I went on RISING this morning and got into a tête-a-tête with Robby about Musk and his current rampage through our governmental agencies. To hear Musk tell it, of course, he’s just making things more efficient!
You don’t feed a hungry child because it’s efficient, however; you feed a hungry child because it’s the right thing to do. Getting rid of government bloat is a good thing, of course, but Musk and his group of computer nerds aren’t just cutting the fact. They’re cutting the bone. They're rushing into government agencies about which they know nothing, asking no one anything about it, and simply deleting programs at will in the space of a few hours. Sometimes they delete a whole agency! There’s a complete absence of democratic, deliberative, Constitutional process here. Congress created those agencies, all of them are overseen by Inspectors General who were fired almost immediately when Trump took office.
Don’t kid yourself, anyone. As I said to Robby, this has little to do with fighting corruption. The corruption lies with insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, Big Oil, military contractors and the rest of the corporate behemoth by which DC is legally and not-so-legally bribed each day. If you really wanted to fight corruption, you’d go there.
What’s happening, unfortunately, is right out of the autocrat’s handbook. The Trump/Musk administration has a sinister goal in all this: convincing people that democracy doesn’t work, so you may as well give up on it. They - and they only - could do a much better job.
The lure of autocracy can be very cunning. Don’t buy it, of course. This is tyranny masquerading as efficiency, and gaslighting as a political technique. What’s going on here is a power grab and an authoritarian maneuver. Stay awake. Hold on. This country belongs to us.
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