Putin must be trilled.
You need to be contacting your Representative and Senators as well as alerting your friends. and coworkers.
snip
...
Let’s be crystal clear about what’s happening: A private citizen with zero Constitutional authority is effectively seizing control of critical government functions. The Constitution explicitly requires Senate confirmation for anyone wielding significant federal power — a requirement Musk has simply ignored as he installs his loyalists throughout the government while demanding access to basically all of the levers of power, and pushing out anyone who stands in his way.
The parallel to Twitter is striking and terrifying. At Twitter, Musk’s “reform” strategy transformed a platform used by hundreds of millions for vital communication into his personal megaphone, hemorrhaging somewhere between 60-85% of its revenue in the process. But Twitter was just a private company. Now he’s applying the same destructive playbook to the federal government, where the stakes involve not just user experience or advertising dollars, but the basic functioning of American democracy.
The constitutional violations here dwarf the Twitter debacle. Where Musk merely broke a social media platform through incompetence last time, he’s now breaking the actual mechanisms of governance — and doing it with the same reckless playbook that turned Twitter into a ghost town. As Conger and Mac, who documented the Twitter disaster, point out, even the specific tactics are being recycled:
...
do chinese whales outnumber canadian whales?
Paul Krugman on a possible Trump bribery racket using Chinese money.
snip
...
The tariffs Donald Trump imposed during his first term were mainly aimed at China. There were a few exceptions, like a tariff on Canadian aluminum, supposedly to protect national security (which was crazy.) But China was, rhetorically and practically, the big trade enemy.
And Trump’s talk about trade during the campaign seemed to point to a continuation of this pattern, with pledges of a 10 percent tariff across the board but 60 percent on China.
But now we have the first big tariff announcement from Trump 2.0, and it’s 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada but only 10 percent on China.
...
16:46 in Current Affairs, General Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)