Dude was born and raised in South Africa pretending to be an American (much like Ted Cruz who was born in Canada) interfering in US elections. It’s fucked.
Our whole schtick is (supposed) to be that anyone who wants to come here and make a life here is an American.
There's plenty of things to be pissed at Musk for, especially in relation to how his family made their money in Apatheid South Africa (emerald slave mines), but him being born elsewhere isn't it.
That shtick is just a shtick. Every country with a functioning government has standards for who they'll allow to immigrate and become a citizen, and Musk is precisely the kind of person I'd want to keep out. He's making a life here as a billionaire, not an American, because billionaires have no real nationality, just flags of convenience. I don't want him on my planet, much less in my country, and I especially don't want his greasy money in our politics.
Lol. These fuckers are all ladder pullers. Check out the tenets of project 2025. They want to kick immigrants OUT. Musk is donating $45 million per month toward kicking immigrants out. He got his though, so…
Yeah but the dude is also pro slavery. If you're a foreign billionaire coming here to make money and promote slavery then I'm not sure I'm prepared to call you an American. No matter how historically accurate it may be.
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert did a lovely series about this.
But in short, Donating millions to Trump. Illegal. Donating millions to Trump PAC. Legal. Trump can not spend Trump PAC money directly. Trump can say "boy I wish I had millions of dollars in political ads in a specific states at specific times about these specific topics." Trump can also get pretty specific about the details.
Trump can also get pretty specific about the details.
I want the Big Macs to be wrapped in 100 dollar bills for the commercial. After the commercial send them to my room to make sure they were wrapped correctly. Do it even if we cut the Big Macs out of the commercial as well.
The Supreme Court declared money to be "free speech" and therefore protected by the first amendment. Therefore, if you are a billionaire and wish to throw elections to a fascist of your choice, that is protected speech.
The case is referred to as Citizens United. It's also the source of the phrase "corporations are people, my friend" as it affords first amendment protections to corporations which are not people. Except in the crooked eyes of the fascist Supreme Court majority.
Short version: strategically place judges at all levels of jurisdiction, bring cases in front of them that upend protections aimed at preventing exactly that type of oligarchic power buying and thus rewrite the laws through these hoops until Freedom of Speech is conflated with buying elections.
You see, despite appearances, companies are actually people. Not in a real, people kind of way. Specifically, in a "the best of both for them" kind of way.
Then was have to remember that paying to circumvent and unduly influence democracy is, we're to beleive, "free speech ^^^^tm" and, contrary to any and all logic, is actually very democratic. Then you have to remember that there aint no limit on freedom in America, baby!
If that doesn't make sense to you then you're a freedom hating commie.
The distinction is that a Super PAC, is explicitly NOT for the direct benefit of a candidate: it’s for the donors to use their free speech to publish messages of their choice.
He started donating as soon as Trump appointed JD Vance as his VP. Vance is a protege of Peter Thiel, a Musk partner and Silicon Valley confidant.
Nobody is going to release "the Epstein file" (whatever the fuck that's supposed to be) because Epstein was doing all sorts of shady shit on behalf of national security services in order to build compromat on people in conflict with those agencies. You didn't need Trump to make any kind of promise for that (not that he's particularly trustworthy anyway). What you needed was a guy on the inside, slavishly loyal to the Silicon Valley techbro community. And JD Vance is that guy.
Not everything is some national security plot. Its completely possible that he ran that kind of service purely for private interests. For instance, Ralph Nader had people trying to do that to him hired by automotive companies.
He also planned to have a bulletproof window cyber truck. He should plan to get his head surgically removed from his ass. Since that is apparently where it's been for a decade.
Probably tax deductible. Also, aren’t Tesla employees happy their owners gave their billionaire CEO a $50 billion bonus instead of sharing it with all their employees? Now they are just passing the bullshit bonus onto Trump instead of the middle class employees that work there.
You're thinking of a direct democracy. The modern term is a catch all for everything from that to limited democracies that require things like land ownership to vote.
You're foolin' yourself. We're living in a dictatorship! And how'd we get that, eh? By exploiting the workers. By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.
That's a great start. Now we just need a few dozen more. That way, we can all have greater access to a billionaire no matter where we are in the world.
If idk, all car companies came together, pooled their resources and knowledge and created joint car lines, using standardized optimized production lines across all of them, resulting in only one line of car per use case (one large truck, one small truck, a 2 person car, a 4 person car, a family car, etc etc) then no advertisement would be necessary. They could make the prices as low as possible to cover costs while still allowing some research into better technology. Everyone would just know/be able to find out "oh if I want a car I go to these people" and then you just choose the car that fits you, there's no advertisement necessary because there's no alternatives.
Of course, that doesn't work because people are shitty, it would be a monopoly and the monopoly would jack prices up to infinity, the quality would be as bad as possible, resulting in an incredibly bad product for incredibly bad value.
But theoretically, if people were good and working for the general good of everyone, took pride in their work to do it as well as possible and deliver a product with the highest quality possible, the above scenario would work.
If idk, all car companies came together, pooled their resources and knowledge and created joint car lines, using standardized optimized production lines across all of them, resulting in only one line of car per use case (one large truck, one small truck, a 2 person car, a 4 person car, a family car, etc etc) then no advertisement would be necessary. They could make the prices as low as possible to cover costs while still allowing some research into better technology. Everyone would just know/be able to find out “oh if I want a car I go to these people” and then you just choose the car that fits you, there’s no advertisement necessary because there’s no alternatives.
Of course, that doesn’t work because people are shitty, it would be a monopoly and the monopoly would jack prices up to infinity, the quality would be as bad as possible, resulting in an incredibly bad product for incredibly bad value.
You are basically talking about a socialist or communist ecenomy, and there are good reasons that that is a horrible idea for certain industries (and a good one for others, and an even better one with some kind of bastardized hybrid system like the chip industry in Taiwan).
There is no best system, IMO everything should be evaluated a la carte instead of trying to centralize or privatize things ideologically.
Many private organizations that get like this are like the worst of both worlds though, where they lose the entrepreneurial spirit, efficiency and drive without any of the "benevolent" motivations and restrictions of a centralized system, especially when they get rich enough to push back against ethics.
There are 756 billionaires in the USA, 2,781 in the world.
They are propped up on the efforts of tens of millions of immoral ultracapitalists all clamoring for a piece of the pie, willing to exploit the labor of billions of people to hoard as much global capital at the top of the chain as they can.
Well the billionaires may want to ask for a refund considering how terrible Trump is......wait the billionaires know exactly what they are getting with Trump; a shitty President that will allow corruption to flourish and lower tax rates.
"Corruption" is such a bad word. When you're the billionaire profiting from it, it's just good words like "common sense policies", "good business practices" and "it's fine, everybody's doing it". And if you own the right media conglomerates, that's then the public opinion too!
There were liberal billionaires holding purse strings about college students protesting the killings in Gaza. This isn't a one-party problem. Though Repubs are more blatant about their corruption because they no longer have any shame.
Zionists aren't liberals in my book. They're just a slightly different flavor of fascists who dress up their sick ideology with a Jewish facade rather than the more traditional Christian facade.
Not necessarily- most Zionists are Christians- they have the belief that the apocalypse will be declared by the antichrist at the Temple, so they want Israel to take control of Palestine, demolish the Al Aqsa mosque and rebuild the Temple.
There were liberal billionaires holding purse strings about college students protesting the killings in Gaza.
What do you mean by the verb phrase “holding purse strings about” here?
I know what holding purse strings means: one controls the money for an operation hence gets to decide.
But what does to mean to “hold purse strings about” these protests? You’re saying they were funding them? Or funding reporting? Or funding the schools? Or what?
I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but the meme really wants you to believe that ordinary people have donation limits and rich people don't. This is an oversimplification.
The limit is still $3,300 in individual donations directly to a campaign, no matter who you are. There is no limit on individual contributions to a PAC, so long as the PAC doesn't work directly with any candidate or campaign when spending the money, and this also doesn't matter who you are.
There isn't a literal rule that separates the rich from the poor here. You too can donate your entire savings to a PAC without limits.
The real inequality is how much we can afford to donate. I won't ever have $45,000,000 in my life, so I won't ever get the level of political influence that people like Elon Musk can buy. I can try to exploit the same systems he does, but he'll always be able to exploit them more.
I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but the meme really wants you to believe that ordinary people have donation limits and rich people don't. This is an oversimplification.
Sure, but it's a practical truth. Which is to say, it's true.
Now, if you want to file the paperwork to start your own superPAC as Stephen Colbert did on his show, you can do that. It wouldn't cost much. That would allow you to accept and funnel unlimited funds to whoever or whatever you wanted. The "laws" around it are ludicrous.
But if you're a regular working stiff and just want to relax and not fuck around but feel like donating to a candidate - the limit is there for you. That's the practical distinction that makes the meme true.
If someone works from 18 to 65 and makes $60,000 a year then over the course of their career they would have a total take-home pay after taxes of about one million dollars. This guillotine dodger is donating 45 people-lives worth of productivity a month.
So I don't want to defend Musk but does anyone have any proof of him actually saying this or donating 45 mil? Its been going around like its a fact because the Wall Street Journal posted it, but Elon called it "Fake gnus" on twitter.
I see, it's not as designed then... I'm not from US and I'm so confused every time I hear about rich people funding your politicians like it's perfectly alright and absolutely not fucked up.
Well. The system didn't originally come with any rules about money. And there was a period of massive corruption. We were working hard on fixing all of that until Reagan came along. And then the supreme Court blew it wide open with their Citizens United decision.
So yeah. It's working as designed by the conservatives in the 1980's.
Regardless of donation limits, election is an innately oligarchic feature. Election strongly favors candidates with money and time to spare. Elections also favor those with wide and influential social networks.
When you want to choose a candidate from amongst the elite, elections are great. If you want a democratic choice, you have to use sortition - choosing at random from the whole eligible pool, like we do for juries.
I understand the general sentiment, but this whole "we're no longer a democracy" is at best bullshit and at worst a dangerous statement to repeat. There's a lot to fix in the US democracy (and somehow money involved isn't even the most critical issue right now), but simply stating it doesn't exist could empower some really destructive behaviour. Try living next to Russia for some perspective.
I really wonder why so many of the super-rich back Trump. He has a really bad track record when it comes to honoring contracts, let alone promises. Add to it that he already tried to overthrow democracy, in which case your campaign contributions would become worthless the moment he manages to seize power.
Dude, Trump got them their tax cut. He gave them billions in shady covid money. He appointed anti union judges. He's done a phenomenal job for billionaires, just like every Republican president.
What I mean is that he clearly has ambitions to become a dictator, as seen when he refused to peacefully step down after losing the last election. The power billionaires wield comes from their ability to use their money to influence elections. Once there's no more free elections, the billionaires have a much harder time applying political influence, and doing so may get them killed. Compare the list of notable Russians who died under suspicious circumstances
"Elon Musk says" not a Elon fan but where did he say that? I have only seen them say "Sources close to". If he actually does it and we have records yes it is bad. But right now it's just a rumor.
No problem. You can be on that side, believing all the same stuff, and only be against the more extreme methods of group-based self-deception. It’s just bad internal intelligence methods. No biggie. The core philosophy’s still sound, I’m sure.