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billionaires
The Climate Finance Plan Leaders Won’t Consider at COP29? Tax the Rich
A global 2% annual tax on billionaire wealth could raise $250 billion per year from just the world’s 100 richest families.
Nov 19, 2024
The world desperately needs to pull the plug on fossil fuels. So agree most of the official delegates from nearly 200 nations who have gathered this month by the Caspian Sea for the 29th annual global “Conference of the Parties” on climate change—COP29 for short—in Azerbaijan’s capital city Baku.
But not all the estimated 70,000 attendees at this year’s COP are practicing what they should be preaching. Private jet arrivals at Baku’s international airport, news reports note, have just doubled.
What makes that such a big deal? Practically nothing symbolizes wanton disregard for our Earth’s environment more dramatically than private jet travel. A corporate executive taking a single long-haul private jet flight, points out the Travel Smart Campaign’s Denise Auclair, “will burn more CO2 than several normal people do in an entire year.”
Instead of taxing the world’s wealthiest at higher levels, rich nations want to give their richest more opportunities to become ever richer.
Researchers at Oxfam have just gone through the flight records of 23 global billionaires. Those airborne souls averaged 184 private jet flights each over a recent single year. They each essentially circumnavigated the globe 10 times over. Their flights averaged 2,074 tons of carbon emissions, an outlay an average person globally would take 300 years to emit.
Extravagances like private jets help explain why global carbon emissions last year expanded by 1.3%. To get climate anywhere near under control, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres noted on the eve of this month’s COP29 extravaganza, the world’s nations ought to be reducing carbon emissions by at least 9% a year.
“The world is still underestimating climate risks,” Guterres added. “It’s absolutely essential to reduce emissions drastically now.”
And that reducing will only unfold, the U.N. secretary-general emphasized in his COP29 opening remarks, if the world’s nations address the pivotal contribution to climate catastrophe that our world’s wealthiest are making.
“The rich cause the problem,” as Guterres explained, “the poor pay the highest price.”
Observers have tagged this year’s global environmental gathering the “climate finance COP.” The key question before all the official government delegates gathered in Baku: Who will actually pay the bill for addressing the climate change crisis?
Back in 2009, national delegations to that year’s COP gathering pledged to raise an overall annual $100 billion over the next 15 years. The world’s nations have since then met that target only once. Any new annual target for the next 15 years, most researchers and activists agree, needs to run considerably higher, anywhere from $500 billion to $5 trillion higher.
No one can reasonably expect governments alone, COP principals from rich nations counter, to come up with anywhere near that level of support. These rich-nation COP delegations want to encourage private investors to get more involved in financing new climate initiatives.
In other words, instead of taxing the world’s wealthiest at higher levels, rich nations want to give their richest more opportunities to become ever richer.
Nations rich with fossil fuels most heartily agree. The “onus” for financing moves to counter the climate crisis, COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev from Azerbaijan is arguing, “cannot fall entirely on government purses.”
Our globe’s richest nations would also like to expand the trading of “carbon credits,” transactions that let wealthy developed nations delay making costly emissions cuts at home by underwriting much less costly climate actions in poor nations.
But the offset projects that developed nations underwrite, The Guardiannotes, have regularly overpromised and underdelivered, leaving “wildfires burning through forests that were supposed to be protected and emissions from renewable energy projects being counted on balance books even though they would probably have been built anyway.”
This year’s CO29 conference will wrap up on November 22, and no serious climate change analyst is predicting any consensus that could significantly slow our globe’s ever more perilous progress to climate collapse. Developed nations, Bloomberg’s Mark Gongloff observes, remain “loath to pitch in more than $100 billion a year.”
“Transitioning the world to clean energy alone,” counters Gongloff, could actually cost $215 trillion by 2050.
How could the world make real progress toward those trillions? Guardian environmental editor Fiona Harvey earlier this week ran down some promising options.
Nations could for starters, Harvey notes, put a serious tax bite on the “unprecedented” profit bonanza that fossil fuel companies have enjoyed ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Those companies have pocketed well over a quarter-trillion dollars in profits in the two years since.
Nations could also place new taxes on the jet flights our richest so enjoy or move to end the more than $650 billion spent annually in the developing world on subsidies for fossil fuels and polluting industries. Better yet, in a world where our five richest billionaires have more than doubled their wealth since 2020, we could adopt the 2% annual tax on billionaire wealth that Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has proposed.
A global tax along that line could raise $250 billion per year from just the world’s 100 richest families.
The only sure thing about initiatives like these: No proposals that could make a real climate difference will get any serious attention at COP29, as the prime minister of Albania, Edi Rama, observed in his brief and biting remarks to conference-goers. Rama opened his address to COP29 by noting that he had decided to ditch his prepared remarks after spending some time in the conference’s leaders lounge.
The global notables in that lounge, Rama continued, had all gathered to “eat, drink, meet, and take photos together, while images of voiceless speeches from leaders play on and on and on in the background.”
“To me, this seems exactly like what happens in the real world every day,” he went on to explain. “Life goes on with its old habits, and our speeches, filled with good words about fighting climate change, change nothing.”
Concluded Rama, a former artist and the current chair of his nation’s Socialist Party: “What on Earth are we doing in this gathering, over and over and over, if there is no common political will on the horizon to go beyond words and unite for meaningful action?”
That inaction—in the face of overwhelming global public support for greater pro-climate action—continues to comfort our world’s most fantastically wealthy.
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Trump Is Creating a Government of Billionaires, by Billionaires, for Billionaires
With his cabinet appointments, Trump wants to deflect our attention while he and his fellow moguls loot America.
Nov 19, 2024
What do card sharks, magicians, pickpockets, and tyrants do to hide their tricks? They deflect your attention. “Look over here!” they say, as they create a commotion that preoccupies your mind while they bamboozle you.
At first, I thought U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s gonzo nominations were intended to flood the zone—overwhelm us, demoralize us, cause us to lose our minds.
Alternatively, I thought, they had a strategic purpose: Smoke out Senate Republicans who might stand in Trump’s way on other issues—such as allying with Russian President Vladimir Putin and destroying NATO—so Trump could purge the holdouts through primary challengers and angry MAGAs.
Musk has vowed to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. The richest man in the world explains that “we have to reduce spending to live within our means. And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship.”
But while flooding the zone and purging recalcitrant Senate Republicans may be part of it, I’ve come to think there’s a larger plan at work.
Trump wants to deflect our attention while he and his fellow billionaires loot America.
As he consolidates power, Trump is on his way to creating a government of billionaires, by billionaires, for billionaires.
Trump intuitively knows that the most powerful and insidious of all alliances is between rich oligarchs and authoritarian strongmen.
Two billionaires are leading his transition team. The richest person in the world and another billionaire will run a new department of “efficiency.” Other billionaires are waiting in the wings to be anointed to various positions.
America is now home to 813 billionaires whose cumulative wealth has grown a staggering 50% since before the pandemic.
Apologists for these mind-boggling amounts argue they’re not a zero-sum game where the rest of us must lose ground in order for billionaires to prosper. Quite the contrary, they say: The billionaires’ achievements expand the economic pie for everyone.
But the apologists overlook one important thing. Power is a zero-sum game. The more power in billionaire hands, the less power in everyone else’s. And power cannot be separated from wealth, or wealth from power.
The shameless feeding frenzy that has already begun at the troughs of Trump—planning for more tax cuts for the wealthy, regulatory rollbacks to make the wealthy and their corporations even wealthier, subsidies for the wealthy and their enterprises—constitute a zero-sum power game that will hurt average Americans.
The pending tax cuts will explode the national debt. As a result, the rest of America will have to pay more in interest payments to the holders of that debt—who, not incidentally, are wealthy Americans.
This will require that the middle and working classes either pay higher taxes or sacrifice some benefits they rely on (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act).
Meanwhile, regulatory rollbacks will make workplaces less safe, products more dangerous, our air and water more polluted, national parks less welcoming, travel more hazardous, and financial transactions riskier for average people.
Trump has tapped Elon Musk, who invested some $130 million to get Trump elected (not to mention in-kind gifts of support from X and a swing-state operation to register right-leaning voters) and former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy, to run a “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Musk calls it DOGE, named after Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency—whose value, not incidentally, has soared since Musk began using its name for his incipient department.
It now appears that DOGE won’t be an actual “Department” but a powerful advisory group outside the official government yet inside the Trump White House. It will announce—presumably posted with great fanfare on X—what Musk allies describe as “slash-and-burn business ideologies to the U.S. government.”
Musk has vowed to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. The richest man in the world explains that “we have to reduce spending to live within our means. And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship.”
Hardship for whom? Not for Musk. Not for Trump. Not for the billionaires heading Trump’s transition team. Not for all the billionaires who will profit from the planned tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.
And not for people responding to Musk’s recent X post calling for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account…. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”
Musk says we have to reduce spending “to live within our means?” Whose means?
Since Trump’s election victory on November 5, Musk himself has become $70 billion richer due to the rising value of his enterprises.
Why have Musk’s companies—Tesla, SpaceX, and X—risen so much in value? Because investors expect some or all of the 19 known ongoing federal investigations and lawsuits against Musk’s companies to wind down. (Lawsuits involving alleged securities law violations, workplace safety, labor and civil rights violations, violations of environmental laws, consumer fraud, and vehicle safety defects.)
Investors also expect SpaceX to become more profitable from more multibillion-dollar contracts. Musk’s xAI could also reap vast rewards as the new administration considers AI regulations.
Other billionaires who invested in Trump have also been raking it in.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison, the world’s second-richest person—a close friend of Musk’s and a former Tesla board member—is a longtime Republican donor who’s enjoying his own Trump bump. Since the election, Oracle’s share value has increased 10%, increasing Ellison’s own wealth by some $20 billion.
Venture capital billionaire Marc Andreessen, who donated at least $4.5 million to a super PAC that supported Trump, expects to cash in by having Trump ease the antitrust crackdown on Big Tech, in which Andreessen has invested heavily. Andreessen’s wish has already been partly monetized: Big Tech has reaped most of the stock market gains since Election Day.
There’s also crypto. Since the election, the price of bitcoin has surged to record levels. The crypto exchange Coinbase, a major contributor to candidates friendly to crypto, expects regulators to keep their hands off it. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has become about $4.5 billion richer since Trump’s victory, as Coinbase shares soared 67%.
Oh, there are also the private prison corporations. George Zoley, a top executive at GEO Group and another major donor to Trump, expects Trump’s reelection to drive up demand for empty beds at detention centers the company runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Since the election, GEO Group has had the largest surge in its stock price since 2016, after Trump was elected the first time.
GEO Group executives told Wall Street analysts on a recent earnings call that Trump’s election could help GEO Group fill as many as 18,000 empty beds at its facilities, which would generate as much as $400 million in annual business.
Venture capitalists and investors in new military technologies are now swarming around the Defense Department like bees over a vast flower bed. They also donated to Trump and expect a big quid pro quo.
The fossil fuels CEOs who plunked down millions of dollars for Trump in the expectation they’d get a fat return in the form of rollbacks of environmental regulations are also celebrating.
The list of wealthy beneficiaries from Trump’s election goes on and on.
So who will suffer the “hardship” Musk predicts?
I doubt that Musk will recommend cutting the billions of dollars in government contracts Musk’s corporations receive, or the GEO Group’s contracts for private prison space, or the military budget. Quite the contrary: Government spending on all these will increase.
If history is any guide, there is no limit to how greedy the greedy will get when the guardrails are lifted.
Instead, Musk will want to cut the enforcement of antitrust laws, securities laws, workplace safety laws, labor laws, civil rights laws, laws against consumer fraud, laws mandating vehicle safety, tax laws, and environmental laws.
And because there’s no other place to find anything close to the $2 trillion he’s promising to cut from the federal budget, I expect Musk will turn to cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Here’s where the trick comes in. We’ll all be so distracted by what Gaetz is doing at the Justice Department, Gabbard to national intelligence, and RFK Jr. to public health, that we may not notice.
After all, the next months will be filled with Trump theatrics—a major fight in the Senate over the Gaetz nomination, another fight over recess appointments, another over RFK Jr. and his plans for destroying public health.
Meanwhile, Musk and company will be recommending all sorts budget cuts that cause hardship for hardworking Americans but almost no one will notice because of the distractions.
I prefer to end this post on a hopeful note, so here goes.
There has always been a close relationship in America between wealth and power, but it has usually been thought slightly shameful—something to be hidden or elided—because it contradicts the basic tenets of democracy.
Recall the admonition credited to Justice Louis Brandeis that America has a choice: either great wealth in the hands of a few, or democracy—but we cannot have both.
Hence, American politicians typically play up their humble origins. CEOs and bankers minimize their political clout. The wealthy refrain from overt displays of power.
But in Gilded Ages—such as the one that dominated the turn of the 20th century and the one we’re now in—the ultra-rich abandon such humility. The linkages between wealth and power becomes apparent for all to see. Conspicuous consumption becomes the handmaiden of conspicuous clout.
In such times, the wealthy brag about their access to politicians, talk openly about how many tens of millions of dollars they’ve donated to campaigns and about the “return” on these “investments,” and want everyone to know how they’ve turned their affluence into influence and their influence into even more affluence.
Ultimately, these insults to democracy—delivered by the new oligarchs shamelessly, openly, and arrogantly—go too far. They invite a backlash.
If history is any guide, at some point the public will become revolted by the stench of legalized bribery. It will not abide the quid pro quos of billionaire campaign donations for tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.
The public will also become fed up with brazen billionaire propaganda delivered through billionaire ownership of key media, such as Musk’s X, right-wing radio, and Murdoch’s Fox News, New York Post, and editorial pages of the The Wall Street Journal.
More than a century ago, this sort of revulsion generated what historians refer to as the “Progressive Era.” It was responsible for pushing Teddy Roosevelt to break up the monopolies, institute the nation’s first income tax, stop corporations from funding candidates for president and Congress, and create the Food and Drug Administration.
And when the excesses finally caused the economy to collapse, another upsurge in progressivism prompted Teddy’s fifth cousin, Franklin D., to raise taxes even further on the affluent, create the 40-hour workweek with time-and-a-half for overtime, force corporations to negotiate with unions, institute unemployment insurance, create a minimum wage, and establish Social Security.
If history is any guide, there is no limit to how greedy the greedy will get when the guardrails are lifted. So Gilded Age excesses are almost guaranteed.
And when the corruption and ensuing hardship become so blatant that they offend the values of the majority of Americans, that majority will once again demand systematic reforms that bring us closer to those values.
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We Need an Anti-Billionaire Party
The way back for the Democratic Party begins with rejecting billionaires and their money.
Nov 16, 2024
Everything feels different this time. In November 2016, there were protests; today, mostly silence. In November 2016, there was a lot of talk about resistance; today, people are talking about stepping away from politics. In November 2016, people clamored for news; today, folks are logging off. In November 2016, there was shock. It has been replaced by numbness. But best to take the words of Joni Mitchell to heart, that “something’s lost but something’s gained, by living every day.”
The warning signs were hiding in plain sight, even at the Democrats’ ecstatic four-day August convention in Chicago that felt more like a warehouse rave than a political confab—a vibe-shift that sent delegates back home convinced that their nominee Kamala Harris was about to vanquish Donald Trump from American political life for good.
But in an election year in which there was fury from the middle class over how much it costs to get by in today’s America, some observers—especially in the party’s left flank—were appalled at the barely hidden embrace of big money. Across the Windy City, in rented venues like the House of Blues, lobbyists for industries like crypto or PACs funded by firms like Cigna or AT&T threw posh late-night private parties for Democratic insiders after the TV lights were turned off.
The current Democratic brand is toxic—especially with working-class voters who have no idea what the party stands for. It’s past time to cast out the money-changers and stop pandering to millionaires and billionaires who may be pro-abortion rights or support the LBGTQ community, but who mainly just want to keep America’s unequal economic status quo.
But one pivotal moment inside the United Center even horrified the seen-it-all investigative journalist and former Sen. Bernie Sanders speechwriter David Sirota, who noted that a line from Illinois governor and Hilton hotel heir J.B. Pritzker—“Take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing, stupidity”—caused “raucous applause from an audience overjoyed to have found its newest billionaire idol.”
Sirota and others who heard it knew instinctively that this was not a winning message for the party that once dominated American politics in the mid-20th century by turning out the working class, and Tuesday’s results proved them right. In the flaming wreckage of an election in which Trump won a return ticket to the White House by winning the popular vote for the first time in three tries, while his fellow Republicans were capturing control of Congress, both pundits and Democratic insiders have spent the last week fighting over who to blame.
For these wounded elites, prime suspects include everything from President Joe Biden’s insistence on running and staying in the race until July, to Harris’ failure to reach young men by not going on testosterone-laden shows like Joe Rogan’s podcast, to the party’s collective inability to feel consumers’ pain over the post-COVID spike in prices. But you don’t need to be a rocket scientist or even a political scientist to argue that the biggest blunder was not attacking the billionaire class because Harris was too busy begging for their campaign checks.
If there is one thing that gets working-class Americans across the familiar fault lines of political ideology or race or ethnicity to agree, it’s that the super rich have too much wealth and power and don’t pay their fair share. In March, a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of voters in the seven key swing states found some 69% of voters—including 58% of Republicans and 66% of independents—supported higher taxes on billionaires. That populist fervor is hardly surprising in a nation where the top 10% controls 60% of all wealth, while the bottom half struggles with just 6%.
But while the Harris campaign did pay lip service to raising taxes on the super wealthy, it didn’t give voters the red meat of a soak-the-rich campaign that might have landed emotionally in a nation that most voters believe is on the wrong track. That’s probably because Team Harris, with its ambitious yet eventually reached goal of raising $1 billion in order to outspend Trump on TV ads and getting out the vote, felt it needed to woo Big Business, not offend it with a truly populist campaign.
A New York Times post-mortem on what went wrong with the vice president’s messaging and proposals noted in its headline that she had a “Wall Street-Approved Economic Pitch” that “Fell Flat” with voters, writing that Harris “adopted marginal pro-business tweaks to the status quo that both her corporate and progressive allies agreed never coalesced into a clear economic argument.”
It was arguably worse than that. One of the Democrat’s few firm economic proposals was a 28% capital-gains tax plan that was actually lower and thus more friendly to the wealthy than what Biden had been proposing. Much of her economic agenda, according to the Times, was bounced off a key adviser: her brother-in-law Tony West, a corporate lobbyist for Uber—and it showed. Although the Biden administration had been cracking down on abuses in cryptocurrency, Harris signaled support for the scam-plagued, polluting industry, and won over some new donors.
Harris even campaigned with a billionaire—the colorful Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban—who went before a Wisconsin rally to say the Democrat “has an amazing plan for small business,” even after he’d initially lobbied for Harris to dump controversial tough-on-business Federal Trade Commission chief Lina Khan. Watching Harris’ carefully calibrated campaign, it’s also hard not to wonder whether her tepid talk about reining in fossil fuels and even her weak-tea echo of Biden’s Gaza policies—unpopular with many young voters—were meant more for donors than for voters.
It can’t be a coincidence that Democrats’ decades-long embrace of the donor class in an era of big-money politics has disabled its potential populist message to working folks who elected FDR, JFK and Bill Clinton. The Democrats need radical change in a hurry if the party wants to retake the House in the 2026 midterms and start the search for a new leader who can replace Trump in the 2028 election—assuming that we’re still having those by then.
That won’t happen under the current Democratic leadership or its consultants, who owe their status to the party’s wealthiest supporters. Any serious political movement to reinvent the anti-MAGA left will have to start from the bottom-up—with meetings and phone calls and rallies by community activists and environmentalists and ministers and everyday folks. The goal must be finding a new breed of candidates who will reject all billionaire and corporate contributions. That can help remake Congress and eventually boost a presidential candidate truly committed to taxing the rich, waging a new war on poverty, cutting the wasteful Pentagon budget and expanding the Supreme Court to protect these gains.
Sound crazy? Such a movement happened in this century, when the Tea Party emerged in 2009-10 to challenge established Republicans with new grassroots organizations that met regularly, staged boisterous protests and primaried GOP incumbents, pushing their party furtherto the right. That short-lived counter-revolution set the stage for Trump, and for last week’s big victory.
The current Democratic brand is toxic—especially with working-class voters who have no idea what the party stands for. It’s past time to cast out the money-changers and stop pandering to millionaires and billionaires who may be pro-abortion rights or support the LBGTQ community, but who mainly just want to keep America’s unequal economic status quo. Build a new Democratic Party that bans big money, because elections are won with votes, not dollars. The next Democrat who brags about how obscenely rich he is should be booed out of the arena.
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