High-Tech Billionaires Won't Save Us - Jim Hightower,Humor Times

A clique of arrogant and abusive high-tech billionaires is leading a careless assault on nature, and our future.

Here’s an interesting fact: Dinosaurs dominated Earth for 165 million years — and they assumed they always would.

Which brings us to… well, us. We bipedal, large-brained, far-ranging, high-tech Homo sapiens primates have certainly established our dominance over modern-day Mother Earth. And even though our reign has only lasted about 200,000 years, we 21st-century humans grandly assume that we’re ordained by the gods to rule ad infinitum over our planet (and beyond).

But — oops! — unfortunately, we’ve based our present preeminence on the unsustainable consumption of our domain, rather than on stewardship for the ages. Under the global misguidance of corporate, political, religious, academic and other Powers That Be, our large-brained species has ended up making an awful mess of the nest we inherited. Elite plunderers and profiteers have imposed an ethic of greed, narcissism, inequality and even inhumanity that is devouring everything from Earth’s climate to our basic human values of fairness and justice.

Leading this careless assault is a clique of arrogant and abusive high-tech gabillionaires who consider themselves geniuses because, well… they’re rich! Consider Elon Musk, presently the richest of the world’s richest, who postures as an uber-brained deep thinker, social engineer and whirling corporate dervish. He presently runs not one, but three megacorps (Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX) while also rewriting the rules of free speech, telling American’s how to vote and claiming he’ll save humanity from the ravages of Earth by colonizing Mars.

But wait: Strip away the hype, and Musk is just another self-serving plutocratic ravager and cartoonish robber baron whose “genius” lies in taking credit (and profit) from other people; demanding subsidies and special breaks from government; cheating workers and customers; and suing everyone for his failures.

What this country needs are highway signs on every interstate to caution the public about an extreme danger that lies ahead: “WARNING,” the signs would shout, “GENIUSES AT WORK!”

The danger comes from the clique of multibillionaire capitalists who are the self-proclaimed crypto-meta wunderkinds of high tech. They’ve decided that their class of high-wealth geniuses are the ones to save civilization. Among these saviors are such “brilliant” corporatists as Musk, who’s on the verge of losing the $44 billion he stupidly paid for his egomaniacal takeover of Twitter — a colossal business blunder that, in a plutocratic panic, he turned into a public disaster by a bulk firing of half of Twitter’s employees.

Granted that civilization could use a good dose of smarts, given our acceleration of climate change, spread of inequality and reemergence of fascism. But Elon Musk?

Forget savior; his grandiose self-serving scheme for “the future of our species” is, as usual, solely to glorify himself, his progeny and his self-styled class of Big Thinking rich people. Musk is a promoter of an elite cult of uberrich “pronatalists.” They smugly assert that their enormous wealth is derived from their enormous IQs, and therefore they must — get this — seize “control of human evolution.”

How? By each richie having a large herd of babies — each of which would be certified as a “genetically superior” human. Thus, they should rule society, since… well, their parents are rich! Musk and other techie money lords in this futuristic pro-natal movement actually see themselves as heroic for being willing to sacrifice their sperm and eggs for civilization by replicating themselves as much as possible. Indeed, they’ve set a standard for each member to pop out eight to 14 babies (Musk already has 10 children by three different women). Each child is then raised in the cult’s elitist doctrine, requiring them to produce their own large litters of Little Elons. In just a few generations, they calculate that this mass breeding of elites will create enough rich geniuses to rule over society… and save civilization.

But who’ll save us from them? If billionaire humanoids like Elon really wanted to save us from extinction, they would do the honorable thing… by going first.

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Jim Hightower

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, "Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow," Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower is a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, spreading the message of progressive populism all across the American grassroots.

He broadcasts daily radio commentaries that are carried in more than 150 commercial and public stations and on the web.