If you want to do a bit of Both-Sides-ism, big chunks of the Dem Establishment have also been very friendly with Elon. FFS, he didn’t have any trouble landing contracts under the Biden Admin. And he led Gavin Newsom around by the nose with his Hyperloop promises for nearly a decade.
But I’d say the more pervasive concern is how heavily leveraged Elon’s businesses are with respect to his Saudi creditors. And that’s the real snarl at the end of this problem. The US has made the Saudi Royal Family such an enormous nexus of dollar inputs and outputs that Aramco might as well be a second Federal Reserve.
Our addiction to fossil fuels is driving significant chunks of our bad policy, both domestic and foreign. And while you can wax poetic about Americans “not voting for this”, there’s a deep socio-economic bond between American industry and cheap oil. Americans “vote” for the Saudis with their labor hours and their consumer spending on a daily basis.
We don’t have a lot amount of choice in our employment and consumer spending because of regulatory capture and economies of scale. Without any new coordination mechanism, getting off oil will have to be a top-down change.
Big oil has convinced us to cut down our own “carbon footprint” to encourage purity testing and exhaustion instead of collective action. They know it’s an externalities problem… do we?
We don’t have a lot amount of choice in our employment and consumer spending because of regulatory capture and economies of scale.
That’s true to a degree. But all too often, I see employment and consumer choices influenced by propaganda rather than raw economic forces. Whether or not you attend college is often not an economic choice but one of peer pressure and social expectation. Whether you move into the city or stay remote in the suburbs/exurbs is as much an expression of your social anxieties (amplified by “if it bleeds, it leads” local media coverage) as your economic position. While driving isn’t typically a choice, the size and shape of your vehicle absolutely is. People opting for increasingly large and ostentacious large-cab trucks and luxury SUVs are not acting under economic constraints. Often, Americans will pay a premium to live remote, drive a gas-guzzler, and subsist on disposables as an expression of their wealth.
This isn’t a problem other countries have. Germany, Japan, South Africa, India, Brazil, Mexico, even fucking Russia have figured out how to build densely and leverage mass transit to bring down waste. The Americans are uniquely incapable of developing efficiently. A big part of that is purely cultural, with white Americans having fled to the suburbs to avoid their black neighbors in the 70s/80s and putting a premium on one story ranch homes even in areas like San Fransisco or Chicago or Atlanta, where land is at a premium.
Never let Mitch McConnell off the hook, despite how he now says he doesn’t like what Trump his doing. Since this all started, he has done nothing but enable him and has done as much as anyone to put the guy in power. Same to be said of Graham. When this all goes terribly wrong(er), none of us should, for a second, allow them a pass on any future backtracking or apologizing that they might do.
Remember: it’s not just trump and musk to blame, the entire Republican party is responsible for supporting all this.
If you want to do a bit of Both-Sides-ism, big chunks of the Dem Establishment have also been very friendly with Elon. FFS, he didn’t have any trouble landing contracts under the Biden Admin. And he led Gavin Newsom around by the nose with his Hyperloop promises for nearly a decade.
But I’d say the more pervasive concern is how heavily leveraged Elon’s businesses are with respect to his Saudi creditors. And that’s the real snarl at the end of this problem. The US has made the Saudi Royal Family such an enormous nexus of dollar inputs and outputs that Aramco might as well be a second Federal Reserve.
Our addiction to fossil fuels is driving significant chunks of our bad policy, both domestic and foreign. And while you can wax poetic about Americans “not voting for this”, there’s a deep socio-economic bond between American industry and cheap oil. Americans “vote” for the Saudis with their labor hours and their consumer spending on a daily basis.
We don’t have a lot amount of choice in our employment and consumer spending because of regulatory capture and economies of scale. Without any new coordination mechanism, getting off oil will have to be a top-down change.
Big oil has convinced us to cut down our own “carbon footprint” to encourage purity testing and exhaustion instead of collective action. They know it’s an externalities problem… do we?
That’s true to a degree. But all too often, I see employment and consumer choices influenced by propaganda rather than raw economic forces. Whether or not you attend college is often not an economic choice but one of peer pressure and social expectation. Whether you move into the city or stay remote in the suburbs/exurbs is as much an expression of your social anxieties (amplified by “if it bleeds, it leads” local media coverage) as your economic position. While driving isn’t typically a choice, the size and shape of your vehicle absolutely is. People opting for increasingly large and ostentacious large-cab trucks and luxury SUVs are not acting under economic constraints. Often, Americans will pay a premium to live remote, drive a gas-guzzler, and subsist on disposables as an expression of their wealth.
This isn’t a problem other countries have. Germany, Japan, South Africa, India, Brazil, Mexico, even fucking Russia have figured out how to build densely and leverage mass transit to bring down waste. The Americans are uniquely incapable of developing efficiently. A big part of that is purely cultural, with white Americans having fled to the suburbs to avoid their black neighbors in the 70s/80s and putting a premium on one story ranch homes even in areas like San Fransisco or Chicago or Atlanta, where land is at a premium.
Also if the dem inside trader are happy with their stock going to the moon they dont care what happen to the rest.
The whole establishment is based on corruption and foreign influence.
Never let Mitch McConnell off the hook, despite how he now says he doesn’t like what Trump his doing. Since this all started, he has done nothing but enable him and has done as much as anyone to put the guy in power. Same to be said of Graham. When this all goes terribly wrong(er), none of us should, for a second, allow them a pass on any future backtracking or apologizing that they might do.
And to a lesser extent, the corpo Dems for their pissweak “opposition”.