Basic

https://theduran.com/the-problem-isnt-the-billionaires-its-their-wealth/

The problem isn’t the billionaires; it’s their wealth.

Eric Zuesse

It’s the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of just a tiny fraction of the richest 1% of the richest 1% of the richest 1% of wealth-holders that makes the country be an aristocracy instead of a democracy. This extreme inequality of wealth does that, by distorting Government-expenditures in the directions that the few super-rich (both liberal and conservative ones) want, instead of in the way that the poor 50% need. The reason why the poor 50% need more wealth than they have, is that in order for them to have even a bare hope for equality of opportunity, which comes from equality of education, and from equality of upbringing, and from many other types of legal equality of personal rights — and this is not referring here to natural inequalities, but only to societal ones — each person must have as much political power as any billionaire has, and no billionaire may be allowed to have more political power than is normal or “average.” Every non-billionaire needs to have the same right to control the Government as any billionaire does, neither more nor less. In other words, in order for a democracy to exist, there must be a one-person-one-vote government, instead of the present fascist dictatorship by the few super-rich in a one-dollar-one-vote aristocracy. Wealth brings power, and this is not only the power to hire and fire people, but also the power to influence the public by controlling news-media, think tanks, universities, and other propaganda-organizations, thereby amplifying billionaires’ voices and influence by means of their hirees, in the media, and in the academic and other hired ‘experts’ who can deceive the public so as to sway the predominant beliefs the ways that those few super-rich want the public to believe. In an aristocracy, fake ‘expertise’ sways the public more than authentic science does. That’s a huge difference between an aristocracy versus a democracy. In an aristocracy, myths inevitably reign supreme, so as to keep the aristocrats in power.

Here is what the tax-advantaged givings — the donations, from the rich, in the forms of tax-advantaged ‘charity’ that they prefer — produces as actually being ‘our’ Government:

As an example of a Democratic Party billionaire who has vastly higher ability to control America’s Government than the average citizen does, George Soros donated $125 million to that Party during the 2022 mid-term congressional elections. His donations during that campaign cycle can be seen here. Though that cycle was his highest ever, he has donated billions of dollars to political campaigns in previous years, and on 17 October 2017, CNBC headlined “PHILANTHROPY: George Soros just gave almost 80 percent of his wealth to his charity” and reported that, “The billionaire philanthropist transferred $18 billion to Open Society Foundations, a sprawling international group of charities that works in more than 100 countries on projects focused on refugee relief, public health and many other topics.” (That’s how the ‘charities’ of these ‘philanthropists’ describe themselves, and the billionaire controlling owner of CNBC, Brian L. Roberts, accepts unquestionably that ‘charitable’ and ‘philanthropic’ self-designation by another billionaire; it’s how billionaires work together — “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”) Soros routinely communicates directly to heads-of-state, such as to Presidents of Ukraine and other countries that Soros’s hired U.S. President and members of Congress are carrying out his policies on, and he instructs them on what to do and how to do it. He also keeps track of the hundreds of members whom he has funded into the European Parliament. His obsession is to expand America’s empire to include, as ‘allies’ (vassal nations) ultimately both Russia and China. This type of activity is called “charity,” and he gets tax-write-offs for it, and he also gets to stay ahead of the curve in his investments because of his inside seats in those nations’ governments. He has trained his children — Robert, Andrea, Jonathan, and Alexander — to do the same things that he does, by their establishing and/or funding 20 ‘charities’, including, for example, “Conservatives for National Popular Vote”, proposing (as the Democratic Party has long proposed to do) to eliminate the Constitution’s Electoral College and to replace it with automatically declaring as America’s President whomever wins the largest number of popular votes nationwide, which, if it becomes achieved, will make Republican Presidents virtually a thing of the past. That name for their organization was chosen in order to fool Republican voters into supporting this Democratic Party proposal.

As an example of a Republican Party billionaire who has vastly higher ability to control America’s Government than the average citizen does, Barre Seid, the owner of Tripp Lite Corporation, maker of computer surge protectors, largely created the Federalist Society, which has taken over America’s Republican judgeships, including the U.S. Supreme Court. He’s extremely secretive, especially about his political donations, but acknowledges that he is a “libertarian,” an enemy of all government and regulations, and — as being that enemy of all socialism (democratic or otherwise) favoring only private property — is aiming to make America, even more than it has already become, a one-dollar-one-vote country, a country that’s ruled by counting wealth, instead of by counting persons. Instead of being any sort of one-person-one-vote country, its billionaires will control the Government, and billionaires won’t have to pay any taxes to support it (since that would be thair supporting socialism). Tax records obtained by the Democratic Party's billionaires' ProPublica show that between 1996 and 2018, he made at least $775 million in donations to nonprofit groups, thus avoiding any taxes on those transfers-of-ownership, and Seid has been especially fond of the Republican Party’s libertarian ‘nonprofit’ Federalist Society ‘charity’, which has come to control the judicial branch of the U.S. federal Government and to shape the way that the U.S. Supreme Court interprets the U.S. Constitution (such as to increase restrictions against abortions, and to reduce restrictions on gun-ownership). The Republican Party’s billionaires’ Capital Research Center’s (among whose Trustees is the Reagan Administration’s Edwin Meese, who founded the Federalist Society) Influence Watch organization has reported that, in 2020, Leonard Leo, the mastermind behind the Federalist Society, quit his office there in order to create the Marble Freedom Trust so as to facilitate secret mega-donations to political campaigns and foundations, and thus to advance ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ for billionaires to control the government, as libertarians want. (That’s privatized government; zero socialism.) At the same time, or by no later than 2021, Seid donated his $1.6 billion of hugely capital-gained Tripp Lite stock to the Marble Freedom Trust without ever having paid any cap-gains tax on any of it — all of that growth being tax-free to him because that Trust, to which he sold it, is ‘nonprofit’ — and that ‘charitable’ organization then promptly sold Tripp Lite to a regular taxpaying corporation, so that the net effect was that Tripp Lite Corporation was sold by its owner to another corporation tax-free, and Leonard Leo’s new tax-evasion organization, the Marble Freedom Trust, received 100% of the proceeds, and the Democratic Party billionaires’ New York Times propaganda corporation headlined on 22 August 2022, “An Unusual $1.6 Billion Donation Bolsters Conservatives”. That reported:

The funds are difficult to trace through public records. Tripp Lite is a private company that is not subject to corporate disclosure rules for public companies. On its tax filing, Marble indicated that the $1.6 billion came from the “sale of gifted company and subsidiaries,” but indicated that it withheld identifying information “to protect donor confidentiality.”

And Eaton, the publicly traded Irish company that bought Tripp Lite, does not refer to Marble in statements related to the sale.

The person with knowledge of the matter said that the Tripp Lite shares were donated to Marble months before the deal with Eaton was announced in January 2021. The sale was completed in March 2021.

Both Soros and Seid have been evading taxes, but they have, in effect, hired the people who write and who interpret the tax-laws and other laws, and, so, theirs is “tax-avoidance” instead of tax-“evasion,” and therefore billionaires normally pay taxes (if they do) at far lower percentages than normal citizens do. The burden of funding the dictatorship by the billionaires — America’s aristocracy — thus falls onto the public. And this is one of the many ways in which it’s being done.

Numerous studies in authentic political science and related fields have demonstrated very clearly that, as a general rule, the more successful a person is, the more psychopathic that person is; but, what is even more important (since it gets to what causes what there): that the richer a given person becomes, the more psychopathic that individual becomes; and this is true EVEN so that when a person, by mere chance, happens to win a lottery: that person becomes more psychopathic, and less compassionate to the unfortunate, than they had been before this pure stroke of exceptional good luck had occurred. Consequently: it has now been scientifically established that wealth-increase causes increased psychopathy, MORE THAN increased psychopathy causes wealth-increases.

CONSEQUENTLY: the problem with billionaires is not themselves but instead their enormous wealth, which causes them to become more and more psychopathic as they become more and more wealthy.

This problem cannot be successfully addressed by any other means than by establishing a system which imposes a continuous wealth-redistribution from the rich to the poor, in which the rates of downward redistribution are at their highest at the top to the bottom, and are graduated steadily between those two extremes, so that, in the exact middle, there will be no redistribution at all.

The objective of such a system would not be that everyone would be equally wealthy, but instead that the current wealth-inequality-measure will become reduced to some empirically justifiable lower — much lower — level than it is, and all social (including all political) policies would be modified accordingly, to achieve the optimal wealth-distribution. The wealth-distribution measure that has been the most reliably calculated is the OECD nation’s “Bottom 40% of wealth” (the lower it is, the worse); or else the OECD nation’s ratio of “Median net wealth per household (current prices)” divided by “Mean net wealth per household (current prices)” (the lower it is, the worse). Right now, if one goes to the OECD’s relevant page and enters as “Country” the “United States”, one sees “Last update: December 2021,” and for the latest year, 2019, median net wealth per household = $97,400, and mean net wealth per household = $684,500. That’s the median being 14% as high as the mean. If the wealth-distribution were even (i.e., flat), then that percentage would instead be 100%; anything below 50% here is highly unequal; so, 14% is extremely unequal. The share of “Bottom 40% of wealth” as being “-0.08” means that the indebtedness of the bottom 40% of housholds is a miniscule higher than their assets are: they have virtually the same amounts of debts as of assets. Obviously, then, according to either measure, America’s super-rich are destroying their country.

The existing wealth-aristocracy, of both political Parties, constantly opposes any such system; they want no improvement, because it would have to come out of their assets; it would have to be authentic charity, like poor people customarily donate to (and like any decent Government would be funding out of taxes); and, therefore, in order for such a change to become instituted, those super-rich individuals will need first to become stripped of their existing dictatorship over the existing Government. How that would be done, ought to become the main topic of public political discussion and debate, because it’s the basic societal and political problem. My initial proposal on it would be to replace elective public offices by instituting far fewer public offices but each of which would randomly select from the existing voting rolls a committee to fill that public office; and each existing political appointee would become replaced by such a randomly selected committee, which then would become the top executive level of that federal agency, with full hire-and-fire authority, over the Department (or other agency) it heads. This might eliminate the existing revolving door between “government and the private sector,” which now is so basic to political corruption. Corruption is the basis of all aristocracies, and destroys any democracy. If this replacement cannot be done, then how would democracy even be possible? Would it even be possible?

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.