The class struggle, heating up

[Important note:  This post is not condoning violence.  It is a discussion of a social/political phenomenon that needs to be understood clearly.]

The global Tesla boycott as a weapon against arch-oligarch Elon Musk continues to take its toll.  Just this Monday alone, Tesla's stock price fell 14%, wiping out $127 billion from the company's market value and further eroding Musk's personal wealth, which had already dropped by over $100 billion since December.  And it's not just Musk and Tesla.  The idea of permanently boycotting toxic brands -- not just symbolic, meaningless one-day or thirty-day abstentions -- seems to be taking hold (this post has links to several lists of boycott-worthy brands).  Several billionaires associated with Trump have seen declines in their wealth, though none as dramatic as Musk's drop.

But as I pointed out at the beginning of the year, what's emerging now in the US is something far more fundamental than the old left-vs-right paradigm or opposition to Trump.  Americans all across the political spectrum have been awakening to the underlying reality of the class struggle, beside which party politics increasingly stands revealed as a mere sideshow.  For half a century now, regardless of which party was in power, a tiny class of oligarchs have siphoned off more and more of the wealth produced by the workers, growing richer and richer while real incomes for most of the population barely rose or just stagnated.  The Republican party has been totally captured by the parasite class, cutting taxes on the wealthy at every opportunity (and eroding the threadbare social safety net for the poor to pay for this), while the Democrats have mostly just tinkered ineffectually around the edges of the problem, treating the oligarchy as a normal part of the political landscape.  There is no serious political faction, in either party, calling for wholesale expropriation of the parasites' wealth and returning it to the workers who produced it.

Given this reality, the wave of mass supportive feeling unleashed by the UHC CEO assassination in December 2024 should not have surprised anyone -- it merely revealed the reality of anger and frustration that had been festering among the masses of people for years.  And while the MSM are downplaying it, violence is actually spreading, targeting oligarch wealth in various forms.  Just last week three yachts were destroyed in an explosion and fire in Miami.  There have been arson attacks on Tesla dealerships and charging stations across the country.  Here in the Portland area, there were recently gunfire attacks on a Tesla dealership and the house of a corporate CEO.  No person was harmed in either attack, and I probably wouldn't have even heard about them if they hadn't been nearby and thus mentioned in the local news.  The billionaire-owned national media will not highlight such attacks -- they don't want to risk fueling any more mass enthusiasm as with the CEO assassination -- but they are happening nevertheless.  One should also mention the apparent cyber-attack against Twitter yesterday, another property of Musk's (his attempt to blame Ukraine for this is absurd since the last thing Ukraine needs right now is to pick a fight with a powerful American), though it's always possible that the real culprit was Musk's own incompetence.

There is every reason to expect more of this kind of thing.  As Musk trashes the federal government to free up the last dregs of our money for yet more billionaire tax cuts, and as Trump's idiotic blundering wrecks the economy, job losses are skyrocketing, while government assistance for the deprived grows ever more meager.  More and more Americans are being plunged into desperation and despair and anger.  With growing class consciousness, more and more of them know who is really to blame, and for whose benefit it is all happening.  And this country is awash in guns.  Beyond that, the Ukraine war has made everyone aware of the military potential of drones.  Drones are widely sold in the US, at prices individuals or small groups can easily afford, and could be adapted to carry things like improvised explosives.  Mansions, yachts, and corporate headquarters stand as potential soft targets for such devices.  And note that the victims of Musk's mass firings include a disproportionate number of military veterans, people skilled in the use of a wide range of weapons.  Don't be surprised if things get really nasty.

It didn't have to be this way.  Nobody needed to pile up ten or hundreds of billions of dollars in personal wealth; a tiny fraction of that could keep a whole family in luxury for generations.  It was their choice to rig the economy so that they could skim off endlessly more and more of what the workers produced, to chip away at pay and benefits every way they could, to grind us down without mercy for the sake of their own greed that appears to be literally insatiable.  It was their choice to buy a dominating influence over both political parties and use it to take any serious redistributionist policy off the table, so that no sensible person believes any more that voting for one party over another can put so much as a serious dent in this problem.  They've put a huge, heavily-armed population in a hopeless position and taken away any option for peaceful change.  What the hell did they think was going to happen?  The left thinks we're heading for Germany of 1933.  We're actually heading for something more like France of 1789.

It's still not too late to turn aside the advent of a hot class war.  Some of the wealthy themselves understand what's at stake, openly recognize the nature of the problem, and support rational policies to resolve it; some of these have formed the Patriotic Millionaires group.  There's nothing to stop the wealthy as a class from adopting their view and saving the country and themselves.  Given their track record, I'm not optimistic.  But maybe they'll come to their senses.