The War Over Global Warming is Class Warfare on Many Fronts

Global warming is upon us. My rhododendron told me this decades ago as it bloomed during the middle of a brutal January ice storm. However, we have been made a bit confused about the issue because some very rich people’s income and wealth accumulation, along with their economic and political power, is greatly dependent upon the rest of us believing something else despite what is happening right before our eyes.

We have been divided, sliced and diced into competing camps. A great many people believe either in the nonsense the Wall Street/billionaire controlled Democratic Party has conjured up, or the nonsense the billionaire/Wall Street/Big Oil controlled Republican Party has placed before us. We have been divided by social issues by the competing camps of billionaires while the big boys of both sides rape us financially. Most of the faithful of both political parties appear to be just like European soccer fans. It’s our team against their team and we’re going to believe whatever the leaders of our team tell us to believe. This is called WAR, which is an acronym for “We Are Right.” Some people are as zealous in this regard as the European soccer fans who duke it out in the stands and parking lots of stadiums over men kicking a ball.

Sometimes, however, the truth can win against the lies of either group of billionaires. Mother nature has been telling us for decades that global warming is occurring. We could see, for example, flowers that used to bloom in Spring blooming in December and January, insects we’ve never seen before that belong in hotter climates than the Pacific Northwest, in some places river and lake water levels have been reduced by 50 percent in just the last five years, and ducks and geese migrating south in November and December, and then flying north in February.

Hopefully, enough people have experienced the severe and record-breaking heat in the Pacific Northwest, along with historic droughts throughout the west, to understand the great danger to the people and other species of the world that global warming is bringing because these current events are only the tip of the ice berg of what the future holds, no pun intended. As late as early June 2021, nobody living in Portland, Oregon would have believed the record mid-June temperatures of 108 and 116 degrees would ever occur. The same thing has happened to the people of Montana, Idaho and Washington, among other places.

Hopefully, enough voters in the Republican Party will understand the billionaires who control the party have been lying to them that global warming is not occurring, and if it is by some miracle, it is not man-made; We can hope enough of them will believe the eyes and brains that God gave them, and they will demand action from their party leaders. By now many should have come to understand global warming is a reality in the same way many Democratic voters have come to realize the Wall Street controlled Democratic Party leadership and its news media has been lying to them that free trade agreements do not result in the exporting of jobs, although tens of millions of jobs have been exported over the last thirty years. The billionaires who control both parties and all three branches of the federal government, along with the corporate news media, have been lying to us for forty and more years over a great number of issues, thanks to their Supreme Court. It isn’t your Supreme Court, and it certainly does not belong to the U.S. Constitution; the super wealthy own the court.

We can only hope change will come in the midst of record setting heat waves and drought before those of us living outside of gated communities experience the full brunt of global warming, which will continue to get worse. 116 degrees is Portland Oregon is only the beginning unless action on a massive scale is taken.

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The CoronaVirus Bailout Is Working — for the Rich

As I mentioned back in March 2020, the economy is in free fall but the billionaires are thriving, and stocks of big private equity firms are soaring dramatically higher. As usual, the billionaires have been the real beneficiaries of the federal government’s massive rescue efforts. 

Ten weeks into the worst crisis in 90 years, the government’s effort to save the economy has been both a spectacular success and a tremendous failure.

Two events showed this better than anything. On Friday, May 8th, 2020, the government reported that 20.5 million people had lost their jobs in April. That is massive damage to the middle class. The rich receive 2/3rds to 100 percent of their income from holding corporate stock. The stock market rallied with the news of the 20.5 million lost jobs. They are likely expecting trillions more from the Federal government and the Federal Reserve. 

The second event happened on Thursday, May 14th. The government reported the middle class lost another 3.8 million jobs, and the stock market rallied again both that day and the following day. 

If you’re looking for the billionaire’s decision on who has won the four government and Federal Reserve bailouts, consider these returns: Shares of Apollo Group, the giant private equity firm, have soared 80 percent from their lows. The stock of Blackstone, another private equity behemoth, has risen 50 percent. The Nasdaq Composite Index has gotten back nearly all of its losses. 

 

ProPublica reports that billionaire clubs such as “Apollo and Blackstone, disproportionately the wealthiest and most influential, have been insured by the world’s most powerful central bank. This largess is boundless and without conditions. “Even if a second wave of outbreaks were to occur,” JPMorgan economists wrote in a celebratory note on May 9th, “the Fed has explicitly indicated that there is no dollar limit and no danger of running out of ammunition.”

“Many aspects of the coronavirus bailout that assist individuals or small businesses, meanwhile, are short-term or contingent. Aid to small businesses comes with conditions on what they can do with the money. The sums allocated by the CARES Act for stimulus and expanded unemployment insurance are vast by historical standards. But the relief they provide didn’t prevent tens of millions from losing their jobs. The assistance runs out in weeks, and the jobless live at the mercy of a divided Congress, which will decide whether that help gets extended and, if so, for how long.”

Meanwhile, the billionaire’s investment clubs can expect additional trillions of dollars from the Federal Reserve and U.S. government. Picture the CEOs of these firms manipulating puppets by a string, then picture Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell and you’ll understand how politics work. 

ProPublica went on, “The Fed’s efforts, universally praised for their boldness and speed, have come in two stages. First, in February and March, the central bank shored up the capital market “liquidity,” which marks how willing investors are to buy and sell. The central bank’s role is to be a “lender of last resort,” working through banks so they can get money to companies and people.

The second stage of the Fed’s extraordinary rescue goes beyond liquidity. It has said it will buy assets it has never bought before. For almost 100 years, the Fed purchased only government bonds. Now it has announced a wide variety of programs to buy various forms of corporate and other debt, either by direct lending, by buying bonds, or buying loans.”

The mere announcement that the Fed would do this had an immediate effect, spurring the boom in corporate borrowing. For example, if Amazon issued a bond costing $1 trillion at face value and it comes due in five years. The Fed simply buys the bond and Amazon gets $1 trillion from the Fed. When the bond comes due in five years,  the Fed will simply print up the money and pay itself. Meanwhile, Amazon and its mostly billionaire and multi-millionaire shareholders divvy up the trillion dollars among themselves. 

ProPublica reported, “The Fed didn’t stop with the most solid, safest corporate stalwarts. In early April, it also announced something unprecedented. The central bank said it would buy junk bonds, debt issued by fragile companies, many of which already have crushing debt loads. Sure enough, junk bonds roared back and their cousins, leveraged loans, revived.

In doing so, the Fed backstopped the riskiest markets in the world. The most dangerous investments in the world, it should go without saying, are not owned by middle- and working-class Americans, to whom every politician pledges fealty. No, they are owned by the most risk-seeking investors in the world, the ones that need the highest returns: private equity firms and hedge funds.

The Fed has to work through the credit markets. The House and Senate have much greater powers, the power of the purse and of legislation. Congress could have passed laws that directed help in different ways. Europe has essentially nationalized payrolls, a much more direct form of aid to people who have lost the ability to work. However, the rotted corruption of the U.S. Federal government has seen it reluctant to use sufficient fiscal measures going back to the 2008 rescue.

What happens if the economy doesn’t come back soon? If the health crisis does not pass quickly, or if the economy does not roar back, the Fed’s actions might prove inadequate. But investors shouldn’t be too worried. They have been taught they can count on the government to rescue them from their bad investment decisions, and so they can make plenty of bad investment decisions. 

The Bailout is Working for the Rich-ProPublica

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United States Income Inequality Continues to Surge

The gap between the richest and the poorest U.S. households is now the largest it’s been in the past 50 years according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

U.S. income inequality was “significantly higher” in 2018 than in 2017, the Census Bureau says in its latest American Community Survey report. Since the rich in the United States possess earnings and investments abroad, it is likely the income and wealth gaps are much larger than the Census Bureau measures.

The gap grew despite a surging national economy that has seen low unemployment and more than 10 years of consecutive GDP growth.

The most troubling thing about the new report, says William M. Rodgers III, a professor of public policy and chief economist at the Heldrich Center at Rutgers University, is that it “clearly illustrates the inability of the current economic expansion, the longest on record, to lessen inequality.”

That is because the rich are using their political power to create income inequality in their favor.

When asked why the rising economic tide has raised some boats more than others, Rodgers lists several factors, including the decline of organized labor and competition for jobs from abroad. He also cites tax policies that favor businesses and higher-income families.

To understand even a little of how labor unions have been weakened you only need to look at a few of the legal decisions made by the corrupt corporate wing of the United States Supreme Court when it sided with the billionaires and their corporations in the Janus vs. AFSCME case. The corrupt wing of the court, lead by Cheif Justice John Roberts, decided to put an end to decades of legal precedent in which labor union members who did not want to pay union dues were required to pay a lesser fee to their unions to cover the cost of negotiating new contracts with management. Now labor unions are the only organizations in the United States that must provide free services to members who do not wish to pay. The corrupt wing of the court’s intention in making this decision was to weaken the power of labor unions, and working people in general, vis-a-vis the billionaires and their corporations.

Everybody knew the corrupt corporate wing of the court was going to vote in favor of Janus and end four decades of legal precedent in the process. Everybody knew the billionaires had the corporate wing in their hip pocket.

Income inequality is measured through the Gini index, which measures how far apart incomes are from each other. To do that, the index assigns a hypothetical score of 0.0 to a population in which incomes are distributed perfectly evenly and a score of 1.0 to a population where only one household gets all of the income.

The United States has been one of the most unequal of nations in the world using the Gini coefficient. The U.S. is ranked 103 in the world by the World Bank for income inequality, behind every major industrialized country, and up there with such nations as Haiti and Uganda. The U.S. was ranked at 73 ten years ago, so inequality continues to worsen here.

The billionaires’ control the corrupt corporate wing of the United States Supreme Court, the entire Republican Party, and most Democratic politicians at the national level. Therefore, you can expect income and wealth inequality will continue to get worse in the United States.

In other words, vote for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren for president.

US Census Bureau Report

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It Begins: Elizabeth Warren for President, and the Wall Street Controlled Democratic Party’s War Against the Progressive Movement?

Elizabeth Warren announced yesterday that she was forming an exploratory committee to determine whether or not she should make a run for the United States presidency.

Meanwhile, as of last week, former Wall Street Senator Claire McCaskell has been making the rounds on national television shows to voice complaints against newly elected United States Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. She does not mention Ocasio-Cortez by name. Claire simply alludes to her existence, and she is very critical of what that existence stands for. As a Senator, McCaskell’s voting record shows she was clearly controlled by Wall Street money. For example, McCaskell successfully co-authored a bill that rolled back regulations on Wall Street investment firms. Ocasio-Cortez is against relaxing regulations against Wall Street.

This suggests the Democratic Party Leadership, which Wall Street controls, is using McCaskell as a high profile figurehead in its attack against the progressive insurgency within the Democratic Party. Ocasio-Cortez is the most visible member of the progressive wing in the US House of Representatives. Elizabeth Warren is another high profile progressive, and perhaps the most anti-Wall Street of the bunch.

Much like Warren, Cortez campaigned on issues such as the $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All, free college for all, and the rest of the Bernie Sanders platform. McCaskell was against all those things, all of which would cut into corporate and Wall Street profits if enacted.

McCaskell had the audacity to suggest progressive politics was a vote-losing strategy, and this is why the Democratic Party has been losing elections at all levels of government for over a decade. In reality, more and more grassroots Democratic Party voters realize the party leadership is controlled by Wall Street, and the party has abandoned its progressive past, which is represented by such historic legislation and programs as the New Deal, social security, minimum wages, shared prosperity, etc…. This is why Democrats have lower turnouts and have lost so many elections. The party has not represented working people for four decades. McCaskill is a perfect example of this.

While Missouri citizens voted McCaskell and her Wall Street agenda out of office last November, 68 percent of them voted to increase the state’s minimum wage. The initiative was heavily supported by small business owners.

McCaskell may be voicing her own opinions, but it is just as likely that she is being used by Wall Street controlled Democratic Party leadership as a spearhead in their war against the progressive movement within the Democratic Party. This may not only be the beginning of the war against Ocasio-Cortez, but part of a grander strategy leading up to the conclusion of the 2020 presidential election.

Several progressive Democrats are reportedly looking at that election, which a progressive should easily be able to win if that candidate can get through the Democratic party primary. Besides Warren, Vermont’s U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Oregon’s U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley have also been mentioned as possible candidates.

Wall Street’s opening shots in the war of words, lies, and smears have likely been launched against the progressive movement with McCaskell’s December tour of news shows. The billionaire owned and controlled corporate news media will close ranks behind Wall Street’s point-of-view, which means it will paint progressives as negatively as possible while attempting to create a false impression of impartiality, just like when Bernie Sanders ran for president against Wall Street’s chosen candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

This suggests the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party has begun in earnest and in preparation for the 2020 presidential election. Expect Wall Street’s favorite, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden, to be the Wall Street Democratic party presidential candidate choice.

As for Elizabeth Warren; she could and should be the first female president of the United States in 2020.

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The 99 Percent is the Left, and That’s What the Corporate Media Doesn’t Want You to Know

There is a lot of talk out of Republican Party circles about the left and its plots to take away our freedoms, such as our guns. However, this is a lie. The left has been dead for decades. There are no popular parties of communists and socialists. Sure, there are a few remaining members of these old parties, but they are hardly a threat to the status quo. Most of them may be FBI informants anyway.

Nowadays, the left is the old political right on bread and butter issues, the environment, and much more. Remember President Richard Nixon? Over forty years ago he was a hard-line conservative who hated communism but made peace with China, ended the war in Vietnam by withdrawing all US troops, signed legislation creating the Environmental Protection Agency, and offered a public option on national health care which was rejected by the Democrats. Nowadays Nixon would be considered politically far to the left. He would be a big letter “COMMUNIST!”

So when we hear talk about the left from say, Fox News, especially on economics and politics, those folks really mean the 99 percent. That’s right! They mean us! In poll after poll the 99 percent want a $15 minimum wage, higher taxes on the rich, an end to free trade agreements that are designed to export millions of US jobs but which benefits the 1 percent almost exclusively, Medicare for all, greater worker and environmental protections, legislation that will strengthen labor unions, and a lot more stuff that would be in interest of the 99 percent, but which would not necessarily be in the interests of the billionaires who control your government, both major political parties, and all of the major news media that keep you blinded to the things the billionaires don’t want you to know about.

So when you hear somebody on television talking about how the left is out to steal your freedoms, like a powerful gang of communists, that really is not true. These groups don’t exist in any serious way. That somebody on television is really out to steal your freedoms by distracting you from the real economic bread and butter issues by focusing your attention on the social issues. That person on the news is a paid employee of the billionaires on the political right. That person has little credibility.

By today’s political right standards, even old arch-conservative Richard Nixon would be a hard-line communist. Nixon was, of course, also a crook who resigned under the very real threat of impeachment. Nowadays, the political servants of the 1 percent can commit all sorts of crimes and get away with it, like torture, waging wars against humanity, and on and on.

Oh my! How things have changed.

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In the United States the 1 Percent Now Own More Wealth Than the Bottom 90 Percent for the First Time In US History

The United States Federal Reserve Bank issued a report in September 2017 showing that the top 1 percent of US income earners now own almost twice as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of Americans. Notice the corporate media did not cover this report. They did not want us to know this stuff.

Anyway, wealth is defined as assets, such as stocks, bonds, futures options, houses, cars, clothes, trinkets and such.

The graph above is straight from the Federal Reserve Bulletin. Notice the bottom 90 percent have seen their wealth drop from nearly 38 percent of the total wealth in 1989 to 23 percent today, a 40 percent drop. Meanwhile, the 1 percent has seen their wealth grow from just under 30 percent in 1989 to 38.6 percent today. The 1 percent also own more wealth than those people among the 90 to 99 percent, but just barely.

The reason the 1 percent has gained so much wealth while the 90 percent has lost it is that the rich are stealing it from everybody else via their corruption of both major political parties, and such corrupt politicians as Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, Paul Ryan, and Ron Wyden.

In the same report, Federal Reserve researchers discovered the rich stole a record-high 23.8% of the overall US created income in 2016 (See graph below), up from 8 percent in 1980. However, the current figure appears to be understated. At least one report shows the rich are stealing 37+ percent of the total income produced in the United States. The Fed’s report showed the bottom 90% of families now make less than half of the country’s income. That figure slipped to 49.7% in 2016, down by more than 20% since 1992 (It is likely the drop is greater according to another study).

The reason why the billionaires are getting wealthier and the rest of us are becoming poorer is because of such things as trade agreements via political corruption, privatization scams, tax cuts for the rich, unrestricted campaign finance donations, mandatory testing of public school students K-12, student loans, Federal Reserve and US government rescue of mortgage-backed bondholders by the tens of trillions of dollars (See The $26 Trillion Dollar Bailout to Save the 1 Percent, a totally corrupt corporate wing of the US Supreme Court (John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Anthony Kennedy),  etc…. Corruption in US politics have not been this bad since the Gilded Age, and this is how the rich are getting richer by stealing from the rest of us.

Millions of US jobs have been exported since 1992, thanks to trade treaties negotiated to ensure US corporations can export jobs to low wage nations, as well as create jobs in these poverty-wage nations rather than here. The difference between the old higher US wages and the new lower extreme poverty wages in Mexico (where the minimum wage is $4.70 a day), China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and elsewhere goes straight into the already fat wallets of the well-to-do parasites of the millionaire and billionaire classes.

The job losers (the producers) might get unemployment insurance if they are lucky. The rich take their stolen loot and purchase wealth, such as stocks and bonds. The job losers often have to sell their assets to cover their expenses as they search for new jobs that typically pay less than what they once earned.

This is a nice income and wealth redistribution scam that every Democratic and Republican senator and member of the House of Representatives know very well. Every president since and including Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama have known this scam.

The billionaires continued their war against the 99 percent when the US Senate passed their tax cut for the rich and their corporations. And so the war continues against the 99.5 percent. This is class warfare at its most one-sided.

You can find the report from the Federal Reserve at https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf17.pdf. The graphs are located on pages 11 and 12 if I remember correctly.

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The Movement Against Climate Change: Here’s Something the Corporate Media Doesn’t Want You to Know

More than 200,000 people took to the streets in Washington, DC, Saturday April 29th for the People’s Climate March. Tens of thousands more joined via sister marches across the globe, including Japan, the Philippines, New Zealand, Uganda, Kenya, Germany, Greece, United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica and more.

In the U.S., more than 370 marches in nearly all 50 states took place, from the town of Dutch Harbor in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands to the streets of Miami, Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago and other major American cities.

A coalition of communities, faith leaders, labor activists, civil rights champions and climate justice advocates led the march while demanding commonsense protections for the air we breathe, the water we drink and the health of the vulnerable communities who have the most to lose under President Trump’s administration.

The battle over climate change is a sticky one. The fossil fuel industry which own plenty of politicians in both major political parties spends millions of dollars a year denying it’s happening, but my rhododendron is now blooming in early December. Twenty-five years ago, it began blooming in late March and early April. Fifteen years ago, it began blooming in January. I also have roses blooming in snowy December, and that is something that never happened in the forty years I’ve lived in this house.

Quite naturally, the war over climate change is a battle over ever increasing profits and share prices. Major corporations and their shareholders, as well as Wall Street (which controls the Democratic Establishment like puppets), want ever increasing profits because this produces ever increasing share prices and dividends. Getting rid of fossil fuels will force the oil corporations out of business, and cut into the profits and share prices of other manufacturers.

This means the battle over climate change is a battle between ultra rich shareholders and millionaire and billionaire CEO’s on the one hand, and the rest of the world’s people on the other. Naturally, the rich and their corporations fund bogus studies showing global warming in not real in order to influence the voters of the 99 percent to believe climate change is a communist plot to destroy the American way of life, when it is really the rich destroying the US middle class way of life. My roses and rhododendron tell me climate change is real, but then, so is the class warfare the rich are waging on the rest of us.

I should point out that the folks at Exxon now admit fossil fuels are causing global warming. The company denied it for decades, but knew as early as the middle of the 1970s that it was happening.

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Bernie Sanders: It Ain’t Over Because Bernie’s Revolution Has Just Begun

On Tuesday, Bernie Sanders lost the California primary, as well as a few other states. On Thursday, Sanders gave somewhat weak signals that he is ready to support the Democratic Wall Street candidate. Bernie told reporters after meeting with Wall Street President Barack Obama at the White House that he will ally himself with Hillary Clinton in the fight against Donald Trump.

Regardless, Bernie Sanders has built a grassroots movement that can and will only get bigger. There’s a hurricane of a recession coming down the pike, with gale force winds. It’s going to be worse than the last recession because the economic policies the US government has been following for the last thirty-five years, and the last eight, have redistributed income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent, curtailing the demand for goods and services. See The Coming Recession: It’s Going to Be a Big One

Currently, the 1 percent steal 37 percent of all the income produced in the United States, compared to 8 percent in 1980. That means the 99 percent has less money to burn.

The current political and economic situation looks a lot like 1928. Then came the Great Depression storm, and then came President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the New Deal. In 1976, Gerald Ford defeated Ronald Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination. Four years later, after successfully negotiating with the Iranian government to keep the American embassy hostages until after the election, Reagan ushered in the modern tyranny of the 1 percent with Reaganomics when he became president. See Argo Helps Iran’s Dictatorship Harms Democracy–The Christian Science Monitor.

That era is about to end.

This coming recession means the next president is likely going to be a one term president.

Then it’ll be our turn. Bernie is 74 years old, and highly unlikely to run for president again. That means our political revolution against the 1 percent will sprout fruit most likely in the form of progressive majorities in the US house and senate, as well as the next US president. That could be Elizabeth Warren.

So while Bernie lost the Democratic primary election, he planted and cultivated a people’s movement to reclaim our democracy and take it back from the plutocrats of the 1 percent, such as Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden.

Our time is coming. Don’t give up. This Democratic primary fight was just the first round. Plenty of billionaires want you to give up, especially since we are on the verge of winning.

Think about the late Muhammad Ali. He didn’t give up against the most powerful government in the world when he refused induction into the US military because of his religious beliefs. It took some time, but he won! We will too!

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New Study: The Twenty Richest People in the USA Have Used Their Political Clout To Accumulate More Wealth Than 152 Million American Citizens

A new report released this week by the Institute for Policy Studies looks at the fortunes of the Forbes 400, and compares their wealth to the much more meager assets of the rest of America.

Among their most significant findings:

* America’s 20 wealthiest people — a group including Warren Buffett, Charles and David Koch, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg and Sheldon Adelson — now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people in 57 million households.

* The Forbes 400 now own about as much wealth as the nation’s entire African-American population — plus more than a third of the Latino population — combined.

* With a combined worth of $2.34 trillion, the Forbes 400 own more wealth than the bottom 61 percent of the country combined, a staggering 194 million people.

* The median American family has a net worth of $81,000. The Forbes 400 own more wealth than 36 million of these typical American families.

* Furthermore, the report authors note that they “believe that these statistics actually underestimate our current national levels of wealth concentration.” They say the “growing use of offshore tax havens and legal trusts has made the concealing of assets much more widespread than ever before.”

The folks at the Institute for Policy Studies appeared to be clueless as to how this historically massive unequal distribution of income came about. Those who control the state and federal government engineered this inequality, through such income redistribution programs as;

1. International income redistribution scams falsely marketed as free trade treaties. The latest scam is the Trans Pacific Partnership, a so-called trade treaty involving 12 nations of the Pacific Rim. Such wealthy class warriors as George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, and Ron Wyden support this, the largest, income redistribution scam in US history. It will also diminish the voting rights of the 99 percent on local and state levels. These agreements pave the legal route for US corporations to ship US jobs overseas. It also paves the way for US corporations to create jobs over there, rather than over here. The difference between the old higher US pay and the new lower overseas pay goes straight into the pockets of the super rich via higher corporate profits, rising dividends and surging share prices. The job losers may get some unemployment insurance, if they are lucky. These agreements are the biggest income redistribution scams, but there are other significant scams of this nature. According to the Federal Reserve Bank, Wyden voted to export 28 million US jobs overseas from 1990 to 2010, and millions more since.

2. Privatization scams, which enrich the wealthy.

3. Tax breaks for the rich, which allow them to purchase politicians, who then do their bidding in the halls of congress, in the white house, and in state houses across the nation. That bidding usually consists of legislation that redistributes income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent, such as Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden’s Trans Pacific Partnership.

In spite of their ignorance of how we got here, the folks of the Institute for Policy Studies did come up with some good suggestions to curtail wealth accumulation by a few people, which has come about at the expense of the many.

“First, we must close wealth escape routes. 
Wealthy individuals are moving quickly to shift wealth into offshore tax havens and bury it in private trusts, avoiding accountability and taxation every step of the way. This hidden wealth now totals in the trillions. Our first step must be to close these escape routes and tax dodges.

Second, we need to implement policies to reduce concentrated wealth. 
Without action to directly reduce private concentrations of wealth, inequality will continue to grow. By seriously taxing our wealthiest households, we could raise significant revenues and invest these funds to expand wealth-building opportunities across the economy.”

The next installment on this story, Why Wealth and Income Inequality Matters: Especially Since the Rich Are Stealing From the Rest of Us, will be within two days.

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How Much Did Big Money Pay to Get Fast Track Through the Senate?

A decade in the making, the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) reached a climax two weeks ago when corporations paid enough money to politicians in the US Senate and the House of Representatives to give President Obama Fast Track Authority, which makes it easier to ramrod the TPP through congress against the wishes of the US public. The TPP is the largest income and political power redistribution scam in US history, but it’s being falsely being marketed as a free trade agreement. Congress must still pass the TPP, and that is not necessarily a done deal. However, big money talks louder, and is more important to politicians, than voters, as noted during the debate over fast track authority. Click on the link below for a reasonably good analysis by the Guardian UK. 54 percent of US voters were against giving Fast Track Authority to the president. This is proof enough democracy does not exist on the federal level in the USA.

Here’s how much corporations paid US senators to fast-track the TPP bill–The Guardian

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