Dean Baker
Okay, as far as
I know Elon Musk is not literally in your underwear, but it seems that he is in
your tax, Social Security, and Medicare records. This probably also means that
Musk has access to your banking information since tens of millions of people pay
their taxes through a bank transfer and get Social Security checks through
direct deposit.
This is not some
far out conspiracy. Trump and/or Musk forced a long-time career government
employee at the Treasury Department to resign because he would not turn over
control of the government’s tax and payment system.
To be clear,
this has nothing to do with a normal political agenda. David Lebryk, the person
they had fired, simply oversaw the sending out of checks and payment of bills
as required by the law. There was no issue that Lebryk had acted improperly or
had somehow failed at his job. The issue was simply that Musk and his DOGE team
wanted direct access to the payment system.
There are two
plausible reasons why they might want access to personal information that no
prior administration had ever requested, neither of them very good. The first
is that Trump intends to break the law and selectively make the payments
mandated by Congress.
The point here
is that, under the law, the president does not have the discretion to decide
which payments they want to make. The president has the option to veto bills
that include spending they don’t like, but once spending has been approved and
signed into law, they legally must spend it. That is the clear wording of the
constitution as affirmed repeatedly by the Supreme Court.
If Trump plans
to ignore the law, and possibly even a Supreme Court ruling, then it would be
useful to have direct control over the system of payments. This would
effectively make him a dictator, he could do whatever he felt like with our tax
dollars, with or without Congressional approval.
The other reason
why Elon Musk might want control over the system of payments is that it gives
him access to an enormous amount of financial information about almost every
person in the country. Musk has said that he wants to turn his Twitter social
media platform into an all-purpose financial service operation. Having access
to detailed information on hundreds of millions of people would give Musk a
huge leg up in this effort.
Would Musk use
his political ties to Trump to illicitly advance his business operations? Do we
really need to ask? Just today, Musk got the brilliant idea of making his
platform the exclusive distributor of National Transportation Safety Board
(NTSB) information about the recent plane crashes. The information is not
posted on its website or shared in e-mails with reporters covering the topic.
Taking control
of NTSB statements is trivial compared to prying into all of our tax and
banking records, but it shows Musk’s contempt for the law and his willingness
to nefariously use government information to enrich himself. Let’s just stick
to the facts as we know them. Elon Musk now has access to a vast trove of
personal information that can be used to enrich himself and he shows zero
concern about the laws that would stop him.
So is Musk in
our underwear as we speak? Use your own judgment.
Vijay
Prashad
For
the past quarter century, ever since 2001, presidents of the United States
inaugurate their terms not with bottles of champagne but with drone and missile
strikes. Donald Trump followed the rhythm. Not long after he ascended to the
chair in the Oval Office, he sent off missiles against ISIS fighters “hiding in
caves” – as he put it on social media – in the Golis mountains in northeast
Somalia. No civilians were killed, said Trump. They always say that.
Trump’s
first missile strike of this presidency reminded me of Barack Obama’s first
missile strike, only three days after the Nobel Peace Prize winner was sworn in
as the president of the United States in 2009. In the morning of January 23,
CIA director Michael Hayden told Obama that they were ready to strike
high-level al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in northern Pakistan. Obama did not
object. At 830pm, local time, a drone flew over Karez Kot in Ziraki village,
Waziristan. The people on the ground heard it. They called the drones bhungana,
that which sounds like a buzzing bee. Three Hellfire missiles were fired
remotely, and they smashed into some homes. Fifteen people died in that attack.
One
of the missiles went through the wall of a home and exploded in the drawing
room of the house. Inside that room sat a group of family members who were
celebrating before one of the young men – Aizazur Rehman Qureshi (age 21) – was
to leave for the United Arab Emirates. The drone strike killed him. It also
killed two men, Mohammed Khalil and Mansoor Rehman, leaving their fourteen
children without a father. Their nephew, Faheem Qureshi (age 7), felt his face
on fire, and ran out of the room (he lost an eye). Not one of the men and boys
in the room had a connection to either al-Qaeda or to the Taliban. They were
hard working people, one of the men had been a worker in the UAE and on his
return, his nephew was preparing to go and help the family by working in the
Gulf. Now, a hasty decision by the CIA left the family distraught. The US
government never apologised for the attack and did not compensate the family.
In
2012, Newsweek’s Daniel Klaidman published Kill or Capture: The War on Terror
and the Soul of the Obama Presidency. If I were Obama, I would like this book.
It is sympathetic to him. After that drone strike, Klaidman points out, “Obama
was understandably disturbed.” The next day, a person who was there in the
Situation Room told Klaidman, Obama walked in but “you could tell from his body
language that he was not a happy man.” Apparently, this was the spur for Obama
to learn about the CIA’s “signature strikes” (when the US government felt it
could kill anyone who looked like a terrorist) and “crowd killing” (when it was
acceptable to kill civilians in a crowd if a “high value target” was also
there). Obama said that he did not like this that he was unhappy that there
might be women and children in the crowd. But, as Klaidman writes, “Obama
relented – for the time being.” In fact, the “time being” seems to have
extended through the two terms of his presidency. What differentiated Obama
from Bush before him and Trump afterwards was merely his hesitancy. His actions
were the same.
In
2010, Obama’s team developed the Disposition Matrix or the “kill list” and the
procedures to activate the use of strikes to kill or capture “high value
targets.” The chain of decision making for this kill list did not include any
sense that the men on the list could have been accidentally placed there or
that they would get a chance to defend themselves from the CIA’s accusations in
a court of law. In other words, there was no judicial review. In 2011, this
should have raised eyebrows when these procedures led to the assassination of
several US citizens in Yemen (first Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, and
then – in a separate drone strike – his sixteen-year-old son Abdulrahman
al-Awlaki); in 2017, the US government killed al-Awlaki’s eight-year-old daughter,
Nawar al-Awlaki. All three were US citizens, who should have been afforded some
US constitutional protections even if the US disregards international law. None
was available to them.
In
2012, the film Ghaddar (Traitor) has a popular song sung by Rahim Shah called
Shaba Tabhi Oka (Come on Destroy Everything). The film is in Pashto, the
language of northern Pakistan and large parts of Afghanistan. It is also the
language of those who died in Obama’s 2009 drone strike. In the song sequence,
two lovers, played by the popular actors Arbaaz Khan and Sobia Khan, dance and
sing with the culture of drones and bombs now associated with love. “Look at
me, bomb my heart,” says Sobia Khan, while the refrain runs, “come on, destroy
everything.”
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