Who Can NOW Say America
Hasn’t Become a Mega-Corporate Dictatorship?
February 8, 2020
© Photo: Pixabay
Jon Hellevig posted on
January 16th at The Saker, “Capitalism in
America: How a Dismal Decimal is Robbing Americans Blind” the most extensive and up-to-date compendium
anywhere, of data on economic inequality in America, and one fact especially
stands out from it: “Today Top 1% are losers compared with Top 0.1% – the
Dismal Decimal – who are where the music plays. Top 0.1% now holds as much
wealth as Bottom 90% combined.” These top 0.1% people also donate the lions’
share of the money that finances political ads and organizations for their
candidates and against the candidates who are financed instead by the other
Party’s billionaires. Any candidate who isn’t backed by the billionaires of any
Party is a rarity and (except for the independent Bernie Sanders, who is truly
an exception) has no realistic chance of winning or keeping a seat in Congress.
That drastic inequality of
wealth in America — “Top 0.1% now holds as much wealth as Bottom 90% combined”
— is calculated by Deutsche Bank, in their January 2018 study “U.S. Income and Wealth Inequality”. Here’s more from that study:
—
On page 3 is shown that U.S.
is comparable to Chile, Israel, Mexico, Portugal, and Turkey, as being at the
top of the nations studied, in “inequality in household disposable income.”
On page 6: “A record high
30% of households have no wealth” in the United States.
On page 7: All-time high
median net worth in constant dollars was 2007, at $119,000, declined to $67,000
in 2010, and rose to $78,000 by 2016.
On page 8: “U.S.: Top 0.1%
owns as many assets as the bottom 90%”
On page 10: U.S. has higher
income-inequality than any other OECD nation.
On page 11:
Income-inequality is rising faster in U.S. than any other OECD nation.
On page 15: Top 1% in
pre-tax income in the U.S. in 2014 was $1.3 million+.
Top 0.1% was $6 million+.
So: if the top 0.1% in
income in America are also the top 0.1% in wealth in America, then the
individuals in America who draw $6 million+ annual income own as much as do all
90% who aren’t in the top 10%.
—
When a nation’s billionaires
control not only its mega-corporations but its government, that small group —
who do business with one-another — constitute a national dictatorship which is
just as bad as in feudal times when a tiny aristocracy (who also did business
with one-another) controlled the government and were a collective dictatorship
over the entire nation’s population. A king isn’t required in order for there
to be a dictatorship. Most dictatorships are aristocratic, not monarchical.
Furthermore, in almost all monarchies, the king represents, and
comes from, his class — the aristocracy. A collective dictatorship is no
better, or worse, than is a one-person dictatorship.
There are, according to the
latest count by Forbes (as of 2019), 607 billionaires in the U.S., and these people include, for example, Jack Dorsey
who controls Twitter, and Eric Schmidt and John Doerr who mainly control
Google, as well
as Mark Zuckerberg who controls
Facebook. Of
course, Bezos, Buffett, the Waltons, the Kochs, and hundreds of others, are
also among these 607: but, still, it’s this group of people (plus perhaps a
hundred of the mere centi-millionaires) who actually control mega-corporate
America including its government — they also hire and control millions of
employees and other agents such as law firms and lobbyists — and the other 330 million Americans do not
possess such control, but instead only work for them, and sell to them, and buy
from them, and view the world through their media. Most importantly, the other
330 million Americans receive their television and radio and newspaper and
magazine ‘news’ from the country’s billionaires, and vote for the U.S.
President and members of Congress on the basis of that news, which is virtually
entirely filtered by appointees of these 607 people, not only as being
controlling owners of the media but as being (controlling) the largest
advertisers in all of the major media. The largest advertisers participate,
with the media-owners, in controlling the media. It’s all the same group of
fewer than a thousand individuals, who collectively control America.
Some of them — such as
Trump, and Bloomberg, and Steyer — are also in politics or trying to be,
because they want to be controlling America even more directly than they already
do, so that their power will be even greater than it already is. Of course,
Trump has already succeeded at this, and we can see from what he has been doing
to America as its President, a fair representation of the billionaire class’s
political intentions, though he is more blatant about it than, for Example, Tom
Steyer is, who was the biggest political donor in the 2016 campaign year,
having given $91 million to
help Hillary Clinton and other Democratic politicians. He was the top donor that year to defeat Bernie
Sanders, and thus help Clinton win the Party’s Presidential nomination; so,
that’s the type of Democrat which this billionaire actually is: a
neoconservative and a neoliberal. No matter what Tom Steyer and another
Democratic Party Presidential candidate, Michael Bloomberg, might say in order
to win votes, that’s what they all actually are: neoconservative, and
neoliberal. They support American imperialism, and they support America’s
billionaires — they are the actual beneficiaries from American imperialism, and
from an American economy that funnels more and more of the nation’s wealth into
their control.
Here are some recent studies
which document this dictatorship:
If America were a democracy,
then there would ne no “narrative control on social media,” because social
media wouldn’t be allowed to censor whatever they want to censor. They wouldn’t
have that power. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the
Government from punishing anyone for any type of “speech,” but doesn’t say
anything to limit America’s aristocrats from censoring out whatever they want
to be censored-out — using their “social media” so as to reduce the ability of
anyone to say or to link to what those super-rich don’t want the public to have
access to. Censorship by the billionaires is accepted in America.
Consequently, Julian Assange
is kept imprisoned (in one way or another) for around a decade and is now being
drugged in a British maximum-security prison while awaiting extradition to the
U.S. for final slaughter, and he has never been convicted of anything, but
Americans — alone of all the world’s people in this regard — approve of this,
and accept both a Democratic President Obama and a Republican President Trump
perpetrating this illegal punishment of him for revealing truths about their
dictatorship.
And, also consequently, the
United States has a higher percentage of its people in prison than does any
other nation — and virtually all of them are lower class, not the type of
criminal who murders by giving an order or by signing a contract or by selling
a dangerous or toxic product but by knifing or shooting someone. The crooks who
do the most harm are the richest ones, and they don’t merely violate the laws,
they (through their lobbyists etc.) also write the laws.
This working through agents,
whom they pay, is how it comes to be that America is now scientifically proven
to be one dollar one vote instead of one person one vote.
And that is how it comes to
be the case that the billionaire Trump can push into law a $32 billion
taxpayer-giveaway to the investors and top executives in America’s biggest
banks, which then use the money to increase stockholder dividends and to cut
their workforce.
And, as “Capitalism in
America: How a Dismal Decimal is Robbing Americans Blind” documents, it’s no longer the top 1% but now is
instead the top tenth of one percent who are raking money in from the poorer
99.90% of the U.S. population. You’ve now got to be pretty rich in today’s
America in order to be robbing from virtually everyone else. “Top 0.1% now
holds as much wealth as Bottom 90% combined.” The top 0.1% are now scamming
even the rest of the top 1%. But, of course, in this nation where the top 0.01%
have been writing the laws (via their lobbyists) for decades now, none of them
is anywhere among the millions of Americans who are in prison. To be that rich
is to have a stay-out-of-prison card, no matter how many people you’ve harmed
or even killed by your dangerous or harmful products or services, such as trick
mortgage contracts or toxic pharmaceuticals.
So, realistically, now: Who
can say that America hasn’t become a mega-corporate dictatorship?
Emphasis added by the poster.
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