I don’t want to sound like some fundamentalist Christian white bread idiot, but I am thoroughly convinced that the problem we face as a nation, and in our world, is greed.
And I am talking greed on a scale the average man cannot fathom.
Nancy Pelosi has managed a net worth to right around two-hundred million dollars.
And still at her advanced age she soldiers on. More money, more power. As of last week I read she is still using her position in Congress to insider trade. Two hundred million isn’t enough. The power isn’t enough, it isn’t all encompassing. She wants what California Democrats have, a super-majority.
Can you imagine a Democrat super majority in our Federal Government?
They’ve managed to destroy San Francisco completely, and LA is teetering, but we somehow need to yield the entire nation to these idiots.
A super majority and I actually read a quote where a California state house administrator blamed “Republicans” for some problem out there. Holy Crap. Absent all power somehow those nasty Republicans are still able to throw a wrench into Democratic rule.
Good Old Nancy, two-hundred-million just isn’t enough.
I don’t know about you, but somewhere around forty million I’d have stepped off stage, allowed the interest payment to suffice, and gone forth to live a very comfortable, enjoyable, and exciting life of travel, first rate accommodations, and leisure.
Today we live in an age where there is no limit on “enough”.
A hundred-fifty foot yacht, a choice property in the finest location worth a hundred million, your own jet at your disposal, servants, maids, a big support staff. There is today no limit to the aspirations of the wealthy.
Billionaires are not content to just take the money and go, go away, enjoy themselves, live a life that few in history could afford. No, no, no. Zuckerberg decides to pour four hundred million into seeing that Wisconsin goes Democrat, subverting our election process completely. Gates gets involved in vaccinations, profits into the billions, and gets onto television discussing medicine as if a trained medical doctor. When the man didn’t graduate college.
Every day on Twitter I read the blatherings of Mark Cuban, Barbra Streisand, Stephen King, all tremendously upset over all things Trump. When in point-of-fact whether Biden is re-elected, Trump is elected, or some Biden surrogate is placed into the race and elected our next President, their lives won’t change one iota. Why can’t these people just take their hundreds of millions, or billions, and go, exit stage right?
Look at George Soros, a billionaire many times over. He has ruined America’s court system, ruined our politics, and is hell bent on ruining the make-up of our country by funding open border policies.
Greed is fueling a lust for power the likes of which we’ve never witnessed.
The billionaire class is in complete control of our politicians. In turn, our economy is set up to fuel a transition of cash over the past twenty years toward the billionaire class. Huh. What a coincidence.
When is enough, enough?
Hillary, in conjunction with her “charity” is worth over a hundred million. Obama has a deal into the hundreds of millions with Hollywood, a spread in Hawaii, a home in Martha’s Vineyard.
The monied class must sit having cocktails at the club these days, see some new money walk in worth a measly hundred million and say “Good God, do we have to sit around and drink with these cretins”?
If I get into conversation with friends their attitude is “So, what, Herman, it doesn’t affect your life”.
But it does, it affects all our lives.
George Soros has single-handedly taken Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York off the table as potential long weekend vacation spots given that crime is out-of-control in all three, the homeless crisis has expanded to the extent you can’t even escape it in Times Square, and the policies Soros funds has narrowed my own ability to enjoy cities we used to visit regularly. I don’t want to risk the crime element to see a broadway show, get out to LA and see Manhattan Beach, a comedy show at the “Store”, or have a milkshake at Mel’s. We were there last year in LA, I couldn’t believe the homeless problem. It has spread to “everywhere” out there. That is, everywhere but Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Calabassas, and the very rich gated areas.
All these billionaires are funding Democrats that are ruining my life by the week, the day, and the hour. They are the “intrusive” party. They won’t be happy until I’m a vegan, with the carbon footprint of an ant, driving an electric car, keeping my AC on 80, and volunteering for the Ukraine front lines to save “Democracy”.
Oh, and voting to make abortion federally legal across the nation, funding Israel’s genocide, dismantling the local police department, turning in the gun, and helping fund reparations, even when “my people” arrived on a boat in 1904 from Ireland.
Make no mistake about it, the middle-class is in the process in the US of A of being wiped out. Gone, incapable of survival.
There will be the Dollar Store poor, and the very rich, and absolutely no in-between.
This column should serve as warning to those sitting on twenty million. You ain’t shit.
It won’t be long, you are going to be at the lower rung of the upper class, sitting on a commercial plane with the cattle. Oh sure, you’ll be in first class, but you will aspire to private jet. Sorry, with all the new hundred millionaires that price ratcheted up beyond your means. Enjoy the flight! And the “free” glass of warm champagne as you smugly watch the cattle board your flight.
Television and the internet finally hit mass exposure, and showed the population what they lacked. Instilling a materialism as the new “God”, showing people a lifestyle they couldn’t dream about, absent having it stuffed into their face online 24/7.
In the nineteenth century we were an agrarian nation, and by necessity families held large amounts of land. To grow crops for survival. Which meant neighbors were few and far between, and the nearby town rather drab and utilitarian. The mass of people didn’t know what they didn’t have, they had no guidance, no measuring stick, no way of knowing how bereft of material items they were.
Then the Sears Catalog came along. And people sat in the outhouse turning page, after page, seeing all the worldly goods they didn’t possess. It opened their eyes to an entire new world of luxury and comfort.
Soon radio came into their homes with ads for product they couldn’t imagine, and demand for an industrial workers drove the people to the cities, where they began to see a luxury they never knew existed.
Movies, then television opened whole new worlds to the masses. People in flannel and denim watching as tuxedo clad Fred Astaire danced with Ginger to a big band that would require every man in their town to participate in, were they to have the chance to hear such a large orchestra. Fred and Ginger sipped champagne from glasses in a shape they’d never seen, what with the cupboard full of mason jars in their own homes.
Eventually the internet came along with Tik Tok, influencers, and vapid “lifestyle” posers, living a lifestyle that everyone now dreamed of having, but couldn’t afford.
Which has led us to today. There is wealth, and then there are the Kardashians, or Drake, with their 747 personal jet planes, and ridiculously over-the-top lifestyle.
Did Robin Leach understand what he was unleashing when he started the trend of showing us all just how decadently the rich were living? Did he realize then that in Andy Warhol fashion that “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”, and that he was indeed correct, just any Tik Tok idiot who can flaunt being in Miami can go viral and be famous in an instant?
Everyone under forty wants to be Drake. They want to be worth hundreds-of-millions, have their own 747, and live a life of debauchery. Decadence. Of a plenty that only kings and potentates lived in the past.
Problem is this is a spiral where only the biggest winners win. As I said, a mere twenty million won’t get you a seat at the table. Their greed forces you to participate, to fight for your own. So you and yours aren’t left behind. Condemned to a life of searching the Dollar Store for bargains, and ordering the chicken off the menu when you want the surf-and-turf. Some claim today they can’t afford fast food meals. They’ve become a “luxury item”.
That is what I am referring to, when a Big Mac meal stresses the budget, you are in the “poors”. But that won’t stay limited to just the lower class. So much money is being siphoned off at the top in this day and age that you’ll be at the bottom with a million dollar net worth. All your life you wanted to be a millionaire, congratulations, you made it, now you are poor.
A millionaire, congratulations. Sorry, you can’t afford to go out to eat this weekend.
If you think I am kidding, and you are “doing rather well”, do me a favor, to test out my theory.
Go on a luxury vacation.
Pay a grand a room night. What does that get you? A regular room. No upgrade, no suite, nothing extra. That is the cost of the ocean view room. Oh, you wanted ocean front? That is fifteen hundred plus. The grand gets you a room where if you tip-toe out to the side of the balcony, you can get a sliver, a small glimpse of ocean.
Pool? You want to sit at the hotel pool where you just dropped a grand a night to stay?
Well, chairs are fifty dollars a crack by reservation only, and a “Cabana” seating two with a fruit plate, that is a grand a day. Worth it because “they have misters”. This cost on top of the grand for a “standard room”.
Dinner? By reservation only, almost sold out, a buck-fifty a person prix fixe, not including alcohol. Fine wines begin at $ 150 a bottle. Bon appetite!
Any rental car bigger than a “smart car” will run you a grand a weekend. And flights to fly into the “vacation paradise” are five-hundred minimum in coach, or as I call it “cattle class”. And I’m not being disparaging. Look for me on my next flight, I’ll be in row 23C.
Amenities for your stay? You want jet skis? Hundred an hour minimum. You want paddle boards, oh those are “free”, you won’t notice until you check out but we’ve added a seventy-five dollar “resort fee” each night of your stay, in addition to the grand a night for the room. And none of that included tax. The thousand dollar room is fourteen hundred by the time you check out.
I would go on about twenty dollar plus umbrella drinks by the pool, but you already get the idea.
That two grand long weekend in a fine resort is now eight-to-ten grand. A million doesn’t last too long when you are throwing it away ten grand at a time. Makes you feel like “one of the poors”.
Not hard to run up a fifty grand a month “nut” when you have the private school tuition, the country club membership, the two nice cars, the mortgage, the vacations, the insurance.
Because the greedy have eaten so much for themselves, they have so much money now, accrued to them by an economy set up to reward the greediest of us all, they’ve managed to run prices up to live the lifestyle to the extent only the super rich can afford to play. All others need not apply. Get into the “poors” line. Maybe there will be a cheat code to save two bucks on that Big Mac meal deal.
Twenty million won’t last long at ten grand weekends, even when you are only spending the “interest”.
As Will Smith sang, “Hundred thousand dollar cars, everybody got one”.