A lot of people are very concerned about it. but what am I supposed to do about it? I voted, canvassed, and donated as hard as I could already. and I lost.
Wherever you are, find friends, bring family, go to the closest government building, camp in front of it. Block the main street of your city, block highways, block ports, &c.
It really isn't rocket science, German hardcore ecologists put more efforts on a random Tuesday morning than Americans during a coup, it's mind boggling.
They gave you an online "public square" so that you can all scream in its void, get the fuck out and protect what's yours
There are a hundred options to fight back against fascism that don't involve violence or being arrested. Don't get me wrong, sometimes people are pushed too far and they need to use violence to achieve liberty. It's how our nation was founded after all. But it's a last resort and more often than not backfires. Just a glimpse at French and Russian history will tell you all you need to know about that.
The biggest thing we can do is get people out to vote in the midterm election and take back the house and senate. Until then we need to volunteer and donate to organizations that are fighting back legally like the ACLU. Education is also a huge part of that.
Organizing peaceful protests is possible but fraught due to anti-protest countermeasures employed by fascists. Stuff like media blackouts, attempts to incite violence, astroturfed counter protests and false flag operations make it dangerous and hard to accomplish. A big thing we can do is to create our own media coverage of protests and spread it as much as possible on friendly platforms. Putting up signs, posting to Bluesky, posting to group chats, and educating friends and family. Utilize your own personal networks to wake people up to the problem.
Call your senator. Republican or Democrat or Independent or whatever. Call them, tell them you expect them to cease all routine business in the senate until accountability is restored. They do listen, it does matter.
My Senator is Susan Collins. She does not give a single shit.
My friend worked for her as a page one time. If congress isn't voting on something to do with potatoes or blueberries, she doesn't even show up. She's been emphatically on-board with this for a decade now.
Call anyway. If they don't answer the phone, go to the closest field office in person and knock. The stakes are too high, you need to ask yourself every step of the way: is THIS the roadblock that's going to stop me?
Maybe your senator doesn't care, maybe the courts are bought and the criminals are immune, maybe maybe maybe. Fighting means you keep powering through the maybes, the roadblocks, the hopelessness. There are sophisticated campaigns at work designed to make you feel hopeless and powerless. DO NOT give in to these without a fight!
I know using the phone can be uncomfortable if you don't do it often and that's okay. It gets easier the more you do it, and you don't need to word everything perfectly. The important thing is that you get your point across. "My name is x, I live in county y, and I'm calling to say I expect a yes/no vote on issue z."
I just did this for the first time, I found all three of mine had websites with a form to fill in which I used to leave my message. I hope filling in the form counts as much as a phone call? I left one a phone message too, but do kind of hate calling people...
Email is NOT as good! Phone calls are the most effective means by far. I know it's uncomfortable, it is for me too, but you need to power through that feeling. It gets easier the more you do it.
I called and kept calling until I got through. There were busy signals for 30 minutes before I got in. Be persistent. Keep trying!
To add, as someone who’s called offices to share opinions over the last several years:
You may get either voicemail or someone will pick up. A staffer will be who gets these messages, so be polite. Simply being polite means you’d be doing better than a lot of other callers.
I state my name, that I am a constituent, my city+ZIP, a brief message stating that I urge the congressperson to support/oppose an action and why.
If you’re talking to a human, give them a moment to jot it down and you’re done.
Also, you don’t have to call their DC office. If that line is busy, try a field office.
The womans march was one of the largest protests in DC history and I think it was only about 470k. 75 million, man a quarter of that would shut the country down.
If those people hit the streets they'll be hit by chemical weapons (i.e. tear gas) that are illegal for our government to use in war but perfectly legal to use on peaceful protesters. Just something to keep in mind in case anyone is wondering why Americans don't really protest.
There is a reason why people, especially those outside the US, are treating the series of events of past few days as if it were a regime change, and the reason is it satisfies most criteria for it. From [1]:
“Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” Musk said. “Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”
“These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done,” Musk said, adding later: “If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”
Tear gas is illegal to use in war because of a fear of escalation/retaliatory strikes due to an enemy thinking you're using other more dangerous chemical/biological weapons (chlorine, sarin, mustard, phosgene, etc).
It's not banned in war because it's as dangerous as chemical weapons, it's banned in war so people don't think you're using chemical weapons.
I’d also add that in basic training you’re hit with tear gas so you know what it’s like and learn to trust your equipment. They don’t do that unless there’s a chance you may encounter it.
French police use tear gas on protestors, and in 1980, the South Korean government fired on and killed protestors. I don't think it's just the tear gas; I think it has more to do with the fact that we're way more distributed (it's very practical for most French people to descend on Paris than it is for US residents to descend on DC) and culturally not in the habit.
It takes a critical mass to be unmanageable by any amount of tear gas. Even if they use various types of anti-protest weapons, so what? Do you want to cry at home or on the streets?
I'd wager a solid 20%-30% of the people who voted for Trump were poorly informed, or deliberately misinformed, and simply wanted "change" because they weren't pleased with the current state of their life / country. Unfortunately they didn't take the time to appropriately attribute the cause of their ills and made the grave mistake of thinking Trump and his administration would do anything at all to help them and their kind, not recognizing the narcissistic sociopath in front of them, and realizing that such people are wholly incapable of caring about any other person, under any circumstance. They were conned by a lifetime expert conman. Sad!
Or maybe you’re just upset because your candidate lost and now you’re looking for a narcissistic way to justify your own beliefs to avoid your world view from crashing?
You do not wait for an order, because there is no central authority for a general strike. That's what gives it legitimacy.. You canvass, wheatpaste, recruit or whatever sort of political organizing/agitating you find appropriate. You have to meme it into existence.
Not OP, but someone with a significant national platform and an explicit call (dates, details, support from other prominent folks), not a generic "we should do something!" hint.
I'd find calls from, say, AOC or Taylor Swift more interesting than rando red rose LARPers.
If you wait for someone else to do the hard work nothing will happen, look at the French yellow vests, it started from nothing, and the causes were laughable compared to what the US is going through now
They're not gonna push for it without grassroots organization, which means doing things at the local and online level to get the idea in wide circulation. It's not a startup.
Absent this, people will get more and more frustrated which will eventually manifest as riots as it did in 2020. So if you prefer a more peaceable outcome, I think it's better to talk up the idea of a general strike rather than talk it down.
Does this treasury department payment system not also cover the payments made to bondholders?
Every time Congress delays raising the debt ceiling until the last minute, people get anxious and worry about a default and the full faith and credit of the US, etc. Are we now saying that the US could default even when funds are available if an un-elected guy and some junior programmers decide that would be a good idea or just mess up when dealing with a complex and arcane legacy system, and that's not scary to markets?
I would think every financial model that references a "risk-free rate" now has to be revisited while people consider whether any information visible to the Treasury Department might link their account to someone who has said something disparaging about Musk on twitter.
You are over-estimating the financial sector. They don't model these things. Models are rather simple (US 0% risk, this country x% risk because a handful of institutions said, etc...). There is really not much science, research or sophistication there. Take the stock market, pretty much everyone is following everyone else.
The important risk is a runaway executive that feels completely unconstrained by law, with the blessing of both other branches of government. Today, it's blocking members of the legislature from entering government buildings and is unilaterally shutting down an agency that exists on a directive of Congress.
Tomorrow, will it carry out any legislature that congress passes?
I am so excited about this... He's hiring some of the top people in the world to work for the GOVERNMENT!!! how amazing is that? We've lost the will as Americans to send our best people to serve the interest of the people because private industry was more profitable.
Elon has about 30 years of experience leading software teams at the cutting edge of development. He's conducting wide spread audits to the government, and ensuring the funds being appropriated by congress are being used effectively.
I think this whole thing boils down to whether you like elon or not.
Elon Musk, David Sac, Vivek ramswamy, Tom Krause, Kimberly Brandt, John Brooks....? Even the youngest person working at Doge solved the vesuvius challenge... not to mention top engineers from Jump Capital, Vinay Hiremath, founder of Loom working as recruiting... the list goes on...?
This is exciting, and awesome, and i can't believe trump has been able to convince such a powerhouse team to work for the benefit of the US. By auditing the government, we ensure our debt surety payments don't slowly bleed us to death. For the first time in my entire life have i felt a sense of hope.
> I think this whole thing boils down to whether you like elon or not.
I think this whole thing boils down to you being an anti-abortion zealot who is so anti-abortion (you've expressed opposition to abortion on Hacker News, a tech forum, not just once, but multiple times![1]) that you see no issue with Trump cutting government spending in certain areas while he is simultaneously expressing support for the US occupying Gaza, funding a goddamn Christian task force[2], etc.
My worry is it could
become a political issue. Agency you don’t like? Employee you don’t like? US state you don’t like? Just don’t pay them any more. And who would be able to do anything about it?
The blatant ignoring of laws shows that Trump thinks it's fine to be lawless as long as it serves his chaotic agenda to sew discord and distrust in the government so he and his Elon goon squad can install more autocracy into the system.
Why in the world would you trust Elon and his cadre to do that investigation? The man has no self-control, has the temperament of a spoiled teenager, and by all accounts is a drug addict. He also has a shocking number of conflicts of interest.
> This is the first time the veil of undocumented or secret government payments has been pierced and it's going to shed a lot of light into the corruption behind government spending.
... is there somewhere that DOGE people with access are publishing the stuff they see? If this were about transparency, that could be good, but that purpose could be served with read only access.
I'm not saying there isn't serious corruption in government spending, but this administration and Musk aren't in a credible position to fight it, especially not this way. The Treasury Department should refer stuff to Justice who should convene a grand jury, present some evidence, and prosecute corrupt contractors etc. We're supposed to be a country of laws.
I disagree. They are very credible. I trust them much more than I trust a bunch of government bureaucrat fat cats.
I’ve worked in government and I know first hand how useless they are so seeing them being exposed is a long time coming. The idea that these bureaucrats are unsung heros is hilarious. It’s exactly the same how taxi companies were somehow the heroes against Uber when taxi companies are the most exploitive companies ever, especially to minorities.
I’m anxious to see what the results of all this effort is. But I don’t think anything nefarious is going on.
Ideally, trying to reform the government & its activities shouldn't require a team to burrow all the way down to the literal payments system & call individual balls and strikes.
But I assume that is indicative of how unresponsive the bureaucracy has become to political direction from the president & secretaries.
Look I get where you're coming from, but those "checks and balances" can't be the thing you defend because they've largely done neither and in fact allowed this insanity in the first place.
Bureaucracy is there to protect us from people like Trump and Elon. Congress can pass laws and the president can issue orders. This action threatens the US financial system, which threatens the economic stability of most of the world. In terms of human suffering this could have massive impact. We now have a psychopath (well, at least one) with his fingers around our throats. We're all waiting to see what comes next, but it won't be good.
No there hasn't. When someone named the 6 DOGE guys kicking in doors at OPM and TReasury Musk spluttered on his social media platform that the person was committing a crime by naming them and then deleted the person's account.
What have you actually learned? And consider that there's no way for anyone to argue that information was already available to the public, because the main activity of DOGE so far ahs been taking government web pages or entire domains offline. With no organized archival process, how do you equate significantly less availability of information with 'transparency'?
I mean, I've been watching my feed scroll by with the various monetary alotments they've discovered. Finally, someone's taking a critical glance at the $$ dedicated to increasing atheism in Tibet (no, I'm not kidding).
Wow, your feed tells you you're better informed now? Compared to what? As I pointed out, you have no way to check how much of this information was previously published, a point you chose to ignore.
I'm curious about whether you ever attempted to find details of USAID spending, pulled budget docs from their site or filed a FOIA request or anything like that. If you had done so and run into a brick wall, I would understand your saying that there had been a lack of prior transparency. But your posts reads as if someone just drew your attention to something you weren't aware of before, and you've mistaken that for transparency when in fact it's just a talking point designed to grab your attention.
Elected or unelected, politicians with an agenda should not be in charge here.