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
NAFTA GLOBALIST JOE BIDEN - FOLKS, FLOODING AMERICA WITH ANYONE WHO WANTS TO INVADE IS WORKING! - WAGES DEPRESSED AND CORPORAT PROFITS AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO DEMS UP! - Big oil, food giants, restaurant chains reap windfall profits as US real wages plunge!
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.
Biden’s Labor Chief: Immigration Is About Importing Workers for Business
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.
With one week remaining before the US midterm elections, President Joe Biden has taken to denouncing the oil monopolies for “war profiteering” and price-gouging. On Monday, he took time out from traveling around the country to boost the faltering campaigns of Democratic House and Senate members and candidates for state offices to attack the record profits reported last week by oil and gas companies as “outrageous” and threaten the imposition of an excess profit tax.
“It’s time for these companies to stop war profiteering, meet their responsibilities to this country, give the American people a break and still do very well,” he told reporters at the White House.
It is all too obvious that Biden’s bluster against corporate profit-gouging is prompted by polls showing that soaring prices for basic necessities is the biggest concern driving voters in elections that may very well shift control of one or both chambers of Congress, as well as much of the country’s electoral machinery, to Trump’s fascistic Republicans.
Nobody knows better than Biden that there is no possibility of getting an excess profits tax through Congress, even should it remain under Democratic control.
Share of corporate-sector income received by workers over recent business cycles, 1979-2022. [Photo: Economic Policy Institute]
The oil magnates responded contemptuously to Biden’s threat. Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, stated, “Rather than taking credit for price declines and shifting blame for price increases, the Biden administration should get serious about addressing the supply-and-demand imbalance that has caused higher gas prices and created long-term energy challenges.”
In other words, it should lift the minimal restraints on the fossil fuel industry and give it an even freer rein to pollute and profit from the impact of the US-NATO war against Russia.
Last Friday, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the largest US oil companies, reported record or near-record profits for the July-September quarter of 2022. Exxon’s profit of nearly $20 billion was a record for any quarter and 10 percent higher than the previous record, set the quarter before. Chevron’s profit of $11.2 billion was slightly less than the previous quarter’s record amount.
On Thursday, the two biggest European producers, Shell and TotalEnergies, reported that their profits had more than doubled from the third quarter of 2021.
The five biggest oil companies took in more than $50 billion in profits in the second quarter of this year, and the International Energy Agency reported that the net income of the world’s oil and gas producers will double this year from last to a record $4 trillion. “Today’s high fossil fuel prices have generated an unprecedented windfall for producers,” the agency stated.
Rather than using some of their windfall profits to reduce prices or increase production, the oil giants have raised dividends and carried out massive stock buybacks to enrich their big investors. On Friday, Exxon Mobil raised its stock dividend, citing its commitment to “return excess cash” to shareholders.
Biden has released some 165 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and prices at the pump have receded in recent weeks from their previous highs, but they remain more than 13 percent higher than at the end of 2021.
The energy industry is not alone in taking advantage of the inflationary spiral, rooted in decades of central bank handouts to Wall Street and exacerbated by supply chain disruptions triggered by US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, to reap windfall profits.
A person shops at a grocery store in Glenview, Ill., Monday, July 4, 2022. [AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh]
The New York Times on Monday reported that major food companies and restaurant chains have driven up their profits by charging the public far more than what was needed to cover their increased costs.
The article noted that over the past year, the price of food eaten at home has increased 13 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Basic staples have risen far more than the 8.2 percent year-over-year increase in the Consumer Price Index.
Cereals and bakery goods are up 16.2 percent. Dairy products have shot up by 15.9 percent.
A dozen eggs that could have been purchased for $1.83 in 2021 now cost $2.17.
Meanwhile, the profits of major food companies have risen even faster than the prices they charge. Last month, PepsiCo, whose prices for drinks and chips were up 17 percent from year-earlier levels, reported that its third-quarter profit grew by more than 20 percent. Coca-Cola reported a profit increase of 14 percent from the previous year.
Many restaurant chains are likewise reaping super-profits on the basis of inflated prices. The Times article focused on Chipotle Mexican Grill, which reported that its prices by the end of 2022 would be nearly 15 percent higher than a year earlier. It reported a nearly 28 percent increase in its profits in the latest quarter as compared to the same quarter last year.
The newspaper quoted Kyle Herrig, president of advocacy group Accountable.Us as saying, “The [earnings] calls tell us corporations have used inflation, the pandemic and supply chain challenges as an excuse to exaggerate their own costs and then nickel and dime consumers.”
Housing costs are likewise soaring, further eroding workers’ purchasing power. According to the latest report on inflation, issued last month by the BLS, the cost of renting a primary residence rose this year by 7.2 percent through September, more than double the usual annual increase of around 3 percent.
The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has topped 7 percent, due mainly to the rapid increase in interest rates imposed by the Federal Reserve to slow down economic growth and drive up unemployment—a central component of the ruling class war against workers’ wage struggles. This is the highest mortgage rate since the Great Recession of 2008.
With the national median asking price for a home at $435,050—itself prohibitive for most workers—mortgage payments today are nearly $1,000 a month higher than in August of 2021.
Biden’s feigned outrage over corporate price- and profit-gouging cannot conceal the fact that his administration is working relentlessly with the trade union apparatuses to impose the full inflationary impact of the war in Ukraine, for which the White House and Congress have already allotted over $50 billion, on the working class. With the support of both big business parties, Biden has joined with the rail and West Coast dock workers’ union leaderships to block 22,000 longshoremen and 120,000 railroaders, who have voted overwhelmingly to strike and rejected pro-company contracts, to exercise their right to strike.
The result has been a devastating decline in the real earnings of US workers.
Dallas Federal Reserve chart shows most US workers have negative wage growth. [Photo: Dallas Federal Reserve Bank]
Last month, the BLS reported that real hourly and weekly earnings for all employees decreased 0.1 percent from August to September, seasonally adjusted. Year over year, real hourly earnings fell 3 percent, while real weekly earnings declined even more, 3.9 percent, due to a decrease in the average workweek.
According to a study released in October by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the decline in real wages for US workers is even more severe. The authors of the study wrote:
We find that a majority of employed workers’ real (inflation-adjusted) wages have failed to keep up with inflation in the past year. For these workers, the median decline in real wages is a little more than 8.5 percent. Taken together, these outcomes appear to be the most severe faced by employed workers over the past 25 years…
While the past 25 years have witnessed episodes that show either a greater incidence or larger magnitude of real wage declines, the current time period is unparalleled in terms of the challenge employed workers face.
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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