Accumulated Old Wealth

Wealth Gap Series

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Pikett
2014, Excerpts

Foreign possessions became important in the period 1750-1800. It was the nineteenth century that British subjects began to acquire considerable assets in the rest of the world, in amounts previously unknown and never surpassed to this day. By the eve of WWI, Britain had assembled the world’s preeminent colonial empire and owned foreign assets. France was the second most important colonial power.

By the turn of the twentieth century, capital invested abroad was yielding around 5 percent a year in dividends, interest, and rent. A fairly significant social group was able to live off this boon. The rest of world worked to increase consumption by the colonial powers and at the same time became more and more indebted to those same powers.

France and Britain have always been countries based on private property; private wealth has always dominated public wealth. Private wealth in 2010 accounts for virtually all of national wealth in both countries: more than 99 percent in Britain and roughly 95 percent in France.

Wealth Gap

Wealth Gap Series

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
2014, Excerpts

Physical reality of inequality is visible to the naked eye. Peasant and noble, worker and factory owner, waiter and banker: each has his or her own unique vantage point and sees important aspects of how other people live and what relations of power and domination exist between social groups, and these observations shape each person’s judgment of what is and is not just. There is a fundamentally subjective and psychological dimension to inequality, which inevitably gives rise to political conflict.

An economy and society cannot continue functioning indefinitely with such extreme divergence between social groups. The widening wealth gap raises many questions as to its long term consequences. The way this large divergence of income distribution has evolved demands an explanation.

The unlimited growth of global wealth inequality, which is currently increasing at a rate that cannot be sustained in the long run, ought to worry even the most fervent champions of the self-regulated market. It is an illusion to think that the laws of the market economy ensure that inequality of wealth will decrease and harmonious stability will be achieved.

 

 

Income Inequality

Wealth Gap Series

This series explores the widening Wealth Gap and its impact on class and race relations, excerpting heavily from Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, depicting the structural cause of the wealth gap in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century published in 2014. The book created quite a stir at the time, getting both rave reviews and harsh critiques, and remains relevant. Essentially, he provides a historical basis that a widening wealth gap eventually spawns war and unrest. And since 2014, the gap has grown to unimagined extremes, heading exponentially to a resolution.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty 

2014, Excerpts

The central thesis of this book is that a small gap between the return on capital and the rate of income growth can in the long run have powerful and destabilizing effects on the structure and dynamics of social inequality.

The concentration of wealth and prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. The main driver of inequality – the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of income growth – generates extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values.

There is no fundamental reason why we should believe that growth is automatically balanced. We should put the question of inequality back at the center of economic analysis and begin asking questions first raised in the nineteenth century. For far too long, economists have neglected the distribution of wealth.

Wealth Gap

Capital vs Income

Accumulated Old Wealth

Inherited Wealth

Testimony of Abigail E. Disney

Racial Wealth Gap

Wealth Gap Correction - War

Franklin D. Roosevelt on Privileged Enterprise

Thomas Piketty refuses to censor latest book for sale in China
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/31/thomas-piketty-refuses-to-censor-latest-book-for-sale-in-china
31 Aug 2020

The latest book by the French economist Thomas Piketty appears unlikely to be sold in mainland China after he refused requests to censor it. The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has expressed admiration for Piketty’s work, but Capital and Ideology, which was published last year, has not made it to the mainland China market due to sections on inequality in the country.

Obama’s Farewell Address, Excerpts

10 Jan 2017

Stark inequality is corrosive to our democratic idea. While the top 1 percent has amassed a bigger share of wealth and income, too many of our families in inner cities and in rural counties have been left behind. Convinced that the game is fixed against them. That their government only serves the interest of the powerful. That’s a recipe for more cynicism and polarization in our politics. Workers of all shades are going to be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves.

Wealth Over Work

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/opinion/krugman-wealth-over-work.html?_r=0

23 Mar 2014

It seems safe to say that “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year — and maybe of the decade. Mr. Piketty, arguably the world’s leading expert on income and wealth inequality, does more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. He also makes a powerful case that we’re on the way back to “patrimonial capitalism,” in which the commanding heights of the economy are dominated not just by wealth, but also by inherited wealth, in which birth matters more than effort and talent.

Wikipedia: Wealth inequality in the United States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States

The distributive nature of tax policy has been suggested by some economists and politicians such as Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty, and Barack Obama to perpetuate economic inequality in America by steering large sums of wealth into the hands of the wealthiest Americans. This claim has created much controversy and debate within the academic and political spheres.

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French economist Thomas Piketty argues that "extremely high levels" of wealth inequality are "incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies" and that "the risk of a drift towards oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism about where the United States is headed".

Civilizations and Usury

The Form of Money


In May 2026, Chinese leader President Xi Jinping cited the Thucydides Trap to urge the U.S. to accept China's rise without resorting to conflict, as history has shown that competing growth economies will go to war.

A History of Interest Rates by Sidney Homer, Rutgers University Press, 1963

Credit is sometimes considered a modern device or even a modern vice. A glance through the pages of financial history will dispel the notion of novelty. Credit was in general use in ancient and medieval times. Credit long antedated industry, banking and even coinage; it probably antedated primitive forms of money.

For example, about 1800 B.C., Hammurabi, a king of the first dynasty of ancient Babylonia, gave his people their earliest formal code of laws. A number of chief provisions of this code regulated the relation of debtor to creditor. The maximum rate of interest was set at 33 1/3% per annum for loans of grain.

Twelve hundred years later, around 600 B.C., the legal history of classical Greece began with the laws of Solon. Drastic reforms were then called for by an economic crisis in Athens stemming in part from excessive debt and widespread personal slavery for debt.

The Romans also began their legal history with a body of laws regulating credit. This, too, was forced by a crisis characterized by excessive debt.

These three examples from the earliest days of historic Babylon, Greece and Rome are enough to support the conclusion that credit at interest was widespread enough to create major political problems.

Usury, or interest, was fundamental to the economics of these great civilizations, driving its unsustainable growth and eventual collapse. Modern civilization has the same trappings of past fates.

The Dance of Death by Chris Hedges
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/03/13/dance-death
13 Mar 2017

The graveyard of world empires—Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian—followed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Civilizations in decline, despite the palpable signs of decay around them, remain fixated on restoring their “greatness.” Their illusions condemn them. They cannot see that the forces that gave rise to civilization are the same forces that are extinguishing it. Their leaders are trained only to serve the system. And when the last moments of a civilization arrive, the degenerate edifices of power appear to crumble overnight.

Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus. The ecosystem that sustains the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth, concentrated in the hands of elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage imposed on the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests, courtiers, mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society. Capitalism ruthlessly commodifies human beings and the natural world to extract profit until exhaustion or collapse. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only to instill technical proficiency to serve the engine of capitalism. Historical amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future. Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages. State repression is indiscriminant and brutal.

The elites’ myopic response to the looming collapse of the natural world and the civilization is to make subservient populations work harder for less, squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids, palaces, border walls and fracking, and wage war. Increasing military spending and taking the needed funds out of domestic programs typifies the behavior of terminally ill civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to sustain an army of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on state resources.

Regime Change

 

Regime change.

Seems to be topical.

Venezuela, Iran, Cuba.

Sure, why not.

Madero was an asshole,

Shahs suck.

So do Supreme Leaders.

Cuba is an enigma.

 

Regime Change,

overwhelming force,

nightly on TV.

 

I pause to think,

what would move me,

to justify,

to initiate,

a Regime Change?

 

To risk the impact,

to make the point,

of a just cause,

worth risking,

personal extreme.

 

Hypothecating,

 

A new class has surfaced.

Unwillingly exposed,

popularized as the,

Epstein class.

Pedophiles.

 

A class of privilege,

of connections,

of wealth,

of power.

 

So, here’s a class of folks,

at the highest levels,

of societal power,

anchored on pedophilia.

 

Regime change,

purge the Epstein class,

anger justified,

anger released.

Zero tolerance.

 

Walks of shame,

with a modern twist,

crueler.

 

Pedophilia.

the cruelest sin,

not acceptable,

in any society,

not ever,

and not in this society.

 

Regime change,

Epstein class.

Constitution Series

This series draws primarily from two primary sources: An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles Beard, 1913, and The Anti-Federalists by Jackson Main, 1961.

Charles Austin Beard [1874-1948] is widely regarded as one of the most influential American historians of the early 20th century. He is most widely known for his radical re-evaluation of the Founding Fathers of the United States, whom he believed were more motivated by economics than by philosophical principles.

It is difficult to conceive of the Constitution as an economic document. It places no property qualifications on voters or offices; it gives no outward recognition of any economic groups in society; it mentions no special privileges to be conferred upon any class. The concept of the Constitution as a piece of abstract legislation reflecting no group interests and recognizing no economic antagonisms is entirely false. It was an economic document drawn with superb skill by men whose property interests were immediately at stake.

Jackson Main [1917-2003, Academic and Historian]:

I had chosen to tackle Beard’s Economic Interpretation with the notion that Beard erred, but discovered that the secondary literature supported him.

The Power of the Purse by E. James Ferguson, 1961, Excerpt

Beard’s major thesis that the Constitution was the handiwork of the classes of American society possessing status and property cannot be ascribed to him alone. What shocked Beard’s contemporaries and still provokes the most criticism was his purported demonstration that many of the founding fathers held securities and stood to profit from their work. Although his declared object was merely to identify the founders as members of an economic class, the implication was that they had a profit motive.

Howard Zinn:

When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support. The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history.

Series:

The Articles of Confederation

The First President - John Hanson

Class Distinctions 1780's

Debt and Taxes 1780's

The Antifederalists

1780's Post Revolution Depression

Shays' Rebellion Series 

Society of Cincinnati

Federalists Push for a Constitution

The Federalist Papers Series - Economic Excerpts 

The Constitution as an Economic Document

Fear of Aristocracy

Skewed Power Structure

Philadelphia Convention of 1787

The Founding Fathers’ Economic Interests

Constitution Ratified

The Whiskey Rebellion Series 

The Revolution Financiers and Creditors

Robert Morris

Alexander Hamilton

Haym Salomon

Timeline

1776: Declaration of Independence

1777: Continental Congress drafts Articles of Confederation

1781: Americans defeat British at Battle of Yorktown

1783: Treaty of Paris signed

1786 to 1787: Shays' Rebellion

1787 May: First meeting of Philadelphia Convention

1787 Sep: Proposed Constitution signed, ratification called.

1787 Oct: First Federalist Paper appears:

1789 Mar: First United States Congress is seated.

1789 Apr: George Washington is inaugurated as the first President of the United States.

1791 to 1794: The Whiskey Rebellion

Statue of Liberty Puerto Rico Flag - 1977

Puerto Rican Series

Google AI

In 1977, Puerto Rican nationalists occupied the Statue of Liberty, draping the Puerto Rican flag from the crown as a political statement protesting the U.S. territorial status of Puerto Rico. This act, which lasted eight hours, was meant to highlight the hypocrisy of the U.S. promoting freedom while denying political representation to Puerto Ricans. A 2000 protest also involved placing a flag on the statue. 

1977 Occupation

• Who: 

A group of about 30 Puerto Rican nationalists, including members of groups like the Young Lords Organization, under the name Committee to Free the Five Puerto Rican Nationalists. 

• What: 

They took over the statue, draped a Puerto Rican flag from its crown, and placed a banner calling for independence across its pedestal. 

• Why: 

They aimed to draw international attention to Puerto Rico's political situation and challenge the U.S.'s claim of being a beacon of freedom, especially in light of Puerto Rico's lack of political representation. 

• Outcome: 

The group was arrested by federal authorities after a day-long standoff. 

Luis Raúl Muñoz – Young Lords mural, 2019

Chicago’s Humboldt Park