The United States of Billionaires

Maybe it wasn't this bad back then, but it's terrible now.

Hey, I’d like to be a billionaire. Or at least a high nine-figure millionaire.

Here’s what I’d do with it if I had a billion clams or so.

I’d start a charitable foundation devoted to minimizing the influence of billionaires, because once you’ve got a billion (or $439 billion, like the South African Aspergian Fascist Wannabe House Speaker AND President of the What Was The United States Elon Musk), you get bored.

Like Musk, you can buy the presidency for sofa change ($250 million, and you can wear stupid, ill-fitting t-shirts while doing it). If you’re the detestable garden gnome Jeff Bezos, you buy The Washington Post, a formerly great newspaper and then turn it over to Rupert Murdoch’s crew. What this elf on a shelf has done has shattered the reputation of one of the truly heroic and inspiring newspapers of all time. It’s sad, because there are still so many great journalists still working there with a millstone around their necks. I haven’t canceled, because they deserve to still try to make a difference.

Good luck.

As an aside, Bezos’s ex and rightly so, MacKenzie Scott, is worth $42 billion, which is $41 billion more than even I aspire to. She’s been doing all sorts of good works with her money, and I publicly call upon her to buy The Washington Post from her SOBezos ex. He paid $250 million. Again, he could have bought hisself a genuine President of the United States, but only settled for a newspaper. Then it would be in solid billionaire hands.

When billionaires get bored, they buy things they don’t need. Why did Bezos get into journalism? To sashay around Georgetown cocktail parties? I’ve been to some of those myself, and they are indeed amusing, if you went to the Right Schools. But no, Bezos, who did graduate from Princeton with a 4.2 GPA, could have simply amused himself by being one of the DC Kool Kids. He decided that instead of having fun and being an enlightened owner, he trashed the beautiful reputation the Post enjoyed and turned it into a safe space for leftover Fleet Street hacks. I used to be with the Washington Post Writers Group. I was proud of it.

Now?

The hell with them. I’ll never run in the Washington Post again, and they started my career.

Since the election, which was traumatizing for any decent person, like you, I have been ignoring most of our electronic media. Along with my wife and son, I have turned to the NBA and the NFL.

Oh, and lots and lots of fly fishing videos. I’d write a column about the stuff I watch, and you’d probably think, wow, OK, he’s more into the Apollo program than I previously thought. I also watch a lot of CBS News 1969 space launch videos. I like “What’s My Line” from 1950-1968. The usual.

Anyway, it’s mostly basketball and football.

I wouldn’t even call myself a true, knowledgable fan. My son is always explaining one thing or another, which is fine. I have to say I have learned the starting lineup of the Sacramento Kings, for example.

What I realized is this: I am trying to avoid billionaire-owned politics by now turning to billionaire-owned sports.

Hmm.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, the only billionaires I had probably heard of is John D. Rockefeller, Daddy Warbucks, and Richie Rich.

Rockefeller wasn’t St. Thomas Aquinas, and one of his grandsons, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, did try for the presidency and lost a few times (1960, 1964, 1968), ultimately becoming Vice President of the United States under President Gerald R. Ford. Rocky was actually progressive in his own way, and was a solid citizen.

But those are all the billionaires I knew about.

A billion dollars back when I was child was a lot. For example, Jack Kennedy’s dad, Joe Kennedy, was worth $400 million when he died in 1969. That’s several billion now. He was able to finance his son’s election to the presidency in 1960. What did he get out of it? I am not privy to the inner machinations he involved himself in, but I don’t think he was trying to be the shadow president of the United States. In fact, his sons mostly blew him off. I know my sons would, pleasantly.

I think Joe Kennedy was mostly interested in sticking it to the rich Protestant Brahmin brats he knew at Harvard. They kept him out of Porcellian Club, baby, and that burns.

He stuck it to them, at a huge personal and national cost.

But thank God his sicko grandson is around to save the family name.

The first billionaire who really made a serious run at the presidency was H. Ross Perot in 1992. In fact, Perot led in the polls against George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton for awhile until it was revealed he was, in fact, quite nuts. Not as nuts as Trump, however, and a hundred times smarter.

He is largely forgotten now, but I commented on him at the time and his followers were very much like Trump people. Disaffected cultists in some ways, but many were sincerely motivated folks who wanted to break the two-party gridlock. I get that. But I can tell you the surviving people I know now who were Perot people then are sure as hell Trump people now.

I remember one of my best college buddies, a really smart guy I enjoyed immensely, decided never to speak to me again because he went around the bend on Trumpism and guns. I was devastated by this, honestly. I have Trump people in my life now, and I routinely talk to them. I have only cut one—ONE—off in eight years, and that’s because he was a jerk about it.

I have been cut off by a few, I think, people I barely knew.

I can also tell you that the billionaires do not give a damn about them, either. Oh, and Old Pal, they’ll take your guns and Ted Nugent’s.

I am beginning to think we don’t really have countries as we understand them.

We live in Billionaires Spheres of Influence.

The Russians have theirs (they currently own Donald Trump), the Chinese have theirs, and we have ours.

The thing is that they’re now not even bothering to conceal their influence. They are bouncing their moobs up on stages with Trump. They’re supplicating in public. They’re kowtowing. They’re destroying their newspapers (don’t get me started on Dr. Patrick Soon-Shoing of the Los Angeles Times). They’re now strutting around like they own the place.

And they do.

Musk has had a busy week showing how little he understands about government, which is even less than the moronic one-page-memo-me Trump. Trump clearly hasn’t read or studied the U.S. Constitution. Musk? He thought Congress didn’t really have to pass any bills until Musk ( I mean Trump) takes office on January 20th. This interference into the Continuing Resolution the Congress had to pass in order to, you know, keep a lot of Trump people and other U.S. citizens in government checks and public safety.

Incidentally, you would think a billionaire like Musk could get some effective hair plugs. But no. Plus, the dude loves Ketamine. Trump’s got the worst hair/scalp surgery botch job ever. Just glue chartreuse mohair on your head, dude.

I was wondering what drug he was on. Trump’s on over-the-counter speed.

Anyway, I recommend this Musk Lincoln Project video, in case you missed it.

The Democrats have their billionaires, too. That’s part of the problem, honestly. How are they gonna retool the message if they’re helping them?

Easy.

Their billionaires don’t seem to be fascists.

Trump’s billionaires are. Whatever works for them, they will do.

They want to take over our currency. They want to privatize the U.S. Postal Service. They literally want to take over every government function and make a buck off of it. These are things you, the American people, need to keep control of. Because billionaires don’t dig you interfering in their plans. They don’t like voting.

They just like money.

A early sign the billionaires had swing was the GOP VP nomination Gov. Sarah Palin, a proto-Trump idiot who had run something the size of Multnomah County, Oregon (look it up). Her selection rattled me, and I even said at the time that maybe it doesn’t matter, because the billionaires have taken it over.

Wow, was I right.

There’s a billion reasons they want to come out. Staging these presidential campaigns is a huge theater production, and they need more time to pump teen blood into their veins (Peter Thiel). They need more time to try to get off the planet they enjoy polluting. You know.

We can get it back, but it’s going to take more than a billion bucks. That’s the easy part.

It’s going to take courage and character.

Those are the things the billionaires can’t buy.

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Hey, Folks: That’s it for the moment. Enjoy your evening. Maybe do something billionaires hate. —J.