The let them eat cake nation
The rich are different from you and I, Jazz age novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. Yes, Ernest Hemingway replied, they have more money.
Both were right. Several things happened last week that showed both how different the rich are from you and I and how much more money they have.
A hedge fund billionaire, Kenneth C. Griffin, bought a penthouse in Manhattan for a record $238 million. Why does anyone need a $238 million house and how do you get that much money? A little math shows that you couldn’t get that much through a lifetime of hard work in a high-paying profession. A doctor or a lawyer who has averaged $400,000 a year for forty years and saved a quarter of that would at the end have savings of $4 million. That’s $234 million less than Griffin paid for his house. Mr. Griffin, on the other hand, has a net worth of $10 billion.
I could make the example more realistic by subtracting student loans that had to be paid back with interest and adding what the well-paid professional made from investments. But it wouldn’t make much difference unless the person was extraordinarily lucky with his or her investments.
Two things are clear. One, we are talking about an-orders-of-magnitude difference here; $4 million is about one-and-a-half percent of $238 million. Second, working for your money, even at a highly paid profession, doesn’t cut it to get as rich as Mr. Griffin. For that you would need to have your money working for you. And one additional trick that hedge fund managers have mastered: Having other people’s money working for you.
But how do you get the money in the first place? Making tons of money, on say the stock market, is mainly a matter of luck. Studies have shown that a computer that spits out random numbers can pick stocks as well as a panel of top financial planners. The point is that being super-rich has little to do with education, hard work, and saving. It has more to do with luck, including the luck of having wealthy parents, and a system that rewards wealth more than work, and taxes unearned income from investments at a much lower rate than salaries.
The United States is a plutocracy; meritocracy is a myth. Plutocracy is a cruel system. In order for the building in which Griffin bought his uber-pricey penthouse to be reconfigured for people like him, the landlord kicked out dozens of middle-class families living in rent-controlled apartments. This script is not exclusive to New York. It has and is happening all over the country, albeit with local variations and permutations but the same bottom line: we who make up more than 90 percent of the population get screwed.
The cruelty of plutocracy stands out in stark relief in a different arena. When billionaires are directly in charge of governing, they have a hard time not showing the scorn in which they hold the masses. Take the government shutdown. The lack of empathy shown by top officials was glaring. Billionaire Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross asked what the problem was; after all, furloughed workers could always take out a loan.
This was only one of the comments made by top Trump officials and even one Trump family member that the media judged as clueless, out of touch or insensitive. That explanation falls short. It’s about class, not cluelessness. The slave masters in the South before the Civil War thought they were beloved by their slaves. They were wrong but the slave owners had to believe it to salve their consciences and continue to benefit from a cruel system of total oppression. Trump too wants to believe that workers who were furloughed or worked without pay agreed with him that his lunatic, racist obsession with building a Wall of Hate is worth missing two paychecks.
But the day of reckoning is coming. Democrats are taking off their gloves. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ridiculed Wilbur Ross’s suggestion about workers taking out loans as a GOP “let them eat cake” solution. Pelosi beat Trump. The government is open for business again and Congress has not given even $1 for a Wall. Trump showed he is no master of the art of the deal or even the art of graceful retreat. He never stopped making threats—including another shutdown or a declaration of a national emergency.
Now some 2020 Democratic candidates are coming after the let them eat cake society the Republicans have built over a generation. Senator Elizabeth Warren is proposing a tax on wealth, which is the best way to fight inequality. Kamala Harris wants to take the middle man out of health care, dump the vampire insurance industry, and let government pay for health care like in every other decent country.
Neither of these women will flinch when the savage right-wing attacks come. Some Republican is going to find out that when you try to take a bite out of someone as formidable as Kamala Harris you have jumped on the back of a tiger and sooner rather than later you will fall off right into the jaws and claws of an angry and fearsome feline. Good luck to that fool.
Perhaps the excesses of a take-no-prisoners society like the $248 million penthouse and countless others are beginning to boomerang. Maybe people are scared more about being evicted, left without health care, being priced out of a decent education than they are of the word socialism.
When Trump was elected, the mantra on our side was: “Be scared. Be very scared.” Trump has shown that was no false fear. But now let’s turn the tables. Plutocrats, reactionaries and racists, your day has come. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
