from the corruption-on-steroids dept
You can’t say that Elon Musk hasn’t gotten his money’s worth after spending $277 million to help buy Donald Trump an election victory (that’s not including the $44 billion Musk spent on turning Twitter into a right wing propaganda mill). The end of the numerous investigations into labor, environmental, and consumer fraud abuses alone have already more than paid for themselves:
“In more than 40 other federal agency matters, regulators have taken no public action on their investigations for several months or more — raising questions about whether those cases may have become dormant, according to an NBC News review of regulatory matters involving Musk’s companies.”
That’s before you even get to the billions in additional subsidies Musk is poised to receive. Musk has particularly benefited the Trump administration’s relentless promotion of Starlink, Musk’s expensive, congestion-plagued, ozone layer destroying, low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband network.
ProPublica notes how the Trump administration has been pressuring African countries to use Starlink if they know what’s good for them. In many instances they’re tethering continued lifesaving aid efforts to paying Musk for connectivity and easing any regulatory burdens Musk is facing in developing nations:
“In recent months, senior State Department officials in both Washington and Gambia have coordinated with Starlink executives to coax, lobby and browbeat at least seven Gambian government ministers to help Musk, records and interviews show. One of those Cabinet officials told ProPublica his government is under “maximum pressure” to yield.”
This comes on the heels of Musk’s DOGE attacks on organizations like USAID, which are estimated to have a fairly massive body count under the pretense of “progress” and “reform.” Even Bush administration officials, certainly no strangers to corruption, express alarm to ProPublica at the level of corruption:
“If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption,” said Kristofer Harrison, who served as a high-level State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “Because it is corruption.”
To justify the corruption, Republicans have convinced themselves that Musk’s Starlink is some sort of magic that you can sprinkle on any problem with miraculous results. They don’t care that the service is generally too expensive for those who need it most. Or is harming astronomical research. Or harming the ozone layer. Or is increasingly becoming more and more congested due to oversubscription and physics.
Or may not even exist five years from now if the company can’t make continued launches viable.
Starlink is sometimes a useful niche option if you can afford it and live in a remote area without access. Or want to spend thousands of dollars a month to get broadband on your yacht. Or are fighting a war in territories where traditional telecom infrastructure has been decimated and have no choice but to rely on the whims of a zealot. But, contrary to the Trump cult’s beliefs, the technology is not fucking magic.
Yet Trump’s FCC boss, Brendan Carr, has been running around falsely telling countries that if they refuse to use Musk’s Starlink, they’re basically communist. Elon Musk’s been trying to steal Verizon’s $2 billion contract with the FAA to implement Starlink. They’ve taken to duct-taping potentially unencrypted Starlink terminals to the White House roof to, apparently, try and hide their comms from public scrutiny.
Republicans are also rewriting big swaths of the infrastructure bill to redirect billions in taxpayer broadband subsidies away from better, cheaper, fiber options and toward Elon Musk’s Starlink platform. That means less money for future-proof, more reliable, locally-owned options (including cheap community owned fiber and less congested wireless), and more money for one of the nation’s most erratic and unhinged racist billionaires.
It’s grotesque new levels of American corruption and cronyism dressed up as fake populist reform, and if you’re still one of these people who think these two billionaires care about anything beyond their own wealth and power, we have some sawdust and duck shit-filled supplements to sell you.
Filed Under: congested, corruption, cronyism, donald trump, elon musk, foreign aid, low earth orbit, satellite, starlink, telecom
Companies: spacex, starlink
