Bulletins and News Discussion from February 3rd to February 9th, 2025 - Fuhrer Failsons

Image is of Elon Musk giving the Nazi salute a week or so ago.

I didn't really want to keep spotlighting American domestic events as I had assumed that shit would calm down pretty quickly, but it appears that the Trump administration, including Musk, are determined to bring down the empire from the inside.

One of the most important lessons of ruling a country - and especially an empire - is to never, ever believe your own propaganda; and yet now we have neo-Nazi failsons disrupting parts of the imperial apparatus and causing general government mayhem because they actually seem to believe in libertarianism; that the state and the capitalists are somehow in opposition, rather than working in lockstep to maximise profit and boost American hegemony around the world.

I'm not so optimistic as to believe that a national collapse is FOUR DAYS AWAY, like those weird anti-China cranks often speculate - the US has at least a decade or two left even under these conditions. But consider the damage being inflicted in these past couple weeks, and extrapolate that over the next four years. Does any living American political figure possess the competency to halt - or even meaningfully slow - the already ongoing decline? And could they achieve power (or even be allowed to do so) after Trump's term is done?

Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

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Nathan Tankus’s latest piece: Day Five of the Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025: Not “Read Only” access anymore
… a top DOGE employee, 25 year old former SpaceX employee Marko Elez, has not only read but write access to BFS servers
…
Additionally, I can exclusively report that while there was initial hesitation from “IT Leadership” to give them access, they relented. However, they still believed this was extremely risky with one member of leadership saying “I’ve never done anything like this before”, according to a source familiar with the situation. A current IT employee of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service told me “This level of unchecked access is critically dangerous to the economy and the government”. When I replied “this is terrifying” to being informed that they have “write access” this source replied “Yeah it's not good. Read privileges on its own still would have left room for catastrophe, but read and write is apocalyptic.”
It is as of yet unclear whether anyone on the Payment Application Modernization (PAM) system or the “Secured Payment System” (SPS) have been put on “paid administrative leave”, coerced into resigning or quit in protest. All that is known is that Marko can “access and query” SPS and that there was someone who gave Marko a “tour” of the facilities. We do not know where they are in operationalizing any control. One senior IT source can see Mark retrieving “close to a thousand rows of data” but they can’t see the content because the system is “top secret” even to them. No source I have has knowledge of what DOGE is doing with the data they are retrieving.
- He probably wants to have "AI" comb over every expense before accepting, which is obviously illegal, but also certain to break really really ancient digital systems that only an extremely few people are capable of understanding within a short (and probably medium) period of time. It cannot be overemphasized how much you can't mess with payment systems; the best case is some ancient dudes getting millions out of mostly, maybe, fixing it.
- Dollar stability goes bye bye
- If Americans didn't want to have their personal information stolen by groyper zoomers, they should have merely made the highest bid for the data
- It'll be interesting if these pests mess up some code and payments stop clearing.
- Musk just gonna have them edit accounts and payments and deposit $10T into a personal account
  
  This seems like the obvious answer. Musk has overleveraged himself and needs to clear out to federal reserves so it looks like his businesses are operating in the black.
- giving a fvcking foreign grifter that access

751 comments