Bits 'n pieces from east, west and beyond

East, west or beyond, sooner or later events elsewhere may have a local impact. A recent sampling, mostly about money:

The difference between millionaires and billionaires: Columnist Jim Hightower explains that with a clock analogy. Think of each dollar as a second, and in 11.5 days you have a million dollars. Amassing a billion dollars would amount to 32 years. He noted that this summer a bank survey revealed that billionaires on average stashed away $4 billion —each. They didn’t do so by working harder or creating new products benefitting mankind, Hightower stated. Rather, they let their money work for them, and that’s worked well during the pandemic.

For the multi-millionaires, wealth has been gained by store closures, taking bailout money and/or declaring bankruptcy. Example: JCPenney closed 154 stores but gave their CEO a $4.5 million cash bonus.

Inequality Media said Amazon owner Jeff Bezos is worth $180 billion, making him the world’s richest person. In the last nine months Bezos’ wealth increased such that if he gave each of his Amazon employees $105,000 he would still be as rich as he was before the pandemic began. Nonetheless, Bezos has not invested in a COVID-19-safe workplace and 20,000 U.S.-based Amazon employees have been infected (Amazon’s estimate) in exchange for low pay and occasionally unsafe work conditions.

Amazon has added 400,000 jobs to keep up with pandemic and holiday shopping.

Millions of families are entrenched in the holidays but live in the shadow of being, on average, $5,000 behind on their rent, The Washington Post reported.

In the four decades since inequality started growing (1979-2019), the “bottom 90 percent” saw wages grow 26 percent while the top 1 percent saw their wages grow 160 percent, according to a new Economic Policy Institute report. And for the tippy-top 0.1 percent, annual wages increased 345.2 percent.

Why should Congress hold out for a COVID-19 relief package that includes $1,200 direct payments? Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) explained: One out of four workers are either unemployed of making less than $20,000 annually. More than 90,000 are un- or under-insured. Tens of millions face eviction. Hunger is “exploding.” Sanders said that, of the relief dollars provided in the previously passed CARES Act, $560 billion remains unused. And Congressional republicans are ready to pass $740 billion for defense, with no one saying it’s too much.

“If we are concerned about the debt,” Sanders said, then “we need progressive taxation, we need to end corporate welfare, we need to end the bloated military budget, but we do not need, in the midst of an unprecedented crisis, to punish working families who are hurting so badly today.”

What’s holding up COVID-19 relief? U.S. Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) tweeted there’s been bipartisan agreement at the negotiating table (for perhaps $1.4 trillion), with the exception of the senate leader, who refused to advance aid unless “all covid-related lawsuits filed that ‘allege injury or death’ due to corporate negligence” are wiped away. Porter said those lawsuits signify “the worst examples of disregard for human life” — they include cases filed for nursing home patients and grocery store workers.

To successfully rescue the economy, the Economic Policy Institute said lessons from the Great Recession should not be repeated: that fiscal policy was too weak. New policies should “go big and stay big,” including a goal of 3 percent unemployment. EPI concluded that a realistic recovery bill is in the realm of $3 trillion.

The 2020 election cycle cost $14 billion, Mother Jones reported. That’s twice the amount of 2016 and almost three times as much as the 2008 election cycle. Most of the money went to advertising. But some funds went to groups that worked on getting voters out and undoing voter-suppression efforts.

With the COVID-19 death toll now past 300,000, all 50 states were scheduled for the first COVID-19 vaccine deliveries to hospitals, The New York Times reported. High-risk health care workers and nursing home residents will be prioritized. Because the vaccine can cause fever and aches, it is being administered on a staggered schedule among health workers.

Vaccine shortages: President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed negotiations are “ongoing” for meeting demand. But former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who is now on vaccine-producer Pfizer’s board, said last week that Pfizer made many offers that the government rejected, Politico reported.

When the Electoral College certified Monday that President-elect Joe Biden won the presidency (with over seven million more votes than were cast for Trump), U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who has been accused of frequently acting on Trump’s behalf, submitted his letter of resignation. Some in the media are speculating that he doesn’t want to be in office when Trump announces pardons Barr would not approve of.

Blast from the past: in an essay written in 1967, “Truth and Politics,” philosopher Hannah Arendt cautioned that “a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth” is a necessary element for a totalitarian dictatorship.