Forget MAGA – the global project is Make Elites Great Again

Why the Billionaire Bros are abandoning the system that made them

With all eyes on the USA while President Donald Trump and his attention-seeking, power-hungry, rabid dog Elon Musk enact outright fascist policies, destroy government departments and implement huge tax breaks for their wealthy pals, it’s easy to trick ourselves into thinking this is an American problem.

If only that were the case. Trump isn’t even the first leader of his generation to play pinball with his own economy. In Argentina, President Javier Milei, a caricature of Trump who even followed a similar career path from television pundit to extreme power, enacted mass austerity policies which pushed millions of Argentinians into poverty. Milei — pals with Trump and Musk — has all but destroyed the national manufacturing and construction markets, and 50% of its citizens now live in poverty, including 60% of all children. For all his extreme anti-elite rhetoric, he has also worsened Argentina’s debt trap with the International Monetary Fund, a well-known arm of the Global North to cripple developing economies with high interest rates so as to ensure their resources flow into the hands of Western industry. Despite all this, stocks are now pumping up, with the economy “recovering” and expected to grow by 4% this year. How? As Geopolitical Economy reports, Milei is turning Argentina into “a resource colony for foreign oligarchs”.

This is the playbook. As Grace Blakeley explained in last week’s podcast, we live in a world of two economies: the real one and the abstract, financialised economy. Sadly, politicians and economists only care about the latter, hence why Milei can be praised for his extreme tactics of triggering a recession in order to strengthen economic growth later. Never mind the kids, never mind the workers, never mind the backs crushing under the weight of the oligarchy. Three cheers for The Bros.

All over the world, elites are gaining confidence in their mad pursuit of wealth. A subscriber alerted me to a leaked video of Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart speaking on on National Mining Day. The speech, delivered to a closed conference of industry professionals on November 22 2024, was laced with praise for Trump, Musk and Milei as she railed against “woke ideology”, green energy, government spending and even the national broadcaster.

She began: “Don’t you just love the saying ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’”?

Gina Rinehart is a household name in Australia, worth 29.2 billion USD. The richest person in the country, she is the executive chairwoman of Hancock Prospecting, a privately owned mineral exploration and extraction company founded by her father. Like most billionaires, she has diversified her holdings to increase her wealth, and, through the many tentacles of her companies, has major investments in oil, gas, rare earths, iron and more. She is also one of Australia’s largest landowners and cattle farmers, and has recently begun buying up Australian clothing brands.

And yet, it’s not enough.

Rinehart’s 20-minute long diatribe, riddled with ideology and factual errors, tirades against the “Net Zero cult”, claiming Australia needs more methane gas because wind and solar are unstable sources of energy. She also takes aim at the national broadcaster, calling for it to be sold off, and demands a DOGE-style approach to cutting government spending. And, throughout the speech in which she repeats, tirelessly, that Australia needs less “government tape, regulations, government wastage and tax burdens”, she says this will make things great again — but doesn’t say who for.

Having set up the speech by denouncing the falling living standards in Australia, one could assume Rinehart means the lives of ordinary Australians. And, of course, the speech is deliberately constructed to support that implication. But she slips up throughout, making clear that she, like all these other Billionaire Bros, plans on stealing from the poor to line her own pockets. At the beginning of the speech she bemoans the government’s green energy policies, saying: “By all means put these on your own properties if you wish, but please stop forcing this on us taxpayers when the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always make it to your solar panels.” In fact, the only time she ever mentions “the taxpayers” is when lambasting green energy: “Stop taxpayer funding of unreliable green energy and its incredibly expensive infrastructure.” This is because, when she says taxpayer, she means businesses — not everyday people. Yet “taxpayer” has been a political shorthand for decades which means everyday, working people. Rinehart, like Trump, makes it seem like she is talking on behalf of everyone, when really she only cares about a select few.

“This expensive NetZero cult sure likes to use lots of fossil fuels for their many, many trips including using hundreds of private jets. Does anyone here want the taxpayer to keep funding these trips?”

No, none of the people in the audience want to pay for anything, exemplified by the rounds of applause for Rinehart’s poorly written rhetoric. She goes on to paint the image of the mining industry being the backbone of the Australian economy, funneling over 70 billion AUD into government pockets through tax every year. She says that those tax payments alone “without all the other billions, is enough to pay for our entire defense budget, plus all the federal expenditure on schools, plus all federal expenditure on roads, and leaving some change to spare.”

Amazingly, a few minutes later, she then calls for massive corporate tax cuts, pointing to Trump’s planned 15% flat rate as the gold standard. It’s almost incomprehensible to understand how, in the blink of an eye, someone can go from demanding recognition for an industry’s tax revenue in supporting the national economy to demanding that revenue be slashed. This is pure greed. For the 2024 fiscal year, Rinehart's Hancock Prospecting reported a bumper profit of AU$5.6 billion, up 10 percent from the previous year. Her quality of life isn’t decreasing, her businesses aren’t in danger. She has the biggest piece of the pie in Australia and simply wants to keep more of it for herself.

Her speech is riddled with contradictions like this. One of the first things she claims when taking to the stage is, “It’s getting so damn hard to drill baby drill, and the government wants to see the end of the fossil fuel industry, your industry.” Minutes later, she then boasts of tripling Senex energy’s production of methane gas compared to 2022 levels, when her right-wing pals were voted out of office.

Despite this, Rinehart’s attack on the ruling Labor Party is vitriolic, and she even warns that if they don’t get out of the way of big business they will lose the next election. The woman — who was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Australia by the outgoing right-wing party in 2022 for her “distinguished service to the mining sector, to the community through philanthropic initiatives, and to sport as a patron” — trumpets that it is time to “Make Australia Great Again”.

“Record business failures, record and rising national debt, rising inflation and our cost of living crisis. This is not a time for linos timidly fiddling around a few edges, careful not to upset the minority noises, or rapidly increasing bureaucrats, none of whom will ever vote for the coalition.” Unsurprisingly, she doesn’t offer an explanation as to why Australia is becoming too expensive for ordinary people — that the billionaire class are hoovering up resources and stealing from the poor, exploiting the system which bestows more power on them every quarter. Instead, she leapfrogs over logic and starts banging on that red tape and tax burdens are squeezing progress out of Australia, claiming that major resource projects are “casualties of excessive government tape and ideological policies”.

Then, the richest person in Australia and formerly the richest woman in the world, cries: “This should be a wake up call. The siren alarm has gone off.”

And what solution does Australia’s top billionaire call for?

“Make our bank accounts great again!”

Gone is the talk of “taxpayers” or living standards. Rinehart, to rousing applause, calls for a DOGE department to help “return dollars to our pockets”. She slavishly praises the Reagan era and Trump’s first term, claiming that massive tax cuts and deregulation helped Americans “flourish”.

Anyone with any sense of history will know, of course, that Reaganomics did the opposite. Reagan slashed the top tax rate from 70% to 30% over his two terms, flooding wealth to the top echelon. Pundits claim this stimulates economic growth. Evidence says otherwise. A 2012 report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service states: “Throughout the late-1940s and 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was typically above 90%; today it is 35%. Additionally, the top capital gains tax rate was 25% in the 1950s and 1960s, 35% in the 1970s; today it is 15%. The real GDP growth rate averaged 4.2% and real per capita GDP increased annually by 2.4% in the 1950s. In the 2000s, the average real GDP growth rate was 1.7% and real per capita GDP increased annually by less than 1%.”

All major tax cuts do is increase wealth inequality by leaving the wealthy with more after-tax income, which they typically leverage to increase their wealth, buying up more businesses and land. But the sycophantic belief in billionaire generosity is everywhere, from governments to pubs, and perpetuated by mindless media. In 2019, BBC broadcaster Emma Barnett scoffed at then-Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle when he claimed that nobody should be a billionaire: “Why on earth shouldn't people be able to be billionaires?” she said incredulously, before repeating right-wing talking points that billionaires create jobs despite all the economic evidence that no, wealth doesn’t trickle down and, yes, employee-owned businesses outperform traditional privately-owned business models.

But the right-wing elite don’t care for evidence. If they did, they would heed the warnings of the UK’s Faculty of Actuaries which states that the global economy will crash by up to 70% by 2070 if we continue to over-consume Earth’s resources, causing the planet’s systems to break down. If they cared for evidence, they would propose higher tax rates for themselves so as to avoid societal collapse in major economies like the UK which academics warn could happen in the next decade, triggered by wealth inequality. If they cared for evidence, they would know that Russia is the aggressor, women are dying without access to reproductive care, and empires always collapse.

The main piece of evidence that these Billionaire Bros ignore is that this system made them who they are. It seems mindbogglingly stupid to dismantle the rules, narratives and classes which made exorbitant wealth accumulation possible — but none of these people seem particularly bright to begin with. That’s because their wealth is built upon the extraction and exploitation of labour and resources, without whom their stores of gold disappear, like mist into memory. They probably hope that AI and other forms of automated machinery will be able to replace much of the human workforce, artificially stimulating the requisite labour input into industries which provide essential needs like energy, food, water, housing. Needs we cannot live without, and may very well be forced to pay a subscription to in the near future as these Bros eye up the success of the tech industry’s subscription-based models. We are, it seems, months away from paying taxes to private citizens for basic human services. All it took was having the Bros in power neuter the states’ capacities to provide.

These Bros are part of the global oligarchy who think they’ve found a way to squeeze even more out of us and government infrastructure (let’s not forget that most of these billionaires own companies which queue up in government halls to get handouts in the billions, only when they do it it’s called “subsidies” not welfare). They also, quite obviously, think they’ve figured out how to survive without the consumer dollar lining their pockets — likely they’ve realised that resources are scarce and so the best way to ensure their lifestyles is limit our own access to goods and services whilst charging us for the basic necessities to survive. The Bros’ revolution will cost all of us. They are forcing the collapse of what has been in order to squirrel even more wealth to their private stores, snapping up our rights to sell them back to us for a monthly fee.

This is not an American project. It is global, and, for these elites, there is a world to win. Emboldened by Milei, Trump, Musk, Boris, the unspeakable has become common place. In 2023, Australian property tycoon Tim Gurner went viral for saying the economy needs to “hurt” working people: “We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50 percent in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.” Gurner was worth $990 million in December 2024. He will likely be a billionaire before the year is out.

Even Rinehart’s attack on green energy is an impossibly stupid thing to say given her own investments in exactly that, and the rare earths which are in high demand for the renewable supply chain. Any decent businesswoman would, surely, not call for the abandonment of the very materials she’s invested in? But this isn’t about business anymore. It’s about power. And power is much easier to centralise in a centralised energy system like fossil fuels. Solar and wind energy will change our political systems, not just our energy systems. They’ll provide a necessity cheaply, and can be deployed in a decentralised manner, meaning ordinary people can quite literally own the means of production. That doesn’t serve the global elite vision of what is now possible: Absolute power.

Complexity scientist turned social scientist Peter Turchin created a new method of analyzing historical called cliodynamics, a mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of past societies. He and his colleagues set out to understand why societies collapse. He reveals their research and results in his fantastic book, End Times, which explains that elite over-consumption of resources always triggers collapse. To summarise, he explains that elites begin by exploiting the resources and people of their own lands, a good example being Lords and serfs. Then, they gain enough wealth and power to set off and colonise elsewhere. This wealth does trickle back to their home, as cheaper goods flood the market, improving people’s purchasing power and gradually increasing standards of living. People move out of the typical labour market and into the managerial class. Wealth goes up. So do ambitions. This is exactly what happened in the post-war boom in the USA, UK and Europe as these massive colonial powers exerted their financial grip on the Global South. But then the elites run out of foreign territories to exploit. Resources dry up or independence movements win. Eventually, they have to move home and begin exploiting their own people again. Wages stagnate. Inflation increases. And people begin to get pissed off. A new class of elites emerge, not quite as powerful as the original class but desperate to get to the top. It is these people that topple old systems of power. They are the counter-elites, who weaponise rhetoric against inequality to unseat the past and position themselves at the helm of the future. They are the Musks, Rineharts, Zuckerbergs, Mileis, and Trumps of the world.

We are living through that period now, and it explains why billionaires like Rinehart, who have benefited greatly from the system, are so keen to throw it under the bus for more. It explains why they want to tear down governments that have subsidised their businesses for decades — because those governments are the old seats of power. Now, for the first time since the age of Kings, is the opportunity for an era of rule by coercion, strength and wealth. Now is an opportunity for power without responsibility. Now is the chance for absolute freedom. And it is MEGA: Make Elites Great Again.

Hey Australia — I’m going to be down under in a few months. If you’d like me to speak at your university or event, get in touch: info@planetcritical.com

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