American Art Center, 2. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: “Here are our monsters,” without immediately turning the monsters into pets.

– Jacques Derrida

Musk and Trump’s intended Shock and Awe bombardment of the federal government has turned into an Opéra Bouffe of Schlock and Chainsaw.

Here is Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Howard (Net worth: $808 million) Lutnick’s message to seniors (whose ranks I have now reluctantly joined) on the gutting of the Social Security Administration: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out your check this month. My mother-in-law, who is 94, wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and will get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming and yelling and complaining.” As a writer who worked for decades as a freelancer, if I were to take my Social Security payments at the age of 65, the check would amount to about $40 a day. Try living on that for a month, never mind two months. The billionaire “economic populists” who are running the country haven’t the faintest clue how most of us live…

How many landlords are cool with you delaying your rent payment by a month and then not having enough left in the bank to pay the current rent?

Musk or Bust (Your Social Security checks)! Leland Dudek, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, has threatened to shut down the agency in response to a court ruling blocking Elon Musk’s DOGE demolition teams from accessing sensitive taxpayer data.

Financial journalist Michael Lewis (The Big Short) talking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on his new book, Who Is Government?:

When people throw around insults at federal bureaucrats, they’re really revealing they don’t know what goes on in federal government. It’s a mind-bendingly complicated place that does lots of different things, some of which they do very well and some less well. When you go in, you realize how hard fraud would be to perpetrate. Waste is different. Waste is more complicated. There are all sorts of inefficiencies that aren’t really the fault of the workers, that’s more the fault of the structure of the system. But you can’t take a federal worker to work and buy them a turkey sandwich. They just won’t take the money. They are watched every which way and they are conditioned to be very careful about what they do financially. If you said Mike, I’d like you to write a story about fraud; I’d much rather look for it in a private company…I worked on Wall Street. A million things happen every day in a Wall Street firm that if it happened in the civil service, it would be a scandal.

Even worse, DOGE’s mission is to defund and demolish the government agencies who are investigating fraud on Wall Street, while Trump issues executive orders and waivers removing any oversight for their own corrupt practices and conflicts of interest.

As Trump and Musk eviscerate the Federal Trade Commission, Public Citizen compiled a list of the donations made to the Trump campaign by corporations currently under investigation by the FTC…

Corporations currently facing FTC investigations & lawsuits that collectively gave $8,000,000 toward Trump’s inauguration:

Abbott $500K
Adobe $1M
Amazon $1M
Coca-Cola $250K
Meta $1M
Microsoft $1M
OpenAI $1M*
Syngenta $250K
Uber $2M*

*includes CEO donations

The Federal Trade Commission has erased from its website all content critical of Amazon, Microsoft, and AI companies published during the Biden administration.

This week, DOGE fired a disabled veteran who was working at the VA Medical Center in Salem, Virginia, despite excellent performance ratings. “This has put my wife and I in a terrible place mentally and financially…I’m being told by HR that I have lost everything.” And yet they want to require disabled, chronically ill, and injured people to work in order to qualify for Medicaid.”

Christopher........

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