Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) us
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Even if rich people were no more likely to believe stupid shit than you or me, it would still be a problem. After all, I believe in my share of stupid shit (and if you think that none of the shit you believe in is stupid, then I'm afraid we've just identified at least one kind of stupid shit you believe in).
The problem isn't whether rich people believe stupid shit; it's the fact that when a rich person believes something stupid, that belief can turn into torment for dozens, thousands, or millions of people.
Here's a historical example that I think about a lot. In 1928, Henry Ford got worried about the rubber supply chain. All the world's rubber came from plantations in countries that he had limited leverage over and he was worried that these countries could kneecap his operation by cutting off the supply. So Ford decided he would start cultivating rubber in the Brazilian jungles, judging that Brazil's politicians were biddable, bribeable or bludgeonable and thus not a risk.
Ford took over a large area of old-growth jungle in Brazil and decreed that a town be built there. But not just any town: Ford decreed that the town of Fordlandia would be a replica of Dearborn, the company town he controlled in Michigan. Now, leaving aside the colonialism and other ethical considerations, there are plenty of practical reasons not to replicate Dearborn, MI on the banks of the Rio Tapajós.
For one thing, Brazil is in the southern hemisphere, and Dearborn is in the northern hemisphere. The prefab houses that Ford ordered for Fordlandia had windows optimized for southern exposure, which is the normal way of designing a dwelling in the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, you try and put your windows on the other side of the building.
Ford's architects told him this, and proposed having the factory flip the houses' orientation. But Ford was adamant: he'd had a vision for a replica of his beloved Dearborn plunked down smack in the middle of the Amazon jungle, and by God, that was what he would get:
Fordlandia was a catastrophe for so many reasons, and the windows are just a little footnote, but it's a detail that really stuck with me because it's just so stupid. Ford was a vicious antisemite, a bigot, a union-buster and an all-round piece of shit, but also, he believed that his opinions trumped the axial tilt of the planet Earth.
In other words, Henry Ford wasn't merely evil – he was also periodically as thick as pigshit. Ford's cherished stupidities didn't just affect him, they also meant that a whole city full of people in the Amazon had windows facing the wrong direction. Like I said, I sometimes believe stupid things, but those stupid things aren't consequential the way that rich people's cherished stupidities are.
This would be bad enough if rich people were no more prone to stupid beliefs than the rest of us, but it's actually worse than that. When I believe something stupid, it tends to get me in trouble, which means that (at least some of the time), I get to learn from my mistakes. But if you're a rich person, you can surround yourself with people who will tell you that you are right even when you are so wrong, with the result that you get progressively more wrong, until you literally kill yourself:
A rich person could surround themselves with people who tell them that they're being stupid, but in practice, this almost never happens. After all, the prime advantage to accumulating as much money as possible is freedom from having to listen to other people. The richer you are, the fewer people there are who can thwart your will. Get rich enough and you can be found guilty of 34 felonies and still become President of the United States of America.
But wait, it gets even worse! Hurting other people is often a great way to get even more rich. So the richer you get, the more insulated you are from consequences for hurting other people, and the more you hurt other people, the richer you get.
What a world! The people whose wrong beliefs have the widest blast-radius and inflict the most collateral damage also have the fewest sources of external discipline that help them improve their beliefs, and often, that collateral damage is a feature, not a bug.
Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) to the rest of us. They are wronger than the median person, and the consequences of their wrongness are exponentially worse than the consequences of the median person's mistake.
This has been on my mind lately because of a very local phenomenon.
I live around the corner from Burbank airport, a great little regional airport on the edge of Hollywood. It was never brought up to code, so the gates are really close together, which means the planes park really close together, and there's no room for jetways, so they park right up against the terminal. The ground crews wheel staircase/ramps to both the front and back of the plane. That means that you can walk the entire length of the terminal in about five minutes, and boarding and debarking takes less than half the time of any other airport. Sure, if one of those planes ever catches fire, every other plane is gonna go boom, and everyone in the terminal is toast, but my sofa-to-gate time is like 15 minutes.
Best of all, Burbank is a Southwest hub. When we moved here a decade ago, this was great. Southwest, after all, has free bag-check, open seating, a great app, friendly crews, and a generous policy for canceling or changing reservations.
If you fly in the US, you know what's coming next. In 2024, a hedge fund called Elliott Investment Management acquired an 11% stake in SWA, forced a boardroom coup that saw it replace five of the company's six directors, and then instituted a top to bottom change in airline policies. The company eliminated literally everything that Southwest fliers loved about the airline, from the free bags to the open seating:
The airline went from being the least enshittified airline in America to the most. Southwest is now worse than Spirit airlines – no, really. Southwest doesn't just merely charge for seat selection, but if you refuse to pay for seat selection, they preferentially place you in a middle seat even on a half-empty flight, as a way of pressuring you to pay the sky-high junk fee for seat selection:
Obviously, passengers who are given middle seats (and the passengers around them, who paid for window or aisle seats) don't like this, so they try to change seats. So SWA now makes its flight attendants order passengers not to switch seats, and they've resorted to making up nonsense about "weight balancing":
Even without junk fees, Southwest's fares are now higher than their rivals. I'm flying to San Francisco tomorrow to host EFF executive director Cindy Cohn's book launch at City Lights:
Normally, I would have just booked a SWA flight from Burbank to SFO or Oakland (which gets less fog and is more reliable). But the SWA fare – even without junk fees – was higher than a United ticket out of the same airport, even including a checked bag, seat selection, etc. Southwest is genuinely worse than Spirit now: not only does it have worse policies (forcing occupancy of middle seats!), and more frustrated, angrier flight crew (flight attendants are palpably sick of arguing with passengers), but SWA is now more expensive than United!
All of this is the fault of one billionaire: Elliott Investment Management CEO Paul Singer, one of America's most guillotineable plutes. This one guy personally enshittified Southwest Airlines, along with many other businesses in America and abroad. Because of this one guy, millions of people are made miserable every single day. Singer flogged off his shares and made a tidy profit. He's long gone. But SWA will never recover, and every day until its collapse, millions of passengers and flight attendants will have a shitty day because of this one guy:
Even if Paul Singer were no more prone to ethical missteps than you or me, the fact that he is morbidly wealthy means that his ethical blind spots leave behind a trail of wreckage that rivals a comet. And of course, being as rich as Paul Singer inflicts a lasting neurological injury that makes you incapable of understanding how wrong you are, which means that Paul Singer is doubly dangerous.
Billionaires aren't just a danger when they're trying to make money, either. One of the arguments in favor of billionaires is that sometimes, the "good" billionaires take up charitable causes. But even here, billionaires can cause sweeping harm. Take Bill Gates, whose charitable projects include waging war on the public education system, seeking to replace public schools with charter schools.
Gates has no background in education, but he spent millions on this project. He is one of the main reasons that poor communities around the country have been pressured to shutter their public schools and replace them with weakly regulated, extractive charters:
Gates was a prep-school kid, so it's weird for him to have forceful views about a public education system he never experienced. In reality, it's not so much that Gates has forceful views about schools – rather, he has forceful views about teachers' unions, which he wishes to see abolished. Gates is one of America's most vicious union-busters:
Gates's ideology permeates all of his charitable work. We all know about Gates's work on public health, but less well known is the role that Gates has played in blocking poor countries from exercising their rights under the WTO to override drug patents in times of emergency. In the 2000s, the Gates Foundation blocked South Africa from procuring the anti-retroviral AIDS drugs it was entitled to under the WTO's TRIPS agreement. The Gates Foundation blocked the Access to Medicines WIPO treaty, which would have vastly expanded the Global South's ability to manufacture life-saving drugs. And during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, Gates personally intervened to kill the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool and to get Oxford to renege on its promise to make an open-source vaccine:
It's not that Gates is insincere in his desire to improve public health outcomes – it's that his desire to improve public health conflicts with his extreme ideology of maximum intellectual property regimes. Gates simply opposes open science and compulsory licenses on scientific patents, even when that kills millions of people (as it did in South Africa). Gates's morbid wealth magnifies his cherished stupidities into weapons of mass destruction.
Gates is back in the news these days because of his membership in the Epstein class. Epstein is the poster child for the ways that wealth is a force-multiplier for bad ideas. We can't separate Epstein's sexual predation from his wealth. Epstein spun elaborate junk-science theories to justify raping children, becoming mired in that most rich-guy coded of quagmires, eugenics:
Epstein openly discussed his plans to seed the planet with his DNA, reportedly telling one scientist that he planned to fill his ranch with young trafficked girls and to keep 20 of them pregnant with his children at all times:
We still don't know where Epstein's wealth came from, but we know that he was a central node in a network of vast riches, much of which he directed to his weird scientific projects. That network also protected him from consequences for his prolific child-rape project, which had more than 1,000 survivors.
In embracing eugenics junk science, Epstein was ahead of the curve. Today, eugenics is all the rage, reviving an idea that went out of fashion shortly after the Fordlandia era. After all, Henry Ford didn't just build a private city where his word was law – he also bought up media companies to promote his ideas of racial superiority:
And like Epstein, he wants to seed the human race with his babies, and has built a secret compound in the desert he plans to fill with women he has impregnated:
Billionaires and their lickspittles will tell you that all of this is wrong: the market selects "capital allocators" by executing a vast, distributed computer program whose logic gates are every producer and consumer in The Economy (TM), and whose data are trillions of otherwise uncomputable buy and sell decisions.
This is a tautology: the argument goes that only good people are made rich, and therefore all the rich people are good. If rich people had as many cherished stupidities as I claim, The Economy (TM) would relieve them of their wealth, and thus their power to allocate capital, and thus their potential to hurt people by being wrong, which means that they must be right.
This is the stupidest (and most destructive) of all of billionaireism's cherished stupidities: that we live in a meritocracy, which means that whatever the richest people want must be right. It's a modern update to the doctrine of divine providence, which held that we can discern god's favor through wealth. The more god loves you, the richer he makes you.
This can't be true, because every single economic cataclysm in the history of the world was the fault of rich people. Rich people gave us the 19th century's bank panics. They gave us the South Seas bubble. They gave us the Great Depression, and the S&L Crisis, and the Great Financial Crisis. They invented greedflation and created the cost of living crisis. Today, they are teeing up an AI crash that will make 2008 look like the best day of your life:
The old left aphorism has it that "every billionaire is a policy failure." That's true, but it's incomplete. Every billionaire is a machine for producing policy failures at scale.
In both Venezuela and Greenland, the Trump administration is proposing taxpayer-funded grabs of oil and rare earths so that Trump’s billiona
Aaron Regunberg and Tyson Slocum at TNR:
It’s been quite a busy few days for U.S. foreign policy. First was President Donald Trump’s brazenly illegal abduction of Venezuela’s head of state. Then Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened to make good on his longtime dream of retaking Cuba, warning that the Cuban government is “in a lot of trouble.” And on Tuesday, Trump’s senior adviser on fascism (or whatever his title is), Stephen Miller, declared that Greenland belongs to the United States and that Trump could take the territory if he wanted. This “Donroe Doctrine,” as they’ve termed it, is based on a single principle: that, as Miller ranted Tuesday, the United States will henceforth “conduct ourselves as a superpower” by using our military “to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere.”
Here’s the rub: When the Trump administration says “our interests,” they’re not talking about your or my interests, and they’re not talking about the nation’s interests. They’re talking about the interests of corporate elites. The Donroe Doctrine is a racket—nothing more and nothing less—designed to make the U.S. taxpayer underwrite resource imperialism for Trump’s billionaire buddies.
They don’t appear to be trying very hard to hide this reality. Trump has been pretty explicit that the Venezuelan takeover is not about freedom for Venezuelans. Asked whether he would demand the acting Venezuelan president offer amnesty to opposition figures or release political prisoners, Trump responded, “We haven’t gotten to that. Right now, what we want to do is fix up the oil.” The Venezuelan takeover is not about democracy. Asked about plans for “free and fair elections,” he responded, “Well, it depends.… We’re going to have to have big investments by the oil companies.” According to Trump, kidnapping Maduro wasn’t even about regime change. The new acting president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, was vice president under Maduro, so the regime running Venezuela today is identical minus one person. When Trump was asked, “What do you need from Delcy Rodríguez?” his singular response was: “Total access. We need access to the oil.”
So this gunboat diplomacy is about oil. But it’s not oil for American consumers. The U.S. is already the largest oil producer in the history of the world, and no country on earth exports more oil and refined oil products every day than we do. America’s domestic gasoline sales have essentially been flat for 20 years, so it’s a very safe bet that the U.S. refineries in Texas and Louisiana designed to process Venezuela’s expensive and dirty crude won’t be increasing domestic supplies. Rather, they will most likely convert that high-sulfur oil into finished oil products for export out of the U.S., which does nothing to lower prices at the pump for American consumers.
So who does stand to gain? The same people as usual: Trump’s billionaire buddies. In the case of Venezuela, these are the fossil fuel villains who are already poisoning our air and water and driving the increasingly catastrophic climate disasters that are destroying our homes, raising our property insurance rates, and threatening our future. That includes corporations like ExxonMobil, which has used the controversial investor-state dispute settlement system to claim $15 billion from the Venezuelan government, and ConocoPhillips, which has sought $30 billion via the investor-state dispute settlement system—claims Trump will likely use as a starting point for forced repayments to Big Oil. Both companies’ stocks, as well as Chevron’s, jumped following the Venezuela news on Monday.
[...]
That is the real Donroe Doctrine. It’s not about pursuing U.S. interests—it’s about using the power and resources of the U.S. government to pursue the private interests of Trump’s oligarchic cronies. Of course, the former is bad enough. Using one’s military to, as Miller said, “secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere” is literally a description of the foreign policy of Mussolini and Hitler. But the Donroe Doctrine lacks even the fig leaf of supposedly doing all this for our shared national security and wealth.
The only good news is that there’s real political vulnerability to this scam. Nobody likes getting ripped off, and voters don’t want their tax dollars to finance the exploitation of other countries for the benefit of wealthy elites.
But Democrats need to actually say this. They need to explain why this rewarmed fascist nonsense is a terrible deal for the American taxpayers who’ll be subsidizing those billionaire profits.
The Donroe Doctrine of dominating the Western Hemisphere and the world is about oil grabs.
In the years after the undisclosed trip to Alaska, Republican megadonor Paul Singer’s hedge fund has repeatedly had business before the Supr
Justice Samuel Alito is a far right fanatic and makes no secret of that. But he apparently also has a conflict of interest.
In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.
Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.
In the years that followed, Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times in cases where his role was often covered by the legal press and mainstream media. In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.
Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. By failing to disclose the private jet flight Singer provided, Alito appears to have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most gifts, according to ethics law experts.
In court cases where judges have a personal connection, judges are expected to recuse themselves. Another option, chosen by Alito, is to pretend that you're ignorant.
ProPublica sent Alito a list of detailed questions last week, and on Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s head spokeswoman told ProPublica that Alito would not be commenting. Several hours later, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Alito responding to ProPublica’s questions about the trip.
Alito said that when Singer’s companies came before the court, the justice was unaware of the billionaire’s connection to the cases. He said he recalled speaking to Singer on “no more than a handful of occasions,” and they never discussed Singer’s business or issues before the court.
A reminder of the connection between Justice Clarence Thomas and Nazi art collector Harlan Crow.
This spring, ProPublica reported that Justice Clarence Thomas received decades of luxury travel from another Republican megadonor, Dallas real estate magnate Harlan Crow. In a statement, Thomas defended the undisclosed trips, saying unnamed colleagues advised him that he didn’t need to report such gifts to the public. Crow also gave Thomas money in an undisclosed real estate deal and paid private school tuition for his grandnephew, who Thomas was raising as a son. Thomas reported neither transaction on his disclosure forms.
The Republican Supreme Court shows growing signs of corruption in addition its decision making which is based more on ideology than the law.
It's interesting that the two most far right SCOTUS justices are also the most corrupt.
When you vote for president you are voting for the person who appoints Supreme Court justices. When you vote for US senator you are voting for one of the people who confirms those justices. People considering casting "protest votes" for unelectable third party candidates should be reminded of the long term effects of their acts of futility.
Billionaire Paul Singer’s Elliott Management has taken a ‘sizable stake’ and intends to ‘push for changes’, reports Bloomberg News
A major Republican donor has purchased a stake in Twitter and is reportedly seeking to oust its chief executive, Jack Dorsey.
Bloomberg News first reported that Elliott Management has taken a “sizable stake” and “and plans to push for changes at the social media company, including replacing Dorsey”.
Paul Singer, the billionaire founder of Elliott Management, is a Republican mega-donor who opposed Donald Trump during the real-estate magnate’s run for the presidential nomination but has since come onside.
After a White House visit in February 2017, Trump said Singer “was very much involved with the anti-Trump or, as they say, ‘Never Trump’, and Paul just left, and he’s given us his total support and it’s all about unification”.
Trump famously communicates with the public largely through Twitter, at the expense of traditional media strategy.
Twitter made headlines in October when it announced a ban on political advertising. Its use and potential manipulation by politicians of all stripes, from Trump to Democratic candidate Mike Bloomberg, remains a source of fierce contention.
Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, is also chief executive of Square, an online payment company. In November, he announced a plan to live and work in Africa for part of each year.
It was reported that those moves were motivations for Singer’s desire to push Dorsey out. Other stakeholders have voiced concern about Dorsey’s leadership and Twitter has seen its share price struggle, although it recently reported quarterly revenue above $1bn for the first time.
News of the Elliott stake saw Twitter’s share price rise on Friday, during general market slides in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak.
Elliott Management is an activist investor, which means it regularly pushes for change in companies in which it buys shares.
Singer has even taken on whole countries: in 2016, after a relentless campaign, he secured a partial repayment of debts by Argentina, arising from its financial collapse in the early 2000s.
Neither Elliott nor Twitter immediately offered comment.
