Browsing: Opinions

    If successful, I suspect Musk’s “love of money” will propel him to buy up or seek to use government to control all jobs effectively rendering him the Massa of the Big Plantation formerly known as the USA. Government of the people may be our last best hope preventing us all from being reduced to Fugitive Slaves. Let me explain. 

       Yet despite its laudable service, CFPB has been added to a still-growing list of federal agencies that recently have been shuttered, with employees laid off and consumers confused as to when or if operations will resume. At the same time, a profusion of lawsuits – including one that intends to preserve CFPB’s record of consumer protection – are challenging the actions of the executive-authorized Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).     It is noteworthy that a heroic, 83-year-old, retired pastor is the sole consumer plaintiff joining the CFPB Employee Association, Gupta Wessler LLP, NAACP, National Consumer Law Center, the National Treasury Employees Union, Public Citizen Litigation Group, and the Virginia Poverty Law Center in a lawsuit  that seeks to halt what the group calls illegal actions by CFPB’s appointed and acting officials.

   The American people did not vote for toxic air and poisoned water. But that will be the consequence as Donald Trump and Elon Musk move not only to dismantle the programs that keep our families healthy and safe but to fire, recklessly, the dedicated civil servants who have devoted their careers to doing the same.

     On February 18, Presidents Trump and Zelensky spoke by phone following US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia that aim at ending the war in Ukraine. Their conversation boils down to this: Trump offered his usual mix of lies and outrageous demands, and Zelensky politely and indirectly suggested that Trump was selling Ukraine out.

     On January 20, President Trump reorganized the United State Digital Service into the Department of Government Efficiency and ordered it to begin “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity.” The task list soon became much larger to include, in the President’s words, “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cute wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal agencies.”

     Make some calls and write your elected officials express your concerns and remember elections have consequences.

     Trump claimed that the mass firings were necessary to save money and make the government more efficient. But the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelley, retorted that the firings were really “about power,” with Trump “gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence.”

     Thus begins one of the most stunning letters I have ever read, written almost four years ago by former U.S. Attorney James H. Reynolds to President Joe Biden, pleading with him to exonerate former American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Leonard Peltier, who had been convicted of murdering two FBI agents at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975.

We need to know eggxactly what’s going on

       Later, I realized that extreme cruelty is not uniquely German. The potential lurks in all races, a latent trait in human nature. It is plain in American history with slavery and the genocide of native Americans; in French history during the bloody Revolution of 1789, in English history during the Crusades; in Ottoman history with the massacre of the Armenians and in Russia with Stalin’s carnage of his own people.