If America Can't Be OURS, It Will Be Theirs
Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezeos, Ellison, Alex Karp, Trump, Vance...
We are rocketing our way into a new Gilded Age.
This corrupted economy of ours is about to create the world’s first trillionaire. Elon Musk is worth 850 billion dollars now. Eight hundred and fifty billion. Make no mistake, he is no genius. He’s a welfare king. Every dime of this insane fortune built on what’s yours and mine. Government loans. Government subsidies. Government contracts. Government IP. Government facilities. Government infrastructure. Guvment, guvment, guvment.
And this guy has the audacity to walk into our government and start cutting it up, looking for waste, fraud, and abuse, when he is the waste, fraud, and abuse. He is the line item. He is the bloat.
Not that it’s just an Elon Musk problem. What we have is a billionaire problem. A private monopoly problem. A corporate power problem. Those few have too much and we many have too little.
Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. Nvidia. Apple. A handful of companies and the men who run them now hold a share of this country’s wealth and power that is hard to even put into words. They are taking over power once reserved for “We the People” through the state and giving us shittier subscription based versions. Amazon got tax breaks and priority status with the United States Postal Service and now they are building their own shipping fleet to replace it. SpaceX launches our satellites. Meta wants to be our communication infrastructure. We’ve been outsourcing not just our jobs but our government. Our power. We’ve been handing it over to corporations and oligarchs piece by piece, and we act surprised when they start behaving like the people who own the place. They do own the place. We and our elected leaders let them.
So where is the elected opposition that’s supposed to be fighting this?
The Democrats don’t want to go through the trouble. They don’t seem to have a vision for a true alternative. At least not one that is worth the disruption true opposition would require. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are negotiating with terrorists. They are doing their absolute best to pretend that things are normal enough that we can just go back to the way things were and be OK. There is zero acknowledgment from Democratic leadership that our institutions, our elections, and our economy must fundamentally change or we are going to keep marching towards authoritarianism. Zero willingness to accept how much work there is to do. Political work. Economic work. Social work. Physical work. Restoring our capacity to make things. Restoring people’s ability to make a living. Restoring our towns and our bridges and the whole rotting skeleton of this country.
And I think part of the reason is that these people live in a separate world. Things just come to them because there’s enough money around them to make that happen. They don’t feel the rot the way the rest of us do. The boldest thing they’re calling for right now is breaking up monopolies and fighting Big Tech. Maybe a better minimum wage. Maybe Medicare for All. Those aren’t bad ideas. But they don’t go nearly far enough. They don’t begin to acknowledge what most people who actually vote already realize, which is that this system is broken at a level that tinkering won’t fix.
Look at Gavin Newsom and how he’s handling the Make America Healthy Again stuff. His whole approach is to vilify RFK Jr. And fine, RFK Jr. deserves plenty of that. But where is the vilification of the pharmaceutical companies? Where is the vilification of organizations like the AMA that have turned our healthcare system into a financial extraction machine? You can’t just oppose the other side’s guy. You have to oppose the forces that created the problem in the first place. And Democratic leadership will not do that because those forces write checks.
Woody Guthrie once wrote that this land is your land, this land is my land. He meant it. He wrote that song because he thought “God Bless America” was a bunch of complacent bullshit that ignored who actually built the country and who was getting screwed. He was right then and he’s more right now.
Because if it can’t be our land, if these can’t be our assets, if we can’t have our healthcare system, if this country can’t be for me and for you and for trans people and queer people and Black people and immigrants, if we’re going to fight to the death over the last cup of water left on the table after the billionaires have drained every aqueduct and aquifer we’ve got, then we’re going to be left with nothing.
Nothing.
Because we will have been fighting each other while they took everything. Every last piece of our inheritance. Everything our grandfathers and great-grandfathers and the ones who came before them worked and died to build. Were enslaved to build. Were held in indentured servitude to build.
And I don’t think it’s worth it. I don’t think it’s a good trade. I don’t think it makes a lick of sense to hand Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg everything that has been built in this country, to let it all just fall apart, because what? What if some Black dude gets something he wasn’t the absolute most qualified human being on earth for?
You know how many people aren’t qualified for the good jobs they’ve got? A lot. And for that matter, here comes AI gunning for every one of our jobs anyway. Every human’s job. There will come a time, and it’s not far off, when you can’t even make a case for a human getting a mid-level job at all. Unless we build some kind of affirmative action program that says you’ve got to have humans on your staff. And lo and behold, you might see a whole lot more people suddenly thinking that affirmative action is pretty damn important after all.
But that’s the rearguard action. The path forward is through us.
The real solution is shared ownership. American production. American capacity. Every single one of us as shareholders in this economy. The answer is not to tax Elon Musk. It’s not to pressure him into being a better person. The answer is to compete his market share away. Stop giving him breaks and incentives and getting nothing in return. Start building publicly owned alternatives that work for the people who fund them, which is all of us. You don’t beg a welfare king to share. You build something that makes him irrelevant.
This is not the time for institutionalists. It’s not the time for people who want to manage the decline and call it governing. It’s the time for dreamers. For visionaries. For revolutionaries. For people who understand that there is so much work to do in this country that we could put every person in America to work tomorrow if we had the will and the honesty to say what needs to be built.
That’s what we’re building toward. Our SuperPAC, A Fight Worth Having, is nearly ready to launch. It’s going to lift up voices that are fighting for the kind of alternative vision we’re talking about here. People who want to build. Keep watching this space. And when the time comes, help us get this thing off the ground and make some noise.
Because if it can’t be ours, it’s gonna be theirs. There’s no middle.
ICYMI: I’ve been making the rounds on Fox News lately, trying to talk to my southern brethren. I sat down with Laura Ingraham on The Ingraham Angle and I’ve been on Fox News Live a few times. You can find clips on my Instagram @bcorbintrent.
Under Capitalism, money ensures that the worst people will eventually rise to the top.
Just wondering how one fights this multi headed juggernaut.
It's a frightening situation.
Most elected officials are indebted to the oligarchs