More, Faster, Donald!

The Trump administration can for now continue its mass firings of federal employees, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, rejecting a bid by a group of labor unions to halt Donald Trump’s dramatic downsizing of the roughly 2.3 million-strong federal workforce. The ruling by the US district judge Christopher Cooper in Washington DC federal court is temporary while the litigation plays out.

But it is a win for the Trump administration as it seeks to purge the federal workforce and slash what it deems wasteful and fraudulent government spending.

Oh, how we so desperately need a UK version of DOGE...

In a statement released last Wednesday, NTEU president Doreen Greenwald said: “We will not stand idly by while this administration takes illegal actions that will harm citizens, federal employees and the economy.”

She went on to add: “All of these orders are further evidence that this administration is motivated not by efficiency, but by cruelty and a total disregard for the government services that will be lost.”

If they can be 'lost' so easily, they weren't worth having in the first place. That's rather the point. 

Everyone Else Is A Realist, Love...

Someone struggles with reality...

I have spent most of the last week on Zoom calls with accountants in New York, trying to figure out the personal finance implications of moving to the UK – lugging dual citizenship behind me. (Short version: they’re not good.) Since these conversations deal with economic outcomes it has felt, as a matter of form, necessary to mention that given the US just elected a maniac, at some level – don’t we think? – all bets are off. Joking not-joking: we can talk about pensions or college savings until the cows come home but really, why aren’t we screaming? A remark that has elicited, to a man, either blank looks or cheerful entreaties not to be so alarmist.

I'd entreat you to get psychiatric help, personally... 

The spectacle of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, co-hosts of the fiercely anti-Trump MSNBC show Morning Joe, beetling down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the president-elect as fast as their little legs could carry them, was presented by the pair as a necessary piece of journalistic engagement.

It's their job, of course they will want to do that. Not everyone has the luxury of acting like a spoiled child and refusing to do something they find distateful. 

Under the auspices of pragmatic engagement, or “holding Trump to account”, or the reasonable accommodation of a new American reality, there is the usual sucking up to money and power. Despite Trump’s conviction that the entire mainstream media is against him, it seems unlikely that he will be sitting alone in a ballroom at the White House Correspondents’ dinner next April while the US news media takes a stand.

And it’s true: sulking or ranting does nothing.

I wouldn't say that. It clearly gets you a column in the 'Guardian'...