Latest news with #H.W.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Musk's Government Teardown Isn't About Cutting Waste — It's a Land Grab
In one of the opening scenes of the award-winning movie There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis' protagonist, Daniel Plainview, stands with his adopted son, little H.W., atop his shoulders, giving the movie's famous 'I'm an oil man' speech. Plainview uses H.W. as a prop to soften his image, describing himself as a family man, running a family business, as he lobbies to win new contracts for lucrative oil leases out West at the dawn of the gusher age. The movie is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's Oil, a novel depicting the corruption and exploitation that characterized the American oil industry at that time. Sinclair drew his inspiration from the Teapot Dome scandal of the Warren G. Harding administration, a scandal some historians still deem the largest political corruption scandal in American history. Harding's Secretary of the Interior, Albert Bacon Fall, sold several Naval petroleum reserves, including those at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to private oil companies without competitive bidding, in exchange for personal kickbacks, making Fall a very, very wealthy man. Data is the new oil. Swap in President Trump for Harding and Elon Musk and his young son X for Daniel and H.W., and this, my friends, is the Teapot Thunderdome. Anyone who still views Musk's project to be about improving government efficiency or modernizing government technology or eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse is not playing with a full deck. This is a land grab. Musk has seized nearly every major data repository in the federal government and may now access the Social Security numbers, employment records, banking information, and tax returns of the majority of Americans. If you are a veteran, use Medicare, or have applied for Social Security Disability Insurance, he may have a chunk of your medical history too. The value of this treasure trove of data is hard to calculate — but given Musk's keen interest in amassing enough data to build an artificial intelligence empire with his AI platform, Grok, it is safe to assume he has a pretty good idea. It certainly exceeds the $300 million he spent to put Trump in office. It's not just your personal data he's after either. This is corporate espionage in broad daylight. Musk and his DOGE boys now have access to the business and technology ideas of America's best and brightest. They are thumbing through tens of millions of new business applications at the Small Business Administration in a terrifying game of Shark Tank in reverse. We can only assume the United States Patent and Trademark Office will be their next stop, if they are not there already. Musk has also ransacked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau where he'll find detailed information on the future competitors of his new digital payment platform collaboration with Visa, X Money. Over at the Food and Drug Administration he'll find immensely valuable information from clinical trials evaluating the safety and efficacy of medical devices, like those of the competitors to his new brain chip company, Neuralink. Meanwhile, Musk is after larger and more lucrative federal contracts for his companies, Starlink, Space X, and Tesla. The fruits of his labor are already bearing: The Federal Aviation Administration announced this week that they'll use Starlink to upgrade its IT systems. Further, he can axe the regulators tasked with keeping an eye on companies. To date, Musk has shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and helped Trump fire labor law enforcers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, both of which have investigated Musk's companies for illegal hostility and harassment of their workers. The Teapot Dome scandal was a wakeup call for policymakers, and they strengthened and passed a number of laws in its wake. Albert Fall became the first Cabinet secretary to go to prison. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress had the power to compel testimony and Congress strengthened the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, regulating campaign finance. Congress also gave the Ways and Means Committee the ability to obtain the tax records of any taxpayer, power they used to eventually secure the public release of Trump's tax returns. Toward the end of There Will Be Blood, Day-Lewis' Plainview lectures his rival, played by Paul Dano, on the cutthroat nature of the oil business. He explains that if they both have a milkshake, but Day-Lewis has a straw that reaches Dano's milkshake, 'I drink your milkshake,' making a loud, exaggerated slurping sound. 'I drink it up,' he concludes. Elon Musk is drinking America's milkshake. We must stop him before he drinks us dry. More from Rolling Stone GOP Leaders Advise Lawmakers to Simply Stop Hosting Town Halls: Report Who Is the Anonymous Data Expert Telling Elon Which Cuts to Make? Trump Eviscerates a Bedrock Public Health and Environmental Protection Law Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
Yahoo
26-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘Marriage is no longer sexual servitude': European court condemns France over ‘marital duty'
The European Court of Human Rights ruled on Thursday that French courts had violated a woman's rights by citing her refusal to have sex as grounds for divorce. The landmark case condemned outdated notions of marital duties, sparking debates on consent in France. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled on Thursday in favour of a 69-year-old Frenchwoman, identified as H.W., whose husband had obtained a divorce by citing her refusal to have sex as marital misconduct. The Strasbourg-based court found that France had violated H.W.'s right to respect for private and family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It condemned the notion of marital duties based on obligation, emphasising that such interpretations undermine bodily autonomy. 'This victory is for all women who, like me, have faced unjust judicial decisions that undermine their bodily integrity and right to privacy,' H.W. said in a statement after the ruling. H.W. filed her case with the ECHR in 2021 after exhausting all legal avenues in France. She first petitioned for divorce in 2012, citing years of verbal and physical abuse and her ex-husband's prioritisation of work over their family life. Read more on FRANCE 24 EnglishRead also:EU rights court rules Frenchwoman not 'at fault' in divorce for refusing sexFrance unveils new measures to protect women in wake of Pelicot affair
