Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 23, 2025
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.
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.
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.”
Alex Norris, 13 Feb 2025 [Liberal Currents, via The Big Picture February 16, 2025]
...To make a very, very long story short: People working for Elon Musk, who is technically working for President Donald Trump, have attempted to suspend large parts of the federal government, including a total closure of the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID). They have also established a back door into the Treasury system that distributes funds and have possibly already used it to stop funds. They are trying to end the 14th amendment. They are firing people en masse from the civil service, including those they consider their political enemies, those who they suspect of promoting “diversity”, and anyone else, for any reason. They do not have the legal authority to do any of these things, and in many cases not even the security clearance to look at the things they are shutting down. There’s obviously more, but these are probably the most “coup-like” actions being taken.
This is clearly in the realm of self-coup rather than a coup displacing an executive. Musk seems relatively autonomous, but even his illegal power derives directly from Trump. Nothing Musk has done can prevent Trump from locking him out of all government buildings tomorrow. So, this is the illegal action, and if left standing it basically gives Trump an unoverridable veto over all legislation, including civil service protections, past and future. That is illegal and unconstitutional, so we have illegal and increasing power at the expense of others checked off….
...I’m going to list the potential resolutions from best to worst:
1. Courts rule that everything is illegal. Trump backs down, blames Musk, fires him. This has the least damage to the legitimacy of the law, as it preserves the power of the courts to say whether the executive is enforcing the law….
3. Courts rule that everything is illegal. Trump refuses to back down, military intervenes against him. This would end the U.S. military’s long history of neutrality in politics (with a couple notable exceptions), and so even in defeating the self-coup could leave us more vulnerable to future military interventions in civilian politics.
4. Courts rule that everything is legal. Peaceful self-coup succeeds. This would drastically strengthen the President compared to all other actors in the government….
6. Courts rule that everything is illegal. Military and/or civilian law enforcement divide and fight themselves. Civil war breaks out. This is the least likely, but by far worst possible outcome….
Why Should We Care If the Trump Administration, and Musk’s DOGE, are Acting Unconstitutionally?
Nathan Tankus, 21 Feb 2025 [Notes on the Crises]
Recognizing that the current impoundment crisis comes from the same right wing think tanks which built the modern right wing legal movement and successfully led the Supreme Court to embrace their agenda, we can see better how this all fits together. Impoundment is meant to be the final demolition of the administrative state that the Supreme Court has been building up to. Before their job was to weaken it themselves. Now the Supreme Court’s job is to avoid confronting the constitutional crisis before us and let executive power take the reins, permanently demoting the previously co-equal branches. Expending the President’s executive power, embracing unitary executive theory, striking down laws passed by congress: it was all in service of eliminating administrative agencies, especially “independent” administrative agencies and shrinking Congress’s ability to govern (even if, at times, it was in the name of Congress governing more). Now the baton has been passed in service of limiting the rights of individuals, especially minorities and greatly enhancing centralized, unaccountable power.
Abraham Lincoln, House Divided Speech
Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858
We can not absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen -- Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance -- and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few -- not omitting even scaffolding -- or, if a single piece be lacking, we can see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in -- in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.
Lambert Strether, February 9, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]
...As always with Constitutional questions, I return to the Federalist Papers[2], in this case Federalist 51, which discusses the powers of the Executive. The author, James Madison, begins:
“We must so contrive] the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.”
Those mutual relations are those of interest:
“This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.”
Madison applies this policy only to the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. However, because he expects the legislative branch to be the strongest, he divides it into “different branches” (House and Senate). He does not, I would argue, consider doing so with the executive branch because he expects it to be “the weakest.” However, today that’s not so, but I believe that Madison’s words — “might be traced through the whole system of human affairs” — license me to extend the same policy to the executive branch….
A central aspect of Madison’s policy:
“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”
….When the Framer’s wrote “place,” we today would say “office” (a placeman, back then, was an office holder). Now, the President’s actions in creating DOGE and setting it in motion run counter to Madison’s principle; “places” are unclear, hence interests are unclear, hence checks are unclear, hence “interior structure of the government” is out of whack….
The Unitary Executive faction would say DOGE’s hazy structure is jake with the angels; they’re government employees, so Trump can do what he wants. I say DOGE’s deliberately obfuscatory structure is anti-Madisonian in principle because it prevents the proper operation of checks and balamces, and I further say it’s bad stewardship of the Office of the President of the United States because it will undermine confidence in the legitimacy of officials and government generally[4]. All this is not to say that a suit can be brought on this basis; but it does reduce the Unitary Executive to Absurdity.
Who’s in charge of DOGE? Not Elon Musk, White House says
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-18-2025]
“The technical designation does not mean Musk is not, for all practical purposes, the key decision-maker for DOGE, which has been staffed full of his allies and may still ultimately be fueled by his influence in the White House. Musk has eagerly touted DOGE’s work, described his influence over its operations and appeared alongside Trump to talk about its mission. Trump himself has credited Musk with leading DOGE. ‘I’m going to tell [Elon Musk] very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education,’ Trump said in a Super Bowl interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier. ‘He’s going to find the same thing … Then I’m going to go, go to the military. Let’s check the military.’ But the Fisher filing suggests a technical degree of separation that raises new questions about accountability for DOGE’s operations — a breakneck effort that has alarmed federal employees and raised fears about data breaches in some of the federal government’s most closely guarded databases.”
[Lambert Strether: “Recall once more (cited here) Madison’s fundamental architectural principle for devising checks and balances: “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” And I wrote: “[T]he President’s actions in creating DOGE and setting it in motion run counter to Madison’s principle; ‘places’ [offices] are unclear, hence interests are unclear, hence checks are unclear, hence ‘interior structure of the government’ is out of whack.” Here we have a place (“Services Administrator”) with no “man” in it. And yet that Service is putatively auditing the Federal Government! It’s extraordinary.”]
DOGE’s ‘Nerd Army’ Is Breaking the Government by Threatening to Snitch to Elon
[Rolling Stone, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-18-2025]
When security officials, for instance, at several departments and agencies have responded that they need to check to ensure these young Musk allies have proper clearance to view sensitive databases, DOGE staff have routinely erupted in fury. Some have told these security officials that if they don’t give them what they want immediately, they’ll call Musk’s cellphone and give him the officials’ names — and have the richest man in the world call and yell at them, or get them reprimanded or fired. ‘Do I need to call Elon?‘ one DOGE member barked at a federal security official while demanding access to sensitive information at one agency this month, a source familiar with the exchange tells Rolling Stone. This has happened repeatedly since the dawn of the second Trump administration — at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Treasury Department, at the Office of Personnel Management, and elsewhere. It has become a cruel punchline within the federal bureaucracy, four sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone, that ‘some child’ from the DOGE team ‘will threaten to call Elon Musk, if you don’t do what the child wants,’ as one federal career official describes it. So far, it’s working.
Is This Why Musk Keeps Using the Same Dozen Tech Micro-Bros for Each Takeover?
Josh Marshall, Feb 18, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
A few days ago I did this post on the taxonomy of DOGE, who’s actually involved in it, the people who are formally part of it and the ones who are part of Musk’s operation but have not gotten official appointments in the executive branch. In that post I asked why it is that Musk seems to continue to rely on this subset of DOGE personnel — the dozen or so under-25 techies — as the landing parties who go in and actually force their way into these departments. It happens again and again….
So why does it continue to be this really small group of guys? They almost all have connections as interns at Musk companies. But interns, not people he’s worked with for years and presumably knows at a deep level.
As I was sitting here yesterday evening it came to me. Musk keeps using these guys because they’re willing to do things these other more experienced people are not. I want to be crystal clear: This isn’t something I’m reporting. I believe it’s just the most logical reading of the available evidence….
The big-picture bad act here is that the Congress had the power of the purse. This whole operation involves seizing that power away from Congress. That’s the big, bad act. But in the mechanics of how this is being carried out there appears to be a lot of more granular and specific criminal conduct — how you treat confidential information, authorization to take certain actions, cancel contracts, fire people, take possession of computer systems, offload government data to private servers, etc. It’s hard to know the details precisely because everything is intentionally opaque….
But back in the real world those are still laws. And if you’ve got a career and a family and a mortgage, maybe you say you believe those theories but that’s still not the same as being perfectly happy to just walk into these places and just do absolutely whatever Elon tells you to do. Because sure Trump has your back today. But tomorrow is a long time. And there are state courts and prosecutors, too, and bar associations and civil suits. Even if you assume a future administration that is laggard in pressing legal consequences like the last one, those things still create headaches. Lawyers cost money. These are bad acts you’d probably prefer someone else do, especially if they’re willing.
The Elon DOGE Emperor Has No Clothes
[TechDirt, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-18-2025]
[[Lambert Strether: “Excellent article.”]
“If the Justice Department’s declaration is true and Elon really isn’t running DOGE, then federal employees should immediately stop bowing down to these threats. After all, why would anyone need to worry about a call from someone who (according to the DOJ) has no official role or authority over the DOGE team? In fact, given this declaration, shouldn’t security officials be asking DOGE staff who actually has the authority to override their security protocols? (Good luck getting an answer to that one.)?”
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-21-2025]
Elon Musk is not the administrator of the US DOGE Service, the agency that houses the temporary Department of Government Efficiency. He’s not even a DOGE employee, according to the White House.In fact, the world’s richest man, who was named by President Donald Trump to lead DOGE in November, who posts about it dozens of times a day, who talks publicly about the agency using the pronoun “we,” and who even conducted an impromptu press conference in the Oval Office with Trump, has “no greater authority than other senior White House advisors,” according to a sworn statement submitted in court this week by a White House personnel official….CNN interviews with multiple government officials, plus a review of hundreds of court documents, employment agreements, agency directories and executive branch memos shed new light on the behind-the-scenes preparation and strategy behind DOGE, choreographed, structured, and executed to take swift control of Washington nerve centers….
That plan has undeniably – and intentionally – minimized transparency while also maximizing the free rein Musk’s allies have wielded across the federal bureaucracy….
Despite their relative lack of government experience, political appointees with deep ties to Musk, his companies or other major tech firms now sit in key leadership positions across agencies that comprise the federal government’s personnel, technology, property and acquisition operations. The organization that works day-to-day at DOGE’s official home hasn’t been publicly laid out by the White House. But according to multiple sources familiar with the organization, the operation is lean by design, with its central office populated primarily by lawyers and younger staff members.
A cadre of young technology engineers have fanned out across multiple agencies over the past month, appearing in organizational directories with different agency-specific email addresses. Some of those engineers, according to disclosures made public in court filings the last several weeks, are detailed to operate in multiple agencies simultaneously….
Their work has been accelerated by political appointees who took control of agencies including the General Services Administration and Office of Personnel Management on Inauguration Day. OPM in particular has served as a cornerstone of a carefully calibrated interplay between Trump’s expansive executive orders and DOGE’s role in carrying out – or in many cases, enforcing – their intent….
Crucially, however, the executive order housed DOGE within the executive office of the president. That insulates its operations from federal records requests until long after its 18-month existence expires, due to the Presidential Records Act.
The wave of initial Inauguration Day legal challenges to DOGE, meanwhile, have stalled out, because they were built on the expectation – now proven wrong – that DOGE would operate as a singular committee, led by Musk, that would advise Trump and his administration….Musk’s official position as a special government employee operating within the White House and not tied explicitly to DOGE, appears intentional in its design. A special government employee is allowed to maintain their private sector employment – which in Musk’s case include a collection of space, electric vehicle, AI and social media companies worth billions of dollars.
While DOGE may be ‘overseen’ by Musk, as [press secretary] Leavitt says, the official DOGE apparatus is outwardly leaderless and under the umbrella of the White House. The effect is an operation difficult to penetrate through public records requests, difficult to pin down for lawmakers pledging oversight, and more complicated to challenge via the legal process.”
DOGE’s Lawyer Once Warned That Ignoring Court Orders Would Destroy the Country
Shawn Musgrave, February 21 2025 [The Intercept]
DOGE’s Millions: As Musk and Trump Gut Government, Their Ax-Cutting Agency Gets Cash Infusion
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-21-2025]
“Most of DOGE’s money, records show, has come in the form of payments from other federal agencies made possible by a nearly century-old law called the Economy Act. To steer those funds to the new department, the Trump administration has treated DOGE as if it were a federal agency. And by dispatching members of its staff to other agencies and having those staffers issue edicts about policy and personnel, DOGE has also behaved as if it has agency-level authority. The use of the Economy Act would seem to subject DOGE to the same open-records laws that cover most federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the State Department. However, DOGE has refused to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests, saying it operates with executive privileges. Musk has also flip-flopped about whether DOGE’s staff members are paid. Initially he said they were not, but earlier this week he said some of them were. The conflicting stances put the Trump administration in a bind, legal experts say. If DOGE is a federal agency, it can’t shield its records from the public. If it’s not an agency, then DOGE’s tens of millions of dollars in funding weren’t legally allocated and should be returned, some contend. ‘The administration can’t have it both ways,’ said Adam Grogg, a former deputy general counsel at OMB and now the legal director at Governing for Impact, a left-of-center think tank. ‘Either it’s an agency covered by FOIA with the authority to do what it’s doing, or it’s purely advising the president and can’t be directing agencies in the way it now is.'”
What happens if President Trump defies a judge’s order?
[The Business Times, via Naked Capitalism 02-17-2025]
...Judges have no ability to take action against a US president, who has broad immunity for official actions. But they do have a few tools to use against his appointees, civil servants or government agencies. They can find agency officials or their lawyers in contempt of court and fine them. They can impose financial sanctions on agencies for failure to comply. And in extreme cases, they can jail officials for contempt.
Judges can also grant injunctions that block parts or all of an executive order, as four jurists have done with Trump’s attempt to terminate citizenship for people born in the US whose parents are undocumented immigrants….
Judges have no police powers, but they can order the US Marshals to bring someone to court. While the marshals must comply with a judicial order, they also work for the Justice Department, which is under the president’s control. This could theoretically trigger a major clash if the president orders marshals not to comply with a judge’s order….
Trump Asks Supreme Court to Let Him Fire US Agency Head
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-17-2025]
“President Donald Trump asked the US Supreme Court to let him fire the head of an independent US agency that protects government whistleblowers, seeking high-court intervention for the first time in his campaign to oust federal officials who don’t embrace his views. The filing, submitted Sunday but not yet formally docketed, asks the court to lift a temporary restraining order issued by a federal trial judge in Washington. The order shields Hampton Dellinger from being removed from his position at US Office of Special Counsel for 14 days….
In issuing the temporary restraining order on Wednesday, US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the firing ‘plainly’ went against US law. The administration didn’t provide any reason, even though federal law says the person in that position could only be removed ‘for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,’ the judge said….
‘This language expresses Congress’s clear intent to ensure the independence of the special counsel and insulate his work from being buffeted by the winds of political change,’ Jackson wrote.”
[Lambert Strether: “It makes perfect sense that checks and balances apply within the branches of government as well as between then; indeed, that’s how Madison defends a bicameral leglislature in Federal 51; see NC here. Indeed, the avoidance of corruption within the executive itself, as protecting whistleblowers, is an obvious case where checks and balances render the executive more functional not less. (And if you want an example of an all-powerful Being voluntarily limiting his Power, see Gen 9:13-15.) Here is the filing.”
[AOL, via Naked Capitalism 02-21-2025]
How Musk And Trump Plan To Hijack The Country— Root Access And The Billionaire Takeover
Howie Klein, February 22, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Musk says the future of Tesla lies with self-driving cars— and one of the first targets DOGE went after is a small government team regulating autonomous vehicles. The notoriously crooked Musk apparently didn’t find any conflict of interest when he cut the team nearly in half. Ian Duncan reported that the loss of personnel from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will “touch on many aspects of the agency’s safety work. ‘It was just very jarring to go from saving lives one day to being locked out of your computer the next,’ said one terminated employee.” This means there will be less scrutiny of robotic vehicles, precisely what Musk was aiming to achieve….
One month of Trump: Press freedom under siege
[Repprters Without Borders, 02-19-2025, via downwithtyranny.com]
The Trump administration’s most overt anti-press freedom moves have been direct threats and restrictions against journalists and their outlets.
- Editorial interference: On February 11, the Associated Press (AP) news agency was informed by the White House that it would be barred from attending official events. According to its Executive Editor Julie Pace, the ban was retaliation for the AP style guide’s continued use of the “Gulf of Mexico” rather than the “Gulf of America” following an executive order renaming the body of water.
- Limits to reporting access: The administration is limiting journalists’ physical access to government information by restricting access to its pool reports and allowing ideologically-friendly content creators to apply for access to the White House and Pentagon, while ending the longstanding residencies of NBC News, The New York Times, National Public Radio, and Politico.
- Personal attacks and social media harassment: Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who Trump brought in to drastically reduce the size and scope of the federal government, publicly insult journalists by name for their reporting and call for their removal.
- Contradictions on free speech: Despite claiming to be a “free speech absolutist,” Musk called for CBS’s 60 Minutes staff to receive “a long prison sentence” for interviewing a critic of his policies.
- Legal intimidation: Trump settled a lawsuit with ABC parent company Disney but continues to sue CBS, the Des Moines Register, Gannett, and the Pulitzer Center over unfavorable coverage.
- Misleading allegations: Musk falsely claimed Reuters and Politico received improper government subsidies, leading to punitive actions. President Trump ordered government agencies to cancel any subscriptions to Politico Pro after negative coverage of Elon Musk, using his political power to punish dissent.
- Pardons for violence against journalists: Trump pardoned over a dozen individuals charged with or convicted of violent crimes against journalists at the US Capitol during the insurrection on January 6, 2021.
Trump Declares Himself the Law in Fight With Democratic Governor
Hafiz Rashid, February 21, 2025 [The New Republic]
Donald Trump got into an argument with the Maine Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, during an address Friday to the nation’s governors in the White House dining room.
During his remarks, Trump referenced his executive order banning transgender women from competing in women’s sports, and singled out Maine for going against his order, directly calling out Mills, who didn’t back down.
“Are you not going to comply with it?” Trump asked Mills.
“I’m complying with state and federal law,” Mills replied.
“Well, we are the federal law,” Trump said, and continued to speak over Mills. “You better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t.”
Strategic Political Economy
Trump’s Economic Recovery – A Dead End?
Michael Hudson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen, YouTube. A must watch, via Naked Capitalism 02-18-2025]
We spoke with the renowned economist Michael Hudson regarding Trump’s plan for economic recovery. The use of tariffs was important for US industrialisation throughout the 19th century as it enabled infant industries (low quality, high cost) to develop and gradually become more competitive vis-a-vis Britain’s mature industries (high quality, low cost) before accepting free market competition. However, today’s economy is defined by complex supply chains that are disrupted by tariffs. As a result, the US producers can be affected unfavourably if their finished product is no longer competitive as a result of components and resources under tariffs. Furthermore, the industrial capitalism of the 19th century entailed tax on rent-seekers and oligarchs to finance infrastructure and education in order to elevate the standard of living and make the overall economy more competitive. An economic recovery cannot be restricted to tariffs as Trump must also deal with the oligarchs.
Trump and Musk Keep Spouting Bogus Numbers to Hide Their Real Agenda
Ross Rosenfeld, February 21, 2025 [The New Republic]
...Before Trump took office, Musk promised to find $2 trillion in savings each year, despite the fact that discretionary spending totals only around $1.8 trillion. So far, no such savings—or anything close—has materialized, and no evidence of the massive waste and fraud Musk vowed to uncover has emerged. Instead, Musk and the Trump administration keep throwing out random figures that are misleading at best, and often downright lies.
Their goal is not merely to apply a veneer of truth and legitimacy to their wholesale wreckage of the federal government, or to make it even more difficult for the fact-checking media to keep up with the Trump administration’s relentless, dizzying moves. It’s also a sleight of hand to make it appear as if it’s not corporate titans like Musk himself who are receiving sweetheart deals and robbing the American people blind, but “deep state” bureaucrats, DEI recipients, and African children.
No, 150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security Benefits
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-18-2025]
“Musk first made the claims during his Oval Office press conference last week, when he claimed that a ‘cursory examination of Social Security, and we got people in there that are 150 years old.'” Cursory is right. More: “While no evidence was produced to back up this claim, it was picked up by the right-wing commentators online, primarily on Musk’s own X platform, as well as being reported credibly by pro-Trump media outlets. Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies. COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it. Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the ‘Convention du Mètre.’ These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150. That’s just one possible explanation for what DOGE allegedly found. Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit payments when anyone reaches the age of 115. However, on Monday morning Musk doubled down, posting a screenshot of what he claims were figures from ‘the Social Security database’ to X, writing that ‘the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!’ The figures suggested that over 10 millions people aged over 120 were collecting benefits…. The fact that the Social Security system contains millions of entries from people who are dead is likely distinct from a potential COBOL-caused error, and also not news. A report written by the SSA’s inspector general in 2023 found that 98 percent of those aged 100 or older in the Social Security databases are not in receipt of any benefits. The report added that the database would not be updated because it would cost too much money to do so.”
[Lambert Strether: “Dealing with Elon is like dealing with Ukrainian propaganda. It’s really good propaganda, it comes in great volume, and its amplified by an army of bots and shills.”]
About Those $4.7T in "Untraceable" Payments DOGE Allegedly Found
boudiesmommy, February 18, 2025 [DailyKos]
Nope. There are no 150-year-olds on Social Security. It's COBOL!
lobachevsky, February 14, 2025 [DailyKos]
[A useful comment from Reddit, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-19-2025]
The critical importance of domain knowledge can never be overstated when it comes to data scientific research. You'll never get good (and truthful) results if you don't have a deep understanding of the intricacies of the specific data sets under investigation. And, those of us who've done this for a while know that pretty much every data set (especially those that live in databases whose ages are measured in decades) tend to have boatloads of "interesting" aspects that make straightforward analysis challenging at best."The critical importance of domain knowledge can never be overstated when it comes to data scientific research."I'm an auditor, and domain knowledge is what makes an audit an audit. Without it, the "audit" is just a waste of time and money.
Not a waste of time and money when the intent was never to conserve time and money. Incompetence and malice can often be hard to distinguish from one another, but you would be foolish to discount malice in this instance.Richest man in the world gets access to the complete records of the US Treasury, of which he himself has numerous contracts (and therefore crystal clear conflicts of interest), preferentially targets areas that disproportionately affect non-billionaires and non-millionaires, targets regulatory agencies that keep billionaires like him in check, and has within just a few weeks been caught in blatant lies about what he's found. Eg. $50 million for condoms in Gaza and $59 million by FEMA for luxury hotels for illegal immigrants.
It's not ignorance; it's malice. Recognize their goals are not aligned with most of us. They're not interested in truth. It's always just been about the power. THAT is why it's never a problem when they're caught lying or doing something seemingly incompetent.
Engineers of good conscience often can't even imagine the desire to throw a wrench into the gears of a working machine. It's a massive blind spot, and the country voted for it. Now the leopards are eating our faces, and we're acting surprised.
Twice this week Trump vowed to end Social Security for “millions”—believe him.
Dean Obeidallah, Feb 20, 2025
Trump and Musk are intentionally lying to make people believe that nearly 20 million dead people are receiving Social Security. Why? So they can justify cutting in the area of 25% of the program. The problem is too many people dismiss this as bluster. You do so at you and your family’s peril because I can 100% guarantee Trump and Musk are coming for Social Security.
That’s not just my opinion. But also that of Social Security Works—a non-partisan organization dedicated to protecting Social Security and Medicare. They noted in response to Trump’s lies this week: “Trump is intentionally undermining confidence in our Social Security system.” They added, Trump is “laying the groundwork to ILLEGALLY DENY EARNED BENEFITS to anyone he wants to punish or deems unworthy.”
Trump won’t need Congress to act in order to toss thousands if not millions of people off the Social Security rolls. He will just claim—through his hand picked head of the Social Security Administration—that there is fraud and they are simply cleaning up the system.
With Congress Pliant, an Emboldened Trump Pushes His Business Interests
Norms recognized for decades in Washington by both parties no longer appear to apply to the Trump White House, former prosecutors and ethics lawyers say.The democratic system in United States never really anticipated what is happening in the Trump administration, said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department national security lawyer who is now a law professor at the University of Minnesota. ‘The presidency requires virtue— it requires a basic level of decency and loyalty to the country,’ Rozenshtein said. ‘If you don’t have that kind of person, there is not much one can do unfortunately at that point, especially if Congress is supine.’… Trump’s business ventures have created a climate for potential conflicts unlike any other U.S. president. And the list of matters sparking controversy in the second Trump administration is extensive.”
What makes the situation most worrisome, these lawyers said, is that so much of the system erected since the Watergate era to monitor and punish individuals involved in ethics violations has rapidly been dismantled since Trump’s inauguration.
“They are taking a wrecking ball to organizations across the executive branch that play a role in integrity, oversight and accountability,” said David Huitema, who was confirmed by the Senate as the new head of Office of Government Ethics in November for a five-year term, but then fired by Trump this month.
Ex-officials warn Zeteo that the USXports database is a means for Musk to undercut competitors to SpaceX in the defense sector.
Global power shift
[Institutional War Theory, via Naked Capitalism 02-17-2025]
...Roughly two weeks ago, in an interview with Megyn Kelly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio essentially announced that the United States accepts the multipolar world order and has ended its ambitions for global hegemony.1 I believe we are now seeing the first stages of this strategy coming to fruition.
In the past week, Trump’s administration has said and done so many consequential things related to Russia and Ukraine that is hard to keep track of. I have attempted to compile them all here….
Last week, Trump said that the United States would take control of and rebuild the largely destroyed Gaza strip, and that it would temporarily relocate the entire population to do this….
Trump has always been an advocate of the long delayed “pivot to Asia“ strategy initialized by Barack Obama.19 Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign put a trade war with China as one of his primary goals.20 Trump appears to want to restart the trade war by imposing tariffs on the majority of imports from China.21 ….
There are three colloquial terms to describe foreign policy tools: hard power, soft power, and sticky power. Hard power is military force, soft power is diplomacy, and sticky power is economic leverage like sanctions. Trump is transforming each of these tools and leveraging them in very different ways than the Biden administration....
Yes, America Is Europe’s Enemy Now
[Foreign Policy, via Naked Capitalism 02-21-2025]
It’s Time for Europe to Do the Unthinkable
[Foreign Policy, via Naked Capitalism 02-20-2025]
It is not Trump that betrayed Ukraine
[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 02-20-2025]
Kyiv was betrayed by those who promised it NATO and EU membership so it fights Russia and rejects any compromise in a war it cannot win.
In the past three years, the West reached the upper limit of what it could feasibly do in terms of supplying weapons and imposing economic sanctions without triggering World War III or badly damaging the world economy. Continuing this costly backing longer would not have changed the reality that Russia is bigger and richer than Ukraine and is able to sustain an army that has adapted to modern warfare and cannot be defeated by large quantities of state-of-the-art Western military technology. Above all, Russia would always have the final word in any regional war as a major nuclear power – a factor that restricts Western involvement in the conflict.
[Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, via Naked Capitalism 02-17-2025]
Green Berets and Reaper Drones: Trump’s Shadow War in Mexico
Ben Makuch, February 21, 2025 [The New Republic]
Oligarchy
The Rise of the Selfish Plutocrats
Brian Klaas [The Atlantic, via The Big Picture February 16, 2025]
Instead of pursuing philanthropy, many now seek to evade social responsibility….
...In 2021, The Wall Street Journal broke the news that the priceless painting had been kept on private display aboard bin Salman’s superyacht, Serene, a 439-foot-long, half-billion-dollar boat that had recently run aground in a navigational accident. A fragile, irreplaceable object of significance to the shared cultural history of all humanity was being kept in a hot, humid environment for the private enjoyment of one royal billionaire and his ultrarich guests….
The journey of one painting charts a profound shift in modern societies. The role of the ultra-wealthy has morphed from one of shared social responsibility and patronage to the freewheeling celebration of selfish opulence. Rather than investing in their society—say, by giving alms to the poor, or funding Caravaggios and cathedrals—many of today’s plutocrats use their wealth to escape to private islands, private Beyoncé concerts, and, above all, extremely private superyachts.…
In 1908, the English writer G. K. Chesterton observed that “the poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”
Chesterton’s observation was astute for the modern era, but for much of Western history, it was only half true. In his 2023 book, As Gods Among Men, the economic historian Guido Alfani chronicles the role of the ultra-wealthy from antiquity to the era of cryptocurrency. The superrich have always wielded inordinate economic and social power and, as such, have plenty of historical ills to answer for. But the affluent of many past periods also invested in the shared betterment of society, understanding that doing so helped justify the existence of wealth inequality. Today’s ultrarich, by Alfani’s telling, are uniquely selfish, and by abdicating the philanthropic role, they are “fuelling resentment and leaving their place in society uncertain.”….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
A 40-year behavioral study confirms your worst fears—kids who bully go on to make the most money
[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 02-19-2025]
Trumpillnomics
Trump begins firings of FAA staff just weeks after fatal DC plane crash
[AP, February 17, 2025]
...Probationary workers were targeted in late-night emails Friday notifying them they had been fired, David Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, said in a statement.
The impacted workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, one air traffic controller told The Associated Press. The air traffic controller was not authorized to talk to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity….
Trump’s economic masterplan: He is plotting an anti-Nixon shock
Yanis Varoufakis, February 12, 2025 [Unherd]
Why Asian central banks are starting to decouple from the Fed
[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 02-20-2025]
Commerce Secretary Lutnick: Trump’s goal is to abolish the IRS
[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 02-20-2025]
Trump Enforcers Affirm Lina Khan’s Approach to Antitrust Matt Stoller
Assume a Debt Crisis Stephanie Kelton, via Naked Capitalism 02-18-2025]
Metals Crucial to Clean Energy Are Getting Caught Up in the US–China Trade War
[Wired, via The Big Picture February 17, 2025]
After a Chinese export ban, can the US get gallium and germanium from Canada—or will tariffs get in the way?
Disrupting mainstream economics
Why Japan Succeeds Despite Stagnation
Tomas Pueyo [Uncharted Territories, via Naked Capitalism 02-20-2025]
Curing Economics' Addiction to Unreal Theories
David Sloan Wilson, January 20, 2025 [evonomics, via Avedon’s Sideshow]
A Review of Ricardo's Dream, by Nat Dyer
Read almost any recent critique of neoclassical economic theory, and you will find its unreality pointed out. Homo economicus is nothing like flesh-and-blood humans, we are told—again, and again, and again. Remarkably, this critique has been leveled against the precursors of neoclassical economics, all the way back to the origin of the profession. That's what we can learn from a new book titled Ricardo's Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray, by Nat Dyer, an able scholar and entertaining writer on the subject. The title refers to David Ricardo (1772-1823), whose influence was on a par with Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill. His dream was to discover economic laws as universal and mathematically tractable as Newton's laws of motion. He became so mesmerized by his models that he gave them priority over the more complicated real world—just like the neoclassical economists of today."
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
The Final Despotism: When Technology Rewrites Human Freedom
Mike Brock, Feb 17, 2025
Throughout history, tyranny has been limited by human frailty. Dictators tire. Their attention wanders. They must sleep. Even the most sophisticated systems of oppression ultimately relied on human beings to maintain control—people who could be corrupted, convinced, or who might simply look the other way at crucial moments. Resistance always remained possible because no human system of control could achieve total perfection.
Artificial intelligence fundamentally changes this equation. For the first time in human history, we face the prospect of systems of control that never sleep, never tire, and never look the other way. AI-enabled surveillance can watch everyone, everywhere, all the time. AI systems can process vast amounts of data to identify patterns of resistance before they even fully form. AI can optimize systems of social control with inhuman precision, crafting personalized manipulation for every citizen….
When figures like Elon Musk claim that technical competence should override democratic process, when they work to replace human judgment with AI systems, they're not just seeking efficiency—they're building the infrastructure for a form of despotism humanity has never encountered before. Their vision of replacing democratic deliberation with algorithmic governance isn't just anti-democratic—it's potentially irreversible.
The technical elites driving it genuinely believe they're creating something better than democracy. When figures like Musk and Thiel work to replace democratic processes with AI-driven governance, they're not just seeking power—they're advancing a vision where human judgment and democratic deliberation are seen as inefficient obstacles to be optimized away. They sincerely believe that their technical competence justifies dismantling democratic institutions, making them even more dangerous because they'll pursue this transformation with absolute conviction….
Lois Parshley, Feb 21, 2025 [The Lever]
As Trump leans into AI, automated systems are already ruining lives. A new organization is out to stop it….
Eventually, Austin turned to lawyers at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, who learned that Texas’ automated verification system, developed by multinational consulting firm Deloitte, had made extensive and repeated errors, including issuing incorrect notices, wrongful denials, and losing paperwork….
Though De Liban was not involved with Austin’s case, he has worked with scores of people trapped in similar situations — victims of algorithmic decisions gone wrong. These kinds of systemic harms are already impacting Americans in every phase of their lives, he says. “Our legal mechanisms are totally insufficient to deal with the scale and scope of harms these technologies can cause.”
Nearly 10 Years After Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier Says: Privacy’s Still Screwed
[The Register, via Naked Capitalism 02-18-2025]
Ed Zitron, Feb 17, 2025 [Where's Your Ed At]
Climate and environmental crises
Trump Moves To Kill The Environmental Magna Carta
Veronica Riccobene, Feb 17, 2025 [The Lever]
...In a filing submitted Feb. 16, administration officials announced an interim rule titled “Removal of National Environmental Policy Act Implementing Regulations.”
NEPA requires all federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of their work, including by submitting new contracts and permits to rigorous environmental assessments and public comment. Signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970 amid growing pollution concerns, NEPA was the nation’s first major environmental law, predating the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Project 2025 — the conservative policy agenda authored by Trump’s former aides — said that the government is “abusing” NEPA, and has called for severely limiting the law.
Democrats' political malpractice
Lambert Strether, www.nakedcapitalism.com/...
From the 30,000 foot-level — i.e., beyond “Who lost Pennsylvania?” — I believe the 2024 majority comprehensively rejected governance as practiced by our professional managerial class (PMC). That was the “tide in the affairs of men” in the election just past. By “governance” I don’t mean actions only performed by the State, but situations outside the workplace where a supplicant citizen sits on one side of a desk, and a credentialed functionary sits on the other, and is the gatekeeper to some sort of reward or punishment. You can see this is broad: It covers everything from health care to children’s schooling (“they/them” “not you”) to insurance to human resources to law enforcement to student loans. (Note that all these “across the desk” issues are kitchen table issues, bills; the price of eggs, I would speculate, is a concern at the margin, people having been pushed to the edge by a person behind a desk, then over the edge at the grocery store.) The price of eggs is also visible and understandable; an absurd medical bill is accepted as one of life’s inevitable burdens.)
And it’s hard to disagree with that rejection; from my class traitor armchair, there’s not one PMC-managed system I’d trust, though I give special attention to the PMC’s catastropic management of our ongoing Covid pandemic (unless you consider installing another tranche of lethality on top of deaths of despair a success). Since the PMC is the base of the Democrat Party, to reject PMC governance is to reject the Democrat Party. The 2024 majority also comprehensively rejected PMC policy, going all the way back to NAFTA, for which the Democrats finally paid the price, as they fully deserved, but also including today’s war in Ukraine, and foreign policy establishment that produced it. (I view the DOGE and MAGA as completely distinct; rather, DOGE is leveraging/exploiting MAGA rage for its own purposes, which have more to do with a power surge by Silicon Valley
fraudsters and schemerscapitalists than they do with the fate of the rust belt. That MAGA got beaten into the ground by DOGE on one of their main issues, H1B, is something to think about.)
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-20-2025]
At protest against DOGE, Congressman Glenn Ivey tells NIH workers facing mass layoffs, "We're gonna make Hakeem Jeffries the Speaker of the House in two years, right?"
Why Democrats Won’t Throw a Real Punch
[The Nation, via downwithtyranny.com 02-20-2025]
...we need to lose the theory that these Dems are ‘spineless’ and just don’t understand how to wage political war. We know they can be vicious because we’ve seen them execute that kind of operation against the left since Ralph Nader caught them sleeping in 2000. We have seen them do it maliciously during Senator Bernie Sanders’s two primary runs. We saw Black and brown women stamped as ‘Bernie Bros’ with enough, yes, ruthless, repetition to make it stick. We’ve seen President Barack Obama with all his rhetorical powers hector young Black men, but not aim his electric cadence at Musk and his Palo Alto brownshirts. It’s not that they cannot—they will not. When it was Sanders or an individual who demanded even a modest change in policy on Gaza, they brought out the knives. When it’s Musk and his apartheid army of incels, they wield sporks. Yet, as we keep seeing, spork fighting is demoralizing. The question then is why, amid this tornado of anger, are Democratic institutions so soft?
The GOP is pushing a false choice
Catherine Rampell [Washington Post, downwithtyranny.com 02-19-2025]
Americans want change. Yet Republicans have somehow backed Democrats into defending the status quo — or sounding like it, anyway.That’s because President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their underlings have managed to frame recent events as a binary choice: Either you like the ongoing mass destruction and trampling of the Constitution by the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or you support keeping government as it is. It’s a false choice, obviously. But Democrats and other Trump critics have done a poor job articulating that failure in logic and the existence of a third option: actually fixing things….However bloated the government bureaucracy might be, the solution is not indiscriminately firing nuclear weapons inspectors, Head Start staff, law enforcement officers or air traffic controllers. (Yes, mere weeks after multiple deadly airplane crashes, Trump is canning hundreds of employees at the Federal Aviation Administration.) Nor does it seem wise to grant Musk and his DOGE goons access to the Treasury’s sensitive payments system or your personal taxpayer data in order to cut “waste, fraud and abuse.”Likewise, when American voters expressed frustration with health-care costs, they were presumably not seeking to cut funds for cancer research (as this administration has tried to do). They didn’t vote for public health agencies to suppress research on bird flu or to fire disease trackers, in the middle of bird flu and measles outbreaks. Or to remove seasonal flu vaccine campaign materials from government websites as hospitalization rates for the illness hit a 15-year high….Trump is shattering the status quo, but he’s not fixing the problems you care about. He’s creating new, much scarier ones.
Howie Klein, February 16, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Resistance
Surviving Fascism: Lessons from Jim Crow
[Scalawag, via Naked Capitalism 02-21-2025]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The Next Round of the Abortion Wars Is Just Beginning
[Governing, via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2025]
CDC Shutters PRAMS Program on Maternal and Infant Health
Josh Marshall, February 22, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) is a federal data collection system, run out of CDC, “designed to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants,” in the words of the program’s website. It has run continuously since 1988 and covers everything from the particulars of newborn health and morbidity to issues like post-partum depression in mothers. I can report that the Trump CDC has shuttered the program as part of its general clampdown on medical research and public health information.
Texas Won’t Study How Its Abortion Ban Impacts Women, So We Did
Andrea Suozzo, Sophie Chou and Lizzie Presser, Feb. 20, 2025 [ProPublica]
A first-of-its-kind analysis by ProPublica found that the sepsis rate in second-trimester pregnancy loss hospitalizations increased by more than 50% after Texas’ near-total abortion ban went into effect in September 2021. The analysis also identified at least 120 in-hospital deaths of pregnant or postpartum women in 2022 and 2023 — an increase of dozens of deaths from a comparable period before the COVID-19 pandemic….
The Christian Nationalist Plot to Disenfranchise Women Voters
Sarah Stankorb, February 21, 2025 [The New Republic]
...The proposed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, now considered a priority for Republicans in the House, will make it harder, if not practically impossible, for millions of women to vote. The SAVE Act would require documentation, such as a passport or birth certificate matching your current legal name to allow a person to register to vote. These requirements would pose a challenge to broad swaths of the country, but would fall especially hard on women.
Eight in 10 married women in opposite-sex marriages took their spouse’s last name, and the bill could exclude over 69 million married American women whose names do not match their birth certificate….
Another GOP Assault on Healthcare: Trump And Musk's War On Telemedicine
Howie Klein, February 01, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
The MAGA movement’s obsession with cruelty has a new target: telemedicine. In a move straight out of the Republican playbook of punishing the vulnerable, the Trump administration is slashing telehealth services for millions—especially seniors, low-income patients, and people with disabilities.
Trump’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) just gutted Medicare’s telehealth coverage, effective April 1. Before, seniors could access vital medical care from the comfort of their homes. Now? Unless they’re in a rural clinic or a handful of select facilities, they’re out of luck. The exceptions are narrow— a few mental health services and remote check-ins for chronic conditions— leaving countless others stranded without the telehealth access they depended on.
[The Reframe, via The Big Picture February 21, 2025]
It’s not a coincidence that we’re being led by the least qualified monsters available; it’s a deliberate strategy. Facing the Worst – a series about directional alignment.
Republicans move to impeach judges who blocked Trump
[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2025]
Money, Lies, and God: Katherine Stewart on the Christian Right’s Influence
[YouTube,
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