The Bezos of Robbery,
or: Sadly, not a Standup Routine
A Rant for Occupy Day
The poverty of liberal identity politics — which is far removed from the story of intersectional struggle and solidarity, is in fact its corporate shadow — was encapsulated last year when the well-funded leading organization of the LGBT movement, Human Rights Campaign, bestowed its "National Equality Award" on the most odious of the current Human Robber Barons, Jeff Bezos.
Seriously: the Equality Award! They couldn't just make a new one up for Supervillain, erm, sorry, Superhero of the Year. They probably didn't blink. They seriously gave the currently most money-swollen walking dick in the primate universe a prize named for... Equality!
Bezos is busy. His great achievement over the last year was not whatever sum he as HRB donated or is going to donate to HRC — I’m sure he got his prize at a fair price. Nor was it his announcement, following on similar pledges by others of his 11- and 12-digit brethren — that he plans to establish a feudal principality populated by his genetically engineered super-clones and descendants on Mars. They can have arranged dynastic marriages to pacify the occasional wars with the Duchy of Musk and the Zuckerberg Palatinate.
Seriously. What do you think he's thinking? He's into space travel because that's the next step in human evolution? Inspired by Star Trek? Such a humanitarian! But maybe I'm too cynical. He's probably only thinking of Martian mineral rights.
His greatest achievement also wasn’t the continuing and even more medieval intensification of the Amazon work regime, as horrible as that is for its bearers. Or the company’s usual cannibal feast on whatever's left of Mom and Pop. Soon, I'm sure they'll let you buy just by looking at the button while the algorithm divines your intent by facial expression as read through the camera. (Which camera? All of them!) It's just a matter of time. Orwell might call it the vision of a human face clicking on Buy Now, forever. Shit, I probably just gave them the idea myself, a bot has already harvested it. For free! I'm such a genius.
No. His greatest achievement of the last year was his public stand as the unelected Boss of Seattle — should we just call him The Bezos? The name already sounds like a monarch’s title. He ordered the city council to revoke a small tax on his company and a few others, which was meant to fund shelters for the homeless. They complied. Now there's an Equality prize winner.
Don't fall into the temptation, however, of thinking we're at some non-plus-ultra in neoliberal era austerity. Erm, sorry, in this case I meant absurdity. Neoliberal absurdity. It can get worse.
Things can and probably will get worse, and besides the living billionaire comrades of Bezos, history is full of equally outrageous moves by Our Owners, past, present and future. And although the examples are infinite, in this case I refer, rather parochially, to U.S. history. Pick your decade, but the 1920s and 1890s were exemplary for just such characters, Fricks and Mellons and Fords, oh my. Deprived by the Constitution of being able to buy titles of nobility — Which. Was. So. Much. More. Honest! — their likes pioneered the image conversion from Robber Baron to Philanthropist.
Incidentally Owner of the Washington Post and Contractor to the CIA, Bezos just joined the latter sanctified group, also last week. He pledged to start a foundation with a whopping 2 billion out of his estimated 163 billion, or whatever his known holdings are trading for today (given some plus-minus for variability in the real estate valuations, and obviously not including offshore assets). He promises to give it all away before he dies, which by the way he is not planning to do. Die, I mean. Also, he won't be giving it away, but more on that in a moment.
This first "donation" is supposed go to the causes of messing up childhood education and maybe providing shelters for some of those homeless people he just put out on the street. Sorry, that's also no joke. I'm just a terrible person. I mean it. I'm desecrating the icon of Saint Mother Teresa of the Money Tree as she helps the children. The children! I'm going to hell.
No. This is not a comedy routine, not even a failed one. These people don't give away anything. They never have. That's not the game. That's not why God or Darwin or History or Pure Grit chose them to be the world's richest mammals.
Remember when the Rockefellers gave away their fortune to their charitable foundation, so that they could serve humanity? They so totally gave away that money that it's still around today, 100 something years later, still controlled by the family and its appointed agents, still employing half the still-burgeoning clan. See how that works?
The robber baron foundations are hedge funds. 95% of the action is in the equity holdings (the "endowment") and the idea of those is to make money, not to lose it. In this way the robber barons get a tax break now, and secure their fortunes against the potential of wealth taxes. So the first point is, they maintain control of what they have "given away" to their foundations.
The corporate media — their goddamn royal court, pundits and reporters often working for companies owned by the robber barons — have orgasms about the humanitarianism. These wonderful guys! First they create all the world's wealth - including your job, you worthless peon - through their genius and innovation and bold, big-balls risk-taking. Why don't you losers do that? And then, they give it away! To you! Amazing! Kneel before the Baron Harkonnen, if you know what's good for you.
The relatives and friends and descendants get nice jobs. And imagine if some heir turned out to be a spendthrift, or nuts, or a loser on the market, and lost it all. Putting most of it into the foundation reduces that risk. The family is still on perpetual welfare, and management of the foundation equity is in the hands of a responsible board who may be tied down by the founder's conditions. Like the title of nobility, it's a kind of immortality. The long-dead hand of the founding pirate remains on the keel long after the worms and microbes have processed his bones into fertilizer. That's if they can penetrate the titanium coffin. Take that, worms and microbes. The Bezos always wins!
Anyway, Bezos and the current crop of 0.0000001%ers aren't actually planning on dying. They will, of course, but they're not planning for it. They're gunning for the Singularity. Certain Christians have the Rapture, but these guys are hoping to live long enough to achieve physical immortality through new medical technology, or failing that to upload their brains as AIs, so that future generations can remain under their generous guidance.
Each year, some part of the proceeds from the foundation endowments go into the "charitable activities," most of which is actually capitalist social engineering. In any case, projects by which these sickos seek to remake society according to their own fantasies, and if you don't like those, fuck you very much. I mean, why not, right? Who we gonna entrust this to, me? You? If you're so smart, why aren't you a billionaire, huh? These guys are proven managers. They should run it all, right? Forever, right?
The Koch brothers don't just fund political climate change by superpac; they have built a host of dishonest scholarship factories to promote extreme libertarian policy, total deregulation, and also help keep the family-values fascists angry all day. Some of these are set up at real universities, by the way. Remember, all this gets tax breaks. Just in case any of the billionaire swag is still being taxed.
The Gates, Walton and Broad foundations fund the astroturf campaigns to destroy teachers' unions and destroy-by-reform public education, also to get schools to buy lots of Microsoft Surplus XL. Whatever Gates decides is the reform of the moment, the education departments and the rest of the money follow. For the children, you understand. Never mind if they have clean drinking water or dioxin-free playgrounds, what every single child needs is a laptop. A laptop that runs on Windows.
Back in the 1990s, my fellow Greek American, Pete Peterson, courageously put one of his Blackstone billions (after making a billion in a single day) into starting a crusade to reduce, privatize or end Social Security and Medicare. He wrote a column praising himself for it in Newsweek. What a guy! He gave all that money away! For the public good! Because he's concerned the government is spending too much money. On Social Security. This guy was in the Nixon Administration, by the way. He chaired the New York Federal Reserve and the Council on Foreign Relations, the original and perhaps still the premier war think-tank. But war is affordable. Remember his generosity, when you're 65 and opening a can of catfood. Also, next time you see propaganda urging Social Security cuts - follow the money. Part of it probably goes back to the Peterson Foundation.
Rockefeller and Ford were so busy in the Cold War, they made the CIA almost superfluous. Now there's a case where it's hard to tell which was top and which was bottom.
Okay, okay, they also pay for good things. Remember, this is with money that should never have been accumulated in the hands of a single individual, or should have been taxed if it was. They pay to build hospitals, and not always for rich-people diseases, and museums, and libraries. They run vaccination campaigns, the occasional water purification, and oh yeah, they fund academic grants that I'll probably apply for myself, so I can finish my dissertation.
(Hi hi hi, Ms. and Mr. Mellon Application Committee Members, reading this two years from today! How did you find this? I thought I'd deleted it, but hey, ha, why would I do that?! It's all fun and games. Nothing to hide here. No siree. So happy to see you! Love you! Remember, this is just a comedy routine! It's a tribute! Love you double!)
The point is, why do they get to decide how the accumulated wealth derived from the collective labor of this economy is reinvested, whether that's in rockets or meals on wheels, a shiny new 256-story tower in the middle of Central Park, with some pocket change thrown at "public" NPR and PBS so that they remain pious and obedient?
Did you know? Some countries actually have well-funded world-class public universities, hospitals, museums, libraries, etc., etc., and even give a higher percentage of GDP to aid for poorer countries, and that's in actual aid, not just loans to buy warplanes from the providing country. Did you know?
Still, one thing is clear. Our times are definitely getting more educational, and education is such a beautiful, public good. The lesson of HRB Bezos the Great, Empress of Amazonia and Lord Viscount of Mars, Master of the Universe in the Era of the Billionaire Grifter President, is that the comic book and James Bond villains really do exist in real life, albeit without the magic powers, without the charm, and sadly without their defeat plotted into the end of the story arc. Bruce Wayne is the Joker and Thanos is, in fact, Tony Stark.
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