Financing Our Own Destruction
Are we taking this fascism thing seriously?
Humans have a wonderful capacity for normalizing our own experiences. When our circumstances change, we are able to readjust to them as a new baseline in order to carry on with our lives. Research beloved by pop psychologists shows that this hedonic adaptation allows us to regain our equanimity even after a devastating life event—or, to lose our sense that extraordinary changes are special, rather than expected.
This is a nice thing and all, and probably an evolutionary necessity to allow us not to freak the fuck out at this wacky wild life all the time. It does, however, come with drawbacks. A positive mental model of hedonic adaptation would be an accident victim who is paralyzed, yet manages to regain their happiness. Great. But another mental model of this phenomenon would be: Frogs in a pot, constantly readjusting to the rising temperature as they are boiled alive.
America in 2025 is a nation that is being dragged by malign political forces into a pit of fascism, oligarchy, and hatred. This transformation is not happening very slowly at all. Yet it is slow enough that we can observe ourselves and others ever so slightly readjusting our daily expectations so that we can carry on with our normal lives. As we should. Simmering in constant anxiety is not a productive form of personal resistance. On an institutional level, though, that dogged refusal to snap out of the soothing belief that things are the same as ever is going to get us fucking killed. The simple act of getting our political parties, businesses, social groups, unions, and other aspects of civil society to grasp the peril that democracy is in and act as if it is our job to do something meaningful about it is the first and most important step to getting the still-powerful machinery of opposition moving with the urgency that we need.
This shift in thinking can be applied to many arenas. (If Democratic elected officials would stop insisting that their constituents being snatched off the streets by secret police is a Distraction From Kitchen Table Issues, that would be cool.) Today I want to look at just one example. Last week I was at a gathering of activists discussing What Is To Be Done, and among the research materials they distributed was a sheet listing the closest billionaire allies of Trump’s movement. These are people you know, who have both funded Trump directly, and who are taking advantage of his dissolute power as a way to rush us all faster towards a tech-dominated quasi-authoritarian dystopia. Silicon Vallley right wing titans like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, David Sacks, along with corporate and Wall Street allies like Steve Schwarzman, Robert Mercer, and Jeff Yass.
These people amount to the financial backbone of MAGA-ism. Most of them derived their wealth from running lucrative venture capital firms, hedge funds, or other investment firms. That means that they have clients. Their firms, and their subsequent fortunes, are funded by investors. And who are these investors? In many cases, they are the pension funds of public employees. For example: Antonia Gracias, one of the key leaders of Elon Musk’s devastating DOGE project, runs the firm Valor Equity Partners, whose investors include public employee pension funds from California, New York, and Illinois, as well as union pension funds. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund has county employees retirement money; Marc Andreesen’s firm has both pension funds and the funds of progressive foundations invested in it; David Sacks’ venture firm has San Diego city employees’ and Illinois teachers’ retirement funds; Paul Singer, the hedge fund billionaire, major Republican donor, and one of the guiding forces in assembling our current Supreme Court, has multiple state employee and university pension investors; etcetera.
This dynamic is well known. It is all part of capitalism’s washing machine, the process by which the wealth of working people is invested in ways antithetical to the interests of working people, with the explanation that doing so is necessary or even good because the proceeds will fund those workers’ retirements. I have written before about how perverse and self-defeating this dynamic is, particularly in the case of union pension money, which often directly fuels the forces bent on destroying unions. My goal today is not to restate this entire argument here (you can read books about this) or to name and shame every last investor in every last investment fund run by an evil Republican. Today I want to make a much more modest point. Which is: MAYBE THINGS HAVE GOTTEN BAD ENOUGH NOW THAT WE SHOULD MAKE SOME ATTEMPT TO ADDRESS THIS?
Republicans know that money equals power, and they understand the sort of impact that enormous pension funds could have if they were able to place political or moral criteria on their investment decisions, and they go to great lengths to short circuit that possibility with a thicket of regulations about fiduciary duty, even as they themselves do things like pass laws saying that their states won’t do business with you if do anything that could be construed as “ESG,” or try to make consumer boycotts illegal. They play this game better than us! All of these legal restrictions should be understood as having political motivations. It is not easy to get pension funds to divest from things, but it is, at its core, a battle of self-preservation, and one that should be undertaken in earnest. This is the low-hanging fruit of fighting fascism, people. We need to be on this. This is not you getting shot by riot police or thrown into an ICE prison. This is “maybe as a public employee my retirement money should not be invested with the guys whose personal project is to destroy the entire public sector.” It is very difficult to say, with a straight face, that workers and their representative institutions are taking seriously the urgency of the threat to their livelihoods, their freedom, their democracy, and their brothers and sisters lives, when we can’t even rouse ourselves to fucking invest our money in firms other than those controlled by the architects of the right wing takeover of America.
I am, modestly, just asking for a little action here. Some agitation. Union members can agitate to be informed about what your pension funds are invested in. So can public employees of all stripes. We are not even talking about a major ideological divestment campaign here. We are not even talking about “divest from Israel” (which should be done) or “divest from fossil fuels” (which should be done). We are talking about, you know, “let’s take a look and make sure that we’re not investing with the guy who fired all of our federal employee colleagues illegally, haha. Let’s make sure we’re not unintentionally helping to fund the secret police who will soon come to arrest us, haha.” Small stuff.
If you are a worker who wants to take on this cause, you may find that you are told, dismissively, that any monkeying around with pension investments for reasons like this is a bad idea because it will cause you to get lower financial returns, and that an unsophisticated idiot like you should not be trying to micromanage the teams of highly paid consultants who select the brilliant hedge funds for the pension to invest in. Apart from the fact that this is the attitude that got us into this trap in the first place, a good thing to know is that, in aggregate, almost all of these expensive investment firms fail to beat the market in the long run. And picking the few that can is nothing more than a lucky guess! You can stick your money in low-cost index funds, stay far away from fascist Silicon Valley billionaire-owned firms, and still probably get just as good of a return! Don’t take it from me—take it from chief investment officer of the $190 billion UC endowment and pension fund, who just completely divested from hedge funds, after concluding that they are not worth it, financially.
He is not unsophisticated, I promise you. If that doesn’t do the trick, you can reach out to these fine folks at Harvard who can guide you. We will know that we are taking our situation seriously enough when the conversation around this matter shifts from “here are the reason why this is too much of a hassle to be done,” to “it is imperative that we find a way to do this immediately.”
In conclusion: Fascism is on the rise, an aspiring authoritarian is consolidating power, he is building a secret police force that is kidnapping people across the nation, the very existence of government services is under attack, health insurance is being ripped away from millions of vulnerable people, union members are being fired at will and their contracts thrown away, and a small coterie of internet-poisoned billionaires are gleefully funding this entire enterprise in the name of warped revanchist politics and naked self-interest. If we want to stop this process from playing out to its grim conclusion, we may be asked to make great sacrifices and take great risks. In the meantime, we could just not give those same motherfuckers our money. Or at least do our utmost to see to it that work is proceeding towards that goal! That would be a very, very, very small but meaningful thing.
Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way now because it is going to get harder.
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Related reading: Capitalism’s Washing Machine; Privatized America; The Underlying Problem; We’re All Mice Trying to Chew Through a Trillion Dollar Tree.
One of the best things you can do to fight for a better America is to unionize your workplace. Stop procrastinating! Contact EWOC or the AFL-CIO (or email me) for help. If you’re interested in the bigger picture of how labor fits into the fucked state of American politics, you might enjoy my book “The Hammer,” available for order wherever books are sold. If you want to look good while doing all of this, you can get a union-printed “How Things Work” t-shirt right here.
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I think that part of the problem, and I'm talking about myself here, not those who understand all this, is that I have no idea how my blessed pensions have been funded--- I'm just grateful that they're there at all in this day and age, where most decent things have been thrown away by the Pigs who pretend to love America but worship money. Thank you for the wakeup call.
I am down with this but as an individual, it's hard to do the right thing here. I only recently started working in an industry where a 401k is available. I decided to plop it into a fund that was purportedly all about ESG and green industries and stuff rather than the broader index fund they had on offer. I looked closer and saw that Tesla was the top investment in that portfolio... Second was Microsoft I think. Further down there were literal oil companies.