In 1927, Frenchman Julien Benda wrote La Trahison des Clercs (“The Treason of the Intellectuals”), a plea, basically, for a return to Enlightenment thinking. Well, we could definitely do with a little more enlightenment thinking these days—and a little more enlightenment as well—but our real problem is not so much treacherous intellectuals as treacherous billionaires (or “milliardaires”, en français).
The real trouble began back in 2008, when a young Barack Obama let his head be turned by a gaggle of Wall Street financiers. “You will save us, young man! If you take care of us, we’ll take care of you!” The implicit bargain: universal health care for the poor, in return for the “trimming” of entitlements, so that big shots wouldn’t have to pay taxes to bail out the retirements of the masses.
Obama bit, and bit hard, appointing notorious billionaire butt-boy Tim Geithner as secretary of the treasury. Geithner was, and is, a one-man Kool-Aid stand for the ultimate Wall Street myth: that Wall Street is the fountain of all wealth. Wall Street bankers aren’t amoral hustlers—they aren’t “wolves”! No, they’re financial geniuses! All we have to do is let them make all the money they want—all the money they deserve—and they will unleash their genius on our behalf. The wheels of commerce will turn! Business will boom! But if we don’t give them everything they want, they will take their ball, and their genius, elsewhere—to London, to Singapore, to Dubai, to the Caymans, to wherever. They’ll still be rich, but we’ll starve, because we disrespected them!
Obama did everything Wall Street wanted, handing out million-dollar bonuses to executives for cleaning up the messes their companies had made—rewarding when he should have been indicting—and when the public outcry grew so great that he tried, clumsily, to make amends by offering a few vague words of criticism, men worth hundreds of millions of dollars, who literally would have been paupers had not Uncle Sam bailed them out with hundreds of billions of dollars of interest-free loans, publicly compared themselves to Jews facing extermination under Nazi rule. Hypocrisy had made its masterpiece.
But that was only the beginning. When Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2010 and set out to destroy the U.S. economy en route to destroying Obama, by in effect repudiating the public debt, Wall Street stood on the sidelines. Obama did everything for them, and they did nothing for him.
And now, after demanding for eight years that Obama cut the size of the national debt, lest they be forced in the future to pay for the ever increasing retirement costs of America’s aging population, we see Wall Street licking its lips in anticipation for tax “reform” that will add at least a trillion dollars to that supposedly unendurable debt, because this time around the money is going to them—the top 10%, the top 1%, and the top 0.1%. The richer you are, the richer you’re going to get. Which is what billionaires call “justice”.
Afterwords
As of 2016, real household income for the bottom 20% of families has declined 9.4% since 1999 (go here for full data), and by 2.4% for the next lowest. Everyone else has had at least some increase and, of course, the higher you go, the greater the increase. Income inequality has been growing throughout the 21st century and the whole point of Republican tax “reform” is to exacerbate this entirely noxious trend.
