onward

Scott Dworkin is an independent journalist that tries to keep up with some "good news" re Trump frequently. He is the co-founder and lead investigator of the Democratic Coalition. It's a pretty thankless job. If you can, toss Scott a few bucks at Substack.

Sunday’s Great News That’s Awful For Trump

Onward!

SCOTT DWORKIN MAR 16

Before we start another week of Trump’s chaos, I’m pleased to have more good news for you today. I truly hope it gives you some relief, and shows you that—in our fight against tyranny—we are becoming stronger and louder, every single day.

The “Tesla Takedown” movement continued to spread this weekend, with thousands of folks protesting at nearly 80 events throughout the world. Hundreds of people showed up in Baltimore, Boston, and the Philadelphia areas.

The pushback against Musk’s unhinged co-presidency is working. Tesla’s stock is down around 48% since it peaked in mid-December. Multiple stock analysts agree that Elon’s activism plays a role in the stock plummeting. JP Morgan analysts wrote: “We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly.”

National protests took place this weekend, following the unlawful detention of activist Mahmoud Khalil—a legal permanent resident of the US, married to a US citizen. Nearly 1,000 people showed up in Times Square to call for Khalil’s release.

There was another protest held outside of the US consulate in Greenland’s capital city. Roughly 1,000 people gathered in what has been described as Greenland’s largest protest ever, rallying against Trump’s attempt to annex the island.

The country’s likely next Prime Minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said: "There is not the slightest chance that I will talk to Trump about Greenland becoming part of the US. Greenland will be Greenland.”

MN Gov. Tim Walz held his second town hall of the weekend yesterday—this time in GOP Rep. Don Bacon’s Congressional District, in Omaha, NE. The crowd of hundreds greeted Walz, a Nebraska native, with chants of “welcome home!”

Walz said this about Bacon, who refuses to do in-person town halls: “Do the damn job and answer the questions.” When asked about Trump’s ban on transgender Americans serving in the military, Walz said: “This nation is less secure and less safe because of that dumbass decision that was made … This is an outrageous attack.”

Walz also said: “There are a lot of ways folks in Omaha could spend their Saturday, but they’re fed up with Trump and want to make their voices heard. I’m here with local Democrats to listen.”

A judge put an immediate halt on Trump’s attempt to deport Venezuelan nationals using an archaic wartime powers act. The judge said the use of the “Alien Enemies Act” was illegal, and ordered all deportation flights in the air to be turned around. “However that is accomplished … make sure it’s complied with immediately,” the judge said.

Michelle Obama just launched a brand new podcast called In My Opinion, along with her brother Craig Robinson. In a yet to be released episode, recorded live from SXSW in Austin, TX, Obama said: “I worry about folks being out of work, and I worry about how we think about diversity and inclusion. I think about how we treat one another, and ... what models that’s setting for the next generation.”

Obama continued, saying: “But I find in those moments that it is better not to try to figure that stuff out alone. Share those concerns. We're not going to figure this stuff out on our own. We need each other.”

Reminding us of the power we have when we are united, Obama said: “The truth is, the small power that each of us has to do something is right in front of us. If we're all doing that, it outweighs anything that some big leader somewhere can do.”

Michelle Obama nails it. Trump can make all the big moves he wants, but we can absolutely stop him if we all do our part, and work together. That’s why we formed our activism arm—The Watchdog Coalition—so that we could unite the opposition against this wannabe-king, focusing on real actions that produce tangible results.

We’ve already sent more than 216,000 letters, and made countless calls to the House and Senate. We will never stop fighting against any cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, the VA, and so much more.

And our social media following is one of the largest in all of politics, which we use to push our unmatched messaging campaigns. Like our “Hands Off Our Medicaid,” and “Republican Cuts Hurt Veterans” efforts, which generated more than a billion impressions in a matter of only weeks.

We do all of this, on top of delivering good news daily, as well as one-on-one exclusive interviews with changemakers. Unlike corporate media, we aren’t going to just copy and paste Trump’s propaganda, or repeat his lies.

We’ve been taking on Trump for 9 years, and we will never back down to him. Never.

We have zero outside investors, and we remain ad-free. Which means 100% of our funding comes from our paid subscribers on Substack. So if you haven’t yet, and you’re able, please support what we do by becoming a paid subscriber today:

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Onward!

Robert Morris

Yet another holier-than-thou TV megapastor and Donald Trump worshipper has been arrested on sex charges. Never fails. The louder you rant against something, the more guilty you are of it. The more you hold yourself up as a paragon of virtue, the more vile you act. Quite an interesting phenomenon. You'd think they'd have enough brains to shut the fuck up about stuff that YOU DO, but they cannot resist incriminating themselves. No wonder they love Trump. They recognize a fellow conman when they see one.You know, you can be a slut behind closed doors, but don't go molesting women against their will!! And don't even THINK about abusing children!! It's pretty simple!

I keep hoping that unmasking these religious hucksters will eventually cause enough people to turn away from the church, but they just keep coming. 

So many cannot seem to live without imagining that the imaginary being in the sky is looking out for them, and he cares about them, but he needs more money!!

Robert Morris, former Texas megachurch pastor and Trump adviser, indicted for child sex crimes

Morris is a former spiritual adviser to President Donald Trump, and Gateway — one of the nation’s largest megachurches — has been particularly active in Dallas-area GOP politics.

BY ROBERT DOWNEN, Texas Tribune

MARCH 12, 2025

Robert Morris, the Dallas-area megachurch pastor who resigned last year amid sexual abuse allegations, has been indicted in Oklahoma for child sex crimes that date back to the 1980s.

Morris is a former spiritual adviser to President Donald Trump, and Gateway — one of the nation’s largest megachurches — has been particularly active in politics. In 2020, Trump held a “Roundtable on Transition to Greatness” there that was attended by then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr and other prominent Republicans.

Morris faces five counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child, the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office said in a Wednesday evening press release.

The indictment comes less than a year after Morris resigned from Gateway Church in Southlake after an adult woman, Cindy Clemishire, said Morris repeatedly sexually assaulted her while she was a child in Oklahoma in the 1980s. Morris was at the time working as a traveling preacher.

In a Wednesday text message, Clemishire said through an attorney that she was grateful for the indictments.

“After almost 43 years, the law has finally caught up with Robert Morris for the horrific crimes he committed against me as a child,” she said. “Now, it is time for the legal system to hold him accountable. My family and I are deeply grateful to the authorities who have worked tirelessly to make this day possible and remain hopeful that justice will ultimately prevail.”

pervert pastor

Clemishire’s disclosure came as the Dallas religious community was still reeling from a handful of recent sex abuse scandals. Since then, at least a dozen Dallas-area churches or pastors have been accused of committing or concealing sexual misconduct — allegations that have ensnared some of the area’s most prominent leaders and institutions.

Few, if any, were more high-profile than Morris, who steadily involved himself in state and national politics after founding Gateway in 2000. In 2017, Morris was tapped by Gov. Greg Abbott to help support the so-called “Bathroom Bill” that sought to ban transgender people from using their preferred bathroom — in part by arguing that it would allow children to be sexually abused.

During Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Morris was among at least three other Dallas-area religious leaders who served on Trump’s evangelical advisory board. And in 2021, Morris was part of an effort to mobilize conservatives and evangelicals ahead of Trump’s 2024 presidential bid.

As Morris’ national political spotlight grew, so did his church’s local footprint. For years, Morris and Gateway would show slates of local school board candidates on the church’s massive screens in the lead up to elections — potentially in violation of federal rules that prohibit overt political activity by churches.

“Many of you see what Satan has been trying to do even in our school systems,” Morris told some of the church’s roughly 25,000 members in 2023, before showing a list of Republican candidates.

Those tactics have since been replicated at nearby congregations such as Mercy Culture Church. The Fort Worth church was founded with financial support from Gateway, and has become a staple of local Republican circles, often hosting local elected Republicans and the chair of the Texas GOP.

Rep. Nate Schatzline, R-Fort Worth, is also a pastor at Mercy Culture. Schatzline was among numerous Republican lawmakers who called on Morris to resign after Clemishire came forward last summer.

Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Dallas, joined those calls, and vowed to use this legislative session to pursue bills that would give more rights to victims of childhood sexual abuse — including extending the time period that victims have to file lawsuits against their attackers or those who enabled them.

This session, multiple bills have been filed that would broaden civil statutes of limitation, allowing those like Clemishire to sue those responsible for their attacks and be compensated for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime costs associated with childhood abuse.

In a Wednesday text message, Clemishire’s attorney Boz Tchividjian said she has been working behind-the-scenes with advocates for such reforms. “I don’t know if they have gotten to the point of testifying committees,” he said. “But I have no doubt she will do so when that time comes.”

Original.

Steve Liesman

This is my first attempt to post something from Bluesky HERE on my blog. Looks like it's going to work. This opens up a can of interesting worms. Hopefully those of you who are not on Bluesky will still be able to play this clip successfully. 

I'm glad to see Steve Liesman "going here" on CNBC. He has always seemed more "factual" than many who just speculate and spew crap.

Iceberg!

I wonder if Leon Skum is going to try to slash jobs at NASA too? I mean, NASA is in direct competition with SpaceX, so I can see Mr Skum trying to kill it. After all, what regular guy needs to see satellite images like the two in this story? That should be reserved only for the very wealthy, like Scum. Just in case, that is satire.

Iceberg Grinds to a Stop off South Georgia Island

NASA Earth Observatory

March 6, 2025

Antarctic iceberg A-23A, currently the largest iceberg on Earth, appears to have run aground off the coast of South Georgia island. As of early March 2025, satellite images showed little movement of the 3,460-square-kilometer (1,240-square-mile) berg after its long and winding journey across the Scotia Sea and final approach toward the island.

South Georgia is the largest of nine islands that make up the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands, a British overseas territory. While the remote island lacks a permanent human population, scientists visit its research station, and tourists visit its historical sites. The region supports abundant life, from seals and penguins to tiny phytoplankton. It also happens to lie along the northern extent of an ocean route traveled by many Antarctic bergs known as “iceberg alley.”

A-23A’s northward drift suddenly slowed around February 25, 2025, according to Christopher Shuman, a retired glaciologist with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Shuman has used satellite images to track A-23A’s drift since it wiggled free from the seafloor in the early 2020s after decades grounded in the Southern Weddell Sea. The berg is now parked more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) north of its birthplace at Antarctica’s Filchner Ice Shelf, where it calved in 1986.

The map above shows the iceberg’s location on March 4, 2025, with respect to the remote island and its underwater shelf. Its position is based on an image (below) acquired by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Aqua satellite.

Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, agrees that currents appear to have carried A-23A into the same shallow shelf region previously encountered by some notable icebergs. The last large iceberg to approach South Georgia was A-68A, a trillion-ton behemoth that encountered the island’s shallow shelf in December 2020. That berg quickly broke into two main pieces that continued to fracture and eventually disintegrate in the northern Scotia Sea around South Georgia.

Researchers later found that melting from the bottom of A-68A added 152 billion metric tons of fresh water to the ocean during its three-month stay near the island. Iceberg meltwater can potentially affect the local ocean environment. It can also add nutrients to the water that foster biological production.

Already, many ice fragments have broken from A-23A’s margins. Though these pieces appear small in the image above and are not large enough to be named by the U.S. National Ice Center, they could still affect the flora and fauna along the island’s shoreline. 

It remains to be seen what becomes of the remainder of the berg’s main mass. When icebergs make it this far north, they eventually succumb to the warmer waters, winds, and currents that make this ocean area a challenge for all seafarers. 

“I think the big question now is whether the strong current will trap it there as it melts and breaks up or whether it will spin around to the south of the island like previous bergs,” Willis said. “Time will tell.”

NASA Earth Observatory images by Wanmei Liang, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview, ocean bathymetry data and digital elevation data from the British Oceanographic Data Center’s General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans(GEBCO) and the British Antarctic Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

Mike Poirier

I detect more ferocity coming from the left about Trump and Musk. Not from our Congresscritters exactly, but from regular folks across this country. The rhetoric is sharpening, the words biting, the anger swelling at what those two clowns are doing to this country. While GOP Senators complain of getting death threats from MAGA if they dare to oppose Trump, they cower instead of rising to the bully challenge. So far, they are all weak cowards, but I still hold out some hope, however remote, that they will begin to step up and say "Enough!" Yeah, I'm naive that way, but it feels to me like the tide is turning against Trump and Musk. I guess they expected all Americans to just lie down and roll over. So far, the GOP sure is.

I borrowed the writing below from a Facebook group. Next up I will try to repost an epic rant from Chris Titus, American comedian. This one was written by Mike Poirier. No, I have no idea who he is, but he strikes me as a pretty smart guy.

Blue Rev

Elon Musk launched a Starship rocket from Texas yesterday (March 7). It got almost 90 miles high before they lost control of it and it exploded. Flaming wreckage was seen falling from the sky all the way from Florida to the Bahamas. Airports were closed from Miami to Orlando.

At least it works half the time. Out of the 8 Starship rocket launches so far, 4 have been successful. "Unfortunately this happened last time too, so we have some practice at this now,” SpaceX flight commentator Dan Huot said.

In January a SpaceX rocket launched from Texas exploded over the Turks and Caicos Islands. Fiery shards of debris literally broke the sound barrier as they screamed towards the earth, creating sonic booms that terrified people below and rattled the walls of their homes. According to seismic data, the rumbling was comparable to a small earthquake. Islanders are still picking up the random pieces of wreckage that were left scattered over their neighborhoods and beaches. The FAA also closed airports when that rocket exploded, then they grounded Starship launches.

Two weeks ago, SpaceX engineer Ted Malaska showed up at FAA headquarters with a directive from Musk to start immediate work on a program to deploy 1000s of Starlink satellites terminals to support a new revamped national air traffic system. He told them they had 18 months to get the project done and anyone in the way would be reported to Musk and risked being fired.

The conflicts of interests are obvious, with DOGE able to now undermine the same agency that regulates Musk's SpaceX, and retaliate against it from within the government. It's corruption in broad daylight. But even were it not for the ethical issues, it's not even a practical or workable solution. Starlink can work to connect remote FAA facilities, but it doesn’t have the bandwidth yet or reliability to support a robust nationwide communications network. SpaceX has no business overhauling the working system we already have, and should not be trusted to safeguard the 2.9 million passengers flying overhead every day. That's up to 5000 planes in the air at once during peak hours, going every which way. That's a lot of lives at stake. It's certainly not something to let the Ketamine Clown tinker with.

“As a backup layer or alternative connectivity provider, Starlink makes sense,” Kim Burke, a government affairs analyst at the consultancy Quilty Space, told Forbes. “But SpaceX spearheading a total overhaul of the FAA’s terrestrial networks? Not a chance.” And that was BEFORE another Starship blew up.

Some guys just buy a sports car when they have their midlife crisis but Musk is out here lobbing 400 foot phalli at Mars all day long and using us to bankroll it. He shouldn't be allowed to play sandbox with our country just because he has a disgusting amount of money. He has zero business being involved with our government. I'm not even going to start digging into the damage and theft from the corny DOGE puppet show that has people so enthralled and fooled. It's just more theater, and they're not even trying that hard anymore because their base is just that gullible.

If I had to guess what Elon is doing right now I'd guess he's probably deep in a K-hole, manically tweet-trolling the libs, or desperately trying to breed one more influencer in his own personal Führerbunker, the Banyan Cottage at Mar-a-Lago. Maybe all at the same time. Maybe he's contemplating his getaway: self-exile to Russia or possibly a rocketship to Mars. Elon is smart enough to recognize that this situation ultimately cannot be unf*cked and this is spiralling out of control. The wheels are really coming off now. His rockets are crashing. Tesla is crashing. Planes are crashing. The illusion of competency is collapsing too. This house of cards cannot hold much longer. Wherever we go from here, we're going there fast and it's bound to be exciting. - Mike Poirier

The Economist

It's not too late to stop Trump and his criminal gang, but it's going to take everyone to do it. I am becoming pessimistic that America will wake up and reject Trump and his wack policies. He has surrounded himself with toadies and yes-men, and no one has the guts to tell him he is fucking shit up. If there were any justice, the orange fuck would keel over with a major stroke and the GOP would suddenly rediscover their spine. 

Europe sees things a bit more clearly than we Americans do. They recognize the danger, while the GOP here just tries to figure out how to praise Trump enough to keep him from fucking them over. The column below is from The Economist magazine's editorial leader, whoever that is. I remember not too long ago The Economist stated that the American economy was "the envy of the world," despite Trump and his cronies repeating over and over what a total disaster Biden was. Trump is dismantling the federal government at a frantic pace, and it will take a long time to put it all back together again. 

Donald Trump's economic delusions are already hurting America

The president and reality are drifting apart

Editor’s note (March 6th): Since this article was published, Donald Trump announced that tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods covered by the North American trade agreement (roughly half their total exports to America, according to the White House) would be paused until April 2nd. Hefty tariff increases and significant uncertainty, therefore, still loom over the world economy—precisely what our leader discusses. Indeed, our cover illustration feels only more apposite.

In his speech to Congress on March 4th President Donald Trump painted a fantastical picture. The American Dream, he declared, was surging bigger and better than ever before. His tariffs would preserve jobs, make America richer still, and protect its very soul. Unfortunately, in the real world things look different. Investors, consumers and companies show the first signs of souring on the Trumpian vision. With his aggressive and erratic protectionism, Mr Trump is playing with fire.

By imposing 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, also on March 4th, Mr Trump is setting light to one of the world’s most integrated supply chains. Although he belatedly delayed duties on cars by one month, plenty of other industries will suffer. He has also raised tariffs on China and has threatened the European Union, Japan and South Korea. Some of these duties may also be deferred; others may never materialise. Yet in economics as in foreign relations, it is becoming clear that policy is being set on the president’s whim. That will cause lasting damage at home and abroad.

When Mr Trump won the election in November, investors and bosses cheered him on. The s&p 500 rose by nearly 4% in the week after the vote in anticipation of the new president lighting a bonfire of red tape and bringing about generous tax cuts. His protectionist and anti-immigration rhetoric, investors hoped, would come to nothing. A stockmarket correction or a return of inflation would surely curb his worst instincts.

Alas, those hopes are going up in smoke. Elon Musk’s doge is causing chaos and grabbing headlines, but with little sign yet of a deregulatory bonanza. (Mr Trump’s order banning the federal purchase of paper straws will do little for America Inc’s bottom line.) The budget blueprint passed in Congress in February keeps the tax cuts from 2017, in Mr Trump’s first term, but does not expand them—though it does add trillions to the national debt. In the meantime, Mr Trump’s tariff promises would return the average effective duty to levels not seen since the 1940s, when trade volumes were much smaller.

No wonder that, despite Mr Trump’s talk of a roaring comeback, the markets are flashing red. The s&p 500 has given up nearly all its gains since the election. Although economic growth remains fair, in recent weeks the yield on ten-year Treasuries has fallen, measures of consumer sentiment have plunged and small businesses’ confidence has slipped, hinting at a slowdown to come. Meanwhile, inflation expectations are rising, perhaps because Mr Trump is talking about all those wonderful new tariffs.

Underlying the alarm is a dawning realisation that Mr Trump is less bound by constraints than investors had expected. Although price rises blew up Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, the prospect of inflation is not deterring Mr Trump, who argues that the economic harm from tariffs is worth it. During his first term he gloried in the long stockmarket boom; this time markets have not featured among his many social-media posts. His postponement of the car tariffs is too short-lived for the industry to adapt. Mr Trump is sticking to his belief that tariffs are good for the economy.

Just as important, the people around the president also appear to lack influence. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, are both financiers, but if they are trying to rein in Mr Trump, they are not doing very well. Instead of being wise counsellors, they come across as stooges, explaining why tariffs are essential and Wall Street doesn’t matter. Few businesspeople want to speak truth to power for fear of drawing Mr Trump’s ire. And so the president and reality seem to be drifting ever further apart.

That threatens America’s trading partners. For some reason, Mr Trump reserves special hostility for Canada and the EU . Because his approach lacks any coherent logic, there is no knowing how to avert his threats. Worse is to come if he carries through his promise to Congress to impose reciprocal tariffs, which match the duties that American exports face abroad. That would create 2.3m individual levies, requiring constant adjustment and negotiation, a bureaucratic nightmare that America unilaterally abandoned in the 1920s. Reciprocal tariffs would strike a fatal blow to the global trading system, under which every country has a universal rate for every good that is not within a free-trade agreement.

As if that were not bad enough, tariffs will harm America’s economy, too. The president says he wants to show farmers that he loves them. But protecting America’s 1.9m farms from competition will inflate the grocery bills of its nearly 300m consumers; and compensating them for retaliatory tariffs will add to the deficit. Whatever Mr Trump believes, economic growth will suffer because tariffs will increase input costs. If businesses cannot pass them on to consumers, their margins will wither; if they can, households will experience what amounts to a tax rise.

Mr Trump’s policies set up an almighty clash with the Federal Reserve, which will be torn between keeping rates high to curb inflation and cutting them to boost growth. One of America’s most important remaining independent institutions, the Fed would have to face down an angry president used to getting his way. When the administration staged a power grab over the Fed’s regulatory responsibilities it carefully set monetary policy apart. How long would that distinction last?

MAGAlomania

The world economy is at a dangerous moment. Having defied reality (and the constitution) after he lost the election in 2020, only to be triumphantly re-elected in 2024, Mr Trump has no patience for being told that he is wrong. The fact that his belief in protectionism is fundamentally flawed may not sink in for some time, if it ever does. As the message that Mr Trump is harming the economy grows louder, he could lash out at the messengers, including his advisers, the Fed or the media. The president is likely to inhabit his protectionist fantasy for some time. The real world will pay the price.

Original.

Robert Reich

Been crazy busy over the last couple of weeks, ever since we decided to sell our home on South Padre Island and move inland. We cannot stomach the idea of twice as many, maybe three times as many rocket launches per year than are already launching. And our house cannot take that much abuse either. Today's Starship 8 launch was the loudest yet, and when the booster returned to the launch pad, there were three or four sonic booms (for ONE BOOSTER!) that were just absurdly loud. And Musk doesn't give a shit. When we first moved to the island seven years ago, we heard that SpaceX was going to build some "stuff" at Boca Chica and I was excited. But several explosions later, and multiple sonic booms later, and now Musk has turned into some kind of power-mad, right-wing, wannabe king of the world, and is indiscriminately firing hundreds and hundreds of federal workers, all the while scooping up as many federal subsidies as possible. Somebody has to stop him. 

As for the Robert Reich column below, it is just like Musk and the GOP to call Social Security a Ponzi scheme, when it is nothing of the sort. It provides cover for their own real Ponzi schemes: crypto. It's just like them to mis-name something to distract from what they are doing. Manipulative fucking bastards. 

The actual 'biggest Ponzi scheme of all time'

Robert Reich - March 6, 2025 - Alternet

I remain optimistic about the longer term, but I still awaken each morning with a sense of dread. I’m sure some of you do, too. 

Start with Elon Musk’s bonkers comment that Social Security is “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

In a Ponzi scheme, a con artist lures investors into a fake investment project, pockets the cash, and then gets new “investors” to funnel their cash to the earlier investors — until there are no new recruits and the whole thing collapses. The last ones in are suckers left holding worthless bags. 

Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s a high-functioning, universal, and exceptionally efficient part of the American social safety net — the opposite of a Ponzi scheme. Which is why the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose cutting it.

Social Security is a simple “pay as you go” program. Current workers, via the payroll tax, fund payouts for retirees and disabled people. In 2024, about 1 in 5 U.S. residents received Social Security.

I used to be a trustee of the Social Security trust fund. I know what I’m talking about. 

As the Social Security Administration explains, “In 2025, when you work, about 85 cents of every Social Security tax dollar you pay goes to a trust fund. This fund pays monthly benefits to current retirees and their families and to surviving spouses and children of workers who have died. About 15 cents goes to a trust fund that pays benefits to people with disabilities and their families.”

The only reason that the Social Security trust fund is slowly running out of money is the trustees never anticipated that so much of the nation’s total income would be in the hands of so few people (such as Elon Musk).

The simple way to fix this is to lift the cap on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes, which is now $176,100. 

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg fulfilled their 2025 Social Security payroll tax obligations a few minutes past midnight on January 1. Most Americans continue paying payroll taxes all year. 

If you want to see a real Ponzi scheme, look no further than the crypto investments Musk and Trump have hyped.

Trump’s new cryptocurrency, “$Trump,” soared and then crashed, just like every other Ponzi scheme. It generated enormous profits for insiders like Trump, but a cumulative $2 billion in losses for more than 800,000 other investors.

Trump claims ignorance. “I don’t know if it benefited” me, he said. “I don’t know much about it.” (The Trump family and its business partners earned nearly $100 million in trading fees alone on the coin.)

Musk has been promoting “dogecoin” since 2019. In the days following Trump’s announcement of the launch of Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the value of dogecoin soared over 70 percent. Since then, it’s dropped like a rock. Another classic Ponzi scheme. 

With Trump now in office, crypto is back to its Ponzi ways. It’s emerging from a four-year federal crackdown on crypto fraud, market manipulation, and other scams following the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX in 2022 — one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in recent memory.

Tomorrow, Trump is even holding a “crypto summit” at which he’ll promote the idea of a federal crypto reserve that will give crypto schemes a temporary boost by increasing demand for them. 

But why should American taxpayers foot the bill for a crypto reserve? The most obvious winner will be Trump, whose own crypto venture carries millions of dollars in tokens that are to be included in the reserve. 

Other winners will be crypto executives, many of whom donated extensively to Trump’s reelection effort. One example: Ripple, whose XRP token is one of the five that Trump said would be included in the reserve — and which donated $45 million to an industrywide PAC that sought to help elect Trump and other Republicans.

Trump’s crypto efforts are ways to curry his favor by paying him off.

Consider Justin Sun, a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur whom the Securities and Exchange Commission charged with securities fraud in March 2023.

After Trump was elected in 2024, Sun bought $30 million worth of Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto tokens, putting $18 million directly into Trump’s pockets. Since then, Sun has invested another $45 million in WLF. Altogether, Sun’s investments have netted Trump more than $50 million.

Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission just dropped its prosecution of Sun. 

The SEC also dropped its case against the crypto trading platform Coinbase after the platform donated $75 million to a political action committee associated with Trump and $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.

To top it off, the SEC just ruled that “memecoins” aren’t securities, meaning that Trump’s novelty crypto tokens won’t be subject to any regulatory oversight. An open invitation to more Trump Ponzi schemes. 

My real dread has to do with the much bigger Ponzi scheme that Trump and Musk are peddling. 

They’re promising huge “savings” from destroying the federal government — including programs like Social Security and Medicaid — savings that will go to America’s wealthy and big corporations in the form of tax cuts. 

At Musk’s urging, the Social Security Administration recently announced it will consolidate the current 10 regional offices it maintains into four and cut at least 7,000 jobs from an agency already at a 50-year staffing low. 

The Republican budget recently pushed through the House cuts over $880 billion out of Medicaid. 

Who will get left holding the bag? Most Americans. 

Zoom out and you’ll see the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all — the entire Trump 2 regime.

Trump is promising to “make America great again” by raising tariffs, deporting more than 11 million people, taking a wrecking ball to the federal government, pulverizing democracy, and joining Putin and other global dictators.

Trump is the con artist behind this giant Ponzi scheme. He lured voters into this fake MAGA project, pocketed some of the cash and rewarded his billionaire backers and friends (including Musk) with more, and will leave most Americans with a corrupt and decimated society. 

I’m still optimistic about our power to overcome this and our resilience in bouncing back from it. But the dread I feel when I open my eyes in the morning concerns the sheer magnitude of the largest and most cynical Ponzi scheme in history.

NOW READ: Republicans are totally out of touch with their MAGA base on one key issue

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

Original.

new feeds

I have added several "new" RSS feeds to this blog, from The Atlantic, HuffPost, Scientific American, The New Yorker, and a couple from the New York Times. You can find them in the right-hand column of the blog. I have discovered that some services don't actually advertise the RSS feed, but you can find a feed on their site by combing through the various sectors the site covers. I stumbled on that one by accident.

The.Ink

The.Ink is a newsletter on politics and culture, money and power - telling the truth without fear - from Anand Giridharadas.   

 

For fascism to win, they will have to stifle many journalists and writers like Giriharadas and Montopoli. I haven't seen a sign any overt act of that yet, but we must be vigilant. We are going to have to beat Trump a second time, and this time it's much more serious than before.

Government is a miracle

Why DOGE's attack on "waste" is really an attack on an entire century of progress

THE INK

 AND 

BRIAN MONTOPOLI

An age of miracles…

…brought to you by…

…the government

By Brian Montopoli

Feb 26, 2025

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan summed up his political philosophy — and set the country on the path Elon Musk and his team of junior developers are speedrunning right now:

I think you all know that I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.

Reagan had by then given millions of Americans frustrated by major cultural changesomeone easy to blame: Uncle Sam. That was who was supposedly allowing those so-called “welfare queens” to live lavishly on your hard-earned dime. That was who was making your life harder and more confusing. And that was who needed to be stopped.

And that’s the argument that Donald Trump (and Elon Musk with DOGE, and Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget) are making now: forget about inequality, disinformation, gun violence — the country’s real problems are “waste,” “fraud,” and “abuse” by the federal government, eliminating those means “saving” the country, and almost anything can be justified in the effort. 

The message still lands because people tend not to realize just how much their government does to make their lives better: from building roads to regulating commerce to a million other things we never have to think about, achieved with a whole lot of work by (or with the support of) government in the century-and-a-quarter since the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era. This is the PR problem faced by good government: When things work so well that we get used to them, we stop appreciating how lucky we are that they're there at all.

Imagine how today’s world might look to someone who had gone to sleep a century ago — and then somehow woke up in today’s America. This Rip Van Winkle would, correctly enough, view ours as an age of miracles.

Think about it: We have easy access to a huge variety of fresh, safe, delicious food. We get clear and drinkable water piped into our homes. The entirety of human knowledge is literally at our fingertips. We don’t worry about most of the illnesses that used to kill more than 40 percent of children before the age of five. These are just a few of the once-unthinkable astonishments that we take for granted. 

These wonders exist largely because of — yes — the government, which has played a central role in creating the elaborate and complex systems that make it all possible. Now, however, the Trump administration, wielding the blunt instrument of Elon Musk’s DOGE team, is putting many of these crucial systems at risk. And Americans may soon realize just how important the government has been to their daily lives. 

Start with food safety. Last week, the head of the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division resigned, citing the firings of much of his staff — including people who work on the safety of infant formula. Meanwhile, the new administration is poised to ramp up deregulation and reduce oversight of the food industry. That will almost certainly lead to an increase in deadly outbreaks of foodborne illness — think of the listeria contamination in Boar’s Head deli meat that killed ten last year.

Next, consider our protections against infectious disease. The administration has laid off more than 1,000 people who work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which will hamper our response to bird flu and other emerging threats — any one of which could become the next pandemic. (Remember how that went last time around?)

Meanwhile, the anti-vaccine activist now leading the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., says that as part of his campaign against real and imaginary threats to American public health, he’s going to “investigate” the vaccine program that has for the last half-century and more kept Americans and their children from dying due to diseases like measles. That is a first step, most who are familiar with his anti-vaccine career think, toward limiting or eliminating the availability of vaccines. And it doesn’t take much vaccine hesitancy to cause a crisis, as we’re seeing in the current Texas measles outbreak.

Whether they realize it or not, millions of Americans depend on the federal government to step in and help in the event of a natural disaster. Well, the administration is now working to effectively eliminate the office that oversees response to wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters. It has also fired many of the employees whose job it was to prevent nuclear disasters — including the top authority for all nuclear safety matters. As for the water that comes out of your tap? The administration just laid off hundreds of people from the Environmental Protection Agency, which works to ensure that we have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink.

Speaking of miracles: For decades, we have felt safe in the knowledge that we can safely board airplanes to travel to distant lands, or just across the country to find a new job or visit family. But the Trump administration has fired hundreds of people at the Federal Aviation Administration whose job is to keep the skies safe. Since that decision, we have seen an alarming spate of plane crashes.

The list goes on and on. The National Park system — a flagship achievement of the Progressive Era — that gives Americans access to nature is now being seriously diminished, prompting staffers to hang an upside-down American flag — a distress signal — at Yosemite. These parks, one of America’s greatest achievements, are being kneecapped, purportedly for the sake of a minuscule reduction in the federal budget. The Trump regime has, by the way, also dismantled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that has worked to prevent Americans from being swindled out of their hard-earned savings — an obstacle removed for Musk and other wealthy oligarchs.

Some of what we are losing will not be easy to measure. But over the long run, these losses could be even more devastating. The administration has fired thousands of people who worked at agencies that do research into how to fight diseases likely to kill us — including cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, slowing or stopping progress toward medical advances that save lives. (Republican Rep. Tom Cole, whose father died of Alzheimer's, has called that Alzheimer's center "critically important.")

The administration argues that all these firings are targeted cuts that eliminate waste. But that claim is most clearly belied by the fact that Elon Musk and his army of teenage DOGE employees have absolutely no idea what they are doing, or just don’t care. They are making sweeping cuts without any real understanding of the operation of these agencies — as illustrated by the fact that they’ve had to hastily rehire some crucial employees caught up in their broad, indiscriminate firings. None of what DOGE or Trump or Russell Vought are up to has much to do with fiscal responsibility, except in the most tangential and performative way.

Even if you put aside the cuts to research and services that are likely to hurt millions of Americans, kill who-knows-how-many from preventable illnesses, and further kick the can down the road on humanity’s inevitable reckoning with climate, a good chunk of what’s being cut is the country’s ability to pay for anything at all — and as a bunch of former IRS heads wrote the other day, you don’t get your finances in order by firing your accounts receivable department. They’re simply sacrificing any return on the investment we’ve all made in good government.

Trump’s “golden age” is, it turns out, just a gilded one. And we’ve seen that before: massive inequality, class warfare, the rolling back of the gains of Reconstruction — that’s the legacy of the Gilded Age, and returning to that is only good if you’re a robber baron.

Reagan had argued that the way to reign in government was by attacking “waste” — setting that — in bad faith — against an alternative, taxing regular folks more:

The progress we've made is a good start, but it's little more than a ripple in the river of waste, fraud, and abuse that's been rising for years. That's why it's clear the way to reduce the deficit is by strong economic growth and by reducing wasteful bloated government, not by raising taxes on you, the people.

Reagan’s heirs — and Musk is, whether he knows it or not, calling back to that conservative tradition — are responding to Americans’ anger over things like diminishing social mobility, deindustrialization, and the speed of social change by channeling that toward disdain for the government But that just papers over the problem, of course.

The things Musk is attacking aren’t bloat or waste — they are what makes American success possible in the first place. He should and does know — his businesses are dependent on federal research dollars and direct spending. The fortunes of the entire broligarchy — the people standing behind and poised to benefit from the privatization to come — are rooted in the fertile ground of federal research dollars.

Musk and his team either don’t understand or don’t want to understand the systems they are attacking. Consider their targeting of the “probationary” employees they fired across various agencies, mostly because there are fewer legal barriers to letting them go. 

“Probationary” employees, it turns out, are often longstanding employees who have been promoted — they’re “probationary” only in their new role. High achievers, the best and brightest in their fields. And now they’re looking for work.

The best-case scenario? The systems that enable modern American life may survive the Trump administration, if in a weakened state. The possibility of dying from contaminated food will increase but remains remote. Our access to crucial medical interventions will be diminished, but not be cut off. We may still be able to visit our national parks, with more trash and longer wait times. Our world of modern miracles endures, tarnished but intact. It could be a lot worse — and it might be.

We should realize what we are losing, and why. The systems that make modern life so remarkable are under attack. The march of progress that has steadily made life better is now being slowed. And for what? A relatively miniscule cut, if any, in federal spending, and a significant consolidation of oligarchic power — what Senator Chris Murphy has called the “most massive transfer of wealth and resources from poor people and the middle class to the billionaires and corporations in the history of this country.” The costs of this assault on our nation are already exponentially higher than any supposed savings we might get in exchange. And generations to come will pay those costs.

Indeed, what Trump and Musk have in mind goes beyond what Reagan imagined, and owes more to the way tax revolt crusader Grover Norquist (who wanted not just to wipe out the New Deal, but to return government to its supposed pre-Teddy Roosevelt scope, i.e., back to the Gilded Age) infamously put it in 2001:

I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

America can’t afford to let that happen, so it’s time to learn to swim. 

It’s going to take a long time to undo the damage, and depriving Elon Musk of his billions is only the beginning. Winning Democratic victories in 2026 and beyond is only the beginning. It’s going to take a transformation of how we see public goods — creating an understanding of just how valuable these things we build together as a country really are: solid gold, not gilt.

Original.