We must stand up to billionaires and corporations

To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards of men.

(Listen to the radio version here.)

On Friday, I cancelled my long-standing subscription to The Washington Post. This hurt. I’ve had so much respect for the Post since they exposed the Watergate scandal while I was in college, and I was particularly thrilled when, in 2012, they hired Martin Baron (a genuine hero as he led the Boston Globe in their investigative reporting on priests abusing children in the Boston archdiocese) as executive editor.

But my reason for loving the Post is far outside the realm of politics. It’s because of Chandler Robbins, my most treasured hero in the world of birding and bird conservation, and the one person in my life I most want to emulate.

When Robbins died on March 20, 2017, The New York Times didn’t mention his death at all, but The Washington Post ran both a lengthy and beautiful obituary by Emily Langer and a heartfelt and personal tribute by Darryl Fears. Oddly enough, both writers tracked me down for phone interviews and quoted me in their pieces, apparently because of the detailed blogpost I’d posted two days after he died, “My North Star.”

I was very concerned in 2013 when billionaire Jeff Bezos bought the paper, but Martin Baron stayed on, and it was during this period that the Post’s masthead added the words “Democracy dies in darkness,” so I tried to quell my concerns, even after Baron retired in 2021. But on Friday, after the editorial board had already composed the paper’s official endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, the Post announced it would not be endorsing anyone. Within minutes, Martin Baron posted that this was “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” and Robert Kagan, an editor at large who has written for the Post for more than two decades, resigned. Later on Friday, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote that the decision “ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”

Friday night, Trump met with executives at the billionaire’s Blue Origin space company, which has at least one multi-billion dollar contract with NASA (for the second Artemis lunar lander provider). Robert Kagan said, “Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people… which tells us that there was an actual deal made, …[setting up] this quid pro quo.” Bezos of course denied that, as if it were just a coincidence that Trump met with Bezos’s people the very night Bezos had done his bidding.

Now this of course has nothing to do with birds. But it reminded me just how much power billionaires and their corporations have over us, birds, and the environment we all depend upon and share. It isn’t just that billionaires are bigger and more powerful than the rest of us. They’re not oversized but somehow well-meaning and innocent, like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster or Lenny in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. By definition, corporations have no conscience, and the billionaires running them easily tuck away what conscience they may have when profits and power are at stake.

It was billionaires and corporate interests that devised Project 2025—the written plan put together by many of the same Heritage Foundation people that Trump appointed to his administration. And it is billionaires and corporate interests that are igniting a fresh new wave of lawsuits to invalidate a great many federal regulations regarding climate, environment, education, health, and labor, with the current Supreme Court expected to smile down on dismantling as many regulations as possible. (Gift link to Washington Post story, “Supreme Court ignites wave of lawsuits against federal regulations.”)

Donald Trump may be saying at his rallies that he is not aware of or involved with Project 2025, but one of the frightening provisions in Project 2025 is to get rid of the scientists and other bona fide experts (people exactly like Chandler Robbins, now dismissed by the right-wing as “bureaucrats”) at federal agencies, turning those positions into political appointments. During his administration, Trump took the first step, directing the EPA, NOAA, NASA, the FDA, and other agencies to identify which positions this would involve. Fortunately, President Biden threw that out within the first days of his administration.

Remembering how Trump politicized our response to Covid and used a sharpie to claim a hurricane’s predicted track was different from what NOAA scientists were saying, it’s clear that the concept of neutral scientific expertise eludes him. And based on how much support he’s getting from South African immigrant Elon Musk, who has his own multi-billion-dollar government contracts and security clearings and is even richer than Jeff Bezos …well, that’s how billionaires and corporations play the game.

Democracy does die in darkness. The Washington Post’s masthead states a truth as certain as Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “To sin by silence, when we should protest, /Makes cowards out of men.” Next time, I’ll talk about the situation I witnessed firsthand that showed how corporations can make cowards, and worse, of the most well-meaning of men and women, government agencies, and non-profits.