Prosecute Pete Hegseth for murdering helpless sailors!

VIDEO OF THE DAY: World leaders stun Trump in response to Greenland threats
If Trump thought he would be able to bully the European Union into handing over Greenland, he's got another thing coming. Brian Tyler Cohen breaks down the latest bout of Trump insanity and the stunning declarations from our European allies vowing to oppose any American aggression against Greenland, no matter the consequences.

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Memo to moderate Democrats: Abolishing ICE is NOT a fringe position
Toby Buckle, The New Republic: :"How do we create liberal democracy in America? Notice that I say “create,” not “protect.” The old constitutional order is gone, and we should be straightforward about that. Nor do I say “return”; the system was clearly incapable of meeting the challenges of our age. We should not want to go back to the past. The past is what led to the present. Rather, we need a reconstruction agenda. And we need the entire anti-Trump coalition—from neocons to neo-Stalinists and everyone in between—to be, despite all our differences, fully signed off on it. It’s becoming obvious that, whatever else is on the reconstruction agenda, ICE abolition must be included. The agency is acting as a secret police force, ideologically loyal to the far right—perhaps even to Trump personally, like a latter-day Praetorian guard. They have, with the assistance of the executive branch and Supreme Court, arrogated to themselves the power to stop and detain any person for any reason. Unless stopped, it’s hardly insane to think that someday Immigrations and Customs Enforcement will functionally assert the ability to summarily execute American citizens in broad daylight, on camera, and in front of witnesses. All this, however chaotic, seems to have been the plan all along. It’s a simple trick when you think about it: During fascism’s ascent, you endlessly insist on more immigration enforcement. More funding, more powers, more agents. Once in power, you then have a premade apparatus of violent control outside of the normal checks and balances, one institutionally and culturally set up not to see its victims—those who 'aren’t supposed to be here'—as people. You don’t need to set up a secret police to go after dissidents or targeted racial groups; you just expand the definition of “not supposed to be here” to include them. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security recently called for '100 million deportations.' There aren’t anywhere near this many immigrants in the United States. Rather, it’s around the size of the country’s nonwhite population. It is preposterous to imagine we will be able to create liberal democracy in the U.S. with the secret police of the current regime still in operation. Its overtly fascist recruitment targets far-right groups for its agents. Those agents very plainly see liberal America as, at best, occupied territory and, at worst, subhuman. The instincts driving ICE are not instrumentally rational. Like the institutional equivalent of a serial killer, it is driven by sadism, male insecurity, and the desire to dominate and humiliate. Like a serial killer, it will not stop until it is stopped. ICE agents in Michigan explicitly talk of the killing of Renee Nicole Good as a warning to others. They believe they are entitled to absolute obedience, and their only answer to not getting it is violence. Administration officials openly say that accusations of murder will be met with more murders. The coalition is ready: 85 percent of Democrats disapprove of ICE; 70 percent support abolition. And partisan signaling would boost both those numbers if the party fully committed. Bill Kristol called for abolition. This isn’t some fringe left thing. I’ll take a terrified moderate over a fascist any day. But wouldn’t it be so much better to have people leading the party of liberalism who didn’t need to be nagged? Who were just there. Who instinctively understood their base—and hated those trying to kill us. Think of all the mutual frustration and acrimony we could save if the party leaders could, just this one time, lead."

Take Action: Stop the coverup of deaths in ICE custody!

Trump plots to open 90% (!!!) of U.S. coastal waters to oil and gas drilling
Earthjustice: While our climate change scientists are desperately calling for an end to fossil fuel pollution before there’s no turning back, Donald Trump just announced a huge handout to Big Oil that would be catastrophic for the environment and our communities. The Trump team has unveiled a new National Offshore Drilling Plan that would open up the vast majority of our coastal waters to oil and gas drilling that would put our coastal communities and their livelihoods under threat from destructive oil spills — not to mention super-charging the natural disasters of the future. We need to stand together as one in rejecting Trump’s dangerous drilling plan. Click here to make your voice heard and say NO to offshore drilling expansion!

The tech billionaires behind Trump’s Greenland push
Lois Parshley, Jacobin: "President Donald Trump started his second term with his sights set on Greenland. When Trump first proposed buying the arctic nation during his first administration, it was treated like a joke. But in a phone call last week with Denmark’s prime minister, who controls the autonomous territory’s foreign policy, the president doubled down on his efforts to seize power. In the 'aggressive and confrontational' conversation, Trump threatened tariffs if he didn’t get his way. In a news conference earlier this month, he also refused to rule out the use of military force. Now Denmark is taking him seriously: on Monday, it announced a $2 billion military expansion in the Arctic. Though the island is not for sale, the president emphasizedGreenland’s importance to US national security. Left unspoken: a US takeover could weaken the country’s mining laws and ban on private property, aiding Trump donors’ plans to profit from the island’s mineral deposits and build a libertarian techno-city. The president’s renewed intention to take over Greenland has reignited debates over its sovereignty, as the country grapples with the trade-offs between economic opportunity and independence from Denmark. As the country’s glaciers recede, it’s also facing sweeping climate-driven transformations, threatening traditional industries like fishing and hunting and exposing valuable mineral resources. These shifts have prompted interest from powerful players associated with Trump. Tech moguls in the front row of his inauguration, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, are also investors in a start-up aiming to mine western Greenland for materials crucial to the artificial intelligence boom. That company, KoBold Metals, uses artificial intelligence to locate and extract rare earth minerals. Their proprietary algorithm parses government-funded geological surveys and other data to locate significant deposits. The program pinpointed southwest Greenland’s rugged coastline, where the company now has a 51 percent stake in the Disko-Nuussuaq project, searching for minerals like copper. Just two weeks before some of its investors were glad-handing at the Capitol celebrations, KoBold Metals raised $537 million in its latest funding round, bringing its valuation to almost $3 billion. Among the contributors was a leading venture capital firm founded by Marc Andreessen, an early Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has helped shape the administration’s technology policies, including consulting with Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency as a self-proclaimed 'unpaid intern.' In addition to KoBold, Andreessen has also backed other ventures eyeing the arctic nation: he is a significant investor in Praxis Nation, a project aiming to use Greenland to establish a “crypto state,” a self-governing, experimental community built around libertarian ideals and technology like cryptocurrency. The venture is also funded in part by Pronomos Capital, a venture capital group founded by the grandson of economist Milton Friedman and bankrolled by libertarian figures such as Peter Thiel, whose own family reportedly managed a uranium mine in Namibia. Pronomos aims to create private, business-friendly charter cities like Praxis, often in developing countries where investors could write their own laws and regulations. These 'broligarchs'” now have the ear of the president. Thiel has been a significant supporter of Trump, throwing millions of dollars behind him throughout his political career and introducing him to current Vice President J. D. Vance."

The Enshittifinancial Crisis
Ed Zitron, Where's Your Ed At: "One time, a good friend of mine told me that the more I learned about finance, the more pissed off I’d get. He was right. There is an echoing melancholy to this era, as we watch the end of Silicon Valley’s hypergrowth era, the horrifying result of 15+ years of steering the tech industry away from solving actual problems in pursuit of eternal growth. Everything is more expensive, and every tech product has gotten worse, all so that every company can 'do AI,' whatever the fuck that means. We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there 'just isn’t the money' to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth. The money does exist, it just exists for those who want to gamble — private equity firms, 'business development companies' that exist to give money to other companies, venture capitalists, and banks that are getting desperate and need an overnight shot of capital from the Federal Reserve’s Overnight Repurchase Facility or Discount Window. No, the money does not exist for you or me or a person. Money is for entities that could potentially funnel more money into the economy, even if the ways that these entities use the money are reckless and foolhardy, because the system’s intent on keeping entities alive incentivizes it. We are in an era where the average person is told to pull up their bootstraps, to work harder, to struggle more, because, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, it’s socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor. The 'free market' is a fucking con. When you or I run out of money, our things are taken from us, we receive increasingly-panicked letters, we get phone calls and texts and emails and demands, we are told that all will be lost if we don’t 'work it out,' because the financial system is not about an exchange of value but whether or not you can enter into the currently agreed-upon con. By letting neoliberalism and the scourge of the free markets rule, modern society created the conditions for what I call The Enshittifinancial Crisis — the place at which my friend Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification Theory meets my own Rot Economy Thesis in a fourth stage of Enshittification. 'Enshittification unfolds in three phases: first, a company is 'good to users,' Doctorow writes, drawing people in droves, as funnel traps do Japanese beetles, with the promise of connection or convenience. Second, with that mass audience consolidated, the company is 'good to business customers,' compromising some of its features so that the most lucrative clients, usually advertisers, can thrive on the platform. This second phase is the point at which, say, our Facebook feeds fill with ads and posts from brands. Third, the company turns the user experience into 'a giant pile of shit,' making the platform worse for users and businesses alike in order to further enrich the company’s owners and executives.' We have now entered Enshittification Stage 4, where businesses turn on shareholders. Analysts and investors have become trapped in the same kind of loathsome platform play as consumers and businesses, and face exactly the same kinds of punishment through the devaluation of the stock itself. By incentivizing the Rot Economy — making stocks disconnected from the value of the company beyond net income and future earnings guidance — companies have found ways to enshittify their own stocks, and shareholders will be the ones who suffer, all thanks to the very downstream pressure that they’ve chosen to ignore for decades. Focusing on growth-at-all-costs thinking naturally encourages, enables, and empowers grifters, because all they ever have to promise is 'more' — more users, more debt, more venture, more features, more everything. This is what happens when you make everything about growth: everybody becomes stupid, ready to be conned, ready to hear what the next big growth thing is because asking nasty questions gets you fucking fired."

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