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.
Billionaires Continue To Hoard Wealth During Pandemic
Download: mp3 (Duration: 24:41 — 22.6MB)
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.
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.
John Binder is a reporter for
Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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.
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!”
Exclusive–Mo
Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of
Americans’
Bob Gathany / AL.com via AP
10 Mar 2019122
3:19
Rep. Mo Brooks
(R-AL) says the “Masters of the Universe” want more legal immigration to the
United States to further diminish the incomes of American working and
middle-class families.
In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Brooks said
recent demands to increase the number of foreign workers coming to the U.S. to
compete against American citizens for jobs is merely an effort by corporations
to deplete the earnings of Americans.
Brooks said:
I’m not a part of the Masters of the Universe crowd who thinks we
ought to be bringing in all this foreign labor and the reason for it is pure economics. This is the chance for Americans and lawful immigrants who are already here who are working
in the blue-collar trades, who are working in the places where
wages are not as high they ought to be, this is their chance to prosper. [Emphasis added]
And to the extent you import a lot of foreign labor, then you are
artificially increasing the labor supply which in turn means that you’re
artificially suppressing the wages of American families who are often hard-pressed to make ends meet So I
respectfully disagree that we need more foreign labor, to the contrary, I would like to see us reduce the foreign labor that comes into
America so that American families who are struggling to make ends meet, particularly those of us who are earning the least
amounts, would be better to take care of their own families and less likely
to be dependent on the welfare. [Emphasis added]
Brooks said Democrats support for mass legal immigration is
centered on the premise that increasing the number of foreign workers in the
U.S. will decrease Americans’ wages, thus forcing many into poverty and
becoming welfare recipients. This, Brooks said, is how Democrats create a
permanent dependent class of Democrat voters.
“Don’t get me wrong, [Democrats] want to decrease the incomes of
Americans so that they’re dependent on welfare,” Brooks said.
That makes them in turn likely Democrat voters and the best way to
do that is to have a huge surge in the labor supply, particularly illegal
aliens, that will depress their wages therefore creating more Democrats who are dependent on welfare at the same time as they
bring in illegal aliens who also under Democrat doctrine will be allowed to
vote and those types of voters, they’re also dependent on welfare. [Emphasis
added]
“About 70 percent of illegal alien households are on welfare …
plus this is a bloc of voters that seems unusually susceptible to the racial
divisions that the Democrats advance,” Brooks said. “You have to look at the
big picture in all of this, and to me, we should not be importing as much
foreign labor as we are. We should be helping the least among us earn more and
importing foreign labor that suppresses wages is not the way to do that.”
Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.2 legal immigrants
annually, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration, whereby newly
naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the
country. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million.
The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next
two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15
million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in
the country through chain migration, where newly naturalized citizens can bring
an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125
from 9:00 p.m. to Midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m. Pacific).
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on
Twitter at @JxhnBinder.