The Kings Of Capitalism Are Finally Worried
Wed 24 Apr 2019 | The kings of capitalism are finally worried about the growing gap between rich and poor
GUARDIAN.UK: This month Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest hedge fund, an investor in low-wage employers including Walmart and KFC, and a man worth about $18bn according to Forbes, became the latest in a bank of billionaires to go public about his fears of widening income inequality.
If you are a follower of this blog, you surely recall the article titled "200 People Control $50 Trillion". Without a doubt, Dalio is one of "them".
The yawning gap between rich and poor is a “national emergency”, Dalio wrote in an 8,000-plus-word blogpost on LinkedIn (where else?) that poses an “existential risk for the US”.
See the bottom page for the LinkedIn reference. After having helped suck up all the sweat and natural resources on a global scale, Dalio is having a moment of faith, but of course will not take the blame. Instead he criticizes most capitalists and socialists, accusing them of being either gluttonous or ignorant respectively. Yet, he admits that capitalism is not working well for most Americans.
What millionaires and billionaires should do is to give back their assets to the planet to fix it. So that we would no longer have any wealth conglomerate opposing the startup of a money-free society.
Dalio joins the JP Morgan boss, Jamie Dimon, investment guru Warren Buffett and even the Blackstone chairman, Stephen Schwarzman, “private equity’s designated villain” and usually an unapologetic 0.01%er, in publicly worrying that income inequality has stretched the US body politic to breaking point.
Pretending compassion is a tactic of theirs, but they still rake up millions weekly from their own financial operations. If you want to have a bigger scope of how business is conducted in high finance, read The New Yorker article below, and which is quite obscene since most of us struggle to pay the bills. Actually, Schwarzman contends that the real problem was that those not belonging to his wealth bracket were suffering from “income insufficiency”. And guess what? He advocates for a higher minimum wage, which is a complete farce.
Charles Geisst (author of Wall Street: A History and professor of economics and finance at Manhattan College): The last time the 1% felt so under pressure was probably back in the 1930s as the US came to terms with the Great Depression, said Geisst
That is where we are headed, and it will be the mother of all crises, way worse than the great depression.
How sincere the 1% are about helping the 99% rather than themselves may be up for debate but it is pretty clear that the billionaires do believe there is a crisis. Dalio, in particular, offers a startling deconstruction of the state we are in even if it is somewhat spoiled by his “solutions” – more leadership, bipartisan cooperation, accountability, private-public partnerships, yadda, yadda, yadda – sound like the sort of non-policy policies trotted that helped get us into this mess.
They will start pushing for Universal Basic Income very soon. But we also know that war is potentially on the menu, so let's get ready for that too. The elites have no other plans than saving their bank accounts from a revolution.
Dimon too has, unsurprisingly, rejected any radical reordering of a system he agrees is broken, calling socialism a “disaster” that leads to “stagnation, corruption and often worse”.
Well, EC have already stressed that countless of times, but we are in this mess because of
- a monopoly on value
- speculation on credit
- deceitful marketing
- blind overconsumption'
- ignorance of the above
And without these ingredients, monetarism falls apart. In the long run, it is doomed anyway of course, but such ingredients multiply the conflicts of interest and thus hide relatively well what is really going on.
Dalio started investing at the age of 12 using money from his newspaper round and a job as a caddy and is now a self-made billionaire who clearly has a genius for making money.
The money making mentality is the dark energy that is consuming this world. The psychopathy to own life. That very mentality has shaped the pyramid scheme preying on humanity since ever. It only is since the last 2 decades that we have become fully aware that there won't be any escape this time. If 5G ever becomes fully implemented there won't be a country to flee to, nor safe haven for 80% of world population. And crypto-fluctuations are very volatile.
In a recent interview, Scaramucci warned that massive inequality has “crippled” societies in Latin America. “You don’t wanna be the guy living in your McMansion in your barbed-wired security compound while your neighbours are struggling,” he said.
Right, that scenario is likely... but there is another one: that humans unite and start doing extraordinary things, like quitting hoarding, their luxury shopping habits for example. We don't need to do all the exact same things but we must act in unison. Withdrawing enough cash to live on for 2 weeks to slow down the flow of digital money for example... etc... etc... A future blog will tackle what we can do at our own level. Stay tuned!
RELATED LINKS
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-how-capitalism-needs-reformed-parts-1-2-ray-dalio/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/11/the-birthday-party-2
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/18/income-insufficiency-steve-schwarzman-rich-poor-gap
EARTH CUSTODIANS BLOG: https://earthcustodians.net/blog/
To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.
Brought to you by @tts. If you find it useful please consider upvoting this reply.
Curated for #informationwar (by @wakeupnd)
Ways you can help the @informationwar!
Richie worried enough he could do philanthropy. Put some pingers into things good for his community. Easy to be a hero and win a lot of support too for doin good. Chur.