Catch US Now We’re Falling
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
—James Madison, Federalist Paper #47
Friday, February 14, 2025— Let’s try to reprise this week in the dismantling of the Republic: Trump proclaimed Super Bowl Sunday, Gulf of America Day, and announced his plans to “buy Gaza.” From whom it isn’t clear.
On Monday, Trump said he was ordering a 25 percent tariff/tax on all imports of steel and aluminum and warned Hamas that if all hostages in Gaza weren’t released by noon this Saturday, “all hell” would break loose. Then he banned paper straws.
On Tuesday, JD Vance and Elon Musk fumed that federal judges had no business intruding on their unconstitutional raids on the federal government and that Trump should ignore any injunctions imposed on them. Meanwhile, Trump signed an executive order rolling back enforcement of a law that makes it illegal for U.S. companies to bribe foreign officials, arguing that the restriction puts American firms at a disadvantage, and told the Justice Department to drop corruption charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams. To be fair, Trump also abolished the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, making it easier for overseas corporations and governments to bribe U.S. officials. (He also shut down the Justice Department’s task force responsible for tracking down Russian oligarchs evading U.S. sanctions.)
On Wednesday, Trump demanded that the Education Department be closed “immediately!” The problem: the Department was opened by an act of Congress, which isn’t as insurmountable a problem as it once might have been given that Congress barely asserts its existence anymore. Later that day in the Oval Office, Trump was allegedly told by X Æ A-Xii1, one of Elon Musk’s 12, make that 13 (known) kids, to “Shut up” and “You’re not the president!” Perhaps as compensation for being dissed by a four-year-old (who also wiped streams of snot on the Resolute Desk,) Trump proclaimed himself the head of the Kennedy Center, whose annual awards he’d boycotted during his prior term, and called Putin to let him know he could take as much of Ukraine as he could carry back to Moscow, as long as he left the rare earth minerals behind for Trump.
A Data for Progress poll conducted on February 2 asked, “Billionaires have:
Too much influence over government: 73 percent
The right amount of influence over government: 13 percent
Too little influence over government: five percent”
Of course, the whole point of having billionaires, and their slash-and-burn hackers, run the government is that they don’t give a damn what the people think and, in fact, will almost always serve their own interests first by doing the exact opposite.
The only thing these three did to increase their already unimaginable wealth by unimaginable amounts was to help get Trump elected. And Trump returned the favor by giving them free reign to gut the federal government’s regulatory system from the inside out, eliminating programs that curbed the growth of their wealth and protecting those features that fuel it.
Oxfam: The wealthiest one percent of people now own almost 45 percent of all wealth, while 44 percent of humanity live below the World Bank’s poverty line of $6.85 per day.
It’s a strange kind of economic populism, which bolts out of the gate with mass layoffs. But what would you expect from a guy whose only successful business venture (aside from two elections) was a TV gig where he hammed it up firing people?
As we bear first-hand witness to the evisceration of “democracy” in our own country by the billionaire class, it’s perhaps helpful to consult what the Greeks now think about the failure of what’s considered–rightly or wrongly–the first democracy, the one that briefly bloomed in fifth century BC Athens before being crushed and supplanted by a dictatorship of oligarchs and eventual imperial occupation, first by the Macedonians, then the Romans. Here’s the view of contemporary Greek political philosopher Takis Fotopoulos:
“The final failure of Athenian democracy was not due, as it is usually asserted by its critics, to the innate contradictions of democracy itself but, on the contrary, to the fact that the Athenian democracy never matured to become an inclusive democracy. This cannot be adequately explained by simply referring to the immature ‘objective’ conditions, the low development of productive forces and so on—important as may be—because the same objective conditions prevailed at that time in many other places all over the Mediterranean, let alone the rest of Greece, but democracy flourished only in Athens.”
The word that leaps out at me from Takis Fotopoulos’s post-mortem is “inclusion,” now being elided anywhere it’s found in the federal government here, with consequences that would surely be familiar to Demosthenes.
Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor: “It is easy to dismiss Diversity Equality Inclusion (D.E.I.) programs as ineffectual, because in many ways they have been. But that raises the question of why the right is so determined to undermine and dismiss them.”
As the Musk crew takes a widely swinging wrecking ball to the federal government, they have targeted the federal defender’s offices, which provide legal representation to low-income and indigent clients. This week, several federal defenders’ offices received notices that their leases are about to be terminated. However, federal public defense lawyers don’t work for the Justice Department; they are employees of the judiciary branch, which is one more demolition of the walls separating the branches of government as Trump seeks to expand his autocratic control over the Republic. But the potential wreckage goes deeper since undermining the Federal Public Defenders Office also cuts into not only the Constitution’s separation of powers provisions but also the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee that all residents of the U.S. have the right to effective legal representation.
According to a report in Drop Site News, Marco Rubio’s State Department lists Tesla as the recipient of its largest expected contracts, the department planning to purchase $400,000,000 worth of “Armored Tesla.”
The New Republic reported that one of the inspector generals Trump fired was examining Elon Musk’s failures to comply with reporting protocols designed to safeguard national security as a major recipient of Pentagon contracts.
Despite court orders, 98 percent of National Institute of Health (NIH) grants that should have gone out this month didn’t, meaning that biomedical research will skid to a stop and clinical trials will end. Why? NIH’s spending on research is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the federal budget.
Between February 3, 2024, and February 10, 2024, the NIH issued 513 grant awards totaling $218,273,053. Between February 3 and February 10 this year, the NIH issued just 11 grant awards totaling $4,981,089. In other words, since the courts ordered a full resumption in grant funding, the agency approved a handful of grants accounting for 2.2 percent of its typical volume. An NIH official says a small number of grants are being approved by NIH leadership, but nearly all grants remain frozen.
This was followed by the abrupt resignation of Lawrence Tabak, longtime principal deputy director of the NIH, as a move that came as a shock to his own lab staff.
Who will audit the auditors?
February was born with too few days. Will Trump add a few more by Imperial Edict before the month runs out?
30—the percentage of Americans who think all or most of Trump’s executive orders have been Constitutional.
As Trump slaps 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, here’s a look at who the U.S. buys steel and aluminum from:
Steel
Canada–6 million tons
Brazil–4.1 million tons
Mexico–3.2 million tons
Vietnam–1.2 million tons
Aluminum
Canada–3.2 million tons
UAE–0.3 million tons
China–0.2 million tons
South Korea–0.2 million tons
Bahrain–0.2 million tons
Argentina–0.2 million tons
India–0.2 million tons
The U.S. isn’t producing less steel than Canada or Brazil because it can’t produce its own steel or because other steel-producing nations are preying on the poor, weak little U.S. It is making less steel because the billionaire financial class Trump surrounded himself with concluded that it was too expensive to fund steel production in the U.S. and cheaper to finance steel plants elsewhere and import it. He should target his tariffs on them.
In February 2024, Canadians’ net favorability toward the U.S. was 12 percent. Now it’s minus 20 percent and still falling.
The Financial Times reports that “tariff anxiety” has prompted the stockpiling of $82 billion worth of gold in New York, causing shortages elsewhere.
Trump, when asked if his drive to annex Canada was a real thing: “Yeah, it is. I think Canada would be much better off being a 51st state because we lose $250 billion a year with Canada, and I’m not gonna let that happen. It’s too much. Why are we paying $200 billion a year, essentially, in subsidies to Canada? Now if they’re a 51st state, I don’t mind doing it.”
The U.S. is not “paying Canada $200 billion a year.” In 2024, the U.S. ran a trade deficit with Canada of around $63 billion. But the U.S. ran a $22 billion surplus in services. So, the overall trade deficit was only $41 billion. And it’s not a subsidy; it’s the price Americans are willing to pay for Canadian goods.
I’m not a cognitive psychologist, but this doesn’t sound like a mind firing on all cylinders:
“I spoke to Governor [sic] Trudeau on numerous occasions and we’ll see what happens [Canada becoming the 51st U.S. state], but it just sets up so good for them. Look the people would pay much less tax than they’re paying right now. They’d have perfect military protection. They don’t have any military protection, because they, essentially, because, um, and you take a look at what’s going on out there, you have Russian ships, you have China ships, you have Chinese ships, you have, uh, you have a lot of ships out there. You know people are in danger. It’s a different world today. It’s a different world that they need our protection.”
Stephane Dion, Canada’s Ambassador to France and Monaco, and the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy to the European Union (EU) and Europe, say that Trump’s threats to invade and confiscate land in other countries violate international law. This is good to hear, especially since Canada has abetted and even sent troops to join many previous such invasions by the U.S.
In a talk at the King’s Head Pub, Mark Carney, the Federal Liberal candidate to replace Justin Trudeau, called Trump’s insistence on making Canada the 51st state “ridiculous” and “insulting” the “Voldemort2 of comments.” Carney said Trump’s aggressive posture toward Canada is a result of rising inequality in the U.S.:
“I think that Americans built their social safety net with enormous holes in it, that tens-of-millions of people fell through. The Americans worshipped at the altar of the market, and the gains were not spread across that society. Now, there’s a backlash. There’s a backlash, and that backlash is leading to them pushing out against us.”
Make Canada Healthy Again! It took Trump’s tariffs for Canada finally to figure out that American cheese sucks.
Representative Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-GA) introduced a bill this week authorizing Trump to “acquire” Greenland and rename it “Red, White, and Blueland.” The best and the brightest!
Forty-six percent of Danish people considered the U.S. to be either “a very big threat” or “a fairly big threat” to Denmark, a higher percentage than North Korea and Iran. Sounds reasonable to me.
Trump on Fox News: “We want to raise defense spending. I think we have to have it.” Cut off school lunches, cancer research, and toxic waste cleanups, but keep building weapons to kill poor people halfway around the world who aren’t a threat to the U.S.
Trump wants to resurrect Reagan’s discredited old Star Wars plan to use “space lasers” to destroy nuclear weapons. They’ll do anything to avoid eliminating nuclear weapons.
Space lasers don’t stay in space.
Maybe the empire will end with a bang and not a whimper after all: As part of the massive firings of federal workers, the Trump administration has terminated nearly 300 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency responsible for maintaining America’s nuclear weapons arsenal and combating nuclear terrorism.
Yun Sun writing in Foreign Affairs:
“Beijing assumes that Washington’s own policies will dismantle the foundations of U.S. global hegemony, even if it creates a lot of turbulence… in the process. China’s top priority, then, is to weather the storm.”
Trump is trying to shake down Ukraine for access to $500 billion in rare earth minerals as compensation for past support, even if the U.S. greenlights a Russian takeover of the country:
“They [Ukraine] may make a deal, they may not make a deal. They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday. They have tremendously valuable land in terms of rare earth, oil, gas, and other things. I want our money secured. I told them I want the equivalent of $500 billion worth of rare earth, and they’ve essentially agreed. At least we don’t feel stupid—otherwise, we’re stupid. I said we have to get something; we can’t just keep giving money.”
(Most of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals are now under lands occupied by Russia.)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has evicted mainstream news outlets at the Pentagon to make room for more than a half dozen rightwing outlets. Out: The New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, CNN, Politico, The Hill, The War Zone, and NPR. In: The New York Post, Washington Examiner, One America News, Newsmax, HuffPo, The Free Press, The Daily Caller, and Breitbart audio services. No invite yet for CounterPunch.
Marco Rubio tapped Darren Beattie to serve as acting Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affair, even though Beattlie has repeatedly called for the sterilization of people he calls “low IQ trash.” Beattie previously served as a speechwriter for Trump but was fired in 2018 after he spoke at a conference attended by white nationalists. According to Rubio, Beattie’s primary focus at the State Department will be to “fight censorship.” You can understand why he might be concerned about having his own opinions muted.
The percentage of Americans who approve of the expansion of the United States by force is four percent. Looks like Big Daddy’s going to have to take out the paddle and beat MAGA into line.
This week, the Trump White House banned an AP correspondent from a press event because the Associated Press has refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” citing the fact that the Gulf is not fully within the territory of the U.S. Indeed, Mexico enjoys more territorial rights to the Gulf than the U.S. (Are all tyrants this petty or just our own?)
Surface Area of the Exclusive Economic Zones of the Gulf of Mexico/America
Mexico: 285,899 Square Miles / 47.67 percent
U.S.A: 268, 388 Square miles / 44.75 percent
Cuba: 31,364 Square miles / 5.23 percent
International waters: 14,047 Square miles / 2.34 percent
The 6.7 thousand square mile Dead Zone should be renamed the Gulf of BP.
The Munich Security Conference report for 2025 says that because of Trump’s proposed land grabs, the U.S. should no longer be perceived as “an anchor of stability, but rather a risk to be hedged against.”
The Inspector General at USAID warned that the U.S. currently can’t determine whether aid is reaching “terrorist” organizations because the Trump/Musk freeze has furloughed the entire terror vetting team. In addition, despite Rubio’s alleged waiver, no humanitarian assistance is flowing because 90 percent of staff in charge of managing and overseeing this aid have been sent home and denied access to their email.
Frederich Mertz, who seems likely to become the next chancellor of Germany: “the EU must not come to Washington as a dwarf—because then it will be treated as one.”
Here’s a reminder of why you shouldn’t weep too many tears for the demise of USAID: John Bolton, who served as director of policy and budget for USAID, showing Piers Morgan his farewell present from the Agency, a hand-grenade with the inscription: John R. Bolton, Truest Reaganaut.
Of course, USAID will almost certainly be replaced by something worse.
The House released its budget bill, which contains massive tax cuts for the rich and devastating budget cuts for the poor. The bill targets an $880 billion cut in Medicaid, reducing SNAP’s (food stamps and other nutritional aid to low-income families) funding by at least 20 percent. They aim to pass the bill through the Reconciliation process to avoid a senate filibuster David Dayen, author of Monopolized: “Here’s the best way of explaining it: they want to take food and medicine away from poor people and give that money to billionaires instead.”
If the policies are this stupid three weeks in, how moronic will they become four years from now?
Some things never change no matter who’s in office, like Larry Summers’ Cassandra-like warnings on inflation: “We are now in the riskiest period for inflation policy since the early Biden administration…Even without tariffs, immigration restrictions, deficit bloat and attacks on the fed there would be serious grounds for inflation worry.”
Trump’s acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Russell Vought, told all staff at the Bureau not to perform “any work task.” The CFPB is one of the few federal agencies that generate a profit for the U.S., having returned more than $21 billion. So, it’s not really about “efficiency,” is it?
According to a Hult School of International Business survey, employers would rather hire AI robots than bring a Gen Z graduate into the company.
Auto insurance rates in the U.S. have increased by 93 percent over the last decade, far above the 34 percent increase in overall consumer prices.
—CounterPunch, February 14, 2025
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/02/14/roaming-charges-catch-us-now-were-falling/
1 “X Æ A-12” (pronounced “X Ash A Twelve”) is Elon Musk’s son.
2 Lord Voldemort is the main antagonist in the Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling.