May 6, 2025
I grew up in the 1980s acutely aware of both the threat of nuclear armageddon and the fact that millions of people had been working for decades to end it. I’m not sure how old I was when I first heard the phrase “Ban the Bomb” but it had a great ring to it and it stuck. Although 122 nations have banned the bomb, the nine countries, including the U.S. that currently possess these weapons of mass destruction have refused to join this common sense movement. So sadly amidst all the various threats emerging in this time of polycrisis nuclear weapons are still in the mix. The work continues.
But today I’m struck by a different type of bomb that has been amassing more and more explosive power in our society for the past few decades. The is the force of global economics which has been sucking up planetary resources and concentrating them into unimaginably large amounts of wealth in the hands of an infinitesimally small global super-elite.
Let’s call it the BILLIONAIRE BOMB, the astounding fact that according to Forbes as of April 2025, roughly 3000 individuals (87% of them men), have over $1 billion dollars of personal wealth. On a planet with over 8 billion people, they represent less than .00003% of the global population but control nearly half of all wealth on the planet. The accumulation of wealth has gotten so extreme that a new term has been coined: centibillionaire, to describe the 15 individuals with fortunes valued at over $100 billion. And the phenomenon is continuing to get worse. In their latest annual report on global inequality Oxfam predicts that we are on track for up to five trillionaires within the decade.
Now the existence of billionaires may not produce a blinding flash of annihilation or mushroom clouds of toxic radiation, but make no mistake it is still a deadly bomb. It is exploding in a slower, far less visible way that is in fact undermining the basic structures and poisoning the principles of our society.
And with the return of Donald Trump, the United States once more has a billionaire as President. But in reality Trump is just the symptom, a metastasization of the broader cancer of unchecked money that has long-been growing in the U.S. political system. In an economic system where money is power you can’t have billionaire level concentrations of wealth and continue to have a functioning democracy, even one where the idea of democracy is as over-hyped and aspirational as it is in the U.S.
Because you know what capitalism has been really great at producing for the last generation? BILLIONAIRES. Lots of them. As the chart below shows the United State went from 66 billionaires in 1990 to 748 in 2023! And their ranks have continued to grow so that according to the latest reports in April 2025 the US now has 902 billionaires.
Trickle Down is a Sick Joke
Meanwhile, to the extent that it is even acknowledged, our politicians and pundits tell us more billionaires is actually good because it means the economy is growing and that’s good for everyone right? WRONG.
Yep, that’s a bunch of Republican members of Congress, back when Paul Ryan was still the Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, laughing after they got away with passing yet another tax cut for the rich. Even they are amazed that they continue to get away with such blatant deceit.
They made up “trickle down economics” as a control mythology to convince us there is something reasonable about having super wealthy oligarchs. “Trickle down economics” is a lie intended to distract us from a reality that is more accurately described as SUCTION UP economics where the super rich get even richer while the rest of us fall behind. Their wealth grows exponentially. Our wages grow… sometimes not at all.
“Well they are all geniuses who invented things and worked super hard. They are self-made billionaires.” Yeah right. Don’t believe that bullsh*t. This is just rich people gaming the rules so they can get unimaginably richer.
The Billionaires Dream of Becoming the Ultimate Vampires
And here’s one more chart just to help us visualize how much the billionaires and richest echelons of society increasingly control almost all the wealth in American society. This chart showing the distribution of family wealth is an insane hockey stick curve that helps us visualize how much of the total wealth is being hoarded by a tiny number of super wealthy families. This perverse distribution translates into concentrations of power that are fundamentally at odds with a functioning democracy
And in addition to the billionaires getting more and more powerful they are increasingly getting weirder. As University of Chicago history professor Gabriel Winant described it in a post-election essay in Dissent magazine: “… the rise of an engorged, predatory, and increasingly insane billionaire class, obsessed with eugenics and immortality”
I think we should be talking more about the billionaire immortality obsession. Not only are they trying to hijack our society’s medical research agenda for their longevity fetish, rather than say curing cancer or just giving working people health care. But imagine if they actually succeeded? The richest people in human history, burning our dwindling global resources at a previously unimaginable rate while consolidating unprecedented power, and then on top of all that…they live FOREVER!? This is a true horror story. The ultimate vampire capitalism where our overlords are rapidly morphing beyond the healthy constraints of what it means to be human. Even Steve Bannon, terrifying in his own right as a MAGA Field Marshall of 21st Century Ethnonationalism, denounces the billionaire oligarchs, their technofeudalism and their obsession with eternal life.
So let’s face reality. We don’t need to accept billionaires. In fact we can’t, if we want to have a shot at a creating a true multiracial democracy. So as we mobilize to (nonviolently) overthrow our fascist billionaire President, let’s help people realize if we want an democratic society, not to mention an economy that works for people AND planet, then we need to get rid of the whole idea of billionaires. It’s time to BAN THE BILLIONAIRE before it’s too late.
Nobody is saying it’s going to be easy because as it stands right now, it is too late. Our political system and economy have become completely co-opted by billionaires and the super-rich. However part of the value of articulating a clear vision is so we can organize around it. We name billionaires as the villain so that when elite propaganda tells people to punch down by blaming migrants, or transkids or whatever latest marginalized group is being scapegoated, nobody falls for it.
Instead our job is to point out that the whole idea of individuals having billionaire–level wealth is an unacceptable pathology that a healthy society cannot tolerate. We are helping people understand the real source of our current problems and offering them a chance to punch up. This is critical because if left-wing populism is invisible then right-wing populism is inevitable.
So let’s all “Rise” like the determined orca targeting an ostentatious, super-polluting megayacht in this beautiful “Rise” image by artist Roger Peet of the Just Seeds Collective. After all there’s only 3,000 of them and there’s eight billion of us.