We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.
—Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1856–1941)
Secretary General Jean Paul Renault stood before the UN General Assembly and stared out over the 800 ambassadors and translators. He had just finished introducing and thanking the various UN officials, and now that august body sat before him as if they were a vast theater audience, which in a sense they were. They were even more on edge than he was. The world’s democracies were up in arms against what they claimed was “an income-inequality plague,” and at the UN the demand for reallocation of assets had finally reached the tipping point. Something had to break. Jean Paul was indeed about to deliver the speech of a lifetime. He was about to make the case justifying the confiscation of one-third of all illicit funds currently secreted in foreign black-hole accounts by the world’s superwealthy tax cheats. A new UN agency would then redistribute the money to those around the world who were less advantaged. If victims of genuine exploitation could prove their case in court, they would receive an even greater share.
The Secretary General glanced at his image in a side monitor. He had deliberately down-dressed. His black three-piece suit looked as if it had been custom-tailored for him even though he had bought it off a rack at a nearby Walmart. But then he was easy to buy suits for. Clothes often fit him with no alterations whatsoever. Reporters often commented on his tall, regally slim physique. He was frequently told that his thick, meticulously coiffed white hair and mustache made him look distinguished, and he was glad he’d taken his wife’s advice and gone to his hairdresser. This speech would live forever on YouTube. He wanted to look good, not out of personal vanity, but because the seriousness of the issues at hand demanded that he make a good impression.
“For the last thirty-five years, we have watched as more and more wealth has been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. As we speak, the net assets of a single Wall Street investment firm, BlackRock, are 50 percent greater than the entire GDP of Germany, the third wealthiest nation in the world. BlackRock handles other assets, however, besides its own, so the total value of all BlackRock assets are valued at over $14 trillion—which tops China’s GDP. Given BlackRock’s rate of growth, their assets might well exceed America’s GDP in a few years. Currently, there is no way for BlackRock’s top executives—nor any top executives, for that matter—to be held to account for the management of these holdings. Whereas government officials can be defeated in elections, the transnational superfirms, their top executives and America’s Mega-Rich Plutocrats are, in effect, nations unto themselves and untouchable. Most of today’s J. P. Morgans and John D. Rockefellers are virtually beyond the law. That the Justice Department refused to seriously investigate, let alone prosecute, any top Wall Street executives for wrongdoing after those people melted down the global economy in 2008 is living proof of Super-Money’s ability to avoid serious legal or political reprisals. As then-Attorney General Eric Holder confessed, Wall Streets moguls were ‘too big to jail.’
“The trillions of dollars the Super-Firms and Über-Rich garner each year in government subsidies also bear ample witness to their political omnipotence. For instance, the fossil fuel energy and financial sectors garner more than $6 trillion a year in subsidies from global governments. Those subsidies sap over 8 percent of the planet’s total GDP—so much that the World Bank has asked specifically for an end to all energy subsidies everywhere. According to another study, the U.S. has spent more money protecting Mideast oil for J. T. Tower and his fellow energy oligarchs than it did fighting Soviet/Chinese Communism during the Cold War.
“Over a century ago Theodore Roosevelt broke up the Rockefeller oil refinery monopoly for being too large and powerful, but our situation is graver than anything that that president faced. Today’s corporate welfare enriches the financial elites on a scale that the 19th-century robber barons never dreamed of. Nor has the planet ever known a breed of plutocrats as unproductive as those sucking up most of the world’s wealth. At least Rockefeller produced oil, a valuable commodity that fueled that century’s Industrial Revolution, and Henry Ford revolutionized transportation. But as the financial journalist Jules Meredith has written: ‘Unlike the robber barons of the 19th century, Tower’s billionaires produce almost nothing that is useful or socially redeeming: Wall Street money-making-money-off-money scams, internet hype enterprises, fiscally destructive mergers—yes, 80 percent of mergers line the coffers of the key players but impoverish everyone else—predatory casinos, and, of course, debt-derivatives, which Warren Buffett called ‘financial weapons of mass destruction.’ The majority of today’s robber barons enrich themselves off greed, vanity and folly; that is all. They produce nothing of value.
“The corporate profits of the world’s financial sectors are especially obscene. In the United States alone, for example, the financial community sucks up 50 percent of that country’s nonfarm corporate profits, and around the world that industry is equally voracious.
“The situation has gotten so bad that in the U.S. the top one tenth of 1 percent of the population possesses more money than the bottom 90 percent.
“No good can come out of so much avarice. John Maynard Keynes once described the money motive—the accumulation of wealth solely for wealth’s sake—as intrinsically pathological. By that standard, the financial machinations of today’s oligarchs and plutocrats are ‘intrinsically pathological’—so much so that the world financial community now resembles not a global banking complex as much as a gigantic vampire bat with its wings wrapped around the people of the earth, its fangs sucking out the last dregs of their hearts’ blood.
“As some of you might know,” Secretary General Renault continued, “Oxfam—in conjunction with Forbes and Credit Suisse—has published a rigorously researched and painstakingly documented study that proves that eight men, six of whom are Americans, now possess more wealth than one-half of the world’s population. These figures probably understate our fiscal crisis. Some economists now argue that the top seven oligarchs are richer than that half of the planet’s populace.
“As our resolution painstakingly documents, these oligarchs and their transnational corporations have deliberately created and are exacerbating these economic disparities. Their strategy is to impoverish workers in the developed world by outsourcing their jobs to the world’s most economically depressed countries and then paying even those workers only the lowest possible Third World wages. Their other monopolistic tactics include underpaying their suppliers and contractors. At the same time, their expenditures on their businesses’ upgrades and infrastructure shrink. Through such strategies, these corporations have for over four decades grossly suppressed wages for employees everywhere and depleted their own companies. Then they merge, merge, merge their firms, until today’s plutocrats are tomorrow’s oligarchs.
“The predatory rich—and the corporations they represent—exhibit no allegiance to the countries in which they reside and which have helped them to prosper. Their only loyalty is to that nation that grants them the lowest taxes, allows them to pay the lowest wages and permits them to poison the planet with the greatest possible impunity. Consequently, they end up paying in taxes a smaller percentage of their revenues than they pay their cleaning staff and their secretaries. In fact, their tax rates often approach zero percent. These exploitative elites then hide their filthy lucre in labyrinthine networks of secret offshore tax havens. As their wealth explodes and their power to buy politicians soars, the gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of the world will, of necessity, increase astronomically.
“For thirty-five years, these politically ambitious and obscenely powerful magnates have conducted a gradual but persistent financial takeover of the planet. They have been particularly eager to turn the U.S. into an oligarchy. As Jules Meredith reports in her book, Filthy Lucre:
In the United States, the Oligarch Movement is headed by President J. T. Tower. The heart and soul of that movement are his 200 megadonors. He has organized them into a clandestine, rigorously disciplined political group, which he has nicknamed at various times “Murder, Inc.” and his “Killer Elite.” Tightly coordinated at the grassroots level, this group is dedicated to steamrolling its opposition in state and local elections and radically gerrymandering congressional districts in their favor. Active at the topmost levels of government as well, where it peddles influence and strong-arms legislators with primary threats, it is infinitely more powerful than any other group around—arguably more powerful than any U.S. political group in history.
“Time was that society condemned avarice. Asking for excessive interest on a loan damned the usurer to hellfire everlasting. Christ Himself could not have been more adamant about the evils of financial predation. The Lord’s Prayer’s literal translation says nothing about ‘trespasses.’ In the original Greek, as well as in Hebrew and Aramaic, the word is ‘debts’—monetary debts. The supplicant is strongly advised to forgive his or her debtors—all debtors. Near the Lord’s Prayer’s close, Christ says that God will treat us the way we treat those who owe us money. If you’re hard on them, God will be hard on you. Christ exemplifies His hatred of greed when He flogs the money changers out of the temple. He believes they are committing the sin of avarice because they are charging people fees for the privilege of purchasing a special kind of currency—church-blessed money. In other words, the priests were making money off money, and Christ drives them from their house of worship.
“Paul famously tells us: ‘The love of money is the root of all evil,’ and the serpent tells us why in the Garden of Eden. He convinces Eve to bite the apple, telling her that if she and Adam ‘eat the fruit of the tree thereof, then ye shall be as Gods.’ That is the siren song of riches and profligacy: If you have enough money and material possessions, you can live as a god on earth and do anything you want. Money lust is the implicit overreaching of God; it’s hubris incarnate.
“In chapter thirteen of Revelation—which chronologically ought to be the book’s first chapter—greed provokes Armageddon, leading us to the End of Days. John of Patmos has an angel explain in that chapter why God will visit this apocalypse on us and then kill and torture in perpetuity over one-third of humankind: The angel announces to the world that God wants us to either reject avarice—and stop trafficking financially with the Anti-Christ—or God will sentence us eternally to hellfire and brimstone. You can have Paradise, the angel says, or money, which will be promptly followed by hellfire everlasting. One-third of humanity says, ‘We’ll take the money.’ Humanity is, of course, destroyed, and the greedy ones go straight to hell.
“In the New Testament love of money is far and away the deadliest of all the deadly sins. It tells us that greed will destroy human beings by the billions and will in the end rid the earth of humanity’s shadow.
“The time to stop this oligarchic take over is now. The hard truth is that oligarchy and democracy are mutually incompatible. If this financial exploitation of our planet and its people does not stop today, if the UN’s resolution mandating the mass expropriation and redistribution of a full third of the über-rich’s illegal assets is not passed, we will witness the end of freedom and democracy throughout the globe. The world will enter a new Dark Age, and global totalitarianism will inevitably follow, just as it did in Putilov’s Russia. So we are out of time, and we must act today. There is no room left for compromise.”
There were five, stunned, uncomprehending seconds of silence, then the General Assembly rose up in a single monstrous protracted roar—sudden, spontaneous and elemental—a tsunami of approbation.
Glancing at a panel of side monitors, the Secretary General saw multiscreen footage of massive crowds all over the world—in Beijing and Buenos Aires, in London and Mumbai, in New York and New Dehli—thundering for the bill’s passage.
Mon Dieu, Secretary General Jean Paul Renault thought to himself. This bill will pass! Nothing can stop it—nothing short of an asteroid strike on the UN.