Do you? Like, how can they be so rich that they couldn't spend their money in 1000 lifetimes, and yet begrudge their workers a decent living and seek in every way to replace them with machines?
I'm thinking today of the Bezos wedding that closed the whole city of Venice down for a long weekend and lured the most vapid and wasteful wealthy people to a private celebration mired in excess. This is the same Jeff Bezos who moves heaven and earth to keep his employees from organizing. The same Jeff Bezos who wouldn't let the newspaper he owns endorse Kamala Harris for president.
The same Jeff Bezos who joined Joe Biden for state dinners at the White House. Because, you see, it doesn't matter who is in power, they can all be bought.
My confusion is how their minds work, the rich. Why do they never have enough? Why does it bother them, if some unfortunate Americans get health care? Why don't they want to pay taxes? They wouldn't miss it!
I suppose from our earliest eras as humans on the savannah, we have had self-preservation at the forefront of our minds. This self-preservation instinct evolved into cooperation, which is a benefit to humankind. It also evolved into competition, into taking the other group's harvest when your own failed.
Is that what lurks in the minds of the Bezos and Thiel and Murdoch and Musk scions? Some vague anxiety about an invading horde carting off all their stuff? Because, ha ha! If the Apocalypse comes, their own security details will turn on them.
They are all subsidizing research into longevity too. Heck, if they are going to enjoy the fruits of their exploitation to the max they will have to live thousands and thousands of years. And good luck with that, fly boys! Inevitably your submarines will implode.
I'm not the most charitable person on the planet, by any means. But I pay my taxes, no matter how high they are. I hate the president, but I'm paying the Secret Service to protect him. I'm also paying for the health care of some 29-year-old, able-bodied man who is sitting in his parents' basement. Somehow that bothers me a hell of a lot less than it seems to bother Jeff Bezos.
Fewer and fewer people are standing up to defend the super-rich. I think it's finally dawning on average Americans that they aren't the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" that John Steinbeck described. Events like this vacuous wedding, set against a backdrop of unrelenting toil at Amazon, will hopefully move the needle another inch or two.
I don't get these rich people, but one thing I know. I would not trade places with them. Not for all the tea in China.
2 comments:
Bezos's spirit animal is named Smaug. It's mildly baffling how for some billionaires no matter how much money they hoard none of it ever goes to humanitarian causes and others are the opposite.
They all seem like Tortured Souls to me and all the Money in the World can't fill the Void they clearly have inside of them. The Marie Antoinette Moment is looming here in America once the Masses realize how screwed they now truly are and taken advantage of by the Long Con going on in this Regime. I would not be surprised to see a Revolution... and the obscenely wealthy won't be able to buy their way out of the exile they might have to escape to... since, not every place is like America to live in and where they will be Welcomed are places even I wouldn't dare to live.
Post a Comment