Where Have the Good Oligarchs Gone?
The so-called 'left,' the actual Left, and oligarchs
The Left — the actual Left — is ideologically and permanently opposed to Rule by the Rich. The distinction above is important, and without the utter destruction of the Oligarch class, its actual dismantlement, real self-rule in the U.S. will be hope unfulfilled, a “stretch goal” in corporate-speak, not something we’ll ever have back.
In addition, the clock is ticking on climate dismantlement, the long descent from our emergent AI world, back through the stages we walked through to get to this place: from electronic life with powered electric tools; to wind and water machines; to oxen and plows; and finally, spears and tribes — the great species march to what we call civilization, but in reverse.
Trump and the Oligarchs
There’s no doubt Donald Trump, whatever else he may do, will enhance oligarchic rule, drive it to new heights.
Tech billionaires including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos were given prime positions at Donald Trump's inauguration Monday, in an unprecedented demonstration of their power and influence on US politics.
Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg are the world's three richest people, according to Forbes. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who also attended, ranks seventh. US tech tycoons have spent the weeks since the election courting favor with Trump, marking a dramatic shift from Silicon Valley's more hostile response to his first term as president four years ago.
Attendees also included Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. TikTok CEO Shou Chew sat in the back row of the stage, even as his platform's future remains uncertain. Trump later in the day ordered a 75-day pause on enforcing a law that would effectively ban TikTok in the United States.
We’ll see how this plays out, but the odds are not in a betting person’s favor.
‘Good Billionaires’
On the Democratic Party side, it’s much the same story. Corps and oligarchs are where the money is, so there, like Willie Sutton, is where Democrats go. Some have embarrassingly made that explicit:
“There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money,” Ken Martin, a leading candidate for Chair of the Democratic Party, said at a forum on Sunday. “But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.” [emphasis added]
That sets up the split I mentioned at the top: the so-called “left” versus the actual Left, divided by whether they want to defeat what we call “oligarchs” and FDR called “economic royalists”:
For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service. …
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. [emphasis added]
Let’s make that explicit and clear: If it wants nothing else, the actual Left wants to kill oligarch power. The so-called “left” does not.
Links
• “Stop left-punching for the love of God” (Elise Joshi via TikTok)
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
File under “’Nuff said?”
• Bernie Sanders support in 2020 (Twitter)
File under “’Nuff said?”
• Leakers Declare War on Trump (Ken Klippenstein)
In the past 24 hours, over two dozen people from across the federal government leaked to me various internal directives and memos killing their agencies’ DEI programs. One angry official even sent me Elon Musk’s new official White House email address … In fact, I've gotten more leaked documents in the past day than I’ve gotten on any other day ever...
The leaks are tantamount to a declaration of war against the president and his agenda, which at first glance seems like an affirmation of Trump’s claims about the existence of a bureaucratic “deep state.” But this office uprising is more complicated, as a closer look at the documents reveals.
The signatories of these memos — the people enforcing Trump’s war on DEI — are themselves civil servants. They are the high-level career bureaucrats currently running these various agencies. They are not Trump political appointees.
File under “Life in interesting times.”