Cracks in the Wealth Extraction System

Wealthy people for wealth redistribution!? Is this a quirky “man bites dog” story? Or a curious symptom of late-stage capitalism where the beneficiaries of extreme wealth inequality speak out against the system that concentrates wealth and makes them financially wealthy in the first place?

These trends are flickers of possibilities, cracks in what sometimes appears to be an impermeable system of concentrated wealth and power.  These dissenters of the power elite, who by no means constitute a majority of the ultra-wealthy, are working together with promising movements to address the harms of extreme inequality, racial capitalism, and the need for reparations and healing.

Here are a few of these signs of the time:

• A veteran wealth advisor starts a new firm to help wealthy clients entirely rethink their relationship to wealth. She sparks a “progressive advisor’s movement,” including the tax attorneys, accountants, wealth managers, and family office staffers, to join to a higher purpose: aiding their clients to deploy wealth to heal the harms caused by wealth extraction.
• A segment of these wealth managers, members of the trusted couture of enablers that serve the ultra-wealthy, are defecting, blowing the whistle on systemic abuses and helping craft laws to close the tax loopholes that they helped to create.
• Wealth holders are pledging to radically redistribute their wealth, seeking ways to share decision-making and power to “decolonize wealth.”
• Former philanthropists are calling for “taxing the rich” through the endowments of foundations.
• Wealthy individuals and families are forgoing their privacy – sometimes facing belittlement and attack – to publicly speak out in favor of higher taxes on the wealthy, higher wages for workers, and reforms in the laws governing philanthropy.

Read the full article on Kosmos Journal