Nina-Bytes: Bagmen for the Transnational Oligarchy

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An Open But Unspoken Class War

A few days before writing this, I briefly talked about the rarefied transnational, or post-nation state of being that the uber rich in our society inhabit, while offhandedly mentioning that they maintain their own council, and social structures, even while operating out in the open. I think these facts are important to keep in mind when trying to understand why you’re on a boiling planet, surrounded by a ruling class that clearly intends to keep doing extractivist fossil fuel capitalism, even if the world burns to ash. Unfortunately, if you’re not familiar with the open structures of power, influence, and control that the billionaires who own everything pay to maintain and employ, all of that can sound very much like a conspiracy theory. For anyone who understands this, however, it’s crystal clear why the billionaire-owned corporate media is never going to deliberately help you figure that out.

As such, I think it’s a fascinating stroke of luck that Cory Doctorow just published an informative essay offering a more detailed examination of this very subject, albeit in a somewhat different context, on his Pluralistic blog:

How the Oligarchs Hunt Civil Society Groups to the Ends of the Earth

This piece is ultimately built around reading and discussing a recent academic paper called “Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism,” written by Alexander Cooley, John Heathershaw and Ricard Soares de Oliveira. The paper itself documents and examines how a collection of institutions and institutional actors openly manages the retention of wealth, procurement of power, and laundering of reputations for the global uber rich. This highly-respected functionary army also works tirelessly to actively counter the efforts of those seeking justice, equality, and accountability by employing methods that range from dishonest, to coercive, and often blatantly criminal. Finally, and most importantly, the paper demonstrates that literally none of this is actually a secret.

As always, I strongly encourage you to read the article itself. While the piece is a little heavy on new jargon, the terms are explained clearly in Cory’s essay, and can be summed up by the idea that we’re talking about the millionaires, who work to acquire, maintain, and exercise power for the billionaires as the planet boils. These are not shadowy figures, but bankers, public relations experts, wealth managers, corporate executives, accountants, lawyers, and real estate brokers. Without their help, the billionaire fascist kleptocrats currently trying to burn your children alive in order to keep doing capitalism even as we run out of planet, would simply not be able to exercise or retain their power.

“Both case studies shed light on the network of brilliant, driven enablers and procurers without whom the world’s greatest monsters would falter. It’s a rare window on a secretive world, one that is poorly understood even by its inhabitants. As Michael Mechanic wrote in Jackpot, his 2021 book on vast, intergenerational fortunes, the winners of the lucky orifice lottery often lack any real understanding of how The Money is structured, grown and protected.”

This examination can be placed alongside the already large collection of publicly documented examples we have of a wealthy, openly reactionary ruling class “conspiring” to maintain and exercise power, very much in plain view. These examples of course include think tanks, lobby groups, SuperPacs, propaganda placements in for-profit media, donor networks, regularly scheduled international conferences, celebrity galas, open funding of Astroturf political movements, campaign finance donations, bill mills, and so on. Although Doctorow’s piece highlights two examples of the global rich who are not from the Anglosphere, we have ample documented evidence that this type of behavior extends equally to Western billionaires; simply examining the rich guys and corporate actors who funded Trump’s attempted fascist coup in Amerikkka would readily demonstrate that much.

Look folks, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and then buys a lobby firm to help give ducks all the power in our society, I’m pretty comfortable calling it a duck. It’s not a conspiracy theory to say a few hundred billionaires own pretty much everything in the Pig Empire. It’s not a conspiracy theory to say those same billionaires wield vastly outsized influence in our politics, our governance, and our discourse, when they openly and routinely buy propagandists, politicians, and megaphones for precisely that purpose. Furthermore, it is not a conspiracy theory to point out that these same few hundred billionaires all spend a lot of time associating together, and working together in the open, to maintain and exercise power. This phenomenon is literally just life under capitalism in a class-based society, functioning as intended.

These are the folks with real power in the Pig Empire. These are the folks really running our society, as anyone who has ever organized to effect meaningful change at the ballot box in a Pig Empire country will tell you. So when you want to know why “the powers that be” are setting the world on fire rather than ending fossil fuel consumption, these are the people who ultimately have to answer that question. That’s not my opinion; that’s just how class warfare and capitalism actually work, especially now on the edge of this cliff, where either capitalist extractivism ends, or a planet that can sustain billions of lives does.

 

– Nina Illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

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