Justin Schroder

thinking I'm becoming adjusted to the new abnormal, the hell that the United States has inflicted upon itself and on the rest of an innocent (sort of) planet under our new "leader," His Imperial Highness, Generalissimo, Field Marshall, Dear Leader and Defender of the Cult, Trump I and his Imperial Sidekick, the equally reactionary, repulsive and repugnant Elon Musk. Because of the horrors being wreaked by them of late, I've been posting nothing but the occasional rant and lots of images of fighting fascism, not to mention the occasional image of Jews defending themselves from the once again threatening onslaught of antisemitism. I imagine that as the ugliness becomes more commonplace, I'll settle down and get back to posting my usual silliness: lovely photographs by fine photographers; cool music; interesting quotes; lovely poetry and art pieces that I find beautiful or important in some way. Then, something happens that sends me back into feeling the only thing that's appropriate to post in this rapidly sinking world is more anti-fascist stuff. I can't say how long this s going to go on, but at the moment it shows no sign of subsiding. This is what set me off yet again.

It was revealed today that the new United States Department of State budget has a budget line item for the purchase of $400 million dollars worth of Tesla trucks. Not just any trucks, or any electric trucks, but a specifically designated budget line for those hideously ugly and not particularly efficient Tesla trucks. No conflict of interest there and the already ungodly rich Elon Musk certainly isn’t going to be further enriched by the very government he’s claiming to be rooting corruption out of (while in reality not touching corruption at all and mercilessly gutting the very few programs that constitute this country’s minimal social safety net, dismantling what little remains of the old New Deal quasi-social democracy and firing millions of unionized federal employees). I guess it’s a good thing this country has those Inspectors General whose job it is to prevent such corrupt and self-serving contracts from going into effect. Oh, wait a second…

For those of you not in the United States, the Inspectors General were, at least in theory, independent of political interference, and had the job of, among other things, examining proposed federal contracts for waste, fraud and corruption. To keep them supposedly independent, it was written into the laws establishing their positions that they couldn't simply be fired by presidents, that the presidents had to demonstrate incompetence, corruption on their part or inability to do their job, and then the Congress had to vote to approve those firings. Trump, very quickly after he assumed his imperial throne, simply ignored the law, didn't seek Congressional approval and didn't demonstrate malfeasance or inability by the Inspectors General. He simply fired most of the them. It was obvious to anyone who cared to think about it that the notoriously corrupt Trump was aiming to further enrich himself and his billionaire buddies with corrupt federal contracts, further fattening their already bloated selves on the ever-shrinking supply taxpayer dollars. This instance, of Musk, the man in charge of gutting the federal workforce, firing millions of unionized workers and making it impossible for the government to do much of anything other than persecute trans people and deport those who are undocumented, somehow "accidentally" failing to notice that he was going to make a tidy sum in this contract, was just too much. So, my anti-fascist posts will continue for a while longer.