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.

A top economics reporter goes off script on national TV: “I am going to say this at risk of my job, but what President Trump is doing is insane.”

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— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen.bsky.social) March 11, 2025 at 10:10 PM

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.