‘Should you exist?’ Billionaires face rising criticism alongside rising power – By Mark Trumbull (CS Monitor) / Feb 25 2020
In a capitalist society, money more than talks. But in an age of rising inequality, some Americans are wondering whether there is such a thing as being too wealthy.
The United States was at the precipice of a financial crisis – and the wealthy and well-connected worked out a plan to avert disaster.
That was the narrative in 1907, as John Pierpont Morgan brought fellow financiers into a room and coaxed them to prop up a tottering banking system. Their action eased a potentially devastating financial panic. But it also troubled many Americans by revealing how, even within an already mighty nation, a relative few wielded extraordinary power.
Today, those concerns still resonate. They punctuated the 2016 presidential race when candidate Donald Trump poured $66 million into his campaign and went on to become the first billionaire president in the United States. Last week they became especially pointed in a Democratic presidential debate, as a billionaire candidate on stage confronted another candidate’s assertion that “billionaires should not exist.”
“We’re in this populist moment, and the populist sentiments are playing out in different ways,” says David Callahan, editor of Inside Philanthropy. Where President Trump has tapped into anger at the media and coastal elites – even while being a person of big wealth himself – on the left “Bernie Sanders is really tapping into anger at the billionaires and wealth inequality, also taking on his party establishment.”
At the same time, another American billionaire is throwing his wealth behind one of the pressing problems of the day. Jeff Bezos, the world’s second-richest person pledged an astronomical sum – $10 billion – toward addressing a climate crisis in the absence of federal leadership.
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