Santa’s arrival at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade signals the start of the holiday season, a season supposedly of “good will to all mankind.”
It is the season when those who have made obscene amounts of money – through hook, crook, manipulation and tax advantages – make their annual ritual of cleansing their souls by showing charity to the rest – a toy for a tot here, a check to Dolly Parton to spread her goodness there (Bezos didn’t even bother to appear to care how the money was spent).
‘Tis the season for plutocrats to pretend to care – if not a ticket to salvation, it’s good public relations to over-write the exploitation of workers, consumers, the environment and keep the good graces of regulators, politicians and the masses.
Indeed, Bezos’ “gesture wasn’t about generosity any more than Herschel Walker’s Senate candidacy in Georgia is for the children. After all, the money Mr. Bezos is now so magnanimously distributing was made through his dehumanizing labor practices, his tax avoidance, his influence peddling, his monopolistic power and other tactics that make him a cause of the problems of modern American life rather than a swashbuckling solution,” Anand Giridharada writes in The New York Times.
Talk about inflation! The number of U.S. billionaires grew more than tenfold between 1990 and 2021, leaping from 66 to 719, according to Americans for Tax Fairness.
In that period, the total wealth of U.S. billionaires grew from $240 billion to $4.18 trillion. In April 2021, those American billionaires had more wealth than the bottom half of Americans – $4.56 trillion vs. $2.62 trillion. That means 719 billionaires have more wealth than 165 million people in 61 million households.
And now that the Republicans are back in charge, you can bet the “trickle-down” theory (conspiracy) will be back on the docket. They have already blocked the extension of the child tax credit that achieved the miracle of cutting childhood poverty in half in one year. Can’t have that.
Next: repealing Obamacare, which has seen the number of people going without health insurance cut to record lows – 5 million already newly enrolled this season (must keep people like indentured servants dependent upon employers for healthcare). And must block any effort to shave up to $20,000 from student debt (must keep people in the clutches of landlords and slumlords like Jared Kushner, unable to purchase their own first home).
The fallacy of the “trickle down” theory has been apparent since Reagantimes and is demonstrated in the rise of the plutocrats and steady march to oligarchy – along with Republicans’ resurrection of the bogeyman of Big Bad Government Spending and National Debt.
“From 1989 to 2019, typical working families saw a negligible increase in wealth. Meanwhile, the wealthiest one percent got $29 trillion richer in those same 30 years. This is what oligarchy looks like,” writes economist Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary. “CEO pay at America’s largest public companies is up 1,460%, while worker pay has scarcely kept up with inflation since 1978. The CEO-to-worker pay gap is now 351-to-1 compared to 21-to-1 in 1965…Trickle down economics was invented by conservatives in the 1980s to justify massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. … It’s been nothing short of a disaster.”
Republicans campaigned on the misery caused by inflation – while actually opposing every measure aimed at reducing costs for families. The cost of Thanksgiving meal was up 11%, but the four largest food companies control 82 percent of beef packing, 85 percent of soybean processing, 63 percent of pork packing, and 53 percent of chicken processing. PepsiCo raised prices by 17% and – big surprise – their profits went up by more than 20%. Chipotle raised prices by nearly 15% and their profits went up by nearly 26%. ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and Shell profits have skyrocketed by 169% so far this year to $125 billion. “Corporations are raising prices because they can,” Reich writes.
“Corporate profits only accounted for roughly 11% of price growth from 1979 to 2019. Today, record corporate profits account for 53.9% of price increases. Folks, corporate greed is driving inflation, not workers asking for better wages,” Reich writes, citing Economic Policy Institute data.
While Bloomberg economists are telling American families they need to budget $5,200 extra to cover rising prices, corporations have scored the biggest profits since 1950, leaping 35% in 2021.
The danger is magnified since the radical rightwing Supreme Court’s unconstitutional decisions, which have made money equal to power.
So while the wealthiest people and corporations have billions to spend on political campaigns and lobbying, average people, frantic to pay for rent and food, are shut out of the process, just as with the other efforts to suppress voting and subvert elections.
A record $16.7 billion was spent on the midterms with billionaires like Peter Thiel making up a huge chunk of that spending; a right-wing dark money organization Donors Trust received two anonymous “contributions” of $425 million each last year, which Politico described as “among the largest ever donations to a politically connected group.”
“Be warned: our democracy, our rights, and our livelihoods will be on the line as long the super-rich are able to pump huge sums of money into elections,” Reich writes.
Americans are enthralled with billionaires, ascribing to them godlike qualities of genius, talent and foresight bordering on omniscience.
But that bubble may be bursting with the spectacular failures of Elon Musk (the Twitter fiasco) and Sam Bankman-Fried, who used billions of dollars in political and charitable donations to buy favorable policy and regulations and friendly regulators and politicians, now being investigated for the sensational collapse of the cryptocurrency enterprise, FTX.
The aim of the MAGA Republicans is to mimic Putin’s corrupt oligarchy instead of addressing the rigs embedded in the system – tax policy, voter suppression, education, public health, “corporations are people,” workers rights, civil rights, fiscal policy – that would eliminate so much of that poverty, inequity, dependency.
It is possible because we’ve done it before – when America addressed the Robber Barons in the Gilded Age, created unions and workers’ rights, women’s suffrage and civil rights and reached a certain zenith of opportunity around the 1970s. It’s been downhill ever since.