East and West

Polo isn’t a big sport in China, in fact it is “barely known.” But the developers of the Tianjin Goldin Metropolitan Polo Club & Hotel are betting more than $240 million on appealing to the new Chinese rich who want to be identified with European aristocracy. It will have two international-standard polo fields, stables for 150 horses, a 167-room hotel, 10 restaurants, a three-storey wine cellar with a capacity of 10,000 bottles, a ballroom for 1,000 guests and conference rooms, spas, gymnasiums and a Roman-style indoor swimming pool. Membership will cost about $57,000, with memberships for “patron” team owners to be much higher.

This remains one of the great paradoxes of modern wealth. While the new rich are quick to distance themselves from the Leisure Class, with their attacks on inherited money and devotion to hard work, they still crave the respectability and traditions of the aristocracy.
from here

Often it is heard that rich people are not like the rest of us, and it appears, that really this is true. Many of today's rich folks earned their wealth themselves, and tend to look at life through the lenses of the Meritocracy. This is in contrast to the old idea of inherited wealth giving rise to inflated opinions of one's self worth. Those people of the "newly rich" demographic had managed to attain their wealth themselves through whatever hard work and tricky manipulations that it took. They come across as smug, self-satisfied, and dismissive of others who had not attained a similar status in life. And worse, they believe all this because they themselves have had such great success in life, due to contacts, and opportunity combined with hard work and dedication to their goals. One member of this elite group, was born in Taiwan, and studied in the U.S. but like most of the wealthy, didn't feel any particular bond with any particular country.These people have more in common with each other than the rest of us. They tend to interact socially with others of their rank, and live in secure communities, often gated and surrounded by guards. They tend not to interact socially with the "great unwashed" (the rest of us), and tend to have a rather dismissive attitude towards those who have not managed to become as wealthy as they have. They often tend to blame the rest of us for our poverty, for our lack of success. They say that they did it, so why can't anyone else? Such derision, such contempt, such a lack of empathy was displayed by these people towards the less fortunate than themselves.

Most of us do not appear to have what it takes to become a member of the Corporatocracy, neither inherited wealth, nor earned wealth, neither family connections, nor old boy connections, in short, we are excluded from the heights, so longed for by so many. Another sobering thought. When asked about this, these uber rich, who believe in the meritocracy, tended to state that American labour is way too expensive for the output, and that they can get cheaper labour elsewhere, like in China or Indonesia (where Nike relocated its factories). Also they tended to believe that if Americans lost a few jobs, at least Asians got some jobs, and if American wages come down then others in Asia will get some of that money. In short these modern day industrialists and bankers and financiers are Globalists, who have little or no allegiance to either the country of their birth, nor to the country where they may reside. Indeed many of them, once wealthy, will relocate to a country more favourable to their ideas of taxation: low, or nil. They care so little for the people in their own countries, that not only do they move their factories overseas to cheaper countries, but that they even take all their money earned in their home countries out, for the most part untaxed, and put it in numbered Swiss bank accounts.

Further, they then practise the old doctrine of imperialism: "Divide and Conquer", by stirring up the non union labour sector, in jealousy and envy, to support their wholesale attack on the wages, benefits, pensions and working conditions of unionised public sector labour, the idea being to "share the pain".The aim is to drive those on middle incomes into the poor working class, and to strip all the workers' rights so painfully acquired over the last century. Not satisfied with their current take home pay, these greedy Corporatocrats want it all, or as much of it as they can manage to grab, at least. They appear to believe that really, we, the rest of the population do not really need the pittance that we are currently granted to live upon, through the fruits of our labour, in the current sweatshops of commerce. Their attitude would have been understood very well by the Victorian style of capitalist, who extracted every penny's worth of work from his impoverished working staff, including young children, while remunerating them with as small a pittance as possible, barely enough to keep body and soul together for a while. This is considered to be "good" capitalistic practice, and is the reason why Unions were devised in the first place: to work for the common good of labour against the oppression by the capitalists.

Basically these Corporatocrats currently blame the workforce for their own unemployment. They are the CEO's and owners of companies, who have moved their factories away from North America to other, cheaper venues, like China and Indonesia. Nike, for example closed most of its plants in America and moved overseas to Indonesia, and were cited by Michael Moore for exploiting child labour in that country. In his film "The Big One" he confronted the CEO of the company, Phil Knight, in the Seattle area, with this outsourcing scandal. When asked, Knight insisted that Americans do not want to make shoes, and that's why he moved the factories. Moore then went back to Flint Michigan where there were large numbers of unemployed folks, and asked them if they wanted to work in a Nike plant making shoes. He filmed a largish group of these unemployed folks, with banners and such chanting that they did indeed want to work for Nike making shoes. Mr. Moore then took this film to the Seattle area and showed it to the Nike CEO, who laughed at it, and dismissively said that it was meaningless, and that still Americans do not want to make shoes, and that they were only saying they wanted to, because they were unemployed.

Mr. Moore also presented the Nike CEO with two airline tickets, and offered to travel with him to Indonesia to clear up the dispute over whether he employed children and teenagers in Indonesia or not, making American shoes. Knight declined the offer, but continued to insist that he did not employ children.

The exact same deal works with China as well. North American companies close their North American factories, claiming that North American labour costs are too high, and ship their factories overseas to such countries as Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Taiwan and so on, where labour costs are considerably lower, and government oversight considerably less.

All of this manipulating, and law passing, and outsourcing, is having the result of the middle class disappearing, sucked down into their former squalor in the lowest, so-called "working classes", where the wages are cheap, the benefits do not exist, nor pensions, the work place may be dangerous, the hours long, and underpaid, and when worn out at an early age, these folks are cast aside like garbage: no medical insurance, no pension. Just let them eat cake I guess. Not having the right education, the right family, and the right "old boy" connections, they are doomed to the underclasses, slaving away for their daily bread, squeezed between the employer, the rent payments, and the food bill, wherein many have to take two or three low paying jobs just to pay the rent. And then there's a debate as to whether they can pay the ever inflating electrical bills, or should they go shopping for food. Unfortunately there's often not enough for both.

Not only that, but the uber rich are so greedy and dismissive of the rest of us, that they fight tooth and nail (through their proxies of various parties in various countries) to safeguard their tax cuts, such that they pay next to no taxes, shielded by various loopholes in the tax laws. On top of this, and since this leaves the government budgets in serious deficit, when the rich do not pay their fair share, they agitate at the same time for service cuts through governments, from the local on up to the federal, cuts mostly to such irritating services as Medicaid, or Welfare, or in education. At the same time they are advocating for much greater spending by governments on their favourite companies, through Defense contracts and such, while outsourcing as much of the labour and construction costs as possible, again proving a net drain on the economy of their supposed "home" country.

Warren Buffet has admitted in an interview in 2005 : "Yeah. The rich people are doing so well in this country. I mean, we never had it so good...It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be..."

Today, the ordinary folks living in North America are suffering the results of such a greedy consolidation of the continent's wealth in such a few hands. While a few lavish great wealth on themselves, the rest of us struggle each day to manage to get another scrap of bread for our families.

Adapted from here