Billionaire Bill Gates and World Bank head Jim Yong Kim at the 2016 edition of the hyper-elite World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. CREDIT: AP Photo/Michel Euler
On December 28, 2016, Alan Pyke writes on ThinkProgress:
As right-wing politicians around the world gathered power by scapegoating immigrants for the economic struggles of working people, the world’s richest people got nearly a quarter trillion dollars richer in 2016.
The 500 wealthiest individuals on a planet of roughly 8 billion humans gained $237 billion in personal net worth over the year, according to Bloomberg.
Those massive investment gains followed similarly massive convulsions — a natural byproduct of beginning the investing year with incredible wealth. The same microfraction of the species was almost $400 billion in the hole by Valentine’s Day, then up more than $300 billion in the months before Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in November’s election, before slumping to the mere $237,000,000,000 net gain by year’s end, Bloomberg reports.
The poorest 2.4 billion adults worldwide have an average wealth of under a thousand bucks, and a combined net worth of 2.36 trillion. The 500 people on Bloomberg’s list ended the year with close to double that between them: $4.4 trillion.
In other words, capitalism has decided that one crowded nightclub’s worth of people are worth twice as much as a human herd that could fill the cavernous Indianapolis Motor Speedway six thousand times over — assuming none of them brought their children along.
Such inequality isn’t just a condition of economic strife. It’s a cause of it. Yet in countries around the world, the broke billions are being encouraged to blame their own dire straits on other poor people. And it’s working. Xenophobic, nativist politicians on the extreme right edge of the traditional political spectrum have captured a larger and larger share of power.
Trump’s win in November, like the victory of pro-Brexit campaigners in the summer, suggests that the economically oppressed are embracing paranoid, mathematically insane explanations of why their lives are so rotten. Liberal political values seem poised to fall soon in France, Germany, and Brazil. The Trumps and Le Pens of the world are winning at the ballot box even as the evidence grows starker that inequality is to blame for the hardships these populists’ supporters endure.
The idea that democracies cannot survive intense maldistribution of wealth for very long is not new. But the sheer speed of this transformation is nonetheless breathtaking.
The fall of the liberal idea comes barely five years after a very different political moment around the world, where populists were in the streets decrying the wealthy, the financial industry, and their government abettors. Protests from Wall Street to Madrid to Athens to Reykjavik targeted not immigrants or refugees or government benefits programs, but concentrated wealth.
Sooner or later, governments called down the police on those same protesters. Few of those governments took any aggressive policy steps to redress inequality, or even to repair the devastation of the 2008 financial crisis. The already severe concentration of global wealth in a few hundred hands intensified.
And now, those same masses who rode a leftward breeze for a year or two have retreated — or simply turned right.
Gary Reber comments: The greatest crisis facing our country today is the obscene level of wealth and income economic inequality we now see, which has come about due to concentrated ownership of the productive assets employed in the production of products and services in our economy. This is a moral issue, an economic issue, and a political issue.
The fact is the top 1 percent own more than the bottom 90 percent combined and most of the capital asset growth and sharing of growth profits goes systematically to that same 1 percent. It gets even more concentrated among the top 0.1 percent.
The system is the cause. The solution is to transform basic economic institutions to favor universal citizen participation in capital ownership.
If both labor and capital are independent factors of production, and if capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all. Yet, sadly, the American people and its leaders still pretend to believe that labor is becoming more productive, and ignore the necessity to broaden personal ownership of wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets simultaneously with the growth of the American economy.
To put this in context, it is important to briefly note that throughout history, man has endeavored to overpower the time constraints of physical and biological processes. It is now an accepted fact that accelerated scientific and technological innovation has directly led to a speeding up of all physical and social processes in the name of progress. The competitive drive has led to a frantic national and international chase for more efficient methods of production and distribution. In the process, humanity has pushed to develop even more powerful technologies, on the assumption that such technologies would accomplish more and more useful functions in less time. The results have been a dramatic acceleration of change and concentration of wealth ownership.
Economic democracy has yet to be tried. We are absent a national discussion of where consumers earn the money to buy products and services and the nature of capital ownership, and instead argue about policies to redistribute income or not to redistribute income. If Americans do not demand that the contenders for the office of the presidency of the United States, the Senate, and the Congress address these issues, we will have wasted the opportunity to steer the American economy in a direction that will broaden affluence. We have adequate resources, adequate knowhow, and adequate manpower to produce general affluence, but we need as a society to properly and efficiently manage these resources while protecting and enhancing the environment so that our productive capital capability is sustainable and renewable. Such issues are the proper concern of government because of the human damage inflicted on our social fabric as well as to economic growth in which every citizen is fairly included in the American dream.
Binary economist Louis O. Kelso wrote: “In the distribution of social power, whether it be political power or economic power, all things are relative. The essence of economic democracy lies in the elimination of differences of earning power resulting from denial of equality of economic opportunity, particularly equal access to capital credit. Differences of economic status resulting from differences in advantages taken and uses made of differences based on inequality of economic opportunity, particularly those that give access to capital credit to the already capitalized and deny it to the non- or -undercapitalized, are flagrant violations of the constitutional rights of citizens in a democracy.”
The fact is that political democracy is impossible without economic democracy. Those who control money control the laws that foster wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery. These laws can and should be changed by the 99 percent and those among the 1 percent who are committed to a just and economically classless market economy, true equality of opportunity, and a level playing field in the future for 100 percent of Americans. By adopting economic policies and programs that acknowledge every citizen’s right to contribute productively to the economy as a capital owner as well as a labor worker, the result will be an end to perpetual labor servitude and the liberation of people from progressive increments of subsistence toil and compulsive poverty as the 99 percent benefits from the rewards of productive capital-sourced income.
