Fighting Back Against the Billionaires
Hi Friends,
How are you all doing? How's your bank account holding up? I have certainly noticed an increase in the price of groceries and other household necessities. Here in Denver, the government has frozen hiring and laid off many workers. Nonprofits and service organizations are trying to prepare for increased needs and decreased budgets. I'm sure wherever you are is grappling with similar realities.
The current administration has created a perfect economic storm for most Americans, cutting programs and support services while also increasing unemployment. More people will struggle to feed themselves and their families, for example, and food banks and nonprofits have had their budgets slashed and will struggle to meet increasing demand. Half of teachers surveyed recently anticipate that they will purchase food for their students this year.
Scott Nakagawa elaborates in "Keep Your Eyes on Big Business" saying that "Authoritarian regimes prioritize control over economies and markets. However, rather than nationalizing industries (as classic fascists did in some cases), contemporary right-wing authoritarianism seeks to integrate corporate power into governance. This means that major industries will align with authoritarian rulers in exchange for economic favoritism, deregulation, and lucrative government contracts."
I'm noticing more and more how many ultra-wealthy people in this country have ties or investments (or both) to the prison industrial complex. The demand for their services has only increased under the current administration, in criminalizing immigrants, houselessness, and more. Their lobbying efforts are paying off, leaning heavily on politics in order to increase their bottom lines, which they have done for decades and has been supercharged in the last 9 months.
Oxfam calls attention to the structural inequities in place in the US that allow the wealthy to increase their wealth exponentially, citing that the "Wealth of 10 richest US billionaires increased by over $360 billion in the last year, as President Trump and Congress prepare massive tax giveaway for the ultra-rich." This data is from before the horrible budget bill was passed. It continues, "If the wealth gains of the 10 richest men in the U.S. were taxed like income from work, they would collectively owe $135 billion. However, U.S. tax policy treats passive accumulation far more favorably than labor income — with increases in the value of assets like stocks and bonds largely untaxed — which inherently favors the ultra-wealthy. For this reason, billionaires often pay a lower effective tax rate than teachers and nurses."
Here's another example, "Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda has given the private prison industry much to celebrate. During the second quarter of 2025, CoreCivic’s revenue from its contracts with ICE rose about 17 percent from last year’s second quarter, from $151 million to over $176 million. The company’s net income for the second quarter was over $38 million, an increase of more than 100 percent from last year.... The FBI investigation and deaths were not mentioned on CoreCivic’s earnings call, which focused on celebrating the company’s growing opportunities to lock up record numbers of people."
Akela Lacy from The Intercept has a very insightful article about how billionaires are making even more money because of the current administration's policies and practices. This is an oligarchy.
Lacy cites a report by Popular Democracy in Action, which was written before the horrible budget bill was passed. That report says, "Trump’s 'oligarchs' are billionaires who are attempting to control political decisions in order to increase their wealth. Over ten billionaires have secured powerful positions in the Trump administration, leading agencies and making decisions that affect us all. Trump’s cabinet is currently the richest in U.S. history, with a collective net worth of $460 billion. Other billionaire donors are exerting influence over the government while leading large corporations."
The billionaires profiting the most have connections to prisons, policing, surveillance, housing evictions, private utilities, union busting, and anti-climate/fossil fuels. For example, direct company owners among the top 20 wealthiest Americans (Ellison, Bezos, Gates/Ballmer via Microsoft, Page/Brin, Huang) are likely to benefit directly from increased federal spending on cloud, AI, and surveillance systems used by ICE/DHS/law enforcement. Private-prison expansion (CoreCivic, GEO) is a clear, recent policy win under the administration because their revenues rise with more detention beds; the direct beneficiaries include shareholders and the institutional investors that hold those stocks (BlackRock, Vanguard). Big private equity and landlords (Blackstone/Schwarzman) profit when housing becomes more extractive (evictions, rent hikes) and when local governments privatize services.
For example, the companies that control our utility bills simply keep charging more and more for their services. In Missouri, for example, "The corporate gains and moving from renewable energy are costing us, nearly 60 utilities across the country have already raised or proposed rate hikes in 2025 alone, representing $38.3 billion in electricity customer costs and $3.5 billion in gas customer hikes, amounting to 56.7 million electric households and 26 million gas customers impacted. In other words, while claiming to cut taxes, the Missouri Governor and President Trump are actually massively increasing taxes for the middle class and poor through their utility bills, and transferring that money directly to fossil fuel and utility company shareholders."
Those billionaires involved in AI/tech/etc. are also directly contributing to increased climate change and increases in basic costs for families. Marilyn Kunce shares more:
U.S. electricity demand, after being flat for nearly two decades, is projected to grow at about 1.7% per year through 2026, with commercial and industrial demand rising faster. New data centers, especially those serving AI and cloud infrastructure, now consume 4.4% of U.S. electricity and are expected to triple by 2028, according to the US Department of Energy. And, of course, much of that cost is being picked up by the public, the working poor, subsidizing the Big Tech’s power bill.
New power plants like the natural gas plants that some utilities are proposing to serve new data centers, are extremely expensive to build. And when build new plants, expand old ones, build transmission lines, or update grids for AI or data centers, the costs are largely passed on to everyday ratepayers.
...Putting it together, older, inefficient homes coupled with more extreme weather leave residents exposed to higher bills. Rolling back energy-efficient upgrades and solar incentives removes the tools many families use to reduce costs. Utility monopolies ensure rate increases are passed directly to consumers without relief.
Following historical trends of environmental racism, big tech data centers are being built in historically underserved areas, contributing to further harms to the people who live nearby. "As tech companies scramble to build data centers in the relentless “AI race,” they are creating infrastructure that will lock us into burning fossil fuels for decades. They are seeking a future where we have to compete with corporations for drinking water and subsidize Big Tech’s energy costs with our own wallets due to increased utility bills." These business enterprises do not create jobs and states are providing tax breaks to the companies building them, abandoning the welfare of their residents for wealth and resource extraction.
As people struggle to afford to heat their homes, houselessness is being further criminalized. The wealth and abundance of our country could ensure that no one is unsheltered, that everyone is housed. In an interview of Brian Goldstone, he states clearly that "What causes homelessness, in the 1980s as now, is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford. That is the variable. That is why we see huge rates of homelessness in places that are very, very expensive or where affordable housing does not exist, and we don’t see it in places that might have high rates of drug use, like certain areas of Appalachia, but housing is still relatively available. That is the variable, is not having access to housing that people can afford."
But capitalism as a system does not support that, and so we don't honor the humanity of our community members, we turn those who struggle into criminals, funding yet another source of wealth in the prison system. For example, "With public dollars pouring into the hands of the billionaires and the jaws of the military, police, and surveillance states, and with housing and health care still considered privileges for the deserving and not rights in the United States, the scapegoating of disabled and unhoused people continues."
This all connects to "Ruth Wilson Gilmore's concept of organized abandonment — the intentional disinvestment in communities which, in turn, creates opportunities for extraction, revenue generation, and carceral enforcement to fill the cracks of a compromised social infrastructure." In this worldview, the conditions that lead to struggles for basic needs are not blamed upon an individual's failure, but more accurately upon the systemic, intentional removal of resources from communities, often under the guise of capitalism.
Criminalization on its face needs to be understood as a process used by those in power to control the rest of us. Kelly Hayes, in an interview with Andrea Ritchie, says, "When people’s lives feel out of control, they want there to be a number they can call, they want there to be people whose job it is to make things make sense again. But what those forces really offer us is a process of human disposal that reinforces untenable and increasingly cruel and inhumane conditions."
In what feels like the beginning of a second age of McCarthyism, anyone who is deemed inappropriate in some way is being criminalized or punished. This is a function of authoritarianism and fascism. Hayes continues, "Fascism creates moral panics around scapegoated groups, and builds culture and policy around the total control, containment, or eradication of people it portrays as a threat to the dominance of its in-group members, to status quo values, or civilization itself."
The governmental occupation of cities with Black or Brown leadership and/or large Black/Brown populations is a glaring example of fascism and authoritarian control. Sonali Kolhatkar writes about Black abolitionists expanding their existing work against over-policing and criminalization to respond to an increased governmental presence in their cities. The administration's attempt to control history and education is another example of attempts at fascist control.
As government support systems fail more and more people, as people's basic needs increase, the systemic "conditions that generate crime" will likely increase, thereby increasing criminalization and giving the government more power. The administration has already threatened houseless people with imprisonment, which includes many people with disabilities and LGBTQ+ people. The groups of people likely to be criminalized simply expands from there.
One of the paths out of these systemic challenges is rethinking capitalism, which gives too much power to business elites who undermine economic alternatives. As David Dean wrote in a recent newsletter about the coup in Chile in the 1970s, "The most powerful financial interests have always sought to destroy democratic alternatives to capitalism. In Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and elsewhere similar stories played out—U.S. government and business elites supported local military factions to overthrow democratically-elected leftist leaders and then supported the creation of military dictatorships where unfettered capitalism could thrive. At the same time, these gaslighting elites uplifted propaganda to the public in the U.S., in Latin America, and around the world, that the only possible alternative economic systems to capitalism were themselves totalitarian and dictatorial."
While all of this may sound dire and unchangeable, the recent boycotts and pushback against ABC and Disney and the subsequent reinstatement of Kimmel's show, indicates that the ultra-wealthy are vulnerable to public sentiment. "Our swift and widespread opposition showed that just because corporate bosses value their stock prices more than free speech, that doesn’t mean ordinary people have to. The reversal wasn’t an act of corporate consciousness — it was a strategic retreat as they began to understand that their media conglomerates are ultimately accountable to the people."
The people have power in every "pillar of support" for the government and its attempted takeover. "No business can handle a large-scale consumer withdrawal, and no government agency can handle widespread worker withdrawal. So even though the Trump administration has been moving methodically to consolidate power, the people of this country have the power to make it an exercise in futility."
And resistance continues. DC residents are fighting back against ICE activity. The next No Kings protest on October 18 could be the next tipping point. If you know people who were activated to fight for free speech, invite them to continue to stay active, to continue to raise their voices. "The No Kings protests demonstrated our defensive capacity - our ability to mobilize rapidly against authoritarian excess. But sustained movements require transitioning from episodic resistance to continuous pressure that makes authoritarian governance impossible. This means moving from protest to strategic noncompliance and disruption, from opposing what we reject to building what we demand."
Jen Harvey quotes adrienne maree brown in noting "What we focus on is what we grow." What will you grow?
Emily
Listen. Amplify. Follow. In Solidarity.