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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 months ago

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 4, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 05, 2025

Shortly after 1:00 this morning, Vittoria Elliott, Dhruv Mehrotra, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman of Wired reported that, according to three of their sources, “[a] 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies [SpaceX and X], has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government.”

According to the reporters, Elez apparently has the privileges to write code on the programs at the Bureau of Fiscal Service that control more than 20% of the U.S. economy, including government payments of veterans’ benefits, Social Security benefits, and veterans’ pay. The admin privileges he has typically permit a user “to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.”

“If you would have asked me a week ago” if an outsider could’ve been given access to a government server, one federal IT worker told the Wired reporters, “I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the f*ck knows."

The reporters note that control of the Bureau of Fiscal Service computers could enable someone to cut off monies to specific agencies or even individuals. “Will DOGE cut funding to programs approved by Congress that Donald Trump decides he doesn’t like?” asked Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) yesterday. “What about cancer research? Food banks? School lunches? Veterans aid? Literacy programs? Small business loans?”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reported that his sources said that Elez and possibly others got full admin access to the Treasury computers on Friday, January 31, and that he—or they—have “already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system.” They are leaning on existing staff in the agency for help, which those workers have provided reluctantly in hopes of keeping the entire system from crashing. Marshall reports those staffers are “freaking out.” The system is due to undergo a migration to another system this weekend; how the changes will interact with that long-planned migration is unclear.

The changes, Marshall’s sources tell him, “all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked.”

Both Wired and the New York Times reported yesterday that Musk’s team intends to cut government workers and to use artificial intelligence, or AI, to make budget cuts and to find waste and abuse in the federal government.

Today Jason Koebler, Joseph Cox, and Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media reported that they had obtained the audio of a meeting held Monday by Thomas Shedd for government technology workers. Shedd is a former Musk employee at Tesla who is now leading the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), the team that is recoding the government programs.

At the meeting, Shedd told government workers that “things are going to get intense” as his team creates “AI coding agents” to write software that would, for example, change the way logging into the government systems works. Currently, that software cannot access any information about individuals; as the reporters note, login.gov currently assures users that it “does not affect or have any information related to the specific agency you are trying to access.”

But Shedd said they were working through how to change that login “to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud.”

When a government employee pointed out that the Privacy Act makes it illegal for agencies to share personal information without consent, Shedd appeared unfazed by the idea they were trying something illegal. “The idea would be that folks would give consent to help with the login flow, but again, that's an example of something that we have a vision, that needs [to be] worked on, and needs clarified. And if we hit a roadblock, then we hit a roadblock. But we still should push forward and see what we can do.”

A government employee told Koebler, Cox, and Maiberg that using AI coding agents is a major security risk. “Government software is concerned with things like foreign adversaries attempting to insert backdoors into government code. With code generated by AI, it seems possible that security vulnerabilities could be introduced unintentionally. Or could be introduced intentionally via an AI-related exploit that creates obfuscated code that includes vulnerabilities that might expose the data of American citizens or of national security importance.”

A blizzard of lawsuits has greeted Musk’s campaign and other Trump administration efforts to undermine Congress. Today, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the minority leaders in their respective chambers, announced they were introducing legislation to stop Musk’s unlawful actions in the Treasury’s payment systems and to protect Americans, calling it “Stop the Steal,” a play on Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

This evening, Democratic lawmakers and hundreds of protesters rallied at the Treasury Department to take a stand against Musk’s hostile takeover of the U.S. Treasury payment system. “Nobody Elected Elon,” their signs read. “He has access to all our information, our Social Security numbers, the federal payment system,” Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) said. “What’s going to stop him from stealing taxpayer money?”

Tonight, the Washington Post noted that Musk’s actions “appear to violate federal law.” David Super of Georgetown Law School told journalists Jeff Stein, Dan Diamond, Faiz Siddiqui, Cat Zakrzewski, Hannah Natanson, and Jacqueline Alemany: “So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”

Musk’s takeover of the U.S. government to override Congress and dictate what programs he considers worthwhile is a logical outcome of forty years of Republican rhetoric. After World War II, members of both political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. The idea was to use tax dollars to create national wealth. The government would hold the economic playing field level by protecting every American’s access to education, healthcare, transportation and communication, employment, and resources so that anyone could work hard and rise to prosperity.

Businessmen who opposed regulation and taxes tried to convince voters to abandon this system but had no luck. The liberal consensus—“liberal” because it used the government to protect individual freedom, and “consensus” because it enjoyed wide support—won the votes of members of both major political parties.

But those opposed to the liberal consensus gained traction after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. Three years later, in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, sent troops to help desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Those trying to tear apart the liberal consensus used the crisis to warn voters that the programs in place to help all Americans build the nation as they rose to prosperity were really an attempt to redistribute cash from white taxpayers to undeserving racial minorities, especially Black Americans. Such programs were, opponents insisted, a form of socialism, or even communism.

That argument worked to undermine white support for the liberal consensus. Over the years, Republican voters increasingly abandoned the idea of using tax money to help Americans build wealth.

When majorities continued to support the liberal consensus, Republicans responded by suppressing the vote, rigging the system through gerrymandering, and flooding our political system with dark money and using right-wing media to push propaganda. Republicans came to believe that they were the only legitimate lawmakers in the nation; when Democrats won, the election must have been rigged. Even so, they were unable to destroy the post–World War II government completely because policies like the destruction of Social Security and Medicaid, or the elimination of the Department of Education, remained unpopular.

Now, MAGA Republicans in charge of the government have made it clear they intend to get rid of that government once and for all. Trump’s nominee to direct the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, was a key architect of Project 2025, which called for dramatically reducing the power of Congress and the United States civil service. Vought has referred to career civil servants as “villains” and called for ending funding for most government programs. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said recently.

In the name of combatting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the Trump administration is taking down websites of information paid for with tax dollars, slashing programs that advance health and science, ending investments in infrastructure, trying to end foreign aid, working to eliminate the Department of Education, and so on. Today the administration offered buyouts to all the people who work at the Central Intelligence Agency, saying that anyone who opposes Trump’s policies should leave. Today, Musk’s people entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which provides daily weather and wind predictions; cutting NOAA and privatizing its services is listed as a priority in Project 2025.

Stunningly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced today that the U.S. has made a deal with El Salvador to send deportees of any nationality—including U.S. citizens, which would be wildly unconstitutional—for imprisonment in that nation’s 40,000-person Terrorism Confinement Center, for a fee that would pay for El Salvador’s prison system.

Tonight the Senate confirmed Trump loyalist Pam Bondi as attorney general. Bondi is an election denier who refuses to say that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket noted, a coalition of more than 300 civil rights groups urged senators to vote against her confirmation because of her opposition to LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and reproductive rights, and her record of anti-voting activities. The vote was along party lines except for Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), who crossed over to vote in favor.

Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is the logical outcome of the mentality that the government should not enable Americans to create wealth but rather should put cash in the pockets of a few elites. Far from representing a majority, Musk is unelected, and he is slashing through the government programs he opposes. With full control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans could cut those parts themselves, but such cuts would be too unpopular ever to pass. So, instead, Musk is single-handedly slashing through the government Americans have built over the past 90 years.

Now, MAGA voters are about to discover that the wide-ranging cuts he claims to be making to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs skewer them as well as their neighbors. Attracting white voters with racism was always a tool to end the liberal consensus that worked for everyone, and if Musk’s cuts stand, the U.S. is about to learn that lesson the hard way.

In yet another bombshell, after meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump told reporters tonight that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip,” and suggested sending troops to make that happen. “We’ll own it,” he said. “We’re going to take over that piece, develop it and create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something the entire Middle East can be proud of.” It could become “the Riviera of the Middle East,” he said.

Reaction has been swift and incredulous. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, called the plan “deranged” and “nuts.” Another Foreign Relations Committee member, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), said he was “speechless,” adding: “That’s insane.” While MAGA representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) posted in support, “Let’s turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago,” Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told NBC News reporters Frank Thorp V and Raquel Coronell Uribe that there were “a few kinks in that slinky,” a reference to a spring toy that fails if it gets bent.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) suggested that Trump was trying to distract people from “the real story—the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #Right Wing Coup #Musk #TFG #Gaza #history #American History #the US Treasury #treasury department #MAGA #here we go folks

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coochiequeens · 1 month ago

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Women’s goods are taxed at a higher rate than men’s, an invisible bias that is estimated to cost women $2.5bn a year"

Perhaps with so much talk of boycotts women should boycott unnecessary purchases that would cost more due to pink tariffs and taxes.

Women pay 3% more in tariffs than men, though it could be more. Photograph: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

By Alaina Demopoulos Mon 17 Mar 2025

Many shoppers know about the so-called pink tax – a needless markup on products marketed to women, even if those products are essentially the same, just cheaper, when sold to men. Personal care items such as razors, deodorants and shampoo fall into this category. But shoppers may be less aware of “pink tariffs”, or taxes on imported goods labeled as “women’s items”.

Pink tariffs are one reason women’s clothing tends to cost more than men’s at the checkout counter, and why some women might buy sweatpants or oversized sweaters technically made for “men” – it could save them some cash.

As first reported by the 19th, two Democratic House members, Lizzie Fletcher of Texas and Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, introduced a bill this session calling on the treasury department to study pink tariffs, and publish any findings on how these taxes might lead to a gender bias in retail.

The move comes amid Donald Trump’s continued tariff war, when more Americans are paying attention to how tariffs work and affect their day-to-day lives. (On TikTok, young people especially balked at how the taxes on China-made goods might affect Temu or Shein fast-fashion prices.) Ed Gresser, vice-president and director for trade and global markets at the centrist thinkthank Progressive Policy Institute, said in a statement that the bill “will help us design a better and fairer system”, noting that gender bias in clothing “likely costs women at least $2.5bn per year”.

Fletcher noted that women pay 3% more in tariffs than men, though in some cases it could be more. Things don’t get easier if shoppers head to a genderless aisle: unisex clothing, the 19th also reported, gets taxed the same rate as womenswear. Pink tariffs can also apply to personal care items, sneakers and toys marketed toward young girls as opposed to boys.

Sheng Lu, a professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware, says the wide margin between tariffs on women’s and men’s clothing are “the results of decades-old negotiations” influenced by simple misogyny. “Men dominated these discussions, and women were not fully considered in these negotiations, and that’s a very important reason for the impact and legacy of the pink tariffs.”

The first US tariff laws were written in the 18th century and eased by the early 1900s with the implementation of income tax. After the 1929 stock market crash, President Herbert Hoover brought tariffs back, though those decreased after the second world war during the era of free trade agreements. Tariffs became a hot topic during Trump’s first presidency, when he proposed taxes intended to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. (Fashion designers say that’s easier said than done, as China has become a world innovator in apparel manufacturing techniques.)

Studies show that women drive 70-80% of all consumer spending, which is also an incentive for governments to set higher import taxes on their clothing. One study found that in 2015, the tariff burden for US households on women’s clothing was $2.77bn more than on men’s clothing.

Women’s clothing also tends to be made from human-made fibers such as polyester, which is taxed more than cotton, one of the US’s largest exports. “Fashion brands cannot totally absorb these tariffs by themselves, so they are eventually passed to consumers,” Lu said.

The US Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a labyrinthian code which lays out set tariff rates for all categories of goods, contains what Susan Scafidi, director of Fordham’s Fashion Law Institute, calls “financial microaggressions”.

One example: men’s silk brief underwear is taxed at 0.9%, while women’s silk underwear is taxed at 2.1%. Meanwhile, overcoats are taxed by a combination of price per kilogram plus an additional percentage; a wool blend overcoat for men has a tariff rate of 38.6 cents per kilogram plus an additional 10% of the value; a women’s wool overcoat is taxed 64.4 cents per kilogram, plus an additional 18.8%.

You could make the argument that men’s clothing, which tends to be larger than women’s, weighs more, justifying the discrepancy – a higher tariff makes up for the difference in weight. But Scafidi doesn’t buy it. “The average women’s coat may be a little lighter than a man’s, but certainly many of the weights are similar or identical to each other, and that does not account for such a huge difference in tariffs,” she said.

Though Scafidi would like to see the elimination of pink tariffs, she’s not confident that will happen anytime soon. “Tariffs make money in a way that voters don’t see,” she said. The actual markup of an item due to tariffs is hidden from customers, unlike a sales tax, which is printed on a receipt or shown online during checkout. “We can see a price tag, we can see sales tax, but we don’t see the tariffs right in front of our faces when we shop. Those are invisible to us, so there is no incentive for politicians to roll them back.”

Still, the pink tariff’s cousin, the pink tax, is well known, partly due to a heavily covered 2015 study by the New York City department of consumer affairs that in turn inspired ad campaigns from companies including Burger King and the European Wax Center drawing attention to the issue. California and New York state have since enacted laws that prohibit businesses from charging different prices for “substantially similar” but gendered products.

Scafidi imagines that if retailers were required to list out how tariffs affect prices, then people would be more likely to demand change. “Pink tariffs can add up a little bit at a time, drip by drip, like slow water torture,” she said. “It’s unfair at so many levels, but it’s unlikely to be corrected.”

#Pink tax #$2.5bn a year #Lizzie Fletcher of Texas #Brittany Pettersen of Colorado #introduced a bill calling on the treasury department to study pink tariffs and publish any findings on how these taxes might lead to a gen #women pay 3% more in tariffs than men #The first US tariff laws were written in the 18th century and eased by the early 1900s with the implementation of income tax.#women drive 70-80% of all consumer spending #The US Harmonized Tariff Schedule #men’s silk brief underwear is taxed at 0.9%#while women’s silk underwear is taxed at 2.1%#Just boycott anything unnecessary that would have a pink tariff or tax

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