2367 – How much influence do the (German) super-rich have (2023 documentary)

What’s with Europe’s ultra-wealthy high-spending fossil fossil-burning elite, beyond the Arab sheikhs and crazy nouveau-rich Asians?

This DW (Deutsche Welle) documentary in English is one of several documentaries and reports being commissioned by very mainstream German media channels (ZDF, DW, ARD etc). Since a few years, the discussion about growing inequality in Germany (or what is termed “inequality studies” in Picketty’s famous update). We enter a world of unwanted and expensive gifts given by the German ultra-rich to their communities or small towns were they live a life of anonymity and how refusing such gifts is becoming harder and harder.

This is also the murky world of “taxation designing”, of Steuern Gestalten basically a German term or euphemism for the high payed fiscal professionals and legal eagles who sometimes work for the government (finance ministry) AND also give advice to the super-rich oligarchs on how to legally avoid taxation in their own respective countries (if they didn’t already leave for the fiscal paradise of Switzerland). As always the best analysis of how the rich keep getting richer in Germany (and elsewhere) – in one of Adam Tooze’s last substack posts (highly recommended!).

While we are all aware and fulminate about the outrageous antics of Russian, Ukrainian (or say Romanian) or US billionaire for that matter – plutocrats, the German super-rich are a shifty lot. They actually stay out of the limelight and are much more elusive – even paying (or suing) to be taken off the lists of the global super-rich. Several of the richest family fortunes (do not get any illusions it is all a family business) owning chains such as Kaufland, Lidl or container shipping liners such as Hapag-Llyod in Germany do not appear listed in the annual who’s who of largest profits and incomes. When education or state services seem less and less reliable – charity capitalism is stepping in, but there are many tie-ins. Not to mention the silence and implications of such foundations with their nazi past (check out Nazi Billionaires 2022 book).

What we still have to learn today is that we cannot trust or employ the super-rich to save the planet (it is more the other way around, saving the planet from them and their private jets), what is less clear is that the Social Market Economy (Ordoliberalism) has been consistently enriching them during the last years, while the vast majority of Germans scrapes by a living from day to day, and the number of homeless people in Germany has doubled the last year.