ALL BILLIONAIRES THINK PAYING LIVING WAGES IS A SOCIALIST COMMUNIST THREAT TO AMERICA
DEMOCRAT PARTY CORRUPTION
"This is how they will destroy America from
within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are
extravagantly wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never
be exposed to the downside of the invasion of millions of migrants, the
crime or the financial burden. They have nothing but contempt
for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being
intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human
traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans;
like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA
McCARTHY
Buss: Home Depot Co-Founder Bernie Marcus Challenges CEOs to Fight U.S. Flirtation with Socialism
1:33
Dale Buss writes for Chief Executive Group that Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus is warning American CEOs to fight to protect the business community and the U.S. economy overall by actively fighting creeping socialist thinking in the country:
Every time he hears a new, multi-trillion-dollar government-spending promise by a Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Marcus grows more determined to fight the ideas behind it. But the co-founder of Home Depot isn’t so sure the rest of America’s CEOs are ready to do battle against what Marcus sees as a real threat to the U.S. economy from socialist thinking.
“They’d better start fighting and get off their rear ends,” the 90-year-old Marcus told Chief Executive. “Guys my age didn’t hesitate to fight the battles that had to be fought. But I’m afraid that in this environment, with social media, a lot of CEOs are afraid of fighting.”
Marcus co-founded Job Creators Network (JCN) nearly a decade ago to promote free-market capitalism and rally everyone from small-business owners to Fortune 500 CEOs in its defense. The not-for-profit organization has played key roles in episodes such as generating support and political pressure for the tax cuts passed by Congress and signed by President Trump in late 2017, and for Trump’s broad deregulation of American business since the day he took office.
Read the rest of the article here.
Is
Corporate America Selling Out Our Country?
Within
hours of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt began summoning the heads
of American industry to Washington. Roosevelt knew the country would need an
unprecedented buildup of planes, ships, and other war materiel. Without
hesitation, American companies responded. Ford, Packard, Chrysler, 3M, Hormel,
General Mills, Pillsbury, Cargill, Boeing, and many other major U.S. companies
gave their all to the war effort. At Roosevelt's request, the president of
General Motors even left his company to oversee the war production effort as a
lieutenant general in the U.S. Army. Roosevelt's initial request for 50,000 new
airplanes per year was openly mocked by the Germans as outlandishly high and
impossible to achieve. But the mighty U.S. industrial base roared to life and
pulled it off. By war's end, the United States was producing 100,000 warplanes
a year. U.S. industry literally transformed itself to save our country. It's
fair to wonder if our current CEOs would do the same.
Would
American companies in a new globalized economy drop everything for their
country? Do American companies even consider themselves American anymore? The
Daily Caller News Foundation asked 19 of the biggest names in corporate America
if they saw themselves as "American" companies. It shouldn't be a
very hard question to answer. But 10 of the 19 -- including Amazon, Apple,
Chevron and General Electric -- refused to answer altogether. The others mostly
gave weasel answers. Only General Motors and the bank JPMorgan Chase were
willing to clearly identify as American institutions. And even with them, the
actual record is cause for concern.
Billionaire
tech investor Peter Thiel brought this issue to light recently when he accused
Google of "seemingly treasonous" behavior for cozying up to the
communist Chinese government. Amazingly, Google has been working on a censored
search engine: Project Dragonfly, built for the Chinese government and designed
to keep the Chinese people from seeing the free flow of information. At the
same time, Google refused to work with the U.S. military. Thiel suggested that
the FBI and CIA should investigate Google, which seems like a good place to
start. More broadly, though, can we really call Google an American company?
Google
and many other U.S.-based companies have operations, sales, and customers all
over the world. They think of themselves globally. They value the bottom line
above all. A dollar made in China is the same as a dollar made in America.
The
question for America is whether this is sustainable. Every big company has a
Washington office dedicated to influencing U.S. government policy and
regulation. With our increasingly powerful government and regulatory regime,
it's smart for companies to do this, and there is nothing wrong with it in
theory. But now that corporate America is pushing Washington for its often
globalist positions instead of for policies that benefit Americans, we may have
a real crisis on our hands.
We're not
talking about just a few corporate offices. Washington is completely dominated
by corporate America. Big companies fund the influential trade associations all
over Washington and hire lobbyists all over Congress and the regulatory
agencies. These lobbyists understand our increasingly complex labyrinth of
regulations. And they are often writing the laws Congress enacts.
Think
tanks are supposed to be independently analyzing and commenting on our
policies. But who do you think funds the think tanks in Washington? Corporate
America dominates in this sphere as well. When they want a new law or to stop a
law or regulation they don't like, these companies go even further, hiring
public relations firms and ad agencies to convince us of their positions. All
of this is a multibillion-dollar business.
Lately,
when senators and representatives leave Congress, they go to work for the
corporate influence machine. Over two-thirds of the congresspersons who retired
or lost their seats this last election cycle is now corporate lobbyists. That's
a record level. A seat in Congress has become an extended tryout for a
high-paying corporate influence job.
All of
this would be of less concern if corporate interests still aligned with actual
American interests, but those days seem to have ended sometime between the
great industrial ramp-up for World War II and Google's recent siding with
communist China over the U.S. military. Where does this leave the American
people?
Watchdog
Accuses Silicon Valley Giants of Dodging $100 Billion in Taxes
Six of the Silicon Valley
Masters of the Universe have been accused of dodging $100 billion in taxes by a
British tax watchdog.
CNBC reports that six
major Silicon Valley tech firms have been accused of having a combined “tax
gap” of $100 billion over the past ten years according to an analysis by a
British tax organization. Fair Tax Mark, a British organization that certifies
businesses for proper tax conduct, examined the global tax payments of
Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft from 2010 to 2019.
The research analyzed the company’s
10-K filings submitted to the U.S. government by the tech giants. Fair Tax Mark
looked at tax provisions, which is the amount that companies set aside in their
financial reports to pay taxes, and compared these with the amount of money
that the companies actually paid to the government, called cash taxes.
Researchers found that over the past ten years, the gap between the tax
provision set out by the tech firms and the taxes they actually paid was
approximately $100.2 billion.
The report also claimed that the
profits were “shifted to tax havens, especially Bermuda, Ireland,
Luxembourg and the Netherlands.” The researchers noted that most of the tax
shortfall “almost certainly arose outside the United States,” with tax charges
from countries outside the United States coming to 8.4 percent of the
companies’ profits overseas.
Paul Monaghan, CEO of Fair Tax Mark,
discussed the report with CNBC stating: “The amount of tax being paid by
these businesses is $100 billion less than reported in their accounts.” The
report noted that Amazon was the worst offender of the six tech firms. The report
alleged that Amazon paid $3.4 billion in income taxes since 2010, noting that
the cash tax paid by Amazon amounted to 12.7 percent of its profit for the
decade despite the corporate tax rate being set at 35 percent for seven of the
past ten years. President Donald Trump cut the corporate tax rate to 21 percent
in 2017.
The report stated: “The company
is growing its market domination across the globe on the back of revenues that
are largely untaxed and can unfairly undercut local businesses that take a more
responsible approach.” A spokesperson for Amazon told CNBC in a statement:
Amazon represents about 1% of global
retail, with larger competitors everywhere we operate, and had a 24% effective
tax rate on profits from 2010-2018. Amazon is primarily a retailer where profit
margins are low, so comparisons to technology companies with operating profit
margins of closer to 50% is not rational. Governments write the tax laws and
Amazon is doing the very thing they encourage companies to do — paying all taxes
due while also investing many billions in creating jobs and infrastructure.
Coupled with low margins, this investment will naturally result in a lower cash
tax rate.
Facebook had the second-biggest tax
gap with the cash tax it paid representing 10.2 percent of the profit it made
over the decade. A spokesperson for Facebook told CNBC:
In 2018 we paid $3.8 billion in
corporation tax globally and our effective tax rate over the last five years is
more than 20%. Under current rules we pay the vast majority of the tax we owe
in the U.S. as that is where the bulk of our functions, assets and risks are
located. Ultimately these are decisions for governments and we support the OECD
process which is looking at new international tax rules for the digital
economy.
Google ranked third with its taxes
amounting to 15.8 percent of its profits with its foreign tax charge amounting
to 7.1 percent. A Google spokesperson told CNBC that the report form Fair Tax
Mark “ignores the reality of today’s complicated international tax system
and distorts the facts documented in our regulatory filings.”
The company added: “Like other
multinational companies, we pay the vast majority — more than 80% — of our
corporate income tax in our home country. As we have said before, we strongly
support the OECD’s work to end the current uncertainty and develop new tax
principles.”
Netflix ranked fourth in the list
handing over 15.8 percent of its profit while Apple ranked fifth with a tax
rate of 17.1 percent. Apple told CNBC in a statement:
As the largest taxpayer in the
world, we know the important role tax payments play in society. We pay all that
we owe according to tax laws and local customs wherever we operate, and since
2008 Apple’s corporate taxes alone have totaled over $100 billion.
Microsoft paid the highest tax rate
of 16.8 percent with a spokesperson telling CNBC: “Microsoft is fully compliant
with all local laws and regulations in every country in which we operate. We
serve customers in countries all over the world and our tax structure reflects
that global footprint.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for
Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him
on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
DEMOCRAT PARTY CORRUPTION
"This is how they will destroy America from
within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are
extravagantly wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never
be exposed to the downside of the invasion of millions of migrants, the
crime or the financial burden. They have nothing but contempt
for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being
intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human
traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans;
like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA
McCARTHY
Democrat Corruption is a Clear and Present Danger to America
On
November 6, it seemed the Republicans might hold their majority in the Senate
and in the House. Sadly, they lost their majority in the House. The
mystery is why so many Democrat candidates who are so obviously ethically
challenged won in races that should not have even been close.
How and why do Democrats continue to vote for unqualified,
dishonest candidates? Elizabeth Warren is a proven liar, a cheat who
claimed Native American heritage in order to get a job at
Harvard. Her baby, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was her
plan to wield control over all bank and non-bank institutions without
Congressional interference. In short, she is a hard-left socialist who
means to control how Americans earn, spend and borrow money, how they use their
savings. Warren is a blight on the Constitution and the guaranteed
freedoms of US citizens. She is an advance operative for the socialist America
the left envisions.
Andrew
Gillum, the left's choice to be Governor of Florida, is the failed mayor of
Tallahassee. He remains
under FBI investigation for
corruption. Given the information about that investigation that has
been released, he appears yet another greedy and corrupt Democrat pol in the
Hillary Clinton mold. The stability of Tallahassee declined
catastrophically under his leadership; crime
and murder rose drastically.
Gillum
sold out his city for money, and cries racism when confronted with his
crimes. He should never have been the candidate for the Governor of
Florida but the left cares only about race and power, not ethics or
honor. For progressives, race trumps everything else, even
character. If Gillum wins after the cheating Broward County is
infamous for, Florida will suffer the slings and arrows that are inevitable
under politicians like Gillum. Why was this race even
close? Have half the nation's voters scuttled any semblance
of traditional values in order to win? Yes.
Then there is Robert Menendez, the credibly accused pedophile
senator of New Jersey. He should be in prison but was saved by one
juror in his corruption trial with whom he partied after his win on November
6. Who votes for a man like this? There
is plenty of proof that he took bribes from a wealthy client for numerous
favors, trips to the Dominican Republic for sex with underage girls
being one of them. But New Jersey just re-elected this
man. They too have lost all sense of right vs. wrong.
Stacey
Abrams, the still grasping gubernatorial contender in Georgia, is a
hard-left, anti-capitalist, anti-Second Amendment candidate. She
owes about $200K in credit card debt and wants to run Georgia? She
too is corrupt and incompetent. She is also willing to cheat to win.
Are Georgians ignorant of her many, many negatives? If they are, they voted for
her anyway. Again, skin color trumps
everything.
The
left ignores fine men like John
James, who ran for the House in Michigan against
Debbie Stabenow. The left ignored Eddie Edwards who
ran in New Hampshire. Both men are conservative African
Americans. The American left today pretends such candidates do not
exist. They have ignored fine people like James and Edwards as they
have always ignored brilliant men like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Walter
Williams, Jason Riley, and Larry Elder. They revile the brilliant
Clarence Thomas. They don't like to be reminded of men like Frederick
Douglass or Booker
T. Washington. Neither of them, like
Sowell, Steele, Williams and Elder ever promoted the idea that African
Americans were or would be perennial victims. Each of them advocated
for quite the opposite, for self-reliance and independence.
This
notion of personal responsibility is anathema to today's left; they need and
promote subservience and dependency among their flock of reliable but
uninformed voters. This is why they encourage the immigration of so
many millions of illegal migrants. They assume they will be able to win for
them the right to vote. Judging by the number of them who likely
voted in the midterms, their plan is succeeding.
This is how they will destroy America from
within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are
extravagantly wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never
be exposed to the downside of the invasion of millions of migrants,
the crime or the financial burden. They have nothing but
contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities
being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human
traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans;
like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us.
Then
there is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the thoroughly-ignorant-of-everything
candidate who won her district by 80%! This young woman
knows nothing about how any government works, let alone ours. She is
hopelessly uniformed; she knows even less about US history or the
Constitution. She is clueless about the economy. When
asked how she would pay for all the give-away programs she touts, she replied
that that was a "puzzling question"! "You
just pay for it" she answers. She
has no idea; no idea about anything. She thinks she will be
"inaugurated" to the House! Most fourth graders know more
than she does about US history. And yet she is already
thinking about running for President! This is a
wholesale indictment of our politicized, dumbed-down system of
education. Many of her constituents are immigrants; we are obviously
not educating them at all. They voted for all the free stuff --
college, medical care, basic income, housing, that Ocasio-Cortez has
promised to deliver. This is what socialist Democrats dream
about: perpetual power over a populace too ignorant to
rebel. American as founded is at grave risk.
In
addition to ODasio-Cortez, Gillum, Ilhan Omar, Abrams, Sinema,
who very likely cheated to
take the Arizona Senate seat, there is Linda
Sanchez. Kirsten Gillibrand is a Hillary clone;
she only cares about her own political power. She speaks like a small child but
is also considering a run for the presidency. She was best pals with
Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein until they were politically
inconvenient. Amy Klobuchar, who embraced the vicious and obviously
false allegations against Judge Kavanagh, was re-elected! Like every
other Democrat member of the judiciary committee, she knew those accusations
were false, without a shred of corroboration, but her constituents re-elected
her! Who are these voters? How do they reconcile voting
for people willing to destroy a fine man for political purposes? She
is exactly who every Democrat member of that committee is, who every member of
the Democrat Party is: nothing more than power-hungry political
operatives out to ruin any and all opponents by any means
necessary. They are a clear and present danger to American as
founded.
Young
people are no longer taught the truth of American history. They are
not taught the truth of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism
is acceptable, even promoted, by the Democrats. They
embrace Linda
Sarsour and Louis Farrakhan without
shame. Young people don't know that communism killed
over a hundred million people in the twentieth century. Their
calculated-by-leftists ignorance is destroying our country. They try
to sell the idea that gender is not a factor of biology! They
attempt to convince young people that climate change is man-made (a travesty)
and that global warming causes wild fires (a lie). Having control
over academia, they have willfully brainwashed students for nearly two
generations. Unless your children are a strong-willed, independent
thinkers, do not send them to college!
How
and why the American left has devolved into the kind of party one finds in a
banana republic is a mystery. That our media is so anxious to
promote their corrupt candidates and the low-brow
tactics they employ is a tragedy. Do they do it
because they can no longer win by promulgating their Orwellian vision of a
socialist state, mandated equality of
outcome? Perhaps. They will never sell socialism to
enough sentient Americans to win. They need millions of uninformed
voters to succeed.
We must not let them cheat their way to power over the rest of
us. Their ongoing vote fraud must be stopped and the Democrats need
to take a look at themselves and at what they have become. It's not a pretty
picture. What they have become threatens to destroy the greatest
nation on the planet and they are doing it on purpose. They have
nothing but contempt for the US as founded and for those of us who love this
country.
A new Gilded Age
has emerged in America — a 21st century version.
The
wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both
the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia,
where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle
class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire
sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated
corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among
Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle
class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a
defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the
length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here
a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich.
They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they
don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help
them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this
country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of
this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well,
we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company,
we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits
for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs
overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you
don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has
become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control
more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as
less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers
and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem
which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust
competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to
bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to
the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley
said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big
business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you
can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can
start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to
succeed in this country. Most people don’t
want to start a tech company. [Americans]
maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in
a small town … they want to be able to make a living and
then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis
added]
The problem with corporate
concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it
inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get
together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector,
for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance
between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem
and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has
dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades,
crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries,
entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make
very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,”
Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot
of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported,
Hawley detailed in the
interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World
Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that
disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01
percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much
wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been
reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of
wealthiest earners. A study released last month
revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than
all other Americans.
Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other
Americans
The wealthiest
Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking
analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
For the
first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax
rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from
University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel
Zucman finds.
The
analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower
federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class.
Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which
the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a
combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23
percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47
percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot
via the New York Times)
The
analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is
less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning
working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt
writes:
For
middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal
income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t
benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And
they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social
Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat.
[Emphasis added]
The
report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich
and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned
against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and
open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the
elite.
“The same
consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and
economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade,
open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national
security or for American workers or for American families or for American
principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics
for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,”
Hawley said in an August speech in the
Senate.
That increasing
worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic
research showing a rise in servant-class jobs,
strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class
regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times
the rate of other Americans.
Census Says U.S.
Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
(Bloomberg) -- Income
inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S.
Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality
known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the
bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top
and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the
first to incorporate
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
But the distribution of
income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America
the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted
through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties,
has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for
the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich
with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states --
California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of
Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level,
while the reading was lower in 36 states.
TRUMPERNOMICS:
Billionaires’ wealth surged in 2019
28
December 2019
As the second decade of the 21st century comes to a close, its
most salient feature—the plundering of humanity by a global financial
oligarchy—continues unabated.
Amidst trade war and the growth of militarism and authoritarianism
on the one side, and an eruption of international strikes and protests by the
working class against social inequality on the other, the stock market is
hitting record highs and the fortunes of the world’s billionaires are
continuing to surge.
On Friday, one day after all three major US stock indexes set
new records, Bloomberg issued its end-of-year survey of the world’s 500 richest
people. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index reported that the oligarchs’ fortunes
increased by a combined total of $1.2 trillion, a 25 percent rise over 2018.
Their collective net worth now comes to $5.9 trillion.
To place this figure in some perspective, these 500 individuals
control more wealth than the gross domestic product of the United States at the
end of the third quarter of 2019, which was $5.4 trillion.
The year’s biggest gains went to France’s Bernard Arnault, who
added $36.5 billion to his fortune, bringing it above the rarified $100 billion
level to $105 billion. He knocked speculator Warren Buffett, at $89.3 billion,
down to fourth place. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos lost nearly $9 billion due to a
divorce settlement, but maintained the top position, with a net worth of $116
billion. Microsoft founder Bill Gates gained $22.7 billion for the year and
held on to second place at $113 billion.
The 172 American billionaires on the Bloomberg list added $500
billion, with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recording the year’s biggest US gain
at $27.3 billion, placing him in fifth place worldwide with a net worth of
$79.3 billion.
It is difficult to comprehend the true significance of such
stratospheric sums. In his 2016 book Global Inequality, economist
Branko Milanovic wrote:
"A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience
of practically everyone on earth that the very quantity it implies is not
easily understood… Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1
billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three
years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700
years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to
blow your inheritance in the second case."
The vast redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top of
society is the outcome of a decades-long process, which was accelerated following
the 2008 Wall Street crash. It is not the result of impersonal and simply
self-activating processes. Rather, the policies of capitalist governments and
parties around the world, nominally “left” as well as right, have been
dedicated to the ever greater impoverishment of the working class and
enrichment of the ruling elite.
In the US, the top one percent has captured all of the increase
in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in
national wealth since the 2008 crash.
The main mechanism for this transfer of wealth has been the
stock market, and the policies of the US Federal Reserve and central banks
internationally have been geared to providing cheap money to drive up stock
prices. The cost of this massive subsidy to the financial markets and the
oligarchs has been paid by the working class, in the form of social cuts, mass
layoffs, the destruction of pensions and health benefits, and the replacement
of relatively secure and decent-paying jobs with part-time, temporary and contingent
“gig” positions.
Since Trump was inaugurated in January of 2017, pledging to
slash corporate taxes, lift regulations on big business and dramatically
increase the military budget, the Dow has surged by 9,000 points. This year,
Trump and the financial markets applied massive pressure on the Fed to reverse
its efforts to “normalize” interest rates. The Fed complied, carrying out three
rate cuts and repeatedly assuring the markets it had no plans to raise rates in
2020.
This windfall for the banks and hedge funds was supported by the
Democrats no less than the Republicans. In fact, Trump’s economic policy has
been given de facto support by the Democratic Party all down the line—from his
tax cuts for corporations and the rich to his attack on virtually all
regulations on business. Even in the midst of impeachment—carried out entirely
on the grounds of “national security” and Trump’s supposed “softness” toward
Russia—the Democrats have voted by wide margins for Trump’s budget, his
anti-Chinese US-Mexico-Canada trade pact and his record $738 billion Pentagon
war budget.
This has included giving Trump all the money he wants to build
his border wall and carry out the mass incarceration and persecution of
immigrants.
Trump’s pro-corporate policies are an extension and expansion of
those pursued by the Obama administration. It allocated trillions in taxpayer
money to bail out the banks and flooded the financial markets with cheap
credit, driving up stock prices, while imposing a 50 percent across-the-board
cut in pay for newly hired autoworkers in its bailout of General Motors and
Chrysler. Obama oversaw the closure of thousands of schools and the layoff of
hundreds of thousands of teachers, and enacted austerity budgets that slashed
social programs.
Two of those running for the 2020 Democratic presidential
nomination are billionaires—Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. The latter, with
a net worth of $56 billion, is the ninth richest person in the US. He entered
the race as the spokesman for oligarchs outraged over talk from Bernie Sanders
and Elizabeth Warren of token tax increases on the super-rich.
The oligarchs are not frightened by Sanders and Warren—two
longstanding defenders of the American ruling class, who seek to mask their
subservience to capital with talk of making the oligarchs pay “their fair
share,” a euphemism for defending their right to pillage the population. The
billionaires are frightened by the growth of mass opposition to capitalism that
finds a distorted expression in support for the phony “progressives” in the
Democratic fold.
Between them, Bloomberg and Steyer have already spent $200
million of their own money in an effort to buy the election outright.
The impact of the policy of social plunder is seen in the
deepening of a malignant social crisis in country after country. In the US,
society is marching backwards, as the crying need for schools, hospitals,
affordable housing, pensions, the rebuilding of decrepit roads, bridges,
transportation, flood control, water and sewage, fire control and electricity
grids is met with the official response: “There is no money.”
The result? Three straight years of declining life expectancy,
record addiction and suicide rates, devastating wildfires and floods,
electricity cut-offs by profiteering utility companies. And a climate crisis
that cannot be addressed within the framework of a system dominated by a
money-mad plutocracy.
Not a single serious social problem can be addressed under
conditions where the ruling elite—through its bribed parties and politicians,
aided by its pro-capitalist trade unions and backed up by its courts, police
and troops—diverts resources from society to the accumulation of ever more
luxurious yachts, mansions, private islands and personal jets.
Where social reform is impossible, social revolution is
inevitable. The solution to the impasse is to be found in the growth of the
class struggle. The movement of workers and youth all over the world—from mass
strikes in France to strikes by autoworkers and teachers in the US, protests in
Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil, strikes and mass demonstrations in Lebanon,
Iran, Iraq and India—reveals the social force that can and will put an end to
capitalism.
The watchword must be—in opposition to the Corbyns, the Sanders,
the Tsiprases and their pseudo-left promoters—“Expropriate the super-rich!”
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