Dear Dirty America

Who says billionaires don’t meet in smoky rooms and hammer out national policy? Giambattista Vico, the great philosopher for those of you who know, scoffed at that notion by poking fun at citizens who believed the world was run by such secret rendezvous. But then again, he doesn’t get a chance to read the New York Times does he?

It almost starts off like a stupid joke. So Warren Buffett, Sheldon Adelson, and Bill Gates are sitting in a hotel room together talking about immigration policy, and about how their own investments, ventures, and milking of third world countries has produced crises all over the planet, when one of them says, “Hey, we don’t actually agree about politics very often, between the three of us wealthy fucks, but I think we could come to a conclusion about US immigration reform.”

And they did. Kind of. Long after the hand-rolled cigars had burnt out and the underage servant boys were fast asleep, crouched in defensive positions in the corners of the suite, and Buffett had a small hole burnt into the lapel of his suit jacket from hot falling cigar ash, did Sheldon Adelson finally pull out his laptop to officially record the groundbreaking discussion the three had had about the immigration crisis on the US-Mexico border in the last month or so.

Gates and Buffett refuse to touch the computer. The keyboard had a greasy sheen to it. Adelson riffed off the earlier part of their conversation by ribbing Congress a bit. How can 535 elected officials not serve the people who elected them? And, he included the sentiment that if a few billionaires can come to agreement, why can’t half a thousand congressional knuckleheads and their egos?

After all, whose billions had elected more than half of those Washington slouches? “We are getting shortchanged,” the Vegas billionaire wrote.

What is considered the masterpiece paragraph of the Times article is the following, which Adelson wrote himself, and Buffett read slowly aloud while running the wrinkly tip of his finger along each sentence on the screen. Adelson, at times so pleased to hear his own writing read aloud, slapped his fist into his hand and licked his lips. Here is one such section:

Their citizenship could be provisional — dependent, for example, on their making investments of a certain size in new businesses or homes. Expanded investments of that kind would help us jolt the demand side of our economy. These immigrants would impose minimal social costs on the United States, compared with the resources they would contribute. New citizens like these would make hefty deposits in our economy, not withdrawals.

“Nice one, Shelly,” Bill Gates said. “Send it over to Andrew and we’ll get her published by morning.”

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The Times wonders why it is hemorrhaging readers? How many Americans want to read directly the opinions of billionaires? Even if they did have three heads put together for their piece, it still wasn’t much more sophisticated than what a precocious teenager with access to a library and the motivation to get an A in class could write on the situation.