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Billionaires

Why Oligarchs Want A Recession

April 8, 2025 Van Jackson, Labor Notes. , , , ,
A recession is looming. Trump himself recently affirmed that his economic plans would induce a recession in the near term. He remarked when asked as much by an interviewer, “There is a period of transition because what we’re doing is very big.” And yet, before Trump crashed the stock market last week with his global tariff regime, America’s CEOs had the highest confidence in the U.S. economy that they’ve had in three years, according to a nationwide survey in the early weeks of the Trump administration. And Trump has simply been carrying out the promises he’s long made.

An Inequality Tale Of Two Capital Cities

March 11, 2025 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. , , ,
Nine of the world’s ten wealthiest billionaires now call the United States home. The remaining one? He lives in France. And that one — Bernard Arnault, the 76-year-old who owns just about half the world’s largest maker of luxury goods — is now feeling some heat. What has Arnault and his fellow French deep pockets beginning to sweat? Lawmakers in France’s National Assembly have just given a green light to the world’s first significant tax on billionaire wealth. “The tax impunity of billionaires,” the measure’s prime sponsor, the Ecologist Party’s Eva Sas, exulted last month, “is over.”

Tesla Showroom Occupied By Activists In Clear Message To Elon Musk

March 3, 2025 The Canary. , , , , ,
Far-right miscreant Elon Musk got a taste of the opposition to him in London – as protesters occupied his Tesla showroom over his multiple crimes against people and planet. At midday on Saturday 1 March, the Tesla showroom in Westfield Shepherd’s Bush was disrupted by Climate Resistance protestors. A massive banner with the demand “Abolish billionaires” was dropped over the Tesla logo from a balcony above as a group of 30 staged a sit-in inside the showroom. The disruption took place as part of the new Abolish Billionaires campaign from campaign group Climate Resistance.

The World’s Richest People Look Out For Each Other

February 22, 2025 Pete Tucker, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. , , , ,
The Washington Post won’t say why it cancelled a six-figure ad buy calling for Elon Musk to be fired, but it’s likely the same reason the Post insisted Musk wasn’t Nazi-saluting on Inauguration Day, and why the paper killed its endorsement of Kamala Harris: because that’s what Jeff Bezos wants. In addition to owning the Post, Bezos is the founder of Amazon and currently the world’s third-richest human. At best, the Post is a side-hustle for Bezos, while Amazon and his other business pursuits are what truly animate him. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, told the Post.

A New Plan To Create A World Without Elon Musks

February 17, 2025 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. , , , ,
Americans these days don’t much like billionaires. Our ultra-rich, Americans overwhelmingly believe, aren’t paying enough in taxes. Polling earlier this month found that nearly three-quarters of the nation’s likeliest voters — 74 percent — feel billionaires are paying “too little’ at tax time. Just how concerned about billion-dollar fortunes have Americans become? Nearly half of us overall, Harris polling found last summer, would like to see a limit on “wealth accumulation.” Among Gen Z’ers, that support for limits on billionaire fortunes runs all the way up to 65 percent.

The Mafia State

February 16, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , ,
Kiss the ring. Grovel before the Godfather. Give him tribute, a cut of the spoils. If he and his family get rich you get rich. Enter his inner circle, his “made” men and women, and you do not have to follow rules or obey the law. You can disembowel the machinery of government. You can turn us and the natural world into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. You can commit crimes with impunity. You can make a mockery of democratic norms and social responsibility. Perfidy is very profitable at first. In the long term it is collective suicide.

Trump Megadonor Escalates Campaign Against Freedom Of The Press

February 11, 2025 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. , , , ,
In 1964, the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision known as New York Times Company v. Sullivan that further protected freedom of the press and speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Billionaire Steve Wynn, a casino tycoon and former finance chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), has now asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn this precedent. During the 2024 election cycle, he donated over $1 million to groups that supported President Donald Trump. If Wynn prevails, it would potentially open the floodgates to libel lawsuits against reporters, editors, producers, and news media organizations and have a chilling impact beyond what President Donald Trump has accomplished through his latest torrent of lawsuits.

World’s Richest Billionaires At Center Of Trump’s Inauguration

January 21, 2025 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Donald Trump has returned for his second term as US president. He invited some of the world’s most powerful billionaire oligarchs to his inauguration in Washington. Sitting next to Trump’s cabinet nominees, at the center of his inauguration, were the three richest people on Earth: Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla; Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon; and Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Together, these three men have nearly $900 billion in wealth. They could be seen on video chatting alongside Sundar Pichai, who is the billionaire CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet.

Over 80 US Cities To Hold Protests On Trump’s Inauguration Day

January 18, 2025 People's Dispatch. , , , , , ,
Conveners of the demonstrations have spoken to the variety of Trump’s promised attacks on working people. “Trump is planning to wage war on immigrant families through a brutal mass deportation campaign,” said Claudia De La Cruz, who ran on a socialist platform in her campaign for president against both Harris and Trump, on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. “We will stand up and say NO to these attacks. Trump is a billionaire, was elected with the help of other billionaires, and runs the government on behalf of the billionaire class.

Billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy Is A Wall Street Speculator

December 28, 2024 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , ,
Vivek Ramaswamy is the billionaire Republican politician and failed presidential candidate whom Donald Trump appointed to lead the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), alongside co-chair Elon Musk, the richest oligarch on Earth (who brands himself a libertarian anti-government crusader, while his companies receive billions in US government subsidies). Ramaswamy sparked something of a civil war among US conservatives with a puerile Twitter post lamenting how US popular culture upholds jocks over nerds.

Ghastly Glimpses Of America’s Most Rich-People-Friendly Year

December 22, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Counter Punch. , ,
The good times — for America’s super wealthy — are now rolling way past good. Our richest have in 2024 enjoyed their best year ever. No other nation’s deepest pockets have watched their fortunes grow as large or as fast. Elon Musk, of course, perfectly embodies this unprecedented surge in the personal wealth of America’s wealthiest. Musk has entered 2024’s last two weeks with a net worth spilling past $450 billion, nearly half a trillion dollars. Over the last 12 months, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index neatly notes, Musk’s wealth has doubled.

Billionaires Take Center Stage After US Elections

November 18, 2024 Philippe Alcoy, Left Voice. , , , , ,
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its capitalist restoration, the world witnessed a veritable festival of fraudulent privatizations and appropriations of collective property by a small group of former apparatchiks, state bureaucrats, and Mafia-like businessmen. This was the great new capitalist class needed in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc to make capitalist restoration “irreversible,” as Western economists and technocrats liked to say at the time. What followed was a large-scale theft on the part of imperialist banks and Western political leaders, a process which functioned in the interests of the international capitalist class as a whole.

There’s A Severe Housing Crisis In The US: The Work To Make Housing A Right

October 29, 2024 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , , , , , ,
A new report, Billionaire Blowback on Housing: How concentrated wealth disrupts housing markets and worsens the housing affordability crisis, explains how the United States has entered a state of hyper-gentrification in which the average person has to compete with a large corporation when it comes to buying or renting a home. There are currently 28 vacant homes for every homeless person. Clearing the FOG speaks with Chuck Collins, a co-author of the report, and Mehrdad Azemun of Peoples Action, about the housing crisis, the vision for a homes guarantee and how people are working to make housing a human right.

Report: Billionaire Investors Are ‘Supercharging’ Housing Crisis

October 23, 2024 Julia Conley, Common Dreams. , , , ,
A new report out Monday puts "into numbers the trend that ordinary Americans have known to be true for years," said economic justice advocates behind the analysis: "Their everyday struggles of affording a home are made worse by the sweeping influence that billionaires have over the market." The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) joined Popular Democracy in compiling a 71-page report titled Billionaire Blowback on Housing, aiming to get to the bottom of growing concerns in recent years about how Wall Street, as Democratic vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said earlier this month, is "buying up housing and making them less affordable."

U.S. Billionaire Wealth Is Up 88% Since The Pandemic

March 26, 2024 Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo, In These Times. , , ,
Four years ago, the United States entered the Covid-19 pandemic. Forbes published its 34th annual billionaire survey shortly after with data keyed to March 18, 2020. On that day, the United States had 614 billionaires who owned a combined wealth of $2.947 trillion. Four years later, on March 18, 2024, the country has 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.529 trillion, an 87.6 percent increase of $2.58 trillion, according to Institute for Policy Studies calculations of Forbes Real Time Billionaire Data.
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