Oblivious to the Coming Revolution

(Paul Farrell)

Davos

The world looks different from rarified altitude of a billionaire. Especially if you’re one of the 85 richest, who control more wealth than the 3.5 billion poorest.

You guys already own half the planet. Keep up the good work, getting richer, by the end of this century your family could be one of the world’s 11 trillionaires predicted in the new Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report. Capitalism is the ticket to owning everything.

Cruising at 51,000 feet, Mach 0.85 in your $40 million Gulfstream jet, you know the world belongs to you. A few days at the World Economic Forum in historic Davos, Europe’s highest city, high in the Swiss Alps, and your world seemed even bigger. Roots in the Higher Middle Ages. Fabulous ski resort.

Davos is mostly about business contacts, meeting other powerful capitalists, great PR and i-photo ops walking among world leaders, in seminars, at meals, over drinks, just mingling with the 2,500 participants — all the captains of industry, central bankers, heads of state, thought leaders and celebrity economists, maybe even listening to actor Matt Damon talking about his Water.org or attending a mindful meditation session with Goldie Hawn.

But bottom line: for 1,500 business and financial types at Davos, many whose firms are permanent members, just one new contact can justify the quarter million often spent belonging to the exclusive Davos Forum. Yes, up at their altitude, the world really does looks different.

Billionaires aren’t ‘Curious Capitalists,’ they just want to make more money

The truth is, for 43 years Davos has been a private club for capitalists that has had more to do with increasing economic inequality than any other global organization. Here’s how a real “Curious Capitalist,” as Time’s editor, Rana Foroohar, sees it from ground level mingling with world leaders, gathering quotes, interviewing and blogging, to get answers to “The 5 Most Important Questions for the Davos Elite”:

• Is U.S. economic recovery for real?
• Will China’s economy blow up?
• Is technology a friend or an enemy?
• Who wins, millennials vs. baby boomers?
• What will the political impact of inequality be?

Actually, only one of these five questions has the potential of triggering catastrophic long-term consequences: Economic inequality. The other four, while significant, are all what mathematicians call dependent functions of the inequality equation that’s impacting technology, generational conflicts and the economies of China and America.

In fact, a cultural revolution is creating a new global collective conscience between capitalism and inequality, the Haves and the Have-nots. A powerful virus is spreading, rising from the grass roots of billions in the repressed poor and the middle class, forcing moral leaders to step forward and openly challenge the destructive forces of capitalism. You can now even see them jumping on this new bandwagon.

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(Paul Farrell/26.01.2014/marketwatch.com)

Mississippi basin

Welcome to the San Francisco Bay Area. The epicenter of the tech industry. The global vortex of venture capital. One of the most brutally unequal places in America, indeed the world.

In the distribution of income and wealth, California more resembles the neocolonial territories of rapacious resource extraction than it does Western Europe. The only states that compare to California’s harsh inequalities are deep southern states structured by centuries of racist fortune building by pseudo-aristocratic ruling classes, and the East Coast capitals of the financial sector.

It’s a strange club, the super-inequitable states of the U.S. This list pairs the bluest coastal enclaves of liberal power with the reddest Southern conservative states. In terms of wages and wealth these places have a lot in common.

The economies of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama remain bound by racial inequalities founded in slavery and plantation agriculture; the wealthy elite of all three states remain a handful of white families who control the largest holdings of fertile land, and own the extractive mineral and timber industries, and the regional banks.

Texas, with its sprawling cities, global banks, energy corporations, universities, and tech companies, is more like California in that its extreme economic inequalities are as new as they are old. Stolen land and racial segregation combine with unworldly new fortunes built on the Internet and logistical revolutions in manufacturing and markets to manifest a gaping divide in power and wealth between the few and the many. The Texas border, like California’s, opens up vast pools of Mexican and immigrant labor for super-exploitation by agribusiness and industry.

The same goes for New York, Connecticut, and Washington D.C. the other most unequal places in the United States. New York and Connecticut, like California, have become societies divided by an upper stratum of financial-sector workers and corporate employees whose salaries and investments simply dwarf the bottom half of the population’s earnings, and unlike the South, this extreme level of inequality is rather new in its source of valorization.

Washington D.C. is split between the federal haves, mostly fattened contractors who run the military, or who represent the interests of the billionaires in California and New York, and the have-nots, mostly Black and immigrant service sector workers who wait on these technocrats of empire.

(JacobSloan – disinfo.com)