When  Oligarchs Rule

By Shlomo Maital

From “X”

Oligarchs?  A small cabal of wealthy people who run the country, control its wealth, and dominate its leadership?

Let’s run the numbers.

     The US has 813 billionaires.  One of them, Elon Musk, has net worth of $359.4 billion.   Musk gave Trump an estimated $270 million for his campaign.  That is less than one tenth of one per cent of his wealth.  It bought him control of the US political system and dominance over Trump.  Good deal.

       Other US billionaires have shifted rapidly from supporting honesty, truth, and fairness, and equality and inclusion,  to the opposite, e.g. Zuckerberg and Bezos.

         It has happened before in history.  In Russia.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1990/91, the Russian leadership distributed shares to the people, as part of a plan to privatize and revitalize the economy.  Oligarchs bought up the shares for pennies, using bank loans – and quickly gained control of Russia’s oil, gas, nickel, steel and other industries.  Putin co-opted them, terrorized them – and together, they did a deal – Putin became a dictator, for life, in return for letting the oligarchs retain their wealth – and sharing a big share of it (in secret) with Putin.

         India has 200 billionaires.  India is said to be the world’s biggest democracy.  India does hold elections, free and fair, regularly. But india’s Prime Minister Modi has shown autocratic tendencies, and the amount of abysmal poverty and income and wealth inequality in India is enormous. 

           China has 400 billionaires.  China!  The country run by the Chinese Communist Party.  As in Russia, the Chinese billionaires are on a tight leash.  Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma was reined in by China’s dictator, a chunk of his wealth confiscated, and since then he has almost disappeared.  The remaining billionaires are compliant and acquiescent.

        How come so many billionaires?  The system the US built after WWII, the Bretton Woods Agreement, opened the world to the free flow of money, goods, ideas, people, everything.  IT created huge wealth – and enormous abysmal poverty for those unable to participate in the party.  This led to a wave of migration – and the rise of far right politics in the West, including, now, in Germany.  

          The Bible calls for a Jubilee Year – in the 50th year, debts are forgiven, and assets return to their original owners.  Restart.  We desperately need a Jubilee Year in the world.  But, even asking billinaires to pay their fair share of income taxes is today impossible – and Trump is about to gift them with a huge tax cut, ballooning the US deficit that is already alarming.  The US already pays more in interest payments on its debt than it spends on defense ($1 trillion!). 

           You could see this coming.  Nothing good can ever come out of extremes of wealth and poverty.  It seems that the system has to crash before it can be rebuilt.

           Financial markets are already very nervous.  I advise carefully weighing how a financial collapse might affect your income and savings – and take steps to protect them.