A Rising Progressive Populist Revolt Stuns AI Profiteers
There’s a clique of plutocratic, high-tech billionaires who think they’re entitled to turn America’s farmlands and rural communities into their personal domain of predatory artificial intelligence data centers. But a little bookstore in Tulsa, Oklahoma, recently hit those puffed-up elites where they’re most vulnerable: the funny bone.
Magic City Books put up a sign that rocketed through the Internet, mocking the fatuous potentates. It read:
SUPPORT THESE
DATA CENTERS
Schools
Libraries
Bookstores
Arrogantly, though, the likes of Amazon, Google, and Meta are front-loading trillions of dollars into creating a new social order managed by super-intelligent bots. This scheme, however, requires them to divert vast amounts of rural land, water, and energy to build and run their Orwellian empires. Yet, breathing the fumes of their own egos, the billionaires actually assumed that locals would welcome this dazzling bot wonderworld.
Bad assumption. Even in bastions of rural Republican rule, majorities are saying, “Uh, hell no!” Indeed, at least forty-eight data centers were stopped last year by coordinated local opposition, and public fury has largely driven data center developers out of Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, and Wisconsin. In Texas, corrupt Republican Governor Greg Abbott openly takes AI cash to push data centers, yet rural counties are rejecting them—and the state’s far-right Republican Party has now voted to oppose building more of them.
Even Wall Street money managers are blinking, for there’s growing doubt that investors can get their money back. What’s happening is that the billionaire hucksters have run headfirst into the rock-solid political belief that The People get to decide our common destiny, not a handful of techno scammers.
Forget Being ‘Moderate’—Democrats Should Be the Mad-As-Hell Party
There are towns in Texas named New Deal, Fair Play, Progresso, and even Utopia, but what you won’t find is any town called “Moderate, Texas.”
I offer this curiosity to the monied powers and milquetoast party leaders who keep insisting that Democrats must moderate their progressive policies, abandon their egalitarian commitments, and become more . . . well, corporate.
Hello! Today’s majority hates the everyday arrogance, avarice, and abuse that corporate supremacy has unleashed on workers, consumers, local businesses, family farmers, the poor, the sick, the “different,” our environment—and democracy itself.
The time when “captains of industry” were admired is long gone. Today’s billionaire prigs—such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg—are clownishly greedy and foolish, becoming so reviled that they can’t go out in public. As journalist Perry Bacon points out in The New Republic, even moderate Democrats aren’t moderate anymore: “Around 70 percent” of them, he reports, bemoan the fact that Democratic Party leaders are “ ‘too timid’ in taxing the rich, taxing corporations, and cracking down on companies that break the law.”
Polls aside, you can find out how moderates (and even conservatives) feel about moving the Party of the People to the middle of the road by visiting rural areas in Virginia, Illinois, Texas, or other states being invaded by autocratic corporate billionaires trying to usurp vast amounts of land, water, and energy for their AI data centers. Locals are furious at this plutocratic power grab and wondering if anyone will stand with them in full-force populist rebellion against the profiteers.
We’re in a 1932 moment. Far from becoming a corporate kiss-up party, people want and need Democrats to be the kick-ass party!