Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 16, 2025

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On March 16, 2025

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By Tony Wikrent

 

Jaime Raskin Asks Us To Help Make A FOIA Tsunami

Beryl Stone, March 11, 2025 [DailyKos]

From Raskin:

Today I filed a formal demand for access to my personal data obtained by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk. I encourage all U.S. citizens to join me in doing the same.

Elon Musk should have been more careful in what he wished for, Carol. DOGE recently dodged lawsuits about its seizure of citizens’ personal data by telling courts that it is a legitimate government agency entitled to extract this information. What Elon Musk apparently did not realize is that this statement triggers DOGE’s obligation to comply with citizen demands to see and—if need be—correct their personal information under the Privacy Act. It also allows every citizen to find out what other agencies or outside parties have been made privy to our information.
Last night, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued an injunction commanding DOGE to comply with citizen requests under the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA encompasses the Federal Privacy Act of 1974, which entitles any citizen to access personal information held in any U.S. government records system.
By visiting the link on my website HERE, you can fill out the Privacy Act request form and mail it in directly to DOGE. This newly recognized federal agency, which has been systematically accessing government computer data systems, now has an obligation to respond to specific information demands from any of the 340 million U.S. citizens who exercise their legal right to defend their privacy and establish the security of their personal information.

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

 

Trump Orders US Military to Plan Invasion of Panama to Seize Canal: Report

Brett Wilkins, March 13, 2025 [CommonDreams]

U.S. officials familiar with the planning said options for “reclaiming” the vital waterway include close cooperation with Panama’s military and, absent that, possible war.

 

Legal Fight Underway as Trump Invokes Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for Deportations

Jessica Corbett, March 15, 2025 [CommonDreams]

 

DHS Official Explicitly Equates Protest to Terrorism in ‘Stunning’ Interview

Julia Conley, March 13, 2025 [CommonDreams]

 

Trump visits Justice Department for speech that breaks all norms

Perry Stein, Jeremy Roebuck, Derek Hawkins, March 14, 2025 [Washington Post, via msn.com]

 

DHS has begun performing polygraph tests on employees to find leakers 

[NBC News, via Naked Capitalism 03-10-2025]

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On March 15, 2025

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 09, 2025

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On March 9, 2025

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By Tony Wikrent

 

Men DOGEbags at Work

Understanding Trump’s War on Research Funding & The Future 

[Pandemic Accountability Project, via Naked Capitalism 03-05-2025]

…The gutting of federal funding for scientific & medical research completely destroys America’s position as a global science leader – sending a clear signal to the best and brightest in other countries who now no longer have a reason to immigrate here. China is being handed the rest of the century on a silver platter, along with the rest of BRICS, whilst America regresses into an irrelevant, backwater shithole that is the world’s laughingstock….

As the Obama-Biden Administration wasted the 2010s foolishly letting themselves be bamboozled by Silicon Valley, who flagrantly broke the laws governing industries such as taxis and hospitality by deciding that having an app and calling yourself a tech company meant you could do whatever you want, the economy would be fundamentally reshaped in a siege on what remained of labor protections. The result was a significant transfer of power to a few select billionaires over the American economy….

The National Institute of Health’s (NIH) process to disperse funding, while imperfect, empowered scientists to pursue research that may lead to significant medical and scientific breakthroughs – free from corporate meddling. The justification for the slashing of federal research funding that Vinay Prasad is currently cheerleading is that the American taxpayer shouldn’t be paying for “useless” studies, and that only wealthy interests, such as corporations or tech billionaires, should be able to dictate to scientists what they research. It is in fact much closer towards a regression towards feudalism, forcing our best and brightest to instead placate the whims of the wealthy nobles whose patronage becomes essential as a source of research funding….

What we are witnessing is a significant transfer of power, humiliating hardworking scientists and forcing them to grovel before the ownership class, so they can relish in exploiting America’s brightest minds for profit. Scientists, understand this: Your corporate boss will own the intellectual property of your research, and will be the only one to profit from it – not you – leaving you out to dry with nothing but crumbs. This is the vision of “economic growth” that Trump, Elon, and their billionaire friends share for America. Of course, the current business mindset of short-term infinite growth at all costs (line go up) is completely incompatible with how scientific development actually functions. As Reddit user “throwawayainteasy” explains:

“Some of the most important scientific breakthroughs are things that we won’t really understand the value of until 10-20 years from now or more…No for-profit company would fund the first 20 steps in that process, because there’s no clear path to profitability until the end. That’s why governments across the world are the primary funders of pure research.”

We Found Elon Musk’s DOGE Email Address and We’re Fighting to Reveal His Messages

Shawn Musgrave, March 6 2025 [The Intercept]

FOIA works best when requests are as specific as possible. The U.S. government sometimes plays games with journalists, researchers, and other watchdogs, rejecting asks it considers too vague — such as requests for correspondence that fail to include an official’s government email address.

That’s why The Intercept is publishing Musk’s government email address.

According to a source, Musk has been assigned the email address erm71@who.eop.gov. The email address reflects his attachment to the White House Office, the Executive Office of the President, and, apparently, Musk’s full initials plus his birth year, 1971. This differs from the standard format for EOP emails, which typically include the staffer’s full first and last name.

The Intercept has already filed more than a dozen FOIA requests for Musk’s emails using this information.

[TW: I sent two questions directly to Musk: “Why do you want to kill us?” And, “How many injunctions and court rulings are needed until you understand you are violating the law? Either you respect the rule of law or you don’t. Calling for the impeachment of judges who make rulings you don’t like only solidifies the conclusion you are an authoritarian bully intent on destroying the rule of law in the United States.” ]

Leaked List Shows DOGE Is Lawyering Up

Shawn Musgrave, March 5 2025 [The Intercept]

A list of DOGE staffers reviewed by The Intercept shows Elon Musk’s quasi-agency has brought in at least four more attorneys.

Did Trump just rein Elon in? 

[Vox, via Naked Capitalism 03-07-2025]

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On March 7, 2025

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 02, 2025

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On March 2, 2025

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By Tony Wikrent

 

Musk’s Purges Suddenly Take a Horrific Turn—and Wreck an Ugly MAGA Lie — We can now be depressingly confident that their mass cuts are killing people.

Greg Sargent, March 1, 2025 [The New Republic]

It has a dry, bureaucratic name, but Ready to Use Therapeutic Food has functioned for over a decade as a lifeline for countless starving children around the globe. Manufactured in the United States and distributed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, it’s a paste made of peanuts, milk, and vitamins that alleviates a form of acute malnutrition known as “severe wasting.”

Now the Trump administration has officially terminated a number of current contracts struck by USAID for this lifesaving nutrition, contracts that had called for the paste to be delivered to hundreds of thousands of children, most in Africa, according to the Georgia-based nonprofit set to deliver them, Mana Nutrition….

The full extent of the damage from these cuts—originally set in motion by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency—is not yet known. But Atul Gawande, a surgeon who formerly led USAID’s global health initiatives, has established, via communications with partners that work with USAID, a list of contracts that were terminated. Among them are programs that offer natal care for mothers and children, that provide netting and other equipment to prevent the spread of malaria, that work to thwart the spread of Ebola and bird flu in dozens of countries, and much more. The cancellations will nix programs that helped tens of millions of people, Gawande notes.

“This is going to be a massive loss of life overall,” Gawande told me in an interview. “Children are likely already dying, and will clearly be dying in large numbers.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times has developed a long list of other terminated contracts, which include programs preventing the spread of polio, treating HIV and tuberculosis, ensuring clean drinking water in war-torn regions, and buttressing public health in many other ways. Tens of milions of people benefited; now they will not.

 

Hegseth Clears the Way for More War Crimes 

[Daniel Larison, via Naked Capitalism 02-25-2025]

The Secretary of Defense admitted that the reason for removing the JAGs was so that they wouldn’t be “roadblocks to anything that happens.” If top military lawyers don’t serve as roadblocks more often than not, they aren’t doing their jobs properly.

Trump eases rules on military raids and airstrikes, expanding range of who can be targeted 

[CBS, via Naked Capitalism 03-01-2025]

 

White House point man at Homeland Security shared ‘martial law option’ post to keep Trump in office 

[CNN, via Naked

Capitalism Water Cooler 02-26-2025]

“The Trump administration’s new point man for dealings with the Department of Homeland Security is a former far-right podcast host and election denier who once shared an article calling for ‘martial law’ to keep Donald Trump in office following his loss in the 2020 election. Paul Ingrassia and the Twitter account for a podcast he co-hosted posted the remark and similar sentiments on social media in December 2020 and January 2021, according to a CNN KFile review of deleted and still-active posts by Ingrassia himself and the account of the podcast. The 29-year-old Ivy League-educated lawyer now serves as the second Trump administration’s White House liaison to the DHS, a key role that has historically involved managing the administration’s relationship with the department and overseeing the placement of political appointees.”

 

STATE OF NEW YORK, et al., v. DONALD J. TRUMP (PDF)

[United States District Court, Southern District of New York, via Naked Capitalism 02-23-2025]

 

Judge extends block on DOGE’s access to federal payment systems 

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 02-23-2025] The opinion.

Trump and Elon’s ‘Pointless Bloodbath’ at the FAA Is Even Worse Than You Think 

[Rolling Stone, via Naked Capitalism 02-23-2025]

While air traffic controllers were supposedly immune from the purge, some air traffic control support workers were terminated, the FAA worker says. Rolling Stone separately spoke with a fired FAA employee whose job involved ensuring flight paths account for hazards like cranes and new buildings, as well as another terminated FAA staffer who ensured that pilots are medically able and cleared to fly. No one wants their plane to cross paths with a crane, of course, but the latter role is important, too, given the nation’s ongoing pilot shortage.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 23, 2025

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On February 23, 2025

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By Tony Wikrent

 

Trump’s assault on the Constitution

Friday Night Massacre in the Military

Joyce Vance, Feb 22, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

[TW: The AP story on Fridaynight’s firing of Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. did not include the crucial news that Trump also dismissed all the senior Judge Advocates General (JAGS) for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. In her Civil Discourse substack, Joyce Vance — a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017, and currently a professor at University of Alabama School of Law, as well as a legal commentator on  MSNBC — has raised alarms about what all these dismissals mean:]

Is Donald Trump trying to turn the military into a political weapon, just like he’s trying, and at least partially succeeding, in doing at the Justice Department?

….competent military leaders are being dismissed for no apparent good reason.

And that’s the heart of it, why dismiss them? Why on a Friday night? Why so many all and once? And why the Judge Advocates General?

Members of the Judge Advocates General Corps, for instance, respond to legal questions about rules of engagement, targeting, intelligence law, and detainee operations. They are military lawyers whose core functions involve military justice and law of war. They offer advice on questions including what constitutes an illegal order, what is a war crime, what is a constitutional violation. Replacing their leadership with Trump loyalists could have serious implications for how the military reacts in a number of situations, including assisting with mass deportations and policing protests, which they are currently prohibited from doing by the Posse Comitatus Act.

 

Ominous

Josh Marshall, February 21, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]

President Trump has abruptly fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Charles Q. Brown Jr., and is replacing him with a retired three star general, Dan Caine. This portends a future grave crisis as the President attempts to restructure the military into one personally loyal to him. Caine has not been a service chief or held a combatant command or been the head of the air forces of a combatant command. So basically he’s held none of the assignments which normally precedes elevation to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs….

In its own way equally ominous, Trump tonight fired the Judge Advocates General of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Among many other things it’s the military lawyers who determine what is a legal order and what’s not. If you’re planning to give illegal orders they are an obvious obstacle.

 

The Making of Emergencies

Caroline Elkins, February 16, 2024 [The New York Review]

…On January 20 Trump declared not one emergency but three. The first, applying to the southern border, echoed an emergency he had declared in 2019. This time, much like previously, the president can circumvent congress on multiple issues, including military spending. The second emergency designates “cartels and other organizations” as “foreign terrorist organizations” under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), typically enacted for sanctions. The third is a “national energy emergency” under which Trump can conceivably bypass a host of legal and environmental regulations that had impeded his promise in his first administration to “drill, baby drill.”

In the United States, as soon the president declares a national emergency—a decision entirely within his purview, typically done through executive order—he lays claim to nearly 150 otherwise dormant statutory powers. In his declaration, he must identify which of those powers he is activating….

Most countries today have constitutional provisions for national emergencies, but neither the United Kingdom nor the United States are among them. Only in the past half-century did both countries pass legislation to narrow and regulate the executive’s power to declare a state of emergency: the US’s National Emergencies Act (1976) and the UK’s Civil Contingencies Act (2004)….

…as I was finishing this essay, Trump took to social media channeling Schmitt’s vision. “He who saves his Country,” he posted, “does not violate any Law.”

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On February 22, 2025

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 16, 2025

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On February 16, 2025

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By Tony Wikrent

 

Strategic Political Economy

Why Resistance Alone Will Fail 

Les Leopold, February 14, 2025

 

Musk’s political economy

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-10-2025]

 

[X-Twitter, Feb 9, 2025]

If he found actual fraud like he claims, where is the law enforcement? Where are the investigators, lawsuits, charges? Isn’t it a little odd that they claim to have found trillions of dollars worth of fraud but nobody is being charged and even the “crime scene” is not taken over by the feds to avoid tampering with the evidence? Unfortunately this seems like a political power play where no crimes have been found but they make enough noise that the public will accept the destruction of the government infrastructure, assuming it’s all rotten.

 

Speed Up the Breakdown: The future of the government depends on how far the DOGE dynamo spins. 

Quinn Slobodian, February 15, 2025 [The New York Review]

For the last month, the US opinion-making class has stared agog as Elon Musk and his minions have stormed the engine room of the federal government…. Buffaloed onlookers have groped for precedent….

None of the analogies are very persuasive. This is because we are witnessing something new: the convergence of three strains of politics that have never simultaneously been this proximate to power. Those projects come from different but related places: the Wall Street–Silicon Valley nexus of distressed debt and startup culture; anti–New Deal conservative think tanks; and the extremely online world of anarchocapitalism and right-wing accelerationism. Within the new administration, each strain is striving to realize its desired outcome. The first wants a sleek state that narrowly seeks to maximize returns on investment; the second a shackled state unable to promote social justice; and the third, most dramatically, a shattered state that cedes governing authority to competing projects of decentralized private rule. We are watching how well they can collaborate to reinforce one another. The future condition of the government—and by extension the country—depends on how far the dynamo spins….

Musk’s hirelings by these lights are less latter-day squadristi than radicalized management consultants. Instead of brickbats and lugers, they wield red pens to mark layoffs and offload inventory. We can take Musk at his word when he said in 2021 that the government is a corporation, but a special one that has a monopoly on violence and cannot go bankrupt. If, as he has claimed, private actors are better at allocating resources than public ones, it stands to reason that a state should be shorn of redundant staff and services….

The second way to understand the DOGEstorm is not through Musk but rather through the more systematic approach of Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau…. Vought has said that America is in the “late stages of a complete Marxist takeover” that needs to be reversed aggressively by putting government employees “in trauma,” treating them as “villains,” and sending “power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.” Trans rights are a particular trigger: Vought has denounced the “transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions.”….

The third program that underpins the present moment is often described as a project of right-wing accelerationism. That term is usually associated with Curtis Yarvin…. Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into what Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, calls a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.”….

…For sympathetic observers, however, the goings-on in Washington are inspiring the same exhilaration that the anarchocapitalist economist Murray Rothbard felt when he watched the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was, he said, “a particularly wonderful thing to see unfolding before our very eyes, the death of a state.”

Monopoly Round-Up: On Ending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Matt Stoller [BIGBIG, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-10-2025]

Last week, Elon Musk and the new Trump Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought stopped all work at the commission, including enforcement of rules, litigation, as well as supervision and examination activity. They are planning to shutter the headquarters and presumably will be laying off most of the staff. By shuttering the CFPB, Trump is not just going back to a pre-financial crisis status quo, but to something actually weaker than that. There is essentially no longer any Federal enforcement of consumer protection rules for financial products….

We can now expect rampant fraud and cheating in banking and fintech, not just a scam here or there, but regular losses of life savings by people who followed the rules, illegal foreclosures, random seizures of the working capital of small businesses, abuse by debt collectors, and routine deception by even respected financial firms.

Elon Musk’s stated goal with X is to create an ‘everything app,’ which you would use to communicate, engage with social media, pay for things, hail cabs, shop, and so forth. All the big tech monopolists want to be the ‘everything app.’ The CFPB was proposing to treat these companies with payment systems as, well, payment systems, and subject them to the same supervisory treatment that banks have. Now that’s out the window, so big tech firms have a competitive advantage over banks….

[D]estroying the bureau strikes me as a long term strategic error for the banking sector and big tech. The banks were already losing to Silicon Valley, and now they are at a regulatory disadvantage to boot. More fundamentally, this shutdown breaks a basic deal. I worked in the House during the great financial crisis, and the arrangement was that the banks would accept some mild oversight via the CFPB, and in return they would get a multi-trillion dollar bailout and make excessive profits. I didn’t like that deal and encouraged the member I worked for to vote against it, but it was forced on liberals by Barack Obama. (This deal was an intra-Democratic Party arrangement; conservative Republicans were in thrall to the banks and wanted nothing but foreclosures and bailouts. And they still do.)

It was an egregiously terrible choice, one that liberals couldn’t acknowledge because then they’d have to admit a whole lot of uncomfortable truths, notably that Wall Street is a malevolent force, that Obama was a malevolent leader, and that the Dodd-Frank reform bill passed in the wake of the crisis, rather than ending bailouts, was a joke. But now they will be faced with the bracing truth, that there is no good faith negotiations with dominant firms demanding coercive governing power. Either Silicon Valley bankers rule America, or the public does. But there’s no middle ground.

 

Capture of U.S. Critical Infrastructure by Neoreactionaries (pdf)

anonymous [Naked Capitalism, February-5-2025]

…This memo outlines four alarming developments that transcend partisanship.  I. II. III. IV.

  1. Musk-aligned operatives have seized control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), purging career civil servants and installing loyalists with ties to Musk’s private ventures.
  2. DOGE has deployed unvetted hires—many under 25 years old—who now wield de facto control over sensitive government functions without security clearances. These individuals, drawn from Musk’s orbit and Silicon Valley’s neo-reactionary (NRx) network, operate without legal oversight or accountability.
  3. DOGE has gained read-write access over Treasury pipes and federal payment systems, granting Musk direct influence over the financial infrastructure of the U.S. government. This unprecedented control over money flows creates a national security risk and a personal power lever for Musk.
  4. The congressionally mandated divestment of TikTok has been delayed, with reported Chinese interest in Musk as a buyer. If successful, Musk would control not just X (formerly Twitter) but also the largest platform shaping youth political discourse—further concentrating his influence over public opinion.

Rather than operating as an ally of the Trump administration, Musk has hijacked its ambitions for his own purposes. His rapid takeover of federal infrastructure mirrors the broader ambitions of the neoreactionary (NRx) movement—a small group of Silicon Valley elites who reject democracy and seek to install a “CEO Monarch” to rule by technological and financial dominance. This network includes Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, David Sacks, and Curtis Yarvin, among others. Once considered fringe, purveyors of this ideology have now been embedded into the core of government operations….

 

How Trump’s Firings “Paralyze” the NLRB

[Mother Jones, February 14, 2025]

The shake-up is particularly alarming because—by leaving only two members on the five-member Board—the Trump administration has eliminated a quorum, effectively preventing the NLRB from ruling on cases at the federal level.

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