Are you billionaire-friendly?
“U.S. Billionaire Wealth Surged by 70%, or $2.1 Trillion, During Pandemic.” — Inequality.org
Riffing off of:
• The Petting Zoo Bourgeoisie
• Fuck customers. The investor is always right.
Years ago, somebody showed me the billionaire-friendly side to her personality.
Life at that time had turned evil, mainly due to where I worked. A publicly-traded holding company owned my company. As in, owned us. Billionaire-friendly folks thrive in that type of workplace. Billionaire-friendly co-workers were doing everything they could to maximize day-to-day toxicity.
As one horrible workday was winding down, the thought of hearing this woman’s voice sounded nice. She had moved away, but wanted us to stay in touch. I figured that she would be kind enough to listen to my frazzled mind, so I called her that evening.
And whoa…I got the most billionaire-friendly talk. Almost a talking-to. Her tone grew serious once I mentioned that work had become satanic.
By the time we hung up, maybe a half an hour later, I had been sufficiently gaslit and tone-policed. Going to bed that night, I wondered if I was making too big of a deal out of the situation.
Looking back, it was like she had been in contact with my company’s supervisors or something.
Even if you have never reported to billionaire-friendly managers, you’ve most likely dealt with a relative, coach, or buddy who is billionaire-friendly. C’mon: this is the U.S.A. These people are everywhere. No way you haven’t run across this nonsense.
They might be worth six or seven figures. Or four figures. Anybody can be billionaire-friendly. Just swim at the shallow end of the pool and tell yourself that the stock market provides a real service to the human race.
The main thing that happens when billionaire-friendly folks bombard you with billionaire-friendliness is that, later on, you realize how far off-track the conversation got from the point you wanted to make.
That’s the idea.
It’s all about stifling people’s ability to be heard. Oligarchs love (white) people who are good at shutting others up.
Since 1990, billionaire wealth skyrocketed by a factor of twenty. Thanks to Citizens United, billionaire campaign contributions increased by a factor of forty. They bought the system and billionaire-friendly Americans helped to broker the deal for pittances in return.
Though it does need to be said: not every billionaire is a Dick…Uihlein. (If you’re not familiar with him, this article talks about Uihlein’s investments in groups that sought to overturn the 2020 Election. Yeah, this muhfugga crazy.)
However, the system increasingly allows for an extreme minority of individuals to exert outsize influence over the direction of our nation. And the planet’s future. (Or lack thereof.)
Passive-income earners hate wage increases, or as they call it, “wage inflation.” They take government handouts and redistribute them to shareholders, then get offended at the idea of sustainable pay for employees. The billionaire-friendly crowd takes their side.
In the business world of 2022, finding ways to squeeze a few more pennies for the billionaire class will move a person up the corporate ladder. In the entrepreneurial space, lots of speculators nickel-and-dime it while pretending to bet big. That’s a billionaire-friendly maneuver: getting others to spend their money by placing a bit of yours on the table.
To be billionaire-friendly is to hate job creation — if one believes that customers with money in their pockets are the natural and most effective “job creators.”
Is free-market capitalism still a thing? More like, to use MLK’s term, “socialism for the rich.”
And this minority of the citizenry could not accomplish their takeover without billionaire-friendly folks helping to maintain the unequal status quo. Billionaire-friendly folks do the dirty work and do it for not too much money, comparatively.
They’re like scabs who not only cross the picket lines, but cross them on the cheap.
The Inequality.org article, link above, says a lot. Before the pandemic, there were 614 American billionaires. Now, there are 708. While Club Billionaire got bigger, 86 million Americans got fired or laid off. And too many people shrug their shoulders and see this fact as inevitable.
The prolonged pandemic is billionaire-friendly.
Understaffed hospitals are billionaire-friendly.
Underequipped hospitals are billionaire-friendly.
Crops rotting in the fields — remember that? Billionaire-friendly.
Inflation is billionaire-friendly. Fake hysteria about inflation is billionaire-friendly.
A broken status quo is billionaire-friendly.
The United States of America has been experiencing a well-financed attempt at a paradigm shift for a few decades now. The wealthy have been doing their best to alter our societal values so they reflect the narrow interests of generational and corporate wealth.
The worst thing about billionaire-friendly folks is that they have been doing their part to make this a reality…and they have been doing it for peanuts.
Actually, this is their ugly side: they let billionaires short-change them because they knew they can extract money from Black and brown folks, as well as the white working class.
This is the United States of America, after all.
Also posted on my website. Earlier posts:
• The New Einsatzgruppen wants to talk fatherhood. Oh, boy!
• The Petting Zoo Bourgeoisie.
• Operation Week Off.
• NYC Vacay. May. 2003.
• Bros: America’s New Jews, Part II.
• Fuck customers. The investor is always right.
• Open letter to a selfie of my drunk-ass self, taken on August 11th, 2001.
I write fiction and have two dark comedies available, Fearkiller (Volume 1) and Notes from Trillionaire Island: Fearkiller (Volume 2), as well as Revolutionizer Alpha, the first book in a sci-fi series. I also wrote a story about God. It was weird, but then I decided to make the story and its sequel free. And all of the sudden, it didn’t seem as weird. Writing about God is much less weird when you write about God without charging money for it.
Here’s my professional site, my trade.
