October 2 , 2007
Kamloops Daily News


The rich are revolting. Really.

The revolution of the rich started about three decades ago
when they decided they weren't getting enough.

It's been a remarkable success. Now, the richest 3 people
in the world control more wealth than one-quarter of the
world's poorest countries.

Rich Canadians have doubled their share of wealth since
1970. The richest one per cent now controls 16 per cent of
all income. Not satisfied with only making 30 times the
wage of workers, Canadian CEOs now rake in 300 times as
much.

But wealth is finite. If some get more, others get less
despite the augments of voodoo economists to the contrary.
Wages for the middle class have stagnated or actually
declined says Bruce Livesey in his article for The Walrus
magazine. Low income workers have negative assets (they owe
more than they make) and many in the middle class are two or
three paycheques away from bankruptcy.

The revolution of the rich didn't take place in the streets;
it came about through the steady control of language and
thought. Patience pays.

Right-wing think tanks managed to convince us that the rich
were good for us through something called the "trickle-down"
theory. It goes like this: rich people create wealth
through their spending. Money drifts down from above like a
gentle snowfall that accumulates on the thankful masses.

Another fiction is that the rich benefit society through
charity. Never mind that they spend it on self-aggrandizing
projects while less appealing things like sewers and
highways crumble. Never mind that the money they
accumulate comes at the expense of government programs that
fairly distribute a nation's assets to the benefit of all
society.

Part of this marvelous snow-job is that the undeserving poor
are to blame for their condition and that a stratified
society is a natural condition. We now have a kind of caste
system where the rich are in power because of their supposed
natural superiority and the poor are on the bottom because
that's their lot in life.

It's a return to the Gilded Age of old.

The original Gilded Age extended from the late 1800s to the
early 1900s when industrialization took root. The
accumulation of wealth by capitalists created a kleptocracy
- - a grab of money, resources, and goods by the ruling
class.

It was an age of extraordinary wealth and political
influence. The state was structured to benefit the rich:
low taxes, free land for railways, anti-union laws.

But the difference between the latter-day Gilded Age and the
original one is globalization. New age kleptocrats have no
allegiance to county and capital has wings.

Old capitalists may have pilfered the wealth of nations but
they understood that their continued wealth depended on
healthy countries. That's why they invested in the
infrastructure needed to sustain wealth: roads, railways,
universities, libraries and hospitals. In the first Gilded
Age, the health of a nation was linked to the wealth of the
rich.

The first Gilded Age declined with the Great Depression of
the 1930s and two World Wars. The rule of the kleptocracy
was eroded when the starving masses threatened the stability
of society. The centre could not hold.

The loosening grip of capitalists allowed an extraordinary
rise in wages and living standards for the poor and middle
working class. Unionization grew from the 1940s to the
1980s to the extent that more than one-third of Canadian
workers belonged to unions.

The industrial model of Fordism prevailed - - the notion
that a well-paid worker was a good consumer. Economies
flourished through an expanded middle class. Economist Jim
Standford describes the times: "It was an unprecedented
period in the history of capitalism, where for a variety of
reasons working people were able to advance their demands."

The rise of the new kleptocracy is just as much a threat to
society as the first was.

The demise of the middle and poor classes has been
engineered by stealth. Just as a frog doesn't notice that
it's being boiled to death if the temperature of water is
slowly increased, the underprivileged don't notice that they
are stewing in soup of easy credit and cheap trinkets from
China.

It will be too late when the impending credit crunch and the
demise of an industrial base leave us much poorer. The low
and middle class may not awake from their stupor until they
are cooked.

David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca

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