A Government of Looters
The oligarchs are trying to steal everything they can
Elon Musk just suggested privatizing the U.S. Postal Service and Amtrak. Days ago he lied to the massive audience of the Joe Rogan podcast and called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. At the same time the Social Security Administration is preparing to lay off at least 7,000 people from its workforce of 60,000, and could ultimately aim to fire 30,000, according to AP. All of these events, and countless others, lead us to just one possible conclusion: the oligarchy is going to steal as much as they possibly can from us until we stop them.
Going into this second Trump administration there were plenty of ideas about what the central, animating force of the new regime might be. And every day it grows clearer that the one, primary motive, the one animating idea lighting the path for Trump part 2, is theft — the rich stealing from the entire working class. This administration is motivated by the inverse of the Robin Hood spirit, they believe that government ought to be used to steal from the poor and give to the rich.
Across every department, every day, Musk and Trump and a gaggle of minions – from the highest ranks of government to the semi-adult DOGE ghouls – are finding ways to steal from you on a grand scale. That is this government’s number one priority. They’re doing all manner of evil along the way, and some men like Stephen Miller are more concerned with sadism than theft, but the mass looting of America is this regime’s overarching goal. Whether it’s pouring U.S. dollars into crypto, the IRS halting investigations into wealthy tax dodgers, the Consumer Financial Protect Bureau dropping cases against financial institutions, or almost any other action you can isolate in this administration, they all point in the same direction: transferring wealth from the pockets of the many to the pockets of the few.
None of this is new, and it matters that none of this is new. The Gilded Age, starting about 150 years ago, was filled with theft, namely Robber Barons stealing from the people and our government. As Howard Zinn notes, “The Central Pacific [railroad] started on the West Coast going east; it spent $200,000 in Washington on bribes to get 9 million acres of free land and $24 million in bonds. … The Union Pacific [railroad] started in Nebraska going west. It had been given 12 million acres of free land and $27 million in government bonds.” The railroad conglomerates also used both private and government money to dramatically overpay construction firms, which they surreptitiously owned. Shares in these companies were also sold at discounts to members of Congress, Zinn notes.
In the chapter of his famous People’s History of the United States entitled “Robber Barons and Rebels” Howard Zinn goes on to say that during this era, “the purpose of the state was to settle upper-class disputes peacefully, control lower-class rebellion, and adopt policies that would further the long-range stability of the system.” And, concurrent with that general orientation towards the class divide, there was plenty of rampant, naked theft along the lines of the railroad industry detailed above.
When Grover Cleveland was elected in 1884, he had an advisor named William Whitney, a millionaire and corporate lawyer, who had married into the Rockefeller Standard Oil fortune. Whitney “was appointed Secretary of the Navy by Cleveland. He immediately set about to create a ‘steel navy,’ buying the steel at artificially high prices from Carnegie’s plants.” That is of course Robber Baron Andrew Carnegie, who created a virtual monopoly on U.S. steel before selling out to J.P. Morgan. And this sort of transaction to enrich men like him might sound familiar if you keep up with our current administration.
None of this is new. Since 1975 the richest 1% (and increasingly the .001%) has taken $79 trillion in wealth from the bottom 90%, according to a new analysis. This is the most succinct summary of the long arc of neoliberalism, or the ruling class response to the New Deal and working people carving out a decent life for themselves. The ‘50s and ‘60s weren’t perfect, far from it, between racism and the Cold War and the hot wars fought in that time. But in the eyes of the super-rich the calculus was clear: the poors got too much of the pie, and so the ruling class worked to bend the long arc of history away from justice and back towards their bank accounts.
Over the decades of neoliberalism, key public services have been defunded. That’s led to shortcomings in our government, particularly in the many agencies designed to help people, making them serve people less effectively. The next step, in the eyes of oligarchs, is to privatize. Why make crucial government services better if you can instead profit off them? Especially if you have a good excuse (that you created). Enter a salivating Elon Musk.
It’s tempting to call all of this a kleptocracy, a government whose corrupt leaders use political power to expropriate the wealth of the people, and in many ways it is. Donald Trump is soliciting $5,000,000 bribes, or fees, for CEOs and the like to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago. Businesses are reportedly upping their spending on Twitter ads, in an effort to curry favor with the owner. Business Insider calls this the new “Musk tax” on corporate America. And we all know what the ruling class expects in exchange for these bribes: the ability to plunder the U.S. government and loot from us on a grand scale.
Musk himself is, already, the prototype. The FAA has a deal with Verizon that is now reportedly going to go to Starlink. At the same time, “Starlink could elbow its way into the $42.5 billion Biden-era program to build out broadband internet service in underserved areas,” according to The American Prospect. All of this is on top of the $38 billion Musk’s various companies have already gotten from the government over the years, which is to say that the current round of looting is, in many ways, an extension and expansion of ongoing activity.
More than any specific deal, the current regime hopes to expand on the $79 trillion transferred from the less wealthy 90% of the population to a couple thousand people perched at the top. Grift is not strong enough a word for this. The privatization of public goods is theft. It is stealing from the public, from the collective, taking vital infrastructure from us and imposing a privatization tax that we all have to pay. It is devastating looting on the largest and most detrimental scale.
And the way this administration is going about their pillaging of our resources is open, blatant, and aggressive. The world’s richest man acting as the unelected co-president of the country is jarring day in and day out. But we have to see how our plight isn’t unique. During the time of the Robber Barons, the theft ran rampant. Then, and in the years since, the government has facilitated the upward transfer of wealth (theft) on an incomprehensibly massive scale. It has been shaped by capitalists to serve their interests, as happens when one class structurally holds the majority of wealth and power. We have to know that this problem is systemic and runs deep, and we have to be willing to go down to the root.
Part of what shocks us all here is the deliberateness with which the fascist movement aims to drive us backward. The Robber Baron era was bad enough, but it existed before workers won the weekend, the abolition of child labor, our safety net and more. It existed before we had won the right to clean water and clear air. Now Musk and Trump and the rest of these oligarchs are banking on a combination of their worshipful followers and our docility to allow them to not only maintain an exploitative status quo but roll back a century and more of progress. They think we’ll let them force us back to an era of overt white supremacy, disempowered workers, rampant pollution and so much more.
The bad news? Most of it, but at the same time the anger and the desire for action is palpable. Protests against Tesla, protests in National Parks, thousands and thousands joining organizations and plugging into the ongoing work show us that the collective rage is translating into action. And that’s what we need. Our anger at this looting of all that is and should be held collectively has to become fuel for the fire that consumes the oligarchy. Not because of any grand political theory, but because that’s the only way out of this devastation.
At the same time, we have to see the long trajectory that led us here. The inherently imbalanced and exploitative nature of capitalism was baked into the functioning of the U.S. government long ago. And when people won real concessions from the ruling class, won shorter work days and better lives and a safety net to help us in poverty and old age, the capitalists began to plot their revenge. The ruling class did not plan this moment down to the minute, but they have schemed about the destruction of regulations and the privatization of public goods for decades. So we need to see that beating the oligarchy doesn’t just mean defeating Musk, Trump, and their cronies — it means taking on the ruling class and the capitalist structure of society that is inherently unequal, exploitative, and oppressive.
In this fight we’re all going to feel pain. This economy and this fascist regime will get worse before they get better, before we make them better. But in all of this it’s our job to make sure the fat cats feel the pain more than we do. It’s our job to support one another, to practice solidarity, to build organizations that can legitimately take on the ruling class. We’re going to need one another in this fight more than ever before, we’re going to need mutual aid and fighting unions and communal centers where we can gather and care for one another and build power.
Lastly, we’re going to need a rallying cry. Every day more people are seeing that Musk and Trump want to rob us six ways from Sunday. Every day more people see that social security is in their crosshairs, the post office is in their crosshairs, clean water and clean air and the entire public education system are in their crosshairs. By the time you read this Trump may have put out an executive order intended to dissolve the federal Department of Education. The ultimate reason oligarchs have seized on that goal is, once again, privatizing a crucial public good and profiting.
So let’s rally against being robbed. Let’s rally against looting on the largest scale in world history. Let’s rally around toppling not only oligarchs, but the entire oligarchy. Let’s sweep the house of cards out from under their throne and simultaneously build something infinitely better. We must topple them, but we also must have the power and capacity to erect an equitable, just system in the ashes of this house of corruption and theft. So let’s build as we fight, and let’s take down these Robber Barons before they steal the shirts off our backs.
Some links for organizing.
UAW General Strike: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/may-1st-2028
Check out Dream Defenders: https://www.dreamdefenders.org/
Join DSA: https://www.dsausa.org/get-involved/
Unionize your workplace: https://workerorganizing.org/
Talk to your neighbors and form a tenant union: https://tenantfederation.org/tenant-unions/
Federal workers (and others) check out the federal unionists network: https://www.federalunionists.net/
Organize against the war machine: https://wearedissenters.org/
Fight the coup: https://indivisible.org/coup
Take Down Tesla: https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaigns/teslatakedown
We need a leader to bring us into a general labor strike. I know this is not popular but our dispersed strategy isn’t working. Who can this be? Can we have this conversation?
"This administration is motivated by the inverse of the Robin Hood spirit, they believe that government ought to be used to steal from the poor and give to the rich."
To be fair, that's been the motivation for every single administration from Reagan onward. The only difference is that this administration seems to think it no longer needs to hide it.