The Lights Are Dimming

Evening dispatch

Why would anyone put our future in their hands?

I’m still thinking about Jeff Bezos’ egregious decision to force his paper, The Washington Post, to abdicate it’s journalistic responsibility by not endorsing a candidate for the presidency—only eleven days before the election in which the choice is between a fairly centrist Democrat and a full-blown fascist.

The fallout is greater than anyone—especially Bezos—expected. Bezos’ cluelessness is likely the result of his arrogance because, like many other wealthy men, arrogance made him overstep. Or maybe it’s just that a lot of wealthy men are members of the Dunning-Kruger club for oligarchs.

As I pointed out yesterday, I wasn’t debating the importance of endorsements (in the grand scheme of things, I don’t think they count for much). I wanted, instead, to look at the potential impact this glaring  omission had specifically in the wake of the Post’s endorsements in the last two elections.

On October 13, 2016, the editorial board wrote:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is dreadful, that is true — uniquely unqualified as a presidential candidate. If we believed that Ms. Clinton were the lesser of two evils, we might well urge you to vote for her anyway — that is how strongly we feel about Mr. Trump,” the editorial board wrote in endorsing Hillary Clinton. Trump, it — we because I was a member of the board then — said, “has shown himself to be bigoted, ignorant, deceitful, narcissistic, vengeful, petty, misogynistic, fiscally reckless, intellectually lazy, contemptuous of democracy and enamored of America’s enemies. As president, he would pose a grave danger to the nation and the world.

On September 28, 2020, the Post’s board called Donald “the worst president of modern times,” claiming that “Democracy is at risk, at home and around the world. The nation desperately needs a president who will respect its public servants; stand up for the rule of law; acknowledge Congress’s constitutional role; and work for the public good, not his private benefit.”

All of that remains operative. In the very long four years since those words were written, Donald Trump and the agenda he espouses have gotten much, much worse—more violent, more bigoted, more openly fascist. Choosing not to allow the editorial board to endorse Harris was obscene and the failure, or inability, of the board to do so leaves a gaping void into which the most awful conclusions can be drawn.

On the same day the Post announced its decision, Donald met with executives, including CEO David Limp, of Blue Origin—the space technologies company owned by Bezos that has a $3.4 billion contract with NASA. I’m sure Bezos’ decision and Donald’s meeting have nothing to do with the fact that in 2019, when Amazon was the frontrunner to receive a $10 billion cloud computing defense contract, the Trump administration awarded it to Microsoft instead, which was generally seen as a retaliatory move because, in Donald’s view, the Post’s coverage of him was too negative.

And then there’s Elon Musk, the man whose obscene fortune is valued at approximately $270 billion. In an attempt to help buy the election for Donald, Musk has already put $120 million into his America PAC to which he seems to be the only donor.

It makes sense that Musk would be backing Donald—they’re both deeply damaged men with serious mommy issues who care about money more than anything else. But there’s another reason—Musk has several very valuable government contracts  that may be at risk (or under least under scrutiny) if Kamala Harris is in the White House.

As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote:

As one of the country’s biggest defense contractors, Musk holds high-level security clearances. The idea that he still holds those clearances and has direct operational control over critical national security technologies is simply absurd. But that confluence of power in the communications and political realms, as I said, appears to make him beyond reach. He’s now flagrantly violating federal laws against vote buying, even after a direct Department of Justice warning.

The violation Marshall refers to has to do with Musk’s potential attempt at election interference, which is likely illegal. He set up a “1st and 2nd amendment rights survey” for voters in Pennsylvania, and anybody who is misguided enough to hand their data over to Musk is entered into a $1 million raffle. Almost daily, Musk has been handing out these million dollar checks despite that DoJ warning.

Aspiring oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Musk’s fellow apartheid-era South African cohorts, David Sacks and Peter Thiel (who bought JD Vance’s Ohio senate seat and made sure he was Donald’s VP pick) should not have such an outsize role in our election. And they certainly shouldn’t be allowed to have positions of power in our government. But that could well be where we’re headed.

We’re faced with a very stark choice—another Trump administration in which billionaires like Bezos and Musk help rig the system to our detriment and even more in their favor (with Donald’s permission), or a Harris administration in which the billionaires will finally have to pay their fair share of taxes and in which their extraordinarily lucrative government contracts are pulled or at least re-evaluated.

That seems like a pretty obvious choice, doesn’t it?