Frothy Paradise

The super-rich seem to me, during the past few decades, to have wafted off into their own alternate universe, in which of course they are entitled to have their employers pay them not just large salaries, not just multi-million dollar bonuses every year, but the bills for everything that ordinary people pay for; in which flying on public airlines seems to them the way taking the public busses seems to much of the middle class; in which any possible contact with what the rest of us take to be reality has been airbrushed away by vast quantities of money.

Under normal circumstances, I’d think: nice work if you can get it, and worry about the effects of massive inequality on public life. But these are not normal times. The very people who are getting these bonuses and chauffeurs and private jets and financial planners have just sent the entire global economy into a nosedive. They have caused massive amounts of money to disappear. They are getting bailed out for their mistakes by the rest of us — the people who, if we’re lucky, get to fly coach, and if we’re not, drive across the country or take a bus.

If they had any shame at all, they would stop. More than that: if they had any sense at all of how angry a lot of us are getting, sheer prudence would do the trick. This is our money. We are giving it to them to get all of us out of a problem that they caused. They should bear that in mind, not treat us as if we were one great big cookie jar.