Roaming Charges: Schlock and Chainsaw |
American Art Center, 2. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: “Here are our monsters,” without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
– Jacques Derrida
Musk and Trump’s intended Shock and Awe bombardment of the federal government has turned into an Opéra Bouffe of Schlock and Chainsaw.
Here is Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Howard (Net worth: $808 million) Lutnick’s message to seniors (whose ranks I have now reluctantly joined) on the gutting of the Social Security Administration: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out your check this month. My mother-in-law, who is 94, wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and will get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming and yelling and complaining.” As a writer who worked for decades as a freelancer, if I were to take my Social Security payments at the age of 65, the check would amount to about $40 a day. Try living on that for a month, never mind two months. The billionaire “economic populists” who are running the country haven’t the faintest clue how most of us live…
How many landlords are cool with you delaying your rent payment by a month and then not having enough left in the bank to pay the current rent?
Musk or Bust (Your Social Security checks)! Leland Dudek, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, has threatened to shut down the agency in response to a court ruling blocking Elon Musk’s DOGE demolition teams from accessing sensitive taxpayer data.
Financial journalist Michael Lewis (The Big Short) talking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on his new book, Who Is Government?:
When people throw around insults at federal bureaucrats, they’re really revealing they don’t know what goes on in federal government. It’s a mind-bendingly complicated place that does lots of different things, some of which they do very well and some less well. When you go in, you realize how hard fraud would be to perpetrate. Waste is different. Waste is more complicated. There are all sorts of inefficiencies that aren’t really the fault of the workers, that’s more the fault of the structure of the system. But you can’t take a federal worker to work and buy them a turkey sandwich. They just won’t take the money. They are watched every which way and they are conditioned to be very careful about what they do financially. If you said Mike, I’d like you to write a story about fraud; I’d much rather look for it in a private company…I worked on Wall Street. A million things happen every day in a Wall Street firm that if it happened in the civil service, it would be a scandal.
Even worse, DOGE’s mission is to defund and demolish the government agencies who are investigating fraud on Wall Street, while Trump issues executive orders and waivers removing any oversight for their own corrupt practices and conflicts of interest.
As Trump and Musk eviscerate the Federal Trade Commission, Public Citizen compiled a list of the donations made to the Trump campaign by corporations currently under investigation by the FTC…
Corporations currently facing FTC investigations & lawsuits that collectively gave $8,000,000 toward Trump’s inauguration:
Abbott $500K
Adobe $1M
Amazon $1M
Coca-Cola $250K
Meta $1M
Microsoft $1M
OpenAI $1M*
Syngenta $250K
Uber $2M*
*includes CEO donations
The Federal Trade Commission has erased from its website all content critical of Amazon, Microsoft, and AI companies published during the Biden administration.
This week, DOGE fired a disabled veteran who was working at the VA Medical Center in Salem, Virginia, despite excellent performance ratings. “This has put my wife and I in a terrible place mentally and financially…I’m being told by HR that I have lost everything.” And yet they want to require disabled, chronically ill, and injured people to work in order to qualify for Medicaid.”
Christopher Fasano, a former Senior Enforcement Attorney at the Consumer Financial Protection Board, on his firing by DOGE: “It happened on a Tuesday night at about 8:30. I got an email to my personal email address. It said that my skills and abilities did not meet the agency’s needs at that time. And that was it. And after that I was locked out of my computer and locked out of my work phone. And at that point, no longer employed by the CFPB. What really upsets me more than anything else is that all of the consumers I’ve spent my career defending are being left undefended at this moment. The worst companies, companies that Elon Musk runs, will be able to take advantage of them and commit all sorts of financial abuse and crimes.”
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker: “Trump has handed over the reins of power to Elon Musk and his fellow DOGE-bags.”
Earlier in the week, Lutnick told CBS News that Trump’s goal is to eliminate taxes for anyone earning less than $150,000 a year. He’s actually raising them for anyone earning less than $360,000 a year…
Trump has chosen Crystal Carey as the NLRB’s next general counsel. A former NLRB staffer, Canyon has been working at the union-busting law firm Morgan Lewis, one of whose biggest clients is Amazon.
Fortune reports that “finance leaders are losing faith in the economy, with optimism plummeting 20% since last quarter.”
Goldman Sachs: “Trump won’t lead to a capital markets boom on Wall Street.”
According to Bloomberg News, the head of the world’s biggest ocean carrier has said that proposed US fees on Chinese-built ships and the companies that own them could raise container rates by 25% if imposed.
The Hippie Pope may be on his deathbed, but he still sees capitalism for what it is.
US Treasury Secretary Bessent: “There’s going to be a de-tox period for the economy.”
“De-Tox Period”: A recession generated by Trump’s insane tariffs followed by austerity measures for the 99% and tax cuts for the 1%.
An analysis of the House GOP’s budget bill by the Yale Budget Lab shows that it will enable an enormous transfer of wealth from the lowest-income Americans to the richest…
Income Group / Minimum Income / Change in Income
Bottom 20% / $0 / -%1,125
2nd Quintile / $13,840 / -430
3rd Quintile/ $38,065 / $357
4th Quintile / $67,185 / $1.132
Top 20% / $125,010 / %6,222
Top 10% / $191,360 / $10,085
Top 5% / $272,065 / $16,835
Top 1% / $646,875 / $43,500
Top 0.1% / $3,265,655 / $180,910
Trump attacked the “globalist” Wall Street Journal…(though I don’t think “antiquated” is part of his standard 78-word vocabulary.)
Consumer confidence in the economy has now hit a 29-month low.
Deutsche Bank predicted that the market sell-off would continue for another 6% after steep declines in consumer and corporate confidence.
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the GOP plan will increase the federal debt more than any measure in recent history, including the COVID relief and infrastructure bills.
Dark Lord Cheney: “Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter.” They only care about tax cuts and Pentagon spending and will use the deficits they create to justify further slashing federal social welfare spending.
According to Goldman Sachs, the recent plunges in the S&P 500 are “consistent with a market that is pricing in more recession risk.”
Do you know what’s genuinely “inefficient”? The federal government not collecting income taxes from one of the world’s largest corporations…
By contrast, undocumented immigrants paid $59.4 billion in federal income taxes in 2022.
Tesla is recalling 48,000 Cybertrucks (one of the ugliest cars ever made) because the roof panels keep falling off while the vehicle is being driven. That’s 7 thousand more Cybertrucks than Tesla has sold (38,965)…
Pay of average Tesla worker: $27 an hour.
Musk’s income: $4 million an hour.
On the other hand, Musk has lost $120 billion of his personal wealth in the past month. That’s four billion a day or $166,666,666 every hour. Though I’m sure that comes as cold comfort to his underpaid workers.
As Tesla’s stock price continues its slide (down 53% since December and 35% in the last month), company insiders have begun dumping their shares:
Board Members / Value of shares sold
Kimbal Musk: $27........