Billionaires and aliens

The president is a bad influence. Shocker I know.

What I mean in this particular case is that he has inspired a certain segment of the population to new heights of immorality, the reaction to his presidency is bringing out, in some people, this idea that they can do whatever they want, and in so doing attack the very fabric of democracy.

I speak of course of billionaires.

Howard Schultz, who I admit I didn't even know the name of before this week but who apparently spent a buttload of time as the CEO of Starbucks, announced that he is thinking of running for president, the response has not been super positive. He also mentioned earlier today that he doesn't like to be called a billionaire, this despite having literally billions of dollars, he apparently prefers "Person of Wealth", I... I honestly don't know if that is an attempt at a joke or not but my heart tells me it isn't.

He doesn't seem to be particularly more shitty than any other person of his class, probably better than some, worse than some, but that is damning with faint praise indeed. I can say with one hundred percent certainty that the world would be a better place if each and every billionaire one the planet were to be disassembled at the atomic level and their wealth redistributed or indeed even destroyed. Yes, even Warren Buffett. I know this because despite their existence and unparalleled freedom and power, the problems that plague society on all levels remain in force and are exacerbated every day. Not a single one of them as used their almost inconceivable influence to create housing programs for the homeless, none of them have used their potentially absolute control over the corporate networks they oversee to give their average worker a living wage and benefits, none of them are building and funding schools in low income areas, or buying add time or even bribing congresspeople to advocate for voter protections.

Oh, some of them claim to support these things, but they aren't serious, you know how I know? Because they haven't fixed any of those problems, not even at the local level, the closest they come is starting a charitable trust, or giving an interview... or running for president. They give nothing, take everything, and the world would be better by far if they never existed, or indeed if the conditions that allowed them to exist had never come to pass at all.

Donald Trump was, rumor has it, never particularly welcomed in the company of the other super rich, this is because he is horrible even for a billionaire, but he found himself a rather more exclusive club in the presidency an now I think the rest of his peers are taking notice, they still don't like him, probably not because of any oral opposition to his policies, they exist in a world that is so beyond contact with those policies that it really doesn't matter what he does, but rather they don't like him because he is an obnoxious ass who is even more obviously sociopathic than the average billionaire, and they hate being reminded of what they are.

Anyway, he proved that having billions of dollars is a good way to become president, and so, cautiously, they are dipping their toes in the water, Michael Bloomberg made a suggestion of a run in 2016 and may do so again this coming election, Schultz went ahead and announced that he wanted to do it this week, and I am sure there are more coming. They think their money is all they need to win, and to their credit it is certainly a big part of it, but they are missing an important piece of information.

By all accounts, the Trump campaign spent very little of his own money, comparatively I mean, obviously he spent millions of dollars, but compared to the something like 1.5 billion the campaigning cost in the end? Well it was a pretty good deal really. Money didn't win him the election, being a horrible fascist did. By which I mean he was able to appeal to the people in a way that most billionaires don' connect with, he made people think he understood their problems and would work to fix them. By problems I of course mean "not white people" and by fix I mean "get rid of", he also promised to cut taxes and save jobs and so on, but it was the racism that really attached people to him. The point is he showed a level of connection to the "little people" that we hadn't really seen out of a politician in a while. That connection was a lie of course, but that isn't the point really. He was able to make people think he cared, not about them specifically, but about the same things they cared about, and it wasn't even really a lie. He truly does seem to care about making life miserable for minorities, and he really does want to cut taxes, what he and his followers don't get is that he is a billionaire and they are not.

So a tax cut that matters to a billionaire doesn't do anything at all to the rest of the country, he probably thinks he's totally helping, but doesn't grasp that what he does can't help, his supporters think he is fighting for them, and he thinks he is fighting for them as well, but the realities are too different for the same action that would help him to also help them.

I do not know whether or not Trump fell into this connection with the base accidentally or on purpose, but the fact remains that connection exists, and no other billionaire on the planet has that connection, as alienated from the real world as Trump is, the rest of his kind are even more so.

HP Lovecraft wrote a lot about alien horrors, but we forget that for the most part his monsters weren't evil as such, merely so different from humans that they couldn't recognize humans as something to be concerned about, and in many cases their very presence was intolerable to the average person. That is the level of difference we are talking here, the billionaire cannot comprehend the problems the average person deals with, the idea of living paycheck to paycheck, that one missed day of work could lead to catastrophic consequences, is just so far beyond their world that it isn't even a concern for them.

Trump found a way to connect, or to at least make people think he was connected, I do not think that any other person of his class can, certainly not Schultz.