“But sooner or later baby, here’s a ditty
Say you’re gonna have to get right down to the real nitty gritty”
– “The Nitty Gritty,” by Lincoln Chase
By Catherine Austin Fitts
I am drowning in strange intellectual justifications for income inequality. There seems to be no end in inventing explanations for the existing centralization of wealth.
One recent article in the WSJ said that it was all because of semiconductors. You almost don’t know what to say to such hubris. If that were true – and it is not – I would point out that the early developments of semiconductors might have been paid for by the taxpayers through the black budget and transferred out to Silicon Valley in a manner that provided no return to the taxpayers.
The growth of academic and intellectual justifications has become so robust, I purchased Thomas Pikety’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century to try to understand what all the fuss is about. To my delight, his introduction is beautifully written and promises lots of statistics. So we shall see.
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Statistics are welcome, as the divergence between reality and the “official reality” on this topic has become unbearable. Every time, however, I say that, the divergence gets even greater. If you look at the statistics of how much our consumption has to drop relative to Asia to rebalance the global economy, it looks like the divergence has far to go.
We could “jump the curve” on the entire policy discussion by approaching it by asking better questions. Rather than asking why income inequality is growing, we should simply ask why organized crime results in growing income equality. Or we could ask for better economic statistics. How about the government providing on line financial statements for your Congressional district? That way you and your neighbors can discuss opportunities to reengineer federal resources within your community.
That opens the conversation up to real people who function in the real world and know how to get something concrete done now.
I stopped in a Wal-Mart in rural Tennessee this weekend. There is anger in people’s faces. Effort is spent on not speaking or looking at each other unless it is required by the task at hand. And then great effort is made to be civil and pretend away the seething tension.
They cannot put their finger on the enemy, but they know the enemy is there.
Related Reading:
Here are some of my favorites to help you frame the right questions.
Sir James Goldsmith’s 1994 Globalization Warning
Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Stock Profits
