Looking at the new Richest Man on Earth is an invitation to consider billionaires, and why they shouldn’t exist.
During the COVID pandemic, the richer got richer than at any point in recorded history, according to the World Bank. [Bernard] Arnault was one of the world’s ten wealthiest men, who collectively doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion — at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion daily. Arnault’s yacht of cash grew from $76 billion in 2020 to $188 billion just two years later.
The World’s New Richest Man, Bernard Arnault, Is Hardly Better Than Elon Musk, Jacobin 12.14.2022 [emphasis added]
It’s disgusting that rich people in general got richer because of covid, but how Arnault did it seems worse than usual. He makes his money selling rich people things and rich people services to other rich people. His multinational accumulates such companies. He seems to be trying to get a monopoly. How useless is that? Click the link to see some of the uselessness listed.
Another article indicates that 48% of the company's revenue comes from sales of fashion and leather goods. It's expanding through growth in Asia, as well as in Europe, and though LVMH [Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton] doesn't have an overall brand — absorbed companies keeps their original branding — there is a corporate strategy of enticing new customers of its various brands via lower priced logo'd items such as belts or other small items, hoping to get them hooked into the luxury lifestyle.
PS: Please rec & read Daily Kos announces staff layoffs; Daily Kos Guild demands to negotiate, and sign the petition. I had completed this essay (except for one section and the tags) and then I saw the Guild’s diary on the rec list. I feel somewhat weird posting free content when some of the paid news staff may be facing layoff because I don’t want to cross a picket line. I carefully read the post and I don’t think they’re asking for that solidarity at this time, though ACM should have a contingent plan in place [I hope that won’t be necessary].
More billionaire bashing below the break.
"The Rich Benefited from Covid" is enough of a meme that I found someone (to laugh at) who had a pout about the accusation:
CHARLIE MUNGER: I think that to some extent the complaint about the rich getting richer during the— as a result of the corporate panic, I think that's a misplaced concern. Nobody was trying to make the rich richer. We were trying to save the whole economy under terrible conditions.
The rich getting richer during the pandemic is a ‘misplaced concern:’ Charlie Munger, February 24, 2021 [emphasis added]
See below about one of Munger’s other pouts.
Another Billionaire has taken a political candidate to court, arguing that the size of his political donation doesn’t make him a public figure:
Warren’s lawyers have asserted the natural gas tycoon experienced “mental anguish” from comments, ads, and social media posts in which O’Rourke’s campaign suggested that the money was a reward for Abbott going easy on Warren’s pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners, before and after a deadly storm that shut down power to more than four million people. …
If the Texas court rules for Warren, O’Rourke could be forced to cough up $1 million. In the process, the case could pioneer a replicable model for wealthy political donors to deter and punish speech about money in politics.
A Texas Billionaire Is Suing to Stop Free Speech Against Billionaires, Jacobin 01.20.2023 [emphasis added]
What Parasites Do
Having money and power mean it’s easier to influence government. So taxes and regulations are altered to protect the interests of the powerful, even when it’s contradictory.
Here's a horribly typical example:
David Michaels, OSHA’s director throughout the Obama administration, told ProPublica that legal challenges had so tied his hands that he decided to put a disclaimer on the agency’s website saying the government’s limits were essentially useless: “OSHA recognizes that many of its permissible exposure limits (PELs) are outdated and inadequate for ensuring protection of worker health.” This remarkable admission of defeat remains on the official site of the U.S. agency devoted to protecting worker health.
“To me, it was obvious,” Michaels said. “You can’t lie and say you’re offering protection when you’re not. It seemed much more effective to say, ‘Don’t follow our standards.’”
As Workers Battle Cancer, The Government Admits Its Limit for a Deadly Chemical Is Too High by Sharon Lerner Dec. 15, 7 a.m. EST [emphasis added]
... the article I linked to lists details of some of the lawsuits. Which are aggravating (understatement).
If this were really a democracy in USA the minimum wage would be raised. “We” wouldn’t be at war all the time. There would be single payer. There would be accountability for racist police and politicians that make campaign promises they don’t keep.
I believe the climate crisis would be less severe without billionaires and billionaire projects, as their projects are about accumulation and they accumulate via theft, often theft of a stable and biologically diverse ecology.
per-capita emissions of the top 1% of emitters in the world grew by 26% over 1990-2019. The top 0.01% saw an even larger rise of 80%. Meanwhile, the bottom half of emitters saw a more modest 16% increase in per-capita emissions. And the “lower- and middle-income groups of the rich countries” saw a drop in per capita emissions of 5-15%.
The Top 1% of Emitters Caused Almost a Quarter of Global Emissions Since 1990 [emphasis added]
The changing climate is personal to me, in a background critical way. I've lived in the same house for 45 years, in the same city for 49. The snow in winter is noticeably less! To experience climate change in my own lifetime is frightening. Communities that try to enforce local climate measures keep getting sued and pressured by businesses that don't want to be bothered, that don't want any limit on their accumulating. The billionaire parasites don't care.
Luxury stuff that’s highly polluting — such as private jets or helicopters — ought to be highly restricted or prohibited. Hurtling metal vehicles through the sky can’t be other than a high-carbon activity! There ought to be a lot of individual and cultural examination about why we do these things. (The USA military is the largest single consumer of oil and gas, for wars & practicing for wars & over 500 major foreign military bases. We won’t be able to deal with climate change (& the international cooperation that needs) if we don’t change war culture into peace culture.)
A Tragedy
Look at the before and after pics to the right. This is the picture of a dangerous rich people thing, … and the horrible (and predictable) aftermath of such a folly.
There used to be 1,500 fish in that ticking time bomb. (A Radisson Hotel in Berlin, Germany.) This was something obviously conceived to attract the bored attention of parasitic rich people. I suppose other people also came to look and enjoy. Though I don’t think they would have insisted if they really understood the danger. What possible public good was this monstrosity? When it exploded it registered on earthquake detectors. How did it ever get a building permit?
And this is a trivial example of how the pursuit of power and luxury has so warped the world. There are so many other examples available. Consider what the Communards were building, and 10,000 -15,000 killed in a week by the rage of the ruling class.
Consider the not-capitalism that Roxanne Donbar-Ortiz describes at the beginning of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States:
Rather than domesticating animals for hides and meat, Indigenous communities created havens to attract elk, deer, bear, and other game. They burned the undergrowth in forests so that the young grasses and other ground cover that sprouted the following spring would entice greater numbers of herbivores and the predators that fed on them, which would sustain the people who ate them both. Mann describes these forests in 1941: “Rather than the thick, unbroken, monumental snarl of trees imagined by Thoreau, the great eastern forest was an ecological kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens, and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak.” ...
This brief overview of precolonial North America suggests the magnitude of what was lost to all humanity and counteracts the settler-colonial myth of the wandering Neolithic hunter.
— from chapter 1
Rich Useless Person Having a Pout
This is an example of an Elon Musk-style snit. The place is southern California, where the community is having an argument with University of California Santa Barbara over lack of affordable housing because the university doesn’t have enough dorms. This is a longstanding issue.
This problem, already thorny, got made worse by a billionaire, showing another danger of megarich people. If they get a Notion, and want to be stubborn about it, they have the ability to insert themselves and their opinions into a mess and they can’t be told to go away by the adults in the room (if there are any adults in UCSB administration). Billionaire investor and amateur architect Charles Munger decided he had the solution. He’s rich enough that a $200 million donation is a small enough sum that he’s OK with spending that to show what he thinks about students, that they should live in prison-like architecture. When I first became aware of this issue last year one of the stipulations of his donation is (was?) that there could be no alterations. Because, of course, he’s a genius billionaire.
The planned dorm went viral after a consulting architect on the project resigned in protest in October 2021, calling it a “social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves” in his resignation letter. …
While the report cites reams of academic literature and extensive surveying to support its findings that the building plausibly jeopardizes the mental health and physical well-being of future UCSB students, perhaps the most telling aspect is that the word “prison” appears 41 times, including in a section titled “Massiveness and Density: Prison-like Design.”
Independent Review Panel Finds UCSB’s Dormzilla “Unwise” and Poses “Significant Health and Safety Risks” By Aaron Gordon, December 21, 2022 [emphasis added]
I became aware of the controversy about Dormzilla in June or July last year. When I found the “We were trying to save the who economy” vid above (I can’t remember how I came across it) I did not realize the interviewee was the designer of this monster dorm. I laughed to make the discovery when I was doing final edits. It so fits that someone who said that (and let it be put out on the internets) would also come up with this this impossible dorm (which I hope doesn’t get built, though there is a housing crisis).
The genius billionaire, by the way, didn’t include a dining hall, nor would there be a dining hall near by. Student rooms would be grouped 8 to a suite — each suite would have some common areas. Then suites would be grouped with one large kitchen for 63 students. The last cubicle would be for the RA, I assume. How soon would that go toxic? For a needed modification to have cooking appliances for each of the suites (instead of the one large kitchen per 8 suite block) there would be ventilation requirements which would require ventilation shafts (& maybe low-quality windows?). Eight student strangers sharing a refrigerator & stove & microwave still sounds dicey to me. Multiply by however many suites-of-8 per floor. I really don’t understand why genius billionaire thinks buying and maintaining 50 large kitchens would be more efficient than having a cafeteria complex — even if the RAs can keep the 63 students from trashing the machinery. And if it turns into a disaster it would be more staff needed to get it out of crisis … there should be a dining hall and kitchen. Maybe the 50 separate kitchens and no dining hall is supposed to be anti-union protection.
The university did seem to have an agreement with local governments, but the intruding billionaire upset that understanding. Perhaps it was a welcome intrusion, from the UCSB admin PoV ??
Separately, UCSB is being sued by Santa Barbara County and the city of Goleta for throwing out a previous legally-binding development agreement to address the housing crisis so it could pursue Munger Hall. UCSB’s paper the Daily Nexus reports there is no longer a target date for construction to begin.
Why did I say “(was?)” above? Because the article I linked to includes discussions of possible alterations, which would mean less students housed in the dorm and other needed, but probably not sufficient changes. The article doesn’t mention Munger’s agreement to possible alterations. The article does mention that administrators had defending the building design. So I foresee further delay as the committee tries to convince admin, and then admin has to convince the donor. In the meantime, the housing situation — which is ongoing — continues. With time lost where the recalcitrant administration of the university might have been forced to start addressing the issue in a reasonable manner. FUBAR!
Taming Billionaires: FTT, etc.
Taxing and rationing have a high success rate at affecting people’s behavior. It’s a reason why so much lobbying is about changing tax law. I wasn’t able to find the article I read years ago, but I think a large number of new billionaires used hedge funds as their means up the wealth ladder. Many, many more would-be billionaires would logically fail in their attempts than than would succeed ... but any number of more billionaires is still a drain on the rest of us.
A financial transaction tax or taxes (FTT) makes sense all the way around. They wouldn’t put any more burden on the already-burdened poor. People speculating on the market can obviously afford to pay a tax on their speculation. What they do isn’t a public good. Reducing speculative financial activity would be a valid government goal. I support FTT!
Public Citizen has pitched a Wall Street sales tax on speculative transactions like stock, bond, and derivative trades. Nicknamed a Robin Hood tax, estimates show just a tiny fee of 10 cents per $100 traded would generate $777 billion over 10 years, with the potential to raise even more, depending on the tax rate set. Targeting high rollers through a tax on financial speculation would have the added benefit of limiting high-frequency trading — a type of algorithmic financial trading that can be risky and unfair in its potential to help the wealthiest rapidly accrue assets and has been blamed in part for flash crashes.
Billionaires Should Not Exist — Here’s Why
by Rebekka Ayres December 29, 2021
Lots of other taxes come to mind. Anyone paying real estate taxes is paying a wealth tax. More of the wealth of megarich people should be taxed, and it should be a yearly thing, same as real estate taxes. In the same way that highly polluting choices should be highly taxed or fined (and taxes and fines should fund programs that address the harm done), there are lots of financial and business actions that should get high taxes. There should be extra taxes on stock buybacks, vacant residences and vacant urban land. Advertising shouldn’t be a fully deductible business expense (maybe briefly for new businesses). I don’t think excessive top level salaries should fully deductible either.
It’s a class war
and we shouldn’t be intimidated by pearl-clutchers.
Obviously, billionaires are part of capitalism's class war against poor and working class, and to add to the New Year's discussion about anger (even if the Dali Lama said whatever, I think of him as ruling class rather than a comrade. [He's closer to status quo than change the system ... a reformer, at best, IMO.] )
Being loud and emotional on behalf of others is solidarity! It isn’t a sign of lack of theory. China Mieville says it well. Here a few quotes from a passage about the uses and dangers of hate:
The very absence of a critical mass of hatred may militate against resistance: Walter Benjamin, in his extraordinary, prophetic, controversial 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” took social democracy, as opposed to militant socialism, to task for its focus on the future and on the working class as “redeemer,” thus actively weakening that class by directing its eyes away from the iniquities of the past and present, to “forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice.”
… hate may help not only with strength but intellectual rigor, and of analysis, too. The very flat abstractions of capital can generate their own seemingly implacable logic, against which an emotionally invested, a hating contrary eye, might prove necessary not only ethically but epistemologically.
China Mieville on Why Capitalism Deserves Our Burning Hatred, 11.27.2022 [emphasis added]
I'm also remembering a video clip of Hawaii residents at a navy town hall, something to do with the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility leakage issue. The general or whatever sat there blank faced while a series of speakers told all the bad things and the general or whatever made no reply except to make flat admonishment to be "civil" whenever anyone said the F-word, or other appropriate curse.
The social training is that victims and their supporters should be polite when complaining about how the Navy (or any Power) is breaking rules and doing actual harm. Said powers obfuscate and refuse to change … but the complaining gets the attention and moral panic. Bizzaro World logic!
I’ve also seen another version of this locally where there is theoretically public input, where the process is emphasized rather than what the public might want. Last year, I attended a community event in a neighboring ward because some residents spoke forcefully a month earlier about how a community garden was lost and other complaints. I wanted to learn more. A few weeks after the event a council member who attended asked community development staff who were presenting about the zoning change under consideration to explain the official report of the event which was supposed to collect public input. Per her, it didn’t describe the meeting she attended.
There were accusations and counter-accusations and I won’t get into details when my understanding is incomplete. It isn’t the reason I bring up this experience. Of course, there the obvious observation that the desires of poor people aren’t respected. What I also learned by watching this is how the bureaucratic process was designed to be biased towards certain outcomes while having a veneer of so-called “neutrality.”
First, unlike council meetings, this was considered a “community event” so it wasn’t recorded, so it can’t be revisited to verify the accuracy of the official report. What didn’t get into the official report doesn’t officially exist. Also, the public input rules are apparently different for events. At city council meetings, any member of the public can speak for up to five minutes on whatever topic, with only narrow exceptions. (My city allows for a good amount of time, if necessary, without any overt gatekeeping.) Well, CD staff running the community development events for public input are looking for public input on particular issues. Since the event was announced to be gathering community opinion on the zoning change, they only reported on zoning issue comments.
When residents of the area made statements that they needed a grocery store not more housing complexes when what’s already there needs repair, the school is already overcrowded, and teenagers need more programs, the staff replied that wasn’t what the meeting was “supposed” to be about. None of those comments was given the dignity of being acknowledged and reported, apparently, not even in summary form. Excuse me! You are city staff that’s supposed to be serving this community! You should pay attention and work with them. If the community liked the food garden that was there, it’s not, IMO, a valid response to say: “The city has always intended for that corner to be housing once a good proposal was made. The garden was always temporary.” A valid response would be, “There’s strong support for continuing the garden, let’s reconsider.” I think the development staff has some entitlement issues they need to address, wouldn’t you agree?
Whenever bureaucrats (or generals or whatever) have a snit about “not following the rules” they should get pushback.
- 1. It’s not “the rules” — it’s one particular rule you’ve cherry-picked as the current Most Important Thing.
- 2. There’s lots of rules Governments/Bureaucracy agree to, then ignore.
- 2. Rules aren’t “neutral.” Don’t pretend they are.
- 3. Who’s making the rubrics? The people most affected deserve democracy and proportional influence.
- 4. It’s always appropriate to re-evaluate, if substantive cause can be shown.
Bottom line on the little piece of a local story I saw a part of: The record will probably state that the project had community support (or with minor complaint) because the residents weren't giving input in the so-called “proper” way. Looking at the historical record down the line, someone who hadn’t been there at the time is going to get an inaccurate description of what kind of public engagement happened and whether the spirit as well as letter of the law was followed. That kind of bureaucratic thumbs-on-scales is how things like the time bomb fish tank get judged as acceptable … or even an asset to the community!
pfffft
Conclusion
Is there any doubt? Down with billionaires! They should be taxed and taxed and taxed and made to make restitution for the harms they have done, until their living conditions have been pared down to an acceptable level of comfort. It would be a better world.
I hope this small collection of stories-to-tell are helpful. I like collecting anti-capitalist stories. It’s a good kind of accumulation.