The richest man on Earth owns half of Congress

And he wants to use his power to strip the government for parts

Elon Musk could shut down the government. If some sort of spending plan isn’t passed by tomorrow (Friday, December 20th) the federal government will partially shut down, with countless government workers going unpaid through the holidays, food aid halting, and numerous other services shutting their doors until the money starts flowing again. House Speaker Mike Johnson had a bill that seemed likely to pass 24 hours before the publication of this newsletter, but then the richest man on Earth took to the social media platform he owns and started spreading lies to kill the deal.

His propaganda blast worked, GOP members of Congress bent the knee to him, Trump then came out against the bill, and it’s now dead. In fact, Republicans in Congress are salivating so much over Musk money that one familair name took to Twitter this very morning to suggest Elon become the Speaker of the House.

Musk used no subtlety, no cleverness to kill government funding. It’s just a matter of the brute force that can be exercised with nearly half a trillion dollars. He threatened members of Congress with endless donations to their future opponents, spread patently false claims, and even amplified tweets saying the government should get no funding until Trump takes office. “We will be fine for 33 days [with no government funding]” read one tweet he blasted out to his over 200 million followers, and to countless other people given the way he’s forced Twitter engineers to rig the algorithm for him.

This is the crux of the issue. Elon Musk will, of course, be fine. But millions of government workers and the millions of others who rely on them in all kinds of ways will not be. Musk’s DOGE ‘government office’ operates on the same principle. Cut government funding and disregard those who will be hurt, because the super rich will be just fine. In fact they’ll be more than fine – they’ll profit immensely from the privatization of key government services.

This week Trump took the priviziation mission public, aiming at one of the most vital public services the country has: the USPS. Whole pieces have and will be written about the importance of the postal service, how it delivers medicines and serves rural areas that for-profit companies don’t and makes society tick. I’ll always remember how David Graeber, in his book “The Utopia of Rules,” presents the mail infrastructure, from post offices to mail carriers, as a hallmark of modern society. It’s one of those paradigm shifts that completely re-frames something you’ve taken for granted. As Michael Brown writes, “For most Americans, Graeber says, the Post Office was the primary face of the federal government until after the Civil War. It represented government at its best, offering secure and dignified employment.”

Now Trump says his team is “looking into” privatizing the USPS. This would be an unmitigated disaster for workers, people across the country, and for our national infrastructure. Costs would go up, reliability would go down, and a dangerous precedent would be set. And this atrocious idea is just one in a constellation of moves that together comprise the incoming administration’s approach to governance. I call this approach stripping us for parts.

Photo by Victória Kubiaki on Unsplash

Trump, Musk, and the neo-fascist elite are focused on dismantling public goods, privatizing them, and profiting. There are other goals in this loose alliance, but profit is the big uniter. Unlike most fascists of the past, and some in the present, this pursuit of the next dollar is so strong, and the emphasis on short-term gains so paramount, that utilizing the power of the state falls in priority compared to dismantling the state and sacrificing it at the altar of privatization. The post office might be first on the chopping block, but as we know ‘first buddy’ Elon Musk is preaching the shrinking of state capacity at every possible occasion.

It’s hard to know how far they’ll be able to go in stripping our government down. We know that Trump and Musk admire Javier Milei, the ‘anarcho-capitalist’ fascist leading Argentina at the moment. He’s already slashed the number of government ministries from 18 to 8 and laid off more than 30,000 government employees. He’s also halted virtually all public infrastructure projects, ended most subsidies to local governments, and frozen public sector wages and pensions. The list goes on. We know that cuts on this scale will be extremely difficult to get through Congress, but Musk in particular appears determined to try.

In the wake of his first big win, Musk says “the voice of the people” has triumphed. This is, of course, untrue, and even Musk’s adherents don’t really believe it. He’s cultivated a base of tech bros and other whiny boys who want to feel like men, and who attempt to fulfill that desire by seeing the numbers go up in their bank accounts. Until their latest crypto asset gets wiped out, of course. This crowd knows that ‘the voice of the people’ means Musk and company. Fascists are fluent in doublespeak, and they know that the populations who have been scapegoated and maligned are not included in the in-group.

What the working class portion of this in-group might not realize is how vulnerable they too are to the government being stripped down and sold for parts. There is a delusion among some libertarian types and the far-right that they are somehow in the club. But the club is small, very small, and they’re not in it. None of us are in it. This club is of the .001%, the people who own the companies and factories and politicians of this country. Any effort to defund public goods and privatize government services benefits that group, and precisely none of the rest of us.

There’s a story over in the UK that presents a clear picture. Public water utilities started being privatized in 1989. Today, 70% of the English water industry is owned by foreign private corporations, water bills have gone up 360%, and the company ‘serving’ the London area says it needs emergency loans or it might fold. Also, according to The Guardian the Greater London company, Thames Water, “was responsible for almost 17,000 occasions of dumping raw sewage in 2023 because of poor overflow systems that have had insufficient infrastructural investment.”

Photo by Waldemar on Unsplash

And you don’t have to go across the pond to see these effects. Water bills have jumped in Pennsylvania since the state enabled the privatization of drinking and wastewater services – some nearly doubling in just three years. This is what privatization does. A few rich people make out like bandits while everyone else gets screwed over. In announcing that his team is looking into killing USPS, Trump explicitly referred to Amazon, UPS, and FedEx, saying that because of them things are “different today.” In other words, he concisely laid out who would benefit from privatizing the post office while everyone else gets screwed.

As is so often the case, what our opponents attack shows us what they value and shows us what we may want to protect. We can’t simply be reactive to what they go after, but in the case of public goods we see how things like government mail and water protect sectors of life from the profit motive. We should go all-out to defend these services both so that billionaires don’t scalp us to pay for their fourth homes and because we want to move towards a society filled with “commons,” with arenas that are secluded from profits and are instead formulated around what we can collectively uphold and what benefits all of us.

Attacking institutions like the post office is an attack on all of us. It’s a deliberate effort to tear down everything that’s been built for the public good in this country and siphon those institutions off into the sphere of billionaire control and profit generation. As Sean Morrow recently laid out, “We need to call privatization what it is: adding a profit tax onto a public good. A public post office puts all its resources towards delivering mail. A privatized post office will divert a large chunk of its income to shareholders.”

Photo by Elsa Olofsson on Unsplash

It’s incumbent on us to protect the public goods we have, and not allow smash-and-grab neo-fascist billionaires to subject them to the profit tax, while simultaneously making these services worse. The GOP already has a long history of defunding and worsening key government services to make them bad enough that people see privatization as a viable option. They’re trying to do this with public education across the country as we speak. And we have to resist both their narrative and their efforts in this arena. Public goods, imperfect as they may be, should be funded. Billionaire wealth should be taken to make this happen. We live in a society, and the lie that we would somehow be better off as hardscrabble individuals clawing our way to the top than we are as a collective working together must be resisted in every way.

Elon Musk himself is once again emblematic of the lies he pushes, in that his wealth is largely built on government contracts. Those of course will not be threatened by DOGE, which is already advocating for cuts to numerous government services, but not to any of the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar budget, of course. Another $895 billion for the military just made its way smoothly through both houses of Congress in fact, before a resolution to keep the doors of the rest of the government open hit the billionaire snag. The world’s richest man wants to defund all of us, but never his own fortune.

What we are seeing is the long fight to roll back the New Deal. Despite its imperfections, the historic construction of some safety net for Americans, more power for workers, and a dramatic increase in public services remains the landmark progressive legislation in U.S. history. In attacking it, the whole neo-fascist billionaire class is showing us the world they want. They’re revealing that they want us to have nothing in the way of public services, so that all of our needs can become sites of profit extraction.

Simultaneously, in the fight against the privatization of every feature of society, we are pointed toward a very different sort of world, one that goes far beyond the current, relatively meager measure of public good we currently have. We are pointed toward a society free from the constant pull of the profit motive and instead guided by people’s needs. We are pointed to real democracy where we collectively cultivate and control our lives. It’s a long battle, but the lines are being drawn with growing clarity and the stakes are becoming increasingly clear. Now, we need to organize and fight.