The Real Big Brother
August 29, 2019
It's a billionaire's world and the biggest of them all is in the thick of
it, as Eric Zuesse explains.
By Eric Zuesse
Strategic Culture
Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post, which leads America's
news-media in their almost 100 percent support and promotion of
neoconservatism, American imperialism and wars. This includes sanctions,
coups, and military invasions against countries that America's billionaires
want to control but don't yet control - such as Venezuela, Syria, Iran,
Russia, Libya, and China.
These are aggressive wars against countries which have never aggressed
against the United States. They are not, at all, defensive, but the exact
opposite. It's not necessarily endless war (even Hitler hadn't planned
that), but war until the entire planet has come under the control of the
U.S. Government, a government that is itself controlled by America's
billionaires, the funders of neoconservatism and imperialism - in both major
American political parties, think tanks, newspapers, TV networks, etcetera.
Bezos has been a crucial part of neoconservatism, ever since, at the June
6-9 2013 Bilderberg meeting, he arranged with Donald Graham, the Washington
Post's owner, to buy that newspaper, for $250 million. Bezos had already
negotiated, in March of that same year, with the neoconservative CIA
Director, John Brennan, for a $600 million ten-year cloud computing
contract that transformed Amazon corporation, from being a reliable
money-loser, into a reliably profitable firm.
That caused Bezos's net worth to soar even more (and at a sharper rate of
rising) than it had been doing while it had been losing money. He became the
most influential salesman not only for books, but for the CIA, and for such
mega-corporations as Lockheed Martin. Imperialism has supercharged his
wealth, but it didn't alone cause it. Bezos might be the most ferociously
gifted business-person on the planet.
Some of America's billionaires don't care about international conquest as
much as he does, but all of them at least accept neoconservatism; none of
them, for example, establishes and donates large sums to, anti-imperialistic
organizations; none of America's billionaires is determined to end the reign
of neoconservatism, nor even to help the fight to end it, or at least to end
its grip over the U.S. government. None. Not even a single one of them does.
Plutocrat Bezos at the Pentagon with then Defense Secretary Ash Carter, May
2016. (Wikimedia Commons)
But many of them establish and donate large sums to neoconservative
organizations, or run neocon organs such as The Washington Post. That's the
way billionaires are, at least in the United States. All of them are
imperialists. They sponsor it; they promote it and hire people who do, and
demote or get rid of people who don't. Expanding an empire is extremely
profitable for its aristocrats, and always has been, even before the Roman
Empire.
Bezos wants to privatize everything around the world that can become
privatized, such as education, highways, health care, and pensions. The more
that billionaires control those things, the less that everyone else does;
and preventing control by the public helps to protect billionaires against
democracy that would increase their taxes and government regulations that
would reduce their profits by increasing their corporations' expenses. So,
billionaires control the government in order to increase their takings from
the public.
With the help of the war promotion of The Washington Post, Bezos is one of
the world's top personal sellers to the U.S. military-industrial complex. He
controls and is the biggest investor in Amazon corporation, whose Web
Services division supplies all cloud-computing services to the Pentagon, CIA
and NSA. (He's leading the charge in the most advanced facial recognition
technology too.)
In April there was a headline, "CIA Considering Cloud Contract Worth 'Tens
of Billions'," which contract could soar Bezos's personal wealth even higher
into the stratosphere, especially if he wins all of it (as he previously
did).
He also globally dominates, and is constantly increasing his control over
the promotion and sale of books and films, because his Amazon is the world's
largest retailer (and now also one of the largest publishers, producers and
distributors.) That, too, can have a huge impact upon politics and
government, indirectly, by promoting the most neocon works helping to shape
intellectual discourse (and voters' votes) in the country.
Bezos is crushing millions of retailers by his unmatched brilliance at
controlling one market after another as Amazon or as an essential middleman
for - and often even a controller of - Amazon's retail competitors.
He is a strong believer in "the free market", which he has mastered perhaps
better than anyone. This means that Bezos supports the unencumbered ability
of billionaires, by means of their money, to control and eventually absorb
all who are less powerful than they.
Because he is so enormously gifted himself at amassing wealth, he has
thus-far been able to rise to the global top, as being one of the world's
most powerful individuals. The wealthiest of all is King Salman- the owner
of Saudi Arabia, whose Aramco (the world's largest oil company) is, alone,
worth over a trillion dollars. (Forbes and Bloomberg exclude monarchs from
their wealth-rankings.)
President Donald Trump touches lighted globe with Egyptian President Abdel
Fattah al-Sisi and Saudi King Salman at the opening of Saudi Arabia's Global
Center for Combating Extremist Ideology on May 21, 2017. (Photo from Saudi
TV)
In fact, Bloomberg is even so fraudulent about it as to have headlined on
Aug. 10, "The 25 wealthiest dynasties on the planet control $1.4 trillion"
and violated their tradition by including on their list one monarch, King
Salman, whom they ranked at #4 as owning only $100 million, a ludicrously
low 'estimate', which brazenly excluded not just Aramco but any of the net
worth of Saudi Arabia.
Bloomberg didn't even try to justify their wacky methodology, but merely
presumed the gullibility of their readers for its acceptance. That King,
therefore, is at least seven times as rich as Bezos is. He might possibly be
as powerful as Bezos is. The supreme heir is lots wealthier even than the
supreme self-made billionaire or "entrepreneur" is.
Certainly, both men are among the giants who bestride the world in our era.
And both men are libertarians - champions of the belief that property rights
(of which, billionaires have so much) are the basis of all rights, and so
they believe that the wealthiest people possess the most rights of all, and
that the poorest people have the least, and that all persons whose net
worths are negative (having more debts than assets) possess no rights except
what richer people might donate to or otherwise grant to them, out of
kindness or otherwise (such as familial connections).
This - privatization of everything - is what libertarianism is: a person's
worth is his or her "net worth" - nothing else. That belief is pure
libertarianism. It's a belief that many if not most billionaires hold.
Billionaires are imperialistic because they seek to maximize the freedom of
the super-rich, regardless of whether this means increasing their takings
from, or ultimately impoverishing, everyone who isn't super-rich. They have
a coherent ideology. It's based on wealth. The public instead believes in
myths that billionaires enable to be promulgated.
Like any billionaire, Bezos hires and retains employees and other agents who
do what he/she wants them to do. This is their direct power. But
billionaires also possess enormous indirect power by means of their
interdependencies upon one-another, as each large corporation is
contractually involved with other corporations, especially with large ones
such as they; and, so, whatever power any particular billionaire possesses
is actually a shared power, along with the others. (An example was the deal
Bezos made with Graham.)
Collectively, they network together, even with ones they might never even
have met personally, but only through their representatives, and even with
their own major economic competitors. This is collective power which
billionaires possess in addition to their individual power as hirers of
employees and other agents.
Whereas Winston Smith, in the prophetic allegorical novel 1984, asked his
superior and torturer O'Brien, "Does Big Brother exist?"
"'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of
the Party.'
'Does he exist in the same way as I exist?'
'You do not exist,' said O'Brien."
Big Brother poster illustrating George Orwell's novel about modern
propaganda, 1984.
This collective power is embodied by Bezos as well as any billionaire does.
A few of the others may embody it too, such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett,
Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Charles Koch, Sergey Brin, Michael
Bloomberg, George Soros, and Jack Dorsey. They compete against each other,
and therefore have different priorities for the U.S. government; but, all of
them agree much more than they disagree in regards to what the Government
"should" do (especially that the U.S. military should be expanded - at
taxpayer's expense, of course, not their own).
Basically, Big Brother, in the real world is remarkably coherent and unified
- far more so than the public is - and this is one of the reasons why they
control Government, bypassing the public.
Here is how all of this plays out, in terms of what Bezos's agents have been
doing:
His Amazon pays low to no federal taxes because the Federal Government has
written the tax-laws to encourage companies to do the types of things that
Bezos has always wanted Amazon to do.
The U.S. government consequently encourages mega-corporations through taxes
and regulations to crush small firms by making it harder for them to grow.
That somewhat locks-in the existing aristocracy to be less self-made (as
Bezos himself was, but his children won't be).
Elected politicians overwhelmingly support this because most of their
campaign funds were donated by super-rich individuals and their employees
and other agents. It's a self-reinforcing system. Super-wealth controls the
government, which (along with the super-wealthy and their corporations)
controls the public, which reduces economic opportunity for them. The
end-result is institutionally reinforced extreme wealth-inequality, becoming
more extreme all the time.
The billionaires are the real Big Brothers. And Bezos is the biggest of them
all.
Eric Zuesse is a freelance writer.
