GIVE AMERICA’S ‘HELICOPTER PARENTS’ A BREAK

Posted on March 17, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Hovering parents don’t need lectures. They need a more equal nation.

By Sam Pizzigati

A good many of us aging baby boomers are having trouble relating to the “helicopter parents” of our modern age — those moms and pops constantly hovering over their kids, filling their schedules with enrichment activities of every sort, worrying nonstop about their futures.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, baby boomers didn’t grow up like that. We lived much more “free-range” childhoods. We pedaled our bikes far from hearth and home. We organized our own pick-up games. We spent — wasted! — entire summers doing little bits of nothing.

We survived. So did our parents. So why do parents today have to hover so much?

The standard explanation: Times have changed. Yes, today’s parents take a more intense approach to parenting. But they have no choice. The pressures of modernity make them do it.

Economists Matthias Doepke of Northwestern University and Fabrizio Zilibotti of Yale have followed all the debate over helicopter parenting, and they’re not jumping on this blame-modernity bandwagon. If the pace and pressures of our dangerous digital times are driving parents to hover, the pair points out, then we ought to see parents helicoptering across the developed world.

We’re not.

In fact, researchers have found significant differences in parenting styles from one modern industrial nation to another. Parents in some nations today have parenting styles as relaxed as anything aging baby boomers experienced back in the 1950s. In other nations, by contrast, parents seem as intense as today’s helicoptering norm in the United States.

How can we account for these differences?

Doepke and Zilibotti have a compelling explanation. Levels of helicopter parenting, they note, track with levels of economic inequality. The wider a society’s income gaps, the more parents hover.

The two countries most notorious for their helicopter parenting, China and the United States, just happen to sport two of the world’s deepest economic divides. And those more relaxed parenting days of mid-20th century America? They came at a time when the United States shared income and wealth much more equally than the United States does today.

What’s going on here? Why should economic inequality have any impact on parenting styles?

In severely unequal nations, the evidence suggests, childhoods have become high-stakes competitions. Only the “winners” go on to enjoy comfortable lives when they grow up. You either make it into the ranks of your nation’s elite or you risk struggling on a treadmill that never ends.

In more equal societies, you don’t have to matriculate at the “best” schools or score a high-status internship to live a dignified life. In societies with income and wealth more evenly distributed, broad swatches of people — not just elites — live comfortably. That leaves parents, as Doepke puts it, “more room to relax and let the kids just enjoy themselves.”

Parents in highly unequal nations can’t afford to relax. They have too much to do. They have to shape their kids into winners. But the competition their children face will always be rigged, because the already affluent in deeply unequal societies have more time and money to invest in that shaping.

Researchers Doepke and Zilibotti call for greater public investments in social services — like quality child care — to narrow the competitive advantage that wealth bestows upon affluent American families.

The investments they recommend would certainly help ease the pressure on working households. Would they be enough to get our parents more relaxed? Not likely, not so long as rewards keep concentrating in the pockets of the few at the expense of the many.

Our helicopter parents, in short, don’t need fixing. Our economic system does.

The Erosion of the Middle Class — Why Americans Are Working Harder and Earning Less

Posted on February 8, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By John Liberty

Source: The Mind Unleashed

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it.” — Howard Beale

Howard Beale, the main character in the 1976 film Network, became a part of cinematic history when he uttered the line “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore.” That one line expressed a growing rage among America’s shrinking middle class at a time when Americans were reeling from years of war, political scandals and economic downturn.

In the four decades that have followed, little has improved for the average American. We’re still ‘mad as hell’ and the middle class is being eroded right in front of our eyes. When adjusted for inflation, many Americans are working longer hours and earning less than they did in 1976. So, how have we gone from vibrant middle class to the working poor in a matter of decades?

Median Incomes Are Stagnant

Despite increases in the national income over the past fifty years, middle class families have experienced little income growth over the past few decades. According to U.S. Census data, middle class incomes have grown by only 28 percent from 1979 – 2014. Meanwhile, a report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that the top 20 percent of earners has seen their incomes rise by 95 percent over that same period of time.

Contributing to the stagnation of wages is a notable decrease in the workforce participation rate. According to the Brookings institute, “One reason for these declines in employment and labor force participation is that work is less rewarding. Wages for those at the bottom and middle of the skill and wage distribution have declined or stagnated.” Historical data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics backs up these findings, showing a steady decrease in workforce participation over the last two decades.

The Erosion of the Minimum Wage & America’s Purchasing Power

Anyone who has read a comment thread on the internet about minimum wage laws knows the debate is currently one of the most highly contentious political topics in America. In the halls of Congress, the debate has turned into a nearly decade long impasse. As a result, workers at the low end of the wage scale have watched the purchasing power of their wages decrease from $7.25 in 2009, to $6.19 in 2018 due to inflation. In 2018, you need to perform 47 hours of minimum wage work to achieve the same amount of purchasing power as 40 hours of work in 2009.

The inflation-adjusted minimum wage value has been in steady decline since 1968, when the $1.60 minimum wage was equal to $11.39 (in 2018 dollars). Since then, lawmakers have reduced minimum wage increases relative to the rate of inflation. As Christopher Ingraham reports:

“Recent research shows that the reason politicians — Democrats and Republicans alike — are dragging their feet on popular policies such as the minimum wage is that they pay a lot more attention to the needs and desires of deep-pocketed business groups than they do to regular voters. Those groups tend to oppose minimum wage increases for the simple reason that they eat into their profit margins.”

To be clear, the erosion of the purchasing power of everyday Americans is hardly a new phenomenon. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the purchasing power of the U.S. Dollar has plummeted by over 95 percent since 1913, the year the Federal Reserve was created. The Bureau’s Consumer Price Index indicates that prices in 2018 are 2,436.33% higher than prices in 1913 and that the dollar has experienced an average inflation rate of 3.13% per year during this period.

The Rich Get Richer

While the outlook may be grim for low-wage workers, this is fantastic news for large corporations. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Economics shows that corporate profits are approaching all-time highs. But it’s not just workers who are feeling the effect of growing income inequality. The contrast is also being felt on Main Street. An analysis of the S & P 500 and the Russell 1,000 & 2,000 indexes by Bloomberg revealed a growing gap between America’s largest employers and smaller businesses.

A report from the Institute for Policy Studies entitled Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us echoed these findings when it revealed that America’s 20 wealthiest people — a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet – now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined.

Although the Trump administration continues to tout stock market and labor force increases as signs of economic prosperity, numbers show that the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own 84 percent of all stock. A study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute found that wage growth remains too weak to consider the economy at full employment and that stagnant wage growth has contributed to the growing level of income inequality in America. The study noted that while wages have recovered from the 2008 recession, the gap between those at the top and those at the middle and bottom has continued to increase since 2000. As the study’s author, Elise Gould writes:

“We’re looking at nominal wage growth that is still slower than you would expect in a full employment economy, slower than you would expect if you thought there were any sort of inflation pressures from wage growth.”

The Decimation of the American Dream

Comedian George Carlin once said, “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.” For millions of middle class Americans Carlin’s statement has proven eerily accurate. Stagnant wages and decreased purchasing power has put the prospects for middle class children in a tailspin as upward mobility trends have reportedly fallen by over 40 percent since 1950.

A poll conducted by the Pew Research Institute corroborates this claim. According to Pew, only 37 percent of Americans believe that today’s children will grow up to be better off financially than their parents. That means more Americans think that today’s children will be financially worse off than their parents than those who believe they will be better off.

The sentiments expressed by millions of middle class Americans appear to be wholly justified due to the fact that middle class families are becoming more fragile and dependent on two incomes. A report from the Council of Economic Advisors found the majority of the income gains made by the middle class from 1979 to 2013 were a result of increased participation in the workplace by women. The report also noted the fragility of two income families amidst a decline in marriage and a drastic rise in single parent homes in recent years.

As a result of the slow growth in wages, over half of Americans now receive more in Government transfer payments (Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security) than they pay in federal taxes. An analysis of all 50 states also found that in 42 states the cost of living is higher than the median income.

The rising cost of healthcare is also putting the pinch on the wallets of many Americans. As Jeffrey Pfeffer noted in his book Dying for a Paycheck, healthcare spending—per capita—has increased 29 fold over the past 40 years, outpacing the growth of the American economy.

While many Americans continue to look to the government to fix problems like wage stagnation, income inequality and rising healthcare costs, the sad truth is that we live in a time when 1 in 3 households has trouble paying energy bills and 40 percent of Americans face poverty in retirement at the exact same time the Federal Government has admitted that they lost $21 trillion. Not only did they lose $21 trillion (yes that’s TRILLION with a T), but the Department of Defense indicated in a press conference that they “never expected to pass” the audit to locate the missing taxpayer money.

John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton famously proclaimed in 1887:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

Perhaps it’s time for the millions of Americans who are quietly ‘mad as hell’ to start expressing their rage at the corrupt institutions of power that are decimating their livelihoods rather than expecting those very same institutions to fix the problems they created.

Prices, plutocrats, and corporate concentration

Posted on February 5, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Would less corporate concentration – and a weaker corporate capacity to raise prices – mean less inequality?

By Sam Pizzigati

Source: Nation of Change

Andrew Leigh, a member of the Australian parliament, has a side gig. He just happens to be a working economist. Other lawmakers may spend their spare hours making cold calls for campaign cash. Leigh spends his doing research – on why our modern economies are leaving their populations ever more unequal.

Leigh’s latest research is making some global waves. Working with a team of Australian, Canadian, and American analysts, he’s been studying how much the prices corporate monopolies charge impact inequality.

The conventional wisdom has a simple answer: not much. Yes, the reasoning goes, prices do go up when a few large corporations start to dominate an economic sector. But those same higher prices translate into higher returns for corporate shareholders.

Thanks to 401(k)s and the like, the argument continues, the ranks of these corporate shareholders include millions of average families. So we end up with a wash. As consumers, families pay more in prices. As shareholders, they pocket higher dividends.

But this nonchalance about the impact of monopolies, Andrew Leigh and his colleagues counter, obscures “the relative distribution of consumption and corporate equity ownership.” Average families do hold some shares of stock, but not many. In the United States, for instance, the most affluent 20 percent of households own 13 times more stock than the bottom 60 percent.

These bottom 60 percent households, as a result, get precious little return from the few shares of stock they do hold, not nearly enough to offset the higher prices they pay on corporate monopoly products.

“On net, that means it’s nearly impossible for the typical U.S. family to make up for higher prices via the performance of their stock portfolio,” notes a Washington Post analysis of the Leigh team research. “When prices rise, low- and middle-class families pay. Wealthy families profit.”

By how much do these affluents profit? Leigh and his colleagues have done the math. The higher prices – and profits – that corporate concentration has generated have shifted 3 percent of national income out of the pockets of poor and middle-class families into the wallets of the affluent.

The larger our corporations become, in other words, the more unequal our societies become.

Now corporations don’t grow larger in the same way as people grow larger. Corporations have no adolescent growth spurts. They don’t mature. They have no real personhood. Corporations only become larger when the executives who run them make them larger, most typically by wheeling and dealing their way through ever grander mergers and acquisitions.

This wheeling and dealing takes up a huge chunk of modern corporate executive time and energy. Why do execs devote so much of their time and energy to getting bigger? Getting bigger pays – for execs.

Indeed, firm size determines how much executives make more than any other factor, as research has shown repeatedly over the years. Executives don’t have to “perform” – make their enterprises more efficient and effective – to make bigger bucks. They just to need to make their enterprises bigger.

Executives, in short, have a powerful incentive to grow their companies, and that powerful incentive, as the latest research from Andrew Leigh and his colleagues shows, isn’t just making these executives richer. It’s leaving our societies much more unequal.

So what can we do to ease the damage? Tougher antitrust enforcement could certainly slow our rates of corporate concentration. But the legislative activities of Andrew Leigh in Australia suggest another promising approach as well.

Leigh serves as a “shadow” minister for the Australian parliament’s Labor Party opposition. This past fall, he announced that his party, if elected to power, will require all major corporations to publicly disclose the ratio between their CEO and worker pay.

A similar disclosure mandate went into effect in the United States last year. As of January 1, 2019, the UK now has a pay-ratio disclosure mandate in effect as well.

Forcing Australian corporations to reveal their CEO-worker pay ratios, Leigh notes, would encourage these corporations “to think about how they are serving all their workers, and society as a whole.” But a growing number of progressives in the United States and the U.K. believe that pay ratios can do more than just “encourage” corporations to better serve their societies.

These progressives are pushing for consequences on CEO-pay ratios, proposing legislation that would deny government contracts and subsidies to corporations with wide gaps between their CEO and worker pay. They’re also calling for higher tax rates on companies with wider CEO-worker pay ratios, and one American city, Oregon’s Portland, already has such an “inequality tax” in effect.

More moves in this direction could significantly reduce the incentive for the executive wheeling and dealing that’s concentrating corporate power in fewer and fewer corporate hands. That wheeling and dealing – in nations with consequences on pay ratios in effect – would no longer guarantee grand windfalls to our corporate executive class.

Less wheeling and dealing, in turn, would mean less corporate concentration – and a weaker corporate capacity to raise prices. And that would mean, as the new Leigh gang’s research so clearly shows, less inequality.

“It’s Crucial to Break Up Facebook”

Posted on January 21, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Asher Schechter

Source: ProMarket

Four decades ago, writes Tim Wu in the introduction to his recent book The Curse of Bigness, the United States and other countries entered into a sweeping experiment that radically transformed their economies and politics. The experiment in question consisted of abandoning most checks on anticompetitive conduct, thus allowing concentrated corporate power to grow undisturbed.

The result: an increasingly concentrated global economy marked by historic levels of inequality and extreme concentrations of economic and political power, with disaffected voters being lured by radical far-right nationalists across the West. “We have managed to recreate both the economics and politics of a century ago—the first Gilded Age,” Wu writes.

Now, he warns, liberal democracies risk making yet another grave historical error by ignoring the well-established link between the concentration of economic power and the rise of authoritarianism. That monopolization poses an existential threat to democracy has been widely known throughout history: Louis Brandeis famously referred to this threat as the “curse of bigness”; in Germany, the rise of fascism was partly facilitated by monopolists and industrial cartels.

Yet in recent decades, explained Wu in an interview with ProMarket, much of this history has been forgotten. The legacy of Brandeis, America’s leading defender against bigness, has been “neglected, almost forgotten,” along with the greater antimonopoly tradition that has been an integral part of US politics for over 200 years. Which is why he decided to write The Curse of Bigness, a slim book that is equal parts historical polemic and urgent call to action.

Wu, the Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia Law School and also the author of The Attention Merchants and The Master Switch, is perhaps best known for coining the term “net neutrality.” In his interview with ProMarket, he discussed the parallels between the monopolies of today and those of the first Gilded Age and explained why breaking up dominant companies is crucial, particularly when it comes to Facebook.

[This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity]

Q: I want to start with Brandeis, who famously coined the phrase “curse of bigness.” In the book, you write that Brandeis “has been done a disservice.”

Yes, I think he has been. I think his economic vision has been forgotten. There are powerful ideas in it, very appealing in our times, very appealing through much of American history. So I wanted to try to do justice to and resurrect the Brandeisian strain of thought when it comes to economic policy.

Q: You point to many parallels between Brandeis’s time and ours, but one that especially haunts the book is the rise of neo-fascist movements around the world and the potential link between large business groups and aspiring authoritarians. Did you feel a certain sense of urgency in writing this book and making this link at this particular moment in time?

There is something alarming about the rise of extremist governments around the world. It has something to do with a sense of discontent as to how the economy functions for people, and that did give the writing of this a sense of a sense of urgency and a sense of a historic moment.

It’s a dangerous moment around the world and in the United States. I don’t think we have a complete understanding of what causes fascist uprisings, but I have a strong instinct, and I think many people do too, that there are economic origins to fascism that are very important and that, among other things, we really need to understand how to prevent people from turning to fascist, neo-nationalist, and extremist answers. I would suggest that has a lot more to do with economic policy than people think.

Q: That is something many of the “big is beautiful”-type arguments about private monopolies seem to ignore: the historical precedents of concentrated economic power contributing to the rise of authoritarian regimes.

I think that’s right. Also, it ignores [the fact] that there’s more to people’s lives than their lives as customers. People are also workers, and it’s one thing to face scale when you’re buying things and another thing to face scale when you’re an employee looking for a job and in a difficult bargaining position.

To take this further: I don’t like excessive pricing or price gouging, but the vision of antitrust over the last 40 years has been that the best of all possible worlds is one where you have relatively mild reductions in prices for consumer goods. Let’s just say there’s more to life than that. It’s not always clear that economics can get at it, but the focus on price in antitrust yields very narrow results.

“I don’t like excessive pricing or price gouging, but the vision of antitrust over the last 40 years has been that the best of all possible worlds is one where you have relatively mild reductions in prices for consumer goods. Let’s just say there’s more to life than that.”

Q: Unlike many people involved in the antitrust debate, even those that support vigorous enforcement, you don’t shy away from what Robert Pitofsky called the “political content of antitrust.” In fact, you seem to embrace it. What would you say is the political role of antitrust?

Ultimately, antitrust is a kind of constitutional check on private power. You can’t understand antitrust law without understanding its relationship with power. This is the centerpiece of the book and the original soul of antitrust law. It wasn’t so concerned with the details with price. It just had a sense that there needed to be some kind of outer limit on private power, much like there’s a limit on public power set by the constitution.

Q: What do you say to criticisms that you’re leading antitrust through uncharted waters, and that reinstilling political values into antitrust risks turning antitrust into a blunt political tool, much like what Trump is threatening to do with tech platforms?

I think this is confusing two meanings of the word “political.” There’s a narrow political sense in which a law can be used to punish your opponents or save your friends—consumer welfare antitrust can be used to do that already. But there’s also the broader sense of the law informed by constitutional values or concerns about power. That is also political, but in a much broader sense. That is the best sense in which the law has been enforced in the best moments of its history—the sense that a firm has become too powerful and too dominant to be tolerated in a land which calls itself free. It’s important not to confuse those two ideas of the term “political.”

Q: You compare the first Gilded Age to our own. Where do you see parallels between the monopolists of the Gilded Age, people like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, and present day dominant firms? Google and Facebook are not shooting workers, after all.

There’s some traces of the same ideology. Peter Thiel is a prominent example: He calls his [ideology] libertarianism, but it’s not much different than 19th century social Darwinism, which worships the monopoly form and holds the idea that we should see our society as a winner-take-all, survival of the fittest, “The strong shall rule, the weak shall serve them” kind of undertaking. Google and Facebook have much kinder public faces, but—particularly with Facebook—I’m not sure underlying it they think that much differently.

There are other parallels as well, particularly levels of individualized personal wealth that the world has never seen before. In the concentration of wealth is a glorification of wealth, and almost a fetishization with accumulating amounts of money that no person could spend in their lifetime. A lot of projects in Silicon Valley get bent to the need for monstrous payouts and it ends up getting in the way of what would otherwise be good projects or better ways to run companies.

Obviously, as I explore in the book, the economic structure is also similar, where you have an overall economy dominated by fewer entities and greater levels of inequality.

Q: Another parallel seems to be this belief in the goodness of monopolies and the benefits they bring humanity. The ruthless robber barons, who threatened to crush rivals who didn’t submit to their will, genuinely believed they were doing the good, moral thing, for the betterment of humankind.

That’s right. But I think this has less to do with Silicon Valley and more to do with Wall Street today, this very fragmented morality, the idea that somehow the right thing to do is not exactly what we would usually call the ethical thing: It’s right to destroy your rivals, it’s right to lie and cheat so long as you get away with it.

“If you’re looking for the one big signal failure of the last 20 years, it’s got to be merger review. There has been an inexplicable allowance of so many industries to merge down to four or three players, sometimes two, sometimes even a monopoly. Europe is as guilty of this as the United States.”

Q: You write that the priority for neo-Brandeisian antitrust would be reforming the process of merger review. Why is merger review the top priority, and how should it be reformed?

If you’re looking for the one big signal failure of the last 20 years, it’s got to be merger review. There has been an inexplicable allowance of so many industries to merge down to four or three players, sometimes two, sometimes even a monopoly. Europe is as guilty of this as the United States. In many cases, it seems like the question was not how are we going to stop this [merger], but what kind of conditions are [merging companies] going to agree to, which is not the way merger review was intended. Merger review is not intended to be a big set of commitments that companies make, but rather the actual blocking of mergers. There’s been some recovery from that, particularly in the United States near the end of the Obama administration, but merger review has been in a crisis point.

It’s possible Congress could act and reaffirm that it meant what it said when it passed the 1950 Merger Act. It’s possible you could add greater burdens for larger mergers, or mergers that pass some structural threshold. Another way would be to open merger review to more public scrutiny. I understand some of the arguments in favor of secrecy, but I think that in the case of really big blockbuster mergers there’s just too much at stake. Having more public awareness and more groups involved would be good actually, given the important political consequences.

Q: What’s interesting about European antitrust is that although they’ve taken on several big cases in recent years, in terms of mergers European competition authorities don’t put up a lot of a fight.

I agree. I think that Europe, if anything, has been worse than the United States for the last ten years. The beer merger of Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller was inexplicably approved, creating a monopoly. Telecom mergers across Europe have been allowed, bringing multiple markets down to three [competitors].They allowed the Monsanto-Bayer merger—I’m not sure what they were thinking with that one.

Overall, I think consent decrees appeal to academic economists, but they have a bad track record. One problem with consent decrees is that you have the most talented attorneys and economists negotiating these on the government side, but once they’re done, they’re given to an enforcement bureau which is typically not heavily staffed. And sometimes it can be forgotten, and certainly not enforced with any kind of vigor.

Structural separation is self-executing. The blocking of mergers is self-executing. You don’t have to have the government constantly trying to make sure the thing is working. I think Europe has really gone down the wrong path in that direction.

Q: Another solution you explore in the book is breaking up dominant companies. One company you point to in this regard is Facebook—you call for breaking up Facebook, separating it from Instagram and WhatsApp. Why single out Facebook? And what would breaking up Facebook accomplish, considering its business model is at this point shared by the majority of online platforms?

I think it’s crucial to break up Facebook, particularly from WhatsApp and Instagram. In some ways, I think the burden should be on Facebook to explain why they shouldn’t be broken up.

Will that make a difference? I think it will. I have faith in improved competition. I don’t think there’s strong evidence of great efficiencies that come from having all of the major social networks under one roof. It’s hard to see any real loss of so-called efficiencies, at least ones that matter to consumers.

People are looking for somewhere to switch, but they don’t have anywhere to go. WhatsApp can easily be that platform, and its leadership has different values, or at least had different values before they left.

“I think it’s crucial to break up Facebook, particularly from WhatsApp and Instagram. In some ways, I think the burden should be on Facebook to explain why they shouldn’t be broken up.”

Q: In a recent post in Medium, you laid out ten antitrust cases the government should be investigating. Which ones would you say are the most pressing?

Someone has to stop the T-Mobile/Sprint merger. Maybe it will be the states, but someone has to stop that merger. I already mentioned the Facebook breakup, which I think is big and symbolically important.

I think the Justice Department actually is already working on this, but the Live Nation-Ticketmaster matter has been sitting there for a long time. It’s not the biggest industry, but it’s still a case with a lot of anticompetitive conduct.

And I would like to take a look back at the airline mergers and ask whether we should consider breaking down the triopoly. The state of the airlines is really unacceptable.

Q: It’s been roughly a year since the repeal of net neutrality. You, of course, famously coined the term net neutrality. What would you say is the importance of net neutrality, in terms of competition and the bigness debate?

It’s really a parallel discussion but the same issue, which is: When you have monopolies that don’t seem to be going anywhere, should they be completely unconstrained? Or should there be some rules as to how they conduct themselves? It’s always been a parallel to this question of antitrust, but they’re part of the same discussion. For some reason, we’ve moved in the direction of extreme, radical, laissez faire [responses] for all of these questions. But people are starting to move in different directions now, and the backlash is inevitable.

Reflections on 2018, Forecasting 2019

Posted on January 3, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

In many ways it is painful to reflect on the year 2018; a year of vital opportunities lost when so much is at stake.

Whether politically, militarily, socially, economically, financially or ecologically, humanity took some giant strides backwards while passing up endless opportunities to make a positive difference in our world.

Let me, very briefly, identify some of the more crucial backward steps, starting with the recognition by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in January that the year had already started badly when they moved the Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight, the closest it has ever been to ‘doomsday’ (and equal to 1953 when the Soviet Union first exploded a thermonuclear weapon matching the US capacity). See ‘It is now two minutes to midnight’.

This change reflected the perilous state of our world, particularly given the renewed threat of nuclear war and the ongoing climate catastrophe. It didn’t even mention the massive and unrelenting assault on the biosphere (apart from the climate) nor, of course, the ongoing monumental atrocities against fellow human beings.

Some Lowlights of 2018

The global elite, using key elite fora such as the Group of 30, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group and the World Economic Forum, continued to plan, generate and exacerbate the many ongoing wars, deepening exploitation within the global economy, climate and environmental destruction, and the refugee crisis, among many other violent impacts, in pursuit of greater elite power, profit and privilege.

International organizations (such as the United Nations, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) and national governments used military forces, legal systems, police forces and prison systems around the world to serve the global elite by defending its interests against the bulk of the human population, including those individuals and organizations audacious enough to challenge elite power, profit and privilege.

$US1.7 trillion was officially spent worldwide on military weapons to kill fellow human beings and other lifeforms, and to destroy the biosphere. See ‘Global military spending remains high at $1.7 trillion’.

However, so out-of-control is this spending that the United States has now spent $US21trillion on its military in the past 20 years for which it cannot even account! That’s right, $US1trillion each year, including 2018, above the official US national budget for killing is ‘lost’. See Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported, ‘Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us?’ and ‘The Pentagon Can’t Account for $21 Trillion (That’s Not a Typo)’.

War and other military violence continued to rage across the planet wreaking devastation on many countries and regions, particularly in the Middle East and Africa. If you missed this, read what is happening to Yemen, described as ‘ the world’s worst [humanitarian] crisis in decades’ with ‘three quarters of the entire Yemeni population – 22 million women, children and men – dependent on some form of humanitarian assistance to survive.’ See ‘Yemen: UN chief hails “signs of hope” in world’s worst man-made humanitarian disaster’.

Not content with the nature and extent of the military violence they are inflicting already, during 2018 elites continued to plan how to do it more effectively in future with research and development of artificial intelligence just one manifestation of this: ‘an “arms race in AI” is now underway, with the U.S., China, Russia, and other nations (including Britain, Israel, and South Korea) seeking to gain a critical advantage in the weaponization of artificial intelligence and robotics’ so that ‘artificial intelligence will be applied to every aspect of warfare, from logistics and surveillance to target identification and battle management’. See ‘“Alexa, Launch Our Nukes!” Artificial Intelligence and the Future of War’.

The United States government unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (which limits the deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons).

Another significant proportion of global private financial wealth – conservatively estimated by the Tax Justice Network in 2010 to already total between $US21 and $US32 trillion – has been invested virtually tax-free through the world’s still-expanding black hole of more than 80 ‘offshore’ tax havens (such as the City of London Corporation, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Nauru, St. Kitts, Antigua, Tortola, Switzerland, the Channel Islands, Monaco, Cyprus, Gibraltar and Liechtenstein). This is just financial wealth. ‘A big share of the real estate, yachts, racehorses, gold bricks – and many other things that count as non-financial wealth – are also owned via offshore structures where it is impossible to identify the owners.’ See Tax Justice Network.

Controlled by the global elite, Wall Street and other major banks manage this monstrous diversion of wealth under Government protection. ‘Their business is fraud and grand theft.’ Tax haven locations offer more than tax avoidance. ‘Almost anything goes on.’ It includes ‘bribery, illegal gambling, money laundering, human and sex trafficking, arms dealing, toxic waste dumping, conflict diamonds and endangered species trafficking, bootlegged software, and endless other lawless practices.’ See ‘Trillions Stashed in Offshore Tax Havens’.

The world’s major corporations continued to inflict enormous ongoing violence (in a myriad of ways) in their pursuit of endless profit at the expense of living beings (human and otherwise) and Earth’s biosphere by producing and marketing a wide range of life-destroying products ranging from nuclear weapons and nuclear power to junk food, pharmaceutical drugs, synthetic poisons and genetically mutilated organisms (GMOs). These corporations include those involved in the following industries: weapons manufacturers, major banks and their ‘industry groups’ like the International Monetary Conference, asset management firms, investment companies, financial services companies, fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas) corporations, technology corporations, media corporations, major marketing and public relations corporations, agrochemical (pesticides, seeds, fertilizers) giants, pharmaceutical corporations, biotechnology (genetic mutilation) corporations, mining corporations, nuclear power corporations, food multinationals and water corporations. You can see a list of the major corporations in this article: ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

More than a billion people continued to live under occupation, dictatorship or threat of genocidal assault. See, for example, ‘500 Years is Long Enough! Human Depravity in the Congo’.

36,500,000 human beings (mainly in Africa, Asia and Central/South America) were starved to death.

18,250,000 children were killed by adults in wars, by starving them to death, and in a large variety of other ways.

8,000,000 children were trafficked into sexual slavery; executed in sacrificial killings after being kidnapped; bred to be sold as a ‘cash crop’ for sexual violation, to produce child pornography (‘kiddie porn’) and ‘snuff’ movies (in which children are killed during the filming); ritually tortured and murdered as well as raped by dogs trained for the purpose. See ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’.

Hundreds of thousands of individuals were kidnapped or tricked into slavery, which now denies 46,000,000 human beings the right to live the life of their choice, condemning many individuals – especially women and children – to lives of sexual slavery, forced labor or as child soldiers. See ‘The Global Slavery Index’ and ‘46 million people living as slaves, latest global index reveals’.

Well over 100,000 people (particularly Falun Gong practitioners) in China, where an extensive state-controlled program is conducted, were subjected to forced organ removal for the trade in human organs. See Bloody Harvest and The Slaughter.

15,750,000 people were displaced by war, persecution or famine. There are now 68,500,000 people, more that half of whom are children and 10,000,000 of whom are stateless, who have been forcibly displaced worldwide and remain precariously unsettled, usually in adverse circumstances. One person in the world is forcibly displaced every two seconds. See ‘Figures at a Glance’.

Millions of people were made homeless in their own country as a result of war, persecution, ‘natural’ disasters, internal conflict, poverty or as a result of elite-driven national economic policy. The last time a global survey was attempted – by the United Nations back in 2005 – an estimated 100 million people were homeless worldwide. As many as 1.6 billion people lack adequate housing (living in slums, for example). See ‘Global Homelessness Statistics’.

73,000 species of life (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles) on Earth were driven to extinction with the worldwide loss of insects, including vital pollinators such as bees, now between 75% and 90%, depending on the species. See ‘Insect Decimation Upstages Global Warming’. Have you seen a butterfly recently?

Separately from global species extinctions, Earth continued to experience ‘a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’ Moreover, local population extinctions ‘are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ See ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ and ‘Biological Annihilation on Earth Accelerating’.

Wildlife trafficking, worth up to $20 billion in 2018, is pushing many endangered species to the brink of extinction. Illegal wildlife products include jewelry, traditional medicine, clothing, furniture, and souvenirs, as well as some exotic pets, most of which are sold to unaware/unconcerned consumers in the West. See, for example, Stop Wildlife Trafficking.

16,000,000 acres of pristine rainforest were destroyed (with more than 40,000 tropical tree species now threatened with extinction). See ‘Measuring the Daily Destruction of the World’s Rainforests’, ‘Estimating the global conservation status of more than 15,000 Amazonian tree species’ and ‘Half of Amazon Tree Species Face Extinction’.

Vast quantities of soil were washed away as we destroyed the rainforests, and enormous quantities of both inorganic constituents (such as heavy metals like cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel and zinc) and organic pollutants (particularly synthetic chemicals in the form of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides) were dumped into the soil as well, thus reducing its nutrients and killing the microbes within it. We also contaminated enormous quantities of soil with radioactive waste. See Soil-net, ‘Glyphosate effects on soil rhizosphere-associated bacterial communities’ and ‘Disposing of Nuclear Waste is a Challenge for Humanity’.

The TEPCO nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan discharged 109,000 tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean killing an incalculable number of fish and other marine organisms and indefinitely contaminating expanding areas of that ocean. See ‘Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War: The Unspoken Crisis of Worldwide Nuclear Radiation’.

Human use of fossil fuels to power aircraft, shipping and vehicles (among other purposes) released 10 billion metric tons (gigatons) of carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere, a 2.7% increase over 2017. See ‘Global Carbon Budget 2018’ and ‘Carbon dioxide emissions will hit a record high globally in 2018’. As a measure of their concern elite-controlled governments and corporations around the world are currently planning or have under construction 1,380 new coal plants? That’s right. 1,380 new coal plants. In 59 countries. See ‘NGOs Release List of World’s Top Coal Plant Developers’ and ‘2018 Coal Plant Developers List’.

90 billion land animals and 60 billion marine animals were killed for human consumption, more than 100 million animals were killed for laboratory purposes in the United States alone and there were other animal deaths in shelters, zoos and in blood sports. See ‘How Many Animals Are Killed Each Year?’

In addition, 40 million animals were killed for their fur. Approximately 30 million of these animals were raised on fur farms and killed, about 10 million wild animals were trapped and killed, and hundreds of thousands of seals were killed for their fur. See ‘How Many Animals are Killed Each Year?’

Farming of animals for human consumption released 7,100,000,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent into Earth’s atmosphere. About 44% of livestock emissions were in the form of methane (which was 44% of anthropogenic CH4 emissions), 29% as Nitrous Oxide (which was 53% of anthropogenic N2O emissions) and 27% as Carbon Dioxide (which was 5% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions). See ‘GHG Emissions by Livestock’.

Human use of fossil fuels and farming of animals released 3.2 million metric tons of (CO2 equivalent) nitrous oxide (N2O) into Earth’s atmosphere. See ‘Nitrous oxide emissions’.

As a result of previous greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the consequent rise of about one degree celsius in the global temperature, causing the melting of Arctic permafrost and undersea methane ice clathrates, an incalculable quantity of methane was uncontrollably released into the atmosphere during 2018 (with the quantity being released getting ever closer to ‘exploding’). See ‘7,000 underground gas bubbles poised to “explode” in Arctic’ and ‘Release of Arctic Methane “May Be Apocalyptic,” Study Warns’.

Ice in the Antarctic is melting at a record-breaking rate, losing 219 billion tonnes of ice in 2018 at a rate that has accelerated threefold in the last five years. See ‘Antarctic ice melting faster than ever, studies show’.

An incalculable amount of agricultural poisons, fossil fuels and other wastes was discharged into the ocean, adversely impacting life at all ocean depths – see ‘Staggering level of toxic chemicals found in creatures at the bottom of the sea, scientists say’ – and generating ocean ‘dead zones’: regions that have too little oxygen to support marine organisms. See ‘Our Planet Is Exploding With Marine “Dead Zones”’.

At least 8 million metric tons of plastic, of which 236,000 tons were microplastics, was discharged into the ocean. See ‘Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean’ and ‘Plastics in the Ocean’.

Earth’s fresh water and ground water was further depleted and contaminated. These contaminants included bacteria, viruses and household chemicals from faulty septic systems; hazardous wastes from abandoned and uncontrolled hazardous waste sites (of which there are over 20,000 in the USA alone); leaks from landfill items such as car battery acid, paint and household cleaners; the pesticides, herbicides and other poisons used on farms and home gardens; radioactive waste from nuclear tests; and the chemical contamination caused by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in search of shale gas, for which about 750 chemicals and components, some extremely toxic and carcinogenic like lead and benzene, have been used. See ‘Groundwater contamination’, ‘Groundwater drunk by BILLIONS of people may be contaminated by radioactive material spread across the world by nuclear testing in the 1950s’ and ‘Fracking chemicals’.

The longstanding covert military use of geoengineering – spraying tens of millions of tons of highly toxic metals (including aluminium, barium and strontium) and toxic coal fly ash nanoparticulates (containing arsenic, chromium, thallium, chlorine, bromine, fluorine, iodine, mercury and radioactive elements) into the atmosphere from jet aircraft to weaponize the atmosphere and weather – in order to enhance elite control of human populations, continued unchecked. Geoengneering is systematically destroying Earth’s ozone layer – which blocks the deadly portion of solar radiation, UV-C and most UV-B, from reaching Earth’s surface – as well as adversely altering Earth’s weather patterns and polluting its air, water and soil at incredible cost to the health and well-being of living organisms and the biosphere. See ‘Geoengineering Watch’.

As one outcome of our dysfunctional parenting model and political systems, fascism continued to rise around the world. See ‘The Psychology of Fascism’.

Despite the belief that we have ‘the right to privacy’, privacy (in any sense of the word) was ongoingly eroded in 2018 and is now effectively non-existent, particularly thanks to Alphabet (owner of Google). Taken together, ‘Uber, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Tinder, Apple, Lyft, Foursquare, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Angry Birds… have turned our computers and phones into bugs that are plugged in to a vast corporate-owned surveillance network. Where we go, what we do, what we talk about, who we talk to, and who we see – everything is recorded and, at some point, leveraged for value.’ Moreover, given Google’s integrated relationship with the US government, the US military, the CIA, and major US weapons manufacturers, there isn’t really anything you can do that isn’t known by those who want to know it. In essence, Google is ‘a powerful global corporation with its own political agenda and a mission to maximise profits for shareholders’ and it partly achieves this by expanding the surveillance programs of the national security state at the direction of the global elite. See ‘Google’s Earth: How the Tech Giant Is Helping the State Spy on Us’ and the documentary ‘The Modern Surveillance State’.

The right to free speech was ongoingly eroded in 2018. For just a couple of examples in the United States alone, see ‘Marc Lamont Hill On Getting Fired From CNN, His Remarks On Palestine + More’ and ‘A Texas Elementary School Speech Pathologist Refused to Sign a Pro-Israel Oath, Now Mandatory in Many States – so She Lost Her Job’.

Believing that we know better than evolution, humans created the first gene-edited baby in 2018. See ‘Why we are not ready for genetically designed babies’ and ‘China’s Golem Babies: There is Another Agenda’.

An incalculable amount of junk was added to the 100 trillion items of junk already in Space. See ‘Space Junk: Tracking & Removing Orbital Debris’.

Incalculable amounts of antibiotic waste, nuclear waste, nanowaste and genetically engineered organisms were released into Earth’s biosphere. See ‘Junk Planet: Is Earth the Largest Garbage Dump in the Universe?’

Ongoing violence against children – see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’ – ensured that more people will grow up accepting (and quite powerless to challenge) our dysfunctional and violent world, as described above.

The corporate media, education and entertainment industries continued to distract us from reality ensuring that most people remain oblivious to our predicament and their own role in it, let alone what they can do to respond powerfully.

While the above list of the setbacks humanity and the Earth suffered in 2018 is very incomplete, it still provides clear evidence that humanity is rapidly entering a dystopian future far more horrific than the worst novel or film in the genre. The good news is that, at the current rate, this dystopian world will be shortlived as humans drive themselves over the edge of extinction. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.

But so that the picture is clear and ‘balanced’: were there any gains made against this onslaught?

Of course, it goes without saying that the global elite, international organizations (such as the United Nations), governments, corporations and other elite agents continued to live in delusion/denial endlessly blocking any initiative requiring serious action that would cut into corporate profits, or arguing over tangential issues of insignificant consequence to humanity’s future.

In short, I could find no record of official efforts during the year to plan for the development and implementation of a comprehensive, just and sustainable peace, but perhaps I missed it.

Separately from this, there have been some minor activist gains: for example, some western banks and insurance companies are no longer financially supporting the expansion of the western weapons industry and the western coal industry, some rainforest groups have managed to save portions of Earth’s rainforest heritage, and activist groups continue to work on a variety of issues sometimes making modest gains.

In essence however, as you probably realize, many of the issues above are not even being tackled and, even when they are, activist efforts have been hampered by inadequate analysis of the forces driving conflicts and problems, limited vision (particularly unambitious aims such as those in relation to ending war and the climate catastrophe), unsophisticated strategy (necessary to have profound impact against a deeply entrenched, highly organized and well-resourced opponent, with the endless lobbying of elite institutions, such as governments and corporations, despite this effort simply absorbing and dissipating our dissent, as is intended – as Mark Twain once noted: ‘If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.’) and failure to make the difficult decisions to promote necessary solutions that are ‘unpopular’.

Fundamentally, these ‘difficult decisions’ include the vital need to campaign for the human population, particularly in the West, to substantially reduce their consumption – by 80% – involving both energy and resources of every kind as the central feature of any strategy to curtail destruction of the environment and climate, to undermine capitalism and to eliminate the primary driver of war: violent resource acquisition from Middle Eastern and developing nations for the production of consumer goods and services for western consumers.

While we live in the delusion that we can simply substitute renewable energy for fossil fuels and nuclear power (or believe such delusions that a 1.5 degrees celsius increase above the preindustrial temperature is acceptable or that we have an ‘end of century’ timeframe to solve the climate crisis), we ignore the fundamental reality that Earth’s biosphere is under siege on many fronts as a result of our endless extraction of its natural resources – such as fresh water, minerals, timber and, again, fossil fuels – for consumer production and the provision of services that go well beyond energy.

In short, for example, we will not save the world’s rainforests because we switch to renewable energy. We must reduce demand for the consumer products that require rainforest inputs. We must stop mining the Earth for minerals that end up in our mobile phones, computers, vehicles, ships and aircraft by not using the products and services these minerals make possible. We must stop eating meat and other animal products. And so the list goes on.

Forecasting 2019

In many ways it is painful to forecast what will happen in 2019 mainly because of the absurd simplicity of doing so: It will be another year when vital opportunities will be lost when so much is at stake.

Given the insanity of the global elite – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – which will continue to drive the dynamics producing the lowlights mentioned above with the active complicity of their agents in governments and corporations coupled with a human population that is largely terrified, self-hating and powerless to resist – see ‘In Defense of the Human Individual’ – it is a straightforward task to forecast what will happen in 2019.

So let me forecast 40 lowlights for 2019:

See list above.
See list above.
See list above.

.
.

See list above.

So unless you play your part, 2019 and the few years thereafter will simply be increasingly worse versions of 2018 and it will all be over by 2026. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ which cites a wide range of scientific and other evidence which you are welcome to consider for yourself if this date seems premature.

Responding Powerfully

If you already feel able to act powerfully in response to this multifaceted crisis, in a way that will have strategic impact, you are invited to consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth ’, which outlines a simple plan for you to systematically reduce your consumption, by at least 80%, involving both energy and resources of every kind – water, household energy, transport fuels, metals, meat, paper and plastic – while dramatically expanding your individual and community self-reliance in 16 areas, so that all environmental and climate concerns are effectively addressed.

If you are also interested in conducting or participating in a campaign to systematically address one of the issues identified above, you are welcome to consider acting strategically in the way that Mohandas K. Gandhi did. Whether you are engaged in a peace, climate, environment or social justice campaign, the 12-point strategic framework and principles are the same. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy. And, for example, you can see a basic list of the strategic goals necessary to end war and halt the climate catastrophe. See ‘Strategic Aims’.

If you want to know how to nonviolently defend against a foreign invading power or a political/military coup, to liberate your country from a dictatorship or a foreign occupation, or to defeat a genocidal assault, you will learn how to do so in ‘Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strateg y ’.

If you are interested in nurturing children to live by their conscience and to gain the courage necessary to resist elite violence fearlessly, while living sustainably despite the entreaties of capitalism to over-consume, then you are welcome to make ‘My Promise to Children’.

To reiterate: capitalism, war and destruction of the environment and climate are outcomes of our dysfunctional parenting of children which distorts their intellectual and emotional capacities, destroys their conscience and courage, and actively teaches them to over-consume as compensation for having vital emotional needs denied. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

If your own intellectual and/or emotional functionality is the issue and you have the self-awareness to perceive that, and wish to access the conscience and courage that would enable you to act powerfully, try ‘Putting Feelings First’.

And if you want to be part of the worldwide movement committed to ending all of the violence identified above, consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

In summary: if we do not rapidly, systematically and substantially reduce our consumption in several key areas and radically alter our parenting model, while resisting elite violence strategically on several fronts, homo sapiens will enter Earth’s fossil record within a few years. Given the fear, self-hatred and powerlessness that paralyses most humans, your choices in these regards are even more vital than you realize.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

Wealth of 400 richest Americans hits record $2.9 trillion

Posted on October 8, 2018 by Reid Mukai

These six men own as much wealth as half the world’s population

By Alec Anderson

Source: WSWS.org

On Wednesday, the US finance magazine Forbes released its annual “Forbes 400” list of wealthiest Americans, revealing an immense increase in wealth among the top social stratum in the United States.

The total net worth of the 400 people included on the list hit a record $2.9 trillion this year, up from $2.7 trillion last year. The most heavily represented sector was finance, from which 88 people on the list, including bank executives, hedge fund managers and investors, drew their wealth.

The next highest proportion comes from technology giants such as Google and Facebook. The CEO of Twitter and payments firm Square, Jack Dorsey, registered the greatest percentage growth in wealth from the previous year, an increase of 186 percent to $6.3 billion. This was due in large part to a jump in Square’s stock price.

The threshold necessary for inclusion on the list rose to $2.2 billion in 2018, up $100 billion from last year’s threshold. Fully one-third of billionaires in the United States, a record 204 individuals, failed to make this year’s Forbes 400 list.

The average net worth of billionaires on the list rose to $7.2 billion, an increase of a half-billion over last year’s average of $6.7 billion.

As Forbes notes, the vast increase in wealth among the very richest Americans is largely thanks to a continuing surge in US stock indexes. They have reached new record highs in part due to unprecedented levels of stock buybacks and dividend increases, which are parasitic diversions of wealth away from productive investment in areas that produce decent-paying jobs and to the detriment of pursuits such as research and development. The billionaires on the Forbes 400 list have also benefited immensely from the Trump tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy signed into law in December 2017.

Topping the list is Amazon CEO and world’s richest person Jeff Bezos, whose $160 billion is $63 billion more than the second-wealthiest person on the list, Bill Gates, and a full $78.5 billion more than last year. Bezos has made his fortune through the super-exploitation of warehouse workers around the world, enabling Amazon to move its products faster and at cheaper prices than its retail competitors.

The staggering increase in Bezos’s wealth over the past year has been due to the more than 100 percent increase in Amazon’s stock price. The $2,950 Jeff Bezos has earned per second in 2018 is more than the $2,796 a fulfillment center worker in India makes in an entire year.

Ironically, the Forbes report was published the same day that the press was full of praise for Bezos’s supposed generosity and humanitarian concern for his workers, occasioned by the announcement that he was raising the minimum wage of his US-based employees to the poverty-level wage of $15 an hour.

If the $160 billion fortune Bezos holds were divided among Amazon’s global workforce of 500,000, each worker would receive $320,000.

Coming in second on the list with a net worth of $97 billion is Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates, who had topped the Forbes list since 1994. The top 10 wealthiest people on the list alone have a total net worth of $730 billion, up from $610 billion in 2018.

However, just the top 45 individuals out of the 400 on the list accounted for fully half of the total wealth, or $1.45 trillion. That amounts to an average fortune of more than $32 billion each, which is more than the estimated $30 billion required to end world hunger, according to a United Nations estimate.

The Forbes report illustrates that the barrier to resolving societal ills, such as poverty, hunger and disease, is the siphoning off and hoarding of a growing proportion of society’s resources by the wealthiest segment of society.

The $2.9 trillion in the hands of these 400 richest people in the United States is roughly three-quarters of the total federal budget. It represents nearly three times the 2018 budget for the Department of Health and Human Services, which was slashed from over $1.126 trillion in 2017 to $1.112 trillion this year, and 176 times the $16.4 billion budget for the Department of Education in 2018.

Rather than addressing these issues, the Democratic Party’s midterm election campaign has instead been centered on a right-wing effort to channel opposition to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump behind a #MeToo-style hysteria over alleged sexual abuse. This is accompanied by the ongoing campaign to demonize Russia and Vladimir Putin and brand Trump as a stooge of the Kremlin.

The timing of the release of the Forbes list is significant, coming as it does on the 10-year anniversary of the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)—the $700 billion bank bailout that set the stage for the trillions that were essentially stolen from the working class to rescue the financial oligarchy and make it richer than ever. The result of the decade-long plundering of society since the crash, carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations, is the ever-increasing concentration of wealth at the very top reflected in the new Forbes 400 list.

The Richest Sociopath in the World

Posted on October 1, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By John Rachel

Source: Dissident Voice

Obviously the above pie chart is a put-on. It is well-documented that working conditions for most employees of Amazon are abysmal, dehumanizing, bordering on abuse we normally associate with slavery.

Moreover, the median employee’s salary under Jeff Bezos’ imperial lordship is $28,446. No one working as a regular there has paid off their credit cards and is driving to work in a Mercedes.

Jeff Bezos is referred to as The Richest Man in the World and his personal fortune, while growing by $191,000 each minute, is currently estimated at $168 billion.

So …

$28,446 vs. $168,000,000,000? While I can acknowledge the simple math, I find the contrast of such numbers on a gut level difficult to grasp.

To get a handle on such inequality, let’s try approaching it from different angles.

One way to put the disparity into perspective is to recognize it takes Bezos just under 9 seconds to earn what Amazon’s median worker does in an entire year.

Another is to recognize that for a worker to go through Jeff Bezos’ current personal fortune — and, of course, it continues mounting at accelerating levels as I write this — at his/her current median annual income of $28,446 per year, WOULD TAKE 5,905,927 YEARS! That’s close to 6 million years!

For Jeff Bezos himself to go through his current $168 billion, assuming his earnings stopped dead this very moment — which as you and I know they won’t — SPENDING $1,000,000 A DAY, would take NEARLY 460 years. Yes, even spending $1 million a day, in the year 2475 he’d still have plenty of cash, tens of million of dollars mad money. We can feel confident that he wouldn’t be foraging through the dumpster behind 7-11.

Now, further consider that while the $28,446 median salary is above the national poverty line for a single individual if that person is the sole breadwinner for a family of four, it is marginally above it, which is why many Amazon employees must rely on government assistance to keep from starving.

As well as calculation, I did some speculation — a simple exercise in imagination.

Apparently Bezos’ wealth generating machine is raking it in so fast, he’s currently making $11.5 million per hour … every hour … 24 hours a day … seven days a week. $11,500,000 per hour!

So here’s what I was picturing in my mind’s eye …

If for 40 hours of the 168 hours in a week, Bezos were willing to scrape by on a mere $5,840,000 per hour, he could give every one of his 566,000 Amazon employees a $10 per hour raise. Of course, the remaining 128 hours in each week, Bezos could continue earning his normal $11.5 million per hour, not having to share any of it with the pathetic slobs who work for him.

Rhetorical question: Does Jeff Bezos have any concept of what that $10 per hour increase would mean to his employees?

I’m not going to even suggest here I’m offering this for Bezos to entertain. There are so many advantages to him both as a putative member of the human race and the employer of over a half million workers — advantages that are so OBVIOUS — if they haven’t occurred to him up until now, then his brain functions in ways beyond my understanding. For one thing, he could point to his new fig leaf of “generosity” and ask people to stop calling him a selfish prick. Second, Amazon employees I’m sure would respond to his largesse with greater company loyalty and increased tolerance for his onerous working conditions. He’d still be the richest SOB on the block and could mock the pauperish Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as pitiable wannabees.

Consider …

The most poorly paid Amazon employee now makes $12 per hour. The $10 per hour raise I proposed would boost those $12 per hour workers right up there with Costco employees, who make an average of $21 per hour. And with the across-the-board $10 per hour increase, Bezos’ higher paid employees would be earning among the finest wages in the world provided by a major corporation.

And by golly, there’s a plus side to the plus side …

Bezos’s bold and gracious gesture would result in a public relations coup of cosmic proportions! Amazon would no longer be demonized — well, not quite as much — by us bleeding-heart lefties as a capitalistic scourge and one-way ticket to Hell for the future of mankind, even if its environmental record is appalling and its business model generally the stuff of steroid-laced neo-feudalism.

Granted, Bezos would have to do some belt-tightening. He’d have to watch his pennies but could probably manage it, eh? Maybe he could skip a couple meals and do some of his own weeding at his estate. After all, after lavishing the $10 per hour raise on all of his employees, he’d only be pulling in $1,705,600,000 per week. I know I know! Like me you’re probably getting all teary-eyed for the poor guy.

Let me get to the extremely anti-climactic conclusion of this lament qua analysis.

Since nothing will change until the system itself changes, meaning the one in place now that creates, incentivizes, and lionizes the obscenely wealthy — reference current holder of the Office of President of the United States of America — I can only recommend this …

We have been labeling Jeff Bezos as ‘The Richest Man in the World’. Yet, quite honestly I don’t personally know any human, man or woman, who behaves like this gluttonous chunk of self-indulgent meat. It actually makes me nauseous to think we’re members of the same species.

Thus, from now on let’s use the correct terminology. Let’s call Jeff Bezos what he really is: the Richest Sociopath in the World.

We could probably order bumper stickers to help correct the record … from Amazon, of course.

25 Families Own $1.1 Trillion Between Them as the Global Wealth Inequality Gap Grows

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Reid Mukai

Using data from their list Forbes has produced a list of the top 25 richest families in the world. Together they are worth over $1.1 trillion, or the entire GDP of Indonesia.

By Rosa Tressell and Dr. Leon Tressell

Source: SouthFront

Once a family-owned business Forbes is well known for producing their annual list of the world’s richest billionaires. Launched in 1982 the original list ranked the top 400 Americans by net worth. Only 13 billionaires were included in that list, and their combined worth was the equivalent of 2.8% of GDP. In an era where “Greed is Good”, the list became wildly popular, by 2000 the combined net worth of the top 400 equated to 12.2% of US GDP. So prestigious became the list that an ex-employee of Forbes has claimed that Donald J Trump inflated his personal wealth to be included.

This year more than 2,200 billionaires made the Forbes list with a combined value of $9.1 trillion, or half the GDP of the US. Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, topped the list this year as his fortune rose to £112 billion making him the first centi-billionaire. His wealth is now equal to that of 2.3 million Americans. This has allowed him to dethrone Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, worth just $90 billion.

Using data from their list Forbes has produced a list of the top 25 richest families in the world. Together they are worth over $1.1 trillion, or the entire GDP of Indonesia. The richest clan is the Walton family who own the ubiquitous Walmart chain in America. They have a total family wealth of £152 billion and several family members are on the list of billionaires as individuals. The Koch Brothers, of Koch Industries, are ranked second with £98.7 billion. The third spot, with $90 billion to their name, is taken by another American family, the Mars family, known for their various sweet treats.

In comparison to the billionaires list this list is a measure of families who have inherited and grown their wealth over generations. The billionaires list is dominated by Americans in certain fields; technology, finance, entertainment and sport. It lauds entrepreneurism and promotes the self-made man (and small handful of women). The family fortunes list on the other hand reveals a more historical route for making money. Whilst Jeff Bezos has shot to the top of the list based largely on the astonishingly over valued share price of Amazon stock, the family fortunes are centered on the production and purveyance of goods.

Many of the families on the list started making their fortunes in the late nineteenth century. These are: Cargill Industries (agricultural conglomerate); Boehringer Ingelhelm (pharmaceuticals); Cox Enterprises (communications); Hyatt Hotels (hotels); SC Johnson (household goods); Roche (pharmaceuticals); and the Hearst Corporation (media). Meanwhile the Van Damme/De Spoelberch/De Mevius family (ranked fourth with a fortune of $54.1 billion) have been brewing quality Belgian beer, like Stella Artois, dating back centuries.

The production and purveyance of quality high end goods as a means to fortune is evident as BMW (the Quandt family), Chanel (the Wertheimer family) and Hermes (the Dumas family) find these families all ranked in the top ten.

Reliance Industries is the fist non-Western entry. A Mumbai-based energy conglomerate, it was founded by Dhirubhai Ambani in 1957 and is now worth $43.4 billion. It was his ambition to be the world’s richest man. However, following his untimely death there was a very public and acrimonious dispute between his two sons revolving around the inheritance. The widow eventually brokered a settlement and the family fortune goes on, but it does show how easily a family fortune can be dissipated.

In addition to Walmart there are two other families that have made their fortunes in retail. The Albrecht Brothers who founded Aldi are ranked 11^th with a $38.8 billion fortune followed at twelfth by the Mulliez family who founded Auchan, France’s equivalent of Walmart. At thirteenth spot, with a fortune of £34 billion, is the Kwok family. They started in business as a grocery wholesaler but they really made their money when they moved into Hong Kong real estate in the 1970s. Similarly the Lee family from South Korea began as grocery exporters but have made their fortune as the worlds largest producers of smart phones with their company Samsung.

There is some methodology to the list that requires explanation. Bloomberg’s categorisation of family wealth is based on reliable, sourced documentation. They add up family members assets, including stakes in public and private companies, real estate, art and cash, and takes into account debts. It excludes first-generation fortunes and those in the hands of a single heir. It also excludes those who have derived their fortune from the state. This explains why there are no Chinese families on the list and only three from the Asian region. As newly found wealth is handed down this looks set to change.

The Forbes list also excludes members of royal families and dictators who derive their fortunes entirely as a result of their position of power. Nor do they value those holding fortunes in trust for their nations. So, despite being worth untold billions, families like the royal family of Brunei or the British monarchs are absent. Quantifying this wealth is difficult. For example, Buckingham Palace alone would be valued in excess of $5 billion, however there would certainly be conflict with Parliament if the Queen wanted to sell it!

Many billionaires positively don’t want to be on the list. They don’t want the publicity for their families with the increased risk of kidnapping, being hit up for money, questions from the tax man or even from law enforcement. Kenichi Shinoda, current Kingpin of the Yakuza, is rumoured to be worth billions but is known to keep a low financial profile. There is also plenty of Western media speculation that the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is actually the world’s richest man. The Bush family have amassed a vast fortune, and there are allegations that much of it has been amassed behind the political scenes in various CIA backed gun and drug running operations.

Calculations of wealth, for individuals or families, can be obfuscated by the numerous off shore arrangements that exist today. Historically, many of the world’s largest landowners are not officially registered as a result of having held title to the land for centuries. In addition trusts, foundations and “charities” allows for the ownership and management of assets in a more private manner. Wealthy families pay professionals a healthy wage to minimise their exposure to the taxman – especially avoidance of inheritance tax.

Absent from the list are the giant banking families, the Rockefellers, the Morgans and the Rothschilds; famed for being on every conspiracy theory list as powers behind the scene. The report says that their fortunes are too diffuse and diversified to correctly value. Other families suspected of wielding their riches for their own political and social agendas include the DuPonts, the Astors, the Bundys and the Freemans, to name a few. Families that like to keep their immense fortunes and their activities confidential.

To have such wealth is naturally to have much power. Certain families, like the Bushes and the Kennedys used their cash to enter politics. The Koch Brothers have already pledged $400 million to the Republicans for the 2018 mid-term elections and their support was seen as instrumental in securing Donald J Trump’s election victory. The Walmart Family Foundation is one of America’s largest political donors, and is described as a “heavy hitter” from the Centre of Responsive Politics. Economic advantage is translated into legislative favours via lobbying and campaign donations. For example, one Arkansas Congresswoman who supported the repeal of an estate tax received $83,650 from the Walton Family Foundation and now works for them as a lobbyist. This exemplifies the corrupt relationship between economic and democratic inequality and is indicative of a system where the majority feel their voice is irrelevant.

Capitalism is built on an idea that a rising tide lifts all ships. We are supposed to look up to these rich families as examples of our betters. Underlying the lists that Forbes assembles is a worshiping of the rich. Underpinning the American dream is that its possible for anyone or any family to make it (onto the list). However, even Scrooge McDuck must be envious of the enormous fortunes of these families. As the wealth inequality gap grows within countries, especially the Western nations, there is the risk that the social fabric is coming apart at the seams. When 40% of Americans have less then $500 in savings the material basis for living the Dream is seriously compromised. Indeed, this could all turn just as easily into anger as people see that the six individual Walmart heirs alone have more wealth than the bottom 30% of the US population, and they ask themselves is this fair?

This report confirms accelerating trends towards further wealth disparity. Reports by Oxfam have shown a gaping chasm of global inequality. In 2017 3.7 billion people saw no increase in their wealth, whilst 82% of the wealth created went to the top 1%.

According to the World Inequality Report 2018:

If established trends in wealth inequality were to continue, the top 0.1% alone will own more wealth than the global middle class by 2050.

Donald Trump’s ambition to be included on the list displays his naked ambition for money, power and success. In his school of market economics, of dog eat dog, this trend is only the logic of the market. It is seen as aspirational by those at the top and by magazines like Forbes. However, even the 1% at Davos earlier this year had wealth inequality on the agenda. As the social fabric tears, political and social instability will increase. The Brexit vote, driven by the anger of the dispossessed English working class, for example, has turned the UK’s traditional stability on its head. Anger is brewing below the surface everywhere and the probability of social and political uprisings throughout the globe are increasing.

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