Late ‘Epiphany’ For Financial Elites – OpEd

By Sergei Guk

It seems that Klaus Schwab the founder of the World Economic Forum has learnt some basic tenets of Karl Marx’s economic theory. In particular, he learnt about the widening gap between the rich and the poor. In an interview with Financial Times Deutschland he said “Capitalism in its current form no longer fits the world around us”. At the same time the Organization for Economic Cooperation happened to make the same discovery when it was unpleasantly shocked by the growing gap between the “cream” of society and ordinary people.

Analysts have warned many times that there was a strong imbalance in the distribution of wealth. The rich and mighty preferred to stay silent on the issue but now it looks like “the levee has broken”. Even the currency dealer and billionaire George Soros has now joined the critics haunted by apocalyptic nightmares, which he confessed in an interview with the Newsweek magazine. Europe is gripped by chaos and there are protests in the US. And there is a spectre of a repressive political system as a reaction of the rich and mighty to the attempts of the poor to deprive them of their fortunes.

The explosive situation, which is now terrifying the world’s “powers that be” did not come about yesterday or even the day before yesterday. It had been building up for decades. So why did the elites wake up so late? We addressed this question to Ruslan Grinberg, our expert, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the head of the Institute for Economic Studies:

“In the 1950-1970, the Western world became the capitalism with a human face thanks to the standoff with its rival, i.e. the Communist bloc. For the first time the struggle was on to make life better for everyone. When our system collapsed it turned out that we had to go back to Adam Smith’s theory and market self-regulation. But as Karl Marx once said, market forces bring about the situation when the poor find themselves on one end and rich people on the other. Today Obama speaks out against the rich. In the US they worked out that very rich people there pay only 15% of their income in taxes. That’s a atrocious. I recall Mr. Kennedy’s statement: “those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will male violent revolution inevitable”. All these warnings made by Soros and the Organization for Economic Cooperation are symptomatic. Either you start sharing your income with others or you’ll get what Soros has warned you about, i.e. street revolts and then dictatorship. That will be bad for everyone, there are too many discontented and completely unhappy people. In the last 25 years credit policy have been hiding the imbalance in the distribution of income but now, all of a sudden all this has come to the fore.”

There is an ancient saying: “Fate leads the willing and drags along the reluctant”. May be someone can comfort himself with Mark Twain’s aphorism Not everybody gets rich most people remain human. But given there are one billion people on Earth who are struggling to survive on $2 a day, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation, and the hundreds of millions of those who found themselves in a dead-end situation, there is little comfort in it. Besides, according to Soros; admission, the financiers who triggered the crisis were not only making mistakes but were doing Evil.