The Cost of Billionaire-Run Government
What Comes After the Downsizing...
There is a very real cost in human terms as tens of thousands of federal government employees are being pushed out agency doors willy-nilly with no sense of potential consequences. The people doing the pushing are following orders from Elon Musk’s task force, many of whom are in the dark about workings of the agencies being hollowed out.
The manner in which this purge is being executed is proof positive that empathy was disregarded as a desirable quality in hiring these weasels. Basic math may have also been excluded in the hiring process, as the calculations of waste or fraud being publicized by the White House are plagued with errors like not being able to tell billions from millions, or figuring out the difference between a total grant amount and what was spent.
Then there are the absolutely rude and hostile words being used as part of the dismissal process, where employees who have been promoted and have good performance reviews are being told they weren’t worthy. And who could forget dismissing/recalling the employees charged with ensuring nuclear weapons safety?
Via NBC News:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday that, over the weekend, it accidentally fired "several" agency employees who are working on the federal government's response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak.
The agency said it is now trying to quickly reverse the firings.
It will still be weeks before the real impact of all these firings makes its way down to the public consciousness. Farms going belly up, healthcare facilities closing, mass food poisonings, infectious disease outbreaks with diseases thought eradicated just a few years ago… these are just a few of the possibilities coming down the pike for Americans.
In the short run, two of the biggest hustles are deeply integrated in gutting the administrative state. Or bureaucracy. Or Deep State, if you prefer. They are Artificial Intelligence (AI) and crypto-currency. (I’ll do crypto another day)
For purposes of the agency-wrecking in progress, AI is a linchpin of what the masters of this destruction envision. It’s being used to determine who stays and who goes in federal agencies.
Who could possibly have predicted that putting AI in charge of personnel dismissals without knowledge of the systems they operate in, that there’d be wildly harmful and dysfunctional results? Obviously not Elon Musk, in between his therapeutic ketamine encounters.
Mind you, AI is often not able to muster what passes for common sense (words that are in vogue with the right wing set these days) about realities beyond the parameters of a query. And its programing, which involves scraping millions of websites, does a mediocre job of assessing the trustworthiness of a source, while devaluing all creators, authors, and publishers.
The promised breakthrough in AI always seems to be just around the corner, and investors are speculating that the hundreds of billions of dollars being raised to get to the promised land will hit pay dirt before they run out of money… OR some other breakthrough in tech renders the Large Language Models currently in vogue to be useless.
After several delays, DOGE finally posted its purported savings. And what we get is a 1000-row table that a high schooler could create in a few hours.
Lookie! It says $55 billion was saved for American taxpayers. The savings are broken down by the dollar amount of each rescinded contract. Totaling the "saved" column for all canceled contracts and real estate, the numbers are $16.5 billion and $0.14 billion, respectively.
Other parts of that $55 billion number are still waiting on receipts.
Setting aside real estate for the moment (it takes longer to get out of leases), the biggest ticket item is a Department of Homeland Security contract listed as saving $8 billion.
Oooopsie! That’s actually $8 million. Zeroes Matter. How very disappointing!
The next 3 biggest ticket items are all USAID contracts listed at $655 million each. Except that’s not what was being spent; it was the limitation on what could be spent, over seven years via smaller contracts. And it was listed three times because there was one entry per disbursement. Over the first 5 years, only $73 million was awarded, with only 2 years remaining.
So what DOGE counted totaled $1,956,000. Less $73 million, we find an error of $1.23 billion.
Let’s blame that mistake on AI. And don’t tell Dear Leader. Reports late Tuesday indicated that the records themselves were being altered to cover the lack of institutional knowledge by the auditors.
As is true with Artificial Intelligence generally, there’s quite a bit to be done before algorithms can do the jobs involved in running government. A minimum number of staffers will have to pledge loyalty to the President, as opposed to the Constitution. The point here is the infrastructure for AI is being installed (often with unsecured hard/software) so that some day most of the rest of them-thar human critters can be put out to pasture.
Going beyond feeding Trump’s ego, the dissolution of checks and balances leading up to becoming officially an autocratic state makes way for governments beyond the lifespan of the man with gold toilets. Their toilets will be AI powered, maybe. (Don’t laugh, I just came back from Japan, where any possible discomfort from excretions is automatically eliminated.)
Mike Brock explains where we’re headed in an essay: The Final Despotism.
Read these paragraphs closely and things will seem more clear.
Traditional autocracies relied on crude instruments of control—violence, imprisonment, censorship. Even the most sophisticated propaganda systems of the 20th century worked through relatively simple mechanisms of message repetition and information control. People could still maintain private thoughts, secret conversations, hidden resistance.
AI-enabled autocracy operates at a deeper level. It doesn't just control behavior—it shapes the cognitive environment in which thoughts themselves form. When every digital interaction is monitored and manipulated, when social media feeds are optimized for compliance rather than connection, when AI systems can predict and preempt dissent before it crystallizes into action—the very possibility of resistance begins to dissolve.
What makes this particularly dangerous is how it combines total surveillance with personalized manipulation. AI systems don't just watch everyone—they can craft individually optimized strategies for controlling each person's behavior. Your news feed, your social connections, your entertainment, your economic opportunities—all can be algorithmically adjusted to either reward compliance or punish deviation. This isn't just external control—it's the technological colonization of human consciousness itself.
Things like “humans” and “work” aren’t the future for the billionaire set. (Yes, some of us will be around to sweep up the stables).
Cory Doctorow’s essay on America and “national capitalism" goes into the future these wannabe gods want to live in and draws on Thomas Piketty to reveal its ultimate fate.
The Parable of Bill Gates, Liliane Bettencourt and Bill Gates (again) shows us the mechanism of divorcing wealth from labor.
Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 and he stepped down as CEO in 2000. In the intervening 25 years, he built the company into the most profitable firm in human history and grew very, very rich. This is Market Lore Canon: found a successful company, grow rich.
Now, Bill Gates started with a bunch of money - he comes from a wealthy family - but he grew his personal fortune over those years in extraordinary ways, and not by investing it, but rather, by founding a company and working at it.
Now consider Liliane Bettencourt, who, during Bill Gates period as Microsoft CEO, was the richest woman in Europe. Bettencourt was born very, very rich, heiress to the L'Oreal fortune. Unlike Gates, Bettencourt didn't have a job. She just sat around, while financial planners invested her family money. Over the 25 years when Bill Gates was growing Microsoft from zero to the most successful company in planetary history, Bettencourt *made more money* than Gates. Gates made his money by *doing something*. Bettencourt made her money by *emerging from a very lucky orifice* and just hanging around.
But here's the kicker: after Bill Gates quit Microsoft, he became a professional investor. He stopped doing a job and started investing in companies where other people were working. Over the next 13 years, Bill Gates (investor) made more money than Bill Gates (Microsoft CEO) made in his 25 years of doing a job. He also made more than Liliane Bettencourt.
Here’s economist Thomas Piketty, who knows a thing or two about wealth, writing at Le Monde:
Impressed by market capitalizations and billion-dollar figures, some observers are amazed by the US’s economic power. They forget that these valuations stem from the monopoly dominance of a few major groups, and, more broadly, that the astronomical dollar amounts reflect the very high prices imposed on American consumers. It’s akin to analyzing wage trends without taking inflation into account. When measured in terms of purchasing power parity, the reality is very different: the productivity gap with Europe disappears entirely.
Using this measurement, China’s GDP surpassed that of the US in 2016. It is currently more than 30% higher and will reach double the US GDP by 2035. This has very real consequences in terms of its capacity to influence and finance investment in the Global South, especially if the US locks itself into its arrogant, neo-colonial posture. The reality is that the US is on the verge of losing control of the world, and Trump’s rhetoric won’t change that.
National capitalism is not immune from the cycles of history, which demonstrate that extreme wealth distribution is ultimately destabilizing. We have the French Revolution and World Wars that stand out as great resets involving capital destruction, documented by Piketty and his grad students painstakingly researching 300 years' worth of global capital documentation.
Understanding the long game here doesn’t solve our short term problems via Musk/Trump but it does provide an economic lens through which to view the world we live in.
This is all very grim analysis, but there are ways of defeating this techno-fascism. They all start with making human connections. In the near future they’ll have to be less obvious than in-person or anything tech enabled, built around social functions that can serve to insulate progressive thought and action from the techno-state agenda.
Basketball anyone? Or cocktails? Art appreciation tours? A union negotiating team? Let’s remember the French underground during WWII… the possibilities are endless. I’ll speak to these sorts of concepts at a future time.
As measles outbreak rages in Texas, RFK Jr. pushes anti-vaccine message by Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims at Popular Information
The largest measles outbreak Texas has seen in over 30 years is sweeping through the western part of the state. According to information released yesterday by the Texas Department of State Health Services, 58 cases have been confirmed throughout five counties. The total number of cases is likely much higher, however, with “health officials suspect[ing] that between 200 and 300 people are infected but untested.”
The vast majority of cases are occurring among the unvaccinated. Only four confirmed cases in Texas were vaccinated. Gaines County, which has the most confirmed cases, is a rural area that has one of the highest vaccine exemption rates in Texas. During the 2023-2024 school year, 18% of kindergarten students had not received the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella.
Meanwhile, RFK Jr., who was confirmed last week as the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), appeared in Texas on Tuesday. He did not address the burgeoning measles crisis. Instead, he continued his anti-vaccine advocacy, falsely suggesting that childhood vaccines like MMR may be linked to chronic illnesses. He said he would convene a new panel to study the childhood vaccination schedule and other “formally taboo” issues.
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A quarter of US shoppers have dumped favorite stores over political stances by Lauren Aratani at The Guardian
More Democrats (50%) indicated they were changing their spending habits compared with Republicans (41%) and independents (40%). Democrats were also more likely to say they have stopped shopping at companies that have opposing political views to their own – 45% of Democrats indicated so, compared with 34% of Republicans.
It is a sign that consumers with liberal views are starting to use their wallets in response to politics in the private sector.
Most recently, this has been seen with a backlash against Target – the seventh-largest retailer in the US that has enjoyed a typically favorable reputation among liberal consumers.
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Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find by Josie Garthwaite at Techxplore
Climate policies that promote expansion of renewables as well as carbon capture and direct air capture to deal with emissions from fossil fuels and biomass "do not distinguish between good and poor solutions," and any policy promoting carbon capture and direct air capture "should be abandoned," the authors write in the study.
They add, "The only way to eliminate all air-pollutant and climate-warming gases and particles from energy is to eliminate combustion."
