The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

In revealing Friday that it is considering building a U.S. factory for electric vehicles, German automaker Audi became the latest company to signal that the Biden administration’s support for high-tech and green-energy manufacturing is bearing fruit.

The German carmaker joins a string of manufacturers of cars, computer chips, batteries and solar panels that have announced concrete plans or tentative prospects for boosting U.S. production, all drawn at least in part by subsidies and tax breaks rolled out in White House-backed legislation.

Some of the projects could fail to materialize, and there are larger economic factors motivating the investments. But it’s clear that incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) are helping spark the activity, said Willy Shih, a manufacturing expert at Harvard Business School.

“What it’s done is it’s stimulated a huge wave of new capacity building in the U.S. for EVs and EV materials and batteries,” he said. “I used to be a skeptic about the practicalities of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. Now that I see the impact of the IIJA and Inflation Reduction Act, my observation is, well, that seems to be working.”

Cautious optimism abides.

The bad:

The fiery derailment of a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals in eastern Ohio is coming to represent bigger societal failures. It’s a story about profit-driven rail companies underinvesting in safety, lobbyists weakening rail regulation, and the government’s failure to assure residents’ security from lingering toxins.

But in certain right-wing media precincts, the disaster is about something else: A campaign of discrimination being waged against White people.

“East Palestine is overwhelmingly White, and it’s politically conservative,” Fox News’s Tucker Carlson recently said of the roughly 4,700 residents of the disaster zone. “That shouldn’t be relevant,” he added, but “it very much is.”

It very much isn’t. But ever since the Feb. 3 disaster, Carlson and his comrades have sought to transform East Palestine’s plight into a tale about “woke” Democrats abandoning White communities in the virtuous, forgotten heartland.

What this illustrates is how the right uses race-baiting to deceive people into forgetting that Democrats are now the far more committed party when it comes to investing in such left-behind communities.

Central to Carlson’s insinuation about the “relevance” of East Palestine’s Whiteness is the conduct of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Carlson cites recent remarks by Buttigieg about the construction industry’s racial makeup, sneering that Buttigieg has been neglecting East Palestine specifically to focus on a more “pressing problem,” that “we have too many White construction workers.”

Two-legged rat Carlson, in particular among fascist screechers, is functioning nightly almost exclusively as a rabid, pro-Putin racist perfectly happy to see America burnt to the ground if it accomplishes his cherished goal of a Christofacist autocracy.

The ugly: 

Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams, the under-fire creator of “Dilbert,” in a series of tweets Sunday, blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip after Adams said that White people should “get the hell away from Black people.”

Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

Musk previously tweeted, then later deleted, a reply to Adams’s tweet about media outlets pulling his comic strip, in which Musk asked, “What exactly are they complaining about?”

The billionaire’s comments continue a pattern of Musk expressing more concern about the “free speech” of people who make racist or antisemitic comments than about the comments themselves. Musk’s views on race have been the subject of scrutiny both at Twitter, where he has reinstated far-right accounts, including those of neo-Nazis and others previously banned for hate speech, and at Tesla, which has been the subject of multiple lawsuits alleging a culture of rampant racism and sexual harassment in the workplace.

Private companies are under no obligation to run Adams' comic strip.  They're free to drop it if they believe its author is a racist slug, or for any other reason.  Adams is also free to make racist comments; it's just the consequences he and Musk don't like.  As for noted American history and constitutional law expert Musk?  Well, what else would you expect from that p.o.s.?