Many today are dancing on the grave of the multi-billionaire David Koch. And with good reason. No matter how you want to cut it, Koch is not a person most of the world will remember warmly. During much of his 79 years "pan ert," he used his immense power to ruin the lives of millions (if not billions) of people. He attacked unions, he attacked democratic institutions, and his project was the establishment of a terrestrial paradise only for the members of his class. He also died at same time that the whole world had just become greatly alarmed by the thousands of fires that are destroying unbelievably large parts of the "lungs of the earth," the Amazon. Many on Twitter rightly see a connection between the industrialist's aggressive and tireless promotion of climate denialism and the images of apocalypse arriving from Iceland—which recently held a funeral for a glacier (in one day, 13 billion tons of ice melted")—and Brazil.

The world is literally on fire.

If you don't take a moment to dance on the grave of David Koch now you may never get the chance to.
— Ijeoma Oluo (@IjeomaOluo) August 23, 2019

It's fine to be a Koch hater and all that (he deserves the flood of acid and curses on Twitter and Facebook), but we must also understand that just being a billionaire is bad enough. Even if you do not give money to the far right, even if you donate money to the progressive left, the ownership of even a billion dollars exerts great downward pressure on the workers in the middle and bottom of a class-structured society. And the reason for this can be explained in a simple formula by the economist Thomas Piketty: r > g.

Continue reading »