Billionaires and Manifest Destiny
I personally am grateful for Bloomberg’s beautifully produced informative and factual anti-Trump ads, and I’m especially thankful that he will keep it up. I really do mentally thank him each and every day for that, because the real opponent is the mind-state that gave as much support to Trump and to Trumpism as they got.
The current state of the American union shows us new and scary seismic ideological and emotional shifts in the heartland. The fault lines (in reasoning and sentiment) were perhaps always there, and Trump simply acts on them like an efficacious black and slimy drawing salve on a long festering boil or suppurating wound.
It is a wound rooted in a violent and comparatively recent history. It possibly going back to the societal traumas wreaked upon the collective American soul by White colonials perpetrating the Church and State-sponsored practices of Indigenous genocide in the Americas, of waging slavery, and of aggressive settler colonizing practices, like those deployed by Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Entailed in the collective historical wound is the necessary depersonalization of, and enculturation of hatred for, the ‘Other’ in order to justify such acts.
Addressing that is going to take a LOT of attractive, persuasive and enlightening, educational media across all platforms. This is where right-motivated altruistic billionaires like Bloomberg come in. But, except in remedial situations having to do with distortions of hoarded wealth, such as the one we currently inhabit, there is no evolutionary value to billionaires. In fact, their existence is destructive. They represent a distortion of aggressive capitalism.
Wealth should be sustainably, more evenly distributed. I’m by no means against reasonable and, to some degree, shared wealth. Warren is wealthy. Bernie is wealthy, They’re not against wealth — just its hoarding and stockpiling.
It is unacceptable that extreme wealth, far beyond millionaire status, can buy an election. We are lucky that Bloomberg is sincere and well-intentioned as far as democratic principles and decided to put his money behind them. We dodged a bullet with this guy. In future, it could bode badly. What if Elon Musk decided to take the U.S. presidency? I love his innovations, or at least most of them, but he’s unstable, unreliable and mercurial — as we have amply seen of late, traits not good in a leader.
There are many other billionaires who are hugely altruistic — Gates, Buffet, Musk, Branson, and the Rausing heiresses among them. But for every one of them there is an ill-motivated all-powerful dynast, like Robert Mercer and his spawn, Betsy DeVos, and Erik Prince (De Vos’ brother) who work assiduously against the world and its manifest wellbeing. Most, by far, stash their money in offshore tax shelters and don’t even pay taxes, let alone give back.
Billionaire professional assassin, Erik Prince, charged with and acquitted of war crimes through his various mercenary warfare corporations, starting with Blackwater covert military services, is an Evangelical nut case killer, who applied to Trump for the corporate rights to wage the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, as well as in conflicts in South America. deploying his commercial militias in U.S. conflicts world-wide.
Maybe his pitch was accepted. Maybe that’s why we’re seeing the abrupt withdrawals of actual enlisted U.S. forces everywhere. Maybe this guy and his hired killers, ex-special forces, are going in. Maybe privatized war is the face of the billionaire-class Christian Evangelical militarized dystopian future?
The imbalance is bonkers and harmful. Less than one percent of the population owns over 90 percent of the world’s property; this same tiny percentage made 87 percent of the world’s profit income last year. The gulf is wider than it’s ever been. People tend to vote against their own and their families’ interests, as in the case of Trump’s tax cut for the already obscenely corporate rich, because they labour under the delusion that they can someday ‘make it big’ and join that moneyed, privileged class. But what they don’t realize is that the system is rigged against them. It’s like thinking you can win against the house in Las Vegas.
What will actually bring them happiness is living in a caring society that has their back, like those lucky citizens of Democratic Socialist countries like Finland or Denmark, which score highest on the Happiness Index consistently, year after year, and just simply have the most happy, healthy, fulfilled, productive and stress-free citizens.
One enlightened employer who heads up a small but prosperous tech company in the States pays everyone there around $80,000 per year with benefits, from himself to the janitor. Everyone feels valued and part of a team, like a family, give it their all, show great loyalty and are happy. Studies have shown that, with security, even just that level of affluence produces the practical balance and stability people need in contemporary society to feel great about their lives. There are lots of economic experiments in sustainability that point to a very different, inspiring and hopeful world, for ALL, not just a tiny, topmost minority.
