Billionaires Are Buying Everything, Including Free Speech
Their utopia is your dystopia.
They say money can’t buy you love or happiness, but the world’s billionaires don’t care. They’re not interested in that.
They only want one thing:
Power.
Money can buy you plenty of that. There’s one common thread in most of the popular dystopian novels and movies out there, whether we’re talking about Blade Runner or The Hunger Games.
It’s not the end of the world.
It’s rich people.
Billionaires are buying our happiness.
The super rich are using their money to buy all the power, and all the means to happiness. If they can’t buy happiness, they want to control ours as much as they possibly can. We can’t get anything for free anymore. We pay for everything from healthcare to the water we drink.
It’s getting worse.
Our politicians have crushed public goods and services. They’ve been defunding everything from schools to the post office, all in order to replace them with their own private alternatives. The only thing they won’t defund is the police, who exist to protect rich people’s property.
This is what happens when you privatize everything.
Life becomes a commodity.
Billionaires are buying up all the free speech.
Freedom of speech barely exists anymore.
Our constitutional rights have turned into assets. The more money you have, the more speech you enjoy. It’s all right there in the Supreme Court’s decision Citizens United V. Federal Election Commission:
Money is speech.
Orwell couldn’t have written it better.
Billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have bought most of our newspapers and social media platforms, or they’re trying to. They’re using them to disseminate their own propaganda, turning the public’s attention to what they want them to see and hear. They might lean one way or the other, but it doesn’t matter when both parties are ultimately upholding and reinforcing the same status…
