I have long been fascinated by the version of capitalism that allows amassing of multiple billion dollar fortunes. Especially when the the small handful of multi billionaires live in multi colored opulence that could so easily provide an uplift from black and white poverty for multiple millions, if not Billions. Of our 7.8 Billion population on Earth, more than 50% – some 4 billion people are born into sub-human squalor, just like their parents and their grandparents, and certainly the same hopeless illiterate religious squalor their children will inherit.

For years I have been admiring India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, 63, born in Yemen, now worth possibly $100,000,000,000 although likely more. Oil, Telecoms. You name it. He profits from it. His workers, not so much. Ambani’s personal fortune increases more annually for his home, with a population of five, than Yemen’s GDP. (Yemen GDP 2019 – under 23 Billion. Population under 30 Million, and falling.)

In 2010 Mukesh and Nita and their three children moved into his newly built dream home. He named it Antilia. It remains the worlds most expensive private home, costing over $1 billion. It stands 27 storeys high, but many of the floors are double or triple height, so the building rises to 570 feet, equivalent to a 40-storey building, towering over swanky Altamount Road in Mumbai.

It has a Hindu prayer room, because God plays a big part in this arrangement.
“Getting my temple right was so important” says Nita.

Mumbai, where possibly half of it’s current 20 million population live in slums, (One of the worlds largest slum communities; where life is hopeless without prospect of change) while hundreds of thousands don’t have a roof over their head, meets the location location location criteria for the worlds most expensive home. Because, what else is a wannabe trillionaire going to spend his hoarded wealth on. It must be challenging for any multi-billionaire to find a worthy cause beyond golden toilets and personal prayer rooms with a view.

After 11 years of seemingly harmonious living between this enormous wealth and such transparent poverty in Mumbai there has been an event.

A car was parked outside this Palace. A Scorpio.
Inside was some dynamite. A modest amount with no detonator. There was a letter intended for Mr. Ambani.

“This is a trailer, but next time we will connect [all these explosives] and come. We have made arrangements to blow up your entire family.”

There was a second car that followed this car. Clearly not a lone wolf operation.
But why?
An idealist group – like 17N – The Greek ethical terror cell who operated so successfully after the Student massacre of November 17th, 1973, looking to encourage a more equal distribution of wealth.
Or was it just plain blackmail – a threat followed by a demand?

Police tracked the parked car to Mansukh Hiren, a local bodyshop owner. He had reported the car stolen. As police continued investigations they were informed of a body washed up on the shore. It was Mansukh’s bloated body. Earlier that day Mansukh told his wife he was going to meet a Policeman. A Policeman is a prime suspect in this threat to the rich man and his palace. That Policeman, Sachin Vase, was also very friendly with Mansukh.

Sachin Vaze is an assistant inspector with the elite crime branch of the Mumbai police. He has Means, Motive and Opportunity in the Car Bomb element. Apparently digital evidence related to the Mukesh Ambani bomb scare case was tampered with by suspended Mumbai Police officer Sachin Vaze.

“Vaze was arrested by the NIA in a case related to the recovery of an SUV (a Scorpio) with explosives near industrialist Mukesh Ambani’s house. He has been remanded in NIA custody till March 25.”

In the Land of Bollywood and far fetched stories with elaborate multi colored outfits – where the gap between rich and poor is a chasm of black and white – this story seems set to run.

India’s richest man lives in his palace with a panoramic view of 10 million slumdweller’s who are invisible to him, with a new concern. Are the poor sharpening their pitchfork tines? or is this just a bent cop on the make, willing to execute his friend?

More importantly and closer to home, should other multi-billionaire hoarders without social conscience be concerned? What happens when Police charged with security feel underpaid and have ambitions for their own upliftment.

I am offering odds on a bet that Mukesh Ambani will be retaining gifted writers to upgrade his Philanthropy profile. Along the lines of ‘The Ambani fund, providing clean safe free housing for 200,000 of Mumbai’s poorest‘. Rebranding him and Nita as India’s Bill and Melinda Gates of super rich. He may even raise his workers minimum wage to a dollar a day, although I am not offering odds on that outcome.

The Mukesh and Nita Foundation. Coming soon?

It was our lovely visionary and responsible republican president Eisenhower who taxed the super rich at 90%. Knowing that creates incentives to spend more growing the business, to show less profit for tax. An effective way to avoid the hoarding mentality that has seen the growth of the super-rich oligarchy, a small handful of billionaires, less than 0.0001% of the population, co existing with hundreds of millions of third generation dirt-poor parents to the next generation of dirt-poor without hope.

Look at how far we have fallen from the days of responsible leadership in this one simple expedient. Tax the Rich.

Americans in the 1950s enjoyed what economists called “the virtuous circle of growth”: Well-paid workers fueled consumer demand, which, in turn, generated business expansion and hiring, raising corporate profits, which produced higher wages and more hiring. A consumer culture flourished and unsurprisingly, so did the economy. Fortune noted that, by the mid-1950s, the number of middle-class families was increasing by 1.1 million a year.

A key part of the prosperity equation of the 1950s was public policy – what the federal government accomplished with its tax revenues. The Eisenhower administration invested in human capital, not in corporate welfare.

It expanded Social Security. It raised the minimum wage significantly. Eisenhower initiated the greatest public works project in American history, the interstate highway system, a program funded by a gas tax, costing some $114Bn.

Eisenhower’s 1958 budget nearly doubled the federal budget from that of the Truman era, and raised the national debt by billions of dollars. But it also provided jobs and education for millions of Americans who, in turn, would repay the nation many times over.

Mostly – 90% tax for the super rich prevented the hoarding that has enabled the 0.01% to own 90% of the worlds wealth – with no accountability for the human or environmental consequences. While more than half of the Earth’s population continue to live in hopeless inherited squalor that repeats with each successive generation of the dispossessed.

“The rich get richer and the poor get children” said F Scott Fitzgerald in his now culturally corrected Gatsby book that is no long recommended reading in our Woke culture.
When he wrote that line 1925 the Earth’s population was below 2 Billion. And the number of super rich was limited to a small handful, friendly with Rockefellers and Royalty with heads still attached.

Now, almost 100 years since Fitzgerald’s observation, there are some six Billion more people, of whom 50% are still as dirt poor as the 50% in 1925. And, pro rated to population, we have a bigger oligarchy.
More billionaires than ever before. And more poor people than ever before.

The rich did get richer. And the poor did get children.

Here’s the current state of the investigation into the threat to Asia’s Richest man – the Bomb scare – on the BBC page

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