Martin HenrySHH! DON'T let anybody know! What a magnificent photograph of Fidel Castro accompanying the AP story carried by The Gleaner on March 3, 'Castro on Forbes rich list!' The leader of one of the world's last remaining classless societies in which personal wealth is eschewed as the result of capitalist exploitation was immaculately dressed in a dark business suit and tie which would blend right into Wall Street. Warning finger raised to lips, eyes averted and closed.
Forbes magazine's annual ranking of the world's richest people has estimated Castro's personal wealth at US$150 million. The report didn't say how the estimate was arrived at. No Jamaican Prime Minister, however cleverly kleptocratic, could ever likely achieve a personal fortune of US$150 million [$9 billion] in office. It is remarkable how much wealth the dictators of poor countries can amass. Baby Doc allegedly creamed off up to US$500 million from the meagre resources of Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, before being pushed into exile. Though not exactly a dictator but "the first democratically-elected president of Haiti", there has been pretty good documentation of Jean Bertrand Aristide's access to copious resources, while refugees have been fleeing for years partly from unbearable poverty.
And while Fidel Castro is hushing up his wealth he has just ordered managers of state enterprises to hand over their unproletarian cars like Toyotas and Mitsubishis and drive Ladas without decorations and air-conditioning, which would set them apart from ordinary Cubans. The top 10 people on the Forbes billionaires list are nearly all the holders of recently acquired entrepreneurial wealth. The last five spots are held by members of the Walton family which owns the Wal-Mart retail chain with a combined fortune of US$100 billion. And most of the rest of the list are business people or people whose personal creative talent has brought them enormous returns. The Google boys are on with a billion apiece, and so is author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling.
ARISTOCRATIC FAMILIES
Old, aristocratic wealth is largely out. There are not too many old, aristocratic families around in the world today, anyway. The British queen is still hanging on among the really wealthy and a Saudi Arabian prince is number three on the Forbes list. There isn't much ancestral wealth from business either. The great and rich business families of even a couple of generations ago usually have not held their wealth together across generations.
It is virtually impossible for anybody without personal wealth and not backed by the rich to become president of the United States. Despite all the restrictions on campaign financing, in a very significant sense the leadership of the greatest democracy and greatest bastion of the capitalist enterprise is 'bought'. Two wealthy men backed by other wealthy persons are now squaring off for the November presidential elections, with vast expenditures. The Kerrys are worth an estimated US$500 million, News-week of May 3 reports. Wife Teresa is an inheritor of Heinz food processing wealth through her deceased first husband. Bush has some oil money.
Capitalism is a wealth creation machine, the most efficient that the world has yet invented, but obviously not for all equally as is dreamt in Castro's Cuba. The distribution of wealth, its enormous concentration in a few hands raises troubling questions. How can anybody have more personal worth than the gross domestic product of entire countries which are not even small and really poor ones? Our man on the Forbes list offers an interesting case.
PHILANTHROPIC VENTURES
Jamaican-born Michael Lee- Chin is 216th of 587 billionaires on the Forbes list, with personal worth of US$2.4 billion. Like Bill and Melinda Gates and many other wealthy persons, Michael Lee- Chin finances a number of welcome philanthropic ventures. But he managed, last week to stir up some controversy with his proposal to acquire majority shares in RJR, up from his 10 per cent. The proposal makes hard business sense: injection of investment capital, economy of scale, growth, expansion into the Caribbean, creating a media powerhouse, better returns to other shareholders, of which there are thousands.
RJR is a broadly owned entity with no dominant shareholder, a situation which its articles of association deliberately created and is one of the triumphs of small shareholding schemes in Jamaica. The ownership structure gives it a desirable community-based sensitivity and a 'democratic management structure', objectors would argue. Among the first to shoot at the Lee-Chin proposal was Danny Roberts from the trade union leadership of RJR workers/owners. Does everything have to grow big or perish? If an enterprise is holding its own in the marketplace, is increased profitability the grand measure of its reason for existence?
There is a powerful two-way relationship between wealth and power: The powerful find it easier to acquire wealth; the wealthy have the power of wealth, which can be used to back their interests and ideas. F.A. Hayek, freedom scholar and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, conducted a lively discussion in his book The Constitution of Liberty [ch. 8] on the role of the independent wealthy in backing innovations in society. The freedom to acquire wealth by personal effort is clearly tied up with the whole bundle of constitutional rights and freedoms. But can't the acquisition and concentration of wealth be a threat to those rights and freedoms? The concentration of media power in a few wealthy hands, for example, is now a matter of worldwide concern.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
