The Epidemic of Billionaires

Craig Murray:

It takes a lot to get tens of thousands of people to riot. For it to happen simultaneously across several countries points to a supranational underlying cause, as opposed to local grievance at an egregious state injustice. That the temporary collapse of authority and restraint will allow some opportunists to loot is an inevitable concomitant. That does not make theft the cause.

There is a reason that, in every western democracy during the last 20 years, neoliberal politicians have campaigned under the slogans “Hope”, “Change”, or their various synonyms and translations. It is because very highly paid PR consultants have told them that what the people lack, what the people need, what the people desperately crave, is hope and change. Riot and rebellion are acts of extremely high risk which are the resort of the otherwise hopeless.

When I was studying history, a core part of the curriculum was the cross-European revolutionary waves of 1830/1, 1847/8 and 1870/1, against which you can precisely pin dozens of cross-European events including the overthrow of Charles XII, the Hungarian Rebellion and the Paris Commune, and their pale reflections in the UK such as the Great Reform Act and Chartism.

We were, I think, told that these waves of rebellion coincided with poor harvests, which is true. It is only a decade or so ago I learnt that they also coincided precisely with the waves of cholera epidemic which swept across Europe into Central Asia. My point is merely to illustrate that it takes a great deal of pain and hopelessness to force people in the streets to attempt to defy their governments with physical force.

In his short but superb essay on the education protests that sparked rebellion in France, Thomas Piketty includes this devastating passage:

To justify the inadequacy of education funding, and in particular the decrease in spending per student, the government and its supporters argue that France cannot afford to invest more. They are making two reasoning errors. Public debt has indeed risen from 20% of GDP in 1970 to 120% today. But at the same time, private wealth has grown much more dramatically: It has gone from 300% to 600% of GDP, with extreme concentration among the wealthiest financial fortunes. In other words, France’s national wealth – the sum of private and public assets minus private and public debts – has never been so high, not only in absolute terms but also as a percentage of GDP (which itself has never been higher).

In other words, France has never been richer. The problem to solve is simply one of distribution.

Precisely the same is true in the UK. It has never been richer. The problem is of distribution. It is true across the Western world. The living standards and the prospects of betterment for ordinary people are in slow but apparently irreversible decline. This is indeed due to an epidemic sweeping the Western world. It is an epidemic of billionaires.