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