As Josh Marshall said in this earlier post, this is almost certainly illegal and there needs to be immediate legal action to stop it. We have no idea who these people are, whether they are competent or if they have nefarious goals. It’s literally just Musk’s boys taking over the very closely held US payment system. It could not be more dangerous. I wonder if Republicans are really a-ok with this. Do they all think Musk is a genius godhead who can be trusted? Or are they just cowards who are so afraid of losing their seats that they won’t question Dear Leader and his henchmen? Let’s just say I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for them to take a stand. Update — It gets worse: Update II — The New York Times now has the story: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency full access to the federal payment system late on Friday, according to three people familiar with the change, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
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We now know that Trump’s order to the military to “turn on the valve” and give southern California all the water it could ever need resulted in the Army Corps of Engineers releasing a bunch of water into a flood plain without notice almost causing a catastrophe. Oh, and the water would not have flowed to Southern California in any case. The whole thing is insane but apparently we have the military carrying out insane orders that they must know make no sense which is extremely troubling. And now we have Musk lying like Trump to his millions of followers about this ridiculous stunt. The LA Times article is a bullshit snowjob by the way. But even with that the truth can gleaned if you read the whole thing. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has dramatically increased the amount of water flowing from two dams in Tulare County, sending massive flows down river channels toward farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley. Federal records show that water releases from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success jumped early Friday morning. The sudden increase occurred four days after President Trump said on social media that the U.S.
AUSTRALIAN regional centres, including Coffs Harbour, are benefiting from stronger business investment growth than capital cities, according to new business lending data from Westpac. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth it for your business. Message us. Phone us – (02) 4981 8882. Email us – media@newsofthearea.com.au Westpac lending to businesses in regional...
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At the 2025 Jerusalem (Al Quds) Peace Prize ceremony in the Melbourne Town Hall on Friday evening February 21, this year’s award will go to Wendy Turner, trade unionist, ageless social justice activist and long term advocate for the human rights of all Palestinians. From a record list of ninety two nominations, Wendy Turner more Continue reading »
There’s an abundance of interesting theatre out there in the non-Anglo worlds that could inspire, amuse and surprise Australian audiences. Yet, we seldom get to see those plays. For this article, let’s define Anglo as continental Europe, UK, US, Australia and Russia (eg, Chekhov). When I started reviewing theatre in 1975, mostly plays on our Continue reading »
By grappling with the history of the story of the adulteress, we are reminded to approach Scripture critically, aware of how it has been shaped and reshaped to suit power. In doing so, we ensure that its calls for justice, equity, and mercy are not silenced but remain central to our understanding of faith and Continue reading »
The new liberal consensus, born of a shared “exhaustion,” is that it is time to “tune out,” or “take a break,” or simply close one’s eyes and ears. I simply cannot figure American liberals and “progressives”—’pwogwessives,’” as the late Alexander Cockburn used to call them. They do nothing when faced with calamitous events and call Continue reading »
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Turning the White House into a chop shop Anand Giridharadas’s The Ink this morning announces: Musk’s hostile takeover It’s hard to know just how destructive this will be in the long run, but for now, this is arguably the most troubling development in a day of extremely troubling developments. Elon Musk appears to be trying to do to the federal government what he did at Twitter/X: massively disrupt its functioning and drive out experienced employees not on board with his transformations and his personality cult. [Tusk] Musk bought his way into the White House complex and now means to, as they say, “have his way” with the federal government. If you haven’t heard, Musk locked Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) civil servants “out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees” (Reuters): The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department’s data systems.
With the Democratic Party reeling from its losses, the DNC is voting on a new chair. Will it choose to reform its top-down model?
The post The Democratic National Committee Is Undemocratic. That’s by Design. appeared first on The Intercept.
Whole Foods workers are made whole, corporate criminals face the music, private equity loses its painkillers, and an empire of pain gets a taste of its own medicine.
Faced with a low budget, Doctor Who has made some surprising and creative decisions over the years. Will the show be returning to those days?
The day I watched Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, there was a rare red weather alert where I live in central Scotland. The night before, I had gone to the supermarket and found an end-of-days scene that gave me flashbacks to March 2020. Lone shoppers lined the aisles in preparation for a Government-mandated 24-hour indoors, with […]
Labour’s housing strategy makes a dysfunctional system bigger. We need systemic change. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 26th January 2025 Build baby, build. That’s about the intellectual limit of the government’s housing strategy. Millions are under-housed, so let’s “bulldoze” the planning system and build more homes. But it’s not nearly so simple. As […]
The bill will cause untold human suffering while also still failing to deter irregular migration, argues Nathan Phillips
In a chaotic week, the Trump administration froze federal spending and sent the nation into turmoil. Was that the point?
With federal funding paused to USAID, pro-Western media outlets from Ukraine to Nicaragua are panhandling for donations, and a multi-billion dollar regime change apparatus is in panic mode. Among the flurry of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump in the first days of his administration, perhaps the most consequential to date is one titled, “reevaluating and realigning US foreign aid.” Under this order, a 90-day pause was instantly enforced on all US foreign development assistance across the globe – […]
The post Did a Trump executive order just cripple the global US regime change network? first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Did a Trump executive order just cripple the global US regime change network? appeared first on The Grayzone.
On Sunday, @CaliforniaDFW brought 3 orphaned mountain lion cubs to Oakland Zoo’s vet hospital. The trio, estimated to be about 3 months old, were found in Portola Valley. CDFW believes the mother of these cubs is the same female mountain lion that was killed by a car in the same… pic.twitter.com/D7QWzUjoDY — Oakland Zoo (@oakzoo) January 29, 2025 This past Sunday, January 26th, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and brought three orphaned mountain lion cubs to Oakland Zoo for rehabilitation and care. These rescues mark the 30th mountain lion rescue for the Zoo, with close collaboration with CDFW. Oakland Zoo’s advanced Veterinary Hospital has enabled the Zoo to assist in numerous mountain lion rescue cases for those who were sick, injured, burned, or orphaned. The three mountain lion cubs, now named Fern (female), Thistle (male), and Spruce (male), are currently recovering at the Zoo’s Veterinary Hospital Mountain lions in California face many threats, including car strikes and wildfires. These factors contribute to human-wildlife conflict, increasing encounters as mountain lions encroach on urban areas and developments.
by Tamar Barkay* Are the inverse trajectories of internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the decline of organized labor in the past decades linked? If so, how?These questions arise from three widely recognized observations. First, since the 1980s, most OECD countries have experienced a decline in unionization and union density rates (Visser, 2012). Second, following […]
This is probably what Trump was babbling about the other night when he said he’s sent in the military to “turn on the valve” to bring water to southern California. Good Lord: Water managers were relieved Thursday evening after the Army Corps of Engineers agreed to back off of a sudden decision earlier in the day to dump massive amounts of water from Kaweah and Success lakes. Water managers said they got about an hour’s warning from the Army Corp’s Sacramento office to expect the Tule and Kaweah rivers to be at “channel capacity” by Thursday night. Channel capacity means the maximum amount of water a river can handle. For the Kaweah, that’s 5,500 cubic feet per second and for the Tule, it’s 3,500 cfs. Those levels were last seen, and surpassed, during the 2023 floods, which destroyed dozens of homes and businesses and caused significant damage to infrastructure.“We were able to get them to back off that,” said Eric Limas, General Manager of the Lower Tule River and Pixley irrigation districts, of the Army Corps.