40 Percent

Short Takes: Two Trillion for Poor Countries; Anti-China Rhetoric Really About U.S. Failures; De-Constructing Joe Biden's Pro-Union Video

The Long Take:

The number that sticks in my mind today, and has since I heard it, is 40 percent.

40 percent.

While over half a million people in the U.S. have died because of COVID in the year-long pandemic while millions of people have become sick, while millions of people have lost their jobs, their savings, their homes, and so many have been forced to wait in long food lines to get enough to feed their families—while all that was happening, the billionaires—the top 0.05 percent in the country, the Waltons, the Jeff Bezos’ of the world—saw their collective wealth go up 40 percent.

FORTY PERCENT…

One illustration of this obscenity comes via Bernie Sanders who, in an extensive email about Wal-Mart greed and the opposition by the Waltons to hiking the federal minimum wage to $15-an-hour, said this:

This is a family that has made more than $50 billion during the pandemic – yet many of their workers reported going into work without the protective gear they needed during that same pandemic, …