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Trump Throws Global Economy into Chaos with On-again, Off-again Tariffs

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2025 //
7

The New York Times said bluntly that Trump has plunged the global economy into chaos with his wild and wooly tariffs. He doesn’t know what they are, who pays for them, how they affect trade. He is listening only to Peter Navarro, the tariff evangelist. Trump is not the master of “the art of the deal” (a ghost-written book). He is the master of obfuscation and chaos.

The New York Times reported:

Six months into his new administration, President Trump’s assault on global trade has lost any semblance of organization or structure.

He has changed deadlines suddenly. He has blown up negotiations at the 11th hour, often raising unexpected issues. He has tied his tariffs to complaints that have nothing to do with trade, like Brazil’s treatment of its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, or the flow of fentanyl from Canada.

Talks with the United States were like “going through a labyrinth” and arriving “back to Square 1,” said Airlangga Hartarto, the Indonesian minister for economic affairs, who met with U.S. officials in Washington on Wednesday.

The resulting uncertainty is preventing companies and countries from making plans as the rules of global commerce give way to a state of chaos.

“We’re still far away from making real deals,” said Carsten Brzeski, global head of macroeconomics at the bank ING in Germany. He called the uncertainty “poison” for the global economy.

Gone is the idea that the White House would strike 90 deals in 90 days after a period of rapid-fire negotiation, as Mr. Trump pledged in April. Instead, Washington has signed bare-bone agreements with big trading partners including China, while sending many other countries blunt and mostly standardized letters announcing hefty tariffsto start on Aug. 1.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Economics, Economy, Extremism, Stupid, Trump

Ted Cruz Slashed NOAA Funding for Weather Forecasting in Trump Budget

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2025 //
12

Since the disaster in Texas, where more than 100 lives were lost to a flash flood in the middle of the night, Senator Ted Cruz has been readily available to comment for every television camera.

He has warned Democrats and Republicans alike not to politicize the tragic events (forgetting that Republicans pounced on the Los Angeles fires to blame Democrats and DEI as the 98-mile-an-hour winds were still spreading disaster. They blamed Mayor Karen Bass [who is female and Black], they blamed the female leaders of the LA Fire Department, they blamed Governor Gavin Newsom for refusing to turn on an imaginary faucet in Northern California).

What Cruz has not mentioned is that he inserted a cut into Trump’s Big Ugly Bill that slashed $150 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget for forecasting the weather.

The Guardian reported:

“There’s no doubt afterwards we are going to have a serious retrospective as you do after any disaster and say, ‘OK what could be done differently to prevent this disaster?’” Cruz told Fox News. “The fact you have girls asleep in their cabins when flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way.”

The National Weather Service has faced scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas, triggering floods that caused the deaths and about $20bn in estimated economic damages. Late-night alerts about the dangerous floods were issued by the service but the timeliness of the response, and coordination with local emergency services, will be reviewed by officials.

But before his Grecian holiday, Cruz ensured a reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (Noaa) efforts to improve future weather forecasting of events that cause the sort of extreme floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate crisis.

Cruz inserted language into the Republicans’ “big beautiful” reconciliation bill, before its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, that eliminates a $150m fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” around weather forecasting.

Cruz was vacationing in Greece with his family when the flood occurred. A few years ago, when the power grid in Texas collapsed during a bitter cold spell, Cruz and family were on their way to Cancun. Maybe he should put out public alerts about his vacations so we can all be prepared for disasters.

Politifact debunked the claim that Trump totally defunded NOAA and the National Weather Service, it acknowledged that cuts were made (at the insistence of DOGE).

“While the administration has not defunded the NWS or NOAA, it is proposing in 2026 to cut significant research arms of the agency, including the Office of Atmospheric Research, a major hot bed of research,” Matt Lanza, Houston-based meteorologist and editor of The Eyewall, a hurricane and extreme weather website, told PolitiFact. “Multiple labs that produce forecasting tools and research used to improve forecasting would also be impacted. The reorganization that’s proposed would decimate NOAA’s research capability.” 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Environment, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Stupid, Texas

Michael Cohen: Texas Sat on a $30 Billion Surplus and Refused to Build a Flood Warning System

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2025 //
9

The leaders of Texas have shown again and again that they are indifferent to the lives of the people of their state. Governor Greg Abbott has repeatedly refused to participate in the federal summer lunch program for low-income children, which would have fed nearly four million children. Abbott and his fellow Republicans imposed one of the strictest laws in the nation blocking abortion and the death rate of pregnant women has shot up. He has repeatedly refused to expand Medicaid to reach more than one million Texans who have no health insurance. Governor Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick want to do as little as possible to provide public services or to improve the lives of the poor. They want low taxes. They believe in individual responsibility. That’s their highest priority.

The following article was written by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer. It appeared on the Meiselas blog. He called it: “When the System Drowns Its People.”

Cohen writes:

There are disasters, and then there are premeditated failures dressed up as acts of God. What’s unfolding across Central Texas isn’t just a freak storm or an unfortunate tragedy; it’s the culmination of arrogance, willful neglect, and a depraved obsession with austerity over human life. More than 100 are confirmed dead, and over 160 remain missing. This is not just weather. This is the rotting fruit of a political doctrine that puts dollars before dignity, and ideology before infrastructure.

This is Flash Flood Alley. They’ve called it that for decades. Scientists warned. Local officials knew. But Texas chose not to prepare. The topography is unforgiving: limestone hills, shallow rivers, rapid runoff. When the sky opens up, this region doesn’t flood. It drowns. It suffocates. And still, nothing. No modernized alert systems. No meaningful statewide plan. Just the usual chest-beating about “personal responsibility” while entire families were swept into the dark.

Here’s the insult to injury: Texas is sitting on $30 billion in a rainy-day fund. That’s not a metaphor; that’s a literal pile of untouched cash that could’ve bought sirens, early-warning systems, elevated infrastructure, floodplain mapping, and the staffing to support it all. Instead, it sat in a bank account while children drowned in their camp bunks.

Now comes the scapegoating. Right on cue, Texas officials have turned their aim at the National Weather Service, claiming it failed to provide sufficient warning. But the San Antonio Express-News called it what it is: a coward’s deflection. The NWS issued alerts—repeatedly. The problem wasn’t the forecast. The problem was that the system built to respond to that forecast had been deliberately dismantled.

Let’s talk about DOGE: the Department of Government Efficiency. This isn’t satire. This is a real federal agency, created in 2025 under Trump’s second administration. Its stated mission? To “streamline” government. Its real job? Gut it from the inside out. Think of DOGE as the ideological Molotov cocktail thrown into the machinery of public service. Under the guise of saving taxpayer money, it laid off meteorologists, froze critical positions at FEMA, slashed NOAA’s coordination grants, and eviscerated the very agencies that make emergency response possible. Efficiency? No. This is strategic sabotage dressed up in a four-letter acronym.

DOGE didn’t just cut fat; it amputated limbs. In the name of small government, they made us small-minded. In the name of freedom, they left us unprotected. And in the name of fiscal responsibility, they created the exact scenario that led to over a hundred preventable deaths in Texas. It’s bureaucratic manslaughter. And it’s spreading.

Texas didn’t just follow DOGE’s lead; it internalized it. Governor Abbott didn’t need to be told to ignore warnings. He’s been doing it for years. Flash Flood Alley has seen repeated disasters, and each time, the response has been more anemic than the last. Why fund a new emergency alert system when you can cut taxes and call it liberty? Why invest in preparedness when you can just blame someone else after the storm?

But here’s the fundamental question: What the hell is government for if not to protect its people?

If your ideology leads you to hoard billions while people drown, then your ideology is broken. If your system prioritizes “lean governance” over living children, then your system is immoral. And if your political leaders shrug at death tolls while quoting spreadsheets, then they shouldn’t be in office; they should be in court.

We live in a nation of deep denial. We still treat climate change as an abstraction. We pretend billion-dollar disasters are flukes. But we are in the age of permanent emergency. The floods are coming every year now. The fires, the heat domes, the inland hurricanes—they’re all part of the new American experience. And yet, our government—federal, state, and local—is being stripped down to the studs in the name of a 1980s fiscal fever dream about trickle-down competence.

Let’s not forget: FEMA, too, is on the chopping block. The same anti-government crusade that birthed DOGE has its sights set on dismantling the last institutions capable of responding to disaster. Because in the minds of these so-called “efficiency experts,” saving lives is a luxury. The bare minimum is too expensive.

Texas is the cautionary tale. It’s what happens when the government decides its job is not to serve the people, but to shrink until it disappears. The dead in Flash Flood Alley didn’t need to die. They died because warnings went unheeded, because funds went unused, and because the infrastructure built to protect them was methodically, proudly destroyed.

So no, this wasn’t just rain. It wasn’t just a storm. It was a policy choice. And that choice killed people.

Let this be the moment we stop pretending that slashing budgets is a moral good. Let this be the moment we say, with clarity and fury: government is not the problem; government is the responsibility. And if it can’t do the basics—warn, protect, rescue—then it isn’t just broken. It’s complicit.

Flash Flood Alley didn’t have to be a graveyard. But thanks to DOGE and the cowardice it inspires, it is.

And if we don’t change course, it won’t be the last.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Texas

Michael Tomasky: What Will ICE Do with Its Enormous New Budget ?

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2025 //
10

From Day 1 of the Trump administration, the strategy of the Trumpers was to “flood the zone.” That is, to roll out so many new policies that the public could not keep track, and the media couldn’t deal with them all. Trump’s staff had the blueprint in Project 2025, and they were prepared with dozens of executive orders. That, plus the depredations of Elon Musk’s DOGE kids made it seem as if we had suddenly been swarmed by an invasion from outer space of aliens intent on destroying our government.

Now that Congress has passed Trump’s One Big Ugly Bill, we are in the same situation. The near 1000-page bill has so many policy reversals that no one knows all of its contents. The goal seems to be to wipe out anything that Biden or Obama accomplished.

Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, insists that we pay attention to the dramatic increase in funding for ICE. Will we have labor camps spread across the country where detainees can be hired out to farmers to perform the labor they used to be paid for?

Tomasky writes:

One aspect of the Republicans’ big, ugly bill that didn’t get enough attention until Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elevated it over the last few days is the massive amounts of money it directs to the apprehension and detention of immigrants. On Thursday, right after the bill passed the House, AOC posted on Bluesky:

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion – making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@aoc.bsky.social)July 3, 2025 at 2:58 PM

The next day—the Fourth of July, as fate would have it, when President Trump signed the bill into law—historian Timothy Snyder posted a columnon Substack under the blunt headline “Concentration Camp Labor.” If AOC’s post and Snyder’s headline sound hyperbolic to you, consider what’s actually in this new law.

It includes $170 billion for immigration enforcement: about $50 billion to build a wall on the Southern border; $30 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); and $45 billion for detention camps.

A little perspective: ICE’s existing annual budget has been around $8 billion, so $30 billion is nearly quadruple. As AOC noted, it will make ICE into a huge police force that will indeed be larger than the FBI ($11.3 billion), the Bureau of Prisons ($9 billion), and the Drug Enforcement Administration ($3.3 billion) combined.

What is ICE going to do with all that money? One thing, obviously, is that it will try to hire enough people to hit MAGA apparatchik Stephen Miller’s target of rounding up 3,000 people a day. That’s a target it apparently still hasn’t even hit. On June 5, NBC News reported that ICE hit a then-record of 2,200 detentions that day. That included hundreds of people who showed up at regional ICE offices to check in as required by the release program they were enrolled in—a program under which these people were deemed not to be threats to public safety and whose movements were already monitored by ankle bracelets or geo-locator apps.

In other words, ICE has already been detaining thousands of people who, yes, entered the United States illegally, but ever since just lived, worked, and even paid taxes. Some may have gotten into some trouble with the law, but they’re wearing monitors and showing up for their appointments. Others have had no scrapes with the law at all. And now ICE is going to have the resources to detain thousands more such people.

And no—the American public emphatically does not support this. A late June Quinnipiac poll found that 64 percent of respondents said undocumented people should be given a path to citizenship, and only 31 percent said they should be deported. And that 64 percent is up from 55 percent last December, meaning that people have watched six months of Trump’s immigration policies in action and turned even more strongly against deporting everyone.

So that’s what ICE is going to do with its $30 billion. Now think about $45 billion for detention camps. Alligator Alcatraz is expected to cost $450 million a year. Right now, a reported 5,000 detainees are being held there. The Trump administration says the new $45 billion will pay for 100,000 beds. So that’s 20 more Alligator Alcatrazes out around the country. But it’s probably even going to be worse than that, because the state of Florida, not the federal government, is footing the bill for that center. If the Trump administration can convince other states to do the same, or pay part of the freight, we’re looking at essentially a string of concentration camps across the United States. Besides, there’s something odd about that $450 million a year price tag. (Here’s an interesting Daily Kos community post asking some good questions about that astronomical cost. The math doesn’t add up.)

Forty-five billion will build a lot of stuff. As a point of comparison: In 2023, the United States budgeted $12.8 billion to build new affordable housing. We’re about to spend nearly four times on detention centers what we spend on housing.

Open the link to finish reading.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Immigration, Trump

A Message to MAGA

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2025 //
25

It is sickening to realize that the US, our beloved country, is now aligned with Russia and Putin. It is sickening to realize that when the UN took a vote to condemn Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. voted “no,” allied with Russia, North Korea, and Iran. It is sickening to realize that the U.S. is now in cahoots with the enemies of freedom and democracy.

It is sickening to see the Justice Department turned into a weapon for Trump’s personal revenge. It is sickening to see Trump’s vicious assault on higher education and academic freedom. It is sickening to watch the arrest and detention of immigrants by masked men without ID without a semblance of due process. It is sickening to see the massacre of civilians in Gaza. It is sickening to see the Trump family scoop up billlions in real estate deals, crytocurrency and other ventures. It is sickening to see the Republican Party pass a budget that cancels the health insurance of millions of low-income Americans to pay for tax cuts for the richest Americans.

One man is responsible: Trump. He worries about Putin’s feelings, not about Russian bombs hitting Ukrainian schools, playgrounds, hospitals, homes, and its energy supply. He plays with tariffs as a way to humiliate other countries, carelessly wiping out the life savings of people who trusted him. Was it by accident that he excluded Russia, North Korea, Belarus, and Cuba from his tariff threats? Trump jokes about turning Gaza into a luxury resort instead of demanding an end to the war. The cruel budget that takes from the poor and gives to the rich was his budget. It is his massive ego that has turned the Department of Justice into his personal revenge and retribution machine.

I wish he could watch Charlie Chaplin in this speech from his film The Great Dictator. It is only three minutes. Please watch. These thoughts are needed today more than at any time since 1945.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, International, Trump

Anand: A Biblical Flood, a Girl’s Death, and a Great-Grandfather’s Legacy

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2025 //
7

Anand Giridharadas is a remarkable thinker and writer. In this post, he ties together the legacy of a very wealthy man who funded the fight against climate change and the terrible fate of his great-granddaughter Janie, who died in the flood in the Hill Cihntry of Texas.

He wrote:

In April 2013, Joe Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas, made a statement that transcended the traditional obscurity of House Subcommittee on Energy and Power proceedings to trigger national headlines. “Republican Congressman Cites Biblical Great Flood To Say Climate Change Isn’t Man-Made,” declared BuzzFeed.

In a hearing about the Keystone pipline, Representative Barton, whom The New Yorker once described as one of “Washington’s most vociferous — and, arguably, most dangerous — climate change deniers,” played the denier’s game of delinking human activity from weather events: “I would point out that if you’re a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change and that certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”

Three months later, Barton received a campaign contribution from William Herbert Hunt, an oil baron in Dallas. It was neither the beginning nor the end of their alliance. According to the Open Secrets database, Hunt had already donated to Barton about ten times since 2005. And Hunt would go on to donate to Barton another half dozen times, as well as to the Texas Freedom Fund, a political action committee linked to Barton. Though most of Hunt’s donations were to Barton, he also donated to other climate deniers and foes of environmental protection, such as Christi Craddick, David McKinley, Dan Sullivan, and Dan Patrick, who once said former President Barack Obama “thinks he can change the weather…because he thinks he’s God.”

I have not been able to get the Hunt family out of my heart after I learned from The New York Times over the weekend that one of William Herbert Hunt’s great-grandchildren, Janie Hunt, all of 9, was among the dozens tragically killed in those Texas floods that were biblical in proportion, if not in explanation. Remarkably, Janie was one of seven cousins who attended the camp, and the only one to die.

Now, I know how the internet works. I know people pounce on news items like this to make heartless, cruel comments. The object of this essay is very different from that.

I am a father, and I know what I’d do to protect my children’s lives. The answer is anything. I hope I live one day to become a great-grandfather. William Herbert Hunt, according to this Dallas Morning News obituary, passed in April 2024, at 95, a life long enough that he got to enjoy more than 72 years of married life, see his children and grandchildren grow and thrive, and even get to see 35 great-grandchildren of his line.

I have to imagine that Hunt, like me, would have done anything, absolutely anything, for his family. I even have to imagine that, if, by impossible magic, you could go back in time and a little birdie could whisper that one day a catastrophic flood, made more probable by climate change, made worse by fossil fuels, would claim one of his great-grandchildren at summer camp, Hunt might have reconsidered fundamental things.

I have to believe that, because I refuse to believe that being an oilman makes you any less human. When the equation is made that simple, anyone would do the right thing. Anyone would do what it takes to save their own flesh and blood. But when it becomes more abstracted — when one’s activities indirectly cause X, which indirectly causes Y, which sometimes makes Z happen more often than usual — the mind loses its clarity. When no individual happening can be definitively linked to climate change, the deniability, the not-knowing, grows easier still. Suddenly a human being can go from doing anything to save their kin to doing nothing to save everyone’s. A person who, I have to imagine, would have given his own life for his great-granddaughter’s donates to those who have fought for a world that makes deaths like hers more likely.

Source: OpenSecrets.org

I am not writing to accuse one man. On the contrary, this story of a great-grandfather and his great-granddaughter is a story of a whole country and its descendants. As always, some will say the death of children should not be politicized. I hear that. But, also, what is politics for if it’s not a debate about stopping the death of children?

I have sat with this story since I read the Times paragraph above. It has given me a pit in my stomach. I guess what one does with that is write. There is no glib I-told-you-so here. This is about what kind of great-grandparent all of us want to be, collectively. Do we want to put our heads down, do our work, justify it however we can justify it, donate to people who defend our interests, ignore the gathering evidence that we are on a path that will kill many of us and, at some point, take down the livable world?

Or do we want to be the kind of great-grandparent who right now is acting to save great-grandchildren who aren’t even born yet, but who one day, beside some river, surrounded by inner tubes and kayaks and Crocs and flip-flops and cabins and bunk beds and singalongs and brightly colored blankets — the kind of elder who defends those lives and their right to glorious summers even before we know their names?

What does it take to be that kind of great-grandparent now? It takes fighting back against the war on science that makes it harder for climate scientists and weather forecasters to do their jobs. It takes pushing back against extractive industries and their political protectors who would sell our future for a song, and who have made it unsafe for young girls to enjoy a Christian camp. It takes a campaign of media and organizing to educate people about the fact that a cabal of wealthy, well-connected corporate overlords is profiting at the expense of a future of carefree summers.

I am still sitting with the pit in my stomach. My heart goes out to the Hunt family, to those six surviving cousins who must be feeling so many awful things that children should never have to. They are feeling things many others have already had to feel, and that more and more of us are going to be feeling if we continue down this road.

On Instagram, an adult cousin of Janie, Tavia Hunt, who is the wife of Clark Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs football team, shared the family’s pain and raised the old Jobian question of how to sustain faith in the wake of such inexplicable tragedy.

I am not a religious person, but my heart goes out to her, too. And, whether or not you believe in the god she cites above, it is also, of course, people who let things happen in this world we live in. It is also we who allow things to happen to us. And part of me wonders if, even hopes that, there might be an awakening from a story that connects cause to effect, upstream to downstream, more clearly than usual in a crisis that has long suffered from nebulousness. Perhaps this family, out of this horror, can help rouse the rest of us to become the great-grandparents our descendants deserve.

Categories Accountability, Environment, Texas

CBS Sells Out, Capitulates to Trump’s Demand for Payoff

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2025 //
2

During the 2024 Presidential campaign, “60 Minutes” invited both Trump and Harris to sit for an interview. Harris accepted, Trump declined. The interview took about an hour. As is customary, the editors cut the interview back to 20 minutes, the customary time slot.

CBS used a short response from Harris about the war in Gaza to promote the show. In the show itself, the promotional clip was replaced by a different response. To the editors, it was a distinction without a difference, a routine editorial decision.

Trump, however, saw the switch in the short clip and the longer one as a financial opportunity. He sued “60 Minutes” and CBS for $10 billion (later raised to $20 billion) for portraying Harris in a favorable light, interfering in the election, and damaging his campaign.

Since he won the election, it’s hard to see how he could demonstrate that his campaign was damaged. Most outside observers thought it was a frivolous lawsuit and would be tossed out if it ever went to trial.

But Trump persisted because the owner of CBS and its parent company Paramount, Shari Redstone, needed the FCC’s approval to complete a deal to be purchased by another company. Trump could tell his friend Brendan Carr to approve the deal or to block it. Shari Redstone would be a billionaire if the deal went through.

A veteran producer at “60 Minutes” resigned in anticipation of corporate leaders selling out their premier news program. The president of CBS News followed him out the door.

As expected, corporate caved to Trump. CBS will pay $16 million towards the cost of his Presidential library. He once again humbled the press. He did it to ABC, he did it to META, he did it to The Washington Post.

Will any mainstream media dare to criticize him?

Larry Edelman of The Boston Globe wrote about Trump’s humbling of the most respected news program on network TV:

💵 A sell-out

The show is almost over for National Amusements, the entertainment conglomerate with humble beginnings as a Dedham drive-in movie theater chain.

Unlike most Hollywood endings, this one is a downer.

Shame on Shari Redstone.

Recap: Redstone is the daughter of Sumner Redstone, the larger-than-life dealmaker who transformed the theater company started by his father into the holding company that owns CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, and the Paramount movie studio.

On Tuesday, Paramount Global, controlled by Shari Redstone, said it agreed to pay $16 million to settle President Trump’s widely criticized lawsuit stemming from the “60 Minutes” interview of Vice President Kamala Harris during last year’s election campaign. The payment, after legal fees, will go to Trump’s presidential library.

Why it matters: It’s impossible not to see this as an unabashed payoff intended to win the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of Redstone’s multibillion-dollar deal to sell Paramount to Skydance Media, the studio behind movies including “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.”

Everyone involved denied the settlement was a quid pro quo. If you believe that, I have some Trump meme coins to sell you.

In a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS last year, Trump alleged that “60 Minutes,” part of CBS News, deceptively edited the Harris interview in order to interfere with the election.

Legal experts said Trump’s chances of winning the case were slim to none given CBS’s First Amendment protections for what was considered routine editing. But his election victory in November gave him enormous leverage over Redstone.

Reaction: “With Paramount folding to Donald Trump at the same time the company needs his administration’s approval for its billion-dollar merger, this could be bribery in plain sight,” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement after the settlement was announced.

“CBS and Paramount Global realized the strength of this historic case and had no choice but to settle,” a spokesperson for Trump’s lawyers said. The president was holding “the fake news accountable,” the spokesperson said. 

Of course, the lawsuit was all about putting the news media under the president’s thumb.

“The enemy of the people” — Trump’s words — is a power base Trump wants desperately to neutralize, along with other perceived foes such as elite universities and big law firms.

Columbia University and law firms including Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison have already caved. Harvard University had no choice but to come to the negotiating table, though it also is battling the White House in court.

“The President is using government to intimidate news outlets that publish stories he doesn’t like,” the conservative editorial board of The Wall Street Journal wrote.

For what it’s worth: The two points I’d like to make here may seem obvious but are worth repeating.

First: The ownership of news outlets by big corporations is a double-edged sword. 

Yes, they can provide financial shelter from devastation wrought by Google and Meta — and the brewing storm coming from artificial intelligence. 

But they also own bigger — and more profitable — businesses that need to maintain at least a civil relationship with the federal government.

That’s why Disney ended Trump’s dubious defamation case against ABC News by agreeing to “donate” $15 million to the presidential library, and why Meta, the parent of Facebook, coughed up $25 million to settle a Trump lawsuit over the company’s suspension of his accounts after the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol. 

Second: Private sector extortion — multiple law firms promised $100 million in pro-bono work for causes favored by Trump — dovetails with the president’s use of the power of the office to make money for himself and his family.

Trump’s crypto ventures, including the shameless $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, have added at least $620 million to his fortune in a few months, Bloomberg reported this week. Then there are all those real estate deals in the Middle East, the Qatari jet, and the licensed products, from bibles to a mobile phone service.

Shari Redstone’s $16 million payment is chump change by comparison. And it makes perfect business sense. It smooths the way for National Amusements to salvage at least $1.75 billion from the sale of its stake in Paramount. Sumner Redstone, a consummate dealmaker, would have done the same thing.

Skydance, by the way, was launched by another child of a billionaire, David Ellison.

His father, Larry Ellison, founded software giant Oracle and is worth nearly $250 billion. Oracle is negotiating to take a role in the sale of TikTok by its Chinese owner, a transaction being orchestrated by Trump.

Small world, eh?

Final thought: After nearly 90 years in business, National Amusements, now based in Norwood, is going out with a whimper, not a bang.

The company has struggled with heavy debt, declining cable network profits, and huge costs for building out its streaming business. Paramount’s market value has dropped to $9 billion from $26 billion when Viacom recombined with CBS to form the new company in 2019.

To get the Skydance rescue deal done, Redstone, 71, sold out the journalists at CBS News — the onetime home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and still one of the most respected names in the business.

That’s one bummer of an ending.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Fake News, Freedom of the Press, Hoax, Media, Politics, Trump

Anand: The Plutocrats Stop Pretending to be Philanthropists

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2025 //
7

Anand Girihadaras writes in his blog “The Ink” that the billionaire elite have given up their pretense of using their fortunes to make a better world. Two events stripped away the veil: one, the greedy gaudy wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in Venice and the announcement by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan that they are abandoning their lofty goals of curing the world of disease.

Naked greed is in, big-hearted philanthropy is out. The oligarchs revel in their splendor.

Anand writes:

Like bottomless mimosas and a mother’s unsolicited advice, eras don’t just end. The new thing elbows its way in, the old thing lingers like a houseguest, and they compete for primacy. Only eventually — sometimes long after — do you notice the eclipse.

No one was ever going to announce that the era of performative elite do-gooding had ceded to the era of naked oligarchy. But this week three events made that eclipse clear.

The first was the multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos’s wedding, in Venice, to Lauren Sánchez, who would surely float if she fell into a canal. As celebrities poured into a city already strained by tourism, and the happy couple was photographed frolicking in a literal foam party aboard a yacht, there was an almost refreshing, well, nakedness to the avarice, to the carelessness, to the not-giving of civic fucks.

There was a reminder of the omnipotence and the utter loneliness at the commanding heights: you can get anyone you want to your wedding, and the people you want are the people you’d invite if you told your assistant to run to the dentist’s office, pick up People magazine, write down names in it, and invite them. These are people who have everything, and who don’t have the thing everybody else does.

The second was the inevitable announcement by multi-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable foundation, run with his wife, Priscilla Chan, that it is no longer focused on ending all the diseases, as it once promised. Rather, in the Trump era, it is focused on things that would not be any trouble to Trump. “Can we cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime?” read a screen behind the couple at a rehearsal in 2016. The answer turns out to be: No. The Washington Post, owned by the oligarch in the above item, nonetheless rightly warned, in the Zuckerberg-Chan case, of “the risks for communities reliant on wealthy private donors.”

The third event was the passage today of Donald Trump’s and the Republicans’ budget, a document of searing meanness that former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls the “Worst Bill in History” — a “giant budget-busting, Medicaid-shattering, shafting-the-poor-and-working-class, making-the-rich-even richer bill.” Like the Bezos wedding and the Zuckerberg-Chan pivot, the bill had one refreshing quality, though. It made zero effort to mask its ugliness. It said the cruel part out loud.

There is a nakedness to our oligarchy now, and it is pruny as hell. But at least there is this: As far as I can tell, the era of highly performative elite do-gooding is passing. The billionaires who felt the need to give TED talks about eradicating poverty while also causing poverty. The incessant blabbing about Africa by oligarchs who rarely left Connecticut. The pledges to save democracy, save the planet, and, yes, end all diseases. The buy-one-donate-one products. Red things involving Bono.Subscribe

I wrote a whole book about that era and its maneuvers and deceptions and costs, and it occurs to me now that the entire complex of activities I chronicled is giving way to something altogether different. What is ascendant now is nakedness — of greed, of sociopathy, of power thirst. Somewhere along the way, the professed goal of the elite morphed from fighting inequality from above to defending their castles in the sky.

There is a kind of progress in this, because what is naked is easier to see, even if pruny.

This eclipsing of performative virtue by pungent avarice, of fake billionaire “change” by real billionaire wolfishness, is part of why figures like Zohran Mamdani are rising. When I published Winners Take All in 2018, the things I was trying to deconstruct took explaining. That is, after all, why you write a book. I’m not sure a book is needed now.

The moves, the lust, the underlying goals — all of it is in the open. This era is less confusing. And people are voting accordingly.

It’s also why a generation gap is opening. The old guard power elite, seeing Mamdani’s rise, is terrified that the Soviet Union could soon be coming to a bodega near them, even though they probably don’t live near any bodegas and probably think the word “bodega” is Arabic. But their children and grandchildren are not afraid of free buses and childcare. They’re willing to take a chance on something that would switch their trajectory off the track from nothing to nowhere and on to a course of life.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Cruelty, Ethics, Fake, Hoax

Texas Floods: Staff Cuts at Weather Service, Plus Local Refusal to Pay Taxes for Early Warning=Disaster

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2025 //
10

The disastrous floods that swept through Hill Country and caused the deaths of 80 or more people were made worse by human error.

The New York Times found that the local branches of the National Weather Service were short on staff; critical positions were empty. The computer specialists who worked for Elon Musk in an operation called DOGE decided that too many people worked for the National Weather Service. Some meteorologists took buyouts, others resigned.

Furthermore the affected area did not have an early warning ststem. Local taxpayers didn’t want to pay for it.

The quasi-libertarian belief that we don’t need government services and we shouldn’t pay for them took a toll on innocent people.

The combination of Musk’s ruthless cost-cutting and local hostility to taxes set the stage for a disastrous tragedy.

The Times reported:

Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose. 

Texas officials appeared to blame the Weather Service for issuing forecasts on Wednesday that underestimated how much rain was coming. But former Weather Service officials said the forecasts were as good as could be expected, given the enormous levels of rainfall and the storm’s unusually abrupt escalation.

The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said — the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight. 

The shortages are among the factors likely to be scrutinized as the death toll climbs from the floods. Separate questions have emerged about the preparedness of local communities, including Kerr County’s apparent lack of a local flood warning system. The county, roughly 50 miles northwest of San Antonio, is where many of the deaths occurred. 

In an interview, Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, said the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive, and local residents are resistant to new spending. 

“Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” Mr. Kelly said. Asked if people might reconsider in light of the catastrophe, he said, “I don’t know.”

The National Weather Service’s San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents Weather Service workers.

The Weather Service’s nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, Mr. Fahy said. Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.

That office’s warning coordination meteorologist left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration used to reduce the number of federal employees, according to a person with knowledge of his departure. 

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Some of the openings may predate the current Trump administration. But at both offices, the vacancy rate is roughly double what it was when Mr. Trump returned to the White House in January, according to Mr. Fahy.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Extremism, Funding, Musk, Elon, Texas

DOGE Cuts to NOAA and National Weather Service Blamed for Deaths in Texas Floods

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2025 //
28

Among its many stupid decisions, Elon Musk’s DOGE cut the staff of NOAA and the Natuonal Weather Service. Experts warned that people would die without accurate warnings. Trump ignored the warnings; so did Republicans in Congress. The cuts were imposed. The savings were a pittance. Unprepared for the storm and flooding in Texas a few days ago, people died.

Ron Filipowski wrote at The Meidas Report:

As the best and the brightest were being fired at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by senseless and draconian ‘DOGE’ cuts earlier this year under Trump, with no reason given except for the need to cut a paltry amount of the government’s budget, experts warned repeatedly that the cuts would have deadly consequences during the storm season. And they have.

Dozens and dozens of stories have been written in the media citing hundreds of experts which said that weather forecasting was never going to be the same, and that inaccurate forecasts were going to lead to fewer evacuations, impaired preparedness of first responders, and deadly consequences. I quoted many of them in my daily Bulletins and wrote about this issue nearly 20 different times. 

And the chickens have come home to roost. Hundreds of people have already been killed across the US in a variety of storms including deadly tornadoes – many of which were inaccurately forecasted. And we are just entering peak hurricane season. Meteorologist Chris Vagasky posted earlier this spring on social media: “The world’s example for weather services is being destroyed.” 

Now, after severe flooding in non-evacuated areas in Texas has left at least 24 dead with dozens more missing, including several young girls at a summer camp, Texas officials are blaming their failure to act on a faulty forecast by Donald Trump’s new National Weather Service gutted by cuts to their operating budget and most experienced personnel. 

At a press conference last night, one official said: “The original forecast we received on Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3-6” of rain in the Concho Valley and 4-8” of rain in the hill country. The amount of rain that fell in these locations was never in any of their forecasts. Everybody got the forecast from the National Weather Service. They did not predict the amount of rain that we saw.” 

Reuters published a story just a few days ago, one of many warning about this problem: “In May, every living former director of the NWS signed on to an open letter with a warning that, if continued, Trump’s cuts to federal weather forecasting would create ‘needless loss of life’. Despite bipartisan congressional pushback for a restoration in staffing and funding to the NWS, sharp budget cuts remain on pace in projections for the 2026 budget for the NOAA, the parent organization of the NWS.”

But Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose agency oversees NOAA, testified before Congress on June 5 that the cuts wouldn’t be a problem because “we are transforming how we track storms and forecast weather with cutting-edge technology. Under no circumstances am I going to let public safety or public forecasting be touched.” Apparently the “cutting edge technology” hasn’t arrived yet.

And now presumably FEMA will be called upon to help pick up the pieces of shattered lives in Texas – an agency that Trump said repeatedly that he wants to abolish. In fact, Trump’s first FEMA director Cameron Hamilton was fired one day after he testified before Congress that FEMA should not be abolished. 

The voters of Texas decided that they wanted Donald Trump and Greg Abbott to be in charge of the government services they received. That is exactly what they are getting. And as of this writing on Saturday morning, Trump still hasn’t said a word about the storm and the little girls who were killed at the camp. 

However, Trump was seen dancing on the balcony of the White House last night celebrating the latest round of cuts in his budget bill that just became law so billionaires and corporations can have huge tax cuts. People are dying and more will die because of their recklessness, just like we saw during covid. And now millions won’t even have health insurance to deal with the consequences.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Texas
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