THE ENTIRE BASIS OF AMNESTY IS TO KEEP WAGES
DEPRESSED.
“Tech tycoons like Larry Ellison and Mark
Zuckerberg have gotten rich while wages in the technology sector have
stagnated.”
Tech firms fight hiring rules in immigration bill
Tech firms fight hiring rules in immigration bill
Americans
would "be shocked to know that most of the H-1B visas … are going to
outsourcing companies," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said during a recent
hearing.
VISAS
America… NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!
One-way trips to U. S. frustrate immigration authorities
An estimated 4.4 million people entered the country on
legal visas and have never left. Officials often have no way of knowing whether
they do.
Portrait of a modern-day plutocrat:
Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle
By
Julien Kiemle
22 April 2014
22 April 2014
Earlier
this month, the data firm Equilar published its list of the
highest paid CEOs for 2013. The report paints a picture of vast inequality,
with extraordinary sums being paid to a tiny layer of the population. Pay for
the top-earning 100 CEOs in the US increased by 9 percent last year, to $13.9
million a piece.
Topping the list was Larry
Ellison, the CEO of Oracle Corporation, a man who exemplifies the social
character of the ruling class and its manner of wealth accumulation.
Ellison’s total compensation for
2013 was $78.4 million, almost all of it in stock options. For the
eight years that Equilar has tracked executive compensation, Ellison’s
cumulative pay was $582 million, almost $83 million more than the runner-up,
Tim Cook of Apple. His pay in 2013 was more than
double that of the runner-up for that year, CEO Bob Iger of Walt Disney
Company, paid $34.3 million.
Ellison’s pay was actually down
$18 million from its high in 2012, perhaps a reflection of the slowing
performance of Oracle’s stock. Ellison’s wealth consists largely of real
estate, and his fortunes have been amassed primarily through the medium of the
stock market—a practice that has become pervasive among the ruling class since
the 1980s, and vastly accelerated by the policies of the Federal Reserve.
Indeed,
Ellison is one of the intended beneficiaries of the Obama administration’s
policy since the 2008 crash, which has consisted of making available an
unlimited stream of cash to the financial system. The stock market has soared
as a result, even as pay for the vast majority of the population has stagnated
or declined, and unemployment remains at catastrophic levels.
Oracle Corp. is a developer of
business software, such as supply chain management and enterprise resource
planning, founded by Ellison and Bob Miner. One of the famed Silicon Valley
startups, the company is now a tech giant, with revenues second only to
Microsoft in the world of software development.
Ellison runs his company as
something of a despot, even over its shareholders. Though Ellison himself owns
only about a quarter of the company’s stock, their votes to roll back his pay
package in two consecutive years were offered as nothing more than nonbinding
suggestions, and promptly ignored.
Nominal
management of the company has catapulted Ellison up the ranks of the
super-rich. He is now the fifth-wealthiest person in the world, with a personal
net-worth of about $50 billion. Ellison
is a personification of the obscenity of contemporary capital accumulation, the
object of a fawning media and his fellow aristocrats. A New York Times
feature on the CEO recently proclaimed, “It is good to be the king. It is even
better to be Larry Ellison.” In this they have surely not exaggerated.
Oracle’s
CEO is well-known for his egomaniacal and costly pet projects. His recent
sponsorship of the America’s Cup race in San Francisco at a cost of $100
million is a small expense compared with some of his previous undertakings,
such as spending $250 million to buy up a third of Malibu.
In 2004 he commissioned a
gargantuan custom “superyacht” for $377 million, and his 2012 purchase of the
sixth-largest island in the Hawaiian chain, Lanai, was paid for with between
$500 million and $600 million—cash. He continues to make changes and “develop”
the island as a “model for environmentally sound living.”
Frugal in his own way, Ellison managed to cheat San Mateo County
out of $3 million of property taxes by arguing that one of his mansions, an
imitation of a Japanese Shogun estate, was “functionally obsolete” and worth
hundreds of millions less than he paid for it. As a result, the public school
system lost some $1.4 million in tax dollars.
Like many billionaires of his
type, he gives freely to both political parties, including some of the most
influential figures at the national level, such as Democratic Party House Majority
Whip Kevin McCarthy and former Senator, now Secretary of State in the Obama
administration, John Kerry.
Breaking down Ellison’s pay on
the assumption of a 40-hour workweek means that the CEO makes more in an hour
($37,692.31) than a typical worker is likely to in a year—paying the much lower
capital gains tax rate on almost all of it.
The tragedy of this spectacle
hardly needs to be pointed out, when 12.5 percent of the globe’s population
sits on the cusp of starvation. In the United States, Ellison’s home, a third
of Americans experienced “poverty” in its narrow official definition between
2009 and 2011.
In a
period when the most basic forms of assistance to the working class—food
stamps, unemployment insurance, education, health care, nurturing of culture—are
being systematically dismantled to free up resources for the accumulation of
capital by the aristocracy of finance, the likes of Oracle Corp.’s “king” are
the incarnation of reaction all down the line.
In the early years of Oracle,
possessing a fortune several orders of magnitude smaller than today, Ellison
invited the company’s co-founder Bob Miner to come along with him for a joyride
on a hired fighter jet. Miner wrote back, perhaps more prophetically than he
intended, “You obviously have far more money than you should. It’s things like
this that caused the French Revolution.”
What goes for Ellison goes for
the social layer of which he is a particular expression. Drunk on wealth, their
relationship to society as a whole is fundamentally parasitic. They sit atop a
social power keg—not unlike the aristocracy of the ancien regime. And
similar causes produce similar effects.
WALL STREET LOOTS!
THE STAGGERING COST OF OBAMA’S CORPORATE WELFARE PROGRAM:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-staggering-cost-of-obamas-crony.html
LIKE HIS CRONY BANKSTERS, Tech CEOs literally got access to the Oval Office while the bill was being shaped, the New York Times reported in those heady early days of Hope and Change, while the CEOs’ lobbyists met down the hall with top economics aide Jason Furman.
THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS
OBAMA’S WALL STREET DRIVE CRONY CAPITALISM
The Great Recession should have put the victim-blaming
theory of poverty to rest. In the space of only a few months, millions of
people entered the ranks of the officially poor—not only laid-off blue-collar
workers, but also downsized tech workers, managers, lawyers, and other
once-comfortable professionals. No one could accuse these “nouveau
poor” Americans of having made bad choices or bad lifestyle decisions. They
were educated, hardworking, and ambitious, and now they were also poor—applying
for food stamps, showing up in shelters, lining up for entry-level jobs in
retail. This would have been the moment for the pundits to finally admit the
truth: Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a
shortage of money.
Fed projects
high US unemployment into 2015…so they keep the borders open for hordes more illegals, and continue to
import boatloads of Indians and Chinese for tech jobs!
By
CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER
WASHINGTON
(AP) — The Federal Reserve foresees
unemployment remaining high into 2015, suggesting it will keep short-term
interest rates near record lows at least until then.
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