Trump administration to cut billions in medical research funding
Somehow, Trump (and we mean Elon) has decided that cutting $4 BILLION from the National Institutes of Health research budget is a good idea. We just got out of one pandemic and there's bird flu breaking out all over the country...but we don't need to spend money researching disease. Right. "This is a surefire way to cripple lifesaving research and innovation,” said Matt Owens, president of the Council on Government Relations. “America’s competitors will relish this self-inflicted wound. We urge NIH leaders to rescind this dangerous policy before its harms are felt by Americans.” If you were describing how an enemy of the United States would govern it, you'd be describing the Trump administration to a T.
Take Action: Tell Congress to overturn Trump's attack on clean energy!
This is so much worse than last time
Alex Shephard, The New Republic: "This is all very bad. Saying that it is very bad feels like an understatement. There is an ongoing oligarchic takeover of the U.S. government. Donald Trump’s authoritarian project has never been more threatening and fully realized. Things are already so much worse than his first term. The first time around, the president was stymied by legislative checks, particularly by a handful of congressional Republicans who occasionally emerged to block him, a still embryonic political project that had a dearth of apparatchiks to fulfill his (often insane) requests, and a bureaucracy that often frustrated his unconstitutional overreach and general authoritarianism. Now the Republican resisters have been replaced by lackeys and cowards (sometimes a combination of both) and his administration is being staffed by fascistic loyalists eager to do his bidding; these loyalists are now engaged in a project aimed at destroying much of the existing civil service, particularly any part of it that was deemed insufficiently pro-Trump. (USAID, for instance, is under fire in part because of the perception that it is a hotbed of Commies; the FBI, famously not a hotbed of Commies, is under fire because it investigated Trump’s attempted coup after he lost the 2020 election.) Despite all the full-frontal fascism, the response has been oddly and frustratingly muted.The Democrats have, in characteristic fashion, taken the wrong lessons from his reelection and seem to have spent much of the last two months paying the same consultants who lost the election to tell them how they can be more like Trump. Despite the takeover of the Treasury they are, incredibly, still voting for some of his nominees. Media coverage has somehow been even less inspiring than the Democratic response. The speed of all of this and the enormity of it is, to be fair, difficult to capture. But there’s also been the return of an old malady: The mainstream press’s wholesale inability to grasp the magnitude of Trumpian misrule and capture the existential threat he poses. Worse still, all of these old problems have been exacerbated by an emerging consensus that the media’s intelligentsia somehow extracted from Trump’s reelection campaign, which is that much of the public thought that their coverage was too sensationalist. And so there has been a palpably strenuous effort to dial things back, at the very moment when Trump and Musk are escalating their war on American life. No one is crying wolf, but the wolves have arrived."
Take Action: Tell your senators: Oppose Trump’s pick for EPA administrator!
BTC leads collective of progressive creators with plan to take back the internet from Joe Rogan and the right-wing machine
Chorus: This election has made it painfully clear that Democrats' messages are just not getting through the tsunami of right-wing propaganda and lies flooding through social media, and we have no real answer to a Joe Rogan or a Ben Shapiro...until now! Chorus Collective is a new collaborative founded by creators like Brian Tyler Cohen, Leigh McGowan (Politics Girl), Roland Martin, David Pakman, Elizabeth Booker Houston, and Adam Mockler, who are bringing their audience of 40 million people together to create a new infrastructure to scale their voices and build support for more creators like them. Chorus aims to not only amplify progressive voices but also uplift new creators and build a left-wing social media ecosystem that supports its voices ALL the time, not just in the months leading up to an election. Will you chip in to help Chorus get off the ground and help break the right-wing stranglehold on social media?
Trump’s phony trade wars are evidence of American imperial decline
Jeet Heer, The Nation: "Donald Trump loves talking tough on trade. He’s full of swagger as he threatens to wield the power of tariffs against friend and foe alike to reclaim the American primacy that he feels other politicians are too weak to assert. Toward the end of last year, a senior Trump official told a Financial Times reporter, 'Our strategy on tariffs will be to shoot first and ask questions later.' You don’t need to be a psychologist to know that this type of hyper-macho swagger is often compensatory, masking deep insecurities about weakness. There’s no reason to think words will match deeds, especially with a figure like Trump whose characteristic mode of aggressive hyperbole is invariably dishonest. Trump’s lies are integral to his politics and public persona, rooted in his background not just as a real estate huckster but also as an entertainer. So far in his second term, Trump’s trade wars have been pure kayfabe. They’ve been noisy, attention-getting, and full of surprise narrative turns, but they are only slightly more connected to reality than the feud between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. In other words, Trump is just fighting fake matches on a wrestling stage that allows him to beat his chest as well as enact the essential surprise turn where he shifts from friend to foe to friend again. This may be great kayfabe—but it has little to do with economic or geopolitical reality...Trump’s tariff wars are not, as he proclaims, proof that America is recovering from global decline. Rather, they are a symptom of an empire that is increasingly on the skids, withdrawing into the pleasures of fantasy to escape the reality of diminishing power."
Take Action: Block RFK Jr. from leading Health and Human Services!
The Super Bowl will be a spectacle of Black excellence, but you’ll need to tune out MAGA’s white whine
Dave Zirin, The Nation: "Sad-boy billionaire Mark Zuckerberg thinks he can find his 'masculine energy' by sucking up to a 78-year-old autocrat slathered in orange. But for all the alleged 'masculine energy' surrounding Trumpists, there has never been a bigger group of babies. This administration and its acolytes are part of what I call 'the cult of the white whine.' Well, grab a goblet, because the white whine will be flowing this Sunday. The Super Bowl, of course, is this weekend in New Orleans and will be the most watched event of the year. It is still one of the few shared experiences left in this divided country. The day, as programmed by the NFL, was set to celebrate New Orleans’s incredible history of Black music and culture. Yet, given the current climate of voluntary surrender to Donald Trump’s “anti-DEI” (anti-Black) obsession, it would not have surprised me if the NFL pulled the plug and just showed a hologram of Hank Williams Jr. on a loop. But when I contacted the NFL’s vice president of communications, Brian McCarthy, he not only affirmed that the show would go on but seemed downright excited. The people trying to silence Black voices and erase Black history won’t be happy about it. The white whine will pour before the game even starts when a New Orleans–born recording artist, the brilliant Ledesi, performs 'Lift Every Voice and Sing.' The rest of the day will be filled with musical legends of New Orleans like the legendary Trombone Shorty and Jon Batiste. New Orleans is the cradle of Black music—meaning all “American” music. In the eyes of the people in power, it must be DEI and anti-white prejudice that is keeping reality-show singer Carrie Underwood or the shower-allergic Kid Rock off the big stage. On Sunday, they’ll all be drunk on grievance, fragile as porcelain, choking on their tears—their 'masculine energy' exposed as buzzwords for an agenda to oppress and remove those with whom they are scared to compete."
Take Action: Defend birthright citizenship and the Constitution!
Bomb the area, gas the tunnels: Israel’s unbridled war on Gaza’s underground
Yuval Abraham, 972mag: "The Israeli army intensively bombarded residential areas in Gaza when it lacked intelligence on the exact location of Hamas commanders hiding underground, and intentionally weaponized toxic byproducts of bombs to suffocate militants in their tunnels, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call can reveal. The investigation, based on conversations with 15 Israeli Military Intelligence and Shin Bet officers who have been involved in tunnel-targeting operations since October 7, exposes how this strategy aimed to compensate for the army’s inability to pinpoint targets in Hamas’ subterranean tunnel network. When targeting senior commanders in the group, the Israeli military authorized the killing of “triple-digit numbers” of Palestinian civilians as 'collateral damage,' and maintained close real-time coordination with U.S. officials regarding the expected casualty figures. Some of these strikes, which were the deadliest in the war and often used American bombs, are known to have killed Israeli hostages despite concerns raised ahead of time by military officers. Moreover, the lack of precise intelligence meant that in at least three major strikes, the army dropped several 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs that killed scores of civilians — part of a strategy known as “tiling” — without succeeding in killing the intended target. The investigation also reveals how Israel has known for years that the use of bunker-buster bombs releases the lethal gas carbon monoxide as a byproduct, which can kill people inside a tunnel through asphyxiation even at a distance of hundreds of meters from the strike location. 'Imagine this was Tel Aviv and not Jabalia, and that in order to reach 'the Pit' [the nickname for the Israeli army’s underground operations center at the Kirya, situated near residential and commercial areas in Tel Aviv], the neighborhoods around the Kirya would be bombed,' the human rights lawyer Michael Sfard said. 'You don’t know where the military tunnels under the Kirya reach, you don’t know exactly where your target is, and you want to make sure he is killed. So you bomb [the adjacent streets]? Nobody would accept such a thing.'”
Finally, a Trump opposition?
Liz Featherstone, Jacobin: "At a rainy protest in front of Senator Chuck Schumer’s office in midtown Manhattan Thursday, the target could be identified by the chants: “Elon Musk has got to go.” Organized by Indivisible, a volunteer-driven group of progressive Democrats and part of a larger nationwide effort to pressure senators, especially Democrats, to do more to stop Musk, an unelected billionaire, and his unauthorized interference with the very operations of government — probably unprecedented for a private citizen whose specific job in the administration has never been approved by Congress. After an eerie silence during the first weeks of the second Trump administration, something like “the resistance” feels like it’s slowly coming back to life. And while we are in its earliest days, the effort seems more focused and politically mature, more informed by an understanding that oligarchy is the main enemy of the American people. This pushback, though so far smaller in scale than at this time during Donald Trump’s first term, has been targeted and savvy in calling attention to the administration’s worst appointments and in its focus on Musk. Jacobin readers might roll their eyes at liberal groups like Indivisible, but they are the ones doing the work of opposition right now. As the richest man in the world assaults the US government without our consent, we must recognize the situation as class war from above — and fight back. His visible and concerted project of destroying that government while flouting basic legal and democratic controls on his power is a brazen insult to the country. Fighting Musk and getting him out of the government should be a top priority for every left-of-center citizen and organization in America right now. Indivisible has been the most organized nationwide group. But equally crucial are federal workers who have been sharing information with the public, rallying to call attention to the abuses like Musk’s unauthorized access to Treasury Department data and picketing and at times preventing Musk minions from entering buildings. Other unions rightly focused on Trump’s abrupt disabling of the National Labor Relations Board. But they are starting to respond to the larger situation. The AFL-CIO has created the 'Department of People Who Work for a Living,' organizing a response to Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). The labor movement is right to move quickly on this, and all socialists should join them, union members or not. The Musk takeover is a wholesale assault on the working class and anyone who is not a billionaire. That such a takeover could happen at all shows how deeply our system has been captured by the capitalist class and is a potentially fruitful point of attack against a president who is trying to portray himself and his party as fighting for workers."
Food for thought
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