The global plutocracy

[Lord Beria3]

On the eve of the annual spectacle of parasitic wealth and power that is the World Economic Forum in the Alpine resort town of Davos, Switzerland, the Oxfam charity has issued a report warning of the unprecedented growth of social inequality throughout the world.

Describing a planet in the malevolent grip of a handful of plutocrats, the report states that the richest 85 people in the world control as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the world's population—3.5 billion people! It notes that the richest 1 percent today controls 46 percent of the world’s wealth. Oxfam writes: “The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion… 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.”

While the wealth of the world’s billionaires has doubled, there are today over 1 billion people living on less than a dollar per day, and nearly half the world’s population, more than 3 billion people, subsist on less than $2.50 per day.

There is no parallel in human history to the immense concentration of wealth that exists today, nor to the extremes of parasitism and decadence that constitute the “new normal.” Contemporary capitalism—what the ruling class and its political and media flunkies call the “free enterprise system”—has created a world in which every policy decision is dictated by the need to protect and increase the wealth of an infinitesimal portion of the world’s population.

This global plutocracy—by definition, a society governed by the wealthy—generates a huge and ever-increasing portion of the ruling elite’s wealth not from the production of useful products and expansion of society’s productive capacities, but from the manipulation of money, speculation and outright swindling—essentially criminal activities that are destructive of the productive forces.

A few hundred people, backed by an army of bribed politicians, academic apologists, intelligence spooks, experts of all sorts and the repressive force of the military and police, hold civilization by the throat and threaten to destroy it to satisfy their insatiable greed.

This social—or, to be more precise, anti-social—element is virulently hostile to the people, contemptuous of democratic rights, and militaristic
Petrified at the prospect of social revolution, they are putting in place the infrastructure of a global totalitarian police state, as revealed by the revelations of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Competing cliques of plutocrats, using their national states as bases of operation, invade weaker countries and occupy and plunder them without mercy, inflicting death and destruction. In the struggle against their rivals for control of territories, markets, resources and cheap labor, they turn the planet into an armed camp and threaten to plunge mankind into a third world war, this time with the prospect of nuclear annihilation.

The rich and the super-rich will be on display this week at Davos, the yearly event at which government officials and leaders of global agencies such as the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund come to pay obeisance to billionaire bankers and corporate CEOs.

The global financial elite is preparing, in the words of one commentator, “to jet to the World Economic Forum 5,000 feet up in the Swiss Alps in their helicopters, mink-clad trophy wives in tow.” The cost of attending the conference, estimated by CNN at around $40,000 per person, is about 50 percent greater than what a typical worker in the US makes in a year.

This conference has announced that the “problem” of social inequality will be a central topic of discussion.

The masses all over the world are becoming increasingly outraged over this criminal layer, which they hate and despise. It is only a matter of time before that anger is transformed into action.

The moneyed elite is haunted by the specter of social upheaval and revolution. They received a taste of it three years ago in the mass working class uprising that brought down the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt. They have seen social explosions in Europe and anticipations of coming upheavals in the United States.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01 ... s-j21.html

You don't need to be a Marxist to feel some kind of horror and astonishment at the massive inequalities in our current system and wonder if it is socially sustainable?

Are revolutions coming? I suspect that social unrest in some form is coming in many parts of the world.

[UndercoverElephant]

Are revolutions coming? I suspect that social unrest in some form is coming in many parts of the world.

"Social unrest" is already a regular feature of life in many parts of the world.

Are revolutions coming?

Yes, eventually. They will come to the western world when the majority of the population can no longer be pacified with Chinese-manufactured trinkets and cheap television programmes. They will come when it becomes obvious that living standards are going to continue falling as far into the future as anybody can see, but that the richest 5% are still living a life of luxury which the vast majority of them did little or nothing to deserve.

I would not be surprised if it takes the form of a new sort of terrorism. Or maybe just a cultural change whereby anybody who is rich is seen as "fair game". One way or another, it is going to get nasty.

[vtsnowedin]

I consider the "Arab spring" as the first of the revolutions caused by peak oil. There will be more unrest there as they have found no solution to their real problem which is their still growing population running smack into the export land model. There will be others as the problem spreads.

[vtsnowedin]

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of how those 85 rich people use their wealth. How much of it is gold sitting in a vault or art hanging on a wall and how much of it is productive farm land, hospitals, plant and equipment, commercial aircraft and ships delivering goods etc. to be used by us the consumer.

[UndercoverElephant]

More and more, it is property and land. There are currently a greater proportion of property transactions for cash than at any previous time.

Although if you are one of those 85 then I suspect there is a limit to how much property and land you can rely on. Their wealth is tied to the fiat money system. It has to be, because there is far more paper/digital "wealth" than real underlying physical wealth.

[PS_RalphW]

When it comes to land, you own as much as you can afford to defend, and that ultimately depends on who you can encourage to defend it on your behalf, and to relinquish the produce from it to your control. Ultimately all ownership is a matter of social control. If people who physically surround or occupy or defend the land do not recognise your ownership, then you will starve. No one owns anything except that they can physically control directly.

[Little John]

When it comes to land, you own as much as you can afford to defend, and that ultimately depends on who you can encourage to defend it on your behalf, and to relinquish the produce from it to your control. Ultimately all ownership is a matter of social control. If people who physically surround or occupy or defend the land do not recognise your ownership, then you will starve. No one owns anything except that they can physically control directly.

That's why, when the only land one could defend was that which could be travelled by horse, we had the feudal system. What better, if you are a large landowner, than to stick a policeman on your land every few square acres who would, free of charge, defend your land for you, and even pay you in produce from it for the privilege. This, in turn meant a landowner also benefited from having the land kept up in good order since it was in the interests of both the owner and the tenant.

Nowadays, with high levels of mechanisation, all the people have been pushed off the land and into the cities. This has only worked due to the cheap food that can be shipped into the cities. However, if times get really tough in the future, then landowners may be economically motivated to re-populate their lands with tenants because, although this kind of low mechanistic farming is very uncompetitive compared to machinery at present, it will be a lot easier to defend the land and it's produce and so may prove to be the most profitable arrangement in the end.

All of the above is really a post-collapse speculation. We have a long and very hard road to travel yet and my life will almost certainly have been and gone before we arrive at that destination.

[eatyourveg]

' However, if times get really tough in the future, then landowners may be economically motivated to re-populate their lands with tenants because, although this kind of low mechanistic farming is very uncompetitive compared to machinery at present, it will be a lot easier to defend the land and it's produce and so may prove to be the most profitable arrangement in the end.'

Which, as it just so happens, is my plan. But times are nowhere near tough enough yet to implement. I'm not particularly looking to create a serf class (I'm too late for that, those 85 people beat me to it), but I am putting in place a small scale 'community garden' affair. The funny thing is, those that will find the arrangements I am making useful wet themselves laughing at the the thought that such a thing might ever be necessary. Hoho.

[Little John]

' However, if times get really tough in the future, then landowners may be economically motivated to re-populate their lands with tenants because, although this kind of low mechanistic farming is very uncompetitive compared to machinery at present, it will be a lot easier to defend the land and it's produce and so may prove to be the most profitable arrangement in the end.'

Which, as it just so happens, is my plan. But times are nowhere near tough enough yet to implement. I'm not particularly looking to create a serf class (I'm too late for that, those 85 people beat me to it), but I am putting in place a small scale 'community garden' affair. The funny thing is, those that will find the arrangements I am making useful wet themselves laughing at the the thought that such a thing might ever be necessary. Hoho.

Actually, with regards to the post-collapse agricultural production scenario I outlined, this is likely to be seen a lot sooner, albeit on a less severe scale, in things like urban allotments/community gardens. I've already been hearing local stories of people nicking food from allotments over the last year. That kind of thing would have been unheard of and/or laughable 5 or 10 years ago.

[vtsnowedin]

[quote="stevecook172001"]What better, if you are a large landowner, than to stick a policeman on your land every few square acres who would, free of charge, defend your land for you, and even pay you in produce from it for the privilege. This, in turn meant a landowner also benefited from having the land kept up in good order since it was in the interests of both the owner and the tenant.

quote]
Square acre? what about the triangular ones or the circular ones? As an acre already has been squared if you square it again does it become a cube?

[Lord Beria3]

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of how those 85 rich people use their wealth. How much of it is gold sitting in a vault or art hanging on a wall and how much of it is productive farm land, hospitals, plant and equipment, commercial aircraft and ships delivering goods etc. to be used by us the consumer.

As UE says, the majority of the wealth of the ultra-rich is in paper wealth (shares, etc) rather than hard assets like antiques, gold, art etc.

That is hardly surprising and maybe of some confort. As growth falters and eventually collapses (due to Peak oil/Peak energy) in the coming decades, much of that paper wealth will disappear into a massive black hole.

The smart money will move early and massively into hard assets, in particular farmland, but many will only move once the super-boom in these hard assets are already well underway.

For the poorer sections of the population, it will be much worse.

[vtsnowedin]

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of how those 85 rich people use their wealth. How much of it is gold sitting in a vault or art hanging on a wall and how much of it is productive farm land, hospitals, plant and equipment, commercial aircraft and ships delivering goods etc. to be used by us the consumer.

As UE says, the majority of the wealth of the ultra-rich is in paper wealth (shares, etc) rather than hard assets like antiques, gold, art etc.

That is hardly surprising and maybe of some confort. As growth falters and eventually collapses (due to Peak oil/Peak energy) in the coming decades, much of that paper wealth will disappear into a massive black hole.

The smart money will move early and massively into hard assets, in particular farmland, but many will only move once the super-boom in these hard assets are already well underway.

For the poorer sections of the population, it will be much worse.

I would not discount "paper shares" so rapidly. After all a share of BP or Exxon is indeed a share in the assets of the corporation and worth the book value of the stock. People will not want to eat gold post peak but they surely will want some of the oil Exxon or BP can deliver.

[emordnilap]

The rich are becoming far richer - even during a so-called 'recession' - and the growing poor growing poorer. This is not a conspiracy. But don't it look like one? The US would probably call it democracy. As in, "one dollar, one vote".

[emordnilap]

Ha! Coincidence?

We appear to possess an almost limitless ability to sit back and watch as political life is seized by plutocrats, as the biosphere is trashed, as public services are killed or given to corporations; as workers are dragooned into zero-hour contracts. Though there are a few wonderful exceptions, on the whole protest is muted and alternatives are shrugged away without examination. How did we acquire this superhuman passivity?

[RenewableCandy]

What better, if you are a large landowner, than to stick a policeman on your land every few square acres who would, free of charge, defend your land for you, and even pay you in produce from it for the privilege. This, in turn meant a landowner also benefited from having the land kept up in good order since it was in the interests of both the owner and the tenant.

quote]
Square acre? what about the triangular ones or the circular ones? As an acre already has been squared if you square it again does it become a cube?

Circular acres don't tesselate and triangular acres are Bad Feng Shui. But the latter do seem rather common 'round here, if you look at the shapes of typical road networks and the spaces in between.