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Month: January 2025

Farewell Joe

Published by digby on January 19, 2025

The Corruption Is Already Overwhelming

Published by digby on January 19, 2025

It’s not just that Trump is personally stealing his followers blind and accepting vast sums in untraceable bribes. He’s also making sure his cyberbaron buds are working on behalf of special interests and zillionaires everywhere. All the lobbyists have found a perfect end run around regulations by going directly to President Elon’s shadowy DOGE:

The Musk-run initiative, dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, is supposed to advise President-elect Donald Trump on spending cuts and regulatory reform. It doesn’t yet — and may never — have any formalized responsibilities or authority. So far, its recruits have been organizing in clandestine meetings blocks from the White House.

But already, companies and industry groups have started looking to the DOGE, above the more traditional committees of Congress and federal agencies, to advance their agendas and protect their interests.

The urgency to make inroads with Musk’s group underscores how special interests see the billionaire as a shortcut to Trump, a way to push their issues to the front of the line. It also shows how an entity ostensibly created to disrupt politics as usual is quickly becoming a target for Washington’s seasoned advocacy apparatus.

They don’t have to disclose these contacts because for all intents and purposes DOGE doesn’t really exist. How convenient. Burt some are just openly announcing their corruption:

Some are doing that work in plain sight. This week, defense contractor L3Harris Technologies Inc. sent a letter to Musk and his partner, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and posted it on the company’s website.

L3Harris urged them to endorse four technical changes to the federal contracting process “to unleash American industry and make defense acquisition more efficient.”

Why not? Who’s going to stop them?

Apropos of nothing, President Elon has a whole bunch of defense contracts himself.

What Would Jesus Do?

Published by digby on January 19, 2025

Apparently, he’d tell suffering people in the middle of a horrific disaster to do what an imbecilic cretin tells them to do or go fuck themselves.

Johnson is from Louisiana. It’s a good thing they don’t have any natural disasters down there.

Tik Tok, Tick Tock

Published by digby on January 19, 2025

That’s the notice that people found when Tik Tok went dark last night.

Then Trump posted this:

We’ll see if a law passed by Congress and upheld by the SC still applies after 12:01 tomorrow:

— Steve Lewan (@moochie666.bsky.social) 2025-01-19T16:29:10.558Z

Now it’s back. In both instances its owners seized the opportunity to praise Dear Leader. Smart move. He loves to have his boots licked more than anything. They can totally manipulate him with flattery.

Trump has his own reasons for all this:

2021: Trump demonized tiktok because it was useful for Chinese xenophobia and he thought he could force them to sell it to his friends at Walmart and Oracle

2023:

2024: Trump wants to “save” Tiktok to help billionaire Trump donor and Tiktok investor Jeffrey Yass and force a sale to somebody like Musk

Now he’s indicating that he might nationalize it but I feel very confident he won’t do that. He’ll make sure one of his billionaire buds is in charge.

He’s not even president yet.

The veil drops?

Published by digby on January 19, 2025

Nah, they’ll adapt.

Trump’s shitcoin scam has now reached almost $60 Billion in 48 hours. No doubt he and his family are very excited. Some of his followers who understand what he’s doing are a little squeamish, however:

Yeah, “reputation” is no longer operative in GOP politics.

Axios:

The $TRUMP memecoin — a financial asset that didn’t exist on Friday afternoon — now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth.

The coin (technically a token that’s issued on the Solana blockchain) has massively enriched Trump personally, enabled a mechanism for the crypto industry to funnel cash to him, and created a volatile financial asset that allows anyone in the world to financially speculate on Trump’s political fortunes.

  • After another massive overnight rally, as of Sunday morning Trump’s crypto holdings were worth as much as $58 billion on paper, enough — with his other assets — to make him one of the world’s 25 richest people.

 While the Biden administration broadly took the view that memecoins like $TRUMP are securities subject to SEC regulation, the incoming Trump administration has pledged to be much more crypto-friendly and to regulate such coins with a light or nonexistent touch.

The coin’s official website, GetTrumpMemes.com, urges visitors to buy coins with either dollars or crypto in order to “Celebrate Our Win & Have Fun!”

  • The coin is “not intended to be… an investment opportunity,” per the site, which says that it “has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office.”
  • That hasn’t stopped investors from making millions by speculating on the price of the coin, which was launched while Trump was reportedly hosting a “Crypto Ball” in Washington.

 Some 200 million of the 1 billion total coins have already been released and are being actively traded. The rest, which are owned by Trump-controlled entities, will be able to be sold at various points over the next three years, starting in April.

  • On average, Trump’s companies will be able to sell some 24 million coins per month into the market, which at current prices (which keep moving), would amount to an income of $1.73 billion per month, or $20.7 billion per year. (Although no one has a clue what the value of the coin will even be this afternoon, let alone three years from now.)

[…]

  • Since then, Trump has listed a meme stock where he controls more than 50% of the shares — and, now, has a meme coin that’s even less tethered to reality.
  • Both of them represent a much more direct way of funneling money to Trump than staying at his hotel did.

 The emoluments clause of the Constitution, written in 1787, hardly envisaged a world where a president could conjure billions of dollars of wealth out of nowhere just by endorsing a meme.

  • In the present day, it’s impossible to track who’s going to be buying this coin over the next three years and thereby directing their money directly at Trump.
  • Given the Supreme Court’s expansive view of presidential immunity, there’s a good chance that any such action will be deemed lawful.

They conclude: “The bottom line: Trump has just delivered a masterclass in the ability of a president to turn power into wealth.”

Nothing to see here folks.

Trump will be overseeing this arcane, new market that very few average people understand much less participate in. He is making himself into one of the richest men in the world right before our eyes.

This must be that populism everyone’s talking about.

Update —

The Opposite

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 19, 2025

People who demand better won’t get it from Trump

In a Seinfeld episode entitled “The Opposite” from 1994 (before my Gen Z friends were born, sorry), Jerry convinces George Costanza, perennial sad sack, that “if every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.” George tries doing the opposite of what his instincts tell him and his fortunes rapidly turn around.

The United States after instituting The New Deal built the greatest middle class the world has ever seen. Then after social and political reforms of the 1960s opened more opportunity to Americans still lagging behind, business interests organized a quiet counterrevolution to do the opposite.

The rich got their taxes cut under Ronald Reagan and fat cats got even fatter. Upward mobility stopped. Wages stagnated. President Bill Clinton loosened banking regulations opening the door for mortgage-backed securities and the subprime mortgage crisis. President George W. Bush, the supposed apotheosis of the grandees’ grand designs, cut their taxes even more and the economy crashed, impoverishing average Americans even more. The Obama administration let the fattest-cats-yet get away with their gains, and — voilà — Donald Trump, himself a privileged fat-cat-celebrity, promised the suckers he’d turn things around. He’d make America “great again,” invoking the historical period and economy his rich buddies had worked decades to unmake.

Trump’s opposite turns out to be more of the same, Eugene Robinson explains:

Trump connected with many voters who feel their current trajectory is downward, who no longer have the confidence that their children’s lives will be more affluent than their own. These voters put their faith in Trump to put them and their communities once again on a rising path.

But Trump promises to do the opposite: to double down on policies that have made the rich richer and the poor poorer.

This is already a second Gilded Age. Trump imagines adding even more gaudy gold leaf to it. He wants to return to the days of Wlliam McKinley: high tariffs, monopolies, and American expansionism. Good times for fat cats. Lean times for everyone else. After McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt came along and did the opposite.

Roosevelt promised a “square deal” for everyday Americans. Trump portrays himself as a champion of the working class, but his policies and practices say otherwise. I’ll believe him when he stops trying to fleece his supporters by selling them $40 American flag flip-flops, $55 MAGA hats and ugly red $200 sneakers.

He’s back for what will be four long years. If you love everything about him, enjoy the ride. If you don’t, spend this time planning and working to bring the Second Gilded Age to its end.

That is, if you can afford to.

Ball Of Confusion

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 19, 2025

Great Googamooga

“Look at the size of this. It’s massive,” said Trump.

How the hell did we survive four years of this deeply insecure man-child once? How did Americans get crazy enough to give this unstable knot of personality defects four more years in the White House instead of in jail?

Anne Applebaum’s account of her visit to Denmark has me waggling my head like a Lonney Tunes character. She writes that “a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.” And yet Donald Trump apparently called Copenhagen on Wednesday and demanded Mette Frederiksen do a real estate deal with him. It’s Kafkaesque.

Trump the Transactional seems to have generated a political crisis in Scandinavia even before his inauguration.

“In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion,” Applebaum writes. It’s not as if anything Trump might want the U.S. to do in Greenland is not already doable.

A former Danish diplomat related a story from 1957. The American ambassador sent the Danish prime minister a note that the U.S. was considering storing nukes at their Greenland base. Would the Danes like to be notified? Since it was not a specific ask, H.C. Hansen’s reply was:

“I do not think your remarks give rise to any comment from my side.” In other words, If you don’t tell us that you are keeping nuclear weapons in Greenland, then we won’t have to object.

The Danes are faithful trade partners and allies who lost a larger proportion of their population fighting alongside the U.S. in Afghanistan than we did. One diplomat asked Applebaum what the Danes did wrong:

Obviously, they did nothing wrong—but that’s part of the crisis too. Trump himself cannot articulate, either at press conferences or, apparently, over the telephone, why exactly he needs to own Greenland, or how Denmark can give American companies and soldiers more access to Greenland than they already have. Plenty of others will try to rationalize his statements anyway. The Economist has declared the existence of a “Trump doctrine,” and a million articles have solemnly debated Greenland’s strategic importance. But in Copenhagen (and not only in Copenhagen) people suspect a far more irrational explanation: Trump just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map.

Great Googamooga.

Windmills, sharks, Hannibal Lecter, and now Greenland, Applebaum laments. The Russians are crowing over the similarity between Trump’s territorial ambitions in Greenland and Vladimir Putin’s imperial designs on Eastern Europe. Republicans on Capitol Hill and elsewhere just smile, nod, and say, “Yes, sir. How high?”

One year shy of 250 years old, the United States is the world’s most enduring democracy, yet still in its adolescence. Many of the world’s greatest creatives do their best work as adolescents, or as recent ones. The Beatles began in their teens. Steve Jobs launched Apple at 21. The U.S. has led the world in technological advancement and politically for a century. But plenty of adolescents never survive their teens.

We were lucky once. And now?

About Those Eggs

Published by digby on January 18, 2025

Cluck, cluck:

I’m sure this is all Biden’s fault as everything bad will be for the next four years. Still, from what I’ve been told, the price of eggs is the most important issue faced by all mankind. Of course, now that Dear Leader has returned I’m sure most people will be happy to roll with the punches.

Another Sad Tech-Bro Doofus

Published by digby on January 18, 2025

Are they all like this???

From Gizmodo:

Marc Andreessen, the billionaire tech investor who co-founded Netscape, has recently been making the rounds on various podcasts to talk about how the Democrats were so very mean to him and forced him to become a supporter of Donald Trump. Andreessen’s obnoxious whining wouldn’t otherwise be notable, given how many guys in the tech industry have blamed backlash against “wokeness” on their support for the MAGA movement. But a new interview released by the New York Times on Friday is interesting, if only because the Times cleaned up its own transcript to make Andreessen sound like less of an idiot.

Andreessen said that Hillary Clinton was really running the government between 2017 and 2021. The Times claimed he misspoke but as you read further it’s clear that he’s talking about some conspiratorial deep state BS about which either the Times is unaware or they decided to ignore.

But even if Andreessen did misspeak he still sounds like a sophomoric fool, much like the rest of these tech bros who all seem to be in the grip of serious cases of arrested development.

Who knows that Showtime’s “Silicon Valley” was a documentary?

Attention!

Published by digby on January 18, 2025

I offer you a gift link to the whole interview (and transcript if you prefer.) It’s super interesting.

A little excerpt:

Klein: I think attention is now to politics what people think money is to politics. Certainly at the high levels.

There are places where money is very powerful, but it’s usually where people are not looking. Money is very powerful when there’s not much attention. But Donald Trump doesn’t control Republican primaries with money — he controls them with attention.

I keep having to write about Musk, and I keep saying he’s the richest man in the world. But it’s actually not what matters about him right now. It’s just how he managed to get the attention and become the character and the wielder of all this attention. And that’s a changeover I think Trumpist Republicans have made, and Democrats haven’t.

Democrats are still thinking about money as a fundamental substance of politics, and the Trump Republican Party thinks about attention as a fundamental substance of politics.

Hayes: I really like this theory. I think there are a few things: One, I think you’re totally right to identify that it’s sort of a sliding scale between the two. Which is to say: For politics that get the least attention, money matters the most.

So in a state representative race, money really matters — partly because no one is paying attention to who the state rep is. Local media has been gutted. Money can buy their attention. You could put out glossy mailers. There’s a lot you could do. The further up you go from that, to Senate to president, the more attention there is already, the less the money counts.

And you saw this with the Harris campaign. They raised a ton of money, and they spent it the way that most campaigns spend it, which is on trying to get people’s attention, whether that’s through advertising or door knocking — but largely attention and then persuasion: I’m running for president. Here’s what I want to do. Here’s why you should vote for me.

Now you can do that at billions of dollars’ worth of advertising, and everything is just like drops of rain in a river because there is so much competition for attention.

What Trump and Musk figured out is that what matters is the total attentional atmosphere. That in some ways, it’s kind of a sucker’s game to try to pop in and be like: I got an ad. Hey, hey, do you like tax cuts? What do you like?

All that is just going to whiz past people. The sort of attentional atmosphere — that’s where the fight is.

And that’s what Musk’s Twitter purchase ended up being — an enormous, almost Archimedean, lever on the electorate.

Hates’ book is called “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.”