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Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News
Saturday, November 02, 2024

George Monbiot: A vote for Donald Trump next week is a vote for Elon Musk. Just as Trump is using Musk, Musk could be using Trump as a springboard to perhaps even greater power than the US president can wield.

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FTA:

What would the world's richest man gain from the e-Muskulation of US--and perhaps global-- politics? He would gain what capital has sought since workers acquired the vote: the truncation of democracy. Democracy is the problem capital keeps trying to solve. Why? Because it ensures that workers have rights and fair wages; that the living world has some (though never enough) protections; that we cannot be ripped off, poisoned and robbed without restraint.

Capitalism has used two powerful tools to try to solve its problem: fascism and neoliberalism. But now, though drawing on both those ideologies, it reverts to an older and cruder mode: oligarchy. Why, the billionaires might wonder, should they rely on intermediaries to wield political power? After all, in every other sphere, the world bows to them, not to their concierges. This, I think, is where Musk and some of his fellow tech authoritarians have been heading.

#1 | Posted by Gal_Tuesday at 2024-11-02 06:35 AM | Reply

"Why has Thiel been such a strong sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel sees in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the US away from democracy. "For Peter," said one of the people familiar with his thinking, "Vance is a generational bet."

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power."

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"That's the point. Thiel and Vance - along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital's Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement - believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup."

'

In Yarvin's view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major "shareholders" select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure.

Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

How to achieve Yarvin's vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace "every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state ... with our people.

And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say" " as did Andrew Jackson " that "the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it."

www.theguardian.com

#2 | Posted by Corky at 2024-11-02 01:57 PM | Reply

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