The Limits of FU Money: Some money can make you brave, but a lot of money can make you a coward

Seeing tech billionaires lining up to kiss Donald Trump's ring and seeing media corporations cave to pressure from a mad king unhappy about the jokes made by their late-night jesters makes me think of John Goodman.

In the 2014 film The Gambler, Goodman's character makes an internet-famous speech about money and the freedom it can bring. He says a person's goal should be to accumulate $2.5 million, buy a house free and clear, and create a "Fortress of Solitude." There the person can live with their family and not worry about pleasing anyone else. No one can tell them what to do, because they now have "fuck-you money."

He goes on, "A wise man's life is based around 'fuck you.' The United States of America is based on 'fuck you.' You're a king? You have an army? The greatest navy in the history of the world? Fuck you. Blow me."

Goodman's character today might tell a different story today, as the mega-wealthy fawn over the king and beg him to love them. 

One would think that fuck-you status had been reached by billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Bill Gates. But there they were, on the Joni Mitchell Patio -- Trump paved the paradise of Jackie Kennedy's Rose Garden and put up a parking lot of white tables and chairs with golden umbrellas.  

During Trump 1.0, some people referred to his Florida home as the Southern White House. In Trump 2.0, he is turning the White House into the Northern Mar-a-lago.

The tech bros yucked it up with Trump, and Gates, of all people, praised Trump's "leadership" in artificial intelligence policies -- despite Trump eliminating foreign aid, including food and medical supplies, to Africa. Gates has spent years working and millions of his own dollars to help African communities. 

Weeks before the grotesque patio love-fest, Cook gave Trump a literal gold brick in the Oval Office.

Why are these men debasing themselves this way, when, surely, they have fuck-you money? Was Goodman's character lying?

When I thought of Goodman and his speech from The Gambler, I thought of a graph that would chart the relationship of money to freedom. The line would start low, go high, and then drop again. It would represent the Mountain of Freedom.

The x-axis would represent the amount of money you have. The amount increase as you move from left to right. The y-axis represents the amount of freedom you have. It starts low and climbs as the amount of your money increases. But at some point it begins to decline. Even though your wealth increases further, your freedom diminishes. 

On the left side of the chart, where you have little money, you have little freedom. Because you need money to survive, you must perform tasks you do not want to do or pretend to believe things you do not believe or pretend to like people you do not like. 

As the amount of money you have increases, you gain freedom from those undesirable activities. For most Americans, this does not come until retirement. That is when we have secured enough resources (through savings or pensions and through paying off our homes) that we can live in our Fortresses of Solitude.

However, if the money line keeps rising, ironically, you can lose freedom. Either from an irrational desire to gain even more money or from a pathological fear of losing the money you have, you resume performing tasks you do not want to do or pretending to like people you do not like or pretending to believe things you do not believe. 

Or the money twists you, changes you, and you begin liking people you had disliked and betraying your previous beliefs. 

Zuckerberg and Company do not need any more money. They have more money than they can spend in ten lifetimes. And yet there they were, flattering an ignorant buffoon at the White House. He is a man with a fraction of their intelligence, but since he possesses no shame or scruples, he is willing to abuse his power, enabling his greed, his petty resentments, and his delusions of grandeur. And because they love their wealth more than their dignity, the wealthy suck up to him.

Meanwhile, corporations worth billions of dollars run by CEOs worth millions curry favor with the minions Trump has appointed to various federal agencies. If they have a merger in the works that needs federal approval, they are willing to silence their employees (Stephen Colbert at CBS and Jimmy Kimmel at ABC) only because Trump does not like being criticized. Other corporations are willing to eliminate their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to avoid the regime's disfavor. They will do anything to keep the money flowing. The company store has sold its soul.

On either side of the Mountain of Freedom are valleys of enslavement: the Valley of Poverty and the Valley of Obscene Wealth.

Regular people want enough. The Rich always want more.  

It is hard to tell who owns whom. Do the wealthy own their fortunes, or do their fortunes own them?

Unfortunately, under the current administration, they may end up owning the rest of us.

Democratizing Capitalism Can Be A Trainwreck

Currently, about 62 percent of Americans have money invested in individual stocks, mutual funds, or exchange-traded funds. That compares to about 25 percent when I started investing in 1990.

This is considered part of the democratization of capitalism. This means more people -- not just the wealthy -- can benefit from the mechanisms of capitalism. Some of them will be able to grow generational wealth (or at least plant the seeds for it). A lucky few will grow rich in their lifetime. 

However, this democratization is limited. More people then ever have access to investing, but that does not mean they have gained much (if any) control over the levers of capitalism. Most of these people hand their money to someone who invests on their behalf. These average investors are participating in the system of capitalism, but they are not changing the system. They definitely are not controlling it.

Giving their money to investment managers and corporations to invest may increase the financial wealth of regular Americans, but those controllers of capital have goals that differ from those of regular Americans. In The Master's Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (and a Radical Plan to Rebuild It), Michael McCarthy writes about how corporate capitalism, through lobbyists and campaign contributions, too often dominates how governments allocate resources and regulate day-to-day life for Americans.

"The political capacities these levers generate offer distinct ways for the masters of finance to remake formal political institutions in their image" (12).

Corporate America is dedicated only to maximizing profits, whereas regular people have multiple priorities, including their health and safety. McCarthy writes, "We know that finance capitalism underinvests in socially and ecologically needed goods and services" (13).

I tried to think of an example to illustrate this and the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, came to mind.

Thirty-eight cars of a freight train came off the tracks in the town. Poisonous chemicals were released, and everyone within a mile of the derailment was evacuated. I wondered how many people impacted by the derailment might own shares in the company that owned the train: Norfolk Southern Corporation. 

Several industrial facilities were located near the crash site: U.S. Stoneware, Ceram Fab, Strohecker Inc. (according to Google Maps). I cannot find retirement plans for their employees on their web sites. However, the derailment impacted the whole town with clouds of chemicals and other disruptions, and I can find information about the retirement plans for teachers at East Palestine High School and East Palestine Elementary School, which are located within 2 miles of the crash site.

Employees there would be members of the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System. Their retirement account investments include ETFs for major stock indexes, such as the S&P 500 and the Russell 1000. Those indexes included Norfolk Southern in 2023. I assume some of the workers at the industrial sites mentioned above also had investments in these indexes and therefore in Norfolk Southern.

While those workers were trusting investment professionals with their money, Norfolk Southern was dissuading government officials and regulatory agencies from strengthening safety regulations. According to The Lever, an online publication: 

Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.

Having a secure retirement would be one goal of  workers in East Palestine, but they would have other priorities, such as living in a safe and healthy environment. If Norfolk Southern had asked them about their priorities -- as part owners of the company -- they probably would have said, "We want you to operate safely, especially since you pass through the heart of our town."

However, the people investing on behalf of those East Palestine workers had just one priority, and that was shared by the Norfolk Southern executives: maximize investment returns. 

The workers were part owners of the means of production (the trains and their tracks), but they did not control the means of production, despite living near it. 

The major owners of the means of production rarely live near them. Those things would be a lot safer and cleaner if they existed near mansions and country clubs.

A short video related to this question of the undemocratic nature of American capitalism was posted in March of this year. (Generic Art Dad on Facebook and @genericartdad on Instagram.) In it, he discusses how banks knowingly make loans to private equity firms who will use the money to acquire a company. The investors will then strip the company of assets and leave it holding the loans. The banks do not care if the loans go bad because once the acquired company goes under, they will have sold the loans to others -- including pension funds.

The demise of the acquired companies hurts their workers and the workers who participate in the pension funds that might have purchased the bad debt.

"The people who bear the brunt of this aren't exactly at the table to push back," says Generic Art Dad.

To truly democratize capitalism, workers and regular citizens need a voice on the boards of directors for companies, and their daily priorities would need to be reflected in the decisions of the investments professionals responsible for their money.