American "Oligarchocracy"

A renegade priest. A rogue multi-billionaire. The tale of two creepy guys out to dominate their nation.

Tired of Elon Musk’s antics? Well, get used to them. He’s only just getting started.

In the past week, the world’s richest man came within a tweet’s-breadth of closing down the United States government. “‘Shutting down’ the government (which doesn’t actually shut down critical functions btw) is infinitely better than passing a horrible bill,” declared the demi-trillionaire, who then posted, “No bills should be passed Congress until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office. None. Zero.” As if that weren’t enough, Musk, who spent $277 million (exceeding all small donor contributions combined) and deployed his “X” platform getting Trump elected, then threatened to “primary” all members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, if they did not obey him. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” he added in case folks didn’t get the full picture of the consequences.

Musk’s liberally tossing out open threats is disturbing. Examples:

“There will be consequences for those who pushed foreign interference hoaxes. The Hammer of Justice is coming.”

Following recent attempts on Trump’s life: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.”🤔

UK MPs “will be summoned to the United States of America to explain their censorship and threats to American citizens.”

“[Former NSC official Alexander] Vindman is on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and has committed treason against the United States, for which he will pay the appropriate penalty.”

Musk’s torpedoing the spending bill and his threats are reminders to political amnesiacs that Trump chaos is back! That with him back in charge, an unelected mega-billionaire can, with the flick of a keystroke, bring a superpower to a grinding halt through MAGA’s signature witch’s brew of vitriol, threats and disinformation.

What’s even more disturbing is that Trump had to play catch-up, repeating Musk’s message well after the latter’s posting. This, of course, has prompted many to wonder aloud, “Who’s in charge?” — with such memes as “President Musk,” “Vice President Trump,” images of a Trump puppet attached to Musk’s fingers, and of King Elon in royal attire being entertained by clown-costumed Donald the Court Jester. It is reported that ego-sensitive Trump has asked Musk to delete all references of him as “Vice President Trump” from “X.”

There is also speculation that mini-billionaire Trump, now fully bought and paid for by aspiring trillionaire Musk, can’t ditch the Afrikaner, who now practically stalks him, insinuating himself into Trump family events, even crashing an intimate dinner at Mar-a-Lago between the president-elect and Musk arch-rival, Amazon chieftain Jeff Bezos.

Musk, with his creepy demeanor, weird pronunciamentos and now unabashed megalomania, shares some things in common with another creepy figure, Grigori Rapsutin.

Rasputin was a Russian Orthodox priest and mystic who held Tsar Nicholas II’s family in his sway. When the monarch left Moscow in 1915 to disastrously take direct command of his retreating troops during World War I, the charismatic and unwashed priest persuaded Tsarina Alexandra, whom her husband had left in charge of domestic affairs, to change ministers in a revolving door fashion, thus, weakening Russia further. Rasputin did not end well, having been whacked at age 47 by three noblemen who then tossed his body in a river.

Rasputin and Musk have another thing in common. The Orthodox priest was a depraved figure who had affairs with and sexually assaulted numerous women. This past June, eight former employees filed a lawsuit against Musk for sexual harassment, including having sexual relationships with two of his employees, one an intern, and exposing himself to a flight attendant on a private jet in 2016. Musk denies the allegations. He is reported to have had numerous affairs. He has had 12 children (including a son whom he named X AE A-XII) with three different women. For what it’s worth, Musk’s father, Errol, had two children with his stepdaughter.

Power-mongering and a messy personal life aside, two big picture things bother me about the rise of Musk and his ilk.

The first is the threat plutocrats pose to our democracy. As stated, it seems clear Musk now owns Trump, who needs the former’s vast wealth and power to impose autocracy on the American people, not least to further satiate their unquenchable greed. But other billionaires are also part of the team: Peter Thiel, who bought an Ohio U.S. senate seat for J. D. Vance and persuaded Trump to take him on as vice president. Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s partner in gutting the so-called “deep state.” David Sacks, fellow South African immigrant and Putin propagandist whom Trump has named his “AI and crypto czar.” Rupert Murdoch, whose pervasive Fox-News helped convince voters twice to elect convicted felon Trump president (and paid a heavy price in court fines for spreading the “Big Lie”). Then there are the Mercer’s, Koch’s, Harlan Crow and other mega-moneybags who use their Croesus coffers to deform our democracy in pursuit of their selfish goals.

The first Gilded Age saw the rise of hyper-rich dynastic families, such as the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies, and DuPonts. Today, three individuals — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett — own more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined. And three families — the Walton’s, the Koch’s, and the Mars’s — have enjoyed a nearly 6,000 percent rise in wealth since Ronald Reagan took the oath as president, while median U.S. household wealth over the same period has declined by three percent. What we are witnessing is a replay, but on a larger scale, of Gilded Age 1.0 when the “robber barons” used their millions to corrupt government. As Mark Twain, who coined the term “the Gilded Age,” said, “The external glitter of wealth conceals a corrupt political core that reflects the growing gap between the very few rich and the very many poor.” The result of this imbalance is that as a corrupt oligarchy rises, democracy suffers.

Collectively, the billionaires tapped for the Trump administration are worth well over half a billion dollars — higher than the GDP of 172 countries. Musk’s net worth has increased by $276 billion, or 135 percent, since the election, giving him a total net worth of $479 billion. By comparison, President Joe Biden’s cabinet’s total net worth is about $118 million.

My second major concern involves national security. Among the lies Musk cited in his spending bill-killing tweet, was repetition of a Russian intelligence disinformation charge that the U.S. was “funding bioweapon labs” in Ukraine — a brazen fabrication. Why do this? As Yale professor and Russia/Ukraine scholar Timothy Snyder points out, “Putin has a strange hold over Trump” and “Musk himself is a Putinist. He communicates regularly with Putin. For two years he has repeated Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine.” Snyder maintains that the U.S. is taking on the trappings of Russia of the 1990s, marked by weak, corrupt leadership and outsized power of a new oligarchic elite — which in the U.S. is pro-Putin. Snyder has confected a name for this: “Trumpomuskovia,” which is a play on Trump’s and Musk’s surnames but also incorporates “Muscovy,” which is what Russia was called in ancient times. It boils down to a potential Putin triumph over the United States not by conquest, but rather by promoting the catalysts for its self-destruction: Trump, the U.S. oligarchs and gullible MAGA followers duped by oligarch-financed right-wing media.

Snyder adds:

Ukraine is a useful shortcut as we try to evaluate Trumpomuskovites: what do they say about Ukraine? As a rule of thumb, those that wish for its fall also want the fall of the American republic. I would expect that the first actions regarding Ukraine will be a harbinger of what is to come for America if Ukraine is sold out, expect America to be sold for parts.

Following Snyder’s example, I therefore coin my own term for the emerging new order: “Oligarchocracy.” Musk is setting an example for the rest of them: brazen bullying with no guard rails. Can the American Experiment survive this?

On the one hand, Theodore Roosevelt, through his trust-busting and other Progressive Era policies, tamed the robber barons of the first Gilded Age. On the other, there’s the Putin era in Russia that followed the brief experiment with flawed democratic government after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the U.S., the Russophile “oligarchocrats” are in ascendance, led by Elon Musk — guided by the malevolent spirit of Grigori Rapsutin. The future isn’t looking good.