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The Brookings Institution just released a list of the 25 US billionaires with the most political power

The Brookings Institution think-tank has just released a list of the 25 US billionaires with the most political power. You can access an interactive graphic here.

The list is a part of Brookings Institution Governance Studies Director Darrell West’s forthcoming book Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust. The book argues that the wealthy are more politically engaged than the general public. Research has found that 99 percent of the top 1% of wealth holders vote in presidential elections, nearly double the rate of the general public. This is likely due to the fact that the super wealthy know that political engagement matters, and being involved in politics yields results. While the general public is busy turning a cynical eye to elections, seeing little difference between Democrats and Republicans, the ultra rich are buying up our government and influencing domestic and foreign affairs.

West notes that much of the debate of how wealth influences politics suffers from an ideological fallacy. Progressives raise alarm when conservative billionaires are politically active, yet are quick to praise the efforts of the left-leaning rich. Alternately, conservatives fear when liberal billionaires put money into elections but celebrate the advocacy efforts of their own billionaires and special interest groups. West argues that each side misses the challenges raised by billionaire activism for the entire system. The extensive resources and advocacy efforts of the super wealthy provoke concerns about “political influence, transparency and accountability.” During this time of “high income concentration and dysfunctional political institutions” it is important that the general public understand just how much money impacts politics.

Here’s the top five billionaires with the most political power:

1. The Koch Brothers
Topping the list are Charles and David Koch, the multibillionaire owners of Koch Industries, who in 2014 alone have spent well over $30 million in campaign ads targeting vulnerable Democrats in a number of states’ Senate races. That number is expected to rise to $290 million by Election Day.

Ultraculture had previously reported on Koch Industries spending to promote climate denial, and among other things bankrolling “the Tea Party; the efforts against Obamacare; California Prop 23 (which would have overturned anti-global warming regulation in California); the campaign against Obama’s re-election; Mitt Romney; Scott Walker’s campaign for governor of Wisconsin; anti-union groups; keeping young members of the Democratic Party from voting and more.”

2. Michael Bloomberg
The former New York City Mayor spent $650 million on his political campaigns and advocacy activities. He has currently devoted $50 million to fight the NRA and promote his views on gun violence using Independence USA, his Super PAC.

3. Tom Steyer
Steyer made his fortune as a hedge fund manager. Like Bloomberg, Steyer is a billionaire concerned with leftist political causes such as raising public awareness about climate change. He announced that he plans to spend $100 million during the 2014 midterms through his NextGen Climate Action PAC.

4. Sheldon Adelson
Adelson is the CEO of the Las Vegas Sands corporation. In 2012, he spent $93 million to defeat President Barack Obama. While he was unsuccessful, after the election he promised to spend twice as much next time around. Republican presidential candidates look at him as a serious source of campaign finance. Recently, Adelson held a so-called “Sheldon primary” in which four prospective candidates visited Las Vegas for personal meetings. Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and John Kasich each showed and delivered a major speech. The winner of this money primary can expect a hug super-PAC expenditure.

5. George Soros
Soros is a major supporter of progressive grassroots organizations in the United States. He funds causes such as social justice, political rights and HIV prevention through his Open Society Foundations. In 2012, Soros provided $1 million to President Obama’s reelection campaign late in the game, and has already signed up as co-finance chair of the Ready for Hillary super PAC.

It’s pretty despondent to think that American politics is like a game of capture the flag being played between a small group of ultra rich. While we may root for our team to win the game, it is at the expense of losing our own voice. But knowledge is power, and never has the need been greater for policies that promote better disclosure, governance and opportunity.

http://www.brookings.edu/research/intera...ower-index

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The Global Oligarchy

By Jim Kirwan
9-22-14

Francisco Goya
The birth of the United States grew from some very powerful men, many of whom were connected to some of the Oligarch’s of Old World Europe.
This land was clearly stolen from the native population that was living here when the first colonial adventurers arrived. From then on this place began to take over ever larger stretches of the land which they viewed as “free”. Any resistance by the people who were here was met with force and extermination in the name of “Manifest Destiny”, but initially America practiced Apartheid in the extreme.
It could be said that the colonies were funded by the Oligarch’s and settled by some of the richest former noblemen from Europe. From those early days there was always a conflict between the privileged classes and the rest of the early Americans. In addition there were slaves, blacks and the natives; none of which held the same rank, as the Oligarch’s. Women were not represented at all.
After the Constitutional Convention and the sporadic beginnings of the “new country” ­ efforts were made to try and confront some of these missing components in the new Republic. Some progress was made and yet defacto slavery and segregation still exist here, despite the passage of all that time. From our earliest days the United States was a colonial power that casually invaded other nations beginning with Jamestown in 1607.
Central and South America and the entire Caribbean became very familiar with America and her gunboat diplomacy, which lasted almost 200 years: This for the most part is not discussed in the official history of this nation. The US moved on from that and began to make her own place in the wider-world as a colonial and military power, without much notice from the old world of Europe.
It’s this part of American-history which set the stage here, for our adventures in Oligarchy. Meanwhile what was being taught at home omitted what we in fact did to dozens and dozens of nations for fun & profit. It was this traveling road-show that Marine General Smedley Butler referred to when he said: “War is a Racket” back in the early 1920’s and 1930’s. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3_EXqJ8f-0
The practices the marine general mentioned have only gotten more intense since those early days, but that’s also why most Americans pay almost no attention to the wars we’re continually “fighting” all around the world. We grew up with the false-flag institutionally created wars that were good for American business and therefore these “wars” needed to be kept away from everyday life in America, so as not to disturb the growing of the nation that spoke about Freedom & Democracy, while practicing some of the most violent destructions of so many nations that tried to resist America’s adventurism abroad.
What we inherited was a place that lives in several worlds, not just in one. The first is that beacon of light, a nation filled with hope and promise to “the poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. But the flip side begins with an iron-clad Oligarchy that recognizes no one who is not of the same class. It’s this continuing dichotomy that lives at the heart of this place and that’s what is behind what we must now deal with today.
Setting the Global Agenda
The wider world was thought to have developed many nations: Separate countries that could create their own policies as to how they each wanted to deal with the world. But the United States and later Israel, had already decided that no other country could enjoy the same rights as they did. This is what led us all into this Global Oligarchy where there can only be one ruler, one power, one form of money—and everything else must be eliminated.
While this was agreed to within the secret ruling circle of the ruling elite’s, the rest of the planet actually thought that they still had a right to live, where they decided to live, and in the way they preferred to live their lives. That’s no longer the case. Yet that’s where the Apocalyptic hysteria begins to make itself felt throughout every global confrontation now: Because there has never been a global-unanimity about this most significant of all societal determinations.
When no nation has the right to say “NO” to the Elite’s, which Russia has frequently done: Then the Oligarchy must challenge every attempt to break away from their universal-plan for global hegemony.
That’s what is behind the demonization of Putin and Russia as well as every circumstance which might touch upon any power that is not fully controlled by the forces of the Oligarch’s.
American History has been skewed!

I was very lucky as a boy, because of an accident of time. By the time I graduated from Jr. High School, in 1954, there was still something called ‘The Weekly Reader’. That was a publication that went with Civics classes in public schools. It was a miniature newspaper that brought students news of the nation and the world, which needed to be discussed weekly, in class: Along with the basics of Civics in America.
I left public-school and finished high school at a Catholic private school that tried to instill the principle of “Questioning Everything” into the student body. That was something that was not mentioned in public schools, in 1957, either then or now. But it has served me well throughout the years.
As it happens I was exceptionally lucky - given the way my life was shaped by events in Oklahoma City and beyond. I had been part of the middle class until I started the 10th grade. My old man lost the house in Vegas, one weekend, which radically changed many of the options in life. I ended up in my own apartment early - But that too added to understandings that I wouldn’t have had, if my circumstances hadn’t changed everything at that time.
I discovered a lot about Mulligan Flats, the white trash community where some of the houses were cardboard and many were glorified tin shacks. It was a place where a number of families got together to “own” a single car that was shared among the community. Mulligan Flats was a tribal sort of place that survived on weeds and whatever else that could be scrounged.
There was massive racism across the board in Oklahoma. Native Americans were last on the list. Two of my best friends were among them. Above them were Mexicans, then Blacks and sprinkled over that were the white trash that made up the unseen society in the unrecognized parts of Oklahoma City. That’s where I came to understand exactly why LBJ’s “War on Poverty” could never work ­ because I’d seen it all for years before he ever offered it to the public as his “national policy”!
After Kennedy’s murder LBJ dumped the entire State Department in favor of a bunch of flakes that had been car-dealers and good-ole-boys until he appointed them by the dozen to the Department of State ­ where he swapped career and professional statesmen and women, for political neophytes, who just wanted the money and a chance to get drunk and stay drunk for awhile…
The USA hasn’t had a real Department of State since Kennedy died!


That’s how we came to have creatures like Samantha Power in the UN, (she who is now claiming that we have 40 nations in our coalition of the willing”) but she refuses to name any of them. And of course there’s Victoria Nuland who routinely disgraces the Dept. of State, and the list goes on and on and on…

The Death of the Media
Has forced the United States into a permanent state of Imbecility!

The Permanent Death of the U.S. Border Patrol
14 min Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqHEYR8WVO0

USI has over 900 bases in one hundred and thirty countries and that tends to enforce the idea that the Global Oligarchy gets to dictate whatever it wants to call for: Except that in today’s world that “power” no longer has any real credibility as we have not won a war since the end of WWII.
The world has to return to a place where there are many individual nations and where there are very basic international laws that apply to every nation on the earth.
Logic and Reason have been banned from politics, permanently; along with sanity and the willingness to keep any of the pseudo promises that far too many people make every day ­ which is why this will all come apart in the end.
The Global Oligarchy will not win this war, because it cannot be won ­ This ‘chaos’ can only be “LOST by the greater evil”
I just cleared the 75 year mark today and it seems that for most of my adult life these criminals have been ‘running this place’ for far, far too long. It’s time for us to end them all and get back to living again!