“I guess maybe Bernie Sanders shouldn’t exist,” said billionaire Steve Schwarzman while seated in a library building named after billionaire Steve Schwarzman and promoting a book with billionaire Steve Schwarzman’s face on it.
According to Bloomberg this humble response from the always modest billionaire Steve Schwarzman came in response to a question posed by an audience member about a Sanders tweet in which the Vermont Senator said that billionaires should not exist. The comment was reportedly met with enthusiastic applause.
Blackstone CEO Schwarzman, who has previously compared tax increases on the wealthy to the Nazi invasion of Poland, is an oligarch by any reasonable definition. As one of America’s top individual campaign donors he
is immensely influential; his plutocratic power is so deeply interwoven
with the highest levels of government that his book’s 14 pages of acknowledgements describe cuddly relationships with a who’s-who of top US officials, including the last five presidents. According to a recent report by The Intercept,
two Brazilian firms owned by Schwarzman “are significantly responsible
for the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest, carnage that has
developed into raging fires that have captivated global attention.”
It is very telling that this oligarch
sees an equivalence between (A) saying that an elite class should not
control such vast amounts of wealth and (B) saying actual people should
not exist. What this tells us is that Schwarzman sees being a
billionaire as a fundamental part of his identity, making the idea that
he shouldn’t control billions of dollars indistinguishable from saying
that he himself should not exist. From his point of view he’s just doing
the same thing that Sanders is doing: Bernie’s saying the thing that
Schwarzman is shouldn’t exist, and Schwarzman is saying that Bernie
himself shouldn’t exist. To him they’re the same.
This statement gives us a bit of insight
into the way billionaires see themselves as fundamentally different
than the rest of us, forming an egoic identity construct out of being a
billionaire in the same way a medieval king would form an egoic identity
construct out of that position. This anti-billionaire rhetoric is
perceived as an attack on their very identity, which is why they are
spinning it as though Sanders is calling for the elimination of actual
people.
Ken Langone rips Bernie Sanders: What has he done for the little people?
Predictably, Fox News is now trotting out billionaires to defend themselves from this outrageous billionairephobic bigotry, with Home Depot founder and major Republican Party donor Ken Langone receiving a warmly sycophantic reception from Fox’s Mornings with Maria.
“What the hell has he done for the little people?” Langone asked his host Maria Bartiromo. “What jobs has he created?”
Langone went on to detail all the many
jobs he’s “created” (read: how many people he’s needed to hire to help
him reap lucrative profits from an already existing demand) without
bothering to explain what hoarding billions of dollars in offshore
accounts has to do with job creation. Exponents of the “billionaires
create jobs” argument always avoid this glaring plot hole like the
plague.
Again, we see in Langone’s emotional
response two things: that he sees ordinary citizens as “the little
people” innately different from himself, and that he perceives the push
toward greater economic equality as an existential threat.
“If you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany,” Langone has said of
the rising pushback against wealth and income inequality. “You don’t
survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”
Stephen Cloobeck Blasts Dems For Attacking Wealthy: 'Hopefully We'll Get Our Shit Together'
“It is very, very disturbing when I hear
the millionaire or billionaire word,” Cloobeck said, as though he was
uttering an ethnic slur for an oppressed minority and not a conventional
label for a class that effectively owns the US government. “And I’ve
told them to stop it. Knock it off.”
We’re seeing this hilarious conflation
of economic justice with the persecution of minorities and the
elimination of actual human beings more and more often, so we should
probably come up with a name for it. I’d like to propose that we label
this phenomenon “wealth identity politics”, and it is capitalism’s
dumbest turn yet.
It’s especially dumb because the
billionaire class has already proven with its actions that it cannot
exist without actively working to manipulate governments in a way that
undeniably subverts democracy and the will of the people. The debate
over whether or not billionaires should exist is long settled. They
should not.
A few million dollars will buy you a
nice car, a nice house and some nice clothes. A few billion dollars will
buy you the ability to control public narratives using media ownership,
lobbyists and think tanks, thereby manipulating entire governments and
international affairs. Believing that it makes sense to have an elite
class which controls this much wealth and power is exactly as stupid as
believing it makes sense to have a total monarchy.
Billionaires should not exist, for the
same reason that kings and pharaohs should not exist. The leadership of
our world should not belong to a class of highly mediocre people who
have nothing noteworthy between their ears apart from a knack for
accumulating dollars. The ability to amass wealth is not a valid basis
upon which to determine who leads us. Our fate as a species should be in
all our hands.
___________________________
Internet censorship is getting pretty bad,
so the best way to keep seeing the stuff I publish is to get on the
mailing list for my website,
so you’ll get an email notification for everything I publish. My
articles and podcasts are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you
enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
No comments:
Post a Comment