A Closer Look at America's Top .0001%

Forbes just released their annual report on the nation's four hundred top income "earners". The average income of this group is 1.38 Billion dollars, yes that is right. The numbers confirm that they are richer than ever. To get our heads around it, perhaps it would help to divide the income of just one of these ultra rich people by the four hundred million or so people in The United States of America. Looking at the numbers this way puts it in slightly better perspective. Let us say that each one of us, every man woman and child gave three dollars and fifty cents to one of these folks, then, to keep things straight, these folks made a line four hundred deep. Each one in turn would come to the front of the line and get their $3.50 and so on. They would collectively receive $1,400 from each man woman and child in America. Now I'm not provincial enough to not understand that most of these folks are involved in a worldwide network of exploitation (sorry to all the rich folks out there, I mean earnings), but to get a better picture of how much wealth these folks control, it helps to break the numbers down to what an average person can understand. I raised four children for the last twenty years on around 20K. If you look at the cost to our household alone of these very wealthy individuals, it would be about 1/4 of our income, siphoned off to support these levels of earnings for just those 400 wealthiest individuals.

I do not begrudge them their wealth, but I do detest the fact that they unduly influence public debate, political fortunes of our representatives and I certainly will not remain silent as their agendas are pushed through the Halls of Congress, The White House, or The Courts. I certainly do not want them to receive any sort of corporate welfare or subsidization of any kind. However, many of these fortunes are subsidized greatly and the extreme reach of government virtually assures that these people are rewarded at the expense of the rest of us. It is our hard work and as they say, our blood, sweat and tears that fund this level of luxury.

My children, if they want to "make something of themselves", will go into debt for the privilege, paying interest for years, so that the wealthy can play the system for all it is worth. If my children want to purchase a home, many of these people will get richer at their expense. If I or my children do not read labels carefully and remain ever-vigilant about the products that we buy, it assures that a large part of their purchases will flow to the pocketbooks of these billionaires. We will look a little closer at the numbers, but letting this sink in for a while will help to see some of the problems, and solutions that are necessary if we want to return to being a nation for, of and by the people.

Less than 2% of these 400 individuals are self-made women. Nearly ten percent of the top four hundred are female, but the vast majority of those women inherited their wealth. Once again, looking more closely at the numbers, the vast majority are older white men. I have tried to forgive as many of the mistakes that this "class" of people have made over the years as possible, but for their continued attempts to claim that climate change is fiction, for their continued fight against living wages for the rest of us, for their rape of the planet and her people and for the insensitivity to the levels of corporate welfare flooding into their coffers, I am not ready to forgive them. It seems that most of these individuals are either blind to their own responsibility or in denial about their complicity in many of our national problems, most of the environmental destruction and the lion's share of the human tragedies that are lived with day in and day out by the rest of us.

The wealth of the heirs of the Wal-mart fortune is a good case in point. Just one of the three stores that this company has built in my home town, (that continuously skims off money to be sent to Atlanta, never to return.) has received millions of dollars in subsidies. The local tax payers paid dearly for the "opportunity" to shop there. Not only was Wal-mart given seven years of tax exemption, (what small businessperson would not love to have that opportunity?) but the facility needed an intersection that cost over one million dollars to upgrade. The creek that used to flow past the area, supporting a wide variety of wildlife is now choked with boxes and bags, shopping carts and car piddle from the giant parking lot. Our city is not huge, only around 100,000 people, but this giant corporate entity thinks that building a fourth facility right in the heart of the city would help them to capture more wealth from our residents. The public is not interested in having them, but the monied interests weigh more heavily on state and local officials than the people who have to live here.

The most vile subsidy that we give the Wal-marts of the world, at least here in Wisconsin is that the poverty wages that they pay assure that publicly financed health care and food stamps are helping to keep their wage slaves alive. Millions more dollars, not going directly to the corporation, but paid by our citizens to prop up the economically unsustainable approach of the exploiters. Then, we can add in the dozens of locally owned and operated fabric stores, food stores, clothing stores, shoe stores, pharmacies, art supply stores, appliance stores, stationary shops, hardware stores and bike shops that have gone away since they came to town and you have a rough sketch of how they gobble up our quality of life while wresting more and more income from places that cannot afford a single penny more, for less. No one seems to like to look in the mirror anymore. We are the ones who have let this exploitation occur. We are the ones who feel threatened by our own poverty and we are ultimately the ones who line up for this sort of exploitation at the hands of the oligarchs.

It is my humble opinion that we need to understand that there has always been class warfare and the truth of the matter is, as Warren Buffet (who is always at or near the top of this list) himself has said, "My class, the rich are winning."

Getting Our Bearings

When we took our first tentative steps into the information age, we brought along with us the baggage and predispositions of a by-gone age. We assumed that knowledge was power and that human beings would do the right thing with the information that was being collected and distributed about us. Although we had no idea of the size and extent of data that would be at our fingertips, we thought we knew everything we needed to know about information. We had a relationship with the press, textbook publishers and the libraries of the world that allowed us to assume that some sort of due diligence and thorough fact check had been performed on the information that was available. Many of us had forgotten about the dark ages, the library at Alexandria and tried not to think of the data collected by the FBI. We also considered that editorial staff would have ejected the lunacy, tightened up the grasp of fact and elucidated ideas that had merit. Many of us assumed that history was correct and that there had been, once upon a time, such a thing as a just war. What has taken place in the information age is that none of these processes are operating and the sieve that we had hoped to capture the most important ideas for distribution has been removed, allowing falsehood and speculation to proliferate. 

I have shared memes that I did not research exhaustively on facebook, but I have worked hard to only re-post things that I am reasonably certain are true. The idea of reasonable certainty has morphed into something quite different over the last forty years and there may be little we can do to get our footing in the flow of current information overload. My concern here is about the rampant use of powerful information management and retrieval systems to bolster our fictional account of the world around us. I have watched hours of footage that supposedly "proves" that 9-11 was an inside job. What I have come to understand is that it was more likely pure incompetence that allowed the structures to be brought down. The possibility of the series of events going utterly perfectly for legions of munitions guys, who supposedly set the explosives for the demolition, seems far fetched, but not inconceivable. That is the foot in the door that is required for uncertainty to get a foothold.

Stories swirl around us as if they are a very part of the air that we breathe. They often obscure more fact than they are based on and the murky waters seem to never be allowed to settle. Before we can take the time required to dispel one myth, several more have come into existence. Often it is better to follow ancient wisdom like, "A stitch, in time, saves nine." If we can get to the bottom of a single modern myth, perhaps we can begin to break the chain of hearsay and contempt that seem to be alive and well within our culture. When working to break the stranglehold that bad information has over our societies, it is well to attack the weakest link in the chain of events that allows us to be taken in by whatever the conspiracy theory of the day is. I have heard hundreds of people dismiss it all as lunacy, but the grotesque and unsubstantiated things they purport to believe dwarf the ones they deny. 

Case in point, the climate change deniers. It has been my experience that scientists do sometimes get things wrong, to be sure. Looking at allopathic medicine we have more than enough fallacies to question the whole assumption that our bodies are like a battlefield and that waging war on "germs" can make us healthy. It has been my experience that our health is a lot more like a good cocktail, it depends on a majority of things we do not normally think of as good by themselves and a small portion of poison just to give them the desired kick. Okay, I'll stop being flip, but don't miss my message here. Just because some scientists initially thought that the greenhouse effect would heat the whole planet evenly, and that has not been the case is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The deniers blame the whole warming of our planet on things like sunspot activity or a "conspiracy of the left". I have even heard that scientists are "making the whole thing up to secure research dollars from the government." The fact that the ozone layer that protects us from incoming radiation has been slowly stripped away by a chemical process proven to be caused by chlorofluorocarbons (man-mad chemicals) in the atmosphere seems to have gone in one ear and out the other with these folks. The fact that we have reintroduced into the atmosphere more CO2 in just the last fifty years than it took hundreds of thousands of years to store up in the geologic deposits that we are trying desperately to eliminate seem to be lost on these powerfully stupid individuals and groups.

It seems that some conspiracy theories pop up like mushrooms, almost of their own volition. Unfunded and as if by magic, they bloom in an instant virtually from thin air. others are continually propped up by well-funded think tanks and almost religious zeal by a few well-heeled interests. It is interesting that in some cases, like those who claim that global warming is not real, we can follow a glut of money, corporate welfare, fortune 500 companies and political might to the perpetrators of the myth. The public is not being told that for every BTU, kilo-calorie or ounce of fuel that is produced from fracking, four are expended to wrest the oil from the tar sands or shale. The massive wasteland that is being produced by these sorts of activities is every bit as grotesque as the deforestation of the rainforest with the added twist of (lime that accompanies great drinks) a toxic legacy to go with the annihilation of native flora and fauna. This past month, the petroleum council, a public relations and industry mouthpiece for the industry has said that of all the gasoline sold in both Wisconsin and Minnesota, 50-80% of it comes from tar sands oil. The irony here is that when a person pulls up to a gas pump, there is no way to know the source of the oil used to make the fuel. Most people do not even understand that for the convenience of fueling up, a series of not so wonderful things have to have happened  to allow that luxury.

This first image is just a portion of the existing Midwest pipelines and refineries. The image is dastardly incomplete because I have personally been to at least one other refinery in Midland, Michigan near Saginaw and Bay City. Also missing from this schematic diagram is the pipeline running into the heart of my city, Green Bay, Wisconsin. The irony of these lies perpetrated by map makers is that petroleum and the petroleum industry itself has special status as a result of the fact that it is a feedstock for the machines of war and has been allowed nearly military intelligence status. we are supposed to remain ignorant about the levels of subsidy, the health threats posed by it and the exact toll that is being placed on the environment by our pursuit of this black gooey gold.

I heard an excellent perspective about the energy contained in a gallon of regular gasoline. Imagine the energy equivalent of 100 people working for eight hours a day for a week. Yes, 4,000 human hours of actual work, that is the amount of energy in a single gallon of petrol. It is nearly unbelievable until you start to do the math. Over half of the energy is squandered as heat. Even the most efficient transportation device, the bicycle can only allow a human to produce about three quarters of a horsepower. Add to these facts the effort of punching a car-sized hole in the atmosphere, pushing half a ton or more of steel along surfaces with bumps and potholes perhaps on under-inflated tires and you begin to see the truth of the matter a little more clearly.

When we add the energy required for our vehicles, imagining every gallon of fuel as an extra hundred people just hanging out for a week, one can see the problem of global warming a little more clearly. Just having that many extra people would choke the air with carbon dioxide from them breathing, but instead of a waste gas that feeds trees, shrubs and plants of all types, these tools that we use to move about the earth exhale poison gas that can kill. We have the tools needed to stop, look around, follow the money and make up our own minds about what is right and good. The time has come for us to use every tolls in our arsenal to wage peace, speak truth to power and to teach the next generation what it truly means to be human. I throw down the challenge to everyone to be the best we can be in the face of the tumult and turmoil that we have foisted upon us each and every day. Be strong, hold tight to your soul, for there are those who would estrange you from it for money out there and they feed on fear and hate. Love them as you would yourself and perhaps we can heal their wounds as well as our own.