Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, The Sudden Descent of the United States | TomDispatch

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Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, The Sudden Descent of the United States
Posted by Rebecca Gordon at 8:00am, June 30, 2020.
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Ever more often, as I face the latest news from this increasingly woebegone American world of ours, I imagine bringing my long-dead parents back to view it. After all, they knew bad times and good. They lived through the Great Depression as young adults, World War II (my father was in the U.S. Army Air Corps), and the 1950s and 1960s. Those were the decades of my youth when, thanks to both Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and the boom the war had triggered, economic inequality in this country narrowed drastically from the “roaring twenties.”

I now regularly picture the two of them in this pandemic moment, comfortably social-distanced from me, as I start to describe our present world by telling them something that’s astounded me since I first stumbled across it in 2017: three men -- Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett -- now have more wealth than the bottom half of American society. Three years later, at a moment when