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Nevilledog

Nevilledog's Journal
Nevilledog's Journal
February 12, 2025

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Out of Chaos and Corruption, a Revelation and a Reckoning

https://lucid.substack.com/p/out-of-chaos-and-corruption-a-revelation

Authoritarianism, at its core, is about restricting or eliminating the rights of the many and giving vast new liberties to the very few. It is about depriving the population of the rights of assembly, free speech, reproductive freedom, and the right to live without state persecution regardless of your race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, or gender and sexual identity. It rearranges government so that the rich can become even richer: it removes regulations and other obstacles against plundering and exploiting the workforce, the environment, natural resources, and much more.

Moral deregulation is also essential to the success of authoritarianism, which depends on the normalization of lying, corruption, and forms of violence. Freeing people from the idea that they should respect others as individuals with dignity and autonomy is part of the agenda. So is promoting thievery and cruelty in people by appointing assaulters, grifters, sympathizers with war criminals, and other thuggish individuals to positions of power, holding them up as role models for young people.

The hostile takeover of the United States government we are now living through, with the full collusion of the Republican Party, reflects years of effort by Trump, a convicted felon, to create an environment propitious to smash-and-grab governance. The vehicle for this plunder is Musk, who may be the richest man in the world, but presents as an infantile being puffed up with grandiose fantasies of possession and the domination of everything.

The allure of the Trump-Musk-Peter Thiel partnership is the chance to make the United States a laboratory of freedom from every kind of ethical and professional norm that might restrain behaviors of individuals, political entities, and corporations. For that, you need to replace American democracy with some form of autocratic governance.

*snip*
February 12, 2025

Levitsky & Way: The Path to American Authoritarianism (Foreign Affairs)

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/path-american-authoritarianism-trump

No paywall link
https://archive.li/9egkW


Donald Trump’s first election to the presidency in 2016 triggered an energetic defense of democracy from the American establishment. But his return to office has been met with striking indifference. Many of the politicians, pundits, media figures, and business leaders who viewed Trump as a threat to democracy eight years ago now treat those concerns as overblown—after all, democracy survived his first stint in office. In 2025, worrying about the fate of American democracy has become almost passé.

The timing of this mood shift could not be worse, for democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history. America has been backsliding for a decade: between 2014 and 2021, Freedom House’s annual global freedom index, which scores all countries on a scale of zero to 100, downgraded the United States from 92 (tied with France) to 83 (below Argentina and tied with Panama and Romania), where it remains.

The country’s vaunted constitutional checks are failing. Trump violated the cardinal rule of democracy when he attempted to overturn the results of an election and block a peaceful transfer of power. Yet neither Congress nor the judiciary held him accountable, and the Republican Party—coup attempt notwithstanding—renominated him for president. Trump ran an openly authoritarian campaign in 2024, pledging to prosecute his rivals, punish critical media, and deploy the army to repress protest. He won, and thanks to an extraordinary Supreme Court decision, he will enjoy broad presidential immunity during his second term.

Democracy survived Trump’s first term because he had no experience, plan, or team. He did not control the Republican Party when he took office in 2017, and most Republican leaders were still committed to democratic rules of the game. Trump governed with establishment Republicans and technocrats, and they largely constrained him. None of those things are true anymore. This time, Trump has made it clear that he intends to govern with loyalists. He now dominates the Republican Party, which, purged of its anti-Trump forces, now acquiesces to his authoritarian behavior.

*snip*
February 9, 2025

Trump and Musk crippled our most important global aid agency. The consequences are grim

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-02-07/usaid-elon-musk-donald-trump-foreign-aid-tesla-china-robin-abcarian

No paywall link
https://archive.li/fk134

It’s probably too soon to claim Elon Musk has babies’ blood on his hands for effectively shuttering America’s most consequential foreign aid agency. But trust me: He will.

On Musk’s orders, the work of the United States Agency for International Development has come to a screeching halt. Thousands of its administrators, workers and contractors have been thrown out of work, its programs suspended for who-knows-how-long and its website no longer functioning.

“We’re shutting it down,” Musk said Monday. “You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair.”

My guess is that Musk, the unelected, unappointed billionaire bureaucrat in charge of slashing federal spending, and his boss, President Trump, are betting that most Americans won’t care about stuff that goes on overseas. Voters were in an isolationist mood when they gave Trump a second term. And most of us have only a glancing knowledge of USAID, which delivers humanitarian aid to developing nations beleaguered by conflict, disease and natural disaster across the globe. With a budget of around $40 billion, USAID is also the world’s largest provider of food assistance — which, to put in terms even Musk might grok, means it saves the lives of malnourished babies.

But — surprise — Americans do care. On Wednesday, pro-USAID demonstrations took place at state capitols around the country. In Washington, D.C., where USAID is headquartered and many of its workers and contractors live, thousands turned out to protest Musk’s abrupt, potentially illegal move.
Detractors may wonder what the agency does, but a better question is what doesn’t it do?

*snip*

February 8, 2025

Did Trump Quietly Kill a Sensitive Pentagon Probe into Elon Musk?

https://newrepublic.com/article/191330/trump-quietly-kill-sensitive-pentagon-probe-elon-musk

No paywall link
https://archive.li/nfjso

In December, more than a month before Donald Trump took the presidential oath of office, The New York Times reported a blockbuster scoop: Elon Musk and his SpaceX company had repeatedly failed to meet federal reporting requirements designed to safeguard national security despite being deeply entangled with the military and intelligence bureaucracy. These included a failure to provide details to the government of Musk’s meetings with foreign leaders, the Times reported.

Those lapses had triggered a number of internal federal reviews, according to the Times. Perhaps most interestingly, the Defense Department’s inspector general had opened a probe of the matter sometime during 2024. The Air Force and the Pentagon Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security also launched reviews in November.

Now that Trump is president and controls the executive branch—including the Defense Department—it’s time to raise what appears to be a forgotten question: What exactly is going on with these government reviews into Musk? Have they continued? Or are they effectively dead?

When Trump fired over a dozen independent inspectors general last month, one of them was the Defense Department IG, Robert Storch. We don’t know whether the Musk probe was a reason for this firing, but it now seems awfully convenient for the SpaceX billionaire, who is known to be enraged about having to face regulations and oversight while enjoying immensely lucrative contracts with the federal government.

*snip*
February 8, 2025

Anna Bower: DOGE-ing Questions in Federal Court

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/doge-ing-questions-in-federal-court


Anna Bower
Anna Bower
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On Wednesday, Feb. 5, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly held a status conference in Alliance for Retired Americans et al. v. Secretary of the Treasury. The suit alleges that the secretary of the treasury, Scott Bessent, violated federal privacy law by allowing individuals associated with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to the Department’s payment system. According to the complaint, the system maintains sensitive personal and financial information about “every individual” who makes or receives a payment from the federal government. Among other disbursements, the system is responsible for distributing tax refunds, federal employee salaries, payments to government contractors, and Social Security and Medicare benefits.

The purpose of the hearing was to set a schedule on the plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction. But Judge Kollar-Kotelly spent much of the hearing in fact-finding mode, peppering a Justice Department attorney, Bradley Humphreys, with questions about the nature and extent of the access provided to the DOGE-aligned individuals. Humphreys, for his part, provided answers that were carefully hedged with qualifying language—and that were often inconsistent with public media reports. Far from clarifying what exactly DOGE and its associates are up to, Humphreys’ responses raised more questions than they answered.

Below, here are three disputed factual issues that remain unresolved following the hearing.

Question #1: Who has or had access to the information maintained in the payment system?

During the hearing on Wednesday, Humphreys, on behalf of the Justice Department, initially stated that only one DOGE associate had access to the Treasury Department’s payment system: Marko Elez, a 25-year-old Elon Musk ally who reportedly worked at Musk’s companies, SpaceX and the social media platform X, before joining the government. Later, Humphreys clarified that the system is also accessible to Tom Krause, a software executive affiliated with DOGE.

According to Humphreys, Krause supervised Elez’s work within the Treasury Department, where both men were designated “special government employees.” A special government employee is a person who is expected to work in the federal government for a 130-days or less during a 365-day period. Special government employees are subject to most government ethics and conflict of interest rules, though “sometimes in a less restrictive way.”

*snip*
February 7, 2025

Memory-Holing Jan. 6: What Happens When You Try to Make History Vanish?

https://www.propublica.org/article/january-6-erasure-doj-database-trump-history

On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which claimed several hundred lives and left the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in smoldering ruins. The department’s investigation determined that the attack was “so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.” While it conceded that “no avenue of prosecution now exists for these crimes,” the department hailed the findings as the “federal government’s first thorough reckoning with this devastating event,” which “officially acknowledges, illuminates, and preserves for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims.”

“Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about the race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa,” said Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, in announcing the report. “This report breaks that silence through a rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report reflects our commitment to the pursuit of justice and truth, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles.”

Only two weeks later, the department took a strikingly different action regarding the historical record of a violent riot: It removed from its website the searchable database of all cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that were prosecuted by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

These jarringly discordant actions were, of course, separated by a transfer of power: the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who swiftly moved to issue pardons, commute prison sentences and request case dismissals for all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes on Jan. 6, including seditious conspiracy and assaulting police officers. That sweeping clemency order — “Fuck it, release ’em all,” Trump said, according to Axios — prompted a wave of outrage, and criticism even from some Republicans. “I’ve always said that when you pardon people who attack police officers, you’re sending the wrong signal to the public at large,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.

*snip*
February 7, 2025

One Tech Tip: How to block your phone from tracking your location

https://apnews.com/article/tech-tip-disabling-phone-tracking-33f6dedaa4c6f587a4049bceb87daadc

LONDON (AP) — Smartphones are useful tools for everyday life, but they’re privy to nearly everything about you, including all the places you’ve been — if you let them.

When you use a map app to find the new restaurant your friend recommended, or your phone’s browser to check the price of something you saw while window shopping, you could be unwittingly allowing your phone to track your location and share that information with others.

Phones use various signals to find your location, including cell tower pings, Wi-Fi access points, Bluetooth and GPS.

Sometimes your phone needs to know your location to provide a useful service, like telling the Uber driver where to pick you up. But in other cases, there’s little justification for tracking your whereabouts, which then can be exploited by apps, ad services or even hackers.

“From fitness tracking to navigation, every location ping potentially reveals details about our routines and movements – which could be risky in the wrong hands,” said Darren Guccione, CEO of Keeper Security. “Users should turn on location tracking only when necessary, such as during navigation, emergencies or sharing updates with trusted contacts, and disable it immediately afterward.”

*snip*
February 6, 2025

Trump and Musk are Pushing an Absurd Lie About Government and Media

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-musk-lie-government-funding-politico-1235258376/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/JKn7q

Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fox News, Republican lawmakers, and countless prominent right-wing commentators across social media are pushing a ridiculous lie about the Biden administration funding the media.

It started on Tuesday when staff at Politico reportedly didn’t receive their paychecks on time because of technical glitch. The right began speculating that the delay was related to Musk taking a blowtorch to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with many pointing out that the government had ferried $8.2 million to Politico over the past year.

Musk — the world’s richest man, whose companies have substantially benefited from government contracts and subsidies — began amplifying the narrative on Wednesday, and it was off to the disinformation races, with conservatives using some truly hare-brained sleuthing to claim payments to Politico and other outlets prove the government and the media are working together nefariously to prop up Democrats and take down Trump.

The reality isn’t so scandalous. Politico is by no means a left-wing outlet, and it has often been criticized for being too deferential to conservative and corporate interests. It covers the machinations of Congress, more than anything, and it offers an extremely expensive “Politico Pro” service that many government offices use to track these machinations.

The $8.2 million figure represents the total spent by the entire federal government; USAID paid Politico only $44,000 from 2023-2024. The Washington Post points out that earlier this week the Trump White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director signed a $35,000 contract for a Politico Pro. Plenty of congressional offices pay for the subscription, too, including the office of Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who posted yesterday that Musk was “exposing” Politico’s “grift.”

*snip*
February 6, 2025

US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/ice-us-immigration-deportations-google

No paywall link
https://archive.li/rtvNk

News of mass immigration arrests has swept across the US over the past couple of weeks. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) spreading through communities and rounding people up. Quick Google searches for Ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines include “ICE arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado operation”, “New Orleans focuses targeted operations on 123 criminal noncitizens”, and in Wisconsin, “ICE arrests 83 criminal aliens”.

But a closer look at these Ice reports tells a different story.

That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008.

All the archived Ice press releases soaring to the top of Google search results were marked with the same timestamp and read: “Updated: 01/24/2025”.

The mystery first caught the attention of an immigration lawyer who began tracking Ice raids and enforcement actions when Donald Trump took office. She spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the administration. At first, she was baffled when she clicked on these seemingly new press releases and they detailed Ice raids from more than a decade ago.

So she set to work doing some digital sleuthing and enlisted a friend who’s a tech expert to help. What they found leads them to believe that Ice is gaming Google search.

*snip*
February 6, 2025

Warzel: The 'Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly' of the United States Government

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/elon-musk-bureaucratic-coup/681559/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/c6fng

Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he—a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress—is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States, seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It is nothing short of an administrative coup.

As the head of an improvised team within the Trump administration with completely ambiguous power (the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in reference to a meme about a Shiba Inu), Musk has managed quite a lot in the two weeks since Inauguration Day. He has barged into at least one government building and made plans to end leases or sell some of them (three leases have been terminated so far, according to Stephen Ehikian, the General Services Administration’s acting administrator). He has called in employees from Tesla and the Boring Company to oversee broad workforce cuts, including at the Office of Personnel Management (one of Musk’s appointed advisers, according to Wired, is just 21 years old, while another graduated from high school last year). During this time, OPM staffers, presumably affiliated with DOGE, reportedly set up an “on-premise” email server that may be vulnerable to hacking and able to collect data on government employees—one that a lawsuit brought by two federal workers argues violates the E-Government Act of 2002 (there has not yet been a response to the complaint). Musk’s people have also reportedly gained access to the Treasury’s payments system—used to disburse more than $5 trillion to Americans each year (a national-security risk, according to Senator Ron Wyden, a democrat from Oregon)—as well as computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of civil servants. (They subsequently locked some senior employees out of those systems, according to Reuters.) Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Over the weekend, the Trump administration put two senior staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on administrative leave—staffers who, according to CNN, had tried to thwart Musk’s staff’s attempts to access sensitive and classified information. Musk posted on X yesterday that “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” USAID staffers were barred from entering the unit’s headquarters today.

This is called “flooding the zone.” Taken in aggregate, these actions are overwhelming. But Musk’s political project with DOGE is actually quite straightforward: The world’s richest man appears to be indiscriminately dismantling the government with an eye toward consolidating power and punishing his political enemies.

*snip*

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