Nina-Bytes: Rigged Games, Supervillains, and Neofeudalism

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

 

U.S. Billionaires Got 70% More Wealth Under COVID. They Didn’t Deserve Any of It.

A little over a week ago, I published a blog that briefly touched on the historically unprecedented levels of financial inequity in our society. In that post I theorized that this phenomenon was both a contributor to, and side effect from, our society's ongoing transition to a state of capitalism I, and others, have been calling neofeudalism. In this Jacobin article by Luke Savage, we get a glimpse of what that actually looks like in the context of an ongoing class war during a pandemic; and it's predictably infuriating. 

Using data from an Institute for Policy Studies report, Savage reports that the combined wealth of America's billionaires has risen by seventy percent during the pandemic. This includes the minting of a hundred and thirty one new billionaires; creating a situation where just under seven hundred and fifty people "now own almost 70 percent more wealth than half the country combined." Although Savage doesn't mention it, the report also notes that this comes during a pandemic when eighty-nine million people in the U.S. have lost their jobs. "We're all in this together" my shiny pink ass.

 

Although the numbers are staggering, it's tempting to write them off as pandemic profiteering. As Savage notes however, the real driving force behind this intense concentration of wealth during the pandemic is keystroke hot money injected into financial markets by central bankers. In other words; this is plutocratic disaster capitalism on steroids. As nearly everyone on the left predicted, the pandemic relief strategy of just giving rich people a bunch of money to buoy the stock markets, worked out well for rich people and not so much for the rest of us.

 

This pandemic windfall is of course on the heels of, and in addition to, the unprecedented transfer of wealth granted to America's rich by Donald Trump's barely-remembered tax cuts. Furthermore, all of this wealth concentration must be understood in the context of a lobbying fight against even moderate tax increases, that these same rich people are waging against Joe Biden's Build Back Better Act as we speak. Clearly, it's always a good time to be rich in America; which brings me to my larger point.

 

Unfortunately, explaining precisely how I think neofeudalist capitalism works is beyond the scope of this blog. I can however easily tell you what it looks like. And what it looks like is a society rigged so that no matter what happens, good or bad, the billionaires always win. It looks like a society where the political solution to every crisis, or even the absence of a crisis, is to give billionaires more public money. Most importantly, it looks like a society prepared to herd eight billion people off the ecological cliff so knock off supervillains like Jeff Bezos and Charles Koch can pocket unheard-of wealth for just a little while longer. 

 

I have seen the enemy, and he is Musk.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

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“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”