August 29, 2019 • 0
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It’s a billionaire’s world and
the biggest of them all is in the thick of it, as Eric Zuesse explains.
By Eric Zuesse
Strategic Culture
Strategic Culture
Jeff Bezos is the owner
of The Washington Post, which leads America’s news-media in their almost
100 percent support and promotion of neoconservatism, American imperialism and wars. This
includes sanctions, coups, and military invasions against countries that
America’s billionaires want to control but don’t yet control — such
as Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, Libya, and China.
These are aggressive wars against
countries which have never aggressed against the United States. They are not,
at all, defensive, but the exact opposite. It’s not necessarily endless war
(even Hitler hadn’t planned that), but war until the entire planet has come
under the control of the U.S. Government, a government that is itself controlled by America’s billionaires, the funders of
neoconservatism and imperialism — in both major American political
parties, think tanks, newspapers, TV networks, etcetera.
Bezos has been a crucial part
of neoconservatism, ever since, at the June 6-9 2013 Bilderberg meeting, he arranged with
Donald Graham, the Washington Post’s owner, to buy that newspaper, for $250 million. Bezos
had already negotiated, in March of that same year, with the
neoconservative CIA Director, John Brennan, for a $600 million ten-year
cloud computing contract that transformed Amazon corporation,
from being a reliable money-loser, into a reliably profitable firm.
That caused Bezos’s net worth
to soar even more (and at a sharper rate of rising) than it had been doing while
it had been losing money. He became the most influential salesman not only for
books, but for the CIA, and for such mega-corporations as Lockheed Martin.
Imperialism has supercharged his wealth, but it didn’t alone cause it. Bezos
might be the most ferociously gifted business-person on the planet.
Some of America’s billionaires
don’t care about international conquest as much as he does, but all of them at
least accept neoconservatism; none of them, for example, establishes and
donates large sums to, anti-imperialistic organizations; none of America’s
billionaires is determined to end the reign of neoconservatism, nor
even to help the fight to end it, or at least to end its grip over the U.S.
government. None. Not even a single one of them does.
Plutocrat Bezos at the
Pentagon with then Defense Secretary Ash Carter, May 2016. (Wikimedia
Commons)
But many of them establish and
donate large sums to neoconservative organizations, or run neocon organs such
as The Washington Post. That’s the way billionaires are, at
least in the United States. All of them are imperialists. They sponsor it; they
promote it and hire people who do, and demote or get rid of people who don’t.
Expanding an empire is extremely profitable for its aristocrats, and always has
been, even before the Roman Empire.
Bezos wants to privatize
everything around the world that can become privatized, such as education,
highways, health care, and pensions. The more that billionaires control those
things, the less that everyone else does; and preventing control by the public
helps to protect billionaires against democracy that would increase their taxes
and government regulations that would reduce their profits by increasing their
corporations’ expenses. So, billionaires control the
government in order to increase their takings from the public.
With the help of the war
promotion of The Washington Post, Bezos is one of the world’s top
personal sellers to the U.S. military-industrial complex. He controls and is
the biggest investor in Amazon corporation, whose Web Services division
supplies all cloud-computing services to the Pentagon, CIA and NSA.
(He’s leading
the charge in the most advanced facial recognition technology too.)
In April there was a
headline, “CIA Considering Cloud Contract Worth ‘Tens of Billions’,” which
contract could soar Bezos’s personal wealth even higher into the stratosphere,
especially if he wins all of it (as he previously did).
He also globally dominates,
and is constantly increasing his control over the promotion and sale of books
and films, because his Amazon is the world’s largest retailer (and now also one
of the largest publishers, producers and distributors.) That, too, can have a
huge impact upon politics and government, indirectly, by promoting the most
neocon works helping to shape intellectual discourse (and voters’ votes) in the
country.
Bezos is crushing millions of
retailers by his unmatched brilliance at controlling one market after another
as Amazon or as an essential middleman for — and often even a controller of —
Amazon’s retail competitors.
He is a strong believer in
“the free market”, which he has mastered perhaps better than anyone. This means
that Bezos supports the unencumbered ability of billionaires, by means of their
money, to control and eventually absorb all who are less powerful than they.
Because he is so enormously
gifted himself at amassing wealth, he has thus-far been able to rise to the
global top, as being one of the world’s most powerful individuals. The
wealthiest of all is King Salman— the owner of Saudi Arabia, whose Aramco (the
world’s largest oil company) is, alone, worth over a trillion dollars. (Forbes and Bloomberg exclude
monarchs from their wealth-rankings.)
President Donald Trump touches
lighted globe with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Saudi King
Salman at the opening of Saudi Arabia’s Global Center for Combating Extremist
Ideology on May 21, 2017. (Photo from Saudi TV)
In fact, Bloomberg is
even so fraudulent about it as to have headlined on Aug. 10, “The 25 wealthiest dynasties on the planet control $1.4
trillion” and violated their tradition by including on their list one
monarch, King Salman, whom they ranked at #4 as owning only $100 million, a
ludicrously low ‘estimate’, which brazenly excluded not just Aramco but any of the net worth of Saudi Arabia.
Bloomberg didn’t even try
to justify their wacky methodology, but merely presumed the gullibility of
their readers for its acceptance. That King, therefore, is at least seven times
as rich as Bezos is. He might possibly be as powerful as Bezos is. The supreme
heir is lots wealthier even than the supreme self-made billionaire or
“entrepreneur” is.
Certainly, both men are among
the giants who bestride the world in our era. And both men are libertarians —
champions of the belief that property rights (of which, billionaires have so
much) are the basis of all rights, and so they believe that the
wealthiest people possess the most rights of all, and that the poorest people
have the least, and that all persons whose net worths are negative (having
more debts than assets) possess no rights except what richer people might
donate to or otherwise grant to them, out of kindness or otherwise (such as
familial connections).
This — privatization of
everything — is what libertarianism is: a person’s worth is his or her “net
worth” — nothing else. That belief is pure libertarianism. It’s a
belief that many if not most billionaires hold. Billionaires are imperialistic
because they seek to maximize the freedom of the super-rich, regardless of
whether this means increasing their takings from, or ultimately impoverishing,
everyone who isn’t super-rich. They have a coherent ideology. It’s
based on wealth. The public instead believes in myths that billionaires enable
to be promulgated.
Like any billionaire, Bezos
hires and retains employees and other agents who do what he/she wants them to
do. This is their direct power. But billionaires also possess
enormous indirect power by means of their interdependencies upon
one-another, as each large corporation is contractually involved with other
corporations, especially with large ones such as they; and, so, whatever power
any particular billionaire possesses is actually a shared power,
along with the others. (An example was the deal Bezos made with Graham.)
Collectively, they network
together, even with ones they might never even have met personally, but only
through their representatives, and even with their own major economic
competitors. This is collective power which billionaires possess in addition to
their individual power as hirers of employees and other agents.
Whereas Winston Smith, in the
prophetic allegorical novel 1984, asked his superior and torturer
O’Brien, “Does Big Brother exist?”
“‘Of course he exists. The
Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.’
‘Does he exist in the same way
as I exist?’
‘You do not exist,’ said
O’Brien.”
Big Brother poster
illustrating George Orwell’s novel about modern propaganda, 1984.
This collective power is
embodied by Bezos as well as any billionaire does. A few of the others may embody
it too, such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg,
Charles Koch, Sergey Brin, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Jack
Dorsey. They compete against each other, and therefore have different
priorities for the U.S. government; but, all of them agree much more
than they disagree in regards to what the Government “should” do (especially
that the U.S. military should be expanded — at taxpayer’s expense, of course,
not their own).
Basically, Big Brother, in
the real world is remarkably coherent and unified — far more
so than the public is — and this is one of the reasons why they
control Government, bypassing the public.
Here is how all of this plays
out, in terms of what Bezos’s agents have been doing:
His Amazon pays low to no
federal taxes because the Federal Government has written the tax-laws to
encourage companies to do the types of things that Bezos has always
wanted Amazon to do.
The U.S. government
consequently encourages mega-corporations through taxes and regulations to
crush small firms by making it harder for them to grow. That somewhat locks-in
the existing aristocracy to be less self-made (as Bezos himself was, but his
children won’t be).
Elected politicians
overwhelmingly support this because most of their campaign funds were donated
by super-rich individuals and their employees and other agents. It’s a
self-reinforcing system. Super-wealth controls the government, which (along
with the super-wealthy and their corporations) controls the public, which
reduces economic opportunity for them. The end-result is institutionally
reinforced extreme wealth-inequality, becoming more extreme all the time.
The billionaires are the real Big
Brothers. And Bezos is the biggest of them all.
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