The Faux Generosity of the Super-Wealthy: Why Bill Gates is a Menace to Society

AN AMERICAN OLIGARCH

BernieSanders

If you had a couple billion dollars, you could announce your candidacy for president and be taken seriously, even if you were the dumbest person on Earth.

Billionaires should not be able to buy our elections and we’re going to change that.

The Faux Generosity of the Super-Wealthy: Why Bill Gates is a Menace to Society

Let us stop glorifying these greedy scumbags. They need mental health assistance more than your sympathy. By the way, gates did not invent anything, he was given the golden egg by the NSA. 

As former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee said, “Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.”

mintpressnews.com

by Alan Macleod

December 06th, 2019

If Gates represents a net negative force in world politics, why does he receive such good press? For starters, he makes sizeable donations to a host of mainstream corporate media outlets.

Last month Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates surpassed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to once again become the world’s richest individual, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Buoyed by an enormous 48 percent increase in Microsoft’s share price this year, Gates has retaken the title he last held in 2017.

That outcome is partially owed to the whims of Donald J. Trump. Microsoft recently surprisingly defeated Amazon’s bid for an extremely lucrative $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract that sees the company instantly become one of the world’s most important military and security contractors. This decision, Amazon alleges, was due to interference from the president who holds a personal grudge against Bezos, whose Washington Post has maintained a campaign of “resistance” against him.

Gates was also recently in the news attacking the wealth tax that Democratic presidential nomination candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed. “I’m all for super-progressive tax systems but when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over,” the Seattle native said. (For the record, he would still have over $6 billion).
In response, Warren was apologetic, asking for an opportunity to meet with Gates to explain how much he would pay under the plan. “I promise it’s not $100 billion,” she said. But Sanders has been far more forthright in his opposition to the super-wealthy, categorically stating, “billionaires should not exist.”

Bernie Sanders

✔@BernieSanders

If you had a couple billion dollars, you could announce your candidacy for president and be taken seriously, even if you were the dumbest person on Earth.

Billionaires should not be able to buy our elections and we’re going to change that.

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Across the media, Gates is presented as one of the “good billionaires”: a warm-hearted philanthropist dedicated to giving away his entire fortune to needy causes. His charitable organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is the largest of its sort in the world, holding over $50 billion in assets. His insight and generosity are constantly emphasized in headlines, as the following examples demonstrate.

“Bill Gates: Philanthropist,” BBC, (2/1/10).

“Why Bill Gates Thinks Ending Polio Is Worth It,” NPR, (5/8/13).

“How Bill Gates aims to Clean Up the Planet,” The Guardian, (2/4/18).

“What Einstein and Bill Gates Teach Us About Time Travel,” NBC News, (5/10/17).

“Bill Gates And Other Billionaires Pledge To Take On Climate Change,” NPR, (11/30/15).

“Bill Gates on ending disease, saving lives: ‘Time is on our side,’” Al-Jazeera, (4/27/19).

“Bill Gates gives $4.6bn to charity in biggest donation since 2000,” The Guardian, (8/15/17).

There are a few problems with that narrative. Firstly, if Gates is so committed to giving his money away, why does he keep getting richer? This is not a trivial question: his net worth has increased from $75 billion in March 2016 to a staggering $106 billion today, according to Forbes Magazine, an over 40 percent increase in three years alone.

Lee Camp, a political comedian who covers topics like rampant inequality on his show, Redacted Tonight, told MintPress News:

It is a sickness of our system that billionaires even exist. The UN estimates it would take 30 billion dollars to end world hunger per year. Gates or Bezos could end world hunger for multiple years. We can’t even comprehend that level of wealth. It’s sociopathic. So I’m not saying Gates doesn’t do good things sometimes, but he should not be viewed as a hero. All billionaires should be viewed as sick in the head. They need mental health professionals to work on them before it’s too late for humankind.”

Linsey McGoey, Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, UK, and author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy, is profoundly skeptical of philanthropy as a whole, claiming it can actually sometimes harm democracy in the long run: “Philanthropy can and is being used deliberately to divert attention away from different forms of economic exploitation that underpin global inequality today” she told MintPress News,

The new ‘philanthrocapitalism’ threatens democracy by increasing the power of the corporate sector at the expense of the public sector organizations, which increasingly face budget squeezes, in part by excessively remunerating for-profit organizations to deliver public services that could be delivered more cheaply without private sector involvement.”

Thus, huge donations give Gates enormous power over the education, health and social policies of entire countries.

 

Where do Bill’s billions go?

As Foreign Affairs noted, “few policy initiatives or normative standards set by the World Health Organization are announced before they have been casually, unofficially vetted by Gates Foundation staff.” In this sense, his wealth is extraordinarily anti-democratic, giving him veto power over the decisions and directions of organizations that should be collectively made by the highest representatives of the world’s population, not by one very rich man. And Gates is far from omnipotent, holding many of the patronizing assumptions about developing countries and how best to organize the world that one would expect a rich American tech geek to hold.

McGoey spells out the problem with this corporate attitude to development:

The Gates Foundation has spent twenty years relentlessly championing ‘business solutions’ to inequality and poverty. Through this corporate approach, Mr. Gates personally and the Gates Foundation more generally have enhanced the power and clout of corporations at every level of decision-making, at the regional, national and international level. The Gates Foundation has helped make philanthropy a handmaiden to corporate power rather than helped to empower the non-profit sector to act as a check on corporate profiteering and abuses of power.”

Bill Gates just surpassed Jeff Bezos as the richest person on Earth, with a net worth of $110 billion.

I struggled to imagine this huge number, so I animated some bar graphs that put it in proportion with other points of reference. The scale is quite stark. pic.twitter.com/uteU9h72fC

— bog witch 🌞 (@betty__cam) November 19, 2019

One example of the Foundation enhancing corporate power is its close relationship with highly controversial pharmaceutical and chemical giant Monsanto Corporation, whom it helped gain a stronger foothold in Africa. It also oversaw a flawed clinical trial of the HPV vaccine in India in 2009, where 23,000 impoverished girls aged 9-15 were exposed to potentially lethal drugs without even their parents’ consent, leading to seven deaths. He is also preoccupied with controlling Africa’s population through family planning, fearing a population boom. As such, he appears almost more interested in eliminating the people who are suffering than the source of the suffering itself.

Gates is also one of the most important individuals leading the assault on the American public education network in the form of charter schools. Charter schools effectively privatize the public school system, where the public continues to foot the bill for the school, but has no influence or say in how it is run. They have not been found to increase test scores, but are very popular with both the private sector and the religious right, whereas the vast majority of unionized public school teachers oppose them. But, as the Associated Press stated, there is “no bigger champion [of charter schools] than Bill Gates,” who has plowed enormous amounts of money into the movement, even funding the pro-charter school documentary Waiting For Superman.

 

Buying power and influence

If Gates represents a net negative force in world politics, why does he receive such good press? One reason may be his sizeable donations to a host of mainstream corporate media outlets. For example, the Gates Foundation underwrites the entire Global Development section of the Guardian, and has given the British newspaper over $9 million. Studying its donation database, it transpires it has also contributed over $3 million to NBC Universal, over $4 million to the influential French newspaper, Le Monde, over $4.5 million to NPR, $1 million to Al-Jazeera, and an astonishing $49 million to the BBC’s Media Action program, to name only a few. He who pays the piper, it is said, calls the tune. McGoey claims that the motive of billionaires giving to media organizations is primarily “to help legitimate the spurious idea that large corporate actors can rectify the economic harms and economic inequality that their practices have often compounded.”

Gates himself is the head of a gigantic media empire. We already rely on Microsoft for social media (LinkedIn), entertainment (Xbox), hardware and software like the Windows Phone and Windows OS. The company also owns stakes in media giants like Comcast and AT&T. And the “MS” in “MSNBC” stands for “Microsoft.”

Bill Gates, second left, poses with Hollywood studio execs in March 1995 ahead of the unveiling of cable TV channel MSNBC. Dave Weaver | AP

It is a similar story for Jeff Bezos, who, in addition to Amazon’s myriad media ventures, owns the Washington Post, which media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has constantly shown often descends into little more than a propaganda outlet for its boss’s interests. It appears that once billionaires have purchased every worldly material good possible, the only things left to buy are power and influence.

While the media may be full of stories singing Gates’ praises, presenting him as a good billionaire (as opposed to the current president), the reality is that one man with that amount of power, be it political (like Trump) or economic (like Gates and Bezos) has a highly corrosive effect on democracy and society more generally.

While they are portrayed as visionaries, multi-billionaires are often blinkered in other, very important ways. Just as reports about Amazon workers’ poor pay and shocking working conditions were surfacing, Bezos declared that the only way he could see to spend the financial resources he accrued was to explore the solar system and beyond. Sharing the profit with his beleaguered workforce appears to genuinely not have occurred to him.

If we are to move towards a better society, the philanthropy of the super-wealthy must be scrutinized, as all too often, what appears to be a generous gift is actually a calculated action intended to increase their power, image or influence. As former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee said, “Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.” Bill Gates is not just some rich guy who is unsure about paying more tax: he’s a menace to society.

Feature photo | Former Microsoft CEO and co-founder Bill Gates attends the World Health Summit & Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Berlin, Oct. 16, 2018. Markus Schreiber | AP

Alan MacLeod is a MintPress Staff Writer as well as an academic and writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. His book, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting was published in April.

The Only Truly Civilized People are Anti-War

The Only Truly Civilized People Are Anti-War

lewrockwell.com

By Gary D. Barnett

December 5, 2019

“What is left after war is silence: The silence of the death; the silence of the debris; the silence of the birds! After war even the screams of sadness are silent because the pain is in the very depths of the soul!”  ~ Mehmet Murat ildan

Justification for war has taken many paths. All those paths were tainted and immoral, and all those paths led only to death and destruction. There is never a need for war; there is only a want for war. This hard fact is very disturbing to those who have been manipulated through fear to not only support and accept war, but to embrace the very concept of national pride and aggression. This I believe exposes the major failing of man, as the killing of others is also the killing of the human soul.

War knows no bounds. It is indiscriminate in its brutality, in its scope, and in its torturous methods. It matters not who are the victims, whether men, women, children, entire families, communities, or the flora and fauna of nature. It breeds massive suffering, famine, death, and homelessness, and leaves only stark landscapes filled with the lifeless bodies of rotting flesh. It is literally the curse of mankind.

If war were waged in order to solve a legitimate local threat due to an active attack on our soil, it would be self-defense, not war, and would have to end immediately once that threat was squelched. Any force evident after the immediate threat subsided, would be nothing more than pure aggression, and therefore criminal and immoral. Considering that all U.S. wars since the inception of this country have never been due to any direct attack on the mainland, and therefore not self-defense, the entirety of U.S. war history has been one of only barbarous invasion. This is a difficult truth to accept, but until accepted by the masses, war will be unending, and intensely perilous to civilization.

The idea of war is not normally one of the people at large, unless that idea is planted in their psyche due to the trickery of the controlling class. This is normally accomplished by fomenting fear among the common citizenry due to the creation of false-flag strategies of terror meant to cause alarm. Heavy mainstream media propaganda is used to spread lies about alleged monsters from afar. The state can create an enemy simply by false claims and accusations about everything from unfair trade, non-existent weapons production, charges of human rights abuses, and a myriad of other reasons that can lead to regime change operations through aggressive measures. Natural human emotions are easy to stoke, and the general populace is often fooled into a false sense of rage that turns into acceptance of heinous acts carried out by the state.

Elite controllers and the puppet political class seek war in order to gain support in times of popular dissent or disapproval. They seek war to support the banking and corporate class for monetary gain. They seek war to gain territory, whether by actual possession or in order to take geopolitical control. They seek war to steal the natural resources of other countries, and in the process exploit the people for their own gain. And in all cases, mortal invasion by these warmongers is meant to expand empire. Currently, especially considering the U.S., this seems to be a primary factor, as the future of war appears to be in large part based on a global consolidation of power by a select group of oligarchs mainly outside the political arena, but in concert with them.

Many refer to this plot as the creation of a “New World Order,” including some of those responsible for orchestrating this coup. In fact, this seems to be the desired and planned agenda of the fascist oligarchs. Of course, this is almost always attributed by the mainstream to “conspiracy theory,” but then that gives credence to my assertion, as those who scream “conspiracy theory,” a term coined purposely by the CIA, are normally trying to eliminate or marginalize the truth tellers. Actually, the globalization of the politics of control is now in the advanced stage, so a conspiracy is already evident, and is not theory.

It is crucial to understand that war is always about money, power, and control. Without ever being directly threatened or having its mainland attacked, the United States has been at war 93% of its entire existence. How could this be possible since there has never been any legitimate reason to defend this country from aggression at home? This should be a stark reminder to the bourgeoisie who in the past were fooled into supporting state murder, to rethink their undying support for the criminal and murderous policies advanced by this nation-state called America.

There have been plenty of bad people and bad regimes, and countries that have a history of committing heinous acts of war in the past. There is any number of brutal dictators, tyrants, and evil politicians in this world, all with control over military might. But none have ever reached the level of death, destruction, and military presence as the U.S. Empire. This is not pleasant to hear, but it is the truth. With that knowledge, it is time for Americans to stop the terror and murderous wars committed by their own country, because this country is the world leader in violence. It is unethical to condemn the acts of those in other lands when one’s own acts are far more savage and deadly. Common ethics require correcting self before attempting to correct others.

Civilized society requires a peace-loving, anti-war stance. With war, no true civilization exists, as war brings about barbarity, depravity, and inhumanity toward mankind. That is the essence of a cold and heartless society, not one that embraces culture, intellect, art, compassion and enlightenment. Peace and harmony amongst people is the only way to create a civilized society, and one that will sustain and prosper throughout time.

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Davos is a family reunion for the plutocrats that broke the modern West

Ecological Consciousness

Nov 30, 2019

Anand Giridharadas. Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

“Davos is a family reunion for the plutocrats that broke the modern West.. who think that they are changing the world when they are exactly what needs changing. A gathering of people who use the idea of making a difference as a kind of lubricant in the engine of making a killing, of people who promote generosity as a cheap substitute for justice.

“Change the world” has become a way for them to shoot down and remove from serious consideration ideas that would threaten their power of privilege. And so then what Davos is becomes clearer, which is that it is a way of getting together, using the world’s problems as a convening mechanism, to form a cartel against real change…

The genius thing that these people understand, that maybe prior generations of plutocrats didn’t, is you don’t fight public pressure for people-friendly change by shooting mine workers and busting unions in the light of day. They do that secretly. But what you actually do is you fight back by claiming to be one of those people. You claim to be a revolutionary yourself. You claim to be fighting for the people yourself. And your relatively modest do-gooding provides your credibility that pays for itself many, many times over.”

‘We’re all passengers in a billionaire hijacking’ says the critic who has the world’s richest people buzzing

Source

http://www.businessinsider.com

Richard Feloni

 

Feb 1, 2019

• Anand Giridharadas is an author and professor whose book “Winners Take All” is a scathing critique of the way elites treat philanthropy.
• He said Western elites have cloaked themselves in “changing the world” to protect their interests and reduce the efficacy of democratic change.
• He’s critical of Davos, corporate proclamations of solving societal problems, and Howard Schultz and Michael Bloomberg as presidential candidates.
• The only way destabilizing inequality can be meaningfully addressed in the United States needs to come from public policy, he said, with increased taxes on the wealthiest of prime importance.
• This article is part of Business Insider’s ongoing series on Better Capitalism.

By 2015, Anand Giridharadas felt that the world he was inhabiting was built on a charade.

As an Aspen Institute fellow for five years and a former McKinsey analyst, he lived and worked among a collection of elites who believed their exchange of ideas, philanthropy, and so-called conscious capitalism could “save the world.” But it began to feel like “MarketWorld,” a term he coined for the bubble where it’s accepted that the private sector can fix anything with enough money.

He decided he would be transparent with the rest of the Aspen crowd, and gave a speech where he declared that, “we may not always be the leaders we think we are,” which brought a mixture of praise and outrage.

Giridharadas has written for the New York Times and taught journalism at New York University, and late last year, he published his book “Winners Take All.” It’s a thorough, nuanced takedown of MarketWorld that declares companies should work to do less harm, but that systemic changes must come from policy changes. Giridharadas’s thesis is therefore not only a cultural critique but a political one, with a progressive lens.

The book is currently in a second wave of popularity in the wake of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos, Switzerland, where it came up in conversation, and with the official start of the 2020 presidential race.

Giridharadas spoke with Business Insider about Davos, the idea of “better capitalism,” why he’s so avidly against Howard Schultz and Michael Bloomberg as presidential candidates, and why he wants Americans to take back their country from billionaires.

The following transcript was edited for length and clarity.

Richard Feloni: What does Davos stand for in your view? Do you have any particular thoughts on this year’s, specifically?

Anand Giridharadas: I think Davos is a family reunion for the plutocrats that broke the modern West. I’ve never been to it, so I’m a cultural critic looking from a distance, but it seems to me to be a gathering of people who think that they are changing the world when they are exactly what needs changing. A gathering of people who use the idea of making a difference as a kind of lubricant in the engine of making a killing, of people who promote generosity as a cheap substitute for justice.

And what was so great about Davos this year is that the mask slipped. Normally, they’re able to go there and pull off their Bono impact investing, ESG something, give-one-get-one something, social impact, social this, social that — anything but actual social justice. And it works. And this time, in great measure because there has been this rising chorus of critics — I’m one out of many. Way more prominently, you have AOC [Alexandria Ocasio Cortez] out there, Elizabeth Warren out there, staking really bold positions about how to actually change the world, how to actually fight structural inequality. And a lot of these guys, when actually pushed about those specific proposals  —I don’t know if you saw the Gates and Blair clips about me…

Continue:

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No jurisdiction? Scotland Yard forced to explain why it dropped sex trafficking probe into Epstein and Prince Andrew

Source

RT.com

29 Nov, 2019

©  Reuters / Andrew Winning / Shannon Stapleton / David Mirzoeff

The Met had to give an explanation for why it stopped investigating allegations of sex trafficking against Jeffrey Epstein after a woman who claims she was forced to have sex with the Duke of York accused the police of corruption.

Virginia Giuffre is pictured in a now-notorious photo of Prince Andrew with his hand around her bare waist, with Epstein and the Duke’s ‘friend’ Ghislaine Maxwell in the background. Then a teenager, she claims to have had sex with the royal at least three times back in 2001.

READ MORE: Judge on Epstein’s case says ‘unthinkable’ he could die in custody ‘unnoticed’, demands ‘full accounting’

Some 14 years later, she brought her story to the Metropolitan Police Service, only to see the probe dropped rather quickly. “At first the Scotland Yard told me they were going to forensically examine [Ghislaine Maxwell’s] house in London – next thing I hear, just like the FBI, they were not allowed to pursue the investigation. Corruption in the highelevels (sic) of gov,” Giuffre wrote on Twitter this week.

ALSO ON RT.COMPrince Andrew’s disastrous Epstein denial poses more questions than answers (VIDEO)

The Met confirmed on Thursday that they had indeed launched a probe, interviewed Guiffe, got advice from the Crown Prosecution Service, and decided the case was out of their jurisdiction to proceed with a full criminal investigation.

We therefore concluded that the MPS (Metropolitan Police Service) was not the appropriate authority to conduct enquiries in these circumstances.

“It was clear that any investigation into human trafficking would be largely focused on activities and relationships outside the UK,” Commander for Specialist Crime Alex Murray said, noting that Scotland Yard once again reviewed its position in 2019 and it remained unchanged.

READ MORE: Justice blind or blinded by titles? A tale of Prince Andrew and Julian Assange

Giuffre in the meantime doubled down on her accusations against Prince Andrew in the upcoming interview with the BBC, as the Duke of York faces a growing backlash following his own train-wreck interview with Newsnight about his friendship with the US financier.

He knows what happened, I know what happened, and there’s only one of us telling the truth.

A Nation Run by Billionaires and Lobbyists

A Nation Run by Billionaires and Lobbyists

http://www.counterpunch.org

by EVAGGELOS VALLIANATOS

NOVEMBER 28, 2019

Photograph Source: Lord Jim – CC BY 2.0

In 1961, I left Greece for the United States. The reason for that life-changing decision was education. The University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin welcomed me and gave me a free education. I earned my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Illinois and my doctorate from Wisconsin.

In college

My education was a mixture of science and humanities. I combined zoology with Greek (ancient, medieval and modern) history, as well as Roman history and modern European (Russian, Soviet Union, Southeastern European and British) history. To this multidisciplinary bowl I added the history of science from my postdoctoral studies at Harvard.

I did all this book reading, test taking, and writing a dissertation in ten years. The next step was finding work. By the time I graduated from Wisconsin, in 1972, I was married with my first child. This made earning a living imperative.

I worked on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency for twenty-seven years.

Sporadically, I taught at several universities about things I learned at work: how the federal government regulates or fails to regulate pesticides and agriculture.

The hidden truth

If this sounds obscure, technical, and of little value, it is not. There’s complexity in these things, but within this complexity there are gems of truth on how this country works.

Imagine a group of bureaucrats led by a political representative of the president deciding how much pesticide poison goes into each fruit, vegetable, grain, bread, cheese  and meat Americans eat. That’s what the Office of Pesticide Programs does. The responsibility is awesome. The science is dubious; the ethics abhorrent. I did not want to do anything with it, save for criticizing the very idea of poisoning our food under the guise of environmental protection, which translated into protecting the farmer and poison maker from legal suits. The moment I came across evidence of massive and chronic malpractice and fraud in the testing of pesticides, I knew my early suspicions were legitimate; I knew how agribusiness rules America.

This experience helped me understand the meaning and practice of “environmental protection” in an industrialized America. In other words, I brought to the classroom information not in environmental policy textbooks

History, and especially the history of science, hovered around me, always tempting my thought to precedents: how did people of earlier times and other societies face the natural world or raise food?

The message to my students 

I probably overwhelmed my students with data, facts and explanations about the environment and how America works. But the take-home message to my students was a warning:

”Your elders have abandoned your protection to the unkind and often corrupt industry and politicians. Study the natural world, study the science of the environment and, once out of school, reform or change the politics of this country for your protection and the protection and health of the natural world. A polluted natural world is your enemy. It will make you sick or kill you.

“Do away with pesticides, industrial agriculture, nuclear bombs, nuclear power plants, plastics, and toxic chemicals. They were the products of war, ignorance and hubris.

“Build a society with different values, one based on carbon-free and toxic pollution-free technologies, including respect for nature. Don’t approve any industry disrupting ecosystems, poisoning the natural world, and causing the extinction of species. Learn from science and older traditions and wisdom how the world works. Learn from the natural world.”

I don’t know if my students understood me. I treated them like graduate students. I opened their eyes to the beauties of science and truth as well as the secret and corrupt ways of the chemical industry. I let them see and examine original documents showing industry-government corruption. Some of them might have passed my ideas to their parents and, possibly, administrators.

I knew college and universities were rarely on the forefront of justice or truth, much less political change. In many instances, like the land grant universities, they become the inventors of hazardous chemicals and technologies that enable agribusiness to control rural America. At other instances, universities legitimize pollution.

With some exceptions, my college colleagues were indifferent to me and my teaching.

At Humboldt State University in northern California, I taught about society and the environment in a sociology department. There was a possibility for a permanent position for me but the chairman of the department said not to bother to apply because my doctorate was in history, not sociology. I asked him to come to my class, so he could form his own opinion about my teaching. “I care less about your teaching or the admiration students have for you,” he said.

Twice at two different schools (the University of Maryland and Pitzer College) I spoke to the Dean about expanding teaching and research on the fate of black farmers in America who declined by 98 percent in the twentieth century. The Deans were black. They listened to me politely but did nothing.

These anecdotes may be a fly in the ointment, but they suggest a deeper malady.

America after WWII

Since World War II, the culture of America is becoming inimical to democracy and civilization. By civilization I mean justice, the rule of law, the employment of science for making decisions, equal opportunity for humans to make a living, relative equality among citizens and ethical and science-based government rules regulating corporate and business behavior. Moreover, protecting human and environmental health should be at the core of this civilization.

Civilization is in trouble in America. Perpetual wars, the nuclear bomb, and the supremacy of money have made this country an empire. This political transformation is dismantling democracy at home and threatens the planet.

An oligarchy of billionaires are behind this aggression. They have captured the government, milking its fat Pentagon budget while using other government departments like the Environmental Protection Agency to buy legal protection for their chemicals polluting our food, drinking water, air, rivers, lakes and the seas.

The spectacle of Trump

The spectacle of Trump being president says it all. This is a very bad man. Some people, including senior government officials, and especially ambassador Gordon Sondland, are saying Trump urged the government of Ukraine to dig dirt about his political opponent Joe Biden. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) accused Trump of being “a criminal in the White House.” Others charge him with betrayal and infamy for allowing the Turks to slaughter the Kurds who have been faithful American allies.

Trump is threatening democracy. He displays and employs government power for his personal benefit. He does not have a clue about international relations. He is an enemy of public and environmental health.

In desperation, the Democrats in the House are collecting evidence of wrongdoing for “impeaching” him. They know, however, that the Republicans in the Senate will declare Trump innocent of all charges.

This effort of finding Trump guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors is the ethical thing to do. But for me, Trump’s persistent undermining of this country’s environmental laws, including his willful ignorance of climate change, constitute high crimes and misdemeanors. They are translated into policies hurting and killing people all over the country. And pretending there’s no climate change, as the Trump EPA does, exacerbates the onslaught from climate change.

This official apathy and blindness is affecting the country, even the Democratic politicians running for president. The warming of the Earth and the fossil fuels causing it have all but disappeared from public discourse.

With the possible exception of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), I just don’t think these candidates are passionate enough to embrace the climate threat and opportunity for shaping American politics and assuring the survival of civilization and the natural world. Yet they say climate change is the gravest danger America and the world face.

The hegemony of commercial television

Another way of explaining this pathology is the overwhelming power and influence of commercial television. It has remade Americans into obedient corporate subjects. Just like cigarette companies during most of the twentieth century brained-washed Americans to do nothing without a cigarette hanging from their mouth, advertisements and news reporting mix with each other so thoroughly the viewer, in most case, does not understand the difference between the two. The result of this willful malpractice and propaganda is the dumbing down of Americans.

Second, commercial television networks treat the natural world like a  zoo: a place for expensive cruises, hunting, industrialized farming, logging, mining and forest fires. Even the PBS and BBC nature documentaries keep corporate crimes against nature strictly separate from the lives of the threatened species they document.

This television onslaught has been taking place for decades while most Americans live increasingly in cities, which separate them further from the natural world.

Despite this undemocratic and plutocratic record, commercial television is in charge of the Democratic presidential debates. They ask the questions and restrict answers to seconds and minutes.

Undoing this industrial-cultural-academic-television-propaganda complex requires a “political revolution” even greater than the revolution Senator Bernie Sanders has in mind.

The Sanders agenda

Sanders is an angry American prophet who insists in bringing justice back to America. He wants an economy for all. He is lashing at bankers, drug and insurance companies, billionaires, Trump and the Republicans. He is accusing them of theft: sucking trillions to an oligarchy and impoverishing the rest.

Should Sanders be elected, this country may be spared some of the calamity of climate change. He has promised repeatedly to put fossil fuel companies out of business – replacing them with carbon-free alternatives and creating 20,000,000 well-paying jobs.

In addition, Sanders is likely to save America from tyranny. This will demand a Herculean labor: channeling the Potomac River through the Washington stables of billionaires and industry lobbyists.

This would demand the end of exporting American jobs; taxing the billionaires enough to narrow the gigantic gap between them and the rest of Americans: use that money to fund climate change and cleaning up and eliminating pollution; outlawing the fossil fuels industry and funding alternative carbon-free energy technologies; revive the New Deal government programs of President Roosevelt for healthy farming, environment, and rebuilding of rural America; upgrade America’s medical mess to European health standards; make state universities free; give EPA the freedom and independence it needs to embrace its real mission; regulate commercial television: it should not be able to interrupt news with advertisements, nor charge money to politicians running for office; regulate and tax Wall Street; regulate and tax agribusiness: ban pesticides, break up large plantations, and bring back family farms.

Finally, take money out of politics.

Only this broad agenda of economic, social and ecological renewal can put the breaks to a Hothouse Earth and violent political revolution.

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More articles by:EVAGGELOS VALLIANATOS

Evaggelos Vallianatos is a historian and environmental strategist, who worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency for 25 years. He is the author of 6 books, including Poison Spring with Mckay Jenkings.

Rich Americans Are Interfering in Local Elections

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Amazon’s efforts to manipulate Seattle’s city council race show that wealthy individuals and companies are threats to democracy.

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newrepublic.com

By LIBBY WATSON

November 8, 2019

Imagine this: One of the largest companies in Russia and the world, with billions of dollars in contracts with the Russian government, dumps $1.5 million into an American local election with the intent to shape the outcome to be more favorable to its interests. It donates or spends this money on the candidates it knows will vote for policies that keep its taxes low. We would have to imagine that the disclosure of such a scheme would touch off outrage, congressional hearings, wall-to-wall coverage on MSNBC and CNN, perhaps even special counsel investigations or the sanctioning of elected officials. It would dominate news cycle after news cycle.

Before you fire up Twitter and sound the dezinformatsiya alarm, this did not happen. What did happen is that Amazon, headed by the world’s richest man and armed with $230 billion in revenue last year, spent $1.5 million on an attempt to mold the outcome of the Seattle city council election. The effort wasn’t particularly successful—their candidates failed to win a majority—but the company may have succeeded in toppling some of their loudest opponents, including socialist councilwoman Kshama Sawant, though many ballots that may tip in her favor remain uncounted.

Regardless of the result, the episode should serve as a reminder of the utterly insane state of campaign finance in America. It is bonkers that a corporation of any national origin, including America, can openly spend money with the intent of manipulating an election to their liking, whether or not it works (and it often does). It is wild that we are even talking about “Amazon-backed candidates” in any setting outside of a bribery hearing.

In the case of Seattle’s elections, Amazon dropped a tiny bit of its vast resources into trying to purchase a council that would prize the company’s interests over the interests of Seattle residents, and to quiet progressive critics who have credibly accused Amazon of worsening the homeless crisis. Last year, for example, the city council almost passed a “head tax” of $275 per employee to fund affordable housing, but repealed it just a month later after Amazon launched “a well-funded and vicious campaign.” (There are 11,000 homeless people in Seattle.) The company threatened to sublease space in its new building instead of occupying it itself, which it later did anyway. In 2019, Amazon donated $1.45 million to an organization called Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy, which backed six candidates. Sawant’s Amazon-backed opponent, Egan Orion, “garnered personal donations from at least 18 Amazon executives,” according to Bloomberg.

It is true that Amazon, or any domestic company, interfering with elections is not the exact same thing as a foreign company or government spending money in American elections. But how different is it in practice? The logic of rejecting foreign influence in our elections—down to the point of banning any foreign national without a green card from buying a t-shirt from a campaign—is to prevent foreign governments from influencing electoral outcomes for their own potential gain. Again: How significant is the difference between a foreign government seeking to shape our government to its liking, and a huge, multinational corporation that happens to be located in the United States trying to do the same? Or, for that matter, a single billionaire?

The specter of outside influence over our elections is threatening because it undermines the ability of the American people to decide their own fate; the delicate project of democracy rests on the voters choosing the government, that old “by the people, for the people” idea. If that process doesn’t function well, whether it’s because voters are disengaged and turnout is too low or because a small group of wealthy people make sure their opinions are heard far more than everyone else’s, then the sanctity of our democracy can be called into question. Thanks to voter suppression and the aforementioned campaign finance madness, there is already significant cause for doubt.

The discourse around foreign national involvement in American elections never really seems to interrogate the reason it’s illegal in the first place.

Yet the discourse around foreign national involvement in American elections never really seems to interrogate the reason it’s illegal in the first place. We are supposed to understand instinctively why “foreigners” shouldn’t have a role in American elections, even though American elections affect the rest of the world to a frightening degree. (Reading these takes as a foreigner in the United States, I am also supposed to agree that it is outrageous for me to want to donate to a candidate whose policies will directly impact my life.) This is an outdated and false notion of what kinds of influence and interference truly are nefarious. It is a vestige from a pre-globalization world in which foreign governments were the greatest threats imaginable. It also underestimates how great the threat from the rich is.

If Russia packed up the Internet Research Agency tomorrow, American elections would still be incredibly vulnerable to manipulation, because foreign governments are not the only actors with an interest in screwing with our democracy. A billionaire like Tom Steyer can spend a trifling amount of his net worth, akin to your average American spending a few hundred bucks, to replace actual politicians on stage in the Democratic primary, all while his aides allegedly bribe local officials for endorsements with the promise of campaign contributions—which is all legal, as long as it’s disclosed. An organization like the United States Chamber of Commerce, representing most of the biggest corporations in America, can spend $10 million on elections (or $94 million on lobbying for that matter), in order to ensure the favorable status quo is maintained.

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Time for a Billionaire Ban

People like to glorify the rich, the billionaires. I don’t. I think they are a bunch of mentally ill self-centered parasites preventing the evolution of the species! Tax these scumbags out of existence!

Time for a Billionaire Ban

 

by NEGIN OWLIAEI

NOVEMBER 15, 2019

 

Bill Gates wants you to know he pays taxes.

“I’ve paid more than $10 billion in taxes. I’ve paid more than anyone in taxes,” Gates told journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. “But when you say I should pay $100 billion, OK, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over.”

Supposedly Gate was talking about a wealth tax 2020 candidates have supported. But no plan yet proposed would seize $100 billion from the philanthrocapitalist anytime soon. Even if it did, he’d still be one of the richest men in the world, with $7 billion left over.

Gates isn’t the only billionaire who’s worried. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon also has concerns about the rising resentment towards his fellow elites.

“I think you should vilify Nazis,” Dimon told Lesley Stahl, “but you shouldn’t vilify people who worked hard to accomplish things.” Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman, who’s become a fixture on CNBC, recently teared up while complaining about the “vilification of billionaires.”

Why do the feelings of the 600 Americans that constitute our billionaire class suck up so much media attention?

For one thing, billionaires literally own the news. Buying up media companies is a new rite of passage for the ultra wealthy, like the purchase of the Washington Post by Amazon head Jeff Bezos, or TIME by tech CEO Marc Benioff.

They’ll say they’re all about editorial independence, but the truth is billionaire ownership can affect news output. When billionaire Joe Ricketts found out the staff of DNAinfo, a network of city-based news sites he owned, was unionizing, he promptly shut down the entire venture out of spite.

There are more subtle ways in which the rich buy media access. The Gates Foundation, for example, has poured millions in donations into the media over the last several years to raise awareness around the foundation’s philanthropic goals — including its controversial funding of charter schools.

Not all billionaire power is publicly broadcast, however.

In their book Billionaires and Stealth Politics, researchers Benjamin Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J. Lacombe documenthow economic elites have banded together to lobby for extremely conservative policies, like cutting estate taxes, opposing regulations on the environment and Wall Street, and gutting social programs.

Because these moves are highly unpopular, they’ve done this work in the background.

That means there’s a network of billionaires aligned with the Koch brothers, who’ve poured hundreds of millions of dollars into anti-labor policies. And Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who changed the media landscape with Fox News. And casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who’s spending his billions shaping U.S. foreign policy.

Their enormous wealth offers them an outlandishly oversized role in our democracy. It’s poisoning both our politics and our media.

So how about a ban on billionaires? Let’s tax away their wealth, but let’s get them off our airwaves, too. Imagine what we’d learn if corporate media didn’t devote entire news cycles to the whims of the rich.

You may not have heard, but for the last several months, the sanitation workers at Republic Services have been fighting for higher wages. “I haven’t had a raise since 2004,” Demetrius Tart told The Guardian. Meanwhile, the company is making a killing from the 2017 tax cuts, and returned more than $1 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks.

The company’s largest shareholder? Bill Gates. Workers took their fight directly to the billionaire, protesting outside a Gates Foundation event in September with signs that read, “Bill Gates treats his workers like garbage.” He ignored them.

Maybe these sanitation workers could get the airtime instead.