Ian Welsh

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

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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Open Thread

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On February 22, 2025

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. No vax/anti-vax.

Understanding DOGE’s War Against the 20th Century

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On February 21, 2025

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To understand DOGE, it’s best to start with Reagan. Reagan reduced regulation massively, and where he couldn’t get rid of laws, he and his successors just stopped enforcing them regularly. This took steam over time. So, for example, there was some anti-trust action up until George W. Bush. In fact, without anti-trust actions, there would be no Microsoft as we understand it. IBM had MS write the operating system for the IBM PC because they had been hit by anti-trust action repeatedly and wanted to avoid it. It’s not like IBM couldn’t write its own operating system

Gates himself engaged in repeated violations of anti-trust law, and most of it was allowed to slide; eventually the Feds went after him. The case was going badly for him, but George Bush Jr. ordered it shut down.

Generally, regulations do impose a cost, and in return, the public receives a benefit. There’s also some benefit to corporations, because regulations increase trust. But as time goes by, people assume companies are trustworthy, and regulations start seeming like pure cost.

Cut regulations, and you increase profits. It’s often that simple. The decay of trust which loses money takes decades, and the profits are now.

Likewise, when you cut government workers, the work usually still needs to be done. Contractors take over, and they charge more and usually do a shittier job, if not immediately, but certainly in due time. Here in Toronto, where I live, half the garbage collection was given to private enterprise. At first, they were cheaper, but within ten years, why, they were more expensive than union work, though somehow the actual workers were getting paid less. Strange, that.

Nor is the Federal bureaucracy in any significant way bloated:

The chart above is in absolute numbers, which means the size of the federal workforce, relative to population, has been declining. You wonder why you’re getting bad service? That, plus contractors, is why.

All of this, of course, doesn’t include the fact that Musk was under investigation by multiple agencies. This Grok (his own AI) generated lists from February, amuses:

Before the election, Musk said:

Billionaire Tesla and X boss Elon Musk suggested Monday that he will end up behind bars if Vice President Kamala Harris beats former President Donald Trump in next month’s election.

“If he loses, I’m f—ed,” Musk told Tucker Carlson of the Republican nominee in an interview broadcast on X.

“How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?” the world’s richest man quipped. “Will I see my children? I don’t know.”

Perhaps more important is the larger picture of financial enforcement. Musk wants X to be an “everything app,” which includes making it a payment system, and in effect, a bank. Like Crypto-entrepreneurs and many others, he wants the profits of a financial corporation without the oversight, including without the FDIC deposit insurance.

Tech bros have spent over 30 years staring at financial elites and seeing how rich they are, they’re salivating for some of that easy money. Destruction and intimidation of regulatory agencies is what is required to make it truly happen. Remember that Musk and other politically active tech-bros like Peter Thiel made their first bundle from PayPal.

Finance firms have been the most politically powerful special interest group since at least the 90s, but they are being replaced by politically-connected tech firms — an industry they helped birth, and billionaires who would not exist without tax and financial law changes spear-headed by Wall Street.

DOGE’s purpose isn’t to cut costs. It’s to open up new profit opportunities, attack resisting parts of the deep state, and remove legal risk from breaking the law. That’s all. It’s why the second part of the government shut down entirely was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The idea, as always, has been to end the reforms which began with FDR’s New Deal and go back to the 1890s. Notice how obsessed Trump is with ending income tax and going to tariffs: That’s a 19th century political economy setup.

Welcome to the new Gilded Age, with even richer oligarchs.

 

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If You Go For the King #2: Romania

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On February 20, 2025

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So, Romania’s Supreme cancelled their previous Presidential election, ostensibly due to Russian interference.

The guy who won last time, however, will probably win the next election in May. He recently stated:

Westerners don’t seem to get how you do lawfare. If Democrats and/or the deep state were going to prosecute Trump and his associates, they needed to make sure Trump wound up in jail and unable to run for President. The purges which have happened since his re-election are only logical: Why wouldn’t he try to destroy the people and the mechanisms they used to go after him?

Same thing with Romania. Cancel the election, then don’t lock Georgescu up? Were they smoking their own crack? Did they genuinely think something would change the numbers in the next election?

I think what Pakistan has done to Imran Khan is despicable, but once you break norms and go after someone who normally would be beyond bounds, you have to finish the job — which the Pakistani deep state (military) did: They threw him in prison on essentially bogus charges.

Western liberals are good at foreign coups and whatnot, but they haven’t quite figured out how to use lawfare properly against truly powerful people in their own countries. That, I suppose, is a good thing, but it is rather pathetic, and it isn’t a weakness shared by their domestic opponents.

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Understanding the Russian-American Ukraine Peace Negotiations

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On February 19, 2025

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Let’s take a look at these negotiations in more detail. First, a summary of Secretary of State Rubio’s:

  • Ending the conflict in Ukraine will require “difficult and intense diplomacy” over a long period of time.
  • Ending the conflict in Ukraine will require concessions from all sides and is only possible with their consent, the conditions must be “acceptable”
  • Trump wants to end the conflict in Ukraine fairly and not allow it to resume “in 2-3 years”
  • The EU must be at the negotiating table at some point, as it imposed sanctions against Russia
  • The future of the negotiation process on Ukraine will be determined by the willingness of the parties to “keep their promises”, this will be shown in the coming weeks
  • Ending the conflict in Ukraine will open the way for Russia and the US to cooperate in economics and geopolitics
  • There have been no significant US-Russia contacts for almost three years, the meeting in Riyadh laid the foundation for future interaction
  • Work to restore the activities of Russian and US diplomatic missions could be quite quick
  • Restoring the normal operation of the US and Russian diplomatic missions is the “next stage” of the negotiation process between the two countries, since the US considers it impossible to negotiate with Russia on Ukraine without the normal operation of diplomatic missions

This is all remarkably sensible, actually, and the idea that the two great powers with the most nuclear weapons did not have regular diplomatic contacts was always dangerous and stupid.

As discussed here before, the American intention is to make Europe provide peacekeepers and pay for reconstruction, and America hopes to force Ukraine to sign over a large amount of mineral rights, though Zelensky has, quite rightly, so far refused to do so.

Meanwhile, there’s this piece of wishful thinking:

The United States is trying to “break up” Russia’s alliances with Iran, China, and North Korea. This was announced by Keith Kellogg, the US President’s special representative for Ukraine, during a conference in Munich, CNN reports.

Some commenters think that this is what America and Russia want — an end to the above alliances and:

What Putin wants: No NATO membership, (non-negotiable), 4 oblasts in Ukraine and Crimea, including territories not currently occupied by Russia

What Trump wants: Break ties with China (non-negotiable), join US sanctions on China

I’m reasonably certain ending the alliance with China and joining US sanctions on China is a non-starter, and if that’s non-negotiable, then there isn’t going to be a deal. China, North Korea, and Iran all helped Russia when Russia desperately needed help. It is no exaggeration to say that if China had not supported Russia’s economy, the anti-Russia sanctions would have worked, and Iran and North Korea provided weapons and munitions the Russians desperately needed while they were ramping up domestic production.

While simultaneously trying to cut this deal, Trump is turning on long-term allies, threatening them with sanctions — and in the case of Greenland/Denmark, even saying he refuses to rule out using military force. America’s record of keeping agreements is abysmal.

Over the decades of observing Putin, I’d say that he values reliability more than almost anything else. The Iranians, North Koreans, and Chinese are reliable. America is not.

In negotiations there’s a concept known as BATNA: your Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement.

Russia’s is simple enough: It’s winning the war. Unless America is literally willing to go to war with Russia, there’s nothing they can do to stop Russia from winning, and then impose a peace after a Ukrainian unconditional surrender.

What’s America going to do, impose more sanctions? The Russia economy has done better under Western sanctions than it did before the sanction regime. Send more military aid? Cupboards are damn near bare. The only viable threat America has is to hit deeper into Russia, and that’s a real threat, but since such weapons are aimed and fired by Western specialists, that risks war with Russia.

What can America offer as an ally that China can’t? Only a removal of sanctions. That would be valuable mostly if it meant repair of NordStream and renewal of gas to Europe, but America wants to keep Europe as a captive customer for U.S. LNG (which is twice as expensive).

It’s hard for me to see why Russia would agree to get rid of reliable allies, and turn on China in exchange for an agreement from America which Putin must regard as unreliable. Sure, he’d like a negotiated peace, and an end to the war, but Ukraine’s army looks close to collapse. When that happens, Russia will suddenly start taking huge swathes of Ukraine. And “No NATO” is entirely achievable in an unconditional surrender.

Plus, Europe’s politics are changing. Parties which oppose hostility to Russia are coming on strong, and Europe is furious at Trump’s actions, and the words of his proxies. Right now, Europe is still full-on in support of Ukraine, and generally supports an anti-Russian stance, but time is likely to break that unity of hatred.

It’s not that Trump is wrong to want to break up the Russia-China axis. Pushing Russia into China’s camp was one of the greatest unforced errors of post-Cold War diplomacy, and an error I’ve written about in the past. With Russia in China’s camp, anti-China sanctions cannot work, because Russia is a land-based supplier of the food, mineral, fuel which cannot be interdicted.

But the ship has sailed. You can’t undo almost 50 years of anti-Russia policy overnight, because the last 50 years have proved to Russia that America can’t be trusted to keep agreements and, overall, China is far more reliable.

Suppose Russia cooperates against China, and America does manage to take out China. Who do you think would be next? Who does Putin think would be next?

So if joining anti-China sanctions really is non-negotiable, then these talks will fail. My guess is that this negotiation point isn’t actually required or non-negotiable, and that Trump really wants this war over one way or the other. But if this requirement is non-negotiable, the war will continue.

Meanwhile, restoring proper diplomacy between Russia and America is a good thing. We’ll see what comes of it.

 

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Understanding Canadians’ Reaction to Trump’s Threats

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On February 18, 2025

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Most Americans don’t understand why Canadians are so angry about Trump’s actions, and his talks of annexation.

I think hockey illustrates it well. Back in 2014, the singer who sang the American anthem’s mic failed at a hockey game. Canadians finished the song:

Just recently, fans at a Montreal game booed the anthem.

Here’s the thing: Ordinary Canadians thought that America was Canada’s friend.They really believed this.

Thus, hearing Trump’s threats, and seeing how many Americans back them, and how Americans deride and insult Canada, they feel betrayed.

The opposition to joining the US is in super-majority territory: over 80 percent. Canadians like being Canadian and think our society and form of government is better than America’s. They know Americans think the opposite, but it never occurred to most of them that America would try and force Canada to give up its sovereignty, or economically attack Cnanda.

Of course this is foolishness. America has never had friends and never will. It’s an antagonistic nation of bullies, and they have a long record of invading and bullying other nations. But ordinary Canadians, like ordinary people everywhere, don’t really think such issues through. Americans are a lot like Canadians and Canadians consume a ton of American media and tended to identify with America.

Personally, I’ve always been worried that America would turn on Canada, and since the ’90s I’ve been pushing for Canadian policy to recognize that. So, if we can avoid an invasion, I’m somewhat pleased that Trump has torn off the mask and shown the barbarian beneath. Even if the political elite is still in denial, it pushes us towards understanding the world more realistically. There is only one country that can credibly threaten Canada, and it’s been that way for as long as Canada has existed. Hell, since before Canada was formed.

Oh, and Americans: America doesn’t protect us from anybody but America. For Canada, NATO is and always has been nothing but an American protection racket. A proper Canadian military wouldn’t be an expeditionary force designed to help American overseas wars; we would lend naval and air support, with a lot of icebreakers, and an army primarily trained for insurgency to defend the only country in the world which has ever been a threat to us.

But I agree. Canada should spend a lot more on its military. We just shouldn’t spend it on US tech, as Canadians have begun to recognize:

Defence experts warn that The United States controls many of the key systems onboard Canada’s new warships, allowing the Americans to hold this country hostage over future upgrades or even the provision of spare parts.Taxpayers are spending as much as $80 billion on a new fleet of Canadian Surface Combatants to be constructed at Irving Shipbuilding.

The heart of each of the warships is the command management system, which controls weapons, radars and other intelligence-gathering equipment.

Originally that high-tech system was supposed to be Canadian-made and under the full control of the Canadian government.

But that was switched out for a made-in-the-U.S. technology called Aegis, allowing the Americans full control and oversight of the supply of parts, modifications or future upgrades, industry officials confirm.

“This is what happens when you exclude Canadian companies: You find yourself potentially being held hostage,” explained Alan Williams, the former procurement chief at the Department of National Defence. “We don’t control the (combat management) system; the Americans do. Who knows what they are going to demand from us?”

Other Canadian defence industry officials acknowledged the same concerns — they asked not to be named as they did not want to jeopardize ongoing contracts with the federal government.

You don’t make your military dependent on the good will of the country that is the primary threat,and you get what you pay for.

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Europe and Ukraine Aren’t at the Peace Table; That Means They’re on It

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On February 17, 2025

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Russia and America are going to have a peace summit about the Ukraine war — without Ukraine or any European country. This is slightly less ridiculous than the previous peace summit, which didn’t include Russia because Russia can fight on without anyone but China’s support, whereas if the Ukraine tried to fight on without US support, it’s cooked.

Well, sort of. Ukraine is cooked any way you look at it. It was always going to lose the war, and that hasn’t changed.

What’s amusing about the what’s being floated is that Europe is supposed to send the peacekeepers and pay for the reconstruction of Ukraine and the US is supposed to… well, maybe get some of Ukraine’s wealth, though Zelensky has quite rightly refused to sign that deal.

Interestingly Zelensky had, at first, expressed willingness, but when he got to the White House, it turned out that he was being offered nothing in return. It seems the Trumpian right feels that Ukraine has been taking advantage of America and owes it.

So, the US, which was the primary actor behind the Maidan coup and Ukraine’s actions since then which contributed to the war, who was almost certainly responsible for cutting Europe/Germany off from Nord Stream gas through sabotage, wants the Euros to foot the entire bill for ending the war.

Any European leader willing to chew down on this has less than zero self-respect.

And the sheer chutzpah of saying that Ukraine has taken advantage of America reminds me of the guy V.P Cheney shot apologizing to him. None of this would have happened if the US hadn’t pushed for it every step of the way, and the US and UK were responsible for Ukraine not taking an early, far better peace deal.

The issue, of course, is that neither Europe nor Ukraine can sustain the war without American support. It’s lost, but the Euros could veto the deal if they could keep the war going alone and drag it out enough that it was worth Putin dealing with them.

There is another way, of course. Europe could offer Putin an end to sanctions and repair of NordStream. They could ask China to be the peace guarantor, which makes sense because China is, actually, the only country Russia has no choice but to listen to. They could cut a deal with China at the same time.

Then they could leave NATO and build their own militaries up. Kick out 90% of all American diplomats and all remaining post-USAID NGOs at the same time, to help avoid the inevitable coup attempts.

All this requires is either a modicum of self-respect or a scintilla of self-interest. When Europe’s power has disintegrated to the point where they don’t even have a seat at the table on how a war being fought on their soil should be ended, it’s either a wake-up call, or the end of Europe’s significance.

More realistically the best hope is that multiple European governments fall and are replaced by those who have enough pride or self-interest to strop grovelling.

Europe has no prospect of being what it once was. But it could be a regional great power. It’s that, or returning to what it was for much of history, a meaningless Eurasian peninsula full of barbarians.

 

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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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