Suppose you’ve read the latest Forbes edition. In that case, you’ll see that the billionaires got richer over the past year in our Kleptocracy, which would seem counter-intuitive seeing that we’ve had a global pandemic, supply chain bottlenecks, economic disruptions, job market anomalies, and over three-quarters of a million deaths in the USA alone due to pandemic. Everybody is making sacrifices across the board, except for the wealthiest Americans. How is that possible?
What’s the old saying, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.” Hmm, it doesn’t seem to apply in the USA. I wonder why that is?
According to Forbes, the list of billionaires even grew by over 130 individuals. We see strikes all across the globe with container ships floating in our oceans because supplies aren’t meeting fundamental demands and continued deaths. In Africa, less than 5% of the population got the Covid vaccine. How do we justify the disparity between the rich and poor?
According to an analysis of Forbes data about US billionaires by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) Program on Inequality, the wealth of the richest people in the country increased from “just short of $3 trillion at the start of the COVID crisis on March 18, 2020, to over $5 trillion on October 15 of this year,” and this wealth is “two-thirds more than the $3 trillion in wealth held by the bottom 50 percent of U.S. households estimated by the Federal Reserve Board.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/10/20/bill-o20.html
The Definition of a Kleptocracy
If you read any articles about the leaked Panama Papers or Pandora Papers, you’ll learn how the wealthy conceal their money in overseas accounts. We’ve even learned that the lawyers and accountants used by the global elite use many states in the USA that’ve set themselves up as tax havens for the wealthy.
According to Wikipedia:
Kleptocracies are generally associated with dictatorships, oligarchies, military juntas, or other forms of autocratic and nepotist governments in which external oversight is impossible or does not exist. This lack of oversight can be caused or exacerbated by the ability of the kleptocratic officials to control both the supply of public funds and the means of disbursal for those funds.
Kleptocratic rulers often treat their country’s treasury as a source of personal wealth, spending funds on luxury goods and extravagances as they see fit. Many kleptocratic rulers secretly transfer public funds into hidden personal numbered bank accounts in foreign countries to provide for themselves if removed from power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptocracy
Well, the US is an oligarchy that controls the political class through financial contributions. With the passing of Citizens United by SCOTUS, this is no longer disputable. Watching the cowardness of Senator Joe Manchin get taken down by his fellow Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders tells you the problems oligarchy creates not just for the people but the planet and ALL its people. Africa puts out the most negligible CO2 emissions but reaps the negative consequences of the wealthy nations who emit the most.
Economists and sociologists are asking questions they should have been asking decades ago. Instead, those following the Wall Street Journal for “market information” have been given the pro-capitalism propaganda you’d expect. Economists and workforce development people want to know why workers are quitting their jobs. They want to know why workers won’t return to work and fill all the open positions.
Why don’t all these academics ask where the money is going or why the stock market is setting record highs while shoppers find empty shelves at the stores and cargo ships are drifting around the ports waiting to be unloaded. The money counters are saying we spent $21 trillion on war and surveillance the past twenty years. They’ve told us we spent $2.3 trillion in Afghanistan alone, but the Afghan people are in worse shape today than they were 20 years ago. The United Nations is begging for money and food for the Afghani’s. So, where did the money go?
The Treasury or Federal Reserve
Since 2008, the Federal Reserve has been actively printing money and electronically sending it into the banking system to salvage what the Banksters destroyed with their toxic global assets. But, unfortunately, they were gambling with depositors’ money, and their bets blew up. Luckily for them, Barack Obama was willing to make a deal and turned over the Treasury and the Fed to the same bankers who ran the global financial system into the ground. How cozy!
If you’ve only read my last article and this one, you will start to get a funny feeling in your stomach that something is amiss. Americans believe that our government is corrupt and the Fed is part of the government, even though you won’t find it when we set up our government. The concept of a central bank was known, but the Founder’s wanted nothing to do with the “money changers.”
I’ll delve into this more deeply next week, but while Forbes applauds the increasing number of billionaires and the growth of wealth overall, there is no mention of where their wealth was derived.As I mentioned above, you would think that the Oligarchs would have experienced the most pain and suffered the most losses with the economy shutting down. They didn’t. A couple of nonprofits who analyzed the billionaire’s newfound wealth also didn’t ask, but the journalists at the Worldwide Socialist Website (WWSW) caught it, writing:
The ATF and IPS analysis fails to mention that the grotesque increase in the number and wealth of America’s billionaire capitalist elite over the past 19 months has been fueled by a combination of an increase in the exploitation of the working class during the public health crisis and the unprecedented purchase of $7 trillion in financial assets by the Federal Reserve Bank as part of the US government’s pandemic stimulus response.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/10/20/bill-o20.html
Is this what Republicans mean by “trickle-down economics?” Thanks to the massive propaganda campaigns by our Mainstream Media owned by Oligarchs, the working class blamed the Democrats in office for enriching the unemployed, which hurt the local and national economy. It worked to perfection. It was an incredible smokescreen to prevent workers from seeing who was taking trillions from the Treasury via our Federal Reserve. Poof!
First by Donald Trump, and then by Joe Biden. Do you still think it’s a war between Republicans and Democrats?
