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.
NR
Pretty much spot-on, Ian. The only thing I’d argue with is the idea that erosion of trust in companies takes decades. That used to be true, but today it can happen much faster. Information about contaminated food, etc., can spread very quickly today. That’s why Trump and Musk are shutting down information about food recalls and the like. But it remains to be seen how much they can really stop the flow of information about listeria outbreaks and other things of that nature.
And of course, on the other side, we have all the pro-corporate propaganda in our culture and on social media, which as we’ve seen is very effective.
So the corporations may simply be betting that their propaganda can counter any information about the decline in quality and safety of their products that manages to get out. And given how fundamentally stupid a lot of people are these days, they may very well win that bet.
StewartM
I also think you’re leaving out a key element of why Musk wanted to get into the Federal Payments systems: social control.
What? Say something “nasty” about the Great Leader, or his minions? Or maybe not even grovel appropriately before the Great Leader? Expect a letter a few weeks later saying:
“There’s a problem with your student loan/your Medicare payment/Your Medicaid reimbursement/Your SS payment”. Or “You’be been selected for an audit” or “Your bank account is suspected of criminal activity and has been frozen.”
David Pakman has been told by lawyers to expect that Trump will start a harassment campaign against independent liberal/left media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5aleKSQTyM&t=16s
Also–and I say this having come from the corporate world–I see what Musk is doing to be nothing less than what Wall Street did to companies like Boeing (and mine). Essentially, force older experienced workers out to be replaced by cheaper, younger kids who don’t know as much. Downsize the work force in total. Some observations:
1) Musk sees himself as the lone genius Ayn Rand hero. (Cue in the end of the Foundainhead movie):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-VEZpQNYWY
The old-timers will tell the Ayn Rand genius that what he/she wants isn’t wise, has been tried before and didn’t work, and so on. They will push back. That’s not tolerable to the lone genius!
The kids, not knowing as much, and being less secure in their jobs, won’t argue back but comply. The “efficiency” savings are illusory, as management is just deluding that say, 4 people are still doing the work that 15 once did just as well. In reality (and I say this from having witnessed it) vital things are being dropped and no longer done, and as everyone is wearing multiple expert “hats”, so to speak, you don’t really have any experts left, you just pretend that people who know only a fraction of what the experienced people who could focus on an area of specialization once knew.
2) While Musk may see himself as such a genius, he’s really suffering a massive Dunnig-Kruger case. Just like in his tenure with X, he shows no appreciation of technical talent and acts without stopping to ask questions (asking questions first is the true mark of an intelligent person). Just like Ayn Rand (from a review of Atlas Shrugged) a worker is just a worker without any skills or knowledge or talent worth mentioning and management consists of giving barking orders. This is where Anarcho-Capitalism greets fascism, given how they both worship the Fuehrer Prinzip.
3) With US corporations having been largely gutted of institutional knowledge, the US government was the last bastion. That is being destroyed as we speak. You’re right, the goal of this will not to be to “save money” but to provide private companies (and Musk!) opportunities to gouge the government just like defense and Pharma does while providing shitty products and service.
Lastly, when institutional knowledge is gone and the Dunning-Kruger idiots have full sway, expect a lot of unforced errors and utter disasters. It will happen domestically for sure (witness Trump’s ordering the resevoir drained to fight the LA wildfire, but it didn’t and couldn’t and only wiped out the irrigation source FARMERS WHO VOTED FOR HIM needed for their crops during the dry summer; plus he did it with no advance warning):
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/11/california-water-trump
But I, and you, should be most worried about foreign policy. There aren’t any more George Marshalls to push back against these stupid ideas, and the idiots have no sense of limits on their power. They really do see themselves as omnipotent. They’re certainly have eliminated anyone who might tell them otherwise to their face, no?
Joseph Wolz
A redux of the 1890s without having an escape valve (movement West) plus a LOT MORE GUNS doesn’t seem like a very forward thinking thing to do. Especially given that the US military has never been good against insurgencies.
someofparts
On the positive side, Canada will probably have an even greater chance to welcome many of the most skilled scientists and other workers with critical skills who will be fleeing the repressive regime and failed economy of your southern neighbor.
Arthur
I agree with Mr. Wolz. In the past there was an escape valve. Move. I am, of course, well aware that the major problem with that stratagy was usually there was somebody already in place. Obviously, that brought its own set of problems. But it was an escape valve. I often think what will happen when the southeast becomes unliveable and the MAGAs start to move north. Right now they believe that they share a bond with the MAGAs in, let’s say, southern Illinois. And right now they do. But when the good ole southern boys want to share what the northerners already have they’ll find that they are no more welcome then if they had moved to Times Square. Then the fun will start for real.
different clue
@StewartM,
The Dunning-Kruger crash-path Musk will put governance on suits the New Maganazi Revolutionaries just fine, thank you. Especially the White Power Christianazi Gilead wing of the New Maganazi Revolution.
Their plan is to hang partway back, and when America is as much of a pile of rubble that Musk and Trump can make it . . . to then swoop in and transform the wreckage into the New Gilead White Christian Republic of Shit Headistan. ( They probably won’t include the ” Shit Headistan” part.)
That’s the intended future that non-Maganazi non-Shit Headistani Americans should be planning for, or planning against, or whatever.
StewartM
DC,
I have always argued against the survivalist mentality of ‘what to plan for for the upcoming ‘time of tribulation’ discussions here was misguided. Before civilization collapse and everyone becomes a hardscrabble farmer or similar, there will be some sort of authoritarian phase (or even totalitarian phase) where you and your likes will be the ‘enemy of the people’.
Nor will it take a massive government to achieve this. The Gestapo had only 6,500 agents in all of Germany. They didn’t need to keep the ‘enemy within’ under surveillance. Ordinary Germans (usually Nazi enthusiasts, or someone who wanted to cause mischief for you) were the informers. There will be a whole sleuth of MAGA faithful pointing you out by your posts on social media platforms, and here too, for disloyalty to the Great Leader. Punishment could range from warnings to keep your mouth shut, to threats of financial retaliation that I spoke of, all the way up to wrongful imprisonment and/or having you disappear and murdered by MAGA militia (former KKK and neo-Nazi types, no doubt).
Just recently, Trump’s DOJ is testing the waters by hinting prosecution of both a Congressman and Schumer with prosecution for saying nasty things about Musk or Trump:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-doj-threatens-dem-congressman-221559154.html
Recently, I’ve been enjoying (in a gallows humor way) re-runs of the 1960s TV show “Hogan’s Heroes”. Even though it’s obviously satire and farce, there is a kernel of reality in that show about the actual Third Reich. The rampant corruption within the Third Reich, the fact that everyone is watching his own back, that everyone puts his own survival above winning the war, the lies Germans told each other about the war effort and their chances of winning, and last but not least the lack of enthusiasm among many Germans. Remember, there were no fewer than 42 assassination attempts on Hitler’s life, most by Germans, and–remembering that Hitler only won 32.8 % of the vote in a free and fair election, and only 43.8 % in an election run by his own SA, less enthusiasm for the war among many Germans than their propaganda would have you believe. The suppression of dissent may give the impression of unified nation, but in reality the dissent and resentment just smolders under the surface.
Along those latter lines, the excellent Youtube Channel “WWII US Bombers” run by a person who works at an Air Force museum had a Youtube on information gleaned from German pilot POWs (captured in December 1944) who attacked US bomber formations on how the bombers could better mitigate such attacks. A commentator there described the conduct of POWs who would give their captors advice on how to defeat them “disgusting”, but I mentioned what I just mentioned, and moreover (given our current trajectory) I was thinking “if Canada and NATO and other countries invaded “Shit Headistan”, and I was asked for any information that would help them win, would I do it? MOST CERTAINLY YES! I would feel just like those cooperating German pilot POWs.
someofparts
I expect the US southwest to become uninhabitable, but the southeast will do better than you think. Sure, the lowlands and coastal areas may become impossible to live in, but areas around the Appalachians won’t. Atlanta is on a piedmont just beyond the foothills of the mountains and the altitude, frequent rainfall, and hardwood canopy mitigate the discomforts of a hot climate. It is delicious to sit on a porch here in the summer just after the sun goes down. Breezes kick up and fill the air with the green smells of plants cooling down after a day of baking in the sun. If people still had the sense to use architecture properly you would rarely even need to use air-conditioning.
different clue
At some point I can imagine that some Blue States and Blue Zones contiguously bordering Canada might petition Canada to admit them as Provinces of Canada.
If that happens, would Canada ever trust them? Would Canada even want them?
different clue
Here is an article I saw on Reddit just now, from The Hill, called: ” Trump‘s revolution will end badly for him and for America”
Is it hopium or is it just copium?
Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Foodforthought/comments/1iv00m2/trumps_revolution_will_end_badly_for_him_and_for/
different clue
@StewartM,
Given that I’ve already been here for several years and written some comments, if what you say is true then I have already been tagged.
So “suddenly stopping writing” is not going to save me, under your scenario.
So I might as well keep writing comments.
Obviously, the analog meatspace avatar-sender which sends “me” here to type will ‘ go gray in place’ in the meatspace world when things begin to smell like what you describe. People have mistaken me for homeless, so I clearly know how to look homeless in meatspace. I also know how to look like a low-functioning dull-normal when I am not looking homeless.
bruce wilder
I wish any of you could help me better understand better why “the 20th century” is shredding under this assault like wet toilet paper.
I’ve been observing the rot for thirty years and commenting sardonically for as long. Some aspects were very visible at particular moments, but the pushback was always misdirected or absurdist or lost in an instant memory hole. I know money and corruption and the crapification of everything is central to the process. It is like aging in that way, regrettable but inevitable, but still curious in a society that is continually reproducing and renewing.
StewartM is prattling on about Nazi Germany. Not a helpful analogy. No close parallels I can see. His argument, even overlooking the internal contradictions in characterizing the history, is just bizarre in its application. A dark fantasy I hope he finds entertaining, but it contains no insight into the current situation.
I gave up partisanship reluctantly more than 15 years ago and maybe that is why I see it so differently from those commenters who imagine they have been fighting the good fight against those “other” people all along, “other people” who are inexplicably “wrong” about everything, their complaints groundless or racist, “fundamentally stupid”
I am still waiting for NR to apologize for abusing people when commenters here were pointing out the early emerging evidence that the COVID vaccines were not very effective in preventing infection or transmission. I mention that because the loss of trust in government was well-earned and his voice was often lent to the cause of denial that it was happening when it was happening. I recall he was very pro-Ukraine in Feb ‘22, as if the propaganda was not already dog-eared cliches.
I mean no personal offense to other commenters, but without specifics, I don’t see how else to push back effectively on arguments that omit so much, in order to cheerlead nonsense. Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day, and it wasn’t only the Vandals knocking bricks to the ground. “Biden is sharp as a tack” might have something important to do with how we got here and why conmen as obvious as Trump and Musk are so absurdly powerful while being Dunning-Krueger incompetent.
someofparts
The Biden administration already went after Rob Urie for his writing. He posted about it at NCap. They threatened to hurt his family if he did not stop publishing.
As to the scenario DC linked to, if Vance staged a coup, I think that would be going from bad to worse. Vance is pure calculated demagogue. He should be shunned and outcast. Also, the part of that Hill article that refers to Trump as a Putin sympathizer tells me that the author is a clueless potato who actually fell for Hillary’s little Russiagate scam. I do agree with the premise of the article though. I don’t think the plans of president kookoo bananas and his deadbeat dad sidekick will be successful because their plans are stupid, but they will cause much damage and hurt many people before it ends.
Hvd
As is long apparent Trump is obviously effective at amassing and using power but is equally obviously terrible in governing and implementing real solutions to real problems. There is nothing historically unusual about this. That is not to say that a stopped clock can’t be right twice a day.
DMC
We’re moving to Ecuador. The low cost of living, especially the health care is our prime motivator but it’s also the “time to leave the burning house” factor. If no law can restrain Trump/Musk, then it’s a dictatorsip already. Plus they grow coffee and chocolate. Check out the videos on YouTube about expat life in Ecuador. Americans and Europeans have been moving there for about 20 years and they all say they’re biggest regret is not moving there sooner. All organic food and, depending on where you move, no seasons. It’s warm spring year round and they use the USD$ as their official currency.
StewartM
Bruce Wilder
StewartM is prattling on about Nazi Germany. Not a helpful analogy. No close parallels I can see. His argument, even overlooking the internal contradictions in characterizing the history, is just bizarre in its application. A dark fantasy I hope he finds entertaining, but it contains no insight into the current situation.
Well, given that both Musk and now Steve Bannon are giving Nazi salutes, and that real neo-Nazis among us recognize them and are cheering them, I think that you’re being willfully blind to what is actually happening. True, history never repeats itself, but it often rhymes.
And others with attitudes more ‘woke’ than yours Bruce agree with me. There’s been a uptick in USians leaving the country.
I am still waiting for NR to apologize for abusing people when commenters here were pointing out the early emerging evidence that the COVID vaccines were not very effective in preventing infection or transmission.
Uh, Bruce–no vaccine against an infectious disease will work unless a vast majority of people take it. That means, by hook or crook making it mandatory. Else you’re just allowing the infectious agent a pathway to developing resistance. That not only happened with the vaccines, but with COVID treatments; the treatments that worked for the first strains didn’t work on the latter ones.
mago
Wow! A food fight.
Think I’ll wander over to open thread and see what’s happening there.
different clue
In past posts or post lead-ins, Yves Smith has referred to all the parts and pieces of society as being ” tightly coupled”. I take that to mean that every node that is connected to every other node in this society is connected by wires that are so excessively tightened that any little vibration anywhere vibrates throughout the whole society, and if any wire can be tightened to the point of snapping; then waves of wire-fatigue and wires-snapping propagate throughout the whole Cats Cradle.
How can the ” whole 20th century” disintegrate like wet tissue paper? A highly overdeveloped and overspecialized civilization wound up tighter than a snare drum and full of various ” schwerpunkts” and “local centers of gravity” ( if I correctly understand the terminology that John Robb introduced us to at Global Guerillas years ago) that destroying one can propagate waves of unravelling all over in every direction.
Either Real President Musk has studied the Global Guerillas blog over the years or else he has an instinctive knowledge and grasp of some of these things. He knows where the tiny little command and control points are and how you can destroy the whole systems they command and control if you can destroy the tiny little command and control points themselves.
You can kill a ten ton elephant with a 1 ounce bullet if you fire it at high-enough muzzle velocity from the right kind of elephant gun into the elephant’s brain. And that is Musk’s mission here.
Plus at least tens of millions of Americans have been carefully instructed in learned helplessness over the last few decades. Democracy has been demonstrated to be mainly fake and decoy at various key nodes and choice-points, as when the DemParty Choice-Lords carefully engineered Sanders out of his victory path in two primaries back to back in a row.
The National Officeholder Democrats have spent many years being exactly what Lambert Strether says they were and are. They were never going to support anything good or oppose anything bad. I did my little part to vote “against genocide” in the Michigan Primary by voting for “uncommitted”. We “uncommitted” primary voters sent the DemParty a message. The DemParty sent the message back that it was committed to this particular genocide and also committed to rejecting and mocking the desires of a bunch of voters in a sensitive key state with very narrow margins.
So when it came time to vote in the election, why did I from time-to-time suggest that it was better to vote for Biden’s Harris than not? Because I knew the Democrats would support nothing good and oppose nothing bad and that the alternative was Trump and that Trump was not the normal run-of-the-mill greater evil. More Gaza genocide was likely either way but Trump promised the extermination-from-within of American governance and civilization as we have known it whereas Harris offered 4 more years of drifting stagnation. 4 years that could have been put to use arming and training millions of DemVoting citizens into possibly-credible citizen militias for meeting the Republican moment when it finally arrived in 4 years ( or maybe 8 years) from now, which it clearly would.
But it has arrived now right now, with no time to prepare any kind of resistance or obstructance or delayance or derailment of any kind.
Oh well . . .
Nate Wilcox
Musk, Thiel & company have promised Trump that if he gives them control over the military and security apparatus they will make his enemies pay for Russiagate, the Impeachments, the various lawsuits and trials.
Regardless of the merits of the various attacks on him (which to me ranged from slanderous nonsense to letting him off scott-free for openly taking bribes from foreign governments, and the capital crime of attempting a coup), Trump is deeply embittered by his experience.
Never forget he entered the race as a publicity stunt to get a raise out of NBC. He never thought he’d win the nomination, much less the election (even as of election night 2016). He had no idea what he was getting into or how to control the government apparatus. He had multiple cabinet-level appointees who openly defied him and did the opposite of what they had been ordered.
The players that have yet to emerge are Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel. They’re going to be the righteous furies of the Trump administration, doling out punishment to the authors of various attacks on/betrayals of Trump in his first term.
The real question is whether or not Trump will be able to ride the tiger he’s happily sat atop. I give him a 50% of completing his term. Vance belongs 100% to the techbros which makes Trump very replaceable.
We’ve already seen that the Secret Service is either completely incompetent when it comes to Trump or have actually conspired with plots against his life. He openly proclaimed that he blamed Iran for those attempts but he may be smart enough to not actually say who he suspects.
This is high stakes revolutionary politics. Nothing in our experience is really relevant to the moment.
Talking about mid-term elections and the Democratic party right now seems completely irrelevant to me.
Nate Wilcox
This is a good piece on the Musk/Bannon split. paywalled but great quote https://www.readcontra.com/p/bannon-musk-maga
“Many Americans understand this moment as an overdue reckoning for them, and understandably, they feel exuberant about it. So exuberant that they have not stopped to wonder whether it is really a good idea to trust a man who mused in a joking-but-not-joking way that perhaps “our new god will come from” the artificial intelligence he is developing, even as he quietly weaves the walls of an invisible prison around the Earth, throwing up the unblinking eyes of the new regime that, unlike the one it is replacing, will not be so incompetent.”
Nate Wilcox
Most coherent pro-Trump case I’ve seen made https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/american-strong-gods
“There’s a 2018 quote by the late Henry Kissinger that’s circulated recently, in which he mused about whether “Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.” If that wasn’t true in 2018 it certainly is now. I believe that what we’re seeing today truly is the end of an era, an epochal overturning of the world as we knew it, and that the full import and implications of this haven’t really struck us yet.
More specifically, I believe Donald Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century.”
bruce wilder
@StewartM
I appreciate your willingness to reply. We might as make it clear to one another that our views are diametrically opposed.
Re: Elon’s supposed -Z- salute.
Unless the person making the gesture or statement explicitly invokes the alleged precedent and references it with pleasure and approval, I would not make it an issue. The only reason I see to do so is to reinforce the polarity of tribal politics: you are inviting your side’s partisans to see your common, shared opponents as evil on the basis of a tendentious projection. Living in your own solipsistic reality, judging rather than thinking, “controlling the narrative” and being controlled by a narrative spun out by cynical professional PR talkers — this is much of what is wrong with American politics. Moreover it is a practice incompatible with democratic deliberation over the objective problems and conditions of a singular, common reality.
The numerical majority of Americans pay little attention to politics, even if they may vote or repeat a slogan or opinion they have heard in passing. One reason they do not pay much attention is that on those rare occasions they do tune in, they encounter only lies and gross exaggeration from both sides, with political Media doing a lousy job of arbitrating disputes. In the last Trump-Biden debate, Biden’s theme was that Trump was a liar and then Biden proceeded to misrepresent things Trump had supposedly said or done — such as with the Charlottesville “fine people” hoax so he could perform as if filled with moral outrage. And, this was just the last episode in a Democratic campaign years long, which included painting Trump as a traitorous stooge to Putin on the basis of purchased fabrications and empty assertions and innuendo.
others with attitudes more ‘woke’ than yours Bruce agree with me
I am sure that is true. The ‘woke’ choose the politics of narcissistic isolation and solipsism.
I happen to have been reading a book by the British scholar, Richard J Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich the last couple of weeks, so the actual history is top-of-mind for me. Nothing big you didn’t already know probably, but well-written, if you haven’t picked it up. A completely different time-and-place: a people humiliated by defeat in war in a nation-state barely as old as its grandfathers, its politics organized around a republic despised by sizeable partisan minorities. The most striking similarity to me is the impotence of a political center unwilling to address acute crises, but always eager to punch left, hard. ymmv
Re: vaccines
Your assertion that a vaccine must be made mandatory and administered universally across the human population to be effective in preventing transmission and infection among the vaccinated is contradicted by the well-known history of several highly successful vaccines.
I have heard it argued that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA formulations should not have been accorded the label, vaccine, because their biological mechanisms were not consistent with any of the various mechanisms employed strategically to provoke a strong and persistent immune response by the justifiably famous examples of vaccines that have been so successful that eradication was a possibility. I cannot make such an argument from my own knowledge — only observe that calling the Pfizer and Moderna formulations, vaccines, became integral to misleading propaganda campaigns, which touted their actually quite limited efficacy as sufficient to fully justify policies of exclusion, discrimination and disemployment intended to compel submission to participate in a vast medical experiment conducted for private profit without adequate testing for safety. The safety of these experimental “vaccines” was so doubtful that private, for-profit business corporations had to be exempted from legal liability for the consequences of their mass administration, but so essential that individuals and families, who did not want to take on the unknown risk of undergoing an unrequested and unnecessary medical procedure had to be persecuted. That policy and the accompanying false and misleading propaganda used to justify it (Honest Joe “sharp as a tack” Biden: “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit and you’re not going to die.”) — that policy of lies, corporate profit and compulsion to undergo medical experimentation was not some performative “salute”; that was actual, operational “fascism” and you apparently supported it fully though, by the implications of your own analysis, it had zero chance of arresting the pandemic.
As I watch Trump and Musk shred the civil service and the Constitutional concept of Congressional appropriations, while Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is plaintively wondering what leverage he has and using lame talking points about prices and Republicans not delivering on the cost of living after a month in office, I continue to puzzle over exactly how and why the great realignment has left partisan politics from the nominal “left” so impotent and at the same time uninterested in defending civil liberties, due process or the working and merely middle class.
bruce wilder
@ different clue
from the moment Obama was elected to lead the Democratic majorities elected to reverse the multiple disasters of the younger Bush, accelerating degeneration of the American Republic at home and Empire abroad was locked in. Democrats had been the cautious brakemen dithering uselessly on the runaway Reagan train up to that point, doing nothing, but they were given the signal to throw the switch and change course and then . . . crickets. Because Obama. They had accomplished their performative best.
I was a civil servant long ago. I can only feel for my demoralized former colleagues. But, I will say that a lot of formal protections and processes had to be stripped away by Obama for any of this to be possible. Not just civil service procedures but the legal structures surrounding Congressional authorization of agency staffing and function and budgets and appropriations. Regular Congressional budgeting and appropriations were never restored in the Obama years, even during the two years of Democratic super majorities.
I am not convinced that any controls were in place in the Biden “autopilot” years and very clearly Harris was a promise to continue on autopilot.
capelin
@ DMC “We’re moving to Ecuador.”
I wonder how the Ecuadorians feel about it.
down to the banana republics
down to the tropical sun
go the expatriated american
hoping to find some fun
next you learn the native customs
soon word of spanish or two
you know you can not trust them
because they know they can’t trust you.
( jimmy buffet )
@StewartM “Uh, Bruce–no vaccine against an infectious disease will work unless a vast majority of people take it. ”
This not what we were told, and you are not addressing either of the points being made by BW; that the truth is not what was on offer from our illustrious leaders, and that people were abused, here, for stating the truth.
“…. to apologize for abusing people when commenters here were pointing out the early emerging evidence that the COVID vaccines were not very effective in preventing infection or transmission. ”
A) Every professional bullshitter out there and repeatedly explicitely stated that the Injection _would stop infection/transmission. “The virus meets a vaccinated person, the virus stops, it can’t go any further”. I paraphrase slightly Rachael Maddow’s sanctioned lie, never to this day flagged as mal-information.
B) The Injections were _never tested_ for infection/transmission, only reduction of symptoms. Clearly stated on like, the first page of the trial reports. So, “they” all knew.
Sorry Ian …
Purple Library Guy
That article from The Hill has a couple of interesting points, but also some fundamental errors. So, it opens
“Trump’s revolution will fail because rapid, comprehensive and fundamental change is too complex, with too many imponderables and unknowns to succeed.”
Um, no. It is possible to do rapid, comprehensive and fundamental change and succeed because you don’t have to just set things in motion and then watch. You can make adjustments as you meet up with new factors. But you have to have a broadly accurate assessment of the situation and why change is needed and a fundamentally solid plan, and good intentions. And it’s still hard. Trump’s revolution will fail because it has none of that stuff–it starts from a false assessment of the situation, a completely inaccurate idea of why change is needed, and involves a totally stupid plan, and the intentions are such that even if it did what they wanted it to do, the results would still suck. Although it may still manage to siphon a lot of money into a few rich pockets in the process of failing.
bruce wilder
Trump is basically carrying out a plan of demolition. Succeed or fail, we still end up with a pile of rubble.
different clue
@Bruce Wilder,
I preferred autopilot to demolition so I voted for “Brezhnevian stagnation” Harris against ” Yeltsinian burndown” Trump.
Canada may have to build a Big Beautiful Wall sooner than it had expected in order to keep out any possible Demolition Refugees coming from America far sooner than the endless millions of Climate Refugees due to come eventually.
StewartM
Bruce Wilder
Let’s keep it short. After all hubbub after Elon’s Nazi salute, wouldn’t you think that Bannon would know that to avoid having a similar ‘burst of enthusiasm’? But he did.
There is messaging there, for sure.
You must also know from the 1990s onward, the Rs in Congress have resisted attempts to investigate or hold hearings on rightwing and neo-Nazi activity in the US, claiming “how dare you investigate ‘conservatives’!!” I know this because at that time I was on the usenet group misc.activism.militia and I read their posts. Not all were neo-Nazi but there was that element for sure. Timothy McVeigh was described in the media as just a ‘anti-government’ type but if you read the book that inspired McVeigh and that he recommended his contacts read, The Turner Diaries, you see it’s clearly neo-Nazi. Yet movement conservatives helped SHIELD these guys from scrutiny and falsely labeled them as just “anti-government”. All I can conclude is that while liberals help conservatives destroy their own possible allies on their left, conservatives strive to PROTECT their far-right allies, both to shift the Overton Window and to possibly use them as bully boys.
And the other thing about this coup, as David Sirota has pointed out, the Rs have the Presidency, Congress, and the Courts. So why not just do what they want legally? They have that power, after all; the Democrats can’t stop them and the courts likely won’t.
Trump is too stupid to have written Project 2025. There were a lot of conservative thinkers working on creating this. Every R president since Nixon has claimed the power to break the Constitution—from Nixon claiming the power to ‘impound funds’, to Reagan using the money he got from selling weapons to Iran (payback for them holding the hostages for the October Surprise of 1980) to fund his war in Nicaragua (also explicitly forbidden by Congress) to Dubya/Cheney taking funds from some programs to fund their spying on Americans program, something also that had been explicitly prohibited by Congress. Sirota nails it–they want the president to have powers above both Congress and the Courts, which is essentially making him an elected dictator or king.
And who knows? Maybe the “elected” part will drop out soon. After all, they don’t want to give the President to have such powers and risk getting a Corbyn one day!
As for vaccines, all it takes is some familiarity with natural selection, Bruce. For vaccines to be effective, you cannot allow resistant strains to mutate. Having a large unvaccinated segment of the population will allow the pathogen to continue to exist, and this will eventually will create resistant strains. It’s no different than say, antibiotics, and why you are told to take the whole dose, and not just stop when you feel better. The fact that some of the vaccines used a non-traditional pathway is irrelevant (and besides, the J&J and similar ‘traditional vaccines’ were the LEAST effective vaccines, not the most).
The original calculations on the first vaccines said we had to get c. 90 % + of the population vaccinated in a relatively short time to defeat COVID. That never happened, because the false “freedom of choice” mantra, something completely inconsistent with any public health measure, was invoked. We never got anywhere close to that. Smallpox and polio were eradicated because we made them mandatory and even those vaccines had to be updated at times (moreover polio was less infectious than either smallpox or COVID).
You cannot have any effective public health measure work if your motto is “freedom of choice”. It. Cannot. Be. Done. Not just vaccines, it’s ANY public health or safety protection. Would you argue that an ordinance against open fires during a fire hazard warning is some violation of “freedom?”. The arguments are pretty much the same.