Re: Socialism vs Capitalism containment thread
Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2023 1:30 pm
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Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... -funds/(Mother Jones) As the author of a book about runaway wealth in America, I’ve thought a fair bit about the Giving Pledge, the exclusive do-gooder club Bill and Melinda French Gates launched in 2010 with their pal Warren Buffett and 37 other billionaires, all vowing to give away the majority of their fortunes.
Now that the pledge has been around more than a decade, one can reasonably ask what progress its members have made toward their goal. As we’ll soon see, most of them have made very little.
In some respects, the whole enterprise feels like a bit of a scam. Not in the legal sense—though at least one former pledger was recently convicted of financial fraud and a current member took a federal plea deal to escape prosecution for the same.
I mean a scam in the sense of a self-selected group of excessively wealthy people—some of whom have made their fortunes in problematic ways and likely most of whom have used extreme strategies to avoid taxation—burnishing their reputations even as they exercise undemocratic influence over matters of public interest.
And maybe they stick to the pledge and maybe they don’t—or maybe they stick to it by bankrolling very, very bad causes. Because the Giving Pledge asks neither where its members’ money came from nor where it’s going.
Read more here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/0 ... ot-both/(Counterpunch) As we count down toward the 2024 general election, we should expect to hear from media pundits about candidates and their viability, swing states and the electoral college, likely voters and poll results, and much more. Occasionally we may hear about some issues of importance. Most likely, we will hear little about the urgent need for wealth redistribution in the United States. Extreme inequality remains an invisible scourge underlying so much of what ails society and, even when discussed, is touted as an unavoidable and inevitable outcome of our economy.
However, there is abundant evidence that wealth inequality is the product of intentional design and the idea that what is good for billionaires is good for society. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Switzerland-based global bank UBS just released its 2023 Billionaire Ambitions report and concluded, “For the first time in nine editions of the report, billionaires have accumulated more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship.” Benjamin Cavalli, Head of Strategic Clients at UBS Global Wealth Management said, “This is a theme we expect to see more of over the next 20 years, as more than 1,000 billionaires pass an estimated [$5.2 trillion] to their children.”
That’s more than the economy of the entire United Kingdom. It’s more than the economies of Canada and Mexico combined.
The UBS report was not a critical one and hardly blinked an eye about the obscenity of wealth being hoarded in dynasties. About half of all billionaires around the world use UBS’s banking services, so the bank merely analyzed the investment habits of its most important clients. It did so candidly, referring to “the great wealth transfer” from one generation to the next, avoiding mention of the wealth transfer from the majority of the public to an elite minority.