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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 months ago

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Michael de Adder :: @deAdder :: The Globe and Mail

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 2, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 03, 2025

Billionaire Elon Musk’s team yesterday took control of the Treasury’s payment system, thus essentially gaining access to the checkbook with which the United States handles about $6 trillion annually and to all the financial information of Americans and American businesses with it. Apparently, it did not stop there.

Today Ellen Knickmeyer of the Associated Press reported that yesterday two top security officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) tried to stop people associated with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, from accessing classified information they did not have security clearance to see. The Trump administration put the officials on leave, and the DOGE team gained access to the information.

Vittoria Elliott of Wired has identified those associated with Musk’s takeover as six “engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college.” They are connected either to Musk or to his long-time associate Peter Thiel, who backed J.D. Vance’s Senate run eighteen months before he became Trump’s vice presidential running mate. Their names are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran, and they have little to no experience in government.

Public policy expert Dan Moynihan told reporter Elliott that the fact these people “are not really public officials” makes it hard for Congress to intervene. “So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world,” he said. Law professor Nick Bednar noted that “it is very unlikely” that the engineers “have the expertise to understand either the law or the administration needs that surround these agencies.”

After Musk’s team breached the USAID computers, cybersecurity specialist Matthew Garrett posted: “Random computers being plugged into federal networks is obviously terrifying in terms of what data they're deliberately accessing, but it's also terrifying because it implies controls are being disabled—unmanaged systems should never have access to this data. Who else has access to those systems?”

USAID receives foreign policy guidance from the State Department. Intelligence agencies must now assume U.S. intelligence systems are insecure.

Musk’s response was to post: “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” Also last night, according to Sam Stein of The Bulwark, “the majority of staff in the legislative and public affairs bureau lost access to their emails, implying they’ve been put on admin leave although this was never communicated to them.”

Congress established USAID in 1961 to bring together the many different programs that were administering foreign aid. Focusing on long-term socioeconomic development, USAID has a budget of more than $50 billion, less than 1% of the U.S. annual budget. It is one of the largest aid agencies in the world.

Musk is unelected, and it appears that DOGE has no legal authority. As political scientist Seth Masket put it in tusk: “Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the President nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government. The ‘Department of Government Efficiency,’ announced by Trump in a January 20th executive order, is not truly any sort of government department or agency, and even the executive order uses quotes in the title. It’s perfectly fine to have a marketing gimmick like this, but DOGE does not have power over established government agencies, and Musk has no role in government. It does not matter that he is an ally of the President. Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices. That is not efficiency; that is a coup.”

DOGE has simply taken over government systems. Musk, using President Donald Trump’s name, is personally deciding what he thinks should be cut from the U.S. government.

Today, Musk reposted a social media post from MAGA religious extremist General Mike Flynn, who resigned from his position as Trump’s national security advisor in 2017 after pleading guilty to secret conversations with a Russian agent—for which Trump pardoned him—and who publicly embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory. In today’s post, Flynn complained about “the ‘Lutheran’ faith” and, referring to federal grants provided to Lutheran Family Services and affiliated organizations, said, “this use of ‘religion’ as a money laundering operation must end.” Musk added: “The [DOGE] team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”

In fact, this is money appropriated by Congress, and its payment is required by law. Republican lawmakers have pushed government subsidies and grants toward religious organizations for years, and Lutheran Social Services is one of the largest employers in South Dakota, where it operates senior living facilities.

South Dakota is the home of Senate majority leader John Thune, who has not been a strong Trump supporter, as well as Homeland Security secretary nominee Kristi Noem.

The news that DOGE has taken over U.S. government computers is not the only bombshell this weekend.

Another is that Trump has declared a trade war with the top trading partners of the United States: Mexico, Canada, and China. Although his first administration negotiated the current trade agreement between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, on Saturday Trump broke the terms of that treaty.

He slapped tariffs of 25% on goods coming from Mexico and Canada, tariffs of 10% on Canadian energy, and tariffs of 10% on goods coming from China. He said he was doing so to force Mexico and Canada to do more about undocumented migration and drug trafficking, but while precursor chemicals to make fentanyl come from China and undocumented migrants come over the southern border with Mexico, Canada accounts for only about 1% of both. Further, Trump has diverted Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents combating drug trafficking to his immigration sweeps.

As soon as he took office, Trump designated Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and on Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth responded that “all options will be on the table” when a Fox News Channel host asked if the military will strike within Mexico. Today Trump was clearer: he posted on social media that without U.S. trade—which Trump somehow thinks is a “massive subsidy”—“Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada—AND NO TARIFFS!”

Trump inherited the best economy in the world from his predecessor, President Joe Biden, but on Friday, as soon as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Trump would levy the tariffs, the stock market plunged. Trump, who during his campaign insisted that tariffs would boost the economy, today said that Americans could feel “SOME PAIN” from them. He added “BUT WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, AND IT WILL ALL BE WORTH THE PRICE THAT MUST BE PAID.” Tonight, stock market futures dropped 450 points before trading opens tomorrow.

Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum wrote, “We categorically reject the White House’s slander that the Mexican government has alliances with criminal organizations, as well as any intention of meddling in our territory,” and has promised retaliatory tariffs. China noted that it has been working with the U.S. to regulate precursor chemicals since 2019 and said it would sue the U.S. before the World Trade Organization.

Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau announced more than $100 billion in retaliatory 25% tariffs and then spoke directly to Americans. Echoing what economists have said all along, Trudeau warned that tariffs would cost jobs, raise prices, and limit the precious metals necessary for U.S. security. But then he turned from economics to principles.

“As President John F. Kennedy said many years ago,” Trudeau began, “geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends, economics has made us partners and necessity has made us allies.” He noted that “from the beaches of Normandy to the mountains of the Korean Peninsula, from the fields of Flanders to the streets of Kandahar,” Canadians “have “fought and died alongside you.”

“During the summer of 2005, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged your great city of New Orleans, or mere weeks ago when we sent water bombers to tackle the wildfires in California. During the day, the world stood still—Sept. 11, 2001—when we provided refuge to stranded passengers and planes, we were always there, standing with you, grieving with you, the American people.

“Together, we’ve built the most successful economic, military and security partnership the world has ever seen. A relationship that has been the envy of the world…. Unfortunately, the actions taken today by the White House split us apart instead of bringing us together.”

Trudeau said Canada’s response would “be far reaching and include everyday items such as American beer, wine and bourbon, fruits and fruit juices, including orange juice, along with vegetables, perfume, clothing and shoes. It’ll include major consumer products like household appliances, furniture and sports equipment, and materials like lumber and plastics, along with much, much more. He assured Canadians: “[W]e are all in this together. The Canadian government, Canadian businesses, Canadian organized labour, Canadian civil society, Canada’s premiers, and tens of millions of Canadians from coast to coast to coast are aligned and united. This is Team Canada at its best.”

Canadian provincial leaders said they were removing alcohol from Republican-dominated states, and Canadian member of parliament Charlie Angus noted that the Liquor Control Board of Ontario buys more wine by dollar value than any other organization in the world and that Canada is the number one export market for Kentucky spirits. The Liquor Control Board of Ontario has stopped all purchases of American beer, wine, and spirits, turning instead to allies and local producers. Canada’s Irving Oil, which provides heating oil to New England, has already told customers that prices will reflect the tariffs.

In a riveting piece today, in his Thinking about…, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder wrote that “[t]he people who now dominate the executive branch of the government…are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation.” “Think of the federal government as a car,” he wrote. “You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them.”

On Friday, James E. Dennehy of the FBI’s New York field office told his staff that they are “in a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy.” He vowed that he, anyway, is going to “dig in.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#deAdder #Michael de Adder #The globe and Mail #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #Musk #tariffs #coup #Timothy Snyder #FBI #USAID #DOGE #constitutional crisis #unprecidented

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 8 months ago

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The Chronicle Herald :: Michael de Adder :: @deAdder

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 28, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 29, 2024

Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began. I’ve struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means.

I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly.

That’s how scholars say fascism happens, too—first slowly and then all at once—and that’s what has been keeping us up at night.

But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once.

At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime.

In 1763, just after the end of the French and Indian War, American colonists loved that they were part of the British empire. And yet, by 1776, just a little more than a decade later, they had declared independence from that empire and set down the principles that everyone has a right to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government.

The change was just as quick in the 1850s. In 1853 it sure looked as if the elite southern enslavers had taken over the country. They controlled the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They explicitly rejected the Declaration of Independence and declared that they had the right to rule over the country’s majority. They planned to take over the United States and then to take over the world, creating a global economy based on human enslavement.

And yet, just seven years later, voters put Abraham Lincoln in the White House with a promise to stand against the Slave Power and to protect a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He ushered in “a new birth of freedom” in what historians call the second American revolution.

The same pattern was true in the 1920s, when it seemed as if business interests and government were so deeply entwined that it was only a question of time until the United States went down the same dark path to fascism that so many other nations did in that era. In 1927, after the execution of immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, poet John Dos Passos wrote: “they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspaper editors the old judges the small men with reputations….”

And yet, just five years later, voters elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised Americans a New Deal and ushered in a country that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights.

Every time we expand democracy, it seems we get complacent, thinking it’s a done deal. We forget that democracy is a process and that it’s never finished.

And when we get complacent, people who want power use our system to take over the government. They get control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and they begin to undermine the principle that we should be treated equally before the law and to chip away at the idea that we have a right to a say in our government. And it starts to seem like we have lost our democracy.

But all the while, there are people who keep the faith. Lawmakers, of course, but also teachers and journalists and the musicians who push back against the fear by reminding us of love and family and community. And in those communities, people begin to organize—the marginalized people who are the first to feel the bite of reaction, and grassroots groups. They keep the embers of democracy alive.

And then something fans them into flame.

In the 1760s it was the Stamp Act, which said that men in Great Britain had the right to rule over men in the American colonies. In the 1850s it was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which gave the elite enslavers the power to rule the United States. And in 1929 it was the Great Crash, which proved that the businessmen had no idea what they were doing and had no plan for getting the country out of the Great Depression.

The last several decades have felt like we were fighting a holding action, trying to protect democracy first from an oligarchy and then from a dictator. Many Americans saw their rights being stripped away…even as they were quietly becoming stronger.

That strength showed in the Women’s March of January 2017, and it continued to grow—quietly under Donald Trump and more openly under the protections of the Biden administration. People began to organize in school boards and state legislatures and Congress. They also began to organize over TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and newsletters and Zoom calls.

And then something set them ablaze. The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision stripped away from the American people a constitutional right they had enjoyed for almost fifty years, and made it clear that a small minority intended to destroy democracy and replace it with a dictatorship based in Christian nationalism.

When President Joe Biden announced just a week ago that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, he did not pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris.

He passed it to us.

It is up to us to decide whether we want a country based on fear or on facts, on reaction or on reality, on hatred or on hope.

It is up to us whether it will be fascism or democracy that, in the end, moves swiftly, and up to us whether we will choose to follow in the footsteps of those Americans who came before us in our noblest moments, and launch a brand new era in American history.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#last supper #about art #Michael de Adder #political cartoon #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #American political history #politics #anti-authoritarianism #anti-democratic #election 2024

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