Trump FIRST MOVES Lead to INSTANT CATASTROPHE: It wasn't a DEI hire that crashed American Airlines flight 5342, but budget cuts and and removal of leadership. There should have been at least two air traffic controller, instead of one.
by Michael Popok
MeidasTouch
Legal AF Podcast
Jan 31, 2025
It is starting to look like Trump’s cost-cutting and decapitating leadership at the FAA may have been the true cause of the Flight 5342 disaster, as there should have been 2 controllers, not one monitoring the helicopter and planes in the airspace, and that’s on Trump. Michael Popok reports on this developing story that demonstrates that our lives are all at risk with Trumpat the helm, as Project 2025 enacts policies to kill its own voters.
Transcript
Preliminary results are trickling in
about the American Airlines flight 5342
disaster in Washington and it's making
Donald Trump out to be a liar. It wasn't
a DEI hire who worked in the air
traffic control that crashed the plane
it looks like it was the type of budget
cuts and hollowing out of
administrations and the removal and
decapitation of leadership that has
marked Donald Trump's beginning days
that caused the crash it looks like
there should have been at least two air
traffic controllers one watching
helicopters the other one watching
planes instead of one trying to do both
that's a budget and Leadership problem
that's not a Dei problem and that's a
Donald Trump major problem on Michael
Popok you're on the Meidas touch
Network in legal AF earlier reporting
from Donald Trump if he was to believed
it's because the uh the FAA was putting
people who were mentally diminished or
had other types of handicaps in
positions to be air traffic controllers
so it must have been a black or brown
handicapped one-armed mentally disabled
person that crashed the planes in
blaming Obama and Biden and the rest now
it looks like it's the very thing that
we feared When Donald Trump got in is
that he would hollow out and force to
leave those people those Legacy people
with deep deep understandings of the
institutions for which they work and
with knowledge fleeing fleeing um as
federal workers to run as far away and
fast away from Donald Trump as possible
first Donald Trump decapitated the
leadership around Airline safety and air
aircraft safety on day one the head of
the NTSB gone the head of the FAA gone
the head of the TSA gone because Donald
Trump wanted to get rid of them didn't
replace them all sorts of acting people
there's a reason a lot of people are
acting and are never made the head
leadership there so that happened that's
all in the we're only 10 days into the
administration then Donald Trump decides
to Furlow Andor fire federal workers
including those that work for the FAA in
these positions so with tax cuts I'm
sorry with budget cuts with uh
employment and hiring freezes with the
hollowing out of leadership what do you
think happens it all comes to a perfect
storm more likely uh uh last night when
there should have been two traffic
controllers but there's only one now you
have an Administration that took took
its eye off the ball of Public Safety it
is instead looking at penny pinching
cost cutting getting rid of people
having them Furlow paying them 7 months
to get rid of it all seven months to get
rid of these people of uh Severance
payments that's a Donald Trump problem
and if you think that this is not
already in day 10 the symptom of a
greater disease in Donald Trump leave me
a note in the comments right now you
don't think more of this is going to
happen see when they when that ship hit
the bridge and a collapsed in Washington
they immediately started to blame Dei
hires back in the Biden Administration
it doesn't work now when you're now in
charge when it's your policies you know
that were just uh very uh obscenely
implemented without any thought in the
beginning days beginning hours and
minutes of the Trump Administration
leads to things like boom not enough uh
air traffic controllers at the very
moment when they were needed one
tracking the Blackhawk helicopter one
tracking flight number 5342 for American
Airlines that didn't happen we're going
to see more of this as he shrinks major
departments that that are responsible
for the safety of Americans and safety
of the very voters that put him into
office people that are supposed to be
focused on uh uh avoiding pollution and
illness from air and water contaminants
gone people that are supposed to be
worried and about and inspecting Bridges
tunnels our infrastructure gone people
that are supposed to be responsible for
our nuclear power reactors and how
they're maintained gone the people that
are responsible within the military at
the very very top level forced into
retirement those that are on the front
lines like uh air traffic controllers
gone
Donald Trump says it must have been a
woke deal Dei air traffic controller no
it was the lack of air traffic
controllers which is on your watch and
as a result of what you're doing you
can't Lop off the leadership leave it
rudderless and then just on a on a
regular Wednesday night hope things are
going to go well in the world of air
traffic control and one of the busiest
airspaces the most regulated and tightly
controlled airspaces in the world that
around the capital of the United
States see this is the kind of story and
the kind of drill down that only you'll
find here on might Network and legal
layoff because the other networks have
already moved on look we've got 70
victims we have that many families
grieving we have people still being
recovered from the icy Potomac and Donald
Trump's first thing was to start reading
from an old FAA website and blaming it
on the website like the website killed
these people now it turns out the worm
has turned now it turns out that it's
more likely the fault of the Trump
administration now look I'm not here I
didn't want to cast blame one day into a
n a national
tragedy that's not where I go check my
you know 1,500 other videos that's not
me but I've been forced into do it to
respond to Donald Trump because
mainstream media is not going to do it
we have
to if you just if you just remember only
the last thing you heard from mainstream
media would be the press conference with
Donald Trump where he BL blamed the
website he blamed Dei and he blamed
Obama and by everybody but himself but
now now it's coming to fruition now it's
coming coming up and what I want people
to understand from this hot take is this
is not unfortunately going to be the
last time this presidency is going to be
tested and fail and people's lives are
at risk as a result you can't shrink the
government and take away those people
that know what they're doing with
expertise in places at the very very uh
guard rails of protecting people's
health and safety whether it's medical
vaccines uh disease and Disease Control
uh Bridges tunnels infrastructure our
power grid nuclear power those in the
military you you can't get rid of
leadership and then and then expect an
organization to run properly
Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down the Gates
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WTF!!! Top IG Gets PHYSICALLY ACCOSTED by Trump’s GOONS: Phyllis Fong, whose office opened up an investigation in 2022 against Elon Musk's Neurolink, literally dragged from her office because she refused to recognize the illegal firings of inspector's Generals
by Michael Popok
MeidasTouch
Legal AF Podcast
Feb 1, 2025
The next phase of fascism has begun, with Trump dragging out of their offices Inspectors General who refused to recognize his illegal firings. Michael Popok discusses the brave and important resistance of Phyllis Fong, a 22-year apolitical watchdog, who took on Elon Musk’s companies, and has been retaliated against, as new lawsuits pile up against Trump tying his administration up in knots.
Transcript
The next stage of fascism has started
with Donald Trump now pulling out of
offices and dragging away Inspector
Generals that oppose him or people in his
administration. And now we have Phyllis
Fong, a 22-year Inspector General all her
job has been for republicans and
Democrats alike has been to root out
corruption to root out abuse of power at
various departments. She's been at the US
Department of Agriculture. She got
sideways with Elon Musk because her office
opened up an investigation in
2022 against Neurolink one of his
companies and now they've attempted to
literally drag her from her office
because she's refused to recognize the
illegal firings of inspector's Generals
uh with a note a boilerplate note no
less from the director of personnel for
Donald Trump she's a profile in Courage
the resistance continues and is
televised and at least on YouTube and
I'm going to continue to follow it right
here in the Meidas touch Network in legal
I'm Michael Popok let's talk about the
firings and what Phyllis Fong's
resistance means the reason these
inspectors General were were created was
in
1976 after Watergate after the Nixonian
crime
spray and Congress at the time had the
wisdom to install these Watchdogs
independent Watchdogs to root out abuse
of power and Corruption within the
various departments and uh agencies of
the government everyone has an inspector
general or did until on Friday they're
in dependent they're they're they're
aartis
apolitical they just look you know it's
like a it's like an accountant I mean is
your CPA or your accountant political or
are they just looking at the numbers and
the facts and delivering an audit or a
message same thing for inspector
generals think of it as an Ethics or
Abuse of power audit being run by an
independent Auditor in the form of An
Inspector General that's one way to
think about it and Congress is always
concerned about the independence of the
inspector's General and they were very
concerned about it before Trump's
potential arrival because in
2022 knowing that there was a chance
that Donald Trump could come back and
because project 2025 has as one of its
tenants one of its principles get rid of
the inspector's General I'm going to
show you a video clip about that in a
minute right from their handbook right
from their playbook but because of all
of that in 2022 even the MAGA Congress
thought it's a great idea we should
increase the independence and protect
the dep dependence of the inspector's
General and they passed a law that said
you can't fire just because you came
into office you can't fire people you
don't like who happen to be inspectors
General you have to give us sufficient
notice which they never gave here and
you have to list the reasons by person
why they are being removed effectively
for cost none of that happened here
there was a mass a mass mailing a mass
email your services are no longer no
longer wanted does anyone truly believe
that Elon Musk didn't have Phyllis Fong
fired because they opened up an
investigation against neurolink leave it
in the chat in the comment if you think
I'm I'm uh my thought experiment is all
wet so she properly and she's the
perfect person by the way to be the
profile en courage for this story why
Phyllis Fong was appointed by both
Democrats and Republicans to do her job
Bush and Clinton confirmed by the Senate
working away tirelessly patriotically
as a public as a as a public servant
just to do her job to root out abuse of
power and Corruption she's been given
every award Under the Sun that you can
think of if I were to do it a list of
her accolades and awards and
commendations on both sides of the aisle
it would take up the entire hot take
that's all she's ever wanted to do
that's all she's ever done with for her
adult
life and she served democratic
presidents and and uh and Republican
ones that's what happens over 22-year
career she was the first chairperson of
the Council of inspectors General on
integrity and efficiency she was the
very first one let alone the first woman
won and she has refused to acknowledge
that the that there's been an illegal
firing of her in fact if you go up on
their website she's still there at least
at the time of this recording let's put
her up now now why do I say that there's
a one-to-one correlation between project
202's Playbook and the firing of Phyllis
Fong and the other inspector's General
because there's a training video made by
project 2025 I don't know if they never
thought this would ever see the light of
day but they like kept receipts it's
like you know it's like a terrorist
organization you know when you when you
finally bust it up you know like an
undercover operation and you get all of
their videos and audios and social media
posts and Diaries yeah they thought they
were uh they were immune that they that
they were above reproach so we have a
training video where they say exactly
that fire the inspector General let's
play the clip you should be worried
about in oversight investigations
there's this whole other community of
permanent bureaucrats that are out to to
you know look after your conduct and
what I'm talking about here are the
inspector's General and the government
accountability officer are two that come
to mind so Tom why don't you just
explain what inspectors General are IG
and GAO yeah so the inspectors General
are uh permanent staff within the agency
that are responsible for rooting out
Fraud and Abuse within the agency
operation and these are guys you don't
want to get Crossways with these are
guys that show up with Badges and they
can conduct investigations and they have
the power to investigate uh in a way
that really a lot of other um
investigative agencies and organs don't
have so you know they're they vary in
the quality some agencies have
outstanding inspectors General who are
impartial who are looking at rooting out
fraud some agencies have guys that are
kind of meh they're they're less than
Stellar uh but at the end of the day you
you don't want to be in the in kind of
the crosshairs because that you know
they can get information from outside
sources or within the building that says
hey we think there's a problem going on
within this department we think this
political appoin is misbehaved done
misappropriated funds used things you
know outside the the proper course
coordinated with political actors thank
you propublica for finding that
clip so for Donald Trump to look the
American people in the eye and and lie
which he does regularly running on a
phony populist message not caring about
the pop the population at all not caring
about the average American at all for
him to say there's no link between his
administration and project 2025 is a
bald-faced criminal
lie the Father the self-professed father
to use that term uh mildly you Loosely
of project 2025 the architect of it is
Russ fought what's Russ VA he's going to
be changing your life on a daily basis
until we get lawsuits up and running
against him because he's going to run
the Congressional manage management and
budget office yeah the Office of
Management and budget the nation's
checkbook if you will he's a project
2025
founder yeah
I don't know
why someone didn't think of this sooner
now we've got that clip Phyllis Fong had
to do
something this is a preview of the
lawsuits that are going to be filed I'm
on record of saying that there's going
to be at least three to four lawsuits a
day being filed against this
Administration who is operating who's
careening from one illegal executive
order to the next this is this is a
presidency by executive order which is a
gift to the Democrats and progressives
and moderates because that means every
executive order has a matching
correlating lawsuit 1,000 lawsuits or
more were filed against Donald Trump the
first time triple that number now maybe
even quadruple it he's already been he
has already had um one lawsuit a little
over one lawsuit a day since he's been
in office and he's only been in office
for about 12
days yeah we have almost that many
lawsuits in four different courts and
two restraining orders already by
federal judges triple that number at
least double that number as we move
forward as the Attorneys General of uh
the Attorneys General of the United
States 18 or 20 of them that are
democratic move forward against Donald
Trump and these executive orders judges
start to rule public interest groups
like like uh the ACLU and the na ACP and
others execute their plan in opposition
and resistance we need Phyllis fun we
need a Phyllis fun in our life right to
lead to lead from the front and that's
what we're watching this Council of
independent inspector's General is
currently led by a guy named uh Hannibal
but he goes by Mike Mike wear and Mike
wear went on I think on MSNBC recently
and and and uh laid down the Line in the
Sand as a as a precursor to the lawsuits
that are coming let's play that clip the
reason was uh due to changing priorities
of the administration and the reason
that is alarming is because IGS are not
a part of any
Administration ig's oversee how the
priorities of the administration is
being conducted to make sure that
there's transparency in government and
to make sure that there's no fraud waste
and abuse and how taxpayer funds are
being um expended so the decapitation of
the inspector's General by Donald Trump
will not
stand democracy requires that we have
especially when you have an occupant
like Donald Trump that we have firewalls
around all the Departments to avoid
abuse of power and Corruption as as I've
said
before on the day one of his
administration minute one of his
administration that we be kening from
one abuse use of power to another one
violation of separation of powers to
another one constitutional crisis to
another on almost an hourly basis and
that's exactly what we're seeing but the
counter to that the antidote to that is
the federal
courts who will put him back in his
place and groups led by Phyllis Fong who
were going to sue to get their jobs
rated the Department of Justice senior
leadership that were fired by Donald
Trump not reassigned but fired illegally
against Civil Service protection laws
against Merit service protection
laws they're going to get their jobs
back they're going to get their money
look how much money Donald Trump is
wasting with this retribution scheme the
money for lawsuits the money to pay
these people when when they have to
settle with these people or are awarded
large tens of millions of dollar sums
the buyouts for federal employees over
seven
months yeah where's that coming from not
Donald Trump's pocket he doesn't pay
taxes you yours in my pocket
wasteful yeah petulent
childish not dignified not adult not
professional not in your best interest
as the President of the United States
and now we've got to use these examples
these two to three lawsuits a day the
firings of the inspector's General uh
the firings of the uh Department of
Justice Personnel the firing of anybody
who would who would uh have the tarity
to resist Donald Trump we have to use
that in our campaign against the
fascists in our campaign against Donald
Trump at and the Republicans you know
sometimes we slip in the shth head and
we call it Maga call it the Republican
Party hold them responsible and
accountable in every race local local to
Federal every race from now until the
midterms and Beyond every judge that
runs with a red banner every every dog
catcher every School Board
member all every Congressional candidate
and the Democrats are going to are going
to do our part and the moderates are
going to do our part in the lawsuits and
then running great candidates that
you'll that you'll admire and that
you're going to want to vote for but you
got to make the Republicans pay that
they are the power the party of abuse of
power they are the party of
constitutional crisis they are the they
are the party that's in favor of
releasing criminals that beat police and
have them released and child
pornographers and put them back on the
streets to satisfy the worst instincts
of Donald
Trump we have to call it out we have to
televise it we got to talk to each other
before we speak truth to power we'll do
it all right here on the Meidas touch
network and on legal AF
by Michael Popok
MeidasTouch
Legal AF Podcast
Feb 1, 2025
The next phase of fascism has begun, with Trump dragging out of their offices Inspectors General who refused to recognize his illegal firings. Michael Popok discusses the brave and important resistance of Phyllis Fong, a 22-year apolitical watchdog, who took on Elon Musk’s companies, and has been retaliated against, as new lawsuits pile up against Trump tying his administration up in knots.
Transcript
The next stage of fascism has started
with Donald Trump now pulling out of
offices and dragging away Inspector
Generals that oppose him or people in his
administration. And now we have Phyllis
Fong, a 22-year Inspector General all her
job has been for republicans and
Democrats alike has been to root out
corruption to root out abuse of power at
various departments. She's been at the US
Department of Agriculture. She got
sideways with Elon Musk because her office
opened up an investigation in
2022 against Neurolink one of his
companies and now they've attempted to
literally drag her from her office
because she's refused to recognize the
illegal firings of inspector's Generals
uh with a note a boilerplate note no
less from the director of personnel for
Donald Trump she's a profile in Courage
the resistance continues and is
televised and at least on YouTube and
I'm going to continue to follow it right
here in the Meidas touch Network in legal
I'm Michael Popok let's talk about the
firings and what Phyllis Fong's
resistance means the reason these
inspectors General were were created was
in
1976 after Watergate after the Nixonian
crime
spray and Congress at the time had the
wisdom to install these Watchdogs
independent Watchdogs to root out abuse
of power and Corruption within the
various departments and uh agencies of
the government everyone has an inspector
general or did until on Friday they're
in dependent they're they're they're
aartis
apolitical they just look you know it's
like a it's like an accountant I mean is
your CPA or your accountant political or
are they just looking at the numbers and
the facts and delivering an audit or a
message same thing for inspector
generals think of it as an Ethics or
Abuse of power audit being run by an
independent Auditor in the form of An
Inspector General that's one way to
think about it and Congress is always
concerned about the independence of the
inspector's General and they were very
concerned about it before Trump's
potential arrival because in
2022 knowing that there was a chance
that Donald Trump could come back and
because project 2025 has as one of its
tenants one of its principles get rid of
the inspector's General I'm going to
show you a video clip about that in a
minute right from their handbook right
from their playbook but because of all
of that in 2022 even the MAGA Congress
thought it's a great idea we should
increase the independence and protect
the dep dependence of the inspector's
General and they passed a law that said
you can't fire just because you came
into office you can't fire people you
don't like who happen to be inspectors
General you have to give us sufficient
notice which they never gave here and
you have to list the reasons by person
why they are being removed effectively
for cost none of that happened here
there was a mass a mass mailing a mass
email your services are no longer no
longer wanted does anyone truly believe
that Elon Musk didn't have Phyllis Fong
fired because they opened up an
investigation against neurolink leave it
in the chat in the comment if you think
I'm I'm uh my thought experiment is all
wet so she properly and she's the
perfect person by the way to be the
profile en courage for this story why
Phyllis Fong was appointed by both
Democrats and Republicans to do her job
Bush and Clinton confirmed by the Senate
working away tirelessly patriotically
as a public as a as a public servant
just to do her job to root out abuse of
power and Corruption she's been given
every award Under the Sun that you can
think of if I were to do it a list of
her accolades and awards and
commendations on both sides of the aisle
it would take up the entire hot take
that's all she's ever wanted to do
that's all she's ever done with for her
adult
life and she served democratic
presidents and and uh and Republican
ones that's what happens over 22-year
career she was the first chairperson of
the Council of inspectors General on
integrity and efficiency she was the
very first one let alone the first woman
won and she has refused to acknowledge
that the that there's been an illegal
firing of her in fact if you go up on
their website she's still there at least
at the time of this recording let's put
her up now now why do I say that there's
a one-to-one correlation between project
202's Playbook and the firing of Phyllis
Fong and the other inspector's General
because there's a training video made by
project 2025 I don't know if they never
thought this would ever see the light of
day but they like kept receipts it's
like you know it's like a terrorist
organization you know when you when you
finally bust it up you know like an
undercover operation and you get all of
their videos and audios and social media
posts and Diaries yeah they thought they
were uh they were immune that they that
they were above reproach so we have a
training video where they say exactly
that fire the inspector General let's
play the clip you should be worried
about in oversight investigations
there's this whole other community of
permanent bureaucrats that are out to to
you know look after your conduct and
what I'm talking about here are the
inspector's General and the government
accountability officer are two that come
to mind so Tom why don't you just
explain what inspectors General are IG
and GAO yeah so the inspectors General
are uh permanent staff within the agency
that are responsible for rooting out
Fraud and Abuse within the agency
operation and these are guys you don't
want to get Crossways with these are
guys that show up with Badges and they
can conduct investigations and they have
the power to investigate uh in a way
that really a lot of other um
investigative agencies and organs don't
have so you know they're they vary in
the quality some agencies have
outstanding inspectors General who are
impartial who are looking at rooting out
fraud some agencies have guys that are
kind of meh they're they're less than
Stellar uh but at the end of the day you
you don't want to be in the in kind of
the crosshairs because that you know
they can get information from outside
sources or within the building that says
hey we think there's a problem going on
within this department we think this
political appoin is misbehaved done
misappropriated funds used things you
know outside the the proper course
coordinated with political actors thank
you propublica for finding that
clip so for Donald Trump to look the
American people in the eye and and lie
which he does regularly running on a
phony populist message not caring about
the pop the population at all not caring
about the average American at all for
him to say there's no link between his
administration and project 2025 is a
bald-faced criminal
lie the Father the self-professed father
to use that term uh mildly you Loosely
of project 2025 the architect of it is
Russ fought what's Russ VA he's going to
be changing your life on a daily basis
until we get lawsuits up and running
against him because he's going to run
the Congressional manage management and
budget office yeah the Office of
Management and budget the nation's
checkbook if you will he's a project
2025
founder yeah
I don't know
why someone didn't think of this sooner
now we've got that clip Phyllis Fong had
to do
something this is a preview of the
lawsuits that are going to be filed I'm
on record of saying that there's going
to be at least three to four lawsuits a
day being filed against this
Administration who is operating who's
careening from one illegal executive
order to the next this is this is a
presidency by executive order which is a
gift to the Democrats and progressives
and moderates because that means every
executive order has a matching
correlating lawsuit 1,000 lawsuits or
more were filed against Donald Trump the
first time triple that number now maybe
even quadruple it he's already been he
has already had um one lawsuit a little
over one lawsuit a day since he's been
in office and he's only been in office
for about 12
days yeah we have almost that many
lawsuits in four different courts and
two restraining orders already by
federal judges triple that number at
least double that number as we move
forward as the Attorneys General of uh
the Attorneys General of the United
States 18 or 20 of them that are
democratic move forward against Donald
Trump and these executive orders judges
start to rule public interest groups
like like uh the ACLU and the na ACP and
others execute their plan in opposition
and resistance we need Phyllis fun we
need a Phyllis fun in our life right to
lead to lead from the front and that's
what we're watching this Council of
independent inspector's General is
currently led by a guy named uh Hannibal
but he goes by Mike Mike wear and Mike
wear went on I think on MSNBC recently
and and and uh laid down the Line in the
Sand as a as a precursor to the lawsuits
that are coming let's play that clip the
reason was uh due to changing priorities
of the administration and the reason
that is alarming is because IGS are not
a part of any
Administration ig's oversee how the
priorities of the administration is
being conducted to make sure that
there's transparency in government and
to make sure that there's no fraud waste
and abuse and how taxpayer funds are
being um expended so the decapitation of
the inspector's General by Donald Trump
will not
stand democracy requires that we have
especially when you have an occupant
like Donald Trump that we have firewalls
around all the Departments to avoid
abuse of power and Corruption as as I've
said
before on the day one of his
administration minute one of his
administration that we be kening from
one abuse use of power to another one
violation of separation of powers to
another one constitutional crisis to
another on almost an hourly basis and
that's exactly what we're seeing but the
counter to that the antidote to that is
the federal
courts who will put him back in his
place and groups led by Phyllis Fong who
were going to sue to get their jobs
rated the Department of Justice senior
leadership that were fired by Donald
Trump not reassigned but fired illegally
against Civil Service protection laws
against Merit service protection
laws they're going to get their jobs
back they're going to get their money
look how much money Donald Trump is
wasting with this retribution scheme the
money for lawsuits the money to pay
these people when when they have to
settle with these people or are awarded
large tens of millions of dollar sums
the buyouts for federal employees over
seven
months yeah where's that coming from not
Donald Trump's pocket he doesn't pay
taxes you yours in my pocket
wasteful yeah petulent
childish not dignified not adult not
professional not in your best interest
as the President of the United States
and now we've got to use these examples
these two to three lawsuits a day the
firings of the inspector's General uh
the firings of the uh Department of
Justice Personnel the firing of anybody
who would who would uh have the tarity
to resist Donald Trump we have to use
that in our campaign against the
fascists in our campaign against Donald
Trump at and the Republicans you know
sometimes we slip in the shth head and
we call it Maga call it the Republican
Party hold them responsible and
accountable in every race local local to
Federal every race from now until the
midterms and Beyond every judge that
runs with a red banner every every dog
catcher every School Board
member all every Congressional candidate
and the Democrats are going to are going
to do our part and the moderates are
going to do our part in the lawsuits and
then running great candidates that
you'll that you'll admire and that
you're going to want to vote for but you
got to make the Republicans pay that
they are the power the party of abuse of
power they are the party of
constitutional crisis they are the they
are the party that's in favor of
releasing criminals that beat police and
have them released and child
pornographers and put them back on the
streets to satisfy the worst instincts
of Donald
Trump we have to call it out we have to
televise it we got to talk to each other
before we speak truth to power we'll do
it all right here on the Meidas touch
network and on legal AF
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Re: Anti-Anti Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down the Ga
by admin » Sat Feb 01, 2025 11:41 pm
Trump TURNS Against Students Nationwide With Crushing Executive Order: President Donald Trump signs executive order to cancel visas and deport International students who express support for Palestinians, and end to genocide
by John Iadarola
The Damage Report
Feb 1, 2025 #TheDamageReport #JohnIadarola #TheYoungTurks
Donald Trump attacks freedom of speech with a new executive order meant to silence student protests with the threat of deportation for any foreign students who express support for Palestinians during anti-war protests. John Iadarola and Francesca Fiorentini break it down on The Damage Report. Leave a comment with your thoughts below!
Transcript
President Donald Trump signed yet
another executive order just yesterday
in this case uh the executive order
would cancel visas and Deport
International students who committed the
irredeemable crime of expressing support
for Palestinians and calling for an end
to the genocide in Gaza that's
unacceptable but yay Free Speech yay I
I'm a free speech absolutist but if you
say a thing I don't like then you're
going to be sent somewhere else in the
world that's how it works here the fact
cheat for the president's order
describes the move as a means to address
anti-Semitism directing the doj to
prosecute quote terroristic threats
arson vandalism and violence against
American Jews and it says in particular
this is actual text in the order to all
the Resident aliens who joined in the
pro- jihadist protests we put you on
Notice come 2025 we will find you and we
will Deport you God pro like if you
literally say hey could we stop Dr 2,000
pound pound bombs and killing kids no
you're a jihadist and to give you an
idea like that they've been sitting on
these orders it says come 2025 they just
signed it again that's how this works we
will Deport you because it's not about
actually protecting America from
criminals it is a weapon to be wielded
against people they don't like in all
cases that's why they talked about
deporting uh Reverend uh buddy that's
why they instantly were talking about
deporting Selena Gomez and that's why
they're talking about deporting these
students now go back to your country is
no longer just a thing terrible people
say it's the official policy of our
government in all cases and so if you're
a Hamas sympathizer they're going to
cancel your visas Trump called college
campuses infested with radicalism and I
just want to give a counterveiling point
before we discuss this is from Jamie
baren CEO of progressive Jewish group
Ben The Arc who said Trump's order
promot the false premise that Jews and
Israel are one entity this idea
reinforces the anti-semitic dual loyalty
dropes Trope uh which Trump has
reinforced a thousand times in his
career quote Jews feel many ways about
Israel and Palestine and the protests on
college campuses have included and
continue to include many Jewish
participants and that may be true but
they're apparently also pro- jihadist
and anti-semitic and they should
probably be deported I guess to Israel I
suppose is how that would work I guess
again we are living in the dumbest time
ever but Fran what do you think I mean
like honestly no irony here but like
deporting Jews to Israel is kind of
Christian Zionist bag like that's what
they would like they would love for all
the Jews to go to Israel that's the
point so that then they die in a in
Hellfire and or convert to Christianity
and then are saved like that's what's
going to get Jesus to come back if
you're Mike Huckaby who is currently the
ambassador to Israel um so this is crazy
you know it's absolutely insane and this
is I've been talking a lot about the
permission structure to do things like
this meaning when Democrats during these
protests were
also Democrats like Josh Shapiro saying
that these college campus protesters
were engaging in anti-Semitism when they
said please stop bombing Palestinians
Gaza that gave a permission structure so
did um College administrators when they
were grilled by Elise stefanic giving a
permission structure saying that yes
their students were anti-semitic giving
a permission structure to do things like
this because things like project Esther
which is basically a like farri Heritage
Foundation um plan to go after Palestine
demonstrators that is now being enacted
and this is part of that plan it is part
of purging and so to all the liberals
and to all the people who at once may be
identified uh as a Zionist hey man don't
you see what is going on here don't you
understand that this is all about um
purging International students foreign
students same with like similar
anti-immigrant sentiment but it's also
about clamping down on actual free
speech that being said John I absolutely
think we should Deport anti-semites from
this country get rid of them goodbye but
real anti-semites the ones who toppled
Jewish headstones in cemeteries When
Donald Trump was elected the first time
the ones who Mass shot uh uh synagogue
worshippers at the Tree of Life all
right the people who marched on on in
the the unite the right rally screaming
Jews will not replace us let's Deport
them but let's go after actual
anti-semites yeah Deport Elon Musk by
the way the dude just did a Nazi salute
by John Iadarola
The Damage Report
Feb 1, 2025 #TheDamageReport #JohnIadarola #TheYoungTurks
Donald Trump attacks freedom of speech with a new executive order meant to silence student protests with the threat of deportation for any foreign students who express support for Palestinians during anti-war protests. John Iadarola and Francesca Fiorentini break it down on The Damage Report. Leave a comment with your thoughts below!
Transcript
President Donald Trump signed yet
another executive order just yesterday
in this case uh the executive order
would cancel visas and Deport
International students who committed the
irredeemable crime of expressing support
for Palestinians and calling for an end
to the genocide in Gaza that's
unacceptable but yay Free Speech yay I
I'm a free speech absolutist but if you
say a thing I don't like then you're
going to be sent somewhere else in the
world that's how it works here the fact
cheat for the president's order
describes the move as a means to address
anti-Semitism directing the doj to
prosecute quote terroristic threats
arson vandalism and violence against
American Jews and it says in particular
this is actual text in the order to all
the Resident aliens who joined in the
pro- jihadist protests we put you on
Notice come 2025 we will find you and we
will Deport you God pro like if you
literally say hey could we stop Dr 2,000
pound pound bombs and killing kids no
you're a jihadist and to give you an
idea like that they've been sitting on
these orders it says come 2025 they just
signed it again that's how this works we
will Deport you because it's not about
actually protecting America from
criminals it is a weapon to be wielded
against people they don't like in all
cases that's why they talked about
deporting uh Reverend uh buddy that's
why they instantly were talking about
deporting Selena Gomez and that's why
they're talking about deporting these
students now go back to your country is
no longer just a thing terrible people
say it's the official policy of our
government in all cases and so if you're
a Hamas sympathizer they're going to
cancel your visas Trump called college
campuses infested with radicalism and I
just want to give a counterveiling point
before we discuss this is from Jamie
baren CEO of progressive Jewish group
Ben The Arc who said Trump's order
promot the false premise that Jews and
Israel are one entity this idea
reinforces the anti-semitic dual loyalty
dropes Trope uh which Trump has
reinforced a thousand times in his
career quote Jews feel many ways about
Israel and Palestine and the protests on
college campuses have included and
continue to include many Jewish
participants and that may be true but
they're apparently also pro- jihadist
and anti-semitic and they should
probably be deported I guess to Israel I
suppose is how that would work I guess
again we are living in the dumbest time
ever but Fran what do you think I mean
like honestly no irony here but like
deporting Jews to Israel is kind of
Christian Zionist bag like that's what
they would like they would love for all
the Jews to go to Israel that's the
point so that then they die in a in
Hellfire and or convert to Christianity
and then are saved like that's what's
going to get Jesus to come back if
you're Mike Huckaby who is currently the
ambassador to Israel um so this is crazy
you know it's absolutely insane and this
is I've been talking a lot about the
permission structure to do things like
this meaning when Democrats during these
protests were
also Democrats like Josh Shapiro saying
that these college campus protesters
were engaging in anti-Semitism when they
said please stop bombing Palestinians
Gaza that gave a permission structure so
did um College administrators when they
were grilled by Elise stefanic giving a
permission structure saying that yes
their students were anti-semitic giving
a permission structure to do things like
this because things like project Esther
which is basically a like farri Heritage
Foundation um plan to go after Palestine
demonstrators that is now being enacted
and this is part of that plan it is part
of purging and so to all the liberals
and to all the people who at once may be
identified uh as a Zionist hey man don't
you see what is going on here don't you
understand that this is all about um
purging International students foreign
students same with like similar
anti-immigrant sentiment but it's also
about clamping down on actual free
speech that being said John I absolutely
think we should Deport anti-semites from
this country get rid of them goodbye but
real anti-semites the ones who toppled
Jewish headstones in cemeteries When
Donald Trump was elected the first time
the ones who Mass shot uh uh synagogue
worshippers at the Tree of Life all
right the people who marched on on in
the the unite the right rally screaming
Jews will not replace us let's Deport
them but let's go after actual
anti-semites yeah Deport Elon Musk by
the way the dude just did a Nazi salute
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Re: Anti-Anti Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down the Ga
by admin » Sun Feb 02, 2025 7:46 pm
Government technological workers forced to defend projects to Elon Musk at random: GSA’s Technology Transformation Services employees surprised to meet people not identified in the meetings, who won't say their names
by Elijah
Wired
January 30, 2025
https://whatsnew2day.com/government-tec ... at-random/
The email reminds one that Musk sent early on their Twitter days, demanding that the employees send a description of a page of what they had achieved the previous month and how to differ from their goals.
Instead of calling Shedd [Tesla alum Thomas Shedd] at these meetings, TTS [GSA’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) exists to design and deliver a digital government with and for the American people.] employees were surprised to meet people with whom they had never seen or worked before.
“It was a very confusing decision because I expected to meet you, and instead I was received by two people reluctant to identify,” said a TTS employee to Shedd in an open channel, one of several reviewed by Wired. “They had not seen the information I sent in my form, so I was trying to explain things without the images/links I had sent,” one wrote.
“It also had the same exact experience,” added another employee. “The individual with whom I had gathered had no idea of the Google form that I sent and when I made it reference, I found myself with avoidance.”
In a loose message to TTS staff on Thursday morning seen by Wired, Shedd apologized for vague and sudden meetings invitations, and to include people not identified in the meetings that joined the Gmail addresses.
“Each is in the incorporation process of obtaining a GSA laptop and a PIV card. I assume all the responsibility of the actions of each of them in the calls. I asked them to begin the calls with their first name and confirming that they are an advisor to me, ”said Shedd in a Slack message screenshot seen by Wired.
Shedd told employees that people in the calls were “examined by me and invited to the call.” He said they were physically present with him at the headquarters of the GSA, and that he had “inspired them all in the building.” This implies that those who join the calls did not currently have official government identifications issued to the agency.
At least two of these individuals seemed to be “university students with an authorization from Suite to disturbingly high,” a TTS source told Wired. (Suite authorizations to link employees to the GSA administrator office).
A person says they were taken to a review with Edward Coristine, a newly graduated from high school that spent several months in Neuralink, the Musk brain interface company, which Wired has previously identified as a person who worked in the management office of personnel (OPM) and directly informing her new chief of cabinet, the former employee of Xai Amanda Scales. He has not responded to Wired’s requests, and OPM has refused to comment.
“We don’t have additional personnel ads right now.” A GSA spokesman told Wired on Thursday.
It is typical that TTS workers work together with other agencies throughout the government, with many of their projects that contain external data to GSA and subject to sensitivity agreements. However, by sharing specific technical achievements, it frightened some employees who feared that they could violate these agreements.
“The team is right when feeling nervous by sharing details about other agencies in these calls and must continue following the normal guide that cannot share confidential information,” Shedd wrote in Gsa’s slack on Thursday. “The objective of these calls is to talk about interesting example/victorious problems and dig on how that victory was made. An opportunity to show off how a problem solved."
(Tagstotranslate) Elon Musk (T) Silicon Valley (T) Government
by Elijah
Wired
January 30, 2025
https://whatsnew2day.com/government-tec ... at-random/
The email reminds one that Musk sent early on their Twitter days, demanding that the employees send a description of a page of what they had achieved the previous month and how to differ from their goals.
Instead of calling Shedd [Tesla alum Thomas Shedd] at these meetings, TTS [GSA’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) exists to design and deliver a digital government with and for the American people.] employees were surprised to meet people with whom they had never seen or worked before.
“It was a very confusing decision because I expected to meet you, and instead I was received by two people reluctant to identify,” said a TTS employee to Shedd in an open channel, one of several reviewed by Wired. “They had not seen the information I sent in my form, so I was trying to explain things without the images/links I had sent,” one wrote.
“It also had the same exact experience,” added another employee. “The individual with whom I had gathered had no idea of the Google form that I sent and when I made it reference, I found myself with avoidance.”
In a loose message to TTS staff on Thursday morning seen by Wired, Shedd apologized for vague and sudden meetings invitations, and to include people not identified in the meetings that joined the Gmail addresses.
“Each is in the incorporation process of obtaining a GSA laptop and a PIV card. I assume all the responsibility of the actions of each of them in the calls. I asked them to begin the calls with their first name and confirming that they are an advisor to me, ”said Shedd in a Slack message screenshot seen by Wired.
Shedd told employees that people in the calls were “examined by me and invited to the call.” He said they were physically present with him at the headquarters of the GSA, and that he had “inspired them all in the building.” This implies that those who join the calls did not currently have official government identifications issued to the agency.
At least two of these individuals seemed to be “university students with an authorization from Suite to disturbingly high,” a TTS source told Wired. (Suite authorizations to link employees to the GSA administrator office).
A person says they were taken to a review with Edward Coristine, a newly graduated from high school that spent several months in Neuralink, the Musk brain interface company, which Wired has previously identified as a person who worked in the management office of personnel (OPM) and directly informing her new chief of cabinet, the former employee of Xai Amanda Scales. He has not responded to Wired’s requests, and OPM has refused to comment.
“We don’t have additional personnel ads right now.” A GSA spokesman told Wired on Thursday.
It is typical that TTS workers work together with other agencies throughout the government, with many of their projects that contain external data to GSA and subject to sensitivity agreements. However, by sharing specific technical achievements, it frightened some employees who feared that they could violate these agreements.
“The team is right when feeling nervous by sharing details about other agencies in these calls and must continue following the normal guide that cannot share confidential information,” Shedd wrote in Gsa’s slack on Thursday. “The objective of these calls is to talk about interesting example/victorious problems and dig on how that victory was made. An opportunity to show off how a problem solved."
(Tagstotranslate) Elon Musk (T) Silicon Valley (T) Government
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Re: Anti-Anti Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down the Ga
by admin » Sun Feb 02, 2025 8:08 pm
US aid agency is in upheaval during foreign assistance freeze and staff departures
by Matthew Lee and Ellen Knickmmeyer
AP News
Updated 9:27 PM MST, January 31, 2025
https://apnews.com/article/trump-usaid- ... 8e883b9756
WASHINGTON (AP) — Trump administration changes have upended the U.S. agency charged with providing humanitarian aid to countries overseas, with dozens of senior officials put on leave, thousands of contractors laid off, and a sweeping freeze imposed on billions of dollars in foreign assistance.
Democratic senators warned the Trump administration Friday against any effort to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development as an independent agency, responding to growing fears among its supporters that such plans may be in the offing.
Sen. Chris Murphy was one of a half-dozen Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to argue in statements and on social media that President Donald Trump would have no legal authority to dissolve the agency.
Aid organizations say the funding freeze — and deep confusion over what U.S.-funded programs must stop work as a result — has left them agonizing over whether they could continue operating programs such as those providing round-the-clock nutritional support to extremely malnourished infants and children, knowing that closing the doors means that many of those children would die.
Current and former officials at the State Department and USAID say staffers were invited to submit requests to exempt certain programs from the foreign aid freeze, which Trump imposed Jan. 20 and the State Department detailed how to execute on Jan. 24.
Three days later, at least 56 senior career USAID staffers were abruptly placed on administrative leave.
Three officials said many of those put on leave were lawyers involved in determining what programs might qualify for waivers, helping write proposals and submitting those waiver requests as they believed they had been invited to do.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. A Trump administration directive that aid organizations interpret as a gag order has left them unwilling to speak publicly for fear of permanently losing U.S. funding.
In an internal memo Monday about the staffing changes, new acting USAID administrator Jason Gray said the agency had identified “several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders and the mandate from the American people.”
“As a result, we have placed a number of USAID employees on administrative leave with full pay and benefits until further notice while we complete our analysis of these actions,” Gray wrote.
A former senior USAID official said those put on leave had been helping aid organizations navigate the “confusing process” to seek waivers from the aid pause for specific life-saving projects, such as continuing clean water supplies for displaced people in war zones.
Others were identified as having been involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programming, which the administration has banned.
On Thursday, a USAID human resources official who tried to reverse the action, saying there was no justification for it, was himself placed on leave, according to two of the officials who had viewed internal emails and verified them as authentic. Reporters from ProPublica and Vox first reported the emails on X.
The State Department and White House didn’t respond to messages seeking comment about the staffing changes.
The new leaders at USAID also abruptly laid off contractors who made up about half the workforce in the agency’s humanitarian bureau Tuesday, knocking them out of systems so that some vanished in the middle of videoconferences, the former senior official said. The targeted institutional service contractors do everything from administrative and travel support to grant processing and data analytics.
The staffing changes came three days after the State Department issued guidelines last Friday for implementing Trump’s executive order freezing foreign assistance for 90 days. The department says it’s reviewing the money the United States is spending to ensure it adheres to administration policy.
The guidelines initially exempted only military aid to Israel and Egypt and emergency food programs but also said program administrators and implementors could apply for waivers for programs that they believe would meet administration standards.
On Tuesday, new Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a broader waiver for programs that provide other “life-saving” assistance, including medicine, medical services, food and shelter, and again pointed to the possibility of waivers. Rubio pointed to the broadened exemptions in an interview Thursday with SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly.
“We don’t want to see people die and the like,” he said.
Rubio said there would be a program-by-program review of which projects make “America safer, stronger or more prosperous.”
The step of shutting down U.S.-funded programs during the 90-day review meant the U.S. was “getting a lot more cooperation” from recipients of humanitarian, development and security assistance, Rubio said. “Because otherwise you don’t get your money.”
The State Department said that since the aid freeze went into effect, it has approved dozens of waivers, although many were returned because they did not include enough detail. It said waiver requests for programs costing “billions of dollars” have been received and are being reviewed.
The department did not specify how many waiver requests had been denied but said Thus far its actions had stopped more than $1 billion from being spent on programs and projects that are “not aligned with an America First agenda.”
Even with the broadening of exemptions for life-saving care, uncertainty surrounds what U.S.-funded programs legally can continue. Hundreds of thousands of people globally are going without access to medicine and humanitarian supplies and clinics are not getting medicine in time because of the funding freeze, aid organizations warn.
——
AP reporter Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed.
by Matthew Lee and Ellen Knickmmeyer
AP News
Updated 9:27 PM MST, January 31, 2025
https://apnews.com/article/trump-usaid- ... 8e883b9756
The Trump administration has placed two top security chiefs at the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave after they refused to turn over classified material in restricted areas to Elon Musk’s government-inspection teams, a current and a former U.S. official told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Members of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, eventually did gain access Saturday to the aid agency’s classified information, which includes intelligence reports, the former official said.
Musk’s DOGE crew lacked high-enough security clearance to access that information, so the two USAID security officials — John Vorhees and deputy Brian McGill — were legally obligated to deny access.
The current and former U.S. officials had knowledge of the incident and spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share the information.
Musk on Sunday responded to a post about the news on X by saying, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It comes a day after DOGE carried out a similar operation at the Treasury Department, gaining access to sensitive information including the Social Security and Medicare customer payment systems.
Musk formed DOGE in cooperation with the new Trump administration with the stated goal of finding ways to fire federal workers, cut programs and slash federal regulations.
USAID, whose website vanished Saturday without explanation, has been one of the federal agencies most targeted by the Trump administration in an escalating crackdown on the federal government and many of its programs.
-- USAID security chiefs put on leave after trying to stop Musk’s team from accessing classified info, officials say, by Ellen Knickmeyer and Matthew Lee, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Trump administration changes have upended the U.S. agency charged with providing humanitarian aid to countries overseas, with dozens of senior officials put on leave, thousands of contractors laid off, and a sweeping freeze imposed on billions of dollars in foreign assistance.
Democratic senators warned the Trump administration Friday against any effort to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development as an independent agency, responding to growing fears among its supporters that such plans may be in the offing.
Sen. Chris Murphy was one of a half-dozen Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to argue in statements and on social media that President Donald Trump would have no legal authority to dissolve the agency.
Aid organizations say the funding freeze — and deep confusion over what U.S.-funded programs must stop work as a result — has left them agonizing over whether they could continue operating programs such as those providing round-the-clock nutritional support to extremely malnourished infants and children, knowing that closing the doors means that many of those children would die.
Current and former officials at the State Department and USAID say staffers were invited to submit requests to exempt certain programs from the foreign aid freeze, which Trump imposed Jan. 20 and the State Department detailed how to execute on Jan. 24.
Three days later, at least 56 senior career USAID staffers were abruptly placed on administrative leave.
Three officials said many of those put on leave were lawyers involved in determining what programs might qualify for waivers, helping write proposals and submitting those waiver requests as they believed they had been invited to do.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. A Trump administration directive that aid organizations interpret as a gag order has left them unwilling to speak publicly for fear of permanently losing U.S. funding.
In an internal memo Monday about the staffing changes, new acting USAID administrator Jason Gray said the agency had identified “several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders and the mandate from the American people.”
“As a result, we have placed a number of USAID employees on administrative leave with full pay and benefits until further notice while we complete our analysis of these actions,” Gray wrote.
A former senior USAID official said those put on leave had been helping aid organizations navigate the “confusing process” to seek waivers from the aid pause for specific life-saving projects, such as continuing clean water supplies for displaced people in war zones.
Others were identified as having been involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programming, which the administration has banned.
On Thursday, a USAID human resources official who tried to reverse the action, saying there was no justification for it, was himself placed on leave, according to two of the officials who had viewed internal emails and verified them as authentic. Reporters from ProPublica and Vox first reported the emails on X.
The State Department and White House didn’t respond to messages seeking comment about the staffing changes.
The new leaders at USAID also abruptly laid off contractors who made up about half the workforce in the agency’s humanitarian bureau Tuesday, knocking them out of systems so that some vanished in the middle of videoconferences, the former senior official said. The targeted institutional service contractors do everything from administrative and travel support to grant processing and data analytics.
The staffing changes came three days after the State Department issued guidelines last Friday for implementing Trump’s executive order freezing foreign assistance for 90 days. The department says it’s reviewing the money the United States is spending to ensure it adheres to administration policy.
The guidelines initially exempted only military aid to Israel and Egypt and emergency food programs but also said program administrators and implementors could apply for waivers for programs that they believe would meet administration standards.
On Tuesday, new Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a broader waiver for programs that provide other “life-saving” assistance, including medicine, medical services, food and shelter, and again pointed to the possibility of waivers. Rubio pointed to the broadened exemptions in an interview Thursday with SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly.
“We don’t want to see people die and the like,” he said.
Rubio said there would be a program-by-program review of which projects make “America safer, stronger or more prosperous.”
The step of shutting down U.S.-funded programs during the 90-day review meant the U.S. was “getting a lot more cooperation” from recipients of humanitarian, development and security assistance, Rubio said. “Because otherwise you don’t get your money.”
The State Department said that since the aid freeze went into effect, it has approved dozens of waivers, although many were returned because they did not include enough detail. It said waiver requests for programs costing “billions of dollars” have been received and are being reviewed.
The department did not specify how many waiver requests had been denied but said Thus far its actions had stopped more than $1 billion from being spent on programs and projects that are “not aligned with an America First agenda.”
Even with the broadening of exemptions for life-saving care, uncertainty surrounds what U.S.-funded programs legally can continue. Hundreds of thousands of people globally are going without access to medicine and humanitarian supplies and clinics are not getting medicine in time because of the funding freeze, aid organizations warn.
——
AP reporter Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed.
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Re: Anti-Anti Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down the Ga
by admin » Sun Feb 02, 2025 9:01 pm
Trudeau says Canada will place 25% tariffs on US imports in retaliation for Trump tariffs
Associated Press
Feb 1, 2025 #canada #usa #economy
The Canadian prime minister spoke after President Donald Trump on Saturday signed an order to impose stiff tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada and China. Read more here: https://bit.ly/3CnNmat
Transcript
[Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau] Tonight I am announcing Canada will be
responding to the US trade action with
25% tariffs against
a155 billion worth of American
Goods this will include immediate
tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods as
of Tuesday followed by further tariffs
on
$125 billion worth of American Products
in 21 days time to allow Canadian
companies and Supply chains to seek to
find
Alternatives like the American tariffs
our response will also 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
*********************
Trudeau: Canada will retaliate with 25% tariffs on $155B of U.S. goods
CBC News
CBC/Radio-Canada is a Canadian public broadcast service.
Feb 1, 2025
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Saturday that Canada will respond to Donald Trump's tariffs with 25 per cent tariffs on $155 billion of U.S. goods.
Transcript
[Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau] Today the United States informed us they
will be in imposing 25% tariffs on
Canadian exports to the United States
and 10% on Canadian energy a decision
that should the elect to proceed with
should take effect on Tuesday February
4th a Rel been the source
weal and opportunities on both sides of
the Border tonight first I want to speak
directly to Americans our closest
friends and
neighbors this is a choice that yes will
harm Canadians but beyond that it will
have real consequences for you the
American
people as I have consistently said
tariffs again against Canada will put
your jobs at risk potentially shutting
down American Auto assembly plants and
other manufacturing facilities they will
raise costs for you including food at
the grocery stores and gas at the pump
they will impede your access to an
affordable supply of vital Goods crucial
for US security such as nickel poach
uranium steel and aluminum
they will violate the free trade
agreement that the president and I along
with our Mexican partner negotiated and
signed a few years
ago but it doesn't have to be this
way as President John F Kennedy said
many years ago geography has made us
neighbors history has made us friends
economics has made us partners and
necessity
has made us
allies that rang true for many decades
prior to President Kennedy's time in
office and in the decades
since from the beaches of Normandy to
the mountains of the Korean Peninsula
from the fields of Flanders to the
streets of Kandahar we have fought and
died alongside
you during your darkest
hours during the Ian hostage crisis
those
444 days we worked around the clock from
our Embassy to get your innocent
compatriots
home 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 September member 11th 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 yes we've had our differences in
the past but we've always found a way to
get past
them as I've said before if president
Trump wants to usher in a new golden age
for the United States the better path is
to partner with
Canada not to punish
us Canada has critical minerals reliable
and affordable energy stable Democratic
institutions shared values and the
natural resources you need Canada has
the ingredients necessary to build a
booming and secure partnership for the
North American economy and we stand at
the ready to work
together let's take a moment to talk
about our shared border our border is
already safe and secure but there's
always always more work to do less than
1% of fenel less than 1% of illegal
Crossings into the United States come
from
Canada but hearing concerns from both
Canadians and Americans including the
American president himself we're taking
action we launched a 1.3 billion border
plan that is already showing results
because we too are devastated by The
Scourge that is fenel a drug that has
torn apart communities and caused so
much pain and torment for countless
families across Canada just like in the
United States a drug that we too want to
see wiped from the face of this Earth a
drug whose traffickers must be
punished as
neighbors we must work collaboratively
to fix
this
unfortunately the actions taken today by
the White House split us
apart instead of bringing us
together
tonight I am announcing Canada will be
responding to the US trade action with
25% tariffs against
$155 billion worth of American
Goods this will include include
immediate tariffs on $30 billion worth
of goods as of Tuesday followed by
further tariffs on $125 billion worth of
American Products in 21 days time to
allow Canadian companies and Supply
chains to seek to find
Alternatives I am announcing Canada's
response I am announcing 25% tariffs on$
1555 billion of us
Goods as of
Tuesday $30 billion worth of us products
will be affected and in 21 days to allow
Canadian companies the opportunity to
find Alternatives this will be the case
for $125 billion worth of
productss our response will also 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 and as part of our response we are
considering with the provinces and
territories several non-tariff measures
including some relating to critical
minerals energy procurement and other
Partnerships we will stand strong for
Canada we will stand strong to ensure
our countries continue to be the best
Neighbors in the
world with all that
said I also want to speak directly to
Canadians in this
moment and I'm sure many of you are
anxious but I want you to know we are
all in this together the Canadian
government Canadian businesses Canadian
organized labor Canadian Civil Society
Canada's Premier and tens of millions of
Canadians from coast to coast to coast
are aligned and
United this is Team Canada at its best
earlier today I spoke with premiers from
all provinces and
territories we are
united they've all supported our
approach we're also aligned to
reduce internal trade barriers and to
make it easier for consumers to choose
um
Canada and Canada products
a few moments ago I spoke with Mrs Shin
bom the president of Mexico our other
North American
partner who was and this country was
also the subject of 25% tariffs today
we're working together to face these
tariffs this threat is targeting the
entire country and I am hearten to see
all our leaders answer the call and um
to be so committed to make sure that no
Canadians are left behind our government
will be there for Canadians we will be
there for
you at the same time I do have something
to ask of you I would ask you to remain
United many of us will be deeply
affected a lot of people will go through
dark times I'm asking you to support one
another to be there for your friends
your neighbors and um your fellow canadi
from C to C Canadians are different we
speak different languages we have
different beliefs and opinions we have
different
ideas but when we remain
united we are stronger and now is also
the time to choose
Canada there are many ways for you to do
your part it might mean checking the
labels at the supermarket and picking
canadian-made
products it might mean opting for
Canadian rye over Kentucky bourbon or
foregoing Florida orange juice
altogether it might mean changing your
summer vacation plans to stay here in
Canada and explore the many national and
provincial parks historical sites and
tourist destinations our great country
has to
offer it's time to choose Canadian
products and to support Canadian
businesses to support our Farmers our
producers our workers our business
owners or artists it might mean doing
all of these things or finding your own
way to stand up for
Canada in this moment we must pull
together because we love this country we
pride ourselves on braving the cold
during The Long Winter months we don't
like to beat our chests but we're always
out there waving the maple leaf loudly
and proudly to celebrate an Olympic gold
medal we have a distinct identity we
have our own history and our
values Canadians are welcoming open
Innovative and
ambitious we prefer to solve our
differences with
diplomacy but we're prepared to fight if
it's required Canada is home to
Bountiful resources breathtaking beauty
and a proud people who've come from
every corner of the globe to forge a
nation with a unique identity worth
embracing and
celebrating we don't pretend to be
perfect but Canada is the best country
on Earth there's nowhere else that I and
our 41 million strong family would
rather be
and we will get through this challenge
just as we've B done countless times
before together thank you Merada
[Music]
Associated Press
Feb 1, 2025 #canada #usa #economy
The Canadian prime minister spoke after President Donald Trump on Saturday signed an order to impose stiff tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada and China. Read more here: https://bit.ly/3CnNmat
Transcript
[Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau] Tonight I am announcing Canada will be
responding to the US trade action with
25% tariffs against
a155 billion worth of American
Goods this will include immediate
tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods as
of Tuesday followed by further tariffs
on
$125 billion worth of American Products
in 21 days time to allow Canadian
companies and Supply chains to seek to
find
Alternatives like the American tariffs
our response will also 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
*********************
Trudeau: Canada will retaliate with 25% tariffs on $155B of U.S. goods
CBC News
CBC/Radio-Canada is a Canadian public broadcast service.
Feb 1, 2025
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Saturday that Canada will respond to Donald Trump's tariffs with 25 per cent tariffs on $155 billion of U.S. goods.
Transcript
[Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau] Today the United States informed us they
will be in imposing 25% tariffs on
Canadian exports to the United States
and 10% on Canadian energy a decision
that should the elect to proceed with
should take effect on Tuesday February
4th a Rel been the source
weal and opportunities on both sides of
the Border tonight first I want to speak
directly to Americans our closest
friends and
neighbors this is a choice that yes will
harm Canadians but beyond that it will
have real consequences for you the
American
people as I have consistently said
tariffs again against Canada will put
your jobs at risk potentially shutting
down American Auto assembly plants and
other manufacturing facilities they will
raise costs for you including food at
the grocery stores and gas at the pump
they will impede your access to an
affordable supply of vital Goods crucial
for US security such as nickel poach
uranium steel and aluminum
they will violate the free trade
agreement that the president and I along
with our Mexican partner negotiated and
signed a few years
ago but it doesn't have to be this
way as President John F Kennedy said
many years ago geography has made us
neighbors history has made us friends
economics has made us partners and
necessity
has made us
allies that rang true for many decades
prior to President Kennedy's time in
office and in the decades
since from the beaches of Normandy to
the mountains of the Korean Peninsula
from the fields of Flanders to the
streets of Kandahar we have fought and
died alongside
you during your darkest
hours during the Ian hostage crisis
those
444 days we worked around the clock from
our Embassy to get your innocent
compatriots
home 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 September member 11th 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 yes we've had our differences in
the past but we've always found a way to
get past
them as I've said before if president
Trump wants to usher in a new golden age
for the United States the better path is
to partner with
Canada not to punish
us Canada has critical minerals reliable
and affordable energy stable Democratic
institutions shared values and the
natural resources you need Canada has
the ingredients necessary to build a
booming and secure partnership for the
North American economy and we stand at
the ready to work
together let's take a moment to talk
about our shared border our border is
already safe and secure but there's
always always more work to do less than
1% of fenel less than 1% of illegal
Crossings into the United States come
from
Canada but hearing concerns from both
Canadians and Americans including the
American president himself we're taking
action we launched a 1.3 billion border
plan that is already showing results
because we too are devastated by The
Scourge that is fenel a drug that has
torn apart communities and caused so
much pain and torment for countless
families across Canada just like in the
United States a drug that we too want to
see wiped from the face of this Earth a
drug whose traffickers must be
punished as
neighbors we must work collaboratively
to fix
this
unfortunately the actions taken today by
the White House split us
apart instead of bringing us
together
tonight I am announcing Canada will be
responding to the US trade action with
25% tariffs against
$155 billion worth of American
Goods this will include include
immediate tariffs on $30 billion worth
of goods as of Tuesday followed by
further tariffs on $125 billion worth of
American Products in 21 days time to
allow Canadian companies and Supply
chains to seek to find
Alternatives I am announcing Canada's
response I am announcing 25% tariffs on$
1555 billion of us
Goods as of
Tuesday $30 billion worth of us products
will be affected and in 21 days to allow
Canadian companies the opportunity to
find Alternatives this will be the case
for $125 billion worth of
productss our response will also 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 and as part of our response we are
considering with the provinces and
territories several non-tariff measures
including some relating to critical
minerals energy procurement and other
Partnerships we will stand strong for
Canada we will stand strong to ensure
our countries continue to be the best
Neighbors in the
world with all that
said I also want to speak directly to
Canadians in this
moment and I'm sure many of you are
anxious but I want you to know we are
all in this together the Canadian
government Canadian businesses Canadian
organized labor Canadian Civil Society
Canada's Premier and tens of millions of
Canadians from coast to coast to coast
are aligned and
United this is Team Canada at its best
earlier today I spoke with premiers from
all provinces and
territories we are
united they've all supported our
approach we're also aligned to
reduce internal trade barriers and to
make it easier for consumers to choose
um
Canada and Canada products
a few moments ago I spoke with Mrs Shin
bom the president of Mexico our other
North American
partner who was and this country was
also the subject of 25% tariffs today
we're working together to face these
tariffs this threat is targeting the
entire country and I am hearten to see
all our leaders answer the call and um
to be so committed to make sure that no
Canadians are left behind our government
will be there for Canadians we will be
there for
you at the same time I do have something
to ask of you I would ask you to remain
United many of us will be deeply
affected a lot of people will go through
dark times I'm asking you to support one
another to be there for your friends
your neighbors and um your fellow canadi
from C to C Canadians are different we
speak different languages we have
different beliefs and opinions we have
different
ideas but when we remain
united we are stronger and now is also
the time to choose
Canada there are many ways for you to do
your part it might mean checking the
labels at the supermarket and picking
canadian-made
products it might mean opting for
Canadian rye over Kentucky bourbon or
foregoing Florida orange juice
altogether it might mean changing your
summer vacation plans to stay here in
Canada and explore the many national and
provincial parks historical sites and
tourist destinations our great country
has to
offer it's time to choose Canadian
products and to support Canadian
businesses to support our Farmers our
producers our workers our business
owners or artists it might mean doing
all of these things or finding your own
way to stand up for
Canada in this moment we must pull
together because we love this country we
pride ourselves on braving the cold
during The Long Winter months we don't
like to beat our chests but we're always
out there waving the maple leaf loudly
and proudly to celebrate an Olympic gold
medal we have a distinct identity we
have our own history and our
values Canadians are welcoming open
Innovative and
ambitious we prefer to solve our
differences with
diplomacy but we're prepared to fight if
it's required Canada is home to
Bountiful resources breathtaking beauty
and a proud people who've come from
every corner of the globe to forge a
nation with a unique identity worth
embracing and
celebrating we don't pretend to be
perfect but Canada is the best country
on Earth there's nowhere else that I and
our 41 million strong family would
rather be
and we will get through this challenge
just as we've B done countless times
before together thank you Merada
[Music]
- admin
- Site Admin
- Posts: 37580
- Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am
Re: Anti-Anti Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down the Ga
by admin » Sun Feb 02, 2025 9:23 pm
Senior U.S. official to exit after rift with Musk allies over payment system: [Highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department, David A. Lebryk, departing after clash with allies of Elon Musk and DOGE over access to sensitive payment systems]
by Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf and Jacqueline Alemany,
(c) 2025, The Washington Post
Fri, January 31, 2025 at 7:54 AM MST
https://www.yahoo.com/news/senior-u-off ... ccounter=1
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.
David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.
Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said -- requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration.
A spokeswoman for DOGE declined to comment. Lebryk could not be reached for comment late Thursday.
When Scott Bessent was confirmed as treasury secretary on Monday, Lebryk ceased to be the acting agency head.
Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate. (Musk was seen on Thursday visiting GSA, according to two other people familiar with his whereabouts, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters. That visit was first reported by the New York Times.) His Department of Government Efficiency, originally conceived as a nongovernmental panel, has since replaced the U.S. Digital Service.
The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all agencies to ensure it has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which would appear to include the Treasury payment systems.
It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts.
On Monday, the White House Office of Management and Budget ordered a freeze on all federal grant spending - an order it rescinded two days later amid intense political backlash and multiple lawsuits over the consequences of that decision.
Musk has characterized the rising national debt as an existential threat to the country and has proved willing to break norms in service of sweeping change.
Still, the possibility that government officials might try to use the federal payments system - which essentially functions as the nation’s “checking book” - to enact a political agenda is unprecedented, said Mark Mazur, who served in senior treasury roles during the Obama and Biden administrations.
“This is a mechanical job - they pay Social Security benefits, they pay vendors, whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for nonmechanical things, at least from the career standpoint. Your whole job is to pay the bills as they’re due,” Mazur said. “It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda. … You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.”
In the 2023 fiscal year, the payment systems processed nearly 1.3 billion payments, accounting for about $5.4 trillion, nearly 97 percent made electronically, according to the Treasury Department. Every payment was made on time.
Lebryk’s departure is expected to be a shock to Treasury personnel, among whom he enjoys a sterling reputation. The lifelong bureaucrat joined the department as an intern in 1989 and spent three decades at the agency under 11 different treasury secretaries, serving as acting director of the U.S. Mint and commissioner of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, among other roles.
In his email announcing his retirement, Lebryk praised the department’s staff. “Please know that your work makes a difference and is so very important to the country. It has been an honor to work alongside you," he wrote. “Our work may be unknown to most of the public, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exceptionally important.”
Michael Faulkender, whom Trump nominated as deputy U.S. treasury secretary in December, praised Lebryk’s work in 2023.
“I could not, to this day, tell you his politics,” Faulkender, who served as an assistant secretary at Treasury during Trump’s first term, told The Washington Post at the time. “He always seemed to be relaxed and under control.”
***********************
SHOCK NEWS: Elon Musk pulls dangerous move at Treasury Dept.
Brian Tyler Cohen
Feb 2, 2025 Democracy Watch with Marc Elias
Democracy Watch episode 251: Marc Elias discusses Elon Musk's dangerous moves at the Treasury Department.
Transcript
[Brian Tyler Cohen] This is democracy watch Mark we've got
some alarming news here the highest
ranking career official at Treasury and
the guy who was previously serving as
the acting treasury secretary is now out
after a clash with Elon Musk and his
allies because they wanted access to
sensitive payment systems that
distribute about $6 trillion in US
Government payments so this is basically
all of the money that flows out of our
government into the hands of the folks
where it gets distributed whether it's
different programs and whatnot first of
all can I have your reaction to what
looks on its face like pretty startling
news in that uh the guy who is managing
these systems is out and Doge and Elon
musk's um whole organization is now in
after trying to get access to the system
for a a long time now
[Marc Elias] I mean it's
shocking I mean I don't shock easily and
even I am shocked by this at a couple of
levels the first is you know this guy
who has now retired and resigned he was
the acting uh treasury secretary just a
few days ago I mean this is a guy who
knows how to make sure the treasury
Department runs and the treasury
Department is one of the most important
agencies and departments in in the world
it not only oversees the payment uh uh
process but it oversees literally you
know a lot of how the US economy winds
up working and so just the fact that a
guy with that much experience who's that
senior who has been around the treasury
Department all these years for him to
suddenly resign tells you something
really bad is happening number one but
number two you know there are only a
couple reasons why someone from Doge
would want access to the US payment uh
system um one is that they're trying to
cut off the flow of funds to certain
programs. Now that is important because
remember the Trump White House through
OMB and then through a tweet from the
press secretary has tried a series of
ways to suggest that Donald
Trump can control whether or not funds
are distributed or not distributed to
various Federal programs or
through grants or through loans and that
is a power explicitly reserved in the US
Constitution for congress. So having been
frustrated with their effort to block
this through OMB one wonders if they're
now trying to find another way to block it
through the actual mechanism of funds
moving out the door. Of course the only
other possibility is that why you would
want to control the payment process is
not to stop funds from going out but you
would want to direct where the funds go
out, right? And you know you can only
imagine what kind of trouble could be
done there.
[Brian Tyler Cohen] I want to dig into
that part a little bit of it because we
already know that the Trump
Administration is especially interested
in blocking payments to recipients
that they don't want to fund anymore.
They've already tried to to do it to
programs like Medicaid to Meals on
Wheels a lot of these programs that
the poor, who the Elon Musks of the world
and the Donald Trumps in the world don't
care about, rely on to survive.
But if you
have other recipients we'll
just say who might want
government want funds from the federal
government but the oversight all of the
controls are other Trump lackies then
then what bulwark is there to prevent
from abuse happening?
[Marc Elias] You know
we tend to focus on this as we should
about what does this mean for the poor,
what does this mean for people who need,
who who are the most needy. What does it
mean for the billionaires, right? And the
large multinational corporations that
have either bowed down or not bowed down,
right? What does it say if you are a
major defense contractor? What does it
say if you are a major contractor to the
federal government that provides, oh, I
don't know, say cloud Computing
Services right or space Services? What
does it mean that now the spigot for how
money can go out or how money
cannot go out is now under a control of
political actors rather than, you know,
people who are who are upholding their
oath of office or federal law? So that
is terrifying because that is
the stick portion of
the program, not just the carrot
portion of it. And then of course there
is just the possibility that
funds are just distributed
in ways that that defy common sense,
and that might benefit
Donald Trump's political
supporters. Will funds flow, for
example, to certain types of
cryptocurrency, certain meme coins for
example? I don't know if there's one you
could think of you know maybe what we
need is a Brian Tyler Cohen coin.
[Brian Tyler Cohen] Yeah,
that's next up
on my plate. I need a shitcoin
basically that. That's what I should be doing.
[Marc Elias] It seems to be very much
in fashion.
[Brian Tyler Cohen] I know. it is it's in it's in
Vogue I'll tell you what if all I have
to do is Pivot to the right and I can I
can start selling coins and and that
that's really all it takes at this point.
Marc, in terms of in terms of recourse
what is what is the bulwark if the
federal government if the Executive
Branch if the folks at the treasury
aren't willing to provide any adequate
or requisite oversight do we then look
to the courts like what happens when all
of the police basically become bought
and sold by the very people um who who
are who are content to abuse the system
and look we've spoken at length about
how Donald Trump is trying to root out
career civil servants from the
government he's trying to get them to
resign he's sending out these mass
emails, he's promising them buyouts which
may or may not happen I don't think
there's any Avenue for the government to
be able to pay 12 months in advance um
but but these are the folks who would
largely make up the population of
whistleblowers for example if there was
abuse these are folks who wouldn't be
willing to just allow a criminal
president and his criminal accomplices to
just run Roughshod over over these these
departments and so if those people are
gone then who becomes the
person responsible for oversight here?
[Marc Elias] Well, so, sadly, in our system of checks
and balances, the check on the
executive branch --
misusing appropriated funds -- is Congress,
because it's Congress that has the
greatest interest in seeing that their
Appropriations are followed. I mean, after
all, it is literally in the Constitution.
The House of Representatives has a
privileged place in the Constitution
about appropriated funds. And normally --
normally -- the Senate appropriators, the
house appropriators, on a bipartisan
basis, the one thing that they guard more
than anything else is their prerogative
to appropriate funds. And to ensure that
the funds that they appropriate are sent
out, and the funds that they don't
appropriate are not sent out. But I
got to tell you Brian, I mean, we're
not seeing any sign of life from the
republicans in Congress as a check.
[Brian Tyler Cohen] Yeah
I mean if if if the goal here is to hope
that Mike Johnson and the Marjorie Taylor
Greenes of the world are going to serve
as a bulwark to Trump's worst
excesses, I think we're in a
pretty Grim position moving forward.
At this point we would have to hope
that that um either there's going to be
some remaining officials who are willing
to speak out and not just completely
bend the knee to Donald Trump which you
know if if he gets his way those people
won't exist or that someone in Congress
is willing to actually speak out against
against the worst abuses by their own
party which again also doesn't seem
likely given them given the way the
incentive structure for the GOP today
right.
[Marc Elias] And so look the courts are an
ultimate backstop here because
ultimately people who don't get funds
that they're entitled to can sue the
federal government and then go to court
but but I want to be clear you know I
try to point out the places where I
think the courts can be really a
Frontline uh actor to Halt Donald
Trump's worst imp uh impulses and and I
think it's important that we recognize
when the courts do that and celebrate
them when they do that. This one's
trickier because the fact is you will
need a a recipient of federal funds who,
number one, is willing to blow the
whistle. So far we have not seen a lot of
courage from Corporate
America, or government contractors, or
from Republican state Governors. So sure,
you have the Democratic AGS, and the
Democratic Governors and
they can do this. But the second is the
courts are not meant to police the
day-to-day distribution of funds from
the federal government. The oversight
that is done by Congress, that's why we
talk about Congressional oversight of
the executive branch. And like I said,
usually, if there is is one aspect of the
federal government that is subject to
more rigorous day-to-day oversight, it is
the Appropriations process. And so this
is a terrifying development, because they
may have found, you know Trump may have
found the weak spot in the federal
government where Congress won't do
oversight, and the courts will, but where it
is very clunky and not efficient. And
then you are left, as you say, with the
career civil servants, and hoping that
they can stand up against the powerful
in the way in which the Legacy Media is
backing down, the way in which Corporate
America is backing down, the
billionaire oligarchs are backing down.
And I should add to that whistleblowers. Were do
whistleblowers go? Whistleblowers usually
either go to Congress or the
inspector Generals which have been fired. Or they go
to the media. And tell me
which, if you're a career civil
servant --
[Brian Tyler Cohen] You can't go
to the LA Times, you can't go to the
Washington Post.
[Marc Elias] Yeah like what are you
going to do?
[Brian Tyler Cohen] I think all of that
underscores the importance of of the
work that you're doing over at democracy
docket which is the news Outlet you
founded to focus on everything voting in
elections you guys have been uh
completely cleare eyed and focused on
Fearless journalism and holding the
powerful to account so for those who are
watching right now if you are not yet
signed up please do yourself a favor and
sign up you'll get good information and
you'll support folks who are actually
meeting this moment with the urgency
that it deserves so I'll put the link
right here on the screen and also in the
post description of this video I'm Brian
teller Cohen I'm Mark Elias this is
democracy watch
[Music]
********************
Elon Musk’s task force has gained access to sensitive Treasury payment systems, sources say
by Fatima Hussein
Associated Press
Politics Feb 2, 2025 12:07 PM EST
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/e ... ources-say
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Department of Government Efficiency, run by President Donald Trump’s billionaire adviser and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has gained access to sensitive Treasury data including Social Security and Medicare customer payment systems, according to two people familiar with the situation.
The move by DOGE, a Trump administration task force assigned to find ways to fire federal workers, cut programs and slash federal regulations, means it could have wide leeway to access important taxpayer data, among other things.
The New York Times first reported the news of the group’s access of the massive federal payment system. The two people who spoke to The Associated Press spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon, on Friday sent a letter to Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expressing concern that “officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs.”
“To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” Wyden said.
The news also comes after Treasury’s acting Deputy Secretary David Lebryk resigned from his position at Treasury after more than 30 years of service. The Washington Post on Friday reported that Lebryk resigned his position after Musk and his DOGE organization requested access to sensitive Treasury data.
“The Fiscal Service performs some of the most vital functions in government,” Lebryk said in a letter to Treasury employees sent out Friday. “Our work may be unknown to most of the public, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exceptionally important. I am grateful for having been able to work alongside some of the nation’s best and most talented operations staff.”
The letter did not mention a DOGE request to access Treasury payments.
Musk on Saturday responded to a post on his social media platform X about the departure of Lebryk: “The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups. They literally never denied a payment in their entire career. Not even once.”
He did not provide proof of this claim.
DOGE was originally headed by Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who jointly vowed to cut billions from the federal budget and usher in “mass headcount reductions across the federal bureaucracy.”
Ramaswamy has since left DOGE as he mulls a run for governor of Ohio.
by Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf and Jacqueline Alemany,
(c) 2025, The Washington Post
Fri, January 31, 2025 at 7:54 AM MST
https://www.yahoo.com/news/senior-u-off ... ccounter=1
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The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.
David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.
Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said -- requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration.
A spokeswoman for DOGE declined to comment. Lebryk could not be reached for comment late Thursday.
When Scott Bessent was confirmed as treasury secretary on Monday, Lebryk ceased to be the acting agency head.
Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate. (Musk was seen on Thursday visiting GSA, according to two other people familiar with his whereabouts, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters. That visit was first reported by the New York Times.) His Department of Government Efficiency, originally conceived as a nongovernmental panel, has since replaced the U.S. Digital Service.
The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all agencies to ensure it has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which would appear to include the Treasury payment systems.
It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts.
On Monday, the White House Office of Management and Budget ordered a freeze on all federal grant spending - an order it rescinded two days later amid intense political backlash and multiple lawsuits over the consequences of that decision.
Musk has characterized the rising national debt as an existential threat to the country and has proved willing to break norms in service of sweeping change.
Still, the possibility that government officials might try to use the federal payments system - which essentially functions as the nation’s “checking book” - to enact a political agenda is unprecedented, said Mark Mazur, who served in senior treasury roles during the Obama and Biden administrations.
“This is a mechanical job - they pay Social Security benefits, they pay vendors, whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for nonmechanical things, at least from the career standpoint. Your whole job is to pay the bills as they’re due,” Mazur said. “It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda. … You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.”
In the 2023 fiscal year, the payment systems processed nearly 1.3 billion payments, accounting for about $5.4 trillion, nearly 97 percent made electronically, according to the Treasury Department. Every payment was made on time.
Lebryk’s departure is expected to be a shock to Treasury personnel, among whom he enjoys a sterling reputation. The lifelong bureaucrat joined the department as an intern in 1989 and spent three decades at the agency under 11 different treasury secretaries, serving as acting director of the U.S. Mint and commissioner of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, among other roles.
In his email announcing his retirement, Lebryk praised the department’s staff. “Please know that your work makes a difference and is so very important to the country. It has been an honor to work alongside you," he wrote. “Our work may be unknown to most of the public, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exceptionally important.”
Michael Faulkender, whom Trump nominated as deputy U.S. treasury secretary in December, praised Lebryk’s work in 2023.
“I could not, to this day, tell you his politics,” Faulkender, who served as an assistant secretary at Treasury during Trump’s first term, told The Washington Post at the time. “He always seemed to be relaxed and under control.”
***********************
SHOCK NEWS: Elon Musk pulls dangerous move at Treasury Dept.
Brian Tyler Cohen
Feb 2, 2025 Democracy Watch with Marc Elias
Democracy Watch episode 251: Marc Elias discusses Elon Musk's dangerous moves at the Treasury Department.
Transcript
[Brian Tyler Cohen] This is democracy watch Mark we've got
some alarming news here the highest
ranking career official at Treasury and
the guy who was previously serving as
the acting treasury secretary is now out
after a clash with Elon Musk and his
allies because they wanted access to
sensitive payment systems that
distribute about $6 trillion in US
Government payments so this is basically
all of the money that flows out of our
government into the hands of the folks
where it gets distributed whether it's
different programs and whatnot first of
all can I have your reaction to what
looks on its face like pretty startling
news in that uh the guy who is managing
these systems is out and Doge and Elon
musk's um whole organization is now in
after trying to get access to the system
for a a long time now
[Marc Elias] I mean it's
shocking I mean I don't shock easily and
even I am shocked by this at a couple of
levels the first is you know this guy
who has now retired and resigned he was
the acting uh treasury secretary just a
few days ago I mean this is a guy who
knows how to make sure the treasury
Department runs and the treasury
Department is one of the most important
agencies and departments in in the world
it not only oversees the payment uh uh
process but it oversees literally you
know a lot of how the US economy winds
up working and so just the fact that a
guy with that much experience who's that
senior who has been around the treasury
Department all these years for him to
suddenly resign tells you something
really bad is happening number one but
number two you know there are only a
couple reasons why someone from Doge
would want access to the US payment uh
system um one is that they're trying to
cut off the flow of funds to certain
programs. Now that is important because
remember the Trump White House through
OMB and then through a tweet from the
press secretary has tried a series of
ways to suggest that Donald
Trump can control whether or not funds
are distributed or not distributed to
various Federal programs or
through grants or through loans and that
is a power explicitly reserved in the US
Constitution for congress. So having been
frustrated with their effort to block
this through OMB one wonders if they're
now trying to find another way to block it
through the actual mechanism of funds
moving out the door. Of course the only
other possibility is that why you would
want to control the payment process is
not to stop funds from going out but you
would want to direct where the funds go
out, right? And you know you can only
imagine what kind of trouble could be
done there.
[Brian Tyler Cohen] I want to dig into
that part a little bit of it because we
already know that the Trump
Administration is especially interested
in blocking payments to recipients
that they don't want to fund anymore.
They've already tried to to do it to
programs like Medicaid to Meals on
Wheels a lot of these programs that
the poor, who the Elon Musks of the world
and the Donald Trumps in the world don't
care about, rely on to survive.
But if you
have other recipients we'll
just say who might want
government want funds from the federal
government but the oversight all of the
controls are other Trump lackies then
then what bulwark is there to prevent
from abuse happening?
[Marc Elias] You know
we tend to focus on this as we should
about what does this mean for the poor,
what does this mean for people who need,
who who are the most needy. What does it
mean for the billionaires, right? And the
large multinational corporations that
have either bowed down or not bowed down,
right? What does it say if you are a
major defense contractor? What does it
say if you are a major contractor to the
federal government that provides, oh, I
don't know, say cloud Computing
Services right or space Services? What
does it mean that now the spigot for how
money can go out or how money
cannot go out is now under a control of
political actors rather than, you know,
people who are who are upholding their
oath of office or federal law? So that
is terrifying because that is
the stick portion of
the program, not just the carrot
portion of it. And then of course there
is just the possibility that
funds are just distributed
in ways that that defy common sense,
and that might benefit
Donald Trump's political
supporters. Will funds flow, for
example, to certain types of
cryptocurrency, certain meme coins for
example? I don't know if there's one you
could think of you know maybe what we
need is a Brian Tyler Cohen coin.
[Brian Tyler Cohen] Yeah,
that's next up
on my plate. I need a shitcoin
basically that. That's what I should be doing.
[Marc Elias] It seems to be very much
in fashion.
[Brian Tyler Cohen] I know. it is it's in it's in
Vogue I'll tell you what if all I have
to do is Pivot to the right and I can I
can start selling coins and and that
that's really all it takes at this point.
Marc, in terms of in terms of recourse
what is what is the bulwark if the
federal government if the Executive
Branch if the folks at the treasury
aren't willing to provide any adequate
or requisite oversight do we then look
to the courts like what happens when all
of the police basically become bought
and sold by the very people um who who
are who are content to abuse the system
and look we've spoken at length about
how Donald Trump is trying to root out
career civil servants from the
government he's trying to get them to
resign he's sending out these mass
emails, he's promising them buyouts which
may or may not happen I don't think
there's any Avenue for the government to
be able to pay 12 months in advance um
but but these are the folks who would
largely make up the population of
whistleblowers for example if there was
abuse these are folks who wouldn't be
willing to just allow a criminal
president and his criminal accomplices to
just run Roughshod over over these these
departments and so if those people are
gone then who becomes the
person responsible for oversight here?
[Marc Elias] Well, so, sadly, in our system of checks
and balances, the check on the
executive branch --
misusing appropriated funds -- is Congress,
because it's Congress that has the
greatest interest in seeing that their
Appropriations are followed. I mean, after
all, it is literally in the Constitution.
The House of Representatives has a
privileged place in the Constitution
about appropriated funds. And normally --
normally -- the Senate appropriators, the
house appropriators, on a bipartisan
basis, the one thing that they guard more
than anything else is their prerogative
to appropriate funds. And to ensure that
the funds that they appropriate are sent
out, and the funds that they don't
appropriate are not sent out. But I
got to tell you Brian, I mean, we're
not seeing any sign of life from the
republicans in Congress as a check.
[Brian Tyler Cohen] Yeah
I mean if if if the goal here is to hope
that Mike Johnson and the Marjorie Taylor
Greenes of the world are going to serve
as a bulwark to Trump's worst
excesses, I think we're in a
pretty Grim position moving forward.
At this point we would have to hope
that that um either there's going to be
some remaining officials who are willing
to speak out and not just completely
bend the knee to Donald Trump which you
know if if he gets his way those people
won't exist or that someone in Congress
is willing to actually speak out against
against the worst abuses by their own
party which again also doesn't seem
likely given them given the way the
incentive structure for the GOP today
right.
[Marc Elias] And so look the courts are an
ultimate backstop here because
ultimately people who don't get funds
that they're entitled to can sue the
federal government and then go to court
but but I want to be clear you know I
try to point out the places where I
think the courts can be really a
Frontline uh actor to Halt Donald
Trump's worst imp uh impulses and and I
think it's important that we recognize
when the courts do that and celebrate
them when they do that. This one's
trickier because the fact is you will
need a a recipient of federal funds who,
number one, is willing to blow the
whistle. So far we have not seen a lot of
courage from Corporate
America, or government contractors, or
from Republican state Governors. So sure,
you have the Democratic AGS, and the
Democratic Governors and
they can do this. But the second is the
courts are not meant to police the
day-to-day distribution of funds from
the federal government. The oversight
that is done by Congress, that's why we
talk about Congressional oversight of
the executive branch. And like I said,
usually, if there is is one aspect of the
federal government that is subject to
more rigorous day-to-day oversight, it is
the Appropriations process. And so this
is a terrifying development, because they
may have found, you know Trump may have
found the weak spot in the federal
government where Congress won't do
oversight, and the courts will, but where it
is very clunky and not efficient. And
then you are left, as you say, with the
career civil servants, and hoping that
they can stand up against the powerful
in the way in which the Legacy Media is
backing down, the way in which Corporate
America is backing down, the
billionaire oligarchs are backing down.
And I should add to that whistleblowers. Were do
whistleblowers go? Whistleblowers usually
either go to Congress or the
inspector Generals which have been fired. Or they go
to the media. And tell me
which, if you're a career civil
servant --
[Brian Tyler Cohen] You can't go
to the LA Times, you can't go to the
Washington Post.
[Marc Elias] Yeah like what are you
going to do?
[Brian Tyler Cohen] I think all of that
underscores the importance of of the
work that you're doing over at democracy
docket which is the news Outlet you
founded to focus on everything voting in
elections you guys have been uh
completely cleare eyed and focused on
Fearless journalism and holding the
powerful to account so for those who are
watching right now if you are not yet
signed up please do yourself a favor and
sign up you'll get good information and
you'll support folks who are actually
meeting this moment with the urgency
that it deserves so I'll put the link
right here on the screen and also in the
post description of this video I'm Brian
teller Cohen I'm Mark Elias this is
democracy watch
[Music]
********************
Elon Musk’s task force has gained access to sensitive Treasury payment systems, sources say
by Fatima Hussein
Associated Press
Politics Feb 2, 2025 12:07 PM EST
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/e ... ources-say
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Department of Government Efficiency, run by President Donald Trump’s billionaire adviser and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has gained access to sensitive Treasury data including Social Security and Medicare customer payment systems, according to two people familiar with the situation.
The move by DOGE, a Trump administration task force assigned to find ways to fire federal workers, cut programs and slash federal regulations, means it could have wide leeway to access important taxpayer data, among other things.
The New York Times first reported the news of the group’s access of the massive federal payment system. The two people who spoke to The Associated Press spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon, on Friday sent a letter to Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expressing concern that “officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs.”
“To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” Wyden said.
The news also comes after Treasury’s acting Deputy Secretary David Lebryk resigned from his position at Treasury after more than 30 years of service. The Washington Post on Friday reported that Lebryk resigned his position after Musk and his DOGE organization requested access to sensitive Treasury data.
“The Fiscal Service performs some of the most vital functions in government,” Lebryk said in a letter to Treasury employees sent out Friday. “Our work may be unknown to most of the public, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exceptionally important. I am grateful for having been able to work alongside some of the nation’s best and most talented operations staff.”
The letter did not mention a DOGE request to access Treasury payments.
Musk on Saturday responded to a post on his social media platform X about the departure of Lebryk: “The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups. They literally never denied a payment in their entire career. Not even once.”
He did not provide proof of this claim.
DOGE was originally headed by Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who jointly vowed to cut billions from the federal budget and usher in “mass headcount reductions across the federal bureaucracy.”
Ramaswamy has since left DOGE as he mulls a run for governor of Ohio.
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Re: Anti-Anti Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down the Ga
by admin » Sun Feb 02, 2025 10:56 pm
The Trump White House Wants A Court Challenge Over Frozen Funds: An internal OMB document shows that it is official administration policy to block funding to provoke a constitutional challenge.
by Paul Blumenthal
HuffPost
2/01/2025 09:20pm GMT
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ ... 7053bf8d23
The Trump administration’s federal government funding freeze instituted Monday and apparently rescinded Wednesday appears to be a part of the White House’s official policy to get courts to hand President Donald Trump the power to pick and choose which congressionally authorized funding he will spend, according to a confidential document obtained by HuffPost.
The confidential Office of Management and Budget document outlining “regulatory misalignment” calls on Trump to issue executive orders blocking the release of appropriated funds in order to provoke a court challenge over the president’s power to impound such funds.
“Use executive orders to impound funds exceeding legislative intent or conflicting with constitutional duties, citing national security, fiscal waste, or statutory ambiguities,” the document states. “Seek legal precedent to affirm the President’s Article II powers under the Take Care Clause and Executive Vesting Clause.”
A confidential Office of Management and Budget document on "regulatory misalignment" outlines administration plans to provoke a court challenge over funding freezes. Office of Management and Budget "regulatory misalignment" document
That is what is playing out with the now-rescinded OMB memo freezing federal grants, loans and financial assistance across the federal government.
Less than 12 hours after the OMB memo’s release, it was challenged in court by Democratic state attorneys general and a coalition of nonprofit groups. The challenge brought by the nonprofit groups resulted in a judge issuing a temporary restraining order blocking the freeze from going into effect Tuesday evening. On Wednesday, the administration rescinded the memo but then claimed that the policy was still in effect and officials only rescinded the memo to get courts to drop the restraining order. A second judge issued another temporary restraining order on Wednesday after the administration rescinded the original memo.
This confusing series of events and conflicting statements and actions may be a fiasco, but the confidential OMB document makes clear that the administration intends on fomenting this very court challenge over the president’s power to not spend congressionally authorized funds.
Trump is targeting the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, a law that greatly restricts the ability of the president to defer or deny spending funds authorized by Congress. The law was passed after President Richard Nixon refused to spend funds appropriated for pollution cleanup and mental health centers, among other things. The Government Accountability Office determined that Trump violated it in 2019 when he withheld funds from Ukraine as part of a blackmail scheme targeting his 2020 election opponent Joe Biden.
Russell Vought, Trump’s OMB director in his first term and current nominee to run it again, has been vocal about his belief the law is unconstitutional and that the president has inherent constitutional authority to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress as he desires. The Senate has not yet confirmed Vought to the position.
President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget director nominee Russell Vought want courts to rule that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional. Evan Vucci via Associated Press
Similarly, billionaire Elon Musk, who leads the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, has also pushed for challenging the Impoundment Control Act and stated in an op-ed written with his former DOGE co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy that “we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.”
In response to a question about the confidential document, OMB provided a statement from press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“In light of the injunction, OMB has rescinded the memo to end any confusion on federal policy created by the court ruling and the dishonest media coverage,” Leavitt said in the statement. “The Executive Orders issued by the President on funding reviews remain in full force and effect and will be rigorously implemented by all agencies and departments. This action should effectively end the court case and allow the government to focus on enforcing the President’s orders on controlling federal spending. In the coming weeks and months, more executive action will continue to end the egregious waste of federal funding.”
Whether or not the current OMB funding freeze remains in effect, the OMB document and Leavitt’s statement make clear that the Trump administration wants this fight and it will happen — if not now, then later.
by Paul Blumenthal
HuffPost
2/01/2025 09:20pm GMT
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ ... 7053bf8d23
The Trump administration’s federal government funding freeze instituted Monday and apparently rescinded Wednesday appears to be a part of the White House’s official policy to get courts to hand President Donald Trump the power to pick and choose which congressionally authorized funding he will spend, according to a confidential document obtained by HuffPost.
The confidential Office of Management and Budget document outlining “regulatory misalignment” calls on Trump to issue executive orders blocking the release of appropriated funds in order to provoke a court challenge over the president’s power to impound such funds.
“Use executive orders to impound funds exceeding legislative intent or conflicting with constitutional duties, citing national security, fiscal waste, or statutory ambiguities,” the document states. “Seek legal precedent to affirm the President’s Article II powers under the Take Care Clause and Executive Vesting Clause.”
A confidential Office of Management and Budget document on "regulatory misalignment" outlines administration plans to provoke a court challenge over funding freezes. Office of Management and Budget "regulatory misalignment" document
That is what is playing out with the now-rescinded OMB memo freezing federal grants, loans and financial assistance across the federal government.
Less than 12 hours after the OMB memo’s release, it was challenged in court by Democratic state attorneys general and a coalition of nonprofit groups. The challenge brought by the nonprofit groups resulted in a judge issuing a temporary restraining order blocking the freeze from going into effect Tuesday evening. On Wednesday, the administration rescinded the memo but then claimed that the policy was still in effect and officials only rescinded the memo to get courts to drop the restraining order. A second judge issued another temporary restraining order on Wednesday after the administration rescinded the original memo.
This confusing series of events and conflicting statements and actions may be a fiasco, but the confidential OMB document makes clear that the administration intends on fomenting this very court challenge over the president’s power to not spend congressionally authorized funds.
Trump is targeting the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, a law that greatly restricts the ability of the president to defer or deny spending funds authorized by Congress. The law was passed after President Richard Nixon refused to spend funds appropriated for pollution cleanup and mental health centers, among other things. The Government Accountability Office determined that Trump violated it in 2019 when he withheld funds from Ukraine as part of a blackmail scheme targeting his 2020 election opponent Joe Biden.
Russell Vought, Trump’s OMB director in his first term and current nominee to run it again, has been vocal about his belief the law is unconstitutional and that the president has inherent constitutional authority to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress as he desires. The Senate has not yet confirmed Vought to the position.
President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget director nominee Russell Vought want courts to rule that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional. Evan Vucci via Associated Press
Similarly, billionaire Elon Musk, who leads the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, has also pushed for challenging the Impoundment Control Act and stated in an op-ed written with his former DOGE co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy that “we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.”
In response to a question about the confidential document, OMB provided a statement from press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“In light of the injunction, OMB has rescinded the memo to end any confusion on federal policy created by the court ruling and the dishonest media coverage,” Leavitt said in the statement. “The Executive Orders issued by the President on funding reviews remain in full force and effect and will be rigorously implemented by all agencies and departments. This action should effectively end the court case and allow the government to focus on enforcing the President’s orders on controlling federal spending. In the coming weeks and months, more executive action will continue to end the egregious waste of federal funding.”
Whether or not the current OMB funding freeze remains in effect, the OMB document and Leavitt’s statement make clear that the Trump administration wants this fight and it will happen — if not now, then later.
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Re: Anti-Anti Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down the Ga
by admin » Mon Feb 03, 2025 2:37 am
Politics Chat: "We‘re in the middle of a constitutional crisis,”
by Heather Cox Richardson
Feb 1, 2025
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Transcript
Minneapolis. Grand Rapids, dance. Rapids. Danny, how are you?
Seeing what else is going on here. I just got over here.
Quite a day, Quite a couple of days. Quite a couple of weeks, actually. Thank you for being here.
We got Virginia and Minnesota against Sweden. Central Valley and California.
Metro. Atlanta. Portland, Oregon. It's really cold here, by the way. Hingham, mass. With the beautiful church.
Columbus, Ohio I love Columbus. Monterey Bay. Here we go. Wisconsin. Maui.
Oh, man. Me and. All right. So I am here, obviously on Facebook today.
I'm working on the YouTube thing. I just will confess to you, I really care about content.
I'm less good with, technology, so I'm not moving as fast on that front as I could be, but, But I will work on that.
Okay, so let me get right into things, with where we are on this moment,
January 28th, 2025, we are in the middle of a constitutional crisis.
And it's not an immediate as in, you got to do something right this very moment, but it's very, very serious.
And let me let me start by stepping back and explaining, once again, the three branches of government that are established in the Constitution,
that is the underpinning for all the laws in the United States. That is, there are three branches of government.
And the first among equals, if you will, is the Congress.
And the Congress is made up of two different chambers, two different branches, the House of Representatives and the Senate.
And those two branches together are supposed to write our laws. So the House of Representatives turns over completely every two years,
with the hope that it would be very responsive to the American people. And the Senate turns over, every two years.
Only a third of it does. The complete revolution of the Senate is every six years. Although always it has had people stay there forever.
I think I said to you once that until at least recently, I haven't checked the numbers. Recently, the only legislative body that turned over,
more, more slowly than the US Senate was the House of Lords in the UK. So you have those two branches and they are supposed to,
to be the lawmaking body of the United States so they can initiate laws.
But each house has to approve of the laws. And there's one exception to the fact that people can initiate laws,
and that's that the House of Representatives is the only place where revenue bills can start. And you can imagine the framers of the Constitution being concerned
about taxes and the things that they had come out against with, the king. So they made sure that the people would be the ones who were,
the people's representatives would be the ones who would start revenue bills. So the House and the Senate make the laws, and then it doesn't become a law.
Just if the House and Senate says they want a law, it has to go to the president, which is the head of the executive branch,
which is the second of the branches of government. If you look at the way the Constitution was written and in article two,
the framers set out the the duties and the rights of the president, and the president can,
sign the bill into law, in which case it becomes a law or can veto it, can say, no, I don't like this.
At that point, the president almost always just one exception, but has to send it back to the Congress and say, here's why I don't like this law,
which is actually really interesting for people like me. And the the Congress can either go, oh, yeah, oopsie poopsie.
We don't. We made a mistake, which they almost never do, by the way. Or they can say, okay, we can overcome your objections and repass the law
in such a way that she'll sign it. Or they can say, take a hike. We like this law the way it was, and they can pass it over
the president's veto, but that takes a supermajority to do that. Those are the two branches of government that make laws.
And then, as I always joke, there's this third branch of government and that's the judiciary. And by the time the framers
got around to forming the judiciary, I always tease my students and say, well, you know, by then, after they'd given all of these things
that the house is supposed to do and all these things that the Senate is supposed to do as a legislative branch, and then all the things that the executive was supposed to do,
they're like really bored and they're like, we got to go home, we're tired, we're hungry. Let's have a judiciary. And they walk away.
Because in the Constitution, the judiciary is only given the power to adjudicate things between states and between the federal government,
the United States of America and other countries. But what happens is in 1803, with the case of Marbury versus Madison,
the Supreme Court under Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, who was one of our great chief justices,
took upon itself the right of what's called judicial review. And that is they took upon themselves the right to say
whether or not a law was constitutional. They were the ones who got to decide that. And that's, you know, at first the people didn't pay much attention to that.
And sometimes it's been challenged. But really, since 1803, the Supreme Court
has been able to decide whether or not a law is unconstitutional. And if the Supreme Court says now, really not, then they can declared
unconstitutional and the, the, the Congress can get back to work and write a law that is constitutional according to that Supreme Court.
Now, those are the three branches of government as they have been set out in the Constitution of the United States,
and as we have lived with them since that Constitution was signed. So what is going on right now?
Beginning on last Friday, is that the Trump administration is denying that order.
They are, are working with a different concept of the executive branch that began to be developed under the Reagan administration.
And one of the people who really pushed this was Samuel Alito, who at the time was in the Justice Department.
And now, of course, is on the Supreme Court. And what they argue is this they argue
that because the president is the head of the executive branch, that the president in that in that column cannot be checked.
The president is all powerful. And so you can't the other branches of government can't say, well, you can't do that.
And the president can decide for himself whether or not laws are constitutional and whether or
not the things that the Congress does, whether or not he's going to fulfill them. Now, this is deeply problematic, not least because the president takes an oath to,
to, to, make the laws happen.
I can't believe I can't think of the wording right now to defend the laws of the United States and to make sure they're
put into into effect. But it's also a problem because, in fact, the way the Constitution is written,
the Congress has a check on the president, and that's the place you start to see the rise of this concept of what's called the unitary executive
is in the 1980s, when it's very clear that dismantling the federal government as the Reagan Revolution people want it to do, is really unpopular.
So they start to try and find ways that they can do what they want, even if the American people don't like it.
So they begin to stack the judiciary with, with it, ideological,
right wingers, they begin to, to, suppress the vote and they begin to make this argument for the unitary executive.,
Okay. You with me so far? I hope. Nobody is answering, so maybe I hope you're with me.
All right, so what happened on last week on Friday? First of all, was that in mind?
You, it's really interesting to me how vague a lot of what's going on is.
And believe me, I would know because after doing the Trump administration and the Biden administration
and the Trump now the new Trump administration, if you want to know what the Biden administration was doing, there was always a document or statement somewhere so that things were very clear.
It's the Trump administration is not operating the same way. There are things that are just fuzzy and you can't find anybody to clarify them.
So what they did on Friday was they halted funding for foreign aid
and a broad range of foreign aid, and that was really, really astonishing.
First of all, because foreign aid is appropriated by Congress, Congress
writes the laws that appropriate money, that's one of their jobs to do that.
And the the Trump administration said they were pausing aid until they could make sure that all the aid that was distributed
was done in according to what Trump cared about, which is, you know, you want all this, you know, no data and all the stuff he wants.
So this was like a bombshell, because if you know anything about our foreign affairs, you know that since World War II,
beginning under Eisenhower, there was a real concerted effort to focus on diplomacy.
And Eisenhower recognized Eisenhower was a Republican, by the way, is like elected in 1952.
Eisenhower recognized that if you did not make it possible for people
around the world to have a rising standard of living, they would be easy prey for religious extremists or political extremists
like Hitler to come in and turn them into a cult, essentially. And in an era in which there were nuclear weapons,
this would mean the end of the world. So he began really to focus on funding,
countries who were experiencing starvation or who needed some help with their legal systems and so on.
And he won in 1952, the primary in the Republican primary against Senator
Robert Taft of Ohio, who insisted on isolationism and said, I let him let them deal with it themselves,
which to Eisenhower was going to mean that we were going to have extremes in politics.
And everybody focuses on Eisenhower's anti-communism, which is true. And by the way, he made some mistakes.
Everybody does. But he was also the world's first anti-fascist, right. That's what he had fought against in in Europe and that's
what really made him a convert to this idea, was seeing the prison camps. And, you know, from the Holocaust and saying, we have to find a way
to make sure this doesn't happen again. So since 1952 and before that, by the way,
the Democrats had the Marshall Plan, for example. But there has been this idea that the United States would work to
stabilize countries around the world, not because we're touchy feely,
although it does feel good to make sure babies don't starve, but also so that those countries would remain stable
and be good trading partners for the United States. And that's just been what we do.
So when Trump on Friday, he didn't pause that funding, he stopped it.
What that meant was that the places, for example, where George H. Over George W Bush started what's known as pep for the attempt
to stop the spread of Aids in Africa or right now. I don't know if you're following the situation in Sudan.
It is simply heartbreaking. The funding for, for feeding the starving,
Sudanese or, places where they were clearing landmines or, places where they were supporting
food delivery or, places where they were training people to stand against ISIS or,
you know, all the sorts of things that we do that we don't. The people like you and me don't pay a lot of attention to,
just stopped. So all those places are suddenly standing there going, we don't know what we're going to do.
Because, for example, what do you do with the ISIS, the, the, the ISIS prisons, which we're funding to keep the ISIS people in prison?
They're going to let go, get them, let go. And what about the people who are now
had hired people to find landmines, who now can't? And most dramatically, of course, the funding
that we have put into development projects in developing countries as a hedge against, well, first of all, with luck, in a way
that will help those developing countries, especially across the middle of Africa. But by pulling that, what we are doing is saying to up to other countries,
you can't trust us and be, you know, if China wants to do this, why don't you go play with China, which is,
a really dramatic abdication of the role that the United States has played in the world since World War two.
And, of course, the complete dismissal of everything that Biden and Blinken tried to do to create a better global structure that supported,
the needs of everybody in the country, in the world, but also that really made sure the United States had a seat at the table.
We've just walked away from every single table, with the exception of the fact that, the Trump administration
continued to fund munitions for Israel and for Egypt. All right.
So that was Friday. And then, then yesterday,
last night, last night, really late. I'm sorry. You know me, I've lost track of time already
because I'm writing in, in different areas here. Trump did something else but that built on that.
So if you remember on Friday, I think it was on Friday, he fired inspectors, the inspectors general from 17,
different departments, major departments in the, in the, in the country. I wrote about that. It's actually quite interesting how we got inspectors general.
But the reason that that's really important is because he tried that in his first administration. He fired, I think it was five
major inspectors general whom he thought were disloyal to him after his first acquittal from his first impeachment.
And when that happened in 2022, Congress wrote a law aimed at making sure he couldn't do it again.
And they said, if you want to fire an inspector general, which, you know, Obama did it to,
the inspector general that he fired was really erratic and that, you know, but he did do it. And you don't want to fire inspectors general if you can possibly avoid it
because they're from outside and they're basically watchdogs for the departments. But but Congress in 2022 wrote a law that said,
if you want to fire inspectors general, you have to give Congress 30 days notice and you have to explain why you're firing them.
Trump didn't do that. He just blew that off. And some of the Republicans
who voted for that bill said they didn't care, including Tom Cotton of Arkansas, by the way, a senator from Arkansas.
So what Trump apparently heard was go ahead and break the law.
So what we saw Monday, I'm sorry, today's Tuesday. So what we saw Monday was that Trump stopped the funding for everything.
Every federal grant and loan in the United States of America. So think of anything the federal government does with with,
as I say, some exceptions. He says this does not include social Security and Medicare, which makes sense
because he promised up and down he wouldn't do that. And that's much of his base.
But think of everything else. This is this is, federal grants to local law enforcement.
This is, grants to states. This is education. This is Medicaid.
This is supplemental nutrition programs, including women, infants and children: WIC. If you know WIC, it's a great program. This is Head Start. This is, I mean, I could just keep on going.
And here's the kicker. How can you do that? I mean, I can't tell you. Many people have come up to me today and said he can't do that.
It's against the law. Well, it is against the law because this is what's called impoundment.
And impoundment was an attempt under Richard Nixon
in the early 1970s to stop Congress from doing things he didn't like by saying,
I don't care that you appropriated money to create this agency. I'm just not going to disperse that money so you can create whatever you want.
But I'm not going to put up any money to fund that. And you need to remember what I'm telling you this,
that funding is your money. It is your money. It is my money.
This is money that you pay into the federal government. So often we talk about, you know,
federal funding and we don't seem to talk about taxes at the same time. And, you know, taxes are really my thing.
You know, I love the study of taxes because I know and and it makes me sound like the most boring person in the world, which might be true,
but when you talk about taxes, you were talking about what a society thinks is important enough to put money into.
So when Nixon said, I'm not going to fund these things, he was saying, listen, I don't care what Congress said it wants to spend your tax dollars on.
I, Richard Nixon, don't think that's a good way to do it. And Congress said, oh boy, is this not going to fly.
So in 1974, they passed something called the Impoundment Control Act that said, and I paraphrase, screw you, you're not doing that.
That's a paraphrase. What they said was a president may not impound
moneys that the Congress has appropriated for whatever purpose. You just got to do it.
You have to make sure the laws are are carried out. That's what the president agrees to do.
So the right wing movement in the United States of America, led in this moment by
the Heritage Foundation, which has very close ties to Viktor Orban in Hungary, says they consider that law unconstitutional.
They consider that law unconstitutional. I bet you have some favorite laws you consider unconstitutional, too, right?
My point being that Trump has just signed on to the idea that is laid out in project 2025,
that the impoundment Act is unconstitutional. It's a law, and courts have upheld this law repeatedly
since 1974, saying Congress is the lawmaking body. If it says we're going to put $100,000 toward
developing a new kind of Brussels sprout, which I'm making up -- they may or may not have done that -- that's what the people's representatives decided to do. Trump is saying, no,
I don't care that Congress thinks we should fund cancer research.
I don't care that Congress thinks we should fund supplemental nutrition
programs. I don't care that Congress thinks we should fund law enforcement. I don't care that Congress thinks we should fund education. He is saying the person who gets to decide
what we do is him. I want to make sure that sinks in deeply enough.
He is saying that the person who gets to decide what this government is going to fund
is him.
So, let me now step back from that a little bit and give you a, not not necessarily a bigger picture, because that's a really big picture,
but a picture of where we are in this two week period. Because I think what we have seen
is somebody is asking what's going to happen, and what do we do next? I'm going to come to that, I promise. But I do think
the set-up here is important. Because this is a constitutional crisis and it looks very much like an earlier period in our history,
before we had a Constitution, that I'll talk about. But this other piece that I want to tell you about matters too,
and that said, if you remember when he was running for office, and you must keep in mind that this president is mentally
slipping badly, that really matters. He is not playing with a full deck.
You know, I can't think of any other way to put it. You have to understand that he is not the evil genius here.
He's a man who loves money, appears to like to have women around him, and who wants to stay out of jail,
and wants to be loved, which you know, he likes adulation. I don't think he knows what love is. That was an editorial I shouldn't have given you. He wants adulation, but he doesn't have the capacity to put these pieces together.
He really doesn't. Which does raise the question of who is putting them together. But if you think about project 2025, which we talked about a lot last summer
before the election, and Trump and his people distanced themselves from, they said, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We got nothing to do with project 2025. Well, of course they did. And now two thirds of the executive orders and the things he's done, that
he's put in place, are straight from project 2025, including his office, are the person he wants to install
at the head of Office of Management and Budget. Russ Vought, who was instrumental in writing
in the Heritage Foundation and Instrumental in writing Project 2025. And what project 2025 called for, was for the President
to get rid of the nonpartisan civil service, which we've had since 1883, and make it loyal to him.
He's called for getting rid of the independence of the Department of Justice and making it loyal to the President, and he called for getting rid
of the independence of the military and making it loyal to the President. And once you had that in place, you wanted a very strong executive
who would impose Christian nationalism on the United States of America.
In the last less than eight days, what we've seen is exactly that.
We have seen the purging of the nonpartisan civil service to make it loyal to Trump.
We have seen the purging of the Department of Justice to make it loyal to Trump. There was a big purge of people yesterday.
Joyce White Vance wrote about it last night. And we've seen the attempt to put,
to have control of the military by putting over it Pete Hegseth, who is a radical, right wing Christian extremist,
who studied at Princeton under Patrick Deneen, who is one of the right wing extremist Catholics like JD Vance and like Peter Teal,
who want to destroy the federal government in order to put in place, right? Right wing Christian nationalism.
So we've got those three things in place. And now we have the attempt to destroy the secular government that we have had in place,
that we have built, that you and I have built by electing our representatives, and to destroy it.
We don't know what they plan to put in place, but this is destruction
of our constitutional system. And a number of Republicans are vocally going along with it saying, that, you know, they think private philanthropy, for example,
is a better way to fund cancer which is just crap. I mean, I could start citing studies, but it just doesn't work.
The reason we built the government that we did is because this is
how you deliver to the American people who have joined together. We the people have joined together to form a union, to create a government
that does the best it can for the most of us. That's what the United States government is.
And what they are coming in is saying, no, no, no, no, no, we're going to get rid of that because our guy Donald Trump,
although, as I say, I don't think he is the one pulling the strings here, he's the one who should make
the final decisions. So right there,
we have ourselves a constitutional crisis.
And and let me walk a little bit further.
And now I'm, I'm telling you not what has happened, but what
certainly seems like it's going to happen, because they have said it's going to happen. So what is he doing?
And I think there are a number of things he's doing. I think one is they are provoking a Constitutional crisis.
And I will tell you more about that in a second. I think they are also, I think somewhere they have figured that
if they stop all this funding, that that will put enough money back in the Treasury,
that they can have their tax cuts for the very wealthy and corporations, which Trump's new Treasury secretary, Scott
Bezzant, has agreed is a top priority for the Trump administration. But it's been a big problem for the radical right wing extremists
because they're like, we don't like how much spending is going on here. Well, they're the same ones who want to get rid of the secular government.
So if you get rid of the secular government and you say, we're clawing back all that money, we're going to throw it in the Treasury, now we can give all the money to the rich people and corporations.
It kind of is an equation that cancels a lot of stuff out.
Is that how you want your tax dollars to be spent? To have it go into the pockets of the very wealthy and corporations? Remember, from 1981 to 2021, about $50
trillion went from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. So I think they are partly doing that as well.
Now, what they're going to fill those holes with is anybody's guess. So that's what they are doing so far.
Now let me go back to and like I say, I keep talking about power sloshing around in Washington. Trump is already talking about a third term.
You know, that's like me -- I suppose he could live forever but come on, he's 78 years old.
He's a wreck now. I'm not expecting that's going to happen. I think what they're doing more clearly is putting all this in place
for somebody else to take over and then say, hey, we didn't do this. This is all Trump's fault, and throw the bag on him.
So when you think about power sloshing around, who is that? Who are the people calling the shots?
I don't know. I've been thinking about this all day. And I think you can see certain fingerprints, but others are not as clear. Whom does it benefit to destroy America's standing around the globe?
There's a lot of people that benefit. But there's a lot of people who are benefiting from cutting the government
domestically that are hurt by that. So I don't know the answer to that, and I urge you to think about it.
But now I want to go back to what we do,
because I told you, this looks like something else to me.
And you know what it looks like to me? It looks like the attempt of the monarch,
George the Third, who, by the way, was also mentally incapacitated,
on occasion, to force the colonial English settlers
to pay taxes without having a say in their government. And if you remember that, and I'll write about that this week,
because I think it's important. If you remember, the British Crown has to pay for all
the wars that have taken place both in Europe and in the colonies.
And Americans have not been heavily taxed at all. So after 1763, they chunk a whole bunch of taxes
on Americans, in a number of different places. One of the places you can see it,
there's a couple of rafts of them, but one of the places you can see it is in Pride and Prejudice, you know, the novel by Jane Austen, when Mr. Collins is pointing out how many windows
the Lady Catherine de Berg's mansion has. And a modern American reader is like, who cares how many windows?
That's because one of the things that was taxed was glass. So by saying, look at all these windows, and counting
the windows, he's saying, look, she's so rich, she can pay all those taxes. There you go. That's your literary moment of the day.
But they chunk on a whole bunch of taxes. And the Americans are like, especially the American merchants are like, what's going on here?
Like, we're not paying this crap, you know. We're not represented, and we're not going to do this. But most Americans are, you know, they get rid of most taxes
gradually because it's not worth it. It's costing more money to collect the taxes than they're making. So they get rid of most of the taxes, but they keep the tax on tea for the East India Company. And the East India Company has a subsidy.
So they're going to be able to sell tea more cheaply to the colonies. And if they
flood the colonies with this cheap tea, and the colonists are willing to buy it, the Crown
and the Parliament will have established the principle of being able to tax the people without representation.
So what do the people who recognize the issues here do?
They write and say, stop it. It's one thing to do. But they also talk about it everywhere.
They have fliers about it. They literally paint tea pots that talk about it.
They urge people to move away from tea, and they explain what's going on. And the reason that I'm thinking about that today is
because this is bad. And I mean, this is bad in a Constitutional sense.
It's of course, also bad for anybody who depends in any way on federal money.
And and I say that as somebody who does not. I am one of the extraordinarily few
lucky people in the country right now who doesn't yet need Medicare or Medicaid,
and who doesn't need grants or all those things. But I'm rare in that, and it will not last forever.
So I'm not like, oh, they took my benefits. I'm telling you that as somebody who cares about the functioning of society,
we all care about this. And people need to understand what exactly this means.
This means a lot of people are scared right now because they do not know where their paycheck is going to come from.
It means people are scared because they do not know how they're going to maintain their elderly relatives in a nursing home, which is usually paid for by Medicaid.
There's there's a lot of damage and a lot of places people are going to be hurt here. They need to understand what the Constitutional problem is here.
And the fact that Trump is trying, and his people are trying to set him up to become a dictator.
So when you think about what we are going to do next in this,
the obvious thing to do is to complain to Congress because they're the ones who are giving up their power.
And I'm not going to say not to do that. You should be doing that every second. And I would urge you to
certainly cheer on the Democrats. The Democrats are not the problem here. Everybody complains to the Democrats.
I've said this to you before. When you get really upset, people complain to me, "I can't do anything. I'm already on your side.
Complain to the Republicans." Make their lives swamped with constituents and people saying you took a specifics.
You took away Medicaid, you took away WIC, you took away funding for Sudan, you took away all these things.
And we are not going to support you going forward. And that needs to be not just people who voted for Kamala Harris.
That needs to be everybody.
I can think of two people right now who voted for Trump. And when I said their Medicaid was at risk
based on project 2025, they said he will never touch Medicaid. If you don't think I'm going to be telling them that Medicaid has now been frozen,
you're dead wrong. They need to know what is happening, because we need to make this
a moment where we defend the US Constitution. Do it by pressuring your Congress people,
of course, but also do it by doing the same thing that the Colonials did.
Make sure you cannot not know this is happening. The people must know that this is happening.
Because it is. Somebody just said, we need to stop this madness. It is madness. And when you write to Congress, when you write to the Republican senators,
remember, I keep saying this, only about 14 of the Republican senators are MAGA. The other 40 or so are not. They're scared, and they need constantly to hear that they are destroying their power.
They are destroying the power of the Senate and they are destroying America, the American constitutional government.
And they must hear it in a huge way starting now, or it will be too late.
They are out there very much testing the waters to see if they can get away with this. As I say, power is sloshing and now is the time
for Americans to say, these are my tax dollars. I mean, you can disagree. You can say, I don't care.
I'd just as soon let Donald Trump decide these things. I think the vast majority of us like the idea
of having a Congress, a government, having the Constitution,
rather than having a dictator decide what's going to happen.
I will point out, of course, that,
we are less than two years away from 1776, which I think is really interesting.
I think it's time for us to challenge what it means to be part of the United States government, and what it means to be part of this country,
and what it means for the people to have a say in their government.
And as you know, the right wing flooded the media.
And today, CNN's Jim Acosta left. He said he needs to stand against dictatorship.
He needs to stand against a tyrant. And now is the time we're going to have to be doing that. \
So, what else did I say I was going to tell you today? That was pretty much it.
I would urge you, in this to take care of people who are frightened right now.
But don't let up. I mean, one of the things you simply cannot do is say, I can't deal with this.
I can't look at this because, again, the number of people who want this country
to become a Christian dictatorship, it's about 6% of a country of 332 people, 332 million people.
Even if it were 332, it would be okay. 332 million people,
if we speak up, they cannot do it. And I think that this is what they're trying to
do is hit so quickly that we don't see what's going on. And I would urge you really to focus at the state level everywhere for sure.
But call on your representatives, call on your Congress people, call on your state people and say, are you really okay with this?
Because this is not the American democracy that I know. We cannot be silent.
In the midst of this, call it out.
Somebody just said one of their congresspeople said that it was a waste to put money
into prosthetics for old people because it was a waste of money. Do you believe that? I don't believe that.
Speak up for the things that you care about and that you believe in and and call this one out.
Now, I'm I'm sitting here, we have a lot of trolls here. Don't argue with the trolls. Shut them down.
Block them. We're not going to have this conversation with them. They are wasting our time. And, I'm trying to shop at the stores that are supporting American democracy.
Support the people who are supporting American democracy. It does not have to be Partisan at this point.
It's absolutely not Partisan. Are you with a dictator who is trying to destroy our Constitution,
or are you with the American Constitution and our democracy? We can sort the rest out later.
I'm seeing if there's anything else. I know people keep saying,
they're frightened and they feel alone. You're not alone. There's 17,000 people here on this call right now.
Find your people. You can find your people. I always send people to red wine and blue. But you can go to any other organization, or you can just start some of your own.
You must not be alone in this. But again, you must speak up. And again, they want you to be frightened.
They want you to be so scared you won't speak up. And once they get you to that place, then nobody will dare to speak up.
But we are not there yet. I talked about this before the other night. Power is sloshing around. In a dictatorship like North Korea power is not sloshing around. You know exactly who holds that power right now.
You can still speak up. You can still support independent media. Absolutely. You know, if you have the money to support independent people, don't give it to me.
Give it to somebody else who can get out there and and keep holding truth to power.
You can support the people who speak up, and you can come down on the media that doesn't speak up. I mean, at this point, who do we have left but ourselves? And you know what? When the American people have had to do this in the past, every freaking time they have stepped up,
and they have recreated the idea of American democracy. They did it in the 1850s.
They did it in the 1890s. They did it in the 1930s. They did it in World War II.
They began to do it in the 1960s. We can do it again today, because at the end of the day,
all democracy is, is it's the idea that people have a right to work
hard and create their own destiny, their own end. And what we are seeing here in this moment
is MAGA Republicans saying, no, no, we don't actually think that you have the right
to have a say in your government, or to be treated equally before the law. We believe that we, a few dictators and one dictator over
all, get to determine your future. That has never flown in in society.
It's certainly never flown in American society. And this is our moment to say,
it's not going to fly now, or at least to go down fighting. And I don't believe it's going to come to that.
I really think that this is in our DNA and that we can do it. We just have to make sure that people understand the stakes.
Look around you. How many of even the MAGA voters around you would say, hey, I'd rather have a dictator?
They didn't think that. They wanted to make sure that people like them
had a shot at a future, and at least the ones who weren't openly Proud Boys and so on.
But given the choice between a dictatorship
and a democracy, I think most of them would choose a democracy. You saw it during the Civil War as well, when people who were virulently racist, anti-black
racist, came on board to defend democracy. We've done it in the past, we can do it again.
I'm trying to look here. Somebody just said my next book maybe should look at the times that the American public has done this.
In my last book, the whole third section of Democracy Awakening was the different ways in which people had managed to expand
democracy, even in really bad times. So I'm actually working on a new book that's going to be fun, actually. People are asking if you live in a blue state, what can you do?
Contact any of the organizations that are working to defend rights, including, as I say, red, white and blue, because you can get involved
across the states in different races. You can put pressure on in different ways.
If you're in North Carolina, get involved this minute trying to defend the election of Allison Riggs to the state Supreme Court.
She won. The Republican is trying to throw her out by throwing out at least 4000 votes, or as many as 60,000 legally cast votes.
Get involved there. Get involved in Wisconsin. Wisconsin has an election on April 1st for a state
Supreme Court seat that needs to be held by a non MAGA person, by a Democrat in this case,
because that Supreme Court will determine whether or not Wisconsin will be gerrymandered within an inch of its life.
So it only returns Republicans to office. Reach out to any of these organizations. Lots of people write to me saying they want to start stuff.
I would urge you to make sure that there isn't already something out there doing what you're doing,
because what people really need is support, and by that I mean your time or your money, both of which are extraordinarily valuable.
And if you don't have money to put into things, remember that your time is equally valuable.
That's one of the things I always say to people, you know, there's two kinds of currency. One is time and one is money.
And often the people who have a lot of one don't have much of the other. So whichever you've got, throw your Oar in, and
help independent media. I've talked about this before. Independent media is rising.
If you don't want to start your own web page about what's happening in your town, find somebody else who is and say, you know what,
maybe we can go together and I'll cover the school board meetings. You cover the basketball game. Somebody else will cover, you know, the Department of Public Works, and we'll be able to inform people of what is happening in our towns.
This is a moment for us to reclaim reality so that we can't have a President who says he has had the army turn on the spigot of water in California.
Do not even start me. That's is crap. Somebody also wrote to me the other day and asked if it was true that Trump was
calling out the Army Corps of Engineers to work in North Carolina. The answer to that is no.
The Army Corps of Engineers has been there since the the floods happened. They've cleared, you know, hundreds of millions of tons of debris.
They've rebuilt all kinds of stuff. Trump is now saying he did that. That is a lie. All that stuff out there, all kinds of places we can be heard
right now, we need to feel it and not say, oh, I'm scared, somebody else needs to do this.
Think about it. 17,000 people here. Think of the difference we could make in just the next week.
If we all do things, it's okay to take a break, but make sure your voice gets heard.
All right? I think I'm going to leave it there.
And somebody just said, what do you do in Florida again? You got plenty of pressure to put on places in Florida at the state level.
Your state legislature is corrupt as hell. And same with Ohio, and same with Mississippi.
You know, you can do a lot of good there just by by dealing with your local legislature, Slater's and saying, you know, what are you doing here?
Ohio's, energy issue and all that. Or Florida is finally starting
to push back against Ron DeSantis, chair those people on demand that you get felons, you know, that they actually honor
the law that you all passed to get felons able to vote again. You know, they're there. You just need to find your issue.
All right?
Somebody just asked how to watch me.
If you have quit Facebook, I am working on getting YouTube and streaming to Facebook and I'll keep trying to expand what I do.
I got the impression you liked the short thing I did on Sunday. I will see if I can incorporate those more often.
Things are coming at us awfully quickly. I will urge you once again, try and get enough sleep.
You'll notice I'm posting letters earlier, which means I'm not catching the 11:00 breaking news.
But it does mean I'm getting sleep. Try and eat, right? Try and exercise. And try and laugh some.
Because, as I say, a joyful population cannot be controlled. All right.
Thank you for being here. And I will see you. I'm actually doing a big radio show at 5:00 my time
somewhere. Don't remember where. Don't know what the topic is. But I will see you tonight, in a letter.
And I will see you again later on this week. Thanks for being here.
by Heather Cox Richardson
Feb 1, 2025
Want more Politics Chat? Send me your questions on Facebook, and find me on Facebook Live every Tuesday at 4 pm (eastern time).
Transcript
Minneapolis. Grand Rapids, dance. Rapids. Danny, how are you?
Seeing what else is going on here. I just got over here.
Quite a day, Quite a couple of days. Quite a couple of weeks, actually. Thank you for being here.
We got Virginia and Minnesota against Sweden. Central Valley and California.
Metro. Atlanta. Portland, Oregon. It's really cold here, by the way. Hingham, mass. With the beautiful church.
Columbus, Ohio I love Columbus. Monterey Bay. Here we go. Wisconsin. Maui.
Oh, man. Me and. All right. So I am here, obviously on Facebook today.
I'm working on the YouTube thing. I just will confess to you, I really care about content.
I'm less good with, technology, so I'm not moving as fast on that front as I could be, but, But I will work on that.
Okay, so let me get right into things, with where we are on this moment,
January 28th, 2025, we are in the middle of a constitutional crisis.
And it's not an immediate as in, you got to do something right this very moment, but it's very, very serious.
And let me let me start by stepping back and explaining, once again, the three branches of government that are established in the Constitution,
that is the underpinning for all the laws in the United States. That is, there are three branches of government.
And the first among equals, if you will, is the Congress.
And the Congress is made up of two different chambers, two different branches, the House of Representatives and the Senate.
And those two branches together are supposed to write our laws. So the House of Representatives turns over completely every two years,
with the hope that it would be very responsive to the American people. And the Senate turns over, every two years.
Only a third of it does. The complete revolution of the Senate is every six years. Although always it has had people stay there forever.
I think I said to you once that until at least recently, I haven't checked the numbers. Recently, the only legislative body that turned over,
more, more slowly than the US Senate was the House of Lords in the UK. So you have those two branches and they are supposed to,
to be the lawmaking body of the United States so they can initiate laws.
But each house has to approve of the laws. And there's one exception to the fact that people can initiate laws,
and that's that the House of Representatives is the only place where revenue bills can start. And you can imagine the framers of the Constitution being concerned
about taxes and the things that they had come out against with, the king. So they made sure that the people would be the ones who were,
the people's representatives would be the ones who would start revenue bills. So the House and the Senate make the laws, and then it doesn't become a law.
Just if the House and Senate says they want a law, it has to go to the president, which is the head of the executive branch,
which is the second of the branches of government. If you look at the way the Constitution was written and in article two,
the framers set out the the duties and the rights of the president, and the president can,
sign the bill into law, in which case it becomes a law or can veto it, can say, no, I don't like this.
At that point, the president almost always just one exception, but has to send it back to the Congress and say, here's why I don't like this law,
which is actually really interesting for people like me. And the the Congress can either go, oh, yeah, oopsie poopsie.
We don't. We made a mistake, which they almost never do, by the way. Or they can say, okay, we can overcome your objections and repass the law
in such a way that she'll sign it. Or they can say, take a hike. We like this law the way it was, and they can pass it over
the president's veto, but that takes a supermajority to do that. Those are the two branches of government that make laws.
And then, as I always joke, there's this third branch of government and that's the judiciary. And by the time the framers
got around to forming the judiciary, I always tease my students and say, well, you know, by then, after they'd given all of these things
that the house is supposed to do and all these things that the Senate is supposed to do as a legislative branch, and then all the things that the executive was supposed to do,
they're like really bored and they're like, we got to go home, we're tired, we're hungry. Let's have a judiciary. And they walk away.
Because in the Constitution, the judiciary is only given the power to adjudicate things between states and between the federal government,
the United States of America and other countries. But what happens is in 1803, with the case of Marbury versus Madison,
the Supreme Court under Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, who was one of our great chief justices,
took upon itself the right of what's called judicial review. And that is they took upon themselves the right to say
whether or not a law was constitutional. They were the ones who got to decide that. And that's, you know, at first the people didn't pay much attention to that.
And sometimes it's been challenged. But really, since 1803, the Supreme Court
has been able to decide whether or not a law is unconstitutional. And if the Supreme Court says now, really not, then they can declared
unconstitutional and the, the, the Congress can get back to work and write a law that is constitutional according to that Supreme Court.
Now, those are the three branches of government as they have been set out in the Constitution of the United States,
and as we have lived with them since that Constitution was signed. So what is going on right now?
Beginning on last Friday, is that the Trump administration is denying that order.
They are, are working with a different concept of the executive branch that began to be developed under the Reagan administration.
And one of the people who really pushed this was Samuel Alito, who at the time was in the Justice Department.
And now, of course, is on the Supreme Court. And what they argue is this they argue
that because the president is the head of the executive branch, that the president in that in that column cannot be checked.
The president is all powerful. And so you can't the other branches of government can't say, well, you can't do that.
And the president can decide for himself whether or not laws are constitutional and whether or
not the things that the Congress does, whether or not he's going to fulfill them. Now, this is deeply problematic, not least because the president takes an oath to,
to, to, make the laws happen.
I can't believe I can't think of the wording right now to defend the laws of the United States and to make sure they're
put into into effect. But it's also a problem because, in fact, the way the Constitution is written,
the Congress has a check on the president, and that's the place you start to see the rise of this concept of what's called the unitary executive
is in the 1980s, when it's very clear that dismantling the federal government as the Reagan Revolution people want it to do, is really unpopular.
So they start to try and find ways that they can do what they want, even if the American people don't like it.
So they begin to stack the judiciary with, with it, ideological,
right wingers, they begin to, to, suppress the vote and they begin to make this argument for the unitary executive.,
Okay. You with me so far? I hope. Nobody is answering, so maybe I hope you're with me.
All right, so what happened on last week on Friday? First of all, was that in mind?
You, it's really interesting to me how vague a lot of what's going on is.
And believe me, I would know because after doing the Trump administration and the Biden administration
and the Trump now the new Trump administration, if you want to know what the Biden administration was doing, there was always a document or statement somewhere so that things were very clear.
It's the Trump administration is not operating the same way. There are things that are just fuzzy and you can't find anybody to clarify them.
So what they did on Friday was they halted funding for foreign aid
and a broad range of foreign aid, and that was really, really astonishing.
First of all, because foreign aid is appropriated by Congress, Congress
writes the laws that appropriate money, that's one of their jobs to do that.
And the the Trump administration said they were pausing aid until they could make sure that all the aid that was distributed
was done in according to what Trump cared about, which is, you know, you want all this, you know, no data and all the stuff he wants.
So this was like a bombshell, because if you know anything about our foreign affairs, you know that since World War II,
beginning under Eisenhower, there was a real concerted effort to focus on diplomacy.
And Eisenhower recognized Eisenhower was a Republican, by the way, is like elected in 1952.
Eisenhower recognized that if you did not make it possible for people
around the world to have a rising standard of living, they would be easy prey for religious extremists or political extremists
like Hitler to come in and turn them into a cult, essentially. And in an era in which there were nuclear weapons,
this would mean the end of the world. So he began really to focus on funding,
countries who were experiencing starvation or who needed some help with their legal systems and so on.
And he won in 1952, the primary in the Republican primary against Senator
Robert Taft of Ohio, who insisted on isolationism and said, I let him let them deal with it themselves,
which to Eisenhower was going to mean that we were going to have extremes in politics.
And everybody focuses on Eisenhower's anti-communism, which is true. And by the way, he made some mistakes.
Everybody does. But he was also the world's first anti-fascist, right. That's what he had fought against in in Europe and that's
what really made him a convert to this idea, was seeing the prison camps. And, you know, from the Holocaust and saying, we have to find a way
to make sure this doesn't happen again. So since 1952 and before that, by the way,
the Democrats had the Marshall Plan, for example. But there has been this idea that the United States would work to
stabilize countries around the world, not because we're touchy feely,
although it does feel good to make sure babies don't starve, but also so that those countries would remain stable
and be good trading partners for the United States. And that's just been what we do.
So when Trump on Friday, he didn't pause that funding, he stopped it.
What that meant was that the places, for example, where George H. Over George W Bush started what's known as pep for the attempt
to stop the spread of Aids in Africa or right now. I don't know if you're following the situation in Sudan.
It is simply heartbreaking. The funding for, for feeding the starving,
Sudanese or, places where they were clearing landmines or, places where they were supporting
food delivery or, places where they were training people to stand against ISIS or,
you know, all the sorts of things that we do that we don't. The people like you and me don't pay a lot of attention to,
just stopped. So all those places are suddenly standing there going, we don't know what we're going to do.
Because, for example, what do you do with the ISIS, the, the, the ISIS prisons, which we're funding to keep the ISIS people in prison?
They're going to let go, get them, let go. And what about the people who are now
had hired people to find landmines, who now can't? And most dramatically, of course, the funding
that we have put into development projects in developing countries as a hedge against, well, first of all, with luck, in a way
that will help those developing countries, especially across the middle of Africa. But by pulling that, what we are doing is saying to up to other countries,
you can't trust us and be, you know, if China wants to do this, why don't you go play with China, which is,
a really dramatic abdication of the role that the United States has played in the world since World War two.
And, of course, the complete dismissal of everything that Biden and Blinken tried to do to create a better global structure that supported,
the needs of everybody in the country, in the world, but also that really made sure the United States had a seat at the table.
We've just walked away from every single table, with the exception of the fact that, the Trump administration
continued to fund munitions for Israel and for Egypt. All right.
So that was Friday. And then, then yesterday,
last night, last night, really late. I'm sorry. You know me, I've lost track of time already
because I'm writing in, in different areas here. Trump did something else but that built on that.
So if you remember on Friday, I think it was on Friday, he fired inspectors, the inspectors general from 17,
different departments, major departments in the, in the, in the country. I wrote about that. It's actually quite interesting how we got inspectors general.
But the reason that that's really important is because he tried that in his first administration. He fired, I think it was five
major inspectors general whom he thought were disloyal to him after his first acquittal from his first impeachment.
And when that happened in 2022, Congress wrote a law aimed at making sure he couldn't do it again.
And they said, if you want to fire an inspector general, which, you know, Obama did it to,
the inspector general that he fired was really erratic and that, you know, but he did do it. And you don't want to fire inspectors general if you can possibly avoid it
because they're from outside and they're basically watchdogs for the departments. But but Congress in 2022 wrote a law that said,
if you want to fire inspectors general, you have to give Congress 30 days notice and you have to explain why you're firing them.
Trump didn't do that. He just blew that off. And some of the Republicans
who voted for that bill said they didn't care, including Tom Cotton of Arkansas, by the way, a senator from Arkansas.
So what Trump apparently heard was go ahead and break the law.
So what we saw Monday, I'm sorry, today's Tuesday. So what we saw Monday was that Trump stopped the funding for everything.
Every federal grant and loan in the United States of America. So think of anything the federal government does with with,
as I say, some exceptions. He says this does not include social Security and Medicare, which makes sense
because he promised up and down he wouldn't do that. And that's much of his base.
But think of everything else. This is this is, federal grants to local law enforcement.
This is, grants to states. This is education. This is Medicaid.
This is supplemental nutrition programs, including women, infants and children: WIC. If you know WIC, it's a great program. This is Head Start. This is, I mean, I could just keep on going.
And here's the kicker. How can you do that? I mean, I can't tell you. Many people have come up to me today and said he can't do that.
It's against the law. Well, it is against the law because this is what's called impoundment.
And impoundment was an attempt under Richard Nixon
in the early 1970s to stop Congress from doing things he didn't like by saying,
I don't care that you appropriated money to create this agency. I'm just not going to disperse that money so you can create whatever you want.
But I'm not going to put up any money to fund that. And you need to remember what I'm telling you this,
that funding is your money. It is your money. It is my money.
This is money that you pay into the federal government. So often we talk about, you know,
federal funding and we don't seem to talk about taxes at the same time. And, you know, taxes are really my thing.
You know, I love the study of taxes because I know and and it makes me sound like the most boring person in the world, which might be true,
but when you talk about taxes, you were talking about what a society thinks is important enough to put money into.
So when Nixon said, I'm not going to fund these things, he was saying, listen, I don't care what Congress said it wants to spend your tax dollars on.
I, Richard Nixon, don't think that's a good way to do it. And Congress said, oh boy, is this not going to fly.
So in 1974, they passed something called the Impoundment Control Act that said, and I paraphrase, screw you, you're not doing that.
That's a paraphrase. What they said was a president may not impound
moneys that the Congress has appropriated for whatever purpose. You just got to do it.
You have to make sure the laws are are carried out. That's what the president agrees to do.
So the right wing movement in the United States of America, led in this moment by
the Heritage Foundation, which has very close ties to Viktor Orban in Hungary, says they consider that law unconstitutional.
They consider that law unconstitutional. I bet you have some favorite laws you consider unconstitutional, too, right?
My point being that Trump has just signed on to the idea that is laid out in project 2025,
that the impoundment Act is unconstitutional. It's a law, and courts have upheld this law repeatedly
since 1974, saying Congress is the lawmaking body. If it says we're going to put $100,000 toward
developing a new kind of Brussels sprout, which I'm making up -- they may or may not have done that -- that's what the people's representatives decided to do. Trump is saying, no,
I don't care that Congress thinks we should fund cancer research.
I don't care that Congress thinks we should fund supplemental nutrition
programs. I don't care that Congress thinks we should fund law enforcement. I don't care that Congress thinks we should fund education. He is saying the person who gets to decide
what we do is him. I want to make sure that sinks in deeply enough.
He is saying that the person who gets to decide what this government is going to fund
is him.
So, let me now step back from that a little bit and give you a, not not necessarily a bigger picture, because that's a really big picture,
but a picture of where we are in this two week period. Because I think what we have seen
is somebody is asking what's going to happen, and what do we do next? I'm going to come to that, I promise. But I do think
the set-up here is important. Because this is a constitutional crisis and it looks very much like an earlier period in our history,
before we had a Constitution, that I'll talk about. But this other piece that I want to tell you about matters too,
and that said, if you remember when he was running for office, and you must keep in mind that this president is mentally
slipping badly, that really matters. He is not playing with a full deck.
You know, I can't think of any other way to put it. You have to understand that he is not the evil genius here.
He's a man who loves money, appears to like to have women around him, and who wants to stay out of jail,
and wants to be loved, which you know, he likes adulation. I don't think he knows what love is. That was an editorial I shouldn't have given you. He wants adulation, but he doesn't have the capacity to put these pieces together.
He really doesn't. Which does raise the question of who is putting them together. But if you think about project 2025, which we talked about a lot last summer
before the election, and Trump and his people distanced themselves from, they said, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We got nothing to do with project 2025. Well, of course they did. And now two thirds of the executive orders and the things he's done, that
he's put in place, are straight from project 2025, including his office, are the person he wants to install
at the head of Office of Management and Budget. Russ Vought, who was instrumental in writing
in the Heritage Foundation and Instrumental in writing Project 2025. And what project 2025 called for, was for the President
to get rid of the nonpartisan civil service, which we've had since 1883, and make it loyal to him.
He's called for getting rid of the independence of the Department of Justice and making it loyal to the President, and he called for getting rid
of the independence of the military and making it loyal to the President. And once you had that in place, you wanted a very strong executive
who would impose Christian nationalism on the United States of America.
In the last less than eight days, what we've seen is exactly that.
We have seen the purging of the nonpartisan civil service to make it loyal to Trump.
We have seen the purging of the Department of Justice to make it loyal to Trump. There was a big purge of people yesterday.
Joyce White Vance wrote about it last night. And we've seen the attempt to put,
to have control of the military by putting over it Pete Hegseth, who is a radical, right wing Christian extremist,
who studied at Princeton under Patrick Deneen, who is one of the right wing extremist Catholics like JD Vance and like Peter Teal,
who want to destroy the federal government in order to put in place, right? Right wing Christian nationalism.
So we've got those three things in place. And now we have the attempt to destroy the secular government that we have had in place,
that we have built, that you and I have built by electing our representatives, and to destroy it.
We don't know what they plan to put in place, but this is destruction
of our constitutional system. And a number of Republicans are vocally going along with it saying, that, you know, they think private philanthropy, for example,
is a better way to fund cancer which is just crap. I mean, I could start citing studies, but it just doesn't work.
The reason we built the government that we did is because this is
how you deliver to the American people who have joined together. We the people have joined together to form a union, to create a government
that does the best it can for the most of us. That's what the United States government is.
And what they are coming in is saying, no, no, no, no, no, we're going to get rid of that because our guy Donald Trump,
although, as I say, I don't think he is the one pulling the strings here, he's the one who should make
the final decisions. So right there,
we have ourselves a constitutional crisis.
And and let me walk a little bit further.
And now I'm, I'm telling you not what has happened, but what
certainly seems like it's going to happen, because they have said it's going to happen. So what is he doing?
And I think there are a number of things he's doing. I think one is they are provoking a Constitutional crisis.
And I will tell you more about that in a second. I think they are also, I think somewhere they have figured that
if they stop all this funding, that that will put enough money back in the Treasury,
that they can have their tax cuts for the very wealthy and corporations, which Trump's new Treasury secretary, Scott
Bezzant, has agreed is a top priority for the Trump administration. But it's been a big problem for the radical right wing extremists
because they're like, we don't like how much spending is going on here. Well, they're the same ones who want to get rid of the secular government.
So if you get rid of the secular government and you say, we're clawing back all that money, we're going to throw it in the Treasury, now we can give all the money to the rich people and corporations.
It kind of is an equation that cancels a lot of stuff out.
Is that how you want your tax dollars to be spent? To have it go into the pockets of the very wealthy and corporations? Remember, from 1981 to 2021, about $50
trillion went from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. So I think they are partly doing that as well.
Now, what they're going to fill those holes with is anybody's guess. So that's what they are doing so far.
Now let me go back to and like I say, I keep talking about power sloshing around in Washington. Trump is already talking about a third term.
You know, that's like me -- I suppose he could live forever but come on, he's 78 years old.
He's a wreck now. I'm not expecting that's going to happen. I think what they're doing more clearly is putting all this in place
for somebody else to take over and then say, hey, we didn't do this. This is all Trump's fault, and throw the bag on him.
So when you think about power sloshing around, who is that? Who are the people calling the shots?
I don't know. I've been thinking about this all day. And I think you can see certain fingerprints, but others are not as clear. Whom does it benefit to destroy America's standing around the globe?
There's a lot of people that benefit. But there's a lot of people who are benefiting from cutting the government
domestically that are hurt by that. So I don't know the answer to that, and I urge you to think about it.
But now I want to go back to what we do,
because I told you, this looks like something else to me.
And you know what it looks like to me? It looks like the attempt of the monarch,
George the Third, who, by the way, was also mentally incapacitated,
on occasion, to force the colonial English settlers
to pay taxes without having a say in their government. And if you remember that, and I'll write about that this week,
because I think it's important. If you remember, the British Crown has to pay for all
the wars that have taken place both in Europe and in the colonies.
And Americans have not been heavily taxed at all. So after 1763, they chunk a whole bunch of taxes
on Americans, in a number of different places. One of the places you can see it,
there's a couple of rafts of them, but one of the places you can see it is in Pride and Prejudice, you know, the novel by Jane Austen, when Mr. Collins is pointing out how many windows
the Lady Catherine de Berg's mansion has. And a modern American reader is like, who cares how many windows?
That's because one of the things that was taxed was glass. So by saying, look at all these windows, and counting
the windows, he's saying, look, she's so rich, she can pay all those taxes. There you go. That's your literary moment of the day.
But they chunk on a whole bunch of taxes. And the Americans are like, especially the American merchants are like, what's going on here?
Like, we're not paying this crap, you know. We're not represented, and we're not going to do this. But most Americans are, you know, they get rid of most taxes
gradually because it's not worth it. It's costing more money to collect the taxes than they're making. So they get rid of most of the taxes, but they keep the tax on tea for the East India Company. And the East India Company has a subsidy.
So they're going to be able to sell tea more cheaply to the colonies. And if they
flood the colonies with this cheap tea, and the colonists are willing to buy it, the Crown
and the Parliament will have established the principle of being able to tax the people without representation.
So what do the people who recognize the issues here do?
They write and say, stop it. It's one thing to do. But they also talk about it everywhere.
They have fliers about it. They literally paint tea pots that talk about it.
They urge people to move away from tea, and they explain what's going on. And the reason that I'm thinking about that today is
because this is bad. And I mean, this is bad in a Constitutional sense.
It's of course, also bad for anybody who depends in any way on federal money.
And and I say that as somebody who does not. I am one of the extraordinarily few
lucky people in the country right now who doesn't yet need Medicare or Medicaid,
and who doesn't need grants or all those things. But I'm rare in that, and it will not last forever.
So I'm not like, oh, they took my benefits. I'm telling you that as somebody who cares about the functioning of society,
we all care about this. And people need to understand what exactly this means.
This means a lot of people are scared right now because they do not know where their paycheck is going to come from.
It means people are scared because they do not know how they're going to maintain their elderly relatives in a nursing home, which is usually paid for by Medicaid.
There's there's a lot of damage and a lot of places people are going to be hurt here. They need to understand what the Constitutional problem is here.
And the fact that Trump is trying, and his people are trying to set him up to become a dictator.
So when you think about what we are going to do next in this,
the obvious thing to do is to complain to Congress because they're the ones who are giving up their power.
And I'm not going to say not to do that. You should be doing that every second. And I would urge you to
certainly cheer on the Democrats. The Democrats are not the problem here. Everybody complains to the Democrats.
I've said this to you before. When you get really upset, people complain to me, "I can't do anything. I'm already on your side.
Complain to the Republicans." Make their lives swamped with constituents and people saying you took a specifics.
You took away Medicaid, you took away WIC, you took away funding for Sudan, you took away all these things.
And we are not going to support you going forward. And that needs to be not just people who voted for Kamala Harris.
That needs to be everybody.
I can think of two people right now who voted for Trump. And when I said their Medicaid was at risk
based on project 2025, they said he will never touch Medicaid. If you don't think I'm going to be telling them that Medicaid has now been frozen,
you're dead wrong. They need to know what is happening, because we need to make this
a moment where we defend the US Constitution. Do it by pressuring your Congress people,
of course, but also do it by doing the same thing that the Colonials did.
Make sure you cannot not know this is happening. The people must know that this is happening.
Because it is. Somebody just said, we need to stop this madness. It is madness. And when you write to Congress, when you write to the Republican senators,
remember, I keep saying this, only about 14 of the Republican senators are MAGA. The other 40 or so are not. They're scared, and they need constantly to hear that they are destroying their power.
They are destroying the power of the Senate and they are destroying America, the American constitutional government.
And they must hear it in a huge way starting now, or it will be too late.
They are out there very much testing the waters to see if they can get away with this. As I say, power is sloshing and now is the time
for Americans to say, these are my tax dollars. I mean, you can disagree. You can say, I don't care.
I'd just as soon let Donald Trump decide these things. I think the vast majority of us like the idea
of having a Congress, a government, having the Constitution,
rather than having a dictator decide what's going to happen.
I will point out, of course, that,
we are less than two years away from 1776, which I think is really interesting.
I think it's time for us to challenge what it means to be part of the United States government, and what it means to be part of this country,
and what it means for the people to have a say in their government.
And as you know, the right wing flooded the media.
And today, CNN's Jim Acosta left. He said he needs to stand against dictatorship.
He needs to stand against a tyrant. And now is the time we're going to have to be doing that. \
So, what else did I say I was going to tell you today? That was pretty much it.
I would urge you, in this to take care of people who are frightened right now.
But don't let up. I mean, one of the things you simply cannot do is say, I can't deal with this.
I can't look at this because, again, the number of people who want this country
to become a Christian dictatorship, it's about 6% of a country of 332 people, 332 million people.
Even if it were 332, it would be okay. 332 million people,
if we speak up, they cannot do it. And I think that this is what they're trying to
do is hit so quickly that we don't see what's going on. And I would urge you really to focus at the state level everywhere for sure.
But call on your representatives, call on your Congress people, call on your state people and say, are you really okay with this?
Because this is not the American democracy that I know. We cannot be silent.
In the midst of this, call it out.
Somebody just said one of their congresspeople said that it was a waste to put money
into prosthetics for old people because it was a waste of money. Do you believe that? I don't believe that.
Speak up for the things that you care about and that you believe in and and call this one out.
Now, I'm I'm sitting here, we have a lot of trolls here. Don't argue with the trolls. Shut them down.
Block them. We're not going to have this conversation with them. They are wasting our time. And, I'm trying to shop at the stores that are supporting American democracy.
Support the people who are supporting American democracy. It does not have to be Partisan at this point.
It's absolutely not Partisan. Are you with a dictator who is trying to destroy our Constitution,
or are you with the American Constitution and our democracy? We can sort the rest out later.
I'm seeing if there's anything else. I know people keep saying,
they're frightened and they feel alone. You're not alone. There's 17,000 people here on this call right now.
Find your people. You can find your people. I always send people to red wine and blue. But you can go to any other organization, or you can just start some of your own.
You must not be alone in this. But again, you must speak up. And again, they want you to be frightened.
They want you to be so scared you won't speak up. And once they get you to that place, then nobody will dare to speak up.
But we are not there yet. I talked about this before the other night. Power is sloshing around. In a dictatorship like North Korea power is not sloshing around. You know exactly who holds that power right now.
You can still speak up. You can still support independent media. Absolutely. You know, if you have the money to support independent people, don't give it to me.
Give it to somebody else who can get out there and and keep holding truth to power.
You can support the people who speak up, and you can come down on the media that doesn't speak up. I mean, at this point, who do we have left but ourselves? And you know what? When the American people have had to do this in the past, every freaking time they have stepped up,
and they have recreated the idea of American democracy. They did it in the 1850s.
They did it in the 1890s. They did it in the 1930s. They did it in World War II.
They began to do it in the 1960s. We can do it again today, because at the end of the day,
all democracy is, is it's the idea that people have a right to work
hard and create their own destiny, their own end. And what we are seeing here in this moment
is MAGA Republicans saying, no, no, we don't actually think that you have the right
to have a say in your government, or to be treated equally before the law. We believe that we, a few dictators and one dictator over
all, get to determine your future. That has never flown in in society.
It's certainly never flown in American society. And this is our moment to say,
it's not going to fly now, or at least to go down fighting. And I don't believe it's going to come to that.
I really think that this is in our DNA and that we can do it. We just have to make sure that people understand the stakes.
Look around you. How many of even the MAGA voters around you would say, hey, I'd rather have a dictator?
They didn't think that. They wanted to make sure that people like them
had a shot at a future, and at least the ones who weren't openly Proud Boys and so on.
But given the choice between a dictatorship
and a democracy, I think most of them would choose a democracy. You saw it during the Civil War as well, when people who were virulently racist, anti-black
racist, came on board to defend democracy. We've done it in the past, we can do it again.
I'm trying to look here. Somebody just said my next book maybe should look at the times that the American public has done this.
In my last book, the whole third section of Democracy Awakening was the different ways in which people had managed to expand
democracy, even in really bad times. So I'm actually working on a new book that's going to be fun, actually. People are asking if you live in a blue state, what can you do?
Contact any of the organizations that are working to defend rights, including, as I say, red, white and blue, because you can get involved
across the states in different races. You can put pressure on in different ways.
If you're in North Carolina, get involved this minute trying to defend the election of Allison Riggs to the state Supreme Court.
She won. The Republican is trying to throw her out by throwing out at least 4000 votes, or as many as 60,000 legally cast votes.
Get involved there. Get involved in Wisconsin. Wisconsin has an election on April 1st for a state
Supreme Court seat that needs to be held by a non MAGA person, by a Democrat in this case,
because that Supreme Court will determine whether or not Wisconsin will be gerrymandered within an inch of its life.
So it only returns Republicans to office. Reach out to any of these organizations. Lots of people write to me saying they want to start stuff.
I would urge you to make sure that there isn't already something out there doing what you're doing,
because what people really need is support, and by that I mean your time or your money, both of which are extraordinarily valuable.
And if you don't have money to put into things, remember that your time is equally valuable.
That's one of the things I always say to people, you know, there's two kinds of currency. One is time and one is money.
And often the people who have a lot of one don't have much of the other. So whichever you've got, throw your Oar in, and
help independent media. I've talked about this before. Independent media is rising.
If you don't want to start your own web page about what's happening in your town, find somebody else who is and say, you know what,
maybe we can go together and I'll cover the school board meetings. You cover the basketball game. Somebody else will cover, you know, the Department of Public Works, and we'll be able to inform people of what is happening in our towns.
This is a moment for us to reclaim reality so that we can't have a President who says he has had the army turn on the spigot of water in California.
Do not even start me. That's is crap. Somebody also wrote to me the other day and asked if it was true that Trump was
calling out the Army Corps of Engineers to work in North Carolina. The answer to that is no.
The Army Corps of Engineers has been there since the the floods happened. They've cleared, you know, hundreds of millions of tons of debris.
They've rebuilt all kinds of stuff. Trump is now saying he did that. That is a lie. All that stuff out there, all kinds of places we can be heard
right now, we need to feel it and not say, oh, I'm scared, somebody else needs to do this.
Think about it. 17,000 people here. Think of the difference we could make in just the next week.
If we all do things, it's okay to take a break, but make sure your voice gets heard.
All right? I think I'm going to leave it there.
And somebody just said, what do you do in Florida again? You got plenty of pressure to put on places in Florida at the state level.
Your state legislature is corrupt as hell. And same with Ohio, and same with Mississippi.
You know, you can do a lot of good there just by by dealing with your local legislature, Slater's and saying, you know, what are you doing here?
Ohio's, energy issue and all that. Or Florida is finally starting
to push back against Ron DeSantis, chair those people on demand that you get felons, you know, that they actually honor
the law that you all passed to get felons able to vote again. You know, they're there. You just need to find your issue.
All right?
Somebody just asked how to watch me.
If you have quit Facebook, I am working on getting YouTube and streaming to Facebook and I'll keep trying to expand what I do.
I got the impression you liked the short thing I did on Sunday. I will see if I can incorporate those more often.
Things are coming at us awfully quickly. I will urge you once again, try and get enough sleep.
You'll notice I'm posting letters earlier, which means I'm not catching the 11:00 breaking news.
But it does mean I'm getting sleep. Try and eat, right? Try and exercise. And try and laugh some.
Because, as I say, a joyful population cannot be controlled. All right.
Thank you for being here. And I will see you. I'm actually doing a big radio show at 5:00 my time
somewhere. Don't remember where. Don't know what the topic is. But I will see you tonight, in a letter.
And I will see you again later on this week. Thanks for being here.
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Re: Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down the Ga
by admin » Mon Feb 03, 2025 5:56 pm
Musk aides lock workers out of OPM computer systems: [Quit and Take vacation to "dream destination"; Sofa beds moved into Agency so team can work around the clock]
by Tim Reid
Reuters
February 2, 2025 3:32 PM MST Updated 19 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-a ... 025-01-31/
Protest outside the Office of Personnel Management headquarters, Washington, D.C., February 2, 2025. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura
• Musk aides restrict access to federal employee data systems
• Musk's team works around the clock, installs sofa beds at OPM
• Concerns include cybersecurity and lack of oversight
WASHINGTON, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.
Since taking office 11 days ago, President Donald Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.
Musk, the billionaire Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab CEO and X owner tasked by Trump to slash the size of the 2.2 million-strong civilian government workforce, has moved swiftly to install allies at the agency known as the Office of Personnel Management.
The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department's data systems.
The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.
"We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems," one of the officials said. "That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications."
Officials affected by the move can still log on and access functions such as email but can no longer see the massive datasets that cover every facet of the federal workforce.
Musk, OPM, representatives of the new team, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
OPM has sent out memos that eschew the normal dry wording of government missives as it encourages civil servants to consider buyout offers to quit and take a vacation to a "dream destination."
Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, said the actions inside OPM raised concerns about congressional oversight at the agency and how Trump and Musk view the federal bureaucracy.
"This makes it much harder for anyone outside Musk's inner circle at OPM to know what's going on," Moynihan said.
MUSK INFLUENCE
A team including current and former employees of Musk assumed command of OPM on Jan. 20, the day Trump took office. They have moved sofa beds onto the fifth floor of the agency's headquarters, which contains the director's office and can only be accessed with a security badge or a security escort, one of the OPM employees said.
The sofa beds have been installed so the team can work around the clock, the employee said.
Musk, a major donor to a famously demanding boss, installed beds at X for employees to enable them to work longer when in 2022 he took over the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter.
"It feels like a hostile takeover," the employee said.
The new appointees in charge of OPM have moved the agency's chief management officer, Katie Malague, out of her office and to a new office on a different floor, the officials said.
Malague did not respond to a request for comment.
The moves by Musk's aides at OPM, and upheaval inside the Treasury building caused by other Musk aides that was reported on Friday, underscore the sweeping influence Musk is having across government.
David Lebryk, the top-ranking career U.S. Treasury Department official, is set to leave his post following a clash with allies of Musk after they asked for access to payment systems, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
The new team at OPM includes software engineers and Brian Bjelde, who joined Musk's SpaceX venture in 2003 as an avionics engineer before rising to become the company's vice president of human resources. Bjelde's role at OPM is that of a senior adviser.
The acting head of OPM, Charles Ezell, has been sending memos to the entire government workforce since Trump took office, including Tuesday's offering federal employees the chance to quit with eight months pay.
"No-one here knew that the memos were coming out. We are finding out about these memos the same time as the rest of the world," one of the officials said.
Among the group that now runs OPM is Amanda Scales, a former Musk employee, who is now OPM's chief of staff. In some memos sent out on Jan. 20 and Jan. 21 by Ezell, including one directing agencies to identify federal workers on probationary periods, agency heads were asked to email Scales at her OPM email address.
Another senior adviser is Riccardo Biasini, a former engineer at Tesla and most recently a director at The Boring Company, Musk's tunnel-building operation in Las Vegas.
Reporting by Tim Reid; Editing by Ross Colvin and Howard Goller
by Tim Reid
Reuters
February 2, 2025 3:32 PM MST Updated 19 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-a ... 025-01-31/
Protest outside the Office of Personnel Management headquarters, Washington, D.C., February 2, 2025. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura
• Musk aides restrict access to federal employee data systems
• Musk's team works around the clock, installs sofa beds at OPM
• Concerns include cybersecurity and lack of oversight
WASHINGTON, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.
Since taking office 11 days ago, President Donald Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.
Musk, the billionaire Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab CEO and X owner tasked by Trump to slash the size of the 2.2 million-strong civilian government workforce, has moved swiftly to install allies at the agency known as the Office of Personnel Management.
The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department's data systems.
The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.
"We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems," one of the officials said. "That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications."
Officials affected by the move can still log on and access functions such as email but can no longer see the massive datasets that cover every facet of the federal workforce.
Musk, OPM, representatives of the new team, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
OPM has sent out memos that eschew the normal dry wording of government missives as it encourages civil servants to consider buyout offers to quit and take a vacation to a "dream destination."
Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, said the actions inside OPM raised concerns about congressional oversight at the agency and how Trump and Musk view the federal bureaucracy.
"This makes it much harder for anyone outside Musk's inner circle at OPM to know what's going on," Moynihan said.
MUSK INFLUENCE
A team including current and former employees of Musk assumed command of OPM on Jan. 20, the day Trump took office. They have moved sofa beds onto the fifth floor of the agency's headquarters, which contains the director's office and can only be accessed with a security badge or a security escort, one of the OPM employees said.
The sofa beds have been installed so the team can work around the clock, the employee said.
Musk, a major donor to a famously demanding boss, installed beds at X for employees to enable them to work longer when in 2022 he took over the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter.
Twitter employee, whose pic of sleeping in office went viral, laid off
by Ritu Maria Johny
Edited by Chandrashekar Srinivasan
Hindustan Times
Feb 27, 2023 12:20 PM IST
https://www.hindustantimes.com/business ... 03754.html
The latest layoff is said to be the eighth round of job cuts since Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022.. Twitter laid off at least 200 employees over the weekend as per a report by The New York Times (article beyond paywall), and it has now emerged that a product manager, whose picture of sleeping on the floor at the company headquarters went viral earlier, was among the fired staff.
Esther Crawford went viral in 2022 for a picture of her sleeping on the floor at the company's office to meet deadlines. (Twitter)
"It feels like a hostile takeover," the employee said.
The new appointees in charge of OPM have moved the agency's chief management officer, Katie Malague, out of her office and to a new office on a different floor, the officials said.
Malague did not respond to a request for comment.
The moves by Musk's aides at OPM, and upheaval inside the Treasury building caused by other Musk aides that was reported on Friday, underscore the sweeping influence Musk is having across government.
David Lebryk, the top-ranking career U.S. Treasury Department official, is set to leave his post following a clash with allies of Musk after they asked for access to payment systems, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
The new team at OPM includes software engineers and Brian Bjelde, who joined Musk's SpaceX venture in 2003 as an avionics engineer before rising to become the company's vice president of human resources. Bjelde's role at OPM is that of a senior adviser.
The acting head of OPM, Charles Ezell, has been sending memos to the entire government workforce since Trump took office, including Tuesday's offering federal employees the chance to quit with eight months pay.
"No-one here knew that the memos were coming out. We are finding out about these memos the same time as the rest of the world," one of the officials said.
Among the group that now runs OPM is Amanda Scales, a former Musk employee, who is now OPM's chief of staff. In some memos sent out on Jan. 20 and Jan. 21 by Ezell, including one directing agencies to identify federal workers on probationary periods, agency heads were asked to email Scales at her OPM email address.
Another senior adviser is Riccardo Biasini, a former engineer at Tesla and most recently a director at The Boring Company, Musk's tunnel-building operation in Las Vegas.
Reporting by Tim Reid; Editing by Ross Colvin and Howard Goller
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