I’ve warned for some time about America’s rigged economy fueling a dangerous level of wealth inequality that has mutated into a direct threat to our national security. Until the other day, I mistakenly thought I was a choir of one. Turns out, people far better credentialed than me agree. I’m feeling emboldened—particularly about my warnings that stock buybacks have systematically destroyed America’s competitiveness while allowing mediocre CEOs to keep their jobs.
One of my kindred spirits is Heather Boushey, a former economic adviser in the Biden administration and an authority on the structural impact of inequality.
“Clearly our economy is designed to create a handful of billionaires and a trillionaire,” Boushey told The New York Times. “It is no longer about creating opportunity and stability for the majority.”
Stefanie Stantcheva, a Harvard professor who studies public sentiment, noted in that same Times piece that prolonged bouts of high inflation leave deep, permanent scars on consumer psychology. It isn’t just the mathematical strain on a household budget; it’s the profound sense of injustice. The wealthy absorb soaring prices without blinking, while lower-income households are pushed to the brink.
“It goes hand in hand with a big sense of inequity and injustice,” Stantcheva said.
Glenn Hubbard—a Columbia Business School economist and top adviser to President George W. Bush—warned that today’s tech moguls aren’t helping their case by smugly bragging that their innovations will wipe out entire sectors of employment.
“It’s not too crazy to imagine a backlash,” Hubbard told the Times.
That backlash isn’t coming—it’s already here, and it is poised to accelerate. Look at the political fringe capturing mainstream power:
Exhibit A: Zohran Mamdani, New York’s Jew-hating socialist politician, whose election served as a major FU to the ruling elite and whose platform has been fiercely anti-Israel.
Exhibit B: Katie Wilson, Seattle’s socialist activist who accused Israel of committing genocide and called for a boycott of hometown corporation Starbucks, whose baristas union is also rabidly anti-Israel.
Exhibit C: Abdul El-Sayed, a rabid anti-Israel candidate who is running for Michigan’s open Senate seat. El-Sayed was just endorsed by the rabidly anti-Israel UAW, which was the first union to endorse Mamdani.
Spare me the argument that opposing Israel isn’t driven by antisemitism. As the economy worsens, so will the Jew hatred, and it won’t be veiled as simply anti-Zionism. Extreme wealth disparity doesn’t just destabilize markets; it rots civic stability and unleashes predictable, historical animosities.
Right now, America’s manufacturing core is sitting on a powder keg. Look at how close the Detroit 3 came to a secondary ignition.
The UAW just averted a wider crisis by settling a 10-day strike at the American Axle plant in Michigan. The corporate media dutifully amplified UAW President Shawn Fain’s messaging, hailing the contract as a historic victory. But run the actual numbers, and the math tells a different story.
In 2008, American Axle workers were forced to watch their wages sliced in half—plunging from $29 an hour down to $14.50. Under the newly settled terms, these workers will finally claw their way back to $30 an hour… by year four of the contract. That barely catches them up to where they stood nearly two decades ago, completely ignoring the devastating compounding inflation highlighted by Professor Stantcheva. And it all hinges on the assumption that American Axle won’t simply pack up and move operations offshore, just as they threatened to do in 2008.
For the frontline workers—some of whom have reportedly been reduced to sleeping in their vehicles—the American Axle contract looks less like a victory and more like a structured sellout.
Rank-and-file skepticism is boiling over. Radical elements of his union see Fain as a Democratic stooge — as do I — and openly agitated for a broader shutdown. The World Socialist Web Site reported that some auto parts workers across multiple UAW plants were clamoring for solidarity walkouts, as well as workers at GM’s Flint assembly plant, where the company builds its highest-margin, most profitable trucks and possibly couldn’t remain open had the American Axle strike been prolonged.
They are right to be angry. If labor wanted to leverage its power, the strategy wouldn’t be isolated, one-off strikes. It would be a coordinated frontline front. Imagine UAW autoworkers marching shoulder-to-shoulder down Detroit’s Woodward Avenue alongside the Teamsters-backed nurses from Corewell Health’s Metro Detroit hospitals who have overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike, and Henry Ford Hospital nurses from Grand Blanc, who have been on strike since last September.
A unified march down Detroit’s Woodward Avenue would be the ultimate wake-up call for the donor class. For now, the corporate elite can sleep easily because union leadership lacks the strategic vision and political will to execute a coordinated campaign.
If I were sitting in the top one percent, I wouldn’t assume this containment will last forever.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO, which on paper bolstered his net worth to more than $1 trillion, should further give America’s oligarchy the shivers. Simpletons like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who frighteningly registers as a realistic Democratic presidential candidate, has flat-out declared that Musk couldn’t have achieved his milestone by dint of his intellect and his possibly unrivaled appetite for risk.
“You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that,” the Oracle from the Bronx declared. “You can get market power, you can break rules, you can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws—you can pay people less than what they’re worth—but you can’t earn that. And so you have to create a myth. Since you didn’t earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it.”
Make no mistake, I’m no fan of Elon Musk. I would never buy a Tesla, set up an account on X, use his Grok chatbot, or use any products that he owns or benefits from. But to say he isn’t deserving of his current paper $1 trillion betrays AOC’s ignorance of how the economy and markets are rigged—and have been for quite some time, including when Democrats controlled the levers of power.
While Musk is only worth $1 trillion on paper, public corporations have spent nearly $5 trillion in cold, hard cash on share repurchases since Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cuts.
Five trillion dollars. That is not paper profit. That is capital that could have been reinvested in domestic operations, groundbreaking R&D, and better wages for the working class. Instead, it was routed into a legalized form of stock manipulation.
By reducing outstanding float to artificially boost share prices, these buybacks did nothing to improve America’s global competitiveness—but they perfectly secured massive, stock-tied compensation packages for mediocre CEOs.
It was this exact multi-trillion-dollar corporate self-sabotage that created the massive innovation vacuum. Musk didn’t just build an empire; he walked into an industrial wasteland cleared out by Wall Street’s buyback machine.
Musk’s fortune comes from companies that launch rockets, build satellites, manufacture vehicles, and produce tangible products and services. He accomplished this by harvesting every available dollar of capital and channeling it into his businesses.
Consider Mary Barra’s General Motors. In 2022, Barra vowed that GM would be selling more electric vehicles than anyone, including Tesla. Not only has she not come close, but GM has written off some $9 billion in EV investments while reverting to what it knows best: selling some of the most fuel-inefficient gas-engine trucks and SUVs on the market.
Yet, Barra still insists that EVs are GM’s “north star.” I’d wager Musk will have populated Mars before GM under Barra becomes a powerhouse selling EVs.
Barra blames China’s government subsidies for GM’s inability to compete—this despite GM having competed in China for decades and once commanding a significant market share there. Meanwhile, a significant portion of Tesla’s profits flow directly from its Chinese operations.
Tesla sustains a $1.3 trillion market cap in part because of its pivot to autonomous taxis. GM’s Cruise unit was once the clear leader in driverless taxis, commanding a $30 billion valuation in 2022. Barra subsequently fired the executive who scaled the business and shuttered operations in 2024.
Sterling Anderson—whom Barra had to lure with a $40 million recruitment package to leave Aurora Innovation, a money-losing outfit he co-founded that trades well below its November 2021 IPO—was just quoted saying GM might wiggle its way back into the robotaxi business. The Information reported that GM has quietly hired back 100 Cruise workers.
Notably, one of Anderson’s previous claims to fame was having worked for Tesla.
Over the past three years, Barra has earmarked a staggering $23 billion for GM stock buybacks, all while laying off hundreds of employees and shuttering business units. The standard corporate justification for buybacks is that management has surplus cash it doesn’t know what to do with, or it views its own stock price as deeply undervalued.
But look at the executive behavior behind the curtain. While GM was actively in the market buying back its own stock to pump the price, Barra unloaded roughly 40 percent of her personal holdings last year. GM President Mark Reuss followed suit, selling $38 million worth of his GM stock earlier this year.
Just a few days ago, Barra dumped another $1.8 million worth of GM shares—a curious move for a CEO to make when most Wall Street analysts maintain a strong buy rating on her stock.
I’m feeling more emboldened about my longtime criticisms of Barra these days. In addition to the investor advocacy group calling for Barra’s immediate removal, a YouTube channel called “Car Insights and Teardown Truth” posted the damning takedown below of Barra’s leadership of General Motors. The video explains how under Barra’s leadership, GM has contributed to wealth inequity in America.
You won’t find criticisms of Barra in the corporate media, just like reporters have mostly ignored an effort by Senator Elizabeth Warren to champion a modest increase of the excise tax on stock buybacks to four percent from one percent. Attacking Musk’s wealth generates more clicks than modest efforts to fix the rigged system that allowed him to achieve it.