Finally! A backlash against the super-rich!

LongTomH

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Sun Apr-20-08 02:17 PM
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Finally! A backlash against the super-rich!

The headline article on the Guardian American website this morning was: Now super-rich face a backlash as credit crunch hits home in America The author may be a little bit tardy in realizing that people are fed up with the shareholder class and the executive class prospering "beyond all dreams of avarice," while the rest of us struggle harder just to exist.

But America's relationship with wealth - uncomfortable as it has sometimes been - has always been built on the same foundation. Even as charted in the salutary tales of Fitzgerald, Steinbeck or Wolfe over the decades, or in the endless fascination with Howard Hughes and the fictional Ewings of Dallas, the aspiring masses never quite lost their admiration for blatant enrichment, nor the elite their pride in it. Now, however, all that appears to be changing.

The man with history's biggest annual pay packet is hedge fund manager John Paulson of Paulson & Company. But he is not alone, as the 'Alpha 25 list' of the super-rich published by Alpha financial magazine last week made clear. Up with Paulson were global markets gambler George Soros and rival dealer James Simons, who made $3bn apiece. Meanwhile ordinary Americans are being squeezed harder by inflation and the credit crunch, a stagnant economy, falling house values and rising unemployment - and, in a tax system rigged against them by successive conservative administrations, often pay proportionately twice as much tax as Paulson, Soros and their cohorts.

Here's where it starts to get interesting:

The widening gap that these trends are producing in US society is shaking traditional values to their roots. There are growing signs that the majority are losing faith in the remains of the American dream, while the chief beneficiaries of it feel guilty as never before. 'It's unprecedented that the superwealthy would express so much shame in public', said Robert Frank, author of the book Richistan, which chronicles the rise of America's new super-wealthy to a point where they live in a separate world of rarefied exclusivity. 'It is not just people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett standing up and saying "it's not fair". I spoke to 100 people earning over $10m who would not even admit to being rich: they feel ashamed about the inequality.'

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It does not seem to have changed the inequality gap in America, nor taken away fears that the equality of opportunity that is the essence of the American dream is being fatally undermined. And a lot of the concern freshly expressed by the rich for the poor, the environment - even the less rich - stems from self-interest anyway, says Robert Frank. In the big picture of Rothkopf's global 'superclass' and the Richistan that sustains the mega-billionaires in their excess, recession or no, Frank concludes: 'It's business as usual.'

"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

"We must not forget ... it is the poor who are forced to make sacrifices while the possessors of great riches do not show themselves ready to renounce their privileges for the good of others." — Pope John Paul II

"For the greatest heretic of all is Jesus of Nazareth, who drove the money changers from the temple in Jerusalem as we must now drive the money changers from the temples of democracy." – Bill Moyers “A Time for Heresy”