CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Roaming Charges: Pity, the Poor Billionaire

The Stuff of America, Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Gallery, Joshua Tree, California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

I do not belong to any faction; I will fight them all. – Louis Antoine Saint-Just

I do not belong to any faction; I will fight them all.

– Louis Antoine Saint-Just

I knew Ted Turner slightly, because his foundation used to dispense print-sustaining lucre to our impertinent environmental rag, Wild Forest Review, when almost no other foundation would touch us, largely because we were sharply critical about the role that elite liberal foundations had played in neutering the environmental movement, especially when Democrats came into power, as Clinton and Gore had just done. Ted didn’t give a shit about the Democrats, but he did seem to genuinely care about old-growth forests, grizzlies and bull trout. 

One day, I got a call from Peter Bahouth, a former Greenpeace honcho whom Ted Turner had swiped to run his grant-making operation. Peter said, “Jeff, can you hold for a sec? My boss wants to talk to you.” I was going to say, “No,” to Ted Turner? I waited longer than “a sec,” more like two or three minutes. Billionaires must be busy managing their billions, I thought.  I was expecting to hear Ted’s southern drawl. Instead, it was Jane, who chattered on pleasantly for about 30 seconds, thanking me for mentioning the foundation [it was new then] in a piece I’d written with Alex Cockburn for The Nation, and then hung up without allowing me to say as much as “Hello” or “Damn, you had the greatest hair in Klute!“ 

A few months later, I met Ted in his place outside Bozeman. He gave me a tour of his ranch in his truck, a real mud-splattered and dented farm truck, not a rich guy’s polished Land Rover. He was very proud of his bison herd, which he slaughtered a bunch of each year, selling the meat at his steak house in town. I told him I thought this was gross and he said I was a wimp. And chuckled. Ted Turner seemed more substantial and human, somehow, than almost all of the other hyper-rich jerks, especially the current crop of tech bros and finance nerds. He piloted his own yachts (which were actual sailboats, not mini-cruise liners), liked baseball, sought to normalize relations with the USSR and Cuba and gave us TCM. Turner could be generous, brusque, profane, curious, petulant and funny, all in the same hour–if only he had resisted the temptation to colorize!

Speaking of billionaires and the press, the crybaby Matt Taibbi sued journalist Eoin Higgins (former CounterPunch contributor, before he hit the Big Time) for accurately describing Taibbi’s transformation from faux-Gonzo journalist into a sniveling scribe for the billionaire class, in his book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. Taibbi’s baseless defamation suit–a suit so specious it was itself almost a case of defamation–was just dismissed, a victory for the First Amendment against a self-infatuated scold who bogusly claimed to be a defender of free speech. Congrats, Eoin. I hope you can soak Taibbi for lawyer fees and court costs. Here’s the judge’s tartly written dismissal … As our contribution Ari Paul quipped, “Gotta love how the ruling is basically like ‘none of this is actionable.’”

Billionaire NY real estate mogul Steve Roth claims that calls to “tax the rich” are the equivalent of racist epithets, somehow even managing to work “from the river to the sea” into his prissy diatribe aimed at NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani:

I must say I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich, quote ‘tax the rich,’ but spit out with anger and contempt by politicians, both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase ‘from the river to the sea.’ What these pols seem to be saying is that the rich are evil or the enemy or the targets or maybe just suckers. But the rich whom the politicians are targeting started with nothing, and are the epitome of the American dream. They are the largest employers and largest philanthropists and it’s the one percent that pay 50% of New York’s income taxes. They are at the top of the American economic pyramid for a reason. They should be praised and thanked.

I must say I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich, quote ‘tax the rich,’ but spit out with anger and contempt by politicians, both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase ‘from the river to the sea.’ What these pols seem to be saying is that the rich are evil or the enemy or the targets or maybe just suckers. But the rich whom the politicians are targeting started with nothing, and are the epitome of the American dream. They are the largest employers and largest philanthropists and it’s the one percent that pay 50% of New York’s income taxes. They are at the top of the American economic pyramid for a reason. They should be praised and thanked.

Pity the poor billionaires, chased from state to state in their Lear jets by the threat of taxation, with no place to moor their yachts…Their struggle is our struggle! We must honor them! We must fete them! We must donate to their cause! And, yes, we must pay their taxes for them!!

Elizabeth Warren:  “If Jeff Bezos can drop $10 million to sponsor the Met Gala, he can afford to pay his fair share in taxes.” He probably wrote off the $10 million he dropped on the Met Gala to get a tax rebate!

The Wall Street Journal reports that since 1976, the top 0.001% of U.S. households have seen their wealth increase by 3,500%, versus 2,200% for the top 0.01%, 1,200% for the top 0.1%, and just  200% for the average household.

Canadian PM Mark Carney: A lot of countries rushed into deals with the US — they weren’t really worth the paper they were written on… Reporter: Like which ones? Carney: I’ll put it back to you. Tell me which countries you’ve bumped into that are pleased with their deal with the US. Reporter: You don’t think there are any? Carney: Well, certainly not in private.

Canadian PM Mark Carney: A lot of countries rushed into deals with the US — they weren’t really worth the paper they were written on…

Reporter: Like which ones?

Carney: I’ll put it back to you. Tell me which countries you’ve bumped into that are pleased with their deal with the US.

Reporter: You don’t think there are any?

Carney: Well, certainly not in private.

According to the BBC, 35% of young men aged 20-35 in the UK are living with their parents, more than young women (22%). I’m all for this, by the way. I like our kids, their partners and the grandkids and wish we were all living together, sharing expenses, child care, gardening, cooking, cleaning and putting our collective wisdom (and inside knowledge) together to strike it rich on the predictive markets…

Don’t knock it. Fraud is one of the last thriving sectors of our economy.

Baby boomers comprise about 20% of the U.S. population, but hold more than $85 trillion in assets. Yet, millennials, who make up about the same percentage of Americans, hold roughly one-fifth that of baby boomers, about $18 trillion, according to data from the Federal Reserve.

Overworked, underpaid and super-charged with stress, nearly a third of all U.S. adults sleep fewer than the recommended seven hours per night.

Under capitalism, the underclass has always been permanent, but under AI Capitalism, the permanent underclass will eventually encompass almost all of us…Welcome to the club, as Joe Walsh sang.

According to the National Association of Realtors, the average age of a first-time home buyer in the US has climbed to a record high of 40. Meanwhile, the average age of a repeat buyer has reached a record high of 62.

WSJ: More and more people are selling their cars, even though they still owe more money than the car is worth.

Elon Musk “AI/Robotics will mean everyone can have a penthouse if they want. The output of goods & services will be several orders of magnitude higher than today’s economy.”

Reuters: “Big Tech firms are set to spend over $600 billion on data centers this year, driven by AI investment.”

We keep being told that the US doesn’t need foreign oil, yet as this chart from analysts at JPMorgan shows, the spiking gas prices in the USA in response to Trump’s Iran war are higher than any region in the world, except Southeast Asia, which is the most dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf States. 

Goldman Sachs:  “Iran conflict could push oil to $170.”

Bloomberg News: When do oil storage tanks run empty?

Jeffrey Currie, energy analyst at the Carlyle Group: Parts of the world, like Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, you are there. But the question is, when and where. I still say that it’s going to be sometime in the month of May that you’re going to end up with Europe hitting tank bottoms. And in the US, it’s somewhere in that July 4th time period, if not sooner.  By the way, the inventory numbers coming out of the US, the ones we got last night [Tuesday], the ones last week, I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

Marco Rubio: “If Iran had a nuclear weapon and they decided to close the Strait and make our gas prices $9 a gallon, there would be nothing we could do about it. This is another example of why Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

Is this an inexpressibly stupid statement or am I missing some deeply coded message that Rubio is trying to transmit here? I mean, Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon. Its leadership and military were (allegedly) “totally destroyed” and yet it closed the Strait of Hormuz and there was nothing the US could do about it…

Not to rub it in, but let’s just say that Rubio got progressively more outlandish as he sputtered on during his WH briefing on Iran, in what was billed as an audition for the spot of front-runner to replace Trump now that JD Vance has been locked in cold storage.

You’ve got friends who have been SHOT IN THE HEAD because they’re out PROTESTING, and it’s heartbreaking to him to see these people are abused in this way and have no measures to take against their own........

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