- Second class service - 29th October 2024
- Bizarrium - 28th October 2024
- From Russia without love again part one… - 25th October 2024
During 23 years with the BBC, and a 40 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry was always fascinated by the intersection in stories about business as well as politics, and now this is shown in spades by the selection of an unknown capricious senator as Donald Trump’s running mate, which could affect everybody.
What we are seeing now is ‘pushback’ and they always make good stories.
Even better if it comes in the world of business, where it overlaps with the world of politics, because those intersections have always captivated me!
The right wing former American President Donald Trump has picked as his Republican running mate in November’s election, the controversial Senator JD Vance, but almost as soon as he was named there were grumbles of discontent in the world of big business that this was NOT progress.
Mr Vance is backed, though, by a few in the tech world who, some critics claim, are odd balls with dubious records.
Business people are, for example, nervous about Mr Trump’s tariff threats, echoed by Mr Vance, that risk inflaming trade wars, as well as the spectre of mass deportation of immigrants, which may exacerbate labour shortages for firms.
There will be more geopolitical uncertainty, and businesses never like that.
Mr Vance has made doubtful comments about Taiwan and his foreign policy statements have been puzzling to say the least.
Mr Vance quickly established himself as a leading isolationist in the US Senate, and has made his contempt for Ukraine clear.
“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another”, he declared days before Russia’s invasion in 2022, and he once called a congressional visit by Volodymyr Zelensky “grotesque”.
As for the antitrust schemes, which Mr Vance has promoted – they are, again, anathema to many firms.
He is a fan of Lina Khan, who heads the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and like her, he wants to stick it to companies like Alphabet’s Google.
Mr Vance does, though, have fans amongst those working in tech, even if some have questionable backgrounds.
One is controversial Elon Musk, who according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is planning to throw $45 million a month behind Mr Trump’s presidential run, and said the Trump-Vance ticket “resounds with victory”.
Delian Asparouhov of the Founders Fund, a Venture Capital (VC) firm co-founded by Peter Thiel (and Mr Vance once worked in another company of his), jumped the gun with boyish insouciance, tweeting: “We have a former tech vc in the White House. Greatest country on earth baby”.
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the eponymous co-founders of a VC goliath, released a video the day after Mr Vance’s nomination backing Mr Trump (albeit with pretend sheepishness: “Sorry Mom”, Mr Horowitz bleated).
Let’s look in a bit more detail at the background of one of them – Mr Musk, who is behind X/Twitter.
He said “go fuck yourself” to advertisers after they had threatened to pull ads from his platform following an earlier alleged anti-Semitic controversy, but insisted that this was actually intended as a general point on free speech rather than a comment to the wider advertising industry.
Mr Musk has never been shy of taking legal action, although his apparent keenness to resort to the law, could, perhaps, appear incongruous set next to his emphasis on the importance of free speech.
Mr Musk’s ‘apology’ or ‘clarification’ (call it what you will), came at the Cannes Lions advertising festival of creativity, when he also admitted to general laughter: “I mean not every post I make is a banger”.
This is surely an understatement.
He declared at the festival: “It wasn’t to advertisers as a whole, it was with respect to freedom of speech, I think it is important to have a global free speech platform, where people from a wider range of opinions can voice their views”.
Perhaps it might be of a larger concern to Mr Musk, that a significant amount of money might have been lost if major firms boycotted X (formerly Twitter).
In the past he had also allegedly agreed with a post on his site that falsely claimed Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people.
He supposedly said that the user who referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was speaking “the actual truth”.
The conspiracy theory holds that Jewish people and leftists are engineering the ethnic and cultural replacement of white populations with non-white immigrants that will lead to a “white genocide”.
Major firms including Disney, Warner Bros and Sky News’ parent company Comcast pulled their advertising. Lions Gate Entertainment and Paramount Global also said they were pausing advertising, and it has been reported that Apple was pulling ads too. IBM also halted its advertising on X/Twitter after a report by Media Matters (MM), the US media watchdog, which found that its ads were placed next to pro neo-Nazi content.
It has emerged that Mr Musk sued MM alleging it manufactured the report.
In a lawsuit filed in the US District Court in Texas, it was claimed that MM “knowingly and maliciously”portrayed ads next to hateful material “as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform”.
This came after figures showed that the monthly US ad revenue at X/Twitter had declined at least 55 per cent year-on-year each month since he bought it.
The company has struggled to retain some advertisers since the takeover, and the Chief Executive, Linda Yaccarino, met bank lenders who helped finance Mr Musk’s acquisition to outline the company’s business plans.
The extraordinary ‘anti-Semitic’ row and ‘clarification’, are not the first time Mr Musk has been accused of being anti-Semitic either. He has, though, always firmly denied it.
As in Cannes, he has proclaimed: “To be super clear: I am pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind“.
Yet to Mr Musk’s critics this is pure humbug because he has described George Soros (the 93 year old Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, and a frequent victim of anti-Semitic attacks), as ‘reminding him of Magneto’ (a Marvel comic villain who is also a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust).
Mr Musk has, too, engaged in a very public spat with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which is a high-profile organisation opposing anti-Semitism and racism.
He has threatened the ADL with legal action, blaming it for a collapse in advertising revenue, when it could, in fact, be to do with the nervousness of companies associating with him.
So Mr Musk’s background (like Mr Vance’s) is questionable.
Their stories make good copy for journalists like me though!
The memories of Phil’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (when he always avoided making anti-Semitic comments) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disease Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Publication of another book, though, was refused, because it was to have included names.
Tomorrow – even as he controversially announced his right wing running mate with bandaged ear, Donald Trump wheeled out the cliché that the charges against him amounted to a ‘witch-hunt’, but during 23 years with the BBC, and 40 years in journalism (when he was trained to use simple language, avoiding jargon) this tired phrase was always studiously avoided by Phil.
