This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

Strange days in the auto industry, with high prices and extreme interest rates. A lot of auto manufacturers are struggling just to stay afloat these days. The American economy is teetering on the abyss, with ten million automobile repossessions projected for this year. And then there is Elon. A man who says he wants to die on Mars. And I’m good with that. How soon can he be ready to go?

But a strange thing happened on the way to the launch pad. Is Elon getting ready to bail on us? The Tesla board of directors just approved Elon’s new pay package of ONE TRILLON DOLLARS. Sure, that sounds fair. Jesus hitting clean up and playing third, isn’t worth that kind of money. My former boss was a multi, multi, millionaire. And he explained to me that he took a small salary but kept his real money inside of the business. When he retired, he took his onetime capital gains exemption and took his money out.

If the owner is taking money out of the business, there must be some reason why. After all, Elon already has all the money he could spend in ten life times. Did you know, if you work for Tesla and need a company car, they’ll give you a Cyber truck? They can’t give the damn things away and they have tens of thousands of them gathering dust and rust. The bloom is off the rose for electric vehicles. Once upon a time, Tesla was new and hip, and with it. Nowadays, you can get an electric vehicle almost anywhere.

Tesla doesn’t have any new models. I wonder why? If you can pay the boss a trillion dollars, surely you can design some new models. But back a hundred years ago or so, the curved dash Oldsmobile was one of the best-selling cars in the country. Billy Durant, the founder of General Motors, bought Oldsmobile for a million dollars. Durant then asked to be shown their plans for new models. They explained they didn’t have any. Durant lamented. He’d just paid a million dollars for highway billboards. There was nothing there.

Could history be repeating itself? Elon famously hitched his electric wagon to the backside of Donald Trump. When will they ever learn? Waving his chainsaw around gleefully gutting government departments. Elon successfully made himself one of the most unpopular people in the world. The stock price and sales fell dramatically. Driving a Tesla was soon considered a kind of a dick move. Elon was advised by company execs to shut the hell up. Then Elon disappeared in his submarine after famously quarreling with the orange Hitler.

It’s the reason Facebook gave me the boot. Suddenly, my Facebook feed was filled with Tesla propaganda. In one fabricated story, Elon had a flat tire. And a poor young man of the minority variety. Changed the tire for Elon, and Elon was so pleased. He gave the young man a $70,000 Tesla as a reward. Let’s break this story down. Elon drives himself around? No chauffeur, no body guard and no auto club? No cell phone? “You gotta help me, kid! I’m a multi billionaire, all alone and helpless on this earth. I have a flat tire and I’m really scared!”

They call it reputation repair. You do something stupid like getting into bed with Donald Trump. Then you hire people to say nice things about you in phony articles. Until they forget what an asshole, he really is. To plant fake news stories about you. Elon opens a homeless shelter or Elon rescues babies from a burning orphanage. And all I ever did, which so disturbed Meta, was to point out the similarity to NAZI propaganda. How the Nazis would also print fake news stories. Joseph Goebbels broke down and a poor French boy helped to fix his half-track. Total lies and complete fabrications.

Elon was easy money for Facebook. So what, if it was all a bunch of bullshit. Easy money! I say easy money! Not social media, but social propaganda, with Winston Smith reporting.

Slowly, ever so slowly, like a U-boat on the prowl. Tesla’s stock price began creeping back up towards where it had once been. If you look at, say, Toyota. Their value and assets are 8.1 times their earnings. Tesla’s are 300 times their assets. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. It’s Billy Durant’s Oldsmobile all over again. Smoke and mirrors, a lot of big talk and unfulfilled promises. But when they got there, the cupboard was bare, and so the poor stockholder got none.

Investors were so pleased with Elon’s pay package the stock dropped 4%. The global auto industry is headed for a rough patch. Tesla has no new models available and a declining reputation. Is Elon getting ready to take the money and run? It sure looks like it. The owner of the company suddenly pays himself a trillion dollars, puts on his hat and heads for the door. What do you think he plans to do? I mean, what could a car company do with a trillion dollars anyway? Design new models, maybe?

The orange king of corruption announced yesterday. He had struck a deal with Eli Lilly to lower the cost of anti-obesity drugs to be covered by Medicare. Isn’t that great? The government is shut down and employees aren’t being paid. Forty-two million Americans have no SNAP Benefits headed for Thanksgiving Day. But he’s signed a deal for designer drugs. The cynical total cluelessness of it all. I wonder what the deal cost Eli Lilly? How many Hrump funny money crypto coins did they have to buy to make that dream become a reality?

I wondered until I was certain. I bet with enough money I could get meth and heroin legalized.

Hrump is genuinely frightened. His tariff argument before the Extreme court was a bust. (NO SALE!) Hrump warns between mental lapses. If we have to pay back all of that tariff money. It will be a disaster for this country! The court shouldn’t act so irresponsibly. That’s it exactly! This is all the court’s fault! Why, if they rule against Hrump and his night school lawyer brigade. They will be doing irreparable harm to this country! It couldn’t be Hrump’s fault. Maybe he should have asked for some responsible legal advice first, before running off half-cocked. (Pun fully intended)

It’s the dictator’s lament. In Hitler’s will, he blamed the German people for not working hard enough and for not fighting hard enough. That’s why Germany lost the war. It couldn’t have been his fault.  

“Our civilization is wonderful, in certain spectacular and meretricious ways; wonderful in scientific marvels and inventive miracles; wonderful in material inflation, which it calls advancement, progress, and other pet names; wonderful in its spying-out of the deep secrets of Nature and its vanquishment of her stubborn laws; wonderful in its extraordinary financial and commercial achievements; wonderful in its hunger for money, and in its indifference as to how it is acquired; wonderful in the hitherto undreamed-of magnitude of its private fortunes and the prodigal fashion in which they are given away to institutions devoted to the public culture; wonderful in its exhibitions of poverty; wonderful in the surprises which it gets out of that great new birth, Organization, the latest and most potent creation and miracle-worker of the commercialized intellect, as applied in transportation systems, in manufactures, in systems of communication, in news-gathering, book-publishing, journalism; in protecting labor; in oppressing labor; in herding the national parties and keeping the sheep docile and usable; in closing the public service against brains and character; in electing purchasable legislatures, blatherskite Congresses, and city governments which rob the town and sell municipal protection to gamblers, thieves, prostitutes, and professional seducers for cash. It is a civilization which has destroyed the simplicity and repose of life; replaced its contentment, its poetry, its soft romance-dreams and visions with the money-fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions, and the sleep which does not refresh; it has invented a thousand useless luxuries, and turned them into necessities; it has created a thousand vicious appetites and satisfies none of them; it has dethroned God and set up a shekel in His place. – Mark Twain