They’ve got all that money but, hypothetically, no more voting power than their chauffeur or yacht captain or nanny.
In this one-person, one-vote democracy, though, they’ve got a plan to fix all that for themselves. They’re paying for it. And they’re accomplishing it, even though that means stripping voting rights from non-rich minority groups. Their goal is to make America more of a one-dollar, one-vote plutocracy.
Their scheme is deeply offensive to democratic ideals. In a perfect democracy, each citizen possesses the same power of self-governance as all other individuals, no matter how poor or rich, no matter their religion or skin color, no matter their country of origin or ancestry.
he people who lived — and suffered — through America’s original Gilded Age had plenty of problems. One just happened to be statistical. Back then, in the 19th century’s closing decades, everyone knew that the United States had become significantly more unequal. But no one had a firm take on just howunequal.
Good, reliable statistics on income and wealth distribution simply didn’t exist. The nation had no taxes on income and wealth — and no particular bureaucratic reason to collect data on either.
One Gilded Age U.S. senator, Richard Pettigrew from South Dakota, did do his best to prime the data pump. Pettigrew secured an amendment to the 1890 census bill that required enumerators “to ascertain the distribution of wealth through an inquiry into farms, homes, and mortgages.” A few years later, Pettigrew would use data from that enumeration to charge that 4,000 families, just 0.03 percent of the U.S. population, held 20 percent of the nation’s aggregate wealth.
Bur Pettigrew knew the nation needed much more in the way of raw data. He tried to get the next census, in 1900, to include a deeper dive into who owned what.
“The question as to what becomes of what the toilers of the land produce, whether it goes to them or is taken from them by special privileges and accumulated in the hands of a very few people,” Pettigrew told his Senate colleagues, “reaches ultimately the question of the preservation of free institutions.”
Jim Hightower
Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist
Boston is experiencing a luxury real estate boom, with thousands of new luxury residential and rental units in different stages of development. A decade from now, Boston’s skyline and population demographics will be fundamentally altered by decisions being made today.
This boom does have benefits, providing good jobs in the building trades and increasing property tax revenue for the city. But the boom is not helping address Boston’s acute affordable housing crisis. Bostonians today have a median household income of $58,500. Average Bostonians cannot afford the new luxury condos. They will, unfortunately, feel their impact. Boston’s luxury boom figures to push up land and housing costs and accelerate Boston’s already troubling disparities of income, wealth and opportunity.
Suffolk County, the jurisdiction where Boston resides, rates as the most unequal county in Massachusetts, our nation’s sixth most unequal state in terms of the gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and everyone else. And Boston’s racial wealth divide will only worsen if current trends continue. One marker of those trends: In 2015, not one single home mortgage loan was issued for African-American and Latino families in the Seaport District and the Fenway, two Boston neighborhoods with thousands of new luxury housing units.
City officials are failing to understand how such towers play a key role in the global hidden wealth infrastructure, a shadowy system that’s hiding wealth and masking ownership, all for the purpose of helping the holders of private fortunes avoid taxes and oversight of illicit activities. Many Boston luxury properties are functioning, in effect, as wealth storage lockers for global capital.
Seven patient advocate and health care groups are suing the Trump administration for expanding short-term limited duration plans, cheap health insurance with a history of discrimination.
These groups — representing patients, providers, and insurers — accuse the Trump administration of jeopardizing health care for the most vulnerable, as these short-term plans can skirt consumer protections outlined in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and deny people with pre-existing conditions or charge them more. Indeed, roughly half of these plans do not cover services for mental health or addiction treatment and none cover maternity care. And many people with HIV are generally denied coverage entirely.
The Obama administration only permitted people to purchase these plans for up to three months, as they were only intended to cover people who, for example, are in between jobs. But, in August, the Trump administration issued a final rule, allowing people to purchase these plans beginning October 2nd for up to one year and renewable for three. This rule was largely unpopular; in fact, 335 of 340 formal comments criticized it, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“At a time when suicide and overdose deaths have hit epidemic levels and continue to rise, the last thing we need is a rule that confuses consumers and offers worse mental health and substance use benefits,” said Paul Gionfriddo, president and CEO of Mental Health America, in a statement. “The [short-term] rule not only violates the intent of Congress in the ACA, it also rips away needed treatment and threatens the lives of countless Americans.”
Rolls-Royce CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös sees himself as the custodian of a hallowed brand — and woe be to anyone who dares dispute Rolls supremacy in the universe of ultra luxury. This past March, Müller-Ötvös lit into an Aston Martin exec who had the temerity of suggesting that the traditional Rolls design amounted to an outmoded “ancient Greece.” An “enraged” Müller-Ötvös, Auto News reported, fumed that Aston Martin had “zero clue” about the ultra rich and then accused other carmakers of stealing Rolls-Royce intellectual property. Last summer, Müller-Ötvös rushed to defend the $650,000 price-tag on one Rolls model after a reporter told him that his son wondered why anyone who could afford to “fly to the moon” would choose to buy a Rolls instead. Rolls patrons, the 58-year-old CEO harrumphed back, hold at least $30 million in personal wealth: “They don’t have to choose. They can fly to the moon as well.”
