A tiny number of people control almost all the wealth and power in this country. There are fewer than a thousand billionaires in our country of over 340 million people, but they control around 80% of the wealth, leaving crumbs for the rest of us.
These billionaires wield vast power over every part of our lives: not just owning the companies we work in (where they can lay off entire divisions at a whim), and the news outlets we trust to keep us informed (which only tell the kinds of stories that they want us to hear), and the entertainment companies we get our TV and movies and video games from (which embed the billionaires’ worldview in every product), but the very fabric of the government as well (since the billionaires are allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money to buy politicians and elections).
The main story we’re raised to believe—and that the media sources owned by those billionaires tell us—is that if you work hard, you’ll get to be rich. That’s what they call “the American Dream.” But here in reality, almost nobody who works hard gets to be rich. The people who are rich almost universally inherited their wealth, or started in a position of high privilege that gave them a far better chance of being inducted into that elite class.
Where did all that concentrated wealth come from in the first place, then? Go back in time, and you’ll find the ultra-wealthy capitalists of an earlier age got their wealth by exploiting the labor of their workers. To put it simply, think about a typical company that has a single owner. The owner has a hundred employees and pays each of them a fixed wage. The employees in turn do work that generates income for the company. The total income they all generate has to exceed the amount they’re paid, or the company loses money.
The excess income is profit, and all of it goes to the owner, even if the owner does no work. There are countless companies where the owners do not do any work; instead they hire someone to run the company, and then sit back and collect the profits. And since they don’t do any work, they have lots of free time and lots of money that they can spend on things like buying news outlets and lobbying government officials. The workers can’t afford to do these things—at least, not individually.
The billionaires who own the media outlets use them to distract and divide us. They distract us with floods of entertainment, convincing us that we absolutely must see the next Marvel movie, or the next NFL game, or the next episode of Real Housewives. They divide us by owning news outlets on all parts of the political spectrum, which scream at each other about divisive wedge issues like abortion and gun control, while never mentioning the exploitation of labor that allowed them to gather so much money and power in the first place.
And the owners invariably use a good chunk of that money and time to convince the government to pass laws that further benefit the owners, making it easier for them to continue stealing their workers’ labor. It’s a vicious cycle that leads to ever-increasing amounts of wealth consolidation in the hands of a few, and has led us to where we are now: a tiny class of oligarchs who spend their time concocting new ways to exploit us and pit us against each other.
Other articles here go into detail on these ideas, and what you can do to change your perspective on how the world works. We can’t fight the power if we don’t understand it.