Think of this as Volume 18, Number 27 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.
The real crisis of our time is not really the environment. The real enemy of our time isn’t Russia, or China. The war zone isn’t where you think it is – it’s not in Iraq, or Israel, not Nigeria or on the Mexican border.
The real crisis of our time asks who will govern this world. Will it be government, its provenance notwithstanding. Or will it be the world’s billionaires and the giant corporations they control, who right now have the power to overrule any government and do so routinely, with impunity.
It is said that when any person or group becomes more powerful than government that they become the government. Corporations and wealthy individuals currently lie beyond the reach of any government.
It’s all a question of lines.
The one percent, and the multinational corporations they run or own, routinely erase lines.
City lines. County lines. State lines. National lines. Wealth makes you a global citizen. Wealth can cross lines with impunity.
To get an estimated $672 million in incentives for a new Atlanta Braves stadium, including free real estate, all Liberty Media had to do was cross a line separating the city of Atlanta from suburban Cobb County.
A decade earlier the state of Georgia put $400 million on the table to lure Kia Motors of Korea into West Point, GA, instead of Alabama of Mississippi.
Cross a line and cash in.
Mitt Romney’s moves to evade taxes using the Cayman Islands became an issue in the 2012 campaign, but nothing was done about it. Large companies are now headquartering in Ireland to avoid U.S. taxes. Apple bought Beats Music recently for $3.2 billion with profits it held in Ireland.
Wealth crosses lines money wouldn’t dream of crossing. By crossing lines the middle class pays for government services the wealthy benefit from. This leads to middle class resentment of poor people. They vote with the rich to stop the poor. That’s why Wall Street hedge fund managers like Tea.
Wealth promotes political instability in the name of its power. Wealth also crosses lines to avoid political instability.
Wealth has birthed a new acronym, UHNWI – Ultra High Net Worth Individuals. UHNWI has transformed Hong Kong, Singapore, London, New York, and Moscow, filling them with huge apartments that sit empty most of the time.
Hong Kong attracts Chinese fearful of their government. London attracts Americans fearful of our government, along with Russians and Arabs fearful of their governments. The churning of tax havens is how London’s City makes its money – all those new skyscrapers are crumbs from the one percenters’ table.
By contrast the Tea Party, and ultra-nationalist groups gaining power across Europe, love lines. Calls to national power, to state power, and to local control are, in the end, calls to strengthen lines across the globe.
This is music to the ears of the one percent. They don’t need no stinkin’ lines.
By pitting cities against counties, and states against states, the ultra-wealthy build tax-free fortunes. By moving raw materials across oceans, to wherever labor is cheapest, they expand their profits. Holding the profits on one side of a line keeps it tax-free, and once disbursed to the wealthy tax shelters leap the lines and tax men can’t cross.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Most members of the U.S. Tea Party, or its nationalistic counterparts in Europe, aren’t members of the one percent. In their fight to create lines, and define lines, most have no clue that they’re doing the work of the one percent, or acting against their own interests.
Ironically, this is not a crisis Barack Obama or the Congress can address. Our government has authority only inside our borders. Vladimir Putin has no real power over these people. Neither does China president Xi Jinping.
No national politician can stop the line crossing. Which makes those who can cross lines more powerful than any politician. Nationalism hardens the lines. Calls for state control or local control harden the lines.
So here’s to the Earth’s new bosses. They are not the same as the old bosses.
Good luck stopping them.
This is an incredibly familiar scenario. Back in the last days of the Roman Republic, certain enterprising individuals began amassing fortunes so great, they could buy and sell entire armies, and did. Crassus and Pompey were both far richer than the official government; Julius Caesar came back from Gaul with a fortune so great that his heir could become the de facto ruler of the Roman Empire while remaining, officially, a private citizen. A private citizen whose family name became a synonym for Great Boss of Everything.
I think we all know how that ended.
This is an incredibly familiar scenario. Back in the last days of the Roman Republic, certain enterprising individuals began amassing fortunes so great, they could buy and sell entire armies, and did. Crassus and Pompey were both far richer than the official government; Julius Caesar came back from Gaul with a fortune so great that his heir could become the de facto ruler of the Roman Empire while remaining, officially, a private citizen. A private citizen whose family name became a synonym for Great Boss of Everything.
I think we all know how that ended.
Just came across your writing and enjoy reading what you articulate. I wish to contact you, haven’t found the way so that’s why the following addresses this post only obliquely.
How did I find you: the internet could be a great equalizer if it were correctly applied. Instead, I use it to escape and avoid personal pain and growth,lazily substituting the pursuit of intellectual stimulation as self-medication. Which is how I found your writing.
To catalog my datapath: I had logged out of yahoomail, which put me on the yahoo news site, where I spotted a story about California being split into 6 states, the plan of billionaire SV VC GOP Tim Draper (who just purchased all bitcoins at US gov auction). I started researching his political leanings, whereupon I learned he just attended the (world government)Allen & Co. Conference in Montana, which I hadn’t heard of before.
So the article about the Allen & Co.event was written by a disgruntled tech finance journalist who sounded as if he had been standing on tiptoe outside a walled compound, trying to see what they were talking about. All he got out of his after-interviews was this hilarious quote referencing a talk by Google’s Larry Page: “an artist named Pride Winkenwerder, who said: “His dedication to protecting the data at his company was visceral … I thought he was fascinating.”
First – OMG, the sentiment about Larry Page…but:
Pride Winkenwerder?
(ah-h-h-hhhhhh HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!)
(I digress in laughter.)
I just HAD to look up “pride winkenwerder” – a name smacking of entitled, mysterious androgyny. Why would someone with such a stupid name A) be allowed at such a secretive event and B)be the only actual guest quoted by a so-called “upstart business journal editor”?
In typical tangential-surfing style, and sparing the details about how someone came to be called Pride Winkelwerder – I quickly learned about her hubs William Winkelwerder and the AHLTA VistA affair. Which, while further researching, got me to one of your posts. From whence I searched out your most recent post I could find on here – this one.
And that I did because I wanted to comment-stalk you to pitch you an idea.
I’ve been looking into community land trusts. The San Francisco Community Land Trust has been buying a few little multi-unit buildings and leasing them to low-income tenants, preserving affordable housing in perpetuity, i.e with 99 to 200 year leases. If billionaires were to fund CLT’s the way Paul Allen funds the L.A. Clippers, there would be no affordable housing crisis in the US for the foreseeable future – and the model can be used in other countries. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, though – I’m sure there will soon be laws passed that outlaw this activity.
Me, I’m just trying to find a couple of SV VC bro-yonaires that could, with a wave of their scepters, solve the housing problem in my berg, so close to Silicon Valley. With much less than one of their billions, we could build all the beautiful, green, affordable housing needed in little, be-bubbled Santa Cruz. The funders would come out smelling like roses in their tiny klatch of Bro-cialist liberal billionaires.
Santa Cruz, like San Francisco, is kicking out poor people from homeless to teachers and cops by encouraging the “extreme rentier” approach to capitalism. Since there are so few ways to make money in Santa Cruz – it’s all about the real estate. Now that the housing bubble has returned, rental prices are higher than the previous highs in ’07. But the same high unemployment with low wages abides like the dude.
So I thought I’d look into forming a CLT, look for some interested parties like lawyers, financiers, activists. That’s proving harder than I thought, but still working at it.
Meanwhile, I’m wondering what laws are being cooked up to stop CLT’s – which have the propensity to become a charitable way for bro-billions to flow into affordable housing, calming the masses, and avoiding destruction of the pursuit of capital. The problem with CLT’s is that it removes real estate from the clutches of predatory investors. I’m certain they are paying off some California CorpoDems this very second, to “propose” some ALEC-written form of extreme regulation of community land trusts – which will be portrayed as communist threats.
Anyhow, keep your eye on that, if you’re interested. The CLT is an interesting possibility.
Just came across your writing and enjoy reading what you articulate. I wish to contact you, haven’t found the way so that’s why the following addresses this post only obliquely.
How did I find you: the internet could be a great equalizer if it were correctly applied. Instead, I use it to escape and avoid personal pain and growth,lazily substituting the pursuit of intellectual stimulation as self-medication. Which is how I found your writing.
To catalog my datapath: I had logged out of yahoomail, which put me on the yahoo news site, where I spotted a story about California being split into 6 states, the plan of billionaire SV VC GOP Tim Draper (who just purchased all bitcoins at US gov auction). I started researching his political leanings, whereupon I learned he just attended the (world government)Allen & Co. Conference in Montana, which I hadn’t heard of before.
So the article about the Allen & Co.event was written by a disgruntled tech finance journalist who sounded as if he had been standing on tiptoe outside a walled compound, trying to see what they were talking about. All he got out of his after-interviews was this hilarious quote referencing a talk by Google’s Larry Page: “an artist named Pride Winkenwerder, who said: “His dedication to protecting the data at his company was visceral … I thought he was fascinating.”
First – OMG, the sentiment about Larry Page…but:
Pride Winkenwerder?
(ah-h-h-hhhhhh HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!)
(I digress in laughter.)
I just HAD to look up “pride winkenwerder” – a name smacking of entitled, mysterious androgyny. Why would someone with such a stupid name A) be allowed at such a secretive event and B)be the only actual guest quoted by a so-called “upstart business journal editor”?
In typical tangential-surfing style, and sparing the details about how someone came to be called Pride Winkelwerder – I quickly learned about her hubs William Winkelwerder and the AHLTA VistA affair. Which, while further researching, got me to one of your posts. From whence I searched out your most recent post I could find on here – this one.
And that I did because I wanted to comment-stalk you to pitch you an idea.
I’ve been looking into community land trusts. The San Francisco Community Land Trust has been buying a few little multi-unit buildings and leasing them to low-income tenants, preserving affordable housing in perpetuity, i.e with 99 to 200 year leases. If billionaires were to fund CLT’s the way Paul Allen funds the L.A. Clippers, there would be no affordable housing crisis in the US for the foreseeable future – and the model can be used in other countries. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, though – I’m sure there will soon be laws passed that outlaw this activity.
Me, I’m just trying to find a couple of SV VC bro-yonaires that could, with a wave of their scepters, solve the housing problem in my berg, so close to Silicon Valley. With much less than one of their billions, we could build all the beautiful, green, affordable housing needed in little, be-bubbled Santa Cruz. The funders would come out smelling like roses in their tiny klatch of Bro-cialist liberal billionaires.
Santa Cruz, like San Francisco, is kicking out poor people from homeless to teachers and cops by encouraging the “extreme rentier” approach to capitalism. Since there are so few ways to make money in Santa Cruz – it’s all about the real estate. Now that the housing bubble has returned, rental prices are higher than the previous highs in ’07. But the same high unemployment with low wages abides like the dude.
So I thought I’d look into forming a CLT, look for some interested parties like lawyers, financiers, activists. That’s proving harder than I thought, but still working at it.
Meanwhile, I’m wondering what laws are being cooked up to stop CLT’s – which have the propensity to become a charitable way for bro-billions to flow into affordable housing, calming the masses, and avoiding destruction of the pursuit of capital. The problem with CLT’s is that it removes real estate from the clutches of predatory investors. I’m certain they are paying off some California CorpoDems this very second, to “propose” some ALEC-written form of extreme regulation of community land trusts – which will be portrayed as communist threats.
Anyhow, keep your eye on that, if you’re interested. The CLT is an interesting possibility.