With numbers like this, how long will it be before the whole system ruptures?

[GliderGuider]

The top one percent of the wealthiest people on the planet own nearly fifty percent of the world's assets while the bottom fifty percent of the global population combined own less than one percent of the world's wealth.

Those are the findings of an annual report by the investment firm Credit Suisse released Tuesday—the 2014 Global Wealth Report (pdf)—which shows that global economic inequality has surged since the financial collapse of 2008.

Though the rate of this wealth creation has been particularly fast over the last year—the fastest annual growth recorded since the pre-crisis year of 2007—the report notes that the benefits of this overall growth have flowed disproportionately to the already wealthy. And the report reveals that as of mid-2014, "the bottom half of the global population own less than 1% of total wealth. In sharp contrast, the richest decile hold 87% of the world’s wealth, and the top percentile alone account for 48.2% of global assets.”

http://www.countercurrents.org/queally141014.htm

[Bigmack]

1. Saw this in a couple places, but

GOOD to post it here. Unf'king believable! This baby gonna unravel one of these days.... Ms Bigmack

[Nuclear Unicorn]

40. A real anarchist isn't someone who screams, "Overthrow the system!" but rather

someone standing out of the way saying, "See. I told you so," as the system overthrows itself.

[RadiationTherapy]

55. This 3 minute video has an interesting perspective on anarchism, I think.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

58. Thank you for the video

After your post I did some reading on Mr. Wilson. Interesting fellow with some delightful "quirks" (if I may be so bold). He would have made a delightful neighbor.

I'll do some more reading.

Thank-you again.

[RadiationTherapy]

59. I don't personally have heroes or idols, but RAW is one of the greatest influences on my life.

His "Illuminatus Trilogy" is, to my mind, absolutely amazing. The audiobook is even better, except for several cringe-worthy accents.

[KansDem]

2. But...but...it's gonna start trickling down any day now!!!

Liars...f*cking liars. They knew what they were doing.

[maindawg]

23. The Kpchs were worth 4 billion when Obama took office

Its now 84 billion...

[Make7]

35. What are you talking about? Forbes has each brother worth $19 billion in 2008.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120922140751/http://www.forbes.com/2008/09/15/400list08_all_slide_10.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20101026202837/http://www.forbes.com/2008/09/15/400list08_all_slide_11.html

[AZ Progressive]

44. Nope, it was back in 2004

[Andy823]

3. If you think it's bad now

Just think what it would be like if republicans were still in charge, or if they take the Senate this year, keep the president from doing anything the next two years, and by some miracle they actually win the WH in 2016!

[raven mad]

50. Due to general ignorance and a strong belief that the oil fields can "come back" (????) -

Mark Begich is in trouble. Granted, he's more independent than Democratic - but he's ours, and between the Kochsuckers and Karl Rove, he's down by 3 points.

I've given, direct, all I can. I hope others do the same and then go out and VOTE.

[Taitertots]

4. Look around, it already has

There is widespread civil unrest in almost every country on earth. You just wouldn't know if you watch corporate media.

[GliderGuider]

9. Yes, that's my take on it as well.

We're already into the mouth of the collapse, but it's too big a process for most people to understand as such.

[ChisolmTrailDem]

5. Hey Glider, I've long respected your contribution to the discourse around these kind of issues both

here on DU and points beyond, especially your research and writing on the challenges civilization faces with regard to natural resources, etc. Can you tell me what your take is on this upward-funneling of global assets or guide me to anything you've written on it recently? Are we seeing a gathering of eggs into their overstuffed baskets due to some sense by those who hold the reigns that perhaps we're facing the limits of growth?

[GliderGuider]

10. Believe it or not, my take on this is that's it's largely a natural process.

I take a bottom-up view of how self-organizing complex adaptive systems like societies and civilizations function. Consolidation of wealth seems to follow the same principles that guide the appearance of hierarchic levels of control as systems grow. As systems grow they spontaneously develop increasingly complex control systems, which allows them to manage their operation more effectively. Such hierarchies are generally pyramidal, with a concentration of control information at the tip. Along with the consolidation of control comes the consolidation of power and wealth. We've seen this happen time after time in monarchies, dictatorships and oligarchies.

The difference now is that the system in question has globalized, with few obstructions to the flow of control, power and wealth. Certainly national boundaries are no longer an impediment. The process has sped up dramatically over the last few decades, as the level of technology and energy flow has exploded around the world.

There is NO sense at the highest levels that the game is about to crash. I have a couple of collapse-aware friends who have been hedge fund managers. They report on their contacts with those still in the game, and their reports are uniformly negative. The people at the top of the pyramid believe the infinite-growth propaganda far more than those near the bottom. To the movers and shakers the world is gravy as far as the eye can see.

It's worth remembering though, that the huge majority of those assets are virtual - mere status markers. The real users of real assets, requiring energy and resource flows are people...just like us. When the bubble finally pops, those virtual assets will vanish and with them part of our collective mental and social worldview. That doesn't mean that the pop won't kill a lot (and I mean a LOT) of people. Those virtual assets are what control the movement of most of the real assets, after all. We may use them, but the path from their origin to us lies through the middle of that virtual asset maze.

I don't think politics can fix this, because all political activity is in service to the growth agenda, in one way or another. IMHO.

</Cassandra>

[socialist_n_TN]

60. RE: your fourth paragraph.......

I think that's an important point. Most of the "wealth" is merely fictitious, as you said "status markers". The real actual wealth is in the factories and farms that actually make stuff. REAL assets can be taken over and run by the working class, BUT IT MUST BE A WORLD-WIDE PHOENOMA. Otherwise the holders of the "wealth" just take it out of the country. True they lose the physical assets, but as long as the world recognizes these "status markers" as real, they will hold power.

Good thread. Thanks.

[GliderGuider]

61. I had another friend point out this wrinkle, though

Think about the family farmers of America. Sixty years ago they (not huge agri-corporations) owned most of the arable and cultivated farmland in this country, but not any more. Farm land isn't a mere "status marker."

As wealth consolidates, so does a lot of the "real asset" ownership - farms, retail establishments, factories etc. If/when there is a crash in virtual wealth, what happens to those real assets that the oligarchs have invested their virtual wealth in?

[socialist_n_TN]

62. Hopefully the workers in these real assets take them.......

and run them for themselves and for the good of everybody as a whole. To ensure this though, the organization has to be NOW, not when it happens.

[notrightatall]

6. How long will it be until last week?

[greatlaurel]

7. Rich people are just not all that smart. Some are cunning.

They are surrounded by sycophants who tell them they are geniuses from private preschool to legacy enrollments to the "elite" universities where they are handed a degree and at the corporations they run into the ground. The rich may be able to insulate themselves for a while in the new hot world, but they cannot protect themselves from toxic chemicals, radiation, disease and lack of food.

The fact that estrogen mimicking chemicals and assorted and numerous other toxins are now permeated into every food stuff, even organic foods, as well as the air we all breath means the rich people are ingesting the same toxins as all the rest of us. While the Koch brothers and their fellow travelers fight to prevent research and regulation, they are slowly poisoning themselves and their offspring along with the rest of us. They are truly idiots.

[KingCharlemagne]

8. This concentraton of wealth in the hands of a few is a feature, not a bug, of global

capitalism. Funny how wealth distribution and concentration were more equitable back when the USSR and People' Republic of China were still valid socialist states, eh?

[GliderGuider]

11. Absolutely! See my post above about how I think it's a natural phenomenon. nt

[hifiguy]

15. I recently saw a very plausible estimate that

the world's superrich have $30-40 trillion - let me repeat that: 30-40 TRILLION DOLLARS - stashed in various financial black holes around the world doing sweet f**k all. Just sitting there. It is well past time to liberate and repatriate that inconceivable fortune.

[GliderGuider]

17. Does money ever "sit there"?

Unless it's converted to a real asset, it always stays in motion. All the "black holes" do is guarantee their access to the money if they need it.

[Adrahil]

65. Yeah.... Rich people don't let their money "sit there"

Someone pay for the privilege of using that money for something.

[KingCharlemagne]

18. Agree 1000%. I would merely note that the physical assets that $30-40 trillion

represent exist as privately-held assets and means of production, thus giving a special point to Proudhon's observation that "all private property is theft."

In parallel to "liberate and repatriate that inconceivable fortune," one can equally consider "expropriate and nationalize the means of production."

Emma Goldman had a great way of putting it:

“Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.”

Quoted from Anarchism and Other Essays, (1910)

[Louisiana1976]

34. What America needs is a socialist government that would expropriate and nationalize the means of

production and distribute the wealth to the 99%.

[hifiguy]

47. i'd be content to leave the means of production for non-essentials

and luxury goods in wholly private hands. There's no reason private enterprise shouldn't continue to exist in a substantial realm of the economy but it should no longer be in a position to commoditize everything. The necessities (energy, health care, education, etc) should either be nationalized or subject to intense and ongoing supervision and regulation by a government in the hands of the People, not the Corporations. The New Deal on stilts and steroids, as it were. Root out corporate-fueled corruption at all levels.

[abelenkpe]

52. Add retirement

401ks are awful.

We definitely need a new new deal.

[mb999]

54. There should be maximum personal and corporate wealth limits

and a minimum guaranteed standard of living. Public utlilites should be just that, public and controlled by the government including health care and education. Eliminate the insurance cartel out of health care. Forgive all student debt.


No one person or corporation should be able to control so much wealth they can buy the congress and nullify the democratic process with their money. Super rich oligarchs should not exist. Period. Inheritance of wealth should be capped at a maximum amount. Why should anyone be born rich? Let them earn it and play with it while they are here. When they die it gets redistributed. no one should be in poverty.

[hifiguy]

12. it will get far worse before everything implodes,

which it eventually has to. They have not yet begun to steal. But there is a limit to how much internal pressure any system can withstand. I give it another ten years.

I hope I live long enough to see the tumbrels roll to the National Razor.

[GliderGuider]

14. Ten years sounds about right to me.

Though it won't all go down with a single reverberating THUD! I think we'll see an unraveling that accelerates rapidly over the next two decades. It seems to have become a dead heat between climate change and social collapse.

[The2ndWheel]

31. Maintenance costs

It's like a human body. You have to feed it, or else it breaks down. Well, even if you feed a human body, it breaks down. Just takes a little longer.

[GliderGuider]

36. Speaking of maintenance costs

You might find this interesting. Have you heard of a researcher named Tim Garrett? He has figured out that the world uses use about 7 milliwatts of power for ever constant dollar's worth of global GDP we've produced over the last thousand years or so. In other words, virtually all of the energy produced in the world goes either directly or indirectly to maintain the stockpile of real wealth (infrastructure etc.) we've built up over the centuries. Talk about your Red Queen's Race!

I was skeptical, so I duplicated his work using data from the World Bank, the BP Statistical Review and Angus Maddison for historical GDP estimates. This is what I got:



IMO the implications for the future are "disturbing" - especially since over 85% of the world's energy still comes from fossil fuels.

[hatrack]

38. As they say, Rome wasn't destroyed in a day . . . .

[GliderGuider]

39. +1 nt

[ffr]

22. RWNJs will have to turn against Fox & Co first

If anything, they'll eat their children before those people will turn their TVs & radios off. RWNJ media makes them feel good about how backward gullible they are. It'll take a mighty force to overcome that.

Any revolt would have to happen without them or with them as protectors for the 1%.

[KingCharlemagne]

25. Actually, it probably need not come to that. The educated sons and daughters of the

frustrated and stagnated middle class will have to determine that they have more to gain by making common cause with the working poor and lower classes than they do with the bourgeoisie.

We saw nascent signs of this in the Occupy Wall Street movement, although one could easily lose that signal amidst all the quackery and tomfoolery the movement engendered ('End the Fed,' 'ChemTrails,' ad infinitum).

Once the intelligentsia and middle classes throw in with the working class, the days of the ruling class can be numbered if not on the fingers of two hands, then in months and not years.

[The2ndWheel]

13. Civilization is an external resource concentration mechanism

That resources would then get concentrated within that mechanism is pretty much a given.

Once you invest the time and energy into concentrating those resources, it's very difficult to just let it loose. Imagine if we just let out all of the livestock to roam as they want? The water from behind a dam? If more people had more money to spend, how much more of the planet would we have to privatize for humanity?

I wouldn't go so far as to say the 1% are helping the planet, but at the same time, because they are hoarding so much wealth, a lot of potential energy is not being used. Energy drives human activity. If human activity is helping to drive climate change...

Either way, it should be an interesting century. We can't stop, but we can't continue.

[GliderGuider]

16. Are they actually hoarding the wealth?

I think they control it and can access it at will, but it's all out there fueling more growth. That's what the "velocity of money" idea is all about. Money never sits still.

Otherwise I am in violent agreement with your views!

[The2ndWheel]

21. Hoarding might not be the right word

Funneling is probably better.

[GliderGuider]

27. Yes, "funneling" works.

[MontyPow]

19. Not anytime soon.

The lessons from the Great Depression were to save the rich, this time, not the poor or middle class. And the lessons from 9/11 learned was BE AFRAID.

So combine Citizens United with WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE and the American People will keep doing what they have been doing, voting for the 1%'s best interests.

We'll totally be made Ready For Hillary on the Democratic side. Who knows what the Republicans will vomit up.

[GliderGuider]

20. This isn't an American problem. It doesn't have a "Made in America" solution.

Certainly not one that might emerge from the ranks of purchased politicians.

You need to expand your horizons beyond your national borders. This is a transnational problem.

[MontyPow]

45. I think there can be an American solution.

While the problem is international in scope, not all successful nations have adopted this approach.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

24. The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.

The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. Marie Beyle (Stendahl)

[hfojvt]

26. How much different are those numbers

from twenty years ago? Or forty?

When you start talking about the globe, well even poor Americans are riding pretty high. About half of the world live on less than $2.50 a day. If they are living on that little, what chance do they have to accumulate wealth?

Also in the "bottom 50%" are people with NEGATIVE net worth. For example, in the 2011 census of wealth, it was said that 10.7 million households had a net worth of less than -$8,610. Their combined net worth then, is less than $92.5 billion. Add Bill Gates to their number, and their total net worth is STILL less than zero. Take away Bill Gates and add all THREE of the Koch brothers and the total net worth is still negative.

But most of those people who are upside down in net worth, are probably still living better than $2.50 per day. In fact, 8% of those in the HIGHEST quintile for income, have zero or negative net worth.

Also, what is the number? How much wealth does it take to be in the top 1% globally. That would be 70 million people or 23 million households. Well, I guess I do not make that, because there are 31 million households in the US alone who have over $250,000 in net worth.

But the top 10% would be about 230 million households, and there are only 52 million households in the US with over $100,000 in net worth. I am guessing that they (myself included) are part of the global top 10% for wealth. Because about 80% of the world lives on less than $10 a day.

And I added quite a bit of personal wealth since 2007, especially when I started working full time in September 2011.

http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats

[Docross]

28. Feudal Lords and...serfs

It used to be “whoever controlled the land, controlled the people”.
Then it was “whoever controlled the media, controlled the people”.
However, the other half of that statement has always been..

“ But for God’s sake NEVER let them go hungry or they will rise up and crush you!”

Most of the people in the whole world are now IN COMMUNICATION with each other.
This changes everything.

[GliderGuider]

32. It's fascinating watching how democratized communication has changed things.

I'm reminded of that guy Gutenberg.

[The2ndWheel]

33. What has that changed?

[elehhhhna]

49. North Korea isn't rising up

[Kalidurga]

29. 5 years

[valerief]

30. It's not that the PTB *have* so much. It's that they *charge* so much

and *pay* so little.

[Travis_0004]

37. Isnt a significant percent of this forum part of the global 1%

An income of about 34,000 is all it takes, which probably includes thousands of members on this forum.

[GliderGuider]

41. The measure her isn't income, but wealth - net worth.

I don't think may people on DU would qualify by that yardstick. The top 10% maybe.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

56. I'd like to know about income versus wealth distribution.

You could have a lot of assets, but not much income.

You could have a lot of income, but very few assets if you spent it all. Or a negative net worth.

Most of the stats I see around here concentrate on income, usually earned income, rather than wealth.

[Adrahil]

64. Do we know what it is? I suspect many of us...

Have houses and retirement accounts that would put us in the global 1% for wealth.

[Adrahil]

63. Yep.... Easily. And almost all Americans are in the top 10%

The bottom of the top 10% is poverty wages in the U.S.

[CK_John]

42. Was the Keene,NH riots a beginning of 99% revolt without them knowing it???

[GliderGuider]

43. I don't know if Keene qualifies, but OWS sure does.

As do the Arab Spring, the Syrian shitstorm etc.

[jwirr]

46. Okay, I have read every post in this thread. I need to start reading again. I know what you are

talking about just want to know more.

Some books I have already read:

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy.
The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler.
After the Empire by Emmanuel Todd.
The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson.
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.
When Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten.

What do you suggest I read now? I am especially interested in the living conditions after a crash.

This thread has been enlightening. Thank all of you.

[Enthusiast]

48. But that one percent work much harder than the 99%.*

You know.


*If you believe that you will believe anything.

[Dont call me Shirley]

51. Once the rich steal everything from us they will then begin cannibalizing their own

[hifiguy]

57. As surely as the sun rises in the east.

It is inevitable.

[Uben]

53. They want it ALLLLLL!

So they own 50%, big whoop. You think they'll stop there? Doubtful. Question is, how long before we have had enough of the gluttony? Before we say "No more". We could control this if our elected officials would do their jobs and vote the will of the people and not kiss the butts of their campaign donors. It takes a humongous amount of money to get elected. We the people are tapped out, but guess who has lots of cash? That's right...the 1%ers. And all they want for their immense generosity is a couple of votes, which will, of course, make them even richer. Somebody gets poorer. Guess who?

[randome]

66. The only 'rupture' (Rapture?) that will occur is that taxation will become more equitable.

As the GOP dies out, that becomes more of a certainty. And that will super-charge an economy that has for too long been held back by obstructionist, austerity policies.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]If you don't give yourself the same benefit of a doubt you'd give anyone else, you're cheating someone.[/center][/font][hr]