Rob Dietz 00:00
I’m Rob Dietz.
Asher Miller 00:02
I’m Asher Miller.
Jason Bradford 00:03
And I’m Jason Bradford. Welcome to Crazy Town where we were forced to fly first class with the low lifes and riff raff because our private jet was in the shop.
Rob Dietz 00:13
Billionaires. They should be objects of scorn rather than envy while they ride around in their super yachts and private jets producing the climate damaging pollution of entire nations. They’re doing things to extract even more wealth, harm your health, diminish democracy and rig the whole system in their favor. How did this happen? Why do we tolerate it? How can we stop the billionaires and can we get a hold of our own super yacht for crazy town pleasure cruises, Chuck Collins returns to crazy town to offer insights from his new book, burned by billionaires, how concentrated wealth and power are ruining our lives and planet.
Rob Dietz 00:56
Chuck Collins is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the author of a new book titled Burned by Billionaires, which we’re going to talk about today. We know Chuck very well here in Crazy Town. He was a guest way back in the first season on episode Welcome back to Crazy Town.
Chuck Collins 01:25
Wow, thanks for having me back, Rob. After those early ones, I m just honored you re giving me another chance.
Rob Dietz 1:32
Well that proves how much we like you, right? I wanna jump straight into your new book, Burned by Billionaires. This will air right after it has hit the presses, so if we do a good enough job, we re going to turn it into a bestseller. But the main idea of your book is right there in the subtitle, which is How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. I was wondering if you could just orient our listeners, give us a quick overview of why concentrated wealth is such a problem.
Chuck Collins 02:10
Yeah, you know, I think that the first thing to say is it’s a problem when it translates into power, I would say that there’s a certain point where people’s wealth, you know, they’ve bought a private jet and they’re got a couple of mansions around the world, but now they’re buying senators and broadcast networks. And that’s when it becomes really problematic. I edit a website, co-edit a website called inequality.org, and, you know, we get a lot of fan mail and some not-so-fan mail, but one guy just wrote to me. I’ll just read what he said. He said, this guy, Greg, he writes, None of my problems exist as a result of someone else being a billionaire. And I don’t think that’s an uncommon perspective, you know, yeah, my life is hard or whatever, but it has nothing to do with the concentration of wealth and how rich the rich are. And I really wrote this book, because it actually does matter a lot. It really touches every corner of your life, particularly when the billionaires or the top 1/10 of 1% are wielding huge amounts of power that distort pretty much every corner of our lives. So it really just disrupts our everyday life.
Rob Dietz 03:22
All right, well, let’s figure out who is rich. And, you know, I’m kind of a geography nerd. I really love maps. And in, you know, here in crazy town we the whole show is sort of based on this geographic metaphor. It’s that we’re walking around in this town where most people seem caught up in delusion or denying the problems that we have within environmental and in social breakdown. And I really liked in Burned by Billionaires, how you used a geographic metaphor to figure out who is wealthy, right? So you talked about Affluent Town and Lower and Middle and Upper Richistan and Billionaireville. I wonder if you can describe these places and who fits into what categories?
Chuck Collins 04:09
Now I often hear people say, Yeah, those people are rich over there, and that could be the person down the street who got a new car and seems to have lots of family vacation pictures all the way up to the billionaires. So who’s rich and why does it matter? So, yeah, in Burned by Billionaires, I borrow from a journalist, Robert Frank, who wrote a book called Richistan, where we kind of segment out the different categories of wealth, if you will. You know, there’s the top 10%, there’s the top 1%, wealthiest 1% of households. I would argue that, you know, where we start to pay attention, really is at the top 1/10 of 1%, what I would call Upper Richistan, 130,000 households that are in that, you know, $50 million-or-more category, all the way up to the 1,000 or so billionaires in the US. And their level of power and influence is so much greater. And that’s not to say that people in the 1% and people in the top 10% aren’t benefiting from an economy that’s essentially been rigged to funnel wealth to the top. They’re all benefiting from it, but the real drivers of the train are that Upper Richistan and Billionaireville. And by the way, I think Crazy Town isn’t anywhere near those places, although I think there’s probably visitors. Some of these people visit Crazy Town regularly.
Rob Dietz 05:36
No, in Billionaireville, you’re sitting up on a hill casting aspersions down on Crazy Town, and we’re all down here going nuts, going, What are you doing? Well, I did a little bit of a thought exercise this morning, before I joined forces with you here in this interview, and I was thinking to myself, if somebody offered me a billion dollars, or, let’s say I had the winning numbers to the Mega Millions lottery, or whatever, the Powerball. Would I accept it? And I think if I’m being entirely honest, the answer would be, yeah, I would take it. But even if I were altruistic about like, Oh, I’m gonna give the money away to my favorite charities, or I’m not going to buy a private jet or a megayacht or whatever. But, I mean, you’re basically saying that would be a bad idea, right? I mean, that I should maybe show some restraint and not take that billion.
Chuck Collins 06:34
Well, I’m not going to advise you on that, Rob. I mean, I’m married to somebody who does buy the lottery ticket when it hits a billion dollars, I think it’s mostly a kind of act of fantasy. You start saying, you know, well, if I win, then I’m gonna I’m like, stop, stop. Why are you doing this? It’s like, more remote than getting hit by lightning. So, you know, I guess I would say the problem is, it’s not the money, it’s the power. If you got that billion dollar lottery ticket, maybe you could exercise that power through the redistribution of that wealth, you could actually have a positive impact there. And there are billionaires who actually think that way, not, not enough of them. But you know, you hear about somebody like MacKenzie Scott who used to be married to Jeff Bezos. She’s sort of pledged. She’s going to empty the vault. She’s moving a lot of money to some pretty good causes. So, you know, I think that gets us kind of distracted, in a way, when we think and dream about billions, when, in fact, our goal should be like, shouldn’t we have an economy that doesn’t extract so much wealth from the rest of the society and funnel it upward. You know, wouldn’t we be all better off with a much more equitable economy? Not everyone being the equal. Some people, there will be natural differences in effort, and you know what people aspire to. But it shouldn’t be 10 to one or over, you know, not 1000 to one or a million to one, as it is today. So I’m worried about a system that creates extreme inequality.
Rob Dietz 08:08
Yeah, and I guess we don’t have to worry a whole lot about joining the billionaire class anyway. As George Carlin once said about the rich and powerful, It’s a club, and you ain’t in it. I’m certainly not in it, although I do want to remind our listeners, if they didn’t hear the interview that we did with you in the previous seasons, we were talking about your experience in being in a wealthy class and deciding that that was unearned wealth and giving it away. I mean, that you’re the living example, that we actually have of someone who can show restraint and understand fairness and understand that it’s good for society that everybody’s on an equal opportunity, equal footing.
Chuck Collins 09:00
I mean, I would just say that was, on my part, a rather selfish decision. I just didn’t want to live in a society with these extreme wells. I don’t I just don’t think it’s a good idea if people are born winning the lottery and it creates all kinds of other distortions. I mean, we’re moving toward, as I write in this book, a dynastic society if we don’t do anything, if we just sort of stay on oligarchy autopilot, or whatever we want to call it, you know, a generation from now, the sons and daughters of today’s billionaires are going to be dominating our politics, economy, culture, philanthropy. You may be like, well, aren’t we there already, but just think about it. Elon Musk, you know that guy’s got like 20 kids now. Larry Ellison, the wealth, second wealthiest guy in the world. His son is running huge projects and broadcast networks and movie companies. You know that dynastic wealth living in a society where wealth piles up based on. A narrow family bloodline versus real opportunity? No, no, we don’t want to live in that kind of society.
Rob Dietz 10:07
Yeah, I was pretty upset reading in your book about the Mellon family. I had heard of Mellon or Mellon Bank or whatever, and knew that there was wealth there, but I didn’t know that there was still this ongoing, I don’t know, like mustache-twirling evil son who’s out there trying to wreck things for everybody else. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what happened there?
Chuck Collins 10:32
Well, yeah, if you live in Pennsylvania, you know that there’s the Mellon banking family that they were the bankers to Andrew Carnegie and US Steel and some of the the sort of Pittsburgh area big fortunes. And, yeah, the Mellons were a robber baron family that was very focused on changing the rules that the next generation. Andrew Mellon became Secretary of Treasury in the 1920s and, you know, worked to dismantle the inheritance tax as it existed in the in the 20s. And here’s Tim Mellon, four generations later, this kind of reluctant billionaire living in the hills of Wyoming, but he’s still using all his wealth and power to influence taxes. He gave a huge amount of money to Trump to he supports politicians that want to dismantle taxes. So, you know, here’s an example. Like the dynasty keeps going. They figured out how to arrest the process of wealth dispersion, and now they’re sort of continuing to grab more and more. And there are a few of those families, the Mars family, the candy empire, now in its third, fourth generation, the Kochs. We know about the Koch brothers, but you know, that’s a private company, hugely wealthy, and they’re setting themselves up to be lording over us for the next century.
Rob Dietz 11:52
Yeah, it’s, it’s really amazing to me. I often think about it like, even if you buy into sort of billionaire as hero, like, Oh, here’s somebody who got their wealth because they were smarter. They came up with some idea that we were all enamored by and paid them a lot of money for it, even if you believe that, who’s to say that their offspring aren’t going to be idiots and do crazy things with an inheritance that that is just allowed to pass, on and on and on and on. Yeah, I’ve wondered about that. So we’re going to get to policy stuff maybe a little later in this interview, but I’m sure inheritance tax is going to be something that comes up there. I want to up the temperature a little bit, because I found myself getting angry as I read your book, and I think it’s a good thing. It’s sort of a righteous anger, in a way. I was kind of thinking about like, How can I feel good about doing my part to lower carbon emissions? You know, I’ll ride my bike to work or put some solar panels on the roof, or just decide to conserve, you know, and how can I feel good about that when billionaires are sitting on their yacht that’s idling all the time, or are you brought up flying around in a private jet like there’s no tomorrow. I mean, how am I supposed to feel, other than just angry?
Chuck Collins 13:25
Well, I think you should be angry. I think we should all be angry at how the billionaires are burning up our future. And there’s sort of three reasons. I think. One is these are the super emitters. Their carbon footprint is, you know, Godzilla next to the mouse. You know, of ordinary people, they have yachts, which are one of the most super emitting forms of transportation. These super yachts, private jets, huge houses, more houses. They’re just, that’s one thing is that they’re just responsible, historically and in the present, for the lion’s share of emissions. But the other thing is that they’re like oligarchs. They’re wielding their wealth and power to block alternatives to fossil fuels options. You know, they’re, you can see this now. We’re living through it. You know, the fossil fuel oligarchs and billionaires ponied up, you know, huge amount of money to get Trump elected, and they and they’re getting payback. I mean, we’re shutting down wind projects and keeping coal plants that were scheduled to close down, keeping them open. So the fossil fuel oligarchs wield tremendous power, and they’re kind of running out the clock. And then, to your point, how are we going to build a movement where we kind of need everybody on board but the unequal sacrifice. You know, if you’re riding your bike and Kylie Jenner is just jetting across LA on their jet for lunch, you feel like a chump. Like, Why should I give up something when these billionaires are not giving up anything? So that undermines the solidarity that we’re going to need to weather or to navigate the Great Unraveling, if you will. So I think that focusing on the inequities in terms of emissions and power is really critical for the climate justice movement. We need to constantly be talking about the role that the billionaires are playing and the fossil fuel oligarchs in running out the clock.
Rob Dietz 15:25
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head there. I do feel like a chump most of the time, although not on the bike. I will always stand behind bikes as the best transportation method that humanity has ever invented. But I also, you know, with the anger, I don’t want to turn people off of your book, because it’s also got a lot of, you know, you have a fun sense of humor, Chuck, and I think you poke quite a bit of fun in there at the billionaires, like the super yacht stuff. You know, you talked about the magazine Super Yacht Times and the World Super Yacht Awards and the Monaco Yacht Show, and I found myself…it’s a fun place to laugh at the silly competitions that these billionaires find themselves locked into.
Chuck Collins 16:12
I was thinking about you this morning, because as of this morning, the Monaco Yacht Show for this fall has just ended after 38 years, and it is the place where the super-rich go. They all go to Monaco, by the way. They ride out the hurricane season. They’re not in the Caribbean. They’re kind of tucked in these nice little bays in the Mediterranean Sea. As they ride out the hurricane system, caused by their excessive emissions, or inflamed by their current emissions. But, you know, yeah, it is important to maintain a sense of humor here and understand the, you know, and actually, the power of humor and satire. We could talk more about that, but, you know, the other thing is, when, when you’re talking to your neighbors, I think it’s really helpful to just say, you know, you’re grumbling about your local property tax bill. But that’s because for 50 years, the billionaires have been shifting taxes off the federal onto states and localities, off of wealth, onto sales taxes and property taxes. The fact that your local property tax bill is higher and you’re mad at your town select board or mayor or whatever — that’s misplaced. You should be like the billionaires, they’ve been shifting taxes off themselves and onto everyone else for decades, and here we are, whether it’s your physical and mental health, your tax bill, the air you breathe, the food on your dinner plate. Even the cost of housing is getting supercharged by these extreme inequalities and by the billionaires in the economy. On down the list, I even have, I guess one of my favorite chapters is about pets, people who have dogs and cats, like people who love their animals. Guess what? The billionaire private equity firms, they know that, they know that you’re willing to pay more to help your animals have healthy lives, and so they see that as a profit center from which to squeeze and grab more money. So they’re buying up veterinary clinics and pet food and even apps where you match dog walkers to pet owners. Blackstone has bought rover.com so they can skim money every time you line up somebody to walk your dog. I mean, it just they’re moving into every nook and cranny of our existence. And that’s not always apparent, but that’s kind of the mindset we should have. Darn these billionaires, they’re really wrecking my life. They’re really having an impact on my life.
Rob Dietz 18:42
This is exactly what I’m glad that your book does Chuck, because the surest way to signal a villain in pop culture or anywhere in society is through animal cruelty, and especially when it comes to our dogs. I mean, come on, the bad guy in John Wick steals his car, which, that’s a big no no in America too. You know, don’t mess with someone’s car. But way worse is he murders his puppy. And you know, I don’t know if any billionaires are directly murdering dogs, but they’re certainly indirectly harming the health and here in crazy town, we’ve got Dylan Willow and Bijou as our official family dogs. And, yeah, I’m, I’m not gonna stand for billionaires gutting them. Yeah, that’s, that’s horrendous. So you were, you were kind of mentioning you have these chapters on different ways that billionaires are wrecking things. There’s one on the housing market. There’s the idea that they’re supercharging economic inequality across racial lines. They’re doing harm to our personal health and the entire healthcare system, and in what. On the erosion of democracy, which maybe, maybe that’s the one. I wonder if you could maybe give a few more details or ideas about how billionaires are messing with our democracy and taking power away from from us within that. Yeah. I mean,
Chuck Collins 20:17
it’s important to realize, like the billionaires are basically, they’ve taken away our voice, our vote in a democratic society, billionaires have captured our political system. And you know, we kind of know that when it comes to campaign finance, you sort of CEO the billionaire backpacks. You know, it’s a big event. Marco Rubio got this gift from this billionaire, but now that billionaire is getting cold feet, and now they’re supporting this other candidate. You know, you know, the influence of money in politics is pretty apparent to most people. I think what we don’t realize is the billionaires exercise their power pretty much to block very popular policies and programs three years ago, in 2022 Congress came within two votes in the US Senate of passing this $4 trillion investment bill. They called it build back better BBB, not the big beautiful bill or the big ugly bill, but they this is just three years ago, but that would have like raised revenue by taxing the rich and investing it in creating a modern childcare system, healthcare for all, a green infrastructure to help transition toward the future. Down the list, it was this really big, bold and very popular agenda, and that’s kind of what the backlash and the billionaires understood, like all we need to do is get Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to block this big proposal. And that’s what they did. And here we are, three years later, more tax cuts for the rich, dismantling social safety net, ignoring climate disruption, you know, down the list, in a way that, to me, is good news, in that you can see how quickly things can reverse. And I believe things are going to reverse in the direction of trying to again, address the real problems, not the phony problems and phony populist approach that we’re living through now, our muscle memory is still there. People remember what it was like. They know what the program is to create a more fair and equitable society. We just have to kind of push back against billionaire capture of our democracy.
Rob Dietz 22:36
Yeah, I do see billionaires as obviously the main villain in your book. And you know, it’s all about how they’re wrecking these parts of society and environmental conditions that we all depend on. But you know, the best villains always have kind of a wormy sidekick who’s there to carry out certain parts of the villainy. And I feel like you bring that up in your book with the wealth defense industry, and you’ve written another book previously about that. Can you describe how the wealth defense industry works and what’s going on there? And maybe that’s another place where activism needs to come into play, and we need to dismantle that.
Chuck Collins 23:25
When we look at the 1/10 of 1% that 50 million and up group, one of the things they’ve got to their advantage is they can hire professional help to help them hide their wealth and minimize their tax so, yeah, there’s this whole class, really, of enablers, the wealth. We call it the wealth defense industry, tax attorneys, you know, accountants, family office staffers, wealth managers. These people are well paid, and their job is to make the if you’re hiring them Rob It’s to make your pile bigger, to minimize tax, ideally, no tax, and pass it down your narrow generational bloodline, create wealth dynasties. That’s how they measure their success. You know? They’ll say, Oh, I’m just helping families. Well, they’re just helping the most wealthy families on the planet at the at the expense of all other families. Oh, and we’re just helping our clients, you know, obey the rules, but in fact, they’re writing the rules, rigging the rules, creating new trusts, creating complicated I call them MEGO trusts. My eyes glaze over. Complexity is their bread and butter. They don’t want a lowly URI or I or even a IRS tax oversight person to have any clue what the shell game looks like. That’s what they’re all about. And to be honest, the wealthy wouldn’t be able to hide as much money without their help. So they’re really, really important enablers of the inequality they are the agents of inequality, and we should, you know, the good news is, I’ll talk about this, but there’s some cracks in that system. There are people who I’ve met. Some of them read the earlier book I did about the wealth defense industry, and they call me up and they say, I’m 60 years old, and all I’ve done for my entire professional life is help the rich get richer at the expense of the whole functioning of a healthy society. I feel bad about that. What should I do? I said, Well, why don’t you defect, tell your story, and help us close those loopholes you you created them. Help us close them up so we have this whole cadre of renegade wealth managers who have stepped up to help us dismantle the system that they the wealth hiding apparatus that they helped create.
Rob Dietz 25:43
That’s really amazing. I like that. You have that encouragement. You know, I m sitting here talking about villains and vilifying, but you know, you’re more like the team guy who’s like, Just join our team and then be a do-gooder. So that’s great,
Chuck Collins 26:01
Yeah, if anybody’s out there listening, and you’re managing the wealth of the super-rich and you want to defect, call Crazy Town and get my phone number.
Rob Dietz 26:11
Yeah, that’s probably 70, 80% of our listeners are probably wealth managers, right?
Chuck Collins 26:16
You just never know, Rob, you don’t know who’s listening.
Rob Dietz 26:19
That’s true. You talked about the MEGO, my eyes glaze over complexity. It totally reminded me. One of my favorite movies is The Big Short. There’s a scene in there where, I think, it’s Ryan Gosling s character is saying about the language that they use in Wall Street, Does it make you feel bored or stupid? Well, it’s supposed to. Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think that only they can do what they do, or, even better, for you to just leave them alone. I get that all the time when I have to read some bit of legalese, like, What does this mean? But that’s a whole industry devoted to that — unbelievable. I wonder if we can do a little bit of turning towards what we can do about all this. I mean, I guess first of all, before we talk policy, you describe in your book that there’s two main reasons that we seem to tolerate the billionaire class and all the harm that it causes. And one is powerful narratives that justify billionaires. And the second is that the problem feels like we can’t handle it. It’s intractable, like the political side that you were just describing, that billionaires have too much influence, so it’s not something we can fight. You talk about those two parts of tolerating billionaires, and then how do we get past that?
Chuck Collins 27:43
Yeah, well, the first one is like, yeah, the stories that we as a culture tell that justify these great inequalities. So, you know, Rob, you’re a billionaire, and I’m, I’m not, you know, I might be like, Well, Rob deserves what he has because he’s worked harder. There’s this great interview with J. Paul Getty, the oil billionaire, and he was asked, How do you become wealthy in America? He says, Ah, it’s really quite easy. You got to get up early in the morning. I know you got up early this morning, Rob. Work hard all day. I mean, here we are late Friday, we’re doing this podcast. And find oil.
Rob Dietz 28:20
See, that’s the problem. I found a microphone to podcast with you, Chuck. I didn’t find oil.
Chuck Collins 28:26
Yeah. Well, two out of three doesn’t get you there, no. But a lot of people look out over at the billionaire class and say, Well, you know, they got up early in the morning, they worked hard, they created a new mouse trap that all of us want to buy, you know, MS, dos, or whatever it is. And so that narrative of everyone is where they deserve to be. That’s kind of the bumper sticker. And that has that shadow side, which is, if you’re not doing so well economically, that’s your fault too. There’s something wrong with you. There’s something deficient. You don’t have the grit, you don’t work hard, whatever that is the dominant narrative in our culture, the sort of culture of meritocracy. And what’s hard about that is there is this little kernel of truth, which is, yeah, what each of us do does matter. The fact that you do work a heck of a lot harder than me, Rob, means you probably should be rewarded a little bit for that while I’m goofing off and you’re working, but not 100 times more or 1000 times more or a million times more. And I think what we do is we we take a simplified narrative of difference in individual effort, and we kind of beam it like a searchlight onto economic statistics and realities. So you know, how do we change that narrative? Well, part of it is people need to be honest about the help that they get. All these billionaires, at some point, benefited from working in a society where we, together as taxpayers and people who live in communities and workers, contributed to the fertile ground that made. At individual wealth possible on a theological point of view. Just reading, reading about the new pope, Pope Leo the 14th says, you know, there’s no such thing as individual wealth. Society has a social mortgage on capital. Okay, that’s a little theoretical, but, but the basic idea is, No, you didn’t do it alone. Nobody does it alone. Getting people to tell true stories, or getting journalists to tell true investigative stories about how these how this wealth is created, is part of how we chip away at that narrative. The reality is, more and more people aren’t buying that story anymore, because they see, especially coming out of the pandemic, how the wealthy kind of rigged the rules to keep getting richer during the pandemic when everyone else was was in dire straits. So not everybody buys that the great man theory of wealth creation anymore.
Rob Dietz 30:55
So are you seeing evidence of that among young people and folks you talk to? Because, I mean, you’ve been chipping away at this for your whole career, chipping away at inequality and trying to make sure that we do have fairness and justice in our opportunities in the economy. Are you sensing that? Are we going to have a groundswell of anti-billionaire and an equality platform?
Chuck Collins 31:19
Absolutely, there has been a cultural shift, an attitude shift, reflected in polling and all kinds of things. Younger people, people under 35 tend to look at billionaires and say, yeah, these are the people who are pulling up the ladder and denying me opportunity. And it’s the crusty older baby boomers who are kind of like, hey, the billionaires, they’re creating wealth, and, you know, they’re that’s good, you know, no problem. So there is a generational shift and a political shift happening. I think more people are sort of souring on this idea, like, somehow these billionaires, isn’t it great, and aren’t they going to help make it for a strong economy? Because we’re seeing how at this stage, billionaires are using their wealth and power to extract more wealth and power from the healthy economy. They’re kind of going into the housing market and saying, How can we squeeze those mobile home park tenants? I’ll buy the mobile home park, as one of them said, you know, it’s like owning a waffle house where your customers are chained to the seats. We’re just gonna they have no choice. They’re just gonna have to pay more, and we’re gonna squeeze more out of it, or we’re gonna buy up all the single family houses in a community and rent them back to people who used to be able to buy a house, but in this economy, can’t. And we’re just gonna keep squeezing more and more wealth out of the real economy. And people are getting wise to that.
Rob Dietz 32:43
Yeah, my head is starting to spin with that. I could see I’m well into my middle age time now, and I thought housing was expensive when I was early in my career. I think a young person now thinks they have to be a part of the billionaire class just to buy a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house.
Chuck Collins 33:05
Yeah, and we should understand, yes, there’s gentrification, and there’s historically always this dynamic when wealthy people can bid up the cost of land and housing. But we’re kind of heading into warp speed on that front, and we’re not even talking about the number of billionaires from around the world who are bringing wealth to the United States and buying up land, housing, forest land, farmland and real estate, because the United States is a good place to park a lot of wealth and keep extracting more wealth from it. So even global billionaires are coming to the US, because we’re also a tax haven. Now, if you’re trying to avoid your taxes in Africa or Europe or wherever, bring your wealth to the United States, we’ve rolled out the welcome mat to tax dodgers from around the world.
Rob Dietz 33:53
Okay, so it’s clear that we’ve gone the wrong direction, policy wise, based on what you just said and some of the other things that that we’ve covered here, what should we do differently? What’s the policy agenda to stop this whole burning by billionaires?
Chuck Collins 34:13
You know, just to underscore, I think the first stage is to just understand how an economic system that rewards billionaires harms you. Take it personally to look at the world through the lens, through the eyeglasses, if you will, of how billionaires are disrupting your life, because that is how we’re going to talk to our neighbors and build a political movement and a social movement to push back and the second is to understand how billionaires have captured our political system, and we need to we’re going to have to fight like hell to get it back. We kind of know what the policy agenda is. I mentioned, build back better, but we can even just look at the years after World War II to the 1970s you know, we had an economy where the wealthy paid much higher taxes, and we invested in things like first-time home buyer loan programs, debt-free higher education, infrastructure that helped everybody, not just the rich. Down the list, that was a shared prosperity economy, and initially that was racially discriminatory, like after World War II, the GI Bill mostly went to white returning veterans, not veterans of color. But even by the 60s and 70s, the racial wealth divide was narrowing, the gender income gap was narrowing. We were becoming a more equitable, equal society, and then we took this radical wrong turn. Now I would say one thing is to think about campaigns that address personal things that people really need right now, affordable housing, and raise revenue from the billionaires in the top 1/10 of 1% so how about a luxury real estate transfer tax in your town that goes into a fund that creates permanently affordable housing? Or let’s tax private jet fuel and fund green infrastructure. Or let’s tax wealth to save democracy, not just for the revenue, but for simply breaking apart these bastions of power.
Rob Dietz 36:20
It’s a brilliant point. I mean, I got to think, if you polled the average person out there on the street, they’re going to be in favor of taxing private jets, private jet mooring fees, or whatever you call it, to park at an airport, private jet fuel, anything private jet. You know, it s pretty easy to say, Yeah, let’s tax that, but, but as you said, the billionaires have the hold on the policy makers, so we’re gonna have to fight like hell there. There’s some examples of that, right? I mean, you certainly have the Bernie Sanders anti-oligarchy tour that’s been going on. Do you see other successful things happening out there that people are deciding to band together to try to take back the political power that should be in the hands of the people.
Chuck Collins 37:10
I mean, you see a lot more political discussion about the impact of billionaires in all these spheres, and as well as sort of private equity firms. You know, it used to be that our community hospitals were started by religious orders and charitable organizations to care for people. Now they’re all being bought up by, you know, predatory investors who want to squeeze more money out of the health care system. And some people are saying radical things like, well, maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to own hospitals. You know, maybe there shouldn’t be wealth extraction arenas, you know. So that sensibility is actually really encouraging. And I would underscore Senator Bernie Sanders and the fight oligarchy tour, going to all these red states and places, bringing in 10s of 1000s of people with that very populist message, which is, got to stop the oligarchs. We got to fight push back. We’re being encouraged to think, well, politics won’t make a difference in my life. It’s not going to improve my situation. So I have to figure this out individually. But that’s part of how they beat us, is to get us all thinking about individualized solutions to a systemic problem. And I think when we get out there and say, No, we should have a system, a decent system, of childcare in this country. It’s not up to everybody to sort of figure it out, and how do we care for retiring elders who live longer in our society? Is every family going to have to come up with their own blueprint for aging in place? You know, those are societal problems. When we come together, we can, we can totally make a difference. I think people know that, but they are discouraged. And frankly, the oligarchs want you to be discouraged. They want you to think, oh, yeah, just sidle up to me, I’ll help you, Rob. We’ll let the rest of these losers, you know, over here, swim in the rising tide.
Rob Dietz 39:10
Well, I want to say I think there’s a huge urgency in your message, Chuck. Time is really important here. You talked about the emissions earlier. Obviously, climate, if we keep increasing our emissions, that’s a ticking time bomb. The more we allow private equity to buy up what should be public goods, public entities, institutions — that’s a time bomb. And maybe most important for you, Chuck, is the title of your book — it is Burned by Billionaires. But you’re gonna have to write Churned by Trillionaires or Trounced by Trillionaires, or whatever it is, pretty quick here, if we allow this to continue, and we don’t want that to happen.
Chuck Collins 39:51
No, we’re gonna probably see the first trillionaire in by the potentially by the end of the decade, if not in the next six months. With Elon Musk, who just hit the half a trillion dollar wealth mark yesterday. Here we are in early October. So our danger lights should be flashing right now, right?
Rob Dietz 40:10
I guess hinged is the opposite of unhinged, you know. And thank goodness our first trillionaire will be such a hinged individual, right? Unbelievable. Okay, I want to give you the last word on what in the world should a listener do. You know, I’ve been hearing what you’re saying. I’ve read your book. I mean, I’m gonna that’s my first callout to what a listener should do is get a copy of Burned by Billionaires. Give it a read, get some righteous anger, and then proceed. But what should they proceed with Chuck?
Chuck Collins 40:47
Well, I think it is thinking about what’s a game changing campaign that would address a harm that is affecting you personally and your community, and linking it to a tax billionaire reign in billionaire strategy, you know. So if you’re really concerned about affordable housing, let’s organize to create permanently affordable housing paid for by taxing the harms, taxing speculation and luxury housing transfers. We do have to talk about taxing the rich. There is no other way around it. We, you know, the rich have basically opted out of paying taxes, laughing at us now as we try to scramble to pay for the expenses that we all share. You know, the other is the satirical organizing side. People should check out Trillionaires for Trump, join the satirical resistance. They just launched their healthcare campaign called Go Fund Yourself. It’s very playful and fun. And believe it or not, satire and satirizing the billionaires is part of our power and part of how we reclaim our power in this moment when it feels like we can’t make a difference, and then, yeah, join others. You know, in my town, actually, this may sound irrelevant, but we started a weekly coffee klatch where 30 or 40 neighbors come together to build a sense of neighborliness and community. And there’s no actual political agenda there, except right now, in this moment, neighborliness is a political, radical act, being together and facing the future with your neighbors. So the work of Post Carbon Institute, the Resilience.org website, if you’re not looking at that community of practice about how do we build the alternatives in place and prepare ourselves and our neighbors for a disrupted future. That’s a compelling part of how we need to respond. But don’t give up on changing the larger system right now. I think there are some pressure points. There are some cracks in the system, and our job is to get our foot in there and make those cracks bigger and form alliances and engage our discouraged neighbors too, if the discouraged people got re engaged that this is a critical time to do that.
Rob Dietz 43:12
So well said, Chuck. I mean, you’re hitting themes that are near and dear to our hearts here in Crazy Town, with the humor, the satire, obviously, and then the neighborliness and community and working together to take back the power that that has been stolen by the billionaires. Your book is Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. I encourage everyone to take a look at that. And obviously the other work you’ve done. I’m a fan, Chuck. I really appreciate your writing, and most of all, just appreciate the attitude and the professionalism that you bring to the table in discussing what’s frankly not discussed enough. So thank you so much for that.
Chuck Collins 44:01
It’s great talking to you, Rob. Listen, I got to go catch my private jet. It’s time to head back to the East Coast, so it’s nice to see you in person, but
Rob Dietz 44:09
Yeah, I’m going to ride my bike to my private jet and then fly it over to my super yacht, so I’ll see you.
Chuck Collins 44:17
See you in Monaco.
Rob Dietz 44:18
Take care, Chuck.
Chuck Collins 44:19
Thanks, Rob.
Melody Allison 44:20
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