20250306

Friends,

I remain optimistic about the longer term, but I still awaken each morning with a sense of dread. I’m sure some of you do, too.

Start with Elon Musk’s bonkers comment that Social Security is “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

In a Ponzi scheme, a con artist lures investors into a fake investment project, pockets the cash, and then gets new “investors” to funnel their cash to the earlier investors — until there are no new recruits and the whole thing collapses. The last ones in are suckers left holding worthless bags.

Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s a high-functioning, universal, and exceptionally efficient part of the American social safety net — the opposite of a Ponzi scheme. Which is why the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose cutting it.

Social Security is a simple “pay as you go” program. Current workers, via the payroll tax, fund payouts for retirees and disabled people. In 2024, about 1 in 5 U.S. residents received Social Security.

I used to be a trustee of the Social Security trust fund. I know what I’m talking about.

As the Social Security Administration explains, “In 2025, when you work, about 85 cents of every Social Security tax dollar you pay goes to a trust fund. This fund pays monthly benefits to current retirees and their families and to surviving spouses and children of workers who have died. About 15 cents goes to a trust fund that pays benefits to people with disabilities and their families.”

The only reason that the Social Security trust fund is slowly running out of money is the trustees never anticipated that so much of the nation’s total income would be in the hands of so few people (such as Elon Musk).

The simple way to fix this is to lift the cap on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes, which is now $176,100.

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg fulfilled their 2025 Social Security payroll tax obligations a few minutes past midnight on January 1. Most Americans continue paying payroll taxes all year.

Trump and Musk’s Plan to Destroy Social Security Started Tuesday Night
It starts with cutting staff at the Social Security Administration. That will sow confusion. Then it builds from there.

Social Security Chief Privately Admits DOGE Will Wreck Things
The acting head of the Social Security Administration warned his staff that Elon Musk’s DOGE could make some costly mistakes.

The Department of Government Efficiency’s influence at the Social Security Administration is growing to be too much even for the agency’s Trump-loving acting commissioner, who privately warned that Elon Musk and his team will soon make serious mistakes.

“I am relying on longtime career people to inform my work, but I am receiving decisions that are made without my input. I have to effectuate those decisions,” acting Commissioner Leland Dudek said in a staff meeting Tuesday, The Washington Post reported.

He described Musk’s cronies as “outsiders who are unfamiliar with nuances of SSA programs,” and warned that their aggressive approach could hurt the some 73 million Americans who receive Social Security benefits, according to meeting notes from the Post.

U.S. workers are being laid off at levels not seen since the Great Recession in 2009, all thanks to Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

A new report from Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, an international firm that helps laid-off workers find new jobs, said that job losses spiked a whopping 245 percent to 172,017 last month, higher than any month since the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic in July 2020, and the highest in any February since 2009.

At his newsletter, Tusk, political scientist Seth Masket has an interesting piece about the different approaches of the two parties. Democrats, he points out, tend to try to moderate in response to political losses. Republicans in contrast double down.
…
Masket’s certainly right that our politics have gone to a bad place. But I think the problem precedes the different party attitudes. Or to put it another way, I think I can explain why the two parties have different attitudes in two words: white supremacy.
…
There are some caveats here. For example, Trump has alienated voters with more education, which has led the GOP to sacrifice a good chunk of its off year election advantage. But the combination of a system that benefits the white supremacy party and an ideological default which legitimizes the white supremacy party has created a powerful gulf in the way that the two parties see elections.

The toxic split in party attitudes is, then, a result, not a cause, of our toxic white supremacist politics. If Democrats want to change course, they need to go against their own instinctual desire to cower and equivocate, and they need to instead focus on institutional changes which can correct the rightward leaning tilt of our politics. That could create a virtuous circle in which the white identity party no longer seems impervious and (worse) natural.

If Trump’s presidency is as bad a failure as it seems likely to be, there may be room for this kind of sweeping reset of our Democracy’s systems and presuppositions. Alternately, if Trump’s presidency is as bad a failure as it seems likely to be, we may just no longer have a democracy. At that point, Democrats and everyone else will have a different, and worse, set of problems.

Is American democracy doomed?
How to understand the concept of “competitive authoritarianism” and why it’s crucial to push back now to avoid it.

I: Are the reports of democracy’s death greatly exaggerated?
A few weeks ago, as Donald Trump and Elon Musk ran roughshod over laws and the Constitution in their quest to take a literal chainsaw to the US government, a major political science democracy index was quietly updated.

The “Polity IV” index—which measures levels of democracy and authoritarianism in every country—decided to re-classify the United States as a non-democracy. The official notice read as follows: “The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy.”
…
II: Don’t Wait for Instructions. Make Ripples Now.
…
First, it’s far easier to save a democracy than to resurrect one. …
Second, successful pro-democracy movements are big tents that transcend traditional political divides. …
Third, the inverse is true: exploiting latent divisions in the ruling movement can help divide and weaken attacks on democracy. …
Fourth, democracy takes time to destroy, so slowing down the pace and “running out the clock” can be a viable strategy.…
Fifth, shape narratives, don’t just respond to existing ones. …
Sixth, digital activism matters little compared to real-world protests, boycotts, and strikes. …
Seventh, nonviolent movements are more effective than violent ones.…
Eighth and perhaps most crucially: Don’t wait for instructions. Ripples matter—and you can make some now.

Top Foreign Diplomat Fired Over Comment About Trump
His position became “untenable” after the remark, the nation’s foreign minister said.
…
During a Q&A with the audience, New Zealand High Commissioner to the U.K. Phil Goff quoted Churchill’s words to then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after Chamberlain agreed to let Adolf Hitler annex part of Czechoslovakia in the 1938 Munich Agreement.

“You had the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, yet you will have war,” Churchill said at the time.

Goff then asked Valtonen: “President Trump has restored the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office, but do you think he really understands history?”

But last month, President Trump invited John Amanchukwu, the self-proclaimed “book-banning pastor,” to the White House for a Black History Month event. Since 2023, Amanchukwu, a youth pastor from North Carolina, has travelled to at least 23 school board meetings in 18 states on a nationwide book-banning tour financed by Trump donors and allies, including Turning Point USA (TPUSA).

On this tour, Amanchukwu demands that school districts remove books that do not align with his conservative Christian ideology

In their heedless quest to chainsaw the federal budget, the world’s most powerful person and the richest man on Earth managed to cut a program that had cost nothing at all—while developing more than 60 drugs for children with cancer and rare, life-threatening diseases.

“This program has not cost taxpayers a dime,” notes Nancy Goodman, who conceived and championed the Give Kids A Chance Act, which passed Congress in 2011 and now needs renewal.

Senior White House trade adviser Peter Navarro claimed that Canada has been “taken over by Mexican cartels.”

Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing who was jailed for contempt of Congress last year after refusing to testify about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, was speaking about U.S. tariffs on our northern neighbor with Fox News’ Bret Baier on Wednesday evening.

Trump Press Sec Accidentally Blurts Out Real Goal of His Tariff Scam
…
Then press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters directly that if Canada wants to avoid tariffs in the future, it should become the fifty-first U.S. state.

After two days of watching the markets tank, President in Name Only Donald Trump’s lackeys began to talk about a “compromise” on his wrongheaded, disastrous rollout of steep across-the-board tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada, and China. This is a common Trump stunt: Make a boneheaded move, watch the fierce blowback, make a meaningless deal, and declare victory.

In this case, the “compromise” appears to include a one-month reprieve from tariffs for automakers. However, after the one-month pause, those tariffs apparently will go into effect. No such relief was offered for other goods.

Whatever wiggle room Trump provides, the damage is done. Markets, businesses, and consumers are rattled.

How can the right be so wrong? Or at least portions of the right—especially the American right—when it comes to Ukraine? To begin to grapple with this, you have to go way, way back to Donald Trump’s first term in office.

In that time, Ukraine came to the public’s consciousness just twice. The first occasion was when Trump and other Republicans began to make hay over the business dealings of Hunter Biden. Since 2014 the then vice president’s son had been sitting on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. He was earning around $1 million annually to advise a company in a sector about which he had zero expertise. Why might a foreign company want the son of the vice president on their board? Obviously—as all the investigations have shown since—so that the Biden name could bring contracts, grants, and other support to Burisma.

The only other time Ukraine came to the attention of the American right was in 2019, when President Trump had a phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump’s political opponents claimed that he had used the call to tell Zelensky that American aid to the country could be contingent on Ukraine helping to expose the Biden family’s financial dealings. Trump was impeached over the call but acquitted by the Senate. But these two events started to embed the idea on the right that Ukraine was simply a corrupt country, which had enriched and cooperated with its own political opponents.

This was all that Ukraine meant to most MAGA Republicans until Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

This is all awful, but the response from White House spokesperson Harrison Fields is simply off the hook wild.

“The White House condemns any threats to really any public officials, despite our feelings that a lot of these people are leftist, crazy judges that aren’t following the constitution,” Fields said. “Just because these people are leftist, crazy, unconstitutional people doesn’t mean they deserve to be harmed. That’s not how you engage with disputes in this country.”

In eerily similar fashion to Starship’s seventh test launch in January, the ship appears to have exploded less than 10 minutes into flight and created a massive debris cloud near populated islands in the Caribbean and Atlantic.

Judge orders Trump administration to pay nearly $2 billion in USAID and State Dept. debts

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday gave the Trump administration until Monday to pay nearly $2 billion owed to partners of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department, thawing the administration’s six-week funding freeze on all foreign assistance.

American musicians have boycotted performing in countries with objectionable politics such as the evil apartheid in South Africa during the ’70s, and more recently in Russia since their illegal, immoral and evil invasion into the Ukraine. But the tables are being turned on the United States—once considered a great leader of all free countries on the planet. This perception is changing dramatically by a lot of people including great musicians and artists from around the world who’ve loved performing in America, and now they are staring down the Trump administration. The White House official spokesperson had two words to say to the New York Times in response to the great German musician’s boycott that includes a concert at Carnegie Hall this spring. He said, “America first.”

The Musk Myth: Genius or Just Another Billionaire Oligarch?
Musk’s influence over politics has become increasingly apparent in recent years, with his growing alignment with right-wing ideologues and willingness to use his platform to manipulate public discourse. However, his meddling in legislative matters has now escalated beyond merely posting inflammatory tweets—he is actively using his financial and social capital to kill policies that serve the public good.

AOC pointed out that the PBM reform bill had overwhelming bipartisan support, meaning that both Democrats and Republicans recognized the urgent need to lower prescription drug costs. The bill had been moving toward passage until, at 4:15 a.m. on December 17th, Musk took to social media to post a flurry of tweets attacking the legislation. Within hours, Republican lawmakers, seemingly in lockstep with Musk’s agenda, reversed course and effectively killed the bill. Days later, Musk tweeted: “What is a pharmacy benefit manager?”—admitting he had no clue what he had just helped sabotage.

“We are the safest major city in America because we are safe for everyone — that will never change,” she added. “We are all these things not in spite of our immigrants, but because of them.”

Wu deftly avoided the traps set by the Republicans on the committee. When Arizona Representative Paul Gosar tried to push her buttons by saying comprehensive immigration policy wouldn’t help because Boston was already “defying” existing policy, Wu pushed back.

“If you want to make us safe, pass gun reform, stop cutting Medicaid, stop cutting cancer research, stop cutting funds for veterans,” she said with just the right amount of exasperation. “That is what would make our city safe.”

Understanding his likely motivations is key to thwarting his objectives. The Canadians may understand the history of tariffs and efforts to annex their country as a state, but it’s time for Americans to as well and to begin a public discourse about how badly this failed the last time around.

Congress needs to wake up and understand that Trump has yanked more power for himself by stealing the power to tax away from them, and the courts need to figure out where they will draw the line on this unconstitutional delegation of congressional power.

And for whatever tariffs that do kick in, the investigative press needs to start to track who is applying for exemptions and which of those folks are in and out of Mar-a-Lago, making it harder for Trump to set up a successful pay-to-play system.

The public should better understand and call out what 47 is up to every time he shifts his stance on tariffs or claims fake national emergencies over fentanyl and migrants. We can all be on to his game, and in that way stay a step or two ahead of the chaos.

Speaking of chaos, there’s a fourth rather dark theory out there that I’ve chosen not to explore today: that Trump and Musk hope to crash the world economy and swoop in while everything is distressed to take over. Musk has indicated that he supports a period of “severe overreaction” where “markets will tumble” in order to achieve long-term prosperity. The problem with this theory is that it can neither be proven nor disproven. To my mind, while this may fit the “evil villain” persona of Musk, it doesn’t really align with Trump’s M.O. While Trump appreciates chaos enough to take advantage of people and businesses in distress, he doesn’t want to be swallowed up by it, if the past is any guide.