Dollars Mean More Than Votes
None of us voted for Musk, Zuck or Bezos, but they have power over us anyway
Here is how democracies are supposed to work: Each of us is equal before the law and gets one vote. We each cast our vote for the candidate we think will do the best job. If an official doesn’t please us, we use our one vote to help put somebody else in power next time.
That’s not how the big decisions are being made in our supposed democracy now.
The oligarchs can buy and sell our elected officials any day of the week, and they do.
Elon Musk has used his power to help Russia instead of Ukraine. I don’t remember voting to let this man make decisions about our national security. Do you?
Mark Zuckerberg decides what billions of people around the world should or should not see on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. That would be fine if these apps stuck to inconsequential things like cat memes, but in fact, those platforms are a toxic stew of political manipulation, propaganda, misinformation and disinformation. These apps appear to be designed to foment hatred and division between … well, everybody.
I have zero memory of ever having voted for Mark Zuckerberg. What about you?
Zuck’s Meta is a danger to democracy and to children and makes our world worse in a thousand ways. The early days of Facebook had so much potential for keeping family and friends connected. Now, it’s just a cesspool.
If Facebook is a cesspool, I guess Twitter/X is a leaking septic tank.
If you’ve ever lived out in the country, you might have had one. All would seem well for years. You’d flush the toilet and your waste would disappear.
But then one day, you’d walk outside and you’d realize something — none of that nasty stuff actually went away. Nope, it just quietly filled up your septic tank, and then you had a problem. If you walked across the lawn above your leaking tank, your feet sank into a stinky mire.
You had to hire a company to come pump out your septic tank.
But only if we’re speaking literally. We’re speaking figuratively here, and nobody is coming to pump out the figurative septic tank that is Twitter or X. It will just keep reeking and leaking forever, apparently.
Musk does not appear to mind how bad it gets.
In fact, he seems to be doing everything possible to increase the flow of filth into his multi-billion-dollar tank. A lot of us got tired of stepping in sewage and stopped going there; others revel in the miasma.
And speaking of waste, look at Jeff Bezos.
His Amazon empire earns billions while squeezing Amazon employees — the hardships of his workers are by now well-known. He’s transformed buying and selling in this country, mostly for the worse.
They say you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip, but you can extract urine from an Amazon driver.
If you haven’t read the true story of how the bottled urine of Amazon drivers unable to stop working long enough to use a restroom became a №1 drink on the platform, you have to read this. The story is both amusing and horrifying.
Bezos became one of the richest men in the world, but at a terrible cost to the rest of us. He’s shaped the world to his will more than almost any elected politician now alive has.
I must have been on some kind of strong drug the day I voted to give Jeff Bezos such power over us, because I can’t even recall having done so. Tell me, can you remember voting for him?
While you’re at it, try to remember that time you voted for Bill Gates or Jamie Dimon or Warren Buffett … there are a lot of names we could add to this list.
Power comes from money, not elections.
Our elected officials can pass all the laws they want about things like child labor and worker exploitation. We can pass antitrust legislation to provide level playing fields for commerce.
I don’t know that we ever actually passed a law stating that we would not allow private citizens to unilaterally make decisions about our allies’ war capabilities, because we probably never imagined we might need one. Russia appears to be using Musk’s Starlink system, in addition to Musk having “thwarted a Ukrainian military operation against Russia’s Black Sea fleet.”
If you have enough money and power, you can go over politicians’ heads and do whatever you want.
We don’t protect our children because it might cut profitability.
We have plenty of laws against child exploitation, but the big platforms so far seem to operate with impunity. Our laws can’t keep up with technology, and all the big tech platforms seem to live by the old adage that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission — not that we’ve seen many cases of genuine apologies.
A 2018 Wired story, Why Zuckerberg’s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn’t Fixed Facebook, compiles Zuckerberg apologizing and apologizing for one oopsie after another. So forgive me if I say his latest apology to parents of victims of online exploitation made five years after that compilation rings hollow.
It’s like that colleague you work with who comes in late all the time but always expresses deep remorse and a promise to do better.
Come on. The guy has no intention of doing better, and we all know it.
There are a few different roads to power.
Leadership, money, democracy, charisma and religion are just a few paths. Money beats them all.
In prehistory, if you had the gift of leadership and some skill at leading hunting and war parties, you could win the trust of the people around you, and they’d recognize you as their chief. You generally had limited, conditional power, and you could lose it easily if you pushed too hard or made a few bad calls.
Charisma has often been a part of the mix. It dovetails nicely with religion. If you have enough charisma, you can convince people to give you all the money and power you want.
If you have charisma, you can wave a flag and thump a Bible and hit the trifecta. Think Hitler. Think of the leaders of any number of churches who are later brought down by too many sex scandals. Think … ah, let’s not mention that guy by name.
Until a few years ago, I thought the power of religion was waning, but I was wrong.
U.S. right-wingers performed the miracle of transubstantiation right in front of our very eyes. They laid hands on a womanizer who never attends church, brags about grabbing women by their genitals and has repeatedly broken most of the 10 Commandments — and turned him into a Christian! Who can be a skeptic now?
Come on. If that’s not evidence of a miracle, I do not know what is.
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Some years ago I started wondering how Congress and the White House came up with their policies, that time after time went against the wishes of 60, 70, 80% of the population. And I wondered how it could be that it didn't seem to matter a lot which party was in power on the general direction of their policies. Then I started putting 2 and 2 together and never being able to get 4, even though that's the answer I learned in elementary school. Upon a lot of thinking on the matter, I realized that my suspicion, that something was "rotten in the state of America" ( Hamlet would agree). For me it started with President Carter's malaise speech, where he pointed out,that our way of life was unsustainable. It was met with ridicule and indifference. He put solar panels WH grounds, which were promptly removed when Reagan moved in. Then Clinton ended "welfare as we know it" , and he repealed the Glass-Steagall Act which had put a damper on the shenanigans of Wall Street, resulting in the meltdown of the economy in 2007. Bush deciding to invade Iraq on shady grounds, the Afghanistan debacle, Gore and Hillary losing despite having a majority of votes. I came to realization that the system was "rigged", maybe not as republican losers saw it, but to make sure the general population's wishes would not interfere with the interests of the super rich . On top of that we have a Supreme Court, that achieved a rightwing supermajority by hook and by crook. Now corporations are people, gerrymandering found friendly ears, and reproductive rights have been taken away from millions of women. As I see it, the oligarchs have decided that with the population split up and fractured by opposing views and massive misinformation , now is a good time to introduce "democratic authoritarianism " or some such, ala the Hungarian model. It will make doing business so much easier! Talk about an unhinged rant!
Well said. Robert Reich mentioned something about how Trump was having a secret meeting with Musk. Unfortunately, Musk is the kind of guy who has the assets to make Trump's financial problems go away. There should be a limit to how much any one person can contribute to a political campaign (and corporations shouldn't be allowed to contribute anything). But that will never happen.