Triumph of the Oligarchs
A new class of overlords are making their bid for world domination.
The views of the Authors are not necessarily the views of Enigmose.
The Corona virus has trammeled the prospects of most Americans, particularly low-income workers. But for one small group, the pandemic has proved something like manna from heaven. Already ascendant beforehand, the tech oligarchy—a relatively small number of companies, venture, and private equity funds—are riding the current crisis to unprecedented dominion over our ever-weakening Republic.
To be sure, some tech firms, including Google, have taken a hit from the weakened advertising market. But tech stock prices generally have soared as most others have lagged. Undeterred by the downturn, tech moguls continue to increase their research spending in order to tighten their already rapidly constricting stranglehold on the economy. The shift to remote work has boosted firms that facilitate video conferencing and digital collaboration like Slack—the fastest growing business application on record—as well Google Hangouts, Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
No surprise then that the tech rich are simply getting richer: seven of the ten richest Americans come from the tech sector. Apple, by some calculations, is now worth more than the entire oil and gas industry. The already obscenely rich have become richer still; Jeff Bezos alone has seen his net worth jump by an estimated 34.6 billion in the first two months of the pandemic.
Oligarchy, American Style
For these ascendant overlords, President Trump represents an insultingly inconvenient barrier to such wish-list items as HI-B visas (critical to keeping labor costs down), web censorship, and uninhibited trade with their critical business partners n China. But with the Trump Administration clearly imploding, the oligarchs now have a chance to regain control of the national agenda and attain even greater political sway than that they enjoyed under Barack Obama.
Long a major source of Democratic Party funding, the tech industry will likely find a President Biden more favorably disposed toward off-shoring to China, importing temporary foreign labor, and consolidating tech firms (to which, in fairness, both parties have proven amenable).
The Rising American Surveillance State
The pandemic has also boosted the prospects for ever greater surveillance following the model of China. Even beforehand, the tech giants, notably Google and Apple, made bold steps into capturing medical records as part of a drive to emulate what the British academic David Lyon describes as a “surveillance society.”
China is increasingly a model for intensified digital snooping. Already Google, IBM, and Apple are assisting China’s systematic use of digital technology to impose ever greater control over its citizens. Some in our academic establishment see the pandemic as proving that, in the “debate over freedom or control,” China “was largely correct and the US was wrong.”
Cultural Dominion
Perhaps the most terrifying development has been the tech elite’s decision to move beyond profitable snooping toward controlling content. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults now get their news through social media like Facebook or Google. This is even more true among Millennials. As the publishing industry has shrunk—between 2001 and 2017 it lost 290,000 jobs or 40% of all its jobs—Facebook and Google dominate the only growth area, online advertising.
The oligarchs have further expanded their domain by purchasing much of what is left of the mainstream media, including the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and long-distressed Time magazine. Ownership of this media increases the oligarchs’ ability to promote their own progressive views
Socialism in Silicon Valley
Rather than seeing them as “benign” or even counter-cultural heroes, many progressives now label the tech oligarchs as just the latest purveyors of “predatory capitalism” and a mounting threat to democracy. This includes increasingly part of their own their own workforces, where they confront a growing socialist movement among tech employees in Silicon Valley who have little chance of replicating the wealth accumulation enjoyed by prior generations in the Bay Area.
Total Power or the Guillotine?
With the departure of Donald Trump, the toxic glue that now unites them in opposition, progressives and oligarchs will likely emerge more into the open. Oligarchs and their overwhelmingly white and Asian leadership actually have little in common with the proudly Marxist-oriented Black Lives Matter movement to which they are currently pledging allegiance. This uneasy peace will not last long between captains of industry and a revolutionary movement which proposes socialist economics as an antidote to what its founders see as “racial capitalism.”
Some leftists openly seek to seize the oligarch s’ wealth and commandeer their technology to create “fully automated luxury communism” and a “post-work society.” At very least they could be under pressure by fiscally challenged governments, as is already happening in Europe, to fork over more of their profits to the state. Full Article @ American Mind
American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class
Paperback – September 27, 2017
A permanent political class has emerged on a scale unprecedented in our nation 's history. Its self-dealing, nepotism, and corruption contribute to rising inequality. Its reach extends from the governing elite throughout nongovernmental institutions. Aside from constituting an oligarchy of prestige and power, it enables the creation of an aristocracy of massive inherited wealth that is accumulating immense political power.
In a muckraking tour de force reminiscent of Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, and C. Wright Mills, American Oligarchy demonstrates the way the corrupt culture of the permanent political class extends down to the state and local level. Ron Formisano breaks down the ways this class creates economic inequality and how its own endemic corruption infects our entire society. Formisano delves into the work of not just politicians but lobbyists, consultants, appointed bureaucrats, pollsters, celebrity journalists, behind-the-scenes billionaires, and others. Their shameless pursuit of wealth and self-aggrandizement, often at taxpayer expense, rewards channeling the flow of income and wealth to elites. That inequality in turn has choked off social mobility and made a joke of meritocracy.
As Formisano shows, these forces respond to the oligarchy 's power and compete to bask in the presence of the .01 percent. They also exacerbate the dangerous instability of an American democracy divided between extreme wealth and extreme poverty...... Read More