Politics & Stuff

[Fulham Broadway 16,987]

US Colonel ''Trump is Netanyahus ventriloquist dummy'' 

 

[Fernando 6,502]

I will say that the whole relocation of Palestinians sounds similar to what was done to Israel by previous empire in the past, the Babylonians and Roman empire. 

So not sure if that is good or bad. 

And the whole relocation of prisoners to El Salvador prison sounds weird as well. I don't know if the Soviet Union used to do that by sending prisoners to neighbor countries...

So not sure if that is good or bad, time will tell what comes of all of this. 

 

 

[Vesper 29,247]

Jonathan Pie - The Corporate Con

 

[Fernando 6,502]

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,987]

'Popularity in the toilet': Report claims even Republicans now revolting against Elon Musk

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is a potential liability for President Donald Trump's new administration as polling reveals voters are not on board with his takeover of federal systems 

House Oversight ranking member Gerry Connolly (D-VA) saying, “This guy who says he’s your champion has hired a billionaire from South Africa who doesn’t give a damn about you or your family and is proving it every hour of the day,” and conservative Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) calling Musk an "unelected, weirdo billionaire" who is "swinging left and right and smashing things."

70 percent of voters opposed “the creation of a government of the rich for the rich by appointing up to nine different billionaires to the administration,” 

AP Press

[Fulham Broadway 16,987]

Musk shields his finances as he hoards private data of millions of Americans

Elon Musk vowed "maximum transparency" in his government work but won't even share his financial disclosures, according to a new report.

"So just to recap: Elon Musk has all of your personal confidential data," posted the co-executive director of the activist group Indivisible Guide. "And he will not be disclosing any of his information to the American people. One set of rules for Musk and Trump, one set of rules for the rest of us."

AP Press

[Vesper 29,247]

Heritage Foundation Wants Trump To Deport Prince Harry

They want you to know they'll come after disloyal rich white men too

https://www.wonkette.com/p/heritage-foundation-wants-trump-to

The tentacles of our new Christofascist overlords the Heritage Foundation were back in court last Wednesday, this time continuing a two-year fight they’ve been having with the Department of Homeland Security to make public the visa application of one HRH Prince Henry Charles Albert David George of Wales, the Duke of Sussex, Earl of Dumbarton, and Baron Kikell K.C.V.O., AKA Prince Harry, AKA the ginger married to the lady from “Suits.”

Heritage has been slobbering over the possibility that his visa application will reveal that when he immigrated during the first Trump administration he lied about “numerous drug offenses” he mentioned in his memoir, like some kind of British Hunter Biden. Harry was never arrested or convicted of anything, but he wrote that he and his wife-to-be smoked pot while watching Inside Out, angry face! Also he tooted some lines at a party once, and did some shroomin’, so they think he should be DEPORTED. Harry is married to a US citizen and has two American children, but if he lied on the application, he could still be deported anyway. And what a fine example he would make of the Heritage Foundation’s newly boundless power to harass people and upend their lives!

Nile Gardiner, the director of the foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and Fox News blatherer, told Vanity Fair, “I think that US immigration law has to be applied equally and fairly to anyone who applies. It doesn’t matter whether you are a prince. If Harry has nothing to hide, he should support the release of the records [...] I think it’s very clear that if Prince Harry lied on his immigration application, which is a criminal offense, he will be deported.” And Heritage is also reportedly appealing to Trump to ORDER Harry’s confidential records released, too.

And if they can do it to Harry, well, they can do it to anyone, they’re hoping. Maybe even to El Salvador!

Hm, one could say the same “nothing to hide” thing about immigrant Elon Musk, who came to the US from Canada on a student visa and openly admitted to the Washington Post and in a legal deposition that he violated the terms by stealing American jobs instead of going to school. And his brother Kimbal humblebrag-hyuked on a podcast that the two of them committed fraud on entry by lying to border agents that they were going to a David Letterman taping, instead of to break the law by working at a web company. Which if true should make him inadmissible to the US for the rest of his life, and made him ineligible for citizenship!

Elon Musk Was An Illegal Immigrant

Read full story

---

Or how about the immigration records of one Melania Knauss Trump, who came here on an extremely rare EB-1 “Einstein” visa for people of extraordinary ability, who are supposed to show evidence that they will be continuing to work in the area of their expertise, and:

provide evidence of a major award or meet three of 10 criteria proving excellence in their field. The criteria include coverage of the applicant in major publications, original and significant contributions to a field, and work displayed at artistic exhibitions.

Doesn’t the public have the right to know what the First Lady wrote down for that? Was Melania perhaps the first-ever model to appear naked as a jaybird in high heels on a bear rug? Did she invent getting greased in baby oil and turning around to make a pouty “you caught me, you naughty boy!” expression?

Anyway, back to Harry. The Heritage Foundation first started trying to get Harry’s confidential records in 2023, with FOIA requests to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services as well as US Customs and Border Protection, which turned them down because these records are confidential. Then Heritage sued the Department of Homeland Security, demanding an injunction to force DHS to expedite the request because Heritage would suffer irreparable harm if they didn’t get Harry’s private documents immediately.

Last October Trump appointee Judge Carl Nichols — the same judge blocking the Trump administration from putting all the USAID employees on leave right now — told Heritage to fuck on off, because “the public does not have a strong interest in disclosure of the Duke’s immigration records.”

And the Heritage Foundation has appealed, hoping that Trump, longtime voracious tabloid reader that he is, will make an example out of Harry. Trump told the trashy London Express last year: “I wouldn’t protect him. He betrayed the Queen. That’s unforgivable. He would be on his own if it was down to me,” and “I think they [the Biden administration] have been too gracious to him after what he has done.”

The Queen, of course, loved her grandson, and did not like Donald Trump, much less ask his fucking opinion about anything. And Trump has written eleventy hundred books bragging about how the real Art of The Deal is fucking over any contractor with bad enough sense to work for you. Also, you know who is entitled to write a book about their life, and should? EVERYBODY!

Especially Harry, who has been dogged and lied about by shitty publications since before he was born, and shamed into not defending himself by his glamorously inbred family. Until now! He got out of their clutches and off his dreary little island, and just settled a lawsuit with Rupert Murdoch’s British NewsUK operation that included a full and unequivocal apology and admission to all the illegal hacking and intrusions that they plagued him with his entire life. He’s been working to tell his own story, live his truth, and better his lot, and there ain’t a damn thing wrong with that.

But to conservatives, it was unforgivable to break the omertà of the royal family and write a book called Spare, titled for the way it was openly discussed in the royal family that Harry existed to be spare parts for his brother. He also talked about his grief over the death of his mother, and the fact that his family was made up of humans who did human things. Why does Heritage care so much? Perhaps because in a cult, the only unforgivable sin is leaving. If their minions discovered that by being reasonably nice people they could find a nice person to marry and go live a happy life outside of the cult instead of snorting powdered haterade all day long, the whole scheme falls apart. Just a theory.

Also Harry is what a Klansman or probably Princess Michael of Kent would call a race traitor for marrying a half-Black lady, instead of one of his horsefaced cousins, or at the least a blandly pretty white girl whose parents sold party supplies. And they are “woke,” of course. Recently the Sussexes called out Meta for their disgusting new Hateful Content Policies, which Wallis and the late Duke of Windsor would have adored.

Judge Nichols said that he’d make public what he could and asked the government to submit redactions, so maybe something will be released, hopefully as redacted as a Michael Flynn court document.

Meanwhile, Harry and his wife Meghan Markle are near Vancouver for the Invictus Games, the 11-year-old international sporting event for wounded veterans that he founded. Invictus has also just broken ground on a new rehabilitation center in Nigeria! The couple also let people who’d lost their homes in the LA fires stay in their house, had been working alongside chef Jose Andres's World Central Kitchen handing out food, and played with displaced kids at the San Diego Zoo. Meghan even helped track down a replacement Billie Elish T-shirt that a 15-year-old lost in the fire. So of course the Twitter trolliverse is shitting all over her for being the worst person ever born, and gossip websites are reporting that she and Harry are on the brink of divorce, based on nothing. They want her to be miserable so bad.

Oh well! And best of luck to them. We need more Americans like these!

[Vanity Fair]

Edited yesterday at 00:05 by Vesper

[Vesper 29,247]

On 06/02/2025 at 19:07, Fernando said:

 

 

How Much More F*cked Can Trump's War On USAID Get? Let Us Lose Count Of The Ways!

https://www.wonkette.com/p/how-much-more-fcked-can-trumps-war

Now that the lawsuits and restraining orders against Donald Trump’s executive orders are flying, it’s also time for some injunctive relief to protect the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which was targeted by Elon Musk and his Incel Clown Posse last weekend.

Yesterday, unions representing federal employees at USAID and members of the foreign service sued to stop Trump from dismantling the agency and freezing foreign aid. The complaint argues, with 100 percent accuracy, that a president can’t eliminate a federal agency that was created by Congress, so knock off that unconstitutional shit toot sweet, OK?

The lawsuit demands an immediate halt to efforts to shut down the agency’s operations and to put nearly all staff and contractors on leave, to restore the funding that Congress authorized, and calls for USAID’s offices to be reopened.

The suit also includes as defendants the State and Treasury Departments, USAID, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Notably, Elon Musk isn’t a defendant, possibly because he doesn’t deserve recognition as any official part of the federal government (the complaint refers to the “so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency’” because that too is a fake entity.)

Honestly, that’s plenty, although the complaint goes into detail on why exactly USAID can’t be dismantled by the executive branch, as well as the many harms the agency’s shuttering will cause, both to the plaintiffs, those receiving congressionally authorized aid, and to the Rule Of Goddamned Law In These United States.

Your Tax Dollars Not At Work

The complaint emphasizes that the attempt to eradicate USAID is already having “life-threatening consequences” (we’ve removed footnote numbers in the quote below; see complaint for links):

Clinics stopped distributing HIV medication. Staff who operate humanitarian operations at refugee camps in Syria were told to stop work, leaving thousands of people vulnerable to instability and violence at the hands of ISIS.

Soup kitchens that feed nearly a million people in famine-stricken Khartoum were shut down. Toddlers in Zambia were deprived of rehydration salts to treat life-threatening diarrhea.

Doctors at U.S.-funded medical facilities in Sudan that treat severely malnourished children were forced to choose whether to obey Defendants’ orders and “immediately stop their operations or to let up to 100 babies and toddlers die.”

Temporarily happy ending: In that final example, the workers continued caring for the babies, and hope they won’t face reprisals. They only had a few days of supplies left as of last Friday, however, and we know how things have deteriorated since then.

Even the State Department’s alleged “waivers” to the funding freeze, which on paper were supposed to allow “life-saving humanitarian assistance” and the continuation of HIV care and treatment, did no good. As ProPublica reports, the waivers didn’t actually restore funding and the overseas partner organizations had no way to apply for it. All the USAID workers who could have processed the requests were laid off.

Aid Workers Ordered To Stop Saving Lives So They Can Come Home And Be Fired

Also this week, virtually all of USAID’s employees abroad were ordered to drop their work, pack up their families, and move back to the USA by midnight tonight so they can officially be shitcanned, thank you for your service. Overseas contractors were fired without warning and locked out of computer systems, leaving some who work in violent regions unable to ask for help getting the hell out. Just as well, though, since nobody was left at USAID offices in Washington to take their calls.

One contracted staffer in a dicey situation somewhere in the Middle East told the AP that even the emergency “panic button” app was wiped off their smartphone. We’re sure the Trump team will come looking for the contractor and their family eventually, if only to prosecute the staffer for violating a ban on speaking to the media.

Some 6,000 of the agency’s 10,000 employees (before today’s decapitations — metaphorically, one hopes — of the workforce) are stationed overseas, so it is of course turning into a logistical clusterfuck. Some staff will have up to 90 days to GTFO, but others had just days to return to the US. Several US embassies have held town-hall style meetings to pass on any information they have, where, as one employee said, “Everyone was in tears, from leadership all the way down to janitors of our building. […] The community is gutted.”

Why yes, they had it coming, because Elon Musk really really hates USAID for investigating his Starlink satellite company, and maybe also for helping to dismantle apartheid, but most of all for helping people who insist on being poor, brown, and of no use at all in making Musk money. Musk tweeted in delight Monday that he a “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” and his fans only wished they could have thrown some aid workers, vipers, and globalists into a literal wood chipper too.

Some Caught A Freight, Some Caught A Plane

The AP reports on the chaos resulting from the recall order, which of course will cost the government tens of millions of dollars in travel costs, and is probably illegal to boot, hence the lawsuit from the foreign service and federal employee unions.

Locally employed USAID staff, however, do not have much recourse and were excluded from the federal government’s voluntary buyout offer.

USAID staffers and families faced wrenching decisions as the rumored order loomed, including whether to pull children out of school midyear. Some gave away pet cats and dogs, fearing the administration would not give workers time to complete the paperwork to bring the animals with them.

That could make for an exciting scene in a movie in a few years, like the embassy evacuation in The Killing Fields, as the embassy staff and journalists tried to forge a fake US passport for Cambodian journalist Dith Pran while the Khmer Rouge ran firing AK-47s through the streets of Phnom Penh. You could win an Oscar, even.

But when it’s happening, it’s not art yet, it’s just horror, especially for the people who can’t get on the helicopters and are told to go home without AIDS treatment or left to wonder if they’ll have anything to feed their kids. (Sigh. We wish Spalding Gray were still alive, too.)

10,000 Workers Into The Wood Chipper

According to insiders at the agency and internal emails obtained by Wired, Musk and his young racist Skibidi Totalitarians have inflicted some real American Carnage at USAID, already “taking a team of over 10,000 down to just under 300.”

The move leaves only 12 people in the agency’s Africa bureau and eight people in its Asia bureau, with around 290 overall. There will be some additional foreign workers retained, two USAID employees tell WIRED, but it is unclear how many.

“There are more impoverished people in Asia than anywhere else, and our presence has always helped counter the influence of China,” says one USAID employee, who was granted anonymity due to fears of retaliation and because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the agency.

Some US workers still overseas haven’t yet even gotten any official word of what’s going on from the agency. One told Wired, “The only official communication I’ve received is from the local embassy State Department facilities people, asking if or when we were moving out so they could renovate our houses.” Hey buddy, don’t forget to dispose of your pets, too.

Oh Yeah, The American Farmers. Can’t Forget About the American Farmers.

On top of leaving people in poor countries hungry, dying, and without resources to survive the effects of climate change (another gift “From The American People,” as the aid shipments are always marked), the sudden disruption of foreign assistance is taking a toll on American farmers who sell crops to USAID (Washington Post gift link) to distribute around the world. The losses could total in the billions of dollars, depending on when — or whether — aid is resumed.

American farms supply about 41 percent of the agency’s food aid, to the tune of $2.1 billion in 2020, according to the Congressional Research Service. The current chaos has frozen more than $340 million in aid shipments of rice, wheat, soybeans, and other commodities.

That has left hundreds of tons of American-grown wheat stranded in Houston alone, Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, said Tuesday.

In addition, researchers funded by USAID have already been furloughed, but that’s OK because MAGA Chuds think science is pointless and wasteful anyway, and if people in poor countries want better crop yields they should fund their own labs.

To prove that USAID is worthless, the White House pointed and shrieked at USAID grants it said funded gender-affirming care and DEI in other countries, so shut up, nothing good for the American People comes from all that wokeness, and President Trump has a huge mandate, don’t forget that lie, too.

In addition to the farm harm and the thousands of USAID staff being fired (illegally, remember that lawsuit), thousands more jobs in the private and nonprofit sectors are also at risk as contracts are cancelled and corporate partners see projects go away.

Again, this will have no effect on anyone that matters because you seem to keep forgetting that USAID is full of Marxists who hate America, making all the other businesses working with the agency Marxists too, the end.

Aren’t we all happy and free now? If you aren’t happy and free, you hate America.

That court order blocking this shit can’t get here soon enough.

Update: And Lo, a court order has arrived, putting at least some of the fuckery on hold.

Edited yesterday at 00:04 by Vesper

[Fernando 6,502]

13 hours ago, Vesper said:

 

How Much More F*cked Can Trump's War On USAID Get? Let Us Lose Count Of The Ways!

https://www.wonkette.com/p/how-much-more-fcked-can-trumps-war

Now that the lawsuits and restraining orders against Donald Trump’s executive orders are flying, it’s also time for some injunctive relief to protect the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which was targeted by Elon Musk and his Incel Clown Posse last weekend.

Yesterday, unions representing federal employees at USAID and members of the foreign service sued to stop Trump from dismantling the agency and freezing foreign aid. The complaint argues, with 100 percent accuracy, that a president can’t eliminate a federal agency that was created by Congress, so knock off that unconstitutional shit toot sweet, OK?

The lawsuit demands an immediate halt to efforts to shut down the agency’s operations and to put nearly all staff and contractors on leave, to restore the funding that Congress authorized, and calls for USAID’s offices to be reopened.

The suit also includes as defendants the State and Treasury Departments, USAID, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Notably, Elon Musk isn’t a defendant, possibly because he doesn’t deserve recognition as any official part of the federal government (the complaint refers to the “so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency’” because that too is a fake entity.)

Honestly, that’s plenty, although the complaint goes into detail on why exactly USAID can’t be dismantled by the executive branch, as well as the many harms the agency’s shuttering will cause, both to the plaintiffs, those receiving congressionally authorized aid, and to the Rule Of Goddamned Law In These United States.

Your Tax Dollars Not At Work

The complaint emphasizes that the attempt to eradicate USAID is already having “life-threatening consequences” (we’ve removed footnote numbers in the quote below; see complaint for links):

Clinics stopped distributing HIV medication. Staff who operate humanitarian operations at refugee camps in Syria were told to stop work, leaving thousands of people vulnerable to instability and violence at the hands of ISIS.

Soup kitchens that feed nearly a million people in famine-stricken Khartoum were shut down. Toddlers in Zambia were deprived of rehydration salts to treat life-threatening diarrhea.

Doctors at U.S.-funded medical facilities in Sudan that treat severely malnourished children were forced to choose whether to obey Defendants’ orders and “immediately stop their operations or to let up to 100 babies and toddlers die.”

Temporarily happy ending: In that final example, the workers continued caring for the babies, and hope they won’t face reprisals. They only had a few days of supplies left as of last Friday, however, and we know how things have deteriorated since then.

Even the State Department’s alleged “waivers” to the funding freeze, which on paper were supposed to allow “life-saving humanitarian assistance” and the continuation of HIV care and treatment, did no good. As ProPublica reports, the waivers didn’t actually restore funding and the overseas partner organizations had no way to apply for it. All the USAID workers who could have processed the requests were laid off.

Aid Workers Ordered To Stop Saving Lives So They Can Come Home And Be Fired

Also this week, virtually all of USAID’s employees abroad were ordered to drop their work, pack up their families, and move back to the USA by midnight tonight so they can officially be shitcanned, thank you for your service. Overseas contractors were fired without warning and locked out of computer systems, leaving some who work in violent regions unable to ask for help getting the hell out. Just as well, though, since nobody was left at USAID offices in Washington to take their calls.

One contracted staffer in a dicey situation somewhere in the Middle East told the AP that even the emergency “panic button” app was wiped off their smartphone. We’re sure the Trump team will come looking for the contractor and their family eventually, if only to prosecute the staffer for violating a ban on speaking to the media.

Some 6,000 of the agency’s 10,000 employees (before today’s decapitations — metaphorically, one hopes — of the workforce) are stationed overseas, so it is of course turning into a logistical clusterfuck. Some staff will have up to 90 days to GTFO, but others had just days to return to the US. Several US embassies have held town-hall style meetings to pass on any information they have, where, as one employee said, “Everyone was in tears, from leadership all the way down to janitors of our building. […] The community is gutted.”

Why yes, they had it coming, because Elon Musk really really hates USAID for investigating his Starlink satellite company, and maybe also for helping to dismantle apartheid, but most of all for helping people who insist on being poor, brown, and of no use at all in making Musk money. Musk tweeted in delight Monday that he a “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” and his fans only wished they could have thrown some aid workers, vipers, and globalists into a literal wood chipper too.

Some Caught A Freight, Some Caught A Plane

The AP reports on the chaos resulting from the recall order, which of course will cost the government tens of millions of dollars in travel costs, and is probably illegal to boot, hence the lawsuit from the foreign service and federal employee unions.

Locally employed USAID staff, however, do not have much recourse and were excluded from the federal government’s voluntary buyout offer.

USAID staffers and families faced wrenching decisions as the rumored order loomed, including whether to pull children out of school midyear. Some gave away pet cats and dogs, fearing the administration would not give workers time to complete the paperwork to bring the animals with them.

That could make for an exciting scene in a movie in a few years, like the embassy evacuation in The Killing Fields, as the embassy staff and journalists tried to forge a fake US passport for Cambodian journalist Dith Pran while the Khmer Rouge ran firing AK-47s through the streets of Phnom Penh. You could win an Oscar, even.

But when it’s happening, it’s not art yet, it’s just horror, especially for the people who can’t get on the helicopters and are told to go home without AIDS treatment or left to wonder if they’ll have anything to feed their kids. (Sigh. We wish Spalding Gray were still alive, too.)

10,000 Workers Into The Wood Chipper

According to insiders at the agency and internal emails obtained by Wired, Musk and his young racist Skibidi Totalitarians have inflicted some real American Carnage at USAID, already “taking a team of over 10,000 down to just under 300.”

The move leaves only 12 people in the agency’s Africa bureau and eight people in its Asia bureau, with around 290 overall. There will be some additional foreign workers retained, two USAID employees tell WIRED, but it is unclear how many.

“There are more impoverished people in Asia than anywhere else, and our presence has always helped counter the influence of China,” says one USAID employee, who was granted anonymity due to fears of retaliation and because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the agency.

Some US workers still overseas haven’t yet even gotten any official word of what’s going on from the agency. One told Wired, “The only official communication I’ve received is from the local embassy State Department facilities people, asking if or when we were moving out so they could renovate our houses.” Hey buddy, don’t forget to dispose of your pets, too.

Oh Yeah, The American Farmers. Can’t Forget About the American Farmers.

On top of leaving people in poor countries hungry, dying, and without resources to survive the effects of climate change (another gift “From The American People,” as the aid shipments are always marked), the sudden disruption of foreign assistance is taking a toll on American farmers who sell crops to USAID (Washington Post gift link) to distribute around the world. The losses could total in the billions of dollars, depending on when — or whether — aid is resumed.

American farms supply about 41 percent of the agency’s food aid, to the tune of $2.1 billion in 2020, according to the Congressional Research Service. The current chaos has frozen more than $340 million in aid shipments of rice, wheat, soybeans, and other commodities.

That has left hundreds of tons of American-grown wheat stranded in Houston alone, Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, said Tuesday.

In addition, researchers funded by USAID have already been furloughed, but that’s OK because MAGA Chuds think science is pointless and wasteful anyway, and if people in poor countries want better crop yields they should fund their own labs.

To prove that USAID is worthless, the White House pointed and shrieked at USAID grants it said funded gender-affirming care and DEI in other countries, so shut up, nothing good for the American People comes from all that wokeness, and President Trump has a huge mandate, don’t forget that lie, too.

In addition to the farm harm and the thousands of USAID staff being fired (illegally, remember that lawsuit), thousands more jobs in the private and nonprofit sectors are also at risk as contracts are cancelled and corporate partners see projects go away.

Again, this will have no effect on anyone that matters because you seem to keep forgetting that USAID is full of Marxists who hate America, making all the other businesses working with the agency Marxists too, the end.

Aren’t we all happy and free now? If you aren’t happy and free, you hate America.

That court order blocking this shit can’t get here soon enough.

Update: And Lo, a court order has arrived, putting at least some of the fuckery on hold.

Post a lot of cursing in this article I'm not going to be reading much. 

That is not professional. 

And when your like that your view will be bias and won't be neutral in your reporting. 

Anyhow thought this was funny 

 

 

[Vesper 29,247]

2 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Post a lot of cursing in this article I'm not going to be reading much. 

That is not professional. 

it is Wonkette

that has always been their style

does not make anything they say untrue

Trump, Musk & Co are rapidly destroying the American Constitutional system of governance (as predicted), and tearing into the underpinnings of socio-economic, socio-cultural bedrock as well

they are going far beyond even Project 2025

it is a sort of 'techno-Gilead kakistocracy' being erected by the RW billionaire class

a person has to be wilfully blind (and/or have ill intent) to not see what is going on

the hollowing out, massive systemic changes, etc are going to have disastrous impacts on a global basis

it is so rapid, so voluminous, and so destructive at multivariate levelsthat it is quite breathtaking

[Fulham Broadway 16,987]

USAID.  It is a way of influencing other countries.

Very telling that the only countries that have said its good idea to stop it is Georgia and Putin.

I don't think Trump and Musk realise it is Soft Power, which can be more influential than Hard Power -bombing and threats.

Thats what happens when you have showbiz people in politics - Trump, Zelensky, they havent a clue really - add Aspergers Musk to the list of rich idiots

[Vesper 29,247]

6 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

USAID.  It is a way of influencing other countries.

Very telling that the only countries that have said its good idea to stop it is Georgia and Putin.

I don't think Trump and Musk realise it is Soft Power, which can be more influential than Hard Power -bombing and threats.

Thats what happens when you have showbiz people in politics - Trump, Zelensky, they havent a clue really - add Aspergers Musk to the list of rich idiots

China will deffo fill the gaping soft power void the US is creating

[Fernando 6,502]

18 minutes ago, Vesper said:

it is Wonkette

that has always been their style

does not make anything they say untrue

Trump, Musk & Co are rapidly destroying the American Constitutional system of governance (as predicted), and tearing into the underpinnings of socio-economic, socio-cultural bedrock as well

they are going far beyond even Project 2025

it is a sort of 'techno-Gilead kakistocracy' being erected by the RW billionaire class

a person has to be wilfully blind (and/or have ill intent) to not see what is going on

the hollowing out, massive systemic changes, etc are going to have disastrous impacts on a global basis

it is so rapid, so voluminous, and so destructive at multivariate levelsthat it is quite breathtaking

Well you will have some Republicans fight back which is what we are seeing because of the touching of government employees... Which to be fair I don't think it's much Republicans but both democrats and Republicans when you touch government employees. So will see a lot of fighting to be taking place. 

Cutting right out as y say it's crazy. That is disturbing the works of many. 

What they should just focus is just audit for potential corruption. But yes they are going a bit too far. However the good thing is we have judges and courts that will fight back to give some balance. 

[Vesper 29,247]

33 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Well you will have some Republicans fight back

[Vesper 29,247]

The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/opinion/trump-power-surrender.html

In 1978, my parents went to Poland, the first foreign trip in each of their lives. When they returned to our home in Moscow, my mother couldn’t stop talking about what they’d seen — not a place but a movie, Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret.” One scene in particular stayed with her. Three friends are returning from a weekend trip. Sleep-deprived, hung over and preoccupied with their sexual and romantic entanglements, they pull over at a roadside cafe. There, a teenager wearing a Hitler Youth uniform starts singing. He is both earnest and, in his brown pants tucked into white knee-high socks, puerile. But after a minute, other young people in uniform join in, and soon all but one customer are standing and singing. The protagonists duck out. They have been pushing Nazism out of their minds, but at this moment they realize that they are in the minority, that life as they’ve been living it is over. The song everyone around them is singing is “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

I was 11 when my mother couldn’t stop talking about “Cabaret,” and I was confused. I thought my parents had gone to an actual cabaret and somehow gained an insight into the nature of the Soviet regime. A few years later, after I’d seen the movie myself, I realized my mother was right: That scene is the single most vivid portrayal of what it feels like to live in a society that is falling in line before a totalitarian leader. I experienced this in real life as an adult, when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia and my world suddenly felt like a chessboard from which an invisible hand was picking off pieces faster than I had thought was possible.

Now, in Donald Trump’s America, I am living through something similar, and it is moving at a faster rate still. For me, it began before the election, when the owners of The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post decided to pull their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris for president. It continued with Mark Zuckerberg remaking Meta to reflect what he called the “cultural tipping point” that was the presidential election; with ABC News handing over millions of dollars in response to one of Trump’s frivolous lawsuits and CBS considering doing the same; and most recently, with the great erasure: of records of trans care for minors provided by hospitals and of diversity-and-inclusion policies at many universities and corporations. Now some universities are quietly retooling their programming in hopes of conforming with expectations that have not yet been clearly laid out.

I am talking not about deletions of pages from government websites, such as those of the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presumably mandated by newly installed officials; I am talking about actions that individual people or private institutions took pre-emptively, with some measure of free will.

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called this “anticipatory obedience.” In his 2017 book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” lesson No. 1 was “Do not obey in advance.” Those who anticipate the demands of a repressive government and submit to these demands before they are made, Snyder wrote, are “teaching power what it can do.”

Snyder is right, of course, but his admonition makes obeying in advance sound irrational. It is not. In my experience, most of the time, when people or institutions cede power voluntarily, they are acting not so much out of fear but rather on a set of apparently reasonable arguments. These arguments tend to fall into one or more of five categories.

First, the responsibility-for-others argument. In 2004, I assigned and edited an article by a man who had protested Putin’s handling of a hostage crisis at a school in which more than 300 people had died. I was fiddling with the headline when one of the people in charge materialized next to my desk. If you publish that, he warned me, the entire staff of the publishing house might lose their jobs. To the best of my knowledge, the Kremlin had never threatened or even criticized the publishing house for editorial content. (The man in question now says he never tried to stop me.)

The great Russian sociologist Yuri Levada coined the term “collective hostage-taking” to describe the phenomenon when individuals cannot be free to act because of a constant, credible threat of collective punishment. Collective hostage-taking is particularly insidious because it pits different sets of values against each other: My boss, for example, was asking me to weigh the value of one article against the livelihoods of hundreds of people. The article wasn’t published.

The second argument is the higher-purpose argument, which is a close cousin of collective hostage-taking. In 2012, during the winter when more than 150,000 Russians protested against rigged elections and Putin’s intention to assume the presidency for a third term, a popular actress, Chulpan Khamatova, broke ranks with the liberal intelligentsia and came out in support of Putin. Khamatova had co-founded an organization that helped children with cancer. She faced some criticism but said, “If it meant that another hospital was built, I would do the same thing again.” Her dignity was, after all, a small price to pay for saving children’s lives.

I suspect that some American hospital administrators who are discontinuing trans care for young people are using similar logic: To serve their patients, they must protect their federal funding — even if this means that they stop serving another group of patients.

Next comes the pragmatic argument. Rational people do not stand on principle for the sake of principle. They pick their battles. Or so this argument goes. Perhaps this was the logic that led the country’s largest private funder of biomedical research to halt a $60 million diversity program, Target to scrap its D.E.I. goals or ABC News to settle Trump’s libel suit. As cynical as this argument sounds, it too is rooted in values and obligations to others — shareholders, business partners, clients.

There’s also the if-I-don’t-do-it-someone-else-will argument. A few years ago, a couple of journalists who had fled Russia in fear for their lives took an assignment to make a video that looked to me and many others like pure Russian propaganda. When I asked them why they did it, they replied that someone would have done it anyway — and they needed the money. Refusing the assignment wouldn’t have changed anything, so why not? Perhaps this is the logic of the top-tier law firms that have scrambled to hire Trump loyalists and otherwise position themselves as allies of the new administration. Perhaps this is also the logic of those Senate Democrats who have voted for Trump’s cabinet nominees: The nominees would get confirmed anyway, so these senators might as well shore up support in their contested states.

Last, we have the zeitgeist argument. “We are in a new era now,” Zuckerberg observed when he announced that Meta would end its fact-checking program. Companies should have more “masculine energy” and have “a culture that celebrates the aggression” more, he added a few days later, speaking on the Joe Rogan podcast. This kind of argument is the very definition of rational. Societies define sanity as conforming to dominant beliefs and culture. In totalitarian societies, cultural and intellectual rebels are often confined to psychiatric institutions. In the Soviet Union, dissidents were often diagnosed as insane — and by the standards of that society, they were.

There are many good reasons to accommodate budding dictators, and only one reason not to: Anticipatory obedience is a key building block of their power. The autocracies of the 20th century relied on mass terror. Those of the 21st often don’t need to; their subjects comply willingly.

But once an autocracy gains power, it will come for many of the people who quite rationally tried to safeguard themselves and their businesses. That boss from the publishing house is living in exile now, and so is that actress. Of course, many people, including wealthy entrepreneurs, are still living in Putin’s Russia. But they have discovered that to keep themselves and their businesses safe, they have had to cede ever more money and ever more power to the regime — a regime they helped build. Had they withheld obedience in advance, the autocracy that now controls almost every aspect of their lives and their businesses could not have been constructed.

A couple of weeks into Trump’s second term, it can feel as if we are already living in an irreversibly changed country. And yet, my parents, who belonged to the second generation of people born under Soviet totalitarianism — they had never known a different society, and neither had their own parents — experienced a moment of recognition when they saw that scene in “Cabaret,” that moment when a new, dark era has taken hold. My mother died more than 30 years ago, so I can’t ask her where that recognition came from. All I know is that it was, apparently, possible to maintain a sense of facts and values — not only not to obey in advance but not to obey at all. If that was possible in the Soviet Union half a century ago, then it is certainly possible in the United States today.

 

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The Department of Energy tried to clarify why DOGE staffers suddenly got some I.T. access to a department that oversees the U.S. nuclear stockpile.

https://newrepublic.com/post/191319/doge-energy-department-nuclear-weapons

The Department of Energy on Friday tried to clarify why one of Elon Musk’s DOGE underlings was granted access to the department’s I.T. systems despite opposition from its general counsel and cybersecurity offices. 

CNN reports that Luke Farritor, 23, whose previous work experience consists of an internship at Musk’s company SpaceX was granted access by Energy Secretary Chris Wright Wednesday. The department’s legal counsel and chief information offices, which govern I.T. and cybersecurity, “said this is a bad idea,” according to a source who spoke with CNN, given that Farritor hadn’t received a standard background check. 

“He’s not cleared to be in DOE, on our systems. None of those things have been done,” said the unnamed source. 

While Farrior was only granted access to basic I.T., including email and Microsoft 365, according to CNN’s sources, the report still rang alarm bells as the agency is in charge of the country’s nuclear arsenal, among other aspects of American energy policy and production.

In response to the uproar, Wright sought to discourage speculation that Farrior or anyone else associated with DOGE had access to U.S. nuclear secrets.  

“I’ve heard these rumors. They’re like seeing our nuclear secrets. None of that is true at all,” the energy secretary told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan Friday. 

But Trump administration officials haven’t been honest with the level of access given to Musk’s DOGE cronies. One of his young software engineers, Marko Elez, had administrator privileges with the country’s most vital payment systems governing trillions of dollars in disbursements, allowing critical code to be rewritten, despite Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claiming Elez only had “read-only” access. Elez resigned this week over racist social media posts (but already may be rehired). Meanwhile, a U.S. district court on Thursday limited DOGE’s privileges in government agencies.

Right now, DOGE’s activities are stretching, if not outright breaking, federal law over government functions and positions that are supposed to be governed by Congress. But the only bulwark against Musk and Trump’s overhauling of the federal government is the courts, as federal law enforcement is in the president’s crosshairs.

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madness.....................

Federal Financial Watchdog Ordered to Cease Activity

In an email to staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency’s acting director ordered workers to cease “all supervision and examination activity.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/us/politics/cfpb-vought-staff-finance-watchdog.html

Employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were instructed to cease “all supervision and examination activity” and “all stakeholder engagement,” effectively stopping the agency’s operations, in an email from the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, on Saturday evening.

Mr. Vought, who was confirmed this week to lead the Office of Management and Budget, was on Friday named acting director of the consumer protection bureau, the federal government’s financial industry watchdog. In his email to staff on Saturday, he reaffirmed earlier instructions from the previous acting director, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who ordered last week that staff should not issue any new rules or guidance and cease all investigations.

“As acting director, I am committed to implementing the president’s policies, consistent with the law, and acting as a faithful steward of the bureau’s resources,” Mr. Vought wrote in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The agency, created by Congress in 2011 as a financial industry watchdog, cannot be closed without congressional action, but its director can freeze most of its actions by halting enforcement, weakening or repealing regulations and softening its supervision of banks and other lenders. The agency did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on Saturday.

The agency has issued a number of high-profile regulations and enforcement actions over the years, seeking to strengthen safeguards on mortgages, credit cards, loans and other consumer finance. Most recently, the bureau sued Capital One in mid-January, arguing that the bank misled customers in promoting a high-yield savings account that it then kept at a near-zero interest rate.

In a Saturday evening post on X, Mr. Vought, an author of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for radically remaking the federal government, wrote that he had notified the Federal Reserve that the finance bureau “will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not ‘reasonably necessary’ to carry out its duties.” (The agency is directly funded by the Federal Reserve, outside the usual congressional appropriations process.)

“The Bureau’s current balance of $711.6 million is in fact excessive in the current fiscal environment,” he added in his post. “This spigot, long contributing to CFPB’s unaccountability, is now being turned off,” he said, using the agency’s initials.

On Saturday, some members of the union representing the consumer protection bureau’s employees protested outside the agency’s Washington building with signs mocking Elon Musk, whose government efficiency effort has wreaked havoc across various federal agencies. Several members of Mr. Musk’s team arrived at the agency on Friday morning and gained access to its headquarters and computer systems.

Later that day, Mr. Musk posted “CFPB RIP,” with an emoji of a gravestone, on X. Hours after Mr. Musk’s post, the home page of the bureau’s website was updated with a “404: Page not found” message.

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The New Authoritarianism

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/trump-competitive-authoritarian/681609/

With the leader of a failed coup back in the White House and pursuing an unprecedented assault on the constitutional order, many Americans are starting to wrap their mind around what authoritarianism could look like in America.

 

If they have a hard time imagining something like the single-party or military regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or more modern regimes like those in China or Russia, that is with good reason. A full-scale dictatorship in which elections are meaningless and regime opponents are locked up, exiled, or killed remains highly unlikely in America.

 

But that doesn’t mean the country won’t experience authoritarianism in some form. Rather than fascism or single-party dictatorship, the United States is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition.

 

In his first weeks back in office, Donald Trump has already moved strongly in this direction. He is attempting to purge the civil service and directing politicized investigations against rivals. He has pardoned violent paramilitary supporters and is seeking to unilaterally seize control over spending from Congress. This is a coordinated effort to dig in, cement power, and weaken rivals.

 

Unlike in a full-scale dictatorship, in competitive-authoritarian regimes, opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they often seriously vie for power.

 

Elections may be fiercely contested. But incumbents deploy the machinery of government to punish, harass, co-opt, or sideline their opponents—disadvantaging them in every contest, and, in so doing, entrenching themselves in power. This is what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and in contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey.

 

Crucially, this abuse of the state’s power does not require upending the Constitution. Competitive autocracies usually begin by capturing the referees: replacing professional civil servants and policy specialists with loyalists in key public agencies, particularly those that investigate or prosecute wrongdoing, adjudicate disputes, or regulate economic life.

 

Elected autocrats such as Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and Nayib Bukele all purged public prosecutors’ offices, intelligence agencies, tax authorities, electoral authorities, media regulatory bodies, courts, and other state institutions and packed them with loyalists.

 

Trump is not hiding his efforts to do the same.

 

He has thus far fired (or declared his intention to fire, leading to their resignation) the FBI director, the IRS commissioner, EEOC commissioners, the National Labor Relations Board chair, and other nominally independent officials; reissued a renamed Schedule F, which strips firing protections from huge swaths of the civil service; expanded hiring authorities that make it easier to fill public positions with allies; purged more than a dozen inspectors general in apparent violation of the law; and even ordered civil servants to inform on one another.

 

Once state agencies are packed with loyalists, they may be deployed to investigate and prosecute rivals and critics, including politicians, media companies, editors, journalists, influential CEOs, and administrators of elite universities.

 

In the United States, this may be done via the Justice Department and the FBI, the IRS, congressional investigations, and other public agencies responsible for regulatory oversight and compliance. It may also be done via defamation or other private lawsuits.

 

The administration doesn’t have to jail its opponents to bully, harm, and ultimately intimidate them into submission. Indeed, because U.S. courts remain independent, few targets of selective prosecution are likely to be convicted and imprisoned. But mere investigations are a form of harassment.

 

Targets of selective investigation or prosecution will be forced to devote considerable time, energy, and resources to defending themselves; they will spend their savings on lawyers; their lives will be disrupted; their professional careers will be sidetracked and their reputations damaged.

 

At minimum, they and their families will suffer months and perhaps years of anxiety and sleepless nights.

 

Plus, the administration need not target all critics. A few high-profile attacks, such as a case against Liz Cheney, a prominent media outlet, or selective regulatory retaliation against a major company, may serve as an effective deterrent against future opposition.

 

Competitive-authoritarian governments further subvert democracy by shielding those who engage in criminal or antidemocratic behavior through captured referees and other impunity mechanisms.

 

Trump’s decision to pardon violent January 6 insurrectionists and purge prosecutors who were involved in those cases, for example, sends a strong signal that violent or antidemocratic actors will be protected under the new administration (indeed, that’s how many pardon recipients are interpreting the pardons).

 

Likewise, a loyalist Justice Department and FBI could disregard acts of political violence such as attacks on (or threats against) campaign workers, election officials, journalists, politicians, activists, protesters, or voters.

 

They could also decline to investigate or prosecute officials who work to manipulate or even steal elections. This may appear far-fetched, but it is precisely what enabled the consolidation of authoritarian rule in the Jim Crow South.

 

Protected by local (and often federal) authorities in the aftermath of Reconstruction, white-supremacist groups used violent terror and election fraud to consolidate power and disenfranchise African Americans across the region.

 

Finally, state institutions may be used to co-opt business, media, and other influential societal actors. When regulatory bodies and other public agencies are politicized, government officials can use decisions regarding things such as mergers and acquisitions, licenses, waivers, government contracts, and tax-exempt status to reward or punish parties depending on their political alignment.

 

Business leaders, media companies, universities, foundations, and other organizations have a lot at stake when government officials make decisions on tariff waivers, regulatory enforcement, tax-exempt status, and government contracts and concessions.

 

If they believe that those decisions are made on political, rather than technical, grounds, many of them will modify their behavior accordingly.

 

Thus, if business leaders come to the conclusion that funding opposition candidates or independent media is financially risky, or that remaining silent rather than criticizing the administration is more profitable, they will change their behavior.

 

Several of the country’s wealthiest individuals and companies, including Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Disney, already appear to be adjusting in that way.

 

Democracy requires robust opposition. Opposition parties and civil-society groups cannot function without money and without a large and replenishable pool of talented politicians, lawyers, journalists, and entrepreneurs.

 

But using the state’s power against critics will likely deter many of them, depleting that pool. Talented politicians may decide to retire early rather than face an unfounded investigation.

 

Donors may decide that the risk of contributing to Democratic candidates or funding “controversial” civil-rights or pro-democracy organizations is not worth it.

 

Media outlets may downsize their investigatory teams, let go of their most aggressive editors and reporters, and decline to renew their most outspoken columnists.

 

Up-and-coming journalists may steer clear of politics, opting instead to write about sports or culture. And university leaders may crack down on campus protest, remove or isolate activist professors, and decline to speak out on issues of national importance.

 

Civil society therefore faces a crucial collective-action problem. Individual politicians, CEOs, media owners, and university presidents act rationally and do what seems best for their organizations.

 

They work to protect their shareholders’ interests and stave off debilitating investigations or lawsuits. But such isolated acts of self-preservation have collective costs; as individual players retreat to the sidelines, the opposition weakens.

 

Some of these costs will be invisible. The public can observe when players sideline themselves: congressional retirements, university presidents’ resignations, the ceasing of campaign contributions, the softening of editorial lines.

 

But we can’t see the opposition that never materializes—the potential critics, activists, and leaders who are deterred from getting in the game.

 

How many young lawyers will decide to remain at a law firm instead of running for office? How many talented young writers will steer clear of journalism?

 

How many potential whistleblowers will decide not to speak out? How many citizens will decide not to sign that public letter, join that protest, or make that campaign contribution?

 

Democracy is not yet lost. The Trump administration will be politically vulnerable. Unlike successful elected authoritarians such as Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and Vladimir Putin in Russia, Trump lacks broad popular support.

 

His approval rating has never surpassed 50 percent, and incompetence, overreach, and unpopular policies will almost certainly dampen public support for the new administration.

 

An autocratic president with an approval rating below 50 percent is still dangerous, but far less so than one with 80 percent support.

 

The new administration’s political weakness will open up opportunities for opposition in the courtroom, on the streets, and at the ballot box.

 

Still, the opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Worn down by defeat, and fearing harassment and lost opportunities, many civic leaders and activists will be tempted to pull back into their private lives.

 

It’s already happening. But a retreat to the sidelines could be fatal for democracy. When fear, exhaustion, or resignation eclipses our commitment to democracy, competitive authoritarianism succeeds.

About the Author

Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Government at Harvard University.

Edited 6 hours ago by Vesper