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Money loves power and the mega-rich can smell its perfume a mile away. You only had to watch them this week, giddy and almost drunk on its fragrance, forming a grovelling conga line to bend the knee before Donald Trump.
No wonder they were euphoric. If the outrageously rich hanker for anything more than cash and influence, it's the good old days when fortunes and empires were built without nosy regulators and messy safeguards. Trump, their fellow traveller, has promised them a future that looks awfully like the past.
History has seen this before, of course. But not bootlicking and brown-nosing on this grand scale. The procession of billionaires paying their respects to the new emperor - Australians Gina Rinehart and Anthony Pratt among them - can only mean one thing. The machinery of American government that influences the guiding philosophy behind much of the western world is now not only controlled by the ultra-wealthy. They own it.
Rinehart and Pratt recently took out fawning ads in the American press declaring their allegiance to Trump's vision of a future where regulations will be slashed, tax breaks extended and climate and environmental protections repealed or simply ignored.
For Rinehart this must feel like nirvana. After years of whining about government waste and praising the power of the free market, she will return to Australia flushed with Trump's victory, undoubtedly determined to play a significant part in a conservative victory in the approaching federal election.
Oh, the joy. Trump, who declared a "national energy emergency" on his first day in power, has ordered the oil to flow, the coal to burn and the forests to fall - payback for the tens of millions of dollars the oil, gas and logging industries donated to his campaign.
The shackles are off for other multinational czars, too. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, who is weirdly demanding more "masculine energy" in the workplace, has sacked his army of fact checkers, leaving Facebook's responsibility to the truth to the mob.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos, the ruler of a vast jungle built on cardboard and algorithms, moved with the cold stillness of a predator hunting more prey by preventing his editors at The Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris.
Elon Musk, whose strange air of other-worldliness surpasses even the eeriness of Zuckerberg, now has the imprimatur to slash US government spending, including welfare services. No wonder he's fixated on colonising Mars. With his satellites circling above us, his electric cars gliding past us while gathering our data and his fortune fattened by billions in tax credits and subsidies, he will soon need a new world to conquer.
We know what happens next, don't we? When the rich in ancient Rome bought and fought their way into power the Republic was torn apart and eventually fell. Russia's oligarchs fed on the bones of the old Soviet Union and created a lawless empire for themselves, strewn with poverty and hopelessness that still exists today.
Australia has not been immune, either. In the early to mid-19th century, the squattocracy controlled vast areas of land, giving it extraordinary political influence. A century later, a ruling class of European-descended elites engineered and maintained the White Australia policy to preserve their social and economic dominance.
The power of the wealthy few was again on show just a few months ago when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese scuppered a key election promise to create an Environmental Protection Agency after intense lobbying by the WA Premier and the mining industry.
A feeble Joe Biden warned in the final days of his presidency that the US was in danger of becoming an oligarchy - a nation run by a small, select few. It became one overnight this week.
History tells us, over and over again, that oligarchy leads to inequality. The 20 richest Australians now boast more money than our bottom two million households combined, according to Andrew Leigh, the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury.
Globally, the world's richest 1 per cent own close to half of the planet's wealth.
And when the waters rise and the land further cracks with heat and the rivers turn to dust, the mega-rich will flee to their bunkers, sipping their bottled water and breathing their filtered air, claiming it wasn't their doing, that they only intended what was best for business and for the world at large.
They will still own their fortunes. But they will be the kings of ash, rulers of a dying world, and all their dollars will amount to nothing. Small solace for the rest of us.
HAVE YOUR SAY: Do you support Donald Trump's business-first policies? Could Trump's victory influence the outcome of our coming federal election? Is Australia no longer the egalitarian nation it once claimed to be? Email us: echidna@theechidna.com.au
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
- Former Liberal Party staffer Bruce Lehrmann wants to face trial without a jury on charges alleging he raped a woman in 2021.
- More than one in four girls experienced being sexually propositioned online by an adult before they turned 18, often as young as age 11, according to research by the eSafety Commissioner and Queensland University of Technology.
- A $50 million debt lifeline for Rex will pave the way for a second crack at selling the embattled regional airline. The federal government will acquire $50 million of debt from Rex's largest creditor.
THEY SAID IT: "It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their own selfish purposes." - Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States
YOU SAID IT: When millionaires are concerned billionaires wield too much power and influence and say wealth extremism threatens democracy, you know something is broken.
"The millionaires got it wrong," writes Rowan. "Wealth was never simply about worth. It was about worthless people vulgarly amassing money. To quote Maxwell Smart, 'If only they had used their riches for goodness instead of evil.'"
Maggie writes: "If only there were more like Chuck Feeney, a billionaire who gave away his wealth quietly and effectively. He called it Giving While Living, and by all reports, he was happier for it. When he died in 2023 at the age of 92, he left the world a better place. I doubt that any of the manipulative mob could claim that."
"We wonder why our young people are depressed, but many see few positives in their future," writes Sue. "Bringing climate change under control has just hit another major setback with the Mump/Trusk alliance in the US, tertiary education costs a fortune, and technical education isn't far behind. Even with qualifications a decent paying job is not guaranteed. Yes, we did get a tax break a little while ago, but while we low and relatively normal income earners actually pay tax because we haven't the alternatives, what sort of taxes are these billionaires paying? Remember social contract theory and Rousseau? Tax is part of that."
Murray writes: "Billionaires are not a threat to democracy, they exist because of democracy. Changing the system so achievers cannot achieve is called Marxism. It has one fatal flaw. As Margaret Thatcher said, 'The problem with socialism is, eventually you run out of other people's money.'the pr"
Sue K writes: "Billionaires have always attempted to control governments. Nothing new there. What's new is that they no longer feel the need to be behind the scenes or be subtle in their manipulation of our leaders. Trump has made them feel they have a legitimate right to tell us how to live. Democracy! What a concept!"
"Great cartoon, Peter," writes Tony. "Couldn't believe Trump was selling copies of the Bible to fundraise during the election campaign."
Jan writes: "I have always believed that the growing uneven distribution of wealth in any community is the single greatest threat to the future stability of any vibrant, functioning democracy. Amongst other things, our taxation system here in Australia continues to fail to address and rectify this situation. Wage and salary earners continue to carry the tax burden while the obscenely wealthy and major corporations often pay little or no tax because of loopholes in the system."
