Showing posts with label rich people. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rich people. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Reasons For Rich People To Feel Smug in 2023

 I haven't posted in the last couple of weeks for the simple reason that I'd deliberately ignored what passes for news. This was for both mental and physical health reasons. But as neoliberal doctrine dictates to the Lessers, there shall be no more excuses.  Western culture hasn't celebrated the whole, original 12 Days of Christmas for centuries. Everybody has to get back to the New Normal before New Year's Day. And for me, that means keeping up with the New York Times so that the more squeamish among you don't have to.

It didn't take me long to find a piece guaranteed to annoy and nauseate. Titled "Reasons for Optimism in 2023," it quickly becomes obvious that this iteration of the year-end "listicle" is exclusively addressed to the people who sincerely believe that the only reason they got so much filthily richer in 2022 is because they are so "blessed." 

But on the off-chance that a twinge of guilt might threaten to afflict the sensitive rich, DealBook's Andrew Ross Sorkin and about half a dozen of his closest assistant scribes are here to assure them that even the Lessers never had it so good. 

The main things that rich people can safely ignore in 2023 are the "tripledemic," the "brutal war with no end in sight," and the climate crisis.

Even though more than 400 people a day are still dying of Covid, they are mainly old or they have pre-existing conditions. The good news is that vaccines became available for "children as young as six months old, a relief for parents as much of the world returned to a new normal." 

The article does not inform its well-heeled readers  that Covid has exploded in China, and that a bipartisan Congress just voted to kick millions of poor people off the Medicaid rolls come spring. That is because Congress had no interest in funding any kind of pandemic relief in the next fiscal year. 

The New York Times listicle does not report these little factoids, possibly because they might make the Smugnorati feel uncomfortable in this season of comfort and joy.

Meanwhile, as if they needed another reason to feel self-satisfied about 2022, they're reminded that rich countries finally abandoned their selfishness and agreed at the COP 27 confab to study pledging financial aid to poor countries suffering from the capitalistic pollution of rich countries.  However, since the Times doesn't want its readers to feel bad, it side-steps the inconvenient truth that it's only a pledge, not an ironclad commitment. And besides, what difference does irreversible global warming make when Science™  just made a nuclear fusion clean energy breakthrough, and Joe Biden promised to cure cancer in 20 years?

And if the rich are altruistically worried that bots and artificial intelligence will replace human sweat, the article continues, they shouldn't be. Bosses and owners should reject the notion that wage labor can ever be fully replaced by technology.

"What the bots can do well is make grunt work easier. One example that went viral shortly after ChatGPT’s release: A Palm Beach doctor posted a video of himself dictating a letter to an insurance company."

The article doesn't mention that such writing programs replace the office insurance grunts who normally would not only take dictation from the boss but would have the skills necessary to write a business letter. This must be especially true in the billionaire paradise of Palm Beach, where denizens have private insurance and concierge medical care, and where nobody will ever notice the millions of people getting kicked off Medicaid because "we" cannot afford it, and because poor people must always jump through hoops in order to prove their deserving need.

And speaking of poor-shaming,  that brings us to perhaps the most shameless whopper in the whole mendacious Times article:

Real progress is being made in tackling child poverty. The number of children in America living below the poverty line has plummeted by 59 percent since 1993. As The Times’s Jason DeParle reported in September, “child poverty has fallen in every state, and it has fallen by about the same degree among children who are white, Black, Hispanic and Asian, living with one parent or two, and in native or immigrant households.”

Conveniently left unmentioned, lest rich readers lose the soft rosy glow of their own smugnorance, is that since Congress failed to renew the temporary Child Tax Credit before they left town for their holiday break. childhood poverty already is heading right back up.

But, the twisted Times logic goes, since kids were lifted out of poverty for six whole months in 2022, that is all the reason that "we" need to celebrate now and in the years to come.  Six whole months of relief was actually a pre-Christmas miracle when you come to think about it, because for once, Congress did not impose much if any "means-testing" poison pills on recipients. Nearly every family in the United States received it, whether or not they worked or paid taxes. This shocking universality brought out all the usual elite concern trolls, who feared that it would discourage people from working.

"Even the theoretical possibility of enabling laziness was enough to make a permanent extension a complete non-starter," explained Bloomberg News.

But never mind all that, because the New York Times concludes its own feel-good piece with news about a giant fan in Iceland that can suck tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. "The Department of Energy and a bevy of investors are racing to bring the technology, called direct air capture, to other parts of the world," the newspaper gushed.

I bet they are. If they can do subversive regulatory capture of government agencies that were originally formed to protect the public, and if they can suck the very life out of regular people just because it's profitable and because they can, then they can certainly do air capture.  They might even find a way to capture and privatize oxygen itself, and charge people for the privilege of breathing it.

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Isn't It Rich: Trump, Madonna, and Chelsea Clinton

Despite his best efforts, Donald Trump is not quite the shoo-in for best performance by a rich, famous, entitled and clueless narcissist this week.

The internet is exploding because Madonna made her VMA show tribute to the late Aretha Franklin all about herself and her own struggles to achieve fame and fortune. She is now known as Me-donna, which is quite a big step up from Material Girl. She's made Trump's own accolade to Aretha -- "She worked for me on numerous occasions " -- look almost magnaminous.

But sorry, Don and Me-Don, because neither of you has anything on Chelsea Clinton. Unlike both of you, she at least brings a little class to the narcissistic table.

Then again, she didn't have the Queen of Soul to compete with her, because the sole topic of the day was the Clinton family and her book sales. 

Persistently still plugging "She Persisted" in Scotland, the daughter of Bill and Hill was asked, yet again, if she will ever run for office. Definitely maybe someday, but definitely not right this very minute was the nuanced Clintonoid reply.

Chelsea classily explained:
"While I disagree with the president … I think my family ... is being really well represented. But if that were to change, if my city councillor were to retire, if my congresswoman were to retire, my senators, and I thought that I could make a positive impact, then I think I would really have to ask my answer to that question."
This is honesty as only the clueless rich can convey it. As long as her family is being well-served by her politicians, she is content, because their needs are being met thank you veddy much. She disagrees with Trump on almost everything - she abhors his presidency - but she is not about to complain about the tax breaks he has gifted to her. The needs, wants and interests of the less-fortunate people of her voting district(s) do not enter into her thought processes at all. They are invisible to her, and unlike your typical phony populist,  she doesn't have the capacity to even pretend to see them, let alone care about them.

She will run for office only if she can make a positive contribution to her family fortunes. Once The Help retire, she might be forced to serve herself for lack of any more family retainers.  At least it sounds that way. To be fair, though, she does at least pay lip service to her own class, admitting that "I feel incredibly protective of Barron Trump" before generously reminding everybody that he has been "bullied for his appearance."

I mean, was anybody even thinking that Barron has a problem with how he looks before Chelsea insinuated that there is something not quite right about the kid? As she readily admits, her feelings of protection toward the youngest Trump son are simply not credible.

Sadly, Chelsea Clinton's wealth and expensive education haven't even made her discourse as erudite as she pretends. "If... I thought I could make a positive impact, then I would really have to ask my answer to that question" is either crafty Clinton doublespeak, or an indication of some seriously muddled thinking.

But as Mother Hillary once wisely asked her answer, "What difference, at this point, does it make?" 

Plus, you can always blame the narcissism of rich people on genetics. Hillary and Madonna are tenth cousins, having shared the same great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother. 

They're all one great big happy self-satisfied family.

Madonna and Hillary

Madonna and Chelsea

Although Chelsea and Ivanka Trump used to be besties, they're not speaking to each other these days. And sadly, Chelsea hasn't expressed the same indignant concern for lesser sister Tiffany Trump, who suffered the ignominy of having to avoid Madonna during a recent high-fashion event in New York and even required extra Secret Service protection as a result. That's because Madonna had also made the first Women's March against Trump all about Madonna, and threatened to blow up the White House.

That's another way the rich are different from you and me. They're never held accountable, because enough of us are enjoying this show way too much to even care. Either that, or we're too numb or jaded to care.

  It's what happens when the Spectacle replaces participatory democracy.

So I hope that maybe definitely someday, Chelsea will find herself forced to protect her own interests when, let's say, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez decides to run for the ignominiously retiring Chuck Schumer's Senate Seat on a socialist platform. Now, that would be spectacle to participate in with gusto and vengeance.