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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/how-to-reduce-the-harms-that-billionaires

https://theduran.com/how-to-reduce-the-harms-that-billionaires-cause/

How to Reduce the Harms that Billionaires Cause 

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

Billionaires control capitalist governments and thereby turn them into fascist-imperialist dictatorships by the super-rich who thereby harm everybody else as dictatorships inevitably do; and billionaires as competing groups — gangs, really — of such dictators, even produced the contending empires that produced both World Wars and now increasingly threaten to produce a World War Three that will annihilate everything including even themselves; and, so, billionaires really do constitute an existential threat to everyone including themselves, and are therefore like addict-gangs who destroy everything around themselves including ultimately themselves, and so must be stopped.

What should one do with such addicts to wealth, more wealth, and even more wealth, without cease, until they control and destroy the whole world?

One proposed solution is to redistribute the world’s wealth. Luke Hildyard, in his 2024 book Enough: Why It’s Time to Abolish the Super-Rich, says that there are two ways to do this, and one, straight redistribution, involves taking from existing billionaires in order to fund training, health care, etc., for the billions of non-billionaires so that those non-billionaires won’t continue to be wracked with the extreme competitive disadvantages they now suffer from billionaires; and the other way is to prevent future billionaires — what Hildyard calls the “pre-distribution” method. Here is how he presented this in pages 2-6 of that book:

[Wealth] redistribution and pre-distribution are critical to securing a decent standard of living for vast numbers of people. All countries already do both to differing extents, and poverty, inequality and instability would be much worse if they didn’t. Examples of redistribution include progressive taxes, which are paid disproportionately by rich people and used to benefit the entire population. This can mean literally giving money raised from the rich to the poor or disadvantaged – when these taxes are used to fund social security payments that support those on low incomes who might be in low-paying work, or have disabilities, or have lost their job. And it can also mean what is effectively indirect redistribution, whereby tax revenues are used to fund public services that benefit everyone – and that many people might otherwise be unable to afford – like health services or education.

Examples of pre-distribution include the minimum wage, which prohibits employers from paying their staff below a certain hourly rate, thus raising the pay of low earners and reducing the profits that would otherwise accrue to the business owners. Similarly, key employment rights, like rules guaranteeing trade union representation or preventing employers from sacking striking workers, are pre-distributive. They strengthen the negotiating position of generally lower-paid workers, meaning they get a bigger share of the revenues generated for the employer by their labour, again at the expense of profits accruing to the generally richer business owners.

In all these examples, the government makes poor people richer by making rich people poorer, either by giving the poorer people money or access to public services disproportionately paid for by rich people, or by implementing laws that facilitate increases to the income and wealth of generally poorer people at the expense of generally richer people.

Extreme high incomes and wealth sit alongside stagnating living standards and widespread hardship

The examples are interesting in the context of my [libertarian] talk radio interlocutor’s comments, because all these developments – the welfare state funded through progressive taxation, the minimum wage and the role of trade unions in economic life – were considered to be bordering on revolution when they were originally proposed. But despite facing strong initial resistance, they are widely, if not universally, accepted (albeit to differing degrees) across all advanced economies by almost all mainstream political parties and are generally agreed to have hugely improved society.

Now, as of mid-2023, it is fairly uncontroversial to say that the UK is failing quite badly socio-economically in many different ways. After over 15 years of pay stagnation real average pay remains below 2008 levels.2

   Food bank use is hitting record highs.3

Polling in spring 2023 suggested that around 5 million households could not afford to heat their homes adequately, while over 2 million had defaulted on major payments like their mortgage, rent or credit card bills in the previous month.4

Our public services and infrastructure are also in a parlous state. The number of people waiting for consultant-led treatment on the NHS [National Health Service] had ballooned to over 7 million people by April 2023, with more than 4 million waiting for over 18 weeks, double the figure for those facing a similar wait in 2010.5

   An international analysis found that the UK has the fewest MRI/CT scanners of any of 19 comparable high-income countries, the second fewest hospital beds per 1,000 people and the fifth fewest intensive care beds.6

As these problems accumulate, the share of total incomes held by the richest 1 per cent of the UK population continues to hover close to its highest level since the Second World War, while the top 1 per cent by wealth own assets of a greater value than those of the bottom 50 per cent combined.7

   The combined wealth of the richest 350 households in Britain as reported by the Sunday Times Rich List reached a new high of nearly £800 billion in 2023.8

A similar contrast is visible in other countries. In the US, for example, the Institute for Policy Studies think tank estimated that between the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in March 2020 and autumn 2022 billionaire wealth increased by about 50 per cent or $5 trillion.9

At the same time, extraordinarily terrible developments are occurring regarding the health and well-being of millions of Americans. Life expectancy rates in the country have fallen, in part due to the pandemic, but also due to rising rates of suicide, drug overdoses and factors including alcoholism and poor diet.10 In 2021, 210,000 Americans died from so-called ‘deaths of despair’, linked to alcohol abuse, drugs or suicide.11

An estimated 20 million people in the US are living in deep poverty – classified as having less than half the cash income required to surpass the poverty threshold (in 2021 this amounted to an income of less than $7,049 for a single individual under 65 and less than $13,740 for a family with two children).12 Nearly 28 million Americans have no health insurance, meaning they potentially lack access to vital medical care.13

The problem of the Super-Rich is being ignored by politicians who think we can grow pies and cakes 

Despite the juxtaposition of collapsing public services and widespread hardship on the one hand, and the inexhaustible accumulation of vast riches by a tiny number of already incredibly well-off people on the other, the potential to ameliorate socio-economic problems and generate wider well-being through redistribution or pre-distribution is essentially being ignored. It is extraordinary to record that in the political mainstream there is no real discussion of rebalancing income and wealth significantly, let alone a policy programme with that stated intent. The existence of the super-rich isn’t seen as problematic or inefficient and the premise that to make the poor richer, you need to make the rich poorer is emphatically rejected, certainly by mainstream p

Neither of the UK’s two major political parties has, for example, committed to a wealth tax on millionaires that would generate billions in support of vital public services.

Arguably the most high-profile reform the government has enacted since ‘taking back control’ of our laws from the EU on behalf of the left-behind regions of Britain was to lift the cap on bankers’ bonuses.

It is true that the abolition of the top rate of income tax by the Liz Truss government in autumn 2022 was at least swiftly reversed, but the fact that the government’s instinct was to reduce taxes on the very richest (and that plans to do so were wildly cheered by MPs in Parliament) demonstrates how far the prospect of significant increases in taxes on the rich remain from the mainstream.

Setting out her agenda as UK prime minister in the Daily Mail, Truss told readers that ‘For too long politicians have fought over how to slice up the economic pie. My mission is to make it much bigger’.14 This was one of the clearest expressions of a series of beliefs that have defined recent policymaking in the UK: a delusion that the country, one of the most unequal in the developed world, is overly focused on reducing inequality; a belief that distribution doesn’t matter.  

The concept that “distribution doesn’t matter” means, for example, that if all of a country’s wealth is owned by its dictator, say the nation’s monarch, then in terms of the welfare or happiness or fulfillment of that country’s total population, it will make no difference in comparison against another otherwise-similar nation but in which the wealth is evenly (or nearly evenly) distributed: both countries are indistinguishable from one-another in economic theory. This is the way that existing economic theory presents economics (as-if “distribution doesn’t matter”), and in Chapter 4, the last chapter, of my own 2022 book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, I criticized and proposed a replacement of existing economic theory, and I there documented that a vast body of empirical econometric studies have by now conclusively shown that the “distribution doesn’t matter” theory has never been any sort of scientific theory, because it has instead been consistently shown by the empirical evidence to be false, so that this economic “theory” has never been anything more than just a false hypothesis that nonetheless stays taught in university classrooms because billionaires’ donations dominate the endowments of all of the prestigious academic institutions — billionaires fund only what they want to grow, never what they want to shrink — and they want to shrink any economic theory that takes into account the extent of economic equality and inequality.

In other words: wealth means power; and, in a capitalistic economy, that produces a fascist dictatorship — a dictatorship that serves the aristocracy against the public.

But here is an alternative approach to undoing the economic inequality:

A new law is desperately needed:

“In any instance where civil law impedes, or conflicts with enforcement of, a criminal law, criminal law and its enforcement takes precedence and nullifies — makes inoperative — any such provision in any such contract.”

Such a law would, for example, free up all who work in the federal bureaucracy, and who work in the chemical and other corporations — individuals who right now are stymied by confidentiality agreements they’ve signed with their employer, which confidentiality agreement will strip them financially if they do violate the contract by going public and blowing the whistle, but this law would end that fear they have — so that they will then become suddenly, because of this new law, they will suddenly be ABLE, to blow the whistle safely, because those are merely contracts they’ve signed, civil-law matters, and therefore any whistleblower who goes public revealing a criminal-law violation, such as poisoning and killing — murdering — people en-mass (by producing poisonous products or otherwise), which are common corporate and bureaucratic crimes, can then be revealed safely, as-if that confidentiality agreement didn’t even exist. The confidentiality agreement will then be null and void, because it then conflicts with enforcement of a criminal law. There are so many examples of this, such as the ones cited in this review of movies that have been made about these cases, “whistleblower movies," such as “A Civil Action, and “Dark Waters”, all of which cases have ended badly for the whistleblowers, because NO LAW SUCH AS THIS YET EXISTS. That’s the problem. (I especially recommend watching the extraordinarily fine and factually truthful motion-picture reconstruction of perhaps the biggest of all corporate criminalities, the “Dark Waters” film. It’s a masterpiece. And it entirely honestly lays out the problem that existed and that still hasn’t yet been at all addressed. But this law would address it; and, I think, would effectively prevent the innumerable recurrences of it, from happening again.)

A law like this would transform America — or any other capitalist country — from what it is, an aristocracy (control by its billionaires), into a democracy, even though a limited one (because the U.S. Constitution’s system of “checks and balances” prohibits any complete democracy here). But that still would be vastly better than America’s current ruling system is.

An excellent article about how corrupt the U.S. Government is on this matter was published on 8 February 2022 and headlined “What if, instead of a movie, I got flung in jail? This lawyer who fought Chevron was”, by Erin Brockovich. It described the case of the U.S. lawyer for Ecuador, Steven Donziger, who was sent to prison for having won a court case against Chevron/Texaco, to pay a nearly $10 billion fine for having recklessly poisoned indigenous Ecuadorians. The polluter refused to pay, and U.S. courts instead sent to prison Ecuador’s lawyer — and had him disbarred. The victims got nothing. The question of Chevron/Texaco’s guilt was ignored: the fine was simply cancelled. Crucial to Donziger’s penalties was the decision by what Brockovich referred to as “In 2018, an international tribunal ruled that Chevron had been previously released from liability for pollution in the Amazon and ordered Ecuador not to enforce the $9.5bn judgment.” But that ‘tribunal’ wasn’t a court-case; it was an arbitration-case, and Ecuador had never authorized sidelining their case, moving it out of the courts and into the extremely corrupt ICSID private system of international arbitration that the U.S. Government largely created to protect its billionaires. It created that starting with Nixon in 1974, and being expanded afterwards by Clinton’s NAFTA treaty, and then by Obama’s struggling to pass his proposed TPP, TTIP, and TISA, treaties — and all of that since 1974 has veered way off the rails of the U.S. Constitution, but the U.S. Supreme Court has deferred to the other branches of the U.S. Government to interpret the Constitution regarding treaties, because America’s billionaires like it that way — regardless of what the Constitution says (and even though the Sureme Court was thereby, by its passivity on this matter, allowing, basically authorizing, blatant violation of the Treaty Clause in the U.S. Constitution, by allowing the Legislative Branch of the Government to interpret the Constitution — as-if allowing that didn’t itself violate the Constitution).

Every aristocracy tries to deceive its public, in order to control its public; and every aristocracy uses divide-and-rule in order to do this; but it’s not only to divide the public against each other (such as between Republicans versus Democrats, both of which are actually controlled by the aristocracy), but also to divide between nations, such as between ‘allies’ versus ‘enemies’ — even when a given ‘enemy’ (such as Iraq in 2003) has never threatened, far less invaded, the United States (or whatever the given imperial ‘us’ may happen to be), and thus clearly this was aggressive war, and an international war-crime, though unpunished as such, because it was done by the empire. The public need to fear and hate some ‘enemy’ which is the ‘other’ or ‘alien’, in order not  to fear and loathe the aristocracy itself — the actual source of (and winner from) the systemic exploitation, of the public, by the aristocracy. It’s distract, and divide, and rule. That’s their method.

And that is how what Hildyard calls “pre-distribution” gets done under fascism (the end-state of capitalism).

The pinnacle of the U.S. regime’s totalitarianism is its ceaseless assault against Julian Assange, who is the über-whistleblower, the strongest protector for whistleblowers, the safest publisher for the evidence that they steal from their employers and from their employers’ government. He hides the identity of the whistleblowers, even at the risk of his own continued existence. Right now, the U.S. regime is raising to a fever-pitch and twisting beyond recognition not only U.S. laws but the U.S. Constitution, so as to impose its will against him. President Trump was supported in this effort by the corrupt U.S. Congress, to either end Assange’s life, or else lock him up for the rest of his heroic life in a dungeon having no communication with the world outside, until he does finally die, in isolation, punishment for his heroic last-ditch fight for the public’s freedom and for democracy — his fight, actually, against our 1984 regime. What Jesus of Nazareth was locally to the Roman regime in his region, Assange is to the U.S. regime throughout the world: an example who is martyred so as to terrify anyone else who might come forth effectively to challenge the Emperor’s authority.

A key country in this operation has been Ecuador, which became ruled by the dictator Lenin Moreno, who stole office by lying to the public and pretending to be a progressive who backed his democratically elected predecessor, Rafael Correa, but then as soon as Moreno won power, he reversed Correa’s progressive initiatives, including, above all, his protection of Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.

On 11 April 2019, RT headlined “Who is Lenin Moreno and why did he hand Assange over to British police?” and reported that:

Following his 2017 election, Moreno quickly moved away from his election platform after taking office. He reversed several key pieces of legislation passed under his predecessor which targeted the wealthy and the banks. He also reversed a referendum decision on indefinite re-election while simultaneously blocking any potential for Correa to return.

He effectively purged many of Correa's appointments to key positions in Ecuador's judiciary and National Electoral Council via the CPCCS-T council which boasts supra-constitutional powers.

Moreno has also cozied up to the US, with whom Ecuador had a strained relationship under Correa. Following a visit from Vice President Mike Pence in June 2018, Ecuador bolstered its security cooperation with the US, including major arms deals, training exercises and intelligence sharing.

Following Assange’s arrest Correa, who granted Assange asylum in the first place, described Moreno as the “greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history” saying he was guilty of a “crime that humanity will never forget.”

Despite his overwhelming power and influence, however, Moreno and his family are the subject of a sweeping corruption probe in the country, as he faces down accusations of money laundering in offshore accounts and shell companies in Panama, including the INA Investment Corp, which is owned by Moreno's brother.  

Damning images, purportedly hacked from Moreno’s phone, have irreparably damaged both his attempts at establishing himself as an anti-corruption champion as well as his relationship with Assange, whom he accused of coordinating the hacking efforts.

On 14 April 2019, Denis Rogatyuk at The Gray Zone headlined "Sell Out: How Corruption, Voter Fraud and a Neoliberal Turn Led Ecuador’s Lenin to Give Up Assange: Desperate to ingratiate his government with Washington and distract the public from his mounting scandals, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno has sacrificed Julian Assange – and his country’s independence”, and he described some of the documentation for the accusations that Moreno was corrupt.  

On 12 April 2019, Zero Hedge headlined "Facebook Removes Page Of Ecuador's Former President On Same Day As Assange's Arrest”, and opened: “Facebook has unpublished the page of Ecuador’s former president, Rafael Correa, the social media giant confirmed on Thursday, claiming that the popular leftist leader violated the company’s security policies.”

On 16 April 2019, Jonathan Turley bannered “‘He Is Our Property’: The D.C. Establishment Awaits Assange With A Glee And Grudge”, and opened:

They will punish Assange for their sins

The key to prosecuting Assange has always been to punish him without again embarrassing the powerful figures made mockeries by his disclosures. That means to keep him from discussing how the U.S. government concealed alleged war crimes and huge civilian losses, the type of disclosures that were made in the famous Pentagon Papers case. He cannot discuss how Democratic and Republican members either were complicit or incompetent in their oversight. He cannot discuss how the public was lied to about the program.

A glimpse of that artificial scope was seen within minutes of the arrest. CNN brought on its national security analyst, James Clapper, former director of national intelligence. CNN never mentioned that Clapper was accused of perjury in denying the existence of the National Security Agency surveillance program and was personally implicated in the scandal that WikiLeaks triggered.

Clapper was asked directly before Congress, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

Clapper responded, “No, sir. … Not wittingly.” Later, Clapper said his testimony was “the least untruthful” statement he could make.

That would still make it a lie, of course, but this is Washington and people like Clapper are untouchable. In the view of the establishment, Assange is the problem.

On 11 April 2019, the YouGov polling organization headlined "53% of Americans say Julian Assange should be extradited to America”.

On 13 April 2019, I headlined "What Public Opinion on Assange Tells Us About the US Government Direction”, and reported the only international poll that had ever been done of opinions about Assange. Its findings demonstrated that, out of the 23 nations which were surveyed, U.S. was the only one where the public were anti-Assange, and that the difference between the U.S. and all of the others was enormous and stark. The report opened:

The only extensive poll of public opinion regarding Julian Assange or Wikileaks was Reuters/Ipsos on 26 April 2011, "WikiLeaks' Julian Assange is not a criminal: global poll”, and it sampled around a thousand individuals in each of 23 countries — a total of 18,829 respondents. The Reuters news-report was vague, and not linked to any detailed presentation of the poll-findings, but it did say that “U.S. respondents had a far more critical view” against Wikileaks than in any other country, and that the view by Americans was 69% “believing Assange should be charged and 61 percent opposing WikiLeaks’ mission.” Buried elsewhere on the Web was this detailed presentation of Ipsos's findings in that poll. Here are what those findings were, as shown in slide 3:

https://www.slideshare.net/mediapiac/julian-assange-and-wiki-leaks

Oppose Wikileaks:

61% U.S.

38% UK

33% Canada

32% Poland

32% Belgium

31% Saudi Arabia

30% Japan

30% France

27% Indonesia

26% Italy

25% Germany

24% Sweden

24% Australia

22% Hungary

22% Brazil

21% Turkey

21% S. Korea

16% Mexico

16% Argentina

15% Spain

15% Russia

15% India

12% S. Africa

Is the U.S. a democracy if the regime is so effective in gripping the minds of its public, as to make them hostile to the strongest fighter for their freedom and democracy?

On 13 April 2019, washingtonsblog headlined “4 Myths About Julian Assange DEBUNKED”, and here was one of them:

Myth #2: Assange Will Get a Fair Trial In the U.S.

14-year CIA officer John Kiriakou notes:

Assange has been charged in the Eastern District of Virginia — the so-called “Espionage Court.” That is just what many of us have feared. Remember, no national security defendant has ever been found not guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia. The Eastern District is also known as the “rocket docket” for the swiftness with which cases are heard and decided. Not ready to mount a defense? Need more time? Haven’t received all of your discovery? Tough luck. See you in court.

… I have long predicted that Assange would face Judge Leonie Brinkema were he to be charged in the Eastern District. Brinkema handled my case, as well as CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling’s. She also has reserved the Ed Snowden case for herself. Brinkema is a hanging judge.

On 20 May 2019, former British Ambassador Craig Murray (who had quit so that he could blow the whistle) headlined “The Missing Step” and he argued that the only chance that Assange had was if Sweden cancelled its rape-arrest-warrant against Assange and thus cancelled Sweden’s extradition-request from Britain. Sweden was then forced to drop its charge against Assange (because neither of the two alleged complainants would agree to testify against him), and so only Donald Trump and Boris Johnson (and now Biden and Sunak) were keeping him imprisoned until he will die.

How can it reasonably be denied that the U.S. is, in fact (though not nominally) a dictatorship? All of its allies are thus vassal-nations in its empire. They are mere colonies. This means acquiescence (if not joining) in some of the U.S. regime’s frequent foreign coups and invasions; and this means their assisting in the spread of the U.S. regime’s control beyond themselves, to include additional other countries. It reduces the freedom, and the democracy, throughout the world; it spreads the U.S. dictatorship internationally. That is what is evil about what in America is called “neoconservatism” and in other countries is called simply “imperialism.” Under American reign, it is now a spreading curse, a political plague, to peoples throughout the world. Even an American whistleblower about Ukraine who lives in the former Ukraine was being targeted by the U.S. regime even before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 — when such targeting was blatantly illegal.

This is how the freedom of everyone is severely threatened, by the U.S. empire — the most deceitful empire that the world has ever experienced. The martyrs to its lies are the whistleblowers, the canaries in its coal mine. They are the first to be eliminated.

Looking again at the top of that rank-ordered list of 23 countries regarding public sentiment concerning Assange, one sees the U.S. and eight of its main allies (or vassal-nations), in order: U.S., UK, Canada, Poland, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Japan, France, Indonesia. These are countries whose subjects (‘citizens’) are already well-controlled by the empire. These countries already are vassals, and so these nations are ordained (accepted by America’s aristocracy) as being ‘allies’.

At the opposite end (as of 2011, when that poll was taken), starting with the most anti-U.S-regime, were: S. Africa, India, Russia, Spain, Argentina, Mexico, S. Korea, Turkey. These were countries where the subjects were not yet well-controlled by the empire, even though the current government in some of them is trying to change its subjects’ minds so that the country will accept U.S. rule. Wherever the subjects reject U.S. rule, there exists a strong possibility that the nation will become placed on the U.S. regime’s list of ‘enemies’ and be subjected to at least attempts at “regime-change.” 

Consequently, wherever the residents are the most opposed to U.S. rule, the likelihood of an American coup or invasion is real. The first step toward a coup or invasion is the imposition of sanctions against the nation. Any such nation that is already subject to them is therefore already in severe danger. Any such nation that refuses to cooperate with the U.S. regime’s existing sanctions — such as against trading with Russia, China, Iran, or Venezuela — is in danger of becoming itself a U.S.-sanctioned nation, and therefore officially an ‘enemy’ of today’s version of nazism (as Nuremberg defined it: imperialistic fascism, which is what today’s U.S. Government represents).

And this is why freedom and democracy are ending. 

Unless and until the U.S. regime itself becomes conquered — either domestically by a second successful American Revolution (this one to eliminate the domestic aristocracy instead of to eliminate a foreign one), or else by a World War III in which the U.S. regime becomes destroyed even worse than the opposing alliance will — the existing insatiable empire will continue to be on the war-path to impose its dictatorship to everyone on this planet.

The force that is ending freedom is empire, and it’s now being wielded by the U.S.A. Like all empires, it thrives on lies, and therefore its biggest enemies are whistleblowers.

The only possible peaceful solution to this would be if a law were to become passed in the U.S. saying, “In any instance where civil law impedes, or conflicts with enforcement of, a criminal law, criminal law and its enforcement takes precedence and nullifies — makes inoperative — any such provision in any such contract.”

I’m not saying that forced redistribution and future pre-distribution might not be needed ultimately, but that first the passage of such a law should be tried in order to bring about the necessary end-result peacefully — and that only if the billionaires block that from happening should the inevitably more violent revolution occur.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest 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.