Elon Musk – Strategic Culture Foundation https://www.strategic-culture.org Strategic Culture Foundation provides a platform for exclusive analysis, research and policy comment on Eurasian and global affairs. We are covering political, economic, social and security issues worldwide. Sun, 10 Apr 2022 20:53:47 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.16 Billionaires Are Not Morally Qualified To Shape Human Civilization https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/10/31/billionaires-are-not-morally-qualified-to-shape-human-civilization/ Sun, 31 Oct 2021 20:36:22 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=760807 By Caitlin JOHNSTONE

Human civilization is being engineered in myriad ways by an unfathomably wealthy class who are so emotionally and psychologically stunted that they refuse to end world hunger despite having the ability to easily do so.

The United Nations has estimated that world hunger could be ended for an additional expenditure of $30 billion a year, with other estimates considerably lower. The other day Elon Musk became the first person ever to attain a net worth of over $300 billion. A year ago his net worth was $115 billion. According to Inequality.org, America’s billionaires have a combined net worth of $5.1 trillion, which is a 70 percent increase from their combined net worth of under $3 trillion at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

So we’re talking about a class which could easily put a complete halt to human beings dying of starvation on this planet by simply putting some of their vast fortunes toward making sure everyone gets enough to eat. But they don’t. This same class influences the policies, laws, and large-scale behavior of our species more than any other.

To get a sense of how insane this is, imagine if you had seen a video clip of me calmly watching a child drown to death in a swimming pool and doing nothing to help. After watching such footage, would it ever in a million years occur to you that I am someone who should be in charge of the entire world?

I’m going to guess no. I’m going to guess that, in the unlikely event that you ever decided anyone should rule the world, after watching me let a child drown I’d rank somewhere near the very bottom of possible candidates.

Now imagine if instead of letting one child drown, it was millions.

That’s how absolutely insane it is that we allow this class to shape our civilization.

And we most certainly do allow them to shape our civilization.

Take Bill Gates. He spends a fortune on narrative control ranging from immense contributions to The Guardian to tens of billions of dollars in grants, and he’s committed hundreds of millions of dollars to shady political influence groups as well. He’s been influencing Covid policies around the world, from intervening against the waiving of vaccine patent restrictions to facilitating the worldwide rollout of digital vaccine passports; he’s been giving countless media interviews about Covid-19 and vaccines despite having no medical degree or indeed any qualifications at all apart from a net worth of $136 billion. This is after falsely pledging to give his immense fortune away over a decade ago; his net worth has more than doubled in that time.

Jeff Bezos has been a contractor with the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, and experts have claimed that Amazon is trying to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy. As sole owner of The Washington Post he ensures that a hugely influential news outlet will always be staffed by people who will help manufacture consent for the status quo upon which his empire is built, and his grand vision for humanity involves shipping us offworld to breed in giant rotating space cylinders.

Billionaires Reid Hoffman and George Soros have teamed up on a narrative control operation called Good Information Inc. with the stated goal of countering misinformation and disinformation in the news media, and the unstated goal of elevating empire-authorized narratives about what’s happening in the world and undermining unauthorized narratives.

The World Economic Forum has laid out an agenda for giant corporations to move beyond their unofficial and unacknowledged role as unelected rulers of our world and become open partners in the governance of world affairs alongside our official elected governments, with more power than ever before.

There are almost infinite examples I could highlight, but I think my point is clear. Billionaires and billionaire corporations own our media, influence our thinking, manipulate our economies, interfere in our politics, determine the fate of our ecosystem, and shape our world. And they are the very least qualified among us to be doing so.

Nobody who makes the decision day after day to let millions of people die of starvation has any business making decisions which affect other people, much less decisions which affect everyone. The fact that the billionaire class and its lackeys make this depraved decision day in and day out permanently disqualifies them from any legitimate claim to having the empathy and compassion that would be required for such a job. They are too narcissistic and dysfunctional to be permitted to have any power or influence whatsoever, much less the ungodly amount they wield today.

Billionaires should not exist. They should have their power and wealth taken from them, and the steering wheel of humanity should be given to the ordinary people who are infinitely more qualified to navigate us through the rough waters ahead for our species.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

]]> Space Colonization Is a Capitalist Perception Management Op https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/05/09/space-colonization-is-a-capitalist-perception-management-op/ Sun, 09 May 2021 17:01:11 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=738361 By Caitlin JOHNSTONE

The world’s two wealthiest people are fighting over the moon, which just says so much about where our species is at right now.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in a dispute with NASA over whose private spaace exploration corporation will get the $2.9 billion US government contract to return to the moon. I gleaned this annoying piece of information by way of an obnoxiously sycophantic Atlantic puff piece titled “Elon Musk Is Maybe, Actually, Strangely, Going to Do This Mars Thing”, subtitled “From his private Cape Canaveral, the billionaire is manifesting his own interplanetary reality — whatever the cost.”

The mainstream press cannot get enough of these two unfathomably wealthy plutocrats and their outspoken ambition to colonize space, with Musk advocating Mars colonization and Bezos preferring to ship us all offworld to live in giant Amazon space tubes. They love it for the same reason they love war and status quo politicians: it fits in beautifully with the capitalist world order.

Space colonization is largely a capitalist perception management op promoted by the likes of Musk and Bezos to strengthen the narrative that it’s okay to continue the world-raping global capitalist principle of infinite growth on a finite world because we can escape the catastrophic ecological consequences of that paradigm by fleeing to space.

“Ecocidal capitalism is fine, we’ll just go to space before it kills us!” is the message we’re all meant to absorb. And too many do. A large obstacle to waking people up to the existential crises we are facing as a species is the blind faith that technology will save us from the consequences of our mass-scale behavior, and therefore we don’t need to change. Which suits the world’s richest men perfectly.

But it’s a lie. Humanity will never colonize space. We are not separate or separable from this planet in that way.

People believe we can just snip humans out of their ecosystemic context to colonize space for the same reason they believe in rugged individualism: they don’t grasp how inseparably interconnected each human is. With our ecosystem, and with our society. Separation is an illusion.

We are not separable from our ecosystem. We are our ecosystem. We’re so inseparably one with our ecosystem that we need to send astronauts into space with a little box full of it or they’ll die. Thinking a human can be snipped out of its ecosystemic context and permanently transported across the desert of space is like thinking you can snip a ripple out of a pond and place that ripple in a teacup on the other side of the world. The ripple is the pond. It’s not separate.

We know how to build rockets, and how to keep a human alive in space for a short time as long as they bring part of their ecosystem with them, but there’s no scientific evidence that we can live separately from our ecosystem, and we’ve barely begun exploring our ignorance here.

Many imagine we’ll have people living independently of Earth’s ecosystem within the next century or two, but there’s literally no basis for this assumption; we essentially know as much about how to keep a human being alive apart from Earth’s ecosystem as we knew ten thousand years ago. Our Biosphere attempts to create a closed-Earth system were as clueless and silly as monkeys poking around at a supercomputer, and that was right here on our home planet.

The myriad ways in which we are connected with the ecosystemic context in which we evolved boggle the mind. Science is barely even beginning to explore those connections. There are tons we know about, but that’s just scratching the surface. We don’t know how much we don’t know. We’re only barely beginning to understand our own gut bacteria, and how those mini-ecosystems relate to our health. Those mini-ecosystems have their own relationships with our greater ecosystem. We know next to nothing about any of this. Most of the picture is missing.

And Elon says he’s going to ship humans to live on Mars?? What, because we have the technology to get there? Our bodies might get there, sure, but the whole staying alive part is a riddle that science is not even the tiniest fraction of a percentile close to solving.

Musk likes to argue that we must become a “multi-planetary species” because if an asteroid strikes Earth or we wipe ourselves out in a nuclear war, that’s it for our species. Our survival as a species, he argues, depends on colonizing other planets.

This is false and toxic thinking, because it will not happen. Our survival does not depend on our becoming a multi-planetary species, our survival depends on collectively waking up and learning to collaborate with each other and with our ecosystem. We’ve got an infinitely better chance of developing the technology to deal with an asteroid than we do of developing technology that will allow us to colonize space, and if we can transcend our self-destructive patterning the threat of nuclear war will be neutralized by our no longer being crazy enough to keep weapons around that make it a possibility.

Some argue for the possibility of terraforming planets like Mars to give them Earth-like ecosystems, but terraforming runs into the same problem: not just humans but all organisms are dependent on Earth’s ecosystem for survival. You couldn’t begin creating an Earth-like ecosystem without snipping out all the organisms which give rise to it. This can’t be done. A tree can’t be snipped out of its unfathomably interconnected ecosystemic context any more than a human can. To terraform you need trees and a near-infinity of other ecosystemic building blocks, none of which are separable from their terrestrial ecosystemic context.

We’re just going to have to make this Earth thing work. People assume space colonization is part of our future primarily because science fiction takes this as a given. But science fiction is just that: fiction, written to entertain and appeal to the same ego which imagines it is separate from the rest of the world. It’s an illusory premise.

We’re not going to rocket ship our way out of this mess. We’re not going to be able to keep doing things the way we are doing them. The “growth for its own sake” ideology that Musk and Bezos have dedicated their lives to embodying is, as Edward Abbey put it, the ideology of a cancer cell. Such an ideology is unsustainable. We’re going to have to change.

“I must change” is always the first possibility that an ego rules out when evaluating a dilemma, and it’s the same ego which says we are separate individuals, and it’s the same ego which created our dilemma in the first place. But we must change. We must transcend the ego.

That’s always the last thing anyone wants to hear, that we need to change, but it’s true. We’ll either collectively change our minds in a way that enables us to drastically shift the way we operate on this planet, or we’ll go extinct. It is evolve or die time. We’ll either make it or we won’t.

Space will not save us, and we will never colonize it. We can explore space, but it will be done via satellites and other tech, not by living organisms. Our astronauts have up until this point been nothing more than glorified scuba divers, entirely dependent on boxes of Earth’s ecosystem, no more independent from that ecosystem than someone holding their breath. This will remain the case.

Hell, forget colonizing space, try colonizing part of the Sahara Desert. Get everything you need, then seal yourselves in a bubble completely separate from the rest of the ecosystem. Even on Earth, with many of the terrestrial connection factors still intact, you will fail relatively quickly.

Such a project isn’t even on Musk’s radar, which shows his pet space project is really about making money and justifying an economic/political paradigm which will necessarily destroy our ecosystem. It’s justifying his cancer cell ideology, proving Robert Heinlein correct when he said, “Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.”

They work to make it appear that we’ve got some other option than to end our ecocidal trajectory and all the systems which feed into it, because otherwise it just looks like they’re a bunch of psychopaths burning an entire world and throwing its ashes into a gaping hole their hearts that can never be filled. If space colonization isn’t possible, then the people who are destroying our environment for money are just deranged lunatics who must be stopped at all cost.

But they are. And we must.

This is our home. It is our only home. I really, really wish we could stop treating it like a womb we plan on leaving or our parents’ house we plan on moving out of. There is nowhere else to go. This is it.

The earth is not some temporary transit station. We – the earth. We are inseparable from it. We are all indigenous terrestrials. We need to stop trying to move out, and start moving in.

It’s so, so beautiful here. We should be willing to change to keep it alive, like we would if a loved one’s life depended on our changing our behavior. Because that really is the case. I hope we see this before it’s too late.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

]]> Elon Musk’s Coup Stooge Áñez Arrested Trying to Escape Bolivian Justice https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/11/28/elon-musk-coup-stooge-anez-arrested-trying-escape-bolivian-justice/ Sat, 28 Nov 2020 17:21:25 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=605870 On November 24th, Elon Musk’s agent and now deposed Bolivian coup leader Jeanine Áñez was caught trying to escape justice by making her way to Brazil, but was prevented from boarding a plane by a group of citizens who were able to identify her in Trinidad.

Áñez was astoundingly prevented from boarding a plane at the Jorge Henrich Arauz airport in the city of Trinidad, as she was trying to go to a border city and then flee to Brazil. There is likely to be more to this story, involving a small deal with Trinidad & Tobago’s financial intelligence service, the FIUTT, who appears to have informed a left-leaning activist group with ties to Bolivia and Venezuela, to make the ‘citizen’s arrest’, so as to separate the state from the actual arrest.

From Deutsche Bank to Citibank – Espionage: Moves against Morales

At issue here is that Puerto España’s FIUTT service is apparently aware of Áñez’s money laundering to an offshore account under their watch, connected also to the US and its own Citibank. The tip from the FIUTT financial intelligence in Trinidad and Tobago on an eyebrow raising transaction was relayed directly to vectors within the Movement for Socialism (MAS-IPSP).  Because of Áñez has accounts either frozen or under scrutiny in Bolivia, it appears she had suddenly accessed or moved a high amount of money in an offshore account, as she prepared to leave from the Trinidad region (Bolivia) to Brazil. She was likely attempting to travel using false documents.

For its part, the Bolivian BIP or the Special Security Group would not be the best party involved in making the arrest themselves directly, as this could connect that a tip-off from Trinidad and Tobago’s FIUTT had cooperated with Bolivia’s Special Security Group, (or worse, likely, the MAS-IPSP itself) which in turn is conducted under the Ministry of the Interior.  Activities of the Ministry of the Interior are under scrutiny, and moreover there are divisions and potential leaks within them, and could sully the legal case against Áñez. Because of the very same relationships and allegiances that made the coup possible from within the military and police would also apply to Bolivian intelligence activities under the Ministry of the Interior.

Because the Special Security Group and the Multipurpose Intervention Brigade (BIP) may be compromised and could then inform Áñez that her plans were known and an arrest was imminent, where she could have avoided being at the airport that day and would look instead at other ways of crossing the border perhaps by land, the moves here on the part of the Movement for Socialism are better understood.

The charges against Áñez include corruption, and her defense will revolve around claims that the evidence is politically motivated or was arrived it illegally, without proper warrants. Thus, a problem could arise between Sucre and La Paz. The judiciary in Sucre would look at La Paz for making a politically motivated prosecution and prosecutors would then be in a position of engaging in parallel construction of the evidence, one that circumvented the actual direct relationship between MAS-IPSP and Puerto España’s FIUTT. The fact that MAS would claim that problems within the Ministry of the Interior and Bolivia’s own intelligence service were the reason for this.

Trinidad is a member of the US led Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI), invites significant US foreign investment, and is likely not to want to be seen as overtly involved themselves. Here, the role of Citibank in Trinidad’s non-citizen banking system where offshore accounts are possible, cannot be understated.

To wit, much of the thrust of 21st Century Socialism has been part of a transatlantic agreement wherein Citibank is in an investment partnership with other transatlantic banks within the IMF structure, prominently Deutsche Bank, in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. In exchange, Deutsche Bank subsidiaries and partners in France and Spain are the primary western banks on call for Latin American countries belonging to the so-called ‘pink tide’.

And so this counter-coup against Áñez is as much a European banking effort against its ‘frenemy’ in the form of Citibank and New York City.

The Failed Coup

These exciting events are now transpiring as the result of what has become an ultimately failed coup attempt in Bolivia, a tragic year-long period where democratic rule was upended.

Indeed, last month something incredible happened. The Globalist’s golpe de estado failed, in what has been a series of incredible failures world-wide. Among their sought after bounty was Bolivia’s lithium wealth, valued in billions. Bolivia is known to have somewhere between 50 to 80 percent of the world’s lithium.

Morales (L) and Áñez (R)

Goldman Sachs says that the global market demand for lithium could in fact triple to some 570,000 tons a year in the next 10 years due to electric vehicles. It’s no wonder that Elon Musk’s hands were all over it.

But nevertheless, Evo Morales made a come-back in at the end of October 2020, and was able to overturn a coup (by way of law-fare) imposed on the country from the Globalist deep state.

Summarizing it succinctly, Ramona Wadi wrote for SCF last month;

“Bolivia has managed to overturn the neoliberal agenda which the U.S. attempted to force upon the nation in the 2019 coup, which ousted former President Evo Morales to install the far-right wing Jeanine Añez as president, or dictator. While Chile was dealing with its state violence, the Bolivian coup was out in the streets exerting its vengeance on the country’s indigenous population. For months, Bolivians protested against state violence and police repression. It is now the new government’s obligation to bring the perpetrators to justice, while retracing Bolivia’s path to its revolutionary progress.”

Besides being involved in an unconstitutional coup, where the armed forces and the police conspired with US Deep-State agents to overthrow Evo Morales, Jeanine Áñez is also wanted in particular for killing of civilians in Senkata and Sacaba.

And yet despite all this, western media – in backing the coup – painted her as a symbol of a woman “breaking the glass ceiling”, and then she doubled-down on virtue signaling by claiming without evidence that she had ‘contracted the coronavirus’, in what was no doubt both a sympathy ploy and a signal to globalist elites that she was still their man, or woman, rather.

Of course we face a strange and newly arisen contradiction in our terminology, where in Latin America ‘far-right’ means almost nothing like what it means inside the US. In Latin America, it describes an agent of the bankers and foreign interests who undermine sovereignty, and who employ the tactics of death squads and mass repression. In Latin America, it is the ‘far right’ who view the common people as the ‘deplorables’, and tend to view themselves as trying to maintain a vestige of privilege bestowed on them by the legacy of Spanish colonialism on the continent.

Despite her own obviously indigenous features, Jeanine Áñez Áñez is among a certain upwardly mobile demographic of La Paz’s urban petit-bourgeoisie whose blonde hair comes from the bottle and not from the mother. While perhaps a seemingly trivial point for those outside of Latin America, this ‘personality tick’ of hers has become a symbolic focus of outrage against her coup, as it is emblematic of the disastrous neoliberal policies of its petit-bourgeoisie who fetishize the downplaying of any indigenous roots. For these reasons and more, the big news of her detention on November 24th was widely celebrated by Bolivia’s underclass.

Will Justice Fall on Áñez? Musk’s Puppet and her Crimes against Humanity

But others from her administration have already successfully escaped justice. Defense Minister Fernando Lopez who was critical in organizing the coup and who is believed to have received millions from Elon Musk, has escaped to Brazil. Last week, former de facto government minister Arturo Murillo, facing corruption charges and more, successfully fled the country and arrived in Panama. As a result of this, three officials of the Bolivian Migration Directorate were arrested for allowing these wanted fugitives to escape. Presently Bolivia is in both diplomatic talks and litigation to push Panama and Brazil to return the ‘asylum seekers’ to face justice in La Paz.

Following the inauguration of Morales’ ally, the newly-elected Bolivian President Luis Arce, the corruption that prevailed during the de facto government has been further revealed. At present, there are some 24 cases open and being reviewed by courts.

Last October the Plurinational Legislative Assembly moreover recommended that the Public Prosecutor’s Office (Fiscalía) open a lawsuit against Añez for the massacres of Cochabamba, Senkata, Sacaba, and El Alto, which all occurred in November 2019. She stands accused of committing the crimes of genocide, torture, and kidnappings.

November 2019, Mourners in Bolivia make prayers for citizen’s killed by Añez’s coup forces – Photo credit – The Associated Press

Elements from within the armed forces and the police were the primary ‘on the ground’ actors of the coup d’état of November 10th, 2019, and would have also involved actors within the Ministry of the Interior including the BIP or perhaps the Special Security Group. At the time in exile in Argentina and fearing his own life, Evo Morales repeatedly called for charges against those responsible for the massacre in El Alto. Morales has denounced Bolivia’s high military commands for decorating and honoring the “coup leaders,” who now stand accused in the massacring of citizens.

The aim of these killings ordered by Áñez was to strike fear in indigenous communities, because of the mechanisms of the coup. Many coup tactics are employed during elections, as being seen right now in the US against Donald Trump. It is an opportune time because electronic voting devices, or the much older method of controlling local political machines, are used to throw the vote towards an otherwise unpopular leader – such as Biden.

But in the case of Bolivia, with Añez who was backed by American plutocrat Elon Musk, the coup had to be arranged after the election because the re-election of the wildly popular Morales was hard to contest. But in Bolivia, where indigenous communities live protected from many of the depravities of modernity, it is difficult to widely use electronic voting. And more, the local political machines are controlled by indigenous people who saw Evo Morales as one of their own.

And so the coup relied upon the mid-century fascist tactics of the death squad, torture, and classical repression.

Elon Musk’s hopes were that the then upcoming October 2020 elections could see a continuation of the Añez junta, if sufficient numbers of Bolivian populists could be murdered.

But now with the come-back success of Morales’ party with the assumption of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) into power with Morales ally Luis Arce, the promises to investigate the various crimes committed the year that Áñez was in government are now coming to fruition.

Elon Musk, in search of ever-cheaper access to lithium, got behind this brazen gilded-age act of imperialist violence. He was eager to oppose the will of millions of Bolivian voters, a base widely backed by its indigenous population with its pre-Columbian culture.

SPACEX CEO ELON MUSK SHOWS PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA AROUND THE COMPANY’S CAPE CANAVERAL ROCKET PROCESSING SITE IN 2010. (CREDIT: BILL INGALLS / NASA)

Now the character of Elon Musk has been difficult for some to discern, but what is abundantly clear is that he represents a breed of ‘entrepreneurs’ in name only, who in fact rely on ‘socialism for the rich’, on subsidies and government largesse. He has angled on themes that suit his own interests, and his own interests alone. At times appearing to align with Trump’s populism on space technology or against lockdowns, but in fact got his start from deep connections with the Obama administration’s mini ‘Green New Deal’, and the privatization of NASA resources that made Tesla Motors and Space-X a possibility.

It is lamentable, or at the very least hypocritical, that he would work so hard to subvert any kind of socialism for the poor, as was the case when he so enthusiastically supported the coup against Bolivian President Evo Morales.

The successful prosecution of Áñez, who faces murder and kidnapping charges, will help bring closure to a troubled, if brief, chapter in the long trajectory of independence, national liberation, and self-determination for Bolivia and its 11 million people.

]]> The Evilness of America’s Ruling Class https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/08/08/evilness-america-ruling-class/ Sat, 08 Aug 2020 17:00:11 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=484019 The landmark Gilens & Page study in 2014, which was the first study anywhere to examine the data to determine scientifically whether or not a given Government is a democracy or instead a dictatorship, studied the U.S. data, and found conclusively that it’s a dictatorship. The U.S. is controlled by its six or seven hundred billionaires (the study identified America’s ruling class as only “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests”, but the people who own the controlling interest in over 90% of that and hire their lobbyists and fund the careers of the winning politicians are simply America’s billionaires, the U.S. oligarchy or “aristocracy”). After that landmark 2014 study, other reports came forth, all adding further confirmation to its findings.

What is the result of billionaires-rule?

America has a higher percentage of its people in prison than any other nation on Earth, and none of America’s prisoners are billionaires nor spouse or child of any, except for the very few organized criminals who were cheating and stealing from other billionaires (and, since billionaires rule America, that’s the only type of crime a billionaire can be successfully prosecuted for perpetrating in America — crimes against other billionaires). The people who control the people who write and enforce the laws don’t need to worry about prison. Almost all of America’s prisoners are, in fact, poor people, not even middle-class — and virtually none are upper-class. They’re born poor, live poor, and die poor.

Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and George W. Bush, have all had their careers funded by America’s billionaires, and that’s why these politicians received their respective Party’s nominations. Without the billionaires’ support, they’d be nothing, just losing politicians. You get the nomination by representing your Party’s billionaires, not by representing its voters. Behind the scenes, even America’s racial caste system is enforced on behalf of both Parties’ billionaires, because supremacism is what they all share, regardless of their rhetoric to the contrary, and there is a groupist element to this supremacism. (Every aristocracy is like that — very groupist.)

And this fact shows itself most starkly in international relations, America’s imperialism, from which the whole world suffers.

That’s why the U.S. Government is profoundly evil: destroying Iraq in 2003-, destroying Libya in 2011-, destroying Syria in 2012-, etc., and trying so hard to destroy Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, and any other country it hasn’t yet destroyed and is still trying to conquer via sanctions, coups, or invasions.

It’s not the American people who are evil; it is all of America’s billionaires — not a one of whom funds any anti–imperialist candidate. They ALL want conquest, because they all are supremacists.

Here’s just one example: Elon Musk.

A 29 November 2019 article “Bolivia: Post-Coup Update” presented the 10 November 2019 coup there as having been internally based upon targeting that country’s native indian 70% as being inferior to the country’s 30% white European-derived aristocracy and upper-middle class, so that this was a targeting by the richest, a bigotry which serves the interests of the wealthiest. And, as usual, the U.S. regime was backing that bigotry. Furthermore, on 24 July 2020, Tesla corporation’s founder, Elon Musk, tweeted back in response to a tweet from an “Armani” which criticized “the U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there.” Musk replied “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” After some negative public reactions to that, he added, “Also, we get our lithium from Australia.” Then, on July 25th, “Carlos Reymon G” replied “Dude you get Lithium from Ganfeng which gets their Lithium from Bolivia; a quick google search will tell you that.” Immediately prior to those exchanges, Musk had tried to signal his virtuousness by tweeting, on the morning of July 24th, “As a reminder, I’m in *favor* of universal basic income.” So, though he thinks it’s fine to rob the poor in Bolivia, he doesn’t want to treat his own nation’s poor so psychopathically. His bigotry against the masses in Bolivia doesn’t extend to the masses in his own country, he was saying. At Reddit, many of the commenters were in denial, and just assumed that Musk had been joking — “In order to understand the joke you have to understand the coup thing ( and his involvement ) is a conspiracy theory in socialist circles without any basis in reality.” — or etc. Many ordinary people simply refuse to believe how evil and deceitful, and outright bigoted (basically supremacist), people have to be in order to become and remain a billionaire. The idea that wealth reflects virtue — maybe even God’s blessing — is heavily promoted, by billionaires. For them, it’s a self-‘justifying’ belief. The myth of the kindly ‘philanthropic’ billionaire (supposedly not motivated by the tax-writeoffs and buildings that will be named in their honor for the ‘donation’) is thus intrinsic to the culture in America and many other countries — countries that are largely controlled by the U.S. regime (its billionaires).

Musk himself was born in 1971 and lived his entire formative years in apartheid South Africa, leaving for Canada in 1988, so that he lived all of his first 17 years under the racist apartheid White dictatorship. He was raised in an exceptionally wealthy family, and went to Canada for college, specifically so that he would be able more easily to be received into America’s Wharton School as a Canadian. He and his entire family were obsessed with money and sex, surrounded by intense racism and with being on the “gifted” (i.e., lucky) end of that supremacism, and they were satisfied to live as extremely wealthy and successful Whites under an apartheid White-supremacist Government, never condemning it, either before or after the end of apartheid in the 1990s. So, it’s perhaps natural for Musk today to view the 70% native-indian population of Bolivia as being just fine to exploit and crush — even to rob them — much like Blacks had been robbed by the racist bigoted system, when and where he was growing up.

To view people like Musk as models to emulate, is common, but evil — systemically evil, because it sets an abhorrent standard, as being something that should instead be perpetuated and copied. There is no way in which the social sciences should shun moral evaluations, but they need to be empirically justifiable, which is not the way nature itself functions — nature is unplanned (nothing that is justifiable or unjustifiable). This type of planning can be done only by deviating from the natural dominance of psychopathy (“It’s I versus everybody else”) in social matters. To deny the unnaturalness of good, and to set the natural psychopathy as being instead something to emulate, is the opposite of science. It is not only to lie; it is to avoid the application of science to the planning of society. It is to negate any social science, and to advocate instead for the “state of nature,” which is “red in tooth and claw,” and to apply that standard to human society. It is to take what is the systemic norm (chaos), as being instead what should be the systemic norm; it is to reject any social science, at all. Victory to the psychopaths is bad, not good. That actual societal chaos is what billionaires push for, even when their rhetoric is the exact opposite. Their rhetoric is the opposite because, in order to win, they need to deceive the public; they need to do this in order to conquer the public, as any supremacist wants to do. Deceit is their primary weapon.

On 8 June 2020, Glenn Greenwald headlined at The Intercept “The New York Times Admits Key Falsehoods That Drove Last Year’s Coup in Bolivia: Falsehoods Peddled by the U.S., Its Media, and the Times”, and he documented that the U.S. regime and its Latin American vassal nations had engineered the coup that took place during October and November of 2019 in Bolivia. This was little more than two years after Bolivia’s President Morales, on 17 July 2017, had publicly announced a plan, with funding from his Government, to develop Bolivia’s lithium — the world’s largest reserves of the mineral — so that the Bolivian people, instead of foreign investors, would reap the rewards from that lithium.

On 20 July 2020, Forbes headlined “Elon Musk Is Now The Fifth Richest Person In The World” and reported that “As of Monday afternoon, Musk’s net worth surpassed $74 billion, meaning he is now the fifth-richest person on the planet.” Bolivia’s entire Gross National Product during 2019 was $40.58 billion. That’s for 11.4 million people — $3,559 per person. How much of an opportunity will each of those 11.4 million people have to ‘earn’ $74 billion (assuming they’d be psychopathic enough, and gifted enough, to ‘earn’ it)?

For a person to become a billionaire, or stay one, psychopathy is the first requirement. It’s that way everywhere, unless the Government is very strict in prohibiting that. A libertarian (otherwise called “neo-liberal”) government offers maximum freedom for the richest, but grinding servitude for everyone at the bottom, where there are typically found many decent, and even many heroic, individuals. It’s an upside-down world, but that’s naturally the way things are. What’s natural isn’t necessarily good. Billionaires want the public to believe otherwise, but they know themselves to be lying when they say that what’s good is natural. A good society never happens naturally, and they know this, but they don’t want the public to know it, and they make sure that the majority of the public won’t know it.

While a pauper who kills one person will likely go to prison for decades, a billionaire who crushes millions and kills tens or hundreds of thousands will have no accountability, at all. And most, even of Bolivia’s 70% native-indian population, won’t know who robbed and crushed them, and how it was done to them. They will know only the result — nothing else. The result is something that they’ll know, only too well.

A progressive wants equal opportunity for all, and equal liability to all. The state of nature is exactly the opposite: it is libertarian (total opportunity, and no liability) for the richest, but stifling serfdom for everybody else. Libertarians call the state of nature simply “libertarianism,” but it’s actually the most liberty for the fewest. And today’s America exemplifies that, in an extreme way. The suffering, from it, extends globally.

And the source of this suffering is hidden by billionaires, globally, which is the reason why the regime that perpetrated Iraq 2003-, Libya 2011-, Syria 2012-, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, etc., and that is also profoundly bigoted against Blacks and some other groups domestically, is still accepted in some countries, and not yet sanctioned worldwide, and why its brands are not even being boycotted, anywhere.

This isn’t to say that America’s billionaires are abnormal, but only that they are the most powerful, because they are the billionaires who control the imperial regime. America’s allies such as UK and Holland are just as corrupt (and new reports of their corruption keep coming in all the time), but they would not be the threats that they are if they weren’t vassals of the imperial regime. The problem isn’t only their evilness; it’s the power that they hold. That’s why the focus right now needs to be on the U.S. regime, and on the billionaires who control it. That’s where the main threat to the world is, at the center. Voters in the corrupt countries accept it, they continue to vote for it; they don’t revolt against it; so, if the counterforce won’t come from the outside, then it won’t come at all. And, if counterforce won’t come at all, then what hope is there, really? Individuals in foreign countries can vote against it, and boycott it. That’s all.

]]> The Privatization of Global Chaos https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/08/02/the-privatization-of-global-chaos/ Sun, 02 Aug 2020 13:00:19 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=476607 A recent off-hand remark by one of America’s oligarchs points toward a new methodology for undermining what is left of international law and order. Speaking in earnest or in jest, nobody really knows, but smart money would certainly bet on the former, when admonished that the Bolivian coup that toppled President Evo Morales last year “wasn’t in the best interests of the Bolivian people,” Elon Musk, the Tesla electric car magnate, brazenly tweeted: “We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it!”

There is, of course, room for plausible deniability here because Musk was responding to another tweet calling the U.S. government, not Musk directly, to account for “organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there.” Musk’s “we” response could theoretically be interpreted as not a personal confession of responsibility for the dastardly deed but, rather, a good citizen’s loyal expression of support for his country’s foreign policy. Charitably speaking such a reading is possible. But speaking more realistically Musk, although associated in the public mind with a pioneering electric car design, did in fact have a very vital interest in the Bolivian regime change operation. Electric cars, to put it very simply, run on lithium batteries, and Bolivia just happens to be a major supplier of that ore. No lithium, no Tesla or any other electric vehicles.

To fill in some more blanks, it also happens that just weeks before the coup in November of 2019, President Morales issued a decree essentially nationalizing Bolivia’s mineral wealth, including lithium deposits. Bolivia watchers, of course, could see it coming for some time. The politically artless President disclosed his audacious game-plan to empower the Bolivian people to enjoy the benefits of their country’s wealth two years before. Just read and weep at his naiveté: “Bolivian President Evo Morales sees a prosperous future for his currently impoverished South American nation, pinning his hopes on the rapid rise in the global price of this valuable resource. ‘We will develop a huge lithium industry, over $800 million have already been made available,’ Morales told the German DPA news agency.”

So the jackals were put on notice as early as 2017. Morales’ “sins” were numerous enough and he would have been targeted for removal anyway even if he had not antagonized the lithium cartel by announcing the ambitious project to extract a fair price from it. But now we have at least established that Elon Musk and his local agents “highly likely” were not neutral observers while preparations for the coup were being conducted. Musk may have made his “we can coup whoever we want” remark as a loyal citizen who supports his country’s hemispheric interests, but clearly he also had significant financial interests of his own in this controversy.

Indeed, the contest between the individual by the name of Elon Musk and the country of Bolivia was anything but the “level playing field” that noble U.S. diplomacy insisted on in Bosnia while their local team was losing. Musk’s personal worth of $68 billion contrasts rather conspicuously with Bolivia’s GNP of $40.58 billion in 2019. Quite simply, the American oligarch could buy Bolivia and have plenty of change left over. But why buy it if you can far more cheaply organize a coup, put your people in charge, and then own it, including the lithium? That is a much more sensible business plan.

President Morales’ cheeky pipe-dream of “Bolivia’s enormous reserves provid[ing] a major windfall for the country, allowing it to generate wealth and spread prosperity among its destitute population” was clearly a non-starter in some influential circles and last year’s fascist coup at least temporarily put an end to it.

The genuine possibility that a very rich man with a huge pecuniary interest had concentrated his resources to overthrow the legitimate government of a member-state of the United Nations and got away with it, even boasting retrospectively of his accomplishment, should be shocking. The levity with which Musk’s revealing remark was met fully reflects the decay of the international legal system. Or, to be more precise, it shows the seemingly complete evaporation of what Ivan Ilyin called “legal consciousness,” embodying the fundamental norms that limit sociopathic and predatory behaviour at all levels, between states and between individuals, as well as between enormously powerful individuals and comparatively weak states, as in the Bolivian example that we are citing.

The Bolivian example, however, is far from isolated. The purposeful substitution in the conduct of foreign policy of private individuals for government personnel goes back at least to the Croatian Operation Storm in August of 1995. That was managed from the shadows by MPRI (Military Professional Resources Inc.), ostensibly a Washington-based private association of retired military officers renting their experience and expertise (including doctrinal advice, scenario planning and U.S. government satellite intelligence) to NATO strategic allies in distress. The 1995 MPRI arranged Croatian military assault, orchestrated with full Pentagon and White House plausible deniability, resulted in thousands of Serb civilian casualties and the expulsion of 250,000 Serb inhabitants from the UN protected Krajina region.

For a more recent illustration of the same principle at work, look no further than the May 2020 privately subcontracted invasion of Venezuela, with the goal of physically seizing its leadership and replacing it with pliant puppets clustered around the self-proclaimed “President” Juan Guaido.

Are we looking at a trend, or a “new normal”, to borrow a phrase from the current pandemic vocabulary, in the domain of international relations? It would appear so. The trailblazers of this new dispensation are wealthy oligarchs with lethal political agendas that go far beyond activities arguably excusable for members of their class, such as amassing more wealth. Coming immediately to mind are Soros (color revolution) and Gates (global imposition of unsafe vaccines and population reduction). Has admitted participation in the Bolivian coup now outed another “philanthropist,” Elon Musk, whose benefactions we must in future also suffer and dread?

]]> Elon Musk Is Acting Like a Neo-Conquistador for South America’s Lithium https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/03/12/elon-musk-is-acting-like-a-neo-conquistador-for-south-americas-lithium/ Thu, 12 Mar 2020 11:00:44 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=332145 Vijay PRASHAD – Alejandro BEJARANO

Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, wants to build an electric car factory in Brazil. He was supposed to meet Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, in Miami in early March, but he was too busy; instead, Musk will go to Brazil sometime this year. All eyes are on the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, whose Secretary of International Affairs Derian Campos is in direct contact with Musk. Two automobile manufacturers—BMW and GM—already have factories in Santa Catarina. Marcos Pontes (Minister of Science, Technology, Innovation, and Communications) held a video conference with Anderson Ricardo Pacheco, a senior Tesla official. They were joined by Daniel Freitas, a congressman, and Claiton Pacheco Galdino, who is the business development director for Criciúma, a city in Santa Catarina. They are eager for Tesla to open a Gigafactory—Tesla’s name for a big factory—in South America’s largest economy.

It helps that Brazil has considerable lithium deposits—mostly in the southeastern states of Minas Gerais and Paraíba and in the northeastern states of Ceará and Rio Grande do Norte. The production of lithium is limited, largely having been used for ceramics and glass production. The Bolsonaro government is interested in increasing the production of lithium, including as a key raw material for the lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars such as those made by Tesla. But Brazil’s lithium will not be sufficient. Tesla would need to import lithium from elsewhere.

The Lithium Triangle

Over 50 percent of the world’s known lithium deposits are in the “Lithium Triangle”—the lithium concentrated brine sources in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. Bolivia’s high mountain deserts—the Salar de Uyuni—have by far the largest known reserves of lithium.

In a bizarre tweet, the Bolivian entrepreneur Samuel Doria Medina wrote that since Elon Musk and Jair Bolsonaro will discuss the Tesla plant in Brazil, they should add to this initiative the following: “build a Gigafactory in the Salar de Uyuni to supply lithium batteries.” Doria Medina is not just an entrepreneur. He is the vice-presidential candidate alongside the “interim president” Jeanine Áñez for the May 3, 2020, Bolivian presidential elections. Áñez came to power only because of the coup d’état against Evo Morales in November 2019. Doria Medina’s welcome mat to Tesla should, therefore, be seen as having the full authority of the coup government behind it.

Morales’ government had been very cautious with these lithium reserves. It had made clear that these precious resources were not to be turned over to transnational corporations in deals favorable to the firms; what gains come from lithium, Morales had pointed out, must be properly shared with the Bolivian people. The point that Morales’ government made is that any deal must be done with Comibol—Bolivia’s national mining company—and Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos—Bolivia’s national lithium company. The monetary gains from the mining would come into the Bolivian exchequer and then fund the social programs so necessary for the country. This sensible socialist policy was too much for three major transnational firms—Eramet (France), FMC (United States), and Posco (South Korea)—all three of whom turned tail and went to Argentina.

The Lithium Coup

It was Morales’ socialist policy toward Bolivia’s resources that doomed his government. The oligarchy, which was angry with Morales’ government and its socialism, used every mechanism to undermine the election of 2019. Forest fires in the northern and eastern regions of Bolivia provided the oligarchy’s media with the weaponry to suggest that Morales had abandoned his commitment to the environment and to Pachamama (Mother Earth), and that he was now working to benefit the cattle ranchers; it is important to point that this is not only ridiculous, but that as soon as the coup government of Áñez came into office, it passed legislation that allowed the ranchers to extend their lands into forested areas.

Morales’ opponent—Carlos Mesa—and other senior leaders of the oligarchy’s political parties openly said long before the election that Morales could only win by fraud. A self-proclaimed Council for the Defense of Democracy said that Morales was an illegitimate candidate because he had lost the 2016 constitutional referendum. The media—backed by these corporate and neofascist interests—banged the drum of fraud, while Carlos Mesa—on the night of the election—said that there was “monumental fraud” in the election. These provocations from Mesa, the neofascists, and the corporate elites resulted in street violence; in the midst of this, the police—sections of whom were angry with Morales for cracking down on police corruption—mutinied. The 36 Bolivians who died in the immediate post-election aftermath are victims of Mesa’s incendiary language. The Organization of American States (OAS), egged on by the U.S. government, came up with a “preliminary report” of fraud in the election; the hard conclusions in the report were not substantiated by the data in it. The OAS report played an important role in legitimizing the coup against Morales.

It is important to point out that there was no controversy about Morales’ election in 2014; in that election, Morales won 61 percent of the votes to defeat the entrepreneur Samuel Doria Medina, who won 24 percent (Doria Medina is the same person who is now running for vice president and welcomes Tesla to Bolivia’s lithium). Morales’ term, from the 2014 election, had not yet expired in November 2019; the removal of Morales then violated the mandate of 2014, a point that has received almost no discussion either inside Bolivia or abroad.

John Curiel and Jack Williams of the Election Data and Science Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) went over the Bolivian election data and found no fraud: “There is not any statistical evidence of fraud that we can find,” they wrote conclusively in the Washington Post. Curiel and Williams contacted the OAS, but they note, “We and other scholars within the field reached out to the OAS for comment; the OAS did not respond.” By their assessment, Morales won the election in November 2019 and should have been inaugurated this year to a new term.

Terrible pressure by the coup government against the party of Morales (the Movement for Socialism, or MAS)—as well as the presence of USAID monitors and a U.S.-backed head of the election commission, Salvador Romero—suggests that this election on May 3 is not going to be at all fair; it will likely favor the coup government, including the entrepreneur who wants to turn over Bolivia’s lithium to Elon Musk’s Tesla and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

A World of Lithium

In 2019, the benchmark Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s “Energy Storage Outlook 2019” report anticipated that by 2030, the price of the lithium-ion battery would drop dramatically, and that—as a consequence—renewable energy (solar and wind) plus storage of energy in batteries will expand exponentially. By 2040, there is an expectation that wind and solar will produce 40 percent of world energy consumption, rather than the 7 percent it now produces. For this, demand for energy storage will increase. “The total demand for batteries from the stationary storage and electric transport sectors is forecast to be 4,584GWh (Gigawatt hours) by 2040,” write the Bloomberg analysts, “providing a major opportunity for battery makers and miners of component metals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel.” The current use is merely 9GW/17GWh.

The key point to emphasize here is that this will provide “a major opportunity” for “miners of component metals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel.” When Bloomberg’s analysts use a word like “miners,” they do not mean the Bolivian miners or the Congolese miners, but the transnational firms, such as Tesla and its chief, Elon Musk. As far as Bloomberg and Áñez are concerned, South America is no longer to follow the resource nationalist project of Evo Morales; this is Elon Musk’s South America, a place for the neo-conquistadors to make money and leave behind them social carnage.

counterpunch.org

]]> Elon Musk Is Gaslighting America https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/06/25/elon-musk-is-gaslighting-america/ Tue, 25 Jun 2019 10:20:32 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=126154 Robert SCHEER

Tesla, from the get-go, has sold itself as a green dream in our era of rapidly-worsening climate change. But there’s a lot about the electric car company that’s more nightmarish than many of its fans or even the California government, which heavily subsidizes Tesla’s operations with hundreds of millions of dollars in tax exemptions and other incentives, would like to admit.

Will Evans, an award-winning journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting, published a hard-hitting series about Tesla’s flagrant labor violations, exposing Elon Musk’s purportedly progressive business for what it truly is: a green mirage. In the series, Evans reports on the clash between the manufacturing elements of the company and the management that operates like a tech startup, and how this contradiction has created often dangerous conditions for Tesla factory workers. Rather than address these very real issues, however, Musk and his company have chosen to brush them off and hide reports of injuries in order to maintain the illusion its customers buy into when they purchase their luxurious Tesla cars.

“We started looking into Tesla because we were hearing that there was safety problems there, people getting hurt,” Evans tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” “It has this great reputation for being this futuristic, forward-thinking, world-saving company that’s going to bring sustainable energy to transportation and revolutionize how we do things. And a lot of people go there because of that.

“What we found was that, under pressure to meet its production goals, it was really leaving safety, worker safety, by the wayside, and had prioritized cranking out cars as fast as possible, and left its workers dealing with all kinds of serious injuries. And then was actually trying to hide those injuries in order to make its safety record look better.”

The revelations should have jolted Musk and California officials to take a deeper look into the company’s operations, but quite the opposite took place. While state officials did in fact grill Tesla after the investigative reports were published, according to Evans, they are mostly afraid regulating the company could push Tesla—with its factory and the jobs it creates—out of the state. As for the CEO, he had a response that anyone reading any news about the arrogant tech baron might expect.

“The company and its supporters, and Elon, sees this all as sort of an attack on him and on the company—that people want to see it fail,” Evans tells Scheer. “[Tesla] went as far as to say that [the Center for Investigative Reporting” is] an extremist organization … working on a disinformation campaign. [Musk] went on to attack journalists in general for being beholden to the fossil fuel industry because of advertisements, and gthat that’s why journalists are out to get Tesla.

“When someone pointed out that, hey, over here at the Center for Investigative Reporting we don’t even have advertisements, we’re a nonprofit, he went on Twitter and he called us just a bunch of rich kids from Berkeley who took their political science professor too seriously. That was his diss.”

Scheer points out how stories about Tesla aren’t so different from other troubling stories coming out of Silicon Valley.

“These companies have escaped serious regulation—antitrust, [accountability, occupational standards],” says the Truthdig editor in chief. “We’ve kind of anointed these new industrialists as somehow prophets of a future, whether it’s at Apple or Google or Tesla or Facebook. They’ve got the magic wand; they know where it’s all headed. What you have in Elon Musk is sort of the poster boy for that arrogance. He just shrugged it off. You could do investigative reporting, you had the facts, it’s solid as can be—and they just don’t have to care, because they’re the wave of the future, right?”

Listen to the full discussion between Scheer and Evans as they talk about the wider issue with Silicon Valley and green washing, as well as the hypocrisy behind tech barons’ libertarian approach to government. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

—Introduction by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it’s Will Evans, a highly regarded investigative reporter with Reveal, which is basically a radio investigative program carried on, I think, 450 stations. And it’s part of the Center for Investigative [Reporting] in Emeryville, California, which has filled in for the void left by the weakening of mainstream newspapers and news organizations, and does terrific work. And what Will Evans does, and what I want to talk to him about, is basically he’s looked into the sausage of internet life and how that sausage is made. He evaluated Uber and got all sorts of prizes for it, and the question of Silicon Valley’s discrimination against different categories of employees. And the one that’s gotten the most recent attention is he dared to look into the inner workings of Tesla, the electric car company that has been celebrated widely. And found, you know what, it ain’t that different than horrible working conditions at lots of assembly-line businesses, no matter how nouveau the product. So why don’t you really tell us what you found in this investigative series?

Will Evans: Sure, thanks for having me on here, appreciate that. We started looking into Tesla because we were hearing that there was safety problems there, people getting hurt. And it had this, as you say, it has this great reputation for being this futuristic, forward-thinking, world-saving company that’s going to, you know, bring sustainable energy to transportation and revolutionize how we do things. And a lot of people go there because of that. And what we found was that, under pressure to meet its production goals, it was really leaving safety, worker safety, by the wayside, and had prioritized cranking out cars as fast as possible, and left its workers dealing with all kinds of serious injuries. And then was actually trying to hide those injuries in order to make its safety record look better.

RS: You know, in a way, this sort of investigative series that you’re doing, and other people at the Center for Investigative [Reporting], really goes to the heart of how do we make things these days. And how does Apple make iPhones in China, and are people paid, what, two bucks an hour, or less or more, and what are the working conditions? And people are so enamored with the product, the slickness, the style. Tesla cars, you know, came in as high product, high quality and very expensive. They don’t want to look under the hood; they don’t want to look at how the sausage is made. And so give us the specifics. Because reading your series, it’s a guy gets his back busted when the, trying to assemble a car, or all sorts of bad products are consumed; paint destroys their health, and what have you. And we forget, it’s still–yes, robots are involved, but there are still human beings out there popping in and out of cars as they’re moving down an assembly line. And it has a lot of the downside of traditional manufacturing, and actually you pointed out Tesla had a worse record than the industry standard.

WE: Yeah, and what you see is, you know, all the–in manufacturing, you have a ton of manual labor, and a lot of heavy machinery and dangerous, potentially dangerous conditions. And a lot of, thousands of people working in that factory. And then you have the tech company operating almost like a startup that’s going very fast, growing very fast, changing things on the fly, as if it were as easy as to change some software. And you end up, those two things clash with each other, and people start getting hurt. And yeah, exactly, you have the guy who has the trunk of a Model X Tesla fall on his back when he’s inside, and he ends up getting sent back to work; you know, they tell him to just go back to work, he can barely walk. You have people, everything from getting your finger cut off, or they had an incident where people were sprayed with molten metal, electric explosions that burned people, breathing toxic fumes from chemical fires or from paint and adhesives, to just a lot of repetitive injuries.

RS: So you know, really what we’re talking about is a glamour industry of Silicon Valley in which very often they don’t even make money, but there’s a lot of venture capital goes into that. And then to justify it, they have to cut corners and squeeze. And in Tesla’s case, they’ve raised a lot of money, they’ve spent a lot of money, and they haven’t made a lot in the way of profits, and they’ve missed their production schedules. And so in a way, you have an old-fashioned assembly line speed-up, don’t you? Trying to get these workers to work harder, when in fact the conditions are not good. And then you rig the system: you have an in-house medical system that, as you documented, is involved in sort of cover-up and corruption of these injuries. Workers are not sent to care that they’re entitled to under workers’ comp. And then finally, a very aggressive medical practitioner, doctor, takes over this business, and he becomes complicit with their profit motives, rather than the health of the workers. Does that sort of summarize what you found?

WE: Yeah, that’s a good summary. I mean, I think they are under the gun to produce these incredible production goals that–I mean, it’s very difficult to meet those.

RS: You can say his name, you can say the name of the man who keeps promoting it.

WE: [Laughs] Well, right, so Elon Musk, right? He’s making a lot of promises, he’s got a lot riding on it. It’s a tremendously valuable company that’s not had a great record at actually making a profit, and has missed goal after goal after goal. And so, yeah, his future is riding on this, the future of the company is riding on this, and the answer has been to just work the hell out of these workers, and do things so fast that precautions aren’t being taken. And safety is not going to get in the way of something that–that’s what, we would talk to these safety professionals who worked in the factory, and they’re hired by Tesla to evaluate the–why people are getting hurt, and try to solve that. And they would come up with these fixes or make these warnings, and say hey, look, someone’s going to get really hurt, someone’s going to die. And they were told again and again that, look, we need to do this this way, Elon wants it, we need to keep the cars moving. And some of them left in disgust, and some of them were fired after raising concerns over and over again. And so, and these are people who, some of them come to Tesla because they really believe in the vision, and believe in Elon Musk. And then they’re disillusioned when they see, on the factory floor, people getting hurt in the name of progress.

RS: So really what it’s about is hype. And these events go unexamined. I mean, why did it remain for you to do this kind of investigation? You got wind of these things, but basically these people were rigging or undermining a system that is supposed to protect workers. If you’re injured, it’s supposed to be reported; you’re supposed to get treatment, right? You’re supposed to–what’d they do? They send people in a Lyft or an Uber to get care?

WE: [Laughs] Right, to the emergency room.

RS: And really, cover up–the whole thing reeks of kind of just old-fashioned cover up, you know. And yet using professionals, doctors and others, to look the other way. And the few people who object, the whistleblowers, they end up getting fired.

WE: Yeah. I mean that, I think that’s why it is hard to unearth this stuff, and some companies get away with it, is because the people who know what’s going on are very fearful that they will, their careers will be ruined if they speak up, that they’ll be sued. I mean, Tesla is very aggressive against whistleblowers. The people who worked for the medical clinic that I talked to have faced threats of legal action; they’ve been reported to the medical board; various forms of retaliation, really, for speaking up about what they saw. And many of them don’t want to talk at all–or will say I’ll talk, but don’t use my name. And so you need to find–you know, I need to find, like, those few courageous individuals who were so upset at what was going on that they’re just willing to risk it. That’s how you know that it really is extreme and serious, where you’d have this medical clinic that was seemingly designed to avoid having any record of these injuries, and a doctor who is operating under a lot of pressure to keep these injuries dismissed, or off the books, or not on workers’ comp. And you have this profit motive driving that. And a lot of people are afraid of both that doctor, they’re afraid of Elon Musk, they’re afraid of the power of Tesla. And so it’s hard to get that out.

RS: And they’re also afraid that it’s a lousy job market for good-paying jobs. You know, we have a lot of young people graduating now, getting out there in the field, and they can’t find–and here you have a glamour job. But let me ask you something about an old-fashioned check and balance that we used to have with labor unions. And that’s sort of not dealt with extensively in your articles, but there is a sort of subtext of keeping a strong union out. Now, it used to be if you were on the Ford assembly line, or General Motors or something, you had shop stewards; you had people, and if somebody was injured, they’d go to their shop steward and say, hey, you know, I just busted my arm, I got to go to emergency, they don’t want to send me. There was a check on the power of the people running the factory. Here, Elon Musk, according to your article, was able to say I don’t want yellow caution tape used around the scene of an accident, because it’s depressing. How do you get that kind of power? What kind of union, what kind of check and balance do they have within the Tesla plant?

WE: Well, so there is no union. That’s the short answer. The UAW was trying to organize, and the company was, fought that effort. And the union has claimed that a lot of its supporters were let go under the guise of layoffs and firings for, you know, production reasons. And then you have, I think there’s still some pending labor relations complaints in terms of how the company dealt with that. But the bottom line is that there is no union. The company and its supporters, and Elon, sees this all as sort of an attack on him and on the company, that people want to see it fail. He argues that, you know, the unionized plants don’t have better records for their workers, and that workers would be worse off with the union. And so far has gotten away with that, and has used the union as this sort of bogeyman–they tried to attack our reporting by saying it was part of some coordinated attack with the union. Which, I mean, we had nothing to do with that, but it’s a convenient excuse. They went as far as to say that we were an extremist organization when we came out with that first piece.

RS: “We” being the Center for Investigative Reporting?

WE: That’s right, yeah. They called Reveal an extremist organization.

RS: OK–

WE: –working on a disinformation campaign. And then another point, he went on to attack journalists in general for being beholden to the fossil fuel industry because of advertisements, and that that’s why journalists are out to get Tesla. And there’s this sort of a complex of, like, that they’re being persecuted. And when someone pointed out that, hey, over here at the Center for Investigative Reporting we don’t even have advertisements, we’re a nonprofit, he went on Twitter and he called us just a bunch of rich kids from Berkeley who took their political science professor too seriously. That was his diss. [Laughs]

RS: So let me–I mean, I want to get at that. Because there’s an aspect of this that relates to green washing, PR, how you spin. And this is not the old Ford company, Henry Ford, and you know, he’ll break the union and call the National Guard out and have his own police force and so forth–no! These people are on the side of enlightenment. And in the enlightened state of California, which is supposed to be deep blue, and you have these progressive governors like Jerry Brown was there during this critical period–the question I want to ask, we’re going to take a break for a minute, but when I come back with Will Evans from the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Reveal series, you can get this on their website. But basically, this is not happening in the Deep South with runaway shops, you know. This is happening in California. And what about all the laws that exist to protect workers when they’re injured, and their rights, and so forth? [omission for station break] I’m back with Will Evans, and we’re talking about his incredible series, really, on how the sausage is made in Silicon Valley. In this case we’re talking about Tesla cars; they’re shiny, they’re wonderful, people like looking at them, they’re expensive, now there’s actually one that’s more reasonably priced. And as with Apple phones, as with all of these products from the new tech industry, they’re not examined very carefully. And when you read this series you understand, no, people get their backs broken, they inhale dangerous fumes, all sorts of bad stuff happens, and it’s covered up. So I want to ask you, what about the state? The state of California has been very pro-electric car. And they actually have given Tesla, through various breaks and so forth, in one of your articles I think it said a $200 million state subsidy. And there’s also federal subsidy. So this is not just free enterprise doing what it has to do; this is a highly subsidized government entity, on the one hand, and yet government is not doing its due diligence of protecting workers in these plants in terms of occupational health and safety. Is that not a big contradiction?

WE: Yeah, there’s a couple of things working here. One is the focus in California on combating climate change and wanting to incentivize sustainable energy, and having these programs to provide tax exemptions to encourage that. They’re using a lot of–you know, Tesla’s the biggest recipient of these tax exemptions. And it’s because it’s like the–you know, it’s this huge hope for electric transportation. And so I think there’s a reluctance to turn that off, because of what it means for–what it promises for sustainable energy, but also in terms of what it promises for jobs. It’s the only car maker here in the state; it provides a lot of jobs. And so it has a lot of support, and powerful support, because of that. And people don’t want to see it leave, and they don’t want to see it go to another state or country. And so you might see a little bit of a lighter touch there. You also have the issue of worker protections, in terms of health and safety protections. They’re not all that strong, here or anywhere else in the country, in terms of how much you get fined for a–you know, when a worker dies, or gets maimed, and it’s deemed the company’s fault and a safety violation. I mean, these are–at most, you’re talking about like over $100,000, or maybe you get tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe you get much less than that, and then it gets reduced because of other, you know, in settlement negotiations. And that’s just not enough to change a company’s practices, I don’t think.

RS: You know, there’s a kind of a, there’s an important cultural critique in your articles. This is a very important series on Tesla, but in the other articles that I’ve read by you, whether it’s Uber or just generally in Silicon Valley, there’s a conceit that they are enlightened. They’re not like the old, industrial barons, and they’re not the people who do strip mining and so forth. That they’re on the side of the angels. So when a lot of, when people were jumping, workers in China jumping out of the window of their dormitories and so forth in desperation, and when we read about the low salaries paid for most of these shiny gadgets–people love the Tesla, and you give fairly wealthy people a tax break to buy one. And let me just, full confession, I own an electric car. I even own a Chevy Bolt, I hope the working–maybe you should tell me about the working conditions, better there, do they still have some check and balance of unions? I don’t know. But the fact is, we’re intrigued–we have an aura of progress, and yet they’re these shiny toys, and we–it’s too good to check. We really don’t want to know how they’re made. Isn’t it–and the reaction to your series was not one that brought about major change or scrutiny. They kind of shrugged it off. And they attacked, they shot the messenger; they attacked you for doing the series, the Tesla folks.

WE: That’s true, and there’s a lot of Tesla supporters, and I don’t think this is unique to Tesla, although I think there is more of a sort of cult following and a belief in the inherent wonderfulness of its leader. But there is a lot of people who just don’t want to hear any criticism, and who see any criticism as an attack, and a cynical attack, and something that is trying–you know, from the forces of darkness that are trying to undermine this great, progressive company that’s going to, you know. And it’s certainly not the only Silicon Valley company that says it’s doing good. So I think it is interesting, and representative in some ways of these, the image, the sleek image of do-gooder companies with an underside that no one wants to hear about. I think you’re right about that.

RS: Well, and it’s also the modern economy. I mean, you know, this is how things are going to be made, and if you don’t like–if the company says well, you’re enforcing these–like you say, they’re afraid in California they’ll take the company elsewhere. They’ll take it overseas, and they’ll find a [workforce], they’ll find governments that look the other way. And that’s really the challenge here. No one denies that we should move to a different kind of transportation, and that electric cars are critical to that. And you can even applaud the effort put into that by different engineering groups, and what have you. But at the end of the day, your description is one that–I wouldn’t say quite comes out of Dickens [Laughter]. But it’s certainly, I mean, people get their bodies destroyed, and they’re told to what, take a Lyft or an Uber and go check it out, and it’s got nothing to do with us, and the government looks the other way? The same government that, I mean, the figure you used I think was $200 million California has given in subsidies? And that government says we’ll subsidize you, but we don’t really care how you make this thing, and the working conditions, and so forth? I mean, that–that’s a prescription for disaster if that becomes the norm in production. And Silicon Valley is certainly the trend center.

WE: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a–there’s probably people who think that, well, it’s better, even with the current conditions, it’s probably better that it’s being produced here in California than in China. So, you know, and these jobs do pay, and are seen as good jobs by many in the Central Valley. But that’s like only a good job until you get hurt and can’t work anymore, and you end up losing, sleeping in your car, as one of our, one of the people we talked to, had happened to him. I mean, it’s–you know, some people love it, but then, yeah, if you get destroyed by it, that–it’s not worth it.

RS: Well you know, just as a final point, we’ve kind of anointed these new industrialists as somehow prophets of a future, you know, whether it’s at Apple or Google or Tesla or Facebook. They’ve got the magic wand; they know where it’s all headed. And now, there’s sort of, there’s a pushback even from those same people. Tim Cook at Apple, for instance, has said look, we can’t exploit privacy, and we have to care about individual freedom, and we’re going too far. And what you have in Elon Musk is sort of the poster boy for that arrogance. He just shrugged it off. You could do investigative reporting, you had the facts, it’s solid as can be–and they just don’t have to care, because they’re the wave of the future, right?

WE: [Laughs] Yeah, I mean, he not only shrugged it off, but said it just wasn’t true. Said we were, you know, just basically lying, and that’s all. You know [Laughs], there was no, sort of–you know, you’re right, we could do better; it was just, ah, these guys are just lying, and don’t pay any attention to that. And that is scary. That is a scary thing, where there are so many people who are just willing to believe whatever he says on any subject. And I think it is a lesson for, you know, don’t believe the hype, for a lot of these tech leaders.

RS: Well, let me ask you a question structurally about the news business. You were honored by the Investigative Reporters and Editors with an award; your work is highly regarded. So in this case, the character assassination–attacking you, and challenging your motives–didn’t quite work. But I think what you do at Reveal, you know, goes out very wide. I know in fact the station that I’m doing this for, KCRW, carries Reveal; most of the NPR stations do. I think the figure is like 450 or something stations carry it. Do people care? Or is this just, you know, OK, nice, glad you called attention to it, but I want one of those shiny objects and I really don’t care how my iPhone is made or how my electric car is made. Is that what you’re getting?

WE: I think, I actually think there’s a lot of people who care. I don’t know how to measure it, but there was a lot of interest in this story. You know, a lot of pickup, a lot of other publications, a lot of people wrote in. There–it’s partly because it’s one of those companies that is fascinating, and that people are paying attention to, and does represent in some way the future. And so even people who don’t, who aren’t in the market to buy a Tesla, are kind of intrigued and interested in it. And there was–I mean, I definitely hear from people who are upset about this, and who have had their opinions changed, either by this in conjunction with other stories, but just sort of–they have come around to the idea that maybe, maybe some of these tech leaders–and you see it with Facebook, too, right? They’ve had their bubble pierced. You know, that these tech leaders are no longer, should no longer be seen as invincible or that they can’t do, that they can do no wrong. I think that they’re, that people are sort of waking up to the idea that there are problems with even companies that you want to believe in.

RS: So that leaves us, finally, with the big idea that I got out of your series. And it’s not the only place, as you say, with the Facebook controversy now; with the, you know, controversy about how Google uses our data. But it goes to a larger question. These companies have escaped serious regulation–antitrust, you know; accountability. Whether it’s occupational standards on a state level, tax subsidies, communities have fallen all over themselves to attract these companies, and so forth. And there are two questions to raise about it. First of all, who’s going to buy these products if they’re not able to make a decent living, or if they’re not able to sustain their life, or they sacrifice their bodies to make it? I mean, what world are you creating? But also, they have actually, out of a kind of a libertarian ideology, denied the value of government. Assumed that government is something just old-fashioned, and regulation just gets in the way of progress. And yet, as you point out in your articles, without government subsidy we wouldn’t have had Tesla move to this point. And in fact, companies like Google came out of defense department research and, you know, a lot of government funding. And you really, at the end of the day, came up against the basic contradiction for Silicon Valley: is this thing too shiny, a distraction from the reality of life, of how things are produced, how people make a living, and how they can survive.

WE: Well, I think you hit on something that I think is interesting for a lot of the Silicon Valley industry, which is this idea that they’re–you know, it’s a cliché now, but that they’re disrupting this, and revolutionizing that. And a lot of it is new, and this disruption and this sort of “we’re breaking the rules” is seen as a good thing, and a driver of innovation. And the only way that many of these companies–Uber, or whatever it is–can, made it in the first place, and can survive, is by breaking a lot of rules. And some of those rules maybe we’re OK with breaking. And then when you start breaking labor regulations and things like that, then you know, are we still OK with it? I don’t know. And how do you regulate it? Now, when it’s something where you’re talking about gig workers, who aren’t, don’t have minimum wage or all kinds of other protections, or when you’re talking about autonomous vehicles, how do you, what do you do with that? When you’re talking about the tremendous power that Facebook has, that’s something we haven’t dealt with before. And I think there’s probably a lot of grappling that needs to be done with that. But in the meantime, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re thinking, like, I need to break things in order to succeed. And so the more things that get broken, you might see some troubling things come out sooner or later.

RS: And we seem to be on the cusp of that now, because actually there is, you know, the Federal Trade Commission is–there’s a lot of movement to take a second look at how these companies operate. And some–as I say, Tim Cook is one–have even suggested maybe that’s a good thing. So why don’t we leave it at that–maybe the long-run impact of this kind of reporting will be quite beneficial, hope so. If people want to follow this article, they should go to the Center for Investigative Reporting. What’s the quickest way to get it? Go to Reveal, CIR?

WE: Yeah, RevealNews.org.

RS: OK. RevealNews.org. Thanks again, Will Evans. And our producer for “Scheer Intelligence” is Joshua Scheer. Our engineers at KCRW are Mario Diaz and Kat Yore. Sebastian Grubaugh here at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism provided another exemplary engineering effort. See you next week with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence.”

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