Elon Musk

Trump Is Turning the White House Into a Billionaire Time-Share

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Original article by Bob Burnett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk talk ringside during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on November 16, 2024 in New York City. (Photo: Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC)

It appears that Trump has entered into a power-sharing agreement with Musk and several other wealthy individuals including Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and David Sacks.

Democracy decays into oligarchy when a few individuals accumulate most of the political power.

The reelection of Donald Trump has accelerated the decline of the United States into oligarchy. Trump has had billionaire donors for each of his presidential campaigns, but in 2024 the role of these wealthy donors expanded. Donors such as Elon Musk made gigantic contributions to Trump’s campaign; in return for this they are taking an active role in the Trump White House. Perhaps, this time around, Trump turned the oval office into a time-share.

On December 19, Elon Musk led the call for House Republicans to repudiate a continuing resolution they had just negotiated to keep the federal government running through the end of the year. Perhaps Musk’s charter includes coordination with Congress.

When Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy speak of increasing government efficiency, they usually start with services for the unfortunate.

It appears that Trump has entered into a power-sharing agreement with Musk and several other wealthy individuals including Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and David Sacks. However this arrangement works, it’s likely that the Trump administration will cater to billionaires—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) observed that the 13 billionaires chosen by Trump to serve in his administration have a combined wealth of at least $383 billion.

What do these billionaires want? The oligarchs and billionaires want lower taxes and reduced government regulations. Of course, each billionaire has a particular set of interests; for example, David Sacks, Trump’s “AI and crypto czar,” is a venture capitalist with heavy investment in AI and crypto. Sadly. most of the oligarchs are climate-change deniers.

The oligarchs want more wealth. Robert Reich observes:

Since [1980], the median wage of the bottom 90% has stagnated. The share of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest 400 Americans has quadrupled (from less than 1% to 3.5%) while the share owned by the entire bottom half of America has dropped to 1.3%… The richest 1% of Americans now has more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.

The oligarchs share a fiscally conservative agenda. They intend to shrink the size of the federal government. The particulars vary but the oligarchs are not concerned with the size of the defense budget; their cost-cutting focus is on programs that service the poor and disadvantaged—such as Medicaid. When Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy speak of increasing government efficiency, they usually start with services for the unfortunate.

What are the practical consequences of this shift to oligarchy? It’s unsettling to be in a political situation where we do not understand who is in charge at the White House. We don’t know how power-sharing will work. The relationship between Trump and Congress has been fraught. The shift to oligarchy will make this relationship even more difficult.

Will the oligarchs fix the economy? Trump was elected because he promised to fix the economy. Most Americans believed he would drive down inflation; they thought Trump would reduce the cost of food, housing, and household and medical expenses. Since November 5, Trump has given no indication of how he plans to do this. Perhaps he has lost interest.

During the presidential campaign, Trump said his inflation-fighting agenda would rely upon tariffs, but it’s likely that the oligarchs will influence how Trump’s tariff strategy plays out. Musk has huge business interests in China, and it’s unlikely that he would support a tariff policy that would hurt his relationships with the country.

Trump has appointed a “czar” for immigration (Tom Homan), energy (Doug Burgum), and AI & Crypto (Sacks). Trump has not appointed a czar for inflation. With much fanfare, Trump has appointed a commission on “government efficiency;” they’ve already started meeting. Trump has not appointed to a commission to curb inflation.

After January 20, Trump will own inflation and the economy. Trump’s immigration “purge” will drive up the cost of food. Trump’s tariffs will drive up the cost of household expenses.

Trump’s trying to ignore inflation. Or turn it over to an oligarch co-president. Stay tuned.

Original article by Bob Burnett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingTrump Is Turning the White House Into a Billionaire Time-Share

Morning Star Editorial: Starmer isn’t working – and Starmerism cannot work

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Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.

Reproduced from https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-starmer-isnt-working-and-starmerism-cannot-work . I will have no hesitation to comply with copyright laws if requested by the Morning Star.

STARMERISM is an attempt to turn the clock back. It isn’t working, cannot work and tolerating it risks disaster for the working-class movement.

It has always been an attempt to turn the clock back. The entire Starmer project was, from his election as Labour leader on a false prospectus, an attempt to undo Corbyn: to drag the unruly Labour Party back to a supposed “middle ground” of support for neoliberal economics and imperialist war.

It has been a project pursued with total ruthlessness: Labour members were, and are, broadly supportive of Corbyn’s manifesto commitments to greater public ownership and redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation, and certainly weren’t happy with the former leader being portrayed as the devil incarnate and cast out of the party, so Starmer had to smash Labour democracy.

His regime has banned debate in constituency parties, suspended those in their entirety when they wouldn’t play ball, and expelled anyone who dared to object. Since coming to power, MPs have found themselves excluded from the parliamentary party for backbench rebellion against child poverty — an authoritarian intolerance for dissent far harsher than anything Tony Blair ever expressed.

The paranoia reflects an underlying reality: Starmer and his acolytes know the majority are against them and must coerce because they cannot persuade. In this sense, the project is about much more than exorcising Corbyn.

It is part of a wider ruling-class effort to reboot the British system so we are back where we were in 2015 or even 2007 — pre-Corbyn, pre-Brexit, pre-bankers’ crash: when the world was one the liberal elite understood and had mastery over.

It is an impossible task. In foreign policy, the “unipolar moment” is gone: the West is no longer economically strong enough to dictate to the world, and its attempts to do so merely alienate.

In domestic policy, the consensus for privatisation and unfettered corporate domination of the economy can only continue to deliver what it delivers already: worsening services and falling living standards.

The two come together because Establishment liberalism is collapsing in the cockpit of imperialism, the United States. It is already defeated there by hard-right nationalism of the Farage type, but the nature of the US-led “free world” forces the ostensibly liberal leaders of Europe to fawn on the demagogic leader of the counter-revolution, Donald Trump.

Labour members fooled into voting for Starmer on the grounds he might be a polished, media-savvy version of Corbyn misunderstood Establishment hatred of the Corbyn project: it was about content, not form, and any leader threatening real reform would have met the same vitriol.

Similarly, the angst now expressed by liberal commentators from the Guardian to Channel 4 about Starmer not having what it takes to see off Farage is off-piste. Starmer is bad at politics, but that is not the root of a problem that engulfs Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and Joe Biden too. Liberalism has nothing to offer and populations across the West can no longer be duped.

The labour movement needs to wake up to this. Without a radical change of direction from Labour, Britain will soon be ruled by nasties of the Donald Trump sort, whose hostility to trade unions (see Elon Musk) equals their viciousness towards immigrants.

The Jonathan Freedlands and Robert Pestons wonder if Starmer needs to be replaced. He does, but not because he is incompetent: because his zombie-Blair politics are anachronistic. The political consensus of the 1990s is not coming back.

It’s over a century since Rosa Luxemburg defined the choice facing humanity as socialism or barbarism. It is the choice now, for sure. We can break with Starmer-Labour or we can resign ourselves to Reform UK: there is no middle ground.

Reproduced from https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-starmer-isnt-working-and-starmerism-cannot-work . I will have no hesitation to comply with copyright laws if requested by the Morning Star.

Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefitting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity causing suffering and death.
Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefitting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity causing suffering and death.

Continue ReadingMorning Star Editorial: Starmer isn’t working – and Starmerism cannot work

‘The Next Recession Starts Here’: Trump Team Weighs Abolishing Bank Regulators

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Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

The president-elect’s advisers are reportedly discussing plans to shrink or eliminate key bank watchdogs, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

President-elect Donald Trump and his advisers are reportedly considering plans to weaken—or abolish altogether—top bank regulators, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that members of Trump’s transition team and the new Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency have asked nominees under consideration to head the FDIC and OCC if the bank watchdogs could be eliminated and have their functions absorbed by the Treasury Department, which is set to be run by a billionaire hedge fund manager and crypto enthusiast.

“Bank executives are optimistic President-elect Donald Trump will ease a host of regulations on capital cushions and consumer protections, as well as scrutiny of consolidation in the industry,” the Journal reported. “But FDIC deposit insurance is considered near sacred. Any move that threatened to undermine even the perception of deposit insurance could quickly ripple through banks and in a crisis might compound customer fears.”

The Trump team’s internal and fluid discussions about the fate of the key bank regulators broadly aligns with Project 2025’s proposal to “merge the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Credit Union Administration, and the Federal Reserve’s non-monetary supervisory and regulatory functions.”

The FDIC, which is primarily funded by bank insurance premiums, was established during the Great Depression to restore public trust in the nation’s banking system, and the agency played a central role in navigating the 2023 bank failures that threatened a systemic crisis.

Observers warned that gutting the FDIC and OCC could catalyze another economic meltdown.

“The next recession starts here,” tech journalist Jacob Silverman warned in response to the Journal‘s reporting.

Eric Rauchway, a historian of the New Deal, wrote that “even Milton Friedman appreciated the FDIC,” underscoring the extreme nature of the incoming Trump administration’s deregulatory ambitions.

Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, is also pushing for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency established in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The Journal noted Thursday that “Rep. Andy Barr, a Republican from Kentucky and Trump ally on the House Financial Services Committee, has backed the plan to eliminate or drastically alter the CFPB and said he wants to get rid of what he calls ‘one-size-fits-all’ regulation for banks.”

Barr has received millions of dollars in campaign donations from the financial sector and “introduced many pieces of pro-industry legislation, including significant rollbacks of protections stemming from the 2008 financial crisis,” according to the watchdog group Accountable.US.

Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue Reading‘The Next Recession Starts Here’: Trump Team Weighs Abolishing Bank Regulators

Team Trump Wants to Destroy Key Safety Rule Hated by Tesla

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https://newrepublic.com/post/189363/trump-team-destroy-crash-reporting-rule-tesla-hates

Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Tesla’s “self-driving” cars may be about to get a whole lot more dangerous.

Elon Musk’s efforts ingratiating himself into Trumpworld are about to pay off.

Donald Trump’s presidential transition team has recommended that the president-elect quash a crash reporting requirement for self-driving vehicles. In an internal document obtained by Reuters, the team described the safety reporting condition as a mandate for “excessive” data collection, advising that the president-elect abolish the requirement entirely.

Doing so would radically alter the playing field for the burgeoning automated vehicle industry, decreasing transparency and making it more difficult for federal regulators to spark inquiries into dangerous practices. And Tesla would be the new policy’s biggest benefactor.

…

https://newrepublic.com/post/189363/trump-team-destroy-crash-reporting-rule-tesla-hates

Continue ReadingTeam Trump Wants to Destroy Key Safety Rule Hated by Tesla

‘By and For the Ultra-Wealthy’: Here Are the Billionaires Set to Run Trump’s Administration

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Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Linda McMahon and Elon Musk attend the America First Policy Institute gala held at Mar-a-Lago on November 14, 2024 in Palm Beach, Florida.  (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

“Trump paid plenty of lip service to working-class Americans, but as president-elect, he’s moved quickly to stack his administration with billionaires that share his vision of a rigged economy that only works for people like them.”

Since winning the presidential election earlier this month, Donald Trump has wasted no time working to fill his incoming administration with billionaires and other ultra-rich individuals who are poised to benefit from the GOP agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy and large-scale deregulation.

In separate analyses published this week, Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and Accountable.US offered overviews of the president-elect’s key nominations and their potential conflicts of interest as Trump prepares to retake power in January.

So far, Trump has announced plans to nominate billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to head the Treasury Department, WWE billionaire Linda McMahon to head the Education Department, billionaire crypto banker Howard Lutnick to head the Commerce Department, and billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency—an outside advisory commission tasked with slashing federal spending and regulations.

“These appointments clearly show the incoming administration will be run by and for the ultra-wealthy,” said David Kass, ATF’s executive director. “They’ve already announced plans to spend trillions of dollars to renew the Trump tax bill, to further enrich large corporations and wealthy elites like themselves while advocating for cuts to vital programs that working and middle-class Americans depend on.”

ATF’s analysis, released Monday, shows that the combined wealth of Trump’s richest nominees and transition team members—including the president-elect and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the vice president-elect—is over $313 billion. By comparison, the combined net worth of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet is an estimated $118 million.

“Even excluding Elon Musk—the world’s richest man and Trump’s co-director of the Department of Government Efficiency—the average net worth of Trump, his vice president, and top appointees is $616 million,” ATF observed. “This figure is over 616 times higher than the mean average wealth of the typical American household, which is a little more than $1 million.”

ATF and Accountable.US also highlighted other ultra-rich individuals nominated for key roles in the incoming administration, including drilling enthusiast Doug Burgum, worth an estimated $100 million; Mehmet Oz, worth up to $315 million; and Chris Wright, who as of earlier this month held nearly $47 million worth of stock in his fracking company, Liberty Energy.

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Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, said in a statement Tuesday that “Donald Trump paid plenty of lip service to working-class Americans” during the 2024 campaign, “but as president-elect, he’s moved quickly to stack his administration with billionaires that share his vision of a rigged economy that only works for people like them.”

“Should the Senate rubber stamp these nominations,” Carrk added, “Trump’s department heads will be among the biggest beneficiaries of another promised tax giveaway for big corporations and the top 1%, paid for with deep cuts for seniors, veterans, and everyday workers.”

Billionaires have already gotten significantly richer since Trump’s election victory, according to research published last week by ATF. In roughly the week after Trump’s win, the combined net worth of the nation’s 815 billionaires jumped by around $280 billion—with Musk’s wealth surge accounting for 20% of that gain.

Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue Reading‘By and For the Ultra-Wealthy’: Here Are the Billionaires Set to Run Trump’s Administration