Summary
California officials warned that Trump’s order to release massive amounts of water nearly caused severe flooding for farmers.
Trump boasted about the move, claiming it would help fight wildfires, but experts said the water couldn’t reach affected areas, which are over 200 miles away.
The Army Corps of Engineers initially planned to release water at maximum capacity but scaled back after urgent pushback.
Experts warned the water could have been better used months later for irrigation.
How can a president in a democratic country order a dam opening, and this is left unchallenged by knowledgeable experts affected by the dam and stake holders? There seems a deep flaw in the system when it comes to the singular power of the US-president?
In his previous term there people in all the position that would say no. He didn’t like that and fired people constantly, rotating through an inordinate amount of staff.
This time round they pre-planned everyone in every inch of federal government. All loyalists. No one will say no. They all fall in line and do as they’re told.
Trump and his handlers will strip mine and destroy the country from top to bottom completely unchallenged. And any challenge will simply be sidestepped or simply ignored.
The dams are entirely the responsibility of the Army Corp of Engineers, and the US President is the commander-in-chief.
The only ways for this to not happen is for the President to have their mind changed, or the President is removed from office, or, the order is refused enough (at cost of being court-martialed) that nobody will carry them out.
The great powers of the US Presidency is meant to expedite government action. We are currently far from the scenario where Congress, by the will of the US voters, will remove the current President.
Easy: it didn’t happen in a democratic country.
We have three branches in the federal government - executive, legislative, judicial. Legislative creates laws. Judicial basically decides when they apply/arbitrates their implementation. Executive branch is the actual meat of the entire thing, containing basically every other federal government institution, which is (in broad strokes) a giant hierarchy with the President at the top, with the ability to override every decision. It’s because the people who designed this system had monarchism as their primary frame of reference and basically designed “monarchism with a couple restraints”. People like to think it’s democracy with checks and balances, but the democratic elements are worthless and the checks and balances have completely failed.
This is why I’m glad we don’t directly elect our head of government in Australia.
People bitch “oh we’ve had 5 prime minister’s in 5 years!”. Better that than a president that can only be stopped by 2/3rds of the senate.
That and Australian cabinet members (who are the executives of the various departments), who can be removed by the prime minister, at least are somewhat covered by the fact the prime minister only has this power while a simple majority of the parliament allows it.
I’m not claiming we’ve got democracy figured out over here, and suffer from a lot of the same shit as the US because of capitalism and corruption.
But hell, US-style elected constitutional monarchy is wild.
And we’re still under an actual monarchy lol
Mmn…2/3 of the House and Senate is what’s required to override a veto, if the the President doesn’t want something to pass. But the President can’t just pass something without a majority vote.
Anyway, you don’t have to solve that problem by handing control of the executive to the Congress (House + Senate). You can have popular referendums, popular recalls, more frequent elections. Having high turnover in that job is a good thing, because the job itself has way too much power. Abolishing the job would be better. The idea that “one guy has to be in charge” causes extreme problems.
We elected Trump. The Democrats had the opportunity to run an opposition candidate, and opted not to.
Trump knows his audience and the media too well.
He claimed his actions would help wildfires. That’s a win to his audience.
Experts said no and the Army Corps responded to pushback. That fuels his audience’s prejudices into believing Trump’s initial claim even more.
What a fucking idiot
This isn’t about his ample idiocy. It’s about raising food prices.
Thanks, Kamala! This is her fault, right?
It’s just about everyone’s fault. Biden/Harris co-opted and crippled the opposition movement.
That’s putting it lightly. But I don’t blame you, language can’t easily express the level of moron we’re witnessing.
Holodomor 2: Orange Crush
Trump is such an utter fucking idiot. Nothing this useless fuck makes any sense. He’s neither a good businessman, leader, or president.
He knows exactly what he’s doing here. He’s punishing the blue state specifically.
The Conservative subs have been really quiet for the last few days, after all their glee a fortnight ago.
Almost like they are hiding.
I keep peeking at old.shittyplace.com/r/conservative and AFAICT they are still in full on “FUCK YEAH this is what we voted for!”
Half of it. The other half is on full r/LeopardsAteMyFace mode.
Almost like they are hiding.
Hopefully, they are thinking about their decision to vote for a guy who’s coming to destroy their lives, too.
“they are thinking”
You give them too much credit.
When they elected him the first time i tgought: hah, i bet they feel really stupid now because how incompetent he was. Nope, they doubled down and did it again.
Oh no don’t worry there is plenty of leopards eating people’s faces going on. I’ve seen so many crying about how these tariffs are gonna cost them jobs. Also saw some posts by conservative women pissed off when they found out DEI includes them as well not just people of colour
Lemmy has conservative subs?
Yeah there are two: one at .world and one at .ee
I don’t know about the .ee instance, but the .world one tends to have every post downvoted to zero and every comment stating why conservatives are wrong. I try to keep my ear to the ground and know what crazy talking points conservatives are believing and the .world sub is pretty much useless for that. I don’t think there’s a single conservative that actually uses that sub.
Likewise, I like to pop into them from time to time. Check up on what insanity is their new flavor of the month.
This motherfucker really is all four horsemen of the apocalypse all at once huh?
He really is a cow in a porcelain store.
I have driven by countless large signs from California farmers supporting trump. I hope they enjoy the flooding.
It’s a face eating extravaganza - for the leopards that is.
What an idiot.
is this just a fecking game to this big baby?
Yes. He just does things and flails in an attempt to get recognition and give faux news or whatever a reason to praise him
It’s OK. Trump is sending fire to Disney world Florida to fight their possible flooding!
I think he has no idea what he is doing, and he has dismantled all the guardrails. According to project 2025 the entire country needs to be razed and dismantled. So they can rebuild it as Musk/Trump’s techno fascist state.That’s why Musk wants access to social security numbers, health data and addresses. Musk now knows where you live, what colour your skin is, your gender, your income and debt, and all your weak points. The Nazis did this, it helps with identifying perceived enemies of the state, deportation of immigrants and jailing or execution of political rivals. I am so sorry for those of you in the states who didn’t vote for this monster.
2025 is right in that it’s existence and the ability of the current president to implement it tell us that we have erred in the amount of power we place in the president(s). Constitutionally he has the full power to do what he is doing, or at least he mostly does, the problem is that the constitution was written centuries before FDR expanded the power of the executive in a major and possibly anti constitutional way (as many of his contemporaries suggested).
The Founding Fathers left us a great system, impervious to tyranny and the sort of populism that Trump represents, and we ruined it.
Constitutionally he absolutely does not have the power to do what he’s doing. Our system of checks and balances is failing because the Supreme Court and the Legislature have both all but fully ceded their authority to the Executive. Constitutionally, the job of the Executive is to implement the laws created by the Legislature and abide by rulings from the judiciary, not to do whatever they want with no basis in law or procedure.
“The Ford Pinto is the greatest car ever made. Yes, it blows up and breaks down and is uncomfortable but it’s the best”
That’s what you sound like.
The Founding Fathers left us a great system, impervious to tyranny and the sort of populism that Trump represents, and we ruined it.
It’s not looking impervious in the slightest right now. We’re living in the consequences of their actions, and one of the consequences being tyranny.
And it’s always been tyrannical, regardless of the year you pick. This country has always been enslaving, discriminating, disenfranchisng, warring, killing innocents, or otherwise robbing workers/indiginous peoples. And always done the majority of this all at the same time.
FDR kind of fucked it up, and from then on every subsequent president added to the enshitification of the office by expanding its powers. But yes it is inherently an oligarchy, but I do not think that is inherently a bad thing. The intentions were good.
And all those mechanisms were designed into the Constitution. You can’t keep defending it as perfect if its very structure allowed this to happen.
Were they? Initially only white land owners were allowed to vote. Seems like they created a system that was great for people just like them.
They left us a system that was easily abused and hard to change. What’s not great about that?! /s
“Impervious” yet FFR was able to break it. Do you not hear yourself. Maybe people 300 fuckin years ago didn’t quite understand everything yet.
He phrased it wrong but he’s sort of right. If Americans knew how to leverage their own policies system , as designed by the founding fathers, to their advantage in a focused and rational way, we wouldn’t be here. Could it have been better? Sure, but ultimately there is no democratic system that can protect voters from themselves. Democracies grsnt the people immense power, including the power to destroy their own democracy. That’s what Americans have chosen.
A system that depends on the people running it not to make mistakes is usually a bad system.
Doesn’t every system of government require people running it to avoid mistakes in order for it to work long term?
It’s ok to depend on people being generally competent most of the time. It’s not ok to depend on people never making mistakes, nor is it ok to depend on people acting in ways that real human beings don’t act. I’m politics, one if there critical failures was depending on politicians to act in good faith, and another was depending on the voters to stay informed and use critical thinking enough to avoid voting for an obvious conman.
Maybe there’s just no truly good system for politics, and the best we can hope for is the least bad option. But we won’t even achieve that much if we pretend the US system was created by enlightened demigods. It’s a deeply flawed system created by men who had no experience with democracy and who clearly saw themselves as the leaders of a new kind of aristocracy.
I will give them unqualified credit for one thing, though. The Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution are some of the most effective works of propaganda ever created. Saying that all people are fundamentally equal while simultaneously excluding most people from the levers of power was perhaps the greatest con of all time.
I think he has no idea what he is doing, and he has dismantled all the guardrails.
He knows exactly what he’s doing, or at least, someone else proposed this and explained it to him. What he is doing is: ruin Californias agriculture. This water would’ve been needed in summer, when the place runs dry.
So come August, chances are, California agriculture is withering on the vine with no way to water it. At which point Orange Führer will blame the state government, just like he did with the wildfires. CA will suffer politically and economically, which is the real goal here.
While also deporting the people who would harvest it.
Which in turn we devastate all the red states because California is largest tax payers in the country. Those taxes help the red states. So by destroying California economy he fucks over all of America. Well they voted for it so let them suffer. Just wish rest of us didn’t have to suffer too.
Sure, but as long as he and his oligarch bros get away with blaming Dems, DEI, China or whatever, it’s just another piece of red meat for the gullible
The American government is not funded by taxes. It spends new money, then it collects taxes to stave off inflation. Trump doesn’t need a single cent from California to shower red states with dollars if and when he wants to. If you think California failing would hurt red states in some way, it has to be a real, non-financial effect. E.g. of red states important Californian food which can’t be grown because of X or Y.
What do you mean by “new money”?
The treasury prints money, backed primarily by treasury bonds and the faith in the US government. Fiat currency is a government backed scam, just like bitcoin is a techbro backed scam.
So you’re saying the government prints enough new money each year to cover its expenses and then collects taxes to stave off inflation? Do you have a source for this?
According to the US Government Accountability Office, “the federal government borrows money straight from the public. The government issues securities like bills, notes, and bonds through the U.S. Treasury… Individual and institutional investors can back the government by investing in these types of securities and many choose to do so.”
USD is backed by your faith in the US government to exist and not prints giant amounts of money. Taxes are another way of raising money, it helps to stave off inflation rising since the gov considers it better to have small amounts of inflation then deflation.
That’s a perfect example of the ignorance which allowed Trump and Maga to take over the states.
They’ll just up the debt and blame dems again or say we have to implement austerity for the good of the country.
I’m not sure he knows or cares about the knock on effects. He knows it hurts California, so he does it.
It’s so fucked that someone willingly followed the order to release the water. I’m sure it won’t be the last time
Side-note but this is exactly the reason why my country never asked for my ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation (and AFAIK is not legally allowed to do so). We learned from WWII that this is too great of a liability to entrust to future, potentially hostile governments. The Nazis poured over every written registry of Jewish population census to make a handy murder list, maybe we shouldn’t facilitate their job next time?
(Side-side note: because of what I just said it is very surprising that Germany keeps a registry of everyone’s religion for tax purposes, like maybe just find any other way to allocate subsidies?)
(Side³ note: I’m going to guess unfortunately my government does have “legally trans” people in a database due to the logistics of changing legal gender)
In a system where men and women are treated equally (double surnames, same parental leave etc), it might no longer be needed for central governments to register people’s sex, only the healthcare system would need to know. I’m just thinking out loud here, this might be a bad idea for other reasons.
Yeah that’s the gender-radical answer. I’m all for it but we’re certainly not there yet despite being on the very progressive side of gender rights.
There are also the positive discrimination laws to take into account (in Belgium it’s illegal for companies to have a pay gap between men and wonen in equivalent positions) but IMO those should not rely on a central government database to be enforced.
Then there’s the fact that people usually change their names if they change their legal gender… When Robert becomes Julia there’s no need for a gender marker to guess what happened.
Well, now maybe you understand why republicans are so against DEI initiatives.
Because of potential data abuse? That’s a good one
Why is trump even allowed to do this?
Everyone is allowed to do anything as they please as long as theres noone enforcing the rules that would forbid it.
Everyone is allowed to do anything as they please
This means checks- ans balances are a lie? Where are these systems that characterize democracy in times of need?
They look like they voted in the Trump supporters in every department of checks and balances, democratically.
Funny how this time it was actually a democratic decision to abolish democracy. Back then in Germany the NSDAP reached 30% and then 44% the next year with a heavily rigged election. Gotta give the people what they want I guess…
He’s not supposed to be, he is just making it clear that he will fire anyone who says no to him.
He’s not, but no one has the power or balls to stop him
Presidents are supposed to have full power over the executive branch. The problem is that the executive branch now and when the constitution were written ware very different beasts, as the states had much much more autonomy before FDR.
Congress is in charge of stopping him. Republicans are in charge of Congress.
And the entire judicial branch so he will face no consequences either.
All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.
THE WATER MUST FLOW!!! - National mad man.
