Filthy Lucre and Profound Wealth

Jason Kempin/Getty Images

Elon Musk and Grimes at the 2018 Met Gala

The world is stumbling through a global pandemic with nation after nation watching helplessly as their economies crumble, stock market values tumble, businesses fail, great corporations are prostrated, and pharmaceutical companies rush to develop a life-saving vaccine -- and all the while their health-care systems are overwhelmed with mounting cases of a coronavirus that has crushed the lives of millions of people.

Yet, all is not lost. The world's wealthiest billionaires are in fine shape, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index which ranks the world's 500 wealthiest people in order of the riches they have amassed. For the past eight years those rankings have informed a curious world of the wealth that some individuals have been able to accrue to themselves. And this year, which has seen nations stumble to their financial knees, the ultra-wealthy are doing just fine, thanks for asking.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos is now acknowledged as the wealthiest man in the world. Bill Gates has been dumped south, from the second richest man on Earth, to third-place status. And Elon Musk, who in January ranked 35th in wealth among the 500 billionaires the report names, added $100.3 billion to his net worth in the year 2020, for a total of $127.9 billion, the year that spelled disaster to Planet Earth. That princely sum added to his net worth has brought him to the position of second wealthiest man on this blue planet.

Microsoft Corp.'s Bill Gates's net worth of $127.7 while powerfully rich, has been diminished from the heights it might have reached had he not donated considerable portions of his vast wealth to charity, in giving over $27 billion to the Bill Gates Foundation, since 2006. He appears to have been more than willing to surrender the top spot in soaring wealth in favour of funding research in viruses to rescue humanity from dread diseases.

There are notable differences between Gates and Musk, the former believing in vaccine research and putting his money where his mouth is, as opposed to the values of the latter who questions pandemic data, finding comfort in certain conspiracy theories. And just as urban legend often speaks of the peculiar social mores and twisted morals of the very rich, there are examples that reveal the inner value core of such people.

The COVID-19 pandemic has undeniably made for a poorer world for most of Earth's inhabitants. Millions have lost employment, millions have become ill and the lingering effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID will bedevil some people all their lives, those spared the devastation of more immediate life-taking complications. Governments have had to borrow vast sums in funding to financially support their desperate populations.

Widespread layoffs disproportionately affecting the working class and the poor, poverty is increasing exponentially. In marked contrast to the members of the Bloomberg index having collectively profited by gaining 23 percent (roughly $1.3 trillion-worth) since the beginning of the year when a mysterious pneumonia-like illness began to emerge in Wuhan, China and all too soon spread world-wide to wreak havoc everywhere.

•X, the unknown variable

•Æ, my elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence) •A-12 = precursor to SR-17 (our favorite aircraft). No weapons, no defenses, just speed. Great in battle, but non-violent

+ (A=Archangel, my favorite song) (

metal rat)

The world's second richest man's partner is a Canadian-born entertainer, sufficiently successful in her career to have made a name for herself, and the owner of her own recording company, Crystal Math Music Inc. Her stage name is Grimes, her true name Claire Elise Boucher, born in British Columbia and an alumni of McGill University. The staff she employs at her recording company applied to a granting agency on her  behalf.

This is a woman, while a reportedly gifted musician and entertainer, lives in California with her love partner, Elon Musk, and their young son whom they named XAE A-XII. Factor, a Canadian arts subsidy program partially funded by the Government of Canada, awarded her a $90,000 grant. She evidently under the eligibility criteria of the funding body seems fully qualified, irrespective of the fact that she no longer lives in Canada, though listed as a Quebec artist.

So a woman with a successful entertaining career who owns her own recording company appealed to a partially publicly-funded arts-grant group for a grant acknowledging her contribution to Canadian entertainment. That she has access to undreamed-of wealth, living with the world's second-most wealthy man appears incidental; she has not hesitated to take the grant and he appears uninvolved with the moral implications.

Among which is the fact that entertainers of all kinds in the world of art are struggling to assert their talents in circumstances where public venues revolving around art and entertainment are now closed off to them, and while continuing to polish their talents in hopes of better days to come, seek gainful employment in the ill-paid services industries in hopes of earning a living to get by current difficulties. 

F.Scott Fitzgerald was right when he penned that throw-away line that "the rich are not like you and me".

"Money is an Addictive Substance"

"[Many of the super-wealthy have been] navigating work and life in sixth gear for decades."
"Once they have no financial need to work -- are 'post-economic' -- as some say in San Francisco -- they have trouble shifting into lower gears."
Tim Ferris, life-hacking writer

"I don't know that I have an exact threshold on what amount of money someone should have."
"But on some level, no one deserves to have that much money."
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, $70 billion

"A lot of Wall Street traders didn't create anything -- all they did was trade on the value and ingenuity of what other people created, so at the end of the day, what can they point to that's tangible?"
"All they have is money. So they go out and buy a house and a fancy car, and that feels good for a short while, then they buy a second house and a fancier car."
"Because all they have is what they earn. They're defined by it."
Jordan Belfort, inspiration for "The Wolf of Wall Street"

Tim Graham / Getty

F.Scott Fitzgerald, the American writer born in the 19th Century and published in the early 20th, was fascinated by the wealth and status of American millionaires. He became famous himself, albeit not wealthy, as a writer. As for his conclusion about the different mindset of the wealthy, he put it this way: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different."

Where once being a millionaire was an unattainable goal for the financially ambitious, millionaires now abound, and it is billionaires whose inaccessible wealth and the influence and prestige that comes with it, as a manifestation of a mysterious entrepreneurial skill that fascinates the public. And as they amass their fortunes and keep getting richer and richer, the puzzle is, why make the effort once their finances have reached such a stratospheric level of achievement? Why not just enjoy what they have amassed and set aside the focus on acquiring more, for how much after all, does anyone need?

The answer to that appears to be that it is not the considerable wealth that motivates them to continue striving to acquire more, but the fact that the wealth itself is symptomatic of their achievement which has set them apart and above, and apart and above is where they want to remain. The chief executive of Apple, with an estimated wealth of hundreds of millions wakes up at 3:45 a.m. to begin his quotidian effort to leave his competitors in the dust. Space X, and Tesla's Elon Musk, worth about $23 billion, decided to cut back his working hours from 120 hours weekly to a "manageable" 80 or 90 hours. 'Getting a life' to these high achievers is nonsensical; they hotly pursued the life they attained.

"Driven people are just driven", noted Fox Business TV anchor, Maria Bartiromo. "They want to stay fresh and relevant, and to do that, it requires consistent practice. If you want to win, you need to be all in." Make sense? If all you focus on is acquiring more wealth and achieving the vaunted status of ultra-wealthy you join a rare enclave, elevated in status through the acquisition of wealth beyond the dreams of ordinary people ... or even most over-achievers ... through following a unique vision and promoting it endlessly. 

Warren Buffett has given away a staggering 71.1 percent of his wealth

A Harvard University survey of 4,000 millionaires discovered that those whose financial capital is $8 million or grater tended to be no more satisfied than their $1-million counterparts. Robert Frank, wealth editor for CNBC stated "For most people enough is enough. But there is another group of people, no mater what they have, they have to keep going. I call them 'scorekeepers;' They're truly driven by competitive zeal." That material needs have been achieved is irrelevant among the very wealthy, according to Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University.

"Among the rarefied group of the extreme rich, social status depends on net worth. Their enhanced wealth allows them to make substantial charitable contributions to institutions like museums and concert halls that may lead to having a building or the like named after them." How's that for motivation to dispense with spare cash by having your name immortalized? Oddly, close to 20 percent of the world's most wealthy people having assets of $30-million or greater, live in ten cities globally, and it seems six of those cities are located in the United States.

"If you're an alcoholic you're going to take one drink, two drinks, five drinks, six drinks to feel the buzz. Well, when  you get a million dollars, you need 10 million dollars to feel like a king."
"Money is an addictive substance."
Steven Berglas, psychologist

Should Jeff Bezos with his $110-billion nest-egg make a bad investment on Amazon delivery drones, he won't be forced to auction off his $65-million Gulfstream Jet. He can just casually write off the loss. According to Dr.T.Byram Karasu, emeritus professor of psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, apex entrepreneurs and financiers are "adrenaline-fueled, transgressive people who tend to have laser-focused digital brains, always in transactional mode, and the bigger they get, the lonelier they are, because they [are isolated]."

Islamism is the Problem -- Where is the Solution?

The world has a problem. One of monumental proportions. Of course there are always problems, threatening one part of the world or another. Or, in the instance of a problem as universal as Climate Change, a problem whose dimensions are difficult to grasp, let alone for nations to agree on whether and how, when and why each will pledge to restrain their use of energy that carbonizes our atmosphere interfering with nature and causing implacably dangerous weather systems to arise.

And, as it happens, there is a link to greenhouse gas emissions and the vulnerability of our environment to forces both natural, repetitive and cyclical and the way that humans manipulate our environment, corrupting it and endangering all of life. For it seems that the more we advanced our technologies to enable us to extract natural resources the more we compromised our habitat.

There are countries whose vast natural store of fossil fuels enriched them beyond imagination, countries which were entirely devoid of any economic mechanism and recognized resources as well as initiatives to further themselves economically to advance into the future. This is where countries of the Middle East like the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia in particular derived their financing and their power; from the exploitation of their vast stores of oil and natural gas.


And it is Saudi Arabia upon which the focus should be held. For this is a puritan country of elites in the Arab/Muslim world, a country that sees itself as the exemplar-devotion of divine faith as the acknowledged protectors and stewards of the two most sacred sites in the world's second-most-followed religion, Islam. Mecca and Medina, which the Prophet Mohammad conquered in the 7th Century, through bloodshed and appropriation is what motivates the House of Saud.



Their vast stores of oil have lent them authority and power and fabulous wealth. They have used all three to monumentalize themselves as the custodians of the faith. The country is zealous with an epic strain of religious bigotry, celebrating and spreading a 'pure' form of Islam that dates from its founding, Wahhabism. Non-Muslims are not permitted entry to those sacred cities, and nor is any religion other than Islam officially permitted to be worshipped in Saudi Arabia.

It is a country, like other Islamic countries that is Islamist in its form and function and purpose, and it looks to the Koran and Sharia law to address due punishment for crimes against Islam. Apostasy is a crime deserving death. But then, in Sharia law many 'crimes' against Islam and against the state are seen to be deserving of death. And the most common death sentence carried out in Saudi Arabia is by beheading, grotesque and grisly, a cultural/religious practise that has gained huge notoriety for a Wahhabist offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, but preferentially ignored for Saudi Arabia.

With its vast wealth, the rulers of the country set about ensuring that their Islamist brand of Islam would prevail. When the Muslim Brotherhood was rejected in Egypt where it was born over 80 years ago, it found an appreciative home in Saudi Arabia. Salafist Islam is a stern, medieval, unrelenting form of Islam. Sunni Muslims are in the majority of roughly 80% in the community of Islam, the ummah, and Shiite Islam is the minority. The standard-bearer for Shia Islam which reveres descent from Mohammad is Iran, whose own Islamist credentials rival Saudi Arabia's.



The West views Wahhabist and Salafist Islam as 'radical', but it is Islam itself that practices an excess of manipulation of humanity, whose values are most often directly opposed to human rights in favour of total submission to the will of Allah. And the will of Allah is, needless to say, the human-imagined will of an all-powerful spirit whose expectations are that human beings live for the sole and singular pleasure of worshipping the divine.

All gods are jealous gods competing for human devotion and all inform their faithful of their obligation to convince others that theirs is the only way to salvation. Wahhabist Saudi Arabia does this by funding madrassas throughout the world; schools of religious teaching whose mandate is to transform people into Islamist fundamentalists. Of course, social tradition and culture has its part to play, as well; the madrassas formalize all of that, emphasizing jihad as the tool by which non-believers can be convinced they should believe in Islam.



Out of Wahhabism has come the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and Islamic State. And these are the nemesis of liberal democracies whom they decry as decadent insults to the sacredness of Islam. The pervasive nature of Western culture, Western values and Western goods is seen as inimical to Islam, weapons that the west uses in its war of ideas and possessions over the pure and selfless self-vision of Islam; a clash that is interpreted as an existential war.

Should the West succeed, they will diminish Islam. Should Islam succeed, it will destroy the West. Fanatical Islamism is the culture common to Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mali, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Arab/Muslim states, most of whom view the values and culture of the West as degraded and vulgar and a threat to Islam. To decry the violence that oozes out of Islam is to be labelled Islamophobic, a handy shaming tool for sensitive Western consciences.



And so, the West, out of a sense of colonialist guilt and sheer politeness, side-steps the questions that should be asked of Islam; that if it is as it insists, a religion of peace, how can it be that it is the foremost instigator of, and fount of institutionalized violence, human-rights abuses, slander, corruption and oppression, not only targeting its own, but impressively in its sheer savagery, non-Muslim democracies in regular paroxysms of raging psychopathy?

Plotting Control

"I think we are approaching a perfect storm of big money and limited accountability coming together in ways that really threaten American democracy. It's going to be decisive in 2016."
"So it's a way to communicate with a wide range of voters and really get your message out there. I mean in 2014 we saw a lot of evidence of big money that went into the top 10 senate races and almost all of them ended up breaking in favour of Republicans and money was a big part of the overall story."
"It means Democrats are going to be seriously outspent. Essentially, we have a party of rich conservative activists and they are going to spend as much as Republicans or Democrats."
"These are smart business people. They wasted their money in 2012. They went back and studied their failures and they recalibrated their strategy and their communications."
Darrell West, money and politics expert, Brookings Institute

"To my knowledge there have been no actual investigations of alleged coordination between candidates and outside groups in the last couple of years."
"There's no cop on the beat ... (Big donors) pretty much know the agency is not going to act if they break the law."
"So you are going to see candidates and parties drowned out."
Daniel Weiner, campaign spending expert, Brennan Center for Justice

What a story; affirmation of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to control the free world. Didn't we see it coming? Weren't we warned? Isn't that in essence what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion essentially said was on the horizon? We let our guard down, obviously. And now, there it is, Jews, money, politics, news media, control, there is the blueprint and the goal, and there, looming on the near horizon is the result. And who is breaking the story? Jews, of course.

These are not simply billionaires setting out to buy election results to favour their party, their candidates, their agenda, their world view. This is world Jewry finally reaching the pinnacle of success, achieving the long-sought-after-goal of power. Raw power. Shock waves, we are informed by the latest news being circulated, are reverberating throughout Washington.

At the news of the billionaire Koch brothers' plans to spend $900-million to promote the conservative candidates who find favour with them in the 2016 presidential campaign. Barack Obama may have had limitless support from Hollywood, the new left, academia, and the downtrodden, and he may have been skilled in the use of social media to reach far and wide, and his campaign chest may have brimmed with contributions, but this is Big Money on the horizon, folks.

This is new: buying the forthcoming Government of America. Or is it? Have not, in fact, American election campaigns been all about cold, hard cash and who is throwing it around most lavishly for ultimate effect? Putting the lie to the message that the most humble of American citizens can aspire to the presidency...  Well, dreams die hard, and anyone can aspire, but without the assist of proper conspiring backed by reams of riches, dreams remain dreams, the goal elusive as a wisp of mist.

America is on the brink of an oligarchy in the hands of the wealthiest one percent of the one percent of the one percent ad infinitum. Bill Gates could have chosen to use some of his wealth in that manner, but he's a WASP, not a Jew, and he chose to become a global humanitarian, inoculating the indigent worldwide against disease. His type of philanthropy is not of the political variety, benefiting an ideology other than humanity.

But we have it on the highest authority: billionaires, according to Darrell West, an expert at the Brookings Institute, are buying America, lock, stock and barrel; White House, National Rifle Association and Petroleum resources. The 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling opening the door to unlimited corporate and private interest spending on political advertisements led the way; a conspiracy of the Supreme Court justices in the pay, no doubt, of those influential Jews.

Total funding for election spending in 2012 by outside parties reached $828-million, below what the Koch network is prepared to spend four years later. OpenSecrets, tracking campaign spending reveals this to be a fact. The limited advertising space on airwaves is set to be consumed by the Koch brothers' campaign. They're not the only ones; billionaire Sheldon Adelson's $98-million to defeat Barack Obama in 2012, to be considered as well.

Then there's George Soros, Tom Seyer and Michael Bloomberg; wealthy all, influential all, Jews, don't you know? The Koch brothers brought together hundreds of wealthy donors to Palm Springs, California for three days of strategizing to elect Republican conservatives in 2016. This was the "largest concentration of political money outside the party establishment", according to The New York Times which managed to deftly side-step the Jewish element involved.