Plutocracy

Billionaires Take Center Stage After US Elections

November 18, 2024 Philippe Alcoy, Left Voice. Educate! 2024 US Presidential elections, Billionaires, Capitalism, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Plutocracy

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.

Venezuela In The Crosshairs Of Technological Imperialism

September 5, 2024 Misión Verdad Orinoco Tribune. Educate! Big Tech, Capitalism, Democracy, Elon Musk, Freedom of Expression, Plutocracy, Social Media, Technology, US Imperialism, Venezuela, X

In August, Venezuela’s re-elected president, Nicolás Maduro, signed a decree blocking access to social media platform X, formerly Twitter, for 10 days. President Maduro said of its owner, tycoon Elon Musk, “He has violated the rules by inciting hatred, fascism, civil war, death, confrontation among Venezuelans, and has violated all Venezuelan laws.” Musk, who also owns the Starlink satellite broadband network, expressed his support for the far-right Venezuelan opposition and insulted the president, which is a sign of the determination of the new global elites to carry out regime change in Venezuela. This action was accompanied by other attempts implemented through various technological platforms such as Apple, Google, and Meta.

US Elections 100% Bought Off!

July 7, 2024 Lee Camp, BreakThrough News. Resistance Report Citizens United, Elections, Money in Politics, Plutocracy

US elections are the most bought-off in the world. How did we get here? Most people know that it has something to do with the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision. But most do not know it actually goes back more than a hundred years before that to an 1886 Supreme Court decision. But it gets worse — The statement that made corporations people (and therefore able to buy elections) wasn't even in the actual Supreme Court decision. It was in the "headnote" by the court reporter. Comedian Lee Camp dives deeper into the last hundred years of corporate money corrupting every inch of our elections.

A Telling Tale Of Two Press Lords

September 25, 2023 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Educate! Capitalism, Fox news, Media, Plutocracy, Rupert Murdoch, Scripps

Murdoch has been wreaking all this damage ever since he inherited — way back in 1952 — his first media property, a daily Australian newspaper his daddy had owned. Over the years, especially those years since his Fox News became America’s premiere news network in 2001, no single individual anywhere on Earth has done more to make our world safe for grand fortunes. Could we realistically have expected anything even a bit more socially redeeming from a media mogul as powerful as Murdoch? Well, actually, history does offer up some models for media moguls interested in something besides maximizing their mega millions.

Why Democracy Is Not Possible Under Capitalism

September 14, 2023 People's Dispatch. Strategize! Atlanta, Capitalism, Democracy, Plutocracy, Socialism

In Atlanta, residents are using the existing democratic systems under capitalism to fight the construction of a multi-million dollar training ground for militarized police repression, and finding those systems lacking. Meanwhile, in socialist Cuba, the people and the government collaborated on formulating the world’s most progressive family code. Is it possible to have democracy under a capitalist system? Under a different economic system, such as socialism, what would democracy look like? Mariah Parker, Stop Cop City activist, labor organizer with the Union of Southern Service Workers, and rapper, spoke to over 300 attendees of the Dilemmas of Humanity: A Socialist Horizon conference in Atlanta on September 2, as part of a panel discussion on Socialism and Democracy.

On Contact: How Joe Biden Is Not FDR

May 9, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. Resistance Report Biden administration, Capitalism, Democrats, Plutocracy

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to history professor and author Paul Street about the Biden administration and its continuity with the Democratic and Republic administrations’ policies and programs to benefit the elite and corporate interests, rather than working-class Americans.

Gamestop—And the Game That Never Stops!

February 2, 2021 Jack Rasmus, ZNet. Educate! GameStop, Plutocracy, Stock Market, Wall Street

This past week a video game company in trouble, Gamestop, became the center of media attention. Day traders had driven up the company’s stock price by thousands of percent in just one day. The mainstream media narrative was the ‘small guy’ investor challenged the big boys of finance who had bet Gamestop stock price would contract, not rise sharply. The little investor, so the story goes, initially won big but Gamestop’s stock price escalation was stopped in its tracks by coordinated forces of Wall St., as trading was abruptly halted later in the day in the midst of the run-up. But that narrative, that media spin, has it wrong. The real meaning of what has happened is quite different.

How Corporations Bankroll US Police Foundations

June 20, 2020 Gin Armstrong and Derek Seidman, Eyes on the Ties. Educate! Capitalism, Corporatism, Plutocracy, Police

As calls to defund the police gain traction, bloated police budgets are coming under scrutiny for siphoning public resources away from black and brown communities. While police budgets are typically public documents that must be approved by elected officials, there are other institutions in place with the sole purpose of funneling even more resources toward law enforcement. Police foundations across the country are partnering with corporations to raise money to supplement police budgets by funding programs and purchasing tech and weaponry for law enforcement with little public oversight. Annual fundraising events and parties like the St. Paul Police Foundation’s “Blue Nite Gala” and the Chicago Police Foundation’s “True Blue” event are huge moneymakers.

These ‘Are The Good Times — Compared To What’s Coming Next”

April 30, 2020 Chauncey DeVega, Salon. Educate! COVID-19, Greater Depression, Plutocracy, US Empire

Empires fall a little bit at a time and then all at once. Over the last two decades, America has proven itself to be well along on that journey. The coronavirus pandemic has simply pushed our nation further along that downward spiral. Ultimately, the pandemic has further exposed and exacerbated — for those still somehow in denial about the decades-long reality of America as a decaying empire — deep political, social, economic, cultural and other societal problems. The country's infrastructure is rotting. Trump presides over a plutocratic, corrupt, cruel, authoritarian, pathological kakistocracy. The commons is being reduced to rubble while the ultra-rich extract ever more wealth and other resources from the American people. Excessive military spending has left the United States incapable of attending to the basic needs of its people.

Curtains Up!

April 26, 2020 David Perez, Information Clearinghouse. Educate! Corporate duopoly, Democracy, Elections, Plutocracy

Welcome, everyone to the longest-running play in U.S. history: “Voting for the Lesser Evil.” The play’s strength, as you well know, is its easy-to-memorize script, combined with its superb ability to change the essential characters—all while keeping the same dialogue! Our set design also remains largely the same, although recently we’ve had to highlight red and blue colors and build a swing to denote the characterizations of “states.” Throughout the decades, our show has been labeled a melodrama, a tragicomedy, and even science fiction. The beauty of ““Voting for the Lesser Evil” is that it’s all above the above! Some people have lobbied for the play being renamed “The Greatest Show on Earth.” It does remind one of a circus, doesn’t it?

Government By Goldman

September 24, 2017 Gary Rivlin and Michael Hudson, www.theintercept.com Educate! Corruption, Democracy, Goldman Sachs, New Economy, Plutocracy, Trump, Wall Street

By Gary Rivlin and Michael Hudson for The Intercept. Steve Bannon was in the room the day Donald Trump first fell for Gary Cohn. So were Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner, and Trump’s pick for secretary of Treasury, Steve Mnuchin. It was the end of November, three weeks after Trump’s improbable victory, and Cohn, then still the president of Goldman Sachs, was at Trump Tower presumably at the invitation of Kushner, with whom he was friendly. Cohn was there to offer his views about jobs and the economy. But, like the man he was there to meet, he was at heart a salesman.

Populism Defeated: Trump’s Bait And Switch

December 11, 2016 Nomi Prins, www.tomdispatch.com Educate! Donald Trump, oligarchy, Plutocracy

By Nomi Prins for Tom's Dispatch. Only a month has passed since November 8th, but it’s already clear (not that it wasn’t before) that Trump’s anti-establishment campaign rhetoric was the biggest scam of his career, one he pulled off perfectly. As president-elect and the country’s next CEO-in-chief, he’s now doing what many presidents have done: doling out power to like-minded friends and associates, loyalists, and -- think John F. Kennedy, for instance -- possibly family. Here, however, is a major historical difference: the magnitude of Trump’s cronyism is off the charts, even for Washington. Of course, he’s never been a man known for doing small and humble. So his cabinet, as yet incomplete, is already the richest one ever. Estimates of how loaded it will be are almost meaningless at this point, given that we don’t even know Trump’s true wealth (and will likely never see his tax returns). Still, with more billionaires at the doorstep, estimates of the wealth of his new cabinet members and of the president-elect range from my own guesstimate of about $12 billion up to $35 billion.

Endorse The People’s Agenda

November 22, 2016 Staff, www.popularresistance.org Organize! Government, Human Rights, oligarchy, Plutocracy

Right now is the opportune time for people to say no to plutocracy and demand a people's agenda. The rejection of the Democrats and the unexpected election of Donald Trump have caused confusion among the elites and have opened political space. The people's defeat of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a victory over the power of transnational corporations, confirms that when a movement of movements works together, we win. People across the country are rising up and will continue to do so. This is critical for social transformation. We encourage you to organize in your communities and to take the streets.We must also be clear in our demands. We are offering an outline for a People's Agenda.

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