Since the election, the chorus has been growing in the United States raising awareness that we’re quickly slipping into (or have already arrived at) oligarchy. However, Noam Chomsky said it best when he declared, even before the 2016 election of Donald Trump, that the United States is a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy. An oligarchy is government power concentrated in the hands of the few so you could say a plutocracy is a form of oligarchy. Cambridge dictionary defines plutocracy as “a system of government in which the richest people in a country rule or have power.”

Trump, an alleged billionaire himself, is the richest person to ever hold the presidency. According to ABC news, he has assembled the wealthiest presidential administration in modern history to take over next year. At least 13 billionaires are set to take on government posts. The total combined net worth of the wealthiest members of his administration could surpass nearly $500 billion. But of course the lion’s share of that total net worth is owned by just one, foreign born billionaire: Elon Musk. Even without Elon, Trump’s cabinet is worth at least $7 billion and many of his picks for ambassadors are also billionaires. For comparison, Joe Biden’s cabinet, according to ABC, has a combined net worth of $118 million. Still a concentration of wealth, to be sure, but nothing compared to the billionaires we’re about to see ascend to the throne when Trump takes office next month. And recent events make it all too clear how much sway these unelected billionaires will have over the elected billionaire in office. And of course none will have the power over president elect Trump quite like Elon Musk.

From using his role in the Department of Government Efficiency for personal and financial gain to using the megaphone he bought on Twitter to threaten our elected officials, Elon Musk is demonstrating just how dangerous the concentration of both money and power in the hands of the few can be to democracy. Let’s get into it.

Thank you to my partner on today’s video, Lumen. I’ve been, for the first time in my life, actually prioritizing the health of my nervous system lately. After the stress of the pandemic and a stint working an incredibly demanding job as a corporate lawyer, my body was messed up, to say the least. I gained 40 pounds, lost my period, was constantly tired all the time, something was wrong. This experience sent me down a rabbit hole of learning everything I could about health, wellness, hormones, and metabolism. Turns out it’s all connected, and it’s not as simple as “calories in vs calories out” and “eat more vegetables and protein for more energy.” And once you start down that rabbit hole, you’ll find a million purported “experts” online giving you “advice” that’s iffy at best, and it’s overwhelming and impossible to know what’s actually right for YOUR body. That’s where Lumen comes in. Lumen is the world’s first handheld metabolic coach. It’s a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. In less than 30 seconds, first thing in the morning, Lumen lets me know whether I’m burning carbs or fat for fuel.

This is really important because when we can easily shift from burning carbs and fats in our body, depending on our energy needs, it’s a sign of metabolic flexibility. Lumen then gives you recommendations to improve your metabolic health based on the context of your breath measurement. Lumen helps me focus on balance, not perfection, and educates me about my own body. Having that personalized insight into how your body is functioning is so key to learning how to make your body feel the best that it can feel.

So, if you want to stay on track with your health this holiday season, go to lumen dot me slash leeja to get 15% off your Lumen. That is L-U-M-E-N-DOT-ME Slash LEEJA for 15% off or just click the link below. Thank you, Lumen, for sponsoring this episode!

This past weekend, in the wee hours of Saturday morning, the Senate narrowly passed a bipartisan funding bill hours before the government was set to shut down. The bill temporarily funds the federal government through March, when we get to do this all over again, and, in order to get it passed, was whittled down from over 1500 pages to just over 100.

On Wednesday last week, as the House was preparing to vote on the omnibus spending bill, Elon Musk took to Twitter, according to Salon posting over 40 times to rail against the spending bill, calling on his supporters to “stop the steal of your tax dollars.” (I’ll note that the revised bill that passed cost about the same amount of money as the longer one.) Musk also threatened, “Any member of the house or senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in two years!” According to Politico, much of Musk’s twitter based tantrum included promoting outright falsehoods, including agreeing with a post saying “Just close down the government until January 20th. Defund everything. We will be fine for 33 days.” That’s right, just shut it down until Trump takes over, that would be fine and painless for everyone! A five-week shutdown from 2018 to 2019 caused an estimated $3 billion dollars in losses. Musk also railed against the pay increases the legislators gave themselves. And while it is an easy talking point to say hey look they’re trying to pay themselves more, and I personally don’t think their end of year review should result in any sort of bonus or raise given their “does not meet expectations” performance. Musk again shared false information, however, saying they were giving themselves a 40% pay raise. Members of Congress haven’t gotten a raise since 2009 but according to Politico the maximum potential pay adjustment would be 3.8%, an increase of $6,600.

Elon also said the bill would block house republicans from investigating the January 6th committee, even though the bill literally didn’t say that anywhere. Musk reposted a Libs of Tiktok tweet claiming the bill would fund “bioweapons labs” when in reality it simply allows for the creation of labs to conduct “biomedical research to support public health and medical preparedness” as part of a pandemic preparedness plan.

Also concerning is that Elon Musk beat Trump to the task of criticizing the bill–Trump and VP elect JD Vance who literally no one cares about anymore and I love that, didn’t start posting their criticisms until later that evening, with some concerned that Trump’s lambasting was really just a means of going beyond what Musk said in order to re-establish his power and authority. Which sets a really great precedent for all of us–the president battling the richest man in the world to have the last, most bombastic word. I see no way for that to go wrong!!

And then Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty had the GAUL to go on CNN and say “Thank God Elon Musk bought Twitter, because that’s the only way we’d even know what’s in this bill.” CNN noted “The comment might seem strange since lawmakers ought not to need a social media network to be able to read a bill before they vote.”

To be clear, yes 1500 pages is long but it’s also literally their job. According to the Washington Post, the original bill included an increase to the debt ceiling with Trump had demanded from Speaker Johnson, plus funding for pediatric cancer research, federal funding for replenishing stolen food stamp funds, an overhaul to regulations around pharmacy benefit managers, which are scummy middlemen who negotiate drug prices and determine what medications are covered by insurance firms and who often charge more for a drug than what they pay to the pharmacies to dispense it, keeping the difference in profit. The spending package originally also included bipartisan bills that would crack down on junk fees used by ticket sellers and hotels to jack up your prices that they typically don’t tell you about until the end of the checkout process. And it would have criminalized some deepfake images as well as revenge porn. The new bill that actually passed was whittled down to 100 pages largely because the pharmacy benefit manager language was so lengthy because healthcare regulations tend to be highly technical, but it stripped all of that out, opting instead to provide for the continued functions of government at their current funding levels and also adding about $110 billion in relief funds for survivors of natural disasters as a response to recent hurricanes Milton and Helene and $10 billion in economic aid for farmers.

Senator Hagerty also noted that his and his colleague’s phones were ringing off the hook with constituent complaints about the bill in response to Musk’s tweets. And if that’s not the most convincing show of the power that Elon Musk gained when he bought Twitter and changed the algorithm to show his posts more prominently than everyone else’s on one of the largest social media sites on the planet, and then turned around and bought an election, I don’t know what is. We have an unelected foreign billionaire with zero political experience influencing the actions of both the President and the American people largely through the ALLEGED propagation of disinformation. And it took just one afternoon of tweeting from the shitter to kill a major spending bill and nearly shut down the entire government, prompting Democrats to wake from their post election slumber and declare him “President Musk.” Given that Trump fuckin HATES sharing the limelight and CERTAINLY hates sharing power, that title quickly got under his skin, with CNN reporting that he made it clear at a recent conservative Turning Point USA event that Musk is DEFINITELY not president.

But in many ways, the damage is done, with many in the GOP turning to Musk for leadership in addition to their loyalties to Trump. In fact, with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s leadership in tatters after the government funding bill fiasco, some Republicans are calling for Elon Musk himself to become Speaker of the House. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul made the call on Twitter, saying Elon should take over from Johnson. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted her support, saying she’d “be open to supporting ElonMusk.” Utah Senator Mike Lee agreed as well. According to reporting by Truthout, the speaker of the house has always been an elected representative serving in the house. However, it’s not technically required that the speaker of the house be a representative. The constitution just says that the House of Representatives “shall choose their speaker and other officers.” That’s it. Beyond that it’s up to the House to set the rules. And nothing technically says foreign unelected billionaire Elon Musk can’t be the speaker of the house.

According to the National Constitution Center, the speaker of the house is one of the most important roles in Washington. It is SECOND in line to the presidency, so if Musk took the speakership, only 2 people would have to die, one of whom is nearly in his 80s, for him to become the president, though of course he is foreign born and the constitution says the president must be born in the United States so that would present its own challenges. The constitution center goes on to say “the Speaker plays a key role as negotiator between the House and president and with the Senate, and as the point person for the House’s fundamental role in originating and passing legislation and controlling “the power of the purse” to tax and spend taxpayer money.” As speaker, Musk would be tasked with forging deals between the House, Senate, and Trump, and would make calls about how to spend taxpayer money, a role he’s already been promised in the yet to be created Department of Government Efficiency, but he would have a direct ability to introduce and dramatically influence tax spending as speaker of the house, which would include passing legislation that affects his many business interests that are the reason why he’s the richest man in the world in the first place. Of course, any suggestion that Musk become house speaker would require he be actually voted into the speakership, something that has proven to be very difficult for Republicans to find consensus over in recent years and which would be even more difficult given how unpopular Musk is even with some Republicans and the absolutely miniscule majority Republicans will hold in the House starting next month. So is it realistic? No. But is it concerning that some of our elected officials are calling for the placement of the unelected, foreign born richest man of the world as the head of the chamber of government that is meant to be most representative of and responsive to the people? Yes. Yes it is.

The problem with Elon Musk, and with unelected plutocrats generally, is that he has all the power that comes from being an elected official–the ability influence bills and laws, the ability to determine what the government spends our tax dollars on, and the huge megaphone that comes with being prominent in politics–but has none of the controls. He doesn’t have to worry about re-election, because he can buy whatever election he likes. He doesn’t have to be answerable to the people because we didn’t elect him in the first place. Elon Musk is the epitome of everything that goes wrong when oligarchy and especially plutocracy is allowed to take hold in a country. And our lack of any real campaign finance regulations is directly to blame for the growing influence of foreign-born billionaires in our government.

I have made so many episodes at this point about campaign finance reform and the citizens united decision and the dangerous role money plays in our government, and I will go blue in the face continuing to scream about it. Over the course of nearly half a decade posting videos on YouTube, I have created over 280 videos, and I have studied and discussed everything from healthcare to the US relationship with Israel to the housing crisis to the crisis with our education system and SO much more. Every single subject I have looked into. Every. Single. One. could be significantly improved if we got money out of our politics. If political campaigns were publicly financed and everyone had a fair shot at running for office and no one with deep pockets could come in and buy ad space and air time and create super PACs that hire door knockers and actively campaign in favor of policies and the politicians that will further their personal interests. If corporations weren’t given the same free speech rights as individuals and weren’t allowed to spend billions hiring lobbyists to flout the will of the people for the will of the wealthy few. Amd there is no political divide on this issue. According to Pew Research, 80% of US adults believe that people who donated a lot of money to political campaigns have too much influence when it comes to the decisions that members of Congress make. And 73% believe that lobbyists and special interest groups have too much influence when it comes to the decisions that members of Congress make. Controlling for party affiliation, 72% of democrats and 78% of republicans think lobbyists and special interest groups have too much influence, and 80% of democrats and 83% of Republicans believe people who donated money have too much influence. And 72% of US adults say there should be limits on election spending, including 71% of Republicans and 76% of Democrats. This is a thing we can ALL agree on. This gets at the very heart of the class struggle we’re becoming aware of in America because of the recent murder of UHC CEO Brian Thompson and the outpouring of support for Luigi Mangione. That event brought light to the issue of our abysmal healthcare system in this country, but for me it is so much bigger than that. Because, again, our healthcare system is abysmal because of the outsized influence money from the healthcare and health insurance industries plays in our politics, influencing regulations or the lack thereof, and killing the prospect of any kind of healthcare reform that would create the real changes needed to reel in a broken industry. It all comes back to campaign finance.

Citizens United, the Supreme Court case in 2010 in which the court determined that corporate money is speech and therefore should be allowed to flow with no limitation to influence our elections, was the beginning of the end. From there, dark money non profits which are allowed to hide the source of their funding have created webs of shady organizations funneling money into influencing our elections and laws while allowing the millionaires and billionaires who fund them to remain anonymous and free from public scrutiny. The very obvious long-term outcome of the Citizens United decision, as foretold by the dissent to the decision itself as well as legal analysts everywhere when the decision came down, is that the rich will be able to buy elections and elected officials.

A 5-minute long video posted 9 years ago from an organization called Represent Us called Corruption is Legal in America is perhaps the clearest demonstration of how this manifests. Because rich corporations and individuals can create shadow networks to hire lobbyists and influence the outcome of elections, studies have literally shown that the government does not represent us. Instead, a study out of Princeton found that, across the board, no matter how popular or unpopular a bill is with the majority of the American people, that bill has about a 30% chance of becoming law, no matter how much support it has or doesn’t have. HOWEVER, if you control for wealth, and take out the bottom 90% of Americans, the stats change significantly. The more the top 10% of Americans support a bill, the more statistically likely it is to becoming law, and even more significantly, the more the top 10% of Americans don’t support a bill, it is even more statistically likely to be killed. The top 10% of Americans have the power to pass or block bills and the opinions of the rest of us have literally zero statistically significant sway. I’ve linked this video in the description, I think about it ALL the time.

The problem, I’ve found, is that people need a rallying cry. A simple, effective, catchy idea that gets people fucking riled up. And I’m really at a loss for how to make campaign finance reform sexy. Organizations like Open Secrets do amazing work to compile information about how money is influencing our politics but then don’t do a great job getting the message out and galvanizing actual collective action. So if you have any ideas for how to make “getting money out of politics” a sexy rallying cry, please for the love of god drop them in the comments.

The video I mentioned was put out 9 years ago but Represent US is still doing work to end corruption and might be a good place to start if you’re looking to get involved. They work at the local level to create strong campaign finance, ethics and lobbying laws, pass ranked choice voting initiatives, and end partisan gerrymandering. You can also check out move to amend dot org where they’re pushing for a constitutional amendment to overrule the Citizens United decision.

And if you’re interested in working with me directly, learning more about eating the rich and building solidarity, I invite you to join me over on Patreon, where I’m launching the Why, America? Co-Learning Lab on January 1st–get self-paced syllabi curated by me, plus guided discussions, and tangible action items for building solidarity and taking political action in this new gilded age. Plus you get ad free and uncensored versions of these videos as well. Go to patreon dot com slash leejamiller to join. Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons, Conn Conagher, Art, David, R_H, Tee, L’Etranger (Lukus), Joshua Cole, Thomas Johnson, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!

And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one I made a while ago about how money is ruining democracy. Wednesday is Christmas so I’ll be back next week on Monday with a brand new episode all about how the rich avoid paying taxes, so don’t forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell so you don’t miss out on all the things I got cookin for the new year.

Leeja Miller