Miscellaneous Gripes from Yours Truly

You know, this is not just obscene, but it is indeed criminal.

Since money is a finite resource, you can guess where all of the billionaires' money is coming from:

The wealth of the world’s billionaires now stands at $7.3 trillion, an increase of 12 percent from last year, according to a new report released yesterday by Wealth-X and UBS. There are a record 2,325 billionaires in the world, up from 2,170 in 2013 and 1,360 in 2009, the first year following the financial collapse.

Billionaires make up 0.000033 percent of the world’s population, or, to put it in another way, there are about three million people for every one billionaire. Yet this exceedingly small social layer possesses about 4.5 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the population, or 3.5 billion people.

Virtually all that money is from theft by various means.

As I have said before, I can remember when there were only four billionaires in the entire world 40 years ago, inflation notwithstanding: Howard Hughes, Ross Perot, H.L. Hunt, and J. Paul Getty. Only two other billionaires preceded them: John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford.

Now we don't know shit who these people are outside of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and a handful of other people. All we know is these people are thieves, aided and abetted by the politicians they own.

A Parasite By Any Other Name is Still a Parasite

The superrich have succeeded in buying off and owning politicians and controlling the debate in order to further fatten their already overbloated fortunes, fortunes they got largely through widespread theft. That theft is either by stealing from workers or from gaming the tax system so they pay very little in proportion to "their" wealth.

They didn't "make it on their own" anyway:

They didn’t. Their fortunes derived in varying degrees – usually big degrees – from public funding, which provided almost half of basic research funds into the 1980s, and even today supports about 60 percent of the research performed at universities.

Businesses rely on roads and seaports and airports to ship their products, the FAA and TSA and Coast Guard and Department of Transportation to safeguard them, a nationwide energy grid to power their factories, communications towers and satellites to conduct online business, the Department of Commerce to promote and safeguard global markets, the U.S. Navy to monitor shipping lanes, and FEMA to clean up after them.

Apple, the tax haven specialist, still does most of its product and research development in the United States, with US-educated engineers and computer scientists. Google’s business is based on the Internet, which started as ARPANET, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency computer network from the 1960s. The National Science Foundation funded the Digital Library Initiative research at Stanford University that was adopted as the Google model. Microsoft was started by our richest American, Bill Gates, whose success derived at least in part by taking the work of competitors and adapting it as his own. Same with Steve Jobs, who admitted: “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

Companies like Pfizer and Merck have relied on basic research performed at the National Institute of Health. A Congressional Budget Office study reminds us that The primary rationale for the government to play a role in basic research is that private companies perform too little such research themselves (relative to what is best for society).

Not to mention "their" fortunes are dependent on workers to do the work and consumers who spend to buy "their" products.

Interesting the author notes "the last five years." Just who was president during that time?

A puppet of said superrich.