Profit is king, the poor are only livestock to create wealth for the wealthy, mindless uneducated drones to serve their betters / masters. Right wing billionaire bought a president and with that came all new courts aided by a willing republican congress. All to destroy any assistance for the lesser incomes / poor / workers and keep all power in the hands of the most wealthy people. In their minds they are the only real people, the public is not people like the wealthy are, they are a lessor people, a sub human class who should be kept desperate for any job at any low wage in any dangerous working conditions offered simply to survive. And to accomplish this the right keeps their people busy hating minority groups like immigrants, gays, trans, and even non-Christian groups. Hugs. Scottie
Side note: I had my spine epidurals yesterday, in the L4s5, both sides. Very painful. This morning I have my allergy shots, which last week left in a full-blown allergic reaction. The doctor was not happy when I saw him and talked to him about it. I suspect the nurses will grill me on it and lower my doses. Which means I will have to stay on once a week longer. Hugs. Scottie
Oxfam predicts first trillionaire within a decade, with gap between rich and poor likely to increase
Demonstrators in Davos on Sunday. A wealth tax of 1% to 2% on wealth above £10m could bring in £22bn a year for the UK. Photograph: Denis Balibouse/Reuters
The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes to $869bn (£681.5bn) since 2020, while the world’s poorest 60% – almost 5 billion people – have lost money.
The details come in a report by Oxfam as the world’s richest people gather from Monday in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum meeting of political leaders, corporate executives and the super-rich.
The yawning gap between rich and poor is likely to increase, the report says, and will lead to the world crowning its first trillionaire within a decade. At the same time, it warns, if current trends continue, world poverty will not be eradicated for another 229 years.
Highlighting a dramatic increase in inequality since the Covid pandemic, Oxfam said the world’s billionaires were $3.3tn (£2.6tn) richer than in 2020, and their wealth had grown three times faster than the rate of inflation.
The report, Inequality Inc., finds that seven out of 10 of the world’s biggest corporations have a billionaire as CEO or principal shareholder, despite stagnation in living standards for millions of workers around the world.
Will Elon Musk be the world’s first trillionaire? Photograph: Reuters
Compiled using data from the research company Wealth X and Forbes, it says the combined wealth of the top five richest people in the world – Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg – have increased by $464bn, or 114%. Over the same period, the total wealth of the poorest 4.77 billion people – making up 60% of the world population – has declined by 0.2% in real terms.
“People worldwide are working harder and longer hours, often for poverty wages in precarious and unsafe jobs,” the report says. “Across 52 countries, average real wages of nearly 800 million workers have fallen. These workers have lost a combined $1.5tn over the last two years, equivalent to 25 days of lost wages for each worker.”
Mirroring the fortunes of the super rich, it also says business profits have risen sharply despite pressure on households amid the cost of living crisis. It finds 148 of the world’s biggest corporations together raked in $1.8tn in total net profits in the year to June 2023, a 52% jump compared with average net profits in 2018-21.
Calling for a wealth tax to redress the balance between workers and super-rich company bosses and owners, the report says such a levy on British millionaires and billionaires could bring in £22bn for the exchequer each year, if applied at a rate of between 1% to 2% on net wealth above £10m.
Julia Davies, an investor and founding member of Patriotic Millionaires UK, a nonpartisan group of British millionaires campaigning for a wealth tax, said levies on wealth were “minuscule” compared with taxation on income from work.
“Just imagine what £22bn a year invested in public services and infrastructure could pay for; improving the lives of every one of us who live in the UK and providing our elderly, young and vulnerable with the care and support they need and deserve,” she said.
Oxfam said the most recent Gini index – which measures inequality – found that global income inequality was now comparable with that of South Africa, the country with the highest inequality in the world.
The world’s richest 1% own 59% of all global financial assets – including stocks, shares and bonds, plus stakes in privately held business. In the UK, the richest 1% own 36.5% of all financial assets, with a value of £1.8tn.
Aleema Shivji, Oxfam’s interim chief executive, said: “These extremes cannot be accepted as the new norm, the world can’t afford another decade of division. Extreme poverty in the poorest countries is still higher than it was pre-pandemic, yet a small number of super-rich men are racing to become the world’s first trillionaire within the next 10 years.
“This ever-widening gulf between the rich and the rest isn’t accidental, nor is it inevitable. Governments worldwide are making deliberate political choices that enable and encourage this distorted concentration of wealth, while hundreds of millions of people live in poverty. A fairer economy is possible, one that works for us all. What’s needed are concerted policies that deliver fairer taxation and support for everyone, not just the privileged.”
This goes along with my last post, Christian take over of the US pushed by Churches, leaders with money, and wealthy older people who see it as a way to enforce their bigotry to remain a white cis straight 1950s society. I really want to emphasize the hard right bigotry and hate these billionaires have and the changes they are making to society. They fund the very rabid right wing media that is trying hard to change all of our society and political leanings, increasing hate for LGBTQIA and hate against blacks / brown people. They push a pro Christian white cis straight male in charge of society. Dunn & Wilks also control influential legal, policy, & advocacy organizations. One of those orgs argued in court that pharmacies shouldn’t sell birth control. The lawyer who argued that case later became a federal judge. He banned the abortion pill. And they’ve even created their own right-wing media bubble. Dunn & Wilks fund Texas Scorecard, the top far-right publication. Wilks owns the Daily Wire and bankrolls PragerU, a right-wing “education” platform they’re trying to force into our schools. Prager U is now being used in red state public schools as instruction materials. Florida pushes their message hard. There is a serious push by really wealthy old Christian bigots to turn the US into a Christian Iran, a Christian Saudi Arabia, a Christian Afghanistan. Do we the poor majority want to allow this? Hugs. Scottie
For more than three months, Republican Party of Texas Chair Matt Rinaldi has vigorously attacked critics of Defend Texas Liberty, and rebuffed calls to distance the state party from the powerful group over its ties to white supremacists. As he did so, Rinaldi was also working as an attorney for one of the group’s two billionaire funders, Farris Wilks, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Since 2021, Wilks has given nearly $5 million to Defend Texas Liberty, which last year was the state party’s largest financial supporter. With Rinaldi’s help, the group has sought to purge the Texas GOP of more moderate voices by bankrolling far-right causes and primary candidates. Publicly, Rinaldi has also been silent about Defend Texas Liberty as the Tribune extensively reported on ties between the group and other white supremacists and Nick Fuentes acolytes.
Read the full article. There’s much more. Give the tweets below a minute to fully load because they illuminate how deep this goes. The final tweet links to a grimly fascinating deep dive into Defend Texas Liberty’s leader.
Texas GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi backed a group with white supremacist ties — while working for its billionaire funder https://t.co/2h63antXz5
These two billionaire-pastors are spending their fortune enacting an extreme Christian nationalist worldview in the second-largest state in the country.
In his teens and his 20s, Jonathan Stickland was a prolific internet troll.
He later made a career of it — ascending to the role of a conservative Texas powerbroker, before taking heat for hosting a meeting with white supremacist Nick Fuentes. https://t.co/vvMwzjDh22
Y’know that old saw that goes, “If you enter a room and there are 12 Nazis having dinner at the table and you sit down to join them, there are now 13 Nazis at the table”?
Rinaldi, Dunn, Wilks, Strickland and the rest of these guys are the ones who catered the meal.
Two billionaires funding right wing hate groups and Nazis. And both are pastors.
Who said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle then it is for a Richmond to enter the kingdom of heaven?
Who said the greatest commandment after loving God was loving your neighbor?
Who said not to store up treasures on earth?
no one of any importance whatsoever to modern fundamentalist Christianity. One could almost wish that they succeed turning Texas into a theocracy and the right wing state. Maybe they can leave the union.
I think it reveals that they don’t even believe their religious nuttery. They just want to use superstition and money to control EVERYTHING, and they also think they’re so smart that no one will pick up on the hypocrisy
Actually, they are heretic “Christians”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi… Wilks’ parents founded their own church (cult?), which denies Christian doctrines like the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, and gives primacy to the Hebrew Scriptures. While they seem to recognize Jesus as a prophet of some sort, they don’t seem to be bound to follow his teachings.
And look! Wilks is the pastor of his own church cult. Currently the Assembly of Yahweh (7th day) is a conservative Jews for Jesus-type congregation. It teaches that “the true religion is Jewish (not a Gentile religion)” and its members celebrate the Old Testament holidays rather than those related to the New Testament. The congregation considers the Old Testament historically and scientifically accurate.
The law he touts that would allow local police to arrest people they “think” are not here legally and a local judge gets to order their immediate removal. Guess what that means in reality? Arrest all brown people, charge them, quickly send them to Mexico at gun point … learn later they were here legally, or maybe even citizens. Ah who cares, they republican leaders get their nice white straight cis ethnostate where they are complete rulers over how people live. Hugs. Scottie.
The third-term Republican responded that the state is using “every tool that can be used, from building a border wall to building these border barriers.” He also touted the new Texas law empowering state officials to remove people from the U.S. who they suspect of being in the country illegally.
“… the new deportation law, which is set to take effect in March and threatens to upend longstanding precedent leaving immigration enforcement solely to the federal government. The law would allow any law enforcement officer in Texas to arrest migrants accused of unlawfully entering the state from Mexico and empower judges to order their removal”.
Department of Public Safety troopers stand guard over migrants in a detention area Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023, in Eagle Pass as a surge of migrants push across the border.
William Luther
WASHINGTON — Gov. Greg Abbott says Texas is doing everything to stop border crossings short of shooting migrants because the Biden administration would “charge us with murder.”
“We are deploying every tool and strategy that we possibly can,” the governor said in an interview with conservative commentator Dana Loesch. “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
The comments came during an appearance on Loesch’s show last week in which Abbott was asked what he believed was the “maximum amount of pressure” he could implement to secure the border.
The third-term Republican responded that the state is using “every tool that can be used, from building a border wall to building these border barriers.” He also touted the new Texas law empowering state officials to remove people from the U.S. who they suspect of being in the country illegally.
The clip was aired on Loesch’s program again Thursday without the line about shooting migrants. A version of the audio was also posted on social media by Heartland Signal, a progressive radio show based in Chicago.
Abbott said Friday that he was asked to point out where he was drawing the line on what the state can legally do to secure the border.
“I pointed out something that is obviously illegal,” Abbott said. “It’s that simple.”
The comments come as the Biden administration has sued the state to stop a slew of Abbott’s border security efforts, including the new deportation law, which is set to take effect in March and threatens to upend longstanding precedent leaving immigration enforcement solely to the federal government. The law would allow any law enforcement officer in Texas to arrest migrants accused of unlawfully entering the state from Mexico and empower judges to order their removal.
Abbott also has strung miles of razor wire along the border and deployed a wall of buoys in the Rio Grande, which the Biden administration is also fighting to have removed in a separate court battle.
But Abbott still has faced pressure from some conservatives to do more, and some in the GOP have called for the use of deadly force to stop suspected traffickers. Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis urged as much during a campaign stop in Texas last summer, saying those breaking through border barriers and displaying “hostile intent” should “end up stone-cold dead as a result of that bad decision.”
The Texas Department of Public Safety last month found no wrongdoing by agency officials after six troopers working for Abbott’s border security initiative alleged mistreatment of migrants last summer.
The complaints included an email from a DPS medic describing “inhumane” treatment of migrants he witnessed while deployed in Eagle Pass. The email said troopers had been ordered to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande and told not to give water to asylum-seekers even in extreme heat. The agency’s inspector general found that most of the incidents raised by the troopers did happen, but concluded that DPS officials did not violate law or agency policy.
Benjamin Wermund is the Washington correspondent for the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News. He can be reached at ben.wermund@houstonchronicle.com. He covers the Texas delegation and the many ways the state and its leaders shape national politics and policy. He’s a Texas native and a diehard Spurs fan.
People like Abbott are precisely the reason why laws exist. He has no moral compunction against murder, but luckily realizes it could land him in prison.
Scottie's Playtime 