World Wide Protest: we still protect the wealthy

Over the weekend, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke the following when he accepted the Jury du Prix Tocqueville Prize in France:

The foregoing observation is especially relevant to our understanding of the challenge facing contemporary America.  Though a democracy, it is becoming a country of socially ominous extremes between the few super rich and the increasingly many who are deprived.  In America today the top 1% of the richest families own around 35% of the entire nation’s wealth, while the bottom 90% own around 25%.   It should be a source of perhaps even greater concern that the majority of all currently serving Congressmen and Senators, and similarly most of the top officials in the executive branch, fall in the category of the very rich, the so-called top 1%.

At the same time, though still a unique super-power, America finds it difficult to cope with the consequences of the increasingly accelerating global changes that are spinning out of control, both on the socio-economic and on the geopolitical levels. Socio-economically, the world is becoming a single playing-field in which 3 dynamic realities increasingly prevail:  globalization, “internetization”, and deregulation. 

Today instant financial transactions involving billions of dollars occur literally in seconds; often essentially speculative in character and unrelated to either technological innovation or new forms of employment,  they create instant wealth on an unprecedented scale for only a few.  Investments and employment opportunities abroad, guided largely by opportunistic self-interest,  now transcend national interests.

Politically, that very same world – despite the seeming concentration of global power in the hands of the very few states with enormous economic and military capacity — is witnessing the dispersal of power.  The West is declining because it lacks the will to unite, while the East is rising but also facing the danger of selfish rivalry and potential conflicts among its principal states. Neither existing national governments nor rudimentary regional arrangements are capable of providing effective discipline, not to mention asserting control, over the autonomous financial-economic universe so recently shaped by globalization, “internetization”, and deregulation.

Brzezinski’s words are sobering if one looks at the news of the past year, both here and abroad.  His entire speech can be read at the CSIS website.  Many Americans have become disturbed by the fact that the extremely wealthy have become so powerful politically, especially behind the scenes.  George Soros and the Koch Brothers have become symbols of manipulation of both money and politics.  While people like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and Steve Jobs have had the reputation for being great philanthropists who have given billions back to those less fortunate, how many others continue to pad their own pockets?

Brzezinski feels we need to make those very rich more transparent.  Who are they and what do they do for others?  More controls are needed over hedge funds and banking according to Brzezinski.  He calls for social awakening so that more people are are of those holding great wealth; the 1%.

Meanwhile, in addition to discovering who is holding the wealth, we need to determine what these wealth holders do to give back.  We need to ask ourselves why our politics are to protect these people and what influence these people have on those very worker bees who are out there protecting the wealthy.  We already see that members of Congress are part of the elite subset and you had better believe they are going to be protecting themselves.

Not every rich person is a jobs producer.  Not even close.  Many people use money to make even more money in investments and speculation.  Show me the jobs that have been  produced.  You can’t.  There are too few.  Some of those being called “jobs producers” aren’t producing jobs with their personal wealth.  They are using corporate money.  Anyone can do that.  Steve Jobs is a good example there.  He was paid $1 per year. 

Americans need to pull the wool from over their eyes and see that the term “job producers” is just another gimmick.    Protecting job producers is an easy fix.  Write  in tax code that protects them when and if they produce a job.  Deal done.  Now, let them pay their fair share, because they aren’t.  Who was it that said something about the rich killing the poor?  Oh yes,   Zbigniew Brzezinski  who said:  “Its easier to kill a million people…than it is to control them”