Elon Musk

[Thumpalumpacus]

So simple and predictable too. Stay out of politics and everybody judges your product on its merits. Dive deep into politics and you turn off about 50% of them - regardless of what side you take. Such a no-brainer to not mix business with politics. It's a guaranteed loss.

It depends; and it seems like especially if you're diving into left-wing poltics (and I mean "left-wing" in the loosest way possible, because the right tends to not grasp differences in ideas like Stalinism and saying that maybe putting immigrants into what may as well be death camps is something we shouldn't do), it can work out pretty well for you. Even from the right, at least as long as the right-winger in question doesn't understand things like "if you buy something just to destroy it, they still have your money."

To be fair, when Bud Light, an unreasonably popular brand of beer here in America, featured a transgender model on some cans and in some ads, their core base of Redneckistan alcoholics stopped buying BL and shifted to other watery beers of equally-questionable provenance. Coca-Cola saw something similar happen a few years ago, though not to such an extent, because of their corporate support of equal-rights. Hobby Lobby, Tractor Supply Co, and others as well have garnered conservative consumers who do not want to do business with companies which treat employees decently without regard to race, gender, or sexual identity.

Conservatives are not averse to "cancel culture"; they don't mind mounting boycotts and avoiding companies they don't like. I'm not complaining about that here, either. I'm just pointing out their hypocrisy

[Fake Messiah]

A new report found that in just six months, Elon Musk's cost-cutting agency wasted more than $21 billion. Other estimates have found that the cuts will cost more than they save in the long run.

In order to quickly thin the ranks of government, Musk offered federal employees the opportunity to retire early with their benefits and pay through September 30—a deal that around 200,000 took. The Senate report calculates that the government has spent $14.8 billion to pay these employees not to work for eight months.

Roughly another 100,000 employees were also involuntarily fired from their jobs, and had to receive severance pay that amounts to an additional $6.1 billion.

DOGE's funding freezes also resulted in massive waste: freezes on loans for energy utility projects meant that the government lost out on $263 million worth of interest payments and fees. Meanwhile, $110 million worth of food and medicine was left to spoil in warehouses due to the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

DOGE's firing of thousands of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees could cost $395 billion in lost revenues over the next decade, and potentially as much as $2.4 trillion if the decrease in enforcement leads to more tax-dodging.

Musk also virtually eliminated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which has returned over $26 billion to American consumers since its creation in 2011 while costing a fraction of that amount to run.

Even the $125 million cut from USAID—which the White House has claimed results in "no return for the American people"—is projected to result in nearly $29 billion lost each year by U.S.-based organizations.

Meanwhile, the human costs to these cuts, especially to USAID, have been catastrophic, with hundreds of thousands already dead from preventable diseases in a matter of months, and potentially as many as 14 million by the end of the decade.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/doge-w...f-billions