Choosing Democracy

Tuesday, June 03, 2025

MUSK is Leaving after Gaining Billions in Future Contracts

This article is adapted from a Choose Democracy newsletter email.

I’ve been searching for a metaphor to grasp the meaning of Elon Musk’s departure from DOGE. The closest I can come is an abusive relationship, where the person being harmed makes a significant break from their partner, like moving out, but hasn’t completely ended the relationship.

As a friend, you know all is not well. The threat of violence remains. The relationship is still toxic and dangerous. Still, you applaud the move. You don’t feed your friend’s aching feeling of disempowerment and loss — you feed the courage, the agency and the strength to keep going.

So it’s in that spirit that I want us to take a moment to acknowledge, even celebrate, our collective achievement of a massive, unplanned retreat by the richest person on the planet. Yes, it’s not everything — but if we can only cheer when it’s everything, we’re going to live sad lives.

It must be said: Musk’s departure is not because of the 130-day limit on special government employees. Plans had already been made to blow past that. Sure, Trump will spin this as part of his plan — but we have to stop ourselves from thinking that everything they do is masterminded. The anti-authoritarian side can also be relentless, brilliant, courageous and strategic.

Workers ignoring Musk orders. Institutional resistance to DOGE. Tesla Takedown. Pension letters. All these efforts beat back the salesmanship of Donald Trump hawking Teslas on the White House lawn and the richest man attempting to insulate himself from the people’s will.

This is a collective achievement. And I know, it’s hard to hold any kind of victory in dire times of great loss, but trench warfare tells us that before you can fully stop a thing, you have to slow it down. This is a moment for marking a significant slowing.

A critical retreat, not a total withdrawal

Musk’s 130-day tenure at DOGE was characterized by aggressive cruelty. He eliminated somewhere between 200,000-260,000 federal positions through mass firings, buyouts and early retirements. He didn’t achieve his stated goal of $2 trillion in savings. Even his website, filled with misleading and inaccurate claims, only touts around 8 percent of that goal — and actual verifiable numbers are closer to 0.8 percent. The most casual look at his 31 percent cut of tax auditors at the IRS reveals that the goal isn’t savings — it’s enriching himself and displacing democracy. Predictably the Republican budget is set to explode deficit spending andextract more money from all but the richest people in this country.

Nevertheless, Musk did manage to traumatize people in government, as well as much of the country. He’s walking away having stolen vast amounts of our data, killed investigations into his companies and gotten billions in government contracts — including a staggering $831 billion deal to build a fanciful Golden Dome.

President Trump is not a reliable source of information — so it’s unwise to take it too literally when he says, “Elon’s really not leaving.” To be sure, the abusive relationship likely isn’t over. But the relationship has transformed starkly.

After months of sycophant behavior, Musk spent his final weeks repeatedly attacking Trump policy — a violation of the social norms of Trump’s mob loyalty. Musk expressed “disappointment” about Trump’s spending bill. He has apparently withheld $100 million of pledged donations to Republican campaigns. He blasted Trump’s Middle East sweetheart deals that gave preference to Musk’s AI competitor Sam Altman. These open attacks are new and part of a significant growing political distance between Trump and Musk.

While it’s reasonable to doubt how far he is stepping back, it’s notable that a lot of key players in Elon Musk’s team are leaving the White House too. Steve Davis, Musk’s long-time confidant and internal coordinator, packed his bags. Recently fired DOGE staffer Sahil Lavingia told Wired Magazine, “Steven was the only person who was across everything” — leaving a massive hole in DOGE’s coordination. Katie Miller, the wife of the anti-immigrant crusader Stephen Miller, is also following Musk out of the White House. She was another critical node, the person who others trusted with the unenviable task of giving Musk bad news.

Saturday, May 31, 2025

Taco Taco Taco (Trump Always Chickens Out)

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

Rev. William J. Barber.

Robert Reich is live with William J. Barber, II on Substack now: "Live with Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II"

Watch the dialogue

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-should-we-do-now-live-with-rev?

Tuesday, May 27, 2025

Trump's Assault on the Universities is fascism in practice

Assault on the University and on Public Education.

The attacks by the Trump Administration on Harvard and other universities are a critical component of the present consolidation of fascist power in the U.S.

Trump is attacking all of higher education. May 27.2025. Chemerinsky.

https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article307078651.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/opinion/teachers-education-trump-administration.html

Universities are critical to the development of democracy. I have my own concerns about the role of elite private universities, but the survival of universities, of free- open dialogue and investigation is currently at stake.

Most political assessments underestimate the substantive contribution to our society by the development of free public high schools in the 1920-1945 era. The creation of free open education system was a major contributing factor in the development of a more democratic society from 1940- 1960. Education promoted public participation in decision making about public issues such as health care, social security, unionization and more.

The growth and extension of public universities in the post 1945 era had a similar effect on the expansion of democracy. All of this is under assault.

Today’s fight to democracy included the defense of education itself- public, private, secondary schools and more. The assault on equal opportunity in public education is an adjacent struggle, one that deserves more attention.

Saturday, May 24, 2025

Trump's Assault on Higher Education :Robert Reich

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/what-i-told-the-ed-school-graduates?

Yesterday, Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, notified Harvard University that “effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked.”

Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students. Existing foreign students must transfer to another university or lose their legal status. This could affect more than a quarter of Harvard’s student body.

Noem said she did this because of the university’s “failure to comply with simple reporting requirements.”

Rubbish. There was nothing simple about the trove of information Noem demanded from Harvard — including the coursework of every international student and information on any student visa holder who had been involved in “illegal” activity — information beyond what Harvard is legally allowed to share with the government.

We are in deep authoritarian fascist territory, friends.

Trump is escalating his war against American higher education and against the rest of the world.

We will be the worse for this.

To Trump, the only useful non-Americans are those who invest in his crypto schemes and global resorts or gift him jumbo “palace in the sky” aircraft.

Yet global brains have been crucial sources of our scientific and economic advances. Since the end of World War II in particular, we have benefited enormously from talented students and faculty drawn here from all over the planet to learn, study, research, and innovate.

Once again, it will be up to the federal courts to stop this idiocy. The rest of us must speak out loudly and clearly against what is being done.

Here’s what I told the graduates from U. Cal. Berkeley’s School of Education at their commencement ceremony earlier this week (before I learned of the Trump regime’s latest move):

Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Putin and Xi censor the media.
Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.
America’s founders knew this. They saw how easily emperors and kings could mislead uneducated publics. The survival of the new nation required a public wise enough to keep power within bounds. People imbued, in the language of the time, with civic virtue.
Jefferson assured Americans that if they could “enlighten the people generally … tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
So America became the cradle of free, universal, public education.
I don’t have any easy answers to the many challenges we’re experiencing today in classrooms across the land, but we must never give up on these three basic educational ideals: free, universal, and public.
If we stop thinking about education solely as a private investment on the way to a good-paying job and see it as a public good, we’d give every child an understanding of the Constitution, the meaning and importance of the rule of law, and why no one should be above it.
This is, after all, what we demand of people who want to become naturalized citizens: They have to pass a civics test covering the organization of the U.S. government and the Constitution.
Civic education should instill in young people a passion for truth — enabling them to think critically, be skeptical (but not cynical) about what they hear and read, find reliable sources of information, apply basic logic and analysis, and know enough about history and the physical world to differentiate fact from fiction.
Such an education would also urge young people to communicate with others. With people of different races, classes, creeds, nationalities.
Teach them how to listen, to open their minds to the possibility their own views and preconceptions may be wrong, to discover why people with opposing views believe what they do.
Yet the current president of the United States does not appear to have learned any of this.
On the campaign trail, he vowed to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”
He has canceled federal exams that measure student progress and ordered his wrestling executive-turned-Education Secretary to shut most of her department.
He is attacking the freedom of speech of university students and professors, trying to deport international students and faculty solely because of what they say or write, and threatening to halt federal funds to universities that practice DEI.
He has gutted the funding of the National Institutes of Health, which provides a large portion of biomedical research, and the National Science Foundation, responsible for much of America’s engineering and computer research.
Along with certain governors, he is attacking the teaching in our schools of America’s shameful histories of slavery and Native American genocide.
He has cut funding for libraries around the country — which will jeopardize literacy development and reading programs, and reliable internet access for those without it at home.
I keep hearing that all this amounts to an “attack on the liberal state” or “the culmination of our culture wars.”
No. What’s really occurring is an attack on the American mind.
You who are soon to graduate from this wonderful school of education have chosen instead to enhance the American mind, to broaden it, to enlighten our young people, to expose them to a world of possibility.
May you educate like democracy depends on it.