{"id":40798,"date":"2014-03-17T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2014-03-17T12:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=40798"},"modified":"2015-05-05T22:10:56","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T21:10:56","slug":"the-rich-complain-that-we-do-not-love-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/03\/the-rich-complain-that-we-do-not-love-them\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rich Complain That We Do Not Love Them"},"content":{"rendered":"

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said \u201cThe rich are different from you or me\u201d, yet in his days, in the early years of the 20th<\/sup> century, the rich were not subject\u00a0to public scrutiny, and were generally an object of\u00a0envy, not resentment.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to the 21st<\/sup> century and the Occupy Wall Street movement,\u00a0which first took to the streets in September 2011 \u00a0in\u00a0New York\u2019s Wall Street\u00a0financial district, on behalf of the 99 percent of Americans\u00a0(who possess 60 percent of the national wealth) against the\u00a0one percent that possess 40 percent, to denounce growing\u00a0social inequality. The success of the movement\u2019s popular action resonated throughout the world and so now the rich are striking back.<\/p>\n

Tom Perkins is their leader, an 82-year-old with a net worth of 8 billion dollars. He owns a 1,600 square metre penthouse\u00a0in San Francisco and has just bought a yacht worth 110 million\u00a0dollars. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal in January this year, Perkins compared the \u201cprogressive war on the American one percent\u201d of wealthiest Americans to the\u00a0Holocaust, comparing the\u00a0Occupy Wall Street movement\u2019s \u201cdemonisation of the rich\u201d to\u00a0Nazi Germany\u2019s anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n

So, the rich really are different from you and me, and they are growing so much that it would be a pity not to join them.<\/p>\n

A month later, Perkins publicly stated that in elections the number of votes a person can cast should be proportional to the amount of taxes that that person pays. And he is stirring his peers to\u00a0\u201ccome out\u201d.<\/p>\n

Bud Konheim, CEO of luxury fashion company Nicole Miller, has done just that with his message to the 99 percent \u2013 stop complaining. \u201cOur 99 percent \u00a0are the one percent in the rest of\u00a0the world \u2026 The guy that\u2019s making, oh my God, he\u2019s making 35,000 dollars a year \u2026 Why don\u2019t we try that out in India or some countries we can\u2019t even name. China, any place the guy is wealthy.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Mark, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley, which was\u00a0rescued with public funds, is defending the\u00a0extravagant salaries of corporation executives. He has just made a statement in favour\u00a0of James Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase who\u00a0received 20 million dollars at a time when his bank had lost several million in wrong investments in sovereign funds and paid a penalty close to 12\u00a0billion dollars for fraudulent practices.<\/p>\n

According to financial\u00a0sources, Wall Street has spent 600 million dollars in lobbies, to try to deter the action of the regulator in\u00a0implementing the rules approved by the U.S. Congress\u00a0for a somewhat stricter control, hoping to avoid a\u00a0repetition of the financial meltdown of 2008 which, combined with the European crisis of\u00a0sovereign funds, has brought unemployment to young generations everywhere.<\/p>\n

For those who think that in reality the vote of a\u00a0billionaire is equal to the vote of an unemployed person,\u00a0this counterattack by the one percent is legitimate. The only problem is that, apart from their different weight in\u00a0politics, I wonder it the same na\u00efve persons would\u00a0also believe that rich and poor pay taxes in the\u00a0same proportion. According to Tax Justice\u00a0Network (TJN), an organisation that campaigns to curb\u00a0tax avoidance, fiscal paradises now hold close to\u00a0eight percent of the gross world product (the U.S. has\u00a0a gross domestic product close to half of that), and TJN underlines\u00a0how big capital spurs corruption.<\/p>\n

What is corruption? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, corruption is \u201cdishonesty or fraudulent conduct by\u00a0those in power\u201d. And financial institutions and\u00a0the one percent are certainly in power. According to TJN, the amount embezzled over the last 15 years is a\u00a0staggering 30 trillion dollars, or half of the\u00a0world\u2019s annual gross product. In China,\u00a0four trillion is thought to have disappeared between 2000 and\u00a02011, much of it funnelled to fiscal paradises. In\u00a0Russia, the figure is around one trillion and in the European Union 1.2 trillion.<\/p>\n

All over the world, banks have been\u00a0fined at unprecedented levels for fraud and corruption. Reading the U.S. Senate report (2009) on\u00a0the level of corruption in UBS, Switzerland\u2019s largest bank, is like entering the world of crime novels. The 176-page report details the extent UBS went to in helping U.S. clients\u00a0hide billions in assets.<\/p>\n

UBS paid a fine of\u00a0780 million dollars, and more has to come.\u00a0In an appeal for a world\u00a0corruption police force published in the New York Times last month, Alexander Lebedev reported the theft of five billion dollars from Bank of Moscow, four billion from BTA Bank and AMT Bank, four billion from Rosukrenergo, three billion from Globex and Sviaz Bank, two billion from Russian Agricultural Bank, one billion from Rosagroleasing, and one billion from VEFK Bank. According to Lebedev, a former senior KGB official and now businessman, and owner of\u00a0the London Evening Standard and the Independent, \u201cif someone steals one billion dollars,\u00a0and heads for an offshore haven, it is\u00a0practically impossible to take legal action.\u201d Like\u00a0all Russian oligarchs, he certainly has considerable inside knowledge!<\/p>\n

Anyhow, there is no need for the one percent to be concerned. In spite of their complaints, they are doing\u00a0better than ever. Just read this year\u2019s Wealth Report,\u00a0the annual compendium of all things rich from\u00a0Knight Frank, the property management firm. Over\u00a0the past decade, the<\/p>\n

super-rich have swelled by\u00a059 percent, and billionaires by 80 percent: they now stand at 1,682. Those with assets of more than 30\u00a0million dollars number around 167,000, equivalent to the population of\u00a0a sizable town. In a recent poll, 75 percent of the famous 0.1 percent said that they increased their wealth in the last year.<\/p>\n

By 2030,\u00a0China is expected to have 322 billionaires, more than Britain, Russia, France and Switzerland combined:\u00a0finally proof that socialism, albeit in its\u00a0Chinese version, is superior to capitalism. Sovereign\u00a0countries take note. Malta is proposing to\u00a0offer its passport to those who give 650,000 euros,\u00a0with no residency requirement. Malta is part of\u00a0the European Union, so with its passport you can\u00a0go everywhere. Spain and Portugal are offering\u00a0residency, even with limited time, in their country if you make substantial investments, and Latvia\u00a0and Estonia are now following. The U.S.\u00a0gave 7,641 investors an immigrant visa in 2012, and 80 percent of these went to Chinese investors.<\/p>\n

So, the rich really are different from you and me, and they are growing so much that it would be a pity not to join them. The market is now the basis for democracy \u2013 anybody can make it, it\u2019s just a lack of will if we\u2019re still part of the 99 percent!<\/p>\n

__________________________<\/p>\n

Roberto Savio is founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and publisher of Other News.<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 ipsnews.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said \u201cThe rich are different from you or me\u201d, yet in his days, in the early years of the 20th century, the rich were not subject to public scrutiny, and were generally an object of envy, not resentment. Fast forward to the 21st century and the Occupy Wall Street movement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capitalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}