By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Why Resistance Alone Will Fail
Les Leopold, February 14, 2025
[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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Anti-republicanism and the resulting Constitutional crises
David Cole, February 11, 2025 [The New York Review]
The ultimate fate of many if not most of these initiatives will likely be determined by the Supreme Court. That is worrying, because for many years this Supreme Court—deeply distrustful of the “administrative state” and of congressional efforts to rein in presidential authority—has undertaken a campaign to grant the president centralized, consolidated power. In the name of the “unitary executive,” a theory that the president must have unilateral control over the executive branch, the Court has repeatedly struck down limits on the president’s power to remove federal officials. Last term it went still further, granting President Trump himself unprecedented immunity even for criminal conduct, reasoning that subjecting a president to the criminal accountability everyone else faces—even after he has left office—could impermissibly interfere with his unilateral powers, such as the pardon authority, and more generally unduly hinder his freedom and willingness to carry out his duties. [Footnote link to Goldsmith, below]
The President’s Favorite Decision: The Influence of Trump v. U.S. in Trump 2.0
Jack Goldsmith, February 10, 2025 [Lawfare]
The main critical reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States—both in the dissents in the case, and in public commentary—was that its shield of presidential immunity from criminal law portended a lawless presidency. In a lecture last Fall, I argued that the “decision’s main significance for the presidency” lies not in its holding about presidential immunity, but rather “in its expansive discussion of exclusive presidential powers, independent of the immunity ruling.”
The importance of Trump as an executive branch sword rather than a presidential immunity shield has come into clearer view with President Donald Trump’s early executive orders and actions, and with the actions of his senior subordinates. The Supreme Court’s broad holdings on the scope of exclusive presidential power vis-à-vis Congress underlie many of the Trump administration’s most controversial actions….
The Trump administration is relying on the maximalist implications of Trump…. Underlying the first holding was a broad conception of exclusive presidential power vis-à-vis Congress—presidential power, that is, that Congress cannot criminalize or otherwise regulate….
Another important presidential power—based in part on the Take Care Clause and in part on “the executive Power” vested in the president—is the president’s power to fire executive officials at will…. The Trump administration—doubtlessly fortified by Trump’s grudging reference to the Seila Law exceptions, by its expansion of the removal power on other dimensions, and by the broader trend in the case law—is exercising unprecedentedly sweeping removal powers….
I have thus far analyzed the exclusive power rulings in Trump for their discrete influences. But as the constitutional claim in the Federal Workforce EO suggests, the decision’s full significance emerges not just from what it says about individual presidential powers, but from its overall vision of presidential power.
In a nutshell, that vision is expressed (with emphasis added) in a single sentence from Trump: “[U]nlike anyone else, the President is a branch of government, and the Constitution vests in him sweeping powers and duties.” Those sweeping powers, Trump explained, begin with the vesting of “the executive Power,” all of it, in the president. They include broadened enforcement discretion and a broadened removal power. And these powers in turn underlie the president’s broad powers to supervise and direct subordinate executive officials.
We do not have to speculate how this aggregate theory is influencing the Trump administration. Consider its bold impoundment claim—the idea that the president does not have to spend appropriated money even though the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 says he must….
One can imagine the joy with which Trump’s senior legal and political advisors read Trump v. United States on July 1, 2024. They were joyful because the Court recognized a presidential immunity that would make it practically impossible to try Trump criminally before the election. But they were surely also joyful because the decision tended toward an aggregate conception of executive power that was already embodied in Project 2025, and that they planned to deploy to overcome, and to obliterate, the resistance that they believed, with justification, sought to stymie Trump’s first term….
In chaotic Washington blitz, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal becomes clear
[Washington Post, via downwithtyranny.com]
As much as half the government’s nonmilitary real estate holdings are set to be liquidated, a move aimed at closing offices and increasing commute times amid sharp new limits on remote and telework. That is intended to depress workforce morale and increase attrition, according to four officials with knowledge of internal conversations at the General Services Administration, another agency taken over by Musk.“We’ve heard from them that they want to make the buildings so crappy that people will leave,” said one senior official at GSA, which manages most federal property. “I think that’s the larger goal here, which is bring everybody back, the buildings are going to suck, their commutes are going to suck.”To replace the existing civil service, Musk’s allies are looking to technology. DOGE associates have been feeding vast troves of government records and databases into artificial intelligence tools, looking for unwanted federal programs and trying to determine which human work can be replaced by AI, machine-learning tools or even robots.That push has been especially fierce at GSA, where DOGE staffers are telling managers that they plan to automate a majority of jobs, according to a person familiar with the situation.“The end goal is replacing the human workforce with machines,” said a U.S. official closely watching DOGE activity. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be. And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”The defenestration of the federal workforce could clear the way for Trump and Musk to cancel federal spending or eliminate entire agencies without approval of Congress, an unprecedented expansion of executive power. This week, Tom Krause, a Musk ally, was installed to oversee an agency in the U.S. Treasury Department responsible for executing trillions of dollars in annual payments to the full array of recipients, from contractors and grantees to military families and retirees….
Internal documents show how DOGE planned DEI purge — and whom they want to fire next
Hannah Natanson and Chris Dehghanpoor, February 15, 2025 [Washington Post]
A DOGE team plans to fire federal workers who are not in DEI roles and employees in offices that protect equal rights, internal documents show.
A team of workers from the U.S. DOGE Service developed step-by-step plans for carrying out President Donald Trump’s order to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from the federal government — and over the next six months intends to expand that campaign dramatically, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. DOGE aims to target staffers who are not in DEI roles and employees who work in offices established by law to ensure equal rights, internal DOGE documents show.
In the coming weeks, the documents show, DOGE has planned for the Trump administration to trim staff from dozens of offices across the executive branch, including those that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace. Among the groups targeted are a Veterans Affairs office that works to ensure all veterans receive equal access to care and an office within Health and Human Services that provides information about the health of minority populations….
“The remaining offices require closer analysis for potential statutory protection and will also be eliminated, wherever possible, Day 2-30,” the document states.
But a later document, dated Jan. 13, walked that back. Under the revised plan, the DOGE team reduced the number of targeted DEI offices to 76. DOGE also shifted the plan: The aim would be to cut staff from offices required by law, rather than eliminate those offices outright.
The Jan. 13 document listed 38 “statutorily mandated offices (EEO / Civil Rights)” that “have been corrupted with new DEI divisions.” The new plan, the document shows, was to “identify the non-statutory branches / DEI employees and place them on administrative leave.”
John Ganz, Feb 14, 2025 [unpopularfront.news]
… I also keep seeing spirits: those of Murray Rothbard, Samuel T. Francis, and Joe McCarthy…..
I’m willing to hazard that there is just about nothing—yes, nothing—that Trump and Musk are doing that was not already dreamt up in the philosophies of Rothbard and Francis. Whether it’s come to pass by their court intellectuals’ reading, some structural analogy between the movements to its forebears, or even demonic possession, it kind of doesn’t matter: it’s all there.
Consider “DOGE:” This is exactly the kind of wholesale attack on the state that the anarcho-capitalist Rothbard envisioned and desired. And consider the methods: the public smearing of civil servants and their agencies with misleading or downright false “revelations.” This corresponds precisely to Rothbard’s recommended adoption of McCarthyism as a political technique. What Rothbard understood was that McCarthy was undertaking not an attack on Communists so much as an attack on liberalism and institutions, as he writes in his Betrayal of the American Right:
“…I myself was a McCarthy enthusiast. There were two basic reasons. One was that while McCarthy was employing the weapon of a governmental committee, the great bulk of his victims were not private citizens but government officials: bureaucrats and Army officers. Most of McCarthy’s red-baiting was therefore “voluntary” rather than “compulsory,” since the persons being attacked were, as government officials, fair game from the libertarian point of view. Besides, day in and day out, such Establishment organs as the New York Times kept telling us that McCarthy was “tearing down the morale of the executive branch”; what more could a libertarian hope for?”
He goes on to analyze the inner meaning of McCarthy:
“…that there was a vital need to appeal directly to the masses, emotionally, even demagogically, over the heads of the Establishment: of the Ivy League, the mass media, the liberal intellectuals, of the Republican-Democrat political party structure. This appeal could be done—especially in that period of no organized opposition whatever—only by a charismatic leader, a leader who could make a direct appeal to the masses and thereby undercut the ruling and opinion-molding elite; in sum, by a populist short-circuit. It seemed to me that this was what McCarthy was trying to do; and that it was largely this appeal, the openended sense that there was no audacity of which McCarthy was not capable, that frightened the liberals, who, from their opposite side of the fence, also saw that the only danger to their rule was in just such a whipping up of populist emotions.”
There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing: How regime change happens in America
Anne Applebaum, February 13, 2025 [The Atlantic]
Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far, primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.
No one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase, because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired. During his 2024 campaign, Trump spoke of Election Day as “Liberation Day,” a moment when, in his words, “vermin” and “radical left lunatics” would be eliminated from public life. J. D. Vance has said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Steve Bannon prefers to talk about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” but that amounts to the same thing….
Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service….
White House says it’s the judges — not Trump — causing a ‘constitutional crisis’
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 02-13-2025]
Corruption
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, February 13, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]
National Archives Head Resigns as Trump Takes Control of Records
[Mother Jones, February 14, 2025]
…Bosanko’s exit is part of a Trump putsch at the agency, which was deeply involved in the case of the top-secret documents Trump removed from the White House when he left office in 2021. According to two sources familiar with the situation, Bosanko was pushed out by Jim Byron, a 31-year old who was recently president of the Richard Nixon Foundation. Byron delivered Bosanko an ultimatum: Resign now or be fired next week….
“Elon Musk Is a Walking Conflict of Interest”
[Mother Jones, February 14, 2025]
Federal law forbids any Executive Branch employee from “participating personally and substantially” in matters “that will affect his own financial interests.”….
All seven of Musk’s companies—which include X (formerly Twitter), xAI (a rival to OpenAI), Neuralink (a brain implant startup), Starlink (satellite internet service) and the Boring Company (a tunnel drilling firm), in addition to Tesla and SpaceX—have netted a combined $20 billion in US government contracts and subsidies, according to the Financial Times.
Harold Meyerson February 13, 2025 [The American Prospect]
David Dayen February 13, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Will Trump Continue to Defy Court Orders? As long as nobody will stop him, why wouldn’t he?
David Dayen February 11, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Trump-Musk Scandal at USAID Takes Unnerving Turn With Vile Leaked Memo
Greg Sargent, February 15, 2025 [The New Republic]
…There seems to be a split in Trumpworld these days. Some seem to think Trump can get away with anything, no matter how devastating it is to the most vulnerable or how corrupt an abuse of power it represents. Others seem aware that there are limits—that at some point, Trumpworld might push things too far and suffer a public backlash, and that this might actually matter.
A new internal memo circulating inside the U.S. Agency for International Development neatly captures this split. The Washington Post reports that the memo warns USAID employees not to communicate with the press about the shocking disruptions in humanitarian assistance that are being caused by the Trump-Musk attack on the agency, which are already producing horrific consequences. The memo said this transgression might be met with “dismissal.”….
The directive ordering USAID employees to refrain from discussing this with the press represents an unnerving turn in this saga, given how ugly and blatant it is. “This is basically telling USAID personnel not to tell the truth about what they have seen,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior USAID official, told me, adding that this functionally commands USAID staff to “get in line with the propaganda narrative.”
Yet the memo also shows that USAID leaks are infuriating Trump officials precisely because they are exposing the horrifying consequences of the Trump-Musk efforts to cripple this agency….
Global power shift
Chris Hedges: The Empire Self-Destructs
Chris Hedges, February 11, 2025 [Consortium News]
China Urged To End Successful Policies
[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 02-11-2025]
… the New York Times makes the (somewhat racist) claim that China lacks the capability to turn talent into innovation:
What DeepSeek’s Success Says About China’s Ability to Nurture Talent (archived) – New York Times, Feb 10 2025
The subtitle reveals the core thesis:
China produces a vast number of STEM graduates, but it hasn’t been known for innovation. Cultural and political factors may help explain why.
In a globalized world the innovation ability of a country can be measured by the number of global patents it files….
Per million inhabitants China filed 1.2 patents per year while the United States filed 1.5. But the real leaders here are South Korea with 5.5 patents per year per million people followed by Japan with 3.3/y/million.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) provides data on these.
Russia / Ukraine
Double-Decker Special: Hysteria Ignites as Trump Throws Ukraine on the Third Rail
[Simplicius the Thinker, via Naked Capitalism 02-13-2025]
Trumpillnomics
[CNN, via DailyKos, February 14, 2025]
Trump administration officials fired more than 300 staffers Thursday night at the National Nuclear Security Administration — the agency tasked with managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile — as part of broader Energy Department layoffs, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.
Sources told CNN the officials did not seem to know this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons.
Disrupting mainstream economics
The Rise of the Modern Monetary System: An Integration of the Credit and State Money Approaches
L. Randall Wray [Levy Institute, via Naked Capitalism 02-13-2025]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 02-10-2025]
Creators demand tech giants fess up and pay for all that AI training data
[The Register, via Naked Capitalism 02-10-2025]
Stellantis Introduces Pop-Up Ads in Vehicles, Sparking Outrage Among Owners
[TechStory, via Naked Capitalism 02-11-2025]
Climate and environmental crises
Global Warming Has Accelerated. Why? What Are the Consequences?
James Hansen and Pushker Kharecha, 12 February 2025 [via God’s Spies, 02-14-2025]
Inside the CIA’s Decades-Long Climate “Spy” Campaign
[3 Quarks Daily, via Naked Capitalism 02-09-2025]
In the 1960s and 1970s, the CIA conducted a top-secret US program using satellite imagery to capture images of Soviet military installations….
While these satellites were capturing images of Soviet bases, however, they were unknowingly spying on something else: climate change.
Because satellites typically orbit on north-south paths, their sensors can capture the vast majority of the Earth’s surface as the planet turns over the course of a 24 hour period, cataloging sweeping Arctic and Antarctic images. Over the twelve years that CORONA was in operation, the satellite captured approximately 850,000 static images of retreating polar ice, ecosystems’ extent and structures, species’ populations and habitats, and human pressures on the environment….
Due to their highly classified nature, these images weren’t readily available for public and scientific use. In the early 1990s At the urging of first Senator and then Vice President Al Gore for the CIA and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to consider releasing environmental information gleaned from classified data, the CIA established the Environmental Task Force (ETF) to review the classified reconnaissance CORONA satellite imagery and determine whether or not “classified information could help on particular scientific questions.” ….
The ETF quickly evolved into the MEDEA program, a name chosen, not as an acronym, but for the headstrong Greek Mythological figure Medea, and as a complement to another government advisory group, JASON. The MEDEA program gave 70 scientists high-level security clearances to understand satellite technology, orbits, sensors, and calibration so they could evaluate whether the highly classified spy satellite imagery and data could be released to the public.
In 1995, the world finally learned about the existence of the novel imaging reconnaissance satellite when President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12951, effectively releasing all 850,000 images from the CORONA, ARGON, and LANYARD spy satellites….
[Arctic News, via Naked Capitalism 02-13-2025]
Democrats’ political malpractice
Scoop: Dems “pissed” at liberal groups MoveOn, Indivisible
[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 02-12-2025]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
TX Judge Fines NY Doctor $100K for Prescribing an Abortion Pill – This Could Be a Fracture Point
Dan K, February 13, 2025 [DailyKos]
Texas Judge Fines New York Doctor and Orders Her to Stop Sending Abortion Pills to Texas: “In a case that could have major implications for abortion access in the United States, a Texas judge on Thursday ordered a New York doctor to stop prescribing and sending abortion pills to patients in Texas and to pay a penalty of more than $100,000 for providing the medication to one woman.
“The case is widely expected to reach the Supreme Court and become a pivotal test in the escalating battle between states that ban abortion and states that support abortion rights. It essentially pits Texas, which has a near-total abortion ban, against New York, which has a “telemedicine abortion shield law” intended to protect abortion providers who send medications to patients in other states.”
…Also today, the governor of Louisiana formally requested NY to extradite Dr. Carpenter to face a criminal charge filed last week in that state for providing abortion medication. New York state did immediately respond to this one: Abortion Provider Won’t Be Extradited to Louisiana, N.Y. Governor Says.
Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester, Feb. 15, 2025 [propublica.org]
Before Peter Marocco was selected to dismantle America’s entire foreign aid sector on behalf of President Donald Trump, he was an official with the State Department on a diplomatic mission….
On a 2018 visit to the Balkans, Marocco secretly met with officials whom the American government had determined were off-limits without the highest levels of approval: ethnonationalist Bosnian Serb separatist leaders. Those politicians had been working for years to defy their nation’s constitution and undermine the American-backed peace deal in an effort to promote a Christian Bosnian Serb state. ProPublica pieced the episode together from interviews with seven current and former U.S. officials.
Two new lawsuits fired directly at Musk, DOGE and Trump get to the heart of the problem
Poetat13thAve, February 15, 2025 [DailyKos]
Two new lawsuits were filed February 13 directly against Musk, DOGE and Trump. The organization Just Security (link below) has a great litigation tracker on their web site with all the legal filings related to Trump’s presidency since January 20. The two cases are “J. Doe 1-26 v. Elon Musk” and “New Mexico et al. v. Musk”.
https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal-challenges-trump-administration/
….The most horrifying details to me, surround how government employees and their families have been, and are still being, threatened, financially damaged, and abused by Musk and DOGE. It reads like a spy movie gone bad in some places. The following is one excerpt concerning J. Doe 9, that is particularly jarring from “J. Doe 1-26 v. Musk:”
“J. Doe 9 is a PSC offshore, in a high-risk area in the Middle East. On Monday, February 3, 2025, J. Doe 9 tried to login to their USAID email account but was locked out. J. Doe 9 received no warning or notification in advance from being shut out of USAID’s systems. Their supervisor and head of mission were not informed in advance of the cutoff. All of the contacts and the safety and security applications from J. Doe 9’s USAID work phone were removed remotely. The safety and security application is the mechanism by which federal government staff overseas in dangerous areas indicate that they are in a dangerous situation and access help. J. Doe 9 lives with their family in the foreign country in which they are stationed and is concerned for their safety. If there is an emergency, J. Doe 9 hopes they will be able to get out and be taken care of by USAID, but there is no guarantee as over the last few weeks, nothing done within USAID by Defendants has been according to protocol or implemented in a methodical, safe manner. J. Doe 9 has no idea what their status is each day.”
Pope Francis’s Stunning Rebuke of JD Vance Exposes MAGA’s Dark Soul
Greg Sargent, February 12, 2025 [The New Republic]
The other day, JD Vance sought to reconcile President Donald Trump’s “America First” vision with the tenets of Christianity. Vance argued for a “Christian concept” that orders our ethical obligations in a series of concentric circles, starting with love of family, then out to love of neighbor, then to community and nation, and only then out to the rest of the world. Vance claimed the left has “inverted that,” casting Trumpism as more faithful to the allegedly Christian notion he’d outlined, because it puts “American citizens first.”….
Pope Francis also asserts that immigration policy must balance the regulation of migration with a recognition of the “equal dignity of every human being.” And he faults Vance’s use of ordo amoris to justify Trumpism.
“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Pope Francis writes. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
Links1/30/2025 | naked capitalism
Let’s cite to chapter and verse. Matthew22:36-39:
36“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
TooMuchCoffee
This week’s Wrap-up paints the stark and clear picture of a coup-in-progress. But how can we stop it? I suggest that the pivot point is LABOR: this is an attack on Civil Servants as workers, with the right not to be fired for their beliefs. This is the provocation for a strike. And given the scale of the firings, the only effective response can be from all Labor, across America and all Unions, within and outside of government, in solidarity with Civil Servants. In short, I am calling for a GENERAL STRIKE against DOGE, now!
Z
A different perspective on Bibi’s Butler’s tariffs …
https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-trumps-tariffs-are-a-masterplan/
Z
Chuck Teague
re: “Pope Francis’s Stunning Rebuke of JD Vance Exposes MAGA’s Dark Soul”
Also don’t forget that Vance, and other crazy, conservative, Christians of convenience such as Peter Thiel, want to renounce the Second Vatican Council.
“https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/jd-vance-extremist-christian-vp-mike-pence-1235069117/”
“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Vatican_Council”
Longest wikipedia article I’ve ever read, so permit me to TL;DR it. “We Catholics need to stop being such knobs to non-males, non-whites, and non-Catholics.” Vance and his fellow phonies want to go back to subjugating at least the first two of those.
Cheers.
– CT
Chuck Mire
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/chris-hedges-american-fascists
The complete book by Chris Hedges online. Read from start to finish; and/or choose a link to a specific chapter; and/or download in various formats.
different clue
Organizing to a General Strike might be slower than President Genghis Musk’s high speed Regime-Change operation against the United States from within its own government.
Perhaps other smaller things could be also attempted in parallel. Being smaller, they might move faster. Would they make a difference? I don’t know. Perhaps they would at least let people on the same wavelength find eachother.
I notice that a number of people dismayed by Musk’s behavior have begun withdrawing support from the Tesla car company. Perhaps that could be organized into an extermicott designed to exterminate Tesla from existence, thereby exterminating several billion dollars of Musk’s wealth. MMPA! Make Musk Poor Again! Here is an article about that natural decline in Tesla’s fortunes setting in.
https://futurism.com/tesla-employees-musk-fears
Perhaps such a movement could be launched against Xtwitter and every single one of its advertisers. The goal ( impossible dream?) would be to exterminate Xtwitter from existence and thereby vaporise a few more of Musk’s billions of dollars from existence along with it.
Perhaps people taking part in such extermicotts could figure out how to move up the organizing ladder towards selective General Strikes towards the Final Ultimate General General Strike.
Perhaps all those people could also decide which businesses and companies and economic sectors are most Republican-supportive and then most Republican-adjacent and do their best to selectively and targetedly extermicott those companies and industries and sectors so as to begin weaking and undermining the Republican base.
( And to be thoroughly equal-time about it, for those who insist on equal-time-fairness, how about an extermicott on those businesses which support particular black-hat bad-actor Democrats like Pelosi? How about an extermicott of the Pelosi-family minichain of restaurants in California?)