We Love the Rich and Famous
by Errington C. Thompson, MD –
Man, do we love the rich and famous.
Our admiration for those who have buckets of money seems to be endless. The love affair makes almost no sense: we threw off the stuffy and aristocratic British to start our own country.
Those first Americans did not want a society that was stratified by money or status; many of the founders wrote about the evils of inherited wealth and aristocracy. Instead of the British system, we wanted a country in which you could earn your status.
George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams basically earned their position in society through hard work and perseverance. All these men became highly revered, not for being rich but for their accomplishments and their intellect.
Today, we live in a society where if you are rich we love you. It is that simple. Worse, we associate a lot of great virtues with the almighty dollar. If you are rich, you must work harder than the rest of us. You are smarter than the rest of us. You get to work earlier and stay later than the rest of us. You have a better spouse, and you’re even a better Christian than the rest of us.
At least, that is how the myth goes. But let me tell you, it is only a myth. The rich are not any better, more virtuous, smarter, or holier than the rest of us. Some rich folks are great; some are simply average; and some rich people are trailer trash that just happen to have money.
Do you remember Kenneth Lay? He was the CEO of failed energy giant Enron. Leading up to the spectacular collapse of that company, every major magazine in the country had Ken Lay’s face on the cover. He and his executive team were labeled the “Smartest Guys in the Room.” As it turned out, they came up with a smart new way to rip off both their own investors and their customers (especially those that live in California), leaving billions in debt and almost bankrupting the Golden State. Once people figured out the scheme and exposed it, their house of cards came tumbling down and Ken Lay was off to prison—though he died of a heart attack before he got there.
What about Robert Allen Stanford? Do you remember him? Stanford made a boatload of money by speculating in real estate in the early 1980s. During those boom years his financial empire grew and his interest expanded from real estate to banking. By the middle 2000s, he was a billionaire.
Like Ken Lay, he was touted as one of the smartest guys in the room. And just like Ken Lay, he was simply a greedy criminal who ran a Ponzi scheme. He took certificates of deposit and siphoned off a significant amount of money into his own pocket, shady real estate deals, and other investments of his choosing, then brought in new investors to pay back the old ones. He’s serving 110 years in prison.
I should just take a couple of seconds to talk about Carly Fiorina. If there is ever a businesswoman who had a spectacular track record of failure it would be Carly Fiorina. Now remember, almost everybody was cheering for Fiorina when she became the CEO of one of America’s technical companies, Hewlett-Packard—the first woman to head up a Fortune 500 tech giant. How could you mess up a juggernaut like HP?
Well, you make a couple of high-profile, disastrous decisions like buying Compaq ($25 billion) for no good reason other than because it’s a lot easier to borrow money to buy a competitor than to compete with them.
After six years in a contentious relationship with the board, laying off more than 30,000 employees, and losing half the company’s value (while rivals Dell and IBM were making money as fast as they could rake it in), she was fired … but landed softly with a $21 million golden parachute. Now she touts her “success” in business as a qualification for elected office!
This leads me to Donald Trump. I am not saying that Donald Trump has failed in business, although he has had plenty of business ventures that have imploded, collapsed, and fell on their face. Trump did figure out how to work the bankruptcy laws four times so that he could make billions of dollars while walking away from massive debts. What Donald Trump has learned in the last 20 years is how to do one thing and do it really well: promote Donald Trump!! He is THE reality TV star.
Being able to build a luxury hotel with a beautiful golf course does not mean that you can put together a coalition to get something important or difficult passed through Congress. If I told you I could take raw sewage and turn it into beautiful, sweet-smelling, gold bricks, you would be skeptical.
Donald Trump has told us equally ridiculous things over the past several months: he is going to build a wall between Mexico and the United States and have Mexico pay for it; meanwhile he’s going to round up 11 million to 12 million undocumented Mexicans and deport them (over, under, or through that wall). Through sheer force of will he is going to make China fix our trade imbalance; and because he knows how to cut a deal he’ll make Saudi Arabia pay their fair share for defense.
This is all nonsense. Without a concrete plan of making these far-fetched ideas come to fruition, it’s poppycock. In the end, this may be Donald Trump’s greatest gift, the gift of deception.
Despite his repeated claims, there is no evidence that Trump opposed the Iraq War before it started, or opposed taking out Quaddafi in Libya. (He did oppose serving in the armed forces himself: he received four student deferments and, later, a 4-F medical deferment for “heel spurs”—though he does not remember which heel.) Nor is there any evidence that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen, though Donald Trump spearheaded the “birther” movement for over four years; and there’s no evidence that Hillary Clinton began the birther movement, though Trump likes to make that claim, too, now that “birtherism” is utterly discredited.
Like the famous scene in The Wizard of Oz, Trump does not want us to look behind the curtain or into the details of his grandiose plans. But he sure is rich, and apparently that’s quite enough to qualify him for the highest office in the land, at least to his supporters.
