According to data on S&P 500 corporations their CEO’s earnings range from a little over 100 to almost 800 times the average salaries of their employees.  Corporations can pay these CEO salaries and still make billions in profits because of two factors.  (1)  For years they have manipulated the system to avoid paying taxes.  At least 60 of the largest corporations have avoided paying even one dime.   (2) Corporations have been the recipients of billions (yes, billions) of dollars in corporate welfare. Those dollars may be defined as tax incentives, subsidies or some other name but they all boil down to being CORPORATE WELFARE.

A subsidy tracking group Good Jobs First identified the top 100 recipients of corporate welfare in their 2014 report.  Among the highest were Nike, Royal Dutch Shell, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Ford, General Motors, Intel, Alcoa, Boeing, Exxon Mobil, General Electric and Walmart – just to name a few. Subsidies ranged in the multi-billions.  Even the conservative Cato Institute has stated that in 2012 corporate welfare amounted to about 100 billion, while spending on social welfare was only $59 billion.

Many of these same corporations are on the list of those paying no federal taxes.  These are some of the most profitable corporations in the world.

A news release in April, 2019, by the Institute On Taxation and Economic Policy stated that the lowering of the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% created a decline in tax revenue from corporations of 31%.  So the gifts keep coming to corporations and the wealthy and impacting negatively the average American family. It is estimated that repealing corporate welfare would save every household an average of about $800 a year.

The only way to steer American democracy to safety is to wrest money out of the claws of the wealthiest elites, who now control finances rivaling the economies of whole nations.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

As we count down toward the 2024 general election, we should expect to hear from media pundits about candidates and their viability, swing states and the electoral college, likely voters and poll results, and much more. Occasionally we may hear about some issues of importance. Most likely, we will hear little about the urgent need for wealth redistribution in the United States. Extreme inequality remains an invisible scourge underlying so much of what ails society and, even when discussed, is touted as an unavoidable and inevitable outcome of our economy.

However, there is abundant evidence that wealth inequality is the product of intentional design and the idea that what is good for billionaires is good for society. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Switzerland-based global bank UBS just released its 2023 Billionaire Ambitions report and concluded, “For the first time in nine editions of the report, billionaires have accumulated more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship.” Benjamin Cavalli, Head of Strategic Clients at UBS Global Wealth Management said, “This is a theme we expect to see more of over the next 20 years, as more than 1,000 billionaires pass an estimated [$5.2 trillion] to their children.”

That’s more than the economy of the entire United Kingdom. It’s more than the economies of Canada and Mexico combined.

The UBS report was not a critical one and hardly blinked an eye about the obscenity of wealth being hoarded in dynasties. About half of all billionaires around the world use UBS’s banking services, so the bank merely analyzed the investment habits of its most important clients. It did so candidly, referring to “the great wealth transfer” from one generation to the next, avoiding mention of the wealth transfer from the majority of the public to an elite minority.

The report also declared with pride that intent on “continuing the current family legacy, 60% of heirs want to enable future generations to benefit from their wealth.” Of course, they meant future generations of their own families, not in general.

But this wealth transfer is directly the result of tax codes written to benefit the uber-rich. ProPublica’s 2021 analysis of the tax returns of the richest Americans found that they paid an average of 3.4% in taxes, employing armies of lawyers to exploit every loophole carved out to offer special advantages to wealthy elites. Meanwhile, middle-class and working-class Americans pay double-digit tax rates. What this amounts to is collective theft from government revenues.

It’s time to reverse this trend by resorting to a concerted project of wealth redistribution. It’s time to wrest billions, if not trillions, out of the hands of billionaires and their heirs and pour it back where it belongs: to the rest of us.

Call it socialism—which is what the pro-rich rightwing GOP does—or call it progressive taxation, or economic justice. It doesn’t matter; the nation’s fiscal conservatives will demonize any ideas of wealth redistribution and will attempt to instill baseless fears of creeping communism, no matter what specific language we use around fairness. So, we might as well start spelling it out instead of trying to appease the right. After all, there’s a reason why conservatives and wealthy elites want the public to be afraid of socialism: they’re terrified that Americans might be thrilled to embrace policies such as wealth redistribution through taxation.

And if we need any more reasons to put a bullseye on billionaire wealth, it turns out they are vicious, dangerous fascists, whose children are an even more callous lot than their parents.

Billionaires don’t need the protections that democracy offers: earned benefits like Social Security or Medicare, access to free or affordable health care including abortion, labor and wage protections, and due process (they can buy the best legal help when they get in trouble).

In fact, democracy is a threat to their wealth hoarding, which is why they are backing the most dangerous demagogue to have ever occupied the White House: Donald Trump. Economic analyst and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich lists the numerous billionaires backing Trump for a second term and cites Trump’s promise to wealthy elites, that he plans to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Wealthy elites helped bring us Trump’s first term, and they’re itching for a second.

Why wouldn’t billionaires back fascism? It benefits them in ways democracy doesn’t. Indeed, billionaires exist as a design flaw in democracy. The greater the number of billionaires and the greater the wealth they hoard, the weaker the democracy that binds them.

Legislation like Senator Ron Wyden’s Billionaire Income Tax is what they fear if democracy trumps fascism. Wyden’s bill is so modest that it doesn’t target wealth, only income, and would affect fewer than 1,000 Americans, trimming off tiny slivers of their unprecedented hoardings, leaving them as fabulously wealthy as before. After all, is there a real difference between being worth $10 billion versus $9.9 billion?

As to the children of billionaires being worse than their parents, there is a small mention in the UBS report of how heirs of billionaires are far less philanthropic than first-generation billionaires: “while more than [two-thirds] (68%) of first-generation billionaires stated that following their philanthropic goals and making an impact on the world was a main objective of their legacy, less than a third (32%) of the inheriting generations did so.” One could conclude that empathy among children of the ultra-wealthy drops by half each generation. This could be a generation even more determined to fund and fuel fascism in order to protect their riches compared to their parents.

The wealthy are so secure in the protections they have from democratic curbs on their financial power that their biggest worries, as per the UBS report, include “geopolitical tensions,” inflation, recession, and higher interest rates. Fears around a “tight jobs market” and “stricter sustainability rules,” fall low on their list. In other words, they feel secure against threats of wage rebellions and government regulations.

And so, as we hurtle toward authoritarian aristocracy, we must normalize the idea of wealth redistribution. There is no good reason against it, not a single one. We can have either billionaires or democracy, not both.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” – Former Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis

By Thom Hartman

So, Donald Trump won Iowa. A crazed billionaire who wants to “suspend the Constitution” and claims the right to a murder his political enemies. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Imagine.

Fox “News” shuts down (or just decides to only tell the truth), and most of the steam goes out of the rightwing populist MAGA movement which its billionaire owners helped create in the U.S. Insurrectionist members of Congress find themselves in jail facing sedition charges, as the previous leader of the country is under criminal investigation for taking help from Putin’s Russia. The government begins the process of decriminalizing abortion nationwide. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is overturned and, without the flow of billionaire money directing their votes, Congress begins to actually pass laws that reflect the desires of the majority of the people.

Unless you read international newspapers like The Financial Times, odds are you have no idea that same scenario is now playing out in Poland which, for the previous eight years, had been suffering under a Trump-like administration.

Last summer, progressive Polish politician Donald Tusk promised he was going to clean up that country with an “iron broom.” Few took his promise seriously, but after being sworn into office last month, he’s actually doing it. As Maciej Kisilowski writes for The Financial Times, just a few days after Tusk became prime minister:

“… Poland’s politicized public television station, notorious for its xenophobic, homophobic and racist messages, abruptly went dark. Tusk’s culture ministry summarily dismissed the station’s board and stopped broadcasts to prevent the outgoing leadership from inflaming tensions by airing live the takeover of the group’s headquarters.”

Last week two of the top rightwing politicians in Poland were arrested for abuse of power during the previous regime, while only a few hundred people showed up to protest the end of rightwing programming on the nation’s main television network.

Last Thursday there was a march to protest the new progressive prime minister, but the reaction was both tepid and nonviolent. As Kisilowski writes for The Financial Times:

“These decisive, if heavy-handed, actions come at a time when democrats globally are searching for strategies to deal with populists. In the U.S., for example, there is intense debate about whether the protracted legal cases against Donald Trump are serving to boost his campaign to return to the White House. Perhaps Tusk’s approach offers hope.”

Dislodging the death grip the GOP has on American politics will be more difficult than in Poland, in large part because five corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision.

The 2020 election cost over $14 billion. The 2016 election was only $6.5 billion. But in 2008, two years before Citizens United, it hadn’t even hit $1 billion: total spending with a mere $717 million. As the Executive Director of the money tracking opensecrets.org, Sheila Krumholz, said:

“Total outside spending is surprisingly high for this point in the cycle—we’re already at nearly $230 million. That’s more than twice the previous record through this point in the cycle, which was back in 2016. But it’s more than five times as much as was spent by this point in the last presidential cycle in 2020.”

Rightwing fascist-adjacent billionaires have used that open door to severely corrupt our political system, leading to massive gridlock when it comes to anything average people want.

Meanwhile, billionaires got tax cuts and deregulation making them vastly richer at the same time the companies that made them rich refuse to even commit to paying their workers a living wage (fewer than one percent of the world’s top companies have made such a commitment).

As a result, Princeton scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page famously found that the odds of average Americans’ political desires being translated into policy are about the same as “random noise.”

On the other hand, the new American system created by Republicans on our Supreme Court works quite well for the morbidly rich. The people Gilens and Page refer to as the “economic elites” frequently get everything they want from the political class.

They wrote that we still have the “features” of democracy, like elections, but ended their paper with this cautionary note:

“[W]e believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

So, here we are.

If, in a zoo somewhere, a single chimpanzee had risen up and taken all the food from all the other chimpanzees and was hoarding it without being challenged, scientists from all over the world would be trying to figure out what was wrong with that chimpanzee and why the others tolerated his theft.

As Oxfam International pointed out in a report timed to correspond with the kickoff of the billionaire love-fest at Davos this week, the five richest men in the world—four of them Americans—saw their net worth more than double over the past three years from $405 billion to $869 billion.

Since those five corrupt Republicans on the Court also ruled in Citizens United that corporations are “persons” with nearly-full access to the Bill of Rights—including the right to use money to pay off politicians (the Republicans on the Court call it First Amendment-protected “free speech”)—the corporations that are producing these billionaires are also gouging American consumers as hard and fast as they can.

As Oxfam noted (keep in mind, “profit” means, essentially, “the money that’s left over after all of our business expenses, including payroll, that we, the owners, get to split up and keep for ourselves”):

“Mirroring the fortunes of the super-rich, large firms are set to smash their annual profit records in 2023. 148 of the world’s biggest corporations together raked in $1.8 trillion in total net profits in the year to June 2023, a 52 percent jump compared to average net profits in 2018-2021. Their windfall profits surged to nearly $700 billion.”

That money isn’t going to workers, though, who’ve seen their real, inflation-adjusted wages fall worldwide in the same period. Instead:

“The report finds that for every $100 of profit made by 96 major corporations between July 2022 and June 2023, $82 was paid out to rich shareholders. … It would take 1,200 years for a woman working in the health and social sector to earn what the average CEO in the biggest 100 Fortune companies earns in a year.”

Thanks to Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking vote in Citizens United, Americas are not getting what they want. Which is another way of saying the morbidly rich and the judges and politicians they’ve bought are actively breaking our democratic republic.

On the eve of the 2016 election of Donald Trump, for example, the Progressive Change Institute did a nationwide survey of likely voters. The results were stark:

— 84 percent want the government to negotiate drug prices.
— 79 percent support expanding Social Security (which Haley and DeSantis both just last week promised to cut).
— 78 percent want “fair trade” that ends shipping our jobs overseas.
— 77 percent want to tax corporations that have moved jobs overseas.
— 77 percent want universal free pre-kindergarten.
— 74 percent want all Americans to be able to buy into Medicare-for-All.
— 71 percent support a massive infrastructure spending program aimed at rebuilding our broken roads and bridges and putting people back to work.
— 70 percent want free college at all public universities.
— 68 percent want a guaranteed minimum income.
— 67 percent want the government to be the employer of last resort to end unemployment (like FDR did).
— 66 percent want the morbidly rich to pay at least a 50 percent income tax (currently the average American billionaire pays around 3 percent).
— 65 percent want the big banks broken up and a return to local banking.
— 64 percent want net neutrality so your billion-dollar corporate internet and email providers can’t monitor everything you do online and sell that information.
— 63 percent want public financing of elections to get billionaire money out of them.
— 60 percent want the Post Office to offer inexpensive public banking.

President Biden and Democrats in Congress got some of the infrastructure work done and tried to end much of America’s nearly $2 trillion in student debt (until they were blocked by Republican lawsuits and six Republicans on the Supreme Court), and a small bit of the “Green New Deal” incorporated into the Inflation Reduction Act, but otherwise there’s a lot that Americans want and deserve that they’re not getting.

Why? Because the morbidly rich control much of our political process right now, and most of our media.

As former Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously said:

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

This year’s election will not only decide whether we’re going to let Trump or a similar Republican end American democracy; it will also, if enough of us show up, determine if Citizens United can be legislatively overturned and we can purge our political system of the cancer of big money.

Democrats almost did it in 2022: the For the People Act would have reversed significant parts of Citizens United and provided for public funding of and more transparency around elections. It passed the House and got enough votes to pass the Senate under the Constitution.

Even the Republican filibuster could have been overcome if we hadn’t been betrayed by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate. Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote. The stakes have never been higher.

Pharmaceutical companies are resisting public scrutiny and suing over modest drug price regulations. It’s past time to regulate their profiteering.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Major pharmaceutical companies in the United States are battling with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders over an issue that is at the heart of whether we value human wellbeing over corporate profits. As chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), Sanders has vowed to force CEOs of pharmaceutical companies to publicly answer for why their drug prices are so much higher than in other nations. He plans to bring a committee vote to subpoena them. The subpoenas are necessary because—brazenly—the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson and Merck have simply refused to testify to the HELP committee. What are they afraid of?

In a defensive-sounding letter to Sanders, an attorney for Johnson & Johnson accused the Senator of using committee hearings to “punish the companies who have chosen to engage in constitutionally protected litigation.” The letter does not specify the litigation in question—perhaps because it would sound so ridiculous and would reveal the company’s real agenda. Last July, the company, along with Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb sued the Biden administration fceuticalor allowing the Medicare program to regulate prescription drug prices.

It appears that Johnson & Johnson and Merck are indeed afraid of being questioned by lawmakers about drug-profiteering in the U.S.

One pharmaceutical expert, Ameet Sarpatwari of Harvard Medical School explained to the New York Times that, “The U.S. market is the bank for pharmaceutical companies… There’s a keen sense that the best place to try to extract profits is the U.S. because of its existing system and its dysfunction.” Another expert, Michelle Mello, a professor of law and health policy at Stanford university, told the Times, “Drugs are so expensive in the U.S. because we let them be.”

In other words, it’s been a free-for-all for pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. In 2003, then-President George W. Bush signed a Medicare reform bill into law, promising help for seniors struggling to pay for medications, but that law stripped the federal government of its power to negotiate drug prices for Medicare’s participants. It was a typically Republican, Orwellian move: promise help to ordinary people and deliver the exact opposite.

Nearly two decades later, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Biden signed into law in 2022, tied Medicare drug prices to inflation and required companies to issue rebates if prices rose too fast. It was the first time since Bush’s 2003 law that drug manufacturers were subject to any U.S. price regulations. Pharmaceutical companies aren’t having it, and not only did they sue Biden over the IRA, they don’t seem to want to answer for their actions publicly.

It’s not enough for Medicare to be able to cut drug prices. There needs to be nationwide regulation on all drug prices for all Americans. After all, American taxpayers generously subsidize the research and development of most drugs. A report by Sanders’ staff explained that “[w]ith few exceptions, private corporations have the unilateral power to set the price of publicly funded medicines.” The report’s authors chided that “[t]he government asks for nothing in return for its investment.”

What’s more, the report rightly points out that people in other nations benefit from having access to lower-cost drugs that Americans have paid global pharmaceutical companies to develop. For example, SYMTUZA, an HIV medication that scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health helped to develop, is available to U.S. patients for a whopping $56,000 a year, while patients in the UK pay only $10,000 a year for the same drug purchased from the same company.

It’s not as if companies like Johnson & Johnson have some perverse preference for European patients over American ones. It’s merely that their prices are regulated by most other industrial nations. The U.S. “happens to be the only industrialized nation that doesn’t negotiate” drug prices, explained Merith Basey, Executive Director of Patients For Affordable Drugs NOW, in an interview on Rising Up With Sonali last fall.

Indeed, countries like the UK, France, and Germany, offer models for the U.S. in drug price controls and much has been written about what works best. Further, there is—unsurprisingly—a strong public desire for price controls. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll in August 2023, “[m]ajorities across partisans say there is not enough regulation over drug pricing.” Moreover, a whopping 83 percent of those polled “see pharmaceutical profits as a major factor contributing to the cost of prescription drugs.”

There is no shortage of ideas for specific price control regulations that could work in the U.S. For example, the Center for American Progress’s October 2023 report, “Following the Money: Untangling U.S. Prescription Drug Financing,” delves deep into how market prices are determined for medications and suggests interventions at every stage of drug price setting.

Frankly, such complex solutions would not really be necessary if all Americans could simply join Medicare health coverage and if Medicare’s bargaining power to negotiate drug prices could be applied to all drugs. But, in the absence of this commonsense holistic approach to healthcare, even complex price controls would be better than no price controls.

Predictably, conservative capitalist critics have trotted out the same, tired arguments against government price regulations of pharmaceuticals. “Drug Price Controls Mean Slower Cures,” declared a Wall Street Journal editorial headline. The paper’s editorial board called the IRA, “the worst legislation to pass Congress in many years,” and went as far as accusing the Biden administration of “extortion.”

But who is engaging in extortion? Economists studying the pharmaceutical industry have found that for years companies have been so flush with cash that they have spent hundreds of billions of dollars in stock buybacks and exorbitant executive bonuses and pay packages. “The $747 billion that the pharmaceutical companies distributed to shareholders was 13 percent greater than the $660 billion that these corporations expended on research & development over the decade,” wrote William Lazonick and Öner Tulum in a report for the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Further, the Wall Street Journal’s screed ignores price controls in the UK, France, Germany, and other nations. If those have no bearing on the speed and quality of drug development, why should U.S. price controls have an impact? And if they do have an impact, then Americans are being unfairly required to bear the burden that people all over the world benefit from.

The Journal’s editorial board made one accurate claim, saying that the IRA “will also give companies the incentives to launch drugs at higher prices and raise prices for privately insured patients to compensate for the Medicare cuts.” The paper made this prediction without any comment on unfettered corporate greed. Indeed, if anyone is engaging in de facto extortion, it appears as though pharmaceutical companies may be the guilty parties in punishing Americans for price controls.

Pharmaceutical companies launched the new year with announced price hikes on at least 500 medications—a massive effort at gouging the public. In contrast, the IRA’s drug price controls apply to only 10 medications so far, and will be expanded to 15 drugs per year for the next four years, and 20 drugs per year thereafter.

Rather than removing price controls on the paltry numbers of medications the IRA can regulate, an easy fix is to apply those same regulations to most or all drugs. Best of all, in order for such a solution to be implemented, pharmaceutical company CEOs wouldn’t even have to drag themselves into committee hearings to explain away their corporate greed.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

By J. Lee Nelson

In 2022 midterms, 72 percent of women ages 18-29 voted for Democrats in House races nationwide.

The entirety of disregarded and underestimated women are a sleeping giant. Females influence more than 80 percent of all consumer purchases. We dominate activity on social media by more than a 55/45 split over males, and the influence gap is even wider because our messages are way more substantive. We also register and vote at a higher rate than men. When women finally harness and assert our full collective power to condemn injustice and obtain equal rights, we can move mountains for humanity by making politicians listen.

THERE WILL NEVER BE SUBSTANTIAL PROGRESS IN GENDER EQUALITY, RACIAL EQUALITY AND ECONOMIC EQUALITY WITHOUT WOMEN AT THE FOREFRONT

A GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT THAT IS TOO BIG TO FAIL CAN ONLY BE LED BY WOMEN

Women in solidarity and the men that support them comprise a dominant popular majority that transcends boundaries. Women can create bridges and mighty alliances that expand civic participation among the many different groups and communities that they are important members of. Fearless, unapologetic and practical female leadership in America will have extraordinary reach and political impact. Female sensibilities and activism can inspire, unify and mobilize people of color, the working class, people in poverty, young people, senior citizens, and independent voters. The collective actions of those core groups and other passionate supporters can produce a quantum leap in voter turnout.

Females are generally more understanding, compassionate, unselfish and honorable than males. A study conducted by Facebook found that women are warmer and friendlier on social media than men are. As nurturers and family-oriented caregivers, maternal figures are more concerned about being respectful of others and would prefer a simpler and happier life. Women are terrific problem solvers because they are grounded, open, honest, tolerant, compromising and collaborative. By nature, we are better at channeling conversations toward reasonable and ethical outcomes. Though women are usually less biased, pretentious, and cruel than men, we are not weak.

WOMEN IN SOLIDARITY CAN CHANGE THE WORLD

Women In Solidarity can advance Democracy, human rights and world peace. The tipping point is simple. Women must come together and WORK TOGETHER to to stand up and speak up with a non-negotiable position of equality for all. We will not see a more harmonious, just and loving world until enough women get on the same page. Please reply to me if you are SERIOUS and want to contribute to achieving the objectives. We have to increase kindness and caring to defeat hatred and tyranny, Please help us propel a quantum leap in voter turnout so that we can permanently end the MAGA extremist and GOP fascist threat to Democracy, in 2024? WHEN WE VOTE, WE WIN!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/553563159754346 AND GUN REFORM You can also view our website: TruthJusticeAndCHOICE.com

We Can Do This! LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOO.