The powerful agree: exploitation at home and genocide abroad
An odd trio has been bouncing around my head for the past few days. The first item of the three is a little interaction I had two weeks ago. My partner and I were visiting friends, and they had a few people over for dinner. Another couple we had never met was there, and we got to talking. Turns out they build houses. Naturally, I couldn’t help but ask about how much their homes sell for these days, and eventually we got around to something truly unbelievable. Last fall they finished a project where they built three tiny houses – 600 sq. feet each. And each one ultimately sold for about $500,000. I didn’t pick my jaw up off the floor for the rest of the night.
The second thing hopping off the walls of my skull for nearly a week now is a Washington Post expose, which revealed how a group of ultra-rich American businessmen, and every name I’ve seen listed has been a man, went as far as having a Zoom call with Eric Adams in order to push for the NYPD crackdown on students at Columbia university. As the HellGate write-up of the situation reads:
“They got a meeting with Mayor Eric Adams on April 26, a few days before the NYPD raid on Hamilton (Hind’s) Hall, during which they urged him to send in the goon squad and propose an arrangement in which they, the millionaires and billionaires, would hire their own private investigators to sic on the students and then pass that information along to the NYPD.”
The millionaires and billionaires in this group have not limited their activities to one call with the notoriously corrupt mayor of New York City. They formed a WhatsApp group chat to coordinate their pressure campaign, and may well have influenced other police attacks on college students, or other recent political developments related to the U.S. relationship with Israel and its ongoing genocide. This group chat reportedly includes former Congressman Ted Deutch, billionaire Len Blavatnik, Kind Snacks founder Daniel Lubetzky and dozens of other influential people. The full extent of what they’ve been up to will undoubtedly find its way into the light soon enough.
The third little thing bouncing around my brain recently is much more minor than the other two in virtually every way. It was a just tweet, a few words which read as follows: “Everything doesn’t have to do with everything- and that’s ok. American civil rights isn’t related to Israel-Palestine, which isn’t related to the rising cost of groceries, which isn’t related to protecting American democracy…the universe is indifferent. This isn’t a movie.”
Now it’s a silly tweet in many ways, but that doesn’t mean people don’t think that way. Plenty do, so I want to take just a little time to respond to this comment by tying the cost of living to a WhatsApp chat of wealthy and powerful individuals pressuring the mayor of America’s biggest city to send the police after students. Because that comment, which would be remarkably dismissive and over-simplified at any time in the last several decades, is sort of shocking to see as we witness first-hand the interconnectedness of international affairs, domestic policy, and so muh more at this moment in history.
To begin, the friends we were visiting live near Missoula, Montana. That’s where the tiny homes sold for half a million dollars, and it’s one of the many places across the country where you can start to trace a line showing how the rising cost of living connects to Palestine, and to just about everything else. I wrote about rural gentrification and rural decay a few weeks ago along with the good folks over at , and learned that a whole bunch of you have witnessed the absurd jump in housing prices across America, both in smaller towns and of course in a lot of big cities. In that recent piece we wrote about tenant unions and public investment and protecting our towns from the ups and downs of the capitalist economy.
But we also wrote about the people profiting from rents going up, the cost of buying a home skyrocketing, and the price of everything else increasing too. That recent Washington Post investigation actually gives us a comically short bridge between the cost of groceries, Palestine, and our civil rights here at home. If we take the founder of Kind Snacks, Daniel Lubetzky, whose net worth is estimated at $2.3 billion, and see how he’s made a lot of that money on his overpriced snack products, and then we see how he’s currently using that wealth (and the power that comes along with it) to pressure a politician to send that police after students protesting genocide, we get our snapshot of interconnection. We get our instant link between how the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people very directly threatens our civil rights and any semblance of democracy we hope to have or maintain.
Real estate investor Joseph Sitt was also on that call with Eric Adams, and is in that group chat. Sitt is worth nearly a billion dollars and runs Thor Equities Group, which has around $20 billion in assets under management. That’s a long way of saying that the people profiting from the cost of housing going up are also involved in making America less democratic and tramping on our civil rights. Of course this isn’t just a matter of a handful of individuals, it’s a matter of how systems work. The immense concentration of wealth in this country right now is as high as it’s ever been, corporate profits are at record highs, and we teeter on the edge of full-blown fascism. None of this is a coincidence. These things are, in fact, connected.
Simply put, the concentration of wealth is the concentration of power. Hoarding obscene amounts of money allows individuals and corporations to have obscene amounts of influence. We see that in our political system, and we see the disastrous effects. Congress has chosen to side with for-profit healthcare corporations and the handful of people who make ungodly amounts of money from our current heatlcare system over the rest of the country, over the countless people whose lives and health would benefit immensely from universal healthcare. That is just one of the infinite examples we could examine to see how capitalism and the concentration of wealth it enables runs counter to democracy. The will of the people is squashed by the will of the wealthy.
But right now we’re at a point where a more overtly fascist paradigm is emerging. Fascism is defined by a number of features, including rampant nationalism, a facade of far-right populism, scapegoating minorities and more. And at the center of it all is an alliance between business and government to suppress the left, to crush the will of the people in favor of the will of the ruling class. What we glimpse in the ultra-rich chatting with Eric Adams about violently repressing student protest is this dangerous alliance between capital and government. What we see in life getting more and more expensive is the domestic exploitation and extraction of wealth that the super-rich want to preserve. What we see in the ruling class’s relentless support for Israel is the imperialist structure that upholds the international exploitation and extraction of wealth that the super-rich want to preserve. What we see in the rise of fascism is how willing they are to fight us, to crush us to preserve it all.
One of the countless realities laid bare over the last seven months is how the ruling class will embrace fascism before they divest from imperialism. We’ve seen it in how protests are crushed, how universities are turned into police states, and how the popular consensus to stop arming and funding Israel is ignored. At the same time dozens of Cop Cities (police repression training facilities) are under construction, police funding has risen dramatically since 2020, and capitalists are explicitly planning their repression with politicians.
But at the same time, people are fighting back. Today thousands of student-workers unionized with the UAW are striking in California. We have infinitely more tenant unions than we did 5 years ago, and people have taken more and more direct action to shut down weapons factories and protest U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide. The student protest wave is a powerful movement, one that saw tangible results at several universities. Have our wins been enough, so far? No. Certainly not. But is the U.S. left, still in its infancy in many ways, growing up and evolving rapidly? I hope so.
And one of the things that more and more people are seeing as we develop our analysis and try to get better at building a more just world is that the problems and battles we all face are interconnected. In an era of rampant and rabid conspiracy theorizing, people who are serious about improving society are seeing and declaring the plain truth that the systems of power are not hidden in the shadows, they’re out in plain sight. The real conspiracy is capitalism — it’s not a mystery. It’s visible in billionaire group chats and political donations and the open, out-loud declarations of the richest people on Earth. They don’t hide their wealth and power, and we shouldn’t either. We should be clear about the detrimental role the ruling class and their capitalist system are playing in the United State, Palestine, and across the globe. We should be clear about our determination to fight them and replace their exploitative, extractive, violent system that hurts us both in the mundane price increases of snack bars at the grocery store and in the production of bombs being dropped on families in Gaza. Clarity, honesty about the world we live in is the first step to building something better — the first step to building a world where people are more important than profit margins. We can and will build that world.
We literally outnumber these fascist fuckers by BILLIONS. We just need to organize. A global general strike is long overdue and badly needed.
It's all part of a large connected system to protect the bourgeois & class sell outs like Eric Adams willing to do it for ego & a few pieces of silver. Funny enough I read a tweet this morning saying the downfall of Red Lobster was not endless shrimp. It was a sale to hedgefunds that owned Red Lobster property & rented back to Red Lobster. It was rent increases for profit not the shrimp!