Happy endings?

As more and more money and more and more power is concentrated in the hands of a small group of the ultra wealthy, you have to ask yourself, “ How do they think this is going to end?”

The answer seems to be, “Very well, thanks for asking”.

There are worrying reasons to think they are right, unlike previous periods when vast amounts of wealth and power were in very few hands, this time the wealthy have made sure to buy up the media so that only their message gets to be heard. This is massively leveraged by the fact that so many of the very wealthy have made their money from social media and the online world which they also dominate. .

They have also been helped by a very long running campaign that predates even Reagan and Thatcher of funding totally disreputable “think tanks”, “research centres” and lobby groups who have spent billions supporting the ideas of Ayn Rand, trickle down economics, the Laffer curve and other such ridiculous ideas. Which help to create a culture of not just “wealth knows best” but that we must all forsake our own interests and give the wealthy ever more tax cuts, subsidies and exemptions because it is for the greater good.

But it is not for the greater good, it is extremely dangerous and damaging not just to people’s welfare but to democracy itself.

Years ago I saw a classic physical demonstration of the billionaires’ influence at a Walmart shopping centre in America. There was a huge Walmart supermarket on one side of a typically massive car park and the other sides of the car park were lined with small shops selling books, jewellery, sewing material, pets and then there were cafes, repair centres and gun shops.

But every single one of them was empty and boarded up; while the Walmart had a jewellery section, a repair shop, a cafe, a haberdashery, a book shop and pet centre, and a gun store.

Every single small retail business that had tried to compete with Walmart had been driven to the wall, in what looked very much like a deliberate act to destroy all competition and subsume their businesses into Walmart’s empire.

This vampire economics is just what Amazon has done on a much larger scale online, or what X is doing to social media.

This is not capitalism, competition is being destroyed before our eyes and we are all paying the price while the billionaires will soon be trillionaires.

At the moment 60% of Americans cannot afford a minimum standard of living and are living from pay check to pay check; their benefits and health insurance are being shredded and they are being told to blame blacks, immigrants, diversity, or trans rights so that they don’t notice that the water is reaching boiling point.

And all the time the billionaires are working out how to take another 1%, 2% or 10% of GDP from the vast majority of citizens and keep it for themselves.

The almost inevitable result is populism, we have seen it in America, it is a real threat in the UK, and many other places.

But populism may be the least of our worries because what happens when that too fails to reverse this suicidal trend? As we see in the UK Reform’s policies include destroying the NHS, making us pay private sector prices for public services, cuts to the minimum wage, fewer and fewer workers rights (which are apparently the real problem, as if) and a war on immigrants, minorities and diversity.

When things still get worse and worse for the people who fall for this con trick, what happens then?

It may be something the billionaires have thought about, hence their investments in second passports, gold, fall out bunkers in New Zealand, massive security and secret lives.

Maybe they know something we don’t but it doesn’t suggest they are 100% sure things will actually end well, just that they think they are rich enough to ride out the storm.

Jonty’s Jotting

From Jonty Bloom Media Ltd

Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.