Trump's Billionaire Ball

Government by the Rich for the Rich

It’s the season of goodwill to all men, when those who have a lot are invited, like Scrooge, to make common cause with those who have nothing or very little. But as the world braces itself for the Trumpocalypse in three weeks time, there are those who have more than many humans have ever had in the whole of human history, who remain untouched by the milk of human kindness.

Take the World’s Richest Man. Earlier this month the self-styled ‘Dark Gothic MAGA’ took time out to opine on some of the less-favoured residents of his adoptive country:

This is not the first time Rocket Ozymandias has offered the world his pearls of wisdom on the subject of homelessness. In June this year, he made another typically insightful, knowledgeable and measured contribution to the debate:

In January 2023, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reported that over 650,000 extremely drug-addicted and mentally zombified Americans were likely to be homeless on any given night. OK, HUD didn’t put it in quite those terms. The agency attributed the rise in homelessness to a number of factors including the COVID-19 pandemic, an opioid epidemic, and a nationwide affordable housing crisis, all of which had ‘conspired to make attaining and maintaining housing increasingly difficult for many low-income households.’

But that’s not a lens the World’s Richest Man and his pals like to look through. Because such an analysis raises a number of troubling societal questions relating to inequality and the American economic model that might reflect badly on the beneficiaries of that model.

Far better to associate homeless people with ‘violent drug zombies with dead eyes, and needles and human feces on the street,’ as the repellent white supremacist shill Kremlin Tucker Carlson did in October. Because if it’s true, as Donald Trump himself argued last year that, ‘Our once-great cities have become unliveable, unsanitary nightmares, surrendered to the homeless, the drug addicted, and the violent and dangerously deranged,’ then the only problem you have is how to get these degenerates off the streets.

This is what Joe Lonsdale – the co-founder of tech firm Palantir and and head of a Trump super PAC – did in Austin, Texas, when he helped finance a referendum calling for a ban on homeless encampments in 2021. Austin’s elite pitched in $1.9 million into the campaign for Proposition B. Since then, more than – more than 900 citations have been issued in Austin for sleeping, lying down or pitching a tent in the city. Lonsdale has since founded and funded a thinktank to promote similar policies in other states, and succeeded in getting the support of the Supreme Court for the criminalisation of homelessness.

In a twenty-first century version of A Christmas Carol, you could imagine a ketamine-adled billionaire stumbling through the streets of San Francisco, where he encounters three ghosts who lead him back to charity and humanity. This heart-warming show would culminate in a scene in which said billionaire hosts a Christmas dinner for the homeless in a glass house, and everyone sings ‘for he’s a jolly good fellow’ as our billionaire-protagonist finally discovers that money isn’t everything.

But in the real world of Trump’s America, where money walks and bullshit talks, the fetid stench of the Mar a Lago swamp wafts through penthouses, mansions and government departments, and the fact that the richest man in the history of humanity is viciously attacking and dehumanizing homeless people is just one more symptom of the disease America is suffering from.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates describes oligarchy as a form of government in which ‘men become lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man.’ In a society in which ‘the great mass of the citizens become lovers of money,’ Socrates argued, ‘the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.’

Trump’s America is an almost too perfect manifestation of this dynamic. His cabinet includes eleven billionaires and assorted multi-millionaires. Another two - Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy - have been tasked with heading a non-government agency that will, according to Musk, enable the US government to ‘reduce spending to live within our means.’

Who better than a billionaire - who may become the world’s first trillionaire - to tell a country how to live within its means? And if you were that man, dreaming of rockets, Mars, and driverless cars, would you want to find zombified drug addicts loitering outside your San Francisco office when the chauffeur dropped you off in the morning?

You know you wouldn’t.

And so Musk and his cohorts, and the president who brought them into his government, and the media and the movement that scandalously brought that president into the White House have added the homeless to their list of people to be persecuted and victimized.

They have embraced social cruelty with the same fervour that Scrooge once demonstrated towards his money, only unlike Dickens’s miser, they will not get over it, and the ghosts of Christmas will not redeem them.

Because these are men and women with dreams too great for ordinary mortals to comprehend, in a country where moral value is measured by net worth. Gods in the cult of money, following decades of unrestricted and unregulated accumulation of wealth, they dream of outliving their natural lifespan and perpetuating themselves into the near future, of establishing colonies on Mars, or deploying soldiers in space to defend US economic interests.

As the president-elect himself has shown many, many times, immense wealth does not bring honour or virtue, and the same can be said of his cronies and appointees Before he was pardoned by Trump and made US ambassador to France, Charles Kushner was convicted on 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering - the last of which involved hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law in order to intimidate his own sister.

Musk is a proven liar and a dangerous one. At least three of his companies - Tesla, X and SpaceX - are under investigation for alleged misconduct by at least nine government departments, some of which will come under the purview of his new government-cutting agency.

This whiff of sleaze and criminality has not prevented governments and politicians from fawning on Musk like some ancient potentate. In the last few weeks billionaires have also grovelled before Trump and his government of billionaires. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Patrick Soon-Schiong, Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel - all hail to the rapist criminal who tried to overthrow his government.

The billionaires outside the government have one thing in common, apart from their wealth, with those who are inside it - they all want absolute freedom to live in a world where they can do whatever they want to do without regulation and preferably without taxation.

But isn’t Bill Gates different from Elon Musk? Isn’t he the nice philanthropist who wants to cure malaria and reduce world poverty?

The problem isn’t whether these men are individually good or bad, or whether they have done good things or not with their wealth. Some have, some haven’t. The point is that no one should have the money they have, and no one who has that money should have the power they have.

Billionaires should not be worshipped. Wealth should not be worshipped, because the interests of billionaires are not synonymous with the interests of society. And countries that value the common good, and their democratic survival, should not be so stupid, cowardly and politically inept, to allow such men to dictate to their governments what they can and can’t do.

But hasn’t American politics always been rotten with money, and susceptible to the rich men with enough money to lobby politicians and shape political outcomes?

Yes, but what is happening now is something new. This is America’s first government of billionaires, governing in the interests of billionaires, regardless of whether these interests clash with the office they hold.

Now these men hold America in thrall, and no wonder Bezos and co are grovelling before the felon who appointed them.

Many years ago Abraham Lincoln denounced the ‘money powers [that] prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity,’ which had profited from the civil war. For Lincoln this power was ‘more despotic than a monarch, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy.’

In an era in which ‘corporations have been enthroned,’ Lincoln predicted that ‘ an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.’

That moment has now arrived. And it remains to be seen whether the American republic survives the insolence of money over the next four years.

So Merry Christmas to all. And then get strapped in, because there will be turbulence, and Americans are not the only ones who will experience it.