Robber Baron Elon Musk Takes His Toys and Stomps Off to Texas
Our corporate media overlords manage to lift up individuals who are mostly assholes, but tend to be rich. And frame those working to mitigate injustices created by these same robber barons as somehow unreasonable. I guess it’s just part of selling us on “everything is fine” when we know it’s not.
This week it’s Elon Musk vs. Lorena Gonzalez.
Musk is rich. He’s eccentric. He’s smart. I’d buy one of his cars if I could. And there isn’t a whit of empathy to be found in his soul.
The hubbub about his announced move of Tesla Headquarters to Texas as some sort of a big “win” for freedom loving Americans and a slap in the face for California commies.
Now Faux News and some of their cronies are championing the idea of blaming Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez for the relocation based on a profane Tweet.
I guess all the righties need something else to do now that their “People don’t want to work because of unemployment benefits” economic theories have collapsed.
Let’s set the scene with a couple of facts.
CEO Elon Musk announced at Tesla's annual shareholder meeting last week that he's moving Tesla's headquarters from California to Austin, Texas.
Musk blamed it on:
A lack of space to expand the Fremont factory, and
The high cost of living
From the New York Times:
“There’s a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area,” he said, adding that high housing prices there translate to long commutes for some employees. The Texas factory, which is near Austin and will manufacture Tesla’s Cybertruck, is minutes from downtown and from an airport, he said.
Mr. Musk was an outspoken early critic of pandemic restrictions, calling them “fascist” and predicting in March 2020 that there would be almost no new cases of virus infections by the end of April. In December, he said he had moved himself to Texas to be near the new factory. His other company, SpaceX, launches rockets from the state.
A blog that covers Tesla dug up a Gonzalez "Fuck Elon Musk" tweet from 2020 along with Musk's response, and posited that it amounted to the motivation for him to pull up stakes and relocate to Texas.
Musk agreed on Twitter.
Never mind that Gonzalez was angrily responding to Musk’s decision to defy local health authorities and reopen a manufacturing plant at the height of he first COVID-19 wave.
The Assembly woman knew that there would be no consequences for a corporate decision to endanger hundreds of employee lives, because consequences are not a thing that happens to a tech-bro these days. And she was right. People got sick and Musk made money.
The facts of the matter don’t matter because that’s how things are done in right wing silos. And context? I mean what the hell does that mean when it comes to ‘owning the liberals.’
Here’s Bill Murphy at Inc on the ridiculousness of this premise:
But let's accept for purposes of the rest of this article that an ill-advised, angry, or mean tweet truly switched Musk from "wandering eye mode" to "heck with that, we're out of here."
Can you imagine anything more ironic?
Musk, who has so many Twitter followers that he would be one of the most popular and successful influencers on social media if he chose to devote himself to it, and whose tweets have been known to land him in hot water on more than one occasion--leaving the state at least in part, over a tweet?
***
If California really was all the things the righties claim it to be, we’d have run Musk out on a rail years ago, and auctioned his empire off to the highest bidder. Instead, we gave him $200 billion in subsidies.
https://twitter.com/AsmMarcBerman/status/1447251986827653125?s=20
Again with the pesky facts, the decision to move Tesla HQ to Texas is not that big a deal. Taxpayers in Austin will (if they haven’t already) cough up a bunch of budget busting incentives on promises of revenues that will, never, ever, happen.
The same Texas legislature that incentivized abortion bounty hunters and fought hard against the imaginary threat of voter fraud found time this year consider a new tax on EV owners that, at up to $400 per year, would be the highest in the nation.
Another hinky thing about Tesla and Texas is that it’s illegal for the company to sell its cars there.
***
Elon Musk may have the money, but I’m doubtful he’ll ever be remembered as somebody who made the world a better place. I’m sure his antics will be remembered along with his status as somebody who people felt obliged to kiss his ass.
His enemies have been and will be the broken souls and bodies he’s climbed over to get to what he thinks is the top. Fortunately for him, they’ve all signed non-disclosure agreements requiring mediation by a well paid minion.
Owen Diaz, a former contract worker who was hired in 2015 via a staffing agency, is one of the lucky ones. Last week a jury awarded him $137 million in damages because Tesla’s culture enabled racial taunts and offensive graffiti the man had to endure at the electric carmaker’s auto plant in Fremont, Calif.
***
Now let’s get to the other player in this story, Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez.
Gov. Pete Willson’s crusade to demonize Latinos in California fired up an ambitious daughter of immigrants. And she’s never forgotten where she came from nor the historical forces that have advanced the causes of working people in this country.
Her critics say she’s owned by Big Labor. They’re either being disingenuous or they’ve never actually dealt with her. They should try flipping that coin if they want to understand Gonzalez.
There aren’t many legislators who actually get to pick and choose what bills they want to go to the mats for; she’s one of them. There also aren't many legislators whose bills are just about guaranteed to make the California Chamber of Commerce no-no list each year.
She has been known to settle for good over perfect, but come back at it the following year.
Let’s sample a few of her accomplishments in the past year:
Crime: While right wingers bellyache about criminal justice reform, Gonzalez went after one of the egregious ongoing criminal acts. Wage theft — including minimum wage, overtime, rest break and off-the-clock violations — dwarfs all other kinds of theft. In California, minimum wage violations cost workers close to $2 billion annually. And companies usually have gotten away with it.
AB 1003 made the intentional theft of wages, tips, benefits, or compensation — over $950 for one employee and over $2,350 for two or more employees in any 12 consecutive month period — punishable as grand theft. Sharp eyed readers will remember the $950 number as the one that sticks in the craw of our state’s prison industrial complex types; they say it’s too high. Huh.
Fair Wages for fair work. Writing about labor law these days involves cutting through decades of framing that glorifies capital and denigrates labor.
One of those frames is the mythology of Big Tech being allowed to trample humans in the name of innovation. Exploitation is exploitation, no matter what you call it or how you sell it. The results are always the same: massive wealth acquisition by a few, subsistence income for the many.
"She's an absolute fierce champion for the working class. There are other politicians who see themselves as great dealmakers, Lorena's more like, 'How do I get the most for working people?'" California Assemblyman Alex Lee, who represents the Silicon Valley area.
Gonzalez’ AB 286 mandates an itemized fee disclosure for food delivery apps like DoorDash, UberEats, and GrubHub to both customers and restaurants for each transaction — one that lists food price, fees, tips, and commissions. It says delivery services pay the entire gratuity to their drivers, following a lawsuit alleging that DoorDash had stolen drivers' tips.
Gov. Newsom just signed AB 701, which says that productivity demands for companies like Amazon cannot come at the expense of health and safety, for example by pushing workers to skirt safety techniques or skip rest breaks to which they're entitled. It also calls on companies to reveal details of the quota systems they use to ramp up productivity in their warehouses.
From NPR:
Amazon carefully watches "time off task," which the company says is to monitor for "issues with the tools that people use," but also to identify underperforming workers. Too much time off task after a while and the algorithm can flag you, though Amazon says firings over performance are rare, less than 1% for operations employees.
Still, many workers, such as [former employee turned organizer, Yesenia] Barrera, have argued the pace inside Amazon warehouses can be unhealthy and unsustainable. Investigations by news organizations and by the labor-backed Strategic Organizing Center have found that the rate of serious injuries at Amazon warehouses has been nearly double the industry average.
The Assemblywoman doesn’t always get her way: Gov. Newsom vetoed Assembly Bill 616, a priority of the United Farm Workers that would have made it easier for farm employees to organize.
And...although it wasn’t part of this year’s crop of legislation, no account of her efforts should exclude AB5, which codified a state Supreme Court ruling reclassifying gig workers as employees. A massive corporate effort to negate the legislation (via Prop 22) was overturned last month after a California Superior Court judge ruled the ballot initiative unconstitutional.
Police brutality. In the old days (OB back in the sixties), conflict with police was often initiated as officers marched into crowds to disperse them. The armaments used in making the wars we were protesting against came home with the troops. All-too-often modern law enforcement crowd control involves the indiscriminate use of kinetic projectile weapons.
From the Sacramento Bee:
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law on Thursday that will restrict law enforcement officers’ use of kinetic projectile weapons, such as rubber bullets, and chemical agents, such as tear gas.
The new law — Assembly Bill 48, authored by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego — only allows the use of such weapons and chemical agents after deescalation techniques have been attempted, repeated audible announcements have been made announcing the intent to use such weapons, and people are given a reasonable opportunity to disperse and leave the scene.
The law also requires police to make an “objectively reasonable effort” to identify people engaged in violent acts compared to people who are not, and indiscriminate firing into crowds is prohibited.
***
Elon Musk isn’t all evil, just as Lorena Gonzalez is no saint. But I felt motivated to write this post after seeing a bullcrap anecdote being elevated into a big deal.
The real Big Deal is that in California being kind to robber barons isn’t always the default mode.
Hey folks! Be sure to like/follow Words & Deeds on Facebook. If you’d like to have each post emailed to you check out the simple subscription form on the right side of the front page.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com