Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
Given the increasing dominance of right-wing politics by arrogant, super-rich Tech Bros, here’s a question about wealth inequality for your barroom philosophers to ponder: Does one have to be born a jackass to become a billionaire, or does becoming a billionaire cause jackassim?
Either way, they do seem to go together — as in Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and so forth, ad nauseam. Oddly, the richer they get, the whinier they become, devolving into over-privileged crybabies.
Consider the appalling example of that California clique of Thiel, Zuck and other Silicon super-richies. They’ve been caterwauling that if voters approve a proposed wealth tax on billionaires, By Gollies, they’ll just up and abandon the state. So? Do they not know that voters know that nearly all tax subsidies have long profited undeserving vainglorious elites like them at everyone else’s expense? So excuse us if we don’t join their pity party. In fact, most of us commoners would gladly trade that whole pack of pompous plutocrats for a dozen good kindergarten teachers.
Besides, it’s possible to be both very rich and a decent human being! I’ve known such people. For example, Texas businessman Bernard Rapoport devoted millions to advancing labor, women and our state’s progressive movement. Or my friends, Ben & Jerry, who’ve spent their lifetimes and fortunes delivering financial help — and even ice cream! — to grassroots democracy fighters. Then there’s the example of heirs to the Pillsbury family fortune — calling themselves the “Pillsbury Doughboys,” then later, “Doughgirls. They have donated their inheritances to progressive causes benefitting the Common Good.
As an East Texas farmer pointed out to me years ago: “Money is like manure. You can’t just pile it up. It only works if you spread it across the grassroots.”
Billionaire Gangs Marauding Through Rural America
Here they come again. Every couple of decades, another infestation of smiling, winking, fast-talking, corporate hucksters descends on rural America.
The scammers have ranged from Big Oil’s notorious landmen to peddlers of private prisons. But this one is the biggest, most important flimflam yet, with Silicon Valley billionaires and Wall Street speculators rushing through the countryside buying up vast tracts of land.
Why? Because Amazon, Google, Meta and dozens of other tech profiteers are converting their corporations into Artificial Intelligence robotic empires and each AI facility is absolutely humongous, requiring airport-size swaths of land.
Acreage is the least of it, though, for the data centers consume Niagara Falls-levels of water. So local families, farms, factories and businesses suddenly find their essential water supply being raided by faraway corporate water suckers.
Also, local utility bills skyrocket as profiteers drain enormous amounts of electric power from the area’s grid. Worse, corporate lobbyists squeeze local officials to subsidize this thievery! For example, a private equity predator named Apollo Global Management recently fleeced a New York county for $1.4 billion in “job-creation” subsidies for a sprawling data center that will — get this — employ only 125 people. Yes, that’s $11 million per job — with actual workers only getting a pittance of it.
You don’t need a big schnoz to smell this stink. The good news is that county officials across the country are beginning to say “NO” to AI’s money grab. Also, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a national moratorium on this corporate frenzy to impose an AI future that We the People do not want. For more information and action, go to foodandwaterwatch.org.
The Reality of the Virtual Metaverse
Our future was pronounced dead in late March. Mean that glorious future of “The Metaverse,” promised to us by Silicon Valley’s tech and financial geniuses. Just a decade ago, they were promising us that by now we’d all be playing, working and relating as digital avatars of ourselves, living out our lives in a phantasmagoric new world of virtual reality.
They boldly proclaimed that the next Big Thing in tech, replacing smartphones and all other personal devices, would be a “Metaverse,” digitally connecting everyone everywhere. They exclaimed that by purchasing goofy-looking, reality-augmenting headsets, interactions could be done without any in-person human contact. And who better to sell this future than the super-goofy gabillionaire, Mark Zuckerberg?
The CEO of Facebook, he was so bedazzled by the digital hokum of the metaverse that he even renamed his corporation “Meta.” Then he pumped a whopping $80 billion into developing and marketing his wondrous new world, including peddling a Meta brand of those magical headsets.
Not wanting to miss out on a bonanza, other tech billionaire geniuses joined the virtual reality rush. But it was just fool’s gold, for the geniuses had failed to consider an essential factor: Customers. Specifically, customers! Far from dazzled, buyers pronounced the meta-mess — Goofy.
Even Zuckerberg has now pulled the plug on his fantasy of a digital, virtual, immersive, avatar world of tech “reality.” Don’t think, however, that goofy, avaricious, egomaniacal billionaires have gained any modesty from their Metaverse misadventure. They are the same ones now hurling trillions of public and corporate dollars into erecting intrusive, massive, wasteful AI data centers all across America. Why, to power their profiteering fantasy of replacing humans with AI bots.
Why Corporations Pay Millions for Executive Mediocrity
Most people believe the American economy is being rigged by and for bankers, CEOs and other superrich elites, because ... well, because it is!
With their hired armies of lawmakers, lobbyists, lawyers and the like, they fix the economic rules so even more of society’s money and power flows uphill to them. Take corporate CEOs. While the economy was somewhere between a downer and devastating for most people, the CEO class made out like bandits, with each of the three top-paid corporate honchos pocketing as much as a billion dollars in personal pay!
Are they geniuses, or what? What. All three of their corporations ended with big financial losses and declining value. So how can such mediocrity produce such lavish rewards? Simple — rig the pay machine.
Today’s corporate system of setting compensation for top executives is a flimflam disguised as a model of management rectitude. On its face, it sounds good — “Pay for performance,” it’s called, meaning the CEO does well if the company does well.
But who defines “doing well?” The scam at most major corporations is that the standard of corporate performance that the chief must meet to qualify for a huge payday is set by each corporation’s board of directors. Guess who they are? Commonly, board members are the CEO’s handpicked brothers-in-law, golfing buddies and corporate cronies. So, they set the bar for winning multimillion-dollar executive paychecks so low that a sack of concrete could jump over it.
Well, insist these flimflammers, corporate shareholders are the ultimate stopgap against CEO greed. These “owners” can just vote “no” on any executive pay they consider excessive. However, even “shareholder democracy” is rigged — corporate rules decree that votes by shareholders are merely “advisory,” meaning top executives can simply ignore them, grab the money and run. This system is fixed ... and we need to break it!
Jim Hightower is a former Texas Observer editor, former Texas agriculture commissioner, radio commentator and populist sparkplug, a best-selling author and winner of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Write him at info@jimhightower.com or see www.jimhightower.com.
