Why the morbidly rich were front and center at Trump's inauguration
Billionaire Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the drop in the stock market is nothing to be concerned about because Americans aren’t looking at the “day-to-day fluctuations” in their retirement savings.
Billionaire Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick says we shouldn’t be concerned that mass layoffs in the Social Security Administration have caused delays because his mother-in-law wouldn’t be worried if she didn’t get her monthly Social Security check.
The richest person in the world, Elon Musk, whose minions are busily slashing the Social Security Administration, calls Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”
Billionaire Trump says he “couldn’t care less” if automakers raise their prices because of his tariffs.
On what planet do these people live? Surely not this one.
To be fabulously wealthy today means not having to come across anyone who isn’t. It therefore means having not a clue about how average working people live or what they worry about it.
The billionaire class doesn’t care if producers raise their prices, because prices mean almost nothing to them. They aren’t concerned about retirement savings, because they don’t have to prepare for retirement.
If they’re preparing for anything, it’s the “event,” as they call it — the thing that will cause them to secede even further from the rest of the world into isolated, sanitized survival chambers. The “event” could be massive social unrest, an unstoppable virus, a malicious computer hack that takes everything down, or environmental collapse.
Taking their cue from Musk, they’re considering ever more elaborate escape routes — colonies on Mars, solar-powered SeaPods, anti-aging health-span extenders, and uploading their minds into supercomputers.
For America’s billionaires, the future of technology has less to do with making the world a better place than escaping from the rest of us.
As Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor put it, the billionaire bros are basing their secessionist plans on:
“the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.”
A bevy of billionaires in Washington is now attacking Social Security and Medicaid, obliterating health and safety regulations, destroying much of public education, and deciding who in America should be abducted and sent to a brutal prison in another country.
Even before Trump, America’s extreme wealth and privilege combined with the most unequal distribution of income and wealth in more than a century had rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top.
Their tax rates had plummeted. Their profits had exploded. Their fortunes had soared. When they took excessive risks with the economy and faced ruin, they were bailed out while banks foreclosed on millions of homeowners.
The reaction among America’s working middle class has been fury. Trump exploited that fury by telling them he was on their side.
But he’s not. He never was. He and his billionaire appointees feel no connection to the rest of America. They want only to dismantle government and insulate themselves from the ensuing chaos.
As Klein and Taylor say, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/