Russian Ukraine invasion: Russia-Ukraine War, Andrey Melnichenko: A Russian Billionaire's Wife Is Contesting "Irrational" EU Sanctions

anctions On Russia: Aleksandra Melnichenko, who was born in Belgrade and holds Serbian and Croatian citizenship, will "vigorously contest the unfortunate decision against her", the representative said in an email statement to Reuters, declining to give a name

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Global Economy: How billionaires are exploiting a world in crisis, and laughing all the way to the bank - by Stephen J. Lyons

Divide and conquer – this strategy has worked for centuries. Americans’ full-throated participation is required as we blame each other for everything, from job losses to political defeats to the rising costs of living.

And, if we can’t condemn each other, then we can always turn on those invasive brown and black immigrants from what previous, twice-impeached US president Donald Trump called “sh**hole countries”.

Meanwhile, the real culprits, the cabal of greedy billionaires that manipulate the international economic system – and, consequently, the futures of the rest of us taxpayers – laugh all the way to the banks, which, of course, they also own. <

Read more at: a href="https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3164956/how-billionaires-are-exploiting-world-crisis-and-laughing-all-way">How billionaires are exploiting a world in crisis, and laughing all the way to the bank | South China Morning Post

USA: Tech CEOs Invoke the American Dream to Obscure the Nightmare They Created

Getting Rich On Your Personal Data

During the recent  congressional antitrust hearing, the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Google, and , and Facebook used their opening statements to try and paint themselves—and their companies—as uniquely American success stories with humble origins, heart-warming anecdotes, and impactful lessons for the American people.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ statement wasted no time retelling his origin story: born to a single mother and adopted by a Cuban immigrant, Bezos was inspired in part by summers at his grandfather’s ranch (and a small $245,000 investment from his parents) to become a garage inventor and eventually create Amazon in 1994. Now, Amazon has 1.7 million small and medium-sized businesses selling on his platform, and has created 2.2 million jobs around the world, but Bezos was quick to remind Congress that Amazon accounts for "less than 1 percent of the $25 trillion global retail market" and "less than 4 percent of the retail in the U.S."

Bezos wasn’t alone in portraying his company as representing some aspect of what one might call the American dream, or America itself. Google CEO Sundar Pichai framed the hearing as being about “opportunity” and said that, growing up in India, he didn’t have much access to a computer until he came to America to study. Although Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t invoke the humble dorm room origin mythos that has given his company so much cover in the past, he said that “the tech industry is an American success story.” Apple CEO Tim Cook described his company as a “uniquely American company.”  

While these CEOs talked a lot about America and its possibilities, and how their companies and even personal histories embody it, it is undeniable that their actions are undermining what they claim to celebrate. 

For years, Amazon’s abusive work policies have made each warehouse into a “colony from hell,” as one employee put it, rife with injuries and mental breakdowns. The pandemic has made this point virtually indisputable given the many outbreaks of Covid-19 in warehouses, retaliation against workers who raised safety concerns, and labor actions by Amazon workers fed up with working conditions.

Just last week, America’s largest unions petitioned the FTC to investigate Amazon’s exploitation of the Covid-19 pandemic over concerns that it was suppressing wages, exploiting data on sellers to undermine their products, and leveraging its dominance in cloud computing to make competitors reliant on Amazon’s offerings.

The company also operates as part of the backbone of ICE’s deportation machine, offered a racially-biased facial recognition software to police departments nationwide, and transmits fear and racist paranoia to suburbs through its Ring surveillance program and its partnerships with over 600 police departments (as of December 2019). These are all functions of its incredible market power, even if they didn’t come up as topics in the antitrust hearing, and they all have the potential to destroy someone’s own shot at opportunity in America and elsewhere.  


A quick glance reveals the same is true for the other companies. Apple and Google are both being sued for using Congolese child miners to secure cobalt and other minerals at minimal cost, resulting in the maiming and death of several children. Apple is also a key player in reducing opportunities for individuals and small businesses in America to repair their devices, leading to calls for right to repair legislation.

Facebook has spent years apologizing and promising to do better after facilitating a genocide in Myanmar, cratering the news industry, harming the mental health of users and content moderators, compromising elections, attempting to remake the global monetary system with it as a key player, spreading hate speech and propaganda, and more.

These companies, and the tech industry at large, are all complicit in racist police violence that has existed long before their arrival but become supercharged in underappreciated ways with their help. It is hard to imagine any company could do any of these actions unless it enjoyed market dominance in multiple industries and leveraged that into control over how each of us went about our daily lives (how we watched videos, conducted searches, carried out commerce, consumed the news, engaged in communication, etc.) —which makes it hard to understand why we should let these companies have that much power in the first place.

These CEOs insist we play on their terms—terms that are incredibly profitable for them—and return to market logic—to the American Dream and its promise of cheap goods, services, and material abudunance. But that promise has been dead for years, a fact that the pandemic has made self-evident. That the technology sector seems to be a bright spot of the American (and global) economy doesn’t actually suggest that they are success stories as much as it reveals that the rest of the world has lost.

Sure, the price we’ve paid for allowing these corporate tech giants to get so large includes real damage to our economy and democracy, but they’ve also suffocated our political imagination and left us arguing on their terms about how much exploitation and how much surveillance is necessary for the ideal levels of economic growth.     

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Tech CEOs Invoke the American Dream to Obscure the Nightmare They Created

EU under Attack: America’s Billionaires Battle Each Other for Political Control over Europe - by Eric Zuesse

A contest for political control of Europe is gearing up between two American teams, one headed by the long-established George Soros, and the other now being set up by the upstart Steve Bannon, US President Donald Trump’s former campaign-manager. Soros has long led America’s liberal billionaires in controlling Europe, and Bannon is now organizing a team of America’s conservative billionaires to wrest that control from the liberal ones. 

Whereas Soros claims to represent the public’s interests, Bannon claims to represent the population’s interests — that’s the ‘populist’ side of America’s billionaires, versus the established ‘public-interest’ (Soros) side of them.

Two American brands of ‘philanthropists' will thus now be fighting for control over Europe's political markets (or institutions).

It’s a battle to serve either ’the public’ or else ’the people’, and each political brand will be struggling to keep Europe as an ally in American billionaires’ war against Russia (which all American billionaires want to defeat), but each team does this from a different ideological perspective, one being ‘liberal’, and the other being ‘conservative’. 

Just as there is liberal-conservative political polarization between billionaires domestically within a nation, there also is such political polarization between billionaires regarding their given nation’s foreign policies; and America’s billionaires are politically very highly polarized, both nationally and, increasingly, internationally as well. None of them is progressive, or left-populist. The only ‘populism’ that any billionaire currently promotes is right-‘populist', which is Bannon’s team. (Stalin was left-‘populist’; and Hitler was right-‘populist’; but neither dictator really was at all populist, which is simply democratic and against the aristocracy.) Both teams demonize each other within the United States for control over the US Government, but both are now competing against each other internationally for control over the entire world, by two different brands: liberal versus conservative. Both brands endorse ‘democracy’ or “the allies”; and both support spreading that ‘democracy’ by means of invading and occupying ‘dictatorships’ or “the enemies.” 

In Europe, this is called “imperialism”; in America, it is called “neo-conservatism” or “neoconservatism”; but no American billionaire actively opposes it (because to oppose it would be to oppose the aristocracy itself, the billionaires’ control over the Government — the very system that has been enormously successful for them, far more than the public itself recognizes)

For the complete report click on: America’s Billionaires Battle Each Other for Political Control over Europe

Asian Economy: New billionaire born in Asia every other day

The total wealth of billionaires surged to six trillion dollars last year, more than 17 percent than a year ago. Asian billionaires are outpacing their US counterparts for the first time, says research released by UBS on Thursday.

The surge is caused by an increase in Asia’s emerging billionaire class and growth in the materials, industrials, financial and technology sectors.

“On average, a new billionaire was created in Asia every two days, with the total number of Asian billionaires rising by almost a quarter to 637, compared to 563 in the US,” the report says.

Read more: New billionaire born in Asia every other day — RT Business News

Disparity between Rich and Poor: World’s 400 richest get richer, adding $92bn in 2014

The 400 richest billionaires in the world added another $92 billion to their names in 2014 and now sit on assets worth $4.1 trillion, but Russia’s super-wealthy have been hit by economic problems resulting from the Ukraine crisis.

The biggest winner in 2014 was China’s Jack Ma, who co-founded the Alibaba Group Holding ltd, (BABA), China’s largest e-commerce company, Bloomberg reports.

Ma, who has a personal fortune of $28.7 billion, has added $25.1 billion to his wealth since the September initial public offering saw shares surge by 56 percent.

Other big winners in 2014 were Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg. Buffet increased his net worth by $13.7 billion as dozens of businesses he had brought over the past five decades produced record profits.

Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook, the world’s largest social networking company, added $10.6 billion to his cash pile. Facebook has flourished this year as advertising increased and marketing initiatives expanded, and the 2012 acquisition of Instagram has also paid off; with the photo sharing app now worth $35 billion.

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, remains the world’s richest man with an $87.6 billion personal fortune, up $9.1 billion this year.

Read more: World’s 400 richest get richer, adding $92bn in 2014 — RT Business

European Wealth: The Richest People In Europe

With 468 billionaires, Europe claims 28% of the world’s ten-figure fortunes adding up to an aggregate net worth of $1.95 trillion. Russia leads the count with 111 billionaires – the same number as the state of California – while Germany has the second-highest, boasting 85 ten-digit fortune.

The United Kingdom is home to 47 billionaires, slightly more than its neighbor across the Channel, France, which claims 43 billionaires. Georgia, Guernsey, Lithuania and Romania each have just one billionaire.

An indication of a strong economy, Germany saw 26 new super-fortunes in 2014, earning it the third-highest number of billionaire freshman. Only the U.S.A and China had more first-time billionaires.

This week, Europe’s richest man, Amancio Ortega, saw his net worth fall 3.1%, to $62 billion. He is now the world’s fourth-richest person following downgrades of Ortega Inditex, the parent company of his retailer, Zara.

No European has ever landed the top spot on Forbes’ global wealth list, but the continent is home to the world’s richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt. Aged 91, the French cosmetics queen is worth $34.5 billion, thanks to her L’Oréal empire.

A third of Europe’s 52 richest, listed below, earned their fortunes in fashion and retail, including brand names Miuccia Prada and Giorgio Armani, as well as H&M giant Stefan Persson, who is third-wealthiest in the continent. (Not all industries are as glamorous; German Georg Schaeffler made his $14.3 billion from ball bearings.)

Prada is just one of six women in this shortlist of Europe’s richest. She is joined in this elite group by Bettencourt, BMW’s Susanne Klatten and Johanna Quandt, beverage inheritor Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken and oil heir Carrie Perrodo.

Several of Europe’s richest live outside their country of citizenship. Though an Irish passport holder, Pallonji Mistry lives in Mumbai, India. Hansjoerg Wyss lives in Wilson, Wyoming, while both Wertheimer brothers live in New York.

Read more: he Richest People In Europe