Billionaires Continue To Hoard Wealth During Pandemic
https://www.risingupwithsonali.com/2020/08/19/billionaires-continue-to-hoard-wealth-during-pandemic/
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FEATURING CHUCK COLLINS – As the coronavirus pandemic devastates the nation with more than 170,000 deaths so far and widespread economic collapse, Congress remains deadlocked on providing a lifeline to the tens of millions of unemployed Americans.
Now, a new report shows that the wealthiest Americans have not just remained immune to the crisis but have thrived during it. The richest 12 billionaires in the nation now have a combined wealth of $1 trillion.
According to the report’s author Chuck Collins, “This is simply too much economic and political power in the hands of twelve people. From the point of view of a democratic self-governing society, this represents an Oligarchic Dozen.”
Find out more at www.inequality.org and access the new report here.
Chuck Collins, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good. He has written a number of books including 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It, and Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good. He is the author of a new report, “Twelve U.S. Billionaires Have a Combined $1 Trillion
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.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Big Tech Writes Its Ticket to the White House
Silicon Valley's allies are filling up the Biden administration. A big payoff is sure to follow.
Silicon Valley played an integral role in propelling Joe Biden to the White House. He raked in uncounted millions from liberal tech billionaires such as Netflix's Reed Hastings, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, and Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs; their employees shelled out $5 million more.
As Biden takes office, the techies want what they paid for. Reuters reports that executives at top firms like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are gunning for jobs at the Departments of Defense, State, Justice, and Commerce and also eyeing influential posts at the Federal Trade Commission and beyond.
They want two things: lucrative federal contracts and less scrutiny than they’ve gotten over the past four years, as President Donald Trump has made their bias against conservatives front-page news. The Department of Justice's antitrust inquiry into big tech has already garnered bipartisan backing, including from a group of state attorneys general who have filed their own suit.
A Biden administration could make all of that go away. And it could ignore altogether these firms' obsequious dealings with Communist China.
That explains the rush to fill seats: It’s unlikely that the techies moving into the Biden administration will check their business relationships at the door. Each hire is another pressure point for Silicon Valley’s most powerful to exploit.
This is hardly a problem unique to Democrats—you just hear about it less when they’re in the White House. This sort of revolving door was considered outrageous in the George W. Bush administration, when Democrats and the media harped relentlessly on Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton and charged that he was in the pocket of Big Oil. They raised the same ruckus when Trump appointed Exxon chief Rex Tillerson as his first secretary of state.
These unseemly connections aren’t new for Democrats. Google employees averaged a meeting a week with that Obama White House, influencing a president who "routinely pushed policy that pleased the tech-savvy."
Now think what happens with those same lobbyists running the show. After rolling out transition teams free of connections to big tech, Team Biden added several Facebook executives over the Thanksgiving holiday. The transition team "has already stacked its agency review teams with more tech executives than tech critics," Reuters notes, including "several officials from Big Tech companies, which emerged as top donors to the campaign."
Their influence doesn’t stop there. Biden on Tuesday named as an economic adviser Joelle Gamble, who last worked as an investor under eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, funneling funding to outfits run by other Biden appointees. Others may soon follow, like Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy chief and former Kamala Harris aide Mike Troncoso.
For just one example of how a problematic connection, consider WestExec, the consultancy cofounded by secretary of state nominee Tony Blinken. The firm helped Google win contracts from the Defense Department and advised Google cofounder Eric Schmidt's philanthropy. Now, Reuters says, Schmidt is making recommendations for personnel in the Biden Defense Department, a textbook example of business relationships shaping government policy.
That’s just the start of the coming horse trading, hidden behind the Obama-era pretext that the White House is merely cultivating a relationship with the smartest people. But if personnel is policy, the Biden White House will be doing everything it can to comfort Silicon Valley’s most comfortable.
More Silicon Valley Insiders Added to Biden Transition Team
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
12 Dec 20201,206
3:36
After an election year in which the tech giants repeatedly interfered in the election against President Donald Trump, Joe Biden is now rewarding Silicon Valley by appointing insiders to a range of roles in his transition team.
Shortly after election night, the Financial Times reported that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is being considered to lead a key tech task force inside the White House.
As Politico recently reported, four more Google and Facebook employees have been added to Biden’s transition team.
They are : Zaid Zaid, a Facebook public policy official, Chris Upperman, a Facebook manager, Rachel Lieber, a Facebook director and associate general counsel, and Deon Scott, a Google program manager who also worked in the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Biden transition is quietly putting Google and Facebook employees into its transition landing teams. pic.twitter.com/UI2QZKTcz6
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 11, 2020
This is just the latest news of the Biden team’s efforts to court current and former Silicon Valley employees.
As Breitbart News previously reported, plenty other alumni of big tech, including former executives at companies like Amazon and Airbnb, are also expected to join the Biden transition team:
A recent report outlines the number of Big Tech executives that are expected to join Joe Biden’s transition team in the coming weeks. The team includes insiders from the entire range of Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe.
A report published by Protocol has revealed that a huge number of Big Tech executives are expected to join Joe Biden’s presidential transition team, with Protocol stating there’s “definitive Silicon Valley representation and thought leaders on tech issues involved in shaping the future of the federal government. ”
Notable tech execs joining the transition team include:
· Tom Sullivan, Amazon’s director of international tax planning (State Department)
· Brandon Belford, Lyft’s senior director to the chief of staff (Office of Management and Budget)
· Divya Kumaraiah, Airbnb’s strategy and program lead for cities (Office of Management and Budget)
· Will Fields, Sidewalk Labs’ senior development associate (Treasury Department)
· Nicole Wong, former Google and Twitter, former Obama Deputy Chief Technology Officer (Office of Science and Technology Policy)
· Martha Gimbel, senior manager of economic research at Schmidt Futures (Council of Economic Advisers)
· Linda Etim, senior adviser at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (team lead for International Development)
This comes after Silicon Valley companies intervened in the election on behalf of Joe Biden. In addition to Twitter and Facebook both burying the New York Post’s reporting on the Biden family’s financial ties to Ukraine and China, Google also suppressed conservative news sources.
Six months before the election, following a major change to its core search algorithm, clicks and impressions to Breitbart News from Google searches for “Joe Biden,” dropped to zero and stayed their through election day. Prior to Google’s update, clicks and impressions from the search term saw a normal pattern of activity.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.
Further, the dubious choice of Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee was made solely to placate and reassure Wall Street and the wealthy, as she was viewed by them as being very deferential to the mega-rich class based on her days in California.
Biden’s Billionaires
By Steve McCann
Many years ago, while participating in a voter registration drive, I came upon a grizzled and disheveled old man sitting in the overgrown and weed-infested yard of his paint-starved house calming smoking his pipe. Despite his gruff demeanor, Ully (Ulysses) was very pleasant and loquacious as we talked for over an hour on topics ranging from the weather to the innate foibles of mankind. It turned out that he had to leave school after the fourth grade in order to work in the fields to help support his family and had toiled in a variety of menial and labor-intensive jobs ever since. Yet, he had a deep and thorough insight into human nature. Among his comments about the rich and ostensibly well-educated was: “All the money in the world cain’t buy a fool a lick of common sense.”
I was reminded of that observation after reading an article describing the 131 billionaires who are pouring millions into the coffers of the Democrat party and Joe Biden’s campaign in their mindless obsession to defeat President Trump in November. Among the prominent names are Jeff Skoll, a founder of eBay who has contributed $4.5 million; Laurene Powell Jobs of Apple and owner of The Atlantic magazine has donated $1.2 million, and Josh Bekenstein, Chairman of Bain Capital (co-founded by Mitt Romney), $5 million.
Far more Wall Street financers have also jumped on the Biden/Democrat party bandwagon than are supporting Donald Trump, whose policies have overwhelmingly revived the economy after the stagnation of the Obama-Biden years. The tech billionaires, not content to simply cough up untold millions in direct political contributions, are also funding massive voter drives, promoting mail-in balloting, creating divisive partisan news sites, aiding and designing the Democrat party’s digital campaigns and unabashedly censoring the social media accounts of the Trump campaign and innumerable conservatives.
The political party they are gleefully underwriting in order to oust Trump is no longer the party of the middle and working class (which is now one and the same) but a two-tier assemblage in which the prey is sleeping with the predator. The witless wealthy and socially aware are in bed with the avowed socialists and militant Marxists. What is holding this marriage of convenience together is a mutual hatred of Donald Trump and the undoable promises made by Joe Biden and the Democrat party hierarchy.
In a 2019 meeting with 100 super-wealthy potential donors, Biden assured the gathering that he would not demonize the rich and would only increase their taxes slightly while ensuring that their standard of living would not be affected by any of his policies. He also stated: “I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 Billionaires are the reason why we are in trouble”. Further, he unabashedly emphasized that the wealthy are not the reason for income inequality and “If I win this nomination. I won’t let you down. I promise you.”
Further, the dubious choice of Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee was made solely to placate and reassure Wall Street and the wealthy, as she was viewed by them as being very deferential to the mega-rich class based on her days in California.
When the time came to deal with the Marxist/socialist wing of the Democrat party’s anti-Trump coalition, policy commitments, many diametrically opposite of what was promised the wealthy donors, were also guaranteed with a non-verbal pledge of we won’t let you down.
The first step was a de facto party platform. The 110-page Biden-Sanders Manifesto which includes, among other commitments, a massive job killing $2+ trillion climate agenda to phase out fossil fuel usage within 15 years, the elimination of cash bail, redirecting (i.e. cutting) funding for the police, dismantling all border protections, legalizing virtually all illegal immigrants and massively raising corporate and individual tax rates on the wealthy. This manifesto is a socialist screed that would destroy the middle class and permanently neuter the economy and nation.
An effusive Bernie Sanders proclaimed to the world that Biden and the Democrats have embraced his socialist agenda and that Biden would be the most progressive president since FDR. Sanders exposed not only the behind the scenes reality of today’s Democrat party but Biden’s figurehead role.
Further confirmation of the radicalization of the Party came about unexpectedly as the militant Marxist faction of the Sanders coalition forced the issue. Impatient and unwilling to wait until after the 3rd of November, Antifa and Black Lives Matter used the death of George Floyd as a pretext to take to the streets and begin their long-hoped for revolution. They claimed that rioting, looting, committing arson and attacking law enforcement was a necessity as this was a systemically racist country. Yet, they openly demanded immediate changes rooted in their radical Marxist ideology of class warfare not so-called systemic racism. As two of their preferred chants and graffiti slogans “eat the rich” and “abolish capitalism now” confirms.
Biden, the Democrat party hierarchy as well as virtually all Democrat elected officials refused to address the violence and those responsible. Thus, they tacitly approved of the lawlessness and by doing so flashed a green light to continue the riots. When forced to acknowledge the reality on the streets of the nation’s cities, they instead blamed Trump, the police, white supremacists and even the Russians. Due to their spinelessness, the armies of anarchy and revolution Biden and the Democrats unleashed will never be defeated or mollified by them.
Considering the vast dichotomy in the litany of promises made and actions taken, it is inevitable that either the moneyed elite or the mob of passionate true believers will be betrayed. There is no middle ground. Who will prevail?
Will it be the elites whose only weapon is money and fleeting political influence or the passionate mob whose weapons are unconstrained violence and intimidation? Will it be those who believe a revolution could never happen here or those who are currently inciting revolution with the implicit blessing of a major political party? Will it be those who believe that Biden and the Democrats, if elected, will be able to forcefully deal with the insurgents or the insurgents who now know that riots and extortion causes Democrat politicians to cower in the corner?
Beginning with the French Revolution and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, history has recorded that passionate mobs always prevail when dealing with a feckless ruling class or party. And the first casualties have inevitably been the wealthy elites.
I can envision sitting with my old friend, Ully, and asking him if he thought the wealthy elites, indiscriminately tossing money at the Democrats for the sole purpose of defeating President Trump, understood the pitfalls involved. He would lean back, slowly exhale a puff of smoke from his well-worn pipe and with uncontrollable anger in his eyes would say: “Nope. Those damn fools ain’t got a lick of common sense.”
Biden Taps Liberal Billionaire’s Acolyte for Top Econ. Job
Incoming Biden adviser's last project said capitalism 'fundamentally broken'
President-elect Joe Biden announced Monday that he will appoint Joelle Gamble, who previously worked as a principal at the social-change investment firm funded by liberal billionaire Pierre Omidyar, as a top economic adviser.
Gamble, who left her role at the Omidyar Network (ON) to work on domestic economic policy for the Biden-Harris transition team, will serve as special assistant to the president for economic policy, a job on the National Economic Council.
That role may be informed by her previous work as a principal at the network's "reimagining capitalism" project, an Elizabeth Warren-esque endeavor that maintains that "capitalism can still be a powerful force for good" but that "the current form of capitalism is fundamentally broken."
Gamble's appointment means that an economic progressive will have the president's ear as he seeks to revitalize the post-COVID economy. It also forges a connection between the Biden administration and Omidyar, who has funneled millions to left-leaning activist groups, including those run by other Biden appointees, and is a major funder of groups opposed to President Donald Trump.
Neither the Biden Transition Team nor the Omidyar Network responded to requests for comment.
Gamble joined the Omidyar Network last June, following her graduation from Princeton's graduate program in economics. In that role, she was a frequent public commentator on what she saw as the injustices and inequities of capitalism, writing in the left-wing magazine Dissent, for example, that "our measure of economic security is based on white economic security." Reporting her involvement with the Biden transition in October, the Washington Examiner described her as "represent[ing] the left wing of the Democratic Party within Biden's economic team."
She honed those positions at ON, a social-change investor that operates as both an LLC and a 501(c)3 nonprofit, allowing it to invest in both for-profit and non-profit ventures.
ON operates several major projects across its portfolio of over $100 million in outstanding grants. That includes Gamble's "reimagining capitalism," which aims to restructure capitalist society around principles that include "an explicitly anti-racist and inclusive economy" and "rebalanc[ing] the relationship between markets, governments, and communities."
Under that aegis, "reimagining capitalism" has given grants to a number of influential left-leaning groups, including those with connections to the incoming administration. Contributions include $500,000 to the Roosevelt Institute, where Gamble worked for five years before matriculating at Princeton, as well as $700,000 to the Center for American Progress, run by Biden OMB nominee Neera Tanden, and $1.5 million to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, led by Heather Boushey, a Biden nominee to serve on the Council of Economic Advisers.
The whole affair is funded by eBay cofounder Pierre Omidyar, whose net worth Forbes estimates to be in excess of $20 billion. Omidyar is one of a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who have increasingly flexed their financial muscle in the political arena since Donald Trump's ascent to the presidency.
ON is not Omidyar's only charitable venture. Through Democracy Fund Voice, he has given extensively to activist groups including the Proteus Action League, Sixteen Thirty Fund, and the Tides Foundation, the primary sponsor of Black Lives Matter. He also has a history of financial support for Democrats, including generous donations to the DSCC and DCCC in the early 2000s and contributions to both Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and then-senator Harry Reid (D., Nev.) in 2008. His media company, First Look Media, is the primary backer of the left-wing investigative outlet The Intercept.
Omidyar has also been a generous backer specifically of opponents of Trump. He was the primary funder of NeverTrump PAC, later Never Means Never PAC, dropping $250,000 over the 2016 cycle. He also backed the anti-Trump "Not Who We Are" PAC, alongside fellow Silicon Valley billionaires Dustin Moskovitz, Cari Tuna, and Christopher Hughes. Through Democracy Fund Voice, he has given over half-a-million dollars to support Stand Up Republic, a group that organizes Republicans critical of the president.
Techies like Omidyar have flocked to Biden, with a Wired investigation finding that 95 percent of contributions from tech employees went to the Democratic nominee. They are in turn already enjoying outsized influence in the transition, which has drawn on Silicon Valley to staff its teams. Gamble's appointment extends these connections from the office to the network of charitable groups funded by top tech execs, further entwining the Biden administration with their wealth.
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