Killing all the billionaires is not the answer

It was then I knew I’d had enough,
Burned my credit card for fuel, and
Headed out to where the pavement
turns to sand . . .–Neil Young, “Thrasher”

If all the billionaires and those in their wills were to die today, the world likely would be a better place, with suffering massively diminished. The economy could then blossom, no longer working only for the few at the expense of the many. It would be easy to kill all the billionaires, there are millions of us for every one of them.

But killing all the billionaires is not the answer. Despite the fact that they kill millions of us every year with unsafe products, in unsafe workplaces, through needless starvation and death owing to a rationing of food and health care, to murder the bastards would make us no better than are they. It would only make martyrs of them and they could soon be replaced by scum equally worthless.

Instead, we should concentrate on ways to make the world more democratic so that we may exact fair taxes from the billionaires. In this way we may stop the wars that go on to further enrich the billionaires. In this way we may improve the environment, instead of destroying it for the enrichment of the billionaires, as we do today.

If we don’t stop these senseless wars that take place to enrich the billionaires, we may one day expect to see global, thermonuclear war end civilization.

If we don’t start addressing environmental problems, we will one day become extinct from pollution caused so that billionaires may increase their wealth.

In the modern corporate world, billionaires have divested themselves of all responsibility. Their investments, diversified throughout various corporations of the world, put pressure on CEOs to do whatever it takes to increase profits at any cost to the planet, pushing wars and pollution.

Gaia

There is a scientific theory called Gaia which has it that the biosphere is a living entity that self corrects. That is to say when one element is out of control, Gaia brings that element in line so that there is harmony.

Homo Sapiens have emerged as the greatest threat to Gaia’s balance in modern times. All around us species are dying by the thousands each year, species that have lived on earth for millions of years.

To Gaia, we are only one species, one of the great apes out of control. Our closest relatives, DNA tells us, are the chimpanzee and the gorilla. We did not evolve from them, that is nonsense. They evolved with us. We had common ancestors very long ago, but gorillas are closer to us than they are to chimps, and chimps are closer to us than they are to gorillas. So you can’t accurately lump those two species as somehow below us in the evolutionary chain.

It is ridiculous of us to think we are somehow more important to the universe than other creatures. Mother Nature, or Gaia, would not accept that. Even the tiniest plant photosynthesizes, contributing wonderfully to the earth’s oxygen levels (and the only way it gets replaced or we would die).

If all of the one-celled plants at the bottom of the food chain were to suddenly die, we would soon find out that they are more important to the chain of life on earth than humans, as a massive die-off occurred.

Alga, blue whales, amoeba and redwood trees are all important and threatened more by humans than any other peril. Most of the species on the planet would be far better off if all of the humans died, and Gaia would again have her balance of nature.

When we realize that we are not as important to life as the one-celled plants, we should be humbled and understand that nature is a complex jigsaw puzzle in which all of the pieces are important and interlink.

The ridiculous obsession with creating billionaires at any cost to the environment is the single biggest reason that humans are environmentally out of control.

Global, thermonuclear war

Wars have been a part of human history for the amusement of the ruling classes for centuries. It is said that the early European kings would line up their peasants to kill one another for sport during times when they were not needed for planting or harvesting. The kings would wager land, wives or other possessions on the outcome, as they took joy in watching the peasants chop off each other’s arms and legs with swords, scythes, axes and other weapons of the time until it was clear that one side was defeated.

In this way, war’s bloodshed was to some extent limited. Today this is no longer true.

In his book, Inside the Third Reich, Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, explained how millions of people could be murdered, including Jews, Gypsies, communists, labor organizers, homosexuals and others, without most of the population knowing it was happening. He explained that in the technology of the twentieth century it was easy for a small number of people to commit such a holocaust.

Despite the fact that modern thermonuclear weapons are being produced far beyond numbers necessary to destroy civilization, the strategies of our ruling classes have not caught up with the reality.

Decades ago I edited anti-nuke articles of Carl Sagan for Physicians for Social Responsibility. Carl was one of the scientists who signed on to a major study of global thermonuclear war known as the TTAPS, concluding that following such a global war, we would have a phenomenon known as “Nuclear Winter.”

The concept entered the mainstream media with ridicule, corporate “journalists” accusing the scientists of predicting that the world would be buried in ice as part of the study. That was never the intention.

In fact, a typical Nuclear Winter was thought to only drop global temperatures a degree or two Celsius. But Carl concluded that a drop of 1.5 degrees Celsius would be enough to wipe out the entire Canadian wheat crop. With Canada as a major exporter (and one might imagine a loss of such crops in Russia and other northern wheat growing nations), there would be massive global starvation.

Though many scientists have since questioned the Nuclear Winter theory, Carl went to his grave convinced it is valid.

In the first fraction of a second after exploding, a nuclear bomb is hotter than the center of the sun, so we know that fires would be started.

Modern cities are very different from the cities of World War Two. If a small nuclear warhead hit a modern city anywhere, the entire city will burn. There are natural gas lines connecting houses in modern cities. More automobiles full of gasoline, and gas stations, than ever. There would be no way to put out such a nuclear fire, even if firemen could be found willing to sacrifice their lives (because it would be certain death to fight such fires, as we discovered in the Chernobyl disaster in which all of the firemen died).

Most nuclear targets are at the edge of cities, because the military bases need food and other supplies that cities offer. So to hit military targets, one also burns a city. Imagine the heat that large burning cities would create. In the Nuclear Winter theory, particles of ash would be sent up into the stratosphere and blown around the world.

But we don’t need a Nuclear Winter theory to wonder how our leaders can contemplate destroying cities in this manner. We have clearly reached a time when we must get rid of our simple-minded ruling classes who believe that war is a game for them to play in order to control global economies with which to further enrich billionaires.

Killing the billionaires

If billionaires were one-percent as intelligent as they think they are, they would realize that we must change the way we think about the accumulation of wealth by a few, at any cost to the public interest.

To stop the warriors and stop the polluters who now doom future generations by their actions, we must find a way to promote democracy in the public interest. To do that, we must somehow control the billionaires, and I think the best way would be to tax them until they are no longer billionaires, applying those taxes in the public interest.

The Norse countries of Europe do something like this and enjoy a very high standard of living for all their people, and none has found it necessary to make nuclear warheads for their “defense.” It is difficult to become a billionaire there, but there are many millionaires, and there is little or no poverty.

It makes no difference though that we ask that billionaires not be killed. Like Russian Czars or French kings, at the rate we are going they will one day be slaughtered in a violent revolution. So it’s really to the advantage of our overlords to wake up and realize they are taking humanity down a highway to hell.

Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.