NOV 13, 2019
by Negin Owliaei
Bill Gates wants you to know
he pays taxes.
“I’ve paid more than $10
billion in taxes. I’ve paid more than anyone in taxes,” Gates told journalist
Andrew Ross Sorkin. “But when you say I should pay $100 billion, OK, then I’m
starting to do a little math about what I have left over.”
Supposedly Gate was talking
about a wealth tax 2020 candidates have supported. But no plan yet proposed
would seize $100 billion from the philanthrocapitalist anytime soon. Even if it
did, he’d still be one of the richest men in the world, with $7 billion left
over.
Gates isn’t the only
billionaire who’s worried. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon also has
concerns about the rising resentment towards his fellow elites.
“I think you should vilify
Nazis,” Dimon told Lesley Stahl, “but you shouldn’t vilify people who worked hard
to accomplish things.” Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman, who’s become a
fixture on CNBC,
recently teared up while complaining about the “vilification of billionaires.”
Why do the feelings of the 600
Americans that constitute our billionaire class suck up so much media
attention?
For one thing, billionaires literally own the
news. Buying up media companies is a new rite of passage for the ultra wealthy,
like the purchase of the Washington Post by Amazon head Jeff Bezos,
or TIME by tech CEO Marc Benioff.
They’ll say they’re all about
editorial independence, but the truth is billionaire ownership can affect news
output. When billionaire Joe Ricketts found out the staff of DNAinfo, a network
of city-based news sites he owned, was unionizing, he promptly shut down the
entire venture out
of spite.
There are more subtle ways in
which the rich buy media access. The Gates Foundation, for example, has
poured millions
in donations into the media over the last several years to raise
awareness around the foundation’s philanthropic goals — including its controversial funding
of charter schools.
Not all billionaire power is
publicly broadcast, however.
In their book Billionaires
and Stealth Politics, researchers Benjamin Page, Jason Seawright, and
Matthew J. Lacombe document how
economic elites have banded together to lobby for extremely conservative
policies, like cutting estate taxes, opposing regulations on the environment
and Wall Street, and gutting social programs.
Because these moves are highly
unpopular, they’ve done this work in the background.
That means there’s a network
of billionaires aligned with the Koch brothers, who’ve poured hundreds of
millions of dollars into anti-labor policies. And Rupert Murdoch, the
media mogul who changed the media landscape with Fox News. And casino magnate
Sheldon Adelson, who’s spending his billions shaping U.S.
foreign policy.
Their enormous wealth offers
them an outlandishly oversized role in our democracy. It’s poisoning both
our politics and our media.
So how about a ban on billionaires?
Let’s tax away their wealth, but let’s get them off our airwaves, too. Imagine
what we’d learn if corporate media didn’t devote entire news cycles to the
whims of the rich.
You may not have heard, but
for the last several months, the sanitation workers at Republic Services have
been fighting for higher wages. “I haven’t had a raise since 2004,” Demetrius
Tart told The
Guardian. Meanwhile, the company is making a killing from the 2017 tax
cuts, and returned more than $1 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks.
The company’s largest
shareholder? Bill Gates. Workers took their fight directly to the
billionaire, protesting outside
a Gates Foundation event in September with signs that read, “Bill Gates treats
his workers like garbage.” He ignored them.
Maybe these sanitation workers
could get the airtime instead.
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