President Donald Trump and his allies are celebrating the passage of his sweeping tax and spending bill, which he signed into law on July 4 after a monthslong effort to shepherd it through Congress. Ultimately, just three Republicans in the Senate and two in the House voted against the legislation. The so-called Big, Beautiful Bill includes about $1 trillion in federal cuts to Medicaid and could kick 17 million people off their healthcare. It makes the largest-ever cuts to food assistance benefits, could cause the closure of nursing homes and rural hospitals across the country, raises housing and energy costs, and supercharges the Trump crackdown on immigrants — all while delivering massive tax benefits for the wealthiest people in the country. “This is the most massive transfer of wealth upward in American history,” says John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

His most recent findings expose a gross obscenity, a level of wealth inequality in the US that should shame every politician, every mainstream-media commentator, and every cultural influencer who fails to make recognition of this travesty central to his or her message.

Discussed in some detail in an article by Juliet Chung, appearing in the Thursday, April 24 Wall Street Journal, Zucman’s most recent findings draw little attention from the other corporate media.

Zucman claims that the wealth of 19 households in the US grew by one trillion dollars in 2024, more than the GDP of Switzerland. That top 0.00001% of households accounted in 2024 for 1.81% of all the wealth accumulated in the US– nearly 2% of all US wealth is held by those 19 households.

Other conclusions drawn from the WSJ article:

● Total US wealth in 2024 was $148 trillion.

● The share of total US wealth held by the 0.00001% of households was, by far, the greatest since 1913, when the US income tax system originated.

● JP Morgan Chase estimates that there were 2,000 billionaires in the US in 2024; 975 in 2021.

● The top 0.1% of households constitute approximately 133,000 households and each holds an average of $46.3 million in wealth, accumulating $3.4 million a year since 1990 (Steven Frazzari, Washington University, St. Louis).

● The next 0.9% of households– approximately 1.2 million households– were each worth $11.2 million and grew by $450,000 per year in the same period (Frazzari).

● The cumulative 1% of households account for 34.8% of total US wealth in 2023.

● In capitalist counterpart countries, the 1% account for 21.3% of the total wealth in the British Isles, 27.2% in France, and 27.6% in Germany (2023).

● The top 10% of US households hold 67% of all the wealth in the US.

● The top half of US households have secured 97% of all US wealth.

● CONSEQUENTLY, THE OTHER HALF OF US HOUSEHOLDS (~ 66 MILLION HOUSEHOLDS, ~166 MILLION CITIZENS) SHARED ONLY 3% OF ALL THE WEALTH ACCUMULATED IN THE US.

These data underscore the fact that the US is a radically unequal society, with wealth concentration increasing dramatically as one ascends the class ladder.

What conclusions can we draw from the Zucman/Wall Street Journal report?

First, it is important to distinguish wealth inequality from income inequality.

Income inequality is a snapshot of the remuneration that an individual or household might receive in a given period. For example, a sports figure or a celebrity might receive a huge compensation package for two or three years of success, but otherwise fall dramatically in income and end with modest wealth.

Wealth on the other hand, is inheritable and cumulative. In a capitalist society, it is possible to have income without accumulating wealth, but it is almost impossible to have wealth without effortlessly gaining income.

Among the employed, income is always contingent. Wealth, to the contrary, is owned and can only be alienated by legal action.

While income is empowering, accumulated wealth imbues its owner with both security and degrees of power and influence proportionate to its quantity.

Thus, wealth is a better measure of personal or household economic status than income.

For those academics and media pundits who prattle on about “our democracy,” it must be pointed out that over half of the US population is effectively economically disenfranchised from the political system. With so little accumulated wealth (3% of the total wealth), they cannot participate meaningfully in an electoral system driven by money. They lack the means to contend for office, as well as to affect the choice of candidates or the outcomes.

Even if the bottom half of households were to pool their resources, they could not match the financial assets readily available to the top 1% in order to dominate political power.

Cold War intellectuals constantly heralded the formal democracy– the rights to participate in electoral politics– enjoyed by citizens in the advanced capitalist countries. They assiduously avoided mentioning citizens’ actual means to participate in any meaningful way, influenced by the vast and telling inequalities in those means. Clearly, the bottom half of all US households have little means of engagement with politics, apart from casting an occasional vote for limited options, for which they have little say in determining.

Further, the next 40% of households have between them, in diminishing amounts as they approach the bottom half, just 30% of US wealth to express their political prerogatives. No doubt that provides the false sense of political empowerment that the two bourgeois parties prey upon.

The victory of form-over-substance in the legitimation of US social and political institutions is surely threatened by the reality of wealth inequality– a reality that empowers the wealthy over the rest.

The fact that the top 10% of US households have a grip on 67% of the wealth makes a mockery of “our democracy.”

Talk of “oligarchs” or “the 1%” — so popular with slippery politicians or internet naïfs — actually masks the rot behind our grossly unequal society. Neither “evil” nor “greedy” people can explain the travesty recorded by the Zucman data.

Instead, it is a system that produces and reproduces wealth inequality. While wars, economic crises, or the militant action of workers and their allies may temporarily slow or set back the march of wealth inequality under capitalism, the system continues to regenerate wealth inequality. That system is called “capitalism.”

As Paul Sweezy explained most clearly:

The essence of capitalism is the self-expansion of capital, which takes place through the production and capitalization of surplus value. Production of surplus value in turn is the function of the proletariat, i.e., the class of wage earners who own no means of production and can live only by the sale of their labor power. Since the proletariat produces for capital and not for the satisfaction of its own needs, it follows that capitalism, in Marx’s words, “establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital.” The Transition to Socialism, lecture, 1971

Economic historians like Piketty and Zucman who carefully track the trajectory of capitalism demonstrate empirically, again and again, that capitalist socio-economic relations give rise to economic inequality.

While the distribution of wealth in advanced capitalist countries is not captured perfectly by the Marxist class distinctions, class-as-ownership-of-capital goes far to explain how wealth is distributed.

With two-thirds of all wealth concentrated in the top 10% of households and an estimated 89% of all capital-as-stocks held by that same 10%, it seems reasonable to conclude that the capitalist class resides within the top 10% of wealthy households.

It should be just as clear that the bottom 50%– with 3% of the wealth, and nearly all of that in personal real estate and other personal property– survives on income from some form of compensation; its members work for a living.

Thus, as one might anticipate from reading the 1848 Communist Manifesto, capitalist society today– 177 years later– remains substantially divided between those who create the wealth by working for a living and those who own the means of wealth creation and, therefore, gain most of their wealth from that ownership. Capital– whether it coalesces as factories, banks, or other enterprises– concentrates wealth at the top.

Between the bottom 50% and the top 10% of households is a contested field of largely income earners– workers– as well as professional, self-employed, and small business owners. While most are, strictly speaking, working class, many have illusions about their class status (“middle class”) or harbor the illusion that their class status will improve.

Some have been characterized as “aristocrats of labor” because of their relatively elevated possession of income or wealth among workers. Others are even better characterized– to follow Marx– as “petty-bourgeois”: small, insignificant capitalists.

From the classical texts through Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas to Soviet analyst S. N. Nadel, Marxism has yet to produce a robust and rigorous theory of the upper-middle strata, though their members often prove to be the pivotal factor in denying social change. Accordingly, it is the segment most intensely courted by the centrist political parties.

If we are to remove the stain of wealth inequality, it must be its sufferers– the working class– who assume that task. And that task will only be decisively accomplished with the replacement of capitalism with socialism.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Many progressives have long pushed for a wealth tax to lessen some of the huge fortunes that have been built as a result of the rise in inequality over the last half-century. Regardless of the merits of a wealth tax, to many of us it seemed like an impossible political and even legal lift. It is unlikely that this Supreme Court would find it constitutional.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to elect a liberal president with majorities in Congress to impose a wealth tax. Donald Trump is doing it for us with his huge tariffs. The S&P 500 is down almost 18 percent from its post-inaugural peak in February and 14 percent from its pre-election level.

Most of the people who supported a wealth tax would have been happy with a 1-2 percent tax. Trump has effectively given us a tax ten times that size and we aren’t even one hundred days into his presidency.

From an economic standpoint, a drop in the stock market is actually very similar to a wealth tax, although it does hit people who are not wealthy. In a country that borrows and spends in its own currency, like the United States, the limit on a government’s ability to spend is not its tax revenue, it can always just print money. The limit is that if it spends too much it will cause inflation.

Taxes free up room for spending by taking money out of people’s pockets, thereby reducing their consumption. But a plunging stock market also takes money out of people’s pockets. This should leave more room for additional government spending without causing inflation.

Another reason for wanting wealth taxes is to reduce the political power of the wealthy. When the rich can freely contribute huge sums to political campaigns and buy news outlets and social media platforms to push their political agenda, it destroys democracy.

The stock market plunge works to lessen the ability of the rich and super-rich to gain political power in the same way that a wealth tax would, except it operates far more quickly. If we have a few more weeks like the week since “Liberation Day,” Elon Musk will have to pawn his chainsaw the next time he wants to buy an election.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Trump’s Big Wealth Tax appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

Image by Morgan Housel.

The ability of the wealthy to accumulate more wealth has its ups and downs. However, as shown by the Federal Reserve Board’s (the Fed) Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989, the overall trend has been one in which the wealthiest .1% have succeeded at growing their share of the nation’s wealth. According to the Fed figures, by the end of the Biden presidency, the .1%’s share of the nation’s wealth reached 13.8%, increasing by over 60% from 8.6% in the third quarter of 1989 when daddy Bush was in power which is when the Fed figures cited start.

In fact, under each president since 1989, at some point during their term, the share of the nation’s wealth held by the wealthiest .1% reached new heights. Setbacks would follow, but in later years, a new all-time high would be reached. For example, during Junior Bush’s presidency, the Great Recession resulted in a large drop in the .1%’s share of the nation’s wealth. Despite the drop, at the end of Bush’s regime, their share was higher than it was at the end of Clinton’s time in office. During Obama’s and Trump’s presidencies, the share of the .1% became even larger. Biden’s tenure ended with their share reaching its highest point yet.

Many have difficulties protecting the current value of their assets and preventing them from being eroded by inflation. What is “impressive” is that not only have the wealthy .1% been successful at increasing their share of the nation’s wealth, but its total has far outstripped inflation, increasing in nominal dollars more than 121/2 times from 1989 to the end of 2024 from $1.75 trillion to $22.14 trillion while the total nominal wealth of the nation as a whole grew less than 8 times from $20.43 trillion to $160.35 trillion. During this same period, the poorest 50% of the population, almost exclusively members of the working class, saw their nominal wealth increase from $.71 trillion to $4.01 trillion, less than a sixfold increase. Unlike the super wealthy, much of their wealth is tied up in basic necessities such as a place to live.

Below is a table based on the Fed figures showing the high point during one’s presidency and the level of the wealth of the .1% at the end of the fourth quarter of the year right before each new president was sworn in (which may be the same as the high point), and the amount in trillions of dollars.

Many have longed for the days of bipartisanship, lamenting the polarization in our political system. However, what is striking about the Fed’s numbers, whether intentional or not, is the degree of bipartisanship around the .1% capturing a bigger share of the nation’s wealth. People often see Republicans as championing the interests of the wealthy, but the greatest recent increases in the share of the .1%’s wealth occurred during Democratic administrations.

From right before the start of the Clinton administration to its high point, the share of the wealth of the .1% during his time in office increased by 2.6% before declining to a gain of 1.4%. For Obama, it went up 2% after the decline from the Great Recession, and for Biden by .8%. By contrast, in the period covered starting in the third quarter of 1989, under daddy Bush, the increase was .6%. Under the second Bush, it increased 1.6% before tumbling during the Great Recession but still ending higher by .3% than it was at the end of the Clinton administration. The increase in the share of the .1% at the end of Trump’s first regime was .5% despite the pandemic.

Certainly, the increase in the wealth of the .1% during any administration may have much to do with changes in the capitalist economy beyond their control and the policies put in place by their predecessor (that are not reversed) and whose full impact is often realized in the subsequent administration. Bush 2 and Trump oversaw major tax cuts for the wealthy. However, Republican policies have not been alone in helping the .1% better their conditions. Under Clinton, there were tax cuts, much deregulation, and the repeal of sections of the Glass-Steagall Act, and Obama instituted the bailout of the financial industry.

Inequality Among the .1% and the 2025 Losses of U.S. Centibillionaires

Assuming the U.S. population was 340 million at the end of 2024, then the average holding of the wealthiest .1% or 340,000 people came to over $65 million. That is a large amount of money, but $65 million is less than .065% of $100 billion, an amount of wealth, according to the April 4, 2025 Bloomberg Billionaires Index, exceeded by 12 U.S. citizens. In other words, it could be viewed as minute when compared to the wealth of our multicentibillionaires, that as of April 3, according to the Bloomberg Index, included Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg, but as of April 4 had one lone member, Elon Musk, as can be seen in the table below.

As a group, these 12 U.S. centibillionaires are experiencing another one of those downturn periods. Using Bloomberg figures, since the beginning of the year, of the wealthiest 12, only Buffet has experienced an increase in the size of his fortune. The remaining 11 have, together for the year as of April 4, lost $359 billion led by Musk, who remains the world’s wealthiest individual despite experiencing a decline in his wealth of $130 billion so far this year, (or $147 billion since January 17, the day Trump was sworn in).[1] Has he been willing to tolerate this huge “sacrifice” because he sees his actions of “disrupting” many peoples’ lives as paving the way for greater gains to make up for his “suffering” from these great losses? Does he deserve to be “admired?” How many people have had the experience, while working in the government, of seeing the value of their wealth drop $130 billion in a short period of time and still remain the world’s wealthiest guy?

Below is a table based on Bloomberg Billionaires Index figures showing what has been happening to the wealth of U.S. centibillionaires.

Don’t shed any tears for the losses these poor folks have suffered. From 2021 to the end of 2024, their nominal wealth increased 82% or by $981.6 billion, far outstripping the rate of gain of the entire .1% during this period that grew 38%, less than half as much. As of April 4, the centibillionares are still up $626 billion from where their nominal wealth stood at the beginning of 2021.

With his fight for tax cuts for the wealthy and other favorable policies for them, despite the recent setbacks, Trump is likely to try to continue the trend of his recent predecessors of providing the .1% with a larger share of the nation’s wealth as he makes America great again while also accelerating the destruction of the environment, enhancing militarism and the threat of a nuclear catastrophe, and fomenting greater alienation and racism along with numerous other social ills.

Notes

1. Since the day Trump was sworn in, as of April 4, despite donating $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, Bezos wealth is down $52 billion, and Zuckerberg’s is down $38 billion. Could Trump be ushering in a revolt by the wealthy against his policies?

The post Has There Been a Bipartisan Effort to Increase the Wealth of the .1%? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rick Baum.

Crude photoshop work done by Nathaniel St. Clair. Image Sources: Screenshot from The Big Lebowski. Photograph of Zuckerberg by Xavier Lejeune. Photograph of Bezos by Senior Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz. Photograph of Musk from Office of Speaker Mike Johnson.

Few billionaires, including those in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, wield as much influence as the tech moguls who shadowed him at his inauguration. Elon Musk, now one of the president’s closest allies, is overhauling the federal government at Trump’s request, which will no doubt secure future government funding for Musk’s companies. Trump’s recent dismissals of Federal Trade Commissioners critical of Amazon were meanwhile interpreted as friendly nods to Jeff Bezos, who pulled the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

The post What Will Tech Moguls Do With Their Wealth?  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John P. Ruehl.

Xi launched an anti-corruption drive shortly after he took power in 2012, aimed at rooting out corruption at all levels of the Communist Party. The campaign, which targeted both high-ranking “tigers” and low-level “flies,” led to the investigation and punishment of hundreds of thousands of officials.

But the U.S.-backed intelligence agency Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, said Xi’s relatives have retained significant financial holdings, and they may have benefited from political connections through private and state-owned businesses.

“Their [Chinese leaders’] senior-level positions would have granted access to privileged information and both private and state-owned enterprise actions could have advantaged family holdings due to their connections to persons with political power,” said the ODNI in a report released on Thursday. It didn’t identify any direct influence from the leaders contributing to growth in family investments.

But it warned that centralized power, a lack of independent oversight, and minimal accountability, especially at the provincial level, are systemic factors that allow corruption to thrive in China. The report said these factors enable government officials to increase their personal wealth through corruption at a rate estimated to be four to six times their official salaries.

“Higher-ranking officials, who have greater access to state resources, benefit the most from bribery and illicit financial dealings,” said the ODNI, citing membership in China’s National People’s Congress, or NPC, as an example.

“Potential benefits of NPC membership incentivize individuals to pay high costs to join, often through bribes, and to accept bribes while a member, or even upon completion of service, to facilitate business deals,” it added.

The NPC, China’s legislative body that serves primarily as a rubber-stamp parliament, is perceived as a status symbol and vehicle through which to gain access to sensitive government information.

Xi’s anti-corruption drive

Since taking power, Xi has positioned himself as a staunch opponent of corruption, launching an unprecedented crackdown within the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, the government, and the military.

According to the ODNI, from 2012 to 2022, nearly five million officials have been investigated, with 4.7 million found guilty.

“In his words, Xi intended to make government officials ‘unable and unwilling to be corrupt,’” said the ODNI.

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The report also acknowledged that Xi’s early anti-corruption investigations primarily targeted high-ranking officials associated with his predecessors.

But a decade-long drive widened its focus to officials from various factions, including those with close personal ties to Xi.

Notably, in recent months, Xi has removed several top military officials, including Defense Minister Li Shangfu and Admiral Miao Hua, both of whom were considered close allies.

Their abrupt dismissals underscore the CCP’s ongoing concerns about loyalty and military effectiveness, particularly within the People’s Liberation Army, which Xi has ordered to be combat-ready for a potential conflict over Taiwan by 2027.

Edited by Taejun Kang and Stephen Wright.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alan Lu for RFA.

Rebels from the Rwandan-backed M23 group have taken a second major city in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which borders Rwanda. Congolese analyst Kambale Musavuli reports on the violence, emphasizing its connection to the DRC’s mineral resources, which are key to the development of high-tech goods. “This battle is coming out of a context: the control of Congo’s vast mineral wealth,” says Musavuli.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This week on CounterSpin: One of many things wrong with corporate news media is the way they hammer home the idea that the current system is the only system. If you don’t see yourself and your interests reflected in either of the two dominant parties, the problem is you. Part of the value of independent media is that the people they listen to give us new questions to ask. For example: How do we acknowledge the fact that many people’s opinions are shaped by messages that are created and paid for by folks who work hard to hide their identity and their interests? If we’re in an open debate about what’s best for all of us, why can’t we see who pays you? We’ll talk about “dark money” with Steve Macek. He’s professor and chair of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois. His recent piece, “Dark Money Uncovered,” appeared on TheProgressive.org.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Phil Donahue.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

On what would have been assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba’s 99th birthday, we speak with author and analyst Vijay Prashad, who has just published a lengthy article on Lumumba and the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s ongoing struggle for control over its own resources. Sunday marked the 64th anniversary of Lumumba’s historic speech marking his country’s independence from Belgium, in which he delivered a blistering critique of colonialism. Lumumba’s rise to become the first elected prime minister of Congo came after decades of brutal violence under Belgian rule and the extraction of vast wealth in rubber, ivory and other commodities from the country. Lumumba was assassinated soon after taking office in a plot involving the CIA and Belgium, leading to decades of dictatorship under Mobutu Sese Seko, wars, poverty and resource exploitation that continues to ravage the country to this day. “The issue of control over resources is fundamental,” says Prashad, director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. “The Congolese have never been able to put forward a national project around how to unite the people. … This has always been suborned by external intervention.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On what would have been assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba’s 99th birthday, we speak with author and analyst Vijay Prashad, who has just published a lengthy article on Lumumba and the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s ongoing struggle for control over its own resources. Sunday marked the 64th anniversary of Lumumba’s historic speech marking his country’s independence from Belgium, in which he delivered a blistering critique of colonialism. Lumumba’s rise to become the first elected prime minister of Congo came after decades of brutal violence under Belgian rule and the extraction of vast wealth in rubber, ivory and other commodities from the country. Lumumba was assassinated soon after taking office in a plot involving the CIA and Belgium, leading to decades of dictatorship under Mobutu Sese Seko, wars, poverty and resource exploitation that continues to ravage the country to this day. “The issue of control over resources is fundamental,” says Prashad, director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. “The Congolese have never been able to put forward a national project around how to unite the people. … This has always been suborned by external intervention.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Court’s ruling is an important victory for fair taxation, as invalidating the tax would have given about 400 multinational corporations a collective $271 billion tax break. The Court ruled narrowly and chose not to rule on the issue of whether broader federal taxes on unrealized income or wealth would be constitutional.

STATEMENT FROM ITEP EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AMY HANAUER:

“Today’s ruling is a win for anyone who didn’t shelter income in offshore tax havens before 2018. It preserves close to $300 billion of tax revenue paid by some of the biggest and most profitable corporations in human history. If the Court had retroactively repealed this one-time tax, any other way of making up the resulting shortfall would have fallen far more heavily on middle-and-low-income families and small businesses.

The Supreme Court also could have taken an activist turn of the worst kind by preemptively ruling federal wealth taxes unconstitutional today. To its credit, the Court did not do so.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Photo by aboodi vesakaran

Each year, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) releases its World Migration Report. Most of these reports are anodyne, pointing to a secular rise in migration during the period of neoliberalism. As states in the poorer parts of the world found themselves under assault from the Washington Consensus (cuts, privatization, and austerity), and as employment became more and more precarious, larger and larger numbers of people took to the road to find a way to sustain their families. That is why the IOM published its first World Migration Report in 2000, when it wrote that “it is estimated that there are more migrants in the world than ever before,” it was between 1985 and 1990, the IOM calculated, that the rate of growth of world migration (2.59 percent) outstripped the rate of growth of the world population (1.7 percent).

The neoliberal attack on government expenditure in poorer countries was a key driver of international migration. Even by 1990, it had become clear that the migrants had become an essential force in providing foreign exchange to their countries through increasing remittance payments to their families. By 2015, remittances—mostly by the international working class—outstripped the volume of Official Development Assistance (ODA) by three times and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). ODA is the aid money provided by states, whereas FDI is the investment money provided by private companies. For some countries, such as Mexico and the Philippines, remittance payments from working-class migrants prevented state bankruptcy.

This year’s report notes that there are “roughly 281 million people worldwide” who are on the move. This is 3.6 percent of the global population. It is triple the 84 million people on the move in 1970, and much higher than the 153 million people in 1990. “Global trends point to more migration in the future,” notes the IOM. Based on detailed studies, the IOM finds that the rise in migration can be attributed to three factors: war, economic precarity, and climate change.

First, people flee war, and with the increase in warfare, this has become a leading cause of displacement. Wars are not the result of human disagreement alone, since many of these problems can be resolved if calm heads are allowed to prevail; conflicts are exacerbated into war due to the immense scale of the arms trade and the pressures of the merchants of death to forgo peace initiatives and to use increasingly expensive weaponry to solve disputes. Global military spending is now nearly $3 trillion, three-quarters of it by the Global North countries. Meanwhile, arms companies made a whopping $600 billion in profits in 2022. Tens of millions of people are permanently displaced due to this profiteering by the merchants of death.

Second, the International Labor Organization (ILO) calculates that about 58 percent of the global workforce—or 2 billion people—are in the informal sector. They work with minimal social protection and almost no rights in the workplace. The data on youth unemployment and youth precarity is stunning, with the Indian numbers horrifying. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy shows that India’s youth—between the ages of 15 and 24—are “faced by a double whammy of low and falling labor participation rates and shockingly high unemployment rates. The unemployment rate among youth stood at 45.4 percent in 2022-23. This is an alarming six times higher than India’s unemployment rate of 7.5 percent.” Many of the migrants from West Africa who attempt the dangerous crossing of the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea flee the high rates of precarity, underemployment, and unemployment in the region. A 2018 report from the African Development Bank Group shows that due to the attack on global agriculture, peasants have moved from rural areas to cities into low-productivity informal services, from where they decide to leave for the lure of higher incomes in the West.

Third, more and more people are faced with the adverse impacts of the climate catastrophe. In 2015, at the Paris meeting on the climate, government leaders agreed to set up a Task Force on Climate Migration; three years later, in 2018, the UN Global Compact agreed that those on the move for reasons of climate degradation must be protected. However, the concept of “climate refugees” is not yet established. In 2021, a World Bank report calculated that by 2050 there will be at least 216 million climate refugees.

Wealth

The IOM’s new report points out that these migrants—many of whom lead extremely precarious lives—send home larger and larger amounts of money to help their increasingly desperate families. “The money they send home,” the IOM report notes, “increased by a staggering 650 [percent] during the period from 2000 to 2022, rising from $128 billion to $831 billion.” Most of these remittances in the recent period, analysts show go to low-income and middle-income countries. Of the $831 billion, for instance, $647 billion goes to poorer nations. For most of these countries, the remittances sent home by working-class migrants far outstrips FDI and ODA put together and forms a significant portion of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

A number of studies conducted by the World Bank show two important things about remittance payments. First, these are more evenly distributed amongst the poorer nations. FDI transactions typically favor the largest economies in the Global South, and they go toward sectors that are not always going to provide employment or income for the poorest sections of the population. Second, household surveys show that these remittances help to considerably lower poverty in middle-income and low-income countries. For example, remittance payments by working-class migrants reduced the rate of poverty in Ghana (by 5 percent), in Bangladesh (by 6 percent), and in Uganda (by 11 percent). Countries such as Mexico and the Philippines see their poverty rates rise drastically when remittances drop.

The treatment of these migrants, who are crucial for poverty reduction and for building wealth in society, is outrageous. They are treated as criminals, abandoned by their own countries who would rather spend vulgar amounts of money to attract much less impactful investment through multinational corporations. The data shows that there needs to be a shift in class perspective regarding investment. Migrant remittances are greater by volume and more impactful for society than the “hot money” that goes in and out of countries and does not “trickle down” into society.

If the migrants of the world—all 281 million of them—lived in one country, then they would form the fourth largest country in the world after India (1.4 billion), China (1.4 billion), and the United States (339 million). Yet, migrants receive few social protections and little respect (a new publication from the Zetkin Forum for Social Research shows, for instance, how Europe criminalizes migrants). In many cases, their wages are suppressed due to their lack of documentation, and their remittances are taxed heavily by international wire services (PayPal, Western Union, and Moneygram) which charge high fees to both the sender and the recipient. As yet, there are only small political initiatives that stand with the migrants, but no platform that unites their numbers into a powerful political force.

The post Migrating Workers Provide Wealth for the World appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Image by Meir Clancy.

Compared to the recent past, Covid-19 is not killing as many people. On the other hand, the U.S. wealth inequality virus continues to become more virulent as reflected in widespread poverty, food insecurity, homelessness, and other social ills.

Over time, the wealth inequality virus, like Covid-19, has had its ups and downs in the damage it causes. Figures on the distribution of family wealth provided by the Federal Reserve Board show that when the wealth inequality virus recovers after a downturn, it generally produces new levels of inequality.

Below are two tables based on Federal Reserve Board figures starting in the first period covered, the third quarter of 1989, showing the high for the wealthiest during each presidency. Also included are the most recent figures covering the 4^th quarter of 2023. The two tables, together, show what has been the general strengthening of the wealth inequality virus in the United States.

During some presidencies, similar percentages were reached in other quarters. In 2020 Quarter 4, for first time, the wealth holdings of the .1% reached 13%.

Below are nominal dollar amounts in each period (which are actual dollar amounts not adjusted for changes in purchasing power from inflation).

Using the Federal Reserve Board figures, from the third quarter of 1989 to the fourth quarter of 2023, the nominal holdings of the wealthiest have grown more rapidly than those of the poorest 50%—over 11 times for the wealthiest .1%, and over 9 times for the wealthiest 1%, while the growth for the poorest 50% was up slightly more than 5 times and the poorest 90% up just above 6 times. During this same period, when the nominal wealth of the poorest 50% increased $.71 trillion to $3.61 trillion, the growth in the difference in the nominal wealth of the wealthiest 1% with the poorest 50% of the population went from $3.95 trillion to $40.91 trillion.

The growth of the wealth of the poorest 90% from 2017 to 2023 can be largely attributed to increasing home values for those who own their own homes, a part of wealth that is used to fill a basic need. It also makes up a much larger portion of their wealth than it does for the wealthiest, most of whose wealth/income is not used to pay for basic needs such as housing.

Growing Income Inequality Virus

From 1989 until the end of 2022, the share (pg. 34) of the nation’s income going to those making the most who are in the top 5% increased from 18.9% to 23.5% while the share of the bottom 60%, mainly members of the working class, fell from 29.1% to 25.2%.

During this same period, the share of the nation’s income going to the those in the 20% of the population making the smallest amount declined from 3.8% to 3%. In 2022 dollars (adjusted for inflation), their average income went up only $1,060 in over 30 years, from $15,060 to $16,120. By contrast, the average income of those in the top 5% during the same period (1989-2022) shot up $202,300 from $297,600 to $499,900.

Biggest Spreaders of Wealth Inequality Virus

The major culprit for the spread of the wealth inequality virus is the working of capitalism, or what some call our free market system. Taking advantage of the system are its chief beneficiaries, the obscenely super-wealthy.

At the end of 2023, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the twenty-five wealthiest U.S. citizens, together, were worth $2,026 billion which came to over 1.38% of the total wealth of some 330 million U.S. residents.

As of May 24, 2024, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows the wealth of the twenty-five wealthiest U.S. citizens, alone, had grown since the beginning of the year $390 billion to $2,416 billion, an increase of over 19%, despite the current year decline in wealth of $38 billion by a member in their ranks, comrade Musk.

Poorer Members of the U.S.

While some have accumulated excessive fortunes, many of those living in the U.S. endure great difficulties getting by and meeting their basic needs.

Poverty

Since 1989, the number of people deemed by the government to be living in poverty (pg. 23) has not fallen below 31 million, and has been as high as 46.6 million. In 2022, the last year for which there is a figure provided, 37.9 million were counted as living in poverty representing 11.5% of the country’s population. In 2022, those living in poverty even included (pg. 4) 15% of all children under 18 years old, and 1.9% of the population who worked full-time for the whole year.

The government’s criteria for determining who is living in poverty is a ludicrously low amount of income. To be classified as living in poverty in 2022 (pg.18), a single person under 65 years of age had an income of under $15,225. In some cities, that amount might not even cover the costs of decent housing. For a family of two adults and two children, the cut off point for them living in poverty was an income under $29,678.

Homelessness

From 2007 until 2016, the government’s national estimate (pg. 10) of the number of people experiencing homelessness declined from 647,258 to 549,928. Since then, it has gone up every year reaching 653,104 in 2023 which is “the highest number of people reported as experiencing homelessness on a single night since reporting began in 2007.” (pg. 2) Of those who were homeless, 111,620 were children (pg. 13) under 18 years of age, 10,548 of whom were unsheltered meaning they were not in “a regular sleeping accommodation for people (for example, the streets, vehicles, or parks).” (pg. 5).

Hunger

Here is how the U.S. Department of Agriculture Key Statistics & Graphics describes households in which people suffer from food insecurity:

“At times during the year, these households were uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.”

Their findings include:

* “44.2 million people lived in food-insecure households.

* 12.8 percent (17.0 million) of U.S. households were food insecure at some time during 2022.

* 7.3 million children lived in food-insecure households in which children, along with adults, were food insecure.

* The 2022 prevalence of food insecurity [households] was statistically significantly higher than the 10.2 percent (13.5 million) in 2021.”

Isn’t the presence of so many poor, homeless, and food-insecure people in such a wealthy country an indication of a gravely sick society?

Social Class

Another way to view the above statistics is from the viewpoint of social class.

The one percent includes the wealthiest and most powerful members of the capitalist class, and those who are closely aligned with them who, generally, financially, politically, and socially benefit from championing, in different ways, the interests of U.S. capitalists.

By contrast, the overwhelming majority of the poorest 90% is made up of members of the U.S. working class.

Going back to the 1970s, the capitalist class in the 1% have had great success at extracting and accumulating more of the wealth produced by the working class both in the U.S. and abroad. Among the reasons for this success are the weakness of the working class and state policies that include laws that are anti-working class.

Perhaps, recent worker upsurges will, if they continue and are successful, begin to reverse the trend of increasing wealth inequality especially if they can overcome growing resistance from capitalists, the government, and within their own ranks. However, even with a supposedly labor friendly president who will join striking workers on a picket line, the people at the top of the U.S. class structure have been increasing their share of the nation’s wealth, exacerbating the wealth inequality virus.

To rid us of the wealth inequality virus and create a world of greater equality and human decency will require major changes that include the antidote of confiscatory policies directed at seizing much of the wealth of the super wealthy, and utilizing it to benefit everyone, especially those with the greatest unfulfilled basic needs.

The post The U.S. Wealth Inequality Virus is Getting Worse appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rick Baum.

Photograph Source: Shaunak Modi – CC BY 4.0

There are several exercises in extremes playing out in India right now. Nearly a billion people are voting in elections that will last into early June, braving record-high temperatures to cast ballots. Against this backdrop, Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is throwing what will likely be the world’s most expensive wedding for his youngest son.

Although they appear unrelated, these phenomena are intimately linked.

With 1.4 billion people, India now has the largest population of any nation in the world, surpassing China in 2023. It is also the world’s largest democracy, a title it has held since the end of British colonial rule in 1947. India’s secular democracy has eroded, particularly since 2014 when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s leadership ushered in a dawn of Hindu supremacy in a nation that is home to many different faiths.

Much like the Christian right in the United States blended religious fervor with capitalist fundamentalism, the BJP has cloaked its pro-business position in saffron robes. And, just as American billionaires embrace the white supremacist Donald Trump, India’s wealthy seem unperturbed by incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hate-filled speeches.

Indian corporate interests are counting on incumbent Modi winning another five years in office, “hoping for further easing of stifling investment restraints,” as per the Financial Times. This dismantling of regulations, which began a few decades before the BJP gained power, ushered in an erosion of India’s socialist infrastructure. Economists Subhashree Banerjee and Yash Tayal explained in the Deccan Herald, that India’s 1991 reforms ended up “liberalizing the Indian economy to an unprecedented extent. These reforms facilitated an environment for the wealthy to profit from the less-affluent without repercussions.”

The BJP accelerated this trend so that India, which housed nine billionaires in 2000, was home to 101 by 2017. According to Oxfam, “The top 10 percent of the Indian population holds 77 percent of the total national wealth,” and “73 percent of the wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1 percent, while 670 million Indians who comprise the poorest half of the population saw only a 1 percent increase in their wealth.” It’s clear that deregulation helped catapult the rich into greater riches while keeping India’s poor relatively impoverished.

Sitting atop this inglorious dung heap of billionaires is Mukesh Ambani, who is not only India’s richest man, but the wealthiest person in all of Asia—the world’s largest continent. He is also the world’s 11th richest man. And he appears to feel no shame in having spent $152 million for a three-day extravaganza in early March celebrating the coming nuptials of his youngest son.

Yes, that’s correct. Twenty-nine-year-old Anant Ambani’s “pre-wedding” festivities, which took place in Gujarat over three days (several months before the actual wedding), cost the equivalent of feeding nearly 50 million of India’s poorest citizens for a day. The groom-to-be’s mother sported a $60 million necklace to the party, while American pop icon Rihanna flew in to perform for guests for one-tenth of the cost of the jewels.

This brazen display of excess is oddly refreshing. Unlike many American billionaires who prefer hiding the perverse extent of their wealth, the Ambanis are delightfully honest in flexing their economic power for the world to see. The pre-wedding has generated countless headlines in India and in the world for its mind boggling lavishness—1,200 guests, including the world’s top CEOs and Bollywood’s most popular stars! More than 2,500 unique dishes including 70 breakfast options and 85 varieties of midnight snacks! Bespoke designer gowns dripping with pearls!

Forget Britain’s royal family, whose weddings appear humble in comparison—Harry and Meghan’s wedding cost a mere $43 million, cheaper than Mrs. Ambani’s necklace—India’s royalty is newly minted and unwilling to bow down at the altar of modesty.

The Ambanis’ conspicuous consumption has also generated endless derision from ordinary Indians who are having a field day lambasting the family’s apparent need for such profligacy on social media. One popular YouTube channel spent more than 13 minutes gleefully delving into every over-the-top detail, ridiculing the ridiculous.

There seemed to be at least some semblance of an attempt by the wealthy family to thwart the inevitable public criticism. Forbes reported that the festivities were held against the backdrop of a wildlife sanctuary called Vantara, which apparently is “the manifestation of Anant’s vision for a brighter future for the animal kingdom, from spreading awareness on the mistreatment of animals to working to breed near-extinct species.”

A friend of the happy couple told Forbes that, “The events brought incredible exposure and shone a spotlight on the good work that’s been done, and also spread the message on the state of animals in the world and the challenges to overcome in improving their welfare.”

Was it charity, shame, or public relations that prompted such a ludicrous juxtaposition as justification? We may never know.

Meanwhile, the defenders of corporate profiteering in India’s business-friendly atmosphere have enjoyed a public relations coup with the release of a long-overdue report by the BJP government earlier this year claiming that poverty in India now afflicts only 5% of the population. The report spawned such wild conclusions by publications like the Brookings Institute as “[d]ata now confirms that India has eliminated extreme poverty,” promoting the wild idea that predatory capitalism is good for Indian democracy.

But critics point out that the report’s numbers have been massaged to align with the BJP’s reelection efforts so as to paint the government as having achieved the near-impossible. According to Princeton economist Ashoka Mody, “While the publication of India’s first consumption figures in over a decade has generated much excitement, the official data appear to have been chosen to align with the government’s preferred narrative.”

Mody eloquently surmised, “[W]hile such misuse of statistics will amplify the India hype in elite echo chambers, poverty remains deeply entrenched in India, and broader deprivation appears to have increased as inflation erodes incomes of the poor.”

The “elite echo chambers” he references are very real. One Indian billionaire, NR Narayana Murthy, argued for a 70-hour work week in India (even as Americans are now debating working for less than half that time). A tech mogul and co-founder of Infosys, Murthy happens to be the father-in-law of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. He complained on a podcast that “India’s work productivity is one of the lowest in the world,” and that the nation’s youth ought to be saying, “This is my country. I’d like to work 70 hours a week.’”

India’s political and financial elites are painting a gold-plated vision of a modern Gilded Age: Because billionaires are saving wildlife from extinction it’s okay for them to obscenely flaunt their wealth, and meanwhile everyone’s fortunes are rising through hard work!

But the strongest evidence that this vision is a lie is for Indians to see their own lives against the Ambanis’. Nearly a billion Indians will finish casting ballots about a month before their “royal family” jet sets off to London for the youngest heir’s actual nuptials, to be held at the exclusive Stoke Park estate. If there’s anything voters can be grateful for, it is that their nation’s wealthy elites are busy reminding them of how little they have in comparison and how morally bankrupt a system is that allows such inequality.

The post India’s Billionaire Wealth is on Display as Nation Votes appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sonali Kolhatkar.

BJP supporters and Right Wing influencers are sharing the clip in response to the criticism by the Congress camp of Prime Minister Modi’s speech at a public meeting in Rajasthan’s Banswara on April 21. In his address, the PM stated that the Congress manifesto had promised wealth redistribution among Muslims. He further claimed that former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh had in 2006 said that the “first claim on nation’s resources” was of the Muslims. Alt News has fact-checked this claim here.

Subsequently, PM Modi was heavily criticized by the Opposition.

Premium subscribed X (formerly Twitter) user BhikuMhatre (Modi’s Family) (@MumbaichaDon) shared the above-mentioned image on April 22 reasserting that Congress wanted to take the wealth of the Hindus to distribute it to the Muslim community.

Throw this in face of Every Liberal & Every Piddi who was arguing that CONgress Menifesto doesn’t mention “Mu$£ims” specifically & it includes SC/STs Also.

CONgress WANTS TO TAKE AWAY WEALTH FROM HINDUS & DISTRIBUTING TO MU$£IMS “ONLY” AS IT HATES HINDUS INCL. SC/STs. pic.twitter.com/6JZn00XEfz

— BhikuMhatre (Modi’s Family) (@MumbaichaDon) April 22, 2024

Another premium subscribed X user, Mr Sinha (Modi’s family) (@MrSinha_) who has been found by Alt News spreading communal misinformation several times in the past, shared the viral image and mentioned in his caption: “PM Modi wasn’t lying……” His tweet has received close to 7.5 Lakh views and has been retweeted over 8,600 times.

PM Modi wasn’t lying…… pic.twitter.com/Qq43xezbgp

— Mr Sinha (Modi’s family) (@MrSinha_) April 22, 2024

Several other users associated with the BJP and members of the Right-Wing ecosystem shared the same image claiming that what PM Modi had said about Congress’ wealth redistribution plans was true.

Fact Check

We searched for the video in question on TV9 Kannada’s YouTube channel and found that it was published on December 3, 2023. At the 0.46 mark of the video, one can find Siddaramaiah’s original speech given in Kannada. We translated the Karnataka CM’s speech from Kannada to English. He said:

“The previous government did less than what was done when I was there. But again, I have worked to increase it again this year, because I came to power in the middle of this year. But from next year I will ensure giving more because you also need to get an education, and religious centres should be developed to practice your religion. You too should get a share in the wealth of this country. You are also Indian right… This country should belong to you and us. The wealth of this country belongs to you and belongs to us, so I will work to distribute the wealth of this country to you too. In this case, I will say one thing you will not be treated unfairly for any reason. I work to protect you. Similarly, I work to protect people belonging to all religions and castes”.

Siddaramaiah made the remarks after inaugurating the South India convention of Muslim religious heads ‘Aluad-E-Gouse-E-Azam Conference’ at Dargah Hazrat Badshah Peeran of Pale village on the outskirts of Hubballi on December 4, 2023. He had also announced increasing the allocation to minorities welfare department from the existing Rs 4,000 crore to Rs 10,000 crore. His statements sparked a row as BJP and JD(S) described it as appeasement and vote-bank politics and demanded an explanation from the CM on how he could make a promise with such huge financial implications at a private event when the legislature was in session.

It is clear from the above translation that Siddaramaiah was not talking about giving doles to any one community. His words, “his country should belong to you and us. The wealth of this country belongs to you and belongs to us, so I will work to distribute the wealth of this country to you too” and “I work to protect you. Similarly, I work to protect people belonging to all religions and castes” belie the claims being made on social media that the Karnataka CM had pledged that he would take the wealth of the Hindus to distribute it to the Muslim community. In reality, he spoke about an equitable distribution of the wealth of this country and everyone getting their rightful share irrespective of caste and religion.

The title of the TV9 Kannada video on YouTube, too, is misleading.

The post Siddaramaiah’s pledge of equitable distribution of wealth irrespective of caste and religion amplified falsely appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 9 compared the document to the Muslim League manifesto. Addressing a pre-poll rally in Pilhibit, he stated, “The manifesto that Congress has made looks more like a manifesto of the Muslim League. Whether it’s Congress or the Samajwadi Party, under the pressure of appeasement, they oppose the CAA. My Hindu and Sikh brothers and sisters who are forced to flee due to persecution on foreign soil,… tell me – if India doesn’t grant citizenship to them, who else will?”

“The Congress manifesto seems like the manifesto of the Muslim League,” says PM Narendra Modi at Pilibhit pic.twitter.com/ignuhdy25R

— IANS (@ians_india) April 9, 2024

On April 21, Modi targeted the Congress manifesto again while addressing a rally in Rajasthan’s Banswada. He said, “When they (the Congress) were in power, they said that Muslims had the first right to the properties of the state. This means that they would collect these properties and give them to the ones who have more kids (insinuating Muslims). They will give it to the ghusapethyon (infiltrators). Do you want to give away your hard-earned money to the intruders? This is what the Congress manifesto says — the amount of gold that mothers and daughters own will be measured, collected and distributed. They will distribute their wealth among those…(smiles) Manmohan Singh ji had said Muslims had the first right to the properties.”

In other words, the claim that the PM made in this section of his speech was that the Congress manifesto spoke about redistribution of wealth among Muslims, as pledged in the past by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who apparently said that Muslims had the first right to the country’s wealth.

Other BJP leaders have shared similar sentiments, including party president JP Nadda, who released a statement accusing Congress of ‘reflecting the ideology of the Muslim League’ and claimed that the party manifesto talked about reservation based on religion, akin to the Muslim League in 1929. Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma stated that the manifesto seemingly aimed to serve Pakistan more than India.

These claims were then echoed by the Right-Wing ecosystem online, who went all out trying to prove that the manifesto was meant to appease the Muslims. Right-Wing influencer Rishi Bagree tweeted about this issue several times, highlighting how the Congress Manifesto was flawed. Verified user Rashaun Sinha, a.k.a, @MrSinha_, also tweeted about the manifesto several times. In one, he tweeted a screenshot of a report on the Congress Manifesto by Pakistani outlet Dawn, remarking that Pakistan was pleased with the document since it ‘reminds them of Jinnah’s Muslim League’. In another tweet, he sarcastically commented that he raised Allah-hu-Akbar slogans after reading the manifesto.

An explainer video by The Pamphlet also drew comparisons between the Muslim League and the Congress. Another verified user, @Starboy2079, listed 13 ‘dangerous’ points in the Congress manifesto, which apparently made it resemble the ‘PFI 2047 vision document.’ The tweet garnered over 400000 views, over 8000 likes and 4500 retweets.

Here’s a list of claims circulating on social media regarding the Congress manifesto. According to these narratives, the manifesto aims to appease Muslims by:

• Abolishing the Citizenship Amendment Act
• Restoring triple talaq
• Reserving positions for Muslims and implementing the Sachchar Committee Report
• Supporting Love Jihad
• Allowing burqas in schools
• Ending majoritarianism and consequently Hinduism
• Banning bulldozer actions
• Increasing the number of Muslim judges in the judiciary
• Introducing a Communal Violence Bill which would stop mob lynchings
• Legalizing consumption of beef
• Providing separate loan interest rates for Muslims
• Allowing acts of treason

Furthermore, users have also claimed that the Congress party apparently supports the legalization of same-sex marriages, promotes gender fluidity and the trans movement and also ‘supports’ Gaza and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Does the Congress Manifesto Speak about Wealth Redistribution?

To begin with, the Congress manifesto DOES NOT mention the redistribution of wealth among the citizens of the country. But it is worth noting that the manifesto speaks about the rising inequality between India’s top 1 per cent and the rest of the country. Citing the report “Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj”, the manifesto also mentions that this rise in inequality has been particularly pronounced between 2014 and 2023.

Under the ‘Economy’ section, the manifesto explicitly rejects the trend of jobless growth and job-loss growth. It declares that the Congress government would address the issues of growing inequalities of income and wealth among others.

Under the Welfare subsection, the document addresses the issue of division among the people of India in economic terms. The manifesto declares that the Congress would strive to ensure that the 22 crore people below the poverty line are lifted above the line in the next decade. This would require accessible education, healthcare, housing, drinking water, sanitation, electricity and especially opportunities for jobs. It declares that the implementation of these promises would achieve the goal of ushering in a ‘fair, just and equitable economy that will make India a rich country, and that will be resilient to adapt to a changing world’.

One must note that the manifesto does not talk about redistribution of the wealth in the country, let alone among any particular community. 

It is pertinent to note here that Rahul Gandhi did mention redistribution of wealth at a public rally in Hyderabad, after releasing the manifesto. He said, “We will first conduct a nationwide caste census to determine how many people belong to the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and minorities. After that, we will conduct a financial and institutional survey in a historic step to ascertain the distribution of wealth,”. But, he also mentioned that the party would ensure representation of all communities in all sectors and that Congress would ensure that people got their rightful share.

Echoing this, under the Social Justice section, the manifesto refers to inequality in the representation of the SC, ST communities and OBC and says, “No progressive modern society should tolerate such inequality or discrimination based on ancestry and the consequent denial of equal opportunity.”

We also spoke to Pawan Khera, the chairman of the media & publicity department of the All India Congress Committee, who downright refuted the claims levelled by the Prime Minister. “Nowhere does our manifesto either mention the words Hindu Muslim or wealth redistribution among citizens. It is a challenge to the PM to find these words in our manifesto”, he said.

In connection to the above claim, PM Modi also quoted former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as saying that Muslims had the first right to the country’s wealth. “This means that they would collect these properties and give them to the ones who have more kids (insinuating Muslims). Will your hard-earned money be given to infiltrators? Do you accept this? The Congress manifesto is saying this.”

Below is a transcript of what former PM Manmohan Singh had said on December 9, 2006:

“I believe our collective priorities are clear: agriculture, irrigation and water resources, health, education, critical investment in rural infrastructure, and the essential public investment needs of general infrastructure, along with programmes for the upliftment of SC/STs, other backward classes, minorities and women and children. The component plans for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes will need to be revitalized. We will have to devise innovative plans to ensure that minorities, particularly the Muslim minority, are empowered to share equitably in the fruits of development. They must have the first claim on resources.”

BJP, the-then Opposition, zoomed in on the word ‘minorities’ and accused the Singh-led government of playing vote-bank politics. The Prime Minister’s office then released a clarification with the transcript of Singh’s speech. “It will be seen from the above that the Prime Minister’s reference to “first claim on resources” refers to all the “priority” areas listed above, including programmes for the upliftment of SCs, STs, OBCs, women and children and minorities… While better off sections of society will benefit from this process, it is the responsibility of the Government to pay special attention to the welfare of weaker and marginalized sections. The Prime Minister has said on several occasions that “India must shine, but shine for all,” the clarification read.

So, it is clear that the claim made by Modi in relation to the Congress manifesto in his Rajasthan speech — that it talks about redistrbution of wealth among Muslims echoing ex-PM Manmohan Singh’s words — is FALSE at two levels. Neither does the manifesto talk about it, nor did Singh state what PM Modi claims he did.

Has the 2024 Congress Manifesto Promised to Abolish the Citizenship Amendment Act?

The accusation that the Congress manifesto speaks of abolishing the Citizenship Amendment Act is unfounded. There is no mention of the CAA anywhere in the 2024 Lok Sabha poll manifesto.

In fact, Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan took this opportunity to question Congress’s ‘reprehensible silence’ on the issue. Speaking to the media on April 6, Vijayan made the point that the manifesto of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) had pledged to scrap “draconian laws” such as the CAA, Prevention of Money Laundering Act and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, among others. He stated that the Congress’s silence on these issues implied that the party was not serious in their fight against the Sangh Parivar and their Hindutva agenda.

It is worth noting that the 2019 Congress manifesto did vow to withdraw the Citizenship Amendment Bill. Point 09.a. under Section 27: Federalism and Centre-State Relations promised to repeal the infamous Citizenship Amendment Bill in the interest of the northeastern states. The same promise was made again in the third point of section 38 of the 2019 manifesto.

Does the Congress Manifesto Indulge in Muslim Appeasement?

If one were to search for the word ‘Muslim’ in the manifesto, one would not find a single reference specifically to Muslims in the document. In this section, Alt News will attempt to categorically analyse the claims made by the Right Wing ecosystem concerning the manifesto.

Does the Manifesto Promise Jobs Separately for Muslims?

Many of the social media claims mentioned at the beginning of the story state that the manifesto promises to reserve jobs specifically for Muslims. Some claims also mention the implementation of the Sachar Committee Report which aims to inquire into the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community.

It must be noted that there is no mention of allocating jobs only to the Muslims. The third point under the Equity section of the manifesto promises to implement the 10% reservation in jobs and educational institutions for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS), for all castes and communities without discrimination. This does not cater only to Muslims.

Additionally, there is no mention of implementing the Sachar Committee Report.

Claims were made that Congress would raise the reservation cap for SC/STs/OBCs above 50%, and there were insinuations that separate seats would be reserved for Muslims.

While it is true that the manifesto guarantees to pass a constitutional amendment to raise the 50% cap on reservations for Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Other Backward Classes (OBC) in the second point under the ‘Equity’ section, there is no specific mention of Muslims.

The manifesto also vows to double the funds for scholarships for OBC, SC and ST students, especially for higher education. It vows to aid SC and ST students to study abroad; and double the number of scholarships for them to pursue a PhD (Point 9 under the ‘Equity’ section). It also promises to enact a law to provide for reservations in private educational institutions for SC, ST and OBC (Point 13, Section ‘Equity’).

Does the Manifesto Promise to Bring Back Triple Talaq?

As has been stated in the beginning, several users have made this particular claim.

Triple talaq (instant divorce) is a means of Islamic divorce wherein a Muslim man can legally divorce his wife by proclaiming three times consecutively the word talaq (the Arabic word for “divorce”) in spoken, written or electronic form. This practice was struck down by the Supreme Court in August 2017, calling it ‘unconsitutional’.

In the eighth point under the Religious and Linguistics Minorities section of the manifesto, the party vows to encourage the reform of personal laws. It further states that such reform would be undertaken with the participation and consent of the communities concerned.

There is no specific mention of Triple Talaq anywhere in the manifesto. It is thus misleading to say that the Congress would bring back triple talaq.

Does the Manifesto Support ‘Love Jihad’, the Consumption of Beef or the Use of Burqas in Schools?

None of the words ‘Love Jihad’, ‘beef’ or ‘Burqa’ have been mentioned anywhere in the manifesto. The seventh point under the Religious and Linguistics Minorities section vows to ensure that, like every citizen, minorities have the freedom of choice of dress, food, language and personal laws. The eighth point of the section, Defending The Constitution, also promises not to interfere with personal choices of food and dress, to love and marry, and to travel and reside in any part of India. “All laws and rules that interfere unreasonably with personal freedoms will be repealed.”

Does the Manifesto Talk about Ending Majoritarianism and Consequently Hinduism?

At the end of the manifesto, there is a mention of how majoritarianism has triumphed over constitutional values in the country. It is said that as the poor and the middle class suffer, the atmosphere in the country has become “hate-filled and divisive”. Congress in its Lok Sabha 2024 election manifesto “promises to lead the country towards a path of all-round development, equality, freedom and justice if voted to power.”

The preamble to the Religious And Linguistic Minorities section also mentions Congress’ belief that there is no place for authoritarianism or majoritarianism in the country, given the history and democratic traditions of India. It strongly promotes the uniqueness of the plurality of religions and the right for every citizen in the country to enjoy the right to practise one’s religion freely.

At no point does the manifesto speak about ending Hinduism. On the contrary, it emphasises the fundamental right of the citizens to practise their religion.

Does the Manifesto Allow Treason?

The manifesto does not have a single mention of the words ‘treason’ or ‘sedition’. What it does promise is the de-criminalisation of the offence of defamation and providing a speedy remedy by way of civil damages. It also promises to remove the provisions that restrict Freedom of Speech and Expression and violate the right to privacy. The manifesto also promises to uphold the people’s right to assemble peacefully and to form associations. The first point promises a ‘freedom from fear’. (Section: Defending the Constitution)

Does the Manifesto ‘Ban’ Bulldozer Action? Is There a ‘Communal Violence Bill’ that will Stop Mob-lynching?

In short, the party has condemned ‘bulldozer justice’. In the sixteenth point under the section of Defending the Constitution, the manifesto states that the party, if brought into power, would put an end to it, along with weaponisation of laws, arbitrary searches, seizures and attachments, arbitrary and indiscriminate arrests, third-degree methods, prolonged custody and custodial deaths.

While there is no specific mention of a ‘communal violence bill’, the Internal Security section of the manifesto mentions that Congress is ‘firmly opposed’ to extra-judicial illegal measures like mob lynching, police encounter killings and bulldozer justice. The party vows to ‘stop them immediately and punish the perpetrators in accordance with law’.

It also addresses the increase in crimes against women, SC, ST and minorities and declares that Congress would deal with hate speeches, hate crimes and communal conflicts with a firm hand. “We will identify the perpetrators of such crimes as well as their sponsors and punish them in accordance with law”, the manifesto states.

Does the Manifesto Promise to Increase Muslim Judges? Does it Promise to Lower Interest Rates on Loans for Muslims?

There are no mentions of subsidised rates of interest on loans for Muslims or an increase in the number of Muslim judges in the judiciary. The manifesto vows to ensure the appointment of more women and persons belonging to the SC, ST, OBC and minorities as judges of the High Courts and the Supreme Court. (Section: Judiciary, Women’s Empowerment)

It is abundantly clear from the above analysis that the Congress manifesto does not exclusively focus on Muslims. However, it is crucial to note that the manifesto pledges to safeguard dignity of life for the minority communities at a time when minorities have repeatedly come under attack in this country for their way of life. It promises them the freedom of choice of dress, food, language and personal laws, a feature that many observers feel are absent under the current dispensation. In January, the international non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch reported that the BJP-led Union government in 2023 continued policies that stigmatized and discriminated against religious and other minorities. It also stated that the police in BJP-ruled states did not investigate crimes against minorities properly and punished the victim communities instead, including those who protested against such abuse.

Does the Manifesto Call for Supporting the Hamas?

The second point under the Foreign Policy section of the manifesto mentions the digression of the consensus on foreign policy under the BJP/NDA government, “notably on the ongoing Gaza conflict”. “Congress pledges to restore India’s global reputation as a voice of peace and moderation in world affairs”, the document reads. It does not show any form of solidarity towards the Palestinian militant group Hamas. 

Does the Manifesto Promise to Legalize Same-sex Marriage, and Support Gender Fluidity and the Trans Movement?

Under the Senior Citizens, Persons With Disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ section of the manifesto, the manifesto pledges to bring a law to ‘recognize civil unions between couples belonging to the LGBTQIA+ community’. Furthermore, the same section also states that it would expand Articles 15 and 16 of the Constitution to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, disability or impairment.

However, there’s no explicit mention of legalizing same-sex marriages, ‘gender fluidity’ or the ‘trans movement’.

The post ‘Muslim League’ to ‘Wealth distribution’: Modi leads the way in amplifying falsehoods about Congress Manifesto appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Recent weeks have brought three more eye-popping glimpses of our world’s unconscionable concentration of income and wealth . . .

The fabled luxury automaker Lamborghini, for the first time ever, has sold over 10,000 vehicles in a single year. Lamborghini’s current 2024 Revuelto model starts at $608,358 . . .

Google co-founder Larry Page has just expanded his collection of private islands to five. His latest, a isle that sits between Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands, sethim back $32 million . . .

The Austrian design firm Motion Code: Blue has released renderings of a new submersible superyacht that can stay underwater for up to four weeks at a time. The 541-foot-long Migaloo M5 also features a built-in swimming pool, a helipad, and a $2-billion price-tag . . .

Why are Austrian designers devoting their talents to fashioning $2-billion baubles for billionaires? Just one reason: Today’s super rich are sitting on mountains of spendable billions.

And what’s raising those mountains of cash? Researchers at Oxfam have a compelling answer to offer in a just-released new analysis.

“The share of national income going to the top 1 percent of earners in G20 countries has increased by 45 percent over the last four decades,” Oxfam notes. “During the same period, the top tax rates on their incomes has fallen by roughly a third.”

In 2022, Oxfam’s researchers add, the top 1 percent of earners in G20 countries pocketed $18 trillion in income.

Oxfam released all these stats on the eve of this week’s inaugural finance track meeting of G20 financial ministers and central bank chiefs. The “G20” actually includes 21 players, 19 of the world’s most powerful nations, plus the European Union and this year, for the first time, the African Union.

Brazil, the G20 chair for 2024, hosted this week’s meeting in São Paulo — and Brazil’s left-led government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva vigorously seized this hosting opportunity. His administration’s ambitious goal? To shove the case for taxing the wealth of our world’s wealthiest onto the world’s political stage.

No nation in the world, Brazilian finance minister Fernando Haddad told the newspaper O Globo earlier this week, may now have more credibility on taxing the rich than Brazil. Just last year, Lula da Silva signed into law landmark legislation that subjects the offshore investments of Brazil’s rich to a 15 percent tax. And earlier this year, to prevent Brazil’s rich from avoiding that new levy, the Brazilian government moved to limit the cash the rich can stuff into their pension funds.

The time has come, finance minister Haddad noted in his welcoming address to this week’s São Paulo gathering, for a “new globalization” that addresses the twin threats of climate change and maldistributed wealth.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

In this important discussion, David Montero, author of the new book The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations, shares the latest research on how reparations for slavery would boost America’s economy, would further our collective healing, strengthen our democracy at a time of rampant and unchecked oligarchy, and force long overdue accountability. The movement for reparations has already begun, with important actions being taken by cities like Boston and New York. 

Montero’s book is an eye-opening walking tour of New York City that will give you an all new look at how the North profited from slavery while at the same time serving as a hotbed of abolition–a polarized America much like today, with the moneyed elites on the side of the fascist machinery of the South, as long as it made them money. Listen to this interview and share it with your activist groups to help the movement for reparations grow. 

And in honor of Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old Air Force service member who set himself on fire outside of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, with the last words “Free Palestine”, here is his final post on Facebook, written that day: 

“Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” 

The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

The Washington Post has a thoughtful write-up on Bushnell, featured in the show notes below. Bushnell is the second person to set themselves on fire in protest of Netanayahu’s genocidal war, his latest destructive attempt to cling to power. 

Show Notes: 

The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-stolen-wealth-of-slavery-a-case-for-reparations-david-montero/20163861?ean=9780306827174

Citigroup Tops List of Banks Who Received Federal Aid

https://www.cnbc.com/id/42099554

Alabama Supreme Court justice cites scripture 'nearly two dozen times' in ruling on embryos

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/alabama-supreme-court-justice-cites-scripture-nearly-two-dozen-times-in-ruling-on-embryos-204960325977

Airman who set self on fire grew up on religious compound, had anarchist past

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/02/26/israeli-embassy-airman-fire-death-gaza/

Reuters Investigation: More than 100 Political Elite Have Family Connections to Slavery 

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-slavery-lawmakers/

Opening Clip: Jack Posobiec

https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1760780642671845629?t=ST2p12xndS77j8l5fK1E9Q&s=19

Clip: Steve Bannon at CPAC

https://twitter.com/piyushmittal/status/1761666054902936048?t=I8clBBbzCvj07qquRxmqmA&s=19

Clip: Donald Trump at a Fox News Townhall: https://twitter.com/MaryLTrump/status/1760882903397830876?t=4aqtc89iRcFpq818M58g1w&s=19

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

You were born in Belgium and now live in the Netherlands, two nations that over the past half-century have rated among the world’s most equal. How has this life experience shaped your perspective on income and wealth distribution?

These two tiny, well-off countries have a high quality of life that many Americans like Bernie Sanders would like to see the United States model. But if you’re living in these countries and interested in distributive justice, you see all the unfairnesses that remain.

These two tiny countries actually have real differences. The Netherlands has gone down the neoliberal road much further than Belgium. The Dutch have become much more punitive, holding people on welfare, for instance, responsible for their poverty.

My own experience? I have a kind of boring story to tell. I wasn’t born poor, I also wasn’t born rich. I’m basically a middle-class person, with parents who essentially started from nothing. But they benefited from the huge investments of the postwar welfare state. They could go to university, thanks to that state’s scholarships, and they enabled me and my siblings to go to university as well.

As a student, I always did voluntary work with poor kids, from places like eastern Germany, Tunisia, and Latin America. I was studying economics then, and I found such a huge gap between what I was studying in the economics mainstream and what I was seeing in the world. Things didn’t fit together. I started to ask questions.

Over the years, I’ve had in my circle of friends vulnerable people who’ve had bad luck in life. If you’re poor or if you’re unemployed, the neoliberals hold, you must be lazy. But I saw that just wasn’t true. And the academic research shows that the capacities we’re born with and the families we’re born into — the natural and social “lotteries” so to speak — leave us all unequal right from the start.

Those who’ve been extremely lucky with their lottery tickets then get to take advantage of social systems that let them get even luckier. I see in my own life the role of luck. And I also see people around me who’ve had a lot of luck, but won’t acknowledge it.

I think studying both economics and philosophy has, in the end, been a blessing for me. Economics has a lot of dogmatism in it. Philosophy happens to be exactly the opposite. You question everything.

You work with students who’ve grown up in a world with a wealth distribution much more concentrated than the world you grew up in. These young people see daily the dashing exploits of fabulously rich people ranging from Elon Musk to Kim Kardashian. How do these young people respond to your advocacy for limits on the wealth any one person can hold?

When I write a book, especially a trade-press book, I argue for whatever I think is right. In my role as a teacher, on the other hand, I try not to impose my views on students. I want to help them find things out on their own. But I have colleagues in other Dutch universities who do teach my work, and they report back to me that many of their students embrace what I believe.

Students, I think, tend to see the whole of my analysis. They see it’s going to be hard for them to afford a home of their own. But they don’t have a broader understanding of why home ownership has gone beyond the reach of ordinary people, in part because they encounter little discussion overall  about economic systems, but plenty on nationalistic themes and other digressions.

How much pushback do you get when you speak to general public audiences about limiting personal wealth? What seems to give people the most pause? How do you respond?

Some people ask me whether we could still have small companies and family firms under limitarianism. That seems to me the most substantial question/objection I get from people not sure whether limits would work.

Other people worry that a limitarian world would essentially kill the economy as we have it, in the process harming everybody. Or they ask how I could claim to care about climate change and yet be critical of Elon Musk when he’s made all these cars so important to the ecological transition.

Perspectives like these don’t consider alternative possible worlds. If Elon Musk had less market power, for instance, we would have many more electrical vehicle companies and more of the cars we need for the green transition. And Elon Musk would pose much less of a danger to democracy because he wouldn’t have the same wealth and power.

The Dutch edition of Limitarianism came out in November. I’ve been getting a lot of reaction from people who say “I’ve been thinking about this for so long and now I understand why.” But I’ve also heard from people, generally somewhat older males, who say they just don’t like what I’ve written. Some of what I’ve received is pure hate mail.

Your book sees the precepts of limitarianism playing out on multiple battlefronts, from collective bargaining tables to legislative chambers. Where do you see the most promising potential for victories that can start convincing the public at large that we don’t have to take grand concentrations of private wealth as an eternal given?

I think we should be trying to create the preconditions for limitarian success, most importantly by closing tax havens. Our contemporary tax havens undermine the capacity of governments to have fair fiscal systems, and very few people benefit from tax havens, with a good number of them criminals. Going after tax havens would be a struggle that would help us build a broad coalition for change.

We can try, as part of this effort, to come to international agreements, but sometimes individual countries just need to take the lead and unilaterally announce they’ll no longer allow business to be conducted in a certain way. Going this route would gain these nations the moral authority to call upon other nations to follow suit, what analysts call “social norm setting.”

Having the United States step up and set an example could be really pivotal because the US remains, of course, a very big and powerful country.

Many mainstream elected leaders, particularly in the United States, see talking about curbing grand fortune as divisive. They urge us instead to focus on helping the poor. What do you say to these elected leaders who urge us to concentrate on fighting poverty and essentially leave wealth alone?

Well, they should look at the data. They should read Matthew Desmond’s new book, Poverty, By America. He shows quite clearly that poverty in no way represents a natural phenomenon. Poverty comes from the political and economic choices our society’s most powerful make.

If we give tax cuts to our richest — something that’s happening worldwide, especially in the United States — we have fewer resources available for things like social housing. Calling talk about fighting inequality “divisive” amounts to a dogmatic, purely rhetorical strategy that aims to stop us from talking about the real choices our most powerful are making.

In the end, the only way you could say we shouldn’t bother with inequality would be if trickle-down strategies really worked. But they don’t.

Your book highlights a number of wealthy people who share your horror over the rising maldistribution of our world’s wealth. Are the numbers of these concerned wealthy people growing enough to help make a real difference? Or do you feel that great wealth will always trap the vast majority of the super rich in a bubble of reality denial they can never escape?

I do know for sure that the wealthy people I’ve interviewed represent the exceptions among the wealthy. The vast majority of the super rich do not, for instance, give away their fortunes, as Chuck Collins, an heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune, did over 30 years ago. Today we do have more individual examples of Chuck’s behavior and even organizations of wealthy people calling for greater equality, groups like Patriotic Millionaires and, in German-speaking countries, taxmenow.

Marlene Engelhorn, a young heir to the family fortune behind the German chemical giant BASF, has just announced that she’s putting together a citizens assembly of 50 Austrians who will decide what should happen with 25 million euro, the largest part of her inheritance. I interpret what she has done to mean that she doesn’t just want to give away her money. She wants to unload her fortune in a way that contributes to the political debate about inequality and how that inequality undermines democracy.

Some of the people in organizations like Patriotic Millionaires, people like Abigail Disney, have become very outspoken. I spoke with her at length for my book. She’s become, in her own life, more political and more radicalized about inequality. That seems to suggest that something is changing among the rich, but how fast will that change be? That’s the question.

At the speaking events you do, do people ask you what they can do to help us move toward limits on wealth? What do you tell them?

People in my audiences tend to be ordinary people, but I also often run into people old enough to have bought a house in the 1970s or 1980s, people who have really gained a lot from increases in housing market value. These people ask me what they should do.

I try to stress that it’s not just a question of what an individual family can do with its money. It’s a matter of how society can change. Inequality has grown so much because we’ve come to look at society in a different way, a neoliberal way that involves celebrating the market, scaling down the welfare state, distrusting government, and no longer seeing ourselves as citizens but as “investors in human capital.”

In my student days, we all seemed engaged in one or another political or charitable activity. Now students — not all of them, but many — see themselves as just attending school to get a degree and make some money on the side. And when they don’t study or make money, they go on holiday. A much more consumerist lifestyle. You can call it an economistic lifestyle.

I see ourselves instead as what the ancient Greeks would call political animals. We need to work politically toward a more caring society, a less harsh society, societies less into everybody for themselves and letting the richest among us win while others get left behind.

I try to ask people to look for ways to contribute to a better society that fit their personality and skills. I ask them to join a democratic political party that respects the rule of law. They have options. And I think that people should also join labor unions. We’ve come to forget the contribution unions make to protecting basic worker rights.

As you look across the world today, what gives you the most hope and inspiration?

The activists. I’ve dedicated Limitarianism to activists in general. Activists are taking risks — often with their own lives, especially in the Global South — to make change.

I’ve also been teaching climate ethics and have seen a big difference over the last year. You now have companies that are really trying to do things differently. That’s fantastic — because if these companies can scale up, we could have a different economic system. But other companies are still actually killing the Earth. And who is really fighting these companies? It’s the activists.

So that’s why activists give me hope.

You can now find Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns, published on January 16, available online and at booksellers worldwide.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

Photograph Source: MINISTÉRIO DAS COMUNICAÇÕES – CC BY 2.0

Many people do not like reading articles containing numbers. Doing so is necessary to be able to grasp the extent of the wealth of the world’s wealthiest individual, Elon Musk. Comparing Musk’s wealth with the future income of baseball player Shohei Ohtani and that of a newly hired assembly line worker at the Tesla Fremont, California plant can help to bring some clarity to how much Musk is worth.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, at the end of 2023, Musk’s wealth stood at $229 billion after increasing $92 billion during the year.

At the end of 2019, Bloomberg placed his wealth at $28 billion. In a mere four years, despite declining $133 billion in 2022, it had increased more than 800%.

Here is where the Bloomberg Index placed the size of Musk’s wealth in the billions at the end of recent years.

2019     $28 billion
2020    $170 billion
2021     $270 billion
2022     $137 billion
2023     $229 billion

The above numbers may look small (though when written out, the last four come to 12 digits). The size of Musk’s 2023 wealth and its growth that year may be difficult to grasp without comparing them to some other amounts.

Musk’s Wealth Compared to Ohtani’s Income

Professional baseball player Shohei Ohtani recently signed the biggest contract in the history of sports. He is to be paid in each of the next ten years $70 million (though much is to be deferred). That comes to $.07 billion/year. Were his  $70 million income added to Musk’s wealth at the end of 2023, it would increase from $229 billion to $229.07 billion. Were the value of Ohtani’s entire contract, $700 million, immediately given to Musk, his wealth at the end of 2023 would have come to $229.7 billion. In other words, Ohtani’s massive ten-year contract for $700 million is less than one-third of one percent of Musk’s entire fortune.

If Ohtani could make his $70 million/year tax free and save all of it, he would have to play baseball for over 3,200 years to reach the level of Musk’s current wealth.

On an average day in 2023, Musk’s wealth increased over $252 million and in an average three days, it grew over $50 million more than the value of Ohtani’s  10-year contract of $700 million.

Musk’s Wealth and Ohtani’s Income Compared to Tesla Assembly Worker

At the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, in early January, there was a full-time job openingfor a Production Associate that requires one to work 12 hour shifts three days a week and every other week a fourth day from  “06:00AM-06:05PM or 06:00PM-06:05AM.” When accessed, the job description provided that the “Expected Compensation is $23.00 – $31.00/hour + cash and stock awards + benefits.”[1] However, soon thereafter, for many days in our high-tech world under “Expected Compensation” is “System is not able to retrieve compensation data at this time, please try again later.”

This job is not for everyone. One is expected to have “a strong work ethic” and be able to “demonstrate flexibility as needed by the business” that includes being “open to schedule flexibility that will allow for a variety of shifts, including days, nights, overnight, and/or weekends as needed as well as potential overtime.” The job involves “essential physical demands” including the “ability to work quickly,” the need to “stoop, lay, bend, reach, squat, kneel, crouch, twist and crawl for extended periods of time, including up to 12 hours/day,” and enduring “exposures to hazardous materials used in the painting process.”

Working an average work week of 42 hours (36 hours one week and 48 the next), yearly pay for that worker will range from $50,232 to $67,704/year (assuming no extra pay for overtime). If the additional value of benefits, etc. come to $12/hour, a Tesla Production Associate paid the highest hourly rate of $31 would be making a yearly pay package valued at $93,912.

To make as much as Ohtani is paid in one year, that worker would have to work more than 745 years. For the worker to make as much as Musk’s wealth increased in 2023, $92 billion, the worker would have to work over 979,600 years.

Musk’s wealth growing over $252 million in an average day in 2023 means that it grew more than $10.5 million in an average hour which comes to more than $175,000 in a single minute.  The yearly pay package of this newly hired Tesla Production Associate who would be expected to spend “extended periods of time” stooping, squatting, crouching, and crawling while being exposed to “hazardous materials” would be covered by less than the increase in Musk’s wealth during an average minute in 2023.

And Taxes

The pay of Ohtani and the Tesla Production Associate is subject to income, social security, and Medicare taxes. By contrast, since there is not a wealth tax on financial assets like stock, Musk is likely to pay little or no taxes on the increase in his wealth except for any of the increase that is income, or his stock holdings are sold at a gain. If the stock had been held for more than a year, it would likely be taxed at a lower rate than the rate paid by both Ohtani and the Tesla Production Associate on their pay.

Musk and other multi-billionaires have been allowed to accumulate great fortunes which is especially troubling given that millions of people throughout the world lack food, proper shelter, medical care, access to an education, and must endure severe environmental problems.

Notes.

[1] Job announcement may have been filled/taken down.  Here is a comparable job announcement. Other jobs listed at https://www.tesla.com/careers

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rick Baum.

It’s a highly profitable situation for investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group and the food and agribusiness conglomerates they invest in. But BlackRock and others are not just heavily invested in the food industry. They also profit from illnesses and diseases resulting from the food system by having stakes in the pharmaceuticals sector as well. Institutional investors and wealthy individuals park their funds and wealth in these firms and depend on the financial system a toxic food system to deliver.

Lobbying by agrifood corporations and their well-placed, well-funded front groups ensures this situation prevails. They continue to capture policy-making and regulatory space at international and national levels and promote the (false) narrative that without their products the world would starve.

They are now also pushing a fake-green, ecomodernist agenda and rolling out their new proprietary technologies in order to further entrench their grip on a global food system that produces poor food, illness, environmental degradation, dependency and dispossession.

The prevailing globalised agrifood model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt to benefit powerful interests, population displacement and land dispossession. It fuels export-oriented commodity monocropping and regional food insecurity.

This model is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness and the eradication of biodiversity. And it relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets and agrifood corporations’ needs ahead of rural communities, local markets, on-farm resources and food sovereignty.

In addition, there are also the broader geopolitical aspects of food and agriculture in a post-COVID world characterised by food inflation, hardship and multi-trillion-dollar global debt.

There are huge environmental, political, social and health issues that stem from how much of our food is currently produced and consumed. A paradigm shift is required.

All of this is set out in Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth (December 2023), published as an open-access (free) e-book by Global Research and is a follow up to the author’s book Food, Dispossession and Dependency: Resisting the New World Order (2022).

That book contains substantial sections on the agrarian crisis in India and issues affecting the agriculture sector. Aruna Rodrigues — prominent campaigner and lead petitioner in the GMO Mustard Public Interest Litigation currently being heard in the Supreme Court of India — stated the following about the book:

This is graphic, a detailed horror tale in the making for India, an exposé on what is planned, to hand over Indian sovereignty and food security to big business.

‘Sickening Profits’ continues in a similar vein. By describing situations in Ukraine, India, the Netherlands and elsewhere, it is another graphic horror tale in the making that is being intensified across the globe. The question is: Can it be stopped?

Frederic Mousseau, policy director at the Oakland Institute, an influential US-based think tank, says:

It takes a book to break down the dynamics that are pushing agro-chemical agriculture to farmers and consumers around the world and to reveal the strength of the diverse movement of people and organizations who stand in the way of these destructive and predatory forces.

Colin Todhunter takes readers on a world tour that makes a compelling case against the fallacy of the food scarcity and Green Revolution arguments advanced by the mainstream media and international institutions on behalf of powerful financial interests such as Blackrock, Vanguard, or Gates. Todhunter makes it obvious that a key factor of world hunger and of the environmental crisis we are facing is a capitalist system that ‘requires constant growth, expanding markets and sufficient demand.’

Uplifting rather than depressing, after this lucid diagnosis, he highlights some of the countless people-led initiatives and movements, from Cuba, Ethiopia to India, that fight back against destruction and predation with agroecology and farmers-led practices, respectful of the people and the planet. By debunking the “artificial scarcity” myth that is constantly fed to us, Todhunter demonstrates that it is actually not complicated to change course. Readers will just have to join the movement.

The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) is “an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists” and believes in “open access to truthful information and nuanced reporting”. It is committed to publishing e-books that are free of charge. Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth can be read directly on the GRG site here and can also be accessed and downloaded as a fully formatted pdf (numbered contents/pages etc) on the academia.edu website here.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

On the last day of the year, one can read in the Guardian an article with the headline “Smiles all round as financial markets end 2023 on an unexpected high,” and be informed that “the tech-focused Nasdaq Composite jumped by about 45%, led by the “Magnificent Seven” – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla,” and that these companies’ stocks “are up 74% this year compared with 12% for the rest of the world’s companies.”

Major beneficiaries from this “unexpected high” in stock prices include many of the world’s wealthiest. In 2023, they managed to add to their already bloated holdings after “suffering” declines in 2022. According to the Bloomberg billionaires index, the 10 wealthiest U.S. citizens saw their wealth shoot up over 53% from where it stood in 2022, reaching $1,373.4 Billion. Most of the ten are associated with one of the “magnificent seven” companies: Page and Brin with Alphabet, Bezos with Amazon, Zuckerberg with Meta, Gates and Ballmer with Microsoft, and Musk with Tesla.[1]

U.S is Number One—in Billionaires Worth Over $100 Billion

The Bloomberg billionaires index indicates that U.S. billionaires hold 9 of the top 10 positions of the wealthiest people in the world.  All 11 of the world’s wealthiest were worth over $100 billion at the end of the year. The two non-U.S. citizens were Bernard Arnault from France whose wealth came to $179 billion (up $17 billion for the year) and Carlos Slim of Mexico at $105 billion (up $31 billion for the year).

Bloomberg’s index place 15 U.S. citizens as being among the world’s 25 wealthiest. As of the end of the year, the total wealth of the wealthiest 15 U.S. citizens came to $1,716.2 Billion rising by $498.4 Billion for the year. Eliminating the “poorest” two of the fifteen, the Kochs, who were the only ones among the fifteen who lost money during the year, leave the remaining wealthiest thirteen experiencing an increase in their wealth of over $503.57 Billion in a single year.

For the wealthiest, there has been some continuity and stability. In 2023, the same wealthiest nine U.S. citizens were also among the world’s 10 wealthiest at the end of 2020.

The overall trend is that the wealth of the wealthiest 10 has become much greater. However, it constantly fluctuates up and down as can be seen in where it stood at the end of each year in the table below that is derived from Bloomberg figures. It declined significantly in 2022 only to come roaring back in 2023 when it reached a new high.

The wealthiest 10 U.S. citizens have holdings whose value is far above where they stood at the end of 2019, just before the outbreak of the pandemic. The difference between their holdings now and at the end of 2019 comes to $677 Billion, up over 97% in 4 years showing that they benefitted mightily during the misery of the Covid pandemic.

The numbers in this table look small but are in the billions which can make them difficult to fully grasp. Professional baseball player Shohei Ohtani recently signed the biggest contract in the history of sports. He is to be paid for ten years $70 million/year (though much is being deferred). That comes to $.07 billion/year. Were this $.07 billion wealth and not income, it would not register in the table unless it was rounded up to $.1 billion.

An individual whose current yearly earnings are about four times the poverty level for a single person, $60,000, would have to work for over 1,100 years to earn what Ohtani is being paid in just one year. To earn the current wealth of Musk, Ohtani would have to play baseball for more than 3,200 years. As good a ballplayer as he is, this is something he presumably is not capable of doing. However, he’s lucky compared to the person making $60,000/year. That person would have to work for more than an impossible    3.8 million years to earn an amount equal to Musk’s current wealth.  In fact, the increase in Musk’s wealth in 2023 was so great that in an average three-day period during the year, it went up over $750 million, an amount more the Ohtani will earn playing baseball for ten years.

Change Coming?

Given all of the problems in the world, no sane society would allow for such great fortunes to be held by single individuals like Musk.  Why do these conditions continue?

Obviously, the conditions described here have much to do with the disproportionate amount of power the wealthy exercise in our so-called democracy. While not all wealthy capitalists are as powerful as their wealth might suggest, they and the rest of the U.S. ruling class have recently shown that they have sufficient power to maintain enough control over the state and society to enable them to accumulate more wealth and power. Their power is helped by the weakness of the working class and social movements for justice, the attention many people must give to difficulties they face getting by in their day-to-day lives, the appeal of widespread misinformation and demagoguery, and people being manipulated and distracted.

Will 2024 be a year of more of the same or will it be one in which people say enough? Will they get themselves organized and demand and fight for a massive shift in power that results in a major redistribution of wealth resulting in it being used to meet basic needs for housing, food, clean water, medical care, an education, and a healthy environment for the people of the world?

Notes.

[1] Most attended finishing schools for the ruling class, either an Ivy League college or Ivy League like colleges,  Stanford and the University of Chicago: Gates, Balmer and Zuckerberg Harvard, Brin and Page Stanford, Bezos Princeton, Buffet Columbia, Ellison University of Chicago.

The post In 2023: The Ludicrous Amount of Wealth of the U.S. Wealthiest Shot Up appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rick Baum.

Photograph Source: André Austin Du-Pont Rocha (Mexico Air Spotters M.A.S.) – GFDL 1.2

Venezuela’s National Assembly on December 6 began deliberation on President Nicolás Maduro’s plan for incorporating Essequibo into the Venezuelan nation.  The region lying between Guyana to the East and Venezuela to the West has long been claimed by both nations.

Maduro’s plan involves creation of a “Zone of Comprehensive Defense of Guyanese Essequibo,” the naming of General Alexis Rodríguez Cabello to direct the project, designation of state agencies for licensing the “exploration and exploitation of oil, gas, and minerals,” distribution of a revised map of Venezuela, and, importantly, creation of “an organic law for formation of Guyanese Essequibo and all the decisions [voted upon] last Sunday.”

Venezuelans on December 3 did approve a referendum calling upon their government to establish sovereignty over the contested territory. Over 95% of those voting backed each of the referendum’s five points;  50% of Venezuelans did not vote.  The upshot was a big majority in favor of Essequibo being a new Venezuelan state and of its 125,000 inhabitants becoming Venezuelan citizens and receiving social support.

An old border dispute is now a conflict impinging on the very fabric of the Venezuelan nation.  Prime responsibility lies with U.S.-based ExxonMobil Corporation, its activities and acquisitive purposes.

Guyana became a British colony after the Napoleonic wars. Britain was uncertain about the boundary between their new colony and newly independent Venezuela. A survey carried out under British auspices in 1835 put the colony’s western boundary close to or at Venezuela’s Orinoco River.

However, Venezuela’s eastern border during its colonial period extended beyond the Orinoco, to the East, to the Essequibo River, flowing from south to north. During the 19^thcentury, Venezuela’s leaders adhered to that version of the border.

President Antonio Guzmán Blanco initiated negotiations with Great Britain. Assuming that the Monroe Doctrine represented a barrier against European designs, as advertised, Venezuela’s government allowed two U.S. diplomats to negotiate on Venezuela’s behalf.

They colluded with their British counterparts. The negotiations ended with an agreement signed in Paris in 1899 that assigned the disputed Essequibo region to Guyana, the British colony.

Essequibo’s gold-mining potential was evident at the time. Now, according to a recent report, “Gold mining generates Guyana’s main export product, and such mining is carried out mainly in the Essequibo.”

Britain granted independence to Guyana in 1966. Earlier that year representatives of the Venezuelan and British governments, meeting in Geneva, agreed to submit the continuing dispute over Essequibo to arbitration. Venezuela’s government subsequently presumed that the 1899 Paris agreement no longer applied.

With no resolution in sight, the two sides in 1987 submitted the issue to United Nations mediation. Nothing happened.  In 2018, in response to a request from Guyana, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres referred the issue to the International Court of Justice located in The Hague.

Although Venezuela denies the Court’s jurisdiction, representatives of both nations appeared before the Court in November 2023. At issue was a Guyanese demand that Venezuela cancel the referendum that did take place on December 3.

The recent urgency of resolving the Essequibo quandary has everything to do with actions taken by ExxonMobil Corporation.

In 2015 ExxonMobil discovered copious off-shore oil reserves under Essequibo’s territorial waters. Guyana’s government expanded the bidding process for oil explorations. A previously humdrum territorial dispute had turned into a momentous contest with potentially far-reaching consequences.

ExxonMobil epitomizes power and wealth. Profits in 2022 were $56 billion. ExxonMobil’s revenues of $413.7 billion for 2022 were greater than the GDPs that year of all but 34 countries in the world; it ranked seventh for income-generating capacity among the world’s corporations.  ExxonMobil sees Guyana as its potentially most productive oil-producing region, a place accounting for more than 25% of ExxonMobil’s total hydrocarbon production.

According to analyst Vishay Prashad, “ExxonMobil … signed an agreement with the government of Guyana in 1999 to develop the Stabroek block, which is off the coast of the disputed Essequibo region.” He adds that, “ExxonMobil was given 75% of the oil revenue toward cost recovery, with the rest shared 50-50 with Guyana; the oil company, in turn, is exempt from any taxes.”

According to Reuters, “Guyana has emerged as a key source for Exxon’s future production, with 31 oil discoveries in its giant Stabroek block so far. It and partners say they plan to pump 1.2 million barrels of oil and gas per day from the block by 2027.”  ExxonMobil is exploiting off-shore oil and gas reserves in the territorial waters of Surinam, Guyana’s neighbor to the east.

Guyana will benefit. The International Monetary Fund is projecting 86% growth in the Guyanese economy due to off-shore oil production.

Venezuela’s government recently accused the Guyanese government of carrying out military operations in Essequibo together with troops of the US Southern Command, their purpose being to “protect US energy corporations.” A Venezuelan observer condemned “the provocative and dangerous incursions of troops of the U.S. Southern Command in [Guyanese] territory,” including “territory claimed by Venezuela.”

On November 30, a Guyana news source indicated that, “At present, members of the US military from the US Army 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade (SFAB) are … in Guyana helping the Guyana Defense Force to build capacity.”

Citing U.S. Ambassador Nicole Theriot as source, the report stated that the U.S. government would “stand in Guyana’s corner when it comes to threats to its territory and sovereignty.”  It referred to “Exercise Tradewinds” which entailed 1500 multi-national troops training in Guyana in July under the auspices of the US Southern Command. U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken visited Guyana on July 6, 2023.

The U.S. government has long paid attention to Guyana. As ordered by President John Kennedy, the CIA manipulated Guyana’s labor unions so as to depose left-leaning Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan, in 1964. More recently, Guyana as a member of the now defunct Lima Group of nations was a U.S. ally in efforts to marginalize Bolivarian Venezuela.

The post Oil Wealth, US Intervention Aggravate Venezuela – Guyana Border Conflict appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.

Photo by Julian Hochgesang

How can we comprehend — truly comprehend — how concentrated the wealth of our world has become? We have some choices.

We can choose to see the world of concentrated wealth through the eyes of those who directly serve the richest among us, people like the veteran Australian sea captain Brendan O’Shannassy, the author of Superyacht Captain: Life and Leadership in the World’s Most Incredible Industry.

Floating palaces like the $500-million superyacht of mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos can routinely run their deep-pocketed owners over $130,000 — per day — for basic upkeep. But these same superyachts, O’Shannassy believes, still constitute the finest investment individuals of immense wealth can make. They offer their deep-pocketed owners both security and relaxation, with no whiff of paparazzi.

Or we could choose to go in a starkly different direction to better comprehend the wealth of our wealthiest. We could look at these wealthy through the eyes of those who measure just how concentrated our world’s wealth has become. Two just-released reports help us do exactly that.

The first comes from researchers at the Federal Reserve. Every three years, these analysts release a deep dive into the distribution of America’s income and wealth, a copiously detailed snapshot of American household “balance sheets, pensions, income, and demographic characteristics.”

The latest Fed Survey of Consumer Finances — released last week — covers the changes in American family finances between 2019 and 2022.

Over this three-year span, after taking inflation into account, typical American family incomes inched up what the Fed describes as “a relatively modest 3 percent.” But the incomes of high-income households, the Fed points out, rose at a much more rapid rate, registering “one of the largest three-year changes” that Fed researchers have ever encountered.

On the net-worth front, ordinary households taken as a whole did register gains, the Fed notes, that “far outpaced inflation” between 2019 and 2022, gains that mostly reflect sizeable jumps in the value of owner-occupied houses. But these same sizeable jumps also put home ownership increasingly out of the reach of families seeking to become — for the first time — homeowners.

By 2022, the value of America’s most typical homes was running 4.6 times our nation’s most typical family incomes, an all-time record gap. Financial advisors usually recommend that families should spend no more than three times their annual income for a home of their own.

The post A New Portrait of the World’s Wealth — and Wealthiest appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

There is a sea change happening in the wider electorate in Aotearoa New Zealand which is counter intuitive to what the polls are saying.

On the one hand the public overwhelmingly support much fairer taxation but the polls tell us we will have an Act/National government in a couple of weeks which will increase unfairness in tax.

The simple answer to this contradiction is that people vote against governments rather than for them and Labour are being punished for failure — a party in policy paralysis — unable to get out of its own way and get anything meaningful done.

• READ MORE: Proving the wealthiest New Zealanders pay low tax rates is a good start – now comes the hard part
• Other NZ election 2023 reports

Spelling this out is a recent poll conducted by Essential Research for the lobby group Better Taxes for a Better Future which shows the big majority of voters want a capital gains tax, a wealth tax, a windfall profits tax and want the wealthy to pay at least the same tax rates as the rest of us. (A survey conducted by IRD earlier this year found the uber rich pay less than half the tax rates the rest of us pay)

Here are the figures:

Wealth tax
A TVNZ poll released last week shows overwhelming support for a wealth tax in line with Green Party policy.

The poll asked eligible voters if they would support or oppose a wealth tax on the assets of New Zealanders with more than $2 million in assets if having the wealth tax meant everyone got free dental care.

A majority — 63 percent — said they would be in support of it, while 28 percent were opposed. The rest did not know or refused to say.

The polls show the ground has shifted dramatically in recent times and has opened the way for Labour’s traditional values (if they have any life left in them) to flourish. The electorate is wanting fairer taxes and have the free-loading rich pay much more.

But Labour under its current and former leaders has been looking the other way. It is out of touch and faces its heaviest electoral defeat in my lifetime.

National and ACT are doing well not because voters want them but because voters are voting against Labour.

The same thing happened in the 1990 election. After six years of brutal Labour policies under David Lange and Roger Douglas the electorate had had a gutsful. They wanted to stop featherbedding the rich at the expense of the rest of us.

National policies even worse
Labour was thrown out and National came in with policies that were even worse than those proposed by Labour.

The same thing will happen this election.

There is a pervasive belief among self-interested politicians that when they are interviewed for opinion polls people will say they are prepared to pay higher taxes but when they get into the ballot box they vote against tax increases.

But this argument can only apply when the individual voter faces paying more tax. In these recent polls the call is for the undertaxed rich to pay a much fairer share. These tax changes the electorate wants will not impact on the 99 percent of voters who go to the polls.

Even National and Act voters want these taxes — but the Labour leadership remain lost in the neoliberal wilderness. They haven’t got the message.

Labour’s failure means we will have to face three years of awful National/Act policies which will deepen the problems we face.

I haven’t kept count but I have personally heard from dozens of Labour members and voters who have told me they have left the party this year and won’t be voting Labour this year — disgust is the dominant theme.

Only hope is reshaped party
After this election Labour’s only hope is to reshape the party around the changed public attitudes to tax and find its roots once more. That is easier said than done for many reasons.

Labour’s activist base is irredeemably middle class and it only has tenuous links with organised workers (less than 10 percent of private sector workers are in unions) who are a small part of the voting public.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins has shown no sign he is capable of leading the rejuvenation policy, thrust and direction the party needs. He is still in the politics of the late 20th century.

All the indications are that the job of Labour renaissance is beyond him.

Hopefully there will be enough good people left in Labour to do what’s needed.

Republished with permission from The Daily Blog.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A recent investigation by The Fiji Times has found that former attorney-general and FijiFirst party (FF) general-secretary Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum did not declare the value of shares he owns in two companies, as per the asset declarations filed with the Fijian Elections Office since 2017.

Section 24 of the Political Parties (Regulation, Conduct, Funding and Disclosures) Act requires political party officials to disclose to the Registrar of Political Parties their “total assets”, together with the total assets of their spouses and dependent children.

Between 2016 and 2022, Sayed-Khaiyum’s asset declarations stated he and his wife Ela were shareholders in two companies, Midlife Investments Pte Ltd and Abide Pte Ltd.

• READ MORE: Other Sayed-Khaiyum reports

In his declarations for the years 2016 through to 2022, Sayed-Khaiyum declared monetary values for his home in Vunakece Rd, Suva, his bank accounts and a motor vehicle.

He also declared that he and his wife held shares in the two companies.

However, for the shares listed, the column “value declared” was left blank in each of the declarations.

Sayed-Khaiyum has not responded to questions emailed to him by The Fiji Times.

Meri Radinibaravi is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Photograph Source: Harrie van Veen – CC BY 2.0

It’s been 15 years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

The investment firm’s startling downfall marked the beginning of a historic Wall Street crash that swiftly wiped out over $7 trillion in home equity and $2.8 trillion in retirement portfolios.

Wall Street hasn’t fundamentally changed its behavior. Since then, Big Finance has engineered an even more entrenched system of creating wealth mostly for the ultra-rich while spinning out crisis after crisis for the rest of us.

That system has led to insecure, low-wage contract jobs replacing stable work, staggering debt mounting for college graduates, and monopolies crushing family businesses. It’s entrenched a political system captured by billionaires and corporations and left society struggling to meet the challenge of climate change.

This anniversary is an opportunity to take a step back and look at the overarching problem here: “financialization.” While we used to have an economy that manufactured stuff, now it manufactures debt.

Before 2008, big banks financialized mortgages. Now they’re financializing houses, buying up single family homes and charging high rents, scrimping on maintenance, and pursuing aggressive evictions.

The same is happening from health care to the local news, as private equity firms buy up vital businesses, cut staff and services to pad profits, and then sell their assets for scrap when the businesses predictably fail.

The latest Wall Street game is to turn the planet into a new asset class, creating  “natural asset companies” to monetize “ecosystem services” from water, forests, coral reefs, and farms.

What drives financialization is what I call “wealth supremacy” — a bias ingrained in our economic system that tells us wealthy people matter most. It suggests the core aim of our economy should be delivering ever-increasing gains to their investment portfolios.

This bias is embodied in a series of myths. There’s the myth that no amount of wealth is ever enough. Another is that only shareholders and executives should have a say in corporations, while workers are disenfranchised and dispossessed.

Then there’s the myth of the free market, which tells us corporations and capital must be able to move freely throughout the world, while the freedom of people — democracy — must be subordinated.

Recognizing wealth supremacy helps us see our task: to build an economic system designed not for maximum investment returns, but for life to flourish. My organization, the Democracy Collaborative, calls it a “democratic economy” — and it’s rising all around us.

For starters, corporations don’t have to be owned by shareholders or executives. They can be owned by workers themselves.

Already workers in the U.S. own some 6,000 companies. Employees at worker-owned companies like the New York City-based Cooperative Home Care Associates and the San Francisco-based waste disposal and recycling company Recology enjoy more stable jobs and double the retirement savings of employees at conventional firms.

Nor do big banks need to do all the banking.

Roughly 1,000 community development financial institutions provide fair loans to marginalized communities typically shunned by Wall Street banks. For example, River City Credit Union in San Antonio, Texas helps immigrants set up bank accounts so they don’t have to rely on predatory payday lenders and check-cashing storefronts.

And what if more of us owned our utilities?

Eighty-five percent of Americans already get their water from public utilities instead of for-profit companies. Now there’s a growing movement from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Maine and New York for publicly and cooperatively owned energy utilities. Such companies could be more willing than for-profit utilities to transition quickly from fossil fuels and make investments to prevent sparking wildfires.

The models and pathways we need exist around us. But making the rapid, systemic change we need requires letting go of the myth that wealth-maximizing capitalism is the only system possible.

It’s not. And if we want to keep our society standing, we need to topple wealth supremacy.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Marjorie Kelly.

As the Biden administration pursues its strategy of building resilient supply chains for the surging clean energy industry, one metals company has seen a substantial boost. Last month, TechMet, which is part-owned by the U.S. government, announced that it had closed a $200 million fundraising round. Celebrating more than $180 million invested in projects around the world over the last year, the company noted in a press release that “both the US President and Vice President have cited TechMet’s role as a leading critical minerals company in the global effort to combat climate change.”

At the G20 summit last November, President Joe Biden touted a TechMet project in Brazil to mine nickel and cobalt for electric vehicle batteries. And during her trip across Africa earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a U.S.-brokered agreement between TechMet and another company, Lifezone Metals, to mine one of the largest nickel deposits in the world: Tanzania’s Kabanga mine. 

Yet White House chief of staff Jeffrey Zients, whose job involves implementing the administration’s policy, has sidelined himself from the U.S. government’s deepening involvement with TechMet — thanks to what could be perceived as a conflict of interest stemming from his family’s vast wealth.

TechMet’s CEO is Brian Menell, a South African mining baron and the brother of Zients’s wife, Mary Menell Zients. Jeffrey Zients disclosed the relationship when he was brought on as chief of staff, the White House said, and recused himself from all matters related to the company. His recusal, which has not been previously reported, was the appropriate move, as ethics experts agree, but it also means the U.S. is operating without its chief quarterback in its dealings with a major player in the green energy transition.

“Zients informed vetting and ethics lawyers about Techmet as part of the standard onboarding process for his hiring,” White House spokesperson Saloni Sharma told The Intercept. “Even though he was not required to do so under relevant ethics regulations, out of an abundance of caution, he elected to recuse himself from all particular matters involving Techmet to avoid even an appearance of a conflict of interest.”

Securing ingredients like nickel for electric vehicle batteries is a critical part of the green energy transition heralded by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, both of which were passed before Zients took over as chief of staff and represent hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending. As part of the administration’s multipronged approach to reduce carbon emissions, federal and executive agencies are working to source these metals away from their primary producer and chief U.S. competitor, China. 

U.S. backing for TechMet dates back to 2020, when the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation put $25 million in the company under President Donald Trump. Last year, the DFC approved another $30 million of investments in the company’s clean energy projects. The Biden administration went on to facilitate a partnership between TechMet and Lifezone in Tanzania, which Harris promoted in March, as part of the Biden administration’s $560 million of support for the East African country. Thanks to U.S. diplomatic and financial coordination, the Tanzanian government partnered with Lifezone to extract nickel from the Kabanga mine in the northwestern part of the country and deliver it to the U.S. and international markets by 2026.

Zients’s relatives, it turns out, had a stake in both sides of the U.S.-brokered agreement around the mine. The Zients Children’s Trust, which was set up for the benefit of Jeffrey Zients’s adult children, owned more than 400,000 shares of Lifezone before it went public on the New York Stock Exchange in July. The company had a successful first day of trading, seeing its shares jump nearly 50 percent. (Zients is not required to disclose the holdings of his adult children. Sharma said that he is not involved with the trust. “He does not have a position with, receive income from, or have a financial interest in the Trust,” she wrote.)

Even as the clean energy revolution marks a much-needed break from the era of fossil fuels, the potential for the family of the chief of staff to profit from the deal around the Kabanga mine illustrates that when it comes to resource extraction from the periphery flowing to the benefit of elites in the center, structurally, much will remain the same.

Before assuming his role as Biden’s chief of staff early this year, Zients flitted between the federal government and an extraordinarily lucrative career in finance and consulting. He worked in the Obama administration in a variety of roles, including two stints as acting director of the Office of Management and Budget. Like his father, who oversaw the privatization of certain veterans health care services, Zients became heavily involved in privatized medicine. In 2015, while he was serving as director of the National Economic Council, Zients’s investment firm Portfolio Logic reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with the Justice Department resolving allegations that its subsidiary health care firm committed Medicare and Medicaid fraud. 

More recently, he sat on the board of Facebook and was CEO of the Wall Street investment firm Cranemere, which he left in 2020 before becoming Biden’s Covid czar, a position he held until April 2022. 

In his most recent ethics filing, Zients disclosed tens of millions in index fund shares, gold bars, gold shares, federal bonds, commercial real estate holdings, and banked cash. All told, his holdings reflect a net worth somewhere between $89 and $442 million, making him one of the wealthiest members of the administration. Jeff Hauser, executive director of the watchdog organization the Revolving Door Project, said that Zients’s wealth and connections are part of a worrying trend in who inevitably rises to power overseeing the federal government.

Jeffrey Zients’s holdings reflect a net worth somewhere between $89 and $442 million, making him one of the wealthiest members of the administration.

“There are many reasons to prefer our government be made up of dedicated public servants rather than members of an international oligarch set whose personal networks are comprised of the rich and powerful,” Hauser told The Intercept. “One of them is that ‘recusals’ and ‘firewalls’ are necessary but imperfect responses to the inextricable problem that people cannot forget what their interests are.” 

He added that the breadth of a chief of staff’s responsibilities makes it impossible to fully separate familial interests from the administration’s policy priorities. “Jobs as all-encompassing as Chief of Staff can never be truly separated from issues as consequential to the Administration as industrial policy, economic rivalry with China, and the Green Transition,” Hauser said. “Almost everything the US does in foreign policy is connected in some way to these goals, but very few of the questions that foreign policy raises will reference a specific mining company by name — even if that company is sprawling and strategically central.”

Brian Menell, founder and CEO of metals company TechMet, speaks at the Mines and Money conference in London on Dec. 6, 2011.

Brian Menell founded TechMet in 2017 with deep foresight into the change coming to the continent his family had long profited off of. Since then, he has overseen investments in projects tied to the electric vehicle transition across the globe. 

In addition to the nickel mining project in Brazil, that includes investments in a rare earth metals refinery in Norway, rare earth mining in South Africa, tin and tungsten mining in Rwanda, lithium mining in England, geothermal lithium production in California, lithium ion battery production and lithium recycling in Ohio, and a vanadium processor in Arkansas.

“If Tesla is to reach 20 million electric vehicles a year by 2030 that will require two times the current lithium annually mined supply,” he told attendees at the London Indaba conference in July, the trade publication Miningmx reported. “That is before GM, Ford and VW (electric vehicle production) and before the Chinese which already produce two-thirds of the world’s EV batteries.” He then added prophetically, “There is a lull in the artificially depressed market at the moment before a 10-year bull run.”

Under the agreement brokered by the Biden administration this year, TechMet will work to source inputs for Lifezone’s metals processing operation in Tanzania. The agreement was facilitated through the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, the Biden administration’s G7 plan that seeks to coordinate countries’ foreign energy and infrastructure investments, according to a White House fact sheet and reporting in The Economist. Brian Menell did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.

Other members of the Menell family have also had an interest in the Tanzanian mining project. In 2021, Zients’s mother-in-law, Irene Menell, transferred 7,148 shares in Kabanga Nickel Limited, the corporate entity for the mining project, to her son Rick Menell, according to a filing with Companies House, the U.K. database for British business entities.

Rick Menell and his sister, Mary Zients, are founding co-chairs of City Year South Africa, a youth leadership nonprofit. In April of this year, they jointly visited the White House, along with Rick Menell’s daughter. The trio was welcomed by Nina Srivastava, an adviser to the chief of staff, executive office visitor logs show. Sharma said the family was taking a tour of the White House. Rick Menell declined to comment for this article. 

The Menells trace their lineage back to Slip Menell, who in the 1930s founded the Anglovaal Group, one of South Africa’s major mining conglomerates. Since then, mining has stayed a family business. Brian and Rick Menell helmed the company together through the ’90s and early 2000s, quietly seizing control from encroaching investors through an offshore fund to maintain their familial domination. 

Since his time atop Anglovaal, Rick Menell has held senior roles at a variety of mining and finance firms with large sway over the African continent’s mining operations. He is currently the lead independent non-executive director on the board of Sibanye-Stillwater, a mining company that claims to be the world’s largest primary producer of platinum, second-largest primary producer of palladium, and third-largest producer of gold.

Keith Liddell, chair of Lifezone Metals, rings the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City on July 6, 2023.

The U.K. corporate records also shed light on Zients’s adult children’s interest in the Kabanga mine. The Zients Children’s Trust held 3,064 ordinary shares in Kabanga Nickel Limited in early 2022, according to the company’s filing. Later that year, Lifezone subsumed Kabanga Nickel through a holding company, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission records show. 

When Lifezone went public in July 2023, the Zients Children’s Trust held just over 403,000 shares in the company, according to its SEC filing. Those shares are estimated to be worth more than $5 million on the date of the filing. 

The address listed for both the Zients Children’s Trust and the vast majority of other Lifezone shareholders is in the Isle of Man, a notorious tax haven. There is not much public information about the trust, though financial records show that it also held shares in Cranemere, the company Zients left to join the White House, during his time there. (The Isle of Man address is also registered to dozens of other companies, including the holding company of the sanctioned Russian oligarch Sergey Generalov.)

Lifezone has marketed its project at Tanzania’s Kabanga nickel mine as the next frontier in the race to provide raw materials for the electric vehicle transition. It touts the mine as one of the largest and highest-grade nickel deposits in the world that will also produce battery-grade copper and cobalt. The project’s refinery site is going to be permitted as a special economic zone, paving the way for a metal processing hub that the company says will yield “economic and social benefits for Tanzania and the East African region.”

Lifezone has highlighted the low emissions technology it plans to use to extract nickel from Kabanga ore in its public materials, in addition to the steps it is taking to ensure compliance with human rights standards, local laws, and community protections. In its required disclosures with the SEC, however, the company notes that these areas may pose a risk to shareholder profits. 

The company flagged a number of potential risks for shareholders related to its projects in Tanzania and elsewhere on the continent: claims filed over negative health effects from mining operations, labor unrest, anti-corruption compliance, and unpredictable politics, including “resource nationalism.” The Tanzanian government holds a stake in Lifezone’s local operation. 

“We are subject to global resource nationalism trends which encompass a range of measures, such as seeking the greater participation of historically disadvantaged or indigenous people, expropriation or taxation, whereby governments seek to increase the economic benefits derived by their countries from their natural resources,” the filing reads. Taken together, the disclosures serve as a reminder that even a project meant to facilitate a transition to green energy will entail the dangerous and often exploitative work that has long accompanied natural resource extraction. 

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Daniel Boguslaw.

Elon Musk, the world’s single richest individual, believes in sharing the wealth. Or so Tesla chief financial officer Zachary Kirkhorn can certainly attest.

Kirkhorn announced earlier this month that he’s stepping down after four years as Tesla’s CFO. Over those four years, Kirkhorn has pocketed some $590 million, a tidy sum that averages out to an annual take-home not all that far from $150 million.

But Musk’s share-the-wealth inclinations, Tesla workers can attest, don’t extend much beyond Tesla’s executive suites. Workers at Tesla plants all labor without union contracts. They earn per hour from Tesla about one-third less than what workers at Detroit’s unionized Big Three auto makers are making.

Workers at those Big Three firms ― General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, now part of the new auto group Stellantis ― are now feeling Tesla’s low-wage pressure. Their union, the United Auto Workers, has begun bargaining a new Big Three contract, and those negotiations, a Reuters analysis noted last month, most definitely have Musk’s Tesla as a shadow participant.

Tesla’s shadow, adds Reuters, has essentially replaced the looming presence of the “Japanese automaker Toyota and its lean production system.”

That analogy between today’s Testa and yesterday’s Toyota only goes so far. The Tesla and Toyota shadows have impacted Detroit’s top auto execs in strikingly different ways. Toyota posed a personal threat to Detroit auto execs. Tesla offers those execs a personal opportunity.

Toyota’s threat came on the executive compensation front. Japanese corporate chiefs have over recent decades consistently made substantially less than their U.S. counterparts. In 2012, for instance, Toyota’s top exec pocketed $1.8 million. Ford’s CEO that same year took home nearly $21 million.

This past June, Toyota’s top-paid exec, Akio Toyoda, saw his annual compensation riseto an all-time Toyota executive pay record. His take-home: $6.9 million. The 2022 totaltake-home of GM’s CEO: $29 million.

The mega millions that go to Tesla’s top execs, by contrast, provide top execs at America’s unionized auto companies a much more personally useful payday benchmark. The UAW, these execs are now demanding, must allow their companies to be “competitive” with the likes of Tesla.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich recently wrote an article with the subtitle “Biden’s economic policies are the most successful in the US in decades.” He continues stating that the Biden administration policies “may even put the nation on the path to widely shared prosperity for a generation” and “are beginning to alter the structure of the American economy in favor of the bottom 90%.”

These policies have certainly been successful at creating greater prosperity for the 10 wealthiest people in the United States. Their wealth, after a large decline in 2022, is now almost 24% greater than it was at the beginning of 2021, right before the start of Biden’s presidency. (see second table below)

In 2022, according to the Blomberg Billionaire Index, their combined losses were more than $454 billion. The August 1, 2023, Bloomberg Index shows that the wealthiest 10 U.S. residents, as a group, have experienced a recovery of most of their 2022 losses.[1]

In 2022, Zuckerberg’s wealth was down $79.9 billion. Thus far in 2023, it is up $71.5 billion.

During 2022, the wealth of Musk declined by $133 billion. One might assume that Musk’s fortune in 2023 would continue to decline given the fall in the value of X/Twitter and the increased competition in the electric car industry. Such an assumption would be wrong. According to Bloomberg, there is good news for Musk. As of August 1, he had recovered over $100 billion of the losses he sustained in 2022.

Below, as of August 1, are the latest figures for the wealthiest 10. Their wealth, as a group, is up $411.2 billion or 45% in a matter of 7 months. Were this rate of increase to continue, at the end of the year, the increase in their wealth will far exceed the losses sustained in 2022.

The following table, based on Bloomberg figures at the time, shows their wealth as of August 1 and the setback  in their wealth during 2022. The setback can be seen by comparing the second and third columns. Compare columns one and four to see the large increase in their wealth since 2021 of more than $250 billion.    Note: Bezos is the only one whose current nominal wealth is lower than it was in the beginning of 2021–poor guy.

Is Reich correct to claim that the Biden administration’s economic policies have been successful?  Would his claim be confirmed by the millions of people who have recently lost their jobs and/or are homeless and/or live in poverty and/or endure food insecurity? Some of these folks may even include thousands of the students at UC Berkeley where Reich teaches.[3]

Notes.

[1] See my The Wealthy Took a Hit in 2022. Who Lost the Most? https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/20/the-wealthy-took-a-hit-in-2022-who-lost-the-most/

[2] U.S. residents held 9 of the slots of the 10 wealthiest people in the world, increasing from 7 at the beginning of the year. The other position in the top 10 is held by France’s Bernard Arnault who is worth $196 billion. Walton is the 15^th wealthiest.

[3] https://food.berkeley.edu/from-the-field/uc-berkeley-basic-needs-today/

Before the pandemic, a survey conducted found that, “At UC Berkeley, 39 percent undergraduates and 23 percent of graduate students experience food insecurity, and a recent study conducted by the Chancellor’s Housing Task Force found that ten percent of UC Berkeley students experience housing insecurity or homelessness. This is about 14,000 Berkeley students experiencing food insecurity and 3,800 experiencing housing insecurity.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rick Baum.

Photograph Source: haymarketrebel – CC BY 2.0

Been eating a bit too much ice cream this sweltering summer? Thinking about going on a bit of a diet? Well, imagine yourself counting calories but exempting anything with sugar from all your counting.

Would that approach help you make an appreciable dent on your excess bodily baggage? Of course not. We can’t eliminate what we ignore. And that goes for inequality as well, over 300 distinguished economists worldwide are charging in a new open letter to the United Nations and the World Bank.

Back in 2015, these eminent economists remind us, the world’s nations came together and adopted a series of “Sustainable Development Goals” — SDGs for short — designed to systematically attack both poverty and climate change. The tenth of these goals specifically aims to “reduce inequality within and among countries.”

The progress so far on this inequality SDG? Practically nonexistent. By many measures, the open-letter economists note, our “inequalities have worsened,” and that worsening really matters. Without reducing the “deep divide” that separates our global rich from the rest of us, the economists suggest, we’ll forever be going nowhere on “ending poverty and preventing climate breakdown.”

Significantly narrowing our world’s deeply unequal distribution of income and wealth will, of course, always remain a tall order, given the political power that grand fortunes create. The World Bank, unfortunately, has made that order taller.

The UN’s member nations have essentially made the bank the world’s official inequality scorekeeper. But the metrics the World Bank uses to track inequality have turned out to be “very inadequate,” charges Jayati Ghosh, a coauthor of the economists’ new open letter.

We already have, Ghosh points out, a variety of established yardsticks for measuring inequality. The Gini coefficient plots actually existing income distributions between 0 for total equality and 1 for infinite inequality. The more easily understandable Palma ratio divides the income share of a society’s top 10 percent by the income share of its bottom 40 percent.

The World Bank isn’t relying on either of these standard measures. The bank is instead pushing a statistical notion of “shared prosperity” that, as Ghosh puts it, “leaves the rich out of the equation!” This World Bank measure defines success in the battle against inequality as what we have when the incomes of the bottom 40 percent are growing faster than the national average income.

On the World Bank’s scorecard, in other words, any nation where the incomes of the top 1 percent are rising ten times faster than the national average income would be making “progress” against inequality so long as the incomes of the bottom 40 percent were rising slightly faster than that national average.

This “bizarre notion of ‘shared prosperity,’” says Jayati Ghosh, “provides very misleading estimates of the extent of inequality or progress in reducing it.”

By this bizarre World Bank yardstick, over half the world — 53 percent of the nations the bank sampled — were making progress against inequality just before the pandemic hit and another 11 percent were showing no change.

Researchers with the World Inequality Database, an ambitious statistical effort that takes inspiration from the ground-breaking research of scholars like Thomas Piketty, paint a starkly different picture. Only 26 percent of the world’s nations, as measured by the Gini coefficient, are actually showing progress against income inequality, and only 12 percent are showing progress in Palma-ratio terms.

For three top global inequality watchdogs — Oxfam, the Development Finance International, and the New York University Center for International Cooperation’s Pathfinders initiative — the World Bank’s “shared prosperity” scorekeeping makes plain the need for a real “data revolution” that spotlights the wealth of the world’s wealthiest.

The World Bank’s current approach, these three groups charged in a new report released last month, essentially “ignores what is happening to the rich.” We cannot afford that ignoring, the groups stress, not at a time when “the world’s wealthiest citizens continue to be largely responsible for extreme carbon emissions” while the world’s “poorest citizens pay the price through climate disasters.”

Will critiques like this get the World Bank to change its statistical ways? We’ll see. The bank’s first reaction to the economists’ open letter has been somewhat encouraging. The World Bank, says a spokesperson, agrees “we need to do more to address inequality” and “do better in measuring progress.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

Janine Jackson interviewed Good Jobs First’s Arlene Martínez about corporate subsidies for the July 14, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Good Jobs First (7/6/23)

Janine Jackson: Under a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act, some factories making batteries for electric vehicles will each receive more than a billion dollars per year from the US government. That’s along with some $13 billion in state and local economic development incentives that factories making electronic vehicles and batteries are slated to receive.

But as Good Jobs First calls out in their new report on the subject, called Power Outrage, there are no requirements for the jobs promised—and considered key to this deal—to be permanent jobs, or even that they provide market-based wages or benefits.

We have a press corps that considers it due diligence to critically examine every dime the government offers to struggling people. But huge economic subsidies to profitable corporations are a no-comment given, no matter how not needy the grantee, and no matter how opaque the process.

There’s just little sense of any need to follow up on a government, or “taxpayer,” gift to those who we are told are the doers, the makers, the job creators. This crucial but under-examined economic phenomenon is Good Jobs First’s topic all the time. And a new report, the first in a series, takes an angle on the impact of subsidies that you pretty much never hear.

Good Jobs First (6/12/23)

Arlene Martínez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First, and author of the recent report “How Economic Development Subsidies Transfer Public Wealth to White Men.” She joins us now by phone; welcome to CounterSpin, Arlene Martínez.

Arlene Martínez: Hi, thanks for having me.

JJ: We see subsidies, or what you call “mega deals,” going to folks like Amazon, companies that don’t need a lift, they don’t need community support, and they don’t give back, necessarily, when they get it.

The racial unfairness is part and parcel of that. And yet I feel like, every day, we learn how irreducible white supremacy is, how it doesn’t stir into anything else and just disappear. So what did you find, and why do you think it matters?

AM: Yeah, Good Jobs First has a subsidy tracker, which looks at economic development subsidies that have gone to companies. And we have a special category called “mega deals,” as you mentioned. And those mega deals are the biggest of those deals, anything that’s $50 million or above. So I took a look at the top 50 of those, so we’re talking all billion-dollar deals and up, very extravagant packages that go to some of the biggest well-known companies in the world.

And what we saw is that most of those companies were run by white men. And in cases when they weren’t white men, they tended to be born outside of the United States, and then there were just two women, who were also white.

So we talk a lot about this transfer of wealth, and really what you’re doing is taking a community’s very precious, limited resources and directing it towards some of the biggest, most profitable companies in the world, which isn’t what subsidies were ever meant to do in the first place; they were supposed to incentivize development that wouldn’t have otherwise taken place. And that’s just not what we’re seeing here.

So what you’re really having is, you are exacerbating this racial wealth gap through the use of subsidies. We thought we should be explicit about who the winners were.

JJ: Right. You hear, well, OK, these are big companies and they provide a lot of jobs, and a lot of those jobs might go to people of color, or to women, so we can’t help that they’re big. What about that?

Boondoggle (6/16/22)

AM: That’s one of the very popular myths, we would say, we hear quite a bit: Well, these are big companies. They produce a lot of jobs.

But the truth is, that’s not what actual research shows, which is that these companies aren’t producing any type of special, extra amount of jobs. And, in fact, a lot of times they’re just simply taking jobs from smaller companies.

I think Amazon is a great example of this. Their online presence and their warehouse workers mean that a lot of the retail jobs that used to exist have been cannibalized. So it’s really just been a transfer of jobs, in a lot of cases.

And some of those times they’ve gone from good industries to really poorly paid warehouse workers, where Black and brown workers tend to be holding the poorest-paid, most dangerous jobs.

JJ: I remember talking with Dorothy Brown about tax policy, and just saying that there’s a way that, broadly, race can be related to economic outcomes, but somehow when we’re talking about policy-making, it’s not factored in.

And she was saying that people would say, race doesn’t affect tax policy, because we don’t have any data that connects that. So what you don’t study is invisible to you, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

And, similarly, with the case of subsidies, if you don’t think the impacts of these big subsidies are race-related, or have impact that is meaningful in terms of race, well, then, I guess you don’t see it. But that doesn’t mean those impacts don’t exist.

ProPublica (6/8/21)

AM: That’s right. And Dorothy Brown, we had a conversation, and one of the points that I’ve heard her make is ProPublica, which has done a series of really damning, amazing reporting around some of the tax returns of some of the wealthiest people in the world, and just how much they’re avoiding paying taxes.

And one of the points she makes is, look at the list. They’re all white people, and yet ProPublica doesn’t take that extra step to say, by the way, the people who are avoiding paying taxes, who aren’t paying what everyone else is paying, are the richest people in the world, who are white. So I think she does a good job of doing that.

JJ: Calling attention to that impact, which, if you don’t see it, you don’t have to see it, but there it is.

AM: And I was a reporter before I joined Good Jobs First, and I remember one of the stories I was writing about was, there was, of course, a budget shortfall, as there often are in these local communities that we cover; I was a local reporter.

And the first thing on the chopping block really was a boxing gym and a library and a community center in a very heavily Latino neighborhood in the city. And it was, of course, disproportionately used by, well, that city’s Latino population.

And it wasn’t these other things that were being cut; police and fire were being fully funded. Those are both professions that tend to have, again, high populations of white men who occupy those positions, and are being paid some of the highest salaries in a community.

So, yes, I think there is a need, and communities benefit from, really, that conversation becoming a lot more explicit than it’s been.

JJ: Absolutely. Part of, I guess, what galls me about news media’s sort of soft, blurry attention to subsidies is, and I said it to Greg LeRoy last year, we don’t look to corporate news media first for critical examinations of corporate capitalism, but they do present themselves as watchdogs of the public interest, and especially of public spending. We hear about the “cost to taxpayers” a lot.

And so, if that’s true, I feel like minimally, the secrecy around public subsidies to companies like Amazon ought to be compelling stuff, and yet somehow they don’t get broken open often, and the impact and the follow-up on communities just doesn’t seem to be the kind of catnip to reporters that you would think it would be.

Arlene Martinez: “The scrutiny that we give every spending dollar that seems to come out of a city budget is not at all applied in the same way to companies.”

AM: Yeah, and it’s amazing how the scrutiny that we give every spending dollar that seems to come out of a city budget is not at all applied in the same way to companies, and company behaviors and company press releases. Their word is taken at face value, and as if somehow it’s more legitimate, when they’re questioning every nickel and dime that’s coming out of a community.

I remember covering a county museum that was looking to get some money, and there was city council meeting after city council after city council meeting about whether this museum should get a million dollars over five years, or whatever the case was, whereas other communities, and we write about these a lot, they will approve a $300 million subsidy behind closed doors, with no one knowing about it. And it’s touted as a good thing for the community.

So I think there increasingly is more scrutiny on things like these subsidies, and people really are starting to question more whether this is really the best way that communities should be spending that money. But there is something interesting about the way that corporations and companies are reported on with such a trust that isn’t given to government, for example.

JJ: And I just want to say finally, Good Jobs First is very much about involving everyone in the process. And you referenced subsidy trackers that you have. They’re accessible for folks who are reporters or not reporters. You try to make data or databases available to folks who want to follow the money.

AM: Yes, we have databases that we’ve purposely made fully accessible. We don’t even ask for your email, and you can look up a company. So if a company comes to your community and says, “We need some money to expand our operations,” or to even open, you can look to see where else has this company gotten money, and what did it deliver for the money that it’s gotten in other places.

Good Jobs First

Or you can look at a company in our violation tracker and say, “What’s its record on corporate conduct?” Because we have all types of misconduct records in there to say, if the company has a long track record of cheating workers or harming the environment or cheating consumers, you can say, “Is this the kind of company that this city should be investing in?”

So yes, we do try to make these databases very accessible and easy to use. We’re trying to do the research for you, for journalists.

JJ: Right? Well, if journalists won’t use it, then the public can use it and work around the press corps. I mean, the point is to get it done, right?

AM: That’s right. That’s right. And we are thrilled that every day we get some kind of outreach, whether it’s a grassroots community group, an individual who said, “I saw this, I can’t believe what I’m seeing.” So they go to their city council, then they can question what’s going on, or whoever their official might be. And so always thrilled when we see that.

I would just add, I made this point earlier, but communities have a certain amount of money, and the money that’s being spent is precious. And there are things that actually do lift up communities, and those are excellent public schools, and they’re communities with parks that take care of their natural resources, and safe communities.

And when communities invest in those types of things, people want to live in those kinds of communities. And the companies want to be where those people are, where those workers are.

So the real wins that we see that communities do, is when they invest in those things that truly lift up people from the bottom up, rather than showering a corporation with a billion dollars and hoping somebody at the very bottom of that funnel can use it to lift themselves to a better place.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Arlene Martínez. She’s deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First, online at GoodJobsFirst.org. Arlene Martínez, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AM: Thanks for having me.

The post ‘You Are Exacerbating the Racial Wealth Gap Through the Use of Subsidies’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

The Green Party made waves recently when it proposed to tax net wealth more than NZ$2 million for individuals and $4 million for couples. As part of a broad range of actions, the policy aims to “end poverty”.

Reactions ranged from endorsement to accusations it was fuelled by envy, but the debate signalled what could become a major election issue: the wealth gap and how to fix it.

The claim it amounts to an “envy tax” assumes all wealth has been fully earned and fully taxed in the first place. But we know that’s not the case.

• READ MORE: Proving the wealthiest New Zealanders pay low tax rates is a good start – now comes the hard part
• New Zealand’s tax system is under the spotlight (again). What needs to change to make it fair?
• Cutting GST on fresh produce won’t help those most in need – a targeted approach works better

A good portion of the wealth accumulated at the top is attributable to fortunate circumstances generating significant tax-free gains.

Inland Revenue’s recent survey of the wealthiest 311 New Zealand families revealed an average net worth of $276 million. At the same time, we know many households are struggling with the rising cost of living.

According to Stats NZ, around 155,000 households feel their incomes aren’t sufficient to meet everyday basic needs. Foodbanks report ever-rising numbers of families unable to feed themselves.

The major source of this lopsided wealth is the housing market. New Zealand has seen the biggest housing boom in the Western world. Property owners have ridden the wave to make large tax-free capital gains, while others languish in substandard emergency housing or are forced to live in garages and cars.

Far too much of our scarce labour, building materials, imported fixtures and land have been diverted to unproductive high-end housing, leaving too little to meet the real housing need. Because it isn’t taxed properly, investing in housing has been encouraged as a way to accumulate wealth.

Right now, there is enough money tied up in untaxed wealth to lift every single family in this country out of poverty.#nzpol pic.twitter.com/f3ODNOK9hH

— Green Party NZ (@NZGreens) June 12, 2023

The trouble with a wealth tax
While the Greens’ wealth tax is a useful start to a wider discussion about inequality, it inevitably creates obstacles that in the end may be too difficult to overcome.

Probably the biggest hurdle is that this kind of tax can be incredibly complex and would provoke endless debate about what should be included.

The Greens’ proposal, for example, would capture business assets, shares, art above a certain value, and cars above $50,000. But what if you have two cars worth $49,000 each — why should they be excluded when one valued at $80,000 is included?

And how is debt factored into calculations of net wealth? House mortgages may be straightforward, but what about credit card debt, car finance or borrowing to finance overseas travel?

Not a capital gains tax
For all these reasons, it’s time to get away from debating notions of a confiscatory wealth tax and make the issue simply one of treating all income the same for tax purposes.

Instead of a complicated net wealth tax on everything, let’s start with the biggest culprit — housing. This would address the under-taxation of income from holding housing as an asset.

This is not the same as a capital gains tax — those days are over. Numerous tax working groups have failed over 30 years to make headway on this. Politically it is a dead duck.

Besides, the real problems — inequality and misallocation of resources — wouldn’t be touched by a capital gains tax. Such a tax can only apply to gains made on houses sold in the future, not the accumulated gains over many years, and it will always exempt the family home.

Tax specialists warn over intricacies of capital gains tax https://t.co/YqzhInWjBW

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) April 26, 2023

How a house tax works
Instead, let’s take the total value of all housing held by each individual, subtract registered first mortgages, and allow a $1 million exemption to reflect that everyone is entitled to a basic family home.

Then we treat this net equity as if it was in a term deposit generating a taxable interest return. When houses are held in trusts and companies, in most cases the income would be taxed at the trust or company rate with no exemption.

Calculated annually and pegged to the capital value of properties, this effective income would be taxed at the person’s marginal tax rate. It would affect those with second homes, multiple rentals, high-value properties — but without significantly affecting the great majority of homeowners who have much less than $1 million of net equity.

Thus a couple living in a $3 million house with a $1 million mortgage would fall under the threshold.

This approach would help put investment in housing, after a basic home, on the same footing as money in the bank or in shares. Better choices for the use of scarce housing resources should follow.

Landlords would no longer need expensive accountants to minimise taxable rental income. And it would reduce the blight of “ghost houses” and residential land-banking.

A circuit breaker
The simplicity of this income approach means the government can build on the existing tax system. It lives up to the mantra of a “broad base, low rate” tax system and affects only the very wealthy and those whose tax rates are highest.

Moreover, it is possible to implement quickly, using existing property valuations and registered mortgages, unlike a net wealth tax where the devil is in the contentious detail.

The effect should be positive for those struggling in the housing market, as more housing for sale or rent is opened up. Good landlords should welcome the greater simplicity.

In the longer term, the extra taxable income could produce revenue for redistribution and social investment. Critically, however, it would start to give the right price signals to reduce the over-investment in luxury housing and real estate held for capital gain.

The approach is essentially a circuit breaker that can simply and quickly address the accumulation of wealth by a small group of people.

Crucially, it has a sound economic rationale. By taking the first step and including luxury and investment housing returns that are currently under the radar, it reduces the advantages of holding housing rather than more productive investments.

Dr Susan St John, honorary associate professor, Economic Policy Centre, Auckland Business School, University of Auckland. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Juneteenth celebrates the end of chattel slavery in the United States. But over 150 years later, discriminatory public policies have prevented African Americans from closing the racial wealth divide in this country they helped build.

Policy created that divide — and policy can close it.

One state is showing how to move forward in advancing racial economic equality. This year, Connecticut is launching the country’s first “Baby Bond” program.

This program will invest $3,200 for every baby born into poverty in the state. The bonds are projected to grow to between $10,000 and $24,000 in value, depending on when they’re used.

When they reach an age between 18 and 30, these Connecticut residents will be able to use that money to start a small business, get a higher education or job training, or buy a home.

That money goes to poor residents regardless of their race. But because Black and Latino residents of the state are poorer than their white counterparts, the program will significantly address the state’s racial wealth gap — even as it gives young people of every race in the state a path out of poverty.

I’ve been researching and writing about the racial wealth divide for the last 20 years. In my view, Connecticut’s Baby Bond program is the most significant step forward in public policy I’ve seen yet. It should be an example for the country.

The program builds off decades of analysis and advocacy.

In 1959, over 50 percent of African Americans lived in poverty — a figure that had fallen to less than 19 percent by 2019. That’s still more than twice the rate for non-Hispanic whites, but it’s an example of substantial economic improvement for African Americans.

How did this happen? By removing barriers to economic and social opportunities and investing in those facing poverty.

The Black freedom movement of the 1950s and 1960s pushed for important legislation like the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968. The movement also helped advance the War on Poverty and its associated programs — including SNAP, Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, all of which dramatically decreased poverty for the entire country.

Today we see Connecticut taking the next big step forward.

The idea for Baby Bonds came out of the wealth-building movement popularized by Michael Sherraden’s 1992 book Assets and the Poor: New American Welfare Policy. The book’s theme was the need to shift from simply supplementing people’s income to helping them build real assets — to help poor people get beyond day-to-day survival.

Child Savings Accounts under the Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment (SEED) Initiative were one step in that direction.

By 2017, there were 54 of these programs serving 382,000 children in 32 states and Washington, D.C. At that time, the most common initial deposit for a Children’s Saving Account was $50 — not enough to make a significant difference in reducing poverty or the racial wealth divide.

Connecticut’s Baby Bond program was inspired by a vision to address racial economic inequality  first proposed in 2010 by economists William Darity and Darrick Hamilton.

Though the return of $10,000 to $24,000 for all babies born in poverty would not bridge the nearly $150,000 wealth divide between Blacks, Latinos, and whites, it would about double the median wealth of Black and Latino households in the state.

Hopefully this is the beginning of states nationwide creating similar wealth-building programs.

It could also build momentum for the national American Opportunity Accounts Act introduced by Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). That law would provide a Baby Bond of $1,000 for every American child — with an annual addition of up to $2,000 for the lowest income Americans.

For generations, we’ve done little to bridge the racial wealth divide or get families out of  multi-generational asset poverty. Connecticut’s Baby Bond program, which launches in July, and similar proposals across the country show that we may finally be willing to take the next step.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dedrick Asante-Muhammad.

Detail of: Birender Kumar Yadav (India), Debris of Fate, 2015.

In late 2022, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) released a fascinating report entitled Working Time and Work-Life Balance Around the World, in large part encouraged by a slew of initiatives across India to extend the workday. The report accumulated global data on the time spent at work in 2019, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ILO found that ‘approximately one third of the global workforce (35.4 percent) worked more than 48 hours per week’ and ‘one fifth of global employment (20.3 percent) consists of short (or part-time) hours of work of less than 35 hours per week’, such as gig work. Furthermore, the report noted that the occupational group with ‘the longest average hours of work was plant and machine operators and assemblers, who worked 48.2 hours per week on average’.

Across India, there is an ongoing debate about a revision of the limits on the length of the working day. A bill in the state of Tamil Nadu sought to amend the Factories Act of 1948, which would allow factories to lengthen the workday from eight hours to twelve hours. In the Tamil Nadu State Assembly, government minister CV Ganesan said that the state – which has the highest number of factories in India – needed to attract more foreign investment, which would be easier if factories were permitted to have ‘flexible working hours’. Protests led by trade unions and the Left blocked the government, despite opposing pressure from the business lobby (the Vanigar Sangangalin Peramaippu). In February, a similar bill passed in the neighbouring state of Karnataka. ‘India is in competition with places all around the world to attract investments’, said Minister of Electronics, Information Technology, and Biotechnology Dr CN Ashwath Narayan; ‘Only when you have flexible labour laws, investments can be attracted’.

Birender Kumar Yadav (India), Government Work Is God’s Work, 2017.

From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research comes our own intervention into this debate, our May dossier, The Condition of the Indian Working Class. The dossier opens with two events from 2020. First, at the start of the pandemic, the Indian government callously told millions of workers to return to their villages, and second, India’s farmers began a powerful protest against the government’s attempt to transfer control of the mandis (‘produce markets’) to big corporations. These events demonstrate both the harsh behaviour of the Indian government and the corporate class towards workers as well as workers’ and peasants’ ongoing resistance to the structure that exploits and oppresses them.

In 1991, India used a short-term balance-of-payments crisis to disrupt the institutional fabric of national development and open the economy to foreign investment. This ‘liberalisation’, as it is known in India, meant that capital was given a decisive advantage over labour and that labour protections hard won by the working class and the peasantry would be withdrawn.

Recognising this trend, Indian workers initiated a cycle of protests to defend their rights against what became known as ‘labour market liberalisation’. The key word ‘flexibility’ meant that workers would now have to surrender their precious rights to attract investment and deliver larger profits to those investors. Despite concessions made by workers – some forced, some through bargaining – the jobs produced by the neoliberal dispensation were work for the desperate. As we write in the dossier:

The promise of large-scale industrial investment and the creation of high-quality industrial jobs did not materialise in a significant way, and both economic and industrial growth have remained at low levels not only because of the lack of investment, but also because of the suppressed demand of the Indian population. This demand was reduced because of the desperately low wages of much of the population as well as neoliberal restraints on public spending, particularly in the agrarian sector.

Birender Kumar Yadav (India), Erased Faces, 2015.

What we find in India is not dissimilar to other parts of the world, with more and more workers slipping into increasing precarity. While the pandemic accelerated the rise of informal and unregulated employment, the ILO has shown through a number of regional studies – in Egypt for instance – that the trend towards precarious labour was already growing precipitously, with class war of a ruthless kind camouflaged in technical-sounding terms such as ‘labour market flexibility’.

In 2015, the United Nations passed a landmark resolution announcing seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, clearly stating the need to ‘Promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all’. The ILO understands ‘decent work’ to mean ‘full and productive employment, rights at work, social protection, and promotion of social dialogue’, or – in plainer language – the right to productive work, safe working conditions, social insurance, and collective bargaining.

Birender Kumar Yadav (India), Donkey Worker, 2015.

It has been clear for a long time that ILO standards are simply not taken seriously by most countries. Trade unions and other organisations of the working class provide the only platform with liberatory potential, with the unity of sectoral unions and union confederations playing a key role for any such effort to succeed. To fight the proposed Industrial Relations Bill (1978), whose provisions would have weakened the right to strike, various unions formed the National Campaign Committee of Trade Unions. In 1982, this committee led a general strike against the imposition of the Essential Services Maintenance Act (1981), another attempt to enfeeble labour organising. Since 1991, this committee, alongside the joint platform of the Central Trade Union Organisations, has held twenty-two general strikes, each of them larger than the one that came before.

In March 2022, 200 million workers, from the industrial sector to the care sector, joined the general strike to shut down the country. These strikes have been massive because the trade union movement has taken up the battles of unorganised informal workers with the same energy as the battles of their own members, as K. Hemlata, the president of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, pointed out in our dossier no. 18 in July 2019. The class struggle is alive and well, although one of the weaknesses of our time is that these massive mobilisations have not been easily converted into political power. Financial power has drowned democracy, and the rise of toxic right-wing ideas – including religious fundamentalism – has played an influential role in communities struggling with the gradual destruction of collective life (a phenomenon we discussed in dossier no. 59, Religious Fundamentalism and Imperialism in Latin America). Nonetheless, as we write in the closing sentence of our new dossier, the workers ‘remain alive to the class struggle’.

Birender Kumar Yadav (India), Walking on the Roof of Hell, 2016.

In early summer 2020, my heart sank watching millions of workers drag their tired feet across the overheated landscape of India. Gulzar Saab, one of the country’s great poets and film directors, watched this exodus of the working class and wrote a poem that captured the mood, Marenge To Wahin Jaa Kar Jahan Par Zindagi Hai (‘They Will Go to Die There, Where There Is Life’). We are grateful to Saab for letting us publish this poem here, translated by Rakhshanda Jalil:

The pandemic raged.
The workers and labourers fled to their homes.
All the machines ground to a halt in the cities.
Only their hands and feet moved.
Their lives they had planted back in the villages.

The sowing and the harvesting was all back there:
Of the jowar, wheat, corn, bajra – all of it.
Those divisions with the cousins and brothers.
Those fights at the canals and waterways.
The strongmen, hired sometimes from their side and sometimes from this.
The lawsuits dating back to grandparents and grand uncles.
Engagements, marriages, fields.
Drought, flood, the fear: will the skies rain or not?
They will go to die there – where there is life.
Here, they have only brought their bodies and plugged them in!

They pulled out the plugs:
‘Come, let’s go home’ – and they set off.
They will go to die there – where there is life.

Birender Kumar Yadav (India), May Day, 2022.

The art in this newsletter, taken from our latest dossier, is by Birender Kumar Yadav, a multi-disciplinary Indian artist from Dhanbad, a city of iron ore and coal built on the backs of mineworkers and indigenous people. Much of Yadav’s work, informed by his early experiences as the son of a blacksmith who worked in a coalmine, draws attention to unjust class hierarchies and the plight of the working class.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/05/in-the-factories-there-is-wealth-but-there-is-no-life/feed/ 0 392849 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/18/theres-so-much-poverty-in-america-not-in-spite-of-our-wealth-but-because-of-it/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/18/theres-so-much-poverty-in-america-not-in-spite-of-our-wealth-but-because-of-it/#respond Tue, 18 Apr 2023 16:57:59 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=1bf0ec1e738635d63370dba05d62b33d
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/18/theres-so-much-poverty-in-america-not-in-spite-of-our-wealth-but-because-of-it/feed/ 0 388580 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/15/talking-down-the-billionaires-suffering-from-excessive-wealth-disorder/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/15/talking-down-the-billionaires-suffering-from-excessive-wealth-disorder/#respond Wed, 15 Mar 2023 15:04:44 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/excessive-wealth-disorder-institute

A mid-pandemic survey from Pew found that 55 percent of Americans have no opinion on whether billionaires – whose wealth doubled during the pandemic – are good or bad for the United States.

How do we shift the narrative to convince a larger majority of the dangers of wealth hoarding at the top end of our economic ladder?

Inequality.org managing editor Rebekah Entralgo sat down with Gabriela Sandoval, the Executive Director of the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute – a new think tank focused on curbing the excessive wealth of the nation’s richest individuals through elevating policy campaigns and shifting the narratives on wealth.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Rebekah Entralgo: When did you first become aware of inequality?

Gabriela Sandoval: My first recollection of inequality, and maybe I wouldn’t have called it that at the time nor would I have really been able to articulate it, was really in elementary school. I grew up in a working class immigrant family from Mexico and helped them navigate a lot in this country because I spoke English and they didn’t. I used to help my mom write checks and translated information on grocery store runs as early as nine or 10 years old. I soon realized not all of my peers had the kind of economic power that I had in my household. And of course what I mean by economic power is not really that I had actual economic power, but that I had an influence on my parents’ economic power in a way that was disproportionate for a child.

RE: That resonates with me as well. My mom is also the child of immigrants and shared with me stories from her childhood of having to call the utility company and translating for her mother so she could pay the electric bill. I never thought of it as a kind of economic power. With that lived experience in mind, what brought you to this position working to fight against mass concentrations of wealth?

GS: I spent a lot of time thinking I wanted to be an academic. I got a Ph.D in Sociology and landed a pretty plumb tenure track job at a California university. I quickly realized it wasn’t the right fit for me, but it took me a long time to do something about it. Just as I was coming up for tenure I realized that if I ever got tenure, I would never leave. So I jumped ship and started working as the academic director for a technical midwifery school in Mexico. That was my first opportunity to wade into the policy world in a real way.

When I came back to the United States a year later, I started working at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, a national think-and-do tank out of California, as its research director on their closing the racial wealth gap initiative. We talked a lot about wealth-building strategies for communities of color, structural impediments to wealth building for those communities, and the policy choices that have led to the massive racial wealth divide. But I was frustrated because we never really talked about the other side of the wealth divide — all of the mass concentrations of wealth.

More recently, I worked at the Utility Reform Network, a state-wide consumer advocacy organization in California, advocating on behalf of utility consumers in the state legislature and working to bridge the digital broadband divide. I remember speaking on a panel in front of regulatory commissioners from around the country and telling them that we don’t have a poverty problem in this country, we have an affluence problem. I started thinking about how so much of my work has been about addressing affordability, but the lever I was pulling on was regulatory rules. I knew that if I was going to make an impact, it needed to be through our broader economic system.

We won’t move the needle on any of the many of the existential crises we are facing if we don’t address wealth hoarding and the fact that the ultra-rich are sitting on so many of our resources. We can’t address climate justice, racial justice, or economic justice without addressing mass concentrations of wealth because so much of that hinges on resolving this issue.

RE: So much of our country’s work on inequality focuses on lifting the bottom up and leveling the top down, meaning focusing on alleviating poverty without addressing the concentrations of wealth at the top end of our society. Why is it so important to make sure that those working in support of economic justice tackle both at the same time?

GS: If you look at the economic system we have and the disparities facing us today, those are all policy choices. And this gets at why the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute focuses on the ultra-rich and not just the wealthy. There’s a point at which individuals in this country have come to have so much wealth that they are holding our government hostage. And not just them, but their lobbyists, their armies of attorneys and tax professionals, and the politicians that they’ve bought off.

There’s no way for us to undo the damage that is causing without breaking up those intense concentrations of wealth. The reason that we were able to create such a prosperous middle class at one point has everything to do with policy decisions. In some ways I was compelled to apply to this position because of its name: Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute. There’s a provocation there, but there’s also a very real truth in that we are living in a dysfunctional system. It is very much disordered and we can fix it.

RE: One of the ways your organization is working to fix it is by shifting the narrative on deservedness and wealth. What is your approach to that and what are some common narratives that you are wanting to debunk through your work?

GS: I’m a big believer that our words and our stories help us win. We can’t use language that presupposes that this is a natural way of being or that billionaires worked hard and that’s why they now get to reap the benefits of that work. In order for us to move the hearts and minds of so many people, we really need to be able to talk about this complicated issue in a way that everyone, across multiple audiences, can understand.

With the threshold at which our government can be captured by so much wealth, we need allies who are wealthy to join the struggle with us, especially the ultra-wealthy. It’s really about finding the words to convince and persuade our country and the entire world that this inequality is more damaging than it is worth. And I do feel that narrative shift is part of what has to happen.

The evidence from a mid-pandemic Pew survey found that 55 percent of people in this country don’t think billionaires are either good or bad for this country. They are indifferent to their presence. But the fact is that they capture so much of the power in this country that there is no way that this is good. Jeff Bezos has more money than he can spend in multiple lifetimes. The struggle is in how we educate people about that. We need to move public opinion in order to be successful.

RE: Your distinction between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy is important because I think when people hear the phrase “tax the rich,” they think of the wealthy individuals in their community who they aspire to be. But there’s a disconnect, because we aren’t talking about the people you see in your community driving a fancy car, we’re talking about the nameless, faceless 0.1 percent who hoard wealth for generations. What is your take on the extent to which making that distinction plays a key role in shifting the narratives on wealth?

GS: By no means are we interested in stunting folks’ aspirations, but when the game is rigged against the vast majority of people, the system is not working. I think there’s an important distinction to be made between our neighbors who have nurtured our communities through a small business and the ultra-ultra-wealthy, the top 0.1 percent of people who have more than $40 million in assets. My next-door neighbor — and I’m in California so many of my neighbors live in homes worth over a million dollars — they aren’t holding our government hostage and I’m not begrudging them or their success. But it is a problem when we have such intense concentrations of wealth at the top that our whole government is then dysfunctional.

It’s pretty clear that after a certain point, all of this wealth hoarding isn’t really about production and productivity. It becomes less about the things that people own or what they make, and it becomes so much more about power and status. That’s a really critical part of the puzzle. That power to influence our lives and government is at the heart of this problem.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Rebekah Entralgo.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/15/talking-down-the-billionaires-suffering-from-excessive-wealth-disorder/feed/ 0 379540 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/10/dubai-superlatives-the-power-of-excessive-wealth/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/10/dubai-superlatives-the-power-of-excessive-wealth/#respond Fri, 10 Mar 2023 14:20:03 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138575 Questions From a Worker Who Reads (Bertolt Brecht 1935) Who built Thebes of the 7 gates? In the books you will read the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? And Babylon, many times demolished, Who raised it up so many times? In what houses of gold glittering Lima did […]

The post Dubai Superlatives: The Power of Excessive Wealth first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Questions From a Worker Who Reads (Bertolt Brecht 1935)

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?

Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai, UAE (Photo: Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin)

Maybe the closest we can get to Elon Musk’s vision of Mars is a visit to Dubai. Imagine an alien planet where you can only live in the base settlement with a breathable atmosphere: a comfortable place and a comfortable temperature.

In the hottest months of the year in Dubai, temperatures rise to 50 degrees so people move from air-conditioned apartments to air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned offices to air-conditioned shopping malls.

Of course, they are very nice cars, apartments, offices and shopping malls. Dubai deals in expensive property and large scales: the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa (829.8m, 2,722ft), the tallest hotel in the world under construction (Ciel), and the foundations laid for the tallest construction in the world – the Dubai Creek observation tower which will be 1.3km (1,300m, 4,300ft) high.

Workers gardening near Burj Khalifa, Dubai, UAE
(Photo: Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin)

This should keep Dubai on the superlative lists into the next decade. Here the hierarchies of height determine your wealth. For example, the entrance to the Burj Khalifa is a luxurious shopping mall which also contains a massive food hall for the workers, servers and shop workers. The more money you have to spend, the higher up the Burj Khalifa you can go. The extremes of wealth mean that it is likely that most of the people who work in the mall have never been up the lifts into the stratospheric heights of the tallest building in the world. While many eat in the cheap food mall at the base, only a few have tea and coffee in the lounge and outdoor observation deck on the 148th floor (named At the Top) which is so high that it is more like looking down on Dubai from a plane than from a building. This contrast is certainly symbolic of the incredible extremes of wealth that exist in Dubai.

Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?
Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them ?
Over whom did the Caesars triumph ?

History

I read a comment somewhere that if Dubai were described as a book then the front cover would be Cosmopolitan Magazine and the inside would be The Big Issue (homeless magazine). Starting life as a poor village in the desert beside the sea, Dubai has come on in leaps and bounds ever since. For example,”in 1822, a British naval surveyor noted that Dubai was at that time populated with a thousand people living in an oval-shaped town surrounded by a mud wall, scattered with goats and camels.” By the 1930s Dubai was known for its pearl exports but “the pearl trade was damaged irreparably by the 1929 Great Depression and the innovation of cultured pearls. With the collapse of the pearling industry, Dubai fell into a deep depression and many residents lived in poverty or migrated to other parts of the Persian Gulf.” However, oil was struck in 1966 and this all changed. While Dubai had already started a period of infrastructural development and expansion in the 1950s based on revenue from trading activities (such as the trade in gold), the discovery of oil offshore set the tone for a new rapid growth in building projects during the 1970s.

This growth was fueled by revenues from oil and gold but depended mainly on cheap labour from developing countries. The treatment of the many thousands of workers in Dubai has been the subject of many reports and documentaries, such as Human Rights Watch (living conditions  described as being “less than humane”) and the documentary, Slaves of Dubai (2009).

In an article titled  “What is Modern Slavery in Dubai and How Does it Affect You?” it is stated:

“More than 88.5% of UAE residents are foreign workers, with South Asian migrants constituting 42.5% of the UAE’s workforce. […] These migrants, usually illiterate and from impoverished, rural communities in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh […] Eager to move to Dubai and begin earning money that they can send home to their families, they take out loans of up to $3000 from unscrupulous recruitment agencies to pay the exorbitant ‘visa fees’ (which is actually illegal – the recruitment agencies are supposed to cover these fees) and board flights to Dubai, excited for a new life in the glitzy Emirate. When they touch down in Dubai, however, it’s a different story. Driven to squalid shanty towns on the outskirts of Dubai, where 45 men share one outdoor bathroom and 10 or more people sleep in a room, their passports are confiscated and they are told that they will actually be working 14 hour days, 6 or 7 days a week, in the desert sun.”

The cramped living conditions and low wages has led to high suicide rates too.

City Centre Deira, mall worker, Dubai, UAE (Photo: Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin)

The International Institute for Global Strategic Analysis has reported that the kafala sponsorship system has played an important part in the exploitation of workers:

“Kafala is a system popular in Gulf countries that gives private citizens and companies responsibility and oversight over workers. The kafala sponsorship system is used to monitor migrant labourers, working primarily in the construction and domestic sectors in Gulf Cooperation Council member states. The kafala system involves withholding labourers’ passports to regulate their residency and employment, which gives employers near-total control over migrant workers’ salary, living conditions, nutrition, ability to work elsewhere, and even their ability to return home.”

The treatment of citizens is very different to the situation for expatriate workers:

“It is estimated that in 2018, there were seven million workers in the UAE alone. Over 90 per cent of the private-sector labour force is comprised of expatriates while UAE nationals continue to be employed in stable and relatively well-paying jobs in the country’s vast public sector. Although citizens face restrictions on their human rights, the state offers them a wide range of social benefits, including generous housing benefits, access to free education and medical services, preferential treatment in the workforce and higher salaries.”

It was also reported that “domestic workers are exposed to multiple forms of exploitation and violence, including sexual, physical and psychological abuse”.

Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants ?
Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,
The drowning still cried out for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone ?
Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him ?

Tourism

The conditions for workers and the rapid building growth and expansion of Dubai is tied in with tourism as many projects are dependent on sales to foreign tourists and investors. However, many apartments are also sold off the plans, and then resold upon completion without the investor even visiting Dubai. Every shopping mall has selling points with sophisticated screens using 3D maps of Dubai and the properties for sale. The sales assistants are usually from Eastern Europe. There is no shortage of potential customers as Dubai has become one of the “world’s leading tourism destinations” and tourism is now one of Dubai’s main sources of revenue. The city “hosted 14.9 million overnight visitors in 2016” and “in 2018, Dubai was the fourth most-visited city in the world based on the number of international visitors.”

Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep ?
Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War.
Who else won it ?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors ?
Every 10 years a great man.
Who paid the bill ?

Workers districts

By far the most interesting areas of Dubai are the areas where the workers themselves live, work, and shop. Deira, for example, is a historic district where the population consists mainly of Pakistan and India natives. Deira has many markets: Murshid Souk, Spice Souk, Deira Covered Souk, and Gold Souk. There are leather shops, shoe shops, supermarkets, barbers, butchers, cafes and family restaurants with dining areas on the city pavements. Compared to the soulless atmosphere of the wealthier districts, Deira is full of life with friendly shop assistants and large groups of African, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers and their families enjoying the convivial atmosphere of the restaurants indoors and outdoors.

Deira, Creek, Dubai, UAE (Photo: Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin)

So many reports.
So many questions.

The Future of Dubai

There is no doubt that Dubai is the creation of a particular set of circumstances economically, geographically and geopolitically. It has made good use of its central position in relation to Europe, Africa and Asia as a cosmopolitan meeting point for international trade and travel. Dubai has benefitted from the UAE’s diplomatic moves to play down differences regionally:

The UAE is revisiting its foreign policy goals with the aim of boosting its global trade partnerships and ensuring its security and political stability, by replacing robust military intervention and proxy politics with dialogue and diplomacy.[…] Differences between the UAE on the one hand and Iran, Turkey, and Qatar on the other remain strong. However, the UAE is beginning to realize that the lack of a healthy bilateral dialogue with regional powers will make progress towards de-escalation much harder. The country acknowledges, after a decade of regional conflict and proxy politics, that the divergent policies of regional players should not prevent diplomatic cooperation.

However in an era of rising temperatures and rising seas, it must be asked how much hotter can Dubai get, and how will this coastal city deal with erosion and flooding? The continued existence of Dubai is dependent on heavy power consumption to maintain air conditioning, trains and services for very large buildings, many more of which are being planned at the moment for future development.

Deira, Creek, Dubai, UAE (Photo: Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin)

Even the locals have always had an uncomfortable feeling about the future of Dubai. Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum (ruler from 1958 till 1990) is believed to have said: “My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel”.

One cannot help but feel that a major collapse of oil prices and/or the economies of the West will have a profound effect on the future of Dubai. As the quote (with as obscure an origin as Dubai itself) that ‘the Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stones’ has noted, new technologies will substantially decrease our reliance on fossil fuels in the future. All these potential changes do not augur well for the future of Dubai’s dependence on trade in tourism, oil and gold. If Dubai is ultimately an unsustainable vanity project instigated by a tiny minority of the super rich, as some believe, then the city could be deserted (in more ways than one), and Dubai itself could become the largest open-air museum in the world.

The post Dubai Superlatives: The Power of Excessive Wealth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/10/dubai-superlatives-the-power-of-excessive-wealth/feed/ 0 378494 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/13/revealed-facebook-still-allowing-unauthorised-wealth-scheme-adverts/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/13/revealed-facebook-still-allowing-unauthorised-wealth-scheme-adverts/#respond Mon, 13 Feb 2023 23:01:06 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/unauthorised-wealth-scheme-matrix-freedom-advertising-facebook-instagram-meta-action-fraud/ Vulnerable people are losing money to the ‘infinite income’ scheme, while authorities fail to act

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Dimitris Dimitriadis.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/13/revealed-facebook-still-allowing-unauthorised-wealth-scheme-adverts/feed/ 0 372354 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/04/shifting-baseline-disorders-only-the-one-percent-is-bad/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/04/shifting-baseline-disorders-only-the-one-percent-is-bad/#respond Sat, 04 Feb 2023 15:43:23 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=137487 But for now, let me repeat: the world’s richest 85 individuals do not have the same amount of accumulated wealth as the world’s poorest 50 percent. They have vastly more. The multitude on the lower rungs—even taken as a totality—have next to nothing. — Michael Parenti Funny stuff seeing the MoveOn outfit go after ONLY […]

The post Shifting Baseline Disorders: Only the One Percent is Bad first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

But for now, let me repeat: the world’s richest 85 individuals do not have the same amount of accumulated wealth as the world’s poorest 50 percent. They have vastly more. The multitude on the lower rungs—even taken as a totality—have next to nothing.
— Michael Parenti

Funny stuff seeing the MoveOn outfit go after ONLY the one percent who are tax dodgers, tax sheltering criminals:

Sign the petition: Don’t let House Republicans undermine the IRS for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

Republicans are trying to cut $80 billion in recent investments designed to strengthen the IRS and its ability to crack down on millionaire, billionaire, and corporate tax cheats through the Inflation Reduction Act.¹ In other words: As per usual, Republicans want to issue handouts to their wealthy donors and leave working families in the lurch.

In 2019 alone, the richest 1% of households evaded $163 billion of the total of unpaid or underpaid taxes that year. When we allow the ultrawealthy to evade paying their fair share, we place that responsibility on regular working people. Donald Trump’s recently released tax returns are a clear example of this corruption and greed. His returns expose overseas bank accounts and manipulative real estate evaluations that effectively allowed him to dodge taxes. This is exactly why Democrats included funding for the IRS, to ensure there were people within the agency that would hold the wealthiest people in this country accountable. We cannot allow the GOP to tank our efforts to lessen the tax burden on the working class.

Fun stuff, you know, since we are getting close to USA shooting nuclear weapons, utilizing the dirty tricks of CIA and false flags and dirty bombs. You know this country’s history, yet the Democrats, the MoveOne outfit, is going for the One Percent.

You know, since these companies are as honest as a nun (not). Imagine, the amount of US taxpayer money paying for fraud, crimes, endless and meaningless and worthless reports, hearings, white papers, investigations, stalling tactics, cover-ups, PR spin, all of it, including the dirty, polluting, community-breaking externalities of these corporations. And how many of these corporations have GOVERNMENT contracts in the hundreds of millions and billions?

How many dual-income earners in the Five percent — $208,000 x 2 – $416,000 yearly income — have trouble sending their kids to Yale and Harvard, uh?

The book, Dream Hoarders tells a picture of those Five and Ten Percenters and the Twenty Percenters x two incomes ($97,000) = $195,000. But here, the irony, at the most elite-sucking, exceptionalist outfit locally, Aspen Institute:

https://www.youtube.com/live/pTgpgMzs5sU?feature=share

Now, now. I have a 77-year-old fellow with all sorts of medical operations under his belt driving a bus, me as his monitor. There are older people driving school buses where I live, one aged 81. You know, high winds, in a tsunami zone, earthquake zone, king tides, ice, fallen trees, fallen power lines, rain rain rain. You know, that precious cargo — children — and we get $19 an hour, with three cameras on board, a tablet that marks our stops and time, and, well, you can imagine the lack of trust this huge corporation has in us, the lowly guys and gals. Precious cargo my ass!

Truckers in the world, got .06 (cents) a mile in the 1960s. And when you are owner-operator, you pay pay pay for expenses, upkeep, maintenance and more. In the old days, the idea was to get to New York from Portland, Oregon, as quick as possible with that load of seafood. One fellow told me he took ZipLock baggies with him to urinate on that 72-hours, one-way from Oregon to NYC. And, the pills. The uppers. Keeping awake.

This is, alas, Capitalism with a capital “c” for corruption, collusion, chaos, criminality, contraband, crassness.

But alas, MoveOne is going after the One Percent, because of course, all those Five Percenters working for the One Percenters in high level jobs, all those 10 Percenters who are hoarders and vote to not have an extra percentage of tax put upon them, all the Eichmann’s and Faustians, all of them, love the idea of becoming rich and famous too, or just rich. They think being part of the 80 Percent is a crime against their egos and sensibility.

There is only so much of the good money to go around to the One Percent and up to the 19 Percent, right? Just talked to a 51 year old who gave me a ride back home since my ride was indisposed in Newport. I had to get to the bus driving gig. I stopped someone coming from the hospital, and he gave me a lift. He grew up in Toledo, Oregon, and had a year’s worth of wages saved up for Oregon State University, but he opted to work. As a lineman for the local central utility district. His brother went to college, and even called him a loser. Just a few years ago, the brother apologized to this man, who has worked 32 years for this company, and he said he’s making $150,000 a year as he is in management. The brother never got that income with his college degree.

Yes, there have to be options for young people. Yes, everyone needs to go to a cool college, for history, for the arts, for writing, for sociology. Yes, there should be contruction courses in college. Yes, there should be a way to get those who might have a proclivity for hands-on high IQ stuff to get that hands-on education, but all junior and senior high school students should be exposed to Oceanography, Orwell and Organic farming. In addition to, Reading and Writing, but also, learning what soil is and is not. What a forest is. What the jet stream is, and what weather is and is not. Hands down, the only way humanity is going to solve the crimes of capitalism and the savagery of capitalism and the barbaric acts of the One Percent and maybe another 5 percent, is to arm ourselves with thinking, caring, community-driven people.

Out here in Rural Oregon, we have those rugged (sic) individuals looking for acres and a place to put some chickens and cool motorcycles and jungle gyms on, and a place AWAY from humanity. Imagine that.

Some of those homes I pass by in the rural landscape are 6,000 square foot lodges that would look like they fit in Aspen or Jackson Hole.

Here it is, then, the shifting baseline disorder. Up is down, and somehow, Nazi History is Okay History. Ukraine is a country with a violent and racist history, and now, worse than ever. But these kids and these linemen, well, they do not want to know about THAT.

As we drain the tax coffers for Zelensky, for all those military industrial complex big boys and little ones.

This is fact — Russia-Soviet Union beat the Nazi’s then:

The Battle That Changed the Course of WWII: 80th Anniversary of the Soviet Victory at Stalingrad

On February 2, 1943, Nazi forces trapped in the ruined city of Stalingrad (modern-day Volgograd) by the Soviet Red Army surrendered, marking the end of one of the bloodiest and most intense battles in history – the Battle of Stalingrad.

During the course of this battle, Soviet forces managed to trap a substantial force of Nazi soldiers inside the very city the latter wanted to capture. The Soviet’s also managed to repel all attempts by the rest of the Nazi war machine to relieve their trapped comrades, and to finally break the enemy’s will to resist.

This triumph allowed the USSR to seize the strategic initiative and effectively turn the tide of the entire World War II, paving the way for the eventual defeat of the Nazi Germany a little over two years later. (source)

You’d never know that istory talking to linemen or bus driver or high school teacher or city council or …. And youth in college or in high school who will never get to read this article and discuss: “How a Network of Nazi Propagandists Helped Lay the Groundwork for the War in Ukraine”

A mass grave of Red Army soldiers, executed on orders from Franz Halder, at Stalag 307 near Dęblin, Poland.

Don’t let MoveOn fool you — Liz Warren maybe a super capitalist, but that means she is for great wealth misdistribution, great land exploitation, the Monroe Doctrine on steroids, and of course, money, missiles and mush for Ukraine.

Michael Parenti — Peeling back those Shifting Baselines!

The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me.  I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.

How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States. (source)

Most of the 3.5 billion earn an average of $2.50 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world population accounts for just 5 percent of all global income. About 80 percent of all humanity live on less than $10 a day. And the poorest 50 percent  maintain only 7.2 percent of the world’s private consumption. How exactly could they have accumulated an amount of surplus wealth comparable to the 85 filthy richest?

Hundreds of millions live in debt even in “affluent” countries like the United States. They face health care debts, credit card debts, college tuition debts, and so on. Many, probably most who own homes—and don’t live in shacks or under bridges or in old vans—are still straddled with mortgages. This means their net family wealth is negative, minus-zero. They have no  propertied wealth; they live in debt.

Millions among the poorest 50 percent in the world may have cars but most of them also have car payments. They are driving in debt.  In countries like Indonesia, for the millions without private vehicles, there are the overloaded, battered buses, poorly maintained vehicles that specialize in breakdowns and ravine plunges. Among the lowest rungs of the 50 percent are the many who pick thru garbage dumps and send their kids off to work in grim, soul-destroying sweatshops. (source)

The post Shifting Baseline Disorders: Only the One Percent is Bad first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/04/shifting-baseline-disorders-only-the-one-percent-is-bad/feed/ 0 369911 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/28/how-concentrated-wealth-and-corporate-power-nurtures-the-greed-of-thieves/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/28/how-concentrated-wealth-and-corporate-power-nurtures-the-greed-of-thieves/#respond Sat, 28 Jan 2023 13:02:01 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/concentrated-wealth-corporate-greed

What makes for a thieving culture? An overabundance of pickpockets? Tsunamis of burglary and shoplifting?

Most definitely not. To truly gauge a society’s larcenous leanings, many of us would posit, we need to look beyond the nimble-fingered and focus more on the smooth-talkers, the power-suited flimflammers who thrive in any society where significant numbers of people feel a driving need to get rich quick.

The most recent example? Federal prosecutors last month charged the crypto currency CEO phenom Sam Bankman-Fried with committing “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.” The 30-year-old billionaire, the Securities and Exchange Commission charges in a separate filing, built an immense financial empire on a “house of cards.”

The executive now trying to pick up those cards — the new CEO of Bankman-Fried’s FTX cryptocurrency exchange — says his predecessor simply engaged in “old-fashioned embezzlement,” not even stopping to bother with the “highly sophisticated” thieving of Enron’s fabled executive crooks a generation ago.

Right before Bankman-Fried’s brief appearance on America’s economic stage, the nation’s face of fraud belonged to Elizabeth Holmes, the founding CEO of the health-tech company Theranos.

Holmes raised some $900 million from a “star-studded” list of investors who ranged from media mogul Rupert Murdock to Henry Kissinger. Early in 2021, a federal jury convicted her of various frauds in what the Washington Postcalled “the most high-profile test of whether Silicon Valley’s “fake it until you make it” ethos could withstand legal scrutiny.”

The hustles of our Bankman-Frieds and Elizabeth Holmeses can certainly make for entertaining reading. But Freya Berry, a veteran corporate fraud investigator, sees their scams “as not as unusual as you might think” — and not as entertaining either. With “rewards high” and “penalties higher,” she notes, corporate miscreants “go to great pains to conceal” their nefarious ways, even “making death threats to whistleblowers.”

We need these whistleblowers. We also need to understand that our thieving culture rests on more than the outright larceny of our indicted corporate crooks. Our most accomplished corporate thieves, in fact, never fear indictment. They steal in broad daylight. They regularly steal livelihoods — from the thousands upon thousands of men and women who’ve worked ever so diligently, sometimes for many years, to make them fabulously rich.

We’re now living through an intense stretch of this theft. Tech’s top execs are now laying off workers at a fearsome rate. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced plans to pink-slip some 10,000 workers. Amazon is cutting 18,000, Google parent Alphabet 12,000, IBM nearly 4,000. Overall, estimatesForbes, tech firms have so far this month alone given the heave-ho to 56,000 employees.

What makes these layoffs “thefts”? Simple avarice. Investors on Wall Street “expected more growth,” explainsGrid economics analyst Matthew Zeitlin, than Big Tech companies “are currently showing.” That has Big Tech share prices sinking, “and any time share prices fall, investors and executives get antsy — and workers often pay the price.”

Meanwhile, the antsy CEOs slashing all these jobs are continuing to stuff dollars into their own personal pockets, at overall pay rates that rarely dare drop below a quarter-million dollars a week.

This past October, Microsoft disclosed that chief exec Satya Nadella’s annual compensation had jumped 10.2 percent to just under $55 million. Nadella now makes more in one year than the typical Microsoft employee can make in 289 years. Back in 2018, the typical Microsoft worker only had to labor 154 years to earn what the company’s CEO made in just one.

This past December brought news that Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai has a new three-year “performance” package that stands to award him $210 million.

Execs like these set a thieving tone for our entire society. Their grand fortunes don’t just make the rest of us feel ever poorer. They leave us ever more vulnerable to the con artists who promise shortcuts to jackpots.

And this larceny from our corporate world’s most “respected” chief execs supplies the con artists among us with rationalizations for their own scamming behaviors. The corporate big boys play their games, they tell themselves, we play ours.

Societies that let enormous wealth concentrate in the pockets of a few make all this inevitable. They nurture greed and grasping. They always have. They always will.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/28/how-concentrated-wealth-and-corporate-power-nurtures-the-greed-of-thieves/feed/ 0 368062 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/28/strikes-sleaze-and-huge-wealth-gaps-could-hinder-tory-neoliberal-agenda/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/28/strikes-sleaze-and-huge-wealth-gaps-could-hinder-tory-neoliberal-agenda/#respond Sat, 28 Jan 2023 06:16:07 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/truss-sunak-neoliberal-agenda-strikes-trade-unions-nhs-reform-wealth-gap/ OPINION: Market fundamentalism survived the fall of Truss, but could a changing public mood bring about its demise?

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Paul Rogers.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/28/strikes-sleaze-and-huge-wealth-gaps-could-hinder-tory-neoliberal-agenda/feed/ 0 368009 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/18/hiding-wealth-the-walton-and-getty-family-way-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/18/hiding-wealth-the-walton-and-getty-family-way-2/#respond Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:48:45 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/getty-walton-family-hiding-wealth

Much of what we know about the global hidden wealth system comes from leaks from within the wealth defense industry, the wealth managers and tax attorneys that facilitate the wealth vanishing act for their billionaire clients. As I wrote in my book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, this enabling class has helped sequester trillions of dollars in trusts, anonymous shell companies, and offshore tax havens.

The 2016 Panama Papers and the 2021 Pandora Papers were both the result of massive data leaks from inside wealth management firms, reported by the courageous global journalists connected to the International Consortium of investigative journalists. And now, a new blockbuster investigation from The New Yorker traces the decision of a whistleblower — “a disgruntled wealth manager” — to expose how the descendants of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty use Nevada trusts to avoid California taxes.

The Getty disclosure stems from a wrongful termination lawsuit, which along with divorce is one way light occasionally shines onto this shadowy world. Wealth advisor Marlena Sonn worked for several members of the Getty family for eight years, advising them on socially responsible strategies for their investments. But she was troubled by the Getty family’s use of Nevada-based trusts and a Reno-based family office, to maintain the fiction that family members did not live in higher-tax California. When she suggested they pay their California tax obligations, she was fired. The full family gossip is well chronicled in The New Yorker piece.

We are now living through the “golden age of tax avoidance,” thanks to both the increasing concentration of wealth and the expansion of the “wealth defense industry,” a class that focuses on aggressive tax avoidance and dynastic wealth succession. The Inequality.org team estimates more than $30 trillion globally is sequestered by the wealthiest people on the planet, money that societies could be taxing and investing to broaden opportunity for everyone else.

The United States has become a premier tax haven thanks in part to the manipulation of U.S. trust law. Trusts are a lynch-pin in the wealth hiding apparatus. They are an antiquated ownership system that professional enablers have morphed and manipulated to serve the needs of their wealthy clients.

One important analytical point not included in The New Yorker piece is that the wealth defense industry has captured a number of U.S. states and lobbied for changes in trust law. These wealth advisors proclaim they are helping their clients obey the law. But they are actively writing new legislation and lobbying to have them installed.

A powerful case in point: Last week investigative journalists in Florida uncovered how the Walton family, descendants of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, hired tax lawyers and lobbyists to change Florida state family trust law to allow their trusts to exist for a thousand years and have less disclosure obligations. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), after receiving contributions from Walton-backed intermediaries, dutifully signed the trust changes into law over the summer of 2022.

Similarly, the state governments of Nevada and South Dakota — now a global destination for billionaire dynasty trusts — are working together to become the “Delaware of the West,” attracting corporation formation and not levying corporate or income taxation. Nevada also extended its state rule against perpetuities so trusts can exist for 375 years and without the obligation to report beneficiaries. The state is working to keep information sealed about trusts, passing a law in 2009 to exempt trust company documents from public disclosure. They are possibly the only state that does not cooperate with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in sharing data, a vestige from the state’s secrecy around the gambling industry. California, meanwhile, is the opposite, with progressive income and corporate taxation and no exotic manipulations of trust law.

There are over a dozen states actively changing state law to compete for global trust business. And these trust systems are intentionally complicated. Complexity is the bread and butter of the wealth defense industry, who often layer multiple ownership systems to hide the transactions. As former Democratic Senator Carl Levin used to say, “enough with the MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) Trusts,” designed to skirt the law.

But this system can be fixed. The Biden administration is taking important steps towards investing in tax enforcement, especially shutting down some of the manipulations of trust law. But federal lawmakers should pass legislation to shut down the race between states in manipulating trust law. This includes creating a federal “rule against perpetuities’ to limit the lifespan of trusts and a federal registry for trusts that discloses beneficiaries.

In 2020, Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act which requires the disclosure of beneficial ownership of corporations and shell companies. The law could be extended to include oversight of trusts. Institute for Policy Studies Associate Fellow Bob Lord, who is quoted at length in The New Yorker article, argues that Congress should reduce the attractiveness of trusts by levying an excise tax on trust assets, say over $25 million.

The more we learn from courageous whistleblowers like Marlena Sonn, the more outrage and pressure will build to reform trust law and eliminate the games that the Waltons and the Gettys are playing.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Chuck Collins.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/18/hiding-wealth-the-walton-and-getty-family-way-2/feed/ 0 365434 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/18/hiding-wealth-the-walton-and-getty-family-way/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/18/hiding-wealth-the-walton-and-getty-family-way/#respond Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:48:45 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/getty-walton-family-hiding-wealth

Much of what we know about the global hidden wealth system comes from leaks from within the wealth defense industry, the wealth managers and tax attorneys that facilitate the wealth vanishing act for their billionaire clients. As I wrote in my book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, this enabling class has helped sequester trillions of dollars in trusts, anonymous shell companies, and offshore tax havens.

The 2016 Panama Papers and the 2021 Pandora Papers were both the result of massive data leaks from inside wealth management firms, reported by the courageous global journalists connected to the International Consortium of investigative journalists. And now, a new blockbuster investigation from The New Yorker traces the decision of a whistleblower — “a disgruntled wealth manager” — to expose how the descendants of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty use Nevada trusts to avoid California taxes.

The Getty disclosure stems from a wrongful termination lawsuit, which along with divorce is one way light occasionally shines onto this shadowy world. Wealth advisor Marlena Sonn worked for several members of the Getty family for eight years, advising them on socially responsible strategies for their investments. But she was troubled by the Getty family’s use of Nevada-based trusts and a Reno-based family office, to maintain the fiction that family members did not live in higher-tax California. When she suggested they pay their California tax obligations, she was fired. The full family gossip is well chronicled in The New Yorker piece.

We are now living through the “golden age of tax avoidance,” thanks to both the increasing concentration of wealth and the expansion of the “wealth defense industry,” a class that focuses on aggressive tax avoidance and dynastic wealth succession. The Inequality.org team estimates more than $30 trillion globally is sequestered by the wealthiest people on the planet, money that societies could be taxing and investing to broaden opportunity for everyone else.

The United States has become a premier tax haven thanks in part to the manipulation of U.S. trust law. Trusts are a lynch-pin in the wealth hiding apparatus. They are an antiquated ownership system that professional enablers have morphed and manipulated to serve the needs of their wealthy clients.

One important analytical point not included in The New Yorker piece is that the wealth defense industry has captured a number of U.S. states and lobbied for changes in trust law. These wealth advisors proclaim they are helping their clients obey the law. But they are actively writing new legislation and lobbying to have them installed.

A powerful case in point: Last week investigative journalists in Florida uncovered how the Walton family, descendants of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, hired tax lawyers and lobbyists to change Florida state family trust law to allow their trusts to exist for a thousand years and have less disclosure obligations. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), after receiving contributions from Walton-backed intermediaries, dutifully signed the trust changes into law over the summer of 2022.

Similarly, the state governments of Nevada and South Dakota — now a global destination for billionaire dynasty trusts — are working together to become the “Delaware of the West,” attracting corporation formation and not levying corporate or income taxation. Nevada also extended its state rule against perpetuities so trusts can exist for 375 years and without the obligation to report beneficiaries. The state is working to keep information sealed about trusts, passing a law in 2009 to exempt trust company documents from public disclosure. They are possibly the only state that does not cooperate with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in sharing data, a vestige from the state’s secrecy around the gambling industry. California, meanwhile, is the opposite, with progressive income and corporate taxation and no exotic manipulations of trust law.

There are over a dozen states actively changing state law to compete for global trust business. And these trust systems are intentionally complicated. Complexity is the bread and butter of the wealth defense industry, who often layer multiple ownership systems to hide the transactions. As former Democratic Senator Carl Levin used to say, “enough with the MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) Trusts,” designed to skirt the law.

But this system can be fixed. The Biden administration is taking important steps towards investing in tax enforcement, especially shutting down some of the manipulations of trust law. But federal lawmakers should pass legislation to shut down the race between states in manipulating trust law. This includes creating a federal “rule against perpetuities’ to limit the lifespan of trusts and a federal registry for trusts that discloses beneficiaries.

In 2020, Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act which requires the disclosure of beneficial ownership of corporations and shell companies. The law could be extended to include oversight of trusts. Institute for Policy Studies Associate Fellow Bob Lord, who is quoted at length in The New Yorker article, argues that Congress should reduce the attractiveness of trusts by levying an excise tax on trust assets, say over $25 million.

The more we learn from courageous whistleblowers like Marlena Sonn, the more outrage and pressure will build to reform trust law and eliminate the games that the Waltons and the Gettys are playing.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Chuck Collins.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/18/hiding-wealth-the-walton-and-getty-family-way/feed/ 0 365433 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/18/because-congress-wont-act-lawmakers-in-seven-states-team-up-to-introduce-wealth-tax-bills/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/18/because-congress-wont-act-lawmakers-in-seven-states-team-up-to-introduce-wealth-tax-bills/#respond Wed, 18 Jan 2023 16:33:13 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/states-wealth-tax-bills

Frustrated with federal inaction in the face of soaring inequality, Democratic lawmakers in seven states across the U.S. are teaming up this week to simultaneously introduce wealth tax bills targeting the fortunes of billionaires and other rich individuals who have seen their net worth explode in recent years.

Officially launching on Thursday, the first-of-its-kind effort is led by state lawmakers in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, and Washington—collectively home to around 60% of the country's wealth.

"If the federal government won't act, we the states will," said Alex Lee, a California assemblymember who will join several other state lawmakers at a press conference on Thursday.

According to TheWashington Post, which got an early look at the text of the coming legislation, "some of the state bills resemble the 'wealth tax' that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pitched during her 2020 presidential candidacy."

Emmanuel Saez, a prominent Berkeley economist who helped craft Warren's plan, had a hand in the wealth tax proposals that will be unveiled this week by lawmakers in California, New York, and Washington who are taking aim at the assets—not just the incomes—of the mega-rich.

"In four states—the three that drafted bills with Saez’s involvement, along with Illinois—lawmakers say they will float versions of a tax on wealthy people's holdings, or so-called 'mark-to-market' taxes on their unrealized capital gains," the Post reported Tuesday. "Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, and New York lawmakers, meanwhile, are proposing a change based on some Democrats' frustration with national tax policy. The federal government taxes capital gains—the income that a person makes from selling a stock or similar asset—at a separate rate from other income."

"The highest earners pay a 20% tax on capital gains while paying a 37% tax on wages—a disparity that some Democrats want to close," the Post continued. "If federal rates on capital gains are lower, state rates on capital gains should be higher, these lawmakers argue."

The slate of bills set to be introduced Thursday also includes proposed changes to state-level estate taxes, including a Maryland plan to lower the exemption cutoff from the current level of $5 million to $1 million.

An analysis released Tuesday by the Patriotic Millionaires and other progressive advocacy groups found that there are nearly 1.5 million individuals in the U.S. with a net worth of $5 million or more.

"Their total wealth is equal to $28.02 trillion," the analysis shows. "This also includes 64,500 individuals with $50 million or more with combined wealth of $12.5 trillion and 728 billionaires. For every $100 of wealth created in the United States over the past decade, $37.4 has gone to the top 1%, while the bottom 50% received only $2."

The groups estimated that a federal "wealth tax of 2% on millionaires with wealth over $5 million, 3% on those with wealth above $50 million, and 5% on American billionaires would raise $583.5 billion annually," enough revenue to "increase education spending by 47.3%."

In a tweet on Wednesday, Warren wrote that "the majority of Americans agree: it's time for a wealth tax on the ultra-rich in America."

"States are stepping up to make billionaires pay their fair share, and it's time for Congress to take action too," Warren added.

\u201cThe majority of Americans agree: it's time for a wealth tax on the ultra-rich in America. States are stepping up to make billionaires pay their fair share, and it\u2019s time for Congress to take action too.\nhttps://t.co/RtsoeGjkg8\u201d

— Elizabeth Warren (@Elizabeth Warren) 1674052921

The state lawmakers' wealth tax campaign was coordinated by SiX Action—an arm of the State Innovation Exchange—and the State Revenue Alliance. In a press release on Wednesday, the coalition said the new initiative "demonstrates that state legislatures are leading the charge in enacting transformational policies on key issues of the day, including tax justice—particularly in light of a split Congress."

But the Democratic lawmakers' approach stands in marked contrast to the tax policies that Republican legislators are currently pursuing—and have already enacted—at both the state and federal levels.

As researchers at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) wrote Tuesday, "one-third of the 41 states with income taxes have opted for a flat rate," a regressive tax structure that "guarantees that wealthy families' total state and local tax bill will be a lower share of their income than that paid by families of more modest means."

Republicans in the U.S. House, meanwhile, are pushing extreme legislation that would abolish the Internal Revenue Service and replace federal income taxes with a highly regressive national consumption tax.

"The bill is a tax cut for the wealthy and a tax hike on working people," the progressive advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness said Wednesday. "MAGA Republicans don't have the power to make this law now, but they’re playing the long game for a tax code that tilts even more in favor of the rich and corporations. Their far-right tactics show us their attacks on working people won't stop, they'll only get more aggressive."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/18/because-congress-wont-act-lawmakers-in-seven-states-team-up-to-introduce-wealth-tax-bills/feed/ 0 365336 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/16/new-oxfam-report-on-inequality-and-extreme-wealth-proves-the-need-to-tax-the-rich/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/16/new-oxfam-report-on-inequality-and-extreme-wealth-proves-the-need-to-tax-the-rich/#respond Mon, 16 Jan 2023 16:22:46 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/new-oxfam-report-on-inequality-and-extreme-wealth-proves-the-need-to-tax-the-rich

Billionaires, in particular, have seen their wealth explode since 2020, adding around $1.7 million to their net worth for every $1 in wealth gained by a person in the bottom 90% of the global income distribution. According to Oxfam, billionaires' fortunes have grown by an average of $2.7 billion per day since 2020.

Meanwhile, nearly 2 billion workers across the globe likely saw inflation rise at a faster pace than their wages, resulting in a real pay cut that has increased poverty, hunger, and other hardships.

"While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams," said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International. "Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires—a roaring ‘20s boom for the world's richest."

Oxfam's report also spotlights how corporations have taken advantage of crises such as pandemic-induced supply chain woes and Russia's war on Ukraine to drive up prices for consumers around the world, making it more difficult for billions of people to afford basic necessities.

The analysis finds that at least 95 food and energy corporations more than doubled their profits in 2022, bringing in $306 billion in windfall profits and dishing out 84% of it to their shareholders.

"The Walton dynasty, which owns half of Walmart, received $8.5 billion over the last year," Oxfam notes. "Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, owner of major energy corporations, has seen this wealth soar by $42 billion (46%) in 2022 alone. Excess corporate profits have driven at least half of inflation in Australia, the U.S., and the U.K."

"Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn't lift all ships—just the superyachts."

To combat skyrocketing inequality produced by excess corporate profits and the disproportionate wealth gains of the ultra-rich—who also contribute far more to the climate crisis than the rest of humanity—Oxfam argues that governments around the world should institute "a systemic and wide-ranging increase in taxation" targeting billionaires who often pay astonishingly low tax rates.

The new report cites the example of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who—according to Internal Revenue Service documents obtained by ProPublica—paid a true tax rate of just over 3% between 2014 and 2018.

By comparison, Oxfam observes, "Aber Christine, a flour vendor in Uganda, makes $80 a month and pays a tax rate of 40%."

The aid group's report makes clear that Musk is hardly alone among billionaires in reaping massive wealth gains—much of it unrealized stock appreciation—while paying little tax.

"Every billionaire is a policy failure," the report says. "The very existence of booming billionaires and record profits, while most people face austerity, rising poverty, and a cost-of-living crisis, is evidence of an economic system that fails to deliver for humanity. For too long, governments, international financial institutions, and elites have misled the world with a fictional story about trickle-down economics, in which low tax and high gains for a few would ultimately benefit us all. It is a story without any basis in truth."

It's unclear whether the Davos summit—dominated by individuals and corporations committed to preserving and growing their wealth—will feature discussion of anything close to the tax policy that Oxfam recommends. Specifically, the group calls on policymakers to "permanently increase taxes on the richest 1%... to a minimum of 60% of their income from both labor and capital, with higher rates for multi-millionaires and billionaires."

Oxfam also urges governments to "tax the wealth of the richest 1% at rates high enough to significantly reduce the numbers and wealth of the richest people, and redistribute these resources. This includes implementing inheritance, property, and land taxes, as well as net wealth taxes."

Taxation is not mentioned in an overview of the World Economic Forum's central topics.

In a statement, Bucher said that "taxing the super-rich and big corporations is the door out of today's overlapping crises."

"It's time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow 'trickling down' to everyone else," said Bucher. "Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn't lift all ships—just the superyachts."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Last month The Daily Blog offered its New Year infamous news media gongs — and blasts — for 2022. In this extract, editor and publisher Martyn Bradbury names the mainstream media “blind spots”.

Graham Adams over at The Platform made the argument this year that the failure of mainstream media to engage with the debates occurring online is a threat to democracy.

With trust in New Zealand media at an all time low, I wondered what is the list of topics that you simply are NOT allowed to discuss on NZ mainstream media.

Here is my list of 17 topics over 30 years in New Zealand media:

1. Palestine: You cannot talk about the brutal occupation of Palestine by Israel in NZ media. It’s just not allowed, any discussion has to be framed as “Poor Israelis being terrorised by evil angry Muslims”. There is never focus on the brutal occupation and when it ever does emerge in the media it’s always insinuated that any criticism is anti-Semitism.
2. Child Poverty NEVER adult poverty: We only talk about child poverty because they deserve our pity. Adults in poverty can go screw themselves. Despite numbering around 800,000, adults in poverty are there because they “choose” to be there. The most important myth of neoliberalism is that your success is all your own, as is your failure. If an adult is in poverty, neoliberal cultural mythology states that is all on them and we have no obligation to help. That’s why we only ever talk endlessly about children in poverty because the vast majority of hard-hearted New Zealanders want to blame adults in poverty on them so we can pretend to be egalitarian without actually having to implement any policy.
3. The Neoliberal NZ experiment: You are never allowed to question the de-unionised work force that amputated wages, you can never question selling off our assets, you can never criticise the growth über alles mentality, you are never allowed to attack the free market outcomes and you can’t step back and evaluate the 35-year neoliberal experiment in New Zealand because you remind the wage slaves of the horror of it all.
4. Class: You cannot point out that the demarcation line in a capitalist democracy like New Zealand is the 1 percent richest plus their 9 percent enablers vs the 90 percent rest of us. Oh, you can wank on and on about your identity and your feelings about your identity in a never ending intersectionist diversity pronoun word salad, but you can’t point out that it’s really the 90 percent us vs the 10 percent them class break down because that would be effective and we can’t have effective on mainstream media when feelings are the currency to audience solidarity in an ever diminishing pie of attention.
5. Immigration: It must always be framed as positive. It can never be argued that it is a cheap and lazy growth model that pushes down wages and places domestic poor in competition with International student language school scams and exploited migrant workers. Any criticism of Immigration makes you a xenophobe and because the Middle Classes like travelling and have global skills for sale, they see any criticism of migrants as an attack on their economic privileges.
6. Hypertourism: We are never allowed to ask “how many is too many, you greedies”. The tourism industry that doesn’t give a shit about us locals, live for the 4 million tourists who visit annually. We are not allowed to ask why that amount of air travel is sustainable, we are not allowed to ask why selling Red Bull and V at tourist stops is somehow an economic miracle and we are certainly not allowed to question why these tourists aren’t directly being taxed meaningfully for the infrastructure they clog.
7. Dairy as a Sunset Industry: We are never allowed to point out that the millisecond the manufactured food industry can make synthetic milk powder, they will dump us as a base ingredient and the entire dairy industry overnight will collapse. With synthetic milks and meats here within a decade, it is time to radically cull herds, focus on only organic and free range sustainable herds and move away from mass production dairy forever. No one is allowed to mention the iceberg that is looming up in front of the Fonteera Titanic.
8. B-E-L-I-E-V-E victims: It’s like How to Kill a MockingBird was never written. People making serious allegations should be taken seriously, not B-E-L-I-E-V-E-D. That’s a tad fanatical Christian for me. It’s led to a change in our sexual assault laws where the Greens and Labour removed the only defence to rape so as to get more convictions, which when you think about it, is cult like and terrifying. Gerrymandering the law to ensure conviction isn’t justice, but in the current B-E-L-I-E-V-E victims culture it sure is and anyone saying otherwise is probably a rape apologist who should be put in prison immediately.
9. The Trans debate: This debate is so toxic and anyone asking any question gets immediately decried as transphobic. I’ve seen nuclear reactor meltdowns that are less radioactive than this debate. I’m so terrified I’m not going to say anything other than “please don’t hurt my family” for even mentioning it.
10. It’s never climate change for this catastrophic weather event: Catastrophic weather event after catastrophic weather event but it’s never connected to global warming! It’s like the weather is changing cataclysmically around us but because it’s not 100 percent sure that that cigarette you are smoking right now is the one that causes that lump inside you to become cancer, so we can’t connect this catastrophic weather event with a climate warming model that states clearly that we will see more and more catastrophic weather events.
11. Scoops: No New Zealand media will never acknowledge another media’s scoop in spite of a united front being able to generate more exposure and better journalism.
12. Te Reo fanaticism: You are not allowed to point out that barely 5 percent of the population speak Te Reo and that everyone who militantly fires up about it being an “official language” never seem that antagonistic about the lack of sign language use. Look, my daughter goes to a Māori immersion class and when she speaks Te Reo it makes me cry joyfully and I feel more connected to NZ than any other single moment. But endlessly ramming it down people’s throats seems woke language policing rather than a shared cultural treasure. You can still be an OK human being and not speak Te Reo.
13. Māori land confiscation: Māori suffered losing 95 percent of their land in less than a century, they were almost decimated by disease and technology brought via colonisation, they endured the 1863 Settlements Act, they survived blatant lies and falsehoods devised to create the pretext for confiscation, and saw violence in the Waikato. Māori have lived throughout that entire experience and still get told to be grateful because Pākehā brought blankets, tobacco and “technology”.
14. The Disabled: Almost 25 percent of New Zealand is disabled, yet for such a staggeringly huge number of people, their interests get little mention in the mainstream media.
15. Corporate Iwi: You can’t bring up that that the corporate model used for Iwi to negotiate settlements is outrageous and has created a Māori capitalist elite who are as venal as Pākehā capitalists.
16. Police worship: One of the most embarrassing parts about living in New Zealand is the disgusting manner in which so many acquiesce to the police. It’s never the cop’s fault when they shoot someone, it’s never the cop’s fault when they chase people to their death, it’s never the cop’s fault for planting evidence, it’s never the cops fault for using interrogation methods that bully false confessions out of vulnerable people. I think there is a settler cultural chip on our shoulders that always asks the mounted constabulary to bash those scary Māori at the edge of town because we are frightened of what goes bump in the night. We willingly give police total desecration to kill and maim and frame as long as long as they keep us safe. It’s sickening.
17. House prices will increase FOREVER! Too many middle class folk are now property speculators and they must see their values climb to afford the extra credit cards the bank sends them. We can never talk about house prices coming down. They must never fall. Screw the homeless, scre the generations locked out of home ownership and screw the working poor. Buying a house is only for the children of the middle classes now. Screw everyone else. Boomer cradle to the grave subsidisations that didn’t extend to any other generation. Free Ben and Jerry Ice Cream for every Boomer forever! ME! ME! ME!

You’ll also note that because so many media are dependent on real estate advertising, there’s never been a better time to buy!

• Pacific Media Watch notes that the the brutal Indonesian military occupation of West Papua, a half century of colonisation, and violations of human rights ought to be cited on this list too.

Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury is a New Zealand media commentator, former radio and TV host, and former executive producer of Alt TV — a now-defunct alternative music and culture channel. He is publisher of The Daily Blog and writes blogs at Tumeke! and TDB. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Today, the top 0.01% of the wealthiest people in America hold more of the country's total wealth than that same group did during the Gilded Age, a time of unrestrained financial speculation—but also of grinding poverty, corruption, and racial strife. That extreme concentration of wealth is in large part attributable to the dominance of Wall Street over American life, and bankers and investors' willingness to manufacture and exploit crises, when the spoils are greatest. The centrality of finance in the United States and across the globe arose through successive waves of neoliberal reform over the last half century involving the privatization of profits and externalization of risk.

The 2007 financial crisis led to widespread distrust of banks and government, but rather than creating a fairer economic system, it gave rise to new trends in finance that expanded speculators' influence in the global economy and continued to facilitate massive accumulations of wealth. Since the crisis, the financial sector has witnessed the rise of private equity (PE) as a major-league wealth maker, such that founders of the largest PE firms have become multi-billionaires.

This infrastructural power and concentration of ownership, largely unknown to the public, allows BlackRock and these other "big three" firms enormous influence over nearly every industry in the world.

In 2021, 25 members of the Forbes billionaire list made their money in PE, notably Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts (KKR) founder Henry Kravis (net worth $7.4 billion) and Stephen Schwarzman (around $30 billion net worth), the cofounder of the PE giant Blackstone, which manages about $1 trillion, a mammoth sum.

PE is a rebranded form of the leveraged buyouts (LBOs) of the Reagan era, memorialized in Oliver Stone's Oscar-winning film Wall Street—a fictionalized account of how real-life banker-predators like Ivan Boesky speculated on corporate takeovers in the go-go 1980s using illegal insider information, justified with survival-of-the-fittest ideologies and slogans like "greed is good." In that dog-eat-dog world of risk arbitrage, insider information was both money and power. The racket involved buying stock in "target" companies, pushing up bids beyond their actual value, and forcing takeovers.

In the 1980s, LBOs and mergers and acquisitions (M&As) were among Wall Street's hottest techniques for making massive amounts of money. LBOs took public companies private by borrowing against their assets to pay off shareholders (usually at inflated stock prices), with financing from banks and junk bonds. They tended to involve incredibly high debt levels, which were used to justify shop-floor cost cuts at a time when unions were far too weak to prevent them. After pieces of target companies were sold and their workforces "streamlined," the "re-engineered" companies would go public again with new and improved stock prices. LBO players claimed to be purchasing undervalued assets to unlock corporations' value and "rescue" them, but the buyouts were not for innovation and product development—they were for getting rich quickly.

For target companies, LBOs were rarely profitable, but they were big money makers for the bankers and cadres of lawyers and specialists who collected fees on the massively inflated buyout prices. Today, billion-dollar buyout and merger deals total in the trillions and PE has become a powerful engine of financialization, profoundly deepening the reach of wealthy investors in all parts of the economy. As of 2019, assets under PE management totaled more than $6.5 trillion, and in 2020, PE accounted for 6.5% of GDP, directly employing nearly 12 million workers and its suppliers employing an additional 7.5 million. By the middle of 2018, PE owned more companies than the number of businesses listed on all of the U.S. stock exchanges combined.

How PE operates

In broad strokes, a PE fund is an unregulated pool of money operating outside of public markets that elite investors buy into. Given the size of the initial outlay, those investors tend to be classified as "high net worth" or are institutional investors, such as universities, insurance companies or pension funds. Enabled by low interest rates and a politically friendly climate, the pooled funds are used to invest in or buy a target company—toy stores, newspapers, hospitals, pretty much anything under the sun—and then load it up with debt (as much as 90% of the sticker price) to finance the purchase. The borrowed money is, theoretically, used as working capital to restructure the company and "unlock" its value, while paying large dividends and funneling profits back to investors. Then, the idea is, they sell the company at a profit.

PE is so lucrative in part because of its generous "2 and 20" fee structure—2% in annual fees, plus a 20% cut of the profits above a certain level. Under the current tax code, that 20% is considered "carried interest" and is thus classified as capital gains, which saves PE firms tens of millions each year in taxes.

PE advertises itself as a benevolent force, as just a group of well-intended entrepreneurs investing in underperforming companies and restructuring them so they become more productive and efficient, and thus good for the economy. Some are. But most of the companies taken over by PE start off healthy and only become distressed after being raided for their value. The purpose is not to make companies productive citizens—it is to maximize the fund's profits and increase a company's appeal to buyers by cutting its operating costs, while shifting the risks associated with their investment onto shell companies and workers.

Companies acquired through leveraged buyouts are more likely to lower wages, cut retirement plans, and have higher rates of bankruptcy. Instead of reinvesting profits, as someone trying to build a company would, PE strips them of workers and assets and saddles them with untenable debt repayment schedules to "discipline managers." Such was the case with the dozens of large retailers that PE firms drove into the ground—including the otherwise profitable Toys-R-Us—wiping out millions of jobs and shorting workers of their severance pay.

The volatility that PE has introduced into the workforce is matched by high-risk lending to companies with poor credit and already high debt loads. PE's incentive structure is such that the more debt one raises against a target company, the less cash that is needed to pay for it, and the higher the returns once the company is sold. PE has also introduced dangerous levels of corporate concentration and monopoly by driving target companies out of business or merging them with other firms in the same industry.

After the 2007 financial crisis, for example, Blackstone bought up chunks of "troubled" real estate assets and used them to found a large single-family home rental company, Invitation Homes Inc. After "streamlining" its operations, Invitation Homes went public, then merged with another PE-backed business to create the United States' largest single-family rental company—all on the backs of millions of people forced out of their homes due to a crisis that the banks created. As of 2022, giant PE firms continue to buy up real estate—fostering an epic housing bubble and major affordability crisis, especially for renters—and create increasingly high-risk, shadowy, complex investment vehicles and shell companies to profit off overvalued or worthless assets.

Profiting off sickness

PE's raiding of the U.S. healthcare system—one of the country's most essential industries, accounting for a fifth of GDP—has proven disastrous. As a decentralized and fragmented industry composed of small operators, healthcare was ripe for investors looking to churn profits of mergers and by controlling markets. In 2020, large PE firms invested more than $340 billion to buy healthcare-related operations around the world, including rural hospitals, nursing homes, ambulance companies, and healthcare billing and debt collection systems.

This concentration has led to price gouging, hospital closings, predatory billing, cuts in hospital infrastructure and workforces, and declining quality of care. According to a study of PE-owned nursing homes, researchers found "robust evidence of declines in patient health and compliance with care standards" after PE firms took over the facilities. Moreover, despite receiving at least $1.5 billion in interest-free loans from Covid-relief funding streams, PE-backed healthcare providers cut workers' pay and benefits to make up for lost profits due to the emergency suspension of elective surgeries. They also contributed to shortages of ventilators, masks, and other equipment because their managers did not want to lose potential profits by keeping such equipment on the shelves in their hospitals.

PE managers have been caught grossly overcharging for medical treatment. In 2020, NBC News reported that while the median cost for treating a broken arm in an emergency room was about $665, Blackstone's TeamHealth charged almost $3,000. In a typical emergency room, NBC found, a physician group might charge three to four times the Medicare rate, but TeamHealth charged six times the rate. There is also the problem of "surprise billing"—when a patient's hospital is in their insurance network, but not the doctors who are treating them. PE firms found that, especially in emergency rooms, they could squeeze out profits by moving doctors out of network and then extracting higher prices from patients unaware that they are being treated by out-of-network providers.

Naturally, when Congress tried to thwart this criminal behavior, PE lobby groups spent a fortune protecting their interests, including a benevolent-sounding organization called Doctor-Patient Unity, which spent more than $28 million on ads funded by PE-backed companies. The bill did not pass, and to the Biden administration's credit, its Health and Human Services Administration passed a rule in July 2021 banning this egregious practice.

The other big three

The years since the financial crisis also witnessed the rise of just a handful of asset management firms as a dominant force in the world economy. Asset managers are companies that run investment funds for a variety of retail, institutional and private investors. While traditionally, ownership of corporate shares has tended to be dispersed across many diverse investors and owners of assets, this vast pool of corporate equity has become increasingly controlled and owned by a small, concentrated group of intermediary financial institutions.

Today, a "big three" of asset management firms—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors—together are the largest shareholder in almost 90% of the companies in the S&P 500 index, including Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil and GE. As of 2020, they were also the largest shareholder in 40% of all publicly listed U.S. companies, employing 23.5 million people, and with combined assets of over $15 trillion—an amount equivalent to more than three-quarters of GDP. The largest of these firms, BlackRock, not only controls shares in all of these companies but also has been hired by leading governments and central banks to advise them, in some cases making decisions about institutions in which BlackRock is a shareholder.

This infrastructural power and concentration of ownership, largely unknown to the public, allows BlackRock and these other "big three" firms enormous influence over nearly every industry in the world. Among fossil fuel companies alone, in 2020 BlackRock managed more than $87 billion worth of shares, giving it a major hand in decision making over how to combat the climate crisis, or not combat it at all.

Political economist Benjamin Braun termed this concentration of ownership "asset manager capitalism" to indicate the systemic effects of this acute consolidation and the novel corporate and financial architecture it has fostered. With a small group of financial companies controlling this architecture and an already large and still growing amount of wealth, they are on course to one day hold voting control of every major corporation and wield an immense, systemic level of power over governments and the global economy.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Heather Gautney.

Only the most privileged members of North Korean society are allowed to live in Pyongyang, and most North Koreans can only dream of ever visiting, so being selected for the tour is considered a great honor.

“The farmers who visited Pyongyang said they were envious that Pyongyang residents receive better food rations, live in good houses with bright lights, and ride around on buses and subways wearing fancy clothes, a resident of Unjon county in the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

The farmers were left wondering why they should work so hard to increase output only to give Pyongyangers a better life, the source said.

“Pyongyang residents enjoy all kinds of benefits that rural residents do not receive, just because they are citizens of the capital, so the farmers are angry that the authorities are emphasizing that they must support the country, but the fruits of their labor are only used to take care of Pyongyang residents,” he said.

According to the source, the farmers’ excursion to Pyongyang, hosted by the Union of Agricultural Workers of Korea, has happened every year since 1985 during the agricultural off-season.

The union invites the farmers that achieved the highest yields and exemplary farmers recommended by cooperative farms. They get the honor of seeing the city’s most important museums, the zoo, the circus theater, and the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun – the final resting place of national founder Kim Il Sung – the source said.

“Most of the farmers living in rural areas in the provinces have never been to Pyongyang. Everyone wants to go on a field trip to Pyongyang,” he said.

In years past, the government footed the bill for the tour, but now it is so cash-strapped that each farmer has to shell out 200,000 won (about U.S. $24), so some of the farmers who were selected for the trip refused to go.

“Authorities expect farmers to energetically innovate in farming next year, motivated by their trip to Pyongyang, but the farmers who went there ended up questioning why they’ve worked so hard all their lives,” the source said.

A resident of Hongwon county in the eastern province of South Hamgyong said that the 50 farmers selected from his county came back angry that the authorities always put Pyongyang first, to the point that the people there are “living in another world.”

“The farmers were surprised to see Pyongyang changing so rapidly with the  construction of new streets. They also marveled that the residents there get larger food rations, including bonus rations for holiday celebrations, unlike rural residents,” the second source said. “They said that the sight of Pyongyang residents riding city buses and subways wearing colorful clothes and shiny shoes was very offensive to them since they have to go out to work in the fields wearing shabby clothes all year round.”

He said the farmers work from dawn until dusk in the summer to feed the country, but don’t get enough to eat from the government’s distribution system.

“It’s simply unfair that only Pyongyang residents receive benefits like adequate food rations,” he said.  

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chang Gyu Ahn for RFA Korean.

But the years that followed brought a series of crushing disappointments. A corruption scandal sunk the country into economic and political turmoil and an insurgency swept through the oil-rich Cabo Delgado province, destroying schools and hospitals and displacing thousands. It all happened before a single ounce of gas was shipped for export. 

Today, Mozambique is still hoping to use its fossil fuel resources to develop its economy, a story that has played out across the continent, often to disastrous effects. From the vast deserts of Algeria to the delicate peatlands of Namibia, hundreds of mostly foreign-owned corporations are exploring new fuel reserves, prompting claims that the continent will become oil’s “final frontier.” But if the world is to limit global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, no new oil and gas infrastructure can be developed, according to the International Energy Agency. Even as oil giants like Shell and TotalEnergies set up shop in Namibia and Angola, a wealth of recent research has demonstrated that Africa also has immense, largely untapped potential for renewable energy. Despite pleas from environmental advocates across the continent to pursue this path instead, governments have held tight to the idea that tapping fossil reserves is essential for expanding their economies, reducing poverty, and providing power to millions of Africans. 

“Africa wants to send a message that we are going to develop all of our energy resources for the benefit of our people because our issue is energy poverty,” said Maggy Shino, Namibia’s petroleum commissioner, in an interview with Reuters at the United Nations Climate Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, last month.

With 89 percent of the liquified natural gas from the new infrastructure slated for export to Europe, some advocates have questioned how far these projects will actually go toward increasing electricity access for ordinary Africans. More troublingly, a growing body of research suggests that rather than serving as a boon for development, major fuel discoveries tend to spawn corruption and economic instability in countries that lack strong financial institutions and legal systems. This, experts told Grist, is what happened in Mozambique, where the promise of economic growth led to rapid increases in borrowing and sparked violence over access to resources before they ever left the ground. 

Lars Burr, a professor of political economy at Roskilde University in Denmark, said that Africa’s colonial history and its relatively small contribution to climate change make drilling for fossil fuels on the continent a question of fairness. “There’s an environmental justice case for African governments being able to consume certain amounts of coal, gas, and oil in order to develop their countries. That’s one side of it.” The other side, he said, is how much these countries are really getting from developing their oil and gas industries. “That’s a difficult one, because the track records are poor.”

For decades, academics have been studying the “resource curse,” a phenomenon in which countries endowed with abundant natural resources wind up with worse social and economic outcomes after they cash in. This “paradox of plenty” has been seen across Africa, particularly in the continent’s two largest oil-producing states. In the early 2000s, billions of dollars in revenue from deepwater exploration off the coast of Angola went missing after government elites siphoned the funds away from a population that lacked basic public services after decades of civil war. In Nigeria, weak regulations have enabled a quantity of oil equivalent to 50 Exxon Valdez disasters to spill into farms, forests, and rivers, devastating the environment and nearby towns.

What can explain the apparent paradox, this riches-to-rags story? Scholars have pointed out that governments hungry to cash in on major fuel discoveries tend to pull resources away from other vital sectors of the economy such as agriculture, thereby constricting their development. Another explanation points to weak financial institutions, regulatory agencies, and legal systems that fail to stave off corruption and protect against environmental abuses. While these patterns have been observed in many oil-rich nations across Africa and the world, experts emphasized that political conditions, not wealth of natural resources, are what determine whether discoveries will cause more harm than good.

“Resources by their nature are not a curse,” said Erik Katovich, a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute of Economics and Econometrics at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. However, “if a country already deals with conflict or corruption or instability, throwing millions of dollars in oil revenues into the mix is only going to exacerbate any sort of institutional weaknesses that you already have.”

More recent research suggests that these effects are not only reserved for the period after governments receive windfalls from fossil fuels. In what’s called the “presource curse,” the anticipation of oil and gas revenues may engender corruption and lead governments to prematurely restructure their economies and pile on debt. 

After Anadarko made its first natural gas discovery in the deep waters of Mozambique’s Rovuma Basin in 2010, billions of investment dollars poured into the country’s Cabo Delgado province, a remote, forested region near Mozambique’s northern border with Tanzania. As oil giants such as ExxonMobil and France’s TotalEnergies rushed to find and develop new fuel reserves, government officials in the capital Maputo took out $2 billion in secret loans to start companies that would provide shipyard services and security for these oil and gas companies. After news of the scandal broke in 2016, the International Monetary Fund suspended financial assistance to Mozambique, sparking an economic crisis that saw the national currency lose a third of its value. The following year, an outbreak of violence in the oil-producing province was quickly linked to the government’s lucrative deals with foreign firms.

The turmoil following Anadarko’s discovery was “a matter of governance,” said José Macuane, a professor of political science at the University Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo. “You have institutions that are not able to address aspirations for development.”

Despite authoring a paper that explores the “presource curse” in Mozambique, Macuane isn’t quick to discount the potential benefits of fossil fuel extraction in the country’s north, where the government started exporting natural gas from last month. Selling this gas, he reasoned, could help Mozambique eventually shift to renewable energy and catch up with the rest of the world without relying on foreign aid. (Roughly 40 percent of the population has access to electricity. Although officials have promoted solar power in rural areas, it accounts for less than 1 percent of the country’s total energy supply.) 

Such a prospect, he admitted, is challenging given the state of the country’s government, which is still reeling from violence in the north and the decade-old corruption scandal that tanked the economy. 

Nonetheless, Macuane expressed frustration with climate activists, particularly those from the West, who he characterized as pushing for a moratorium on fossil fuel extraction in Africa without sufficiently reckoning with the economic reality that many developing nations face. 

“Just because we had a case of presource curse, I don’t think we should abandon our natural resources,” he said. “For us to catch up to technology, human capital, and to make a transition, we need resources. Which will be the country to fund it?”

Countless experts have warned about the perils of relying on fossil fuel resources given their unpredictability in global markets. Katovich said that petrostates, nations that depend on fossil fuel exports, risk financial trouble when events such as the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine roil oil and gas markets.

“If your economy is too dependent on natural resources, you’re exposed to a lot of volatility which is out of your control, driven by world events beyond your borders,” he said. Such price swings make it hard for governments to carry out long-term social welfare plans like funding schools and building new electrical grids — even if they wanted to.

In a world that is starting to look beyond fossil fuels, this uncertainty around their future value is the biggest challenge facing petrostates. The falling cost of developing renewables has challenged the notion that natural gas could be used as a “transition fuel” in coal-reliant countries like India and Germany. A study published in May found that it is now more economical for countries to switch straight from coal to renewables instead of importing gas from abroad. Last year, the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based think tank, reported that fossil fuel-producing countries could see their oil and gas revenues tank by more than 50 percent over the next two decades. 

That’s why African climate activists are calling on their governments to stop investing billions in infrastructure that might not serve them several decades from now. But at the annual United Nations climate conference in Egypt last month, those demands largely fell on deaf ears, said Dean Bhebhe, a South Africa-based climate activist with the Don’t Gas Africa campaign. 

“We got to a point where climate activists were labeled as anti-development,” Bhebhe told Grist. “Our argument was essentially that Africa has every right to develop, but because of the history of ‘extractivism’ of coal and oil, surely fossil fuel production does not provide the answer to improved socio-economic [conditions] across Africa. Development needs to center human rights.”

Campaigners with climate justice organizations like Don’t Gas Africa and Power Shift Africa point out that many African countries could be rich with renewable power. The IEA estimates that Africa holds 60 percent of the world’s solar power potential but only 1 percent of its generation capacity. A separate analysis from the International Finance Group found that much of the continent’s wind is faster than 8.5 meters per second, making it ideal for wind farms. The report also identified significant wind capacity in Mozambique, Nigeria, and other countries. While these forms of alternative energy are cheaper to develop than liquid natural gas pipelines and offshore oil rigs, they still require money that many developing countries don’t have. 

The outcome of last month’s U.N. climate summit could help address that. In a historic agreement that has been hailed as a major win for the global climate justice movement, wealthy nations agreed to create a loss and damage fund that will provide financial support to countries that have historically contributed little to climate change but suffer deep economic losses as a result of it. In addition to offering resources for disaster recovery in places like Pakistan, where historic floods recently submerged a third of the country, the fund is meant to help developing nations construct green infrastructure that they would otherwise be unable to afford. 

Bhebhe said the fund is a step in the right direction, but added that until certain details are ironed out, including which countries will receive financing and how it will be distributed, it can only be considered a win on paper. Green financing without also abandoning fossil fuel extraction on public lands is “like being in a bathroom with a tub filling up with water and instead of turning off the tap, you’re like ‘We’ll buy more mops!’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline African countries are tapping their fossil fuel wealth. Why aren’t they getting rich? on Dec 8, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lylla Younes.

Billionaire Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest men in the world and the CEO of BNSF Railway's parent company, saw his wealth jump by nearly $1.4 billion in a single day earlier this week, a sum that could easily fund 15 days of paid sick leave for every rail worker in the United States.

BNSF is one of the major railroad giants refusing to budge in contract negotiations with rail unions as they fight for 15 days of paid sick leave. Under a White House-brokered contract that major rail unions have recently voted to reject, rail workers would not receive a single paid sick day.

"In one day, Mr. Buffett made twice as much money as it would cost to guarantee 15 paid sick days a year to every rail worker in America."

A nationwide rail strike or lockout with major implications for the U.S. economy could begin as soon as December 9 if rail companies and unions don't reach a contract deal.

"In one day, Mr. Buffett made twice as much money as it would cost to guarantee 15 paid sick days a year to every rail worker in America," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted Wednesday. "The greed of the rail industry must end."

Warren Gunnels, Sanders' staff director, reiterated that message Thursday, writing, "Can't stop thinking about how Warren Buffett, the owner of BNSF Rail, made more money in one day than it would cost to guarantee 15 paid sick days to rail workers."

"Buffett could avert a rail strike today by giving workers what they need: paid sick days," Gunnels added. "That's how you give thanks."

Rail companies have estimated that it would cost roughly $688 million a year to provide 15 days of paid sick leave to rail employees, who work long and erratic hours and are often expected to be on call 24 hours a day. To make matters worse, rail companies' attendance policies punish workers for calling out sick or taking a day off to see the doctor.

"Buffett's BNSF, for example, has started using a convoluted system called 'Hi-Viz' under which workers start with a point balance then lose points if they're unavailable to work because they're sick, have a family emergency, or other reasons," Mother Jones reported in September. "If their balance hits zero, they get a 10-day suspension, and a 20-day suspension if it happens again. Reaching zero for the third time in a two-year period means getting fired."

BNSF has urged Congress to intervene and force rail workers to accept a contract with no paid sick days, something Senate Republicans tried to do via the unanimous consent process in mid-September. Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, blocked the GOP legislation, allowing the collective bargaining process to continue.

With the possibility of a nationwide strike growing after the largest union of rail workers in the U.S. voted to reject the White House-brokered contract deal earlier this week, Congress is once again facing calls from the hugely profitable railroad industry to get involved.

"Rail union leaders are increasingly grim that they'll be able to reach a contract agreement with freight carriers before Congress has to step in," Politico reported earlier this week. "Michael Baldwin, president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, said Tuesday there had been no progress 'whatsoever' at the bargaining table since that union rejected its tentative agreement on October 26. Union officials have been meeting daily with the railroads over Zoom this week, but Baldwin said discussions typically last only 15 minutes and not much is accomplished."

Jeremy Ferguson, president of the Transportation Division of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers, said in a statement earlier this week that "the ball is now in the railroads' court."

"They can settle this at the bargaining table," Ferguson added. "But, the railroad executives who constantly complain about government interference and regularly bad-mouth regulators and Congress now want Congress to do the bargaining for them."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Every time I hear that we as a nation cannot afford something—whether that might be assuring non-toxic water in Jackson and Flint or universal pre-K or an industrial policy with teeth—I have wondered how many dollars a national wealth tax might yield. So I looked the numbers up.

Taxing wealth would provide a nearly inexhaustible source of government revenue.

Wealth turns out to run way bigger than income. Our total U.S. wealth in 2021 sat at $150 trillion. Total income, combining personal income and company profits, amounted to about $25 trillion. A small wealth tax would clearly produce much more government revenue than a much larger income tax.

Like income, wealth in the United States remains highly concentrated. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans hold about one-third of that $150 trillion in U.S. wealth. That comes to $50 trillion, twice the total annual income of all Americans, everyone from the millions of workers making less than $15 an hour to the corporate executives making multiple millions. Again, you don't need an algorithm to figure out that even a tiny wealth tax on the top 1 percent could produce as much—or more—than a large income tax on everybody.

A modest national wealth tax could solve a lot of problems and fund a lot of common good, even if that tax only somewhat reduced our savage economic inequality.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have offered pioneering proposals to introduce national wealth taxes to the United States. Critics have raised various objections to these proposals. Collecting a wealth tax would prove impractical, some charge. Others say that taxing wealth at the federal level would be unconstitutional. Senator Warren has convincingly addressed these objections, but I'd just like to add one point: Taxing wealth would provide a nearly inexhaustible source of government revenue. Collecting that revenue may well hit some administrative or political obstacles. But overcoming those obstacles would be well worth the effort.

Let's look at what a 1 percent wealth tax on our top 1 percent could buy and then see how much pain and suffering that levy would impose on those who would pay the tax. A 1 percent wealth tax on the top 1 percent would produce $500 billion a year in revenue, or $5 trillion over the 10-year budget calculation demanded of federal legislation.

That $500 billion could buy something like a revolution in child-rearing. President Biden's original Build Back Better proposal had elements of such a revolution, but never won full funding because implementing family-friendly policies will always be so damned expensive. With a 1 percent tax on the top 1 percent, we could meet that expense.

Here's what a plan concentrated on helping children and making parenting more manageable could do with a 1-percent-on-the-1-percent tax:

Sources: Congressional Budget Office, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, CNBC.

This package would provide $3,000 per child for virtually all parents, save an average of $11,000 for those now using day care for pre-schoolers, and open up employment opportunities for those parents with pre-schoolers who cannot now afford day care. This would all be great for children's academic, psychological, and social development—and would transform the economics of parenting, most especially for low- and moderate-income families.

Senator Booker's Baby Bonds would create and seed a savings account of $1,000 at the birth of every child in the United States and then add up to $2,000 each year depending on household income. The funds would earn income that would not be available for the children until they reach 18. At that point, they could use the money for education, to buy a home, start a business, or continue as a retirement account.

Taken as a whole, this package would cut child poverty by more than half, greatly improve general educational levels over time, and immediately provide substantial support for families during their most challenging years for managing both time and money. A modest wealth tax could provide all this benefit, with money left over to do still more common good. But at what cost? How much harm would a wealth tax do to those elite few who would have to pay the tax?

As illustrated below, the amount individuals would pay in wealth taxes would indeed be very hefty, often running into the millions, even billions of dollars. But in most years and on average, America's top 1 percent would continue to get wealthier even with this wealth tax in effect. Given that the S&P 500's annual average stock market return since 1957 has topped 11 percent, a mere 1 percent tax on wealth would amount to little more than a rounding error for anyone in the top 1 percent.

Once established, a wealth tax could easily expand in small increments to a perhaps more reasonable 4 percent, producing $2 trillion a year in revenues, based on current levels of wealth. Or we could tax higher levels of wealth at higher percentages, as Senator Warren proposes, with tax rates on billionaires reaching 6 percent. Even at those higher rates, the wealthy would go on getting wealthier. But taxing the wealth of these wealthy would open a cornucopia of public capital to invest in addressing our multitude of problems and in bettering working people's lives.

By not taxing wealth we are failing to tap by far the largest source of our potential public revenues. And because the wealth of the wealthy confers both economic and political power, we cannot adequately defend democracy if we go on allowing our economic oligarchy a completely free lunch.

A clear majority of Americans support most of the family-friendly policies listed above. Even larger majorities support the notion of a wealth tax, with nearly two-thirds of Americans favoring a tax on grand fortune. Imagine that. The polls are showing higher support for taxing the rich than for the beneficial programs that taxing the rich could finance. Makes you wonder why our elected representatives, especially Democrats, are not standing in line to support such a combination of policy and pay-fors.

Next time you hear a politician say "we" can't afford something that clearly needs doing, just stop a moment and think—about what a wealth tax on a very small proportion of Americans could accomplish.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jack Metzgar.

Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., tweeted about a new report that he’d requested from the Congressional Budget Office. The report included a chart illustrating the shockingly low amount of wealth held by the poorer half of American households compared to everyone else.

St. Louis Federal Reserve and Josh Bivens, Economic Policy Institute

St. Louis Federal Reserve

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

In 2019, to gain entry into the wealthiest .1% of residents of the United States required one to be worth over $43 million which was about three and a half times the entry point of $11.1 million for the wealthiest 1%.1

There is a huge difference between those at the top of the .1%–people such as Musk, Bezos, and Gates–and those at the entry level. One worth $43 million could not even afford to pay for two years, at $25 million a year, the annual cost to run Bezos’     $500 million yacht.

As of September 30, Musk was the wealthiest of the trio. His net worth was put at $238 billion by the  Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That is a sum that is more than 2,300 times greater than that of a poorer member of the .1% who is worth a mere                $100 million.

Growing Concentration of Wealth at the Very Top

Below is a table derived from the Federal Reserve figures showing what has happened to the size of the wealth of the .1% since the presidency of daddy Bush.

Three categories below

1. Size of the wealth of the wealthiest .1% in trillions.

2. Wealthiest .1% share of the nation’s total wealth

3. Wealthiest .1% share of the wealth of. the wealthiest 1%

The development of capitalism is uneven. In addition, capitalism is an unstable system that has periods of rapid growth followed by periods of slow or negative growth.  One should not be surprised that the further consolidation of wealth has temporary setbacks such as happened during the great recession before it rose to new heights.2

As can be seen from the above table, despite setbacks during economic downturns, the share of the nation’s wealth held by the wealthiest .1% has increased from a low in the third quarter of 1989 of 8.6% to its highest level in the fourth quarter of 2021 of 13%, a more than 50% increase. During the same time, the share of the wealth of the .1% as a share of the wealth of the 1% also increased.

Below is a table showing the wealth of the wealthiest .1% and poorest 50% when Daddy Bush was in power, and that of the two groups in the fourth quarter of 2021, its highest point. By the fourth quarter of 2021, the wealth holdings of the .1% had gone from being 2.3 times as much as that of the poorest 50% to almost 5 times more. The differences between the two groups would be even greater had a recent upsurge in the wealth of the poorest 50% not occurred due to increasing real estate values that, for most owners among the 50%, fill a basic need for shelter.3

What is clear from both sets of the above figures is that the wealthiest .1% have been the recipients of major transfers of wealth during both Democratic and Republican presidencies. The increase in the nominal dollar value (which is the dollar amount disregarding the impact inflation has on its purchasing power) during this period went from $1.76 trillion in 1989 to $18.46 trillion, a more than 10-fold (1,048%) gain which was a rate of growth more rapid than the rate of inflation during the period. It was far greater than the growth rate for the poorest 50% and poorest 90%. The wealth of the poorest 50% increased in nominal dollars 482% from $.77 trillion to $3.71 trillion and the poorest 90% wealth increased 530% in nominal dollars from $8.19 trillion to $43.45 trillion. The result is a more extreme concentration of wealth at the top with the growth of a much greater gap between the .1% and everyone else, even for those within the wealthiest 1%.

Recent Decline in the Holdings of the .1%

According to the latest Federal Reserve Board figures, from the end of 2021 to the first half of 2022, the nominal wealth of the .1% has declined by $1.41 trillion. Factoring in inflation, the decline is even greater.4   Much of this decline presumably has to do with the falling stock prices.  Interestingly, a disproportionately larger share of the decline has been, perhaps “unfairly,” absorbed by our 10 wealthiest Americans. Their wealth accounted for 7% of the total wealth of the .1% at the beginning of the year. Yet, the decline in their wealth during the first 6 months in 2022 accounted for 17.1% of the total loss of the .1%. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, here is what has happened to the wealth of these fine individuals during this period.

If one adds in the decline in wealth experienced by our now poorer good friend, Mark Zuckerberg, who, in the first half of the year, saw his wealth decline by an impressive $65.5billion, the net total loss (factoring in the gains of the Kochs) for those individuals comes to $307 billion. That accounts for over one-fifth, 21.8%, of the total decline in the wealth of the entire .1% for the first half of the year.

From 2020 thru 2021, the wealthiest ten, using the Bloomberg figures, gained some $583.9 billion.5 Throw in Zuckerberg and it comes to over $630 billion making them way ahead of where their wealth was before the outbreak of the pandemic—by more than $323 billion—which, if the stock market crashes, could be wiped out. To be fair, $180 billion of their $323 billion gain since 2020 through the first half of 2022 has ended up in the pocket of just one individual, the ever-delightful Elon Musk.

Zuckerberg has managed to achieve a loss of $65.5 billion in just the first half of 2022. Nevertheless, he remains extremely wealthy after this loss with his wealth still put at $60 billion. Only a sick society would allow one to accumulate this much wealth and remain extremely wealthy after losing $65.5 billion.6 The sickness is even more apparent when taking into consideration the large number of people in the United States who live with food insecurity and homelessness.7  

Notes.

[1] https://dqydj.com/top-one-percent-united-states/  for the cut-off point for the .1%.

A table cited in the New York Times indicates that membership into the 1% can vary with one’s age.   https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/12/upshot/are-you-rich-where-does-your-net-worth-rank-wealth.html    scroll down and then “click here to skip the exercise.”

2 The concentration of wealth does not have to increase. It could be reversed by a shift in power that stops further concentration from happening.

3 According to Fed figures, in the first quarter of 2016, the wealth of the wealthiest .1% was $10.81 trillion, more than ten times as great as the wealth of the poorest 50% whose wealth then was put at $1 trillion.

Recently, the wealth of the poorest 50% has shot up reaching $2 trillion for the first time in the second quarter of 2020 and $4.41 trillion in the second quarter of 2022. This is largely a result of the increasing value of the homes some own.  During this time, the value of their real estate minus their home mortgages went from $1.21 trillion to $3.17 trillion, accounting for more than 81% of the increase in their wealth.

4 The impact of inflation on the super wealthy may not be quite the same as what is experienced by most everyone else. For example, the cost of super yachts may be declining due to the greater supply coming to the market resulting from the seizure of such vessels owned by Russian oligarchs.

5 see my article at https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/07/08/the-wealth-of-the-wealthiest-1-and-poorest-50-since-biden-became-president/ The gain of $583.9 billion of the ten wealthiest during that period was 11.4% of the gain of the entire wealthiest .1%

6 As of September 30, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zuckerberg had lost even more for the year, $74.6 billion, leaving the size of his wealth at $50.9 billion.

7 Below are government studies on the degree of poverty, hunger and homelessness adversely affecting millions of people. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-277.pdf pg. 21 In 2021 some 37 million people are living in poverty of whom over 11 million are children.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/104656/err-309.pdf?v=4127.5 Page IV “In 2021, 89.8 percent of U.S. households were food secure. The remaining 10.2 percent (13.5 million households) were food insecure. Food-insecure households (those with low and very low food security) had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members because of a lack of resources…. Children were food insecure at times during 2021 in 6.2 percent of U.S. households with children (2.3 million households), down from 7.6 percent in 2020 and not significantly different from the 6.5 percent in 2019. These households with food insecurity among children were unable at times to provide adequate, nutritious food for their children.”

Homelessness  https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2021-AHAR-Part-1.pdf In January of 2021, due to the pandemic, only the sheltered homeless were counted. The sheltered homeless “refers to people who are staying in emergency shelters, transitional housing programs, or safe havens.”

From page ii “On a single night in 2021, more than 326,000 people were experiencing sheltered homelessness in the United States.”

The prior year study accounts for all homeless people. From  https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2020-AHAR-Part-1.pdf page 1

“On a single night in 2020, roughly 580,000 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States. Six in ten (61%) were staying in sheltered locations—emergency shelters or transitional housing programs—and nearly four in ten (39%) were in unsheltered locations such as on the street, in abandoned buildings, or in other places not suitable for human habitation.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rick Baum.

The post Royal Money: Charles III and the Wealth Dimension appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The argument that the monarchy makes money for the British state and others in the Commonwealth starts to seem shallow the more one looks at the accounts and the standing of the institution.  But nonetheless, individuals such as Charles Scarlett-Smith, director of Brand Finance Canada, could only see the Queen in terms of beneficial dollars and cents.  “When we’re thinking about Queen Elizabeth II’s brand, we really are being synonymous with the royal family and the monarchy.”

In June 2022, accounts for the Sovereign Grant, which cover funds for the official monarch and the household’s official expenses, was £86.3 million for the 2021-22 year.  Official expenditure came in at greater than the Sovereign Grant and supplementary income earned – a net expenditure amount of £102.4 million.  This registered an increase of 17% from the previous year.  Much of the inflation came from the reservicing of Buckingham Palace.

The Keeper of the Privy Purse, Sir Michael Stevens, made the following observation: “The year covered in the report reflects some return to normality in many ways for the Royal Household with physical engagements, travel and inward visits by Heads of States undertaken.”

What can be expected of the new monarch?  In terms of cash and assets, the picture is bewilderingly archaic and expansive.  Even before coming to the throne, Charles had developed the Duchy of Cornwall, a creation of Edward III in the 14th century, into a spanning corporate enterprise, with the aid of a team of managers, worth $US1.4 billion.  The amount was such as to edge out the Queen’s own private portfolio worth US$949 million.  These figures are dwarfed by assets of the whole royal family (Forbes estimates the amount at US$28 billion), which say nothing about the actual scale of personal wealth.

On the surface, the Duchy’s punchy economic success might suggest aptitude, thrift and industry on the part of Charles.  But this ignores the insulated benefits and encouragements granted the royal family, and, in particular, the Duchy of Cornwall.

The Duchy in question, like much of the royal family, is an odd beast of history.  Only 13 per cent of the duchy’s 135,000 acres is located in Cornwall itself.  Other estimates range from Kevin Cahill’s assessment of 141,000 acres arrived at in his 2001 work Who Owns Britain and Ireland, and one offered by National Geographic: 135,526 acres.

The rest is dispersed across 23 counties in England and Wales, with the heaviest concentration in the South West.  In the county itself lie a number of housing developments, much luxury holiday accommodation, monuments and estuaries, the latter dedicated to business, recreation and fishing purposes.

Other ownings include The Oval cricket ground, with Surrey County Cricket Club being the sole leaseholder since 1874, and a number of residential and commercial properties both in and outside London.  “With these remaining properties,” says the Duchy of Cornwall’s website, “the Duchy operates a policy of retention.  In other words, it refurbishes and re-lets rather than selling a property if a vacancy arises.”  The current commercial portfolio of 18 properties is valued at £124 million.

In its constitution, the Duchy is a creature of medieval dimension. It is not a company and is therefore exempt from Corporations Tax.  Nor is it a public body, despite being accountable to Parliament and the Treasury.  While it is subject to requests under the Environmental Information Regulations, it is immune to the workings of Freedom of Information laws.  With such opacity of financial arrangements at work, the heralded money-making talent of the new king looks somewhat misplaced.

With the Queen’s passing, the tradition of the handout and the gift again comes into play.  There will be no inheritance tax, something common citizenry are not exempted from.  We will not know for decades what her will disposed of, but to Charles go the private estates such as Balmoral in Scotland, and Sandringham, where Royal Studs, the horse farm, is located.  Then comes the vast private collection of jewellery, art, the treasured stamp collection and a number of personal investments, which come to the value of US$500 million.

The new monarch has also had money issues of another nature.  Last year, Norman Baker, who was Home office minister for crime and prevention between 2013 and 2014, revealed that he had written privately to the head of London’s Metropolitan Police Force and filed a complaint against Charles on the issue of awarding an honour to a donor.  The Saudi businessman in question, Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz, is said to have donated over £1.5 million to Charles’ Scottish charities.

Graham Smith, CEO of the activist group Republic, also filed a complaint against Charles along the same lines: that both he and his close aide and former valet, Michael Fawcett, had allegedly breached the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925.  In the peculiar world of royal family relations, Fawcett made himself indispensable as chief squeezer of toothpaste onto the royal toothbrush when required. “I can manage without just about anyone, except for Michael,” Charles once stated.

A published email from Fawcett to an aide of bin Mafouz, written in 2017 as chief executive of the Dumfries House Trust, promised, “In light of the ongoing and most recent generosity of His Excellency… I am happy to confirm to you, in confidence, that we are willing and happy to contribute to the application for Citizenship.”  An effort would also be made to apply “to increase His Excellency’s honour from Honorary CBE to that of KBE in accordance with Her Majesty’s Honour’s Committee.”

Charles, for his part, denies having any knowledge of the scheme, something considered risible by Baker.  “The idea that Fawcett was running a rogue operation without telling [Charles] is simply unbelievable.”  The issue of royal money and its inscrutable mysteries is unlikely to go away.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The same day as his historic inauguration on August 7, the newly-elected President of Colombia Gustavo Petro introduced his ambitious tax reform bill to Congress. The proposed legislation would collect $50 trillion Colombian pesos annually—approximately $12.5 billion USD—through a new, progressive tax system. 

It is an unprecedented sum of money for the Colombian state, but the coalition that makes up the Pacto Histórico considers it a necessary measure to address both the fiscal deficit that ballooned under former President Iván Duque and to finance the proposed social programs designed to alleviate poverty and reduce economic inequality.

While the bill is yet to be finalized, a progressive wealth tax on the nation’s millionaires and billionaires will be a core feature. 

During the presidential campaign, Petro declared he would focus on the fortunes of 4,000 of the most affluent families in the country. But since his historic victory in June, his economic advisors have sent mixed messages on who exactly will be subjected to the reform. According to Colombian economist Ricardo Bonilla, the wealth threshold will be lowered to $1 billion pesos, or $250,000 USD.

The Colombian right reacted strongly, arguing that such a threshold will increase the tax burden on the middle class. But given the unequal distribution of wealth in the country, this is unlikely. A Credit Suisse report released last year found that the median wealth per adult in Colombia is just $4,854 USD, and only 2.6 percent of adults have a net worth of more than $100,000 USD.

Media reports suggest Petro plans to levy a 0.25 percent tax on wealth over $250,000 USD; 0.5 percent on wealth over $500,000 USD; 0.75 percent on wealth over $750,000 USD; and one percent on wealth over a million US dollars.

The Institute for Policy Studies consulted the Wealth-X database to estimate how much revenue Petro’s wealth tax would raise if implemented on the wealthiest in Colombia. We identified 4,740 individuals who, at the end of 2021, had at least $5 million USD in wealth. Their combined net worth totals $104.3 billion USD. This list of wealthy elites also includes 250 individuals who have $50 million USD or more and a combined net worth of $52.81 billion USD. 

These 4,700+ individuals represent only 0.009 percent of the population, yet hold approximately 17.3 percent of the country’s total wealth.

According to IPS analysis, a straightforward progressive wealth tax, at the rates listed above and levied on the wealthiest 4,700+ individuals, would raise more than $4 trillion pesos or $1 billion USD. This accounts for roughly 8 percent of the revenue that President Petro wants to raise. 

But if we include a more progressive wealth tax that adds a two percent tax on wealth over $5 million USD and a three percent tax on wealth over $50 million USD, the revenue raised more than doubles to $8.8 trillion pesos or $2.2 billion USD. 

To give a concrete example of how a wealth tax would work in practice, we can take a look at the richest man in Colombia, Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo, and how much revenue he would contribute under this tax structure.

Sarmiento’s net worth was listed at $8 billion USD by Forbes when the markets closed on August 1. Under Petro’s plan, he would pay:

• a 0.25 percent tax on the $250,000 USD between $250,000 USD and $500,000 USD; 
• a 0.5 percent on the $250,000 USD between $500,000 and $750,000; 
• a 0.75 percent tax on the $250,000 USD between $750,000 USD and $1 million; 
• a 1 percent tax on the remaining $7.99 billion USD.

His total tax obligation would be $79.9 million USD. Under our recommended tax rates, however, he would pay more than $239 million USD and still have a net worth of over $7.7 billion USD, about 1.6 million times more than the median Colombian. Meanwhile, adults with the mean or median wealth pay nothing.

Petro will have to exert a lot of political capital in order to get his tax reform bill passed. But considering the extreme inequality that currently exists in Colombia, it is evident that the status quo will not change absent a redistribution of wealth.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Omar Ocampo.

President Biden’s student debt plan will provide relief to some 43 million borrowers of all races—and it is a particularly important step towards narrowing the racial wealth divide.

Black graduates also face greater challenges in paying off their student debt because of the systemic racism in education, employment, housing, and other areas that creates economic disadvantages.

The student debt crisis has disproportionately affected Black families, exacerbating racial inequalities. On average, Black students have to take out larger loans to get through college than their White peers. A National Center for Education Statistics study reveals that Black Bachelor’s degree graduates have 13 percent more student debt and Black Associate’s degree graduates have 26 percent more than White graduates with those degrees.

Black women have the largest student debt burdens of all. Those who received bachelor’s degrees in 2015-2016 have average student debts of $37,558, compared to $31,346 for White women, according to a 2020 analysis by the American Association of University Women analysis of a 2017 U.S. Department of Education survey.

Black graduates also face greater challenges in paying off their student debt because of the systemic racism in education, employment, housing, and other areas that creates economic disadvantages. Black Bachelor’s degree and Associate’s degree holders earn 27 percent and 14 percent lower incomes, respectively, than Whites with the same degree.

Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Federal Reserve data shows that while the racial wealth gap has improved slightly, an estimated 28 percent of Black households and 26 percent of Latino households had zero or “negative” wealth in 2019 — twice the level of Whites. Families that have zero or negative wealth (meaning the value of their debts exceeds the value of their assets) live on the edge, just one minor economic setback away from crisis.

As a result of these economic disparities, Brandeis University researchers have found dramatic racial differences in long-term debt burdens. Black and White students who enrolled in college in 1995 took out relatively similar amounts of student loans: $19,500 for Black people, and $16,300 for White people. Twenty years later, the Black graduates had on average only been able to pay down 5 percent of their total amount owed, while Whites had on average been able to pay off 94 percent of the amounts they owed.

Debt cancellation will be a boost not only for borrowers, but the economy as a whole. Research by the Federal Reserve and the Levy Economics Institute shows that once former debt holders are freed up from these financial burdens, they will have more buying power to help spur economic recovery.

President Biden’s plan will provide up to $20,000 in debt cancellation to Pell Grant recipients with loans held by the Department of Education and up to $10,000 in debt cancellation to non-Pell Grant recipients. Pell Grants are needs-based financial assistance. According to the White House, about 94 percent of Pell Grant recipients came from a family that made less than $60,000 a year and 66 percent made less than $30,000.

Borrowers are eligible for relief if their individual income is less than $125,000 ($250,000 for married couples). No one who ranks in the top 5 percent of U.S. incomes will receive benefits under the plan. The plan also includes several other provisions to make student loans more manageable, such as capping monthly payments for undergraduate loans at 5 percent of a borrower’s discretionary income — half the rate that most borrowers now pay.

Much more needs to be done to reduce remaining debt burdens and prevent future students from accumulating new unpayable debt loads. In a statement, the White House admitted as much, vowing to continue working to lower tuition costs by increasing the size of Pell grants and making community college free. But Biden’s action is a welcome step to help millions of people meet their basic needs and build the generational wealth that has been elusive for so many Americans, particularly Black families.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Sarah Anderson, Brian Wakamo.

The post The Proposed Wealth Tax on Colombia’s 4,700 Richest People Would Raise $1 Billion appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Omar Ocampo.

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are important financial actors that control over $3.5 trillion in gross assets and over 500,000 properties in the U.S. Yet they have been largely ignored because tax rules define them as 'passive investors.' They exist as tax "pass through" entities and pay no corporate taxes if they invest at least 75 percent of their assets in real estate, derive 75 percent of their gross income from real property, and pay out at least 90 percent of taxable income (excluding capital gains) as shareholder dividends each year.

The separation of property ownership from operations is driven entirely by the financial logic of maximizing returns for investors— NOT the business logic of providing high quality integrated services.

In our new report, "The Role of Public REITs in Financialization and Industry Restructuring" (Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper #189), we question this conventional view of REITs as passive investors. Our evidence shows that they are financial actors that aggressively buy up property assets and manage them to extract wealth at taxpayers' expense. They do not simply wait patiently to buy real estate through market transactions, sit back passively, and collect the rent. The case studies in this report suggest that their tax-exempt status should be revisited.

We identify three important ways in which REITs have had a powerful impact on the US economy in general and on productive enterprises more specifically—whether intended or not. We draw on cases from markets where REITs have a major presence—nursing homes, hospitals, and hotels.

First, because REITs were designed to facilitate retail investing in the real estate market, they have become an important mechanism for expanding the financialization of the US economy. That is, they increase the power of finance capital by expanding its reach into larger swaths of the productive economy. They have expanded the pool of capital available for transactions that monetize real property and turn it into tradable assets—financial widgets with little or no connection to the real purpose of the productive enterprises that occupy the properties they own.

Second, REITs have played a major role in industry restructuring and consolidation. They have done so by promoting REITs as a separate asset class—one that should be legally separate from the commercial enterprises that produce goods and services on real estate property. By separating ownership of real property (property company or PropCo) from the enterprises operating on that property (operating company or OpCo), investors may more precisely calculate the returns to capital based on the risk-reward features of the asset class—in this OpCo/PropCo model, real estate assets versus the goods or services produced on the property. And the stock market values these assets differently.

Thus, REITs have grown and expanded their reach by separating real estate assets from productive assets. They have dominated M&A activity in real estate markets due to their tax-exempt status, which allows them to pay higher premiums for properties than non-REIT property owners. As REITs buy up local property and consolidate it into national or global property corporations, they also facilitate the consolidation of the operating companies that become their tenants. That is, they facilitate industry consolidation both at the property level and at the commercial enterprise level.

This is evident in the three sectors analyzed in this study. In healthcare, healthcare REITs have partnered with private equity firms to separate assets into property and operating entities—with REITs financing the expansion and consolidation of PE-owned nursing homes and hospitals into mega-chains with enhanced local, regional, or national market power. The anti-competitive implications of these developments in healthcare have become a major focus of scholarly research and a major concern for political leaders and anti-trust regulators. A similar pattern of concentrated ownership is evident in the hotel sector, where REITs have dominated M&A activity and fostered industry consolidation – both at the level of the hotel real estate and also at the level of the brands and operating companies that manage the property assets.

A third effect of REITs occurs at the level of operating companies and the outcomes for the companies, employees, and consumers. By law, REITs must act as passive investors to retain their tax-exempt status, which means that they cannot interfere with the management or operating decisions of their tenants. This has led to the OpCo/PropCo model described above, which separates property and operations ownership into separate legal entities—entities that by law must maintain arms-length relations. But this separation poses major problems from the standpoint of effective business management and service delivery. That is because productive operations depend importantly on the quality and maintenance of the underlying property. The quality of patient care depends on how well facilities are maintained; hotel revenues depend on customer satisfaction with both services and facilities.

In other words, the separation of property ownership from operations is driven entirely by the financial logic of maximizing returns for investors— NOT the business logic of providing high quality integrated services. The legal requirement for an arms-length relationship between property and operating companies is in conflict with the needs of the business, and ironically, also the ability of real estate owners to make sure that operations on their properties are managed effectively.

To overcome this dilemma, REITs have developed work arounds to allow them to influence or partner with the companies that manage their properties—strategies that are at odds with the original conditions for their tax-exempt status. They have successfully lobbied for legal changes that have freed up REITs to behave more and more like publicly traded corporations, but without paying the corporate taxes that their counterparts pay. These work arounds vary based on different risk-reward assumptions across industries.

Moreover, the cases in this report show how REITs achieve their financial goals through work arounds that directly or indirectly shape the decisions or business strategies of their tenants—and in turn, outcomes for consumers, patients, and employees. However, they bear no legal liability for what happens to the operating company or any of these stakeholders. While these REIT strategies may be technically legal, they undercut the original intent of the laws.

In healthcare, REITs use sale-lease back agreements with healthcare operating companies in which the companies are tenants and the REITs are landlords. These agreements assume that government reimbursement systems provide long term predictable funding mechanisms. The tenants bear all of the profit-loss risks, as well as the costs and risks of property maintenance. Thus, healthcare REITs are viewed as safe investments that yield reliable dividends, almost as safe as bonds. They bear little risk if an operating company fails; and in that event, their properties may be repurposed for a new tenant. Healthcare operating companies in nursing homes and hospitals, however, bear substantial risk of financial failure due to ongoing cost increases and uncertain and unpredictable funding.

Healthcare REITs have teamed up with private equity firms to strip property assets from healthcare providers. Our case studies show how private equity firms have bought out nursing homes and hospitals using extensive debt, and then have sold the underlying property to a REIT, in what is known as a 'sale-leaseback.' The PE firms have taken the proceeds from these sales to pay dividends to themselves and their investors, rather than using them to improve healthcare services for patients. The REITs have received inflated rents from healthcare providers, while the healthcare providers have become tenants of the property they formerly owned. Now they are burdened with 'triple net' leases in which they pay rent subject to annual escalator clauses (and continue to pay the costs of property maintenance and improvements, taxes, and insurance).

While REITs appear to be passive investors in these cases, a deeper analysis shows how they have made it possible for private equity firms to extract wealth through excessive debt financing; and how they have undermined healthcare providers' financial stability through charging excessive rents with unsustainable escalator clauses in long-term renewable leases. Our case analyses illustrate how this happens. They include examples in skilled nursing: Healthcare Properties (HCP) (a healthcare REIT) and HCR ManorCare (owned by PE firm Carlyle Partners); and Health Care REIT and Genesis (owned by Formation Capital). In hospitals, they include Medical Properties Trust (a healthcare REIT) and its involvement with Cerberus-owned Steward Health, Leonard Green-owned Prospect Medical Holdings, and LifePoint Healthcare, owned by PE firm Apollo.

In hotels, by contrast, REITs bear most of the risk of profit and loss, as they lease their properties to taxable REIT subsidiaries, which in turn contract with hotel operators—paying them a fee for managing the REIT's properties and reimbursing them for labor and other expenses. Hotel REITs hide behind the complexity of contracting relationships to argue that they maintain arms-length relations with operators. But their financial concerns over risk management lead them to promote strategies to 'actively manage' their assets and drive down hotel operating costs, which became particularly evident during the COVID pandemic.

Notably, if operating companies or their stakeholders suffer negative consequences due to REIT ownership strategies, the REITs bear no liability or responsibility for these outcomes.

In sum, this working paper suggests that scholars and policy makers need to take a much closer look at REIT activities. Their profits and executive compensation have been extraordinary in recent years, with little discomfort caused by the COVID pandemic. Their financial transactions offer little or no transparency, and taxpayers deserve a clear assessment of how much they are subsidizing yet another asset class that may be contributing to greater inequality in the US economy.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Eileen Appelbaum, Rosemary Batt.

Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.

― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

Sure, Gabor has a way with trauma, and his own life as a Jew in Hungary, young, and his mother giving him to a neighbor for a few weeks to protect the young Gabor from the Nazis, that is what Gabor sees as both early childhood trauma and epigentic trauma.

The documentary focusing on the Canadian is good. Alas, he is also part of a group attempting to heal, but for a fee. All sorts of access to Gabor, extended conversations, and ways to work with trauma.

Here’s a list on the resources link/drop down: The Wisdom of Trauma.

• Adverse Childhood Experience short video explaining toxic stress (by KPJR Films)
• ACE Study (by Academy on Violence and Abuse)
• Breakthrough: The Trauma Chaser
• Cormac Russell on Asset Based Community Development (Podcast)
• CRACKED UP
• Former Jail Warden Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia | We Are Witnesses
• Gabor Mate & Adyashanti: Emotional and Spiritual Maturity
• Hannah Beach, trauma work with students using movement and stories, Each of Us Has a Story
• Higher Practice (Podcast)
• How childhood trauma effects health across a lifetime (TED talk with Nadine Burke Harris)
• Is Your Story Making You Sick?
• Oprah reports on Childhood Trauma’s long term effects
• Paper Tigers: One High School’s Unlikely Success Story
• PBS Newshour: Childhood Trauma
• Professor Julianne Holt Lunstad on the the amazing impact of social relationships on health and longevity (Podcast)
• Professor Steve Cole on human social genomics amongst many others with fantastic insight into the power of community (Podcast)
• Reasons I Drink (Alanis Morrissette)
• Reclaiming Our Students, 12-session online educational series for educators
• Resilience: The Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope
• Step Inside the Circle
• Surgical Empathy
• Tashi and The Monk (Film)
• This Might Hurt (Film)
• Trauma and The Nervous System: A Polyvagal Perspective

There are other ways to also see how the world works, how people in both the West and the Global South are dealing with microaggression and macroaggression after aggression. Of course, patriarchy, capitalism and many variations on that theme are killing the human soul, the human body, from pre-birth to seven generations out. Trauma is also the synergy of chemical x mixed with chemials a,b,c onward. Imagine that, a world where we barely talk about Rachel Carson, why the eagle egg thins out and why the sperm counts drop, but then, we are in a world of constant organic chemistry alchemy. The countless science experiments on humanity and ecology focused on products to make them sleeker, thinner, cooler, softer, harder, bigger, smaller, less flammable, more flammable, more slippery, less stinky, more glowing, better looking, easier to digest, more aromatic, less shiny.

That is the Faustian Bargain we all have engaged in, for our new species, Homo Consumopithecus, Erectus Plasticus. That bargain also involved a world of more complicated diodes and self-replicating genetically engineered stuff, one where computing and virtual reality and augmented reality and artificial intelligence and machine learning, all of that, has colonized us daily . . . . We have accepted that stuff in our toys and our mundane jobs, but we sometimes shudder (as in a Philip K Dick book-movie) to think of the truly monsterous matrix and biopiracy we have allowed the data hogs and the surveillance soldiers to deploy in order to control our lives.

So, yes, adverse childhood experiences make sense, and it is a scale, a way to look at children who are struggling in school, and sometimes as a predictor of what might befall a student who has seen daddy put in jail, mommy hooked on booze, seen the repo man come into the home, found the beat up Ford Taurus hooked up to a tow truck for lack of payment. You know, just what happens in a home with chaos, violence between parents, and then add up homelessness, and their own abuse; i.e., physical and sexual. The reality, though, no looking at the cause of those terrible events, Cause-effect/effect-turned-to-cause/ cause-the-effect of another cause and effect. The daisy chain!

The devil, though, is in the details of what ACEs really mean to the titans of finance, to the masters of social impact investing to the Fourth Industrial Revolutionaires:

“Factors associated with adverse childhood experiences in Scottish children: a prospective cohort study” (source)

Pay for success or social impact partnership: Return on investment for social impact, as in the cost of special education, or what is the cost of depression. All that money attached to human issues, but they (money hoarders) want to tie in money and making money to those profiles — pre-crime — to preemptively fix you when you ARE not even broken! Investing on disaster (disaster capitalism) or investing on your childhood or household or prison sentence. Scary stuff.

Beware of Kaiser and Silicon Valley and Futures Markets and Hedge Funds and Human Capital Markets. Making money on trauma? Prenatal shit, too.

These are nefarious human beings. These are the Inquisition’s offspring, in skinny jeans and fancy pant suits. The human capital market is contradictory in terms of health and mental care. Making money, man. No healing comes from making money!

Here, Alison:

What concerns me about ACEs is the “scoring.”

Why should a standardized rubric developed under the auspices of one of the largest managed healthcare systems, Kaiser Permanente, label clients and structure the way a doctor, therapist, social worker, or educator can care for them? How did this tool come to have such a far reach, and whose interests will it ultimately serve?

Is a reliance on “scores” an intentionally-constructed framework that allows providers to limit their scope to “fixing” individuals and families rather than advancing a more radical approach whereby systemic causes of community trauma, trauma rooted in our country’s deep racist history, can be acknowledged, holistically assessed, and begin to be ameliorated?

And finally, will this “scoring” system be used to transform the treatment of childhood trauma into a machine for “pay for success” data speculation?

I believe it will.

A September-October, 2017 article for Academic Pediatrics, “Financing Mechanisms for Reducing Adversity and Enhancing Resilience Through Primary Prevention,” shows why ACE interventions will be an extremely attractive investment option for predatory social entrepreneurs. The authors note interventions that “prevent or mitigate the effects of ACEs can have impact across multiple sectors including: behavioral health, general health, child welfare, and “future criminal justice.” Every sector represents potential profit for investors. It appears there’s a lot of money in trauma remediation.

The paper references work done by the Washington State Institute on Public Policy (WSIPP) in which sophisticated cost/benefit models were created that estimate future cost savings across sectors so that the savings can be used to repay investors. WSIPP is one of eight data labs, operating under the purview of the NYU Gov Lab. Among the policy recommendations presented in this paper were: 1) setting “a conceptual framework to understand and account for outcomes across a broad range of public and private investment” 2) “validating metrics to estimate society costs and benefits” 3) adopting integrated budgets that combine health and social welfare finance and 4) disseminating information about innovative policies and finance mechanisms like “pay for success.”

The bottom line is that investors see children who have been harmed as potential sources of vast quantities of “impact” data, since the damage inflicted upon them extends across so many domains. The fact that the harm is so pervasive is, sickeningly, what makes so profitable. Interoperable databases are key to the program. All the data must be pooled in data lakes to claim the future cost offsets that enable the profit taking. WSIPP and its counterparts have been key collaborators in developing a national data architecture upon which impact investment markets will be built. More details in my post “Interoperable Data To Fuel Human Capital Hedge Funds.” (Adverse Childhood Experience Scores: Part of the “Pay for Success” Plan?)

More on this in a later article. But for now, it comes back to MY ground truthing. The father-in-law tipped over at home, had a headache, slurred speech, so 911 was called, EMT’s came out, and the idea was maybe a stroke. He’s been captive in a hospital bed for a month.

He already had ambulatory issues with a genetic disease tied to his feet’s weakness and curling and bad legs (he’s 79, was a truck driver, and he is in his Seventh Day Adventist world); and he had a hip replacement that went south six years ago, both because of that traumatic sawing of bone event, and I suppose because he didn’t “do” the hard end rehab program. He is in constant leg and hip pain.

He is also a military veteran, so he loves the VA since just four years ago, at my urging and assistance, got on that welfare-socialist gravy train. Good resources for equipment, rehab, and a listening nurse or PA.

That EMT call was a month ago, and they found the 2 inch mass in his frontal right lob, and he went under the knife a week ago, and the glioblastoma was the result. Stuck in a Kaiser hospital, and alas, he “tested” positive for the Bioweapon Covid19, so did his wife and his visiting son (from American Somoa) and grandson (from Texas).

Stuck in a hospital, and no visitors, and there you have it. Now, he has been shifted to a rehab place, and he again, tested positive for Bioweapon Covid19, and so, two days barely there, and now no visitors because he is in a “Covid19 wing” of the national for-profit rehabilitation unit (Regency).

My wife and I live three hours from Portland area, and we wanted to visit her mother and this husband, but the lockdown is in effect (he’s been jabbed four times, his wife three but is Jonesing for the 4th one).

My fear is the reality of 2020 and 2021. The horror stories of families separated from loved ones who ended up dying alone in a hospital. This is the madness of these mandates and these rotten dictatorial systems. ALL of it.

The trauma (mental) of this fellow in a rehab clinic, locked down, and he has opted for chemo therapy and radio therapy, big time issues without the support of a wife by his side some part of a day. The predicted lifespan for this 79 year old, according to surgeon and cancer specialists and his primacy care doctor is a year. That’s optimistic.

One year lifespan. Do not return to sender. Do not expect a refund. And, the radiation, and the poison pills or IVs, those treatments (they will have to be at the VA, so transportation is an issue, as in $), what will those medical interventions do to his mind, to his mental capacity, to his neuro net? What about the gut and the pain and confusion and amazing body’s complete aches and heaves from head to toe?

Yeah, we all say we would not do this, go through this hell, for another 12 months on planet Blackrock? Or, really, the diagnosis is one year without the poisons? I am not sure they have had that conversation — you have a choice NOT to poison and irradiate yourself —  since I am not a lynchpin in their lives.

Of course, the father-in-law is looking toward getting back to his small apartment with his fragile wife helping with the catheter and comode and transfering from chair to toilet to shower to bed.

It aint going to happen. He thinks he’ll be back on his scooter and tooling around Costco, etc. He believes he’ll be back dragging his legs and feet using a walker, to the curb, to the family handicap van, etc.

This is trauma, for me and for my wife and for his wife and for the grandson who had never met the granddaddy for his 24 years of life until the cancer diagnosis and his father footing the bill to have him come out to Sandy, OR. The son, 53, did not spend much time with this father, who is now ailing and has an expiration date, AKA medical diagnosis.

I get why people who read my stuff all over the internet, including at Dissident Voice, might not get into the nitty-gritty of personal lives, my own vagaries of living, or the ground truthing I attempt to traverse while still tying into that truthing with my belief that we as a nation and globe have to throw off the chains and do some hard hard work about getting back to our tribal selves, the neo-tribal selves. Oh, yes, eco-socialism, retrenchment, global thinking, global cooperation, true human to human work. Away from the elites, the rich (there shall be no billionaires or multimillionaires).

It’s getting complicated, though, not going along with the so-called progressives who want mandates, forced vaccinations, and, of course, these social impact bonds, these systems of holding poor people and struggling people accountable vis-a-vis the investors and the social impact pogroms. On Dissdient Voice, we have those who think carbon dioxide that we spew has no effect on climate, and then we have others talking about the climate emergency.

We have so many emergencies, and these medical issues will be hitting more and more people, not just indirectly with the aging Baby Boomers, but with the anxiety, self-harm, the childhood trauma leading to destructive behavior, addiction, obesity, workaholic behavior. The constant stream of negative news, the war drums, the incompetent Western governments, the Nazis and right wing conservative anti-human, anti-ecology movements, the openly dumb censoring and cognitive dissonance of the fake progressives wanting control, mandates, and pushing techno fascism of the Google Types onto everyone, but themselves!

We will not see the revolution televised:

Poverty, sickness, community decay, environmental disaster will not be solved by the billionaires, the investors, the bloody idiots investing in “the developing child.”

And, more people moving to Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona will not solve a bloody thing: Imagine that, one generation’s damming of the river, flooding the desert for unchecked growth is another generation’s major- major problem. Water, baby, water, and Lake Mead! The largest reservoir in the United States, is a critical source of water for 25 million people across seven states as well as some of the country’s largest agricultural valleys.

Here are the 10 states with the fastest growth rates:

1. Utah (1.53%)
2. Idaho (1.45%)
3. Texas (1.35%)
4. North Dakota (1.35%)
5. Nevada (1.28%)
6. Colorado (1.27%)
7. Washington (1.26%)
8. Florida (1.25%)
9. Arizona (1.05%)
10. South Carolina (0.95%)

And, the Gates Formula is for land grabbing. These are real struggles: “This website [Farmland Grab] contains news about the global rush to buy or lease farmlands by agribusiness, governments and financial investors — and people’s resistance against it. Its purpose is to serve as a resource for those monitoring, researching or organising around the issue, particularly activists, non-government organisations and journalists. It was initially set up by GRAIN, to share evidence of the new global farmland grab documented in Seized: The 2008 land grab for food and financial security.”

It all comes down to family, no, the battered family, the epigenetic trauma, the cities and towns flagging, the infrastructure crumbling, the fires and droughts, the heat waves, the inflation, and, of course, broken medicine, and the for-profit model of everything. And the question: Who will undergo the chemo and radiation and bed-riddennes and non-ambulatory life stuck in a hospital bed and rehab clinic or hospice center for that one year lifespan?

The costs, man, mental, familial, the community impact. And, just the bills, man, the hospital bills.

How much? How much money does a brain tumor surgery cost? For patients not covered by health insurance, the typical cost of brain tumor treatment can range from less than $50,000 for a small benign tumor in an accessible location that can be treated with surgery alone up to $700,000 or more for a malignant tumor that must be treated with some combination of surgery, radiation ….The median total direct cost of patient care was $91,000, with radiotherapy and imaging costs being the most expensive (approximately $14,000 each). The majority of direct costs were incurred in the first four months of treatment with a plateau in costs beyond 1 year, reflecting the poor survival of this disease.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

The aid group Oxfam International estimated Monday that a mere two weeks of wealth gains recently secured by global food billionaires would be enough to fully fund the United Nations' multibillion-dollar effort to combat hunger in East Africa, where soaring commodity prices are intensifying food insecurity and pushing poverty to new extremes.

"A monstrous amount of wealth is being captured at the top of our global food supply chains."

"Food inflation in East African countries where tens of millions of people are caught in an alarming hunger crisis has increased sharply, reaching a staggering 44% in Ethiopia—nearly five times the global average," Oxfam said in a new analysis published amid a worsening global hunger emergency.

"It is estimated that one person is dying every 48 seconds in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia alone, where the worst drought in decades is being exacerbated by the war in Ukraine and is pushing food prices to skyrocketing levels," the organization said. "Against this backdrop, food billionaires have increased their collective wealth by $382 billionaire since 2020."

"Less than two weeks' worth of their wealth gains," the group calculated, "would be more than enough to fund the entirety of the U.N.'s $6.2 billion humanitarian appeal for East Africa. The appeal is currently woefully funded at merely 16%."

In late May, Oxfam issued a report showing that "corporations and the billionaire dynasties who control so much of our food system are seeing their profits soar" in the midst of surging prices and hunger worldwide. The crisis has hit particularly hard in East Africa, a region heavily reliant on imports.

"There have been 62 food billionaires created in the last two years," Oxfam found, pointing to the global food corporation Cargill—one of a handful of businesses that collectively control more than 70% of the worldwide market for agricultural commodities—as a striking case in point.

Cargill is "87% owned by the 11th richest family in the world," Oxfam observed. "The combined wealth of family members listed on the Forbes billionaire list is $42.9 billion—and their wealth has increased by $14.4 billion (65%) since 2020, growing by almost $20 million per day during the pandemic. This has been driven by rising food prices, especially for grains. Four more members of the extended Cargill family have recently joined the list of the richest 500 people in the world."

Hanna Saarinen, Oxfam's food policy lead, said Monday that "a monstrous amount of wealth is being captured at the top of our global food supply chains, meanwhile rising food prices contribute to a growing catastrophe which is leaving millions of people unable to feed themselves and their families."

"World leaders are sleepwalking into a humanitarian disaster," Saarinen warned. "This fundamentally broken global food system—one that is exploitative, extractive, poorly regulated, and largely in the hands of big agribusinesses—is becoming unsustainable for people and the planet and is pushing millions in East Africa and worldwide to starvation."

Oxfam argued there are a number of steps rich countries can take to help East African nations avert disaster, including canceling their surging debt burdens and taxing the rich to adequately fund humanitarian relief efforts.

"We need to reimagine a new global food system to really end hunger; one that works for everyone," said Saarinen. "Governments can and must mobilize enough resources to prevent human suffering. One good option would be to tax the mega-rich who have seen their wealth soar to record levels during the past two years."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The post Does the Future Belong to People Who Profit Off Our ‘Excessive Wealth Disorder’? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

The danger that extreme wealth poses to democracy is ever-present, and the idea that it must be restrained is almost as old as democracy itself. In 1792, Thomas Paine wrote that the freedom of elections was "violated by the overbearing influence" of inherited wealth, and proposed an extremely aggressive wealth tax that would have put a hard ceiling on how much wealth a person could accumulate. Nearly a century ago, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously observed: "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

Paine's plan to fix this problem was the right one: taxation. America's ever-increasing inequality has motivated recent tax proposals targeting the ultra-rich, but the primary purpose has been to raise revenue, with any reduction in our concentration of wealth being incidental. While we do not oppose any of those proposals, we believe America needs a tax designed exclusively for the purpose of addressing the threat that our extreme concentration of wealth poses to democracy.

As the rich grow astronomically richer, the power accompanying their massive wealth will further destabilize our democracy.

To that end, we developed our proposal, the Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Restore Civil Harmony (OLIGARCH) Act, as a straightforward progressive annual tax on extreme wealth. But instead of being tied to an arbitrary amount of wealth, say $50 million, the tax would have four brackets based on a household's wealth compared to that of the median American household: 2% on wealth between 1,000 and 10,000 times median household wealth, 4% on wealth between 10,000 and 100,000 times median household wealth, 6% on wealth between 100,000 and 1,000,000 times median household wealth, and 8% on wealth over 1,000,000 times median household wealth. Currently, the threshold for taxation under our proposal would exceed $100 million. 

Structuring a tax this way specifically targets the extreme concentration of wealth: The tax would wax and wane along with wealth concentration, rather than in response to legislative tweaking. It would automatically kick into high gear during periods of worsening inequality, when wealth at the top is increasing faster than wealth in the middle. But when the economy works for the middle class, causing median household wealth to increase and inequality to moderate to an acceptable level, the tax would taper off to near nonexistence. The tax would apply exclusively to those whose wealth, if allowed to grow unchecked, could be unhealthy for our society, and would ask much more from the ultra-ultra-wealthy than it does from those who are "just" ultra-wealthy. 

We used the analysis of Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman [table E4] to assess how this proposal would respond to changes in wealth concentration. In 1980, fewer than 0.005 percent of adults had more than 1,000 times the median wealth, the threshold for taxation under our proposal. By contrast, in 2019, after 39 years of increasing wealth concentration, about 0.025 percent of adults — five times the 1980 level — had wealth exceeding 1,000 times median wealth.

At the two top tax brackets, it's even clearer. Comparing Forbes' data for the richest Americans to estimates of median household wealth from the Federal Reserve, we estimate that in 1983 no American would have had wealth equal to 100,000 times median household wealth, our proposal's threshold for the 6% tax rate. But in 2021, about 52 Americans would have exceeded that threshold, with two Americans having wealth greater than 1,000,000 times median household wealth.

These changing numbers reveal how quickly the divide between the rich and the rest of us is widening, and the critical need for significant tax reform. Both Paine and Brandeis saw out-of-control wealth accumulation as a crisis deserving aggressive government action, but the concentration of wealth in America's early years pales in comparison to the inequality of today. The pandemic has only widened the distance between the ultra-rich and everyone else. While families struggled with losses of jobs, income and loved ones over the past two years, America's 700-odd billionaires added $2 trillion to their collective net worth, an average increase of nearly $3 billion each. 

To be clear, our proposal wouldn't prevent the accumulation of extreme wealth. A household with 999 times median household wealth would not pay a nickel in additional tax. Our proposal addresses only the containment of "runaway wealth," or wealth so great that living expenses and other non-tax factors don't materially limit its growth.

That level of wealth accumulation isn't just unnecessary—it's dangerous. As the rich grow astronomically richer, the power accompanying their massive wealth will further destabilize our democracy. The only lasting solution is a narrowly-tailored tax that will shrink America's concentration of wealth from its current democracy-threatening level, and constrain any future movement toward an aristocracy. 

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Bob Lord, Dylan Dusseault.

The post The Wealth of the Wealthiest 1% and Poorest 50% Since Biden Became President appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rick Baum.

On April 25, Twitter's board of directors announced an agreement to sell the company to Elon Musk, the world's wealthiest person, for $44 billion. That sounds like a lot of money. But Musk can afford it. One recent estimate of the Musk fortune puts his wealth at $214 billion, a sum a bit down from the more than quarter trillion he held earlier this year.

Our nation's wealthiest 10 percent now hold nearly 70 percent of our country's wealth.

Our Institute for Policy Studies colleague Chuck Collins has documented that Musk's personal wealth, over the first year and a half of the Covid pandemic, grew by an incredible 751 percent at the same time millions of American families were struggling to pay their rent and utility bills.

Unfortunately, we can't write Musk off as some sort of an anomaly. U.S. billionaires combined increased their wealth by a staggering $2.1 trillion over the first year and half of the pandemic. All those trillions could now be addressing a host of serious crises at home and internationally. Those dollars could be charting the world on a new sustainable course. Instead they're merely making the already rich phenomenally richer.

Not my fault, says Elon Musk, who loves to claim that he's doing his part—as the driving force behind the world's biggest electric-car company—to save our planet.

Should we be giving Musk the applause he feels he so richly deserves? Let's step back for a moment and take a closer look at where grand fortunes, Elon Musk, and Tesla fit into our menacing big picture.

Let's start with greenhouse gas emissions. Worldwide, these emissions have grown steadily over the last several decades. They have, to be sure, declined in the United States since their 2007 peak, but their rate of decline comes nowhere close to what we need. At the current decline rate, we'll still be emitting 3.6 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases annually in 2050. By that year, scientists tell us, we will need to have emissions down to zero.

Newly emitted quantities of carbon dioxide, a chemically stable gas, can last in the atmosphere for generations—and continue heating up our Earth for centuries. So even with declining U.S. emissions, we're doing the Earth no grand favor. Here in the United States, we already bear the responsibility for one-fifth of all global greenhouse gas emissions since 1850, more emissions than the next two highest cumulative emitters, China and Russia, combined. And we remain today one of our world's largest per capita emitters.

Overall, the huge emissions disparity between the United States and other wealthy countries and the nations of the Global South has led the United Nations to adopt the principle of "common but differentiated responsibility" as the ethical basis for determining just who needs to pay what to help our world mitigate and adapt to climate change.

This principle hasn't yet actually translated into the kind of North-South financial flows we need to see, as demonstrated by the intransigence of wealthy countries at the UN climate talks last November, particularly on questions over funding for climate change-related loss and damage. Even so, the UN's official acceptance of the principle that wealthy countries should fund climate action in the Global South as a matter of basic fairness represents a significant step forward.

This same discussion about responsibility, unfortunately, hasn't taken place at the national level here in the United States. How should we allocate the cost of climate change mitigation and adaptation among Americans? We Americans need to be addressing this question head on, even if Elon and his fellow deep pockets would rather we not.

The vast bulk of the wealth in the United States today did not exist before the Industrial Revolution. We owe our current affluence to the fossil-fueled economy that has dominated the United States ever since this Revolution began.

The gains from this economic growth have gone to a narrow share of the American people. Our nation's wealthiest 10 percent now hold nearly 70 percent of our country's wealth. Our top 1 percent holds over 32 percent of our nation's $142.18 trillion, mostly fossil fuel-generated fortune, an average of $35 million of wealth per household.

Meanwhile, the poorer half of the U.S. population owns only 2.6 percent of America's wealth.

Connect all these dots and we have a simple, straightforward story: Fossil fuels fueled the Industrial Revolution. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by 50 percent since that revolution began. The economic gains from that revolution have gone to a small wealthy in-crowd. These wealthy few, from John D. Rockefeller to Elon Musk, have cornered the economic gains from our generations of fossil-fueled economic growth.

Does Elon get a pass because he's making electric cars? Hardly. For starters, Tesla cars come with an inordinately expensive price-tags. Musk relies upon fossil fuel-generated wealth to even have a market for expensive cars. Tesla, as an auto manufacturer, also benefits mightily from our nation's elaborate highway system, a key contributor to the outsized  emissions our country has historically produced.

Our wealthiest Americans have benefited disproportionately from our fossil-fuel economy. It's only fair that these wealthy pay for the climate damage they've so benefited from. How could we see to it that they pay up?

First, we should close the gaping loopholes in America's estate and gift tax law. Under current statutes, America's wealthiest families sit poised to escape estate and gift tax on the coming intergenerational transfer of trillions of dollars in wealth.

According to a recent Americans for Tax Fairness report, the top 0.5 percent of our U.S. population will transfer $21 trillion of wealth to the next generation over the next 24 years. If America's wealth transfer tax system were working as intended, those wealth transfers would generate upwards of $5 trillion in tax revenue. But existing tax loopholes guarantee that Uncle Sam will realize precious little of that $5 trillion.

Second, we should replace the generation-skipping tax, or "GST" as the tax lawyers call it, with an annual excise tax on large accumulations of trust-held wealth. Lawmakers originally created the GST to keep wealthy families from sidestepping the estate tax, for one or more generations, by gifting their fortunes to their grandchildren or great-grandkids. Unfortunately, this GST is not working to recoup the estate and gift tax revenue lost to the "dynasty trusts" that now hold trillions of ultra-rich family wealth.

Third, we should subject the investment gains of the ultra-wealthy to income tax as these gains accrue—and not let these gains pile up untaxed until the assets that produce them get sold. Two proposals before Congress and a third from the Biden administration would do just that. These proposals differ in detail, but each would make avoiding taxes by holding highly-appreciated assets until death much less lucrative. Each of those proposals would also produce hundreds of billions in new tax revenue.

The revenues generated by these commonsense tax reforms would provide much-needed funding for just climate mitigation and adaptation. And having the vast fortunes created by our fossil-fueled economy become a major funding source for transitioning away from the system that generated these fortunes in the first place would be, by any measure, only fair.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Basav Sen, Bob Lord.

A 23-year veteran of Goldman Sachs, Ms. Naison-Tarajano oversees the transactional business in Private Wealth Management across asset classes. She also oversees the Apex business that partners with private wealth advisors to deliver tailored investment opportunities and services to family offices. She is a member of the Partnership Committee, the Firmwide Suitability Committee, the CWM Inclusion and Diversity Council (IDC) where she is on the Steering Committee and is an IDC Pillar Lead. She is also the former co-head of the CWM Women’s Network. 

“We are thrilled to welcome Ms. Naison-Tarajano to the Innocence Project Board of Directors. Sara brings invaluable wealth and investment expertise which will be of enormous benefit to the organization as we continue to take on and fund new and ambitious work. Of equal importance is her commitment to equity and the exceptional work she has done on the Inclusion and Diversity Council at Goldman Sachs. I have no doubt Sara will be a powerful force in the organization and in the fight for a more fair and just criminal legal system,” said Innocence Project Board Chair, Jack Taylor. 

“Sara Naison-Tarajano is a respected leader in her field and we are excited to have her on the Innocence Project Board,” said Christina Swarns, Executive Director of the Innocence Project. “Sara recognizes the value and importance of diversity, equity and inclusion and she has used her platform to promote powerful and lasting change at Goldman Sachs. I look forward to collaborating with Sara to create equitable and compassionate systems of justice for everyone.”

Ms. Naison-Tarajano joined Goldman Sachs as an analyst in the Investment Banking Division in 1999 and was named managing director in 2012 and partner in 2020. Prior to her current role, she led the Markets Coverage Group for the Americas, structured cross product derivatives for institutional clients of the Emerging Markets desk in the Securities Division, and was a member of the Single Stock Risk Management team in Equity Derivatives, helping individuals and family offices manage large stock positions. 

“I am honored and humbled to be joining the board of directors of the Innocence Project,” said Ms. Naison-Tarajano. “For my entire adult life, I have watched with admiration as this incredible organization battled to both exonerate the wrongfully convicted and reform our criminal justice system. The Innocence Project has done an astounding amount of good, and yet there is still so much work to be done. I look forward to joining this crucial fight for social and racial justice reform.”

Ms. Naison-Tarajano earned a B.A., cum laude with distinction, in American Studies from Yale College. She is a native of Brooklyn, New York where she currently lives with her family.

The post Sara Naison-Tarajano, Partner and Global Head of Private Wealth Management Capital Markets at Goldman Sachs, Joins the Innocence Project Board of Directors appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by jlucivero.

The post The Climate Case for Taxing Wealth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Basav Sen – Bob Lord.

Whenever there are new or proposed changes to tax law, your eyes may glaze over as they skim the headlines. Meanwhile, the wealth defense industry — and its legions of accountants, financial advisors, and lawyers — is quietly mobilizing.

Last year, the Biden administration unveiled a proposal for a revitalized IRS, including a stronger “wealth squad” to take on tax evasion by the extremely wealthy, that is, people with tens of millions of dollars. Soon after, the wealth defense industry announced strategies that wealth advisors should use to prepare.

The wealth squad, officially called the Global High Wealth Industry Group, was formed in 2009. But the following year was a pivotal shift in U.S. politics, and due to conservative blowback against the agency, the IRS has since bled funding. Combine budget cuts with the power of billionaires and multimillionaires to hire seemingly endless teams of lawyers and accountants, and it’s clear how the wealth squad has not always been an effective force.

Emphasizing both the unrealized purpose of the squad and the hope that enforcement will increase, a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) highlights how audit rates have significantly declined over the past decade. This is particularly true for high-income households. Between 2010 and 2019, audit rates of households earning more than $5 million per year declined by 86 percent, falling from a more than 16 percent audit rate to just over 2 percent.

The reduction in audits of the wealthy is concerning not only because of the substantial revenue lost from tax evasion, but also because of the explosion of wealth — and wealth hiding — over the past decade.

Let’s take, for example, the wealth of the top ten billionaires from Forbes’ list of billionaires in 2010. That year, the list was topped by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim; Jeff Bezos had yet to break the top 40 and Elon Musk’s Tesla had only just gone public. The total wealth of the world’s ten richest people totaled $342.2 billion.

Fast forward almost a decade later, to 2019, when Bezos was number one. By then, the total wealth of the top ten billionaires in the world had more than doubled, to $744 billion.

The start of the pandemic the following year was particularly lucrative, too. As the Institute for Policy Studies reports, U.S. billionaire wealth has soared by more than half — $1.7 trillion — since the pandemic began.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kalena Thomhave.

We speak with the chair of the California Reparations Task Force, which is the first in the United States and has just released a landmark report calling for “comprehensive reparations” for Black people harmed by a historical system of state-sanctioned oppression. While the state report is unprecedented, reparations are “first and foremost a federal responsibility,” says attorney Kamilah Moore.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Whenever there are new or proposed changes to tax law, your eyes may glaze over as they skim the headlines. Meanwhile, the wealth defense industry — and its legions of accountants, financial advisors, and lawyers — is quietly mobilizing.

Last year, the Biden administration unveiled a proposal for a revitalized IRS, including a stronger “wealth squad” to take on tax evasion by the extremely wealthy, that is, people with tens of millions of dollars. Soon after, the wealth defense industry announced strategies that wealth advisors should use to prepare.

The wealth squad, officially called the Global High Wealth Industry Group, was formed in 2009. But the following year was a pivotal shift in U.S. politics, and due to conservative blowback against the agency, the IRS has since bled funding. Combine budget cuts with the power of billionaires and multimillionaires to hire seemingly endless teams of lawyers and accountants, and it’s clear how the wealth squad has not always been an effective force.

The reduction in audits of the wealthy is concerning not only because of the substantial revenue lost from tax evasion, but also because of the explosion of wealth—and wealth hiding—over the past decade.

Emphasizing both the unrealized purpose of the squad and the hope that enforcement will increase, a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) highlights how audit rates have significantly declined over the past decade. This is particularly true for high-income households. Between 2010 and 2019, audit rates of households earning more than $5 million per year declined by 86 percent, falling from a more than 16 percent audit rate to just over 2 percent.

The reduction in audits of the wealthy is concerning not only because of the substantial revenue lost from tax evasion, but also because of the explosion of wealth — and wealth hiding — over the past decade.

Let’s take, for example, the wealth of the top ten billionaires from Forbes’ list of billionaires in 2010. That year, the list was topped by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim; Jeff Bezos had yet to break the top 40 and Elon Musk’s Tesla had only just gone public. The total wealth of the world’s ten richest people totaled $342.2 billion.

Fast forward almost a decade later, to 2019, when Bezos was number one. By then, the total wealth of the top ten billionaires in the world had more than doubled, to $744 billion.

The start of the pandemic the following year was particularly lucrative, too. As the Institute for Policy Studies reports, U.S. billionaire wealth has soared by more than half — $1.7 trillion — since the pandemic began.

As the rich get richer, they need somewhere to park their billions beyond the traditional financial markets. That’s why the uber-wealthy choose a wide variety of physical assets, like real estate, yachts, and expensive art, as vessels for wealth storage. They also create complex trusts to house their wealth, hiring skilled lawyers to extort loopholes and manipulate laws to protect wealth from the worst thing that could happen to it: taxation.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed in last year’s Pandora Papers how exactly the world’s wealthy use trusts to avoid taxes and accountability. Some of the world’s top destinations for trusts are U.S. states like South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska, and Delaware. These states have passed laws that attract the wealthy to state trust companies; both international and domestic ultra-high-net-worth people are increasingly setting up trusts in these states. South Dakota, for example, hosts more than $500 billion in trust assets, up from $57 billion in 2010. Nationwide, according to estimates by Gabriel Zucman, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, the U.S. was home to at least $5.6 trillion in trust assets in 2021, more than double the approximately $2.3 trillion it hosted in 2010.

In short, strong IRS oversight is needed now more than ever. But as the GAO report contends, that’s not what we’ve seen.

Unfortunately, the IRS doesn’t exactly have the resources for a robust effort against tax evasion and avoidance. In a comment on a draft of the GAO report, IRS deputy commissioner Douglas O’Donnell said that budget cuts have hampered the agency’s ability to fully carry out its mission. He wrote that reduced funds have led to a staffing shortage that “has resulted in challenges to overall tax administration, including our ability to deliver adequate customer service, audit coverage, collecting on taxes owed, closing the tax gap, funding the government, and IT modernization.”

In inflation-adjusted dollars, IRS funding has fallen by approximately 21 percent since 2010. More than 13,000 enforcement employees were lost to attrition between 2010 and 2020, and the number of agents handling complex cases specifically fell by more than a third.

Though higher-income individuals are more likely to misreport their taxes, those who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) — low- and middle-income households — are audited at higher-than-average rates. According to the IRS, this is because EITC audits can be automated, while high-income audits require much more work by teams with specialized skills — skills that the IRS has increasingly lost.

The IRS itself estimates underreporting and underpayment led to a $441 billion annual gap between taxes owed and taxes paid between 2011 and 2013, and that just $60 billion of that would eventually be collected. In recent years, more than half of what’s known as the “tax gap” is due to underpayment by those in the top 5 percent of income — and more than a quarter of the gap is the responsibility of the top 1 percent.

Over the next decade, the tax gap is estimated to reach approximately $7 trillion.

Multimillionaires and billionaires have immeasurable resources to defend their wealth... If the IRS continues to hobble and the capacity of the IRS wealth squad recedes, those resources will only continue to grow.

To crack down on tax abuse, the Biden administration hopes to give the IRS a shot in the arm through an infusion of $80 billion over the next ten years, funds that would go toward enforcement efforts and better technology. The funding was included in the languishing Build Back Better plan. It’s unclear whether it the funding plan will pass, even if it’s an investment that would yield substantial revenue.

“[W]hen you have fewer employees doing compliance work, you end up leaving tax revenue on the table,” said then IRS commissioner John Koskinen in 2015, addressing the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants at its National Tax Conference. “In cutting the IRS budget, the government is forgoing billions just to achieve budget savings of a few hundred million dollars.”

The Treasury Department estimated that the $80 billion investment in the IRS would generate $480 billion in revenue over the next decade due to increased tax enforcement. This is consistent with IRS data that suggest each dollar invested in enforcement yields a return of about $5.

Yet, even if the IRS gets increased appropriations, the wealth defense industry will be prepared — it began preparing when there were mere whispers of a better-funded wealth squad. A spring 2021 webinar from WealthManagement.com suggested that clients should expect a “holistic” and “intrusive” auditing process and to start preparing immediately — an excellent way to advertise wealth advisor services.

Multimillionaires and billionaires have immeasurable resources to defend their wealth against taxation and creditors. If the IRS continues to hobble and the capacity of the IRS wealth squad recedes, those resources will only continue to grow — and inequality will only continue to widen.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kalena Thomhave.

In the shadow of the Davos summit of global elites taking place this week, a new report from Oxfam International details how skyrocketing inequality during two years of the global Covid-19 pandemic surged to a point where a new billionaire was created in the world nearly every day while over one million people are now being pushed into poverty at almost the same daily rate.

"The extremely rich and powerful are profiting from pain and suffering. This is unconscionable."

The new report—titled "Profiting From Pain"—is the latest accounting of how the pandemic has only deepened grotesque discrepancies between the haves and have-nots of the world, showing that while 573 new billionaires were created since the pandemic began, approximately one billionaire every 30 hours, an estimated 263 million are expected to "crash into extreme poverty" this year—a rate of one million people every 33 hours.

Such stark realities and gross injustice, the anti-poverty group concludes, is clear evidence that a tax on billionaire wealth and windfall pandemic profits is urgently needed to address crucial needs.

"Billionaires are arriving in Davos to celebrate an incredible surge in their fortunes. The pandemic and now the steep increases in food and energy prices have, simply put, been a bonanza for them. Meanwhile, decades of progress on extreme poverty are now in reverse and millions of people are facing impossible rises in the cost of simply staying alive," said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.

Among the key findings of the report:

• Today, 2,668 billionaires — 573 more than in 2020 — own $12.7 trillion, an increase of $3.78 trillion.
• The world’s ten richest men own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of humanity, 3.1 billion people.
• The richest 20 billionaires are worth more than the entire GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa.
• A worker in the bottom 50 percent would have to work for 112 years to earn what a person in the top 1 percent gets in a single year.
• High informality and overload due to care tasks have kept 4 million women in Latin America and the Caribbean out of the workforce. Half of working women of color in the US earn less than $15 an hour.

While a tall stack of reports has documented such trends since the pandemic took hold in early 2020, Oxfam's latest study shines a bright light on the massive profits in the key sectors of energy, food, and pharmaceutical companies—all of which are able to consolidate financial gains due to their monopoly control over commodities essential to society.

According to Bucher, the fortunes of the world's billionaires have "not increased because they are now smarter or working harder" than the average worker, many who faced layoffs, lack of hours, fractured families, childcare crises, and dangerous work conditions throughout the pandemic.

"The super-rich have rigged the system with impunity for decades and they are now reaping the benefits," she said. "They have seized a shocking amount of the world's wealth as a result of privatization and monopolies, gutting regulation and workers' rights while stashing their cash in tax havens—all with the complicity of governments."

At the same time, she added, hundreds of millions of regular workers and their families "are skipping meals, turning off the heating, falling behind on bills and wondering what they can possibly do next to survive. Across East Africa, one person is likely dying every minute from hunger. This grotesque inequality is breaking the bonds that hold us together as humanity. It is divisive, corrosive and dangerous. This is inequality that literally kills."

The report notes that the profit margins of the world's big oil companies doubled during the pandemic, while the cost of energy worldwide is projected to soar by 50% this year—the largest increase in energy prices, the group noted, since 1973. Giant food companies that control a bulk of the world's food supply and the large pharmaceutical companies, some like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson which control large portions of the Covid-19 vaccine supply, have been swimming in profits since the virus struck.

With the world's billionaire class and national leaders meeting in Davos this week as they pretend to meet as stewards of international leadership, Oxfam said there is one clear thing they should do if they want to be taken seriously: support a tax on billionaire wealth.

Among other things, Oxfam calls for a "one-off solidarity taxes on billionaires' pandemic windfalls to fund support for people facing rising food and energy costs and a fair and sustainable recovery from Covid-19."

Citing the nearly $8 trillion in tax havens that the global elite is believed to have stashed around the world, the group indicated the global tax system—which has never been defensible—is no longer sustainable in the face of such enormous challenges. 

The group is also calling for an end to "crisis profiteering" by introducing a "temporary excess profit tax of 90 percent to capture the windfall profits of big corporations across all industries." Oxfam estimates that such a tax on less than three dozen "super-profitable multinational companies" could have generated $104 billion in revenue in 2020 alone.

Lastly, Oxfam says a permanent tax on extreme wealth and the disruption of monopoly power by huge multinationals is essential to equalize the world's economy, lift billions of people out of poverty, and to fund the kind of investments on healthcare, climate action, and social protection for all the low- and middle-income people of the world.

"The extremely rich and powerful are profiting from pain and suffering. This is unconscionable," said Bucha.

"Over two years since the pandemic began, after more than 20 million estimated deaths from Covid-19 and widespread economic destruction," she said, "government leaders in Davos face a choice: act as proxies for the billionaire class who plunder their economies, or take bold steps to act in the interests of their great majorities."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jon Queally.

In the shadow of the Davos summit of global elites taking place this week, a new report from Oxfam International details how skyrocketing inequality during two years of the global Covid-19 pandemic surged to a point where a new billionaire was created in the world nearly every day while over one million people are now being pushed into poverty at almost the same daily rate.

"The extremely rich and powerful are profiting from pain and suffering. This is unconscionable."

The new report—titled "Profiting From Pain"—is the latest accounting of how the pandemic has only deepened grotesque discrepancies between the haves and have-nots of the world, showing that while 573 new billionaires were created since the pandemic began, approximately one billionaire every 30 hours, an estimated 263 million are expected to "crash into extreme poverty" this year—a rate of one million people every 33 hours.

Such stark realities and gross injustice, the anti-poverty group concludes, is clear evidence that a tax on billionaire wealth and windfall pandemic profits is urgently needed to address crucial needs.

"Billionaires are arriving in Davos to celebrate an incredible surge in their fortunes. The pandemic and now the steep increases in food and energy prices have, simply put, been a bonanza for them. Meanwhile, decades of progress on extreme poverty are now in reverse and millions of people are facing impossible rises in the cost of simply staying alive," said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.

Among the key findings of the report:

• Today, 2,668 billionaires — 573 more than in 2020 — own $12.7 trillion, an increase of $3.78 trillion.
• The world’s ten richest men own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of humanity, 3.1 billion people.
• The richest 20 billionaires are worth more than the entire GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa.
• A worker in the bottom 50 percent would have to work for 112 years to earn what a person in the top 1 percent gets in a single year.
• High informality and overload due to care tasks have kept 4 million women in Latin America and the Caribbean out of the workforce. Half of working women of color in the US earn less than $15 an hour.

While a tall stack of reports has documented such trends since the pandemic took hold in early 2020, Oxfam's latest study shines a bright light on the massive profits in the key sectors of energy, food, and pharmaceutical companies—all of which are able to consolidate financial gains due to their monopoly control over commodities essential to society.

According to Bucher, the fortunes of the world's billionaires have "not increased because they are now smarter or working harder" than the average worker, many who faced layoffs, lack of hours, fractured families, childcare crises, and dangerous work conditions throughout the pandemic.

"The super-rich have rigged the system with impunity for decades and they are now reaping the benefits," she said. "They have seized a shocking amount of the world's wealth as a result of privatization and monopolies, gutting regulation and workers' rights while stashing their cash in tax havens—all with the complicity of governments."

At the same time, she added, hundreds of millions of regular workers and their families "are skipping meals, turning off the heating, falling behind on bills and wondering what they can possibly do next to survive. Across East Africa, one person is likely dying every minute from hunger. This grotesque inequality is breaking the bonds that hold us together as humanity. It is divisive, corrosive and dangerous. This is inequality that literally kills."

The report notes that the profit margins of the world's big oil companies doubled during the pandemic, while the cost of energy worldwide is projected to soar by 50% this year—the largest increase in energy prices, the group noted, since 1973. Giant food companies that control a bulk of the world's food supply and the large pharmaceutical companies, some like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson which control large portions of the Covid-19 vaccine supply, have been swimming in profits since the virus struck.

With the world's billionaire class and national leaders meeting in Davos this week as they pretend to meet as stewards of international leadership, Oxfam said there is one clear thing they should do if they want to be taken seriously: support a tax on billionaire wealth.

Among other things, Oxfam calls for a "one-off solidarity taxes on billionaires' pandemic windfalls to fund support for people facing rising food and energy costs and a fair and sustainable recovery from Covid-19."

Citing the nearly $8 trillion in tax havens that the global elite is believed to have stashed around the world, the group indicated the global tax system—which has never been defensible—is no longer sustainable in the face of such enormous challenges. 

The group is also calling for an end to "crisis profiteering" by introducing a "temporary excess profit tax of 90 percent to capture the windfall profits of big corporations across all industries." Oxfam estimates that such a tax on less than three dozen "super-profitable multinational companies" could have generated $104 billion in revenue in 2020 alone.

Lastly, Oxfam says a permanent tax on extreme wealth and the disruption of monopoly power by huge multinationals is essential to equalize the world's economy, lift billions of people out of poverty, and to fund the kind of investments on healthcare, climate action, and social protection for all the low- and middle-income people of the world.

"The extremely rich and powerful are profiting from pain and suffering. This is unconscionable," said Bucha.

"Over two years since the pandemic began, after more than 20 million estimated deaths from Covid-19 and widespread economic destruction," she said, "government leaders in Davos face a choice: act as proxies for the billionaire class who plunder their economies, or take bold steps to act in the interests of their great majorities."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jon Queally.

The post Black Land Theft and the Racial Wealth Divide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tykeisa Nesbitt.

“Find a way to be against the war in Ukraine, please.” That was the subject line of one of my recent hate emails. “If you look through Mr. Rall’s cartoons for the past month, there isn’t a single one condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” an anonymous online commenter chided. “There’s plenty of ones based around whataboutism condemning us for condemning them but not a single one that just comes right out and says what Russia is doing now is wrong.”

The Right — in the U.S. that includes Republicans, Democrats and corporate media — has set a clever trap for the anti-war Left. The rhetoric in this essay’s first paragraph is an example. If the Left were to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Right would portray us as Russia-loving hypocrites who only oppose wars when the United States starts them. If the Left backed Ukraine, they’d be joining an unholy alliance with a government installed in a CIA-backed coup that pointlessly provoked Russia by asking to join NATO and is so tolerant of neo-Nazism that it allows soldiers wearing Nazi insignia in its military and seems to be trying to set some sort of record for building statues to World War II Nazi collaborators and antisemites. Plus, they’d be helping the Right distract people from the murderous sins of American imperialism, which are ongoing.

So, again, the offensive weapons industry, from the grenade to the guzzling B-1 bomber, from the pant zipper to the propelled hand-held rockets, from the Meals Ready to Eat to the Missiles from the Drones’ Mouth, all of those shell casings and depleted uranium bullet heads, all of that, including Burger Kings for Troops to the Experimental Anthrax Vaccines, all of that, and all the paper-mouse pushers, all the middlewomen and middlemen, all the folks in this military everything industrial complex, that is what the Russian Right to Stop Extremists/Murderers/ Nazis in Ukraine is all about. USA/UK/EU can take out wedding parties, but Russia can’t take out Nazi’s.

So, we have Angela Davis (throw away your blackness black panther card) and Chomsky and Sean Penn and every manner of woke and wise idiot calling Putin a dictator, a thug, an authoritarian leader. Oh, the authoritarian BlackRock and Raytheon and Biden Administration and USA Lobbying Network, and on and on, so, again, tenured professors with book contracts and speaking (paid big bucks) engagements, forget about them.

This is the American Way — Making Money on/off of WAR. The Racket that General Butler talked about is so so more complicated than his experiences in the 1890s through 1940s. These times are filled with buckets of DNA we might think have zero to do with war, but are so attached to the inbreeding of the war machines that every nanosecond of business and every transaction in this society is all tied to WAR. Like embedded energy and life cycle analysis, the military complex, if we really did the true cost of war/warring, the one or six trillion dollars that Brown University comes up with would be factored up by 10 or more.

The 2022 spending bill, which passed both chambers with gleeful bipartisan support last week, included billions of dollars for ships and planes that the Pentagon didn’t ask for, a common occurrence in Congress. Then, here it is — just one angle. Congress authorized $27 billion for Navy ships, including $4 billion for several vessels the Navy didn’t ask for, and $900 million for additional Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets the Navy had hoped to phase out. The bill also provides billions to purchase 20 more Lockheed Martin C-130J transport planes than the Pentagon requested.

And, the details are in the sausage making, from scarred land for corn, to the poisons to grow the corn, to the ponds of pig blood and guts, to the butchering of antibiotic-filled and toxin-laden pigs, to the transportation of poisoned meat, to sausage warehouses, to all of the packaging and happy meal advertisements, and then, of course, the cost of clogged arteries and obesity and colon cancers, all of that, well, figure in a similar cost analysis for every Hellfire missile produced for the profits of the offensive weapons Mafia.

Since the start of the new year, Lockheed Martin’s stock has soared nearly 25 percent, while Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman each saw their stock prices rise by around 12 percent.

In a January earnings call, Lockheed Martin CEO James Taiclet said that the “renewed great power competition” would lead to inflated defense budgets and additional sales. On the same day, Raytheon Technologies CEO Greg Hayes told investors that the company expected to see “opportunities for international sales” amid the Russian threat.

“The tensions in Eastern Europe, the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things are putting pressure on some of the defense spending over there,” Hayes said. “So I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.”

The defense lobbyist also predicted a major gain for U.S. defense firms thanks to increased European defense spending.

“As much as many countries have their own defense industrial base, they don’t make everything they need themselves. So they are going to rely on us in many cases for missiles, for aircraft, for ground vehicles,” they said. (source)

These are sociopaths. Read it again and again if you are dense. “…. thanks to increased EU spending . . . .” Or, “. . . . fully expect we’re going to see … benefit from it (wars) . . . ” These are golf course dealing misanthropes. Their kids go to Yale, and they have two or four homes around the country. They attend $500 a ticket Hamilton galas. They are the Titans of Terror.

Alas, the offensive weapons-equipment-PSYOPS-marketing-financing INDUSTRY is the gift (poison, PTSD, maiming, mauling, murdering) that keeps on giving. The sacking of our own personal and collective agency, that is, where is the fight for our poor, for our huddled masses, for our general anxiety disordered citizens? Where are those bandaids and nurses staffing those free drop-in clinics? Where are those hefty checks for clean water systems, R & R-ing lead pipes? Where are those insulating old homes programs? Where are those funds for aging in place programs? Where are the deals for the poor and struggling to get into national parks free? Where are those used tires for aging cars that take mother and daughter to their fast-food/child care/adult care jobs? Where are those food vouchers even the French are handing out? Where is all that help, uh?

Over decades of brainwashing and history scrubbing and agnotology and consumerism and propaganda and plain bad PK12 education. After years of mediocre college degrees, and after throwing money at computer engineers, the AI Hole in the Autism Wall Gang, and after so much celebrity pimping, the American public will pull out a yellow and blue hanky and smear their crocodile tears for a billionaire lying comic ZioLenskyy and wax nostalgic for those Nazi-loving Ukrainians, but never a word for fellow human beings in, well, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Russia.

We wonder about Word Press — a non-profit (sic) that takes $100 a year just for this little shit show? Will the site be hacked, cut, or disengaged because of Russia’s flag above and the UkiNazi image below?

Oh, the stories over at Grayzone or Consortium News or Mint Press or Covert Action Magazine, or . . . .

‘Gods of War’: How the US weaponized Ukraine against Russia TJ COLES

And the evil is the shutdown of discourse. True evil. Makes Mossad and CIA and Stasi and KGB look like Keystone Cops:

And, so, Zelenskyy wants hundreds and hundreds of billions in weapons and aid and for his padded luxurious life. Yep, a failure to communicate — the US of A! But there is still some sanity — Black Agenda Report:

Left Voices are Censored

Censorship is supposed to happen in other places, not in the U.S. But big tech, in alliance with the state, is silencing Black and other left voices in the media. The war in Ukraine is bringing this process into high relief and making a mockery of claims of freedom of expression. Jacqueline Luqman, co-host of the Sputnik program, By Any Means Necessary , explains.

The U.S. Crisis Plays Out in Ukraine

Joe Biden travelled to Europe for NATO and G7 meetings one month after Russian troops entered Ukraine. Biden predictably condemned Russia but also suggested he was seeking regime change against Vladimir Putin. Dr. Gerald Horne , author and historian who currently holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, analyses US policy in Ukraine.

The end game is lies, all the spin, the tens of thousands of outlets, the social media monsters, all of the PSYOPS, all the roots of Edward Bernays, Milton Friedman, Madmen, the entire suite of propaganda tools. A failure to communicate is now an avalanche of lies, as in the Empire of Lies. Russia loses that war — information 5.0 USA style, is Russia 1.0. Honesty is a crutch.

We’ve studied this system of propaganda, and it is sophisticated, way before Goebbels, but still, he is the master 2.0. Israel is a killer of a liar. Britain. USA.

Russia’s approach to the Ukraine question is remarkably different from the West’s. As far as Russia is concerned Ukraine is not a pawn on the chessboard but rather a member of the family with whom communication has become impossible due to protracted foreign interference and influence operations. According to Andrei Ilnitsky, an advisor to the Russian Ministry of Defence, Ukraine is the territory where the Russian world lost one of the strategic battles in the cognitive war. Having lost the battle, Russia feels all the more obliged to win the war — a war to undo the damage to a country that historically has always been part of the Russian world and to prevent the same damage at home. It is rather telling that what US-NATO call an “information war” is referred to as “mental’naya voina”, that is cognitive war, by this prominent Russian strategist. Being mainly on the receiving end of information/influence operations, Russia has been studying their deleterious effects. (source)

Marketing 101 is now hyperspace marketing, and the tools of bots, AI, algorithms, etc., they are like neutron info bombs.

1.  Bandwagon propaganda
2.  Card Stacking propaganda
3.  Plain Folk Propaganda
4.  Testimonial Propaganda
5.  Glittering Generality Propaganda
6.  Name Calling Propaganda
7.  Transfer Propaganda
8.  Ad nauseam propaganda
9.  Stereotyping propaganda
10.  Appeal to prejudice propaganda
11.  Appeal to fear propaganda

So therefore, this relentless manipulation of people’s emotions and coginitive disassociation and associative thinking has unleashed a dangerous whirlwind of mass insanity.

The most dangerous purveyor of it:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

The hideous reality of war and its public relations and adverting departments that allegedly inform us about it has people accepting its horror as some sort of natural occurrence like sunset, tides, weather, rather than seeing it as caused by ruling powers battling over their wealth struggles which reduce humanity to commit mass murder under the pretense of it being the natural order of things. Further, rules have been drawn by upper class educated folks with doctoral degrees legalizing mass murder who teach us just what is the proper way to bash in skulls, burn people to death and rape and murder in a supposedly civilized way.

The alleged morality of humans accepting one form of insanely hysterical murder as long as it adheres to a guidebook on the proper form of slaughter should make us all grateful there is no judgmental, vindictive old testament deity or we’d all have been destroyed after the second world war let alone after our profitable feasts of death since then when we’ve murdered even more.

This closely guarded secret that humanity suffers in wars but only when rationalizations of bloody filth called “war crimes” are committed is currently being used and abused in a form of language, thought and moral degeneracy that may finally end when human consciousness, especially American, rejects the degenerate advertising and public relations blitz posing as reporting to blame Russians for what is called by language perverts their “war crime” against the Ukrainian government. Said government is a product of a U.S. financed insurrection that dumped an elected president who favored Russia for a western political pimp favoring market forces, which include some modern Nazis.

While he has become a celebrity among morals free political employees of ruling power by informing everyone to send him weapons so that there can be more bloodshed of the loving, violence free western kind, the western world has increased military spending to record breaking figures. Our rulers, media employee shepherds, see to it that our population is reduced to sheep as much of the world is angrier than ever at the machinations of the warfare business though you’d never know it if all you had was the western media called a free press. They create mentally brutalized souls into paying hundreds of dollars for taco-pizza-burgers and calling it free food.

While Ukrainians have been dying by the thousands for the past eight years, subject to a US/NATO financed and controlled assault, Americans and the west have known absolutely nothing of what was going on and not until Russian retaliation have we heard repeated use of words like brutal, savage, slaughter and worse, to condemn what under normal American circumstances would be called a form of legal police action to purify the world and see to it that peace, love and tranquility would prevail as we slaughtered. Maybe after everyone was dead?

A nation that leads all others in conducting wars against weaker countries and murdering hundreds of thousands, at the least, and millions, at the worst, is not only bellowing murderous nonsense but manipulating good, well meaning people into swallowing editorial garbage that has some decent folks almost ready to pawn their pets to send money to suffering Ukrainians. Even worse, some perverted by venomous outpourings of what would be called vicious hate speech if conducted by anyone else, are ready to accept the potential of nuclear war in order to stop the horrible slaughter which mostly exists between the ears and comes out of the mouths of our thought police working overtime for our ruling powers.

A recent story headlined a murderous, bloody, brutal assault by Russians, which had killed two people at the time the story was filed. Sadly but horrendously over-stated in a nation which kills 4-5 Americans every hour in our private transport system of undeclared road wars to get us to work, shop, school, and conduct other freedom loving democratic economic action. This while the sanctions against Russia are causing serious economic pain the world over, including to Americans, while military spending and the mass murder business that is the backbone of our incredibly gross national product is growing faster and more dangerously and fossil fuel interests profit more than ever as environmental destruction proceeds at a more menacing pace.

This assault on reason, combined with the rape of language and the reduction of public consciousness to the level of a nation of insects, is really only an update of what has been going on for more than 100 years concerning Russia. The assault on that nation began in 1917 when the Russian revolution threatened capitalism, its global center then as now in the United States. America immediately invaded along with a group of its future lapdogs which eventually became NATO after the Second World War. The idea of a return to humanity’s roots by building a society based on communal cooperation rather than competitive actions which created wonderful benefits for some but only by reducing others to dreadful lives was too much for fanatics of the fundamentalist church of capital.

Our primitive communistic survival in the days before we destroyed hunter-gatherer people meant that when the hunt was successful, everyone ate meat and when it wasn’t, everyone ate what was gathered. This was thousands of years before vegan diets and anti-meat worship among good people who comfortably house 136 million pets in a nation where more than 500,000 humans are without shelter. The pet business was good for more than 104 billion in 2020, a mass of economic clout but still chump change compared to the 778 billion for war, which involves 750 American bases in 80 foreign countries for something calling itself “defense”. This protected folks like George Floyd from the brutal, savage, bloodthirsty fiend Putin, but was totally helpless to defend him from a few Americans with badges.

A communist ideal which held that a thousand people and a thousand loaves of bread should mean a loaf of bread for everyone sickened rich capitalists who insisted that some should get ten loaves each and the rest be damned, which is the gross foundation dressed in economic jargon that would make a house of prostitution a citadel of love. Capital said that just as sex workers made a decent living by using their private parts to make private profits for their pimps, workers of all kinds could live comfortably if they just did their jobs and didn’t ask any questions. Their media saw to it that unquestioners became everyday people.

The social seeds planted by people like Marx and Engels in the 19th century came to fruition early in the 20th in Russia, and the vicious assault on that nation began, then as now, from its headquarters in America. After 70 years of continuous physical and mental assault finally helped cause a breakdown of the Soviet Union and a return to capitalism, that was still not enough and the U.S. and its imperial lackeys kept up the war and its present experience which threatens the worst outcome for humanity. This will hopefully not only bring China and Russia closer but the people of the USA and global humanity together to transcend the danger by helping to end the degeneracy of warfare and create peace via the end of an imperial crusade to further enrich billionaires and their upper class servants while increasing mass poverty and the environmental threat to us all.

With daily by the minute assaults on consciousness reducing other wise good people to hateful idiocy demanding death for the savage Putin and evil Russians, there is glee among the perverted political economic leadership of the war business. They number a tiny group with power supposedly democratic while they brainwash people into believing autocracy – a term most hardly understand – is in charge everywhere but where it exists; in what we have been taught to believe is the free world. Benign (?) America billionaires become malevolently evil (ominous background music) Russian oligarchs, according to our mind shapers who neglect to point out they keep their wealth in the same banks – mostly American or at least using American dollars – to perform as charming space travelers or deranged killers, depending on national origin.

This perverse market freedom continues to mean imperial abuse by one nation, ours, while taxpayers absorb a debt of 30 trillion dollars paying for the empire which is bringing us all closer to a point at which we will have little time left as a human race. We need to begin acting like one very soon. That means far more than waving a Ukrainian flag and sending paychecks to the pimps of war, but no longer accepting their crimes against nature and beginning to act like what we are: a human race badly in need of global democracy to stop all wars, not just those we are told are the wrong way to butcher humans, and begin life. That calls for the end of the post World War II domination of the American empire and this present horror is hopefully a sign that it will be so. We need to turn off the anti-social media that insure further private profit and ultimate public loss and turn on humanity’s original instinct for cooperation. And hurry.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Frank Scott.

And, well, it is tax time, and these beasts of a nation — Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, MSM — they rally around the military offensive murdering complex for, well, billions thrown at the Nazi regime of Ukraine. And I have to pay more taxes on my subpar wages? Give me a few of those drones, please! Billions of dollars thrown at the most corrupt and evil of them all (well, there are many evil ones, so see this as hyperbole). One contract with this outfit, AeroVironment. Looking into that company, I find its current president to be an interesting man:

Wikipedia — Nawabi is an Afghan sub clan mega Barakzai the majority of this clan played an important role during the Barakzai dynasty – such as Ismail Khan Nawabi.

The name Nawabi is borrowed from the Arabic, being the honorific plural of Naib or “deputy”. The name Nawab is mostly used among South Asians. In Bengal it is pronounced Nowab. The English adjective nawabi (from the Urdu word nawwābī) describes anything associated with a nawab.

He says AeroVironment is a great place to work because: “There is no place like AeroVironment where a group of honorable, smart, and hardworking people can make such a big and positive impact on our lives and society. I am excited and honored to lead such a team in order to help all of our 3 stakeholders Proceed with Certainty.”

Wahid Nawabi

Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer

Yes, the face of the military murdering complex is a smile, a wink, and even a diversity statement validation.

As President and Chief Executive Officer at AEROVIRONMENT INC, Wahid Nawabi made $2,524,773 in total compensation. Of this total $632,319 was received as a salary, $535,513 was received as a bonus, $0 was received in stock options, $1,333,024 was awarded as stock and $23,917 came from other types of compensation. This information is according to proxy statements filed for the 2021 fiscal year. President and Chief Executive Officer. AEROVIRONMENT INC

So, the wink and a nod, all those stock options, all of that base pay, all of it, all predicated on, hmm, contracts. Yes, US GI Joe fed contracts. And, well, a contract is a contract, whether Mario Puzo is writing about it, or if one of the slick female heads of the war complex companies is drafting and signing it. This is one company, which I have previously discussed in general and specifically is really not just one in Santa’s Serial Murder workshops, but one represents dozens of companies (contracted) relying on those contracts for these drones with payloads: wires, optics, diodes, motherboards, paint, metal, gears, etc. Kamikaze drones, what a lovely thing to be proud of, and this company is just one of thousands that makes money off of blood.

The officials told the outlet that the White House is currently considering supplying Ukraine with Switchblades, as part of a new package of military aid. However, they noted that no decisions on the matter have been made, yet.

There are two available variants of the loitering munition, the Switchblade 300 and the 600. The 300 was designed to target personnel and unarmored vehicles. It has a range of 10 kilometers and an endurance of 10 minutes. The larger 600 was designed to destroy armored vehicles, like battle tanks. This version has a range of 80 kilometers and an endurance of up to 20 minutes. (source)

Please, kind reader, look at these people — the website of their team: Aerovironment. For me, they are scary people, for sure, in that they are the paper-pushers and state college grads from engineering programs; they are the marketers, the CPAs and the HR folk. These are what I have faced my entire life teaching — people who have no reservation about making money selling drugs that kill (Big Pharma) or booze that kills or anything that kills, both human or environment. Look at their biographies on the “About Us” page above. This is the banality of evil, and I am afraid, that evil is much much deeper engrained than Hannah Arendt could have conjured up because there is no “great war,” no great global war against Nazis and fascists, as in WWII. It’s all transactional, money for blood, weapons ‘r us!

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958

I’m not sure she was thinking of the pure structural/sanctions-led/financial tyranny of capitalism, that soft tyranny of western consumerism, the constant inverted tyranny in a world where most First World folk eat, drink, sleep oil. A world that is run by business men and business women, under the umbrella of the Deep State and government thugs. I do not think she was in the know around how pernicious the marketing of lies and evil doing was under the guidance of a fellow Jew, Edward (Freud) Bernays. But she was onto something, for sure:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

You see, the totalitarianism is in the marketing of these spoils of war, and the war minders, and the war industry. Look at this company’s founder, Paul MacCready. Check him out on Wikipedia — Paul B. MacCready Jr. (September 25, 1925 – August 28, 2007) was an American aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the first Kremer prize. He devoted his life to developing more efficient transportation vehicles that could “do more with less.”

In so many ways, MacCready represents the best and the brightest of his generation, the hope for mankind, the genius of the American System producing tools of war, tools of profit. He represents the undying American work ethic, with only the heavens (err, he said sky, as he was an avowed atheist) as his limit.

That is it, really — the biography of a military industrial complex tool of death, all started in the twinkle of a 15-year-old MacCready’s eye when he was designing planes and gliders in 1940. Now? Every sort of munition and payload delivered in the fuselages of those toys. Heck, why not drone-carrying bugs injected or engineered with viruses?

CNBC 3/16/2022: “Stocks making the biggest moves midday: Alibaba, AeroVironment, Boeing and more”. Again, success at the start of the trading and the end of the day bell on Wall Street! Get US taxpayer contract in the millions, and see you stock rise rise rise like sour dough bread,

Dark Side of Delivery: The Growing Threat of Bioweapon Dissemination by Drones —

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Platitudes about ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘standing on your own two feet’. A relentless ideological attack on the state and collective responsibility. The doctrine of ‘no such thing as society’ Thatcherism. Ideologically, at least, the individual and ‘the market’ were paramount. But in reality, of course, there was no genuine rolling back of the state: its machinery was used differently to facilitate the needs of global capital while attacking the labour movement. 

In all this ‘freedom’, there was never much talk in the mainstream political and media narrative about the plight of the poor or workers who felt the brutal effects of the brave new world of neoliberal capitalism. 

Never sufficient analysis about offshoring manufacturing and service-sector jobs to cheap labour economies to boost profits. This was merely presented as efficiency and job creation for poorer countries, as if the owners of industry were on some kind of humanitarian mission. 

But it was only ever the old colonialist mentality passed off in new clothing. 

Today, this mentality manifests by subjecting poorer nations to IMF-World Bank ‘structural adjustment’ directives and beating them into being ‘business friendly’ and compliant with the needs of global (Western) capital. Spin it any way you like, whether ‘foreign direct investment’ or ‘liberalising’ the economy, it amounts to richer countries merely using or loaning back money to the poorer countries (with strings) that they stole from them over the centuries. 

Courtesy of lop-sided trade deals, the WTO and the international financial institutions, we see a model of ‘development’ characterised by indebtedness, displaced populations resulting from ‘infrastructure projects’ (to facilitate the needs of capital) and a deliberate running down of indigenous models of agriculture. 

There was not much talk about ‘freedom’ in relation to the subsequent state-corporate economic brutality experienced by society’s most marginalised, highlighted, for instance, by Arundhati Roy in The Ghosts of Capitalism – the ‘invisible’ and shoved-aside victims of a rampant neoliberalism, with a good dose of state-backed violence always on hand to secure compliance.

Their ‘freedom’ never amounted to much in the first place. 

Economic structural violence waged against people, economies and ecosystems courtesy of elite interests bent on monopolising energy, money, food, land and violence across the globe. 

Yet the system now purports to care about the well-being of those it persistently regards as ‘collateral damage’ and ‘economic fodder’. A system that by its very nature concentrates money, control and power at the top of the pyramid. 

Consider that prior to COVID, Pfizer was “the least trusted company in the least trusted industrial sector in the United States”, according to Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice. 

But we are supposed to have faith in Pfizer and disregard its lengthy corporate rap sheet and its unscrupulous profiteering practices regarding its COVID vaccine rollout across the globe. We are supposed to trust its products and its vaccine data that it is trying so hard, with help from the US Food and Drug Administration, to keep from the public. 

At the same time, to facilitate uptake of Pfizer’s injections, we hear a lot about ‘collective responsibility’. A much-maligned concept in a dog-eat-dog neoliberal regime. Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau and others spin vaccine sceptics’ talk of ‘freedom of choice’ regarding what is allowed to be injected into their own bodies as selfish and the domain of right-wing women haters and fascists. 

The right to protest, to free speech, to associate and so forth were (and often continue to be) suspended as people were locked down waiting for ‘the vaccine’ thanks to a virus that mainly targets those over 80 and those with compromised immune systems due to existing (serious) morbidities. 

We have seen all manner of state interference in the private lives of citizens over the past two years. 

Political leaders like Macron, Trudeau, Biden, Merkel and Arden – the frontline managers and facilitators of private capital – have seemingly become so concerned about the public’s welfare that their freedoms and rights must be trampled on by the state. 

Those who demand freedom and have questioned the mainstream COVID narrative have been labelled ‘anti-vaxxers’, ‘granny killers’, irresponsible and as prioritising their own selfish needs over those of the collective. 

Even those who claim to be of the ‘left’ have become part of the ideological apparatus of the state: joining in the chorus and defending tyranny as well as Big Pharma’s rushed-to-market injections and its right to your body and right to make billions in the process. 

Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine brought in $37bn in 2021. Nick Dearden calculates the NHS has paid a mark-up of at least £2bn – six times the cost of the pay rise the UK government agreed to give nurses last year. 

Moreover, Dearden argues companies like Pfizer behave more like hedge funds, buying up and controlling other firms and intellectual property, rather than traditional medical research companies. 

He says: 

The truth is, they aren’t the sole inventors of the vaccine. That was the work of public money, university research and a much smaller company, Germany’s BioNTech. As one former US government official complained, the fact we call it the ‘Pfizer’ vaccine is ‘the biggest marketing coup in the history of American pharmaceuticals’.

Even though many on the ‘left’ have campaigned against the brutality of capitalism over the years, they bought into the fear propaganda from the start without question, helping to pave the way for pharma’s distorted profits, the destruction of small businesses and the loss of countless livelihoods due to lockdowns. 

Many stood by in silence and watched the mega rich accrue enormous profits. Research by Oxfam has shown that the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn between March and December 2020. The world’s 10 richest billionaires collectively saw their wealth increase by $540bn over this period. In September 2020, Jeff Bezos could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID. 

While lockdowns and restrictions were imposed on ordinary people and small businesses, the winners were the likes of Amazon, Big Pharma and the tech giants. The losers were small enterprises and the bulk of the population, deprived of their right to work and an entire panoply of civil rights. 

A report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) stated that COVID-19 policies had severely disrupted economies and labour markets in all world regions, with estimated losses of working hours equivalent to nearly 400 million full-time jobs in the second quarter of 2020, most of which were in emerging and developing countries. 

Among the most vulnerable were the 1.6 billion informal economy workers, representing half of the global workforce, who were working in sectors experiencing major job losses or had seen their incomes seriously affected by lockdowns. Most of these were self-employed and in low-income jobs in the informal sector. 

For policies that were supposedly brought in to protect health, there has also been immense damage resulting in lengthy non-COVID healthcare waiting lists for all manner of life-threatening diseases and conditions. 

A more logical approach to protecting public health would have involved the promotion of a targeted strategy based on risk along with early intervention treatments as set out in the Great Barrington Declaration. But this was not even up for debate. Censorship and smears were the norm. 

Locking the global population in their homes, or in places like India compelling millions to walk huge distances or travel in crowded conditions to return to the countryside, until a vaccine was made available smacks of incompetence or worse – a predetermined agenda. 

Writing in the Contemporary Voice of Dalit journal (31 October 2021), researchers Krishna Ram and Shivani Yadav note the effects of COVID policies in India: 

The economic tumult caused by the pandemic over the past two years has the potential to double the nation’s poverty… Our calculations show that around 150–199 million additional people will fall under poverty in 2021–2022; a majority of which are from rural areas, owing to the immiserate nature of the rural economy. Further disaggregation reveals that the SC/ST [Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes], casual labour and the self-employed are the most impacted groups.

It is clear who was influencing the lockdown-COVID public health policy. In a report by Yohan Tengra of the Awaken India Movement, it is described how the Gates Foundation and Big Pharma have infiltrated and co-opted key public health institutions at the national level in India, not least the COVID-19 National Task Force. 

Tengra says the report has exposed: 

… not just the names of those who are sitting in this task force but also how they are financially connected to the pharmaceutical industry and vaccine mafia. This task force has been responsible for the aggressive push to lockdown, mandatory mask requirements, forced testing of asymptomatics, dropping ivermectin and hcq from the national protocol, suppressing vaccine adverse events and a lot more!

It was fitting that an MP recently asked in Canada’s parliament just who does the government serve: Klaus Schawb and the World Economic Forum (WEF) or Canadian citizens? 

A pertinent question. But any enquiry should also look to include the wider digital-financial-industrial complex which has used COVID as cover for bailing out financial markets and restructuring capitalism and trying to manage the long-term falling rate of profit. 

These issues are at the heart of the ‘Great Reset’ or ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ that Klauss Schwab and others talk of. Concepts that – like neoliberal globalisation in the 1980s – are given a positive spin and which supposedly symbolise a brave new techno-utopian future. 

The WEF, Big Finance, Big Tech, the Gates Foundation and Big Pharma have been heavily promoting the COVID-Great Reset agenda from the start. This has to date resulted in the reinvigoration of an ailing pharma sector with a multi-billion-dollar windfall, the eradication of smaller firms and jobs, cementing the dominance of the online retail giants, global chains and the digital payments sector and the injection of much-needed liquidity into what were by late 2019/early 2020 collapsing financial markets. 

In the 1980s, to help legitimise the deregulated neoliberal agenda, government and media instigated an ideological onslaught, pressing home the notion of individual rights and responsibility and emphasising a shift away from the state, trade unions and the public sector. This reflected economic changes underpinned by notions of the primacy of the market and individual consumer choice.  

But there is now a new ideological shift. We hear claims of a ‘democratic deficit’, whereby individual rights are said to be undermining the wider needs of society. The message is that individual freedom is posing a threat to ‘national security’, ‘public health’ and ‘safety’.” As a result, there must be clampdowns on the right to travel, associate and protest and on freedom of speech.  

As stated by journalist Iain Davis in a recent article, a commitment to the ‘public interest’, ‘safety’ and protecting the population from ‘harm’ will replace freedom and democracy. Technocracy: The Operating System For The New International Rules-Based Order (unlimitedhangout.com) 

As in the 1980s, this messaging is being driven by economic factors. Neoliberalism has privatised, deregulated, exploited workers and optimised debt to the limit. We have collapsing markets kept afloat by endless financial injections and an overall declining rate of profit with firms suffocating under mountains of debt. 

AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision (3D manufacturing, drone technology, driverless vehicles, lab grown food, farmerless farms, robotics, etc) are also on the horizon. 

A mass labour force – and therefore mass education, mass welfare, mass healthcare provision and entire systems that were in place to reproduce labour for capitalist economic activity – might in the near future no longer be required. Labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed. So, if labour is the condition for the existence of the working class, why bother with the working class?  

COVID has accelerated economic restructuring and the shift towards an authoritarian form of capitalism that is ultimately to be based on a Chinese-style social credit system to ensure the population complies with its coming servitude.  

Former WEF-sponsored ‘young global leaders’ like Trudeau, Macron, Merkel and Arden rose to the political helm of various countries after having been suitably groomed. They will continue to fulfill their roles by managing dissent through mass surveillance and clamping down on civil rights as the effects of inflation (induced by the liquidity injected into the system), joblessness and post-COVID austerity measures kick in. 

They will, of course, still facilitate freedom: the freedom of the billionaire class to continue to plunder across the globe. And the freedom for citizens to submit. 

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

The Twist

In his book, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, Ralph Nader picked the wrong people.¹  People like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Naively, I wrote the two and included my most recent book at that time in which I cited their philanthropic organization, “The Giving Pledge” as a source of the super-rich who could rescue America and the world from the evildoing of the power elite of America’s corpocracy. ²  Nary a response. Either they are too tethered to the corpocracy, or their gatekeepers ditched my mail. It is just as well. I later discovered that both have run afoul of the law on several counts.  ³

I then turned to allegedly the richest person on earth, Elon Musk, creative inventor of useful and harmless products (the Tesla auto, for instance). I tried reaching him unsuccessfully several times. Just as well, also, for I soon learned that he did not have an impeccable record. ⁴  So, I have at the last moment pulled him from the manuscript for my latest book, Wolves Dressed in Suits Leading Humanity to Extinction, currently being considered for publication.

I contacted an organization by the name of Patriotic Millionaires. They seemed interested initially then responded no further, causing me to wonder which of these two forms of patriotism they practiced: “My country right or wrong,” or “My country please do no wrong.”

I also contacted a few wealthy celebrities in various fields. One was the well-known feminist, Gloria Steinem. The Chicago Tribune declared she was a “spook” of the CIA. ⁵  She candidly admitted it and defended her work for them, saying, “In my experience the Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.” ⁶  She obviously did not know or want to admit that the CIA operates with a forked tongue.

Perhaps the super wealthy are afraid of being associated with any endeavor aimed at neutralizing the elite’s power. Their fear and the same fear of all Americans is well founded. America’s corpocracy has an unquenchable craving for conducting undeclared and declared wars and for spying on people. ⁷ The deep state that includes the CIA and the NSA and probably some dark agencies as well know more about the American people than they know about themselves. John and Nisha Whitehead, creators of the alternative news media outlet, The Rutherford Institute, warn that “all of us are in danger” of seeking and telling the truth. ⁸  George Orwell’s famous 1984 book should be retitled “1984 and Evermore!”Recently I personally experienced the workings of “Big Brother” ⁹

I have been collecting for several years the writings of investigative journalists about their findings in investigating the true cause of the “911” explosions of the Twin Towers and the East Wing of the Pentagon. Recently, I noticed in browsing the Web a new article on the subject by one of journals in the alternative news media. The article’s title implied that a “smoking gun” had been finally found. When I tried to open the site, my computer was immediately blocked. It took a Microsoft technician to unlock my computer. Moreover, the site had been removed.

Heeding the Whiteheads’ warning and my own brush with the deep state, I modified my new book by stating that stripping the elite of their power was punishment enough since they crave power as much as money but with the caveat that they must no longer be allowed to reap all sorts of tax breaks.

In Closing

Perhaps it is impossible to be both wealthy and moral. A progressive journalist thinks so, having written that “it’s basically just immoral to be rich,” and then adding that “people who possess great wealth in a time of poverty are directly causing that poverty.” ¹⁰

Be that as it may, like Diogenes and like Don Quixote in his quest for the improbable, I remain undaunted in my search for one or more “super-rich outliers,” my name for the honest wealthy.

1. Nader, R. Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, Seven Stories Press, 2011.
2. Brumback, G.B. 911! KDP Independent Publishing, 2019.
3. Stein, T. “Microsoft Ruled a Monopoly / Court Finds Firm Abused its Power”, SFGGate, November. 6, 1999. See, also, Allen, P. “Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft. Portfolio”, 2012, and Warm, B. “Is Warren Buffett an Ethical Investor?” Seven Pillars Institute, December 11, 2019. Mr. Warm was a research intern there when he wrote this article.
4. Boudetta, N.E. “Telsa Faces New Scrutiny Over Racial Bias and Elon Musk’s Tweets”, The New York Times, February 7, 2022.
5. Kounalakis, M. “The Feminist was a Spook” Chicago Tribune, October 25, 2015.
6. Ibid.
7. Brumback, G.B. America’s Oldest Professions: Warring and Spying. KDP Independent Publishing, 2015.
8. Whitehead, J.W. and Whitehead, N.  “The Mind Control Police:  The Police and  Government’s War on Thought Crimes and Truth Tellers“, February 15, 2022.
9. Brumback, G.B. “911 Revisited and Two Bizarre Encounters”, Uncommon Thought Journal, February 10, 2022.
10. Smith, A.Q. “It’s Basically Just Immoral to Be Rich“, Current Affairs, March 30, 2017.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Brumback.

The day after New Zealand’s first lockdown was announced, I expressed to a senior colleague my concern for those around the country whose livelihoods would suffer as a result.

She agreed, but was confident that the spirit of “we’re all in it together” accompanying these drastic public health interventions would allow the government to lead the country towards a kinder, more equitable society.

“I think we might see a universal basic income,” she said hopefully.

As it turns out, the government had little appetite for progressive welfare or tax reform.

Instead, working with the Reserve Bank, they have propped up the economy through a combination of measures that have drastically inflated the price of houses.

This has most likely protected some jobs, but it has also made work increasingly irrelevant as capital gains completely outstrip wages. The wealthy have been made even wealthier, while many can no longer afford a roof over their heads.

In the past year, the average New Zealander effectively lost $54.59 for every hour they turned up to work if they did not own a home.

According to Stats NZ, the median worker earned $26.44 per hour before tax in 2020. That comes to $21.49 per hour after tax if working a 40 hour week.

Median house prices
Meanwhile, in the year to end of February 2021, the median nationwide house price increased from $640,000 to $780,000: a difference of $140,000. If houses took weekends, public holidays and four weeks’ leave off each year – which of course they do not but it makes the calculation simpler – that makes an hourly rate equivalent to $76.08 per hour. Tax-free.

This is a direct result of the decision to support the economy through a combination of quantitative easing, a reduced Official Cash Rate and wage subsidies, instead of meaningfully increasing spending on things we need such as infrastructure and welfare.

The government handed out money to the banks, effectively at no cost, allowing them to lend more at increasingly attractive rates.

The government also bought bonds at the same time, devaluing deposits and making it pointless to keep money in the bank. This combination of easy credit and disincentivised saving caused a large amount of money to start sloshing around looking for somewhere to go.

The traditional concern with this approach to stimulus is that it will inflate the price of goods and services, increasing the cost of living.

In New Zealand, though, we like to buy houses. A tax system that drastically favours property ownership, combined with a cultural sensibility that houses are a safe bet, has seen much of this newly available money pumped straight into the housing market.

A feature
This is a feature, not a bug.

It represents a new, more interventionist version of trickle-down economics for the 2020s. Decried in 2011 by Labour MP Damien O’Connor as “the rich pissing on the poor”, politicians from the right have long argued that if the wealthy feel wealthier, their increased spending will benefit those less well off.

Generally used to advocate for reduced taxes on the rich, these ‘trickle down’ arguments refuse to die, no matter how comprehensively and repeatedly they are discredited.

This revival of trickle-down economics is a little different, as it is based on direct stimulus rather than a reduction in tax, but the effective mechanism is the same.

House price inflation is desirable, we are told, because homeowners feeling the resulting “wealth effect” will spend more on the goods and services provided by other New Zealanders. The win-win logic of this argument hides the fact that, fundamentally, someone is paying a heavy price.

Another way to think about it is that the government has effectively paid for covid-19 by levying a special tax on anyone who wants to live in New Zealand, but did not happen to own property during the summer of 2020/21, and handing that money to homeowners.

Paying the price
Many will pay this price throughout their lives. Some will be consigned to renting forever, handing over ever-increasing portions of their incomes to landlords seeking increased yield from their value-inflated properties.

Too many won’t even be able to do that, and sleeping on the street or in emergency accommodation. The relatively lucky few who do manage to buy a home will have mortgages hundreds of thousands of dollars larger than they otherwise would, spreading the cost of covid across their entire lifetimes.

Even as the beneficiaries of this covid levy, most homeowners are unable to simply stop working and enjoy this newfound wealth.

They may feel that they cannot realise their capital gain because it is tied up in their family home. What this windfall does provide, however, is choice: the option to release some of their newfound capital by downsizing into somewhere cheaper, or to stay put, taking advantage of the extra equity to fund lifestyle improvements like a new boat, a bach or a remodelled kitchen.

Unprecedented demand for watercraft this summer suggests that many are doing exactly this.

It can be tempting to view this growing inequity as just another “baby boomers vs millennials” issue. Certainly, it does represent a massive transfer of wealth from generally younger New Zealanders who do not currently own homes, to the largely older folk who were able to buy homes cheaply in the past.

This disparity is reflected in Westpac’s latest consumer confidence figures, which show that younger New Zealanders are far more likely to be worried about their financial situation compared with older cohorts.

Patronising advice about avoiding avocados and food delivery services to save for a home entirely misses this point. Nonetheless, it is important to note that many older New Zealanders also live in poverty while subject to similarly individualising narratives of self-control.

Social divide
Perhaps the more important question is how this rapidly accumulating wealth will be deployed to further entrench a growing social divide.

Parents with equity to spare are increasingly using it to help their children “get on the property ladder”. On an individual basis this is an entirely reasonable thing to do.

At a larger scale, though, the competitive advantage conferred by having generous, wealthy parents makes it even harder for those who do not have such privilege to obtain a home. Many are being left behind as a new landed gentry takes shape.

These political-economic arrangements favouring existing wealth over hard work have been a long time in the making, beginning well before most of the current crop of politicians arrived in parliament.

It is notable, though, that a government that promised to address the “housing crisis” has actively and knowingly pursued policies that have produced an unprecedented upward step-change in the market.

Perhaps most concerning is that the Prime Minister has expressed her intent that house price inflation should continue, just at a more “moderate” rate, because that’s what “people expect”.

It is exactly these expectations that are the problem: these issues will not be resolved while houses remain a speculative investment vehicle, rather than a home.

‘Tipping the balance’
Tuesday’s announcement of measures to “tip the balance” towards home buyers, rather than investors, might begin to signal a growing recognition that housing is more than an investment.

A substantial class of investors have certainly been made exceptionally wealthy by the covid-19 response, even as those who work for a living have seen their incomes stagnate.

But while this separation of ‘investors’ or ‘speculators’ from ‘homeowners’ might be politically convenient, it makes something of a false distinction.

Whether a house is owned as a home, or purely a source of income, any non-improvement appreciation in value comes at someone else’s expense.

Until New Zealand acknowledges this, little will change: whoever is in charge, and no matter how many new homes get built.

Covid-19 has shown that when politicians want to act, they certainly can. As many others have pointed out, this government promised “transformational change”. I’m not sure that taking money from those with the least, handing it to those with the most, is quite the kindness my colleague had in mind.

Dr Brendon Blue is a geographer in Te Kura Tātai Aro Whenua, the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington. He mostly studies and teaches the politics of environmental science and restoration, but would have been better off owning a house instead. This article was first published on The Democracy Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

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