from the corruption-on-steroids dept

You may’t say that Elon Musk hasn’t gotten his cash’s price after spending $277 million to assist purchase Donald Trump an election victory (that’s not together with the $44 billion Musk spent on turning Twitter right into a proper wing propaganda mill). The tip of the numerous investigations into labor, environmental, and consumer fraud abuses alone have already greater than paid for themselves:

“In additional than 40 different federal company issues, regulators have taken no public motion on their investigations for a number of months or extra — elevating questions on whether or not these circumstances might have turn out to be dormant, based on an NBC Information evaluation of regulatory issues involving Musk’s corporations.”

That’s earlier than you even get to the billions in extra subsidies Musk is poised to obtain. Musk has significantly benefited the Trump administration’s relentless promotion of Starlink, Musk’s expensive, congestion-plagued, ozone layer destroying, low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband network.

ProPublica notes how the Trump administration has been pressuring African countries to use Starlink if they know what’s good for them. In lots of situations they’re tethering continued lifesaving help efforts to paying Musk for connectivity and easing any regulatory burdens Musk is going through in growing nations:

“In current months, senior State Division officers in each Washington and Gambia have coordinated with Starlink executives to coax, foyer and browbeat a minimum of seven Gambian authorities ministers to assist Musk, data and interviews present. A type of Cupboard officers informed ProPublica his authorities is underneath “most stress” to yield.”

This comes on the heels of Musk’s DOGE assaults on organizations like USAID, that are estimated to have a fairly massive body count underneath the pretense of “progress” and “reform.” Even Bush administration officers, actually no strangers to corruption, categorical alarm to ProPublica on the degree of corruption:

“If this was performed by one other nation, we completely would name this corruption,” mentioned Kristofer Harrison, who served as a high-level State Division official within the George W. Bush administration. “As a result of it’s corruption.”

To justify the corruption, Republicans have satisfied themselves that Musk’s Starlink is some sort of magic that you can sprinkle on any problem with miraculous results. They don’t care that the service is generally too expensive for those who need it most. Or is harming astronomical research. Or harming the ozone layer. Or is more and more turning into more and more congested as a consequence of oversubscription and physics.

Or might not even exist 5 years from now if the corporate can’t make continued launches viable.

Starlink is usually a helpful area of interest possibility in the event you can afford it and dwell in a distant space with out entry. Or wish to spend thousands of dollars a month to get broadband on your yacht. Or are preventing a warfare in territories the place conventional telecom infrastructure has been decimated and haven’t any selection however to depend on the whims of a zealot. However, opposite to the Trump cult’s beliefs, the know-how will not be fucking magic.

But Trump’s FCC boss, Brendan Carr, has been operating round falsely telling nations that in the event that they refuse to make use of Musk’s Starlink, they’re basically communist. Elon Musk’s been making an attempt to steal Verizon’s $2 billion contract with the FAA to implement Starlink. They’ve taken to duct-taping potentially unencrypted Starlink terminals to the White House roof to, apparently, try and hide their comms from public scrutiny.

Republicans are additionally rewriting big swaths of the infrastructure bill to redirect billions in taxpayer broadband subsidies away from higher, cheaper, fiber choices and towards Elon Musk’s Starlink platform. Meaning much less cash for future-proof, extra dependable, locally-owned choices (together with cheap community owned fiber and less congested wireless), and more cash for one of many nation’s most erratic and unhinged racist billionaires.

It’s grotesque new ranges of American corruption and cronyism dressed up as pretend populist reform, and in the event you’re nonetheless considered one of these individuals who suppose these two billionaires care about something past their very own wealth and energy, we now have some sawdust and duck shit-filled dietary supplements to promote you.

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Corporations: spacex, starlink


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