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Dear antifa,
Welcome back to the shitshow where the air reeks of the unmistakable stench of authoritarian rot. If you’re reading this, congratulations—you’ve survived another day in the crumbling empire formerly known as the United States. We aren’t terribly united anymore.
Here’s what happened today…
The regime is reallocating about 2,000 federal agents from agencies including the FBI, DEA, ATF, and the U.S. Marshals Service to assist DHS with their illegal mass deportation efforts—a significant escalation. Trump has called for an additional 20,000 officers, but that number appears to represent new hires intended to further expand Gestapo capacity. Speculation continues to grow that pardoned January 6 participants from the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Proud Boys are now serving as ICE agents, though I (nor anyone else) have yet been able to confirm this.
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan—who was arrested on April 25 after federal prosecutors alleged she helped an undocumented immigrant evade arrest by immigration agents in her courthouse—has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of concealing a person from arrest and obstructing legal proceedings. Prosecutors allege that Dugan directed the defendant and his attorney out a back door after learning ICE agents were present to detain him. The man was later apprehended outside the courthouse. Dugan, who has been suspended from her judicial duties by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, maintains her innocence but faces up to six years in prison if convicted. Nothing about this is normal, nor is it okay.
Things got heated during a House Energy and Commerce Committee session, with lawmakers clashing over a Republican proposal to cut Medicaid as part of a broader domestic policy bill advancing Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires. The hearing was repeatedly disrupted by brave protesters—26 of whom were detained, including several in wheelchairs—who used their voice to rightly accuse Republicans of stripping health care from those in need. The Republican plan aims to cut $880 billion from health care programs, with the majority of the cuts coming from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, potentially leaving 8.6 million people uninsured.
Trump withdrew a $6.7 million grant awarded to Cornell University for research on PediaFlow, a device designed to improve blood flow in infants with serious heart defects. Medical professionals warn that the loss of funding is a significant setback for pediatric medicine. Incidentally, it has been estimated that $6.7 million is approximately what the Orange Fat Fuck spends on golf trips in just two weekends.
Nearly three dozen American business leaders accompanied Trump to Saudi Arabia where they attended a lavish lunch with American journalist murdering fuck Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Saudi government invited these executives—including Elon Musk, Antonio Gracias of DOGE, Sam Altman of Open AI, Andy Jassy of Amazon, Alex Karp of Palantir, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, and Jane Fraser of Citigroup, to name just a few—to reflect Saudi efforts to curry favor with Trump, whose regime has seen significant Saudi investment in his family businesses. During the visit, Trump signed agreements for $600 billion in Saudi investment in the United States, including a $142 billion arms deal, and announced joint tech investments and partnerships between leading U.S. companies and Saudi entities. The increase in Trump’s personal wealth since he took office is estimated at $3 billion, and you can safely bet that the bootlicking executives who’ve hitched their wagon to this regime are being handsomely compensated for their lack of morality.
So there you have it—another dispatch from the American freakshow. Call me Nostradamus, but I’m sure that tomorrow’s Gonzo Report will be full of things guaranteed to piss off anyone with even a shred of decency.
Yours in glorious, caffeine-fueled dissent,
Chris Zappa
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Is This the Year We Doom Civilization?We may be losing our last, best chance to limit climate change
On Monday House Republicans released the final parts of their proposed tax and budget bill — and it’s the stuff of nightmares. As Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress documents, the bill would impose the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP — the program formerly known as food stamps — in history. Millions of low-income Americans would lose health coverage; millions would go hungry. Many of those suffering would be children. The purpose of these cuts, sadism aside, would be to partially offset the cost of huge tax cuts for the rich — cuts that would still explode the budget deficit. The cruelty is mind-boggling. In fact, I have both a suggestion and a prediction for major media organizations: I’d like to see them do focus groups with ordinary voters, describing these plans. My prediction, based on what we’ve seen in the past, is that many voters will simply refuse to believe the policy descriptions, insisting that elected officials can’t possibly be that vicious. But they can be and are. And yet the brutality of the cuts to the social safety net isn’t what bothers me most about what’s about to happen to public policy. Even worse is the assault on renewable energy. From the Financial Times:
Meanwhile, fossil fuels would receive billions in subsidies. Are we just looking at money-driven politics as usual? To some extent. If you look at data on political spending by industry groups, oil and gas is overwhelmingly pro-G.O.P.:
Source: Open Secrets While alternative energy mostly backs Democrats:
Source: Open Secrets But this goes beyond the usual role of money in politics, in two ways. First, it’s obvious that MAGA politicians hate renewable energy in ways that go beyond the fact that they get a lot of money from the fossil fuel sector. Consider what’s happening in Texas, which leads the nation in wind power. You might think that the state’s politicians would embrace a rapidly growing industry that is boosting its economy. But no. According to the Houston Chronicle,
Why does MAGA hate renewables? They consider them woke because they help fight climate change, which they insist is a hoax. And they’re cleaner than burning fossil fuels, which means that they aren’t manly. It’s all kind of funny — or would be if it weren’t so tragic. At this point there’s no legitimate way to deny that man-made climate change is an existential threat. According to researchers at NASA — whose work is, of course, on the chopping block — 2024 was the warmest year on record. But the politics of climate action have always been extremely difficult. The threat isn’t always obvious, since there are still cold days; it’s global, not local; and it’s long-term, with the big payoffs to doing something decades in the future. As a result, the Economics 101 answer to pollution — put a price on emissions — has seemed politically out of reach. As far as I know, every government that has tried to impose some form of carbon tax has paid a large political price. Around 15 years ago it was hard to avoid feeling despair about our chances of steering away from catastrophe. Then came a miracle: Dramatic technological progress in renewable energy, making it drastically cheaper, especially but not only as a way of generating electricity. The International Renewable Energy Agency has a striking chart showing how the cost of electricity generation from various renewable sources has plunged compared with the cost of generation from fossil fuels:
Source: IRENA This technological miracle suddenly made an alternative climate strategy possible, one that was all carrots, no sticks. Instead of using carbon prices or regulations to force people to stop burning fossil fuels, policymakers could subsidize and promote renewable energy, nudging us toward an electrified economy with wind and solar — plus, probably, nuclear, which has its place — providing the electricity. Instead of telling people to eat their spinach, we could be advertising job-creating investments. Given how cheap renewables have become, the subsidies probably wouldn’t have to be that large. Wind and solar have been taking off on their own:
Source: Energy Information Agency What we mostly needed, arguably, was a push to overcome the What I’m describing, of course, is something like the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which was actually mainly about climate and not at all about inflation. And the renewable technology miracle, with the policy possibilities it offered, came just in time. True, even with serious climate change policy finally possible in the United States, and even with other major economies adopting I.R.A.-type policies, it’s too late to avoid a damaging rise in global temperatures. Climate-related disasters are already on the rise, and would keep rising even if we stopped emissions tomorrow. But as of a few months ago there was hope of avoiding the worst. Well, abandon all hope, ye who enter an era of MAGA rule. OK, all may not be lost. There are already enough jobs tied to IRA-linked subsidies, enough businesses that made big bets on the new climate policy, that actual policy may not be as bad as what emerged from the Ways and Means Committee. But things really have taken a grim turn. And a lot of it isn’t even about money. It’s just about spite. MUSICAL CODA  |
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