EDITOR’S NOTE (Nick Stamatakis):  As we are waiting to see the final results of the mid-term elections, it is very helpful to remember that the top 1% of wealth holders – or about 1,000 billionaires – have enough money to stop or pass any legislation they want, to elect anyone they prefer and to escape any serious judicial interference with their financial interests!!..  As someone who knows how DC works internally told me in no uncertain terms, less than $200 million is enough to pass any legislation from Congress!… But it seems that these greedy billionaires have global plans and put the rest of us at risk by promoting constant wars – including with Russia and possibly China… Well, there is always a limit to greed – and this seems to be their mistake that will lead to their undoing…

So, my friends, do not fret about “winning” Congress… We should instead worry about how to elect people on specific “contracts”, i.e., to establish term limits for Congress and to establish measures that limit the power of the super-wealthy… And for bringing the country back to what the founding fathers had established… Short of these limits, our hopes for democracy in America are just a mirage… 

But looking at these numbers, one has to wonder what is the purpose of taxing anyone in the lowest 80% of wealth holders if the top 20% own $94 Trillion out of $134 Trillion of total wealth… Really, why tax the rest of us if we, at the lower 80%, only own $40 Trillion or less than 25% of the total wealth of this country? This is how Marxist revolts have happened all over the world!… Do these fat cats want to make Americans revolt? A look at the chart in our main shows that in the last 30 years “the poor have become poorer and the wealthy have become much wealthier”…

AND A FINAL NOTE: The known reserves Russia has in mineral wealth (hydrocarbons, uranium, gold, silver, etc.) is $70 Trillion!!  Again, this is only about the known wealth and not the total of the vast Russian territory – and it does not include much of the Arctic!! My friends, do you now understand who is really behind the war against Russia?  Our billionaires know this fact: they see Russia’s wealth, and they salivate… Yes, the biggest fault of the capitalist system is greed, and in recent years it has gone unchecked!!…

=========================

SOURCE – THE DURAN.COM

How the Super-Rich Control the U.S. Government

Eric Zuesse

The U.S. Government tries to hide how obscenely top-end the nation’s wealth-distribution is; but one remarkably clear presentation of it (the U.S. private-wealth distribution)  was the web-page from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System that presented an “Overview” of “Distribution of Wealth” starting in “1989:Q3” and extending up till “2021:Q2”. (It will be presented even more clearly here, using their reported data.)

The following shows breakdowns of the wealth-quintiles — percentages of the wealth held by the nation’s households, all the way from the top fifth to the bottom fifth — in the “US$ Trillions” for each fifth — during the latter quarter (the “2021:Q2”), as is shown on that web-page:

Top 5th =Top 20% total $94.68T ($36.23T for top 1% + $58.45T for all of the next 19%)

2nd 5th =Top 40%-Top 20%: $20.68T

3rd 5th = Top 60%-Top 40%: $9.62T

4th 5th = Top 80%-Top 60%: $5.41T

5th 5th = Too 100%-Top 80%: $3.69T

100% = $94.68T + $20.68T + $9.62T + $5.41T + $3.69T = $134.08T total.

Therefore: Top 20% = 70.6% of all wealth.

Top 40% = 86.0% of all wealth.

Top 60% = 93.2% of all wealth.

Top 80% = 97.2% of all wealth.

Top 100% = 100% of all wealth.

Additionally shown was the top 1%:

Top 1% (“99-100%”): $36.23T

Top 20% less that top 1%: $58.45T

So: the top 1% (the wealthiest 5% of the wealthiest 20%) held 38.3% of all the top fifth’s $94.68T.

Top 1% =  27% of all wealth.

(Bottom 1% wasn’t shown.)

Bottom 20% = 2.8% of all wealth.

Bottom 40% = 6.8%

Bottom 60% = 14.0%

Bottom 80% = 29.4%

Virtually all people who have the discretionary cash to be able to donate significantly to the politicians they favor are in the top fifth — the people who have 70.6% of all wealth. They dominate the nation’s political money. Almost all of the virtually bribes that fill political campaign-chests in America come from the richest 20% of Americans — and the top 1% contain all of the ‘king-makers.” And if you’re in the bottom 80% of wealth-holders in the U.S., you’re not represented, at all, in the U.S. Government.

The top 1% have vastly more, than rest of the top 20%, available to them to donate to their favored politicians, because these people — the top-one-percenters — hold the corporate board seats, and select the corporate executives who hire the congressional lobbyists to entertain and reward and hire the crucial congress-members so as to serve their corporations, and serve those top one-percenters who control all of those corporations. Included in these corporations are the ones that control all of the major, and most of the minor, news-media and that thereby shape the ‘knowledge’ and thus the views that most of the voters (in each Party) hold.

America has around a thousand billionaires, and they have control over so much discretionary cash as to be able to get Congress to not pass any bill that these super-rich oppose, and to pass many of the legislative bills that those super-rich want to become law. So, almost all of the thousand-or-so individuals who control the U.S. Government are billionaires. They especially control international corporations. Those few people dominate both Parties. But they do it very much behind-the-scenes. In previous centuries, aristocrats were publicly known, by formal titles; but in today’s ‘democracies’, they are, instead, as hidden as they can be. They don’t want the public to know that the Government represents only them, because, otherwise, the Government’s saying that this or that foreign ‘dictatorship’ that poses no real threat to the national security of one’s own country, should be regime-changed, would have the citizens wonder, instead, “Isn’t it our nation’s regime that should be regime-changed first?” Any look at the ‘news’-media will make clear that they DON’T want THAT question to be in anybody’s mind. The message is instead always to regime-change the foreign leaders whom one’s own nation’s billionaires WANT to be regime-changed. That’s the way to get the public to be willing to fund (via their own taxes) the ‘Defense’ Department. Isn’t it un-‘patriotic’ to want to slash the spending on ‘defense’? Where did THAT idea come from?

—————

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

6 COMMENTS

  1. And the Super Rich continue to vote Republican every time, so if you want to know why everyone else is poor, look at the Republican Party as the reason why! Btw Nick, where is the major MAGA Red Wave that you predicted? I’m glad the GOP can get back to reality and realize that their conspiracy theories and lies won’t make people vote for them.

    • Linda, if you want your uneducated comments to be posted here, you have to insert some updated data in your train of thought. The majority of the uber-wealthy mostly vote Democrats and this is a known fact… The late Rush Limbaugh included this statement in almost every part of his program. If you do not accept this FACT then explain George Soros giving hundreds of millions to the Dems – and the same for Bill Gates. The same is true for the Wall Stret billionaires and many of the “bankers” – for good reason: Obama bailed them out after the 2008 financial crimes against the country they committed. In a now-famous White House meeting with Wall Street Bankers, he reassured them he is going to help them and he did. And they supported him big time, in return.
      If this country is to stay faithful to the representative democracy established by the founders 250 years ago, it needs many red waves and many reforms – and not just what happened yesterday. It needs elections with paper ballots taking place in a full weekend or in just one Sunday as it happens in Europe. And it needs many more reforms curtailing the power of the very rich – which, as our graph shows, has gone out of control over the last 30 years.
      Finally, if you take the NY and CA and PA vote at face value and you haven’t heard anything about the corrupt systems in these and other states – then you are totally lost. In 2020 people were calling me from the poll places in NY: they went to vote and they were told that they had already voted!!
      Enough for now! Put down the kool-aid and open your eyes to the truth!

    • Linda,

      Do you know how many times I was blocked from my commute back home from my lower Manhattan job so that President Obama could fly in on his helicopter to meet Wall Street “donors”? At least once a month over the 4 years I was at that job…our taxpayer dollars were funding helicopter trips to Wall Street donation fiestas…how come you don’t know about these details?
      You are out of touch with reality. The bi-partisan system is always a choice between “bad” and “worse”. It has always been a system based on lying to the people in order to get elected, and focusing upon self-serving activities after the election… and that is true all over the world, not just here. It’s not democracy, for sure. Plutocracy might be a better epithet for this phenomenon.

      People have taken the bait about Trump, or MAGA, or whatever they want to call it, but these are the symptoms of a deeper problem, not the root causes. Decades of arrogant neglect of the “people” by both parties resulted in the “protest vote” that caused Trump to be elected over 17 other Republican candidates that year…and instead of both “big parties” solving the root causes that resulted in Trump’s election, they are back to doing business as normal…hint for you, Linda: if the parties continue to ignore what Helleniscope is pointing out here, the next “protest vote” (for either party) could yield someone that would make Trump look like a saint in comparison…and it will only be the fault of people like yourself who are complacent and are more than happy to “take the bait” and focus on the “squirrels” that the 2 parties release in front of you, while they frivolously erode the future standard of living of your grandchildren…

      • That is very well said, Jimmy… I couldn’t have stated better myself… All of us need to wise up and focus on the deeper trends…

  2. Where did Linda go? I hope she returns soon so she can read the responses to her comment. I would also like Linda to comment on the following quote:

    “The unspoken foreign policy of the US is to serve the imperialist interests of its ruling class.”
    (Finian Cunningham)

  3. The only “problem” America’s elites know how to solve is the “problem” of how to get personally richer while tightening their control of the nation-state’s vast flood of (taxed / borrowed) money. Cronies and contributors get tax breaks hidden in 1,000-page legislation and overflowing rivers of money (here’s looking at you, Big Pharma, Big Defense, Higher Education, Sickcare, et al.).

    https://www.oftwominds.com/blognov22/imperial-corruption11-22.html

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here