The Trump administration on Wednesday nixed federal approval of New York’s “congestion pricing” automobile tolls, which had been instituted just last month to raise funds for the region’s aging mass transit system.
In a letter to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the federal government has jurisdiction over highways leading to Manhattan and that these additional tolls posed an unfair burden in motorists outside the city.
Duffy called the tolls, targeting Manhattan-bound drivers, “backwards and unfair.” “New York State’s congestion pricing plan is a slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners,” Duffy said in statement.
[…]
MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber said Wednesday the New York transportation agency will go to court to fight any federal efforts to end the tolls.
“Today, the MTA filed papers in federal court to ensure that the highly successful program — which has already dramatically reduced congestion, bringing reduced traffic and faster travel times, while increasing speeds for buses and emergency vehicles — will continue notwithstanding this baseless effort to snatch those benefits away,” Lieber said in a statement.
Congestion pricing underwent a thorough federal review and proved its benefits, according to the MTA head. “It’s mystifying that after four years and 4,000 pages of federally-supervised environmental review — and barely three months after giving final approval to the Congestion Relief Program — USDOT would seek to totally reverse course,” according to Lieber
It’s anything but mystifying. We know exactly why they are doing it. It will be interesting to see how New Yorkers take it, however:
“Before the start of congestion relief, talk of lawsuits and doubts dominated the conversation, but now it’s the undeniably positive results we’ve been seeing since week one,” MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber said in a statement Wednesday.
The MTA says travels times have improved in the Congestion Relief Zone by as much as 59% during peak afternoon hours. Officials say traffic patterns indicate more drivers are shifting to off-peak hours, as the plan intended.
Data shows most of the vehicles entering the zone were passenger vehicles, followed by taxis and for-hire vehicles and then small trucks. Of them, 43% entered the zone north of 60th Street, 24% came from Brooklyn, 17% percent came from New Jersey and 16% from Queens.
Inbound trip times at all Hudson and East River crossings are at least 10 percent faster than they were last January, according to the MTA. The Holland Tunnel has seen the biggest improvement, with a 48% reduction during the morning commute, the MTA says. On the East Side, the Williamsburg and Queensboro Bridges have both seen 30% faster trips.
Officials say drivers on the Long Island Expressway, NJ 495 and Flatbush Avenue have also seen improved speeds.
I guess he thinks he’s servicing his biggest fans but you have to wonder if they’re going to be as happy as he thinks they will if the traffic goes back to the way it was before.
By the way, when are they going to weigh in on the toll roads all over the east coast? Millions of those working class and small businessmen pay those too. The only difference I can see is that they don’t have any positive effect on the traffic.
Musk: If the will of the president is not implemented and the president is representative of the people that means the will of the people is not being implemented and that means we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy. Does that make sense? pic.twitter.com/cRAjd8VauJ
“We live in a bureaucracy.” Lol. No, it does not make sense.
Here’s a little lesson for Elon that he must have missed when he became a citizen:
He does seem to be familiar with this:
The Führerprinzip was the basis of executive authority in the government of Nazi Germany. It placed the Führer’s word above all written law, and meant that government policies, decisions, and officials all served to realize his will. In practice, the Führerprinzip gave Adolf Hitler supreme power over the ideology and policies of his political party; this form of personal dictatorship was a basic characteristic of Nazism. The state itself received “political authority” from Hitler, and the Führerprinzip stipulated that only what the Führer “commands, allows, or does not allow is our conscience,” with party leaders pledging “eternal allegiance to Adolf Hitler.
A pillar of Trump’s political strength has been public belief that his policies will be good for the economy, and his rating on the economy remains significantly higher than the final readings of his predecessor in office, Democrat Joe Biden, who ended his term with a 34% approval rating on the economy. But Trump’s rating for the economy is well below the 53% he had in Reuters/Ipsos polling conducted in February 2017, the first full month of his first term as U.S. president.
In the latest poll, only 32% of respondents approved of Trump’s performance on inflation, a potential early sign of disappointment in the Republican’s performance on a core economic issue after several years of rising prices weakened Biden ahead of last year’s presidential election. Trump defeated Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, in the Electoral College and narrowly won the popular vote.
Fifty-four percent of respondents in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll said they opposed new tariffs on imported goods from other countries, while 41% were in favor of them. Increasing tariffs on Chinese goods had higher levels of support, with 49% in favor and 47% against.
It’s likely to get a whole lot worse. Economist Jesse Rothstein has some bad news:
It seems almost unavoidable at this point that we are headed for a deep, deep recession. Just based on 200K+ federal firings & pullback of contracts, the March employment report (to be released April 4) seems certain to show bigger job losses than any month ever outside of a few in 2008-9 and 2020.
To be clear: Even greater damage will be done by the loss of federal government productivity. The workers who are losing their jobs were worth more than they were being paid! We are all poorer when roads, planes, and food are unsafe, when parks are closed, etc.
That’s not even talking about the effects of the tariffs and the deportations.
But don’t worry, at least we won’t have to put up with DEI at the FAA anymore. I’m sure it will all be worth it.
Update — I should have added this:
Note that approval of his economic stewardship is lower than it ever was in the first term and it’s sinking fast. That’s an alarm bell that he doesn’t seem to be hearing.
President Trump took some questions yesterday as he finished yet another round of golf and wound up another long weekend at his Florida resort. Elon Musk was a big topic which appeared to get on his nerves especially when a reporter wanted to know what position the multi-billionaire actually held now that the White House has said that he is not actually running the DOGE department after all. He responded, “So, you know, you could call him an employee, you could call him a consultant, you could call him whatever you want… but you know what? Ukraine’s a bigger deal.”
He sounded quite irritated that they were asking him about such trivialities when he is the one who has world leaders quaking in their boots as he re-makes the whole world in his image. He’s clearly delegated the wrecking of the federal government to Musk, to which he’s only peripherally paying attention, so that he can concentrate on wrecking the world order. Both men are doing a bang-up job so far.
Trump’s still planning on threatening allies and adversaries alike with draconian tariffs virtually designed to destabilize the world economy which has only recently come out of the pandemic. He’s being advised by his fellow convicted felon Peter Navarro who is reportedly pushing him to go fully maximalist under the assumption that they will force foreign manufacturers to completely move their operations to the United States in order to avoid them. Yes, they really seem to think that will happen.
But Trump’s real interest these days is as the creator of a new American Empire, the prince of peace and prosperity who will end all wars simply by exercising what he believes to be his infinite power to force the people of the world to pay up.
He’s quite serious about annexing Canada, buying Greenland, invading Mexico, seizing the Panama Canal , “owning” the Gaza strip and turning into a shopping mall. As unlikely as those all are, there is one that looks as though he may pull it off and it’s absolutely terrible. He is now in the process of selling out Ukraine and Europe to Vladimir Putin for which he thinks he’ll win the Nobel Peace Prize.
You’ll recall that he vowed to end the war within 24 hours of being elected and then immediately after the inauguration, neither of which happened, of course, because they were daft promises. He has also always said that the war never would have happened if he were president by which I think most of us assumed he meant that Putin would never have had the nerve to invade in the first place. But his comments in recent days indicate something quite different. He holds Ukraine responsible for the war and apparently thinks that had he been in office when Putin invaded they would have followed his orders to surrender immediately.
Just yesterday, he excoriated the Ukrainians saying they never should have started the war, that they could have “made a deal.”
"You should have never started it" — Trump to Ukraine, which very much did not start the war pic.twitter.com/xDLQKQ6mev
He also claimed that they need to have elections because Zelensky is at a 4% approval rating (which is a lie, he is between 50% and 60%, better than Trump) saying “I like him personally, but it is the leadership that allowed the war to go on.” As always, never a bad word to say about Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s angry comment was in reaction to the fact that Zelensky expressed his unhappiness that the U.S. and Russia have decided that they are now going to negotiate a deal without any input from Ukraine or Europe, the two parties who have the biggest stake in the outcome. He said, quite rightly, that there can be no deals without Ukraine at the table.
It’s pretty clear how this is going to go and it’s very bad news for Ukraine, Europe, NATO and global stability in general. It started with Trump’s triumphant phone call with Putin a week ago in which Putin clearly made Trump feel all tingly inside because he’s had a glow about him ever since.
He dispatched his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance to Europe for meetings where both of them embarrassed the United States almost as much as Trump usually does. Hegseth blathered on about “hard power” sounding more like a 70s porn star than a Defense Secretary and gave away most of America’s leverage by saying outright that Ukraine would have to give up territory and would never be allowed to enter NATO. (I’m fairly sure Trump told him to do that — that part of the deal’s already in the bag.)
Vance, meanwhile, was expected to speak about Ukraine but instead lectured the Europeans on their culture and values and told them they should be nicer to Nazis. He did meet with Zelensky for the purpose of getting him to promise to pay the U.S. $500 billion for the United States’ support over the last three years. (The U.S. has not spent even a quarter of that and most of it went to American military contractors.) The proposed deal included no security guarantee and included not only the rare earth minerals that Trump’s all excited about, but ports, infrastructure, oil and gas, everything. Zelensky politely declined.
If this draft were accepted, Trump’s demands would amount to a higher share of Ukrainian GDP than reparations imposed on Germany at the Versailles Treaty, later whittled down at the London Conference in 1921, and by the Dawes Plan in 1924. At the same time, he seems willing to let Russia off the hook entirely.
They point out that Trump has said publicly on Fox News that unless Ukraine agreed, the country would be handed to Putin, saying “they may make a deal, they may not make a deal. They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday. But I want this money back.” Spoken like a true mob boss.
A mineral deal was actually proposed by Zelensky last September in the hopes that the U.S. would be more likely to continue to protect it as an asset. The idea has recently been pushed by S. Carolina GOP Senator Lindsey Graham who thinks he’s very clever at manipulating Trump like a 3 year old by giving him a financial incentive to continue backing Ukraine. But Zelensky will not turn over all the resources of the country in perpetuity or turn it into an American colony. And Trump clearly has no intention of continuing to support Ukraine militarily. He sees this deal as payback for services already rendered.
As for the future, the Financial Times reported that Trump is now considering withdrawing US troops from the Baltics and perhaps even further west. At the meeting on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia between the US, represented by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov the focus was more on the ecstatic reconciliation between the US and Russia than any potential cease fire or peace deal in Ukraine. There was lots of talk about “economic opportunities” which would obviously include the lifting of sanctions.
All of that comes with the understanding that Russia gets to keep whatever territory they’ve taken, the growing disdain for Europe by the U.S. government, the slow dissolution of NATO and absolutely no demand for anything from Russia in return. Vladimir Putin must be a very happy man indeed. Trump may think he’s the King of the World but I think we know who the real winner is in all this.
Oligarchs are waging a war on the working class, and they are intent on winning. But this is what I know: The worst fear that the ruling class in this country has is that Americans come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthy few.
Bernie as a presidential candidate struck me as a one-trick pony: class struggle. But he knows that trick in his bones.
“The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats,” entrepreneur Nick Hanauer wrote over a decade ago To: My Fellow Zillionaires:
But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?
I see pitchforks.
Better late than never.
The Congress won’t save this republic. Nor will the courts. The press is owned by and enabling the oligarchs. We are going to have to take to the streets. It’s just a matter of when.
A friend just yesterday said you will know someone by what they’re willing to die for. He and his spouse recognize that taking to the streets under Trump 2.0 involves physical risk. Their strategy is never to both go to the same event. One has to be there for the grandkids.
Even as Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger saboteurs bleed federal agencies of skilled public servants and threaten nuclear stockpile security at the National Nuclear Security Administration, Donald Trump is selling out Ukrainian allies to Russia and again trying to shake down NATO. Trump on Tuesday blamed President Volodymyr Zelensky for presiding over a country “that has been blown to smithereens” in a war he falsely accused Ukraine of starting. Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago.
Zelensky responded, “Unfortunately, President Trump – I have great respect for him as a leader of a nation that we have great respect for, the American people who always support us – unfortunately lives in this disinformation space.”
As do we all.
Nice country you got there
The Telegraph of London reports on the $500 billion “deal” Trump’s agents dropped on Ukraine in exchange for its strategic minerals. The Telegraph obtained a Feb. 7 draft of the offer Trump must think Ukraine can’t refuse:
The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity. It implies a burden of reparations that cannot possibly be achieved. The document has caused consternation and panic in Kyiv.
[…]
The agreement covers the “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine”, including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure (as agreed)”, leaving it unclear what else might be encompassed. “This agreement shall be governed by New York law, without regard to conflict of laws principles,” it states.
The US will take 50pc of recurring revenues received by Ukraine from extraction of resources, and 50pc of the financial value of “all new licences issued to third parties” for the future monetisation of resources. There will be “a lien on such revenues” in favour of the US. “That clause means ‘pay us first, and then feed your children’,” said one source close to the negotiations.
I don’t think we should call it a “deal.” After all, isn’t a deal something in which both sides bring something to the table? What Trump suggested was that Ukraine give the United States half of the revenue it gets from resource extraction, as far as I can tell in perpetuity. Trump suggested that this would amount to $500 billion, although this seems like a wildly exaggerated sum.
In return, Trump offered, well, zero. No additional aid, no security guarantees, no nothing.
Many of us look at Ukraine and see a nation heroically defending freedom against heavy odds, receiving arms and money from the world’s democracies but doing all the fighting and dying — a nation that deserves our deepest gratitude. Trump, however, apparently thinks that America’s past aid — which has been substantial, although Europe has given considerably more — entitles us to strip Ukraine of its wealth.
Not to mention, Krugman adds, that if Vladimir Putin conquers Ukraine, there is no way he’d honor Trump-the-Dealmaker’s deal. That would be the deeply stupid part.
Trump’s vision isn’t even the old-fashioned imperialism of Weimar Germany, but more like “the Belgian Congo in the late 19th century, a personal possession of King Leopold which he brutally exploited for its rubber and ivory.”
And the price of this depravity would be to mark America irrevocably as a rogue nation, one nobody will want to deal with and nobody will trust to honor its promises.
Donald Trump is taking America out of NATO to join the Warsaw Pact.
Well done, my Republican friends. You have no character, no conviction, and your legacy will be the betrayal of the Greatest Generation's sacrifice.
You are a disgrace and will be remembered for who you are.
Trump is not simply operating in a disinformation space, or in a 19th century space, or in a depraved and deeply stupid one. He and his broligarch accomplices are operating in a fundamentally un-American one. Over the last century, American troops rode into Europe (twice) and the Pacific in white hats to save the world from the very imperialism and fascism Trump and his red-hatted goons now embrace like Trump’s friends in the Autocrats Club.
Trump has twice sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” and to uphold its laws, then set about finding ways to subvert them. His effort to elide the unambiguous language of the 14th Amendment and strip birthright citizenship from a class of Americans he dislikes is indefensible. Not that conservatives in his thrall won’t try.
The only thing American about Donald Trump is his birth certificate. You can’t even say that much about Elon Musk or J.D. Vance sponsor Peter Thiel.
If Trump wants to revoke birthright citizenship, let’s start with his.
a feeling of well-being combined with a tingling sensation in the scalp and down the back of the neck, as experienced by some people in response to a specific gentle stimulus, often a particular sound.
Note that the original tweet came from the official White House feed.
We are dealing with sociopaths. They don’t try to hide it. And because of that it is rational to be horrified and enraged right now about what these people are willing to do to us. Normalizing this level of sadism and cruelty can only lead in one direction.
I just assume now that all Republicans agree with these sentiments since none of them have said a peep about any of this.
Never forget that even as President Musk is destroying the government agencies and Trump’s henchmen are taking apart the Department of Justice piece by piece, when he isn’t pretending to be Alexander the Great and playing golf he’s making money for himself and his family. This term they aren’t even trying to hide it:
The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration left her job this weekend after a clash with billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service over its attempts to access sensitive government records, three people familiar with her departure said Monday.
The Oval Office meeting convened by President Trump brought together the most important leaders in the world of professional golf: Jay Monahan, the top executive at the PGA Tour, and, via telephone, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of the Saudi Arabia-backed league known as LIV Golf. The stated goal was to figure out a way to eliminate roadblocks preventing the planned merger between the rival two groups.
But the gathering earlier this month said something even more important about the Trump administration itself. Mr. Trump was not simply using the power of his office to forge an agreement — something that presidents have done for centuries. In this case, Mr. Trump was pushing a merger that relates to his own family’s financial interest. The Trump family is a LIV Golf business partner. The family has repeatedly hosted LIV tournaments at its golf venues, including one planned in April at the Trump National Doral in Miami for the fourth year in a row.
There was a time when a president was harassed for four years for allegedly taking a phone call from his son when he was Vice President years before. You know, that whole HUnter Biden thing. Today, Trump is putting together million dollar deals for himself right in the oval office.
It seems trivial now considering what else they are doing to actually kill, sicken and impoverish Americans. But it’s still worth mentioning, I think. The President of the United States is selling the presidency of the US to a Saudi Arabian golf tournament for his own profit. And that’s on top of a whole bunch of Trump Org. deals all over the world. I honestly won’t be surprised if he signs the deals in the Oval like he signs his Executive Orders.
Ask yourself what you would have thought during the Bush administration if anyone had told you this would happen in the future.
The NY Times has a good piece today (gift link) looking at the inside workings of the Adams case at SDNY. It is truly astonishing. What this case proves is that what’s happening is truly the complete corrupt Trumpification of the DOJ that goes way beyond just seeking retribution for the Special Counsel prosecutions.
This is a remaking of the department as a full-fledged political arm of the president and this case was chosen in particular to demonstrate to the lawyers and the public that they plan to use that power. By choosing to protect a Democrat who made an appeal directly to Donald Trump, licking his boots and promising to do his bidding, they have shown that it’s not about the past, it’s about the future. By choosing the SDNY, the flagship office of the DOJ, they prove that no office has any independence.
This is the conclusion of the piece:
Across the department, dismay has set in over the standoff in the Adams case, which echoes a grim moment during the Watergate scandal known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Rather than carry out an order from President Richard M. Nixon to fire the prosecutor investigating him, several senior political appointees resigned.
The current conflict, some in the department believe, is even worse. When senior leaders resigned in 1973, they were in essence standing up to the White House, even as political appointees.
But now the department’s leaders are taking aim at their own lower ranks, in what many current and former Justice Department officials describe as a profound betrayal of the shared cause of justice.
Mr. Bove and Ms. Bacon could have signed the Adams motion at any time, without drawing other department lawyers into it, the officials said. Proceeding this way appeared to accomplish little more than forcing career prosecutors to capitulate.
It was a power play, pure and simple.
And they will find people in the department more than willing to sign on. A bunch of people resigned as you know, and the man who ultimately agreed to sign the dismissal is a long time career prosecutor considered to be a sort of hero because he took the hit to his integrity mostly because he had already been tainted with an earlier case. I’m not really sure I understand all that but I take their word for it.
But the Trump cult has infected many people you might have thought would have some integrity. Here’s an example:
Many in the group considered Mr. Sullivan’s decision to step forward an honorable act.
Along with Mr. Sullivan, another lawyer put her name on the document: Antoinette Bacon, known as Toni. Current and former Justice Department officials view her role more critically.
A longtime prosecutor in Ohio, Ms. Bacon had joined the administration to run the criminal division — an appointment that had been initially greeted with relief by career officials. But as the standoff between Mr. Bove and the career prosecutors persisted last week, many who report to Ms. Bacon came to see her as unquestioningly following Mr. Bove’s instructions, despite her years of experience as a corruption prosecutor.
Ms. Bacon’s former supervisor in Ohio, Ann Rowland, expressed disbelief at her actions.
“Toni is one of the foremost public corruption attorneys in the country, so she knows the Adams indictment is more than worthy of prosecution,” Ms. Rowland said. “One then can only conclude her decision to sign off on the motion to dismiss was purely political.”
She signed that loyalty oath so she had to sign this dismissal. That’s how things are going to work in Trump’s DOJ. The Constitution is toilet paper — you do as the king says.
In the office of the DC US attorney’s office today, another career prosecutor in charge of the criminal division resigned after being told to “claw back” grants that the Biden administration had already sent out, another violation of the Constitution. That order apparently came from the main justice department.
That’s right — Bove cited a Project Veritas video. That’s where we are.
Last night the White House submitted a filing to Judge Tanya Chutken that Elon Musk does not lead the DOGE and has no power to do anything but advise the president. Apparently, this was an attempt to head off her potential ruling that DOGE is not properly constituted to do what it’s doing, particularly under the leadership of the unaccountable Musk:
