Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. No vax/anti-vax this week.
Category: Uncategorized Page 8 of 105
From Ken Klippenstein, written by Elias Rodriguez
The Embassy shooter’s manifesto is short, to the point and entirely sane. I won’t wring my hands and say I think he was wrong, I will merely note that it is illegal to kill Israelis, and that unlike the butchers of Gaza, he will be punished.
Explication
May 20, 2025
Halintar is a word that means something like thunder or lightning. In the wake of an act people look for a text to fix its meaning, so here’s an attempt. The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification. Instead of reading descriptions mostly we watch them unfold on video, sometimes live. After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls Israel had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well. At time of writing the Gaza health ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force, at least ten thousand lie under rubble, and who knows how many thousands more dead of preventable disease, hunger, with tens of thousands now at risk of imminent famine due to Israeli blockade, all enabled by Western and Arab government complicity. The Gaza information office includes the ten thousand under the rubble with the dead in their own count. In news reports there have been those “ten thousand” under the rubble for months now, despite the continual making of more rubble and repeated bombing of rubble again and again and the bombing of tents amid the rubble. Like the Yemen death toll which had been frozen at some few thousand for years under Saudi-UK-US bombardment before being belatedly revealed to stand at 500k dead, all of these figures are almost surely a criminal undercount. I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the toll at 100,000 or more. More have been murdered since March of this year than in “Protective Edge” and “Cast Lead” put together. What more at this point can one say about the proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children. We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians’ forgiveness. They’ve let us know as much.
An armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares with many unarmed actions. Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point. Never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West. Never before had so many American politicians been forced to concede that, rhetorically at least, the Palestinians were human beings, too. But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much. The Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians. Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged, they’ll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they’re doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright. Aaron Bushnell and others sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre and the state works to make us feel their sacrifice was made in vain, that there is no hope in escalating for Gaza and no point in bringing the war home. We can’t let them succeed. Their sacrifices were not made in vain.
The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion, then. The impunity we see is the worst for those of us in immediate proximity to the genocidaires. A surgeon who treated victims of the Mayan genocide by the Guatemalan state recounts an instance in which he was operating on a patient who’d been critically injured during a massacre when, suddenly, armed gunmen entered the room and shot the patient to death on his operating table, laughing as they killed him. The physician said the worst part was seeing the killers, well known to him, openly swagger down local streets in the years after.
Elsewhere a man of conscience once attempted to throw Robert McNamara off a Martha’s Vineyard-bound ferry into the sea, incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam as he sat in the ferry’s lounge laughing with friends. The man took issue with McNamara’s “very posture, telling you, ‘My history is fine, and I can be slumped over a bar like this with my good friend Ralph here and you’ll have to lump it.'” The man did not succeed in heaving McNamara off a catwalk into the water, the former secretary of state managed to cling to the railing and clamber back to his feet, but the assailant explicated the value of the attempt by saying “Well, I got him outside, just the two of us, and suddenly his history wasn’t so fine, was it?”
A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn’t exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.
I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O*****
Free Palestine
-Elias Rodriguez
•U.S. 20Y Yield: Spiked to 5.097%, up +10.7 bps intraday. •10Y Yield: Rose +11.1 bps to 4.592% •30Y Yield: Jumped +10 bps to 5.067%
This caused stocks to trend down and even the dollar. Simply put, the US is adding a lot of debt, reducing revenue by cutting taxes, and there’s wild amounts of uncertainties due to Trump’s tariff and trade policies. Bond traders are worried, Japan is reducing its Treasuries’ holdings, and everyone is looking imploringly at the Federal Reserve.
As a friend quipped, “the economy is perfectly healthy, as long as we keep it on life support.”
Which is to say the likely result is that the Federal Reserve will have to step up and start buying Treasuries again. The last time it did that was during Covid.
“Print more money to bail out elites.”
But here’s the problem. The US really is trouble. Yes, in principle the US can print as much money as it wants, like any sovereign that issues its own currency. But that’s not the issue. The question is, “What does the money being printed produce?”
QE has essentially produced richer elites, more monopolization, a poorer general population (a recent study found 60 percent of Americans cannot afford a “decent” lifestyle), and higher prices. You could also say it has funded a less competitive US that is falling further and further behind in technology.
It’s what you spend money on that matters. All QE has EVER done is make it so that current elites stay in power, keep getting richer, and are rewarded for driving Americans into the ground at very accelerating speeds.
The Fed can’t rescue the US from spending its money to do all the wrong things. That requires legislative and executive action. Those parts of the government, however, are even more fickle and stupid than the Fed, which is like saying that Mount Everest is taller than K2. Technically true, but both are so tall (stupid) that it beggars belief.
If there’s something the US can do wrong right now, it’s doing it wrong, and it if it isn’t, it’s a legacy policy they haven’t gotten around to fucking up yet.
At donor retreats and in pitch documents seen by The New York Times, liberal strategists are pushing the party’s rich backers to reopen their wallets for a cavalcade of projects to help Democrats, as the cliché now goes, “find the next Joe Rogan.”
Here’s the thing, Rogan could lean left (not centrist, left). Remember this?
Here’s the deal: There will never been a popular, centrist online presence which is stronger than the right-wing populist one. Centrists don’t do popular. They don’t have the instincts. It’s all about pandering to elite and PMC ideology — think Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and their ilk. They can run numbers, sure, but no one gets super worked up. No one who wasn’t going to vote Democratic no matter what loves them.
Rogan is a populist. He was willing to go left, he’s willing to go right. He’s not going to go Centrist. There will never be a centrist Joe Rogan.
This is a symptom of a larger problem.
Six months after the Democratic Party’s crushing 2024 defeat, the party’s megadonors are being inundated with overtures to spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an army of left-leaning online influencers.
If by “left-leaning” they meant left, this would be theoretically possible, but what they mean is centrist:
Democrats widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media-like sports or lifestyle podcasts. Many now take it as gospel that Mr. Trump’s victory last year came in part because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, in addition to the many Trump-friendly hosts on Fox News.
It’s been memory-holed, but there was a time when the left was stronger than the right online — vastly stronger. In the 2000’s, the days of the so-called Netroots or blogosphere, it wasn’t even close. The big names were left-wing, and the biggest right-wingers did numbers that were one-tenth of theirs.
This was widely acknowledged. There were mainstream press articles about the right-wing’s online problems.
Then Obama took power, and the word went out: If you’re a Democratic operative or donor, you should stop funding Netroots, and if you don’t, well, you will be frozen out of work as an operative, and if you’re donor, your interests will not be prioritized.
It was there, I was an insider, and I know. The combination of Google and Facebook systematically driving advertising revenues into the dirt, along with some other issues (basically related to Democratic core voters lack of any actual principles other than, “Our party is always right, the Republicans are always wrong, and the left owes us their votes and has nowhere to go”), Netroots died. It took a few years, but the job was done.
The Netroots’ mantra was, “more and better Democrats.” We fundraised for Democrats, but we also primaried Democrats we considered bad. This was unconscionsable to Democratic power brokers. We were supposed to be entirely an adjunct and not interfere in internal Democratic politics at all. So, they put Netroots down like a diseased dog.
Democrats want a cheering section. They don’t want anyone who will do anything but promote the candidates chosen by insiders.
That’s NOT how a popular online movement works. It isn’t how any of the movements which have been successful on the right worked. They all primaried Republicans they didn’t like and pushed policies they believed in — even if the party didn’t agree.
So donors can throw as much money as they like at the problem, but unless they’re willing to fund the actual left, and to understand that funding doesn’t mean they get complete control, they will fail.
It would be better to encourage already existing, left-wing populist figures and give them some funding, as opposed to trying to astroturf a new online movement.
But then, an already-existing figure might say, “Free Palestine” or “Biden is senile,” and they can’t have that.
No one will really trust an astroturfed “left-wing” figure, and they won’t grow to huge stars.
You can have effective, powerful left-wing online populists, or you can have court eunuchs who always back the party line.
Choose one.
by Tony Wikrent
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Trump in TROUBLE as Amy Coney Barrett SNAPS at Supreme Court (YouTube video)
[Legal AF, May 16, 2025]
[TW: Leah Litman, Michael Popok and Alex Aronson discuss the Supreme Court hearings on Friday 5-16-2025. This is ostensibly about birthright citizenship, but perhaps the more important issue is whether US District courts can impose injunctions nationwide. I do not recall ever before having linked to a discussion of Supreme Court hearings, but these were extraordinary in showing how (anti)Republicans and conservative are attempting to obliterate two and a half centuries of legal development and reasoning in the USA republic’s experiment in self government. Recall that the (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians repeatedly sought and obtained injunctions to stop implementation of Biden policies they disliked. But now that Democrats and liberals are stopping Trump policies with court injunctions, (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians are arguing that only the Supreme Court can impose nationwide injunctions.
[But it’s even worse: Trump’s former personal attorney, now serving as U.S. Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, actually argued that a court injunction can apply only to the particular case and the particular litigant. (This was the point in the hearings that Justice Amy Coney Barrett sputtered “Really?” with some incredulity.) In other words, according to Sauer, if you want to prevent Trump / Musk / DOGE from disposing of 12,351 workers from an agency, you would need 12,351 injunctions for each of the 12,351 agency workers to protect all of them. As Justice Sonya Sotomayor, pointedly asked Sauer, “You’re talking about the hundreds and thousands of people who weren’t part of the judgment of the court. They would all have to file individual actions?”
Litman, Popok and Aronson also discuss how (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians are pushing for laws and legal decisions that would almost totally restrict the path for class action lawsuits, the only alternative to using court injunctions to legally protect large groups of people. With this, you see the outlines of the legal assault on American law and jurisprudence that has been developed during the past half century in the seminars and conferences by the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, Mercatus Center, and the rest of the apparatus of plutocrat-funded conservatives and libertarian entities.
[As I have argued before, the “left’s” response to this assault on American law and jurisprudence has been crippled by the “left” rejecting the legitimacy of American history and institutions for being based on racism and misogyny. I firmly believe this is the primary reason the doctrines and ideas being developed by conservatives and libertarians were largely ignored for the past half century. The “left” has yet to deal with the question of why the plutocrats are expending so much to reinterpret and change American law and jurisprudence. What was there in place before the plutocratic assault that plutocrats want to obliterate, and the “left” has been ignoring?
[Especially frightening is that “Justices” Thomas and Alito appear to have accepted Sauer’s arguments.]
In Birthright Citizenship Case, Trump DOJ Asks Supreme Court Justices to Make Themselves Irrelevant
Garrett Epps, May 16, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
… Thursday’s argument had two aspects, which appeared and disappeared like the Katzenjammer Kids playing peekaboo throughout the nearly three hours of oral argument. The Court had formally assembled to hear the first: When is it okay for one federal district judge to block a government policy nationwide?
The second was: Has every Congress, every Court, and every administration for the past century and a half read the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause wrong, leaving Donald Trump, on his sole authority, to upend the rule that all babies born in the U.S., except the children of diplomatic families, are citizens at birth?
Though Sauer began his argument by boldly proclaiming the administration’s novel interpretation of the Amendment (it applied, he said, only to the children of free slaves in 1868 and has no effect on the children of immigrants today), he quickly moved to the administration’s real aim in bringing this “emergency docket” application before the Court.
In Sauer’s view, the case was about a broader issue than the permissibility of “universal injunctions” (federal district court orders that block new executive policies nationwide). Article III of the Constitution, which created the federal judiciary and gives it its powers, he argued, does not permit any federal court, at any level, to issue such injunctions.
This raises the question: What if the government loses in the district court—and then loses again in the Court of Appeals? What if it loses in the Supreme Court? What court can order it to stop engaging in behavior that Article III courts have found to violate the Constitution?
Without quite saying so, Sauer let it be known that the answer is: None.
If plaintiffs won in the Supreme Court, he graciously conceded, they could take the judgment to the bank—for themselves, that is. But Sotomayor asked him, once the Court decided the constitutional issue, would its order bind the government to stop the unconstitutional action against anyone?
Well . . . said Sauer . . . Not so much.
The result of such a case, Sauer said, would not be a Supreme Court order binding everyone else, but instead a Supreme Court precedent. And of course, plaintiffs still being injured by a government policy (for example, by being rendered stateless by an executive order) could cite that precedent in their cases. “If there was a decision that violated the precedent of the Court, then the affected plaintiffs could get a separate judgment,” he said.
Responded Sotomayor, “You’re talking about the hundreds and thousands of people who weren’t part of the judgment of the court. They would all have to file individual actions?”
Maybe not, said Sauer—if the case could satisfy “the rigorous criteria of Rule 23,” to be certified as a class action.
But if not, said Sotomayor, “you are claiming that not just the Supreme Court—that both the Supreme Court—and no lower court can stop an executive from universally, from violating those holdings by this Court.”….
If a president can simply wave away that much adverse authority—and then only grudgingly apply his losses in court—then the role of the federal courts will be, from now on, quite different from the one they have played for the past 100 years. American-style judicial review would become something like the Mexican writ of amparo, by which parties can get a judgment blocking an unconstitutional law only as to their individual cases; others in the same situation must go to court to get their own amparo. In the atomized world envisioned by the administration, judicial review might be called the Writ of Sisyphus. No matter how often a court pushes the rock up the hill, it will face the same task over and over if the government so chooses.
McKay Coppins, May 16, 2025 [The Atlantic, via ownwithtyranny.com]
…Vought’s critics have warned that elements of his agenda— for example, unilaterally cutting off funding for congressionally established agencies such as USAID— are eroding checks and balances and pushing the country toward a constitutional crisis. But in interviews over the past several weeks, some of his allies told me that’s the whole point. The kind of revolutionary upending of the constitutional order that Vought envisions won’t happen without deliberate fights with Congress and the judiciary, they told me. If a crisis is coming, it’s because Vought is courting one.Bannon told me that mainstream Republicans have long complained about runaway federal bureaucracy but have never had the stomach to take on the problem directly. Vought, by contrast, is strategically forcing confrontations with the other branches of government. “What Russ represents, and what the Romneys and McConnells don’t understand, is that the old politics is over,” he said. “There’s no compromise here. One side is going to win, one side is going to lose, so let’s get it on.”… Vought himself has written that we are living in a “post-Constitutional time.” Progressives, he argues, have so thoroughly “perverted” the Founders’ vision by filling the ranks of government with unaccountable technocrats that undoing the damage will require a “radical” plan of attack. “The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years,” he wrote in an essay for The American Mind, a journal published by the Claremont Institute.What exactly would such an approach look like in practice? Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and a friend of Vought’s who helped steer judicial nominations in Trump’s first term, told me that he expects an escalating series of standoffs between the Trump administration and the judicial branch. He went so far as to say that if the Supreme Court issues a decision that constrains Trump’s executive power in a way the administration sees as unconstitutional, the president will have to defy it. “The reptiles will never drain the swamp,” Davis told me. “It’s going to take bold actions.”
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, May 5, 2025 [Wall Street on Parade]
Last Wednesday, Congressman Sean Casten, Democrat of Illinois, stated the following in an open meeting of the House Financial Services Committee:
“For the first time in my memory, foreign investors are not only fleeing U.S. equities but are fleeing U.S. Treasuries. I met with banks last week – banks under our jurisdiction – who said that the international community is putting a risk premium on investments in the United States because of regulatory risk and because they question whether the rule of law that they depend on to execute contracts in the United States will be executed as it will be in European markets where that capital is running to.
“So, if you need to tell yourself before you go to bed that you’re a deficit buster, fine, but just acknowledge you’re lying. This is not about deficit busting. This is about making rich people richer, and that’s it.”
Has Asia just taken a step away from the US dollar?
Alice Li, 7 May 2025 [South China Morning Post]
Asia’s largest economies have broken new ground by approving an emergency financing tool using the yuan and other local currencies
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 4, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
‘We’re Not Stopping’: Trump Border Czar Vows to Ignore Judges
[The Daily Beast, via MSN 03-18-2025]
Judges Who Rule Against Trump Become Target of New MAGA War
Malcolm Ferguson, May 2, 2025 [The New Republic]
At least 11 federal judges and their families have been threatened and harassed since they ruled against President Trump on issues of deportations, federal funding, and his war on “wokeness.”
The judges, under anonymity, told Reuters that they had received multiple intimidating calls and emails to their homes and offices. Some have been subject to the disturbing “pizza box” method, in which antagonists will anonymously send a pizza to the home of a judge or their relatives just to show that they know where they live.
This is only compounded by the countless attacks and doxxing attempts that people like Laura Loomer and Elon Musk have made on X. When U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled against Trump’s illegal deportation of 137 men under the Alien Enemies Act in March, Loomer and Musk shared photos of his daughter, while their army of keyboard warriors called for the execution or arrest of Boasberg and the rest of his family. Loomer did the same to Judge John McConnell after he blocked Trump from freezing education grants, posting a picture of his daughter who had worked for the Education Department. Loomer’s post conveniently omitted that McConnell’s daughter left the department before Trump was even inaugurated….
You Already Knew He’s The WORST President Ever— Did You Also Know He’s The Most Blatantly Corrupt?
Howie Klein, April 26, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
…On Thursday, Drew Harwell and Jeremy Merrill reported that shady characters have poured tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s meme coin since he advertised on Wednesday that top purchasers could join him for an “intimate private dinner” next month. “The holders of 27 crypto wallets have each acquired more than 100,000 $TRUMP coins, stakes worth about a million dollars each, since noon on Wednesday, when the team announced that the 220 top coin holders would be rewarded with a ‘night to remember’ on May 22 at the president’s Trump National Golf Club outside Washington. Crypto wallets are generally anonymous, making it challenging to identify who the purchasers were.”
They also advertised something so blatantly illegal that they partially removed it, no doubt at the insistence of White House lawyers: an offer of a tour of the White House for the 25 top $TRUMP coins purchasers. Now they’re just offering a tour but with no indication of what. This idea of offering direct presidential access to those who pay into a project benefiting the Trump personal bottom line would be enough to get him impeached if House Republicans weren’t so wedded to enabling his criminality. Not one House Republican has spoken out about this.Harwell and Merrill wrote that “the biggest buyer acquired 2 million coins worth about $24 million.” That’s a substantial bribe, especially coming from a criminal in China who desperately needs a pardon from Trump. “Taken together, the 27 wallets acquired more than 8 million $TRUMP coins, worth about $100 million as of Thursday afternoon…
Howie Klein, May 2, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, was even stronger on the same particular crime: “Never before in American history have foreign governments, as well as people and corporations under investigation, so overtly and directly funneled vast sums to the president of the United States and his family. This is far more than is captured by the term ‘conflict of interest.’ It is foreign policy for sale and justice for sale. And, as one of the executives in the deal said, ‘it is only the beginning.’ With a president who has no regard for the basic norms of propriety, ethics, the law or the U.S. Constitution, the question is: Will the U.S. Congress permit this mockery of the American people? Or will it insist on the most minimal baseline standards, so that foreign governments cannot send money directly to the president and his family?”
How Trump Accidentally Sabotaged His Own Case Against Abrego Garcia
Greg Sargent, May 3, 2025 [The New Republic]
He has now said it right out in the open—not once but twice. In two major interviews, President Donald Trump openly declared that he has the power to bring the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States. And on both occasions, Trump said straight out that he is not doing so because administration lawyers have told him he doesn’t have to—or that he shouldn’t.
This has been widely seen as an admission that Trump is defying the Supreme Court, which has directed the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Yes, it is that. But these two moments are also their own story. They offer a unique glimpse into the deep rot of bad faith infesting Trump and Stephen Miller’s broader project to expand the president’s removal powers into something extraordinarily vast and entirely unaccountable….
Public Records Wreckers: The consequences of gutting FOIA offices are both obvious and unknowable.
Will Royce, Andrea Beaty, May 1, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Ten months ago, Roman Jankowski sent dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), among other agencies. He was one-third of a three-man fishing expedition spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and the Daily Caller to dig up dirt on civil servants, particularly if they were the type to use phrases like “climate equity” or “voting.” ….
Today, Jankowski oversees FOIA compliance for DHS as its chief FOIA officer. His agency receives more public records requests than any other by a wide margin. And instead of gumming up FOIA administration from the outside, Jankowski now works for an administration that is attacking FOIA by firing many of the federal employees who respond to those requests, precisely what his records requests sought to facilitate….
While the administration staunchly refuses to be “maximally transparent,” groups like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) are trying to get answers. CREW is currently suing the Trump administration for refusing to comply with its FOIA requests on DOGE’s activities. To prop up their argument that DOGE and Musk aren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the administration has claimed that Musk doesn’t work for DOGE—despite Trump’s personal posts and a basic comprehension of daily news contradicting that idea—and that the roughly 100 operatives under Musk’s direction are not acting independently from the office of the president.
Joyce Vance, Joshua Kolb, Lily Conway, and Bri Murphy, May 02, 2025
This week, the Trump DOJ was dealt two significant blows by two Republican-appointed district court judges. On Thursday in Texas, Trump-appointee Fernando Rodriguez, Jr., ruled that the Trump Administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act—a 1798 law that allows the government to detain and deport noncitizens from the country during wartime—was improper and unlawful. Rodriguez, Jr., ruled that Trump’s proclamation “exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”
Earlier in the week, Judge Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia, who was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, lambasted the Trump Administration, preventing Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from being decimated and ruling that “It is hard to fathom a more straightforward display of arbitrary and capricious actions than the Defendants’ actions here.” Lamberth then took an extraordinary step back from the particulars of the case to strongly defend the independence of the judiciary in our constitutional system, writing: “By enjoining the defendants’ efforts to dismantle the plaintiff networks, actions which I perceive to be contrary to the law, I am humbly fulfilling my small part in this very constitutional paradigm—a framework that has propelled the U.S. to heights of greatness, liberty and prosperity unparalleled in the history of the world for nearly 250 years. If our nation is to thrive for another 250 years, each co-equal branch of government must be willing to courageously exert the authority entrusted to it by our Founders.”
Beyond the judiciary, institutions that bent the knee to Trump faced setbacks while those that held resolutely against intimidation were rewarded. Notably, Microsoft, one of the largest companies in the world, dropped the law firm Simpson Thacher—among the shops that caved and made a deal with the Trump White House—and signed up Jenner Block, one of the three law firms that challenged Trump’s Executive Order in court. The cowardly firms that acquiesced cited, as their prime justification, their obligation to their clients to maintain good relations with the government. That was always a false choice, but it was also foolhardy in the long run—after all, what client wants a lawyer who will be intimidated by its bad-faith adversary?
That is indeed courageous, a fact that can be quantified. In the law firms’ litigation against the Trump Administration, hundreds of firms banded together to sign an amicus brief defending their colleagues and decrying the president’s Executive Order. The first amicus brief a couple weeks ago, supporting Perkins Coie’s lawsuit, secured about five hundred firms; this week, another amicus brief in the Jenner Block suit garnered around eight hundred signatories.
Men DOGEbags at Work
‘There’s Never Been a More Blatant Corporate Incursion Into the Public Sector Than DOGE’
[FAIR, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]
Jeff Hauser is the executive director of the Revolving Door Project:
“We, in general, track corporate influence in politics, with a particular focus on the executive branch. And there has never been a more blatant corporate incursion into the public sector than DOGE, which reflects the privatization of our domestic policy, and increasingly our foreign policy as well, by people who are not even bothering to give up any of their private sector ties, and actually join the government for a few years—which we’re not fans of; we believe in career civil servants. But these people aren’t even doing that much. They’re just continuing to run, say, Tesla and SpaceX while running large swaths of the government, and never having been put before the Senate for nomination.”