Notices by Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im), page 20

"Conservatives" who believe that agencies exercising their regulatory powers are usurping legislative authority by determining “major questions”

Don't get to claim it’s legal to unilaterally shut down entire agencies created by acts of Congress

What I'm saying
(crib/edit as needed):

"Hi, I'm a constituent. I'm horrified by Trump's recent [anti-trans] executive orders. This is morally wrong & harms many innocent people in our state.
I'm calling to ask you to publicly declare that [California] will not comply with them.
Thank you for representing me."

https://www.commoncause.org/find-your-representative/

The worst presidential choice prior to 2024 was James Buchanan in 1856.

Like Trump, Buchanan won both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

These two presidents are the lowest-ranked in an annual poll of American political scientists,
and Buchanan ranks last in a 2021 survey of American political historians
(though for some mysterious reason that one ranks Trump only fourth-worst).

Buchanan is reviled for fumbling Confederates’ threats to secede,
which of course led to the Civil War.

I would argue that the public also chose very badly in reelecting Richard Nixon in 1972 and George W. Bush in 2004
—and that in choosing Ronald Reagan in 1980, the party cleared a path that eventually led to Trump.

But 2024 may be the first election in American history in which a majority of United States voters specifically chose oligarchy.

This is terra incognita, but it turns out to be a problem to which our second president, John Adams, gave considerable thought.

None of the Founders fretted as much about oligarchy as Adams;
he was writing about its dangers as early as 1766,
and in 1785 he urged that the Pennsylvania Constitution permit sufficient payment to its legislators to allow ordinary people to serve,
lest “an Aristocracy or oligarchy of the rich will be formed.”

Six years after he ended his presidency (the weakest part of his legacy), Adams wrote that “the Creed of my whole Life” had been that
“No simple Form of Government, can possibly secure Men against the Violences of Power.
Simple Monarchy will soon mould itself into Despotism,
Aristocracy will soon commence an Oligarchy, and Democracy, will soon degenerate into an Anarchy.”

By this time in his life, Adams had come to believe that the ideal government balanced democracy against elements of monarchy and aristocracy.

Adams is widely judged (by the conservative writer Russell Kirk, among others)
to have evolved after the American Revolution into a conservative apologist for privilege.

Holly Brewer, Burke professor of American history at the University of Maryland, told me
“He became more comfortable with it.”

The carriages, pulled by six horses, were “modeled after how the king traveled in London,” Brewer said.

But there’s an alternative view.

C. Wright Mills identified Adams as a more incisive critic of the power elite than Thorstein Veblen
-- and Judith Shklar and John Patrick Diggins voiced similar opinions.

In the 2016 book John "Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy", Luke Mayville, a Yale-trained historian and co-founder of the grassroots group "Reclaim Idaho",
takes this argument further.

“In his letters, essays, and treatises,” Mayville writes, “Adams explored in subtle detail what might be called soft oligarchy
—the disproportionate power that accrues to wealth on account of widespread sympathy for the rich.”

Adams did not judge this attraction benign,
but neither did he believe it could be wished away.

The Framers of the Constitution, Mayville argues, believed in checks and balances among various government institutions,

but they did not consider any need to balance the power of government against the power of wealthy private citizens.

Adams thought otherwise.

“The rich, the well-born, and the able,”
Adams wrote in "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787–8)
“acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense, in a house of representatives.”

Adams’s solution to this imbalance of power was to separate out
“the most illustrious” among this elite
and corral them into the Senate.

Jefferson and other Adams critics saw this as elevating the oligarchs.

But Adams judged it “ostracism” because it removed the rich from the sphere of self-interest.

A modern expression of this conceit would be that
“it takes a thief to catch a thief.”

Former Senator Jay Rockefeller was precisely the sort Adams had in mind:

knowledgeable and disgusted in equal measure about the tricks by which oligarchs
like his great-grandfather John D. Rockefeller
acquired and held power.

Other former senators in this mold included Herbert Kohl and,
to a lesser extent,
former Senator John Heinz.

But you can’t count on getting a Rockefeller or Kohl or Heinz.

Sometimes you get Rick Scott.

Jefferson understood this better than Adams.

In a letter to Adams, Jefferson argued that
“to give [oligarchs] power in order to prevent them from doing mischief,
is arming them for it,
and increasing instead of remedying the evil.”

(1/2)

https://newrepublic.com/article/189230/democracy-trump-musk-oligarchy-inequality

The Constitution ended up giving the Senate more power,
and the president less power,
than Adams thought wise.

Jefferson thought the opposite.

“You are afraid of the one,” Adams wrote Jefferson,
“I, the few.… You are apprehensive of monarchy;
I, of aristocracy.”

Adams judged a strong president a natural ally of the many against the oligarchs.

That theory worked superbly with Franklin D. Roosevelt and reasonably well with John F. Kennedy.

It works not at all with Donald Trump.

Adams may have been naïve about the possibility that a rich sociopath like Trump might eventually come to power,
but in Mayville’s view,
Jefferson was just as naïve to believe that oligarchy would wither and die if government would only deny it power.

Mayville summarizes Jefferson’s view as
“Old World aristocracies would be replaced in the republican age by new natural aristocracies of virtue and talent.”

To a great extent that eventually happened,
aided in the twentieth century first by the spread of publicly funded high schools
where attendance was mandatory
and, at midcentury, by the spread of higher education.

Mayville summarizes Adams’s very different view as
“wealth and family name would continue to overpower virtue and talent.”

Half a century ago that judgment would have seemed hopelessly old-fashioned,
but it’s a lot harder to dismiss today.

Wealth accumulation among the very rich
and weaker inheritance taxation at the state and federal levels
brought a revival, in the words of the inequality expert Thomas Piketty, of
“patrimonial capitalism.”

Donald Trump is the consummate patrimonial capitalist,
with his real estate success built atop at least $413 million from his father;

with his surly, dim-witted older sons managing what’s left of the Trump Organization;

and with his more polished daughter Ivanka capitalizing on the family name.

Jefferson failed to anticipate that the voting public would resent his natural aristocracy of virtue and talent
—the people we today call meritocrats
—much more than trust fund brats and hedge fund billionaires.

Indeed, Adams defined “aristocrat”
(he also meant “oligarch”)
as those who exercise the most electoral sway.

“By aristocracy,” he wrote, “I understand all those men who can command, influence, or procure more than an average of votes.”

Why do rich people exert so much influence?

Money is the obvious answer,
and Adams acknowledged its power.

But in "The Discourses on Davila" (1790) he emphasized another, more psychological explanation.

There is, Adams wrote, a universal desire
“to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected, by the people about [us],
and within [our] knowledge.”

In short:
We all live to show off.

This is why Mills compared Adams to Veblen;
one might also compare Adams to the journalist Tom Wolfe,
the preeminent chronicler of social status in the late twentieth century.

Granted, among idealistic college students, associating oneself with the wretched of the earth yields greater status,
-- but for most of the rest of us associating oneself with the rich is what gets the job done.

Adams again (in The Discourses on Davila, quoted by Mayville):

Riches force the opinion on a man that he is the object of the congratulations of others,
and he feels that they attract the complaisance of the public.

His senses all inform him,
that his neighbors have a natural disposition to harmonize with all those pleasing emotions and agreeable sensations which the elegant accommodations around him are supposed to excite.…

As Trump put it in the Access Hollywood tape:
“Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Sticklers might say Trump was talking about being a TV star,
not about being rich.

But the specific nature of Trump’s stardom was that he played an exaggerated version of himself on TV:
A very rich man who, because he is very rich, can get away with anything.

During his first presidential term,
Trump showed that he could transgress beyond our wildest dreams
—flout the woke hall monitors,
lie with abandon,
defy the law
—and get away with it
all because he was rich.

Even the many Trump voters who pulled the lever for him in 2024
while disapproving of his personal behavior
tend to envy the man.

Trump Envy isn’t the only political force out there;
that explains why he lost in 2020.

But it’s turned out to be shockingly powerful.

The United States grew more oligarchical over the past half-century,
with the rich accumulating ever-greater power over politics.

But Trump represents a quantum leap
—supercharged oligarchy
not in spite of the public will
but because of it.

Which makes ours a John Adams sort of moment.

This was as bleak an electoral outcome as the country has ever seen,
and democracy wasn’t the victim.

It was the cause.

(2/2)
https://newrepublic.com/article/189230/democracy-trump-musk-oligarchy-inequality

If the president can ignore court orders and illegally circumvent Congress,
there is no Constitution.
It’s gone.

There’s no enumerated right that the president can’t take from you,
no law Congress can pass that is binding,
and no court that can protect you from any of it.

It’s the whole ballgame.

https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/113988173759453329

Reporter: You said an example of fraud that you have cited was $50 million of condoms was sent to Gaza -- but after a fact-check apparently it was Gaza in Mozambique meant to protect them against HIV.

Elon Musk:
"First of all, some of the things I say will be incorrect"

The Justice Department’s chief tax official is resigning rather than accept a forced transfer to a new unit,
raising fresh concerns about the Trump administration’s aggressive drive to reshape the agency to fit the president’s agenda.
#David #Hubbert, a career official whose 40 years at the office included serving as interim chief for the entire Biden administration and part of Donald Trump’s prior term,
opted to retire to avoid a reassignment to the sanctuary cities enforcement group.

Hubbert’s departure comes on the heels of numerous other veteran career supervisors at the Justice Department receiving orders to choose between quitting or taking reassignments to the upstart immigration team.
It creates a vacancy that current and former federal tax enforcers say they worry could ease the administration’s path to
overhaul a division with immense authority over civil and criminal tax prosecutions.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/justice-departments-top-tax-enforcement-official-is-forced-out

Google Maps v Apple Maps

Trump Welcomes Anti-MLK Activist With Black Pilot Phobia to the White House

Charlie Kirk called passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned segregation, a mistake

Beyond his attacks on MLK and civil rights legislation, Kirk has openly voiced racist concerns about diversity initiatives. 

https://meidasnews.com/news/trump-welcomes-anti-mlk-activist-with-black-pilot-phobia-to-the-white-house

We cannot afford to wait any longer.

The immediate clear and present danger to the fabric of our democracy,
the headlong rush to a police state,
cannot be ignored.

And unprecedented times demand unprecedented approaches
by Democrats in Congress, minority status or not.

Last week, I advocated for Senate Democrats to use every rule and weapon at their disposal to bring the Senate to a halt,
or at least put big-time speed bumps in the way for them to act, hold hearings,
and confirm Trump’s executive nominees.

But given just what we have seen since I wrote that piece, we need more.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are not tiptoeing the United States toward autocracy, one step at a time.

They are racing there, using Steve Bannon’s approach of muzzle velocity to flood Washington with radical and illegal acts,
including unilaterally freezing congressionally mandated spending,
seizing control of top-secret information
and shutting employees out of their buildings ,
claiming the demise of agencies protected by law,
illegally firing federal employees protected under civil service laws,
trying to undermine the FBI and CIA,
firing agency and regulatory commission chairs and members
despite that they have fixed terms set by Congress,
taking security from individuals Trump dislikes,
even those facing death threats from actions they took at Trump’s command during his first term,
and threatening retaliation against those Trump and Musk don’t like.

-- Jen Rubin
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/donald-trump-and-elon-musk-are-not?r=230tr&selection=f7639a6c-e967-4b17-bda6-3f592c165449&triedRedirect=true

The NYT has published a useful graphic showing all the agencies with investigations into or regulatory battles with Musk's companies that have seen staffing cuts, including the firing of top officials.

-- Brian Krebs
@KrebsOnSecurity_rss
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/us/politics/elon-musk-companies-conflicts.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Trump's FCC chief opens investigation into NPR and PBS

"For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS given the changes in the media marketplace,"
FCC chairman Brendan Carr wrote.

He argued that any sign that taxpayer dollars are supporting a broadcaster running what are effectively commercials further undermines the case to send federal dollars to public broadcasters.

In a statement, FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, a Democratic appointee, said Carr's announcement was a source of "serious concern."

"Public television and radio stations play a significant role in our media ecosystem," Starks said.
"Any attempt to intimidate these local media outlets is a threat to the free flow of information and the marketplace of ideas."

Carr's letter fits into Trump's calls for the end of public funding for NPR and for PBS and into the president's broader rhetorical onslaught against media outlets.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/30/nx-s1-5281162/fcc-npr-pbs-investigation

On February 10, Trump issued an executive order pausing enforcement of the "Foreign Corrupt Practices Act" ( #FCPA ) for at least 180 days.

This move has sparked intense debate over whether it effectively legalizes bribery for American businesses operating overseas

—or if it simply removes what some see as unnecessary obstacles to US economic competitiveness
(by legalizing bribery for American businesses operating overseas)
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/bribing-legal-what-donald-trump-pausing-fcpa-means-for-american-business/articleshow/118150038.cms

Every Mastodon account also has an RSS feed of public posts.

Just add /rss to the profile link!

Bitcoin is a closed market with limited supply.

Who profits when Musk drives prices up through X's manufactured crises and Trump's appointees ensure limited oversight?

Not the average American buying $100 worth of crypto
- but the whales who hold thousands of Bitcoin,
the insiders with privileged access,
and the scheme's architects.

This isn't a story about crypto innovation or financial freedom.

It's about how the President of the United States and the world's richest man used their power to engineer a wealth transfer from the many to the few
- while making the public think they were part of a financial and political revolution.
https://www.narativ.org/p/the-greatest-heist

Let me say this more clearly:
what is happening right now,
in America, in real time,
is a coup.

This is an information war and this is what a coup now looks like.

Musk didn’t need a tank, guns, soldiers.

He had a small crack cyber unit that he sent into the Treasury department last weekend.

He now has unknown quantities of the entire US nation’s most sensitive data
and potential backdoors into the system going forward.

Treasury officials denied that he had access -- but it then turned out that he did.

If it ended there, it would be catastrophic.
But that unit
- whose personnel include a 19-year-old called “Big Balls”
- is now raiding and scorching the federal government,
department by department,
scraping its digital assets,
stealing its data,
taking control of the code
and blowing up its administrative apparatus as it goes.

This is what an unlawful attack on democracy in the digital age looks like.

It didn’t take armed men,
just Musk’s taskforce of boy-men
who may be dweebs and nerds
but all the better to plunder the country’s digital resources.

This was an organised, systematic, jailbreak on one of the United States’ most precious and sensitive resources:
the private data of its citizens.

https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/it-is-a-coup?triedRedirect=true

On Air Force One today en route to the Super Bowl Trump told reporters that DOGE analysts (whatever that means) had found
“irregularities” in US treasuries
and that that the US may not be obligated to pay some of them.

“Maybe we have less debt than we thought,” he said.

Needless to say, this is quite literally violating the express language of the 14th Amendment which says:
“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned"
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-says-some-treasury-notes-may-not-be-real

The armed individual who blocked senators from entering federal property bears the insignia of "Triple Canopy", which merged with Blackwater in 2014.

This is a mercenary paramilitary guard for Musk and his minions. *Anyone wearing this insignia should be considered extremely dangerous.
https://bsky.app/profile/spartacus-nemik.bsky.social/post/3lhown2hn4225

Constitutional law experts are warning of “limited options” if President Donald Trump defies federal judges’ orders to limit the scope of his executive actions, Business Insider reports.

This, Politico reports, comes as “at least nine federal judges — from Washington, D.C., to Washington state — have halted aspects of Trump’s early-term blitz, from his effort to rewrite the Constitution’s birthright citizenship guarantee to his sweeping effort to freeze federal spending to his plans to break and remake the federal workforce.”

As courts prepare to challenge Trump's broad claims of presidential authority, his supporters are railing against 'perceived judicial overreach' — and insist “the president’s orders are well within the powers outlined in the Constitution’s 'second section' on the executive branch."

University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill constitutional law professor Michael J. Gerhardt said if Trump does defy a court order,
“the consequences would likely fall on lower-level officials, not the president himself,”.

"At the very least, you would have a possible contempt citation directed at a particular official who has refused to comply with a court order," Gerhardt said,

"If they indicate they are defying it because of his order, then the court is going to include the president in the citation of contempt.”

Still, as reporters Brent D. Griffiths, Natalie Musumeci and Laura Italiano explain, enforcement of court orders
“fall to the Justice Department — which answers to Trump.”

Or, as Cornell Law School professor Michael Dorf put it,
“The president has much more force at his disposal than do the courts.”

Some legal experts see a deliberate strategy in Trump's approach beyond brute force.

Columbia Law School constitutional law teacher Michael Paradis told Business Insider he believes part of the president’s
“strategy is to manifest (court) defiance in many ways, so it becomes very difficult to keep track of all of them.”

"We're not just talking about one thing,
it's many things.
And I think one reason why there are many things is because it overwhelms the system,” Paradis said.

A Yale Law School professor appeared to concur with Paradis, telling the Times the Trump Administration “seems to have wanted challenges that consume a ton of resources — of opponents, courts and public attention — even as members of the administration know the provisions do not square with the law that exists.”

https://www.alternet.org/news-politics/trump-constitutional-law/

At least one Democrat is saying explicitly that the party should fight back against Trump and Musk by refusing to help Republicans reach a government funding deal.

“Look, if we have to take steps to be able to hold them accountable,
use the leverage that we have to force it,
I cannot support efforts that will continue this lawlessness that we’re seeing when it comes to this administration’s actions,”
Sen. #Andy #Kim
(D-New Jersey) said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

“And for us to be able to support government funding in that way
only for them to turn it around to dismantle the government,
that is not something that should be allowed."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/09/democrats-government-shutdown-trump-musk/