Billionaires do not hesitate to present their ideology as interpretation of truth. Hedge fund billionaire Bob Mercer and his family spent millions in GAI (Government Accountability Institute), Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 campaign to get Trump elected. Hillary Clinton did propose a tax on high-frequency trading of securities, which is reportedly a favorite of Mercer’s Renaissance Technologies. The Mercer Family Foundation gave nearly $3.6 million to Citizens United between 2012 and 2014, which sued for access to Clinton Foundation-related emails and whose president David Bossie also got a senior job on the Trump campaign. Cambridge Analytica was a data mining and data analysis company that obtained the data of 50 million Facebook users, constructed 30 million personality profiles, and sold the data to US politicians seeking election to influence voters, without the users’ consent. Mercer’s investments helped Trump win the 2016 election.
Americans for Prosperity, founded in 2004, is a libertarian conservative political advocacy group in the US funded by David and Charles Koch. The AFP Foundation describes its mission as “educating and training citizens to be courageous advocates for the ideas, principles, and policies of a free society – knowing that leads to the greatest prosperity and wellbeing for all – especially the least fortunate.” In reality, it is part of a network that uses dark money to fund an interlocking array of organizations that can work in tandem to influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses and Congress. This system eliminates the need to debate libertarian ideas in elections; but ensures that libertarian views on regulation and taxes are ascendant in majority of state governments, the Supreme Court and Congress. These activities account for the fact protections for employees have been decimated, and hedge fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle class workers.1
What links climate change and inequities? “A few billionaires (corporations) together have ‘investment emissions’ that equal the carbon footprints of entire countries like France, Egypt or Argentina,” claims Dabi “The major and growing responsibility of wealthy people for overall emissions is rarely discussed or considered in climate policy making.” These billionaire investors at the top of the corporate pyramid have huge responsibility for driving climate breakdown. The evidence is mounting: a World Bank report estimated that an additional 68 to 135 million people could be pushed into poverty by 2030 because of climate change. As the poorest tend to be excluded from the decision-making process, there is always a risk of underinvestment in actions that would be particularly beneficial to them. Policies need to be tailored to ensure the economic elite do not impose undue financial constraints on those who have the fewest resources.2
It seems strange, but it shouldn’t. Governments and central banks around the world took exceptional measures to support the financial system during the pandemic, and it worked to excess. Fantastic amounts of money were made in stocks, housing, cryptocurrency and more during a pandemic that killed 6.2 million people and rocked the global economy. Billionaires’ wealth has risen more since COVID-19 began than it has in the last 14 years. At $5 trillion dollars, this is the biggest surge in billionaire wealth since records began. A one-off 99 percent tax on the ten richest men’s pandemic windfalls, for example, could pay: to make enough vaccines for the world; to provide universal healthcare and social protection, fund climate adaptation and reduce gender-based violence in over 80 countries. All this could be done, while still leaving these men $8 billion better off than they were before the pandemic.3
While a plutocracy is a government ruled by the wealthy, an aristocracy is a form of government ruled by an elite few or a privileged, minority ruling class. The 1% aren’t just the biggest climate wreckers, they also greatly influence how the world responds to the crisis. Some critics think that the supergiant tech corporations that have spawned so many modern billionaires operate in ways that resemble feudalism more than capitalism, and, certainly, plenty of billionaires operate like the lords of the Earth while campaigning to protect the economic inequality that made them so rich and makes so many others so poor. They use their power in arbitrary, reckless and often environmentally destructive ways. Donald Trump received a “small” loan from his Dad; Elon Musk used his smarts not his father’s money from emerald dealing and property development, and even the beloved Buffett had help from his politician/businessman father. We are told it’s a meritocracy, when in fact we exist in a plutocracy.
Neoliberal globalization is a system of smoke and mirrors where the basic instability and unsustainability of the whole system leaves a financial elite who hold governments to ransom. Exploitation here isn’t just about direct wrongdoing. It a spectrum that moves from being blissfully ignorant to actively manipulating systems to safeguard or increase their fortunes, often at our expense. The reality is that the staggering levels of wealth that billionaires amass necessitate practices like maintaining low wages, evading taxes through intricate global schemes, and prioritizing corporate profits over the well-being of communities and the environment. It’s tough to see how you can rack up that kind of wealth without being tangled in systems that inherently make the rich richer and the poor, well poorer. The dysfunctional US economic system doesn’t work for ordinary people – making it ripe for exploitation by a populist such as Trump.4
Social media manipulation of public opinion by political actors is a growing threat to democracies around the world. Citizen influencers are used to spread manipulated messages. Our brains use shortcuts to navigate the complex world around us and keep us safe and healthy: We pay more attention to fearful, dangerous stimuli to stay safe. We remember things that hurt us more than things that help us so we can predict future consequences. We tend to follow the popular opinion of those around us to build stronger communities around shared ideas. But these shortcuts don’t work perfectly in every situation. They can become cognitive biases, or ways in which our brains’ patterns make us vulnerable to errors in judgment, manipulation, and exploitation. Confirmation-bias draws us in to the one-sided outlets, and the cognitive dissonance pushes us away from conflicting ideas. Cognitive dissonance stops us from hearing other opinions that conflict.5
Individuals and corporations can become rich by relying on market power, price discrimination, and other forms of exploitation. But that does not mean they have made any contribution to the wealth of society. On the contrary, such behavior often leaves everyone else worse off overall. Economists refer to these wealth snatchers, who seek to grab a larger share of the economic pie than they create, as rent-seekers. The term originated from land rents: those who received them did so not as a result of their own efforts, but simply as a consequence of ownership, often inherited. With the help of new technologies, they can – and do – engage in mass discrimination, such that prices are set not by the market (finding the single price that equates demand and supply), but by algorithmic determinations of the maximum each customer is willing to pay. Bloomberg notes it’s the “biggest daily increase” of wealth it’s seen since the index began in 2012.
The power elite control what you think through proxies who control information and communication, and through their lobbyists who influence what most of your politicians believe. A little more than a year after America rebelled against political elites by electing a self-proclaimed champion of the people, Donald Trump, its government is more deeply in the pockets of lobbyists and billionaires than ever before. Interrogating a culture of cruelty offers critics a political and moral lens for thinking through the convergence of power, politics and everyday life. It also offers the promise of unveiling the way in which a nation demoralizes itself by adopting the position that it has no duty to provide safety nets for its citizens or care for their well-being, especially in a time of misfortune. There is more to introducing change than getting rid of Trump, we need to deal with plutocrats – the wealthy donors who sabotaged Kamala Harris’s presidential bid.
Big money has always spoken loudly in American politics. During the election cycle, Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy were being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups determined to win at all cost. Partisan gerrymandering renders the House of Representatives so polarized that most lawmakers now fear a primary challenge from the right or left more than they fear losing to the other party in a general election. They have no incentive to compromise. This cries out for non-partisan redistricting commissions to redraw the lines and make House members more accountable to people other than the extremes of each party. The influence of wealthy donors has only gotten more pronounced over the years: the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in the Citizens United case overturned certain long-standing restrictions on political fundraising and spending. It is necessary to overturn Citizens United and fully adopt public financing of elections.
1 Mayer, Jane. (2016) Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
4 https://www.whatshesaidtalk.com/are-billionaires-good-for-society/
5 https://www.humanetech.com/youth/social-media-and-the-brain#question-1