billionaire 2 bk

trump hijack node, so backup but also new 8/15 content

see Billionaire 3 pluto-

see FUNDERS

see tax dodge

see inequality

see oligarch ussr, plutocrat

html  carnival 

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/billionaires-2656489510/

me truthout

Billionaire election spending has drastically increased over the last 12 years as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, according to TruthOut.

Americans For Fair Taxation (AFFT)recently analyzed data that breaks down election campaign contributions. Their assessment suggests that there is an upward trend in billionaire donations to political campaigns. Per the assessment, "billionaires have increased their donations from $31 million total during the 2010 election cycle to a whopping $1.2 billion in the 2020 election cycle, or about 39 times more."

In short, the amount spent in just 2020 accounts for almost 40% of all billionaire political campaign donations since 1990. In fact, spending in the four-year span between 2012 and 2016 is an indication of how trends have changed dramatically.

In 2016, billionaires spent approximately $682 million in campaign donations as opposed to just $233 million back in 2012. So how did the Citizens Unitedruling open this door?

Per Truthout:

"In January of 2010, conservative Supreme Court justices ruled in their Citizens United decision that restricting corporate donations was a violation of corporations’ First Amendment rights – a decision that granted individual rights to corporations and enabled them to spend unlimited amounts of money on campaign contributions. As a result of this decision, vast amounts of money from corporate and deep-pocketed interests have been funneled into elections."

Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness released a statement criticizing the court's decision describing it as "weak taxation of the wealthy" and "anemic regulation."

“On this anniversary of the disastrous Citizens United decision, the escalating campaign donations of billionaires offer the clearest argument possible for why we have to get big money out of politics,” said Clemente. “Weak taxation of the wealthy combined with anemic regulation of campaign fundraising have handed America’s billionaires outsized political influence to go along with their huge economic clout.”

AFFT also released a statement criticizing the ruling.

“Corporations are not people, and billionaires shouldn’t get to use their enormous wealth to pick and choose who they want in office,” Americans for Tax Fairness wrote. “It’s well beyond time for Citizens United to go, and to put real action towards getting big money out of politics. Our democracy depends on it.”

no lnx twit nice table

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/us-billionaires/

Top 10 US billionaires got $1 billion richer every day of pandemic

Jake Johnson and Common Dreams January 20, 2022

The 10 wealthiest billionaires in the U.S. have added roughly $1 billion to their collective fortune every day—or around $12,600 per second—since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed millions of people across the globe and thrown countless lives into chaos.

The billionaire wealth update comes courtesy of the progressive advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), which released an analysis Wednesday estimating that the combined net worth of the 10 richest people in the U.S. has more than doubled since March 2020, reaching $1.35 trillion this week.

"The pandemic has been very good to American billionaires, especially the top 10," said ATF executive director Frank Clemente, who noted that billionaires' pandemic profits will likely not be taxed because they consist largely of unrealized capital gains.

Sen. Ron Wyden's (D-Ore.) proposal to subject the unrealized capital gains of the mega-wealthy to taxation has gone nowhere in Congress.

"Their obscene rise in wealth—all of it potentially untaxed—stands in stark contrast to the lot of America's working families, who've struggled through almost two years of a health crisis and economic uncertainty including most recently, rising prices," Clemente said. "Chairman Wyden's Billionaires Income Tax would better align the fortunes of America's richest of the rich with the needs of average Americans."

[nice table/stats]

ATF's analysis is the latest in a series of new studies highlighting the extent to which the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the decades-long trend of soaring wealth inequality in the U.S. and worldwide.

Earlier this week, as Common Dreams reported,Oxfam International released an analysis showing that the 10 richest men in the world have doubled their combined wealth since the pandemic began. Meanwhile, the anti-poverty group noted, "the incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off because of Covid-19."

On Tuesday, a coalition of progressive organizations including the Fight Inequality Alliance and the Institute for Policy Studies estimated that a modest annual wealth tax on global millionaires and billionaires would raise $2.52 trillion dollars a year, enough money to lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty.

In an open letter published Wednesday morning, a group of more than 100 rich individuals voiced support for such a tax, warning that "history paints a pretty bleak picture of what the endgame of extremely unequal societies looks like."

"For all our well-being—rich and poor alike—it's time to confront inequality and choose to tax the rich," reads the letter, which was addressed to political and economic elites. "If you don't, then all the private talks won’t change what's coming—it's taxes or pitchforks. Let's listen to history and choose wisely."

see big report that rich have no taxable income like wages, just assets

an ah 921

In order to fund his "human infrastructure" proposals, President Joe Biden has recommended increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans — including inheritance taxes. Republicans and corporate lobbyists are claiming that doing so would punish blue-collar businesses.But liberal Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent, this week in his column, notes that this claim is also being promoted by a centrist Democrat: former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, now a lobbyist.

"Of all the insulting lies we've heard about Democratic proposals to tax the rich," Sargent writes, "perhaps the worst is the idea that they would devastate owners and operators of family farms…. As president, Donald Trump embellished this further, adding the idea that estate taxes threaten salt-of-the-earth family-owned trucking businesses. Now, a new version of this line is back — only this time, it's being pushed by a Democrat who's advocating against a key tax provision in President Biden's $3.5 trillion 'human infrastructure' plan."

Sargent continues, "A swarm of lobbyists is gearing up against Democratic efforts to tax corporations and the wealthy to fund major investments in our people and in preserving the future home of human civilization. One thing the lobbyists want to protect is a loophole allowing untold inherited wealth to escape taxation."

The New York Times recently reported that Democratic proponents of Biden's inheritance tax proposals are saying that rural swing voters would not be affected by them. But Heitkamp, according to Sargent, is "pushing the argument that taxation at death is bad politics."

Sargent argues that the lobbying against Biden's tax proposals isn't motivated by a desire to protect family farms and blue-collar businesses, but to shield the ultra-wealthy from the taxes they are dodging.

"As it is, wealth and investment income are not taxed as labor income is," Sargent explains. "So, those amassing large fortunes often already receive privileged tax treatment. But in addition, when estates are passed down to heirs, for tax purposes, assets are assigned the value they have at that point of transfer. If assets are then sold later, they're taxed based on their appreciation in value from that point, effectively allowing all the appreciation before then to permanently escape taxation. This is one way billionaires can get away with paying so little in income taxes relative to their wealth, whereas most Americans have income taxes taken from each paycheck."

Sargent adds, "Biden's plan would combat this. It would tax those assets based on their appreciation from the original point of acquisition, thus taxing all that unrealized value. That's what lobbyists want to prevent. One of them is Heidi Heitkamp, the former Democratic senator from North Dakota."

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/america-s-ultra-wealthy-is-responsible-for-28-of-unpaid-taxes-in-us-report/

https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files

https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tech-mogul-peter-thiel-turned-a-retirement-account-for-the-middle-class-into-a-5-billion-dollar-tax-free-piggy-bank

quite long

no lx grads animation

billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned “confiscatory taxes.” He’s been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And he’s bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes.

The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax]

But Thiel doesn’t need a man-made island to avoid paying taxes. He has something just as effective: a Roth individual retirement account.

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Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.

To put that into perspective, here’s how much the average Roth was worth at the end of 2018: $39,108.

And here’s how much $5 billion is: If every one of the 2.3 million people in Houston, Texas, were to deposit $2,000 into a bank today, those accounts still wouldn’t equal what Thiel has in his Roth IRA.

What’s more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions.

ProPublica has obtained a trove of IRS tax return data on thousands of the country’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. This data provides, for the first time, an inside look at the financial lives of the richest Americans, those whose stratospheric fortunes put them among history’s wealthiest individuals.

What this secret information reveals is that while most Americans are dutifully paying taxes — chipping in their part to fund the military, highways and safety-net programs — the country’s richest citizens are finding ways to sidestep the tax system.

One of the most surprising of these techniques involves the Roth IRA, which limits most people to contributing just $6,000 each year.

The late Sen. William Roth Jr., a Delaware Republican, pushed through a law establishing the Roth IRA in 1997 to allow “hard-working, middle-class Americans” to stow money away, tax-free, for retirement. The Clinton administration didn’t want to give a fat tax break to wealthy people who were likely to save anyway, so it blocked Americans making more than $110,000 ($160,000 for a couple) per year from using them and capped annual contributions back then at $2,000.

Yet, from the start, a small number of entrepreneurs, like Thiel, made an end run around the rules: Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock — no matter how giant — are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments.

About a decade after the creation of the Roth, Congress made it even easier to turn the accounts into mammoth tax shelters. It allowed everyone — including the very richest Americans — to take money they’d stowed in less favorable traditional retirement accounts and, after paying a one-time tax, shift them to a Roth where their money could grow unchecked by Uncle Sam — a Bermuda-style tax haven right here in the U.S.

To identify those who have amassed fortunes in retirement accounts, ProPublica scoured the tax return data of the ultrawealthy for IRA accounts valued at more than $20 million. Reporters also examined Securities and Exchange Commission filings, court documents and other records, including a memo detailing Thiel’s wealth that was included in his 2005 application for residency in New Zealand.

Among this rarefied group, ProPublica found, the term “individual retirement account” has become a misnomer. Rather than a way to build a nest egg for old age, the accounts have morphed into supercharged investment vehicles subsidized by American taxpayers. Ted Weschler, a deputy of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, had $264.4 million in his Roth account at the end of 2018. Hedge fund manager Randall Smith, whose Alden Global Capital has gutted newspapers around the country, had $252.6 million in his.

Buffett, one of the richest men in the world and a vocal supporter of higher taxes on the rich, also is making use of a Roth. At the end of 2018, Buffett had $20.2 million in it. Former Renaissance Technologies hedge fund manager Robert Mercer had $31.5 million in his Roth, the records show.

Buffett didn’t respond to questions sent by email. Mercer couldn’t be reached for comment, and his accountants and attorneys didn’t respond to requests to accept questions on his behalf. Smith also couldn’t be reached for comment, and an employee at his hedge fund repeatedly hung up when ProPublica reporters identified themselves. Other representatives for Smith and his hedge fund didn’t respond.

In a written statement, Weschler said his retirement account relied on publicly traded investments and strategies available to all taxpayers. Nevertheless, he said he supports reforming the system....

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/billionaire/

As we're struggling to recover from Trump's half-million unnecessary Covid deaths here in America, fighting to get a clear picture of how extensive the sedition was among Republicans in Congress around January 6th, and trying to pass legislation to ensure clean and safe elections and put the country back into shape, dark money, foreign oligarchs and rightwing media groups are hard at work tearing this nation apart.

This article was originally published at The Hartmann Report

And they're having considerable success.

About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to "do what is right" when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower 1950s administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson's 1960s presidency.

In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent of Americans trusted their government. It's so bad that throughout 2020 armed protesters showed up nationwide to protest the "tyranny" of having to wear masks during a pandemic, and then stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election, all cheered on by the then-President of the United States and multiple rightwing media outlets.

This is no accident; it's the result of a five-decades-long campaign by some of America's richest people to tear apart the governing fabric of our nation, formally kicked off by their man, Ronald Reagan, proudly proclaiming at his January 20, 1981, inauguration that, "[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Put yourself in the place of the heirs to a multimillion-dollar fossil fuel empire, a situation akin to the "heroic" brother and sister who inherited a railroad from their dad in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged:

• If you don't have to pay to dispose of cancer-causing byproducts from your refineries but can simply vent them into the air, and you make more money.

• If you can cut wages and threaten employees because they don't have a union, you make more money.

• If you can run a pipeline across sacred Native American land atop a major national aquifer with minimal safety oversight, you make more money.
• If you can hide your money from the IRS because the agency has had its budget slashed so badly that it can no longer do expensive audits of morbidly rich people, you can keep more of the money you've made.
• If you can get the government to cut social programs and public education, thus lowering your taxes, you can keep more of the money you've made.

So how do you pull this off, when every one of these things hurts average Americans?

Easy. Just embark on a 50-year-long campaign, through think tanks, right-wing media, and massive PR efforts to convince average Americans that government is the cause of, not the solution to, their problems. Convince working-class Americans that gutting government is a good thing that will ultimately help them in some mystical, magical way through the incredible "invisible hand" of the marketplace.

Lewis Powell, a lawyer for Big Tobacco, launched the movement to do just this with his infamous memo in 1971, and billionaires have funded and promoted politicians who jump on board the "government is evil" bandwagon ever since.

And it's largely worked, if the "trust in government" statistics compiled by the Pew Research Center since 1958 are accurate.

Years ago I was up late one night watching, as I recall, Bloomberg News on a hotel TV. The American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.

Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was "suffering under" in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, "A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included."

"How can you handle that?" asked the host, incredulous.

The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.

A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.

The reporter went for a third try. "Why don't you lead a revolt against those high taxes?" he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.

The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.

He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, "I don't want to be a rich man in a poor country."

There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. But the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it's perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it makes them a few extra bucks.

They've funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and rightwing paramilitaries, media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, and organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC. They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as they never stray far from the "deregulate, cut, denigrate" line about American government. They sponsor climate denial to increase their own profits.

And over and over again, they've been successfully pulling this off for the past 50 years. The most recent example is the disaster we're seeing in Arizona where the majority of Republicans in the Arizona Senate, totally owned by rightwing billionaires, went along with Trump and started a phony "audit"to further erode Americans' faith in our government. Reaganism has become Trumpism, and it's all pointing toward destroying faith in democracy in America just to make a buck.

Similarly, a Morning Consult poll about saving Americans from the Covid crisis a few months ago had this headline: "With Congressional Stimulus Fight Looming, 76% of Voters Back $1.9 Trillion Plan, Including 60% of Republicans." Yet every single billionaire-owned Republican in Congress opposed it, and now they're opposing President Biden's efforts to rebuild our infrastructure, both hard and soft.

As this nation recovers from a deadly pandemic that — unnecessarily — killed more than 500,000 of our fellow citizens, and struggles with rightwing hate groups that are trying to provoke a second Civil War, let's remember how this all came about. And all for a few extra pieces of gold.

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now 1220 4 centabilioaires

fresh aire weds 12/20  chuck collins Inst for Pol studies

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. While millions of Americans have lost their jobs because of the pandemic, the combined wealth of just 10 billionaires has increased by more than $127 billion since the beginning of the pandemic. Those billionaires include the principal owners of Amazon, Instacart, Walmart and Tyson Foods. My guest, Chuck Collins, has been writing about that and how the pandemic has increased income inequality in the U.S. Economic inequality has been his subject since he was 26 and gave away his inheritance. Collins is the great-grandson of Oscar Mayer, the founder of the meatpacking company famous for its hot dogs, the Oscar Mayer wiener, and the Wienermobile.

Collins is the director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he co-edits inequality.org. His books include "Born On Third Base: A One Percenter Makes The Case For Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, And Committing To The Common Good" and the forthcoming "The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions To Hide Trillions." That book is scheduled for publication in March. Chuck Collins, welcome to FRESH AIR. It's a pleasure to have you on our show.

CHUCK COLLINS: Thanks for having me.

GROSS: Who are the billionaires who made the most money since the start of the pandemic?

COLLINS: Well, there's an overall trend. You know, 657 billionaires have seen their combined wealth go up a trillion since mid-March. But there's a couple that have just seen their wealth surge. Elon Musk seen his wealth go up almost 500%, 120 billion. Jeff Bezos has seen his wealth go up about 74 billion, an increase of 65%. And there's a guy, Dan Gilbert, who's the Quicken Loans founder, CEO, his wealth has gone up 600% - almost 38 billion. So it's a surge of wealth for some. You know, some have ridden the stock market. But others have just seen - they've kind of delinked from the amount of wealth they had before.

GROSS: So is the numbers that you're giving us, is that linked to the stock market? - because the stock market fluctuates so much. It can go up, you know, hundreds of points or go down hundreds of points.

COLLINS: Yeah. The stock market has been steadily going up as well. But some of these billionaires have just seen their wealth surge, you know, in the double digits or much higher than the market itself. I mean, four billionaires - Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg - now have a net worth of about 550 billion combined. And the whole group of U.S. billionaires now has a combined wealth of 4 trillion, which is double the wealth of the bottom half of all U.S. households, you know, in the United States. So they are seeing their fortunes accelerateduring the pandemic....

https://marker.medium.com/welcome-to-the-hunger-games-economy-7e44665d88e1

Welcome to the Hunger Games Economy

An exclusive excerpt from Scott Galloway’s new book, ‘Post Corona’

tequila habitat

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/09/barbuda-resorts-dejoria-de-niro/

why asuide from amazon bezos and mebbe zuck wd billionaiores profit so much from covid?

sjmn

By Farhad Manjoo

When I called up Chuck Collins on Tuesday afternoon, I found him glued to one of the grimmest new metrics documenting America's economic and social unraveling.

Collins is a scholar of inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, and since March he has been tracking how the collective wealth of American billionaires has been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. In previous recessions, Collins said, billionaires were hit along with the rest of us; it took almost three years for Forbes' 400 richest people to recover losses incurred in 2008's Great Recession.

But in the coronavirus recession of 2020, most billionaires have not lost their shirts. Instead, they've put on bejeweled overcoats and gloves made of spun gold - that is, they've gotten richer than ever before.

On Tuesday, as the stock market hit a record, Collins was watching the billionaires cross a depressing threshold: $1 trillion.

That is the amount of new wealth American billionaires have amassed since March, at the start of the lockdowns that state and local governments imposed to curb the pandemic.

On March 18, according to a report Collins and his colleagues published last week, America's 614 billionaires were worth a combined $2.95 trillion. When the markets closed Tuesday, there were 650 billionaires and their combined wealth was now close to $4 trillion. In the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, American billionaires' wealth grew by a third.

It is difficult to think of a more succinctly obscene illustration of the unfairness of the American economic and political system.

"The economy is now wired 'heads you win, tails I lose,' to funnel wealth to the top," Collins told me.

Billionaires amassed their new billions just as millions of other Americans plunged into dire financial straits. More than 20 million people lost their jobs at the start of the pandemic. As Congress lazily contemplates whether or not to bother to continue to provide economic assistance to America's neediest, as many as 13 million people are at risk of losing the expanded benefits that keep them just beyond the grip of hunger and homelessness....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/billionaires-rich/

igor salon

Billionaire wealth increased to $10.2 trillion through the end of July, setting a new record amid the coronavirus pandemic even as millions of unemployed people fall into poverty.

Wealth held by billionaires around the world rose to $10.2 trillion in July, up from the previous record of $8.9 trillion in 2017, according to an analysis by Swiss bank UBS and consulting firm PwC.

The number of billionaires also rose from 2,158 in 2017 to 2,189 this summer, according to the report.

Not all billionaires saw their wealth increase, though some saw their wealth rise by close to 50%. Health care billionaires, for example, saw their wealth increase by 50%. Technology billionaires saw their wealth rise by 42.5%. Billionaires in the entertainment, financial services, materials, and real estate sectors saw increases of 10% or less.

While the UBS analysis looked at billionaires around the world, a separate analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness found that billionaire wealth in the United States has grown by $792 billion, or 27%, since the beginning of coronavirus lockdowns in March. The combined wealth of American billionaires now tops $3.7 trillion.

Some prominent billionaires have done particularly well. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has seen his wealth rise more than 60% during the pandemic to $195 billion through late August, according to the analysis. Tesla CEO Elon Musk saw his wealth more than triple to $85 billion over that time frame.

The study pointed to President Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts, which helped billionaires keep more of their earnings. The UBS study noted that Trump's desired capital gains tax cut, billed as a pandemic-related stimulus, would overwhelmingly favor the richest Americans.

"For billionaires, this is a heads-we win, tails-you-lose economy, boosted by Trump policies to funnel wealth to the top," Chuck Collins, the head of the Institute for Policy Studies' Program on Inequality, said in a news release.

"The pandemic profiteering of America's billionaires shows taxes on the wealthy must go up substantially to narrow the wealth gap and raise revenue vital for our big climb back from disaster," added Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. "By demanding even more tax cuts for the rich at this crucial moment President Trump shows he is as out of touch with our nation's needs as America's billionaires are disconnected from our nation's misery."

Some executives, like Zoom CEO Eric Yuan and Bezos, have profited from a boom in business caused by the lockdowns. Others have profited directly from government aid distributed to their companies. But most billionaires saw their wealth increase due to rising investments, buoyed by a stock market surge propped up by government assistance.

The rising wealth amid an economically devastating pandemic threatens to deepen longstanding inequalities.

"Extreme wealth concentration is an ugly phenomenon from a moral perspective, but it's also economically and socially destructive," Luke Hilyard, the executive director of the High Pay Center, a think tank that focuses on excessive executive pay, told The Guardian.guk "Anyone accumulating riches on this scale could easily afford to raise the pay of the employees who generate their wealth, or contribute a great deal more in taxes to support vital public services, while remaining very well rewarded for whatever successes they've achieved. The findings from the UBS report showing that the super-rich are getting even richer are a sign that capitalism isn't working as it should."

UBS executive Josef Stadler also acknowledged that billionaires could face societal backlash over their growing wealth as many people face months if not years of struggles.

"We're at an inflection point," he told the outlet. "Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?"

But it's far from the first time that billionaires profited while millions suffered. The Institute for Policy Studies found that the wealthiest 400 billionaires in the US not only recovered from the 2008 recession within three years but increased their wealth by 80% over the following decade. By comparison, the bottom 80% of earners have still not recovered.

While government intervention has helped billionaires accumulate even more wealth, the lack of government action since the spring has resulted in an estimated 8 million Americans falling into poverty since May, according to a study from researchers at Columbia University. The lack of additional stimulus payments and the expiration of enhanced federal unemployment benefits has resulted in 6 million Americans falling into poverty over just the last three months, according to a study from researchers at the University of Chicago and Notre Dame.

The problem has been even worse globally. Between 88 million and 114 million people around the world have fallen into extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 per day, since the pandemic hit, according to the World Bank. There are now more than 700 million people living in extreme poverty and researchers expected that number to keep rising.

"This is the worst setback that we've witnessed in a generation," Carolina Sánchez-Páramo, the global director of the World Bank's Poverty and Equity Global Practice, told The Wall Street Journal.

World Bank Group President David Malpass argued in a speech this month that the problem is worse in developing economies because "rich countries" have the resources to expand sweeping "government spending programs" while poorer economies have few tools to mitigate the economic damage.

The US, by contrast, should be doing better if not for Republican reluctance to increased government relief. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned Congress last month that inaction in the face of growing inequality would be highly damaging to the economic recovery.

"Those are things that hold back our economy," he said at a news conference. "If we want to have the highest potential output and the best output for our economy, we need that prosperity to be very broadly spread."

Many analysts have also faulted Powell and the Fed for contributing to the growing inequality with policies "disproportionately benefiting stockholders," according to the Associated Press.

Just as the coronavirus has exposed longstanding health disparities between the richest and poorest Americans, the growing inequality is largely the result of a "catastrophic failure to tackle inequality" well before the pandemic struck, according to a report from Oxfam International.

"Governments' catastrophic failure to tackle inequality meant the majority of the world's countries were critically ill-equipped to weather the pandemic," said Oxfam interim executive director Chema Vera. "No country on earth was trying hard enough to reduce inequality and ordinary people are bearing the brunt of this crisis as a result. Millions of people have been pushed into poverty and hunger and there have been countless unnecessary deaths."

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DN 920

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/18/headlines/us_billionaires_added_845b_to_net_worth_since_march_as_pandemic_exposed_racial_inequities

• U.S. Billionaires Added $845B to Net Worth Since March as Pandemic Exposed Racial Inequities

==

beware forbes mag 420

Here Are The Billionaires Backing Donald Trump’s Campaign

Michela Tindera Forbes Staff

Money & Politics

The richest president in American history has gotten financial support from nearly one in 10 U.S. billionaires.

Nearly five years ago Donald Trump descended an escalator inside Trump Tower and announced a long-shot bid to become president of the United States. Standing on a stage in the building’s lobby, in front of eight American flags, he spoke to a gaggle of cameras. “I’m using my own money,” Trump said, indicating that he would self-fund his campaign. “I’m not using the lobbyists. I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich.”

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How times have changed. Now in the midst of his reelection campaign, President Trump has accepted donations from 80 billionaires and their spouses, according to a review of Federal Election Commission filings. Fifty-one moguls donated in their own names. Seven others are married to people who did. In other words, 9% of America’s billionaires, who together are worth a combined $210 billion—either directly or through their spouse—have pitched in to cover the costs of Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Tracking Billionaire Donations Over Time

Forbes mined more than 2.5 million entries in the Federal Election Commission database to identify Trump’s richest donors. We searched for contributions made to the president’s campaign committee, Donald J. Trump For President. Our analysis begins on inauguration day, 2017, when Trump officially filed papers for his reelection effort, and ends on February 29, 2020, the latest date for which the campaign has submitted federal filings. (By contrast, Barack Obama didn’t begin seeking contributions to his election campaign until the third year of his presidency.)

Most of the donors, some 56%, live in just three states: Florida, New York and Texas. More than three-quarters are self-made. The rest inherited small fortunes and grew them into bigger ones. They come from all sorts of industries—real estate, energy, sports and so on. But one-fifth of the donors got rich in finance & investments. That group includes titans like Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, hedge funder John Paulson and retired Franklin Templeton chief Charles B. Johnson. About 10% of the donors made their money in real estate, including Trump’s fellow New York City billionaire, Richard LeFrak. Shopping mall magnate Edward DeBartolo pitched in $3,000 with his wife Cynthia; Trump later pardoned him, in February.

Texas banker Andy Beal, who Forbes estimates is worth $8.1 billion, has given more money to the Trump Victory joint fundraising committee than any other individual billionaire, according to federal filings. Since 2017 Beal, whose bank was once a senior lender to Trump Entertainment Resorts, has donated more than $1 million over many months. That’s nearly twice as much as he gave during the 2016 campaign. (And just $12,200 less than the combined sum TD Ameritrade AMTD’s Joe Ricketts and his wife Marlene gave.) Brothers and casino magnates Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, along with their wives, meanwhile, gave $1.4 million to Trump Victory in one single day last October.

How Donald Trump's Donors Got Rich

Some donors made one large contribution early in the Trump presidency, like Revlon chairman Ronald Perelman, who gave $125,000 to Trump Victory in September 2017. Others have contributed multiple times over the last three years. Fifty-one percent of Trump’s billionaire donors did not give to the president’s 2016 campaign. U-Haul billionaire E. Joe Shoen made his first-ever contribution to Trump Victory, $35,500, in February 2020. “President Trump has done an outstanding job and certainly merits my vote,” Shoen says. (Forbes reached out to all of Trump’s donors, nearly all of whom declined to comment on the record.)

Nearly all the money coming from billionaires traveled through something called a joint fundraising committee.By law, no individual can donate more than $5,600 to an official presidential campaign. But anyone can give bigger sums to joint fundraising committees, which gather funds for specific campaigns and political parties. President Trump has two major joint fundraising committees, Trump Victory and Trump Make America Great Again Committee, which collect money for his campaign, the Republican National Committee and other state-level RNC groups. Forty-five billionaire donors have pitched in more than $100,000 each to Trump’s joint fundraising committees.

Some of the donors who supported Trump during his initial run received roles thatgave them access to the president. WWE cofounder Linda McMahon, who contributed $152,700 to Trump Victory in 2016, was appointed by Trump to head the Small Business Administration. She stepped down from her position last year to run a pro-Trump super PAC called America First Action. She has since given more than $2.7 million to that PAC, money that’s not included in this tally because super PACs are technically independent of campaigns.  

Not all of Trump’s 2016 billionaire supporters are still giving—at least not yet. Private equity titan Stephen Feinberg gave $339,400 to Trump Victory last election,and Carl Icahn chipped in $200,000.Neither has donated to Trump since his inauguration. Jennifer Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, contributed $250,000 to Trump Victory in 2016. A transgender woman, Pritzker spoke out against Trump’s transgender military ban, and last year, she donated $1,000 to the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. 

Amid all this support, however, one billionaire stands out for having donated no money to his reelection campaign. That billionaire is Donald Trump.

Trump’s billionaire backers, ordered by amount given:[graf?]

Contributions made by nearly all donors were made to two joint fundraising committees, Trump Make America Great Again Committee or Trump Victory and then transferred in part to the Donald J. Trump For President Committee.

Methodology:

Forbes looked for donations from those who appeared as part of the 614 American billionaires on the 2020 World’s Billionaires list published April 7, 2020, and all of their publicly identifiable spouses. We used that list to search Federal Election Commission filings, which show donations to candidate committees. We counted individual itemized contributions made in increments of at least $100 to the Donald J. Trump For President campaign committee, then reviewed addresses and employment information to confirm identities. We counted contributions that were transferred in from joint fundraising committees Trump Victory and Trump Make America Great Again Committee. We left out donations made to super PACs, counting just the money that went straight to Trump’s campaign. We reached out to every person we found to get their feedback. It’s possible we missed someone. We’ll continue searching through the 2020 election.

Additional reporting by Giacomo Tognini.

Send me a secure tip.

Michela Tindera

Staff writer at Forbes. Email me at mtindera@forbes.com and follow me on Twitter @mtindera07.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/worlds-500-richest-people-gained-1-2-trillion-in-wealth-in-2019-analysis/

no lnx graf

World’s 500 richest people gained $1.2 trillion in wealth in 2019: Analysis

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams December 27, 2019

The 500 richest people in the world, all of whom are billionaires, gained a combined $1.2 trillion in wealth in 2019, further exacerbating inequities that have not been seen since the late 1920s.

That’s according to a new Bloomberg analysis published Friday, which found that the planet’s 500 richest people saw their collective net worth soar by 25 percent to $5.9 trillion over the last year.

“In the U.S., the richest 0.1 percent control a bigger share of the pie than at any time since 1929,” Bloomberg noted. “The 172 American billionaires on the Bloomberg ranking added $500 billion, with Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg up $27.3 billion and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates [rising] $22.7 billion.”

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, eight of the 10 richest people in the world are from the U.S.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos lost nearly $9 billion in wealth in 2019, according to Bloomberg, but he will still likely end the year as the richest man in the world with a total net worth of $116 billion.

The analysis comes as 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, particularly Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have made tackling inequality a key component of their policy platforms.

Warren has proposed an annual two percent tax on assets over $50 million and a three percent tax on assets above $1 billion.

Sanders, who has said he does not believe billionaires should exist, is calling for a wealth tax that would slash the fortunes of U.S. billionaires in half over 15 years, according to his campaign.

“A small handful of billionaires should not be able to accumulate more money than they could spend in 10 lifetimes,” Sanders said in September, “while millions of Americans are living in poverty and dying because they can’t afford healthcare.”

an 1219

Bloomberg and Steyer have spent six times as much on TV ads as all of the other Democratic candidates combined

Joshua Holland

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https://theintercept.com/2019/11/27/iran-environmentalists-panthera-thomas-kaplan/

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an 1219

no lnx

Why is the media so obsessed with what Wall Street and billionaires think of Elizabeth Warren?

Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos December 1, 2019

It turns out the media’s obsession with the superrich isn’t confined to the world of celebrity and entertainment. In politics, the press also seems utterly fascinated with how the 0.1% live, and especially what their political leanings are. For the 2020 campaign, that means a barrage of coverage about what Wall Street bankers and billionaires think about Elizabeth Warren and her populist agenda. They don’t trust her! Some like her! Some won’t donate! On and on it goes, as the press scurries to document the opinions of the superwealthy, but there’s no explanation for why they’re supposed to matter so much.

“From corporate boardrooms to breakfast meetings, investor conferences to charity galas, Ms. Warren’s rise in the Democratic primary polls is rattling bankers, investors and their affluent clients, who see in the Massachusetts senator a formidable opponent who could damage not only their industry but their way of life,” read a typical passage from The New York Times recently, as the press continues to be deeply fascinated with what the financial community thinks of the Democratic nominee, and keeps treating financial opinions as important political news.

The headlines keep coming:

“As Warren Gains in Race, Wall Street Sounds the Alarm”

“Wall Street donors are so worried about Elizabeth Warren that they are snubbing Democrats in 2020 Senate races”

“In a Pick-Your-Poison Election, Wall Street Likes Warren Over Trump”

“Warren has a plan for Wall Street — and Wall Street isn’t panicking”

“Elizabeth Warren is winning grudging respect among some on Wall Street”

“Warren Would Take Billionaires Down a Few Billion Pegs”

“The Wall Streeters who actually like Elizabeth Warren”

The never-ending emphasis sends a clear message that the votes and donations of Wall Street bankers and billionaires matter more than other people’s. But they don’t. It’s reminiscent of the media’s 2016 campaign obsession with coal miners, followed close by its obsession with those who have manufacturing jobs, which sent the obvious signal that white working-class male voters were the ones who counted the most.

It’s clear that Warren’s agenda, and her rise in the polls, have gotten the attention of Wall Street. She’s running on a billionaire wealth tax to help pay for her $52 trillion Medicare for All plan. Her wealth tax proposal would also impose a 2% tax on net worth between $50 million and $1 billion. “Our democracy has been hijacked by the rich and the powerful,” Warren often says on the campaign trail.

Buy why is the press so hypersensitive to Wall Street’s take on Warren? Obviously, Democrats have never been the election darlings of Wall Street executives and billionaires, who traditionally vote Republican. So it’s not as if it’s a natural constituency for reporters to focus on during the Democratic primary. Yes, there is a portion of that financial audience that donates to Democrats, and most candidates want to keep receiving that money. But those donations pale in comparison to the small-donor, grassroots money that fuels most Democratic campaigns these days.

Yet again and again, journalists push the premise that it’s a big problem that Wall Street isn’t supporting a prominent Democrat this election. For instance, the Times recently interviewed “more than two dozen hedge-fund managers, private-equity and bank officials, analysts and lobbyists” to find out what they thought, and feared, about Warren’s campaign. CNBC also checked in with “hedge fund managers and private equity executives” to chronicle their Warren complaints. And I’m just wondering: On paper, is it possible to find a coalition of voters less likely to support a Democrat than hedge-fund managers, private-equity and bank officials, analysts and lobbyists? I seriously doubt it. That’s like doing a news report on how college history professors aren’t supporting Trump in 2020. Yes, and … ?

The press focus reflects the media’s worshipful culture of the superrich and its conviction that of course it matters if they don’t like a Democrat, even though it doesn’t really matter much at all. Billionaire Leon Cooperman made headlines when he posted a whiny open letter to Warren, castigating her policies and claiming she was beating up on the rich. But why does his opinion even constitute news? “The fact that each random billionaire’s thoughts on Elizabeth Warren is a news story is itself a powerful demonstration of the disproportionate political influence of the very rich,” Matthew Yglesias noted on Twitter.

The fact is that financiers are not an integral part of the Warren campaign. Through the first three quarters of the year, she raised just $215,000 from people in the securities and investment industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And that’s typical for Democrats who simply don’t pull huge donation numbers from that industry. Through the third quarter, Pete Buttigieg had raised $935,000, trailed by Cory Booker who has raised $927,000 from the finance industry, Joe Biden ($889,000), and Kamala Harris ($765,000), according to figures from the center.

Warren’s populist agenda has clearly sparked concerns from Wall Street financiers and billionaires. But the press shouldn’t pretend that those voices matter more than those of everyday voters in the Democratic election season.

Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.

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https://boingboing.net/2019/11/22/save-dot-org.html

Civil society groups protest the sale of .ORG to a private equity fund and a collection of Republican billionaires

11/19

Earlier this month, management of the .org top-level domain underwent a radical shift: first, ICANN dropped price-caps on .org domains, and then the Internet Societ (ISOC) flogged the registry off to Ethos Capital, a private equity fund, and a consortium of three families of Republican billionaires: the Perots, the Romneys, and the Johnsons. Read the rest

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cooperman hedge fund former GS

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/billionaire-curses-out-elizabeth-warren-to-a-reporter-over-her-powerful-new-ad/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-ultra-wealthy-are-more-likely-to-lie-cheat-and-steal-than-the-rest-of-us-why-should-we-care-what-they-think-about-politics/

no lnx

The ultra-wealthy are more likely to lie, cheat and steal than the rest of us. Why should we care what they think about politics?

Steve Mnuchin and wife Louise Linton. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Written by Joshua Holland November 7, 2019

Over the past couple of weeks, the political press has quoted a veritable parade of whiny billionaires complaining about Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax. John Arnold, “a billionaire investor and philanthropist,” said it would kill charities. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who is not known for being a delicate flower himself, complained that Warren “uses some pretty harsh words” to describe the billionaire class. Bill Gates joked that it might compel him to vote for Donald Trump. And Leon Cooperman actually cried about it, moaning “this is the f**king American Dream she is s**tting on.”

Warren’s campaign, meanwhile, is fundraising on their tears.

Keep in mind that her tax would only apply to that portion of a person’s wealth exceeding $50 million. (One economist interviewed by Fox News said, “Well…$50 million is big, but it’s not as big as you think.” He’s obviously a ridiculous person.)

The answer to the question in the headline above is that ultra-elite opinion is objectively more important than yours or mine. You’re not going to get a sit-down with your Senator or the next president if you shell out a donation of $50 or $100, but large donors have opportunities to directly influence politicians. They mingle with high-profile journalists and regulators and cultural creators. They fund university chairs and think-tanks and their opinions are sought after by cable news producers and the people who put together those ubiquitous “ideas festivals.”

But while their views do carry outsized weight, that doesn’t mean that we should care what they think.  Because the reality is that while it’s certainly wrong to say that the ultra-rich are uniformly corrupt or that working people are consistently virtuous, studies show that “high status” individuals tend to hold an outsized sense of entitlement, and as a result of that, they’re more likely than average people to bend the rules or twist the truth in order to satisfy their desires.

In 2013, I wrote about the work ofPaul Piff, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley who had conducted (and continues to conduct) a series of experiments designed to find out if the wealthy really are fundamentally different than the rest of us.

[In a study] published in the current Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Paul Piff of UC Berkeley conducted five experiments which demonstrated that “higher social class is associated with increased entitlement and narcissism.” Given the opportunity, Piff also found that they were more likely to check themselves out in a mirror than were those of lesser means.

Piff looked at how participants scored on a standard scale of “psychological entitlement,” and found that those of a high social class — based on income levels, education and occupational prestige — were more likely to say “I honestly feel I’m just more deserving than others,” while people further down the social ladder were likelier to respond, “I do not necessarily deserve special treatment.”

In an earlier study, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Piff and four researchers from the University of Toronto conducted a series of experiments which found that “upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals.” This included being more likely to “display unethical decision-making,” steal, lie during a negotiation and cheat in order to win a contest.

In one telling experiment, the researchers observed a busy intersection, and found that drivers of luxury cars were more likely to cut off other drivers and less likely to stop for pedestrians crossing the street than those behind the wheels of more modest vehicles.  “In our crosswalk study, none of the cars in the beater-car category drove through the crosswalk,” Piff told The New York Times. “But you see this huge boost in a driver’s likelihood to commit infractions in more expensive cars.” He added: “BMW drivers are the worst.”

Summing up previous research on the topic, Piff notes that upper-class individuals also “showed reduced sensitivity to others’ suffering” as compared with working- and middle-class people.

“Lower-class individuals are more likely to spend time taking care of others, and they are more embedded in social networks that depend on mutual aid. By contrast, upper-class individuals prioritize independence from others: They are less motivated than lower-class individuals to build social relationships and instead seek to differentiate themselves from others.”

This is all perfectly consistent with these billionaires freaking out over Warren’s wealth tax. Although their vast fortunes are a result of structural changes in the economy that have shifted trillions of dollars from labor to capital and allowed the uber-wealthy to pay a fraction of the taxes they did in the post-World War II era, they think they earned every penny and are entitled to tell us how much they’re willing to fork over in taxes. Because they tend to have a “reduced sensitivity to others’ suffering” than the rest of us, the fact that Warren wants to use those revenues to expand access to health care and education and get people out from under crushing student debt burdens isn’t all that salient to them. And when they are asked for their opinions about the issues of the day, they’re happy to offer mendacious excuses for why they shouldn’t have to pay their fair share.

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CEOs of major companies who donate to abortion ban politicians.

Check out other recent posts on Eyes on the Ties,including an expose on the hedge fund-backed thing tank that published a blog post sympathizing with the killer of the Christchurch attack (our post invited a response from the powerful Partnership for NYC) and our piece on the major banks and hedge funds that sponsored an NYC awards ceremony for Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro (under pressure, Bolsonaro canceled his trip to the event).

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The rich aren’t merely different from you and me. … They’re ridiculous!

I mean the uber-rich, the billionaire barons of Wall Street who literally live above the real world and are clueless about the gross inequality their financial schemes are creating. Take Kenneth Griffin, a hedge fund tycoon who’s the latest gold medal champion of conspicuous consumption. He just paid an obscene $238 million for a sprawling 24,000-square-foot New York City penthouse located 79 stories above street level at Central Park South — a strip nicknamed “Billionaire Row.” Griffin’s splurge on three floors of the luxury building is the most expensive residential purchase in U.S. history, exceeding the excesses of robber barons in the Gilded Age.

Adding to the overindulgence, he will live in his mansion in the sky only occasionally, for he also has a little $60 million penthouse in Miami, a backup $122 million mansion in London and posh crash pads elsewhere. Griffin is the poster child for that disgraceful Trump-GOP tax cut for the superrich, which they passed by claiming that beneficiaries like Griffin would put their windfall into jobs and wage increases for the working class.

Interestingly, his exclusive new skyscraper residence replaces a modest, 20-story building of affordable, rent-controlled apartments where dozens of middle-class tenants lived. All of them were evicted by the corporate developers to provide opulent digs for a few house-hopping billionaires. That ought to be illegal, but instead a state law specifically empowers high-dollar landlords to toss out middle-class and low-income tenants, demolish their apartments and put up a swanky new building. If you wonder where inequality and America’s affordable-housing crisis comes from … there it is.

Yet, Griffin is so out of touch with reality that he has complained that rich elites like him have “insufficient influence” in politics. Really, Ken? Who had the political clout to eject dozens of families from their homes?

Once upon a time, there was a place where the prevailing ethic of the very richest people was that monetary self-indulgence was tacky, and they had an awareness that wealth was a matter of good fortune, carrying with it an obligation to the Common Good.

Believe it or not, that place was the USA! Where did it go?

The prevailing ethic of today’s billionaires club is one of entitlement, superiority and grandiosity — including flaunting their wealth like the robber barons of old. They’ve contrived a new Gilded Age of plutocratic privilege, with the same sort of excesses as the old one, erecting ostentatiously enormous residences. For example, a ludicrously large “house” is now under construction in Florida for one of our modern-day barons, boasting 11 kitchens, five swimming pools, and a 30-car garage.

A monument to garish greed.

Worse, the billionaire class is asserting its sense of plutocratic privilege by weaponizing their huge fortunes to get more for themselves at the expense of the rest of us. They’ve been spending massively (and often secretly) to build a culture of inequality across our land, using such ploys as the Republicans’ deplorable trillion-dollar tax giveaway to the rich. To their dismay, however, America’s workaday majority is rebelling, with newly elected democratic populists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposing a top tax rate of 70 percent on incomes above $10 million. “Oh, the horror!” shrieked billionaires like computer magnate Michael Dell: “Name a country where that’s worked,” he demanded dismissively.

Okay, Michael: How about the United States?

Yes, between the end of World War II in 1945 and Ronald Reagan’s start of coddle-the-rich government in 1981, the top tax rate never fell below 70 percent — and that was a period of unparalleled growth and prosperity for America’s middle class.

Dell, who lives in a sprawling 33,000-square-foot house with all the charm of a shopping mall, confuses value with money and has no grasp of the essential richness of American egalitarianism. We should not be listening to people like him (much less be governed by them) just because they are rich.

Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/watch-this-historian-call-out-davos-elite-to-their-faces-stop-talking-about-philanthropy-and-pay-higher-taxes/

While the private jets have mostly left the airport outside of Davos, Switzerland following the conclusion of this year’s World Economic Forum, a little noticed exchange that took place during the annual gathering has picked up steam in recent days showing what it looks like when some of the world’s richest people are confronted by someone willing to call literal “bullshit” on the we-can-save-the-world-with-charity mantra that dominates among the global elite.

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If the world’s richest and most powerful are worried about a so-called popular “backlash” in response to the global economic system they defend—and largely control—Rutger Berman, a Dutch historian and author of the book Utopia for Realists, during a panel last week titled “The Cost of Inequality,” said the pathway is not complicated. “The answer,” he said, “is very simple: Just stop talking about philanthropy, and start talking about taxes.”

“I mean we can talk for a very long time about all these stupid philanthropy schemes,” Bregman added. “We can invite [U2 frontman] Bono once more. But, come on, we’ve got to be talking about taxes. That’s it. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion.”

Watch the following clip put out by Now This:

Embedded video

NowThis

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@nowthisnews

‘It feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water.’ — This historian wasn’t afraid to confront the billionaires at Davos about their greed

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4:33 PM - Jan 28, 2019

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Also on the Davos panel with Bregman was Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International. Just last week, as the WEF summit was just opening, Oxfam released a report on global inequality showing that just26 billionaires now own as much wealth as the world’s 3.8 poorest billion people.

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“We have a tax system that leaks so much, that allows $170 billion of money every year to be taken to tax havens and to be denied the developing countries that need that money most,” said Byanyima during the panel. “So we have to look at the business model, and we have to look at the role of governments to tax and plow back money into people’s lives.”

As the video clip began to go viral in the wake of the Davos’ gathering, the media team for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who has continued to put global inequality and the idea of a “rigged” economy at the heart of his political message—snagged the central claims of Bregman’s remarks and on Tuesday put out this version:

Embedded video

Bernie Sanders

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@SenSanders

We have a rigged tax code that has essentially legalized tax-dodging for large corporations and the world's wealthiest individuals. It is time to end these egregious loopholes and make the wealthy pay their fair share.

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12:18 PM - Jan 29, 2019

4,349 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

“We have a rigged tax code that has essentially legalized tax-dodging for large corporations and the world’s wealthiest individuals,” said Sanders. “It is time to end these egregious loopholes and make the wealthy pay their fair share.”

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https://www.alternet.org/while-rest-world-burned-billionaires-made-more-money-2017-any-other-year-history

During a year in which so much of the world faced deep poverty, the corrosive effects of austerity, and extreme weather caused by the worsening human-caused climate crisis—from devastating hurricanes to deadly wildfires and floods—one class of individuals raked in more money in 2017 than any other year in recorded history: the world's billionaires.

"No money for health or infrastructure, all the money in the world for yachts."

—Josh Shepperd

According to the Swiss bank UBS's fifth annual billionaires report published on Friday, billionaires across the globe increased their wealth by $1.4 trillion last year—an astonishing 20 percent—bringing their combined wealth to $8.9 trillion.

"The past 30 years have seen far greater wealth creation than theGilded Age," the UBS report notes. "That period bred generations of families in the U.S. and Europe who went on to influence business, banking, politics, philanthropy, and the arts for more than 100 years."

UBS estimates that the world now has a total of 2,158 billionaires, with 179 billionaires created last year. The United States alone is home to 585 billionaires—the most in the world—up from 563 in 2017.

Meanwhile, according to a June report by U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Philip Alston, 18.5 million Americans live in extreme poverty and "5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty."

A significant percentage of the "newly created" billionaires are hardly the self-made men—and they are overwhelmingly men—of popular lore. According to UBS, 40 of the 179 new billionaires created last year inherited their wealth—a trend that has driven an explosion of wealth inequality over the past several decades.

According to UBS, this trend will continue to accelerate over the next 20 years, given that there are currently 701 billionaires over the age of 70.

"A major wealth transition has begun. Over the past five years (2012–2017), the sum passed by deceased billionaires to beneficiaries has grown by an average of 17 percent each year," the UBS report concludes. "Over the next two decades we expect a wealth transition of $3.4 trillion worldwide—almost 40 percent of current total billionaire wealth."

https://www.alternet.org/they-think-it-would-be-fun-run-newspaper-billionaires-buying-media-another-step-toward-oligarchy

FAIR

 announcement that Time magazine would be bought by software CEO Marc Benioff highlighted the growing trend of billionaires buying up media outlets. While media moguls have always been wealthy—with press barons (Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, Donald Newhouse, etc.) still well-represented on Forbes’ running list of the world’s billionaires—what distinguishes this new breed of press magnate is that they bought their media properties with fortunes made in other industries.

Some, like Benioff, come out of the tech industry; tech tycoons like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, eBay’s Pierre Omidyar and Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs have profited from a tech boom (or bubble) that gives them plenty of cash to spend. Others come out of the financial sector, which has doubled its share of the US economy over the past 70 years. Real estate developer Mort Zuckerman—who owned The Atlantic from 1980–1999, the Daily News from 1993–2017, and still owns US News & World Report, which he bought in 1984—was a harbinger of non-media money coming into the media sector.

Wherever their money comes from, the new moguls’ interest in buying up outlets is generally less the direct profit involved—media profits are typically declining as the old local monopoly model erodes—and more the power that comes with control of the public conversation. Being a latter-day Citizen Kane is a personal ego boost, to be sure, and provides a platform for an individual ideology—whether it’s Philip Anschutz’s social conservatism or Omidyar’s civil libertarianism.

But it also can be a tool to advance more personal interests: Sheldon Adelson is a fervent supporter of Israel and its Likud Party, but he bought a Las Vegas paper when it was running critical coverage of a lawsuit that threatened to shut him out of the gambling business. Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Postinstantly made him the most powerful media figure in the nation’s capital—a handy position to be in when your company is seeking multi-billion-dollar government contracts.

Whatever the motivation, billionaires buying up media is another step toward oligarchy, as a handful of super-wealthy individuals assume power over crucial news outlets, both locally and nationally.

Research: John McCullough

Billionaire

Media Owned Net Worth Source of Wealth

Jeff BezosWashington Post$112 billionAmazonWarren BuffettBuffalo News,

Omaha World-Herald,

Business Wire, etc.$84 billionFinanceSheldon AdelsonLas Vegas Review-Journal$39 billionCasinosLaurene Powell JobsThe Atlantic$19 billionApple

Philip :{Anschutz Weekly Standard, Washington Examiner,

Oklahoman,

Colorado Springs Gazette$13}:billionOil

Pierre OmidyarThe Intercept$11 billioneBay

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Patrick Soon-ShiongLA Times,

San Diego Union-Tribune$8 billionBiotech

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Marc BenioffTime$5 billionTech

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Mort ZuckermanUS News & World Report$2.8 billionReal estate

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Glen TaylorMinnesota Star-Tribune$2.6 billionPrinting

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John HenryBoston Globe$2.5 billionFinance

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Joe MansuetoInc., Fast Company$2.5 billionFinance

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USA oligarch study:

https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study

...

I reached out to Gilens and Page (2014) to see what they made of the emerging critique of their work, and in particular the one included in the Bashir and Branham/Soroka/Wlezien papers.

Gilens made four main points. First, the definition of "rich" here is "at the 90th percentile of the income distribution." Households at the 90th percentile currently make $160,000 a year. They're rich, for sure, but not superrich. It's impractical to use surveys to measure the opinions of the ultra rich (millionaires, billionaires), but Gilens argues that their opinions would diverge from the middle class more dramatically. That might be, but it's somewhat orthogonal to the claims about the influence of the 90th percentile made in the original Gilens/Page paper.

Second, he insists that the issues where the rich win despite middle-class opposition are important ones relating to redistribution and economic policy. But Branham, Soroka, and Wlezien found that win rates for the rich weren't significantly different between economic and social issues.

Third, he writes that even though the middle class and rich agree on most things, "a political system that responds to the preferences of average citizens is profoundly different from one in which average citizens get their way only when they happen to agree with the preferences of the well to-do." This is a fair point, but again, the average citizen does not onlywin when they agree with the well-to-do. When they disagree, they win about half the time anyway.

Finally, Gilens argues that the use of "win rates" by Branham, Soroka, and Wlezien is misleading. By focusing on whether majorities of each group support a policy, they ignore gradations in the level of support. He also takes issue with them lumping in wins that consisted of a policy not passing — pretty common in a system with strong status quo bias, like American politics — with ones that consisted of a policy passing, a much rarer event:

When the rich (but not the middle-class) favor a policy, the policy is adopted 37 percent of the time; when the middle-class (but not the rich) favor a policy, the policy is adopted 26 percent of the time. Conversely, when the rich (but not the middle-class) oppose a policy, the policy fails 74 percent of the time and when the middle-class (but not the rich) oppose a policy, the policy fails 63 percent of the time."

In other words, the tiny gap in win rates gets somewhat wider when you break it down a little. Branham, Soroka, and Wlezien say this criticism misses the point. "While the rich do slightly better when explicitly taking into account the status quo, the rich still do not dominate the middle," they note. The middle class still gets its preferred policies enacted 26 percent of the time even when the rich are opposed. The picture Gilens and Page painted of a world where the opinions of the middle class literally count for nothing doesn't hold up.

"Our argument is not that American democracy is perfect," they say in a prepared response to Gilens. "Our paper responds to a specific claim made by Gilens and Page, namely, that when a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose." That contention, they argue, is vastly overstated.

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wolff says via oxfam that increase in uber wealth 4k billioaires wd lift all out of extreme poverty  1.90/day

https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2018-01-22/richest-1-percent-bagged-82-percent-wealth-created-last-year

Richest 1 percent bagged 82 percent of wealth created last year - poorest half of humanity got nothing

Published: 

22 January 2018

Eighty-two percent of the wealth generated last year went to the richest one percent of the global population, while the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their wealth, according to a new Oxfam report released today.  The report is being launched as political and business elites gather for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

‘Reward Work, Not Wealth’ reveals how the global economy enables a wealthy elite to accumulate vast fortunes while hundreds of millions of people are struggling to survive on poverty pay.

• Billionaire wealth has risen by an annual average of 13 percent since 2010 – six times faster than the wages of ordinary workers, which have risen by a yearly average of just 2 percent. The number of billionaires rose at an unprecedented rate of one every two days between March 2016 and March 2017.
• It takes just four daysfor a CEO from one of the top five global fashion brands to earn what a Bangladeshi garment worker will earn in her lifetime. In the US, it takes slightly over one working day for a CEO to earn what an ordinary worker makes in a year.
• It would cost $2.2 billion a yearto increase the wages of all 2.5 million Vietnamese garment workers to a living wage. This is about a third of the amount paid out to wealthy shareholders by the top 5 companies in the garment sector in 2016.

Oxfam’s report outlines the key factors driving up rewards for shareholders and corpo

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https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2016/10/liberal-big-money-is-pouring-into-elections/

If you think campaign finance is just a right-wing billionaires’ spending spree, take another look. Liberal money has been pouring into federal elections in recent years.

In 2012, when post-Citizen United money started flowing in earnest, wealthy Republicans took the leading roles. The number of individuals making contributions of $1 million or more grew from 16 in 2010 to 108 in 2012. That year, 69 percent of the $380 million coming from the top 100 individual donors was conservative money.

This election, liberal benefactors have worked to close the gap. So far this cycle, about 40 percent of the $558 million provided by the top 100 donors has come from Democrats.

In fact, seven of the 10 biggest donors this cycle are liberal, with the top slot occupied by climate change activist Tom Steyer. The San Francisco billionaire has spent a total of about $39 million so far, with most of it going to his own super PAC, NextGen Climate Action. NextGen, in turn, has spent more than $4.5 million opposing GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Now, don’t get us wrong: Most of the big money goes to outside groups like super PACs, and conservative groups are outspending liberal ones by almost two-to-one. But individual liberal donors come close to holding their own versus conservative ones in the upper reaches of those who have given most.

More from Dems or less from Republicans?

While liberal megadonors have gained ground this cycle over the last presidential election, the 2014 midterms saw them actually out in front: 61.5 percent of funds from the 100 biggest individual donors came from liberals; conservatives on the list gave just $112 million, roughly, of the $303 million total.

Current top donor Tom Steyer has been making small contributions since the early 1990s, but he wasn’t close to making the top donors roster until 2014, when he forked over $75 million. That was twice as much as second-place donor Michael Bloomberg, even though the New York news mogul had doubled his outlays from $14 million in 2012 to $28.5 million — most of which went to his super PAC, Independence USA PAC. And it was almost seven times the sum given by the biggest conservative megadonor, Paul Singer.

Campaign Finance Institute Executive Director Michael Malbin said top liberal donors may have arrived on the scene more slowly because they took more time to learn how to exploit the new landscape and build their own full-blown political staffs. Unlike Steyer and Bloomberg, who were using their own super PACs, conservative donors were giving to large existing outside spending groups such as American Crossroads in 2012.

Public Citizen lobbyist Craig Holman said another factor was the “Obama Phenomenon,” which allowed Democrats to avoid relying on large scale donations in 2012.

“Obama excelled at candidate fundraising,” Holman said. “Though he also made use of super PACs — where megadonors contribute — most of his money came in direct and limited candidate contributions. Super PACs were not the chief fundraising vehicles for Democrats until 2014.”

In a marked difference with then-GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s campaign, 43 percent of President Barack Obama’s $540 million in individual contributions came from donations of $200 or less in 2012.

Big liberal donations seem to have accelerated even more this cycle.

New York financier Donald Sussman, long a source of largess in Democratic politics, had only given $1.6 million by the end of the 2012 cycle, but has already spent about $26 million so far this cycle. Most of that has gone to Priorities USA Action in support of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Money from liberal megadonors may be on the rise this cycle “because they are aghast at the thought of a Trump presidency and are putting their money where there brains and hearts are,” said Miriam Galston, a law professor at George Washington University.

That’s what has brought Hungarian-born investor George Soros out of his self-imposed dormancy as a big donor since his vigorous, but unsuccessful, 2004 effort against former President George W. Bush. Soros had said Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz are “doing the work of ISIS.” 

This cycle to date, he has given $17 million, mainly to Priorities USA Action and to House Majority PAC.

So where are the conservative megadonors?

Republicans lost two of their biggest donors in 2013. Texas homebuilder Bob J. Perry and a fellow Texan, Harold Simmons, gave a combined $50 million in the last presidential election cycle, mostly to conservative outside groups such as American Crossroads and Restore Our Future (the pro-Romney super PAC) in 2012. But both passed away the next year.

Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson is still around, but he has been relatively quiet until now.

In the 2012 cycle, Adelson dumped a total of $93 million into the system, making him by far the single biggest individual donor.

The GOP billionaire wrote several $5 million checks to Winning our Future, a super PAC backing former House Speaker Newt Gingrich‘s presidential bid. When Gingrich dropped out of the race, Adelson quickly shifted gears and continued funding Restore our Future and American Crossroads.

This year, he halted at a mere $1.7 million until summer, when he and his wife Miriam each gave $10 million to the Senate Leadership Fund to back Republican Senate candidates.

Adelson has recently committed to giving more than $40 million by the end of this cycle to super PACs supporting congressional bids. And two GOP operatives told the *Guardian* that Adelson had given $10 million to a 501(c)(4) group called One Nation this year, though the group has not confirmed that. The “social welfare” organization isn’t required to disclose its donors.

That group is the successor to Crossroads GPS, a dark money outfit masterminded by GOP operative Karl Rove that was very active in previous election cycles but faded as it became mired in a long battle with the IRS. One Nation has already spent at least $25 million on broadcast time this cycle, according to an analysis of FCC political ad buy records, but FEC data shows only about $1.5 million in expenditures by the group because its spending prior to early September didn’t have to be reported to the agency.

One Nation and other 501(c) groups demonstrate a major caveat to any list of top donors: Unless there’s a leak, there’s no way to know whether individuals are giving heavily to nondisclosing groups.

Adelson appears finally to be coming off the sidelines in the presidential contest, though: He has recently pledged at least $25 million to a pro-Trump dark money group, 45Committee, and an associated super PAC, Future45, according to Politico. The groups are run by Todd Ricketts, whose family owns the Chicago Cubs and has a history of big Republican donations; he’s urging other Republicans to fall in line. According to *CNN*, a Ricketts family insider said the family now has $35 million in the bank thanks to Adelson and is planning on boosting the number up to $70 million exclusively for the presidential bid.

“There is a substantial appetite for a nondisclosing vehicle, because it’s embarrassing to support Trump,” a GOP finance insider told Politico. “There are more donors who are willing to support Donald anonymously than with their names on it.”

Ironically, earlier in the year, the Ricketts family helped lead the #NeverTrump movement, giving millions to Our Principles PAC in an effort to stop the combative billionaire from winning the Republican nomination. And they weren’t alone in not supporting Trump — which makes this cycle far different from 2012, when the biggest conservative spenders almost unanimously funneled the majority of their dollars to super PACs of similar purpose, American Crossroads and Restore Our Future, to attack President Obama and support Romney.

Another big donor to Our Principles? New York hedge funder Singer, who had spent $3.7 million, mostly on congressional elections, by the end of 2012; he has spent about $19.7 million already in 2015-16.

Earlier this year, Singer gave $5 million to Conservative Solutions PAC in support of former Republican candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and $2.5 million to Our Principles PAC, attacking Trump.

Singer still has not joined the Trump bandwagon. Since the Republican primaries ended, he’s been focusing entirely on congressional bids, records show.

One of the few Republican top contributors who declared relatively early for the GOP nominee is another hedge fund manager, Robert Mercer. As the biggest conservative donor this cycle, Mercer has given $22.6 million so far, more than three times the $6 million he invested four years ago.

He began 2015 by dumping $11 million into an outside group backing Cruz called Keep the Promise I and then focused mainly on funding down-ticket races until after the super PAC refurbished itself as Make America Number 1 in late June 2016. The New Yorker has since given additional $2 million to the super PAC aiming to “defeat crooked Hillary.“

Mercer’s daughter Rebekah Mercer has been running the anti-Hillary group since September.

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http://individual-contributors.insidegov.com/

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http://ecowatch.com/2016/01/19/global-wealth-gap/

ere 62 people own the same amount of wealth as the world’s poorest 3.6 billion people, according to an Oxfam report published on Monday. This number has fallen dramatically from 388 as recently as 2010 and 80 last year.

The above chart shows what size transport the billionaires would fit on. Photo credit: Oxfam

The report, An Economy for the 1 Percent, found that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010.

“This 41 percent drop has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period,” Oxfam said. “Meanwhile the wealth of the richest 62 has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76 trillion.”

Using data from Credit Suisse, Oxfam also found that the richest 1 percent now has as much wealth as the rest of the world combined.

“It is simply unacceptable that the poorest half of the world population owns no more than a small group of the global super-rich—so few, you could fit them all on a single coach,” Mark Goldring, Oxfam Great Britain chief executive, said.

The report comes ahead of the World Economic Forum, an annual gathering of financial and political elites in Davos, Switzerland, which will take place Jan. 20 to Jan. 23.

“World leaders’ concern about the escalating inequality crisis has so far not translated into concrete action to ensure that those at the bottom get their fair share of economic growth,” Goldring said. “In a world where one in nine people go to bed hungry every night we cannot afford to carry on giving the richest an ever bigger slice of the cake.

“It is no longer good enough for the richest to pretend that their wealth benefits the rest of us when the facts show that the recent explosion in the wealth of the super-rich has come at the expense of the poorest.

“Ending extreme poverty requires world leaders to tackle the growing gap between the richest and the rest which has trapped hundreds of millions of people in a life of poverty, hunger and sickness.”

62 billionaires own as much as the poorest half of the world's population, Oxfam reports https://t.co/Vastbkwkzn pic.twitter.com/H4iuGxN2y4

— Press Association (@PA) January 18, 2016

The wealth of the richest 62 was calculated using Forbes‘ billionaires list. The list of 62 includes Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, the Koch brothers and the Walmart heirs.

David and Charles Koch, principle owners of Koch Industries, are tied for sixth place on Forbes’ billionaire list with each having an estimated net worth of $42.9 billion. The Koch brothers stand out with the second largest private company by revenue in the U.S.

“Few outside business circles know … how pervasive their company’s industrial influence is on our everyday lives,” explained Popular Mechanics.

The Rolling Stone reported:

“The volume of Koch Industries’ toxic output is staggering. According to the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute, only three companies rank among the top 30 polluters of America’s air, water and climate: ExxonMobil, American Electric Power and Koch Industries.

Thanks in part to its 2005 purchase of paper-mill giant Georgia-Pacific, Koch Industries dumps more pollutants into the nation’s waterways than General Electric and International Paper combined. The company ranks 13th in the nation for toxic air pollution. Koch’s climate pollution, meanwhile, outpaces oil giants including Valero, Chevron and Shell. Across its businesses, Koch generates 24 million metric tons of greenhouse gases a year.”

And they’ve used their vast wealth to back candidates and legislation that weaken environmental regulations that safeguard human health. Their network of conservative mega-donors, or the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, raised $400 million in the 2012 election, and they plan to spend $889 million for the 2016 presidential race, according to the The Washington Post.

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http://www.nytimes.com/**2015/08/**02/us/small-pool-of-rich-donors-dominates-election-giving.html

Fewer than four hundred families are responsible for almost half the money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign, a concentration of political donors that is unprecedented in the modern era.

The vast majority of the $388 million backing presidential candidates this year is being channeled to groups that can accept unlimited contributions in support of candidates from almost any source. The speed with which such “super PACs” can raise money — sometimes bringing in tens of millions of dollars from a few businesses or individuals in a matter of days — has allowed them to build enormous campaign war chests in a fraction of the time that it would take the candidates, who are restricted in how much they can accept from a single donor.

Super PACs supporting Jeb Bush have raised over $108 million dollars.‘Super PACs’ Spent Millions Before Candidates Announced, Filings ShowJULY 31, 2015

video The Age of Super PACsJULY 7, 2015

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas at an Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday.First Draft: The Man Behind the $10 Million Donation to a Ted Cruz ‘Super PAC’JULY 31, 2015

Jeb Bush spoke at the National Urban League convention in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Friday.First Draft: Mysterious $1 Million Donor Helps Bush ‘Super PAC’ Meet Fund-Raising GoalJULY 31, 2015

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey spoke with guests gathered for a campaign event at a sports bar-restaurant in Davenport, Iowa, this week.First Draft: Chris Christie ‘Super PAC’ Raises $11 Million From a Handful of DonorsJULY 31, 2015

Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida participated in a town hall-style meeting in Gorham, N.H., last week.First Draft: Familiar Names Gave Big to Jeb Bush-Aligned ‘Super PAC’JULY 31, 2015

Marco Rubio and Norman Braman at a bipartisan rally for Israel in 2012. Positions on Israel helped bring them together.Billionaire Lifts Marco Rubio, Politically and PersonallyMAY 9, 2015

Robert MercerHedge-Fund Magnate Robert Mercer Emerges as a Generous Backer of CruzAPRIL 10, 2015

Who Is Running for President?JAN. 30, 2015

A New York Times analysis of Federal Election Commission reports and Internal Revenue Service records shows that the fund-raising arms race has made most of the presidential hopefuls deeply dependent on a small pool of the richest Americans. The concentration of donors is greatest on the Republican side, according to the Times analysis, where consultants and lawyers have pushed more aggressively to exploit the looser fund-raising rules that have fueled the rise of super PACs. Just 130 or so families and their businesses provided more than half the money raised through June by Republican candidates and their super PACs.

GRAPHIC

Million-Dollar Donors in the 2016 Presidential Race

More than 30 individuals or corporations have given $1 million or more, based on the super PACs that have filed so far.

OPEN GRAPHIC

“The question is whether we are in a new Gilded Age or well beyond it — to a Platinum Age,” said Michael J. Malbin, president of the Campaign Finance Institute, which tracks the flow of campaign money.

The intensifying reliance on big money in politics mirrors the concentration of American wealth more broadly. In an era when a tiny fraction of the country’s population has accumulated a huge proportion of its wealth, the rich have also been empowered by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and other regulatory changes to spend more on elections.

To peruse the top donors in presidential politics is to take a cross section of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. At least 67 are billionaires or married to one, according to Forbes. Some of the donors inherited wealth, but many are self-made: publicity-shy investors who earned billions in high-frequency trading, oilmen made rich by the fracking boom, and entrepreneurs whosebets in the health care industry have made them both wealthy and politically connected. There are polo enthusiasts, sports team owners and even presidents.

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“In the donor world, it is primarily a love of economic freedom,” said Chart Westcott, a Dallas private equity investor who has contributed $200,000 to Unintimidated PAC, a group backing Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. “That’s the biggest drive for most donors — more prosperity for the country as a whole, as well as for themselves.”

Editorial: Republicans Audition for Big Money JULY 31, 2015

At least $13.5 million of the $20 million raised by Mr. Walker’s super PAC came from just four donors: the Wisconsin roofing billionaire and union foe Diane Hendricks; the Ricketts family of Nebraska and Illinois; the New York investor Len Blavatnik; and the Uihlein family of Illinois, whose members descend from the founders of the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company.

Out of the $16 million raised by Conservative Solutions PAC, which is supporting Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, $12.5 million came from just four donors, including Norman Braman, a billionaire auto dealer and longtime patron of Mr. Rubio, and the tech investor Larry Ellison.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a favorite of the Tea Party movement, has raised the most cash from the fewest donors. A collection of super PACs supporting Mr. Cruz raised $37 million, nearly all of it from three families. Robert Mercer, a deeply private hedge fund investor from New York, contributed $11 million, making him the top known political donor in the country so far this election cycle.

The Wilks family of Texas, which earned billions in the fracking boom, gave $15 million to back Mr. Cruz’s bid. Toby Neugebauer, a private equity investor in Puerto Rico — a home he adopted two years ago that has more favorable tax laws — gave $10 million.

Continue reading the main story

First Draft Newsletter

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The super PAC set up by allies of Jeb Bush collected by far the most money, $103 million, given by thousands of donors. But a relatively small number provided the bulk. At least 26 individuals or companies contributed more than $1 million to the group, including Mike Fernandez, a Cuban-American billionaire who with his family gave more than $3 million; Francis Rooney, a former ambassador to the Vatican, who gave more than $2 million; and Helen Schwab, wife of the investor Charles R. Schwab, who gave $1.5 million.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s super PAC, Priorities USA, brought in $15 million, most of it from nine donors giving $1 million each. But Mrs. Clinton and the other Democratic candidates have raised most of their cash directly to their campaigns, from a much larger number of donors giving relatively smaller checks.

A few donors, with strong ties to various Republican circles, gave to more than one candidate: Annette Simmons, widow of the billionaire and major Republican donor Harold Simmons, gave $100,000 each to groups backing Mr. Walker and Mr. Bush.

Many of the country’s biggest donors are not only financial peers but also friends, members of an elite class of contributors who gather at events like the Club for Growth’s annual Palm Beach retreat on the right, and the closed-door meetings of the Democracy Alliance on the left. Almost half live within a few metropolitan areas, sometimes in the same buildings: near Dallas, Houston and New York City, or across the sunny sprawl of southern Florida.

Photo

Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, also contributed to the Conservative Solutions PAC. Credit Kimberly White/Getty Images

But millions of dollars also came from corporate entities with no clear link to a known individual or business: One million-dollar donor to the pro-Bush super PAC is Jasper Reserves, a limited liability corporation established two years ago in West Virginia, where records provided few clues about its owners.

Big donors are not only patrons of the candidates but also confidantes, with great access to the candidates — and, sometimes, business before them.

Mr. Braman has previously subsidized Mr. Rubio’s salary, and employed his wife. Mr. Fernandez, who became a billionaire after building several health care companies, emailed with Mr. Bush often when he was governor of Florida to ask about doing business with the state, Mr. Bush’s emails show.

The largest single donation to America Leads, a group supporting Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, came from a Boston investor seeking to build a $4 billion casino resort there. At least five donors to Mr. Walker’s super PAC are companies that received hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid from Wisconsin’s economic development agency, according to state records.

Continue reading the main story

GRAPHIC

Which Presidential Candidates Are Winning the Money Race

See how the latest fund-raising numbers from the campaigns and outside groups stack up.

OPEN GRAPHIC

The findings also hint at two sides to the Supreme Court’s multiyear drive to deregulate the nation’s campaign finance rules, which have whittled away at limits on giving by the rich. Super PACs, unleashed by the Citizens United decision, have become de facto campaign arms, increasingly undertaking the core costs — advertising, polling and travel, for example — once assumed by candidates, who are limited to raising $2,700 per donor.

“The 2016 presidential candidates and their individual-candidate super PACs are wiping out the nation’s anticorruption candidate contribution limits,” said Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, which favors tighter limits on political money.

But the looser rules for super PACs have also helped expand the pool of candidates, letting a small number of very wealthy people jump-start contenders who might otherwise not make it to the first primary contests next year. The super PAC backing Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, raised almost all of its money — about $3 million — from the poultry magnate Ronald Cameron, for example. A Philadelphia-area options trader and a San Francisco tech investor have provided more than half the money to super PACs supporting Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.

“Most start-up operations need an angel investor: someone who believes in the project and the candidate and puts money in to make it viable,” said David Keating, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, which pushes for fewer limits on campaign giving. He said the potential for corruption was minimal.

“Are they going to return people’s phone calls? Yeah, I’m sure they’re going to return people’s phone calls,” Mr. Keating said. “But I don’t think it’s going to drive policy.”

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/12/gop-billionaires-cant-seem-to-buy-this-election.html

...

Rove’s 2012 crash is having profound effects on the 2016 Republican primary. To begin with, George W. Bush’s Brain is no longer considered much of a brain. “I gave Rove $500,000. What did I get for it? Nothing!” Langone told me. Two of Rove’s most generous 2012 funders, Texas billionaires Bob Perry and Harold Simmons, have since passed away, and their heirs have turned off the cash spigot. “Everyone is still shocked Romney lost,” says Simmons’s widow, Annette. “I haven’t committed at all.” So far this year, Crossroads has raised just $784,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Rove insists he’s still a player. “We’ll be involved in the Senate races,” he told me. “Depending on who the presidential nominee is, we may be involved in that, but that’s a long way off.” What Rove is not is anywhere near the center of the Republican Party. “But for his perch on Fox News, Karl would be in political Siberia,” says a top Republican strategist. “The going joke is that he must have a picture of Roger Ailes in his underwear to keep his contract.”

It’s not just that Rove is personally marginalized. Donors have awakened to the realization that topflight consultants can earn millions from campaigns regardless of whether they win. “It bothers a lot of people that politics has become a cottage industry. Everyone is taking a piece of this and a slice of that,” says California winemaker John Jordan, a former Rove donor. “Crossroads treated me like a child with these investor conference calls where they wouldn’t tell you what was really going on. They offered platitudes and a newsletter.”

Working under the assumption that they can support a campaign better themselves, donors are building their own organizations, staffed by operatives who report to them. “A lot of people who felt betrayed in 2012 set out to build political structures,” says Kellyanne Conway, president of the pro–Ted Cruz super-pac Keep the Promise I, which is backed by hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer. Mercer is a prime example of the new breed of activist donor. This presidential cycle, he has donated more than $30 million to a quartet of pro-Cruz super-pacs. A computer scientist by training, Mercer is also part owner of a political data firm called Cambridge Analytica, which boasts on its website that it employs “psychographic profiling” to recruit voters. As a result, Mercer’s pacs have shunned the traditional strategy of saturation TV coverage. Instead, Mercer is focused on targeted radio buys, digital outreach, and field organizing.

The savviest GOP candidates have capitalized on this shift. In fact, Cruz’s campaign fund-raising apparatus seems designed to let donors roll up their sleeves. Cruz contributors can specify how they want their money spent, much in the way universities allow benefactors to earmark their donations for a new science wing or aquatics center. “If you’re a donor, you can say, ‘I want to see this money used for Iowa,’ ” one strategist told me. “It’s a way to entice donors. They look at it like fantasy football.”

The new billionaire-backed operations style themselves as models of superior sophistication. During the last Republican primary, Sheldon Adelson bankrolled Newt Gingrich’s campaign essentially by writing blank checks with little or no oversight. Compare that to the super-pac funded by Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts, who has his own political staff and demands accountability. “I’m used to saying the Ricketts’ spend their super-pac money like it’s their own money — because it is,” the family’s political adviser, Brian Baker, told me.

Or look at the network being built byElliott Management founder Paul Singer. In 2014, Singer created the American Opportunity Alliance, a group of roughly 40 Republican financiers who gather regularly for secret meetings with candidates. This fall, Singer threw his weight behind Marco Rubioand urged his members to do the same. In the general election, Singer will be a player with America Rising, the opposition-research firm headed by Romney’s dark-arts wizard Matt Rhoades. Instead of funding TV ads, Rhoades’s group offers Singer more predictable returns: It is narrowly focused on digging up dirt on Democrats, for example by sending video trackers to events in order to build a library of unflattering material.

It’s all about retaining control. In October, billionaire investor Carl Icahn announced he was launching a $150 million super-pac to lobby for corporate tax reform. “At the risk of being immodest, we have one of the best records on Wall Street. And I like doing things myself,” he told me. “Too many cooks spoil the soup.”

John Jordan now supports Republican candidates through his own super-pac, which applies the lessons he’s learned from winemaking. He, too, is backing Marco Rubio. “I know really well how to sell things. I make my own ads,” Jordan said. “The quality of ads produced by most of the ad-makers is just so bad that they’re ineffective. Have you looked at Jeb’s ads? They’re terrible! It’s unforgivable.”

Perhaps Bush is the perfect case study: The candidate who has underperformed the most is the one with a 2012-style campaign, who steered all his major donors into one super-pac. That organization, Right to Rise USA, is run by the grizzled strategist Mike Murphy, who succeeded in bundling a $100 million war chest and is now finding himself on the receiving end of donor backlash. Last month, for instance, a group of major Bush supporters held a conference call to vent about Murphy after he outlined his strategy in an interview to Bloomberg Politics. “These guys got rip-shit,” said one person briefed on the call.

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Rubio's main backer, Paul Singer, uses his American Opportunity Alliance super PAC to fund "digging up dirt on Democrats, for example by sending video trackers to events in order to build a library of unflattering material."

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Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp—on the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American Politics Hardcover – June 3, 2014

by Kenneth P. Vogel (Author)

http://www.alternet.org/economy/meet-hedge-funders-and-billionaires-who-pillage-under-shield-philanthropy

Meet the Hedge Funders and Billionaires Who Pillage Under the Shield of Philanthropy

For every dollar they give, they take 44 from the rest of us.

By Lynn Stuart Parramore / AlterNet July 29, 2015

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America’s parasitical oligarchs are masters of public relations. One of their favorite tactics is to masquerade as defenders of the common folk while neatly arranging things behind the scenes so that they can continue to plunder unimpeded. Perhaps nowhere is this sleight of hand displayed so artfully as it is at a particular high-profile charity with the nerve to bill itself as itself as “New York's largest poverty-fighting organization.”

British novelist Anthony Trollope once wrote, “I have sometimes thought that there is no being so venomous, so bloodthirsty as a professed philanthropist.”

Meet the benevolent patrons of the Robin Hood Foundation.

Robin Hood in Reverse

The Robin Hood Foundation, named for that green-jerkined hero of redistribution who stole from the rich to give to the poor, is run, ironically, by some of the most rapacious capitalists the country has ever produced — men who make robber barons of previous generations look like small-time crooks. Founded by hedge fund mogul Paul Tudor Jones, the foundation boasts 19 billionaires on its leadership boards and committees, the likes of which include this sample of American plutocracy:

-Hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, who, when he is not being probed for insider trading  (his company, SAC Capital Advisors, pled guilty to securities and wire fraud) is busy throwing parties for himself worthy of a Roman emperor at his Hamptons palace and bragging about his $700 million art collection. He suspends a 13-foot shark in formaldehyde from the ceiling his office, perhaps as an avatar of his business practices.

-Billionaire Home Depot founder Ken Langone, who threatened to turn off the charity donations if Pope Francis dared to continue criticizing capitalism and inequality, and also likened the plight of the wealthy in America to Nazi Germany. The GOP megadonor doesn’t care for bank regulation and it’s no surprise that he is the main booster for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s presidential bid, as his plan to shred Social Security is a fond wish of the tycoon’s.

• Hedge fund billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller, funder of right-wing causes who dedicates himself to spreading deficit hysteria and ginning up generational warfare on college campuses by trying to convince young people that they are being robbed by seniors using Social Security and Medicare. A long-time anti-tax crusader and supporter of such anti-labor enthusiasts as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Druckenmiller warned President Obama that any attempt to tax the rich to pay for social services for the poor would be futile.

By occupation (the more useless and parasitical the better), it comes as no surprise that 12 of the 19 men in leadership positions at the Robin Hood Foundation happen to be hedge fund managers. A group called Hedge Clippers, supported by a coalition of labor unions and community groups and devoted to exposing how billionaires scheme to inflate their wealth and influence, has pointed out in a scathing report that the Robin Hood Foundation has close ties to an organization called the Managed Funds Association (MFA) that — shocker! —lobbies tirelessly for unjustified tax breaks for hedgies. Paul Tudor Jones’s top deputy, John Torell, chairs the MFA, and 31 members of Robin Hood’s governing board and leadership committees are executives at firms that belong to the highest membership levels of the organization.

The MFA was relatively small until 2007, when Congress started eyeing the “carried interest” tax loophole. Then it brought out the heavy artillery to protect elites from paying their fair share. The carried interest loophole is the MFA’s top priority.

The King of Scams

The carried interest loophole, as economist Dean Baker put it, is likely the worst of all the “sneaky and squirrelly ways that the rich use to escape their tax liability.”  It goes down like this: Hedge fund managers brazenly claim they deserve to pay a special low tax rate on the money they earn overseeing the funds they manage because, um, it’s not guaranteed. So they pay 20 percent instead of the 39.6 percent they would pay if the money were taxed as ordinary income. They get very rich from this windfall, just ask Mitt Romney. But you know what? Lots of workers have no guarantee about the money they’ll earn, from people selling cars to the guy who just served you a burger. Do they get a special tax rate? No, they don’t. They pay full freight. In fact, almost nobody’s income is guaranteed. You could get a pay cut tomorrow. Or a pink slip. Do you still pay regular income tax? Yep, you do.

This unfair tax break basically allows hedge fund managers to screw their fellow Americans out of money that could do things the illustrious patrons of the Robin Hood Foundation claim are so dear to their hearts, like building schools and feeding the poor. According to a Congressional Research Service cited in the Hedge Clippers report, closing the carried interest loophole would generate $17 billion a year. How many hungry children in New York City could that feed? All of them?

The loophole makes absolutely no economic or social sense, it’s just a way for the rich to say, hey, we’re powerful enough to lobby for this insanity, so you little people just go ahead and pay for that airport where our private jets are about to land and that road where our Porsches and limos cruise. It’s a middle finger held up to every hard-working person in America. Dirt kicked in the face of the poor.

It’s a driver of inequality and encourages risky speculation on Wall Street. Hillary Clinton, perhaps hoping to ward off the threat of Bernie Sanders, has been making noise about closing the carried interest loophole, which many a politician has made before. Given the cultural focus on inequality and the egregiousness of the policy, it may just be vulnerable. Let’s hope so.

Den of Thieves

The mission statement of the Robin Hood Foundation brays about all the funding it provides for school programs, generating “meaningful results for families in New York's poorest neighborhoods.” Soup kitchens! Homeless shelters! Job training! The tuxedoed tycoons throw money at all these causes “to give New York’s neediest citizens the tools they need to build better lives.”

How far does this largesse actually go toward ameliorating New York’s poverty problem? Unsurprisingly, not very far at all. In fact, as Hedge Clippers points out, the poverty rate in the city has grown over the course of the Robin Hood Foundation’s history, from 20 percent in 1990 to 21.2 percent in 2012.

Guess what’s also grown? The bank accounts of 19 billionaires on the Robin Hood Foundation’s boards, which have ballooned 93 percent since 2008.

Hedge Clippers applied a delicious tactic to expose the hypocrisy at the heart of the Robin Hood Foundation with stark mathematical precision— they used the organizations own metrics as an analytical tool. The foundation is famed for using grantee evaluations, cost-benefit analyses, and performance measures, including a metrics system freakishly named “relentless monetization.” So the Clippers applied these methods to the foundation’s hedge fund backers themselves, systematically exposing the degree to which they increase inequality and poverty.

How bad it is?  A chilling ratio summarizes just how bad— 44:1. That is to say, for every dollar the Robin Hood Foundation hedge fund managers studied give to the organization’s antipoverty efforts, they soak up $44 from the public in the form of tax avoidance and anti-tax advocacy.  The authors of the report believe that to be a conservative estimate.

Take the case of Steve Cohen, he of the shark in formaldehyde, and board member emeritus of the Robin Hood Foundation.

The tally of his recent donations to the foundation: $4,850,000.

The estimated amount he ripped off the public in 2014 by paying special low tax rates: $1,300,000,000.

Quite a difference.

When they aren’t advocating tax swindles, members of the Robin Hood Foundation put in plenty of time fighting fair wages, trying to shred the social safety net, and killing worker protections through their associations with organizations like the Manhattan Institute, the Partnership for New York City (the voice of big business in NYC and a big foe of paid sick leave), and Fix the Debt (a notorious group devoted to crushing Social Security and Medicare).

When you think about it, it looks as if the Robin Hood Foundation members are actively trying to strip the public and strangle working people to such a degree that poverty and nickels thrown by billionaires will be all that’s left of America.  The rest of us will all be living in Sherwood Forest.

The Robin Hood Foundation’s new motto: Increasing poverty is our business.

Lynn Parramore is contributing editor at AlterNet. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of "Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture." She received her Ph.D. in English and cultural theory from NYU, and she serves on the editorial board of Lapham's Quarterly.

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billionaire715

see bundlers, inequality, financial, dark $ ....

The WaPo noted there was some resistence to Jeb’s lobbying reforms in the beltway. No kidding.

This week's news provided an additional counterpoint underscoring why reversing decades of economic policies creating America’s inequality quagmire is so hard. Tuesday was the fifth anniversary of the Dodd-Frank reform law, which was passed to rein in Wall Street excess after 2008’s global financial meltdown.

The White House issued a long release touting the law’s stronger consumer protections, which have stopped commercial banks from gouging customers. It’s collected and paid back $10.1 billion to 17 million people, it said, and tried to make financial institutions more transparent and curb excess risk. The GOP has not fought the law like Obamacare;instead it's blocked one-third of its rules from taking effect, complaining all along that it would harm the economy.

Meanwhile, outsized CEO pay—the most easily understood indice of greed—is still sky high. Two high-profile Wall Streeters, Goldman-Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon—just joined the ranks of the world’s billionaires. So the financial reform law, imperfect as it may be and hated by the GOP, has not exactly been bad for Wall Street's elite.

2015 forbes released its annual Billionaires List this week, with 536 of the world’s 1,826 billionaires residing in the United States. Among those American billionaires, 49 are from Texas.

The list ranked a record number of billionaires this year—a 181-person increase from 2014’s list of 1,645. Aggregate net worth on the list totaled $7.05 trillion this year, with average net worth of individuals on the list coming in at $3.86 billion. Only California and New York had more billionaires than Texas, and of the 49 Texas billionaires, 22 hail from Dallas-Fort Worth.

Among the top 500 of the world’s billionaires are these 16 Texans, listed in order of real-time net worth as of March 4, 2015:

Alice Walton, Fort Worth- #11, $38.1 billion

Michael Dell, Austin – #47, $18.8 billion

Charles Butt, San Antonio – #94, $12 billion

Richard Kinder, Houston – #100, $11.8 billion

Andrew Beal, Dallas – #105, $11.7 billion

Dannine Avara, Houston – #230, $6.2 billion

Scott Duncan, Houston – #230, $6.2 billion

Milane Frantz, Houston – #230, $6.2 billion

Kelcy Warren, Dallas – #230, $6.5 billion

Randa Williams, Houston – #240, $5.8 billion

Ray Lee Hunt, Dallas – #265, $5.5 billion

Robert Rowling, Dallas – #277, $5.6 billion

Jeffery Hildebrand, Houston – #318, $4.6 billion

Trevor Rees-Jones, Dallas – #381, $4.3 billion

Jerry Jones, Dallas – #393, $4.2 billion

H. Ross Perot Sr., Dallas – #462, $3.7 billion

Other Texans on the list are, in order of net worth:

Dan Friedkin, Houston

Ray Davis, Dallas

Mark Cuban, Dallas

John Paul DeJoria, Austin

Richard Rainwater, Fort Worth

Robert Bass, Fort Worth

George Bishop, The Woodlands

John Arnold, Houston

David Bonderman, Fort Worth

Tilman Fertitta, Houston

Timothy Headington, Dallas

Robert McNair, Houston

Drayton McClane Jr., Temple

Fayez Sarofim, Houston

Gerald Ford, Dallas

Rodney Lewis, San Antonio

Edward Bass, Fort Worth

Lee Bass, Fort Worth

Billy Joe “Red” McCombs, San Antonio

Ross Perot Jr., Dallas

Sid Bass, Fort Worth

Herbert Hunt, Dallas

Joe Jamail, Houston

Leslie Alexander, Houston

David Booth, Austin

Darwin Deason, Dallas

Paul Foster, El Paso

Christopher Goldsbury, San Antonio

Todd Wagner, Dallas

Kenny Troutt, Dallas

Dan Wilks, Cisco

Farris Wilks, Cisco

James Leininger, San Antonio

see beef subsidies:

Some of America's biggest welfare ranchers:

David and Charles Koch (Koch Industries)

The brothers hold a half-dozen grazing permits on public land in Montana to go with its 300,000-acre Matador Ranch there. The brothers are tied for fourth place on Forbes 2014 400 Richest People in America list (net worth: $ 42 billion each). The Koch family ($ 89 billion) is #2 on Forbes Richest Families list; Koch Industries is #2 on Forbes America's Largest Private Companies list, ($ 115 billion in sales).

J.R. Simplot Corp.

The largest U.S. public lands ranching entity (with an estimated 2 to 3 million acres of allotments in CA, ID, NV, OR and UT) is #63 on Forbes 2014 list of America's Largest Private Companies ($ 5.8 billion in sales). In 2014, the family was #29 on Forbes list of America’s Richest Families (net worth: $ 8 billion).

Bruce McCaw (McCaw Cellular)

McCaw was #382 on Forbes 400 list of America’s Richest People in 2005 (net worth: $ 925 million). Through his 9 sprawling ranches, he controls a significant number of public grazing leases in ID and possibly NV. One of them (Camas Creek ranch) includes 272,000 acres of Federal grazing allotments in Idaho's Camas Prairie. Grazing permitted to his other ranches could easily double or triple that to a million acres or more.

Barrick Gold

The Canadian mining company is one of the two largest public lands ranchers in NV, ranking 771st on Forbes Global 2000 list of the World’s Biggest Public Companies in 2014, (sales: $ 12.56 billion). Like many other large public lands ranchers, Barrick buys ranches to secure water rights.

Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA)

The supplier of drinking water to Las Vegas is a large NV public lands rancher with an estimated 1 million acres of public grazing allotments. Like Barrick Gold, it, buys up private ranches to gain their water rights.

W. Barron Hilton (Hilton Hotels)

The hotel heir dropped off Forbes Billionaires list (ranked #459 in 2011) as well as its list of the 400 Richest Americans (#144 in 2010), with a net worth of $ 2.5 billion. He died in 2013.

Though records are hard to pin down, Hilton's heirs inherited a ranching operation in the CA-NV border area, which has been known to have vast public lands grazing allotments permitted to it.

Mary Hewlett-Jaffe (Hewlett-Packard)

Jaffe holds the largest BLM public lands grazing permit in central ID and is among the top 15 public lands ranchers in the state (estimated at under 200,000 acres that are said to be in extremely degraded condition, according to sources).

James Barta (Sav-Rx.com)

Barta is not on any Forbes rich lists, but owns one of the largest cattle ranching operations in the U.S., according to his attorneys. Barta holds grazing permits to nearly 900,000 acres of public grazing allotments in connection with two properties: White Horse Ranch (in OR) and Soldier Meadows (in NV). Barta may have additional NV grazing leases through two other ranches in NV, according to Jon Marvel, founder of Western Watersheds Project.

T. Wright Dickinson

Though not on any Forbes list, the Dickinson family is a large public lands rancher, with  grazing permits estimated at more than a half million acres of CO, UT and WY public lands under its LLC, Vermillion Ranches. Dickinson is a former County commissioner and proponent of county efforts to gain control of federal lands, according to the Denver Post.

Stan Kroenke (Kroenke Group) & Ann Walton Kroenke (Walmart)

With just two of his ranches (in MT and WY) totaling 664,000 acres (not including public grazing allotments), Kroenke is one of the ten top land owners in the U.S. In 2014, he ranked #89 on Forbes list of the 400 Richest Americans, #247 on its Billionaires list, and #5 on its list of Richest American Sports Team Owners (net worth: $ 5.8 billion). His wife, Ann Walton Kroenke (net worth: $ 5.6 billion), was #261 on Forbes Billionaires list and #11 on its list of America’s Richest Women.

Family of Robert Earl Holding (Sinclair Oil and hotels)

Forbes ranks the family #87 on its 2014 list of America’s Richest Families (net worth: $ 2.7 billion). With 400,000 acres of land, the family is the 19th largest private land owner in the US, according to the 2014 Land Report 100. This includes land that Forbes reported “may be the largest ranching operation in the Rocky Mountains.” Public grazing leases are associated with some of the family’s WY and possibly MT holdings, according to Jon Marvel, founder of Western Watersheds.

Ted Turner

He's the second largest U.S. land owner (2 million acres in 6 states), is estimated to hold grazing leases in MT and NM (estimated at as much as 300,000 acres), and owns the world's largest bison herd. Forbes ranked him #296 on its 2014 list of the 400 Richest Americans and #818 on its global Billionaires list (net worth: $ 2.2 billion).

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http://www.alternet.org/print/economy/meet-billionaires-using-their-immense-wealth-make-life-miserable-ordinary-americans

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/science/billionaires-with-big-ideas-are-privatizing-american-science.html?_r=0

...

Chronic racial and gender imbalances amongst the super-rich only add to their detachment from the world around them. Despite the glitter and visibility of black and Latino celebrities, black and Latino wealth is the lowest on record. The annual list of America’s richest four-hundred people, generated by Forbes, highlights alarming realities.

Even though they make up half of the U.S. population, only 48 women are on the list. Only one Latino, Jorge Perez, and one African-American, Oprah Winfrey, are on it as well. The list indicates an even starker truth. Even in rapidly diversifying present-day America, close to 100 percent of America’s wealthiest households are white; 96 percent to be exact. These whopping wealth inequities underscore that the super wealthy occupy a world apart from the rest of us, one that is growing more distant.

Reinforced by political access, national economic policy, and their own echo chamber of social networks and media outlets, their world has an outsized influence on and negative consequences for the reality lived by everyone else.

Wealth and its discontents

The latest glimpse into the Oz-like mind of the superrich erupted when Perkins fired off a screed to The Wall Street Journal on January 25. His letter to the editor was sparked by anger at San Francisco’s anti-gentrification protests centered on Google’s private bus network used to ferry employees to the company’s campus 35 miles away. In his note Perkins railed against “progressive radicalism,” and declared that there were “parallels” between Hitler’s Germany and “the progressive war on the American 1 percent, namely the ‘rich.’” Even though Perkins gave a partial apology for some of his words days later, the damage was done. In response to his screed, Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman penned an op-ed titled, “Paranoia of the Plutocrats.”

The problem with Perkins’ paranoia is that he is not alone in it. Despite the fact that the top 1 percent has captured nine out of 10 dollars of all the wealth added to the economy since 2000, there is a pervasive sense that they are the ones facing persecution and denigration. As wealth therapist Jamie Trager-Muney told Politico, “I think that with Occupy Wall Street there was a sense of the heat getting turned up and a feeling of vilification and potential danger.” But as Krugman points out the real danger in America is poverty and inequality. There is “strong evidence that high inequality leads to worse health and higher mortality,” he writes. Being poor, rather than being rich, is what kills.

Regardless of the facts, the issue is that what the rich actually believe about themselves and about everyone else has an excessive impact on American society. As was laid out in a reportlast year by the think tank Demos, wealthy individuals are far more likely vote and contribute to political campaigns. Those making over $150,000 showed up at the polls nearly twice the rate as those making less than $20,000. In 2012, just 41,000 Americans — out of a total population of 310 million — gave $2,600 or more to presidential campaigns that year. But these contributions made up nearly one out of four dollars raised that year meaning that these individuals’ impact on presidential fundraising was 2,500 times greater than their actual percentage of the population.

....http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/great-isolation-1

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oligarchs trash the planet for profit http://ifg.org/pdf/IFG_plutonomy_Part2.pdf

http://bigthink.com/econ201/mobility-hasnt-changed-but-it-means-less-than-it-used-to

The combined wealth of the world's richest 85 people is now equivalent to that owned by half of the world's population – or 3.5 billion of the poorest people – according to a new report from Oxfam.

In a report titled "Working for the Few" released Monday, the global aid and development organization detailed the extent of global economic inequality created by the rapidly increasing wealth of the richest, warning of the major risks it poses to "human progress."

According to the report, 210 people have become billionaires in the past year, joining a select group of 1,426 individuals with a combined net worth of $5.4 trillion.

It added that the wealth of the richest one percent of people in the world now amounts to $110 trillion, or 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world's population.

"This massive concentration of economic resources in the hands of fewer people presents a significant threat to inclusive political and economic systems," the report said....

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/worlds-85-richest-have-same-wealth-3-5-billion-poorest-2D11958883

http://www.alternet.org/print/economy/philanthropy-trouble

AlterNet [1] / By Prashanth Kamalakanthan [2]

How Billionaire 'Philanthropy' Is Fueling Inequality and Helping To Destroy the Country

August 14, 2013  |

Peter Buffett, the second son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, worries that the state of philanthropy in America “just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place.” At meetings of charitable foundations, he says “you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.”

Describing the stunning growth of what he calls a “charitable-industrial complex,” his recent New York Times op-ed reads inconfessional style [3]: “People (including me) who had very little knowledge of a particular place would think that they could solve a local problem.”

An insider’s critique from someone like Peter Buffett is certainly welcome. Charitable giving, after all, has seen a meteoric rise in recent years, virtually unchanged amid a historic global recession. In what the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy calls a “New Gilded Age of Philanthropy,” [4] the ballooning fortunes of the 1% seem to mirror levels of giving by foundations:

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(Source: National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy [4])

As Buffett suggests, this growth in elite largesse, totaling $316 billion [5] in 2012, has done little to combat economic inequality. But the problem isn’t just one of ineffectiveness. A recent paper [6] published in the Journal of Economic Inequality shows philanthropy hasn’t simply failed to meet its goals; it’s made the situation worse.

"Using measures of both absolute and relative inequality,” the study’s authors conclude, “we have shown that philanthropy may actually exacerbate inequality, instead of reducing it.”

It’s hard to believe that all the industrial titans and Wall Street tycoons shelling out billions on charitable projects don’t understand this. They spend their lives swimming in numbers. What, then, might their real goals be? A closer look at how the world’s wealthiest are choosing to give away their money provides clues. While pretending to fix inequality, contemporary philanthropy’s actual role has been to strengthen the arrangements that make gross inequality possible in the first place. It has become a weapon in the class warfare of the 1%, the carrot to win people over to their ideology complementing the stick of political spending to coerce them into the same.

The Koch brothers

David and Charles Koch, together worth $35 billion [7], have perfected this philanthropic misanthropy perhaps better than anyone else. Their Kansas-based Koch Industries is the second largest private company in the country after Cargill, with annual revenues estimated to surpass $100 billion [7]. Together they control [8] thousands of miles of oil pipelines from Alaska to Texas; fertilizers, minerals and biofuels; Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups and Lycra.

A research team at American University [9] found that from 2007 to 2011, Koch foundations gave $41.2 million to 89 nonprofits and sponsored an annual libertarian conference. The report details how Koch Industries’ $53.9 million federal and state lobbying budget routinely goes hand-in-glove with Koch-affiliated nonprofits’ “public advocacy” for reasons having little to do with the public and everything to do with the brothers’ sprawling business interests. Koch lobbyists advocate for bills like the Energy Tax Prevention Act — which sought to roll back the Supreme Court ruling allowing EPA regulation of greenhouse gases — that are then supported in congressional testimony by “experts” from Koch-funded nonprofits.

Though private foundations cannot legally “be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests,” the study’s authors note that IRS enforcement is largely “sporadic and somewhat mysterious,” and even in the case of an investigation communications between the foundation and the government are generally kept from the public. The Koch nonprofit machine has exploited this loophole for all it’s worth, testifying before congressional committees at least 49 times since 2007.

For decades, Koch philanthropy has also waged ideological warfare within U.S. universities, contributing over $30 million to 221 universities since just 2011. Here, the payoff couldn’t be plainer. A 2012 report in Academe documented the Koch-funded coup [10] in Florida State University’s economics department, showing how “in exchange for his ‘gift,’ the donor got to assign specific readings, select speakers brought to campus and instruct them with regard to the focus of their lectures, shape the curriculum with new courses and specify the number of students in the courses, name the program’s director, and initiate a student club.”

The Charles G. Koch Foundation gave FSU $1.5 million to sponsor two assistant professors, fund fellowships and shape curricula promoting free-enterprise doctrine. It then created an advisory board to distribute money to faculty and ensure their work aligned with the foundation’s ideology.

The Kochs have tapped many useful allies, academic and non, in their collegiate ploys. A year before the FSU story, Inside Higher Ed[11] exposed how administrators at Clemson University cultivated the Koch Foundation to build its “Institute for the Study of Capitalism,” receiving $1 million for the effort. BB&T, the financial institution whose former chairman and CEO John Allison heads the Koch-backed Cato Institute, regularly pays universities to chair favorable professors, typically in economics. Cooperative institutions are rewarded with Koch dollars as a bonus. American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop found 10 such universities, where BB&T-chaired professors coincided with Koch cashflow.

Art Pope

James “Art” Pope, a founding board member of the Kochs’ conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, took the brothers’ brand of charitable devastation and concentrated it at the state level. He is, as the New Yorker’s Jane Meyer put it [12], the “conservative multimillionaire [who] has taken control in North Carolina,” a discount retail baron that has used his unrivaled influence as the state’ssingle largest political donor [13] to literally buy his way into office [14]. While his network of conservative foundations continues steering the debate rightward, Pope puts policies in motion as the state’s deputy budget director.

The Institute for Southern Studies [13] has extensively documented how Pope uses his family nonprofit — the John William Pope Foundation, worth nearly $150 million [15] — to pour tax-exempt donations into thinly veiled conservative advocacy groups like the John W. Pope Civitas Institute, the John Locke Foundation and the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. Over the years, these groups have worked closely with Tea Party organizers [16], attacked climate science [17] (and scientists [18]) and generally championed free market principles.

Pope’s is an impressive empire of shell charities: his foundation spends more than two-thirds of its money providing some 90% [19] of the funding for North Carolina’s leading conservative organizations, at most of which he enjoys a leadership role. In 2010, three of these groups — Civitas Action, Real Jobs NC and Americans for Prosperity — banded together with Pope and his family to flood [20] North Carolina’s legislative races and stage the first Republican takeover of the state since 1896 [21].

Since then, Pope’s puppeteering has pushed North Carolina into free-fall, galvanizing the grassroots, Moral Monday [22] opposition that’sspreading across the country [23]. Policies long advocated by Pope foundations are now proposed and enacted on a daily basis, seeking to eliminate corporate and income taxes [24], shrink healthcare coverage [25], gut environmental regulations [26], remove early education opportunities [27], oppose public transit [28] and defund public schools [29] and higher education [30].

It’s this last foray that student groups like the North Carolina Student Power Union [31] are fiercely resisting, mounting a statewide campaign against Art Pope’s involvement in the University of North Carolina system. In exchange for his foundation’s more than two dozen grants over the past 15 years, last year Pope was rewarded [32] with a seat on UNC’s “blue ribbon” panel to craft a five-year strategic plan for the 16-campus system. Students claim the move defies UNC’s mandate for public accountability, reeking of blatant corruption.

Pope is hardly an educator, and his gifts [33] demonstrate a Koch-like determination to indoctrinate college students at any cost, bidding to bring them into the fold while they’re young. His past contributions include $900,000 for pro-free market political science program [34]at North Carolina State University; an attempted $10 million [35] for a UNC program in “Western civilization,” later diverted to football coaches’ salaries after widespread outcry; and a similarly ill-fated $600,000 attempt to launch a constitutional law center [36] led by the director of a Pope-funded nonprofit at North Carolina Central University.

Bill and Melinda Gates

But it’s not just rightwing demagogues who have [21] “drank all the Tea Party they could drink and sniffed all the Koch they could sniff” using charity to further their political agenda. Bill and Melinda Gates’ own liberal-leaning, $36.4 billion [37] charitable foundation, by far the world’s largest, has long been scrutinized for attempting to fix with one hand the problems it creates with another. In 2007, the Los Angeles Times [38] uncovered “hundreds of Gates Foundation investments — totaling at least $8.7 billion, or 41% of its assets… in companies that countered the foundation’s charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy.”

These included endowment holdings in top polluters like ConocoPhillips and Dow Chemical Co., oil refineries and paper mills that sicken the children whose parents the foundation treats for AIDS, and “pharmaceutical companies that price drugs beyond the reach of AIDS patients the foundation is trying to treat.”

The Gates Foundation’s dealings with lifesaving drugs in particular showcase the contradictions of today’s philanthrocapitalism. [39]

Although leading global health campaigners [40] want an end to Big Pharma’s monopoly drug patents to increase affordability in poorer countries, the Gates Foundation opposes any changes to existing intellectual property law. Advocates for loosening IP regulations point out that doing so would both lower prices by encouraging generic competition and enable innovation outside of patent-hoarding companies. This proposal, however, threatens multinational pharmaceutical corporations, well-represented [40] among foundation leadership, as well as monopolistic firms like Microsoft, which as late as 2007 was lobbying the G8 to tighten global intellectual property protection — a move Oxfam has consistently warned [41] spells disaster for the health crisis in the Global South.

The Timesreport traces the effects of this position on the ground, quoting an intellectual property expert [38] who claims the foundation’s stance makes “medicines available only to a narrow spectrum of a rich elite in a developing country” in a form of “pharmaceutical apartheid.” As millions of impoverished AIDS and HIV patients are priced out of the market, lucrative patents allow the world’s top 10 drug companies to collect some $80 billion in profit annually. And Gates sure won’t stop them.

Boards of broken trust

The overtures by Art Pope and the Kochs show how the American university itself has lately emerged as a hub of misanthrope philanthropy, offering both opportunities for long-term indoctrination as well as short-term plunder. A 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education study [42] found that boards of trustees, many composed of top university donors tasked with making decisions that “profoundly affect everyone on the campus,” frequently conduct business with trustee-affiliated companies. According to the Chronicle, one in four boards at private colleges have such financial ties, signing contracts involving “banks, law firms, construction companies, and insurance conglomerates” linked to trustees. And the trend is accelerating, with 58% of colleges (64% among private institutions) now allowing business relationships with trustees, as opposed to 46% just two years ago.

These sorts of boardroom entanglements have led universities into profoundly embarrassing situations, like the fallout at Dartmouth [43]after the 2008 financial crisis. As Todd Zywicki, a former Dartmouth trustee, later wrote, “The large contributions that were their ticket on to the board were functionally a mere downpayment for the fees that they would later receive for managing [44] half a billion dollars of Dartmouth’s endowment,” 14% of which was at one point invested in trustee-affiliated hedge funds and private equity. By 2009, Dartmouth’s Wall Street-heavy board had packed 67.5% of its endowment into risky instruments, ending in a catastrophic crash thatdeepened the university’s debt and forced its credit downgrading [45].

Kenneth Langone, the $1.1 billion investor [46] who founded Home Depot, recently made headlines for similarly capitalizing on his neatly purchased trustee appointment. His $200 million donation to NYU’s medical center, the largest in the institution’s history, earned him the renaming of the facility (it’s now the Langone Medical Center [47]) along with what is now the Stern School of Business’s Langone Part-Time MBA. Also part of the deal was his appointment as vice co-chair of NYU and its medical center’s board of trustees [48], a position he abused in July [49] to email staff about donating to the reelection campaigns of his favorite (very corporate-friendly) members of Congress. Coming as the “medical school clamps down increasingly on salaries and tenure,” employees reported feeling threatened and pressured to follow through.

More broadly, the Langone board at NYU has produced a string of harshly condemned decisions [50] that in many ways encapsulate the world his brand of giving is working to create. It’s a closed circle of wealth, where money flows between toward massive expansion projects [51] and million-dollar payouts [46] for star staff’s condominiums while NYU students [52], among the nation’s most indebted, are left in the dust.

The change we need

For all its failures, today’s philanthropy continues to succeed as a form of self-therapy for the world’s rich. The philanthropic elite have won out in a not-so-pretty world of entrenched and widening inequality, and their charitable giving helps hide the ugly truth of the situation — from us as well as themselves. Ruinously for us, though, the ways in which our misanthrope philanthropists contribute are significantly deepening the crisis at hand.

Of course, there are occasional flickers of light that emerge from the nonprofit world. Foundations like Marian Wright Edelman’sChildren’s Defense Fund [53], growing out of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign to advocate for working-class families, and the new International Organization for a Participatory Society [54], seeking to build a bottom-up, classless global society, work for the poor and powerless in important ways. Still, trapped in the logic of competing cashflows, these groups are overshadowed by their misanthropic counterparts.

To echo Peter Buffett’s call, what we need is “systemic change… built from the ground up.” No more scraps from the rich kids’ table. The idiosyncratic, undemocratic “giving back” of the world’s wealthiest in the end gives to nobody but themselves, some [55] more brazenly than others. As philanthropy analyst Michael Edwards asks: “Would philanthrocapitalism have helped fund the civil rights movement in the US? I hope so, but it wasn’t ‘data driven,’ it didn’t operate through competition, it couldn’t generate much revenue, and it didn’t measure its impact in terms of the numbers of people who were served each day. Yet it changed the world forever.”

We’re all still waiting for the change we really need, not the kind dropped from swollen pockets.

See more stories tagged with:

philanthropy [56]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/philanthropy-trouble

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/prashanth-kamalakanthan

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-complex.html?_r=0

[4] http://www.ncrp.org/files/rp-articles/ResponsivePhilanthropy_Winter2011-12_Laskowski.pdf

[5] http://www.cnbc.com/id/100831257

[6] http://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/jecinq/v9y2011i1p1-21.html

[7] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all

[8] http://www.kochind.com/FactsSheets/KochFacts.aspx

[9] http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/the_koch_club/story/Koch_millions_spread_influence_through_nonprofits/

[10] http://www.aaup.org/article/fine-print-restrictive-grants-and-academic-freedom#.Uf__hVNQ1EN

[11] http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/06/28/koch_foundation_gifts_to_colleges_and_universities_draw_scrutiny

[12] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_mayer

[13] http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/01/investigative-series-how-pope-reigns.html

[14] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/art-pope-koch-brothers_n_2342932.html

[15] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all

[16] http://www.southernstudies.org/2010/10/art-pope-still-dancing-at-the-tea-party.html

[17] http://www.southernstudies.org/2010/10/a-pope-of-climate-denial.html

[18] http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/11/special-investigation-whos-behind-the-information-attacks-on-climate-scientists.html

[19] http://www.southernstudies.org/2010/10/blessed-to-have-a-pope.html

[20] http://www.artpopeexposed.com/explainer_how_much_did_art_pope_really_spend

[21] http://www.thenation.com/article/175328/north-carolinas-moral-mondays

[22] https://twitter.com/MoralMondays

[23] http://www.carolinamercury.com/2013/08/thousands-attend-mountain-moral-monday-protests-spread-to-chicago-and-oakland/

[24] http://www.nccivitas.org/2012/new-report-touts-benefits-from-replacing-the-north-carolina-income-tax-with-consumption-based-tax/

[25] http://www.johnlocke.org/newsletters/research/2013-07-25-om9498jb60qcklc3e6g74ijo37-health-update.html

[26] http://www.johnlocke.org/agenda2012/4b-renewableenergy.html

[27] http://www.johnlocke.org/agenda2012/2k-earlychildhoodeducation.html

[28] http://www.johnlocke.org/agenda2012/6b-urbanrailtransit.html

[29] http://www.johnlocke.org/agenda2012/2f-publicschoolfinance.html

[30] http://www.johnlocke.org/agenda2012/2m-highereducationpolicy.html

[31] http://www.indyweek.com/citizen/archives/2012/09/28/art-pope-and-the-future-of-education-in-north-carolina

[32] http://www.northcarolina.edu/news/index.php?code=homepage&actn=view&article_id=208271

[33] http://www.southernstudies.org/2012/09/art-pope-translates-dollars-into-influence-at-unc.html

[34] http://www.artpope.com/philantropy/

[35] http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2012/MJ/Feat/mele.htm

[36] http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/10/01/1530376/nccu-law-idea-pulled.html

[37] http://www.gatesfoundation.org/who-we-are/general-information/foundation-factsheet

[38] http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,2533850.story

[39] http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/30/the_big_thinkers_of_giving

[40] http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-giving-ethics/

[41] http://www.oxfam.org/en/grow/category/freetags/intellectual-property

[42] http://chronicle.com/article/Divided-Loyalties-Conflicts/64629/

[43] http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2779

[44] http://www.dartblog.com/data/2012/05/010228.php

[45] http://chronicle.com/article/Dartmouth-College-Its-Bond/47641

[46] http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/06/kenneth_g_lango.php

[47] http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2008/04/16/nyu_medical_center_changes.html

[48] http://www.nyu.edu/about/leadership-university-administration/board-of-trustees.html

[49] http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/have_seat_the_nyu_big_will_dun_you_wWzyF666utNUDoYPlaqULL

[50] http://nplusonemag.com/no-confidence

[51] http://now.msn.com/nyu-expansion-causes-student-debt-controversy

[52] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/opinion/expand-minds-not-the-nyu-campus.html?_r=0

[53] http://www.childrensdefense.org/

[54] http://www.iopsociety.org/about

[55] http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/meet-private-equity-tycoon-forefront-americas-new-phony

[56] http://www.alternet.org/tags/philanthropy

[57] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

http://www.muckety.com/maps/restore/2038788B3FEB6698337A48A2BF7EB8C9.png?width=645&height=500

1 Sheldon Adelson & family (see profile) $93.3 million Republican

2 Harold Simmons & wife, companies (see profile) $30.9 million Republican

3 Bob Perry (see profile) $23.5 million Republican

4 Fred Eychaner (see profile) $14.1 million Democratic

5 Joe Ricketts (see profile) $13.1 million Republican

6 William S. Rose (Specialty Group) (see profile) $12.1 million Republican

7 United Auto Workers (see profile) $11.8 million Democratic

8 National Education Association (see profile) $10.8 million Democratic

9 Michael Bloomberg (see profile) $10 million Independent

10 Republican Governors Association (see profile) $9.8 million Republican

11 James H. Simons (see profile) $9.6 million Democratic

12 AFSCME (see profile) $8.2 million Democratic

13 AFL-CIO (see profile) $7.4 million Democratic

14 Robert B. Rowling (see profile) $6.1 million Republican

15 American Federation of Teachers (see profile) $5.8 million Democratic

16 Robert Mercer (see profile) $5.5 million Republican

17 Steve and Amber Mostyn (see profile) $5.2 million Democratic

18 George Soros* & family (see profile) $5.1 million Democratic

19 William Koch (see profile) $4.8 million Republican

20 Peter Thiel (see profile) $4.7 million Republican

21 SEIU (see profile) $4.4 million Democratic

21 Joe Craft (see profile) $4.4 million Republican

23 John Childs (see profile) $4.2 million Republican

23 Plumbers and Pipefitters Union (see profile) $4.2 million Democratic

25 Jerry Perenchio (see profile) $4.1 million Republican

AlterNet [1] / By Lynn Stuart Parramore [2]

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10 Worst People on Forbes 2013 Billionaires List

March 12, 2013  |

It will hardly come as a surprise that the rich got richer in 2013. Didn’t happen to you, did it? The combined wealth of the world's billionaires hit an all-time high of 5.4 trillion, up from 4.6 trillion in 2012.

The Forbes list of billionaires is brimming over with oligarchs, monopolists, thugs, miscreants, and hustlers. Not to mention right-wingers, narcissists, and parasitic predators. The only thing missing is the king of Mexian drug lords, Joaquin"El Chapo" Guzman, whose assets were evidently too hard to calculate this year.

Putting together a list of the worst individuals in this group is a daunting task: How to choose, for example, between telecom monopolists? The richest person in the world, Mexican mogul Carlos Slim Helu, is certainly no friend of humanity, but Silvio Berlusconi, with his special brand of Technicolor depravity, managed to edge him out. There are hundreds of garden-variety jerks to choose from, along with several dozen egregious SOBs like GoDaddy’s Bob Parsons who deserve dishonorable mention. And there should be a whole separate list of Russian oligarchs. Alas, one runs out of space and time.

While not comprehensive, here, in no particular order, are some of the biggest creeps on the 2013 roster.

1. The Koch brothers: Charles Koch ($34 bn), David Koch ($34 bn), William Koch ($4 bn)

Where to begin? David and Charles, the brothers still with Koch industries, are among the world’s biggest polluters, for starters. Bill Koch, who split off from the family company, is a world-class weirdo who devotes himself to things like building a faux Western town [3] solely for his amusement and buying a $2 million photo of Billy the Kid [4]. Though not as active in bankrolling GOP pols as his brothers, Bill was a big supporter of fellow 1 percent jerk Mitt Romney and has found time to fight against America’s first offshore wind farm in Massachusetts. As for David and Charles, they have won a permanent spot in the Public Menace Hall of Fame, kicking their fellow human beings in the face with everything from funding climate change denial to strangling democracy. They have striven mightily to reshape America into a Tea Party nightmare, and have plenty of money to continue their mission.

2. Rupert Murdoch ($11.2 bn)

Murdoch, the Australian media tycoon, has dedicated himself to coarsening the public sphere through the misinformation, intolerance, and contempt of ordinary people promoted through his News Corp. Politicians woo him for his cash and the vast influence of his newspapers, magazines and TV networks, creating a foul nexus of influence that is corrosive to democracy. Be it union busting, race-baiting, or monopolistic business practices, Murdoch has been there, done that. Lately, he has found himself embroiled in a hacking scandal [5] in which employees of his newspapers were caught doing just about anything, including bribing police and hacking into the phone of a murdered schoolgirl, to get a story. Murdoch recently tweeted [6] what he considered a joke about an obese woman who fell through a New York sidewalk, asking if she got fat from food stamps and welfare.

3. Gina Rinehart ($17 bn)

If there is a hell for those who hate working people, Australian mining mogul Gina Rinehart occupies the innermost circle, right there in Satan’s maw. The richest woman in the Asia/Pacific region likes to share her obscene philosophy of wealth [7], and recently made a case for $2 dollar-a-day pay. She also instructed poor people to stop being jealous of the rich and to focus on working harder, and drinking and smoking less. She has blamed Australia’s economic problems [8] on a socialist anti-business agenda, but of course Rinehart, who inherited a $30 billion fortune, has never had a real job. She does have her own Facebook fanpage, “F*ck Gina Rinehart [9],” which boasts nearly 38,000 likes.

4. The Walton family: Christy Walton and family ($28.2 bn), Jim Walton ($26.7 bn), Alice Walton ($26.3 bn), S. Robson (Rob) Walton ($26.1 bn), Anne Walton Kroenke, ($4.5 bn), Nancy Walton Laurie ($3.9 bn)

The Walton family is the richest in the U.S. and heirs to the retail juggernaut Walmart. They collectively claim 0.14 percent of the country’s entire wealth [10], or to put it another way, they are worth as much as the bottom 41 percent of all Americans [11] combined. Their legacy is a grotesque business model that depends on pushing down wages and sinking living standards for millions of Americans. Rob is chairman of the board of directors of a company that pays its full-time hourly employees an average of $12.50 and has a policy [12] of keeping them part-time so they don’t even earn that. The Waltons are big-time funders of conservative causes, with special emphasis on undermining public education [13]. Jim Walton, who serves as the chairman for the Walton-owned Arvest bank, is particularly active in injecting his family’s ill-gotten gains into politics.

5. Sheldon Adelson ($36.5 bn)

The casino mogul Sheldon Adelson is known as a backer of hawkish pro-Israel groups and a supporter of right-wingers both in America and Israel. In 2012, he spent more than any American in history funneling money –at least $100 million [14] – mostly to various conservative candidates. Next to the Koch brothers, he’s been just about the biggest bankroller of the right. He’s also a poster child for corruption. Recently, Adelson admitted that his Las Vegas Sands Corporation likely broke the law by bribing Chinese officials [15] in order to expand business opportunities and to raise money for his various projects [16].

6. Silvio Berlusconi ($6.2 bn)

Berlusconi, one of Italy's longest serving post-war prime ministers, is a telecom monopolist whose nauseating personality and image have dominated the country and brought corruption and sex scandals to new heights. With his notorious “bunga-bunga” parties, he has normalized a special brand of cheesy misogyny and crepuscular excess that has made him the model for goatish gazillionaires across the world. When confronted with accusations that he'd paid for sex with an underage Moroccan prostitute, he replied [17], "At least I'm not gay." Belusconi’s criminal record is long and impressive, including tax fraud, bribery and the illegal financing of political parties. But he has deployed a creative means of avoiding being locked up: make up new laws [18]. Last week, he was convicted of wiretapping in a bank deal and sentenced to a year in jail. [19] But this will not prevent him from participating in the next government and evidently has not changed public opinion in Italy. Why should it? He’s been committing crimes and getting away with it for decades.

7. Carl Icahn ($20 bn)

Icahn’s face should be placed beside the term “corporate raider” in any dictionary of financial chicanery. C.E. Meyer, the chairman of Trans World Airlines, which was taken over by Icahn, famously called him [20] “one of the greediest men on earth.” Also referred to as “Icahn the Barbarian,” his specialty has been taking over a company, selling its assets to pay the debt used for the purchase, and sending jobs down the toilet while enriching himself. The elderly vulture capitalist has lately been thinking about his legacy and is attempting to rebrand himself as a “shareholder activist.” That’s rather a tall order for the man who, along with Ivan Boesky, served as the inspiration for Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street.

8. Donald Trump ($3.2 bn)

Famed for the assholic mantra “You’re fired!” from his reality show venture, Trump is as shallow and thuggish a 1 percenter as you’re likely to find anywhere. He is a congenital liar, having delivered whoppers on his net worth [21], his business deals [22], and, well, just about anything else he talks about for more than five minutes. He used the 2012 election cycle as a forum for personal ego boosting and the spreading of lies, including the idiotic notion that Obama is not a natural-born citizen. Fun fact: Trump used deferrments to avoid service [23] in the Vietnam War, but lied and said it was because he had a high draft number.

9. Peter Peterson ($1.3 bn)

Private equity mogul Pete Peterson, who founded the Blackstone Group with Stephen Schwarzman (also on our list) has a very straightforward agenda. He wants to kill Social Security and Medicare, the programs that keep millions of American out of poverty. His strategy is to channel gargantuan amounts of money into stoking nonsensical deficit hysteria. His focus on austerity policies, which have proved disastrous around the world, particularly in places like the U.K., makes him an economic quack, but one who has found willing ears among fools and knaves. Peterson has pushed his messaging into popular culture, he has held high-profile summits, and he has enlisted hordes of wealthy politicians, like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, to carry his water in Washington. He is a driving force behind the “Fix the Debt” campaign, a consortium of corporate honchos and rich individuals who have attempted to bring deficit scare-mongering to D.C. in order to achieve cuts to vital programs and further strip hardworking Americans of their dignity.

10. Stephen Schwarzman ($6.5 bn)

The Blackstone Group's co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, described as “private equity’s designated villain [24]” in the New Yorker, is fond of throwing lavish parties for himself, including an infamous $3 millon birthday fete in June 2007 at New York City's Park Avenue Armory. The party, which went down in history as a show-stopping hymn to bad taste, featured a marching band and a 50-foot silkscreen recreation of Schwarzman's own $40 million apartment. Revellers included Bill Clinton and Cardinal Edward Egan, now considered a dark horse for pope. A couple of months later, the economy tanked, thanks in part to the mismanagement and excess debt of the unregulated private equity firms that have served to weaken the real economy. Most recently, Schwarzman captured headlines by comparing raising taxes [25] on private equity fatcats like himself to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Seriously! He is reportedly outraged that persons like himself have been the subject of contempt [26] since the financial crisis. The heart bleeds.

hmmn: http://www.newsmeat.com/billionaire_political_donations/

Meet the billionaires funding the 2012 Republican primary season

five donors find themselves in the spotlight: Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, casino moguls Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Paypal co-founder (and Facebook investor) Peter Thiel, and Houston home-builder Bob Perry

$30.4 million donated by the five people, the largest donations going to the Super PACs Winning Our Future and Endorse Liberty; however, American Crossroads leads the pack with $15 million collected source

» A massive financial mind share: That’s almost $1 out of every $4 collected by all super PACs this election cycle, and certainly seems to explain exactly how we ended up with the remaining crop of Republican candidates that we have. Bob Perry is a former Tim Pawlenty supporter who switched to Team Romney with a $1 million dollar donation, while the Adelsons — who are ready to boost their support for Winning The Future from $10 million to $20 million — have provided the lifeblood of the Gingrich campaign. Of the remaining four candidates, only Rick Santorum finds himself without support, via Super PAC donations, from one of these five wealthy conservatives.

...

http://maplight.org/

Waitt isn't the only billionaire who has recently returned to political giving. Leo Linbeck III, a Texas real estate magnate with a thin record of donations, gave nearly a million dollars to launch the Campaign for Primary Accountability, dedicated to make life miserable for longtime incumbents. Louisiana oil billionaire William Doré, content to sit on the political sidelines for years, gave $1.5 million to a super-PAC supporting former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum's presidential campaign. TD Ameritrade's Joe Ricketts, who six years ago didn't even donate to his son's US Senate campaign, has signaled his intention to spend $10 million trying to take down Obama this summer and fall. Super-PACs are the hot new accessory for the über-rich....http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/ted-waitt-icpurple-super-pac

...There are now economic studies that confirm what Americans have been sensing in their own lives, though the mainstream U.S. news media tends to attribute these trends to cultural changes, rather than political choices.

For instance, the Washington Post published a lengthy front-page article on June 19, describing the findings of researchers who gained access to economic data from the Internal Revenue Service which revealed which categories of taxpayers were making the high incomes.

To the surprise of some observers, the big bucks were not flowing primarily to athletes or actors or even stock market speculators. America’s new super-rich were mostly corporate chieftains.

As the Post’s Peter Whoriskey framed the story, U.S. business underwent a cultural transformation from the 1970s when chief executives believed more in sharing the wealth than they do today.

The article cites a U.S. dairy company CEO from the 1970s, Kenneth J. Douglas, who earned the equivalent of about $1 million a year. He lived comfortably but not ostentatiously. Douglas had an office on the second floor of a milk distribution center, and he turned down raises because he felt it would hurt morale at the plant, Whoriskey reported.

However, just a few decades later, Gregg L. Engles, the current CEO of the same company, Dean Foods, averages about 10 times what Douglas made. Engles works in a glittering high-rise office building in Dallas; owns a vacation estate in Vail, Colorado; belongs to four golf clubs; and travels in a $10 million corporate jet. He apparently has little concern about what his workers think.

“The evolution of executive grandeur – from very comfortable to jet-setting – reflects one of the primary reasons that the gap between those with the highest incomes and everyone else is widening,” Whoriskey reported.

“For years, statistics have depicted growing income disparity in the United States, and it has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, the last year for which data are available, for example, the top 0.1 percent of earners took in more than 10 percent of the personal income in the United States, including capital gains, and the top 1 percent took in more than 20 percent.

“But economists had little idea who these people were. How many were Wall Street financiers? Sports stars? Entrepreneurs? Economists could only speculate, and debates over what is fair stalled. Now a mounting body of economic research indicates that the rise in pay for company executives is a critical feature in the widening income gap.”

Jet-Setting Execs

The Post article continued: “The largest single chunk of the highest-income earners, it turns out, are executives and other managers in firms, according to a landmark analysis of tax returns by economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley T. Heim. These are not just executives from Wall Street, either, but from companies in even relatively mundane fields such as the milk business.

“The top 0.1 percent of earners make about $1.7 million or more, including capital gains. Of those, 41 percent were executives, managers and supervisors at non-financial companies, according to the analysis, with nearly half of them deriving most of their income from their ownership in privately-held firms.

“An additional 18 percent were managers at financial firms or financial professionals at any sort of firm. In all, nearly 60 percent fell into one of those two categories. Other recent research, moreover, indicates that executive compensation at the nation’s largest firms has roughly quadrupled in real terms since the 1970s, even as pay for 90 percent of America has stalled.”

While these new statistics are striking – suggesting a broader problem with high-level greed than might have been believed – the Post ducked any political analysis that would have laid blame on Ronald Reagan and various right-wing economic theories.

In a follow-up editorial on June 26, the Post lamented the nation’s growing income inequality but shied away from proposing higher marginal tax rates on the rich or faulting the past several decades of low tax rates. Instead, the Post suggested perhaps going after deductions on employer-provided health insurance and mortgage interest, tax breaks that also help middle-class families.

...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/28-12

hightower:

Corporation & products Total contribution Percentage contributed

Bob Perry

Billionaire Houston developer. NOTE: An additional $1,284,600 was donated by Mrs. Bob Perry. $10,517,050 92% to GOP

Jerry Perenchio

Multi-billionaire Hollywood media mogul. $4,150,313 52% to GOP

0% to Dem

48% to other

Rob Rowling

Billionaire, owner of Gold's Gym, Omni Hotels, etc $2,818,964 100% to GOP

Parker Collier

Florida developer who has given most of her money to Republicans outside of her state. $1,239,014 100% to GOP

Paul Singer

Founder of a $7 billion hedge fund (Elliott Associates) and long time right wing funder, including helping finance the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth front group used by the GOP to attack John Kerry in 2004. (*Libertarians) $1,069,658 81% to GOP

19% to Libs*

Charles Schwab

Billionaire founder of his eponymous investment firm and longtime GOP partisan. $933,550 100% to GOP

Jackson Stephens

Funded the ultra-conservative Club for Growth. $765,406 95% to GOP

John Childs

Billionaire founder of JW Childs, a Boston private equity firm specializing in takeovers of consumer product corporations and health care companies. $712,300 99% to GOP

Harlan Crow

Billionaire owner of Trammel Crow Company and Crow Holdings, huge developers and investors in everything from hotels to hedge funds. $616,863 96% to GOP

Harold Simmons

Billionaire toxic waste disposal operator and funder of right-wing groups and candidates [NOTE: sued by his own daughters for illegally forging campaign contributions in their names without their knowledge or permission. Settled with them for $50 million.] $614,800 88% to GOP

John Chambers

CEO of Cisco Systems, a Silicon Valley giant. $582,100 72% to GOP

John Nau

Owner of the Houston distributor of Budweiser products and other beverages. $504,974

[UPDATED]Virtually all of the $4.7 million raised by Karl Rove's new conservative outfit was contributed by just four billionaires, three of whom are based in Dallas, Texas, and two of whom made their fortune in the oil and gas industry.

The IRS filing of American Crossroads, an outside 527 group that was conceived by Rove and ex-RNC chair Ed Gillespie, gives a good taste of who is funding the GOP effort to make big gains in the House and Senate come the fall. The group has already burned through $600,000 on ads attacking Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is facing a reelection contest against Republican Sharron Angle (see one of the spots below). Chaired by another ex-RNC chair, Mike Duncan, American Crossroads has pledged to raise $50 million to beat Democrats in the midterms and has been seen by some as a competitor to the Republican National Committee itself.

And despite the group's description of itself as "grassroots," Salon's review of its IRS filings show that four billionaires have contributed 97 percent of the $4.7 million it has raised to date. There are no limits on how much corporations, unions, and individuals can donate to 527 groups. Here's a guide to American Crossroads' four donors:

Trevor Rees-Jones, president of Dallas-based Chief Oil and Gas, gave a $1 million donation to American Crossroads just as the group was starting in April. That's small money for Rees-Jones, who, Forbes estimated in 2009, amassed a $1.5 billion fortune investing in gas prospects around America. He has also been a big donor to John McCain and the Texas Republican Party, Politico reported.

Bradley Wayne Hughes, chairman of Public Storage Inc, is American Crossroads' biggest donor, contributing $1.55 million to date. Hughes founded Public Storage in 1972 and the company has grown into a self-storage behemouth with over 2,000 locations. Worth $3.9 billion, he lives in Lexington, KY, where he actively raises thoroughbred horses at Spendthrift Farm. (Hughes' son, B. Wayne Hughes Jr., is on the board of former Senator Norm Coleman's new conservative group, the American Action Network.)

A company called Southwest Louisiana Land LLC donated $1 million to American Crossroads in June. It turns out Southwest, which doesn't have much of a public footprint, is owned by Dallas billionaire investor Harold Simmons -- no stranger to conservative causes. Since the 1980s, he has ponied up for everthing from Oliver North's defense fund, to Newt Gingrich's PAC, to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, to the American Issues Project, a group that ran ads attempting to tie Obama to Bill Ayers in 2008 (Simmons was the sole funder of the Ayers effort, giving nearly $3 million.) Simmons is worth $4.5 billion.

TRT Holdings, owned by Dallas' Robert Rowling, gave American Crossroads $1 million. Rowling, whose firm owns Omni Hotels and Gold's Gym, got started at his father's successful company, Tana Oil & Gas. He's now worth $4.4 billion. In 2004 Rowling gave $1 million to Progress for America, an outside group backing President Bush's reelection.

It's also important to note that American Crossroads has set up a partner organization called  American Crossroads GPS that, because it has a different tax status, does not have to reveal any donor information and is also more limited in spending its money on campaigns (Politico has more on this). American Crossroads GPS took in over $5 million in June, and we'll likely nver know who is putting up the money.

The Billionaires Behind Newt’s ‘American Solutions For Winning The Future’

The same old men that propelled George W. Bush into office in 2000 and 2004 are behind Newt Gingrich’s multimillion-dollar front group, American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF). ASWF has capitalized on the energy crisis caused by the Bush presidency to promote a “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” campaign. Although the campaign’s priorities are just a rebranding of an oil-company agenda, ASWF’s well-funded drill-drill-drill message has achieved significant success, with 1.3 million people signing their petition:

We, therefore, the undersigned citizens of the United States, petition the U.S. Congress to act immediately to lower gasoline prices (and diesel and other fuel prices) by authorizing the exploration of proven energy reserves to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources from unstable countries.

The Wonk Room has covered in depth how the “solutions” promoted by “environmentalist” Newt Gingrich: increased offshore drilling, oil shale mining, coal-to-liquids, and tar sands — would be ecological disasters without economic benefit, except for Big Oil executives and their even wealthier investors. That group has likewise prospered richly under Bush, while the rest of the nation falls into disrepair.

So who is behind ASWF? The key funder is right-wing casino kingpin Sheldon Adelson, who has pumped over $3 million into the organization since its beginning in 2006. Adelson is flanked by 56 other such donors who have given at least $10,000. Donors can give unlimited amounts to this 527 corporation, making it an ideal mechanism for the superrich to influence the presidential season. In the first of a Wonk Room series, we discuss the seven right-wing billionaires bankrolling this “non-partisan” organization:

The ASWF Billionaires

SHELDON ADELSON

Net Worth: $26.0 billion

Donations to ASWF: $3,066,340

Bush Pioneer

The Casino Kingpin

BACKGROUND: The third richest man in America, Adelson made his first millions with the dot-com trade show Comdex, then purchased the Las Vegas Sands Hotel and Casino, tearing it down to construct the Venetian in 1999. Since he took the Sands Corporation public in 2004 and began establishing casinos for the Asian market in Macao, his wealth has ballooned at a rate of “almost $1 million an hour” to $26 billion, mostly in China. A major GOP donor, Adelson sits on the board of the “conservative Republican Jewish Coalition.” Armed with, in his language, a “big pair of brass monkeys,” Adelson “is fiercely opposed to a two-state solution” in Israel. In addition to supplying over $3 million to ASWF, Adelson co-founded Freedom’s Watch, a “big neoconservative slush fund” with ties to the American Enterprise Institute.

QUOTES:

“You know, I am the richest Jew in the world.” [New Yorker, 6/30/08]

“We’re the largest investor of any kind in the history of China.” [New Yorker, 6/30/08]

On AIPAC’s support for aid to Palestinians: “If someone is going to jump off a bridge, it is incumbent upon their friends to dissuade them.” [Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 11/15/07]

“Why is it fair that I should be paying a higher percentage of taxes than anyone else?” [New Yorker, 6/30/08]

CARL LINDNER

Net Worth: $2.3 billion

Donations to ASWF: $650,000

Bush Pioneer

The Banana Republican

BACKGROUND: Carl Lindner, Jr., “a Cincinnati businessman with international interests ranging from banking to bananas, is one of the nation’s wealthiest men” and “gives heavily to political campaigns.” He built a dairy empire into the holding company American Financial Group, making giant profits off the savings and loan industry, junk bonds, and Chiquita Brands International Inc., where he “oversaw the payment of roughly $1.7 million to a Colombian paramilitary group.” Using political connections in the 1990s, “Lindner opened European markets for Chiquita bananas,” but “it came at a high cost: more expensive goods for American citizens; the threat of fewer jobs in industries that buy American-manufactured steel; and certain economic instability for Caribbean and African nations and its citizens.”

GEORGE ARGYROS

Net Worth: $1.7 billion

Donations to ASWF: $25,000

Bush Pioneer

Mr. Ambassador

BACKGROUND: Making a fortune in Orange County real estate, Argyros diversified into interests such as the Seattle Mariners, the Apria home health-care giant, and the investment firm Westar Capital. Argyros’s real estate company, Arnel Management Co., gouged thousands of tenants out of millions of dollars in security deposits and illegal fees. After raising $30 million for George W. Bush’s election, Argyros was appointed ambassador to Spain in 2001, despite not even speaking the language.

QUOTES: On the unpopularity of the Bush administration in Spain: “It’s not always easy when people aren’t in agreement with all the questions, but they’ll never be in agreement with everything — not even my wife.” [El País, 2/6/04]

“It’s an especially opportune time for exporters, since the U.S. is essentially on sale because of the low dollar.” [Orange County Business Journal, 3/04]

“The bombings, which were tragic in Spain, on that Thursday of March 11, certainly had an effect on the elections in Spain. And that was the intended purpose of the bombings. The timing could not have been better as far as the Al Qaeda is concerned.” [Fox News, 6/23/05]

STANLEY STUB HUBBARD

Net Worth: $1.6 billion

Donations to ASWF: $100,000

The TV Guy

BACKGROUND: The Hubbard Broadcasting Company, founded by Stanley E. Hubbard in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, has become a television giant under the stewardship of his son, Stanley S., who spent the 1980s working to make digital satellite television a reality. He dominates Twin Cities politics and media, calling up news anchors if he disagrees with their coverage, and his corporation, which owns the Reelz channel, is a consistent enemy of unionization.

QUOTES:

“You know, blacks obviously are just as good as whites and they need to hear that . . . I think Jesse Jackson is the single worst enemy of the black people. If he didn’t have people thinking they weren’t good enough, he wouldn’t have any followers.” [Corporate Report Minnesota, 1/91]

“If I couldn’t work here, I would do anything. I would work at anything. My wife and I talk about it, if we couldn’t be here, we would be hired help. . . . I would be a butler and she would be a maid. We don’t have a problem, but so many do when it comes to finding good help. I think we would know how to treat people.” [Corporate Report Minnesota, 1/91]

“Well, I think the thing [my father] taught me and taught all of us, more than anything else, was integrity, that the number of the byword in this world is integrity. You tell the truth, you don’t lie, you don’t cheat.” [CNN, 6/24/96]

PETER THIEL

Peter Thiel

Net Worth: $1.2 billion

Donations to ASWF: $100,000

The Techno-Libertarian

BACKGROUND: A self-described “staunch libertarian” who made his first millions as a co-founder of Pay Pal, 40-year-old Stanford-educated Peter Thiel has become a hedge fund billionaire by betting on rising oil prices and investing in dot-coms such as Facebook and LinkedIn. In the words of Wired journalist Alexis Madrigal, Thiel supports a “deep, crazy future, where you would be able to do whatever you want — radical freedom — the Internet as tool to absolutely transform both your body and the government.”

QUOTES:

“In the culture, everything’s forced toward a shorter time horizon. As a libertarian, I tend to blame the government for a lot of this, because socialized welfare, socialized health care, and socialized retirement programs all encourage people not to think about the future.” [Reason Magazine, 5/1/08]

RICHARD T. ‘DICK’ FARMER

Dick Farmer

Net Worth: $1.0 billion

Donations to ASWF: $100,000

Bush Pioneer

The Right-Wing Rag Man

BACKGROUND: Cincinnati’s other billionaire, Dick Farmer owns Cintas Corporation, the “nation’s largest uniform rental company.” With deep ties to Washington conservatives, Cintas has successfully fought environmental and labor regulations for its industrial laundries. However, its continued union-busting, labor abuses and even postal fraud are costing the corporation millions in fees. In the 2000 election cycle, “Farmer gave $721,000 to the Republicans, making him the second-largest individual donor to the GOP.”

QUOTES:

“I don’t expect any special treatment when I give my money. All I want is decent government.” [Cincinnati Enquirer, 1997]

“If you think I’m giving money to get access to [President Bush], you’re crazy. I’m just trying to get the right guy elected. That’s all I care about.” [Washington Post, 3/17/04]

ROGER MILLIKEN

Net Worth: $1.0 billion

Donations to ASWF: $10,000

GOPAC

The Globalist Protectionist

BACKGROUND: Milliken is a “billionaire textile magnate from South Carolina, founding member of the conservative movement, and patron of right-wing causes for almost 50 years” — from William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater to Richard Nixon and Newt Gingrich. Fiercely anti-union and proud of his company’s “culture of secrecy,” Milliken also is famously protectionist. In 1994, Milliken funneled over $2 million to Pat Buchanan to fight the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and aid his 1996 run. However, as Ryan Lizza wrote in the New Republic, “Although Milliken is the chairman of the Crafted With Pride in the USA Council, the union and business coalition that has spent millions on ads suggesting that imports are hurting the economy, for decades now he has bought only foreign-made machinery to produce his American textiles.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_billionaires

The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 344 total. This list may not reflect recent changes (learn more).

A

John Abele

S. Daniel Abraham

Sheldon Adelson

Guma Aguiar

Paul Allen

John Edward Anderson

Leonore Annenberg

Wallis Annenberg

Walter Annenberg

Philip Anschutz

Mary Anselmo

Barbara Cox Anthony

George Argyros

Micky Arison

Shari Arison

Ted Arison

Roland Arnall

John D. Arnold

John Arrillaga

B

Louis Bacon

Thomas H. Bailey

Steve Ballmer

Tom Barrack

Ed Bass

Lee Marshall Bass

Robert Bass

Sid Bass

Frank Batten

Andrew Beal

Riley P. Bechtel

Stephen Bechtel, Jr.

Clayton Bennett

Carl Berg

Jeff Bezos

Leon Black

Arthur Blank

Leonard Blavatnik

Michael Bloomberg

Ernie Boch, Jr.

David Bonderman

Franklin Otis Booth, Jr.

Amar Bose

Donald Bren

Sergey Brin

Eli Broad

Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

Warren Buffett

Ronald Burkle

Gary Burrell

Charles Butt

C

John Calamos

Clive Calder

James R. Cargill

Margaret Anne Cargill

Alan Casden

S. Truett Cathy

Anne Cox Chambers

Charles Dolan

Steven A. Cohen

William Cook (entrepreneur)

David C. Copley

James Coulter (financier)

Lester Crown

Mark Cuban

D

Ray Dalio

Daniel A. D'Aniello

William Davidson

D cont.

Barbara Davis

Marvin Davis

Fred De Luca

John Paul DeJoria

Michael Dell

Richard DeVos

Barry Diller

John Doerr

Ray Dolby

Stanley Druckenmiller

Doris Duke

Dan Duncan

E

Richard Egan (businessman)

Larry Ellison

Archie Aldis Emmerson

Jeffrey Epstein

Charlie Ergen

Eric Schmidt

F

Chuck Feeney

David Filo

Donald Fisher

Kenneth Fisher

Thomas Flatley

J. Christopher Flowers

Jim France

Sidney Frank

Thomas H. Friedkin

Foster Friess

G

Bill Gates

Edward Gaylord

David Geffen

Gordon Getty

J. Paul Getty

George N. Gillett, Jr.

Malcolm Glazer

Tom Golisano

James Goodnight

Alec Gores

Tom Gores

David Gottesman

Chryss Goulandris

Pincus Green

Kenneth C. Griffin

William H. Gross

H

Bill Hambrecht

Marguerite Harbert

Sidney Harman

Bill Haslam

George Randolph Hearst III

George Randolph Hearst, Jr.

Leona Helmsley

Ken Hendricks

Tom Hicks

Steven Hicks

Larry Hillblom

Barron Hilton

Robert Holding

Amos Hostetter, Jr.

Ming Hsieh

B. Wayne Hughes

Howard Hughes

Ray Lee Hunt

Jon Huntsman, Sr.

Barbara Hutton

I

Carl Icahn

Erskine Bronson Ingram

Martha Rivers Ingram

J

Jess Stonestreet Jackson, Jr.

Joe Jamail

James Jannard

Steve Jobs

Abigail Johnson

Barbara Piasecka Johnson

Charles Bartlett Johnson

Edward Johnson, III

Robert L. Johnson

Rupert Johnson, Jr.

Samuel Curtis Johnson, Jr.

Jerry Jones

Paul Tudor Jones

K

George Kaiser

Min Kao

Peter Kellogg

James C. Kennedy

Kirk Kerkorian

Vinod Khosla

Richard Kinder

Randal J. Kirk

John Kluge

Phil Knight

Bill Koch (businessman)

Charles G. Koch

David H. Koch

Jerome Kohlberg, Jr.

Herbert Kohler, Jr.

Bruce Kovner

Henry Kravis

John Krehbiel, Jr.

Ann Walton Kroenke

Stan Kroenke

L

Edward Lampert

Leonard Lauder

Ronald Lauder

Ralph Lauren

Thomas H. Lee

Fred A. Lennon

Al Lerner

Leon Levy

Peter Lewis (businessman)

Edward Linde

Carl Lindner, Jr.

Leonard Litwin

George Lucas

Daniel K. Ludwig

M

Craig McCaw

Aubrey McClendon

Patrick Joseph McGovern

Bob McNair

C. Edward McVaney

Maloof family

George J. Maloof, Jr.

Alfred E. Mann

Joe Mansueto

Bernard Marcus

Roger Marino

Donald Marron

Forrest Mars, Jr.

Jacqueline Mars

John Franklyn Mars

Manny Mashouf

Matthew Pritzker

Fred Meijer (businessman)

John Menard, Jr.

--

M

Michael Milken

Robert Warren Miller

Howard Milstein

Paul Milstein

George P. Mitchell

William Moncrief

Gordon Moore

Jim Moran (automotive)

William Morean

Arte Moreno

Manuel Moroun

Charlie Munger

Rupert Murdoch

David H. Murdock

N

Marshall Naify

Robert Naify

Donald Newhouse

Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr.

Samuel Irving Newhouse, Sr.

Henry Nicholas

Larry Nichols

O

Pierre Omidyar

Bernard Osher

P

David Packard

Larry Page

Max Palevsky

John Paulson

Nelson Peltz

Ronald Perelman

Ross Perot

Peter George Peterson

T. Boone Pickens

Jeffry Picower

Carl Pohlad

Michael F. Price

Pritzker family

Anthony Pritzker

Daniel Pritzker

J.B. Pritzker

Jay Pritzker

Linda Pritzker

Nicholas J. Pritzker

Penny Pritzker

Robert Pritzker

Thomas Pritzker

R

Richard Rainwater

Raj Rajaratnam

Mitchell Rales

R cont.

Steven M. Rales

Sumner Redstone

Trevor Rees-Jones

Ira Rennert

Marc Rich

Sid W. Richardson

George R. Roberts

Arthur Rock

David Rockefeller

Edward P. Roski

Stephen M. Ross

Wilbur Ross

Robert Rowling

David Rubenstein

S

Haim Saban

John Sall

Henry Samueli

Herbert Sandler

Marion Sandler

David I Saperstein

Tamir Sapir

Harry Sargeant III

Fayez Sarofim

Richard Mellon Scaife

Dwight Schar

Howard Schultz

Richard M. Schulze

Charles R. Schwab

Stephen A. Schwarzman

Sheldon Solow

Walter Shorenstein

Thomas Siebel

Larry Silverstein

Harold Simmons

Herbert Simon (real estate)

Norton Simon

James Harris Simons

J. R. Simplot

Jeffrey Skoll

John A. Sobrato

Patrick Soon-Shiong

James LeVoy Sorenson

George Soros

Alex Spanos

John Sperling

Peter Sperling

Steven Spielberg

Allen Stanford

S cont.

John W. Stanton

George Steinbrenner

Jackson T. Stephens

Leonard N. Stern

Max Stern (businessman)

Jon Stryker

Pat Stryker

T

Glen Taylor

Jack C. Taylor

David Tepper

Peter Thiel

James S. Tisch

Joan Tisch

Jonathan Tisch

Laurence Tisch

Kenny Troutt

Donald Trump

U

Steven F. Udvar-Házy

V

Jay Van Andel

Hope Hill Van Beuren

Alberto Vilar

W

Romesh Wadhwani

Ted Waitt

Walton family

Alice Walton

Christy Walton

Jim Walton

S. Robson Walton

Sam Walton

Roger Wang

Tom L. Ward

Ty Warner

Dennis Washington

Bruce Wasserstein

Les Wexner

Dean White

Meg Whitman

Arthur L. Williams, Jr.

Oprah Winfrey

Chin-Cheng Wu

Steve Wynn (entrepreneur)

Y

Jerry Yang (entrepreneur)

Z

Sam Zell

William Bernard Ziff, Jr.

Anita Zucker

Jerry Zucker (businessman)

Mark Zuckerberg

Mortimer Zuckerman

CA

The Chron describes Crane as a Democrat, who was an adviser to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and now lectures on public policy at Stanford University and serves on the UC Board of Regents and the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

But Haaland points out that Crane is also the multi-millionaire former investment banker who donated $37, 500 to Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s failed Measure B, last fall.

“And the Capitol Weekly reported that after Schwarzenegger’s 2005 State of the State Address, Crane said he would support any effort by the Governor to eliminate pensions for government workers, which he described as ‘burdensome special privileges,’” Haaland continued in a recent Facebook post.

Actually, Crane went a whole lot further than that, according to a 2006 blog post that describes Crane’s free-market economic philosophy as sounding “distinctly libertarian.”

“He advocates against government intervention in private business and touts his admiration for conservative economist Milton Friedman,” wrote UC Berkeley graduate and former Capitol Weekly reporter Shane Goldmacher on the California Observer blog.

Goldmacher also noted  that Crane called defined benefit pensions  "non-market deals,” saw minimum wage as a "market distorting mechanism,” and endorsed Schwarzenegger’s defined contribution pension proposal in 2005.

"All the governor proposed would be a limitation to some of these special privileges held by government employees, “ Crane reportedly said.

But Crane isn’t the only billionaire behind Measure B’s curtain. As Haaland points out in a recent SEIU flyer that says, “Beware the Billionaires, Stop the Attacks on Public Workers,” one of Prop. B’s biggest donors was Howard Leach, a billionaire financier and investor who served as George W. Bush’s ambassador to France.

“”Leach was a Republican ‘pioneer,’ raising more than $100,000 for Bush’s campaign,” the SEIU flyer notes. “He also contributes to the Republican Governors’ Association, whose main objective was the election of the new crop of conservative governors pushing anti-worker measures in Florida, Ohio, New Jersey, Wisconsin and other states.”

The SEIU flyer also identifies billionaire venture capitalist, Michael Moritz, as “a major financial backer of Ohio Governor John Kasich and contributed to the Ohio Republican Party Central Committee.”

http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2011/03/01/beware-billionaires-behind-pension-reform

Rupert Murdoch’s Donald Trump Nightmare: He Can’t Control the Monster Fox News Created

Even the powerful mogul can’t stop his biggest media asset from acting as Trump’s biggest booster.

By Sophia Tesfaye / Salon July 22, 2015

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36 COMMENTS

If there seems to be a split in the way Rupert Murdoch-owned media outlets are covering the presidential campaign of Donald Trump that’s because one of Murdoch’s holdings is reportedly out of control — Murdoch can’t get Fox News to stop positively covering The Donald.

According to New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, the conservative media mogul has been unsuccessful in his attempt to wield influence over the editorial decisions of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. Sherman reports that Ailes has pushed Fox’s on-air personalities to defend Trump’s controversial comments in recent weeks, boasting that the conservative network was covering the Trump campaign to his personal specifications. For his part, Murdoch appears to be dead set against a Trump candidacy, publicly blasting the Republican’s incendiary rhetoric:

Trump, who has a longstanding relationship with Fox News, met with Ailes for an extended lunch around the time of his announcement and has called the cable news executive “one of the great geniuses in television history.” During the month of June, Trump appeared on Fox 10 times, amounting to 1 hour and 48 minutes of free airtime from the network and it’s become evident that there is little Murdoch can do to stop it. According to Sherman, Murdoch, whose 21st Century Fox is the parent company of Fox News, recently called Ailes to ask him to “back off the Trump coverage.” Trump was back on “Fox & Friends“, a show where he held weekly appearances before entering the presidential race, this morning to push-back against all of the negative scrutiny his stunt giving out Lindsey Graham’s personal cell number generated. Per usual, the host provided Trump his softball interview. And as Sherman points out, “yesterday, at a campaign event in South Carolina where he gave out Lindsey Graham’s personal cell-phone number, Trump heaped praise on Fox & Friends’ Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Elisabeth and Hasselbeck, ‘They’re great people.’” Sherman, a veteran Fox News observer, describes “Fox & Friends” as “a show that is used by Ailes to inject his point of view into debates.”

And as the New York Times explains, there is little Murdoch can do to wrangle editorial control over the network from Ailes: “As the creator of the highest-rated cable news channel in the country (even surpassing ESPN in total viewers on some nights) and one of the most profitable assets in Mr. Murdoch’s film and television company, 21st Century Fox, Mr. Ailes has been given the freedom to operate largely outside the purview of Mr. Murdoch.”

So, for now, Murdoch’s control is relegated to the front page of the NY Post, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and his personal Twitter account. But the head of one of the most powerful media conglomerates in the world can’t stop his biggest media asset from acting as Trump’s biggest booster, as the carnival barker marches his campaign to the first Republican debate stage — on Fox News.