source: YouTube
There's no sense in having political democracy without economical democracy, and our world is undeniable proof of that. Power, any kind of power including political power, is inextricably linked to wealth; if you're still unaware of this blatant truth, I'd advice you to crawl out from under that rock and join us here in the real world. A few centuries of capital accumulation and concentration of wealth has left us in a world where a handful of individuals own more wealth than half of the world's population. It has created a situation where each segment of the market is owned and controlled by a handful of mega-corporations, and where governments are bought and paid for by their owners.
The main reason why I am repulsed by Elon Musk's fanboys isn't even because of the fact that Elon Musk is a giant asshole, but because so many people literally look up to him, idolize him as some savior of humanity, a billionaire superhero like Tony Stark. And that's even after he fucked up the world's primary social platform used for dissemination and gathering of news. It's a mistake to let such large and important social platforms be privately owned in the first place for obvious reasons, but Musk showed the world what can happen if one single person wields all the power in a place that's so important for the functioning of our limited democracy; with his $8 blue-check-mark plan he effectively sealed free speech behind a pay-wall. And still the army of Musk-rats defend him as if he's a free-speech-absolutist.
Elon Musk is living proof of why billionaires shouldn't exist. If you have so much money that world leaders are compelled to sit down and negotiate with you, or that you can single-handedly buy the single-most important platform for the exchange of information and ideas, vital for the functioning of democracy, you've got too much money. Is Musk the only one? Or is he the worst? Unfortunately no, he's just the most visible one because he just loves to be in the spotlight. But most billionaires do their unholy work quietly, in the shadows, behind the curtain. I'll briefly mention two of the most damning examples here: Bill Gates of Microsoft fame, and Virgin's Richard Branson.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is responsible for the decades long destruction of Public Schooling in America, and has become the defacto authority on world health issues. Even though total costs of public schooling in America amount to some $500 billion per year, the Gates Foundation demonstrated that an injection of "just" a few billion in strategic places buys you disproportionate power, and enables you to set the national agenda for the entire K-12 education. Here's a snippet from a 2019 blog on the School Info System:
William Henry Gates III, more commonly known as Bill Gates, has wielded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a tool for wrecking education with Common Core and has hijacked the College Board, which began as a conclave of elite college leaders, into pursuing his radical social and political agendas.
source: SIS
That blog is titled "HOW BILL GATES DESTROYED THE COLLEGE BOARD", and most alarming is the fact that this is not the first, but the second attempt to reform public schooling by the Gates Foundation; needless to say that both were disastrous and caused lot of harm to mainly poor children and families. The first attempt began in 2000 and was based on Bill Gates' suspicion that graduations and test-results were declining because schools and classes were too big. Gates spent $2 billion between 2000 and 2008 to set up 2,602 schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia, "directly reaching at least 781,000 students," according to a foundation brochure. There was talk about the "Gates effect":
Gates funding was so large and so widespread, it seemed for a time as if every initiative in the small-schools and charter world was being underwritten by the foundation. If you wanted to start a school, hold a meeting, organize a conference, or write an article in an education journal, you first had to consider Gates (“Power Philanthropy” in The Gates Foundation and the Future of Public Schools, 2010).
source: Dissent
But he didn't just attack the size of schools. Ultimately Gates' ideology, as is the case with all billionaires, is an unreserved belief in the private business model; school should be run like a business. So the Gates Foundation, together with two other main "philanthropic" foundations (the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation), started programs aimed at attracting leaders from business, the military, law and government in order to make them, after a short training period, superintendents and upper-level managers of urban public school districts. In their new jobs, they could then implement the foundation's agenda. Read the above linked Dissent article to learn how this network of new leaders spread across the nation and even infiltrated the Obama administration; Arne Duncan, for example, went from becoming the Chicago public schools CEO to being appointed the U.S. Secretary of Education, which was celebrated as a victory by the participating billionaires' foundations.
The only problem is that both experiments have failed miserably; graduation percentages and test results did not improve, got worse even in some cases. The justification for such nation-wide experiments is the usual mantra that U.S. schools are falling behind compared to other OECD nations, which is true, but warrants a closer look at the numbers. In districts where poverty rates are below 10 percent, the U.S. ranked first. Even when poverty rates are between 10 and 25 percent, the U.S. ranked first. Only as poverty rates rose higher, students ranked lower and lower. The low average ranking of American students reflects the fact that 20 percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates of over 75 percent. The problem never was public schools, it's always been poverty, and we know that that's one thing billionaires will never solve.
The solution, as always, is in more economic democracy. Seeing that we won't transition to socialism or communism anytime soon, we must resort to heavier taxation of these billionaires. Instead of letting them invest their money as they see fit, money they extracted from the community in the first place, tax them and invest that money as we, the people see fit. Instead of letting them purchase unlimited power over the institutions that shape our daily lifes and determine our children's future, take some of that money back and invest it in public education in a manner that makes sense. That way schools' financing can be decoupled from property taxes, leveling the playing field between rich and poor neighborhoods. Tax payers still fund more than 99 percent of the cost of K-12 education, so it's only reasonable that public schools should be run by officials who answer to the voters.
On Gates' escapades in World Health Organization's affairs, especially the "war on malaria", I'll be brief; because the Gates Foundation is funding almost everyone studying malaria, the cornerstone of scientific research, independent review, is falling apart:
Many of the world’s leading malaria scientists are now "locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group," Dr. Kochi wrote. Because "each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others," he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals "is becoming increasingly difficult."
source: Dissent
Look, capitalism leads to monopoly, the kind of monopoly that extends well beyond the confines of the markets of labor, goods and services. As you have read above, this can lead to the destruction of education and science by making them subservient to the will of profit-seeking corporations and individuals. It destroys universal healthcare as well, as our last example will show.
Rising from the ashes of the Second World War, the English National Health Service (NHS) was founded in 1948 as part of a welfare state designed to eradicate want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness (the "five giant evils"). The promise was to provide world-class medical care that's always free at the point of delivery for everyone, including nonresidents. This, in my mind, is just common sense; no one should be left to die or remain sick if it can be helped. Just like every child should have access to a good public school, all people should have access to medical care.
The NHS is the pride and joy of many Brits, it's a beloved institution. And that's the only reason why it's still there. Starting with Margaret Thatcher, slowly but surely several pillars of the NHS are being privatized and destroyed (privatization equals destruction in this case). Here's how the NHS was originally set up:
In its original iteration, the government transferred ownership of all existing hospitals in Britain to the NHS, which then employed staff, using taxpayer money, to deliver services without charging out-of-pocket fees. Some charges were implemented soon after its founding, including fees for dentures and glasses, as well as prescription payments brought in by Winston Churchill.
source: The Nation
Thatcher was the first of many neoliberal believers in free market principles and, as was later revealed, she hired an American right-wing think tank to draw up privatization plans. This started a process of slowly chipping away at the foundation of public health and opening it up to the private sector. It was New Labor's Tony Blair who in 2001 decided to finish what Thatcher started; "New Labour brought in lucrative contracts with independent sector treatment centers (ISTCs) to perform "elective" procedures, paid for at inflated rates with taxpayer money, while leaving more expensive, complex surgeries to the NHS."
There's a lesson to learn here, especially for Americans: since the still ongoing process of quietly privatizing the NHS started, it resulted in an incredibly complex bureaucracy that's becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. Private businesses being far more efficient than government-run institutions is a stubborn myth; governments deal with entire nations, maintaining open and fair elections, keeping track of the census, regulating businesses, traffic, policing and so on, which justifies a measure of bureaucracy. But the business of managing a national health service is far less bureaucratic than the sum total of independent profit-seeking, cost-minimizing private corporations fighting over the "customers'" patronage. The mere fact that sick people are demoted to "customers" is a hellish travesty in itself...
Anyhow, 2012 was the year that the Health and Social Care Act, which created new markets in the NHS and really ramped up the privatization. It was also the year that Richard Branson's "Virgin Care" was commissioned by the NHS. In 2021 Virgin Care was bought by Twenty20 Capital and rebranded as HCRG Care Group. Of course, as a bonafide billionaire philanthropist, Branson denies that he ever made any profits from his NHS contracts. In 2018 he wrote:
Over the last 50 years, I have been fortunate to build many successful companies and do not want or intend to profit personally from the NHS. Indeed, I have invested millions in Virgin Care to help it transform its services for the better and to improve both the patient and employee experience. Contrary to reports, the Virgin Care group has not made a profit to date. If and when I could take a dividend from Virgin Care (which would make us a profit over and above our overall investment), I will invest 100% of that money back into helping NHS patients young and old, with our frontline employees deciding how best to spend it.
source: Wikipedia
Isn't that just lovely. In reality though, Branson's Virgin empire scooped up billions, tax free, from his NHS deals. Just read these articles, whose titles alone say enough: Virgin awarded almost £2bn of NHS contracts in the past five years and Richard Branson's Virgin Healthcare has paid no tax on £2billion NHS deals. There's one left-wing and one right-wing news-media confirming what we already know: billionaires' "philanthropy" is all smoke and mirrors aimed at polishing their personal brand. If anything, it only shows how much they fear the proverbial pitchforks. Needless to say that Virgin Care was at the forefront of the fight for privatization of the NHS.
These are just three examples of billionaires using their disproportionate wealth and power to shape our daily reality and undermine democracy. Like I said at the start; there is no real political democracy without economical democracy, which is why capitalism is, at its very core, anti-democratic. At the very least we should tame that beast to the point that no individual person, business or corporation is able to aggregate so much wealth that they're able to to have more votes than you or I. If all billionaires were left with just $1 billion, they'd still be able to live lifes of ridiculous wealth, they wouldn't have to change their current lifestyles at all. So it's not radical at all to cap their wealth at one billion and tax every dollar above that for 90 or even 99 percent. Twitter, education, healthcare should all be strictly public services run by representatives of the people. And that's just the start. It's ridiculous that we produce enough food to feed 12 billion mouths, but destroy most of it just to keep prices up instead of feeding the hungry. We need to get sensible here, we need to abolish billionaires.
I'll leave you with another example: Peter Thiel, who was Elon Musk's business partner at PayPal, and dreams of a libertarian future, one he's actively building, or trying to build, in America. He does this by funding some of the worst Trump candidates, among other ill-advised ventures. I found it refreshing, and honest, how he admits that the aim of any business startup is to become a monopoly. And a monopoly is exactly what he believes in, but for an entire nation; no democracy, just the power of money.
Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy!
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