The 2020 presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren & Bernie Sanders are making no secret of their disdain for out-of-control capitalism on the campaign trail. Warren in particular, is feisty about it. A recent tweet: ‘The billionaires can whine all they want. That won’t stop us from fighting for big, structural change to make our economy work for the people’.
So now the Wall Street-cheerleader channel CNBC, seems to invite a billionaire onto the set every week, and ask each what he (it’s always a he) thinks about the proposed Warren wealth tax, and the state of American capitalism, and if Fortune 500 CEOs get paid too much. The answers (in my humble opinion) are very clear and very simple. Yes, the wealthy should pay more taxes (though a wealth tax might not be be best solution). Capitalism in the USA is brutal, and leaves many, many people falling ever further behind, with no hope to ever make ends meet. And yes, of course CEOs get paid too much (compared to the rank-and-file workers).
P.S. I just had to look up the famous Rolling Stone magazine article about Goldman Sachs being a ‘vampire squid’ after the interview with Lloyd Blankfein. Here it is.
‘The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates’. – Matt Taibbi, in an essay titled ‘The Great American Bubble Machine’ in Rolling Stone magazine, Apr. 5, 2010.