Donald Jeffries - Survival of the Richest: How the Corruption of the Marketplace and the Disparity of Wealth Created the Greatest Conspiracy of All

Copyright 2017 by Donald Jeffries

Foreword 2017 by Richard Syrett

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas
Cover photo credit: iStock

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2065-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2066-4

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to the millions of anonymous souls such as my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, who have been forced to live with constant financial uncertainty, because of a system that is stacked against them.

C ONTENTS

F OREWORD

T HE RECENT US PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN pitted a rude, crude, alpha-male, reality TV star and real estate tycoon against a political insider, opportunist, and fair-weather progressive feminist.

And for the first time in living memory, the battle lines were cleanly drawn between two diametrically opposed camps. On one side was a cabal of globalists who view western liberal democracies as an annoying obstacle to the free flow of capital. Once content to pull strings from the shadows, a perceived change in the windnamely, a nationalist fever sweeping Europeforced them out of their lairs and into the glare. For their latest standard-bearer, they awkwardly shoehorned onto the ballot, by hook and by crook (but mostly by crook) the tired and insipid Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Across the irreconcilable breach, the brash, trash-talking disruptor Donald J. Trump defied all odds and won the White House and the hearts and minds of the disaffected with a barrage of plainspokenness and rough-hewn truths. His ball capready battle cry in defense of the sanctity and sovereignty of the nation-state was a middle finger in the face of political, corporate, and media elites. Like JFKs pledge to smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the wind, Trumps anti-globalist screed may yet still prove to be his coffins final nail.

Against this revolutionary and historic backdrop, Don Jeffries has once again proven himself to be a true and righteous chronicler of our times and for our times. In Survival of the Richest , he shines a disinfecting light on the dark insidious players that have, over the course of only two generations, conspired in a process that has led to the hollowing out of the flyover states and the virtual collapse of Americas middle class.

Jeffries tackles his subjectthe root causes of economic inequalitywith all the finesse of a back-alley brawler. Understanding the urgency of Americas perilous decline, he spends little time on nuance and subtlety.

Like Rowdy Pipers immortal drifter, John Nada in the John Carpenter film They Live , Jeffries has come to chew bubble gum and kick ass. Don Jeffries is all out of bubble gum.

Richard Syrett is a veteran radio and television broadcaster based in Toronto, and a frequent guest-host on Coast to Coast AM .

I NTRODUCTION

PoorPersons who are unable to pay their taxes. For example, Vanderbilt.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devils Dictionary

T HERE HAVE BEEN WEALTHY PEOPLE and poor people throughout the course of history. One cannot exist without the other, much as no one would understand what beautiful meant, if there wasnt a contrasting ugly to compare it with, and teenagers would have no idea who the popular kids were, if there werent corresponding unpopular kids. How many organizationsfrom Country Clubs to Freemasonswould exist without exclusionary rules? What good is a group, after all, if anyone can be a member? Rich and poor, success and failure, are man-made constructs. However, when the medium of exchange in our society, which largely determines the quality of everyones lives, is being distributed in an obscenely unfair way, then the vast majority of the people, who arent benefiting from the present arrangement, have a right and an obligation to demand change.

This book is not meant to be an attack upon the rich. Without wealthy statesmen, which nearly all the Founding Fathers were, the United States would still be a colony of England. Historically, many rich individuals heeded the call to public service and felt an obligation to look out for the interests of their fellow human beings. They had a sense of history and were principled enough to care about liberty and justice. Joseph P. Kennedy urged all his children to enter public service, reminding them regularly of the old adage, To whom much is given, much is expected. Can anyone picture the Koch brothers, Warren Buffet, and their ilkthe closest approximations we have today to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, or Patrick Henry, sacrificing their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for independence, or freedom, or any cause? When was the last time we had a leading statesmannow mere politicianswho led the troops, who was even seen near any battlefield, such as George Washington and many other signers of the Constitution?

One doesnt have to be a socialist to be concerned about the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots in our society. Certainly there should be incentives for every citizen to work harder and improve their lot in life. Just like human skills and qualities are not distributed equally, the collective wealth cannot ever be distributed equally. Individuals should be allowed to become rich. But when things have reached the point where the richest four hundred people in the country have more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the population combined, then we simply must recognize the extent of the problem and address it rationally. Even more incredibly, on an international scale, the richest eighty-five individuals in the world now have as much wealth as the poorest half of their fellow human beings around the globe.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald once notably said, The rich are different from you and me. The wealthiest 20 percent of Americans, especially the ones in the rarified air of the top 1 percent, have no concept of the problems their fellow citizens in the bottom 80 percent face every day. It used to be that those in the middle class were nearly as removed from the struggles of the lower class. That is no longer the case; the middle 40 percent of Americanswhat is left of the steadily shrinking middle classare in most cases a few paychecks away from joining their unfortunate brethren in the lowest 40 percent, whom collectively have less than 1 percent of the total wealth in this country. Put another way, the six heirs to Sam Waltons fortune have as much wealth as these hapless 40 percent at the bottom of the economic scale.

According to an eye-opening article on the March 1, 2013, Minimum Wage Union Workers of America blog, after adjusting for inflation, 90 percent of Americans were earning less than what minimum wage earners made in 1950. When factoring in the productivity rate, they conclude that the minimum wage in America should really be about $28.56 per hour in 2010 dollars. They cited movie projectionists as just one example of a formerly high-paying, union job that gradually atrophied into minimum wage work, with the accompanying lack of benefits. I had a great-uncle who made a wonderful living doing this for decades. Business Insider, on December 2, 2013, published a graph showing the federal minimum wage since 1960, adjusted for inflation. Based upon this, the minimum wage peaked in 1968. Inspired by the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, the Democrats platform included a provision to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.