Tom Lehrer famously remarked that satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In a similar vein, I’ve increasingly found it difficult to come up with creative new ways of writing about the depredations of American inequality and the billionaire class that has been able to enrich itself so obscenely while hundreds of thousands have perished from a deadly disease. How, exactly, are you supposed to describe this stuff except in the most prosaic and literal way?

People in the world’s richest country are quite literally going hungry and the economy is somehow creating new billionaires while making the existing ones even richer. Seven million people are about to face eviction and the wealthiest man in human history just bought himself a personal yacht that costs the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster, $500 million now being basically pocket change for a guy like Jeff Bezos.

It’s just emerged that Americans owe around $140 billion in medical debt to collections agencies, a sum which could be taxed away from Bezos’ wealth while still leaving his net worth at $64 billion or so. The skies of North American cities are beset by a noxious haze from wildfires, yet Congress is so captured by corporate interests that even modest action on climate change is written off like it’s some kind of boutique political demand.