Voters are angry at the political establishment and the political establishment doesn’t much care for the voters either. In fact, they think voters are pretty damn stupid. That’s the conclusion of a new survey of America’s unelected governing elites by political scientists at Johns Hopkins University. While media outlets endlessly poll and probe the American people to understand why they …
Joanne Barkan – Charitable Plutocracy: Bill Gates, Washington State and the Nuisance of Democracy
Once upon a time, the super-wealthy endowed their tax-exempt charitable foundations and then turned them over to boards of trustees to run. The trustees would spend the earnings of the endowment to pursue a typically grand but wide-open mission written into the foundation’s charter — like The Rockefeller Foundation’s 1913 mission “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” …
John Perkins – Confessions of a Panama Papers Hit Man
The Panama Papers should be no surprise. I was there in the 1970s, when the system they’ve exposed was set in motion. As an Economic Hit Man (an EHM), I helped forge this global economy that is based on legalized crimes. It’s a system in which 62 individuals have as much wealth as half the world’s population, and a handful …