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    Trader Joe’s and Starbucks are helping Elon Musk undermine the US government | Steven Greenhouse

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    Elon Musk boasts that he’s a “free speech absolutist”, but that didn’t stop his rocket company, SpaceX, from firing eight workers who had criticized him for making light of reports that SpaceX had settled a sexual harassment claim against him.Not stopping there, SpaceX has moved to put the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the US’s top labor watchdog, out of business. Earlier this year, a day after the board accused SpaceX of illegally retaliating against those workers, SpaceX filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that seeks to have the labor board – which has successfully overseen relations between business and unions since the 1930s – declared unconstitutional and shut down.In so doing, Musk and SpaceX have joined a broader, rightwing effort that hopes to hobble the federal government’s ability to regulate business. Indeed, SpaceX’s lawsuit could serve as a potent wrecking ball in the right’s push to weaken and perhaps demolish the administrative state – the network of federal agencies that the US Congress created to, among other things, promote workers’ safety on the job, prevent fraud in financial markets, protect workers’ right to unionize, limit environmental hazards, make sure consumer products are safe and administer social security for seniors.With their lawsuit, SpaceX and Musk – who owns 42% of that company’s shares and controls 79% of its voting power – are seeking not just to silence the eight employees who criticized Musk, but also to shut down the agency that protects such workers’ rights to speak out at all. Musk, the $180bn man, is throwing a legal temper tantrum because the NLRB has sought to hold him and SpaceX accountable.Those employees wrote a letter saying: “Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us.” They wrote that letter after Business Insider reported that SpaceX had paid $250,000 to silence a company flight attendant who accused Musk of exposing himself and propositioning her for sex. Musk dismissed her in a tweet, saying she was a “liar” and that the incident “never happened”.The NLRB’s complaint against SpaceX is based on a law, the National Labor Relations Act, that makes it illegal for companies to fire or otherwise retaliate against workers who join together to push to improve work conditions. In their letter, the eight employees also called on SpaceX to spell out its anti-harassment policies and enforce them more effectively.If SpaceX’s lawsuit succeeds in getting the federal courts to declare the NLRB unconstitutional, it could set a dangerous precedent that other courts seize on to weaken or even eviscerate other federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), and perhaps even the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the Social Security Administration.SpaceX’s lawsuit seeks to build on a case in which George R Jarkesy Jr, a rightwing activist and radio talkshow host, persuaded the hard-right fifth circuit court of appeals to declare the Securities and Exchange Commission unconstitutional after it fined Jarkesy hundreds of thousands of dollars for defrauding investors.In their effort to blow up the NLRB, Musk and SpaceX are hoping to capitalize on the federal judiciary’s sharp rightward turn – a shift accelerated during Donald Trump’s presidency. It shouldn’t be a surprise that SpaceX filed its lawsuit in Texas, the state that arguably has the nation’s most extreme, most activist conservative federal judges. Following SpaceX’s lead, Amazon, Trader Joe’s and Starbucks also filed legal papers seeking to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional.Like SpaceX, those companies face NLRB charges of illegally retaliating against workers. One way to look at all this is that a band of billionaires – Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, and Trader Joe’s German owners, the Albrecht family – are seeking to kill the federal agency that protects typical workers when they seek to unionize or merely speak up for better conditions.Using uncharacteristically tough language, Jennifer Abruzzo, the labor board’s general counsel, slammed SpaceX, Starbucks and the other companies as “deep-pocketed, low-road employers” that seek to stop the NLRB from fulfilling its pro-worker mission “because they have the money to do so”.“Unfortunately,” Abruzzo added, it seems that SpaceX and the others “would rather spend money initiating court litigation than improving their workers’ lives”.If these “low-road employers” prevail, the whole NLRB process of holding union elections and prosecuting companies that violate labor laws could crumble. This “would leave US workers more vulnerable to exploitation”, Kate Andrias, a law professor at Columbia, wrote recently.Of course, for Starbucks and Trader Joe’s, this effort to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional could backfire – sabotaging the “progressive” image they have long sought to cultivate. Many Starbucks and Trader Joe’s customers might be outraged that the companies that furnish them with lattes and organic produce have joined this conservative legal and political assault.Many legal experts have derided one of SpaceX’s main arguments: that the labor board’s administrative law judges – who determine, for instance, whether a company violated the law by firing pro-union workers – should be deemed unconstitutional. SpaceX asserts that the NLRB’s judges exercise executive functions and therefore that the president, as the head of the executive branch, should be free to fire them. (Under federal labor law, they can be fired only for cause.) SpaceX makes this argument even though it’s crystal clear that the labor board’s judges merely do what judges do: issue judicial decisions.Moreover, what SpaceX is demanding would allow Trump, if re-elected, to do something that corporate America would hate – fire labor board judges because they upset him by ruling in favor of companies whose CEOs had criticized him or not donated to his campaign. Administrative judges – whether labor board judges, immigration judges or social security judges – have legal protections against being summarily fired so that they can make honest, independent decisions without fear of being terminated for political reasons.It is sad, if not altogether surprising, that SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s have joined a rightwing effort to destroy the federal agencies that set the rules that helped make the US the world’s richest nation and Musk, Bezos, Schultz and other billionaires fabulously wealthy. Now these billionaires are seeking to destroy the NLRB so that they can become even more fabulously wealthy.This is yet another unsettling example of plutocrats exercising their financial might to reshape government to their liking. It’s an effort that, if successful, will hurt millions of average Americans – consumers, workers, small investors and anyone who wants the environment protected.Here’s hoping that public interest prevails over Musk and the billionaires.
    Steven Greenhouse, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is an American labor and workplace journalist and writer More

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      Shawn Fain, president of the UAW: ‘Workers realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades’

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      From Amazon and UPS to Starbucks and Hollywood studios, organized labor is making a comeback in the US after decades of decline. Shawn Fain thinks he knows why: “Workers have realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades, and they’re fed up.”The United Auto Workers (UAW) president has emerged at the front of the pack of a new generation of labor leaders as a galvanizing voice in a critical year for the labor movement and American politics.A soft-spoken but unrelentingly blunt midwesterner, Fain has met the moment in his role as the union’s newly elected president. Having beaten the US’s big three automakers into a landmark new union contract, Fain’s members have been courted by both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Fain has gone all in for the Democrats despite some reservations and the misgivings of some of his members.Now he faces bigger tests. The UAW is taking its fight to states that have long, successful records of seeing off union drives – and he must hold his new coalition together as the US enters a fractious election cycle that will pit worker against worker.The union boss’s political ascendancy was crowned by his recent appearance as a guest at Joe Biden’s State of Union address, where both he and the union were called out in a nationally-televised salute from the commander-in-chief.Sporting a new, closely cropped beard and wearing a dark business suit and tie for the Capitol occasion, Fain responded with a raised power fist, telegraphing in one succinct image how much organized labor’s message and tone have changed of late, along with their popularity.View image in fullscreenThe winning trajectory of the union and its new, class-conscious president have caught carmakers off guard, no more so than when Fain, 55, contrasts his workers’ declining wages with corporate share buybacks and the lavish compensation bestowed upon automotive CEOs.Not without irony, Fain’s ascent almost certainly wouldn’t have been possible but for the 2022 federal felony convictions of more than a dozen union officials, as well as three Stellantis executives, for fraud and corruption, including embezzlement of union training funds. A UAW dissident with near 30 years’ previous service as a Stellantis (formerly FCA and Chrysler) electrician in Kokomo, Indiana, Fain unseated the union’s long-entrenched leadership cabal in 2023, vowing to root out corruption and change what he viewed as the union’s overly accommodating posture toward their employers.Speaking recently with the Guardian in his office at the UAW’s Detroit headquarters – Solidarity House, a brutalist four-story structure built in the 1950s along a grim stretch of East Jefferson Avenue, overlooking the Detroit River – Fain without naming names derided previous leadership. “The corruption was one thing. But even prior to that. What they call ‘working together’, I call ‘company unionism’. All we witnessed out of that philosophy is losing plants, losing jobs. We watched over 20 years as 65 factories [owned by] the big three, disappeared. ‘Working together’ in the spirit of what I view it as would be when it’s a win-win for everybody. It’s not one-sided.”View image in fullscreenFain was a national bargaining negotiator during the Great Recession and the 2009 Chrysler bankruptcy. “I saw how the company really went after everything, took advantage of a bad situation while our workers bore the brunt of all that sacrifice. Moving forward, we’ve sat here for over a decade, watching the big three make massive profits. I ran for this reason, to change this union, to get us back to what it is supposed to be and hasn’t been in my lifetime. Right from the beginning, we had to set the tone and do things differently. We ran the contract campaign to define the narrative and define the issues. In the last decade, the [big three] companies made a quarter trillion dollars in profits. CEO pay went up 40% in the last four years. And our pay went backwards. So that was really setting the table.”Cleaning house at the union’s headquarters, Fain brought in new staff experienced in the use of social media, something that helped galvanize his campaign to lead the UAW. “I didn’t have the advantages that [predecessors] had because they were in power. They could fly all over the country on the union’s dime and visit plants under the guise of union business. People like me who were running had to take vacation [time] and go stand out at plant gates and hope to catch workers coming and going.”Fain turned to social media to interact with members all over the country. “We were doing this as a way to communicate with our members. But it turned into a lot more because social media brought in anyone that wanted to come in. The general public was paying attention, the news media paid attention. And I think it was really effective because when it got time to go on strike, 75% of Americans supported us.”The big hree were caught flat-footed by the fresh approach. “I think they just thought that it was talk,” Fain said. “They’re used to hearing talk. Companies were used to having their way, saying what they wanted and getting it. I don’t think they really knew how to handle leadership that wasn’t operating in that mode. I mean, our leaders in the past, they’d stand up and beat the podium and say, ‘We’re gonna fight, we’re gonna fight, fight, fight!’ and then when they got into negotiations, they’d roll over. Obviously, I don’t think they expected this and, let’s be honest, they didn’t expect me to be president.”View image in fullscreenBreaking with precedent, where just one of the trio of American legacy makers would be “targeted” for a strike, the UAW launched simultaneous strikes against all three, then shrewdly conserved strike funds by closing individual plants rather than all at once. The 46-day “Stand Up Strike,” begun after contract negotiations with General Motors, Ford and Stellantis collapsed, ended in a resounding victory for the UAW. Since then, with the wind at its back, the union has taken the fight to the many non-union auto manufacturing plants dotting the country, including many in southern, so-called “right to work” states.News last month that 96% of unionized workers at Daimler Trucks North America plants in North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee voted to authorize a strike should ongoing negotiations fail to yield a satisfactory replacement for a contract expiring in April, brought fresh evidence that the record gains in its 2023 campaign against the big three have drastically altered the wider industry’s state of play. So did the UAW’s successful drives to have elections held at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, and at Mercedes-Benz’ Vance, Alabama plants.Fain is bullish on the possibility of extending the union’s gains to non-union automobile factories. Notable among the Detroit settlements’ broader impact has been how, in efforts to avert unionization, several non-union carmakers, including Toyota, Honda, Tesla, Nissan, Subaru, Volkswagen, and Hyundai hurried to give workers unsolicited raises and, in some cases, improved benefits and eliminated the two-tier wage structures, where new hires, often classified as temporary, are paid substantially less than veteran workers.Fain said he believes these companies all have more to give, as does Tesla, which, despite recent share losses, has been one of the world’s most profitable makers of electric vehicles. Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, is a vociferous foe of unionization. Recently, following a complaint filed against his SpaceX company, the rocket and satellite maker joined Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s in suing the NLRB, challenging the constitutionality of the almost 90-year-old agency.View image in fullscreenFain’s overarching optimism is grounded, he insists. “Workers have realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades, and they’re fed up … If Volkswagen workers had Ford’s [new] agreement, they would have got $23,000 profit-sharing checks this year. Instead, they got zero … We made a big deal in the big three contract fight that these companies made a quarter trillion dollars in profits in the last decade. But the Japanese and Korean six [with US factories] made $480bn. The German three made $460bn in profits worldwide. Toyota alone made $256bn profit in the last decade. Their profit margins are obscenely more gross than they were at the big three, and yet their workers get less. I truly believe we’re going to see a huge shift this year. I think we’re gonna win in the south.” And Musk? A somewhat tougher nut to crack, Fain concedes, adding: “He’s the epitome of everything that’s wrong with this world.”Not one to mince words, Fain’s bold rhetoric harkens to a long-gone era, his regular use of stark terms like “billionaire class” recalling, for this reporter, childhood remembrances of elderly trade unionist relations recounting 1930s Labor Day marches down New York’s Fifth Avenue. Fain credits his old-school class consciousness to the experience of his grandparents – poor people who emigrated from the south during the Depression to the north to work in the newly unionized automobile industry, affording them a middle-class life. He also notes the importance of his faith. An unthinking churchgoer as a youth, he said adulthood brought a renewed interest in religion. “I started reading the Bible. I pray every day when I wake up. I do a daily reading. And everything I read about it, no matter what religion someone is, whether you’re Muslim or Christian, whatever your belief is, all religion speaks to one thing, it’s love of your fellow human being. With the greatest excess in the history of the world, why don’t we work with a mindset of what works for human beings?”What he doesn’t have faith in is the likelihood that corporations will use technology to make life better for his members. “[Legendary UAW leader] Walter Reuther [who died in a 1970 plane crash] had this famous saying, ‘We have to master technology, not let it master us,’” said Fain.“As we have advancements in technology, it should be making life easier for people and workers’ lives. But what happens? When technology advances, the companies find ways to eliminate jobs, close plants, exploit workers in other places. And then the people that are left with a job, they want them to work longer and harder … The companies have to realize they’ll still make their profits; government should be subsidizing some of this. And everyone wins in this equation. Workers have better lives, working class people have better lives. The companies are profitable. The money’s there. This can all happen but let’s go back to the central issue of this. It’s corporate greed and a miniscule amount of people, the billionaire class, who want to concentrate all the wealth in their hands and screw everybody else to do it.”View image in fullscreenFain objects strongly to those who would place the blame for rising car prices on union contracts. “Another myth. Five to 7% of the cost of a car is labor. [Carmakers] could give us everything they gave us in that contract and not raise the price of cars a penny and still make massive profits. Why are they not saying what $20 billion in [additional] corporate dividends and stock buybacks cost them? That affects the bottom line more. That money somehow just disappears and doesn’t count, right? All they want to talk about is our wages and our benefits. People forget, over the last four years, the price of vehicles went up 35% on average. But our wages didn’t go up. Our benefits didn’t get better. Nothing changed for us. [Price hikes are] because of two things: corporate greed and consumer price gouging. They just pile all those costs on and then try to blame the workers for it.”A latter day rise in the union’s long-sagging fortunes – its membership dwindled from 1.5m in the 1970s to its current 380,000 – has been seen by some hopeful observers as early evidence of a burgeoning reversal of the downward trend that began with the punishing defeat of the air traffic controllers’ union early in the Reagan administration. In hindsight, Fain, who was a teenager at the time, suggests “all labor, not just union labor, should have come together then. I wish they would have. Because what’s happened over the last 40 years? Reagan and the ‘greed is good’ idea and the new philosophy of the rich getting richer. Forty years of going backwards for the working class … people understand that they’ve been left behind. Workers are now scraping to get by, while working multiple jobs, seven days a week, 12 hours a day and living paycheck to paycheck. That’s not a life. When I was a kid it didn’t matter if you worked at a grocery store, or if you worked at an assembly plant, a one-person income could sustain a family. That’s not the case anymore … workers, union and non-union, have to harness the power that we have and take back our lives.”Asked about the parallels between Reagan and Trump, charismatic presidents who quietly championed the interests of wealth and organized capital while retaining a strong following among the working class, Fain acknowledged the undeniable presence of a voluble Maga contingent among autoworkers including members of his own union. But he played down the political division within the ranks.Trump, a lifelong anti-union voice, has singled out the labor organization and Fain, in particular, for derision. Calling the union corrupt and Fain “a weapon of mass destruction” for jobs, Trump traveled to Detroit during the high-profile strike to a staged rally purportedly in support of auto workers but opposed to the union. Held at a non-union plant that charged his campaign $20,000 for its use, the event featured a crowd containing no actual auto workers, anti-union or otherwise.In January, Fain, who has said Trump represents the billionaire class and “doesn’t give a damn about working-class people” endorsed Biden’s re-election bid on the union’s behalf. “As I tell our members, ‘Look, this isn’t a Democrat-Republican issue. This isn’t a party issue. This wasn’t my opinion. Let’s look at their own words and their own actions.’” Fain credits Biden and Democrats with the federal government’s rescue of the domestic industry during the 2008-2009 recession, as the newly-installed Obama administration pro-actively addressed the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler. “They worked on a path forward for [the US car business] to come out of this and to live, they battled for the American worker. Trump, at the same time, was blaming the workers for everything that was wrong with these companies.”Last Fall “[f]or the first time in American history, a sitting US president [Biden] joined workers on the picket line. Trump had that opportunity in 2019, when GM was on strike for 40 days. He never said a word about the strike. He never did a damn thing to support it.”Auto worker support could well be critical in determining the allegiance of Michigan’s electoral college delegates, as well as those in other swing states. There’s no doubting where Fain thinks their best interest lie. “Joe Biden has a lifelong history of serving others and in standing with working-class people. President Trump has a lifetime history of serving himself and the billionaire class. And so there’s a stark contrast there. When you look at those things, the decision for us is very easy about who has our interests at heart. And who doesn’t. Sure, some of our members are still going to vote for Trump. But at the end the day we have to put the facts out there, we have to talk to our members about that and hope like hell we don’t have another disaster for four years.” More

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      RBG’s son fights decision to give Musk and Murdoch mother’s namesake award

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      The son of the late US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called a decision to give Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch an award named for his mother a “desecration” of her memory.Discussing protests made to the Dwight D Opperman Foundation, which gives the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership award, James Ginsburg told CNN: “I don’t want to speak to what our other plans might be if the foundation doesn’t see the wisdom of desisting and ending this desecration of my mother’s memory. But I will say that we will continue to fight this.”The second woman appointed to the US supreme court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent 27 years as a justice, becoming a hero to American liberals. She died aged 87 in September 2020 and was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, the third conservative justice installed by Donald Trump.Ginsburg helped establish the award colloquially known as the RBG, saying it would honour “women who have strived to make the world a better place for generations that follow their own, women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility, and who care about the dignity and wellbeing of all who dwell on planet Earth”.Previous recipients have included Barbra Streisand and Queen Elizabeth II.Last week, the Dwight D Opperman Foundation announced a five-strong list it said was chosen from “a slate of dozens of diverse nominees” but which included just one woman.That was Martha Stewart, 82, the lifestyle entrepreneur (and member of the first RBG award committee) who in 2004 was convicted of fraud and jailed for five months.The men were:
      Musk, 52, the billionaire owner of SpaceX, Tesla and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, through which he has taken increasingly rightwing political stances;

      Murdoch, 93 and the rightwing media baron owner of Fox News;

      Michael Milken, 77, a financier jailed on securities charges, pardoned by Trump and now a philanthropist;

      And Sylvester Stallone, 77, the star of films including the Rocky saga and the violent Rambo franchise.
      The list prompted protests including a widely publicised letter to the foundation from a former Ginsburg clerk. Jane C Ginsburg, the justice’s daughter and a Columbia University law professor, called it “an affront to the memory of our mother”.James Ginsburg, the founder and president of Cedille Records, a classical music label, told CNN he did not have “a clue” how the list of honorees was decided.He said: “The original purpose of the award was … to recognise an extraordinary woman who has exercised a positive and notable influence on society and served as an exemplary role model in both principles and practice.“And whether you want to discuss the wisdom of opening up that to men or not is one thing, but I think it would be hard pressed to apply that description to people like Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch. And that’s why the family is so upset … the whole family and her clerk family …“I’ve been contacted by people I know and people even that I don’t know about this, saying how upset they are. My sister even got a threatening letter and one of the things we want to do here is set the record straight. The family had nothing to do with this. We were not consulted. We are vehemently against this appropriation of our mother’s name and this insult to her legacy.”The Opperman Foundation has said it intends to honour both men and women because Ruth Bader Ginsburg “fought not only for women but for everyone”. The Guardian contacted the foundation for further comment.James Ginsburg said his mother would be “appalled” by honours given in her name to “people who pretty much stand against all the things that she stood for in terms of trying to … make the world a better place for people striving for equality and for a more inclusive world where everybody is treated with respect.“I think one of her law clerks made a great analogy … it’s a little bit like … if somebody gave money to a university to build a physics lab and they built a football stadium instead. It so violates the purpose of what was intended here. And this is not what my mother signed on to when the award was first created …“We can discuss the wisdom of each [nominee], but the two that obviously stand out here are Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch.”The two men did not immediately comment.James Ginsburg said: “When you think of trying to create a more just society, which of course was mom’s ultimate goal, those are probably about the last names that would come to mind.”
      This article was amended on 18 March 2024 to correct a misspelling of Ginsburg. More

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      in US Politics

      Brawny billionaires, pumped-up politicians: why powerful men are challenging each other to fights

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      The first rule of insecure masculinity fight club? Tell everyone about it. And I mean everyone. Tweet about it, talk to reporters, shout about it from the rooftops. Make sure the entire world knows that you are a big boy who could beat just about anyone in a fistfight.Twenty twenty-three, as I’m sure you will have observed, was the year that tech CEOs stepped away from their screens and decided to get physical. Elon Musk, perennially thirsty for attention, was at the center of this embarrassing development. The 52-year-old – who challenged Vladimir Putin to single combat in 2022 – spent much of the year teasing the idea that he was going head-to-head with Mark Zuckerberg in a cage fight. At one point he suggested the fight would be held at the Colosseum in Rome.Don’t worry, you didn’t miss it. The fight never happened and will never ever happen for the simple reason that Musk would get destroyed by Zuckerberg, who has been obsessively training in mixed martial arts (MMA) and won a bunch of medals in a Brazilian jiujitsu tournament. The only way Musk will actually follow through with the cage match is if he manages to get his hands on some kind of brain-implant technology that magically transforms him into a lean, mean, fighting machine. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if Neuralink, Musk’s brain-chip startup, was working on that brief right now. Although seeing as the company is under federal investigation after killing 1,500 animals in testing– many of which died extremely grisly deaths – it may be a while before any such technology comes to fruition.Musk and Zuck aren’t the only tech execs looking to get physical. Vin Diesel-level biceps have become the latest billionaire status symbol. Just look at Jeff Bezos: his muscles have increased at about the same rate as his bank account. The Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, has also been working on getting swole. Back in June, Chesky told the Bloomberg writer Dave Lee that he’d “challenge any leader in tech to bench press”. He added: “I’ve been waiting for these physical battles in tech. It’s just so funny.”It’s not just tech bros. Politicians are at it too. Over the summer, Robert F Kennedy Jr posted a video of himself doing push-ups while shirtless with the caption “Getting in shape for my debates with President Biden!” Which may or may not have been prompted by Biden once challenging an Iowa voter and Donald Trump to a push-up contest.I don’t know how good Kevin McCarthy is at push-ups, but he’s certainly fond of shoving. In November, the former speaker bumped into the congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee and reportedly elbowed him in the back. Burchett then chased after him, calling him a “jerk” and a “chicken”. McCarthy, it seems, was angry that Burchett had helped oust him from the speakership in October, making him the first speaker in US history to have been removed by his own side.Just a few hours after that altercation, Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, challenged Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to a physical confrontation during a Senate committee hearing on labor unions. Mullin, a former businessman who regularly boasts about his prowess as an MMA fighter, was miffed that O’Brien had once called him a “greedy CEO” and a “clown” on Twitter. He decided to settle his private grievance during a public hearing and the two agreed to have a fight right there and then – yelling at each other to “stand your butt up” and get started. Eventually Bernie Sanders got them to calm down.Just pause for a moment and imagine acting like this in your own job. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that if I challenged a colleague to a fight and started yelling at them to “sit their butt down” in the middle of a public meeting, I would face some sort of consequences. In the Mullins case, the meltdown doesn’t seem to have had any impact on his career. It may have even increased his popularity among his base. Politicians routinely seem to be held to a lower standard than the rest of us.If you ignore the fact that we’re being ruled by people with enormous egos and no self-restraint, then there is an amusing element to all this. But more than anything, it’s just pathetic, isn’t it? All these grown men so clearly worried about their masculinity that they feel the need to puff out their chests and show everyone just how strong they are.The one per cent’s desperate shows of bravado are part of a broader insecurity about masculinity in the west that plenty of snake-oil salesmen and opportunists are exploiting for all it’s worth. In 2022, for example, the rightwing commentator Tucker Carlson came out with a documentary called The End of Men that argues testosterone counts are plummeting and “real men” are an endangered species. The documentary was full of bizarre ways to counteract this, including testicle tanning. I’m not sure how many tech bros and politicians are regularly exposing their balls to red-light therapy, but there does seem to be a widespread preoccupation with “bromeopathic” ways to increase testosterone. Testosterone blood-test “T parties” are apparently a growing trend among tech types: a bunch of founders get together and find ways to raise their T.Do whatever you like in private, I say. Tan your testicles, go to T parties, organize push-up competitions. Just don’t foist your masculine insecurities on the rest of us. Stop challenging each other to public fights and getting into brawls in government. It seems to be easy enough for women to follow this advice, doesn’t it? I mean … has a female CEO or politician ever tried to organize a public fistfight with a female counterpart? I’ve got a weird feeling the answer is “no, they would be a complete laughingstock if they did”, but if anyone can find me a recent example then I’ll eat my hat. Or – on second thoughts – I’ll throw my hat in the ring and fight Elon Musk myself in the Roman Colosseum. Consider that a challenge. More

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      in US Politics

      Musk ‘believes in America’: DeSantis defends X owner after antisemitic post

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      Ron DeSantis defended Elon Musk as “a guy that believes in America” on Sunday as the Florida governor refused to condemn X’s billionaire owner for an antisemitic post that caused numerous key advertisers to desert the social media platform.In an interview Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, the Republican Florida governor claimed he had not seen the message on the platform that was formerly known as Twitter. The message – in which Musk said an X user who accused Jewish people of hating white people was speaking “the actual truth” – was denounced by the White House on Friday as “abhorrent”.Instead, DeSantis dedicated his remarks on CNN to exalting Musk as a banner carrier for free speech. And he dismissed other prominent right wingers who have expressed antisemitic positions as “fringe voices”.“Elon has had a target on his back ever since he purchased Twitter, because I think he’s taking it into a direction that a lot of people who are used to controlling the narrative don’t like,” said DeSantis, whose campaign for the Republican 2024 nomination continues to crater. “I was a big supporter of him purchasing Twitter.”When State of the Union host Jake Tapper brought Musk’s widely condemned “actual truth” message to the screen, DeSantis said he had “no idea what the context is” and said he would not “pass judgment on the fly”, although he said he stood against antisemitism “across the board”.“I know Elon Musk,” DeSantis said. “I’ve never seen him do anything. I think he’s a guy that believes in America, I’ve never seen him indulge in any of that. So it’s surprising if that’s true.”Critics have previously accused the governor of being slow to condemn rallies by neo-Nazis in his state, some carrying flags with the words: “This is DeSantis country.” He has attempted to portray the criticism as a “smear campaign” by political opponents while a campaign aide posted a “reprehensible” tweet suggesting DeSantis’s Nazi supporters were actually Democratic party staffers.After Sunday’s CNN interview, senior Democrats were skeptical of DeSantis’s insistence he hadn’t seen Musk’s message. The message drew headlines globally and prompted disgusted major companies – including Apple, Disney, IBM and Warner Brothers – to suspend advertising on X.“The guy’s running for president, and Elon Musk [posted] that on Wednesday. It’s Sunday. So this is four days later, and he has not had the chance to read what Musk wrote? That is very hard for me to believe,” Democratic US House member Jamie Raskin of Maryland told Tapper.“You showed it to him, and he still refused to condemn it. If you’re serious about condemning and confronting antisemitism, and racism, and these bigotries, which are the gateway to destruction of liberal democracy, you’ve got to be explicit and open and full throated about it when you’ve got [the opportunity] to denounce antisemitism and racism across the board.”DeSantis has vocally supported Israel since its war with Hamas began in October. On Sunday, he urged greater US support for the Israeli’s military’s onslaught against Hamas in Gaza.“We need to let Israel win this war,” DeSantis said. “We should support them publicly and privately to actually finish the job, because if you just do some glancing blows, Hamas is going to reconstitute itself and we’re going to end up in the same cycle going forward.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Israel’s in a situation where they suffered the biggest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. You have an organization, Hamas, that wants to wipe Israel totally off the map. This is not just some minor dispute. This is an existential threat to the survival of the world’s only Jewish state [and] they have to do whatever they can to protect their people.”DeSantis pointed to his ban of a pro-Palestinian student group from Florida’s university campuses, a policy challenged in court this week on free speech grounds, as an example of standing up to terrorists.“We have Jewish students fleeing for their lives because you have angry mobs,” he said. “I have constituents in Florida whose kids don’t even want to go to campus … because of such a hostile environment.”Tapper, in a thinly disguised dig at DeSantis’s well publicized previous attacks on minority students on grounds of race and gender, replied: “Absolutely Jewish students, just like Muslim students, Black students, gay students, or all students, should feel safe on campuses.” More

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      Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover review – the billionaire is laughably grandiose at times

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      It is hard to take anyone very seriously when they use the phrase “the woke mind virus” with a straight face. But, increasingly, when it comes to Elon Musk, there is no other option. Is he a visionary? A hypocrite? The last defender of the first amendment? Or simply a bullied kid who got his own back by buying the global playground and trashing it? Opinions of Musk are as volatile and wide-ranging as the man himself.“When things are calm he seeks out storms,” says his biographer, Walter Isaacson. As this exhaustive documentary shows, when Musk acquired ownership and control of Twitter (subsequently rebranded X) in 2022, he certainly found one. The film works on several fascinating levels. It is a character study, a potted history of the last decade of American politics and also a detailed and disturbing exploration of how social media became a dysfunctional forum for the world’s grievances.The pandemic and the Trump presidency were the strongest accelerants in this process. For years, Twitter had attempted to negotiate a balance between allowing free expression and refusing to tolerate hate speech and overt disinformation. But what is a company to do when the president starts spreading verifiable falsehoods on its platform, at a time when those falsehoods have the potential to cost lives? Twitter’s response was to suspend Trump. Musk was, at the time, annoyed about the compulsory closure of his Tesla factories. So, in opposition to lockdown, an uneasy alliance was born.Who decides to suspend a president? In this case, people such as Yoel Roth, working in Twitter’s Trust and Safety department and about to become a lightning rod for Trumpite wrath. Interviewed at length, he is jittery, nervous and looks extremely young. He is also, in his measured way, defiant. Who are you, Roth is asked, to make this decision? “I’m no one,” he responds. “It shouldn’t be any one person’s decision” And there’s the nub of it. These people didn’t seek this power. They are essentially nerdy kids (although Roth did once call Trump “a racist tangerine” on Twitter, which probably didn’t help). He is right though. It shouldn’t be up to him alone. And it surely follows that it also shouldn’t be up to Jack Dorsey, or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.Musk, meanwhile, was spiralling. He was becoming a high-profile example of the way in which a person’s buy-in to a conspiracy theory often wedges the door open for others. In one tweet (“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”) he managed to insult transgender people, Covid victims and the integrity of medical science in the space of five words.Here, things get unnerving. Musk’s opinionated carelessness is, in the context of his status, extremely dangerous. The list of people harassed and threatened after being the target of his tweets grows as the film proceeds. This amounts to its own form of censorship: the scariest censorship of all – self-censorship. If you suspect that a billionaire with more than 160 million followers (many of them aggressively protective of him) will disapprove of a course of action, you might decide not to take that action. This principle has subsequently applied to everyone who might oppose Musk’s worldview – from politicians to journalists. By the time Musk’s acolytes were using The Twitter Files (a leak of information claimed to show collusion between government and social media companies) as a pretext for excoriating Joe Biden’s presidency, one thing had become clear: social media had warped our discourse by ostensibly liberating it.In its quiet, diligent way, the film is a noble response to this phenomenon. Stylistically and aesthetically, PBS documentaries typically resemble elongated news reports – no frills or fripperies, just reporting. In the context of our partial, bad-faith current news environment (nurtured, ironically, by Twitter), this feels admirably spartan and bracing – old investigative techniques, such as examining multiple perspectives and asking difficult questions of people on both sides of the argument, prove refreshing. Old-fashioned broadcasting might be one antidote to social media’s poisonous hysteria.But what of Musk himself? He is hilariously grandiose at times, but also seems easily bored – which might be our salvation. Early in the film, there is a clip following him at the launch of one of his spacecraft. If you can ignore the wild extravagance of these endeavours, it is oddly charming. He looks like a little boy bubbling with excitement about having a chance to play with the biggest and best toys ever made. While the regulation of social media will be a headache for years to come, dare we hope that, one day, Elon Musk might decide to return to his rockets?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion
      Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover aired on PBS America, which is available for catchup on Freeview Play and Amazon Fire TV. More

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      For Elon Musk, the personal is political – but his march to the right affects us all

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      The personal is political. The phrase was popularized by 1960s second-wave feminism but it sums up Elon Musk’s ideological journey. Once a “fundraiser and fanboy for Barack Obama”, to quote his biographer, Walter Isaacson, the sometime world’s richest man now plays thin-skinned, anti-woke warrior – a self-professed free-speech purist who in fact is anything but.His rebranding of Twitter to X having proved a disaster, he flirts with antisemites for fun and lost profits. He threatens the Anti-Defamation League with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit. The ADL never suggested the name “X”. That was a long-term fetish, now a clear own-goal.Like the building of Rome, Musk’s march to the right did not take only one day. A series of events lie behind it. Musk is a modern Wizard of Oz. Like the man behind the curtain, he is needy. According to Isaacson, outright rejection – and gender transition – by one of Musk’s children played an outsized role in his change. So did Covid restrictions and a slap from the Biden White House.In March 2020, as Covid descended, Musk became enraged when China and California mandated lockdowns that threatened Tesla, his electric car company, and thus his balance sheet.“My frank opinion remains that the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself,” he wrote in an intra-company email.But Musk jumped the gun. Moloch would take his cut. In the US, Covid has killed 1.14 million. American life expectancy is among the lowest in the industrialized west. Thailand does better than Florida, New York and Iowa. For their part, Ohio, South Carolina and Missouri, all Republican-run, trail Thailand. Bangladesh outperforms Mississippi. Overall, the US is behind Colombia and Croatia. Under Covid, Trump-voting counties became killing fields.But in May 2020, amid a controversy with local government in California, Musk tweeted, “take the red pill”. It was a reference to The Matrix, in which Neo, the character played by Keanu Reeves, elects to take the “red pill” and thereby confront reality, instead of downing the “blue pill” to wake happily in bed. Ivanka Trump, of all people, was quick to second Musk: “Taken!”Musk’s confrontation with California would not be the last time he was stymied or dissed by those in elected office. In summer 2021, the Biden administration stupidly declined to invite him to a White House summit on electric vehicles – because Tesla was not unionized.“We, of course, welcome the efforts of all automakers who recognize the potential of an electric vehicle future and support efforts that will help reach the president’s goal. And certainly, Tesla is one of those companies,” Biden’s press secretary said, adding: “Today, it’s the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers and the UAW president who will stand with President Biden.” Two years later, the UAW has gone on strike. At midnight on Thursday, 13,000 workers left the assembly lines at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.For all of his talk of freedom, Musk sidles up to China. This week, he claimed the relationship between Taiwan and China was analogous to that between Hawaii and the US. Taiwan is “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China”, Musk said. Such comments dovetail with Chinese talking points. He made no reference to US interests. He is a free agent. It’s not just about Russia and Ukraine.Musk’s tumultuous personal life has also pressed on the scales. In December 2021, he began to rail against the “woke mind virus”. If the malady were left unchecked, he said, “civilization will never become interplanetary”. Musk apparently loves humanity. People, however, are a different story.According to Isaacson, the outburst was triggered in part by rejection and gender transition. In 2022, one of his children changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson, telling a court: “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” She also embraced radical economics.“I’ve made many overtures,” Musk tells Isaacson. “But she doesn’t want to spend time with me.” His hurt is palpable.James Birchall, Musk’s office manager, says: “He feels he lost a son who changed first and last names and won’t speak to him anymore because of this woke mind virus.”Contradictions litter Musk’s worldview. Take the experiences of Bari Weiss, the professional contrarian and former New York Times writer. In late 2022, she was one of the conduits for the Twitter Files, fed to receptive reporters by Musk in an attempt to show Twitter’s bias against Trump and the US right. On 12 December, Weiss delivered her last reports. Four days later, she criticized Musk’s decision to suspend a group of journalists, for purportedly violating anti-doxxing policies.“He was doing the very things that he claimed to disdain about the previous overlords at Twitter,” Weiss charged. She also pressed Musk over China, to his dismay. He grudgingly acknowledged, she told Isaacson, that because of Tesla’s investments, “Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China.“China’s repression of the Uyghurs, he said, has two sides.”“Weiss was disturbed,” Isaacson writes.Musk is disdainful of Donald Trump, whom he sees as a conman. This May, on X, Musk hosted a campaign roll-out for another would-be strongman: Ron DeSantis. A glitch-filled disaster, it portended what followed. The Florida governor continues to slide in the polls, Vivek Ramaswamy nipping at his heels.Musk remains a force. On Monday, he is slated to meet Benjamin Netanyahu, the indicted rightwing prime minister of Israel who will be in New York for the United Nations general assembly. Like Musk, Netanyahu is not a favorite of the Biden White House. Misery loves company. More

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      Rudy Giuliani ‘mob scene’ turned Elon Musk off seeking advice, new book says

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      Elon Musk backed away from a plan to recruit Rudy Giuliani as a political fixer to help him turn PayPal into a bank in 2001 after he and an associate found the then New York mayor “surrounded by goonish confidantes” in an office that felt “like a mob scene”.“This guy occupies a different planet,” Musk, who would become the world’s richest man, said of Giuliani, then approaching the peak of his fame.Giuliani left office at the end of 2001 after leading New York through the 9/11 attacks, then ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2008, a campaign which soon collapsed.He became an attorney and ally to Donald Trump but missed out on a cabinet appointment when Trump won the presidency in 2016.Trump’s first impeachment was fueled by Giuliani’s work in Ukraine, seeking political dirt on opponents. Now 79, Giuliani has pleaded not guilty to 13 criminal charges of racketeering and conspiracy, regarding his work to advance Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.The irony of the former mayor and New York US attorney being indicted on charges often used against figures in organised crime has been widely remarked. As a prosecutor, Giuliani made his name chasing down mafia kingpins.The latest picture of Giuliani as gangster is included in Elon Musk, a new biography of the 52-year-old Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) owner and sometime world’s richest man, by Walter Isaacson, whose other subjects include Leonardo Da Vinci and Steve Jobs.Isaacson’s book was widely excerpted in the US media before publication on Tuesday.The brief meeting between Musk and Giuliani came about, Isaacson writes, as Musk sought to turn PayPal, the online payments company he co-founded, into “a social network that would disrupt the whole banking industry” – a vision he now harbours for Twitter, which he bought in October 2022 and renamed as X this year.“We have to decide whether we are going to aim big,” Musk told those who worked for him, Isaacson writes, adding that some “believed Musk’s framing was flawed”.Describing stymied attempts to rebrand, Isaacson writes: “Focus groups showed that the name X.com … conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about in polite company. But Musk was unwavering and remains so to this day.”Such discussions, Isaacson reports, led Musk and an investor, Michael Moritz, to go to New York, “to see if they could recruit Rudy Giuliani, who was just ending his tenure as mayor, to be a political fixer and guide them through the policy intricacies of being a bank.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“But as soon as they walked into his office, they knew it would not work.“It was like walking into a mob scene,” Moritz says. Giuliani “was surrounded by goonish confidantes. He didn’t have any idea whatsoever about Silicon Valley, but he and his henchmen were eager to line their pockets.”“They asked for 10% of the company, and that was the end of the meeting. ‘This guy occupies a different planet,’ Musk told Moritz.”Giuliani succeeded in lining his pockets after leaving city hall, making millions as a lawyer and consultant and giving paid speeches around the world.That picture has also changed. Faced with spiraling legal costs arising from his work for Trump and other cases including a $10m lawsuit from a former associate who alleges sexual assault, lawyers for Giuliani have said he is struggling to pay his bills. In New York, his luxury apartment was put up for sale. More

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      Elon Musk’s hypocrisy about free speech hits a new low | Margaret Sullivan

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      Even before he took over Twitter, Elon Musk touted himself as a “free speech absolutist”.This was always a troubling notion for an insanely rich guy with a cult following whose sense of history is as limited as his ego is boundless.As it turns out, what Musk had in mind was something more along the lines of “free speech for me, but not for thee”, as the title of the revered columnist Nat Hentoff’s 1992 book put it.A few days ago, he threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League – for defamation, no less – blaming the non-profit for driving billions of dollars in advertising from his company. The ADL has criticized Twitter for failing to take action against hate speech, charging that fewer than a third of posts flagged for antisemitic content were removed or sanctioned; and it joined other civil rights groups last year in calling for advertiser boycotts.But clearly, if anything has destroyed the value of the company for which he paid an ill-considered $44bn, it’s been Musk himself.He’s made a series of stunningly bad decisions that seemed designed to drive away users and advertisers. Rebranding Twitter, nonsensically, as X was one; another was removing unpaid verification symbols, making it much more difficult to figure out who is real and who is an impostor.Yet another was the restoration of thousands of banned accounts.“Musk has declared open season for hate on his platforms,” Suzanne Nossel, author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All, and the CEO of PEN America, the free-expression organization, told me.Twitter was far from great under its co-founder Jack Dorsey, but at least an army of content moderators tried to restrain the worst offenders.Under Musk’s control, many of those employees have been fired or have departed in disgust.But a few days ago, things got much worse. Over the weekend, Musk engaged with posts from far-right figures by “liking” or responding to them. When the ADL called him out, he threatened to sue and got his ardent followers to go on the attack.The hashtag #BantheADL went viral, fanning the flames of antisemitism, already ablaze in the US and around the world.“It is profoundly disturbing that Elon Musk spent the weekend engaging with a highly toxic, antisemitic campaign on his platform,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the non-profit’s chief executive, noting the effort has been promoted by “individuals such as white supremacist Nick Fuentes, Christian nationalist Andrew Torba, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and others”.Then things got worse.“We saw the campaign manifest in the real world,” Greenblatt said, referring to masked men marching outside Orlando, Florida, waving flags adorned with swastikas and chanting: “Ban the ADL.”Musk claims he opposes antisemitism in all forms, but it sure doesn’t look that way.“Those who go up against the ADL tend to find themselves on the wrong side of history,” Nossel said, noting the organization’s fights for more than a century against the Ku Klux Klan, fascists and white supremacists.Free-speech issues aren’t easy to parse these days. The digital world, with its lightning-fast speed and worldwide reach, has changed everything. There are legitimate disagreements about what’s allowable on social media platforms.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Musk’s approach never made sense. “By ‘free speech’, I mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law,” he declared before he bought Twitter. “If people want free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”Musk’s rhetoric seemed to conflate the first amendment with practices imposed by a corporation.“It’s not just about turning up the free-speech dial, because there are always trade-offs,” Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told me then.If there were no limits on harassment and abusive speech, people – particularly women and members of historically oppressed groups, who often are the targets – would leave the platform altogether.And that, Jaffer said, is not a free-speech victory: “Nobody wants a platform on which anything goes.”Musk seems immune to that kind of reasoned discussion. He wants revenge.Just weeks ago, X Corp filed a $10m suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, claiming revenue loss due to “false and misleading claims”; the center had published research finding that hate speech on the platform had soared.The suit Musk has threatened against the ADL would likely be for much more, since he claims its criticism has cost his company billions.Like many a mogul, Musk doesn’t like to be challenged.And his company’s precipitous decline has him searching for a scapegoat when he ought to look in the mirror.In targeting the ADL, he’s proven himself not a free-speech absolutist but an absolute bully.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More