Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and unelected adviser to President Donald Trump, is asserting control over much of the federal bureaucracy and sensitive government computer systems despite lacking clear authority. The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department was pushed out after refusing to hand Musk’s team the keys to the government’s entire payment system and the $6 trillion in payments the system processes annually, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and Medicare benefits. Musk and his team have also seized control at the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, key institutions that function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government. “In any other situation, this would be called state capture, and people around the world would be condemning it,” says Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, who writes in a new blog post that Elon Musk is staging a coup. We also speak with Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, who warns that Musk could be laying the groundwork for major tax cuts Republicans have promised that will disproportionately benefit corporations and wealthy people like him. “Elon Musk is going to pay for his tax cut with your Social Security,” says Owens.

There is a coup occurring now

  • thefartographer@lemm.ee
    151·
    15 hours ago

    Mostly because it’s so brazen and fucking insane that people don’t even know what to do about it. If someone walked into your office building while waving a knife around and shouted, “get the fuck out or I’m gonna start stabbing people!” what do you think you’d do?

    My guess is that everyone is going to run out because we’ve been engrained to recognize the mechanisms in place to prevent and protect from these types of things. Anyone thinking anything other than getting the fuck out would probably be thinking “it’s not worth it, let the police handle it.”

    Let’s say you start shouting, “that’s illegal, go choke on a dick! C’mon y’all, there’s only one of him and many of us; we can’t wait for the police, ACAB!!!” I’d probably commend you when I read the article or your obituary, but everyone else in the office is going to be concerned with saving themselves and letting whatever contingencies kick in.

    Everyone with the power to stop this is sitting on their hands while waiting for someone else to step up. And we, the people? We’ve been trampled and subjugated for so long that now that we’re being told to rise up, we don’t know how. “Rise up against the system you helped manufacture? How? Y’all arrest and kill us in droves just for threatening money, much less people in power.”