this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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What power do Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have over you?
They both are spending tons of money to spread propaganda to influence public opinion and elections is the first and easiest to point out.
They also both own major news outlets that defend them publicly and are very influential of public opinion.
Both have through their businesses received government subsidies, in effect having us tax dollars go to their pockets. This cycle is repeated through the influence they buy by spreading propaganda, using lobbyists, using money as a tool within the government apparatus to generate more money for their companies and in turn for themselves.
Why does influencing public opinion and elections matter to you?
I like your last paragraph, I think it distills it nicely. Its not that they directly harm you, they influence the government which is allowed to harm you.
If you don't think that influencing public opinion matters in a democratic republic, I invite you to learn about Hitler's rise to power, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi party in Germany, and the holocaust. Using the same propaganda techniques used by the Nazi party, misinformation is used to influence public opinion. This is especially true on Elon's Twitter, but Bezos has used the same techniques to attempt to union bust.
Millions of people died as a result of the propaganda campaigns of the Nazi party. I fear history is about to repeat itself in the usa.
So as you say influencing public opinion is bad because then that public opinion is used by a POWERFUL government to harm people. I agree that is what I am talking about, the government having the power over your life is the bad thing, not the opinions of rich people. They can have whatever opinion they want, and the only way they can make it count is if they can sway the people to vote your rights away or directly sway the current officials.