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Evening
dispatch
Why
would anyone put our future in their hands? I’m
still thinking about Jeff Bezos’ egregious decision to force his paper, The
Washington Post, to abdicate it’s journalistic responsibility by not
endorsing a candidate for the presidency—only eleven days before the election
in which the choice is between a fairly centrist Democrat and a full-blown
fascist. The
fallout is greater than anyone—especially Bezos—expected. Bezos’ cluelessness
is likely the result of his arrogance because, like many other wealthy men,
arrogance made him overstep. Or maybe it’s just that a lot of wealthy men are
members of the Dunning-Kruger club
for oligarchs. As I
pointed out yesterday, I
wasn’t debating the importance of endorsements (in the grand scheme of
things, I don’t think they count for much). I wanted, instead, to look at the
potential impact this glaring omission had specifically in the wake of
the Post’s endorsements in the last two elections. On
October 13, 2016, the editorial board wrote: Republican
presidential nominee Donald Trump is dreadful, that is true — uniquely
unqualified as a presidential candidate. If we believed that Ms. Clinton were
the lesser of two evils, we might well urge you to vote for her anyway — that
is how strongly we feel about Mr. Trump,” the editorial board wrote in
endorsing Hillary Clinton. Trump, it — we because I was a member of the board
then — said, “has shown himself to be bigoted, ignorant, deceitful,
narcissistic, vengeful, petty, misogynistic, fiscally reckless,
intellectually lazy, contemptuous of democracy and enamored of America’s
enemies. As president, he would pose a grave danger to the nation and the
world. On
September 28, 2020, the Post’s board called Donald “the worst president of
modern times,” claiming that “Democracy is at risk, at home and around the
world. The nation desperately needs a president who will respect its public
servants; stand up for the rule of law; acknowledge Congress’s constitutional
role; and work for the public good, not his private benefit.” All
of that remains operative. In the very long four years since those words were
written, Donald Trump and the agenda he espouses have gotten much, much
worse—more violent, more bigoted, more openly fascist. Choosing not to allow
the editorial board to endorse Harris was obscene and the failure, or
inability, of the board to do so leaves a gaping void into which the most
awful conclusions can be drawn. On the same day the Post announced its decision, Donald met with executives, including CEO David Limp, of Blue Origin—the space technologies company owned by Bezos that has a $3.4 billion contract with NASA. I’m sure Bezos’ decision and Donald’s meeting have nothing to do with the fact that in 2019, when Amazon was the frontrunner to receive a $10 billion cloud computing defense contract, the Trump administration awarded it to Microsoft instead, which was generally seen as a retaliatory move because, in Donald’s view, the Post’s coverage of him was too negative. And
then there’s Elon Musk, the man whose obscene fortune is valued at
approximately $270 billion. In an attempt to help buy the election for
Donald, Musk has already put $120 million into his America PAC to which he
seems to be the only donor. It
makes sense that Musk would be backing Donald—they’re both deeply damaged men
with serious mommy issues who care about money more than anything else. But
there’s another reason—Musk has several very valuable government
contracts that may be at risk (or under least under scrutiny) if Kamala
Harris is in the White House. As
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote: As
one of the country’s biggest defense contractors, Musk holds high-level
security clearances. The idea that he still holds those clearances and has
direct operational control over critical national security technologies is
simply absurd. But that confluence of power in the communications and
political realms, as I said, appears to make him beyond reach. He’s now
flagrantly violating federal laws against vote buying, even after a direct
Department of Justice warning. The
violation Marshall refers to has to do with Musk’s potential attempt at
election interference, which is likely illegal. He set up a “1st
and 2nd amendment rights survey” for voters in Pennsylvania, and anybody who
is misguided enough to hand their data over to Musk is entered into a $1
million raffle. Almost daily, Musk has been handing out these million dollar
checks despite that DoJ warning. Aspiring
oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Musk’s fellow apartheid-era South
African cohorts, David Sacks and Peter Thiel (who bought JD Vance’s Ohio
senate seat and made sure he was Donald’s VP pick) should not have such an
outsize role in our election. And they certainly shouldn’t be allowed to have
positions of power in our government. But that could well be where we’re
headed. We’re
faced with a very stark choice—another Trump administration in which
billionaires like Bezos and Musk help rig the system to our detriment and
even more in their favor (with Donald’s permission), or a Harris
administration in which the billionaires will finally have to pay their fair
share of taxes and in which their extraordinarily lucrative government
contracts are pulled or at least re-evaluated. |
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