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    View image in fullscreenElon Musk is not a people person, as millions around the world will be able to attest after the planet’s richest man cut off food supplies, healthcare and probably even life itself to some of the most vulnerable without so much as a fore- or afterthought.Musk sees himself as a data man, wielding numbers like a machete to slash and burn his way through government waste and corruption as he leads the rightwing charge to capture the US state.Within days of Musk dispatching his minions to kick down the doors of the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and rifle through its finances, the agency was in effect out of business. Musk claimed USAid was “a criminal organisation” and full of Marxists – an assertion called “laughable” by the agency’s former administrator under George W Bush, Andrew Natsios, who describes himself as a conservative Republican.Musk didn’t care. Less than three weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the head of the new “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a special group that Trump created, has built an extensive power base in Washington of a kind not seen before.Trump has given free rein to Musk to send his operatives into more than a dozen federal agencies to look for evidence of mismanagement and subversion, and to generally create chaos, outside of the usual bounds of oversight and regulation.Crucially, Musk now in effect controls the office of personnel management (OPM), which oversees federal employment. He immediately encouraged more than 2 million government workers to resign with the stated aim of forcing a few hundred thousand out the door.View image in fullscreenIt’s clear who Musk thinks should be running the country instead, from his recruitment to Doge of “special government employees” from his own companies and the wider tech industry to storm the federal citadels. They include a significant proportion of young male software engineers of the kind who tend to worship tech billionaires like Musk, including a teenager who has gone by “Big Balls” online.Few, if any, have undergone the security clearances other government workers need to access sensitive and personal information. If they had, Doge might have been discouraged from hiring another recruit from Silicon Valley, Marko Elez, who was sent into the US treasury department, where he had access to taxpayer records. Elez resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal revealed he had posted racist messages on social media and defended eugenics.“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” Elez wrote on X in July.He was reinstated on Friday.On the face of it, Musk is implementing Trump’s commitment to cut spending, “dismantle the deep state” and sack “rogue bureaucrats”. But his embrace of the far right, including an unrestrained endorsement of the German nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), and what looked to much of the world like a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration celebrations, has raised urgent questions about Musk’s political beliefs and how he intends to use his newfound power.As it happens, much of what Musk is doing is also good for his businesses, including scrapping regulatory bodies and curtailing the power of unions and workers. The labor board, which upholds workers’ rights, has been frozen and agencies that regulated the financial industry have either been scrapped or told to abandon key parts of their work.Musk’s politics have been eclectic. In the past, he has backed universal basic income and a tax on carbon emissions. At the same time, he has a deep dislike of trade unions and public transport because it means being around “random strangers, one of whom might be a serial killer”. He espouses a visceral hostility to diversity programmes and appears to regard those who believe in helping the less fortunate as subversive.Thrown into this mix is Musk’s fascination with the pro-natalism movement, for which he has done his bit by fathering 12 children, and his hope that one day his rocket company, SpaceX, will help them colonise Mars.Raised in South Africa under apartheid, Musk is clearly suspicious of democracy and the leaders it produces. His grandfather headed a fringe political movement in Canada in the 1930s, Technocracy Incorporated, which sought to abolish democracy in favour of government by elite technicians, but its overtones of fascism saw it banned during the second world war.Musk shows some of the same tendencies, as do other libertarian-leaning Silicon Valley billionaires unhappy with the messiness of elected government. He has spoken in support of direct democracy, where policies and other issues are decided by popular referendums rather than elected representatives.In the meantime, Musk appears happy to embrace the US version of the “strongman” ruler through the Republican right’s “unitary executive theory”, which regards the authority of the president as paramount and Congress as an impediment to the implementation of his or her will.Over the years, Musk has described himself as “not a conservative” and “politically moderate”. He backed the Democratic candidate in every presidential election going back to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 until he soured on the party in the past few years.View image in fullscreen“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold,” he wrote on X in 2022.But there were clues to other motives, including a statement that he would be voting Republican because of Joe Biden’s support for trade unions and what he regarded as insufficient Democratic backing for his companies.Not long before last year’s presidential election, Musk declared that Trump would save American democracy from Democrats trampling on individual liberties. But he kept moving ever further to the right in public, with an open embrace of racist European political leaders, including the AfD, and the promotion of claims of a “white genocide” in the country of his birth, South Africa.Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, has linked his shift from Obama voter to cheerleader for the AfD to the transition of his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson.Wilson was 16 when she texted a relative: “Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna. Don’t tell my dad.” The day after Wilson turned 18 in 2022, she changed her name because of “gender identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form”.Musk told Isaacson he was sanguine about the change but then Wilson became a fervent Marxist and wouldn’t speak to him any more, a situation he described as one of the most painful of his life.“She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” Musk told the author.Musk blamed Wilson’s progressive Los Angeles school and said he was disturbed at the “woke mind virus” holding back America.After California passed a law barring school districts from requiring teachers to tell parents of changes to a student’s sexual orientation and gender identity, Musk announced he was moving the headquarters of his two largest companies, SpaceX and X, to Texas. He said that the law caused “massive destruction of parental rights” and put children at risk of “permanent damage”.Musk did not say that moving his companies also had significant tax advantages for himself and his businesses, which would additionally be subject to fewer climate regulations than in California.Still, his apparent anger over his daughter’s transition appears to have set in motion a broader hostility toward identity issues, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, a favourite target of the Trumpian right. Musk announced that the words “cis” and “cisgender” were considered slurs on X, and he came out against pronouns, tweeting that they “suck”.In late 2022, another tweet linked Musk’s hostility toward the way people choose to identify themselves – an odd position for a man who claims to be a champion of free speech – to his anger at the Biden administration’s Covid restrictions.View image in fullscreenMusk mocked Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, who was instrumental in the lockdown and other measures to contain the crisis.“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” he wrote.Some saw the tweet as evidence that Musk was now openly identifying with the far right, which defied mask regulations and stay-at-home orders and called for Fauci to be locked up for intruding on their liberties.But while Musk’s hostility toward pronouns was personal, Covid regulations touched on his businesses and net worth.Musk refused to close his Tesla factory at the height of the pandemic, claiming without evidence that “panic” over the virus would do more damage than the disease itself. He disparaged social distancing, predicted that the virus would claim few lives in the US (it eventually claimed more than 1.2 million), and described the lockdown as “fascist” and “erasing people’s freedoms”. Musk tweeted a meme comparing Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to Hitler over his government’s Covid restrictions.Musk may have dressed up his position as a concern about people’s welfare but its immediate effect was to keep his factories rolling even if the people working in them were at greater risk of infection and death. And while Musk claimed a principled position in favour of individual liberty, he has a history of suppressing the rights of his own workers.In 2023, he said that he disagreed with the concept of trade unions.“I just don’t like anything which creates a lords-and-peasants sort of thing,” he told the New York Times Dealbook Summit. “Unions naturally try to create negativity in a company.”One reason Musk may not like unions is they tend to stand up for their members. He has faced accusations from former employees of aggressively using a secretive dispute-resolution process to fend off repeated claims of sexual and racial harassment within his companies, including accusations of women enduring a “frat house” atmosphere of groping and other abuses ignored and even perpetrated by high-level managers.Tesla has paid out millions of dollars to Black workers subjected to racial harassment.Yet, while Musk restricts the rights of his employees to seek redress from the courts, he and his companies filed at least 23 lawsuits in federal courts in the year to August 2024, according to Fortune magazine.They include a legal action by X against the Center for Countering Digital Hate over a report accusing the social network of making millions of dollars out of accounts spewing hate from “neo-Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists and spreaders of dangerous conspiracy theories”. A California judge threw out the lawsuit last year, saying it was clear the “case is about punishing the defendants for their speech”.Musk will probably spend a lot more time being frustrated by the courts. Judges have already put on hold his push for mass resignations from the civil service and placed some restrictions on Doge’s mass collection of data. Federal workers, unions and civil rights organisations are lining up a flurry of lawsuits to challenge Musk’s actions.But the courts themselves may become a target for Musk as he works to tear down the old order.Isaacson in his biography wrote that Musk once described being in “a state of war at all times” as one of his default settings.No one thinks that, so long as Trump continues to regard the billionaire as more of an asset than a liability, Musk’s thirst for power will stop at gutting federal agencies. The question is where he will launch his next offensive. More

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      Trump delays key piece of China tariff plan amid threats to other countries

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      Donald Trump halted a key part of his tariff attack on China on Friday, as he threatened to impose new US duties on goods from many more countries next week.Plans to ensure shipments from China to the US worth less than $800 still face tariffs – removing the longstanding duty-free status of low-cast packages – have been delayed to give more time to federal agencies to prepare for the change.At the White House on Friday, however, the president said he would announce new reciprocal tariffs on more countries next week. He did not give any details specifying what the tariffs will be and which countries would be affected.“I’ll be announcing that next week reciprocal trade, so that we’re treated evenly with other countries. We don’t want any more, any less,” Trump told reporters during a bilateral meeting with Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba.On Tuesday, the US Postal Service briefly halted all incoming packages from China and Hong Kong after Trump ended a de minimis provision that allowed low-value packages from China to enter the US duty-free.The provision allowed Chinese e-commerce companies such as Shein and Temu to ship items into the US without having to pay tariffs Trump had enacted on China in 2018. After a 12-hour period, the US Postal Service resumed taking all packages on Wednesday.An executive order, signed by Trump, said he would keep the provision until “adequate systems are in place to fully and expediently process and collect tariff revenue”.The president had removed the duty-free provision as his overall tariff strategy against China, what he says is in response to illegal drugs that are coming in from the country. Trump placed a 10% tariff on all Chinese imports, which went into effect this week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAny new tariffs will add to the confusion and chaos over global trade Trump has created since he entered office. Trump had originally planned to place 25% tariffs against Mexico and Canada on 1 February but ultimately halted both tariffs after negotiations with the country leaders. Those tariffs are now expected to go into effect 1 March.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Why does McKinsey still get hired? | Peter O’Toole

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      In late 2005, I was in a Tokyo meeting room with some top GE executives. As the company’s corporate director of public relations at the time, I was helping sort through a corporate initiative we were planning to announce with some important Japanese customers. A few minutes later, a handful of people I’d never met came into the room. Most were not from Japan; all of them, I was told, were from McKinsey, perhaps the world’s most famous management consulting firm. Following the 15-minute meeting they had probably flown in from all over the world to attend, they left.The firm McKinsey, of course, remains, dispensing advice to thousands of companies like GE and to governments and institutions in more than 65 countries. But as the company approaches a $600m settlement with the US government over its role helping opioid makers boost sales and drag out the painkiller epidemic, you might ask: why does McKinsey still get hired?There are reasons why it shouldn’t.In 2018, McKinsey agreed to repay $74m in fees to the government of South Africa after a judicial inquiry found evidence of contract abnormalities surrounding its work. This came soon after McKinsey was forced to pay back more than $66m for its work alongside a contract-looting partner who later fled the country. And just last week it was confirmed that the firm’s South African subsidiary will pay more than $122m “to resolve an investigation by the Justice Department into a scheme” to bribe South African government officials between 2012 and 2016.Chasing a Mongolian railroads contract in 2010, McKinsey ignored a US state department corruption warning and signed an agreement with the government even as the government rainmaker who connected McKinsey to the contract signed his own contract with the same government entity. By 2015, Mongolian anti-corruption investigators were snooping and McKinsey was eventually barred from doing business there.Since 2019, the firm’s bankruptcy advisory business has paid millions in fines, or relinquished fees, for “disclosure deficiencies”.The firm can also give questionable advice.Under former McKinsey partner Jeff Skilling, Enron paid the firm $10m a year, during which the firm endorsed Enron’s suspect accounting tactics that would ultimately torpedo the business. According to a McKinsey employee quoted in Duff McDonald’s book The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business, Enron “was a great business that just got out of hand”.In April 2017, after three years studying the escalating inmate brawls and assaults by guards that endangered the viability of New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex, McKinsey sent a confidential final report to the city corrections commissioner. McKinsey had tested its new anti-violence strategy, the report said, and violence was down by more than half in the units where McKinsey had recommended new tactics.What the report didn’t say was that jail officials and McKinsey consultants had fixed the game, moving inmates they believed were less violent into the units ahead of the period of study. The reality was the opposite of McKinsey’s report: violence actually rose by nearly 50% since the firm had been working at Rikers. The city government dumped McKinsey, but not before paying it more than $27m.Then there’s the Department of Justice case, which found the firm’s invisible hand reached into virtually every opioid manufacturer and distributor. While McKinsey was advising the opioid manufacturers and distributors, the lawsuit noted, it was also advising the US Food and Drug Administration’s drug-approval department.So why does McKinsey still get hired? Because it sells what business wants.According to McDonald, in The Firm, McKinsey “certainly made the world a more efficient, rational and objective place than it might otherwise have been”. Eighty-five per cent of McKinsey’s work is repeat business, which would seem to show that the company provides useful counsel.But McKinsey also shields weak leaders from accountability. After a preventable shop floor accident or before big layoffs – known as “efficiency consulting”, McDonald notes – a McKinsey report can shield a company from an angry plaintiff or its soon-to-be former workers. Its presence offers the plausible deniability that layoffs were just a business decision, one recommended by a respected, external party. In the Rikers Island case, McKinsey’s contract let city administrators say they had tried their best, since they had only requested proposals from consultants on a pre-approved list from the previous administration.The durability of firms like McKinsey points to festering weakness in business’s upper reaches: today’s leaders either don’t have the skills to meet the accelerating world around them, can’t effect change within their own organizations, or are too afraid to make a mistake and fail.But if they succeed? Well, that’s what was supposed to happen, just as what we heard in Tokyo was preordained.I later asked a colleague from a GE business who also attended the Tokyo meeting what they had heard. Our own ideas, they replied: McKinsey had surveyed our own people and customers for ideas, then tried selling them as their own.It’s unlikely that McKinsey will change. After all, the firm’s partners ousted former CEO Kevin Sneader not for being too weak on compliance failures, but for being too tough. “Mr Sneader’s letter to employees about the [opioid] settlement was blunt in criticizing the firm’s behavior,” the Wall Street Journal noted, and “[s]ome partners felt that language was too strong.”Today’s business leaders should look within themselves and determine why they don’t trust their own people to make tough decisions. They need to find out why they are afraid to fail on their own terms. Making yourself accountable can be more painful than hiring a consultant to be accountable for you, but it’s likely to be more rewarding.Nearly 20 years after that meeting in Tokyo, I am also a consultant. And while my small firm didn’t earn the record $16bn that McKinsey did last year, we also didn’t get kicked out of Mongolia.

      Peter O’Toole is principal of Objective Lab and on the adjunct faculty at Georgetown University. He was a speechwriter in the Clinton administration and a senior executive at GE and Pfizer More

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      Elizabeth Warren introduces Senate bill to hold capitalism ‘accountable’

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      The senator Elizabeth Warren will introduce a bill in Congress on Wednesday aimed at shifting corporations away from “maximizing shareholder value” and towards giving more support to workers and other stakeholders.The Accountable Capitalism Act proposes a series of reforms to increase corporate responsibility, strengthen the voices of workers and others in corporate decisions and shift companies away from their focus on shareholders.In the 1980s, the largest corporations in the US dedicated less than half of profits to shareholders, reinvesting the rest into the company, according to a fact sheet on the bill provided by Warren’s office to the Guardian.But over the past decade, more and more profits have gone to shareholders rather than workers or long-term investments. During the same period, worker productivity has risen, with only modest increases to real wages for the median worker, while income and wealth inequality have soared.“Workers are a major reason corporate profits are surging, but their salaries have barely moved while corporations’ shareholders make out like bandits,” said Senator Warren in a statement on the bill “We need to stand up for working people and hold giant companies responsible for decisions that hurt workers and consumers while lining shareholders’ pockets.”Given that 93% of all stocks in the US are owned by the wealthiest 10% of the population, with over 50% of all US households owning no stock at all, Warren argues the corporate policy of maximizing shareholder value is predicated on “making the richest Americans even richer at all costs”.The bill would mandate corporations with over $1bn in annual revenue obtain a federal charter as a “United States Corporation” under the obligation to consider the interests of all stakeholders and corporations engaging in repeated and egregious illegal conduct can have their charters revoked.The legislation would also mandate that at least 40% of a corporation’s board of directors be chosen directly by employees and would enact restrictions on corporate directors and officers from selling stocks within five years of receiving the shares or three years within a company stock buyback.All political expenditures by corporations would also have to be approved by at least 75% of shareholders and directors.She first introduced the bill in 2018 to the US Senate, with the congressman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin introducing a companion bill in the House.The bill faces tough opposition in Congress, especially with an incoming Republican administration. Business leaders have considered similar proposals. In 2019 the Business Roundtable, the US’s lead business lobby, called for a redefinition of the purpose of a corporation away from a focus on shareholders to an “economy that serves all Americans”. But that redefinition now seems to have been dropped. More

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      Elon Musk’s rumoured $100m donation may just fuel a fresh look at UK political funding

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      Elon Musk has denied he is gearing up to chuck $100m at Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, as it pushes to take on the Tories. But the very fact the question arose is a reminder of the pressing need for political funding reform on this side of the Atlantic.Musk is the living embodiment of economic power in the modern US: a multibillionaire, with spicy political views, who has bought his way into a role as Donald Trump’s costcutter-in-chief.Part of his motivation seems to be not just slashing spending for the sake of it but the dismantling of regulators that his companies have found irksome.He had previously joined legal action, alongside Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, aimed at having the National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional, for example.This is the body, created in 1935, that enforces workers’ rights. It ensured staff at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse had the opportunity to ballot – successfully – for union recognition (an outcome the giant retailer has continued to challenge).Musk has also said he wants to “delete” the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, suggesting it is “duplicative”.Musk et al’s affront at the very idea that federal agencies have oversight of business is reminiscent of the fury faced by President Theodore Roosevelt and his allies during the so-called Progressive Era, at the turn of the 20th century, when they fought to bust vast monopolies and tame the worst excesses of capitalism.The mega-rich capitalists back then were the likes of JD Rockefeller and JP Morgan but then, as now, there was a clash of principles about the government’s right to oversee corporations. And then, as now, money was used to buy influence over the debate.If Musk and his co-director, Vivek Ramaswamy, succeed in scrapping a whole suite of regulators, it could fundamentally shift the relationship between capital and the individual (which, of course, is exactly his hope).Musk’s deregulatory zeal may yet run into trouble in Congress, and Trump may tire of his fellow egotist and end up wheeling out his catchphrase from the Apprentice to tell the Tesla boss “you’re fired”.But the immense influence Musk has bought, by spending an extraordinary $243m (£190m) on getting Trump re-elected, and using X to pump out pro-Trump propaganda, should sound alarm bells in the UK.We may lack the equivalent of Silicon Valley’s galactically rich donor class, with their screwball libertarianism. But we still have a system where wealthy individuals can effectively give unlimited sums to their favourite political parties.There are spending limits during campaigns, but these are very high: for a party standing candidates in every seat in the UK, it topped £34m at this year’s general election.Party funding rules state that you have to be a UK citizen to give more than £500 – or a UK-registered company, which “carries out business in the UK”.So even if Musk felt so minded, he could not donate as an individual, but would have to channel any donation to Farage’s crew via the UK outpost of Twitter, now known as X.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the very fact he could do so in theory highlights the gaping holes in our funding rules.Keir Starmer’s Labour seems at ease with big money. Labour declared three times as much in donations as all other parties combined during this year’s election campaign – more than £9.5m – with big donors including the trade unions, of course, but also wealthy individuals, such as Lord Sainsbury, the former chair of the supermarket chain, as well as the Autoglass founder, Gary Lubner, and the hedge fund manager Martin Taylor.Yet the row over freebies – which led to Starmer being castigated over donations of glasses and gig tickets – revealed a deep public scepticism over the role of private money in politics.Just as with the MPs’ expenses scandal, a practice that Westminster considered perfectly normal was shown to be deeply unpalatable to voters.Labour’s manifesto included a promise to “protect democracy by strengthening the rules around donations to political parties”. It is unclear what that meant, and it didn’t feature in Labour’s first king’s speech, but my colleague Eleni Courea has reported that Labour will look closely at a forthcoming report from the IPPR thinktank, which is expected to recommend a £100,000 annual cap on individual donations.Cross-party talks on political funding have often foundered on Labour’s reluctance to accept any cap on trade union donations. This is a difficult circle to square – Labour is, after all, the party of labour. At the very least, union donations should be democratically endorsed, so that they function as much as possible like a collection of individual members’ subs.On this basis, plans in the employment bill to move to an “opt out” approach for union political funds seem like a backwards step (though the unions would point out that they do hold regular votes on how their political funds are used).Transparency International, which campaigns to drive big money out of politics, recommends a much lower £10,000 cap on donations, and has a slate of other suggestions – including reducing campaign spending limits, which were raised dramatically by the Tories. Labour would be wise to look closely at these, too.Political funding reform should be a worthy aim in itself, without the looming threat of the populist right. But If Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for Nigel Farage helps motivate the UK’s mainstream parties to crack on with cleaning up politics, both men will have made an unexpectedly positive contribution to public life. More

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      Trump’s promise to tax imported goods could spell trouble for US auto industry

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      Few vehicles are as emblematic of the American auto industry’s might as the Ford F-150 pickup truck, the nation’s best-selling vehicle for over 40 years. But the F-150 is much less American than its image suggests. A fact that could present unique challenges for the company as Donald Trump moves to “make America great again”.Only about 32% of its components are made in the US or Canada, federal data shows, and that could spell trouble if Trump’s proposed tariffs on imported goods are implemented. Even less of the F-150 Lightning electric truck is made in the US – about 24%, a Cars.com analysis of federal data showed.The F-150’s price would almost certainly soar without some mitigation, industry observers say. Moreover, it would be virtually impossible to completely onshore its supply chain in short order – a process that could take many years.The uncertainty around the truck is representative of the auto industry as a whole as it waits to see if Trump follows through on his promised blanket taxes on imported goods. Top-selling vehicles in the US are similarly sourced from around the globe, and the auto industry’s supply chain is “a complicated universe”, said Ivan Drury, director of insights with industry analyst Edmunds.“The auto manufacturer is more like a parts collector – it’s not like Ford makes every component like everyone thinks,” Drury added. Because of that, tariffs would likely deliver supply chain shocks similar to the pandemic disruptions: “It could have the effect of you not getting the truck that you want.”Trump has proposed tariffs of between 60% and 100% on Chinese goods, and a tax of between 10% and 20% on every product imported from all other US trading partners, though very few details are available. During an October rally, he promised as much as a 500% tax on cars made in Mexico.“I’ll put a number where they can’t sell one car,” Trump boasted to the crowd.The goal is to force Ford and other automakers to onshore production and create manufacturing jobs here, but the idea is generating fears of shortages and inflation across the economy – the tariffs would cost the average US household about $2,600 per year, by some estimates.A more expensive F-150 could factor into that figure, but the impact of new tariffs will be felt widely across the industry.The industry analyst’s American Made Index (AMI) ranks how “American” 100 of the top vehicles sold in the US are, based on where parts are made as reported under the American Automobile Labeling Act, the location of vehicle assembly, US factory employment relative to vehicle production, and engine and transmission sourcing.The F-150 and F-150 Lightning ranked 58th and 56th, respectively, in 2024.The law does not require automakers to make granular data about where components such as steering wheels or airbags are made, so it is impossible to calculate how much a theoretical 20% import tax would increase the F-150’s cost. But Cars.com reported that the F-150’s 3.5-liter engines – including the Powerboost hybrid and the Raptor – are made in Mexico.All of its transmissions are made in the US, and final assembly takes place at plants near Kansas City or Detroit. For the F-150 Lightning, all motors and drive units are made in the US, and final assembly is near Detroit.“We’re at a point now in automotive history where the supply chain is not as simple as it once was and the badge on the hood is not indicative of where a vehicle was made,” said Patrick Masterson, chief copy editor at Cars.com.Ford didn’t respond to requests for comment, but when previously asked about the AMI rankings, it said: “Every single Ford F-Series truck is made in America. We build F-150s at Dearborn Truck Plant in Dearborn, Michigan, and Kansas City Assembly Plant in Kansas City, Missouri.”View image in fullscreenBy comparison, the highest ranking truck in the AMI was the Toyota Ridgeline, slotted at sixth, with 70% of its parts produced in the US or Canada, and final assembly in Alabama.No vehicles from Detroit automakers are represented in the top 20 – the highest ranking is the Chevrolet Colorado at 23. Meanwhile, three Teslas are in the top 10 with about 70% of their parts produced in the US, and final assembly in Austin or Fremont, California. The Cybertruck is also among the most American-made trucks. Given that figure, tariffs could be a boon to Trump ally Elon Musk.An automaker’s calculus on where it sources parts includes variables like cost and efficiency of the components’ production, and many even have joint production agreements with other automakers.Fully onshoring would be a long, difficult process because factories would have to be built or expanded, and a workforce would have to be hired and trained. Parts suppliers are often at capacity or do not keep stock on hand to meet sudden shifts in demand, Drury noted.If Ford suddenly asked a US supplier for millions of a hypothetical part for the F-150, there would be a “snowballing effect” as the automaker waited for it to be produced, he added.“We don’t have interchangeable cogs, and these aren’t widgets for which you can swap out one for the next – these are highly specialized components,” Drury said. “Things always sound good on paper at first but the reality of the situation is no factories can be made overnight; a lot of suppliers are stretched thin.”Some automakers who have invested in US factories may be in a better position to weather tariffs, Masterson said, especially with EVs. Ford and GM are readying several new plants that will produce EVs or batteries across the south and in Michigan.On the other hand, tariffs could be especially problematic for EVs because automakers import critical minerals or electronics, like semiconductors. The semiconductor industry began onshoring under Biden, who implemented significant tariffs on Chinese semiconductors, but it remains far from being able to fully supply US automakers.The hit on an F-150 buyer would in part depend on what form tariffs take, Masterson said. Trump has proposed blanket tariffs on imported goods, which would, in theory, include all components produced elsewhere, but observers suspect that may change as he receives input from automakers.Trump’s most dramatic claim – the 500% tax on imported cars – seemed aimed at those undergoing final assembly in Mexico, though a hypothetical vehicle assembled there could have a significant number of parts sourced from the US.While tariffs could ignite turmoil, the cost increases could also benefit automakers by presenting an opportunity to raise prices, and create a sellers’ inflation similar to that which padded major corporations’ profits, including some automakers, as inflation soared several years ago, said Isabella Weber, an economist with the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Implementing policies that cause the nation’s most popular vehicle to suddenly be unaffordable would be deeply unpopular. Trump saw Democrats lose power over inflation, Weber added, and he might come up with measures to avoid hitting US consumers with the cost, like forcing foreign companies to pay part of the tariff.“Power will be their first goal,” Weber said. “Inflation undermines this.”Even with the potential cost shock, the tariffs seem to have some public appeal as a measure to protect the US auto industry. The message is especially potent when it comes to vehicles like the F-150, which holds cultural and emotional value. If Trump can implement policies to make the truck more American without hitting consumers with costs, it could be a huge win.“These are American companies and people have memories of them going back decades, so there’s a lot there for people to grab on to financially and emotionally,” Drury said. “That’s why autos are always going to be top of mind when asking ‘What are we are going to do to protect American industry?’” More

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      ‘Straight in harm’s way’: can Trump open up Alaska’s 19m-acre refuge for drilling?

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      The Arctic national wildlife refuge (ANWR) is one of the earth’s last intact ecosystems. Vast and little-known, this 19m-acre expanse along Alaska’s north slope is home to some of the region’s last remaining polar bears, as well as musk oxen, wolves and wolverines. Millions of birds from around the world migrate to or through the region each year, and it serves as the calving grounds for the porcupine caribou.Donald Trump has called the refuge the US’s “biggest oil farm”.The first Trump administration opened 1.5m acres of the refuge’s coastal plain to the oil and gas industry, and under Trump’s watch, the US government held its first-ever oil and gas lease sale there.In a few weeks, when Trump takes office again, the refuge – one of the last truly wild places in the world – is awaiting an uncertain future.The president-elect has promised to revive his crusade to “drill baby drill” on the refuge as soon as he returns to the White House in January, falsely claiming it holds more oil than Saudi Arabia. Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump’s second term, calls for an immediate expansion of oil and gas drilling in Alaska, including in the ANWR, noting that the state “is a special case and deserves immediate action”.From his end, Joe Biden is moving to limit drilling in the region as much as his administration can. Experts are debating how much oil and gas there is to gain if Trump were to open up the region for drilling again. But Alaska’s Republican governor and Native Alaskan leaders in the region say they are eager to find out – seeing the potential for a major new source of revenue in the geographically remote region.Other Native leaders and activists have banded with environmental groups that oppose drilling on the refuge – and are gearing up for an arduous battle.“I see it as a David and Goliath fight,” said Tonya Garnett, a spokesperson for the Gwich’in steering committee, representing Gwich’in Nation villages in the US and Canada. “But we are resilient, and we are strong, and we’re going to keep fighting.”‘Sacred place where life begins’Garnett, who grew up in Arctic Village, just south of the refuge’s border, has spent most of her life trying to protect the refuge. Trump’s election has upped the urgency.The Gwich’in call the refuge’s coastal plain Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit – the “sacred place where life begins”. It serves as the breeding grounds for a 218,000-strong herd of porcupine caribou – which the Gwich’in have hunted for sustenance through their entire history. “We don’t even go up there, because we don’t want to disturb them,” said Garnett. “We believe that even our footprints will disturb them.”Environmental concerns go beyond the caribou. Scientists have warned that mitigating the risks drilling will pose to polar bears will be impossible. A 2020 study in PloS One found that the infrared technology mounted on airplanes used to scope for dens are unreliable.Experts have also warned that the trucks and equipment used in even the initial stages of exploration could cause severe damage to the remote tundra, endangering the habitat of the bears and many other sensitive species. With the climate warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet, bears are already struggling to hunt on a landscape that is quickly melting away below them. “Drilling puts the polar bears straight in harm’s way,” said Pat Lavin, the Alaska policy adviser for the non-profit Defenders of Wildlife.All the while, extracting and burning more fossil fuels is guaranteed to accelerate global heating – further degrading the region that is home to not only bears and other wildlife, but also several Alaskan communities.Melting permafrost is releasing mercury, as well as greenhouse gases – and eroding infrastructure as the literal ground beneath many Alaskans feet begins to disintegrate. “It’s a scary thing,” said Garnett.‘This issue has become symbolic’The political zeal to drill in the Arctic has remained strong, despite industry skepticism over how much there would be to gain from drilling the ANWR. The US Geological Survey estimates that between 4.3bn and 11.8bn barrels of oil lie underneath the refuge’s coastal plain, but it remains profoundly unclear how large the deposits are and how difficult it will be to get to them. Its location in the remote, northernmost reaches of the continent, bereft of roads and infrastructure, makes it exceptionally difficult and expensive to even explore for petroleum.“We think there is almost no rationale for Arctic exploration,” Goldman Sachs commodity expert Michele Della Vigna told CNBC in 2017. “Immensely complex, expensive projects like the Arctic we think can move too high on the cost curve to be economically doable.”And yet, Republicans seem determined. Environmentalists have wondered if this zeal is more political than practical. “To some extent, this issue has become symbolic,” said Kristin Miller, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League. “There’s an idea that if they can drill the Arctic Refuge, they can drill anywhere.”The Biden administration is working to limit exploration as much as it can in its remaining weeks in office. After two of the companies who’d bought leases in the first Trump years relinquished them voluntarily, in 2023 the Biden administration cancelled the remaining leases. However, the administration is obligated to hold a final oil and gas lease sale in the refuge as required by Trump-era law. Biden’s team has indicated it will be offering up just 400,000 acres – the minimum required by the 2017 law – with contingencies to avoid habitat for polar pears and the caribou calving grounds.It’s unclear who would bid for these leases. Already, several big banks have vowed not to finance energy development there, and big oil and gas companies have avoided the region – in large part because drilling into this iconic landscape remains deeply unpopular with many Americans.During the first Trump term, only two small private companies submitted bids for leases on the refuge, and later relinquished them. The other main bidder was the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA), a public corporation of the state of Alaska, which is suing the Biden administration over the cancellation of its leases last year.That group has already approved $20m to potentially bid again on leases for oil exploration in the region, even amid growing scrutiny of the extraction-focused group’s use of taxpayer funds, and its failure to meet its mandate of encouraging economic growth.The group did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment on how it plans to proceed.‘We’re ready to fight’Garnett said she sees the unending drive to drill into this land as a form of colonization. The Gwich’in have built their livelihoods and culture around the porcupine caribou, and by disrupting the caribou’s habitat, oil industrialists will destroy the Gwich’in’s history and way of life, she said.“We’re ready to fight, to educate, and to go with a good heart,” she said. “Because that’s what we have to do.” The Gwich’in tribes have urged the Biden administration to establish an Indigenous sacred sight on the coastal plain in the coming weeks.Not all Native groups in the region agree on that plan. Iñupiaq leaders on the North Slope have said the petition infringes on their traditional homelands, and threatens oil and gas development that could benefit the Iñupiaq village of Kaktovik, the only community located within the refuge boundaries.In an October op-ed, Josiah Patkotak, mayor of the North Slope borough, which includes Kaktovik, said that the territory in question “has never been” Gwich’in territory”.“This is not about the protection of sacred sites” he wrote in response to news that the administration would consider designating the site. “It is about a federal government that thinks it knows better than the people who have lived on and cared for these lands since time immemorial.”Nathan Gordon Jr, the mayor of Kaktovik, said he’s excited about the incoming administration, and its openness to renewing oil and gas exploration. “We would be able to provide more for the community, more safety regulations and infrastructure,” he said.Gordon said he disagrees with the argument that oil and gas exploration would decimate the caribou, noting that residents in Kaktovik, too, rely on the herd for sustenance hunting. “We wouldn’t do anything to hurt our own herd,” he said. “I don’t see the main negative effects that everybody else sees.”One thing he has in common with tribal members on the other side of this issue, is that he too has spent years advocating on the issue. “I’ve been working on this ever since I’ve been a tribal councilmember,” he said. “We want to be able to use our lands.” More

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      Democrats ignored pleas to address price of ‘eggs and gas’, campaigners say

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      Saru Jayaraman tried. As far back as January, the president of low-pay campaign group One Fair Wage recalls telling Democratic leaders in Washington DC that voters were worried about the cost of living.“It just went on deaf ears,” she said. “One of the biggest challenges we faced was they kept wanting to talk about the economy. And we kept saying, it’s not about the economy, it’s about our economy: it’s about my economy, my ability to pay for eggs and gas.”“And so, it was no surprise to us that people did not turn out, why people did not feel incredibly motivated – whether they didn’t vote or they voted for Kamala or they voted for Trump,” said Jayaraman, director of the food labor research center at University of California, Berkeley. “There was a universal feeling of ‘you’re not listening to us.’”A single mom working three jobs as a waitress, and struggling to make ends meet on a sub-minimum tipped wage, is “not going to take time out of her three jobs to vote for either person”, she added. “There’s no future for the party unless they really address the needs of working people. And I use the word ‘address’. It isn’t just running on the issue.”Democrats face calls to actSam Taub has worked as a server for the past 10 years in Michigan, one of the key election swing states, which swung from Joe Biden in 2020 to Donald Trump in 2024. Taub was not that surprised by this year’s result.“You see a lot of generalizations of people who live in the midwest, people who are working class and people who are working-class in the midwest,” he said. “And as somebody who is one of those people, it is a little bit frustrating to hear people say that they’re listening to you – and then not actually listen to you.“The message that Democrats really need to understand is that they can’t assume that they already know what people think and what people need.”View image in fullscreenTaub is one of hundreds of service industry workers who backed an open letter, organized by One Fair Wage in the wake of the 2024 election results, urging the Democratic party to do more to address the needs of working people.Democrats at the state level need to fight to protect workers rights even more given the upcoming second Trump administration, he argued, and push back against industry efforts to scale back or prevent policies, such as raising the sub-minimum wage for servers in Michigan, from taking effect.“It’s pretty obvious Donald Trump is not going to protect workers’ rights, so it’s really important for politicians at the state level to do everything that is within their power to protect workers,” said Taub. “By getting rid of the sub-minimum wage, which is something that’s happening gradually, we can help a lot of people.”Juan Carlos Romero, a bartender in New York City, has worked in the restaurant industry for 16 years. “It’s really hard to try to make ends meet” in this economy, he said.Under Trump workers in the service industry aren’t going to see improvements, he suggested, arguing that the incoming administration’s proposals – such as eliminating taxes on tips – overlook the fundamental issue that so many service workers are in precarious economic circumstances because they rely on tips and sub-minimum hourly wages.Democrats must use the final weeks before Trump takes office “to support us”, he added. “I think our desperation comes from the reality that we see, and especially if wages stay like this, [that] they’re going to continue to affect people on a daily basis. So it really is a call to action that is desperately needed by folks in the industry.”Fears of recessionCampaigners and academics fear the Democratic party’s losses of the White House and Senate majority, and its failure to retake the House majority will leave workers on lower incomes – especially immigrants – vulnerable.“One of the consequences of this election is that the government backs away from having people’s back when they want to join a union,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. “There’s just a cool irony to that that I think is just devastating: this is a time when people need to be in a union more than ever.”Deportation plans targeting undocumented and temporary workers are already inciting fear among these workers. Immigration groups are pushing Biden to solidify protections for immigrants before he leaves office in January.“I think that the anti-immigrant fervor out of Trump and his acolytes is terrifying and defies humanity,” said Judy Conti, director of government affairs at the National Employment Law Project. “And I think immigrant workers everywhere have reason to be worried about discrimination, potential violence, workplace raids.”Trump’s proposed tariffs, and the impact they may have on the costs of basic goods and necessities, are also causing concern.“If they’re not talking about raising wages, which they’re not, but they’re talking about making all of the goods and services that we need for our day-to-day lives 20% more expensive,” warned Conti. “I have fears of recession, and certainly fears that things are going to be less affordable for the people who can’t afford it most.”Democrats who still hold office nationwide are facing calls to help such people when Trump reaches the White House. “Even if you fail,” the One Fair Wage letter said, “at least we’ll see you fighting for once.” More

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      Will the Democrats finally realize that Big Tech is not an ally? | Zephyr Teachout

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      As Democrats think about how to counter the Trump administration, they need to accept a very simple lesson from the last eight years. Big tech and big business are part of the political opposition working on behalf of Donald Trump, not the Democrats’ allies working against Trump and Trumpism.It shouldn’t seem necessary to point out what seems to be an obvious fact. Nonetheless, there are some Democrats trying to stay close to big tech, or downplaying the importance of anti-monopoly policy when it comes to authoritarian risks. For example, a few days ago, Priorities USA, the largest Democratic party Super Pac, held a big resistance strategy session hosted by “our friends at Google”.As another example, Adam Jentleson, a political writer and a former chief of staff for US senator John Fetterman, wrote a recent piece for the New York Times that among other things criticized fighting monopolies as a “niche issue”. He argued that there’s a dichotomy between kitchen table issues and challenging corporate power, and we should focus on the former.The belief that big tech, and more broadly big business, is helpful to Democrats has already been tried – and found to be untrue.When Trump was elected in 2016, one central pillar of the Democratic resistance involved using big tech platforms as a counterweight. If you remember, the CEO of Google even joined anti-Trump protests. Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and pre-Elon Musk Twitter were scolded for using technologies that enabled extremism, but instead of aggressively moving to regulate the algorithmic design, change liability rules or break them up, Democrats focused on nudging platforms on editorial policy.The assumption was they could be corralled into the “right” set of editorial practices, ones that would help defeat Trump and Maga-ism, and limit the reach of his rhetoric in the short term. This was the context in which the “misinformation and disinformation” framework was born.We use the phrases all the time now, but it is worth reflecting on how strange they are. Sometimes misinformation refers to inadvertent lies, and disinformation describes purposeful lies, but sometimes the terms encompass factually correct but misleading information, or as Barack Obama argued in 2022, the “suppression of true information” if such suppression was done for, among other things, “political gain” or “targeting those you don’t like”.Not only did these new categories infuriate those who were caught in the broad, fuzzy definitions, but they focused Democratic attention away from questions of power. The mis/disinformation framework fit part and parcel with joining with big tech as an anti-fascist alliance. “We”, the science-grounded Democrats, would successfully work hand in hand with the biggest tech companies in the world to protect America.Eight years later, the Democrats have lost the White House, House of Representatives and Senate. The big tech platforms are awash in extremist content. Big tech should not look like the ally anymore. Not only is Musk fully ensconced at the head of the power table, right next to Trump, but the CEOs of Meta, Alphabet, Apple and Amazon all reached out to Trump before the election, perhaps taking seriously his threat to put Mark Zuckerberg in jail if he opposed him, perhaps just realizing that Trump is a deregulatory juggernaut.Musk reportedly joined a recent phone call between Trump and the CEO of Google. We can anticipate dozens of such meetings at the highest levels, and strong relationships being born. And instead of repeatedly insisting that tech titans have too much power, we have spent eight years arming them with language that can be used to suppress dissent.Repeated polling has shown that voters actually hate corporate monopolies, and antitrust politics are extremely popular. I don’t want to overclaim the point – antitrust politics disappeared in America for the 30 years between 1980 and 2020, and it is fair to argue that anti-monopoly policy, especially against big tech, can use more experimentation in how we talk about it. On the substance, however, we should be very concerned.Facebook, Google and Amazon have destroyed the actual bulwark against autocratic leaders – local journalism – while cozying up to actual autocracy. They now control the digital ad industry. According to one recent research report, if they paid news organizations what they make off them by standing as a middleman between readers and writers, they would be handing over between $12bn and $14bn a year. The very journalists and news organizations we rely on for fact-finding and fact-checking are scared of being shadowbanned – Jeff Bezos’s fear of Trump being exhibit A of how that can impact editorial content.Google, thankfully, has officially been called an illegal monopolist by a court, thanks to the work of the Department of Justice under assistant attorney general Jonathan Kanter, and other antitrust cases regarding Facebook and Amazon are winding their way through the court system. But even if Google is forced to divest Chrome, which seems possible, the failure of Democrats in power to put serious tech-busting legislation to a vote now seems grotesque. It looks like we didn’t even try to stop the incoming power couple of Trump and tech.While pundits are trying to sort through the messaging lesson of how Kamala Harris lost what seemed like a winnable election, we would do well to look further back, and remember the real lessons from 2016: joining hands with big tech oligarchs is joining hands with the destruction of the Democratic party and democracy.

      Zephyr Teachout is a professor at Fordham Law School and the author of Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money More