 You know, it is really easy to get distracted by Elon Musk's stupidity, especially when he just can't stop tweeting literally every stupid thought that comes to mind. For example, Lance from the Serves shared some new conspiracy theories that he's spreading. One alleging, quote, the long-term goal of the so-called border security bill is enabling illegals to vote. That's not true. And another, where he agrees with Kim dot com, that it really feels like the civil war has already begun because the deep state and Democrats are turning kids LGBTQ, so they'll vote for Democrats. But I mean, to be fair to him, he doesn't just post white supremacist and xenophobic conspiracy theories on the main because he also likes to engage in a little bit of shitposting from time to time as well. For example, he thought that this meme of Mark Cuban as a trans woman was fire. And he also asked LGBTQ and on, I guess, no, now he also thought it was funny how woke ideologs are now making historical figures like Alexander the Great gay, because as you all know, Alexander the Great was very, very straight. I'm being sarcastic, of course, because even the QAnon shaman pointed out that it is widely known that Alexander the Great was bisexual and actually preferred men. But I mean, that's where we're at, where the fucking QAnon shaman is presumably smarter than the richest, most powerful man on the planet. A little bit scary to think about that. But what I'm getting at here is the fact that there's this Trumpian quality about Elon Musk where he's able to get us all to focus on the spectacle and what he says more than what he actually does. Now I'm guilty of this as well. It's like watching a train wreck, right? You can't look away when the richest man on earth is reportedly abusing ketamine and drinking molly water. That's just objectively interesting. But putting aside all of the sensationalism surrounding Elon Musk, he is doing a lot of damage. And it's not just that he's doing damage to his own employees. He is actively working to make the lives of Americans worse in a plethora of ways. And other billionaires are now teaming up with him to accomplish that mission. Vice News reports, Trader Joe's has become the second company in a month to argue in court that the National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional following the lead of Elon Musk's SpaceX as both companies face board charges for firing employees. These two major corporations aren't alone in attempting to protect their interest by undermining public institutions. Meta is also arguing in an ongoing lawsuit that the Federal Trade Commission is unconstitutional. A legal expert told Motherboard that these companies are attempting to take advantage of what they believe is a friendly Supreme Court. Judges currently lien right by a 6-3 margin while they can. SpaceX accused of illegally firing eight workers who were critical of Musk followed its lawsuit one day after the board brought charges against it, arguing that the agency lacked presidential oversight and violated the separation of Paris provision outlined in the U.S. Constitution. Trader Joe's accused of union busting stated in a hearing that the board was unconstitutional and that it would preserve the issue for further briefing and argument according to a transcript of the hearing shared by the Huffington Post. These companies are not the first to bring charges of unconstitutionality against core government agencies. In November, Meta sued the Federal Trade Commission for unconstitutionality in a bid to prevent the FTC from preventing the social media giant from profiting off of data collected from minors. Yeah, so what's happening here is obviously extremely dangerous. When government agencies determine that these corporations break the law, rather than just accepting their punishment which is usually nothing more than a slap on the wrist, they're now choosing to not only challenge the authority of the agencies that are supposed to be regulating them, they're choosing to try to destroy them literally and get them dismantled by declaring their existence unconstitutional. That is absolutely dangerous. Oh, you say that I illegally fire Tesla workers? Well, I say that your existence is unconstitutional and the NLRB should cease to exist. Oh, you think that we shouldn't be allowed to profit off of data that we stole from minors? Well, guess what? We think that it's unconstitutional for you to try to stop us from doing that. See, this is why the left says that billionaires shouldn't exist. Because in a capitalist society, wealth translates directly into power. And that level of wealth makes people so powerful that they literally threaten democracy itself. And that's kind of what we're seeing right now. I mean, government agencies now have to worry about being dismantled if they go after companies and CEOs that are just too powerful. And that is not a healthy environment for a democratic system. Now these existential challenges to government agencies' task with protecting consumers and workers comes after billionaires already rigged our entire judicial system in their favor. First, by changing campaign finance laws through Supreme Court cases like Buckley and Citizens United, and then by stacking the bench with pro-corporate judges through a variety of methods. And that has all culminated in this dangerous moment where corporations have usurped the power of government agencies that are supposed to regulate them and protect us from them. Elon Musk is leading us into a dangerous new era where these large multinational corporations aren't just able to easily thwart accountability, but they now might be able to just outright destroy democracies who try to rein them in. Vice News continues. In April, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of a company challenging the FTC's constitutional authority, Axon Enterprise, a company that makes tasers and police body cameras acquired competitor and police camera maker, Vivu, in 2018. The FTC challenged the acquisition two years later. Axon sued the agency for exercising unconstitutional authority, and after losing an appeals court decision in 2021, argued the case before the Supreme Court. The court ruled that the FTC Act, which established the agency and its administrative procedures in 1914, did not displace a district court's federal question jurisdiction over claims, challenging as unconstitutional the structure or existence of the commission. The FTC abandoned its challenge. This means that lawsuits about the FTC's constitutionality, such as that posed by Metta in November, are legally possible. Laura Phillips Sawyer, a professor of law at the University of Georgia who studies antitrust, told Motherboard that the Supreme Court's new major questions doctrine made it easier for companies to challenge agency's authority. The Chevron doctrine, which everyone is talking about right now, resulted from a challenge to the EPA's administrative authority in 1984. The EPA was not enforcing a rule critical to the Clean Air Act, Phillips Sawyer said in an email. The court said that non-enforcement was within the agency's purview as it was empowered by Congress and the statute. It was a doctrine of deference to administrative agencies. Of course, now the Supreme Court has created the major questions doctrine, which asserts that the court can slash will evaluate administrative rulemaking by agencies and determine if the promulgated rule falls within the authorities granted by Congress and the statute she continued. Now the court seems to suggest that if deference is gone, all rulemaking might be challenged. So we're on the cusp of a legal paradigm shift where corporate supremacy could become the norm, where they're literally just more powerful than government agencies. Now to be fair, you could already persuasively make that argument because things have been getting worse for a while. A 2014 Princeton study concluded that average citizens have zero impact on policy outcomes compared to interest groups and elites. But I mean, we may be entering an even worse era where the corporate dystopia that rules over us is so much more powerful that they can never be challenged. Democracy cannot exist under these conditions and reigning in corporations and taxing billionaires out of existence is a necessity for the survival of this country. There are no good billionaires and there are no good corporations. And I think that the last couple of years have demonstrated that. So if there was anyone who was thinking, you know, maybe we should allow billionaires to exist, but just tax them more. You can't have people with that much wealth and that much power in this country. If you actually want to live in a democratic system, otherwise the system is just going to collapse into an oligarchy. And it may have already done that, right? But I think that there's still time to save the country, but time is running out. We have billionaires actually trying to destroy government agencies, dismantle US institutions. Do you know how serious of a threat to democracy that is? Like I can't stress that enough. It feels like I'm chicken little right now. But I mean, the sky really is falling in a sense because this is awful. Now Alex Press of Jacobin has an interesting take on this that I'd recommend you check out where, you know, he explains how the supposedly liberal organization, Trader Joe's, is teaming up with a fascist like Elon Musk to destroy the NLRB after they were caught busting unions as well. And Starbucks, another ostensibly liberal company also went mask off in response to the wave of unionization within their company. So I mean, I think these stories are important because I think companies like Starbucks and Trader Joe's, they were viewed by a lot of liberals as the example of a good corporation. They, you know, exhibit corporate responsibility. They care about the communities they're in. That's not true. Every single thing that they do is motivated by profits and profits alone. Anything else that they say is nothing more than window dressing. So you shouldn't believe them when they tell you that they're good. Look at their actions. All it takes is a little bit of unionization and Starbucks loses its shit. So we've got Musk trying to dismantle the NLRB. We've got Zuckerberg trying to dismantle the FTC. And it's only a matter of time until other CEOs of different corporations go after other agencies to challenge their authority as well. I mean, these changes are going to affect all of us in a really negative way. And once this precedent is set where a corporation or CEO can get an entire fucking agency destroyed and it no longer exists, that's scary times. So pay attention to this because for all the stupidity that we see from Elon Musk, what he's doing behind the scenes is much more dangerous.