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Honestly, the inequality gap in America should stagger the imagination or, on second thought, maybe it shouldn't, not with the first billionaire in the White House and at least two more threatening to join him in a run for the presidency in 2020. After all, we now live on the planet of the billionaires. In January, as the billionaire summit in Davos, Switzerland, was about to be held, Oxfam summed our world up this way:
"Billionaire fortunes increased by 12% last year -- or $2.5 billion a day -- while the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity saw their wealth decline by 11%... [T]he number of billionaires has nearly doubled since the financial crisis, yet wealthy individuals and corporations are paying lower rates of tax than they have in decades, thanks in part to the new tax law championed by President Trump."
Yes, a billionaire strolled into the Oval Office in January 2017 and (don't be shocked!) promptly fused with congressional Republicans not to fund America's crumbling infrastructure of roads, dams, levies, and the like, or to offer better medical care, or to rescue the environment, or to face the climate crisis that threatens the human future, or to do anything that would help an average American. Instead, they focused on funding the creation of yet more of the super wealthy with a tax cut sent straight from billionaire heaven.
With 2020 in mind, President Trump is now warning American voters about the dangers of "radical left" Democrats, a crew of "socialists" capable of launching a reign of terror against... hmmm, billionaires. Let me quote the most dangerous among them. Bernie Sanders: "Instead of an austerity program for working families and the poor, we need austerity for billionaires and large multinational corporations." Elizabeth Warren: "I want these billionaires to stop being freeloaders." So watch out if they take the White House! And while you're at it, check out what really should be the scandal of this American century. From the indispensable Nomi Prins, TomDispatchregular and author, appropriately enough, of Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, comes an overview of the economic "great wall" that Donald Trump and crew are building to keep most Americans out. Tom
Survival of the Richest
All Are Equal, Except Those Who Aren't
By Nomi PrinsLike a gilded coating that makes the dullest things glitter, today's thin veneer of political populism covers a grotesque underbelly of growing inequality that's hiding in plain sight. And this phenomenon of ever more concentrated wealth and power has both Newtonian and Darwinian components to it.
In terms of Newton's first law of motion: those in power will remain in power unless acted upon by an external force. Those who are wealthy will only gain in wealth as long as nothing deflects them from their present course. As for Darwin, in the world of financial evolution, those with wealth or power will do what's in their best interest to protect that wealth, even if it's in no one else's interest at all.
In George Orwell's iconic 1945 novel, Animal Farm, the pigs who gain control in a rebellion against a human farmer eventually impose a dictatorship on the other animals on the basis of a single commandment: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." In terms of the American republic, the modern equivalent would be: "All citizens are equal, but the wealthy are so much more equal than anyone else (and plan to remain that way)."
Certainly, inequality is the economic great wall between those with power and those without it.
As the animals of Orwell's farm grew ever less equal, so in the present moment in a country that still claims equal opportunity for its citizens, one in which three Americans now have as much wealth as the bottom half of society (160 million people), you could certainly say that we live in an increasingly Orwellian society. Or perhaps an increasingly Twainian one.
After all, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote a classic 1873 novel that put an unforgettable label on their moment and could do the same for ours. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today depicted the greed and political corruption of post-Civil War America. Its title caught the spirit of what proved to be a long moment when the uber-rich came to dominate Washington and the rest of America. It was a period saturated with robber barons, professional grifters, and incomprehensibly wealthy banking magnates. (Anything sound familiar?) The main difference between that last century's gilded moment and this one was that those robber barons built tangible things like railroads. Today's equivalent crew of the mega-wealthy build remarkably intangible things like tech and electronic platforms, while a grifter of a president opts for the only new infrastructure in sight, a great wall to nowhere.
In Twain's epoch, the U.S. was emerging from the Civil War. Opportunists were rising from the ashes of the nation's battered soul. Land speculation, government lobbying, and shady deals soon converged to create an unequal society of the first order (at least until now). Soon after their novel came out, a series of recessions ravaged the country, followed by a 1907 financial panic in New York City caused by a speculator-led copper-market scam.
From the late 1890s on, the most powerful banker on the planet, J.P. Morgan, was called upon multiple times to bail out a country on the economic edge. In 1907, Treasury Secretary George Cortelyou provided him with $25 million in bailout money at the request of President Theodore Roosevelt to stabilize Wall Street and calm frantic citizens trying to withdraw their deposits from banks around the country. And this Morgan did -- by helping his friends and their companies, while skimming money off the top himself. As for the most troubled banks holding the savings of ordinary people? Well, they folded. (Shades of the 2007-2008 meltdown and bailout anyone?)
The leading bankers who had received that bounty from the government went on to cause the Crash of 1929. Not surprisingly, much speculation and fraud preceded it. In those years, the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald caught the era's spirit of grotesque inequality in The Great Gatsby when one of his characters comments: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." The same could certainly be said of today when it comes to the gaping maw between the have-nots and have-a-lots.
Income vs. Wealth
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