Speaker 1: Cal Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome, Dick. It app to hear a podcast about things
Speaker 2: falling apart and how to put them back together again.
Speaker 2: I am your host Mia Wong. With me is James Stout.
Speaker 1: Hi may happy to be here again?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I am. I don't know. I have mixed emotions
Speaker 2: about this one. So today we are talking about how
Speaker 2: the American state, particularly the sort of neoliberal American state
Speaker 2: of the last about fifty years, created Elon Musk and
Speaker 2: how it is destroying itself. And we'll start with the
Speaker 2: fun part of this, which is that Tesla stock is
Speaker 2: down twenty five percent in the last month. Yay, it's
Speaker 2: extremely funny. The protests are working. People are like lighting
Speaker 2: them on cars on fire literally all over the world,
Speaker 2: Like there was just a big ration in France the
Speaker 2: day we're recording this. The pressure is working. He's having
Speaker 2: a bad time. Twenty five percent is just the start
Speaker 2: we can get the other seventy five percent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, And like for people who I guess
Speaker 3: don't know, the value of Tesla stock is directly tied
Speaker 3: to Elon Musk's net worth, Like obviously he's diversified, he
Speaker 3: doesn't have all of his wealth and netstocks but like
Speaker 3: when Tesla Stock goes down, Elon Musk gets poorer.
Speaker 2: Yep, it's great, it's great love. We love making Elon
Speaker 2: Musk poorer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the one line we like to see.
Speaker 2: However, Comma, So we've talked a lot on this show
Speaker 2: about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the
Speaker 2: American state and about all of the people who he
Speaker 2: is harming in the lives is showing the people who
Speaker 2: are dead because of his actions, and I think it's
Speaker 2: worth actually getting into how he was produced and how
Speaker 2: it came to be that. You know, at the beginning
Speaker 2: of the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously wrote that the bourgeoisie
Speaker 2: produced their own grave diggers. Yep. And you know, his
Speaker 2: his promised like inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus
Speaker 2: far failed to materialize. But neoliberalism and like this specific
Speaker 2: state seems to have produced their own gravediggers, partially in
Speaker 2: the form of Trump, but partially in the form of
Speaker 2: Elon Musk. And it's worth actually going into the story
Speaker 2: of how specifically this happened. And also I think what
Speaker 2: neoliberalism is, because this is an important aspect of I
Speaker 2: think people are kind of aware of the broad outlines
Speaker 2: of the story of the extent to which you know,
Speaker 2: Tesla and space Ax were built by American subsidies, but
Speaker 2: it's worth going into some of the more structural elements
Speaker 2: of how this happened. Why So, one of the problems
Speaker 2: that we have here, and I say we have here
Speaker 2: because this is a problem that Elon Musk has, which
Speaker 2: is that he simply does not understand what neoliberalism is
Speaker 2: or how it operates.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, he says a lot of things he
Speaker 1: doesn't understand.
Speaker 2: Via Yeah, and unfortunately he has inherited like the greatest
Speaker 2: of all neoliberal states. So the issue here is that
Speaker 2: Elon Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed
Speaker 2: to be, what neoliberalism is, what is sort of weird libertarianism,
Speaker 2: whatever you call his sort of ideology, you know, is
Speaker 2: supposed to be and you know, like he is just
Speaker 2: sort of a fascist. But on the other hand, he's
Speaker 2: a product of this wing of that movement that was
Speaker 2: created out of out of the neoliberal thing about like ah,
Speaker 2: you must like decrease the size of the state. You
Speaker 2: gotta you gotta eliminate all regulations, you have to you know,
Speaker 2: you keep decreasing the size of the state, keep fire
Speaker 2: like you know, fire all government employees, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and again this is I think largely what a lot
Speaker 2: of people think neoliberalism is, right. They think it's like, okay,
Speaker 2: neoliberalisms where the state gets smaller, And this has always
Speaker 2: been a fucking joke. Like to the entiretyoliberal period, the
Speaker 2: size of the state bureaucracy keeps increasing, and this has
Speaker 2: always allowed a kind of like controlled capitalist opposition to
Speaker 2: emerge to you know, when two thousand and eight happens, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the economy, entire economy collapses, and then out of the
Speaker 2: woodwork come all of these like rand pall sort of
Speaker 2: like quote unquote libertarians who have a lot of sudden
Speaker 2: interesting ties to a bunch of fascist groups and like
Speaker 2: all of these all of these sort of fascist perilitaries.
Speaker 2: But you know, they can come out of the woodwork
Speaker 2: and say, oh, the reason that the two thousand and
Speaker 2: eight collapse happened was because there is too much government regulation.
Speaker 2: And this is like sort of what bitcoin is, right,
Speaker 2: It's like, ah, the evils of capitalism are happening because like.
Speaker 1: Not enough capitalism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it's because like the but like bifically, the
Speaker 2: evil and s trench interests have taken over the state
Speaker 2: and you don't have the power to access the things
Speaker 2: that they do, which is obviously you know, like it
Speaker 2: is obviously true that these people have control of the
Speaker 2: state and you don't. But this sort of controlled opposition
Speaker 2: of if you put us in power, will eliminate parts
Speaker 2: of the state, will get rid of all this regulation
Speaker 2: that you can suddenly be in power. This has always
Speaker 2: been a controlled opposition thing, you know. And this is
Speaker 2: disappears in the form sort of libertarianism or like on
Speaker 2: the most extreme mention arco capitalism. Yeah, and this is
Speaker 2: something that the Montpellier society, which is like the people
Speaker 2: who basically invented neoliberalism and where all like their academics
Speaker 2: come from they slill of conferences, they've always had a
Speaker 2: problem with this, where there's always been a branch of
Speaker 2: an arcro capitalist there who think the only thing that
Speaker 2: the state should do is enforced contracts or just that
Speaker 2: it shouldn't exist. Everything should just yeah, and the neoliberals
Speaker 2: are like, okay, that you guys are fucking ridiculous. And
Speaker 2: the reason they think this is that the actual thing
Speaker 2: that these people believe. And this is this is something
Speaker 2: that if you read more Hiak than just like the
Speaker 2: road to serve him, right, that's like the stuff for
Speaker 2: public consumption. If you read the stuff that you actual
Speaker 2: pub consumption, if you read sort of like rope Key,
Speaker 2: and you read all of the sort of theorists who
Speaker 2: develop what becomes the IMF, and you know, you go
Speaker 2: through all the different schools what they actually believe. Contrary
Speaker 2: the things that they say were like, oh, markets naturally
Speaker 2: emerge and the state just like exists to control them.
Speaker 2: What they believe is that you have to use the
Speaker 2: state specifically to create markets, and you have to use
Speaker 2: the state to discipline workers through just pure violence until
Speaker 2: they become sort of like good neo liberal market subjects.
Speaker 2: You go to work, go home, buy things, and do
Speaker 2: nothing else. And the product of this is the nineteen eighties, right,
Speaker 2: is the replacement of the welfare state, you know, which
Speaker 2: is the sort of carrots of this system with just
Speaker 2: the pure stake of the police, baton and the prison system.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the end of like the post Second World
Speaker 3: War welfare state order, right, that we saw certainly in
Speaker 3: the US. But mostly in New Europe.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, yeah, but and this is very important. This
Speaker 2: never actually decreased the size of the state, because what
Speaker 2: the state, you know, what it was was. It was
Speaker 2: a shifting of sort of recourses and allocation away from
Speaker 2: like the state giving you things towards the states, you know,
Speaker 2: like beating you over the head with a hammer, and
Speaker 2: also insofar as it gives you things, making you go
Speaker 2: through all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever
Speaker 2: sort of like scant welfare policies still exist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the states surveying you both for violence reasons and
Speaker 1: for withdrawing your benefits reasons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this and this is always something that all
Speaker 2: of these people have supported. Right now. The other important
Speaker 2: part for our purposes is is the thing I said
Speaker 2: earlier about the state creating markets, And that's that's kind
Speaker 2: of like an abstract thing, right. There are sort of
Speaker 2: historical examples you can go through to look at what
Speaker 2: this looks like in a place where there aren't markets.
Speaker 2: But this is something that's very important because a huge
Speaker 2: amount of what TESLA is is a direct result of
Speaker 2: you know, pure neoliberalism and action, which is the state
Speaker 2: stepping into create a market as its way of doing
Speaker 2: regulation and with the way interact with the world. And
Speaker 2: so here we need to get to carbon credits. Now
Speaker 2: selling off carbon credits, they're also called regulatory credits. In
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four the selling of carbon credits was forty
Speaker 2: three percent of Tesla's net income. Forty three percent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we should explain what a carbon credit is
Speaker 3: if people I'm familiar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Actuos has numbers on this. Their numbers are that
Speaker 2: since twenty fourteen, thirty four percent of the total profits
Speaker 2: of Tesla are are from selling these carbon credits. So
Speaker 2: the way the system works is that the EPA sets
Speaker 2: standards for how much This is like you know, read
Speaker 2: the acxios thing too, but like the EPA set standards
Speaker 2: for how much like CO two per mile all of
Speaker 2: the cars and trucks combined that a a car company
Speaker 2: makes can can admit. And you know, instead of doing
Speaker 2: the thing where you're like, okay, hey, there's just going
Speaker 2: to be like a firm cap on these emissions, they're
Speaker 2: like no, no, no, you know this this is when
Speaker 2: I say, when I say, they create a mar So
Speaker 2: if what happens if you go over the cap isn't
Speaker 2: that like you know, like people get hauled off to
Speaker 2: jail or whatever. What happens is that you have to
Speaker 2: buy someone else's carbon credits, and if you're below the cap,
Speaker 2: it gives you credits you can sell to other companies.
Speaker 2: So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric cars, right,
Speaker 2: their cars produced like zero basically like.
Speaker 1: They don't have any fossil fuel use at all within
Speaker 1: their line.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Now obviously like whereas you know, you can
Speaker 2: ask the question where is that electricity coming from? But
Speaker 2: you know, like, but that's that's what doesn't get factored
Speaker 2: into it, which is part of the sort of problem
Speaker 2: with trying to use the state like this to solve.
Speaker 3: Right, it doesn't look at life cyclists. Yeah, yeah, it
Speaker 3: just looks at driving the car emissions.
Speaker 2: You know. This is this is the problem with trying
Speaker 2: to use a regulatory state like this to solve the
Speaker 2: problem with climate change by creating a market. And so
Speaker 2: Tesla makes and again this is this last year, this
Speaker 2: was forty three percent of its NEAT income came not
Speaker 2: from selling cars, but from selling these carbon credits. So
Speaker 2: what they're doing is making it so that other companies
Speaker 2: can produce more cars that are less fuel efficients can
Speaker 2: produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids.
Speaker 3: It's why you couldn't get a plug in hybrid EV
Speaker 3: pickup truck, like I think they may be plug in
Speaker 3: hybrid Mavericks now, but like the reason that no US
Speaker 3: manufacturer bothered to make an electric pickup truck like the
Speaker 3: that form fifty lightning that they have now, it is
Speaker 3: because they could just trade with companies like Tesla instead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is a fucking disaster for climate policy
Speaker 2: because instead of having all of the car companies just
Speaker 2: like dramatically lowering their emissions, what you have is one
Speaker 2: car company that makes electric cars and then all the
Speaker 2: rest of the car companies increasing the amount of like
Speaker 2: SEO tuper like biles, et cetera, et cetera. And the
Speaker 2: secondary problem, and this is the problem that we're experiencing now,
Speaker 2: is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort
Speaker 2: of in a lot of ways, like romantic notion of
Speaker 2: what a market is, right with the explain it. So
Speaker 2: it's like, ah, there's all this, there's gonna be all
Speaker 2: this like competition in the market. The competition is going
Speaker 2: to create the best product and what actually happens, and
Speaker 2: the neoliberals in their private doctor understand this is that
Speaker 2: when the state creates a market like this, what he's
Speaker 2: doing is handing like a person, like a single individual,
Speaker 2: a giant monopoly. And that's what happens. And that monopoly
Speaker 2: is one Elon Musk, Yeah, who has now been handed
Speaker 2: the title of the richest man in human history by
Speaker 2: the state's regulatory apparatus.
Speaker 3: Because they've given him basically complete control every I mean,
Speaker 3: there are other ev only companies, but they're minute, right,
Speaker 3: Rivan or something like that, And he's got this scarce
Speaker 3: resource that the entire automotive industry now needs.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And again this is, you know, going back to
Speaker 2: the market creation part of this. None off this shit existed, right,
Speaker 2: Like carbon caps are not something the market would ever
Speaker 2: produce by itself or whatever.
Speaker 1: Like.
Speaker 2: This is a direct neilbal intervention into the market, which
Speaker 2: is what neolibilism is, right. It's the nailable state coming
Speaker 2: into create markets, and the product of it is Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a monopoly.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And when we come back from ADS, we'll go
Speaker 2: into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon
Speaker 2: Musk and not all of these other companies that became
Speaker 2: the sort of single guy and how and how else
Speaker 2: he's benefited from the state. We are back, so the
Speaker 2: other aspect, you know. So, so we've gone into how
Speaker 2: how how Tesla is built on these on this carbon
Speaker 2: credit trading. The other aspect of it is that Tesla
Speaker 2: has received unbelievable amounts of money from government contracts. The
Speaker 2: Washington Post in probably the last like expose they're ever
Speaker 2: going to do like this now that Bezos has been
Speaker 2: like we are free market capitalists, like tried to go
Speaker 2: through and find all of the money in government contracts
Speaker 2: that they've gotten. They totaled it well, I think I
Speaker 2: think they're also including like tax credits and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: But they totald it at thirty eight billion dollars. And
Speaker 2: that's just the ones that are unclassified, which is very
Speaker 2: important because a bunch of what SpaceX does SpaceX's you know,
Speaker 2: most other company is a bunch of contracts for classified
Speaker 2: like the deployment of Spice satellites. So it's definitely way
Speaker 2: more than that, right, Yeah, But this comes to the
Speaker 2: other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how
Speaker 2: tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies,
Speaker 2: like in general, do not make money, right. They hemorrhage
Speaker 2: money for basically their entire existence until they can find
Speaker 2: a bunch of government contracts that can make them money.
Speaker 2: And Tesla in particular was like really sort of eating
Speaker 2: shit after two thousand and eight, and you know, WAPA
Speaker 2: talks about this. They got a four hundred and sixty
Speaker 2: five million dollars low interest loan for the Department of
Speaker 2: Energy in twenty ten that basically saved the company from
Speaker 2: the brink of collapse.
Speaker 3: Good thing, there's nothing else to spend the money on
Speaker 3: in twenty ten. No one else needed low Interestla into
Speaker 3: any think it was.
Speaker 2: Fine, No, no, there was no attempt to build like
Speaker 2: a giant American high speed rail system that Elon Musk
Speaker 2: also killed. Yep, you know not, nothing else was happening.
Speaker 1: I wasn't living in my car at that time. It
Speaker 1: was fine. Yeah, thank you Obama.
Speaker 2: And so and so. As this goes on, right, the
Speaker 2: goal of you as a tech company, there's two things
Speaker 2: you want to do. If you're a smaller tech company,
Speaker 2: you're trying to get bought by a bigger tech company
Speaker 2: so you can retire on your pile of money, or
Speaker 2: if you're a larger tech company, you are trying to
Speaker 2: amass enough US contracts, like US government contracts, to like
Speaker 2: get you to sort of stability. And this is what
Speaker 2: happens with SpaceX. SpaceX now has gotten eighteen billion dollars
Speaker 2: of contracts with NASA, And this is sort of a
Speaker 2: part of like, I mean, NASA has always used government contractors,
Speaker 2: but like this is different, Like this is just straight
Speaker 2: up there using Tesla's rockets to do things. And this
Speaker 2: is also part of why like Tesla and Boeing fucking
Speaker 2: this up, is part of why a bunch of astronauts
Speaker 2: are fucking stranded on the space station right now because
Speaker 2: these things do not work. But there's there's been an
Speaker 2: enormous amount of money here. And the other thing, you know,
Speaker 2: this is one of the other sort of like great
Speaker 2: neoliberal things, is that a lot of the factories that
Speaker 2: Elon Musk sort of builds, you know, the ones that
Speaker 2: are in the US, are there because they get unbelievable
Speaker 2: amounts of tax breaks and tax incentives from from local
Speaker 2: states themselves. All of this brings us to you know,
Speaker 2: one of the other really core aspects of sort of
Speaker 2: the profitability of Tesla in terms of selling in terms
Speaker 2: of selling cars. But we should also mention this is
Speaker 2: something Axios talks about that like, if they weren't able
Speaker 2: to sell carbon credits, this company would literally never make money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, this has been the case. I write
Speaker 1: about this, like I think two years ago.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I remember writing about this before Ela Musk had
Speaker 3: gone full fucking evil villain, I guess. But that's what
Speaker 3: they are. They're a carbon credit company that makes cars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but even their car sales are enormously bolstered by
Speaker 2: a seven five hundred dollars tax credit for electric cars.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I got some tax credit information on electric cars.
Speaker 1: It's now the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. Do you want to talk about the other
Speaker 2: one that's driving these unhinged sales?
Speaker 3: Yes, I do, because I have been driving around San
Speaker 3: Diego and I have seen an obscene number of cyber
Speaker 3: trucks wrapped in people's business livery, and it occurs to
Speaker 3: me that they're not businesses that need a pickup truck,
Speaker 3: nor the people who need a pickup truck for work
Speaker 3: by cyber trucks because they suck at being trucks.
Speaker 1: And so I did some digging, and I discovered that.
Speaker 3: The IRS was a special tax deduction for vehicles which
Speaker 3: are rated over six thousand pounds gross vehicle weight. The
Speaker 3: gross vehicle weight rating, if you're not familiar, that's not
Speaker 3: like the mass of the vehicle if you drove it
Speaker 3: like off the dealer lot onto a scale. That's the
Speaker 3: maximum operating weight of the vehicles as specified by the manufacturer.
Speaker 3: So like it's your tesla with I mean, they are
Speaker 3: very funny videos of guy cycloading one bag of composts
Speaker 3: into the back of the Tesla and being it's a
Speaker 3: great truck for truck stuff.
Speaker 2: The other really funny one is when they try to
Speaker 2: attach like a winch to it and try to use
Speaker 2: it to pull the pull heavy things in the back
Speaker 2: of the truck comes off because it's just like made
Speaker 2: of like it's like glue a unibody.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it might not be a body on frame, Like
Speaker 3: it might not be a proper truck. I actually don't
Speaker 3: know now how I will look into that afterwards. I
Speaker 3: bet it's I bet most of the electric or like
Speaker 3: high minage pickup trucks are not so yeah, not a
Speaker 3: good truck. Actually under it's called section one seventy nine.
Speaker 3: Under Section one seventy nine, a vehicle with a gross
Speaker 3: vehicle weight rating over six thousand pounds, you can deduct
Speaker 3: up to thirty one thousand in the first year rather
Speaker 3: than deducting the depreciation of the capital good over time. Right,
Speaker 3: So instead of instead of deducting the depreciation of your
Speaker 3: vehicle that you purchase your business over time and not
Speaker 3: paying tax on that amount, you cannot pay tax on
Speaker 3: thirty one thousand in the first year of your vehicle
Speaker 3: if it's over six thousand pounds.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: There are some exemptions for luxury vehicles, like if you've
Speaker 3: got a may Bark or something really fucking heavy, So
Speaker 3: that would even cover the Model X, right, the Tesla
Speaker 3: Model X have a GBWR above that. With a truck,
Speaker 3: there are exemptions for work vehicles, and they have to
Speaker 3: have a separate cargo compared apartment that is not the
Speaker 3: driver's compartment, that is six feet or more in length.
Speaker 3: So the cyber truck just happened to have a six
Speaker 3: foot bed. Yeah, so you can deduct one hundred percent
Speaker 3: of value in the first year of what I understand
Speaker 3: for these vehicles which have a six foot bed.
Speaker 1: At least this was the case when I was looking.
Speaker 3: I became aware of the exact nature of this when
Speaker 3: I went on the cyber Truck Owners Club forum and
Speaker 3: looked what a tax deductant people were doing, right, and
Speaker 3: then I worked back from there, and it does seem
Speaker 3: that people are doing this. I think it might be changing,
Speaker 3: so you can only deduct a certain percentage. Soon it
Speaker 3: will shock listeners to hear that I'm not giving you
Speaker 3: tax advice, nor am I qualified to do so. I'm
Speaker 3: not an accountant. This is not accounting advice. On top
Speaker 3: of that, Mia mentioned the IRS Commercial Clean Vehicle credit, right,
Speaker 3: that's a credit, not a deduction. So the deduction would
Speaker 3: discount the amount of your income that you pay tax
Speaker 3: on versus the credit, which is just great credit. So
Speaker 3: potentially the person could deduct the cost of the cyber
Speaker 3: truck plus the cost of wrapping the fucking cyber truck,
Speaker 3: right to prove it's a business vehicle, and then if
Speaker 3: you're wrapping it. From what I understand, like these deductions
Speaker 3: somewhat depend on the percentage of the vehicle's use that
Speaker 3: is business. I guess this could be like the equivalent
Speaker 3: of a fringes on the flag tax theory people claiming
Speaker 3: that when they're driving their their cyber truck to go
Speaker 3: to Whole Foods, but it's wrapped, they're advertising a business,
Speaker 3: so it's a business use. I don't understand how how
Speaker 3: like viable that is as a claim, but well, you know.
Speaker 2: But part of this is, like it's very easy, like
Speaker 2: especially right now when the irs is being gutted, Like
Speaker 2: it's very easy to do this kind of bullshit and
Speaker 2: people are not getting all it did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, so they can take a seven five hundred
Speaker 3: commercial vehicle clean vehicle credit in addition to deducting that much.
Speaker 3: And like you would struggle to persuade me that that
Speaker 3: is not why a lot of people are buying cyber
Speaker 3: trucks right, Like it's got the weight rating, it's got
Speaker 3: the bedside. Like it's a lot of people who wouldn't
Speaker 3: necessarily like not all trucks have six footbeds.
Speaker 1: Now, I will never buy a new drug because.
Speaker 3: I can't find a truck that has like a decent
Speaker 3: seating arrangement and larger than six foot bed and four
Speaker 3: by four and doesn't cost more than I earn in
Speaker 3: a year. But like it's quite a like niche overlap
Speaker 3: of trucks that apply, and like for a truck with
Speaker 3: a six foot bed and a six thousand pound gross
Speaker 3: vehicle weight rating, the cyber truck's pretty small and it
Speaker 3: fits kind of with people who don't actually need a
Speaker 3: work truck that can non the lens take advantage of
Speaker 3: the work truck tax deduction. So once again, thank you
Speaker 3: government for subsidizing the shittiest vehicle on the roads today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's worth noting. So like like Tesla, you know,
Speaker 2: you'll see a bunch of things about how Tesla is
Speaker 2: like one of the like best selling car manufacturers, right,
Speaker 2: and part of it is from this, but also, you know,
Speaker 2: and this is this is the other aspect of this.
Speaker 2: It's worth noting. There's a very good Bloomberg article out
Speaker 2: today by A. Mendum More that talks about how fifty
Speaker 2: percent of all American consumer spending is now by people
Speaker 2: who in the top ten percent of the income bracket,
Speaker 2: so people make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a
Speaker 2: year or more, and that means increasingly that everything in
Speaker 2: the United States reflects the you know, the sort of
Speaker 2: like cultural affect of these bunch of fucking rich assholes
Speaker 2: who all also want to buy this for their sort
Speaker 2: of like like cultural grudges and you know, to like
Speaker 2: to own the libs and like show how like much
Speaker 2: of a fucking man they are. Yeah, you know, and
Speaker 2: and so you already you have that initial incentive and
Speaker 2: then you suddenly have all of these fucking tax incentives
Speaker 2: that you get from buying this vehicle that like, definitely
Speaker 2: this is like designed with a shit in mind.
Speaker 3: Yeah, without a doubt, and it becomes, like you say,
Speaker 3: it becomes like a status good, and it becomes like
Speaker 3: a culture war signifier.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: In addition to all of those things, I guess people also,
Speaker 3: like I've noticed that there's been a lot of backlash
Speaker 3: against people who owned Tesla's. If you go on the
Speaker 3: day we're recording, the top article on the front page
Speaker 3: of Reddit. On the third article Reddit, the top post
Speaker 3: is someone who's been putting pictures that say sell your car.
Speaker 3: It's got a picture of musk Zeke hyling on people's
Speaker 3: test list in Boston.
Speaker 1: Yep, shout out to that person.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Okay, so we're going to take a break and
Speaker 2: when we come back, we're going to sort of finish
Speaker 2: this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of
Speaker 2: how this version of capitalism created Musk and where it's going.
Speaker 2: We are back now. I think this all. I think
Speaker 2: if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard
Speaker 2: of most of this. I actually, okay, you've heard of
Speaker 2: most of what I've said to some extent. I don't
Speaker 2: think you've heard what James has said before, because I've
Speaker 2: seen very little coverage of this. But there's also something
Speaker 2: deeper going on here. The deeper thing going on here
Speaker 2: is that Elon Musk on a fundamental level is also
Speaker 2: a product of the endless bubble economy that we've all
Speaker 2: been living in for decades now. It's a product of
Speaker 2: an economic policy that the economist R. Brenner calls asset canesianism.
Speaker 2: So regular canesianism, right, is about you know, having the
Speaker 2: government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation.
Speaker 2: Also you know, also like the military too, right, Like,
Speaker 2: let's not sort of like sugarcoat it, but it's about
Speaker 2: using a bunch of state money to like make there
Speaker 2: be jobs and using this to sort of I don't
Speaker 2: know though the way they call it is like countercyclical spending.
Speaker 2: But it's like they want to use the state to
Speaker 2: spend money to make their be jobs and to put
Speaker 2: money into the economy and to put goods into the
Speaker 2: economy to counteract economic downturns. Yea asset Knesianism is still
Speaker 2: the state spending a bunch of resources, right, But it's
Speaker 2: the state expending those resources both bureaucratically and in terms
Speaker 2: of incentives and in terms of sort of tax structures,
Speaker 2: and specifically also very much in terms of the federal
Speaker 2: reserves interest rates, specifically to increase the price of stocks.
Speaker 2: And also you know, and you know the reason he
Speaker 2: calls it assets, right, because it's not just stocks, right,
Speaker 2: it's also things like real estates. It's to increase the
Speaker 2: value of speculative assets, things that you buy because you
Speaker 2: think it's going to be worth more later. I have
Speaker 2: talked about this a law on this show. This has
Speaker 2: been the fundamental global economic strategy of most of the
Speaker 2: world's economies ever since sort of Japan kind of pioneered
Speaker 2: it in the eighties. As after the US sort of
Speaker 2: like kneecapped its entire domestic sort of export manufacturing economy
Speaker 2: to the Plaza Accords. And by the end of this
Speaker 2: fucking administration, everyone who listens to the show will be
Speaker 2: able to explain what the Plazai Chords and the River's
Speaker 2: Plaza Accords are from.
Speaker 3: We stop, it won't happen here after that, because you'll
Speaker 3: understand and you'll stop it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you'll know, you'll know, you'll know the origin of
Speaker 2: the economy. Yes, so yeah again, the Plaza Cords, the
Speaker 2: US forces all of these countries to increase the value
Speaker 2: if their currency is relative to the dollar. This makes
Speaker 2: American manufacturing more competitive in nukes, all of their manufacturing.
Speaker 2: These countries need to find another place to you know,
Speaker 2: develop their economy, right, and the thing that the solution
Speaker 2: Japan comes to is real estate speculation. This blows up,
Speaker 2: This blows up in the nineties. This is this is
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of the sort of Asian market collapse
Speaker 2: stuff is from this. And then the US is forced
Speaker 2: to do the ref first Plauset Cords in the nineties
Speaker 2: is spoke Clinton and you know, sort of annihilate American
Speaker 2: and manufacturing in order to sort of prop up the
Speaker 2: rest like proper Japanese manufactury, to keep their economy from
Speaker 2: completely employing. Japanels a number two economy in the world
Speaker 2: at that point, but again this means that the US
Speaker 2: has now been doing this. There's the famous things called
Speaker 2: the Greenspan puts, where like to try to stop a
Speaker 2: market collapse that was obviously coming with a tech bubble
Speaker 2: blew up. Green Span kept cutting the interest rates over
Speaker 2: and over again, trying to keep the bubble from collapsing
Speaker 2: and just making it bigger, and then eventually it blew up.
Speaker 2: This is what two thousand and eight is was, you know,
Speaker 2: we did a whole bubble. I mean, there's another bubble
Speaker 2: and collapse between there. But like you know, and this
Speaker 2: is what we've been doing for the last two decades,
Speaker 2: like since since two thousand and eight, we've been creating
Speaker 2: this giant tech bubble and this tech bubble shit and
Speaker 2: this sort of asset speculation is also a huge part
Speaker 2: of the value of Tesla stock is just you know,
Speaker 2: people who've been given a whole bunch of access to
Speaker 2: cheap credit and by and by people, I mean like
Speaker 2: not really you and me, like a bunch of unbelievaly
Speaker 2: rich people have access to like incredibly cheap loans and
Speaker 2: they use that money to buy Tesla stock. This is
Speaker 2: a sort of cyclical thing that just continues to increases
Speaker 2: the value of the company. And it's not just sort
Speaker 2: of like banks and investors. A lot of money that
Speaker 2: goes into Tesla comes in there from state pension funds yep,
Speaker 2: from a bunch of bunches of a whole bunch of
Speaker 2: different countries. And also like a huge number of American states,
Speaker 2: like your teacher's pensions are all tied up in this
Speaker 2: because pension reform. But the way that we sort of
Speaker 2: like lost the pension as a normal thing was that
Speaker 2: it was you know, it was converted to for a
Speaker 2: one case and the people who still have like regular
Speaker 2: state pensions, all of that money is now sort of
Speaker 2: invested in the stock market and it puts billions of
Speaker 2: dollars into Tesla every year. And so this is also
Speaker 2: another aspect. This is this is the broader structural level
Speaker 2: on which on which US macroeconomic policy was designed to
Speaker 2: create a bunch of companies like Tesla, and then US
Speaker 2: sort of like micro policy, the microcreation of markets to
Speaker 2: tax credits and you know, all of these government contracts
Speaker 2: that they've been given to do like everything from like
Speaker 2: fucking build these cars to like put spy satellites in orbit, right,
Speaker 2: and like the US, like contracting got startled. Like now,
Speaker 2: I mean, like all of this stuff, right is is
Speaker 2: literally how Elon Musk was created. Yeah, but there is
Speaker 2: a third, even deeper level in which you know, we
Speaker 2: can look at at how how these cars are actually
Speaker 2: produced and how these rockets are actually produced, and they're
Speaker 2: produced by just incredible, the incredible exploitation of a huge
Speaker 2: number of workers. And I think people tend to think about,
Speaker 2: you know, Tesla workers in the US, but there's Tessa
Speaker 2: workers all over the world. There's a huge gigafactory in
Speaker 2: shing John, you know, there's factories all over China, and
Speaker 2: you know, these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit.
Speaker 2: They work in unbelievably dangerous conditions and at the end
Speaker 2: of the day they get a very small amount of
Speaker 2: money so that the richest man in the world can
Speaker 2: get fucking richer every day.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's before we consider like ingredient pots to Teslas, right,
Speaker 3: like the you know that we we just addressed for
Speaker 3: instance in our episode on Congo.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are.
Speaker 3: Pots, the tests, geotests that come out of this country
Speaker 3: where there has been a war for as long as
Speaker 3: most of us has been alive. Really very little effort
Speaker 3: has gone into improving conditions for people there.
Speaker 1: Certainly for workers.
Speaker 3: They're doing jobs that are essential to like our economy
Speaker 3: and to like Mia and my four for a one
Speaker 3: K line going up comes from exploiting workers.
Speaker 1: In Congo to an extent and elsewhere in the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know this is something that there's something
Speaker 2: our standard of living is based off of. But at
Speaker 2: the end of the day, right, Elon Musks, all of
Speaker 2: Elon Musk's profit comes from the fact that the States
Speaker 2: monopoly on violence is used to stop all of these
Speaker 2: people from ever attempting to resist him. It's deployed in
Speaker 2: order to stop these people from taking back the fucking
Speaker 2: value that they create. Now, unfortunately, all of this sort
Speaker 2: of Neilibal tinkering we've seen for the last fifty years, right,
Speaker 2: this attempts to sort of like depoliticize everything and have
Speaker 2: everything run by the other technocrats and sort of have
Speaker 2: this sort of like non politics where you're voting for
Speaker 2: two parties that are like literally even more the same
Speaker 2: than they are now. This attempt to do things like
Speaker 2: solve climate change to these to these promotion of carbon
Speaker 2: markets and create the sort of like stable capitalist hegeniminy
Speaker 2: forever has ultimately been self defeating. It's why all attempts
Speaker 2: to regulate capital inevitably fail, because the functioning of the
Speaker 2: capitalist system, and particularly the function of the way this
Speaker 2: version of neoliberalism has worked, has concentrated like the most
Speaker 2: wealth ever held by a single human being into the
Speaker 2: hands of one guy who was a Nazi. And then
Speaker 2: these people use their wealth to cubate political power and
Speaker 2: seize control of the state, dismantling the systems that were
Speaker 2: meant to regulate them. And you can't solve this problem
Speaker 2: with regulation because again, eventually they will simply accumulate enough power,
Speaker 2: retake power, and eliminate their regulations. You can't even solve
Speaker 2: this problem just by killing them. I see people talk
Speaker 2: about like the killing of billionaires in China as like
Speaker 2: an example of this and a that's all political faction,
Speaker 2: lane fighting stuff, and they'll execute people specifically to sort
Speaker 2: of appease like the Chinese workers so that they never
Speaker 2: have to fucking watch the pla get right out of
Speaker 2: Shanghai again. But the thing is, even if somehow you
Speaker 2: use the states to just kill them, right, it doesn't work,
Speaker 2: because capitalism will just produce more of these people. If
Speaker 2: you actually want to stop this, if you want to
Speaker 2: stop this Elon Musk from destroying the entire country and
Speaker 2: quite possibly ending all life on earth by fucking with
Speaker 2: America's nuclear weapons, un so, they're simply not out of
Speaker 2: safety mechanisms. To stop someone from accidentally sending one off,
Speaker 2: you were going to have to destroy them completely. The
Speaker 2: permanent base of their power, the power of the oligarch,
Speaker 2: the power of the billionaire, the power of the dictator,
Speaker 2: must be broken. This tiny group of men cannot, as
Speaker 2: a class, be allowed to own the stores and factories
Speaker 2: and fields and hospitals, supply chains to produce everything we
Speaker 2: need to survive. It must belong to us. We create
Speaker 2: their wealth. The only way to save this world is
Speaker 2: to take it back. If we want to save democracy,
Speaker 2: the only way to do it is to extend democracy
Speaker 2: into the spheres where Elon Musk rules as a tyrant.
Speaker 2: Democracy must march into the workplace to slay the beast
Speaker 2: that is lair before the despotism of the workplace consumes
Speaker 2: our political democracy and leaves us with despotism there too.
Speaker 2: They must cease to rule. They must cease to exist,
Speaker 2: not as individuals but as a class, and the only
Speaker 2: way to do that is by giving control of their power,
Speaker 2: and their property and their wealth to the workers whose
Speaker 2: subjugation produced all of it in the first place. That
Speaker 2: is the tax that we have in front of us.
Speaker 2: The challenge that we face is that we face effectively
Speaker 2: the entire might of the American State, which is one
Speaker 2: of the most powerful apparatus of repression that has ever
Speaker 2: been built. Our advantage is that that apparatus of repression
Speaker 2: is currently being run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk,
Speaker 2: who are and I cannot emphasize this enough, maybe the
Speaker 2: two figures most emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan's,
Speaker 2: after his extensive study of a whole bunch of revolutions
Speaker 2: on the Revolutions Podcast, concluded to be the great idiots
Speaker 2: of history, who who, by their their sheer and unmasterability
Speaker 2: to make the wrong decision at every single moment, are
Speaker 2: what makes revolutions possible. And if these people are not
Speaker 2: the great idiots of history that allow us to bring
Speaker 2: them down and stop them from destroying everything that has
Speaker 2: ever been in this world that is good, then nothing
Speaker 2: else is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have the one great stroke of a good
Speaker 3: fortune we have, right, is that that the old Paris
Speaker 3: been concentrated in their hands of complete idiots who are
Speaker 3: addicted to diet coke and and being mad at their children.
Speaker 2: Yep. And and they you know, we have already seen
Speaker 2: they't they don't understand how this apparatus works.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: They fired the nuke police by accident.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's very funny that they're stripping themselves of
Speaker 3: the means of coercive violence. Yeah, when we start to
Speaker 3: make you spoke about controlled opposition, right, and the idea that,
Speaker 3: like the great debate of our time is how much
Speaker 3: state regulation we should have and how much unfettered anarcha
Speaker 3: capitalism we should have. They are drinking the kool aid
Speaker 3: that got them in power. That is the one thing
Speaker 3: going in our favor right now, that they are dismantling
Speaker 3: the means of coercive violence because they genuinely believe the
Speaker 3: myth that if the state didn't exist, they could be
Speaker 3: even more wealthy and even more tyrannical.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and well, and the second advantage that we have
Speaker 2: is that been they have said about systematically alienating every
Speaker 2: single group of people who they would need as their
Speaker 2: political base, they are pissing off the military. They are
Speaker 2: pissing off the intelligence services they are going through, and
Speaker 2: they are like systematically pissing off the farm states, and
Speaker 2: you know, like the farmers obviously do not have that
Speaker 2: like don't fucking matter, but they're they're pissing off the
Speaker 2: agro businesses. They are individually going through and pissing off
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of the of the of the country,
Speaker 2: scientific resources. They're going through, they're like fucking with the
Speaker 2: Social Security administration. They're individually going through and pissing off
Speaker 2: every single group of people on earth who matter, and
Speaker 2: people who like us under this system aren't supposed to
Speaker 2: matter until we fucking do something about it. And you know,
Speaker 2: the other big thing that we have right now is
Speaker 2: that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by
Speaker 2: actually doing these terrorists, which they didn't think he would do,
Speaker 2: and by pulling apart his base of support, and by
Speaker 2: putting together coalitions of some of these people and not
Speaker 2: all of them, some of them, some of them you
Speaker 2: just need to divide and conquer by getting them out
Speaker 2: from backing him. Right, Like the whole thing with the
Speaker 2: Bolsheviks taking over in the October Revolution was that, but
Speaker 2: people just mostly stayed home and that was how they won.
Speaker 2: Like that is largely what we need. We need these
Speaker 2: people to stay home, but these people can and will,
Speaker 2: if we have anything to say about it, be fucking
Speaker 2: driven home and hopefully we can bury both the grave
Speaker 2: diggers and the people whose graves they were digging in
Speaker 2: the same spot in the dust bit of history, and
Speaker 2: never have to deal with these fucking assholes again. It
Speaker 2: Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 2: more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website pool
Speaker 2: Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 2: now find sources for It could Happen Here listed directly
Speaker 2: in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.