{"id":8653,"date":"2024-10-07T06:59:23","date_gmt":"2024-10-07T12:59:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/uawlocal2250.net\/live\/?p=8653"},"modified":"2024-10-03T07:10:50","modified_gmt":"2024-10-03T13:10:50","slug":"the-great-wealth-confusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uawlocal2250.net\/live\/index.php\/2024\/10\/07\/the-great-wealth-confusion\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Wealth Confusion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ike Gittlin, a former Steelworker and one of my favorite writers has posted The Great Wealth Confusion.\u00a0 Ike also has a substack if you would like to check out his look at issues through a working person’s perspective…<\/p>\n

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Welcome to Ike\u2019s Work in Progress – Read, Debate, Share<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On the Great American Wealth Confusion<\/a><\/h1>\n

10-3-2024<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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On the Great American Wealth Confusion:\u00a0 We are a nation upside down on how we understand great wealth.\u00a0 It\u2019s no wonder, given that wealth has become the most deceptive of political issues.<\/p>\n

We have a Warren Buffet, who projects a quainter image of the benevolent rich guy.\u00a0 He advocates for higher taxes on the mega-rich and talks about the rich having an obligation to the rest of us.\u00a0 On the other side of the wealthy table is an Elon Musk.\u00a0 He believes his accumulation of wealth makes him superior to everyone else.\u00a0 In a James Bond-like way, Musk sees himself as a kingmaker and a shaper of humankind.\u00a0 Lower on the chain of the mega-rich we encounter a Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, whose skill at building monopolies has given them control of much of our vast technology universe.\u00a0 Similarly, Jeff Bezos has put his singular grip around our nation\u2019s consumer purchasing and distribution systems.\u00a0 A bit lower down the gold chain are the Walmart Walton Family, the Koch Family and other second-generation rich folks, who leveraged their original fortune into mega-enterprises.\u00a0 All these people use their wealth to influence and control our political lives.\u00a0 These are the real deal American titans.<\/p>\n

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Then we have the street level rich and those who have hitched their stars to the wealthy.\u00a0 Mostly they are useful idiots for those who really rule the economic world.\u00a0 They may have the kind of money that the average person sees as wealthy (maybe in the millions), but to the masters of the universe, they are supplicants to their thrones.\u00a0 Surely there are folks whose hard work and honest dealings have earned them the money they have.\u00a0 But that\u2019s rarer in America today, where building productive capacity has taken a second seat to draining enterprises and people dry.<\/p>\n

This massive hoarding of wealth has come at our expense.\u00a0 If you build productive capacity and advance technology and the delivery of services, you expand the economy and allow for everyone to profit.\u00a0 If you prey upon existing capacity or refuse to share the gains of economic expansion, then you create a rich\/poor society.\u00a0 Since our nation\u2019s economy is built on consumer spending, taking away broad prosperity is a sure way to disaster.\u00a0 But the wealthy have done a bang-up job of getting us to agree to their greed.\u00a0 We\u2019ve become confused about what kind of rich is good, and what kind of rich is bad.<\/p>\n

In another neat hat trick, the wealthy have purchased a good part of our political system.\u00a0 Yet they\u2019ve kept their hands remarkably clean of their acquisition\u2019s actions.\u00a0 \u00a0They know our government is the only institution that can thwart their money-grubbing ways.\u00a0 Yet as they use the government to pad themselves, they\u2019ve got us believing that we should see government an enemy to our success.\u00a0 While the rich rig the economic system through things like deregulation,\u00a0 lopsided trade policy and curtailing workers rights, we blame our political leaders.\u00a0 Not those pulling their strings.\u00a0 We\u2019re looking to place blame in all the wrong places.<\/p>\n

That brings us to people like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.\u00a0 Clinton was a poor kid who hitched his star to the globalists.\u00a0 In him they saw a talented persuader, who could help them sell their version of a planetary economic system.\u00a0 He did their bidding, was successful (for a while) and got rich in the process.\u00a0 We almost lost our entire manufacturing capacity and dove into a dark political landscape.<\/p>\n

Trump was the child of relatively minor wealth, but grew up privileged and entitled.\u00a0 He sought to join the mega-rich and the power that money could buy.\u00a0 Like Clinton, Trump has unusual persuasive talents, particularly where it came to giving voice to the fears and inequities of our time.\u00a0 The real rich folks, who have an insatiable appetite for power and money, saw him as just the vehicle to vanquish those who stood in their way.\u00a0 Ironically, many of those who financed Trump\u2019s rise (and their successful promotion of many wealthy business people into our seats of power) now realize that they have created an economic Frankenstein.\u00a0 These are the \u201ccorporate people for Harris\u201d and the \u201cright wing economists for Harris\u201d, who realize that they are about to become the dog that caught the tire.\u00a0 A classic case of overreach and blind ambition.<\/p>\n

Where does the public stand on all of this?\u00a0 Well the rich have scrambled our eggs.\u00a0 We no longer believe our government can discipline the ultra-wealthy.\u00a0 Worse, we\u2019re getting happy about the scraps we get out of our rich people\u2019s rule.\u00a0 We see rampant evidence of bankruptcies, scams, and rule rigging that has been the hallmark of this generation\u2019s wealth \u201cbuilders\u201d.\u00a0 Yet, we\u2019ve bought into the myth that business success equals leadership prowess and good judgement.\u00a0 Perhaps the most ironic part of our current view is that someone worth billions of ill-gotten gains will be better for our welfare than someone who had humble beginnings and remembers that.\u00a0 The villains are treated as hero\u2019s and the heroes as trash.<\/p>\n

The nail in our collective coffin is our impatience.\u00a0 The degradation of a just economy has been going on for over fifty years now.\u00a0 Yet the wealthy goad us to demand solutions happen immediately.\u00a0 Of course, that\u2019s unattainable, but we\u2019re falling for it.\u00a0 Where a sane and long-term plan is proposed, it never gets the time it needs to show its success.\u00a0 It\u2019s a form of economic abortion that prevents the consideration or implementation of real solutions.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re not getting out of this until we put wealth in its place.\u00a0 That starts with clearing up our own understanding of the corrosive role great wealth has played on our economic woes.\u00a0 What motivates the ultra-rich.\u00a0 What policies are necessary to turn things around.<\/p>\n

We have to mount a siren call to put a leash on great wealth.\u00a0 They have stolen the money we need to fix what they have broken.\u00a0 We need to take that back.\u00a0 We have to triple our efforts to redirect the assets of our nation into new productive capacity that actually creates new wealth and more good jobs. We have to make sure those gains are fairly shared.\u00a0 The needed environmental \u201cjust transition\u201d must provide economic security for those impacted and a path to greater prosperity.\u00a0 It\u2019s way past due that we insist on old age and health care security for all.\u00a0 We have to re-establish fair business practices on Wall Street.\u00a0 That includes re-regulation, re-establishing sane investment and corporate governance rules and aggressive enforcement of white-collar crime.\u00a0 Investing in higher education and skills training for America\u2019s workforce has to get our full-throated support.\u00a0 We have to reopen a path out of poverty.\u00a0 We need to get back to the basics of a healthy economy that works for all.<\/p>\n

This means wrestling back the steering wheel from those who have purchased control of our public policy.\u00a0 We have to stop the super-rich from constantly dividing us and mis-directing us. We have to be clear that subcontracting our economy to those whose goal is destructively self-serving, is a bad idea.\u00a0 It starts with replacing confusion with clarity and grievance with broad based opportunity.<\/p>\n

ihg 10-3-2024 If you like these commentaries, join my blog for free at:<\/p>\n

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Ike Gittlin, a former Steelworker and one of my favorite writers has posted The Great Wealth Confusion.\u00a0 Ike also has a substack if you would like to check out his look at issues through a working person’s perspective… Welcome to Ike\u2019s Work in Progress – Read, Debate, Share On the Great American Wealth Confusion 10-3-2024 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uawlocal2250.net\/live\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uawlocal2250.net\/live\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uawlocal2250.net\/live\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uawlocal2250.net\/live\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uawlocal2250.net\/live\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8653"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/uawlocal2250.net\/live\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8654,"href":"https:\/\/uawlocal2250.net\/live\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8653\/revisions\/8654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uawlocal2250.net\/live\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uawlocal2250.net\/live\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uawlocal2250.net\/live\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}