Oh, I'm sure this ends well.

commondreams.org/news/musk-tre…

'It's a Coup': Musk's DOGE Granted Access to Treasury System That Pays Out Social Security

"In an op-ed published by MSNBC on Saturday, Owens went into greater detail about her concerns, outlining three reasons why Musk might want access to the Treasury payment system.

He could use it to stop payments to certain programs in order to work around the courts' block on the administration's spending freeze. He could access the list of blacklisted federal contractors in order to boost his own or his friend's companies and harm his competitors. (One of the DOGE allies granted access to the payment system, Tom Krause, is also a Big Tech CEO who leads Cloud Software Group, according to The New York Times.) He could use it to reduce Social Security or Medicare payments as part of DOGE's goal of cutting $2 trillion in federal spending.

Owens noted that Musk wasn't "chasing these cuts for their own sake. He's helping congressional Republicans attempt to pay for a new round of tax breaks for corporations and the ultrawealthy—including Musk himself."

"It's nice to believe in a fantasy in which Musk and DOGE work alongside civil servants to improve technology and services for Americans and save a few bucks along the way. But all evidence points to the contrary," Owens continued. "The richest man in the world, whom no one elected to any government position, is seeking unprecedented access to confidential information, including information pertaining to his own business interests, and seems hell-bent on cutting off as much funding as possible for the programs that matter to the rest of us."

I mean if I'm being honest, I don't think Owens criticisms or predictions of potential disaster go far enough. Yes, it's bad enough that a billionaire Afrikaner who literally believes billions of people are useless eaters who can and should be sacrificed for the goals of creating billions of "artificial minds" and escaping to Mars after rich people have burnt the planet to the crisp, has his fingers inside the payment system that supports America's most vulnerable people, and sure it's not at all good that Musk has access to information he can use to make himself even richer. But as long as you're committed to not actually calling Elon on a fascist, it's hard to understand the scope of what's just occurred here.

For starters, there probably isn't a more identifying clutch of sensitive personal information than the Treasury Department payment system; Musk, a literal billionaire nazi supervillain, now has more personal information on the political enemies of the American fascist movement (read: anyone who isn't going for this Pork Reich bullshit) than the fucking FBI and we know for a fact he's a vindictive little fash muppet who absolutely delights in targeting people who criticize or oppose his frankly quite unhinged agenda. If Musk/Trump/America First want to target, detain, or even eliminate whole swathes of their political enemies and people the fash think shouldn't exist, they now have access to more than enough information to start rounding folks up and conducting political purges.

Furthermore, and while this might not be "news" to folks who've been closely following this fascist movement and Musk's (successful) attempts to buy it, this makes it absolutely clear that the guy running this shitshow isn't an elected official at all - it's Musk. The fact is, a government is at its heart, a system of taxation and spending; if Musk and his allies in the tech industry now have their hands on the purse strings (and all the juicy data that entails) they are in all reasonable sense of the words, in charge of the government. Trump might have "won" an election in a rigged oligarchy, but the fascist wearing the pants in this arrangement is very clearly Elon Musk; a guy in a fascist death cult, who can't run a social media company, builds cars that burst into flames, and wants to eliminate vast portions of the media because they make fun of him for being the most divorced man ever.

Given all that, I am once again asking my fellow Americans if they're sincerely planning to just let this all happen for four years on the off chance a party full of collaborators wholly owned by the same rich people that own Trump, may win a potentially hypothetical election in a rigged oligarchy. Or, are you ready to start becoming ungovernable and shut this shit down, knowing that there will be personal costs involved, the fascist police state will respond with violence, and the liberal establishment which is openly musing that they're happy to let you suffer under authoritarianism to teach you a lesson about not voting for them, will be of no assistance whatsoever and in fact will likely help the fash punish you.

The choice is yours, and it's not a good one; but I still hope you choose wisely.

#USPol #Fascism #Treasury #Musk #Trump #SocialSecurity #PoliceState #Coup #PorkReich #AmerikanMusik