America’s Ultra Wealthy Have Something to Say: Eeeeek!
The rise of the newly discovered darlings of the media, namely the concerned billionaires and their proxies, has given rise to the chattering class saying many Democrats (and especially candidates) want too much, too soon.
If we can just get back to the good old days of the Obama/Clinton/Bush administrations, the thinking goes, everything will be just fine. In this respect, these acolytes of moderation are no different than the MAGAts.
While the Trump era has been more violent, ugly, and targeted than its predecessors, the same underlying conditions remain. As we remain focused on the circus in DC, the world around us is bubbling in turmoil.
On the streets of Chile, Baghdad, Port-au-Prince, Beirut, Hong Kong, and to a lesser degree in dozens of other nations, both democracies and dictatorships, people are marching. And while their articulated demands may differ in style, the unifying theme is that the institutions supposedly serving the people don’t work.
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch wrote an outstanding essay about this phenomena and how it relates to our current political situation by talking about Chile, where as many as a million people have flooded the streets of Santiago in recent weeks.
Most everything in this column is a re-write/quote of what Bunch had to say. I did it that way so his bosses would be less likely to come after lil ol me for copyright violations. You should read the original. You should subscribe to your local dailies. Good people are trying to send a message about just how dire our situation is.
What started this mass uprising? It was a 30 peso (5 US cents) increase in subway fares.
Americans should be paying a lot closer attention to all of this -- and not just because 50-plus years of U.S. meddling in a capital some 5,000 miles south of Washington have played a key role in getting things to this point.
After taking the advice of America’s conservative economics professors for decades, Chile now has -- according to one survey -- the world’s highest level of income inequality.
No. 2 on that list? The United States. No wonder this nation’s billionaire oligarchs are so worried about the 2020 elections. They ought to be terrified.
The economists brought in to run the show in Chile after Augusto Pinochet seized power in a bloody 1973 coup are, by and large, the same geniuses (and their ideological descendants) who started the free market mantra in the ears of the ultra-wealthy in the United States.
The economists who ran Chile’s economy during the Pinochet era were called “the Chicago Boys” because of their close ties to the University of Chicago and its free-market guru Milton Friedman, who famously said he didn’t see the “evil” in simply giving economic advice to a violent right-wing dictator.
Another under-the-radar American adviser to Chile was University of Virginia Nobel laureate and ultra-conservative James Buchanan, who (as chronicled in Nancy MacLean’s remarkable Democracy in Chains) developed an economic regime of “individual liberty” that favored individuals who were very wealthy and, even more incredibly, was first developed as a stealth way for Southerners to fight school integration after 1954′s Brown v. Board of Education.
In the United States, the reaction to our steady increasing wealth gap has been relatively mild compared to that in other countries. The prosperity doctrine preached by the drivers of the consumer economy and self-denial by many as their economic status declines have left the ballot box as the path to salvation.
Trump’s schemes and his failure as a trade warrior should, by the time the next election rolls around, end the mythology about businessmen running government as a desirable outcome. The tax cuts were, as most have figured out, a joke, except that they left the country even more vulnerable to the next recession. The stock market is NOT the economy. Wages are not increasing. “Choice” is code word for screwing people.
And that reality leads Bunch to his conclusion:
In recent weeks, Wall Street and other big-money political funders have run to their favorite journalists -- who’ve responded with headlines like Politico’s “Corporate America freaks out over Elizabeth Warren” -- and floated delusional, desperation theories that some benevolent billionaire like former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg or some other plutocrat could still enter the 2020 race at 11:58 and somehow save their pampered skins.
“Ninety-seven percent of the people I know in my world are really, really fearful of her,” billionaire Michael Novogratz told Bloomberg (heh) News recently of Warren, but the wealthy acknowledge that every time they attack Warren, Sanders, or their proposals such as a wealth tax to fund social programs like universal prekindergarten, eliminating college debt or universal health care, it only makes the chances for their victory stronger.
That’s because you don’t need to fly a helicopter over the streets of Santiago to see that there’s a lot more of us than there are of them. The Milton Friedmans and the James Buchanans of this world were able to get away for decades with their ridiculous theories that freedom for billionaires would eventually trickle down dollars on regular folks -- until the day we woke up and discovered we didn’t even have enough change for the subway. The fires may have started in the shadow of the Andes, but you can already smell the smoke up on Wall Street.
https://twitter.com/JoshuaHol/status/1191411905614798848?s=20
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