State capture? Elon Musk threatens US Congress for voting

You 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.

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.”

He also posed an emotive question to his 207 million followers: “ Ever seen a bigger piece of pork? “

Yes and no.

Mr Musk’s intervention is pretty porky. It’s 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.

I was late to the idea of “state capture”, considering the concept was defined way before the Guptas, back in a 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.

Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com