Raúl Zibechi takes A Glance at the One Percent

[Moon]

From https://compamanuel.wordpress.com/20...one-percent-3/

The current crisis is deepening social and economic polarization between a small handful of multimillionaires and a good part of humanity that is drowning more and more all the time in poverty and desperation. The rich get richer every day, something that we know through dozens of works that have been published in recent years. Nevertheless, the wealthy of financial accumulation are different from the other stages of capitalism, when hegemony corresponded to productive capital.

They are prison dogs, “large predators” as Fernand Braudel defined them. In this period of the descent of United States imperialism and of geopolitical chaos, they have acquired an additional profile: they are warriors, the type of cruel mercenaries of the worst civil wars; they don’t obey rules or have the least respect for human beings. The economist Michael Hudson, who knew them up close, emphasizes that they profess feudal values and seek to set the working population back to debt servitude.

The master’s thesis of Marco Bulhões Cecilio, who is part of the team of the Brazilian economist José Luis Fiori (The Global and geopolitical power of capitalism, within the framework of the Federal University of Río de Janeiro), points out that “in the current financial system, the biggest winners are the elite of the management class and not the shareholders.” As we have pointed out on other occasions, the bourgeoisie has been bifurcated between property owners and the managers of capital, who are those that make the decisions and are situated in echelons where the money flows.

Cecilio’s thesis recuperates the work of Braudel on the period of “accelerated accumulation of wealth,” and submits some of his ideas to severe scrutiny, among them that which postulates that the market economy and capitalism are opposed.

Among the class of managers that make enormous profits for themselves, he places for example some presidents (CEOs) of big corporations, who earned in full crisis remunerations up to 162 million dollars, like Stanley O’Neal, of Merrill Lynch. He is an exceptional case, in a medium where many executives earn more than a million dollars annually. In 2007, the corporation paid bonuses to its executives of 4 billion dollars and in 2008 Wall Street corporations paid 18 billion dollars to its executives, when the government saved the financial system.

Continuing with the remunerations, in 2014 the consultant Robert Walters studied the fixed medium salaries of executives in 27 countries, in particular those that have more than 12 years of experience. Without including the bonuses, after the 2008 crisis, a financial director (CFO) receives 360,000 dollars annually in Shanghai, scarcely on top of their colleagues in New York and London. In São Paulo the same position receives 250,000 dollars annually. The accounting managers, situated in the lower part of the echelon, obtain around 100,000 dollars (Valor, 12/2/14).

But there is a second question as important as that of income...

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