Letter 2 America for May 27, 2014

Dear America,

I feel something near guilt about what I am about to say with regard to Bill Gates.  I have said it so many times before that it almost feels like a vendetta.  But I'll get over it because a guy who has increased his fortune from $55 billion to $76 billion during his hiatus from the top spot on the Forbes list of richest men in the world, all the while claiming the mantle of philanthropist nonpareil, is a hypocrit, and a self-serving braggart in the bargain, and if it's a vendetta, that's what he deserves.  Despite his fulminations of purely selfless, virtuous intent, he has even less of a chance of getting into the gates of heaven now than he ever did.  To put it bluntly, when camels pass through the eyes of needles...and for that matter, when pigs fly...Bill Gates will be able to claim virtue by dint of having his expensive hobby.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is nothing but an apology for acquisitiveness that can never be justified.  I saw him recently, showing off his tote bag full of books he is going to read to find out what the rest of the world needs him to work on as if he were voluntarily undertaking Herculean labors, or even more unctuous, self-immolation.  All appearances to the contrary, butter would definitely melt in his mouth...and it has about 76 billion times.  This is why I think it important to think about Gates' self-aggrandizements carefully.

We are entering a political era in which the focal issue for campaigners everywhere will not be immigration, education loan repayment, aid to flood victims or mistreatment of the Tea Party's affiliates by the IRS.  We are going to be talking about income equality and wealth disparity, and the other things only to the extent that they relate to those two seminal issues.  The American people seem to be recognizing, at last, that vast preponderance of the wrongs they see stem from the disparity between the power of the average man or woman and that of Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, Warren Buffet, George Soros and a slew of other hedge fund managers, real estate "tycoons" like Donald Trump, the Walton family one and all, and a bunch of others whose names are ominously absent from public debate on this subject.  There are billionaires everywhere these days, and right across the street from them are people carrying signs begging them to at least pay a decent minimum wage. It's sheer numbers now.  There are just more of us than there are of them, and finally, we know not just who we are, but who they are as well.

If a guy like Karl Rove read this, he would complain about "class warfare."  But it's a funny thing about class warfare: nobody seems to complain when the rich declare war on the rest of us.  When they marshal their fortunes for political purposes just to prevent the workers at the low end of the economic ladder from climbing up it, that's class warfare.  When they contribute millions of dollars to the campaigns of the venal congressmen and senators who will vote to keep their taxes down as long as their campaign coffers remain full, that's class warfare.  When John Boehner claims that an increase in the minimum wage is a "job killer" because the business owners of the world will create fewer jobs that aren't worth having because you can't support yourself on what they pay anyway, that's class warfare.  We are in a class war, and the upper class wants us to stop fighting while they continue to carve us up.  Well, I'm not going to go along in silence anymore.  Call me a class warrior, but don't expect me to be ashamed of it.

There is, however, plenty of shame to go around in this class war.  That's where we come back to Bill Gates.  In the practice of law, a lawyer has what is called a "duty of candor toward the tribunal."  That means that a lawyer who gets caught lying to The Court, or to other participants in the legal processes, is subject to discipline, and if the lie is great enough, to disbarment, and even though the reputation of lawyers for candor is not stellar, lawyers do get disbarred for dishonesty of one kind or another, and it happens all the time.  I think that there should be a similar consequence for rich people who lie to the rest of us about the virtue of what they are doing, and about our right to be dissatisfied with it.  Let's call it "defortunating."  If you try to mislead people about class warfare, you should suffer defortunation.  If you commit fraud because even though you have hundreds of millions, you want, in the immortal words of John D. Rockfeller, "just a little bit more," you should be defortunated.  In fact, it seems to me that essentially all of the multi-millionaire class are committing some kind of inhumane practice, so they should all be defortunated.   Okay, defortunation may seem like the right thing to do, but obviously we could never get away with it.  But here's what we can get away with.  We can insist that our next congress restore the inheritance tax to some semblance of a just system in which those who do nothing but go to parties on mommy and daddy's fortunes cannot expect to go on like that from generation to generation.  We can insist on a top marginal income tax rate of, let's say, 50%, which is less than the top rate was after World War II, and we had a pretty good economic boom in consequence of it.  Let's demand that the aspects of our tax code that make it possible to profit from out-sourcing jobs to other countries be corrected so as to exact a price from the greedy buggers who do that...more rich guys like Steve Jobs.  Let's insist that our legislators stop treating money made with money, that is capital gains, as less taxable than money that we work for, that is earnings.

We are engaged in a class war.  It's about time we committed ourselves to winning it.

Your friend,

Mike