Who are “They?”

Posted on | October 6, 2011 | 2 Comments

Someone asked me, quite rightly, who the “they” are…so, here it goes:

It’s the money.
The top 1%.
They’ve been there since the Gilded Age.
They crashed the economy in 1929.
They fought FDR tooth and nail.
They’ve been trying to restore the Gilded Age since the end of WWII.
Right now, there are 400 families who control half of America’s wealth.
We can name some…the Waltons, the Kochs, the Dimons.
We can point to corporations and their executives at Goldman-Sachs, The Carlyle Group, Chevron, Monsanto.
They profit on the repeated inflation of the market, and then on the predicable crashes of the market.
I have waded through their backwaters, particularly in D.C.
They vacation at St. Barts and Martha’s Vineyard.
They go to Harvard and Yale and Brown and private prep schools.
They go to the same dinner parties.
They employ politicians as intermediaries between us and them.
They have the best healthcare and eat the best food.
They live in an alternate America.

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