The Market World Of The 0.001% And Their Phoney Crusade

earthcustodians (67)in #philosophy • 5 years ago (edited)

Earth Custodians definitely agree with the author: the elites treat symptoms, not root causes, which they have created – it does not change the fundamentals of what afflicts us. In this sense, the elites prevent any meaningful reform. The article below is pretty long but it IS worth the read. We give it 2 thumbs up!

The new elite’s phoney crusade to save the world – without changing anything. Today’s titans of tech and finance want to solve the world’s problems, as long as the solutions never, ever threaten their own wealth and power.

GUARDIAN.K JANUARY 2019: A successful society is a progress machine. It takes in the raw material of innovations and produces broad human advancement. America’s machine is broken. The same could be said of others around the world. And now many of the people who broke the progress machine are trying to sell us their services as repairmen.

EARTH CUSTODIANS: there is this "us vs them" at play between Europe and America that often drives Europeans to blame the US for almost anything, but they will rarely admit that most American wealthy families are from European descent and still have deep ties with the old continent. It is like the left and right arms of a body, meaning that both sides act in concerto.

For instance, the average pretax income of the top 10th of Americans has doubled since 1980, that of the top 1% has more than tripled, and that of the top 0.001% has risen more than sevenfold – even as the average pretax income of the bottom half of Americans has stayed almost precisely the same.

The Davos and Bilderberg Crowd represents ultra top of 0.001%... Monetarism is a system only rewards money creation, regardless of the worthiness of the ideas. And generally bad ideas take the lead because wealth is coercive. Either one wants more money to fight what is perceived as an obstacle or ally oneself with the prestige of power to earn self-confidence and recognition. If you have missed a previous blog of ours, please check out: The Lords of Creation: The History of America’s 1 Percent (link below)

Globally, over the same period, according to the World Inequality Report, the top 1% captured 27% of new income, while the bottom half of humanity – presently, more than 3 billion people – saw 12% of it.

Since we started our blog, EC have restlessly demonstrated that there is never any new wealth created because Earth's wealth remains invariable, the planet has fixed output and input working along with biodiversity, which is why we destroy the environment, because we force that very biodiversity to produce more than it actually can. Industrialization and technology made that possible, but the concept of maximizing the extraction of resources for profit was inherently born along with the inception of money. This means that we have been wrong for a very... very long while.

The tools for becoming an entrepreneur appear to be more accessible than ever, for the student who learns coding online or the Uber driver – but the share of young people who own a business has fallen by two-thirds since the 1980s

This is what is pernicious: competition kills entrepreneurship on one end but praises the killers on the other. We cannot have it both ways. This is a deadly paradox that will have to go.

Those raised near the top of the income ladder now have a 70% chance of realising the dream. Meanwhile, those close to the bottom, more in need of elevation, have a 35% chance of climbing above their parents’ station. And it is not only progress and money that the fortunate monopolise: rich American men, who tend to live longer than the average citizens of any other country, now live 15 years longer than poor American men, who endure only as long as men in Sudan and Pakistan.

It is obvious that the model is deeply and irreparably flawed. But poverty in EU is too rising fast, the French Yellow Vests is a movement reminding the West that the "wealth effect" since after WW2 was a massive illusion. And we can go back much farther than that of course.

This week Italy threatened NGOs rescuing migrants at sea would be fined €50,000. This is what happens when following the profit mantra. Encouraging human smuggling networks then let the victims drown. The system is rigged and needs to go. Simple.

New data published this week by Oxfam showed that the world’s 2,200 billionaires grew 12% wealthier in 2018, while the bottom half of humanity got 11% poorer.

The psychosis of success. We can see the results now… the pursuit of the purpose of life is what needs to be taught to kids.

But in recent years a great many fortunate Americans have also tried something else, something both laudable and self-serving... They know the problem, and they want to be part of the solution. Actually, they want to lead the search for solutions. They believe their solutions deserve to be at the forefront of social change. They may join or support movements initiated by ordinary people looking to fix aspects of their society. More often, though, these elites start initiatives of their own, taking on social change as though it were just another stock in their portfolio or corporation to restructure.

Problem. Reaction. Solution. Initiatives by the wealthy are mere smokescreens designed to extract more money from taxpayers or/and further wealth consolidation. One thing is certain though: no real solution will be found by pouring money into it. What we need is a change of lifestyle and to begin respecting the environment, learn that our self-serving attitude is at the core of the problem.

This genre of elites believes and promotes the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.

This is ludicrous, there is nothing more coercive that the so-called free market! As long as free association remains possible, nothing will change and to end the competition model, monetarism must go. Monetarism empowers logical fallacies. We have stressed this several times already but validating the consistency of our train of thoughts is essential to us.

This is what I call MarketWorld – an ascendant power elite defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government and thinktanks. It has its own thinkers, whom it calls “thought leaders”, its own language, and even its own territory – including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated and translated into action. MarketWorld is a network and community, but it is also a culture and state of mind.

This is brilliantly explained. We couldnt'do better. Monetarism glues all these cliques together.

Which raises a question for all of us: are we ready to hand over our future to the plutocratic elites, one supposedly world-changing initiative at a time? Are we ready to call participatory democracy a failure, and to declare these other, private forms of change-making the new way forward? Is the decrepit state of American self-government an excuse to work around it and let it further atrophy? Or is meaningful democracy, in which we all potentially have a voice, worth fighting for?

Very pertinent question but which will never find an answer as long as We The People don't begin to seriously cooperate. The abyssal failure merely evidences that we have to take the matter in our own hands instead.

If democracy depends on the data circulating or available, democracy is worth peanuts and totally irrelevant. Moreover we do not need democracy if teaching kids the Trivium and the Quadrivium, because then people know how to analyze issues and look for solutions independently/collaboratively instead of waiting for the powers that be to come up with more shenanigans.

But we should also recall Oscar Wilde’s words about such elite helpfulness being “not a solution” but “an aggravation of the difficulty”. More than a century ago, in an age of churn like our own, he wrote: “Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.”

Exactly, that is where the left and the right political parties complement one another. The good slave owners give a false sense of ethical behavior while slavery is a humanitarian crime. No need to use the past tense here as the servitude of the many is awfully systemic.

This is the absolute bottom line: freedom requires a collaboration between free minds. But so far, and for centuries long, society has made sure that we only regard going through the day as our most important duty.

Man's purpose was not designed to "survive and die". But the death of the economy is going to show that materialism was only worth it to teach us what is WRONG with it.

MORE/VERY LONG READ
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jan/22/the-new-elites-phoney-crusade-to-save-the-world-without-changing-anything

The Market World Of The 0.001% And Their Phoney Crusade

The new elite’s phoney crusade to save the world – without changing anything. Today’s titans of tech and finance want to solve the world’s problems, as long as the solutions never, ever threaten their own wealth and power.

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