Let Them Eat Mars Rocks!

Musk's insatiable power grab continues, supported by systemic paralysis

“They built Colossus, a computer with a mind of its own. Then they had to fight it for the world.”

I find myself spending most of my waking hours at the moment consumed by efforts to understand the different dimensions of what is happening now — the coup or takeover underway — and why it is happening. I am not going to be able to offer some totally coherent meta-analysis for a while, but I will keep sharing my reflections and any and all insights that I glean from my study, more or less in real time.

“Donald Trump may be the president of the United States, but Musk has made himself its CEO,” Brian Barrett writes in “The US Government Is Not a Startup” (Wired). Barrett notes that the naturalized South African apartheid supporter and Nazi-lover is applying the same tactics he used after he bought Twitter: “Get rid of most of the workforce. Install loyalists. Rip up safeguards. Remake in your own image.” There are many grave problems and extreme risks in applying this logic to the US Government as a whole.

Many still cheer on Musk, who is operating in secret and installing tentacles across many government agencies, with zero oversight. He has gotten into the US Treasury Department, where his feckless young minions may have rewritten the code of the payment system responsible for $6 trillion annual disbursements. He has summarily eliminated entire government agencies such as US Aid, with a $7 billion annual budget, providing AIDS drugs and food to starving kids in Sudan. All of those projects have been stopped, with the likelihood that thousands or even hundreds of thousands will die very soon as a result — but hey, as Musk proclaimed, he is “not just MAGA, but dark Gothic MAGA.” For these Yarvin-infused sociopaths who use dystopian science fiction as blueprints, abstractly killing innocent people from a distance seems kind of cool. They’ve also blown the cover of many of our intelligence operatives across the world, delighting our enemies.

Along with engineering a system-software upgrade of the entire Federal Government with no failsafe or Plan B, Team Red demos a new flashy style of casual cruelty, offhand vengeance, and faux macho bravado. Trump decided it would be fun to show his hatred of California by opening reservoirs and pouring out billions of tons of water which farmers need for agriculture in the dry spring and summer months, claiming he was doing this to prove that he could have stopped the LA fires. According to The Hill: “On Friday, Trump boasted on Truth Social about the “beautiful water flow” that he “just opened in California,” noting that 1.6 billion gallons had been released that day alone.” Of course, California produce feeds the entire nation. But hey, why worry about the far-distant future when you can torment the libs now?

Apparently US Aid funded experimental medical research around the world, and the instant cut-off has endangered thousands of patients caught mid-trial, as The New York Times reports: “The stop-work order on U.S.A.I.D.-funded research has left thousands of people with experimental drugs and devices in their bodies, with no access to monitoring or care.” But hey, fuck ‘em!

While millions of Musk supporters continue to buy the carefully constructed illusion that he is some kind of super genius, the more we learn about his past, his lies and deceptions (even lying about something as nonsensical as his mastery of video games), and his shoddy takeover tactics, the less impressive he seems. As Barrett notes:

The thing about most software startups… is that they fail. They take big risks and they don’t pay off and they leave the carcass of that failure behind and start cranking out a new pitch deck. This is the process that DOGE is imposing on the United States.

No one would argue that federal bureaucracy is perfect, or especially efficient. Of course it can be improved. Of course it should be. But there is a reason that change comes slowly, methodically, through processes that involve elected officials and civil servants and care and consideration. The stakes are too high, and the cost of failure is total and irrevocable.

Musk will reinvent the US government in the way that the hyperloop reinvented trains, that the Boring company reinvented subways, that Juicero reinvented squeezing. Which is to say he will reinvent nothing at all, fix no problems, offer no solutions beyond those that further consolidate his own power and wealth. He will strip democracy down to the studs and rebuild it in the fractious image of his own companies.

This is all horrible, of course, and will likely lead to amazing amounts of needless death and suffering, compounded by the other factions supporting Trumpocalypse, including the Christian fanatics who plan to turn the US into a White ethno-state, taking control over women’s reproduction and reversing the Civil Rights Act while we continue to face climate catastrophe (which we can no longer learn about from the scrubbed government websites).

But still, the question remains: Why is this happening to us now?

One reason, of course, is the long-term decline of American prestige, prominence, and wealth, and the longterm failure of our political class to even admit let alone respond to it honestly, which induced populist rage. Trump and the current tech-fash takeover isn’t a return to American “greatness:” This is the last gasp of a dying system based on hyper-individualism, hyper-capitalism, exploitation, and plutocracy, like a black hole sucking in everything it can before it implodes. The success of Trump’s dismal project reveals the rot and corruption which has taken hold of our system as it accelerates the collapse of America as both an ideological project and an imperialist power.

As economist Richard Wolf reminds us, over the last half century the United States and its allies lost major wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. We’re not exactly winning in Ukraine right now. Meanwhile, a global economic realignment has taken place. Just last month, Indonesia—a massive country of 280 million people, similar in population to the US — joined the BRICS alliance. The BRICS nations — led by China — now exceed the U.S. and its G7 allies in economic output. We barely learned about this crucial development from our media.

The American political leadership and financial elite has steadfastly refused to acknowledge our diminished status in a determined effort to maintain the illusion of U.S. power and prestige. After Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971, the fulcrum of the U.S. economy gradually shifted from manufacturing to abstract financial services. The financial sector grew dramatically, selling convoluted financial products like junk bonds and mortgage-backed securities. The 2008 financial crash exposed the systemic fraud, causing widespread economic damage. But not one top Wall Street executives from major banks was criminally prosecuted or jailed for their part in the meltdown, despite extensive evidence of fraudulent practices.