[U] Bob Reich, On Musk's "Fee-dom" -- Free For Him; Not You -- On Twitter... "Musk Is To Freedom Of Speech, As Trump Is To TRUTH."

UPDATE: Trading halted, in Twitter. The claim is that the board has agreed to his price. Press release shortly. Ugh. This, from a guy who stifled his employees' CONSTITUTIONAL right to speak about organizing a union, as found by an NLRB order. ick. End update.

This is a follow up, in the relatively unlikely case Musk is able to wrest control of Twitter from its public shareholders in the next couple of weeks or months.

Hat tip, here, to The Guardian (UK), for hosting Professor Reich's thoughts, here -- he is spot on, to the syllable:

. . .When billionaires like Musk justify their motives by using “freedom,” beware. What they actually seek is freedom from accountability. They want to use their vast fortunes to do whatever they please -- unconstrained by laws or regulations, shareholders, or even consumers.

The “free market” increasingly reflects the demands of big money. Unfriendly takeovers, such as Musk is mounting at Twitter, weren’t part of the “free market” until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Before then, laws and regulations constrained them. Then came corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and Michael Milken. Their MO was to find corporations whose assets were worth more than their stock value, borrow against them, acquire enough shares to force them to cut costs (such as laying off workers, abandoning their communities, busting unions, and taking on crushing debt), and cash in.

But the raiders’ antics often imposed huge social costs. They pushed America from stakeholder capitalism (where workers and communities had a say in what corporations did) to shareholder capitalism (where the sole corporate goal is to maximize shareholder value). Inequality skyrocketed, insecurity soared, vast swaths of America were abandoned, and millions of good jobs vanished....

The raiders altered the “free market” to allow them to do this. That’s what the super-rich do. There’s no “free market” in nature. The “free market” depends on laws and rules. If you have enough money, you can buy changes in those laws and rules that make you even more money. (You can also get the government to subsidize you -- Musk has received a reported $4.9 billion, so far.)

“Free speech” is another freedom that turns on wealth. As a practical matter, your ability to be heard turns on the size of the megaphone you can buy. If you’re extremely rich you can purchase the Washington Post or own Fox News. If you’re the wealthiest person in the world you can buy one of the biggest megaphones in the world called Twitter -- and then decide who can use it, what its algorithms are going to be, and how it either invites or filters out big lies....

Musk’s real goal has nothing to do with the freedom of others. His goal is his own unconstrained freedom -- the freedom to wield enormous power without having to be accountable to laws and regulations, to shareholders, or to market competition -- which is why he’s dead set on owning Twitter.

Unlike his ambitions to upend transportation and interstellar flight, this one is dangerous. It might well upend democracy. . . .

This is extremely well thought out. It is, in fact, where Elon is headed. Damn, thanks Bob.

Now, do go be excellent to one another. . . and keep your eye on the Amazon No. 2 vote, on Staten Island. . . that's the "canary, in the coal mine" -- for union organizing rights.

नमस्ते