March 10, 2025 • 34 mins
Mia and James discuss how the neoliberal state created the markets that made Elon Musk the richest man alive and how the structure of global capitalism ensured his rise.
Sources:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0sg0782h
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/09/tesla-clean-credits-trump
https://www.aol.com/report-says-elon-musks-businesses-170042735.html?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cal Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome, Dick. It app to hear a podcast about things
falling apart and how to put them back together again.
I am your host Mia Wong. With me is James Stout.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Hi may happy to be here again?
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Yeah, I am. I don't know. I have mixed emotions
about this one. So today we are talking about how
the American state, particularly the sort of neoliberal American state
of the last about fifty years, created Elon Musk and
how it is destroying itself. And we'll start with the
fun part of this, which is that Tesla stock is
(00:35):
down twenty five percent in the last month. Yay, it's
extremely funny. The protests are working. People are like lighting
them on cars on fire literally all over the world,
Like there was just a big ration in France the
day we're recording this. The pressure is working. He's having
a bad time. Twenty five percent is just the start
we can get the other seventy five percent.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Yeah, I mean, And like for people who I guess
don't know, the value of Tesla stock is directly tied
to Elon Musk's net worth, Like obviously he's diversified, he
doesn't have all of his wealth and netstocks but like
when Tesla Stock goes down, Elon Musk gets poorer.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yep, it's great, it's great love. We love making Elon
Musk poorer.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, it's the one line we like to see.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
However, Comma, So we've talked a lot on this show
about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the
American state and about all of the people who he
is harming in the lives is showing the people who
are dead because of his actions, and I think it's
worth actually getting into how he was produced and how
it came to be that. You know, at the beginning
of the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously wrote that the bourgeoisie
(01:38):
produced their own grave diggers. Yep. And you know, his
his promised like inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus
far failed to materialize. But neoliberalism and like this specific
state seems to have produced their own gravediggers, partially in
the form of Trump, but partially in the form of
Elon Musk. And it's worth actually going into the story
(02:00):
of how specifically this happened. And also I think what
neoliberalism is, because this is an important aspect of I
think people are kind of aware of the broad outlines
of the story of the extent to which you know,
Tesla and space Ax were built by American subsidies, but
it's worth going into some of the more structural elements
(02:21):
of how this happened. Why So, one of the problems
that we have here, and I say we have here
because this is a problem that Elon Musk has, which
is that he simply does not understand what neoliberalism is
or how it operates.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Yeah, I mean, he says a lot of things he
doesn't understand.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Via Yeah, and unfortunately he has inherited like the greatest
of all neoliberal states. So the issue here is that
Elon Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed
to be, what neoliberalism is, what is sort of weird libertarianism,
whatever you call his sort of ideology, you know, is
supposed to be and you know, like he is just
sort of a fascist. But on the other hand, he's
(02:58):
a product of this wing of that movement that was
created out of out of the neoliberal thing about like ah,
you must like decrease the size of the state. You
gotta you gotta eliminate all regulations, you have to you know,
you keep decreasing the size of the state, keep fire
like you know, fire all government employees, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah,
and again this is I think largely what a lot
of people think neoliberalism is, right. They think it's like, okay,
neoliberalisms where the state gets smaller, And this has always
(03:21):
been a fucking joke. Like to the entiretyoliberal period, the
size of the state bureaucracy keeps increasing, and this has
always allowed a kind of like controlled capitalist opposition to
emerge to you know, when two thousand and eight happens, right, Yeah,
the economy, entire economy collapses, and then out of the
woodwork come all of these like rand pall sort of
like quote unquote libertarians who have a lot of sudden
interesting ties to a bunch of fascist groups and like
(03:42):
all of these all of these sort of fascist perilitaries.
But you know, they can come out of the woodwork
and say, oh, the reason that the two thousand and
eight collapse happened was because there is too much government regulation.
And this is like sort of what bitcoin is, right,
It's like, ah, the evils of capitalism are happening because like.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Not enough capitalism.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, well, it's because like the but like bifically, the
evil and s trench interests have taken over the state
and you don't have the power to access the things
that they do, which is obviously you know, like it
is obviously true that these people have control of the
state and you don't. But this sort of controlled opposition
of if you put us in power, will eliminate parts
of the state, will get rid of all this regulation
that you can suddenly be in power. This has always
(04:18):
been a controlled opposition thing, you know. And this is
disappears in the form sort of libertarianism or like on
the most extreme mention arco capitalism. Yeah, and this is
something that the Montpellier society, which is like the people
who basically invented neoliberalism and where all like their academics
come from they slill of conferences, they've always had a
problem with this, where there's always been a branch of
an arcro capitalist there who think the only thing that
(04:39):
the state should do is enforced contracts or just that
it shouldn't exist. Everything should just yeah, and the neoliberals
are like, okay, that you guys are fucking ridiculous. And
the reason they think this is that the actual thing
that these people believe. And this is this is something
that if you read more Hiak than just like the
road to serve him, right, that's like the stuff for
public consumption. If you read the stuff that you actual
(04:59):
pub consumption, if you read sort of like rope Key,
and you read all of the sort of theorists who
develop what becomes the IMF, and you know, you go
through all the different schools what they actually believe. Contrary
the things that they say were like, oh, markets naturally
emerge and the state just like exists to control them.
What they believe is that you have to use the
(05:21):
state specifically to create markets, and you have to use
the state to discipline workers through just pure violence until
they become sort of like good neo liberal market subjects.
You go to work, go home, buy things, and do
nothing else. And the product of this is the nineteen eighties, right,
is the replacement of the welfare state, you know, which
is the sort of carrots of this system with just
the pure stake of the police, baton and the prison system.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Yeah, it's the end of like the post Second World
War welfare state order, right, that we saw certainly in
the US. But mostly in New Europe.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Right, yeah, yeah, but and this is very important. This
never actually decreased the size of the state, because what
the state, you know, what it was was. It was
a shifting of sort of recourses and allocation away from
like the state giving you things towards the states, you know,
like beating you over the head with a hammer, and
also insofar as it gives you things, making you go
(06:14):
through all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever
sort of like scant welfare policies still exist.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, the states surveying you both for violence reasons and
for withdrawing your benefits reasons.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, and this and this is always something that all
of these people have supported. Right now. The other important
part for our purposes is is the thing I said
earlier about the state creating markets, And that's that's kind
of like an abstract thing, right. There are sort of
historical examples you can go through to look at what
this looks like in a place where there aren't markets.
But this is something that's very important because a huge
(06:51):
amount of what TESLA is is a direct result of
you know, pure neoliberalism and action, which is the state
stepping into create a market as its way of doing
regulation and with the way interact with the world. And
so here we need to get to carbon credits. Now
selling off carbon credits, they're also called regulatory credits. In
twenty twenty four the selling of carbon credits was forty
(07:13):
three percent of Tesla's net income. Forty three percent.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
Yeah, so we should explain what a carbon credit is
if people I'm familiar.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, Actuos has numbers on this. Their numbers are that
since twenty fourteen, thirty four percent of the total profits
of Tesla are are from selling these carbon credits. So
the way the system works is that the EPA sets
standards for how much This is like you know, read
the acxios thing too, but like the EPA set standards
(07:42):
for how much like CO two per mile all of
the cars and trucks combined that a a car company
makes can can admit. And you know, instead of doing
the thing where you're like, okay, hey, there's just going
to be like a firm cap on these emissions, they're
like no, no, no, you know this this is when
I say, when I say, they create a mar So
if what happens if you go over the cap isn't
(08:02):
that like you know, like people get hauled off to
jail or whatever. What happens is that you have to
buy someone else's carbon credits, and if you're below the cap,
it gives you credits you can sell to other companies.
So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric cars, right,
their cars produced like zero basically like.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
They don't have any fossil fuel use at all within
their line.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah. Yeah, Now obviously like whereas you know, you can
ask the question where is that electricity coming from? But
you know, like, but that's that's what doesn't get factored
into it, which is part of the sort of problem
with trying to use the state like this to solve.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Right, it doesn't look at life cyclists. Yeah, yeah, it
just looks at driving the car emissions.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
You know. This is this is the problem with trying
to use a regulatory state like this to solve the
problem with climate change by creating a market. And so
Tesla makes and again this is this last year, this
was forty three percent of its NEAT income came not
from selling cars, but from selling these carbon credits. So
what they're doing is making it so that other companies
can produce more cars that are less fuel efficients can
(09:01):
produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
It's why you couldn't get a plug in hybrid EV
pickup truck, like I think they may be plug in
hybrid Mavericks now, but like the reason that no US
manufacturer bothered to make an electric pickup truck like the
that form fifty lightning that they have now, it is
because they could just trade with companies like Tesla instead.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Yeah, and this is a fucking disaster for climate policy
because instead of having all of the car companies just
like dramatically lowering their emissions, what you have is one
car company that makes electric cars and then all the
rest of the car companies increasing the amount of like
SEO tuper like biles, et cetera, et cetera. And the
secondary problem, and this is the problem that we're experiencing now,
is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort
(09:48):
of in a lot of ways, like romantic notion of
what a market is, right with the explain it. So
it's like, ah, there's all this, there's gonna be all
this like competition in the market. The competition is going
to create the best product and what actually happens, and
the neoliberals in their private doctor understand this is that
when the state creates a market like this, what he's
doing is handing like a person, like a single individual,
a giant monopoly. And that's what happens. And that monopoly
(10:12):
is one Elon Musk, Yeah, who has now been handed
the title of the richest man in human history by
the state's regulatory apparatus.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Because they've given him basically complete control every I mean,
there are other ev only companies, but they're minute, right,
Rivan or something like that, And he's got this scarce
resource that the entire automotive industry now needs.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah. And again this is, you know, going back to
the market creation part of this. None off this shit existed, right,
Like carbon caps are not something the market would ever
produce by itself or whatever.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Like.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
This is a direct neilbal intervention into the market, which
is what neolibilism is, right. It's the nailable state coming
into create markets, and the product of it is Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Yeah, it's a monopoly.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Yeah. And when we come back from ADS, we'll go
into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon
Musk and not all of these other companies that became
the sort of single guy and how and how else
he's benefited from the state. We are back, so the
(11:21):
other aspect, you know. So, so we've gone into how
how how Tesla is built on these on this carbon
credit trading. The other aspect of it is that Tesla
has received unbelievable amounts of money from government contracts. The
Washington Post in probably the last like expose they're ever
(11:42):
going to do like this now that Bezos has been
like we are free market capitalists, like tried to go
through and find all of the money in government contracts
that they've gotten. They totaled it well, I think I
think they're also including like tax credits and stuff like that.
But they totald it at thirty eight billion dollars. And
that's just the ones that are unclassified, which is very
important because a bunch of what SpaceX does SpaceX's you know,
(12:04):
most other company is a bunch of contracts for classified
like the deployment of Spice satellites. So it's definitely way
more than that, right, Yeah, But this comes to the
other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how
tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies,
like in general, do not make money, right. They hemorrhage
money for basically their entire existence until they can find
(12:25):
a bunch of government contracts that can make them money.
And Tesla in particular was like really sort of eating
shit after two thousand and eight, and you know, WAPA
talks about this. They got a four hundred and sixty
five million dollars low interest loan for the Department of
Energy in twenty ten that basically saved the company from
the brink of collapse.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Good thing, there's nothing else to spend the money on
in twenty ten. No one else needed low Interestla into
any think it was.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Fine, No, no, there was no attempt to build like
a giant American high speed rail system that Elon Musk
also killed. Yep, you know not, nothing else was happening.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
I wasn't living in my car at that time. It
was fine. Yeah, thank you Obama.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
And so and so. As this goes on, right, the
goal of you as a tech company, there's two things
you want to do. If you're a smaller tech company,
you're trying to get bought by a bigger tech company
so you can retire on your pile of money, or
if you're a larger tech company, you are trying to
amass enough US contracts, like US government contracts, to like
get you to sort of stability. And this is what
happens with SpaceX. SpaceX now has gotten eighteen billion dollars
(13:26):
of contracts with NASA, And this is sort of a
part of like, I mean, NASA has always used government contractors,
but like this is different, Like this is just straight
up there using Tesla's rockets to do things. And this
is also part of why like Tesla and Boeing fucking
this up, is part of why a bunch of astronauts
are fucking stranded on the space station right now because
these things do not work. But there's there's been an
(13:50):
enormous amount of money here. And the other thing, you know,
this is one of the other sort of like great
neoliberal things, is that a lot of the factories that
Elon Musk sort of builds, you know, the ones that
are in the US, are there because they get unbelievable
amounts of tax breaks and tax incentives from from local
states themselves. All of this brings us to you know,
(14:11):
one of the other really core aspects of sort of
the profitability of Tesla in terms of selling in terms
of selling cars. But we should also mention this is
something Axios talks about that like, if they weren't able
to sell carbon credits, this company would literally never make money.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this has been the case. I write
about this, like I think two years ago.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Yeah, I remember writing about this before Ela Musk had
gone full fucking evil villain, I guess. But that's what
they are. They're a carbon credit company that makes cars.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Yeah, but even their car sales are enormously bolstered by
a seven five hundred dollars tax credit for electric cars.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Oh yeah, I got some tax credit information on electric cars.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
It's now the time.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yeah yeah. Do you want to talk about the other
one that's driving these unhinged sales?
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Yes, I do, because I have been driving around San
Diego and I have seen an obscene number of cyber
trucks wrapped in people's business livery, and it occurs to
me that they're not businesses that need a pickup truck,
nor the people who need a pickup truck for work
by cyber trucks because they suck at being trucks.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
And so I did some digging, and I discovered that.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
The IRS was a special tax deduction for vehicles which
are rated over six thousand pounds gross vehicle weight. The
gross vehicle weight rating, if you're not familiar, that's not
like the mass of the vehicle if you drove it
like off the dealer lot onto a scale. That's the
maximum operating weight of the vehicles as specified by the manufacturer.
So like it's your tesla with I mean, they are
(15:40):
very funny videos of guy cycloading one bag of composts
into the back of the Tesla and being it's a
great truck for truck stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
The other really funny one is when they try to
attach like a winch to it and try to use
it to pull the pull heavy things in the back
of the truck comes off because it's just like made
of like it's like glue a unibody.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
Yeah, it might not be a body on frame, Like
it might not be a proper truck. I actually don't
know now how I will look into that afterwards. I
bet it's I bet most of the electric or like
high minage pickup trucks are not so yeah, not a
good truck. Actually under it's called section one seventy nine.
Under Section one seventy nine, a vehicle with a gross
vehicle weight rating over six thousand pounds, you can deduct
(16:23):
up to thirty one thousand in the first year rather
than deducting the depreciation of the capital good over time. Right,
So instead of instead of deducting the depreciation of your
vehicle that you purchase your business over time and not
paying tax on that amount, you cannot pay tax on
thirty one thousand in the first year of your vehicle
if it's over six thousand pounds.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Right.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
There are some exemptions for luxury vehicles, like if you've
got a may Bark or something really fucking heavy, So
that would even cover the Model X, right, the Tesla
Model X have a GBWR above that. With a truck,
there are exemptions for work vehicles, and they have to
have a separate cargo compared apartment that is not the
driver's compartment, that is six feet or more in length.
(17:05):
So the cyber truck just happened to have a six
foot bed. Yeah, so you can deduct one hundred percent
of value in the first year of what I understand
for these vehicles which have a six foot bed.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
At least this was the case when I was looking.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
I became aware of the exact nature of this when
I went on the cyber Truck Owners Club forum and
looked what a tax deductant people were doing, right, and
then I worked back from there, and it does seem
that people are doing this. I think it might be changing,
so you can only deduct a certain percentage. Soon it
will shock listeners to hear that I'm not giving you
tax advice, nor am I qualified to do so. I'm
not an accountant. This is not accounting advice. On top
(17:42):
of that, Mia mentioned the IRS Commercial Clean Vehicle credit, right,
that's a credit, not a deduction. So the deduction would
discount the amount of your income that you pay tax
on versus the credit, which is just great credit. So
potentially the person could deduct the cost of the cyber
truck plus the cost of wrapping the fucking cyber truck,
right to prove it's a business vehicle, and then if
(18:05):
you're wrapping it. From what I understand, like these deductions
somewhat depend on the percentage of the vehicle's use that
is business. I guess this could be like the equivalent
of a fringes on the flag tax theory people claiming
that when they're driving their their cyber truck to go
to Whole Foods, but it's wrapped, they're advertising a business,
so it's a business use. I don't understand how how
(18:28):
like viable that is as a claim, but well, you know.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
But part of this is, like it's very easy, like
especially right now when the irs is being gutted, Like
it's very easy to do this kind of bullshit and
people are not getting all it did.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Yeah, yeah, so they can take a seven five hundred
commercial vehicle clean vehicle credit in addition to deducting that much.
And like you would struggle to persuade me that that
is not why a lot of people are buying cyber
trucks right, Like it's got the weight rating, it's got
the bedside. Like it's a lot of people who wouldn't
necessarily like not all trucks have six footbeds.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Now, I will never buy a new drug because.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
I can't find a truck that has like a decent
seating arrangement and larger than six foot bed and four
by four and doesn't cost more than I earn in
a year. But like it's quite a like niche overlap
of trucks that apply, and like for a truck with
a six foot bed and a six thousand pound gross
vehicle weight rating, the cyber truck's pretty small and it
fits kind of with people who don't actually need a
(19:28):
work truck that can non the lens take advantage of
the work truck tax deduction. So once again, thank you
government for subsidizing the shittiest vehicle on the roads today.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Yeah, and it's worth noting. So like like Tesla, you know,
you'll see a bunch of things about how Tesla is
like one of the like best selling car manufacturers, right,
and part of it is from this, but also, you know,
and this is this is the other aspect of this.
It's worth noting. There's a very good Bloomberg article out
today by A. Mendum More that talks about how fifty
percent of all American consumer spending is now by people
(20:02):
who in the top ten percent of the income bracket,
so people make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a
year or more, and that means increasingly that everything in
the United States reflects the you know, the sort of
like cultural affect of these bunch of fucking rich assholes
who all also want to buy this for their sort
of like like cultural grudges and you know, to like
(20:24):
to own the libs and like show how like much
of a fucking man they are. Yeah, you know, and
and so you already you have that initial incentive and
then you suddenly have all of these fucking tax incentives
that you get from buying this vehicle that like, definitely
this is like designed with a shit in mind.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Yeah, without a doubt, and it becomes, like you say,
it becomes like a status good, and it becomes like
a culture war signifier.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
In addition to all of those things, I guess people also,
like I've noticed that there's been a lot of backlash
against people who owned Tesla's. If you go on the
day we're recording, the top article on the front page
of Reddit. On the third article Reddit, the top post
is someone who's been putting pictures that say sell your car.
It's got a picture of musk Zeke hyling on people's
(21:06):
test list in Boston.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Yep, shout out to that person.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Yeah, Okay, so we're going to take a break and
when we come back, we're going to sort of finish
this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of
how this version of capitalism created Musk and where it's going.
(21:29):
We are back now. I think this all. I think
if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard
of most of this. I actually, okay, you've heard of
most of what I've said to some extent. I don't
think you've heard what James has said before, because I've
seen very little coverage of this. But there's also something
deeper going on here. The deeper thing going on here
is that Elon Musk on a fundamental level is also
(21:51):
a product of the endless bubble economy that we've all
been living in for decades now. It's a product of
an economic policy that the economist R. Brenner calls asset canesianism.
So regular canesianism, right, is about you know, having the
government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation.
Also you know, also like the military too, right, Like,
let's not sort of like sugarcoat it, but it's about
(22:13):
using a bunch of state money to like make there
be jobs and using this to sort of I don't
know though the way they call it is like countercyclical spending.
But it's like they want to use the state to
spend money to make their be jobs and to put
money into the economy and to put goods into the
economy to counteract economic downturns. Yea asset Knesianism is still
the state spending a bunch of resources, right, But it's
(22:34):
the state expending those resources both bureaucratically and in terms
of incentives and in terms of sort of tax structures,
and specifically also very much in terms of the federal
reserves interest rates, specifically to increase the price of stocks.
And also you know, and you know the reason he
calls it assets, right, because it's not just stocks, right,
it's also things like real estates. It's to increase the
(22:55):
value of speculative assets, things that you buy because you
think it's going to be worth more later. I have
talked about this a law on this show. This has
been the fundamental global economic strategy of most of the
world's economies ever since sort of Japan kind of pioneered
it in the eighties. As after the US sort of
like kneecapped its entire domestic sort of export manufacturing economy
(23:16):
to the Plaza Accords. And by the end of this
fucking administration, everyone who listens to the show will be
able to explain what the Plazai Chords and the River's
Plaza Accords are from.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
We stop, it won't happen here after that, because you'll
understand and you'll stop it.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Yeah, you'll know, you'll know, you'll know the origin of
the economy. Yes, so yeah again, the Plaza Cords, the
US forces all of these countries to increase the value
if their currency is relative to the dollar. This makes
American manufacturing more competitive in nukes, all of their manufacturing.
These countries need to find another place to you know,
develop their economy, right, and the thing that the solution
(23:49):
Japan comes to is real estate speculation. This blows up,
This blows up in the nineties. This is this is
a whole bunch of the sort of Asian market collapse
stuff is from this. And then the US is forced
to do the ref first Plauset Cords in the nineties
is spoke Clinton and you know, sort of annihilate American
and manufacturing in order to sort of prop up the
rest like proper Japanese manufactury, to keep their economy from
(24:09):
completely employing. Japanels a number two economy in the world
at that point, but again this means that the US
has now been doing this. There's the famous things called
the Greenspan puts, where like to try to stop a
market collapse that was obviously coming with a tech bubble
blew up. Green Span kept cutting the interest rates over
and over again, trying to keep the bubble from collapsing
and just making it bigger, and then eventually it blew up.
This is what two thousand and eight is was, you know,
(24:30):
we did a whole bubble. I mean, there's another bubble
and collapse between there. But like you know, and this
is what we've been doing for the last two decades,
like since since two thousand and eight, we've been creating
this giant tech bubble and this tech bubble shit and
this sort of asset speculation is also a huge part
of the value of Tesla stock is just you know,
people who've been given a whole bunch of access to
cheap credit and by and by people, I mean like
not really you and me, like a bunch of unbelievaly
(24:52):
rich people have access to like incredibly cheap loans and
they use that money to buy Tesla stock. This is
a sort of cyclical thing that just continues to increases
the value of the company. And it's not just sort
of like banks and investors. A lot of money that
goes into Tesla comes in there from state pension funds yep,
from a bunch of bunches of a whole bunch of
(25:13):
different countries. And also like a huge number of American states,
like your teacher's pensions are all tied up in this
because pension reform. But the way that we sort of
like lost the pension as a normal thing was that
it was you know, it was converted to for a
one case and the people who still have like regular
state pensions, all of that money is now sort of
invested in the stock market and it puts billions of
dollars into Tesla every year. And so this is also
(25:36):
another aspect. This is this is the broader structural level
on which on which US macroeconomic policy was designed to
create a bunch of companies like Tesla, and then US
sort of like micro policy, the microcreation of markets to
tax credits and you know, all of these government contracts
that they've been given to do like everything from like
fucking build these cars to like put spy satellites in orbit, right,
(25:59):
and like the US, like contracting got startled. Like now,
I mean, like all of this stuff, right is is
literally how Elon Musk was created. Yeah, but there is
a third, even deeper level in which you know, we
can look at at how how these cars are actually
produced and how these rockets are actually produced, and they're
produced by just incredible, the incredible exploitation of a huge
(26:23):
number of workers. And I think people tend to think about,
you know, Tesla workers in the US, but there's Tessa
workers all over the world. There's a huge gigafactory in
shing John, you know, there's factories all over China, and
you know, these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit.
They work in unbelievably dangerous conditions and at the end
of the day they get a very small amount of
(26:44):
money so that the richest man in the world can
get fucking richer every day.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Yeah, and that's before we consider like ingredient pots to Teslas, right,
like the you know that we we just addressed for
instance in our episode on Congo.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yeah, there are.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Pots, the tests, geotests that come out of this country
where there has been a war for as long as
most of us has been alive. Really very little effort
has gone into improving conditions for people there.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Certainly for workers.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
They're doing jobs that are essential to like our economy
and to like Mia and my four for a one
K line going up comes from exploiting workers.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
In Congo to an extent and elsewhere in the world.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Yeah, and you know this is something that there's something
our standard of living is based off of. But at
the end of the day, right, Elon Musks, all of
Elon Musk's profit comes from the fact that the States
monopoly on violence is used to stop all of these
people from ever attempting to resist him. It's deployed in
order to stop these people from taking back the fucking
(27:46):
value that they create. Now, unfortunately, all of this sort
of Neilibal tinkering we've seen for the last fifty years, right,
this attempts to sort of like depoliticize everything and have
everything run by the other technocrats and sort of have
this sort of like non politics where you're voting for
two parties that are like literally even more the same
(28:07):
than they are now. This attempt to do things like
solve climate change to these to these promotion of carbon
markets and create the sort of like stable capitalist hegeniminy
forever has ultimately been self defeating. It's why all attempts
to regulate capital inevitably fail, because the functioning of the
capitalist system, and particularly the function of the way this
version of neoliberalism has worked, has concentrated like the most
(28:32):
wealth ever held by a single human being into the
hands of one guy who was a Nazi. And then
these people use their wealth to cubate political power and
seize control of the state, dismantling the systems that were
meant to regulate them. And you can't solve this problem
with regulation because again, eventually they will simply accumulate enough power,
retake power, and eliminate their regulations. You can't even solve
(28:54):
this problem just by killing them. I see people talk
about like the killing of billionaires in China as like
an example of this and a that's all political faction,
lane fighting stuff, and they'll execute people specifically to sort
of appease like the Chinese workers so that they never
have to fucking watch the pla get right out of
Shanghai again. But the thing is, even if somehow you
use the states to just kill them, right, it doesn't work,
(29:17):
because capitalism will just produce more of these people. If
you actually want to stop this, if you want to
stop this Elon Musk from destroying the entire country and
quite possibly ending all life on earth by fucking with
America's nuclear weapons, un so, they're simply not out of
safety mechanisms. To stop someone from accidentally sending one off,
you were going to have to destroy them completely. The
(29:39):
permanent base of their power, the power of the oligarch,
the power of the billionaire, the power of the dictator,
must be broken. This tiny group of men cannot, as
a class, be allowed to own the stores and factories
and fields and hospitals, supply chains to produce everything we
need to survive. It must belong to us. We create
their wealth. The only way to save this world is
(29:59):
to take it back. If we want to save democracy,
the only way to do it is to extend democracy
into the spheres where Elon Musk rules as a tyrant.
Democracy must march into the workplace to slay the beast
that is lair before the despotism of the workplace consumes
our political democracy and leaves us with despotism there too.
They must cease to rule. They must cease to exist,
(30:20):
not as individuals but as a class, and the only
way to do that is by giving control of their power,
and their property and their wealth to the workers whose
subjugation produced all of it in the first place. That
is the tax that we have in front of us.
The challenge that we face is that we face effectively
the entire might of the American State, which is one
of the most powerful apparatus of repression that has ever
(30:41):
been built. Our advantage is that that apparatus of repression
is currently being run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk,
who are and I cannot emphasize this enough, maybe the
two figures most emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan's,
after his extensive study of a whole bunch of revolutions
on the Revolutions Podcast, concluded to be the great idiots
of history, who who, by their their sheer and unmasterability
(31:05):
to make the wrong decision at every single moment, are
what makes revolutions possible. And if these people are not
the great idiots of history that allow us to bring
them down and stop them from destroying everything that has
ever been in this world that is good, then nothing
else is.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
Yeah, we have the one great stroke of a good
fortune we have, right, is that that the old Paris
been concentrated in their hands of complete idiots who are
addicted to diet coke and and being mad at their children.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Yep. And and they you know, we have already seen
they't they don't understand how this apparatus works.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
They fired the nuke police by accident.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Yeah, so it's very funny that they're stripping themselves of
the means of coercive violence. Yeah, when we start to
make you spoke about controlled opposition, right, and the idea that,
like the great debate of our time is how much
state regulation we should have and how much unfettered anarcha
capitalism we should have. They are drinking the kool aid
(32:07):
that got them in power. That is the one thing
going in our favor right now, that they are dismantling
the means of coercive violence because they genuinely believe the
myth that if the state didn't exist, they could be
even more wealthy and even more tyrannical.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah, and well, and the second advantage that we have
is that been they have said about systematically alienating every
single group of people who they would need as their
political base, they are pissing off the military. They are
pissing off the intelligence services they are going through, and
they are like systematically pissing off the farm states, and
you know, like the farmers obviously do not have that
like don't fucking matter, but they're they're pissing off the
agro businesses. They are individually going through and pissing off
(32:45):
a whole bunch of the of the of the country,
scientific resources. They're going through, they're like fucking with the
Social Security administration. They're individually going through and pissing off
every single group of people on earth who matter, and
people who like us under this system aren't supposed to
matter until we fucking do something about it. And you know,
the other big thing that we have right now is
that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by
(33:08):
actually doing these terrorists, which they didn't think he would do,
and by pulling apart his base of support, and by
putting together coalitions of some of these people and not
all of them, some of them, some of them you
just need to divide and conquer by getting them out
from backing him. Right, Like the whole thing with the
Bolsheviks taking over in the October Revolution was that, but
people just mostly stayed home and that was how they won.
(33:30):
Like that is largely what we need. We need these
people to stay home, but these people can and will,
if we have anything to say about it, be fucking
driven home and hopefully we can bury both the grave
diggers and the people whose graves they were digging in
the same spot in the dust bit of history, and
never have to deal with these fucking assholes again. It
(33:51):
Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website pool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It could Happen Here listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Cal Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome, Dick. It app to hear a podcast about things
falling apart and how to put them back together again.
I am your host Mia Wong. With me is James Stout.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Hi may happy to be here again?
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Yeah, I am. I don't know. I have mixed emotions
about this one. So today we are talking about how
the American state, particularly the sort of neoliberal American state
of the last about fifty years, created Elon Musk and
how it is destroying itself. And we'll start with the
fun part of this, which is that Tesla stock is
(00:35):
down twenty five percent in the last month. Yay, it's
extremely funny. The protests are working. People are like lighting
them on cars on fire literally all over the world,
Like there was just a big ration in France the
day we're recording this. The pressure is working. He's having
a bad time. Twenty five percent is just the start
we can get the other seventy five percent.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Yeah, I mean, And like for people who I guess
don't know, the value of Tesla stock is directly tied
to Elon Musk's net worth, Like obviously he's diversified, he
doesn't have all of his wealth and netstocks but like
when Tesla Stock goes down, Elon Musk gets poorer.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yep, it's great, it's great love. We love making Elon
Musk poorer.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, it's the one line we like to see.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
However, Comma, So we've talked a lot on this show
about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the
American state and about all of the people who he
is harming in the lives is showing the people who
are dead because of his actions, and I think it's
worth actually getting into how he was produced and how
it came to be that. You know, at the beginning
of the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously wrote that the bourgeoisie
(01:38):
produced their own grave diggers. Yep. And you know, his
his promised like inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus
far failed to materialize. But neoliberalism and like this specific
state seems to have produced their own gravediggers, partially in
the form of Trump, but partially in the form of
Elon Musk. And it's worth actually going into the story
(02:00):
of how specifically this happened. And also I think what
neoliberalism is, because this is an important aspect of I
think people are kind of aware of the broad outlines
of the story of the extent to which you know,
Tesla and space Ax were built by American subsidies, but
it's worth going into some of the more structural elements
(02:21):
of how this happened. Why So, one of the problems
that we have here, and I say we have here
because this is a problem that Elon Musk has, which
is that he simply does not understand what neoliberalism is
or how it operates.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Yeah, I mean, he says a lot of things he
doesn't understand.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Via Yeah, and unfortunately he has inherited like the greatest
of all neoliberal states. So the issue here is that
Elon Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed
to be, what neoliberalism is, what is sort of weird libertarianism,
whatever you call his sort of ideology, you know, is
supposed to be and you know, like he is just
sort of a fascist. But on the other hand, he's
(02:58):
a product of this wing of that movement that was
created out of out of the neoliberal thing about like ah,
you must like decrease the size of the state. You
gotta you gotta eliminate all regulations, you have to you know,
you keep decreasing the size of the state, keep fire
like you know, fire all government employees, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah,
and again this is I think largely what a lot
of people think neoliberalism is, right. They think it's like, okay,
neoliberalisms where the state gets smaller, And this has always
(03:21):
been a fucking joke. Like to the entiretyoliberal period, the
size of the state bureaucracy keeps increasing, and this has
always allowed a kind of like controlled capitalist opposition to
emerge to you know, when two thousand and eight happens, right, Yeah,
the economy, entire economy collapses, and then out of the
woodwork come all of these like rand pall sort of
like quote unquote libertarians who have a lot of sudden
interesting ties to a bunch of fascist groups and like
(03:42):
all of these all of these sort of fascist perilitaries.
But you know, they can come out of the woodwork
and say, oh, the reason that the two thousand and
eight collapse happened was because there is too much government regulation.
And this is like sort of what bitcoin is, right,
It's like, ah, the evils of capitalism are happening because like.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Not enough capitalism.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, well, it's because like the but like bifically, the
evil and s trench interests have taken over the state
and you don't have the power to access the things
that they do, which is obviously you know, like it
is obviously true that these people have control of the
state and you don't. But this sort of controlled opposition
of if you put us in power, will eliminate parts
of the state, will get rid of all this regulation
that you can suddenly be in power. This has always
(04:18):
been a controlled opposition thing, you know. And this is
disappears in the form sort of libertarianism or like on
the most extreme mention arco capitalism. Yeah, and this is
something that the Montpellier society, which is like the people
who basically invented neoliberalism and where all like their academics
come from they slill of conferences, they've always had a
problem with this, where there's always been a branch of
an arcro capitalist there who think the only thing that
(04:39):
the state should do is enforced contracts or just that
it shouldn't exist. Everything should just yeah, and the neoliberals
are like, okay, that you guys are fucking ridiculous. And
the reason they think this is that the actual thing
that these people believe. And this is this is something
that if you read more Hiak than just like the
road to serve him, right, that's like the stuff for
public consumption. If you read the stuff that you actual
(04:59):
pub consumption, if you read sort of like rope Key,
and you read all of the sort of theorists who
develop what becomes the IMF, and you know, you go
through all the different schools what they actually believe. Contrary
the things that they say were like, oh, markets naturally
emerge and the state just like exists to control them.
What they believe is that you have to use the
(05:21):
state specifically to create markets, and you have to use
the state to discipline workers through just pure violence until
they become sort of like good neo liberal market subjects.
You go to work, go home, buy things, and do
nothing else. And the product of this is the nineteen eighties, right,
is the replacement of the welfare state, you know, which
is the sort of carrots of this system with just
the pure stake of the police, baton and the prison system.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Yeah, it's the end of like the post Second World
War welfare state order, right, that we saw certainly in
the US. But mostly in New Europe.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Right, yeah, yeah, but and this is very important. This
never actually decreased the size of the state, because what
the state, you know, what it was was. It was
a shifting of sort of recourses and allocation away from
like the state giving you things towards the states, you know,
like beating you over the head with a hammer, and
also insofar as it gives you things, making you go
(06:14):
through all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever
sort of like scant welfare policies still exist.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, the states surveying you both for violence reasons and
for withdrawing your benefits reasons.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, and this and this is always something that all
of these people have supported. Right now. The other important
part for our purposes is is the thing I said
earlier about the state creating markets, And that's that's kind
of like an abstract thing, right. There are sort of
historical examples you can go through to look at what
this looks like in a place where there aren't markets.
But this is something that's very important because a huge
(06:51):
amount of what TESLA is is a direct result of
you know, pure neoliberalism and action, which is the state
stepping into create a market as its way of doing
regulation and with the way interact with the world. And
so here we need to get to carbon credits. Now
selling off carbon credits, they're also called regulatory credits. In
twenty twenty four the selling of carbon credits was forty
(07:13):
three percent of Tesla's net income. Forty three percent.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
Yeah, so we should explain what a carbon credit is
if people I'm familiar.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, Actuos has numbers on this. Their numbers are that
since twenty fourteen, thirty four percent of the total profits
of Tesla are are from selling these carbon credits. So
the way the system works is that the EPA sets
standards for how much This is like you know, read
the acxios thing too, but like the EPA set standards
(07:42):
for how much like CO two per mile all of
the cars and trucks combined that a a car company
makes can can admit. And you know, instead of doing
the thing where you're like, okay, hey, there's just going
to be like a firm cap on these emissions, they're
like no, no, no, you know this this is when
I say, when I say, they create a mar So
if what happens if you go over the cap isn't
(08:02):
that like you know, like people get hauled off to
jail or whatever. What happens is that you have to
buy someone else's carbon credits, and if you're below the cap,
it gives you credits you can sell to other companies.
So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric cars, right,
their cars produced like zero basically like.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
They don't have any fossil fuel use at all within
their line.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah. Yeah, Now obviously like whereas you know, you can
ask the question where is that electricity coming from? But
you know, like, but that's that's what doesn't get factored
into it, which is part of the sort of problem
with trying to use the state like this to solve.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Right, it doesn't look at life cyclists. Yeah, yeah, it
just looks at driving the car emissions.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
You know. This is this is the problem with trying
to use a regulatory state like this to solve the
problem with climate change by creating a market. And so
Tesla makes and again this is this last year, this
was forty three percent of its NEAT income came not
from selling cars, but from selling these carbon credits. So
what they're doing is making it so that other companies
can produce more cars that are less fuel efficients can
(09:01):
produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
It's why you couldn't get a plug in hybrid EV
pickup truck, like I think they may be plug in
hybrid Mavericks now, but like the reason that no US
manufacturer bothered to make an electric pickup truck like the
that form fifty lightning that they have now, it is
because they could just trade with companies like Tesla instead.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Yeah, and this is a fucking disaster for climate policy
because instead of having all of the car companies just
like dramatically lowering their emissions, what you have is one
car company that makes electric cars and then all the
rest of the car companies increasing the amount of like
SEO tuper like biles, et cetera, et cetera. And the
secondary problem, and this is the problem that we're experiencing now,
is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort
(09:48):
of in a lot of ways, like romantic notion of
what a market is, right with the explain it. So
it's like, ah, there's all this, there's gonna be all
this like competition in the market. The competition is going
to create the best product and what actually happens, and
the neoliberals in their private doctor understand this is that
when the state creates a market like this, what he's
doing is handing like a person, like a single individual,
a giant monopoly. And that's what happens. And that monopoly
(10:12):
is one Elon Musk, Yeah, who has now been handed
the title of the richest man in human history by
the state's regulatory apparatus.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Because they've given him basically complete control every I mean,
there are other ev only companies, but they're minute, right,
Rivan or something like that, And he's got this scarce
resource that the entire automotive industry now needs.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah. And again this is, you know, going back to
the market creation part of this. None off this shit existed, right,
Like carbon caps are not something the market would ever
produce by itself or whatever.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Like.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
This is a direct neilbal intervention into the market, which
is what neolibilism is, right. It's the nailable state coming
into create markets, and the product of it is Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Yeah, it's a monopoly.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Yeah. And when we come back from ADS, we'll go
into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon
Musk and not all of these other companies that became
the sort of single guy and how and how else
he's benefited from the state. We are back, so the
(11:21):
other aspect, you know. So, so we've gone into how
how how Tesla is built on these on this carbon
credit trading. The other aspect of it is that Tesla
has received unbelievable amounts of money from government contracts. The
Washington Post in probably the last like expose they're ever
(11:42):
going to do like this now that Bezos has been
like we are free market capitalists, like tried to go
through and find all of the money in government contracts
that they've gotten. They totaled it well, I think I
think they're also including like tax credits and stuff like that.
But they totald it at thirty eight billion dollars. And
that's just the ones that are unclassified, which is very
important because a bunch of what SpaceX does SpaceX's you know,
(12:04):
most other company is a bunch of contracts for classified
like the deployment of Spice satellites. So it's definitely way
more than that, right, Yeah, But this comes to the
other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how
tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies,
like in general, do not make money, right. They hemorrhage
money for basically their entire existence until they can find
(12:25):
a bunch of government contracts that can make them money.
And Tesla in particular was like really sort of eating
shit after two thousand and eight, and you know, WAPA
talks about this. They got a four hundred and sixty
five million dollars low interest loan for the Department of
Energy in twenty ten that basically saved the company from
the brink of collapse.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Good thing, there's nothing else to spend the money on
in twenty ten. No one else needed low Interestla into
any think it was.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Fine, No, no, there was no attempt to build like
a giant American high speed rail system that Elon Musk
also killed. Yep, you know not, nothing else was happening.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
I wasn't living in my car at that time. It
was fine. Yeah, thank you Obama.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
And so and so. As this goes on, right, the
goal of you as a tech company, there's two things
you want to do. If you're a smaller tech company,
you're trying to get bought by a bigger tech company
so you can retire on your pile of money, or
if you're a larger tech company, you are trying to
amass enough US contracts, like US government contracts, to like
get you to sort of stability. And this is what
happens with SpaceX. SpaceX now has gotten eighteen billion dollars
(13:26):
of contracts with NASA, And this is sort of a
part of like, I mean, NASA has always used government contractors,
but like this is different, Like this is just straight
up there using Tesla's rockets to do things. And this
is also part of why like Tesla and Boeing fucking
this up, is part of why a bunch of astronauts
are fucking stranded on the space station right now because
these things do not work. But there's there's been an
(13:50):
enormous amount of money here. And the other thing, you know,
this is one of the other sort of like great
neoliberal things, is that a lot of the factories that
Elon Musk sort of builds, you know, the ones that
are in the US, are there because they get unbelievable
amounts of tax breaks and tax incentives from from local
states themselves. All of this brings us to you know,
(14:11):
one of the other really core aspects of sort of
the profitability of Tesla in terms of selling in terms
of selling cars. But we should also mention this is
something Axios talks about that like, if they weren't able
to sell carbon credits, this company would literally never make money.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this has been the case. I write
about this, like I think two years ago.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Yeah, I remember writing about this before Ela Musk had
gone full fucking evil villain, I guess. But that's what
they are. They're a carbon credit company that makes cars.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Yeah, but even their car sales are enormously bolstered by
a seven five hundred dollars tax credit for electric cars.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Oh yeah, I got some tax credit information on electric cars.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
It's now the time.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yeah yeah. Do you want to talk about the other
one that's driving these unhinged sales?
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Yes, I do, because I have been driving around San
Diego and I have seen an obscene number of cyber
trucks wrapped in people's business livery, and it occurs to
me that they're not businesses that need a pickup truck,
nor the people who need a pickup truck for work
by cyber trucks because they suck at being trucks.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
And so I did some digging, and I discovered that.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
The IRS was a special tax deduction for vehicles which
are rated over six thousand pounds gross vehicle weight. The
gross vehicle weight rating, if you're not familiar, that's not
like the mass of the vehicle if you drove it
like off the dealer lot onto a scale. That's the
maximum operating weight of the vehicles as specified by the manufacturer.
So like it's your tesla with I mean, they are
(15:40):
very funny videos of guy cycloading one bag of composts
into the back of the Tesla and being it's a
great truck for truck stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
The other really funny one is when they try to
attach like a winch to it and try to use
it to pull the pull heavy things in the back
of the truck comes off because it's just like made
of like it's like glue a unibody.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
Yeah, it might not be a body on frame, Like
it might not be a proper truck. I actually don't
know now how I will look into that afterwards. I
bet it's I bet most of the electric or like
high minage pickup trucks are not so yeah, not a
good truck. Actually under it's called section one seventy nine.
Under Section one seventy nine, a vehicle with a gross
vehicle weight rating over six thousand pounds, you can deduct
(16:23):
up to thirty one thousand in the first year rather
than deducting the depreciation of the capital good over time. Right,
So instead of instead of deducting the depreciation of your
vehicle that you purchase your business over time and not
paying tax on that amount, you cannot pay tax on
thirty one thousand in the first year of your vehicle
if it's over six thousand pounds.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Right.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
There are some exemptions for luxury vehicles, like if you've
got a may Bark or something really fucking heavy, So
that would even cover the Model X, right, the Tesla
Model X have a GBWR above that. With a truck,
there are exemptions for work vehicles, and they have to
have a separate cargo compared apartment that is not the
driver's compartment, that is six feet or more in length.
(17:05):
So the cyber truck just happened to have a six
foot bed. Yeah, so you can deduct one hundred percent
of value in the first year of what I understand
for these vehicles which have a six foot bed.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
At least this was the case when I was looking.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
I became aware of the exact nature of this when
I went on the cyber Truck Owners Club forum and
looked what a tax deductant people were doing, right, and
then I worked back from there, and it does seem
that people are doing this. I think it might be changing,
so you can only deduct a certain percentage. Soon it
will shock listeners to hear that I'm not giving you
tax advice, nor am I qualified to do so. I'm
not an accountant. This is not accounting advice. On top
(17:42):
of that, Mia mentioned the IRS Commercial Clean Vehicle credit, right,
that's a credit, not a deduction. So the deduction would
discount the amount of your income that you pay tax
on versus the credit, which is just great credit. So
potentially the person could deduct the cost of the cyber
truck plus the cost of wrapping the fucking cyber truck,
right to prove it's a business vehicle, and then if
(18:05):
you're wrapping it. From what I understand, like these deductions
somewhat depend on the percentage of the vehicle's use that
is business. I guess this could be like the equivalent
of a fringes on the flag tax theory people claiming
that when they're driving their their cyber truck to go
to Whole Foods, but it's wrapped, they're advertising a business,
so it's a business use. I don't understand how how
(18:28):
like viable that is as a claim, but well, you know.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
But part of this is, like it's very easy, like
especially right now when the irs is being gutted, Like
it's very easy to do this kind of bullshit and
people are not getting all it did.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Yeah, yeah, so they can take a seven five hundred
commercial vehicle clean vehicle credit in addition to deducting that much.
And like you would struggle to persuade me that that
is not why a lot of people are buying cyber
trucks right, Like it's got the weight rating, it's got
the bedside. Like it's a lot of people who wouldn't
necessarily like not all trucks have six footbeds.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Now, I will never buy a new drug because.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
I can't find a truck that has like a decent
seating arrangement and larger than six foot bed and four
by four and doesn't cost more than I earn in
a year. But like it's quite a like niche overlap
of trucks that apply, and like for a truck with
a six foot bed and a six thousand pound gross
vehicle weight rating, the cyber truck's pretty small and it
fits kind of with people who don't actually need a
(19:28):
work truck that can non the lens take advantage of
the work truck tax deduction. So once again, thank you
government for subsidizing the shittiest vehicle on the roads today.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Yeah, and it's worth noting. So like like Tesla, you know,
you'll see a bunch of things about how Tesla is
like one of the like best selling car manufacturers, right,
and part of it is from this, but also, you know,
and this is this is the other aspect of this.
It's worth noting. There's a very good Bloomberg article out
today by A. Mendum More that talks about how fifty
percent of all American consumer spending is now by people
(20:02):
who in the top ten percent of the income bracket,
so people make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a
year or more, and that means increasingly that everything in
the United States reflects the you know, the sort of
like cultural affect of these bunch of fucking rich assholes
who all also want to buy this for their sort
of like like cultural grudges and you know, to like
(20:24):
to own the libs and like show how like much
of a fucking man they are. Yeah, you know, and
and so you already you have that initial incentive and
then you suddenly have all of these fucking tax incentives
that you get from buying this vehicle that like, definitely
this is like designed with a shit in mind.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Yeah, without a doubt, and it becomes, like you say,
it becomes like a status good, and it becomes like
a culture war signifier.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
In addition to all of those things, I guess people also,
like I've noticed that there's been a lot of backlash
against people who owned Tesla's. If you go on the
day we're recording, the top article on the front page
of Reddit. On the third article Reddit, the top post
is someone who's been putting pictures that say sell your car.
It's got a picture of musk Zeke hyling on people's
(21:06):
test list in Boston.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Yep, shout out to that person.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Yeah, Okay, so we're going to take a break and
when we come back, we're going to sort of finish
this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of
how this version of capitalism created Musk and where it's going.
(21:29):
We are back now. I think this all. I think
if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard
of most of this. I actually, okay, you've heard of
most of what I've said to some extent. I don't
think you've heard what James has said before, because I've
seen very little coverage of this. But there's also something
deeper going on here. The deeper thing going on here
is that Elon Musk on a fundamental level is also
(21:51):
a product of the endless bubble economy that we've all
been living in for decades now. It's a product of
an economic policy that the economist R. Brenner calls asset canesianism.
So regular canesianism, right, is about you know, having the
government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation.
Also you know, also like the military too, right, Like,
let's not sort of like sugarcoat it, but it's about
(22:13):
using a bunch of state money to like make there
be jobs and using this to sort of I don't
know though the way they call it is like countercyclical spending.
But it's like they want to use the state to
spend money to make their be jobs and to put
money into the economy and to put goods into the
economy to counteract economic downturns. Yea asset Knesianism is still
the state spending a bunch of resources, right, But it's
(22:34):
the state expending those resources both bureaucratically and in terms
of incentives and in terms of sort of tax structures,
and specifically also very much in terms of the federal
reserves interest rates, specifically to increase the price of stocks.
And also you know, and you know the reason he
calls it assets, right, because it's not just stocks, right,
it's also things like real estates. It's to increase the
(22:55):
value of speculative assets, things that you buy because you
think it's going to be worth more later. I have
talked about this a law on this show. This has
been the fundamental global economic strategy of most of the
world's economies ever since sort of Japan kind of pioneered
it in the eighties. As after the US sort of
like kneecapped its entire domestic sort of export manufacturing economy
(23:16):
to the Plaza Accords. And by the end of this
fucking administration, everyone who listens to the show will be
able to explain what the Plazai Chords and the River's
Plaza Accords are from.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
We stop, it won't happen here after that, because you'll
understand and you'll stop it.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Yeah, you'll know, you'll know, you'll know the origin of
the economy. Yes, so yeah again, the Plaza Cords, the
US forces all of these countries to increase the value
if their currency is relative to the dollar. This makes
American manufacturing more competitive in nukes, all of their manufacturing.
These countries need to find another place to you know,
develop their economy, right, and the thing that the solution
(23:49):
Japan comes to is real estate speculation. This blows up,
This blows up in the nineties. This is this is
a whole bunch of the sort of Asian market collapse
stuff is from this. And then the US is forced
to do the ref first Plauset Cords in the nineties
is spoke Clinton and you know, sort of annihilate American
and manufacturing in order to sort of prop up the
rest like proper Japanese manufactury, to keep their economy from
(24:09):
completely employing. Japanels a number two economy in the world
at that point, but again this means that the US
has now been doing this. There's the famous things called
the Greenspan puts, where like to try to stop a
market collapse that was obviously coming with a tech bubble
blew up. Green Span kept cutting the interest rates over
and over again, trying to keep the bubble from collapsing
and just making it bigger, and then eventually it blew up.
This is what two thousand and eight is was, you know,
(24:30):
we did a whole bubble. I mean, there's another bubble
and collapse between there. But like you know, and this
is what we've been doing for the last two decades,
like since since two thousand and eight, we've been creating
this giant tech bubble and this tech bubble shit and
this sort of asset speculation is also a huge part
of the value of Tesla stock is just you know,
people who've been given a whole bunch of access to
cheap credit and by and by people, I mean like
not really you and me, like a bunch of unbelievaly
(24:52):
rich people have access to like incredibly cheap loans and
they use that money to buy Tesla stock. This is
a sort of cyclical thing that just continues to increases
the value of the company. And it's not just sort
of like banks and investors. A lot of money that
goes into Tesla comes in there from state pension funds yep,
from a bunch of bunches of a whole bunch of
(25:13):
different countries. And also like a huge number of American states,
like your teacher's pensions are all tied up in this
because pension reform. But the way that we sort of
like lost the pension as a normal thing was that
it was you know, it was converted to for a
one case and the people who still have like regular
state pensions, all of that money is now sort of
invested in the stock market and it puts billions of
dollars into Tesla every year. And so this is also
(25:36):
another aspect. This is this is the broader structural level
on which on which US macroeconomic policy was designed to
create a bunch of companies like Tesla, and then US
sort of like micro policy, the microcreation of markets to
tax credits and you know, all of these government contracts
that they've been given to do like everything from like
fucking build these cars to like put spy satellites in orbit, right,
(25:59):
and like the US, like contracting got startled. Like now,
I mean, like all of this stuff, right is is
literally how Elon Musk was created. Yeah, but there is
a third, even deeper level in which you know, we
can look at at how how these cars are actually
produced and how these rockets are actually produced, and they're
produced by just incredible, the incredible exploitation of a huge
(26:23):
number of workers. And I think people tend to think about,
you know, Tesla workers in the US, but there's Tessa
workers all over the world. There's a huge gigafactory in
shing John, you know, there's factories all over China, and
you know, these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit.
They work in unbelievably dangerous conditions and at the end
of the day they get a very small amount of
(26:44):
money so that the richest man in the world can
get fucking richer every day.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Yeah, and that's before we consider like ingredient pots to Teslas, right,
like the you know that we we just addressed for
instance in our episode on Congo.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yeah, there are.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Pots, the tests, geotests that come out of this country
where there has been a war for as long as
most of us has been alive. Really very little effort
has gone into improving conditions for people there.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Certainly for workers.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
They're doing jobs that are essential to like our economy
and to like Mia and my four for a one
K line going up comes from exploiting workers.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
In Congo to an extent and elsewhere in the world.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Yeah, and you know this is something that there's something
our standard of living is based off of. But at
the end of the day, right, Elon Musks, all of
Elon Musk's profit comes from the fact that the States
monopoly on violence is used to stop all of these
people from ever attempting to resist him. It's deployed in
order to stop these people from taking back the fucking
(27:46):
value that they create. Now, unfortunately, all of this sort
of Neilibal tinkering we've seen for the last fifty years, right,
this attempts to sort of like depoliticize everything and have
everything run by the other technocrats and sort of have
this sort of like non politics where you're voting for
two parties that are like literally even more the same
(28:07):
than they are now. This attempt to do things like
solve climate change to these to these promotion of carbon
markets and create the sort of like stable capitalist hegeniminy
forever has ultimately been self defeating. It's why all attempts
to regulate capital inevitably fail, because the functioning of the
capitalist system, and particularly the function of the way this
version of neoliberalism has worked, has concentrated like the most
(28:32):
wealth ever held by a single human being into the
hands of one guy who was a Nazi. And then
these people use their wealth to cubate political power and
seize control of the state, dismantling the systems that were
meant to regulate them. And you can't solve this problem
with regulation because again, eventually they will simply accumulate enough power,
retake power, and eliminate their regulations. You can't even solve
(28:54):
this problem just by killing them. I see people talk
about like the killing of billionaires in China as like
an example of this and a that's all political faction,
lane fighting stuff, and they'll execute people specifically to sort
of appease like the Chinese workers so that they never
have to fucking watch the pla get right out of
Shanghai again. But the thing is, even if somehow you
use the states to just kill them, right, it doesn't work,
(29:17):
because capitalism will just produce more of these people. If
you actually want to stop this, if you want to
stop this Elon Musk from destroying the entire country and
quite possibly ending all life on earth by fucking with
America's nuclear weapons, un so, they're simply not out of
safety mechanisms. To stop someone from accidentally sending one off,
you were going to have to destroy them completely. The
(29:39):
permanent base of their power, the power of the oligarch,
the power of the billionaire, the power of the dictator,
must be broken. This tiny group of men cannot, as
a class, be allowed to own the stores and factories
and fields and hospitals, supply chains to produce everything we
need to survive. It must belong to us. We create
their wealth. The only way to save this world is
(29:59):
to take it back. If we want to save democracy,
the only way to do it is to extend democracy
into the spheres where Elon Musk rules as a tyrant.
Democracy must march into the workplace to slay the beast
that is lair before the despotism of the workplace consumes
our political democracy and leaves us with despotism there too.
They must cease to rule. They must cease to exist,
(30:20):
not as individuals but as a class, and the only
way to do that is by giving control of their power,
and their property and their wealth to the workers whose
subjugation produced all of it in the first place. That
is the tax that we have in front of us.
The challenge that we face is that we face effectively
the entire might of the American State, which is one
of the most powerful apparatus of repression that has ever
(30:41):
been built. Our advantage is that that apparatus of repression
is currently being run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk,
who are and I cannot emphasize this enough, maybe the
two figures most emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan's,
after his extensive study of a whole bunch of revolutions
on the Revolutions Podcast, concluded to be the great idiots
of history, who who, by their their sheer and unmasterability
(31:05):
to make the wrong decision at every single moment, are
what makes revolutions possible. And if these people are not
the great idiots of history that allow us to bring
them down and stop them from destroying everything that has
ever been in this world that is good, then nothing
else is.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
Yeah, we have the one great stroke of a good
fortune we have, right, is that that the old Paris
been concentrated in their hands of complete idiots who are
addicted to diet coke and and being mad at their children.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Yep. And and they you know, we have already seen
they't they don't understand how this apparatus works.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
They fired the nuke police by accident.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Yeah, so it's very funny that they're stripping themselves of
the means of coercive violence. Yeah, when we start to
make you spoke about controlled opposition, right, and the idea that,
like the great debate of our time is how much
state regulation we should have and how much unfettered anarcha
capitalism we should have. They are drinking the kool aid
(32:07):
that got them in power. That is the one thing
going in our favor right now, that they are dismantling
the means of coercive violence because they genuinely believe the
myth that if the state didn't exist, they could be
even more wealthy and even more tyrannical.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah, and well, and the second advantage that we have
is that been they have said about systematically alienating every
single group of people who they would need as their
political base, they are pissing off the military. They are
pissing off the intelligence services they are going through, and
they are like systematically pissing off the farm states, and
you know, like the farmers obviously do not have that
like don't fucking matter, but they're they're pissing off the
agro businesses. They are individually going through and pissing off
(32:45):
a whole bunch of the of the of the country,
scientific resources. They're going through, they're like fucking with the
Social Security administration. They're individually going through and pissing off
every single group of people on earth who matter, and
people who like us under this system aren't supposed to
matter until we fucking do something about it. And you know,
the other big thing that we have right now is
that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by
(33:08):
actually doing these terrorists, which they didn't think he would do,
and by pulling apart his base of support, and by
putting together coalitions of some of these people and not
all of them, some of them, some of them you
just need to divide and conquer by getting them out
from backing him. Right, Like the whole thing with the
Bolsheviks taking over in the October Revolution was that, but
people just mostly stayed home and that was how they won.
(33:30):
Like that is largely what we need. We need these
people to stay home, but these people can and will,
if we have anything to say about it, be fucking
driven home and hopefully we can bury both the grave
diggers and the people whose graves they were digging in
the same spot in the dust bit of history, and
never have to deal with these fucking assholes again. It
(33:51):
Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It could Happen Here listed directly
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It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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