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This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott doesn’t want to reveal months of communications with Elon Musk or representatives from the tech mogul’s companies, arguing in part that they are of a private nature, not of public interest and potentially embarrassing.

Musk had an eventful legislative session in Texas this year. In addition to his lobbyists successfully advocating for several new laws, Abbott cited the Tesla and SpaceX CEO as the inspiration for the state creating its own efficiency office and has praised him for moving the headquarters for many of his businesses to the state in recent years.

As part of an effort to track the billionaire’s influence in the state Capitol, The Texas Newsroom in April requested Abbott and his staff’s emails since last fall with Musk and other people who have an email address associated with some of his companies.

Initially, the governor’s office said it would take more than 13 hours to review the records. It provided a cost estimate of $244.64 for the work and required full payment up front. The Texas Newsroom agreed and cut a check.

After the check was cashed, the governor’s office told The Texas Newsroom it believed all of the records were confidential and asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office referees disputes over public records, to allow the documents to be kept private.

Matthew Taylor, Abbott’s public information coordinator, gave several reasons the records should not be released. He argued they include private exchanges with lawyers, details about policy-making decisions and information that would reveal how the state entices companies to invest here. Releasing them to the public, he wrote, “would have a chilling effect on the frank and open discussion necessary for the decision-making process.”

Taylor also argued that the communications are confidential under an exception to public records laws known as “common-law privacy” because they consist of “information that is intimate and embarrassing and not of legitimate concern to the public, including financial decisions that do not relate to transactions between an individual and a governmental body.”

He did not provide further details about the exact content of the records.

The language Abbott’s office used appears to be fairly boilerplate. Paxton’s office, in an explanation of the common-law privacy exception on its website, mentions that “personal financial information” that doesn’t deal with government transactions “is generally highly intimate or embarrassing and must be withheld.”

But Bill Aleshire, a Texas-based attorney specializing in public records law, was appalled that the governor is claiming that months of emails between his office and one of the world’s richest people are all private.

“Right now, it appears they’ve charged you $244 for records they have no intention of giving you,” Aleshire said. “That is shocking.”

Aleshire said it’s not unusual for government agencies to tap the common-law privacy exception in an attempt to withhold records from the public. But he’s used to it being cited in cases that involve children, medical data or other highly personal information — not for emails between an elected official and a businessman.

“You’re boxing in the dark,” Aleshire said. “You can’t even see what the target is or what’s behind their claim.”

Aleshire added that due to a recent Texas Supreme Court ruling, there is effectively no way to enforce public records laws against Abbott and other top state officials. He called the decision an “ace card” for these politicians.

The case dealt with requests to release Abbott and Paxton’s communications in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde. The high court ruled that it is the only body that can review whether these officials are in compliance with public records laws.

Kevin Bagnall, a lawyer representing Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, also wrote a letter to Paxton’s office arguing the emails should be kept secret. He cited one main reason: They contain “commercial information whose disclosure would cause SpaceX substantial competitive harm.”

Most of the rest of Bagnall’s letter, which further explained SpaceX’s argument, was redacted.

Musk and representatives for his companies did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Abbott’s spokesperson did not respond to specific questions about the records, including whether The Texas Newsroom would be refunded if Paxton withholds them.

In a statement, he said, “The Office of the Governor rigorously complies with the Texas Public Information Act and will release any responsive information that is determined to not be confidential or excepted from disclosure.”

The office of the attorney general has 45 business days to determine whether to release Abbott’s records.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Sign up for KUT newsletters.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Elon Musk’s team of Texas lobbyists during the 2025 legislative session did not rival those of huge energy and telecommunications companies, which typically employ dozens of people to represent them. But Musk and his companies still hired more lobbyists this year than any other since 2021, according to data from the Texas Ethics Commission.

Musk, the billionaire businessman behind carmaker Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX, influenced several new Texas laws this year. How his lobbyists came about these wins, however, is more of a mystery.

His lobbyists, who represented Tesla, SpaceX and the social media giant X Corp., spent tens of thousands of dollars on things like gifts and meals for Texas elected officials and others during the session, according to an analysis of state ethics data. In most cases, Texas transparency laws do not require lobbyists to disclose which politicians they wined and dined or on behalf of which clients.

The Texas Newsroom reached out to all 12 of Musk’s lobbyists registered with the state this session. Only one, Carrie Simmons, a lobbyist who counts Tesla among her clients, responded, but she declined to be interviewed. She said only Musk’s companies could comment on their work this session.

Emails sent to Musk’s companies and to Musk himself were not returned.

The Texas Newsroom was able to find hints of some of their actions in records obtained from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and state Sen. Adam Hinojosa. Other documents detailing their deeper connections are hidden from disclosure by state laws.

Ethics experts said the responsibility to improve transparency lies with Texas lawmakers. State law provides a “base level of transparency” for the public on who lobbyists are and who they represent, said Andrew Cates, a former lobbyist who wrote a guide on state ethics rules.

“Beyond that, the Legislature simply has not prioritized enough transparency in how the dollars are actually being spent on legislators on a regular basis. But that’s not the lobby’s fault, it’s the Legislature’s,” Cates said.

Tom Forbes, president of the Professional Advocacy Association of Texas, a statewide lobbyist organization, said while lobbyists sometimes get a bad rap, they play a critical role for lawmakers trying to make decisions on complex policies. He told The Texas Newsroom that his group is “agnostic” about making reporting requirements more stringent but will follow any changes the state implements.

“Our association is going to comply with whatever law the Legislature passes,” Forbes said.

Eight of Musk’s lobbyists worked for SpaceX, according to filings with the Ethics Commission. Tesla had four, one of whom also worked for X.

Musk’s lobbyists include former advisers and staffers for Gov. Greg Abbott, among them Mike Toomey and Reed Clay. Another lobbyist, Will McAdams, once sat on the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which regulates the state’s electric, telecommunications, and water and sewer utilities.

All but one lobbyist had other clients for whom they were also working, making it more difficult to track exactly how much spending went to further Musk’s agenda. Benjamin Lancaster, a former legislative staffer, was only on SpaceX’s payroll.

Lobbyists are not required to report their exact salaries, only a pay range. According to Ethics Commission data, Musk pledged to pay somewhere between about $400,000 to nearly $1 million in total to his lobbyists for their work this year. Half of them could rake in more than $110,000 each working for Musk’s companies.

Each month, lobbyists report their total spending. But state rules don’t require them to disclose who was on the receiving end unless the lobbyist shelled out more than $132.60 on one person in a single day. This includes food and beverages, transportation, lodging or entertainment. Taxes and tips are not counted. The disclosure threshold for gifts is $110.

Lobbyists also don’t need to disclose exactly who attended events to which all legislators were invited, like catered lunches for the entire Texas House of Representatives or happy hours hosted off-site.

In practice, these rules mean a lobbyist could buy the same elected official a steak dinner every night. As long as the daily cost stays under that amount, they don’t need to say who got the free meal.

Musk’s lobbyists spent more than $46,000 on food and drink alone for elected officials and their staff, family and guests this year, according to state ethics records. None of them detailed which elected officials may have been on the receiving end, implying all of their spending remained beneath the daily threshold.

Jim Clancy, the former chair of the Ethics Commission, said it’s common for multiple lobbyists to divide a single bill in order to stay below the reporting threshold.

“They have 15 different credit cards in the deal to make sure that it’s all below the limit,” Clancy told The Texas Newsroom. “The Legislature has to change it. And if they did, they wouldn’t get to eat for free.”

A slate of ethics bills, including several to require transparency into who funds mass text messages for political campaigns, failed to become law this year, according to The Texas Tribune. Meanwhile, legislators approved a new law that will reduce the fine for former lawmakers who engage in illegal lobbying activity.

While lobbyists are not required to disclose which bills they discuss in private meetings with officials and their staff, they must note their position if they choose to testify on a piece of legislation. This is how The Texas Newsroom identified the 13 bills on which Musk’s lobbyists took a public stance.

The Texas Newsroom was able to glean some additional insight on lobbyist influence from records received through public information requests.

Calendars for Hinojosa, a newly elected South Texas Republican who authored multiple bills that would benefit SpaceX and other aerospace companies, showed he or his staff had meetings scheduled with lobbyists or representatives from Musk’s rocket company at least three times in two months. Emails showed Patrick penned a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration supporting SpaceX’s ability to increase the number of launches at its South Texas rocket site.

Patrick was also invited to take a tour of the Tesla Gigafactory outside Austin, these records showed, but it’s unclear if he went.

Neither Hinojosa nor Patrick responded to requests for an interview.

The Texas Senate declined to release other documents that could have shed light on how Musk’s companies interacted with elected officials. In denying their release, Senate Secretary Patsy Spaw said communications between state lawmakers and Texas residents are “confidential by law.”

The reason, she said, is “to ensure the right of citizens of the state to petition their state government without fear of harassment, retaliation or public ridicule.”

This could include emails with lobbyists.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Sign up for KUT newsletters.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Elon Musk’s team of Texas lobbyists during the 2025 legislative session did not rival those of huge energy and telecommunications companies, which typically employ dozens of people to represent them. But Musk and his companies still hired more lobbyists this year than any other since 2021, according to data from the Texas Ethics Commission.

Musk, the billionaire businessman behind carmaker Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX, influenced several new Texas laws this year. How his lobbyists came about these wins, however, is more of a mystery.

His lobbyists, who represented Tesla, SpaceX and the social media giant X Corp., spent tens of thousands of dollars on things like gifts and meals for Texas elected officials and others during the session, according to an analysis of state ethics data. In most cases, Texas transparency laws do not require lobbyists to disclose which politicians they wined and dined or on behalf of which clients.

The Texas Newsroom reached out to all 12 of Musk’s lobbyists registered with the state this session. Only one, Carrie Simmons, a lobbyist who counts Tesla among her clients, responded, but she declined to be interviewed. She said only Musk’s companies could comment on their work this session.

Emails sent to Musk’s companies and to Musk himself were not returned.

The Texas Newsroom was able to find hints of some of their actions in records obtained from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and state Sen. Adam Hinojosa. Other documents detailing their deeper connections are hidden from disclosure by state laws.

Ethics experts said the responsibility to improve transparency lies with Texas lawmakers. State law provides a “base level of transparency” for the public on who lobbyists are and who they represent, said Andrew Cates, a former lobbyist who wrote a guide on state ethics rules.

“Beyond that, the Legislature simply has not prioritized enough transparency in how the dollars are actually being spent on legislators on a regular basis. But that’s not the lobby’s fault, it’s the Legislature’s,” Cates said.

Tom Forbes, president of the Professional Advocacy Association of Texas, a statewide lobbyist organization, said while lobbyists sometimes get a bad rap, they play a critical role for lawmakers trying to make decisions on complex policies. He told The Texas Newsroom that his group is “agnostic” about making reporting requirements more stringent but will follow any changes the state implements.

“Our association is going to comply with whatever law the Legislature passes,” Forbes said.

Eight of Musk’s lobbyists worked for SpaceX, according to filings with the Ethics Commission. Tesla had four, one of whom also worked for X.

Musk’s lobbyists include former advisers and staffers for Gov. Greg Abbott, among them Mike Toomey and Reed Clay. Another lobbyist, Will McAdams, once sat on the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which regulates the state’s electric, telecommunications, and water and sewer utilities.

All but one lobbyist had other clients for whom they were also working, making it more difficult to track exactly how much spending went to further Musk’s agenda. Benjamin Lancaster, a former legislative staffer, was only on SpaceX’s payroll.

Lobbyists are not required to report their exact salaries, only a pay range. According to Ethics Commission data, Musk pledged to pay somewhere between about $400,000 to nearly $1 million in total to his lobbyists for their work this year. Half of them could rake in more than $110,000 each working for Musk’s companies.

Each month, lobbyists report their total spending. But state rules don’t require them to disclose who was on the receiving end unless the lobbyist shelled out more than $132.60 on one person in a single day. This includes food and beverages, transportation, lodging or entertainment. Taxes and tips are not counted. The disclosure threshold for gifts is $110.

Lobbyists also don’t need to disclose exactly who attended events to which all legislators were invited, like catered lunches for the entire Texas House of Representatives or happy hours hosted off-site.

In practice, these rules mean a lobbyist could buy the same elected official a steak dinner every night. As long as the daily cost stays under that amount, they don’t need to say who got the free meal.

Musk’s lobbyists spent more than $46,000 on food and drink alone for elected officials and their staff, family and guests this year, according to state ethics records. None of them detailed which elected officials may have been on the receiving end, implying all of their spending remained beneath the daily threshold.

Jim Clancy, the former chair of the Ethics Commission, said it’s common for multiple lobbyists to divide a single bill in order to stay below the reporting threshold.

“They have 15 different credit cards in the deal to make sure that it’s all below the limit,” Clancy told The Texas Newsroom. “The Legislature has to change it. And if they did, they wouldn’t get to eat for free.”

A slate of ethics bills, including several to require transparency into who funds mass text messages for political campaigns, failed to become law this year, according to The Texas Tribune. Meanwhile, legislators approved a new law that will reduce the fine for former lawmakers who engage in illegal lobbying activity.

While lobbyists are not required to disclose which bills they discuss in private meetings with officials and their staff, they must note their position if they choose to testify on a piece of legislation. This is how The Texas Newsroom identified the 13 bills on which Musk’s lobbyists took a public stance.

The Texas Newsroom was able to glean some additional insight on lobbyist influence from records received through public information requests.

Calendars for Hinojosa, a newly elected South Texas Republican who authored multiple bills that would benefit SpaceX and other aerospace companies, showed he or his staff had meetings scheduled with lobbyists or representatives from Musk’s rocket company at least three times in two months. Emails showed Patrick penned a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration supporting SpaceX’s ability to increase the number of launches at its South Texas rocket site.

Patrick was also invited to take a tour of the Tesla Gigafactory outside Austin, these records showed, but it’s unclear if he went.

Neither Hinojosa nor Patrick responded to requests for an interview.

The Texas Senate declined to release other documents that could have shed light on how Musk’s companies interacted with elected officials. In denying their release, Senate Secretary Patsy Spaw said communications between state lawmakers and Texas residents are “confidential by law.”

The reason, she said, is “to ensure the right of citizens of the state to petition their state government without fear of harassment, retaliation or public ridicule.”

This could include emails with lobbyists.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Sign up for KUT newsletters.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Elon Musk was pleading.

It was April 2013, and Musk stood at a podium in a small committee room in the basement of the Texas Capitol. The Tesla CEO asked the legislators gathered before him to change state law, allowing him to bypass the state’s powerful car dealership lobby and sell his electric vehicles directly to the public.

He painted a bleak picture of what could happen if they didn’t give him his way.

“We would, I’m afraid, we would fail,” Musk told the assembled representatives. “So for us, it’s a matter of life or death.”

Clad in a dark suit instead of his now ubiquitous black T-shirt and baseball hat, the younger Musk was unable to persuade lawmakers in Austin. That year, the bill he wanted to pass died.

More than a decade later, however, Musk’s fortunes inside the Texas Capitol have changed — dramatically.

Musk is now not only one of the richest people in the world, who, until recently, was a key member of President Donald Trump’s second administration, but he’s also become one of the most powerful business and political figures in the state.

During this year’s legislative session, Musk’s lobbyists and representatives publicly advocated for almost a dozen bills that would benefit his companies. The Texas Newsroom identified these priorities by searching legislative records for committee testimony and other evidence of his public stances.

Musk wanted legislators to pass new laws that would make it faster and easier for homeowners to install backup power generators, like the kind Tesla makes, on their properties. He wanted them to create new crimes so people who fly drones or interfere with operations at his rocket company SpaceX can be arrested. And he wanted to change who controlled the highway and public beach near SpaceX’s South Texas site so he can launch his rockets according to his timeline.

Musk got them all.

In a Capitol where the vast majority of bills fail to pass, all but three of Musk’s public priorities will become law. The two bills his lobbyists openly opposed are dead, including a measure that would have regulated autonomous vehicles.

Musk made gains even on bills he didn’t publicly endorse. Texas lawmakers followed the tech giant’s lead by rewriting the state’s corporate laws and creating a new office modeled after the Department of Government Efficiency, the controversial effort he led in the Trump administration to cut federal spending.

By all accounts, Musk’s influence was great enough that he did not have to formally address lawmakers in person this session to make the case for any of his priorities.

Critics said these new laws will hand Musk’s companies more cash, more power and more protection from scrutiny as his business footprint continues to expand across Texas.

“The real harm is the influence of a private company on the decisions made by government,” Cyrus Reed, the conservation director for the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter, told The Texas Newsroom. The Sierra Club is part of a group suing the state over SpaceX’s activities in South Texas.

Musk and his representatives did not respond to requests for an interview. He recently ended his run with DOGE, and his relationship with Trump has increasingly frayed.

Contrary to his slash-and-burn tactics in Washington, D.C., where he bulldozed his way onto the scene after Trump’s reelection, Musk has played the long game to amass power in Texas. He still hasn’t succeeded in changing Texas law to allow for Tesla direct sales, but that hasn’t stopped him from steadily investing his personal and professional capital in the state over more than a decade. Most of his businesses, including the tunneling firm The Boring Company, social media giant X and Tesla, are now headquartered here. While it’s still based in California, SpaceX operates production, testing and launch sites across Texas.

Musk has also moved his personal home to the state, reportedly securing properties in the Austin area and South Texas.

In the Texas Capitol, Musk’s power is subtle but undeniable.

Calendars and emails obtained by The Texas Newsroom through public information requests show his company’s representatives met regularly with lawmakers backing his priority bills and invited Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to tour SpaceX. Patrick, who leads the state Senate, also penned a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration supporting the rocket company’s request to increase its launches in South Texas.

Texas politics, with its long history of outsize characters, has never seen the likes of Musk, said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones.

“Even in the heyday of the [George W.] Bush era, you couldn’t find somebody who had such dramatic wealth as Musk, who also had the same level of access and business interests here in Texas,” Jones told The Texas Newsroom. “Today, Elon Musk is arguably the most powerful and influential private citizen in the country.”

When lawmakers convened their 2025 legislative session in January, one of Musk’s top priorities was quickly clear. He wanted more control over the area around SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas.

Known as Starbase, the massive rocket testing and launch facility has come to dominate the small rural area between Brownsville, on the border, and the Gulf of Mexico. It is the launch site for Starship, the rocket meant to eventually take humans to Mars and the heart of Musk’s mission to make humans a multiplanetary species. The FAA recently gave SpaceX permission to increase Starship launches fivefold.

Although SpaceX owns most of the land around Starbase, county officials retained the authority over access to the adjacent public beach, called Boca Chica. The county worked closely with SpaceX to ensure the area was cleared ahead of launches, but the company’s leaders did not have ultimate control over the process.

That changed this year. First, Musk decided to incorporate the launch site as its own city. That happened on May 3, when the few residents who live in the area — most of whom The Texas Newsroom determined work for SpaceX — voted to create the new city of Starbase.

Musk then wanted state lawmakers to hand the new city the power to close Boca Chica Beach and the adjoining public highway during the week, a change the county officials opposed.

State Sen. Adam Hinojosa, a newly elected Republican who represents the area, authored the legislation to shift control to Starbase. Dozens of SpaceX employees got involved in the effort, submitting pages of identical comments to lawmakers in support.

Democrats succeeded in killing Hinojosa’s bill, prompting local activists to celebrate. Their victory was short-lived. Late in the session, lawmakers decided instead to shift some of this power to the Texas Space Commission, which facilitates the state’s space exploration agenda.

The new law states that the commission’s board can close highways and gulf beaches with the approval of a local municipality, which, in this case, is Starbase. SpaceX retains a connection to the commission itself: Kathy Lueders, who confirmed that she left her job as Starbase general manager last month, still sits on the Space Commission board. She directed additional questions to the commission.

The Space Commission declined to answer questions on SpaceX’s potential future involvement with these discussions.

“The way I view it is SpaceX wanted a certain amount of power,” said Reed, with the Sierra Club. “And at the end of the day, they didn’t quite get it, but they got something pretty close.”

The bill passed along largely partisan lines. Republican state Rep. Greg Bonnen, who authored the bill, did not respond to a request for comment about the role Starbase may play now that it will become law.

Lawmakers passed several more bills to benefit spaceports, the sites where spacecraft launch, like SpaceX.

While Texas is home to multiple spaceports, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, SpaceX dwarfs the rest in size and scope of influence across the state and country, boasting large federal government contracts and a growing satellite industry.

Hinojosa was an author or sponsor on most of these bills; he did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or comment for this story.

Other than the beach closure legislation, many passed with the support of Democrats.

At SpaceX’s urging, Texas lawmakers passed a measure to ban drones over spaceports. They also added spaceports to the state’s “critical infrastructure” facilities, which already include airports and military bases. The law will make it a felony to intentionally damage or interrupt the operation of any site where a spacecraft is tested or launched. Similar critical infrastructure laws have been used in other states to arrest people protesting oil and gas pipeline projects.

Bekah Hinojosa with the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, a local activist group, told The Texas Newsroom the new critical infrastructure law will let Musk “militarize our Boca Chica Beach for his dangerous rocket testing endeavors."

The Sierra Club and other groups from South Texas, including a local Indigenous tribe, are suing the state, arguing that closing Boca Chica violates an amendment to the Texas Constitution that protects access to public beaches.

The General Land Office, the main defendant in that suit, declined to comment. In court filings, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argues the state can still regulate beach access for public safety reasons and that it cannot be sued in this case because it has immunity. The case is pending at the Texas Supreme Court.

Legislators also passed two more new laws that will shield companies like SpaceX from public scrutiny and legal challenges.

One will exempt certain military and aerospace issues from public meetings laws, allowing elected officials in some cases to discuss these topics behind closed doors. The proposal was so concerning to residents who live close to SpaceX’s facility near Waco, where locals say the company’s rocket testing has spooked livestock and damaged homes, that they submitted a dozen comments against it.

This law went into effect on May 15.

Another new law will make it harder for crew members and certain other employees to sue space flight companies. This, like most new legislation approved this session, will become law on Sept. 1.

SpaceX’s only significant public defeat during this year’s legislative session was the failure of a bill it supported to give spaceports a tax cut. The measure would have cost nearly $14.5 million over five years, according to an official estimate from the Legislative Budget Board.

Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, believes Texas is pandering to Musk.

“It’s all to help Elon,” said Jah, who added that his viewpoint is rooted in resisting policies that enable what he called “environmental plunder masked as ‘innovation.’” He has concerns that the state is investing in spaceports, most notably Musk’s, while carving out exceptions that prohibit public insight and input into what’s happening at those facilities.

“There’s this whole cloak of secrecy with whatever Elon is doing,” Jah said. “We will not and should not cease to launch satellites or explore space. But the way in which we do it matters a lot.”

This year, Tesla’s lobbyists publicly advocated against only two bills. Both died.

One was a GOP-authored proposal intended to create a buffer zone between homes and large-scale energy storage facilities like the kind Tesla sells.

The other bill would have imposed more regulations on the type of cars that Musk is rolling out as robotaxis in Texas, and would have required a public hearing if a collision involving an autonomous vehicle resulted in a fatality.

Bill author Rep. Terry Canales, an Edinburg Democrat, believes his legislation failed because it was not pro-industry enough.

“Tesla is the worst actor that I’ve ever dealt with in the Capitol. They’re subversive. They never come out of the shadows,” Canales told The Texas Newsroom. “Not only did I not hear from them, I didn’t expect to hear from them because that’s the way they operate.”

Lawmakers instead advanced a different bill, one with a lighter regulatory touch that was crafted with input from the autonomous vehicle industry.

It will require commercial operators, such as robotaxi and driverless big rig companies, to obtain authorization from the state. This approval can be revoked if the company’s vehicles endanger the public, including causing “serious bodily injury,” though it requires no public hearings in the case of a fatality, as Canales’ bill would have done. Autonomous vehicle companies will also have to develop plans for interacting with emergency responders.

Tesla took a neutral stance on the legislation. But the bill’s author, state Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, told The Texas Newsroom that Tesla’s team participated in work groups and stakeholder conversations with industry groups, trial lawyers and others.

Texas has been at the forefront of testing this technology for years, rolling out its first regulations in 2017. But with more autonomous vehicles hitting the streets, Nichols said it was time to clarify the rules and called his bill “a real opportunity here to actually improve safety.”

Nichols’ legislation initially died in the Texas House. But with less than a week before lawmakers packed up to go home, a House member added the entirety of Nichols’ bill as an amendment to another transportation bill, which will become law Sept. 1.

Tray Gober, a personal injury lawyer who handles vehicle crash cases in Austin, said it’s smart to get new regulations for autonomous vehicles on the books. But he worries that Texas is rushing to give its blessing to a technology that has not been fully tested.

“We’re not talking about rockets crashing into the ocean. We’re talking about cars crashing into other people,” he said, comparing Tesla to SpaceX. “There’s going to be people that are hurt during this process of improving these systems, and that’s unfortunate. I think it’s viewed as collateral damage by these companies.”

When asked about concerns that there could be fatalities as the number of driverless cars grows in Texas, Nichols said, “There probably will be. Eventually there will be. I would not doubt that.” But he pointed to studies showing autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers.

“If you start looking at the breakdown of the fatalities on the roads and the crashes and the wrecks, what causes them? It’s not equipment failure. It’s driver distraction,” he told The Texas Newsroom.

Critics of these studies argue their scope is too narrow to make conclusions about the safety of self-driving technology. Citing safety concerns, some local lawmakers asked Tesla’s robotaxi rollout in Austin to be delayed. The company continued with the launch but with human monitors in the passenger seats.

Many Democrats opposed Nichols’ proposal. But at least three other bills affecting Tesla got bipartisan support.

At times, the Sierra Club was fighting against Musk’s SpaceX bills while working with his Tesla lobbyists on clean energy legislation, said Reed, the club’s conservation director. For example, Tesla and the Sierra Club both supported legislation to create new fire standards for battery energy storage facilities and address the environmental and financial challenges associated with decommissioning them.

Tesla also backed a bill that had bipartisan support to make it easier for homeowners to install backup power generators, such as the company’s Powerwall.

Reed said Musk’s shift to the right has created interesting bedfellows, sometimes making it easier for Republicans to back some of the energy policies more traditionally associated with progressives.

He remarked, “It’s an interesting time in our country, right?”

For all the bills Musk pushed to see pass, he also indirectly influenced the creation of new laws on which he did not take a public stance.

Texas lawmakers created the state’s own DOGE office housed under the governor, the name an homage to Musk’s controversial federal cost-slashing effort in Washington, D.C.

Musk himself took no public role in creating the new office. But at a signing ceremony for the bill, Gov. Greg Abbott explained he was the inspiration.

Texas legislators also rewrote the state’s corporate laws after Musk raised concerns about business codes in other states. Authored by Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the rewrite shields business leaders from lawsuits and establishes thresholds for the types of legal challenges shareholders can file.

Musk and his lobbyists never came out in support of the bill, but he has long complained that states needed to shore up protections for CEOs and other business leaders.

Musk began crusading on the issue after his $55 billion compensation package at Tesla was challenged in Delaware’s business courts. Musk moved many of his businesses elsewhere, including Texas, and publicly urged other companies to “get the hell out of Delaware.”

The legislation written in response was dubbed the “DExit” bill.

“Texas is much better than Delaware,” Musk posted on X in early April, just days after the bill passed the state Senate. “If Delaware doesn’t reform, it will lose all its corporate business.”

Last year, a Delaware judge ruled Musk’s pay package violated his fiduciary duties to the company’s stockholders. He won most of it back in a shareholder vote, but the judge again rejected his pay package in December.

In an interview, Hughes told The Texas Newsroom he heard input from different groups in crafting the Texas legislation and could not remember whether Musk’s companies were involved.

Abbott signed the DExit bill and a handful of other business bills into law on May 14. Standing behind him at a public ceremony marking the occasion were Hughes and a large group of business representatives.

Standing behind Hughes was a representative from Tesla.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT News in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Sign up for KUT newsletters.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom.

No crystal ball was required regarding the eventual sundering of the relationship between Trump and Elon Musk. Here were noisy, brash egos who had formed a rancid union in American politics, with Musk lending his resources and public machinery to The Donald, knowing he could also have sway in the Trump administration as a “special government employee”.  That sway took the form of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), a crude attempt to right the wrongs of misspending in government while politicising the public service. Awaking from a narcotised daze, Musk decided to focus on his floundering companies, notably Tesla, and step back from the inferno. In doing so, he expected “to remain a friend and adviser, and if there’s anything the president wants me to do, I’m at this service.” Gazing at the raging inferno that is Trumpian policy, that convivial attitude has all but evaporated.

For one thing, Trump’s proposed tax breaks and increases in defence spending, espoused in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, seemed to undermine the very premise of DOGE and its zealous mission of reducing government spending. The legislation promises to slash $1.5 trillion in government spending but increase the debt limit by $4 trillion. “I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,” Musk said in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning last month. Such a plan merely inflated, not reduced, the budget deficit. “I think a bill can be big or beautiful. I don’t know if it can be both.”

This month, Musk became even more irritable. His temper had frayed. “I’m sorry, I just can’t stand it anymore,” he barked on his X platform on June 3. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.” He continued to heap shame on members of Congress “who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”

On June 5, Trump expressed his disappointment “because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill”, leaving open the possibility that the billionaire might be suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome.” Musk had “only developed the problem when he found out that we’re going to have to cut the [electric vehicle] mandate.”

A blow was in the offing, coming in the form of a post on Truth Social: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised Biden didn’t do it!” Musk’s embittered retort: “Such an obvious lie. So sad.” He also proposed, in light of the President’s announcement, the decommissioning of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, vehicles used by NASA to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The ripples were finally getting violent.

Musk then decided to do what he called dropping “the really big bomb”. Trump, he revealed, “is in the Epstein files. This is the real reason they have not been made public.” Given Musk’s estranged relationship with reality and its facets, this can only be taken at face value. It’s a matter of record that Trump, along with a fat who’s who of power, knew the late Jeffrey Epstein, financier and convicted sex offender, for many years.

The trove of government documents known as The Epstein Files has offered the easily titillated some manna but, thus far, few bombs. On February 27, US Attorney General Pamela Bondi released what were described as the “first phase” of files relating to the financier and “his exploitation of over 250 underage girls at his homes in New York and Florida, among other locations.” In an interview with Fox News on February 21, Bondi revealed that Epstein’s client list lay “on my desk right now.”

Trump’s response to Musk’s latest gobbet of accusation proved almost melancholic. “I don’t mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago.” He went on to praise “one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress.”

In characteristically bratty fashion, Musk went on to share a post agreeing with the proposition that Trump be impeached and replaced by the Vice President, J.D. Vance, advocate “a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle” (a touching billionaire’s wish), and predict “a recession in the second half of this year” caused by Trump’s global tariff regime.

In the scheme of things, Trump has survived impeachment, prosecution, litigation, and a divided US electorate that gave him a majority in both the Electoral College and the popular vote.  Like a Teflon-coated mafia don, he has made compromising people a minor art.  Musk, compromised in his support and having second thoughts, can only go noisily into the confused night.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In early February, Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia, went to visit one of the country’s Cabinet ministers at his agency’s headquarters, above a partially abandoned strip mall off a dirt road. It had been two weeks since President Donald Trump took office, and Cromer had pressing business to discuss. She needed the minister to fall in line to help Elon Musk.

Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet company, had spent months trying to secure regulatory approval to sell internet access in the impoverished West African country. As head of Gambia’s communications ministry, Lamin Jabbi oversees the government’s review of Starlink’s license application. Jabbi had been slow to sign off and the company had grown impatient. Now the top U.S. government official in Gambia was in Jabbi’s office to intervene.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency loomed over the conversation. The administration had already begun freezing foreign aid projects, and early in the meeting, Cromer, a Biden appointee, said something that rattled Gambian officials in the room. She listed the ways that the U.S. was supporting the country, according to two people present and contemporaneous notes, noting that key initiatives — like one that funds a $25 million project to improve the electrical system — were currently under review.

Jabbi’s top deputy, Hassan Jallow, told ProPublica he saw Cromer’s message as a veiled threat: If Starlink doesn’t get its license, the U.S. could cut off the desperately needed funds. “The implication was that they were connected,” Jallow said.

In recent months, senior State Department officials in both Washington and Gambia have coordinated with Starlink executives to coax, lobby and browbeat at least seven Gambian government ministers to help Musk, records and interviews show. One of those Cabinet officials told ProPublica his government is under “maximum pressure” to yield.

In mid-March, Cromer escalated the campaign by writing to Gambia’s president with an “important request.” That day, a contentious D.C. meeting between Musk employees and Jabbi had ended in an impasse. She urged the president to circumvent Jabbi and “facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by ProPublica. Jabbi told confidantes he felt the ambassador was trying to get him fired.

The saga in Gambia is the starkest known example of the Trump administration wielding the U.S. government’s foreign policy apparatus to advance the business interests of Musk, a top Trump adviser and the world’s richest man.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the State Department has intervened on behalf of Starlink in Gambia and at least four other developing nations, previously unreported records and interviews show.

As the Trump administration has gutted foreign aid, U.S. diplomats have pressed governments to fast-track licenses for Starlink and arranged conversations between company employees and foreign leaders. In cables, U.S. officials have said that for their foreign counterparts, helping Starlink is a chance to prove their commitment to good relations with the U.S.

In one country last month, the U.S. embassy bragged that Starlink’s license was approved despite concerns it wasn’t abiding by rules that its competitors had to follow.

“If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption,” said Kristofer Harrison, who served as a high-level State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “Because it is corruption.”

Helping U.S. businesses has long been part of the State Department’s mission, but former ambassadors said they sought to do this by making the positive case for the benefits of U.S. investment. When seeking deals for U.S. companies, they said they took care to avoid the appearance of conflicts or leaving the impression that punitive measures were on the table.

Ten current and former State Department officials said the recent drive was an alarming departure from standard diplomatic practice — because of both the tactics used and the person who would benefit most from them. “I honestly didn’t think we were capable of doing this,” one official told ProPublica. “That is bad on every level.” Kenneth Fairfax, a retired career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, said the global push for Musk “could lead to the impression that the U.S. is engaging in a form of crony capitalism.”

The Washington Post previously reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has instructed U.S. diplomats to help Starlink so it can beat its Chinese and Russian competitors. Multiple countries, including India, have sped up license approvals for Starlink to try to build goodwill in tariff negotiations with the Trump administration, the Post reported.

ProPublica’s reporting provides a detailed picture of what that push has looked like in practice. After Gambia’s ambassador to the U.S. declined an interview about Starlink — a topic seen as highly sensitive given Musk’s position — ProPublica reporters traveled to the capital, Banjul, to piece together the events. This account is based on internal State Department documents and interviews with dozens of current and former officials from both countries, most of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

In response to detailed questions, the State Department issued a statement celebrating Starlink. “Starlink is an America-made product that has been a game changer in helping remote areas around the world gain internet connectivity,” a spokesperson wrote. “Any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.” Cromer and Starlink did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the office of the president of Gambia. Jabbi made Jallow available to discuss the situation.

During the Biden administration, State Department officials worked with Starlink to help the company navigate bureaucracies abroad. But the agency’s approach appears to have become significantly more aggressive and expansive since Trump’s return to power, according to internal records and current and former government officials.

Foreign leaders are acutely aware of Musk’s unprecedented position in the government, which he has used to help rewrite U.S. foreign policy. After Musk spent at least $288 million on the 2024 election, Trump gave the billionaire a powerful post in the White House. In mere months, Musk’s team has directed the firing of thousands of federal workers, canceled billions of dollars in programs and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which supported humanitarian projects around the world. African nations have been particularly hard-hit by the cuts.

At the same time, Musk continues to run Starlink and the rest of his corporate empire. In past administrations, government ethics lawyers carefully vetted potential conflicts of interest. Though Trump once said that “we won’t let him get near” conflicts, the White House has also suggested Musk is responsible for policing himself. The billionaire has waved away criticisms of the arrangement, saying “I’ll recuse myself” if conflicts arise. “My companies are suffering because I’m in the government,” Musk said.

In a statement, the White House said Musk has nothing to do with deals involving Starlink and that every administration official follows ethical guidelines. “For the umpteenth time, President Trump will not tolerate any conflicts of interest,” spokesperson Harrison Fields said in an email.

Executives at Starlink have seized the moment to expand. An April State Department cable to D.C. obtained by ProPublica quoted a Starlink employee describing the company’s approach to securing a license in Djibouti, a key U.S. ally in Africa that hosts an American military base: “We’re pushing from the top and the bottom to ram this through.”

Musk entered the White House at a pivotal moment for Starlink. When the service launched in 2020, it had a novel approach to internet access. Rather than relying on underground cables or cell towers like traditional telecom companies, Starlink uses low-orbiting satellites that let it provide fast internet in places its competitors had struggled to reach. Expectations for the startup were sky high. Bullish Morgan Stanley analysts predicted that by 2040, Starlink would have up to 364 million subscribers worldwide — more than the current population of the U.S.

Starlink quickly became a central pillar of Musk’s fortune. His stake in Starlink’s parent company, SpaceX, is estimated to be worth about $150 billion of his roughly $400 billion net worth.

Although the company says its user base has grown to over 5 million people, it remains a bit player compared to the largest internet providers. And the satellite internet market is set to become more competitive as well-funded companies launch services modeled on Starlink. Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper, a unit of Amazon, has said it expects to start serving customers later this year. Satellite upstarts headquartered in Europe and China aren’t far behind either.

“They want to get as far and as fast as they can before Amazon Kuiper gets online,” said Chris Quilty, a veteran space industry analyst.

In internal cables, State Department officials have said they are eager to help Musk get ahead of foreign satellite companies. Securing licenses in the next 18 months is critical for Starlink due to the growing competition, one cable said last month. Senior diplomats have written that they hope to give Musk’s company a “first-mover advantage.”

Africa represents a lucrative prize. Much of the continent lacks reliable internet. Success in Africa could mean dominating a market with the fastest-growing population on earth.

As of last November, Starlink had reportedly launched in 15 of Africa’s 54 countries, but it was beginning to spark a backlash. Last year, Cameroon and Namibia cracked down on Musk’s company for allegedly operating in their countries illegally. In South Africa — where Starlink has so far failed to get a license — Musk exacerbated tensions by publicly accusing the government of anti-white racism. Since Trump won the election, at least five African countries have granted licenses to Starlink: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho and Chad.

Now Musk’s campaign of cuts has given him leverage inside the State Department. A Trump administration memo that leaked to the press last month proposed closing six embassies in Africa.

The Gambian embassy was on the list of proposed cuts.

An 8-year-old democracy, Gambia’s 2.7 million residents live on a sliver of land once used as a hub in the transatlantic slave trade. For two decades until 2017, the nation was ruled by a despot who had his opponents assassinated and plundered public funds to buy himself luxuries like a Rolls-Royce collection and a private zoo. When the dictator was ousted, the economy was in tatters. Today Gambia is one of the poorest countries in the world, with about half the country living on less than $4 a day.

In this fragile environment, the telecom industry that Jabbi oversees is vitally important to Gambian authorities. According to the government, the sector provides at least 20% of the country’s tax revenue. Ads for the country’s multiple internet providers are ubiquitous, painted onto dozens of public works — parks, police booths, schools.

It’s unclear why Starlink’s efforts in Gambia, a tiny market, have been so intense.

Cromer’s efforts on behalf of the company started under the Biden administration, as she documented last December in a cable sent back to Washington. Last spring, Starlink began the process of securing necessary approvals from a local utilities regulator and the Gambian communications agency. The utilities regulator wanted Starlink to pay an $85,000 license fee, which the company felt was too expensive. Cromer spoke to local officials, who then “pressured” the regulator to remove “this unnecessary barrier to entry,” the ambassador wrote.

Gambian supporters of Starlink felt that its product would be a boon for consumers and for economic growth in the country, where internet service remains unreliable and slow. “The ripple effects could be extraordinary,” Cromer said in the December cable, contending it could enable telehealth and improve education.

Opponents argued that local internet providers were one of Gambia’s few stable sources of jobs and infrastructure investments. If Starlink killed off its competition and then jacked up its prices — in Nigeria, the company announced last year it would suddenly double its fees — authorities could have little leverage to manage the fallout. When Musk refused to turn on Starlink in part of Ukraine during the war there, it heightened concerns about handing control of internet access to the mercurial billionaire, industry analysts said. One Musk tweet about foreign regulators’ ability to police his company caught the attention of Gambian critics: “They can shake their fist at the sky,” Musk said in 2021.

The ultimate authority for granting Starlink a license lies with Jabbi, an attorney who spent years in the local telecom sector. Gambian telecom companies that don’t want competition from Musk see Jabbi as an ally.

Jallow, Jabbi’s top deputy, told ProPublica that the ministry is not opposed to Starlink operating in Gambia. But he said Jabbi is doing due diligence to ensure laws and regulations are being followed before opening up the country to a consequential change.

After Trump’s inauguration, Jabbi’s position pitted him against not only Starlink but also the U.S. government. In the weeks after the February meeting where Cromer reminded Jabbi about the tenuous state of American funding to his country, the ambassador told other diplomats that getting Starlink approved was a high priority, according to a Western official familiar with her comments.

The stance surprised some of Cromer’s peers. Cromer had spent her career at USAID before President Joe Biden appointed her as ambassador. Her tenure in Gambia often focused on human rights and democracy building.

In March, when Jabbi and Jallow traveled to D.C. to attend a World Bank summit, the State Department helped arrange a series of meetings for them. The first, on March 19, was with Starlink representatives including Ben MacWilliams, a former U.S. diplomat who leads the company’s expansion efforts in Africa. The second was with U.S. government officials at the State Department’s headquarters.

The meeting with the company quickly became contentious. Huddled in a conference room at the World Bank, MacWilliams accused Jabbi of standing in the way of his nation’s progress and harming ordinary Gambians, according to Jallow, who was in the meeting, and four others briefed on the event. “We want our license now,” Jallow recalled MacWilliams saying. “Why are you delaying it?”

The conversation ended in a stalemate. In the hours that followed, Starlink and the U.S. government’s campaign intensified in a way that underscored the degree of coordination between the two parties. The company told Jabbi it would cancel his scheduled D.C. meeting with State Department officials because “there was no more need,” Jallow said.

The State Department meeting never happened. Instead, 4,000 miles away in Gambia’s capital, Cromer would try an even more aggressive approach.

That same day, Cromer had already met with Gambia’s equivalent of a commerce secretary to lobby him to help pave the way for Starlink. Then she was informed about the disappointing meeting Starlink had had in D.C., according to State Department records. By day’s end, Cromer had sent a letter to the nation’s president.

“I am writing to seek your support to allow Starlink to operate in The Gambia,” the letter opened. Over three pages, the ambassador described her concerns about Jabbi’s agency and listed the ways that Gambians could benefit from Starlink. She also said the company had satisfied conditions set by Jabbi’s predecessor.

“I respectfully urge you to facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations in The Gambia,” Cromer concluded. “I look forward to your favorable response.”

In the weeks since, Jabbi has refused to budge. The U.S. government’s efforts have continued. In late April, Gambia’s attorney general met in D.C. with senior State Department officials, according to a person familiar with the matter, where they again discussed the Starlink issue.

Diplomats were troubled by how the pressure campaign could hurt America’s image overseas. “This is not Iran or a rogue African state run by a dictator — this is a democracy, a natural ally,” said another senior Western diplomat in the region, noting that Gambia is “a prime partner of the West” in United Nations votes. “You beat up the smallest and the best boy in the class.”

Gambia is not the only country being leaned on. Since Trump took office, embassies around the world have sent a flurry of cables to D.C. documenting their meetings with Starlink executives and their efforts to cajole developing countries into helping Musk’s business. The cables all describe a problem similar to what happened in Gambia: The company has struggled to win a license from local regulators. In some countries, ambassadors reported, their work appears to be yielding results. (The embassies and their host countries did not respond to requests for comment.)

The U.S. embassy in Cameroon wrote that the country could prove its commitment to Trump’s agenda by letting Starlink expand its presence there. In the same missive, embassy officials discussed the impact of U.S. aid cuts and deportations and cited a humanitarian official who was reckoning with America’s shifting foreign policy: “They may not be happy with what they see, but they are trying to adapt as best they can.”

In Lesotho, where embassy officials had spent weeks trying to help Starlink get a license, the company finalized a deal after Trump imposed 50% tariffs on the tiny landlocked country. Lesotho officials told embassy staff they hoped the license would help in their urgent push to reduce the levies, according to Mother Jones. A major multinational company complained that Starlink was getting preferential treatment, embassy documents obtained by ProPublica show, since Musk’s firm had been exempted from requirements its competitors still had to follow.

In cables sent from the U.S. embassy in Djibouti this spring, State Department officials recounted their meetings with the company and pledged to continue working with “Starlink in identifying government officials and facilitating discussions.”

In Bangladesh, U.S. diplomats pressed Starlink’s case “early and often” with local officials, partnered with Starlink to “build an educational strategy” for their counterparts and helped arrange a conversation between Musk and the nation’s head of state, according to a recent cable. The embassy’s work started under Biden but bore fruit only after Trump took office.

Their efforts resulted in Bangladesh approving Starlink’s request to do business in the country, the top U.S. diplomat there said last month, a sign-off that Musk’s company had sought for years.

Do you have information about Elon Musk’s businesses or the Trump administration? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Brett Murphy can be reached at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Joshua Kaplan, Brett Murphy, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski.

Tech writer and critic Paris Marx discusses the first 100 days of the second Trump administration and the influence of billionaire Elon Musk at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which has slashed government programs and the civil service. Marx says even after Musk gave hundreds of millions to Trump’s reelection campaign, “it was hard to imagine that he would really play this outsized role in the actual governance of the country.” Marx also warns that the DOGE playbook is likely to be exported to “the political right in other countries to try to do something similar with a DOGE organization, kind of wrapping it in this cloak of efficiency and … allowing this further gutting of the state.” Marx also talks about how several Canadian tech executives recently launched the initiative called Build Canada, with the goal of firing 100,000 federal government employees, increasing immigration restrictions and building new oil pipelines, and concern about Musk’s DOGE approach going global.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Photo Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are making corruption and graft the main business of the US government. They have fired all the cops who might try to rein them in and attacked any of the judges, politicians, or reporters who object to them stealing everything in sight.

In this vein, it was entertaining to see reports that Elon Musk has plans to bid on, and presumably get, the contract for building Donald Trump’s “Iron Dome” system for the United States. Before discussing Elon Musk’s latest scheme for getting richer, it is worth noting that there is no obvious need for an Iron Dome-type system in the United States.

Donald Trump may not have noticed, but we have not had a problem of missiles raining down on the United States from other countries. But that’s okay in Donald Trump’s MAGAland. We also didn’t have a problem of pet-eating migrants in Springfield, Ohio, but that didn’t stop Trump and Vance from putting this “crisis” at the center of their campaign.

Donald Trump’s solutions don’t have to bear any relationship to real world problems. He assumes that his supporters will be just fine with spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a weapon system we don’t need, and at least for Republican members of Congress, he is probably right. Needless to say, the “Department of Government Efficiency” won’t be bothered by this waste.

But the potential waste here is even more than it first appears. In Musk’s scheme he won’t be selling the US government the Iron Dome system, he will be “licensing” it. That would mean that Musk maintains ownership of the system, allowing him to sell it to others, and just charges us an annual fee for its use.

There are obvious political issues with this scheme. For example, will Musk shut it down if we have a government that is not sufficiently far-right for his tastes? Suppose the government decides to let trans athletes compete in high school sports; will Musk take away its missile defense system?

But the issues go beyond just political considerations. There is a serious economic issue at stake. There is not currently a mass market for continent-wide anti-missile systems. If Trump decides to pay for the development of one, it will give it developer access to a potentially very valuable technology. It is hard to see how anyone with any business sense at all would hand that asset over to Elon Musk or anyone else.

There are actually some precedents for this sort of transfer of valuable ownership rights. The most famous is when IBM contracted with Bill Gates to design an operating system for its computers in 1981.

At that time IBM was by far the world’s leader in producing personal computers and the computer industry more generally. Microsoft was still a relatively small start-up. But because IBM allowed Gates to maintain ownership of the operating system, Microsoft quickly catapulted past IBM in profitability and market value. It is unlikely Microsoft ever would have become one of the largest companies in the world, if IBM had made ownership of the system a condition of its deal with Microsoft.

To take a more recent example, after the COVID pandemic hit the United States, the government initiated “Operation Warp Speed” to develop vaccines and treatments for the disease. One of the first deals arranged by the program was with Moderna to develop a mRNA vaccine to protect against COVID. Under the contract, the government paid for the research needed to develop the vaccine; it then paid for the clinical trials needed to establish its safety and effectiveness.

However, despite paying the bulk of its development and testing costs, the government handed control over the vaccine to Moderna, which subsequently made tens of billions of dollars selling it in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Instead of making the vaccine a generic that would likely sell for around $5 a shot, Moderna was charging up to $130 a shot for its boosters. Yeah, that deal was signed by Donald Trump.

So, paying for the development of technology, and then giving it away, is not something new for Trump, but the sums involved are likely to be at least an order of magnitude higher for the missile defense system designed by Musk’s team. The economy and financial markets have looked very shaky lately with Donald Trump’s stop/go tariffs, as well as his mass firings and cancellations of government contracts. But there is still at least one investment that is secure in MAGA America: a payment to Donald Trump.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Iron Dome Technology: Elon Musk’s License to Steal Taxpayers’ Dollars appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

Patrick Guarasci, chief political strategist for Judge Crawford, and Sam Roecker, senior campaign advisor and communications lead, share how they pulled off a landmark win in Wisconsin’s pivotal Supreme Court race, offering a blueprint for reclaiming power in GOP-dominated states.

In Wisconsin, the land of cheese, beer, and GOP ratf*cking, progressives scored a major victory. And they did it despite daunting odds, including opposition from none other than the world’s richest man/psychopath. When Musk is not launching cars into space or tweeting himself into SEC investigations, he has been throwing his weight, and giant checks, behind efforts to tilt the judiciary in his favor.

Judge Crawford's campaign wasn’t about crypto hype or culture war distractions; it was about qualifications, a smart strategy, and staying laser-focused on issues people actually care about: reproductive rights, fair electoral maps, and keeping the courts independent.

This wasn’t just a Wisconsin win. It was a blueprint for how to beat big money with big people power. Students, first-time voters, and folks who typically only turn out for Packers games showed up in force. The lesson? When campaigns speak to real concerns and mobilize communities, they can overcome even the deepest pockets. Senator Ron Johnson, MAGA/Russia loyalist and 2028 re-election hopeful, might want to start updating his résumé.

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This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

As federal agencies face crippling cuts and are forced to cut essential services, President Trump has announced he will seek a $1 trillion budget for the Pentagon, a record-setting number that would mark the highest level of U.S. defense spending since World War II. William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, blasts the promised budget as “completely unnecessary” and says that “almost the only beneficiaries are going to be the weapons manufacturers.” Hartung also discusses the growing political influence of Silicon Valley defense technology startups, including Alex Karp’s Palantir and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Image by Samuel Regan-Asante.

What put the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with an annual budget hovering at just about 1% of federal spending, at the top of Elon Musk’s budget-cutting target list? Was it just a political calculation that foreign aid is a safe target because it’s unpopular with so many Americans and cutting those funds will only hurt foreigners, not U.S. voters? Or was Musk motivated by some other grudge we haven’t even heard about?

A related question: Why is his invective about that particular agency — “a criminal organization,” “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” and similar blasts — so much more inflammatory in tone and content than his statements about other government programs?

As reported by various news organizations, one of Musk’s principal influencers on this issue appears to have been a man named Mike Benz, who served in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and briefly in the State Department during President Trump’s first term. Benz has spent the last few years promoting implausible conspiracy theories about USAID — that it played a key role in paying for the 2019 attempt to impeach Trump, that it financed the creation of the Covid virus in a Chinese laboratory, that it funds “all the terrorist groups in Pakistan [and] terrorist groups in the Sahel in Africa,” and numerous other wildly exaggerated or completely unfounded charges. Benz seems to have been the source of a number of Musk’s specific allegations, most of them unsupported by any evidence, about corrupt or unjustified foreign aid projects.

This record leads to another question: What does Elon Musk really know about U.S. foreign aid, the agency staff that delivers it, or the people who receive it? Besides listening to Mike Benz’s falsehoods, has he made any effort to do his own investigation? Has he ever personally seen a recipient of U.S. foreign aid, or someone whose job is to deliver it? Has he ever come face to face with a West African who depends on USAID for lifesaving medicine against deadly tropical disease, or a family driven from their home by war in Afghanistan, Sudan, or Ukraine, or one of the hundreds of thousands of hungry children in Haiti who face starvation without USAID food assistance? Has he ever spoken directly with anyone who could tell him first-hand about the work USAID staffers do, the people they help, or the hardships and dangers they often face on the job?

Someone like Christine Sheckler perhaps?

A Life Helping Others

Christine Sheckler, now retired, spent 27 years working for USAID, including two years in wartime Iraq. Other postings included tours in Sierra Leone, then recovering from a decade of civil war that had left 50,000 people dead and driven more than two million from their homes, as well as in several former Soviet republics, Pakistan, and other countries. In the real world, it’s an all-but-sure bet that she will never have a conversation with Elon Musk, but I’ve wondered what such a conversation might have been like, and whether Musk might have modified his views in any way after listening to her — say, as a start, about her experiences in Iraq.

Sheckler served in Iraq from 2008 to 2010, the years when Musk was putting his first Teslas on the road and (one can guess) paying little attention, or possibly none at all, to America’s already disastrous war in Iraq, Americans serving there, or the war’s impact on Iraqi civilians. She did not spend those years in the Green Zone, the well-protected seven-square-mile enclave in Baghdad where the American embassy and buildings housing the Iraqi government stood behind concrete and barbed-wire barriers and checkpoints manned by U.S. and other allied troops who controlled all traffic into or out of the area. Sheckler was based in the much more dangerous Red Zone, in the district of Abu Ghraib, a prominent staging area for insurgent attacks (and the site of the notorious prison of the same name where American troops brutalized Iraqi inmates).

“It was hard,” Sheckler says, recalling her time there. “Every minute was dangerous.” In the course of her work, focused on helping farmers, small-business owners, and local governments, she regularly traveled to less secure areas of the region, often meeting with local sheikhs. In those meetings, she took off her helmet and other protective gear, a “calculated risk,” to avoid sending a message that she didn’t trust the Iraqis she was dealing with.

On two occasions, her work put her in immediate danger. The first was at a small building in downtown Baghdad where Sheckler had attended a meeting of the Baghdad local city council. She had just left in an armored vehicle (the type commonly called an MRAP, for Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected), heading for the nearby U.S. embassy, and had ridden only a few blocks when the driver was ordered to turn around because the city council had just been attacked. After parking a block away, in case of another attack, Sheckler and several other passengers walked the rest of the way back to the council building, where a suicide bomber driving a vehicle loaded with explosives had been stopped by a barricade in front of the building and had then smashed into a parked MRAP outside the wall, setting off his blast. The bomber was killed, along with the driver and a passenger in a taxi following his vehicle, but although the explosion shattered parts of the roof of the council building and blew out all its windows, showering the people inside with broken glass, “by some miracle,” as Sheckler put it, there were no other casualties.

Some months later, she was riding in a vehicle immediately behind the Humvee (a military truck) at the head of a convoy, when a small white car coming from the opposite direction rolled to a stop a short way ahead. From her car, just 20 feet behind the lead vehicle, she saw a man get out with a phone in his hand, which he then used to set off an EFP (an explosively formed penetrator, a projectile carrying a superheated copper warhead that can be launched from a distance and punch through most protective armor). The blast blew the Humvee into the air, sending it flying into a pasture on the far side of the road, wounding the three soldiers and a civilian riding in it. The most seriously wounded was the driver, who lost his right leg below the knee and suffered a shattered lower left leg and massive internal and external burns. Sheckler knew him and all her convoy soldiers, since the same unit escorted her every day on her travels around the district.

A project she remembers with particular pride from her time in Iraq was the reconstruction of the University of Baghdad College of Agriculture, located in Abu Ghraib, which had been completely destroyed earlier in the war. With USAID help, the college was rebuilt, including a room with audiovisual equipment so students and instructors could communicate with other schools. When it reopened, the school offered local farmers training in improved methods of irrigation and water use, helping to revive dairy farming and grain harvests in a vital food-producing region.

It was an “important partnership,” Sheckler said, which not only benefited Iraqi farmers but also significantly changed local feeling about the American presence, as one sheikh after another told her at a farewell meeting at the end of her tour. “When Christine came here two years ago, we hated America and we hated the American people,” she remembers one of them saying as they sent her off with a gift. “But if Christine represents the American people, we love the American people.”

Summing up her time in Iraq, Sheckler remembers not just the danger and her arduous daily schedule (“6 a.m. to after midnight, pretty much every day”) but the immense satisfaction she drew from the work she did. “We spent a lot of money doing supergood things and I am superproud of that.”

She’s no less proud of her work in other countries, particularly during local council elections in the African country of Sierra Leone, where women hoped for more representation in a society in which, as one international think tank reported in 2009 during Sheckler’s tour there, “Gender relations… are extremely unequal and Sierra Leonean women face high levels of exclusion, violence, and poverty.” Gender inequality became a more visible issue in the aftermath of the 1990s civil war there, when huge numbers of women became victims of sexual violence or endured devastating hunger and poverty after their husbands were killed.

Working with a team from the National Democratic Institute, a nongovernmental organization, Sheckler helped bring female ministers and parliamentarians from all over Africa to find local women throughout Sierra Leone with leadership skills and meet, encourage, and mentor women candidates in the elections. The delegation traveled around the country, riding in old vehicles on rough roads, often crossing paths with Sheckler, who was also on the move to monitor and evaluate the results of the election strategy and leadership training. In the end, in a genuine breakthrough, women won 20% of the local council seats, up from 11% in the previous councils. That result left Sheckler feeling “superproud,” not just about her own contribution but perhaps more importantly about “the strength, wisdom, determination, and resilience of the Sierra Leonean women” she had worked with.

Would Musk Listen?

Now, let’s return to Elon Musk, and imagine the Tesla chief and DOGE warrior’s conversation with Sheckler. Obviously, there’s no way to know if hearing her reminiscences would have moderated any of his opinions or policy decisions when it came to the utter dismantling of AID. Possibly, perhaps probably, no one like her would change his thinking an iota. This is the guy, after all, who believes that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization” because it can supposedly be, as he put it, “weaponized” by enemies to exploit our humane impulses for sinister purposes. And one wonders if Musk can even begin to comprehend a life built around helping other people, or any other purpose except personal gain.

He may think that American soldiers have no obligation to ease civilian suffering in war — a view that President Trump’s defense secretary Pete Hegseth apparently adopted as official policy when he moved to shut down the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office and other Defense Department programs aimed at preventing civilian harm (or at least responding to it) during U.S. combat operations. Accordingly, rather than thanking Sheckler for her work in Iraq, he might argue that she should never have been sent there in the first place. Similarly, it would be no surprise if Musk believes that the U.S. has no business interfering with the oppression of women in Sierra Leone or anywhere else, and so sees Sheckler’s project there and similar programs elsewhere not as steps toward greater fairness but as a pure waste of American taxpayer dollars (if, indeed, he accepts the idea that women’s rights are a legitimate issue in the first place, which is by no means a certainty).

So, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that talking to Musk would be a complete waste of Sheckler’s time. As a possible alternative, she could tell her stories to Republican members of Congress, particularly those who loudly proclaim their Christian faith, which might suggest a different view from Musk’s about empathy (though again I wouldn’t count on it). In that scenario, if Sheckler manages to speak with any senators or representatives, perhaps she could see them together with Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times journalist whose eyewitness reporting in Sudan and Kenya documented the deaths of a number of children and adults directly attributed to the suspension of U.S. foreign aid programs — conclusively refuting Musk’s false claim that no one had died because of the USAID cutback.

Maybe listening to Sheckler and Kristof together would persuade at least a few Republican lawmakers to break their shameful silence. Perhaps they would not only speak out against Musk’s and Trump’s assault on USAID, but act to restore fired employees and reinstate discontinued aid programs. That would not save lives already lost or prevent many more unnecessary deaths caused by the interruptions in AID programs that have already occurred but could help limit the toll in future years. So far, regrettably, there’s no sign that anything like that will happen.

When Musk, Trump, and their subordinates speak about USAID programs or government spending in general, they incessantly repeat the words “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Waste is a legitimate issue, more so in some agencies than others. But by any realistic standard, fraud and abuse come overwhelmingly from the Trump-Musk side, not from federal employees. Fraud is the right word for their false reasoning and wildly exaggerated claims of dollars saved, and the record shows abuses too numerous to count — false claims of poor performance by fired government workers, disrupting mental health services for veterans, attempting to intimidate judges whose rulings they don’t like, and closing the door on refugees who had already been approved for admission to the United States (including many Afghans who fought alongside American troops in the failed war against the Taliban). And don’t forget the once-preventable deaths of many thousands of people who would have lived if USAID had continued its work in their countries — the work that people like Christine Sheckler and thousands of other staffers did all over the world, demonstrating a moral commitment that Americans today urgently need to preserve, not destroy.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post Elon Musk, Meet Christine Sheckler appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Arnold R. Isaacs.

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A few weeks ago, my colleague Doris Burke sent me a story from The New York Times that gave us both deja vu.

The piece reported that Starlink, the satellite internet provider operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, had, in the words of Trump administration officials, “donated” internet service to improve wireless connectivity and cell reception at the White House.

The donation puzzled some former officials quoted in the story. But it immediately struck us as the potential Trump-era iteration of a tried-and-true business maneuver we’d spent months reporting on last year. In that investigation, we focused on deals between Microsoft and the Biden administration. At the heart of the arrangements was something that most consumers intuitively understand: “Free” offers usually have a catch.

Microsoft began offering the federal government “free” cybersecurity upgrades and consulting services in 2021, after President Joe Biden pressed tech companies to help bolster the nation’s cyber defenses. Our investigation revealed that the ostensibly altruistic White House Offer, as it was known inside Microsoft, belied a more complex, profit-driven agenda. The company knew the proverbial catch was that, once the free trial period ended, federal customers who had accepted the offer and installed the upgrades would effectively be locked into keeping them because switching to a competitor at that point would be costly and cumbersome.

Former Microsoft employees told me the company’s offer was akin to a drug dealer hooking users with free samples. “If we give you the crack, and you take the crack, you’ll enjoy the crack,” one said. “And then when it comes time for us to take the crack away, your end users will say, ‘Don’t take it away from me.’ And you’ll be forced to pay me.”

What Microsoft predicted internally did indeed come to pass. When the free trials ended, vast swaths of the federal government kept the upgrades and began paying the higher subscription fees, unlocking billions in future sales for the company.

Microsoft has said all agreements with the government were “pursued ethically and in full compliance with federal laws and regulations” and that its only goal during this period was “to enhance the security posture of federal agencies who were continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors.”

But experts on government contracting told me the company’s maneuvers were legally tenuous. They circumvented the competitive bidding process that is a bedrock of government procurement, shutting rivals out of competition for lucrative federal business and, by extension, stifling innovation in the industry.

After reading the Times story about Starlink’s donation to the White House, I checked back in with those experts.

“It doesn’t matter if it was Microsoft last year or Starlink today or another company tomorrow,” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anytime you’re doing this, it’s a back door around the competition processes that ensure we have the best goods and services from the best vendors.”

Typically, in a competitive bidding process, the government solicits proposals from vendors for the goods and services it wants to buy. Those vendors then submit their proposals to the government, which theoretically chooses the best option in terms of quality and cost. Giveaways circumvent that entire process.

Yet, to hear Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tell it, the Trump administration wants to not only normalize such donations but encourage them across Washington.

Last month, during an appearance on the Silicon Valley podcast “All-In,” he floated his concept of a “gratis” vendor who “gives product to the government.” In the episode, released just a few days after The New York Times published its Starlink story, Lutnick said such a donor would not “have to go through the whole process of becoming a proper vendor because you’re giving it to us.” Later, he added: “You don’t have to sign the conflict form and all this stuff because you’re not working for the government. You’re just giving stuff to the government. You are literally giving of yourself. You’re not looking for anything. You’re not taking any money.”

Since President Donald Trump took office in January, Musk, who is classified as an unpaid “special government employee,” has made a show of providing his services to the president and products from his companies to the government “at no cost to the taxpayer.” The White House donation was just the latest move. In February, he directed his company SpaceX to ship 4,000 terminals, at no cost, to the Federal Aviation Administration for installation of its Starlink satellite internet service.

During our Microsoft investigation, salespeople told me that within the company the explicit “end game” was converting government users to paid upgraded subscriptions after the free trial and ultimately gaining market share for Azure, its cloud platform. It’s unclear what the end game is for Musk and Starlink. Neither responded to emailed questions.

Federal law has long attempted to restrict donations to the government, in large part to maintain oversight on spending.

At least as far back as the 19th century, executive branch personnel were entering into contracts without seeking the necessary funding from Congress, which was supposed to have the power of the purse. Lawmakers didn’t want taxpayers to be on the hook for spending that Congress hadn’t appropriated, so they passed the Antideficiency Act, a version of which remains in effect today. One portion restricted “voluntary services” to guard against a supposed volunteer later demanding government payment.

But in 1947, the General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office), which offers opinions on fiscal laws, made an exemption: Providing what became known as “gratuitous services” would be allowed as long as the parties agree “in writing and in advance” that the donor waives payment.

Microsoft used that exemption to transfer the consulting services it valued at $150 million to its government customers, entering into so-called gratuitous services agreements. To give away the actual cybersecurity products, the company provided existing federal customers with a “100% discount” for up to a year.

It is unclear whether gratuitous services agreements were in place for Musk’s giveaways. The White House and the FAA did not respond to written questions. Neither did SpaceX. An official told The New York Times last month that a lawyer overseeing ethics issues in the White House Counsel’s Office had vetted the Starlink donation to the White House.

For the experts I consulted, the written agreements might help companies comply with the letter of the law, but certainly not with the spirit of it. “Just because something is technically legal does not make it right,” said Eve Lyon, an attorney who worked for four decades as a procurement specialist in the federal government.

The consequences of accepting a giveaway, no matter how it’s transferred, can be far reaching, Lyon said, and government officials “might not grasp the perniciousness at the outset.”

Tillipman agreed, saying the risk for ballooning obligations is particularly pronounced when it comes to technology and IT. Users become reliant on one provider, leading to “vendor lock-in,” she said. It’s too soon to tell what will come of Starlink’s donations, but Microsoft’s White House Offer provides a preview of what’s possible. In line with its goal at the outset, the world’s biggest software company continues to expand its footprint across the federal government while sidestepping competition.

A source from last year’s Microsoft investigation recently called to catch up. He told me that, with the government locked into Microsoft, rivals continue to be shut out of federal contracting opportunities. When I asked for an example, he shared a 2024 document from the Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA, which handles IT for the Department of Defense. The document described an “exception to fair opportunity” in the procurement of a variety of new IT services, saying the $5.2 million order “will be issued directly to Microsoft Corporation.”

The justification? Switching from Microsoft to another provider “would result in additional time, effort, costs, and performance impacts.” DISA did not respond to emailed questions.

Doris Burke contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Renee Dudley.

We go to Madison, Wisconsin, to speak with The Nation's John Nichols about Tuesday's pivotal state Supreme Court election, in which liberal Judge Susan Crawford convincingly defeated conservative candidate Brad Schimel. Crawford’s election is a major victory for Democrats after billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk poured about $25 million into the Wisconsin race, helping to make it the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history. “This is a huge signal from a battleground state that Americans are genuinely upset, genuinely angry, I think, with Trump and with Musk,” says Nichols. Tuesday also saw a pair of special House elections in Florida where Republicans held both seats, helping to maintain the party’s narrow majority in Congress. While Democrats were unlikely to flip the deep-red districts, Nichols notes “there was a huge shift in both of the Florida districts toward the Democratic candidates.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Everything is still awful, but it was heartening to see Tesla Takedown's many protests and fiery message: "Would've fought the Nazis? Now's your chance." And as the world's richest, dimmest Nazi whines about people being mean to him, their persistence brings solace: Judges, park rangers, fired workers fight back, Swasticar posters pop up - "Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds" - and wild hacks, from DOGE lists to (eww) videos of the two foot-fetish besties at it on HUD screens. What a time to be alive.

On Saturday, Tesla Takedown's Day of Action saw over 500 rallies, at nearly every Tesla showroom in the US - San Jose to Austin to New York - and in over 200 cities worldwide, rippling from Australia and New Zealand across Europe. Each was locally organized and thematically designed, "Smash the Fash" to “Down with Doge,” with great signs: Don't Buy Nazi Cars, Burn A Tesla Save Democracy, Tesla Funds Fascists, Musk the Only Immigrant Taking Away American Jobs, DOGE: Department of Greedy Elon and Honk If You Hate Elon, with its accompanying cacophony. Also their sieg-heiling balloon effigy and to the point chants: "We don't want your Nazi cars/Take a one-way trip to Mars." Add multiple incidents of Tesla burnings, eggings, poopings and beadings - revelers throwing Mardi Gras beads at an unwelcome Cybertruck in their parade - and it becomes clear the rage at Musk for his many, many (unelected) transgressions is growing. Its goal: "To boycott Tesla and hurt him so that he stops hurting us."

Despite pie-in-the-sky White House claims DOGE is "very popular" and the regime's flunkies and fawners are "thrilled" with its move-fast-and-break-things carnage, the sound of angry pitchfork-rattling is palpable, and rising. They've lost a flood of lawsuits by advocacy groups and fired workers; judges have repeatedly said their closings and very existence violate the Constitution; GOPers are fleeing angry constituents at town halls; people who've lost jobs for citing the damage being done, aka tracking how many hungry children will die from USAID cuts, are furiously speaking out; and people are realizing when rich fascists slam a "parasite class" - half of them children - to justify their crimes, rich fascists are the biggest parasites of all. When that happens, the parasites inevitably throw vengeful pity-parties for themselves. When DOGE got dealt a series of legal setbacks, Musk yowled we no longer have "real democracy in America" and all these treasonous judges should be impeached. So much for "Heal thyself."

Because, "The country is being run by your drunken uncle sitting in his recliner watching (TV) and yelling 'throw the book at ’em!'”, any pushback against illegal acts of autocrats is met with paranoid histrionics like those of Nazi Stephen Miller, who's defended the disappearing of largely innocent migrants by raving, "We were invaded and occupied. Entire towns were subjugated. Our Treasury was in the (sic) plundered...America voted for liberation." Thus have protests against Musk sparked frantic Fox headlines - "Feds on High Alert" - and threats from the regime's DOJ that said protests will be viewed as "domestic terrorism" and "hate crimes," which no Jan. 6 mobsters were charged with. The FBI has formed a task force to investigate “violent activity toward Tesla," and the mad king has vowed to "catch (the) bad guys," calmly musing, "I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20-year jail sentences" and "perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador...recently famous for such lovely conditions!”

Of course our salesman-in-chief also supported his "first buddy" with a recent White House auto mall, hawking Teslas outside the People's House for "a truly great American" who's "being treated very unfairly" by people "breaking a law (as) Radical Left Lunatics often do (by) trying to illegally and collusively boycott one of the World’s great automakers," even though said cars do randomly explode and have the highest rate of deadly accidents of any brand. Cue tacky burlesque show of fat geezer who can't drive and hates EVs clambering into Tesla and exclaiming, "Wow! Everything's computer!" as slimy bot moronically explains, as to one of his prop children, "It's very simple. It's literally like a golf cart that goes really fast." It's also like a rocket that explodes mid-air in a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," strewing debris into the water. Or like a car that inexplicably bursts into flames, its lithium batteries spewing toxic fumes, while often trapping people inside, sometimes fatally, due to electronic doors that don't work when needed.

Alas, as Tesla shares plunge here and abroad - down 76% in Germany, 50% in China, with sad Elmo losing billions - all 46,000 of its hideous, $80,000 Cybertrucks, once lauded as the Fascistmobile of the future, were just recalled after national safety advisors warned it can fall apart while driving due to bad glue making some trim panels detach and fly off, causing "road hazard” for other drivers. This is its 8th recall in two years, including one for sticking pedal pads that could lead to "unintended acceleration." The Cybertruck is already banned in Europe for exterior edges deemed "a pedestrian danger"; here, it's just ceaselessly trashed as a loud rusty "shitbox" with bad suspension that gets stuck in snow. The brazen, inept hubris it represents offers a bleak metaphor, suggests Paul Krugman: "America is now trapped in a burning Tesla." And with large parts of the economy and government "on the verge of self-immolation" and the combined arrogance and ignorance of Musk/Trump, "It’s hard to see how we get out."

Swasticar billboard in UK makes a splashScreengrab from TikTok

Perhaps, in part, with the help of popular rage. There've been multiple leaks naming alleged DOGE staffers, and an updated list with newly added attorneys to handle growing lawsuits. With protests on the rise, an online searchable map called Dogequest also appeared, documenting the locations of Tesla owners and dealerships and reportedly doxxing DOGE team members with their addresses and phone numbers; the site said it would remove owners' information once they sold their vehicles, but it's evidently since been taken offline. Several leaks have named dubious "wasteful" projects DOGE shut down: millions "doled out" to "push" equity, immigrant justice, indigenous knowledge, a performance of Angels in America in Macedonia? No less outlandishly, last week DOGE (which is still legally not a thing) forcibly laid off almost all employees of the US Institute of Peace, a Congressionally funded think tank, because it "has failed to deliver peace." Two former staff just sued to stop a DOGE-r from taking over.

Of course, as Jon Stewart notes, these "profit-seeking psycopaths" won't touch the billions in subsidies to the rich, polluting, killing, "where the real money is": Over a billion in hedge-fund loopholes, $3 billion to oil and gas giants, $2 trillion to defence contractors, all while cutting health care, food stamps, hot lunch for kids. And while the mad king plays golf on 9 of 10 weekends, or over a quarter of his time "in office," at a cost of over $26 million. This weekend, he also "won" his own gazillionth tournament and boasted he made a great deal with the Finnish president to buy polar Icebreakers for the U.S. though in fact Biden made the deal last year. And Musk was there, high as a kite, playing with silverware, "in all our faces," having bought a government and hired a horde of clueless teenage incels to break shit and steal data and fire thousands of people "whose lives you’ve turned upside down who now can’t get anyone to answer the phone at Social Security because you’ve pared their staff down to the bone."

Of those who still have jobs, many are some pissed to be under the thumb of a rich jerk who demands they report what they did each week while he frolics at Motel-A-Lago. The Alt National Park Service sent shopping lists. Others said they researched why ketamine abusers wear sunglasses inside, reviewed court decisions about DOGE violating the Constitution, began the beguine, visited CatsThatLookLikeHitler.com, became Death Destroyer of Worlds, sent photos of their visit to Las Vegas' Mob Museum, "didn't vote for Elon" each day, listed five foods they couldn't keep down, "was a Lover, Sinner, Joker, Smoker, Midnight Toker," "did not give you up/did not let you down/did not run around/did not make you cry/did not say goodbye," "I get up in the evenin'/And I ain't got nothin' to say/I come home in the mornin/'I go to bed feelin' the same way." "I’m fairly sure I’m going to get fired, which is fine since I don’t work there anyway," one wrote. Another suggested, "Dear Mr. Nazi Musk, You should get a dog instead."

The "best example of civil disobedience EVER!" came the day employees were ordered back from remote work to HUD offices, where they found a grotesque, AI video of Trump fervently kissing the two left feet of his First Lady, with text of "Long Live The Real King," playing on a loop on screens throughout the building. Best: Staff couldn't turn it off, so frantically sent people to every floor to unplug TVs. "Bravo, hackers, a grateful nation tips their hats to you," was one response, urging it be shown in Times Square and at all those crappy golf clubs. Another: "They should leave it running for DOGE Bros to come fix it." After freelance journalist Marisa Kabas shared the clip online, Bluesky briefly took it down as "non-consensual explicit material," aka deepfake porn. Kabas wrote to argue it was "to protest a fascist regime, in the public interest and legitimate news"; Bluesky "reevaluated" and put it back up. One comment: "I'm fairly sure whenever this happens in real life it's completely consensual." Regardless, said another, "Bad day to have eyes."

— (@)

Meanwhile, Mr. Rich Nazi Snowflake with "zero self-awareness" keeps whining. As protests and vandalism reports began rising, he whined, "The goal of the left is to destroy my influence, so they relentlessly push negative propaganda about me like the fake Nazi stuff...They are evil." Also, "My companies are suffering," but definitely not the moms who can't get food stamps for her kids or the cancer patients whose trials abruptly halted or the HIV/ Ebola clinics that had to fold or.....Then he whined about Gov. Tim Walz celebrating Tesla stocks falling into the shithole by calling Walz "a huge jerk." "What an evil thing to do," he screeched on Fox. "What a creep, what a jerk. Like who derives joy from that? Does that sound like a good person to you? I don’t think so." This, from the arbitrer of good personhood. But Minnesota's Mr. Nice Guy walked it back - "I have to be careful about being a smartass" - and offered Musk a deal: He'll stop mocking Tesla's plunging stock "when you take your hands off Social Security." No response.

Still, the huge jerk in a cheesehead hat whined on. Heckled at a Wisconsin rally where he'd come to bribe voters to elect a MAGA creep to a vital state Supreme Court seat by giving away two $1 million checks, he charged (Jewish) philanthropist George Soros was "funding" it all - "It was inevitable a few Soros operatives would be in the audience" - like it costs more than a buck or so to make a sign reading, "Fuck South African Apartheid Nazis," this while he's literally, blatantly buying votes. Chutzpah, thy name is. The next day, Ashley St. Clair, one of his baby mamas, sold her Tesla to make up for his "vindictive" cut in child support - "his modus operandi - I'm not the only one cleaning up after his messes" - and video of more protests prompted him to fume online, never mind the left's "puppets and paid foot-soldiers," "It is time to arrest those funding the attacks." We're with the patriot who watched a sneering MAGA thug cruise through the protest in his Cybertruck and declared, "Get this fucking asshole outta here."

Musk siel-heil cut-outs at U.K protestImage from U.K. group Overthrow Musk

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

Why is billionaire Elon Musk spending about $20 million to shape the outcome of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election on Tuesday, in what has become the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history, giving away $1 million checks to two voters who signed one of his petitions? We speak with longtime Wisconsinite John Nichols of The Nation about the pivotal race on Tuesday that will shape the majority of the state’s top court and have a far-reaching impact on issues like abortion and voting rights. The court is also expected to rule on congressional redistricting in the state, which could whittle down the razor-thin Republican majority in the House of Representatives. “The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has since January been obsessed with this race,” says Nichols, who notes that a liberal victory would be widely interpreted as a rebuke of the Republican agenda. “This is a politically volatile moment for Donald Trump.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

Elon Musk’s DOGE has taken a particularly keen interest in Social Security – and not in a good way. Musk called the program  a Ponzi Scheme and has made wildly false allegations about fraud. Nonetheless, DOGE is actively working inside the Social Security Administration, to the deep frustration of current and former staffers.

According to recent media reports, Social Security will no longer allow certain banking changes to be made over the phone, and will require some beneficiaries to visit regional offices – while the administration also seeks to cut jobs and close some field offices.

It goes without saying that Musk’s misleading rhetoric is alarming. But it’s even more alarming that someone purveying such blatant misinformation is effectively in charge of Social Security’s day-to-day operations.

WIth that in mind, here are five things that Musk hopes you don’t already know about Social Security.

1. There is No Serious ‘Fraud’ Problem with Social Security

To put it plainly – millions of dead people aren’t getting Social Security checks. This Musk claim was easily debunked; unfortunately, that did not prevent Donald Trump from repeating it on numerous occasions.

Beyond this falsehood, there is no other evidence that the system has a substantial problem with fraud. In 2024, an inspector general report found that there had been $71 billion in improper payments over a seven-year-period; about one-third of those payments were recovered. This amounts to roughly 0.3 percent of the total benefits paid out, which is an extremely high rate of accuracy – you can visit the Annual Improper Payments Dashboard to see how it compares to other government agencies, many of which have drawn no interest from DOGE.

2. Social Security is Not Going Bankrupt

Musk’s claim that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme is nothing new; privatizers have been making the same claim for decades, trying to convince people (especially younger workers) that they’ll never see any of the money they’ve paid into the program. While it is true that Social Security is dependent on people paying their taxes to the government, that is also true for the repayment of government bonds – and no one calls government bonds a Ponzi Scheme.

What has happened to Social Security is fairly well understood. In order to account for the retirement of Baby Boomers, Social Security built up a massive surplus. The rhetoric about a ‘crisis’ is rooted in the process of using up that surplus. Even after those funds are exhausted, the program would be able to pay the majority of scheduled benefits. If political leaders were to make changes to the program now – raising the income tax to generate more revenue from the very wealthy, for instance – Social Security would be strengthened for the long term.

3. Social Security is Remarkably Efficient

Since the “E” in DOGE stands for Efficiency, you would think they might be able to spot an efficiently managed program. That is precisely how Social Security operates. The administrative costs associated with Social Security are less than 0.4 percent of benefits paid per year – far less than the typical 401(k) retirement plan, where administrative costs can add up to 20 percent or more of the benefits that are actually paid. Given that Social Security pays out close to $1.4 trillion in benefits every year, this is a remarkably lean and efficient program.

4. Privatization is a Terrible Idea

One of the most common claims about Social Security is that we would all make more money if we simply invested our money on our own. This idea came back recently during a retirement industry summit held by the giant investment firm BlackRock.

There’s no mystery why investment firms advocate for some form of privatization (though they tend to avoid using that word): They would earn billions of dollars in fees for managing these accounts. The idea of a stronger return from a privatized approach is especially attractive when the stock market is booming. Of course, things look very differently when the market goes down – as it inevitably does.

There are a host of other unanswered questions about how to even manage a privatized system. Policies would need to be crafted to regulate the plans, manage the efficient withdrawal of funds, and plan for the possible need for government bailouts. There is also the issue of how privatization would impact current retirees whose benefits are supported by current workers.

And, perhaps most importantly, private accounts would require benefit cuts. The privatization proposals under the second Bush administration included deep benefit cuts for all retirees, which was one of the main reasons the plan was so deeply unpopular. People were not enthusiastic about the idea that they’d get less in guaranteed benefits in order to place bets in the stock market. But on some level, this is what would be required under any privatization plan.

5. Social Security is an Incredibly Effective Anti-Poverty Program

The bogus arguments over fraud and long term funding projections can serve to obscure the overwhelming success of Social Security. There is no doubt that it remains one of the most effective anti-poverty programs in the nation’s history, lifting millions of Americans out of poverty. It is also structured to be highly progressive – lower wage workers will receive a higher share of their wages in benefits.

More fundamentally, the whole point of a nearly universal social insurance program like Social Security is to reinforce the idea that we are all in this together. Retirees and other beneficiaries do not need to manage an investment portfolio or worry about being defrauded by unscrupulous actors. And a program that touches almost every aspect of society makes it politically durable and overwhelmingly popular.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Five Things Elon Musk Doesn’t Want You to Know About Social Security appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

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Ten years ago, when Wisconsin lawmakers approved a bill to allow unlimited spending in state elections, only one Republican voted no.

“I just thought big money was an evil, a curse on our politics,” former state Sen. Robert Cowles said recently of his 2015 decision to buck his party.

As Wisconsin voters head to the polls next week to choose a new state Supreme Court justice, Cowles stands by his assessment. Voters have been hit with a barrage of attack ads from special interest groups, and record-setting sums of money have been spent to sway residents. What’s more, Cowles said, there’s been little discussion of major issues. The candidates debated only once.

“I definitely think that that piece of legislation made things worse,” Cowles said in an interview. “Our public discourse is basically who can inflame things in the most clever way with some terrible TV ad that’s probably not even true.”

More than $80 million has been funneled into the race as of March 25, according to two groups that have been tracking spending in the contest — the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy group that follows judicial races, and the news outlet WisPolitics. That surpasses the previous costliest judicial race in the country’s history, approximately $56 million spent two years ago on the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin.

Money is pouring into this swing state election so fast and so many ads have been reserved that political observers now believe the current race is likely to reach $100 million by Tuesday, which is election day.

“People are thoroughly disgusted, I think, across the political spectrum with just the sheer amount of money being spent on a spring Supreme Court election in Wisconsin,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which has long advocated for campaign finance reform.

But the elected officials who could revamp the campaign finance system on both sides of the aisle or create pressure for change have been largely silent. No bills introduced this session. No press conferences from legislators. The Senate no longer even has a designated elections committee.

The current election pits former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel, now a circuit court judge in conservative-leaning Waukesha County, against Susan Crawford, a judge in Dane County, the state’s liberal bastion.

Though the race technically is nonpartisan, the Democratic Party, including former President Barack Obama, has endorsed Crawford; the party has received financial support from liberal billionaire George Soros. On the other side, President Donald Trump posted a message on his social media platform on March 21 urging his supporters to vote for Schimel, and much of Schimel’s money comes from political organizations tied to Elon Musk.

The stakes are high. Whoever wins will determine the ideological bent of the seven-member court just two years after Janet Protasiewicz won a seat on the court and swung it to the liberals. With Protasiewicz on the court, the majority struck down state legislative maps, which had been drawn to favor Republicans, and reinstated the use of drop boxes to collect absentee ballots.

A Schimel victory could resurrect those and other voting issues, as well as determine whether women in the state will continue to be able to access abortion.

Two pro-Schimel groups linked to Musk — America PAC and Building America’s Future — had disclosed spending about $17 million, as of March 25. Musk himself donated $3 million this year to the Republican Party of Wisconsin. In the final stretch of the campaign, news reports revealed that Musk’s America PAC plans to give Wisconsin voters $100 to sign petitions rejecting the actions of “activist judges.”

That has raised concerns among some election watchdog groups, which have been exploring whether the offer from Musk amounts to an illegal inducement to get people to vote.

On Wednesday night, Musk went further, announcing on X a $1 million award to a Green Bay voter he identified only as “Scott A” for “supporting our petition against activist judges in Wisconsin!” Musk promised to hand out other million-dollar prizes before the election.

Musk has a personal interest in the direction of the Wisconsin courts. His electric car company, Tesla Inc., is suing the state over a law requiring manufacturers to sell automobiles through independent dealerships. Musk and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment about his involvement in the race.

Also on Schimel’s side: billionaires Diane Hendricks and Richard Uihlein and Americans for Prosperity, a dark-money group founded by billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David. Americans for Prosperity has reported spending about $3 million, primarily for digital ads, canvassing, mailers and door hangers.

A Better Wisconsin Together Political Fund, a union-supported electioneering group, has ponied up over $6 million to advance Crawford. In other big outlays, Soros has given $2 million to the state Democratic Party, while Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, another billionaire, gave $1.5 million. And California venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, donated $250,000.

In Wisconsin, political parties can steer unlimited amounts to candidates.

State Sen. Jeff Smith, a Democrat and a minority leader, called the spending frenzy “obscene.”

“There’s no reason why campaigns should cost as much as they do,” he said.

Asked for comment about the vast amount of money in the race, Crawford told ProPublica: “I’m grateful for the historic outpouring of grassroots support across Wisconsin from folks who don’t want Elon Musk controlling our Supreme Court.”

Schimel’s campaign called Crawford a “hypocrite,” saying she “is playing the victim while receiving more money than any judicial candidate in American history thanks to George Soros, Reid Hoffman, and JB Pritzker funneling money to her campaign.”

Quizzed Monday by a TV reporter on whether he would recuse himself if the Tesla case got to the state’s high court, Schimel did not commit, saying: “I’ll do the same thing I do in every case. I will examine whether I can truly hear that case objectively.”

A decade after Wisconsin opened the floodgates to unlimited money in campaigns in 2015, some good government activists are wondering if the state has reached a tipping point. Is there any amount, they ask, at which the state’s political leaders can be persuaded to impose controls?

“I honestly believe that folks have their eyes open around the money in a way that they have not previously,” Nick Ramos, executive director of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks campaign spending, told reporters during a briefing on spending in the race.

A loosely organized group of campaign reformers is beginning to lay the groundwork for change. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign recently called a Zoom meeting that included representatives of public interest groups inside and outside of Wisconsin, dark-money researchers and an election security expert.

They were looking for ways to champion reform during the current legislative session. In particular, they are studying and considering what models make sense and may be achievable, including greater disclosure requirements, public financing and restricting candidates from coordinating with dark-money groups on issue ads.

But Republicans say that the spending is a natural byproduct of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which equated campaign spending with free speech and opened the spigots for big-money races.

“For the most part, we don’t really, as Republicans, want to see the brakes on free speech,” said Ken Brown, past chair of the GOP Party of Racine, a city south of Milwaukee. Noting he was not speaking for the party, Brown said he does not favor spending limits. “I believe in the First Amendment. It is what it is. I believe the Citizens United decision was correct.”

Asked to comment on the current system of unlimited money, Anika Rickard, a spokesperson for the Republican Party of Wisconsin, did not answer the question but instead criticized Crawford and her funders.

At one point, Wisconsin was seen as providing a roadmap for reform. In 2009, the state passed the Impartial Justice Act. The legislation, enacted with bipartisan support, provided for public financing of state Supreme Court races, so candidates could run without turning to special interests for money.

The push for the measure came after increased spending by outside special interests and the candidates in two state Supreme Court races: the 2007 election that cost an estimated $5.8 million and the the 2008 contest that neared $6 million, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

Candidates who agreed in 2009 to public financing and spending limits received grants of up to $400,000 for the race. The money came from the Democracy Trust Fund, which was supported by a $2 income tax check-off.

“​​Reformers win a fight to clean up court races,” the headline on an editorial in The Capital Times read at the time.

But the law was in place for only one election, in April 2011. Both candidates in the court’s general election that year agreed to take public funding, and incumbent Justice David Prosser, a conservative, narrowly won reelection. Then Republicans eliminated funding for the measure that summer. Instead, the money was earmarked to implement a stringent voter ID law.

By 2015, GOP leaders had completely overhauled the state’s campaign finance law, with Democrats in the Assembly refusing to even vote on the measure in protest.

“This Republican bill opens the floodgates to unlimited spending by billionaires, by big corporations and by monied, special interests to influence our elections,” Rep. Lisa Subeck, a Democrat, said in the floor debate.

Wisconsin is no longer cited as a model. Activists point to other states, including Arizona, Oregon and Rhode Island. Arizona and Oregon established disclosure measures to trace the flow of dark money, requiring campaign spenders to reveal the original source of donations. Rhode Island required ads to name not only the sponsor but the organization’s top donors so voters can better access the message and its credibility.

Amid skepticism that Wisconsin will rein in campaign spending, there may be some reason for optimism.

A year ago, a proposed joint resolution in Wisconsin’s Legislature bemoaned Citizens United and the spending it had unleashed. The resolution noted that “this spending has the potential to drown out speech rights for all citizens, narrow debate, weaken federalism and self-governance in the states, and increase the risk of systemic corruption.”

The resolution called for a constitutional amendment clarifying that “states may regulate the spending of money to influence federal elections.”

And though it never came to a vote, 17 members of the Legislature signed on to it, a dozen of them Republicans. Eight of them are still in the Legislature, including Sen. Van Wanggaard, who voted for the 2015 bill weakening Wisconsin’s campaign finance rules.

Wanggaard did not respond to a request for comment. But an aide expressed surprise — and disbelief — seeing the lawmaker’s name on the resolution.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Megan O’Matz.

Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and raised in a wealthy family under the country’s racist apartheid laws. Musk’s family history reveals ties to apartheid and neo-Nazi politics. We speak with Chris McGreal, reporter for The Guardian, to understand how Musk’s upbringing shaped his worldview, as well as that of his South African-raised colleague Peter Thiel, a right-wing billionaire who co-founded PayPal alongside Musk. “Musk lived what can only be described as a neocolonial life,” said McGreal. “If you were a white South African in that period and you had any money at all, you lived with servants at your beck and call.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

After spending over a quarter of a billion dollars on Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign, Elon Musk is pouring money into a Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. Musk has spent more than $18 million to support Trump-backed candidate Brad Schimel over liberal Susan Crawford and has been paying Wisconsin voters $100 to help flip the state’s top court. This election could impact abortion rights, unions and Republicans’ ability to keep gerrymandered districts in place to control Congress. “The level of corruption at play here, the level of money at play here, really is a warning sign for what’s happening to our democracy,” says Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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Elon Musk’s aerospace giant SpaceX allows investors from China to buy stakes in the company as long as the funds are routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore secrecy hubs, according to previously unreported court records.

The rare picture of SpaceX’s approach recently emerged in an under-the-radar corporate dispute in Delaware. Both SpaceX’s chief financial officer and Iqbaljit Kahlon, a major investor, were forced to testify in the case.

In December, Kahlon testified that SpaceX prefers to avoid investors from China because it is a defense contractor. There is a major exception though, he said: SpaceX finds it “acceptable” for Chinese investors to buy into the company through offshore vehicles.

“The primary mechanism is that those investors would come through intermediate entities that they would create or others would create,” Kahlon said. “Typically they would set up BVI structures or Cayman structures or Hong Kong structures and various other ones,” he added, using the acronym for the British Virgin Islands. Offshore vehicles are often used to keep investors anonymous.

Experts called SpaceX’s approach unusual, saying they were troubled by the possibility that a defense contractor would take active steps to conceal foreign ownership interests.

Kahlon, who has long been close to the company’s leadership, has said he owns billions of dollars of SpaceX stock. His investment firm also acts as a middleman, raising money from investors to buy highly sought SpaceX shares. He has routed money from China through the Caribbean to buy stakes in SpaceX multiple times, according to the court filings.

The legal dispute centers on an aborted 2021 deal, when SpaceX executives grew angry after news broke that a Chinese firm was going to buy $50 million of the company’s stock. SpaceX then had the purchase canceled. In separate testimony, the rocket company’s CFO explained that the media coverage was “not helpful for our company as a government contractor.” SpaceX’s business is built on those contracts, with the U.S. government paying the company billions to handle sensitive work like building a classified spy satellite network.

Do you have any information we should know about Elon Musk’s businesses? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

Company executives were concerned that coverage of the deal could lead to problems with national security regulators in the U.S., according to Kahlon’s testimony and a filing from his attorneys.

SpaceX, which also launches rockets for NASA and sells satellite internet service, is perhaps the most important pillar of Musk’s fortune. His estimated 42% stake in the company is valued at around $150 billion. If he owned nothing else, he’d still be richer than Bill Gates.

Federal law gives regulators broad power to oversee foreign investments in tech companies and defense contractors. Companies only have to proactively report Chinese investments in limited circumstances, and there aren’t hard and fast rules for how much is too much. However, the government can initiate investigations and then block or reverse transactions they deem a national security threat. That authority typically does not apply to purely passive investments in which a foreign investor is buying only a small slice of a company. But experts said that federal officials regularly ask companies to add up Chinese investments into an aggregate total.

The U.S. government charges that China has a systematic strategy of using even minority investments to secure leverage over companies in sensitive industries, as well as to gain privileged access to information about cutting-edge technology. U.S. regulators view even private investors in China as potential agents of the country’s government, experts said.

The new materials do not contain allegations that the Chinese investments in SpaceX would violate the law or were directed by the Chinese government. The company did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica. Kahlon declined to comment on the reasons for SpaceX’s approach.

It’s not uncommon for foreigners to buy U.S. stock through a vehicle in the Cayman Islands, often to save money on taxes. But experts said it was strange for the party on the other side of a deal — the U.S. company — to prefer such an arrangement.

ProPublica spoke to 13 national security lawyers, corporate attorneys and experts in Chinese finance about the SpaceX testimony. Twelve said they had never heard of a U.S. company with such a requirement and could not think of a purpose for it besides concealing Chinese ownership in SpaceX. The 13th said they had heard of companies adopting the practice as a way to hide foreign investment.

“It is certainly a policy of obfuscation,” Andrew Verstein, a UCLA law professor who has studied defense contractors, said of the SpaceX testimony. “It hints at potentially serious problems. We count on companies to be forthright with the government about whether they’ve taken money from America’s rivals.”

The new material adds to the questions surrounding Musk’s extensive ties with China, which have taken a new urgency since the world’s richest man joined the Trump White House. Musk has regularly met with Communist Party officials in China to discuss his business interests in the country, which is where about half of Tesla cars are built.

Last week, The New York Times reported that Musk was scheduled to get a briefing on secret plans for potential war between China and the U.S. The Times later reported that the briefing was called off, and Trump denied it had ever been scheduled. The president told reporters it would be wrong to show the war plans to the businessman: “Elon has businesses in China, and he would be susceptible perhaps to that,” Trump said.

The Delaware court records reveal SpaceX insiders’ intense preoccupation with secrecy when it comes to China and detail a network of independent middlemen peddling SpaceX shares to eager Chinese investors. (Unlike a public company, SpaceX exercises significant control over who can buy into the company, with the ability to block sales even between outside parties.)

But the case leaves unanswered the question of exactly what percentage of SpaceX is owned by Chinese investors.

The Financial Times recently reported that Chinese investors had managed to acquire small amounts of SpaceX stock and that they were turning to offshore vehicles to do so. The deals were structured to limit the information investors receive, the outlet said. The Delaware records reveal additional, previously unreported Chinese investments in SpaceX but do not say how much they were worth. The few Chinese investments in SpaceX where a dollar figure is publicly known total well under $100 million.

The experts said the court testimony is puzzling enough that it raises the possibility that SpaceX has more substantial ties to China than are publicly known and is working to mask them from U.S. regulators. A more innocent explanation, they said, is that SpaceX is seeking to avoid scrutiny of perfectly legal investments by the media or Congress.

Once a welcome source of cash, Chinese investment in Silicon Valley has become the subject of intense debate in Washington as hostility between the two countries deepened in recent years. Corporate lawyers told ProPublica they’d counsel their clients against requiring the use of offshore vehicles because it could make it look like they are trying to hide something from the government.

Bret Johnsen, the SpaceX CFO, testified in the Delaware dispute that the company does not have a formal policy about accepting investments from countries deemed adversaries by the U.S. government. Rather, he said, SpaceX has “preferences that kind of feel like a policy.” Sensitive to how such financial ties could make it “more challenging to win government contracts,” Johnsen said that he asks fund managers to “stay away from Russian, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean ownership interest.”

In the public portion of his deposition, Johnsen wasn’t asked whether routing Chinese money offshore made such investments acceptable to SpaceX. But he lent credibility to Kahlon, the investor who said that was enough to get the green light. Johnsen said that he has a long-standing personal relationship with Kahlon and that he’s discussed the company’s approach to Chinese ownership with him. The CFO added that he trusts Kahlon to bring in only investors that the company approves of.

Over the years, Kahlon has personally helped Chinese investors buy stakes in SpaceX on “a number of occasions” through “proxies such as British Virgin Islands- or Cayman Islands-based entities,” according to a filing from his lawyers. He also knows of “many” other Chinese investors who own SpaceX shares, the filing said. He learned about them through conversations with investors and brokers, as well “from having viewed investor lists.”

Kahlon is a consummate SpaceX insider. He “has been with the company in one form or fashion longer than I have,” said Johnsen, who’s worked at SpaceX for 14 years. Early in his career, Kahlon worked for Peter Thiel at the same venture capital firm that once employed JD Vance, and he first met with SpaceX around 2007 a few years after it was founded.

Kahlon eventually opened his own firm called Tomales Bay Capital, becoming a major player among the middlemen who cater to would-be investors in SpaceX. He’s helped people like former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos buy pieces of the rocket company. He also said he has served as a “back channel” between SpaceX and international regulators as the company sought to bring its satellite internet products to countries like India.

Kahlon and Johnsen were forced to testify after the deal with a Chinese firm fell apart in late 2021, sparking years of litigation. That year, Kahlon had the opportunity to buy more than half a billion dollars of SpaceX stock from a West Palm Beach private equity firm. Kahlon had already brought Chinese money into SpaceX before, he testified, and he again turned to China as he gathered funds to purchase the stake.

Kahlon soon connected with a Shanghai-based company called Leo Group, short for “Love Each Other.” As Kahlon made his pitch during their first call, Leo was told that “it would be best not to disclose the name of SpaceX,” an executive at the Chinese company later testified. “They deemed that information to be quite sensitive.”

Leo quickly sent Kahlon $50 million. He then messaged another business associate in China: “Have any folks interested in spcex still?”

Kahlon testified that he was planning to tell Johnsen about the Leo investment and expected the CFO to sign off on it. But the deal blew up after Leo mentioned SpaceX in a regulatory filing that generated widespread coverage in the Chinese business press. (Whether Leo had Kahlon’s permission to make the disclosure is a matter of dispute.) In a panic, Kahlon enlisted a Leo vice president to try to get the articles taken down. But when Johnsen and Tim Hughes, SpaceX’s top in-house lobbyist, spotted the stories, they grew alarmed.

“This is not helpful for our company as a government contractor,” the SpaceX CFO later testified regarding the press attention. “It, in essence, arms our competitors with something to use as a narrative against us.”

“In my entire professional career, this was literally the worst situation that I’ve been in,” Kahlon said. “I failed at what I thought was a core responsibility in the relationship we had.”

SpaceX ultimately decided to let Kahlon buy only a smaller portion of the stake, purchasing much of the half-billion dollar investment itself. According to contemporaneous messages and testimony from Kahlon, he was told that decision was made by Musk. However, Kahlon continued to have a strong relationship with SpaceX after the mishap, court records say, with the company allowing his firm to keep buying a large quantity of shares.

Musk’s business interests in China extend far beyond SpaceX’s ownership structure — a fact that has drawn criticism from Republican lawmakers over the years. In 2022, after Tesla opened a showroom in the Chinese region where the government runs Uyghur internment camps, then-Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted, “Nationless corporations are helping the Chinese Communist Party cover up genocide.”

In addition to Tesla’s sprawling factory in Shanghai, last year, almost 40% of Tesla’s sales were to Chinese customers. The company has also secured major tax breaks and regulatory victories in the country. In 2019, the Chinese premier offered Musk the country’s equivalent of a green card.

In recent years, the billionaire has offered sympathetic remarks about China’s desire to reclaim Taiwan and lavished praise on the government. “My experience with the government of China is that they actually are very responsive to the people,” Musk said toward the end of Trump’s first term. “In fact, possibly more responsive to the happiness of people than in the U.S.”

Do you have any information we should know about Elon Musk’s businesses? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Joshua Kaplan and Justin Elliott.

The post Could Elon Musk Actually Destroy Social Security as We Know It? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

Image by Mariia Shalabaieva..

As the world’s top billionaire rummages through the inner workings of its mightiest state, the influence of America’s oligarchs is hard to miss these days. Never before in modern U.S. history has a private citizen wielded as much political clout as Elon Musk.

It is exactly what President Joseph R. Biden warned about in his farewell address, when he proclaimed that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America.”

As if to prove the point, Musk proceeded to launch an unprecedented—and shockingly corrupt—bid to infiltrate the federal government. In short order, he dispatched a bevy of post-pubescent fanboys, newly emerged from their parents’ basements, into the government’s most sensitive computer systems, doing god-knows-what with their access.

The moves have prompted considerable alarm among the commentariat. “Elon Musk is President,” ran a headline in The Atlantic. “The top 1% are no longer just influencing policy from behind the scenes,” Ali Velshi of MSNBC declared, “they are seizing control of the levers of power.” A recent TIME cover depicts Musk sitting behind Trump’s desk in the Oval Office.

According to the emerging consensus, Trump is president in name only, little more than a puppet in the hands of the reactionary tech entrepreneur.

The reality is far different. Musk and his fellow plutocrats are not omnipotent. They are exceptionally vulnerable, in fact.

Having spent the past two decades studying oligarchs in Eastern Europe, I can affirm that we are witnessing something momentous. Only it is not oligarchization; it is authoritarianism.

As political scientist Jeffrey Winters explains, oligarchy can exist under any political regime, whether democratic or authoritarian. The U.S., for its part, is already an oligarchy and has been for more than a century. America’s richest moguls have long defended their vastly disproportionate wealth by exerting undue influence over tax policy and economic regulation. Nothing about that will change with Trump in office.

A New Order

But this hardly means business as usual—either for the oligarchs or the rest of us. The coming move toward authoritarianism will affect everyone, including the super-rich. Yet, far from enjoying a new heyday, they might not like what the emerging regime has in store.

Trump has already gone a long way toward dismantling the checks on his power. The only question is how far he will be able to go. The Putin model of full authoritarianism is almost certainly not attainable. Trump’s megalomaniacal fantasies will stumble upon myriad constraints, including federalism, a vibrant civil society, and his own incompetence, that will block him from forcing all opposition activity underground.

More likely is what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way refer to as “competitive authoritarianism.” Under this arrangement, civil liberties are curbed while the electoral process is rigged to the advantage of incumbents. But the opposition can still take part in elections and threaten the ruling party’s hold on power.

Trump’s first imperative in this regard is the same one faced by any aspiring autocrat: to “capture the referees,” as Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it. This involves placing loyalists in charge of the key state agencies empowered to launch investigations and sanction rule violators. Trump has wasted little time getting to work on this task, appointing MAGA diehards to the Department of Justice, the Treasury, and other agencies. Unfortunately, when it comes to seizing the reins of federal power, there is little that stands in his way.

Once his lickspittles have taken charge, Trump can unleash the full force of the U.S. government against anyone he wants. As a result, actions that were once unfathomable will become very real. Few abuses of executive power will be off limits, from deploying the military against protesters to deporting masses of people without due process. Equally plausible are lawless and arbitrary investigations of his opponents. Among the likely targets are local officials who refuse to “find the votes,” district attorneys who decline to criminalize homelessness, business owners guilty of hiring Black people, and, of course, wealthy plutocrats who draw his ire.

Law, That Curious Relic

America’s oligarchs built their wealth at a time when constitutional rights and legal protections were taken for granted. Their property rights were protected by a system of courts whose decisions everyone, from ordinary citizens to the most powerful officeholders, regarded as sacrosanct.

This edifice was remarkably fragile, however, dependent on norms whose power derived from the collective expectation that they would be followed. If government officials refrained from violating property rights, it was because they presumed the courts would enforce them in rulings everybody expected everyone else to respect.

But if the president decides to ignore these norms, the law loses the very basis of its authority. In the event that Trump defies a Supreme Court ruling, who will force him to comply? His Justice Department sycophants?

The implications for the oligarchs cannot be overstated. Those who remain in Trump’s good graces stand to profit immensely. But those who cross him can lose everything.

The days when their tax burdens were their overriding concern will soon appear quaint. Instead, the oligarchs will be preoccupied with threats to their ownership rights and even the specter of unlawful detention. Scenarios once confined to developing countries, such as targeted intimidation by federal agencies, prosecutions on false charges, and other forms of administrative harassment, will become facts of life in the U.S.

The ultra-rich are used to lobbying for lower taxes. They are rather less accustomed to F.B.I. raids and asset seizures designed to strong-arm them into selling their assets and fleeing abroad. Yet, this is exactly what could befall an oligarch who runs afoul of Trump. The legality of such moves is beside the point; the feds can do more than enough damage before any countervailing orders come down from the courts which, in any case, can be ignored.

Musk’s sway, while extraordinary, is also fleeting. Snatching it away is as easy as slamming the Wendy’s Baconator button on the Resolute Desk.

It is only a matter of time before these two imbecilic, impulsive narcissists come to blows. When that happens, Musk will receive a harsh lesson in the reality of competitive authoritarianism. His immense wealth matters little when up against the guy who can wield the Justice Department as his personal bludgeon. In all likelihood, he will become the subject of multiple criminal probes and be chased out of the country. It is a lesson that will not be lost on his fellow moguls.

History is replete with examples of business tycoons coming to rue their past support for autocrats. Trump’s reign should prove no different. He is the one in charge, not the oligarchs. That is bad news for them—as well as for us.

This hardly means all is lost, however. As I explained in a previous post, the obstacles to authoritarianism in the U.S. are far greater than those faced by other countries that experienced democratic breakdown. America’s civil society, in particular, is unmatched in terms of its resources and depth. If and when it mobilizes effectively, Trump is finished.

But make no mistake; however dangerous Musk’s shenanigans are, Trump is the problem. It is toward him that we must direct our focus and efforts.

This piece first appeared on The Detox.

The post Elon Musk Is Not the Problem appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Neil A. Abrams.

So, it isn’t surprising that the Tesla Takedown campaign has blossomed with large and enthusiastic protests with people from all walks of life and ages to stop this madness. As a result, Tesla’s stock has tanked with its brand now viewed as more akin to Hitler’s Volkswagen than a vehicle to fight climate change. In Germany, Tesla’s sales have crashed and a miniscule number of people have said they will buy one in the future.

Tesla Takedown is one of the many raging streams of opposition to Trump and Musk, most visible with Bernie Sanders “The Fighting Oligarchy Tour ” drawing thousands of people, many in Republican strongholds, across the country. As Bernie declared at a recent rally at Arizona State University:

“It’s not just oligarchy that we are going to fight. It’s not just authoritarianism that we’re going to fight. We will not accept a society today in which we have massive income and wealth inequality, where the very rich have never done better while working families are struggling to put food on the table.”

Income inequality, fear of authoritarianism, and working class concerns are not where you usually find British television personality Jeremy Clarkson, an enthusiastic Thatherite, multi-millionaire, former co-host of Top Gear and the Grand Tour, and currently the host of Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime.

Let’s be clear that he is not on our side, but he has taken the opportunity to puff out his chest and declare that he was right all along about Elon Musk. Musk sued Clarkson for defamation for a critical review of one of Tesla’s early vehicles nearly two decades ago. Musk lost the case. Musk, like Trump, uses lawsuits whatever their merit to silence critics. So, it was a good thing that Musk lost the suit. And, Clarkson is greatly enjoying the turn-of-event against Musk. But, he can’t leave at that.

He recently wrote in the Sunday Times:

The fact, then, is this. I was always scrupulously fair with my car reviews. Musk claimed I wasn’t. And this is his payback. And what makes it so juicy is that he’s being pecked to death by the very people who put him on the pedestal in the first place. The eco hippies.

“Eco-hippies” is the type of nasty swipe that Clarkson likes to make against anyone concerned about climate change. The fact is that Tesla cars were bought by a largely upper, middle-class grouping, where climate change was a way Musk marketed his cars to them. The turn against Musk is not first and foremost about his cars, but his political role in the Trump administration.

I’ve seen a lot of people passing around Clarkson’s pompous column, Seventeen years after that nice Mr. Musk sued me, victory is mine, as if it is something that vindicates our opposition to Trump and Musk. It is not. Clarkson is a notorious bigot and misogynist, who was fired from the BBC’s top-rated Top Gear for assaulting a staffer. For opponents of Trump and Musk, Jeremy Clarkson is not our friend.

The post Opponents of Elon Musk Don’t Need Jeremy Clarkson appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joe Allen.

So, it isn’t surprising that the Tesla Takedown campaign has blossomed with large and enthusiastic protests with people from all walks of life and ages to stop this madness. As a result, Tesla’s stock has tanked with its brand now viewed as more akin to Hitler’s Volkswagen than a vehicle to fight climate change. In Germany, Tesla’s sales have crashed and a miniscule number of people have said they will buy one in the future.

Tesla Takedown is one of the many raging streams of opposition to Trump and Musk, most visible with Bernie Sanders “The Fighting Oligarchy Tour ” drawing thousands of people, many in Republican strongholds, across the country. As Bernie declared at a recent rally at Arizona State University:

“It’s not just oligarchy that we are going to fight. It’s not just authoritarianism that we’re going to fight. We will not accept a society today in which we have massive income and wealth inequality, where the very rich have never done better while working families are struggling to put food on the table.”

Income inequality, fear of authoritarianism, and working class concerns are not where you usually find British television personality Jeremy Clarkson, an enthusiastic Thatherite, multi-millionaire, former co-host of Top Gear and the Grand Tour, and currently the host of Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime.

Let’s be clear that he is not on our side, but he has taken the opportunity to puff out his chest and declare that he was right all along about Elon Musk. Musk sued Clarkson for defamation for a critical review of one of Tesla’s early vehicles nearly two decades ago. Musk lost the case. Musk, like Trump, uses lawsuits whatever their merit to silence critics. So, it was a good thing that Musk lost the suit. And, Clarkson is greatly enjoying the turn-of-event against Musk. But, he can’t leave at that.

He recently wrote in the Sunday Times:

The fact, then, is this. I was always scrupulously fair with my car reviews. Musk claimed I wasn’t. And this is his payback. And what makes it so juicy is that he’s being pecked to death by the very people who put him on the pedestal in the first place. The eco hippies.

“Eco-hippies” is the type of nasty swipe that Clarkson likes to make against anyone concerned about climate change. The fact is that Tesla cars were bought by a largely upper, middle-class grouping, where climate change was a way Musk marketed his cars to them. The turn against Musk is not first and foremost about his cars, but his political role in the Trump administration.

I’ve seen a lot of people passing around Clarkson’s pompous column, Seventeen years after that nice Mr. Musk sued me, victory is mine, as if it is something that vindicates our opposition to Trump and Musk. It is not. Clarkson is a notorious bigot and misogynist, who was fired from the BBC’s top-rated Top Gear for assaulting a staffer. For opponents of Trump and Musk, Jeremy Clarkson is not our friend.

The post Opponents of Elon Musk Don’t Need Jeremy Clarkson appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joe Allen.

Photograph Source: Fine Apples – CC0

The challenge of separating creators from their creations is not new. However, this age-old dilemma, stretching from Nazi-favored composers to today’s politically divisive billionaires, demands practical rather than merely philosophical solutions.

Elon Musk and his multiple business ventures now stand at the center of this debate. As the world’s richest man deepens his political entanglements through controversial statements and direct government involvement, consumers worldwide face mounting pressure to align their purchasing decisions with their political values. The growing “Tesla Takedown” movement explicitly rejects the notion that Musk’s products can be divorced from his politics.

The Wagner Precedent

The case of Richard Wagner offers a historical lens through which to examine this dilemma. Wagner, who died in 1883—long before Hitler’s rise—wrote viciously antisemitic essays and was later embraced by the Nazi regime as a cultural icon. His music remains unofficially banned in Israel to this day.

In 2001, Argentine-born Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim provoked outrage when he defied this unofficial ban by playing Wagner at Israel’s national arts festival. The incident highlighted the persistent association between Wagner’s compositions and his hateful ideology, despite the music itself containing no explicit antisemitic content.

Wagner’s case begs the question: Can artistic works transcend their creator’s repugnant beliefs? Wagner scholars continue to debate whether his antisemitism infiltrated his operas through coded caricatures. Yet Wagner’s music—the notes, harmonies, and dramatic structures—contains no inherent antisemitism.

Tesla and Musk’s Machinations

The Tesla controversy parallels Wagner’s case in important ways. The “Tesla Takedown” movement has gained momentum across both the United States and Europe, with protests at over 50 showrooms featuring slogans like “Elon Musk has got to go” and “Burn a Tesla: Save Democracy.” Some demonstrations have evolved beyond mere protest into active vandalism, with charging stations torched in Boston and suspected arson at a dealership in France.

Does a Tesla automobile embody Musk’s political activities and statements? Physically and functionally, a Tesla is simply an assemblage of metal, rubber, plastic, and software designed to transport passengers efficiently using electricity rather than fossil fuels. The car itself holds no political opinions. A Tesla car’s engineering is value-neutral.

When Separation Becomes Impossible

While Wagner’s music and Tesla’s vehicles can plausibly be distinguished from their creators, Starlink—Musk’s satellite internet service—presents a more complicated case. The service itself is technologically impressive. However, Musk’s direct operational control means customers remain vulnerable to his mercurial decision-making.

Consider Ukraine: Initially hailed as one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies, Musk deployed Starlink terminals when Russian malware crippled satellite communications across the country at the invasion’s outset. Three years later though, Musk has weaponized his social platform against President Zelensky, sharing false claims and calling for his replacement. More ominously, Musk has warned that “Ukraine’s entire front line would collapse” without Stalink’s satellite terminals—a reminder of his power to withdraw critical infrastructure during wartime potentially.

The Starlink case demonstrates that separation becomes functionally impossible when a product remains under the creator’s active control. An owner can drive their Tesla regardless of Musk’s latest post on X, but a Starlink user remains dependent on Musk’s continued goodwill.

The Control Continuum

The Starlink example reveals a crucial distinction in our age: the shift from products to services fundamentally alters the creator-creation relationship. This transformation may be the most significant factor in determining whether separation is possible.

Products like Tesla automobiles or Wagner’s recorded compositions exist independently once released into the world. A Tesla owner retains full functionality regardless of Musk’s latest controversial statement or political alliance. The vehicle, once purchased, operates autonomously from its creator’s ongoing decisions or moods. Similarly, a Wagner recording plays the same notes whether one approves of the composer’s antisemitism or not.

Services like Starlink, however, establish a perpetual dependency relationship. This product-service distinction carries profound implications as our economy increasingly shifts toward subscription-based services. Traditional product ownership allowed for a functional separation between creator and creation. Modern digital services, however, maintain persistent tethers to their creators, making separation impossible by design.

The Wagner-Musk comparison ultimately highlights how technology has fundamentally altered the terms of our ethical dilemma. When Musk controls Starlink’s satellites with the press of a button, or when social media platforms can instantly deplatform millions, creator and creation become inseparable by definition.

Perhaps the key distinction is not merely between “good” or “bad” creators but between consumption that preserves our autonomy and consumption that surrenders it. In a world of tech tycoons with unprecedented power, we must remember that market problems require market solutions. The hyper-dependence on Musk’s Starlink—with all its ethical entanglements—can only be resolved through robust competition in satellite-provided internet. We need vibrant market alternatives that prevent any single visionary—however brilliant—from accumulating too much control over critical infrastructure. The ultimate answer to the Musk dilemma is not boycotts or ethical agonizing but competing satellite networks that ensure no individual, nation, or military remains dependent on one man’s goodwill.

The post Why Elon Musk Remains Inseparable From (Some of) His Creations appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Federico N. Fernández.

A Trump supporter posted a video online showing Trump sitting next to Musk and talking with dinner guests.

“This exorbitant level of payment for presidential access raises serious concerns about the possibility of corruption by candlelight,” said Jon Golinger, democracy advocate for Public Citizen. “The American people have a right to know who was there and whether the Million Dollar Dinner menu for fat cats included a deep dish of juicy government contracts, a side of tasty tax breaks, or a sweet dessert of ending investigations and enforcement actions against their companies.”

A news report today from WIRED revealed the Million Dollar dinner invitation for the Saturday, March 15 dinner from the MAGA Inc. SuperPAC said: “You are invited to a candlelight dinner featuring special guest speaker President Donald J. Trump . . . $1,000,000 per person.”

MAGA Inc., or Make America Great Again Inc., is a SuperPAC that spent nearly half a billion dollars backing Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. It is seeking to raise millions more to push Trump’s agenda, according to press reports.

“These pay-to-play dinners are only possible because of Citizens United and shows how desperately we need to fix it,” Golinger added. “These dinners demolish the fiction of independent expenditures that the Supreme Court relied on 15 years ago to justify its Citizens United decision, which abolished reasonable limits on campaign spending.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Photo: Indivisible.

A week ago Saturday Co-President Elon Musk took to his X platform to call out several groups staging protests against his Tesla dealerships for Musk’s Trump Administration role in slashing vital federal government functions. The Tesla Takedown movement has mounted hundreds of peaceful actions around the world. Among the groups he named were the Troublemakers, falsely claiming it is funded by ActBlue. The group has been staging protests at dealerships throughout the Seattle area, a major Tesla market, and had a key role in putting up the decentralized movement’s website, where people around the world can post upcoming actions.

I am a member of the Troublemakers, a Seattle-based group dedicated to nonviolent direct action, and was a part of our first action, one focused on forest preservation. “So Elon’s making us famous,” I thought, grimly amused but aware that being targeted in such a way could lead to consequences.

That happened quickly. The next day Musk took it to a new level, targeting Valerie Costa, a close friend and colleague with whom I have worked for years, first at 350 Seattle, and now at Troublemakers. “Costa is committing crimes,” he charged. Musk has a record of playing fast and loose with the facts, and this was another of his many lies. There have been incidents of vandalism against Tesla cars and dealerships. But Troublemakers is a strictly nonviolent group and does not endorse such actions.

The other day, Val told her story in The Guardian in a story entitled, “Elon Musk targeted me over Tesla protests. That proves our movement is working.” I’ll let Val take it from here:

“As a longtime local activist and organizer in Seattle, I’m accustomed to some conflict with powerful forces. The intention of the Tesla Takedown movement is to make a strong public stand against the tech oligarchy behind the Trump administration’s cruel and illegal actions, and to encourage Americans to sell their Teslas and dump the company’s stock. Protests like these – peaceful, locally organized, and spreading across the world – are at the heart of free speech in a democracy and a cornerstone of US political traditions. So it’s telling that the response from so-called ‘free speech absolutist’ Musk has been to single out individuals – and spread lies about us and our movement. The harassment that has followed his post has been frightening.

“It’s also proof that the Tesla Takedown campaign is working.”

Indeed, Tesla stock and sales are tanking. As of today the stock is a little under $240, half of what it was in the euphoria immediately after the election. J.P Morgan projects it to go down by half again, to $120. Meanwhile, Morgan auto analyst Ryan Brinkman last Wednesday cut his first quarter global sales estimate to 355,000, down from 440,000, and a deep plummet from 495,000 in 2024’s fourth quarter.

Clearly connecting those declines to Musk’s work with Trump and connections with Europe’s far right, Brinkman said, “We struggle to thing of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly.”

Continuing to tell her story, Val wrote, “I am not the leader of Tesla Takedown. In fact, no one is.

“Here is the truth: Tesla Takedown is a completely decentralized movement with hundreds of protests taking place around the globe, drawing many thousands of people out of their homes and onto the public sidewalks to stand up for programs that support poor people, older people, veterans, the sick. Out of care and concern for others – a foreign concept to those currently in power – people are offering what they can to help. I’ve offered to schlep supplies, and helped someone find a bullhorn. The environmentally focused Seattle organization I’m a part of, Troublemakers, hosts a map where other people and groups can post the locations of forthcoming demonstrations. Troublemakers has about $3,500 in its bank accounts. All of this is a bare-bones, low-budget, people-powered movement – which is exactly why Musk is afraid of it, and casting about to find a villain.”

Val then hit the crux of the issue.

“If we can’t show our opposition to what the government is doing, we are living in a dictatorship. If we are criminalized for calling out the rich and powerful for their illegal actions, that is a dictatorship. I don’t want to live in a dictatorship.

“Make no mistake, it’s scary to be personally called out by the richest man in the world on the platform he owns. It’s scary to be targeted by a seemingly endless number of his devoted trolls and bots. To be doxxed, to have one’s life pored over and exposed, to be smeared, attacked and falsely accused. It’s scarier still when the FBI director gets tagged into the threads and asked to investigate. But I’m not backing down – and even if I did, it wouldn’t make a dent in this movement. Hundreds if not thousands of people have participated in the ways that I have.

“The truth is, the people are powerful. I’ve always believed that. And now we know that Elon Musk does too.”

Val also told her story on Democracy Now.

Val Costa has acknowledged how terrifying it is to be targeted by the world’s richest man (though he may be knocked off that perch soon). But, no surprise to me, she has continued to stand and speak out with courage. Val has been on many direct action frontlines, and is deeply committed to environmental and social justice in all its forms. Knowing Val, Musk’s attack has only made he more pissed off than she was before. Bravo Val!

We who work in movements have known the second Trump Administration would bring an elevated level of uncertainty and risk. But that isn’t stopping us. As Franklin Roosevelt said, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” With so much at stake now, there are obviously many things more important than fear. Relatedly, Nelson Mandela said, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” Valerie Costa is setting an example of triumph for all of us. One which we will need in coming years as we fight for what is dear to us against oligarchic monstrosities like Elon Musk.

This first appeared in The Raven.

The post Stung by People Power Protests, Elon Musk Targets My Group and a Close Friend appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Mazza.

Image by appshunter.io.

I appreciate people taking the lyrics of popular songs and altering them to effectively and critically address the current situation. California Uber Alles by the punk band, The Dead Kennedys, is a song that negatively depicts Jerry Brown and essentially calls him a fascist. It is a song with witty lines in which the instrumental section meshes effectively with the lyrics.

When first learning about it, I could not think of a more outrageous name for a band than The Dead Kennedys. Ironically, we now have a live Kennedy who appears to be well on his way to causing unnecessary deaths.

Below is my attempt at a new set of lyrics for this song, with some original words unchanged, featuring the increasingly lovable free speech “advocate” former California resident Elon Musk as a replacement for Jerry Brown.

I am your leader Elon Musk
With a maga hat atop my brain
Each day I will cause more pain

People power will soon go ‘way
I will be Führer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will worship me in school
You will thank me every day

X Tesla Über Alles
Space X Doge Über Alles
Über Alles Tesla X
Über Alles Doge Space X

My techies will control you
Hundred percent you will obey
You will bend for my master race
And always wear a happy face

Close your eyes, can’t happen here
AI in control is near
The Nazis won’t come back, you say
Accept them or you will pay
Accept them and my big play

X Tesla Über Alles
Space X Doge Über Alles
Über Alles Tesla X
Über Alles Doge Space X

Now it is 2025
Knock-knock at your front door
It’s the ICE thugs and other boars
Down on your knees forevermore

Come quietly to the camp
You’d look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don’t you worry, it’s only a shower
For your clothes, here’s a pretty flower

Die on organic poison gas
Serpent’s egg already hatched
You vermin will die at dusk
When you mess with your Fuhrer Musk
When you mess with your Fuhrer Musk

Elon Musk Über Alles
Space X Doge Über Alles
Über Alles Tesla X
Über Alles Elon Musk

The post Elon Musk Uber Alles appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rick Baum.

“The implication that the American citizens working at your local VA hospital or Social Security office are worse than Hitler, Stalin, or Mao—history's most despicable masterminds of genocide and mass murderer—is totally disconnected from reality. That's obvious to every American.

“That this baseless accusation comes from the single most influential person in our government should alarm every citizen.

“His intent doesn’t matter. His actions, disregard for the truth, and utter contempt for the patriotic Americans serving their country—a third of whom are veterans of the armed forces—does matter. It has no place in American government.

“It's time for President Trump to step up, end the chaos that's harming the country and his own administration, and tell Elon Musk ‘You’re fired.’”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

A pair of federal judges have ordered the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of fired federal workers at the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior and Treasury. The White House vowed to fight what it called an “absurd and unconstitutional order.” This comes as the White House and its allies have increasingly targeted judges who rule against the administration. Elon Musk has posted dozens of messages on his social platform X calling for the impeachment of judges who rule against the administration. We speak with retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner, who served as a federal district judge in Massachusetts for 17 years, from 1994 to 2011. “The distance between what they are trying to do and what is lawful is so enormous that anyone would rule as these judges are doing,” says Gertner.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

It resembled a sales pitch for Musk’s company, the country’s biggest seller of EVs. Tesla has lost more than half of its value since December as sales have plummeted worldwide. With Musk dismantling parts of the federal government as the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, the vehicles have become a toxic symbol for Democrats, a large portion of Tesla owners. Over the past week, protesters have vandalized Tesla dealerships, set Cybertrucks aflame, and boycotted the brand. Liberal Tesla drivers have slapped stickers on their cars that read “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” 

The strong feelings surrounding Musk have already started to scramble the politics around EVs. Trump’s exhibition at the White House on Tuesday was a defense of Musk, who he said had been unfairly penalized for “finding all sorts of terrible things that have taken place against our country.” Yet the bizarre scene of Trump showcasing a vehicle that runs on electricity instead of gas felt almost like a sketch from Saturday Night Live, and not just because the Trump administration has been trying to reverse Biden-era rules that would have sped up the adoption of low-emissions vehicles. Here were the two biggest characters in MAGA politics promoting a technology that’s been largely rejected by their right-wing base. 

Other prominent Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, quickly moved to defend Tesla against vandalism that Trump is labeling “domestic terrorism.” Tesla’s sudden shift from Democratic status symbol to Republican icon has some thinking the controversy around Musk could lead to a bipartisan embrace of EVs.

“He’s uniquely positioned to and has the power to really shape this debate and help bridge the divide here,” said Joe Sacks, executive director of the American EV Jobs Alliance, a nonprofit trying to prevent “silly partisan politics” from stopping a manufacturing boom for electric vehicles. “I’m unsure if that’s what he’s going to use his new perch and his kind of role in the administration to do, but it seems like he has the ability to do that.” 

According to polling the alliance conducted after the November election, Republicans have warmed up to Elon Musk, with 82 percent of those polled saying that Musk is a good ambassador for EVs. A solid majority of Trump voters — 64 percent — said they viewed Tesla favorably, compared with 59 percent of those who voted for Kamala Harris. “Republicans are probably inching towards the idea that there shouldn’t be much of a cultural divide on this product category, if the market leader CEO is sitting next to President Trump in the Oval Office during press conferences,” Sacks said.

The data aligns with a recent analysis from the financial services firm Stifel, which found that Tesla has become more favorable among Republicans as its popularity plunges with Democrats. Compared to August, 13 percent more Republicans are willing to consider purchasing a Tesla.

Yet there are reasons to suspect that EVs will continue to be a hard sell for Republicans. They are typically tradition-minded people who like big cars, not small cars with new technology they’ve never used before, said Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-author of the book Prius Or Pickup? “Conservatives don’t have the sensibility that fits with electric vehicles at all,” he said. “So I don’t think that you’re going to see a spike in Tesla sales among conservatives.”

Alexander Edwards, president of the research consultancy Strategic Vision, said that Republicans view gas-powered cars as a more practical purchase for transporting their families from place to place. That’s based on his firm’s surveys, which examine the psychology behind the car choices of about a quarter-million Americans a year. “I think Elon made a bet that I think he’s secretly regretting, that Republicans would come out of the woodwork and say, ‘Yes, we’re going to support you,’” Edwards said.

If they came around to any electric vehicle, however, it might be a Tesla. One of the primary things Republicans care about when it comes to buying a car is that it looks fast and goes fast, and Tesla has seen more Republican buyers for that reason, Edwards said. Democrats have consistently been buying electric vehicles at a rate of 4 to 1 compared to Republicans, but 2 to 1 when it comes to Teslas, according to Edwards’ data. Last year, more Republicans than Democrats bought Teslas for the first time — not because more Republican flocked to the brand, but because Democrats pulled away from it.

For Democrats, who had long been criticized as having a smug attitude for driving a Prius, Teslas offered a cool and desirable alternative with less baggage when they took off in the early 2010s. “Tesla was able to finally give Democratic buyers what they were looking for — a Prius-like image of being thoughtful, combined with the fun and excitement of a real luxury sports car,” Edwards said. That started to change as Musk became a magnet for political controversy, starting with his takeover of Twitter in 2022. A Tesla EV became a symbol of Tesla’s CEO. 

“Doesn’t matter if you’re Republican or Democrat — when you jump into the Batmobile, you become Batman,” Edwards said. “And the same thing is true with the vehicles we purchase. We often want them to show who we are, what we’ve accomplished, what we stand for.”

Of course, there are ways to depolarize electric vehicles that don’t rely on cues from Trump or Musk. Sacks recommends talking about the attributes of electric vehicles: their ability to accelerate faster and brake more crisply, as well as help people save money for every mile they drive, since there’s no need to buy gas. When people have friends or family who own an EV, that also helps break down the cultural divide, he said.

In a way, you could see Trump becoming a salesman for electric vehicles as an example of that very phenomenon, with his self-described “first buddy” convincing him to come around. Just two years ago, Trump complained that EVs needed a charge every 15 minutes and would kill American jobs. But, after Musk endorsed his presidential campaign last summer and donated $288 million, Trump softened his tone, saying that he was in favor of “a very small slice” of cars being electric. “I have to be, you know,” Trump said, “because Elon endorsed me very strongly.” 

On Tuesday, as Trump climbed into his new electric car for the first time, he seemed surprised by what he saw there. “That’s beautiful,” he said, admiring the dashboard. “This is a different panel than I’ve had. Everything’s computer!”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline MAGA Teslas? Elon Musk is upending the politics of EVs. on Mar 14, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Poster from a protest against Elon Musk by MoveOn, February 4, 2025. Geoff Livingston, Flickr, Creative Commons.

I worked for 2 years on Capitol Hill and 25 years for the US Environmental Protection Agency. During those 27 years I met many bureaucrats and a few Congressmen and Senators. I even met the mother of President Jimmy Carter and the Secretary of Agriculture, Bob Bergland.

This experience opened my eyes to the advantages of government served by well-educated, competent, honest, and dedicated civil servants. The industry perpetually seeks decisions from government agencies on their products. Some of those products seeking and requiring approval by the US EPA, for example, pesticides, can be lethal to wildlife and humans alike. So, government experts evaluating such chemicals must possess advanced knowledge of chemistry, biology, and toxicology. Unfortunately, these experts work in an environment dominated largely by politics, not science. This means that the lobbyists, not scientists, have the ear of policy makers. I came across and lived through this chaos: scientists making their arguments for human and environmental health protection in technical memos; the opposition from lobbyists representing companies, manufacturers, and powerful legal firms saying their products would save the farmers and increase prosperity. The cacophony and lies of deregulation disturbed me.

I attended hundreds of meetings of EPA scientists, and industry lobbyists and senior EPA policy makers. At times, the public interest of safety prevailed, as in the early years of the EPA, 1970s. But many times, the political appointees made decisions that favored the industry. These decisions, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, explain why conventional, not certified organic, food is probably laced by neurotoxins and carcinogens while ecosystems and wildlife have been threatened with diseases, destruction, and extinction. I protested such policies and, immediately, senior people branded me with a slander of not being a “team player” and, worse, tried firing me. In 1990, they took steps for firing me, but the administrator, William Reilly, rejected their efforts.

My life at EPA became precarious. I had to be very careful. Senior managers even planted a spy in my office who provoked me and, no doubt, reported me to his bosses. A colleague warned me about the spy. The consequences of this treatment were severe. I was promoted only once. So, speaking out was very hazardous and expensive. Despite the antagonism between me and a few senior officials over policy, I persevered. I simply could not accept fashionable deregulation, which compromised science and public and environmental health in order to profit agribusiness. This moral dilemma angered and astonished me. For some time, I refused to accept the US was falling from the rule of law and civilization. No civilized society would willfully feed its people tainted food and risk life on Earth.

Some of my colleagues shared my frustrations. They suspected I was going to write about corruption at EPA. At appropriate times spanning more than 2 decades, they gave me their memos and other reports they authored. The information and knowledge in those documents and my personal experience helped me write my 2014 book, Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA.

Public good

I never gave in to the corrupt temptations for career advancement. Call it stubbornness or moral commitments to science-based decisions for the protection of human and environmental health. I came out of Greek culture centered around the propositions of “the beautiful and the good” and “know yourself” that necessitate the virtues of the supremacy of truth and the public good.

I still have the best memories of the civil servants I worked with. They were my friends. They were certainly more diplomatic than I was, but they did serve the public good with their scientific reports. Now, in 2025, the leadership of America is outdoing the corrupt environmental policies of the Ronald Reagan administration of the 1980s. President Donald Trump and his billionaire co-ruler, Elon Musk, are unravelling the federal government. Their purpose is not efficiency. It is political and ecological disruption. Musk is the “wrecking ball” of “crucial institutions.” He picked up on the fashionable idea of billionaires working long and hard for their ill-gotten wealth.

David Brooks of the New York Times hit the nail on the head, saying: “The “DOGE boys” [of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency], “are mostly incompetent, so the fiscal effect will probably be tiny, but they are unleashing a reign of terror and intimidation that will affect the psychology of all federal workers.”

True. DOGE has been demoralizing and firing thousands of civil servants. However, twenty-one government workers with expertise in data and digital services resigned to protest the vandalism of the billionaire Musk. They said they came to government from holding senior technology positions in private companies. Their goal and mission was to serve all Americans no matter their political affiliation. But seeing the ruthlessness of Musk and his young assistants, they decided that resignation was better than disavowing their oath to serve America. They explained why they left the government in their letter of resignation dated February 25, 2025:

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations. However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments… [The] removal of highly skilled civil servants… endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and Americans’ data less safe… [DOGE’s] actions are not compatible with the mission we joined the United States Digital Service to carry out: to deliver better services to the American people through technology and design. We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services. We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”

I understand these courageous technologists. I, too, lived through a reign of terror and intimidation, so I fully sympathize with them. And while in my case, “whistleblowers” were treated harshly, in the Trump / Musk administration most government workers are treated like whistleblowers for reasons unrelated to informing the public about corruption in the government and industry.

Erik Baker, historian of science at Harvard, gives us useful insights for trying to explain the bizarre behavior of Musk. He says, “Mr. Musk’s decades in the highest echelons of the tech industry, surrounded by other executives who justified their lordship over their private empires by trumpeting their inexhaustible work ethic, have taught him that if you work harder than everyone else, you should be rewarded with unquestioned rule over your dominion. Now he is seeking to extend this logic into our government, transforming it, like one of his companies, into another personal fief.”

Artificial Intelligence fuels the fiefdom of the tech billionaires

With large companies the world over firing workers and replacing them with machines, Musk is bringing this deskilling and debilitating force for the running of the federal government. Musk is an expert in dumping workers for machines. He culled the workers of the companies he purchased. Erik Baker says that after Musk took over Twitter, “he fired half its employees and informed those who remained that he would be imposing an “extremely hard-core” management style; many of them took his offer to resign in exchange for three months of severance. Now Mr. Musk is applying the same playbook to the federal government, seeking to replace career officials with DOGE shock troops and machine learning algorithms.”

Climate chaos

Firing workers increases the profits of billionaires like Musk. It’s the same thing with deregulation. The downsides, ecocide and diseases like cancer, take time to manifest themselves. Climate chaos, however, is different. Hurricanes, fires, and flooding hit hard. Yet for a long time, we failed to connect nature’s anthropogenic fury to human actions. Petroleum companies, which knew since the 1970s of the consequences of ceaseless burning of their product, polluted the atmosphere and muddled waters by funding / bribing academics to keep raising doubts about the causes of climate change.

Indeed, the 1990 effort at the US EPA to dismiss me from the civil service was directly associated to an article I wrote for the Chicago Tribune (Oct. 10, 1989), in which I pointed my finger at the petroleum companies for causing climate chaos.

What I did not know in 1989 was that the US was warming 68 percent faster than any other country on Earth. The bad news came out in November 14, 2023 by the US Fifth National Climate Assessment.

I wonder how is it possible after a decade of climate fires, heat waves on land and sea, ice melting, permafrost thawing, floods, droughts, and destruction of property costing hundreds of billions, how politicians like Trump and Elon Musk, as well as most Republican politicians, dare ignore such calamities and existential dangers? The Trump administration even withdrew from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. It’s mind-boggling. Are they extraterrestrials? Don’t they read? Do they hate science? And, finally, don’t they care about their children and grandchildren? Is America dropping to another dark age?

Freezing the government

As I already said, I remember my days at the US Environmental Protection Agency, starting with the immoral effort to freeze the federal government by the Ronald Reagan administration. Vice President George Walker Bush used to go to government agencies demanding that they rethink any project they funded that cost more than $ 100,000. Deregulation was the most fashionable policy of the Republicans. Reagan even dismantled the solar panels President Jimmy Carter had installed on the roof of the White House. His EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch, fired the agency’s lawyers responsible for enforcing the laws.

The Republican and Democratic politicians were blind to the industry corruption my EPA colleague, Adrian Gross, had revealed. Gross, a capable and dedicated pathologist, brought to light decades-long criminal chemical industry practices of making data out of thin air. That is, Gross caught a giant laboratory, International Bio-test Laboratory (IBT) near Chicago, giving clean reports to hazardous pesticides and other chemicals it tested for companies, states, and even governments. In other words, farmers used those dangerous carcinogenic and neurotoxic chemicals “tested” by IBT and other corrupt laboratories. Those dangerous chemicals had been approved by the EPA because of the fake reports of IBT and the climate of corruption. But the findings of Gross made some difference, and, in 1983, the US EPA and the Justice Department put IBT out of business. Yet, the Republicans and not a few Democrats continue to push their deregulation year after year. By the early twenty-first century, the US EPA was a skeleton of its early 1970s self. Deregulation became policy. Companies still “test” their pesticides and other chemicals. EPA was forced to shut down its own laboratories and do away with its scientists who inspected laboratories. One of those laboratories that closed tested the efficacy of antibiotics. The EPA even deleted public access to hundreds of studies it had funded. Corruption became the law of the land. For example, agribusiness lobbyists are convincing Iowa legislators to give immunity from prosecution to pesticide merchants. The proposed legislation would not allow Iowans suing pesticide companies for failing to warn their products might cause cancer.

What Trump and Musk are doing are accelerating the toxic policies of the Reagan administration. With diminished, dispirited, and frightened federal workers, the industries will do exactly what the cigarette companies did for more than a century. Their advertisements will continue to repeat the lie that American food is the safest in the planet. Meanwhile, our “safe” farmers are sterilizing the land, almost wiping out biodiversity, and even threatening honeybees with extinction. Their animal farms are dormant factories of disease, potential pandemics, and contaminated meat.

Apparently, these dire threats are beyond Trump. His speech to Congress, March 3, 2025, was more of the same rhetoric of deceit and hubris. Frank Bruni of the New York Times, said that “Everything in Trump’s world is extreme, absolute, unnuanced, superlative. Worst ever. Best ever. “Like nothing that has ever been seen before.” Over and over. It’s juvenile. It’s narcissistic.” And yet, Trump and his billionaire advisor, Musk, keep talking about MAGA. But do they understand the word greatness?

Alexander the Great earned that honor because of his genius in strategic thinking and unparalleled courage and virtues. He united the ecumene. He built 70 poleis (cities) all over Asia. Those cities had Greek institutions of civilization: schools, libraries, the rule of law, theaters, athletic games and festivals.

Sliding back to another dark age?

Trump and Musk, however, are not building civilization. They are wrecking it. They know that deregulation increases risk, corruption, disease, and violence. It enables factory owners to profit at the expense of public and environmental health. Seeing Musk wielding a chain saw like a weapon unmasked him and his collaborator and enabler, Trump. These co-emperors intend to discard the already weak democratic institutions of America, thus converting the country officially to a plutocracy. This means setting aside the rule of law and returning to the lawless rule of weapons and wealth.

The post Elon Musk’s Shock Troops, AI and Plutocracy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.

• Nov. 21, 2024: The CFPB finalizes a rule enabling the agency to proactively supervise digital payment apps
• Nov. 27, 2024: Musk tweets “Delete CFPB”
• Jan. 28, 2025: X CEO announces that X Money will debut with a partnership with Visa
• Feb. 7, 2025: Musk’s DOGE staffers enter the CFPB and kick off an effort to shut it down
• March 5, 2025: The Senate is set to vote on legislation to revoke the CFPB’s digital payments rule

Every step of the way, Musk has gotten closer to launching X Money without a watchdog to ensure that the platform adheres to federal rules mandating data security standards, disputes for fraudulent payments, consumer protections against debanking and more. Demand Progress has been a strong supporter of the CFPB’s efforts to supervise digital payment platforms.

The following is a statement from Emily Peterson-Cassin, corporate power director at Demand Progress:

“Elon Musk wants to cripple consumer protections for digital payment apps and the U.S. Senate is doing his bidding. Not only does Musk want X, a platform swarming with bots and crypto scams, to be able to reach into your bank account, he also wants to defang and ‘delete’ the agency responsible for ensuring that X Money follows federal standards for data security and fradulent payment disputes. Senators must side with American consumers, and not online scammers, by voting ‘NO’ on this dangerous bill.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“Elon Musk slandered Social Security over the weekend by calling the vital and beloved program a criminal Ponzi scheme, the same lie Donald Trump used before he decided to run for president. Musk’s comment is no surprise, given his recent actions to begin the wholesale dismantling of our Social Security system. Social Security is overwhelmingly popular among all Americans, including those who consider themselves die-hard Trump supporters.

Trump knows that. Last year, he blanketed swing states with flyers promising that he would protect Social Security – despite the fact that he proposed Social Security cuts in every one of his first-term budgets. Musk and Trump want to undermine support for our Social Security system by convincing the American people that this extremely efficiently run program is rife with fraud, waste, and abuse. Even worse, they want to make it impossible for America’s working families to access their earned benefits. At Musk’s direction, the Trump administration is planning to lay off a substantial part of the already understaffed and overworked Social Security Administration workforce.

A large number of senior staff have already been pushed out, taking with them essential institutional knowledge. Moreover, Trump and Musk have announced their intention to close every Social Security field office, so that no one can claim their earned benefits in person. That will increase fraud, since historically it has been caught by those who meet with the public face to face. It will also make it impossible for many Americans to get the support they need to access their benefits. These layoffs are so destabilizing that it is even possible that Americans may see a disruption in their monthly payments.

Reinforcing Musk’s lies, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) recently said that Musk’s algorithms are crawling through our personal Social Security data and finding ‘enormous amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse.’ That is yet another lie. Musk is the one creating waste, fraud, and abuse. He is stealing our data and firing the public servants who make Social Security work. If Congress does not act soon to stop him, our Social Security system may never recover.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

• Read the Groups’ Letter

The letter—which was spearheaded by Demand Progress and Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF)—calls on senators to honor their duty to the Constitution’s Advice and Consent Clause by rejecting Martin’s nomination to be U.S. Attorney for D.C.

Last week, Martin launched “Operation Whirlwind,” an initiative targeting Democratic lawmakers who have criticized Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Martin deliberately misframes obviously hyperbolic statements about political consequences as threats of violence. Ignoring his duty of impartiality, he has nothing to say about far more aggressive rhetoric from individuals aligned with Musk, including President Donald Trump. That’s consistent with his history of advocating for January 6 rioters whose conduct was exponentially more threatening than the rhetoric he now seeks to criminalize.

Earlier this month, after Musk said that a user on X who listed the names of DOGE staffers identified in a news report “committed a crime,” Martin sent a letter asking Musk to “utilize” Martin’s office to protect DOGE. He followed up with a second letter saying that he will investigate individuals and groups referred to him by Musk. Not only has Martin threatened criminal investigation of Americans who he believes have merely acted “unethically” and not even violated any criminal laws, he has publicly vowed to use the U.S. Attorney’s Office to “chase them to the end of the Earth.”

Misusing the U.S. Attorney’s office for D.C. to silence and punish people for simply using their free speech rights to criticize Musk and DOGE violates constitutional free speech protections, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s own policies on prosecution charging decisions, as well as the professional rules of conduct of the D.C. Bar and the Missouri Bar.

“In just one month, Ed Martin has corrupted the office of the U.S. attorney for D.C. into Elon Musk’s personal hit squad,” said Emily Peterson-Cassin, director of corporate power at Demand Progress. “Martin has incinerated any sense of duty or impartiality by shamelessly currying favor with the world’s richest man by targeting his perceived enemies. Senators must reject his nomination and stop him from using the full weight of his office to illegally silence critics of Elon Musk and DOGE.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

In this urgent episode of Working People, we focus on the Trump-Musk administration’s all-out assault on federal workers and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. “At least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration,” Ed Pilkington and Chris Stein report in The Guardian, “most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections. In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations. The purge has prompted speculation that Trump is engaging in one of the biggest job cutting rounds in US history, which could have a powerful knock-on effect on the American economy.” In today’s episode, we take you to the front lines of struggle and hear directly from three federal workers about what is happening inside the federal government, why it concerns all of us, and how federal workers and concerned citizens of all stripes are fighting back. Panelists include: Cat Farman, president of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Union, Local 335 of the National Treasury Employees Union; Jasmine McAllister, a rank-and-file CFPB Union member and data scientist who was illegally fired two weeks ago; and Will Munger, a rangeland scientist who works across the intermountain west and who, until this month, served as a postdoctoral researcher with the USDA Agricultural Research Service. 

Additional links/info: 

• CFPB Union website, 
• Federal Unionists Network website, Bluesky page, and Instagram  
• 5Calls.Org website 
• Ed Pilkington & Chris Stein, The Guardian, “US personnel office walks back email ultimatum from Musk to workers”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Elon Musk is making technofascism a reality before our eyes”
• Democracy Now!, “‘Grand Theft Government’: Federal workers send SOS over Musk’s DOGE, mass firings & service cuts”
• Emily Anthes & Apoorva Mandavilli, The New York Times, “Mass federal firings may imperil crops, cattle and pets”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and we’ve got an urgent episode for y’all. Today we are focusing on the Trump Musk administration’s all out assault on federal workers in the United States Constitution and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. We are recording today’s episode on Monday, February 24th, and things just keep getting more hectic, absurd, and terrifying by the minute. As Ed Pilkington and Chris Stein reported this morning in the Guardian quote, at least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration, most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections.

In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations. The purge has prompted speculation that Trump is engaging in one of the biggest job cutting rounds in US history, which could have a powerful knock on effect on the American economy. Now, this already chaotic situation got even more chaotic this weekend when as Pilkington and Stein continue, Elon Musk, the Tesla billionaire turned White House sanctioned cost cutter demanded federal workers detail what they do at their jobs in bullet points or faced dismissal. The Saturday email sent to millions of employees was the latest salvo in Musk’s campaign authorized by Donald Trump to dramatically downsize the federal government. Musk’s Ultimatum was sent out on Saturday in a mass email to federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management, one of the first federal organs, Musk and his team on the so-called Department of Government Efficiency infiltrated after Trump was sworn in, the message gave all the US governments more than 2 million workers, barely 48 hours to itemize their accomplishments in the past week in five bullet points and in a post on X Musk indicated that failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.

The order provoked instant chaos across the government with Trump’s own appointed leadership in federal agencies responding in starkly different ways, workers in the Social Security Administration and the Health and Human Services Department were told to comply with the email. And CNN reported that the Department of Transportation ordered all of its employees to respond to the musk email by its deadline that included air traffic controllers who are currently struggling with severe understaffing and a spate of recent accidents. Several other agencies told their employees to refrain, including the FBI, where the new director Trump Loyalist Cash Patel asked agents to please pause any responses. Now, this is a fast moving crisis with long-term consequences that concern all of us, but we cannot understand this crisis if we are swimming in seas of misinformation and if our mainstream media channels and our social media feeds are just not giving us the information that we need, or they’re actively suppressing our access to the voices of current and former federal workers who are on the front lines of struggle right now and on this show and across the Real News Network, we are doing everything we can to counteract that.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing today to help us navigate this mess and to help us figure out how we can fight back before it’s too late, not as red or blue or non-voters, but as fellow working people, the working class of this country, I’m honored to be joined today on the show by three guests. Kat Farman is president of the CFPB Union, which is local 3 3 5 of the National Treasury Employees Union, and they represent workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the CFPB, the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage lending scandal, an agency that was effectively shut down by the Trump Musk administration two weeks ago after having clawed back over $21 billion from Wall Street banks and credit card companies for defrauded customers. We are also joined by Jasmine McAllister, a rank and file CFPB Union member and a data scientist before she was illegally fired two weeks ago, along with around 180 employees at the CFPB.

And last but not least, we are joined by Will Munger. Will is a rangeland scientist who works across the Intermountain West and around the world. Before the Valentine’s Day massacre, he served as postdoctoral researcher with the USDA Agricultural Research Service. Kat Jasmine will thank you all so much for joining us today, and I really, really wish that we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances, but I’m so grateful to have you all here with us and in the first 15 minutes here, I want to start with where we are right now as of this recording on Monday, February 24th. By the time this episode comes out later this week, we’ll presumably know more about the fallout from Musk’s absurd mandate to federal workers this weekend and about who complied and who didn’t. I wish it could be taken for granted that people see right through all of this, that they see federal workers like yourselves as human beings and understand the incalculable impact that this techno fascist coup and all these firings are going to have on all of us that they see Musk and his drugged out, neo-Nazi insane clown, CEO posts and nakedly self-serving corrupt behavior, and they see him for what he is and that they see the Trump administration and all this oligarch led destruction and reordering of our government, our economy, and our society to serve their profit and power motives.

But we know that we can’t take that for granted because Musk Trump, Fox News and the entire ripe wing media apparatus, the social media algorithms controlling our feeds, they’re all pushing the narrative that this is righteous vengeance against the anti-American deep state against wokeness and waste, and a lot of people are buying it. So can we start by going around the table, having y’all briefly introduce yourselves and walk listeners through what this has all looked like for you three over the past week or so and what you want people to know about what’s actually happening to our government in real life in real time?

Cat Farman:

Yeah, thank you, max. Thanks for having us and thanks for being a voice for working people and for the working people who are under attack, specifically in public services working for our federal government. And that includes not just federal workers, but people who work at contractors. There are a lot of private contracting businesses that people are losing their jobs there because Musk is attacking those jobs too. There’s a lot of working people under attack right now. So I’ve been working at the CFPB now for 10 years, and when I got this job, I was excited because I had been working in tech before that, going from small company to small company, just trying to get my foot in the door and prove myself and also get compensated for the work that I do. And one of the things that I struggled with working in the private sector was I wasn’t really finding a lot of opportunities where I live in Philadelphia and the opportunities that did exist were very corporate in nature.

It was a lot of building websites and application software for companies like Ben and Jerry’s or Papa John’s, and those are kind of cool, fun projects to do. But it felt like what it was, which is I’m just being exploited to create something for someone else’s profit, and I’m spending a lot of my life and my time building and crafting very detail oriented code bases and designs for someone to just sell pizza, and it didn’t feel very useful. So I was really excited to find that the folks at CFPB were hiring and that it was to do work using my skills and my technology background to actually provide a socially useful service to the public. So I’ve worked on projects like the consumer complaint database website, which is where before two weeks ago, any person in the USA who had an issue with your big bank, your financial service provider, your mortgage lender or servicer, your student loan servicer, if they were not responding to you because they don’t, right?

They have bad customer service experiences on purpose. They want you to give up. Instead, you can come to the CFPB, you used to be able to submit a complaint or call us, do it on our website and we would require a response from the company in two weeks. That is not happening anymore, but that’s the kind of service that I got to work on and use my skills for good. So we were talking about someone like me who grew up in small town in East Texas, and I was lucky to have internet growing up in that small town. And then to get to use those skills and have a career in that, but find the jobs are wanting few and far between, don’t pay as well as we were told tech skills can get and they’re kind of miserable. And then to be able to come into public service and actually give something back with those skills and know that all the time and effort I’m putting, working 40 hour work weeks or longer, it’s actually doing something useful for society.

That was just a huge shift in my career that I was so excited about and coming into working at the bureau, been there for 10 years, and then realizing also a lot of the benefits that I in my head always ascribe to a government job, stability, security, a decent pay, even if it’s not as high as a private sector, but it’s going to be enough benefits like retirement. We have a pension. These things that I associated with government jobs, they come from unions. It was actually our union contract that got us those and unions fought and won those and have protected those. And unions remain under attack for decades. And in the federal work sector, it’s one of the last sectors that’s got higher than average numbers of unionization. I think it’s still only a third of the sector that’s unionized though, right? So it’s like 34% instead of 10% of Americans in general, but it’s still a higher percentage.

So I learned a lot about unions. This is the first union job I had all the things that made my family from Texas really excited that here I was. I moved to the big city far away and then I was able to get a good stable government job. They knew what that meant, all those things that represents to them. They come from unions and union contracts. So having that for the first time too had been just a total shift and getting involved in our union to fight to protect those things under the first Trump administration and then since to expand on them when we’ve had opportunities to, and then now here we are where the entire sector is under attack. It’s been eyeopening and it’s also been quite a joy to realize we rest on all this labor history that brought us here to where we are today, but also to see that we still have much to learn from that past if we’re going to be able to even survive the current moment.

We have this revived labor movement in this country and federal workers have been a part of that. CFPB union is a part of that. And I believe that is one reason we’re under attack right now. And that’s something that I hope listeners understand that we’re being targeted because we’re unions, because we’re labor and that these attacks are on the right wing that are trying to paint us as faceless DC bureaucrats or suits in Washington are lies meant to obscure the reality, which is where are your neighbors, where your family, your friends, where your community members who are working people and our services that we provide serve working people. We provide those services to the public for free funded by the government. And that means Elon Musk can’t make a buck off of it. And so when he comes in to shut down the CPB to steal our data and to fire our workers illegally when we are the ones who would be regulating his payment processing plans for x.com, it’s because he doesn’t want us standing in the way of him making a buck. And he has no need for any public services for people who are just working, people who want public goods to be provided to them so that they can have a little bit of a shot against the big that we regulate or the financial companies, what Elon wants to be.

That is what he’s doing. He’s seeing no value in the public services that federal workers provide, and if he can’t make a buck off it, then he’s going to find a way. Yeah.

Jasmine McAllister:

Thanks Max. Thanks for having us. Yeah, I wanted to address the first part of what you were asking. So you had mentioned this language that it’s like anti wokeness and the deep state and waste and all of that. And to be honest, I think that’s a distraction and that’s just excuses that they’re using to do what they really want. When you think about who these people are, they have dedicated their whole lives to accumulating wealth and power. They want to keep doing that. It’s like a machine that can’t be satisfied and they’re bad bosses. They’ll make people work in factories in a natural disaster. You think of tech jobs as being cushy, but then once people start to get more bold and organize and try to start unions at their tech companies like mass layoffs, no, it’s not stable. So yeah, I think that they do really want to attack the idea that you can have a stable, dignified job.

It might not make as much money as you could elsewhere, but it’s stable contributes to public life. That idea is threatening to who they are as bosses and what they are in the labor market. So I think that’s threatening to them as well as just organized labor in general. So their strategy to execute on destroying organized labor, destroying the federal services, destroying the federal workforce and making them the only big bad bosses in town. Their strategy to do that is to cause chaos and confusion. So you’d mentioned some headlines from this weekend and yeah, I think maybe you also mentioned that I was legally fired two weeks ago that firing was illegal. I feel like the news is covering it as layoffs. It’s something that’s allowed to happen as routine. It is possible to have a reduction in force in the federal government, but it needs to be thoughtful.

There’s rules and processes for how this is normally followed. If you want to take that kind of action and do it thoughtfully, which they’re completely ignoring, and in terms of what it looks like on the ground, it does feel chaotic and confusing, especially when it’s kind of hard to sort your attention because I feel like I’ll try to be like, okay, a lot’s happening, but I’m going to focus on what I can do and what’s in front of me and what’s in my control. But then I’ll get texts from like, oh, my parents, they saw a headline and they’re like, oh, did you know Elon Musk is saying people resign if they don’t reply to this email? But Elon Musk is not in our chain of command. That’s something that I think is being covered as just a fact when that’s not anyone’s boss. And you’ve seen a diversity in responses from different agencies. And

Maximillian Alvarez:

In fact, if this were in a bizarro world where Republicans did not have a trifecta control of the government, you would have folks on the other side of the aisle screaming about the illegality of all of this. But essentially what the culmination of that GOP trifecta is, is that no one in Congress is doing anything about the blatantly illegal actions of the unelected richest man in the world taking a meat cleaver to our government agencies.

Jasmine McAllister:

Exactly. Yeah. And I think in the absence of leadership from Congress, I think it’s really on each of us as individuals either as federal workers or just American citizens, to do what’s within each of our individual power. So one thing that our union has been really good about is reminding people their rights and their obligations in terms of legal orders. And so one thing that we’ll say is there’s all these rules about what sort of information can be shared where and who gets access to what. And there’s a lot of details there, but if you’re a federal worker listening to this, just remembering I do what my boss tells me to do, and if I’m getting an order from someone who’s not at my agency or not in my chain of command, I ask my boss, is this an order? And I think it violates x, y, Z rules and they can correct you, but don’t do anything that’s illegal and don’t comply. Don’t be scared into complying just because you’re scared. They’re trying to cause chaos and confusion. It’s working, but we need to remain clear-eyed about what our processes are to make our democracy work.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Will I want to bring you in here. We had Kat and Jasmine giving their on the ground accounts of the past couple weeks. I’m wondering what that looked like from your vantage point, not being in DC, but being directly impacted by this same top-down takeover.

Will Munger:

Sure. Well, thanks for having us on Max and Jasmine and Kat, my heart goes out too. And solidarity, this has been a really hard week for everyone. We’re definitely all in this together. I want to paint you a picture of the landscape where I work. I work and live in rural Idaho and Montana. I work with mostly ranchers who are working on public lands as well as the public land managers who are responsible for those public lands, as well as a number of scientists who are doing research and science for the betterment and management of those public lands. And so in my day-to-day job, I talk with ranchers about the issues that are facing them. These are complex issues in the west, there’s multiple jurisdictions, and it’s not just about producing food and fiber for the American people, but also there’s a number of new ask that are being asked of farmers and ranchers to conserve biodiversity, to help mitigate climate change, to deal with rapidly changing rural communities and land fragmentation.

So the challenges facing America’s farmers and ranchers are numerous, and having a federal agricultural research service is so important because we can do public interest research that the private sector isn’t able to do. And so me and my team were actually on our way back from the Society for Range Management meeting where we had been talking with ranchers and public land managers from around the country when we got the call that we were getting fired. And we were actually really shocked and surprised is so many people were. But one thing that I think is unique about my experience is I’m a young scientist. This is my first year in the service. I defended my dissertation in April of last year. And like Kat was talking about, to come from a rural community be able to have a federal job is and be able to serve your community is something that’s really important.

And a lot of young people are really excited to be here because day in day out, we hear from our stakeholders about how important the work that we do is. And when we got the news that we had been fired, it was just a real shock for us because we had been at this conference where we were getting really great feedback while we were hearing from our stakeholders that we were performing at a very high level and actually addressing a lot of the challenges that they’re facing. So it’s pretty dispiriting. But I think the thing I really want to uphold and really call attention to is the impact that these mass terminations have on rural communities out west. A lot of these communities are public lands communities where the people that were fired in this live and work in their livelihoods are interwoven with these lands, these rangers, firefighters, and also locksmiths, mule packers, educators. It’s a real range of people that have been hit by these. And some ranger districts that I’ve heard from have lost 50% of their crews, entire trail crews have been decimated. And over the last week, there’ve been a number of protests in these small towns. This is McCall, Idaho, Flagstaff, Arizona, my hometown of Logan, Utah. Hundreds and thousands of people are coming out in these small towns to say, Hey, these are public servants who serve our interest, who are taking care of our public lands, and we’re going to stand up for them.

Our stakeholders have been really active in making calls to the higher powers it be. And I think this is important because these are no democrats. These are mostly red states. These are mostly conservative agricultural communities, and they feel like projects that they have put a lot of time and effort into are being attacked here. And I think that that’s really important to recognize is that this is a moment where we can really bridge the urban rural divide and listen to each other and really think about what is the point of public science, of public service and what are the goods that brings? And I think this is a real clarifying moment. And the other thing I want to really highlight is the impact to young workers. I coached the range team at Utah State. I’m in contact with a number of young workers around the west, and they are really feeling decimated where these entry level jobs, these probationary positions that were terminated, this is our pathway where young people find their place in the world and can be compensated and rewarded for serving their communities.

And to cut that off is really cruel and not efficient at all. And here’s the real deep irony about calling this governmental efficiency is that so many of these programs are because of years of experience that this works. We responded to the Dust Bowl by creating conservation districts and watershed science so that we don’t have the impact of the Dust Bowl anymore. And our public land servants who are working on the range of issues that our communities are facing are really public servants who deserve to be supported. And that’s why I think it’s so important that we’re raising our voice and making these connections between rural America and what’s happening back east and in our cities.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s take a quick step back and help listeners hear what we’ve been trying to get them to hear since the very first episode of this podcast that your fellow workers doing the unsung work that makes our whole society and economy run are human beings just like you. Can we go back around the table and have each of you just talk a bit more about how you personally got into doing this work, what that day-to-day work entailed before all of this madness with the second Trump administration and how that work contributed directly and indirectly to the public Good. I

Cat Farman:

Came into CFPB 10 years ago now as a web developer and technologist and looking for purpose. And I think that’s really common for people of the millennial generation. And we grew up in a time when we were told, if you go to college and find meaning and passion, there will be jobs and a good life waiting for you on the other side. And then we saw the lie of the 2008 financial crash and the great recession, and that was not the case and that there was no magical great American dream waiting for us after all. And in fact, to the extent that it ever existed, they were doing everything they needed and wanted to do to take away any of the foundations of that. And that includes bailing out corporations and big banks instead of American homeowners who lost their houses in that crisis and lost their jobs.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I feel I got to state, just as a disclaimer, as folks who listen to this show know my family was one of those, the very first interview I ever did on this show was with my dad, Jesus Alvarez, talking about what it was like for our family to lose the house that I grew up in. So I feel like I have to say that for if nothing else, to make the disclaimer, but also to make the point that this impacts millions and millions of us.

Cat Farman:

Yes. And so I hear Will speaking about how the fact that these jobs exist that we’re talking about, that will and Jasmine have been unjustly legally fired from now that these careers exist, that these services exist for the public good is because we’ve learned from past disasters, like you said, the Dust Bowl, that’s the Great Depression. And then with the Great Recession, one of the lessons was there needs to be actual oversight in a central agency of government of these Wall Street banks that they don’t crash the economy and screw over the American people on such a scale again. And that includes regulating the mortgage market and auto loan market lenders and financial products. And that’s what CFPB was created to do. So I hear a lot of patterns, a lot of these services. There were a reason that we were created was because there was a moment, a history of greed and disaster resulting from that greed. And so here we are again. Greed is attacking these and creating disastrous economic effects already on American people. So we already know this history, it’s repeating. We’re in this new gilded age where the billionaires are running away with everything again and seeing if they’ll get away with it. So I think it’s important to remember that history and look back and see what’s going to be necessary for us to put a stop to this coup that’s happening and this corporate takeover of public good.

But yeah, so came to work at CFPB, it was in that context of the sort of disillusionment of being a working person realizing I’m going to have to work the rest of how long of my life and seeing the fallout of the economic, the great recession, and that impact on me and my generation friends and family members too. And again, Jasmine and Will talking about too, and then seeing opportunity in finding a public service job that’s got some security behind it, and that is meant to actually provide a social counterbalance, these forces of greed, corruption, corporate malfeasance, fraud by the billionaire and CEO class. So I’m still very proud to be able to do that work and it is motivating in a way that getting up in the morning to sell pizza every day is not and never was in those previous private sector jobs that I had.

One of the other differences I found too is that the small business tyrant experience is real. I worked for the small business tyrants at previous jobs and they have these little fiefdoms and there are not a lot of protections for workers in those kinds of jobs in this country. The difference is vast between working at those kinds of workplaces and going and working in public sector. And something too, and this is something shameful about some of these places I worked in technology, they shut out people of color, women of color, people like me from these industries, and I had never worked with a black coworker until I worked at the CFPB in technology. I never had a technology job where I had a black colleague in Philadelphia. So that kind of shameful discrimination and industry-wide creating hass and have nots who has access to certain kinds of work and salaries that come along with that, right? That’s something that in the public sector there are a lot more rules, regulations, and there’s a lot less segregation because of that. And I think that’s really key too, to keep in mind a part of the reason that we’re under attack right now is this is federal workforce is one of the more diverse and representative of the American people generally in all areas of demographics. And that is something that billionaires don’t want and certainly racist people like Musk and Trump are against too.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jasmine, I want to come to you and ask if you could pick up where we left off and just say more about how you got into working at the CFPB, what that work entailed and how that work contributed to the public good.

Jasmine McAllister:

Yeah, so I was doing pretty similar work at the state level before coming to CFPB. So I was at the New York State Attorney General’s office similar to CFPB. CFPB has a law enforcement function among other functions. So I was doing law enforcement at the state level for all types of laws in New York state. So like labor laws, voting rights access or some of the things I worked on as well as consumer financial protection. So an everyday person when they interact with their auto lender, what sort of rice do they have and how do they make sure they’re not getting cheated? So that was the type of work I was doing beforehand and I spent many years building those skills up. It’s pretty complicated work. I’m a data scientist and when you investigate these companies, it’s not like they’re sitting around saying, yeah, sure, this is how we’re breaking the law.

It’s pretty complicated. The lawyers have to develop their legal theories and then they talk to us and we say, okay, what type of data might exist? If we look at that data, how can we tell what’s really happening? It’s usually millions of rows of data that we have to link together. So yeah, it’s a pretty specialized skillset that I developed elsewhere and it was pretty competitive to get the job. More than a thousand people applied to my posting and my team had four people hired from that thousand. So yeah, so it’s pretty complicated work and it’s pretty hard to find the skills for this. And all four of us, me and my coworkers, we had to take a technical test that was pretty difficult. We all hit the ground running right away, but then I talk about it being an illegal firing. The excuse that they gave is that it’s performance based. So for new hires, it is possible to fire them for performance based issues, but they fired all new hires in one day at 9:00 PM and it’s just not possible that all of us we’re not performing our jobs, and that’s really just a loophole that they’re trying to use to bully people, and it is illegal. What happened,

Cat Farman:

We have supervisors too who had no say in these firings, right? So your supervisor didn’t say your performance was bad. They didn’t even ask your supervisor because that wasn’t one. Yeah.

Jasmine McAllister:

Well, and my specific supervisor saw this coming. So my specific supervisor was proactively thought that this administration would do this and was sending emails up his chain of command all the way to the director saying, Hey, I know they’re going to try this tactic. These people I would vouch for. It was very difficult to hire them. His supervisor, supervisor agreed. Everyone who would normally have the power in a decision like this to evaluate performance has said no. The performance was extraordinary for these four people. And I think that’s true for all 180 of us who were fired. We have in writing, I have a proactive supervisor, but other people, there’s supervisors now are saying, I would be a reference. Their supervisors are posting on LinkedIn trying to help people get jobs. It’s clearly not performance based and they’re just trying to bully us.

So anyways, that was a tangent. But yeah, I’ve always been interested in holding power to account. I’ve always been interested in balancing out the power imbalances that exist in the world. And yeah, I’ve been doing that data work for a long time. I started doing it in CF PB six months ago. Some of the cases I’ve worked on since joining have to do with illegal overdraft fees. So one such case, it’s the biggest credit union in the country. They provide services to military families and they were doing this thing with illegal overdraft fees where it would say one balance in your account when you make the payment. So you’re like, okay, I’m at the grocery store, I’m looking at my basket. Can I afford this extra item? Oh, cool, I have $40 in my account. I’m going to make sure I’m under that $40. You pay your grocery bill and then the next day you see that actually the way that the transactions were posted in the order that they came in means that by the time that your $35 grocery bill hits your account, actually it was less than that by that time, and now you get an illegal overdraft fee.

So that’s not supposed to happen. That’s deceptive. And that’s something that CF PB got them to stop doing. And we won money for people who were cheated in this way. There were other things happening at this company too where you’re like, okay, cool, I need to buy something, but my friend owes me money. They send me a Zelle payment and then I buy the thing I need to buy, but actually the Zelle payment won’t be posted until the next business day. And that’s something that they were not forthcoming about disclosing. And these are military families. I think that that’s something that is a pretty sympathetic, I think that this sort of thing happens to people across the country and that’s why CPB exists to protect anyone. But the fact that this was happening to military families is an extra layer of they’ve served their country and now the institution that would protect them from this sort of predatory behaviors being abolished.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I mean it really underlines a point that we’ve been making throughout the conversation here that will brought up even earlier, right? It is like maybe people are cheering this kind of top-down government destruction on for partisan reasons, but it is going to have fully nonpartisan effects for all working people regardless of what state they live in. And will, I wanted to bring you back in here and ask if you could talk a bit more about the communities you serve, the work that you do there and how that work is as much in the public interest as what we’re talking about here with the CFPB, even if it’s not something that folks know about or see if they don’t live in a rural redder district.

Will Munger:

So the constituency that I work with are mostly ranchers who are working on a mix of both private and public lands. And on these public lands are multiple resources that are public. And so for example, there’s a huge demand for restoration of species like grizzly bears and wolves and bighorn sheep, which puts sometimes that into conflict with ranching families. So for example, there’s a disease transmission issue that happens between domestic and wild sheep that causes a pneumonia that can destroy wild sheep populations. And so doing really important genetic research, epidemiological research as well as community-based research to figure out how can we restore bighorn populations and have domestic sheep grazing, what’s the right combination? That’s one example of a lot of these complicated, both agricultural and public lands management issues, and obviously wolves and grizzly bears and the introduction of large carnivores in the Intermountain West is another huge issue that are impacting people.

And I think I also want to recognize that a lot of my stakeholders who I’ve been talking to and I’ve been doing qualitative research, interviewing a lot of people, so have a little bit of a grounds to stand on. They do see that there have been too many regulations. They do see their livelihoods diminished and they do want to see some reform. And so that is really important to acknowledge that that demand is out there as well. However, the group that I was working in was specifically created to address these complex public lines challenges by organizing collaborative science efforts rather than having a top-down loading dock model of science where a scientists say, oh, we have the silver bullet. Here’s what these communities have to do. We’re working with ranchers saying, what are the issues that are important to you and how can we work together to make science that is relevant to your livelihoods, to public lands, conservation issues, and be able to find that sweet spot?

And so our project has been years in the making. It takes a lot of work to build relationships both with livestock producers as well as environmental groups who have had conflict with those public land agencies and ranchers. So it takes a lot of time to build that trust and then it takes a really specialized set of specialized team that has geneticists, fire ecologists, social scientists, collaborative experts and facilitators to make these things happen. So these efforts take years and a lot of public investment to turn a page on these issues. And so when you come in and decimate that, that has a real impact on people.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing letters from different wool grower organizations, different stockman’s organizations, different public lands, employee unions who are saying a very similar thing, which is these public servants are serving our interests, our livelihoods, our public lands, and we want to stand up for them because these projects have direct impact on our livelihood. And I think that’s the really important thing to drive home here, is that this is not a political game in the rural west. These are operators who are working on thin margins. These are wildlife populations that have been endangered and are in a route to recovery, and we need really innovative science to keep those things happening. The other part I think that is really important that goes back to some of the larger political economic changes, is that we’re seeing changes in public land ownership out west.

We’re seeing efforts to take over public land, and we are also seeing billionaires buying up working ranches and turning it into resorts, and it’s third and fourth and fifth and 14th homes. And so that both destroys working ranch livelihoods, but then also destroys that wildlife habitat. And so there’s I think, an opportunity to combine some convergences. Where can we build new political coalitions that can bring forth a vision of what might unite us, what might really help take care of rural communities going into the future? And so both Kat and Jasmine were talking earlier about it’s a little disorienting right now. There’s just so much new, so much feed, and that’s the flood the zone strategy, right? It’s the shock and awe that makes us just forget that we are in a web of relationships that are connected and responsible to each other. And so I think what I really want to emphasize is that our relationships make us strong. And whether that’s a union working in a big city, whether that’s a community group working out in the rural west, we need to uplift that next generation and continue to take care of each other during this hard time.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Kat, Jasmine will, there’s so much more I want to talk to you about, but I know we only have a little time left. And in that time I wanted to go back around the table and ask if you could say a little more about who’s fighting back right now and how, right? Is it unions, your unions, other unions will mentioned earlier that the stakeholders that you work with on a day-to-day basis or writing letters to the federal government urging them to not continue with these cuts, these layoffs, this top-down destruction. Are there elected officials who are leading a fight? Can you tell folks more about who’s fighting back and how? And I also wanted to ask by way of rounding out if you had any parting messages that you wanted to leave listeners with about why they need to care about all of this, how they can get involved in that fight, but also who and what we’re fighting against and who or what we’re fighting for here.

Cat Farman:

Well, thank you, max. We’re fighting for ourselves. One of my union comrades today put it perfectly. It’s not Elon versus government, it’s Elon versus everyone. This is about a billionaire and his rich buddies seizing power and getting rid of anything they cannot profit off of no matter the collateral damage because it does not personally affect him. What he doesn’t care. So that’s what’s at stake. And we’re not exaggerating when we say that. I think who’s organizing, who’s fighting back, who’s doing what, definitely I’ve seen workers being the first to sound the alarm, and we’ve tried to do that as well at CFUB Union. We know we’re under attack. We’ve been under attack since we were created because we regulate the biggest banks in the world and we give Americans money back when they get ripped off by these banks. We are the agency that sued Wells Fargo and got people money back from Wells Fargo fraud.

So of course we were under attack again under this second Trump administration. And so what’s gratifying is to see workers are still and continue to be fighting back every day and sounding the alarm about the implications for all of us not waiting for us to lose all these services before we sound the alarm and warn people. Now we know that social security, Medicare, Medicaid, these pillars of what’s left of a welfare state in this country that provides some security for people in old age or in ill health, that these are under attack and they’ll be in the next on the chopping block. So we have to fight back. We don’t really have a choice, right? People subsist on government public services because they’re public good. That was democratically created by the people for the people. That’s not to say that everything in government matches that ideal, and we’re always going to have to work hard to reach full democracy in this country and everywhere.

And that battle always seems to come down to the people versus the greedy, wealthy business owners who don’t care about democracy or public good because they can’t make money off of it. So what we’re doing is continuing to be in the streets and in the courts and everywhere where we need to be on the podcast, on the radio shows to sound the alarm, fight back, get people to join our fight. So CPB Union, we’re hosting pickets multiple times a week all over the country. One of the things that people don’t realize about this fight is that federal workers, most of us are outside of dc. It’s 80% of federal workers that work and live outside of the capital of Washington. So I think all of us on this show right now, we work and live outside of DC so we are representative of that and we are doing actions all across the country too.

So CFPB Union, we have workers in 40 states. We have a lot of folks who are the ones that go into banks to make sure that they’re following the law that live in rural communities, small towns, small cities, big cities all across the country if someone in Hawaii. So we have people everywhere. And what we’re doing along with our pickets DC and New York on Thursday is we’re also having events outside of our regional offices. That’s Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco. We are also going to Tesla dealerships where those are to bring the picket and the union and the fight to where Musk makes his money too. And we are going outside of the big banks. So everyone’s got a big bank in your town, no matter how small or there’s a big bank probably near you, you can go outside and info picket and tell people what’s going on.

Just tell people, did you know that this bank is operating lawlessly for the last two weeks because of Musk and this government corporate takeover that’s happening? That means that no one’s watching the big banks to make sure that they’re following the law. So if are you really going to trust your paychecks and your savings and your dollars with a bank that has zero oversight right now? That is what’s happening. The biggest banks in the country are not being supervised. The laws are not being enforced at those banks. We’ve been told to stop working. So for two weeks they’re operating without any oversight or accountability to the American public. So we invite folks to join us and post on social media. When you do that, spread the heat around where it belongs, do town halls and wherever you are, your local congress member needs to feel the heat bully your local Congress person, bully your local Republican. They need to take the heat for this and answer to what’s happening. What are they doing to stop it? Bully your local Democrat too.

Jasmine McAllister:

They all need to stop it.

Yeah, I definitely agree, Kat, you said that it’s not Elon Musk fighting the government. It’s really all of us fighting for ourselves. One thing that someone had mentioned to me this morning that I knew but kind of forgot just how many people are directly impacted by this, there’s us who work in the federal government, but also a lot of local state, local government, state government and nonprofits for land on federal funding as well. So in my role at the union, I’ve been trying to just build as many connections as possible either within the union or since I live in New York with other federal workers who live in New York, or after the conversation this morning, I’m like, I should try to figure out a way to build a relationship with people who are at these other levels of government or nonprofits that also their jobs are also on the line and their work is on the line and the services they provide to people might go away without this.

Yeah, and I think that’s related to what Will had said about our web of relationships making us strong. I think thinking about, okay, whose interests are aligned with mine? Who can be my allies, who can be in my coalition? And at a very broad level, I think that’s the whole 99%. I think they try to distract us with these different social issues and the different buzzwords, but it’s actually the 99% against the 1% or even the 0.01%. It’s a handful of guys versus the rest of us. So I think that, yeah, and this is maybe a tangent, but I feel like after the 2016 election in my more liberal leftist community, there was kind of a lot of chatter of talk to your racist uncle at Thanksgiving. And it’s like, that’s not what relationship building looks like and you’re just going to further push each other away if you have a big fight at Thanksgiving, I think about who you have access to and who you can influence and do that in a way that’s true and respectful to the relationship you have and the love that you hold for each other. I think that’s really important. And yeah, I mean I think there’s some of us who are in unions and can go through that bridge or our jobs are aligned, but there’s also people where it’s just like your family, whether or not they realize it does have interest aligned with you if they have to have a job to pay rent or a mortgage and eat food. So I think also just thinking about your relationships and then one quick plug, five calls.org makes it really easy to call your congress people and other representatives

Cat Farman:

Five calls.org to bully your local congress person.

Will Munger:

Well, I think those are some great steps and the town hall thing I think is really important right now, particularly in rural communities for folks who are impacted out west, showing up at these protests down at the courthouse, talking to your coworkers, talking to the folks at the bar, talking to the folks at your church. I just think we got to have this conversation from the bottom up. I’ve been reading a really great book by Robin Wall Kimer called The Service Ferrets about reciprocity and abundance in the natural world, and she’s a Potawatomi ecologist and really kind of brings a lot of indigenous science and to the table. And one thing that has really struck me in this web of relationships is whether it’s responding to climate change attacks by billionaires, pandemics, bottom up mutual aid where we’re taking care of each other, making sure no one falls through really, I think is that’s the jam in this social movement that’s got to come and whatever the political outcome, the more we can build relations with each other, with people who are different than us, who might speak a different language, who might have a job that’s different than ours.

I just think the powers that be these billionaires, they want us separated, they want us hating on each other and any way that we can find solidarity from the bottom up to reimagine how we get through this period together, but then also continue to thrive together in the face of all the challenges that we’re up against, I think that that’s something that we can be able to practice day in and day out and we’ve got to stick together on this one, I think.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guest, KA Farman, Jasmine McAllister and Will Munger. I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

We speak with the acclaimed science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow, who has spent decades writing and thinking about the impact of technology on our lives. He coined the term “enshittification” to describe how online platforms degrade the user experience over time in search of profits, though it has been widely adopted to describe a larger sense of decline and decay across society. He discusses his new book Picks and Shovels, Silicon Valley’s big bet on artificial intelligence to discipline its workers, and billionaire Elon Musk’s work in the Trump administration. “The point of this chaotic blitz is to demoralize their opponents,” Doctorow says of Musk’s work through DOGE, which has gutted government agencies and wide swaths of the federal workforce. “In the reality-based world, even if you are worried about government waste, even if you want to make government smaller, you have to acknowledge the empirical fact that payroll accounts for 4% of the federal budget.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The wrap WaPo rejected.

The Washington Post won’t say why it cancelled a six-figure ad buy calling for Elon Musk to be fired, but it’s likely the same reason the Post insisted Musk wasn’t Nazi-saluting on Inauguration Day, and why the paper killed its endorsement of Kamala Harris: because that’s what Jeff Bezos wants.

In addition to owning the Post, Bezos is the founder of Amazon and currently the world’s third-richest human. At best, the Post is a side-hustle for Bezos, while Amazon and his other business pursuits are what truly animate him. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, told the Post (10/30/24). “That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”

To sustain his sprawling empire, Bezos relies on government contracts worth billions of dollars, even as he stiff-arms regulators and irksome antitrust enforcers. This nifty maneuver is only possible if those in power play ball, but Trump didn’t during his first term (CNN, 12/9/19).

To ensure Trump II will be more amenable, Bezos has gone to lengths to grease the wheels, lavishing praise and millions of dollars on Trump and his family. He joined Musk and other tech billionaires in flanking Trump at his inauguration. (Bezos’s presence signaled “anything but independence for the Washington Post,” said Marty Baron, the paper’s former executive editor.)

Meanwhile, with Musk’s hand now on the public money spigot—thanks to Trump ceding much of the US government to him—Bezos is also busy doing favors for Musk (FAIR.org, 2/14/25), the richest person alive.

From a business perspective—the only perspective that really matters to Bezos—pissing the temperamental Musk off at a moment when he commands unprecedented power in the public and private spheres is a bad idea. So Bezos is being careful not to—as is his paper. Which brings us back to that rejected ad.

‘You can’t do the wrap’

The flipside of the Common Cause/SPLCAF ad.

The bright red ad was to wrap around the front and back pages of some print editions of the Post, including those going to subscribers on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the White House, ensuring top officials would lay eyes on it. Featuring a laughing Musk hovering over the White House, the ad asks, “Who’s running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?”

The civic groups Common Cause and the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund were behind the ad wrap, which was to be accompanied by a full-page ad inside the paper.

But even though the groups had signed a $115,000 contract with the Post, the paper canceled the wrap at the 11th hour, even as it said it could run the inside ad, which hit on the same themes.

“They said, ‘You can have something inside the paper, but you can’t do the wrap,’” Common Cause president Virginia Kase Solomón told The Hill (2/16/25). “We said ‘Thanks, no thanks,’ because we had a lot of questions.”

Among them: Was the ad killed

because we’re critical of what’s happening with Elon Musk? Is it only OK to run things in the Post now that won’t anger the president, or won’t have him calling Jeff Bezos asking why this was allowed?

Kase Solomón asked the Post to explain its willingness to run the inside ad, but not the wrap. “They said they were not at liberty to give us a reason,” she told the New York Times (2/17/25).

Tellingly, in providing guidance to Common Cause on how to comply with the Post’s ad standards, Kase Solomón said the paper sent a sample ad paid for by a Big Oil group. “It was a ‘thank you Donald Trump’ piece of art,” Kase Solomón told The Hill.

The pulled ad directed readers to FireMusk.org, which states:

Musk, an unaccountable and unelected billionaire, is pushing to control public spending, dismantle the safety net and reshape our way of life to suit his interests. It’s clear what’s happening here: Musk and Trump aim to replace qualified civil servants with political allies whose loyalty lies solely with them.

‘Unacceptable business practices’

An ad from Ekō rejected by Facebook for “unacceptable business practices.”

The Post’s ad cancellation comes on the heels of Meta pulling an ad critical of Musk earlier this month. The yanked Facebook ad was purchased by the watchdog group Ekō, which had two other anti-Musk ads taken down by Meta—at least until the outlet Musk Watch made inquiries. The two other ads “were removed in error and have now been restored,” Meta told Musk Watch (2/18/25).

Meanwhile, Musk Watch noted, “Ads that were supportive of Musk and Trump were not impacted by similar errors.”

Still, one Ekō ad remains banished, with Meta citing “unacceptable business practices” as the reason.

That explanation makes a certain kind of sense. After all, alongside Bezos and Musk at Trump’s inauguration, was the world’s second richest person, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. And as Bezos’s Post has made clear, pissing off your fellow billionaires is indeed an unacceptable business practice.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Pete Tucker.

“Despite President Trump’s promise not to touch Social Security, Elon Musk has gained access to the system that cuts your grandmother’s Social Security check and is wreaking havoc. Musk’s baseless claims of massive fraud are a poorly disguised pretext to cut benefits for seniors to pay for his giant tax cut.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Within the first month of the new Trump administration, the federal government has already become nearly unrecognizable. Operating through the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been given carte blanche to wage war on every part of the government that stands in the way of the business and investment needs of the billionaire class. The ongoing attacks on the Treasury Department, the Department of Education, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are just the opening salvo of a broader, darker plan to remake American society and government to serve the interests of the largest corporations and most powerful oligarchs. On this week’s livestream, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez will speak with organizers of the emergency rally that took place on Monday outside of the CFPB building in Washington DC to protest the Trump administration’s moves to effectively shut down the agency. Then, we’ll speak with media critic and TRNN columnist Adam Johnson and tech critic Paris Marx about DOGE’s attacks on democracy, Musk’s agenda, and the grim future of technofascism materializing before us in real time.

Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden, Adam Coley

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  Welcome to The Real News Network, and welcome back to our weekly livestream.

The Trump administration has effectively shut down the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the very agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage lending scandal. Since its creation, the CFPB has clawed back over $21 billion from Wall Street banks, credit card companies, and other predatory financial institutions for defrauded customers. Russell Vought, an unabashed Christian nationalist, founder of the far-right think tank the Center for Renewing America, a primary architect of Project 2025, and Donald Trump’s newly Senate-confirmed acting director of the CFPB, ordered all agency staff in an email Saturday to stop working and to not come into the office.

Hundreds of federal employees and protesters mobilized for an emergency rally in front of the CFPB headquarters near the White House in Washington DC on Monday. Democratic lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren and Maxine Waters spoke at the event, which was organized by progressive organizations Indivisible, the Progressive Change Institute, MoveOn, Americans for Financial Reform, and the National Treasury Employees Union Local 335, which represents CFPB workers.

Here’s Sen. Warren speaking to the crowd on Monday:

[CLIP BEGINS]

Sen. Elizabeth Warren:  This fight is about hardworking people versus the billionaires who want to squeeze more and more and more money. And now, now is our time to put a stop to this.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  On Tuesday night, just 24 hours after that demonstration, dozens of CFPB employees were notified over email that they had been fired. For his part, Elon Musk, richest man in the world and unelected head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, celebrated the shuttering of the agency, posting Sunday night on X, the platform that he owns, Musk wrote “CFPB RIP” accompanied by a tombstone emoji.

Now Musk, it should really be noted, has a big fat obvious conflict of interest here. Just last month, his site X announced a partnership with Visa to offer a real-time payment system on the platform. And yes, the CFPB would’ve been scrutinizing the whole thing in order to make sure that users weren’t scammed and didn’t have their sensitive information stolen. Now it won’t.

But the wrecking balls that Musk and Trump are swinging through the government right now are doing incalculable damage that goes far beyond the CFPB as we speak. Trump’s administration appears dead set on manufacturing a constitutional crisis if and when they openly defy court rulings, ordering them to halt their numerous illegal moves to shut down agencies, seize operational control of government finances, and to access everyone’s sensitive government data. There’s very much a Silicon Valley esque move fast and break things strategy that’s being applied here.

And the big tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley who threw their full support behind the Trump-Vance ticket have much more at stake here than just Musk’s payment system on X. Through Trump, Musk, J.D. Vance, and others, Silicon Valley and its technofascist oligarchs are waging a coup of their own right now, rewiring our government and our economy to serve their business and investment needs and to accelerate the coming of the dystopian future that they envision for all of us.

Over the course of this livestream, we’re going to break down this technofascist takeover of our government that’s unfolding in real time. We’re going to talk about what the consequences will be and how people are fighting back. In the second half of the stream, we’re going to talk with media critic, Real News columnist, and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast, Adam Johnson, and we’re also going to speak with Paris Marx, renowned tech critic, author, and host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us.

But we’re going to start right now with the chaos at the CFPB and the protest action outside the DC agency headquarters on Monday. We’re joined now by Aaron Stephens. Aaron is the former mayor of East Lansing, Michigan, a senior legislative strategist with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and he was an organizer of Monday’s CFPB protest.

Aaron, thank you so much for joining us, man, especially with everything going on. Can you start by just giving us and our viewers an on-the-ground account of Monday’s action? How did it get organized? What did you see and hear on the day, and what were the real core rallying messages of the event?

Aaron Stephens:  Yeah, thanks for having me. So this is a really difficult time. I think that everybody’s dealing with a fire hose of news, the Trump administration taking actions, especially taking actions on Fridays, Saturdays to try and get away from the news cycle, to hide some of the worst things that they’re doing during the times when people might not be paying attention.

But we got news that some of the DOGE, those, I think, 20-something-year-old tech folks got into CFPB and started accessing some really sensitive data that the CFPB has and were looking to shut down the agency. You have to remember that Elon Musk, back when Trump first won reelection, tweeted that the CFPB was a redundant agency and one that needed to be deleted in the first place. So this is something that we were expecting to see, but of course we didn’t expect things to happen in the way that it did.

This is an agency that, DOGE, of course, is Elon Musk, is not an elected person. There’s been no act of Congress to authorize anything that’s been happening over at the CFPB, but we saw basically a takeover of the agency. People being told stay home, people being told don’t work.

And so we quickly mobilized with some of our congressional allies and some of our allies like Indivisible, MoveOn, the union folks, and Americans for Financial Reform to show that this was not going to be something that folks just stood by and let happen. We had about a thousand people there, maybe more, many, many members of Congress.

And I want to highlight the fact that it wasn’t just members that care and talk about consumer protection every single day. You had freshman members like Yassamin Ansari and senior members like Maxine Waters who are on the financial services committee, and Elizabeth Warren who, obviously, is the matriarch of this agency, but a lot of support from within the party here to really push back on what’s going on. The core message being that we’re not just going to stand by and let Elon Musk take over at this agency, and we’re not going to let what is really the financial cop on the street die in the darkness.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s talk a little more about that. For folks who weren’t at the rally or for folks who are maybe not fully up to speed on what the CFPB itself does or did, let’s talk a little more about what the CFPB does, why it was created. And as much as we don’t want to speculate, of course we can’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but if we have a shut down of CFPB, what is that going to mean for people?

Aaron Stephens:  I think you really have to look back at why this agency was created. This agency was created after the financial crisis in the late 2000s. This is an agency that is meant to hold banks and corporations and financial institutions accountable for malfeasance and advocates for consumers when they are wronged. This is an agency that, for instance, somebody who has been paying their mortgage on time, but the bank has been misapplying those payments as late and then their house got foreclosed on, they go to the CFPB. And the CFPB is the one that steps in and says, actually, you guys were in the wrong here. We’re going to keep this person in their house. They are the people on the street advocating for consumers. So getting rid of an agency like that is going to leave millions of Americans without somebody to go to.

I want to point out some of the numbers here. The CFPB has returned over $20 billion to consumers. It has a billion dollar a year budget and it has returned over $20 billion to consumers just on actions against corporations that have taken advantage of them alone. You have folks like Wells Fargo that have been taken action against, and they’ve had to pay back $2.5 billion for misapplying mortgage payments, like I mentioned before, and a lot of other actors that are, quite frankly, in the tech space, which Elon Musk is very, very related to, that are seeing action taken against them as well.

And so you can see the throughline there. Not having this agency protect consumers will mean that corporations will have a much, much easier time stealing from consumers and not having any kind of retribution against them.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I guess this is as much a disclosure as anything, because it’s very hard to sit here as a journalist, as editor-in-chief of The Real News Network talking about this, but I’m also someone whose family lost everything in the financial crisis. I’ve been open about this my whole media career. It’s where my media career started. We lost the house that I grew up in. This agency was created because so many millions of families like mine got screwed over in the 2008 financial crash, and now here we are, 15 years later, being told that shuttering this agency is a win for, I don’t know what, efficiency…?

Aaron Stephens:  For who? If you talk about efficiency, again, I’ll point out $20 billion returned to consumers, a billion dollar a year budget. That’s efficient to me. And we’re talking about an agency that is literally dedicated to protecting consumers. So the only thing that I could say this would be efficient for is helping big corporations take advantage of people. There is no other reason to go after an agency that is dedicated to making sure that people have a fair shake in a financial system that is usually difficult to navigate and sometimes, unfortunately, as we’ve seen many, many times in the past, takes advantage of consumers. There’s no reason to go after an agency like this other than to make it easier for those folks to do that.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I think that’s a really important point, and I want to build on that in a second and talk about what the attack on the CFPB tells us about the larger attack that’s happening across the government right now. But I would be remiss if I didn’t ask if you’ve heard anything from the folks at the CFPB who lost their jobs this week, or anyone that you were talking to on the ground on Monday. Our listeners want to know.

Aaron Stephens:  I want to couch this and make sure that the point of this really is to talk about the consumers that are affected by this, but there is a really important story that is not probably going to be as told, which is that there are civil servants that dedicated their lives to basically saying, you know what? — And many of them have very similar stories to you. I saw somebody get taken advantage of, my family got taken advantage of, and now I’ve dedicated my life to fighting for consumers, and this is the agency that I’m part of. All of those people got an email that said, your work’s not important, stop doing it.

And so that’s why so many workers showed up on Monday. And their message was very, very simple. It was, we just want to do our job. We just want to protect people, let us do our job. You’ve got hundreds of people that they’re probably not making as much as they might be able to in the private sector, and they’re doing their best to try and protect people, and they’re just basically being told this isn’t important anymore.

As part of a larger plan, we’re seeing the same playbook at different agencies. I’m not going to be surprised as Elon Musk goes and attacks Social Security, attacks the Department of Education. These are services that affect working families everywhere across the country, and you don’t see him having the same kind of vitriol to a large corporation that’s taking advantage of people. It’s very, very clear that what’s going on right now is they’re dismantling the agencies that are protecting people just to give tax breaks and give an easier time for billionaires to take advantage of consumers.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s tease that out a little more, because I would hope that that is the clear and obvious message that people are taking away from it. But you know as well as I do that, it’s not that easy, unfortunately. We’re going to talk about this in the second segment with Paris Marx and Adam Johnson, but this is as much a war over what Musk and Trump are doing as it is over the perception about what they’re doing.

And so I see people all the time, people I know, people I’ve interviewed, people in my family who are right-leaning or maybe politically independent, who are still very much buying the Musk and Trump line that this is all being done in the name of efficiency, rooting out longstanding corruption and wokeism and all that crap.

So I wanted to ask if, in good faith, if we want to talk to folks who are feeling that way and thinking that way, what does the attack on the CFPB, how does that fit into the larger project that you just described? How can people take that and what’s going on at the Treasury, and just what the hell is going on here and what’s the end game?

Aaron Stephens:  Let’s talk through some of their playbook, because what Elon Musk and Donald Trump will do is they will find one little line item budget thing that they know they can message on, and they will say, look at this inefficient spending, and it’ll be like $10 million in a budget of a billion. And they’ll say, look at this inefficient thing, this is the thing that we’re cutting. And they won’t talk about the millions and millions of dollars going to help consumers. But that’s the thing they’ll talk about so that way they can message to folks, no, no, no, look, we’re cutting. We’re cutting and we’re being efficient. But the reality is that they’re saying that publicly so that way behind the scenes they can cut the things that help people.

And so I think that the CFPB is, and one of the reasons why we are so passionate about it, is because there are so many stories of people being helped by this agency.

I’ll give another random example, although there are literally thousands. People that went to a for-profit college that was not accredited, took out large loans for this, and the CFPB helped state AGs sue that for-profit college, which led to not only money going back to those folks, but also loans being forgiven. Those are people that would’ve been in debt for probably the rest of their lives for a degree that wasn’t even accredited, and that’s the CFPB, that’s what they’re doing.

One of the reasons why I think centering this agency in this fight is a very, very good thing to do is because there are thousands of stories of people really going out there and seeking help from the CFPB and that agency doing the right thing.

One of the rules that they most recently announced, which is a great rule which is now being attacked by congressional Republicans, is their medical debt and credit reporting rule. You’re talking about folks that, for those who don’t know, when you have an amount of medical debt, it goes on your credit report and it can significantly impact your life in the future, not being able to get a mortgage or not being able to get a car. And sometimes those procedures are just not things that you can control. And the statistics have said it and the studies have said it over and over again: Having medical debt does not actually have any real determining factor on whether or not you’re going to be paying back car loans or house loans, and it really doesn’t affect anything. In fact, Experian has even said that publicly.

And the CFPB said, you know what? This should be something that we address. We should not have medical debt [be] something that is reported on their credit report. And there are thousands of stories of people saying, I had a procedure done in the ’90s. It was out of the blue, I couldn’t control anything about it, and now 20 years later, I can’t get a house. I have two kids and I can’t get a house. Those are the people that are affected by closing this agency.

And so I think centering those stories is really, really important in this conversation. And just talking about, really, who is Elon Musk and Donald Trump on the side of? Is it on the side of that person that is trying to get a home for their two kids, or is it on the side of the banks that just want to make sure that they can make every last dime out of these consumers? And I think the answer’s fairly clear to that.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that’s powerfully put. And we do need to center these stories, if only to get people out of the hazy miasma of Trumpian rhetoric and actually see the reality in front of them. We were talking about this two livestreams ago, a day after the horrific plane crash in DC where over 60 people lost their lives. But that was another clear-cut example where the government bureaucrats, the deep state, useless, evil, faceless folks in the government are actually air traffic controllers. They’re working people who are making sure our planes don’t crash when we come in and out of an airport. They’re also the people in the CFPB, the NLRB, talking to workers about organizing every day. If you just look at this in terms of big awful government but you’re not actually seeing the details, we’re going to be sleepwalking into even more dangerous stuff.

And I want to hover on that point for a second because for people who are not right in the middle of this, people who don’t live and work in DC, and even for people who aren’t employees of the government and they’re really only seeing this from the outside through the media and social media, I wanted to ask you, since you were there, you’re in it, how are people who work in government responding to this? What is the range of emotions that you’re hearing and seeing from your colleagues there in DC?

Aaron Stephens:  I do live in Michigan, so I go to DC fairly regularly, but I’m here on the ground in the wonderful, greatest state in the country. There’s folks that are there that are terrified. They get an email one day that says, don’t come into the office, you’re working from home. Get an email the next day that says stop your work entirely.

And I think it’s very important that we engage the union in this protest too, because those are real folks that have families, jobs, lives that are completely in limbo because there’s an unelected billionaire that decided that he wanted to tweet to delete the CFPB, and that’s a really scary reality to live in currently.

To your earlier point about people not really feeling or understanding what a government employee is, I want to point out, I was a mayor back in Michigan, and I think that people have different opinions about different levels of government involvement, but I’ll tell you, when the pandemic hit and you needed those folks out there making sure that people were getting access to vaccines or access to rental assistance or whatever else it was, those are government employees, they’re doing their job. And those backbone, really important things for society are what government employees do. I think we can have discussions about where we can direct policy or direct money more efficiently, but shutting down agencies that are dedicated to protecting people is not the way that we need to go about things.

Maximillian Alvarez:  There’s a larger complicated point here to be made, but I have faith that we can manage it because we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Two things can be true at once. What’s happening right now is a catastrophe, and plenty of government agencies have drawn justified criticism and ire from working people across this country. I’ll be the first to say it.

I talked to working class people living and fighting in sacrifice zones around the country, people in Michigan, people in Baltimore, people in places like East Palestine, Ohio, who have been polluted by private industry, government-run sites, all this crap. The point being is that that is what the Environmental Protection Agency was created in response to a half a century ago. The Cuyahoga River was on fire every other month, and toxic pollution was rampant, and people across the country rose up and said, the government needs to do something about this. And it was fricking Nixon’s administration who created the EPA and actually had an understanding that you need to have a level of enforcement there that gives people confidence that this agency is actually doing what it says it’s doing.

Now over the last 50 years, both parties have contributed in one way or another, either by just cutting the budget, vilifying the agency, or leaning more towards the interests of the corporations that the agency’s supposed to regulate. And so you end up with people like the folks I talked to in these sacrifice zones not trusting the EPA at all, because the EPA is telling them that they’re fine and they can stay in their homes while they and their kids continue to get sick.

And so that is the situation that we are in with so much wrought that has been created in well-meaning or established-for-good-reasons agencies. But that doesn’t mean you throw everything out with the bathwater. Again, we can walk and chew gum at the same time, otherwise we’re going to have nothing left at the end of this.

Aaron Stephens:  Right. And I want to put a fine edge point on that. What we’re not sitting here saying is that everything is perfect, but look at where they’re targeting. They’re taking the frustration that people have that’s valid with government or the way that things are happening right now, and they’re using that frustration to attack agencies that are just holding corporations accountable. Where is the energy from them going? It is not going to address people’s actual concerns about government. They’re taking the, again, valid concerns that people have about the way that things are right now, and they’re saying, great, my solution is to give away tax breaks to billionaires. And they’re doing it in a more couched way.

But the reality is if they cared about people being taken advantage of, then the CFPB would be enhanced, not taken away. And you see where they’re diverting their energy into cutting, and it’s for public services for working families. It is not that real angst — And again, real angst — From people that are just angry at the current situation and the way things are. So they’re taking advantage of folks’ fear, unfortunately.

Maximillian Alvarez:  That, in many ways, is the political difference here between this MAGA-fied Republican Party and what I guess we would tend to call the Democratic establishment, not the whole party itself, but very much the ruling side of the party.

Trump, for all of his lies and the scapegoats and fictive enemies that he creates, is still identifying and speaking to those touchpoints of neoliberal system failure that people feel in their real lives. What is our counternarrative? What is the opposite vision of the future and governance that is being offered instead of the wrecking ball that is the Trump administration? That’s a question that all of us need to sit with.

And it’s a question that leads into, we only got about 10 more minutes here before we move into the next segment, but I didn’t want to let you go without asking about what this all means for the Democrats who are still in office right now, this party that people are looking to as the core institutional opposition to what Trump and the GOP are doing right now.

Axios dropped a story, which I’m sure you saw, earlier this week, sparked a lot of justified outrage all over the internet. And this article said, “Members of the Steering and Policy Committee — with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in the room — on Monday complained” about pressure from activist groups, including ones that helped organize Monday’s action and are putting them. They’re really pissed about the pressure these groups are putting on them to get off their butts and do something. And there was a quote from this Axios article that said, “‘It’s been a constant theme of us saying, “Please call the Republicans.”’” And that was from Rep. Don Beyer from Virginia, basically throwing up their hands and telling their constituents, hey, we’re in the minority now. There’s nothing we can do, go call the Republicans.

Is this the pervasive attitude from Democrats on the Hill right now that you’re hearing? Who’s fighting back? And tell us more about the work that you’re doing with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee to be part of that fight back.

Aaron Stephens:  I think it’s important to note, I think everybody’s seen the responses to some of that article, but also the positive responses to our rally on Monday where Maxine Waters and Elizabeth Warren stood up and said, we’re not going to stand by. Or Maxwell Frost trying to get into USAID. People want to see Democrats fighting back. They feel like, at this moment, they are getting just hounded with news every single day from a different Trump administration action that is going to harm them in the long term or in the short term, and they want to know that their representatives are fighting back.

And so I think that some of that frustration is just going to manifest in people calling their Dem representatives and being like, what are you doing? And I think it’s important that Dem leadership hears that. I think that we as an organization are going to continue trying to channel our members to make sure that action is being taken on the Dem side and that we’re using every single tool in the arsenal, whether that be in the funding fight or whether that be pushing stateside, pushing on AGs and the courts. Whatever it is, people need to see Dems fighting back.

I certainly agree that this is a Republican agenda and we need to be holding them accountable for what they are doing. But again, people need to see Dems fighting back. And if they don’t see that, then they’re going to feel like they’ve been abandoned by the party that claims to be the ones that’s fighting for them.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Picking up on that, for folks out here who are watching and listening to this stream, what would be your message to them about why they should fight back and the ways they can? It could be calling your elected representative, but for folks who are maybe feeling like they’re not getting anything out of their representative right now, but we don’t want to leave folks feeling hopeless and powerless, that is never our aim. What’s your message to the folks around you, the folks you talk to these days about why they need to fight, not give up, and the different things that they can do to hold this administration accountable, preserve the things in our society, in our government that need to be preserved? What’s your message to folks right now?

Aaron Stephens:  My one big message is we need more stories being shared. There are millions of people in this country that have been impacted that are on Medicare and would be in a very, very bad situation if that was reduced, or Social Security, or again, had good action taken by the CFPB, or had their grocery store saved in their local community because the FTC stopped a merger. Those things, those stories need to be amplified.

And I think that it’s important that people are not just apathetic about the situation. I know that it’s difficult given just how much is going on, but show up to the town hall for your congressional member, stage a protest, do it in your own district. We need to be showing that, again, we are not going to stand by and let this happen.

And quite frankly, I think that Democrats need to see that when they do stand up and when they do take real action that they have support. I think they do just based on what the response was to this rally and what happened at USAID. But I think that we need to be also, while still calling out the folks that are maybe a little bit quieter, we also need to be celebrating the folks that are out there fighting the fight and make sure that folks know that if they do stand up, they’ll have backup. And I think that’s important to do.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. Well man, I want to have you back on soon because there’s so many other big questions to talk about here: What’s going to happen when we hit the debt ceiling crap again? What can we expect in the coming weeks, months, and years of this administration? We’re only one month into this thing, so we gotta pace ourselves, but we gotta know what’s coming ahead so that we’re not constantly immobilized by the onslaught of news on a given day. So having that long view, I think, is important for all of us. And I do want to have you back on to talk about that in more depth.

As we close out, I did want to ask if you had any thoughts you wanted to share on that, or if there were any other upcoming actions that you wanted to point people to? I’m hearing that there’s a national day of action that federal workers are going to be participating in on the 17th. Are there agency demonstrations that you know happening in DC? Just anything like that that you wanted to put out there before we let you go. And also tell folks about where they can find you.

Aaron Stephens:  Yeah, so feel free to find me on Twitter, @AaronDStephens — I’ll still call it Twitter — And go to boldprogressives.org, sign up for our listserv. We’ll send out action alerts on protests and different things that are going on there. We’re also going to be collecting stories from folks that are affected.

And I think, again, just because we have those connections in the Hill amplifying those of offices, so they have things to really push for, and they have a little bit more ammunition when they’re having these conversations on the Hill is important. And as you said, fortunately, it’s a marathon that feels like a sprint right now with everything going on. We just need to keep it going. I’d be happy to come back on. Thanks for having me.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Thank you so much, man. We really appreciate you being here. I appreciate the work that you’re doing. We hope to have you back soon, man. Thank you again.

Aaron Stephens:  Thanks so much. Have a good one.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Alright, gang. So we’ve got another hour in our livestream today. We want to thank again Aaron Stephens, senior legislative strategist with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, who was one of the organizers of Monday’s protest outside the CFPB. Thank you to Aaron. Please follow him on X, or Twitter, if you want to stay up to date with Aaron.

And now I want to bring in our next two guests here. They’re longtime friends of The Real News. We’ve interviewed them separately a number of times. I’ve had the honor of being on Citations Needed. Adam himself writes for The Real News. So I’m really, really grateful to see your faces and to have your critical voices here with us, guys.

And I just want to make sure, for folks who are watching, if you are living under a rock and you don’t know about Paris and Adam’s work yet, I actually envy you because you’ve got a lot of great work at your disposal. But Paris Marx is a Canadian technology writer whose work has been published in a range of outlets including NBC News, CBC News, Jacobin, and Tribune. They’re also the host of the acclaimed podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, which everyone should go listen to, especially right now. Paris is also the author of the excellent book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, which was published by Verso Books in 2022.

And we are also joined by the great Adam Johnson. Adam hosts the Citations Needed podcast, which everyone should also listen to. And Adam writes at The Column on Substack. He is a columnist for us here at The Real News. You should read every column he’s ever written for us because they’re all bangers and all critical media analyses. And he also writes for other outlets like The Nation.

Paris, Adam, thank you both so much for joining us today. We got a lot to talk about, and you guys are exactly the folks I want to be talking to about it. But I wanted to just, by way of transitioning from that first segment with Aaron into our discussion, if you guys had any comments on Musk, Trump, and votes attacks specifically on the CFPB, and any thoughts you had on why they’re going after the CFPB that maybe we didn’t cover in that first segment.

So yeah, Paris, let’s start with you, and then Adam, we’ll go to you.

Paris Marx:  Sure. Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear that the CFPB is low-hanging fruit and something easy for them to take on. We know that the right has not liked this agency for quite a while, and then we can also see that an agency like that is going to hinder some of what Elon Musk and these other tech billionaires want to be doing. We know Marc Andreessen, for example, has been angry at this agency and blaming it for debanking people in crypto, which is probably not true, but is one of these conspiracy theories that he has embraced.

Elon Musk, of course, has ambitions of moving Twitter or X into payments and financial services and things like that. It is not a surprise to me that he would want to take on the CFPB right as he is getting into an area like that. And of course, as I understand, the CFPB has also looked into Tesla in the past and issues with Tesla. So yeah, it’s not a surprise to me that he wants to take on this agency, and I think we’re going to see him take on a lot of other ones as well and try to dismantle them too.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Adam, what about you? Were you surprised? You look surprised. You don’t look surprised at all [laughs]. Oh, wait, you’re muted, brother.

Adam Johnson:  My apologies. I want to start off by saying I thought that the intro, Max, you gave at the top of the show about 37 minutes ago was excellent. I don’t usually kiss ass to my host, but that was very, very well written, established the stakes. I thought that was really well done. I forget because you edit me, but you should do more writing. It was very good. It’s a complex thing to break down, and I don’t usually kiss the ass of the host, but I’m doing it.

But to answer your question, yeah, I mean, look, he’s obviously going after the liberal administrative regulatory state. These are all the Project 2025 wishlist, Silicon Valley wishlist of people they want to go after. He is going after it in a different way than previously. He is going after it in a way that is obviously not legal, which is another way of saying illegal. He is doing it in a way that is blatantly illegal, knowing that there’s not really any mechanism to hold him accountable. They are now openly and flagrantly violating judges’ orders, district judges’ orders. My guess is it’ll have to be escalated to the Supreme Court.

And again, as your previous guest mentioned, the fire hose element is because liberal good government groups and progressive groups only have so much resources, so everyone’s putting out fires. As you know as an editor at a progressive publication, that’s what these last three weeks have been, is just putting out a series of fires. That’s part of their strategy because they have far more resources. And of course, as you also mentioned as —

Maximillian Alvarez:  OK, so we lost Brother Adam for a quick second, but he’ll be back on. But yeah, I mean that is something — Oh, wait, do we have you back, Adam?

Adam Johnson:  Did I fall out?

Maximillian Alvarez:  You froze for about 30 seconds there, but go ahead and pick right back up.

Adam Johnson:  So sorry. I apologize. I said, while Democratic leadership in Congress has been largely a no-show, although that’s changed a little bit lately… Oh shoot.

Maximillian Alvarez:  OK.

Adam Johnson:  Hello?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah. So little. Hey, man, it’s a livestream baby. So technical issues —

Adam Johnson:  I’m not sure why my wifi says it’s operating at full capacity. I’m not sure what’s going on. I apologize.

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, you’re good, man.

Adam Johnson:  I was in the middle of my denouement, and now I’m interrupted. Now I feel —

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right. Give me the denouement, baby.

Adam Johnson:  Well, now there’s a lot of pressure to make it a good denouement. No, I was saying that governors had pushed back, but they are attempting to dismantle the liberal state that they know they couldn’t possibly dismantle through Congress or other legal means.

Because here’s the thing, and this is, I think, a dynamic people have to appreciate, which is that Musk can try to do a few dozen illegal things and then what’s the pushback? He gets some court order that says, no, you can’t do that, but he can’t lose anything. It’s not like he’s going to go to prison, and to say nothing to the fact that he’s obviously abusing stimulants and surrounded by a bunch of Nazi Zoomers who are egging him on. So he’s very much high on his own supply. But he can’t lose, he can only be curbed. And so from his perspective, he’s thinking, what are they going to do, take away my birthdays? He can illegally try to shut down whatever department he wants, Department of Education, Department of Labor, to get rid of the NLRA and the NLRB, whatever, name it, because what does he have to lose by doing that? Nothing.

The only limiting thing is two things: Number one, how much resources they have on their end, but two, it will ultimately be congressional Republicans, because it’s very clear, obviously, Trump can’t run again. Musk doesn’t give a shit if this harms the long-term Republican Party brand. The only real counterforce here, other than lawfare, which Democrats are doing and ought to do, which is suing them, as well as these progressive groups like Bold Progressives and others, is that Republicans do have to run in 2026. And if they’re running on putting grandma on cat food, that doesn’t sound as good as going after whatever woke chimpanzee, transgender studies or some other bullshit they make up.

So right now they’re doing this… This is the project, this is the Heritage Foundation’s wet dream, and this is what we’re seeing. We’re seeing these full-blown assaults on the liberal and administrative and regulatory state because it serves Silicon Valley, it serves non-Silicon Valley, the wealthy in general. Again, we’re getting $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. We’re doing the 2017 tax cuts on steroids. This is why most billionaire money went to Trump and Republicans, despite their faux-populist rhetoric and token attempts to make taxes tip-free for waiters or other such trivial nonsense.

And so they’re just going to go until somebody stops them, because why not? Again, what’s the downside? It’s Trump’s. It’s not like Musk is going to get arrested for violating the law.

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, no.

Adam Johnson:  And even if he did, Trump would just pardon him. And this is why — Sorry, real quick I want to say one thing. This is why the Jan. 6 pardons were so key, because it’s a signal to every right-wing vigilante and every hardcore right winger that they can pretty much do anything they want that’s illegal so long as they are advancing the MAGA cause, and they can expect to not be held accountable so long as it’s a federal and not a state crime. So as long as they go from Kansas to Nebraska and commit a crime pursuant to Trumpism, Trump will pardon them no matter what, even if they have a record of all kinds of horrific crimes.

And so that kind of vigilantism and that kind of lawlessness is completely taking hold. That is an escalation from previous… The policies themselves are boilerplate Republican policies, but the extralegal, extrajudicial tactics are an escalation, they’re new. And we’re seeing some of the ways in which Democratic leadership either can’t or won’t be prepared to really address it on those terms.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And it’s even been, like you said, from the first time Trump was elected eight years ago to now, there has been a notable and concerted evolution of the MAGA movement to basically state sanction vigilantism. And you can see the examples of that, not just in Donald Trump and J.D. Vance cozying up to known vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse or the guy who strangled the poor man in New York on the subway.

That celebration of typically white men vigilantes, but also baked into the MAGA-fied legislation that’s been creeping through state Houses all across the country where you see the weaponization of citizens’ impulse for vigilantism as a necessary part of executing the policy. That’s why you get abortion laws in Texas that are encouraging everyday citizens to sue anyone who helps with an abortion, even the Uber driver who drives you to the clinic.

These types of policy points are making the point that Adam made there where you have a party that is not just pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists for their crimes against the country and their violent crimes, but also sanctioning this type of vigilantist mode of politics in other policy areas as well.

I do want to come back to that in a few minutes, but I wanted to, before we get too far afield, come back to the big question that I wanted to ask you both because it’s a question that I feel is at the center of your respective areas of expertise. It’s in that Venn diagram overlap, and it’s something that I’ve been getting asked from our viewers a lot about. So I want to ask if we could break what’s going down now from this angle, because this is as much a war over what Musk and Trump are doing in practice as it is a war over how people perceive what they’re doing and how they want us to perceive it.

I have seen plenty of right-leaning people that I’ve interviewed from sacrifice zones and unions from around the US sharing Newsmax posts that are framing this all as a heroic, historic moment. And Musk is out there rooting out corruption, and I’ve seen others sharing Musk memes with his resting rich face and the texts saying, “‘They’ Lied and Stole from you for Years, and now ‘They’ — ” All caps — “want you to be ANGRY at D.O.G.E. from PROVING it. LET THAT SINK IN.” So this is the war that’s going on right now.

Paris, I want to start with you, and then, Adam, kick it to you. How would you describe the difference between what Musk and Trump say they’re doing and what they’re actually doing right now?

Paris Marx:  Well, it’s a gulf, right? But I feel like it depends on what you’re looking at. These are people who are talking about making government more efficient, making it work better, but actually they are embarking on a major austerity program in order to gut the US federal government and, in particular, the aspects and the departments and the agencies within the federal government that they have personal distaste for.

And not just them personally. Certainly, Elon Musk and his companies will have certain agencies that they want to go after and certain programs that they want to go after. But Adam was mentioning before, we can see the outline for this kind of program in the Heritage Foundation and these other right-wing groups that have been wanting to, basically, launch this campaign against the federal government for a very long time, to remake it.

By bringing in the tech industry and bringing in someone like Elon Musk, you get the ability to frame this as something that tech is doing to give it this framing that it is modernizing the government rather than taking it apart. And in particular, as they are starting to try to do mass layoffs, people often point to what Elon Musk did at Twitter as a comparison for what they’re trying to do with the federal government, where Elon Musk came in, laid off a ton of staff, most of the company, and then kept it running.

And they want people to believe that the government is a ton of fraud, a ton of waste, that you can just get rid of all these workers and then you’ll still be able to provide the services that the US government provides, run the government as it is, because there’s just all these useless bureaucrats who are around. Which is a right-wing narrative that we have been hearing for ages. This is not a new thing.

But what they’re also doing as they embark on this project is to say, yes, we’re going to gut all of these workers, but also now we’re going to roll out these incredible AI tools that are going to be able to do all the work of these various workers to provide these services. Because look, AI has become so much more powerful over the past couple of years. They’ve been spreading these really deceptive narratives about how AI is reaching this point where it’s going to be nearly as powerful as a human being, and it has this understanding that it didn’t have before, and it’s so much more capable.

And a lot of that is bullshit, but it really helps with this larger program to say, we are going to gut the government. We are going to bring forward this massive austerity program, but it’s okay because technology is now going to fill the gap because technology has gotten so much better. To present this as inherently a technological problem, not so much a political one, where they are using technology as a form of power against all of these workers and against, really, the American public as they embark on this massive transformation of the government.

And so far it has been focusing on specific agencies, but we’ve already seen the suggestion from people like Elon Musk that they’re going to have to go after Medicare and Social Security and these other programs that so many Americans rely on. It’s not just going to end at these things that they perceive as only being about the culture wars and things like that. It’s going to expand much greater as they continue down this road.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I have so many thoughts on that, but Adam, I want to toss it to you.

Adam Johnson:  So from the beginning of this stupid DOGE narrative, I’ve been pulling my hair out because the way it’s covered is the exact opposite of the way it exists in reality. I often compare it to the Biden ceasefire talks. It’s just a fictitious alternative reality that has no basis in fact. And the media’s running with it because if you’re powerful, editorially speaking, you’re assumed always to have good faith, even if there’s facts that completely contradict reality. So any skepticism is seen as being too ideological, too outside the lane of mainstream reporting.

So about two weeks ago, I wrote an article criticizing the media covering DOGE as a “cost cutting” or to find waste and abuse, these ostensibly postideological, tech-savvy, as Paris said, and we can get into that, the use of the ways that we’re doing a whole episode on the ways in which AI becomes this moral laundromat where you say, oh, we’re going to fire a bunch of people, which sounds evil, because don’t they have jobs? Oh, don’t worry, we’re going to replace them with AI. But it’s bullshit. Everybody knows it’s bullshit. It’s a way of firing people so they can have more control. These so-called bureaucrats, which is to say those who are part of the liberal and administrative state they loathe because they want to be able to fucking pollute rivers without anyone giving them any flack.

And the way the media covered this was, again, this is someone in Elon Musk who, if you follow his Twitter activity, which everybody in media does because mostly they don’t have a choice, he jams it in front of your fucking face. He posts right-wing white nationalist memes all day from 4chan. White genocide is a huge, “hashtag white genocide is a huge part” of his worldview. He’s obsessed with knockout game type lurid, VDARE, straight up white nationalist propaganda, has been doing this for years. Inauguration day, does a goddamn Sieg Heil three times, clear as day, non-negotiable, not even ambiguous, not well, maybe — No, no, clear as day does a Sieg, Heil — Oh no, it was just a troll. Oh, it was a Roman salute. Again, you can’t ironically murder someone. You can’t ironically do Nazi propaganda. You either do it or you don’t do it, OK?

So you would think this would be, OK, let’s interrogate what he means by waste and abuse. Is this how some bean counter at the OMB sees it? Is this someone, one of these admittedly right-wing think tanks like a center for tax fairness or one of these Peter Peterson Foundation? No, to him, waste is an ideological assertion. Fraud is an ideological assertion. 

Keep in mind, he’s been lying for weeks about fraud, citing public fucking databases that are already online as if it’s some great revelation that he’s found, oh, they did this, they spent this so-and-so USAID or State Department or whatever. And it’s like, yeah, it’s a public database and it’s not fraud, it’s just how government spending works. So he’s been overtly lying for weeks.

And yet, as I wrote on Feb. 3, this is how it was covered. The New York Times, they referred to DOGE as, “finding savings”, “budget cutters”. In a later article, they wrote “cost-cutting effort”. They called it “an efficiency panel”, “a cost-cutting project”. The New York Times wrote on Jan. 12, 2025, “DOGE is a cost-cutting effort to seek potential savings.” Washington Post did the same thing. “Government efficiency commission”, “non-governmental fiscal efficiency group”, “the efficiency group”, “proposed savings”. So here’s someone with overt neo-Nazi ideologic — OK, maybe that’s too hard for you. We’ll say far-right tech billionaire, whatever, someone who’s overtly ideological, and he’s consistently treated like someone who’s genuinely concerned with finding efficiencies.

Now, finally, after weeks of this shit, again, spreading outright lies about USAID — As much as I’m not particularly a fan of them, but just lying about them outright, completely making shit up out of context, accusing congresspeople of getting money from these organizations for some outright lurid conspiracy theories that, if he wasn’t the richest man in the world, we would say, this guy’s just an anonymous crank on Twitter, just completely made up horseshit.

They’re finally — They being the media — They’re starting to finally publish articles that commit the ultimate sin of reportage, which is the I word: Ideology, mentioning ideology. That this is not some postideological, postpartisan attempt to find deficiencies, but is, in fact, a right-wing attack on the liberal and administrative state for programs and departments that have been duly funded by the federal government. And a lot of these programs, of course, were begun under or continued explicitly by the Trump administration, but we can talk about the first one, we can talk about that later.

So here, finally we have The Washington Post — This is Aaron Blake — “Trump and Musk can’t seem to locate much evidence of fraud”. So now we’re finally pointing out that there’s no actual fraud, that them just calling everything fraud is like the Michael Scott “I declare bankruptcy.” You can’t just say it’s fraud. That’s a legal claim.

And so for weeks they’ve been saying there’s this fraud, and Musk uses this word all the time, fraud, fraud — OK, well, if there’s all this widespread fraud, Musk, then why has the Trump DOJ not arrested anyone? Because there’s no fraud. There’s just spending they don’t like, which they’ve now rebranded fraud. And then Reuters says “Musk’s DOGE cuts based more on political ideology than real cost savings so far”. So finally, after weeks of taking this at face value and in good faith — Which, again, is the holiest of holies, especially if you’re rich and powerful — Not if you’re, by the way, an activist, then you’re, as I note in my piece your ideology is…

I compared it to an article written about Democrats as part of a police reform panel, they referred to them four times as progressive, five different times as activists. So their ideology is put on the forefront. But if you’re a megalomaniac billionaire who shares white genocide all day that you took off white supremacist websites, ideology is just not mentioned. It’s not mentioned why you’re going after programs. They can say DEI — As long as you say DEI, not the N word, you can get away with anything, even though clearly this is racially motivated. Clearly it’s about chaining women to the stove. Clearly it’s about hating people with disabilities. Clearly it’s about hating gay and trans people. He fucking loathes trans people, posts antitrans shit all day.

So just now, I’m not in the business of complimenting the media, and it’s still obviously not nearly sufficient, but we’re just now seeing a pivot from people being like, oh, well maybe this isn’t about efficiency. Well, OK, it would’ve been nice had you done that before he destroyed several different federal programs. But we’re now seeing people realizing that indulging this premise of efficiency, which morons like Ro Khanna consistently do, boggles my mind. I mean, I know why. He’s got terminal lawyer brain and he fundraises with a lot of these Silicon Valley billionaires, so he has to play stupid –

That we’re like, OK, clearly this is a right-wing attack on the liberal and administrative state. It is entirely ideological to the extent to which you can even do efficiency nonideologically. Even that premise is suspect. But for someone who does a Sieg Heil on national TV, again, had you told me a month ago, well, Musk is going to do a very clear Sieg Heil on national TV and nothing’s basically going to change, and the ADL is a fucking shakedown operation, who he paid off a few years ago, is going to come to his defense, I’d say, now, clearly there has to be some limit to this. He can’t get away with anything. No, he’s got half a trillion dollars, he can pretty much get away with anything.

So we’re just now seeing, finally, people being like, oh, maybe his ideology is actually what’s motivating this rather than this… Again, I could go on and on. I have all these articles just in The New York Times cost-cutting panel, cost efficiency panel, reducing waste, fraud, abuse. It’s like this guy is sharing the most manic fucking right-wing chud conspiracy theories, completely misrepresenting how you read government spending documents and misrepresenting how you read RFPs, accusing Reuters of — By the way, he did that after Reuters wrote that article. I think that’s why they did it — Because an unrelated company owned by the same corporation did a defense contractor RFP on, I think, data protection or something. Not related at all to anything sinister. Completely takes it out of context, just consistently fucking lies all the time. Just straight up Alex Jones shit.

But because, again, because he’s so rich, he’s so powerful, people kept deferring to him as some kind of neutral expert, and it was literally driving me fucking crazy because sitting there watching this going, are we going to mention that he’s a white nationalist? Isn’t this kind of relevant since he’s going after specifically groups related to racial justice, civil rights, and, of course, anyone who, as you noted, anyone who undermines his bottom line ,just as a person who’s extremely rich?

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, I got three quick things I want to say, then, Paris, I want to come back to you real quick. But the first is I would read the crap out of an Adam Johnson tongue-in-cheek weekly Low Bar Award where Adam Johnson rewards a publication for doing its basic-ass job of reporting the facts about something [laughs]. I would read that.

Second is just a note on the fraud thing and speaking, again, if we’re talking here as media critic, tech critic. In a former life, I was a trained historian, and so, for obvious reasons right now, I’ve been going back to my bookshelf and pulling all of the big history books that I have on the McCarthy period and the Red Scare, and I can’t help but hear what I feel are the very obvious and hackneyed echoes of the McCarthy period, when Sen. McCarthy’s there saying, I hold here in my hand a piece of paper with the names of communists in the government. And then you got this dickhead Musk out there saying like, oh my God, you won’t believe all the fraud I’m finding. I’ve got it all written here.

Adam Johnson:  He keeps doing these lurid, vague, conspiratorial appeals to some secret list he has, and it’s like, where? What are you talking about? And the evidence they share is just shit that was published already. It’s been online, been online because of good government sunshine law liberals, by the way. He’s just doing Alex Jones shit. He’s doing Alex Jones shit, but he’s so rich you can do it and no one cares.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, and Paris, I have a question for you about that because, like I said earlier, this is a real struggle here over what the great Cory Doctorow would call seizing and controlling the means of communication. We’re not just talking about, like Adam said, not just rich billionaires. We’re talking about people who control the infrastructure and platforms upon which we communicate and commerce every single day.

And so, as much as this is the 21st century new digital politics that we’re all swimming in now, who controls the means of communication and who controls the means of public perception is really critical. And I bring this up because I can’t help but notice that, as we’re talking about here the narrative that Musk, Trump, Vance and their donors from Silicon Valley are trying to spin about this, I think your average person with a basic common sense can see the bullshit — But so much of them are not seeing it because they’re getting news on platforms that aren’t showing it. Or the algorithms are keeping them locked into echo chambers that are going to keep the points that we’re talking about here out of sight, out of mind.

I wanted to ask if you could talk about that side of things, as ridiculous as the top-down narrative about DOGE, about the government takeover that’s happening right now, what should people be considering about how these big tech overlords and their accomplices in the government are trying to also adjust our variability to see the truth for what it is here?

Paris Marx:  Yeah, it’s a frustrating one, and I feel like it’s not a uniquely social media discussion. If we look at news, we can see how, whether it’s cable news or radio, has been taken over by the right for years, and then they unleash similar strategies to try to shift how social media works, these narratives that cable news was too liberal and conservative voices were not present there or not as well represented. Meanwhile, you had Fox News pushing out these right-wing narratives. And good —

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, keep going. Sorry. Sorry. Keep going.

Paris Marx:  Yeah, sorry. Meanwhile, you had Fox News pushing out these right-wing narratives and all the liberal media adopting these framings and starting to talk about the issues that were being pushed by the right. What you had, very clearly, the right saw the opportunity to do this on Facebook and other platforms, where they kept saying that conservative voices were being silenced on Facebook or on Twitter, or because people were being moderated when they were posting hate speech, and things like that. And it was no real surprise that people on the right were being moderated much more for those things because they were much more likely to be saying them.

But even still, think years ago, you had Mark Zuckerberg going on this tour of America to talk to conservatives and all this kind of stuff to show that he was not going to give into censorship, and the types of things that he’s talking about in a much more animated way today. I feel like we have this narrative that there has been this shift in the social media landscape in the past little while with Mark Zuckerberg getting rid of the fact checkers and getting rid of everything that he considers woke at Meta, which I think was more of just an opportunity for him to get rid of a bunch of things that he didn’t want to be doing and to lay off more workers, which they’ve already been doing for a while now.

But we’ve seen social media companies already abandoning those sorts of things for a while before the election, up to a year or more ago. And there was a brief moment where they were doing some additional moderation during the pandemic in that period.

But for a very long time, these companies have been quite committed to these right-wing notions of free speech. Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan, who is now in an even more powerful position at the company, a Republican operative, they stopped Alex Jones’s initial banning on the platform for ages, kept pushing it off. They didn’t want to see Donald Trump be banned, all these sorts of things.

Social media is positioned as this place where we can all post what we want to post, and anyone can publish what they want on there. But the reality is that these are environments that are shaped in order to ensure that right-wing narratives are the ones that are being encountered most often by people, that the algorithmic recommendations are ensuring that you’re in that kind of an ecosystem unless you have explicitly tried to opt out of it. But even then, you’re still going to see a lot of this stuff.

And they are platforms that are premised on engagement in order to get ad profits. And what you do in order to make your ad profits is to piss people off a bit and serve them more extreme content so that they begin interacting with the world in that way. I think we saw that very clearly during the pandemic, when you saw people’s brains basically get fried. And it’s not solely because of social media that happened. There are many different reasons that these things have occurred.

But I think even just recently, if you think about before the holidays, people were losing their minds over all these drones that were like in the sky in the United States. This was a huge thing, and it was a big conspiracy theory, and even the mainstream media were covering it as though it was a real thing that people needed to be concerned about and not some bullshit that they needed to debunk. These are not just right-wing platforms, but platforms that spread a whole lot of bullshit that people end up believing because of the way that the information is presented and the ways that average people don’t have the media literacy that those of us who are constantly engaging in these things might. And even then, I would say that we occasionally fall for some bullshit as well. We occasionally see things that we might want to believe and then need to check into it and say, ah, damn, that was bullshit as well.

But anyway, that’s just a long way of saying that I think that these platforms, I called Facebook a social cancer recently, and that’s not just because of the recent changes that Mark Zuckerberg has made, but I think that these platforms have been very socially detrimental to the discourses that we have. And that’s not to say that traditional media is the most amazing thing in the world. Adam has a whole show where he discusses why that is not the case. But I think that we’re living in this media environment that is very polluted, that has a lot of problems with it, and the independent one that has been set up as the solution to it is often very much funded by these right-wing billionaires as well. And if you want to maximally succeed in the new media environment that’s being set up, you’re encouraged to be a right-wing piece of shit instead of to really hold power to account.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Adam, I know you got thoughts on that. Hit me.

Adam Johnson:  So here’s a fundamental problem, which is that the right wing embraces populism in the most superficial and aesthetic sense. They’re good at $50 million of condoms in Gaza, all these little thought memes, they’re extremely good at that, disseminating that to everybody. This idea that, again, Musk speaks in these demagogic or pseudo populous terms about he’s taking on the bureaucrats and the establishment — Again, he’s fucking worth $450 billion, but he’s taking on the man. Trump does this, obviously, very well.

And establishment Democrats and liberals run and are allergic to any form of populism. So naturally they’re going to fail in a media ecosystem where that kind of thing is currency, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. It is a party run by PR hacks and lawyers and eggheads, and they don’t speak in those terms, they don’t speak in that language, they don’t know how to fight back. And when someone within that milieu who’s better at speaking in those terms, whether it be Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, tries to defend the liberal administrative state, it can work, but it’s so rare.

And then meanwhile, you have people like Chris Murphy and talking about how, oh, actually Biden’s going to deport more people, and USAID is how we destroy China. And it’s like, well, that’s not a very populist framing, that’s just ratcheting up the racist machine.

And so there’s an asymmetry of what kind of rhetoric you employ. And again, Democrats, I think by design, just don’t have those kinds of [inaudible] talking points, the $50 million in condoms to dollars or whatever. They are talking about gutting $880 billion from Medicare and Medicaid. They’re talking about raising the retirement age. We’re talking about doing a lot of extremist right-wing shit.

And for a variety of reasons, liberals and Democrats have been unable to really message around that. They are a little bit better over the last week or so. But there hasn’t been a way of framing this as an elite attack on the liberal administrative state because liberals, for 30 years, have run away from the idea of government as something that’s good, something that actually protects you, that keeps your water clean, that makes sure that these fucking speed-addled billionaires don’t wreck every part of your life.

And I think what you see in the messaging asymmetry, the media ecosystem asymmetry, people did all this lamenting about why is there no liberal Joe Rogan? Why is there no Democratic media ecosystem? And it’s like, because the media ecosystem on the right embraces its extremists because they know, ultimately, it doesn’t really undermine their bottom line, whereas liberals’ fundamental project is disciplining, managing, and marginalizing the left, and partisan liberal content is just inherently going to be fucking boring. How many times can you spin for various unpopular policies rather than having a genuine space where you attack them?

And I think that plays into a similar dynamic here. So when we talk about why Musk has been good at messaging this, again, he goes on Joe Rogan, Rogan’s been doing a fucking six-month-long Musk puff fest about how great he is. This is someone who does have a huge working-class listenership. And they’re reframing themselves again, as Trump successfully did. And the cognitive dissonance of all these people being multi-billionaires is just something you put aside in your fucking brain somewhere. These are the rogue billionaires who are actually out to help you.

It’s what I call the, I dunno if you saw that Jason Statham film [The] Beekeeper. It’s this distorted vision of who’s fucking you over. It’s liberal bureaucrats and other billionaires, but not the good billionaires. And there’s also some cops, but some cops are good, and it’s really actually the deep state, but it’s USAID that’s really running the show behind the scenes, not the DOD or the CIA.

It’s obviously this warped vision because people, again, as you note, Max, in your intro and elsewhere, people have a vague sense that there is a system fucking them, and they need it to have a name and a face. And liberals don’t do that. They do this facile Republican billionaires — Oh, but they can’t reject billionaires because when the guy who just won the DNC said, we’re going to find the good billionaires, so we are going to take $50 million from Bill Gates, we’re going to take $50 million from Michael Bloomberg. So we can’t really have populist politics, so we have to turn it into this partisan schlock.

And I keep going back to Norman Solomon’s definition of neoliberalism, which is a worldview of victims but no victimizers. There’s never a fucking bad guy. And the extent to which there ever is a bad guy, it’s just this, again, it’s this particular billionaire here. It’s not a form of class politics. So it’s all very frustrated and limp and half-assed and doesn’t really resonate like the faux populism of the right.

To say nothing of the fact that they just have more control over social media, more control over, obviously, billionaires run the media, so there’s going to be a natural asymmetry that you can’t really do much about just by virtue of who funds things.

But you’re seeing that play out, and they are winning the messaging war to a great degree. Liberals have a liberal sort of elite media, your centrist media, New York Times, Democratic leadership in Congress. What’s the first thing they did after Trump won? You had Joe Scarborough go on TV and say, we’re going to work with Trump. We’re going to do bipartisanship. You had Hakeem Jeffries say, we’re going to work with Trump, we’re going to do bipartisanship, the minority leader. And there wasn’t a sense of, oh, we’re going to resist this time.

New York Times did a profile about how big liberal donors, Reid Hoffman, all these guys, Michael Bloomberg, are pulling back. They’re not really donating to the so-called resistance because, unlike last time, it can’t be filtered into this neoconservative project like Trump is.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I’ll say though, maybe one small bit of grace that we’ve gotten compared to the last time Trump was elected is we don’t have to suffer through year after year of mainstream media pundits saying today is the day Donald Trump became [crosstalk] [laughs] —

Adam Johnson:  Oh, well, yeah, that’s where a lot of the money went. They went through the conspiratorial Milleritism — Or as I ironically call it, Muelleritism. He’s going to come and he’s going to rescue you, and we’re all going to be saved at the 11th hour, and here’s an AI picture of Trump in prison clothes, and we’re going to get him.

In a way, that can create space for a genuine resistance where you do try to reorient a party that does address people’s root issues and economic issues and these genuine issues rather than the Liz Cheney brand. But I think that the point is that we’re going to work with Trumpism. Because whenever they say bipartisanship, nine times out of 10, or 99 times out of 100, they’re not talking about saving the spotted owl or preserving a natural — They’re talking about punishing Gaza protesters, increasing militarism against China. They’re talking about antiwoke stuff. That really was a bipartisan thing. Much of what Trump is executing is just an extreme version of what The Atlantic magazine and New York Times opinion pages have been advocating since, frankly, #MeToo, to some extent, George Floyd, which is like, oh, the wokes got too cute. They got overaggressive. We need to put them back in their place. And they view Trump as someone that could instrumentalize to do that.

So then Musk comes in and does this. And again, a lot of these austerity things Musk is doing is just kind of Bull Simpson on steroids. These are things that a lot of rich Democrats and rich Democrat donors wanted anyway, they just didn’t want it to go this far. And so to the extent to which Democratic elites and the media and Democratic leadership in Congress, again — Less so governors — Are responding now and actually are defending the liberal state, not just spooky stuff at USAID, but the very idea of a liberal state, I think it is coming from bottom-up pressure. I think it’s coming from these, not partisan hack groups, from genuine protests. I think you do see a liberal resistance, in a true sense, liberals.

There was a point where hardcore Democrat pundits on social media, total hacks, people that defended the genocide for 15 months would come on and be like, so are they going to do anything about this? And it’s like, yeah. And so they began to alienate even some of the more hardcore MSNBC set, and I think that’s why you’re seeing the shift now a little bit more.

Not to, God forbid I’m positive, but I do think, again, the lawfare stuff has always been there. A lot of the governors have been there. I hate Gavin Newsom, but he’s been suing, defending trans rights, the attorney general of California, Pritzker. These guys have been suing. It’s not like people are doing nothing.

But actual Democratic leadership has had no consistent message. They have no little $50 million in condoms to Gaza meme stuff. They have nothing to really counter the narrative that Musk is somehow taking on the deep state or elites of nebulous origin, even though he himself has $20 billion in government contracts. So he’s not the elite. It’s unclear.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I want to hone in on that point, actually. I wanted to underline this in red pen, and I know folks in the live chat are asking about it, and it’s on all of our minds, but definitely worth noting here. In rapid pace, I’m going to read some quotes from other outlets that make this point. The Lever reported this week, “Elon Musk’s [Department of] Government Efficiency was reportedly canceling Department of Education contracts in the name of frugality.” As that was happening, “Musk’s rocket company was [this week] cementing a NASA contract adding millions of dollars to its already massive deal with the space agency. […] The new ‘supplemental’ contract dated Feb. 10 adds $7.5 million to SpaceX’s NASA work, according to the Federal Procurement Data System records. The overall transaction obligated $38 million to Musk’s company, as part of its overall deal with NASA.”

This is to say nothing of Musk’s other companies like SpaceX, which, Reuters reports, “SpaceX provides launch services to the Department of Defense, including the launch of classified satellites and other payloads. SpaceX’s CEO Gwynne Shotwell has said the company has about $22 billion in government contracts.” But it’s also important to note that “The total value of Musk’s companies’ contracts with the DoD are estimated to be in the billions [of dollars],” but we don’t know because a lot of them are classified. But you could go through, again, the obvious, what should be the obvious conflicts of interest here, is Musk is going in there like a bull in a China shop, saying he’s rooting out corruption and waste while he’s still securing contracts for himself and his companies.

And the other story there that folks were talking about this morning was, as The New York Times and first the news site Drop Site reported, that apparently the State Department had plans to buy $400 million worth of armored Tesla Cybertrucks, which caused a massive uproar. As of right now on Thursday, Musk has denied those reports and is calling Drop Site fake news, doing the standard like, oh, I’ve never heard of this, that never happened thing, even though it was written on the State Department’s procurement forecast for the 2025 fiscal year, including $400 million of “armored Tesla cars”.

So there’s a whole lot more we could say about that. But Paris, I wanted to come to you because there was another quote that I came across that I think people should really recall right now, and this was a quote from Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, who said that DOGE is a “revolution”, one that will be “very good for Palantir in the long run”. And this was something that Alex Karp said on Palantir’s fourth quarter earnings call.

And so this brings us back to the question of, again, the Silicon Valley oligarchic network that birthed J.D. Vance’s political career, that threw ungodly sums of money behind the Trump and Vance ticket, that are embodied in the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, that were sitting there in the rotunda on Trump’s inauguration day. You had Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Musk all there.

I wanted to bring this back to you, Paris, because, could we describe this as a capitalist coup by the big tech oligarchy? Are they trying to essentially force society and the market to become more dependent on their version of AI? Are they trying to force us to become dependent on crypto even though no one fucking wants to? How do people navigate that question? Is it that concerted? Are they using not just Musk, but Trump and the whole administration, to effectively take over our system of government so that they rewire our whole society to fit their needs?

Paris Marx:  Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t think that’s a big surprise. I think that that has been a project that they have been engaged in for quite some time now. It’s just they have an enormous amount of power and wealth that they can use to further force this onto everybody. And it’s not that this kind of tech oligarchy is unique in that way. I think that if we look at the United States, we can see that powerful capitalist interests have always been very influential in shaping government policy and what the government has been doing, and also what the wider society looks like in order to benefit themselves and their industries.

My book that I wrote was about the transportation industry, certainly looking at what Silicon Valley has been doing recently, but also going back to the early days of automobility and where you see these auto companies and these various interests working together to ensure that communities in the United States become dependent on automobiles because it’s great for the oil business and it’s great for the auto business and so many of these other industries that are associated with it. As we develop this mode of suburban living that is very consumer oriented, there was a concerted effort to create a particular kind of society that was going to be very beneficial to a lot of capitalist interests.

And right now what we see is these capitalists in Silicon Valley making sure that they are trying to remake the United States in their interests, in the way that they want to see it, and it looks like it’s going to be a total mess because they don’t have a very good understanding of how society actually works. They think that because they can code, or even just understand code to a certain degree, that they understand everything, and that is not the case. They’re very narcissistic people.

But you mentioned Palantir and Alex Karp. I was listening to an interview with an executive at Palantir just the other day where they’re talking about how they think it’s very essential for the Department of Defense to increase competition in the development of arms and weapons, because not just does that take the defense primes, the major companies that currently provide weapons to the US government and the US military, down from their current pedestal, but also opens the way for Palantir, Anduril, for these other more tech-framed startup companies to get in on some of those Pentagon dollars.

That is one of the things that they are very focused on in that sector of the tech economy. And a lot of these major tech companies are also reorienting to sell more AI to also develop more defense products so that they can tap into all of this money that the United States spends on defense.

And of course, they will promote that as a savings because one of the things that they always point to is SpaceX, to say, look, SpaceX reduced the cost of launching, and now the United States has this much easier ability to get things into space. And when you note that the United States is becoming dependent on SpaceX in a way that actually has people really concerned, that’s not a worry to them because they just say, oh, well, other companies could compete on cost, but they’re not. So the problem isn’t with SpaceX, it’s with everyone else.

And that is something that we’re also seeing, as you mentioned NASA, is NASA is going to be a focus of Elon Musk and the DOGE agency. There were reports today that DOGE people are now going to NASA to look through the books, and the acting NASA administrator is welcoming them to do that. And it seems quite clear that they are going to seek to remake NASA around Elon Musk’s priorities and SpaceX’s priorities in particular, potentially even the cancellation of the space launch system, which Boeing, and I can’t remember the other company that’s working on that, but essentially to cancel that and to make sure that SpaceX is going to get more business out of it.

So everywhere you look, they are trying to remake things in order for them to benefit from it. David Sachs, who is the AI and crypto czar, says that stable coin legislation is their first big priority. So to try to legitimize the crypto industry and to make sure that it’s easier to roll out crypto and these products throughout the US economy and financial system, despite the fact that we saw how scam laden this whole industry is and how these venture capitalists benefited from it.

We have reporting that Marc Andreessen, despite the fact that he’s not very public facing, he does a lot of interviews and stuff, but he’s not out talking a lot about what he’s doing with the administration, but reportedly he also has a lot of influence in the policies that are being pushed forward.

So a lot of these tech billionaires are trying to make sure that the changes that the Trump administration is going to bring forward are going to be in their interests, and that the things that are going to make them money and increase their power are things that are going to be pushed forward in the next little while.

That is not a big surprise, but we need to be aware of those things if we’re going to be able to push back on them properly and try to ensure that the tech industry isn’t able to remake American society in the way that it would want to see it, regardless of what that means for everybody else. Because I can guarantee you that, just as people have been increasingly waking up to the harms that have come of this industry and these tech companies over the past few decades, despite the fact that they were long positioned as increasing democracy and freedom and convenience and all this stuff, that actually there are a whole load of issues that have come of the transformation of the economy with these digital services because these people don’t really care about average people or the consequences of what they do. They’re capitalists. They’re just trying to make their money and increase their power.

Adam Johnson:  That’s what makes this whole deep state framing so goofy. These are all defense contractors. Palantir was co-founded by the CIA through its In-Q-Tel fund in 2003. Peter Thiel was on their original board of directors the year before he put the first big money into Facebook. This is someone who’s deeply into the so-called deep state Pentagon contract, CIA. It’s all fucking a show. It’s all an act. This is this victimization link of the deep state’s after them, and it’s like, you are the fucking deep state. And this is what they want. They want control over the government.

And a lot of progressives have said, why has DOGE not gone after the Defense Department? And I think that’s a little bit of a trap because I think they will go after the Defense Department in a very particular way, in the same way Josh Hawley holds up DOD bills because he wants to rename bases after Confederate generals. I think they’ll go after it for anti-“DEI” stuff to go after trans people, Black people, they’ll do that. They’ll call it efficiency, but they’ll do the racist disciplining aspect. But they’ll also just get rid of defense contractors that aren’t them.

Again, they’ll put it under the auspices of modernization, AI, all this slick dogshit to make it seem like it’s, oh, they’re just streamlining things. But it’s because they want to pay back a lot of their buddies in Silicon Valley. And some of these companies they perceive as dinosaurs, whether it’s Boeing or Lockheed Martin or whatever, will probably lose out on contracts to some of their Silicon Valley. They have a ton of money in defense contractors.

So I think they’ll do that. And maybe that’ll shave off, at the end of the day, a couple billion. But ultimately it’s just a power grab. It’s got nothing to do with genuinely taking on the power of the deep state or power of the CIA or power of the Pentagon. These guys are not interested in that. They are interested in the raw exercise of American imperial power, just like every other capitalist. They want to do it their way. If anything, it’s maybe a civil war within the defense contracting world, but it’s not going to meaningfully push back on the Pentagon.

So when people like Ro Khanna, and to some extent even Bernie Sanders, they get all cute saying, why don’t you defend, go after the Defense Department? I’m like, man, be careful what you wish for, because what they’re going to do is they’re going to purge it of fucking Black people and give their contracts to their buddies. So again, because all this is just in bad faith, it’s got nothing to do with efficiency, obviously. Clearly, in case it wasn’t obvious [laughs].

Paris Marx:  No, I think the thing to always remember is you think about the history of Silicon Valley, and when we think of Silicon Valley today, we think of the internet companies and digital technology and all this stuff, but Lockheed Martin and missile manufacturers and all that stuff have always been there. They were where the first microprocessors went, to go into these missiles. This relationship has always been there, and we’re seeing it very much come to the fore at the moment.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Guys, this has been a phenomenal conversation, and I could genuinely talk to you for two more hours, but I know I’ve got to wrap up and let you go. And so by way of a final, not a question to answer right here, but just maybe looking ahead to the next stream when we can get you guys back on to talk about this, let’s not forget that the world does not stop and end with the United States.

What happens here is also going to depend on what technology from China and other parts of the world do. And we’ve been seeing that there are plenty of companies, governments, people around the world who are salivating at the chance to make American capitalists and America itself pay the price for all of our bullshit in past years, decades, and centuries.

So I wanted to ask if you had any leading thoughts for things that people should keep an eye on when they’re also trying to get a handle on this subject? What outside of the US, particularly when it comes to China, should we also be factoring in here?

So let’s make that a final note. And also tell folks where they can find you and take advantage of your brilliant work after we close out this stream.

So yeah, Paris, let’s go back to you, and then Adam, we’ll close out with you.

Paris Marx:  Sounds good. Yeah, absolutely. China is the big competitor at the moment when it comes to technology because it has been able to actually develop a proper industry because it’s protected a lot of its companies, so it was able to do that. We recently saw the AI market get this big scare when a Chinese company called DeepSeek developed a more efficient generative AI model that had all these very energy intensive American companies running and getting nervous. I don’t think it’s ultimately going to change a whole lot.

But I would also say in this moment where you have Trump flexing the power of the American government and making it so that the exercise of American power is very short term and very transactional, that you have a lot of countries that were previously aligned with the United States that are still aligned with the United States getting more and more pissed off, I would say, with the US and the American government. I’m in Canada, so obviously I’m thinking about that a lot these days as we hear about major tariffs being put on Canada and Mexico and talk of Canada being a 51st state.

But you also hear what Donald Trump has been saying about Panama, about South Africa, about different parts of Europe, Greenland, Denmark, not to mention his new plan to take over Gaza, apparently, and turn it into a wonderful resort or something.

As the United States says more of these things and turns off countries that have been its allies, I think that there’s also an opening there, as we see the relationship between the Trump administration and Silicon Valley and these tech billionaires, for other countries to come together and to say, not just fuck the United States, but fuck Silicon Valley as well. And we can develop our own technologies to compete against this and increasingly try to reduce our dependence on American digital technology and these tech companies that we were told we had to be dependent on because of this moment and how the internet was supposed to work in this new neoliberal era that increased American power.

So I guess maybe it’s more of a hope. We see the Europeans getting increasingly frustrated. I know Canada is very frustrated, and I’m sure a number of other countries are as well. And I hope that that becomes actually some sort of a broader movement, for these countries to try something different rather than just keep being dependent on the United States. But we’ll see where that ultimately goes. I think China right now is obviously the one to watch in this area, but I hope it will expand beyond that as people get fed up with the US.

And on that, of course, Tech Won’t Save Us podcast is where I am most of the time. Usually I tweet or post on Bluesky these days. And I also have a newsletter called Disconnect.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Which everyone should subscribe to. And I can’t stress enough, go listen to Tech Won’t Save Us. You’ll learn a lot that you’re going to need right now to understand what the hell is happening.

Adam, let’s close out with you. Any final thoughts on that? And where can folks find you?

Adam Johnson:  This is, again, this is an example. What is fascism? It’s imperialism turned inwards. I think they are so high on their own ideological supply. They’re getting so greedy, they don’t understand that the liberal state, such as it is, all these DEI programs — The actual ones, not the racist canard — This is all to preserve capitalism. It’s an HR device. They’re trying to help you.

But Musk and these right-wing oligarchs, they’re so in their own world, they truly have developed what Cass Sunstein refers to pejoratively as a crippling epistemology. They’re so warped in their mind. It’s like going after USAID. It’s a soft power. It’s a regime change [laughs] like [inaudible]. Yeah, it does important work, but that’s not really why it’s there.

And I think that this level of myopia, I think we’re seeing this play out, and they’re so used to just consuming and consuming and consuming that they will let the world burn if it can get them an extra 5%. The smart billionaires, the ones who don’t really see much difference between $100 billion and $150 billion, who understand that, who donate to Democrats, who understand that they’re a fundamentally conservative force, are just losing the day. And they’re not really, they don’t have that much skin in the game, and they just will keep consuming and consuming until there’s nothing left to consume.

Even if, again, they blow up the very — It’s like when they talk about AI. The way they talk, you would think they don’t need consumers or people. It’s humanity without humans. It’s a very dark vision of the world. And Musk really does exemplify this. He is the epitome of this. He views everyone as an NPC. He’s the main actor. People either work for him or they’re in his way.

And this is a general pathology in Silicon Valley. It, again, it’s not everybody, but it’s a lot of ’em. This kind of Randian dark vision of the world of dog eat dog. And they don’t understand that savvy capitalists know how to adapt and throw the little piggy some slop, and they don’t even want to do that. So I think they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction in certain ways. And the question is, what force will emerge to counterbalance that dark vision? And right now, I don’t see that happening.

Maximillian Alvarez:  But I think the question itself is one we all need to sit with because we need to be the authors of that counter story. What is it? How are we telling it? How are we fighting to make it a reality? That is our task, but we know the story that these oligarchs want to tell and the role that they want us, as minor characters and cannon fodder, to play in their story.

And so we want to end on that note, as a call to action to all of us. What is the story that we are telling to counteract this technofascist takeover that ends with the potential destruction of civilization as such, the planet that we live on, if not checked. What is the check? What are we prepared to do? What are we going to do to fight for a better future that’s still worth living in for ourselves and our children? We need to answer that question in a hurry.

And I really cannot thank enough all of our incredible guests today on the stream: the great Aaron Stephens, Paris Marx, and Adam Johnson, who have contributed to making this a phenomenal conversation. I hope that you all learned as much from it as I did.

Please give us your feedback in the live chat. Reach out to us over email. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Become a donor and a community member today, because your support directly translates to us getting to do more shows like this, doing more weekly reporting on workers in the labor movement, on the people victimized by the prison-industrial complex, people victimized by the police, and this gross system of inequality and endless war. We are on the front lines holding a microphone to the folks who are fighting the fight there in the middle of the struggle.

And so we can’t do that work without you and your support. So please let us know how we’re doing. Please let us know what you’d like us to address on future livestreams, and other guests that you want us to have on.

But we do these streams for you. We do them to hopefully empower you and others to act in this moment, because if we don’t act and we let this all happen, we are headed towards a very, very dark place. We’re in a dark place right now, but things can still always get darker. So please fight however you can for the light, and hold it up, and we’ll be right there with you.

For The Real News Network, this is Maximilian Alvarez thanking you for the whole team here, everyone behind the scenes who is making this stream happen. We are with you, and we thank you for watching, and we thank you for caring. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.

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This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

“Lawmakers cannot be surprised at the wanton disregard Elon Musk now shows for the law when he has spent decades ignoring it. Billionaires like Musk and Donald Trump have been enabled at every turn by a judiciary in the pocket of big business, legislators beholden to corporate interests, and law enforcement officials too cowardly to prosecute powerful people for their misconduct.”

Hauser continued: “What Musk is doing now is horrifying to anyone invested in stable governance, effective regulation and the well being of American democracy. But we cannot ignore the fact that this behavior is not new. Musk, like countless other oligarchs, has been enabled at every turn by weak enforcement of federal laws and regulations. On the rare occasion that he or his companies do face penalties for flouting the rules, it is almost always a slap on the wrist – teaching him that he is above the dominion of our nation’s laws.”

“Lawmakers and law enforcement officials must learn that weak enforcement of corporate crime begets further erosion of the rule of law. We at The Revolving Door Project have long called upon attorneys general and regulators to properly enforce the law. We now do so again, with this existential crisis standing as an example of what will happen when billionaires are empowered to disregard the law. We hope this tracker will help reporters, legislators and the public understand how weak enforcement of rules led to Musk’s sense of total impunity, and his hatred of the administrative state.” concluded Hauser.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The lawsuit expands the initial challenge to the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE)’s attempt to raid the DOL for key information on America’s workers in order to hobble the agency tasked with protecting their rights, health and safety on the job, as Elon Musk expands his slash-and-burn approach to Americans’ private data and their most essential government services.

As the complaint lays out: “DOGE seeks to gain access to sensitive agency systems of data before courts can stop them, dismantle agencies before Congress can assert its Constitutional prerogatives in the federal budget, and intimidate and threaten employees who stand in their way, without regard for the consequences. The results have already been catastrophic. DOGE has seized control of some of the most carefully protected information systems housed at the Treasury Department, taken hold of all sensitive personnel information at the Office of Personnel Management, and dismantled an entire agency within a week.”

“Elon Musk and DOGE continue to jeopardize Americans’ most sensitive, personal data, and threaten our health, safety, rights, paychecks, and the essential services we depend on,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “Unions and allies will vigorously fight DOGE’s attempt to put working people at risk through reckless actions that endanger workers and our families. They must be stopped—and today we’re getting back in court to do just that.”

“What Elon Musk is doing is not an audit—it’s an illegal violation of American citizens’ most sensitive personal information by an unelected billionaire who seems to believe he has been delegated the powers of the elected president,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley. “Unions and our allies will continue to stand up against Elon Musk and anyone else who thinks they can buy the government of the United States.”

“Together with our union partners and allies, we filed a lawsuit to protect working people from billionaires stealing their data. Elon Musk thinks his wealth and political contributions give him the right to disregard the law and masquerade as an elected official—but he is not,” said AFSCME President Lee Saunders. “Working people deserve a government that will protect their privacy and hold corporations that break the law accountable. We call on the courts to address this unlawful corruption and ensure that our government remains for the people."

“Elon Musk, under the guise of making bureaucracy more ‘efficient,’ is effectively eviscerating Americans’ privacy and fundamental freedoms,” said American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten. “This may be one of the biggest data hacks in U.S. history—I doubt anyone who voted for Donald Trump thought he would enable Musk to vacuum up their Social Security numbers, spousal details, and kids’ medical records for his own ends. Americans want a better life for themselves and their families: lower costs and higher wages. Yet Musk’s goal is evidently to weaponize this invasion of privacy to cut support for working families and ram through tax cuts for himself and his billionaire buddies. We are joining this lawsuit to stop the heist, end the chaos and confusion, and prevent Musk from causing irreparable harm to millions of American lives.”

“Elon Musk is a notorious union buster whose retaliation against workers exercising their union rights won praise from Donald Trump as thousands of CWA members went out on strike,” said Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Claude Cummings Jr. “Musk and the other billionaires who supported Trump aren’t looting our confidential records to find ways to help workers organize to join unions and collectively bargain. They aren’t feeding sensitive personal data into AI systems to make sure working families are able to secure the benefits they are entitled to or to stop the big banks from ripping us off. They are looking for ways to enrich themselves and punish anyone who stands in the way of their profits.”

“Every person in our country—regardless of race, occupation or political party affiliation—should have the comfort of knowing that their government is attempting to work in their best interests,” said Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President April Verrett. “No one deserves to have their privacy violated when they visit their doctor and seek care for their sick child. Nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals should be able to provide their patients with quality care without the threat of having their personal healthcare information being exposed to unelected billionaires. Medical privacy is the cornerstone of quality patient care and necessary for improving health outcomes across our nation. It is an injustice when our leaders willingly leave any person vulnerable to becoming a victim of fraud, scams, and discrimination. Today SEIU members and our allies are saying that working people will not back down to these attacks on our health and safety from the Trump-Musk Administration. We will not stop fighting to build a future where every worker, of every race and from every place, can join together in a union to win the wages, healthcare, and security we all deserve.”

“Elon Musk’s DOGE is illegally seizing Americans’ private data. No responsible policymaker—whatever their political party—should tolerate this, and we all have a moral obligation to stand up against Elon Musk’s takeover,” said Economic Policy Institute (EPI) President Heidi Shierholz.

The lawsuit was brought in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by the AFL-CIO and a coalition of unions representing workers across the federal government and public sector: the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), AFSCME, AFT, CWA and SEIU, as well as EPI, Economic Action Maryland Fund and Virginia Poverty Law Center.

The full complaint can be found here.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

President Trump has given yet more power to Elon Musk, who is now leading the effort to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Created in response to the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB helps enforce consumer financial laws for mortgages, credit cards and other financial products. We speak to a former CFPB staffer, Julie Margetta Morgan, who says the consumer watchdog has helped recover $21 billion lost to financial fraud and abuse in its decade-plus of existence. She says that Musk, the world’s richest man and a promoter of cryptocurrency, is attempting to eliminate sources of regulatory oversight as he plans to turn the social media company X, which he owns, into a payments platform. “The thing that stands in his way is having strong regulators who will make him play by the same rules as every other bank. … The actions over the last few weeks have been incredibly bad for individual, everyday Americans, but incredibly good for Elon Musk’s pocketbook.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

President Trump has given yet more power to Elon Musk, who is now leading the effort to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Created in response to the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB helps enforce consumer financial laws for mortgages, credit cards and other financial products. We speak to a former CFPB staffer, Julie Margetta Morgan, who says the consumer watchdog has helped recover $21 billion lost to financial fraud and abuse in its decade-plus of existence. She says that Musk, the world’s richest man and a promoter of cryptocurrency, is attempting to eliminate sources of regulatory oversight as he plans to turn the social media company X, which he owns, into a payments platform. “The thing that stands in his way is having strong regulators who will make him play by the same rules as every other bank. … The actions over the last few weeks have been incredibly bad for individual, everyday Americans, but incredibly good for Elon Musk’s pocketbook.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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The Trump administration is not even a month old, but billionaire Elon Musk has already brought in dozens of staffers to help him change the face of the U.S. government. ProPublica has learned the names of nine additional employees connected to Musk’s government overhaul, adding to a tracker the news organization published last week.

The additional names help reveal Musk’s sudden and far-reaching influence across government, as these individuals have moved into a wide array of powerful posts — from chief information officers deciding government IT purchases, to seasoned lawyers helping the effort.

ProPublica has confirmed the names and roles of more than 30 Musk-affiliated staffers who are helping the world’s richest man dismantle or downsize federal agencies one by one. We have received hundreds of tips from readers. Many have helped us identify the people helping Musk, who has not been elected to any office, force out government employees and shutter federal offices.

Musk and his lieutenants are reshaping the government and its mission with the blessing of President Donald Trump. The White House said Musk’s troops are acting within the law, though ProPublica’s reporting and legal scholars have raised questions about the legality of some efforts undertaken by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, as the newly formed office is called.

“The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what the people are going to get,” Musk said at a White House press conference on Tuesday, in which the White House doubled down on its commitment to Doge.

ProPublica has identified two groups of people linked to Musk. One group includes those with previous connections to his businesses. The other group includes those who have no obvious prior connections to Musk but have become part of his DOGE team, including many who work in the Executive Office of the President.

Among the staffers we have identified: Jennifer Balajadia, who has worked as an operations coordinator at Musk’s The Boring Company and now has an official role at DOGE in the Executive Office of the President; Nicole Hollander, who was most recently employed at Musk company X handling real estate and now works in the General Services Administration; and Ryan Riedel, a former SpaceX network security engineer who now lists himself as chief information officer at the Department of Energy. Neither they nor their agencies responded to requests for comment.

One common question has been how DOGE is organized. ProPublica learned that core members of the group use emails tied to the White House. Other members are housed within specific agencies with ambiguous job titles, including “expert” or “senior advisor.” And in several instances, DOGE members have simultaneously been assigned email addresses at numerous agencies.

Our stories have helped show the reach and expertise of those who are working as a part of Musk’s fledgling effort. We have laid out DOGE’s role in breaking the U.S. Agency for International Development. We have investigated the team’s interest in a sensitive Treasury database that tracks the flow of money across the government. We have detailed DOGE’s involvement in the canceling of $900 million in education research contracts. And we have revealed the names of the elite lawyers working for the DOGE team and their ties to Supreme Court justices.

If you work at a government agency and have experience with the DOGE team, we want to hear from you.

Do You Work for the Federal Government? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You.

Avi Asher-Schapiro, Al Shaw, Andy Kroll, Justin Elliott and Kirsten Berg contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Christopher Bing and Annie Waldman.

Established on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration via executive order, the new department is charged with implementing “the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity”.  Trump made it clear that virtually no agency or department would be exempt.  “Pentagon, [the Department of] Education, just everything.  We’re going to go through everything.”  In an interview with Fox News, Trump was convinced that, “We’re going to find billions, hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and abuse.”

When it comes to Musk’s hungry intentions regarding the US Defense Department, things start getting cloudily confusing.  In the first place, letting this “special government employee” loose on a department with which his own companies, notably SpaceX, have contracts with, sounds like a recipe for self-interested slashing.

The broader premise of cutting back on wasteful Pentagon spending, however, is nigh irrefutable.  And as much as he is loathed by establishment wonks in the Pentagon, that other Trump ally-in-cutting, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is merely stating the wondrously obvious in noting that many programs at the Pentagon “don’t have the impact you want them to.”

Much to the horror of defence mandarins, Hegseth has also insisted that the Pentagon pass “a clean audit.”  That, at the very least, was what the US taxpayers deserved.  “They deserve to know where their $850 billion go, how it’s spent, and make sure it’s spent wisely.”

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has already identified an area of interest for the DOGE razor gang: shipbuilding.  “Everything there seems to cost too much, take too long and deliver too little to the soldiers… We need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process.”

Defence departments the world over specialise in innovative, fantastic, even fraudulent accounting in justifying projects that will either never see fruition or, if they do, will only do so at vast cost to the taxpayer.  From the outset, the question of necessity is almost never asked in any serious way, let alone the need to coherently identify the relevant threat against which, presumably, the weapons system is intended to combat.

The unaccountable costs and expenditures associated with US defence place it in an almost peerless category.  When one can fork out money to the value of $5 trillion for failed and catastrophic conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan, something is rotten in the state of budgetary economics.  Much of this can be put down to post-9/11 spending, which dramatically departed from the previous model which focused on raising the marginal tax rate and reducing non-war expenditure.  Taxes were actually cut in 2001, 2003 and 2017, while expenditure ballooned.  Huge borrowings for war were made and emergency funds, which do not fall within standard processes of oversight, became the norm.

What emerged was the phenomenon Linda Bilmes describes as the “Ghost Budget”.  It was aided by abundant capital markets the US Treasury could readily draw upon, a dysfunctional budget system typified by hobbling federal government shutdowns, and a Pentagon determined to reverse the post-Cold War budget cuts it had suffered.  Money flowed in the nature of funding for emergency and Overseas Contingency Operations, passing under the radar of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting & Execution Process.  This incentive for underwriting permanent wars was also a license for permanent waste, characterised by the continuous resort by administrations to supplemental emergency funds (assistance to Ukraine being a case in point) with minimal administrative and Congressional scrutiny.

This situation is further complicated by the entanglements governments have with self-interested weapons companies and arms manufacturers, whose boards are very often packed by former government employees and civil servants who identify their own profits with the security of the nation.

Defence budgets the world over would seem to be subject to a more elastic treatment than those of other departments.  The $400 billion deal for the transfer and construction of nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy by the United States is a case in point, a project criminally needless as to demand those overseeing it to be charged with sedition and baleful stupidity.  It has all the ingredients that should make it a prime target for trimming, if not culling altogether: the absence of a genuine security threat (China is lazily designated as the primary one); the presence of self-interested former politicians who quaff and gobble from a seemingly endless gravy train; and military fatuity.

Defence departments also tend to behave like powers unto themselves.  Criticism, however accurate, can be weathered with arrogant reserve.  The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), to take that other paragon of dedicated waste, has dutifully ignored criticism from Parliament’s watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO), to commit a string of budgetary howlers.  It would be hard to forget the £6 billion blow out on the aircraft carriers, Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales, described by Lord David Richards, former chief of defence staff, as “behemoths … unaffordable vulnerable metal cans”.  Another former senior naval officer told national security reporter Richard Norton-Taylor that the carrier project involved a “combination of naval vanity and pork barrel politics”.

Since making it to sea, both vessels have been dogged by mechanical maladies (flooding and defective propeller shafts have featured), requiring them to spend lengthy sessions in dry dock for repairs.  Instead of participating in NATO exercises intended to show British prowess at sea, wasteful, inefficient indulgence has been on offer.

Trump, then, aided by the furniture breaking teams at DOGE, are onto something – but only up to a point.  Any proper slimming of the Pentagon must come with broader reforms to its funding agenda and how projects are accounted for.  Those arrangements were, after all, aided by previous US presidents convinced that the Republic, to survive, must be doing permanent battle across the globe.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

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When SpaceX’s Starship exploded in January, raining debris over the Caribbean, the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded the rocket program and ordered an investigation. The move was the latest in a series of actions taken by the agency against the world’s leading commercial space company.

“Safety drives everything we do at the FAA,” the agency’s chief counsel said in September, after proposing $633,000 in fines for alleged violations related to two previous launches. “Failure of a company to comply with the safety requirements will result in consequences.”

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s response was swift and caustic. He accused the agency of engaging in “lawfare” and threatened to sue it for “regulatory overreach.” “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” Musk wrote on X.

Today, Musk is in a unique position to deliver that change. As one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers and head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, he’s presiding over the administration’s effort to cut costs and slash regulation.

While it’s unclear what changes his panel has in store for the FAA, current and former employees are bracing for Musk to focus on the little-known part of the agency that regulates his rocket company: the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST. “People are nervous,” said a former employee who did not want to be quoted by name talking about Musk.

The tech titan and his company have been critical of the office, which is responsible for licensing commercial rocket launches and ensuring public safety around them. After the fines in September, SpaceX sent a letter to Congress blasting AST for being too slow to keep up with the booming space industry. That same month, Musk called on FAA chief Mike Whitaker to resign and told attendees at a conference in Los Angeles, “It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.”

FAA leadership seems to have heard him. The day of Trump’s inauguration, Whitaker stepped down — a full four years before the end of his term. And experts said the pressure is almost certain to grow this year as Musk pursues an aggressive launch schedule for Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built.

Whitaker did not respond to requests for comment.

Part of the problem for AST, experts say, is bandwidth.

The office has seen a sixfold increase in launches in the past six years, from 26 in 2019 to 157 last year — with SpaceX leading the pack. At the same time, AST’s staffing and budget have not kept pace. The agency has roughly 160 people to oversee regular flights by private rocket companies — sometimes more than one a day — bringing satellites to orbit, giving rides to astronauts, assisting with national security surveillance efforts and carrying tourists to the edge of space.

Launch traffic “has increased exponentially,” said George Nield, who led the office from 2008 to 2018. “No signs that that’s turning around or even leveling off.”

For each launch, AST’s staff calculate the risk that “uninvolved” members of the public, or their property, will be harmed. They also consider whether the launch will cause environmental damage or interfere with other airspace activities like commercial flight, as well as make sure a rocket’s payload received the proper approvals. The office licenses space vehicle reentries, too, though, as yet, there are far fewer of them.

The process, on average, takes five months. “It takes a certain amount of time to do the work to protect the public, and you do want to do that right,” Nield said. The consequences of shrinking the office or eliminating it altogether could be devastating, he said. “If a rocket goes off course, and nobody’s double-checked it, and so you have a major catastrophic event, that’s going to result in a huge backlash.”

But Musk has criticized AST for focusing on “nonsense that doesn’t affect safety.” He’s also emphasized that his company moves quickly and must have failures to learn and improve. Within SpaceX, this approach is known as “rapid iterative development.” And it is not without risk. Last month, when Starship blew up shortly after liftoff, dozens of airplanes scrambled to avoid falling debris. Residents of the Caribbean islands of Turks and Caicos reported finding pieces of the craft on beaches and roads, and the FAA said a car sustained minor damage.

Have you worked for the FAA or the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST? Heather Vogell wants to hear from you. Here’s how to contact Heather on Signal.

SpaceX has said it was reviewing data to determine the cause, pledging to “conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests.”

Musk, however, downplayed the explosion as “barely a bump in the road.” Moreover, he seemed to brush off safety concerns, posting a video of the flaming debris field with the caption, “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!” He also said nothing suggested the accident would push plans to launch the next Starship this month — even though the FAA investigation was still pending.

Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, said that Musk’s response was “recklessness … at a minimum,” given that people were alarmed by the falling rocket debris, which streaked fire and smoke across the sky before landing in and around the islands.

“That he now gets to provide government oversight over the things that he is trying to get permission to do is one of the most significant conflicts of interest I’ve seen in my career, and it’s inexplicable to me,” said Jah, who served on a federal advisory committee for AST.

The White House did not answer questions from ProPublica about DOGE’s plans for AST. Officials referred to comments by Trump, who said last week that if a conflict arises for Musk between one of his businesses and his government work, “we won’t let him go near it.” Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, also said Musk “will excuse himself from those contracts” if needed.

Musk and SpaceX did not respond to questions.

Jah said Musk and others advocating for less regulation have what he called a “launch, baby, launch mentality” that could push the FAA office in the wrong direction.

Industry representatives and members of Congress have accused the FAA of being more risk averse than necessary, stifling innovation.

“With nations like China seeking to leapfrog our accomplishments in space, it is even more imperative that we streamline our processes, issue timely approvals, minimize regulatory burdens and advance innovative space concepts,” said Rep. Brian Babin, a Republican from Texas and the incoming chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, at a hearing in September. He said he was concerned the FAA’s regulations could result in the mission to return astronauts to the moon being “unnecessarily delayed.”

Babin did not respond to a request for an interview about AST.

Sean Duffy, Trump’s new transportation secretary, has already indicated his department will take a more business-friendly approach.

Last month during his confirmation hearing, when Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas criticized the FAA’s enforcement action against SpaceX and asked Duffy whether he would “commit to reviewing these penalties and more broadly to curtailing bureaucratic overreach and accelerating launch approvals,” Duffy said he would. “I commit to doing a review and working with you, and following up on the space launches and what’s been happening at the FAA with regard to the launches.”

Duffy has since said he’s spoken to Musk about airspace reform and is looking to DOGE to “help upgrade our aviation system” — a move that drew a quick rebuke from Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington last week. She called Musk’s involvement in FAA matters a conflict of interest.

The Department of Transportation did not make Duffy available for an interview, and the FAA did not answer written questions provided by ProPublica, despite multiple requests for comment.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat of the Science committee, said streamlining the regulation of commercial space launches has bipartisan support.

Still, she said, the safety of crews and launchpads’ neighbors, as well as noise and pollution, need to be managed. “There needs to be a traffic cop here,” she said, especially given increased launches and issues such as space debris. “This can’t just be the Wild West, right?”

The $42 million allocated annually to AST is less than 1% of the FAA’s budget.

Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who tracks space launches at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, said the office needs the resources and authority to hold companies accountable as the industry grows and has more impact. “Government will need to play a role,” he said, “and they’re going to have to sort it out.”

Last year, a government advisory committee recommended the AST move out of the FAA and become a standalone agency within the Department of Transportation.

Proponents argue the move would help AST get more attention, and potentially resources. Industry supporters also say the FAA’s culture of allowing no failures — a bedrock of its oversight of the commercial airline industry — is culturally a bad fit for what AST does, given how young the space industry is.

AST does not require that each mission succeed in the conventional sense, said Caryn Schenewerk, an industry consultant who sat on the advisory committee. “They can’t,” she said. Launching rockets is still so new, the office’s goal is to make sure failures don’t hurt anyone — not to prevent them altogether, she said.

As launches have become more common, though, so too have problems like the Starship explosion. A report from the Government Accountability Office found that in the three years before its 2023 review, commercial space launches experienced roughly two dozen mishaps, the industry’s term for “catastrophic explosions and other failures.”

While the report noted that none of those incidents resulted in fatalities, serious injuries or significant property damage to the public, there have been other impacts. Starship’s first launch in April 2023, for example, blew a cloud of dust and grime that stretched miles across Texas. Debris like concrete and shrapnel rained down on an environmentally sensitive migratory bird habitat near the company’s Boca Chica launchpad. Residents have complained, Jah said, but “citizens of that community aren’t feeling that they’re being heard.” A report in The New York Times noted egg yolk staining the ground near a bird’s nest.

In response, Musk wrote on X: “To make up for this heinous crime, I will refrain from having omelette for a week.”

SpaceX’s plans to launch the next Starship this month are part of the accelerated schedule the company has been pushing AST to approve. The company launched four of the vehicles in 2024, and officials said it wants to launch 25 this year.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Heather Vogell.

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The Trump administration has terminated more than $900 million in Education Department contracts, taking away a key source of data on the quality and performance of the nation’s schools.

The cuts were made at the behest of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting crew, the Department of Government Efficiency, and were disclosed on X, the social media platform Musk owns, shortly after ProPublica posed questions to U.S. Department of Education staff about the decision to decimate the agency’s research and statistics arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.

A spokesperson for the department, Madi Biedermann, said that the standardized test known as the nation’s report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, would not be affected. Neither would the College Scorecard, which allows people to search for and compare information about colleges, she said.

IES is one of the country’s largest funders of education research, and the slashing of contracts could mean a significant loss of public knowledge about schools. The institute maintains a massive database of education statistics and contracts with scientists and education companies to compile and make data public about schools each year, such as information about school crime and safety and high school science course completion.

Its total annual budget is about $815 million, or roughly 1% of the Education Department’s overall budget of $82 billion this fiscal year. The $900 million in contracts the department is canceling includes multiyear agreements.

The vast trove of data represents much of what we know about the state of America’s roughly 130,000 schools, and without a national repository of data and statistics, it will be harder for parents and educators to track schools or compare the achievement of students across states.

There’s been a federal education statistics agency since 1867, though the current iteration was established in 2002 under President George W. Bush. Congress sets aside funding for the institute’s work.

Biedermann, the Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for communications, told ProPublica she could not provide details about the canceled contracts, saying that “my understanding is we don’t release specific information.”

But she said there were 90 contracts that had been identified as “waste, fraud and abuse.” She said canceling them was “in line with the department’s goal of making sure it is focused on meaningful learning” and to “make sure taxpayer funds are used appropriately.”

She directed a reporter to the DOGE account on X for more details.

DOGE wrote in a post: “Also today, the Department Of Education terminated 89 contracts worth $881mm. One contractor was paid $1.5mm to ‘observe mailing and clerical operations’ at a mail center.”

The Trump administration has repeatedly expressed a desire to “return” responsibility for schools to the states, although state and local governments already control the largest share of funding for education. There’s no national curriculum; states and districts decide what to teach and dictate their own policies.

The American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit that conducts research in education and other areas, said Monday that it had received termination notices for multiple contracts that are underway, and that canceling them early would be a poor financial decision.

“This is an incredible waste of taxpayer dollars, which have been invested — per Congressional appropriations and many according to specific legislation — in long-standing data collection and analysis efforts, and policy and program evaluations,” spokesperson Dana Tofig said in an email. The nonprofit has contracted with the department for years.

Schools and districts across the country rely on research from the IES and contractors such as the American Institutes for Research to guide best practices in classrooms.

“These investments inform the entire education system at all levels about the condition of education and the distribution of students, teachers, and resources in school districts across America,” Tofig said.

“If the purpose of such cuts is to make sure taxpayer dollars are not wasted, and used well, the evaluation and data work that has been terminated is exactly the work that determines which programs are effective uses of federal dollars, and which are not.”

Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, blasted the contract terminations at IES. “An unelected billionaire is now bulldozing the research arm of the Department of Education — taking a wrecking ball to high-quality research and basic data we need to improve our public schools,” she said in a statement. “Cutting off these investments after the contract has already been inked is the definition of wasteful.”

We are continuing to report on the U.S. Department of Education. Are you a former or current Education Department employee? Are you a student or school employee impacted by changes at the department? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201. Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards.

President Trump’s targeting of South Africa is clearly tied to his influential adviser Elon Musk and a coterie of wealthy U.S. oligarchs, “all of whom in some way or other grew up in South Africa as children.” These men are known as the “PayPal Mafia” due to their involvement in the founding of the financial tech company PayPal, explains reporter Chris McGreal. McGreal, a former South Africa correspondent for The Guardian, outlines Musk’s pro-apartheid and neo-Nazi family history, which appears to form the basis of his adherence to a right-wing ideology that believes white South Africans “are the victims of the end of apartheid” and at risk of a “white genocide.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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As members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have fanned out across the government in recent days, attention has focused on the young Silicon Valley engineers who are wielding immense power in the new administration.

But ProPublica has identified three lawyers with elite establishment credentials who have also joined the DOGE effort.

Two are former Supreme Court clerks — one clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, another for Justice Neil Gorsuch — and the third has been selected to be a Gorsuch clerk for the 2025-2026 term.

Two of the lawyers’ names have not been previously reported as working for DOGE.

All three — Keenan Kmiec, James Burnham and Jacob Altik — have DOGE email addresses at the Executive Office of the President, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. Altik was recently an attorney at the firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, but his bio page is now offline. Neither the White House nor any of the three lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment about their roles.

Referring to DOGE work, the White House told ProPublica in a statement earlier this week that, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law.”

However, DOGE’s aggressive actions across the government have already drawn lawsuits contending that the group has broken the law.

The legal challenges brought by several groups could ultimately reach the Supreme Court. This week, for example, more than a dozen Democratic attorneys general said they would sue to block DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, and federal employee unions sued to challenge the DOGE-led dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“What’s striking is how contemptuous the administration seems to be of traditional administrative law limitations — in ways that might get them into trouble,” said Noah Rosenblum, a law professor at New York University. “When this stuff goes to the courts, one important question is going to be: How well-lawyered was it?”

Trump formally created DOGE with an executive order on the first day of his administration. The order describes teams of at least four people — a leader, a lawyer, a human resources professional and an engineer — who would be detailed to government agencies. Exactly how DOGE is currently structured is not clear, nor are the specific assignments of each of the DOGE lawyers identified by ProPublica.

Trump has granted Musk, the world’s richest man, vast powers to seize control of government agencies, their offices and staff. “He’s a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs, and we put him in charge of seeing what he can do with certain groups and certain numbers,” Trump said of Musk on Monday, adding that “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval.”

The Trump administration has declined to provide information on who is working in Musk’s DOGE group. More than two dozen members of the effort have been identified, and ProPublica is compiling them as part of an ongoing reporting project.

A bit more about the three DOGE lawyers most recently identified by ProPublica:

James Burnham, whose title at DOGE is listed internally as general counsel, is a prominent lawyer in conservative legal circles. In Trump’s first term, Burnham said he was brought to the White House counsel’s office by the office’s top lawyer, Don McGahn. He said he worked on the administration’s judicial selection process, including Gorsuch’s appointment to the high court. He went on to work in the Trump Justice Department and clerk for Gorsuch in 2020.

"He’s a smart guy, and a very conservative lawyer,” Ty Cobb, a lawyer in the first Trump White House, said of Burnham in an interview.

Burnham later launched a boutique law firm and a litigation finance fund that seeks to “ensure righteous lawsuits never falter for lack of financial resources,” according to its website. Burnham was also helping DOGE with legal matters before Trump’s inauguration, The New York Times reported in January.

Keenan Kmiec’s career veered from elite law to, more recently, crypto. After clerking for then-Judge Samuel Alito on a federal circuit court, he clerked on the Supreme Court for Roberts in the 2006-2007 term, according to his LinkedIn. He did a stint at a corporate law firm and had his own firm focused on insider-trading litigation.

Kmiec appears to have become interested in crypto long before it went mainstream. A friend wrote an essay published online recalling meeting Kmiec at an Irish pub in Washington’s Dupont Circle in the mid-2010s, where the men spoke about “the errors of central banks, the libertarian movement, and Bitcoin.”

In 2021, Kmiec began working for a Swiss foundation that promotes a blockchain called Tezos, according to his LinkedIn. He then served for nine months as CEO of a now-defunct startup called InterPop, which described itself as “forging the future of digital fandom with comic, game, and collectible NFTs minted responsibly on the Tezos blockchain.” A former staffer at InterPop described the company in an interview as a refinement of the Magic: The Gathering card game. But the former staffer added, “We ran out of money and the game failed.”

There’s little in the public domain about Kmiec’s political views. In 2009, he wrote a column for Politico critiquing the widespread use of the term “judicial activism,” which he called an ill-defined “empty epithet.” The previous year, he gave $500 to Barack Obama’s campaign, according to federal election records. Kmiec’s father, Douglas Kmiec, a former Reagan administration lawyer and prominent conservative law professor, also made headlines for endorsing Obama. (Obama later named Douglas Kmiec ambassador to Malta.)

DOGE lawyer Jacob Altik is a 2021 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. Altik was selected to clerk for Gorsuch at the Supreme Court in the term that starts this summer, according to an announcement by his law school that was confirmed by a Supreme Court spokesperson.

Altik recently worked as a corporate litigation associate at Weil and previously clerked for D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee known for critiquing the administrative state. He also interned at a nonprofit called the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which has been at the forefront of legal efforts to rein in the power of federal agencies.

We’ve added these names — along with more than 20 others — to ProPublica’s ongoing project tracking DOGE members.

We are still reporting. Do you have information about any of the people listed below? Do you know of any other Musk associates who have entered the federal government? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201. Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.

Kirsten Berg, Christopher Bing and Annie Waldman contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Justin Elliott, Avi Asher-Schapiro and Andy Kroll.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

After creating an uproar last week for demanding access to a sensitive system at the Treasury Department, officials affiliated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are expected to turn their attention to another restricted database next week, according to two people with knowledge of their plans.

The new target, the sources said, is a database that tracks the flow of money across the government, from the Treasury to specific agencies and then to the ultimate destination of the funds.

The data in the system, known as the Central Accounting Reporting System, or CARS, is considered sensitive. Many transactions flowing to the same place, for example, can suggest a new national security priority for the U.S. government. People who work with the system have in the past been briefed that the database may be of interest to foreign intelligence agencies, said a third source who has familiarity with the system.

Musk’s affiliates are expected to arrive at Treasury offices in Parkersburg, West Virginia, next week, according to two sources, prompting concern among the staff there. The offices house a large number of staffers who work for the previously obscure Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the part of the Treasury that manages accounting and payments systems.

A spokesperson for DOGE did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Neither did a Treasury spokesperson.

CARS is intended to standardize accounting across government agencies and account for how money is moved. It’s unclear what specifically the DOGE team’s interest in the system is. When government auditors have examined the system in the past, the Treasury has pushed for them to do it in secure environments or on the Fiscal Service’s laptops.

DOGE’s earlier actions at the Treasury have become a focus of congressional scrutiny and a federal court battle in recent days. Musk’s team initially tried to halt money going to the U.S. Agency for International Development from the Treasury’s payment system.

A veteran career official within the Treasury pushed back and then retired in the face of the demands. On Friday morning, The Washington Post reported that one of the DOGE-affiliated staffers involved in that standoff, Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley tech executive, would be replacing the career official who resigned, which would give him power over the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s payment and accounting systems.

Federal workers unions took the matter to court, and a judge on Thursday temporarily limited Musk’s team to read-only access.

The Treasury has assured Congress that the DOGE-affiliated staffers have read-only privileges for the payment system, but Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has raised concerns that the agency may have misled lawmakers, citing reports from Wired that a DOGE staffer had “read-write” access for several days. “Treasury’s refusal to provide straight answers about DOGE’s actions, as well as its refusal to provide a briefing requested by several Senate committees only heightens my suspicions,” Wyden said in a statement on Friday.

One of the two Musk-affiliated officials probing the Treasury’s systems resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal discovered racist posts on a social media account linked to him.

The posts included “I was racist before it was cool” and “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”

It’s not clear which personnel are scheduled to make the trip to West Virginia or if the resignation will affect those plans. By Friday morning, Musk was posting on X about bringing the staffer back, and Vice President JD Vance backed the idea, saying, “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.” In a press conference, Trump said he wasn’t familiar with the situation but backed Vance’s take.

Do you have any information about DOGE and the Trump administration’s moves at Treasury that we should know? Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Justin Elliott and Robert Faturechi.

On President Donald Trump’s authority alone, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been unleashed on federal agencies. Employees from Musk’s companies and those of his allies, as well as young staffers he’s recruited, are wresting authority from career workers and commandeering computer systems.

While some have been public about their involvement, others have attempted to keep their roles secret, scrubbing LinkedIn pages and other sources of data. With little information from the White House, ProPublica is attempting to document who is involved and what they are doing.

Musk’s team, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, has already thrown entire swaths of the federal government and its programs into disarray — programs that serve millions of Americans.

Musk himself has made no secret of his intentions, saying that DOGE is a “wood chipper for bureaucracy” and that he is “deleting” agencies.

A White House spokesperson wrote, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.” None of the people identified responded to requests for comment.

We are still reporting. Do you have information about any of the people listed below? Do you know of any other Musk associates who have entered the federal government? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201 . Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.

Senior Adviser to the Director

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Worked on Musk’s purchase of Twitter

Armstrong is a technology banker at Morgan Stanley who worked on Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter — since rebranded as X — in 2022. He has been given an influential role at OPM, which handles personnel issues across the federal government. Since Trump took office, OPM has spearheaded the new administration’s efforts to dramatically reduce the federal workforce and roll back telework and remote work policies.

Senior Adviser to the Director

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Former engineer at Tesla, executive at the Boring Company

Biasini is an engineer and former executive who has worked at two of Musk’s companies, the Boring Company and Tesla. He has also taken a high-ranking role at OPM. Biasini was listed as the contact person for the government-wide email system put in place by the Trump administration and used to send messages directly from OPM to millions of federal workers across the government, according to a recent court filing .

Senior Adviser

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Vice president of people operations at SpaceX

Bjelde is a longtime SpaceX employee who’s spent more than 20 years at the company, according to his LinkedIn profile, where he’s had a variety of jobs, including as managing director of the “food services group.” He previously worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He’s been referred to in press reports as a “top DOGE Lieutenant,” working at OPM to slash head count. CNN previously revealed that Bjelde had informed OPM staff of a plan to cut 70% of the agency’s workforce. The New York Times reported that Bjelde helped Musk cut staff at Twitter following its takeover.

Senior Adviser to the Director

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Bobba was named by Wired magazine as part of a team of six young engineers picked by Musk for his DOGE team. A recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Bobba worked as an intern at Meta, the social media company, and at Palantir, the software and data analytics firm that is a major defense contractor. Bobba is listed in personnel records as an “expert” at OPM, where he has reportedly been able to access internal databases. He graduated from high school in 2021; in his graduation speech, featured in the Spotlight New Jersey newspaper, he told his fellow graduates that, in life, the “answers we deserve demand discomfort.”

Connected to: General Services Administration

Cavanaugh is an entrepreneur who has founded companies focused on intellectual property management and small-business finance. He has been interviewing staffers at the GSA as part of the DOGE team, according to those who have spoken with him. GSA procures technology tools, real estate, and other services for federal government agencies. In published interviews, Cavanaugh has expressed an admiration for tech luminaries, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, and has said he is “very interested in crypto.”

Expert

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Interned at Neurolink

Coristine is a recent undergraduate student at Northeastern University and part of the group of young DOGE staffers detailed to OPM, the government’s human resources office. Wired reported that Coristine interned at Neurolink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company. Friends of Coristine told Northeastern University’s independent student newspaper that Musk was one of Coristine’s idols and that while he finished the fall 2024 semester, he did not return to school for the spring term. According to CBS News, Coristine has been seeking access to the Small Business Administration’s internal records on behalf of DOGE.

Musk link: Longtime Musk lieutenant, CEO of the Boring Company

Davis has been a senior executive and close associate of Musk’s for over two decades, working with him at SpaceX, X and the Boring Company. He was one of the first people to be associated with the DOGE effort last year. The New York Times reported he was on early calls with Musk as they conceived of the DOGE effort and explored ways to cut federal programs. Bloomberg reported that Davis has helped recruit staffers for DOGE.

Connected to: Treasury Department

Musk link: Worked as an engineer at X and SpaceX

Elez works at the Treasury Department, a staffer at the office of the Secretary of Treasury confirmed in a call with a ProPublica reporter. Wired reported Feb. 4 that Elez, who graduated from Rutgers in 2021 and studied computer science, has gained access to the highly sensitive payment systems of the U.S. Treasury Department. According to Elez’s LinkedIn bio, which was recently deleted, he was most recently an engineer at X in New York for roughly a year and an engineer at SpaceX in the Los Angeles area for around three years before that. Elez reportedly resigned Feb. 6 after The Wall Street Journal reported that he has links to a social media account that posted racist comments online.

Executive Engineer in the Office of the Secretary

Connected to: Department of Health and Human Services

Musk link: Former SpaceX intern

Farritor works as an executive engineer at the HHS, according to agency data. He studied computer science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and interned at SpaceX, working on its Starlink Wi-Fi team and Starship launchpad software, according to his Linkedin profile. In March 2024, he received a Thiel fellowship , a two-year program founded by billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel that awards a $100,000 startup grant to students who drop out of college.

Human Resources

Holmes is running human resources at DOGE, according to government workers who have been in meetings with her. A former lawyer with Jones Day, a firm that frequently represents Trump, she was previously the chief people officer at Oklo, a nuclear energy company chaired by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. She also ran her own HR consulting firm, BrighterSideHR, which advised companies to pursue “non-woke” approaches to diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Federal Detailee

Connected to: Environmental Protection Agency

Killian works at the EPA, according to agency data. His position is a federal detail, which typically allows government employees to transfer between agencies for temporary roles. He studied math and computer science at McGill University, where he conducted blockchain-related research. He recently worked as an engineer at Jump Trading, an algorithmic financial trading company, and is a member of the DOGE team, according to recent media reports .

Senior Adviser to the Director

Connected to: U.S. Agency for International Development, Office of Personnel Management

Kliger is a senior adviser at OPM, according to his LinkedIn profile. He spent nearly five years as a software engineer at Databricks, a cloud-based AI company. He is widely reported to be part of Musk’s DOGE team. On his personal Substack, he wrote an essay titled “Why I gave up a seven-figure salary to save America,” according to press reports, and described failed U.S. attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz, who withdrew from Congress amid allegations of sexual misconduct, as a “victim” of the deep state. On Feb. 3, workers at USAID received an email announcing that their Washington offices would be closed that day. Replies to the email were directed to Kliger at a USAID email address.

Expert

Connected to: Treasury Department

Krause is a part of DOGE’s efforts to gain access to sensitive federal payment systems as part of Musk’s larger effort to root out spending perceived as wasteful. According to the Treasury Department , Krause leads a team of people who have been granted “read-only” access to the code for the agency’s Fiscal Service payment system, which processes payments for major programs such as Social Security and Medicare. The department has clarified he is designated as a “special government employee.” The New York Times reported that Krause is affiliated with Musk’s DOGE team.

Spokesperson

In December, during the transition, Trump named Miller, who served in the first administration as a press secretary to Vice President Mike Pence, as one of the first members of DOGE. She is the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. After reports that DOGE personnel accessed internal USAID data, Katie Miller defended the group, saying that “no classified material was accessed without proper security clearances.”

Adviser

Connected to: FBI

Musk link: Senior director for security at SpaceX

Monroe is working as an adviser within the office of the director of the FBI, according to three people familiar with the matter. NBC News previously reported that an unnamed SpaceX employee has been placed in the FBI director’s office but said it could not confirm the individual’s identity. Monroe is a seasoned information security professional who previously served in the U.S. Navy as an information warfare officer .

Expert

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Former Twitter employee

Rajpal is listed as an “expert” now working for OPM. An archived version of his personal website from 2018 lists his job title as an engineer at Twitter. Rajpal has extensive access to sensitive personnel data used by OPM, according to a source familiar with his role. Wired reported Feb. 5 that Rajpal also sought and was later granted access to data at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Wired magazine reported that he is part of the DOGE team.

Senior Adviser in the Office of the Secretary

Connected to: Department of Health and Human Services

Riley works as a senior adviser at HHS, according to agency data. She previously worked for consultancy firm McKinsey & Company for about eight years, most recently as a partner leading teams advising the company’s state and federal government clients. She has been working closely with Brad Smith, a former health official in Trump’s first administration who ran DOGE during the transition period, according to media reports .

Chief Information Officer

Connected to: Social Security Administration

Musk link: Former chief technology officer of Starlink payment processor Shift4 Payments

Russo is a top-ranking technology official at the SSA, which disburses over $1.5 trillion in benefits annually. Russo spent over seven years as an executive and senior adviser with Shift4 Payments, a payment processing company that is both an investor in SpaceX and a payment processor for StarLink, according to his Linkedin . The CEO of Shift4 Payments, Jared Isaacman, has been nominated by Trump to lead NASA and is a friend of Musk’s who has purchased multiple spacewalks with Musk’s SpaceX company. Russo’s office will oversee the SSA’s over $2 billion IT budget.

Chief of Staff

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Previous employee of xAI

Scales’ name came to light in the first week of the Trump administration as federal employees received a memo putting them on notice that diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives in the federal government were now barred through an executive order — and to report efforts to conceal them. The message listed Scales as the point of contact for questions. Scales worked in the human resources department at xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, prior to OPM. Before that, she worked in recruiting at ridesharing company Uber. She is reportedly an integral part of OPM’s sweeping efforts to restructure the federal workforce.

Federal Acquisition Service Deputy Commissioner and Director of Technology Transformation Services

Connected to: General Services Administration

Musk link: Software engineer at Tesla

Shedd’s work at Tesla focused on building software that operates vehicle and battery factories, according to a GSA press release . The office Shedd runs, known as TTS, helps federal agencies improve their tech practices. GSA leaders have told employees they plan to cut 50% of the budget. Shedd has told colleagues he plans to run TTS like a “startup software company,” according to Wired magazine , which will reportedly involve the use of artificial intelligence to analyze government contracts.

Smith was among the earliest names associated with DOGE outside of its founder. The New York Times reported he was helping lead the group. He served in a series of health-related policy roles during the first Trump administration, including being part of the board of Operation Warp Speed, the historic COVID-19 vaccine development program. According to The New York Times, which first reported Smith’s involvement in DOGE, he is a friend of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.

Musk link: Senior director for security engineering at X and principal engineer at SpaceX

Stanley is an experienced information security professional who has worked at multiple Musk-related companies. He is reportedly an aide to Musk at DOGE, according to The New York Times , and has a role at the White House. He was part of the initial transition team after Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile . On inauguration day, Stanley assisted in the release of individuals associated with the Jan. 6 riots, he wrote on X.

Beyond the figures ProPublica has confirmed, other media have reported on a few additional people close to Musk who work for DOGE or other federal agencies. ProPublica is working to confirm them as well:

Baris Akis , Nicole Hollander , Ethan Shaotran

We are still reporting. Do you have information about any of the people listed above? Do you know of any other Musk associates who have entered the federal government? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201 . Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

The campaign urges Congress to investigate the process by which Musk was granted authority, along with his abuses of power and emolument violations as the head of DOGE.

Explaining the new grounds, the campaign writes: “As head of DOGE—which operates without any congressional authorization or oversight—Musk and his DOGE-affiliated agents demanded and were granted access to sensitive personal and financial information of millions held by the Department of Treasury, in violation of federal law that prohibits improper disclosure and misuse of this data. And Musk is in receipt of unconstitutional emoluments via lucrative government contracts with Musk’s companies.”

Launched on Inauguration Day, the campaign has already garnered nearly 200,000 petition signatures supporting the impeachment investigation of offenses Donald Trump has already committed. These offenses include: violating the Emoluments Clauses from his first day in office by refusing to sell his ownership stake in companies receiving substantial payments from foreign governments; engaging in unlawful and corrupt conduct during the 2024 election campaign; abusing the pardon power; unconstitutionally stripping U.S. citizens of citizenship; dismantling independent government oversight; unlawfully firing Inspector Generals; unlawfully firing members of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board; abusing his power to seek retributions against perceived adversaries; abusing emergency powers; unconstitutionally usurping local and state authority, and unconstitutionally usurping legislative powers.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and unelected adviser to President Donald Trump, is asserting control over much of the federal bureaucracy and sensitive government computer systems despite lacking clear authority. The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department was pushed out after refusing to hand Musk’s team the keys to the government’s entire payment system and the $6 trillion in payments the system processes annually, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and Medicare benefits. Musk and his team have also seized control at the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, key institutions that function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government. “In any other situation, this would be called state capture, and people around the world would be condemning it,” says Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, who writes in a new blog post that Elon Musk is staging a coup. We also speak with Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, who warns that Musk could be laying the groundwork for major tax cuts Republicans have promised that will disproportionately benefit corporations and wealthy people like him. “Elon Musk is going to pay for his tax cut with your Social Security,” says Owens.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House comes almost exactly 15 years after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark Citizens United ruling, which opened the floodgates for corporations and billionaires to pour unlimited money into elections. At Trump’s inauguration on Monday, the front row included several of the world’s richest and most powerful men, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai. Their collective net worth is over $1 trillion. For more on money in politics and the legacy of Citizens United, we speak with Brendan Fischer, the deputy executive director at Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project. “Democrats and Republicans have both embraced super PACs and embraced the megadonors that fund them, but Trump is taking this to another level,” says Fischer, who notes that about 44% of Trump’s election was funded by just 10 megadonors.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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Elon Musk’s Boring Company spent years pitching cities on a novel solution to traffic, an underground transportation system to whisk passengers through tunnels in electric vehicles. Proposals in Illinois and California fizzled after officials and the public began scrutinizing details of the plans and seeking environmental reviews.

But in Las Vegas, the tunneling company is building Musk’s vision beneath the city’s urban core thanks to an unlikely partner: the tourism marketing organization best known for selling the image that “What Happens Here, Stays Here.”

The powerful Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority greenlit the idea and funded an 0.8-mile route at its convention center. As that small “people mover” opened in 2021, the authority was already urging the county and city to approve plans for 104 stations across 68 miles of tunnels.

The project is also realizing Musk’s notion of how government officials should deal with entrepreneurs: avoid lengthy reviews before building and instead impose fines later if anything goes awry. Musk’s views on regulatory power have taken on new significance in light of his close ties to President-elect Donald Trump and his role in a new effort to slash rules in the name of improving efficiency. The Las Vegas project, now well under way, is a case study of the regulatory climate Musk favors.

Because the project, now known as the Vegas Loop, is privately operated and receives no federal funding, it is exempt from the kinds of exhaustive governmental vetting and environmental analyses demanded by the other cities that Boring pitched. Such reviews assess whether a proposal is the best option and inform the public of potential impacts to traffic and the environment.

The head of the convention authority has called the project the only viable way to ease traffic on the Las Vegas Strip and in the surrounding area — a claim that was never publicly debated as the Clark County Commission and Las Vegas City Council granted Boring permission to build and operate the system beneath city streets. The approvals allow the company to build and operate close to homes and businesses without the checks and balances that typically apply to major public transit projects.

Meanwhile, Boring has skirted building, environmental and labor regulations, according to records obtained by ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas under public records laws.

Watch video ➜

It twice installed tunnels without permits to work on county property. State and local environmental regulators documented it dumping untreated water into storm drains and the sewer system. And, as local politicians were approving an extension of the system, Boring workers were filing complaints with the state Occupational Safety and Health Administration about “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and severe chemical burns. After an investigation, Nevada OSHA in 2023 fined the company more than $112,000. Boring disputed the regulators’ allegations and contested the violations.

The complaints have continued.

“The Boring company is at it again,” an employee of the Clark County Water Reclamation District wrote to the agency’s general manager and legal counsel in June, after video showed water spilling from a company-owned property into the street near the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Tyler Fairbanks, a Boring Company manager, emailed the county official, saying “we take this very seriously and we are working to correct what is going on.” In August, a Las Vegas Valley Water District staffer documented a similar issue. On both occasions, the county issued cease-and-desist letters but did not fine Boring.

Financial penalties wouldn’t put a dent in the company’s bottom line, John Solvie, a Clark County water quality compliance manager, told county Public Works Director Denis Cederburg in an email. Still, the concerns were significant enough that Solvie asked if the department would “consider revoking permits (essentially shutting down their operations until they resolve these issues).”

A county spokesperson declined to answer how the incidents were resolved, or whether the Public Works Department had ever revoked any of Boring’s permits. Solvie and Cederburg declined to comment.

Boring did not respond to repeated requests to comment for this story.

As Boring begins hauling passengers beyond the convention center in the first-ever test of an underground road network using driver-operated Teslas, it has successfully removed yet another layer of county oversight. Last year, Boring requested that the county no longer require it to hold a special permit that, among other things, mandates operators of private amusement and transportation systems to report serious injuries and fatalities, and grants the county additional authority to inspect and regulate their operations to protect public safety.

The result is that key questions about the operation and maintenance of an unproven transportation system are unanswered. The county declined to respond to detailed questions about its oversight role since the special permit ended. It provided a statement saying that Boring is “responsible for the safe operation of its system and retaining a third-party Nevada registered design professional to conduct annual audits of their operations.” The county can review those audits and inspect the system “as deemed appropriate.”

Ben Leffel, an assistant professor of public policy at UNLV, said in an interview with ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas that the private project’s ability to expand without the same scrutiny required of public projects is a major gap in oversight. Vegas Loop customers will expect Boring to follow the same standards as a public transit system, Leffel said, and it “should receive the same amount of oversight and maintenance,” more so because of the company’s construction and labor citations.

Former Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, who completed her third and final term in December, said she too is concerned about safety, as well as accessibility for riders with disabilities. She had questioned whether the tunnel project was the best transportation option for the city. “I have been totally opposed to it from the beginning and still remain so,” she said.

Other elected and appointed officials have offered nearly unanimous support.

Musk, who spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump, is now leading the president-elect’s Department of Government Efficiency taskforce, recommending cuts to the federal bureaucracy and its ability to regulate. And Boring Company CEO Steve Davis is helping recruit staff for the initiative.

Given Musk’s role advising Trump on ways to slash regulations and government oversight, Boring and the Vegas Loop might be a harbinger for the country.

In 2014, Musk stood on the steps of the Nevada Capitol with a man named Steve Hill, who was heading the Governor’s Office of Economic Development. They were celebrating a deal to build a Tesla Gigafactory outside Reno.

Hill, as the state’s negotiator, had worked feverishly on the agreement, which provided $1.25 billion in tax incentives to Tesla. Musk would later praise Nevada as “a real get-it-done state.”

Soon after the battery factory opened in 2016, Musk’s Boring Company was looking for a place to build a project testing its solution to urban congestion, an idea that sprang from Musk’s frustration with LA traffic. Leaders at the city of Los Angeles were interested. A regional transportation authority, Metro, has a say on public transit in the city, and California law requires an environmental review. But Boring and the city tried to sidestep the state law, claiming an exemption for building in urban areas.

Residents, however, weren’t as eager to turn Boring loose. When neighborhood groups in West LA sued the city over the lack of environmental review, Boring settled with them and looked to build elsewhere.

Musk has frequently railed against government scrutiny of his other companies, Tesla and SpaceX, and claims excessive government oversight has made it nearly impossible to build big projects in parts of the country.

“Environmental regulations are, in my view, largely terrible,” he said at an event with the libertarian Cato Institute in June. “You have to get permission in advance, as opposed to paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which I think would be much more effective. To say, ‘Look we’re going to do this project; if something goes wrong we’ll be forced to pay a penalty.’ But we do not need to go through a three- or four-year environmental approval process.”

Everywhere Boring tried, it struggled to start digging. In Chicago, where then-Mayor Rahm Emmanuel was a supporter, local leaders expressed skepticism about whether Boring could build an airport loop without public funding. In Maryland, where Boring and federal officials completed a draft environmental review in 2019 for a high-speed link between Baltimore and Washington, the company never started tunneling.

That was, until it got to Las Vegas.

In 2018, an executive who’d met Hill during the Tesla Gigafactory negotiations called him to discuss potentially bringing Boring to Las Vegas, Hill said. (Hill said Musk himself had previously pitched Hill on a Boring Company project in Northern Nevada.) Hill, now a leader at the convention authority in Las Vegas, was in a position to help. Funded by about $460 million in annual revenue from hotel room taxes and conventions, the authority is a force in local politics, channeling the influence of the gaming and tourism industry.

The authority happened to be looking to build a people-mover to link exhibit halls at the 4.6 million-square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center. Hill said he already had a sense that the Boring Company’s concept “would work pretty well here.” Nine companies submitted bids, and two were finalists. Boring’s bid was about a third of the cost of the other credible proposals, Hill said. A week before the board was to select the winner, Hill called a news conference and announced the Boring partnership. He pointed to a map of a tunnel system extending far beyond the convention center — to the airport and toward Los Angeles.

The authority boasted that news coverage of its Boring partnership was picked up by 1,200 outlets, providing $1.3 million in free publicity for Las Vegas.

The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada is the planning agency for the Las Vegas metropolitan area, overseen by local elected officials. But because Boring’s project started so small and didn’t use federal funding, the commission wouldn’t have a say. The convention authority’s governing board, which focuses more on supporting tourism than transportation for local residents, took the lead. Nearly half of the authority’s 14-member board represents private interests, primarily the gaming industry. Goodman and two others voted against the partnership.

To fund the convention center loop, the authority committed $52.5 million in bonds that will be paid back by the agency. Since it opened in April 2021, Hill said the authority has paid Boring about $4.5 million a year to operate the convention center loop, which provides free rides to conventioneers. The authority also spent $24.5 million to purchase the Las Vegas Monorail out of bankruptcy, giving Boring the right to tunnel in the monorail’s noncompete territory.

Hill has repeatedly claimed, to elected officials, to local environmentalists and in an interview with ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas, that the loop is the only viable way for Las Vegas to address its traffic congestion. “It’s not really a debate. There’s no reason to explore the other options,” he told members of the Sierra Club during a meeting to discuss public transit, according to Vinny Spotleson, volunteer chair of the environmental group’s regional chapter.

Hill acknowledged to ProPublica and City Cast, however, “that’s a prediction. That’s not a mandate. I don’t have the standing to make that decision. I think people listen to what I have to say periodically."

The Clark County Commission — which governs the Las Vegas Strip and surrounding areas — was listening when, just a few months after the convention center loop opened, Hill told them that Boring had already proven “how great a system this is, that it can be done, and I think provided confidence for this community to move forward.”

At the urging of Hill, casino executives and labor union leaders, the County Commission approved a 50-year agreement giving Boring the right to operate a “monorail” above and below ground on county property. The 2021 vote was unanimous.

In Las Vegas, Boring had achieved what it could not in Maryland, Chicago or LA.

“All of their company, it seemed like, was dependent on Vegas working out,” said Spotleson, who first met company representatives around 2019 when he was district director for U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas. “That we were the test case that they wanted to take to the Chicagos and Bostons and other cities of the world and say, ‘Look at what we did in Vegas. We can do that here.’”

The Boring Company has completed more than 5 miles of the 68-mile system. Despite the proposal’s massive scale, it has been approved with little public input.

When the County Commission considered the expansion plans, they were listed on agendas under the obscure names of limited-liability companies, making it difficult for anyone but the company and its supporters to track. For example, the county approved a roughly 25-mile expansion and 18 new stations at a 2023 zoning meeting through a notice that gave no indication it was related to the Vegas Loop: UC-23-0126-HCI-CERBERUS 160 EAST FLAMINGO HOTEL OWNER L P, ET AL. In 2021, the commission approved an extension for Caesars Entertainment hotels under the name UC-20-0547-CLAUDINE PROPCO, LLC, ET AL, and about 29 miles of tunnel under UC-20-0547-CIRCUS CIRCUS LV, LLC, ET AL.

In nearly six years, the company has built about 5 miles of tunnels, with even fewer miles in use.

Watch video ➜

Boring uses a machine known as Prufrock to excavate its 12-foot-in-diameter tunnels, applying chemical accelerants during the construction process. For each foot the company bores, it removes about 6 cubic yards of soil and any groundwater it encounters, according to a company document prepared for state environmental officials. It is required to obtain permits to ensure the waste does not contaminate the environment or local water sources.

Public records — including emails, notices, photos and videos, and other documentation — obtained from Clark County, the Clark County Water Reclamation District and Nevada Division of Environmental Protection through public records requests show the company has been less than meticulous in handling the waste.

In June, an employee with the county road division tailed a Boring Company truck that spilled mud onto city streets, according to the records. The trucks “have no marking and no license plates,” wrote Dean Mosher, assistant manager for the roads division. A truck route that the company had reported to the county must have been “totally false,” Mosher concluded.

A few months later, a truck hauling waste from the project spilled gravel, rock and sand onto Interstate 15, slowing traffic for more than four hours during rush hour. The driver was fined $75 for an unsafe or unsecured load, according to court records.

Last year, without the county’s knowledge, a Boring contractor relied on a permit held by a county contractor to store muck near apartment buildings and the Commercial Center shopping plaza, along one of the busiest thoroughfares in central Las Vegas, a county spokesperson said. The county fined the contractor $1,549. A county spokesperson would not disclose other locations where the company stores waste and directed “operational questions” to the company.

Boring must also remove groundwater as it digs — including near an area where the aquifer is polluted with a dry cleaning chemical known as tetrachlorethylene, or PCE, which can be toxic in large amounts. Boring is required to filter the water before discharging it into storm drains, which flow to Lake Mead. But regulators documented cases where Boring had started work without permits or bypassed their water treatment system, government records show.

In 2019, the company discharged groundwater into storm drains without a permit, resulting in a state settlement and a $90,000 fine. In 2021, state officials sent a cease-and-desist letter to prevent Boring from taking actions that could “cause unpermitted discharge of groundwater,” prompting Davis, Boring’s CEO, to complain to the head of the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection that the state was “being fairly aggressive and that this was starting to hurt” the company, according to an email the head of the agency sent to several staffers.

The following year, local officials cited Boring for illegally connecting to a sewer without approval, records show. In 2023, state environmental regulators found the company was dumping untreated groundwater into the sewer, with one official writing that Boring staff were “unsure of how long they have been bypassing the treatment system.” Local officials said they investigated but did not find evidence to take further action.

That year, Boring tunneled without permits required to work in public rights of way, prompting the Public Works director, Cederburg, to note, “They are in violation of the franchise agreement,” records show. A Boring official responded that once the county notified the company of the issue, it had immediately filed the two permits. The county approved them retroactively, tacking on a $900 fee for each permit.

On a recent Friday at a Vegas Loop station at the Resorts World hotel, an attendant directed riders to Teslas parked in a waiting area. An all-day pass to ride between the Las Vegas Strip hotel and a MagicCon event at the convention center cost $5. (Trips within the convention center are free.)

Inside the narrow tunnels, which glow green, magenta and orange, the driver navigated shoulderless roadways at 35 mph, which felt fast. At the first convention center stop, the driver halted, and three additional riders squeezed into the five-passenger sedan before the trip continued.

Boring says its system will be able to move 90,000 passengers an hour, more than a typical day’s subway ridership in 2023 at New York City’s third-busiest station, 34th Street-Herald Square Station (72,890). It’s also significantly more than Las Vegas’ monorail (3,400 per hour) and its regional bus system (7,500 per hour), according to Hill.

About a dozen Sierra Club members toured the Vegas Loop in June and were impressed, Spotleson said: no carbon emissions; neon everywhere; “It’s very Vegas.” Yet while it might be faster than walking, he said, “it just isn’t the actual mass transit solution” the city needs for its busiest places, like the airport.

The lack of alternatives has made Boring an easy sell to politicians, Spotleson said. “They understand that we need transit solutions. They’re being presented with a free option that is also carbon free. That is as simple as it gets.”

Hill acknowledged skepticism of the company’s claim that the Loop will transport up to 90,000 people an hour. “People poke at this all the time,” he said, adding that he thinks the company will be proven right. “I am completely willing to take that bet. Let’s just wait and see.”

M.J. Maynard, who leads the Regional Transportation Commission, said that because the Vegas Loop is private, her agency did not have information to evaluate Boring’s ridership claims. “As a public agency, we have to be very transparent and accountable with the [ridership] numbers that we publish,” she said. “I can’t speak to the numbers that Steve Hill or his team have posted or talked about.”

Marilyn Kirkpatrick, the only county commissioner to vote against Boring’s 2023 expansion, said she opposed giving the company permission to build beneath miles of public roads when it had completed only a small portion of the system. “Why would we give something away if we didn’t know it was going to work?” she asked.

The public might know even less about whether it’s working, thanks to removal in May of the “amusement and transportation system” permit, a designation also used for enclosed systems like the airport tram and the Strip’s High Roller Ferris wheel.

Over the past three years, county inspections of Boring’s operations under the permit identified numerous issues, including speeding drivers and an unauthorized SUV entering one of the above-ground stations. Since 2022, there have been at least 67 incidents in which the tunnel system was breached, including by outside vehicles, a skateboarder and a curious pedestrian, Fortune reported in October.

But the company convinced Clark County to remove that layer of oversight by arguing the system “did not fit squarely into the requirements” of the regulation, which “greatly complicated” matters for Boring and the county.

The company outlined an alternative oversight plan in a letter obtained by ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas. The company will continue to submit structural, civil, fire, electrical and plumbing studies, as well as emergency plans and other planning documents, according to the letter. But Boring’s letter did not address what would replace ordinances that required multiple layers of inspection and the immediate notification of injuries and fatalities.

A Clark County spokesperson did not answer questions about potential gaps in accountability created by removal of the permit. In a statement, the county said “safety is the top priority for all county departments and agencies” as they review projects.

Kirkpatrick said she worked to include additional fire-safety and security measures in a 2021 franchise agreement, which she supported. Still, she remains concerned about Boring’s operations, including the potential for price-gouging if it becomes the “only game in town.”

In an interview with ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas, a Nevada transportation industry expert who has closely observed the system’s development said it’s concerning that Boring’s plans, including basic transportation safety protocols, haven’t been vetted like a public project.

“What’s the traffic control system going to be like down in those tunnels? How are they going to make sure that none of those cars crash into each other when they’re going at 35 mph from one tunnel into an intersection with another tunnel?” said the expert, who requested anonymity because of concerns about professional repercussions. “All their answers are completely evasive. So there are significant operational concerns.”

Soon after the Boring Company arrived in Las Vegas, Hill approached airport leadership about connecting the Vegas Loop to the airport. The reasons are obvious. More than 50 million people landed at Harry Reid International Airport in 2023. On busy weekends, congestion at the airport can trap casino customers for almost an hour as they wait for rides.

But tunneling there requires compliance with Federal Aviation Administration regulations and federal environmental reviews. For now, Boring plans to end its tunnels near the airport and use surface streets to carry passengers the last mile to the terminals, said Rosemary Vassiliadis, Clark County’s director of aviation. An airport spokesperson later clarified that no plans have been confirmed.

Using surface streets for its airport connection — at least initially — won’t alleviate gridlock like mass transit could. Vassiliadis acknowledged it won’t “give us any [traffic] relief. It’s just supplanting how people are getting here” by car, but said she supports efforts to build a more direct tunnel line to the airport.

With casino and tourism industry support — and their help paying for the project — politicians, including its most vocal critics, like Goodman, have found little reason to challenge Boring’s plans. For some, the airport factored into the decision.

When a large expansion into the city of Las Vegas came before the City Council in 2023, Goodman criticized the project as unsafe, inaccessible and inefficient, but said she would still vote in favor of it “because of the plea of the hotels and the private sector to move more and more people easily around our Southern Nevada community.”

She said she had asked the casinos and hotels if they wanted to connect to the Vegas Loop. “Every one of them said, ‘We’re scared not to, because if it succeeds and if it gets to the airport, we want to connect,’” Goodman told ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas.

With Goodman’s vote, the council approved the extension unanimously.

Michael Squires and Anjeanette Damon contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Daniel Rothberg for ProPublica and Dayvid Figler, City Cast Las Vegas.

Billionaire Trump associate Elon Musk’s latest disinformation campaign is targeting the U.K. government, which Musk appears to believe is not sufficiently anti-immigrant. Musk, who has already shaped the incoming Trump administration’s economic policy by proposing cuts to government spending and tech-oriented privatization of services, signifies a “new era” in American politics, says our guest Quinn Slobodian, who is chronicling right-wing tech billionaires’ accelerating attempts to mold the world according to their “destructive” and “nihilist” beliefs. In a far-reaching conversation, Slobodian touches on Musk’s clear admiration of authoritarian strongmen, market deregulation and white supremacist rhetoric.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

That’s about one-third of all federal spending, and the pair also believe they can cut the government workforce by 75 percent. In announcing the office, known as DOGE, Trump said that “these wonderful Americans” will “dismantle” bureaucracy, “slash” regulations, cut “wasteful” expenditures, and “restructure” agencies. Ramaswamy took to X to promise, “We will not go gently.”

Overall, that’s likely going to be bad news for U.S. environmental policy and the Biden administration’s landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. But there’s a chance that, if DOGE wields its cleaver widely enough, the department may actually please environmentalists by eliminating a few things they have long-loathed, including fossil fuel subsidies. 

“It’s a truth test to all of their messaging,” said Matthew Tejada, a former Environmental Protection Agency official who’s now a senior vice president at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “These handouts to the oil and gas industry, which allows these multinational corporations to earn billions of dollars a year, fly in the face of everything else they talk about.”

The extent of these federal subsidies depends on how they are counted. The Fossil Fuel Subsidy Tracker pegged them at nearly $18 billion in 2023. The International Monetary Fund estimate is $757 billion, including what it calls ‘implicit’ subsidies, such as undervaluing environmental harm. While the exact number is debated, it is clear that ending these industry benefits could reap billions in revenue. 

“The enormous handouts that we continue to make to an industry that extracts tens of billions of dollars out of our country already should certainly be somewhere within their line of sight,” Tejada said. “There are dozens and dozens of different subsidies.” 

One major tax break allows companies to deduct most of the cost of drilling new oil and gas wells. The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan panel of Congress, estimates that repealing this “intangible drilling costs” provision could bring an additional $6 billion in revenue by 2032. Another — the percentage depletion tax break — allows independent producers to recover development costs of declining oil, gas, and coal reserves and has been on the books since 1926. Eliminating it could generate an additional $7.3 billion. 

“I don’t know how much they will be able to cut the tax code subsidies,” said Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering. In all likelihood, he said, oil and gas companies will lobby successfully to preserve their interests. And, he argued, the largest benefit they receive from the government is the ability to pollute, which is outside DOGE’s mandate. 

“They don’t touch on hidden subsidies,” said Jacobson. “The biggest subsidy is allowing these companies to freeload off our health.” 

Neither the Trump transition team or the American Petroleum Institute responded to multiple requests for comment. 

Both Tejada and Jacobson said their wishlist for DOGE would go beyond fossil fuel subsidies. One deadline Tejada is watching arrives this spring, when the tax cuts of the first Trump administration expire. Letting them lapse could be one way the government could work toward a balanced budget. Jacobson said another often overlooked topic is Washington’s support for corn ethanol fuels. The government has spent billions propping up a fuel that studies show has greater climate and environmental impacts than gasoline and now accounts for 45 percent of all the corn grown in the U.S. 

But, they say, for now these hopes for DOGE tackling environmental concerns remain just that. “They probably will end up cutting a lot less than they want to cut,” Jacobson said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Elon Musk could end fossil fuel subsidies on Jan 3, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.

After the Republican-led Congress passes a government spending bill but rejects a last-minute demand for a debt limit suspension from President-elect Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk, we look at the richest man in the world’s growing influence, with The American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner. “At the end of the day, Musk got exactly what he wanted,” says Kuttner, referring to Musk’s influence in the removal of an anti-China trade provision in the bill. “It’s a classic case of Musk rolling Trump. … I don’t think this is going to end well.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

Elon,

I know your relationship with ProPublica got off to a rocky start when we contacted you about a story we were writing about your federal taxes. You replied with a lone punctuation mark — “?” — and subsequently called the story that mentioned you “a bunch of misleading stuff.”

We can agree to disagree on that story and a lot of other things. But we thought it might be useful to reach out again in light of your role, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, as co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Simply put: If you’re trying to identify wasteful practices and spending by federal agencies, you’ll find a wealth of actionable issues that our reporting has surfaced over the past 16 years. You and Vivek noted in your recent Wall Street Journal op-ed on your plans for DOGE that “the federal government’s procurement process is also badly broken.”

Our reporting over the years provides some powerful illustrations of that point. ProPublica’s work on the Navy’s cost overruns and design flaws in its ships is second to none. We recently disclosed how Microsoft boxed its competitors out of providing cybersecurity software to the biggest government agencies, including the Pentagon. (Microsoft defended its conduct, saying in a statement that its “sole goal during this period was to support an urgent request by the Administration to enhance the security posture of federal agencies who were continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors.”)

Perhaps the most immediate relevance of our journalism to your work arises from your reported interest in creating a phone app that most Americans could use to file their taxes.

No national news organization has been more focused on this subject than ProPublica. We have thoroughly documented why the United States is one of the only industrialized countries in the world that does not provide free filing to its citizens: Companies like Intuit that make billions of dollars selling tax preparation software have persuaded Congress to block free filing and keep their businesses alive.

I’d encourage you to take a look at the story “Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free.”

You’re a busy person, so I’ll provide a TL;DR version: The tax prep industry has blocked free filing by organizing a bipartisan coalition on Capitol Hill that is anchored by House Republicans but includes Democrats like Zoe Lofgren, who represents Silicon Valley.

The industry also attracted support from longtime Republican figures like Grover Norquist, who has branded proponents of free filing as “big spenders in Washington, D.C.” who are trying to “socialize all tax preparation in America.”

As you know (or will soon learn if you pursue this agenda), despite decades of resistance, the IRS recently launched a pilot program for free filing. It works pretty well, but it’ll likely remain small scale unless something changes in the current Washington status quo.

That’s where you and Vivek have a historic opportunity.

What has always struck me about Washington is its ability to resist fundamental change. People arrive with big plans for reforms and often end up becoming part of the problem.

I began my career as a Washington reporter in 1983, two years after President Ronald Reagan took office promising to upend how business was done in the capital. Reagan was serious about coming up with some concrete ideas for saving money and reducing waste. He created a presidential commission of business executives and urged its members to work like “tireless bloodhounds.”

“Don’t leave any stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency,” the president said.

Two years later, the commission delivered 47 volumes of reforms that it said could save $424 billion in government spending over three years. Most of the proposals required congressional action, a daunting task when the Senate was controlled by Republicans and the House by Democrats. In the end, only 27% of the recommendations were enacted. By the time Reagan’s term was over, government spending was up and the deficit had grown.

I believe Republican control of the presidency and both houses of Congress gives you and Vivek a better shot at taking on issues like free tax filing that have long been dismissed as lost causes. There’s a broad coalition of Americans who voted for Donald Trump, many of whom feel the government cares little about their problems. Politicians of both parties understand that their futures may depend on taking real, measurable steps to address those concerns.

Eliminating the annual ritual of paying money to a third party in order to tell the government what it already knows about your personal finances could be both popular and more efficient.

There has been a lot of skepticism about whether it’s possible to achieve your goal of cutting trillions of dollars from the federal budget. It appears to me that you could only rack up that level of savings by slashing everything from Medicare to military spending. I think the president’s political advisers will take the ax out of your hands before you hit the first trillion.

That’s not to say there isn’t an array of government programs that could be better run. We see our job as holding power to account, and the waste of the people’s money is one focal point of our reporting. That’s why we’ve written repeatedly about waste and fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, the government’s two biggest health care programs. (We’ve also covered the way cuts to those programs harm people.)

I have little doubt that we will write stories in the coming years that will enrage people you know. Some of our work may even focus on you or your companies. With immense power comes immense scrutiny. (As we did several years ago, we will always reach out to you for your response before we publish anything about you.)

Still, I would be disappointed if we did not also publish a piece or two that prompted you to storm into Vivek’s office and say: “Damn, this is outrageous. We could fix this.”

Best,

Steve Engelberg

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Stephen Engelberg.

“For 89 years, through war and peace, boom time and bust, health and pandemics, Social Security has never missed a single payment. Compared to the risky alternatives on Wall Street, Social Security is a rock of retirement security. If billionaires like Elon Musk paid into Social Security at the same rate as the rest of us on all of their income, we could expand benefits for everyone and pay them in full forever.

This is a declaration of war against seniors, people with disabilities, and the American public. The Republicans are coming for your Social Security, which they call a ‘nightmare.’ Elon Musk’s commission is a plot to destroy our Social Security by giving it to Wall Street executives — so that you get nothing and they get everything.

We’ve seen this play again and again. When Republicans destroyed defined benefit pension plans, they claimed that the market would be able to create amazing returns for everybody. Instead, workers got pennies, while Wall Street managers got billions. That is always the plan.

We will defeat this Republican effort to steal our earned benefits. The money is ours, Mike Lee, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump. You’re not going to get a penny of it.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

As Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stirs up false claims of voter fraud ahead of Election Day, we look at the role of an increasingly “partisan” Federal Election Commission with former FEC general counsel Larry Noble, who explains why “voters of a lot of wealth have the ability to influence elections the way that the rest of us don’t.” As the influence of money in politics grows unchecked, he warns, it has the effect of “silencing the voter.” Noble also responds to multibillionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk’s $1 million giveaways to Pennsylvania voters and discusses the lasting impact of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision on campaign finance law.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Craig Holman, Government Affairs Lobbyist with Public Citizen, issued the following statement:

“Elon Musk’s $1 million giveaway to registered voters – and only registered voters – in swing states is a not-so-disguised attempt to buy votes and it appears to veer smack dab into violating federal law against paying people to register and vote. Public Citizen is filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission challenging Musk’s latest denigration of the right to vote freely and fairly.”

Read Public Citizen’s complaint here.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

We take a look at the richest man in the world, multibillionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, and his support for Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election. During a campaign town hall in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, Musk pledged to give away $1 million to random voters in battleground states every day until November 5 if they sign an online petition in support of the First and Second Amendments. We speak to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Lipton, whose new investigation at The New York Times looks at Musk’s multibillion-dollar contracts with the federal government and the many regulatory investigations his businesses are currently being subject to, both of which may be at stake with the results of the upcoming election.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Photograph Source: MINISTÉRIO DAS COMUNICAÇÕES – CC BY 2.0

Millions of Brazilians woke up on August 31 in a country without X, after the Supreme Court ordered the national telecommunications agency to block the social media platform. This move culminated over a year of X’s refusal to follow Brazil’s telecommunications laws, particularly those requiring deplatforming of suspects in internet crime investigations. In a single day, X lost 22 million users, while alternative platform Blue Sky gained 2 million new Brazilian users in just three days. The order to ban the platform initially came from Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, a figure vilified by the Bolsonaros and the international far right, and was ratified by a 5-0 vote in the Supreme Court’s 1st working group three days later.

The Court order came 12 days after Elon Musk closed X’s Brazilian offices to avoid liability for criminal charges against the company. With X owing R$9 million in fines, the Supreme Court froze the Brazilian assets of Musk’s company Starlink—a minor player in Brazil’s internet service provider industry, serving 250,000 clients in a country of 220 million. After the ban, a furious Musk used his own social media platform to attack one of Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court Ministers, Alexandre de Moraes, inadvertently doxing allies by publishing court documents containing their personal data.

Hailed as a victory for sovereignty while criticized by the far right as an affront to U.S. free speech principles, the X ban is the latest chapter in over a year of conflicts between Brazil and the world’s richest man

To understand how Brazil reached this point, we must go back to October 18, 2018, between the first and second rounds of Brazil’s Presidential elections. That day, investigative journalist Patricia Campos Mello published an article in Folha de São Paulo exposing a group of Brazilian businessmen for spending R$12 million to slander presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s rival, Fernando Haddad, on Meta’s WhatsApp platform. Using illegally acquired personal data, the group microtargeted segments of the population with disinformation. For instance, evangelical voters were bombarded with doctored photos falsely claiming that, as mayor, Haddad distributed baby bottles with penis-shaped nipples to São Paulo pre-school students. As a result, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court—comprising 3 Supreme Court Justices, 2 Superior Court Judges, and 2 lawyers—immediately launched an election fraud investigation.

This led to a surge in threats against judges in the Supreme and Superior Electoral Courts, extending to their families and calling for a military coup to shut down the Supreme Court. Among those making the call was Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Congressman Eduardo, who recorded a YouTube video seen by hundreds of thousands, saying, “All you need to shut down the Supreme Court is a single soldier or corporal […] Do you think anyone will protest in its defense?”

Unlike some countries, the Brazilian judiciary lacks its own police force. According to the 1988 Constitution, judiciary police duties are assigned to the regular police. The system’s failure to adequately address threats against Supreme and Superior Electoral Court judges prompted Chief Justice Dias Toffoli to issue a decree on March 14, 2019, allowing Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes to directly supervise a federal investigation into these threats.

As a result, Moraes became the main target of a hate campaign by Bolsonaro’s allies, who argued that, as a victim, he was unqualified to investigate his aggressors. Meanwhile, online threats against the judiciary intensified.

On October 29, 2021, the Superior Electoral Court announced the results of its investigation, with 5 of its 7 Justices confirming that the Bolsonaro campaign had used social media to commit election fraud in 2018. Unable to determine the fraud’s impact, the Court issued no punitive measures. However, Justice Moraes, set to take over the Presidency of the Superior Electoral Court six weeks before the 2022 presidential elections, announced that they now understood the scheme and that anyone using similar tactics in 2022 would “go to jail for attacking elections and democracy.”

Moraes, a conservative appointed to the Supreme Court by coup president Michel Temer in 2017, was already a target of Bolsonarista claims of a “communist dictatorship of the toga.” His upcoming role as head of the electoral court during the presidential election drove the Brazilian far-right into a frenzy.

As destroying the Supreme Court and installing a military dictatorship became the Bolsonarista rallying cry, de Moraes ordered several preventive arrests. These included Congressman Daniel Silveira for abusing his authority by repeatedly urging the army to shut down the Supreme Court while defying court orders. Sara Giromini, who styled herself as Sara Winter after the English fascist leader, was also arrested. She set up an Azov-inspired paramilitary camp outside Brasília, then led followers to camp out in front of the Supreme Court, launching increasingly large fireworks at the building for three days while making online threats against de Moraes and his family.

Clearly inspired by U.S. events—especially since Eduardo Bolsonaro attended the January 5 Washington DC “war council” meeting before the Capitol attack—the Bolsonaros began crafting their own “stop the steal” narrative, drawing more allies from the international far-right. As this campaign grew, Glenn Greenwald joined the attacks on Moraes, using elements of U.S. law that resonated in the Global North but were irrelevant in Brazil’s legal context.

After months of claiming “communists” would steal the elections, and deploying his federal highway police to suppress voting in pro-Lula districts on election day, Bolsonaro lost and fled the country before his term ended, leaving the presidency to his Vice President, General Hamilton Mourão.

In the last 60 days before Lula took office, two Bolsonaro supporters were arrested for attempting to detonate a bomb at Brasília’s airport, while another group staged a violent attack on Brazil’s Federal Police headquarters. Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters camped outside military barracks, demanding the shutdown of the Supreme Court.

A week after the inauguration, on January 8, a crowd invaded the National Congress and Supreme Court. Their goal, according to a detailed coup plan found in Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister Anderson Torres’ house, was to pressure Lula into declaring a state of siege, which would have handed national security to the armed forces. Lula refused to fall for the trick, relying on his federal police to disperse the rioters. Meanwhile, high-tension electrical towers were sabotagednationwide.

Two months after the capitol riots, a series of school massacres terrorized the nation. Investigators uncovered dozens of neo-Nazi cells targeting children on social media, attempting to incite them to commit school massacres on April 20 in honor of Hitler’s birthday. The Justice Ministry summoned social media representatives and provided a list of accounts requesting deplatforming. X initially resisted. Etela Aranha, then Secretary of Digital Rights, recalls:

“I told them, ‘I’m talking to you because there are profiles of actual terrorists. They use the names and faces of school massacre terrorists, posting videos with songs saying, “I’m going to get you kids, you can’t outrun my gun.” There are clips showing the terrorist’s picture followed by real school massacres.’ The Twitter representative said this didn’t violate their terms. After strong pushback from the justice minister and social pressure, Twitter changed its policy and cooperated with the investigation.” It was one of the last times the company would respect a request from the Brazilian government.

Fast forward to April 3, 2024. A libertarian pundit and former PR operative named Michael Shellenberger tweeted excerpts from emails by X executives, dubbed “Twitter Files Brazil,” alleging crimes by  Alexandre de Moraes. Shellenberger claimed Moraes had pressed criminal charges against Twitter Brazil’s lawyer for refusing to turn over personal information on political enemies. Elon Musk quickly shared the tweets, which went viral and were embraced by the international far right, delighting former President Bolsonaro and his supporters.

Aranha soon exposed the flaws in this narrative. The only criminal charge against Twitter Brazil mentioned in the leaked emails came from the São Paulo district attorney’s office after the company refused to provide data on a leader of Brazil’s largest cocaine trafficking organization, the PCC. Shellenberger had cut an email section about the São Paulo investigation and mixed it with unrelated complaints about Moraes.

Pressed by Brazilian reporters, Shellenberger said: “I regret my mistake and apologize. I don’t have evidence that Moraes threatened to file criminal charges against Twitter’s Brazilian lawyer.”

Three days later, Elon Musk announced his company would stop obeying court orders in Brazil and reinstate accounts of those deplatformed, including Alan dos Santos, a fugitive hiding in the U.S. On X, Musk tweeted a series of insults against Moraes, demanding he “resign or be impeached.”

That night, Moraes ordered X to be included in an ongoing obstruction of justice investigation related to the January 8, 2023, coup attempt and announced a series of fines for refusing to comply with court orders, which have now risen to R$9 million.

Tension continued to mount and on August 7, Musk threatened to close X’s offices in Brazil, claiming court orders to remove accounts of suspects in an online election fraud investigation amounted to “censorship.” His statements were immediately praised by Bolsonaro and allies in the  international far right but had no basis in Brazil’s free speech laws.

Like other nations such as Germany and France, Brazil views the right to free speech as fundamental but not absolute—a right that must coexist with other essential rights. According to Brazil’s constitution, no fundamental right can be used to deny another. This principle allows Brazil to ban actions legal in the U.S., like inciting pedophilia or practicing Nazism. In the case of the digital militia investigation, the court ruled that the right to free expression cannot be used to undermine the right to free and fair elections, another fundamental right in Brazil.

On August 17, Musk fired 40 workers and closed X’s offices in Brazil, leaving behind debts and criminal charges but pledging to keep the platform operational. This violated Brazil’s telecommunications laws, which require any media company operating in the country to have a legal representative. The Supreme Court froze Starlink’s assets until Musk settled his debts, and Moraes warned that if X didn’t appoint a legal representative, the platform would be banned. Instead of complying, Musk escalated his attacks on Moraes and President Lula, sharing an AI-generated image of Moraes behind bars with his 195 million followers.

On August 29, Moraes gave X  24-hours to comply with Brazil’s laws. When X missed the deadline, he ordered Anatel, the national telecommunications agency, to instruct all internet service providers to block X.

With X now offline in Brazil, on Monday, September 2, the Supreme Court held a plenary session to rule on Moraes’ order, upholding it by a vote of 5-0 in the Court’s 1st working group.

Justifying his vote, Minister Flavio Dino stated that a foreign company cannot operate in national territory “and expect to impose its own view on which laws it believes are valid or should be enforced […] Economic power and the size of a bank account do not grant immunity from jurisdiction.”

The Court has made it clear that X can reopen in Brazil by complying with the nation’s laws. Whether Musk will do that is another story. On Monday, September 2, Brazilian news outlets reported that Musk sought help from the Biden administration’s U.S. Embassy in Brasília to develop a strategy to overturn the Supreme Court ruling.

This article originally appeared in United World, and can be seen in its original format here

The post Inside Brazil’s X Ban: How Elon Musk Started–and lost–a Fight With Brazil’s Judiciary appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brian Mier.

Many users of X, formerly Twitter, seem deeply misguided. They imagine that Elon Musk is the saviour of free speech. He’s not. He is simply the latest pioneer in monetising speech. Which isn’t the same thing at all.

All the blue ticks on X – mine included – are buying access to an audience. Which is why Musk has made it so easy to get a blue tick – and why there are now so many of them on the platform. If you don’t pay Musk, the algorithms make sure you get minimal reach. You are denied your five seconds of fame.

That has particularly infuriated corporate journalists. On what used to be called Twitter, they got access to large audiences as a natural right, along with politicians and celebrities. They never paid a penny. They felt entitled to those big audiences because they already enjoyed similarly big audiences in the so-called “legacy media”. They did not see why they start competing with the rest of us to be heard.

The new media system was rigged, as the old media system has been for centuries, to ensure that it was their voices that counted. Or rather it was the voices of the ultra-wealthy paying their salaries who counted.

Independent journalists, including myself, have been some of the chief beneficiaries of Musk’s X. But I don’t for a minute make the mistake of thinking Musk is really in favour of my free speech – or anyone else’s – compared to his own.

A reminder that free speech in America is special and we need to do everything possible to preserve it https://t.co/yAvX1TpuRp

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 19, 2024

Being able to buy yourself an audience isn’t what most people understand as free speech.

Musk’s X is simply the latest innovation on the traditional “free speech” model from the bad old days. Then, only a handful of very rich men could afford to buy themselves lots of hired hands, known as journalists; own a printing press; and be in a position to attract advertisers.

Billionaires paid a small fortune to buy the privilege of “free speech”. As a result, they managed to secure for themselves a very big voice in a highly exclusive market. You and I can now pay a hundred bucks a year and buy ourselves a very, very small voice in a massively overcrowded, cacophonous marketplace of voices.

The point is this: Speech on X is still a privilege – it’s just one that you can now pay for. And like all privileges, it is on licence from the owner. Musk can withdraw that privilege – and withdraw it selectively – whenever he thinks someone or something is harming his interests, whether directly or indirectly.

Musk is already disappearing opinions, either ones he doesn’t like or ones he cannot afford to be seen supporting – most visibly, anything too critical of Israel.

As I said earlier this week, “decolonization”, “from the river to the sea” and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide.

Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension. https://t.co/1fCFo5Lezb

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 17, 2023

He has threatened users with suspension for repeating slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – in other words, for calling for an end to what the judges of the World Court recently decreed to be Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians. He is also against hosting on X the term “decolonisation” in reference to Israel, claiming perversely that “it implies a Jewish genocide” – itself an implicit admission that Israelis (not Jews) have long been colonising Palestine and ethnically cleansing Palestinians.

The Israel lobby is also pushing hard for a ban on the words “Zionism” and “Zionist”. It won’t be long before X, like Meta, cracks down on these terms too.

Note that banning these words makes it all but impossible to discuss the specific historical forces that led to Israel’s creation at the expense of the Palestinian people, or analyse the ideology that today underpins Israel’s efforts to disappear the Palestinian people, or explain how the West has been complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories for decades and is currently aiding the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The loss of “Zionist” and “Zionism” from our lexicon would be a serious handicap for anyone trying to explain some of the major events unfolding in the Middle East at the moment. Which is precisely why the establishment, and Musk, are so keen to see such words discredited.

The Egyptian comedian Bassem Yousef, one of the most acute and acid critics of Israel, has suddenly disappeared from X. Many assume he has been banned. The Jerusalem Post highlights that, shortly before he vanished from X, he had written: “Are you still scared to be called an antisemite by those Zionists?”

Whatever the case, you will see Musk’s X getting a lot more censorious over the next months and years, especially against what he is terming the “faaaaaar left” – that is, disparate groups of people he has lumped together who hold opinions either he doesn’t like personally or that can damage his business interests.

From the standpoint of the faaaaaar left, this platform is far right, but it’s actually just centrist https://t.co/PUNAvdTKQS

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 20, 2024

Billionaires aren’t there to protect free speech. They got to be billionaires by being very good at making money – by seizing markets, by inflating our appetite for consumption, and by buying politicians to rig the system to protect their empires from competitors.

Musk understands that the only people against a world based on rapacious profit and material greed are the “faaaaaar left”. Which is why the “faaaaaar left” are in the crosshairs of anyone with power in our rigged system, from the centrists to the right wing, from “liberals” to conservatives, from Blue to Red, from Democrats to Republicans.

The right and the centrists disagree only on how best to maintain that rapacious, consumption-driven, environmentally destructive status quo, and on how to normalise it to different segments of the public. They are competing wings of a system designed by a single ruling cabal.

I am willing to serve pic.twitter.com/BJhGbcA2e0

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 20, 2024

Musk used to see himself as a liberal and now leans towards the Trumpian right. Trump used to see himself as a Clintonian Democrat but now sees himself as… well, fill in the blank, according to taste.

The point is that centrists and the right are, in essence, interchangeable – as should be only too clear from the rapid shift of free-speech liberals towards authoritarian censorship, and the rapid (pretend) reinvention of conservatives from moralising guardians of family values to the embattled defenders of free speech.

Neither’s posturing should be taken at face value. Both are equally authoritarian, when their interests are threatened by “an excess of democracy”. Their apparent differences are simply the competition for dominance within a system that’s been gerrymandered to their mutual benefit. We are their dupes, buying into their games.

JUST IN: ?? ?? Emmanuel Macron's Liberal MEP threatens to shut down X in Europe .

"If Elon Musk does not comply with the European rules on digital services, the EU Commission will ask the continental operators to block X or, in the most extreme case, force them to completely… pic.twitter.com/8rbt4pjSPp

— BRICS News (@BRICSinfo) August 20, 2024

The two tribes are there to offer the pretence of a battle of ideas, of competition, of choice at election time, of freedom. They look hostile to each other, but when push comes to shove they are united in their support for oligarchy, and opposition to genuine free speech, to real democracy, to meaningful pluralism, to an open society.

The “faaaaaar left” are the true enemy of both the centrists and the right. Why? Because they are the only group struggling for a society in which money doesn’t buy privilege, where speech isn’t something someone can own.

That’s why, when Musk intensifies his crackdown, it will be the “faaaaar left” that’s erased so completely you won’t notice it’s gone. You won’t remember it was ever there.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

The United Auto Workers has filed federal labor charges against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, accusing them of illegally attempting to threaten and intimidate workers who go on strike. The UAW’s complaint comes in response to comments made by Trump during a discussion with Musk Monday on the social media platform X, which Musk owns. The Wall Street Journal reports that Musk is funding a new super PAC to help Trump in swing states and return him to the White House. There have been reports Musk was planning to spend $45 million a month to help elect Trump, but Musk has disputed that figure. Reporter Dana Mattioli says it’s the culmination of Musk’s “remarkable political transformation,” with his break from the Democratic Party largely driven by his anti-union politics and the Biden administration’s ties to the United Auto Workers.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The decision followed the reasoning of the far-right Fifth Circuit’s ruling in SEC v. Jarkesy. The Supreme Court agreed with the Fifth Circuit in its decision this term, but it did not touch the argument directly relevant to this case, leaving the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in place for the time being. Judge Albright’s ruling, ruling against the constitutionality of the 89 year-old agency, may now give the Supreme Court occasion to weigh in.

In response to the decision, Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser issued the following statement: “Right-wing judges have made it all too easy for corporate actors to attack workers. Billionaires like Elon Musk don’t care whether administrative law judges’ removal protections are too robust or not. They just hate unions, and are using the courts as a weapon to crush them.”

Revolving Door Project Researcher Will Royce added: “Administrative agencies like the NLRB are critical for safeguarding workers’ rights, which is why they have long been in the crosshairs of right-wingers and corporations. So long as corporate-aligned judges sit on the bench, we can expect rulings that erode protections for everyday people.”

“This ruling is yet further evidence that the threat posed by corporate influence is not limited to the executive branch. Judicial decisions are increasingly being shaped by the interests of corporations, threatening the well-being of American workers,” concluded Hauser.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The post Nonprofit Watchdog Suffers Due to Elon Musk’s SLAPP Suit appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

It all stems from the April 15 incident that took place at an Assyrian Orthodox service conducted by Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and the Rev. Isaac Royel at Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley, Sydney.  A 16-year-old youth, captured on the livestream of the surface, is shown heading to the bishop before feverishly stabbing him, speaking Arabic about insults to the Prophet Muhammed as he does so.  Rev. Royel also received injuries.

Up to 600 people subsequently gathered around the church.  A number demanded that police surrender the boy.  In the hours of rioting that followed, 51 police officers were injured.  Various Sydney mosques received death threats.

The matter – dramatic, violent, raging – rattled the authorities.  For the sake of appearance, the heavies, including counter-terrorism personnel, New South Wales police and members of the Australian domestic spy agency, ASIO, were brought in.  The pudding was ready for a severe overegging.  On April 16, the NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb deemed the stabbing a “terrorist incident”.  NSW Premier Chris Minns stated that the incident was being investigated as a “terrorist incident” given the “religiously motivated” language used during the alleged attack.

After conducting interviews with the boy while still in his hospital bed on April 18, the decision was made to charge him with the commission of an alleged act of terrorism.  This, despite a behavioural history consistent with, as The Guardian reports, “mental illness or intellectual disability.”  For their part, the boy’s family noted “anger management and behavioural issues” along with his “short fuse”, none of which lent themselves to a conclusion that he had been radicalised.  He did, however, have a past with knife crime.

Assuming the general public to be a hive of incipient terrorism easily stimulated by images of violence, networks and media outlets across the country chose to crop the video stream.  The youth is merely shown approaching the bishop, at which point he raises his hand and is editorially frozen in suspended time.

Taking this approach implied a certain mystification that arises from tampering and redacting material in the name of decency and inoffensiveness; to refuse to reveal such details and edit others, the authorities and information guardians were making their moralistic mark.  They were also, ironically enough, lending themselves to accusations of the very problems they seek to combat: misinformation and its more sinister sibling, disinformation.

Another telling point was the broader omission in most press reporting to detail the general background of the bishop in question.  Emmanuel is an almost comically conservative churchman, a figure excommunicated for his theological differences with orthodoxy.  He has also adopted fire and brimstone views against homosexuality, seeing it as a “crime in the eyes of God”, attacked other religions of the book, including Judaism and Islam, and sees global conspiracies behind the transmission of COVID-19.  Hardly, it would seem, the paragon of mild tolerance and calm acceptance in a cosmopolitan society.

On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, got busy, announcing that X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, had been issued with legal notices to remove material within 24 hours depicting “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”.  The material in question featured the attack at the Good Shepherd Church.

Under the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth), the commissioner is granted various powers to make sure the sheep do not stray.  Internet service providers can be requested or required to block access to material that promotes abhorrent violent conduct, incites such conduct, instructs in abhorrent violent conduct or depicts abhorrent violent conduct.  Removal of material promoting, instructing, or depicting such “abhorrent violent conduct”, including “terrorist acts” can be ordered for removal if it risks going “viral” and causing “significant harm to the Australian community”.

X took a different route, preferring to “geoblock” the content.  Those in Australia, in other words, would not be able to access the content except via such alternative means as a virtual private network (VPN).  The measure was regarded as insufficient by the commissioner.  In response, a shirty Musk dubbed Grant Australia’s “censorship commissar” who was “demanding *global* content bans”.  On April 21, a spokesperson for X stated that the commissioner lacked “the authority to dictate what content X’s users can see globally.  We will robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court.”

In court, the commissioner argued that X’s interim measure not to delete the material but “geoblock” it failed to comply with the Online Safety Act.  Siding with her at first instance, the court’s interim injunction requires X to hide the posts in question from all users globally.  A warning notice is to cover them. The two-day injunction gives X the opportunity to respond.

There is something risible in all of this.  From the side of the authorities, Grant berates and intrudes, treating the common citizenry as malleable, immature and easily led.  Spare them the graphic images – she and members of her office decide what is “abhorrent” and “offensive” to general sensibilities.

Platforms such as Meta and X engage in their own forms of censorship and information curation, their agenda algorithmically driven towards noise, shock and indignation.  All the time, they continue to indulge in surveillance capitalism, a corporate phenomenon the Australian government shows little interest in battling.  On both sides of this coin, from the bratty, petulant Musk, to the teacherly manners of the eSafety Commissioner, the great public is being mocked and infantilised.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Broadband satellite service provider Starlink is now being used in the Pacific but not always legally, for now.

In Vanuatu, border workers are confiscating equipment.

Telecom regulator Brian Winji said people using the service had signed up overseas — likely in Australia and New Zealand — and have brought the equipment into the country.

“They smuggle it into Vanuatu without customs knowing,” Winiji said.

“[Starlink] is not allowed to operate inside Vanuatu without getting a proper licence.”

Starlink was given a temporary restricted licence to operate after severe back-to-back cyclones battered the country. But this was only 20 units given to the National Disaster Management Office and it lapses by the end of April.

Anyone else using Starlink is breaking the rules.

Winji said Starlink had not fully applied to operate in Vanuatu and he does not know when they will be operational.

‘Future competitive environment’
Cook Islands telecommunications regulator chair Bernard Hill said regulators who were banning the use of Starlink might have an “overinflated view” of their importance.

“They feel slightly offended by the fact that this happens without their, ‘oh, you’re allowed to do that’. In deregulated markets, like Cook Islands, like New Zealand, the rule is we let you do it until there’s a good reason to say no,” he said.

“They approached me about a licence 18 months ago, they still haven’t resolved on their local structure but unlike the other regulators, I have authorised the roaming of devices purchased in New Zealand and Australia.”

Hill said he did not know the exact number of people using the service, but it has been enough to have a competitive influence on Vodafone Cook Islands — the nation’s biggest broadband provider.

“I can’t say Vodafone is happy about it but they are at least realistic about this being part of the future competitive environment and I believe they’re doing the best to cope with the challenge that presents them.”

In Fiji, Starlink has already been given a licence to operate but it has not yet set up the service locally.

The Telecommunications Authority chairperson David Eyre said it could be operational by the middle of this month.

He said people who had already brought Starlink equipment into the country would need to switch over to the local service when it was running.

“Starlink is in the process of finalising the operational procedures, processes and what not in preparation for launch, we are encouraged that they’re probably going to launch soon and when I say soon, probably early quarter two,” Eyre said.

Delivering high-speed internet
The company, owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk, promises to deliver high-speed internet to the remotest regions by using thousands of satellites orbiting close to the planet.

Hill said Starlink and other low earth orbit satellite companies should be a good fit for the Cook Islands Pa Enua (outer islands) that struggle with poor communications infrastructure.

Eyre said remote connectivity in Fiji was a consideration for giving the licence.

“Coverage in those areas is probably one of the main reasons why we have licensed Starlink here in Fiji, to serve the remotest of the remote.”

In other Pacific nations, Starlink has become or is becoming available.

Papua New Guinea gave the service an operation licence at the beginning of this year and last month Samoa’s cabinet did the same.

Hill said he did not think Starlink and similar companies would make other forms of receiving internet irrelevant.

He said countries needed back up options in case something goes wrong — like the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Haa’pai volcano eruption that destroyed Tonga’s internet cable.

Hill said as more Pacific economies rely on internet services, being cut off could be disastrous.

“From the point of view of redundancy and resilience having access to services from overhead as well as undersea is pretty important.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

I wrote last November (FAIR.org, 11/22/23) about how Twitter owner Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters—alleging the group’s research “manipulated” data in an effort to “destroy” Musk’s social media platform—was an episode of a right-wing corporate media mogul using his wealth to crush free speech.

“Much appreciated!” declared Elon Musk in response to the Missouri attorney general’s probe (Riverfront Times, 3/25/24). “Media Matters is doing everything it can to undermine the First Amendment. Truly an evil organization.”

Now Musk’s friends in government are joining his efforts to silence his critics. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is suing Media Matters to demand internal documents, because he, like Musk, believes the group “manipulated Twitter‘s algorithm to create a report showing advertisements for normal companies on the platform appeared next to not-normal content, or what Bailey calls ‘contrived controversial posts,’” causing advertisers to flee (Riverfront Times, 3/25/24).

Bailey said in a statement (3/25/24):

My office has reason to believe Media Matters engaged in fraudulent activities to solicit donations from Missourians to intimidate advertisers into leaving X, the last social media platform committed to free speech in America….

Media Matters has pursued an activist agenda in its attempt to destroy X, because they cannot control it. And because they cannot control it, or the free speech platform it provides to Missourians to express their own viewpoints in the public square, the radical “progressives” at Media Matters have resorted to fraud to, as Benjamin Franklin once said, mark X “for the odium of the public, as an enemy to the liberty of the press.” Missourians will not be manipulated by “progressive” activists masquerading as news outlets, and they will not be defrauded in the process.

Bailey clearly wants to get into the fray that has caught up with right-wing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton (11/20/23) announced he was launching an investigation into “Media Matters, a radical anti-free speech organization.” He cited Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act as grounds for looking into whether Media Matters “fraudulently manipulated data on X.com“:

We are examining the issue closely to ensure that the public has not been deceived by the schemes of radical left-wing organizations who would like nothing more than to limit freedom by reducing participation in the public square.

As the government of Texas threatened to bring charges against a nonprofit organization for publishing a study of a multi-billion-dollar corporation, Musk posted the attorney general’s press release on X (11/20/23) and gloated, “Fraud has both civil and criminal penalties.”

McCarthyist witch hunt

It’s easy to write off Bailey and Paxton as partisan hacks who are using the power of the state as a public relations tool to win adulation in MAGA-land. But Musk’s ability to use the partisan prosecutors and the courts to engage in a McCarthyist witch hunt against the corporation’s critics is highly concerning.

A federal judge dismissed Musk’s complaint that the Center for Countering Digital Hate had “embarked on a scare campaign” (Verge, 3/25/24).

At around the same time as Bailey announced his crusade, federal Judge Charles Breyer dismissed Twitter’s lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (Verge, 3/25/24), saying that the company suing CCDH for researching hate speech on the site was “about punishing the defendants for their speech.” It’s good news that a sensible judge can protect free speech. But how long can that last against one of the world’s richest people, who has made it clear he has an agenda to silence critics, and the collaboration of powerful officials?

Former President Donald Trump left his mark on the judiciary, appointing “more than 200 judges to the federal bench, including nearly as many powerful federal appeals court judges in four years as Barack Obama appointed in eight” (Pew Research, 1/13/21). And Bailey and Paxton are not the only state attorneys general who are aligned with Trump and his political positions; Paxton was able to get 16 others to join with him in petitioning the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election (New York Times, 12/9/20).

Rather than turning Twitter into an open free-speech utopia, Musk’s administration of Twitter has been marked by aggressive censorship (Al Jazeera, 5/2/23). Reporters Without Borders (10/26/23) said that Musk’s removal of guardrails against disinformation has been so disastrous that it “regards X as the embodiment of the threat that online platforms pose to democracies.” After the National Labor Relations Board said that Musk’s SpaceX fired workers critical of him (Bloomberg, 1/3/24), the company argued that the NLRB’s structure was unconstitutional (Reuters, 2/15/24).

Musk is clearly inclined to use courts and friendly officials to censor his critics, as well as to shred labor rights. If Trump is elected later this year—which is entirely possible (CNN, 3/9/24)—Musk will have the ability to fuse his desire and resources to shut down critics with emboldened far-right government allies.

Bailey’s outrageous statement might seem silly and destined for the same fate as Musk’s case against the CCDH, but it portends a highly chilling environment if the courts and government agencies fall further into the hands of the right.

The post ‘Free Speech’ Fan Elon Musk Enlists State Allies to Silence Critics appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, arguing that private companies should not be allowed to wield breach of contract claims as a weapon to punish criticism, and to secure damages stemming solely from claimed reputational harm resulting from that criticism.

“The court’s ruling reaffirms that vital First Amendment protections apply to researchers and journalists who use digital tools like scraping to inform the public about the practices of powerful platforms,” said Esha Bhandari, deputy project director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

In this case, CCDH engaged in scraping to inform the public of instances when X failed to remove posts that CCDH deemed dis- and mis-information, despite evidence the content violated X’s content guidelines. X accused CCDH of obtaining its data illegally, and claimed that its reports drove advertisers away from the site. The ACLU and its legal partners argued in its brief, however, that scraping when done in the context of public interest research is part and parcel of the subsequent public interest speech it enables.

The court dismissed X’s suit, writing in its opinion that efforts to use an anti-scraping contract term to bypass the high standard for defamation claims was impermissible and noting that the lawsuit was about punishing CCDH for its speech criticizing X.

“This is an important decision that sees Elon Musk’s lawsuit for what it is—an effort to punish his critics for constitutionally protected speech and to deter researchers from studying his platform,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “Society needs reliable and ethical research into social media platforms, and often that research relies on being able to study publicly available posts. Musk’s lawsuit imperiled that kind of research by threatening it with ruinous liability, but thankfully, the court shut down his case.”

The speech of research organizations like CCDH. as well as academics and journalists — in many instances made possible only by scraping — has shed necessary light on a panoply of concerns that powerful social media platforms have failed to independently monitor and correct, and has provided crucial information for regulators to take enforcement action. Such public interest research serves as a key accountability mechanism to reveal the platforms’ content moderation choices and privacy policies and practices.

“The district court rightly saw through X’s chilling attempt to twist the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and contract law to retaliate against a nonprofit that published critical reports regarding hateful content on X,” said Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The First Amendment and California’s anti-SLAPP statute protect anyone who scrapes publicly available websites and publishes newsworthy information about the data.”

“This lawsuit was nothing more than a vain attempt to stymie independent research into an influential social media platform. The court’s decision today is a much-needed reminder that free speech includes the right to investigate and criticize Elon Musk and X,” said Jake Karr, deputy director of NYU’s Technology Law & Policy Clinic, which helped prepare the friend-of-the-court brief. “And it serves as a clear example for powerful corporations and individuals in the tech industry—it’s not so easy to abuse the U.S. legal system to silence criticism and evade public accountability.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Photograph Source: Steve Jurvetson – CC BY 2.0

When is the acquisitive nature of open frontier capitalism too much?  When Elon Musk is told that US$56 billion as a pay package is unfair.  This, at least, was the finding by Delaware Court of Chancery by Judge Kathaleen McCormick regarding the spellbinding 2018 compensation package for the planet’s wealthiest human being.

McCormick and Musk already have inked some judicial history.  The same judge presided over the Twitter suit against Musk that eventually resulted in him parting with US$44 billion to acquire the company that is now sliding into merry decay as the platform X.

In her sharp ruling, daring to “boldly go where no man has gone before”, let alone a Delaware court, McCormick observed that Tesla, a company of Musk’s own creation, “bore the burden of proving that the compensation plan was fair, and they failed to meet their burden.”  The question of fairness first arose in 2019, when Tesla shareholder Richard Tornetta filed a suit challenging the validity of the 2018 performance-based equity compensation plan, the largest of its type in the history of public markets.

Tornetta’s primary contention was that Musk was hardly showing much devotion to the carmaker, his duties and interests spread, as it were, across a number of other corporate entities: SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink and the Boring Company.  Tornetta’s legal team argued that the 2018 package did nothing to focus the billionaire’s interest on Tesla and, it followed, the interests of its shareholders.  The agreement, for instance, made no mention of any such requirements as time allocation.  “Indeed,” reads the lawsuit, “Musk testified that since the Grant’s approval, he has spent a little more than half his time on Tesla matters and has dedicated substantial time and attention to various other endeavours.”

The judgment acknowledges that any decision by the board of directors on what to pay a company CEO “is the quintessential business determination subject to great judicial deference.”  Delaware law, however, recognised “unique risks inherent in a corporation’s transactions with its controlling stockholder.”  When it came to dealing with “conflicted-controller transactions,” the “presumptive standard review … is entire fairness.”

Here, the defendants proved “unable to prove that the stockholder vote was fully informed because the proxy statement inaccurately described key directors as independent and misleadingly omitted details about the process.”  Even by the judge’s own reasoning, the task left to the defendants was an “unenviable” one, and “too tall an order.”

For the court, there were critical problems with the process leading to the approval of the compensation plan.  The judgment paints a picture of Musk essentially negotiating with himself through devotees, flunkeys and friends.  The adversarial atmosphere was never present; the “controlled mindset” all powerful.

The theme of the entrepreneurial God King holding his courtiers in thrall streaks McCormick’s observations.  Musk, for instance, maintained “extensive ties with the persons tasked with negotiating on Tesla’s behalf.”  The chair of the compensation committee, Ira Ehrenpreis, had known Musk well for 15 years.  Another member of the same committee, Antonio Gracias, had an enduring two-decade business relationship with Musk “as well as the sort of personal relationship that had him vacationing with Musk’s family on a regular basis.”

The entanglements do not stop there.  There is General Counsel Todd Maron, the main negotiating link between the committee and Musk.  Maron had acted as divorce attorney for Musk and admired him so much he was “moved … to tears during his deposition.”

With a flawed process, things did not get much better with the negotiated price.  Again, the defendants argued that, for Tesla to continue to grow, Musk’s continued leadership was indispensable.  Keeping Musk as the main helmsman meant a rise in stockholder value.  In one estimate, offering Musk a chance to increase his ownership of Tesla from 21.9% to 28.3% would mean “6% for (US)$600 billion of growth in stockholder value.”

Such arguments did not convince McCormick.  Musk already owned 21.9% of the company when the plan was approved.  He had every incentive to push the company “to levels of transformative growth” seeing what he stood to gain from it: “(US)$10 billion for every (US)$50 billion in market capitalization increase.”  The arrangements also came with no conditions on how much time Musk would devote to Tesla.  “Swept up by the rhetoric of ‘all upside,’ or perhaps starry eyed by Musk’s superstar appeal, the board never asked the (US)$55.8 billion question: Was the plan even necessary to retain Musk and achieve its goals?”  The answer: plainly not.

Such observations would have stung and made good the judge’s promise to go where no previous Delaware court had dared tread.  Here was a punchy assessment about the comfortable, clique-ridden tribalism of corporate non-governance.  Musk, riled and ruffled, took to the platform X (formerly Twitter) to vent.  “Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware,” were his words of advice.

By no means does this end matter.  Musk is hardly going to be out of pocket, nor is he going to leave the company from which he continues to handsomely profit from via stocks he owns.  Fairness operates in otherworldly dimensions here.  A new compensation package, according to the judge, will have to be worked out with Tornetta.  An appeal is also possible.  “The judge’s ruling should be a wakeup call (for Tesla shareholders) that things have gotten out of hand,” remarks Andrew Poreda, who also invests in Tesla through exchange-traded funds.  In this overgrown corporate jungle, it is questionable whether things were ever really in hand.

The post When Much is Too Much: Elon Musk’s Compensation Package appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

A Delaware state court judge ruled that the $56 billion pay package awarded to Elon Musk by Tesla’s board of directors in 2018 was illegal. The gist of the ruling was that the board was composed of people who were close friends or relatives of Musk. The judge ruled that they gave him an outlandish compensation package, based on targets that they knew would be easily reached. She therefore threw out the contract.

To get an idea of the size of the pay package, Elon Musk’s compensation came to 89 percent of Tesla’s gross (pre-tax) profits over the years 2019-2023. It seems unlikely that that the company could not have attracted a competent CEO who would have agreed to work for a sum substantially less than 90 percent of the company’s profits. It is also seems likely that if an independent board had offered Musk a contract for 1-2 percent of the current contract ($560 million to $1,120 million) that he would have taken it, since it is unlikely that he had better paying options.

It is worth noting that the contract was not thrown out for moral reasons – the judge did not indicate that she felt Musk was making too much money in a general philosophical sense. It was thrown out because the judge determined that a board closely controlled by the CEO was ripping off shareholders with his generous compensation package.

Although most boards are not as tightly controlled by a CEO as Tesla’s, boards generally view their allegiances as being first and foremost to top management and not to shareholders. This is a main cause of outlandish CEO pay.

Last fall, when the UAW negotiated new contracts with the Big Three, it was striking how out of line CEO pay at the U.S. companies was compared with their counterparts in other wealthy countries. The pay of the top execs at Stellantis, Ford, and GM was $21 million, $25 million, and $29 million, respectively. By contrast, at BMW, Mercedes, and Porsche, it was $5.6 million, $7.5 million, and $7.9 million. At the large Japanese manufacturers, it was $2.3 million at Honda, $4.5 million at Nissan, and $6.7 million at Toyota.

It would be difficult to claim that the fact that, GM’s CEO got more than five times the pay of BMW’s CEO, and more than ten times the pay of Honda’s CEO, is explained by superior performance. Clearly the issue is different rules and norms of corporate governance that restrain CEO pay in other countries more than in the United States.

If we looked to change the rules of corporate governance, to give more control to shareholders, it is likely that we can bring pay of CEOs here more in line with their pay elsewhere in the world. This is a big deal, not just because a small number of CEOs get outlandish pay, but because the pay of CEOs distorts the pay structure at the top more generally.

If CEOs got $3 million or $4 million, rather than $20 million or $30 million, the CFO and other top execs would see corresponding cuts in pay, as would third tier executives. This would also spill over into the non-corporate sector. Currently, university presidents or heads of major foundations and charities often get paid $2 million or $3 million a year. When a senior person in the corporate takes a top-level government position at $200,000 a year, that is considered a major sacrifice.

We would be in a very different world if pay for CEOs in the U.S. looked more like pay in Europe and Japan. Elon Musk’s outlandish pay package shows us the route to getting there. It is fine to complain about the morality of CEOs getting $20 million or $30 million or even more, but the more practical issue is that they are ripping off the companies they work for.

If shareholders had more ability to challenge CEO pay, it is likely that we would see serious downward pressure on the size of pay packages CEOs now get. Shareholders have no more interest in CEOs getting two or three times what the market would bear than they do in having assembly line workers or retail clerks getting two or three times the market wage. There is a mechanism in place for restraining the pay of assembly line workers and retail clerks, we need a comparable mechanism for restraining the pay of CEOs and other top management.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.  

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

McCormick and Musk already have inked some judicial history.  The same judge presided over the Twitter suit against Musk that eventually resulted in him parting with US$44 billion to acquire the company that is now sliding into merry decay as the platform X.

In her sharp ruling, daring to “boldly go where no man has gone before”, let alone a Delaware court, McCormick observed that Tesla, a company of Musk’s own creation, “bore the burden of proving that the compensation plan was fair, and they failed to meet their burden.”  The question of fairness first arose in 2019, when Tesla shareholder Richard Tornetta filed a suit challenging the validity of the 2018 performance-based equity compensation plan, the largest of its type in the history of public markets.

Tornetta’s primary contention was that Musk was hardly showing much devotion to the carmaker, his duties and interests spread, as it were, across a number of other corporate entities: SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink and the Boring Company.  Tornetta’s legal team argued that the 2018 package did nothing to focus the billionaire’s interest on Tesla and, it followed, the interests of its shareholders.  The agreement, for instance, made no mention of any such requirements as time allocation.  “Indeed,” reads the lawsuit, “Musk testified that since the Grant’s approval, he has spent a little more than half his time on Tesla matters and has dedicated substantial time and attention to various other endeavours.”

The judgment acknowledges that any decision by the board of directors on what to pay a company CEO “is the quintessential business determination subject to great judicial deference.”  Delaware law, however, recognised “unique risks inherent in a corporation’s transactions with its controlling stockholder.”  When it came to dealing with “conflicted-controller transactions,” the “presumptive standard review … is entire fairness.”

Here, the defendants proved “unable to prove that the stockholder vote was fully informed because the proxy statement inaccurately described key directors as independent and misleadingly omitted details about the process.”  Even by the judge’s own reasoning, the task left to the defendants was an “unenviable” one, and “too tall an order.”

For the court, there were critical problems with the process leading to the approval of the compensation plan.  The judgment paints a picture of Musk essentially negotiating with himself through devotees, flunkeys and friends.  The adversarial atmosphere was never present; the “controlled mindset” all powerful.

The theme of the entrepreneurial God King holding his courtiers in thrall streaks McCormick’s observations.  Musk, for instance, maintained “extensive ties with the persons tasked with negotiating on Tesla’s behalf.”  The chair of the compensation committee, Ira Ehrenpreis, had known Musk well for 15 years.  Another member of the same committee, Antonio Gracias, had an enduring two-decade business relationship with Musk “as well as the sort of personal relationship that had him vacationing with Musk’s family on a regular basis.”

The entanglements do not stop there.  There is General Counsel Todd Maron, the main negotiating link between the committee and Musk.  Maron had acted as divorce attorney for Musk and admired him so much he was “moved … to tears during his deposition.”

With a flawed process, things did not get much better with the negotiated price.  Again, the defendants argued that, for Tesla to continue to grow, Musk’s continued leadership was indispensable.  Keeping Musk as the main helmsman meant a rise in stockholder value.  In one estimate, offering Musk a chance to increase his ownership of Tesla from 21.9% to 28.3% would mean “6% for (US)$600 billion of growth in stockholder value.”

Such arguments did not convince McCormick.  Musk already owned 21.9% of the company when the plan was approved.  He had every incentive to push the company “to levels of transformative growth” seeing what he stood to gain from it: “(US)$10 billion for every (US)$50 billion in market capitalization increase.”  The arrangements also came with no conditions on how much time Musk would devote to Tesla.  “Swept up by the rhetoric of ‘all upside,’ or perhaps starry eyed by Musk’s superstar appeal, the board never asked the (US)$55.8 billion question: Was the plan even necessary to retain Musk and achieve its goals?”  The answer: plainly not.

Such observations would have stung and made good the judge’s promise to go where no previous Delaware court had dared tread.  Here was a punchy assessment about the comfortable, clique-ridden tribalism of corporate non-governance.  Musk, riled and ruffled, took to the platform X (formerly Twitter) to vent.  “Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware,” were his words of advice.

By no means does this end matter.  Musk is hardly going to be out of pocket, nor is he going to leave the company from which he continues to handsomely profit from via stocks he owns.  Fairness operates in otherworldly dimensions here.  A new compensation package, according to the judge, will have to be worked out with Tornetta.  An appeal is also possible.  “The judge’s ruling should be a wakeup call (for Tesla shareholders) that things have gotten out of hand,” remarks Andrew Poreda, who also invests in Tesla through exchange-traded funds.  In this overgrown corporate jungle, it is questionable whether things were ever really in hand.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Elon Musk speaks to members of the media following the Senate AI Insight Forum on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 13, 2023.

After Elon Musk finalized his purchase of Twitter on October 27, 2022, I wrote an article in which I warned, “We need to take seriously the possibility that this will end up being one of the funniest things that’s ever happened.”

Today, I have to issue an apology: I was wrong. Musk’s ownership of Twitter may well be — at least for people who manage to enjoy catastrophic human folly — the funniest thing that’s ever happened. 

Let’s take a look back and see how I was so mistaken.

Musk began his tenure as Twitter’s owner by posting this message to the company’s advertisers, in which he said, “Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise. … Twitter obviously cannot be a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences! In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all.”

Musk had to say this for obvious reasons: 90 percent of Twitter’s revenues came from ads, and corporate America gets nervous about its ads appearing in an environment that’s completely unpredictable. 

I assumed that Musk would make a serious effort here. But this was based on my belief that, while he might be a deeply sincere ultra-right-wing crank, he surely had the level of self-control possessed by a 6-year-old. He does not. Big corporations now comprehend this and are understandably anxious about advertising with a company run by a man who, at any moment, may see user @JGoebbels1488 posting excerpts from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and reply “concerning!”

The consequences of this have been what you’d expect. The marketing consultancy Ebiquity represents 70 of the 100 companies that spend the most on ads, including Google and General Motors. Before Musk’s takeover, 31 of their big clients bought space on Twitter. Last month, just two did. Ebiquity’s chief strategy officer told Business Insider that “this is a drop we have not seen before for any major advertising platform.” 

This is why Twitter users now largely see ads from micro-entrepreneurs who are, say, selling 1/100th scale papier-mâché models of the Eiffel Tower. The good news for Twitter is that such companies don’t worry much about brand safety. But the bad news is that their annual advertising budget is $25. Hence, Twitter’s advertising revenue in the U.S. is apparently down 60 percent year over year.

I also never imagined it possible that Musk would rename Twitter — which had become an incredibly well-known brand — to “X” just because he’s been obsessed with the idea of a company with that name since he was a kid. It’s as though he bought Coca-Cola and changed its name to that of his beloved childhood pet tortoise Zoinks. The people who try to measure this kind of thing claim that this has destroyed between $4 and $20 billion of Twitter’s value. (As you see in this article, I refuse to refer to Twitter as X just out of pure orneriness.)

Another of my mistaken beliefs was that Musk understood the basic facts about Twitter. The numbers have gone down somewhat since Musk’s purchase of the company, but right now, about 500 million people log on to Twitter at least once a month. Perhaps 120 million check it out daily; these average users spend about 15 minutes on it. A tenth of these numbers — that is, about 12 million people — are heavy users, who account for 70 percent of all the time spent by anyone on the app.

Musk is one of these heavy users. He adores Twitter, as do some other troubled souls. But this led him to wildly overestimate its popularity among normal humans. A company with 50 million fanatically devoted users could possibly survive a collapse in ad revenue by enticing them to pay a subscription fee. But Twitter does not have such users and now never will, given Musk’s relentless antagonizing of the largely progressive Twitterati. 

So how much is Twitter worth today? When Musk became involved with the company in the first months of 2022, its market capitalization was about $28 billion. He then offered to pay $44 billion for it, which was so much more than the company was worth that its executives had to accept the offer or they would have been sued by their shareholders. Now that the company’s no longer publicly traded — and so its basic financials don’t have to be disclosed — it’s more difficult to know what’s going on. However, Fidelity Investments, a financial services company, holds a stake in Twitter and has marked down its valuation of this stake by about two-thirds since Musk bought it. This implies that Twitter is now worth around $15 billion.

The significance of this is that Musk and his co-investors only put up $31 billion or so of the $44 billion purchase price. The remaining $13 billion was borrowed by Twitter at high interest rates from Wall Street. In other words, Musk and company are perilously close to having lost their entire $31 billion.

In the end, I did not understand Musk’s determination to torment himself by forcing his entire existence into an extremely painful Procrustean bed. The results have been bleak and awful for Twitter and the world, but not just bleak and awful: They have also been hilarious. Anyone who likes to laugh about human vanity and hubris has to appreciate his commitment to the bit.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.