The Week that Was ...
Ending Sunday, March 30, 2025
Welcome to the latest edition of The Week that Was, my rundown of what happened last week, curated, in the loosest sense of the word, for your reading pleasure, or displeasure.
Last week so much awful stuff happened. But I’m introducing some humor, in the bonus video.
1. Photos of the Week: Explosions in Yemen Serve as a Backdrop to a Cemetery
2. Musk Asleep at the Wheel
3. Democratic Party Establishment Torpor Continues Unabated
4. Tips for Crossing Borders
5. Journalistic Schizophrenia at The Financial Times: The Mexican Economy Is Crashing and Yet Investors Keep Buying
6. Why Isn’t Anyone Asking Why We Are Bombing Yemen Again?
7. Your Must-Watch Podcast for News About Mexico: Soberanía
8. Bonus Video: Sir Humphrey Explains British Democracy on Yes Prime Minister
1. Photo of the Week: Explosions in Yemen Serve as a Backdrop to a Cemetery
© Str/Xinhua via Getty Images
2. Musk Asleep at the Wheel
Seven long days ago The Economist noted what many others have noted: Elon Musk is overextended and inattentive to anything but whatever seems to be in front of him at the moment. Which often has substance of the abusable sort.
“UNTIL RECENTLY Elon Musk had little need to look over his shoulder. He once described competition for Tesla, his electric-vehicle (EV) company, as ‘the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day’, rather than the ‘small trickle’ of other EV-makers. SpaceX, his rocket firm, had so undercut and outwitted the bloated aerospace incumbents that it had developed an almost invincible aura.
“Yet if Mr Musk can tear himself away from the intoxication of shredding the American government, he may notice something. It is not just that the political firestorms he has whipped up this year are singeing his companies’ brands. It is that the two businesses that underpin his corporate empire [Tesla and Space X], accounting for around 90% of its value and probably all its profit, are facing increasingly stiff competition. The world’s richest man has lost focus—and now has a target on his back.” ….
“Mr Musk’s bomb-throwing interventions are alarming SpaceX’s customers, at a time when rivals are growing more capable. His on-again, off-again threats to end Starlink’s support for Ukraine have raised the difficult question of trust. ….
“The threat to Tesla is both greater and more immediate. From a peak of $1.5trn in mid-December, its market value has fallen by almost half. Activists have been picketing Tesla’s showrooms in America and Europe in anger at Mr Musk’s behaviour.
“As with SpaceX, Tesla’s competition is revving up. The firm’s lead in the EV market was narrowing even before Mr Musk began his bureaucracy-bashing. General Motors sold 50% more EVs last year than in 2023, and is now vying with Hyundai, of South Korea, to become America’s second-biggest provider of battery-powered vehicles.”
Musk Inc is under serious threat (X on his back)
And while the reaction from potential Tesla buyers against his reactionary politics is only part of the problem, as The Economist noted a good three weeks ago. (Seems like an eternity, doesn’t it?)
“Mr Musk’s backing for Mr Trump’s second presidential run once looked like a clever business move. His reward was to run the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), boosting what Barclays, a bank, calls the ‘Elon premium’. Investors clearly thought that his political sway would do Tesla good. Its market value hit a record $1.5trn in December (see chart). …
“But Mr Musk’s politics only partially explains Tesla’s troubles. Sales were falling before he took a chainsaw to America’s public sector. Last year Tesla dropped a long-standing aim to be making 20m cars annually by 2030 and reported its first decline in annual sales for many years—a fall of 1%, to 1.79m cars.
“Sales have continued to fall in recent months compared with a year before, at a time when the EV market overall is still growing. Barclays estimates that first-quarter sales in Europe could be down by around 30%. In Germany, where Mr Musk caused an uproar by supporting a far-right party in recent elections, sales fell by 76% in February, year on year.”
Source: The Economist
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, you may be thinking.
However, please don’t forget that the value that Elon Musk is exploiting and potentially destroying came from the labor of human beings.
Elon Musk’s antics are not the only problem for Tesla:
The carmaker’s sales are sinking for other reasons too
3. Expulsion Chronicles: Private Prisons; Cinematic Overkill in Arrests
In Spanish class on Tuesday, which I take over zoom from an instructor in Cancun in the State of Quintana Roo, my teacher informed me that she was taking a ten-day trip to Rome in April. Previously, she has traveled outside of Mexico to Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, and Geneva. And those are the trips I’ve seen on her Instagram feed.
My teacher also informed me that the flight to Rome involved a change of planes in Washington, D.C.
At that point, I told her not to leave the international section of the terminal. And I told her why.
Below are a few stories which, sadly, detail, why.
A young Welsh woman, Becky Burke, was detained by ICE for nineteen days. For a glimpse of the dangerous Ms. Burke, see below, greeting her dog upon her return to Britain following her liberation from ICE.
© Paul Burke
This incredible series of events started on early March, when Becky, having spent several months in the U.S. on a tourist visa, was traveling to Vancouver to stay with a host family there. However, Ms. Burke was denied entry to Canada because Canadian authorities suspected she was going to work. It must be noted that Ms. Burke had been helping an American family in Portland, Oregon, with household chores.
Before her detention, Burke was traveling in the U.S., including a stop in New York City.
Things spun out of control when Burke attempted to reenter the U.S.
“She described how she spent six hours at the border, waiting while officials were ‘trying to determine if what I had been doing in America counted as work’.
“’She said she was ‘interrogated’ and, despite explaining she was ‘not paid at all’, it was decided she had ‘violated’ her visa.”
Visa rule warning as tourist detained at US border
This violation led to her being shackled and then held in a private ICE prison, Northwest Detention Center, a for-profit facility operated by the GEO Group (The Geo Group, Inc.) on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
The Northwest Detention Center is scheduled for closure later in 2025, due to the State of Washington’s outlawing of private prisons in 2021. (Sometimes the wheels of profitable justice grind slowly.) But I’m sure that nobody was trying to hold any prisoners just to run up the charges prior to the facility’s closure.
Interestingly enough, GEO Group was in the red as of 2021, with net losses of $77.2m in 2021. That flood (okay, stream) of red ink was reversed by 2024, with net income of $15.49M in the fourth quarter of 2024 alone.
In short, the company’s fortunes have picked up remarkably in the last year, with a share price rise from 14.26 at market close on April 1, 2024, to 29.81 at market close on March 28, 2025, an increase of 109%.
The most striking increase came shortly after Trump was elected to a second term. The share price went from 15.13 on November 5 to 25.05 a week later.
Tourist in US chained 'like Hannibal Lecter'
Another arrest that was truly terrifying was that of an observant Muslim and Ph.D. student at Tufts University, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national, who was arrested by half a dozen masked ICE agents on Tuesday evening, March 25, in Somerville, Massachusetts, as she was breaking her Ramadan fast.
In spite of a federal court order, she was sent to Louisiana to prepare for her deportation.
Trump administration detains Turkish student at Tufts, revokes visa
It’s hard to keep up with the various arrests, but there is a tracker, provided by The Forward, the English language successor to the Yiddish language newspaper פֿאָרווערטס (Forverts), founded in 1897 in New York City, on the Lower East Side.
Campus arrest tracker: Who has been detained for ‘antisemitic’ or ‘pro-Hamas’ activity?
4. Democratic Party Establishment Torpor Continues Unabated
This is a fascinating interview with New York Times correspondent Jamelle Bouie, on The Majority Report, with Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland, on the subject of New York Senator’s Charles Schumer’s fecklessness in the face of the government funding bill.
Included in a critique of the abundance narrative promoted by Ezra Klein.
And kudos to anyone who invokes The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) the great novel by the Sicilian novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. (Later the wonderful 1963 film The Leopard, directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale.)
Gattopardismo, by the way, is a term used in Mexico to describe this desire to pretend to change without changing at all. (Il Gattopardo, or El Gattopardo, are the respective Italian and Spanish words for “The Leopard.”)
The Dem Gerontocracy Is Dooming Us All
5. Tips for Crossing Borders
These are some tips for protecting your privacy when crossing international borders:
1. Minimize local data;
2. Log out or uninstall apps;
3. Encrypt or power down;
4. Disable biometrics;
5. Use Travel-only accounts; and
6. Consider a Faraday bag.
Border Crossings: How to Protect Your Data
6. Journalistic Schizophrenia at The Financial Times: The Mexican Economy Is Crashing and Yet Investors Keep Buying
The Financial Times seems to have slipped into a sort of journalistic split personality disorder regarding the Mexican economy.
On March 21, The Financial Times reported that:
“For a country that has been the target of US President Donald Trump’s ire over trade, drugs and migrants, Mexico is proving surprisingly resilient. The country’s benchmark IPC stock index is up 7 per cent this year, compared with the S&P 500’s 4 per cent drop and Canada’s TSX index’s 1.8 per cent gain. The peso has also held up well, rallying 2.5 per cent against the dollar since January.”
Mexican stocks deflect Donald Trump’s trade blows
On March 28, the great word processor Christine Murray of The Financial Times reported impending catastrophe:
“Five economists from global banks said it was very likely that Mexico’s GDP would shrink for the second straight quarter in the three months to March.
“’It is also increasingly likely that growth for the full year will also be negative, and there is not much the authorities can do about it,” said Alberto Ramos, chief Latin America economist at Goldman Sachs.
“The Mexican peso had weakened significantly against the dollar long before Trump’s victory in November, as President Claudia Sheinbaum’s party embarked on a sweeping overhaul of the economic and political system. Her government is introducing elections for judges, dissolving independent regulators and reforming the electoral institute.”
Murray’s “reporting” about the Mexican peso is particularly fascinating, as she seems to have confused her timelines. Murray typed, “The Mexican peso had weakened significantly against the dollar long before Trump’s victory in November ….”
And yet the FT article from March 21 noted:
“The peso has also held up well, rallying 2.5 per cent against the dollar since January.”
Personally, seeing this saddens me. Noam Chomsky once called The Financial Times “the one newspaper that tells the truth.” See below, at 0:20, where Chomsky, arriving in the Netherlands to debate the Dutch Defense Minister, gladly accepts a copy of the FT when it’s offered to him.
Noam Chomsky - 1989-05-22 - Debate with Frits Bolkestein (Dutch Minister of Defense) on Propaganda.
7. Why Isn’t Anyone Asking Why We Are Bombing Yemen Again?
The big story this week, at least in the neoliberal press, was the sharing of plans among Trump’s national security team and the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, for bombing Yemen on Signal, the messaging app.
“On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. …I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. … It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.”
The article continues to detail various aspects of the plans and why to do this. The only person who appears to question the need to bomb Yemen is Vice President Vance, and he seems to object because the raid would “bail out” Europe. (“But I think we are making a mistake.” … “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez [sic]. 40 percent of European trade does. … I just hate bailing Europe out again.”)
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal
After the raid, The Atlantic congratulated itself on its “scoop.”
“David: You have done a lot of sensitive national-security reporting. Have you ever received any information like this?
“Jeffrey: No, nothing like this. This was like an intravenous drip of information that no one in the government thinks journalists should have. Until almost the very last minute, I could not believe that this was actually happening, that there could be a Mack-truck-size breach. …”
Personally, I always thought a “scoop” came from a journalist’s careful and dogged reporting, not a happenstance accident, or discovery.
But why did anyone in the group have Goldberg’s cell phone number and then decide to add him?
A Conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg About His Extraordinary Scoop
Of course, no occasion to make excuses for Hillary Clinton’s failures can be ignored. The Atlantic found time to work that angle in.
What really blows my mind is that no one, or almost no one, seems to question the need to bomb Yemen. Just the professionalism with which the attacks are planned.
Vox is providing at least some background:
“In early March, the Houthis threatened to resume attacks on Israel-linked shipping in response to Israel blocking aid into Gaza. Since Israel restarted its war in Gaza on March 18, the Houthis have launched a series of missile attacks on Israel.”
“On March 15, the Trump administration began its own airstrikes against the Houthis. Near-daily airstrikes have continued since then.
“Aside from just being generally more extensive and intense, President Donald Trump’s strikes are different from Joe Biden’s in that they appear to be targeting senior Houthi leaders personally, rather than weapons sites or command-and-control targets. (Former Biden officials say “persona strikes” were considered but not carried out before they left office). These strikes have succeeded in killing a number of senior Houthi leaders, though the group has been cagey about admitting which ones.
“In the Signal chats published by the Atlantic, national security adviser Mike Waltz refers to the killing of the Houthis’ ‘top missile guy.
“’We had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed,’ Waltz wrote. I asked several experts on Yemen, and none knew who this ‘top missile guy’ was or what specific strike this referred to. The US struck a number of buildings that night, and more than 30 people were killed, according to local authorities.
“Some commentators have suggested that Waltz may be describing a war crime here: leveling an entire building with civilians inside to kill one target.”
This is the issue: We’ve been doing this for years. And nothing has changed.
Isn’t the definition of insanity, at least one definition, going the same thing over and over and expecting different results?
8. Your Must-Watch Podcast for News About Mexico: Soberanía
Soberanía YouTube - March 25, 2025 - Water Wars and More (And New Studio)
And if you like it, why not subscribe and help these guys out a bit?
9. Bonus Video: Sir Humphrey Explains British Democracy on Yes Prime Minister
Democracy. What is it, really? For an answer to that question, let’s turn to the United Kingdom, the ostensible original democracy in the modern world.
And who better to explain than Sir Humphrey, a one-time Permanent Secretary for the Department of Administrative Affairs?
