Will the Current Musk Coup Define Our Future?
Sam Pizzigati
Photograph Source: DanielGoldhorn – CC BY 4.0
The classic coup d’état has guns. Uniformed men run wild seizing government agencies and claiming control over what government does and who government serves.
But in our new cyber age, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder reflected this past week, a coup can unfold without any armed overthrow. We can have “a couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives.”
These young men, operating upon “vague references to orders from on high,” can gain access to basic computer systems and “proceed to grant their Supreme Leader” effective power over just about everything that government does.
The historian Snyder is, of course, describing America’s current reality. He’s calling this reality a coup — and so are defenders of America’s democratic faith.
We aren’t living through “a coup with tanks in the streets and mobs overrunning government offices,” charges former U.S. attorney and current Brennan Center senior fellow Joyce Vance. We’ve living through “a quieter coup, a billionaires’ coup.”
“The richest man on Earth is attempting to seize physical control of government payment systems and use them to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally dislikes,” adds in the University of Minnesota Law School’s Will Stancil. “Elon Musk is directly usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse.”
The Musk legions now hacking their way through the nation’s capital, the New York Times reports, have already “inserted themselves” into the databases of 17 federal agencies. These legions include fervent Musk admirers like Akash Bobba, a software engineer less than three years out of high school who once interned with a tech firm chaired by fellow Musk billionaire Peter Thiel.
One by one, the federal agencies that keep the nation running have fallen, with the full blessings of Donald Trump, under Musk’s effective control. Trump, meanwhile, is making headlines about taking over Gaza and Panama, in the process, notes Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, “distracting everyone from the real story — the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”
The Trumpsters, agrees Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, are moving us “into an oligarchic form of society where extraordinary power rests in the hands of a small number of unelected multi-billionaires.”
Elected officials and progressive activists are pushing back in the courts to stop the Musk putsch and scoring some initial victories. One federal judge, for instance, has just blocked Musk’s access to the Treasury Department’s computer payments system. That access, the judge ruled, threatens “irreparable harm” to the personal and financial data of millions of Americans.
But lower-level court rulings may not pass muster with higher-level Trump-appointed judges. Stopping the Musk coup will require a broader popular mobilization, and that push back is indeed building, with protests drawing thousands in locales ranging from downtown Washington to a host of state capitols nationwide.
Our best hope to counter the Musk coup’s billionaire corporate backers — “and their boundless options” to shape “our elections, legislation, and judicial appointments”? That may well be intensified trade union action, suggests a new analysis long-time labor activist Michael Podhorzer, and that action is also building.
Labor’s national voice, the AFL-CIO, has just launched a new campaign, the Department of People Who Work for a Living, to challenge Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency.”
“Government can work for billionaires,” points out AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, “or it can work for working people — but not both.”
Exactly what can unions help us accomplish that could reverse America’s continuing descent into a naked plutocracy? The Labor Institute’s Les Leopold recently outlined a core set of realizable demands that could “bring workers together and give them a sense of collective power.”
These demands range from prohibiting layoffs by corporations that collect taxpayer dollars and tax breaks to upping the hourly minimum wage to at least $20.
The current federal minimum — just $7.25 an hour — translates into an annual take-home of only $15,080 for a full-time worker, not nearly enough to keep a single mom or dad with kids above the official federal poverty line.
That official poverty line traces back to the mid-1960s work of Mollie Orshansky, a Social Security Administration economist. To arrive at that line, Orshansky multiplied the cost of a minimum food diet by three to cover all the other expenses a poor household might confront.
But the current federal poverty line hasn’t increased, to keep up with inflation, since 2009. That’s left minimum-wage workers today making 29 percent less — in real dollars — than minimum-wage workers earned at the time of that last increase and a stunning 40 percent less than minimum-wage workers earned back in 1968.
What has increased — and spectacularly so — since 1968? The fortunes — and power — of America’s richest.
“A handful of people,” notes the New Economics Foundation analyst Fernanda Balata, now “hold disproportionate influence over political outcomes and public discourse.” Enough influence to put coups on America’s political table.
How should we respond to that “disproportionate influence”? Balata spells out one intriguing possibility in a new paper the New Economics Foundation and Patriotic Millionaires International have just published. We need, her paper suggests, more than a poverty line. We need what amounts to an “extreme wealth line,” a framework for public policy that could help cap the fortunes of the world’s most fortunate.
Our globe’s current 10 wealthiest, Balata notes, “now own more than the poorest three billion combined.” These ten have become so rich, Oxfam relates, that they could lose 99 percent of their wealth and still rate as billionaires.
Nine of these top 10 billionaires just happen to be Americans. Affluents this rich, Balata lays out, are using their fortunes “to distort democratic foundations and the social contract, maintaining a system where they keep getting richer despite the consequences for the rest of us.”
Elon Musk’s coup has given those foundations their most significant shaking yet. Establishing an “extreme wealth line,” Balata’s work helps show, could start us down a road that could end that shaking, both today and deep into the future. This wealth line would essentially mark the point where wealth accumulations become a direct threat to our democratic, economic, and environmental future.
“By framing extreme wealth concentration as a societal risk, an extreme wealth line could reshape public opinion, as the poverty line transformed public understanding of economic deprivation,” Balata details. “An extreme wealth line could also provide a reference point for progressive taxation and regulatory reforms aimed at reducing excessive influence over public institutions and the media.”
Where might that extreme wealth line sit? In her research, Balata has interviewed a wide variety of policy analysts and deep pockets open to the wealth line notion.
The wealthy among those interviewed suggested specific setpoints for that wealth line, figures ranging from $10 million to $1 billion. The policy-minded interviewees, by contrast, saw more value in setting the wealth line in a relative context, by linking, for instance, poverty and wealth lines in a fixed ratio.
Taking that approach could reverse the incentives that drive so much of the behavior that our contemporary wealthy exhibit. Within our current economy and polity, our richest have an ongoing incentive to squeeze our poorest. The more they squeeze, the richer they can become. But a wealth line tied to the poverty line could reverse that dynamic.
Think about things this way: In a political system with a poverty line, tax-funded public assistance comes your way if your income sits you under that line or only slightly above it. If we linked that poverty line to a new extreme wealth line, new political dynamics would quickly come into play.
What sort of dynamics? The most affluent among us would suddenly have a vested personal interest in enhancing the incomes of our poorest. The reason? The wealth of our wealthiest would only rise if the incomes of our poorest rose first. We would be creating a society with an ongoing incentive to become ever more caring.
We can certainly stop the current Musk coup — if the mobilizing against it continues to build. The challenge then becomes figuring out what we can do to stop our wealthiest from mounting ever more robust coup attempts in the years ahead. Establishing an excessive wealth line, in the United States and worldwide, could be a giant step toward a Musk-free tomorrow, a future without a super rich.
Sam Pizzigati
Photograph Source: DanielGoldhorn – CC BY 4.0
The classic coup d’état has guns. Uniformed men run wild seizing government agencies and claiming control over what government does and who government serves.
But in our new cyber age, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder reflected this past week, a coup can unfold without any armed overthrow. We can have “a couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives.”
These young men, operating upon “vague references to orders from on high,” can gain access to basic computer systems and “proceed to grant their Supreme Leader” effective power over just about everything that government does.
The historian Snyder is, of course, describing America’s current reality. He’s calling this reality a coup — and so are defenders of America’s democratic faith.
We aren’t living through “a coup with tanks in the streets and mobs overrunning government offices,” charges former U.S. attorney and current Brennan Center senior fellow Joyce Vance. We’ve living through “a quieter coup, a billionaires’ coup.”
“The richest man on Earth is attempting to seize physical control of government payment systems and use them to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally dislikes,” adds in the University of Minnesota Law School’s Will Stancil. “Elon Musk is directly usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse.”
The Musk legions now hacking their way through the nation’s capital, the New York Times reports, have already “inserted themselves” into the databases of 17 federal agencies. These legions include fervent Musk admirers like Akash Bobba, a software engineer less than three years out of high school who once interned with a tech firm chaired by fellow Musk billionaire Peter Thiel.
One by one, the federal agencies that keep the nation running have fallen, with the full blessings of Donald Trump, under Musk’s effective control. Trump, meanwhile, is making headlines about taking over Gaza and Panama, in the process, notes Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, “distracting everyone from the real story — the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”
The Trumpsters, agrees Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, are moving us “into an oligarchic form of society where extraordinary power rests in the hands of a small number of unelected multi-billionaires.”
Elected officials and progressive activists are pushing back in the courts to stop the Musk putsch and scoring some initial victories. One federal judge, for instance, has just blocked Musk’s access to the Treasury Department’s computer payments system. That access, the judge ruled, threatens “irreparable harm” to the personal and financial data of millions of Americans.
But lower-level court rulings may not pass muster with higher-level Trump-appointed judges. Stopping the Musk coup will require a broader popular mobilization, and that push back is indeed building, with protests drawing thousands in locales ranging from downtown Washington to a host of state capitols nationwide.
Our best hope to counter the Musk coup’s billionaire corporate backers — “and their boundless options” to shape “our elections, legislation, and judicial appointments”? That may well be intensified trade union action, suggests a new analysis long-time labor activist Michael Podhorzer, and that action is also building.
Labor’s national voice, the AFL-CIO, has just launched a new campaign, the Department of People Who Work for a Living, to challenge Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency.”
“Government can work for billionaires,” points out AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, “or it can work for working people — but not both.”
Exactly what can unions help us accomplish that could reverse America’s continuing descent into a naked plutocracy? The Labor Institute’s Les Leopold recently outlined a core set of realizable demands that could “bring workers together and give them a sense of collective power.”
These demands range from prohibiting layoffs by corporations that collect taxpayer dollars and tax breaks to upping the hourly minimum wage to at least $20.
The current federal minimum — just $7.25 an hour — translates into an annual take-home of only $15,080 for a full-time worker, not nearly enough to keep a single mom or dad with kids above the official federal poverty line.
That official poverty line traces back to the mid-1960s work of Mollie Orshansky, a Social Security Administration economist. To arrive at that line, Orshansky multiplied the cost of a minimum food diet by three to cover all the other expenses a poor household might confront.
But the current federal poverty line hasn’t increased, to keep up with inflation, since 2009. That’s left minimum-wage workers today making 29 percent less — in real dollars — than minimum-wage workers earned at the time of that last increase and a stunning 40 percent less than minimum-wage workers earned back in 1968.
What has increased — and spectacularly so — since 1968? The fortunes — and power — of America’s richest.
“A handful of people,” notes the New Economics Foundation analyst Fernanda Balata, now “hold disproportionate influence over political outcomes and public discourse.” Enough influence to put coups on America’s political table.
How should we respond to that “disproportionate influence”? Balata spells out one intriguing possibility in a new paper the New Economics Foundation and Patriotic Millionaires International have just published. We need, her paper suggests, more than a poverty line. We need what amounts to an “extreme wealth line,” a framework for public policy that could help cap the fortunes of the world’s most fortunate.
Our globe’s current 10 wealthiest, Balata notes, “now own more than the poorest three billion combined.” These ten have become so rich, Oxfam relates, that they could lose 99 percent of their wealth and still rate as billionaires.
Nine of these top 10 billionaires just happen to be Americans. Affluents this rich, Balata lays out, are using their fortunes “to distort democratic foundations and the social contract, maintaining a system where they keep getting richer despite the consequences for the rest of us.”
Elon Musk’s coup has given those foundations their most significant shaking yet. Establishing an “extreme wealth line,” Balata’s work helps show, could start us down a road that could end that shaking, both today and deep into the future. This wealth line would essentially mark the point where wealth accumulations become a direct threat to our democratic, economic, and environmental future.
“By framing extreme wealth concentration as a societal risk, an extreme wealth line could reshape public opinion, as the poverty line transformed public understanding of economic deprivation,” Balata details. “An extreme wealth line could also provide a reference point for progressive taxation and regulatory reforms aimed at reducing excessive influence over public institutions and the media.”
Where might that extreme wealth line sit? In her research, Balata has interviewed a wide variety of policy analysts and deep pockets open to the wealth line notion.
The wealthy among those interviewed suggested specific setpoints for that wealth line, figures ranging from $10 million to $1 billion. The policy-minded interviewees, by contrast, saw more value in setting the wealth line in a relative context, by linking, for instance, poverty and wealth lines in a fixed ratio.
Taking that approach could reverse the incentives that drive so much of the behavior that our contemporary wealthy exhibit. Within our current economy and polity, our richest have an ongoing incentive to squeeze our poorest. The more they squeeze, the richer they can become. But a wealth line tied to the poverty line could reverse that dynamic.
Think about things this way: In a political system with a poverty line, tax-funded public assistance comes your way if your income sits you under that line or only slightly above it. If we linked that poverty line to a new extreme wealth line, new political dynamics would quickly come into play.
What sort of dynamics? The most affluent among us would suddenly have a vested personal interest in enhancing the incomes of our poorest. The reason? The wealth of our wealthiest would only rise if the incomes of our poorest rose first. We would be creating a society with an ongoing incentive to become ever more caring.
We can certainly stop the current Musk coup — if the mobilizing against it continues to build. The challenge then becomes figuring out what we can do to stop our wealthiest from mounting ever more robust coup attempts in the years ahead. Establishing an excessive wealth line, in the United States and worldwide, could be a giant step toward a Musk-free tomorrow, a future without a super rich.
