White Ghosts

The uberwealthy are invisible to themselves. Living the same sorts of lives as their neighbors, or the contacts they surround themselves with, they look just like everyone else. The confident supporters of their lifestyle look just like they do. It is perhaps not politically correct to use the term today, but WASP is what they called it when I was young. White Anglo Saxon, Protestant. Part of what allows one to see is contrast. Inhabitants of the wealthiest of class, never mingle with commoners. "Traffic" is something interesting to look at if you take a helicopter to the office, or perhaps the name of a PBS series that taught you more than you wanted to know about heroin, but it made you feel like a better person to have learned about it. Traffic is something a guy you pay deals with if it must be dealt with at all. We called their predominantly female offspring Debs, short for debutantes. This was long before the Karen epidemic. The boys stayed home to become investment bankers or day traders like Dad. We never really had a name for those guys, they were not of our world. The privileged have always been rather invisible to themselves.
When recent pandemic relief funds were authorized, of course most of the money would go to companies that had long-established relationships with banks, because you could call up the folks you knew and set up an appointment, or perhaps even do the deal over the phone, we can e-sign documents now-a-days! Jeesh, I wasn't even thinkin' and I'm trying to talk about it! This is how sneaky wealth can be. In my state, Wisconsin, 58 of the states 72 counties are below average per capita income and the vast majority of per capita wealth is concentrated in just eight counties. Vast swaths of territory poor, and just a few concentrations of wealth. Sadly, per capita figures do not raise the floor for the impoverished, it just busts the immense wealth bubble that keeps the impoverished "in their place", for a few, allowing elite status and power for a tiny segment of the population. The top five percent own more wealth than at any time in history. On the last day of January, 2020, it was reported that Jeff Bezos made $13.5 billion in just 15 minutes the previous Thursday. Using per capita income, that is as much as more than 507,061 people would make working for an entire year! Until we begin to attach real life understanding of how vacuous the wallet of a fat cat actually is, we will never get impetus toward sensible and fair taxation. 
Imagine if you will, that in the fifteen minutes we just spoke of, the invisible hand of the state was skimming off 70% of everything over a certain amount and for the sake of perspective, we will say that earlier in the month, his income had already surpassed the amount that would kick his earnings into the highest bracket. He would still have four billion, fifty million to call his own, as much as more than 152,118 people working in Wisconsin would make ALL YEAR! That is more people than live in the entire city of Green Bay, I'm sure that he has no understanding of his vast wealth. No perspective to fit it into, no rational support for the unfairness inherent in his blatant robbery of all of us.

Trash in the foreground picked up by conscientious citizens. Trash pile in the background has been providing toxic blight to our city for generations. Billionaires benefit, the poor, who live, breathe and die in this neighborhood develop black lung.

We go on allowing the ultrawealthy to exploit what is left as if they will one day develop a conscience. If not now, when? If not us, who? The Koch empire owns interest in over a mile of riverfront property in my city. This is just one of the ways they choose to spend their money. My guess is that some of the companies they own have relationships with banks. I can be pretty sure they get subsidies and tax breaks as well, for making my city a slum. We humans are perverse creatures when whole portions of our culture can be in a status of out of sight out of mind. My eyes are attuned to the White Ghosts of the billionaire class who own the rest of us. We are allowed to search for crumbs that fall from the edges of their gilded tables.