The Daily Parker

The era between the end of World War II and now is an aberration in world history. At no other time have so many people enjoyed a middle-class existence, with most—at least in the OECD and adjacent countries—able to afford all of life's necessities, like a house, decent health care, adequate nutrition, and leisure time. This general prosperity is what people like the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X want to end, and for no other reason than they want more for themselves.

The unprecedented attack on the rule of law in the United States is, really, in service of the super-rich at everyone else's expense. The average effective tax rate in the US is about 14.5%, with the people earning below-50% incomes paying about $63 billion, or 3%, of that amount. This low percentage reflects tax credits and deductions designed to ensure a decent life for below-average income earners.

But the unlawful cuts to the Federal government the OAFPOTUS and CPOX have pushed through have done the most damage to the agencies that specifically target corruption and tax cheating:

Trump’s Treasury Department announced last month that it would no longer enforce the Corporate Transparency Act, hampering recent congressional efforts to end money laundering, tax dodging, and other lawbreaking by anonymous investors. In an executive order, Trump suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits American and foreign companies from paying bribes to do business. The Department of Justice is also disbanding a task force set up to administer sanctions on Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

Oversight will be removed from many domestic financial and government institutions too. Trump ordered a full work stoppage at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had been created to protect consumers from manipulation by banks and other financial institutions He has fired top officials overseeing ethics, whistleblower protections, and labor rights, including the heads of the Office of Government Ethics, the Office of Special Counsel, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Meanwhile, Justice Department officials are drafting plans to reduce investigations of fraud and public corruption, which means that prosecuting crooked officials will be more difficult. Cuts to the IRS mean that tax fraud will also be harder to identify and prosecute. Just last week, the Justice Department announced that it would curtail investigations of cryptocurrency fraud and disband its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.

Musk slashed jobs at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency that oversees auto safety and crash investigations, including those involving his own electric-vehicle company, Tesla. Musk oversaw mass firings at other regulatory agencies that had launched more than 30 investigations into his companies, which include SpaceX and Neuralink.

But these are only the conflicts of interest we know about. How many people benefited last week from advance knowledge that Trump would reverse his position on tariffs? How many others are making other stock-market bets based on their access to government information? We don’t know the answers, and Trump’s Department of Justice is unlikely to want to find out. We are living in the dark, just as people do in other kleptocracies, and this changes everything.

To understand Trump’s policies toward Russia and Ukraine, for example, one should ask not merely How will they end the war? and How will they shape America’s relationship to Europe? but Who in Trump’s immediate circle will benefit from the lifting of sanctions? and Have the Russians made explicit financial offers already, and to whom? The rare-minerals deal now being negotiated with Ukraine deserves especially close scrutiny. We need to establish which Americans, exactly, will benefit, and how.

And, of course, the CPOX has stolen your data for his own purposes, with no oversight and no privacy controls:

It’s worth underlining the caveat that no one quite knows where the data allegedly pilfered from the NLRB is going—if indeed it has left the agency at all. But the information allegedly leaving the NLRB would be extraordinarily valuable to corporate titans like Musk looking for a leg up on rivals, as well as a window into the inner workings of the labor unions they despise. It would also explain why Musk is involved with DOGE to begin with. As a number of his companies, especially Tesla, struggle, the government systems DOGE now controls could provide invaluable information.

The theft of personal information also points to another more nefarious motivation for Musk and DOGE. It’s already abundantly clear that the group will not reduce the deficit. It likely will not even decrease federal spending, which is already $100 billion higher under Trump than it was under Biden at this point in his term. Instead, the group’s slashing of regulations and bureaucracy is aimed not at reducing “waste” but at cutting the many governmental layers that exist to fight risk—and fraud.

[U]naccountable coders with close ties to the world’s richest man have their mitts on the personal information of millions of Americans—that’s bad no matter what they’re doing with it. 

Remember, authoritarianism is, at its core, all about theft. Authoritarians use the government to advance their own business interests, taking your taxes to enrich themselves. All the culture war bullshit the Republican Party has stirred up over the past 40 years is meant only to distract you from that reality.

Before I go through the stories from the last day about how we live in the stupidest timeline, here's a photo of the Milwaukee Intermodal Station I snapped heading to my return train on Friday:

Elsewhere in the stupidest timeline, where maximizing corruption is the defining goal of the Republican Party:

• James Fallows takes us through Harvard's big "fuck you" to the OAFPOTUS's demands that the university install minders in its HR and academic departments, as does Josh Marshall.
• Jennifer Rubin reminds everyone that a functioning center-left party opposing a rogue authoritarian party does not constitute "polarization."
• A memo from the Office of Management and Budget outlines the OAFPOTUS's plans to gut climate and weather research, bringing a fresh new anti-intellectual, anti-science mission to NOAA.
• Paul Krugman outlines how cuts to the IRS will enable the rich to steal even more from everyone else.
• A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board says the DOGE children have enabled Russian hackers to gain access to NLRB data.
• Coders using large language models to write code have given attackers an enormous opportunity to introduce malicious code into your favorite apps through supply-chain attacks.

Finally, take a few minutes to read Chuck Marohn's Strong Towns series on how municipalities in the US and Canada routinely hide (or simply don't know) their long-term obligations so as to make building new infrastructure look like a better financial strategy than repairing existing infrastructure. I can tell you that you get no better view of the shitty state of American roads than riding a Divvy down almost any Chicago street, because Americans seem allergic to maintenance spending.

I know we need to put the fire out in Washington before we can fix anything else. But the long-term damage the OAFPOTUS continues to inflict on us will include more failing roads, bridges, and trains. So if you voted for him, you voted for the US becoming a third-world country in our lifetime.

I may have dodged a virus this week, though I'm not 100% sure yet. I have a lot more confidence in my health than the world has in the OAFPOTUS, however. And the news today doesn't change that at all:

• Radley Balko, tongue firmly in cheek, satirizes the Republican Party in a way I will not spoil for you. (His takedown of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, made me guffaw.)
• Yascha Mounk warns that the OAFPOTUS's irrational and malignantly stupid attack on the very things that made America great in service of his demented ego make it likely he'll do other malignantly stupid things in future.
• Anne Applebaum warns that "this is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like."
• Jennifer Rubin counters with a view of "when autocrats screw up."
• The Dispatch editorial board warns that the MAGA crowd's "foreign policy was ancient when Charlemagne was on the throne, and their economic philosophy was hatched in the 15th century."
• Conservative University of Chicago Law professor Aziz Huq offers up the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause as a possible avenue for defeating the OAFPOTUS's personal vendettas.

Tomorrow I'm taking advantage of a ridiculously full PTO bank and cheap train tickets to finally extend the Brews & Choos Project into Wisconsin, so you'll want to watch this space over the weekend for those posts.

I'm only going to note in passing that world equities markets have continued to decline today, though the DJIA and S&P have stabilized a bit as of this afternoon. Still, the S&P is off 14% year-to-date, the DJIA 11%, the Nikkei 21%, and crude oil prices 16%. Still the OAFPOTUS continues to insist that his massive corruption engine will make things better for the people who voted for him, leaving out the bit that it'll only help about 1% of those voters.

Today, though, I want to gesticulate wildly at how the administration will kill us all by destroying biomedical research as we know it. The Times reported yesterday that illegal layoffs at the National Institutes of Health have halted cancer research just as scientists neared a breakthrough:

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health demonstrated a promising step toward using a person’s own immune cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers in a paper in Nature Medicine on Tuesday, the same day the agency was hit with devastating layoffs that left many NIH personnel in tears.

The treatment approach is still early in its development; the personalized immunotherapy regimen shrank tumors in only about a quarter of the patients with colon, rectal and other GI cancers enrolled in a clinical trial. But a researcher who was not involved in the study called the results “remarkable” because they highlight a path to a frustratingly elusive goal in medicine — harnessing a person’s own immune defenses to target common solid tumor cancers.

Former US Representative Adam Kitzinger (R-IL) adds:

Although empowered by President Trump’s newly created, budget-slashing Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the driving force behind the dismantling of our public health infrastructure is Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Like his boss in the Oval Office, Kennedy seems intent on settling old scores with his former opponents.

One of Kennedy’s first moves as HHS Secretary was to suspend a CDC campaign encouraging Americans to get the flu shot. He also created a panel to revisit the debunked vaccine-autism link and appointed vaccine skeptic David Geier to lead it. Geier had previously been disciplined in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license.

In another era, state public health agencies might have been able to compensate for the CDC’s retreat. But Kennedy has attacked those agencies too, suspending grants that funded their response to infectious disease outbreaks. One immediate casualty was a measles vaccination program in West Texas.

Secretary Kennedy insists that a system experiencing a nearly 20 percent workforce reduction will somehow function better. It’s the same kind of magical thinking that fueled his anti-vaccine crusade. Then and now, evidence and logic take a back seat.

He calls his agenda “Make America Healthy Again.” But looking at the hollowed-out public health infrastructure and the rising measles death toll, I can only call it what it truly is: Make America Sick Again.

Josh Marshall frets that no one in the health sphere was prepared for an attack like this, so they don't even know how to talk about how bad this will be for everyone:

The White House and DOGE have entered the war on cancer on the side of cancer.

There are disease communities around every major disease in this country — breast cancer, colon cancer, Alzheimers, etc. I don’t mean the professional societies. I mean, the organizations and informal communities of people who are survivors, who’ve been directly affected by these afflictions, who have genetic predispositions, who are doctors and caregivers. It is totally outside the experience and comfort zone of people from the research community to speak directly to what we might call the end user and say your chance at a cure or your child’s cure is going up in flames as we speak.

Quite simply, until elected officials start hearing from angry constituents in town halls who are pissed that their futures and the futures of their loved ones are being lit on fire for no reason, then nothing matters. The first front in this war has already been lost. The second front, where the forces of cures, treatments and health have the advantage, has only barely gotten off the ground.

What I’m describing here also connects up with the universities, where a lot of this research takes place and which are home to a lot of academic medical centers which are the places many communities rely on for their health care.

For 30 years, Republican extremists have wanted to destroy the Federal government, but party leaders like George W Bush and Mitch McConnell wanted to do it institutionally. The OAFPOTUS and his wrecking crew don't care about institutions, or really about anything, other than their loyalty to the OAFPOTUS and their hatred of people they think look down on them.

Even if we win back all three branches of government in 2026 and 2028, it will take decades to repair the damage. Forget making the US a better place to live, or even getting the US of 2050 on technological parity with the Europe of 2010. We're going to struggle to undo the damage, full stop. So even when these assholes ultimately lose, they'll win.

Since the OAFPOTUS announced his (clearly unlawful) tariffs on everyone, including the penguins in the South Atlantic, the markets have responded. For example, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average and Standard & Poor's 500 indices have made some minor adjustments:

Note that it's only 11am in New York, and these numbers continue to fall.

The bond markets have also raised some questions about the malignant stupidity of the guy behind the Resolute Desk. As Jeff Maurer and others pointed out, the OAFPOTUS has always misunderstood what the balance of trade actually means.

Meanwhile, the Clown Prince of X is about to destroy Medicare. Hang on to your asses.

Cassie and I found a 20-minute gap in the rain this morning so she could have a (slightly-delayed) walk. Since around 9 am, though, we've had variations on this:

Good thing I have all these heartwarming news stories to warm my heart:

• Dane County, Wis., Judge Susan Crawford beat Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel 55% to 45% for the vacant seat on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, despite the $25 million the Clown Prince of X donated to Schimel's campaign. The CPOX himself drew laughs from people with IQs above 80 by claiming he didn't really try to buy the seat for the right-wing Schimel.
• Paul Krugman reminds the credulous that "there's no plan, secret or otherwise" behind the OAFPOTUS's tariffs. ("Does he really believe that Canada is a major source of fentanyl? Worse, does he believe that fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs?") Timothy Noah concurs.
• Scholar Larry Diamond lays out the ways we can get through the constitutional crisis the OAFPOTUS has created.
• A Federal judge has dismissed corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Johnson, but enjoined the US Attorney from threatening more charges. It's only a partial win for corruption in the US, but still a win.
• The Times looks at Brightline's success and asks, "What's so hard about building trains?" After pointing out that "in Florida, Brightline has proved that it can operate reliable, well-designed passenger trains that people want to ride," they fail to project that it will probably get bailed out at least once in the next 25 years by state and federal money.
• The Onion imbues the Chicago Transit Authority with "an unconscious fear of success manifesting through self-sabotage." They're not wrong.

Finally, Bruce Schneier and a colleague published a paper yesterday lauding "Rational Astrologies and Security." In the paper, the authors analyze beliefs like "Nobody every got fired for buying IBM" and "It's always been done this way" as rational, and how security professionals can use them. The timing of the paper's publication in no way affects the soundness of these conclusions, of course.

I've encountered online comments and what passes for deep thoughts from the OAFPOTUS's apologists. Even The Economist has wondered aloud if the vandalism and incompetence of his administration is somehow 4-dimensional chess, his way of bringing about a glorious new world of higher living standards and improved Western cultural hegemony, or some such nonsense. So after this horrible right-wing experiment, should we credit the administration with the centrist correction?

No.

I believe we will recover from this era. I believe that the pain the OAFPOTUS will inflict for the next 46 months or so will, in fact, lead to a massive reset of US politics starting with the 120th Congress in January 2027, and a massive repudiation of both right- and left-wing extremism. And perhaps by the time I'm 80 we'll have a society in North America that bears some resemblance in empathy and technology to the Europe of today, with universal health care, a stronger democracy, and a high-speed train network at least worthy of 1990s France.

This will not, however, have anything to do with the OAFPOTUS himself, nor the Clown Prince of X, nor the double-speaking half-wits they surround themselves with. It will be despite them.

Hiroshima doesn't thank Paul Tibbets for its beautiful city center. America won't thank these thugs for what comes after them, either.

We had a wild ride in March, with the temperature range here at Inner Drive Technology WHQ between 23.3° on the 14th and -5.4°C on the 2nd—not to mention 22.6°C on Friday and 2.3°C on Sunday.

Actually, everyone in the US had a wild ride last month, for reasons outside the weather, and it looks like it will continue for a while:

• US Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) spent the night haranguing the OAFPOTUS from the Senate floor.
• Jennifer Rubin is not tired of winning against the OAFPOTUS, who has lost every single court case brought against his administration's actions.
• David French points at the decrepit Russian Army to remind us that a politicized military is an ineffective military.
• Anne Applebaum frets about "the corruption and stagnation in our future" if the OAFPOTUS keeps behaving like Viktor Orbán.
• ProPublica takes us along with the flight attendants on those illegal ICE deportation flights.
• Mother Jones' editor in chief Kiera Butler spent last weekend with the deeply weird Christianists who want more Christian babies.
• Midland, Texas-based writer Carrie McKean explains that people in her part of the world aren't actually superstitious bumpkins who want the freedom to let their children die of measles instead of vaccinating them, no matter how much that duck quacks.

Finally, the Dunning-Krueger poster children working for the Clown Prince of X have announced plans to replace the 60 million lines of COBOL code running the Social Security Administration with an LLM-generated pile of spaghetti in some other language (Python? Ruby? Logo?) before the end of the year. As this will only cost a few million dollars and will keep the children away from the sharp objects for a while, I say it's money well spent for software that will never see the light of day. There are only two possibilities here, not mutually-exclusive: they are too dumb to know why this is stupid, or they don't care because they actually want to kill Social Security by any means they can. I believe it's both.

Having the morning free, and having a lot of cool air and sun, I took a quick stroll around Nashville. I'll have more later, but for now, here's the Tennessee State Capitol, apparently under construction:

Of course, since the Tennessee General Assembly has a well-Gerrymandered 75-24 Republican majority, I would expect they're actually deconstructing the Capitol. But whatever.

I also passed by Riverfront Station, the downtown terminus of Nashville's adorable little 6-times-a-day toy commuter train:

It may be a really sad attempt to have real public transportation, but it's also a train station, meaning there are Brews & Choos-qualified breweries right by my hotel. I'm planning to visit one today. You'll have to wait until at least Friday for the reviews, though. And also for better photo editing.

Before getting to the weather, I don't anticipate any quiet news days for the next couple of years, do you?

• Someone who owns at least 16 rooms and condos in the OAFPOTUS's Wabash Ave. building in downtown Chicago has sued, alleging that—wait for it—the organization running the building is bilking investors. I mean, how preposterous!
• Speaking of corruption flowing from the OAFPOTUS like toxic waste from a Union Carbide plant, Molly White mourns the end of SEC oversight of the crypto industry.
• Former US Representative Adam Kitzinger (R-IL), the last sane Republican, calls the "desperate, weak, and ultimately meaningless bluff" that the OAFPOTUS won't honor President Biden's pardons.
• James Fallows steps through the "correlation of forces" that defines the struggle between the OAFPOTUS and the Constitution.
• Jennifer Rubin interviews Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D), "a man refreshingly candid about his disgust with the current administration's policies and its lack of humane leadership."
• Yascha Mounk thinks "the World Happiness Report is a scam," just a pile of elite misinformation.
• A sophisticated supply-chain attack may have put 20,000 GitHub projects at risk of subtle but far-reaching security problems.

Finally, the snow that covered Chicago and parts north and west has indeed melted in the past few hours, even though we've barely gotten above 2°C: