~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Why is it that American billionaires want to run their country into Third-World status? Stingy healthcare, high rate of birth deaths, lessening life spans, politicized public education, banned books, low incomes, soaring prices, unsafe bridges and tens of millions of potholes?
Billionaires are eager to give a ton of money to a felon of a president for his “ballroom” and just as eager to hide their wealth so our tax system hasn’t enough money for universal healthcare, education and retirement
This month, April 2026, Mexico began rolling out universal healthcare for its 130 million citizens. Mexico ranks 53rd in the world in their Gross Domestic Product, the USA, first.
There is a critical housing shortage for the middle class and below in the US. Most billionaires own several houses, which we can drool over periodically in the Wall Street Journal.
Billionaires travel a lot and accommodate themselves with their own fleets of jets, helicopters and sea-worthy yachts. The rest of us stand in hours-long lines to catch a plane when the government can’t put aside pettiness and refuses to pay the salaries of airport security.
As far as we can tell from the facts slipping out of the heavily redacted Epstein files, it is the wealthy and powerful who are named as pedophiles. How many $50-thousand-a-year guys were invited to ride in one of the Jeffrey jets, especially the one named “Lolita Express”?
We can now compare our oligarchs to the Russian individuals who also rape their own country and then spit upon it by living more in first world nations like Britain and France than in their poverty-stricken Russia.
I do not get it, billionaires, that you have no pride of self or country. Have you all been warped by your greed? What do you do with all that money? Who raised you to become bloated with goods and empty of decency?
Who needs money? The poor, the struggling middleclass, the ill, the uneducated, people of color, poor white trash as billionaires no doubt consider the rest of us, if they consider us at all.
Do you roll around in your nickels and dimes like Scrooge McDuck? Do you light your Cuban cigars with $100 bills? Do you tip at all?
We are a racist country but not the only one, and racism is not our major split.
An almost zero percent of our population [about 800 men] own $6 to $7.8 trillion among them; the lowest 50 percent of our population own around $4 trillion all together. [Mother Jones]
The astonishing wealth of the few comes at the expense of the rest of us in the form of taxes taken out of our pay checks and soaring prices for our basic needs of food, energy, housing and medical care. They use write-offs to lessen their income before they file, if they file; we might get a write-off check from our income-tax return after we file.
Our president plays the racist card to keep the majority of Americans upset with foul utterances; and worse [war, threats of cancelling Midterm voting]. His theory is that we’ll concentrate on any idea big and disgusting enough to forget that because of him and his ilk we live in a rich get richer/poor get poorer world. It’s this class divide that enriches the billionaire Trumps and Epsteins of the world and weakens “We the people.”
