Fascist Musk, Fascist Tesla: The electric car company would have been unprofitable for seven consecutive years through 2020 without selling its phony government carbon credits to other dirty automakers

 

 Elon Musk’s business empire is built on $38 billion in government funding

... Musk is one of the greatest beneficiaries of the taxpayers’ coffers. ... He has been a big beneficiary of national industrial policy, especially Democrat industrial policy, through government funding. ...

About a third of Tesla’s $35 billion in profits since 2014 has come from selling federal and state regulatory credits to other automakers. The credits are given to automakers that meet certain standards, including selling a certain percentage of zero-emission vehicles. Tesla is the largest seller of these credits to automakers that don’t meet the standards and want to avoid paying a fine.

These credits played a crucial role in the company’s first profitable quarter in 2013 and its first full year of profitability in 2020, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Without the credits, Tesla would have lost more than $700 million in 2020, marking a seventh-consecutive year with no profits, according to an analysis of SEC filings.

With the credits, the company instead reported a $862 million profit.

While Musk has advocated for ending the EV tax credit for consumers, he has said little about these regulatory credits. ...

Nearly a tenth of government money that has benefited Musk’s companies comes from agencies in eight states, including California. ...

In 2016, SpaceX’s success in securing federal contracts prompted rival Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin (and owner of The Washington Post), to say in a company meeting: “Elon’s real superpower is getting government money,” The Post reported. “From now on, we go after everything that SpaceX bids on.”

More.

Musk's many government subsidized businesses are just the currently most prominent examples of American fascism. For bigger ones simply look into the defense industry, the energy industry, or healthcare, or Amazon's early no-sales-tax arrangement which allowed it to become the retail behemoth that it is. President Eisenhower warned us about this long ago, but we're so used to it now that we just take it all for granted.

Real capitalism is swallowed up by the combine between the taxation authority holding a gun to your head, taking your money, and giving it to the corporations.

That's the racket. That's the American way.

Democrats simply hate big oil and are oblivious to the windfall profits of their pals in tech which dwarf those of the oil industry

 

Pandemic overstaffed Amazon cut 100k jobs in 2Q2022

 During the second quarter, Amazon’s workforce shrank by roughly 100,000 jobs to 1.52 million, the biggest quarter-to-quarter contraction in the company’s history. 

More.

As with electric cars, rooftop solar energy is great until it blows up and starts on fire: Now they tell us

 Between April 2020 and June 2021, solar panels atop Amazon fulfillment centers caught fire or experienced electrical explosions at least six different times. ...

The documents, which have never been made public, indicate that between April 2020 and June 2021, Amazon experienced “critical fire or arc flash events” in at least six of its 47 North American sites with solar installations, effecting 12.7% of such facilities. Arc flashes are a kind of electrical explosion. ... 

By June of last year, all of Amazon’s U.S. operations with solar had to be taken offline . . ..

More.

Ralph Northam was barely out of office for one day before Amazon started to run low on Kiwi black

 

Drudge soft-peddles the Biden stories, distorts the Trump stories

 Did Trump say Afghanistan was "better than the US" as Drudge claims? Nope. Trump said their elections were better run than the US election in 2020.

Was a "White House" counselor's brother recently hired by Amazon as a lobbyist? Depends on which "White House" you mean. Certainly not the current one. The "White House" counselor is Joe Biden's counselor, and his brother conveniently was just recently hired by Amazon to lobby for it.

When I don't have Rush Limbaugh to kick around anymore, I'll always have Drudge.

$150 million Amazon facility in Gaines Township Michigan appearing complete in Oct will sit idle until 2020

Hm.

LOL: Director of gay and lesbian art museum opposed to Amazon "invasion" of Queens, New York

“The concern of fellow Queens residents in the face of the Amazon invasion of LIC is that job creation is a euphemism for job relocation. The thousands of jobs will bring new people to the area and displace thousands of long-term residents to the fringes of the city,” Casals explains. “We lost the battle for the souls of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Please, stay away from Queens.”

Our so-called friends the Chicoms installed spychips on thousands of servers used by Apple, Amazon and a host of others

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies:

The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, two officials say, by operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army. In Supermicro, China’s spies appear to have found a perfect conduit for what U.S. officials now describe as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.

Liberty means being able to resist buying anything from Amazon since early May and feeling that's OK

This guy's kidding about Amazon, right?

From the story here at CNBC:

Most people who cook and who don't leave the house often can probably get by pretty well using only Amazon services. You get can clothes, food and entertainment all from a single company, which is pretty wild. Who else offers that?

This guy obviously never heard of Meijer, a big box store where you can get your eyeglasses, prescriptions, haircut, banking, groceries, books, entertainment, electronics, hardware, automotive, pet supplies, flowers and on and on. And they deliver. There are others, and were.

Like Prange's.

Prange's was a department store in my hometown back in the 1960s. It had everything, from toys, sporting goods and groceries to shoes, clothing and furniture, and it delivered. My mom used it all the time. And for fun we went there, on the bus. It had a lunch counter where you could sit down and eat, and an express counter for fast food like foot long hot dogs, and right across from that a wonderful bakery, too.

What goes around comes around. 

What a shock: Now beholden to Amazon, WaPo approves of Senate's TPP vote

Here:

This action is a great victory for the president, who aggressively lobbied wavering members of his party, and for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who piloted the measure past every last-minute obstacle its opponents threw up.

This bipartisan vote was also, we’re obliged to say, a victory for truth. 

Oh yeah that'll work: Amazon hires Obama's liar to run PR and lobbying

Jay Carney.

Story here.

Michigan legislators cut the baby in half in lameduck twilight, requiring internet sales tax collection from businesses with any form of physical presence

Reported here:

SB 658 and SB 659 extend the state's sales and use taxes to out-of-state companies with a physical "nexus" or presence in the state. That would apply these taxes to companies like Amazon, which has a presence in the state but not a retail front.

A ruling worthy of a rabbi.