I don't think I've mentioned her paintings of New Orleans before, but Diane Millsap is an artist I've long enjoyed. This one is Old Absinthe House. You can see more of her work here.
Radley Balko has a quick round-up of "the administration's full-frontal assault on democracy" over the preceding week: The first six weeks of this administration have felt like a year. Every day brings a firehose of brazen corruption, mad power grabs and jaw-dropping idiocy. And that of course is the point. Trump aides and allies like Russ Vought, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon have said for months that their plan is to overwhelm the press, public, and critics with so much activity that no one can possibly keep up. This roundup is a snapshot of what we saw over just a single five-day period — February 21 - 25. Incredibly, includes a weekend! Not long ago, more than half of these bullet points would have been enough to bring down an administration. Instead, many weren't news for more than a couple hours. (Related: Here's a gift link to a piece I recently wrote for Rolling Stone about the harm Kash Patel could do at the FBI.) It's going to be a long four years."
When people asked for any reason to re-elect Biden, I would say, "Lina Khan." I should have said, "Rohit Chopra and Lina Khan," but as it turned out, though we did lose both of them, Dday says things are not entirely bleak, because it's not just Democrats who want to restrain monopolies. "The New Antitrust Consensus: The Trump administration is maintaining the merger guidelines that Lina Khan co-authored, and big business is angry. [...] On Tuesday, the new leaders of the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department's Antitrust Division both released statements saying that they would continue to follow the 2023 merger guidelines, and not seek to make any changes to them, at least in the near future. Those guidelines reflect the understanding of antitrust statutes and jurisprudence as envisioned by Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, the predecessors at those agencies. In other words, the Trump antitrust enforcers are adopting the Khan and Kanter viewpoint on the law. [...] The fact that the richest people in the world, people who populate the funding rosters of both parties, couldn't dislodge these merger guidelines suggests the forging of a new consensus on antitrust policy in the United States. There almost certainly will be selective prosecutorial discretion, and scandals around politicization, in the next four years. But the foundation is in place for what the New Brandeis movement sought for more than a decade: a restoration of competition policy as an economic and social imperative. It's not something, unlike so many other areas, that will have to be built back with a changeover in power." (Matt Stoller has more on this at The BIG Newsletter.)
However, The CFPB Shutdown Is Entirely About Payment Apps: Elon Musk and other Big Tech CEOs want to manage your money without any regulatory protections. [...] Last week, only one CFPB rule showed up on a priority list of CRA resolutions from House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA): the so-called 'larger participant' rule that gives the agency supervisory authority over non-banks engaged in digital payment app transactions. Other CFPB rules, like capping overdraft fees and removing medical debt from credit reports, did not appear among the priority list; neither did more permissive changes to bank merger rules, which has been a priority of some senators. In other words, Republicans are primarily focused on boosting Elon Musk and other Big Tech CEOs as they enter digital payment markets, determined to make managing and transferring money a regulatory-free zone. The move to revoke the larger participant rule takes enforcement decisions out of McKernan's hands, and reveals the degree to which congressional Republicans are doing Musk's bidding, even when it angers their traditional allies at the big banks. As Sen. Warren said at a field hearing on Tuesday, 'Trump and Musk aren't shutting down the CFPB because it's good for consumers—they are doing it to advance their own financial interests.'"
"Trump Stripped All $103 Million of Legal Assistance from Storm and Disaster Victims: Trump campaigned on a promise he wouldn't abandon hurricane and flood victims WASHINGTON—Before officially taking office, the incoming Trump administration directed House Speaker Mike Johnson to strip legal assistance from victims of floods, hurricanes, and fire that had been included in an emergency supplemental spending bill in December. Johnson readily complied, sources familiar with the negotiations said, and the move came even after President Donald Trump's election campaign ran heavily on the claim that Democrats had "abandoned" flood victims, particularly those in western North Carolina. The funding cut, amounting to $103 million, has not been previously reported.."
"The SAVE Act Could Stop Millions of Women From Voting. Here's What You Need to Know [...] The legislation would require all potential voters to provide, in person, proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when they register or reregister to vote. So, for instance, if you're already registered to vote but move to another state, you would probably need to present one of these documents, in addition to a photo ID, at a government office when you reregister. [...] But it would also have a direct impact on anyone whose legal name does not match the name on their birth certificate or passport, such as the 79% of heterosexual married women, per Pew Research, who take their spouse's last name. 'If a married woman hasn't paid $130 to update her passport—assuming she has one, which only about half of Americans do—she may not be able to vote in the next election if the SAVE Act becomes law,' Weiser says." And that's just leaving out trans people or those with mobility issues. We have plenty of safeguards that already prevent non-citizens from voting, but this legislation is clearly meant to disenfranchise legitimate voters.
18F writes "A letter to the American People: For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers. However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called "the gold standard" of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET. 18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated."
"These Ten Democrats Need to Be Primaried: The party needs fighters to stop Donald Trump and Elon Musk. [...] Democrats—voters and politicians alike—were left reeling by their stinging defeat in November 2024. The initial shock was common to both groups, but the two have diverged in how they're approaching the Trump administration now that it's been sworn in. Democratic voters plainly crave a fight—indeed, they report higher dissatisfaction with their congressional leaders than Republican voters reported at the same time in 2009, at the dawn of what would become the Tea Party movement. By contrast, most Democratic politicians, at least those in Congress, are running their usual playbook: laying low, waiting for Trump to screw up, and getting annoyed with the increasingly frantic demands of their base."
"The Secret Cabal That Owns The World: And the media almost never mention them. [...] Let's do one more industry before we throw our hands up and yell 'I get it already!' The propaganda networks that tell us all of this is fine: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, etc. Other than the Murdoch family, the biggest shareholders in Fox News are Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Their top shareholders - Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. NBC and MSNBC are now owned by Comcast. Biggest shareholders? Did you guess it? Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. Okay, I'll stop listing every industry, but Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street are also the biggest stakeholders in big pharma, private prisons and policing, deforestation, dystopian surveillance software, AI, the big car companies, big ag, big banks, chemicals, Amazon, Walmart, UBER — Anything you can think of! Literally anything. Go ahead, think of something. …Ok, you got something in your mind? The top shareholders are BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street."
"'We're clearly heading towards collapse': why the Murdoch empire is about to go bang: An explosive succession trial and an astonishing interview with one of Rupert's sons have exposed the paranoia and hatred at the heart of global media's most powerful family. This could get messy... When some of the mind games and manoeuvres that turned a Murdoch family 'retreat' into an ordeal appeared in Succession, the TV drama about squabbling family members of a right-wing media company, members of the real-life family started to suspect each other of leaking details to the writers. The truth was more straightforward. Succession's creator, Jesse Armstrong, said that his team hadn't needed inside sources – they had simply read press reports."
Stephanie Kelton has a good post up which I only have via a gift link so I'm not sure if you can get to it, but "Elon Musk is the Reason Social Security is 'Running Out of Money'." She points out that, by statute, Social Security can only be paid out of payroll tax receipts, but they can just change the statue if they really want to, so removing the cap isn't the only way to make Social Security solvent". And also: "Back in 1983, following the prescriptions of the Greenspan Commission, changes were made that were supposed to prevent Social Security from “running out of money” over the next 75+ years. Yet here we are, in the Fourth Circle of Hell, wringing our hands over looming shortfalls and automatic benefit cuts. But why? As Stephen Goss put it: Well, it turns out that some things are easier to predict than others. As Goss explains, it's not that people are living longer than expected. In fact, “projected life expectancy at age 65 in the 1983 report was extremely accurate.” It's also not because of an unexpected decline in birth rates, for “this was also known and anticipated in 1983.” The main issue—what the Greenspan Commission did not see coming—was Elon Musk. Or, more specifically, the “increasing concentration of earnings at the top of the distribution.” As Goss explains: “The reduced share of earnings subject to payroll tax explains most of the increase in cost as percent of payroll, compared to the 1983 projection.” In other words, rising inequality is the main reason that Social Security appears to be in financial trouble." So, back in the '80s, they "fixed" the problem, but the fix didn't work when they also lowered the top marginal rate to 28%.
It's always worth remembering why things are so horrible, and one of the big reasons is Jack Welch. "The Shareholder Supremacy: I promise you, everything that's happening makes sense. It all feels so chaotic, so utterly, offensively stupid, so disconnected from reality that it's hard to understand how Meta can run a terrible company with decaying services that's also wildly profitable, or how Meta, Microsoft and Google can proliferate unprofitable, unsustainable tech that takes water from the desert and strains our power grids to produce deeply mediocre outcomes based on incredibly vague promises and have their stock prices go up. [...] Welch's tenure was one that destroyed General Electric's ability to innovate while turning it into one of the most wildly-profitable companies in the world, all through a nihilistic form of capitalism where growth is all that matters, even if it means making worse products, constantly entering and exiting industries, reducing spend in research and development, outsourcing multiple parts of the company to avoid paying benefits and higher American wages, and generally treating human beings like inanimate assets."
The Beatles, "Every Little Thing"
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