Gap

Financial Backlash

Have you wondered when the madness of a handful of billionaires, having access to all the levers of power that affect all the rest of us, will produce a backlash?

And what that may look like?

What I’ve noticed is increased whining from the ultra rich. Which is an early warning sign that the oligarchs are beginning to feel the heat.

When they threaten to move when a tax is imposed on their excess, they’re beginning to get a different, discomforting kind of attention.

As support for this president and his cohort, dwindles, admiration they may have enjoyed for having been smart (lucky?) to have accumulated wealth the rest of us can only imagine, sours.

Jeff Bezos is unloading his obscene 400+ft yacht because it’s drawing too much attention to his wealth. Remember when he basked in that attention?

Hard as it is to imagine, what must it be like when being richer than all but a handful of one’s peers – all of whom, as we have learned from the Epstein files, are terrified of being cast out of the elite club – leaves you feeling as if all there now is to life is protecting your wealth?

If there is any integrity left to the system of government most of us believed governs us, the midterms will begin the laborious task of dismantling the grotesque pyramid our culture now is.

But throwing the rascals out is only step number one.

The more complex job is uncovering the flaws in our system that kept the institutions we trusted – Congress, Supreme Court, chief among them – to become part of the group who profited more from feathering their own nest, than from the sense of duty and integrity that needs to motivate public servants.

Because that’s what they are. Servants of the public good. And the first measure of that good is fairness, access to the means of insuring a decent life.

The Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Civil Rights Act, which has gradually begin to redress the unjust ways black people have been denied access to the ballot, is a crude, cynical move from the Court we once trusted to keep an even hand.

Universal health care access may raise the cry of socialism, but it is the basic right of every person, by whatever name it’s called.

The list is long, but the mission is clear.

Once the envy of the world for our egalitarian ways, our former friends are forming themselves into new alliances, finding our corrupt ways, toxic.

Until the country throws a monkey wrench into the system that has unbalanced our nation over the past 50 years, power will continue to beget power.

You and I must gain hold of that monkey wrench. Beginning this November.