Trump surrounds himself with millionaires and billionaires
Reprinted from OpEdNews.com
Now, more than ever, it has become clear that the world must end the existence of billionaires and the ultra wealthy. They are a danger to humanity, the planet and the future. Laws must be passed that make it illegal to be a billionaire.
This is as big a project as the moon landing, but it can be done, though, be assured, attackers will say it is crazy.
Trump's money made his campaign possible. Trump's money enabled him to make outrageous lying claims. The glamorization of billionaires seduced millions of people who clamor for authoritarian figures of power in their lives to embrace Trump.
Trump has surrounded himself with more billionaires and multi-hundred millionaires as cabinet members and advisors, giving them unprecedented power-- why? Because they're billionaires, as if that is enough.
I've been writing about the need to make it against the law to become a billionaire-- in my series, The No Billionaires, De-Billionairize the Planet Crusade. The description of the series is
Billionaires are freaks, economic mutants that are extremely dangerous to democracy and the middle class. Some of us feel it is time to make it illegal and impossible to be a billionaire.
I published my first article to directly address the need to end the existence of billionaires (through laws and regulations) in 2011, "De-billionairize" the Planet. I start the article, saying,
"When people grow past seven and a half feet, they live very short lives. Almost all of the largest creatures that have walked the earth are extinct. Whales are threatened too, though totally because of humans. Nature doesn't approve of really big. Matter of fact, it kills or severely handicaps biological anomalies and freaks that become really big. I'm suggesting that we do such a "natural" thing with billionaires-- eliminate their existence and prevent them from developing.Billionaires are too big. The power they command through their wealth is too dangerous to be allowed in the control of any flawed human. The economic influence they wield produces warps in the capitalist space-time-economic dimension that prevent capitalism from operating in a free, natural state, as strange attractors change the dynamics in chaotic systems.We have seen the effects of billionaires like the Koches, Waltons, Mellons, Scaife and Soros on American politics. They spend hundreds of millions influencing the political process. They are not alone. They do this along with transnational corporations that the Supreme Court has traitorously and perversely given rights of corporate personhood.Both Billionaires and the largest corporations must be eliminated, boycotted, civil resistanced and legislated out of existence."
In 2013 I wrote Billionaires Are Dangerous to Humanity, Dangerous to the Earth, which said, "-Billionaires are dangerous. There may be a small percentage who are good people with good intentions. That is not enough a reason to hold back from the calls by me, Thom Hartmann and others to make it illegal and impossible to be a billionaire."
In 2014 I published notes from my interview, Chomsky on Billionaires, Wealth Inequality and How Aristotle and Madison Dealt With Them. I asked him about the idea of getting rid of billionaires and he replied,
"You're right, there shouldn't be multi-billionaires while the United States has the worst poverty level in the developed world, outside of Turkey, which is just a total scandal. That shouldn't be happening, but the reasons are institutional structures and specific decisions that have been made all along the line which create these situations and those can be reversed, in fact I think we can go well beyond that to much more just and free institutions in the first place."
And in 2015 I wrote Bad Billionaires-- The Most Dangerous Predators On The Planet, which said,
"Billionaires are the most dangerous predators on the planet.Just to be clear:Psychopaths are predators.Sociopaths are predators.Narcissists are predators.Billionaires are predators-- and be assured, at least 90% of them, probably more, are proud of it. And frankly, like the wolves in the image above, it is their nature. It is our responsibility as compassionate humans to deal with predators. We don't put sheep in vulnerable open fields. We don't allow our democracy or our commons to be vulnerable to predators either, even if it is their nature. We keep what we value and hold dear safe from predators, safe from threats and we keep the predators and threats away from what we hold dear. We restrict and restrain them."
And another 2015 article, A Weird, Crazy Idea: Make Extreme Wealth an International Crime, where I said,
"It's time to start aiming to create international laws that make extreme wealth not only as despicable as war crimes and the worst heinous abuses, but to also make it illegal. It might be a far off vision that some call crazy, but the big solutions this planet and the 99% of humanity need are going to be labeled crazy."
At one time the wealthy owned slaves. Now it is a crime. We can do the same for extreme possession of wealth. It won't happen overnight, but neither did abolishment of slavery.
Currently, billions of people respecte and adulate billionaires as the ultimate successes. This is based on a toxic, pathological value system. We need to turn it around so kindness, generosity, sacrifice and doing good are the prime reasons people are given respect-- not wealth and top-down power over.This will be fought by the wealthy and by their vassals. It will be assailed as crazy and socialist or communist, but we need to create a new economic model that includes justice, fairness and balance, which recognizes that extreme wealth is a threat to democracy, justice, fairness and freedom. To make it possible to put such a law into effect, other laws will also be necessary. Consider this a project as big and daunting as the Apollo moon landing program.Some of the spin-off developments will include massive increases in transparency and will address the problems described in my article, The power and danger of complexity and secrecy , which described how some corporations have created thousands of subsidiary companies to conceal their full activities. Of course, the extreme wealthy can and do use the same strategies to hide the full extent of their wealth and income.And there will be the matter of punishment for the crime of excessive wealth. First, the excess wealth must be distributed to victims. Yes, victims. The extreme wealthy underpay employees. They exploit and despoil the environment. They steal or under-pay for natural resources-- minerals, fossil fuels, airwaves-- and they must all be re-compensated for. The economics of calculating such re-compensation will be another NASA-like "spinoff" of the excessive wealth crime project.
Now that we've seen how predatory and aggressive a pack of billionaires (swarm, pride, flock-- I'm thinking of pack because that's used to describe jackals and rats) can be, how they can coordinate to strip away decades of worker, people and environmental protections.
We need to put this conversation on the table. Of course, Libertarians and acolytes of the lie that unfettered capitalism will cure everything will react with apoplexy to such an idea. But it's not crazy. Anything less than ending the right of people to become so wealthy, influential and powerful is what's crazy.
Ending the right to be a billionaire should be a part of the conversation as we resist Trump. Resisting billionaires and the multibillion dollar companies and hedge funds they control must be part of solution we're discussing. Anything less and we will be ignoring the elephant in the room.
The only way this kind of law will become a reality is for a bottom-up revolution to happen. That does not have to be violent. There are already signs that have appeared, like spring buds on bare tree limbs. We have the power to take back justice, democracy, freedom, clean ecosystems-- from big corporations and the wealthy. We have to think really big. We have to come up with visions and ideas that others will call crazy. As a matter of fact, I would argue that if we don't come up with visions and goals that some, especially the old, top-down powers call crazy, we aren't visioning far enough ahead.