It Is Not that Wealth Is Undesirable — It’s that Our Economic System Is Rigged to Steal Wealth from Many of the People Who Create and Sustain It — a Definitional Difference that Parasitic Plutocrats Don’t Want Us to See

10 October 2011

Exploitation thrives on deception — which is best revealed, when the exploiters are pressured

Paul Krugman summed the current situation up:

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction.

Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is.

They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price.

Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose.

And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny.

Until people understand what is actually going on, they won’t focus enough to be effective in changing it

One legitimate criticism of the Occupy Wall Street protest is that it is unfocused. Just being mad, without defining reasonable objectives, generally gets us nowhere.

Anger is only useful, when it serves to motivate us in relatively narrow and disciplined directions. Focus is a product of insight. Yet insight is hard to achieve, when it is obscured by unreasoned emotion.

This is not a criticism of the Occupiers, whose energy I admire.

Instead, it is a general criticism of our current culture, which more often than not, doesn’t analyze any phenomenon deeply enough to achieve meaningful results.

Even General Electric’s successful CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, does not see the economic implications of what he stands for — and neither do his media interviewers

President Obama appointed GE’s, Jeffrey Immelt, to be our “Jobs Czar.” That, in itself, shows how plutocratically captive the President is. When in doubt, this President’s first inclination is to turn to the plutocrats who caused the problems that we should be trying to fix.

Lesley Stahl interviewed Immelt on 60 Minutes last night.

What viewers got was a big dose of, “What’s good for multi-national corporations is good for America.”

Immelt was (and probably is) not thoughtful enough to step outside the currently prevailing legalistic thinking that corporations exist only to profit their shareholders. Consequently, everything he said was aimed at profiting General Electric, rather than its country of origin.

Immelt correctly pointed out that most of GE’s market is now abroad. Sixty percent of GE’s revenue comes from overseas.

But he completely missed the more crucial point, which is that — just because a market is abroad — does not mean that one necessarily and absolutely has to shift one’s manufacturing capacity there:

Stahl: You have also made the case that by increasing investment in a place like Brazil it would allow you to bring more jobs back home. Now, that's counterintuitive.

Immelt: Look around this room. All of these components come from the U.S.

But after following him around Brazil, I wondered whether GE was still an American company.

Immelt: I'm a complete globalist. I think like a global CEO. But I'm an American. I run an American company. But in order for GE to be successful in the coming years, I've gotta sell my products in every corner of the world.

Stahl: I mean, you may personally think of yourself as an American. But your customers are over there. You put your plants over there, you even put research-

Immelt: If I wasn't out chasing orders in every corner of the world, we'd have tens of thousand fewer employees in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Texas. I'm never going to apologize for that, ever, ever.

“Chasing orders” globally is not the point.

Every competitive economy has to do that. The Germans do, without exporting most of their economy overseas.

Immelt was (and presumably is) not thoughtful enough to recognize that how one frames the issue defines the ultimate result.

General Electric even transfers technology to China that is going to hurt us, as well as another American company, Boeing

Stahl continued:

But even while he [Jeffrey Immelt] promotes American innovation, he's been accused of transferring technology to other countries as in his recent joint venture with China where a new GE computer system will go into a Chinese airliner that could eventually compete with Boeing.

Immelt: It's a way we can grow and it's approved by the U.S. government, it's in an important market around the world and it creates 400 jobs in the U.S.

Stahl: Let me be more specific, are we in any way giving the Chinese a technology that they didn't have before, that--that depletes our-- competitive edge in the future?

Immelt: --we give nothing. We-- own it. No look, you're afraid of China, I'm not. We see them as a big market, and a big opportunity.

This is pro-American? This is American jobs creation?

Giving our biggest competitor intellectual property that results from of American innovation, so that it can use those advances to put us and another American corporation at a disadvantage?

The problem with most global CEOs is that they are not imaginative enough to see beyond self-interest to the larger social and economic issues that are at stake

The overriding problem with Immelt, in his alleged capacity as Jobs Czar, is that he says, “I'm a complete globalist. I think like a global CEO.”

Global CEOs go where the money is now. As a result, jobs creation in the United States is purely an incidental artifact of that more dominant focus.

There is, for Immelt and his peers, no real emphasis on preserving, or building, the national societies that create and permit their corporations to exist.

The core jobs problem lies with our culture’s too-narrow legal and social definition of corporations as solely being profit-makers for shareholders.

The moral? — Stop letting plutocrats call all the shots

Wealth creation comes from most everyone. And it is partially possible to geographically designate where we want the benefits of wealth creation to fall. The first is an economic issue, the second a social one.

Economically speaking, it is impossible to create real wealth, without dynamically integrating capital, labor, and government. At present, “we” seem to be acting as if the “capital” component of the mix is the only prong that matters.

Socially speaking, the idea that economic activity is most “efficient,” only when we let it go willy-nilly wherever it wants is simply silly. That concept obviously results in a perpetual race to the bottom, and it merely reflects how economically and socially unimaginative we are.

People, being the greedy beings we are, will generally do whatever is easiest and least challenging that still gets us where we want to go.

Consequently, the current domination of multi-national corporations — which actively suck jobs out of America — has more to do with doing what’s easy, than with doing what might actually work to keep jobs and proportionately more wealth in America.

Plutocrats are like everyone else. As long as their money’s coming in, re-evaluating their operational paradigm is not going to happen. Envisioning an adjusted socio-economic system is not a prominent component of the multi-national CEO mentality.

Until the United States understands that the our accepted (America-disfavoring and plutocrat-favoring) way of doing things is doing us little good, we’re not going to get anywhere.

If President Obama thinks that the unimaginative Jeffrey Immelt is going to solve America’s misbegotten economic direction, he’s being just as foolish as he has been throughout the last three years.

That’s why Paul Krugman’s take on the situation is worth thinking about. Who’s in charge? And why have we let them take the nation over?

PeteFree.com

It Is Not that Wealth Is Undesirable — It’s that Our Economic System Is Rigged to Steal Wealth from Many of the People Who Create and Sustain It — a Definitional Difference that Parasitic Plutocrats Don’t Want Us to See