Why Did Bezos, Pelosi Support BLM, Nasdaq Hit Record High During Protests?
June 12 — Bezos put BLM front and center on Amazon’s home page earlier this week. Pelosi knelt for 8 minutes 46 seconds wearing an African kente cloth scarf on Monday.
I support BLM. Peaceful protests triggered by the George Floyd video are of course justified. Such police murders must never happen again.
Why did the world’s richest person, recently estimated at $147 billion, and the most powerful elected Democrat in the U.S., the net worth of she and her husband may be around $100 million, also both show their support for BLM?
Why did Nasdaq, which includes Amazon and other leading tech stocks, hit a new high this week as BLM protests spread and Biden’s lead in polls increased? (The S&P 500 fell -5.9% yesterday attributed to concerns about the economy and Covid-19.)
The story you tell yourself about the above chart from Brookings and others linked to below may help you answer these questions. That story might depend on the lens you use in viewing the charts: race, class, both, or neither. For the past three weeks most American political discourse has been mainly using race.
The story I told on June 5, when I also showed the above chart, was “U.S., World Need Unifying Leaders With Massive Approach to Racial, Economic Justice.” That story would be even stronger if the above chart showed the net worth of the top 1% and 0.1%.
Ask yourself whether what has been happening in the U.S. the past three weeks would help significantly change the HUGE wealth inequality shown in these charts? Then ask again why did Bezos and Pelosi support BLM, and why is the stock market so high during the protests?
I’m not going to walk through the following charts, if you look at them, try to be aware of the political lens that you are viewing them with.
This Wikipedia article on “Wealth inequality in the United States” has a number of charts and tables.
To see how wealth inequality in the U.S. has changed since 1963, hit the “animate” button on the first chart in this article, the data end in 2016, the chart would be even more extreme in 2020 with the stock market so high.
Look at the third, fourth and fifth charts here. And at the first two charts here. The first chart in this article is worth trying to verbalize. I’ve already shown three charts from here, including the title chart today, in my June 5 article.
Here is a June 8 article from the Washington Post, owned by Bezos, covering data on deaths by police shootings, which WaPo has been compiling for years and is the major source. How many unarmed blacks like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have been murdered by police?
One is too many, but the data may not be as simple as the story being told by mass and social media. Nor may the story on wealth inequality and social justice, these are all complex issues.
E.g., here’s a link on racial factors in the leading cause of death for African-Americans, heart disease. Covid-19, which dangerously has been getting less attention lately in mass and social media, disproportionately impacts blacks.
To the well-paid professionals of Facebook, Google, and other tech companies in the very liberal San Francisco Bay Area, whose stock options have been appreciating along with the market, did you notice that the Nasdaq 100 hit a new record this week on Blackout Tuesday?
Will your actions that day eventually help meaningfully change the huge wealth inequality data shown in these charts? Since you are data-driven in your business life, what might need to be done to change it?
If there is major change happening right now, then why would Bernie Sanders tweet on June 11: “Over the past three months of this horrific pandemic, 44 million Americans have filed for unemployment, while the ten richest families in America have seen their wealth go up by $243 billion.”
And on June 4: “Over the past 11 weeks, as 42 million workers lost jobs and nearly half of our people lost income, 630 U.S. billionaires increased their wealth by $565,000,000,000.”
I hope the juxtapositions in my title and the charts in this article might raise some questions. The answers are difficult, even for experts, which I am not.
Make America and World Awesome, MAWA
John Furlan
