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A Statement of Democratic Principles of AUDIT USA
We do not believe democratic societies are defined by perfection, moral purity, or the absence of abuse.
We believe they are defined by their capacity to detect error, correct abuse, and restore trust through evidence.
History shows that when power—whether governmental, institutional, or private—operates without transparency and independent verification, abuse becomes not only possible but predictable. This is not a claim about motives or ideology. It is a structural reality observed across time and systems.
Our work is grounded in three principles:
Skepticism is not cynicism.
Asking for evidence is not an accusation. It is a democratic responsibility.
Transparency is not exposure.
Protecting privacy and civil rights is compatible with public verification of outcomes.
Trust must be earned through systems, not personalities.
Good people operating inside opaque systems are still constrained by what the public can verify.
I’ve been struggling to imagine Elon Musk might do if he gets his trillion-dollar payday. He could spend a million dollars a day for 3,000 years. Or, more realistically, $100 million a day for 30 years. He could spend the $290 million he invested in Trump’s election and do it 3,400 times, wherever and whenever he pleases. Or buy more media properties, spending up to twenty times the $44 billion it took for him to buy Twitter and make it into a misinformation swamp key to Trump’s reelection.
But the money the Tesla board just handed Musk isn’t guaranteed. He has to meet goals like delivering 20 million Tesla vehicles and dramatically increasing Tesla’s stock price. Ordinary citizens can prevent that, but we need to take our efforts to another level.
Before the election in 2024, the normally moderate to liberal Washington Post, had its editorial independence eviscerated when its owner, Amazon-billionaire Jeff Bezos, blocked their endorsement of Harris and mandated the editorial policy move towards business and the right. Regular readers might still find hope in the general willingness of the editorial page to make efforts to hold some of the more egregious Trump policies and extremes to account around immigration, foreign policy, and other issues. But, with today’s end of the year editorial mouthing far right anti-poor rhetoric, bashing food stamp programs, and beating the drums for the worst of Trump’s big, bad, budget bill, it’s clear that Bezos hand is getting heavier and any continuing hope for the Post editorial policies to be different than the Wall Street Journal will only find them by degree, not distinction.
Let’s look at their bias and compare the facts. The Post editorial says:
It seems like forever ago when Americans were inundated by the daily news with the chaos in the Trump administration’s empowering Elon Must and his DOGE, Department of Governmental Efficiency, to slash and burn their way through federal agencies and federal workforce. Almost a year later, it’s becoming possible to get an approximate accounting of the real savings, if any, that resulted from all the sound and fury. Indisputably, despite the failure of the program to actually save taxpayers much money under its stated mission, the pain it caused is real and lingers, especially in situations like the almost complete defunding of the US Agency for International Development (AID).
The Times crunched some numbers, as they have been trying to do throughout this reign of terror. It still seems impossible to come up with a real, bottom line number for what amount DOGE and Musk really saved, partially because so many of their claims were completely false or exaggerated. Many times his young, inexperienced techies had no clue how to understand the contracts, whether they were let or not, and how many dollars they represented.
Here’s a sampling of what the Times team found:
This is a documented (but incomplete) map of their abductions and the level of escalation throughout the week. Data is from ICEOUT.
The author, Dissent in Bloom, writes at Substack Please consider supporting her work. https://substack.com/@dissentinbloom
On December 19th, school let out early in Columbus, and children did what children always do. Kids walked home and waited in pickup lines expecting to go home with family for winter break and all the coming festivities of the holidays.
They slung backpacks over one shoulder. They checked their phones. They waited in pickup lines and walked familiar routes home, thinking about winter break, holidays, sleeping in, the small relief that comes with the end of exams. Some were already arguing with siblings over who would sit in the front seat. Some were texting parents they could see just down the road.
A car door opening is usually nothing. That day, it was everything.
Recorded at 6:00 PM EST today 12/18/2025, this footage shows the Hampton Inn and Suites on Stelzer Road in Columbus, which is reportedly housing an estimated 200 ICE, CBP and DHS agents.
These agents are rooming at this location while conducting street raids throughout the city — arresting people who are shopping, walking, working and even someone who was riding home from the food pantry on a bike.
The two white vans pictured are documented as being used in ICE raids and transport across the country. Additionally, four black SUVs and several other vehicles on-site match the specific makes and models used in photographs and videos of ICE arrests here in Columbus.
Video on substack: https://substack.com/@dissentinbloom/note/c-189424208
Additional reporting on Columbus area ICE raids:
Almost everyone who visits the Octagon sites winds up asking: Why would anyone think of building a gigantic octagon? There is a logical answer, and it is rooted in traditions that were already thousands of years old. Shaman-midwives were building increasingly accurate calculators in order to more precisely understand the cosmic cycles of Grandmother Moon. This, in turn, would be expected to produce more accurate calendars for calculating the most fertile times of every woman’s monthly cycle, and for monitoring the stages of every pregnancy.
Among the ancient Ohio earthworks recently added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, the most befuddling are two very similar ones, both in the shape of gigantic irregular octagons. One, southeast of Chillicothe, is called the High Bank Octagon, probably built in the 1st century CE, and the other, probably built about two centuries later, is 58 miles to the northeast in Newark. The shapes of the two are completely congruent, but the Newark Octagon has dimensions exactly double those of High Bank.
Over Thanksgiving, when you were enjoying some downtime with your family and friends, AEP pulled a fast one.
During a routine review of the administrative rules about rooftop solar, AEP filed a comment at 4:30 p.m. on the day before Thanksgiving asking the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio for new rules that would significantly raise costs for people with solar panels.
The way this would happen is through a process called net metering. Under net metering, AEP gives a customer credit when their solar panels put more electricity onto the grid than the customer is using.
To the Editor:
As a resident of German Village and Chair of the German Village Society’s Historic Preservation Committee, I am writing out of deep concern for the ongoing and unnecessary destruction of historic sandstone curbs in our neighborhood. These curbs, hand-cut in the 19th century by immigrant stonemasons, are not just stones. They are part of the original streetscape that gives German Village its nationally recognized character.
In recent months, contractors working on behalf of the City of Columbus have demolished these curbs during ADA ramp installations — without public notice and without obtaining a Certificate of Appropriateness (COA). Every homeowner in German Village is required to secure a COA for any sidewalk, curb, or exterior work affecting historic materials. Yet the City has proceeded as though it is exempt from the very rules that residents must follow.
The result is permanent loss. Once these sandstone curbs are removed and replaced with modern concrete, they cannot be recreated. Their historic craftsmanship and material integrity are gone forever.