[COPY] Plunged into radical uncertainty, we now understand the consequences of oligarchy

The oligarchy's been accumulating power for decades. Now it's clear what that means.

Credit: Center for Economic and Policy Research

Basics we can no longer take for granted

These are times of radical uncertainty, when what we have taken for granted is shaken like a building in an earthquake. The structure is shuddering. Stuff is falling off the walls and shelves. Whether the building will remain standing is in doubt.

The most basic of matters are in question.

Will we continue to receive reliable weather reports, with federal scientific agencies being gutted? Already, weather balloon launches that provide important real-time data are being canceled or suspended.

Will we have any measure of friendly relations with Canada, with Trump reverting to a 19^th century version of manifest destiny, stirring an economic war to make it the 51^st state? (It takes a helluva lot to piss off Canadians. In my lifetime I could never have foreseen a real life version of Canadian Bacon, the 1995 movie starring John Candy and Alan Alda in which a U.S. president beats war drums against Canada for domestic political gain.)

Will the U.S. Postal Service continue to consistently deliver the mail, as staff is cut and a privatization agenda is clearly in play?

Hell, will I continue to receive my Social Security checks for which I paid all my working life, with staff being slashed to the bone and Co-President Musk determined to end it? Will Medicare continue to cover my medical bills? The “free market” libertarians would prefer to have Social Security run by Wall Street equity funds such as Blackrock, and put Medicare entirely under the control of private insurance companies through “Advantage” programs. (If you are on Medicare Advantage, it might seem like a good deal until you are denied care. Get off it as soon as you can.)

I’m a human being. Like most of us, I like certainty, the sense things are nailed down and I can count on them. For so many of us this intensification of uncertainties is having a gut-level emotional impact. I’m certainly having my pangs of anxiety.

The ultra-rich are piling it up

At the same time, uncertainty is a clarifying experience. It teaches us not to build our castles on shifting sands. We have been heading toward the current moment at for a long time. Billionaire-funded right-wing think tanks have long promoted privatization of most federal government functions, and have long sought to roll back the gains of the New Deal and Great Society.

What James Galbraith has called The Predator State has for decades maneuvered to gain increasing access to public revenue flows as their long-term profit rates continue to fall. Libertarian billionaires claim the “free market” can do it better. Such as Elon Musk, whose SpaceX rides on decades of public investment in rocketry. Or Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon rolls on the public creation of digital computing as well as public highway and aviation infrastructure. Nothing like subsidized “free market” billionaires.

The value of a time like this is clarity. And it is becoming increasingly clear to the masses of people that the multiple crises converging on us have a common root in oligarchy and its evil twin, corporate oligarchy: The increasing concentration of wealth at the top, and the increasing monopolization of industry after industry by a handful of corporations. Even as most of us are subject to increasing uncertainty, the ultra-rich are piling up wealth at an astounding rate. Check out these recent findings from Oxfam:

Billionare wealth surges by $2 trillion in 2024, three times faster than the year before

• Oxfam predicts there will be at least five trillionaires a decade from now.

• 204 new billionaires were minted in 2024, nearly four every week.

• Sixty percent of billionaire wealth is now derived from inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections . . . “extreme billionaire wealth is largely umerited.”

• Richest 1 percent in the Global North extracted $30 million an hour from the Global South through the financial system in 2023.

World’s top 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity

• Over a third of the world’s biggest 50 corporations – worth $13.3 trillion – now run by a billionaire or has a billionaire as the principal shareholder.

• Global South countries own just 31% of global wealth, despite being home to 79% of global population.

Besides telling us how rapidly the rich are getting richer, these findings underscore a fact to which we have been largely blind in the developed countries of the Global North. The people who live in the greatest level of economic uncertainty are the people of the Global South, and this is because these countries are sucked dry by the rich classes of the Global North. What has happened to people of the south is increasingly coming to us in the north for the same reason. This is one of those clarifying aspects of the time. The value is to teach us the need for solidarity not just in our own countries, but with people throughout the world.

We used to talk about Russian oligarchs. Now it is increasingly clear to us we have our own oligarchs in the U.S., and they are far richer and more powerful than their Russki equivalents. And we’re using that language to describe them. Take a look at the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which lists real-time wealth of the world’s richest (though for some reason always leaving out Mike Bloomberg himself.) Of the top 15, all but one are from the U.S. Musk leads the pack as of this writing with $348 billion (though he’s down nearly $85 billion with Tesla sales and stock tanking), followed by Bezos at $226 billion and Mark Zuckerberg at $221 billion. (You don’t even get to the first Russian before #61.) Ten of the top U.S. billionaires are in technology, again a sector created by massive public investments during the Cold War and space race. Indicatively, the only non-U.S. billionaire in the top 15 is Bernard Arnault of France at #5, whose Louis Vuitton conglomerate is “the world’s largest maker of luxury goods,” Bloomberg reports. That’s one market that is booming.

Never going back to the way it was

People are now increasingly aware we live in an oligarchy that overwhelms popular democracy. As I wrote a couple of months back, “. . . it is better to be clear about our situation than have it obscured. Better for evil to be revealed than let it hide. Better for us to realize a negative direction than to be blindly carried there anyway. As I often repeat, out of the darkness comes the light. The contrast illuminates, draws the distinction, stirs countervailing responses.”

The concentration of wealth has been increasing since the 1980s, with the tax cuts and suspension of antitrust enforcement under the Reagan Administration and similar neoliberal actions across the world. Now with the second Trump Administration, it has fully metastasized into a billionaire administration bent on ripping apart public services and the social safety net, determined to further enrich the billionaire class. The poison of concentrated wealth and the power imbalance it creates, undermining any form of democracy, is now in our face, illuminated in crystal clarity. Chainsaw-waving Elon could not make it any more obvious.

What is also clear is we are never going back to the way it was before. The imbalances have grown too great. The situation has built up for too long. A profound rearrangement of power realities is the only solution, and that will require a movement of movements, merging all our struggles for social justice, environmental sanity and a peaceful world together. Let us hope the dawning clarity of this moment will drive us together to accumulate the power we need to overturn the power of oligarchy, restore democracy, and bring back some level of certainty to our lives.

p.s. My last post, Stung by people power protests, Elon Musk targets my group and a close friend, gained a wild number of likes and restacks on the Substack app – respectively 975 and 232 as of this writing. This is way out of proportion with anything else in the now 4-year history of this site. I appreciate the show of support, and recognize this shows how pissed people are at Musk and what he represents. It gives me hope that people power can overcome the reign of the oligarchs.

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