Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa and A Happy Holiday Season All Around!
‘The name Scrooge has become a synonym for a misanthrope. He treats his employee terribly, disdains those less fortunate than him and turns away those collecting donations for the poor. His sole concern is his own material enrichment.” The New York Times, Opinion, Roger Rosenblatt, December 24, 2024.
Just imagine that Ebenezer Scrooge had as many employees as, say, Jeff Bezos, founder and largest shareholder of Amazon, and imagine that Bezos treated all of his employees just as badly as Scrooge treated Bob Cratchet. Oh, wait. Amazon is the second largest publicly held company in the United States (Walmart is number one), and employs approximately 1.5 million people worldwide and 1.1 million in the U.S. Yet, less than 1% of Amazon’s American workers are unionized, because the company fights union organization at every opportunity. It has violated federal labor law by refusing to recognize and engage with union representatives within its labor force, intimidates, harasses and fires employees trying to organize union membership, and doesn’t consider its 390,000 drivers to be Amazon employees, although they drive Amazon trucks, only deliver Amazon packages, wear Amazon branded uniforms, and work Amazon-controlled daily schedules.
For the 12 months ending September 30, 2024, Amazon’s gross profit was over $300 billion, which is a 17.7 % year-over-year increase, according to Macrotrends, . During this same year the average Amazon delivery driver made between $16—$20 an hour and salaried employees made between $29, 500—$40,000 with limited benefits and what union organizers and strikers describe as arduous, even hazardous working conditions. Here’s what one Amazon driver who went on strike earlier this year said about her work day:
She [Latrice Shadae Johnson, Amazon delivery driver making $20 per hour] recalled driving in a van reeking of stale urine because the back was strewn with piss bottles, a daily reminder that Amazon’s punishing delivery metrics leave little time to use the bathroom.
How many ghostly visits will it take till Bezos sees that he is hurting hundreds of thousands of people? 1
The New York Times published an Opinion piece right before Christmas about the impact A Christmas Carol has had on our collective values — year after year, for nearly two centuries, we root for Scrooge’s redemption and transformation, we want to see Tiny Tim get the medical care he needs to live a full life, we want everyone to be happy and healthy and fulfilled through doing good for others…don’t we? The author, Roger Rosenblatt, ties in the values espoused during the recent presidential election to help make his point. The campaigns were mostly about economics: Are you better off now than you were four years ago, do you want to expand opportunities for the middle class?
What the campaigns were not about, particularly, is what we as individuals and collectively can do to help others and our country. As noted by Rosenblatt, there were no rousing call to action like President Kennedy issued in his inaugural address:
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
Would any of our citizens even be receptive to this “ask” from a president to become engaged with our country, to selflessly give to her, not only through military service but through volunteering and community service? Current statistics don’t look favorable. As of the first quarter of 2024, according to Statista:
U.S. wealth distribution Q2 2024
Published by Statista Research Department, Oct 29, 2024
In the first quarter of 2024, almost two-thirds percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 2.5 percent of the total wealth.
With this much wealth concentrated among just a few individuals (as of September 2024, there are 801 billionaires in the United States with a combined total wealth of $6.22 trillion) the odds aren’t great for a real leader asking us to serve our country and others, or a Scrooge-like redemption and transformation from those holding the most wealth. And the more people who are kept as low earners and nearly zero wealth accumulators, the less resistance there will be to increasing this wealth gap. It is exhausting to fight a system rigged against you, facing the daily grind with little to no help, but it seems it is what we need.
According to a recent information from Inequality.org
The top five billionaires and by individual wealth are:
Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $252.5 billion
Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $204.8 billion
Larry Ellison of Oracle fame moving into number three spot with $197 billion, surpassing Marc Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $182 billion
Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway with $141 billion.
There are now a total of 12 billionaires with more than $100 billion each. For context, the first person to cross the $100 billion personal wealth threshold — Jeff Bezos — only did so in 2018.
Emphasis added to the last sentence: “There are now a total of 12 billionaires with more than $100 billion each. For context, the first person to cross the $100 billion personal wealth threshold — Jeff Bezos — only did so in 2018.”
Can you see how quickly the inequality gap is growing? What must we do to stop it, to reverse it?
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I’d love to hear your thoughts on these issues—have at it in the Comment Section below.
Stay tuned: Before New Years Day, I’ll put together a compilation of The Poverty Trap’s most popular posts of 2024, then start off the New Year with a recap of a talk I recently attended by sociologist Mathew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of “Evicted” and “Poverty, By America”; an analysis of the Fox News writing style; and a real-life story about how American Rescue Plan funds are being effectively used to house lower income folks right here in Ohio.
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