The Morbidly Rich: A New Name for an Old Problem

We need a new phrase to identify these oligarchs who are reaching out to seize control of our government, our economy, and our culture...

What should we call them?

Attending Trump’s inauguration today will be six of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and the respective leaders/owners of TikTok, Google, and ChatGPT.

Want near absolute power in America with the approval of at least half of the American public?

Simply tweak the top-secret algorithms that determine what posts you see most often on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter/X, and TikTok; algorithmically filter the search results of Google and ChatGPT; and control the content of The Washington Post.

The massive wealth of these men, along with their political and media power, resembles the oligarchs America has seen rise and then repeatedly get rejected or defeated throughout American history.

At the founding of our republic, they were referred to as “speculators,” “monied interests,” or “aristocrats.” In the years leading up to the Civil War they were called the “Cotton Lords” and “Plantation Aristocracy.” The late 19th century labeled them “Robber Barons,” and in the 1930s FDR condemned them as “Economic Royalists.”

Since the Reagan Revolution, we’ve referred to them simply as “Billionaires,” and increasingly the billionaire crowd that’s most closely surrounded and embraced Trump are called “Tech Bros,” a phrase they appear to embrace. Tech, after all, is generally seen as a positive, and just last week Mark Zuckerberg called for more “masculine energy” in American business culture.

We need a new phrase to identify these oligarchs who are reaching out to seize control of our government, our economy, and our culture. One that is descriptive but carries a generally pejorative implication.

I suggest we call them “the Morbidly Rich.”

Seriously. Their great wealth is neither healthy for them, nor for our society and political system. Dr. David Clawson recently wrote an insightful article for Psychology Today titled “Morbid Wealth” in which he argues these very points.

“From a societal standpoint,” he writes, “extreme wealth and wealth inequality are toxic. … Subjectively, we see the ultrarich and their descendants suffer from such things as anxiety, depression, addiction, and loss of meaning and purpose. …

“Notably, the ultrarich suffer from the trappings of their wealth. They have more to track, manage, and protect. Their wealth can become isolating for them, as well. They can be resented by many and targeted by others. Healthy and meaningful relationships can be hard to find for the ultrarich. Their wealth can also precipitate and facilitate their seeking of pleasure over happiness, a formula for addiction and dysfunction. The ultrarich have some increased risk factors for illness and disease.”

He goes on to point out that the income inequality that comes from the growth of extreme wealth is “antidemocratic,” because a few rich people can use their money to drown out the voices of millions of average citizens when it comes to determining public policy.

Remember when Trump promised a roomful of rich fossil fuel executives that if they’d give him a billion dollars he’d eliminate the regulations that cut into their profits and slow down their destruction of our planet? In the months since then, the top 15 oil billionaires in America have seen their wealth increase by over $40 billion.

About two-thirds of Americans, according to a new Pew Poll, believe the mind-bogglingly rich have too much political influence. Fully 83% of respondents identified the chasm between the top 0.1% (about 130,000 families who own 13.5% of the nation’s wealth) and the bottom half of Americans (66 million people who only own about 2.5% of the nation’s wealth) as “a problem.”

“Morbidly” is defined by the Oxford dictionary as meaning “unhealthy” or “indicative of disease.” If great wealth is corroding Americans’ trust and faith in both government and each other, and is even bad for the rich people themselves, it’s hard to argue that its existence is a healthy thing for America.

While Trump has historically been considered a relatively low-level billionaire (many have even questioned his wealth being over a billion dollars), his association with the Tech Bros and embrace of crypto currency appears to have paid off.

Last Friday, Trump rolled out a digital meme coin — $TRUMP — that’s issued on the Solana blockchain, and within a few hours his net worth climbed by an estimated $58 billion, making him one of the 25 richest men on planet Earth.

He’s configured the company and its plans in a way that, Axios reports, will generate $8.1 billion a year for Trump and his family going forward.

That’s $675 million a month going into Trump’s money bins, and there are no limits on foreign nations or their leaders giving millions or even billions to Trump via the new coin: nice work, if you can get it.

And if he weren’t about to be inaugurated as president, it’s unlikely such a venture would generate anywhere near the interest and revenue it’s currently experiencing. This is just the most recent obscene example of Trump being the first man in history to monetize the presidency.

Trump’s pursuit of morbid wealth, and his embrace of the already morbidly rich to first gain and then enhance his wealth and political power brings to mind FDR’s warning about the concentration of wealth America saw during the Roaring 20s that led to the Republican Great Depression.

Three consecutive Republican presidents had dropped and held the top income tax rate from 91% down to 25%, producing the explosion of great wealth described by F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned:

“For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.”

Like President Biden’s Farewell Address alert about “an oligarchy taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom,” FDR pointed out how the “Economic Royalists” of his era were, like the men who will join Trump today, lusting for political power to supplement their already mind-boggling economic authority:

“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result, the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.”

FDR brought the morbidly rich of his era to heel, even though they tried to kidnap and assassinate him.

Trump, on the other hand, promises to make them richer and more powerful while he works with Bezos and Musk to destroy unions, and his multimillionaire Treasury Secretary designate argues before the Senate that a $7.25 federal minimum wage is just fine.

America is experiencing a severe sickness that’s increasingly called oligarchy, caused by the failure of our government to use tax and anti-monopoly laws to prevent the oil and tech billionaires (among others) from accumulating so much wealth that nobody can stand against them, either in business or politics.

We were brought to this point by three major factors.

— The first was five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court declaring, in the purely partisan Bellotti and Citizens United decisions, that money isn’t really money but is, instead, “free speech protected by the First Amendment” and that “corporations are persons” whose right to purchase politicians is secured by the Bill of [Human] Rights.

— The second cause was Reagan’s employing Jude Wanniski’s “Two Santas” strategy, using massive tax cuts for the wealthy to drive up the national debt (to force Democrats to make cuts to social programs), an exercise repeated by both George W. Bush and Donald Trump, leaving our country $36 trillion in debt. That’s $36 trillion that should have been paid as income taxes by the morbidly rich over the past 44 years, with that tax money being used to improve America’s infrastructure, schools, hospitals, and the lives of average citizens — like it was in the decades before 1981.

— And the third was Reagan’s 1983 order to three federal agencies to essentially stop enforcing the nation’s anti-trust laws, leading to our situation today where every major industry — from food to retail to travel to banking and beyond — is controlled by fewer than five major corporations. It makes it possible for them to price-gouge us as much and as often as they want, as anybody who’s recently gotten sick or gone grocery shopping can tell you.

While there’s little hope that this administration will do anything to reverse Citizens United, raise taxes on the rich, or enforce our anti-monopoly laws to lower prices, by referring to the recipients of the GOP’s largesse as the “morbidly rich” we can highlight the moral, economic, and political sickness inherent in the Reaganomics policies Republicans — including Trump — have pursued these past four decades.

That, in turn, may prepare the ground for a national backlash that could, in the next two elections, signal the return of New Deal and Great Society politics and economics.

First, though, average Americans must realize who’s the real problem today, regardless of how things got this far and this bad: it’s the morbidly rich and the politicians and judges they’ve bought.

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.
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