America - take over

[littlebilliie]

There is a LOT going on in America today

From Washington Post

"Billionaire Elon Musk’s deputies have gained access to a sensitive Treasury Department system responsible for trillions of dollars in U.S. government payments after the administration ousted a top career official at the departmentt_, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe government deliberations."

I guess Americans haven't read 1984 😔

There’s PubMedEurope which is a European mirror, but yes, I’m very glad I don’t have an NIH grant right now…

JP Morgan look to be getting worried about the stability of markets. The are physically shipping £ 4 billion ( not a typo) worth of gold to New York to cover bullion contracts due in Feb according to Politico and The Guardian.

That’s more because they are worried about tariffs on gold, not because of markets….yet.

Can anyone explain this in simple terms please

Wouldn't they ordinarily be covered by cash transactions from offshore futures deals & therefore not subject to tariff because the gold does enter the country?

Doesn't enter... Not does. I need stronger reading bins

Information I was trying to access on racism and police brutality was scrubbed from the US website. It's the equivalent of book burning.

If they remove PubMed that will leave gaping holes in the NICE guidance, just for starters, it's going to affect patient advocacy across the world. Playing into the hands of private healthcare.

@sad all federal payments in the US are made by a single department. The worry is that if a single person (in this case Elon Musk) has control of that process they could stop sending payments. Either to targeted groups / organisations or unilaterally. So they could stop all Medicaid payments ... Meaning that only people with comprehensive health insurance could get medical care. They could stop all food stamp payments. They could stop all payments to a particular country eg UK for use of military bases.

It would be very disruptive but effective way of ensuring that the function of government did exactly what is asked by that person... Bypassing the elected officials who should make those decisions.

Reading that medics and scientists are downloading information and dumping it in. Public spaces on the internet as it will be gone.

Government pages are being deleted at a rate

This. And worryingly so.

Also the traditional White Houae website has been deleted and there is no mention of other presidents, parties or the constitution.

Erasing women from scientific achievement

www.propublica.org/article/vera-rubin-astronomer-dei-trump

It is worse than I imagined. And yet there are loads on here cheering him.
I always wondered how people would let this happen and now I’m just sad and angry.

Heather Cox Richardson is always excellent
open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-1-2025?r=2ah0jc&utm_medium=ios

The comments are also very informative

The US is now being run by a small handful of dangerous megalomaniacs.

I am loosely associated with some US scientists and they are very worried, they did see it coming if Trump was elected, sadly. I've often used PubMed articles for reliable information, it will be awful if we lose that as a resource. If RFK Jr is confirmed I can't imagine how bad it'll be. He already lied his way through his hearing. The damage done will take a long time to repair.

I've found the extreme reactions on MN to Trump's presidency to be mildly alarming (I don't do any other SM, but I imagine the hysteria will be similar). One of my daughter's friends is spouting all this doomsday stuff about Trump now (an otherwise reasonable girl). She's been talking about him every lunch break, the other girls are wholly fed up of it and are avoiding her now, which I think is sad.

I don't think it is hysteria. It is an assault on democracy.

Yes it's really a serious mistake.

I find it alarming that there are people who aren't alarmed at Trump's presidency. Have you read this thread?

Well surely that is his endgame? I don't understand much about politics but surely
he is going to try to overthrow the 2 terms rule and I would imagine with the backing of the likes of Musk the USA could surely effectively become a dictatorship. It seems to be part way there already.
Trump showed last time that he is wiling to cling on to power by any means and that he is above the judicial system so the battle is already well on the way to being lost .
Or am I over catastrophising ?

I've just looked at this and this is absolutely correct. He's erasing everything he can lay his hands on everywhere: safeguards, history, academia, international cooperation, institutions, the lot. It's a massive dumpster fire and pp are right it's probably worse than any of us could have imagined.

No. I do though recall the same threat to democracy wails at the outset of his first presidency. I imagine it will fizzle out, in the same manner it did then.