It's Them and Us - And If You're Reading This, You're Not Them.

Sooner or later we're going to have to realize it's a "them and us" world. That wasn't our doing. It was theirs. And the ramifications of this world they've created goes far beyond stashing money and paying taxes. Its tentacles reach into almost every aspect of our society.

Their power is far greater than ours. They bend the ears of those whose sworn duty is to serve us. It's an inevitable corruption, even if somehow, sometimes inadvertent. Much of it is buried in a tax code so intricate, so confusing, so incoherent that it's far beyond the comprehension of the voting public.

As business professor and author, Brooke Harrington, puts it:

“There is this small group of people who are not equally subject to the laws as the rest of us, and that’s on purpose. These people “live the dream” of enjoying “the benefits of society without being subject to any of its constraints.”

“When the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, because individual wealthy people are not paying their fair share of taxes. It won’t be lost on wealth managers and those in the offshore industry that we are reaching sort of French Revolution levels of inequality and injustice.”

In the States today wealth has become more concentrated in the hands of the few than it has been since the Gilded Age of the Vanderbilts, du Ponts, Mellons, Carnegies, Rockefellers, Pulitzers, Scripps, de Youngs, Buschs, Coors, the Cargills and other family names that are still prominent today.

Congressional Republicans are plotting a $5.8 trillion tax heist, 80% of which will flow to the wealthiest 1 per cent.

Across the developed world, inequality has gotten so out of hand that the IMF warns it imperils capitalism itself.  The IMF won't dare get into what awaits the plebs, you and me, if capitalism does fail. Let's just call it feudalism although many would argue we're already undergoing that transition.

It's getting so out of balance that even the billionaires are worried. They're growing increasingly fearful - of us.

Josef Stadler, lead author of the report and UBS’s head of global ultra high net worth, said his billionaire clients are concerned that growing inequality between rich and poor could lead to a “strike back”.

“We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about.

“The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”

Stadler added: “We are now two years into the peak of the second Gilded Age.”

It's not like they're feeling much love these days from the International Monetary Fund that recently prescribed what is essentially confiscatory taxation to relieve billionaires of the burden of their excess wealth and use it to diminish the scourge of inequality.

Billionaires’ fortunes increased by 17% on average last year due to the strong performance of their companies and investments, particularly in technology and commodities. The billionaires’ average return was double that achieved by the world’s stock markets and far more than the average interest rates of just 0.35% offered by UK instant-access high street bank accounts.

Here's the hard truth. This didn't come about by accident. It was neither market nor merit-based, not to any significant degree. No, it was legislated by the same people we have kept electing to represent us. Nobel laureate economist and former World Bank chief economist, the farmboy turned academic extraordinaire whose 1966 PhD thesis was entitled, "Studies in the theory of economic growth and income distribution," the guy who has literally made the study of inequality his life's work, sets this all out in his book, "The Price of Inequality."  Read it - if you dare.

Here's another hard truth. The same political caste who got us into this situation cannot be relied upon to get us out, to deliver us from this.  For this is the same political gang, Conservative or Liberal - no real difference, who made it legal for the richest and most advantaged of us to take the wealth this country provided them and spirit it away offshore, free of the constraints of our society.

This is why I argue that we need a genuine progressive restoration. Throw out the Trudeaus and the Harpers, the Martins and the Chretiens. Their governments got us into this mess. We're the frogs in their pots atop the stove. Do yourselves a favour. Read the history of progressivism. It's a real thing with real principles. Read it, learn it, and then ask yourself if we can settle for anything less and still hope to fight our way out of this.

And, let's end this with a word from George: