Sixth Horseman Of The Apocalypse

Rides a luxury tank so as not to abuse a valuable stud

In the wild (photo ©2010 Weldon Berger)

(Due to circumstances entirely under our control, this newsletter is going out a day late, for which we apologize.)

Luxury tanks are, of course, an actual thing.

We’ve noted elsewhere that U.S. billionaires are capturing an increasing portion of the national wealth. The three with the most massive fortunes — Gates, Bezos, and Musk — at present hold as much of it as at least the 50% of people who reside in a heap at the lower end of the economy.

(The obvious question: if three billionaires control as much wealth as 50% of the rest of us, what percentage do all 600-plus U.S. billionaires — more than 200 of whom, mind you, don’t even make the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans — match? Stay tuned; we’re adding that up.)

ProPublica, the valuable non-profit news organization known for their collaborative investigative efforts, recently reported out a story with The Lever, an investigative and editorial site run by former Bernie Sanders staffer David Sirota and others, about a multi-billionaire's billion-dollar donation to one of the men most responsible for seating the specific reactionary judges running the Supreme Court these days.

Barre Seid doesn’t make the top 20 list of billionaires, but the long-time owner of Tripp Lite, a ubiquitous electronics manufacturer (products from which you’ll find in our headquarters, sadly), still managed a huge donation last year by giving his company to a non-profit run by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, who promptly sold the business for $1.6 billion.

As President Donald Trump’s adviser on judicial nominations, Leo helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, which recently eliminated Constitutional protections for abortion rights and has made a series of sweeping pro-business decisions. Leo, a conservative Catholic, has both helped select judges to nominate to the Supreme Court and directed multimillion dollar media campaigns to confirm them.

Leo derives immense political power through his ability to raise huge sums of money and distribute those funds throughout the conservative movement to influence elections, judicial appointments and policy battles. Yet the biggest funders of Leo’s operation have long been a mystery

Seid’s previous beneficiaries include The Heartland Institue, which has moved on from denying the ill effects of cigarette smoke to denying the existence of climate change. With the Tripp Lite donation, he crafted a simple and legal way to give a huge sum of money to a man he supports for a cause he supports while avoiding the potential half-billion in taxes he would have paid had he sold the company and donated the proceeds.

Billionaires tend to craft intricate estate plans to pass the family business to the next generation, fortified from taxation and protective of their vision. The apparently childless Seid didn’t have that option, but starting in April 2020, he set in motion a plan to make sure his fortune would go toward his favored causes.

That month, the Marble Freedom Trust was created, and Seid subsequently transferred his 100% ownership stake in Tripp Lite to the trust, according to the documents reviewed by The Lever and ProPublica.

In February 2021, Tripp Lite filed its annual reports with the state of Illinois as it had done for decades. But this time, Seid’s typewritten name had been crossed out as an officer of the company. Added as an officer, written in by hand, was Leonard Leo.

A Tripp Lite subsidiary in Nova Scotia, Canada, similarly removed Seid as a director and added Leo as a director in March 2021, according to disclosure filings.

Then, later that same month, Eaton Corporation, a large publicly traded company, acquired Tripp Lite for $1.65 billion.

Imagine the amount of fuckery one could get up to with that much money. You could help the next incarnation of Jeffry Dahmer establish a world-wide culinary institute (and probably do less damage).

Even the lowliest of billionaires, the striver down there in the 600s on the list, has enough resources to quietly buy a federal election or two, or some judgeships. Combining any ten of them to donate to inimical causes through the established Koch brothers networks or other dark money pipelines, or a new one of their own, would create the funding potential to dwarf what Seid did.

And that’s only at the federal level. Billionaires and billion-dollar corporations, some of which can leverage trillions of dollars to accomplish their goals, are immiserating millions upon millions of peoples lives through a variety of means. This story from two years ago, regarding “opportunity zones,” describes one such originating from Trump’s desire to do something for himself and fellow developers.

Trump and members in Congress are now touting opportunity zones as a way to boost economies in those same low-income communities hard hit by the coronavirus. In an attempt to show his support for minority communities during COVID-19 and the protests over George Floyd’s death, Trump bragged that opportunity zones have “created tens of thousands of jobs” in low-income, mostly minority, neighborhoods.  

There is no evidence that opportunity zones are benefiting low-income residents living in these neighborhoods. Developers and investors are not required to publicly report what they are investing in or if it creates affordable housing, jobs, or higher wages for the residents who live there. A recent study by the Urban Institute found that opportunity zones should be “redesigned so government dollars are allocated effectively and help” achieve intended outcomes like improved quality of life for low-income people.

Uber, a truly evil corporation, has lost more than $20 billion (!) since its inception, but thanks to investors and cash flow the company still has had enough money to roll over dozens of municipalities, breaking laws (“We’re just fucking illegal”) and ignoring regulations, exploiting drivers, and “lobbying” leaders across the globe, all while crippling taxi businesses worldwide.

We know what fossil fuel companies have done to deny global warming and confuse any discussion of it, especially Exxon. We know what the chemical industry and other toxic concerns have done in terms of perpetrating environmental racism, the most famous example of which worldwide is the 1984 Dow Chemical disaster in Bhopal, India.

Small towns, which lack the resources to combat environmental racism, are especially vulnerable.

Thanks to the 2008 crash, and again during the pandemic, Wall Street companies were able to buy mass quantities of single-family homes from distressed owners and mortgage companies stuck with massive numbers of repossessed homes.

Wall Street’s latest real estate grab has ballooned to roughly $60 billion, representing hundreds of thousands of properties. In some communities, it has fundamentally altered housing ecosystems in ways we’re only now beginning to understand, fueling a housing recovery without a homeowner recovery. “That’s the big downside,” says Daniel Immergluck, a professor of urban studies at Georgia State University. “During one of the greatest recoveries of land value in the history of the country, from 2010 and 2011 at the bottom of the crisis to now, we’ve seen huge gains in property values, especially in suburbs, and instead of that accruing to many moderate-income and middle-income homeowners, many of whom were pushed out of the homeownership market during the crisis, that land value has accrued to these big companies and their shareholders.”

From massive social engineering efforts to poisoning poor and Black communities to land and home grabs to greasing the skids for whatever the wealthy want, we are at the mercy of the rich, the corporations in which they invest, and the politicians at every level who do their bidding.

We have, though, the means to cow and cripple even the wealthiest corporations and, to a lesser extent, billionaires too. Legality may be an issue, but we have the means. We’re taking the next two or three days mostly off in order to focus again on one such: the general strike. Posts will meanwhile be skimpy but nevertheless entertaining.

(As always, if you have music recommendations we encourage you to drop them in the comments. Musical contributors to this post include Lucinda Williams, “Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone;” The Chills, “Kaleidoscope World;” The Mekons, “Deserted;” Chumbawamba, “Never Mind The Ballots.”)