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If Amazon captures most of the sales in the US but doesn't pay a proper wage, then how are they going to keep the sales going, well, get the government to pay everyone a basic income, of course, then the One Percent can keep on creaming it in? But who's going to pay for the basic income if the elite pay hardly any taxes? A government deficit, maybe? KV A number of the reigning oligarchs -- among them Mark Zuckerberg (net worth .1 billion), Elon Musk (net worth .8 billion), Richard Branson (net worth .1 billion) and Stewart Butterfield (net worth .6 billion) -- are calling for a guaranteed basic income. It looks progressive. They couch their proposals in the moral language of caring for the destitute and the less fortunate. But behind this is the stark awareness, especially in
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If Amazon captures most of the sales in the US but doesn't pay a proper wage, then how are they going to keep the sales going, well, get the government to pay everyone a basic income, of course, then the One Percent can keep on creaming it in? But who's going to pay for the basic income if the elite pay hardly any taxes? A government deficit, maybe? KVIf Amazon captures most of the sales in the US but doesn't pay a proper wage, then how are they going to keep the sales going, well, get the government to pay everyone a basic income, of course, then the One Percent can keep on creaming it in? But who's going to pay for the basic income if the elite pay hardly any taxes? A government deficit, maybe? KV A number of the reigning oligarchs -- among them Mark Zuckerberg (net worth .1 billion), Elon Musk (net worth .8 billion), Richard Branson (net worth .1 billion) and Stewart Butterfield (net worth .6 billion) -- are calling for a guaranteed basic income. It looks progressive. They couch their proposals in the moral language of caring for the destitute and the less fortunate. But behind this is the stark awareness, especially in
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Mike Norman considers the following as important:
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A number of the reigning oligarchs -- among them Mark Zuckerberg (net worth $64.1 billion), Elon Musk (net worth $20.8 billion), Richard Branson (net worth $5.1 billion) and Stewart Butterfield (net worth $1.6 billion) -- are calling for a guaranteed basic income. It looks progressive. They couch their proposals in the moral language of caring for the destitute and the less fortunate. But behind this is the stark awareness, especially in Silicon Valley, that the world these oligarchs have helped create is so lopsided that future consumers, plagued by job insecurity, substandard wages, automation and crippling debt peonage, will be unable to pay for the products and services offered by the big corporations.
The oligarchs do not propose structural change. They do not want businesses and the marketplace regulated. They do not support labor unions. They will not pay a living wage to their bonded labor in the developing world or the American workers in their warehouses and shipping centers or driving their delivery vehicles. They have no intention of establishing free college education, universal government health or adequate pensions. They seek, rather, a mechanism to continue to exploit desperate workers earning subsistence wages and whom they can hire and fire at will. The hellish factories and sweatshops in China and the developing world where workers earn less than a dollar an hour will continue to churn out the oligarchs' products and swell their obscene wealth. America will continue to be transformed into a deindustrialized wasteland. The architects of our neofeudalism call on the government to pay a guaranteed basic income so they can continue to feed upon us like swarms of longnose lancetfish, which devour others in their own species.
"Increasing the minimum wage or creating a basic income will amount to naught if hedge funds buy up foreclosed houses and pharmaceutical patents and raise prices (in some cases astronomically) to line their own pockets out of the increased effective demand exercised by the population," David Harvey writes in "Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason."
"Increasing college tuitions, usurious interest rates on credit cards, all sorts of hidden charges on telephone bills and medical insurance could steal away the benefits. A population might be better served by strict regulatory intervention to control these living expenses, to limit the vast amount of wealth appropriation occurring at the point of realization. It is not surprising to find there is strong sentiment among the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley to also support basic minimum income proposals. They know their technologies are putting people out of work by the millions and that those millions will not form a market for their products if they have no income."
The call for a guaranteed basic income is a classic example of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci's understanding that when capitalists have surplus capital and labor they use mass culture and ideology, in this case neoliberalism, to reconfigure the habits of a society to absorb the surpluses.
In the wake of World War II, for example, the capitalists' problem was solved by heavy investments in the military and war industry, ideologically justified by Red baiting and the Cold War, and by massive infrastructure projects, including the building of highways, bridges and houses, to move people out of cities into suburbs, where consumption rose. The social engineering projects were done in the name of national security and progress. And they made the oligarchs of that day richer.
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Chris Hedges - The Oligarchs' "Guaranteed Basic Income" Scam