By Lambert Strether.
Readers, my head cold seems to be on the downslope, oh joy. Anyohw, I started on-time today, then thought I would have my feeds one last look… –lambert
Bird Song of the Day
Brown Thrasher, Bindloss Campground, Hanna, Alberta, Canada. With some faraway geese.
In Case You Might Miss…
- Possible Democrat strategies against DOGE.
- The notion of “racial capitalism” decried..
- Hole punches.
Politics
“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
Trump Administration
“Hegseth commits to Pentagon passing clean audit within 4 years” [The Hill]. • Big if true. It would take DOGE to do it. How’s that going?
DOGE
“Where’s the Real Power Nexus? How Does the Opposition Get To It?” [Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo]. “I’ve made this point a few times in passing in other posts. But as events develop I wanted to explain it succinctly and with emphasis. Democrats are out of power and have very few actual levers to impact what’s happening. Yelling is important. Driving opposition in what is ultimately a battle for public opinion is important. Contesting everything through the courts is important. But there is only one hard lever of power currently available: that’s the help the White House needs from Democrats on a budget and the debt ceiling. This morning explainer from Punchbowl makes clear why that help is essential. It’s not just helpful. It’s essential. The GOP majorities are simply too small, especially in the House. The GOP is simply too fractious. This is the one area where it isn’t a matter of yelling as loud as you can when no one actually has to listen, or working through a decidedly hostile judiciary. Trump needs this. It’s not a matter of working out a deal with Mike Johnson. Trump needs this help and there’s only one place to get it. It’s a not a discussion with John Thune or Mike Johnson. Only with Trump. I had been somewhat pessimistic about what I was seeing from congressional Democrats on this front. But starting yesterday they began to change their tune and started saying explicitly that the budget and debt ceiling were a key lever for them in handling the situation. That’s real progress. But I think the terms need to be sharpened a lot. The standard should be no help on the budget or the debt ceiling until the lawbreaking stops.” • Well, here I am quoting Josh Marshall with approval. It’s a funny old world.
“Taking DOGE to Court Is a Doomed Strategy” [Ken Klipperstein]. “The war against DOGE is shaping up to be the same as the frenzied and ultimately unsuccessful takedown of Donald Trump that we saw in Russiagate and the January 6 investigations. The parallels are eerie, with Democrats alleging an illegitimate government takeover by DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) headed by Elon Musk. Even more bizarre is their adoption, literally verbatim, of MAGA rhetoric like ‘Stop the Steal.’ After weeks of confusion the party strategy finally emerged this week, expressed in accusations that DOGE was not in compliance with records laws and procedures. There’s plenty to criticize about Trump’s chaotic DOGE-led war on government, but the hunt for some kind of broken rule that will invalidate the whole thing hasn’t worked in the past and won’t now. For one, a senior U.S. intelligence official tells us that neither the FBI nor the intelligence community are investigating Musk and company for any unlawfulness. Trump has apparently granted DOGE officials security clearances, including top secret.” And: “Instead of making a plainspoken case to the public about how DOGE could negatively affect their daily lives, Democratic leaders conducted astroturfed ‘demonstrations’ in front of USAID, Treasury and other government shrines this week. They adopted the conspiratorial tone of the MAGA opposition to the Democrats that they have been so contemptuous of in the past. ;’An unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,’ Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said of DOGE in a press release on Monday. The statement might as well have been written by Alex Jones on January 6, 2021. It was jarring coming from the Democratic Party’s highest ranking official, a bespectacled 74 year old with reliably vanilla politics.” And: “It all reminds me of the Mueller investigation, when political journalists who had never covered national security suddenly peppered their articles with acronyms like ‘SIGINT.’ There’s lots to criticize about DOGE. I certainly have, publishing as many of its boneheaded memos as I can find. But instead of focusing on the substance — what it is actually doing, its gaping exemption for the national security state, and so on — Democrats instead are focused on obscure matters of process. “Did DOGE submit Form 18-7.4?” is a question almost nobody outside of Washington cares about. Nor should they.” • All true, though stops somewhat short of the Courts (i.e., the Federalist Society’s court (hat tip, these same process Democrats)).
“A Constitutional Crisis?” [New York Times]. “The president can’t shut down agencies that Congress has funded, yet that’s what Trump did, with Elon Musk’s help, to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The president can’t fire inspectors general without giving lawmakers 30 days’ notice, but Trump dismissed 17 of them anyway. Congress passed a law forcing TikTok to sell or close, and the courts upheld it, but Trump declined to enforce it. ‘The president is openly violating the law and Constitution on a daily basis,’ said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.” The Constitutional remedy is impeachment, but the Democrats used that one up already with trivial and butchered efforts. Ah well, nevertheless.
“Congressional Democrats denied entry to EPA headquarters” [Axios]. “A group of House and Senate Democrats said they were denied access to the Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. It is the third time this week that Democratic lawmakers were blocked from an agency that has been targeted by President Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.” • Lesson of Occupy: Take and hold ground (although I don’t know the legalities here, the Executive Branch denying entry to the Legislative Branch seems a little sketchy). Of course, the lawmakers liked footsoldiers. Putting aside the possibility of pink pussy hats from the Northern Virginia suburbs, I have long though that DC residents — aside from the Northwest, of course — might have been usefully organized into cadres of sans culottes. One wonders if “shrinking government” will have direct material impact on non-Northwest portions of Washington, DC.
A union stirs:
“DOGE follows longtime Musk pattern — and turns attention to Social Security Administration” [Semafor]. “The Social Security Administration is an upcoming focus of the Department of Government Efficiency, a source with knowledge of its work told Semafor, and one person involved in DOGE is currently preparing to work with the agency that provides benefits to the elderly and disabled…. Those involved and familiar with DOGE, however, say they’re not confused about their mission: They’re empowered to slash government spending and remodel agencies to fall in line with the president’s agenda. What’s more, they appear undisturbed by the drama they’ve caused….. Notably, the views among DOGE supporters differ when it comes to where to draw the line: The first of the three people with knowledge of its work told Semafor the ‘entire federal government’ is up for grabs. The second person suggested the line would be drawn at areas affecting national security and initiatives providing direct benefits. Ernst said ‘it’s quite possible’ every part of the government will face scrutiny at some point. While Musk has mentioned a goal of cutting $1 trillion from the federal government, the group isn’t operating with many specific targets or end goals. ‘It’s going to depend on what we find,’ the second person said. ‘There’s going to be reworks across the government, every agency.’ Moving quickly with a sledgehammer mentality is seen within DOGE as the only way to enact successful change, as all three sources familiar with the group put it.” And: “‘What President Trump and Elon Musk and this entire administration is trying to do is make our bloated bureaucracy in Washington run like a profitable business,’ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News this week.” • Which is nuts, because government is not and should not be run like a business — and if it should turn out to be, every profitable deparment will immediately shart enshittifying itself to compete with the departments. Interestingly, DOGE ends, supposedly, by the midterms, so both — or all — sides are equally aware of the election calendar.
“Here at DOGE, We’ve Streamlined Every Aspect of America’s Collapse” [McSweeney’s Internet Tendency]. “I promise, America will soon be the Cybertruck of countries—uglier than you could have imagined, built for rich chuds, borderline inoperable, and on fire.”
“Afternoon of Day Seven of the Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025: Treasury Secretary Bessent’s Lawlessness & Sorry Readers- Read and Write Code Still Seems in Play” [Nathan Tankus, Notes on the Crises]. “The wording of the court order for Marko Elez to have ‘read only’ access is ambiguous. Specifically it says: Mr. Marko Elez, a Special Government Employee in the Department of the Treasury, as needed for the performance of his duties, provided that such access to payment records will be ‘read only’ [emphasis added]. Records are data which means that a cynical government lawyer may approve ‘read and write’ access for code on the grounds that Marko Elez is only barred from modifying or adding new data to payment records directly rather than indirectly through editing source code. The plaintiffs position would of course, correctly, claim that ‘read and write code access’ is a violation of this order as written. Nevertheless, the possibility is extremely concerning. And remember— ‘read only code and data’ access is still ‘catastrophic.’ All this comes as CNN and other outlets confirm that some of the worst case scenarios I was worried about are true.” And Elez is supposed to be gonzo, but “A source familiar with the situation says: ‘My inclination on any type of question like this is that [Elez] has more access, not less and whatever access he doesn’t have, he’s trying to get.’”
“America This Week, Feb 7, 2025: “The Big Store: Politico, USAID, and Managed Reality” (podcast) [Walter Kirn, Matt Taibbi, Racket News]. • Not sure why Kirn and Taibbi think that DOGE’s write access to OPM’s personnel and the Fiscal Office’s payment data isn’t a story, but they clearly think it’s not (or else they would cover it). On the bright side, no cheerleading for Bhattacharya’s horrid new venture!
“The Government’s Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified” [The Atlantic]. “Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are attempting to access. In our conversations, each expert was unequivocal: They are terrified and struggling to articulate the scale of the crisis…. The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, ‘I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.’ Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical.” • Thsi is a very good IT account:
You can argue that this image represents “the level of danger”; worse, if anything, due to “youthful folly” by DOGE’s programmers, who started, after all, on Inauguration Day. However, you could also argue, as we did yesterday, that DOGE in fact had insider access well before the Inaugural, which could be equally dangerous, just in a different way.
“USAID and Security State Clan Wars” (excerpt) [Yasha Levine, Weaponized Immigrant]. ” USAID was not created for philanthropy. It was created to extend American power through softer non-military means: pacification through propaganda, off-the-books violence, and bribery abroad. I guess some call this bribery ‘assistance’… The agency was set up in 1961 under President Kennedy in order to administer aid programs that fostered economic and social development in foreign countries. It sounded nice on paper. In reality, the agency became a powerful force in America’s global pacification efforts, interfacing directly with ARPA and covert CIA programs. USAID quickly developed a reputation for brutality and bloodlust: it trained death squads, schooled foreign police departments in effective torture techniques, set up opium running operations to finance covert rebel activity in Laos…The agency also became a laboratory for capitalist-friendly neoliberal economic reforms that were supposed to supplant local left-wing demands for wealth redistribution without actually doing anything to change the underlying power structures of society. (In one more recent example Chrystia Freeland’s uncle (yes, from the notorious Nazi collaborator family) worked for USAID to privatize farm land in Ukraine…and then parlyed this experience to start his own agribusiness investment firm in Ukraine.” • I’m not seeing a lot of foreign governments weeping over USAID’s demise, possibly because they feel less likely to be overthrown?
Democrats en déshabillé
K–hole:
That said, this kind of indiscipline is pervasive among Democrats. Remember when they butchered keeping an NLRB seat in Democrats hands, through the same sort of stupidity (from Ro Khanna, ironically enough).
Syndemics
“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison
Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).
Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!
Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (wastewater); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).
Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).
Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, KidDoc, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, thump, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
Transmission: Bird Flu
“The US Is Not Ready for Bird Flu in Humans” [Scientific American]. The deck: “Bird flu is infecting more people than we think. We need to stop it now before a new pandemic begins.” And: “Right after President Donald Trump took office, amid the flurry of executive orders and agency upheavals, the administration told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention not to release any reports or communications until one of Trump’s people could take a look at them. Among the many reports not released that week was a study on how many veterinarians had gotten bird flu…. This virus is versatile. This virus is mutating. And it is surely infecting more people than we think. Sure, the risk of a human epidemic is still considered low. (Sound familiar?).” • I am so, so sick of pervasive Red State/Blue state posturing in Scientific American. There’s more than enough blame to go around.
TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts
| Wastewater | |
| This week[1] CDC January 27 | Last week[2] CDC (until next week): |
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| Variants [3] CDC January 18 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC January 25 |
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| Hospitalization | |
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data February 6: | National [6] CDC January 31: |
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| Positivity | |
| National[7] Walgreens February 3: | Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic February 1: |
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| Travelers Data | |
| ★ Positivity[9] CDC January 20: | ★ Variants[10] CDC January 20 |
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| Deaths | |
| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC January 25: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC January 25: |
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LEGEND 1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated. 2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.” NOTES [1] (CDC) Down, nothing new at major hubs. [2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map. [3] (CDC Variants) XEC takes over. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection. [4] (ED) A little uptick. [5] (Hospitalization: NY) Definitely jumped, but no exponential growth either, Odd. [6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Leveling out. [7] (Walgreens) Leveling out. [8] (Cleveland) Continued upward trend since, well, Thanksgiving. [9] (Travelers: Positivity) Leveling out. [10] (Travelers: Variants). Positivity is new, but variants have not yet been released. [11] Deaths low, positivity leveling out. [12] Deaths low, ED leveling out. Stats Watch Employment Situation: “United States Unemployment Rate” [Trading Economics]. “The US unemployment rate dipped by 0.1 percentage point to 4.0% in January 2025, marking its lowest level since May and coming in just below market expectations of 4.1%. The number of unemployed individuals declined by 37,000 to 6.85 million, while employment edged up by 2,234 to 163.9 million. Additionally, the labor force participation rate rose to 62.6%, and the employment-population ratio increased to 60.1%.” Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 42 Fear (previous close: 41 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 40 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Feb 7 at 1:51:37 PM ET. Gallery Hole punch (1): Hole punch (2):
This is Colossal: “The story of these photographs begins in 1935, when Roy E Stryker, the head of the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), undertook a photographic project that commissioned famous American photographers such as Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans to photograph farmers and farmland during the Great Depression. The FSA aimed to encourage poverty-stricken Americans to partake in self-sustaining programs where they could gain farm loans to buy seeds, equipment, livestock, and partake in homestead schemes which provided both education and healthcare. The project was to demonstrate the results of financial assistance that the FSA offered, in addition to outsourcing images of America life during this time. Each photographer was given specific directives, for example, ‘farmer dumping milk at home,’ ‘worried farmer,’ or ‘federal government shot.’…. Stryker deployed a specific editing process where himself and his assistants would choose photographs they believed were true to the brief; the other images were rendered unsuitable and punctuated with a hole puncher. These ruthlessly ‘killed’ photographs were left unpublishable. Today the found works appear to have black discs floating upon them, a visual mark of rejection which accidentally focus the viewer’s attention. Class Warfare “The Wrong Durée: The Politics of Cedric J. Robinson’s Racial Capitalism” [nonsite.org]. I knew this was a Nonsite story from the headline alone, because who else? (The headline is a horrid but fully justified pun on Braudel’s “Longue durée.”) I’m leaving this here mostly as a marker, though I’m sure it’s a thorough and elegant stomping, Adolph Reed-style. But if you want to grab a cup of coffee, have at it! However, for the political context: “[Roibinson’s’ notion of racial capitalism has been widely embraced by academics and intellectuals, including Robin Kelley, Michael Dawson, Ibram X. Kendi, Michelle Alexander, Jodi Melamed, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Angela Davis, among others. Moreover, the spirit of racial capitalism has suffused mainstream discourse from the New York Times’s celebrated but empirically flawed 1619 Project, which proffered a race-centric creation story of the United States, to the liberal pop cultural fixation on racial wealth disparities born out of the postwar homeownership regime, best represented in the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates and academics like Richard Rothstein, among many others. Robinson’s notion of racial capitalism was even evoked in health disparities discussions of the American Medical Association during the early stages of the novel coronavirus pandemic.” And: “In the face of racial capitalism’s newfound popularity, sociologist Loïc Wacquant has lamented that we might expect ‘a crisply enunciated informing a set of clear claims about the nature of race, the logics of capitalism,’ but ‘one searches in vain for this clarification.’” • Ha ha, ouch [wince]. This is relevant today because all these people are shortly going to lose funding in the assault on NGOs (especially, I would think, the 1619 Project). Any effort to rescue them should, in my view, be resisted. “You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism” [404 Media]. “Many of my journalist colleagues have attempted to beat back the tide under banners like “fighting disinformation” and “accountability.” While these efforts are admirable, the past few years have changed my own internal calculus. Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and News of the Wired “The Power of Naming” [ CS writes: “Some fungi and flowers from NW MT to top up your supply of plantidotes, We have hundreds of these photos, but are lousy photographers, hopefully some will be OK for your purposes.” Oh, I don’t know. I like this composition. However, there may be things about fungus photography that I don’t know. Readers? Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. Material here is Lambert’s, and does not express the views of the Naked Capitalism site. If you see a link you especially like, or an item you wouldn’t see anywhere else, please do not hesitate to express your appreciation in tangible form. Remember, a tip jar is for tipping! Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for three or four days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals: Here is the screen that will appear, which I have helpfully annotated:
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