In response to U.S. President Joe Biden’s pronouncement in his State of the Union Address that the U.S. Dept. of Justice is creating a task force to identify and confiscate all holdings of Russian oligarchs wherever globally possible, while branding these Russians as collective criminals and accusing them of having “bilked billions of dollars off this [Russia’s/Putin’s] violent regime,” Richard Eskow, in an article for Consortiumnews.com posted March 8, asserts factually and polemically that the world should take an honest and critical view of American oligarchs, in turn.
In “Now Let’s Do the US Oligarchs,” Eskow illustrates how the Russian oligarchy pales in comparison to its American counterparts, both in empirical wealth and in the power to wield it globally and have it enhanced through the U.S. government, often to the detriment of the world at large.
In the “violent regime” business, the author references the well-known laundry list of both direct and proxy wars organized and prosecuted by the United States over the past twenty years through the military-industrial complex, which Eskow illustrates is a revolving door and stepping stone for Washington politicians after retirement. The writer cites a report from The Center for Responsive Politics, that over the past twenty years, the arms industry’s donors and lobbyists have spent $285 million in campaign contributions and $2.5 billion in lobbying to influence the defense industry (this being merely what is reported). This relationship, however, is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
While portraying Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates as examples of “mega-oligarchs” who became bonafide global power brokers through incestuous relationships with the U.S. government, Eskow illustrates how wealth and power are used immorally though governmental relationships across the spectrum of American society: from health insurance executives providing inadequate or non-existent care, hence killing people for profit; big-pharma, at the root of the deadly opioid crisis from which they escaped culpability after profiting spectacularly, to speculators everywhere, who, as Eskow articulates, are “aided by their government’s benign view of their predatory business practices.”
As an example of the magnitude of oligarchic wealth from the U.S. compared with that of Russia, Eskow cites the net worth of Musk and Bezos as close to half a trillion dollars combined, while the “criminal” oligarchs cited by Biden in his State of the Union Address possess between a ‘mere’ $20-$30 billion each.
During the past two years of the Covid pandemic, which cost millions of people their lives directly and plunged at least tens of millions more into poverty, homelessness, and famine, Eskow cites indicative and appalling statistics to demonstrate the nature of the oligarchy in the US:
• The top 20 US billionaires increased their net wealth by $1.8 trillion (from $3.5 trillion pre-pandemic to $5.3 trillion post-pandemic).
