State capture? Elon Musk threatens US Congress for voting
Elon Musk’s attacks on the US spending bill, labelling it “criminal” and urging electoral consequences for supporting lawmakers, highlight troubling parallels with “state capture,” exposing risks to American political integrity.
Y ou don’t have to be an institutionalist to find it deeply troubling that members of the US Congress would spend days being threatened with dire electoral consequences if they voted for the three-month spending stopgap introduced by House Speaker Mike Johnson to avoid a government shutdown.
Elon Musk has been leading the charge on X (formerly Twitter).
Any member who votes in favour of the bill, which needs to pass before the Dec 20 deadline to keep the government funded, should be voted out of office, Mr Musk wrote, characterising it as “criminal.”
— CREDIT: X/ELON MUSK —
He also posed an emotive question to his 207 million followers: “Ever seen a bigger piece of pork?”
Yes and no.
— CREDIT: X/ELON MUSK —
Mr Musk’s intervention is pretty porky. It’s a fatback of sorts. It’s all to do with his own view and presumably keeps in mind his own businesses and interests.
That he can threaten elected members of the US Congress for voting their conscience or instincts suggests something deeply rotten about the state of American politics. It puts me in mind of “state capture”, a term I first read in the context of South Africa, where the Gupta brothers worked hard to exert influence on the country’s government.
— AI-generated image of Elon Musk as a master puppeteer in the U.S. Congress.
I was late to the idea of “state capture”, considering the concept was defined way before the Guptas, back in 2003. A World Bank report on corruption in Eastern Europe and Central Asia by co-author Joel Hellman said a new term was needed to describe the extraordinary tactics that certain firms owned by oligarchs were using to maintain their dominance of the market. “We noticed that these firms were active players not just in lobbying, which goes on everywhere, but also in using private payments to public officials to shape the laws of institutions in their favour.”
This must be kept in mind in the context of the shenanigans over the US spending bill, opposed by Mr Musk and Mr Trump.
GOING FURTHER
Major heartburn erupts over Mike Johnson's spending bill | AXIOS
State capture: Zuma, the Guptas, and the sale of South Africa | BBC NEWS
How Trump and Elon Musk derailed bipartisan plans for a funding bill, bringing on risk of shutdown | CBS NEWS
Elon Musk helped kill a U.S. Congress bill. But much of what he spread was misinformation | CBC
Trump-backed bill to keep US government running fails to pass | BBC NEWS
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