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Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks during a campaign event on January 30, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Billionaire White House hopeful Michael Bloomberg must have known the question was coming. At the February 19 Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, the question did come -- from NBC's Chuck Todd. Should billionaires, Todd wanted to know, exist?
"Have you earned too much -- has it been an obscene amount of -- should you have earned that much money?" Todd followed up.
"Yes," Bloomberg replied. "I worked very hard for it."
"Hard work" has been the go-to justification for grand private fortune ever since the days of America's original Gilded Age. In America, the old saw goes, anybody can get rich. You just need to put your shoulder to the wheel, your nose to the grindstone.
"Average Americans who take second jobs to make ends meet routinely work 60 to 80 hours a week without receiving anything remotely close to the robust rewards top execs in the business world regularly pocket."
That true? Social scientists have tested out this "hard work" case for grand fortune. Success in the business world, they've found, most typically comes to those with access to financial capital, via "family money, an inheritance, or a pedigree and connections." Many researchers, economist Andrew Oswald has noted, "have replicated the finding that entrepreneurship is more about cash than dash."
None of this research, naturally, has stopped the awesomely affluent from claiming that they deserve their prodigious wealth because they -- like Michael Bloomberg -- have "worked very hard."
Back in the 1990s, the decade Bloomberg first crashed into the national consciousness, no man of means made the "hard work" claim more unabashedly that John K. Castle, a New York banker who had built up a tidy personal fortune worth about $100 million.
"None of this happens without working 60 hours a week," Castle proudly noted to a Wall Street Journal reporter. "But I work 60 hours a week because I want to, not because I've got a time clock."
Castle probably shouldn't have made that time-clock reference. The enterprising Journal reporter promptly put Castle himself on the clock, figuratively speaking, and followed the New York banker around for a day in the middle of a winter work week.
That day opened, in Florida, with Castle showing off his $11 million Palm Beach estate. Later, the Journal watched Castle wile away the afternoon hours jumping hurdles "astride one of his show horses at his nearby 10-acre farm." The day ended on the water, with Castle nibbling cheese and crackers aboard his yacht.
This busy day, the Journal reported, hardly qualified as out of character for Castle. During the winter months, he spent a few days at his Florida estate every week. And Castle, the Journal added, also found time to organize a private expedition to the North Pole, climb his way up and down mountains in Africa and the Himalayas, and send his yacht on a two-year voyage around the world.
As an ever diligent and hard-working executive, Castle didn't have the time to personally skipper his yacht the entire way. Instead, he would fly overseas to meet up with the yacht at exotic ports of call, then captain the vessel for a week or so of sailing until duty called him back to New York. Castle logged almost 150,000 air miles in the process. All time well spent. Chief executives, Castle told the Journal, "need some time to step back and get the broader perspective."
How many wealthy people labor at schedules as grueling as John K. Castle's? A sizeable number, apparently. One 1998 Management Resource Group study of Americans who make at least $1 million a year, the Washington Postreported, found that over 20 percent of these deep pockets were taking at least two months of annual vacation.
About a decade later, amid the early stages of Wall Street's financial meltdown, Bears Stearns chief exec James Cayne became the emblem of sorts for CEO sloth. In the same 2007 month his firm began tottering, Cayne spent ten "working" days either playing bridge or golf.
Cayne had plenty of deep-pocket company on the links. In 2016, the Harvard Business Reviewreported on research that unearthed "several CEOs who recorded more than 100 rounds of golf in a single fiscal year -- roughly one round every three days!"
Now some exceedingly rich people undoubtedly do "work hard" and put in long hours. How many? Hard to say. CEOs and hedge fund kingpins, after all, punch no time clocks. And if they did, would they punch out before joining a potential investor for dinner? Would they log as work time the hours they spend on golf links mixing putts and patter with potential takeover targets? Would they count as office hours the morning commutes they spend chatting on cell phones in chauffeured limousines?
Profound questions. We seem destined to never know exactly how many hours rich people like Michael Bloomberg spend working. But even if we could calculate such a figure, and if that figure were 60 or 80 or 100 hours a week, would these rich then deserve many millions of dollars a year for their labors? That case would be hard to make.
Average Americans who take second jobs to make ends meet routinely work 60 to 80 hours a week without receiving anything remotely close to the robust rewards top execs in the business world regularly pocket. If moonlighting Americans don't deserve king-sized rewards for the long hours they put in, then why should "hard-working" executives deserve regal rewards for theirs?
Our society obviously places no particular premium value on sheer hard work alone. Nor should it.
"It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold," as Henry David Thoreau once observed. "So does the devil work hard."
Working hard, Open Democracy economics editor Laurie Macfarlane noted last week, will indeed "generally help you earn more money," but "not all wealth has been attained through hard work."
"In practice," adds Macfarlane, "the distribution of wealth has little to do with contribution, and everything to do with politics and power."
"No one makes a billion dollars," as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it earlier this month at New York's famed Riverside Church. "You take a billion dollars."
Michael Bloomberg, a $62-billion-dollar man, has taken plenty.
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next. It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk. Common Dreams is playing a vital role by reporting day and night on this orgy of corruption and greed, as well as what everyday people can do to organize and fight back. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support. |
Billionaire White House hopeful Michael Bloomberg must have known the question was coming. At the February 19 Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, the question did come -- from NBC's Chuck Todd. Should billionaires, Todd wanted to know, exist?
"Have you earned too much -- has it been an obscene amount of -- should you have earned that much money?" Todd followed up.
"Yes," Bloomberg replied. "I worked very hard for it."
"Hard work" has been the go-to justification for grand private fortune ever since the days of America's original Gilded Age. In America, the old saw goes, anybody can get rich. You just need to put your shoulder to the wheel, your nose to the grindstone.
"Average Americans who take second jobs to make ends meet routinely work 60 to 80 hours a week without receiving anything remotely close to the robust rewards top execs in the business world regularly pocket."
That true? Social scientists have tested out this "hard work" case for grand fortune. Success in the business world, they've found, most typically comes to those with access to financial capital, via "family money, an inheritance, or a pedigree and connections." Many researchers, economist Andrew Oswald has noted, "have replicated the finding that entrepreneurship is more about cash than dash."
None of this research, naturally, has stopped the awesomely affluent from claiming that they deserve their prodigious wealth because they -- like Michael Bloomberg -- have "worked very hard."
Back in the 1990s, the decade Bloomberg first crashed into the national consciousness, no man of means made the "hard work" claim more unabashedly that John K. Castle, a New York banker who had built up a tidy personal fortune worth about $100 million.
"None of this happens without working 60 hours a week," Castle proudly noted to a Wall Street Journal reporter. "But I work 60 hours a week because I want to, not because I've got a time clock."
Castle probably shouldn't have made that time-clock reference. The enterprising Journal reporter promptly put Castle himself on the clock, figuratively speaking, and followed the New York banker around for a day in the middle of a winter work week.
That day opened, in Florida, with Castle showing off his $11 million Palm Beach estate. Later, the Journal watched Castle wile away the afternoon hours jumping hurdles "astride one of his show horses at his nearby 10-acre farm." The day ended on the water, with Castle nibbling cheese and crackers aboard his yacht.
This busy day, the Journal reported, hardly qualified as out of character for Castle. During the winter months, he spent a few days at his Florida estate every week. And Castle, the Journal added, also found time to organize a private expedition to the North Pole, climb his way up and down mountains in Africa and the Himalayas, and send his yacht on a two-year voyage around the world.
As an ever diligent and hard-working executive, Castle didn't have the time to personally skipper his yacht the entire way. Instead, he would fly overseas to meet up with the yacht at exotic ports of call, then captain the vessel for a week or so of sailing until duty called him back to New York. Castle logged almost 150,000 air miles in the process. All time well spent. Chief executives, Castle told the Journal, "need some time to step back and get the broader perspective."
How many wealthy people labor at schedules as grueling as John K. Castle's? A sizeable number, apparently. One 1998 Management Resource Group study of Americans who make at least $1 million a year, the Washington Postreported, found that over 20 percent of these deep pockets were taking at least two months of annual vacation.
About a decade later, amid the early stages of Wall Street's financial meltdown, Bears Stearns chief exec James Cayne became the emblem of sorts for CEO sloth. In the same 2007 month his firm began tottering, Cayne spent ten "working" days either playing bridge or golf.
Cayne had plenty of deep-pocket company on the links. In 2016, the Harvard Business Reviewreported on research that unearthed "several CEOs who recorded more than 100 rounds of golf in a single fiscal year -- roughly one round every three days!"
Now some exceedingly rich people undoubtedly do "work hard" and put in long hours. How many? Hard to say. CEOs and hedge fund kingpins, after all, punch no time clocks. And if they did, would they punch out before joining a potential investor for dinner? Would they log as work time the hours they spend on golf links mixing putts and patter with potential takeover targets? Would they count as office hours the morning commutes they spend chatting on cell phones in chauffeured limousines?
Profound questions. We seem destined to never know exactly how many hours rich people like Michael Bloomberg spend working. But even if we could calculate such a figure, and if that figure were 60 or 80 or 100 hours a week, would these rich then deserve many millions of dollars a year for their labors? That case would be hard to make.
Average Americans who take second jobs to make ends meet routinely work 60 to 80 hours a week without receiving anything remotely close to the robust rewards top execs in the business world regularly pocket. If moonlighting Americans don't deserve king-sized rewards for the long hours they put in, then why should "hard-working" executives deserve regal rewards for theirs?
Our society obviously places no particular premium value on sheer hard work alone. Nor should it.
"It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold," as Henry David Thoreau once observed. "So does the devil work hard."
Working hard, Open Democracy economics editor Laurie Macfarlane noted last week, will indeed "generally help you earn more money," but "not all wealth has been attained through hard work."
"In practice," adds Macfarlane, "the distribution of wealth has little to do with contribution, and everything to do with politics and power."
"No one makes a billion dollars," as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it earlier this month at New York's famed Riverside Church. "You take a billion dollars."
Michael Bloomberg, a $62-billion-dollar man, has taken plenty.
Billionaire White House hopeful Michael Bloomberg must have known the question was coming. At the February 19 Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, the question did come -- from NBC's Chuck Todd. Should billionaires, Todd wanted to know, exist?
"Have you earned too much -- has it been an obscene amount of -- should you have earned that much money?" Todd followed up.
"Yes," Bloomberg replied. "I worked very hard for it."
"Hard work" has been the go-to justification for grand private fortune ever since the days of America's original Gilded Age. In America, the old saw goes, anybody can get rich. You just need to put your shoulder to the wheel, your nose to the grindstone.
"Average Americans who take second jobs to make ends meet routinely work 60 to 80 hours a week without receiving anything remotely close to the robust rewards top execs in the business world regularly pocket."
That true? Social scientists have tested out this "hard work" case for grand fortune. Success in the business world, they've found, most typically comes to those with access to financial capital, via "family money, an inheritance, or a pedigree and connections." Many researchers, economist Andrew Oswald has noted, "have replicated the finding that entrepreneurship is more about cash than dash."
None of this research, naturally, has stopped the awesomely affluent from claiming that they deserve their prodigious wealth because they -- like Michael Bloomberg -- have "worked very hard."
Back in the 1990s, the decade Bloomberg first crashed into the national consciousness, no man of means made the "hard work" claim more unabashedly that John K. Castle, a New York banker who had built up a tidy personal fortune worth about $100 million.
"None of this happens without working 60 hours a week," Castle proudly noted to a Wall Street Journal reporter. "But I work 60 hours a week because I want to, not because I've got a time clock."
Castle probably shouldn't have made that time-clock reference. The enterprising Journal reporter promptly put Castle himself on the clock, figuratively speaking, and followed the New York banker around for a day in the middle of a winter work week.
That day opened, in Florida, with Castle showing off his $11 million Palm Beach estate. Later, the Journal watched Castle wile away the afternoon hours jumping hurdles "astride one of his show horses at his nearby 10-acre farm." The day ended on the water, with Castle nibbling cheese and crackers aboard his yacht.
This busy day, the Journal reported, hardly qualified as out of character for Castle. During the winter months, he spent a few days at his Florida estate every week. And Castle, the Journal added, also found time to organize a private expedition to the North Pole, climb his way up and down mountains in Africa and the Himalayas, and send his yacht on a two-year voyage around the world.
As an ever diligent and hard-working executive, Castle didn't have the time to personally skipper his yacht the entire way. Instead, he would fly overseas to meet up with the yacht at exotic ports of call, then captain the vessel for a week or so of sailing until duty called him back to New York. Castle logged almost 150,000 air miles in the process. All time well spent. Chief executives, Castle told the Journal, "need some time to step back and get the broader perspective."
How many wealthy people labor at schedules as grueling as John K. Castle's? A sizeable number, apparently. One 1998 Management Resource Group study of Americans who make at least $1 million a year, the Washington Postreported, found that over 20 percent of these deep pockets were taking at least two months of annual vacation.
About a decade later, amid the early stages of Wall Street's financial meltdown, Bears Stearns chief exec James Cayne became the emblem of sorts for CEO sloth. In the same 2007 month his firm began tottering, Cayne spent ten "working" days either playing bridge or golf.
Cayne had plenty of deep-pocket company on the links. In 2016, the Harvard Business Reviewreported on research that unearthed "several CEOs who recorded more than 100 rounds of golf in a single fiscal year -- roughly one round every three days!"
Now some exceedingly rich people undoubtedly do "work hard" and put in long hours. How many? Hard to say. CEOs and hedge fund kingpins, after all, punch no time clocks. And if they did, would they punch out before joining a potential investor for dinner? Would they log as work time the hours they spend on golf links mixing putts and patter with potential takeover targets? Would they count as office hours the morning commutes they spend chatting on cell phones in chauffeured limousines?
Profound questions. We seem destined to never know exactly how many hours rich people like Michael Bloomberg spend working. But even if we could calculate such a figure, and if that figure were 60 or 80 or 100 hours a week, would these rich then deserve many millions of dollars a year for their labors? That case would be hard to make.
Average Americans who take second jobs to make ends meet routinely work 60 to 80 hours a week without receiving anything remotely close to the robust rewards top execs in the business world regularly pocket. If moonlighting Americans don't deserve king-sized rewards for the long hours they put in, then why should "hard-working" executives deserve regal rewards for theirs?
Our society obviously places no particular premium value on sheer hard work alone. Nor should it.
"It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold," as Henry David Thoreau once observed. "So does the devil work hard."
Working hard, Open Democracy economics editor Laurie Macfarlane noted last week, will indeed "generally help you earn more money," but "not all wealth has been attained through hard work."
"In practice," adds Macfarlane, "the distribution of wealth has little to do with contribution, and everything to do with politics and power."
"No one makes a billion dollars," as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it earlier this month at New York's famed Riverside Church. "You take a billion dollars."
Michael Bloomberg, a $62-billion-dollar man, has taken plenty.
"Thank you to the hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country who are standing up and speaking out for our voting rights, fundamental freedoms, and essential services like Social Security and Medicare."
In communities large and small across the United States on Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people collectively took to the streets to make their opposition to President Donald Trump heard.
The people who took part in the organized protests ranged from very young children to the elderly and their message was scrawled on signs of all sizes and colors—many of them angry, some of them funny, but all in line with the "Hands Off" message that brought them together.
"Thank you to the hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country who are standing up and speaking out for our voting rights, fundamental freedoms, and essential services like Social Security and Medicare," said the group Stand Up America as word of the turnout poured in from across the country.
A relatively small, but representative sample of photographs from various demonstrations that took place follows.
Demonstrators gather on Boston Common, cheering and chanting slogans, during the nationwide "Hands Off!" protest against US President Donald Trump and his advisor, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, in Boston, Massachusetts on April 5, 2025. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP)
"Everyone involved in this crime against humanity, and everyone who covered it up, would face prosecution in a world that had any shred of dignity left."
A video presented to officials at the United Nations on Friday and first made public Saturday by the New York Times provides more evidence that the recent massacre of Palestinian medics in Gaza did not happen the way Israeli government claimed—the latest in a long line of deception when it comes to violence against civilians that have led to repeated accusations of war crimes.
The video, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), was found on the phone of a paramedic found in a mass grave with a bullet in his head after being killed, along with seven other medics, by Israeli forces on March 23. The eight medics, buried in the shallow grave with the bodies riddled with bullets, were: Mustafa Khafaja, Ezz El-Din Shaat, Saleh Muammar, Refaat Radwan, Muhammad Bahloul, Ashraf Abu Libda, Muhammad Al-Hila, and Raed Al-Sharif. The video reportedly belonged to Radwan. A ninth medic, identified as Asaad Al-Nasasra, who was at the scene of the massacre, which took place near the southern city of Rafah, is still missing.
The PRCS said it presented the video—which refutes the explanation of the killings offered by Israeli officials—to members of the UN Security Council on Friday.
"They were killed in their uniforms. Driving their clearly marked vehicles. Wearing their gloves. On their way to save lives," Jonathan Whittall, head of the UN's humanitarian affairs office in Palestine, said last week after the bodies were discovered. Some of the victims, according to Gaza officials, were found with handcuffs still on them and appeared to have been shot in the head, execution-style.
The Israeli military initially said its soldiers "did not randomly attack" any ambulances, but rather claimed they fired on "terrorists" who approached them in "suspicious vehicles." Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an IDF spokesperson, said the vehicles that the soldiers opened fire on were driving with their lights off and did not have clearance to be in the area. The video evidence directly contradicts the IDF's version of events.
As the Times reports:
The Times obtained the video from a senior diplomat at the United Nations who asked not to be identified to be able to share sensitive information.
The Times verified the location and timing of the video, which was taken in the southern city of Rafah early on March 23. Filmed from what appears to be the front interior of a moving vehicle, it shows a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck, clearly marked, with headlights and flashing lights turned on, driving south on a road to the north of Rafah in the early morning. The first rays of sun can be seen, and birds are chirping.
In an interview with Drop Site News published Friday, the only known paramedic to survive the attack, Munther Abed, explained that he and his colleagues "were directly and deliberately shot at" by the IDF. "The car is clearly marked with 'Palestinian Red Crescent Society 101.' The car's number was clear and the crews' uniform was clear, so why were we directly shot at? That is the question."
The video's release sparked fresh outrage and demands for accountability on Saturday.
"The IDF denied access to the site for days; they sent in diggers to cover up the massacre and intentionally lied about it," said podcast producer Hamza M. Syed in reaction to the new revelations. "The entire leadership of the Israeli army is implicated in this unconscionable war crime. And they must be prosecuted."
"Everyone involved in this crime against humanity, and everyone who covered it up, would face prosecution in a world that had any shred of dignity left," said journalist Ryan Grim of DropSite News.
"They're dismantling our country. They're looting our government. And they think we'll just watch."
In communities across the United States and also overseas, coordinated "Hands Off" protests are taking place far and wide Saturday in the largest public rebuke yet to President Donald Trump and top henchman Elon Musk's assault on the workings of the federal government and their program of economic sabotage that is sacrificing the needs of working families to authoritarianism and the greed of right-wing oligarchs.
Indivisible, one of the key organizing groups behind the day's protests, said millions participated in more than 1,300 individual rallies as they demanded "an end to Trump's authoritarian power grab" and condemning all those aiding and abetting it.
"We expected hundreds of thousands. But at virtually every single event, the crowds eclipsed our estimates," the group said in a statement Saturday evening.
"Hands off our healthcare, hands off our civil rights, hands off our schools, our freedoms, and our democracy."
"This is the largest day of protest since Trump retook office," the group added. "And in many small towns and cities, activists are reporting the biggest protests their communities have ever seen as everyday people send a clear, unmistakable message to Trump and Musk: Hands off our healthcare, hands off our civil rights, hands off our schools, our freedoms, and our democracy."
According to the organizers' call to action:
They're dismantling our country. They’re looting our government. And they think we'll just watch.
On Saturday, April 5th, we rise up with one demand: Hands Off!
This is a nationwide mobilization to stop the most brazen power grab in modern history. Trump, Musk, and their billionaire cronies are orchestrating an all-out assault on our government, our economy, and our basic rights—enabled by Congress every step of the way. They want to strip America for parts—shuttering Social Security offices, firing essential workers, eliminating consumer protections, and gutting Medicaid—all to bankroll their billionaire tax scam.
They're handing over our tax dollars, our public services, and our democracy to the ultra-rich. If we don't fight now, there won’t be anything left to save.
The more than 1,300 "Hands Off!" demonstrations—organized by a large coalition of unions, progressive advocacy groups, and pro-democracy watchdogs—first kicked off Saturday in Europe, followed by East Coast communities in the U.S., and continued throughout the day at various times, depending on location. See here for a list of scheduled "Hands Off" events.
"The United States has a president, not a king," said the progressive advocacy group People's Action, one of the group's involved in the actions, in an email to supporters Saturday morning just as protest events kicked off in hundreds of cities and communities. "Donald Trump has, by every measure, been working to make himself a king. He has become unanswerable to the courts, Congress, and the American people."
In its Saturday evening statement, Indivisible said the actions far exceeded their expectations and should be seen as a turning point in the battle to stop Trump and his minions:
The Trump administration has spent its first 75 days in office trying to overwhelm us, to make us feel powerless, so that we will fall in line, accept the ransacking of our government, the raiding of our social safety net, and the dismantling of our democracy.
And too often, the response from our leaders and those in positions to resist has been abject cowardice. Compliance. Obeying in advance.
But not today. Today we've demonstrated a different path forward. We've modeled the courage and action that we want to see from our leaders, and showed all those who've been standing on the sidelines who share our values that they are not alone.
Citing the Republican president's thirst for "power and greed," People's Action earlier explained why organized pressure must be built and sustained against the administration, especially at the conclusion of a week in which the global economy was spun into disarray by Trump's tariff announcement, his attack on the rule of law continued, and the twice-elected president admitted he was "not joking" about the possibility of seeking a third term, which is barred by the constitution.
"He is destroying the economy with tariffs in order to pay for the tax cuts he wants to push through to enrich himself and his billionaire buddies," warned People's Action. "He has ordered the government to round up innocent people off of the streets and put them in detention centers without due process because they dared to speak out using their First Amendment rights. And he is not close to being done—by his own admission, he is planning to run for a third term, which the Constitution does not allow."
Live stream of Hands Off rally in Washington, D.C.:
Below are photo or video dispatches from demonstrations around the world on Saturday. Check back for updates...
United Kingdom
France
Germany
Belgium:
Massachusetts:
Maine:
Washington, D.C.:
New York:
Minnesota:
Michigan:
Ohio:
Colorado:
Pennsylvania:
North Carolina:
The protest organizers warn that what Trump and Musk are up to "is not just corruption" and "not just mismanagement," but something far more sinister.
"This is a hostile takeover," they said, but vowed to fight back. "This is the moment where we say NO. No more looting, no more stealing, no more billionaires raiding our government while working people struggle to survive."