Post by tangent on Jan 8, 2015 20:10:37 GMT
Part 1 of a feature programme about the super rich is about to start on BBC2 at 9pm tonight. This is a quote from the Radio Times (a TV listings journal) advertising the programme.
I'm going to try to record the programme but it will have to be on ye olde video tape because Deborah is recording something else at 9pm
They earn £12,000 an hour – but is life for the gilded bubble oft the top 0.01 per cent about to burst, asks Jacques Peretti.
NICK HANAUER is a venture capitalist who invested in the mid-90s in a promising little start-up company selling books. You'll know it as Amazon. He is now worth, in his own words, "gerzillions' He is one of the fabled one per cent, the super-rich who are pulling away at warp-factor speed from the rest of us in terms of their wealth.
Hanauer earns an eye-watering £12,000 - AN HOUR. But when he talks, it's not like a cardboard cut-out greedy capitalist, it's like a protester from the Occupy movement. Hanauer says that if soaring global inequality isn't dealt with fast, the masses (you and me) will be coming for the super-rich (him) "with pitchforks'. Hanauer, who's based in Seattle, would happily pay more taxes to deal with inequality, but his government won't let him. The same, he says is true in the UK where politicians fawn delusionally at the feet of the super-rich when in fact they should be legislating for more punitive taxation.
The British and US public were, he says quite bluntly, "duped by Reaganomics and Thatcherism" back in the early 80s into believing they'd benefit from allowing the super-rich to get richer "Once upon a time it was called divine right, but now we call it trickle-down. So how did we come to believe in the fallacy we'd all benefit from the rich getting richer, and who are we talking about any way? To pinpoint the one per cent richest is misleading, since the gap between the poorest of the one per cent (anyone earning £220,000 a year)) and the top 0.01 per cent - the 85 individuals whose combined personal wealth is equivalent to that of half the world's population - is a mind blowing chasm. You'd be right to think the Queen is so rich, but there are members of the royal family who are closer to you and I in wealth than they are to the 0.01 per cent richest.
I'm going to try to record the programme but it will have to be on ye olde video tape because Deborah is recording something else at 9pm