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Ruling Class

Billionaires, Not Voters, Are Deciding Elections

November 12, 2018 By Sonali Kolhatkar, Truthdig.com , ,
The recent midterm elections offered an opportunity for America’s moneyed elites to spend their ridiculous wealth on a catalog of their favorite causes and candidates. We are locked in a vicious cycle, where billionaires continue to amass wealth due to policies their influence has bought, which in turn enrich them with even more resources with which to shift the American polity in their favor. Part of the problem is that billionaires’ control over our democracy is largely invisible. As a recent study by The Guardian showed, high-profile wealthy elites like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates are anomalies. To that point, “[M]ost of the wealthiest US billionaires have made substantial financial contributions...

Billionaires, Corporate Money Swing Toward Democrats

November 8, 2018 Staff, Wsws.org , ,
The 2018 midterms have been the most expensive congressional elections in US history, with an estimated $5.2 billion raised and spent by Election Day, according to data collected and reported by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). The total not only rose 35 percent over the previous midterm record in 2014, it exceeds the money spent on congressional races during the 2016 presidential election year. Significantly, the Democratic Party and affiliated political action committees raked in the lion’s share of the record fundraising. Of the $4.7 billion spent by the latest reporting period, Democrats accounted for $2.5 billion, compared to $2.2 billion for Republican candidates and committees. Republicans have traditionally enjoyed a massive fundraising edge.

Sarah Chayes On Kleptocracy In America

November 5, 2018 By Russell Mokhiber, Counterpunch.org ,
“I was loading a lot into Thieves of State,” Chayes told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “I was saying that violent religious extremism is actually related to governmental corruption, not religious ideology. That was a big thing to try and say. I didn’t want to load this book down with too much controversial analysis.” “But I did have a chapter at the end that looked at Iceland, Ireland and the United States in the lead up to the 2008 financial disaster. Many of the factors I was identifying in developing countries were visible in the West. And if we weren’t careful to try and put some constraints on systemic corruption in the West, we were going to suffer the same kind of extremist uprising that could take who knows what form...

Billionaires Made More Money In 2017 Than Any Other Year In History

October 29, 2018 By Jake Johnson, Mintpressnews.com , ,
“The past 30 years have seen far greater wealth creation than the Gilded Age,” the UBS annual billionaires report says. During a year in which so much of the world faced deep poverty, the corrosive effects of austerity, and extreme weather caused by the worsening human-caused climate crisis — from devastating hurricanes to deadly wildfires and floods — one class of individuals raked in more money in 2017 than any other year in recorded history: the world’s billionaires. According to the Swiss bank UBS’s fifth annual billionaires report published on Friday, billionaires across the globe increased their wealth by $1.4 trillion last year — an astonishing 20 percent — bringing their combined wealth to $8.9 trillion.

An Arena Full Of The Richest Americans Would Own As Much Wealth As 70% Of The World

October 27, 2018 Paul Buchheit, Nationofchange.org , ,
Inequality in America is out of control. A careful look at the GWD (Table 3-4) makes that clear. While our nation has BY FAR the greatest percentage of its people in the world’s richest 10%, it is second only to India in the percentage of its people in the world’s poorest 10%. This is almost certainly due to the number of Americans mired in unmanageable debt. To put it another way, ONE OUT OF SEVEN American adults is among the world’s least wealthy 10%. To put it yet another way, while 100 million American adults are among the WORLD’S RICHEST 10%, 34 million American adults are among the WORLD’S POOREST 10%.

The Rule Of The Uber-Rich Means Tyranny Or Revolution

October 24, 2018 By Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com , ,
At the age of 10 I was sent as a scholarship student to a boarding school for the uber-rich in Massachusetts. I lived among the wealthiest Americans for the next eight years. I listened to their prejudices and saw their cloying sense of entitlement. They insisted they were privileged and wealthy because they were smarter and more talented. They had a sneering disdain for those ranked below them in material and social status, even the merely rich. Most of the uber-rich lacked the capacity for empathy and compassion. They formed elite cliques that hazed, bullied and taunted any nonconformist who defied or did not fit into their self-adulatory universe. It was impossible to build a friendship with most of the sons of the uber-rich. Friendship for them was defined by “what’s in it for me?”

Saudi Royals Considering Replacement For Mohammad bin Salman

October 20, 2018 ZeroHedge, Mintpressnews.com , ,
The major French daily Le Figaro on Thursday published a bombshell story which reports the Saudi royal family is actively considering a replacement to crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) as next in line to succeed his father King Salman as the kingdom finds itself under the greatest international pressure and scrutiny it’s faced in its modern history over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — widely believed to have been killed on orders of MbS himself. The Li Figaro report’s unnamed diplomatic source says the Allegiance Council, which is historically the body responsible for approving the order of succession to the throne, is currently meeting in secret...

The Rats Revolt

October 19, 2018 By Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com , ,
There is no American who has fought with more tenacity, courage and integrity to expose the crimes of corporate power and to thwart the corporate coup d’état that has destroyed our democracy than Ralph Nader. Not one. There is little he has not tried in that effort. He has written investigative exposés on the unsafe practices of the auto industry; published best-sellers such as “Who Runs Congress?”; founded citizen action and consumer groups; testified before countless congressional committees; written a raft of environmental and worker safety bills that were passed in Congress under the now defunct liberal wing of the Democratic Party; and, when he was locked out of the legislative process by corporate Democrats, been a candidate for president.

69 Of The Richest 100 Entities On The Planet Are Corporations, Not Governments

October 18, 2018 Staff, Globaljustice.org.uk , ,
Top corporations continue to accrue revenues far in excess of most governments, figures compiled by Global Justice Now show. Comparing 2017 revenues, 69 of the top 100 economic entities are corporations rather than governments. The top 10 corporations – a list which includes Walmart, Toyota and Shell as well as several Chinese corporations – raked in over $3 trillion last year. When it comes to the top 200 entities, the gap between corporations and governments gets even more pronounced: 157 are corporations. Walmart, Apple and Shell all accrued more wealth than even fairly rich countries like Russia, Belgium, Sweden.

Trump And The Dynasty Defense Industry

October 6, 2018 By Chuck Collins, Inequality.org , , ,
There is little that’s shocking in the latest New York Times expose, which revealed Donald Trump and his family were handed hundred million dollar inheritances as they schemed to avoid taxes. Despite Trump’s boast to being a self-made billionaire, he was “born on third base,” inheriting a real estate empire from his father along with connections and other forms of social capital. We can speculate as to how much of this self-made myth is self-deception, brand-building, or amnesia. Previous research shows that Trump benefited from loans and financial connections to his father’s real estate empire.

End Of Hegemony: UN Must Reflect Changing World Order

October 5, 2018 By Ramzy Baroud, Towardfreedom.org , ,
There is a rational explanation of why India and Brazil, two countries with vast populations and large and growing economies, are not permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). The Council – made up of 5 permanent and ten rotating members – was designed to reflect a world order that was birthed from the horrific violence of World War II. It was as simple as this: Those who emerged on the side of the victors were granted permanent membership and a ‘veto’ power that would allow a single country to defy the will of the entire international community. This unfair system, which has perpetually weakened the moral foundation of the UN, remains in effect to this day.

One Man Could End World Hunger, But He Won’t

October 4, 2018 Lee Camp, Truthdig.com , , ,
He’s achieved a net worth of more than $150 billion by selling everything that has ever existed … with free shipping. (It turns out the only thing stopping the human race from giving all our money to one man was that pesky $4.99 shipping fee.) But let me stop right here. Even the way we talk about economics is influenced by a capitalist culture that tells us amassing money is the answer to everything. Did you notice I said Bezos “achieved” a net worth of $150 billion, and that seems like a normal way to phrase it? However, would you say, “Jeffrey Dahmer achieved eating the hearts of 10 different people?” No, that would sound odd to you. Yet having $150 billion is nearly as sociopathic, and still we use terminology as if it’s GREAT!

America 2018: Even More Gilded Than America 1918

September 28, 2018 By Bob Lord, Otherwords.org , ,
It took 100 years, but America has returned to its unequal past. With a vengeance. The year many consider the height of the Gilded Age, when John D. Rockefeller’s wealth was at its peak, was exactly a century ago, in 1918. By that time, Rockefeller had amassed about $1.2 billion — the equivalent of $340 billion today. America’s economy and aggregate wealth were much smaller in those days, which made Rockefeller a truly towering figure. Just over a decade after Rockefeller’s fortune peaked, the Great Depression put an end to America’s first Gilded Age. America eventually recovered from the ruins of the Great Depression and made huge strides toward economic equality. Between 1945 and the early 1970s, circumstances for all Americans, rich and poor alike, improved.

The Establishment’s ‘Fear’ Is Different From Yours

September 27, 2018 Paul Street, Truthdig.com , ,
The instantly famous Anonymous New York Times Op-Ed (ATOE), published Sept. 5, in which a senior Trump administration official complained about the brutish awfulness and incompetence of Donald Trump and claimed to be working with other White House officials to check Trump’s worst impulses, has evoked a range of responses on so-called social media. “The author is Mike Pence,” a first correspondent wrote to me, because the editorial’s anonymous author (hereafter “AA”) used the word “lodestar,” an unusual word that Pence has used many times in the past. No—too easy. The word choice seems calculated to throw people off. Pence, Trump’s presidential heir apparent in the case of constitutional removal, is like the first suspect in every murder mystery. He’s the person who initially seems to make sense as the culprit and then fades as the investigation gets more serious.

The 1% Has A Dark Plot To Replace American Democracy With An Elite Plutocracy — And It’s Working

September 21, 2018 By Leo Gerard, Independentmediainstitute.org , ,
They’ve got all that money but, hypothetically, no more voting power than their chauffeur or yacht captain or nanny in a one-person, one-vote democracy. In this one-person, one-vote democracy, though, they’ve got a plan to fix all that for themselves. They’re paying for it. And they’re accomplishing it, even though that means stripping voting rights from non-rich minority groups. Their goal is to make America more of a one-dollar, one-vote plutocracy. Their scheme is deeply offensive to democratic ideals. In a perfect democracy, each citizen possesses the same power of self-governance as all other individuals, no matter how poor or rich, no matter their religion or skin color, no matter their country of origin or ancestry. This equity is unnerving to some 1 percenters who believe their wealth proves their inherent higher value than other human beings...
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