End of the American Republic?

battle1

mickeyrat said:

battle1 said:

Can we keep the Letter from the American posts in the Letter from the American propaganda thread, please?  

huh. Thought Kat and Sea were the mods.

Hi mick. Last I checked that is still the case. 

I was just politely asking.  You dont want me moderating this place, mickey. 

mickeyrat

battle1 said:

mickeyrat said:

battle1 said:

Can we keep the Letter from the American posts in the Letter from the American propaganda thread, please?  

huh. Thought Kat and Sea were the mods.

Hi mick. Last I checked that is still the case. 

I was just politely asking.  You dont want me moderating this place, mickey. 

ahh. ok. guessing the answer to your question then is a resounding no?

battle1

mickeyrat said:

battle1 said:

mickeyrat said:

battle1 said:

Can we keep the Letter from the American posts in the Letter from the American propaganda thread, please?  

huh. Thought Kat and Sea were the mods.

Hi mick. Last I checked that is still the case. 

I was just politely asking.  You dont want me moderating this place, mickey. 

ahh. ok. guessing the answer to your question then is a resounding no?

That is likely an accurate assumption. Doesn’t hurt to politely ask anyway, I guess. 

brianlux

mickeyrat said:

battle1 said:

Can we keep the Letter from the American posts in the Letter from the American propaganda thread, please?  

huh. Thought Kat and Sea were the mods.

Besides, it's a video not a letter. 

mickeyrat

battle1 said:

mickeyrat said:

battle1 said:

mickeyrat said:

battle1 said:

Can we keep the Letter from the American posts in the Letter from the American propaganda thread, please?  

huh. Thought Kat and Sea were the mods.

Hi mick. Last I checked that is still the case. 

I was just politely asking.  You dont want me moderating this place, mickey. 

ahh. ok. guessing the answer to your question then is a resounding no?

That is likely an accurate assumption. Doesn’t hurt to politely ask anyway, I guess. 

did want to ask, what in your estimation makes her writing propaganda? she is a historian and has a phd in history, teaches same at boston college. has written several books about specific periods of our history and that letter is a view of current events pulling from several cited current news sources juxtaposed against the backdrop of our history.. in so many cases repeating itself or is providing context of where current events originated from in our history.

so do tell, just how is it propaganda?

I pull a copy/paste from adbook given its easy to do to share here.  what I dont do is pull the first comment citing her source material.

battle1

brianlux said:

mickeyrat said:

battle1 said:

Can we keep the Letter from the American posts in the Letter from the American propaganda thread, please?  

huh. Thought Kat and Sea were the mods.

Besides, it's a video not a letter. 

My polite request and discussion with mickey was in reference to the post from Max above, where the letter to an american was copy and pasted.  Actually, I never saw your link until right now. I never open anything that is posted here, but I’m sure it is the same fear and rhetoric as the letter to the american thread. Admittedly, I don’t read those either. I did once, and will never subject myself to that nonsense again. Be well, my fellow Americans. 

Halifax2TheMax

Ignorance is bliss. MAGAHALO.

Halifax2TheMax

205.8 weeks to go. Good luck. And pssssssst, it’s too late.

Trump 2.0: The most damaging first two weeks in presidential history

Trump’s second term is all about curtailing government’s power and reach.

No president in history has caused more damage to the nation more quickly. As we enter Week 3 of President Donald Trump’s second term, the chaos and disruption of his first look quaint by comparison. The country survived Trump 1.0. Now, it faces a real threat that the harm he inflicts during his second term will be irreparable. The United States’ standing in the world, its ability to keep the country safe, the federal government’s fundamental capacity to operate effectively — all of these will take years to repair, if that can be achieved at all.

This column will concentrate on the third piece of that trifecta: efforts to undermine the basic functioning of government. A unifying theme of much of Trump’s activity since Jan. 20 has been his unrelenting and broadscale assault on the federal workforce. In his first term, Trump railed about what he termed the “deep state” and its seeming ability to frustrate his plans. In his second, he has unleashed a no-holds-barred attack on career employees — one designed to punish those who dared to counter him or his allies, to oust or neuter those with years of expertise, and to set the stage for a new spoils system, replacing seasoned, nonpartisan career workers with compliant loyalists.

Trump “is destroying whatever gets in the way of what he wants to do,” Max Stier, the normally mild-mannered president of the Partnership for Public Service, told me. “That includes having loyalty be the primary screen for choosing his direct lieutenants and crushing the civil service and converting it into a tool for his private agenda, as opposed to a force for the public good and the rule of law.”

Contempt for civil servants — sneering at “unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.” — is not unique to the Trump administration. But Trump 2.0 is unrivaled in its willingness to barrel through the guardrails that have protected government workers since 1883, ignoring legal requirements in its quest to retaliate against some employees and intimidate the rest.

Trump “is the executive of the executive branch, and, therefore, he has the power to fire anyone within the executive branch that he wishes to,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt asserted. This is manifestly incorrect, like so many other proclamations since Jan. 20, but that does not make it any less bone-chilling.

And it is a piece of a larger presidential power grab. As I laid out shortly after the election, Trump had a detailed road map to enhance executive power: challenging congressional authority to control spending, putting independent agencies under his thumb, seizing control of the civil service, and abusing his authority to install officials through recess appointments rather than having to endure the inconvenience of Senate confirmation.

We knew this was coming. Trump and his allies trumpeted their plans during the campaign. Still, I had expected this revolution would take months to unfold. Astonishingly, all but the last of these has already come to pass — and we haven’t seen a showdown over recess appointments for the simple reason that the Senate, with the sole exception of the failed effort to install Matt Gaetz as attorney general, has caved to Trump’s desire to install evidently unqualified candidates in many of the most sensitive positions in government.

The onslaught against government itself has been the most alarming. Some of it involves the operations of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” operating with unclear legal authority as a kind of roving strike force to terrorize the bureaucracy.

Over the weekend, DOGE operatives forced out a senior Treasury Department official and gained access to the government’s highly sensitive centralized payment system, potentially exposing vast amounts of personnel data. They executed a hostile takeover and the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development, an agency that was established by Congress and that can’t be disappeared without congressional action. “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die,” the unelected Musk assertedabout an entity that provides humanitarian assistance abroad. Reuters reported that DOGE officials “have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees.” And, in an echo of Musk’s “fork in the road” email to Twitter employees after he bought the platform, federal workers have been encouraged to resign en masse, with an email offering inducements of questionable legality.

It’s not just the world’s richest man running amok. Trump wasn’t satisfied with a pair of Day 1 executive orders asserting new authority to fire certain civil servants. And so:

• Trump fired two of three Democratic commissioners on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Democratic chair of the National Labor Relations Board, setting the stage for a constitutional challenge to independent agencies.
• He dismissed at least 15 inspectors general, most of them appointed by him, ignoring the legal requirement that he provide 30 days’ notice to Congress, along with an explanation for his action.
• The Education Department put on administrative leave at least 50 employees who didn’t work directly on diversity, equity and inclusion but belonged to “affinity groups” or attended voluntary training sessions.
• At the Justice Department, the acting attorney general fired more than a dozen career prosecutors who had worked for former special counsel Jack Smith on prosecutions of Trump, crossing a dangerous red line. “Given your significant role in prosecuting the President, I do not believe that the leadership of the Department can trust you to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully,” acting attorney general James McHenry informed them.
• Acting at the instructions of the acting deputy attorney general, previously Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an election denier who has represented Jan. 6 defendants, fired about 30 prosecutors who had worked on cases involving the insurrection. The department earlier transferred senior officials in the divisions that oversee civil rights, environmental enforcement, national security and public corruption to a newly created office to take action against sanctuary cities.
• And the acting deputy attorney general ordered the firing of eight senior officials and told the FBI’s acting director to compile a list of all bureau employees assigned to investigate the Jan. 6 attack “to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.” This despite a confirmation hearing pledge from Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to run the bureau, that “all FBI employees will be protected from political retribution.”

None of this is normal. Little of it is legal. All of it is misguided, and that’s a mild term. The damage to the federal workforce is incalculable. Years of expertise down the drain. The ability to recruit talented employees: same. Why would anyone join an operation that treats its workers this way?

The reason to worry about this is not because of unfairness to federal employees, although there is that — it’s because of the debilitating, even dangerous, impact on government operations. Disruption is one thing in Silicon Valley, where the stakes are merely profit and loss. It is quite another when you are talking about a government charged with ensuring the safety of its citizens.

“What is happening right now,” Stier said, “is the destruction of the institution itself.”

And if you think that can be repaired four years from now, ask yourself: If Trump is successful in purging the government of perceived opponents and putting loyalists in their place, would a new Democratic administration politely play by old-school rules — or would it be justified in engaging in a tit-for-tat response?

The damage has already begun, and it will be difficult to reverse.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/04/trump-federal-government-workers-destruction/

Halifax2TheMax

If you’re not concerned about this, you never loved ‘Murica. From Letter From An American:

Shortly after 1:00 this morning, Vittoria Elliott, Dhruv Mehrotra, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman of Wired reported that, according to three of their sources, “[a] 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies [SpaceX and X], has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government.” 

According to the reporters, Elez apparently has the privileges to write code on the programs at the Bureau of Fiscal Service that control more than 20% of the U.S. economy, including government payments of veterans’ benefits, Social Security benefits, and veterans’ pay. The admin privileges he has typically permit a user “to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.”

“If you would have asked me a week ago” if an outsider could’ve been given access to a government server, one federal IT worker told the Wired reporters, “I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the f*ck knows."

The reporters note that control of the Bureau of Fiscal Service computers could enable someone to cut off monies to specific agencies or even individuals. “Will DOGE cut funding to programs approved by Congress that Donald Trump decides he doesn’t like?” asked Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) yesterday. “What about cancer research? Food banks? School lunches? Veterans aid? Literacy programs? Small business loans?”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reported that his sources said that Elez and possibly others got full admin access to the Treasury computers on Friday, January 31, and that he—or they—have “already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system.” They are leaning on existing staff in the agency for help, which those workers have provided reluctantly in hopes of keeping the entire system from crashing. Marshall reports those staffers are “freaking out.” The system is due to undergo a migration to another system this weekend; how the changes will interact with that long-planned migration is unclear.

The changes, Marshall’s sources tell him, “all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked.”

Both Wired and the New York Times reported yesterday that Musk’s team intends to cut government workers and to use artificial intelligence, or AI, to make budget cuts and to find waste and abuse in the federal government. 

Today Jason Koebler, Joseph Cox, and Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media reported that they had obtained the audio of a meeting held Monday by Thomas Shedd for government technology workers. Shedd is a former Musk employee at Tesla who is now leading the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), the team that is recoding the government programs. 

At the meeting, Shedd told government workers that “things are going to get intense” as his team creates “AI coding agents” to write software that would, for example, change the way logging into the government systems works. Currently, that software cannot access any information about individuals; as the reporters note, login.gov currently assures users that it “does not affect or have any information related to the specific agency you are trying to access.”

But Shedd said they were working through how to change that login “to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud.” 

When a government employee pointed out that the Privacy Act makes it illegal for agencies to share personal information without consent, Shedd appeared unfazed by the idea they were trying something illegal. “The idea would be that folks would give consent to help with the login flow, but again, that's an example of something that we have a vision, that needs [to be] worked on, and needs clarified. And if we hit a roadblock, then we hit a roadblock. But we still should push forward and see what we can do.”

A government employee told Koebler, Cox, and Maiberg that using AI coding agents is a major security risk. “Government software is concerned with things like foreign adversaries attempting to insert backdoors into government code. With code generated by AI, it seems possible that security vulnerabilities could be introduced unintentionally. Or could be introduced intentionally via an AI-related exploit that creates obfuscated code that includes vulnerabilities that might expose the data of American citizens or of national security importance.”

battle1

No one is reading all that, Max. You are flooding the zone. 

josevolution

😂😂 it hasn’t even been a month and the democracy of this nation is basically done! 3+ years of this and it will be a slave state with the upper class living great and the rest of the population eating the crumbs that fall of their tables! 

mickeyrat

josevolution said:

😂😂 it hasn’t even been a month and the democracy of this nation is basically done! 3+ years of this and it will be a slave state with the upper class living great and the rest of the population eating the crumbs that fall of their tables! 

you day that last part like this is new and hasnt been in play since the founding.

DE4173

josevolution said:

😂😂 it hasn’t even been a month and the democracy of this nation is basically done! 3+ years of this and it will be a slave state with the upper class living great and the rest of the population eating the crumbs that fall of their tables! 

josevolution

mickeyrat said:

josevolution said:

😂😂 it hasn’t even been a month and the democracy of this nation is basically done! 3+ years of this and it will be a slave state with the upper class living great and the rest of the population eating the crumbs that fall of their tables! 

you day that last part like this is new and hasnt been in play since the founding.

I didn’t say this is all new merely that the fragile state of this democracy is being dismantled faster than anyone could’ve anticipated! 

Spiritual_Chaos

Time for Sweden to reign supreme

DE4173

battle1

Spiritual_Chaos said:

Time for Sweden to reign supreme

Time to take Sweden, too. 

Halifax2TheMax

Bah, bah, bah Hillary’s emails! Yip, everything is completely normal. Happy days are here again with extra brilliance of brilliant brilliancy. From Letter From An American:

In a shocking attack on the intelligence personnel who collect information around the world to keep Americans safe, today the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent a list of all employees the agency hired in the past two years to the White House, sending the list by unclassified email. Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that a former CIA agent called the reporting of the names “a counterintelligence disaster.” Lowell also reported that Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that he understands that the White House “insisted” on the list coming through unclassified email. 

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, posted: “Exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China. A disastrous national security development.”

battle1

Halifax2TheMax said:

Bah, bah, bah Hillary’s emails! Yip, everything is completely normal. Happy days are here again with extra brilliance of brilliant brilliancy. From Letter From An American:

In a shocking attack on the intelligence personnel who collect information around the world to keep Americans safe, today the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent a list of all employees the agency hired in the past two years to the White House, sending the list by unclassified email. Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that a former CIA agent called the reporting of the names “a counterintelligence disaster.” Lowell also reported that Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that he understands that the White House “insisted” on the list coming through unclassified email. 

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, posted: “Exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China. A disastrous national security development.”

Heather Richardson Cox ‘28

battle1

Good morning, beautiful Nation. 

24-20 🦅