“America, the beautiful, ’tis of thee I sing today on your birthday,” croons Edward W. Mann as he marks another Fourth of July. “I’ll tell you how much I love you. I love you more than a billion times – that’s one and nine zeroes. That’s how much I love you.”

“Hi, there,” greets Joe L. Bucket as he witnesses Edward’s homage to the Stars and Stripes.

“Who’s that?” Edward demands. “Oh, it’s you, Joe. Your sort of people are always getting in the way of people like us, even when we are paying homage to our national symbol. I mentioned that just the other day to my friend George as we perused my art collection on my super-yacht.”

“Hey, guy, it’s my symbol also,” Joe responds. “And I love America too. Perhaps not as much as you because I have only a couple of zeroes. But I plan to add a few more as I’m moving on up, you know, like George Jefferson.”

“Good luck with that,” Edward replies. “But don’t think about making it into my circle. It’s beyond the reach of people like you. However hard you try, you will remain in the 65 to 90 percent struggling at the bottom.”

“That’s because you and your kind have rigged the system,” Joe says. “And, by the way, your Stars and Stripes is flying upside down.”

“Really? It must be my wife’s doing,” Edward mutters.

Of course, the above conversation did not happen. But what has been happening is the ongoing obscene concentration of wealth.

Data from Forbes and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, cited by Wikipedia, indicate that the 10 super-rich Americans own wealth that ranges from Elon Musk’s $251 billion to Miriam Adelson’s paltry $32.8 billion. They are among 492 American billionaires.

There are only 10 African American billionaires, according to Forbes data. They range from Robert Smith with $8 billion to LeBron James and Tyler Perry with $1 billion each.

Overall, the median net worth of Americans is $192,900 and 37.9 million or 12.4 percent of the population are officially poor, defined as a family of four earning $30,000 or less annually.

So what do the ultra-rich do with their money? A handful donate to charity. Others are trying to create refuges for an anticipated apocalyptic future. Many park it in offshore tax havens. Some are pumping hundreds of millions into political campaigns, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling.

But a few embrace a much nobler use for their wealth. Melinda French Gates announced in the New York Times that she will donate $1 billion globally over the next two years to help support women and families, including in reproductive rights. She has already pledged or donated to various organizations from the $11 billion or so she received in Microsoft stock in her divorce from Bill Gates. MacKenzie Scott announced she will donate $640 million to 361 small non-profit organizations from the $35 billion she received in her divorce from Jeff Bezos.

A group of wealthy people from the U.S. and elsewhere, self-named the Patriotic Millionaires, is calling for higher taxes on people like themselves. They made the call in an open letter coinciding with a recent meeting of the “global elite” in Davos, Switzerland.

“The history of the last five decades is a story of wealth flowing nowhere but upward. In the last few years, this trend has greatly accelerated,” they stated, according to The Guardian. The solution, they said, is “to tax us, the ultra-rich, and you have to start now. … There’s only so much stress any society can take, only so many times mothers and fathers will watch their children go hungry while the ultra-rich contemplate their growing wealth.”

The Patriotic Millionaires may soon get their wish. In March, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and fellow Democrat Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania introduced the “UltraMillionaire Tax Act” designed to raise at least $3 trillion over 10 years.

They propose that the top 0.05 percent of wealthy Americans pay two cents on every dollar over $50 million.

Warren, in a statement, cited a 2020 report by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. They reported, in her words, that “the top 0.1 percent have seen their share of American wealth triple from seven percent to 20 percent between the late 1970s and 2019, while the bottom 90 percent has seen its share plummet from about 35 percent to 25 percent.”

But many wealthy Americans are determined to block such a move, as they have been doing for decades. That is why they are donating huge amounts to Donald Trump’s campaign. The former president has promised to cut their taxes and eliminate President Joe Biden’s policies to control global warming.

There is a point to all this financial background.

Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, in an Aug. 14, 2019, article in The New York Times Magazine, noted that the enslaved “transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. … They grew and picked the cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all American exports and 66 percent of the world’s supply.

“They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton they picked to the Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revolution. They built vast fortunes for white people North and South — at one time, the second-richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island ‘slave trader.’

“Profits from black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and financed some of our most prestigious universities. It was the relentless buying, selling, insuring and financing of their bodies and the products of their labor that made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City the financial capital of the world.”

But, the U.S. Census reported, European Americans, who comprise 65.3 percent of all households, own 80 percent of all wealth, with a median of $250,000. African Americans comprise 13.6 percent of households and they hold 4.7 percent of all wealth, with a median of $24,520.

This disparity is rooted in the historical discrimination against African Americans. It includes slavery, scuttling of the “40 acres and a mule” initiative, sabotaging of Reconstruction, enactment of Jim Crow laws reinforced by terrorism and creating “a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies,” wrote Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on “The 1619 Project” which focuses on slavery and the founding of the nation.

And now the Supreme Court, formerly a champion of the rights of African Americans, is rushing to reverse the gains made before and after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Still, African Americans have persisted in their claim to the United States as their country too. HannahJones recalled that they rejected Abraham Lincoln’s offer to take them back to Africa. The reason? To relieve the then young nation of their “troublesome presence,” as Lincoln put it, while blaming them for slavery and claiming that, without their presence, the Civil War “could not have an existence. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

Hannah-Jones told the story of her father, Milton Hannah, a Vietnam War veteran, raising the Stars and Stripes daily in front of their Iowa house and replacing it “as soon as it showed the slightest tatter.” Growing up, she wrote, she could not understand why he would so honor the symbol of a country which mistreated people like him. But she later understood: “He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us.”

So, as Maya Angelou put it in 1978, “Still I rise.”