Abolish billionaires, dismantle the oligarchy

Abolish billionaires and seize their money to use for public good!

From the Party for Socialism and Liberation:

Trump is assembling an extreme-right cabinet of billionaires with a combined net worth of a whopping $340 billion. Here's what the working class could achieve if we took it from them.

We could end homelessness with $20 billion.

We could end hunger with $25 billion.

With $90 billion, we could clear the backlog of public housing repair needs across the country.

With $205 billion, we could build a much-needed high-speed rail nationwide, creating 2.6 million jobs.

There's no reason any one individual should have such an obscene amount of wealth while contributing nothing meaningful to society. Abolish billionaires and seize their money to use for public good!

This is not a democracy for the people—it’s a democracy for the rich!

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Journalist Ben Norton wrote today: “The US government always represents the interests of billionaire oligarchs, but the second Trump admin is cutting out the middle men and will be direct rule by billionaire oligarchs. At least 11 billionaires will have key roles in Trump's administration.”

“The nominees for the second Trump government will make up the richest administration in US history. Their combined wealth is more than $340 billion: $340,000,000,000+. They will be overseeing tax cuts on the super-rich and big corporations.”

The Hampton Institute stated: “We are living through capitalism's last stand, and Trump's second administration (much like a Harris administration would have been) will be another huge cash grab for billionaires, which will come at the expense of a large majority of Americans as the empire turns inward.”

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In 2014, Princeton University professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page studied the relative influence that the views of average Americans and mass-based interest groups have on policy outcomes versus the views of the economic elite in 1,779 cases.

The 42-page peer-reviewed study states: "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

Gilens and Page wrote: “When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy… Furthermore, the preferences of economic elites have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do… In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.”

We also know that this reality has only intensified and that inequalities in wealth and political influence have only worsened since the Gilens and Page study in 2014.

We in the Holler recently discussed a post-election online meeting of the Socialist Equality Party during which Eric London, a writer for the World Socialist Website, delivered a thorough analysis of Trump’s victory and what he referred to as “the oligarch’s election.”

Below is an excerpt of that analysis:

I think one point which the World Socialist Website has made very forcefully is that the election outcome and the coming to power of Donald Trump represents a sort of coming into being or an expression of the real forms of social relations in America, which is that this is a society that is dominated by the new oligarchy, by a tiny sliver of the population which controls almost all of the wealth. According to a study which was recently published by Americans for Tax Fairness, just 150 billionaire families alone spent 2 billion dollars on the 2024 election, almost double the amount those same families spent on the 2020 campaigns, a massive increase in influence.

These are some of the top donors. It’s a lot of money for Republicans, but the Democrats are well represented as well. Timothy Mellon donated 200 million dollars. Go down the list here, and you can see. These are the people who make the decisions about policy in the United States.

This is another chart that shows some of these families. The Adelson family, Musk in the 130 millions. The Singers, the Bloombergs gave 45 million dollars to the Democratic Party. This is an oligarchic system of government.

There is an important book that was published in 2021 by an Oxford University professor, Joe Foweraker. He makes a couple of points about the way that American oligarchy today is different than the system of blatant corruption which existed in the Gilded Age of the 1890s, for example. He makes a couple of very important points. He says: ‘These modern robber barons are successful in converting their market power into the political power to pursue policies that either distort markets or prevent government from reforming markets. The new barons do not therefore need public subsidies or favorable loans; they simply require a compliant federal government that allows them to impose their lucrative tolls on society.’ He continues: ‘The rise and rise of the financial oligarchy saw the balance of power shift decisively away from the elected constitutional government towards the unelected and largely unaccountable oligarchy. This was not the result of bribes or kickbacks or blood ties to important politicians—the usual sources of power in emerging markets plagued by ‘crony capitalism’, nor to special access to government funding or contracts, but to a highly favorable tax regime and to a permissive regulatory regime engineered to suit oligarchic interests.’ And the last quote I’ll read from this important book makes the point that the American government cannot be considered a democracy. It’s what he calls a ‘patrimonial state,’ a state which is inherited from one generation of oligarchs to the next. He says: ‘The role of the patrimonial state in guaranteeing the conditions of oligarchic rule is routinely projected and reproduced through a political class of this kind that comfortably adapts to different institutional templates within democracy, frequently finds expression in political families, clans or tribes, and typically survives generational change. It is alleged that just such a self-perpetuating and self-aggrandizing political class exists in America, with its apex in Congress and the higher echelons of the federal administration. Thus, virtually all senators and most of the representatives in the House are members of the top one percent and are sustained and rewarded by the top one percent, as are the key executive branch policymakers on trade and economic policy.’

This chart shows on the left the increase, though it ends in 2015, in the total net worth of the two houses of Congress combined, which has doubled in the last ten years. The chart to the right shows the wealth of some of the richest members of Congress. You can see some in the many hundreds of millions.

This will come as a surprise to nobody, but donations have continued to increase over the years and increased massively in the last election as well.

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The West Virginia Holler