8 Shocking Ways the Billionaires Have Schemed to Rob Us of Every Last $
By Mark Ames, eXiled Online
October 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143146/Every day and every week we hear another shocking story about how our billionaires have cooked up an even sicker scheme to shake down Americans and plunder the national wealth, as if the last scheme was too easy and boring. They don’t even bother hiding it anymore: take the story about the “Death Bonds” I wrote about last month, first reported (however blandly) in the New York Times: the very same Wall Street bankers who conned $23 trillion out of America’s wealth is now going to use some of that play money to place bets on when we Americans will die—and the sooner we die, the more billions in E-Z profits Wall Street will earn.
It’s as if America is some kind of despised abstraction to our ruling class: a faraway colony to plunder, a mass of humanity to use and exploit as it sees fit. In fact, there’s a pretty clear pattern developing of just how much they despise Americans and how little they value our lives and our humanity.
~snip~
It’s part of an ongoing pattern for our ruling class and their view of America and Americans. It’s time we faced up to this grim fact. Too many of them are against us and against this country, weakening America to the point where it threatens to be permanently crippled, much like how the communists deformed Russia for decades. They had their bolsheviks; we have our billionaire-bolsheviks. The effect of these two rapacious ruling elites is the same: the state and the people serve the tiny ruling class; and when we’re not serving them, we can fuck off and die. Literally. Because that serves them too.
For practical purposes, here is a small handy list of 8 Reasons To Hate Our Billionaire Bolsheviks
:
1. According to Harvard Medical Researchers, 45,000 Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance. That’s one American dying every 12 minutes; it also means that our fucked-up health care system kills as many Americans every month as Al Qaeda managed on September 11th, with another 9,000 American dead thrown in for good measure. Doesn’t this count as corporate terrorism? Doesn’t this mean we should go to war against our murderers, to protect ourselves?
2. Those hundreds of thousands of American corpses enriched a handful of American health care CEOs like William McGuire of UnitedHealth: he earned hundreds of millions in annual bonuses in the mid-2000s ($125 million in 2004, more in 2005) along with as much as $1.8 billion in stock options (some of which was clawed back by the SEC), and a $5 million annual pension guaranteed for life; at one point, $1 out of every $700 Americans paid in health care went directly to McGuire’s obscene billion-dollar payout.
3. “Dead Peasants Insurance”: Companies paid out $8 billion in premiums on millions of their employees, and expect to earn $9 billion in the next 5 years when these employees die. To make sure that the life insurance companies can pay out the winnings on our deaths, $22 billion in TARP money–our money– was set aside this spring for insurance companies.
4. Herbert Perone, spokesman for the American Council of Life Insurers, told the San Francisco Chronicle: “Nobody gets upset when a company insures its plant or its fleet of cars or land or any other business asset. To think that your labor force is not a business asset is extremely shortsighted.”
5. The gap between wealthiest 10 percent and the rest of America is worse than at any time on record. Two-thirds of all income gains from 2002-7 went to the top 1 percent. The Walton family alone is worth more than the bottom 100 million Americans combined. Wal-Mart is a major player in the “dead peasants insurance” game; it’s alleged that dead peasant insurance payouts are used for executive bonuses.
6. Bank of America chief Ken Lewis will earn a $125 million retirement package after soaking US taxpayers for $45 billion in bailout funds and $118 billion in guarnatees. Meanwhile, banks like BofA earned $24 billion in overdraft fees in 2008, charging some 51 million Americans an average of $470 each in highly dubious circumstances. It’s thought that banks will pocket even more this year.
7. Mortgages: financial institutions get taxpayers to subsidize losses via $700 billion TARP program, $1.25 trillion mortgage-backed securities buyback program, hundreds of billions in “toxic assets” guarantees, at least $400 billion shoring up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, $30 billion for PPIP, etc.
8. Mortgages: homeowners. Two headlines tell the story: “Mortgage-relief program helps relatively few troubled homeowner” and “Firms are getting billions, but homeowners still in trouble” The latter article details how even the meager funds earmarked for homeowner relief winds up getting looted by the mortgage servicers who created the problems in the first place.
And on, and on…
It’s one of the more grotesque yet inevitable examples of just how badly the super-wealthy have warped America so that it’s become little more than a rigged game in which we the people always lose, just like Mr. Lebowski said we would.
~snip~
more at http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/143146
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