Private equity plans to run wild under Trump

In the longer term, the consequences of this will be among the worst aspects of Trumpism's effects on a lot of lives, including for many that voted for him or didn't vote.

Private equity has a well-deserved reputation as a ruthless industry that specializes in stripping and flipping companies to extract profits for wealthy investors and enrich its own billionaire CEOs. It’s an industry that increasingly dominates our lives. Private equity’s tentacles stretch across nearly every sector, including housing, hospitals, energy, prisons, retail and sports.

With a new corporate-friendly Trump administration, leaders of private equity firms are hoping for tax breaks, weakened regulation and access to trillions in 401(k) savings — all of which could broaden their sector’s reach over our society, increase financial risk for millions, and further supercharge billionaire wealth.

“It’s not only that private equity firms are exploiting the tax code to make themselves billionaires,” Eileen O’Grady, director of programs at Private Equity Stakeholder Project, told Truthout. “They’re also eroding health care, the climate and the quality of jobs across almost every industry.” - Truthout

Tech bros grovel for military contracts

Actually there are a lot of reasons that many billionaires have been debasing themselves. But this is undoubtedly among the most compelling.

Donald Trump’s power has thrived on the economics, politics, and culture of war. The runaway militarism of the last quarter-century was a crucial factor in making President Trump possible, even if it goes virtually unmentioned in mainstream media and political discourse. That silence is particularly notable among Democratic leaders, who have routinely joined in bipartisan messaging to boost the warfare state that fueled the rise of Trumpism…

While President Trump has granted Elon Musk unprecedented power, many other tech moguls have rushed to ingratiate themselves. The pandering became shameless within hours of his election victory last November…

Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and smaller rivals are at the helm of corporations eager for government megadeals, tax breaks, and much more. For them, the governmental terrain of the new Trump era is the latest territory to navigate for maximizing their profits. With annual military outlays at 54% of all federal discretionary spending, the incentives are astronomical for all kinds of companies to make nice with the war machine and the man now running it.

While Democrats in Congress have long denounced Trump as an enemy of democracy, they haven’t put any sort of brake on American militarism. Certainly, there are many reasons for Trump’s second triumph, including his exploitation of racism, misogyny, nativism, and other assorted bigotries. Yet his election victories owe much to the Democratic Party’s failure to serve the working class, a failure intermeshed with its insistence on serving the industries of war. Meanwhile, spending more on the military than the next nine countries combined, U.S. government leaders tacitly lay claim to a kind of divine overpowering virtue. - TomDispatch

USDA, and therefore farmers, hit hard by DOGE cuts

I am so sick of a certain megalomaniacal twerp from South Africa who thinks he’s God Almighty.

Mass terminations at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are “crippling” the agency, upending federal workers’ lives and leaving farmers and rural communities without needed support, according to interviews with 15 recently fired employees stationed across the U.S.

Since taking power Jan. 20, the Trump administration has quickly frozen funding and fired federal workers en masse. USDA terminations started Feb. 13, the day Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was sworn in. Rollins welcomed the quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by billionaire Elon Musk, to find parts of the USDA budget to cut.

Terminated employees helped farmers build irrigation systems, battled invasive diseases that could “completely decimate” crops that form whole industries and assisted low-income seniors in rural areas in fixing leaky roofs. That work will now be significantly delayed — perhaps indefinitely — as remaining employees’ workloads grow, the employees said. - Investigate Midwest