< World Premiere > FRANK MICHAEL BEYER : 'Et resurrexit' für 12-stimmigen Chor oder 12 Solostimmen Sunday 16 March 2003 – Berlin Rundfunkchor Berlin, cond. Simon Halsey Boosey & Hawkes / Bote & Bock, Berlin, 2002

< World Premiere > PATRICK BURGAN : Stabat Mater (for unaccompanied SSAATTBB choir & soli) Saturday 16 March, 1996 Auch (France), Festival "Eclats de Voix" Les Eléments, cond. Joël Suhubiette Editions Jobert (JJ1741-7)

< World Premiere > ERNST PEPPING : Das Jahr (for unaccompanied SATB div. choir) Sunday 16 March, 1941 – Berlin Chor der Berliner Kirchenmusikschule, dir. Gottfried Grote Texts: Josef Weinheber Schott Music GbmH & Co., 1941 (ED 2913)

< United States Premiere > RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS : Symphony No. 7 'Sinfonia Antartica' Thursday 16 March, 1953 Chicago Symphony Orchestra, cond. Raphael Kubelik

< World Premiere > ERNST PEPPING : Das Jahr (for unaccompanied SATB div. choir) Sunday 16 March, 1941 – Berlin Chor der Berliner Kirchenmusikschule, dir. Gottfried Grote Texts: Josef Weinheber Schott Music GbmH & Co., 1941 (ED 2913)

< World Premiere > ERNST PEPPING : Das Jahr (for unaccompanied SATB div. choir) Sunday 16 March, 1941 – Berlin Chor der Berliner Kirchenmusikschule, dir. Gottfried Grote Texts: Josef Weinheber Schott Music GbmH & Co., 1941 (ED 2913)

'Ain't I an Athlete' : 'Protecting Women's Sports' Has Never Been About Protecting Black Women Dr. Brigitte Burpo Contraband Camp Friday 14 March, 2025 It’s an old playbook with new opponents. Black women athletes are often criticized as too aggressive, too strong, too much of everything except what white and sexist sports culture deems acceptable. Their bodies are analyzed, their confidence is seen as threatening, and their strength deemed suspicious. Now, the same people performing moral outrage over these supposedly “masculine” Black women are the loudest voices insisting that the fewer than 10 of the 510,000 student-athletes in the NCAA who identify as trans will ruin women’s athletics with claims that they have an unfair advantage. Because, suddenly, the category of "woman" must be firmly defended — when it’s politically convenient. It is not a coincidence that the newfound mass media interest in women’s sports, increased commercialization of such and the new anti-woke era have created a salty roux for the recipe of oppressing trans women athletes through policy and baseless scrutiny — scrutiny that will likely increase for all female athletes, particularly for Black women and girls. Last month, a day after the Trump administration signed an executive order banning transgender women and girls from participating in female sports, the NCAA Board of Governance voted to update the participation policy for transgender student-athletes limiting competition in women's sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth. The NCAA’s swift policy shift reinforced the administration’s exclusionary stance and tapped into a much older and more insidious narrative, one that has long been used to police the boundaries of womanhood in sports. The fight over who belongs in women’s sports has always been more than just an issue of fairness. Per usual, it’s about power, control and exclusion. At this point, Black women athletes could write the playbook on being scrutinized, excluded and policed in sports because we’ve seen this game before, and it’s getting old. From Althea Gibson to Serena Williams, and Flo Jo to Sha’Carri Richardson, every generation brings a new excuse to tell Black women we’re too much to handle. And now, the same tired rhetoric is being recycled to justify excluding trans women, under the guise of “fairness” and “protecting women.” But if fairness was really the concern, we’d be talking about equal pay, equal media coverage and how women’s sports are underfunded. But instead, we have white men “protecting” women who never asked for nor needed to be protected. Society loves to celebrate strength, resilience and competitiveness when it comes in the form of white women athletes. Billie Jean King is rightly celebrated as a trailblazer for women’s sports and was praised for her ability to defeat Bobby Riggs in the renowned “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973. She was aggressive and unrelenting, and in the eyes of American sports media, these were considered virtues. Contrast that with the treatment of Black women athletes who break barriers. Serena Williams spent much of her career battling perceptions that she was too muscular and aggressive to be fully embraced by mainstream narratives in the way that her white counterparts were, despite being one of the greatest tennis players in history. WNBA player Brittney Griner has also faced scrutiny for being too masculine and fighting perceptions that she’s a man. While white women are celebrated for their strength and intensity, Black women’s success comes with an asterisk, a lingering question of whether they really deserve to be here. It is clear that strength is only acceptable in women when it doesn’t challenge the status quo. When Black women excel, bigotry fights back. In 2018, World Athletics introduced new testosterone regulations that were framed as necessary for maintaining a level playing field, but in fact, it overwhelmingly impacted Black women from the Global South, including Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba and Margaret Wambui, all of whom were banned from competing in their events unless they underwent hormone-suppressing treatment to lower their testosterone levels for six months. These women were not taking performance-enhancing drugs nor were they trans. They were simply born with hormone levels that fell outside of an arbitrarily determined “acceptable” range for womanhood. The idea that Black women and girl athletes are “too masculine” and the claim that trans women athletes are “not real women” come from the same place — a covert fear of women who do not fit neatly into the narrow, white and delicate box of femininity that our society loves to celebrate. Black girls are hypersexualized while simultaneously critiqued if they’re not feminine enough as athletes. There is a shrinking box of what it means to be feminine if you are a Black girl who plays sports, and policies that narrowly interpret those terms of femininity do not help. The argument of "protecting women" has also been wielded as a weapon to justify racism and sexism in the United States for a long time. It was this very dogma that led to the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, when the original “Karen,” Carolyn Bryant, falsely accused him of making advances toward her. The same argument of protecting women fueled countless lynchings and domestic-racial terrorism, all in the name of defending white womanhood from perceived threats. While white women were being placed on pedestals in need of defense, Black women were never afforded the same shield. Sojourner Truth asked a very germane question in 1851 when she delivered her iconic speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” When Black women are torn down, ridiculed and denied opportunities because they do not fit a white mold of femininity, where is the outcry for protection? The truth is that “protecting women” has never been about protecting all women. It is and has always been a mask to uphold white supremacy while enforcing Eurocentric gender norms. Today, Black and trans women athletes alike are reminded yet again that the shield was never meant for them.

< World Premiere > ERNST PEPPING : Passionsbericht des Matthäus (for unaccompanied SATB-SATB choir) Saturday 10 March, 1951 – Leipzig, Germany Thomanerchor Leipzig, dir. Günther Ramin Bärenreiter Verlag, 1950 (BA2276) https://tinyurl.com/23cn8t4a

Musk Doesn’t Understand Why Government Matters The Editorial Board New York Times Saturday 8 March, 2025 Elon Musk’s life is a great American success story. Time and again, he has anticipated where the world was headed, helping to create not just new products but new industries. His achievements, from his pioneering role in online payments to the construction of SpaceX’s satellite network to the mass production of electric Teslas, have made him the world’s wealthiest man. But Mr. Musk’s fortune rests on more than his individual talent. He built his business empire in a nation with a stable political system and an unwavering commitment to the rule of law, and he built it on a foundation of federal subsidies, loans and contracts. Mr. Musk’s companies have received at least $38 billion in government support, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. NASA has invested more than $15 billion in SpaceX; Tesla has collected $11 billion in subsidies to bolster the electric car industry. Now, as an influential adviser to President Trump, Mr. Musk is lawlessly tearing down parts of the very government that enabled his rise. As the head of an agency he conjured and named the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Mr. Musk has suspended billions of dollars in spending and discarded thousands of scientists, regulators and other government workers. Brandishing a chain saw during a recent appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he shouted: “This is the chain saw for bureaucracy. Chain saw!” Mr. Musk claims that the government is a business in need of disruption and that his goal is to eliminate waste and improve efficiency. And he’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient. Taxpayers, business owners and recipients of federal benefits all know the frustration of navigating the federal bureaucracy. There are huge opportunities, in particular, for the government to make better use of technology. But DOGE is not building a better government. Instead, its haphazard demolition campaign is undermining the basic work of government and the safety and welfare of the American people. Mr. Musk directed the firing of nuclear safety workers, necessitating a frantic effort to rehire them just days later. He ended federal funding for Ebola monitoring, and despite his subsequent acknowledgment that it might be a good idea to keep an eye on Ebola, it still has not been fully restored. The government at Mr. Musk’s behest has disrupted cancer research, delayed work on transportation projects and sought to close the agency established after the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers from being robbed by banks. Even worse is that Mr. Musk, with Mr. Trump’s support, has demonstrated a disregard for the limits that the Constitution places on the president’s power. Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump insist that voters want change. DOGE’s slogan is “The people voted for major reform.” But in their campaign to shrink the federal government, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have defied laws passed by Congress, and they have challenged the authority of the federal courts to adjudicate the legality of their actions. Mr. Trump recently referred to himself as a king and then insisted he had been joking, but there is no ambiguity in his assertion of the power to defy other branches of government. It is a rejection of the checks and balances that have safeguarded our nation for more than 200 years. Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump are not trying to change laws; they are upending the rule of law. Even where Mr. Musk’s actions have remained within the bounds of the law, he has shown little understanding of the differences between business and government. Mr. Musk built his rocket company, SpaceX, by repeatedly launching rockets that failed until he learned how to launch rockets that worked. Even now, the company often conducts experiments that fail, and Mr. Musk has argued, compellingly, that “if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” But managing the nation’s air traffic control system or its Social Security payment system requires a different calculus. Businesses can take risks in pursuit of profit because it’s OK if they fail. Americans can’t afford for the basic functions of government to fail. If Twitter stops working, people can’t tweet. When government services break down, people can die. While governments are often guilty of inefficiency, it is in the public interest to tolerate some inefficiency when the alternative is a breakdown of basic infrastructure. “I think we’re just moving a little too fast,” Representative Rich McCormick, Republican of Georgia, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in late February after constituents booed him at a town-hall meeting. He suggested the Trump administration should pause to think before acting. “We’re moving really, really rapidly, and we don’t know the impact.” Mr. Trump, responding to similar concerns from members of his administration, reportedly said at a cabinet meeting on Thursday that cabinet secretaries would be in charge of future cuts in their departments and that Mr. Musk would be restricted to an advisory role. But it remains to be seen whether that will happen. Our system of government is obdurate by design. It is stable even by comparison with other democracies, many of which are governed by parliamentary systems in which the results of a single election can sharply shift public policy. In the United States, where power is divided among three coequal branches of government, it is relatively rare for one political party to gain such sweeping power for any period. The stability of the nation’s laws, and of the government’s role, has caused frustration throughout American history. It is also a kind of secret sauce, facilitating the private-sector investment and risk taking that are the wellspring of the nation’s prosperity. That stability is now under assault. The United States has experienced a marked increase in political volatility and even political violence, most notably in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election and in the assassination attempts against Mr. Trump. The World Bank’s index of political stability ranked the United States in the 66th percentile of all nations in 2013. By 2023, it had dropped into the bottom half of the rankings. Research has shown that even small declines in political stability can deliver enduring blows to economic growth, mostly by discouraging investment. In a chaotic environment, like post-Brexit Britain or Mr. Trump’s America, entrepreneurs are less likely to pursue big ideas, and investors will hesitate to make long-term commitments. DOGE, of course, is merely one way that Mr. Trump has increased instability, along with his flurry of executive orders purporting to rewrite environmental policy, the meaning of the 14th Amendment and more; his on-again-off-again tariffs; and his inversion of American foreign policy, wooing Vladimir Putin while disdaining longtime allies. Mr. Musk has made clear that he holds caution in contempt. But the president, whose power Mr. Musk is wielding, should listen to those in his party who are raising concerns about Mr. Musk’s methods and priorities. There are already signs that the chaos is hurting the economy. Inflation expectations have risen; stock prices have tumbled. Americans like to take risks; to do so, they need a government that is steady and reliable.

How American Mainstream Media Eats Away at Our Empathy Greg Fish World of Wierd Things Sunday 16 February, 2025 Americans tend to be a weirdly optimistic and nihilistic bunch at the same time. We’re convinced that things will eventually be better. But also that nothing will really change, and every politician is absolutely useless and doesn’t care about us. In times of need, our government will move mountains to save us. But it’s also a huge, useless waste of our money filled with incompetent goobers only interested in self-enrichment. We are one country, one people, and anyone can become an American. But it’s every person for themselves and no one owes you anything. In other words, modern day American political ideology is a mishmash of oxymorons spoken with absolute conviction. And few institutions do more to reinforce this while doing tremendous damage to our social framework than our mainstream media. Its addiction to negative spin to get clicks and eyeballs, absolute, total moral apathy and insistence on finding two sides to any story, even if one of the sides is fundamentally wrong or actively malicious, encourages us to see the absolute worst in each other at all times, and feel as if nothing is certain. As a result, we’re constantly stressed out, see the world around us as collapsing, all efforts to fix it as hopeless, struggling to find objective reality as our information tools now lie to us for profit, so as we hear more and more unhinged tales, terrible opinions, and see corruption and sociopathic excess laughed off by millionaire pundits, it starts to sap our empathy. And once that happens, societies are at risk of splintering as its members either can’t cooperate, or refuse to. If helping others is for losers and suckers, if everything you try is “bad, actually” or is not good enough, if when you talk about giving people opportunities or making things more fair there’s an instant backlash, if the very people you want to help after they ask for your help only spit in your face, yell slurs at you, make death threats, and wish for horrible things to happen to you while rallying around hate-mongering sociopaths… What’s the point in caring anymore? Why even bother to help? Why not just sit back with a stiff drink and watch the world crumble? Of course, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. A few experts will argue that splintering into groups that have polarized, radical views can be thought of as a form of empathy as we defend those close to us, right or wrong, following our tribal instincts. Some say that instead of being empathetic, we should be compassionate. In other essays, social scientists say that too much empathy can leave us too paralyzed to make difficult but necessary decisions. Researchers who specialize in group psychology, disinformation, and propaganda are ringing the alarm bells as every possible sign of deep societal trouble is now going off at the same time. A country that couldn’t unite over a common enemy like COVID, an apolitical, faceless virus which is impossible to debate about the economy, or tax cuts, or its thoughts on education and history, has a dire problem. The last pandemic was a force of nature, an equal opportunity killer and maimer. That more often than not we fought each other instead of the virus, is beyond disconcerting. Now, we can debate whether it’s the place of scientists or popular science writers to wade into politics. But social science is inherently political. It’s quite literally the study of how we work in groups and organize to survive, create culture, and carry ourselves forward. To not comment on something as basic as “our country refuses to work with itself during a crisis, or solve real problems” requires either extreme privilege, blissful ignorance, or craven cowardice, or some unholy mix of all three. And one thing that is not in dispute is that functional societies believe that “everyone for themselves” is a terrible idea and any civilization worth its salt helps those down on their luck or who haven’t been born with money, access, and connections so they can also have the means and desire to contribute to the greater good. When those in power refer to helping the unfortunate improve their lot in life as “giving handouts to lazy bums” and attack all public works and acts of goodwill as a waste, you know the society in question is in trouble. And things get even worse when public discourse in said society fails to push back on this parasitic and sociopathic rhetoric. How to Perpetually Poison the Well There are two rules of American legacy media. The first is that thanks to 40 years of relentlessly working the refs, any political development must be framed around GOP approved talking points. This is why Trump’s nonsensical rants are edited and cut to make him sound somewhat coherent, and interviews with Biden and Harris tended to circle around hard hitting questions like “Donald Trump said you’re stupid and wear ugly shoes. What’s your reaction to that?” Republicans are good at the border, the economy, and the military, Democrats are bad at everything, and if you thought that they did something good, just wait, you silly little libtard, the NYT politics desk will explain to you why lowering inflation and soaring job numbers are actually terrible news. No matter what Democrats actually say during an appearance on the campaign trail, they’re running on trans woke DEI CRT LGBT-BBQ, while no matter what comes out of a Republican’s mouth, their campaign is all about freedom, America, mom, baseball, and apple pie. That is The Official Narrative™ and it is not to be questioned by the unwashed rabble who don’t understand how difficult it is to be a journalist. If you disagree with any of that, then you must be a sweaty conspiracy theorist in their underwear from mom’s basement. At least according to NYT’s editors on social media. To do otherwise is to risk rabid shrieks of “bias,” although said shrieks will come anyway. And yes, trust me, all of this is relevant and we will circle back to it shortly. But first, let’s talk about the other important rule. Every American voter is the second coming of both Einstein and Newton, and when they cast a vote, they sit down at their kitchen tables with a custom quantum supercomputer which uses algorithms that can summon Laplace’s Demon to calculate every possible outcome of every mark on their ballot. Whatever their decision is cannot be questioned. If you don’t understand why they voted the way they did, you cannot criticize their choice. The only explanation is that you simply can’t comprehend their infinite wisdom. By the way, any important conversation or decision always happens at a kitchen table according to politicians. Dining room? Doesn’t count. You live in a studio? Ha! Get out of here. It’s impossible for you to have a serious discussion. Are you debating current events and their impact on your wallet in your living room? Get your ass in that kitchen immediately. These are kitchen table issues so use the appropriate forum, dammit! In the meanwhile, actual voters think that Obamacare and the ACA are two completely different things and they can’t wait to get rid of that stupid Obamacare bullshit to just get their ACA. They believe that foreign aid is a quarter of the federal budget when it’s around 1% or so. They think NASA commands another quarter of the budget, when in fact, it hovers around half a percent. And every year at tax season, they demand a full breakdown of how their tax money is being spent only to diligently ignore a few million charts showing where every dollar goes. For all the rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth about President Musk and his Itty Bitty Gooner Squad dismantling the government, the number of Americans who think that Washington DC steals $6.8 trillion a year, pays out two million freeloaders in their pajamas $200,000 for nothing, then sets the rest on fire is far from trivial. They really do believe that Republicans are “finally fixing this stupid mess” through the power of bald eagle screeching and… I don’t know, mom’s apple pie served on an AR-15? And yes, I’m trying to make all this at least somewhat amusing to lighten the mood a bit, but this is an untenable situation. A democracy — and yes, a republic is a type of democracy, like Honey Nut Cheerios is a type of cereal — relies on informed, caring, empathetic voters to make decisions for the good of an entire society over the long term. As the Greek proverb goes, civilization grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they’ll never sit. Our old men? They’re selling the seeds for golf clubs and pickleball lessons. When a public is treated as both simpletons with the attention span of a goldfish with ADHD and fed red-baiting anachronisms and rage bait instead of actual news, but also as transcendent, infallible oracles whose words we may not understand but must follow, bad things were guaranteed to happen. Things that require empathetic adults in the room to fix. But these adults have now hit levels of caretaker fatigue that were once thought to be utterly impossible, and are so out of fucks, the ones they gave over the past year were borrowed as they’ve ran out of their own long ago… The New Red Scare, Same as the Old Red Scare What’s happening today in American government has a precedent. Not only that, but we’re technically doing the same thing Republicans did in 1953. After painting pretty much the entire bureaucracy as communists trying to destroy the nation with FDR’s New Deal — because as we all know, first, you start caring for your fellow Americans, next you’re in a collective farm after the government takes everything you own — the party’s loudest and most regressive demagogues unleashed an ideological purge of the rank and file that affected the nation for decades. That’s right folks, McCarthyism is back, and it’s not even remotely veiled. It’s just that instead of “are you a communist spy?” the question that the next House Un-American Activities Committee will ask is “do you support DEI initiatives?” before declaring that the very notion that someone other than a late-middle aged white man can be in any position of expertise or authority is “Cultural Marxism.” Meanwhile, rational adults will look at retrograde reprobates who never got over the end of Jim Crow and segregation re-litigating the 1960s and asking how this helps us deal with modern problems. As in the ones from this century. Like more intense and frequent storms from climate change, antibiotic resistance, losing pace with science and technology worldwide, or woefully outdated infrastructure and urban planning. They will listen to the very people who elected said retrograde reprobates being left without a pot to piss in while the billionaires they claim to hate and want to see paying their fair share get more tax cuts, and how they’re losing the family farm, how their life is getting more and more expensive with no relief, and how it feels as if the world has left these people behind and ignores them. The adults will then offer to help. To enact far reaching programs break up our current oligopolies, forcing businesses to compete and lower prices. To build more housing to lower the insane, and yet still rising costs of putting a roof over one’s head. To expand the current public healthcare system to everyone, with private health insurance being an extra add-on or benefit, like in virtually every other wealthy, industrialized nation. To build more public transit to improve mobility. To invest more in education, science, and technology other than predatory middleman apps. To clean up air and water, and launch lucrative, job-creating green energy projects. And the pundits in the media will sneer at these adults with a dyspeptic grimace and accuse them of being utopian dreamers untethered from reality at best, claim they’re trying to destroy the country at worst, or just laugh in their faces. Meanwhile, the very people they’re trying to help turn to them and say “fuck you commie scum, I hope you die and we can use your grave for target practice.” Repeat this for about a quarter century as things continue to get worse and worse for the people actively making the choice to hurt themselves and the rest of the country in what increasingly seems like a murder-suicide pact, and you can probably see why as of late, the adults in the room are no longer wiping the spittle off their faces to still roll up their sleeves and help where they can anyway. Instead, their response — to the shock of millions — is “okay, cool, fuck you too, don’t call me when you’re finding out after fucking around.” That is the sound of their empathy dying. Because while we tend of think of people as either being kind and empathetic or not, empathy is a finite resource. All of us have a different degree of empathy and compassion we can offer, but can only give so much until we’re burnt down to a cinder and simply cannot bring ourself to care anymore. If we’re being abused while we do it, there’s even less empathy we can muster. At some point, we are no longer trying to help our fellow citizens, we are enabling our own abusers who believe that their rightful place in the universe is with their boot on the necks of anyone not exactly like them or actively groveling before them. We have realized as a society that we have been at this point for a very long time now. And we no longer want to be enablers.

The Putinization of America Garry Kasparov The Atlantic Friday 28 February, 2025 We are barely a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump and he has made his top priorities clear: the destruction of America’s government and influence and the preservation of Russia’s. Unleashing Elon Musk and his DOGE cadres on the federal government, menacing Canada and European allies, and embracing Vladimir Putin’s wish list for Ukraine and beyond are not unrelated. These moves are all strategic elements of a plan that is familiar to any student of the rise and fall of democracies, especially the “fall” part. The sequence is painfully familiar to me personally, because I marched in the streets as it played out in Russia at the start of the 21st century. With ruthless consistency, and the tacit approval of Western leaders, Putin and his oligarch supporters used his fair-ishly elected power to make sure that elections in Russia would never matter again. Of course, American institutions and traditions are far stronger than Russia’s fragile post-Soviet democracy was when Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin, who had already done his share of damage before anointing the former KGB lieutenant colonel to be his successor in 1999. But those who dismissed my warnings that yes, it can happen here at the start of Trump’s first term, in 2017, got quieter after the insurrection on January 6, 2021, and are almost silent now. Trump’s personal affinity for dictators was apparent early on. His praise for Putin and other elected leaders turned strongmen, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, was tinged with undisguised envy. No feisty parliament to wrangle. The free press turned into a propaganda machine for the administration. The justice system unleashed against the opposition. Elections staged only for show. What’s not to like? Putin and Russia always held a special place in Trump world, however. Russian intelligence and propaganda worked full-time to promote Trump once he won the Republican nomination to face Hillary Clinton in 2016. WikiLeaks, long in the service of Russian intelligence but still nurturing its old whistleblower image, fed hacked documents to a naively cooperative American media. The Mueller Report makes the degree of cooperation between various Russian assets and the Trump campaign clear—damningly so, despite years of MAGA crying “Russia hoax” because Special Counsel Robert Mueller decided not to prosecute. Trump made Paul Manafort his campaign chair in May 2016, turning the Russia alarm bells into air-raid sirens for anyone paying attention. Manafort was a former fixer for Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, who attempted to thwart Ukrainians’ desire to join Europe only to be deposed by the Maidan Revolution of Dignity and forced to flee to Moscow in 2014. Manafort’s recent expertise was mostly in money and reputation laundering. Adding him to the campaign when Trump’s oddly pro-Putin rhetoric (“strong leader,” “loves his country,” “you think our country is so innocent?”) was already drawing attention seemed a little too on the nose: Why double down? From affinity, the campaign tilted into deeply suspicious fealty toward the Kremlin. Manafort’s subsequent plea of guilty for conspiracy to defraud the United States, and Trump’s later pardon, only threw more wood on the raging collusion fire. Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, during President Barack Obama’s second term. It annexed Crimea and entered eastern Ukraine, offering up feeble pretexts about protecting Russian speakers (whom it bombed indiscriminately), Nazis in Ukraine (also, naturally, the Jews running Ukraine), NATO expansion, and so-called Ukrainian separatists. Russia launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, in the second year of Joe Biden’s presidency, attempting to take Kyiv in what the Kremlin famously planned to be a three-day special military operation. The timing led Trump and his defenders to say that he had been tough on Russia: The invasion would never have occurred on Trump’s watch. Now that the second Trump administration is racing to tick off every point on Putin’s long wish list, the reason for this has become clear. In Trump’s second term, Putin was expecting him to abandon Ukraine, lift sanctions on Russia, create divisions within NATO, and leave Ukraine relatively defenseless before Europe could get organized to defend it. That is, exactly what is happening today. But Trump lost to Biden in 2020, and, entering his 23rd year in power, Putin needed a new conflict to distract from the dismal conditions in Russia. Dictators always wind up needing enemies to justify why nothing has improved under their eternal rule, and once the domestic opposition is eliminated, foreign adventures are inevitable. Putin didn’t expect much resistance from Ukraine or from the West, which he had successfully corrupted, bluffed, and bullied for decades. But then an unlikely hero appeared in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and actor who, it turned out, could perform a phenomenal impression of Winston Churchill under enemy fire. Ukraine’s brave resistance to the supposedly overwhelming might of the Russian military lasted long enough to force the United States and Europe to join its defense, albeit reluctantly and slowly. Three long years have passed. Iranian drones crash nightly into Ukrainian civilian centers; Russian artillery and missiles reduce entire cities to rubble; China supports Russia’s attempt at conquest while hungrily eyeing Taiwan. Three years of documented reports of Russian torture, rape, and the mass kidnapping of children. North Korean soldiers have arrived to fight and die in Russia’s invasion, while NATO nations stand by, letting Ukrainians die in the war NATO was created to fight. Yet somehow Ukraine holds the line while Russia’s military losses grow and its economy wobbles. Once more unto the breach arrives Donald Trump, back in office with more help from the Kremlin—and the inept Democrats—ready to throw his old pal Putin a lifeline. At his side is someone new: the richest private citizen in the world, Elon Musk. (Putin controls far more money than Musk or Trump—do not underestimate how that affects their perceptions of him as the big boss.) With Musk arrives an overused and misunderstood word in the American vernacular: oligarch. Although it’s not a Russian word, post-Soviet Russia popularized its use and attempted to perfect the system it described. In the 1990s, those most capable of manipulating the newly privatized markets became the richest people in Russia. They quickly seized the levers of political power to expand their resources and fortunes, persecute their rivals, and blur the lines between public and private power until they were erased. Putin, a nondescript technocrat, was a useful front for billionaires such as Boris Berezovsky: Putin appeared to be the hard veteran of the KGB, cleaning up corruption—while what he was really doing was bringing it inside, legitimizing it, and creating a mafia state. Oligarchs could bend the knee and profit, or resist and end up in jail or in exile, their assets ripped away. Russian democracy had no institutional memory, no immune system to fight off these attacks. It was like a baby deer hit by a locomotive. The Russian Duma, purged of real opposition, became a Putin cheer squad under the new United Russia party. Judges and the security services fell in line or were removed in purges. Oversight was twisted into enforcement of the presidential will. Economic policy aimed to nationalize expenses and privatize profits, looting the country to line the pockets of a few dozen well-connected oligarchs. Foreign policy also moved out of public view, conducted by billionaires in resorts and on yachts. A flood of Russian money washed over European politicians and institutions. Kremlin troll farms and bots made social media into a national and then global weapon. If all of this is starting to sound a little familiar, welcome to the Putinization of America, comrade! Trump’s deference to the Russian autocrat has become full-blown imitation. Musk’s promotion of Kremlin-friendly candidates in Germany and Romania and his attacks on Ukraine are bizarre but not random. Berezovsky, who elevated Putin to power from behind the scenes, was soon exiled and replaced with more compliant oligarchs. He also met a grisly end—found hanged at his Berkshire mansion at 67—a precedent that might give pause to anyone thinking of risking his business empire to play that gray-cardinal role for the likes of Trump and J. D. Vance. Trump didn’t campaign on cutting cancer research and foreign aid any more than he did on threatening to annex Greenland and Canada or lifting sanctions on Putin’s dictatorship and extorting Ukraine. What these things have in common is that they provoke conflicts with allies, which then allow him to distinguish the truly loyal. Imitation and servility aren’t the same thing. Trump and Musk could attempt to undermine American democracy and create a Russian-style power vertical without kowtowing to Putin or abandoning Ukraine. But they haven’t. And while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, affinity and envy aren’t enough to explain the abruptness and totality of the Trump administration’s adoption of every Russian position. On Monday, the anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion, the United States even joined Russia in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine. Ronald Reagan gave a famous speech supporting Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 in which he said, “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size … A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” As a “Reagan Communist” myself back in the U.S.S.R., I sympathize with those who want to shrink and limit government power. But replacing it with a junta of unaccountable elites—the Putin model—is not an improvement. Cutting bureaucracy isn’t usually associated with despotism and power grabs. We tend to think of wannabe dictators packing the courts and increasing the size and power of the state. But that isn’t what you do when you want to make the government impotent against private power—your private power. The Putin model was to weaken any state institution that might defy him and to build state power back up only when he had total control. But why has Trump made Putin’s agenda his top priority? The GOP has been compliant with every Trump move so far, but a few members still take issue with Trump calling Zelensky a dictator while cozying up to Putin. So why pick fights with his narrow congressional majorities over Russia so early, with such urgency? The same could be asked of Musk’s reckless slash-and-burn tactics with DOGE, which are beginning to provoke backlash as popular programs are cut and job losses pile up, along with lawsuits. We may never know why Trump is so perversely loyal to Putin. We don’t know exactly why Musk went all in for Trump and Russia or what his deep conflicts of interest in the U.S. and China portend. But the urgency of their actions I do understand, and it’s a dire warning. These are not the acts of people who expect to lose power any time soon, or ever. They are racing to the point where they will not be able to afford to lose control of the mechanisms they are ripping up and remaking in their image. What such people will do when they believe that mounting a coup is the lesser risk to their fortunes and power cannot be predicted. There may be a Pulitzer Prize awaiting the person who discovers the answer to the question “Why?” But stopping Putinization—the looting by cronies, the centralization of authority, the moving of decisions into unaccountable private hands—is the vital matter of the moment. Trump admiring Putin is far less dangerous than Trump becoming him. ~

The Atlantic

The Putinization of America

Trump’s deference to the Russian dictator has become full-blown imitation.

Setting the Record Straight on Social Security Kathleen Romig Center on Budget & Policy Priorities Thursday 20 February, 2025 Social Security has broad support across party lines, income levels, and generations. After 90 years, Social Security remains one of the nation’s most successful, effective, and popular programs. The Social Security Administration (SSA) has strict controls over who receives a Social Security number (SSN) and what documentation is required to prove identity, U.S. citizenship, and immigration status. The agency assigns a unique Social Security number to each eligible individual, and it pays a single Social Security benefit to each qualifying individual with a Social Security number. Only U.S. citizens and some lawfully present non-citizens may receive Social Security benefits. Social Security’s payment accuracy rate is very high — well over 99 percent — and it has many safeguards against improper payments, including rigorous protocols to stop paying benefits to people who have died. Misinformation and false statements from President Trump and “Department of Government Efficiency" head Elon Musk claiming otherwise are causing confusion and risk undermining a trusted program that is rigorously administered, and which 69 million people currently rely on and nearly everyone will eventually use. Here are the facts. — Social Security Number: What Is it and Who Is Eligible? – The Social Security Administration only provides new or replacement Social Security cards to people who meet strict authentication requirements. Applicants must fill out an application for a Social Security card (SS-5) and take or mail original documents to a local Social Security office for processing. Applicants must provide at least two documents that prove age, identity, and U.S. citizenship or lawful immigration status. Almost all U.S. citizens are assigned Social Security numbers at birth through SSA’s enumeration at birth program. – Some non-citizens with lawful immigration statuses may receive Social Security numbers. To receive a work-authorized SSN, non-citizen applicants must prove that they have a current, lawful work-authorized immigration status (such as lawful permanent resident status, also known as having a green card). Social Security cards issued to non-citizens with temporary work authorization are labeled “VALID FOR WORK ONLY WITH DHS AUTHORIZATION.” To receive a non-work SSN, applicants must prove they are lawfully present in the U.S. (for example, on a student visa) and provide the valid, non-work reason for which they need an SSN. Social Security cards issued to non-citizens without work authorization are labeled “NOT VALID FOR EMPLOYMENT.” People who are without lawful immigration status are not eligible for an SSN. – The Social Security number is a unique identifier, meaning that one number is assigned to one individual. It was designed this way to keep track of each worker’s earnings so that SSA could determine eligibility for Social Security and the benefit amount, which is based on a worker’s earnings. — Social Security Benefits: Who Gets Them and How Are They Calculated?  – Social Security has a payment accuracy rate of over 99 percent. Only 0.3 percent of Social Security benefits are improper payments, which are typically caused by mistakes or delays. – SSA has many safeguards to ensure accurate payments, including strict documentation and eligibility requirements, quality reviews, and regular reviews of medical eligibility for disability beneficiaries and financial eligibility for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients. SSA works with its Office of Inspector General (OIG) to root out rare cases of outright fraud, in which applicants or beneficiaries deliberately falsify information to get or keep undeserved benefits. SSA and OIG team with state and local authorities in Cooperative Disability Investigations to investigate suspected fraud and to prosecute violations of the law. – Only U.S. citizens and some lawfully present non-citizens may receive Social Security benefits. Social Security benefits are based on the earnings on which people pay Social Security payroll taxes. As of 2004, non-citizens must have had work authorization for their earnings to count toward Social Security eligibility and benefits. In addition, the Social Security Act has prohibited the payment of benefits to non-citizens who are not “lawfully present” in the U.S. since 1996. – SSA only pays one Social Security benefit to each qualifying Social Security number holder. A person may receive a Social Security benefit based on their own work history or based on their relationship to a worker — for example, the surviving spouse of a deceased worker. Beneficiaries who are eligible in multiple ways (for example, as both a worker and a surviving spouse) only receive one benefit that is reduced under the “dual entitlement rule,” which caps the total benefit amount at the highest single benefit for which the person qualifies. In no case does the same individual receive multiple Social Security benefits, nor does SSA pay Social Security benefits to people without SSNs. – SSA has rigorous protocols to stop payments to beneficiaries who have died. State vital statistics agencies report deaths to SSA via the Electronic Death Registration system, typically within days. SSA also collects death data from funeral home directors, family members, and financial institutions. Across all sources, the agency receives nearly 3 million death reports each year, preventing over $50 million in improper payments each month. To catch any deaths that may have escaped reporting, SSA regularly checks to be sure its oldest beneficiaries are using their Medicare benefits — if not, they verify that the beneficiary is still alive. And in the extremely rare cases where benefits are paid to people over 100 years old, SSA has a policy to stop payments by age 115. – Only 0.1 percent of Social Security benefits are paid to people over 100 years old. DOGE head Elon Musk has been circulating a table he claims shows Social Security beneficiaries at very old ages, but he is grossly mischaracterizing its contents. These numbers appear to be drawn from SSA’s Numident database, a record of every Social Security number application since the program started. The Numident typically does not contain death dates for people born before 1920 — before Social Security was established and long before electronic records were kept. A 2023 OIG report explains that “almost none” of the people born before 1920 in this dataset are being paid benefits. As a result, SSA explained that adding death dates to these very old records would be “costly to implement [and] would be of little benefit.” ~ https://www.cbpp.org/blog/setting-the-record-straight-on-social-security?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Trump and Musk’s Plan to Destroy Social Security Started Tuesday Night Thom Hartmann The New Republic Thursday 6 March, 2025 Tuesday night, Donald Trump stood before the nation and, with the full backing of billionaires like Elon Musk, laid the groundwork for the biggest heist in American history—the rapid, systematic destruction of Social Security, disguised as “reform.” We saw the formal announcement of it during Trump’s non–State of the Union address, and the DOGE announcement earlier in the week that 7,000 employees at Social Security are to be immediately laid off—with as many as half of all Social Security employees (an additional 30,000 people)—soon to be on the chopping block. Republicans and their morbidly rich donors have hated Social Security ever since it was first created in 1935. They’ve called it everything from communism to socialism to a Ponzi scheme, which Musk just called it this week (“the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” no less). In fact, it has been the most successful anti-poverty program in the history of America, one now emulated by virtually every democracy in the world. But the right-wing billionaires hate it for several reasons. The first and most important reason is that it demonstrates that government can actually work for people and society. That then provides credibility for other government programs that billionaires hate even more, like regulating their pollution, breaking up their monopolies, making their social media platforms less toxic, and preventing them from ripping off average American consumers. Thus, to get political support for gutting regulatory agencies that keep billionaires and their companies from robbing, deceiving, and poisoning us, they must first convince Americans that government is stupid, clumsy, and essentially evil. Ronald Reagan began that process when he claimed that government was not the solution to our problems but was, in fact, the *cause* of our problems. It was a lie then and is a lie now, but the billionaire-owned media loved it and it’s been repeated hundreds of millions of times. Billionaires also know that for Social Security to survive and prosper, morbidly rich people will eventually have to pay the same percentage of their income into it as bus drivers, carpenters, and people who work at McDonald’s. Right now, people earning over $176,100 pay absolutely nothing into Social Security once that amount has been covered. To make Social Security solvent for the next 75 years, and even give a small raise to everybody on it, the simple fix is for the rich to just start paying Social Security income on all of their income, rather than only the first $176,100. But the idea of having to pay a tax on *all their income* so that middle-class and low-income people can retire comfortably fills America’s billionaires with dread and disgust. So much so that not one single Republican publicly supports the idea. How dare Americans have the temerity, they argue, to demand morbidly rich people help support the existence of an American middle class or help keep orphans and severely disabled people from being thrown out on the streets! Which is why Musk and his teenage hackers are attacking the Social Security administration and its employees with such gusto. By firing thousands of employees, their evil plan is to make interacting with Social Security such a difficult and painful process—involving months to make an appointment and hours or even days just to get someone on the telephone—that retired Americans will get angry with the government and begin to listen to Republicans and Wall Street bankers who tell us they should run the system. (This won’t be limited to Social Security, by the way; as you’re reading these words, Trump and Musk are planning to slash 80,000 employees from the Veterans Administration, with a scheme to dump those who served in our military into our private, for-profit hospital and health insurance systems.) The next step will be to roll out the Social Security version of Medicare Advantage, the privatized version of Medicare that George W. Bush created in 2003. That scam makes hundreds of billions of dollars in profits for giant insurance companies, who then kick some of that profit back to Republican politicians as campaign donations and luxury trips to international resorts. Advantage programs are notorious for screwing people when they get sick and for ripping off our government to the tune of billions every year. But every effort at reforming Medicare or stopping the Medicare Advantage providers from denying us care and stealing from our government has been successfully blocked by bought-off Republicans in Congress. Once Republicans have damaged the staffing of the Social Security Administration so badly that people are screaming about the difficult time they’re having signing up, solving problems or errors, or even getting their checks, right-wing media will begin to promote—with help from GOP politicians and the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News”—people opting out of Social Security and going with a private option that resembles private 401(k)s. Rumor has it they’ll call it “Social Security Advantage” and, like Medicare Advantage, which is administered for massive profits by the insurance giants, it will be run by giant, trillion-dollar banks out of New York. While big insurance companies have probably made something close to a trillion dollars in profits out of our tax dollars from Medicare Advantage since George W. Bush rolled out the program, Social Security Advantage could make that profit level look like chump change for the big banks. And, as an added bonus, billionaires and right-wing media will get to point out how hard it is to deal with the now-crippled Social Security Administration and argue that it’s time to relieve them too of the regulatory burdens of “big government”: gut or even kill off the regulatory agencies and make their yachts and private jets even more tax deductible than they already are. This is why Trump repeated Musk’s lies about 200-year-old people getting Social Security checks and the system being riddled with fraud and waste. In fact, Social Security is one of the most secure and fraud-free programs in American history. But Tuesday night was just the opening salvo. It took Bush almost three years to convince Congress to start the process of privatizing and ultimately destroying Medicare. Having learned from that process, odds are Trump will try to privatize Social Security within the year. And he may well get away with it, unless we can wake up enough people to this coming scam and put enough political pressure—particularly on Republicans—to prevent it from happening. ~

Trump and Musk’s Plan to Destroy Social Security Started Tuesday Night | The New Republic

The Rise of the Brutal American Anne Applebaum The Atlantic Wednesday 5 March, 2025 A book festival in Vilnius, meetings with friends in Warsaw, a dinner in Berlin: I happened to be at gatherings in three European cities over the past several days, and everywhere I went, everyone wanted to talk about the Oval Office performance last Friday. Europeans needed some time to process this event, not just because of what it told them about the war in Ukraine, but because of what it told them about America, a country they thought they knew well. In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand-new stereotype for America: not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast. Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterward, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win.” They announced that they would halt transfers of military equipment to Ukraine, and hinted at ending sanctions on Russia, the aggressor state. In his speech to Congress last night, Trump once again declared that America would “get” Greenland, which is a part of Denmark—a sign that he intends to run roughshod over other allies too. These are the actions not of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but of the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are Mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling. The Oval Office meeting, the subsequent announcements, and the speech to Congress also clarified something else: Trump, Vance, and many of the people around them now fully inhabit an alternative reality, one composed entirely of things they see and hear in the ether. Part of the Oval Office altercation was provoked by Zelensky’s insistence on telling the truth, as the full video clearly shows. His mistake was to point out that Russia and Ukraine have reached many cease-fires and made many agreements since 2014, and that Vladimir Putin has broken most of them, including during Trump’s first term. It’s precisely because they remember these broken truces that the Ukrainians keep asking what happens after a cease-fire, what kind of security guarantees will be put in place, how Trump plans to prevent Putin from breaking them once more and, above all, what price the Russians are willing to pay for peace in Ukraine. Will they even give up their claims to territory they don’t control? Will they agree that Ukraine can be a sovereign democracy? But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance—who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year—told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or X. Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance. This is not new. Back in 2016, at the height of the election campaign, Trump frequently repeated false stories launched by Russia’s Sputnik news agency, declaring that Hillary Clinton and Obama had “founded ISIS,” or that “the Google search engine is suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton.” At the time, Trump also imitated Russian talk about Clinton starting World War III, another Russian meme. He produced a new version of that in the Oval Office on Friday. “You’re gambling with World War III. You’re gambling with World War III,” he shouted at Zelensky. But what was ominous in 2016 is dangerous in 2025, especially in Europe. Russian military aggression is more damaging, Russian sabotage across Europe more frequent, and Russian cyberattacks almost constant. In truth, it is Putin, not Zelensky, who started this conflict, Putin who has brought North Korean troops and Iranian drones to Europe, Putin who instructs his propagandists to talk about nuking London, Putin who keeps raising the stakes and scope of the war. Most Europeans live in this reality, not in the fictional world inhabited by Trump, and the contrast is making them think differently about Americans. According to pollsters, nearly three-quarters of French people now think that the U.S. is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the U.S. as well. In reality, the Russians have said nothing publicly about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. In reality, they have spent the past decade building a cult of cruelty at home. Now they have exported that cult not just to Europe, not just to Africa, but to Washington too. This administration abruptly canceled billions of dollars of food aid and health-care programs for the poorest people on the planet, a vicious act that the president and vice president have not acknowledged but that millions of people can see. Their use of tariffs as random punishment, not for enemies but for allies, seems not just brutal but inexplicable. And in the Oval Office, Trump and Vance behaved like imperial rulers chastising a subjugated colony, vocalizing the same disgust and disdain that Russian propagandists use when they talk about Ukraine. Europeans know, everyone knows, that if Trump and Vance can talk that way to the president of Ukraine, then they might eventually talk that way to their country’s leader next. ~

The Atlantic

The Rise of the Brutal American

This is how the bad guys act.

< World Premiere > RICHARD RODNEY BENNETT : The Glory and the Dream (for SATB div. choir & Organ) Saturday 3 March, 2001 St. John's College, Cambridge, England New Cambridge Singers, cond. Christopher Brown Text: 'Intimations of Immortality' – William Wadsworth (1770-1850) Novello & Company Limited, 2001 (NOV170376)

One Word Describes Trump Jonathan Rauch The Atlantic Monday 24 February, 2025 What exactly is Donald Trump doing? Since taking office, he has reduced his administration’s effectiveness by appointing to essential agencies people who lack the skills and temperaments to do their jobs. His mass firings have emptied the civil service of many of its most capable employees. He has defied laws that he could just as easily have followed (for instance, refusing to notify Congress 30 days before firing inspectors general). He has disregarded the plain language of statutes, court rulings, and the Constitution, setting up confrontations with the courts that he is likely to lose. Few of his orders have gone through a policy-development process that helps ensure they won’t fail or backfire—thus ensuring that many will. In foreign affairs, he has antagonized Denmark, Canada, and Panama; renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”; and unveiled a Gaz-a-Lago plan. For good measure, he named himself chair of the Kennedy Center, as if he didn’t have enough to do. Even those who expected the worst from his reelection (I among them) expected more rationality. Today, it is clear that what has happened since January 20 is not just a change of administration but a change of regime—a change, that is, in our system of government. But a change to what? There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack. Last year, two professors published a book that deserves wide attention. In 'The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future', Stephen E. Hanson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary, and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, a political scientist at UC Irvine, resurface a mostly forgotten term whose lineage dates back to Max Weber, the German sociologist best known for his seminal book 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'. Weber wondered how the leaders of states derive legitimacy, the claim to rule rightfully. He thought it boiled down to two choices. One is rational legal bureaucracy (or “bureaucratic proceduralism”), a system in which legitimacy is bestowed by institutions following certain rules and norms. That is the American system we all took for granted until January 20. Presidents, federal officials, and military inductees swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a person. The other source of legitimacy is more ancient, more common, and more intuitive—“the default form of rule in the premodern world,” Hanson and Kopstein write. “The state was little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler; it did not exist as a separate entity.” Weber called this system “patrimonialism” because rulers claimed to be the symbolic father of the people—the state’s personification and protector. Exactly that idea was implied in Trump’s own chilling declaration: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” In his day, Weber thought that patrimonialism was on its way to history’s scrap heap. Its personalized style of rule was too inexpert and capricious to manage the complex economies and military machines that, after Bismarck, became the hallmarks of modern statehood. Unfortunately, he was wrong. Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations. In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business. It can be found in many countries, but its main contemporary exponent—at least until January 20, 2025—has been Vladimir Putin. In the first portion of his rule, he ran the Russian state as a personal racket. State bureaucracies and private companies continued to operate, but the real governing principle was Stay on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s good side … or else. Seeking to make the world safe for gangsterism, Putin used propaganda, subversion, and other forms of influence to spread the model abroad. Over time, the patrimonial model gained ground in states as diverse as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and India. Gradually (as my colleague Anne Applebaum has documented), those states coordinated in something like a syndicate of crime families—“working out problems,” write Hanson and Kopstein in their book, “divvying up the spoils, sometimes quarreling, but helping each other when needed. Putin in this scheme occupied the position of the capo di tutti capi, the boss of bosses.” Until now. Move over, President Putin. To understand the source of Trump’s hold on power, and its main weakness, one needs to understand what patrimonialism is not. It is not the same as classic authoritarianism. And it is not necessarily antidemocratic. Patrimonialism’s antithesis is not democracy; it is bureaucracy, or, more precisely, bureaucratic proceduralism. Classic authoritarianism—the sort of system seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—is often heavily bureaucratized. When authoritarians take power, they consolidate their rule by creating structures such as secret police, propaganda agencies, special military units, and politburos. They legitimate their power with legal codes and constitutions. Orwell understood the bureaucratic aspect of classic authoritarianism; in 1984, Oceania’s ministries of Truth (propaganda), Peace (war), and Love (state security) are the regime’s most characteristic (and terrifying) features. By contrast, patrimonialism is suspicious of bureaucracies; after all, to exactly whom are they loyal? They might acquire powers of their own, and their rules and processes might prove obstructive. People with expertise, experience, and distinguished résumés are likewise suspect because they bring independent standing and authority. So patrimonialism stocks the government with nonentities and hacks, or, when possible, it bypasses bureaucratic procedures altogether. When security officials at USAID tried to protect classified information from Elon Musk’s uncleared DOGE team, they were simply put on leave. Patrimonial governance’s aversion to formalism makes it capricious and even whimsical—such as when the leader announces, out of nowhere, the renaming of international bodies of water or the U.S. occupation of Gaza. Also unlike classic authoritarianism, patrimonialism can coexist with democracy, at least for a while. As Hanson and Kopstein write, “A leader may be democratically elected but still seek to legitimate his or her rule patrimonially. Increasingly, elected leaders have sought to demolish bureaucratic administrative states (‘deep states,’ they sometimes call them) built up over decades in favor of rule by family and friends.” India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Trump himself are examples of elected patrimonial leaders—and ones who have achieved substantial popular support and democratic legitimacy. Once in power, patrimonialists love to clothe themselves in the rhetoric of democracy, like Elon Musk justifying his team’s extralegal actions as making the “unelected fourth unconstitutional branch of government” be “responsive to the people.” Nonetheless, as patrimonialism snips the government’s procedural tendons, it weakens and eventually cripples the state. Over time, as it seeks to embed itself, many leaders attempt the transition to full-blown authoritarianism. “Electoral processes and constitutional norms cannot survive long when patrimonial legitimacy begins to dominate the political arena,” write Hanson and Kopstein. Even if authoritarianism is averted, the damage that patrimonialism does to state capacity is severe. Governments’ best people leave or are driven out. Agencies’ missions are distorted and their practices corrupted. Procedures and norms are abandoned and forgotten. Civil servants, contractors, grantees, corporations, and the public are corrupted by the habit of currying favor. To say, then, that Trump lacks the temperament or attention span to be a dictator offers little comfort. He is patrimonialism’s perfect organism. He recognizes no distinction between what is public and private, legal and illegal, formal and informal, national and personal. “He can’t tell the difference between his own personal interest and the national interest, if he even understands what the national interest is,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in Trump’s first term, told The Bulwark. As one prominent Republican politician recently told me, understanding Trump is simple: “If you’re his friend, he’s your friend. If you’re not his friend, he’s not your friend.” This official chose to be Trump’s friend. Otherwise, he said, his job would be nearly impossible for the next four years. Patrimonialism explains what might otherwise be puzzling. Every policy the president cares about is his personal property. Trump dropped the federal prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams because a pliant big-city mayor is a useful thing to have. He broke with 50 years of practice by treating the Justice Department as “his personal law firm.” He treats the enforcement of duly enacted statutes as optional—and, what’s more, claims the authority to indemnify lawbreakers. He halted proceedings against January 6 thugs and rioters because they are on his side. His agencies screen hires for loyalty to him rather than to the Constitution. In Trump’s world, federal agencies are shut down on his say-so without so much as a nod to Congress. Henchmen with no statutory authority barge into agencies and take them over. A loyalist who had only ever managed two small nonprofits is chosen for the hardest management job in government. Conflicts of interest are tolerated if not outright blessed. Prosecutors and inspectors general are fired for doing their job. Thousands of civil servants are converted to employment at the president’s will. Former officials’ security protection is withdrawn because they are disloyal. The presidency itself is treated as a business opportunity. Yet when Max Weber saw patrimonialism as obsolete in the era of the modern state, he was not daydreaming. As Hanson and Kopstein note, “Patrimonial regimes couldn’t compete militarily or economically with states led by expert bureaucracies.” They still can’t. Patrimonialism suffers from two inherent and in many cases fatal shortcomings. The first is incompetence. “The arbitrary whims of the ruler and his personal coterie continually interfere with the regular functioning of state agencies,” write Hanson and Kopstein. Patrimonial regimes are “simply awful at managing any complex problem of modern governance,” they write. “At best they supply poorly functioning institutions, and at worst they actively prey on the economy.” Already, the administration seems bent on debilitating as much of the government as it can. Some examples of incompetence, such as the reported firing of staffers who safeguard nuclear weapons and prevent bird flu, would be laughable if they were not so alarming. Eventually, incompetence makes itself evident to the voting public without needing too much help from the opposition. But helping the public understand patrimonialism’s other, even greater vulnerability—corruption—requires relentless messaging. Patrimonialism is corrupt by definition, because its reason for being is to exploit the state for gain—political, personal, and financial. At every turn, it is at war with the rules and institutions that impede rigging, robbing, and gutting the state. We know what to expect from Trump’s second term. As Larry Diamond of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution said in a recent podcast, “I think we are going to see an absolutely staggering orgy of corruption and crony capitalism in the next four years unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 19th century, the Gilded Age.” (Francis Fukuyama, also of Stanford, replied: “It’s going to be a lot worse than the Gilded Age.”) They weren’t wrong. “In the first three weeks of his administration,” reported the Associated Press, “President Donald Trump has moved with brazen haste to dismantle the federal government’s public integrity guardrails that he frequently tested during his first term but now seems intent on removing entirely.” The pace was eye-watering. Over the course of just a couple of days in February, for example, the Trump administration: By that point, Trump had already eviscerated conflict-of-interest rules, creating, according to Bauer, “ample space for foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to work directly with the Trump Organization or an affiliate within the framework of existing agreements in ways highly beneficial to its business interests.” He had fired inspectors general in 19 agencies, without cause and probably illegally. One could go on—and Trump will. Corruption is patrimonialism’s Achilles’ heel because the public understands it and doesn’t like it. It is not an abstraction like “democracy” or “Constitution” or “rule of law.” It conveys that the government is being run for them, not for you. The most dire threat that Putin faced was Alexei Navalny’s “ceaseless crusade” against corruption, which might have brought down the regime had Putin not arranged for Navalny’s death in prison. In Poland, the liberal opposition booted the patrimonialist Law and Justice Party from power in 2023 with an anti-corruption narrative. In the United States, anyone seeking evidence of the power of anti-corruption need look no further than Republicans’ attacks against Jim Wright and Hillary Clinton. In Clinton’s case, Republicans and Trump bootstrapped a minor procedural violation (the use of a private server for classified emails) into a world-class scandal. Trump and his allies continually lambasted her as the most corrupt candidate ever. Sheer repetition convinced many voters that where there was smoke, there must be fire. Even more on point is Newt Gingrich’s successful campaign to bring down Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright—a campaign that ended Wright’s career, launched Gingrich’s, and paved the way for the Republicans’ takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994. In the late 1980s, Wright was a congressional titan and Gingrich an eccentric backbencher, but Gingrich had a plan. “I’ll just keep pounding and pounding on his [Wright’s] ethics,” he said in 1987. “There comes a point where it comes together and the media takes off on it, or it dies.” Gingrich used ethics complaints and relentless public messaging (not necessarily fact-based) to brand Wright and, by implication, the Democrats as corrupt. “In virtually every speech and every interview, he attacked Wright,” John M. Barry wrote in Politico. “He told his audiences to write letters to the editor of their local newspapers, to call in on talk shows, to demand answers from their local members of Congress in public meetings. In his travels, he also sought out local political and investigative reporters or editorial writers, and urged them to look into Wright. And Gingrich routinely repeated, ‘Jim Wright is the most corrupt speaker in the 20th century.’” Today, Gingrich’s campaign offers the Democrats a playbook. If they want to undermine Trump’s support, this model suggests that they should pursue a relentless, strategic, and thematic campaign branding Trump as America’s most corrupt president. Almost every development could provide fodder for such attacks, which would connect corruption not with generalities like the rule of law but with kitchen-table issues. Higher prices? Crony capitalism! Cuts to popular programs? Payoffs for Trump’s fat-cat clients! Tax cuts? A greedy raid on Social Security! The best objection to this approach (perhaps the only objection, at this point) is that the corruption charge won’t stick against Trump. After all, the public has been hearing about his corruption for years and has priced it in or just doesn’t care. Besides, the public believes that all politicians are corrupt anyway. But driving a strategic, coordinated message against Trump’s corruption is exactly what the opposition has not done. Instead, it has reacted to whatever is in the day’s news. By responding to daily fire drills and running in circles, it has failed to drive any message at all. Also, it is not quite true that the public already knows Trump is corrupt and doesn’t care. Rather, because he seems so unfiltered, he benefits from a perception that he is authentic in a way that other politicians are not, and because he infuriates elites, he enjoys a reputation for being on the side of the common person. Breaking those perceptions can determine whether his approval rating is above 50 percent or below 40 percent, and politically speaking, that is all the difference in the world. Do the Democrats need a positive message of their own? Sure, they should do that work. But right now, when they are out of power and Trump is the capo di tutti capi, the history of patrimonial rule suggests that their most effective approach will be hammering home the message that he is corrupt. One thing is certain: He will give them plenty to work with.

<World Premiere > JULIAN ANDERSON : Magnificat (2016) (for unaccompanied SATB div. choir & soli) Thursday 22 February, 2018 Manchester Cathedral, England ORA Singers, cond. Suzi Digby Schott Music, Ltd. London, 2018 (ED 13975)

How to Organize Our Way Out of the Trump-Musk Putsch Ezra Levin & Leah Greenberg The Nation Wednesday 19 February, 2025 By firing Gwynne Wilcox, Trump is hoping the Supreme Court will overrule 90 years of legal precedent and give him the authority to fire members of independent boards. For the millions of Americans now desperate to reclaim our democracy from the plutocratic vandalism of the second Trump administration, the main challenge before us is simple: We have to unify and fight back. This isn’t new and it isn’t rocket science—the one thing we know from historical fights against authoritarians is that success depends on a persistent, courageous, broad-based, and unified opposition. What that should look like and what that demands of each of us is the heart of the new movement to defeat a more disciplined and lawless Trump White House, but before we get to where we’re going, we have to start with where we are. We run a national pro-democracy grassroots movement organization that’s been helping to marshal local volunteer groups against Trumpism for nearly a decade. Trump’s innovation in his second term is his strategic alignment with neoreactionary forces personified in Elon Musk. As one underground memo circulating in pro-democracy circles recently explained, the neoreactionary goal is “replacing the existing Constitutional system with a privatized state structure akin to a corporation, with a monarch-like figure at the top modeled after a CEO.” It’s no wonder that historians like Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson are raising the alarm about a boiling constitutional crisis. It’s hard not to sound alarmist about such alarming events. Whether we call it a coup, a constitutional crisis, a hostile takeover, or something else, we side with the two-thirds of Democrats who want Democrats in Congress to oppose Trump at every turn rather than appease him. From our perspective as political organizers, the most important thing about this agenda is that it’s wildly unpopular. Project 2025, the governing blueprint for the neoreactionary ideology, polled at just 4 percent support before the election. The marginal voters who gave Trump another term wanted lower prices for bread, and instead they’re being served a hot dish of techno-dystopian fascism with a side of egg shortages. For those of us looking to break the MAGA coalition, this should be a major political opportunity. Trump and his allies in the White House are overreaching dramatically. And rather than acting as a check on executive power, congressional Republicans are rubber-stamping nominees and helping Trump and Musk consolidate their power. So far, they have not paid much of a political price. To change that, we need an opposition capable of making Republicans own their complicity. A week after the election, we published Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink, an open-source handbook for building nationwide opposition to the coming authoritarian takeover. The first step: total opposition to Trump’s Project 2025. Congressional Democrats should lead this charge, but so far, their response has been sluggish, unimaginative, ineffective, and—an absolutely killer liability in our algorithmically driven world—boring. Senate Democrats embraced “strategic silence” on Trump’s nominees. Many House Democrats have focused on professing powerlessness and voicing an interest in reasonable-sounding bipartisan compromise. It hasn’t worked. Even before Trump’s inauguration, too many Democrats helped expedite a MAGA immigration bill to his desk. Democrats have provided votes for almost all of Trump’s cabinet nominees. There have been moments of fight—but they haven’t been linked to an overarching strategy to make Democrats an effective opposition party. Democrats seem to be waiting for Trump, Musk, and MAGA to naturally become unpopular, instead of working overtime to make them unpopular. We can’t wait. We need a unified, aggressive, and creative opposition in this country. Here’s what that federal opposition could look like in practice: — Slow the Senate. Lawmakers in the upper chamber of Congress don’t have a big red “stop everything” button—but the Democratic Senate minority can slow business as usual and dramatize its opposition. One expert in congressional procedure, Norm Ornstein, has detailed these tactics—-from the famous filibuster to simply forcing Senate leaders to read the daily journal prior to conducting legislative business. One concrete example: Senator Brian Schatz has placed a “hold” on all State Department appointees—a major obstacle to Senate Republicans who want to speed through diplomatic confirmations. Senate Democrats should do this for all nominees, of which there are hundreds. — Make congressional Republicans work for Democratic votes. When their votes are not just symbolic, Democrats should filibuster where they can, force Republicans to squirm for as many hours as possible, and extract a serious political price for standing down. The next obvious leverage point for Democrats here is the March 14 funding deadline. Republicans will inevitably fail to pull their majority together to fund the government on their own, and Democrats should extract what they can when Speaker Mike Johnson comes begging for votes. — Break the norms around congressional collegiality. It’s typically considered rude for one member of Congress to confront another in public. But these aren’t typical times. The complicity of congressional Republicans in the trashing of our democracy cries out for the kind of loud and frequent confrontation that will cause members of the Washington Post editorial board to clutch their pearls. For those Republicans who refuse to face their constituents, Democrats should travel to their districts or states in order to publicize the real costs of MAGA appeasement to working families there. For those members who share concerns privately while declining to say anything publicly, congressional Democrats should expose them for the cowards they are. Get creative—and give protesters and activists a morally righteous conflict to rally around. — Work with the new surge in anti-Musk, anti-Trump grassroots energy. Congressional Democrats should treat the current historic popular protests against the Trump-Musk putsch like an opportunity rather than a threat. Since November, we’ve seen record-breaking numbers of new local Indivisible groups forming and new members. These local volunteer groups are focusing on their own elected officials—Democrats, independents, and Republicans. They’re making calls, protesting, showing up at congressional offices, attending town halls, and demanding accountability from their representatives. This is, as they say, what democracy looks like. And the only pro-democracy party in the country ought to tap into that energy with enthusiasm. We’re under no illusion that any senator or representative can summon forth the opposition on their own. It’s up to each of us to try, and learn, and improve, and build. Constituents should be organizing in their own communities as engaged neighbors, pro-democracy volunteers, and educators. Rank-and-file Democrats should be feeding off that energy and harnessing its power. And Democrats in leadership should be corralling their caucuses to produce a unified front with aggressive, creative tactics and messaging. Nobody has all the answers, and we’re all going to have to try, fail, go back to the drawing board, and try again. These are frightening times, and frightening times call for active, courageous leadership. Musk and Trump are really seeking to annex the operations of the state to their pet vanity projects, bigotries, and conspiracy theories , but our enemy is not one or two men. Our enemy is apathy, cynicism, and fatalism; the pernicious, authoritarian-friendly belief that we are merely victims of world events rather than active participants in a global struggle for freedom and justice. Every time one of us—a family member, a community organizer, a representative, a senator—takes a step forward in this fight, a thousand pairs of eyes watch and learn. Courage is contagious. Take that step, and steel yourself with the knowledge that you are the defender of a 250-year experiment in self-governance—a real-life pluralistic democracy, imperfect as it is, striving to be more perfect. Our predecessors deposed a brain-addled king; they crushed the violent insurrectionists of a slaveholding confederacy; they forced the robber barons to contend with workers and unions; they kicked the Nazis’ asses throughout Europe; they broke the back of the southern segregationist political bloc; they fought back against the terrorizing forces at Stonewall. We have planted ourselves in stubborn opposition to monomaniacal fascists of one form or another for a quarter of a millennium. No entitled reality-TV has-been backed by an addle-brained billionaire who cheats at video games is going to roll over us now. We will not finish this fight, but we can each be damn sure to do our part while we’re here. Together, we are the opposition, and this is our republic—if we can keep it. This is the part where we keep it. ~ https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/how-to-organize-our-way-out-of-the-trump-musk-putsch/

< World Premiere > FRANK FERKO : Stabat Mater (for unaccompanied SATB-SATB choir and Soprano solo) Saturday 20 February, 1999 – Evanston, Illinois, USA His Majestie's Clerkes, cond. Anne Heider Rauquaia Hale Wallace, Soprano E. C. Schirmer Music Company, 2000

< World Premiere > ERNST KRENEK : The Santa Fe Timetable, Op. 102 (for unaccompanied SSAATB choir) Monday 20 February, 1961 - Los Angeles, CA The Gregg Smith Singers, cond. Gregg Smith Text: The Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railway System Timetables (circa. April, 1945)