Robbing Workers for Foundations

Cats have nine lives. Billionaires have two: as an industry and as a foundation. I’m no mathematician but this is the formula.

 Slave wages + profit + taxman = foundations

Billionaires collect wealth through different strategies, like paying  gold and platinum miners in African currencies, but trade those minerals in dollars.

Billionaires also make money by robbing the poor, paying them peanuts. Workers are not poor by birth. They’re poor when billionaires don’t pay them a living wage. Workers need it more because they pay cash for food and shelter, unlike billionaires who acquire wealth with collateral and borrowed money called lines of credit.

Unions try to fight for members, but they can’t win because billionaires padlock factories and move offshore where the concept of a minimum wage is heresy.

Tax Havens Called Foundations

Billionaires only care about profits, but there’s one problem: the taxman. The more money they make from exploiting workers, the more money the government collects in taxes. Sure, they have all kinds of tax shelters, but at the end of the day, they still have left-over millions in profits, and the government wants a cut.

What do they do with these foundations? In North America, they feed unemployed workers through food banks. They fly to Africa and Asia, with video cameras to help the poor they created when they took their land, installed railway lines through farmland and forests, mined gold and platinum and paid miners in local currencies.  

But we must make profit, that’s why we’re in business, the billionaire cry. Fair enough, but if you make so much money that you have to ‘shelter’ it in a foundation, it means you overpaid yourself and underpaid workers. That money should have been in their paychecks, not in your foundation.

This is another ‘written podcast’ from Nonqaba waka Msimang.