Saturday Report 12/28/24 - Americans are sick of the Grinches stealing healthcare...

The Best of the Rest of the News

Dec 28, 2024

— This is what happens when five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court put our government up for sale to the highest bidder. Greetings from Australia; Louise and I are visiting a dear old friend who’s one of the top neuroscientists in the world and, driving for a few hours from the airport to their home on the Pacific Ocean, we passed dozens of Teslas. They’re all over the place, and they’re made in China. In fact, reports suggest that more than half of Teslas are made in China. Which is why it makes so much sense that when Republicans and Democrats negotiated a deal to keep the government open and that deal put limits on American companies and morbidly rich billionaires from investing in or expanding operations in China, suddenly President Elect Musk threw nearly a hundred tweets out on Xitter demanding Republicans kill the deal. And kill it they did: instant obedience. The new revised bill that Congress passed and Biden signed into law no longer puts any obstacles in the richest man in the world’s ability to keep on cranking out cars in China. Even more troubling, when Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro pointed this out and implied it was a form of corruption, Musk went after her on Xitter, suggesting he may use his massive fortune — larger than any amassed by any individual in the world’s history of all the pharaohs, kings, popes, and caliphs over the past 5,000 years — to unseat her in the next election. DeLauro wrote to congressional leadership, in part:

”It is particularly disturbing that Musk may have sought to upend this critical negotiated agreement to remove a bipartisan provision regulating U.S. investments in China in order to protect his wallet and the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of American workers, innovators, and businesses.
“Despite the four corners of the Appropriations Committees and Congressional leadership having reached a government funding agreement earlier this week, Republican leadership caved at the last minute to the demands of ‘President’ Musk to shut down the government and strip out hundreds of pages of critical provisions that would have reauthorized important programs to support American workers and families. One key provision that Republicans’ new government funding bill stripped out: a bill to screen U.S. investments in critical sectors in China.
“This outbound investment provision was agreed to after months of bipartisan, bicameral negotiations and years of advocacy from Members of Congress. It would have kept innovation and manufacturing in semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and other cutting-edge technologies in the United States and prevented wealthy investors from continuing to offshore production and U.S. intellectual property into China – benefiting only their bottom lines and the Chinese Communist Party, while hurting American workers and threatening our national security. Importantly, many of the innovations this bill would have protected were developed with the help of taxpayer dollars – all the more reason for these innovations to remain at home and not be used to fuel adversaries’ technological and military capabilities.
“It is no surprise, then, that ‘President’ Musk does not want to see a funding deal containing this provision be signed into law. Musk’s investments in China, and ties with its government, have only grown over the last few years – alongside his growing involvement in American politics.
“Musk’s car company, Tesla has poured billions of dollars into investments in China, particularly its ‘gigafactory’ in Shanghai. The Shanghai plant is Tesla’s largest car manufacturing facility – the Chinese gigafactory produced about 50 percent of Tesla’s global automobile output over the last year, and Tesla drew nearly a quarter of its global revenue in 2023 from sales of Chinese-made vehicles from the Shanghai factory. And there are signs that Musk plans to double down on his company’s investments in China – as Tesla awaits the Chinese government’s approval of its ‘Full Self-Driving’ technology, Musk noted that ‘the value of Tesla lies primarily in its plans for autonomous driving.’ And in May of this year, Tesla broke ground on a new $200 million factory to manufacture large batteries critical to its electric vehicle supply chain – down the street from its Shanghai car factory. Notably, proponents of regulating U.S. investment in China have advocated for the inclusion of large battery manufacturing in the list of technologies subject to outbound investment screening.
“Given the need for Chinese government approvals for his company’s projects in the country, it is similarly unsurprising, yet concerning, that Musk has ingratiated himself with Chinese Communist Party leadership. In April of this year, for example, Musk met with Chinese premier Li Qiang, who helped rush the construction of Tesla’s Shanghai gigafactory when he was still the secretary of the city’s Communist Party. At the meeting, Musk noted that ‘Tesla is willing to further deepen cooperation with China.’ Evidently, ‘[w]hen Chinese leaders have an important message to convey to President Trump, Elon Musk would clearly be the best conduit.’ This is unsurprising given that Musk’s personal finances depend heavily on Tesla’s success or failure: Musk holds a 13 percent ownership stake in Tesla worth more than $100 billion, or more than a quarter of his total net worth.
“Musk’s ties to China, and Tesla’s significant investments in the country, are especially concerning in light of the significant U.S. federal, state, and local financial support Tesla and Musk’s other companies have received. From Fiscal Year (FY) 2000 to present, Tesla has received nearly $3 billion in taxpayer subsidies and more than $466 million in federal loans, and since 2008, the company has benefited from $41.9 million in federal contracts. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, received more than $100 million in federal loans and taxpayer subsidies since FY 2000, and has won nearly $19.8 billion in federal contracts since 2008.” (emphasis added)

Musk is now saying of DeLauro, as MSNBC’s Steve Bennen noted, that “This awful creature needs to be expelled from Congress! Ugh.” He also implicitly threatened to use his massive resources to take down Democratic Congressman Richie Neal, who also pissed him off, with Musk tweeting: “Forgot to mention that I’m also going to be funding moderate candidates in heavily Democrat districts, so that the country can get rid of those who don’t represent them, like this jackass.”
Another part of the bill that was removed included a requirement that social media companies allocate resources to stop revenge porn, something that many in the media speculate may have cost X a lot of money and hassle. And if America were to acquire the Panama Canal and the arctic waters above Greenland that, because of global warming, will be open to shipping within a few years, it could possibly make shipping costs for companies manufacturing in China and selling around the world a hell of a lot cheaper than today.
America has a serious oligarch problem and it’s getting worse by the day. If Citizens United isn’t reversed, the voices of average Americans will be totally drowned out by billionaire cash in our upcoming elections…

— Far-right activist Christopher Rufo — the guy who put DEI and CRT in the bullseye of Republicans and rightwing media — now wants to take on Harvard. He told Bloomberg: “If we can extract changes from Harvard, if we can push it in a better direction, other universities will look at that as a signal and adjust their policies.” It was during the Reagan administration that Republicans first started attacking teachers and professors, although mostly it was rhetorical back then (along with massive cuts to higher education). But now the hard right is trying to take on colleges directly. How dare our colleges educate kids about the actual history of America and teach critical thinking skills?!?

— Will a jury ever convict Luigi Mangioni? A new Gallup poll finds that fewer than half of Americans are happy with the state of healthcare in America, a substantial drop in just the past ten years. The sad reality is that there are around a million doctors in America delivering actual healthcare to people and nearly a million (912,300) employees of the health insurance industry dedicated to saying “NO!” when people want their healthcare bills paid for. Here in Australia, by the way, nobody goes bankrupt because somebody got sick; in America over a half-million families are wiped out every year and thrown into bankruptcy, and many are insured. Again, thank the five bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court who leagalized political bribery, saying that buying off politicians to protect health insurance industry profits is merely “free speech” protected by the First Amendment. Meanwhile, after a New York jury acquitted Daniel Penny (and Trump invited him to a football game) after he killed a Black homeless man, more and more serious commentators are noting that it only takes one juror to deadlock a jury and give Mangioni his walking papers. As I’ve noted before, during the Republican Great Depression — when banks made off with billions in people’s savings — America’s heroes quickly became bank robbers like John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and Ma Barker and her gang. Now that almost every American family has a horror story to tell about a health insurance corporation denying them care, this generation’s bad-boy-hero Dillinger-type is Mangioni…

— Weiner went to prison but Gaetz won’t? Remember when Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner served 18 months in prison for texting a dick pic to an underage girl he never met or touched or paid or anything else? Now comes Matt Gaetz and, according to a new report from the House Ethics Committee, the Republican Congressman actually paid an underage girl for sex that he then had with her in such a public part of a party house that multiple people witnessed it. Will Gaetz similarly go to prison? Don’t count on it; Republicans are generally immune from prosecution for such crimes, particularly when their fathers are major and morbidly rich Republican movers-and-shakers and Trump is trying to pack his administration with accused rapists and predators…

— The CDC reports the first severe bird flu case in the US involves a virus that has mutated in a way that makes it more effective at infecting human lung tissue. This could become, according to multiple virologists, the world’s next pandemic. The bad news is that Trump wants to put Bob Kennedy in charge of our response to this sort of thing; the good news is that, unlike in 1918, we know how to make vaccines quickly. It’s still incredibly concerning and poor countries and poor people with incur the most deaths…

— My Australian friend tells me that there’s a huge housing shortage here in Oz “because conservative governments have let housing become an investment vehicle to make money” instead of an essential resource needed by humans that should be protected by government. We’re seeing the same thing in American, with hedge funds and investment vehicles being among the biggest purchasers of single-family homes, taking them off the market and flipping them into high-priced rentals. The result is an epidemic of homelessness and the Zoomers are screwed when it comes to buying a first home. It’s time to emulate other countries (not Australia) and limit the number of houses a corporation or wealthy individual can buy along with prohibiting foreign investors.

— Hunter in a Farmers World: