Wealth for the Common Good

Aired on 12 November 2009. Linked from The World.

Germany’s new conservative ruling coalition is proposing steep tax cuts to help end the economic crisis. That’s sending Germany’s deficit soaring, so a group of very rich citizens says it wants to help bridge the growing fiscal gap. The World’s Gerry Hadden reports.

Wealth for the Common Good co-founder Chuck Collins weighs in on the importance of this movement.

Transcript:

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MARCO WERMAN:  The European Union today warned countries using the Euro they’d better reduce their debt. German officials say the way to do that in their country is through a drastic tax cut, which would stimulate personal spending. In the short term that means the government might have to borrow. And a group of rich Germans wants to help avoid that, as The World’s Gerry Hadden reports.

GERRY HADDEN:  Germany’s conservative Chancellor, Angela Merkel, led Germany over the last five years in what was called the Grand Coalition. That was a euphemism for being forced to govern with the left. And it meant that Merkel couldn’t cut taxes, as she wanted to. Now she can.

ANGELA MERKEL:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] The new government keeps to their word, that becomes clear in their coalition agreement. We’ll focus on growth and tax relief. We are deeply convinced that this is the premise for work paying off and also to create an incentive. But also the promise for coping with the extraordinary situation the new coalition finds itself in. To get out of the financial crisis stronger than before.

GERRY HADDEN:  Merkel formed a new coalition last month with the like-minded Free Democrats. Together they’re proposing to slash income tax by about 36 billion dollars a year beginning in 2011. The hope is to spur spending and growth. But Germany’s budget deficit is already predicted to be over six percent next year. That’s twice the allowable amount under European Union rules. So, Germany’s mega-rich. Its moguls and barons, its scions of family fortunes, say they want to bridge the gap. Their solution, that Merkel raise their taxes, not cut them. The group’s leader is Dieter Lehmkuhl.

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GERRY HADDEN:  Lehmkuhl explains how the plan would work. For the next two years any individual income exceeding 750 thousand dollars a year would be hit with an additional five percent tax. So someone earning a million dollars would end up paying an extra 50 thousand. Lehmkuhl says if the tax were implemented it would generate about 150 billion dollars a year, but it would come with strings. The group wants the money earmarked to improve healthcare and social programs, programs that could face cuts due to the crisis.

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GERRY HADDEN:  When we tax the rich and narrow the gap between rich and poor, he says, we have the chance for a fairer, freer and more democratic development. And that should be beneficial to everyone including the rich. Ordinary Germans, like art therapist Agnes Zander, like the idea. She says the rich may want to pay more to assuage a certain amount of guilt. But she says that’s just fine.

AGNES ZANDER:  I have to admit my first reaction is disbelief. I think we all still believe that behind a good fortune there are criminal acts and there’s not the kind of generosity you’d expect like this act here. So for me it means hope. Let’s start in Germany and let’s do it all over the world.

GERRY HADDEN:  Actually, efforts are under way in different parts of the world. In France, England, and the U.S. Chuck Collins lives in Boston. He was the heir to a large meat packing fortune. He helped start Wealth for the Common Good. It’s an organization that also lobbies for higher taxes on the wealthy.

CHUCK COLLINS:  We celebrate the roll of individual effort, and creativity in wealth creation. But we also see how critical it is that we live in societies that make public invests in education and healthcare and infrastructure that help create the fertile ground for wealth creation. And without those public investments, which are paid for by our tax dollars, we wouldn’t be able to create the kind of wealth and business opportunities that we have.

GERRY HADDEN:  Collins says Wealth for the Common Good has had what it considers modest successes. For example, helping to maintain the federal inheritance tax. The group is currently fighting for congress to let some 800 billion dollars in Bush era tax deductions expire next year. The United States has more millionaires than any other country, an estimated two million of them. Next is Germany with nearly 800 thousand. But Dieter Lehmkuhl’s organization is still small potatoes compared to Collins’ group. It’s drawing a lot of media attention these days, but it’s only collected about 50 signatures for its tax increase proposal. For The World I’m Gerry Hadden

Published on 3 November 2009. Linked from In These Times online.

By Pete Redington

BOSTON—After hearing Ralph Nader discuss his new book, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, at an event here Friday night, a man expressed the concern many Nader supporters felt upon reading the book’s title.

Only the rich? A book about billionaires giving their time and money to charity? From “America’s first citizen”? Has Ralph Nader lost his faith in grassroots organizing and activism?

Not at all, the perennial third-party presidential candidate replied.

Only the Super-Rich Can Save Usis a utopian fantasy, not an ideological surrender. Its characters are real-life people (usually billionaires) like Warren Buffett, Bill Cosby, George Soros, Yoko Ono and Ted Turner, who are powerful enough to enact large-scale social change.

Nader imagines them acting on behalf of the American people, and wonders what would happen if society’s wealthiest were “not just interested in charity, but real change.”

It is, in essence, Nader’s dream. A dream where the “super-rich” realize they want more than multi-million dollar mansions and private yachts. Or well-endowed foundations memorializing their deaths. “Nothing fails like success,” Nader suggests. His billionaires want more, they want the deeply human satisfaction of civic responsibility. “They want to look their grandchildren in the eye proudly,” he writes.

And so Nader has written his first novel. “If I wrote it as nonfiction,” he quipped Friday, “nobody would believe me.” But he is quick to dispel the notion that his book harbors the secrets the progressive movement has been searching for. “There are no magic wands here,” he cautioned. “In fact, most of the rich are amateurs at social change.”

Instead, over more than 700 pages, the book outlines a blueprint for a progressive movement that is not only top-down, but also bottom-up. Money, argues Nader, is needed to put into effect all the good strategies and ideas that progressives have built. “There’s a difference between being concerned, and being serious,” counsels the always-serious Nader.

But expecting the rich to go against their own interests? That will never happen, challenged skeptics at the public forum in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood.

Except, as Nader pointed out, it already has. Wealthy Bostonians largely financed the abolitionists of the nineteenth century, including John Brown, “until the very end.” Likewise, decades later, the grassroots activism of the civil rights movement received financial support from America’s wealthy class. Nader suggests there’s no reason it can’t happen again. “If we stereotype the super-rich 100 percent,” he said, “we’re missing out on some who are as enlightened as we think we are.”

This process of aligning the wealthy with the grassroots causes they support is how Nader came to speak at the event. It was organized in part by an organization called Wealth For The Common Good, which works with “wealthy individuals…to promote shared prosperity and fair taxation.”

So there is realistic grounding for Nader’s fantastic visionary novel. And that’s as good a place to start as any.

If it is effective, Only the Super-Rich’s brilliance will lie in providing an image of a more just society, rather than in documenting the unjust system progressives are already exposing.

“We are living in the golden age of the documentary,” Nader notes, listing the political and corporate corruptions that have been so diligently exposed in print and on film, and the lack of societal change that they have resulted in. Today’s exposé studies, he suggested, have little chance of achieving the purposeful impact that a book like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring did a generation ago.

For inspiration in writing Only the Super-Rich, Nader turned to the classic utopian novels of the past, like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and Thomas Moore’s aptly titled Utopia. He sees his newest offering as part of this important legacy.

Nader seems less concerned with where the money comes from, and more concerned with a vision of what to do if such funds were available. As anyone involved with social change knows, the only thing more difficult than raising money is deciding how to best use it.

Not surprisingly, Nader has a few suggestions.

Toward the end of the evening, long after receiving a standing ovation, Nader looked out over the packed congregation, full of activists who—like Nader—have experienced the frustration of organizing a great political campaign only to fall short of the ultimate goal. He implored attendees to push the limits of what they believe is possible, asking: “Is there anything in this book that can’t be real?”

He expressed that question as succinctly as possible while inscribing my copy of his book. He wrote, simply: “Imagine.”