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The Guardian – “From mass firings to unprecedented influence…Musk’s role in the Trump administration is without modern precedent. Never before has the world’s richest person been deputized by the US president to cull the very agencies that oversee his businesses. Musk’s attempts to radically dismantle government bureaus have won him sprawling influence. His team has …
The World After Amazon – A project to support workers to reclaim the power of future-making Read as a PDF Read as an EPUB Order a book Listen as a podcast Download the audiobook In 2023, the Worker as Futurist Project supported 13 rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short, speculative fiction about The World After …
The Atlantic – no paywall: Experts fear what comes next. “If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government—a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens. The federal government …
New 40-page slide deck from Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok, entitled “The Voluntary Trade Reset Recession,” the probability of which he now puts at 90%. How are consumers responding to tariffs?… click to enlarge the screen shot below: Consumer confidence at record-low levels Front-loading purchases before tariffs began Tourism slowing, in particular international See also …
The New York Times – “An expert on the federal work force estimates that the speed and chaos of Mr. Musk’s cuts to the bureaucracy will cost taxpayers $135 billion this fiscal year. President Trump and Elon Musk promised taxpayers big savings, maybe even a “DOGE dividend” check in their mailboxes, when the Department of …
The New York Times – no paywall: “Late yesterday, Sethuraman Panchanathan, whom President Trump hired to run the National Science Foundation five years ago, quit. He didn’t say why, but it was clear enough: Last weekend, Trump cut more than 400 active research awards from the N.S.F., and he is pressing Congress to halve the …
Washington Post [no paywall]: “Representatives of the U.S. DOGE Service have received permission to access a highly sensitive Justice Department system that contains information including the addresses and case histories of millions of legal and undocumented immigrants, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. The system — the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s Courts …
Economist Paul Krugman – Substack: “Last week was a scary time in U.S. financial markets, and the danger may not be over. I’m not talking about stocks, whose fluctuations often tell us nothing at all. What had me and others rattled were developments in bond and currency markets. Interest rates on long-term government debt rose …
404 Media: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to bring together data from a wide variety of other U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Labor (DOL), Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to make a centralized database to identify immigration targets, …
The New York Times [no paywall]: “Stepping into the trade war, Hong Kong said on Wednesday that its postal service will no longer send packages to the United States. It is the city’s first move in a spiraling conflict between China and the United States that is reordering global shipping routes. President Trump this month …
Fair Tax Foundation: “This report, The Silicon Six and their enduring global tax gap, analyses the long- run effective tax rate of the Silicon Six (Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft and Netflix) over the past decade. It is a variation of analysis we last undertook in 2019 and 2021. These businesses dominate digital infrastructure and …
Measuring the Income Gap from 1975 to 2023. Carter C. Price. Published Feb 17, 2025 – The author extends prior work to estimate the gap between what workers earned in 2023 and what they would have earned with a more even growth rate from 1975 to 2023. The bottom 90 percent of workers would have …
