He truly believes his actions are best for everyone

My Sunday movies were the two films by Netflix nominated for Oscars in the short film categories. The awards are handed out next week and only the Netflix movies are streamed now. The first one was the short documentary The Only Girl in the Orchestra. It is about string bass player Orin O’Brien and when she joined the New York Philharmonic somewhere about 1965 she was indeed the only woman. Leonard Bernstein was the one to hire her and he thought her playing was wonderful. The film was created by her niece Molly O’Brien, though Orin didn’t think she was special enough to have a movie made about her. Filming included her retirement from the NYP after 55 years, then moving from the apartment she had been in as long. O’Brien is the daughter of actors and while they sought the spotlight she avoided it. She chose string bass because the school orchestra had instruments and no players. Plus, playing string bass meant she was in the back of the orchestra. She and a friend read through some of the newspaper articles from when she got the NYP job and cringed at the sexist language. She noted the men had a changing room. There wasn’t one for women. Even as she retired from the NYP she has kept up her teaching schedule, so we meet a lot of her students. The second film is the short live action Anuja, which takes place in New Delhi slums. Anuja says she is fourteen, but she is clearly younger. She works with an older sister in a garment sweatshop. A school official wants her to take a test to see if she qualifies for a boarding school – he’s heard of her math skills. Part of the film is about coming up with the money to pay for the exam and part of it is about the factors that work to keep her in poverty. These include the sweatshop owner wanting her math skills for himself, and Anuja recognizing that her sister would not go to the boarding school with her. The Detroit Film Theater screens all of the short animation, live action, and documentary films during February. For several years I would attend the marathon viewings of the animation and live action. I stopped when I got tired of the violence in some of the live action shows. I see some of this year’s nominations were for violent films. Alas, most of the other short films don’t get to a streaming service. In an article for Capital and Main posted on Daily Kos Gabriel Thompson discussed the latest difficulty in resolving labor disputes. These disputes include such things as workers voting in union representation yet the corporation continues to refuse to recognize the union. The reason is that the National Labor Relations Board can no longer meet because the nasty guy fired a board member and it no longer has enough members to meet quorum requirements. An agency that’s supposed to be independent from politics can no longer function. This comes after a long period of being underfunded and understaffed and recently hit with a funding freeze.

The freeze at the National Labor Relations Board comes while attorneys for Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, which are both facing labor complaints, argue in federal court that the NLRB is unconstitutional, in part because it impedes executive power.

The nasty guy also fired enough commissioners from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to leave it without a functioning quorum. The NLRB can accept cases and probably begin work on preparing data and arguments. But any cases that need board action are now on hold, which may last a good long time. This will mean that workers, recognizing they can’t depend on a government agency will take matters into their own hands. The Republican threat to significantly cut Medicaid prompted Renuka Rayasam and Sam Whitehead of KFF Health News to write an explainer on Medicaid, posted on Kos.

In January, during a congressional hearing on his way to becoming secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got basic details wrong about Medicaid — a program he now oversees. He said that Medicaid is fully funded by the federal government (it’s not) and that many enrollees are unsatisfied with high out-of-pocket costs (enrollees pay limited, if any, out-of-pocket costs).

Read the article and you’ll know more than RFK. Kos of Kos wrote another article about people who voted for the nasty guy and are now harmed by that decision. The introduction says:

As we sample the latest batch of regretful Trump voters, just note the theme: “I didn’t know it would impact me!” This is a core difference between us and them. They happily voted for President Donald Trump hoping he would hurt other people. We voted against him because he would hurt other people. So the question becomes, how do we build a society in which we are all in this thing together and vote for candidates who uplift rather than destroy? In the short term, sure, let’s pick up people who have been burned. Their votes matter. But as long as peoples’ motivation to vote is to hurt “the other,” we’re going to have a hard time building the caring, supportive, and progressive society we all deserve.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic discussing the “Great Resegregation”

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly. The battles of the Great Resegregation are now taking place in at least three overlapping arenas. The first is politics, where right-wing legal organizations have succeeded in rolling back many civil-rights-era voting protections; they want to now fully destroy the remaining shreds. The second is education and employment, particularly at elite institutions, such as the media and academia; right-wing legal strategies have been similarly fruitful here in attacking diversity, thanks to the conservative capture of the Supreme Court. The third is popular culture, where conservatives have sought to leverage anger and nostalgia against movies, television, books, and other creative media brought to life by artists of color. [...] As the Trump State Department official Darren Beattie wrote, “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” This analysis is perceptive in the sense that the exact reverse is true—we are now in the second decade of a years-long temper tantrum sparked by the election of Barack Obama—not to mention the failed attempts to elect a woman to succeed him—and the effect it had on the fragile self-esteem of people like Beattie.

Kev also quoted Paul Krugman from his Substack talking about the congestion pricing for Midtown Manhattan that the nasty guy reversed.

This behavior may in part reflect the right-wing insistence, going back to Reagan, that government can never be a force for good, a doctrine right-wingers try to validate when they’re in power. Part of it may reflect jealousy: Trump, and only Trump, is allowed to have policy successes. But it’s also surely part of the effort to flood the zone — to do so many bad things at the same time that it’s hard to focus on any one outrage. And I’m sorry to say that this strategy often works.

In a second roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Heather Cox Richardson of her Letters from an American on Substack who quoted Timothy Snyder, scholar of authoritarianism. Snyder has noticed a shift:

People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.

Dworkin also included a tweet by Jennifer Schulze that was also a link to an article on Substack.

I think local news is doing a helluva job covering the doge fallout. Reporters are connecting the dots from DC to main street, going beyond acronyms to explain what government agencies do & giving voice to concerns of regular people.

With the tweet is a photo of some sort of citizen gathering that is standing room only. The people look angry. Yeah, that kind of DOGE fallout. A tweet by Carol Leonning:

Here's one creative way @SecretService managers told agents to respond to Elon Musk's surprise email demanding that fed employees list their 5 accomplishments last week. Sources said it was designed to avoid agents sharing sensitive and classified details of their work protecting @POTUS, the White House and more.

This week I accomplished: + 100% of the tasks and duties required of me by my position description. + 100% of the work product that my manager and I have agreed to. + 100% of the duties and performance elements that are used to evaluate my performance. + 100% of the deliverables requested of me by my direct supervisor. + I exceeded expectations in the delivery of the above.

In the comments is a cartoon by Jonesy showing the nasty guy talking to a firefighter. The nasty guy says, “Keep up the good work – you’ll need to” as between them the nasty guy sets fire to the Paris Climate Agreement. A meme posted by exlrrp has the caption “They never started by taking guns.” The image shows Nazi officials walking away with stacks of books. A tweet by Josh Marshall includes a quote from Vanity Fair that explains Musk’s goals. The Vanity Fair author isn’t named.

“Elon believes he should be emperor of the world, and this is his way of showing people what he’s capable of as emperor,” a close associated of Musk’s, who has worked with him for years and still speaks to him regularly, tells me. “He truly believes his way of handling the world is the best possible outcome for everyone in it.” In Musk’s mind, this person says, everything he’s done in his career to date has proven that thesis to be true – from Tesla’s electric cars reducing emissions and accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, to Neuralink’s efforts to help people with neuralogical disorders regain lost functions, to his belief that he single-handedly saved Twitter from collapse and turned it into a bastion of free speech, rescuing it from what he saw as the censorial grip of Jack Dorsey’s leadership.

He may believe what he does benefits all. But it clearly doesn’t. Or maybe “everyone in it” means only himself. Zez Vaz posted a cartoon of a singer with a guitar onstage being pelted by eggs. He says, “Eggs? In this economy? I’m flattered!”