Remember when 60 Minutes star correspondent Scott Pelley yelled at the show’s puppet executive producer, freshly appointed by freshly appointed CBS News chief Barri “I’m Woke Allergic” Weiss that the new management was bent on “murdering” 60 Minutes?

Boy, was he right.

Weiss took over 60 Minutes and one of her first moves was to load it up with right-wing fatheads like Ross “Me and JD Converted to Catholicism and Look at Us Now” Douthat. Now her boss, David Ellison, who used daddy’s money to buy Paramount, is throwing a great big temper tantrum and threatening to move CBS out of New York and Paramount out of Los Angeles if he doesn’t get his way in his attempt to merge Paramount with Warner Brothers Discovery so he can fuck up CNN, too.

I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. Naturally, the name of Jared Kushner comes into this mess, because why not? He’s running the entire Middle East these days, doing real estate deals in the guise of making “peace” in Gaza and getting the place ready to build high-rise Trump-branded condos; he’s working with his New York real estate buddy Steve Witkoff to make “peace” with Iran so the Strait of Hormuz will reopen and help make all his Republican buddies in the oil business even richer; and now he’s got his fingers in the Paramount-Warner Brothers-CBS-CNN deal by using his Affinity Partners investment fund to help aid Ellison’s takeover of both Paramount and Warner Brothers, along with his buddies from the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar, Saudia Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who threw money to Ellison as well.

You’ve got to wonder how Kushner finds enough time in the day to slip into his loafers and straighten his tie, he’s got so many fingers in so many pies. And isn’t it nice that a couple of spoiled rich shitheads like Kushner and Ellison, who inherited their way to top, get to play in the sandbox with the big boys? I mean, there’s nothing like sitting down with princes and deputy kings from Saudi Arabia and Qatar and carving up not only the Middle East but the media landscape of the United States to make you sigh with contentment when you put your head down on the pillow at night, right?

But back to New York and Hollywood. Can you imagine the bullshit egomania of a brat like Ellison stomping his feet and threatening to move CBS out of New York City and two of the biggest studios in Hollywood out of L.A. because he’s getting sued by some blue states who object to the consolidation of so much power in the uncalloused little fingers of the likes of Ellison? CBS employs about 1,200 people worldwide, a very large percentage of whom live and work in its headquarters in New York City. God only knows how many people are employed by Paramount and Warner Brothers in L.A., but it’s got to be in the thousands.

So, Ellison, who can buy apartments and houses the way you and I buy a Coke and popcorn at the movie, he’s going to tell thousands of middle class employees of CBS News and the Hollywood studios they’ve got to uproot their families and take their kids out of school and Little League teams and Girl Scout troops if they want to keep their jobs.

And move them where, exactly? Well, Ellison isn’t saying where the movie people would have to go. Maybe some cozy red state hellhole in Texas or Oklahoma or Arkansas? One of his hand-puppets, a guy by the name of Makan Delrahim, who works as CNN’s chief legal eagle, even told Politico yesterday that selling CNN itself is “on the table” if that’s what it will take to get the Paramount-Warners merger done.

And who would buy CNN, you might ask? Maybe Sinclair Broadcasting, another Trump-loving television media company that established itself as a kind of diversified Fox News and specializes in spreading lies and right-wing nonsense on the 180-plus local television stations they own. Sinclair Inc. has its headquarters outside of Baltimore in a place called Hunt Valley, so maybe all the CNN employees down in Atlanta and everybody working at CBS News in New York will be calling around Maryland trying to find apartments and houses to buy – at a time when interest rates on mortgages are headed into the stratosphere with rents right along with them.

All this pain to so many people’s lives because Little Ellison is having to contend with a lawsuit that asks a simple question: is it a good thing for so much news media and entertainment power to be concentrated in the hands of one ideologically bent spoiled brat who has never had a real job or done a day of legitimate work in his life because daddy gave him an inheritance the size of West Virginia?

All this on a day that the board of the Kennedy Center announced that they plan to carve Donald Trump’s name in the marble façade of the building, this time celebrating that he “renovated and rehabilitated” the place. The judge who ordered Trump’s name off the building in the first place will have something to say about the new plans to put Trump’s name where it does not belong. But it’s all of a piece, isn’t it? Donald Trump has nothing to do with the Kennedy Center, which was established to honor a president who actually did things while in office.

David “Gimme-Gimme-Gimme” Ellison hasn’t done anything of note with his life, either, other than being born the son of one of the biggest right-wing assholes who ever bent over to kiss Trump’s ass while he slipped millions in his pocket.

No one knows where all this crap will end. There are judges with gavels and laws on the books that still stand between this country being turned into Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And there are midterm elections coming up in November, giving ordinary American citizens who did not inherit billions of dollars from their daddy a chance to cast their votes for reason and democracy.

In the meantime, certifiable right-wing lunatics such as Bari Weiss and David Ellison and Jared Kushner and the Trump sons and who knows how many other grifters have their hands out grabbing at everything that isn’t and is nailed down. They’ll want to carve Trump’s name into the Washington Monument next. Why? Until his power is limited by a Democratic House and Senate, because they can.

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There’s a phrase people use to describe their inability to take in the incredible firehose of shit that floods our lives every day: I can’t wrap my head around it. The phrase sums up in a way that perhaps nothing else can two aspects of our modern lives – as everything has become more complicated and hard to understand, the way our leaders have chosen to deal with uncomfortable situations is to lie about them, thus adding to the confusion and discombobulation.

My job as a writer is to figure things out and write down what I find. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I cover politics and wars and frequently both at the same time. The stories I write seek to find truths when none seem to be there by sifting through conflicting accounts of who did what and when and why and to whom.

Lately, I’ve been trying to answer questions about the insane war Donald Trump decided to wage on Iran. Didn’t anyone think about how pissed off the Iranians would be when their religious leader and most of his family and the top officials of the government were killed on the first day? Why didn’t anyone add up the amount of munitions we had and make an estimate of how long they would last? Why didn’t anyone think that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz and strangle the world’s oil shipping in and out of the Persian Gulf? Why were U.S. bases in the Middle East so poorly defended from Iranian attack after the war started? Who planned, or did anyone do any planning at all, for the economic fall-out from this war?

The way that the Trump administration has attempted to answer these questions and others is to flat-out deny what they suggest and lie about their consequences. But even when you get answers to difficult questions, new ones always arise. Today, one of the questions is, why is the United States so far behind when it comes to drone warfare? The Pentagon just announced it would begin flooding drone manufacturers with orders and loans intended to step up the number of drones made in this country. Today, the White House imposed 100 percent tariffs on imported drones with military capabilities. The President’s sons are major investors in several companies associated with drones, AI, and defense manufacturing. Their investments thus increased in value exponentially.

See how complicated these things get? Each decision has consequences; those consequences develop more consequences; shortages cause gas prices to go up. Down the line, as the war goes on and on, profits are made, and certain people with foreknowledge of what will happen in the war and at the Pentagon get richer and richer.

Meanwhile, soldiers, sailors, airmen and women, and Marines are out there on the front lines of this war as it starts and stops with ceasefires and new attacks and another ceasefire, and more attacks.

The big story today is about the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier that has been at sea for over nine months without a port call. Stories have been published about sailors on the Lincoln attempting suicide by jumping off the ship. So far, no one has succeeded, but the stories themselves emphasize the seriousness of what is happening to the sailors and Marines who have been at sea for so long without relief.

More stories from families of sailors on the Lincoln describe food shortages that have caused meals to be missed, spoiled and rotten food, broken toilets, lack of hot water, mold and mildew in areas where sailors and Marines are quartered, lack of essential personal items like toothpaste and soap and deodorant…the list goes on.

What has happened on the USS Abraham Lincoln is our clarifying moment. Everything that has gone wrong on that ship is the responsibility of failed leadership that goes right to the top. We have a president who in a time of war is obsessed with erecting monuments to himself, putting his name on buildings, putting marble and gold leaf all over the White House, punishing people he considers enemies, enriching himself and his family, and playing golf at public expense.

Everyone in the military sees this. Everyone knows what Trump’s inattention to the war and to them represents. He had fired generals and admirals who have experience and replaced them with ideologues who swear loyalty to him and not to the Constitution. Leadership at a basic level, especially in the military, is a copycat business. Trump doesn’t care about people in the military, so the leaders beneath him don’t care. That is why sailors and soldiers and airwomen and men and Marines are suffering.

I know I have written about this before, but it bears repeating. The military is different from civilian life in all kinds of ways, but perhaps the biggest way it’s different is that there is no profit motive in the military. They don’t pay you more if you do your job well. You do your job because it is your duty. Everyone is dependent on each other. You keep things clean and neat because everyone lives close together, often in the Navy, in very close proximity on both submarines and surface ships. You do your job well, because if you don’t, someone else is going to suffer, and somebody will have to come along after you and do the job you didn’t do right in the first place.

That’s what is happening on the USS Lincoln. The leaders of that ship are in charge of making sure toilets work and showers have hot water and are free of mold. There is no excuse if they aren’t, because sailors are there not only to use the facilities, but to clean them and make sure they work. They can’t do this if they lack cleaning and repair supplies. Leaders are in charge of ordering enough food for the 5,000 souls who live and work on the Lincoln. Leaders are in charge of ensuring that each sailor has enough to eat and gets enough rest and has all the necessities of life such as toothpaste and shaving cream and soap and the necessities of the lives of the females on board. Periods don’t wait for resupply of sanitary napkins. They happen every month whether the sailor is at sea or on land.

Food is so important in the military it bears special mention. It was Napoleon who was supposed to have said that an army marches on its stomach. You could say in turn that a navy sails on its stomach. When I was growing up as an army brat, the son of an army officer and the grandson of a famous general, I was told over and over again how important food is in the military. My grandfather had a saying about it. I remember being at dinner in his house with retired generals and civilian officials such as Allen Dulles and Richard Helms sitting down the table from him. Grandpa would hear someone say something about war that he found wrong or even stupid, and he would bang on the table and say, “It’s simple. First, you feed ‘em, then you put a roof over their heads, then you train ‘em, then you pay ‘em, and only then can you send them off to war. But first, you feed ‘em.”

I heard him say those exact words again and again. When I got in the army and became a platoon leader and was assigned as mess officer, in charge of the mess hall, I found it, to put it bluntly, a mess. I decided to follow grandpa’s orders. I made sure the mess hall was mopped and every surface was cleaned after every meal. I ordered the cooks to change the lard in the deep fat fryers every day, and to use different fryers for meat, fish, and potatoes. The coffee was terrible. I was told that the ancient coffee maker, a huge cylindrical machine with pipes coming out and going back into it strange angles, was to blame and couldn’t be cleaned. I told the cooks to disassemble it and ream out every pipe and remove every scrap of scale and other buildup and reassemble it. The coffee went from bad to good overnight. I put in the first salad bar in any mess hall in the Army. We had to build it using 2 by 4’s and welded tin, but we got it done, and there was fresh salad with two or three kinds of dressing every day, and it was made spotless every night. We rerouted gas lines to move two griddles from the back of the kitchen to the serving line, so soldiers could order their eggs cooked any way they wanted in the morning, and fresh meat like chicken and hamburger was cooked the way they wanted.

The morale of the cooks went up. The morale of the whole company went up. Six months later, we won best mess hall in the whole division. Soldiers from other companies and officers from other battalions and brigades came to eat at our company mess hall. So did the commanding general.

Grandpa was right. If you feed ‘em and respect ‘em and treat ‘em right, soldiers honor you with their respect and their service.

There is absolutely zero reason the Abraham Lincoln can’t be run the way grandpa said. Here is the reason that the USS Lincoln is in so much trouble as a combat vessel: The president, the commander in chief, doesn’t care. He thinks people in the military are suckers and he treats them that way. He is wrong. Everyone in our military, and the sailors and Marines on that vessel deserve to be treated with respect and honor. That isn’t happening, and it’s why the U.S. military has lost the war Trump started with Iran.

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Recently, there has been a spate of mainstream Democrats pooh-poohing the progressives and warning that they threaten this fall’s widely expected blue wave in the midterm elections.

Mark Penn and Andrew Stein were on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago claiming gains by leftists as “a 911 call for the Democratic Party and America.” Penn, pollster, and Stein, New York City Council president 33 years ago, are ideal WSJ Democrats, which is to say, Republicans-lite. Thomas Edsall was in the New York Times saying the socialists “threaten to limit potential center-left gains in voting in the midterms.”

And just this week, the Times was absolutely giddy over a razor-thin 0.47-percentage point victory—3,500 votes out of almost 800,000 cast—by “moderate” David Crowlkey over his democratic socialist rival Francesca Hong. Neither candidate broke the 40% mark.

But the problem the Democrats have isn’t with the leftier wing of the party. No, it’s the right wing, the so-called “moderates” who abandoned the party’s long-term policy goals 30 years ago. It was Jesse Jackson who, rightly, diagnosed the problem in the 1988 Democratic presidential debates. He said his opponents—who included Al Gore, Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt and the eventual nominee, hapless and hopelessly bland Mike Dukakis—were all talking about “managing Reagnomics” rather than rolling it back. The managers have been in charge ever since.

Starting with Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, the mainstream of the party moved so far to the right as to become unrecognizable as the party that dominated the government for 50 years. It’s been nearly that long since Ronald Reagan was elected president, and Reaganomics became the foundational philosophy of both political parties.

Here’s a distillation of the core policy goals of the Democratic Socialists of America. Is there anything here that any working-class Democrat of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s would disagree with? Clinton moved the party to the right, and it lost its hold on the white working class because it abandoned the economic goals of the workers and left it to the Republicans to replace them with fake “social” issues. Look at this list and tell me what any proud Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy-Johnson-Carter Democrat would object to:

• Universal Public Services: Implementing a single-payer Medicare for All system, making higher education tuition-free, canceling all student debt and expanding free universal child care.
• Labor and Workplace Democracy: Expanding labor union rights, raising the minimum wage and instituting a 32-hour workweek without a reduction in pay.
• Housing Justice: Establishing universal rent control and expanding massive public investments into multi-income “social housing” to treat housing as a human right.
• Climate Policy: Enacting a Green New Deal to transition the United States to a 100% renewable energy economy while guaranteeing jobs for displaced workers.
• Racial and Social Equity: Defunding traditional police structures in favor of community reinvestment, and eliminating systemic oppression based on race, gender and sexuality.
• Democracy and Foreign Policy: Eliminating corporate influence in politics through publicly funded elections and reducing the U.S. military footprint overseas.

While Americans may be spooked by the term “socialist,” the policy goals of the Democratic Socialists and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party were fundamental Democratic positions through most of the 20^th century. The objections to the left-leaning policies have far more to do with the label than the objectives.

If the Democrats seriously want to win Congress this year and the White House in 2028, the moderates better get with on the left side of history and become Democrats again.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post Make Democrats Democrats Again appeared first on DCReport.org.

The great historian David McCullough (1933-2022) won the Pulitzer prize for biography twice, for his books on Truman and John Adams, but he also wrote best-selling books on the Panama Canal, the Johnstown Flood, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Wright brothers, and others. Here are his comments in a 2002 interview with Bruce Cole on the importance of writing as an act of thinking and learning (Humanities, “The Danger of Historical Amnesia,” July/August 2002, 23:4, my emphasis):

 I am adamant on the subject that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it. If a child learns nothing but that as a guide to life, that’s invaluable. You can’t learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can’t learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can’t learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard. …

We all know the old expression, “I’ll work my thoughts out on paper.” That’s exactly right. There’s something about the pen that focuses the brain in a way that nothing else does. That is why we must have more writing in the schools, more writing in all subjects, not just in English classes. And the teacher who teaches history should be grading the writing, too.

The post “To Write Well is to Think Clearly”: David McCullough first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Let’s say you’re a Middle East expert on the Trump White House national security team, or maybe you’re what they call a “planner” in “Muscles” Hegseth’s Pentagon. It’s sometime in 2025. Israel’s so-called 12 Day War, and the U.S. “Operation Midnight Hammer” strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities has been over for several months.

Holes have been found in Trump’s claims that the attack had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites. A Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of the effectiveness of the strikes was leaked. The DIA concluded that while entrances to Iran’s underground bunkers were destroyed, it was unlikely that Iran’s enriched uranium and the centrifuges necessary to enrich it were destroyed. In an interview, Vice President Vance admitted that the administration didn’t know where Iran’s enriched uranium was kept. The DIA estimated that all those bombs and bunker busters dropped by B-52’s and B-2 bombers had put Iran’s nuclear program back by “a few months,” not the total destruction claimed by Trump and Hegseth.

Trump got mad. He ordered an investigation into who leaked the DIA report. In August, Hegseth fired the DIA Director, Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse.

The upshot was that Iran still had a nuclear program. Trump began raising the alarm again: Iran could have a nuke in a matter of months, not years.

The word went out from the Oval Office or the 12^th hole at Trump’s Doral golf resort, or wherever it is that Trump makes his Big Decisions. It’s time for a war on Iran.

In years past, even during such bumbling administrations as that of George W. Bush, who started a war with Iraq without planning what he would do after he took over the country, the least that the Pentagons of the past would do is have a look at the history of past conflicts involving the target country. Well, in the case of Iraq, the First Gulf War pretty much decimated Saddam’s army in just a few days, which led to the decision by Vice President Cheney and his pet Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that the U.S. did not need to field the gigantic army that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell had contended was necessary for victory. So, Rumsfeld famously, or infamously, went with “the army you have rather than the army you want,” and they sent about 140,000 troops into battle and fired Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, who had disagreed at a congressional hearing about the number of troops necessary to attack Iraq, saying, correctly as it turned out, that “several hundred thousand troops” would be necessary.

I’m bringing up all this now-ancient history to make the point that exactly none of this sort of planning happened at the Pentagon or anywhere else before Trump decided to attack Iran on February 28. If they had taken a look at the history of Iran’s military and its political leadership since the revolution of 1979, they would have discovered that Iran was attacked by another country, Iraq, in 1980, and fought a war for eight long years to defend itself.

Casualty figures for that war are disputed, but most historians agree that a total of 500,000 soldiers from both sides lost their lives in the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq’s official tally is about 250,000 “martyrs.” Iran’s “Foundation of Martyrs” admits to having lost 155,000 to 172,000 soldiers. Other estimates are much, much higher, with at least one study holding that Iran lost between 500,000 and 750,000 soldiers in the war. Figures for the wounded are also in dispute, but there appears to be some agreement that 400,000 to 600,000 Iranian soldiers were wounded severely enough to require hospitalization.

Whatever the true figures, the Iran-Iraq war was terrible. Both countries had modern air forces with jet fighters and fighter-bombers. Both had huge armored forces. Both were able to conscript hundreds of thousands, even as many as a million, young men to fight in their armies. Both had massive stockpiles of munitions. Both had economies that used oil money to keep going. Iran was backed by a coalition of countries including North Korea, Libya and China. Iraq received military aid from Russia and targeting information from the U.S., as well as loans from Saudi Arabia and other gulf nations opposed to Iran.

The war itself resembles the war between Ukraine and Russia. Iraq was the aggressor, invading Iran in September of 1980. Iraq was able to seize some Iranian territory. Both countries tried unsuccessfully to destroy each other’s air forces. The war quickly settled into trench warfare, with Iran gradually taking back territory it had lost with forays through the front lines to encircle Iraq’s forces. Both sides, but primarily Iran, used variations of “human wave” attacks against the other, causing huge casualties and loss of life. Two days into the war, there was a battle for the Iranian city of Khorramshahr that lasted over a month and cost each side about 7,000 deaths and an unknown number of wounded. The city was occupied by Iraq for two years, and then a second battle returned it to Iranian control, again at great loss of life.

The war ground on. A ceasefire was proposed in 1982, but rejected by Iran, which went on the offensive, attacking Iraq again and again. Iraq was largely on the defensive after 1982, but Iran suffered huge losses in its offensive against Iraq. From 1983 to 1984, the war was stalemated, with neither side gaining advantage. Both countries spent great percentages of their gross domestic product on their militaries.

Iraq attacked Iran’s Kharg Island in 1984 and bombed Iranian tankers, trying to goad the West into entering the war on Iraq’s side to return oil shipping back to normal. Lloyd’s of London estimated that during the war, about 550 commercial vessels were attacked and more than 400 civilian sailors were killed.

In 1985, Iraq went on the offensive, launching air attacks on Iran’s cities. Iran launched a counteroffensive, crossing the Tigris River and taking a section of the Baghdad-Basra highway. Iraq counterattacked using chemical weapons and flooding Iranian trenches with river water from the Tigris.

In 1986, Iran attacked northern and central Iraq, its forces getting as close as 70 miles from Baghdad. Saddam started conscripting large numbers of Shiites into its army and throwing them wholesale into the battles with Iran. Later, after the U.S. took control of Iraq, Saddam would be accused by the Shiite majority that ended up in control of the country of using the Iran-Iraq war to control the Shiite majority simply by having so many young Shiite men killed in the war.

The war went back and forth for the next two years, with Iran launching human-wave attacks trying to take Basra, and Iraq hitting Iranian oil refineries and firing large numbers of its Scud missiles at Iranian forces. Iran used drones armed with warheads from RPG-7 rockets for the first time during the war.

By 1986 and 1987, Iran had developed its own defense industries, producing its own ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, tactical missiles, artillery pieces and ammunition. All of this is still true of Iran…and more…and it started during the Iran-Iraq war.

Both countries were weary of the war and looking for a way out. Saddam threatened Iran with massive attacks using “weapons of mass destruction,” which meant chemical weapons. Iraq had bombed Iranian Kurdish villages with chemical weapons repeatedly, so it wasn’t an idle threat.

Finally in July of 1988, Iraq bombed more Kurdish villages with poison gas. Iran’s political leadership told its religious leaders that the war might last until 1993, and the continuation of the war would bankrupt the country. Iran accepted a U.N. ceasefire resolution on the 20^th of July, 1988. There were sporadic attacks back and forth on each other’s shipping and more chemical attacks by Iraq on Kurdish villages controlled by Iran, but finally by early September, the anti-Kurdish attacks ended and many Kurds that had been in northern Iraq fled into Iran. As many as 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds had been killed by Iraq.

Prisoner exchanges went on for years. Iran continued a naval blockade of Iraq’s oil port, but Iraq used Kuwait and other Gulf nations and Turkey to ship its oil. The negative economic effects on both countries went on for years.

What lesson should have been learned by Pentagon planners before they shot a single missile or dropped even one bomb on Iran? The punishment Iran was willing to take to defend its land, its people, and its oil business was enormous. Eight years and more than a million total casualties. It is unthinkable, really.

Trump is in the sixth month of his war with Iran. Despite the noises he’s made about ceasefires and Iran wanting to “make a deal,” there is no ceasefire, and there is no deal, and there are no negotiations. Iran is in control of the Strait of Hormuz, having learned from Donald Trump himself that their power as a country is larger than the size of its population, the strength of its military, or even the possibility it may one day have a nuclear weapon.

Iran has been ejecting invaders for four thousand years. Iraq was just the latest invader, before Trump and Hegseth decided that the way to defeat the Islamic Republic of Iran was to blow through practically every missile we have with no backup plan and no ability to restock our supplies of offensive and defensive missiles.

Trump famously doesn’t read. All Hegseth apparently reads are his tattoos and the labels on whatever he’s hiding in his desk these days.

Iranian leaders know their own history by heart. They laughed at Trump’s Fourth of July fisticuffs on the White House lawn and his pathetic “fair” on the National Mall. All his flyovers of U.S. jets did was waste fuel, the price of which has continued to rise as Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz goes into its sixth month, with no end in sight.

One of the things Iran has learned since its revolution is the power of what they did to Jimmy Carter in 1980 by keeping the hostages locked up until he lost his election. Do you think that Iran’s leaders might have the same sort of plan for Donald Trump as the date of the mid-term elections approaches? All they have to do is sit back and say that the Strait is closed until they say it’s open. That’s it. Words alone will do it, and there aren’t enough missiles or bombs in the U.S. arsenal to change that.

This is what Trump’s insane ambition and his refusal to study history does. It costs blood and treasure. Our blood. Our treasure.

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IUX, the institutional-grade trading platform serving over 1M+ active accounts across global markets, has made its pricing data fully visible for side-by-side broker comparison—inviting traders to stack its conditions against competitors without reservation.

In a market where cost claims are common and verification is rare, IUX has taken a different position. The firm’s website presents its core trading metrics—raw spreads starting from 0.0 pips, execution speeds averaging under 30 milliseconds, and zero hidden fees—laid out transparently for anyone evaluating where to place their next trade.

For active traders searching for a low cost CFD trading broker , this level of openness is notable. Most brokers advertise competitive pricing in general terms. IUX publishes the numbers and invites the comparison directly.

What the Comparison Actually Shows

IUX positions itself on three pillars when measured against industry alternatives: spread tightness, execution speed, and pricing transparency.

On spreads, IUX reports an average of 0.11 pips across its raw account offering—a figure derived from interbank-sourced pricing with no markup embedded in the quote. The broker’s revenue structure relies on a fixed, disclosed commission per lot rather than widening the spread itself, which means traders see the actual cost of each position before entering it.

Execution infrastructure is the second differentiator. IUX records average order execution at under 30 milliseconds, supported by direct cross-connectivity through low-latency fiber-optic links to major liquidity providers. The system is built on conflict-free STP execution, routing orders directly to the market without a dealing desk intervening between the trader and the fill.

The point about there being no hidden fees is more difficult to measure, but it is probably the most important one for traders who have narrow margins. By completely separating the spread from the commission, IUX’s pricing model ensures that the total cost of a trade can be calculated before the order is given.

Recognition That Supports the Claim

IUX’s comparison page doesn’t rely solely on self-reported metrics. The broker has collected a series of industry awards that independently validate the pricing position it’s asking traders to evaluate.

In 2025, IUX was awarded ‘Lowest Trading Costs Broker in Asia’ and ‘Fastest Trade Execution in Asia’ by the Global Business Review Magazine Awards. For 2025, the Global Brands Magazine Awards awarded IUX the title of ‘Best Forex Broker for Low Spreads in Asia’. Further recognition from Money Expo Mexico, TrustFinance, and Broker View confirms a record that is based on evaluations from a number of different review organisations rather than just one.

In this situation, these recognitions are significant since they deal with the same claims that IUX makes on its comparison page—namely, cost and speed.

The Infrastructure Behind the Numbers

Tight spreads and fast execution don’t hold up without infrastructure capable of sustaining them under pressure. IUX addresses this through several layers of operational architecture.

The liquidity network used by the broker is supplied by a large number of institutional providers, the purpose of this being to minimise slippage risk when the markets are volatile. During periods of high volume, the platform remains running thanks to DDoS protection  and the use of enterprise-grade traffic filtering, and the level of platform uptime is such that executions can be carried out consistently regardless of the market conditions.

Funds are held in segregated accounts, separated from company operating capital and secured under advanced financial standards. For traders who prioritize both cost and security, this structure addresses both requirements without compromise.

What Traders Can Access

IUX offers access to more than 165 CFD instruments across currencies, commodities, indices, stocks, crypto, and thematic index products. Traders can execute across these markets through three platform options: the proprietary IUX Trade App, the IUX WebTerminal, and MetaTrader 5 — all carrying the same underlying pricing and execution infrastructure.

The broker is active in multiple regions, with 24/7 multilingual support available for account and trade-related inquiries. Deposits process instantly for supported payment methods, and the broker’s withdrawal track record is reflected in consistent user reviews across the App Store, Google Play, Trustpilot, and Investing.com.

The Comparison Matters Now Than Ever

The CFD brokerage space has grown significantly more competitive in recent years, and traders have more access to pricing data than at any previous point. That shift has made the gap between advertised and actual trading costs more visible and more consequential for anyone executing at volume.

IUX’s decision to publish its conditions openly and frame them as a direct competitive comparison reflects strong confidence in what the metrics show. Raw spreads from 0.0 pips, sub-30ms execution, STP order routing, and a fully transparent commission structure form a package that IUX believes holds up under direct scrutiny.

For traders ready to run that comparison themselves, the full pricing breakdown and feature details are available at IUX’s broker comparison page.

Photo: Rafael Minguet Delgado via Pexels

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The post IUX Opens Its Pricing to a Direct Low-Cost Broker Comparison appeared first on DCReport.org.