Will Obama Manage to Dispossess American Billionaires?

Market Leader informed

Paradoxical but true - the current situation in the US generally looks very much like that in the USSR in late 1920s – early 1930s when the USSR found a way out of the crisis by collectivizing and dispossessing the wealthiest groups of peasants, and in the US during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt (1933-45) where the same thing was done under a motto of ‘democracy’ and care for ‘simple Americans’. Roosevelt signed Decree No. 6102 of 5 April 1933 to ‘mitigate the critical situation of the US banking industry’ and ordered to seal all bank safe deposit boxes of American individuals and legal entities who, from that day, were not allowed to own gold (including gold coins) seized by the US authorities and exchanged for fiat money.

At whose cost should President Obama take the US out of crisis at this stage? Especially when Obama’s policies are intended to maintain and improve the standard of life of most US citizens (like Roosevelt’s) but the US economy has no money left for this while problems are escalating like a snowball. The crisis aggravated all US problems to an extreme degree:

* an astronomic foreign debt of the US – 13.7 trillion dollars (and growing further)
* bankruptcies of American banks
* losing the trade war with China
* US currency war
* the problems of military conflict between the US and Iran
* fight on terrorism



forced the nation to part with foreign money – unsecured loans. The only thing left to save America from the policy of tightening its belt and a social outburst is involvement of richest Americans in financing the society’s objectives. In other words, American billionaires are invited to ‘share a bit’ like ‘wealthy peasants' in the Soviet past. The state’s clear implication is that we should redistribute financial wealth either on a voluntary basis or in a forced, but civilized, way.

Some have already heard these signals and are even working in this direction. For example, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates invited billionaires to participate in The Giving Pledge project as early as in June 2010 and donate at least 50% of their wealth as charity. In other words, the bottom line is they suggested responding to pressure from the state in a traditional way – by channeling their capitals to charitable foundations rather than giving them up to the US Internal Revenue Service because charity is a way of spending money that nobody is accountable for to the society. That’s why donations are spent as the donor directs without any accountability to the state. In other words, it is recommended that people act like kulaks (wealthy peasants) in the USSR and ‘bury the surplus’…

Yes, of course, the media glorify Buffett and Gates for ‘renunciation', ‘a new approach to shaping the policy of charity’ but it has been demonstrated many times that the best charity means teaching a person to go without charity, ‘freebies’, at all. That’s why US President Barack Obama believes that these kind billionaires who are so fervently eager to help the American society should invest their wealth in economy to ‘give fishing rods, not fish’ rather than ‘do good’. Money simply handed out to people makes them dependant on benefits, discourage them from relying only on themselves, being independent and free, respecting themselves.

‘Capital channeled to charity’ essentially means commonplace withdrawal of capital from production which logically leads to higher unemployment rates, a lower standard of life and, accordingly, only increases the number of unhappy people. On the contrary, money invested in such production will help develop businesses and create new jobs. In this way investment will be for the welfare of society and support people prepared to work rather than used to getting alms especially when investments will be public and require accountability for how these are used both by the investor and the state.

But the US is not the USSR of the early 20th century where the need to undermine financial support of resistance to the state policies was met by a gun and a concentration camp. As they used to say in the Wild West, one could buy the law in the US. This opportunity remains today, but strictly within the Constitution – through elections, i.e. popular vote.
Elections of all levels will be held on 2 November 2010 – both to the federal Senate (37 out of 100 senators and all 435 members of the House of Representatives will be reelected) and local legislative bodies (37 US states will elect a new governor). Billionaires who want to and can buy the law for themselves are also running for elections. According to Forbes, at least half of the top five hundred richest Americans fund elections, including American billionaire Donald Trump. Most of them stake on Obama’s opponents - the Republicans who are getting ready to win the majority in both houses of the federal parliament and on the local level, given such record-high financial support. Currently they are in a disadvantaged position with the Democrats holding a majority in 26 states, and the Republicans only in 23.

The forthcoming elections have already been described as a referendum of trust to Obama as stakes are too high. That’s why President Obama is forced to take people to the streets and hold the elections from a subscription.
‘Very large interests stand in the way of our changes, people that represent them want their conservative followers to take the Senate under control. They are doing it through billionaires and stockholder corporations’, - as Barack Obama has put it in an address to his nation, - ‘The stakes are very high at these elections. Please donate 3 dollars… A dollar to the dollar, give any support you can afford’. The President is backed by famous financial guru George Soros who openly supported Obama’s economic course in Columbia University and expressed his wish to see more drastic measures to be taken by the current President in the future in respect of the banking system, up to and including its nationalization.

Loss of control over the Senate or the House of Representatives will pose a great problem for the Democratic Party and will severely affect the US President’s ability to have Congress adopt his bills for the remaining two years. If the Republican party wins the majority in Congress this will simply put an end to the ability of Obama’s team to implement their legislative program.

One thing is clear so far – the US President and his team will find it hard in any case as during the elections of 2 November 2010 the Democrats and the Republicans will be fighting for death, not life – political and economic, however, unlike in the USSR in the 1920-30s. That’s why this will be a decisive, final baseball match between two teams rather than a bloody drama of ‘the class struggle’.

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