Remember: it’s not just trump and musk to blame, the entire Republican party is responsible for supporting all this.
If you want to do a bit of Both-Sides-ism, big chunks of the Dem Establishment have also been very friendly with Elon. FFS, he didn’t have any trouble landing contracts under the Biden Admin. And he led Gavin Newsom around by the nose with his Hyperloop promises for nearly a decade.
But I’d say the more pervasive concern is how heavily leveraged Elon’s businesses are with respect to his Saudi creditors. And that’s the real snarl at the end of this problem. The US has made the Saudi Royal Family such an enormous nexus of dollar inputs and outputs that Aramco might as well be a second Federal Reserve.
Our addiction to fossil fuels is driving significant chunks of our bad policy, both domestic and foreign. And while you can wax poetic about Americans “not voting for this”, there’s a deep socio-economic bond between American industry and cheap oil. Americans “vote” for the Saudis with their labor hours and their consumer spending on a daily basis.
We don’t have a lot amount of choice in our employment and consumer spending because of regulatory capture and economies of scale. Without any new coordination mechanism, getting off oil will have to be a top-down change.
Big oil has convinced us to cut down our own “carbon footprint” to encourage purity testing and exhaustion instead of collective action. They know it’s an externalities problem… do we?
We don’t have a lot amount of choice in our employment and consumer spending because of regulatory capture and economies of scale.
That’s true to a degree. But all too often, I see employment and consumer choices influenced by propaganda rather than raw economic forces. Whether or not you attend college is often not an economic choice but one of peer pressure and social expectation. Whether you move into the city or stay remote in the suburbs/exurbs is as much an expression of your social anxieties (amplified by “if it bleeds, it leads” local media coverage) as your economic position. While driving isn’t typically a choice, the size and shape of your vehicle absolutely is. People opting for increasingly large and ostentacious large-cab trucks and luxury SUVs are not acting under economic constraints. Often, Americans will pay a premium to live remote, drive a gas-guzzler, and subsist on disposables as an expression of their wealth.
This isn’t a problem other countries have. Germany, Japan, South Africa, India, Brazil, Mexico, even fucking Russia have figured out how to build densely and leverage mass transit to bring down waste. The Americans are uniquely incapable of developing efficiently. A big part of that is purely cultural, with white Americans having fled to the suburbs to avoid their black neighbors in the 70s/80s and putting a premium on one story ranch homes even in areas like San Fransisco or Chicago or Atlanta, where land is at a premium.
Never let Mitch McConnell off the hook, despite how he now says he doesn’t like what Trump his doing. Since this all started, he has done nothing but enable him and has done as much as anyone to put the guy in power. Same to be said of Graham. When this all goes terribly wrong(er), none of us should, for a second, allow them a pass on any future backtracking or apologizing that they might do.
And letting a thin-skinned, Ketamine-fueled, video-game cheating, Nazi apologist billionaire take over the machinery of the United States is not something that anyone voted for.
mother jones throwin hands.
Ketamine-fueled
That’s the important part. We have an adderall addict and a ketamine addict running our government.
Wonder what they’ll think the minute they get ruined by something he does.
Deport Elon Musk
Nah. Seize his assets, but make him stay here. Make that Nazi bastard experience life the American Way™ - living paycheck to paycheck at a minimum wage job (cause the moment his net worth guess to zero, his political influence does as well - another trademarked advantage of American living).
He’d still be a celebrity, a couple of talk show invitations and he’d be better off than the bar majority of Americans. Not to speak of other opportunities he’d have.
Zero assets? Yeah, I really doubt that. He’s not smart. And his popularity? You think any of these sociopaths in power actually like each other? Not a chance.
The moment there’s no chance of material gain by sucking up to him, he’d be tossed aside.
I really wish we’d stop hero worshipping the most worthless fools amongst us.
Oh, I love that idea. Actually, first give him some time, where he gets to work for less than minimum wage at a totally shit job.
Then release him, with the criminal record. See how he does…
Pipe dreams. Billionaires have beat the system. They’ll never be on our level, even after “losing” everything.
It sucks. But unless some external force is involved, they’ll never ever face repercussions for any of the bad they’ve ever done. This is the system they’ve built and designed for themselves.
I was thinking of making bumper stickers for that. But someone already even has the domain for that…
He didn’t seize control. He was given it by the President. I figured the article would cover the nuance the headline missed, but it didn’t.
And then I see others here making the same point and getting downvoted.
The problem is Trump and the very best people he is once again bringing in.
I’m not in the US, but the news coming out almost daily since Trump took office has been pretty worrying to me. I encourage everyone to watch and spread this video: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America. I feel like a tinfoil hatter but, what’s laid out in the video is very convincing after just a couple weeks into Trump’s presidency.
Yeah, watching this unfold makes me wonder just how useless things like a constitution and laws and due process really are in every other country. Because apparently none of those things actually matter and some rich asshole that wasn’t elected can seize power tomorrow if they want. While no one does anything about it. Makes it all seem like a big joke.
It’s the result of over 50 years of chipping away at all the anti corruption laws. Trump wouldn’t have been able to do this with the laws put in after Nixon, but there’s been a concerted effort to overturn all of it through the Supreme Court.
You should listen to the Masterplan podcast that lays it all out, if you haven’t yet.
I disagree there, they are still breaking laws, like what Musk is doing at Treasury, but there is no one enforcing the law. No one (Founding Fathers) accounted for Congress and the Supreme Court being so captured that they would do nothing to threats like this.
That is a huge difference from Nixon. His own party turned against him quickly when the evidence showed the illegal actions were connected to him directly. The modem Republicans never will do that to Trump or things he commands.
Yeah it’s crazy to me, over 300 million citizens in the US alone, but just a handful of billionaires is all it takes to destroy democracy and the government. It honestly feels like violence will be the only option to get at these billionaires as it seems there is no longer any way to cripple them financially. They are completely fearless in their meddling.
