Billionaires, Meet the Folks with Pitchforks

Billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg will rue the day they sided with Trump.

There are a lot of reasons why billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have thrown in their lot with Trump. Tax cuts worth tens of millions of dollars and the government no longer enforcing antitrust or labor or environmental laws are at the top of the list. Getting sweet government contracts with little to no competition is a special bonus for some of them as well.

These short term gains are big. What these guys are too arrogant to understand, though, is that jumping into bed with Trump isn’t just disgusting, it will have longer term consequences. I’m not just talking about the old “history will not look kindly on them” thing, although that is certainly true – I am talking about a much shorter term set of problems.

More than a decade ago, a billionaire named Nick Hanauer, who ironically was one of Amazon's earliest investors, wrote a guest column in Politico entitled “The Pitchforks Are Coming for Us Plutocrats”. He styled the piece as a memo to his “fellow zillionaires.” In it, he said that his success as an investor had come in large part because he had a good sense of where things were heading in the future, and he now saw something coming that his fellow billionaires should know about: pitchforks.

Hanauer’s argument was that regular old working people were getting squeezed by the economic system, and were aware of the growing wealth of billionaires, and they were getting pissed.

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Five years before Hanauer’s pitchforks article had come out, at the height of the financial meltdown, Barack Obama had called the biggest Wall Street CEOs into the White House and told them, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” It was the biggest mistake of his presidency: he should have joined the folks with pitchforks instead of blocking their way.

The populist rage that Obama saved the Wall Streeters from in the short term festered; and Hanauer correctly saw its spread and danger. That rage ironically came to a head in the 2016 election and again eight years later, with the re-election of the faux-populist billionaire Donald Trump. The irony abounds in this story. Anyway, Trump was the perfect vessel for the angry folks in the working class to flip the bird to the DC establishment that they felt was selling them down the river so that the billionaires and big business CEOs could keep raking in more and more money.

With Musk now running the government, and other billionaires like Bezos and Zuckerberg now fully siding with Trump, and with working people getting screwed even worse than before, the populist worm is about to turn.

When billionaires get their enormous tax cuts while Medicaid and Medicare and ACA and the Veterans Administration get slashed to the bone; when the crypto scammers and the rest of the unregulated financial industry crash the economy again; when cuts in education spending are taking away teachers and services in or schools; the pitchforks will be out in force and they will be white hot. The billionaires who sided with Trump will be remembered. Lina Khan will be back in full force breaking up monopolistic companies. Democrats like Chris Murphy and Elizabeth Warren will be driving the debate.

The backlash has begun; we are seeing it all over the country in town halls and demonstrations. Tomorrow is a national day of action where people will boycott Amazon and other big retailers. The next big national day of action is March 4, on the education issue.

I hope you all will join in these great efforts. Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg will reap the whirlwind and rue the day. It will be a joy to see how the mighty will fall.