“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime” ... French novelist Honoré de Balzac
No one disputes the fact that the global pandemic threw us all under the bus. Some of us got sick. Some of us lost loved ones. Others lost jobs. Others reaped the benefits. At Inequality.org, journalist Chuck Collins recently shared some statistics concerning the ever-increasing disparity between billionaires and average folks. In a nutshell, the rich not only got richer – they got a lot richer.
Pandemic profiteers like Musk and Bezos made out like bandits and the figures are jaw-dropping. At the start of the pandemic, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was worth about $25 billion dollars; two years into the pandemic his wealth had surged to $255 billion. When last checked – March 18, 2024 – Musk is at $188.5 billion. That’s more than a seven-fold increase in four years.
At the same time, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ wealth has soared from $113 billion to 192.8 billion – even after donating tens of billions to charity and paying out tens of billions more in a divorce settlement with his now ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott.
Speaking of Ms. Scott, she’s the only billionaire on the 2020 top 15 wealthiest Americans list to see a decline in her wealth decline from a net worth of $36 billion in 2020 to $35.4 billion due to her generous giving to charity. At least someone has their values in check.
In 2022 the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics summed up one study of COVID’s impact on those of us who were just trying to keep our heads above the water line:
The pandemic disrupted lower-paid, service-sector employment
most, disadvantaging women and lower income groups at least
temporarily, and this may have scarring effects...Higher-paid
workers tend to gain more from continuing opportunities to
telework. Less-advantaged students suffered greater educational
setbacks from school closures. School and daycare closures
disrupted the work of many parents, particularly mothers. We
conclude that the pandemic is likely to widen income inequality
over the long run, because the lasting changes in work patterns,
consumer demand, and production will benefit higher income
groups and erode opportunities for some less advantaged groups.
The U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics got it right. Income inequality grew like cancer cells in the course of the pandemic. Collins’ data tells us that in March 2020 the U. S. harbored 614 billionaires worth $2.947 trillion. In March 2024 the number of billionaires had grown to 737 billionaires worth $5.529 trillion.
If not always illegal, this vast increase in billionaires' wealth has deadly consequences.
In 2022 Oxfam International published Inequality Kills, a report detailing how inequality “is contributing to the death of at least 21,000 people each day, or one person every four seconds. This is a conservative finding based on deaths globally from lack of access to healthcare, gender-based violence, hunger, and climate breakdown.”
Oxfam’s International Executive Director Gabriela Bucher made it quite clear just what led to that perilous state of affairs:
Central banks pumped trillions of dollars into financial markets
to save the economy, yet much of that has ended up lining the
pockets of billionaires riding a stock market boom. Vaccines
were meant to end this pandemic, yet rich governments allowed
pharma billionaires and monopolies to cut off the supply to
billions of people. The result is that every kind of inequality
imaginable risks rising. The predictability of it is sickening.
Fixing – or at least ameliorating – inequality is no easy task. The recommendations of the Peterson Institute for International Economics include: governments need to address inequality directly and specifically; taxes and spending programs must be progressive and benefit others than the wealthy; novel approaches must replace tired, by-the-book policy.
Whatever remedies one favors to deal with the obscene inequality of wealth here and elsewhere, the time to act is now. As Oxfam’s Bucher says: “The consequences of it kill.”
Hating Robocalls, and Other Things that All Americans Can Agree On
We live in a divided nation—but there some things will always bind us together.
Very few people seem to be getting along in America right now. Countless relationships have ended, and families have broken apart because of political and ideological differences, which have only grown more extreme following the 2016 election. The divide between Democrats and Republicans, pro-lifers and pro-choicers, climate-change deniers and believers, and many more have become unfathomably vast.
Image via the Seattle Times
But amidst all the chaos, violence and noise, there are just some issues that are decidedly non-partisan; some topics that are so unanimously agreed on that for a moment, it almost seems like we're all only human. In a time of rage, here are the few points of commonality we have.
1. Robocalls Should Stop Forever
There are so many contentious issues being debated in Congress today—from the Green New Deal to bathrooms to anything even remotely connected to the president; it's safe to say that there are very few things everyone in the House and Senate agree upon. But recently, two bills were introduced in the spirit of stopping robocalls—those awful telemarketer messages that constantly interrupt our day with health insurance scams or calls from the Chinese consulate—forever. One is the proposal Stopping Bad Robocalls, from Senator Frank Pallone of New Jersey. The other is Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey's Telephone Robocall Criminal Abuse Enforcement and Deterrence Act. Both of these proposals will make it much harder for telemarketers to call and force their wills upon unsuspecting constituents. According to Markey, "If this bill can't pass, no bill can pass."
AI support centreImage via Ars Technica
2. Voting is Important
Now, though the issue of who to vote for is one of the easiest ways to turn an ordinary Thanksgiving dinner into a full-on screamfest, most Americans do agree that as citizens of this country, we are responsible for performing our civic duty and making our political opinions heard. Starting way back with the Founding Fathers, this has been an American ideal that nobody except for the staunchest anarchists or most apathetic among us is resistant to. Even so, only around 58.1% of America's voting-eligible population voted in 2016, although 67% of Americans believe that not voting is a huge problem, according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. Maybe the disparity lies in the fact that the people who do not believe in voting also probably wouldn't be too likely to respond to a random political survey.
3. The News Is Fake
No matter where you prefer to get your news, most Americans agree that the media has serious issues—namely the abundance of falsified information plaguing and distorting everything from our elections to our dating lives. The issue isn't only a problem among journalists; politicians themselves are also widely distrusted, and for a good reason. In 2010, Senator Jim McMinn proclaimed that 94% of bills in Congress are passed without issue (it was found to be about 27.4%—although who knows if that statistic is true, though it did come from a Pulitzer-prize-winning political fact-checking organization). Since then, things have spiraled more and more out of control. There's no legitimate way to check how much fake news is out there, but according to one survey, most viewers were suspicious of 80% of the news they saw on social media and 60% of what they saw online overall. Though if you're like the majority of Americans, you won't be taking this article's word for it.
Image via Vox
4. We Should Have Healthcare
Although there is certainly not a clear consensus, most Americans do support healthcare for all. According to a 2018 poll, 6 out of 10 Americans believe that the government should provide healthcare for everyone; another survey from The Hill found that 70% of Americans support Medicare for all, and even a small majority of Republicans are in favor of the idea.
5. The Nation Is Divided
We can all agree on one thing: disagreeing. 81% of Americans believe that we are more divided than at any other time in our nation's history, according to Time. (Remember, there was this thing called the Civil War). Americans can't even agree on what exactly the nation's most significant points of disagreement are: most Democrats believe gun control is a huge issue while most Republicans consider it unimportant; same with climate change and income equality, according to surveys from the Pew Institute.
Although contention and chaos might be the laws of the day, at least we'll always have a shared hatred of telemarketers to bind us all together.
Eden Arielle Gordon is a writer and musician from New York City.