I was waiting in line at the grocery store when the two Mexican (i.e. from Mexico) women in front of me whipped out their Centurion cards.

You may not know what I’m referring to. It used to be called the Black card, but Amex forgot to trademark it and then other companies started to use the term, you can get a Black Mastercard. So now it’s called the Centurion card, and although rappers have rapped about it, most people still don’t know what it is.

Let’s see… You’ve got to be invited in, you just can’t apply and get one. Right now, in the U.S., the annual fee is $5,000. With a one time initiation fee of $10,000. My research (well, Wikipedia) tells me it’s cheaper in Mexico, only $2,907 a year, but that’s still a lot of dough. Traditionally, to get a Centurion card you have to spend $250,000 a year on a lesser card, like the Platinum.

So I’d been waiting for over twenty minutes. You see there was only one lane open, and I had too much stuff to self-check, although all four self-check outlets were busy anyway. And these two Mexican women in Moncler jackets with two carts had a bill of $570. Not that they were ready to pay it. You see the bagger had left, so they were bagging their own groceries. But the Latina checker interrupted them and in Spanish told them about the bill. So one lady, who looked like she’d just left the dance floor, came around to insert her card, that’s when I saw that it was a Centurion. But somehow she couldn’t put it in right, so the other woman came over and inserted her Centurion card, that worked, and they went on their  merry way, and the checker proceeded to scan my groceries at light speed, trying to whittle down the line of almost ten carts behind me.

Maybe you don’t know that Mexicans have money.

Well, I bumped into this guy the other week and we were talking and I asked him what he does for work in Mexico. He said he was in telecommunications. I remarked that one man controlled the whole business. And this guy said yes. And then I asked him if he was related to this guy, and he said yes again.

So just now I was dealing with a service person. He grew up in Kansas, he didn’t go to college, he’s twenty eight and working a barely better than minimum wage job. And I’m getting his story and then I ask him what is his dream.

Well, he might go to trade school, but that takes a lot of money, time and effort. So what he really wants to do is be a stockpicker, he told me he’s got a feel for it, he’d put a put on this one company and he’d made three hundred dollars.

And I’m standing there thinking how screwed up the world is.

Used to be there were three classes of people, at least when I grew up. There were the poor, but let’s ignore them, everybody else does. Then the middle class, who worked hard, honestly, to get ahead, and the blue bloods, people who wore chinos and boat shoes and drove old Country Squire station wagons and looked lower middle class but in reality had more money than everybody else. They’d inherited it, and they didn’t brag about it. You had to be exposed to them to know. There were a number of these people in Southern Connecticut, where I grew up. But I was clued-in at Middlebury College, which a lot of blue bloods attended.

Now the blue bloods weren’t necessarily that rich, but they were certainly beyond middle class. I remember this one nerd who inherited $24 million on his 21st birthday. His family was in the tool business, not that you’d know.

But everything changed in the eighties and nineties. Reagan legitimized greed, the baby boomers took the bait, tech took hold and suddenly we had a class of billionaires. Bankers blew up the economy in 2008 and then bitched that they didn’t get their bonuses after the government bailed the banks out.

Everybody knows about these people. Because that became a story unto itself, the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Unlike the blue bloods, the new rich bragged about their money. And lorded it over the rest of the populace. It was a way to be fabulous without being an artist. Used to be artists were atop the celebrity heap, but now the truly rich could buy the artists for private occasions. Everybody’s got a price, and these people have got the money.

So what’s a poor boy to do?

Certainly not play in a rock and roll band. You can’t make that kind of money in the music business, which is why today’s best and brightest don’t go into it. Music is for the uneducated with few skills. Odds are long, but you can make bank without portfolio. As for the intelligent and educated, they don’t like the music business odds, they go elsewhere, like banking and tech and…

The opportunity to pull yourself up by your bootstraps is very thin. You see the rich have rigged the game, and they don’t want to let you in. Jared Kushner’s father gave a building to Harvard so he could be admitted, because otherwise he wouldn’t. But this is not a right or left issue, this is a money issue, and both sides play the game.

Used to be you could make a big buck working in manufacturing. But all those jobs went to Mexico or overseas, where employees would work for a pittance.

So what you’re mostly left with is service jobs, which may not even pay the rent, you might have to have two.

But everybody needs hope. And now that hope is based on the stock market. You can make a killing. But what the hoi polloi don’t know is the game is rigged, it’s not only inside information, but relationships that allow you to buy at a low price and…it’s a professional business.

But just like Spotify, anybody can play. So that’s what people are doing to try and get ahead, playing the market. They’re also investing in crypto. I mean how else can a regular person get rich?

And then there’s the Russian oligarchs. Word is they possess Putin’s money, they’re hiding it for him, essentially laundering it, but they know when Putin calls, they’ve got to deliver. And now governments are doing a good job of cracking down on the Russian oligarchs, but not those in the rest of the world. It’s hard to make a billion dollars honestly. What’s that aphorism? Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. That’s attributed to Honoré de Balzac, a French novelist and playwright, I dare you to come up with a businessman from 175 years ago.

So America has turned into a giant casino. And you know what they say about Las Vegas, the whole town is a monument to losers, it wouldn’t exist if the house didn’t have an edge and make money.

The house has the edge in life. And you probably don’t know it unless you were born in the house, or somehow became a club member.

This is the underlying problem in America today. And just like climate change, there doesn’t seem to be any progress. Then again, those in the house don’t want to let people in, not that these outsiders know it.

So the American Dream is gambling, on the lottery, on the stock market, it’s the only way for most people to get ahead.