Ronnie Moas Interview / Sacramento Alternative Magazine / Cover Story The river of Capitalism flows long and strong. The current is swift, and easily drowns those who attempt to jump into it without preparation: education, business savvy, and connections to people with capital to get you in the river safely, and bail you out if you hit troubled waters. From humble beginnings in Europe, it spread to the New World, where it has grown into a multi-pronged serpentine labyrinth, whose forked tongues have licked every corner of the globe. And if it does one thing better than anything else, it makes the rich even richer. While the billions who drink from it along the way syphon off cups-full, the reservoirs of those who control the flow are filled to the brim. Ronnie Moas has successfully navigated these waters for decades, as an investor and analyst, and he’s seen the way it’s waters have been poisoned and diverted, leaving half the world thirsting or worse, drowning, and he’s turned his boat around, and is now paddling against the current. If he has it his way, the dams are going to break, and billions of dollars will spew back from the reservoirs of the world’s 1%, and into the parched mouths of the masses who keep the system alive with their labors. According to his website, standpointresearch, Ronnie is the Founder & Director of Research at Standpoint Research. The company currently advises and sells its research to pension funds, hedge funds, day-traders and asset management firms. Mr. Moas began his career on Wall Street as an analyst and market strategist at leading Nasdaq market maker Herzog Heine Geduld. He was responsible for making sector, industry and stock recommendations, identifying arbitrage opportunities and hedging strategies. During his years at HHG, he demonstrated remarkable accuracy with his market forecasts and stock recommendations. Mr. Moas left HHG in late 2000 (before the sale of HHG to Merrill Lynch was finalized) in order to start his own firm -- a few months after correctly forecasting the Nasdaq collapse in a timely manner. More recently, Standpoint Research has been ranked the # 1 firm for accuracy through November 15, 2014. He has been featured on CNBC, Fox, Bloomberg TV and others, so taking the time to talk to a relatively small, new publication like SacAlt, was very courteous of him. I first heard about him from comedian/activist Lee Camp (whom I interviewed back in March), and was impressed with his courage and moral clarity. He’s taken the stance that we as people, should not invest merely based on the economic data, but with a moral compass as well. He’s downgraded stocks like Apple and Amazon, based on how they treat and pay their workers, and is actively protesting their labor practices. I wanted to learn more about how he’s gone from economic analyst, to economic activist, and why he feels the capitalist system we are currently living with is so unfair. So, on a rainy November afternoon, he answers the phone, and after a brief introduction, he laughs, “I am probably the first person [you have ever interviewed for SacAlt] that’s never been high, drunk, or buzzed in my life.” He’s right about that, but that’s all good. In this day and age, being straight-edge is more “Alt” than not. So how did he come to this personal revolution? What left him to start downgrading stocks like Apple and Amazon on moral grounds alone? “I travel a lot,” he explains. “Since 2007 I’ve been in more than fifty countries, on six different continents including Africa, and half of the states in this country. I see the world differently because of that.” And when he travels, he’s not “hiding in churches and museums,” he’s out walking an average of ten to fifteen miles a day, seeing the way people live, the unpolished version of the world we live in. “I see what’s going on, and it upsets me, torments me, and I don’t know exactly how to go about changing the system that we have here. What I do know is that it isn’t fair. And we have a situation right now where the hundred wealthiest people in the world have more money than the bottom half of the world’s population. In other words if you liquidated what those hundred people have and transferred that to the bottom half, you would wipe out a hundred people, and you would end up doubling the standard of living for three and half billion. So what does that say about us as a society, where we can give one hundred people the same power as half the world’s population?” Apple is a company that particularly chaps his hide. “You look at Apple for example. Their market capitalization is seven hundred billion dollars. That’s what the share-holders of Apple stock are sitting on right now. And they pay their workers in Asia three dollars an hour. It was two dollars...but when the Asian workers started committing suicide, Apple realized that they had a public relations mess on their hands. Ok, so they have zero tolerance for defects in their products...their gadgets and their phones and their tablets, and these things they sell you, but when the labor agency went into their factories in Asia they found several dozen human rights and labor violations. And their workers in the United States aren’t treated that much better. If I’m not mistaken the workers in the Apple stores make (on average) ten dollars an hour! And I don’t know about you, but I could not live on double that.” I can attest, as someone who is not bringing home double that, it isn’t easy. He continues, “So you have millionaire, billionaire share-holders sitting on their asses, making billions of dollars off the work of these people, who are not even able to survive on what they are paid. And I can give you the same example with Starbucks, and the way the bean pickers in Central America are treated...with CVS, with Amazon, McDonald’s. I don’t even want to talk about Phillip Morris, and how many millions of people are killed by the industry they operate in every year. It is just a horrible system and the way I see the world, it’s a pyramid, everything is going to the top of the pyramid. And nothing’s trickling down, which is what the poor people were always led to believe. You know, the rich people would say just sit tight, if things go well for us, it’s going to trickle down to you.” Ronnie isn’t one to mince words, he concludes with “And that’s bull-shit.” So what about the argument that corporations just can’t afford to pay people more, or they’d have to raise prices? “You go to get a job at Wal-Mart and you know what they say to you? We would love to pay you more than nine dollars an hour, but then wouldn’t be able to keep the prices low for our consumers. And that’s a crock of shit! Ok, what they really should be saying is, we would love to pay you a higher wage, but that would eat into the profits of the Walton family, and the millionaire and billionaire share-holders, that are now sitting on two hundred and fifty billion dollars worth of stock. So it’s just one big racket. The poor people, the uneducated people...not everyone is good with numbers. They know that the CEO of Starbucks has a net worth of two billion dollars, everybody knows that, but the average person on the street doesn’t understand that the Starbucks shareholders are sitting on fifty, sixty, seventy billion dollars worth of stock. Where are the bean pickers in all of this? You know the public relations machine at Starbucks says ‘hey, we give our baristas health-care coverage! And tuition reimbursement! And more than the minimum wage. And the Americans are naive, and they say ‘wow, they’re treating their workers really well, they even recycle the cups! What a great company. Why isn’t anyone speaking on behalf of the people picking the coffee beans in Colombia?” Indeed. And moreover, how can a guy like Ronnie get his message out, when the mainstream media in the U/S/ is owned by just a handful of corporations who operate under the same capitalist principles as the companies he’s attacking, and on top of that, are relying on advertising dollars form many of these corporations? I’ve seen some of these interviews, where the hosts will throw out buzz-words like “re-distribution of wealth,” and “socialism,” in what seems to be an effort to attack and discredit Ronnie and his message. “Well someone who works for MSNBC, knows who his boss is. So they’re going to be on the left, someone on Fox knows who his boss is, they’re going to be on the right. And even if they agree with what I’m saying you’re not going to hear them admit that on camera. They might give me a pat on the back off camera, which is what one of the Fox camera-men did to me when I walked off the set, but they’re not going to do that openly. They know who their audience is. And as far as re-distribution of wealth goes, we’ve had re-distribution of wealth in this country for two hundred years. The problem is it’s going from the poor to the rich! I want to level the playing field, and give the poor people a fair piece of the pie. And they’re calling me communist, or socialist? I don’t put any labels on myself. I know what the truth is and I see what is going on. I see people, these CEO’s, sitting on their asses making millions of dollars a year, and the janitor’s that are wiping the CEO’s urine off the toilet seats, can’t even live off the paycheck that he gets at the end of the day. Why is a janitor less important than a CEO? Not everybody was born with a genius IQ; not everybody was born with two parents at home to raise them; and in a good neighborhood with an option to go to University. You know, you go to Denmark, the people working at McDonald’s make twenty dollars and hour and they get six weeks paid vacation, and they tell people on the street what they do for a living, and they’re proud of what they do! You have millions of people living in this country who are almost ashamed to tell you what they do for a living, because of the stigma that’s attached to the people in the services sector! I believe there’s a birth lottery...nobody gets to pick their parents. You’re born, and either you won the lottery or you didn’t win the lottery. If you’re born with a high IQ and two nice parents, in a nice neighborhood, you basically are born with a silver spoon in your mouth. But if you’re born with a low IQ in a bad neighborhood, with one parent, no parents around, or abusive parents, you have almost no chance to get out of the services sector and the minimum wage. You know it’s almost a death sentence at birth. And I think this needs to change.” I agree with him that the situation for many people today, is just a more polite form of slavery. “It is exactly what it is -- slavery without the whips and chains. And we may have eliminated slavery in this country, but we’re taking advantage of people in third world countries, where these American companies are paying two, three dollars an hour, in some cases two or three dollars a day, to sweat-shop workers and farmers. It’s nauseating, and it’s sickening. You don’t get to the top of the mountain without stepping on people along the way. That’s how this country got the top of the mountain, with the GDP per capita as high as it is. And all I want to do is take 2% of the $17 trillion dollar GDP -- that would be $340 billion, and cut a check every year, for $8,500 to the 40,000,000 people at the bottom.” It’s a bold proposal, and one that is unlikely to happen any time soon in the U.S. as long as the mantra of “trickle down” economics still holds weight, and words like “socialism” and “redistribution of wealth” are used to slander people who even suggest that maybe those at the top have enough already, and that we can afford to trim their profits and give it back to the people struggling at the bottom. But we have to start somewhere. Whether we act on something like Ronnie’s proposal, or something else, one thing is clear; As Jacque Fresco says in Peter Joseph’s documentary, Zeitgeist II: Addendum, “This shit’s got to go!” Nobody needs to be a billionaire, but everyone needs food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare. People who work deserve to be able to live comfortably from their labors, to be able to raise their children and give them a better life then they had. We’ve been entranced by capitalism in this country, the idea that if you just work hard enough, you can be the next Richie Rich. But as Ronnie points out, not everyone has the same opportunities, and the same abilities. A society that produces as much wealth and resources as we have -- has an obligation to take care of those at the bottom and give them a chance. Many people, manipulated by corporate media outlets like Fox News, get infuriated at the idea of handouts, at those who leech on the system. But what they don’t get is that this is a system that produces massive poverty, inequality and massive crime. They aren’t seeing the way that the system is rigged, essentially giving massive handouts to the people at the top for manipulating currency, creating debt, controlling resources, tax loopholes, and unfair international labor practices. All of this has made it easy for the rich to get richer and nearly impossible for the poorest in the world to get out of poverty. According to Pew Research (pewsocialtrends.org), from the end of the recession in 2009 through 2011 (the last year for which Census Bureau wealth data are available), the 8 million households in the U.S. with a net worth above $836,033 saw their aggregate wealth rise by an estimated $5.6 trillion, while the 111 million households with a net worth at or below that level saw their aggregate wealth decline by an estimated $0.6 trillion.1 There has been a lot of talk about a living wage in this country, and many are proposing raising the minimum wage. The point Ronnie makes, is that many small businesses truly can’t afford to pay their workers more. A minimum wage of fifteen dollars an hour would cause many of them to have to cut their staff or go out of business. The big corporations such as Wal-Mart and Apple can afford it, but good luck trying to pass a minimum wage just for big companies. With his proposal, lower income workers would simply get an economic boost to improve their standard of living. The money would come from the top -- those that have more than they could possibly ever need. To those who say we don’t have enough money, or that we shouldn’t punish job-creators to pay a stipend to the bottom 50% of America. Well, first off, it isn’t true. There are a lot of ways to make it work. The money is there. To learn more about Ronnie Moas, visit standpointresearch. To get his message out, he needs people like you to visit his new website philanthropyandphilosophy and share the link with your friends and family on social media. If you are looking for some great charities to contribute to this holiday season, Ronnie provides links and information to dozens of charities worldwide that he has personally vetted.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 04:37:57 +0000
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