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justaprogressive

justaprogressive's Journal
justaprogressive's Journal
February 9, 2025

Why Would 'Christians' Destroy the World's Largest Relief Agency? By Joe Conason

For Christians here and across the world, the ongoing confrontation over the fate of the U.S. Agency for International Development dramatically illustrates the moral degeneration of the politicians who most fervently profess their piety. While Donald Trump wraps himself in the mantle of the Almighty, his assault on the world's largest relief agency is a modern passion play, with scheming malefactors of great wealth sadistically persecuting sincere people of faith who seek to serve the poor.

Not everyone who works for the USAID, a government agency that employs hundreds of private contractors, is motivated by charity or religious conviction. While many are nonprofits, others are profitable companies. But the agency's single largest contractor is Catholic Relief Services, which has provided billions of dollars in assistance to impoverished communities on every continent.

Nearly every denomination is represented among the recipients of USAID funding, including major evangelical and conservative organizations like Samaritan's Purse, the global charity operated by Franklin Graham — who happens to be among Trump's most sycophantic admirers. Graham's reputation as a "humanitarian" has surely benefited from his organization's association with U.S. relief efforts, not to mention $90 million in taxpayer support. And he knows that Elon Musk and Trump are lying about USAID.

As Christianity Today reported on Feb. 4, "Most of USAID's budget goes to grants for specific development projects, including at Samaritan's Purse, World Vision, World Relief, Catholic Relief Services, and many other faith-based groups. It supports local Christian health clinics in Malawi and groups providing orphan care.


https://www.creators.com/read/joe-conason/02/25/why-would-christians-destroy-the-worlds-largest-relief-agency

...maybe because they're not f*ing Christians! oy!
February 8, 2025

thank you for the hearts!

never give up, never surrender!

February 8, 2025

"The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk's merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" - Cory Doctorow



While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters' number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:

https://prospect.org/topics/maureen-tkacik/

Journalists like Wired's Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman are absolutely crushing it when it comes to Musk's DOGE coup:

https://www.wired.com/author/vittoria-elliott/

And Nathan Tankus is doing incredible work all on his own, just blasting out scoop after scoop:

https://www.crisesnotes.com/

But for me, it was Tkacik – as usual – in the pages of The American Prospect who pulled it all together in a way that finally made it make sense, transforming the blitzkreig Muskian chaos into a recognizable playbook. While most of the coverage of Musk's wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause, whom she memorably dubs "the Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (I told you she was a great writer!):

https://prospect.org/power/2025-02-06-private-equity-hatchet-man-leading-lost-boys-of-doge/

Krause is a private equity looter. He's the guy who basically invented the playbook for PE takeovers of large tech companies, from Broadcom to Citrix to VMWare, converting their businesses from selling things to renting them out, loading them up with junk fees, slashing quality, jacking up prices over and over, and firing everyone who was good at their jobs. He is a master enshittifier, an enshittification ninja.

Krause has an unerring instinct for making people miserable while making money. He oversaw the merger of Citrix and VMWare, creating a ghastly company called The Cloud Software Group, which sold remote working tools. Despite this, of his first official acts was to order all of his employees to stop working remotely. But then, after forcing his workers to drag their butts into work, move back across the country, etc, he reversed himself because he figured out he could sell off all of the company's office space for a tidy profit.

Krause canceled employee benefits, like thank you days for managers who pulled a lot of unpaid overtime, or bonuses for workers who upgraded their credentials. He also ended the company's practice of handing out swag as small gifts to workers, and then stiffed the company that made the swag, wontpaying a $437,574.97 invoice for all the tchotchkes the company had ordered. That's not the only supplier Krause stiffed: FinLync, a fintech company with a three-year contract with Krause's company, also had to sue to get paid.

Krause's isn't a canny operator who roots out waste: he's a guy who tears out all the wiring and then grudgingly restores the minimum needed to keep the machine running (no wonder Musk loves him, this is the Twitter playbook). As Tkacik reports, Krause fucked up the customer service and reliability systems that served Citrix's extremely large, corporate customers – the giant businesses that cut huge monthly checks to Citrix, whose CIOs received daily sales calls from his competitors.


https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/#shameless
February 8, 2025

NASA solar mission data recovering after server room flood fiasco


They can put a man on the Moon - but back on Earth, a busted water pipe managed to knock out NASA's solar mission data for months.

Data from two NASA solar missions is becoming available again following an outage that began in November 2024.

The affected missions are the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which was launched in 2010, and the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), launched in 2013.

Both spacecraft have collected vast amounts of solar data over the years. However, new and historical data from the missions became unavailable in November after a broken pipe caused significant flooding of the building that houses the Joint Science Operations Center (JSOC). Data from two of SDO's instruments is processed at JSOC, as is data from IRIS.

The vehicles continued to collect and downlink data during the outage, but researchers were unable to access it.

Repairs at Stanford University's JSOC are ongoing. In a January update, the SDO team noted, "Several pieces of electronics are delayed by the dreaded supply-chain issues we all thought were finally behind us."


https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/07/nasa_solar_mission_data_recovering/
February 8, 2025

A US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as 'Insider Threat' - Wired

Members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team have had access to the US Treasury Department’s payment systems for over a week. On Thursday, the threat intelligence team at one of the department's agencies recommended that DOGE members be monitored as an “insider threat.”

Sources say members of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s IT division and others received an email detailing these concerns.

“There is ongoing litigation, congressional legislation, and widespread protests relating to DOGE’s access to Treasury and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service,” reads a section of the email titled “Recommendations,” reviewed by WIRED. “If DOGE members have any access to payment systems, we recommend suspending that access immediately and conducting a comprehensive review of all actions they may have taken on these systems.”

Although Treasury and White House officials have repeatedly denied it, WIRED has reported that DOGE technologists had the ability to not only read the code of sensitive payment systems but also rewrite it. Marko Elez, one of a number of young men identified by WIRED who have little to no government experience but are associated with DOGE, was granted read and write privileges on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the BFS, an agency that according to Treasury records paid out $5.45 trillion in fiscal year 2024.

“There is reporting at other federal agencies indicating that DOGE members have performed unauthorized changes and locked civil servants out of the sensitive systems they gained access to,” the “Recommendations” portion of the email continues. “We further recommend that DOGE members be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”



https://www.wired.com/story/treasury-bfs-doge-insider-threat/
February 8, 2025

Kash Patel Took $25,000 From Russia-Linked Firm to Appear on an Anti-FBI TV Series

Last year, Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur whom Donald Trump has nominated to head the FBI, received $25,000 from a Russia-linked production company to participate in a documentary in which he assailed the FBI and called for closing its headquarters.

In November, Tucker Carlson’s online network released a six-part series called All the President’s Men: The Conspiracy Against Trump that purported to chronicle the familiar MAGA conspiracy theory that a Deep State plotted against Donald Trump while he was a presidential candidate in 2016 and when he was president. The fourth episode focused on Patel and his years-long crusade to depict the Trump-Russia scandal—Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election and Donald Trump’s efforts to cover up its existence—as nothing but a total hoax orchestrated by nefarious Democrats and rogue government operatives.

In this film—which credits Patel as an executive producer—he offers a blistering attack on the FBI. He calls it a “corrupt” enterprise and claims it has been on the Democratic Party’s “payroll.” He says, “I’m the guy that’s going to tell you they need major reforms. I’m going to tell you to shut down the FBI headquarters building and open it up as a museum of the Deep State the next day. Seriously, you need 50 guys in Washington running the FBI.” He pushes the false claim that the FBI launched its Russia investigation in 2016 on the basis of the infamous and unconfirmed Steele memos. And he insists that the FBI and the rest of the US intelligence community that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election “knew it didn’t exist.” He also asserts that “globalists” have been working with Al Qaeda to make a profit.

The series was produced for Carlson, who is featured in the final episode, by Global Tree Pictures, a Los Angeles-based firm run by Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker Igor Lopatonok. He and Russian-born film director Vera Tomilova, the chief financial officer of Global Tree Pictures, who holds a US green card, are listed in the film’s credits as its producers. Global Tree raised the financing for the series, according to a contract filed in Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy proceedings. (Giuliani also starred in the documentary.)

Lopatonok has ties to Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts.

In recent years, he has helped lead a Kremlin-financed effort to persuade Westerners to move to Russia. In 2023, he chaired a competition dubbed “To Russia With Love” that invited bloggers to produce content that would show the “most appealing side of Russia” and encourage people to emigrate there. This project was funded by the Presidential Foundation for Cultural Initiatives, a state entity that Putin created in 2021 to “support projects in the field of culture, art and the creative industries.”


https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/kash-patel-fbi-trump-tucker-carlson-russia-ukraine-putin/
February 7, 2025

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov - The Register

120-hour work weeks, firing government staffers and dismantling agencies? Oh my. The US government under pseudo President Musk is in for a world of radical change.

Let's leave aside what Elon Musk – who some are saying has become the de facto US government ruler – is doing with American policies, as de jure President Donald Trump plays golf and issues frequently nonsensical executive orders. I hate most of Musk's policies, but today my subject is how he is changing the nuts and bolts of the federal government and its approach to technology.

I come at this not from a unique place, but a relatively rare one. You see, before I became a tech journalist who's spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, I worked as a programmer and system administrator for NASA and the Department of Defense Inside the Beltway. In short, I know how tech works, how tech bros think, and how government tech staffers do their jobs. There's a gigantic difference between them.

For starters, Musk wants to bring the manic tech work style to the government. You can only con tech workers into 120-hours work weeks with the Initial Public Offering (IPO) carrot in their 20s. Thirty-year-old government workers who will never see an IPO are another story entirely.

Tech IPOs are largely a fantasy anyway. The dream of being a billionaire compels people to work themselves into oblivion, but the reality is that only a tiny percentage actually achieve significant wealth via this route. Your best shot is to slave for a company when it's just taking off and then hope like hell it actually makes it to an IPO or an incredibly lucrative exit buyout.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/07/opinion_column_musk/

February 5, 2025

Elon Musk's Enemy, USAID, Was Investigating Starlink Over Its Contracts in Ukraine

Since coming into power, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has barraged USAID, the international aid agency that dispenses food and supplies to nations all over the world. It is likely that the agency will soon be shuttered and could be subsumed into the U.S. State Department. Now, new reporting shows USAID was actually investigating one of Musk’s companies at the time that he attacked the agency.

The Lever reported Tuesday that USAID’s inspector general was in the process of investigating its own public-private partnership between Musk’s Starlink and the Ukrainian government at the time that the billionaire’s DOGE crippled the agency. Publicly available information about that probe is still online. An announcement from last May reads: “The USAID Office of Inspector General, Inspections and Evaluations Division, is initiating an inspection of USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the Government of Ukraine. Our objectives are to determine how (1) the Government of Ukraine used the USAID-provided Starlink terminals, and (2) USAID monitored the Government of Ukraine’s use of USAID-provided Starlink terminals.”

Musk has called the agency “evil” and a “criminal organization,” though the fact that USAID was investigating his company may suggest ulterior motivations for the billionaire’s vitriol. It’s unclear what the Starlink probe’s status is right now.

Musk’s “criminal” remarks are funny since it increasingly looks like Musk’s DOGE activities represent breaches of federal law and, therefore, may be construed as rampant criminal behavior. On Tuesday, the Washington Post noted that officials at half a dozen federal agencies had raised concerns over whether what Musk was doing was illegal. Those agencies included the “Treasury Department, the Education Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the General Services Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the White House budget office, among others,” the newspaper reported.


https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-enemy-usaid-was-investigating-starlink-over-its-contracts-in-ukraine-2000559365
February 5, 2025

Musk creates new power base in Washington with takeover of US agencies

WASHINGTON, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's rapid takeover of two U.S. government agencies has enabled the South African-born billionaire to exert unprecedented control over America's 2.2-million-member federal workforce and begin a dramatic reshaping of government.

The world's richest man and an ally of President Donald Trump, Musk, 53, has in two weeks created a new center of power in Washington as he executes Trump's cost-cutting initiative to reduce the size of the U.S. government.
The CEO of Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab and founder of SpaceX, Musk has acted swiftly since Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration, deploying teams of current and former employees of his companies as his agents.

Musk's actions have fostered a wave of panic among government workers and public protests in Washington and at times have threatened to overshadow Trump's own agenda.
Trump's up-and-down trade war with neighboring Canada and Mexico vied this week for space on front pages with Musk's effort to shut down USAID, the Agency for International Development, America's main humanitarian aid agency to the world.

Musk's efforts are part of a massive government restructuring by Trump, who has fired and sidelined hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.


https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-creates-new-power-base-washington-with-takeover-us-agencies-2025-02-05/
February 5, 2025

Trump team revamps US Justice Department with his former personal lawyer at helm

NEW YORK, Feb 5 (Reuters) - For two weeks President Donald Trump's new administration has been racing to remake the Justice Department tasked with U.S. law enforcement. Leading the overhaul is Emil Bove, a lawyer who defended Trump in a criminal case stemming from hush money paid to a porn star.

Bove, 43, stayed largely in the background during last year's criminal trial, letting his co-counsel address the jury while their client, then a candidate for the White House, spoke to news cameras in the courtroom hallway.

Now as acting deputy attorney general, Bove has been front and center, signing his name to bold policy changes meant to remove what Trump calls political bias but which critics say threaten DOJ's traditional independence from the White House.

"If you want somebody who's going to hit the ground running, he's the guy," said Brendan Quigley, who in 2016 alongside Bove secured the trial conviction of two nephews of Venezuela's first lady on drug trafficking charges at the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan.
"He's not one to shy away from a fight," said Quigley, now a partner at law firm Baker Botts.


https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-team-revamps-us-justice-department-with-his-former-personal-lawyer-at-helm-2025-02-05/

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