Life in Post Democracy Era: The Trump 2/Elon Dictatatorship
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The Evil Genius
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CobraCommander
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LumberThe Evil Genius wrote: Fri Mar 28, 2025 4:13 pm
Not surprising. Canada really doesn't need the US.. but we need Canada for oil, electricity, tourism, etc.
Law Firm Skadden Chooses To Surrender To Trump
President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP preemptively cut a deal with the administration to ward off the potential threat of an executive order targeting the firm.
The deal requires the firm to provide $100 million in pro bono services to the Trump administration, Trump said during a White House appearance. A spokesperson for Skadden did not immediately respond to a request for comment or confirmation on the deal.
Skadden joins the New York powerhouse firm Paul Weiss in choosing to surrender to the Trump administration amid threats to their ability to access government contracts and maintain clients with such contracts. Unlike the situation with Paul Weiss, Trump did not even need to issue an executive order to get the firm to bend the knee.
Click on the link for the full article
President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP preemptively cut a deal with the administration to ward off the potential threat of an executive order targeting the firm.
The deal requires the firm to provide $100 million in pro bono services to the Trump administration, Trump said during a White House appearance. A spokesperson for Skadden did not immediately respond to a request for comment or confirmation on the deal.
Skadden joins the New York powerhouse firm Paul Weiss in choosing to surrender to the Trump administration amid threats to their ability to access government contracts and maintain clients with such contracts. Unlike the situation with Paul Weiss, Trump did not even need to issue an executive order to get the firm to bend the knee.
Click on the link for the full article
Welcome to the Pro-Death Administration
From climate change to nuclear weapons to lethal disease, the Trump administration seems to have decided that preventing mass death isn’t really government’s business anymore.
Perhaps, in retrospect, the most important turning point in the evolution of the contemporary far-right elite occurred in April 2020, just a month into a pandemic that would ultimately become a mass extinction event, killing more than seven million people worldwide. Condemning public health restrictions, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said, “There are more important things than living.”
Patrick, who has proudly stood by that ghoulish statement, meant that the government had a higher obligation to keep the capitalist economy moving than to save any of its citizens from premature death. This sounded shocking to many people at the time, but it’s a philosophy that Trump, Musk, DOGE, and company have now fully embraced.
Our nation’s founders would not have agreed. The point of human society and government, wrote John Locke, the seventeenth-century Enlightenment theorist from whom Thomas Jefferson and other American founding thinkers got many of their ideas, was that people need to band together in community to protect each person’s “life, liberty and property.”
Screw that—especially the “life” bit, is what the political right has been saying for a while. Contemporary conservativism has largely jettisoned the notion of a government’s “duty to protect” its citizens, a phrase that goes back to the Reconstruction era. But never has the rejection of the “duty to protect” found such vivid and chilling expression as it has in Trump’s second term. The Trump–Musk administration has morbidly committed itself to an enthusiastically pro-death agenda.
Let’s take fatal illnesses. On Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he was cutting 10,000 HHS employees, including those tasked with responding to disease outbreaks. (Another 10,000 employees already took “voluntary” buyouts.) Agencies affected by those cuts include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—which will lose an estimated 18 percent of its staff—the National Institutes for Health, the Food and Drug Adminstration, as well as Medicare and Medicaid. Meanwhile, bird flu rages among the nation’s poultry and experts fear that it could turn into a deadly human pandemic. Yet the Trump administration has not even staffed the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, established by Biden in 2022, and his administration is reportedly rethinking a contract with Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine, as RFK Jr. publicly floats just letting the virus run wild among the nation’s flocks.
Click on the link for the full article
From climate change to nuclear weapons to lethal disease, the Trump administration seems to have decided that preventing mass death isn’t really government’s business anymore.
Perhaps, in retrospect, the most important turning point in the evolution of the contemporary far-right elite occurred in April 2020, just a month into a pandemic that would ultimately become a mass extinction event, killing more than seven million people worldwide. Condemning public health restrictions, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said, “There are more important things than living.”
Patrick, who has proudly stood by that ghoulish statement, meant that the government had a higher obligation to keep the capitalist economy moving than to save any of its citizens from premature death. This sounded shocking to many people at the time, but it’s a philosophy that Trump, Musk, DOGE, and company have now fully embraced.
Our nation’s founders would not have agreed. The point of human society and government, wrote John Locke, the seventeenth-century Enlightenment theorist from whom Thomas Jefferson and other American founding thinkers got many of their ideas, was that people need to band together in community to protect each person’s “life, liberty and property.”
Screw that—especially the “life” bit, is what the political right has been saying for a while. Contemporary conservativism has largely jettisoned the notion of a government’s “duty to protect” its citizens, a phrase that goes back to the Reconstruction era. But never has the rejection of the “duty to protect” found such vivid and chilling expression as it has in Trump’s second term. The Trump–Musk administration has morbidly committed itself to an enthusiastically pro-death agenda.
Let’s take fatal illnesses. On Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he was cutting 10,000 HHS employees, including those tasked with responding to disease outbreaks. (Another 10,000 employees already took “voluntary” buyouts.) Agencies affected by those cuts include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—which will lose an estimated 18 percent of its staff—the National Institutes for Health, the Food and Drug Adminstration, as well as Medicare and Medicaid. Meanwhile, bird flu rages among the nation’s poultry and experts fear that it could turn into a deadly human pandemic. Yet the Trump administration has not even staffed the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, established by Biden in 2022, and his administration is reportedly rethinking a contract with Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine, as RFK Jr. publicly floats just letting the virus run wild among the nation’s flocks.
Click on the link for the full article