Friday News Roundup
Trump Foreign Policy Madness Watch
In yet another sign that the EU has written off Donald Trump’s foreign policy as sheer lunacy, France will now use 195 million euros from frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s defense against Russia.
In addition, over 30 European and NATO military leaders met to discuss a blueprint for a peacekeeping force in Ukraine. European official at the event say that US officials were deliberately not invited. European governments are probably responding to being shut out of talks between Russia, US, and Ukraine that are taking place behind closed doors in Saudi Arabia.
In a predictable consequence of Donald Trump’s boneheaded trade war, Premier Doug Ford of Ontario slapped an extra 25% tariff on electricity Ontario sells to the United States. Residents of Michigan, Minnesota, and New York could all see their electric bills go up as a result.
The Trump Administration has ordered the U.S. military to develop plans for Panama, including plans to seize the Panama Canal by force. The administration is basing its current policy in Panama on a John Birch Society campaign from the 1970s. It is literally that insane.
Donald Trump also told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that he wanted to invade and take over Greenland. (Saying that Trump merely wants to “annex” Greenland does not convey the full madness of it.) Voters in Greenland have responded to Trump’s offer by voting in a party that is center-right but strongly pro-independence from Denmark. The incoming prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, has stated clearly, “We don’t want to be Americans.”
Elon Musk and DOGE Watch
I could give you a lot more links about Elon Musk’s activities in the federal government right now, but if you read only one article, you need to read Inside Elon Musk’s Digital Coup by the technology magazine Wired.
Here are some highlights from the article:
You may already know about Edward Coristine, a minion of Elon Musk better known by his internet handle “Big Balls.” But another henchman of Elon is Nikhil Rajpal, an ex-Twitter engineer, who once encouraged Elon to steal dormant user names from Twitter users & auction off the names to the highest bidder. Rajpal was the head of a far-right libertarian student group at UC Berkeley, which had the motto of “Futuate cohortem urbanm,” which is Latin for “F*ck these city dwellers.”
Trump gave Elon and DOGE access to tap into any government system that was marked unclassified. One system was an Official of Personnel Management database of federal employee’s personal data, which was already the target of a Chinese cyberattack in 2015. Trump just allowed Elon and his unvetted contractors inside. Now, if the Chinese want data on American government employees, they don’t have to hire hackers. They can just bribe one of Elon’s employees.
According to government and IT security experts, the type of access that Elon Musk has to government systems is less useful in identifying waste and fraud than for surveillance. According to these experts, “DOGE could help the Trump administration accomplish another goal: to gather much of what the government knows about a given individual, whether a civil servant or an undocumented immigrant, in one easily searchable place.”
Elon’s DOGE gained illegal accèss to Treasury systems so that Elon could have a unilateral “delete” button to remove federal funding he dislikes. David Lebryk, the highest ranking non-political appointee in the Treasury, chose to retire rather than giving Musk access to the Treasury.
DOGE granted a man named Marko Elez the access rights to rewrite the government’s internal computer code. Elez is also the same man who was exposed by the Wall Street Journal for making frequent racist posts on social media, but was reinstated at the behest of Vice Present J.D. Vance.
By unilaterally reducing the credit card limit of government employees to $1, DOGE has also ended up leaving Americans’ Social Security numbers more vulnerable to exposure. According to a Social Security Administration (SSA) employee, “We print a lot of sh!t daily. Stuff with people’s names, addresses, phone numbers, SSNs, bank accounts, you name it. We have giant locking trash bins we put it in, and we pay a shredding company to empty them every month.” Because of the $1 credit limit, American’s personal information is lying out in the open, because SSA cannot pay a company to shred the data & there is too much paper for them to shred all the data in-house.