Billionaires Gerry OShea
Elon Musk
rattled the American political system recently. The leaders of the political
parties in Washington settled on a budget deal that would avert the looming
end-of-year government shutdown. This negotiated agreement was worked out by
the leaders of both parties in the House and Senate without objection from the
incoming president, Donald Trump, or his advisers.
The compromise bill would have the needed
support in both Houses, and President Biden said he would sign it. Then, a
series of tweets by Mr. Musk berated the deal for failing to press home his
version of the conservative agenda.
Amazingly,
the Republican leaders folded immediately, and the bill died, leaving just a
few days for the frustrated negotiators to devise an alternative to avoid a government
shutdown over Christmas.
Historians
could not identify even one occasion in the last 100 years when an outsider
vetoed a budget decision with bipartisan approval in Washington.
Who is Mr.
Musk who can exercise such control over the Republican Party? He is a South
African businessman with major investments in the United States, including in
electric vehicles and space exploration. His political clout emanates from his
bank account. He is a mega-billionaire with a net worth in excess of 400
billion dollars, reputedly the richest man in the world.
He went
all-in supporting Donald Trump in the recent presidential election, donating in
the region of a staggering 250 million dollars – a quarter of a billion – to
the Trump election coffers.
His politics
favor far-right policies. Apart from his support for Trump, he is an open admirer
of Nigel Farage and the far-right British Reform Party, which, according to reports,
he plans to bolster with a 100 million dollar check in the near future.
More
ominously, he has declared strong approval for the neo-Nazi-leaning AfD party
in Germany. The expectation is that they, too, will get generous millions to
enable them to move higher than their current rating of 18% in the polls.
Elections to the Bundestag will be held during the last week of February 2025.
The Supreme
Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which declared that political spending
is a protected form of free speech, has opened the door for super-rich
individuals to expand their power by designing and promoting media platforms
like X, previously known as Twitter. This allows them to exert a significant
influence on political and social developments.
Self-employed billionaires like Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump are part of a
paradigm shift in social media in which their bulging bank accounts can
increasingly convert financial capital into social capital.
Access to
unfiltered social media platforms is grasped by egocentric billionaires who can
now buy an outlet for their controversial ideas and decide who can use it. President-elect
Trump’s lawyers will argue before the Supreme Court that his free speech rights
are being eclipsed, depriving his 14.7 million followers from engaging with him
on Tik-Tok.
The Department of Justice claims that China
and other hostile forces are using this platform to undermine United States
interests, including spreading lies about America.
There is a
vogue among the super-rich for misconstruing the First Amendment as permission to
promote their particular vision for the future, including how free speech
should work and who should benefit from it.
This
unhinged strategy that focuses on increasing the power of very few tycoons presents
a major challenge to the continuation of democracy in America and other Western
countries.
Almost a
decade ago, Warren Buffett, a multiple billionaire, claimed that he paid a
lower tax rate than his secretary, thanks to loopholes and deductions that
benefit the wealthy.
His claim
sparked a debate about the fairness of the tax system as middle-class taxpayers
protested the unfairness of coddling the rich. This depressing statistic was
made worse by President Trump’s massive tax break accruing to the wealthy since
the 2019 budget.
Jack Bogdanski,
a professor at Lewis and Clark Law School, has written trenchantly on how the
tax system works for people at the top. “You have an army of well-trained,
brilliant people who sit there all day long, charging a thousand dollars an
hour, thinking up often-obtuse ways to beat the tax system” for their megarich
clients.
Danie Hemel,
a tax law professor at New York University explains that “the richest Americans
are able to pass down approximately $200 billion each year without paying
estate tax on it thanks to the use of complex trusts and other avoidance
strategies.”
Billionaires
have made a sport of trying to avoid the estate tax. Gary Cohn, a former
Goldman Sachs executive and Donald Trump's chief economic adviser during his
first term, quipped that “only morons pay the estate tax.”
Times were
never better for billionaires. Not only do they have unspendable amounts of
money, but they control social media platforms, reaching tens of millions every
day. Unreal power!
Oxfam
International’s executive director, Amitabh Behar, spoke recently about the
plight of the millions of poor people and how they will fare amid all the
affluence. His words are not encouraging. He points out that the five richest
men in the world have doubled their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion
since 2020 while five billion people were added to the ranks of the destitute
in the same timeframe.
And wait for
Mr. Behar’s prediction about the future – he expects the first trillionaire to emerge
in the next ten years.
Comments
Post a Comment