While everyone is considering the pandemic and thinking it's pretty bad, rich white men in suits are still ending more life than everything else put together. So deadly are they, that the population of the planet has been lulled into the normality of thoughtless acceptance.
Quentin von Baumhafffson-Schtillbank III, a man so rich that he owns the global rights to three 'f's in a row, is one example of many. A multi-billionaire who works hard for the wealth he inherited, got up yesterday in the very early mid-afternoon. Following a brief video exchange with his lead tax consultant, it was established that not only has he still never paid any tax in any country in the world, the structure of his wealth means that most national governments are incomprehensibly paying him tax. But apparently not enough.
Quentin von Baumhafffson-Schtillbank III, a widely respected man of little character or mental capacity just decided that he wanted another billion yesterday. Not for anything in particular, just because he felt like it. The monotony of obscene affluence will do that. But he had absolutely no thought for how that would all come about, and did not care one iota. He just told his number two that he wanted it, and Stramboot Finkelvos made it happen - earning himself a nice little multi-million dollar commission on the side.
Although himself not completely aware of all the substructures which 'make things happen', Finkelvos is very well connected all over the world. He put the call out to an army of hedge fund managers, paid insiders at federal reserves, global investment bank owners, senior politicians in pockets, despots, rebel warlords, and a junior shelf-stacker at Tesco. By the end of a frantic day of shorting, debt swaps, currency movements, corporate global buyouts, a raft of personally beneficial legislation changes, a national coup, multiple massacres, and an each-way bet on the 2:45 at Kempton, QB-S III had made $1.3 billion. 326 million people around the world had been plunged into abject poverty, 2.9 million people had died as a direct result, and 400,000 acres of pristine ecosystem had been destroyed, pushing climate crisis recovery further beyond the collective reach of the entire planet.
Quentin von Baumhaffson-Schtillbank III was, for a brief moment, marginally less grumpy because some numbers on a screen made his personal wealth look slightly bigger. Best of all though, no one knows that the planet-wide annihilation was caused by a fleeting change in whim of one extremely distasteful individual. Not even Quentin himself.
Ironically, rich white men in suits who would like another billion for themselves 'just because', are a self-destroying community. The only piffling element up for consideration is whether their pointless self-consuming behaviour is worth the utter destruction of everyone and everything else?