***. “The term oligarchy traditionally has been seen as the rule of a selfish few over a whole community.”
[ World Book Encyclopedia ]
Technology can be “good”, or it can be “bad,” depending on how it is used, and, WHO controls it. This post presents excerpts from. “Empire Builders”. [ Tim Murphy; Mother Jones; May-June, 2026 ]:
3] “The AI boom has ushered oligarchy onto a new plane by uniting the monopolistic ambitions of the world’s richest men with the nationalist ambitions of their political champions. In the process, it has sparked a reckoning..across the political spectrum, over the demand for resources and tax dollars and over what kind of future we might build….The data centers have, in a sense, transformed opaque structures of inequality and power into literal ones. Oligarchy is now more than an idea; it is a place. Across the country, the empire builders of AI have sold themselves as the gateway to the future you’ve always dreamed of, and the solution to the problems they helped bring about.”
10] “The amount of power needed to keep the data center boom going is astounding. An analysis by Accenture projected that by 2030, energy demand for data centers would be equivalent to that of the entire country of Canada, and trhe industry’s share of global emissions could jump elevenfold. Another study projected that data center use would account for roughly 12 percent of all U.S. energy consumption in that same time frame, up threefold from the start of the boom.”
*** “If Republican leaders are willing to enable Trump’s autocratic enthusiasms in return for oligarchy, American democracy will die.” [ Heather Cox Richardson ]
7] “..the conversations that AI proponents are having in public right now tell a simpler and less idealistic story: The people who claim to be building the future traded the dream of democratic abundance for a strongman who will make them money In September, a few dozen tech luminaries gathered at the White House to promote first lady Melania Trump’s initiative to encourage children to use AI. The ulterior motive for the summit came into focus…when the president called on the AI moguls one by one to say a few words about their work.
“I just wanted to say thank you, said OpenAI President Greg Brockman, for the administration’s “optimism.” “Thank you for being such a pro-business, pro-innovation president – it’s a very refreshing change,” said Altman…..Bill Gates…..Microsoft’s Satya Nadella…..Apple’s Tim Cook…..a lesser autocrat might have kept off camera but that Trump found value in showing the world. The AI executives offered him ballroom donations, settlement checks, and legitimacy. He offered them deals, deregulation, and deference. It was important that everyone understand the arrangement.”
11] “A study by two Harvard Law School researchers found that consumers would end up paying billions to underwrite tech companies’ power infrastructure – to say nothing of billions of dollars in tax breaks. A CNBC analyst found 16 states doled out $6 billion worth of tax breaks over the last five years. In New Jersey, the AI expansion drove a 22 percent hike in electric rates year over year.”
***. “When economic power became concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny.”
[ John Adams; Founding Father; 2nd U.S. President ]
1] “But the thing about building a data center this big you cannot simply build a data center – you must build a whole world to go with it. You need three new power plants and transmission lines to connect them to the grid. You need hundreds of millions of gallons of water and miles of pipes. You must pave roads and build new ones, clear fields and build ponds. You need a port to bring in gravel and dirt from wherever you can get it. You need stoplights and sheriff’s deputies and laundromats. You need thousands of workers and places to house them – executive lodging, cheap motels, and man camps with movie theaters and gyms.”
2]. “If the economic story of the last two decades was the consolidation of wealth and power in Silicon Valley, the story of the last few years is what tech billionaires want to do with it. Since the summer of 2024, America’s richest men have been on a building spree with few precedents in recent history. The scale of the investment…is so vast that proponents have turned to previous eras of reckless extraction and technological advancement to describe it. Energy Secretary Chris Wright called it “Manhattan Project 2.”
4]. “But at one Google site in The Dalles..an offer of $260 million in incentives and a third of the city’s 2024 water supply had resulted in just 200 full-time jobs – many of them off site. The same narratives pop up again and again. Communities are essentially given a choice: Approve it fast or watch some other town reap the rewards – and miss out on future investments..”
***. “..if the U.S. had remained as equitable as it was in 1975 for the next forty-three years therough 2018, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would have earned an extra $47 trillion. Instead that money went to people already at the top, who use that money, among other things, to influence the political system and to hoard real estate.”
[ Alec Karakatsanis ]. [NOTE – think on this. THIS is part of the THEFT the top 15 has done. ]
5] “The rise of the American oligarchy happened slowly and then all at once…you’d see a steady upward slope from Clinton-era deregulation to bush-era tax cuts to Obama-era techno-optimism and on through Trump’s first term. Then it spiked. Between 2000 and 2020, as tech monopolies consolidated power, the share of the nation’s wealth held by the top 0.00001 percent roughly doubled. By the end of 2025, it had nearly doubled again. it is no longer novel or even particularly accurate to note that the richest Americans control a greater share of resources than theydid during the Gilded Age..”
6] “The American oligarchy is an AI oligarchy. The world’s six richest men as of early March were all actively involved in AI development…There are 10 trillion-dollar companies, and nine of them are in AI.”
8]. “The implicit promise of the AI revolution is that all the things made worse by AI will eventually be fixed by AI. Some oligarchs are even pitching AI as a solution to the problems oligarchy has helped bring about.”
*** “To bring about government by oligarchy, masquerading as democracy, it is fundamentally essential that practically all authority and control be centralized in our Federal government…The individual sovereignty of our states must first be destroyed.” [ Franklin D. Roosevelt; 32nd U.S. President ]
9] “Whereas Russia’s kleptocrats started off in extractive mineral industries and then branched out into tech and finance, American’s oligarchs made their fortunes online before pivoting to natural resources.”
12] “All this dirty energy means that, as with public health, oligarchy is slowing our progress on climate…[Trump’s]..agencies are rolling back clean air regulations…the increased power use by the AI industry would produce about $20 billion in public health damages by 2028.”
13]. “The Colossus of Memphis sends a signal about what the oligarchy is that all the whirring servers of the world can’t drown out – shimmering hot air, a reckless consolidation of power, a new extractive machine built on the foundations of old ones.”
*** “Oligarchies, throughout history, have always thought more of their own advantage than that of the rest of the community. It was revolt against the selfishness of past political oligarchies that produced the liberal movement in favor of democracy, and it was the revolt against economic oligarchies that produced socialism.”
[ Bertrand Russell ]
With Justice For All 