The self-pity of some people knows no bounds. Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, said this week that the phrase “tax the rich” is hate speech on a par with other well-known slurs. “I must say that I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’—quote, tax the rich—when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase, ‘from the river to the sea,’” Mr. Roth said on an earnings call Tuesday, as reported by The New York Times.
Roth was peeved because Mayor Zohran Mamdani filmed a video celebrating Governor Kathy Hochul’s embrace of a tax on pricey second homes in New York in front of a building (developed by Vornado) containing a penthouse owned by hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin. Griffin bought it in 2019 for (sit down) $238 million, which made it at the time by far the most expensive single residence ever bought in New York.
I could maybe see an argument against Mamdani specifically singling out one person in that video. Griffin himself was quick to point out that Hizzoner “seems to have forgotten that the C.E.O. of another American company was assassinated just blocks from where I live in New York,” referring to Brian Thompson of United Healthcare. There are a lot of wackos out there. Although if God forbid someone shot Griffin tomorrow, it would not be Mamdani’s “fault,” any more than right-wing anti-government rhetoric was responsible for Justin Mohn shooting and then decapitating his federal-worker father in 2024. Only killers pull triggers. You’d think the people who preach at us constantly about personal responsibility would agree with that.
But let’s get back to Roth. What a crybaby. What he refuses to understand, or at least to admit, is: Nobody hates him personally. (a) Nobody cares enough about him to hate him personally, and (b) odds are he’s a relatively nice man and a good father and all that. This has nothing to do with hatred of individuals.
What millions of Americans hate is the extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the United States. Back in March, a New York Times analysis of donations in the 2024 election campaign found that just 300 billionaires and their families made a staggering 19 percent of all contributions to federal campaigns. That was more than $3 billion all told, either directly or through political action committees. The money helped elect Donald Trump, of course, but also new senators like Montana’s Tim Sheehy, who raked in $47 million from billionaires in his win over Democrat Jon Tester.
This is sick. This is not democracy. These people have no sense of limits, no sense that democracy requires that restrictions be placed on their power. Or maybe they do recognize that fact and have contempt for it, in which case it makes them opponents of democracy.
“I have the right to spend whatever I choose to promote what I believe,” David Koch once wrote, criticizing the landmark 1974 law that sought to impose caps on campaign expenditures. Fuck you. No you don’t. I mean, you do, right now, under the current laws of the United States, where the Supreme Court has held that money is speech and as such needs to be as “free” as speech is. You may think I’m referring to the infamous Citizens United decision of 2010, but actually the court initially made this holding in 1976’s Buckley v. Valeo, which came long before campaigns were so awash in lucre. That year, the average Senate race cost $595,000. Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $3.8 million now. In 2020, Senate races averaged around $30 million.
Koch is wrong. Money isn’t speech. Money is money. The difference is easily provable with the observation that all of us can speak equally but we cannot spend equally. If Koch and I are standing in the town square advocating for opposing candidates for mayor, I can speak on behalf of my candidate as endlessly as he can. That’s speech. But his ability to hand his preferred candidate $100 bills is rather more infinite than mine. That isn’t speech. It’s money. It corrupts the process. Someday, this will be obvious to a different Supreme Court.
You’d think these people would be satisfied with the way things are, so heavily stacked in their favor. But they aren’t. They want more. They always want more. This year, billionaires who want to keep AI free of any restrictions or regulations are pouring eye-popping sums into the midterms: Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC founded by venture capitalist Marc Andreesson and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, has amassed a war chest of $140 million. Their goal is to defeat candidates like Alex Bores in New York, who vows to lead a charge to regulate AI if he gets to Congress, and to promote candidates who’ll lie back and let them do what they want.
Why are they so hot on AI? Well, it’s pretty simple, isn’t? More AI means fewer human employees, with their oh-so-burdensome salaries and benefits and occasional illnesses. Claude Anthropic can’t agitate for a union. More AI means they get richer. The millions who lose work? Well, that’s progress. If they lose work, it’s what they deserved for not keeping up with the times. (Fancifully, some AI evangelists claim to support universal basic income as a solution to the mass immiseration their products will cause. But we know exactly which side they’ll be on if Congress ever takes up such a measure.)
These people have to be stopped. They need to be taxed at higher rates, of course. And their political power has to be curbed. In fact, that has to be a defining issue in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary race.
Every Democratic candidate needs to be asked: What will you do to rein in the political power of the billionaires? They may not be able to do as much as we’d like, given the Supreme Court, but how they talk about it—whether they’re angry or sanguine, whether they convey alarm or spew out a bunch of stupid happy talk about being able to work with everyone—will tell us a lot about their character and their worldview.
It’s kind of a “price of entry” issue. That is, the price of being taken seriously as a candidate, whatever their other positions, is that they recognize this state of affairs for the five-alarm fire it is. If something isn’t done about this, by 2030, those 300 billionaires will account for 40 percent of all federal campaign spending. Or 50. And what remains of this democracy will be dead.
By the way, the other “price of entry” issue? It’s that the candidates will use every ounce of political capital they have to kill the Senate filibuster if they win control of Washington in 2028. Not reform it. Kill it. The filibuster in any form means continued paralysis, dysfunction, and a certain drubbing in the 2030 midterms that will return control of one or both houses of Congress to the GOP. No filibuster means passing 10 or 15 or 20 bills that make people’s lives better and stop monopolies from being able to rip people off the way they can now. It has the potential to revolutionize politics. Any Democrat who doesn’t see this at this point can’t possibly be taken seriously.
Kvetch away, Steven Roth. But maybe in the meantime, pause and give a little thought to what is required for a healthy democracy to function. Reflect, perhaps, on the fact that this country experienced its greatest growth, its golden era, when a third of the workforce was unionized, when the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent, and when corporations generally understood that they had a commitment not only to shareholders but to community stakeholders.
Finally, as you reflect with justifiable pride on your own success, devote at least a few moments to the elements of public infrastructure—the roads, the rails, the computer networks that were all initially developed by the government—that helped make you so rich. If you and your class don’t want to be hated, stop doing things people hate.