When Billionaires Stop Living in the Same Reality as Everyone Else by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. May 17, 2026

When Billionaires Stop Living in the Same Reality as 

Everyone Else

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 17, 2026

Noah Hawley’s essay in The Atlantic, “What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat,” begins as a story about an invitation most people would never receive: a weekend at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara. In 2018, Hawley joined more than 80 celebrities, writers, intellectuals, artists, and powerful people at a private resort where the setting itself became part of the lesson. Private jets carried guests in. 

Bezos, now one of the world's  "centibillionaires"—a word I just learned—had bought out the Biltmore resort and the beach club across the street. There were elite lectures, curated conversations, luxury gifts, security, and the strange intimacy of being temporarily absorbed into the orbit of immense wealth (Hawley, 2026).

But Hawley’s essay is not really about luxury. It is about what extreme wealth does to a person’s relationship to consequence. At a certain level of wealth, money no longer simply buys comfort; it buys insulation. It removes friction. It softens every edge of ordinary life. Hawley’s insight is that billionaires do not merely own more than everyone else. They may come to inhabit a world in which failure, criticism, inconvenience, and even other people’s pain no longer press against them in the same way they do for most of the planet's inhabitants (Hawley, 2026).

The emotional center of the essay comes after Hawley’s wife breaks her wrist during the retreat. The staff responds quickly and efficiently, getting her medical care. Later, Hawley mentions the accident to Bezos, not as a complaint but as a human moment between host and guest. According to Hawley, Bezos does not respond with sympathy or concern. Instead, he appears uncomfortable and is quickly pulled away. For Hawley, that brief exchange becomes a symbol of something larger: when wealth is vast enough, even empathy can begin to feel optional.

Hawley’s argument is unsettling because it moves beyond one billionaire or one awkward encounter. He suggests that extreme wealth can create a “consequence-free” reality, a world where the richest people are surrounded by admirers, employees, lawyers, consultants, security teams, public-relations experts, and political allies whose job is to make difficulty disappear. 

In that environment, the ordinary moral education most people receive from limits, mistakes, embarrassment, dependency, and accountability begins to break down. As Hawley puts it, the danger is not simply that the wealthy become greedy; it is that extreme wealth can build a world so insulated from ordinary consequence that other people’s lives begin to feel abstract—if not invisible altogether.

That is why Diane Ravitch’s recent post, “Trump Sued IRS for $10 Billion. How Much Will He Pay Himself?,” belongs in the same conversation. Ravitch is not writing about a private retreat or a billionaire’s social awkwardness. She is writing about power, public money, and a permission structure that allows the government itself to morph into an instrument of personal enrichment. Her question—how much will he pay himself?—is not just a jab. It is a moral diagnosis (Ravitch, 2026).

We are living in a country where the billionaire class plays by one set of rules while everyone else is told to tighten their belts, pay their taxes, obey the law, and accept austerity as inevitable. At the end of 2025, 935 U.S. billionaires held a combined $8.1 trillion in wealth, up from $6.7 trillion just one year earlier (Collins & Ocampo, 2026). Meanwhile, Federal Reserve data show that the top 1% held 31.7% of total U.S. net worth in the third quarter of 2025, compared with only 2.5% held by the bottom half of households (Cunningham, 2026; also see Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2026a and 2026b).

Against this backdrop, Ravitch’s post captures the grotesque moral divide of our time: Donald Trump, already one of the most powerful people in the country, is pursuing a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury over the leak of his tax records, even as he now oversees the very federal agencies involved in the dispute (Ravitch, 2026). The Associated Press reports that Trump’s lawyers have been in talks with the IRS to resolve the case, raising serious legal and ethical questions about a president suing the government he controls (Hussein, 2026).

The Tax Law Center has similarly warned that any settlement enriching Trump—or shielding him, his family, or his businesses from audits—would raise deeply troubling concerns about political interference in tax administration (DeBot & Hubbert, 2026). The Center notes that discussions about dropping audits of Trump, his family members, or his businesses would implicate legal safeguards designed to prevent political interference with the IRS.

This is not just another Trump scandal. It is a window into a political and economic order in which billionaires and the ultra-rich increasingly treat the state as their private instrument, while public schools, working families, immigrants, students, and everyday people are asked to live with less. Hawley shows us the private psychology of extreme wealth: a world where inconvenience disappears and empathy can be evaded. Ravitch shows us the public danger of that same condition: a politics where the most powerful person in government may seek a massive personal benefit from the government he controls.

The connection matters. Billionaire impunity is not just a lifestyle problem. It is not just about yachts, private jets, elite retreats, or grotesque displays of consumption. It becomes a democratic problem when the richest people are able to bend institutions around themselves. It becomes a civic emergency when accountability is treated as something for ordinary people only.

Most Americans live in a world of consequences. Miss a rent payment, and there are consequences. Fall behind on taxes, and there are consequences. Lose a job, get sick, or make one mistake in a bureaucratic system, and the consequences can be immediate and life-altering. But for the ultra-rich, consequences increasingly appear negotiable. They can be delayed, litigated, spun, purchased, settled, or shifted onto someone else.

That is the country Hawley and Ravitch, in very different ways, are asking us to see. One essay begins at a billionaire’s private retreat. The other begins with a president suing the IRS. Both point to the same question: What happens to democracy when the most powerful people no longer believe the rules apply to them?

Ravitch’s question—how much will he pay himself?—is really a question about the country we have become. And Hawley’s warning helps us understand why the answer matters. When extreme wealth becomes freedom from consequence, democracy itself becomes the thing left holding the bill.

References

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2026a). Share of net worth held by the top 1% (99th to 100th wealth percentiles) [WFRBST01134]. FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2026b). Share of net worth held by the bottom 50% (1st to 50th wealth percentiles) [WFRBSB50215]. FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSB50215

Collins, C., & Ocampo, O. (2026, January 2). Richest 15 centi-billionaires see wealth surge 33 percent over 2025, double S&P 500 rate. Institute for Policy Studies. https://ips-dc.org/release-richest-15-centi-billionaires-see-wealth-surge-33-percent-over-2025-double-sp-500-rate/

Cunningham, M. (2026, January 21). Wealth inequality in America just hit its widest gap in more than 3 decades. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-decades-federal-reserve/

DeBot, B., & Hubbert, D. (2026, May 13). Statement on Trump lawsuit and potential settlement. The Tax Law Center. https://taxlawcenter.org/blog/statement-on-trump-lawsuit-and-potential-settlement

Hawley, N. (2026, April 20). What I learned about billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s private retreat. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/billionaire-consequence-free-reality/686588/

Hussein, F. (2026, April 17). Trump’s lawyers are in talks with the IRS to resolve president’s $10B lawsuit. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/trump-treasury-irs-lawsuit-tax-whistleblower-c710244db618b066f3070a65e75820a5

Ravitch, D. (2026, May 13). Trump sued IRS for $10 billion. How much will he pay himself? Diane Ravitch’s blog. https://dianeravitch.net/2026/05/13/trump-sued-irs-for-10-billion-how-much-will-he-pay-himself/

Did Trump’s Hiring Freeze Raise the Death Toll in Texas Floods? by Diane Ravitch

Friends:

Great question that many of us have asked. Diane Ravitch explores this on her blog in a recent post, highlighting a Texas Monthly report about the Trump administration’s hiring freeze—and its possible role in Texas’s deadly July floods. The National Weather Service had planned to embed an emergency response specialist in the Texas Division of Emergency Management to ensure that extreme-weather warnings were not just issued, but understood and acted upon. That hire was weeks away from starting when Trump froze all federal hiring on his first day in office. The position was never filled.

In Kerr County and across Central Texas, at least 135 people died. While meteorologists insist their forecasts were accurate, some experts question whether the missing liaison might have pushed messaging hard enough to save lives. As Victor Murphy, a veteran climate-service manager, put it: “Lives may have been saved or could have been saved, but we’ll never know.”

This is what happens when political posturing overrides public safety. Cutting or freezing critical positions might sound like “draining the swamp,” but it can drain away the very capacity we need to respond to crisis. Texas lost up to 30 weather service employees during the freeze and related attrition—crippling its ability to translate forecasts into life-saving action.

Disaster preparedness is not just about predicting the storm; it’s about ensuring the right people, in the right places, have the authority and capacity to sound the alarm and guide the response. The “arbitrariness and capriciousness” Murphy describes is not some abstract flaw in governance—it is measured in human lives. 

After 45 years with the National Weather Service, Murphy took early retirement, a loss of deep institutional knowledge driven in part by the very staffing cuts and hiring freezes he condemned. 

History, and lived experience, teach us that when decisions are made on impulse, without expertise, planning, or accountability, the outcome is almost always the same: things go wrong, people suffer, and preventable tragedies become inevitable. It's hard to argue with this, my friends.

In emergency management, you don’t get do-overs. When leadership treats expert staffing as expendable, the cost is paid in grief. And when ideology floods the forecast, the casualties will not be confined to the storm’s path.

Thanks, Diane, for putting this out there. So many Texans are searching for answers and accountability to the terrible tragedy that befell us recently. Remembering this tragedy should mean more than memorials—it should mean changing the systems that failed to protect us.

-Angela Valenzuela

Did Trump’s Hiring Freeze Raise the Death Toll in Texas Floods?


By dianeravitch on August 12, 2025

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The Texas Monthly points out that the state was supposed to get an emergency coordinator for its weather service. But that person was never hired because Trump ordered a freeze on all federal hiring the day he took office.

Texas Monthly reported:

The prospective hire was meant to help solve a persistent problem in dealing with Texas’s many natural disasters: translating warnings about extreme weather into appropriate action. By late January, the National Weather Service’s Fort Worth office had selected a meteorologist to serve as an “emergency response specialist” within the Texas Division of Emergency Management, which coordinates the state’s emergency-management program. The new hire, part of a nationwide reorganization of the National Weather Service, would have “embedded” at the TDEM to help decision-makers prepare for and respond to extreme weather. If all had gone according to plan, the federal meteorologist would have been working elbow to elbow with state emergency responders during the July flooding in Central Texas that killed at least 135.

But when Donald Trump took office on January 20 and announced a federal hiring freeze that day, the new hire hadn’t yet started. The role was left unfilled. “We just couldn’t quite dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s before the federal hiring freeze hit,” said Victor Murphy, the climate-service program manager in the Fort Worth office who took early retirement in April after 45 years with the NWS. “Lives may have been saved or could have been saved, but we’ll never know.”

In the aftermath of the floods in Kerr County and others parts of Central Texas, officials questioned whether staffing shortages in the National Weather Service—the result of the hiring freeze as well as DOGE-led early retirements and firings—had damaged the federal agency’s ability to accurately forecast the extreme rainfall and warn about the extraordinary flooding that would quickly follow. Many meteorologists pushed backhard on this narrative. They said the Austin/San Antonio office, which covers much of the Hill Country, performed adequately despite the cuts, with reasonably accurate forecasting and timely flood watches and warnings. Still, others have asked whether the NWS’s messaging to the public and to emergency responders could have been more aggressive.

The axed TDEM role would have worked to make sure the NWS’s forecasts and warnings were understood and heeded, serving as a liaison between the local, state, and federal governments, according to a job description and interviews with those involved in the hiring process. The emergency specialist would’ve “provided TDEM with eye-to-eye, one-on-one expert analysis,” including during weather emergencies, Murphy said. Texas gets a lot of wild weather. Residents and even decision-makers may need help distinguishing between a typical gully washer and extremely dangerous flooding, between a hard freeze and a life-threatening winter storm.

The TDEM job was part of a sweeping reorganization of the National Weather Service that began under the Biden administration. As part of the modernization effort, NWS officials were in the process of placing meteorologists in each state emergency-management office to help decision-makers. But the Trump administration effectively scuttled the project and decimated the agency’s existing workforce. NWS staffing levels were reduced by roughly 600 employees, to fewer than 4,000, in just a few months, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a labor union. Texas weather offices lost between 25 and 30 employees—a count that doesn’t include positions left unfilled because of the hiring freeze. “The arbitrariness and capriciousness of it is just really, really sad,” said Murphy. “This TDEM job getting axed is an example of that.”

This week, media outlets reported that the Trump administration is planning to fill up to 450 jobs at the federal agency. It’s unclear whether the TDEM position is included.

Hindsight is 20/20. We will never know. 

"Time for Progressives to Become Active In the Democratic Party," by Thom Hartmann

Friends,

I couldn’t agree more with Diane Ravitch’s post amplifying Thom Hartmann’s urgent message: progressives must learn from the radical Right’s playbook. The pre-MAGA Tea Party didn’t just protest—they took over the GOP by starting at the grassroots, winning local Precinct Committee seats, and reshaping the party from within.

History shows the Democratic Party can deliver transformative change—FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society—but only if we organize strategically, from the bottom up. It’s our turn to take on this slow and patient work at the grassroots level. 

In the meantime, we need to support our dems who are out of state so that mid-decade redistricting doesn't come to pass. Here is a link where all can contribute their support: https://poweredxpeople.org/ 

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela

Time for Progressives to Become Active In the Democratic Party

Read on blog or Reader
 Diane Ravitch's blog

By dianeravitch on August 4, 2025

Thom Hartmann, accomplished author, blogger, and podcaster, urges progressives to learn from the success of the radical Right. The ultra-Right as for many years a fringe group, far from the power center of the Republican Party. Now the extremists control the Republican Party. Hartmann explains how they accomplished this feat and why progressives should do the same.

He writes:

What if, lacking an organized resistance to fascism like we have had in previous eras (the civil rights movement, SDS, BLM, the Wobbly’s) the Democratic Party itself could play the role of producing radical, positive transformation across America?

Sound crazy? It’s actually happened twice.

The first time was in the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal literally flipped our politics and the American economy upside down, turning us from a raw, harsh capitalist system to a democratic socialist system with Social Security, legalized unions, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, workplace safety rules, massive infrastructure construction, and millions of Americans being employed directly by the government to end poverty.

It happened again in the 1960s, with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, producing Medicare, Medicaid, the civil rights act, the voting rights act, food stamps, low income housing, National Public Radio, a transformation of our educational system for the better, USAID, Job Corps, VISTA, Head Start, a major Social Security expansion, The National Endowment for the Arts, and what was essentially free college.

Sunday, I was on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNBC a conversation about protest movements. I pointed out that back in the 60s, when I was in SDS, there were a number of groups that were quite active, particularly on college campuses, but today most of them have been gutted or banned.

Black Lives Matter has disintegrated, the movement against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza has led to universities rolling over and capitulating, and the #MeToo and abortion rights movements are essentially leaderless.

Which leaves the Democratic Party, as I mentioned on Ali’s show. Billionaires and racists turned the Republican Party into a neofascist protest party over the past decade; progressives and those of us who want to preserve democracy in America need to similarly says control of and radicalize the Democratic Party in the tradition of FDR and LBJ.

There is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party over a decade ago and forced the entire Conservative establishment to lurch so far to the Right that they’ve even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush.

If progressives hope to have any shot at influencing today’s Democratic Party and kicking out the corporate sellout Democrats and replacing them with real-deal progressives, then we need to get to work right now to do exactly what the Tea Party did a decade and a half ago to take power.

And it starts in our own backyards.

Let me introduce you to the now-defunct Concord Project, a right-wing organization that, a decade ago, was in charge of helping the Tea Party’s Successful effort to take over and radicalize the GOP.

The Concord Project expanded their get-out-the-vote strategy beyond just traditional phone banking, canvassing, and putting up “vote Republican” signs. Instead, they decided to infiltrate local politics by encouraging Tea Partiers and conservatives more generally to become “Precinct Committee Members.”

Here’s their pitch in their own words from one of their Obama-era YouTube training videos:


“What’s the most powerful political office in the world? It is not the President of the United States. It’s Precinct Committeeman.”

So why is a Precinct Committeeman (or person) so important?


“First, because precinct committeemen and only precinct committeemen get to elect the leaders of the political parties; if you want to elect the leadership of one of the two major political parties in this country, then you have to become a precinct committeeman.”

As in the oldest and most basic governing reality in a republic: true and effective political power flows up from the bottom.

It starts with Precinct Committeemen and women — people who are either appointed or win local elections with very few votes at stake, in some cases only 10 or 20 votes — to gain positions that pretty much anyone can hold but which wield enormous power.

It’s Precinct Committee Persons who elect district, county, and state party officials and delegates, who choose primary nominees that then go on to hold elected office, and who help draft a party’s platform.

They’re also generally the first people who elected officials meet with when they come back into the district. And those officials listen carefully to what Precinct Committee persons have to say.

So, the Concord folks told their people, if far right Tea Partiers moved in and took over Precinct Committee seats then they’d also be able to nominate a slew of Tea Partiers to hold higher offices within the Republican Party and for primaries.

And those Tea Party Republican Party primary candidates would then be winnowed down in the primary to one Tea Party Republican to run against the Democrat in the general election. This way, Tea Partiers would end up dominating the GOP.

That was their pitch: take over the party from the inside, from the bottom up. And it worked....

Diane Ravitch's blog © 2025.

"Florida: Where Fascism Thrives," by Diane Ravitch

If you go to Dr. Diane Ravitch's blog post, the conversation is rich. I posted a few of the comments and exchanges below.

Everybody needs to hear this statement by Arnold Shwarzenegger. I have a blog on this—Arnold Schwarzenegger has a Powerful Message for Those Who Have Gone Down a Path of Hate [Youtube Video]—where I post his video.

His main point is that fascists are losers.

-Angela Valenzuela

Florida: Where Fascism Thrives

by Diane Ravitch

Please, don’t make make America Florida! Fascism starts with book censorship. In this case, a world history must remove his personal books because they are not on the state’s approved list. A book without an ISBN number can’t be in the list. We may assume that The Constitution, the Bible, and The Federalist Papers do not have ISBN numbers.

1. H.Hurley 

   September 9, 2023 at 12:37 pm

   This dedicated teacher’s HIGH ALERT 🚨 is beyond sad and frightening.
   Cooperate or being fired & a career damaged and lost.
   #TeachingInFlorida
   Today Florida, tomorrow the Nation!
   Hearing knee-high black boots marching and goose-stepping
   along cobblestone streets
   and BOE knocking at our classroom doors.
   Where to go?

   Reply
2. retired teacher 

   September 9, 2023 at 1:12 pm

   “Fascism rests on four pillars of charismatic leadership, Single party rule under dictator, terror and economic control,” according to some scholars.

   DeSantis lacks charisma, thank God, but he does have an unyielding, iron fist. He is hyper-partisan. He vilifies Democrats and would not meet with Biden even though he was offering support for Florida residents suffering from the impact of Hurricane Idalia. We have all witnessed the terror and economic control he has foisted on public education. He has stripped school boards of most powers. Instead of using librarians to help students, DeSantis is tying them up in an unreasonable, gargantuan task so he can censor reading material in public schools. It is all part of his plan to control that which he despises.

   Reply
   • retired teacher 

     September 9, 2023 at 2:01 pm

     DeSantis is never the bigger man. That would be Joe Biden who knows how to conduct himself like a statesman. DeSantis is always the smaller, self-serving, mean-spirited tyrant. DeSantis is unfit to lead this nation. He is simply another con man.

     Reply
   • dianeravitch 

     September 9, 2023 at 3:02 pm

     It’s easy to see that DeSantis has the makings of a dictator. He doesn’t believe in democracy. I once saw a comment where he boasted that the Democratic Party in Florida was “road kill.” His goal is a one-party state with no dissent.

     Reply
3. Roy Turrentine 

   September 9, 2023 at 1:12 pm

   Time for some collective disobedience. Find the list of banned books. Organize “shelve-in’s” where teachers deliberately place banned books on their shelves. Invite the news. Get arrested.

   Most of my English teaching compatriots had extensive libraries. Asking for this type of oversight is both silly and unnecessary. Any student wanting to know about almost any perversion can access it on the net before FeSantis can say “liberal.”

   Reply
   • Bob Shepherd 

     September 10, 2023 at 4:29 am

     GREAT idea.

     Reply
   • Sara S 

     September 10, 2023 at 10:17 am

     Also you can do silent disobedience. Will anyone notice if you do not scan all the book? Really? Librarians have done this in the past when certain books were considered scandalous.

     Reply
4. SomeDAM Poet 

   September 9, 2023 at 2:28 pm

   One good thing is that DeSantis has let everyone outside Florida know who he is.

   And as a result,he will never be elected President.

   He’s just another loser relegated to a long list of loser governors of Florida.