THE RICH ARE NOT LIKE US

By Robert P. Bomboy

No one seems to be saying it, but the time has come when the rich - the top one percent and their $ billions - have taken over America.

That's really the story of President Donald Trump, an immensely rich man, representative of the richest and their overweening selfishness.

            He is part of that one percent of the people in America who are taking nearly 25 percent of the nation’s income (for a benchmark, that's double what they made in 1986). Wealth? Trump and the rich control 40 percent of the wealth in this country. The rest is spread - pretty thinly - through the upper reaches of our middle class. The poor have virtually no savings, no wealth at all.

Millions of Americans like us are working longer hours for lower wages, and yet almost all of the new income and wealth being created in America is going to that gigantically dominating one percent, who are - like President Trump - the richest of the rich. While the top one percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past 10 years alone, those of us in the middle have actually seen our incomes fall. 

            The early twentieth-century novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald was famous for saying, "The rich are not like us," but we Americans - you and me and Joe the barber - are not generally aware of the huge difference between the rich and the rest of us. People whom the most fair-minded would consider wealthy are now looking at the tailights of the super-rich, like President Trump.

            While the richest rake in literally billions, half of us are keeping our families going on less than $30,000 a year. We’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners because our homes have been foreclosed and taken away. If you combined the pay of all the Americans earning the minimum wage, it would amount to less than half of the bonuses Wall Street gives its traders. The top 25 Wall Street hedge-fund managers together last year earned more than all the kindergarten teachers in America. I don't know whether you know what "hedge funds" are: they're exclusive money investments for high-rollers. No way I could even get into them.

            Shakespeare said, "There's something rotten in the state of Denmark." He should have smelled this.

            I know about these things because, for the past year I've been collecting the facts of our situation from the nation's most respected and authoritative sources - from Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, National Book Award winners - writing in our country's most serious and scholarly journals. You can see the complete picture anytime you want, by looking at my free searchable database/blog at onepercentsearcher.blogspot.com, where you can instantly find specific topics or scroll through almost 400 carefully attributed entries.
           President Trump and his millionaire-billionaire cabinet live in the gold-plated mansions of this one percent. They, like the richest in their gated homes, have their own bible, not the "begats" of Genesis but the "begets" of the one percent in 21st century America. Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. We shouldn't wonder that Congress gave the drug companies their billion-dollar gifts - preventing the federal government from bargaining for lower-priced Medicare drugs.

In the debates over the repeal of Obamacare we should know that virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the richest one percent, are kept in office by money from that top one percent, and know that if they serve the top one percent they will be rewarded by that top one percent when they leave office - more than often taking teak-and-mahogany-paneled suites among the 10,000 other lobbyists in Washington. The most venial of them bargained for the $600 billion tax cut to millionaires and billionaires that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office discovered in the first proposed new replacement of Obamacare. To get that money for the rich, they would steal the health insurance from 24 million of us and kill an estimated 17,000 of America's workingmen and their families of women and children.

They don't care about this. They have hard hearts. The richest, on average, live 10 years longer than working people. They don't need to rely on the federal government for their medical care or health insurance, their education in private schools, or their protection from violence. They don't need it; they can buy all that for themselves, because they have the money. Their mothers don't wait every day for Meals on Wheels.

Being rich, behind their guarded walls, has separated them from ordinary people like us; if they ever had real hearts they've put them away in the lock boxes of their banks. They've lost whatever empathy they once may have had. As the Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman has said, the top one percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but they actually like it just fine: too gridlocked to re-distribute the proceeds of working America; too divided to do anything but lower already low taxes for themselves.

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