EnlargeKen Langone(Credit: AP/Richard Drew)
On August 11, 2015, Matthew Pulver writes on Salon:
I’ve written previously about the growing fear among elites that they’ve pushed economic inequality too far. That fear is proliferating, according to a New York TimesOp-Ed this weekend by former marketing conglomerate CEO Peter Georgescu. Joined by his friend Ken Langone, founder of Home Depot, Georgescu 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.”
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?”
But while Rupert only mused about the prospects for continuing to hawk jewelry and the restfulness of his nights amid the tumult, Georgescu and Langone are being proactive. Georgescu writes that he and Langone “have been meeting with chief executives, trying to get action on inequality,” taking advantage of Langone’s tremendous access to business leaders. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a major CEO that wouldn’t take his call,” said a close associate of Rudy Giuliani of Langone in 2012. Georgescu and Langone are telling their patrician peers that if “inequality is not addressed, the income gap will most likely be resolved in one of two ways: by major social unrest or through oppressive taxes.” The word seems to be getting around at the global aristocracy’s water cooler, and Georgescu writes that they “find almost unanimous agreement on the nature of the problem and the urgent need for solutions.”
It is remarkable that Langone is partnered with Georgescu on this crusade for social justice. Langone served on the board of a leading populist philanthropy group called the New York Stock Exchange, and his deep concern for the downtrodden led him to chair that gang of do-gooders. He’s a longtime generous contributor to Republican presidential candidates who have been on the front lines of the battle to institute supply-side and neoliberal economics. “[T]here’s nobody better than him,” said Rudy Giuliani last year about Langone’s prowess as a bundler for GOP politicians. And when he isn’t giving money and raising funds for the political friends of big business, Langone gives the invaluable gift of his careful insight, last year comparingprogressives’ attention to income inequality to Hitler’s political project in 1933.
The only thing Langone had right was the year: 1933. It was in that year that President Franklin Roosevelt took office at the height of the Great Depression, inequality peaked to record levels, and fears of revolt circulated among that era’s fat-cat elite. Capitalism, unreined during the 1920s, had hit another of its cyclical failures, this time its worst yet. The powerful feared revolution, and the New Deal constituted a sort of bargain made between capitalists and the people: A bit of socialism to save capitalism from itself.
That year, John Maynard Keynes issued an open letter to the newly inaugurated Roosevelt in the New York Times, whose two opening sentences of the more than 2,500-word manifesto defined the stakes and posed revolution as the price of failure of severely altering capitalism as it was practiced. Keynes was no radical. He urged the new president to work “within the framework of the existing social system,” that is, to reform capitalism without allowing it to be abandoned or abolished.
Yet another article by an author 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. Unless this 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.
