By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Franklin D. Roosevelt, State of the Union Message to Congress, January 11, 1944
[TW: In this speech, FDR proposed an economic bill of rights]
…a noisy minority maintains an uproar of demands for special favors for special groups. There are pests who swarm through the lobbies of the Congress and the cocktail bars of Washington, representing these special groups as opposed to the basic interests of the Nation as a whole. They have come to look upon the war primarily as a chance to make profits for themselves at the expense of their neighbors- profits in money or in terms of political or social preferment….
One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis-recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920’s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home….
The Business Community Is Extraordinarily Stupid. Is a dictatorship good for business?
Hamilton Nolan, February 05, 2025 [How Things Work]
…People often criticize business as greedy. Yes. It is greedy, as water is wet. Understanding corporations as anything other than soulless robots seeking profit is a mistake. This is why it is wise to tightly regulate them and unwise to allow them to do whatever they want. In a related sense, people often say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be in the self-interest of business to pay more taxes and subject themselves to more regulations and and generally push for more progressive values because it would help to create the stable and happy society outlined above, which is good for business in the long run?” Well, sure, but this question misunderstands the fact that the political actions of the business lobby assume that they will always be pushing against some force that is pushing back, and that the progressive forces they are pushing against will be enough to protect the basic structure of democratic society, even as businesses try to undermine it just enough to put money in their own pockets. Businesses want to pick up pennies in front of the steamroller, but they don’t want the steamroller to run them over.
Well fuckers, you have miscalculated. You rats.
The business lobby’s many years of selfish conduct and support for deleterious public policies have produced so much inequality and undermined our democratic institutions so successfully that we are now watching a strongman seize control of our government. Smooth move, you fucks. You grasping roaches. Your efforts have gotten us here. All the Koch Brother/ Federalist Society types who invested so much money in capturing the courts for the right wing have gotten us here. All the nice Chamber of Commerce types who supported the Republican Party even as it radicalized further and further because they wanted those tax cuts have gotten us here….
Shock Doctrine USA
Thomas Neuburger, February 07, 2025 [God’s Spies]
What we’re seeing is not a new autocracy, but the old coup, the one called “neoliberalism,” the one we’ve been watching since Reagan: the complete dismantlement of government-by-the-people till only the rich have rights. It’s not the removal of the big FDR state, but its slow, then faster replacement by an equally muscular state responsive to wealth….
….Carl Biejer highlights this point in a recent paid-only piece, “The shock doctrine comes to America.”
Beijer’s point: This isn’t a new autocracy he’s creating, but the same old tried-and-true shocking. The war’s not being waged by Trump, but by “capital” writ large….
“This is what neoliberals have done over and over again to dismantle the state in other countries.…
“The neoliberals are taking an axe to the government rather than a scalpel, and this means that the left could very well see all kinds of programs related to US empire and the security state undergo some significant defunding. But we should not have any illusions about what is driving this: neoliberal austerity”
The Logic of Destruction, and how to resist it
Timothy Snyder, Feb 02, 2025
What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.
The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.
For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.
The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.
Constitutional crisis
Elon Musk Wants to Get Operational Control of the Treasury’s Payment System. This Could Not Possibly Be More Dangerous
Nathan Tankus, February 4, 2025 [Notes on the Crisis]
I try to keep emotion out of this newsletter. I have always tried to write Notes on the Crises in a calm, detached tone so that the information I highlight shines through. However, I must be honest with readers: I’m absolutely terrified…. There is nothing more important on the entire planet than getting Elon Musk and DOGE out of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and allowing career civil service employees to run the Treasury’s internal payments system without capricious and self-serving interference from billionaires and their allies….
Musk and his cronies are clearly aiming to redesign the payments system to serve their agenda. The most chilling sentence is this one from the Wall Street Journal:
“It couldn’t be determined what DOGE representatives intended to do with their access to the payment system. Musk and his team think the payment system should be overseen by political appointees selected by President Trump, the people said.”
This is not the attitude of people who are trying to simply technocratically make the payment system more “efficient.” They have a very clear and specific agenda, which involves unilaterally cutting spending, particularly spending they perceive to be going to their ideological foes. Is “Wokeness,” the “Green New Deal,” “Marxism,” and “Gender Ideology” going to be the new definition of an “improper payment”? ….
The data the Treasury collects could not possibly be more sensitive. We are talking about hundreds of millions of Social Security numbers, as well as a raft of other specific identifying information….
This system collects between “10,000 – 99,999” social security numbers along with identifying “business” information, including sensitive financial records and “business” bank accounts. Does anyone think that if Musk could get his hands on this information, whether directly or indirectly, he would not use it to go after, say, nonprofits he dislikes? At 3:14am Sunday, Musk pledged to shut down “illegal payments” to Global Refuge, a faith-based organization that exists to provide “safety and support to refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants from across the world.” Musk messing with ASAP is no hypothetical at all….
In some ways, as enormously alarming at this all is, it’s somehow not the biggest concern that I have been thinking about. For the past 36 hours (writing these words at Midnight on Saturday) my mind has returned over and over to the idea that they have been asking for “source code information” to the Treasury’s internal payments system….
COBOL is the lingua franca of mission critical legacy IT in use since the 1960s and too many systems have been too important to abandon it. “Modernization” has instead been built around making COBOL function somewhere besides a mainframe. The “modernization” of the Treasury’s IT payments infrastructure seems to have constituted a combination of rooting out Assembly code and a basically completed transition of “mainframe” COBOL to an “internally-developed RM COBOL” running on Linux servers. RM COBOL is an update on mainframe COBOL “designed for optimum performance and wide portability across a broad diversity of computers and operating systems.” Most notably, the Treasury’s transition to RM COBOL seems to have involved harmonizing more than 30 different COBOL systems which had evolved separately. It was 30 “dialects” they managed to get to speak one standardized language.
Does Elon Musk understand any of this? Does he have any grasp of the scale and complexity he is trying to reach into and exercise “influence”? Currently the most urgent and profound danger is not what he intends to make this sprawling apparatus do. The most immediate danger is what might break in the process of trying to get this apparatus to do what he wants.
At every step of modernizing this system they have run systems concurrently to make sure the “new” functions as well as the old. Redundant systems are only phased out over long time periods after they have enough data on system functioning to feel confident in the “modernized” infrastructure. This is expensive, time consuming and absolutely necessary to make sure this system functions 100% of the time. Elon Musk, however, has never shown respect or understanding of the concept of a mission critical IT system. All he sees is “inefficiency” because he doesn’t understand that there are some things in this world that need to function no matter what and you spend the additional money to make sure it runs, including when it’s being updated….
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