The Pernicious Math Of Plutocracy
By Romi Mahajan
23 August, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Recently, the shares of a large public company based in Seattle rose enough in a day to net the CEO and largest shareholder of the firm about $5 Billion in one day. While certainly such windfalls are rare, the occasion got me to thinking through the implications of such a wild example of wealth gain.
If one breaks $5 Billion in a day down to a work-day of 12 hours, one can say, conservatively that on that day, the person made about $400 Million an hour or about $7 Million a minute. That translates to approximately $100 thousand a second.
As we know, there is indeed another side of the world in which such luxuries are unimaginable. In fact, as we know through countless reports, statistics, and anecdotes, there are a good number of people who earn in the vicinity of $300 a year. In a working life-time of, say, sixty years, that person might earn just about $20 thousand for his or her entire life.
A working life equal to one-fifth of a second for the lucky recipient of that share-based windfall!
One can argue the relative merits of systems of personal gain versus systems of equality, of capitalism versus socialism, of private profit versus public investment. Such arguments will never cease. But can anyone who is heir to even an elemental decency or ethical framework deny that this equation is pernicious and inhumane?
We have gotten to a point in which the “facts” of the world read like fiction of the absurd. One person’s blink of the eye is equivalent to another’s life of toil.
This is the pernicious math of plutocracy and it has to be undone.
Romi Mahajan can we reached at [email protected]
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