There was a warm southeasterly breeze Wednesday morning when I woke up to find it was also blowing all across America. And not just here: Protesters clashing with police in France, Italy, Albania, Georgia, and India. Dockworkers striking in 22 countries protesting shipments of arms to wars in the Middle East. Leftists taking power in Brazil, Serbia, and Hungary and a working-class PM in the UK. Feels like 1968 or maybe 1848.
Voters’ verdicts were pretty unanimous. As Jimmy Kimmel said of Trump (plus a whole lot more), “You divided this country like no one ever divided it. The only time you ever brought us together was yesterday when we all teamed up to get rid of you.”
The midterm elections that empowered Democrats at all levels of government was the most expensive election cycle in history, $12B by some accounts, mostly on the GOP side. Well, at least the money kept pollsters, consultants, and media influencers fed, clothed, and housed.
In races that Republicans won, the margin of victory generally was one to three points, despite overwhelming funding advantages from GOP-aligned PACs. Elon Musk’s $446M investment in GOP races (almost half going to his adopted home state of Texas) failed to stem the blue tide. Democrats there took the legislature and the governorship after 40 years of being out of power.
Just ahead of the elections, Trump said if Democrats prevailed he would preemptively pardon unspecified members of his administration. For what, might we ask? Because, he said, they would be harassed, as if all of them are blameless for all the suffering inflicted on Americans and others for the past two years.
There was none of the expected voter interference from federal agencies, and it looks like they won’t be challenging many races or impounding ballots or voting machines. Trump meekly conceded, grumbling to the Times and later to Fox News “I wasn’t on the ticket, and because I wasn’t on the ticket, we couldn’t get enough people out to vote.”
Well, certain Congressional Democrats have been preparing for months to lustrate* members of the Trump regime. Perhaps first on the agenda is an impeachment hearing for Pete Hegseth (which newly-elected South Carolina Rep Nancy Lacore, an Navy Vice Admiral that he fired without cause, will gladly participate in, having ousted feckless Nancy Mace. While Trump can preemptively pardon piss-drunk Pete, that would not shield him from standing trial before the Senate and being kicked out if convicted.
But … after that, then what? I expect a counterrevolution. While Trump and the GOP may choose to contest some results, the biggest backlash is bound to come from billionaires protecting their own interests, mostly through shady nonprofit think tanks and fake grassroots organizations putatively dedicated to integrity in government. The tech and crypto magnates who knelt at the alter of Trump and showered him with largess won’t stop trying to influence policy decisions that have so far kept them from being properly regulated and taxed. The increasingly strident citizen revolts against data centers explains why they are fantasizing placing them in orbit.
Some billionaires simply threaten to pick up and leave, especially in California should prop 40, a tax on billionaire’s wealth, pass. With 60% of the votes counted as yet, it looks like the tax will fail, the opposition having spent $380M (78% of all spending) on the measure and two others designed to hobble it. That’s a lot of money to dispense for ballot initiatives and it shows how fiercely the wealthy cling to their privileged place in society.
But taxing wealth is an iffy business. It’s easy as pie to disappear wealth into offshore accounts, real estate, artworks, yachts, jets, and crypto under the aegis of nonprofits, LLCs or trusts if you have there wherewithal to arrange it. Yet somehow, Switzerland has managed to do just that for decades. This article tells all you need to know about how it works. I haven’t heard that billionaires are fleeing Switzerland because of that. When you set up shop there it just becomes a cost of doing business and a deduction for taxes you might owe elsewhere.
And it’s to avoid costs of doing business that billionaires are building their own tax havens — shiny new private cities under corporate governance that are sovereign or in free trade zones; communities that they will control with no need for an electorate — their own little automated principalities complete with bunkers.
Speaking of which, entertain yourself watching this tour of luxury bunkers for wealthy survivalists. This one offers a dozen $2.3M condo units in a nuclear missile silo in Kansas.
A new breed of city planners including Jon Lonsdale, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreeson, and even JD Vance have been touting the need for and investing in “freedom cities.” One of their companies called Próspera is building ZEDE, “a special jurisdiction in Honduras with a legal, tax, and regulatory system built so businesses and individuals can grow without unnecessary barriers.” It hasn’t gone smoothly. Here’s what Gil Duran, author of recent book The Nerd Reich, has to say about it.
Elon Musk has planned two libertarian tech cities in Texas, company towns to house employees of Hyperloop and SpaceX. Those who get fired are required to vacate within 30 days. Other wealthy seekers of immunity from the ills of the world pursue “seasteads,” floating islands under private maritime flags immune from taxation and regulation.
All of this is just to discursively argue that if a deep blue state can’t manage to tackle wealth inequality I don’t expect the incoming Democratic Congress to do any better, especially given the current disposition of the President and the Supreme Court. So don’t hold your breath expecting effective regulation of crypto, AI, and data centers anytime soon. But don’t shut up about it either.
To buoy your spirits further, view the fabulous Jesse Welles belt out his song The Nerd Reich.
* Lustrate: To purify by means of a ritual; also used in post-Communist countries to refer to the political cleansing of former officials. Same Latin root (lustrum; purify by means of a ritual) as the word luster (or for some of Trump’s clowns, lackluster).
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