Quote:Super-rich outstrip their extraordinary grab of half of all new wealth in past decade.

Billionaire fortunes are increasing by $2.7 billion a day even as at least 1.7 billion workers now live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages.

A tax of up to 5 percent on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty.

The richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population, reveals a new Oxfam report today. During the past decade, the richest 1 percent had captured around half of all new wealth.

“Survival of the Richest” is published on the opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Elites are gathering in the Swiss ski resort as extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously for the first time in 25 years.

“While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams. Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires —a roaring ‘20s boom for the world’s richest,” said Gabriela Bucher, Executive Director of Oxfam International.

“Taxing the super-rich and big corporations is the door out of today’s overlapping crises. It’s time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow ‘trickling down’ to everyone else. Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn’t lift all ships —just the superyachts.”

Billionaires have seen extraordinary increases in their wealth. During the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis years since 2020, $26 trillion (63 percent) of all new wealth was captured by the richest 1 percent, while $16 trillion (37 percent) went to the rest of the world put together. A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90 percent. Billionaire fortunes have increased by $2.7 billion a day. This comes on top of a decade of historic gains —the number and wealth of billionaires having doubled over the last ten years.

Billionaire wealth surged in 2022 with rapidly rising food and energy profits.
...

The billionaire class is $2.6 trillion richer than before the pandemic, even if billionaire fortunes slightly fell in 2022 after their record-smashing peak in 2021. The world’s richest are now seeing their wealth climb again.

In the US, the UK and Australia, studies have found that 54 percent, 59 percent and 60 percent of inflation, respectively, was driven by increased corporate profits. In Spain, the CCOO (one of the country’s largest trade unions) found that corporate profits are responsible for 83.4 percent of price increases during the first quarter of 2022.

The World Bank announced that the world has almost certainly lost its goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and that “global progress in reducing extreme poverty has grind[ed] to a halt” amid what the Bank says was likely to be the largest increase in global inequality and the largest setback in global poverty since WW2. The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than $2.15 per day.

Elon Musk paid a “true tax rate” of just 3.27 percent from 2014 to 2018, according to ProPublica.

Richest 1% bag nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together over the past two years

Quote:The Hypocrisy Just Makes Me Cry (economist Michael Hudson interview)

Michael: Well the whole purpose of the war is economic, but it’s not economic just about Ukraine and the winners and losers of the United States and Europe.

President Biden has said this is a ten- or a twenty-year war, and it’s [a war] for what kind of economy [the world is] going to have.

Is it going to be a finance-based neoliberal rentier economy centered in the United States, with the United States controlling all of the monopoly rents: for oil, for raw materials, for technology, for computer information, for pharmaceuticals?

[Or, on the other hand,] will other countries have a chance to be independent?

Ukraine is just sort of the first joust in this long long war and [the war is] over the economy.

Everything that’s happening right now is just sort of a squiggle over the really big picture, which is how the world is going to be structured economically.
...
How on earth can we explain how Americans or anyone else make a mistake about viewing the future? We can’t explain the logic behind their mistake. There is no particular logic behind it. The fact is, they didn’t care about Russia. This isn’t about Russia. They didn’t care whether Russia would recover.

I think they sat down in Washington, they [realized] that there’s no way that they can prevent what is happening now — [that is, prevent] the Russia-China-Iran-India axis from developing — and they’ve decided, What we’re going to do is a holding operation. [That is:] What can we hold? We can hold on to Europe.
The Hypocrisy Just Makes Me Cry (Michael Hudson)

Quote:For Disney or Blackrock, or any company for that matter, can only be relevant if they carve out a place in the Future —meaning they become a permanent signifier, i.e.: as long as they permanently reproduce the signifier, they “incarnate” the signified —because if you tear out the signified, the Future of the Deep State, they would cease to exist. Best example of this is Starbucks, whose model, and the innovation that Starbucks is championed for is creating an experience —the experience of having a “second home” in the coffeeshop —an experience, that in structure is no different than being in a theme park, i.e.: They sell you a way to reproduce the signified in yourself —ultimately what Starbucks is reproducing is a world where the experience of going into a coffee shop has a specific, symbolic meaning —and it has meaning in a specific world whose Future is that of the Deep State. Even better example is the US dollar, which is a signifier for everything that gives it meaning, and it's the signified, that which is all this for —as, the US dollar represents in its purest form the Deep State and its Future as a Commodity.

Because, as we can see with the example of Starbucks, what they sell as a Commodity is not the coffee, nor the experience, but the world, and by that, the Future in which that experience has a meaning —i.e.: the only commodity that is being produced is the Future itself (that of the Deep State).

The Phenomenology of the Deep State

Quote:Guo Wengui: US accuses Chinese tycoon of billion-dollar fraud

'US authorities have charged a Chinese property tycoon based in New York with orchestrating a billion-dollar fraud.
Guo Wengui and one of his business partners, Kin Ming Je, are accused of wire fraud, securities fraud, bank fraud
and money laundering.


An image of Mr Guo taken from his Twitter account. A picture of Mr Guo & Steve Bannon.
(Considering what is being reported here, is this type of 'hiding-in-plain-sight' a good idea?!)

Mr Guo is a critic of the Chinese government and an associate of ex-White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon.
A fire broke out at Mr Guo's Manhattan penthouse apartment hours after he was arrested. A spokesman for the city's
fire department said the fire was put out, no injuries were reported and the cause is still under investigation.
In an online post earlier, Mr Guo said he was handcuffed and interrogated for more than an hour.

Mr Guo goes by several aliases including Miles Guo, Miles Kwok and "Brother Seven". He was named in the indictment
unsealed Wednesday as Ho Wan Kwok. The indictment alleges that Mr Guo and Mr Je raised $1bn (£830m) from
thousands of online followers who thought they were funding media businesses and an exclusive membership club.
They also allegedly used a cryptocurrency called Himalaya Coin to steal millions from investors.

Mr Guo's opposition to the Chinese Communist Party and his links to high-profile, right-wing US politicians and activists
earned him hundreds of thousands of online followers, most of them Chinese people living in Western countries.
Prosecutors say he took advantage of his prolific online presence to raise money for his ventures. But instead of being
invested in businesses, the funds were allegedly funnelled into personal accounts tied to Mr Guo and Mr Je.

Among other things, the money was spent on a 50,000 sq ft (4,345 sq m) mansion in New Jersey, Lamborghini, Bugatti
and Ferrari sports cars, and nearly $1m worth of Chinese and Persian rugs. Prosecutors say $100 million was put into a
high-risk hedge fund and other money was spent on luxury goods including a $140,000 piano, a $62,000 television and
a $53,000 fireplace log cradle holder.

Starting in September last year, the US government seized approximately $634m of the proceeds from 21 different bank
accounts. The indictment alleges that Mr Guo built his following among opponents of the Chinese Communist Party by
founding two non-profit organisations...'

Quote:Who is Guo Wengui?
Mr Guo was a real-estate developer who reportedly became one of China's richest men before leaving the country in 2014.
In 2017, he claimed political asylum in the United States, alleging persecution by Communist Party authorities. Mr Guo has
been the target of social media campaigns backing the Chinese government, but has also been accused of spreading false
rumours about Covid and other subjects on his social media accounts and websites.

His outspoken opposition to China's rulers inspired several ventures with Mr Bannon. They have appeared frequently
together in online videos, and in 2020, they launched a campaign called the New Federal State of China, with the goal
of overthrowing the Chinese Communist Party.

Later that year, Mr Bannon was arrested while on Mr Guo's yacht in Connecticut. Mr Bannon was charged in an unrelated
case with fraud in an alleged scheme to defraud people who funded a not-for-profit company to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. He has pleaded not guilty in that case, and was not named in the indictment against Mr Guo and Mr Je.

Last year, Mr Guo's GTV Media Group agreed to pay $539m to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US financial
regulator, to settle a lawsuit alleging the company had misled investors in a cryptocurrency investment scheme. The
company did not admit wrongdoing in the case.

Mr Je, who also goes by the name William Je, was named in the indictment as Mr Guo's financier. He is a dual citizen of
Britain and Hong Kong, lives in London, and is still at large, authorities said. He is listed by UK Companies House as the director of two financial services companies headquartered in west London: ACA Capital and Hamilton Investment Management.

Among the funds seized by US authorities were bank accounts linked to Hamilton and to Gettr, an alt-tech social media platform funded in part by Mr Guo. The BBC has contacted the companies. In a statement, one of Mr Guo's foundations called the allegations against him "fabricated and unwarranted" and accused the US justice system of being controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, without providing evidence...'