Richie Rich strikes back

Billionaires are coming after everything the working class has won

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

Jamie Dimon is the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. He has over $2 billion in his personal fortune, and his company made over $50 billion last year. So, naturally, he talked about knife-fighting regulators in a recent interview. Talking about government regulation at a conference of the American Bankers Association, he discussed not only the finance industry but the retail sector and other elements of the economy as well. The CEO said, “We don’t want to get involved in litigation just to make a point but … you know, if you're in a knife fight, you better damn well bring a knife ... it's time to fight back."

Now, on the one hand, this is simply ludicrous. Anyone who's been paying attention for any part of the last forty years knows who’s been winning this supposed knife fight, and it’s not the people standing up to big banks. The billionaires and their ilk have fleeced us all six ways from Sunday, as JPMorgan Chase’s immense and constant stream of profits testifies to. But they’re still not satisfied, and that’s a big chunk of the story here.

The real story has two parts. One, the last few years have seen moderate but in many ways meaningful gains in corporate regulation. At the helm of the FTC, Lina Khan has done great work going after Google and Amazon and Facebook and a whole slew of predatory corporations. The SEC, the DOJ, and the NLRB have also done some great work. They’ve blocked merged and supported unions and held some white collar criminals to account. Are their accomplishments just the very tip of the iceberg when we examine what’s needed to develop a society that isn’t 100% driven by the ruling class and their relentless search for profits? Of course. Has the regulatory progress these last four years also made a difference, and given us (and the billionaires) a little glimpse of what the government actually helping working people looks like? Yes indeed.

To slow down and say it plainly, Biden appointed some good people in roles that check corporate power and uplift workers. They actually did their jobs, which is more than any administration since Reagan, and in some ways since Roosevelt, can say. But the fundamental balance of power didn’t change — corporate profits still hit record highs in 2023. That’s largely because companies used the supply chain disruption of the pandemic to price gouge us for years, under the guise of inflation. And, of course, the broader trends of neoliberalism and international corporate extraction transfering wealth from the working class to the .001% was not reversed. So, while an increase in regulatory oversight was and is welcome, not just by lefties like me but by most of the country, it was a relatively minor countervailing force in the grand scheme of capitalist power and accumulation of wealth.

But, and here’s the second part of the story, the super-rich don’t exactly see it that way. After decades of running roughshod over everyone else, and getting away with it every time, they see a shift in regulation as an existential threat to their unchecked power and wealth. And you combine that with a resurgent labor movement, unions being wildly popular, and workers being willing and even eager to fight, and some billionaires are rattled. They, I would hope correctly, believe that if they give an inch we might end up taking a mile. Of course, if we took 90% of the wealth Elon Musk is hoarding he’d still have over $20 billion, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that they want total power, unfettered greed, and the ability to take everything from us. And they’re willing to spend billions on elections, break the law, and usher in unchecked fascism to fulfill their desires.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Musk comes to mind here not only because of his omnipresent annoyance but because he’s rabidly backing Trump, to the point of possibly breaking the law and skipping out on his most recent court date. He is also, supposedly, being considered for a government position if Trump wins. It’s impossible to know what’s true when the source is two serial liars, but the proposal being floated is that Musk would lead an effort to gut government programs. And while his positions are increasingly extreme, he’s not alone. A growing segment of the ruling class, the overtly fascist contingent, wants to attack migrants, trans folks, and other minorities all while dismantling the parts of the state that make up the relatively weak safety net we have here in the United States and repealing every regulation they can. While Trump and Musk might be the avatars of this movement, billionaires, Silicon Valley tech bros, and a range of business interests are very much in bed with them. They want workers to be vulnerable, easily exploited, and disorganized – which is exactly why we need to fight back.

The real knife fight will be between the ruling class and the working class, no matter what happens next week. Conservative billionaires and their corporations are coming after everything that worker power and organizing has built over the last century. I am not being hyperbolic here, they’re coming after the federal laws and agencies that regulate unions, that regulate toxins, that create standards in education and the environment, and much more. They’re open about their plans, and they file their lawsuits to dismantle every federal agency that works to help people very publicly. The greed of the super-rich knows no bounds, and late capitalism requires limitless, rapid growth. Without creating new markets, without being able to exploit endlessly, the whole house of cards could come tumbling down.

These imperatives will animate the ruling class for the next four years and beyond, and only an incredibly powerful working class, with a strong labor movement, tenant movement, and social movements of all stripes organized to be effective and bold and strategic can stop them. That is our charge; we must fight back. We can’t let this be a one sided knife fight. It might get ugly, but our inaction would allow billionaires to get even uglier with us, to take this country back to an era of child labor and poisoned rivers and hyper-exlpoitation fused with oppressive and dangerous technologies. So we have one path ahead: organize, educate, build, dismantle the capitalist system that views us as nothing more than sources of profit and replace it with something infinitely better. Solidarity, and let’s get to work.