The Appalling Cluelessness of the Super-Rich
Rap impresario Jay-Z and influencer Kim Kardashian are just the beginning. In reality, it's so much worse.
It is this writer’s considered opinion that the real reason socialism never gained purchase in America is because (to borrow a paraphrased quote from John Steinbeck), the poor have always felt themselves to be “temporarily embarrassed” millionaires. In other words, when they make it—and the American poor burn with feverish certainty that they will—the first thing they want to avoid is a burdensome tax bracket.
Those poor fools. If only they knew that the wealthiest Americans pay just 3.4% in taxes—and some don’t even pay that much. As the Pandora Papers illustrate, billionaires love nothing more than a big yacht and an offshore tax shelter. Why wouldn’t they? If you’re looking to ghost law enforcement, avoid government oversight, and outrun the taxman, nothing affords you greater protection than a tax shelter. In fact, you can set one up inside of fifteen minutes for less than two grand.
As much as $25 trillion dollars is hidden in offshore accounts. That’s one million dollars multiplied by a million. Think of the good that tax money could do for our schools, infrastructure, national parks, Superfund sites. Instead, it’s sitting idle in rich people’s offshore accounts.
Here’s the real punchline. One of the reasons so few U.S. billionaires were listed in the leaked trove of financial documents known as the Panama Papers is because U.S. billionaires already pay such a shockingly small amount in taxes. For them, hiding money offshore is mostly unnecessary.
Welcome to America.
There are some truly philanthropic, lovely rich folks. I know a few. And being poor doesn’t automatically confer some kind of virtue. But an interesting psychological dynamic comes into play when there are huge disparities in wealth between the super rich and the poor. Multiple studies show that the richer a person is, the more likely he is to lie, steal, and cheat—and that’s not all. The uber-rich show little to no remorse fleecing people of lower socio-economic standing. They are more likely to cheat in order to increase their chances of winning something of value. The wealthy are also more disengaged during social interactions—e.g., checking their cells phones, doodling, clearly too bored to make eye contact—compared with their poorer brethren. Taken on the aggregate, they exhibit far less compassion for others (so-called “prosocial behaviors”) than the poor and working classes do.
But by far the most appalling sin of the ultra-wealthy is that most of them believe they’ve earned it.
To be fair, some have earned it, and I applaud them for their smarts and enterprise. Rap impresario/Mr. Beyoncé Knowles Shaun Carter (also known as Jay-Z) came from Marcy Houses, a 28-acre public housing project in Brooklyn. But fashionista/influencer Kim Kardashian did not. She came from wealth (her father was O.J. Simpson “dream team” lawyer Robert Kardashian).
There’s a difference between the two. One is a true Horatio Alger story; the other is an overprivileged Armenian-American princess who got the right surgeries, a good PR agent, and rode the coattails of other overprivileged darlings like hotel heiress Paris Hilton—all the way to the top.
Unfortunately, having risen from poverty doesn’t automatically grant immunity from being a clueless asshat.
Case in point: Jay-Z.
He’s offering a series of free cryptocurrency courses exclusively to Marcy Houses’ tenants this summer called Bitcoin Academy.
One possible explanation for his behavior: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Other possible explanation for his behavior: like so many other celebrities, Jay-Z jumped on the crypto bandwagon and has no problem bilking the poor to further his own financial aims, while at the same time hoping to come across as a man of the people. Likeliest explanation for his behavior: he’s forgotten that when you’re desperately trying to feed a family and keep your head above water, you don’t have money to throw down a shithole like crypto.
“People don’t want to be investing money knowing that they might have a chance of losing it,” explains 58-year-old retiree and Marcy House resident Maya Raspberry. “Every dime I get got to go to rent, phone, TV and internet. I don’t have money like that to be losing. If I did, I would try to invest in something that’s more reliable, like the basketball game last night. You know I’m going to win something from that.”
Oh, but wait! Jay-Z has a solution. He’s giving everyone a $25.00 bitcoin to put in their virtual wallet. This from a guy who’s worth 1.3 billion, and likely more. God forbid he start an afterschool program for the children of single mothers or re-provision one of Marcy Houses’ decaying basketball courts. Of course, he and Beyoncé did give away about eight grand in toys back in 2017. I guess that’s better than nothing, right?
But a smart guy like Jay-Z is perfectly aware that crypto is a dangerous investment. A few weeks ago, Terra, which is a stablecoin linked to the U.S. dollar, cratered overnight, rendering billions of dollars’ worth of digital tokens worthless and tanking the fortunes of countless investors. The industry is rife with scams and notorious for its volatility.
So many celebrities were hawking crypto at this year’s Super Bowl, wags slyly refer to it as “Crypto Bowl.” Tom Brady, Elon Musk, Reese Witherspoon, Matt Damon, Snoop Dogg, Serena Williams, Gwyneth Paltrow, LeBron James, all are the public faces of crypto. For them, it’s a fat paycheck, a brand deal, no different than shilling a pair of Nike sneakers. The difference is, if you buy a pair of sneakers, you have something to wear on your feet. Buy altcoin, and you could be facing financial ruin.
Since May of this year, the price of bitcoin is half of what it was when it started, and experts are stepping over each other to bail out of digital assets. Crypto companies are laying off hundreds of employees. The house of cards is falling, and yet Jay-Z is pushing his Bitcoin Academy like Santa himself squeezing his fat ass down a chimney.
Speaking of fat asses ….
Kim Kardashian, who is also a vocal proponent of crypto—or, indeed, anything that will put more money in her pocket, including a failed predatory credit card scheme targeting young people—recently showed her ass level of rich-person cluelessness at the Met Gala. Despite strenuous objections from conservators, Kardashian wore the iconic dress Marilyn Monroe had on in 1962 when she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to a grinning John Kennedy.
Kardashian borrowed the $4.8 million dress from a Ripley’s Believe it or Not! collection in Orlando. She then proceeded to strain, and in some places, rip the seams when she couldn’t squeeze her artificially inflated backside into the dress.
The International Council of Museums, who are adamant that historical garments must not be worn by any public or private figures, were forced to issue a statement:
About this particular situation, the dress that belonged to Marilyn Monroe was custom made by French designer Jean Louis in the colour to match her skin tone, it was sewn on her before she went to the event where she sung Happy Birthday for then US President John F. Kennedy in 1962. She didn’t use any underwear to give a more vivid sensation that she was naked. The material is soufflé silk, which is no longer available, so it’s irreplaceable.
None of that mattered to Kardashian, who clearly felt entitled to wear it. In order to disguise the damage she’d done, she covered it in white fur.
Go ahead and watch Kardashian struggling to ascend the steps of the 2022 Met Gala:
In case you want a preview of things to come in a world where the super-rich are allowed to get richer—often at the expense of the poor—and you and I are forced to eat zoo animals, just take a look at what’s been going on in South America.
Trust me when I tell you, we are headed right off a cliff.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you on this subject. Be sure to leave your comments below.
Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
OK, you didn't so much push my buttons with this one as play some insane inversion of a Beethoven piano concerto on the key board. I just set down my current Whitehead project before my head asploded, but I need to keep typing. Here you go:
For those who don't know (and for context):
1,000 seconds = 16 2/3 minutes
1,000,000 seconds (1,000 X 1,000) = 11.57 *DAYS*
1,000,000,000 seconds (a billion; a thousand times a million) = 31.7 *YEARS*
1,000,000,000,000 seconds (a trillion; a thousand times a billion) = 32,000 years ago. This not only predates human civilization, it largely predates humanity.
This is what $1,000,000,000,000.00, a trillion dollars, looks like.
A friend of mine who was successful at business and since gone into creative pursuits has a sister. That sister was struggling after her separation/divorce from her low-life husband, as a bank teller. She met a successful business man who worked as the CFO (Chief Financial Officer) for a Big Name tech company at the time. (Big Name tech company has since disappeared and it is very telling if you've ever even heard of it, though at the time everyone had.) They fell in love, he divorced his wife at the time and married her. They are worth something below $200,000,000.00.
That is staggeringly wealthy. And it is, for all intents and purposes an order of magnitude below a billionaire.
She prances around like she's earned it, and he's a nice enough, if altogether clueless human being. He's a glorified accountant who just happened to be standing on the platform when the train pulled up.
An example: I was at my friend's house and most/all of her family was there. He was studying the lights flashing on the brickwork behind the stove, and I went over to see what was going on. He commented on the overheads. I glanced around. I pointed out that the lights were coming from the TV at the farside of the extended space, beyond the chef's island and into the living room. The man had absolutely no imagination, and didn't even think about examining his environment.
Elon Musk was born rich, to the family that controls most of the sapphire(?) mines in South Africa. The only company he directly manages (Tesla) is tanking. He is a billionaire. He is patently incompetent.
Economies grow from the bottom. This is ECON 101 stuff. 1,000 people with $1,000.00 each will always be able to spend and consume more than 1 person with $1,000,000.00, even thought the dollar amounts are identical. The more wealth is concentrated, the more the potential for spending and consumption is siphoned out of the economy, rendering it less and less capable of growth, and more and more likely of significant implosion. Again, this not some kind of radical, scary socialist ideological ranting. This is just economic fundamentals, ECON 101. I mean, I consider myself a socialist of a kind, but all I really want to see is people at policy levels paying basic attention to 100 level economic fundamentals.
Just that, FFS. I don't give a shit about some Marxist Utopia. I'd settle for a mild reduction in the resolute and intransigent stupidity.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans were convinced that they were "soon-to-be" millionaires, so I suppose that part of our collective psychology hasn't changed much in two to three centuries. I've always been amazed at our willingness to tolerate excess, perhaps because we want to see ourselves in similar circumstances. But are those circumstances really that much to brag about? I wonder.