The Billionaire Hoarders: How the Wealthy Became Our Biggest Threat

[Ponietz]

This is one issue most Americans could unite around and remedy. Thanks Thom Hartmann

https://newrepublic.com/article/195862/billionaire-hoarders-wealthy-biggest-threat

We defeated Confederate oligarchs with this disease back in 1865. We beat money hoarders back again after the Republican Great Depression with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. We thought we were safe, as the middle class grew from around 10 percent of us to around two-thirds of us (with a single paycheck!) by the late 1970s.

But then, in 1978, in the Bellotti decision written by “Powell Memo” author Lewis Powell himself, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that money is actually “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” It floated Reagan into office in 1981 on a tsunami of oil and banking industry money. Five other corrupted SCOTUS Republicans doubled down on that bizarre ruling in 2010 with Citizens United, creating an entirely new form of corrupt political bribery via something they created out of thin air that is called a SuperPAC.

As a result, today these morbidly rich hoarders shovel small amounts (millions) into the pockets of captured politicians who then provide them with tax breaks, profit-driving deregulation, and government subsidies that return billions to them. And the impact on average Americans over the past 47 years that we’ve been living in the Reagan revolution has been dramatic.

While every other developed country in the world offers free or nearly free health care to its citizens; free or nearly free education, including college; and almost universal unionization and a high minimum wage, we’re stuck living in the nation these billionaires have forced on us just to satisfy their own avaricious obsession with more, more, more money:

[dlk]

1. The irony is the greediest of billionaires can't take even $1 with them

How much does their phobia of death impel their avarice?

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. There is something to this - look at the historical Gini coefficients for G7 countries

(Japan not available): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/economic-inequality-gini-index?tab=line&time=1964..latest&country=USA~FRA~CAN~GBR~DEU~ITA

In the 70s, US Gini (ie inequality) was gradually declining, as it was for the similar France and Canada figures. But from 1980 onwards, it went up in the US (in the UK too, but from a lower level). After about 1993, it levelled in the US, and has remained the highest of the 6 countries - by quite a lot now.