[Joshua Kaplan, Brett Murphy, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica]

From my colleagues on the newsroom side at ProPublica, a story about how the State Department pressured Gambia on behalf of Elon Musk's starlink:

"Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet company, had spent months trying to secure regulatory approval to sell internet access in the impoverished West African country. As head of Gambia’s communications ministry, Lamin Jabbi oversees the government’s review of Starlink’s license application. Jabbi had been slow to sign off and the company had grown impatient. Now the top U.S. government official in Gambia was in Jabbi’s office to intervene.

[...] Since Trump’s inauguration, the State Department has intervened on behalf of Starlink in Gambia and at least four other developing nations, previously unreported records and interviews show."

Previously, as the article notes, the State Department "has avoided the appearance of conflicts or leaving the impression that punitive measures were on the table." This has not been true in these cases.

As a former US ambassador put it, this “could lead to the impression that the U.S. is engaging in a form of crony capitalism.” I'll leave deciding how true this is, and how far it goes across every facet of American government, to the reader.

#Democracy

[Link]