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tanyev

(47,106 posts)
Fri Feb 14, 2025, 09:01 PM Feb 2025

JSTOR (digital academic library) has joined the resistance! Good article in yesterday's newsletter.

I've been getting their newsletters for awhile for their very interesting articles on all kinds of historical topics. If they delve into politics, it's usually about something historical. This article is about our current crisis, but includes a lot of historical context.

There's a lot you can access for free on their site, but you do have to pay if you want access to everything. Also, a lot of their stuff is accessible through school or public libraries.


The Power of the Purse

On January 27, 2025, a week into the second Trump administration, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo announcing that all federal financial assistance was being paused to assess programs’ “consisten[cy] with the President’s policies and requirements.”

Two days later, a second memo rescinded the first. Two major suits had already been brought by parties affected by the cutoff, and one temporary injunction issued. The rescission announcement brought a brief sense of relief, but a tweet by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt hours later removed any doubts about its intention:

This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.
It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo.
Why? To end any confusion created by the court’s injunction.
The President’s EO’s [sic] on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.

—@PressSec, January 29, 2025, 1:40pm

As the week progressed, more information emerged, not only about funds being frozen, but about how the mechanisms and agencies that administrate these funds were being taken over by the non-governmental Department of Government Efficiency, comprised of Elon Musk and a cadre of young men with previous experience in his companies. Private servers were patched into payment systems (there’s a lawsuit for that), legacy code bases accessed and changed, and the personal data of millions of Americans made accessible to Musk employees with no governmental experience.

We, as a country, have not been here before, but in 1974 we briefly visited the neighborhood.

https://daily.jstor.org/the-power-of-the-purse/?utm_term=Read%20More&utm_campaign=jstordaily_02132025&utm_content=email&utm_source=Act-On+Software&utm_medium=email


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JSTOR (digital academic library) has joined the resistance! Good article in yesterday's newsletter. (Original Post) tanyev Feb 2025 OP
Excellent! SheltieLover Feb 2025 #1
Ooh! Greenland, too! tanyev Feb 2025 #2
Good to hear! 2naSalit Feb 2025 #3

tanyev

(47,106 posts)
2. Ooh! Greenland, too!
Fri Feb 14, 2025, 09:13 PM
Feb 2025

The article in the OP was the first article in the newsletter and now that I'm looking at the rest of it, there's also an article about the Greenland saga.

“It’s been incredibly nice to meet people, and people were very happy to meet with us. Dad will have to come here.” So said Donald Trump Jr. to the press when the family jet made a four-hour visit to Greenland last month.

The demands of United States President Trump at the outset of his second term in office have put the world’s largest island into direct conflict with the world’s most powerful state. The Trump administration’s desire to make Greenland part of the US has caused considerable consternation among the Indigenous population of just 57,000 people—though this isn’t the first time that America has made a bid for ownership of this gargantuan Arctic landmass.

The Trump administration’s ambitions put the White House in direct conflict with both Greenland and Denmark, a development that may have been foreseeable. As Hans W. Weigert wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1944,

the consciousness that the far north is an area of great strategic importance to the United States is no longer limited to the small group of men… […] It is no longer necessary to deplore the lack of a national awareness of the north, but rather to warn against over-enthusiastic generalizations which threaten to cloud realities. The strategy of this war has accelerated the pace of Arctic progress, but there are certain barriers raised by nature against the development of this area; and political realities set limits to the possibilities of an American march north.


https://daily.jstor.org/greenland-polar-politics/?utm_term=Greenland%3A%20Polar%20Politics&utm_campaign=jstordaily_02132025&utm_content=email&utm_source=Act-On+Software&utm_medium=email

2naSalit

(97,317 posts)
3. Good to hear!
Fri Feb 14, 2025, 11:09 PM
Feb 2025

I used JSTOR a lot in college. Glad to hear, though not surprised, that they are standing up for knowledge and academia.

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