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Corporate Domination Pre-2021
12/11/20
The Intercept: Tom Vilsack for Agriculture Secretary is Everything That's Wrong About the Democratic Party - Vilsack was originally a dairy industry and Monsanto lobbyist, and eventually became Governor of Iowa by shuttling around the state in a Lear jet paid for by Monsanto. Then Obama named him Secretary of Agriculture. His record since this has been abysmal, as this article details.
Another of Biden’s pro-corporate reruns, setting the stage for 2024 when all of the disillusioned young and minority voters who got out the vote for Biden will stay home, thus re-electing another Trump-esqe thug. Rank and file democrats are doing nothing about it. They will have only themselves to blame.
12/10/20
New Yorker: Billionaires Who Profited From the Pandemic Should Help Pay for Our Recovery - "...between March 18th and December 7th, Musk’s worth rose by $118.5 billion, Bezos’s worth rose by $71.4 billion, and Zuckerberg’s worth rose by $50.1 billion. The other five—Ellison, Page, Brin, Gates, and Ballmer—each saw gains of between twenty billion and thirty billion dollars. As a result of these developments, the report adds, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Gates have joined Bezos as “centi-billionaires,” meaning that each is now worth more than a hundred billion dollars
...and at least 10.7 million Americans are without jobs...The collective wealth gain of roughly a trillion dollars that the billionaires have enjoyed is more “than it would cost to send a stimulus check of $3,000 to every one of the roughly 330 million people in America”
12/4/20
12/3/20
Intercept: Amazon Workers Are Organizing a Global Struggle
11/30/20
American Prospect: Trouble at Treasury - Adewale Adeyemo will be Yellen's deputy Treasury Secretary. He worked for Timothy Geithner in Obama's Treasury Dept. He and Larry Summers came up with the idea of Quantitative Easing which gave $12 Trillion in corporate welfare to the banking sector. When he left Treasury he went to work for BlackRock.
11/27/20
The Atlantic: America Failed at Covid-19, But the Economy's OK, But It May Not Stay That Way
4/30/20
NPR Fresh Air: How the Cares Act Became a Tax-Break Bonanza for the Rich - $2 Trillion in cash and tax breaks most of which went to the richest 1%. Also ProPublica, Fortune, CNBC, NPR details.
2/23/20
Guardian: Charity Clearly Doesn't Begin at Home for Jeff Bezos
7/11/19
Intercept: How US Tech Giants are Helping to Build China's Surveillance State - Google, IBM, Semptian, Aegis
4/1/19
Vox: We Won't Get Out of the Second Gilded Age the Way We Got Out of the First
1/25/19
NPR: Oxfam: Taxing the World's Ultra-Rich Could Immediately End Poverty - From the article:
Overall wealth of the world's top 1%: $8.4T
Overall wealth of the world's poorest 50%: $1.4T
Simply applying a 0.5% tax to that wealth would provide enough money to educate all 262 million children who are out of school according to U.N. calculations and provide enough health care to save the lives of 3.3 million people who are likely to die from lack of proper treatment for medical conditions.
10/15/18
NYTimes: A Genocide Incited on Facebook By Burma's Military - Something else Facebook does really well: start wars
9/18/14
Cambridge University: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens - Study by Princeton and Northwestern Universities. The study focused on 1,779 policy issues and found that in all cases, the preferences of the wealthy economic elite were enacted into law, while “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” A study in the Political Research Quarterly corroborates that conclusion. Democrats were actually less responsive to low income Americans and more responsive to the wealthy than Republicans.
From the article: “American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it's pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation's "news" media). The U.S., in other words, is basically similar to Russia or most other dubious "electoral" "democratic" countries.”
We live in a corporate dictatorship. The viewpoints of the average American voter do not count in the slightest.
See also Here.
6/18/09
Slate: When America First Met the Microchip - For the record, the inventor: Jack St. Claire Kilby of Texas Instruments (1960). Another case where the federal govt. financed an innovation, and private investors reaped all of the profits. Touted at the time as the result of American exceptionalism.