On What Planet is This Good for Business?

 

Where’s the upside of all this wanton destruction?

Once you intentionally tear down a flawed but quite-workable system, once you reduce it to smoking ruins, once you’ve thrown much of your population into high-stress survival mode, what’s the benefit?

And whose benefit is it?

As I said last week, the biggest benefit always goes to Putin. But he’s not the only one looking to make the most of the chaos.

Closer to home, there are any number of billionaires aspiring to oligarch status, plainly looking for opportunity in this new world order.

I’ll use the word ‘oligarch’ as a catch-all for the extravagantly rich and powerful, as well as for the corporate interests they control and the negative influence they exert. Some are household names, but most stay well under the radar. Think of them as today’s Robber Barons.

And they will indeed find ways to increase their wealth under the Trump regime. Which apparently, for some profoundly misguided reason, is an end in itself.

But it seems to me their investments in fascism will ultimately end poorly. Autocracy is notoriously bad for business, and having Trump as your autocrat makes it immeasurably worse. Most business people understand this, even the ones who voted for Trump. That they’ve mostly gone silent is likely from fear.

Even so, while it’s in the nature of fascist states to come down hard with the stick, they also hold out carrots to those who are appropriately obsequious. There are always business favors to be granted to well-connected insiders, who then get to wield monopoly power over their industries. But as any reputable economist will tell you, this leads inevitably to institutional incompetence, pervasive corruption, and staggering market inefficiencies.

For a prime example, look no further than Russia, whose massively sclerotic economy is an evolving catastrophe, albeit one kept well-hidden by Putin’s iron grip on his population and his sword-rattling on the world stage.

But among our own oligarchs, there is plenty of short-sightedness to go around, and when you look down the road they’re taking us, there’s no sense that they know where they’re going. They know perfectly well that Trump and Musk are a trainwreck waiting to happen, yet they sit back and hope they don’t get blood on their suit when it does. They seem oblivious to the perils right in front of them, any one of which could sink entire industries.

Environmental peril, in particular, is a clear and present threat to them, and Trump is determined to make it worse. Climate risk only goes up, never down, and it’s starting to play havoc with commerce at every link in every supply chain. Business people, being sentient human beings, generally believe that climate change is a real thing. But what if their contract with the government requires that they not believe it? Where’s the upside in that?

Then there’s the marketing peril. How much can you degrade the buying power of your market, before that market can’t afford to buy your products? When your target audience is getting pushed into poverty — deprived of healthcare, cut off from social security, the safety net severed — where will the disposable income come from?

Disposable income is indispensable to most of the oligarchy’s business models, yet they’re declaring war on it. For them, this amounts to a circular firing squad. They’re betting that if they can bring the system down and start from scratch, they’ll emerge unscathed. Which is deeply delusional.

Because I think it just as likely that they lose that bet, and get consumed by the conflagration they’ve deliberately set.

And make no mistake, they are playing with fire.

The fire can be quite literal, as in wildfire risk, which is only getting worse, and increasingly impossible to insure against. They’re sitting by as Trump tries to cut off funding for both prevention and relief, especially in blue states like California. A few days ago, it came out Trump vandals are cancelling the training programs for new firefighters, leaving thousands of applicants high and dry, and leaving woodland communities considerably more likely to incinerate this summer. The upside of this is what?

The fire can also be metaphorical. They’re sitting by as Trump ignites a trade war with Canada and Mexico, which they know perfectly well is suicidal. They know the tariffs will blow up cross-border relationships that go back generations. They know that the auto industry in all three countries could seize up and stop functioning altogether. They know that the ripple effects from that alone will be catastrophic. It’s a made-for-TV depression in the making, and they’re abetting it. And they know, even if they won’t admit it to themselves, that their own businesses could be collateral damage.

Yet they sit by, even as Trump actively works to deport a significant component of their labor force, and for no reason at all. He’s terrorizing the very immigrants the oligarchs need to do the jobs even the poorest Americans want nothing to do with. These very immigrants keep their businesses operating. Pull away a few million of them from the construction, agriculture, hospitality, and healthcare industries, and we’re likely to see real disruptions in everyday life.

The oligarchs watched for years, as the Fox propaganda machine trained its viewers to hate the labor force they depend on. Now they need to deal with the business consequences of that, which will not be pretty.

They’re also sitting by as the Trump minions deconstruct key elements of our healthcare infrastructure, negating billions of dollars in research grants that fund basic science, which — besides being good for humanity in general — happens to also provide millions of jobs, especially in red states. Even if they don’t care how many children die of measles — and they obviously don’t — how can any of these bozos who are now in charge be good for business?

Worst of all, the oligarchs are sitting by as Trump tries to dismantle the rule of law, another suicidal move from a business standpoint. Do they not understand that much of what makes American business special — what gives it its preeminent place in global commerce — is the ability of American law to settle business disputes in an orderly manner. This is a key reason why so many global companies are based here. In a litigious world, they’d rather have their day in court here, rather than in, say, Iran. Or Russia. Or China.

But once the Trumpies start monkeying with the credibility and trust built over centuries — once America stops being America and compromises itself judicially — that’s when we become just like Russia: not safe for business.

There are any number of other stupid but damaging moves being made by the new administration, and all of them, without exception, are as bad for business as they are good for Putin. And our own American oligarchs are doing nothing to stop them.

And they’re making people hate them. It’s only a matter of time before the disposable incomes of their customers dry up, and the people who’ve lost everything come at them with pitchforks. Whatever bubble they’re living in will have to be sealed tighter and tighter.

You would think an oligarch would understand this. But as a class, they get far more credit for intelligence than they deserve.

They whine about being over-taxed and over-regulated, but even from a purely selfish, take-no-prisoners, eat-what-you-kill Darwinian point of view, they surely understand that they’re shooting themselves in the foot. None of these moves makes even the slightest business sense.

But the oligarchs have thrown in their lot with the world’s greatest con man, so we shouldn’t be surprised if that just makes them a wealthier form of sucker.