The Insatiable Hunger Of Our Oligarchs

The most horrific part of the current state of the world is the realisation that there is no amount of money, of resources, of power, of influence that the ultra-rich will ever consider to be enough. That the line will eventually get drawn for them is cold comfort.

The American war in Iran may appear to be a bumbling fiasco run by an incompetent administration full of yes-men after the purging of anyone with anything resembling experience or conscience from any position where this could have been prevented. Militarily, the United States has already lost this war, mercifully far more quickly than their defeat in Vietnam, and yet there is no particularly obvious reason to have waged it in the first place.

Unless, of course, the relatively low casualty defeat was the point.

The price of gas has gone through the roof. This will inevitably raise the price of everything else as increasing transportation costs trickle through supply chains. The cost of gas has not gone up with the price of gas, meaning major oil companies are increasing their already obscene profits from their largely domestic supplies. From this perspective, trickle-down economics is a real thing.

Airlines are adding fuel surcharges to deal with rising fuel prices, but are explicitly unwilling to commit to revoking those surcharges should prices come back down. Delta CEO Ed Bastian was quoted as saying as much during an earnings call in April:

Fuel recapture is going to be important no matter what we do, and the degree to which we can retain any of the pricing strength that we talked about from industry rationalization, that will certainly help us boost our margins this year and clearly into next year as well.

In other words, dropping fuel prices with consumers already used to paying the higher rates from the surge will improve their bottom line. It is hard to imagine that grocery chains will be any more charitable.

In order to assuage concerns about high fuel prices, the Canadian government temporarily cut the $.10/litre excise tax on gas. The price drop was immediate at the pumps, and within days was completely erased with further price increases, with the collective taking an ever-smaller cut. The price of gas here in Moncton is now around $1.93 per litre, up about $.60 since the Iran war began — with less of it going to the government, and therefore our future, than before.

The Trump administration, and their Canadian patsies in the Conservative party, have been doing everything they can to kill all forms of renewable energy projects and programs. With this oil price play taking place through the war in Iran, it should be obvious why. Creating a captive market for oil forces the consumers to spend all their money on fossil fuels because the alternatives have been systematically and deliberately destroyed. We are quite literally being forced to sell our future in the interests of short-term profits.

This is not the only way that American policy is fleecing consumers to the benefit of the oligarchs.

Who can forget Donald Trump’s tariffs imposed on most of the world by declaring myriad “emergencies” like Canada being responsible for entirely too much fentanyl smuggling, when the real numbers show that Canada’s contribution to this problem is statistically insignificant, with less than 1% of fentanyl entering the United States from its border. It was simply an excuse — an obvious one — to impose tariffs willy-nilly.

An American court earlier this year declared that this was not legal and ordered a reimbursement of some of those tariffs. This week, some $35.5 billion USD in collected tariff revenue became eligible for reimbursement — to the businesses that passed them on to the consumers rather than to the consumers who paid them.

Yet again, the tariffs had nothing to do with drug or trade policy, and everything to do with robbing the American public to put in the hands of our oligarchy.

We see it over and over again. Mega-corporations like Starbucks, Amazon, and Wal-Mart, to name but a few, have gone to great lengths to fight any prospect of unions organising in their businesses, shutting down facilities rather than allowing anything that might allow their employees to be paid reasonable wages. Their extremely wealthy owners see this as necessary to preserve their wealth, status, and influence.

And that is the point. Every major policy decision coming out of the United States, most of which have consequential impacts on Canada and numerous other countries, are focused a single overarching objective: enriching the rich at the expense of the masses. Social programs are cut for the people while social programs are expanded for the corporations and the oligarchs. Students are drowned in unforgivable debt to make them beholden to this structure before they ever enter the workforce.

There is no amount of money, no amount of power, no amount of influence that these billionaires will ever find sufficient. The very existence of billionaires should offend the sensibility of every other person. There is no rational reason to have that level of wealth, and no ethical way to gain it. Yet few who ever achieve the status of billionaire ever consider how to give back to a society that allowed them to get to that point.

And for those who do, being that wealthy is so self-perpetuating that it is genuinely hard to give it all away. The upward economic syphons are so powerful that being a billionaire is a virtually unstoppable force, once the threshold is crossed.

Consider the case of MacKenzie Scott, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife. In their 2019 divorce, she walked away with an estimated net worth of $38.9 billion. By the end of last year, to her credit, she had made an estimated $26.3 billion in donations to various causes and charities — and, in spite of giving away what would appear to be over two-thirds of her wealth, her net worth is now estimated at $42.7 billion.

If the oligarchs have managed to fix the system this thoroughly to ensure that their limitless wealth continues to grow at rates the rest of us cannot even begin to comprehend, the long-term viability of western democracy and civilisation itself is in obvious and existential danger. There is no such thing as sustainable growth, much less infinite growth, as our resources are ultimately finite. One can ultimately either sustain or grow. At some point, the obscenely rich will reach their physical limits; there will be no working class, no masses to provide still more wealth to them, no assets left that they have not already taken.

This is, in large part, the purpose of the current AI revolution. If a completely broke working class can no longer generate wealth for the oligarchs, perhaps a synthetic work force can replace them. As many have said, the problem AI is being used to solve is not so much knowledge, capacity, or ability — it is wages. It is a huge waste of the phenomenal potential of that technology, which could and should instead be used for the betterment of all.

The two most dangerous types of people are those with everything to lose and those with nothing to lose. At some point, when everyone left falls into one of those two categories, these two discrete groups will come to a head and there is no predicting the outcome of that conflict.

We can be reasonably sure, though, that the price of gas will no longer be of significant consequence when it is over.