One bil­lion­aire was added to the world every day for the past year. The inter­rup­tion to fer­tilis­er sup­plies due to the block­ade of the Strait of Hor­muz could sub­tract up to 10 bil­lion meals across the world every week. How’s that for a juxtaposition?

The mon­ey number is accord­ing to For­tune mag­a­zine, the food num­ber to the boss of one of the world’s biggest fer­tilis­er producers.
Accord­ing to the Roman emper­or and writer Mar­cus Aure­lius: “The only wealth which you will keep for­ev­er is the wealth you have giv­en away.” 
But he was a Sto­ic, a fol­low­er of a phi­los­o­phy whose core tenet is that  to live a good life, we need to devel­op char­ac­ter shaped by wis­dom, mod­er­a­tion, courage, and justice.
The com­bined wealth of the esti­mat­ed 1,000 of the world’s 3,428 bil­lion­aires who are in the U.S., adds up to 6.9 TRILLION dollars,which requires an all but unfath­omable num­ber of zeroes.
It doesn’t seem unrea­son­able or tru­cu­lent to won­der why they don’t  embrace a  lit­tle Sto­icism, spare a bit of change, and fig­ure out a way to help off­set the suf­fer­ing, at the very least until the ridicu­lous war is resolved and the world can get back to its nor­mal lev­el of wealth dis­crep­an­cy and want.
The fault,  as Shakespeare’s Roman sen­a­tor Cas­sius put it, being “not in our stars but in our­selves”, let us look at peo­ple and caus­es upon which the ultra-rich feel are more impor­tant to lav­ish funds when wealth  becomes too pro­fuse to tal­ly. “While some Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates in impor­tant races have amassed war chests much big­ger than that of their Repub­li­can rivals, Repub­li­cans have had more fund-rais­ing suc­cess than Democ­rats when it comes to par­ty com­mit­tees and super PACs, and Trump’s super PAC is its own fund-rais­ing juggernaut.”
How does that make any sense?
Not the sen­tence itself. That’s a clear as spring water, as one would expect from the emi­nent colum­nist Frank Bruni who wrote it. What’s incom­pre­hen­si­ble is that it’s factual.
Not only that, but bil­lion­aires, and those who seem to wor­ship them, are fight­ing to quash an effort to impose a one-time 5 per­cent tax on Cal­i­for­nia res­i­dents with at least $1.1 bil­lion, and ded­i­cate most of the rev­enue to health care.
Appar­ent­ly there is a wor­ry bil­lion­aires will pack up their baubles and toys and  move else­where. What does that say about those with nine zeroes in their portfolios?
The answer is embod­ied in David Elli­son, who is invari­ably accord­ed the des­ig­na­tion “bil­lion­aire”,  which I ven­ture to guess he sees as a kind of title, when he’s men­tioned in news sto­ries. On evi­dence so far,  he’s either nev­er heard of, or cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly rejects the very thought of ‘Sto­ic’ as a prefer­able alternative.
In the inter­est of mak­ing even more mon­ey, he acquired CBS News, then  hand­ed the run­ning of what was left  to Bari Weiss, after he paid $150-mil­lion for her online news site.
A self-pro­fessed Zion­ist ide­o­logue, Weiss has no idea of what CBS rep­re­sents, or how to go about the busi­ness of hard news reporting.
One recent exam­ple: she refused to allow a cor­re­spon­dent and crew to use rare Iran­ian visas because, accord­ing to CBS insid­ers, she con­sid­ered report­ing  from Tehran to be dis­sem­i­nat­ing Iran­ian propaganda.
Eth­i­cal, pro­fes­sion­al reporters, of which  CBS has many — although for how much longer is  an open and vex­ing  ques­tion — are capa­ble of sort­ing wheat from chaff.
They know, as she should, the wis­dom of the late, great British edi­tor C.P. Scott: “Com­ment is free, but facts are sacred. “Pro­pa­gan­da”, so called, by this means is hate­ful. The voice of oppo­nents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard.”

                   ONE STITCH  BEHIND

The lat­est Fed­er­al Reserve data indi­cates that about 1 in 6 Amer­i­can house­holds has a net worth above $1 million.
Appar­ent­ly, that once mag­ic num­ber no longer qual­i­fies the hold­er as being rich, how­ev­er. Accord­ing to  the Wash­ing­ton Post, “many of the country’s newest mil­lion­aires say that even with such wealth, they still feel unde­ni­ably middle-class.”
That may not be a bad thing.
The lat­est way of  flaunting “…extreme wealth and belong­ing to an elite, all-pow­er­ful clique that gets to oper­ate under a dif­fer­ent set of soci­etal norms and rules”, is “glob­al facial micro-opti­miza­tion”, a 150  to 300 thou­sand dol­lar process to tweak every­thing from eye tilt to the way light reflects off the jaw”.
Wash­ing­ton plas­tic sur­geons have report­ed­ly been inun­dat­ed with  requests for  a “Mar-a-Lago face”.
Why any­one would want to look like an habitue of a place owned by a self-pro­claimed bil­lion­aire whose idea of  taste is turn­ing the tra­di­tion-infused Oval Office into a Wal­mart ver­sion of a Sau­di prince’s recep­tion room ‚total­ly escapes me.
What bil­lion­aires do not seem to grasp is that they will not be remem­bered by the num­ber of dol­lars they had, but by the num­ber they spent to help those less fortunate.

Com­ments are wel­comed. Click CONTACT on the site header.
To receive e‑mail alerts to new posts, Click SIGN-UP on the header.