A Modern Christmas Carol: The "Scrooge-Class" Strategy Exposed

"It is a time....when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices!" Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the one of the gentlemen, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigor, then?” said Scrooge.

“Both very busy, sir.”

“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavoring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

The Modern Day Scrooge-Class

Just think about it. The United States could be a country where no one goes hungry, everyone has a place to live, and everyone has adequate healthcare. This is not a pipedream. We all could have nice things because we have enough wealth and resources to make this happen, at least a few of us do. But we don’t have the will.

Here is the reason we can’t have nice things:

The working classes are divided between themselves and their own interests by the deliberate effort of the Scrooge-class and they don’t realize they’ve been taken. And the people that suffer the most, at least numerically, are white people. Yet, 8 out of 10 white people voted for Donald Trump who, frankly, doesn’t give a shit about who is hungry, homeless, or without healthcare.

Bah—-Humbug!

Trump is the leader of the “Scrooge-class oligarchy” who have one objective: divide the lower classes against themselves so he and his cronies can stay in power and keep as much wealth as possible. This column will explain how they do it.

But to begin, here is a Holiday thought for you: 2024 was the biggest and most profitable year for billionaires worldwide. Never mind inflation. Never mind the cost of eggs. Never mind high mortgage rates. The 2,781 billionaires of the world added around $2 trillion in wealth. They have had Christmas everyday. The U.S., which now boasts a record 813 billionaires worth a combined $5.7 trillion, has the most billionaires of any country, followed by China (473) and then India (200).

But the Scrooge class does not care about how well the economy works for the poor, only how well it works for them. They mean to keep it that way.

“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

A Wealth Tax

Here is a novel idea…how about we tax that wealth at 1%...just 1%. Billionaires will still grow their wealth by 5 to 7% annually, so 1% won’t even be noticed. I’m sure Elon, Donald, Jeff, George, the Koch’s and the rest won’t mind.

Is that another “bah-humbug” I hear?

A 1% tax would yield about $130 - $140 billion a year. (Remember the combined wealth of the world’s 2,781 billionaires is around $13 trillion.) So…what could we do with $130 billion annually?

According to Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow at the Global Economy and Development, Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institute, we could eradicate poverty world-wide among other things. Take a look at Kharas’ graph:

The 1% wealth tax is conservative. There are concrete proposals that would raise a wealth tax to 2% or more.[1] Given a return rate of 7%, the Scrooge-class would still see a 5% increase in their wealth, not a decrease.

Let’s just do a quick math problem. If I were a billionaire with say, $10 billion and I made 7% on that money each year that would add $700,000,000 to my portfolio annually. Pretty good for not lifting a finger. Now, if I were taxed on that wealth by 2%, I’d still make $500,000,000. Something tells me I won’t miss the $200,000,000.

How much can I put you down for?

“Are there no workhouses? Are there no soup lines for the poor? Are there no homeless shelters and food pantries? Are there no longer bell-ringers collecting quarters and dimes? Are there no churches to provide for the poor?

For the first time in history, a small group of private individuals could, if they so choose, materially impact global development at a scale that has previously been the exclusive domain of governments. The impact would be transformational. There have always been rich people, but never to these levels where many of them have wealth larger than many countries’ GDP.

The conservative-libertarian critique of government help programs is that charitable giving should be the realm of private citizens. In other words, wealth redistribution should be done only by choice. Wealth in private hands currently could end hunger worldwide and they should do it out of the goodness of their stone-cold hearts…well, how is that philosophy working out?

Bah-humbug!

“Darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

These very rich fellows could eradicate global hunger entirely on their own without government interference. Yes, they could bypass governmental structures and end global hunger, voluntarily, by creating their own infrastructure and institutions to oversee this project. What do you suppose the odds are of them doing this? I bet less than Tiny-Tim’s portion of figgy pudding.

If Trump wanted to really leave a legacy from a second administration he would bring his Scrooge-Class Oligarchs together and have them all ante-up 1 or 2% of their wealth annually and work on a worldwide institutionalized solution to solve hunger and a host of other problems. He could be remembered forever as the man who ended global hunger and want.

Trump’s protege Elon Scrooge instead, now that he is running the US government via puppet strings made of gold, has proposed tax cuts for him and his wealthy fellow oligarchs. His target? Cut funding for childhood cancer research, end Social Security and Medicare, end Obamacare, sending millions more people into poverty.

Help the poor? The sick? Help seniors?

Bah-Humbug!

“Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

I am afraid Elon and the others in the billionaire Scrooge-class will not do much on their own voluntarily. Only the Gates Foundation has contributed anything significant ($350 billion) to solving world problems. That by itself will not be enough.

That is why it will take governments and a groundswell of united people from all walks of life, ethnicity and racial categories to coerce these folks into sharing. Remember “sharing?” That value we learned in kindergarten - to share with others. Or how about the Biblical injunction that “to whom much is given, much will be required.” Jesus even said, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Right Ebenezer? Donald?

To be sure, most of these Scrooge billionaires give money to non-profits, but mostly to PACs and other entities that work to protect their wealth by seeking lower business regulation and lower taxes. The Koch Brothers charitable foundation gives hundreds of millions of dollars to non-profits, but the biggest chunk goes to political contributions and funding conservative-libertarian think tanks. Don’t count on the Koch’s to worry much about poverty.

Poverty In the United States - Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

But let’s just talk about poverty in the United States. The overall poverty rate in this country is 11%. But 11% is obscures the reality that “sixty-three percent of U.S. workers today live paycheck to paycheck and have no savings to help cover an emergency. The average worker in America makes $54 a week less than they did 50 years ago, after adjusting for inflation.”[2] The only direction of “trickle-down economics” is upward to the top 1%. Yet, the Scrooge-Class has convinced those who make less now than they did 50 years ago that somehow installing them in office will make things better, and they should blame other poor people for their plight.

It is all a lie. A damned lie.

Look at the census bureau chart below[3] you can see the relative percentage and number of people experiencing poverty by ethnic/racial classifications. And this only represents the 11%, not the true numbers.

Just adding together the number of people experiencing poverty in all categories except “white” the number comes to 15,348,834. That is less than the “white” category alone at 19,544,155. Usually when people speak of poverty the image is of a Black or Hispanic person or family, and proportionally that is true. Poverty affects people of color far more than white folks, but the dirty secret is that the biggest number of poor people are white.

“If they would rather die they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

However, here is the real irony. There are more white people living in poverty in the United States than there are a combined number of millionaires (those with more than $5 million) and billionaires. Combined there are around 1.5 millionaire-billionaires in the Scrooge-class. If you combine those in poverty with those who are just getting by pay-check to pay-check the number of people who are struggling in the US is probably closer to 60 million with most of them being people with white skin.

The Scrooge Class Strategy - Divide & Conquer

So, the question is why did so many of those poor white people vote in 2024 (and most previous elections) for the millionaire-billionaire Scrooge candidates? A combined effort of poor people of all ethnic-racial groups could easily overwhelm the Scrooge-class and usher in humane policies that would end hunger, provide healthcare for everyone, and while we are at it, end homelessness.

The answer is an astounding yet simply strategy that is time-worn and effective. Divide the lower classes. Rich white men getting non-rich white people to find reasons to blame other non-rich, non-white people for their problems. It is a strategy that has worked time after time. Most of the time the strategy is based on fear…create fear of the “other” group. This has been going on a long time. Here are three historical examples:

Colonial America

In the 1660s and 70s there were rebellions against the Virigina colonial elite and the protests were often a combined white-black indentured and enslaved worker milita. Enslavement was not yet hereditary and, in many cases, white indentured workers were just as destitute and mistreated as enslaved Africans. They worked together in many cases in the same tobacco fields that were enriching a few white elite planters. The rich planters realized they were outnumbered (by a lot), and needed to divide the non-paid laborers. They began creating a systematic legal system to give “white” (a new racial category) workers more status vis-à-vis the Black workers. They changed laws to make Black enslavement hereditary while white indentured servants could escape their poverty eventually. Most important, they created a classification called “white” to separate the interests of unpaid laborers. They imbued poverty-stricken white laborers with the ideology of white supremacy, and eventually these poor white people were supporting the planters.

The Civil War

In the antebellum South, very few white people owned slaves. Most of the enslavement was in the hands of a small minority of white cotton planters. So when it came time to defend the institution of enslavement from abolition, rich white men created a myth of a “Southern Way of Life” which they convinced poor white farmers to support. The institution was not just a necessary evil, according to the rich white men: it was a positive good, a practical and moral necessity for all white people. Controlling the slave population was a matter of concern for all whites, whether they owned slaves or not. Slave rebellions might threaten even non-slave holding whites. Finally, enslavement touched every part of Southern society, and poor white people at least had the sense they weren’t at the bottom of the caste system. This conversation worked and poor white Southerners fought to defend the South’s slave-holding elite and died disporportionate to the rich planters.

The Great Depression

During this era, many labor unions did not accept Black workers even though to do so would result in widespread union victories. The exclusion was due to widespread racial prejudice encouraged by rich white factory owners, which led to explicit exclusionary policies in many unions. It effectively barred Black people from joining and often used the fear of competition for jobs as a justification to maintain a "white only" membership. This was particularly prevalent in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) which dominated the labor landscape at the time. Ironically, when unions did go on strike, factory owners would use Black and Brown laborers to fill the gap, reinforcing the division between the lower classes. Divide and conquer.

There is nothing new going on today. From the emergence of the Tea Party Movement to the MAGA movement, these efforts have been funded, directed and encouraged by a few rich white men who believe that their only hope to hold on to their wealth and power is by dividing the working classes.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric is meant to stoke anger, fear and resentment. “They are eating the pets in Springfield, Ohio.” But there is nothing new about this divisive tactic. The wealthy and the corporations and their handpicked politicians, have used racism and xenophobia to divide the working class because they know if the poor are fighting among themselves, they will fail to see their common interests as working people. And it works. That is how we have once again ended up with a Scrooge-class President.

Expose the Scrooge-Class Strategy

Several important writers and leaders have written about this tactic and have tried to expose the myth and lies. The Rev. William Barber II in his latest book, White Poverty exposes the truth of how we have been deliberately divided. He said,

“I take on white poverty as a declaration that Black people may have problems, but we are not the problem. Other people face the same struggles we do. It doesn’t make any sense to try to fight this battle on our own. It’s past time that we come together and stop being played against one another. We need to link up with anyone who can see that we’re living in a society where it’s hard for most of us to get by, while an increasingly smaller number of people at the top enjoy an unimaginable amount of wealth.”[4]

Heather McGhee, in her groundbreaking book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Us and How We Can Prosper Together, highlights the deliberate divisions that have served the current Scrooge-class so well. She writes,

“Contrary to how I was taught to think about economics, everybody wasn’t operating in their own rational economic self-interest. The majority of white Americans had voted for a worldview supported not by a different set of numbers than I had, but by a fundamentally different story about how the economy works; about race and government; about who belongs and who deserves; about how we got here and what the future holds. That story was more powerful than cold economic calculations. And it was exactly what was keeping us from having nice things—to the contrary, it had brought us Donald Trump.”

Finally, the antiracist author and speaker, Tim Wise has come to a similar conclusion as Barber and McGhee. Wise spoke to a University crowd in Vermont recently and made this comment:

“And we’re not stunned that a rich White man might get elected, telling not rich White people that their enemies were Black and Brown. That is not a move that was crafted in the bowels of the Trump organization, that is a long-standing American play. It is the first play in the playbook of American politics, and it goes back to the colonial period. Rich White men telling not rich White people that their enemies are Black and Brown. It is literally the first play.”[5]

That is how the game is played. The Scrooge-class oligarchs understand how to make and keep their billions. One thing is for sure. The messages that the rich white men tell non-rich white men about who is to blame for their problems is a lie…a big fat Scrooged lie. It isn’t the immigrant, and it isn’t Black or Brown people.

The real reason there is poverty and low wages, is because of the Scrooge-class wealthy policies they promote such as trickle up economics.

I believe if we can hammer this truth to people and keep sharing this narrative from history and how it affects us today, we will find we are not as divided as we are being told. Many of our divisions are manufactured and marketed. It isn’t about Black v White, liberal v. conservative, or Democrat v. Republican. The white, black and brown working class are all in the same place and have common interests. It is the Scrooge-class billionaires who are pulling our strings and pushing the right buttons to stoke hatred and division.

Let’s work together to end it now! And change our world!

“This boy is Ignorance and this girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

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[1] Brazil's Proposal to Tax the Super-rich, July 9, 2024. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/brazils-proposal-tax-super-rich

[2] Barber, William J., II. White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy (p. 9). Liveright. Kindle Edition.

[3] The Visual Capitalist, “How America’s Poverty Rates Differ by Race” Oct., 2024. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-americas-poverty-rates-differ-by-race/

[4]Barber, William J., II. White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy (p. xvi). Liveright. Kindle Edition.

[5] Vermont Humanities, Tim Wise on “Our Nation’s Blinkered History of Itself”, Jan. 17, 2021. https://www.vermonthumanities.org/podcast-tim-wise/