Monday, September 7th, 2015
Sean McElwee, Writer and Research Associate, Demos - Salon
Stephan: Anyone who bothers to spend half an hour on the net knows that a handful of billionaires are literally buying the American government one congressman, judge, or mayor at a time. Here is a good exposition of what I mean.
Credit: AP Photo/Richard Drew
Teddy Roosevelt famously argued that, when it comes to foreign policy, one should “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.” Similarly, an apt summation of the political inclinations of billionaires might be, “Speak softly, and carry a big check.”
While some billionaires, like Warren Buffett, are outspoken on political issues, most tend to say very little, or speak in vague generalities. But a new working paper by political scientists Benjamin Page, Jason Seawright and Matthew Lacombe
finds that what billionaires say and what they do are dramatically different. While billionaires rarely go on the record discussing Social Security and taxes, they work behind the scenes to oppose policies favored by average Americans. Often, there are deep disconnects between what billionaires say regarding policies and which organizations they fund.
The new study examines an even smaller and more insular group than the previous work of Page and Seawright: the richest 100 American billionaires. Together, the billionaires were worth $1,291 billion (more than the entire GDP of Mexico). Obviously, the […]
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Monday, September 7th, 2015
Phillip Inamn, Economic Correspondent - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: The thing about history is that over time it clarifies responsibility by washing away immediate emotion. And as the sifting of history works we can see two evolutions at work. It is showing what a dreadful president George Bush was. This report describes one aspect of what this has meant. In contrast time is showing that Jimmy Carter was far better as President than anyone gave him credit for being at the time. Bush is the personification of a government being overtaken by the uber-rich.
President George W. Bush.
Credit: Eric Draper, White House.
One of the statistical touchstones for left-leaning economists is the run of figures showing that US workers have suffered three decades of flat wages. There is no better way to illustrate how capitalism, marching to its own tune, fails most of America’s 160 million workers than wage data that hardly moves from year to year after inflation is taken into account.
Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and best-selling economist Thomas Piketty often characterise the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the 2000s until the financial crash, as periods of stellar growth that bypassed the average worker. This story of workers slaving, only for corporations to reap the benefits is allied to Piketty’s history of wealth accumulation, which puts a figure on the astounding riches in property and savings amassed by the most affluent 1% in recent years.
But what if a […]
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