Attention economically struggling Americans, warns WP columnist Colbert King, you too could be a billionaire, unless Bernie Sanders stops you!
I always vote against measures to expand gambling in any form. Lottery tickets? They’re a tax on despair. Lotteries help states pay for public schools so the rich don’t have to. Their mild entertainment value does not compensate for their recurring, regressive costs. But by the logic of Colbert King’s essay, “Black billionaires need not apply to Bernie’s world”, playing all those rigged but heavily advertised lotteries is an essential right for the working poor. Once in a great while, somebody wins. And that atypically lucky individual might be a person of color, so lottery opponents like me are actually, wait for it, racist!
But we are not talking scratch-off tickets here. We are talking billionaires. Am I reading this right? Of 607 American billionaires on Forbes’s latest list, an astonishing 5 are black? And three of them are Jay-Z, Oprah, and Michael Jordan? Right. America, when it holds people back, usually makes exceptions for the most incredibly exceptional. In 1947, Wikipedia tells me, Jackie Robinson was the second most popular man in the country (after Bing Crosby), but does that mean racism was over? Nope. Colin Powell became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989, and Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, so racism has been defeated? Forever, unless voters in the Democratic Party bring it back, by voting for the Progressive Wing, the Sanders/Warren wing (the anti-billionaire wing) of the Democratic Party? Sorry, I beg to differ.
I do a little volunteer work in basic and ESL literacy. I hear the occasional story of the food service worker who got Obamacare for the child, but personally was forced by the costs to play health care roulette. Gets a brief but serious illness, and suddenly there is a $3000 bill for a few hours of care. Ridiculously high deductibles anyway, so this was bad luck, not a bad choice. The hospital (a non-profit) graciously agrees to settle for half. Probably still more than my insurance company and I together would have paid, but health care is like magazines in airports. Subscriptions are a dollar an issue, but the kiosk price is seven bucks, and your choice now pay a clearly ridiculous price, or screw you. If you have some salary, and a health emergency, and no insurance, you’re going to help subsidize me and the missus, and probably also some dude at a collections agency.
Listen to some of the working poor, and you will see the huge power that $300 for emergencies could have, or a budget improvement of even $50 to $100 a month. It ain’t just health care. Internet, with monopoly protections for ISPs, is too damn high. Tuition is too damn high. Childcare is too damn high. Rents are too damn high, and the minimum wage is too damn low. Increasing concentration of wealth makes the problem worse. More and more of us now are renters for life.
So on the theory that we are all soon-to-be-realized billionaires underneath, we should all support a system where wealth, once accumulated, enters a permanent tax-free silo? No estate tax below $10.9 million dollars per couple, and no wealth tax at all? Capital gains taxed at a fraction of the rate that they tax the sweat of your brow? But no capital gains tax ever, if you want to use the simple trick of simply not selling the asset before it passes into your estate? While absurdly high interest rates for student loans are okay? We should accept the extortionist pricing of medicines that are cheaper in every other country in the world (“Nice life you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it!”)? The stranglehold that Internet Service Providers have over potential competition? The predatory practices of payday lenders? The inexcusable bilking of the families of prisoners, while mass incarceration feeds the for-profit prisons industry? Colbert King wants us believe that Bernie Sanders and the Progressive agenda is the problem. Apparently, we should just trust Joe Biden to let us find our own path into the Billionaire Boys Club.
Colbert King likes to drink, the “Billionaires are Job Creators” Kool-Aid, and serve it up to the masses as well. He says things like “I have never thought of businesses that create jobs and pay wages as dens of iniquity, although some are better than others.” Oh, there’s your problem! It’s so much easier not to think! Yes, jobs and innovation are both nice things to have. I fully agree. But we should pay no attention to the man behind the curtain? Executive salaries. Golden parachutes. Wells Fargo. Facebook. Hobby Lobby. Coal mines whose air is filled with silica dust. Repetitive motion injuries. Non-disclosure agreements. Ground water contamination. For-profit colleges. For-profit prisons. Pension plan raiding by vulture capitalists. Downsizing. Off-shoring. Payday lenders. Union-busting. Unpaid overtime. Trump University. Stealing tips from wait-staff to cover the salaries of dishwashers and cooks. All those corporations magically relocating their earnings foreign tax havens like Ireland. This isn’t about the best poet-in-motion in the history of sport (I might be biased), or Oprah’s Book Club. It’s about too many of us getting screwed too systematically for far too long.
To all Kossacks, moderate or Progressive. Don’t ever assume news services like CNN, the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or those entrusted to ask questions in Democratic party debates, are neutral. It’s Radical Centrism. It’s the ideology that says Democrats should have to balance the budgets, and Democrats should have to reach across the aisle. It says that transitioning the world’s most overpriced health care system into something more equitable, efficient, and affordable is a non-starter because so many people currently have jobs jacking up our costs. Radical Centrism is its own position, and it’s not neutral, and it went after Sanders and Warren all through the campaign so far, leaving us Joe Biden as the “electability candidate.” I predict we will see problems with that. Attacks Biden from the Right Wing will aim at his left flank, calling bullshit on all his claims to represent the actual core of our party. It will be bloody.
I’ve gone on for too long, so I’ll finish with this, Colbert King, with a note on your inexcusable title. Probably seven of eight readers seeing it won’t click, so that’s most of your audience. Your title takes the form “Black [people in a particular subgroup] need not apply to Bernie’s world.” Yeah. Fuck you. The title implies Sanders is racist, which he isn’t, and it dog-whistles the old anti-Semitic trope that Jews always stick with their own kind at everyone else’s expense. You are a paid professional wordsmith. You know exactly what your title says, so (respectfully and metaphorically) you should go rather speedily to hell. Do not pass go. Do not collect one billion dollars