Cal Zone Media.
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.
Hi may happy to be here again?
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 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.
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.
Yep, it's great, it's great love. We love making Elon Musk poorer.
Yeah, it's the one line we like to see.
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
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
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
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.
Yeah, I mean, he says a lot of things he doesn't understand.
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 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
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
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.
Not enough capitalism.
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
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 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 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 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.
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.
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 through all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever sort of like scant welfare policies still exist.
Yeah, the states surveying you both for violence reasons and for withdrawing your benefits reasons.
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 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
three percent of Tesla's net income. Forty three percent.
Yeah, so we should explain what a carbon credit is if people I'm familiar.
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 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 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.
They don't have any fossil fuel use at all within their line.
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.
Right, it doesn't look at life cyclists. Yeah, yeah, it just looks at driving the car emissions.
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 produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Like.
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.
Yeah, it's a monopoly.
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 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 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, 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 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.
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.
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.
I wasn't living in my car at that time. It was fine. Yeah, thank you Obama.
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 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
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, 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.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this has been the case. I write about this, like I think two years ago.
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.
Yeah, but even their car sales are enormously bolstered by a seven five hundred dollars tax credit for electric cars.
Oh yeah, I got some tax credit information on electric cars.
It's now the time.
Yeah yeah. Do you want to talk about the other one that's driving these unhinged sales?
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.
And so I did some digging, and I discovered that.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
Right.
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. 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.
At least this was the case when I was looking.
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 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
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 like viable that is as a claim, but well, you know.
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.
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.
Now, I will never buy a new drug because.
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 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.
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 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 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.
Yeah, without a doubt, and it becomes, like you say, it becomes like a status good, and it becomes like a culture war signifier.
Yeah.
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 test list in Boston.
Yep, shout out to that person.
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. 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 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 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 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 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
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.
We stop, it won't happen here after that, because you'll understand and you'll stop it.
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 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 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, 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
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 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
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,
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 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 money so that the richest man in the world can get fucking richer every day.
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.
Yeah, there are.
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.
Certainly for workers.
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.
In Congo to an extent and elsewhere in the world.
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
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
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 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
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,
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 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
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, 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
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 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.
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.
Yep. And and they you know, we have already seen they't they don't understand how this apparatus works.
Right.
They fired the nuke police by accident.
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
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.
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 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 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. 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 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.