Tag Archives: Elon Musk

Sauce For The Goose…None For The Gander

Remember Leona Helmsley, and her infamous statement that “the rules are for the little people”? The Trump administration clearly follows her philosophy, crafting rules that are intended to apply only to “those” people.

The Guardian has reported on a June 11th Justice Department directive that would allow authorities to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship for certain “criminal offenses.” And what are those criminal offenses? Murder? Theft? Arson? Probably not. According to the memo, attorneys in the department can institute proceedings to revoke someone’s United States citizenship if it can be demonstrated that the individual “illegally procured” naturalization, or procured naturalization by “concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.”

Evidently, failure to completely answer questions (“completely” can be in the eye of the beholder) during the naturalization process is sufficiently criminal to justify revocation of a person’s citizenship. (The article did make me think: if a factual omission is a crime serious enough to strip someone of citizenship, wouldn’t being convicted of, say, 32 felonies also be enough? But I digress.) 

The directive creates a process that significantly lightens the burden on the prosecutor. According to the memo, the proceedings are civil, so it emphasizes that the accused would not be entitled to an attorney. Also, since the proceedings are civil, the government has a lighter burden of proof than it would in criminal cases.

The overblown rhetoric of the proposal says prosecutors will focus on people involved “in the commission of war crimes, extrajudicial killings, or other serious human rights abuses … [and] naturalized criminals, gang members, or, indeed, any individuals convicted of crimes who pose an ongoing threat to the US”. But justice department attorneys are given wide discretion on when to pursue denaturalization; the directive specifically includes instances of lying on immigration forms.

The justice department’s civil rights division has been placed at the forefront of Trump’s policy objectives, including ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs within the government as well as ending transgender treatments, among other initiatives.

Well, as long as lying qualifies, let’s look at a couple of high-profile people who should be ripe for denaturalization. For example Vox has identified some questionable aspects of Melania Trump’s immigration process. 

The article reported that Melania broke immigration law when she first came to the U.S. in 1996. She entered the country on a tourist visa and then worked as a professional model–work that violated the terms of that visa. Perhaps she didn’t know better, but–as the Vox article notes–it is also entirely “possible that Melania knowingly committed visa fraud; that, in fact, she lied to US immigration officials when entering the country in August 1996 about her intentions to work while in the US. That’s not just an immigration violation but an outright federal crime.”

Either way, in order for Melania to have gotten a green card and then US citizenship, she would have had to attest that she hadn’t violated immigration law before — something that now appears to be untrue.

And speaking of “ongoing threats to the U.S.,” what about Donald’s no longer-BFF, Elon Musk? According to Forbes,

Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by The Washington Post,” reported Maria Sacchetti, Faiz Siddiqui and Nick Miroff.

 The reporters found Musk “did not have the legal right to work” when he founded and attracted investment with his brother Kimbal for a company later named Zip2. Kimbal Musk has long been open about their lack of legal status, even explaining in a video interview that he lied when crossing the U.S.-Canadian border so he could attend a business meeting in Silicon Valley. Immigration attorney Ira Kurzban said, “That’s fraud on entry.” He noted that Elon Musk’s brother could have been permanently barred from the United States. Instead, he became CEO of Musk’s first company.

“(Elon) Musk arrived in Palo Alto in 1995 for a graduate degree program at Stanford University but never enrolled in courses, working instead on his startup,” according to the Washington Post. That means Musk committed at least two immigration violations. First, by failing to take courses, he violated his student status. Second, he did not have authorization to work legally in the United States.

Somehow, I doubt the Justice Department’s new directive will cause trouble for these particular scofflaw’s. After all, they’re White–and the Trump administration is all about selective enforcement of those pesky rules.

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The Perils Of Privatization

According to the Washington Post, Elon Musk and the Trump Administration are hauling out an “oldie but goodie” and promising that once they’ve hollowed out the federal government’s capacity to govern, they’ll turn any functions they deem necessary over to the private sector. They’ll privatize for “efficiency.”  What could possibly go wrong?

Let me count the ways.

I spent a fair amount of my academic career researching what folks on the Right misleadingly call “privatization.” The first thing you need to know is that calling what Trump and Musk want to do “privatizing” is a misnomer. When Margaret Thatcher sold off government-owned industries to the private sector–where they made or lost money, paid taxes, and were left to sink or swim–that was privatization. In the U.S., the term is used to mean contracts between a government agency and a business or nonprofit organization to provide a government benefit or service. Government continues to pay for that service or benefit with tax dollars, and government remains responsible for its proper delivery.

Sometimes, contracting out makes sense. Sometimes it doesn’t. (It also shouldn’t be confused with procurement— government’s purchase of goods and services from the private market.)

Contracts with units of government are qualitatively different from contracts between private actors, and those differences make it far more likely that the “privatization” contracts ultimately negotiated will be unfavorable to taxpayers. Contracting out first became a fad at the state and local level some twenty-plus years ago, and the results weren’t pretty.

As I wrote back in 2013, mayors and governors who are considering privatization are operating under a different set of incentives than the corporate CEO who is charged with long-term profitability of his business. Long term to a politician means “until the next election.” Typically, the elected official is looking for immediate cash to relieve fiscal stress (and improve his immediate political prospects) and is much less concerned with the extended consequences of the transaction.

Furthermore–although it really pains me as a former Corporation Counsel to admit this–the lawyers who reviewed these deals for local governments tended to be far less sophisticated than  lawyers acting on behalf of the contractors. That’s not because they aren’t good lawyers–most are. But the skills required to advise a municipality or state agency aren’t generally the same skills as those needed by practitioners of business transaction law.

In addition to the existence of unequal bargaining capacities, there is also—unfortunately—the very high potential for “crony capitalism,” the temptation to reward a campaign donor or political patron with a lucrative contract at taxpayer expense. Back in the bad old days, patronage meant that you volunteered for the party and if your party won, you–or maybe your brother-in-law–got a job with the city or state. With “privatization,” patronage meant that you made a meaningful contribution to the party and if it won, you got a cushy contract.

Ideally, the media would act as a watchdog in these negotiations, alerting the public when a proposed contract is lopsided or otherwise unfavorable. But media has never been very good at providing this sort of scrutiny, because news organizations rarely employ business reporters able to analyze complex transactions. (In today’s media environment, of course, we’re lucky if we even know a deal is in the works.)

In that 2013 post, I warned that we shouldn’t be surprised when these transactions turn out to be unfavorable to the taxpayer–and in the years that followed, a great many of them proved to be very unfavorable indeed. (For one thing, it turned out that too many government agencies lacked the capacity to effectively monitor contractors.)

Worse, from an accountability standpoint, when services are delivered by an intermediary, citizens often fail to realize that those services are really being provided by government. That failure has constitutional as well as political implications. Only government can violate an individual’s civil liberties–that’s what lawyers call “state action”–so it’s important that we be able to distinguish actions taken by private actors from those that can be attributed to government. Privatization has significantly muddied that distinction.

Also, when contracting is extensive, it masks the true size of government. Today, there are approximately 3.7 million contract employees in addition to 2.1 million civil servants. Only the latter are being targeted by Musk.

Will the public fall for this replay of an expensive and discredited “reform”? Hopefully, our earlier, extensive negative experience with privatization will prevent folks from falling for this again, but as we know, simple prescriptions sell.

The plutocrats are undoubtedly salivating….

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We’re Not In Kansas Anymore, Toto…

Apologies for inundating your inboxes yesterday. The extra post was sent in error.

A large number of older Americans (I’m one) reached adulthood before what I like to call the “digital age.” Unlike our grandchildren, use of email, texting and instant access to a universe of information was not–and is not–intuitive to us. Most of us have learned to “make do”–we have our smartphones, use our computers, increasingly rely upon google–but I think we can be forgiven for not recognizing how dramatically technology is constantly changing the world we inhabit.

Or the ways that technology can be–and is being– employed to threaten the very foundations of our individual liberties.

Donald Trump doesn’t understand that process–but Elon Musk does. Trump is merely an ignorant and self-engrossed buffoon; Musk comes from that “intuitive” generation, and despite his clear mental and moral defects, does understand the various ways our emerging information environment can be employed–weaponized, to use a phrase popular these days–to amass power at the expense of us “little people.”

I’ve previously posted on the hugely negative effects of Trump’s erasures of factual information from government websites, but that is only one aspect of the threat we face.

In a recent “Letter from an American,” Heather Cox Richardson illuminated that threat. In her closing paragraphs, she described how technology was used to skew the 2016 election.

The story of how Cambridge Analytica used information harvested from about 87 million Facebook users to target political ads in 2016 is well known, but the misuse of data was back in the news earlier this month when Corey G. Johnson and Byard Duncan of ProPublica reported that the gun industry also shared data with Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 election.

Johnson and Duncan reported that after a spate of gun violence, including the attempted assassination of then-representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and the mass shootings at Fort Hood in Texas, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, had increased public pressure for commonsense gun safety legislation, the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, worked with gun makers and retailers to collect data on gun owners without their knowledge or consent. That data included names, ages, addresses, income, debts, religious affiliations, and even details like which charities people supported, shopping habits, and “whether they liked the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.”

Analysts ran that information through an algorithm that created a psychological profile of an individual to enable precise targeting of potential voters. Ads based on these profiles reached almost 378 million views on social media and sent more than 60 million visitors to the National Shooting Sports Foundation website. When Trump won in 2016, the NSSF took partial credit for the results. Not only was Trump in office, it reported, but also, “thanks in part to our efforts, there is a pro-gun majority in the U.S. House and Senate.”

That was ten years ago–before the “flowering” of AI. As I write this, Musk’s techie nerds are gaining access to the private information of millions of Americans, and anyone who thinks they’re looking for “fraud and waste” is smoking something.

Checks and balances were designed to prevent any one branch of government from wielding unbounded power. They should prevent the Executive Branch from employing the ever-increasing sophistication of digital technology to target/mislead unsuspecting citizens or punish those who are unwilling to bend the knee. But right now, one branch–Congress–has been neutered. Thanks to the nation-wide gerrymandering that the GOP perfected with RedMap in 2010, the House has devolved into a clown show of radicals, ignoramuses, Christian Nationalists and performative egomaniacs. Vote suppression, civic ignorance and digitally-sophisticated targeting have allowed MAGA to gain (slim) control of the Senate.

Thus far, the courts are doing their duty, but there are increasing signs that our would-be monarchs will simply defy them. The so-called “legacy media” warns that such defiance “would be” a constitutional crisis, ignoring the fact that we are already experiencing a constitutional crisis.

As empowering as having a lot of money has been (and still is), possession of information is even more so. Just as computerization allowed gerrymandering to become ever more precise, ever-expanding digital tools can enable those with access to citizens’ information to gain–and keep–unprecedented control over huge segments of the population.

Those of us who are beginning to understand the dimensions of the threat we face need to take to the streets. Peacefully, but in huge numbers.

We aren’t in Kansas anymore.

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Calling Musk’s Bluff

I have long admired Elizabeth Warren, and recently she’s given me another reason to salute her. She has called Elon Musk’s bluff–while shining a bright light on his ignorance and naivety.

As anyone who follows the news knows, Musk has bragged that he can cut two trillion dollars out of the federal budget. His hints about how he plans to accomplish that feat mostly revolve around sticking it to the poor, ill and elderly via cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and making it impossible for the federal government to do its job by slashing the federal workforce.

Warren’s advice to Musk has done two things: it has demonstrated that there are alternative ways to cut spending, and has reinforced the reality that funding decisions are policy decisions–that where and how government spends money is a reliable guide to what it considers important.

Time Magazine had the story. In a letter that Warren sent to Musk, she listed 30 recommendations for eliminating $2 trillion in federal spending over the next decade.

The list includes several of the progressive icon’s long-held policy fixations: renegotiating Department of Defense (DOD) contracts that independent analysts have found waste billions each year; reforming the Medicare Advantage insurance program and allowing Medicare to negotiate lower costs of prescription drugs; and closing tax loopholes for corporations and the wealthiest earners.

As the article noted, Musk has already walked back his promise to cut two trillion out of the budget, given that he is constrained by Trump’s vows not to touch Medicare and Social Security, and Republican refusal to cut military spending, (As the article notes, “DOGE will have to find less conventional ideas to fulfill Musk’s budget-slashing fantasy.” )

For years, Democrats and Republicans alike have wanted to curb wasteful government spending. While much of Washington recoils at Trump’s disruptive, norm-shattering second-term agenda, some see an opportunity for strange bedfellows to emerge. “In the interest of taking aggressive, bipartisan action to ensure sustainable spending, protect taxpayer dollars, curb abusive practices by giant corporations, and improve middle-class Americans’ quality of life,” Warren writes to Musk, “I would be happy to work with you on these matters.”

As the article notes, actual collaboration is probably not Warren’s goal–her letter is undoubtedly intended to make a point  rather than inviting Musk to work together. Musk, after all, is one of those “let them eat cake” deficit hawks who insist the only way to cut budget deficits is to slash the entitlement programs that prevent millions of Americans from falling into grinding poverty.

I am an advocate for a Universal Basic Income, and I take very seriously the (reasonable) charge that so expensive a measure would require massive changes to the federal budget. Accordingly, I’ve researched what experts (not self-engrossed billionaires) have to say about where we might cut current expenditures. Among the obvious possibilities are the obscene subsidies we continue to give to fossil fuel companies, and the incredibly bloated defense budget. (Even pro-defense scholars estimate that defense spending could be cut by 25% without damaging  U.S. defense capabilities.)

Warren points to similar research.

The biggest cost-saving idea in Warren’s letter is to preserve $200 billion by renegotiating Defense contracts. She points to an Inspector General report from 2011 that found contractors regularly hike prices for the military. One egregious example includes the Air Force overpaying 7,943% on soap dispensers. To rectify the problem, she urged passing legislation she previously introduced with Mike Braun, the former Republican Senator from Indiana, that would close loopholes to prevent defense contractors from price gouging the DOD. “There is a huge problem of the government being able to supervise these contractors carefully enough to be able to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth,” says Don Kettl, an expert on government administration and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

Kettl recently wrote an essay in the Washington Monthly arguing that the federal government needs more and better skilled civil servants to oversee contractors and that Musk and Trump’s plans to massively reduce the federal workforce will perversely lead to higher, not lower, government spending. “The argument is that the market can do the government’s work better and cheaper,” Kettl says. “The problem is that that’s not always the case, and contractors often get higher wages.”

Musk and Trump and their ilk continue to prove the accuracy of that old H.L. Mencken quote:”For every complex problem, there’s a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

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The Emerging Battles

Important notice: Due to the cold, the rally today has been moved to Broadway United Methodist Church, 609 E 29th St, Indianapolis. Indoors.

Today, to our great national shame, America will inaugurate our first felon President.

The fact that he’s a felon isn’t even the worst part of this disaster. Trump lacks a single redeeming characteristic–he’s ignorant, intellectually stunted, deeply disturbed and descending visibly into senility. That a (bare) majority of voters chose to place this specimen in the Oval Office may be the all-time saddest commentary on America’s current descent into White Christian Nationalism.

So what can we expect from the collection of grifters, racists and sycophants who will fill the upcoming administration?

I know my posts lately are rarely optimistic, but I think there may be cause–not for optimism, exactly, but reasons to moderate our pessimism. Because MAGA is more likely than not to eat its own. It isn’t just the nutcases in the House of Representatives, who will make it difficult for the GOP’s very thin majority (a majority that owes its status to gerrymandering, not voter sentiment) to pass anything. It’s the fault-lines between Trump’s White Nationalist MAGA base and the uber-wealthy grifters who see him as a tool to evade pesky regulations and fair taxes.

That fight has already started. As Jonathan Last reported in the Daily Beast, Steve Bannon has unleashed on Elon Musk:

“I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” Bannon told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera this week. “He will not have a blue pass to the White House, he will not have full access to the White House, he will be like any other person.”

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon added.

Bannon focused on the recent fight over H-1B visas, and an immigration system he claimed is “gamed by the tech overlords.”  He claimed that 76 percent of engineers working in Silicon Valley are non-Americans.

Bannon went on to accuse Musk of being self-serving, insisting that his “sole objective is to become a trillionaire.”

“He will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money. His aggregation of wealth, and then—through wealth—power: that’s what he’s focused on,” Bannon said.
Bannon went on to describe Musk’s preferred objective as “techno-feudalism.”

Bannon is not the only MAGA person issuing broadsides against the tech bros:

This isn’t a one-off. Bannon has hated Musk for a long time. And the fight between OG MAGA and Elon MAGA started with Laura Loomer, who launched her own jihad against Musk over the holidays. You can listen to Loomer here but if you don’t want to click, after calling Musk a “welfare queen,” she went on to indict the entire MAGA oligarch class:

“If you have a bunch of tech bros with billions of dollars and direct unfettered access to the vice president and the president of the United States, and then they are also very cordial with our adversaries as in China and Iran—we see that Elon Musk is having these meetings off the books with Iranian officials, with Chinese officials—what does that mean for us?”

If the split among Trumpers was limited to the anger over H-1B visas, that would be one thing, but it isn’t. It’s relatively easy for a party to seem united when it’s in opposition, but once in power, conflicting interests collide and political realities exert pressure, and Trump supporters have distinctly conflicting interests.

Here’s my almost-rosy analysis.

Today’s Republican Party is a White Nationalist cult. What keeps them (barely) cohesive is the cult leader. Donald Trump is the Jim Jones of today’s GOP. Unlike most cult leaders, who rule with iron hands, his obvious disinterest in actual governing means he is less able to exert dominance over factions quarrelling over policy.

The greater danger to Republican power is that Trump is old, unhealthy and in obvious mental and physical decline. His belligerence has masked the extent of that decline, but it is statistically unlikely that he will live to “serve” a full four-year term–and when he’s gone (either drooling in a senility too obvious for even MAGA to ignore, or dead), the MAGA cult will implode.

If JD Vance becomes President, sharp knives will come out; even most Republicans detest him. More to the point, Trump is already demonstrating that he’s unable to exercise total control, and there is no new Jim Jones in the wings.

Until then, sane Americans need to do whatever we can to obstruct and delay MAGA’s efforts to undermine ethics, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

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