Is it anything like a surprise that The Financial Times would be ‘reporting’ on Milken’s Predators’ Ball? A brief description on Milken’s career is revelatory:
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Milken was indicted for racketeering and securities fraud in 1989 in an insider trading investigation. As the result of a plea bargain, he pleaded guilty to securities and reporting violations but not to racketeering or insider trading. Milken was sentenced to ten years in prison, fined $600 million, and permanently barred from the securities industry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. His sentence was later reduced to two years for cooperating with testimony against his former colleagues and for good behavior.[4]Supporters, like George Gilder in his book, Telecosm (2000), state that “Milken was a key source of the organizational changes that have impelled economic growth over the last twenty years. Most striking was the productivity surge in capital, as Milken … and others took the vast sums trapped in old-line businesses and put them back into the markets.”[5] Since his release from prison, Milken has funded medical research.[6]
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Note the headline and sub-headline:
Headline: Elite gathering reveals anxiety over ‘class war’ and ‘revolution’
Sub-headline: Michael Milken invokes Margaret Thatcher as conference debates threats to capitalism
Note the attendees: Steven Mnuchin , David Solomon, Eric Schmidt , Ivanka Trump, Ken Griffin, Alan Schwartz. But the real guest of honor was Thatcher The Milk Snatcher and her dressing of Hayek’s Market Singularity into moralizing drag!
Mr Milken played a video of Thatcher from two years before she became UK prime minister. “Capitalism has a moral basis,” she declared, and “to be free, you have to be capitalist”. Applause rippled through the ballroom.
These Plutocrats have reason to fear! Eric Schmidt sums up the growing paranoia of these profiteers, the fact that both the Working Class and the Middle Class have been decimated by unbridled Capitalism, in its coruscating Neo-Liberal iteration: this reality is lost on these stakeholders in a system corrupted by their greed, clearly demonstrates their egocentricity, expressed as self-serving myopia.
“I’m concerned with this notion that somehow socialism’s going to creep back in, because capitalism is the source of our collective wealth as a country,” Mr Schmidt said, urging his fellow capitalists to get the message out that “it’s working”.
Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represent the end of the hegemony of the Neo-Liberal Swindle’s power over American politics. But Alan Schwartz articulates the political paranoia of these plutocrats, ‘class warfare’ the ultimate argument of the plutocrats, who live in fear of the ballot box. FDR replied to this in his ‘I welcome your hatred’! That, too, is a part of history, that this meeting’s attendees ignore, that is the root of their political paranoia.
“If you look at the rightwing and the leftwing, what’s really coming is class warfare,” he warned. “Throughout centuries what we’ve seen when the masses think the elites have too much, one of two things happens: legislation to redistribute the wealth . . . or revolution to redistribute poverty. Those are the two choices historically and debating it back and forth, saying ‘no, it’s capitalism; no, it’s socialism’ is what creates revolution.”
This statement sums up the paranoia of the plutocrats who live in fear of the ‘putative redistribution’ exercised by the ‘lower orders’ via the ballot box.
One top investment company executive echoed the common view among the conference’s wealthy speakers: “Punitive redistribution won’t work.”
The Green New Deal is The New Deal in its latest iteration.
Almost Marx
https://www.ft.com/content/0f9cf638-6c28-11e9-80c7-60ee53e6681d
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