OPINION

Trump’s ‘common sense’ about government workers is rank bigotry and racism, pure and simple

James E. Garcia, 

Arizona Mirror

February 04, 2025


Most of the bodies of the 67 people killed when their plane plunged into the frigid, murky waters of the Potomac River had not yet been recovered when President Trump decided to turn a press conference into a despicably racist attack on more than 60 years of gains made in hiring practices since the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Trump, fittingly, had opened the press conference by asking reporters to honor the crash victims with a moment of silence.

Things quickly degenerated after that.

“We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system,” Trump said.

Fair enough. It’s what came next that Arizonans — and every American — should find deeply disturbing.

“I changed the Obama standards [at the Federal Aviation Administration] from very mediocre at best to extraordinary,” Trump boasted, claiming that, unlike President Barack Obama, his FAA wanted people who are “psychologically superior” to work as air traffic controllers. “And then when I left office and [President Joe] Biden took over, he changed [the standards] back to lower than ever before.”

There is no evidence to support Trump’s claim that Obama or Biden hired “mediocre” employees at the FAA, much less as air traffic controllers, but Trump rarely lets the facts get in the way of self-serving political attack.

“The FAA’s diversity push includes a focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities,” Trump said. “That is amazing… They can be air traffic controllers.”

It would be amazing — if it was true. But it’s not.

Documents about FAA hiring, according reporting by the Daily Mail, “reveal that last year the agency was recruiting people with targeted disabilities, including ‘hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism,’ “

The FAA policy did not specify which jobs it wanted to fill through its targeted recruitment push, but a former administrator for the agency, which has 45,000 employees, told NewsNation the FAA “hires a lot of people, not all of them can be controllers.”

And just in case his baseless allegation wasn’t clear, Trump added that the FAA “says people with severe disabilities are the most underrepresented segment of the workforce, and they want them in.”

For the record, people with disabilities, including people with serious intellectual and physical disabilities, have some of the highest unemployment rates and highest rates of poverty in the nation — but Trump could care less about any of that.

He said only “brilliant” people should be hired as air traffic controllers, “not regular people.” In Trump’s view, people with disabilities are about as irregular as you get and do not deserve to be seen or heard, much less work alongside us. This is the same president who once openly mocked a disabled reporter at a campaign rally and told Gen. Mark Milley no one wants to see a wounded war veteran at a military ceremony.

After finishing his remarks, a reporter asked: “Mr. President…are you saying this crash was somehow caused as the result of diversity hiring?”

“It just could have been,” Trump said, “…you have to go by psychological quality…and Biden went by a standard that’s the exact opposite. So, we don’t know.”

It’s worth noting here that a Washington Post report discovered FAA posts from Trump’s first term listed the same ‘targeted disabilities’ for hiring.

Challenging the president, another reporter noted, “Mr. President, you have today blamed the diversity elements, but then told us that you weren’t sure that the controllers made any mistake…. I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash.”

“Because I have common sense,” Trump said, “and, unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.”

That’s not common sense. It’s utter nonsense and just the sort of racist and ableist assertion only an ignorant bigot would make.

Make no mistake, the president’s attack on diverse hiring practices at the FAA — and across the federal workforce, which numbers about 3 million people nationwide and includes more than 34,000 people in Arizona — will not lead to hiring more “brilliant” employees. It will lead to a wave of discrimination by this administration aimed at anyone who isn’t a straight, white man — with women, people of color and people with disabilities cast as the chief villains who must be ousted from working in the government.

In a statement, a cohort of disability rights groups led by the National Disability Rights Network said Trump’s baseless claims that the deadly crash of Flight 5342 was because of public servants with disabilities was “irresponsible, disparaging, and wrong.”

“The implication that people are being hired to do a job for which they are unqualified is an unfounded lie that further reinforces harmful stereotypes against disabled people,” the groups added.

Maria Town, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, called Trump’s remarks “part of a broader coordinated attack on civil rights and equal opportunity across government.”

Listening to Trump, I couldn’t help but wonder how disheartened the plane crash victims’ families must have felt as they watched the president use his press conference not to console the nation but to bully people with disabilities and others who have gained from decades of diverse hiring practices just to score points against his political enemies.

On one of the worst days of their lives, Trump instead did what he does best: He used the media spotlight to boast about himself, spread lies, and attack anyone he doesn’t think deserves to be full and equal participants in our society.

That’s not “common sense.” It’s just plain bigotry.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.

Elon Musk and the narratives of decadence that link all anti-democratic movements

Shutterstock/Maryna Linchevska

The Conversation

February 04, 2025

“It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates,” echoed the introduction line in the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter who killed 51 people in a mosque in 2019. His claim was that white people are being “replaced” by other races and won’t survive without action.

A few years later, the same obsession with birth rates has become a catchphrase of Elon Musk’s daily social media activism.

Don’t get me wrong, Elon Musk is neither a white supremacist nor a right-wing terrorist. Yet, like other people with extremist opinions, he promotes the view that society is in decline and that action is needed to prevent a related apocalypse. These rhetorical overlaps are hardly coincidental. They stem from a reactionary philosophy that has a long history of going viral.

Anxiety that low birthrates inevitably lead to population collapse has been haunting the west since mass consumption became its dominant lifestyle. This flips the older Malthusian fear of exponential population growth that will outpace our ability to produce food. Seen in the bigger picture, both are variations of a generic narrative known as decadence.

The idea of decadence – moral decline triggered by excessive indulgence – informs many parts of everyday sense-making, especially cultural criticism.

Ever read American historian Christopher Lasch’s famous bestseller about the contemporary culture of narcissism? Ever come across the popular meme that claims “weak men create hard times”? Ever followed the Cultural Tutor’s tweets about the loss of beauty in architecture? Ever doomscrolled through Jordan Peterson’s 1,293 YouTube videos? The detail varies, but the overarching theme of decadence is the same every time.

Decadence is a useful double-edged sword as a narrative. It frames the masses as sluggish and in need of discipline. The corrupt elites, meanwhile, simply need to be replaced. It bemoans the erosion of authority and draws on the premise that every society rests upon eternal hierarchies. Too much freedom, fun and flexibility, the story goes, jeopardises order and, thus, prosperity.

Hence, some rules for life: men must subordinate and obey for the sake of the greater good. Women must breed to secure the existence of our people and a future for our children. A new nobility shall replace the liberal elites and recreate culture. Otherwise, civilisation, or at least nations, are at stake. Does this sound familiar?

Ever since the biblical legends of Sodom and Gomorrah and the Hindu myth of Kali Yuga, adversaries of equality and the rule of law accused societies of being decadent.

From ancient populists in the Roman empire to Italian fascists, decadence is the transhistorical scaffolding that binds together the branches of anti-liberal philosophy.

Today, neoreactionary philosopher and advocate of a “dark enlightenment”, Curtis Yarvin, declares in the New York Times that democracy is “dead”. He longs to replace it with an American monarchy. Political scientist Patrick Deneen’s claim of a “nearly complete disassociation of the governing class and a citizenry without a cives” equally draws on a decadence narrative.

All these ideas rest on a cyclical perception of time. Rise and fall. Blossom and decay. Apocalypse and palingenesis, meaning a national or ethnic rebirth.

Romans in their decadence. Wikipedia/Musée d'Orsay

In my research, I’ve analysed hundreds of German and French neo-fascist magazines. In the end, the data was the same endless repetition of decadence and apocalypticism. I dubbed it conservative crisis narratives.

The politics of crisis

In most cases, there’s no need to worry. Decadence is just a cliché. But that is why everybody can so easily sell own versions of this story – as long as they recap the grand narrative. Facts don’t matter and the devil isn’t in the detail.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Donald Trump’s vice-president J.D. Vance frankly admitted during the 2024 campaign. His confession reveals a sociological truth about the function of crisis narratives.

According to American anthropologist Janet Roitman, who delved into what she calls the “politics of crisis”, such a narrative “cannot be taken as a description of a historical situation nor can it be taken to be a diagnosis of the status of history”. Instead, she elaborates, it is a “necessarily political denunciation”.

Every crisis narrative necessarily strengthens the call for redeemers. “The 2024 election is the last shot to save America,” claims Donald Trump. “Only the AfD can save Germany,” reposts Musk. It’s a scaleable story.

Elon Musk’s philosophy

In France, the far-right philosopher Guillaume Faye, who inspired the identitarian movement, invented a reactionary philosophy called “archeofuturism”. It aims to combine skyrocketing technical progress and a medieval morality of heroism and hierarchies. That’s not far from how Musk answers the decadence narrative with a call to radical long-termism.

The “digital town square” that X claims to be, for instance, is a signifier of the feudal public sphere. Musk’s digital reenactment of ancient Rome’s aesthetics reflects the far-right desire for an American Caesar. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, the most influential book in pre-fascist Germany, promoted the very same idea.

Musk’s philosophy appears to be that men shall submit to the CEO-king’s long-term ambition. To conquer space, colonise Mars, and merge human brains into one singular artificial intelligence, the individual and its needs become negligible. And that’s what the decadence narrative is all about in the first place.

Felix Schilk, Research Assistant, Faculty of Philosophy , University of Tübingen

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We built America by vanquishing a monarch — but the kings are back

U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia's President Vladimir Putin shake hands as they meet in Helsinki, Finland July 16, 2018.
REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

Thom Hartmann

February 04, 2025

ALTERNET

"It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Today we need a nation of Minute Men; citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom. The cause of liberty, the cause of America, cannot succeed with any lesser effort.” — President John F. Kennedy

The author of the Declaration of Independence went to great lengths, on numerous occasions (as I detail in What Would Jefferson Do?), to point out that when he and his colleagues started the United States of America they were explicitly rejecting — in favor of democracy — the men (they were all men back then) who drove the “three historic tyrannies”: kings/autocrats, theocrats/popes, and morbidly rich oligarchs.

For two thousand years before Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Paine, Adams, Revere, and their colleagues created our checks-and-balances system of republican democracy, every country in the world was ruled by one of those three. Today, of the 167 countries on Earth, only 74 are democracies, and only 24 of those are “fully democratic.”

"As long as we have an independent media and a fierce dedication to freedom, it’s not too late."

And now, because of the GOP, America stands on the verge of losing that status.

— Theocrats have seized control of our Supreme Court, gutting the rights of women and religious/racial/gender minorities.

— Members of the House and Senate are so terrified of oligarchs funding primary challenges against them that it’s been over 40 years since any major legislation has passed fulfilling the wishes of the majority of Americans. (And now, many say they are worried about physical violence against themselves and their families if they fight Trump.)

— And our White House is today occupied by a billionaire who believes himself to be a king.

Trump’s attack on our democracy is an old story, played out repeatedly in various countries by every generation during the past two centuries. It follows an absolutely predictable pattern: You could call it a playbook.


In a democracy, there are four main elements involved in governance: Legislative, Executive, Judicial, and the Press (the Fourth Estate).

While Democrats over the past 50 years or so have focused their efforts on winning elections (Legislative and Executive), the billionaires who own the GOP have directed their attention to using massive amounts of cash to seize control of the unelected branches (Judiciary and Press), a job that can be done with money but doesn’t always require winning elections.

This is a pattern that’s been duplicated in multiple nations that have lost their democracies. Trump and Musk are simply following their instruction manual.

When Viktor Orbán took over Hungary in 2010, he first set out to seize control of the judiciary and the media. He lowered the retirement age for judges, immediately forcing out 57 justices who he replaced with loyalists (an echo of Mitch McConnell’s stealing two Supreme Court seats for Trump).


Then, following the strategy announced last week by Trump and FCC Chair Carr, he sued multiple independent media outlets and attacked the funding of Hungary’s public broadcasting system, shifting control over both into the hands of friendly oligarchs.

With dissenting voices silenced in the media and judges willing to overlook his blatant violations of Hungarian election laws (purging voters, gerrymandering, challenging the votes in opposition-friendly districts), Orbán was able to win every election since.

Vladimir Putin followed a similar script a few years earlier; once he had control of the judiciary and Russia’s media, he was able to stomp all over that country’s new and fragile democratic institutions and intimidate the Russian parliament (the Duma).

In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro followed a nearly identical script. As did Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia and Robert Viko in Slovakia.


And now Trump is trying the same, the GOP having seized control of the Supreme Court and much of the nation’s systems of elections.

He’s launched massive lawsuits against most of America’s major legacy media, and his new FCC head has begun investigations of NPR and PBS for accepting “commercials.” Major media outlets are aggressively whitewashing his campaign against American democracy, while NPR and PBS could be brought to heel by Carr’s efforts.

Once these steps are complete and Trump, Musk, and their billionaire and theocratic allies are done gutting our government and cowing our media, it’s likely there will be no turning back.

Which is why Vladimir Putin is so confident that Trump will destroy our traditional alliances and align America with Russia, once he’s fully consolidated his power. He told Russian media over the weekend that it wouldn’t be long before Trump was as powerful as himself:

“And all of them, you will see — it will happen quickly, soon — they will all stand at the feet of the master and will wag their tails a little. Everything will fall into place.”

However, there are two countries of note — and possible examples for America — that tried to go down this path but had it interrupted, throwing them back into democracy: Poland and South Korea.

In Poland, Andrzej Duda’s Law and Justice Party failed to destroy the independent media, even though they’d succeeded in seizing the judiciary and rigged election rules to their favor. Because roughly 70% of Poland’s media stayed in independent hands, his party lost power in the 2023 elections and Poland is now returning to democracy.

Similarly, in South Korea their President Yoon Suk Yeol tried to declare a state of emergency and outlaw his opposition Democratic Party. He’d failed, however, to first seize control of South Korea’s independent media, so people showed up in the streets demanding his arrest; he sits in prison today.

This all highlights the importance of independent media, from old-line publications like The New Republicto new but blossoming upstarts like Substack, along with all of us fighting hard to protect the neutrality of NPR and PBS.

The American Revolution was an all-hands-on-deck affair, bringing together conservatives like Alexander Hamilton, liberals like Thomas Paine, military guys like George Washington, and intellectuals like Jefferson and Adams.

The Lincoln Project and other never-Trump movements show the commitment of true conservatives to democracy. Increasingly, liberals, military and law enforcement people, and intellectuals across the spectrum are joining the effort to salvage and then revive our republic. We are this generation’s Minute Men.

We’ve done this before; we can do it again: It’s going to take a hell of a fight, though, given that we’re up against the richest men on the planet. But as long as we have an independent media and a fierce dedication to freedom, it’s not too late.

Pass it on.

'Betrayal': Robert Reich reveals how Trump’s tariffs are strengthening a major US adversary

Former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on February 4, 2025 (Image: Screengrab via MSNBC / YouTube)

Alex Henderson

February 04, 2025
ALTERNET

President Donald Trump is delaying, by 30 days, the 25 percent tariffs he ordered for all goods entering the United States from Canada and Mexico, but that doesn't mean he has given up on the idea. And Trump's 10 percent tariff on goods from China remains in place.

Economist Robert Reich, who served as secretary of labor for the Clinton Administration, discussed Trump's tariffs during a Tuesday, February 4 appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." And he warned that Trump's tariffs could not only inflict economic pain on Americans, but encourage instability around the world.

Reich told "Morning Joe" host Mika Brzezinski and her colleagues Jonathan Lemire and Katty Kay: "In terms of what we can do, between now and the midterm elections of 2026, there's not a great deal. I mean, you know, presidents do have some authority and some power — obviously, a separate branch of government. He was elected even though it was a squeaker of an election: one and a half percent of Americans in terms of that margin... Donald Trump is a bully, and what he's trying to do is bully everybody."

READ MORE: 'Unchecked power': Trump himself ordered firings of prosecutors working criminal cases against him

The economist continued, "I mean, what does a bully do? A bully picks on his weakest and most dependent neighbors, for example: Canada, Mexico, Denmark."

Lemire noted that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expressing a feeling of "betrayal," and Reich explained why alienating Canada and other allies is a terrible move on Trump's part.

Reich told Brzezinski, Lemire and Kay, "Canada is not only our most important ally in many, many respects and our neighbor, but we rely on Canada. We've always relied on Canada, and Canada is very dependent on us. Many Canadians are, just like many Mexicans — I'm assuming — are reevaluating their view of the United States and Americans generally... And again, the bullying techniques used by Trump are undermining very, very long and very, very important established relationships."

The former Clinton Administration labor secretary noted that Trump is also threatening to impose tariffs on the United States' European allies.

"Trump is talking about his next target being Europe and slapping big tariffs on Europe," Reich warned. "Well, the potential trade between Canada and Europe and Mexico, already very significant, could get much larger. One of the big beneficiaries here that's not being talked about is China. China would like nothing better than to have Canada and Mexico and Europe and the European Union all battling the United States, because that would give an opening to China... The fundamental issue here is not only jobs, it's wages."

Reich continues, "It's Americans' access to the kind of medications we need around the world. It's the problem of prices. My worry here, ultimately, is that in terms of Trump's drive to show himself as very powerful — that nobody can stop him, that he is the bully of bullies — he is going to increase prices. I mean, tariffs are essentially — as we now are learning, as most people know — taxes. They increase the costs of goods coming into the United States. A lot of Americans are going to be paying much more or could be paying much more."

Watch the full video below or at this link.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Trump tariff threats are just another Trump con job

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo
Donald Trump talks with Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a North Atlantic Treaty Organization Plenary Session at the NATO summit in Watford, Britain, December 4, 2019.

Michael Signorile,

 The Signorile Report

February 04, 2025

Donald Trump's tariff threats are proving to be mostly empty, a risky game in which he accepts cosmetic changes from foreign governments that humor him. He then claims concessions that are big—when they’re not —and calls it a win. Much of the media goes along.

And he will do it again and again until they call out his bulls---.

Trump has talked about tariffs as absolutely necessary for his new “Golden Age”—though after “some pain.” He presents them as a cure-all to raise huge amounts of money (even though consumers pay for them). So it makes no sense for him to call them off by getting some minor things from countries—or nothing dressed up as something—that do not raise huge amounts of money.

This week, once again, Trump threatened tariffs against other countries only to stop them before they went into effect. Almost two weeks ago it was Colombia with 50% tariffs. And this week it was Canada and Mexico. He let 10% tariffs against China go into effect, but tariffs on Chinese products have been in effect for years, including through Joe Biden’s presidency, as it is not an ally of the U.S., and is competing in reckless ways. The tariffs on China, at least previously were strategically targeting specific industries and products.

And Trump had no way to back out of the threatened tariffs on China—which are stupid because they’re on all goods, not specific industries—with even a fig leaf of a win because China, unlike Mexico and Canada, didn’t give him any meeting before they went into effect in which it could humor Trump and allow him to save face.

China just waited for the tariffs to go into effect, and then retaliated with tariffs on liquefied natural gas, coal, farm machinery and other products, and it launched an investigation of Google. So much for Google and the tech companies sucking up to Trump. He just sold them out to China!

There will surely be economic ramifications from the tariffs on China but it will be nothing near the hugely detrimental impact of the 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada which caused markets to plunge yesterday—until Trump halted the tariffs from going into effect (“paused” for a month) after speaking with the leaders of Canada and Mexico. He likely wanted the same outcome with China, but didn’t get it.

Trump’s tariffs, first off, are illegal. Congress must pass a law putting tariffs in place, at it did at the time of the Great Depression—and they caused severe economic decline worsen.

Trump used “emergency powers” of the president to tariff the countries this week, saying it was a national security issue because of the fentanyl crisis and immigration. But there is not an emergency, so this is bogus—and illegal.

But even if Trump was using fentanyl smuggling as a cover to use emergency powers, that doesn’t take away the fact that he loves tariffs and doesn’t seem to get that tariffs are passed from companies onto consumers. During the campaign he vowed 20% tariffs or higher on all goods coming into the U.S. He said that tariffs would lead to the end of the federal income tax. He said that tariffs would fund child care programs. He’s said there’s a trade deficit that causes the US to “subsidize” Canada and Mexico, and thus tariffs would end it.

As the Associated Press points out, Trump has been all over the place on tariffs:

But even if the orders are focused on illegal drugs, Trump’s own remarks have often been more about his perceived sense that foreign countries are ripping off the United States by running trade surpluses. On Sunday, Trump said that tariffs would come soon on countries in the European Union. He has discussed tariffs as both a diplomatic tool on national security issues, a way to raise revenues and a vehicle for renegotiating existing trade pacts.


Trump claimed it as a win—and media went along with it—when Mexico said it would send 10,000 troops to the border. The problem with that is that Mexico regularly sends that many troops to the border. Mexico has 400,000 troops. In 2019 the government sent 15,000 troops to the border and in 2021. In addition, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum got Trump to agree to do something about illegal weapons smuggled into Mexico (not that he will actually do anything.) She’s being praised for how she’s handled it all.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada basically agreed to do what he announced in December, in a 2024 year end review. So it was nothing new. Trudeau also said he’s name a “fentanyl czar”—taking a page from Trump’s terminology—and giving some minor cosmetic changes to Trump to point to as a win.

In other words, Trump got very little in return for “pausing” the tariffs. And the big question is: Why would be pause them if the whole idea is to make a lot of money?

The answer is likely that Trump was, as a caller to my SiriusXM show pointed out, tipping his toe in the water on massive tariffs, something he’s been obsessed about. And the loud reaction on Wall Street—and among Republican politicians and millions of Americans—scared him. The focus on rising prices and the jolt to the economy made Trump blink.

Canada and Mexico had every reason to help him to save face, as it was in their best interests to end this quickly. China obviously took a different tack, but it is also a much more dominant economy and not about to play any game with Trump. China was actually hoping Trump would go ahead with the Mexico and Canada tariffs as it stood to gain a lot as our allies would move toward China.

All of this showed Trump to be weak, and also a fraud. You can’t tell us tariffs are the cure-all and then pull back every time you are set to impose them. And even if you’re doing it to get other countries to take some action, you can’t settle for this weak tea.

Paul Krugman and others have noted that Trump folded. He completely caved when he saw that Mexico and Canada retaliated—rather than bowing to him—and that world markets tumbled as Republicans fretted. And that’s how the media should be covering it, calling Trump’s bluff and exposing his con game.

'Unreliable partner': South Africa's HIV clinics scramble over U.S. aid freeze

Agence France-Presse
February 4, 2025 1

South Africa is one of the largest recipients of funds from the US HIV/AIDS response programme called PEPFAR (STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN)

by Linda GIVETASH

The gates at a Johannesburg LGBTQ clinic called OUT have been closed for more than a week and HIV prevention and treatment services suspended for its 6,000 clients.

The lights are also off at the University of the Witwatersrand's HIV project, a leader in the provision of services to sex workers in South Africa, a country with one of the largest HIV-positive populations in the world.

They are among the several South African HIV/AIDS healthcare providers that have been confused, angry and scrambling for survival since U.S. President Donald Trump issued a 90-day freeze last week on Washington's foreign aid.

"Short-term, I hope that some money can flow so that medium- and long- term, we can make other plans," said Dawie Nel, the director at OUT, whose Engage Men's Health clinic in Johannesburg has a note fixed to the gate that announces it is "temporarily closed".

South Africa is one of the largest recipients of funds from the US HIV/AIDS response program called PEPFAR, a project launched in 2003 and now paused by the funding freeze.

PEPFAR accounts for 17 percent of the country's HIV budget, ensuring some 5.5 million people receive anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment, according to the health ministry.

"The US is a totally unreliable partner," said Nel. "The system is very volatile and chaotic."

OUT's services identify around four to five cases of HIV a day along with other sexually transmitted diseases, he said.

It had been banking on $2 million in US funds to continue until September to provide its 2,000 clients with HIV treatment and another 4,000 clients with the preventative drug PrEP.

- 'Left behind' -

Around 14 percent of South Africans, around 8.45 million people, were HIV positive in 2022, according to government statistics, one of the highest rates in the world.
After a slow response to its AIDS crisis that cost more than 2.5 million lives, the country today has one of the world's biggest HIV treatment programs. "The PEPFAR-fund freeze will take South Africa and the world back in terms of the gains we have made in our response to HIV," the Treatment Action Campaign's Anele Yawa said in a statement.

"People are going to be left behind in terms of prevention, treatment and care."

Since the freeze was announced, a waiver for humanitarian aid, including life-saving treatments, has been issued but many organisations are unclear whether it applies to them.

The Wits University's Reproductive Health and HIV Institute has posted on its Facebook page that its Key Population Programme clinics for sex workers and transgender people were "closed until further notice".

The implications of the USAID stop order were being reviewed "and mitigation plans are being developed and deployed", Wits Health Sciences dean Shabir Madhi said in a statement.

- 'Undue suffering' -

South Africa's government has vowed to make up the difference in HIV funding by reallocating budgets for "key priorities".

But what those priorities should even be "is difficult to say unless we have a more informed decision from the Americans", Munya Saruchera, director of the African Centre for Inclusive Health Management at Stellenbosch University, told AFP.

The country may however be able to leverage its presidency of the G20 this year to "lead the Africa bloc into collective discussions with Western countries" to secure resources, he said.

The retreat in foreign aid spending by the United States, the world's largest foreign aid donor, "creates opportunities for other countries like China", said Craig Lasher, senior policy fellow for health advocacy group Population Action International.


But prolonged delays in filling funding gaps will pose "undue suffering" to health service workers and the communities they support, Lasher said.

"The longer they last, the more difficult it will be to rebuild the programs," he warned.

© Agence France-Presse

Panama lawsuit requests axing Hong Kong firm's canal concession

Agence France-Presse
February 4, 2025 

A subsidiary of CK Hutchison Holdings manages two of the canal's five ports (MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP)

Two Panamanian lawyers filed a complaint Monday to cancel the concession of a Hong Kong-based company for operating two ports on the Panama Canal, following U.S. President Donald Trump's threats to seize the vital waterway.

A subsidiary of CK Hutchison Holdings -- owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing -- manages two of the canal's five ports, an arrangement in place since 1997 via a concession from the Panama government.

But Norman Castro, one of the lawyers in the case brought before the Supreme Court, told reporters the contract "violates what the constitution says in about 10 articles."

"After a detailed analysis of the contract... we decided that an action for unconstitutionality was the appropriate means" to challenge the concession, said Julio Macias, another lawyer behind the suit.

The complaint also accuses the Hong Kong subsidiary of not paying taxes and benefits due to a series of advantages that are allegedly against the law.

Panama Ports Company -- a CK Hutchison Holdings subsidiary -- currently manages the ports of Cristobal on the canal's Atlantic side and Balboa on the Pacific side.

That arrangement was automatically renewed in 2021 for another 25 years.

The case comes after Trump threatened to take back the canal -- built by the United States and handed to Panama in 1999 -- as he said China was effectively "operating" it.

But temperatures have lowered since Secretary of State Marco Rubio's recent visit to the Central American country, with Panama President Jose Raul Mulino announcing they will not renew participation in China's Belt and Road Initiative.

Following Trump's charges, Panama also announced an audit into the company.

CK Hutchison Holdings is one of Hong Kong's largest conglomerates, spanning finance, retail, infrastructure, telecoms and logistics.

© Agence France-Presse

'Assault on America’s children': Experts condemn Trump order to dismantle Dept. of Education

U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, U.S., January 31, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Carl Gibson

ALTERNET

February 04, 2025

President Donald Trump is now reportedly drafting an executive order to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, which would fulfill another one of his 2024 campaign promises. Experts are sounding the alarm that Trump's order is illegal and would harm both students and their communities.

CNN reported Tuesday that Trump's pending executive order would instruct the secretary of the Education Department (former professional wrestling magnate Linda McMahon has been tapped to lead the agency) to "create a plan to diminish the department through executive action." Trump's order has been paired with a legislative push from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to officially abolish the Department of Education, as any agency authorized by Congress can't be repealed without new legislation being signed into law.

On X, higher education attorney Jay Perk noted that the call to eliminate the Education Department comes directly from pages 285 and 319 of the far-right Heritage Foundation's authoritarian Project 2025 playbook (pages 318 and 352 of the PDF). That document calls on Congress to "shutter [the agency] and return control of education to the states."

READ MORE: 'Gratifying': Project 2025 chief celebrates as Trump executive orders overlap with playbook

"Trump and Republicans are getting rid of the Department of Education ... to ensure state education systems who don’t comply with racist book bans, whitewashed curricula, etc., are starved of any and all aid on which they previously relied," Perk tweeted.

Vanity Fair special correspondent and MSNBC contributor Molly Jong-Fast observed that getting rid of the Department of Education "will ultimately punish people in red states who have less state tax revenue for education spending." As Forbes reported last month, the Education Department provides roughly $18 billion in funding to high-poverty school districts across the country under the Title I program. The agency also funds special education to the tune of $15 billion each year through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Democratic members of Congress are also coming out against the plan. On Bluesky, Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) warned: "Today it's [the U.S. Agency for International Development]. Tomorrow it's the Department of Education ... Democrats are actively working to stop these illegal acts." And in a Tuesday speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) called Trump's order "an assault on America's children," adding that "the president does not have the Constitutional authority to do this."

"We need to rise up and oppose this blatantly unconstitutional executive order. We need to stand up for public education," Khanna said.

Click here to read CNN's report in full.

Trump preps executive order to abolish Dept. of Education — despite legal hurdles: report

David Edwards

RAW STORY
February 4, 2025 

U.S. President Donald Trump holds a signed executive order on AI, in the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington, U.S., January 23, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

President Donald Trump is reportedly preparing to use an executive order to try to abolish the Department of Education — even though he cannot legally shut down the agency without the approval of Congress.

Sources told NBC News that Trump's executive order aimed to eliminate the federal agency following years of campaign promises. CNN confirmed the report.

Fox Business host Stuart Varney asked White House Karoline Leavitt to confirm the news during a Tuesday interview.

"So you can't confirm that he is going to try to abolish the Department of Education, you can't confirm that for us?" Varney asked.

"I will say that President Trump campaigned on that promise and I think the American people can expect him to deliver on it," Leavitt replied.

Watch the video below or at this link.

TRUMPLAND

Doctors Rush to Access CDC Archives After Website Is Purged on Trump’s Orders

Doctors are struggling to access public health information as the Trump administration censors federal agency websites.

By Mike Ludwig , 

Truthout

February 4, 2025

President Donald Trump arrives to speak about the mid-air crash between American Airlines Flight 5342 and a military helicopter, in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on January 30, 2025, in Washington, D.C.

Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images

The fallout from President Donald Trump’s “shock and awe” campaign to bend the federal government to his will is becoming painfully apparent. Doctors and advocates report that that the slew of new executive orders are already causing disruptions in treatment, all while Republicans in Congress consider spending cuts that analysts say could strip coverage for millions and spin the health system into further disarray.

Margaret Russell, a family physician and HIV specialist at a clinic in Chicago, was in the middle of seeing patients on Friday when she checked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website for clinical guidelines doctors routinely reference, only to find that the specific page she was looking for had been taken down.

For the past week, agencies across the federal government have been racing to comply with Trump’s vague executive orders targeting “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)” and “gender ideology.” Russell and her colleagues quickly realized that the most up-to-date information on HIV prevention medication, sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing, contraception, childhood vaccination schedules, and more had been scrubbed from the CDC website. Like others across the country, the health workers scrambled to take screenshots of archived versions of the webpages before they could be censored as well.

“I cannot possibly overstate how bad this is,” Russell said in an interview.

Russell said a colleague reached out on Saturday with a question about a pregnant patient with an inconclusive syphilis screening. The U.S. is experiencing an alarming spike in cases of syphilis, an STI that is curable but requires treatment, but pregnancy is known to cause false positives in some tests.

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Russell said she would usually consult the latest CDC guidelines to confirm next steps, but the section had been censored along with other information on serious STI infections in pregnant patients and newborns.

While the CDC reportedly restored some resources to its website after public outcry over Trump’s purge of content, a review by Truthout confirmed that pages providing information for the LGBTQ community and guidelines for the HIV prevention medication PrEP were down on January 31. A message on the CDC website now says modifications are being made to “comply” with Trump’s executive orders.

“It’s not that there are no other ways to access this information, but knowing that there is a reliable, trustworthy, central repository for these types of medical guidelines is really critical to our ability to provide good, safe, efficient care,” Russell said.

“I promise you: You want your doctor to be able to access the accurate, updated, complete medical information.”

Russell said the CDC website was also a reliable place to direct patients because the agency’s information must remain scientifically sound to maintain the public’s trust. That’s no longer the case. Doctors can now expect CDC guidelines to be edited based on the political preferences of whoever is in power, which means the nation’s top public health agency will no longer be a trustworthy source for the most up to date information on diseases and standards of care, Russell said.

Medical science and the latest threats to public health are always evolving, Russell said, so the archived versions of CDC webpages her colleagues “salvaged” the other day are not a long-term solution.

“I think a lot of people don’t believe this impacts them, but I promise you: You want your doctor to be able to access the accurate, updated, complete medical information,” Russell said. “And you don’t want to live in a community where people aren’t receiving appropriate treatment for infections that can be passed on to others.”

Trump and his allies have railed against perceived censorship of conservatives. But Robert Weissman, co-president of the watchdog Public Citizen, points out that censoring government websites that provide fact-based information on contraception and STI prevention shows what little value is placed on the First Amendment.

“Rather, they want to control people’s access to information as part of a dual agenda of advancing authoritarianism and an extremist, hateful cultural agenda,” Weissman said in a statement on Friday. “The Trumpian Thought Police are denying Americans fact-based information and endangering people’s health and well-being.”

The scrubbing of public health websites is just one way in which the new administration is upending public health. Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has spread dangerous misinformation about vaccines and flubbed questions about major federal health programs during confirmation hearings. Protests are erupting outside hospitals as providers curb gender-affirming care for teenagers to comply with Trump’s executive orders. And the chaos over Trump’s initial proposed funding freeze, which has been paused by a judge multiple times, still leaves health researchers and providers concerned about the potential loss in funding.

By further complicating an already dysfunctional health care system, Trump and his allies may be playing with fire. Polls show that besides the economy, health care remains the top concern for voters who are frustrated by spiraling costs and hostile insurance companies that are dysfunctional by design. The depth of the public’s anger was on display in December when the internet erupted in applause following the brazen assassination of a wealthy CEO at UnitedHealthcare, a top U.S. health insurer.

However, this has not prevented Republicans in Congress from considering deep cuts to programs that make health care affordable for millions of people.

As they search for ways to pay for an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts which would pad the pockets of the wealthiest taxpayers without adding to the deficit, Republicans are considering massive cuts to federal health care spending. House Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed on Monday that the GOP is determined to extend the tax cuts without blowing a “hole in the deficit” during an interview on Fox News. Trump is “doing a lot by executive authority, which we applaud,” Johnson said, “but we’re going to follow that up and really reinforce what he’s doing, the agenda, through legislation.”

Kobie Christian, a spokesperson for the economic justice group Unrig Our Economy, said Johnson is determined to make working people foot the bill for millionaires and billionaires.

“Even as Americans continue to face higher prices nationwide, Republicans insist on further increasing costs for regular people by imposing tariffs on everyday items and cutting federal funding for essential programs such as health care and child care to pay for billionaires’ tax breaks,” Christian said in an email on Monday.

A GOP proposal under consideration would cut $2.3 trillion in funding over 10 years from Medicaid, which provides health insurance for lower-income people and people with disabilities. There are multiple ways to make the cuts, including by capping the amount of funding available to states or imposing work requirements that do not increase employment but force people out of the program with red tape.

Republicans may also reduce spending by allowing subsidies for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace health plans to expire, which would cause insurance costs for millions of people to skyrocket and leave an average 3.8 million more people without insurance each year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. In 2024, 56 percent of ACA marketplace enrollees lived in congressional districts represented by Republicans, and 76 percent of enrollees are in states won by Trump.

Trump has been silent about the proposed cuts to Medicaid and the ACA marketplace, but he has said that Medicare, Social Security and the defense budget should be spared cuts, which leaves Republicans in Congress with few other options besides slashing programs that provide health care to working-class people, including some of their own supporters. Despite Trump’s self-assured attacks on the system, health care will continue to raise vexing questions for the GOP moving forward.

 'So stupid!' Prof. shares government threat to halt scientific studies mentioning 'women'

David Edwards

RAW STORY
February 4, 2025

Scientist in lab (Shutterstock)

President Donald Trump's administration reportedly threatened to halt grants for scientific studies that mention words like "female," "women," "systemic" or "trauma."

Darby Saxbe, a professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California, shared a leaked list of words that could cause scientific studies to be flagged by the National Science Foundation.

"This is a crisis for academic freedom & science," Saxbe wrote. "These keywords could show up in the text of ANY grant involving human participants. If you say you're going to study men and women, you get flagged. If you say you're going to control for socioeconomic status - totally standard practice - you get flagged. Disability? Flagged."

"The word 'systemic' is on the banned list, so if I study systemic inflammation & health, flagged. If I study political science, flagged. If I study trauma, flagged. Keep in mind that the largest mental health provider in the country is the Veteran's Administration, but we can't study trauma now?" she continued. " If I study anxiety via threat-biased attention, the word 'biased' gets me flagged. You can't design a study of humans without using at least one of the terms on the banned list, which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA."

"This is what makes them so stupid. Clearly, they only have an elementary school education. Good grief. Why use words at all?"

Although a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order blocking Trump's federal grant funding freeze, the NSF was continuing to flag scientific studies, according to reports.

Read the partial list of words below.

Silencing science: How Trump is reshaping U.S. health

Agence France-Presse
February 3, 2025 

A sign with the logo for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the Tom Harkin Global Communications Center on October 5, 2014 in Atlanta, Georgia

 (Kevin C. Cox/AFP)


by Issam AHMED

Medical researchers left to compile national data by hand, contraceptive guidelines deemed essential by doctors erased, and the nation's largest tuberculosis outbreak left unreported: President Donald Trump's administration has thrown the US health system into uncharted territory.

Here's a look at some of the biggest impacts.

- Key medical journal goes silent -

Within days of Trump taking office last month, the Health and Human Services Department imposed an indefinite "pause" on communications.

One of its first casualties was The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), a venerable epidemiological digest published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

For the first time in 60 years, the journal -- which once published the first case studies of what would become the AIDS crisis -- has missed two editions, with no word on when it will return.

"MMWR is the voice of science. The delay in publishing is dangerous," wrote former CDC director Tom Frieden on BlueSky.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Faust, a physician and Harvard instructor who runs the Inside Medicine Substack, reported that CDC scientists have been instructed to retract or pause all papers submitted to external journals to remove language deemed offensive -- including the word "gender."

- Critical resources for doctors scrubbed -

Doctors nationwide are reeling after the sudden removal of a CDC app that helped determine the suitability of contraceptives based on patients' medical history and medications.

Also deleted: Clinical Guidance for PrEP (a critical HIV-prevention tool), resources on intimate partner violence, and guidelines on LGBTQ+ behavioral health.


Some pages have been restored but now carry an ominous banner: "CDC's website is being modified to comply with President Trump's Executive Orders." Others remain missing, causing widespread confusion.

Jessica Valenti, a feminist author and founder of the Abortion Every Day Substack, has been archiving the deleted materials on CDCguidelines.com to preserve the original, inclusive versions.

"The hope is to have it be a resource for the people who need it," she told AFP, adding that even if documents are restored, words like "trans" may be scrubbed from them.

- Infectious outbreaks unreported -

As medical associations sound the alarm over the lack of federal health communication, outbreaks are slipping under the radar.

In Kansas City, Kansas, the largest tuberculosis outbreak in US history is unfolding with 67 active cases since 2024 -- yet no national health authority has reported on it.


"The National Medical Association (NMA) is calling for a swift resolution to the federal health communications freeze, which has the potential to exacerbate this outbreak and other public health threats," wrote the group, which represents African American physicians.

Similarly, a measles outbreak among unvaccinated schoolchildren in Texas has gone unreported at the national level.

Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist who studies influenza trends, wrote on her blog that she has resorted to manually tallying cases from all 50 state health departments because the CDC's central data repository has been taken down.

© Agence France-Presse

'IT'S NOT' BLACK HISTORY MONTH

NFL removes 'End Racism' from Super Bowl end zone as White House says Trump will attend

David Edwards

RAW STORY
February 4, 2025

The NFL is reportedly removing the "End Racism" logo from the Super Bowl end zone as the White House announced that President Donald Trump would attend the event on Sunday.

NFL sources told The Athletic that "End Racism" would not appear in the end zone for the first time since 2021. The messages "Choose Love" and "It Takes All of Us" would be seen instead.

"We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League," NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said. "And we're going to continue those efforts, because we've not only convinced ourselves, we've proven it to ourselves — it does make the NFL better.

On Tuesday, White House officials confirmed that Trump would attend the big game. He will be the first sitting U.S. president to do so.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was also expected to be on the guest list.

'Sheer malevolence': Analyst says Trump's first weeks 'worse than you could have imagined'

Jennifer Bowers Bahney

February 4, 2025 

Democrats tried to work with President Donald Trump at the start of his second term, but the spirit of "sheer malevolence" by Trump and Elon Musk has made moving forward all but impossible, argued an opinion writer for MSNBC.

Journalist Paul Waldman wrote that initially, "some Democrats decided to extend a hand of bipartisanship." They included progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) who were both spurred on by the idea of cutting government waste through Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

Some progressives criticized Democrats for thinking they could amicably work side-by-side with the administration.

"But it turned out that even the most skeptical progressives who torched Democrats online underestimated the sheer malevolence of both Trump and Musk," Walman wrote. "In just two weeks, the billionaire duo has frozen government payments, scapegoated minorities for an air crash, purged officials deemed insufficiently loyal, seized the government's payment system and potentially shut down congressionally created agencies. Wherever you look, it's worse than you could have imagined."

He continued, "Trump and Musk are in a hurry to destroy everything they can get their hands on...They can’t be reasoned with. And they absolutely will not stop until they lay waste to our government as we have known it. Anyone who thought otherwise ought to understand by now."

Even so, Trump has "the highest favorability rating he's ever had," with "48.9 percent of respondents viewing him favorably and 47.7 percent holding an unfavorable opinion," according to a Real Clear Politics poll.

"I'm not necessarily surprised by Trump's numbers," Andrew David, senior lecturer at Boston University, told Newsweek: "These are impressive for him personally for sure. But this is the point in his administration when he should have numbers along these lines. Considering the scope of his November victory, it would be shocking if there was a major regress in his support."

David added, "That said, while these are great numbers for Trump, they're still low by almost any measure of the presidency. In fact, the only person who started with lower numbers was...Donald Trump [in 2016]."

Read the MSNBC opinion piece here.