Wealth, Income, and Power, G. William Domhoff
When stock markets are high, apologists point to the petty increases in stock ownership by today's struggling middle-classes as indicating progress has occurred. This is despite the fact both social and natural security are collapsing, and the ability of an evaporating middle-class to fund even a modest retirement has become nearly impossible. Come the time when markets crash, currencies decline, and depressions emerge then the wealth, freedom, and social security of the majority disappears.
At the latest peak of a massive stock market bubble generated by private central banks, the top 5 per cent of U.S. households, for example, still own 75 per cent of all stocks. The bottom 80 per cent own only three to five per cent of equities, shares, defined-contribution pension funds, IRA's, Keoghs, and mutual funds. In the U.S., only 1.7 % reach the $600,000 level of taxable estate at death.
Worldwide, 358 billionaires are now worth the combined income of 45% of the planet's population. and less than two hundred companies control half of the world's wealth and production as mergers continue.
Today's global concentration of wealth, and economic and political power, is almost without precedent. In any case, such ill-distributed wealth and power cannot possibly define success for the vast majority. Combined with a pervasive lack of natural freedom, current conditions define oligarchy with its obscene concentrations of wealth and power, monopoly, oligopoly, and pre-revolutionary social conditions.
Where enclosure and factor imbalance prevail, limits to wealth and periodic reshufflings of assets, competition, and opportunity soon becomes a necessity. If reform is thwarted society cannot peacefully ameliorate great disparity or disenfranchisement. We are then destined to breed greater concentrations of wealth and power until society is completely convulsed and the severity of reckonings is greatly increased.
Given a capital-controlled global marketplace, we have entered a new era of stateless oligopoly, monopoly, and disparity without limit, or offset. At this writing, a new round of depressions, recessions, and repressions around the world today are leading to re-evaluation of capital's trade policies, election of "populist" governments, and a new scrutiny into the institution of private central banks, and the undemocratic international tribunals now controlling our lives.
see more on this topic at my site http://www.LimitsToWealth.com
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