This piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Chris Hedges, paints a dire portrait of Great-Depression-level unemployment together with worsening inequalities if we don't get Trump out of office. Do read the entire piece, but this breakdown of monies distributed under the CARES Act supports his argument of treason, and an abandonment of the middle and working classes of our country:

The CARES Act handed trillions in funds or tax breaks to oil companies, the airline industry, which alone got $50 billion in stimulus money, the cruise ship industry, a $170 billion windfall for the real estate industry, private equity firms, lobbying groups, whose political action committees have given $191 million in campaign contributions to politicians in the last two decades, the meat industry and corporations that have moved offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. The act allowed the largest corporations to gobble up money that was supposed to go to keep small businesses solvent to pay workers. It gave 80 percent of tax breaks under the stimulus package to millionaires and allowed the wealthiest to get stimulus checks that average $1.7 million. The CARES Act also authorized $454 billion for the Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, a massive slush fund doled out by Trump cronies to corporations that, when leveraged 10 to 1, can be used to create a staggering $4.5 trillion in assets. The act authorized the Fed to give $1.5 trillion in loans to Wall Street, which no one expects will ever be paid back. American billionaires have gotten $434 billion richer since the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, whose corporation Amazon paid no federal taxes last year, alone added $34.6 billion to his personal wealth since the pandemic started.

If all of us could each commit to getting 100 people to vote in the November election, we can do this.  I will commit.

-Angela Valenzuela

#billionaires #CoronavirusCapitalism @ChrisHedges #GeorgeFloyd #oligarchy, #pandemic #protests2020 #MafiaState #RulingClass #WallStreet #Trumpism

Chris Hedges: The Treason of the Ruling Class

BY EDITORJune 2, 2020 | The ScheerPost

They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state.

By Chris Hedges

The ruling elites no longer have legitimacy. They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state. What the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a “public thing” or the “property of a people,” has been transformed into an instrument of naked pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have perverted the judiciary, the media and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to commit financial fraud and theft.  

The loss of control over our system of rulership, the misuse of all democratic institutions, the electoral process and laws to funnel money upwards into to a handful of oligarchs while stripping us of power, ominously means that the ruling elites can no longer claim the right to have a monopoly on violence. Violence employed by police and security agencies such as the FBI, which have devolved into occupying forces, to protect the exclusive interests of a tiny, ruling criminal class exposes the fiction of the rule of law and the treason of the ruling elites.

“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience,” Stokely Carmichael warned. And if your opponent is bereft of a conscience, then state violence is inevitably met with counter-violence. Tyranny takes the place of reform. The danger of widespread sectarian violence in America is now very real.

There are three options: reform, which, given the decay in the American body politic, is impossible; revolution; or tyranny. The more things deteriorate, the more the elites feel threatened, the more brutal the police, the National Guard and the organs of state security will become. The longer the serfs defy their masters the more the populations in the jails and prisons, which are already the largest in the world, will swell.

If the mafia state is not overthrown, then America will become a naked police state where any opposition, however tepid, will be met with draconian censorship or force. Police in cities around the country have already thwarted the reporting by dozens of journalists covering the protests through physical force, arrests, tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray.  The huge social divides, largely built around race, will be used by the neo-fascists in power to divert a legitimate rage by a betrayed working class to set neighbor against neighbor. Neo-fascist “patriots” will be unleashed like attack dogs against people of color, Muslims, feminists, intellectuals, artists, the media and liberals. Dissent, even nonviolent dissent, will become treason.

Choosing Democracy: Why Do Billionaires Want Charter Schools ?

Why? Harold Meyerson expresses this well in this piece below.  The short answer for me is—because a system that socially engineers inequality is profitable to billionaires. Much more profitable, for sure, than the Waltons raising workers' wages, for starters, as Meyerson aptly notes.

Ranked third by Business Insider for family-owned enterprises, they are certainly well poised to be the rising tide that lifts many, many boats out of poverty.  Same with all the others listed as The 21 biggest family-owned businesses in the world.

School boards, such as in the recent LAUSD School Board battle, are the battleground for this fight against the billionaires, as this story tells.  So please be aware of this deliberate campaign to erode the public good and how this is bad for democracy.

Finally, remember that which may be good for the individual (or individual family) is not necessarily that which is good for the collective.

Thanks to Duane Campbell for sharing.

Angela Valenzuela

Choosing Democracy: Why Do Billionaires Want Charter Schools ?

by Harold Meyerson

The billionaires, apparently, we shall always have with us — even when
we decide how to run the state-funded schools where they rarely send
their own kids.

In the Los Angeles school board elections earlier this month, a number of billionaires,
including Eli Broad, Netflix founder Reed Hastings and two Walton family siblings,
poured millions into the campaigns of two charter-school advocates. These
billionaire-sponsored candidates defeated two badly outspent opponents
who took a more cautionary stance on expanding charters, lest they
decimate the school district’s budget. In total, pro-charter groups
outspent teacher unions, $9.7 million to $5.2 million. (In the 2016
state legislative campaigns, the charterizers outspent the unions by a
far larger margin, $20.5 million to $1.2 million.)

Though a number of the billionaires who’ve involved themselves in the charter cause are conservatives and Republicans, the actual election battles they join almost always pit Democrat
against Democrat — in part because nearly all big cities are now
overwhelmingly Democratic. In California, where Republicans’ numbers
have ebbed past the point of power, the lion’s share of billionaires’
legislative campaign contributions have gone to more centrist Democrats,
who not only are reliable votes on charter issues but also often oppose
environmental and other measures advanced by their more progressive
colleagues.

Charter billionaires have settled on a diagnosis, and a cure, that
focuses on the deficiencies of the system’s victims, not the system
itself.

Of all the issues billionaires could choose, why charters, and why now?
One reason commonly adduced is that they’ve noticed something troubling:
Public school graduates lack the skills necessary for employment. Many
of those needed skills, however, are the kind that students acquire in
vocational educational programs, not at charter schools.

That there are huge problems in the education of low-income students is
beyond dispute — but this is hardly a recent development. The real
recent development is the rising share of such students as the middle
class has waned.

If the Waltons, say, decided to redirect more of their fortune to
raising Wal-Mart workers’ wages, that in turn might enable hundreds of
thousands of families to have more economically secure and stable lives,
which could have a greater effect on student performance than
charterization.

It’s hardly fair, of course, to tar all billionaire charterizers with
that kind of brush. But the fact is that they have emerged as a force at
a time when our staggering levels of economic inequality have become a
widely acknowledged problem. That’s not just a coincidence.

Indeed, we have to go back to the economic polarization of pre-New Deal
America to find a time when the super-rich felt so compelled to better
the lot of the poor, as they understood it. Andrew Carnegie, who grew
mightily rich by building the American steel industry, famously
established libraries in thousands of cities and towns. Though, unlike
today’s charter backers, he wasn’t draining off funds that could go to
public libraries in the process.

What Carnegie and today’s pro-charter rich have in common is a belief in
individual betterment — but not only that. They also share a fierce
opposition to collective betterment, manifested in their respective
battles against unions and, in many cases, against governmentally
established standards and services.

Living in separate eras when the middle class was — and is — embattled
and the gap between rich and poor was — and is — immense, billionaires
have largely shunned the fights that might truly narrow that gap:
raising the minimum wage, making public colleges and universities free,
funding sufficient public investment to create genuine full employment,
reviving collective bargaining and raising progressive taxes to pay for
all of that.

As the billionaires see it, it’s the lack of skills, not the
dysfunctions of the larger economic system that they (or their parents)
mastered, that is the cause of our national woes. Pure of heart though
some of them may be, the charter billionaires have settled on a
diagnosis, and a cure, that focuses on the deficiencies of the system’s
victims, not the system itself. How very comforting for them.

Harold Meyerson is executive editor of the American Prospect. He is a contributing
writer to Opinion.