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December 20, 2015
Chuck Collins -- Wealth Inequality. Billionaires and Psychopaths; Interview Transcript
By Rob Kall
He discusses an important new report on wealth inequality. Then we discuss billionaires, psychopaths and their threat to humanity
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This is a transcript of this radio interview, Chuck Collins- Wealth Inequality, Billionaires and Psychopaths, which was broadcast on December 2, 2015
Thanks to Tsara Shelton for helping with the transcript editing.
Rob: Welcome to Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show sponsored by opednews.com. My guest tonight, a return guest, is Chuck Collins. He is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, co-editor for inequality.org and he's written several books. The more recent ones are 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It. And a book co-authored with Bill Gates' dad titled Wealth and Our Commonwealth. I'm having him back on the show because he just co-authored a report titled Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us. Welcome back.
CC: Hey thanks for having me Rob.
Rob: It's a pleasure. So this is a powerful report. I want to get into the report and then I want to go some places where I've done a lot of writing about billionaires and extreme wealth lately, or the ultra rich. So can you give us a summary of what's in the report?
CC: Sure, what we looked at was how wealth is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. You know, a few years ago we talked about the 99 to 1. In the last few years we've learned that most of the income and wealth gains have gone to the top one-tenth of one percent. And now we're seeing huge concentrations flowing up to the billionaires, to the Forbes 400, to the tippy toppy of the wealth space needle. And so one of our findings is the wealthiest twenty individuals now, enough that could fit on Gulfstream 650 private jet. 200, 20 people have as much wealth as the bottom half of the US households. So 20 people have more wealth than half the population combined.
Rob: Incredible. And you give a lot of additional stats related to different racial populations, it's even worse for African Americans and Latinos.
CC: Yeah we wanted to look at, because we know that, again in the last ten years there's been a growing wealth divide. After the economic meltdown of 2008, there's kind of an implosion of African American wealth, there's many people lost their homes, or lost home equity. So the Forbes 400, again that wealthiest 400 individuals today has more wealth than the entire African American population, plus about a third of the Latino population combined. Sixty million people. That is just a reflection, because there are very few people of color on the Forbes 400 list. So we're talking about essentially, mostly, enormous concentration of white wealth ownership. That has a real impact on the rest of us.
Rob: Okay, and the report is available, what's the best link to go to that?
CC: People should go to the Institute for Policy Studies or just google Billionaire Bonanza, which is the name of the report, but it's at IPS-DC.org and Billionaire Bonanza. It's a short report but it sort of looks at the concentration of the wealth and sort of how it relates to everybody else and why it matters.
Rob: And it gives some powerful stats, you've given us a flavor of it. I mean it's horrible. That just 20 people have as much as, what did you say? 152 million people--
CC: Half, yeah 152 million people. Exactly. And you know the entire Forbes 400 has about the same amount of wealth as about 61% of the whole population at this point.
Rob: And that's, it's just amazing. I want to kind of get to a lot of stuff so I want to cut to some of the issues here. You talk about--
CC: Go for it.
Rob: What are some of the problems that this extreme wealth inequality produces?
CC: Well, one of the things it does is it definitely undermines our democracy. We know that as wealth concentrates, so there's power, the power to shape the culture and give to candidates and essentially undermine our democratic institutions. You know recent studies show that half the donations in the 2016 presidential cycle to all the candidates, have come, half the donations have come from 158 families, about half of whom are on this Forbes 400 list. So that's a huge, you know, thumb on our democratic system. But there are other reasons why we should care. I mean I think that as wealth concentrates it undermines economic stability. Working people don't have, wages have been stagnate for almost 30 years so working people have less buying power. That hurts the economy. At the very very top, the rich have so much wealth that it's sort of unreal to them and they start investing in sort of highly speculative and potentially dangerous to the rest of the economy, kind of financial investments. So you have economic instability that comes from there being too much unequal wealth. And then you know there's a lot of research showing that too much inequality is bad for your health. It breaks down social cohesion, community connection. There's a number of reasons why, it's pretty much bad for everybody including the very wealthy. At a certain point, too much concentrated wealth starts to back fire and lead to a society that nobody wants to live in.
Rob: Are there studies that indicate that it's bad for people's health?
CC: Absolutely. Actually a British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson wrote a terrific book called Spirit Matters. It looks at health indicators and there's parallel research in the United States. But basically you're better off living in a community or county that has lower incomes but greater equality than you are living in a county with high levels of inequality. But tremendous wealth. Meaning so, across every health indicator. You know heart disease and, you know, everything, your public health indicators are better, even for wealthy people, they're better when there's more equality. So that's actually more and more, people understand the health equity implications.
Rob: That's, you know I call my radio show bottom up radio because I believe we're transitioning from a top down to a more bottom up culture and that idea that living in a community with more equality, that sounds really like a bottom up kind of a thing that it's a connection to the community that is part of what produces health.
CC: Yeah, underlying that, and this is the explanation. When we become too unequal, there's a breakdown in social solidarity. Which is you know, you and I live in the same community and you're health matters to me, that's the healthy community. Where we see that we're sort of all in the same boat. But when we become too unequal, it's kind of like well that's happening to those people over there and I don't really even know anybody in that circumstance and, you know, those children got shot. I don't know those children, I don't know their families, I don't know anybody who knows their families. It's like we've become, it's not just the other side of the tracks kind of inequality it's like parallel universe inequality. It's like you're operating in one stratosphere and I'm in another. And that leads to this breakdown of solidarity and the notion hey, we're in the same boat and what happens to you matters to me. And then what happens is wealthy people, particularly stop making investments in the wellbeing of the whole, of the commonwealth. I mean they take their tax dollars out, but they also take out their stake in the functioning of the local schools, of local recreation, because they don't use those services and they don't know anybody who depends on them. So that's why, you know, too much inequality stretches our social fabric in a way that is bad and then wealthy people sort of become fearful and withdraw further into wealth enclaves. Next thing you know people start hiring body guards, you can sort of see where it goes. It becomes, would become like Brazil.
Rob: Okay so, makes us sick, effects our democracy, hurts communities, and also in your report it talks about equal opportunity and social mobility as well.
CC: You know this is important because people think, oh, the United States, we're the most mobile society, we don't really care about inequality because everybody has the opportunity to become wealthy. That sort of self-image if you will is like about 30 years old. So it's like being 50 and thinking that your body is still the same as it was in high school. The reality is, we've become less mobile. There's less social mobility. And if you want the American Dream today and the American Dream of you know, saving money, buying a house, maybe taking a vacation, retiring some day, leaving something for your children, that American Dream is further out of reach today than it was a couple decades ago. And if you're not born wealthy in the United States, you're better off living in Canada or Scandinavia if you want the American Dream because you will be living in a society that makes investments that creates a level playing field and creates the foundation for social mobility, and that's no longer, unfortunately, the United States story.
Rob: Wow. So what are the solutions? You've got solutions in this report too.
CC: Well there's sort of two categories because, you know, here's the bad news Rob. The inequality I'm talking about actually is probably much more in reality extreme than what we're able to document. And the reason for that is huge amounts of wealth are now leaving the spotlight if you will, they're going into the shadows of the offshore tax havens. People are taking their wealth and putting it in Swiss bank accounts or the Cayman Islands and they're pretending that it's owned by a subsidiary corporation that they own. Or they're creating trusts and using these kind of billionaire loopholes that are in the tax code to sort of pass wealth on to family members without any scrutiny, accountability or taxation. So I would estimate actually that the level of inequality is almost twice as a great if we look at the hidden wealth escapes, we factor those in. So it's kind of like you know you've got a leaky bucket, you can't just fill it up with water you're still going to have to plug up the leaks. We have to plug up and close down some of these offshore loopholes, billionaire loopholes, then we can institute the kind of policies we did after World War 2 which really brought us together. We can tax the wealth, tax the top, progressive taxation. And make investments that expand opportunity for everybody else. You know after World War 2 we taxed high incomes at very high levels. We had a robust inheritance tax, and we taxed those funds and we invested in the GI bill and debt-free college education and first-time home buyer low interest mortgages and support to small businesses investing in early children education and things that help raise everybody up and create opportunity. So we sort of have to do the same program but, but also, we've learned some things. We know how important it is to provide very early childhood opportunities before the age of six. We can do that. Many states are already doing it. So we can
Rob: Childhood opportunities, what kind of childhood opportunities?
CC: Well access to healthcare very early on. Preschool education. Identifying and addressing learning disabilities early on. Those are all the kinds of things that good societies do, you know. Working with families that are, that have economic challenges to help create stability in their lives. Those are like the things that you know totally change the trajectory for young people. Right now we have a society where there's like compounding disadvantages for low and middle income people, and accelerating advantages for people at the top.
Rob: Okay, so basically what you just said is, first thing is we've got to deal with the offshore tax havens and the billionaire loopholes.
CC: That's right.
Rob: Then, sorry I've got a cold. In the report, you listed a couple of different, other approaches in addition to those raise the poor, level the playing field and reduce concentrations of wealth and power. What are those about?
CC: Well, again a society like Canada or Denmark, the reason they have much less inequality than the United Sates is they have a high floor. Meaning there's a level at which people cannot fall. They cannot fall deep into poverty. There's minimum, high minimum wages. There's basic health care. There's early childhood education. All those kind of things we can do to raise the floor. There are things that level the playing field. There's things that, like campaign finance reform. Or making sure that the same tax rules apply to US domestic businesses as, to international businesses. So the things we can do to you know make the system fair, but right now we have this problem. We have the 900 billion ton gorilla here which is this huge concentration of wealth and power. And if we don't do anything about that, then we're just going to keep seeing these inequalities continue to grow. So we have to tax wealth. We have to have a robust inheritance tax, those are the two kind of things that you know. And we could link that revenue. We could do something link the revenue to debt-free education, just like after World War Two.
Rob: So link the revenues from taxing the wealthy to get free education, you're saying.
CC: That's just an example, I think of the kind of campaign that would do well. We have all these young people with 1.2 trillion dollars of college debt, average debt $33,000, we know it's terrible for them. Economically it delays their household formation, it delays home ownership. If we taxed wealth and created a debt-free college education fund and it could be means tested you know so Donald Trump's kids don't get a free education, he can pay. But if it's targeted to people who really need, low and middle income households, that's a great investment. That's what we did after World War Two, that enabled 13 million people to get on the wealth building train. You know. So those are the kinds of things I would, you know you could tax carbon and tax big polluters among the wealthy. People who use private jets, who use, have incredibly huge carbon footprint. Let's tax those luxury items and invest that in green jobs creation. Retrofitting buildings and you know fixing our infrastructure.
Rob: So I want to throw in one more credential you have, which is kind of unusual. I found out about it watching a documentary, you're a trust fund baby. You were, you had an opportunity to cruise through life with all the money you needed, right?
CC: Yep, yeah I was fortunate, I was born in the 1%, my great grandfather was the meat packer Oscar Meyer, you may have heard of him. And so, yeah, bringing home the bacon had a different meaning in my family growing up. But yeah I had an opportunity, I could have, you know, I was born on third base you know. At the age of 26, like half my life ago, I made a decision that I didn't want that wealth to shape my life as much as it potentially could and I didn't really felt like I needed it, and I kind of wanted to make my own way and so I gave it to a couple of foundations and life goes on. I have kids now, they're all normal, you know. So the good news is, there's life after enormous wealth and privilege. And I still have a huge amount of privilege. I'm a white middle class guy in the United States who's got a college education and an extended family that would help me if I got into a huge, you know car accident or something. So I have a lot of privilege. But I'm very committed to this idea that we as a society should not have huge intergenerational concentrations of wealth and intergenerational transfers of wealth. I think it's bad for the society, I also think it's bad for the kids. I really believe we're a better society when everybody sort of has relative equity in terms of their opportunities.
Rob: You know I've written a lot about this, I've said that we need to create a very strong aggressive dynasty tax. I think that that's what we're talking about with these huge intergenerational transfers of wealth. This creation of permanent powerful dynasties.
CC: I think you're totally on track, I think that's absolutely the way I would characterize it. These are anti-dynasty taxes. We're trying to prevent the creation of wealth dynasties. Where the sons of daughters of today's Forbes 400 are still running the show. You know people are all excited because Mark Zuckerberg has decided to give away 99% of the wealth that he has, his 45 billion dollar Facebook fortune over his lifetime. I actually think that's, I mean there's a number of questions there, like the fact that he's actually not really giving it away, he's creating an LLC corporation that he controls and he's going to avoid a bunch of taxation in the process, but, that said. That impulse is something we want to encourage. We want people to, particularly the 20 people, the richest 20 people in the United States, to take bold steps to redistribute their wealth and bring it back home and acknowledge that the society helped create their wealth and that they have an obligation to pay back the society.
Rob: That was a conversation we had in the last interview, this idea that individuals create great wealth is pure bull.
CC: Yeah I mean, that's sort of like one of the reigning myths of our culture, I call it the great man theory of wealth creation. It's like saying I did it all alone. And it's not to take away, you know individual effort matters and individual moxie matters and there are people who work harder and hustle and we want to encourage that and have a society that rewards that and an economy that rewards that. But these levels of extreme inequality have nothing to do with differences in effort, you know. I mean it has more to do with luck and timing and the reality is no, if somebody has substation wealth, 5 million 10 million dollars, they didn't do it alone. They live in a society that we together have made investments that have created a fertile ground for wealth creation. And if you're fortunate to have a high level of wealth, you kind of have an obligation to pay back the society so somebody else who's not born wealthy, can have the same opportunities you had. That's my argument to Mark Zuckerberg, is where would you have been without, you know, 50-70 years of public investments creating the internet? Creating the public infrastructure and technological infrastructure that makes his business possible. He is just putting a cherry on top of an ice cream sundae that somebody else made. He doesn't get to keep the whole sundae, he has to share.
Rob: That's it. Now you've done some work to try to get these very wealth to give back. You worked with Bill Gates' father on that. Can you talk about that project?
CC: Sure and actually right now, I've helped cofound a network called The Patriotic Millionaires that has working all over the country, there's like 250 members of the Patriotic Millionaires who are actively out there pressing for fair tax policy, advocating for raising the minimum wage, campaign finance reforms that reduce the influence of big money in politics. Those are all things that the Patriotic Millionaires support and so I'm not saying that all the wealthy people out there are doing this. There's a segment of the 1% that are kind of like, the Koch brothers. They use their wealth and power to rig the rules to get more wealth and power, and that's what a lot of wealthy people do and a lot of people just kind of go along with that. But there's an organized opposition there, if you will. There's a lot of people who see these inequalities are really taking us down the wrong road you know. That's the good news. That not all rich people are greedy and just want more. I'm inspired to say there's a huge segment of people who want the society, want the economy to work for everybody, not just the rich.
Rob: Your report actually lists those 20 individuals. And some of them are ones of have committed to giving away their money, right?
CC: Yep.
Rob: Bill Gates is at the top of the list with 76 billion dollars. And I know he has made some kind of a commitment. Mark Zuckerberg is number seven at 40.3. I think Warren Buffet has some kind of a commitment of some sort. I don't know who else if any of the others on the list. But at least two of them have.
CC: A number, there are a number there who have taken the giving pledge. To give away half their wealth over their lifetime.
Rob: Tell me about the giving pledge again.
CC: The giving pledge is, you know, founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and it's an attempt to organize their peers, the millionaire class, to give away half of their wealth at the end of their life. To give it to charity. And some of them, like Warren Buffet, have pledged to give all their wealth away, not just, not give it to their children.
Rob: Okay. But that's. So let me throw some stuff at you that I've written. I think that billionaires are dangerous. I believe that, and another project that I've done a lot of writing on are psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists.
CC: Yes.
Rob: And I asked the, at the time the president of the society for the study of psychopathy what indigenous cultures do with people who try to accumulate way more than everybody else has. He talked about the Inuits up in northern Canada and he basically said they put them on an ice flow and push them out into the sea. Basically, they kill them. I'm not advocating for that but, I think we learn a lot from indigenous cultures and I think that no indigenous culture would have ever tolerated anybody possessing thousands of times more than anybody else in the tribe or the band. This is something that came with civilization. One of the negative side effects of civilizations. So I've come to the conclusion that becoming a billionaire, regardless of how good your intentions are, is a dangerous thing. What do you think?
CC: I think it is very hazardous. What I've seen is it disconnects people from the community. It challenges their humility, meaning they actually think that they have this money so it makes them better than other people, or smarter than. So it, that disconnects them. They stop being interdependent and vulnerable with their neighbors and so they stop needing other people. They think they can buy all the things they need. It's a prescription for alienation and disconnection. I think there are sociopathic tendencies through the whole culture, but if they fall to people at the very top of the wealth ladder, they can do huge amount of damage. So I think it's a, for the sake, you know this is just for the sake of people and their children. We should have these extreme levels of inequality. They break the tribe apart. I mean the tribe in the human family sense. Yeah.
Rob: So I think that the solution, the big target to aim for is to get rid of billionaires entirely. So that no one is allowed to become a billionaire. That means, getting rid of all the ones that currently exist by taxing them out of their assets and wealth. And then making it a crime, and not just a crime, but an abomination, a moral, a morally unacceptable thing to do to accumulate that much wealth.
CC: Yes, I mean one thing to do is we can say look as a society you earn over, I would put the threshold down considerably but you know. You could have 100% tax on wealth over half a billion dollars. You know. Right now we have a estate tax that taxes at 45% and it's a fixed rate whether you have 10 million or 10 billion. But I would be in favor of a graduated estate tax that, where that rate goes up higher, just like in 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted a very progressive estate tax. The top rate was close to 90% on estates, on wealth above a certain threshold. And I think that that, and then that, you know it's important obviously that government not waste money and that we all be vigilant about how our tax dollars are used. But those investments can be made in things that lift up everybody. That's where we've gone astray.
Rob: So is there a conversation? I mean you're talking about wealth inequality and dealing with it by cutting tax INAUDIBLE 31:58 and things like that. I tried to write a bigger picture go for the stars rather than go for ten miles away kind of a goal. Which is to totally get rid of them. Is this a conversation that's happening?
CC: Well, I think that actually my co-author Josh Hoxie wrote a little piece called, you know, is it time to ban billionaires or effectively tax wealth over a certain amount so that we don't have these huge distorting forces. In the same way we would say golly, if there was like one corporation that had so much wealth and power and control over the market, we would need to institute some kind of anti-trust intervention, break them up.
Rob: That's like Bernie Sanders saying--
CC: Yeah we shouldn't have six banks that control 60% of the money. That's just too much concentrated wealth and power. So if you care about democracy you have to care about these accretions of wealth and power.
Rob: Alright so your co-author wrote an article back with the idea of taxing, what was the exact article about?
CC: I think it's called, you know, is it time to cap wealth at a billion dollars, or something like that. I'll send it along to you.
Rob: Okay so that's, now, you've been having conversations with these very wealthy people as part of your project that you just described. Is that part of the conversation at all? Do any of them feel that that's something possible or acceptable?
CC: Well you know actually I think a number of them, you know they're not a uniformed grouped but I think a number of them believe we should be very clearly advocating wealth taxation, so we don't really have an annual net worth tax. We have a tax at the end of life, an estate tax.
Rob: You know my son who's 25 has an idea. He says we should tax money that's saved. Over a certain amount. You don't tax somebody with 81,000 or 100,000 or even a million but if it's over some limit like 5 or 10 million and it's just sitting in a bank, tax it. Because it's not being used and it's not contributing productively. Is anybody talking about that?
CC: Yes, I think that's along the lines of the kind of, you know right now, this is a good time to be sort, people are paying attention to these great inequalities and we should be having a really robust debate about -
Rob: Alright so we're back. We've been talking. I'm talking with Chuck Collins and we've been talking about extreme wealth and the wealth inequality in this nation and the report that he and his group just generated. And we're talking about billionaires and I want to go into that a little deeper. Now you've worked with billionaires, right Chuck?
CC: I have and in our Patriotic Millionaires group we've explicitly reached out and engaged with a lot of multimillionaires and billionaires on issues of tax policy and the like.
Rob: And you've gotten a sympathetic response from what I understand.
CC: Yeah I think there's a segment of very high network people who understand how the current economy is not good for everybody. How it undermines you know the healthy function of the economy and that it's bad for everybody including the very wealth. I've had one billionaire say to me look I don't want my children and grandchildren to grow up in a like a Brazil like inequality, that's not the kind of society we want the United States to become. We want to live in an opportunity society. And they see how these inequalities are undermining that.
Rob: That's interesting because I was just reviewing an interview I did with somebody who was a native of Holland and he was saying we're already there. You don't have gated communities in Holland, you do have them here in the United States. It already is like Brazil, it already is like a third world country.
CC: Yep, yeah we, the incredibly high percentage of new housing starts are now behind walls. As not just the super wealthy but the affluent are opting to live disconnected from wider communities.
Rob: So tell me more about your experience with working with billionaires. Are there any of them who are willing to give up their billions.
CC: Well, you know there's a segment that have already pledged to give away wealth, half their wealth through the giving pledge. Many of them are like a Warren Buffet and saying they're going to give it all away and not to their children. They're going to give it through, not the Mark Zuckerberg way but they're going to give it through traditional foundations. And there are people who are not so much among the billionaires but there's a whole generation, there's a network called Resource Generation which are young entrepreneurs and young people with inherited wealth who are very thoughtful about, you know, their role in society and privilege and wanting to, I guess I would characterize it as they use their special privileges to eliminate special privilege. So I think there's a movement toward, you know very egalitarian movement even among the very wealthy.
Rob: What are the edges of the strategies and approaches that you're involved in conversations on, to do something about this.
CC: Well a lot of our, the Patriotic Millionaires and other groups see how the student debt crisis is a loser for everybody. The fact that 40 million households now have student debt. Average debt $33,000 dollars, it's actually kind of bad for the economy, it's bad for these families and young people. They wait longer to form households and buy houses, they're just sort of like on the debt treadmill from age 20 on. And so there are people, some of our Patriotic Millionaires who actually got a debt-free college education, thanks to the GI bill or after World War Two, they saw how that kind of public investment in them created and opened doors for them, and are asking the radical question of why can't we do that again? Why can't we tax wealth as we did in the 1950's and 60's and 70's and invest it in things that brought in middle class opportunity, the opportunity for people who are poor to have a level playing field and get into the economic game. So that's, so taxing wealth to invest in debt-free education, taxing carbon, particularly luxury taxation of luxury jets and that sort of thing and investing in green jobs and infrastructure. Those are kind of the public policies that I think start to change the game a little bit because they reduce inequality, but they also are a boost to everybody else.
Rob: Okay, and at that's at the edges. I'm just trying to get an idea just how far along people are in having a conversation about what can be done.
CC: Oh, I mean these are active public policies, some of them are actively introduced into congress. There was a, the Patriotic Millionaires had a lobby day a couple weeks ago where we were pushing for an end to something called the Carried Interest Deduction which is you know a little provision in the tax code that allows hedge fund managers to treat their income as a capital income and tax it at a lower rate than if it had been wage income. And you know there's 12 billion dollars minimum a year that could be invested in, you know, creating green infrastructure. So I think there, that's, or taxing wall street financial transactions as a way to raise revenue for early childhood education. I mean there's a number of ways in which people are looking at creative linkages between reducing inequality at the top and expanding opportunity for everyone else.
Rob: Okay. You know I kind of see them as steps, little incremental things. Are there any big picture ideas out there?
CC: Well one is to institute a wealth tax. I mean I think that Candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders, we've been in discussions with him about what would an actual, how would a wealth tax work, what are the experiences of other countries. You could have a tax that's primarily targeted at billionaires. I mean we in our report propose taxing wealth over a billion dollars. You could have 100% tax on wealth over a billion dollars. You know if you have 2 billion dollars, you pay a billion dollar tax. It sounds, outlandish but actually in the 1930s Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed almost 100% tax on fortunes over a certain level. And an inheritance tax on wealth over a certain level. You know once you get to a billion dollars, you have so much money, you've taken care of all your needs and the needs of the next several generations and it's really then about power. You're holding onto concentrated economic and political power. And that is diametrically opposed to the national interest.
Rob: Talk about it being about power.
CC: Well concentrated wealth, as Louis Brandeis Supreme Court Justice said, you can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few or you can have a democracy but you cannot have both. If we don't want to become like a plutocratic society with, where we all bow before the hereditary aristocrats, if you think that's un-American you actually have to do something about the billionaire problem. You have to start talking about it first, as you have done Rob, talk about it as a billionaire problem.
Rob: I've talked about getting rid of billionaires, and creating laws that make it illegal to be one. Working to create a moral ethic, that it is immoral to be one. Is there any conversation like this going on? I mean Tom Hartman also talks about the billionaire rising or the no billionaires idea. How do we get this idea out there? It seems to me, you know I've written billionaires are dangerous to democracy, they're bad for even capitalism. Where, tell me your thoughts about these things.
CC: I mean it's not a conversation that's broadly being had partly because people are, you know I think they get nervous when you talk about getting rid of billionaires as if you're talking about people themselves. What we're really saying is, no one should have more than a billion dollars, it's not necessary to their well being, and it actually has all, a long list of adverse effects on society. So it's just like saying, nobody should have a personal nuclear bomb in their yard, you know it's like we the society, no you know Rob, you can't have your own nuclear warhead in your yard. That would be a bad thing. And there's no good reason for it. Well it's similar to having a billion dollars. So you know without attacking the person, and just saying that the behavior, we like you Rob but you just can't have a nuclear bomb, and you can't have a billion dollars, more than a billion dollars, you subvert all kinds of things. You subvert our democracy, it's bad for public health, it tears our communities apart, it's bad for social cohesion. It's actually bad for the economy for you to hoard so much wealth. It should be circulating. So I think, you know part of it is getting at the underlying talking points of why extreme wealth inequality is bad for everybody.
Rob: Talk more about the adverse effects of billionaires.
CC: Well I think there's now, it's almost like there's sort of a interdisciplinary body of work now about, okay, when you have a billion dollars your carbon footprint, your ecological footprint is so enormous. Luxury expenditures, larger houses, private jets, multiple houses. This is like one person just burning huge amounts of carbon for their standard of living. So that's, there's an ecology downside. There's a economic downside. For instance, if so much wealth is going to the top, and real wages for everybody else are stagnant or falling, then you don't have a middle class that can participate in the economy and buy goods and services and hire their neighbors to do things, so the economy starts to seize up. And at the very very top, the rich are not content with the low returns in the real economy that they can get investing so they have all these incentives to go and gamble with their wealth. You know the richest 1% probably have 20 trillion dollars of their wealth and maybe a couple trillion of that is invested in the real economy, stocks and securities and real estate and things that you can see. But a huge amount of that is now in the gambling casino, the speculative wall street economy that's just trying to create more paper wealth. It's engaged in derivatives and little hedge bets here and there about the movement of money. And in a way that speculative economy is like a vampire and it begins praying on the real economy and it starts to really matter to the rest of us. So too much wealth and too few hands is bad for the economy in that way.
Rob: Keep going.
CC: Well, okay, I think democracy is easiest one in a way because you can see how when you have, you know, as we now know, 158 families have given half the money in the 2016 presidential cycle. Many of them are in this Forbes 400 list. Half the money. So now our whole system of elections has been taken over by the billionaires. For any candidate to be viable, you need to have your own billionaire. So the reason why the republican primary still has 14 candidates, half of whom you can't remember, is because they all have a billionaire patron that keeps them going. If they had to rely on the campaign contributions of ordinary people, they would be long gone. There would be a, but because they have a billionaire backer, or some of them have multiple billionaires, they can just keep running along and getting their various ideas out there. That's because the billionaire has decided that so and so candidate is a good messenger for my interests. So we are living through the billionnaire wealth primary. Where the billionaires decide who the candidates are with obvious exception of Bernie Sanders.
Rob: And culture, how about culture.
CC: Well culture, I think that you can just look at, how has big money affected art. How has it affected sports. How has it affected what we consider, what's it's done to local culture. We now live in kind of a winner take all culture where one Taylor Swift song, one Adele song is all you hear because, and huge rewards flow to the top and nothing against those artists actually, I think they're great artists, but our whole concept of culture is warped. Culture is what all of us do. Culture is not celebrities. Culture is the music we make together. The theater we create in our communities, the storytelling, the art, the and sport is not the NFL and the NBA and you know Kobe Bryant and whatever, that is not sport. Sport is what all of us do, the games we play. The things that we do to better ourselves and deepen our community ties. We don't even think about this but if you go to a culture where sport has not been billionaire-ized, you see it. You know I know Ireland, there's the Gaelic athletic association hurling and Gaelic football, they're all amateur sports, there are no professional paid athletes in these sports. They're the hugest sports in the country, and they're all athletes who have day jobs, that are not professional. I mean it's fascinating. And so what it means is that if you're a child growing up in that society, you think of sport as something you do, and that maybe someday you will do at the big stadium in Dublin, but you're representing your county and your local parish and your local town. So we can't even think of what our culture would look like outside the incredible influence of billionaire money.
Rob: So when you're talking about the, the effect of billionaires, you're really talking about a massive top down squashing of culture.
CC: It does, it's like, it crushes authentic culture and creates culture for money's sake. You know it's not just a few billionaire, this is the commercialization of culture is a larger issue. But what's driving that are these billionaire communications moguls who are trying to nickel for every song and every touchdown pass they want to get more and more money. And it's corroded the most important things in our culture.
Rob: Yeah. How about community.
CC: Well it's very very hard to have community when there are extreme inequalities. I mean, I grew up in the Midwest, in the 60's there was a certain amount of inequality, we call it sort of the other side of the tracks. But today the rich and everyone else are stratified across really parallel universes. The very very wealthy occupy a rung of existence where they don't have a lot of interaction across economic difference. Except for servants maybe and an occasional employee, but they don't have authentic friendships, reciprocal friendships across the economic divide. And so people begin to get disconnected and they become fearful of one another and they believe mythologies about each other. I mean, you know the presidential campaign candidate who talks about making America great again, how many people is he in relationships with who are Muslims who are Iraq war veterans. You know, he doesn't know anybody. How would he know anybody? He doesn't interact, so he's able to create mythologies in his head and that's essential what happens in an extremely unequal society. So I think too much inequality leads to a breakdown in community, leads to a breakdown in social solidarity which is, hey we're all in the same boat, and injury to you is an injury to me. What happens to your children really matters to me. Like we don't have that level of connection and that's because of these inequalities.
Rob: How about, how does extreme wealth affect relationships between individuals?
CC: Well I think it in a way, we're at risk of commodifying or you know creating sort of calculus in our interactions. I mean one thing is a limit, people very rarely create intimate relationships across social class and across race. There's more of that happening, but if you're circumstances, if you were raised poor in economically insecure family and your partner is from an economically privileged family, there's a lot of work that has to happen for people to overcome some of those differences. And I think, the economic pressures that it puts on people who are non-wealthy and at the same time you have affluent families who can help their children in 101 different ways, get all kinds of head starts and advantages so it creates these sort of families that are all focused on leveraging their privilege as much as possible so that their children can catapult into the affluent and owning classes. So it makes sort of the family life into kind of a business of leveraging privilege. Oh we have to do this, we have to do that, I see that in the top 10% families. A huge amount of stress placed on these kids to become over achievers and they're looking around and saying look in an insecure unequal society, you better do everything you can to make sure your kids get into that upper slot because look what's going on. People are seeing that life for their children isn't going to be as good as it was for them. Or that they're going to be locked in poverty and it creates a kind of stress. Now you see all these young people in college overstressed and committing suicide, you know where are we going here? It's just the main bottom line, Rob, to all we're talking about, is it simply doesn't have to be this way. We have to imagine a culture and a society and family outside of these driving forces. We have to reclaim that as much as possible and try to live in that way.
Rob: And what do you imagine that would look like? I'm not talking about little tweaks to the system, I'm talking if we could really create a new system, what would it look like?
CC: Well I think people would live lives where we would we remember that the most essential things are about our human relationships and connections with others and with nature. We would live without these deep disconnections and divisions between humans and the natural world. We would live in harmony with one another and it would be a radically different life. We would, because you know we're here to be together. And to delight in the gifts of creation, I mean of nature and there's amazing food and abundance and life all around us. We're here to enjoy the gift, to help one another for whatever reason if people are unable to enjoy those gifts, to sort of create a society that community at the local level and at the larger level where people can all share those gifts. And that is our purpose for being here. It is not to keep score, it is not to accumulate the most toys before we die. It's not to walk over as many people as possible and say that you're the winner. That's not why we're here. So I think it's, we periodically can get glimpses of what that life is like.
Rob: You know one of the things that I've written a lot about in the last couple years is psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists. There's a movie The Corporation, have you seen it?
CC: Yes, oh yeah.
Rob: And I wonder whether you're going to see more of those kinds of people at the top of the wealth pyramid, are there more people likely to be narcissistic and sociopathic and psychopathic who are billionaires?
CC: Yeah I think that both, our current system enables pathological people to rise to the top but it also reinforces that behavior. So it sort of, you know, you have a anti-social behavior is over representing in the very very top. Part of my organizing work with the Patriotic Millionaires is to say, lets help shift the culture. Let's not create a system that rewards the most greedy, most anti-social, most disconnected person. Let's reward, lets create a society that rewards cooperation and mutuality. Not rewards it but just celebrates it and affirms it and makes it possible for people for the better angels of our nature to rise through that system. So that's, you know I agree with you Rob, but I think the stuff, the sort of interpersonal sociological side of this is really really important and keep coming back to that question, what kind of society do we want to be, and what kind of lives do we want to lead. I think those are the foundational questions that help us think about why does our current system reward all the wrong things.
Rob: I want to get a little bit more into these psychopaths and sociopaths who are billionaires, have you thought about this at all much and what are your thoughts on it?
CC: Well you know I think that there's a segment of the 1% that for whatever reason, some of them actually think, oh, if we limit government and cut taxes for the wealthy it will actually create prosperity for everyone. So they have a theory about how the economy works but they at some level believe that they think they're acting out of the common good. You know it's just, it's a different path to the common good. But there's a segment of this organized 1% that really actually are like who cares. Who cares about other people, who cares about poverty, who cares about 2 billion people in the world who don't have access to clean water and basic health care. You know like, not my problem. And that is, means, to have gotten to that places means that you sort of had to wall off your heart. You either have a theory that oh, those people get what they deserve and I get what I deserve and I deserve a lot because I'm virtuous and those people are losers. You know you need a theory that can explain away human suffering and, so you don't have to feel what that's like. But the reality is that there's a lot of people out there who feel what these inequalities are like and they're open hearted in some way and it breaks their heart. And they say oh my god, this is not good, I don't want to live in this kind of world. But then I think it's interesting to look at the socialization of the owning classes. I mean in England the owning classes often went to boys private schools where they were sort of systematically brutalized so that they would kind of, you know, they would be dehumanized so that they could become unhuman. There's lots of ways in which the socialization of owning classes wall you off, cut off your heart, disconnect you, prepare you for a life of disconnection so you can look at other people suffering and then turn away without feeling anything. So you know but the good news is there's a segment of the owning classes that are, I would call the open hearted wealthy. And we don't hear their stories as much and it's often times because they act quietly or anonymously they are rebelling against that psychological dynamic of disconnection.
Rob: That's a hopeful thing. Well I promised we'd keep this a half hour, we're right at about a half an hour now. This idea of disconnection is really interesting. You know I've been doing this show for about 8 years now. Bottom up radio, we're going with it I'm writing a book and I think that the key thing to be aware of is what I call connection consciousness, you've got to remember you're connected. You've got to be aware that you are connected to everybody and everything and you treat them as a part of you.
CC: That's brilliant. I look forward to you, for the conversation because I have this little TED talk that's going to come out in a couple weeks and I'll send you the link, it's called Wealthy Come Home. And it's basically saying look it's in everybody's interest for the wealthy to return from exile that the disconnection to come home, bring your wealth and your vulnerability and come back to local communities and put a stake in the working of the society for everybody. And it would be fun to have another conversation in a couple weeks about it.
Rob: I'd love to talk to you about it. Great conversation, thank you so much.
CC: Thanks Rob, carry on.
Rob: You too, bye.
CC: Bye.
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.
Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel
Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel
Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.
Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.
To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.
For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.
Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table
Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..
To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.
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