America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Sunday, December 4, 2022
BIDEN'S SEC. OF 'CHEAP' LABOR MARTY WALSH - JOE'S OPEN BORDERS IS ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED FOR HIS CRONY BILLIONAIRES AND WALL STREET
THE BIDEN PROPAGANDA MACHINE ON JOBS..... ALL LIES!
Devastating Layoffs Lead U.S. Economy Into Unimaginable Challenges
Federal immigration policy is all about the labor needs of business, says President Joe Biden’s labor secretary.
“The issue of immigration is how do we make sure that companies and businesses have the opportunity to employ people,” secretary Marty Walsh told Fox Business on Friday.
Walsh, a former labor union leader in Boston, continued:
We’ve seen a lack of immigration in our country over the last five years, and it’s something that has to be addressed and hopefully, hopefully the next Congress will have a good conversation and address that issue. Every business leader in America I speak to, every single one, says it’s really important …. for us to figure out the immigration issue.
Walsh ignored the progressives’ invented 1950s claim that Americans’ nation is a “Nation of Immigrants.”
Walsh’s business-first claim also demotes the critical needs of unemployed Americans, young Americans, underpaid Americans, disabled Americans, average Americans, skilled Americans, as well as Americans who are drug addicts, lazy, dull, incompetent, and barely employable.
Americans gain when employers must hire workers from within the 50-state union of the United States. But they lose that market power when employers can hire alternative foreign workers — including many desperate, hard-working, and diligent people — who cross that line after migrating from Venezuela, Guatemala, India, or China.'
Business groups want more migration because it cuts wages, raises rents, and boosts retail sales. For example, Biden should cut roughly $100 billion from Americans’ wages in one year by importing 2.5 extra million foreign workers, Wall Street’s leading investment firm, Goldman Sachs, said in May.
Currently, Walsh’s peers in the White House are inviting millions of foreign workers through the southern border and airports, via multiple pathways — legal immigration, illegal migration, parole migrants, asylum migrants, student workers, and even workers who enter with tourist visas. Officials are now predicting a huge inflow in 2023 that would deliver roughly seven million migrants — or two migrants for each of the 3.6 million Americans born in 2020.
The rush of southern migrants over the border is “really not the issue,” Walsh told Fox Business, before claiming that business needs are the driver of federal immigration policy.
Fox Business host Ashley Webster pushed Walsh to talk about helping Americans earn decent wages: “We still always have to talk about the participation rate coming in at 62.1 percent … too many people are just not participating: How do you address that?”
“What we have to do is continue to create opportunity for getting people into jobs,” Walsh replied, before lapsing into his business-first priorities:
There’s different reasons why people aren’t participating in the workforce, and what we want to do is make sure as they come back into the workforce, if they’re looking for better opportunities for themselves, and also partnering with businesses in America, what business’s needs are, we’re doing it through workforce development, we’re doing it through apprenticeship. I spend a lot of time my time talking to companies in America as well, to see what they need and making sure that we’re doing everything we can to partner businesses up with workers in this country.
Training is of little value to Americans when employers can hire cheap, compliant, hard-working, and disposable foreign workers at local bus stations, airports, and government-funded migrant shelters.
“At the end of the day, and I’ve said this, I think the biggest threat to our economy is that we don’t have a good strong immigration policy,” Walsh insisted
Yet Walsh also champions an economy that allows families to remain in the middle class with just one wageL
“I think there’s a way to do [counter inflation] by creating good opportunities for people so they have opportunities to get into the middle class, and not enough people in America are working in those jobs, quite honestly,” he told CNBC.com on October 25. He continued:
I think the best way to describe what is a middle-class job is a job you can work — one job, get good pay — so you don’t have to work two and three jobs to support your family.
Few Americans can hope for a one-income, middle-class life. Instead, many millions are discarded from the workforce altogether and are pushed toward poverty and drug addiction. “The way you do fix that is with a tight labor market [that pressures employers to hire Americans] and by not bringing in lots of foreign workers,” said Steven Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
But for more than a year, Walsh has echoed administration policy in calling for the importation of more workers, even though his job is intended to present the priorities of working Americans.
“The participation rate dropped a little bit, but it was high last month. So, I’m not too concerned about that when you look at the long-term impacts of what these reports will be,” he said in October.
In September, Walsh told MSNBC that illegal migration across the southern border is not immigration:
That’s not immigration. Immigration is what we’ve always survived on as a country. And really, it’s thinking about how do we use immigration in a positive manner? If we had legal immigration into the United States of America, legal pathways into the United States, if we had pathways where people could apply for visas and come into this country for three months, six months, nine months, maybe five years, then we wouldn’t have the challenges to the magnitude that we do at our borders in our country.”
Business groups claim there are 11 million unfilled jobs, he told Fox News on September 12:
If those 11 million jobs had to be filled tomorrow, we certainly don’t have enough people in the United States to fill those jobs … the issue of workers has to be addressed and the only way [emphasis added] you can do it is through immigration.
Extraction Migration
Government officials try to grow the economy by raising exports, productivity, and the birth rate. But officials want rapid results, so they also try to expand the economy by extracting millions of migrants from poor countries to serve as extra workers, consumers, and renters.
Extraction Migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity. This happens because migration allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the skilled American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that earlier allowed Americans and their communities to earn more money.
Outside government, migration also undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.
An economy fueled by Extraction Migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites and it alienates young people. It radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it gives a moral excuse for wealthy elites and progressives to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society, such as drug addicts.
This diversify-and-rule investor strategy is enthusiastically pushed by progressives. They wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into an economic empire of jealous identity groups overseen by progressive hall monitors.
“We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Silicon Valley Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … We will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.
Progressives also rewrite U.S. history to justify migration: “The American democratic experiment is that a country that is made up of all different kinds of people — from all over the place [emphasis added] — all get an equal say,” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said on December 2.
But the progressive-backed colonialism-like economic strategy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.
Progressives hide this Extraction Migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. Progressives claim the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that economic migrants are political victims, that migration helps migrants more than Americans, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
Similarly, establishment Republicans, businesses, and GOP donors hide the pocketbook impact. They prefer to divert voters’ attention toward border chaos, welfare spending, terror-linked migrants, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.
The Divide: Growing Economy, Miserable Citizens | Why Are Rich Countries So Unhappy? | ENDEVR Documentary
The Divide tells the story of 7 individuals striving for a better life in the modern day US and UK - where the top 0.1% owns as much wealth as the bottom 90%. By plotting these tales together, we uncover how virtually every aspect of our lives is controlled by one factor: the size of the gap between rich and poor.
Chuck Schumer Suggests DACA Amnesty Needed to Spike U.S. Population as Nation Hits Record 331.9M Residents
Then, to add insult to injury, like clockwork, right after the midterm election scam-o-rama, Senator Chuck Schumer had an epiphany, because suddenly we're "short of workers," and the only way to fill out those ballots for Democrats...er..."have a great future" is to grant amnesty (read: voting rights supporting leftists) to "however many" illegal invaders there are in the country.
Mass layoffs in tech spread to Meta, corporate parent of Facebook
Meta Platform, Inc., parent of the popular social media platform Facebook, will begin mass layoffs on Wednesday in what will likely be the biggest of the growing job cuts among high tech firms.
A report in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, based on sources familiar with the impending layoffs, said that “many thousands of employees” among the Meta staff of 87,000 will lose their jobs this week. Representatives from the $86 billion global tech monopoly, based in Menlo Park, California, declined to comment on the report.
This Oct. 23, 2019, file photo shows Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington. [AP Photo/Andrew Harnik]
The layoffs will be the largest staff reduction ever in the 18-year-old company founded and still run by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. The news comes after several recent reports that Meta was already making job cuts. Meta owns Facebook (2.9 billion users), Instagram (2 billion users) and WhatsApp (2 billion users), the number one, three and four most popular social media platforms in the world.
During an earnings call with investors on October 26, Zuckerberg said the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas,” and that means “most of our teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.” Zuckerberg said Meta would end 2023 “either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization.”
In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta had begun “quietly nudging out a significant number of staffers” in a drive to cut costs by 10 percent. The report said that the cuts were “expected to be a prelude to deeper cuts,” and that the majority of the cost reduction would “come from reduced employment,” according to unnamed individuals familiar with the plans.
As far back as July, Zuckerberg told employees during a call that the company was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history” and that workers should prepare to do more work with fewer resources. He added, “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”
The mass layoffs at Meta/Facebook follow by several days the jobs massacre at Twitter in which half the staff of 7,500 was eliminated by the billionaire and wealthiest man in the world Elon Musk shortly after he assumed private ownership of the microblogging platform. The layoffs were precipitated by a previously existing financial crisis that was exacerbated when advertisers began pulling out of Twitter after Musk took over the company and fired its executive leadership and board of directors.
According to a Crunchbase News summary, 45,000 tech jobs had been eliminated before the cuts at Twitter were announced. Among the tech firms to announce layoffs recently include the rideshare company Lyft (650 jobs or 13 percent), payment processor Stripe (1,120 jobs or 14 percent), Shopify (1,000 jobs or 10 percent), Snap (cutting 1,000 jobs or 20 percent) and Coinbase (1,100 jobs or 18 percent).
Along with Meta, the larger tech corporations Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet have announced a combination of cost-cutting programs and hiring freezes. These five companies combined have lost approximately $3 trillion on the stock market since the beginning of the year and quarterly earnings reports last week drove their collective share values down by $218 billion last Friday alone.
Deliberately driving up unemployment to beat back rising demands for wage increases, the economic slowdown is being brought on by the Federal Reserve. The Fed’s six consecutive interest rate increases, including another 0.75 percentage point rise on November 2, is rapidly impacting the tech industries. These are among the first sections of the working class to be hit by what is coming throughout the rest of the economy in the coming months.
According to an assessment in the Journal on October 28: “Tech companies that enjoyed strong growth in the early days of the pandemic are feeling the effects of a new reality of high inflation, rising interest rates, currency headwinds and other issues on their income statements. The slowdown in personal-computer sales and digital advertising seen earlier this year appears to be spreading to areas such as cloud computing that were thought to be resistant to economic weakness.”
The response of the financial oligarchy to the situation is to press the demand for tech workers to pay the price. Zuckerberg and the leadership of Meta are following a script laid out by investor and Altimeter Capital Chief Executive Brad Gerstner.
Gerstner, whose firm has $18 billion under management including 2.5 million Meta shares, issued an open letter to Zuckerberg on October 24 in which he said the company should slash its staff and cut back on its technology development plans such as the much-touted metaverse project.
The investor called for a reduction of the Meta staff by 20 percent or a devastating 17,000 employees. Referring to the change in the borrowing environment, Gerstner wrote, “Like many other companies in a zero-rate world—Meta has drifted into the land of excess—too many people, too many ideas, too little urgency.”
He continued, “It is a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley that companies ranging from Google to Meta to Twitter to Uber could achieve similar levels of revenue with far fewer people.”
A measure of the ruthlessness of the billionaire elite in demanding the destruction of jobs in tech industries was the fact that the value of Meta stock rose by 3 percent on Monday following the Wall Street Journal report. The shares have lost more than 70 percent of their value so far in 2022.
U.S. Universities, Backed by Soros and Zuckerberg, Lobby for DACA Amnesty to Preserve Billion-Dollar Profit Pipeline
FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/George Frey/Bloomberg/Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
A number of United States universities, backed by groups funded by billionaires George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg, are lobbying Congress to quickly pass an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens to preserve their billion-dollar annual tuition and fees pipeline.
For weeks, House and Senate Democrats have urged 10 Senate Republicans to join them in approving the DREAM Act, which would provide green cards and, eventually, naturalized American citizenship to 3.3 million illegal aliens enrolled and eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), university executives with the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration suggest DACA illegal aliens are “Americans in every sense but on paper…”
The group is backed by Zuckerberg’s FWD.us and Soros’s Open Society Foundation, as well as the Shapiro Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Walder Foundation.
“… we write to respectfully urge you to prioritize passing bipartisan legislation before the end of this year to provide permanent protections for DACA recipients and other Dreamers,” the letter states:
If Congress fails to act, employers and communities will lose valuable contributors. Families, including many households of mixed-status individuals with U.S.-born children, will suffer the grievous loss of their homes, businesses, and self-sufficiency. Congress alone can avert this looming crisis by passing bipartisan legislation to protect Dreamers and address other immigration priorities. [Emphasis added]
The letter is signed by executives from:
Rutgers University, Eastern CT State University, Delaware State University, Carleton College, Utah State University, Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, Georgetown University, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Texas – San Antonio, Guilford College, Antioch College, Broward College, Salt Lake Community College, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Grand Valley State University, SUNY Westchester Community College, Borough of Manhattan Community College – CUNY, University at Albany – SUNY, University of Nevada – Reno, and University of California – Riverside.
All have a vested financial interest in keeping as many young illegal aliens in the United States as well as adding millions more young illegal aliens to the population because university systems are generating about $9 billion in revenue annually via tuition and fees from foreign students.
Specifically, roughly 182,000 illegal aliens of the more than 400,000 illegal aliens enrolled in U.S. universities and colleges are DACA-eligible or DACA-enrolled — making up a significant portion of university systems’ billions in revenue from their foreign student pipeline.
As Breitbart News reported in 2017, a DACA amnesty would open a surge of chain migration — where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. — ranging from 10 million to 19 million foreign nationals.
A prior Breitbart News analysis found that a DACA amnesty would cost American taxpayers some $115 billion by opening Obamacare rolls to newly legalized illegal aliens. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that such an amnesty would cost taxpayers $26 billion.
That same CBO report suggests that about one in five DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least one in seven would go on Medicaid.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
by failures of border security, a lack of the enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of the United States and huge numbers of visas for high tech workers, the lives and livelihoods of Americans and their children, are being stolen by America’s corrupt political elite who are doing the bidding of those who provide them with huge “Campaign Contributions” (Orwellian euphemism for bribes) pursue legislation that is diametrically opposed to the best interests of America and Americans.
Globalization of the United States economy has had a crippling impact on American towns as free trade makes it easier for companies to move production and jobs overseas, a report from the U.S. International Trade Commission details.
The report, which assembled union representatives, economists, and others to discuss the impact of decades-long U.S. free trade policy, was requested by U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and conducted in March and April of this year.
Among other findings, the report found that U.S. free trade policy has allowed companies to more readily move American jobs overseas and keep wages low for jobs that remain in the U.S.
“Participants identified trade policy as the cause of job losses. One union representative noted that trade policies often have loopholes or are manipulated by China and other countries so that the policies are not operating as intended,” the report states:
Another union representative stated that current trade agreements allow for more capital mobility than the agreements prior to the 1980s, enabling auto, electronics, and steel manufacturers to move overseas for any number of reasons. Various union representatives explained that companies are able to use the threat of moving jobs overseas for various reasons — such as better tax implications and lower wages — to limit the power of labor unions and keep domestic wages down. [Emphasis added]
When U.S. free trade policy enables companies to offshore production, the report states, American employees are not the only ones directly impacted by such moves. Towns and communities as a whole, along with Americans in supporting industries, feel the devastating impact as well.
The abandoned “Scranton Lace Company” factory is seen in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on August 11, 2020, the landmark factory where former Secretary of State and Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton’s grandfather used to work was closed in 2002. (ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images)
“Participants noted that, when jobs are lost, local businesses — such as gas stations and restaurants — that rely on affected workers as customers and clients, as well as other businesses in the industry’s supply chain, suffer as a result,” the report states. “A retired steelworker also noted that company bankruptcies can have effects beyond job loss, such as lost pensions.”
Societal impacts as a result of companies offshoring U.S. production, the report finds, include rising mental health issues, suicide, lower life expectancy, divorce, domestic violence, higher crime rates, and worse off public schools.
In particular, when a plant closed in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, the report states, because of U.S. free trade policy, neighboring mom-and-pop shops, local businesses, and grocery stores suffered tremendously to stay afloat. Many ended up closing as well.
“Another union representative noted that, when General Motors Company shut down production in Lansing, Michigan, jobs throughout the local community suffered as a result,” the report states:
Two other union representatives spoke about the impact of plant closures and production cutbacks on employees. An academic and a business owner reported that plant closures can lead to the loss of opportunity for upward career mobility and a shift to services jobs that tend to have lower wages and fewer benefits. Other union representatives, including one who is retired, said that the closure of the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, in 2019, and the threat of offshoring has been used to suppress worker wages and benefits. Another union representative spoke about Cooper Tire in Finley, Ohio, which reportedly faced competition from dumped imports from China in 2007. Employees at this facility were reportedly scheduled for shifts that were two days on and two days off and could not file for unemployment. [Emphasis added]
In Rep. Tim Ryan’s northeast Ohio district, nearly
deaths in the area have skyrocketed by 400 percent
in some communities.
“A retired union representative said that families and neighborhoods in the Mahoning Valley and Youngstown, Ohio, are still being affected by manufacturing job losses that occurred over 40 years ago, as well as more recent plant closures,” the report states. “She described a cycle of decline, decay, and blight, as the population has dropped to one-third of its previous size and homes lay vacant as children and grandchildren move away.”
The economic and social decay of Ryan’s district is partially why Ohio’s Senator-elect J.D. Vance explained to Breitbart News last month that tariffs on foreign imports must be the center of the nation’s industrial policy to “rebuild the industrial heartland of America.”
The company that produces Louisville Slugger wooden bats has closed its factory and museum on April 20, 2020 in Louisville, Kentucky. The 165-year-old company that produces 2 million wooden bats a year, including some 50,000 destined for Major League Baseball, closed its factory and popular museum in March, furloughing 90 percent of its employees amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. (Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
Offshoring, spurred by U.S. free trade policy, is not letting up.
This month, for example, executives with technology parts manufacturer Jabil Inc. announced that they would be laying off about 1,400 of their American employees in California and closing six plants across the state.
Similarly, a 125-year-old plant Avon plant in Suffern, New York is shuttering and laying off nearly 140 of its American employees. Avon executives said those U.S. jobs will be sent to Brazil and Poland where the price of labor is substantially lower.
Also this month, medical device company Vapotherm announced that it is closing its Exeter, New Hampshire manufacturing plant, laying off nearly 50 of its American employees, and sending production to low-wage Tijuana, Mexico.
Executives with Norcold, the refrigerator manufacturer, are laying off nearly 360 of their American employees at two Shelby County, Ohio plants and sending all production to foreign countries.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
2022 global art market benefits from an “explosion of wealth” at the top
In the past two years, a global pandemic has officially cost more than six million lives (with estimates indicating that some 20 million people have actually perished due to COVID-19). The US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has killed at least 200,000 military personnel and 14,000 civilians, while displacing eight million more. Surging inflation threatens vast numbers with fuel and food insecurity, and starvation in certain parts of the world, in the coming winter months.
Yet the world’s art market has never been in healthier shape, according to A Survey of Global Collecting in 2022, a recently issued Art Basel & UBS Report.
After a brief interruption in 2020, the art market “bounced back strongly in 2021, with aggregate sales of art and antiques by dealers and auction houses reaching an estimated $65.1 billion. Representing a 29% increase on the previous year, this figure outstrips the market’s 2019 value by $0.7 billion.”
Global Billionaire Wealth and Population (A Survey of Global Collecting in 2022)
The “robust” character of the art market mirrors the stratospheric rise in the wealth of the world’s richest people over the same period. According to Credit Suisse, “The ranks of the global ‘ultra-high net worth’ (UHNW) individuals, those who have $30 million or more in assets not including their primary residence, swelled by 46,000 last year to a record 218,200 as the world’s richest people benefited from ‘almost an explosion of wealth’ during the recovery from the pandemic.”
The combined wealth of the UHNW individuals now equals $35.5 trillion worldwide. Together with the wealth of the Very HNWIs (holding from $10 million to $30 million in liquid assets) and “mere” high-net-worth individuals (with $1 million to $10 million each), this represents an enormous sum of money in search of a lucrative return. After stocks and real estate, fine art is one such investment.
The survey by Art Basel & UBS Report describes a market that is global in scope, subject to geopolitical tensions and open to the use of digital formats both for trading and as an art form in itself, such as videos with NFTs (non-fungible tokens), to the extent that it opens new avenues of profitability. This market is highly speculative, with collectors selling almost as much artwork as they buy, and above all concerned with the financial over the aesthetic or cultural value of a work, so much so that 95 percent of the HNW collectors surveyed had purchased works of art sight unseen, with just over half (51 percent) regularly doing so.
While there was some lingering concern about COVID, most collectors still favor in-person interaction at art fairs and galleries with their dealers. Collectors planned to resume travel to the major art fair destinations, such as Art Basel and Miami Basel, which represent high-priced opportunities to view and purchase contemporary art. The cancellation or postponement of such international art fairs due to the pandemic represented a serious loss of revenue for not only galleries, more than a quarter of which generate 20 percent or more of their yearly revenue at such fairs, but for attendant services as well, such as air travel, accommodations, dining, etc.
Before the pandemic, “HNW collectors attended an average of 41 art-related events in 2019, including six gallery exhibitions and five art fairs. This fell to 36 in this sample in 2020.” However, with the “end of the pandemic,” the survey reports, “Art fairs have bounced back, with 74% of the HNW collectors surveyed having purchased at an art fair in the first half of 2022 (versus 54% in 2021), including both in-person and OVR [online viewing rooms] purchases. 65% reported that they had bought a work through an in-person event (up from 37% in 2021).”
The rich collectors are feeling flush. According to the report, their median “expenditure on art in the first half of 2022, at USD 180,000, already nearly doubled their spending in the entire pre-pandemic year of 2019 (USD 100,000) and is notably higher than in the entire year of 2021 (when they spent USD 164,000). And they’re not putting their wallets away. They plan to more than double their 2021 spending by year’s end.”
Sotheby's headquarters in New York [Photo by ajay suresh / CC BY 2.0]
There is an almost desperate quality to this spending, as though HNWIs cannot store their money fast enough in assets that may better withstand an anticipated crisis in the economy. In fact, collectors were slightly more optimistic about the outlook for the art market in the next six months than they were about the state of the stock market over the same period (78 percent vs 75 percent, respectively). “They’re also buying more expensive art than last year. The share of collectors purchasing works priced at more than USD 1 million nearly doubled from 2021, from 12% to 23%. This is similar to the price levels at which they bought in 2019.”
The report pays considerable attention to geo-strategic shifts in power as reflected by trade between the major art centers. Those have traditionally been New York and London, though in recent years the combined mainland China and Hong Kong market has overtaken the UK for second place. This correlates closely with the location of the world’s wealthiest, who are still concentrated in the United States (145,000 HNWIs), as compared to roughly 50,000 in China and 10,000 or fewer in European capitals such as Paris and Berlin. It is noted that the activity of Russian oligarchs in the market has been checked somewhat by the war in Ukraine and the attendant sanctions.
The report documents how the globalization of the past 30 years has seen the development of art markets in places where they barely existed before, such as India, Mexico, Turkey and Brazil. However, the market remains highly unequal. “Its key players continue to be European and American: Sotheby’s, Christies, and Philips in the auction market; Art Basel and Frieze in the art fair sector; and David Zwirner, Gagosian, and Hauser & Wirth among others in the gallery market. If anything, globalization has strengthened their position and they face minimal competition from their counterparts in emerging regions.”
Social inequality also manifests itself strongly among artists, with one percent of them ranked as “super star” figures, with name-recognition and prestige from museum shows, whose work commands millions of dollars. The bulk of artists, 84 percent of whom are so-called “emerging” or unrepresented by galleries, do not participate in this market at all. It is also the case that even at the high end, artists themselves see only a portion of the money paid for their work, with 30 percent typically going to the gallery and the most lucrative sector being in resales. In this regard, the art market in the US is more attractive than that in Europe because it has no legislation concerning resale rights that would guarantee artists a share in future profits off their work, equivalent to royalties in music.
Despite the report’s overall emphasis that 2022 was the best of all possible worlds for the wealthy and the art market, a certain anxiety creeps into the report.
“Even at the very top of the wealth spectrum, where many HNW individuals have been insulated from some of these economic stresses, wealth has stalled its bull run. Forbes’ annual compilation of the world’s wealthiest billionaires showed a large increase in billionaire wealth throughout the pandemic, with certain industries such as tech, e-commerce, and health all flourishing.” However, the report continues, “figures published in March 2022 showed a contraction in both the number of billionaires (down by 3% on 2021) and their collective wealth (also decreasing 3%), with major losses in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine (34 fewer billionaires) and China (losing 87, with government regulation and greater scrutiny of tech companies as a main contributing factor).”
Data in a separate report from Wealth-X issued in November shows a continuation of the downward trend, with the number of UHNWIs said to have fallen by 6 percent in 2022, with double-digit losses in the US, Japan and France.
All is not lost! “But even with these losses, billionaire wealth has more than doubled in ten years, and at the very top of the billionaire list, wealth still grew in 2022, with the top ten billionaires increasing their combined wealth by 13% from March 2021 to March 2022.”
The report concludes by emphasizing, with unintended irony, how much these wealthy art collectors are committed to the betterment of life on the planet–not by making their $35.5 trillion available to meet the pressing needs of humanity, but by taking steps to reduce the carbon footprint produced by their travel and to use recyclable packaging for their art shipments, even if it means paying a little more.
Such an irrational system is not only inimical to the creation of meaningful art and culture accessible to broad masses of the population; it is as unsustainable as the financial house of cards on which it is based.
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