Battle of the billionaires: Why liberals shouldn’t count on their rich patrons to win
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/01/battle_of_the_billionaires_why_liberals_shouldnt_count_on_their_rich_patrons_to_win/
David Koch, Chris Hughes (Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri/Adam Hunger)
A lot has been said about Chris Hughes and the changes at the New Republic, and I don’t have much to add to it. But I haven’t seen anyone acknowledge the fact that while we might expect young tech billionaires to be caught up in Silicon Valley values, Hughes was perceived to be about something more. Remember, we all really came to know him through his high-profile association with MyBarackObama.com, which later morphed into Obama for America. It was the idea that he was a committed liberal billionaire that undoubtedly made many people believe that buying the New Republic was a political project rather than a money-making project. (Yes, you can insert the standard disclaimer about Obama not being a real liberal either, but that’s beside the point.) Hughes wasn’t supposed to be your standard-issue Silicon Valley geek billionaire who didn’t get the Big Picture.
It’s ironic that there was such consternation across the liberal landscape that a magazine that for many decades positioned itself as the home of liberal establishment contrarianism and only under Chris Hughes seemed to be turning itself into a publication with a much more straight-ahead ideology. But the upshot of the whole episode seems to be that people thought Hughes bought the magazine as a way to advance a political philosophy and it turned out that really wasn’t his goal. And it raises an important issue: In this new world of billionaires in politics, where everything seems to be coming down to a sort of cage match between billionaires on the left and billionaires on the right, can liberals count on “their” billionaires to put their money where their hearts are?
This has actually been a long-standing discussion among activists on the left. Setting aside the natural worries about rich people of all political bents keeping one eye on their bottom lines, many liberal donors prefer to put their efforts toward specific charitable efforts they care about. It’s very hard to argue with it — those good deeds are necessary. But it is a very different approach to the way the right-wingers go about using their money to advance their political ideology and directly influence the political process itself.
Now one cannot really fault someone like Tom Steyer who is dedicating a lot of his money to fighting climate change. That is one issue that is so profoundly threatening to the entire planet that you have to be grateful to anyone for putting their fortunes to work to fix it. But so many others are either like Hughes, who everyone thought was political but just turned out to be another tech entrepreneur putting his skills to work in the political field for a brief period, or they are dedicated to their specific causes and allegiance to mainstream Democratic Party politics. And that is definitely not what the Murdochs and the Kochs and the Adelsons and the Foster Friesses are all about. They are attempting to dominate the political process by using their money to directly influence the ideological and political makeup of our society. They leave no stone unturned. From Fox News to think tanks to super PACs to political campaigns they are using their fortunes to actively change American politics. Oddly, unlike their liberal counterparts, they seem to respect state power.
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their shit. A mass general strike and boycott.
Otherwise, the 1% will continue to gain wealth and power until they have all the wealth and power, and the 99% will continue to lose wealth and power until we have nothing.
Obama is not going to save us. Clinton is not going to save us. Warren is not going to save us. Bernie is not going to save us. We have to save ourselves.
The only weapon we have left to fight them with is not giving them our labor, and not giving them our money. We can totally collapse the system in a month if enough people get on board. They cannot cannot imprison, beat, torture, pepper spray, or kill us for simply not going to work and not buying anything.
Yet.
You can bet your ass ALEC is devising legislation to circumvent us from employing this weapon as you read this.
After two weeks of losing billions upon billions of dollars due to general strikes, boycotts, (etc), with no end to the losses in sight, the 1% will be forced to negotiate. The stock market will collapse, and all their sources of profit will become sources of losses. If they allow the system to collapse, it will be Bastille for them for the rest of their lives, lives they will spend every minute of hiding from very angry, dangerous people seeking revenge.
If we don't do something to force them to negotiate, they will completely enslave us. They want to enslave us, they can enslave us, and they will enslave us. Unless we take it upon ourselves to stop them with the only effective weapon that is available to us:
Doing Nothing.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
~ Benjamin Franklin
