Recently a friend asked me to locate a couple of families who could use some help during the holidays. The sad truth is that my friend simply doesn’t know any poor people. He resides on the north side of Seattle, is a highly capable, mid-level professional and lives a life where those who are not middle class are as invisible and mythical as those who live in the stratosphere: The 0.01 percent folks like Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Jeff Bezos. The biggest difference is that my friend thinks that the stratospheric folk are basically benevolent, whereas the poor are, at best, a sad problem that needs fixing.
It is incomprehensible to me that we accept the lies of the stratospheric folk. If we only look around with our eyes, and certainly if we would only listen with our ears, we would see and hear that the misery and anguish of our neighbors is rising, people are living under the enormous stress of job insecurity and even the children of middle-class parents are deep in debt, deeply worried about their futures. If we could see and hear each other, it might strike us strange that in these times of economic anxiety, the stratospheric folk are consolidating even greater gains while we the people strain under the weight of a world gone wrong.
In the past three years the stratospheric folk (about one million households) have increased their individual household net worth by about $4.5 million, those in the top 0.1 percent (about 100,000 households) have increased their individual household net worth by $18 million and the top 0.01 percent (12,000 households) by about $180 million. In the past three years the average member of the Forbes 400 increased his net worth by almost $2 billion.
How you doing lately?
In other words the stratospheric folk are predators. They are snarling beasts devouring widows and orphans, neighbors and citizens — devouring, robbing, pillaging, plundering each and every one of us. They own the government, the media, the markets and the military. They are a threat to peace, a drain on the economy of the commonwealth and most certainly a threat to the continued sustainability of our habitat. They are, in fact, economic terrorists.
These wealth segregationists must be stopped. Just like the old Confederate plantation owners, these abusers of humanity, who think themselves moral, need to be overthrown and stripped of their ill-gotten gains.
A first step for Seattle folks who are like my friend is to make the acquaintance of the poor people in their midst. A second step for those same folks is to make the acquaintance of people of color throughout the city. A third step for those Seattleites, having now seen poor people and people of color, is to actually see and listen to them. What will be discovered is that we’re all chattel. We’re all being fleeced, we’re all being exploited.
A rebellion is coming, and Seattle needs to be part of it.