Stop calling them the elite. Stop calling them the bourgeoisie. These are words that soften the truth. These are academic distractions. The correct term is the predator-class.
No one becomes a billionaire by building something with their own hands. They become a billionaire by building something with other people’s hands and then keeping the value those hands created. Every billion in a bank account represents wages not paid, safety standards not met, environmental damage not cleaned up, taxes not collected, lives not valued. The accumulation of that much wealth is not a byproduct of hard work or innovation. It is evidence of extraction. It is a receipt for predation.
The predator-class does not see workers. They see costs. They see line items to be minimized. The gig economy is not innovation. It is the wholesale elimination of the protections workers spent a century fighting for. No benefits. No security. No recourse. Just a new name for exploitation wrapped in the language of freedom.
The law is not a barrier to them. It is a tool. They do not break laws. They buy the lawmakers and have the laws rewritten. The revolving door between regulatory agencies and the industries they regulate is not a coincidence. It’s a pipeline. The people who are supposed to police the predators are on their payroll before they even leave government. They write the legislation that governs their own industries. They settle lawsuits for fractions of their profits and call it a cost of doing business.
Boeing knew their planes had fatal flaws. They concealed them. Three hundred and forty six people died in two crashes. The executives walked away with bonuses. No one went to prison. The company paid a fine that amounted to a rounding error on their balance sheet. This is not a failure of the system. This is the system working exactly as designed.
The Sackler family flooded America with opioids. They lied about the addiction risks. They pushed doctors to prescribe more. They made billions while hundreds of thousands died. Their punishment was a settlement that protected their personal wealth and allowed them to walk away free. The Purdue Pharma bankruptcy was not justice. It was a transaction.
Monsanto poisoned entire towns with chemicals they knew caused cancer. They settled for amounts that did not touch their profits. They continued to sell. They continued to poison. The fines are just the price of doing business.
But the predation does not stop at exploitation. It extends to the most vulnerable. It extends to children.
Jeffrey Epstein did not operate in secret. He operated in plain sight. The predator-class knew. They attended his parties. They flew on his plane. They protected each other because exposure for one meant exposure for all. The dirt they have on each other is the glue that holds their class together. When one falls, it is not because the system worked. It is because he became a liability.
This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. The supply chains that feed the predator-class are built on forced labor, much of it involving children. The cobalt in their electric vehicles is mined by children in the Congo who will never see a classroom. The chocolate they consume is harvested by children on plantations in West Africa who have never tasted it. The cheap goods they sell are produced in factories where children work sixteen-hour days and never see the sun. They know this. The reports land on their desks. They do not stop it. They do not even slow it. They factor it into the cost of doing business.
The predator-class has built an entire global economy on the backs of children they will never meet and whose names they will never learn. It is not an accident. It is a design. Cheap labor means cheap goods means higher margins means more wealth to hoard. The child in the mine is not a tragedy to them. She is an input. She is a resource to be extracted and discarded.
What kind of human being accumulates that much while others starve? What kind of human being knows that their wealth is built on the suffering of children and does nothing?
The answer is that they do not see them. Not really. The predator-class suffers from a pathological blindness. They have insulated themselves so completely from the consequences of their actions that they can no longer conceive of their victims as fully human. They live in compounds behind gates. They travel in private jets to private islands. They educate their children in schools that cost more than most people earn in a decade. They dine in restaurants where a single meal costs a month’s rent for the people who serve them. They have constructed a reality where they never have to look at the people they feed on.
This is not just greed. It is a sickness. A failure of empathy so profound it has dissolved their humanity. They have convinced themselves that their wealth is a sign of virtue, that their success is evidence of merit, that their victims are simply less deserving. It is a pathology that has infected every institution they touch. The courts. The media. The political parties. The universities. All compromised. All serving the interests of the predator-class while pretending to serve the public.
And when they are done preying, they launder their reputations through philanthropy. They extract billions and give back millions. They want gratitude for the scraps they toss from the table. The Gates Foundation. The Clinton Foundation. The buildings named after themselves at universities that should be ashamed to carry their names. It is the predator feeding on the herd and then expecting applause for returning a fraction of what was stolen.
They own the platforms where the public discusses their crimes. Bezos bought the Washington Post. Musk bought Twitter. A handful of billionaires control the media landscape. They do not need censorship when they own the printing press. They do not need to suppress dissent when they can buy it and hollow it out from the inside.
The solution is not reform. Reform is what they offer to keep the system intact. The solution is to recognize that a class of people who prey on humanity for profit cannot be regulated. They must be removed from power. Their wealth must be seized and returned to the people from whom it was stolen. Their systems must be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.
This is not about policy. It is about survival. The predator-class will not stop. They cannot stop. The pathology does not allow for self-correction. They will extract and exploit and abuse until there is nothing left to extract, until the planet is uninhabitable, until the people they feed on have nothing left to give. And then they will turn on each other.
The relationship is not a difference of degree. It is a difference of kind. They are not richer than us. They are feeding on us. And the infection will not be cured by polite conversation or incremental change.
It must be burned out.
Not reformed.
Not regulated.
Removed.
The predator-class has made clear what they are. It is time to return the favor and make clear what we will no longer tolerate.
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