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Sun, 02/02/2025 - 02:30
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.
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Sat, 01/02/2025 - 22:47

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 […]

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Sat, 01/02/2025 - 20:30
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 […]
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Sat, 01/02/2025 - 11:35

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.

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Sat, 01/02/2025 - 11:30
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.
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Sat, 01/02/2025 - 11:18
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 […]
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Sat, 01/02/2025 - 10:00
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.
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Sat, 01/02/2025 - 08:30
Nobody did. But he’s is our new overlord anyway This is incredibly concerning: The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks. David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said. Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration.
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Sat, 01/02/2025 - 07:00
This Bluesky thread was written by former Obama and Biden administrator, Zealan Hoover: I ran $100 billion in Infrastructure and IRA programs at EPA. We obligated over $70 billion onto signed awards and contracts to protect public health and the environment. All that funding is currently frozen. Here are the facts… On January 20, Trump signed Executive Order 14154 (“Unleashing American Energy”) that directed agencies to “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Law (IIJA/BIL). NOTE: EOs do not give agencies special power to break the law. Not paying grantees with signed grant agreements is illegal. While there are certain activities EPA has discretion to pause, such as designing new competitions and making new awards, once a grant award is signed with a grantee the government is legally obligated to pay them. This obligation to pay is clearly enshrined in 2 CFR § 200.305.