USA: Disparity in the US: America's 1% Has Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% - by Nick Hanauer and David M. Rolf

Lke many of the virus’s hardest hit victims, the United States went into the COVID-19 pandemic wracked by preexisting conditions. A fraying public health infrastructure, inadequate medical supplies, an employer-based health insurance system perversely unsuited to the moment—these and other afflictions are surely contributing to the death toll. But in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic—and its cruelly uneven impact—the elephant in the room is extreme income inequality.

How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades.

This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation. According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.

Read more at: America's 1% Has Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% | Time

COVID-19 vaccine inequity: Inside the cutthroat race to secure doses

No one disputes that the world is unfair. But no one expected a vaccine gap between the global rich and poor that was this bad, this far into the pandemic.

Inequity is everywhere: Inoculations go begging in the United States while Haiti, a short plane ride away, received its first delivery July 15 after months of promises - 500,000 doses for a population over 11 million. Canada has procured more than 10 doses for every resident; Sierra Leone's vaccination rate just cracked 1% on June 20.

It's like a famine in which “the richest guys grab the baker,” said Strive Masiyiwa, the African Union's envoy for vaccine acquisition.

In fact, European and American officials deeply involved in bankrolling and distributing the vaccines against coronavirus have told The Associated Press there was no thought of how to handle the situation globally. Instead, they jostled for their own domestic use.

For the complete detailed report go to: COVID-19 vaccine inequity: Inside the cutthroat race to secure doses | CP24.com

USA: The Dream is becoming a nightmare: The US Empire Is Crumbling Before Our Eyes - by Rebecca Gordon

How can you tell when your empire is crumbling? Some signs are actually visible from my own front window here in San Francisco.

Directly across the street, I can see a collection of tarps and poles (along with one of my own garbage cans) that were used to construct a makeshift home on the sidewalk. Beside that edifice stands a wooden cross decorated with a string of white Christmas lights and a red ribbon—a memorial to the woman who built that structure and died inside it earlier this week. We don’t know—and probably never will—what killed her: the pandemic raging across California? A heart attack? An overdose of heroin or fentanyl?

Behind her home and similar ones is a chain-link fence surrounding the empty playground of the Horace Mann/Buena Vista elementary and middle school. Like that home, the school, too, is now empty, closed because of the pandemic. I don’t know where the families of the 20 children who attended that school and lived in one of its gyms as an alternative to the streets have gone. They used to eat breakfast and dinner there every day, served on the same sidewalk by a pair of older Latina women who apparently had a contract from the school district to cook for the families using that school-cum-shelter. I don’t know, With unprecedented economic inequality and massive overspending on military expansion, America now looks a lot like 476 CE Rome. either, what any of them are now doing for money or food.

Read more at: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/american-empire-decline/

USA - Economy: Thousands of cars form lines to collect food in Covid-hit Texas - by Melissa Alonso and Susannah Cullinane

North Texas Food Bank (NTFB) distributed more than 600,000 pounds of food for about 25,000 people on Saturday, according to spokeswoman Anna Kurian. There were 7,280 turkeys distributed to families, Kurian told CNN.

Read more at: Thousands of cars form lines to collect food in Covid-hit Texas - CNN

Dateline US: Economic Power for the 99% -

The American dream has been lost. A tiny parasitic upper class has managed, with the aid of a political party adept at cultural division, to suck away the benefits of a generation of economic growth from the vast majority who produced it.

The loss of economic opportunity has dealt a near-fatal blow to U.S. democracy. Popular support for democracy may not require breakneck economic growth, but it does require fairness.

Read more at:
Dateline US: Economic Power for the 99% - The Globalist

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems - by George Monbiot

NEOLIBERALISM

Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

If you do have the capability to distinguish between "Right and Wrong",  and  are not too preoccupied with other "things" to do, it might be worth your while to read this rather lengthy, but most informative article, to help you understand why the world is in the total mess it is.  Have fun, and don't get too depressed. Tomorrow might bring better tidings - R.M - EU-Digest

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me?  in which he describes his main concern how social change has led to this psychic crisis and altered the way we think about ourselves.re :epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. Unfortunately we are all neoliberals now.

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

s it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.
Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change ... there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes, “it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.”

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating “investor-state dispute settlement”: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.

Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.

Those who own and run the UK’s privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world’s richest man.

Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is ... unearned income that accrues without any effort”. As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.

Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income.

Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the ‘losers’ who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment”. When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to “cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them”.

Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his thinktanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised.

The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.

A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.

These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.

The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom, Bureaucracy or Friedman’s classic work, Capitalism and Freedom.

For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action. It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power.

Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.

 EU-Digest - Neoliberalism : "The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by its private citizens" - Ale

US Economy; Complete disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street - by RM

Question, who or what is behind the major disconnect between Wall Street and reality, with stocks going up on the Dow for the past 4 days.Today by even more than 500 points, and this while economies are tanking all around the world, and while as many as 30% of the US workforce remains 
unemployed ?

Some companies obviously are making excessive profits as a result of the present emergency situation, but in no way is Wall Street a reflection of the state of the US economy, as President Trump likes to brag about.

The above is, however another clear indication of the great disparity between "the have and have nots" in the US and has to be remedied by an aggressive and progressive new Democratic government, before it destroys the USA from within.

EU-Digest

US Labor Unions 200 years of struggle and final decline: History of Labor Unions in the US, incuding VIDEO

of Labor Unions in the US, incuding VIDEO

The lifespan of American labor unions is shaped like a bell-curve struggling to climb at first, then riding high, and finally today crashing out.

The whole up-and-down took about 200 years total. We need to go back to the 1830s. UC Santa Cruz Professor William Domhoff writes, "Industrial development in the early nineteenth century slowly widened the gap between employers and skilled workers, so the workers began to think of industrial factories as a threat to both their wages and status."

Craft unions began to form but stayed mostly local, focused on clout and working conditions. Then in 1869, Domhoff says, the Knights of Labor was founded as "a secret society by a handful of Philadelphia garment cutters, who had given up on their own craft union as having any chance to succeed" and turned to galvanizing other workers through meetings and parades.

Eventually, violence became part of the picture. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, sparked by railroad companies slashing wages by 10% and doubling some workers'
responsibilities.

And while no major law ultimately clamped down on the groups, "unions came under attack — in the workplace, in the courts, and in public policy. As a result, union membership has fallen and income inequality has worsened — reaching levels not seen since the 1920s," says the,Economic Policy Institute. 

Read more at: History of Labor Unions in the US (VIDEO)

USA: The have and have nots: DISGRACEFUL AND SHAMEFUL disparity

It’s been almost 100 years since America’s 1% had this much wealth -

Read more at:
https://on.mktw.net/2USgQSs

USA Capitalism - Disparity in wages: How CEO pay compares with worker pay in well known companies

Public companies are now required to disclose their companies' pay ratios between the CEOs and median employees.

These data are important because they show which companies are investing in their workforce to create high-wage jobs. The table below shows how companies pay their CEOs relative to their workforce.

Read the full report at: https://aflcio.org/paywatch/company-pay-ratios

Wealth disparity gap - Have and Have Nots : the world's wealthiest saw their fortunes increase by $2.5 billion a day in 2018

World’s wealthiest saw their fortunes increase by $2.5 billion a day in 2018 says Oxfam -

Read more at:
https://on.mktw.net/2sBQnfx

Russia-USA Relations: Trump and Putin’s New "Oligarchic International" - by Alexei Bayer

Ever since Donald Trump began running for President of the United States, he has managed to heap abuse on pretty much everyone.

His targets range from the Mexicans to the Chinese and include plenty of Americans, from actress Meryl Streep to Rep. John Lewis.

The one man who can do no wrong by Trump is Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

It may seem like a strange affinity between a fat cat real estate developer and an ex-KGB colonel who devoted the first half of his life to the cause of burying capitalism.

There have been claims that Putin holds “kompromat” on Trump – damaging materials such as sex tapes – forcing the new U.S. president to sing to Putin’s tune.

While such kompromat material may exist, there is a less conspiratorial explanation why the two are bromancing together — and what kind of world order they are starting to build jointly.

“The working men have no country,” Marx and Engels declared in their Communist Manifesto back in 1848. They famously called for the proletariat of the world to unite because they regarded nationality was a fake distinction. What truly mattered, they said, was class solidarity.

The first Socialist International was founded in London in 1864 and “The Internationale” became its anthem.

The global super-rich class emerged nearly four decades ago. Its members hail from different countries and different walks of life. They have different professional backgrounds and earn their money in a variety of legal, semi-legal and criminal ways.

They ranged from the heirs of the Rothschilds to wildly successful tech entrepreneurs and the investors who backed them.

The class includes financial speculators, bankers, heads of publicly traded companies, with their huge bonuses and golden parachutes, sports and entertainment superstars and so on.
And, of course, let’s not forget the kleptocrats, the oil sheiks and the drug barons.

Each in his own way, Trump and Putin are extreme exemplars of this group. Putin is probably the world’s richest – and most shameless – kleptocrat. He has turned Russia into the world’s first nuclear armed mafia state.

His policy of destabilizing the United States and the European Union and whipping up nationalism at home has been designed with one purpose in mind – to keep himself and his super-rich cronies in power.

Putin claims to be a Russian patriot, but he is bleeding Russia dry and shamelessly, but effectively corrupting all of its institutions.

Trump is not just a billionaire himself (even though no one knows for sure whether he is, because he tends to exaggerate his net worth). His business model also directly caters to them, since his buildings attract the super-wealthy.

Contrary to his sloganeering, Trump doesn’t give a damn about America (and “making it great again.”) Short of finally triggering an American Revolution – an event for which the world is still waiting — America can hardly be any “greater” for him and his ilk than it is right now.

n fact, Trump seems to hate the United States, to judge from how viciously he attacks other Americans and how he is now debasing a proud American institution, the Presidency. Needless to say, like any true oligarch, he has paid no taxes for years.

Trump may wear a stars ‘n’ stripes lapel pin, but his loyalty lies elsewhere — with the nation of the super-rich. He and Putin are countrymen.

It has been asserted that once he assumes the presidency, Trump will sacrifice American interests in favor of Russian ones. It is a mistake to make that assumption.

Putin cares as little about Russia as Trump does about America. The two only care about making the world safe for themselves and all the other super-rich. They might was well adopt a common slogan: Oligarchs of the World Unite!

Read more: Trump and Putin’s New "Oligarchic International" - The Globalist

The Have and Have's not: Bill Gates could become world’s first trillionaire

Microsoft founder Bill Gates could become the first dollar trillionaire in 25 years, according to Oxfam, an international network of organizations collectively working to tackle global poverty.

Given the exponential growth of his wealth Gates would have earned his first $1 trillion by the time he is 86 in 2042.

When Bill Gates left Microsoft in 2006, his was worth $50 billion. In the next decade his wealth has increased to $75 billion, "despite his commendable attempts to give it away through his Foundation," the report said, as quoted by CNBC.


Read more: Bill Gates could become world’s first trillionaire — RT Business

Resolution 2017- Help Clean-up Global Plutocracy:: Breaking Through Power: It's Easier Than We Think

This has become the New Normal: Don't accept it

 "When a small group of people rules a society the political system is considered an oligarchy; when only money and wealth determine how a society is controlled, the political system is a plutocracy.

This is basically the situation we have today in the US, Russia, China, EU and many other countries in the world.

From the standpoint of a democratic society, both oligarchy and plutocracy are inherently unjust and corrupt.

Of course there are variations in the degrees of authoritarianism and cruelty that each system exercises over the communities it relies upon for workers and wealth. Scholars have resorted to using phrases like “benign dictatorships” or “wise rulers” or “paternalistic hierarchies—“ to describe lighter touches by those few who impose their rule over the many.

Thomas Paine simply called them tyrannies. People, families, and communities can only take so much abuse before they rise up to resist. The job of the rulers is always to find that line and provide the lowest level of pay, security, housing, consumer protection, healthcare, and political access for society so that they can extract and hoard the greatest amount of wealth, power, and immunity from justice for themselves. In many ways, the majority of Americans live in a democracy of minimums, while the privileged few enjoy a plutocracy of maximums.

In a plutocracy, commercialism dominates far beyond the realm of economics and business; everything is for sale, and money is power. But in an authentic democracy, there must be commercial-free zones where the power of human rights, citizenship, community, equality, and justice are free from the corrupting influence of money. Our elections and our governments should be such commercial-free zones; our environment, air, and water should never fall under the control of corporations or private owners. Children should not be programmed by a huckstering economy where their vulnerable consciousness becomes the target of relentless corporate marketing and advertising.

American history demonstrates that whenever commerce dominates all aspects of national life, a host of ills and atrocities have not just festered and spread, but become normal—enslavement, land grabs, war, ethnic cleansing, serfdom, child labor, abusive working conditions, corrupt political systems, environmental contamination, and immunity from the law for the privileged few. History also shows that whenever there have been periods when enough of the country organizes and resists, we see movements of people and communities breaking through power. Progress is made. Rights are won.

Education and literacy increase. Oppression is diminished. It was in this manner that people of conscience abolished the living nightmare imposed by the laws and whips of white enslavers. The nation moved closer to promises of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” expressed in the Declaration of Independence. We won more control over our work, our food, our land, our air, and our water. Women secured the right to vote. Civil rights were elevated and enforced. Public schools, improved environments, workplace collective bargaining, and consumer protections did not spontaneously evolve; they were won by people demanding them and breaking through power.

These moments of great progress are expressed in terms of new legislation, regulations, and judicial decisions that directly benefit the life, liberties, and pursuit of happiness of most Americans. From the abolition of slavery to the introduction of seat belts, great social gains have been achieved when people mobilize, organize, and resist the power of the few. The problem is that these liberating periods of humanitarian and civilizational progress are of shorter duration than the relentless commercial counterforces that discourage and disrupt social movements and their networks of support. Some commentators have used the bizarre term “justice fatigue” to describe the pullback that often occurs when communities of resistance are faced with increased surveillance, infiltration, harassment, and arrest. A more accurate term is repression.

Concentrated power in the hands of the few really should matter to you. It matters to you if you are denied fulltime gainful employment or paid poverty wages and there are no unions to defend your interests. It matters to you if you’re denied affordable health care. It matters to you if you’re gouged by the drug industry and your medication is outrageously expensive. It matters to you if it takes a long time to get to and from work due to lack of good public transit or packed highways. It matters to you if you and your children live in impoverished areas and have to breathe dirtier air and drink polluted water and live in housing that is neglected by your landlord. It matters to you if your children are receiving a substandard education in understaffed schools where they are being taught to obey rather than to question, think and imagine, especially in regards to the nature of power.

If you’re a little better off, it matters to you when your home is unfairly threatened with foreclosure. It matters to you when the nation is economically destabilized due to Wall Street’s crimes, and your retirement account evaporates overnight. It matters to you if you can’t pay off your large student loans, or if you can’t get out from under crushing credit-card debt or enormous medical bills due to being under-insured. It matters to you if you are constantly worried about the security of your job, or the costly care of your children and elderly parents.

“We live in a beautiful country,” writes historian Howard Zinn. “But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back.” To better assess what it specifically takes to do just that, it is important to understand how the people profiting from plutocratic forces strategically and regularly dominate old and new circumstances with powerful controlling processes".

With elections coming up in in Europe and other countries of the world in 2017- don't ever believe it is too difficult for you as one person to make a difference.  Speak out, join an advocacy group, or even organize one yourself. Go to political meetings of your choice and ask questions.

Politicians need your vote and will listen to you, specially if their political career depends on it.Politicians will usually also tell you everything you want to hear, and will even lie through their teeth, as long as you give them your vote. Check their voting record and compare it to their promises.  You will notice that most of what they told you before they never materialized. Question them about it in Public.

In Europe these questions could be : "why is Europe spending millions of euros fighting loosing wars in the Middle East.  What is done to improve education, Why has the care for the elderly declined so dramatically?" 

Or people in the US could ask: "why do we still have an outdated voting system, How come military spending figures are kept secret, etc etc".

Believe it or not, your future and that of your children stands or falls based on your involvement as a Citizen. Sitting at home and watching "pre-cooked" news by the corporate owned media or wondering what kind of dog food is better for your dog won't get you anywhere.

Most of the above quoted text comes from an easy-to-read compact book by Ralph Nader, called "Breaking Through Power" - You can order it on line and certainly will find it most fascinating as the world around you becomes more bizarre by the minute.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and an active and involved 2017 - hope you will take-off those slippers and use them to start slapping your politicians into shape and making them listen more attentively to you and what your needs are.

EU-Digest

The Global Economy: Globalization's Gluttony - by Anatol Zukerman

Corporate Power Rules Globally

Globalization is gobble-isation
By the goblins of global gluttony.
While gullible workers of troubled world
Work in the sweat of their brows
Crass corporations grab the world’s wealth
And don’t even share it with its creators.
 
This pen-and-ink drawing captures the shifting mindset among American workers. For decades, they went along with the promises of their leading politicians that, despite all the harsh changes in the national economy, there would be a brighter tomorrow. But now, these voters are running out of hope.

As the biggest American corporations liberally shed jobs at home and have effectively abandoned America for cheap labor and tax havens abroad, working-class voters feel at the receiving end of the stick.

The fact that these companies at the same time have American government in their claws does not make working-class voters feel better. Social benefits, meager to begin with, have been further reduced. Yet, another, fairer social compact is possible, as corporations in Europe demonstrate.

Not so in the United States, where corporations are not only determined to ignore the will of American people in order to expand their power and increase their profits, but get away with it due to bought-off politicians.

It is a painful irony that the latter claim to protect the “public” interest. It only leads to more bitterness that nearly all major American politicians – including the current crop of candidates for President of the United States – have made critical statements about corporations many times over many years. But it was just words, never followed up with deeds.

This globalization for the rich continues. If it isn’t more inclusive, it will fail.

Read more: Globalization's Gluttony - by Anatol Zukerman

Poll: US Voters Agree The Rich Get Richer

As the old saying goes, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Fifty-six percent (56%) of Likely U.S. Voters agree, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Forty percent (40%) disagree and believe most Americans benefit as economic conditions improve. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

read more: Voters Agree The Rich Get Richer - Rasmussen Reports™

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

Disparity: How Shadow Banking and Extreme Wealth Inequality Threaten Us - by David DeGraw

Hidden wealth estimates vary widely. Many of them only take a partial look at the most basic methods of offshoring wealth.  Given the unprecedented growth of wealth over the past generation, the secretive methods used to hide it have evolved far beyond well-known tax havens in Switzerland and small-island jurisdictions such as the Bahamas.  While estimates based on banking secrecy and tax havens help to give us a more accurate picture of overall wealth, they do not give a total view.

Research by Gabriel Zucman, which analyzed banking secrecy, estimated that “around 8% of the global financial wealth of households is held in tax havens.”  If we correlate this 8% with the $82 trillion in accounted for wealth reported by the Federal Reserve, that would be an additional $6.6 trillion for the wealthy, bringing the richest 1% up to roughly $39 trillion in overall wealth.

However, to get a more complete understanding of the reality of the situation, the most wide-ranging look into hidden wealth was done in 2012 by economist John Henry in partnership with the Tax Justice Network (TJN).  They estimated that there was $21- $32 trillion hidden globally at the end of 2010. As shocking as that sounds, that estimate still did not give a complete view of hidden wealth.  As they put it, “We consider these numbers to be conservative. This is only financial wealth and excludes a welter of real estate, yachts and other nonfinancial assets owned via offshore structures.”

We also need to consider that overall US household wealth is up 30% and has increased by $25 trillion since the end of 2010. Globally, High Net Worth Individual investible wealth has increased 19% since then, and has begun to accelerate at a record pace.  In 2013, it increased globally by 14%, with a 17% increase in North America, which is now at an all-time high.  Given these factors, and several others that will be explained below, the higher TJN estimation of $32 trillion in 2012 is conservative today.

Correlating TJN’s wealth estimates with US distribution percentages is not an exact science but it gives a much more accurate total of overall wealth than excluding it.  Based on TJN’s estimation, Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI) accounted for 48% of hidden wealth.  If we correlate that to the overall estimate of $32 trillion, it equates to $15.4 trillion for the UHNWI population.

The US accounts for 35% of the UHNWI population, which correlates to $5.4 trillion.  In the next tier, High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) also accounted for 48% of hidden wealth.  The US currently has 42% of the HNWI population, which correlates to $6.5 trillion.  The additional 4% of hidden wealth is estimated to be held below the economic top 1% of the US population, which correlates to roughly $538 billion.

This brings the estimated total of hidden US wealth to $12.4 trillion, with $11.9 trillion of that held within the top 1%.  We can now estimate that the top .01% has $14.5 trillion in wealth, the top .1% has $26.4 trillion and in total the top 1% has $44.5 trillion.

Read more: How Shadow Banking and Extreme Wealth Inequality Threaten Us | Alternet

USA - The Wealth Gap and the Law: "How the law follows the wealth gap in modern-day America" - by Neil Macdonald

Americans all stand equal before the law, children are taught in this country, regardless of wealth or race or social status. Because this is a classless society.

Of course, children here are also told that a nocturnal fairy will exchange old teeth for cash.
The bitter truth, more obvious by the year, is that law enforcement in the U.S. is actually the enforcement of the class system itself.

If you are poor, you understand that. If you are wealthy, you probably understand it, too, but in another way altogether.

For a member of the American underclass, a minor brush with authorities can turn into the kind of Kafkaesque despair that most Americans associate with places like Egypt or Russia or Iran.

So the story of Kalief Browder, detailed earlier this month in the New Yorker — "Three years on Rikers without trial" — could only have been a shock to the readers of that magazine, who are generally members of America's elite, and therefore largely shielded from judicial abuse.

Long story short, Browder was arrested wrongly for robbery and assault. And for the sin of refusing to cop a plea he was imprisoned in New York's fearsome Riker's Island jail, mostly in solitary, for three years without trial, before prosecutors gave up and admitted they had no case.

Keeping him locked up didn't seem to bother anyone; Browder, a juvenile delinquent from the Bronx, belongs to the nuisance class, and that was enough.

Such treatment, it goes without saying, simply would not happen to a kid from the preppy confines of Sag Harbor or Montauk.

Read more: How the law follows the wealth gap in modern-day America - World - CBC News

US Economy: The Age Of Vulnerability - by Joseph Stiglitz

Two new studies show, once again, the magnitude of the inequality problem plaguing the United States. The first, the US Census Bureau’s annual income and poverty report, shows that, despite the economy’s supposed recovery from the Great Recession, ordinary Americans’ incomes continue to stagnate. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, remains below its level a quarter-century ago.

It used to be thought that America’s greatest strength was not its military power, but an economic system that was the envy of the world. But why would others seek to emulate an economic model by which a large proportion – even a majority – of the population has seen their income stagnate while incomes at the top have soared?

A second study, the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Report 2014, corroborates these findings. Every year, the UNDP publishes a ranking of countries by their Human Development Index (HDI), which incorporates other dimensions of wellbeing besides income, including health and education.

America ranks fifth according to HDI, below Norway, Australia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. But when its score is adjusted for inequality, it drops 23 spots – among the largest such declines for any highly developed country. Indeed, the US falls below Greece and Slovakia, countries that people do not typically regard as role models or as competitors with the US at the top of the league tables.

The UNDP report emphasizes another aspect of societal performance: vulnerability. It points out that while many countries succeeded in moving people out of poverty, the lives of many are still precarious. A small event – say, an illness in the family – can push them back into destitution. Downward mobility is a real threat, while upward mobility is limited.

In the US, upward mobility is more myth than reality, whereas downward mobility and vulnerability is a widely shared experience. This is partly because of America’s health-care system, which still leaves poor Americans in a precarious position, despite President Barack Obama’s reforms. Those at the bottom are only a short step away from bankruptcy with all that that entails. Illness, divorce, or the loss of a job often is enough to push them over the brink.

The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (or “Obamacare”) was intended to ameliorate these threats – and there are strong indications that it is on its way to significantly reducing the number of uninsured Americans. But, partly owing to a Supreme Court decision and the obduracy of Republican governors and legislators, who in two dozen US states have refused to expand Medicaid (insurance for the poor) – even though the federal government pays almost the entire tab – 41 million Americans remain uninsured. When economic inequality translates into political inequality – as it has in large parts of the US – governments pay little attention to the needs of those at the bottom.

Neither GDP nor HDI reflects changes over time or differences across countries in vulnerability. But in America and elsewhere, there has been a marked decrease in security. Those with jobs worry whether they will be able to keep them; those without jobs worry whether they will get one.

Read more: Joseph Stiglitz: The Age Of Vulnerability