The Danger of Bezos, Musk and Zuck Is Not Their Wealth, It’s Their Separation from the 99% of America That Is Not Them.
I apologize for my absense, but my 90th birthday got in the way, and I am just now reecovered.
And I count myself among the latter. I attribute my relative lack of prosperity to a combination of poor choices and stupidity when I had the chance to better my elderly years. No matter, but I live on social security these days, banking $1810 per month at a time when Bezos makes that in seven tenths of a second.
The great majority of the 99% are not nearly as feckless as me.
In the financial wreckage of 2008, many lost their jobs, and many others lost their homes and businesses, as Congress made Wall Street whole, and left Main Street to swing in the wind. The losers were not feckless, not by any definition of the term, but our government turned its back, and is turning it again, twenty-seven years later.
The major banks should have been found insolvent; we have a process for that.
They were not, so the American citizen-soldiers shouldered the burden in that war, as they have in countless other wars.
But they noticed. Noticed that the Dow Jones improved itself from 6,547.05 points in March 2009 to 42,677.24 points today. Noticed that the 1% held approximately $22.11 trillion in 2008, blossoming (there is no other word for it) to $50 trillion today.
A single trillion, we might remind ourselves, is a million times a million.
Between 2007 and 2022, the median net worth of U.S. households increased by approximately $53,200, rising from $139,700 in 2007 to $192,900 in 2022. This represents an increase of about 38% over the 15-year period.
But what the average Joe noticed, was that the middle class he once belonged to was lost in the dust of industries sent off to China and stagnant social security payments with rising age requirements. Suddenly, it seemed to him, the promises held out to immigrants over past decades were denied to him and his children.
Complain about that logic if you will, but the perception is there and has delivered the Orange Man to the Oval Office.
He is not wrong, this common man. He has noticed that jeff Bezos can buy a $350 million home in less that two days income, and his children will probably never own a home of their own.
But—and this is the major argument of this article.
The tragedy, both economically and socially, is that the super-wealthy of America have no idea of what life is like for those who are not them. They do not step over the homeless on their way to the office. They have no idea why taking over Venice for a wedding would be distasteful to the enormous number of Americans who cannot afford to marry.
The largest income gap the world has ever witnessed between haves and have-nots is the stuff of which pitchforks and barricades are made.
And you know what’s really incomprehensible?
Not a single one of them would allow it, if they knew.
You cannot blame a man for heartlessness, if he’s blind.