The 1 Percent’s Sinister Inequality Lie: How Cold-Blooded Billionaires Are Pretending To Care About The American Dream (Demo)

EnlargeDavid Koch (Credit: AP/Mark Lennihan)

On August 12, 2015, Heather Digby Parton writes on Salon:

One of the more interesting sub-plots of this election season is the newfound interest in income inequality among the billionaire class. It seems odd, wouldn’t you say, that they would be suddenly struck by the idea that such drastic disparities in wealth and income aren’t simply the natural consequence of the invisible hand rewarding those who deserve it? That has certainly been the line we’ve heard for decades from the wealthy Masters of the Universe and Titans of Industry (not to mention those who were smart enough to inherit vast fortunes or marry into them). Indeed, after the financial crisis of 2008, virtually all we ever heard from the 1 percent was whining about the terrible unfairness of being held liable for the destruction of millions of lives in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Their total lack of self-awareness was illustrated by endless quotes such as those reported in this 2011 story about something called the Job Creators Alliance, “a Dallas-based nonprofit that developed talking points and op-ed pieces aimed at shaping the national agenda.”

To take just a few examples:

At a lunch in New York, Stemberg and Allison shared their disdain for Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires public companies to disclose the ratio between the compensation of their CEOs and employee medians, according to Allison. Stemberg called the rule “insane” in an e-mail to Bloomberg News. “Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive,” Allison said. “This attack is destructive.” […]

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax. “You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.” […]

Tom Golisano, billionaire founder of payroll processer Paychex Inc. and a former New York gubernatorial candidate, said in an interview this month that while there are examples of excess, it’s “ridiculous” to blame everyone who is rich.“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.

This was during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which these fine fellows referred to as a bunch of “imbeciles.” There was some nervousness about all that “populist anger” being directed at the wealthy elites but for the most part, they were merely petulant and pouty about being criticized by inferior people who simply weren’t giving them proper credit for being their wonderful selves. The billionaires already had all the money and all the power. Now they wanted to be loved.

In 2012, Mitt Romney was their Barack Obama, saying to all who would listen, “Yes, we can!” When he dropped his bombshell 47 percent comment, he was speaking for them. That didn’t work out so well, so now we have a change in strategy. This was recently signaled by the Godfather of Billionaire activists, Charles Koch himself, when he reframed his 50 years of ruthless, capitalist greed and avarice:

Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch on Sunday compared the efforts of his political network to the fight for civil rights and other “freedom movements,” part of a growing effort by the organization to emphasize its commitment to the plight of the disenfranchised.

During remarks to 450 wealthy conservatives assembled in the ballroom of a lavish oceanfront resort, Koch urged his fellow donors to follow the lead of figures such as Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Look at the American revolution, the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement,” Koch said. “All of these struck a moral chord with the American people. They all sought to overcome an injustice. And we, too, are seeking to right injustices that are holding our country back.”

Evidently, they have decided that selling their Ayn Randian libertarian creed on the merits hasn’t gotten them anywhere, so they’re now engaged in outright propaganda to obfuscate their real agenda. Koch said as much himself:

“If we cannot unite the majority of Americans behind the vision, then we’re done for. So that to me has to be our number one objective. But to do so, we’ve got to do a much better job of understanding what matters most to people, and then to demonstrate that a free society gives them the best opportunity of achieving that.”

But Charles Koch is a very smart man. Why has he only now realized that in order to achieve his policy goals (which have changed very little — he’s just added a few goodies for the rubes) that he must create a better image. As we’ve seen, it was only a few years ago that his cohorts were damning the peasants as imbeciles and upstarts.

Well, it may be related to what Matthew Pulver wrote in a piece for Salon yesterday: They’ve finally awakened to the fact that not only aren’t they loved — they are despised.

[F]ormer marketing conglomerate CEO Peter Georgescu [and] his friend Ken Langone, founder of Home Depot, warns his fellow 1 percenters that “[w]e are creating a caste system from which it’s almost impossible to escape.” The column raises the specter of “major social unrest” if inequality is not addressed.

Georgescu writes:

“I’m scared. The billionaire hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones is scared. My friend Ken Langone, a founder of the Home Depot, is scared. So are many other chief executives. Not of Al Qaeda, or the vicious Islamic State or some other evolving radical group from the Middle East, Africa or Asia. We are afraid where income inequality will lead.”

The 99 percent are potentially worse than Al Qaeda? No wonder he’s scared. He’s not the only one:

In June, Cartier chief Johann Rupert — worth an estimated $7.5 billion — delivered the same message to his wealthy colleagues, telling them that the intensifying inequality and what it portends “keeps me awake at night.” He told his fellow elites that “We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us.” Like Georgescu and Langone, Rupert feared unrest and asked, “How is society going to cope with structural unemployment and the envy, hatred and the social warfare?”

This article by Heather Digby Parton is yet another article on Salon that professes the necessity for the system to be reformed but, while conferring with the billionaire capital ownership class whose vast wealth is due to OWNING wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets, is still stuck in one-factor labor-only thinking (need for jobs to earn INCOME), because they are oblivious to the reality that REAL wealth is the result of OWNERSHIP of the means of production. This is especially imperative in an age of exponential development and application of technological invention and innovation, which destroys jobs, eliminates the need for human labor and devalues the worth of labor as “machines” of varied sophistication replace human labor as the primary input in the production of products and services.

Yet unbelievably, neither the author or the wealthy billionaires sourced for this article EVER even mention the necessity to broaden capital ownership simultaneously with the growth of the economy. Instead is always about jobs or wage levels. Unless broadened capital ownership occurs, there is NO WAY to prevent the dominance of a caste system perpetuated by economic injustice.

For those paying attention and actually “THINKING” it should be obvious that as technological invention and innovation  continues to significantly shift the technologies of production to the non-human factor, the question that must be addressed is WHO WILL OWN THE “MACHINES?”  ThIS question which requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and services,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”

On Bernie Sanders Web site (http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/worker-owned-businesses-2014), Sanders is quoted as saying: “At a time when corporate America is outsourcing millions of decent-paying jobs overseas and with the economy continuing to struggle to create jobs that pay a livable wage, we need to expand economic models that help the middle-class,” Sanders said.  “I strongly believe that employee ownership is one of those models. The federal government, however, has not done enough for employee ownership to realize its full potential.”

Bernie Sanders is the ONLY candidate for president that is even near addressing this catastrophic problem of economic inequality. While a long-time advocate for and supporter of employee-owned business corporations, Bernie Sanders now needs to take this concept to its fullest outcome and introduce legislation for the proposed Capital Homestead Act. See http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/…/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-get…/ and http://www.cesj.org/…/capita…/capital-homestead-act-summary/. See http://cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ and http://cesj.org/…/uploads/Free/capitalhomesteading-s.pdf.

The Capital Homestead Act is the fulfillment of the promise to broaden FUTURE wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets by creating millions and millions of NEW capital owners. Using financial mechanisms that provide insured, interest-free capital credit, repayable out of the FUTURE earnings of investments in the corporations growing America would empower EVERY child, woman, and man, whether employed or not, to acquire personal OWNERSHIP stakes in America’s corporations simultaneously with their growth, without the requirement of past saving or ANY reduction in wages or benefits.

The Capital Homestead Act would facilitate the transformation of America’s corporations, now OWNED by a tiny minority wealthy ownership class, into a nation of universal capital owners, who would earn income through profit sharing and the full-earnings dividend payout of corporations, and enable America to finance its future economic prosperity while simultaneously creating new capital owners.

Norman Kurland, President of the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org) argues, “The haves represent a tiny fraction of humanity. Our ideas will split them between those who see our point and understand that they would benefit everyone without taking anything away from them during their lives, and those who want to keep ownership in an exclusive club. The latter cannot publicly attack the institution of private property without threatening the legal foundation that gives them their monopoly over the money system and the ownership system.”

Bernie Sanders is the ONLY candidate for president that will provide leadership to awaken all American citizens to force the politicians to follow the people and lift all legal barriers to universal capital ownership access by every child, woman, and man as a fundamental right of citizenship and the basis of personal liberty and empowerment. The goal should be to enable every child, woman, and man to become an owner of ever-advancing labor-displacing technologies, new and sustainable energy systems, new rentable space, new enterprises, new infrastructure assets, and productive land and natural resources as a growing and independent source of their future incomes.