Opinion Elon Musk is suffering from know-it-all syndrome 22OKT24

 

I can not stand elon musk, I have found him to be a greedy, egotistical, narcissistic pig for years, well before he made his love for fascism and authoritarianism known. I also believe he is a racist. A South African by birth, he could have based his companies and established solar panel, battery and electric car manufacturing facilities in South Africa creating education and employment opportunities to his fellow citizens, boosting the economy of his home country as well as neighboring countries. Musk ran his mouth about rebuilding the shattered energy grid of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria years ago but nothing came of that either. He is only interested in making the rich richer and backing neo-nazi, fascist, authoritarian politicians who are working to destroy democracies and replace them with oligarchies. This from the Washington Post.....

Opinion 

 Elon Musk is suffering from know-it-all syndrome

The billionaire entrepreneur’s influence is vast and increasingly dangerous.

Opinion by Eugene Robinson

Eugene Robinson writes a column on politics and culture and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at The Washington Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s Style section.follow on X @Eugene_Robinson

October 22, 2024 at 3:13 p.m. EDT

Elon Musk is trying to buy this election for Donald Trump, and everyone who loves our country should be alarmed. I realize, of course, that rich people try to buy elections all the time. But never quite like this.

The difference goes far beyond Musk’s shady — and possibly unlawful — attempt to register and track new potential Trump voters through a daily lottery that pays each winner $1 million. And it goes beyond the estimated $75 million Musk has given to his Trump-supporting America PAC. More important, and unprecedented, are other factors: the immensity of Musk’s wealth, the scale of his power, the reach of his voice, the incoherence of his politics, the mercurial nature of his decision-making, the porcelain fragility of his ego. And if Trump wins, heaven forbid, Musk expects to play a major role in the next administration.

In the name of “free speech,” Musk paid $44 billion to buy Twitter and then squander three-quarters of its value turning it into X, a cesspool of far-right anger, grievance, misogyny, conspiracy theory, eighth-grade humor and Trump worship. In the name of “efficiency” — the task he wants to perform for Trump — Musk would be in a position to wreak similar havoc on our professional civil service, our best-in-the-world military, our majestic national parks and who knows what else.

Musk is an immigrant from South Africa who uses the megaphone of X to attack a daughter of immigrants — Vice President Kamala Harris — and to applaud Trump’s racism and xenophobia. Musk never hesitates to fuel the MAGA world’s raging transgender panic and has dismissed his own transgender daughter as “dead — killed by the woke mind virus.” He is the father of 12 children in all, and he proselytizes for procreation, saying on Saturday at a Trump rally that “I don’t think it’s cool to deliberately not have kids. It’s anti-human.”

Imagine how these views might be translated into policy if voters unwisely return Trump to the Oval Office.

Give Musk his due: He became the richest person in the world, worth more than $240 billion, by presiding over feats of engineering that can only be described as genius.

He revolutionized the auto industry, launching the electric-vehicle revolution and making Tesla the most valuable car company in the world, worth more than twice as much as second-place Toyota. SpaceX, the company he founded with the goal of sending humans to Mars, routinely does things that make you disbelieve your eyes, including, for example, a test flight earlier this month in which a booster rocket was guided back to its launchpad in a vertical position and then caught gently by giant mechanical arms.

And Starlink, a SpaceX subsidiary, has launched more than 7,000 small satellites into low Earth orbit, where they circle in a choreographed space ballet, forming a global communications network. No nation-state has anything like it.

Governments, especially ours, are already dependent on Musk’s technology, which has been aided by federal subsidies. SpaceX vehicles are NASA’s only reliable way to get crews and supplies to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX also has contracts to launch Defense Department satellites and other classified payloads. And Starlink has been lifesaving at moments of crisis, allowing Ukrainian armed forces to coordinate their defense against Russia’s invasion and temporarily replacing cellphone networks in the southern Appalachians that had been destroyed by Hurricane Helene.

At the same time, Musk’s companies are regulated by the federal government and have been the subject of numerous investigations. In self-driving mode, his Teslas do not yet drive safely. Regulators want to make sure that water discharged at his SpaceX launch site in Texas is not polluted. Musk promises that the “Department of Government Efficiency,” which he hopes to lead in a new Trump administration, will slash regulation. The conflicts of interest could not be more glaring.

Musk has long been criticized for his bombastic and erratic management style, but only in recent years did he become such a political loudmouth. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Musk’s rage at the Democratic Party began in 2021 when President Joe Biden launched his effort to shift the nation toward electric vehicles — and snubbed Tesla, by far the nation’s biggest maker of electric cars. Before one big White House event, the Journal said, Biden aides called Tesla executives to tell them Musk was not invited.

Why? Because Tesla’s factories are nonunion, and Musk has resisted workers’ efforts to organize. Faced with a choice between offending Musk and angering the powerful United Auto Workers union, Biden sided with labor. Musk reportedly was not pleased.

He might be suffering from know-it-all syndrome, a disease that seems to target billionaire tech bros. (Peter Thiel is another sufferer.) They prove themselves brilliant at electronic payments or rocket design or whatever, and conclude they are brilliant at everything, including politics and government.

They are wrong. Achieving goals in a democracy requires forging public consensus, and Musk doesn’t even know what that means. He is dangerous because of this ignorance. Vote for Harris — and wish Musk a safe journey to Mars.

AT&T and fascism & Corporate Criticism Of GOP-led Voting Bills Spreads To Texas 3&1APR21

 at&t is financially supporting politicians who practice and promote neo-nazi fascist policies and legislation and the insurrectionist that threaten our democratic Republic. They financially support politicians at the local, state and national level who are passing legislation that makes it difficult if not impossible for Black and Brown communities, Native Americans and the poor and working poor of all ethnicities to register to vote and to actually vote. Please sign this petition from UltraViolet demanding at&t end their support of these racist politicians and their anti -democratic voting legislation. HuffPost reports on the American corporations who are actively opposing voter suppression legislation across the country.

Tell AT&T: Speak out against voter suppression laws and pledge to no longer fund anti-democracy politicians.

Republican lawmakers across the country are racing to pass racist voter suppression laws in response to the incredible organizing by Black, Indigenous, and women of color, who helped flip states like Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania from red to blue in 2020.  

And telecom giant AT&T is funding this voter suppression.

AT&T has given millions to the Republican lawmakers in Congress who continued to support the Big Lie about the 2020 election that led to the violence and bloodshed at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. But while AT&T has tried to claim it will no longer give to the members of Congress who supported the insurrection, it has both continued to support the complicit Republican Party as a whole and to still fund state lawmakers who are rushing to erode our democracy with voter suppression laws. 

AT&T has given nearly $600,000 to state Republican politicians in Texas who have been pushing through voter restrictions targeted at Black and brown communities over the last several years. These politicians, like Texas Governor Greg Abbott, are working double-time to ensure our votes do not count if they do not go the way the GOP wants.¹

AT&T needs to feel the heat for its complicity in funding these anti-democratic politicians. We have seen how public pressure on companies works to force them to speak out against voter restriction laws.

Can you sign this petition demanding AT&T speak out against voter suppression laws in Texas and around the country and STOP funding anti-women, anti-democracy candidates and politicians?

Tell AT&T: Speak out against voter suppression laws and pledge to no longer fund anti-democracy politicians.

Sign the petition

Right now, there are several bills aimed at curtailing access to voting before the Texas legislature. Bills like S.B. 7, which is aimed at putting up barriers for disabled people to vote and stopping densely populated counties from using mass voting sites like stadiums for elections. 

And yet, AT&T remains silent while the politicians it funds take a knife to our democracy.

This isn't the first time that AT&T has felt the heat for its political giving. Last year, the UltraViolet community called out AT&T's funding of anti-abortion, anti-women candidates during the Trump era. We know that when candidates for political office are anti-abortion, they almost always support a larger, far-right political ideology that is not only anti-choice, but anti-racial justice, and anti-democracy too. And we are seeing the proof of concept in these moves to restrict voting. The same politicians who supported a six-week abortion ban in Georgia in 2019 also supported voting restrictions that passed late last week in Georgia. This story repeats itself across the country.

That is why we need to turn up the pressure on AT&T to speak out against these dangerous bills. 

AT&T cannot remain silent in the face of these attacks on our most sacred rights. AT&T has a massive amount of power in Texas, where it is headquartered in Dallas, and it has millions of subscribers around the country. Consumers and workers alike need AT&T to stand by the values it touts and stop funding fascism. 

Sign the petition demanding that AT&T speak out against these voter suppression bills and stop funding complicit politicians!

Thanks for speaking out!

--Shaunna, Kathy, Melody, Lindsay, Sonja, Kimberly, Maria, Elisa, KaeLyn, KD, Iris, Isatou, Bridget, and Katie, the UltraViolet team 

Sources:

1. Texas' voter suppression bills are fueled by millions in corporate cash, Popular Information, March 31, 2021

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Corporate Criticism Of GOP-led Voting Bills Spreads To Texas

American Airlines, which is based in Fort Worth, came out against restrictive voting measures in Texas.

Paul J. Weber

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The ranks of big corporations now criticizing GOP efforts to restrict voting access spread Thursday to Texas as measures that would reduce options to cast ballots and limit polling hours advanced in the state Capitol.

American Airlines, which is based in Fort Worth, came out against restrictive voting measures that have a favorable path to reaching Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk in the coming weeks.

Public opposition from the airline came after a package of sweeping elections changes cleared the GOP-controlled Senate and, notably, a day after some of Georgia’s most prominent corporate leaders came out publicly against a new election law after civil rights activists criticized their silence.

“To make American’s stance clear: We are strongly opposed to this bill and others like it,” the airline said in a statement.

Unlike in Georgia, the corporate criticism in Texas to the election bills comes before they have been signed into law. Corporate interests carry big clout in the Texas Capitol, but Abbott and other Republicans have given no indication of wavering in their pursuit of passing the measures before the session ends in May.

The passage of Senate Bill 7 was along party lines in a vote after midnight early Thursday.

American Airlines’ reaction to the bill advancing was slammed by Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the powerful Senate leader. “Texans are fed up with corporations that don’t share our values trying to dictate public policy,” Patrick said in a statement.

House Republicans on Thursday also began efforts to move a similar bill, known as House Bill 6, to the floor with nearly 200 people signed up to testify at a hearing.

Billionaire Michael Dell, whose tech company is headquartered in suburban Austin, tweeted his opposition to the bill as that hearing unfolded.

Critics of the Texas legislation say the efforts particularly target expanded access put into place during last year’s election in Harris County, which is home to more than 2 million voters, controlled by Democrats and a key Texas battleground that includes Houston.

One measure would eliminate drive-thru voting, which more than 127,000 people around Houston used during early voting last year. More than half of those voters were Black, Latino or Asian, said Democratic state Sen. Carol Alvarado.

“Hearing all of that, who are you really targeting when you’re trying to get rid of drive-thru voting?” she said.

Republicans rejected accusations that the bill was designed to suppress turnout.

“None of what we’ve discussed is voter suppression. And none of what we’ve discussed is Jim Crow,” Republican state Sen. Paul Bettencourt said.

The voting packages in Texas mirror a nationwide campaign by Republicans after former President Donald Trump made false claims about election fraud.

Voting rights groups say the measures would disproportionately impact racial and ethnic minority voters. In Texas, which already has some of the strictest voting laws in the U.S., the proposed legislation grants more power to partisan poll watchers and eliminates the option to cast a ballot via drive-thru. The bill also includes a provision requiring a doctor’s note for people with disabilities who want to vote by mail, although Republicans signaled during the debate that language could change.

Trump won Texas but by fewer than 6 points. It was the closest victory by any GOP presidential nominee in Texas since 1996, underscoring Republicans’ loosening iron grip on the state.

After the Georgia bill was signed into law, some of the state’s companies were roundly criticized, including by more than 70 Black corporate leaders who took out an advertisement in The New York Times urging corporate America to stand up forcefully on matters of racial justice.

After days of criticism and the boycott threat on social media, Delta CEO Ed Bastian took a stronger tone, calling the Georgia law unacceptable. “The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 elections. This is simply not true,” Bastian wrote, referring to Trump’s claims that he lost because of fraud.

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Associated Press writers Acacia Coronado and AP Airlines Writer David Koenig in Dallas contributed to this report.