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Funny how we can call representatives from the National Lottery before an Oireachtas Committee because the Lotto stubbornly refuses to be won, but somehow accept that people who earn €19 million in minutes through vagaries of the stock market are not an odd phenomenon at all.
We can just about grasp €19 million and the impact it would have on our lives. The kind of money earned by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates is beyond our comprehension.
Elon Musk calls Elizabeth Warren 'Senator Karen' for suggesting that he should pay more tax
Elon Musk is worth $300 billion or thereabouts. If his wealth declines to, say, $270 billion, the human brain cannot even process the difference properly. Musk does not think he should be paying tax on his wealth.
He stated on Twitter that he should be spending it on getting to Mars and preserving the light of human consciousness. Musk also believes that he is a visionary and that he will save humanity from out-of-control AIs.
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Meanwhile, he calls Elizabeth Warren "Senator Karen" for suggesting that he should pay more tax. (The Karen is a meme that mocks middle-aged or older women for being unreasonable and demanding.)
He is facing a tax bill next year estimated as anywhere between $7.5 and $15 billion, due to tax obligations for stock options. He will probably continue to pay zero income tax. It is hard to feel sorry for him.
It’s been a good pandemic for the super-wealthy. According to Forbes data, in the US in March 2020, there were 614 billionaires. Today there are 745. Each of the 10 wealthiest men in the US (and all the top 10 are men) saw eye-watering increases in wealth, while millions of ordinary Americans lost their jobs and many died.
According to the UK magazine Ethical Consumer, "between March and September 2020, at a time when most businesses were struggling, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos saw his personal wealth increase so much that he could have given all 876,000 Amazon employees a bonus of $105,000 and be as wealthy as he was pre-pandemic".
Tornado twist
As Jeff Bezos lives out his own personal rocket man fantasy, employees of Amazon, the company that made him obscenely wealthy, cowered in toilets during a tornado in Edwardsville, Illinois, that ended up taking half the building away.
Some workers claim they were not given an adequate warning so that they could get to a safe shelter. Amazon says that it followed all necessary health and safety protocols and that there were only 11 minutes between the official tornado warning being issued and when it struck the building.
Our own economy is shakily dependent on the multinational corporations that make these men so wealthy
Amazon has also said that it prefers its workers not to join unions, as positive changes for workers can be made more quickly when there is not a union in the middle. There have been many stories of employees who had to urinate in bottles because they did not have time to visit the toilet. Pregnant women have to stand for 10-hour shifts.
The company was widely mocked for its Zen booth, which resembles nothing so much as a portable toilet without a roof, where employees can access mental health programmes on a computer in the midst of a warehouse.
Some of the gazillionaires believe that the solution lies in philanthropy. Charity has a place in our world, if only because charity often has a softer, more human face than State-funded solutions. Philanthropy, however, allows the very wealthy to have influence without accountability, to set agendas according to their personal obsessions, and often to avoid scrutiny because everyone is afraid of them cutting off sources of aid.
Our own economy is shakily dependent on the multinational corporations that make these men so wealthy. We, too, are terrified of challenging anything about the way they operate.
Rotten system
David Beasley of the World Food Programme challenged the world's billionaires to avert famine for 42 million people by donating $6.6 billion. If they do it, that's no small thing. But they will be getting kudos for doing something as a once-off when it is the whole system that is rotten.
At Davos 2020, a group of extremely wealthy people styling themselves the Patriotic Millionaires reissued a letter whimsically titled "Millionaires Against Pitchforks". They believe that the consequences of catastrophic inequality have the potential to destabilise society to the extent that the pitchforks will come out. The signatories accept that the solution is not philanthropy but fair and equitable taxation.
That the rich get richer and manage to avoid paying large amounts of tax is not an act of genius
The letter states that “individuals who reject this truth pose a dual threat both to the climate and to democracy itself, as those seeking to avoid their tax responsibilities are often the same ones manipulating governments and democratic processes around the world for their own gain”.
That the rich get richer and manage to avoid paying large amounts of tax is not an act of genius. It is a consequence of the weird myth that these people managed to get wealthy all by themselves, never got a government grant, or never needed thousands of workers on low pay to fuel their moneymaking. It’s worth a lot more Oireachtas time than when chance will create another multi-millionaire.