Trump’s bravado meets reality as oil executives politely refuse to bankroll chaos, exposing the yawning chasm between his grand promises and the hard math of global energy markets.
Perfectly said. Hopefully the world has it's eyes wide open, and sees, with their own eyes
Hears with their own ears.
The us not one year yet, and our world, globally has put every single person at risk .
He , nome, the dog murderer, now with her goons are murdering innocent people in our neighborhoods,
None of this is okay
We must stop this madness now, right now
Impeach them all. This entire administration is guilty of crimes ,criminals every one of the. Including the Supreme Court, the 6 most corrupt judges should be Impeached.
Theives, Traitors.
Every one of them.
They must be removed, stopping them, with their dark shadow Court.....
Hopefully this week will be the real turning point when we all wake up and head straight for a stronger democracy than ever......we can reimagine this country together ...nothing more powerful than we the people.
Please encourage everyone you know to remain peaceful no matter what. That is critical. This “administration” wants to provoke a response as an excuse to implement martial law and cancel our midterms. We are going to need to make the peaceful protesters of the civil right era look like radicals. We can not give them any excuse to take another life.
How can "remaining peaceful" as the most important bit of counsel translate into anything but "let's just give America up"?
Minneapolis' Ms. Good and her spouse tried that and ICE agent Ross murdered Good by shots to the head. Trump, Noem, and Vance, revealed only the pygmy size of their moral capacities when they lied, and lied, and lied some more, in the face of videos Americans see and can understand with the very own eyes.
Those videos tell it all. Don't preach 'remaining peaceful ' without offering a plan, courses of action, ideas about what we SHOULD do. The Democrats provide the negative model for you; ongoing failure to offer anything like a strategy to a winning road map to a successful midterm election, then an 18 months strategy for exposing, through vigorous oversight, the crushing incompetence and failures of the Trump regime, and then, on those revelations, winning the 2028 election, then, and ONLY then, begin to address only the first four years of what will be a much longer struggle striving to reinvent democratic America for its second 250 year stint.
Elsewhere I've estimated my own view of the odds for any of happening. They are abysmally low. "Remaining peaceful" is the best advice you can offer to get us there??? We'll never get anywhere acceptable starting out with such negative counsel. Imagine if Paine and Washington and Hamilton and Lincoln and Roosevelt had listed such resolve as their starting points . . . Is the present murderous thrust of those who now reign any different from what America has faced before?? You may mean well and you may perceive this as mean in return but "peaceful" is not the winning starting point. Not when those in control have shown clearly they could care less. We've got to be far more clever than that.
It translates to more people getting their bodies into the streets and being vulnerable but firm. People who wear frog costumes or cycle naked or are physically weak visibly pose no threat. If their peaceful demands are met with violence, it’s clear to everyone watching who the aggressors are.
When the state violently assaults and kills unthreatening people, it creates enough discomfort and even outrage that people who have just been observing, or thought it really wasn’t that bad, join the public protests. The civil rights movement endured injuries, permanent disabilities and deaths but when hundreds of Black people crossed that bridge and were attacked with dogs and clubs while they prayed and sang hymns, no one watching on their televisions could deny what was happening.
Peaceful protests mean understanding that you are putting your body, even your life, on the line. That’s how a peaceful revolution works — not by returning violence for violence, which confuses the question of who’s responsible for it, but by enduring evil in service of a just cause.
If people aren’t willing to do that, America will fall to fascism.
What you say here is an appreciated balm for all the heat under my receding brow. You are wise, Kirsten; I understand you. My anger is clearly aimed at T, and V, N, and Ross (plus Gingbos' limitations) but my frustration is with the Dems who are in a position to do the thinking that is implicit in all that we've both said about the present circumstances and the stakes of not successfully addressing same. Missive after missive has sunk into the leadership's depths without a trace of response. Schumer, Jeffries, and Martin are just not doing it or at all appreciative of others' attempts to help it along..
Exactly. We just saw that regardless of our behavior they will twist it into whatever fits their narrative. Trying to drive away becomes a "violent attack by car". When dealing with a regime that constantly lies, it's impossible to know what approach might be successful. I certainly don't know, but hope that we can regain a voting majority in Congress, (if SCOTUS allows it) so we have some chance to slam on Trump's brakes. It's clear that there's nobody out there to save us but ourselves. Side note: Mr. Cohen is an eloquent writer who makes clear that he "gets" Trump at a deep level others lack. I offer him condolences for all the suffering that brought.
Wow. That’s quite the rant. I’m merely just giving my advice. As you witnessed this past week, the rule of law is now officially dead. Get violent at your own risk. You WILL end up dead, just like Rene. Precious lot of good it will do you, if we come out of this still intact, if your dead.
"Wow" indeed. You exaggerate, of course, just as you exaggerated by eschewing, ever, self defense. You've obviously never had your life threatened. [By the way, why do you hide by a pseudonym?? And how might you distinguish between a rant and a carefully constructed exposition? And Ms. Good wasn't violent byut subjected to it; she was trying to leave. And the rule of law isn't dead until so decreed by the Supreme Court says . . . can you hear the har de har har echoing down the tunnel you're hiding in ??]
I was a mandated reporter as part of my professional career. When my life was threatened, to my face, by a distraught neighbor for her abuse of her fifth of five children authorities had removed from here home which I (and several others, the very same day) had reported to the authorities, a sheriff's deputy had advised me "all they were prepared to do," after many years of interactions with her, was advise me to get a handgun, train for concealed carry, tell the neighbors I'd done so, and use it if I had to. I did the first three and never had to do the last.
But that's not the "police officer is my friend" world I was raised in in the forties and fifties, and that we're clearly we're not any longer under in America's politics. ICE officer Ross was demonstrably not constrained by any niceties about the use of force in executing Ms. Good, the "fucking bitch," this week. Or the violence that Trump, Vance, and Noem did to the truth in the lies, lies, and more lies they delivered afterwards despite the presence of video after video which allowed Americans to see, with our own eyes, the violence visited by the federal government upon Ms. Good.
A lie from a public official is, to me, equivalent to an assault. It's violence is to the truth. The current federal establishment seems blissfully unaware (actually, given their construction, they reveal they're keenly aware) that it's committed same. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
"Gingbos," can you ever imagine yourself defending against violence visited upon you? Does the violence visited upon Good strike you at all? How much more are you prepared to take? What are you prepared to do to protect yourself against it? Violence is never first. Last is almost always too late. Why are we not addressing it except on Substack . . . Why is the opposition in Congress virtually silent on the existential threat to the nation?
this is the kind of optimism I like. Everything is terrible and broken and we are going to have to fix it. Not with middle of the roads like Biden or Newsom, but with strong Bernie-types!
those companies are all publicly traded. A. this is the kind of thing that would come up for a vote. B. the shareholders would crucify any company that announced they were going to commit billions of dollars to such an uncertain scheme.
Hopefully, the oil companies have seen the writing on the wall and they all stay away. As the old saying does, there’s no meat, or, substance to anything this president does.
Yes, indeed, Michael has described the situation perfectly. Oil executives didn't bring their companies into financial success by making half-baked investments. The Venezuela 'opportunity' is fraught with risk, and those executives know it as well or better than anyone. Maybe they should invest in Jewish space lasers, that might be a lesser risk. Ask MTG. ;-)
Trump doesn’t understand that much of the untapped oil in the US hasn’t been tapped because it costs more to get it out of the ground than it’s going to be worth once it’s done. That’s losing money!
and from what I've heard the Venezuelan oil is difficult/expensive to refine, full of sulphur, and highly damaging to the environment - of course, DJT doesn't give a rat's eyelash about the environment... only money. But this deal will suck more cash that it generates. And, based on history, ownership of the drillings is up for grabs.
I wish there was a way I could stop sending my money to the federal government, since I absolutely do not agree with how they are spending it - throwing it away. DJT acts like the US Treasury is his personal piggy bank. Piggy piggy piggy.
As a single senior, I don't have extra funds to get your paid subscription but I love Michael Cohen's words. I can't keep the smile off my face while reading. Please never stop. You always make my day better. Thanks!
Trump is the reason that our country is no longer great again. It is why we are far worse off now than we were under Biden. Yes Biden had to deal with higher inflation. At least our government institutions were still in place. At least our very necessary infrastructure was still in place. People were not being shot in the face because they got scared of masked men with guns trying to pull them out of their vehicles 🚗. Which is not the first illegal shooting or the last. This ICE group are former J-6 insurrectionist’s and proud boys, oath keepers, Neo Nazi’s with no training or discipline. They are bunch of criminal Thugs with a badge and guns. Our leadership from Trump down are criminals as well. Maybe not indicted yet but criminals. Say what you want to about Biden but at least our country was not losing our Constitutional Rights and Freedoms. We had due process to stop illegal arrests and deportation of citizens. We must all stand as one and fight back against this tyrannical regime. Protest peacefully, protest loudly in as big of numbers as possible. Force mainstream media to cover what they are afraid of doing. Make media afraid of the People not of Trump. Make Trump and the MAGA crowd afraid of the People. Make it non violent, peaceful but to the point. Boycott all media and companies that side with Trump. We have to do something to stop Trump and his regime from destroying America.
(minor note: Jonathan E. Ross, the shooter who killed Renee Nichol Good, was no yahoo wanna be cowboy. He had been working with Border Patrol/the ICE for over a decade, was a firearms instructor in that role and should have known better than to walk in front of a moving car, thus creating a dangerous situation which escalated into his shooting. He knew he should immediately go to the aid of the victim. He knew he shouldn't leave the scene of the crime. He knew exactly what he was doing.)
The only thing “well done” in the Trump administration is the mouthing of lies. Truth is much harder to use when you’re a bunch of scam artists attempting to screw everybody over every day of the week!
look at the picture of these fu8king goons, sitting around with the head pedo goon tRUMP, the POS who are raping and pillaging our people of this country.....everyone of these MF'ers need to be locked up in prison with the pedo in chief, tRUMP....
Depending on what country you believe, 75 people lost their lives according to the Trump regime; 100 (including 2 civilians died) according to Venezuela. It doesn't matter to me what nationality they were...they were human lives! All for what? Nothing.
All of us humans who are in his way are just collateral damage with some labeled as terrorists. Chilling. My local DA posted on X his approval of this murder. He’s a self-declared christian nationalist. Shortly after that announcement, two giant black sheriff SUVs followed by a big, plain sedan followed by a big CalFire SUV paraded very slowly down the main street of our scruffy, liberal little beach town. The drivers stared at us as we drank our coffee and ate our lunch. Felt like a message from the DA. Better watch our step or become collateral damage or just another dead supposed terrorist.
The economics of oil take into account the specific gravity of the crude, the sulphur content, whether the oil is paraffin or asphalt based, the refining costs, the lift cost, the transportation cost, and world daily demand. The oil business is complicated, beyond the understanding of Trump.
Since the Trump administration is staffed with buffoons, sycophantic poltroons, and outright idiots I doubt if they are capable of making an informed prognosis of the economics of the petroleum industry. Secretary of Energy Chris White, an MIT graduate should know better, and if he doesn't condemn this bombastic quip from Trump, and I seriously doubt he will, he's complicit in helping the Trump family and sycophants in robbing the American People.
After further reflection, it dawns on me that Trump's comprehension of the oil industry was absorbed from repeatedly watching the introduction of The Beverly Hillbillies. Jethro Bodine, if actually a real person, would have made a better American President. Jethro knew how to "cypher" making his knowledge of percentages greater than Trump's.
After I stopped laughing at the thought of Trump watching that intro, I realized you might be on to something since he gets a lot of his flawed, distorted knowledge from movies and TV.
The inmates are running the asylum while keeping their leader on life support.
Perfectly said. Hopefully the world has it's eyes wide open, and sees, with their own eyes
Hears with their own ears.
The us not one year yet, and our world, globally has put every single person at risk .
He , nome, the dog murderer, now with her goons are murdering innocent people in our neighborhoods,
None of this is okay
We must stop this madness now, right now
Impeach them all. This entire administration is guilty of crimes ,criminals every one of the. Including the Supreme Court, the 6 most corrupt judges should be Impeached.
Theives, Traitors.
Every one of them.
They must be removed, stopping them, with their dark shadow Court.....
EPSTEIN FILES RELEASE EPSTEIN FILES EPSTEIN FILES EPSTEIN FILES EPSTEIN FILES
They are apart of that too. !!!
Expose them all .
𝚃 𝚁 𝙰 𝙲 𝙺 𝙳 𝙾 𝙺 . 𝙲 𝟶 𝙼
Hopefully this week will be the real turning point when we all wake up and head straight for a stronger democracy than ever......we can reimagine this country together ...nothing more powerful than we the people.
It might be a flashpoint, but I think it’s going to explode in aggression not submission.
Please encourage everyone you know to remain peaceful no matter what. That is critical. This “administration” wants to provoke a response as an excuse to implement martial law and cancel our midterms. We are going to need to make the peaceful protesters of the civil right era look like radicals. We can not give them any excuse to take another life.
How can "remaining peaceful" as the most important bit of counsel translate into anything but "let's just give America up"?
Minneapolis' Ms. Good and her spouse tried that and ICE agent Ross murdered Good by shots to the head. Trump, Noem, and Vance, revealed only the pygmy size of their moral capacities when they lied, and lied, and lied some more, in the face of videos Americans see and can understand with the very own eyes.
Those videos tell it all. Don't preach 'remaining peaceful ' without offering a plan, courses of action, ideas about what we SHOULD do. The Democrats provide the negative model for you; ongoing failure to offer anything like a strategy to a winning road map to a successful midterm election, then an 18 months strategy for exposing, through vigorous oversight, the crushing incompetence and failures of the Trump regime, and then, on those revelations, winning the 2028 election, then, and ONLY then, begin to address only the first four years of what will be a much longer struggle striving to reinvent democratic America for its second 250 year stint.
Elsewhere I've estimated my own view of the odds for any of happening. They are abysmally low. "Remaining peaceful" is the best advice you can offer to get us there??? We'll never get anywhere acceptable starting out with such negative counsel. Imagine if Paine and Washington and Hamilton and Lincoln and Roosevelt had listed such resolve as their starting points . . . Is the present murderous thrust of those who now reign any different from what America has faced before?? You may mean well and you may perceive this as mean in return but "peaceful" is not the winning starting point. Not when those in control have shown clearly they could care less. We've got to be far more clever than that.
It translates to more people getting their bodies into the streets and being vulnerable but firm. People who wear frog costumes or cycle naked or are physically weak visibly pose no threat. If their peaceful demands are met with violence, it’s clear to everyone watching who the aggressors are.
When the state violently assaults and kills unthreatening people, it creates enough discomfort and even outrage that people who have just been observing, or thought it really wasn’t that bad, join the public protests. The civil rights movement endured injuries, permanent disabilities and deaths but when hundreds of Black people crossed that bridge and were attacked with dogs and clubs while they prayed and sang hymns, no one watching on their televisions could deny what was happening.
Peaceful protests mean understanding that you are putting your body, even your life, on the line. That’s how a peaceful revolution works — not by returning violence for violence, which confuses the question of who’s responsible for it, but by enduring evil in service of a just cause.
If people aren’t willing to do that, America will fall to fascism.
What you say here is an appreciated balm for all the heat under my receding brow. You are wise, Kirsten; I understand you. My anger is clearly aimed at T, and V, N, and Ross (plus Gingbos' limitations) but my frustration is with the Dems who are in a position to do the thinking that is implicit in all that we've both said about the present circumstances and the stakes of not successfully addressing same. Missive after missive has sunk into the leadership's depths without a trace of response. Schumer, Jeffries, and Martin are just not doing it or at all appreciative of others' attempts to help it along..
I believe California should succeed the union, or at the very least, suspend all monies going to the federal government!
Exactly. We just saw that regardless of our behavior they will twist it into whatever fits their narrative. Trying to drive away becomes a "violent attack by car". When dealing with a regime that constantly lies, it's impossible to know what approach might be successful. I certainly don't know, but hope that we can regain a voting majority in Congress, (if SCOTUS allows it) so we have some chance to slam on Trump's brakes. It's clear that there's nobody out there to save us but ourselves. Side note: Mr. Cohen is an eloquent writer who makes clear that he "gets" Trump at a deep level others lack. I offer him condolences for all the suffering that brought.
We need someone who can lead and organize us.
Wow. That’s quite the rant. I’m merely just giving my advice. As you witnessed this past week, the rule of law is now officially dead. Get violent at your own risk. You WILL end up dead, just like Rene. Precious lot of good it will do you, if we come out of this still intact, if your dead.
"Wow" indeed. You exaggerate, of course, just as you exaggerated by eschewing, ever, self defense. You've obviously never had your life threatened. [By the way, why do you hide by a pseudonym?? And how might you distinguish between a rant and a carefully constructed exposition? And Ms. Good wasn't violent byut subjected to it; she was trying to leave. And the rule of law isn't dead until so decreed by the Supreme Court says . . . can you hear the har de har har echoing down the tunnel you're hiding in ??]
I was a mandated reporter as part of my professional career. When my life was threatened, to my face, by a distraught neighbor for her abuse of her fifth of five children authorities had removed from here home which I (and several others, the very same day) had reported to the authorities, a sheriff's deputy had advised me "all they were prepared to do," after many years of interactions with her, was advise me to get a handgun, train for concealed carry, tell the neighbors I'd done so, and use it if I had to. I did the first three and never had to do the last.
But that's not the "police officer is my friend" world I was raised in in the forties and fifties, and that we're clearly we're not any longer under in America's politics. ICE officer Ross was demonstrably not constrained by any niceties about the use of force in executing Ms. Good, the "fucking bitch," this week. Or the violence that Trump, Vance, and Noem did to the truth in the lies, lies, and more lies they delivered afterwards despite the presence of video after video which allowed Americans to see, with our own eyes, the violence visited by the federal government upon Ms. Good.
A lie from a public official is, to me, equivalent to an assault. It's violence is to the truth. The current federal establishment seems blissfully unaware (actually, given their construction, they reveal they're keenly aware) that it's committed same. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
"Gingbos," can you ever imagine yourself defending against violence visited upon you? Does the violence visited upon Good strike you at all? How much more are you prepared to take? What are you prepared to do to protect yourself against it? Violence is never first. Last is almost always too late. Why are we not addressing it except on Substack . . . Why is the opposition in Congress virtually silent on the existential threat to the nation?
Excellently said.
this is the kind of optimism I like. Everything is terrible and broken and we are going to have to fix it. Not with middle of the roads like Biden or Newsom, but with strong Bernie-types!
those companies are all publicly traded. A. this is the kind of thing that would come up for a vote. B. the shareholders would crucify any company that announced they were going to commit billions of dollars to such an uncertain scheme.
Thank you for exposing the ongoing economic lies from Trump.
Good job, Michael. It’s not just a “no,” it’s a “hell no!”
Hopefully, the oil companies have seen the writing on the wall and they all stay away. As the old saying does, there’s no meat, or, substance to anything this president does.
As always Michael, succinct and to the point.
Yes, indeed, Michael has described the situation perfectly. Oil executives didn't bring their companies into financial success by making half-baked investments. The Venezuela 'opportunity' is fraught with risk, and those executives know it as well or better than anyone. Maybe they should invest in Jewish space lasers, that might be a lesser risk. Ask MTG. ;-)
Brilliant writing. Thanks bunches 💐💐💐💐
Thanks for the kind words.
Looks like they have! A collective, "NOPE"!
Totally agree with you!
Trump doesn’t understand that much of the untapped oil in the US hasn’t been tapped because it costs more to get it out of the ground than it’s going to be worth once it’s done. That’s losing money!
and any sane company would leave it in the ground where it belongs and invest their capital into renewable energy.
and from what I've heard the Venezuelan oil is difficult/expensive to refine, full of sulphur, and highly damaging to the environment - of course, DJT doesn't give a rat's eyelash about the environment... only money. But this deal will suck more cash that it generates. And, based on history, ownership of the drillings is up for grabs.
I was going to make that point too, Judy, but you said it better than I would have.
Trumphuk doesn’t understand ANYTHING about Anything let alone anything about oil.
I wish there was a way I could stop sending my money to the federal government, since I absolutely do not agree with how they are spending it - throwing it away. DJT acts like the US Treasury is his personal piggy bank. Piggy piggy piggy.
As a single senior, I don't have extra funds to get your paid subscription but I love Michael Cohen's words. I can't keep the smile off my face while reading. Please never stop. You always make my day better. Thanks!
I am in the same boat and agree wholeheartedly! :)
After all is said and done
To solve any of these problems
A lot more will be said, than done
If bull$hit was music, TFG would sound like a big, brass band.
Trump is the reason that our country is no longer great again. It is why we are far worse off now than we were under Biden. Yes Biden had to deal with higher inflation. At least our government institutions were still in place. At least our very necessary infrastructure was still in place. People were not being shot in the face because they got scared of masked men with guns trying to pull them out of their vehicles 🚗. Which is not the first illegal shooting or the last. This ICE group are former J-6 insurrectionist’s and proud boys, oath keepers, Neo Nazi’s with no training or discipline. They are bunch of criminal Thugs with a badge and guns. Our leadership from Trump down are criminals as well. Maybe not indicted yet but criminals. Say what you want to about Biden but at least our country was not losing our Constitutional Rights and Freedoms. We had due process to stop illegal arrests and deportation of citizens. We must all stand as one and fight back against this tyrannical regime. Protest peacefully, protest loudly in as big of numbers as possible. Force mainstream media to cover what they are afraid of doing. Make media afraid of the People not of Trump. Make Trump and the MAGA crowd afraid of the People. Make it non violent, peaceful but to the point. Boycott all media and companies that side with Trump. We have to do something to stop Trump and his regime from destroying America.
(minor note: Jonathan E. Ross, the shooter who killed Renee Nichol Good, was no yahoo wanna be cowboy. He had been working with Border Patrol/the ICE for over a decade, was a firearms instructor in that role and should have known better than to walk in front of a moving car, thus creating a dangerous situation which escalated into his shooting. He knew he should immediately go to the aid of the victim. He knew he shouldn't leave the scene of the crime. He knew exactly what he was doing.)
The only thing “well done” in the Trump administration is the mouthing of lies. Truth is much harder to use when you’re a bunch of scam artists attempting to screw everybody over every day of the week!
The only reason the conman ran for office was to avoid prison.
look at the picture of these fu8king goons, sitting around with the head pedo goon tRUMP, the POS who are raping and pillaging our people of this country.....everyone of these MF'ers need to be locked up in prison with the pedo in chief, tRUMP....
Depending on what country you believe, 75 people lost their lives according to the Trump regime; 100 (including 2 civilians died) according to Venezuela. It doesn't matter to me what nationality they were...they were human lives! All for what? Nothing.
All of us humans who are in his way are just collateral damage with some labeled as terrorists. Chilling. My local DA posted on X his approval of this murder. He’s a self-declared christian nationalist. Shortly after that announcement, two giant black sheriff SUVs followed by a big, plain sedan followed by a big CalFire SUV paraded very slowly down the main street of our scruffy, liberal little beach town. The drivers stared at us as we drank our coffee and ate our lunch. Felt like a message from the DA. Better watch our step or become collateral damage or just another dead supposed terrorist.
A goliath example of Trump's stupidity.
The economics of oil take into account the specific gravity of the crude, the sulphur content, whether the oil is paraffin or asphalt based, the refining costs, the lift cost, the transportation cost, and world daily demand. The oil business is complicated, beyond the understanding of Trump.
Since the Trump administration is staffed with buffoons, sycophantic poltroons, and outright idiots I doubt if they are capable of making an informed prognosis of the economics of the petroleum industry. Secretary of Energy Chris White, an MIT graduate should know better, and if he doesn't condemn this bombastic quip from Trump, and I seriously doubt he will, he's complicit in helping the Trump family and sycophants in robbing the American People.
After further reflection, it dawns on me that Trump's comprehension of the oil industry was absorbed from repeatedly watching the introduction of The Beverly Hillbillies. Jethro Bodine, if actually a real person, would have made a better American President. Jethro knew how to "cypher" making his knowledge of percentages greater than Trump's.
After I stopped laughing at the thought of Trump watching that intro, I realized you might be on to something since he gets a lot of his flawed, distorted knowledge from movies and TV.
Typical Donald Trump, READY-SHOOT-AIM!!