Long long, ago, in 2019, I felt rage at seeing wealthy white parents use bribery fraud to get their children into Stanford and USC, two universities I don’t respect (especially the right-leaning Stanford). This was called the college admissions bribery scandal. But no one cared. And frankly, after nearly 3 years of reflection, neither should I. Life is too short to care about the rich getting richer, because they have been back at it since the Reagan administration. I was 8 years old when he and Congress started cutting their taxes. That’s almost all of my life. And many -if not most- in the top 5% pay no tax at all.

Still, with the help of this blog’s former contributor, Archetype, I’ve got some brief, leftover thoughts about a few of the mechanisms that have made the rich much more rich since the election of Donald J. Trump, and then even more rich during the pandemic. I have a lot of things to share on this topic. It’s late in a depressing year. I’m on train. So I’m gonna dump.

We knew about charitable donations and legacies with relation to who gets admitted to prestigious universities. But this scandal reveals all the other mechanism the rich have to block out the good kids who work hard and never get in.

Meanwhile, Trump and his pals joke that no one ever remembers seeing Barack Obama at Columbia and Harvard.

Now would be a great time to leak Trump's transcripts from Fordham. I wish someone at Fordham had to courage to leak those.

By the way., for a man who will pat himself on the back for any and all things he puts his name to, funny he doesn’t have these amazing transcripts bronzed and in the lobby of Trump Plaza. I mean they are the very best grades. No one had better grades.

But why go through all the trouble of fraud. Why not set up a fake university with fake diplomas and everything else. Just set up a fake university that will act like a rubber stamp on a resume that your kid is rich. Frankly, the rich cutting their kids into line de-values the diplomas from these prestigious private institutions. It has always been a slap in the face to the kids who have to work and borrow to go to university.

When I first drafted this blog post, I asked myself a question. if New York City taxi medallions have dropped in value because of new car services like Uber and Lyft, and if retail stores have lost their value because of Amazon, then when will the value of the prestigious universities drop because they are full of rich kids whose parents bribed their way in? 

Are hiring managers are really so stupid to think that a Yale degree in 2021 is exactly the same as a Yale degree in 1960 in terms of prestige and value? 

In each decade since the end of the twentieth century, we have learned of the advanced mechanisms ands schemes the top two percent use to maintain their wealth and privilege. In this pandemic, we have found quite a few. Let’s discover some more. These are teachable moments.

Also: meritocracy. I never believed it was real.

It's no accident that the rich pay little in taxes. After all, they've bought a major political party, which governs on their behalf, while feeding their constituents a steady diet of culture war fairy tales. Is this a great country, or what?

This should be shocking, but of course it's not. In the 1970's, the wealthiest people on earth declared war on the rest of us, and they quickly hired the politicians who would wage it on their behalf. Reagan in the states and Thatcher in the U.K. became the public faces of that extraordinarily successful war. By the start of this century, advanced economies world wide had essentially stopped taxing the rich, and the people at the top of the income and asset heap saw their share of the wealth grow exponentially decade after decade. In good times and bad, the rich got ever richer, and their hired gun politicians made sure the policies which had assured those results were maintained and strengthened. There's a groaning and growing shelf of books explaining this process, and detailing its ruinous consequences. I hope it's not too late to reverse this catastrophe, but I fear that it is. Our republic has never been much of a democracy, and it looks now like the republic itself is destined to become an authoritarian state, ruled by an arrogant, monied oligarchy. I might be mistaken. But I don’t think so.