​Many mutinous mutations

By Ed Raymond

We have trillions of reasons why the world is a mess

Medical researchers have determined that the normal adult human body contains about thirty trillion cells and that at least four million of them are replaced each second we live. How’s that for openers? A perfect time for mutations to take place.

A mutation is any heritable alteration of the genes or chromosomes of an organism. The worst mutation taking place among Homo sapiens — so far — was the famous Black Plague that spread around the world from 1346 to 1353. Wherever it mutated, it killed at least half of the population. Records indicate about 100 million people of all ages died in the most lethal natural disaster in human history — so far.

I can’t wait to read “The Black Plague”by historian Thomas Asbridge. He states that if COVID and variants had been as deadly as the black plague, billions of people on earth would have died in the last seven years.

In medieval times, thousands died in the streets coughing up blood. Children of kings and queens died after their bodies started to turn black. The rumor was, if you saw someone die, you would be next. Some people never left home for years. Most families wrote wills at the start. In Italy, five times the normal number of wills were written. Being a notary was almost an automatic death sentence. However, even with the high number of deaths, most societies survived the plague. Everyone wore gloves most of the time. Some cities closed the bars and clubs. In Egypt, many victims died in the shade of palm trees.

Although medical researchers have tried to come up with a cure for this mutation, there always seems to be a few cases hanging around each year. In 1665, London had a very serious repeat and other cities had numerous cases in the 19th century. The plague was used by Jew haters to kill thousands of innocent Jews over the last 600 years. People who owed Jewish financiers lots of money killed them and then used the Black Plague as a reason for the death. Remember, people who died of the plague usually coughed up their blood, so killers covered up physical wounds with lots of blood.

Is it possible that human greed is the result of a cell mutation?

Oft-quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby was different: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”

Perhaps billionaires contract a cell mutation that convinces them they never have enough. Senator Bernie Sanders got our 900+ billionaire’s attention when he asked a billionaire who was objecting to every kind of wealth tax: “Do you think you could get by on $999 million?”

If this filthy rich billionaire was a “never-enough” billionaire, he had already hired a private concierge for up to $500,000 a year to “fix everything” for him and his family. He probably owned several mansions around the world, a big yacht or two and a private luxury jet to visit them.

There are several companies now that furnish private concierges to billionaires. As an example, the Virtuous Travel and Concierge Company furnish concierges who “staff and run mansions, arrange all high-end travel and handle family celebrations. The goal is to offer the most fabulous, the most opulent, the most individualized and the most singular properties, experiences and service imaginable.” Quite a pitch!

Got that? So why are five countries — Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway — always in the top five in the UN Happiness Country Report? Why is the Divided States of America in 23rd place? Why would these countries — Mexico (12th), Kosovo (16th), Slovenia (18th), United Arab Emirates (21st), Saudi Arabia (22nd) — be ahead of us in the ranking?

The top five have 67 billionaires, while we have 989 today — and grow a few more each week. I still remember reporting years ago that the largest fine for speeding was more than $1 million, paid by a wealthy Norwegian because all fines in Norway were based on a percentage of wealth. The speeder was a multi-millionaire.

Bernie Sanders keeps sounding the alarm about our increasing economic inequality: “The worst is yet to come unless workers overcome a ruling class of billionaires. Unless we fundamentally transform our economic and political systems the worst is yet to come. It’s absolutely important that all of us here and every American understand that the ruling class of this country today, there is an extraordinary level of arrogance and cruelty. In many ways these guys (Musk and Bezos) believe like the monarchs. I’m not exaggerating, like the monarchs of the 19th Century. They believe they have the divine right to rule. Musk owns more wealth than 53% of all Americans.”

Every Generation Z should read Trevor Jackson’s ‘The Aging Class’

This article is in the latest New York Review of Books and is about life spans and various retirement programs available to workers and others for about a century. It’s interesting to me because I am in my 32nd year of retirement.

The first paragraph opens up a whole series of questions and not many answers: “We know how long a life span is, but what about the life span of a policy regime? If modern retirement was born in 1935 with the passage of the Social Security Act, it is now entering its ninth decade. Over that time retirement has been diminished and degraded; Social Security in particular has survived several assassination attempts. It is once again in the crosshairs: congressional Republicans have proposed raising the full retirement age to sixty-nine and changing the benefit formula, while Social Security offices and staff have been cut, and like the rest of the federal machinery, the system is being weaponized to enforce Trump’s agenda. So, are we closer to the end or to the beginning?”

The article points out that older workers today are working longer and earning less toward retirement days — and decades. First, many do not have any savings toward retirement. Social Security payments are insufficient because monthly benefits have not been raised much. Of Americans aged 62-70, only 10% are retired and financially stable. Another 11% could retire in a comfortable fashion but choose not to. A full 51% are retired, but their living standards have diminished significantly since they stopped working. Another 28% are still working and cannot afford to stop.

Experts say that the “working-longer” policy does not work because older workers cannot retire comfortably and then retire later. That does make sense because we are in the middle of class warfare with no end in sight.

Workers are different from the rich: they’re poor and unhealthy

The information in this section comes from the Institute for Policy Studies, which studied the worker and CEO pay of 20 S&P corporations. These 20 corporations employ 6.7 million people.

A worker needs to earn $59,600 to rent a two-bedroom apartment in the Divided States of America. The median pay for 75% of the workers is lower than the income minimum for a family of three to be eligible for Medicaid in most states and is lower than the income threshold for food stamps (SNAP).

The Trump Big Beautiful Bill (or Terribly Bad Bill, depending upon who you are) will result in 7.5 million Americans losing Medicaid and over a million losing some or all of their SNAP benefits. Average median pay among the 20 corporations declined from 2019 to 2024, when adjusted for inflation, from $30,474 to $29,087. In Colorado, Massachusetts, Illinois and Michigan in 2024, 10,920 Walmart and 9,633 Amazon workers were on food stamps. At the same time in the same states, nearly a quarter of Walmart employees (29.3%) and half of Amazon workers (48.4%) were on Medicaid.

During this period, the average CEO pay among the 20 corporations reached an average $18.9 million in 2024, with the average CEO to median worker pay ratio of $899 to $1. Sixteen billionaires were hired by these 20 companies, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, eight members of Walmart’s Walton family and Howard Schultz, the former “outspoken” CEO of Starbucks. Amazon and Bezos, as an example, employ 79% of the workforce in warehouses with over 1,000 employees.

Are old people like me in the U.S. overprivileged with power?

Samuel Moyn, author of “Gerontocracy in America,” which is about to come on the book market, thinks so. I think his evidence is overwhelming. He writes our presidents have been too old, along with all of our leading politicians. Seniors like me dominate elections, especially local and any off-cycle ones. The median age of eligible voters is 48. But the age of actual voters has been about 52 for presidential elections. For off-year congressional elections voters have been 56. For primary elections, which can be very boring, the age is 65. In 2014, the average age of donors — the people who pay for campaigns — was 70 or more.

Economic inequality has grown dramatically in just two decades. From 1990 to 2010, the net worth of households headed by adults over 65 grew by 42%. In the same period, adults 18 through 34 bombed out in a 68% drop! Here is the real shocker — in 2019, Americans under 40 made up 37% of the population but held only 5% of America’s wealth. Those over 40, which roughly the same number of people, held 72% of the wealth.

At the present time, the Divided States of America has very high wage inequality — and it gets worse each day. Between 1979 and 2018, the pay for workers over 55 and those under 35 widened by 61%. The share of workers over 55 increased by 88%. The median age of a homebuyer was just below 30 in 1981; by 2024, it was 56.

Our present tax system should make 99.9% mad as hell

Anyone of us who has a job or anyone who works for himself or others pays significant taxes at a rate up to 37%; plus they pay an additional 15.3% in payroll taxes. But in 2021 (and probably all future years!). billionaires Warren Buffet (who still lives in the house he lived in many decades ago) paid a true tax rate of 0.1%, Jeff Bezos (owner of two yachts that cost him nearly a billion dollars) paid 0.98%, and Michael Bloomberg (who at times doesn’t seem to care about being a billionaire) paid a rate of 1.3%.

Well, glory be! How did they pull that off? They rented, leased, or bought more than half of the Congress of the Divided States of America. And they pay millions to other millionaires who “manage” their money. We have a system where 47% of the people do not pay federal income taxes because they don’t make enough money. Maybe we should have a Congress that will remove billionaires such as Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos and the other 900 or so from the 47% who pay virtually no federal income taxes. We must change the policies of the DSA that demand the poor and middle class pay taxes. The rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers and the ultra-rich pay politicians.