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2 days ago | 
laprogressive.com | John Peeler |Rob Maurer
If you can think of any way to hasten our arrival at the tipping point where the world won’t be able to recover, Trump and his troops are trying it. We have in these last one hundred days necessarily focused on the immediate crises posed by Donald Trump’s frenzy of destruction, at home, abroad, economically, politically, constitutionally. The the world we have lived in is being demolished. It is for us to do what we can to save it.
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2 weeks ago | 
laprogressive.com | John Peeler |Rob Maurer
First learning of this classic as an undergraduate, I was never made to read it. So I never found time for it. But maybe it would help me understand what Donald Trump and his MAGA movement are doing to my country and my world. Arendt was born into a secular Jewish family of Social Democrats in 1906, in Germany. By 1933 the rise of Hitler to power compelled her and her mother to flee to Paris. After the fall of France in 1940, they had to flee again, ending up in New York in 1941.
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2 weeks ago | 
laprogressive.com | John Peeler |Rob Maurer
Trump is so impulsive and narcissistic that he is incapable of imposing order: he can only destroy. Donald Trump is demolishing a rules-based world order dating from the end of World War II. This order underpinned widespread peace and prosperity. One of its features was a long, systematic negotiation to lower barriers to trade. Trump’s tariffs on the whole world (except for Russia), further the demolition.
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3 weeks ago | 
laprogressive.com | John Peeler |Rob Maurer
We were stunned: ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) sent over two hundred undocumented Venezuelans to prison in El Salvador, in open defiance of District of Columbia Chief District Judge Boasberg’s order to return them to the United States. The administration alleges that it a law passed in 1798 and rarely applied since, allows it, without a hearing, to summarily deport them.
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1 month ago | 
laprogressive.com | John Peeler |Rob Maurer
The 1950s were, in short, a time for White males, and that is why Donald Trump and many of his MAGA followers want to go back there. The 1950s are cited by many MAGA (Make America Great Again) folks as the time they want to go back to. And for good—and bad—reasons. On the positive side, it was a time of broad prosperity and relative equality in income and wealth. Taxes were high on top incomes and low on middle and low incomes. More and more Americans were able to get mortgages and own their homes.
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1 month ago | 
laprogressive.com | John Peeler |Rob Maurer
DOGE has made little attempt to determine what jobs civil servants actually do, and how vital those jobs are. MUMP (Musk/Trump) think they’re seizing power, but they’re really causing a power seizure, a freezing-up of the government’s capacity to act. Conservatives have two contradictory aspirations. It has long been their hope, as Grover Norquist put it, to make government small enough to drown it in the bathtub.
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1 month ago | 
newsitem.com | John Peeler
Trump shows himself to be defiantly lawless in his determination to dismantle the federal government as we have known it, brazenly corrupt in his decision-making and stunningly unable to anticipate the consequences of his acts. Start with DOGE (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency), Elon Musk's vehicle for dismantling federal agencies. Neither Musk himself nor DOGE has any grounding in law. DOGE was set up by Trump. It has no authority to do anything.
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1 month ago | 
laprogressive.com | John Peeler |Rob Maurer
Trump’s behavior betrays a literally reactionary desire to return to the world of the nineteenth century, when great powers competed to acquire colonies and clients around the world. Knowing that Donald Trump sees all relationships through the lens of transaction (deals) President Zelensky thought to get on his good side by offering the US privileged access to Ukraine’s rare earths.
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2 months ago | 
laprogressive.com | John Peeler |Rob Maurer
Much will depend on how deep the disillusionment with Trump runs, and the Dems obviously have work to do to hone their message and pick their candidates. Has it just been a month? I feel like I’ve aged ten years. Catastrophes: he’s sending people back to face brutal repression in Venezuela or a complete breakdown of order in Haiti. Musk and DOGE, unauthorized by any law, are firing thousands of federal employees, without regard to what essential functions they may perform.
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2 months ago | 
laprogressive.com | John Peeler |Rob Maurer
Trump shows himself to be defiantly lawless in his determination to dismantle the federal government as we have known it, brazenly corrupt in his decision-making, and stunningly unable to see the unanticipated consequences of what he does. Start with the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), Elon Musk’s vehicle for dismantling federal agencies. Neither Musk himself nor the DOGE has any grounding in law. DOGE was set up by Trump. It has no authority to do anything.
