everyone from Amazon to Xerox are cancelling projects or initial public offerings. What frightens these Republicans is the sentient knowledge that this is madness, and it can’t be allowed to go on for much longer. It is not just the numbers decline. It is the structural damage being done to the markets. Crazy is as crazy does, and crazy does drive investors away. The only thing you can count on now is you can’t count on anything.

Shaved heads and concentration camps with threats to send citizens to said camps have a negative effect on the markets. Sparring and fighting over the definition of what “is” really is with the Federal Courts. Foot dragging and outright defiance of the courts also has a chilling effect on the markets.

The King and his many cronies and toadies, had this thing all planned out. But they assumed incorrectly, that everyone would just have to play along. They’ll just have to. Because we say so, that’s why! We’re the United States of America for God’s sake! They have to!  But they don’t have to play along after all. They don’t have to buy our bonds or our airplanes or our agricultural products ever, ever again.  

Yesterday in the midst of a Stock Market rout. Bloomberg reported Marko Polio, the little man in the big job, had big plans to revamp the State Department, ala Elon Musk. The Administration jumped in front of that story like Superman in front of a speeding locomotive. Fake news! Fake news! Not gonna happen, I swear! But only the King renounced the project, and not Marko Polio. The little man in the big job.

The louder the Administration denies the plan, the more I’m tempted to believe it’s true. No! No! No! Not now! Not today! Look at the damn stock ticker! Only slowly, does the Administration begin to understand they are in deep, deep trouble. The King has so destabilized and terrorized the markets to the point where if the King says it looks like rain, the markets will fall five hundred points.

After 100 days there are no victories to point at. Deportation was supposed to be their big Republican crowd pleaser and now, they’ve mucked that all up. What should have been a positive for Republicans becomes another negative. Now, it’s all bogged down in the courts and will never flower as they had hoped. The Administration believes, in their tiny little hearts and little pin heads they must hang tough and push on through. Only the harder they push, the more the markets recede.

You can begin to see the friction and the heat building as they begin to call each other morons or dumb as a sack of bricks. Aides were frog marched out of the Pentagon the other day, accused of being “leakers.” The walls have ears you know! Keep this under your hat, and whatever you do, don’t tell Pete Hegseth. Rumors abound 86 Proof Pete is about to join the Scaramucci Club and be 86^’d himself. Loose lips spill whiskey and secrets.

The old baseball adage says, there’s no friction in the clubhouse on a winning team, but if they aren’t winning…look out! They’d fire old five o’clock somewhere Pete, but it would look bad. And when you are trying to convince the whole world that you have all the answers in your pocket you can’t admit to any mistakes. But when it is slowly understood by the experts that they really don’t know what they are doing. It becomes a situation where they can do no right. Whatever they do is going to be assumed wrong, because the markets have lost confidence in them. The markets begin to assume and factor in that whatever they do is going to be a mistake, because they really don’t know what they are doing.  Situation normal, all fucked up!

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” – Groucho Marx