Apple's value topped 2 trillion dollars recently. I believe I read it is now considered to be the wealthiest business on the planet. I love my Apple products. I am gobsmacked at the Apple stock I own. I bought in when it was way too high. Now it is twice as high as that.
A couple of other companies are rapidly approaching the same financial milestone. Multiple trillion dollar valuations.
I am no economist. I have no idea what all of this means. I only know that the stock market continues to climb as if there are no disruptions going on in the country.
As if homelessness did not exist.
As if the pandemic did not exist.
As if the job market was not in turmoil.
As if millions of people were not at risk of being evicted.
As if millions of Americans were not at risk of foreclosure.
As if millions of Americans have not already been evicted or foreclosed on.
I am going to guess the multi-trillion dollar tax cut directed at those who can never get enough plays into all of this. I am going to guess that sleight of hand in the financial world also plays into all of this. I am going to guess that when the walls come tumbling down the pain to be felt is not going to be equally distributed.
I heard the other day that the country of Lebanon's gross domestic product is about 40 billion dollars. That tells me there is no reason to care about the vast explosion which decimated a enormous portion of Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East. Lebanon is small potatoes in the financial world. Maybe the budget of a small forgotten department in about every other Silicon Valley company.
I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast and he was talking about the 9/11 Memorial in New York City and how much it cost to build it, how much effort was put in to build it and how much it is going to cost to maintain it in perpetuity. He also visited Jacksonville, Florida, and spoke with the people who keep track of the homeless in their city. They put a substantial amount of effort into counting their homeless population, learning something about them and making an effort to get them back on their feet.
You see where I am going with this, right?
You could house the homeless of Jacksonville for the remainder of their days on earth with the 9/11 Memorial budget. You could house them in palaces. You could give each and every one of them palace guards. You could drown them in opulence.
The point being - we spare no expense when it comes to some things.
And then we cry "there's no money!", when it comes to others.
We act as if this is inevitable. The rich get rich, the poor get poorer, all of us sagely intone. I think it is high time we truly make an effort to raise all boats. I want to be able to look around and be able to say, the rich sure are getting less rich, but they are still able to live like kings if they wish, while the poor are getting far less poor but no longer have to live in constant fear of medical bankruptcy.
Have you ever noticed how conservatives only cry austerity when liberals control the government purse strings? And then, when liberals do take charge, conservatives scare the moderate liberals into believing austerity measures are necessary, and the next thing you know, liberals are hoodwinked into giving tax cuts for the rich again. Or, just as likely, they have just as much to gain by going along with the tax cut ruse, so they play along.
This is the cycle that must be broken.
We need to start throwing money at things that benefit society as a whole. Because if we are going to waste oodles of money, let's do it trying to lift everyone up.
This is what I would rather see than millionaires become billionaires and billionaires become trillionaires. Or memorials built that literally cost a fortune. Or police departments being stocked with military style equipment and conducting overseas operations that costs billions.Â
I would rather see school teachers not have to set up GoFundMe pages to stock their classrooms with essential materials.
I would rather see communities everywhere have safe drinking water.Â
I would rather not see the need for food handouts or food banks.
I would rather see universal basic income or universal health care or both.
I would rather see those so-called "welfare queens" driving around in Cadillacs with eight kids in tow.
I know next to nothing about Buckminster Fuller other than that he was considered smart and was affiliated with the geodesic dome. But I love the quotes attributed to him. Like this one:
You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.Â
And this one is more to my point:
We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.Â
Apparently he was an optimist:
Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked.
One can only hope that we are moving the chess pieces into position to finally get around to doing 'the most intelligent thing.'
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Here's a 3 Minute primer on Buckminster Fuller if you are curious.
Also, in the event you were under a rock or on a river trip, here is President Barack Obama's 2020 DNC speech which lays it all on the line. Every now and then you can hear the exasperation in his voice. Like "I shouldn't really have to say these things." Enjoy!Â