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Ruling Class

Billionaires Devised A Plan To Kill Unions By Sending Worker Stand-Ins To Spread Propaganda

July 7, 2018 By Leo Gerard, Alternet.org , , ,
Hundred millionaire Bruce Rauner just couldn’t wait to tell Illinois state workers that the U.S. Supreme Court had given them what he considered a gift. Within hours of the court’s ruling in the Janus case last week, Rauner, the Republican governor of Illinois, emailed state workers to tell them the decision meant they no longer needed to pay either dues or fair share fees to their labor union but the union would still be required to represent them. What a deal! Free service! And it was brought to them by Rauner! The governor had filed the lawsuit that led to the Janus decision. When a court tossed him as plaintiff, the right-wing foundations whose billionaire donors paid for the lawsuit drummed up replacement plaintiffs including Mark Janus. He’s an Illinois child support worker who refused to join the union and pay dues and who didn’t even want to pay the smaller fair share fee of $45 a month charged to non-members to cover the union’s costs of bargaining for them. 

Nader Open Letter To Jeff Bezos

June 22, 2018 Staff, Nader.org , , ,
You’ve come a long way from being a restless electrical engineering and computer science dual major at our alma mater, Princeton University. By heeding your own advice, your own hunches and visions, you’ve become the world’s richest person – at $141 billion and counting.  You must feel you are on top of the world. You are crushing your competition—those little stores on Main Street, USA, and other large companies that are still in business. Your early clever minimizing of sales taxes gave you a big unfair advantage over brick and mortar stores that have had to pay 6, 7, 8 percent in sales taxes. Your tax-lawyers  and accountants are using the anarchic global tax avoidance jurisdictions to drive your company’s tax burden to zero on a $5.6 billion profit in 2017, plus receiving about $789 million from Trump’s tax giveaway law, according to The American Conservative magazine (see Daniel Kishi’s article, “Crony Capitalism Writ Large,” in the May/June 2018 edition).

The Global Elite Is Insane Revisited

March 24, 2018 Robert J. Burrowes, Informationclearinghouse.info   ,
March 21, 2018 "Information Clearing House" - In 2014 I wrote an article titled ‘The Global Elite is Insane’. I want to elaborate what I explained in the earlier article so that people have a clearer sense of what we are up against in our struggle to create a world of peace, justice and ecological sustainability. Of course, as I explained previously, it is not just the global elite that is insane. All those individuals – politicians, businesspeople, academics, corporate media editors and journalists, judges and lawyers, bureaucrats…. – who serve the elite, including by not exposing and resisting it, are also insane. And it is important to understand this if we are to develop and implement effective strategies to resist elite violence, exploitation and destruction but also avert the now-imminent human extinction driven by their insane desire for endless personal privilege...

Majority Of Americans Agree In Poll That Deep State Exists — Here Is The Cited Evidence

March 23, 2018 By Aaron Kesel, Activistpost.com , ,
A majority of Americans believe an unelected faction or cabal of officials is orchestrating policy in Washington, D.C., according to a new poll, Politico reported. The survey of 803 adults was conducted by the Monmouth University Polling Institute from March 2nd to 5th. The institute found that a whopping 74 percent of pollsters believe in a “deep state” when it is described as a collection of unelected officials running policy. Even more shocking, the poll further notes that it’s a belief expressed by 7 in 10 Americans polled in each political group: Republican, Democrat and Independent. Thirty-one percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Independents say they believe a deep state “definitely exists,” while 19 percent of Democrats believe a deep state exists.

Rothschild Passing Dynasty On To 7th Generation, Marking 200 Years Of Banker Family Rule

March 5, 2018 By Rachel Blevins, Activistpost.com ,
The Rothschild banking empire will ensure that its control continues to stay within the family for a seventh generation as David de Rothschild, 75, is set to hand the role of chairman over to his son, Alexandre de Rothschild, 37, in June. The banking dynasty has been passed between generations for the last 200 years. It was started by Mayer Amschel Rothschild as a French railway company, and five of his sons went on to establish banking businesses across Europe. Financial Times reported that the investment bank is currently pushing to “diversify from its core French and British advisory business to help it ride out less buoyant periods in Europe’s mergers and acquisitions market.” The new chairman joined the bank in 2008, and he has helped to set up and oversee the private equity business.

Billionaires Behind Supreme Court Case Poised To Dismantle Public Sector Unions

March 1, 2018 By Mary Bottari, Exposedbycmd.org , , ,
The Roman god Janus was known for having two faces. It is a fitting name for the U.S. Supreme Court case scheduled for oral arguments February 26, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Council 31, that could deal a devastating blow to public-sector unions and workers nationwide. In the past decade, a small group of people working for deep-pocketed corporate interests, conservative think tanks and right-wing foundations have bankrolled a series of lawsuits to end what they call “forced unionization.” They say they fight in the name of “free speech,” “worker rights” and “workplace freedom.” In briefs before the court, they present their public face: carefully selected and appealing plaintiffs like Illinois child-support worker Mark Janus and California schoolteacher Rebecca Friedrichs. The language they use is relentlessly pro-worker.

Richest 2% In US Made More Money Than Cost Of Entire Safety Net

February 27, 2018 Paul Buchheit, Nationofchange.org  , ,
How was their money made? Almost entirely by passively waiting for the stock market to go up. The data sources for this report are Forbes and Credit Suisse, both of which provide precise numbers for the worsening surge in America’s wealth inequality. U.S. wealth increased by $8.5 trillion in 2017, with the richest 2% getting about $1.15 trillion (details here), which is more than the total cost of Medicaid (federal AND state) and the complete safety net, both mandatory and discretionary, including the low-income programs that make up the social support package derisively referred to as ‘welfare.’ Surprisingly, the richest 1% did not increase their wealth by much in 2017 (although they took nearly $4 trillion in 2016). That means the second half of the richest 2%, Americans with an average net worth of approximately $10 million, outgained the safety net all by themselves in the past year.

How Rich Are The Rich? If Only You Knew

February 14, 2018 By Gil B. Manzon Jr., Theconversation.com , , ,
“If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” Actor and comedian Chris Rock made this astute statement during a 2014 interview with New York magazine, referring to the yawning gap between rich and poor. In so doing, he stumbled upon a key challenge in the study of inequality. What’s the best way to measure it? Most inequality studies have focused on income – measures of which are widely available. However, being rich is not about a single year of earnings but rather about the accumulation of wealth over time. In the past, quantifying that has been tricky. The wealthy would probably prefer we stay in the dark about how rich they are, presumably to avoid the aforementioned riots.

The Deadly Rule Of The Oligarchs

February 12, 2018 By Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com , ,
Oligarchic rule, as Aristotle pointed out, is a deviant form of government. Oligarchs care nothing for competency, intelligence, honesty, rationality, self-sacrifice or the common good. They pervert, deform and dismantle systems of power to serve their immediate interests, squandering the future for short-term personal gain. “The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments that rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, of the few or of the many, are perversions,” Aristotle wrote. The classicist Peter L.P. Simpson calls these perversions the “sophistry of oligarchs,” meaning that once oligarchs take power, rational, prudent and thoughtful responses to social, economic and political problems are ignored to feed insatiable greed.

How Donald Trump Rode In On “Dark Money”

February 7, 2018 Glen Ford, Blackagendareport.com , ,
A team led by University of Massachusetts professor emeritus Thomas Ferguson reveals that “a giant wave of dark money” flowed into Donald Trump’s campaign coffers in the last months of the 2016 election, enabling him to go heads up with Hillary Clinton’s $1.4 billion juggernaut in the final stages of the contest. The identity of Trump’s late-campaign godfathers is “shrouded,” according to a paper authored by Ferguson and his collaborators, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen, but all signs point to “a sudden influx of money from private equity and hedge funds.” The cash infusion brought Trump’s total spending up to $861 million. Although that’s still substantially less than Hillary’s total outlays, Trump’s dark money arrived just in time to capitalize on Clinton’s failure to mount an effective blitz in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Instead Of Davos, Here Is What The Wealthy Should DO

January 27, 2018 Chuck Collins, Qz.com , ,
Over a thousand private jets have landed at the Swiss mountain ski resort of Davos, where the planet’s elected presidents and unelected financial rulers have gathered for the World Economic Forum. There, they discuss the fate of the world. Among those attending are billionaire investors and CEOs of global companies—which is one of the reasons why Donald Trump, the first US president to attend the gathering in 20 years, also made the trip. Beneath the glitz, the gathering features star-studded panels on how businesses and governments can solve the world’s problems. This year’s program calls for new efforts toward “developing a shared narrative to improve the state of the world.” To those gathered this coming week in Davos, here’s another idea: Come home. And bring your wealth with you.

WaPo Defends Its Owner Against Charges That He’s Very Wealthy

January 25, 2018 By Jim Naureckas, Fair.org , ,
Awkwardly enough, one of the world’s six wealthiest people is the owner of the paper doing the factchecking. Or as the Postcoyly put it, “(Among the names on the list: Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post.)” The Post’s Nicole Lewis didn’t say that Sanders was wrong, exactly. Instead, she said that “he has made a habit of relying on simplified statistics that are provocative but do little to illuminate the complexities of the US economic system.” Or as she said of a similar statement Sanders made about US (not global) wealth, “While technically correct, the condensed soundbite lacked nuance about wealth accumulation and debt in the United States.” The factcheck started out by acknowledging that, yes, the six richest people, according to Forbes, have net wealth of $462.6 billion.

Freedom Rider: Oligarch Jeff Bezos

January 20, 2018 By Margaret Kimberley, Blackagendareport.com , , , ,
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $105 billion and is the richest man in the world. But he is not just the richest man at this moment in history. He is the richest person who has ever lived. As of 2017 he and seven other billionaires had a collective net worth equal to that of the poorest 3.6 billion people on earth. These figures have been in the news of late but without much useful analysis. The corporate media refuse to state what is obvious. Namely that inequality is worse around the world precisely because these super rich people demand it. While pundits and politicians go on breathlessly about oligarchs in Russia, they seldom take a look at the wealthiest in their own back yard and the control they exert over the lives of millions of people.

The World’s Wealthiest Get More Obscenly More Wealthy

December 29, 2017 Tom Metcalf and Jack Witzig, Bloomberg.com , ,
Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos added the most in 2017, a $34.2 billion gain that knocked Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates out of his spot as the world’s richest person in October. Gates, 62, had held the spot since May 2013, and has been donating much of his fortune to charity, including a $4.6 billion pledge he made to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in August. Bezos, whose net worth topped $100 billion at the end of November, currently has a net worth of $99.6 billion compared with $91.3 billion for Gates.  George Soros also gave away a substantial part of his fortune, revealing in October that his family office had given $18 billion to his Open Society Foundations over the past several years, dropping the billionaire investor to No. 195 on the Bloomberg ranking, with a net worth of $8 billion.

Help For Struggling Millionaires Is On The Way

December 28, 2017 By Chuck Collins, Otherwords.org , ,
If you're struggling to get by on $20 million, the GOP is looking out for you and your heirs. It isn’t easy being a millionaire these days, especially if you’ve got less than $20 million. Fortunately, Congress is watching out for you. Yes, the Republican tax cut bonanza targets lower end millionaires for special relief. Now those struggling to scrape by with $15 million or $20 million can breathe more easily. And even lowly billionaires will be able to keep more of their wealth. Why? Because Congress just increased the amount of wealth exempted by the estate tax, our nation’s only levy on inherited wealth. In the bad old days, a family had to have $11 million in wealth before they were subject to the tax. This exempted the 99.8 percent of undisciplined taxpayers who, in the words of Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, had squandered their wealth on “booze, women, and movies.”
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