billionaires are the problem, not our neighbors.
and it’s all of them. not just the ones performing a coup. all of them.
The sooner we recognize the problem, the sooner we can quit fighting amongst ourselves, the sooner we can make a real plan, and the sooner we can get to work building a system and society that actually works for and by the people.
Billionaires and the system that made them billionaires is the problem.
Billionaires stepping up and into our government telling us they want to ‘fix the system’ is the problem.
Billionaires are not in the business of fixing a system that made them billionaires in the first place. Their entire existence is based on creating and keeping the absolute most profit possible for themselves. There is nothing, from their perspective, to fix. ‘The system’ worked out for them. Now they’re just trying to take more, and it’s really that simple.
If we’re being told billionaires are just trying to make the government ‘more efficient’, we should really be asking what’s in it for them? If their number one goal is always reducing their cost to make more profit, what do they get out of ‘making government more efficient’? Maybe it's paying no more taxes? They personally do not rely on the services our tax dollars are meant to provide, so they do not care if they go away, in the name of efficiency.
Unless, maybe, these billionaires infiltrated the government to find corruption and fraud? And they’re taking a hard look at the corporations that take billions in government subsidies to run their companies, pay little to no taxes, and keep all the profit for themselves. That actually sounds noble!
Especially, since between 2018-2022 Tesla made $4.4 billion dollars in U.S. profit, paid executives $2.5 billion dollars, and paid 0% in federal income tax. Netflix made $17.7 billion in U.S. profit, paid executives $406 million dollars, and paid 2.2% in federal income tax. Duke Energy made $15.6 billion dollars in U.S. profit, paid executives $181 million dollars, and paid -7.9% in federal income tax. Effectively receiving $1.2 billion in tax returns. MetLife, the largest U.S. life insurance corporation, made $11.7 billion in U.S. corporate profit, paid executives $240 million dollars, and paid 0.8% in federal income tax.
In the same 5 year period, between those four companies, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were handed out to them. All while they contributed little to nothing in taxes. There’s a lot of other companies just like those too, list goes on and on. So yeah, that does sound like a problem that needs fixing!
But, they are definitely not looking into raising corporate tax rates, or closing loopholes, because of who is benefiting.
Maybe we hear someone say billionaires ‘just want to help’ people? HA! Please know that they. do. not. care. about people. Straight up. Do not care.
If ANY of them wanted to ‘help’ people they could do that in an instant. Without setting up shop in the federal government.
Let’s think about it. How many people do billionaires employ? How many of those employees work fulltime and rely on SNAP for groceries? How many of them rely on medicaid? How many have multiple jobs? How many live paycheck to paycheck? How many can’t afford a place to live? How many can’t take a single day off when they're sick?
In October 2020, the Government Accountability Office found that almost 70% of the 21 million adults enrolled in Medicaid and receiving SNAP benefits worked full time. With Walmart, McDonalds, Kroger, and Amazon among those companies with the highest number of employees enrolled in federal aid.
If they actually wanted to materially help people, and make everyday American’s lives better…they could, and they haven’t.
They’ve actually gone out of their way, many times, to fight against having to pay people a livable wage, provide benefits, etc. It’s not hard to find examples of these efforts either, just look at Starbucks, Amazon’s, Apple’s, or Chipotle’s union busting. Or the SpaceX vs. the National Labor Relations Board saga. They do. not. care. about people. They care about increasing profit, and profit only.
And you know what cuts into those profit margins? Taxes. And Labor.
In today’s world where the CEO-to-worker pay ratio is 268-1, and it’s estimated that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, the labor class should really include anyone collecting a paycheck that does not directly own the means of production.
Doesn’t matter if you’re working part-time at minimum wage, a senior vp, or a professional athlete. If you collect a paycheck, rely on a paycheck, and are not receiving the majority of the profit from your labor, you are part of the labor class.
That’s a big group. Since the billionaires and corporations rely on our labor to grow their profits year over year, and because there are more of us than there are of them, they absolutely must maintain control, they must maintain the illusion of power over labor.
The physical form of control for most people is a paycheck, and the more insidious form of control is grown through division. Keeping the labor divided and battling amongst ourselves, only looking out for the individual, and blaming our neighbors for the seemingly unsolvable but ever recurring and growing problems in our world deflects from the real villains.
So if billionaires do work hard at anything, they work hard to keep us arguing. This has become easier and easier for them, because the billionaires own the newspapers, tv networks, the social media platforms. They not only own the way information is disseminated, they choose what information is shared. They do not just sit back and let these publications run unbiased stories and content, they use those outlets as a tool to sow division and preserve control.
This is allowed to happen, because our country is built on a system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for a profit. That just means that the things needed to make all the products and provide services, like factories, tools, land, and so on, are owned by individual people. They then use labor to make their products, and sell those products to make a profit.
This doesn’t just impact the structure of our economy, but it builds a society based on individualism, and is then framed as we all have the ‘freedom to pursue our own goals.’ And, on the surface, it doesn't sound like such a bad deal. Almost sounds like, ‘If you work hard, you could be rich and own some of this too!’
As a result of this setup, our society has been conditioned to measures success, intelligence, leadership skills, and general competence based on an individual’s ability to turn a profit and accumulate privately owned property. Which then makes it easy to elevate people to positions of power based on this perceived level of intelligence and competence, that came purely from a person’s ability to make money. And it also makes it easy for people to assume a person’s amount of “success” is based solely on their own individual actions, and on the flip side a person’s “failures” are also fully the result of their own doing.
However, when the means of production are in the hands of just a couple people and corporations, we are no longer operating with the freedom to pursue our own individual dreams and goals, it actually becomes an omnipotent, everywhere, form of control. Masked by the propaganda of ‘freedom of choice’.
And that’s where we’ve found ourselves today, in a world where the means of all production, even those goods and services that are essential for human survival, are owned by a very small number of individuals and corporations, so we have to live and operate in a world they shaped for us. Use the wages they decide to pay us, to buy the products they decide to sell, at the prices they choose. If all they care about is profit, our entire world, every decision we’re allowed to make, is shaped around providing and maximizing their profit.
This system of constantly maximizing profit does not want to lift people up. It actually needs to keep people down in order to keep growing. Lifting people up would mean sharing profits the labor creates. Either through raising wages, sharing the marketplace with competitors, or paying taxes. And that goes against everything billionaires and corporations stand for.
The requirement of keeping people down in order to maximize profit, is not a scheme that billionaires and their henchmen want labor to pick up on. So to prevent rebellion, to maintain control, they give us someone to blame. That’s where division comes in.
The billionaire-owned news outlets, social media platforms, and politicians create and fuel this division by pointing fingers at small minority groups within the ever expanding labor class. They tell us these other people are the reason we’re struggling to afford groceries, rent, or medical care. But in reality, these ‘others’ are struggling just as much to afford basic necessities.
Instead of focusing on the real issue, the small group of wealthy individuals and corporations controlling essential goods and services, we’re influenced to turn against each other, distracting us from what we all have in common.
There were guardrails and protections in place at one time to protect people from being taken advantage of by the illusive ‘free market’, but big money and corporate influence has been involved in our politics for a long time. We don’t hear about it too often since the same corporations own the news and media, but it’s been there long enough to erode the backbones of our two main political parties. They have both been compromised. Commodified. Bought and sold. Not to uphold the will of the people, but to bow down, and bend the knee to the will of their biggest donors.
As a result, our system and its leaders have no motivation to fix these seemingly chronic, unsolvable, unpreventable issues like poverty, hunger, and homelessness, so they continue to grow. In 2023, 43 million people were experiencing poverty in the United States of America, and 49 million more people were living just above the poverty threshold. 92 million people.
Not only has the general population been conditioned across generations to believe these issues are the fault of the individual, and not systemic. Meaning it is only by coincidence that as the wealth gap widens, a small group enjoys increasing luxury while the majority faces ever encroaching, almost inevitable poverty. In order to even try and fix these the elected officials would have to go against what their donors and beneficiaries have paid them to uphold.
The republicans have become the party of the loud billionaires and christian nationalists, and they have sold their souls for profit and protection. They create and push the lies that keep us divided.
And the democrats are not far behind them. They’ve been failing to put together a message that pushes back against the flagrant lies, because they do not want to upset their quiet billionaires and corporate donors. They need to find a polite way to say those loud billionaires are the bad ones, not the quiet ones that are funding my reelection campaign. Not the quiet ones that will make me a lobbyist, with a big salary, to push their identical profit-driven agenda in the future.
This is all not to say that our institutions were great, and they need to be upheld. Our institutions are and were flawed. Most were built on the foundational idea of exploiting natural resources and the labor of many to benefit a few. But, if we can come together and realize that we are all mad about the same things, that we want the same outcomes, and realize that we are on the same side, just blaming the wrong people. We can overthrow these loser billionaires and corporations, and start rebuilding a government that actually works for us all.
If you’ve read this far, and are still not convinced that we need to come together with all of our neighbors no matter who they are, where they’re from, or who they voted for, just remember your complicity will not protect you from what’s coming. If you haven’t been impacted directly yet, just wait. Those quiet billionaires will become emboldened to assert their power too. Layoffs to promote efficiency and profit will happen, freedom of speech will go away, the price of essential goods will skyrocket, homelessness will grow, more and more children will live in poverty, public education will be decimated, violent crime will increase, and environmental disasters caused by global warming do not care about your bank account or zip code.
We do not need people in charge that are good at running businesses that create profit, exploit people and natural resources. Government is not a business that is supposed to turn a profit.
Our government is supposed to work for the people. We all contribute in order to receive services, safety, and stability from it. It is how we take care of ourselves, take care of each other, and take care of the future.
Billionaires, corporations, and the mechanisms that hold them up is what stands in the way, it’s what keeps us all down, and prevents us from building a world based around the stuff people actually enjoy doing. It’s not complicated. It won’t be easy, but it’s not complicated. We built the system we live in today, we can build a better one for the future.
Why shouldn’t we strive for a world where ‘grinding’ isn’t the default to just barely survive? People deserve to be housed, deserve to be able to eat, deserve healthcare, and deserve education no matter how much money they make. We have to allow ourselves the ability to question the power around us, and give ourselves permission to dream big about the kind of world we want to live in.
Right now, we need to look to the people and to the leaders that do not take money from billionaires and giant corporations, leaders that are not afraid to call out exactly what is happening and why. Leaders that are not afraid to say the issue isn’t just one billionaire, it’s all of them, and the system that allowed them to exist as billionaires in the first place.
If we do not see those leaders around us yet, then we need to be those leaders. Spreading the message of solidarity, recognizing the control that’s been sold to us as freedom, and that pushing back against it is the only way to bring power back to the people.
It is in our own self-interest to make sure all people are taken care of, no matter who they are, where they're from, or who they voted for. We must remember that lifting others up, will lift us all up. It is possible, but only together.