The Trump administration’s immigration sweeps that included more than 2,000 arrests in two days and have chilled many immigrant communities were followed by another blitz: A barrage of video and photos from the federal government showing agents in tactical gear and vests emblazoned with “Police ICE” and “Homeland Security” taking cuffed suspects away.
The made-for-TV look of the arrests is not a coincidence.
Trumps ego was hurt, the only recovery from that is to burn it all down. See cutting off NIH and Federal health organizations at the knees because they dare said that he was wrong about COVID. The possible catastrophic results to that is of no concern as long as Trump gets his revenge.
Indeed, there is, and all of it stomach-churning but this paragraph gave me a real “What the fuck?” moment:
TV talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw announced on social media he was “embedded” with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement team in Chicago as operations began. McGraw released video showing him interviewing the Trump administration’s new “border czar,” Tom Homan, at what was described as an ICE command center.
“Dr. Phil” is literally using this human tragedy to boost his social media presence? What an utter goon; he was opprobrious enough before but this takes his hypocrisy to unexplored levels of assholery.
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Different agendas; the Heritage Foundation fucks and people like Stephen Miller are focused on rounding up and deporting immigrants (and if a few documented people or actual US citizens get caught up, them’s the breaks). The oligarchs and techbros are focused on making money, hawking crypto, and finding ways to jam ‘AI’ into everything in a regulation-free environment. They figure—more or less correctly, at least in the near term—that the economic disruptions won’t impact them because they could give a fuck about the price of eggs or choosing between food or medication. Meanwhile, all the people who voted Trump “because of inflation” are going to get a rude awakening.
That’s not what’s happened in Russia. The more the economy tanked, the more the oligarchs made. Their American counterparts will extract as much as they can from America, and then move on to the next country.
Yep. I won’t try to characterize what’s happening right now or make predictions about where it all goes, but…
If all these hot real estate markets around the country were suddenly devastated by a 25% price drop, who but the wealthy (and institutional investors) is poised to capitalize on that?
How did the ‘recovery’ phase of the 2008/9 Great Recession play out? Who profited?
When these “deep discounts” hit, they devastate most of us. They’re naught but clarion call ‘buy’ signals to those well placed to act.
It’s bloody hell on the rest of us, but … who thinks the US’s wealthiest give a shit about that?
I’ve also mentioned how much the available housing stock might grow if you simply deported the current occupants. The reason that many of these houses aren’t for sale is that people … actually live in some of them.
I’m hoping this gets traction in the media. As a longtime fed employee, this is just such a change from what I have perceived as acceptable.
Add in the apparent firings of DOJ personnel. It will be interesting to see how the Courts respond. Good heavens, there must be tousands of new law suits over the past week. I wonder who is keeping track…
This asshole is going to actively kill people. Clinics aren’t supposed to even distribute drugs they already have on the shelves.
The Trump administration has instructed organizations in other countries to stop disbursing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics.
Appointments are being canceled, and patients are being turned away from clinics, according to people with knowledge of the situation who feared retribution if they spoke publicly. Many people with H.I.V. are facing abrupt interruptions to their treatment.
Late on Sunday night, according to an email viewed by The New York Times, employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were instructed, effective immediately, to stop communicating with personnel at the World Health Organization.
They were later directed not even to be in the same meeting room — real or virtual — as W.H.O. employees or to participate in email conversations in which W.H.O. staff members are also engaged.
One study estimated that if PEPFAR were to end, as many as 600,000 lives would be lost over the next decade in South Africa alone. And that nation relies on PEPFAR for only 20 percent of its H.I.V. budget. Some poorer countries are almost entirely dependent on the program.
“The oligarchs” are not themselves a unified polity, and they have little interest in immigration policy beyond (for the techbros) access to H-1B visa candidates (not so much because they are cheaper but because they are beholden to whomever sponsors them in a near servitude fashion). The finance people care about the markets; the real estate moguls are concerned about property values; the mortgage and student loan holders care about ‘customers’ for those services; techbros are googlie-eyed about AI, SpaceX, and whatever biotech fad is currently making the rounds. Literally none of that is impacted by the price of consumer goods, dismissal of independent oversight and mass firing/forcible retirement of federal agencies, or removal of undocumented immigrants, at least in the near term.
There are basically two economies; the ‘fantasy football’ economy of hype-bloated speculation where the ultrarich are currently living with the ‘money’ protected by ‘charitable’ foundations that function as bulletproof tax shelters, and the real economy where people earn wages to buy basic necessities and go bankrupt from one bad accident or medical malady, and the Venn diagram of the two are lightyears apart. For sure, the “oligarchs” don’t give a good whore’s fuck about whether tens or hundreds of thousands of people leave critical gaps in the capability of federal agencies (although many may welcome the effectively oversight-free regulatory environment that creates), the effects of inflation (which may well serve them in the near term by also inflating their own holdings), or brown people that don’t code. And I’ll note that in post-Soviet Russia, the oligarchs owed their fortunes and fealty to Putin, not the other way around, and we can see a somewhat similar trend here where even some of the richest of them (*cough* Bezos) who aren’t Trump’s “First Buddy” are performatively ‘bending the knee’ to kiss the ring even though they have enough wealth to insulate them from anything but a total autocrat.
Except insofar as they can use the power of government and the parts of the federal agencies they aren’t actively dismantling to achieve their odious goals, which right now is focused on Trump’s (and Bannon, Miller, et al) goal of ridding the country of as many immigrants as they can. Right now it is ‘illegal’ immigrants, then they’ll start going after those with work visas and green cards, and you can follow that trail all the way down. They sure as fuck don’t care about governing for the sake and benefit of the governed, and they’ll walk hand in hand with the grifters if they can all get on board on the ‘culture war’ issues and worship at the alter of Trump. This is what fascism looks like.
He doesn’t give a fuck, and I’d argue that he never really did except that it distracted from starting two pointless and massively expensive wars. Frankly, if he spoke up, the MAGAs would go at him like they did Cindy McCain and Liz Cheney. He’s painting his dog pictures and laughing up with Michele Obama now, and y’all just move on.
But the consensus quickly changed when it became evident that the email address was being signed up not just for NGO newsletters but for a massive swath of listservs in what appears to be an attempt to make the email address’s inbox basically unnavigable. One Democratic operative said they discovered that the email had been added randomly to several Democratic party fundraising email lists after the people operating one such list got a bounceback reply suggesting that the account no longer worked. The Bulwark sent its own email to DEIAtruth@opm.gov and received no such auto-reply…
The Trump White House did not return a request for comment. But there is a fair bit of data to provide clues as to what type of material is being sent to the DEIAtruth@opm.gov account. People have suggested emailing the account Scientology emails, porn, the script of The Bee Movie , and warnings that unqualified, mediocre white people are being hired to head up important government agencies…
