Ruling Class

A Cure For Excessive Wealth Disorder

April 4, 2019 By Chuck Collins, Otherwords.org Create! Inequality, Ruling Class

The U.S. is suffering from excessive wealth disorder. This isn’t your parents’ inequality influenza, but a more virulent strain of extreme disparities of income, wealth, and opportunity. Just 400 billionaires have as much wealth as nearly two-thirds of American households combined. And just three individuals — Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates — have as much wealth as half of all U.S. households put together. Since the economic meltdown of 2008, the lion’s share of income and wealth growth hasn’t gone just to the top 1 percent — it’s gone to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent.

Amazon’s Underbelly 3.0: Lobbying And Bribing To Secure Market Dominance

April 1, 2019 Chris Paulis, Occupy.com Educate! Amazon, Jeff Bezos, Ruling Class

Amazon has continued to expand its influence on policy and on government over the past decade. We laud Jeff Bezos as the richest man in the world and how he rose to the top by his own bootstraps. Many imagine him as a self-starter, an entrepreneur, a visionary. But the fact remains that Jeff has used his vast wealth to influence policy and laws to favor his business practices. Amazon has pushed others aside in order to procure its vast influence on politics and legislation. Granted, Amazon is not alone in this endeavor. It's no secret that corporations endlessly lobby to get what they want...

There’s Plenty Of Wealth To Go Around — It Just Doesn’t

March 28, 2019 By Bob Lord, Otherwords.org Educate! Inequality, Ruling Class

Get ready to hear a lot about baking this campaign season. When it comes to how wealth is distributed in this country, “pie” is a favorite pundit metaphor. Some politicians want to “re-divide the pie,” so everyone’s slice is more equal in size. But that’s “socialism,” some pundits scold. Better to trust our billionaires and millionaires to “grow the pie” so big that every American has a generous slice. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman indulged a bit of this recently. Michael Bloomberg, Friedman explained, is a grow-the-pie guy. Bernie Sanders, he warned, is a re-divide-the-pie guy.

The Real College Admissions Scandal

March 27, 2019 By Jessicah Pierre, Inequality.org Educate! Affirmative Action, Higher Education, Ruling Class

In what’s being called the largest college admissions scam ever, a number of wealthy parents, celebrities, and college prep coaches have been accused of offering large bribes to get rich students into Ivy League schools, regardless of their credentials. The parents facing charges allegedly paid up to $6.5 million to get their kids into college. Shocking as it is, this is hardly a new phenomenon in higher education. Wealthy and privileged students have always had an upper hand in being accepted to prestigious universities.

The Bill And Melinda Gates’ Fair Taxation Scaremongering Tour

February 23, 2019 Chris Orlet, Counterpunch.org Educate! Ruling Class, Taxes

Billionaire philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates, appearing recently on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, said a number of things that made Colbert’s liberal audience squeal with delight. When told that the very existence of billionaires was a signal that capitalism doesn’t work for the many, and that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had mused that America could do without billionaires, the Gates laughed politely and talked vaguely and approvingly of raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy. To those who are given much, much is expected, Melinda Gates said.

Have The Rich Always Laughed Stiff Tax Rates Away?

February 19, 2019 By Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org Educate! New Economy, Ruling Class, Taxes

The guardians of our conventional wisdom on taxing the rich have messed up — and they know it. They slacked off. They started believing their own tripe. Average Americans, they assumed, would never ever smile on proposals to raise tax rates on the richest among us. After all, the conventional wisdom maintains, those average folks figure that someday they’ll be rich, too. But now, with tax-the-rich proposals proliferating and polling spectacularly well, the keepers of our bless-the-rich faith are panicking. Their old rhetorical zingers no longer zing.

Amazon Won’t Pay A Dime In Federal Taxes This Year

February 18, 2019 By Jacob Sugarman, Truthdig.com Educate! Amazon, Jeff Bezos, Ruling Class, Taxes

Amazon won’t pay a dime in federal taxes this year—just as it didn’t pay a dime in federal taxes the year before. According to a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which examined Amazon’s public filings, the online retailer reported a $129 million federal income tax rebate for 2018—good for a tax rate of negative 1 percent, or 22 percent below the federal corporate income tax rate. Amazon’s profits this year were $11.2 billion versus $5.6 billion in 2017. As of last September, the company was valued at over $1 trillion.

Seriously Taxing The Rich Will Take ‘Guts’ — And More

February 14, 2019 By Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org Strategize! New Economy, Ruling Class, Taxes

Jan Schakowsky doesn’t need to apologize for anything. This veteran member of Congress from Illinois has a record second to none on issues that matter to working people. Over the course of her 20 years on Capitol Hill, Schakowsky has introduced much more than her share of innovative legislation, bills like her Patriot Corporations of America Act, a measure designed to give companies that pay their top execs only modestly more than their workers a better shot at winning government contracts.

How The Age Of Billionaires Ends

February 8, 2019 By Josh Hoxie, Otherwords.org Strategize! Class Struggle, Inequality, New Economy, Ruling Class

Serious proposals are on the table to address the deepening divide between the uber-rich and the rest of us. Every month or so there’s a stunning new headline statistic about just how stark our economic divide has become. Understanding that this divide exists is a good start. Appreciating that a deeply unfair and unequal economy is problematic is even better. Actually doing something about it — that’s the best. As 2020 presidential hopefuls start trying to prove their progressive bona fides, serious policies to take on economic inequality are at the forefront.

The Billionaires Are Wrong; We Can’t Afford Anything But Single Payer Health Care

January 31, 2019 Kevin Zeese, Healthoverprofit.org Educate! Health Care, Ruling Class, Single payer health care

The three billionaires who are running for president put out false information on improved Medicare for all. This includes Donald Trump, Michael Bloomberg, and Howard Schultz. Bloomberg and Schultz need immediate attention because in the last few days they have been putting out the false claim that the US cannot afford Medicare for all when the facts are it will save trillions of dollars over the next decade compared to the current expensive and wasteful system. What we cannot afford is the current system.

The Problem Isn’t Robots Taking Our Jobs. It’s Oligarchs Taking Our Power

January 30, 2019 Adam Simpson, Thenextsystem.org Educate! Capitalism, Class Struggle, Ruling Class

The presumed aspirant tech moguls of the automation age acknowledge that your current, barely-making-ends-meet job is going to get squeezed, shortchanged, or wiped out altogether by a robot or an algorithm. But go back to school (and take on some student debt) and get training in a new skill, and you will not only be able to weather the change but you’ll make even more money. This prescription will only work, however, if workers refuse to question the paradigms that preserve the wealthy’s control of the game, and they coded it so they will always ultimately win.

Global Economy On The Brink As Davos Crowd Parties On

January 25, 2019 Jack Rasmus, Jackrasmus.com Educate! Finance and the Economy, Ruling Class, World Economic Forum

“At Davos, Switzerland every year the global capitalist elite gather to party…and to prepare for the year ahead. This year more than 1500 private jets will reportedly fly in. Thousands more of their underling staff will travel via business class to handle their personal, and corporate, logistics. Shielded from the media and the pubic, the big capitalists share views in back rooms and listen to experts on finance, government policy, technology, and the economy. The experts are especially probed to identify and explain the next ‘black swan’ or ‘gray rhino’ event about to erupt.

Extreme Wealth Threatens Our Very Planet

January 25, 2019 By Sam Pizzigati, Otherwords.org Educate! Ruling Class, wealth inequality

We either keep fossil fuels in the ground, or we fry. That’s the conclusion of another new blockbuster study on climate change, this one from the National Academy of Sciences. Our fossil-fuel industrial economy, the study details, has made for the fastest climate changes our Earth has ever seen. “If we think about the future in terms of the past, where we are going is uncharted territory for human society,” notes the study’s lead author, Kevin Burke from the University of Wisconsin.

Elites Descend On Davos As Global Wealth Gap Reaches Historic Levels

January 23, 2019 By Steve Dubb, Nonprofitquarterly.org Educate! Ruling Class, wealth inequality

A new report from Oxfam, compiled by a 10-person team, finds the global wealth gap growing still greater. The revealed trend of increasing global economic inequality may surprise few, but the report also emphasizes, as Casey Quackenbush writes in Time, that “growing inequality is compromising the fight against poverty.” “The size of your bank account should not dictate how many years your children spend in school, or how long you live—yet this is the reality in too many countries across the globe,” remarks Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International.

Facing Populist Assault, Global Elites Regroup In Davos

January 22, 2019 Paul Wiseman and Jamey Keaten, Apnews.com Educate! Populism, Ruling Class, World Economic Forum

DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — As the world’s financial and political elites convene here in the Swiss Alps for the World Economic Forum, their vision of ever-closer commercial and political ties is under attack — and the economic outlook is darkening. Britain’s political system has been thrown into chaos as the country negotiates a messy divorce from the European Union. Under President Donald Trump, the United States is imposing trade sanctions on friend and foe alike, and the government is paralyzed by a partial shutdown over immigration policy that forced Trump and a high-level U.S. delegation to cancel the trip to Davos.

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