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ACCORDING TO LIZ - After the Citizens United ruling in 2010, contributions to election campaigns rose from $31 million to $1.2 billion in 2020.
Why? So that wealthy individuals and corporations could gain control of the one power that might have the ability to put that genie back in its bottle – a democratically elected government.
If you include self-funded campaigns, that’s another $1.4 billion. So the uber-wealthy contributed $2.6 billion to 2020 politicking. Nauseating.
And that was before Rick Caruso made his historically high-priced run for the Mayor of Los Angeles.
BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, investment companies controlling assets of over $20 trillion, are major shareholders in more than 96% of the S&P 500 companies including the too-big-to-fail banks of Wells Fargo, CitiBank and JP Morgan/Chase. A few billion here, a few billion there is but a minor cost for ensuring their businesses continue to thrive.
Of course that is in the short term, just the 90-day Wall Street horizon, and does nothing for the 99%.
BlackRock bought up 15% of US homes for sale in the first quarter of 2021 driving prices up and removing affordable housing from the market. While the top 1% of Americans luxuriated in a $21 trillion wealth increase over the past 30 years, the bottom 50% suffered a $900 billion decline.
So what happens when everyone except the 700-odd American billionaires is destitute?
It’s obscene that the top 25 hedge fund managers in America make more than the country’s 350 thousand kindergarten teachers.
The company controlling one-fifth of the country’s egg market, Cal-Maine Foods, doubled the price of a dozen eggs last year, more than doubling their profits. This is another example of capitalizing on the news – that of chickens killed a year ago because of the avian flu epidemic – to make a corporate killing at the consumers’ cost.
How can it be acceptable that a $926-million golden parachute was approved for Moderna’s CEO, essentially to go away and not work, when EMT workers who save thousands of lives make as little as $40,000 a year?
And the assisted living industry sees failing health as just another commodity, happily depleting seniors’ savings bur only until Medicaid kicks in, meaning their maintenance is no longer as profitable. Then: Bye-bye Grandpa!
Water, too, is now but a commodity, to build personal profits when traded on the world’s largest futures exchange.
Merck’s new anti-Covid drug, developed with millions of taxpayer dollars will cost under $18 to manufacture each course of treatment but they are selling each to our government at the truly discounted price of $712.
The so-called invisible hand of the market place is the one that’s picking our pockets and absconding with our tax dollars.
The uber-rich have perverted elected officials, including judges, to ensure legislation in their interest is pursued, while policies for the people are ignored until they are dropped from the docket.
Kathy Hochul, governor of New York is trying to use the state budget to bend hard-won climate legislation to benefit polluters by loosening methane emission standards. This, after almost half a million dollars in contributions flowed her way from corporations and lobbyists for the polluting industries the law was designed to curb.
With the premise of protecting consumer costs, it would create a phase-in approach for her benefactors giving corporate culprits time and wriggle room in which to profit.
Meanwhile consumers would continue to be exposed to health risks and the existential danger of a warming world.
Scott Wiener has relied on campaign contributions from the real estate industry — landlords, developers, real estate attorneys, property management firms, brokers, architects, among others — to buy and retain his California Senate seat.
His notorious build-baby-build housing legislation has paid off big time for those who funded his meteoric rise in state politics. But it’s had a devastating effect on many Golden State residents forced to move as developers push housing prices through the roof.
Wars have always welcomed profiteers. Not only do those making out like bandits from sweetheart deals profit obscenely, but so do those in the procurement parade that collected the bribes that bumped these bids to the top.
Wall Street REITs and corporate landlords like Steve Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group and Sam Zell’s Equity Residential continue to put people on the street by forcing housing prices up and delivering poorer and poorer services just so they can make an extra buck.
In New York, real estate private equity firms, or REPEs have been set up specifically to evict people. After soliciting money from private investors to buy condo properties with rental tenants so that, by neglecting maintenance, jacking up payments to force often fixed-income renters out or bringing eviction suits, they can flip the building for significantly higher profits without the burden of tenant restrictions. Between 2012 and 2019, real estate contributed $1.2 million to New York’s Democratic Assembly Action Committee. Between October 2021 and July 2022, landlord groups poured at least $6 million into Kathy Hochul’s campaign account.
Corruption pervades the American system of PACs Super-PACs, and lobbyists. Corporate Democrats won’t act because powerful Wall Street forces would spend millions to defeat them.
Last October, the National Republican Senatorial Committee lauded Sean Hannity as a “Champion of Freedom” with Rick Scott giving the infotainer a silver cup.
For those who think of the Fox News host as a champion for ordinary people, he’s anything but. Hannity draws down $40 million annually from his corporate masters and has a net worth of a quarter of a billion dollars.
Martin Luther King Jr. and FDR may have been unlikely partners but as advocates for the American worker, they understood that full employment and decent wages for all who work was foundational, and that civil rights for all, not just Black Americans, plus economic justice was the true guarantor of freedom.
Our only hope is what remains of democracy in this country.
We need to call on our elected officials to join Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad, and stand up for America, for all Americans.
That means going after the pork in the Pentagon and tax breaks for industries profiting from conflict and aggression.
That means holding all judges, especially those of the Supreme Court, to appropriately elevated ethical and moral standards.
Instead of allowing developers to run rampant with shoddy projects, that means funding should go to rehabbing what we have and making all homes more climate friendly and affordable.
That means pushing the government to use the Medicare model to oversee work programs that will train doctors and nurses, care for people in their homes, rebuild our infrastructure, educate our young people, and combat climate change.
Not doing so will cost us far more; subcontracting corporations slap on a 20%, 30% or 50% overhead, and that’s before recouping the cost expended to be considered...
If the government needs money, start by taxing companies fairly and, for those that choose to move manufacturing overseas, call for a repayment on all prior incentives and charge them for every item they sell in the American market.
Almost one third of the U.S. labor force and half of working women of color earn under $15 an hour, with many capped at 30 hours a week so their employers don’t have to pay out any benefits. And far too many are thousands in debt with no foreseeable savings, let alone the need for wealth management, in their futures.
In stark comparison, America's growing number of billionaires saw their wealth increase by over 30% (more than a trillion dollars), since the start of the pandemic, and by 86% in the past ten years. The United States must swivel to more effectively tax wealth as well as income.
With a net worth 40% below its peak during the height of the pandemic but still into the 12 figures at $125 billion, Jeff Bezos is the wealthiest American and second wealthiest human on earth.
Amazon’s takings soared 453% from 2020 to 2021 riding the pandemic wave to profits of $36 billion on income of $470 billion; although exceedingly profitable in 2017 and 2018, the company paid absolutely nada in taxes for those years.
But Amazon persists in fighting unionization, and in illegally calling drivers independent contractors to evade tax, wage and benefit responsibilities. This is the basis of a business model that sees a 150% annual turnover rate and workplaces rife with inadequate safety policies meaning dangerous working conditions with injuries greater than two-and-a-half times the industry norm.
There will be no working class unless we speak up, only slaves and handmaidens... and masters.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
