Rise up people and fast. Tyrant
Trump and his Musk-driven gangsters are launching a fascistic coup d’état. Much of everything you like about
federal/civil service for your health, safety, and economic well-being and
protections is being targeted.
To feed Trump’s insatiable
vengeance over being prosecuted, being defeated in the 2020 election, or now
just being challenged, this megalomaniacal, self-described dictator is harming
the lives of tens of millions of Americans in need and millions of Americans
who are assisting them.
In his demented lawless arrogance,
convicted felon Trump is nullifying the freedoms and protections of the
American Revolution (King Donald is today’s King George III), and rejecting the
Declaration of Independence (which listed the rights and abuses against the
British Tyrant that Trump is shredding and entrenching).
He is defiantly violating the U.S.
Constitution, its controls over dictatorial government, and its powers
exclusively given to Congress. The Constitution demands that we live
under the rule of law, not the rule of one man.
While Trump enjoys Mar-a-Lago and
his golfing, Madman Musk, a South African, is literally living in the Executive
Office Building next to the White House, with his heel-clicking Musketeers,
seven days a week (they brought in sleeping cots) guarded by a large private
security detail.
Consider, people, that the world’s
richest man, with billions of dollars of federal contracts, is unleashing his
henchmen to wreck the daily work of public servants committed to providing
critical services that have long and bi-partisan support.
Assistance to children, emergency
workers, the sick and elderly, public school students, and people ripped off by
business crooks. He is firing the federal cops on the corporate crime beat –
whether at the FBI, the EPA, or the key Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
which Trump/Musk are gutting.
Some headlines: “Laws? What Laws? Trump’s Brazen Grab for Executive Power” by
the great reporter Charlie Savage (New York Times, February 6, 2025).
Outlaws taking charge, driven by greed for the government’s honeypots of
corporate welfare, and near-zero taxes for the rich and big corporations.
Or “Searching for Motive to Musk Team’s Focus on ‘Checkbook’ of
U.S.” by Alan Rappeport, February 6, 2025, New York Times.
Or “White House Billionaires Take on the World’s Poorest Kids” by
the super-reporter Nicholas Kristof (February 6, 2025. New York Times)
shutting down The Agency for International Development’s distribution of AIDS
medicines, and crucially stopping U.S. health agencies from countering rising,
deadly pandemics in Africa that could come here quickly without U.S. defensive
actions abroad. Already the devastating effects on children missing healthcare
and food are erupting.
Kristof concludes that all this
(and the dollar amounts are very small compared to their benefits) may seem
like a game for Trump/Musk, but “… it’s about children’s lives and our own
security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.” It is also criminal!
When the forces of law and order
reassert themselves, Elon Musk may become known as felon Musk. He is not a
properly appointed federal official. He has no authority to send his wrecking
crews into one agency after another, demanding private information about
Americans, pushing people out, and shutting down operations.
Musk, whose next target is the
federal auto safety agency that has been enforcing the safety laws against
Tesla and has not surrendered its regulation of self-driving cars (Musk’s next
big project). Musk refuses to disclose his sweetheart contracts with the
federal agencies nor has he disclosed his tax returns. Demand them.
What is very clear in the first 20
days of Trump’s lawless madness is that he is moving fast for a police
state along with deepening the corporate state with and for Big
Business. His prime victims are not the vast military budget
at the Department of Defense, nor the big budgets of the Spy
Agencies or of Musk’s lucrative fiefdom – NASA, the Space Agency. No, like the
bullies they are, Trump/Musk are smashing people’s programs.
They hate Medicaid (provided to
over 80 million Americans) or the food programs for millions
of children. Crazed Trump is pushing to shut down many clean wind power
projects and cut credits to homeowners installing solar panels while booming
the omnicidal oil, gas, and coal industries. He wants many more giant exporting
natural gas facilities near U.S. ports which could accidentally blow-up entire
cities.
Musk’s poisoned Tusks have even
reached Laos, Cambodia, and parts of Vietnam where mine-clearing efforts have
been cut off. These are the U.S.’s Vietnam War era unexploded ordinances and
bomblets that have killed tens of thousands of innocent residents, mostly
children, in the past fifty years.
The Washington Post headline
on February 6th, “Musk Team Taking Over Public Operations” understates
the carnage. They are brazenly shutting down agencies, taking down thousands of
government websites helpful to all Americans, and telling conscientious civil
servants to obey or be driven out.
The Republicans in Congress, to
their future shame and guilt, are surrendering their constitutional powers in
the very branch of government our Founders assigned to check any rising
monarchy in the White House.
The Democrats in the minority are
just starting to protest, some in front of shuttered federal buildings. But
they have not yet initiated unofficial public hearings in
Congress to give voice to the surging anger of Americans (now flooding their
switchboards) whose narrow majority of Trump voters are sensing betrayal big
time. Demand unofficial lhearings now! Federal judges are starting
to uphold the violated laws.
The media, itself threatened by
Trump’s attacks, censorship, and who knows what is next from this venomous liar
(see the Washington Post’s Glen Kessler’s January 26, 2025
piece “The White House’s wildly inaccurate claims about USAID
spending” or “Trump’s gusher of misleading economic statistics at Davos”)
will cover protests and testimony by people all over the country. The rallies
and marches have begun and will only get larger as Trump and Musk sink lower
with their tyrannical abuses.
The career military does not relish
the reckless buffoon that Trump put over them as Secretary of Defense. American
business cannot tolerate the chaos, the uncertainty, the tumult.
Thirty-nine million small businesses are already feeling the oncoming
Trump tsunami.
Break with your routine, Americans.
It’s your country they are seizing with this burgeoning coup. Take it back
fast, is what our original patriots of 1776 would be saying.
-Ralph Nader is
a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only
the Super-Rich Can Save Us!
CounterPunch
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