Tech
billionaire Tom Perkins may have expressed a class consciousness archetype for
the rich’s collective unconscious fear that people of the world who
aren’t Ultra High Net Worth individuals might awaken from their dogmatic
slumber and send the rich who control most of the world’s approximate 250
trillion dollars of capital assets to a new Auschwitz rather than Davos, St.
Moritz or wherever it is the rich skink off to for plotting hostile takeovers and
leveraged buy outs of the remaining non-networked aspects of the free world
economy.
For
the .6% that control most capital assets the chance of being removed from
wealth and sent naked to gas chambers could be a recurring though vague nightmare
almost as bad as a 90% tax rate that could restore the world environment, space
exploration and buy new shoes for orphan Annie. Who can say the French
Revolution couldn’t happen again with a mobile snappers hydraulic guillotine bringing
supply-on-demand chop shops to lop off the heads of planetary misers? It’s not
the sort of thing the happy poor think about generally. At least an Auschwitz
isn’t going to happen since there are so few people with that big a pile of wealth
on Earth- they could stay in a couple of Marriots and await ultra-fast snappers
without spending much..
http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
1426 billionaires
Since
Tom Perkins brought the subject up though I make ask, what use are
billionaires? Is the world better off without them? Are they a net gyp? Do they contribute more to
the world economy positively or are they really net repressors of competition
through networking? Though there is a lot of good tech product that development
could happen in an infinite number of alterative ways so different as to make
it seem like a different world. Maybe one that is more fair, secure and meaningful
to a majority instead of a minority .6% in a UHNW class. Maybe a poll could
determine popular opinion on the question of should the rich should be
relocated to a concentration camp like Davos with no exit (not the Sartre
play)?
If
billionaires control the world economy through networking corporate ownership
then they comprise a discrete monopoly that has evolved its form over the monopolistic
corporate world of the era of F.D.R. Instead of a corporation such as Microsoft
being viewed as a monopoly now and then that dominates a business area, or as a
state supported quasi-monopoly such as the big Wall Street Banks circa
2008-2009 the modern monopolists concentrate capital power owning everything as
a class through networking, speed of light trading in dark pools and purchase
of political influence and favorable legislation such as tax cuts to
‘stimulate’ there economy with a tingling running up their legs. A monopoly of
the UHNW class stops competition like any monopoly does-if it threatens class economic
power. That’s a bad prospect for the survival of human life on Earth that can
use all the competition, inventiveness and innovation it can not to mention
democracy, a more egalitarian distribution of income in the U.S.A., full
employment, restoration of a healthy wild ecosphere and freedom of ubiquitous
government and corporate network surveillance.
Actually
though Americans seem rather doomed economically and politically speaking being
too ignorant to know or care how things are developing or to fix it. In Greek
city-states there were assemblies only citizens could attend. Those citizens
took their democracy seriously and were vigilant against insidious oligarchy
working sedulously to take over the state.
The
least a U.S. Government could do to safeguard civil rights of free expression
in the tech-control era of global communications would be to make broadcast
wavelengths as non-exclusive as cell phone calls and to provide a terabyte of
online cloud U.S.
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