Nope, definitely not. We should get ready to both resist however we can and help however we can those who are going to get hurt. And if we expect to be in this or that line of fire, well, we’ve been in it before.
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Case in point:
President-elect Donald Trump today announced that a new Department of Government Efficiency—or “DOGE”—will be led by Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk and Ramaswamy, who founded pharma company Roivant Sciences, “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” according to the Trump statement on Truth Social.
not enough facepalms in the world…
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There’s a lot to facepalm about this. A Department that isn’t a Department. The meme dog logo. The “leaderboard” plan. The fact another government agency already exists specifically to do this (GOA).
But the most facepalmy part of the whole thing is that the group in charge of making things more efficient…has two people in charge of it. Because it itself is inefficient.
I mean really, this is just a way to funnel more government money directly to Elon without the space contracts.
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I wonder what kind of shitfit Elbow will throw when Congress refuses to make it a Department and he has to settle for a mere Ooge.
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Thanks for posting these here. I really value her take on things, but I have a really hard time following her on Substack.
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You’re welcome. I grab them from Fbook. (obligatory disclaimer, I’m only there otherwise to stay in touch with older, farflung relatives).
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This always struck me as the obvious outcome of tariffs. Raise import duties on goods from China, there’s plenty of other places where you can find cheap labor.
Say there were universal tariffs on all goods not originating from the US, do you honestly think companies who off-shore production to save costs are going to jump at the opportunity to create new factories in the US? Of course they won’t; they will just raise prices to offset the cost. These jobs aren’t moving back to the US so people will have no choice but to pay more or stretch what they already have.
Let’s say these companies did create manufacturing jobs for their products in the US rather than raise prices to offset tariffs, who are they going to hire? People aren’t going to be fighting one another to work a minimum wage job mass-producing cheap sneakers in a US-based sweatshop, especially not when there’s already extremely low unemployment. Maybe these companies could hire undocumented immigrants? Oops, they are either in hiding or got deported by Trump’s goons and aren’t paying taxes or contributing to the economy anymore.
I’m nothing even resembling a concept of an economist, and even I know these proposals to “save our ‘crumbling’ economy” are stupid and self-sabotaging. All to avoid obvious solutions like making big corporations pay their fair share in taxes and enforce regulations to curb corporate greed.
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I think there’s a case to be made for a universal tariff rate of something like 5%. It’s a hit, it’s not the end of the world, and it’s going to be taken into account for any offshoring activity. Nothing bigger than that except for things we want to not be imported at all, like asbestos or tetraethyl lead or cadmium or whatever. Then by all means move the decimal point over at least one place. Two places over (500%) for shit like plutonium or Boer failsons. But a 60% rate for everything from a major trade partner? It’s just dumb.
People have been losing their shit over the past several years of inflation despite it tracking below global trends. I’m not sure I’d agree that universally raising the prices on foreign goods would do much to quell the anger.
For some companies who see huge profit margins from overseas production they will either raise prices to match or eat the cost, for others who don’t have huge profit margins, they will most likely raise prices or go out of business.
If the point is to encourage companies to bring manufacturing jobs to the US, this is about the worst way possible to do it.
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If that was the point, they would make stock buybacks illegal again and give tax incentives to companies that reshore workers.
But that isn’t the point. High tariffs will raise prices of consumer goods. Then after a few years, you drop the tariffs while those prices feather fall down to lower levels (but still higher than where they started). Corporations make hundreds of billions in profit during that hysteresis period.
The cruelty is always the point.
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The cruelty is always the point.
The cruelty is always the point.
The cruelty is always the point.
it cannot be said enough. if there is anyone left thinking we’ll be all right, remember:
The cruelty is always the point. there is no other “sense” to be found or made. it is all about inflicting pain in the most cruel measure and manner conceivable.
looking for fairness or reason is now simply foolish. who will be our “Cardinal Richelieu” in this Reign of Terror? how long will we last?
do not underestimate the resolve of people to move toward fairness, however.
this, too, shall pass.
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Fascism is bully thinking all the way…
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Ah… 'bout that, eh?
One of Elon’s grandfathers moved to 
from 
, Saskatchewan to be precise. Joshua N. Haldeman he had been active in a nutball organization promoting Technocracy, deemed illegal at the time, then the Social Credit Party of . Neither movement would be considered to have acceptable views these days, on several fronts.
I note that ‘Haldeman’ is a 
name… 
So the general outlook on technology, life and so forth is something Elon seems to come by honestly.
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A sliver of good news, it seems. Not that you’d even notice if it got stuck in your thumb, or even under a fingernail. But still good to hear.
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Yes. I can think of several reasons for the majority voting for Thune, one being a signal to Trump that they’d work with him but only on their own terms and as long as doing so doesn’t harm them in the 2026 mid-terms. Then there are the ones who actually do worry about significant long-term harm for the US and who just may refuse to play ball and perhaps form coalitions with the Dems as needed—or threaten to if they don’t receive certain considerations from Trump. Some of the aforementioned facing their own probable election lost in 2026 may go out with a bang and fuck Trump over… finally.
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It is not necessarily about bringing jobs back, it’s about that farther down the road along with patent liberalization, and also about climate change, and having some kind of accounting of transshipment right now to deal with the corruption of economic flat-earthers. I’m amazed that the left has such a rigid free trade mindset that it can’t see any value to that.
How about 2%? 0.5%? Is there any level you would accept?
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November 13, 2024 (Wednesday)
Republican senators today elected John Thune of South Dakota to be the next Senate majority leader. Trump and MAGA Republicans had put a great deal of pressure on the senators to back Florida senator Rick Scott, but he marshaled fewer votes than either Thune or John Cornyn of Texas, both of whom were seen as establishment figures in the mold of the Republican senators’ current leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
Scott lost on the first vote. The fact that the vote was secret likely helped Thune’s candidacy. Senators could vote without fear of retaliation.
The rift between the pre-2016 leaders of the Republican Party and the MAGA Republicans is still obvious, and Trump’s reliance on Elon Musk and his stated goal of deconstructing the American government could make it wider.
Republican establishment leaders have always wanted to dismantle the New Deal state that began under Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and continued under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower and presidents of both parties until 1981. But they have never wanted to dismantle the rule of law on which the United States is founded or the international rules-based order on which foreign trade depends. Aside from moral and intellectual principles, the rule of law is the foundation on which the security of property rests: there is a reason that foreign oligarchs park their money in democracies. And it is the international rules-based order that protects the freedom of the seas on which the movement of container ships, for example, depends.
Trump has made it clear that his goal for a second term is to toss overboard the rule of law and the international rules-based order, instead turning the U.S. government into a vehicle for his own revenge and forging individual alliances with autocratic rulers like Russian president Vladimir Putin.
He has begun moving to put into power individuals whose qualifications are their willingness to do as Trump demands, like New York representative Elise Stefanik, whom he has tapped to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, or Florida senator Marco Rubio, who Trump said today would be his nominee for secretary of state.
Alongside his choice of loyalists who will do as he says, Trump has also tapped people who will push his war on his cultural enemies forward, like anti-immigrant ideologue Stephen Miller, who will become his deputy chief of staff and a homeland security advisor. Today, Trump added to that list by saying he plans to nominate Florida representative Matt Gaetz, who has been an attack dog for Trump, to become attorney general.
Trump’s statement tapping Gaetz for attorney general came after Senate Republicans rejected Scott, and appears to be a deliberate challenge to Republican senators that they get in line. In his announcement, Trump highlighted that Gaetz had played “a key role in defeating the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.”
But establishment Republican leaders understand that some of our core institutions cannot survive MAGA’s desire to turn the government into a vehicle for culture war vengeance.
Gaetz is a deeply problematic pick for AG. A report from the House Ethics Committee investigating allegations of drug use and sex with a minor was due to be released in days. Although he was reelected just last week, Gaetz resigned immediately after Trump said he would nominate him, thus short-circuiting the release of the report. Last year, Republican senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma told CNN that “we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor, that all of us had walked away, of the girls that he had slept with. He would brag about how he would crush [erectile dysfunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night."
While South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham said he would be willing to agree to the appointment, other Republican senators drew a line. “I was shocked by the announcement —that shows why the advise and consent process is so important,” Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) said. “I’m sure that there will be a lot of questions raised at his hearing.” Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was blunt: “I don’t think he’s a serious candidate.”
If the idea of putting Gaetz in charge of the country’s laws alarmed Republicans concerned about domestic affairs, Trump’s pick of the inexperienced and extremist Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth to take over the Department of Defense was a clarion call for anyone concerned about perpetuating the global strength of the U.S. The secretary of defense oversees a budget of more than $800 billion and about 1.3 million active-duty troops, with another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions.
The secretary of defense also has access to the nuclear command-and-control procedure. Over his nomination, too, Republican senators expressed concern.
While Trump is claiming a mandate to do as he wishes with the government, Republicans interested in their own political future are likely noting that he actually won the election by a smaller margin than President Joe Biden won in 2020, despite a global rejection of incumbents this year. And he won not by picking up large numbers of new voters—it appears he lost voters—but because Democratic voters of color dropped out, perhaps reflecting the new voter suppression laws put into place since 2021.
Then, too, Trump remains old and mentally slipping, and he is increasingly isolated as people fight over the power he has brought within their grasp. Today his wife, Melania, declined the traditional invitation from First Lady Jill Biden for tea at the White House and suggested she will not be returning to the presidential mansion with her husband. It is not clear either that Trump will be able to control the scrabbling for power over the party by those he has brought into the executive branch, or that he has much to offer elected Republicans who no longer need his voters, suggesting that Congress could reassert its power.
Falling into line behind Trump at this point is not necessarily a good move for a Republican interested in a future political career.
Today the Republicans are projected to take control of the House of Representatives, giving the party control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency, as well as the Supreme Court. But as the downballot races last week show, MAGA policies remain unpopular, and the Republican margin in the House will be small. In the last Congress, MAGA loyalists were unable to get the votes they needed from other Republicans to impose Trump’s culture war policies, creating gridlock and a deeply divided Republican conference.
The gulf between Trump’s promises to slash the government and voters’ actual support for government programs is not going to make the Republicans’ job easier. Conservative pundit George Will wrote today that “the world’s richest person is about to receive a free public education,” suggesting Elon Musk, who has emerged as the shadow president, will find his plans to cut the government difficult to enact as elected officials reject cuts to programs their constituents like.
Musk’s vow to cut “at least” $2 trillion from federal spending, Will notes, will run up against reality in a hurry. Of the $6.75 trillion fiscal 2024 spending, debt service makes up 13.1%; defense—which Trump wants to increase—is 12.9%. Entitlements, primarily Social Security and Medicare, account for 34.6%, and while the Republican Study Group has called for cuts to them, Trump said during the campaign, at least, that they would not be cut.
So Musk has said he would cut about 30% of the total budget from about 40% of it. Will points out that Trump is hardly the first president to vow dramatic cuts. Notably, Ronald Reagan appointed J. Peter Grace, an entrepreneur, to make government “more responsive to the wishes of the people” after voters had elected Reagan on a platform of cutting government. Grace’s commission made 2,478 recommendations but quickly found that every lawmaker liked cuts to someone else’s district but not their own.
Will notes that a possible outcome of the Trump chaos might be to check the modern movement toward executive power, inducing Congress to recapture some of the power it has ceded to the president in order to restore the stability businessmen prefer.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was himself a wealthy man, and in the 1930s he tried to explain to angry critics on the right that his efforts to address the nation’s inequalities were not an attack on American capitalism, but rather an attempt to save it from the communism or fascism that would destroy the rule of law.
“I want to save our system, the capitalistic system,” FDR wrote to a friend in 1935. “[T]o save it is to give some heed to world thought of today.”
The protections of the system FDR ushered in—the banking and equities regulation that killed crony finance, for example—are now under attack by the very sort of movement he warned against. Whether today’s lawmakers are as willing as their predecessors were to stand against that movement remains unclear, especially as Trump tries to bring lawmakers to heel, but Thune’s victory in the Senate today and the widespread Republican outrage over Trump’s appointment of Gaetz and Hegseth are hopeful signs.
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November 14, 2024 (Thursday)
Two snapshots today illustrate the difference between the economic—and therefore the societal—visions of the Biden-Harris administration and of the incoming Trump administration.
The Biden-Harris administration today released numbers revealing that over the past four years, their policies have kick-started a boom in the creation of small businesses across the country. Since the administration took office, entrepreneurs have filed more than 20 million applications for new businesses, the most of any presidential term in history. This averages to more than 440,000 applications a month, a rate more than 90% faster than averages before the pandemic. Black business ownership has doubled, and Hispanic business ownership is up by 40% since before the pandemic.
The administration encouraged that growth with targeted loans, tax credits, federal contracts, and support services. Small businesses are major job creators and employ about 47% of all private sector employees.
President Joe Biden rejected the “neoliberalism” of the previous 40 years that had moved about $50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Those embracing that theory maintain that the government should let markets operate without regulation, concentrating wealth among a few people who will invest it more efficiently than they can if the government intervenes with regulations or taxes that hamper the ability of investors to amass wealth.
Biden and Harris returned the U.S. to the model that both parties had embraced until 1981: the idea that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. That system had reduced extremes of wealth in the U.S. after the Great Depression and given most Americans a path to prosperity.
Biden’s policies worked, enabling the U.S. to recover from the pandemic more quickly than any other country with a modern economy, sending unemployment to historic lows, and raising wages faster than inflation for the bottom 80% of Americans.
It has also had social effects, most notably today with the announcement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the U.S. is seeing a historic drop in deaths from the street drug fentanyl. From June 2023 to June 2024, deaths dropped by roughly 14.5%, translating into more than 16,000 lives saved. Experts say the drop is due to better addiction healthcare, the widespread availability of the opioid reversal drug naloxone, and lower potency of street fentanyl.
If the record of the extraordinary growth of small businesses in the past four years is one snapshot, the other is a social media post from yesterday, in which former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy noted that the government spends $516 billion a year on “programs which Congress has allowed to expire.” “We can & should save hundreds of billions each year by defunding government programs that Congress no longer authorizes,” he wrote.
Bobby Kogan, who worked in President Joe Biden’s Office of Management and Budget and on the Senate Budget Committee, explained that Congress often authorizes spending as “temporary” in order “to encourage Congress to revisit it to update various parts of the bill, such as eligibility, benefits, etc.” But Congress can still fund the programs in appropriations bills.
Kogan noted that the largest program currently operating under expired authorization is veterans’ medical care.
Trump and his advisors embrace the neoliberalism Biden rejected. Rather than invest in the economy to create opportunities for middle-class Americans and those just starting out, they want to slash the existing government to free up more capital for investors.
Trump has tapped the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who invested at least $132 million in cash in Trump’s campaign as well as the in-kind gift of the support of X, and former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy to run a “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, named for Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency.
According to the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, and Jacob Bogage, people around Musk say the group is intended to “apply slash-and-burn business ideologies to the U.S. government.” Musk has vowed to slash “at least” $2 trillion from the federal budget and has warned it will create “hardship.”
That the people embracing this plan see a world in which a few elites run things showed in today’s social media post by the “DOGE.” The post called for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account…. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”
Such cuts would be enormously unpopular, and in the Washington Post yesterday, Stein, Dwoskin, Zakrzewski, and Bogage reported that Trump’s aides are exploring ways to enact dramatic cuts to the government without congressional approval. Key among those is simply refusing to release the money Congress appropriates for programs Musk and Trump want to cut. This is known as “impoundment,” and Congress made it illegal in 1974 after President Richard Nixon tried to shape the government to his wishes by refusing to fund congressional programs he opposed.
Trump tried to do this quietly in 2019 by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine to fund its fight against Russian incursions until Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky smeared Biden. When the threat came to light, the House of Representatives impeached Trump. Although the Senate ultimately acquitted Trump, according to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) all the Republican senators agreed he had done as the House charged.
Now Trump’s team apparently hopes that a pliant Supreme Court will declare the 1974 Impoundment Control Act unconstitutional, permitting Trump—or Vice President J.D. Vance, should Trump not be able to fulfill his term—to shape the government without consulting Congress.
Because of the 2024 presidential election, Trump will soon be able to return the country to the neoliberal vision of the 40 years before Biden, supercharging it with the help of unelected billionaire Elon Musk, who recently claimed the title of being the “George Soros of the right,” a reference to the liberal philanthropist who has been the bogeyman of right-wing pundits.
But it’s not at all clear that Americans actually want that supercharged neoliberalism. As vote counts are continuing, it has become clear that Trump’s victory was slim indeed. New numbers from Nate Silver suggest he will not clear 50% of voters.
At the same time, a new study out today from Data for Progress showed that people who paid “a great deal” of attention to political news voted for Vice President Kamala Harris +6, while those who paid “none at all” went +19 for Trump.
Many of those voters got their information from social media or right-wing websites, but one of those today underwent a historic change. The satirical news outlet The Onion bought right-wing radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s InfoWars at auction. Jones’s property was up for sale because juries found him guilty of defamation and awarded his victims about $1.5 billion in damages. After the 2012 shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that killed 26 students and teachers, Jones insisted the event was a hoax designed to provide an excuse for gun safety regulations. He and his supporters harassed the victims’ families for years.
Jones appeared to be trying to keep control of InfoWars by having a company associated with him buy it up under the terms of the bankruptcy and restore it to him. But Sandy Hook families worked with The Onion to keep it from returning to Jones’s hands. Jones is screaming that the sale that took it away from him was a conspiracy. The company associated with him, First United American Companies, is already protesting the sale in court.
Jones rose to prominence in 1993, when he dropped out of community college to start a talk radio show that warned the government was making war on Americans. His shtick echoed the anti-communist grifters of the post–World War II years that promised small donors that their contributions could stop the creeping communism in the United States. Jones became popular enough that he went on to found InfoWars, which made him rich from the sale of nutritional supplements. The theme of InfoWars was that “There’s a war on for your mind!” and that only people like him could deliver the truth.
But his lies cost him a billion dollars, and now, noting that “InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society,” The Onion has bought his website, which it plans to relaunch in January as a parody of Jones and a site that promotes gun safety legislation. But the chief executive officer of The Onion, Ben Collins, told Kim Bellware of the Washington Post: “It’s not just [Jones], it’s the people on Instagram trying to get you to drink raw milk; it’s the [multilevel marketing] people trying to get you to join a scam…. Those people have outsize impact in our completely bifurcated and balkanized media environment.”
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