Tommy Tainant
Diamond Member
- Jan 20, 2016
- 51,769
- 22,871
‘We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros
Challenging each other to cage fights, building apocalypse bunkers – the behaviour of today’s mega-moguls is becoming increasingly outlandish and imperial
www.theguardian.com
Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon. In contrast, however avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras still saw themselves as human members of civil society. Contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress, necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension. Unlike their forebears, they do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest underground lair in New Zealand, colony on the moon or Mars or virtual reality server in the cloud.
Mr Carnegie actually built Wrexham Library. He also built Coedpoeth Library a couple of mile down the road. He may have been an absolute shit of a man but he was recognisably a member of the human race.
Todays megarich seem to spend their money on insulating themselves from the world rather than helping o improve it.
While Bezos flies to the moon. or tries to, his staff are striking for a living wage so that they can feed themselves and keep a roof over their head. His business model is based on killing the opposition by using debt to undercut his rivals.And taxpayers pay for him to do so by giving him tax breaks and grants to open his sweatshops in our towns.
In fact all of these people have benefitted from lax taxation regimes and feeble legislation.Society pays a lot more than just a financial cost. Wages are depressed as Apple makes its phones in countries where the people assembling the products could never afford one.Its exploitation.
There will never be a British or American phone maker because Apple have priced them out of the market.Exploiting overseas workers in order to bypass the workers in their core markets. Jobs never presented that at his cult meetings.
That is globalism.
Starbucks in the UK is structured to avoid UK taxation.The whole enterprise is a tax dodge. And yet you cannot avoid a starbucks in the UK.They close down smaller traders not with a better product. They do it with the financial might that they have. A power not available to smaller local competitors.
And on top of that they do not contribute to the country they trade in. They trade off our roads and utilities.police protection, education and a host of other benefits.
This is why our governments are always short of money and our infrastructure is crumbling.
We should stop subsidising these bandits and start taxing them properly. They are sucking the life out of society.
It wasnt always like this. My taid worked for over 30 yeasr for an American company Monsanto.They might have a dubious environmental record but they were a bloody good employer.
They paid their staff well and paid a generous pension. The modern billionaire class go on joy rides into space.
