AG Merrick Garland Vows To Get Leakers Of Sacred Billionaire Tax Information

cracked |  On today's installment of our government undoubtedly having their priorities perfectly in check, newly-minted Attorney General Merrick Garland promised legislators that investigating the source of the alleged billionaire income tax data included in ProPublica's explosive report earlier this week stands firmly at the top of his agenda. 

“I promise you, it will be at the top of my list,” the former Supreme Court nominee told Sen. Susan Collins, during a Wednesday Senate Appropriations Committee budget hearing, per CNBC. Although the shocking ProPublica article, likely to be the first in a series, details how billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, and George Soros allegedly used legal loopholes to pay next to nothing in personal income taxes, Garland is seemingly more concerned with how, exactly, the outlet obtained the data than why the ultra-wealthy allegedly aren't paying their fair share.

“Senator, I take this as seriously as you do. I very well remember what President Nixon did in the Watergate period — the creation of enemies lists and the punishment of people through reviewing their tax returns,” Garland explained. “This is an extremely serious matter. People are entitled, obviously, to great privacy with respect to their tax returns.” 

Despite the AG's evident passion on maintaining the sanctity of the rich's tax returns, it seems officials are already on the case – namely IRS Commissioner, Charles Rettig. “He said that their inspectors were working on it, and I’m sure that that means it will be referred to the Justice Department,” Garland explained. “This was on my list of things to raise after I finished preparing for this hearing.” Mr. Garland, if you're reading this, I know I may be a constant source of embarrassment for our mutual alma mater – Niles West High School – but you're really giving me a run for my money with this nonsense. 

The report, which aims to dispel the long-running myth "that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most," claims that through a series of legal loopholes – namely the fact that intangible assets, like stock earnings and increases in property value, are not taxable – some of America's richest business people have been paying much less than what some say they should to Uncle Sam. While ProPublica has stayed tight-lipped on how, exactly, they obtained these documents illustrating this phenomenon, which they claimed they received in “raw form, with no conditions or conclusions," the information included seemingly passed a reportedly rigorous fact-checking process. "In every instance we were able to check — involving tax filings by more than 50 separate people — the details provided to ProPublica matched the information from other sources," they explained.

 

Pissants: Taxes Are For Thee!!! NOT For Me....,

propublica |  In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.

Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.

ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.

Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.

Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more. In recent years, the median American household earned about $70,000 annually and paid 14% in federal taxes. The highest income tax rate, 37%, kicked in this year, for couples, on earnings above $628,300.

The confidential tax records obtained by ProPublica show that the ultrarich effectively sidestep this system.

 

 

If Your Profession Is "Lying For Billionaires" You're In Trouble When The People Catch On...,

statnews  |  To understand why billionaires are a sign of moral and economic failure, look no further than the Covid-19 pandemic.

Drug corporations could earn $190 billion from Covid-19 vaccine sales this year. Pharmaceutical profits have minted nine new pandemic billionaires, and helped eight existing billionaires enlarge their fortunes. Several of these are founders and private investors in three pharmaceutical corporations — Moderna, BioNTech, and CureVac — whose vaccines use mRNA technology that was largely developed from publicly funded research.

Their financial bonanzas provide a disturbing contrast with vaccine apartheid. By the end of May, only 0.3% of all vaccine doses worldwide had been administered in low-income countries.

Facing condemnation for hoarding doses, the G-7 countries, which are meeting this weekend in England, are under pressure to launch a new plan to expand Covid-19 immunization globally. One hotly contested issue is whether they will call for mandatory sharing of mRNA vaccine technologies, including a proposed waiver of intellectual property rights for Covid-19 technologies.

Pandemic billionaires are speaking out against government intervention, warning it would undermine innovation and claiming that their firms can satisfy global demand for Covid-19 vaccines.

Because the public sector was largely responsible for developing mRNA technology and sharing it with corporations, the pandemic fortunes of these founders and investors stands in stark and repugnant contrast to billions of unvaccinated people.

Moderna, BioNTech, and CureVac are each led by founders or longtime executives with a key role in company decision-making: Stéphane Bancel is Moderna’s CEO, Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin are BioNTech’s co-founders, and Franz-Werner Haas is CureVac’s CEO. In addition to getting head starts from publicly funded research, these companies also relied on private investment provided through venture capital or family offices (privately held companies that handle investment and wealth management for wealthy families). Venture capital investors include Flagship Pioneering, a Boston-based firm whose founder, Noubar Afeyan, also serves as Moderna’s chair, and MIG AG, a German venture capital firm that made early investments in BioNTech. Other large investors in BioNTech and CureVac were German family offices, including investments by Dietmar Hopp in CureVac and the Struengmann brothers in BioNTech.

Founders, executives, venture capitalists, and family offices all held substantial ownership stakes in the three mRNA companies heading into the pandemic. All of them had a choice at the start of the pandemic: maximize profits or maximize low-cost, global production of vaccines.

The three firms chose profit maximization, partnering with multinational companies or forging partnerships with a few contract manufacturers. This year, these companies will have sold nearly all their limited supply of vaccines to wealthy countries at high prices.

They could have instead chosen to avoid scarcity and hoarding by sharing technology, know-how, and intellectual property with other manufacturers, thereby expanding and decentralizing production. It wouldn’t be like they were giving away their intellectual property for free: sharing would allow these companies to earn royalties — and profits.

 

Bill Gates Has Had A Lifelong Ideological Committment To Knowledge Monopolies

newrepublic |  Gates can hardly disguise his contempt for the growing interest in intellectual property barriers. In recent months, as the debate has shifted from the WHO to the WTO, reporters have drawn testy responses from Gates that harken back to his prickly performances before congressional antitrust hearings a quarter-century ago. When a Fast Company reporter raised the issue in February, she described Gates “raising his voice slightly and laughing in frustration,” before snapping, “It’s irritating that this issue comes up here. This isn’t about IP.” 

In interview after interview, Gates has dismissed his critics on the issue—who represent the poor majority of the global population—as spoiled children demanding ice cream before dinner. “It’s the classic situation in global health, where the advocates all of a sudden want [the vaccine] for zero dollars and right away,” he told Reuters in late January. Gates has larded the insults with comments that equate state-protected and publicly funded monopolies with the “free market.” “North Korea doesn’t have that many vaccines, as far as we can tell,” he told The New York Times in November. (It is curious that he chose North Korea as an example and not Cuba, a socialist country with an innovative and world-class vaccine development program with multiple Covid-19 vaccine candidates in various stages of testing.)

The closest Gates has come to conceding that vaccine monopolies inhibit production came during a January interview with South Africa’s Mail & Guardian. Asked about the growing intellectual property debate, he responded, “At this point, changing the rules wouldn’t make any additional vaccines available.”

The first implication of “at this point” is that the moment has passed when changing the rules could make a difference. This is a false but debatable claim. The same can’t be said for the second implication, which is that nobody could have possibly foreseen the current supply crisis. Not only were the obstacles posed by intellectual property easily predictable a year ago, there was no lack of people making noise about the urgency of avoiding them. They included much of the global research community, major NGOs with long experience in medicines development and access, and dozens of current and former world leaders and public health experts. In a May 2020 open letter, more than 140 political and civil society leaders called upon governments and companies to begin pooling their intellectual property. “Now is not the time … to leave this massive and moral task to market forces,” they wrote.  

Bill Gates’s position on intellectual property was consistent with a lifelong ideological commitment to knowledge monopolies, forged during a vengeful teenage crusade against the open-source programming culture of the 1970s. As it happens, a novel use of one category of intellectual property—copyright, applied to computer code—made Gates the richest man in the world for most of two decades beginning in 1995. That same year, the WTO went into effect, chaining the developing world to intellectual property rules written by a handful of executives from the U.S. pharmaceutical, entertainment, and software industries.  

I Don't Think This Will Pass Congress And We're Going To Make Real Sure It Doesn't!

ritholtz  |  Spoiler alert: Forget the 40% capital gains rate — its DOA, merely misdirection, designed to distract from the real show. My best deductive reasoning leads me to conclude the administration has decided that the 1% have amassed so much money and power, that they deserve their own (higher) tax bracket.

That is the philosophy behind the new cap gains proposal: Treat the top 1% as unique, and tax them accordingly.

Allow me to share my thinking about the proposed doubling of the capital gains tax rate to 40%. I am not going to weigh in on whether or not I support it — thats not especially relevant — but rather, how we got here, and what might be going on behind the scenes, and what is more likely to occur (if anytrhing). Contrary to some of the hyperbolic hysteria you may have seen on social media, there is a method to the madness.

But first, my priors: Following World War Two, the United States enjoyed an unprecedented expansion of the middle class. Corporate CEOs earned about 25 times what the average worker made; jobs with good benefits were plentiful, wages rose regularly. Education and healthcare was affordable.

That began to change when Stagflation took root in the 1970s; change accelerated under President Reagan as tax rates were slashed. Not long after that, audits and enforcements at the IRS began to decrease. Capital began to outpace Labor – modestly at first, and then more significantly. In the 1990s, President Clinton introduced a tax change intended to limit executive pay – but it had the exact opposite effect, shifting more of their compensation from wages to stock options. This led to the creation of vast fortunes including an increased number of millionaires and billionaires. It was the law of unintended consequences writ large. That was before President Trump cut the Corporate tax rate in 2017.

Today, Corporate CEOs earned about 200+ times what the average worker makes (or 320x or whatever); good jobs with good wages and benefits are much less plentiful, Education and healthcare are unaffordable.

Hence, that is from whence my analysis begins. I believe that strategically, the proposed 40% is a misdirection, and a brilliant one at that. It is not at all what this is truly about.

Overtaxing "Success" Is Unamerican

bloomberg  |  Charles Myers was sitting in a first-class seat on a flight from New York to Dallas when his phone started blowing up Thursday. News had just broken that the wealthiest Americans could soon face a tax rate as high as 43.4% on gains from their investments.

The chairman of Signum Global Advisors wasn’t thrilled.

“Raising capital gains taxes hurts the capital markets,” he said in a text message. “Better to raise the personal top marginal rate and estate tax. Leave capital gains and dividends alone.”

Myers has raised funds for Joe Biden, and wasn’t shocked by the White House’s plan because it was part of the president’s campaign. But the donor doesn’t think that 43.4% rate will make it into final legislation.

As the plane descended, he added: “Over-taxing success is un-American.”

Pressure has been building to raise levies on the wealthy after decades of tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the top 1%. Politicians at the national and state levels have recently proposed or passed higher rates, but the measures were largely focused on income taxes.

The plan to target investment gains strikes at the heart of what makes the wealthiest Americans ever more wealthy.

The country’s richest 1% own more than 50% of the equity in corporations and in mutual fund shares, according to Federal Reserve data. The next 9% of the wealthiest own more than a third of equity positions. Added together, the top 10% of Americans hold more than 88% of shares.

Meanwhile, the bottom 90%’s equity exposure has been dropping for almost two decades. That meant last year’s stock market surge widened the nation’s wealth gap further, leaving the 10 richest Americans with more than $1 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Now, Biden wants to help pay for a raft of social spending that addresses long-standing inequality by taxing investment gains more, according to people familiar with his proposal.

Billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper isn’t persuaded. He said raising federal rates to as high as 43.4% would sound the death knell for Silicon Valley and American job creation.

 

Is Income Inequality “Compatible With Values Rooted In Our Nation’s History?"

propublica  |  “Inequality is a cumulative process,” said Karen Petrou, author of “The Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America” and managing partner of the Washington-based consulting firm Federal Financial Analytics. “The richer you are, the richer you get, and the poorer you are, the poorer you get, unless something puts that engine in reverse,” she said. “That engine is driven not by fate or by untouchable phenomena such as demographics but most importantly by policy decisions.”

Under President Joe Biden, the federal government is trying to both create jobs and funnel lots of money to people like Tan with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan stimulus package. Indeed, Tan is grateful for the $4,200 in stimulus funds she recently received. “This country has really, really blessed me a lot,” said Tan, a naturalized citizen who emigrated from Indonesia in 1984.

The Biden administration is also pushing for a $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill. But even without a penny yet having been spent on that, the federal government is running up record budget deficits, with more to come.

A considerable part of current and future deficits will be indirectly financed by the Fed, which has been increasing its holdings of Treasury IOUs and mortgage-backed securities by at least $120 billion a month, and has directed its trading desk to increase purchases “as needed” to maintain smooth functioning in the financial markets.

During Donald Trump’s four years as president, the Fed added $2.25 trillion to its holdings of Treasury IOUs, which helped cover the $7.8 trillion of debt the Treasury issued to finance budget deficits during the Trump years. It’s likely the central bank will be the biggest source of finance for Biden’s deficits, just as it was for Trump’s.

Why does that matter? Because when the Fed buys securities, it does so with money that it creates out of thin air. Pumping more money into the financial system increases the money supply, and some of that cash inevitably ends up making its way into the stock market, boosting prices.

Biden is making tax increases a big part of his infrastructure pitch, which in theory would make that legislation less reliant on the Fed. But it doesn’t mean taxes will go up anywhere near as much as he’s proposing. Or that taxes and spending will rise in lockstep. After all, spending is a lot more popular than raising taxes.

Now, let’s step back a bit and see how we got to this point.

During the 2008-09 financial crisis, the Fed initiated “quantitative easing,” a policy under which the central bank buys massive amounts of Treasury IOUs and other securities to inject money into the markets and stimulate the economy. Then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke championed that approach, which complemented aggressive moves by the Treasury and helped keep giant banks and the world financial system from cratering. (Lots of people still lost their homes to foreclosure, another example of how helping the financial system might not help average people. But that story has already been told.)

Davos Elites Have Their Sights Set On Global Food Control

ipsnews  |  Producers and consumers seem helpless as food all over the world comes under fast growing corporate control. Such changes have also been worsening environmental collapse, social dislocation and the human condition. 

Longer term perspective

The recent joint report – by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and the ETC Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration – is ominous, to say the least.

A Long Food Movement, principally authored by Pat Mooney with a team including IPES-Food Director Nick Jacobs, analyses how food systems are likely to evolve over the next quarter century with technological and other changes.

The report notes that ‘hi-tech’, data processing and asset management corporations have joined established agribusinesses in reshaping world food supply chains.

If current trends continue, the food system will be increasingly controlled by large transnational corporations (TNCs) at the expense of billions of farmers and consumers.

Big Ag weds Big Data
The Davos World Economic Forum’s (WEF) much touted ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (IR4.0), promoting digitisation, is transforming food systems, accelerating concentration in corporate hands.

New apps enable better tracking across supply chains, while ‘precision farming’ now includes using drones to spray pesticides on targeted crops, reducing inputs and, potentially, farming costs. Agriculture is now second only to the military in drone use.

Digital giants are working with other TNCs to extend enabling ‘cloud computing’ infrastructure. Spreading as quickly as the infrastructure allows, new ‘digital ag’ technologies have been displacing farm labour.

Meanwhile, food data have become more commercially valuable, e.g., to meet consumer demand, Big Ag profits have also grown by creating ‘new needs’. Big data are already being used to manipulate consumer preferences.

With the pandemic, e-retail and food delivery services have grown even faster. Thus, e-commerce platforms have quickly become the world’s top retailers.

New ‘digital ag’ technologies are also undermining diverse, ecologically more appropriate food agriculture in favour of unsustainable monocropping. The threat is great as family farms still feed more than two-thirds of the world’s population.

IR4.0 not benign
Meanwhile, hi-tech and asset management firms have acquired significant shareholdings in food giants. Powerful conglomerates are integrating different business lines, increasing concentration while invoking competition and ‘creative disruption’.

The IPES-ETC study highlights new threats to farming and food security as IR4.0 proponents exert increasing influence. The report warns that giving Big Ag the ‘keys of the food system’ worsens food insecurity and other existential threats.

Powerful corporations will increase control of most world food supplies. Big Ag controlled supply chains will also be more vulnerable as great power rivalry and competition continue to displace multilateral cooperation.

 

 

Only Bootlicking Parseltongues Even Pretend To Give A Fsck About Your "Ideas"...,

Fastcompany |  The recently released Forbes World’s Billionaires List includes some shocking figures about our tech overlords. At the start of 2020, the tech barons were collectively worth $419 billion. A year later, their wealth had soared to $651 billion—a 56% increase. The hoarding of that wealth harms us all: It distributes resources away from those who need it most and, by allowing the tech barons to influence government policy, corrodes democratic society.

Most of us will never grow our wealth by 56% in a year. But wealth begets wealth. The superrich have access to investments that yield higher returns, the corporations they run pay less and less corporate tax, and as individuals they pay less in income tax than the rest of us.

The barons’ financial advantage over the average person is extraordinary. While their median net worth is $90.2 billion, the net worth of the median white American household is $189,000, while that of Black American families is $24,000. In other words, the median Big Tech billionaire is more than 477,000 times wealthier than the median white American family, and more than 3.7 million times wealthier than the median Black family.

To get a further sense of scale, consider what these billionaires could achieve with their wealth if they decided to. Together, they could:

• End global hunger ($330 billion);
• Eradicate malaria from the face of the earth ($120 billion);
• End homelessness in America ($20 billion);
• Feed the hungry suffering in Yemen’s famine ($4 billion);
• Give everyone in the world access to clean water and sanitation for six years ($22 billion per year); and
• Vaccinate the world from COVID-19 ($25 billion).

With that done, they would still have enough for each of them to take home $2.6 billion. With their spare change, they could each afford to collect the 10 most expensive works of art in the world ($2.3 billion) or take on another pet project, such as saving 520,000 lives by providing critical vaccines to children across the world.

Some may find it unreasonable to ask the Big Tech barons to survive on just $2.6 billion each. After all, the thinking goes, the barons earned that money. But these billionaires could give away $144 billion—more than enough to eradicate malaria on our planet—and still be as rich as they were when the pandemic started in 2020.

While maintaining their 2020 level of wealth, these Big Tech billionaires could start a direct cash transfer campaign and send $1,100 checks to every American family. Or they could send $19 to every person in the world. (That would be far more impactful: 689 million people around the world live on less than $1.90 a day.) Jeff Bezos would still walk away with $113 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg with $54.7 billion.

As long as the tech barons remain in possession of extraordinary concentrations of wealth, that inequity will continue to erode our society’s democracy. At a time when Congress, independent agencies, and state attorneys general are looking to rein in the power of Big Tech, the sheer wealth of these individuals makes it hard to hold them and their corporations accountable.

Does Nikole Hannah-Jones Channel Ronald McDonald Or Pennywise?

wsws |  The wealth and privilege of the leading proponents of racialism demonstrate the reactionary character of identity politics. It is entirely divorced from the real concerns and experiences of the working class. Fearful of a unified workers’ movement, the ruling class seeks to sow artificial racial divisions among workers through the promotion of identity politics. Additionally, middle class layers seeking a bigger slice of the pie see identity as a means of advancing their own wealth and social position.

The American ruling class is terrified of the growth of a working-class movement. The fight against police violence, racism, and poverty can only be waged through the building of a socialist movement, independent of the capitalist parties, that unifies workers on their common class interests.

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, lead author of the Times’s “1619 Project,” was paid $25,000 for an online Zoom lecture given to the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.

Through a Freedom of Information request, the right-wing news outlet Campus Reform obtained documentation detailing Hannah-Jones’s terms of compensation for the February 19 lecture. Additionally, the documents revealed that Hannah-Jones was partnered with the Lavin Agency, a talent agency that is “the world’s largest intellectual talent agency, representing leading thinkers for speaking engagements personal appearances, consulting, and endorsements,” according to its website. Hannah-Jones’s relationship with the agency suggests she regularly schedules events and is paid for them.

Part of the agreement between Hannah-Jones and the University of Oregon dictated that the lecture, titled “1619 and the Legacy That Built a Nation,” could not be recorded and redistributed. However, a promotional flyer advertised a discussion on “the lasting legacy of Black enslavement on the nation—specifically, how Black Americans pushed for the democracy we have today.”

News of the lecture came days after Hulu announced that it partnered with production studio Lionsgate and billionaire Oprah Winfrey to create a docuseries based on the 1619 Project. In a statement, Hulu said the project was a “landmark undertaking…of the brutal racism that endures in so many aspects of American life today.”

Have Elites Acquired The Technology To Rule Without The Gentry?

michaelochurch  |   In a society like ours, the upper and lower classes have more in common with each other than either has with the middle class. The upper and lower classes “live like animals”, but for very different reasons. The upper classes are empowered to engage their primal, base urges; the lower classes are pummeled with fear on a daily basis and regress to animalism not out of moral paucity but in order to survive. People in the lower class live lives that are consumed entirely by money, because they lack the means of a dignified life. Those in the upper class, likewise, experience a life dominated by money, because maintaining injustices favorable to oneself is hard work. So, even though the motivations are different (fear at the bottom, greed at the top) the lower and upper classes are united in what the middle class perceives as “crass materialism” and, therefore, have strikingly similar cultures. Their lives are run by that thing called “money” toward which the middle classes pretend– and it is very much pretend– to be ambivalent about. The middle classes are sheltered, until the cultural protection, on which their semi-privileged status depends, runs out.

The “middle-est” of the middle class is the Gentry. Here we’re talking about people who dislike pawnbrokers and stock traders alike, who appear to lead a society from the front while its real owners lead it from the shadows. This said, I have my doubts on the matter of there being one, singular Gentry. I would argue that corporate middle management, the clergy, the political establishments of both major U.S. political parties, TED-talk onanist “thought leaders” and media personalities, and even Instagram “influencers” could all be called Gentries; in no obvious or formal way do these groups have much to do with one another. Only in one thing are they united: by the middle 2010s it became clear that both the Elite (bourgeoisie) and Labor (self-aaware proletariat) were fed up with all these Gentries. Starting around 2013, an anti-Gentry hategasm consumed the United States, and as a member of said (former) Gentry I can’t say we didn’t deserve it.

Technology, I believe, is a major cause of this. Silicon Valley began as a 1970s Gentry paradise; by 2010, it had become a monument to Elite excess, arrogance, and malefaction. Modern technology has given today’s employers an oppressive power the Stasi and KGB only dreamt of. The American Gentry was a PR wing for capitalism when it needed to win hearts and minds; but with today’s technological weaponry, the rich no longer see a need to be well-liked by those they rule.

For a concrete example, compare the “old style” bureaucratic, paperwork corporation of the midcentury and the “new style” technological one, in which workers are tracked, often unawares, down to minutes. The old-style companies were hierarchical and feudalistic but, by giving middle managers the ability to protect their underlings, ran on a certain sense of reciprocated loyalty– a social contract, if you will– that no longer exists. The worker agreed not to undermine, humiliate, or sabotage his manager; the manager, in turn, agreed to represent the worker as an asset to the company even when said worker had a below-average year. All you had to do in the old-style company was be liked (or, at least, not be despised) by your boss. If your boss liked you, you got promoted. If your boss hated you, you got fired. If you were anywhere from about 3.00 to 6.99 on his emotional spectrum, you moved diagonally or laterally, your boss repping you as a 6.75/10 “in search of a better fit” so you moved along quickly and peaceably. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked better than what came afterward.

I’ve worked in the software industry long enough to know that software engineers are the most socially clueless people on earth. I’ve often heard them debate “the right” metrics to use to track software productivity. My advice to them is: Always fight metrics. Sabotage the readings, or blackmail a higher-up by catfishing as a 15-year-old girl, or call in a union that’ll drop a pipe on that shit. Always, always, always fight a metric that management wishes to impose on you, because while a metric can hurt you (by flagging you as a low performer) it will never help you. In the old-style company, automated surveillance was impossible and performance was largely inscrutable and only loyalty mattered– your career was based on your boss’s opinion of you. It only took one thing to get a promotion: be liked by your boss. In the new-style company, devised by management consultants and software peddlers with evil intentions, getting a promotion requires you to pass the metrics and be liked by your boss. In the old-style company, you could get fired if your boss really, really hated you. (As I said, if he merely disliked you, he’d rep you as a solid performer “in search of a better fit” so you could transfer peacefully, and you’d get to try again with a new boss.) In the new-style company, you can get fired because your boss hates you or because you fail the metrics. The “user story points” that product managers insist are not an individual performance measure (and absolutely are, by the way) are evidence that only the prosecution may use. This is terrible for workers. There are new ways to fail and get fired; the route to success is constricted by an increase in the number of targets that must be hit. The old-style hierarchical company, at least, had simple rules: be loyal to your boss. Having been a middle manager, I can also say that the new-style company is humiliating for us– we can’t protect our reports. You have to “demand accountability from” people, but you can’t really do anything to help them.

This, I think, gives us a metaphor for the American Gentry’s failure. Middle managers who cannot protect their subordinates from the company’s more evil instincts (such as the instinct to fire everyone and hire replacements 5 percent cheaper) have no reason to expect true loyalty. They become superfluous performance cops and taskmasters, and even if they are personally liked, their roles are justifiably hated (including by those who have to perform them.)

More On The Ruling Elite And Their Narrative,Technology, And Governance Endgame(s)

indiepf |  What I’ve called the Labor, Gentry, and Elite “ladders” can more easily be described as “infrastructures”. For Labor, this infrastructure is largely physical and the relevant connection is knowing how to use that physical device or space, and getting people to trust a person to competently use (without owning, because that’s out of the question for most) these resources. For the Gentry, it’s an “invisible graph” of knowledge and education and “interestingness”, comprised largely of ideas. For the Elite, it’s a tight, exclusive network centered on social connections, power, and dominance. People can be connected to more than one of these infrastructures, but people usually bind more tightly to the one of higher status, except when at the transitional ranks (G4 and E4) which tend to punt people who don’t ascend after some time. The overwhelmingly high likelihood is that a person is aligned most strongly to one and only one of these structures. The values are too conflicting for a person not to pick one horse or the other.

I’ve argued that the ladders connect at a two-rung difference, with L2 ~ G4, L1 ~ G3, G2 ~ E4, and G1 ~ E3. These are “social equivalencies” that don’t involve a change in social status, so they’re the easiest to transitions to make (in both directions). They represent a transfer from one form of capital to another. A skilled laborer (L2) who begins taking night courses (G4) is using time to get an education rather than more money. Likewise, one who moves from the high gentry (G2) to a 90-hour-per-week job in private wealth management (E4) is applying her refined intellectual skills and knowledge to serving the rich, in the hope of making the connections to become one of them.

That said, these ladders often come into conflict. The most relevant one to most of my readers will be the conflict between the Gentry and the Elite. The Gentry tends to be left-libertarian and values creativity, individual autonomy, and free expression. The Elite tends toward center-right authoritarianism and corporate conformity, and it views creativity as dangerous (except when applied to hiding financial risks or justifying illegal wars). The Gentry believes that it is the deserving elite and the face of the future, and that it can use culture to engineer a future in which its values are elite; while the upper tier of the Elite finds the Gentry pretentious, repugnant, self-indulgent, and subversive. The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is incredibly contentious. It’s a cosmic, ubiquitous war between the past and the future.

Between the Gentry and Labor, there is an attitude of distrust. The Elite has been running a divide-and-conquer strategy between these two categories for decades. This works because the Elite understands (and can ape) the culture of the Gentry, but has something in common with Labor that sets the categories apart from the Gentry: a conception of work as a theater for masculine dominance. This is something that the Elite and Labor both believe in– the visceral strength and importance of the alpha-male in high-stakes gambling settings such as most modern work– but that the Gentry would rather deny. Gender is a major part of the Elite’s strategy in turning Labor against the Gentry: make the Gentry look effeminate. That’s why “feminist” is practically a racial slur, despite the world desperately needing attention to women’s political equality, health and well-being (that is, feminism).

The Elite also uses the Underclass in a different process: the Elite wants Labor think the Gentry intends to conspire with the Underclass to dismantle Labor values and elevate these “obviously undeserving” people to, at least, the status of Labor if not promoted above them. They exploit fear in Labor. One might invoke racism and the “Southern strategy” in politics as an example of this, but the racial part is incidental. The Elite don’t care whether it’s blacks or Latinos or “illigals” or red-haired people or homosexuals (most of whom are not part of the Underclass) that are being used to frighten Labor into opposing and disliking the Gentry; they just know that the device works and that it has pretty much always worked.

The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is one of open rivalry, and that between the Gentry and Labor is one of distrust. What about Labor and the Elite? That one is not symmetric. The Elite exploit and despise Labor as a class comprised mostly of “useful idiots”. How does Labor see the Elite? They don’t. The Elite has managed to convince Labor that the Gentry (who are open about their cultural elitism, while the Elite hides its social and economic elitism) is the actual “liberal elite” responsible for Labor’s misery over the past 30 years. In effect, the Elite has constructed an “infinity pool” where the Elite appears to be a hyper-successful extension of Labor, lumping these two disparate ladders into an “us” and placing the Gentry and Underclass into “them”.

The Rich Have Reached The Zenith Of Their Power In NYC

FT  |   The tax fight is a preamble for an upcoming mayoral election that all sides view as one of the most consequential in New York’s history. The Democratic primary, which is expected to crown the eventual winner in a city where seven out of every eight voters are Democrats, is in June. Business leaders and the wealthy have been nursing existential dread at the possibility of what one prominent property developer calls another “ideological” mayor. That is, someone in the mould of the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, who is limited to serving two terms. Two days after winning the 2013 Democratic primary, De Blasio attended a private lunch with the city’s business leaders and promptly alienated many of them. They expected he would solicit their advice and extend a hand. Instead, the mayor reprised his “tale of two cities” campaign rhetoric, and declared that he cared about the other side. “Faces dropped,” one attendee recalls. 

That divide has only deepened in the ensuing years. De Blasio’s legion of executive class critics deride him as a lazy manager who deploys politicised rhetoric to cover for his own incompetence. While the budget has increased by 35 per cent during his tenure, problems like homelessness and public housing have worsened — even before the pandemic. “The city is at a crossroads. This is truly the most important election of our lifetime and in NYC’s history,” Stephen Ross, chair of The Related Companies, and de facto king of the city’s developers, wrote to fellow business leaders last month as he urged them to join his effort to elect a business-friendly mayor. The race’s outcome, Ross wrote, will determine whether “NYC will rebound or languish”. Looming large for executives like Ross is the grim memory of the 1970s, when a fraying city ended up losing half its Fortune 500 companies — many fleeing to surrounding suburbs — and shedding more than 1m inhabitants. That era also birthed a civic movement. It was christened at a breakfast meeting at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue in 1971 when the developer Lew Rudin and hotelier Robert Tisch hatched what would become the Association for a Better New York, a group of business leaders who aimed to step in where city government was failing. ABNY’s moguls lobbied the federal government on the city’s behalf. They also brought labour leaders into their tent.

 

You Can Travel With AIDS, Hepatitis, And Tuberculosis - But Not Without An mRNA Jab!!!

thehill |   Republicans are seizing on the intensifying debate over coronavirus vaccination passports as part of their strategy for recapturing control of Congress in 2022.

In interviews and conversations with The Hill, GOP strategists and operatives acknowledged the growing eagerness among Americans to be vaccinated against COVID-19. But many are also betting that emerging debates about so-called vaccine passports will help them play on voters’ fears of government overreach and privacy violations.

The idea of vaccine passports has gained increasing attention in recent weeks as eligibility for COVID-19 vaccinations has rapidly expanded and Americans begin to see glints of a post-pandemic normal on the horizon. The White House has indicated that it will issue basic guidelines for such programs, though it has also said that it has no plans to create a centralized, federal requirement.

Still, some of the country’s most prominent conservatives have begun to latch on to the emerging possibility of vaccine passports or certificates, seeing such proposals as an extension of their campaign to rally the GOP base in opposition to coronavirus-related restrictions like lockdown orders and mask mandates.

“It’s a political winner,” Ford O’Connell, a Florida-based Republican strategist, said. “They look at it as an all-out assault on personal freedoms and the Constitution, but also, it’s about protecting the average, ordinary Floridian who wants to live their regular day-to-day lives.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is among the Republicans who have come out early against the proposals. He criticized the idea of vaccine passports at a press conference Monday, calling it “unacceptable” for local governments or businesses to require proof of vaccination for people to “participate in normal society.”

On Friday, he signed an executive order banning any future vaccine certificate requirements in Florida, and called on the GOP-controlled state legislature to draft a bill to enshrine such a policy into law.

Republicans are hoping that their early efforts to define vaccine passports as a symbol of government overreach will help counter what Democrats see as their most powerful political weapon in the 2022 midterms: their efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crisis.

Democrats are hoping that a massive $1.9 trillion stimulus package signed into law last month, along with a sweeping proposal to overhaul the nation’s infrastructure, will help them stave off the typical electoral shellacking that a new president’s party typically sees in the first midterms following his inauguration.

 

Vaccine Passports: Where Biosecurity State Aims - Shed - Pandemic Mitigation Pretensions...,

BMJ  |  The critical issue is not the effect that vaccine passports might have on people in general. If one wants to increase take-up, it is the effect on those individuals and communities who harbour doubts about vaccination which matters. 

Based on hard experience, such communities (ethnic minorities in particular) have reason to question whether medical and governmental authorities treat their needs as a priority and this historical distrust provides a framework for interpreting contemporary pandemic policies. [18] Members of these communities are more attuned to the possibility that such policies (including vaccination) are something done to them rather than done for them by authorities who are not of them but against them. Moreover, there are plenty of anti-vaxxers aiming to promote this view by arguing that covid measures are not a matter of public health, but of social control by a hostile elite. [19] The reality, and even the rumour, of vaccine passports for core activities serves to give substance to these fears and to give traction to the anti-vaxxers. Passports can be seen as confirming the perception that vaccination is a measure of compulsion imposed upon the community. And once people begin to regard vaccines as compulsory then the evidence suggests that this produces anger and reduces willingness to get vaccinated. [20]

All in all, there are reasons to conclude that vaccine passports for basic activities may actually undermine vaccine rollout by disincentivising the very populations who most need incentivising. Closer inspection of the Israeli “green pass” scheme serves to reinforce this message. The evidence for passes increasing vaccination uptake is weak, while suspicions of compulsion and reports of people barred from workplaces for not being vaccinated have “resulted in antagonism and increased distrust among individuals who were already concerned about infringement on citizens’ rights”. [21] By contrast, what has proved successful in Israel are basic measures of community engagement: involving trusted community leaders, taking mobile vaccination units into communities, bringing along medical experts who can answer any questions, and providing food and drink to those who attend, has proved successful in Israel. [22]

To conclude: there are many good reasons to reject any passport scheme which makes everyday social participation dependent on vaccination. There are arguments on the grounds of liberties, of equalities, and of practicalities. However, even some of the grounds used to support them (i.e. vaccine take-up) may be another reason to oppose them. At a point in the pandemic where increased engagement is critical, both in order to overcome doubts about vaccination, and to enhance the pandemic response more generally, the mere possibility of vaccine passports threatens to alienate marginalised communities still further. [23,24]

So, let’s stop discussing the use of vaccine passports as a criterion for basic social and economic participation. This is an idea with few redeeming features and even talking about introducing them may be enough to do damage.

Covid19 And The Multinational Biosecurity State

architectsforsocialhousing |  I want to start our awakening from the sleep of reason by looking at the social practices of the coronavirus crisis [to] correct the conspiracy theory of an elite with their hands … on the gears of history. Let’s [instead] look at the machine of history. We all know its name, and despite all the renewed predictions of its death it hasn’t gone away. On the contrary, it’s just going through a revolution … but its name is still the same. Capitalism.

Marx was right. When the material productive forces of society come into conflict with existing relations of production — its property relations — a period of social revolution begins. ‘With the change of the economic foundations’, he wrote, ‘the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.’ The expansion into new markets of the neoliberal capitalism that has dominated Western democracies for 40 years no longer has to accommodate liberal democracy. What we are undergoing — what we are colluding in producing — are the new political, legal and social forms for a multinational biosecurity state. And no elite, no matter how powerful, is in control of it for the simple reason that, despite immensely powerful international organisations increasingly divorced from and opposed to democratic process, capitalism is a dynamic process that develops by conflict and contradiction.

Capitalism has a grip on the world the like of which it has never had before, and as it faces the long-heralded limits to [its] expansion it is developing new forms and powers to extend that grip further over the world’s diminishing resources. But there is no single government or corporation ruling the globe, no secret society whose members sit on every cabinet and board.

The US Government is the greatest military power the world has ever seen, and the United Nations has long been superseded by far more unaccountable coalitions of state and corporate powers whose activities are largely secret and getting more so. And the power of technology to monitor and control the world’s populations is expanding at an exponential rate in both breadth and depth. But the world is not a single, supra-political block.

There is no invisible hand of the market-god ruling over us, for good or for evil; there are only devils competing for his crown. The world undergoing this revolution in capitalism remains a conflict whose battleground, now and for the immediate future, is the coronavirus crisis. What makes that conflict new for Western democracies is that the war being waged is a civil one, of governments against their own people, rather than against other countries.

By looking at how this civil war is being waged, therefore, we can begin to understand to what ends it is being fought.

Resistance To The Multinational Biosecurity State Is Musical Chairs On The Deck Of The Titanic

CTH  |   Consider if you will, the backdrop of current U.S. politics; the influence of Wall Street and the multinationals who align with globalism; the reality of K-Street lobbyists writing the physical legislation that politicians sell to Americans; and then overlay what you are witnessing as those same multinationals now attack the foundation of our constitutional republic.  All of this is CORPORATISM, a continuum that people were ignoring for decades… Now, thankfully, there is a new awakening.

In these economic endeavors President Trump was disrupting decades of financial schemes established to use the U.S. as a host for their endeavors. President Trump was confronting multinational corporations and the global constructs of economic systems that were put in place to the detriment of the host (USA) ie YOU. There are trillions at stake; it is all about the economics; everything else is chaff and countermeasures.

The road to a “service-driven economy” is paved with a great disparity between financial classes. The wealth gap is directly related to the inability of the middle-class to thrive.

Elite financial interests, including those within Washington DC, gain wealth and power, the U.S. workforce is reduced to servitude, “service”, of their affluent needs.

The destruction of the U.S. industrial and manufacturing base is EXACTLY WHY the middle class has struggled, and exactly why the wealth gap exploded in the past 30 years.

Behind this dynamic we find the international corporate and financial interests who are inherently at risk from President Trump’s “America-First” economic and trade platform. Believe it or not, President Trump is up against an entire world economic establishment.

When we understand how trade works in the modern era we understand why the agents within the system are so adamantly opposed to U.S. President Trump.

♦The biggest lie in modern economics, willingly spread and maintained by corporate media, is that a system of global markets still exists.

It doesn’t.

Every element of global economic trade is controlled and exploited by massive institutions, multinational banks and multinational corporations. Institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Bank control trillions of dollars in economic activity.

Underneath that economic activity there are people who hold the reigns of power over the outcomes. These individuals and groups are the stakeholders in direct opposition to principles of America-First national economics. Collectively known as “The Big Club”.

The modern financial constructs of these entities have been established over the course of the past three decades. When you understand how they manipulate the economic system of individual nations you begin to understand why they are so fundamentally opposed to President Trump.

In the Western World, separate from communist control perspectives (ie. China), “Global markets” are a modern myth; nothing more than a talking point meant to keep people satiated with sound bites they might find familiar. Global markets have been destroyed over the past three decades by multinational corporations who control the products formerly contained within global markets.

The same is true for “Commodities Markets”. The multinational trade and economic system, run by corporations and multinational banks, now controls the product outputs of independent nations. The free market economic system has been usurped by entities who create what is best described as ‘controlled markets’.

U.S. President Trump understood what had taken place. He used economic leverage as part of a broader national security policy; and to understand who opposes President Trump specifically because of the economic leverage he creates, it becomes important to understand the objectives of the global and financial elite who run and operate the institutions. The Big Club.

Understanding how trillions of trade dollars influence geopolitical policy we begin to understand the three-decade global financial construct they seek to retain and protect.

That is, global financial exploitation of national markets.

 

Soon, Essential Work Will Include Reporting Your Thought Crimes To The Reality Police...,

consentfactory  |  So, we’re almost a year into the “New Normal” (a/k/a “pathologized totalitarianism”) and things are still looking … well, pretty totalitarian.

Most of Western Europe is still in “lockdown,” or “under curfew,” or in some other state of “health emergency.” Police are fining and arresting people for “being outdoors without a valid reason.” Protest is still banned. Dissent is still censored. The official propaganda is relentless. Governments are ruling by edict, subjecting people to an ever-changing series of increasingly absurd restrictions of the most fundamental aspects of everyday life.

And now, the campaign to “vaccinate” the entirety of humanity against a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms or, more commonly, no symptoms at all, in over 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of the infected survive (and that has no real effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile) is being waged with literally religious fervor.

“Vaccine passports” (which are definitely creepy, but which bear no resemblance to Aryan Ancestry Certificates, or any other fascistic apartheid-type documents, so don’t even think about making such a comparison!) are in the pipeline in a number of countries. They have already been rolled out in Israel.

In other words, as predicted by us “conspiracy theorists,” the “temporary emergency public health measures” implemented by GloboCap in March of 2020 are still very much in effect, and then some. That said, as you have probably noticed, the tenor of things is shifting a bit, which is unsurprising, as GloboCap is now making the transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the “New Normal” roll-out.

Phase 1 was pretty much classic “shock and awe.” An “apocalyptic virus” was “discovered.” A global “state of emergency” was declared. Constitutional rights were cancelled. Soldiers, police, surveillance cameras, military drones, and robot dogs were deployed to implement the worldwide police state. The masses were bombarded with official propaganda, photos of people dropping dead in the street, unconscious patients dying in agony, bodies being stuffed into makeshift morgue trucks, hospital ships, ICU horror stories, projections of hundreds of millions of deaths, terror-inducing Orwellian slogans, sentimental “war effort” billboards, and so on. The full force of the most formidable Goebbelsian propaganda machine in history was unleashed on the public all at once. (See, e.g., CNN, NPR, CNBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Forbes, and other “authoritative” sources like the IMF and the World Bank Group, the WEF, UN, WHO, CDC.)

But the “shock and awe” phase can’t go on forever, nor is it ever intended to. Its purpose is (a) to terrorize the targeted masses into a state of submission, (b) to irreversibly destabilize their society, so that it can be radically “restructured,” and (c) to convincingly demonstrate an overwhelming superiority of force, so that resistance is rendered inconceivable. This shock and awe (or “rapid dominance”) tactic has been deployed by empires, and aspiring empires, throughout the course of military history. It has just been deployed by GloboCap against … well, against the entire world. And now, that phase is coming to an end.

 

Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation Investment In Pfizer-Biontech

fool |  Pfizer

Bill Gates recently stated that he views Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) as the leader in the coronavirus vaccine race. In a CNBC interview, he said, "The only vaccine that, if everything went perfectly, might seek the emergency use license by the end of October, would be Pfizer."

The Gates Foundation also owns shares of the big drugmaker. However, this investment wasn't initiated because of Pfizer's coronavirus program. Actually, the foundation first bought a stake in Pfizer back in 2002 with the stated intention of "expand[ing] access to the pharmaceutical company's all-in-one injectable contraceptive, Sayana Press, giving women in the developing world an affordable option." 

Gates is probably correct in assessing Pfizer as the coronavirus vaccine leader. The company expects to report initial results next month from a late-stage study of BNT162b2, the COVID-19 vaccine candidate that it's developing with BioNTech (NASDAQ:BNTX). If all goes well, BNT162b2 could very well become the first coronavirus vaccine available to Americans. 

BioNTech

It's not surprising that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also owns shares of BioNTech. Again, though, the nonprofit foundation didn't invest in the German biotech stock because of its coronavirus program. 

The Gates Foundation first bought a position in BioNTech in September 2019, well before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It invested $55 million in the biotech, with the potential for total funding to reach $100 million. The foundation's goal with this investment was to work with BioNTech to develop vaccines and immunotherapies for preventing HIV and tuberculosis (TB) infection.

BioNTech began developing its BNT162 COVID-19 vaccine program earlier this year. It had already made significant progress with this program when it announced a partnership with Pfizer in March.

Bill Gates Is NOT Your Benefactor Or Your Friend...,

thegrayzone  |  President Donald Trump’s announcement this July of a U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) set into motion a process that will have a dramatic impact on the future of global public health policy – and on the fortunes of one of the world’s richest people.

The US abandonment of the WHO means that the organization’s second-largest financial contributor, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is soon to become its top donor, giving the non-governmental international empire unparalleled influence over one the world’s most important multilateral organizations.

Bill Gates has achieved a hero-like status during the pandemic. The Washington Post has called him a “champion of science-backed solutions,” while the New York Times recently hailed him as “the most interesting man in the world.” Gates is also the star of a hit Netflix docu-series, “Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak,” which was released just weeks before coronavirus hit the U.S., and was produced by a New York Times correspondent, Sheri Fink, who previously worked at three Gates-funded organizations (Pro Publica, the New America Foundation, and the International Medical Corps). 

The tidal wave of mainstream media praise for Gates during the Covid-19 era has meant that scrutiny of the billionaire and his machinations is increasingly prevalent on the far–right of the political spectrum, where it can be dismissed by progressives as the conspiratorial ravings of Trumpists and Q-Anon quacks. 

But beyond the public relations bonanza about Gates lies a disturbing history that should raise concerns about whether his foundation’s plans for resolving the pandemic will benefit the global public as much as it expands and entrenches its power over international institutions. 

The Gates Foundation has already effectively privatized the international body charged with creating health policy, transforming it into a vehicle for corporate dominance. It has facilitated the dumping of toxic products onto the people of the Global South, and even used the world’s poor as guinea pigs for drug experiments.

The Gates Foundation’s influence over public health policy is practically contingent on ensuring that safety regulations and other government functions are weak enough to be circumvented. It therefore operates against the independence of nation states and as a vehicle for Western capital.

“Because of the Gates Foundation, I have watched government after government fall in its sovereignty,” Dr. Vandana Shiva, a scholar and founder of the India-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, told The Grayzone.

Saving the world?

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest private foundation on Earth, reporting over $51 billion in assets at the end of 2019. Bill Gates says his foundation spends a majority of its resources “reducing deaths from infectious diseases,” and through this philanthropy, he seems to have bought a name for himself as an infectious disease expert.

Corporate media networks rolled out the red carpet for Gates as he advised the world on how to handle the Covid-19 outbreak. In just the month of April, while the virus was severely impacting the U.S., he was hosted by CNN, CNBC, Fox, PBS, BBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Daily Show and The Ellen Show. On the BBC, Gates described himself as a “health expert,” despite his lack of a college degree in medicine or any other field.

The billionaire’s media appearances are shot through with a single, undeniable theme: If global leaders listened to Gates, the world would be better equipped to fight the pandemic. As the fashion magazine Vogue asked, “Why Isn’t Bill Gates Running the Coronavirus Task Force?”

So what does a Gates-led COVID response look like?