Billionaires Rule the World
The prestigious Bloomberg News, which provides a barometer for reading the
international business world, has announced that this world of seven billion people has 1,426 billionaires who owned US$5.4 trillion in 2012, an increase in wealth of 17% over the previous year. At the same time, about 1.29 billion people live in poverty (World Bank figure for 2008) unable to have access to basic human needs like adequate food, health services, sanitation, water and education. So should they celebrate this with champagne and caviar in luxury yachts and private planes and avert their eyes from the mass of humanity struggling for survival? Yes, they would. It is the new world order, so get
used to it.
In the USA, EU and Japan which produce the largest number of these superior super-rich humans, the economies are in a spiral descent since 2008: unemployment is rising, basic
social benefits are being cut by governments while public monies are allocated to corporations in debt or financial institutions which made bad loans and risky speculations. In Greece unemployment is 26% and in Italy 12%, Spain 26%, Portugal 17%, Ireland 14%. In the USA it is 19% if you wade through the cloud of official misinformation that only counts temporary unemployment payment recipients.
Almost everywhere in the world, the spread of neo-liberal economics and the political
doctrine of the Divine Rights of Billionaires increased the gap between the rich and the poor. In the USA, the 400 richest people, out of a population of 320 million Americans, own 36% of the national assets. Yet 46.2 million live in poverty (US Census Reports for
2011) with limited access to basic amenities and 50 million are without access to health services. Despite this, US corporations made record profits of $11 trillion in 2011, outsourcing much of their work to developing countries and reaping profits through marketing at home. While the New York stock markets keep rising to astronomical figures, to the cheers of the complicit mass media, no one cares to say that this is fuelled by an excess of money in the hands of a privileged few. And when the markets collapse, the financial houses that lead this charge can depend on public money to bail them out and keep increasing their millions of dollars in annual bonuses, salaries and perks.
Neil Baroffsky, former Special Inspector General of the US Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) intended to save the US financial institutions that created the 2008 world financial crisis through gross speculative dealing and mismanagement, has exposed the inner workings of a system where government and the super-rich are allied to maintain their power and financial control of the state (Bailout, by Neil Baroffsky, published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. New York, July 2012). He states that while only $1.4 billion was spent of the $50 billion allocation to save troubled homeowners whose houses were being foreclosed, the funds expended to save the banking and financial corporations and the people who caused the crisis totaled $4.7 trillion.
The malaise is evident around the world, even in Communist China and all the major
developing countries. But it is easier to protest these inequities in the developing countries like India, Brazil, China, South Africa, and others in South America, where leaders are at least publicly acknowledging a massive problem and promising to limit inequality. In the EU and America, mass protests raging for the last two years against this inequity were largely being ignored by governments that merely sent the police to quell the street protests, often violently. As a palliative, the EU has just passed legislation to limit top
executive bonuses, though it falls short of the recent Swiss Referendum that will now also place some limit on top executive salaries. Surprise, it is Communist China at the recently concluded National Congress that regarded income inequality and poverty as the major problems that are to be addressed by the government in the coming years. Or is that a surprise at all.
On the contrary, politicians in the USA justify income inequality as desirable. They have refused to increase the tax on billionaires and millionaires from the standard of 35% for all to 39.5% at the highest tax bracket of a million dollars and above. In most of Europe, this top income slab is taxed at 75%. The constant refrain is that billionaires and giant transnational corporations create jobs. The stark reality is that they create jobs in China
and India and have destroyed millions of jobs in the USA.
How is all this possible in “democratic” western countries with the highest living standards and educational and scientific achievements? When Charles II of England and Louis XIV of France proclaimed the Divine Right of Kings and acted accordingly, the masses beheaded them and changed the system. Modern societies have developed more sophisticated mass thought control methods (backed by sometimes visible, sometimes invisible terror against dissidents) that enabled J.V. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao
Zedong, Kim Il-Sung and others of that ilk to deceive the masses and stay in power with wide popular support. So Western billionaires with access to even more sophisticated scientific resources and a captive mass media can feel confident that they can continue to safely exploit the hundreds of millions of their countrymen for years to come. Fooling the public and diverting attention from national problems over the long term is no big problem for people with such unlimited resources and access to governments and major international institutions.
For all the pretense of religiosity, this is an age of widespread immorality. It is a world with political and economic philosophies that justify meanness.
Kenneth Abeywickrama
17 March 2013.