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To Fight Billionaire-Backed Fascism, We Need Grit and Solidarity—Not Hope
This deeply perilous time requires realism—but not fatalism. In the worst of times, solidarity is most needed.
Nov 14, 2024
When some leading thinkers at the London School of Economics saw fascism take hold in the 1930s, Oxford history professor Ben Jackson said in a recent BBC interview, they “argued that in those circumstances the people with economic power in society, the property owners, are willing to cancel democracy, cancel civil liberties, and make deals with political organizations like the Nazis if it guarantees their economic interest.”
That analysis has an ominous ring to it now as many tech industrialists swing behind President-elect Trump. They can hardly be unaware that Gen. Mark Milley, who served as the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman under Trump, described him as “fascist to the core.”
“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos tweeted the morning after the election. Weeks earlier, as the owner of the Washington Post, Bezos had blocked an endorsement of Kamala Harris by the newspaper’s editorial board.
Bezos could lose billions of dollars in antitrust cases, but now stands a better chance of winning thanks to a second Trump administration. During the last decade, Amazon Web Services gained huge contracts with the federal government, including a $10 billion deal with the National Security Agency.
We’re alive. Let’s make the most of it, no matter how much hope we have.
No wonder Bezos’ post-election tweet laid it on thick—“wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”
Not to be left behind at the starting gun in the tech industry’s suck-up-to-Trump derby, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”
As a nine-figure donor and leading purveyor of online lies for the 2024 Trump campaign, Elon Musk has been working closely with Trump. The Tesla magnate, X (formerly Twitter) owner and SpaceX mogul is well-positioned to help shape policies of the incoming administration. A week after the election, news broke that Musk has been chosen by Trump to co-lead an ill-defined “Department of Government Efficiency” with an evident mission to slash the public sector.
Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg rank first, third and fourth respectively on the Forbes list of the world’s richest individuals. The three of them have combined wealth of around $740 billion.
“In recent years, many tech eliteshave shrugged off the idealism once central to Silicon Valley’s self-image, in favor of a more corporate and transactional approach to politics,” the Washington Post gingerly reported after the election. The newspaper added: “A growing contingent of right-wing tech figures argue that Trump can usher in a new era of American dominance by removing red tape.”
For amoral gazillionaires like Bezos and Musk, ingratiating themselves with Trump is a wise investment that’s calculated to yield windfall returns. Evidently, the consequences in human terms are of no real concern. In fact, social injustice and the divisions it breeds create the conditions for still more lucrative political demagoguery, with the richest investors at the front of the line to benefit from corporate tax cuts and regressive changes in individual tax brackets.
After Election Day, the fascism scholar Jason Stanley offered a grim appraisal: “People who feel slighted (materially or socially) come to accept pathologies—racism, homophobia, misogyny, ethnic nationalism, and religious bigotry—which, under conditions of greater equality, they would reject. And it is precisely those material conditions for a healthy, stable democracy that the United States lacks today. If anything, America has come to be singularly defined by its massive wealth inequality, a phenomenon that cannot but undermine social cohesion and breed resentment.”
The threat of fascism in the United States is no longer conjectural. It is swiftly gathering momentum, fueled by the extremism of the party set to soon control both the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government as well as most of the federal court system.
It’s not only that, as Stanley notes, “the Republican Party’s domination of all branches of government would render the U.S. a one-party state.” Already set in motion are cascading toxic effects on social discourse and political dynamics, marked by widening acceptance and promotion of overt bigotries and brandished hatreds.
The successful relaunch of Trump’s political quest has again rocketed him into the stratosphere of power. Corporate profits for the few will reach new heights. Only humanity will suffer.
This deeply perilous time requires realism—but not fatalism. In the worst of times, solidarity is most needed.
And what about hope?
Consider what Fred Branfman had to say.
In the late 1960s, Fred was a humanitarian-aid volunteer in Laos when he discovered that his country was taking the lives of peasants there by the thousands. He assembled Voices from the Plain of Jars, a book with the subtitle “Life Under an Air War,” published in 1972. It included essays by Laotian people living under long-term U.S. bombardment along with drawings by children who depicted the horrors all around them.
When I asked Fred to describe his experience in Laos, he said: “At the age of 27, a moral abyss suddenly opened before me. I was shocked to the core of my being as I found myself interviewing Laotian peasants, among the most decent, human and kind people on Earth, who described living underground for years on end, while they saw countless fellow villagers and family members burned alive by napalm, suffocated by 500-pound bombs, and shredded by antipersonnel bombs dropped by my country, the United States.”
The successful relaunch of Trump’s political quest has again rocketed him into the stratosphere of power. Corporate profits for the few will reach new heights. Only humanity will suffer.
Fred moved to Washington, where he worked with antiwar groups to lobby Congress and protest the inflicting of mass carnage on Indochina. During the decades that followed, he kept working as a writer and activist to help change policies, stop wars, and counteract what he described as “the effect on the biosphere of the interaction between global warming, biodiversity loss, water aquifer depletion, chemical contamination, and a wide variety of other new threats to the biospheric systems upon which human life depends.”
When I talked with Fred a few years before his death in 2014, he said: “I find it hard to have much 'hope' that the species will better itself in coming decades.”
But, Fred went on, "I have also reached a point in my self-inquiries where I came to dislike the whole notion of ‘hope.’ If I need to have ‘hope’ to motivate me, what will I do when I see no rational reason for hope? If I can be ‘hopeful,’ then I can also be ‘hopeless,’ and I do not like feeling hopeless.”
He added: “When I looked more deeply at my own life, I noticed that my life was not now and never had been built around ‘hope.’ Laos was an example. I went there, I learned to love the peasants, the bombing shocked my psyche and soul to the core, and I responded—not because I was hopeful or hopeless, but because I was alive.”
We’re alive. Let’s make the most of it, no matter how much hope we have. What we need most of all is not optimism but determination.
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The Super Rich Are Getting Richer
Despite a decline in the total number of U.S. billionaires, the total wealth of the exclusive nine-figure-club grew by $500 billion over the last five months.
Sep 18, 2024
There are now 801 billionaires based in the United States with a combined wealth totaling $6.22 trillion, according to an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of the Forbes Real Time Billionaire List.
The total number of billionaires is down 11 people as of September 13, 2024 from April when Forbes published their 38th annual World’s Billionaire List. Despite that decline in the number of billionaires, the total wealth of the exclusive nine-figure-club grew by $500 billion over the last five months.
The top five billionaires and by individual wealth are:
- Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $252.5 billion
- Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $204.8 billion
- Larry Ellison of Oracle fame moving into number three spot with $197 billion, surpassing Marc Zuckerberg
- Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $182 billion
- Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway with $141 billion
There are now a total of 12 billionaires with more than $100 billion each. For context, the first person to cross the $100 billion personal wealth threshold—Jeff Bezos—only did so in 2018.
When Forbes started tracking wealth in 1982 there were only 13 billionaires on the Forbes 400 list and it took $75 million to join the list. Today, a person needs have a minimum of $3.2 billion to make the cut.
Among the wealthiest families on the Forbes list:
- Walton: Six members of the Walton Family have a combined wealth of $349.3 billion
- Mars: Six members of Mars family have combined wealth of $142.7 billion
- Koch: Two members of Koch family have a combined wealth of $141.6 billion
Many top billionaires have seen their wealth surge since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
On March 18, 2020, Elon Musk had wealth valued just under $25 billion. By the start of the next year he became the richest person in the world with a net worth of $185 billion.
After a decline of his assets from the acquisition of Twitter (now X) and falling Tesla valuations, Musk’s wealth has almost reached its 2022 peak with $252 billion.
Jeff Bezos saw his wealth rise from $113 billion on March 18, 2020 to $204 billion in the September 13, 2024 survey.
Three Walton family members—Jim, Alice, and Rob—saw their combined assets increase from $161.1 billion on March 18, 2020 to $286 billion this September.
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After Two Years of Failed Promises To Change, Time to Break Up Facebook’s Monopoly
It's now the only option that makes any sense.
Dec 16, 2023
In the fall of 2021, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen shocked the world by exposing just how much harm the company has inflicted on young users—and the fact that the company knew every last detail about it. After years of calls across the aisle to rein in Big Tech, the revelations in the “Facebook Files” felt like the perfect catalyst to get the ball rolling on tech reform in Congress. Haugen’s bravery came just a year after the FTC launched its 2020 antitrust suit against Facebook, and coincided with a historic push in Congress to pass tech antitrust legislation. In an environment like this, it’s easy to see why Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) declared that ‘this time feels distinctly different’: that the time for Congress to clamp down on Big Tech had finally come.
Unfortunately, two years later, it’s self-evident that the company now known as Meta is as harmful and unaccountable as ever. Facebook’s status as a modern-day monopoly allowed the company to withstand public outcry, and the tech giants’ all-out war against antitrust legislation in 2022 killed the bills in the 117th Congress. Fantastical notions that markets would force Facebook to change, popular during Meta’s stock slump in 2022, look even more absurd amid Meta’s stock turnaround this year. Critical reporting on Meta’s harmful influence, such as The Wall Street Journal’s horrifying exposé this summer on Instagram’s role in enabling pedophiles, has received scant attention compared to Haugen’s revelations.
Make no mistake: Without action in Congress, Meta and the other tech giants’ ongoing war on accountability will continue.
As Haugen acknowledged in a recent op-ed, Meta and the other tech giants are still wielding their lobbying might to crush accountability measures across the country. In other words, even as Meta feigns support for accountability measures, ‘self-regulation’ won’t and cannot stop the company’s corrosive impact. To stop Facebook from exploiting children, stealing users’ data, and destroying global democracy, Congress needs to cut to the central issue at hand: Facebook’s monopolistic dominance, which enables the company to commit harm with impunity.
Over the past year, lawmakers looking to rein in Big Tech have largely set their sights on specific policy areas, be it child online safety or artificial intelligence (AI). To be sure, there’s no doubt that these issues and other specific tech policy matters deserve proper attention in their own right. But it’s crucial that the heart of the problem—the fact that Meta and other Big Tech companies’ monopoly power give them free reign to continue their destructive behavior—is not lost on Congress.
And make no mistake: Without action in Congress, Meta and the other tech giants’ ongoing war on accountability will continue. Two years ago, Meta demanded that FTC chair Lina Khan, a noted Big Tech critic, recuse herself from scrutiny of the company over frivolous conflict of interest accusations. Armed with virtually unlimited financial resources at their disposal, Meta and its team of lawyers have only intensified their war against the administrative state.
Amid a separate legal battle with the FTC over child privacy, Meta has gone as far as to target the FTC’s very constitutional authority. At a time when right-wing activists are working to weaponize the justice system in favor of corporate interests, this development should be welcomed with grave concern. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) noted, these ludicrous demands from Meta are akin to “Big Tobacco trying to gut the FDA because they didn't want to be held accountable for hooking kids onto nicotine.”
Contrary to naysayers, the movement to break up Big Tech monopolies is anything butdead. Rapid developments in AI over the past year have raised widespread concerns that Big Tech giants will leverage control of the technologies to entrench their monopolies. As Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), a top proponent of the tech antitrust bills last session recently acknowledged, the rise of AI makes the cause of reining in Big Tech perhaps more relevant than ever. Recent polling has affirmed that Americans are still eager to rein in tech giants’ monopoly power, with a historic September survey finding strong support for AI anti-monopoly measures.
Between the Meta’s aggressive push into AI to its apparent hands-off approach to dangerous deepfake content ahead of the 2024 election, it’s more important than ever to rein in Facebook. Lawmakers should stand with the FTC as it pursues its historic antitrust case against Meta, and vigorously fight any efforts by tech-friendly members of Congress to gut the agency’s funding. Moreover, Congress should finish the work it started last session by passing the reintroduced American Innovation and Choice Act (AICO) to clamp down on Meta and other tech giants’ monopolistic abuses.Keep ReadingShow Less
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