Cuomo Watch 🇺🇸

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, says that US Government raising taxes doesn’t do anything to help the average American He says raising taxes does nothing because Congress just launders the money to their friends, special interest groups and “17,000 lobbying groups” “I don't know anyone, and you guys in the room, you might be Democrats, Republicans who thinks that sending another trillion dollars to Washington D.C will actually improve anything. So when you say raise taxes, if you said raise taxes and directly give it to the people who need it, do it. That does not happen. It goes to all these interest groups, and they give it to their friends and all that.” “Which is why the people are considered a swamp. It's kind of a swamp, the 17,000 lobbying groups. But bank companies are guilty too. They're just fighting for their one self-interest as opposed to what's good for my country”

The paradox of NYC right now is that it’s not “dying” in the sense that it’s losing population of people who want to live and enjoy the benefits of living in a city with rich food and culture. But it is dying in that it’s losing the economic engines that have always paid for these things as it swaps out more tax payers with more tax revenue need. Policymakers are still running the economy as if it’s the 80s with Wall Street: financial sector tied locationally It’s really not good.

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

Been researching DC juries this morning. Did you know that DC has a specific school curriculum which is mandatory from 6th to 12th grade which trains them in civic participation including juries? Students are taught how to look past the actual crime and evaluate all charges through "root causes" and equity. There's no chance of a favorable conviction in DC.