Submitted by Terence Blackett
“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you but rather what you can do for your country.” These were the immortal words of John F. Kennedy in his inaugural speech of January 20th 1961. Fifty-two years later, governments around the world are trying hard to kill major portions of their populations through massive tax hikes, predatory laws and the heavy-handedness of invasion of privacy.
Many would argue today that governments are merely lackeys of BIG BUSINESS* and the harbingers of nefarious capitalist organizations hell-bent on sucking blood out of stone. But we won’t get carried away with vernacular venom at this stage but remain focused on the issues at hand.
WEALTH* – how do we define it? Is there an overarching definition which would encapsulate all dimensions of what is a very complex social entity? The answer may surprise you! But for the sake of clarity – let us put our Google glasses on and focus on the issues which matter to most of us. Top of the list: Food; Health; Land; Trade; Taxes; Climate Change; Human Rights but especially Women’s Rights.
Any discussion on wealth must keep in mind these aspects of the narrative. Political leaders refuse to address the real fundamental underlying issues which confronts the poor and as a result, glaring income gap inequalities exists between the wealth of the “haves” and the abysmal poverty of the “have-nots”.
Let’s examine the facts!
The primary question that we must be answered for there to be any proper debate which will engender revolutionary change is: – “how is it that the elite 1% control so much of the world’s vast resources? Let us try not to get bogged down in a form of geographical miasma – looking at one country (America, for example) as against the global trends in other countries – for we all know that America has glaring wealth inequalities but she does not lead the world in this respect. China and India actually do at the moment!
India is probably the most wealth-unequal nation in the world. According to Reuters, the top 10% of India’s population owns up to 50% of the country’s wealth. 1.8 million households earn $100,000 or more a year, spending 10% of it on luxury goods. A 2008 article in the UK Guardian newspaper suggest that “the concentration of wealth among the super-rich is particularly striking where Mumbai alone has more billionaires than all of Scandinavia, but half the 13 million population lives in slums.”
India boast of having some 53 billionaires to a population of 1 billion people. Their wealth is equivalent to 31% of India’s GDP. India ranks 4th in world in the number of billionaires; after the US, Russia, and Germany – however, India’s billionaires are richer than Russia’s or Germany’s. India is also ahead of Japan, China, UK, & France. (cf. Reuters) On the other hand, 80% of India’s poor live on less than $5 a day and the “Untouchables” a lot less!
China however is not as transparent. Research shows that there are now 1,020,000 millionaires in China and growing. This is a national record! But there is also 63,500 “super-rich” Chinese. The report also estimates that for every “known” millionaire, another two exist under the radar. The average Chinese millionaire is 39 years old, and 60% of them are male. 50% of Chinese millionaires are business owners, 20% are professional investors, and 15% are real estate investors and high-level senior executives. The Unites States has 408 billionaires and China ranks second with 317. It is argued that these numbers maybe underestimated as some billionaires deliberately hide their true wealth because of the illegal nature of their businesses. Yet in China, the Communist machinery does a PR job to cloak corruption and to make the poor relatively invisible.
Some basic research done through the UN has shown that wealth inequality is more insidious than we originally thought. The research showed that the richest global 00000.1% actually controlled 94% of the planet’s wealth, while 80% of the world poorest, had no wealth at all – while the richest 1.9% of the world’s inhabitants have more assets than 50% of the world populations – where basic physiological amenities like medicines do not exist for vast swathes of the world’s populace.
Let’s take it even further along this malevolent continuum so light can be shed on the numbers. Of the 7+ billion inhabitants on planet earth, a global pot of some US$230 Trillion of wealth exist (excluding the toxic derivatives & printed phony money) – distribution sees the so-called 1% controlling a staggering 45% of it, while the 80% of the world’s population controls a meagre, paltry 7%. To put all this into context, according to the maths of Forbes.org and others – the richest 300 persons on earth have more wealth than the poorest 3 billion inhabitants which would include (the population of countries like Brazil, the USA, China & India combined).
Sociologists and historians argue that 200 years ago, at the height of the 18th century Industrial Revolution, rich emerging countries were only 3 times wealthier than poorer countries. By the end of the Colonial period of the early to mid-20th century modernist period – wealth inequalities had burgeoned to a staggering 30% with that parity reaching a mind-blowing 80% today in the 21st century.
This Industrial Era was the engine room that set the stage for what we are seeing today as lubricious, rampant, predatory capitalism. Yet with all the so-called trade, aid and hand-outs from governments – how do we explain these gross incongruities and inequalities?
The UN argues that rich Western countries (i.e. multinational corporations) are taking almost a US$1 Trillion a year out of poorer countries due to unfair pricing and dodgy trade practices. Even the concept of FAIR TRADE* is a misnomer given that it is often a pretext for predatory pricing, oligopoly and unrestricted monopoly.
To exacerbate what is an already ignominious climate of toxic imbalances – DEBT* servicing of loans by poorer countries result in a half a trillion dollars leaving those economies every year. Notwithstanding that unfair practices in trade, poor, unskilled labour out of these countries (who are paid a mere pittance) result in another half trillion dollars migrating to richer countries.
President Ronald Reagan in a State of the Union address on February 18th 1981 cited that “Our nationalDEBT* is approaching $1 trillion. A few weeks ago I called such a figure incomprehensible, and I’ve been trying ever since to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion really is. And the best I could come up with is that if you had a stack of $1,000 bills in your hand only four inches high, you’d be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of $1,000 bills 67 miles high.”
Currently, America’s debt alone stands at, (wait for it), US$13.9, 000,000,000,000 and counting, where (a stack of $100 bills would reach to the planet Mars). Currently global DEBT stands at: $223.3 Trillion, (a stack of $100 bills that would reach to Jupiter) also includes public-sector DEBT of $55.7 Trillion, financial-sector DEBTof $75.3 Trillion and household or corporate DEBT of $92.3 Trillion. (The figures exclude China’s shadow finance and off-balance-sheet financing.) cf. ING Research.
By definition, simple calculus or (as we in Barbados would say Mas*) would suggest that the numbers do not stack up or make much sense. For if global wealth is some 230 trillion dollars and global DEBT is almost 224 trillion – is it any wonder that poor countries are feeling the squeeze from the current fiscal shenanigans of major 1st world economies, Wall Street tyrants and Hedge Fund casino gamblers? Yet governments are in bed with these “crooks” – complicit in this Houdini mirage that is the money markets.
In the crash of 2008, a massive transfer of wealth took place in broad daylight. The world was engineered into believing that if banks and their barons weren’t bailed out that life on planet earth would cease to exist. We were warned that we would be facing a form of moral and social panic not seen since the pillage and sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD70 or the onslaught of the Barbarian hordes of the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Heruli & others who swooped down on Eastern part of Rome in 410 AD and burned her to the ground. Yet as research has shown, since the early post Great Depression years of the late 1930’s, Wall St. CEO’s pay has risen from a mere $800K by the 1970’s to a mindboggling US$5 Million per year currently and that does take into account – perks, stocks ‘n’ shares, dividends and notwithstanding the under-the-table back room deals which earns them extra millions.
At the same time, the average person’s wages in a non-supervisory capacity has fallen from a paltry $32K to $28.3K per year given wage cuts and austerity. So at the pinnacle of the 2008 Stock Market crash, when money supply had saturated the entire system, Wall Street CEO’s and the captains of industry of these giant corporations made themselves “filthy” rich at the expense of the taxpayer by having the US government and other governments bail them out with pay-packages to the tune of some 3 Trillion dollars and counting.
Case in point, Stan O’Neal boss of the beleaguered Merrill Lynch – (ruined beyond recognition) by the wicked practices of an out of control CEO, before it was gobbled up by Bank of America, walked away with a staggering $90 Million bonus & salary package and the board then voted him an additional $115 Million severance based on his share options and other bonuses. All this in broad daylight!
John Thain, O’Neal’s successor, the previous year of 2007 was paid $78 Million and by the Crash of 2008, Merrill Lynch was handed billions of taxpayers’ dollars and he then approved a $3.6 Billion bonus pay-out for himself and other casino high rollers.
Unbelievably, Morgan Stanley, at the height of the 2009 debacle, with soaring unemployment at an astronomic 14% level (numbers denied by the major press) paid it highest earners $14 Billion, with Goldman Sachs on its heels, paying out a staggering $16 Billion to its highest earners.
Yet “GREED” is applauded!!!
Henry Paulsen, who was CEO of Goldman Sachs from 1999 – 2006, the highest paid casino gambler on Wall Street (worth today somewhere in the vicinity of $900 Million); and former George Bush’s Secretary to the Treasury and the chief “FOX” who guarded the hen-house – when he assumed the throne of Treasury Secretary, was forced to sell his almost $500 Million of Goldman stock. But due to a loophole in the Capital Gains Tax law signed by former president George Bush Sr., ended up with a colossal savings of some $50 Million in taxes he should have paid. Yet the poor and the small man can never pass the “smell test”!
This prophesied time narrated by seers, watchers, visionaries and men who saw this cycle coming foretold “Novus Ordo Speclorum” (The New World Order). This order is a new “breed” of demons who like the “frogs” which emanated out of the Bottomless Pit of Revelation Chapter 16 verse 13 are without equal in our world. They are a law on to themselves. They are above politics, economics and religion! They answer to no but LUCIFER himself (that great prince called Satan, the Devil – that great red Dragon) whose sole plan is to control planet earth at any cost!
These men and women decide the roadmap of our lives. Principle amongst them are the crème de la crème, (THE CENTRAL BANKERS) of Bernanke, Draghi & now UK bank chief Carney of Canada. These are the 3 financial unclean spirits, whose job it will be in the next 5 years (if not sooner) to bring the whole world into (ONE) economic union with one currency and here is wisdom folks: “in the days just up ahead, no one will be able to “BUY” or “SELL” unless he has the “MARK” of this “BEAST” system” that is about to unfold.
In Britain, due to the nefarious effects of “quantitative easing” (an excuse to print money out of thin air) with no Gold Standard foundation to rely on (a monetary pillar that was dubiously swept away by Richard “tricky dickey” Nixon on April 15th 1961) has now leveled the playing field for “banksters” to not only print cheap, worthless paper but to also rob the person of the poor; the pension funds of the most shrewd, fiscally-responsible savers in Britain and elsewhere, who are now seeing as much as 50% of their savings either evaporate into thin air or wealth transferred into the pockets of you know who.
Mark Carney’s words (double-speak as we know from people like George Bush Jr.) are indeed dubious, for when he says and I quote: “there is no secret “CABAL” here that is orchestrating things, this is the monetary policy as it is conducted today”… Watch out! If these words, issuing forth as lying spirits from the mouths of false prophets and frog-like spirits whose sole mission is to dupe and kafuffle weak minds into believing nonsense. As any serious “watcher” knows, Basel, Switzerland every year is the stomping ground for these Central Banksters to decide where the world goes next in their Rothschildian orchestrated take-over of the planet’s economic platform.
The current financial system is in a massive “BUBBLE”! Everything from “DEBT”, to interest rates, to credit, to phony money, to housing, to stocks ‘n’ bonds, to food, to even our very own existence on this planet which is undoubtedly on a fiscal cliff peering down into the abyss. All that is to happen now is for one “prick” (no pun intended) to stick these bubbles and the catastrophic domino effect will plunge us all into the final tsunami wave that will usher in the age of ANTICHRIST*… If these are idle words and the writing is not clearly on the wall, then treat this as just the seismic rumblings of a mad man. If it isn’t – (and only you and time can decide if it is or not) then the question is – what can we do to insulate ourselves from the approaching apocalypse?
You decide!!!
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