It’s…still the economic inequality, stupid
rank corruption, crony capitalism, and economic dictatorship
Blink and you missed it: In late February, a Trump super PAC filed a campaign finance disclosure that raised a few eyebrows. The billionaire owner of a trucking empire cut a $1 million check to the slush fund known as MAGA, Inc, all but confirming reports that the president was selling White House policy to the highest bidder.
In the past two weeks, this peccadillo has been understandably eclipsed by more heinous crimes — including the hell that the US is raining down on Iran and the “corporate murder” of AI company Anthropic at the hands of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. But those, too, are stories of rank corruption. Trump’s large adult sons are cashing in on daddy’s war by merging a company that operates golf courses with a company that develops killer robots (yes, really); demand for lethal drones built in the U.S. of A. was induced after the Trump patriarch blacklisted foreign-made drones at the end of 2025. Meanwhile, OpenAI leapfrogged Anthropic to sign a contract that gives the DoD data surveillance superpowers, a deal surely greased by the $25 million donation the company’s president made to MAGA, Inc last September.
But let’s not fall prey to the spectacle of war waged by chatbot. The most damning truth of this moment is also the most boring: rich people have rigged the economy to pluck dollars out of your wallet to pad their own.
The mechanism is mind-numbingly straightforward. Rich guy in business pays rich guy in White House. Rich guy in White House uses the state to help rich guy in business. Both rich guys get richer, everyone else loses. To wit:
Trucking baron Matthew Moroun — what a name! — contributed a cool mill to the MAGA super PAC on January 16th. By February 9th, the poorly christened businessman was meeting with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. Hours later, President Trump posted a lengthy invective at a curious target: the as yet-unopened Gordie Howe International Bridge connecting Michigan and Ontario.
The president, apparently, had undergone a change of heart. During his first term, Trump had urged the bridge’s “expeditious completion.” As recently as January 30th, the administration’s Department of Homeland Security designated the bridge as an official port of entry to the United States. Barely more than a week later, however, Trump flipped, writing that he would quash plans to open the bridge.
What changed? In his Truth Social post, the president gave a number of reasons for his about-face. They included Canadian tariffs on American dairy products (never mind the taxesTrump imposed on Canadian exports last year), Ontario’s ban on selling US booze (another casualty of Trump’s trade war with an erstwhile ally), and the fact the bridge contains “virtually no” US steel (a claim disputed by local, provincial, and national leaders).
What Trump failed to mention among these high-minded reasons, however, was a certain seven-figure contribution to one of his super PACs. The Gordie Howe International Bridge, after all, would compete with an already existing conduit between Detroit and Canada: the Ambassador Bridge, owned by Matthew Moroun.
Here we can applaud the president for fulfilling one of his key campaign promise’s from 2016. He calls it “running the country like a business,” though others might prefer crony capitalism, a pejorative usually reserved for plutocratic banana republics ever since it was coined to describe the Philippine economy under the dictatorial rule of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s.
Personally, I don’t find crony capitalism particularly evocative as a term of abuse. Even “rank corruption,” while descriptively accurate, fails to convey the severity of the institutional looting of the American public by a new generation of robber barons. Economic inequality concentrates political power in the hands of a few backscratching billionaires, leaving all of us worse off. Oligarchy corrodes democracy.
The father of industrial trade unionism, John L. Lewis, called the political situation of his day an “economic dictatorship.” It’s an apt description for ours, too. Lewis explicitly connected the fight for self-determination at the workplace with the fight for fair wages. A system of of wealthy bosses and impoverished workers, a system of economic dictatorship, Lewis said, “must be eliminated before the democratic and economic welfare of all classes of our people could be fully realized.”
Forget the billionaires that are sex pests, Hitler impersonators, and vampiric monarchs sustaining themselves on the blood of the young. Each one is a policy failure because each one undermines the very conditions of self-governance. You and I both are less free — literally less free to participate in the political process — in a system skewed by the outsized power of billionaires.
Even if you never have occasion to stall in traffic on the bridge from Detroit to Windsor, Ontario, the billionaires are rigging the game to enrich themselves at our expense. You and I are probably taxed at a higher rate than Jeff Bezos — meaning we’re helping to subsidize his destruction of the Washington Post. The pending sale of Warner Bros to Paramount will hand the reins of a major news organization over to a Trump-aligned billionaire while driving up the costs to stream Heated Rivalry.
In the wake of the 2024 election, I wrote a blog asserting that a mass constituency was there for the taking for a party opposed to the concentration of wealth in this country.
The numbers still shock me but — surprise — things have only gotten worse. According to Forbes’ just-released list of billionaires, Elon Musk has more than quadrupled his wealth in two years, from $195 billion in 2024 to an estimated $839 billion today.
If you believe this level of wealth concentration will make your life better, then I have a bridge in Michigan to sell you.
Burn After Reading
I just finished Robert Reich’s memoir, a breezy but disjointed account of the hollowing out of New Deal America at the hands of political and economic elite. This passage alone tells you all you need to know about economic inequality in America:
By 2026, when Trump was first elected president, the richest 1 percent of Americans owed more wealth than the bottom 90 percent put together. Between 1972 and Trump’s first election, the pay of the typical American worker dropped 2 percent when adjusted for inflation, although the American economy had more than doubled in size. If you were a young man with only a high school degree, your pay dropped much further.