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Ocasio-Cortez Denounces Musk-Led Attacks on Agencies as ‘A Plutocratic Coup’

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Original article by Eloise Goldsmith republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) delivers a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. on March 22, 2024.
 (Photo: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/YouTube Screengrab)

“It is important that we continue to signal to one another what we believe, because if we get quiet… then everyone around us is going to think that everyone has given up,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a recent livestream.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York took to social media on Sunday to denounce billionaire Elon Musk, who has been tasked with leading the new administration’s effort to slash federal spending and bureaucracy, and is currently working to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development.

In response to reporting that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration placed two security chiefs at USAID on leave after their refusal to hand over classified materials to Musk’s “government-inspection teams,” per The Associated Press, Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday wrote: “This is a five alarm fire. The people elected Donald Trump to be president—not Elon Musk.”

“Having an unelected billionaire, with his own foreign debts and motives, raiding U.S. classified information is a grave threat to national security,” she continued.

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Her remarks were reposted by the venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, who wrote that Ocasio-Cortez is “wrong” and that the real five alarm fire will happen after Musk’s team reveals government waste and fraud.

Ocasio-Cortez hit back, casting doubt on the legitimacy of Musk’s efforts and writing: “This is a plutocratic coup. If you want the power, run for office and be chosen by the people.” The entire exchange took place on the Musk-owned social media platform X.

Musk, a billionaire and GOP megadonor, established himself as a major power player in Trump’s orbit even before Trump was inaugurated. In December, Musk sank a bipartisan spending bill, leaving Congress to scramble to come up with a new spending agreement to avert a government shutdown.

But since Trump’s return to the White House, Musk’s power has only grown as he’s moved swiftly to exert influence over levers of power within government. In a day one executive order, Trump established his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, by repurposing an existing entity, the U.S. Digital Service, an agency conceived to help improve the federal government’s services through better technology and design. Now called the U.S. DOGE Service, the move “will give centibillionaire Elon Musk and his allies seemingly unprecedented insight across the government, and access to troves of federal data,” according to WIRED.

Musk’s influence now extends to the General Services Administration as well as the Office of Personnel Management. Representatives from DOGE were also granted access to a sensitive Treasury Department payment system that contains the personal information of every American who receives tax refunds, Medicare, Social Security, and other payments from the government.

Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez has been one of the most vocal members of Congress speaking out about Musk and the Trump administration’s actions.

In a livestream on social media shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Ocasio-Cortez implored her audience not to take the Trump administration’s actions quietly.

“It is important that we continue to signal to one another what we believe, because if we get quiet… then everyone around us is going to think that everyone has given up,” said the New York Democrat.

“I want you all to know that you’re going to be hearing more from me,” she explained. “My responsibility is in trying to explain to you all what is going on as best as I can and leaning into our ability to collectively organize.”

Original article by Eloise Goldsmith republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Continue ReadingOcasio-Cortez Denounces Musk-Led Attacks on Agencies as ‘A Plutocratic Coup’

Will Elon Musk Do to the Federal Government What He Did to Twitter?

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https://newrepublic.com/article/191037/elon-musk-destroy-federal-government

An unchecked, unelected oligarch is yanking wires out of the machinery that powers American life—and there’s no telling how many people will get hurt.

Michael Tomasky

It literally sounds like the plot of a dystopian science fiction movie: The richest man in the world befriends—and helps finance—another rich man who becomes president of the United States, who then gives his plutocratic benefactor carte blanche access to the operations of the federal government. The bedlamite billionaire instantly zeroes in on the obscure little office that oversees the writing of all the government’s checks, thus ensuring that he has the power to bring down the U.S. and global economy and even, if he so wishes, topple said president.

Oh, and—he’s also a right-wing extremist who recently spoke to the far-right German political party whose leaders say things like “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” He told them—with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge—that Germans placed “too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” And then there’s the matter of that salute, which of course, he denies was what many people—even or especially among those who delighted in it—thought it was.

What does Elon Musk want with control of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and its computers that write the federal government’s checks? Maybe it’s benign. Maybe he and his team just want to scrutinize the hundreds of millions of payments the government makes to individuals, businesses, other governments, nonprofits, and so on and root out inefficiency.

It seems awfully unlikely that it’s benign. Musk tweeted over the weekend that the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has existed for six decades and spends billions on poverty relief, disaster aid, economic development, and more, is a “criminal organization.” But Musk’s motives aren’t even the main point here. The main point is that even if it is benign, it’s unprecedented and antidemocratic.

…

Will Musk do to the federal government what he did to Twitter? The plundering of that platform was a crime, metaphorically, but at least it was (more or less) victimless. Here, there will be victims—immigrants, refugees, poor people, sick people, and many others who interfere with the schemes of the world’s richest man, who believes Germany should stop apologizing.

Read the complete original article at https://newrepublic.com/article/191037/elon-musk-destroy-federal-government

Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Continue ReadingWill Elon Musk Do to the Federal Government What He Did to Twitter?

Extinction Rebellion blockade Farnborough airport in protest

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https://www.basingstokegazette.co.uk/news/24903649.extinction-rebellion-blockade-farnborough-airport-protest

Protestors blockade an airport entrance to protest over plans to double private jet flights.

Residents and climate activists have blocked access to Farnborough Airport this morning (February 2) to protest against the proposed expansion of the airport which will almost double the number of private jet flights to 70,000 a year.

Scores of campaigners from Extinction Rebellion, Farnborough Noise campaign group, Blackwater Valley Friends of the Earth and Alton Climate Action Network joined local councillors and residents, to voice their opposition to the plans, which they say blatantly ignore the climate crisis.

The protest follows a consultation period on Farnborough Airport’s expansion plans which ended in October 2024 drawing fierce opposition from local residents and environmental campaigners.

The proposals include doubling the airport’s annual weekend flight limit from 8,900 to 18,900 flights and upping its annual flight limit from 50,000 to 70,000 flights.

…

https://www.basingstokegazette.co.uk/news/24903649.extinction-rebellion-blockade-farnborough-airport-protest

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‘Chaos and Fear’ at CDC Amid Order to Retract Journal Articles to Purge ‘Forbidden Terms’

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Original article by Olivia Rosane republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

“How can the government decide what words a journal can use to describe a scientific reality? That reality needs to be named,” one journal editor said.

Employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been ordered to pull any articles under consideration for publication in medical or scientific journals so that they can be checked for certain “forbidden terms” including gender, transgender, and LGBT.

The order was sent in an email to CDC division heads on Friday by the agency’s chief science officer, a federal official told Reuters on Sunday. Inside Medicine broke the news on Saturday and provided a screenshot of the full list of terms that needed to be scrubbed.

“It sounds incredible that this is compatible with the First Amendment. A constitutional right has been canceled,” Dr. Alfredo Morabia, editor in chief of the American Journal of Public Health, told Reuters. “How can the government decide what words a journal can use to describe a scientific reality? That reality needs to be named.”

“We can’t just erase or ignore certain populations when it comes to preventing, treating, or researching infectious diseases such as HIV.”

The order is an attempt to ensure that CDC is in compliance with U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order mandating that the U.S. government only recognize two sexes: male and female. The papers will be withdrawn so that a Trump appointee can review them.

The “forbidden terms” CDC employees are supposed to avoid are, in full: Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, and biologically female, according to Inside Medicine.

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The order covers both papers under considerations and ones that have been accepted but not published. If a CDC employee worked on a paper with nongovernmental scientists but did not initiate it, they have been asked to remove their names, according to Reuters.

The new order is separate from a demand two days into the administration that government health agencies including CDC freeze all communications with the public. It follows reports on Friday that CDC webpages and datasets involving HIV, the LGBTQ community, youth health, and other topics were no longer accessible as the agency attempts to comply with the Trump executive order on transgender identity and another on banning government Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.

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“It is Orwellian, it really is,” Steven Woolf, director emeritus and senior adviser at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center on Society and Health, told The Washington Post of the website purges. “The fact that so many websites are being scrubbed, it is an alarming development and endangers public policy and makes it difficult for decision-makers around the country, including doctors like myself, to make informed choices.”

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In response to the purges, scientists, science journalists, and public health advocates have worked to preserve the datasets, with everything on the CDC website as of January 27, 2024 preserved at ACASignups.net and downloaded data sets also available on Jessica Valenti’s Substack Abortion, Every Day.

“Censoring data on ideological grounds is wrong. It is unscientific, and it is designed to eliminate opposition and erase dissidents,” virologist Angela Rasmussen, who was involved with the data preservation efforts, wrote on social media.

The journal article retraction order has created uncertainty and confusion at the agency, Inside Medicine reported:

How many manuscripts are affected is unclear, but it could be many. Most manuscripts include simple demographic information about the populations or patients studied, which typically includes gender (and which is frequently used interchangeably with sex). That means just about any major study would fall under the censorship regime of the new policy, including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else, let alone anything that the administration considers to be “woke ideology.”

Meanwhile, chaos and fear are already guiding decisions. While the policy is only meant to apply to work that might be seen as conflicting with President Trump’s executive orders, CDC experts don’t know how to interpret that. Do papers that describe disparities in health outcomes fall into “woke ideology” or not? Nobody knows, and everyone is scared that they’ll be fired. This is leading to what Germans call “vorauseilender Gehorsam,” or “preemptive obedience,” as one non-CDC scientist commented.

There are also concerns that censoring such a broad list of terms would have unintended consequences for public health.

“We can’t just erase or ignore certain populations when it comes to preventing, treating, or researching infectious diseases such as HIV. I certainly hope this is not the intent of these orders,” Carl Schmid, the executive director of the HIV+ Hepatitis Policy Institute, told Reuters.

Original article by Olivia Rosane republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Donald Trump decrees forbidden terms denying sexual diversity
Donald Trump decrees forbidden terms denying sexual diversity
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Continue Reading‘Chaos and Fear’ at CDC Amid Order to Retract Journal Articles to Purge ‘Forbidden Terms’

Optics over outcomes: How the Chancellor’s airport expansion plans don’t add up

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https://neweconomics.org/2025/01/optics-over-outcomes-how-the-chancellors-airport-expansion-plans-dont-add-up

By the government’s own analysis, expansion will not improve outcomes for communities across the UK

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Source: Civil Aviation Authority and ONS Travelpac

Of the 70-odd million additional passengers the proposed expansions of Heathrow, Gatwick, and Luton would put in the air at their peak, we can expect between two-thirds and three-quarters (or 45 – 50 million) to be UK residents on their way out of the country. Making air travel cheaper while the cost of domestic leisure, hospitality, and overland travel remains prohibitively high leaves many squeezed households with little choice. Between 25 – 50% of travellers report ​‘cost’ as a key factor in their decision whether to stay in the UK or travel abroad.

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From a high point in 2022, the UK’s domestic tourism industry has now seen two years of decline, contributing to the very stagnation that troubles the Chancellor. At the same time UK residents have poured overseas in record numbers, taking their hard-earned cash with them. New NEF analysis suggests trips to Mediterranean resort destinations and the Canary Islands hit a new record in 2024. Our top 20 direct routes saw passenger numbers rise from their 2019 peak of 52 million to 56 million last year.

The last line of economic defence of the proposed expansion of Heathrow is perhaps the weakest of them all. Many desire to increase Heathrow’s standing as a hub airport, this means capturing ​”international to international” passengers changing flights in the UK. As these passengers stop in the UK for a matter of a few hours at most they leave little economic value behind. They also pay no air passenger duty so the benefit to the Treasury is minimal. Their flights do, however, come under the UK’s climate responsibilities. Transfer passengers are a boon for the airports and airlines, and the predominantly foreign-domiciled entities which own them, but of little value to the rest of us.

Today’s airport decisions hint of desperation from a government seemingly more interested in optics for a select group of wealthy international investors than actual improvements in economic outcomes for communities all across the UK.

https://neweconomics.org/2025/01/optics-over-outcomes-how-the-chancellors-airport-expansion-plans-dont-add-up

Continue ReadingOptics over outcomes: How the Chancellor’s airport expansion plans don’t add up