the filthy rich

World’s 500 Richest People Added $852 Billion to Their Wealth in First Half of 2023

Spread the love

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Image of mega-rich Elon Musk and Zuckenberg.
Image of mega-rich Elon Musk and Zuckenberg. Imge:James Duncan Davidson
Copyright: CC BY-NC 3.0

“They can afford to pay their fair share in taxes.”

The 500 richest people on the planet collectively added $852 billion to their fortunes in the first half of 2023 due in large part to a record-breaking rally in the U.S. stock market.

According to a Bloomberganalysis of its Billionaires Index, the world’s richest people added an average of $14 million per day to their wealth over the past six months, “the best half-year for billionaires since the back half of 2020, when the economy rebounded from a Covid-induced slump.”

Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk saw the largest net worth boost of any global billionaire, adding nearly $97 billion in the first half of the year. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, saw his wealth grow by close to $59 billion, the second-largest gain of any billionaire.

“They can afford to pay their fair share in taxes,” Americans for Tax Fairness said Wednesday in response to the Bloomberg analysis.

In the U.S., capital gains are only taxed when they’ve been realized, such as when stock is sold. That’s how Musk and other mega-billionaires have massive fortunes but small tax bills, as ProPublica detailed last year in its reporting on a trove of IRS documents.

“With the exception of one year when he exercised more than a billion dollars in stock options, Musk’s tax bills in no way reflect the fortune he has at his disposal,” the investigative outlet noted. “In 2015, he paid $68,000 in federal income tax. In 2017, it was $65,000, and in 2018 he paid no federal income tax. Between 2014 and 2018, he had a true tax rate of 3.27%.”

In his budget proposal for fiscal year 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden called for a tax on the unrealized gains of the ultra-wealthy—an idea previously put forth by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). But the measure is unlikely to get through the Republican-controlled House, which is currently looking to slash taxes for the wealthiest Americans.

The already-slim prospects of getting a wealth tax approved in the near future could soon get even worse.

Late last month, the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up a case that “could preempt Congress and the Biden administration from instituting a federal wealth tax,” The Leverreported.

“The new case, Moore v. United States, is tailored to try to block Democrats’ promised agenda by defining what can—and cannot—count as taxable ‘income’ under the Constitution. It specifically challenges a one-time levy on some shareholders for their foreign corporate earnings that was included in the 2017 Republican tax law,” The Lever explained. “The real goal of the case is ‘to slam shut the door on a federal wealth tax,’ as the couple’s lawyers wrote in a 2021 column. The couple’s petition to the Supreme Court expressly decries previous wealth tax proposals from Democrats, including Biden, and urges the justices to ‘head off a major constitutional clash down the line.'”

Wyden, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, warned in a statement that “the petitioners in Moore are hoping the Supreme Court will toss out a Ninth Circuit ruling along with potentially decades of settled tax law and bipartisan agreement on congressional authority, all for the benefit of the ultra-wealthy.”

“If the Republicans on the Supreme Court take the petitioners’ side, they’d be handing a massive windfall to multinational corporations and could potentially lock in a right for billionaires to opt out of paying anything remotely close to a fair share in taxes,” the senator said. “I designed my approach to taxing billionaires, the centerpiece of which is an accounting method already used in our tax code, with the understanding that special interests would come at it with well-funded legal challenges. I’m totally confident that it’s constitutional.”

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingWorld’s 500 Richest People Added $852 Billion to Their Wealth in First Half of 2023

Here’s How the ‘Jet-Owning Oligarchy’ Harms Both Planet and Workers

Spread the love

Original article by KENNY STANCIL republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A new analysis catalogs alarming facts about the destructive private jet industry, which is emblematic of runaway economic and carbon inequality.

Research published Monday details how the working class is paying the price, in more ways than one, for the “jet-owning oligarchy” to hop around the globe in their personal luxury planes.

It’s well-established that private jet travel by the super-rich is worsening the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis. Adding insult to injury, this conspicuously carbon-intensive consumption is being subsidized by ordinary taxpayers, as the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Patriotic Millionaires make clear in their new analysis.

Entitled High Flyers 2023: How Ultra-Rich Private Jet Travel Costs the Rest of Us and Burns Up Our Planet, the report catalogs alarming facts about the private jet industry and makes recommendations about how to rein in this potent symbol and manifestation of escalating inequality.

To begin with, “private jets emit at least 10 times more pollutants than commercial planes per passenger,” the report notes. “Unsurprisingly, approximately 1% of people are believed to be responsible for about half of all aviation carbon emissions.”

Amid a surge in wealth inequality since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, “private jet use has increased by about a fifth, and private jet emissions have increased more than 23%,” the report points out. “The private jet sector set industry records with regards to transaction and dollar volume in 2021 and 2022.”

While a coronavirus-era boom is evident, the industry has been growing steadily alongside wealth inequality since the turn of the century. As the report states: “The size of the global fleet has increased 133% in the last two decades from 9,895 in 2000 to 23,133 in mid-2022. This bonanza was accompanied by an unprecedented number of business jet operations, 5.3 million in 2022.”

“If we can’t ban private jets, we should at least tax them and require them to pay to offset their environmental damage and subsidies.”

According to the report, “The median net worth of a full and fractional private jet owner is $190 million and $140 million respectively.” A minuscule 0.0008% of the global population belongs to the jet-owning class, which consists mostly of financial and real estate tycoons.

Last year, billionaire Elon Musk, “the most active high flyer in the United States,” bought a new jet and took 171 private flights, or about one every other day, the report notes.

In so doing, he single-handedly “contributed to the consumption of 837,934 liters of jet fuel,” states the report, and he “was responsible for 2,112 tons of carbon emissions”—132 times more than the entire carbon footprint of an average person in the United States.

In a statement, report co-author Kalena Thomhave, a researcher with the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at IPS, called private jets “a microcosm of our system of wealth inequality even beyond their image of extravagance.”

“Private flyers pay just 2% of the taxes that primarily fund the Federal Aviation Administration, yet nearly 17% of flights handled by the FAA are private,” said Thomhave. “Meanwhile, private jets contribute disproportionately to carbon emissions while often representing significant tax savings for their wealthy owners.”

As the report observes: “Thousands of municipal airports in the U.S. are funded by the public, but many primarily serve private and corporate jets. These airports may not offer scheduled passenger service, but they still offer airport runways subsidized by taxes.”

Such regressive taxation is the product of industry lobbying, the report explains:

The largest player in the private jet lobby, the National Business Aviation Association, has spent an average $2.4 million each year since 2008 lobbying the federal government, primarily for tax giveaways. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the industry specifically lobbied for Covid relief, particularly “medium to long-term liquidity assistance and relief from air transportation excise taxes,” even though industry demand was quickly climbing.

As wealth inequality soars, so too does the value of the private jet market, which grew from $32.3 billion in 2021 to $34.1 billion in 2022, the report notes. With wealth being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and little to no downward redistribution on the horizon, the private jet industry is projected to expand further in the coming years.

Report co-author Omar Ocampo, a researcher with the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at IPS, said that the private jet industry’s expected growth this decade “provides us with a great opportunity to levy a luxury transfer tax on private jet sales.” He added that “the revenue raised from this tax can be invested towards developing a green transportation system.”

According to the report, “A 10% and 5% transfer fee on pre-owned and new private aircraft would have raised $2.4 billion in 2021 and $2.6 billion in 2022.”

In addition to imposing a transfer tax on all private jet sales, IPS and Patriotic Millionaires recommend the following steps be taken:

  • Levy a private jet fuel tax;
  • Institute a “short hop” surcharge;
  • Resist efforts to increase passenger facility charges until private jet owners pay their fair share;
  • Create a sustainable transportation equity trust fund;
  • Increase TSA security oversight of private jets; and
  • Pass the Aircraft Ownership Transparency Act.

According to the report, Musk would have paid nearly $4 million in additional taxes last year if a transfer fee and jet fuel tax had been in place.

“Private jet travel by billionaires and the ultra-wealthy imposes a tremendous cost on the rest of us,” said Chuck Collins, another co-author of the report.

“Not only do ordinary travelers and taxpayers subsidize the air space for private jets, but the high flyers also contribute considerably more pollution than other passengers,” said Collins. “If we can’t ban private jets, we should at least tax them and require them to pay to offset their environmental damage and subsidies.”

Original article by KENNY STANCIL republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingHere’s How the ‘Jet-Owning Oligarchy’ Harms Both Planet and Workers

Climate activists block holes on Spanish golf courses over water use

Spread the love

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230702-climate-activists-block-holes-on-spanish-golf-courses-over-water-use

Madrid (AFP) – Climate activists said Sunday they had plugged the holes on 10 golf courses across Spain to protest at the sport’s excessive water usage as Europe lives through a severe drought.

Some activists blocked holes with cement while others filled the holes with seedlings, Extinction Rebellion said © Handout / Extinction Rebellion/AFP
Some activists blocked holes with cement while others filled the holes with seedlings, Extinction Rebellion said © Handout / Extinction Rebellion/AFP

Activists from Extinction Rebellion (XR) filled in the holes under cover of darkness in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, the Basque Country, Navarra and the Balearic Island of Ibiza to denounce “the waste of water during one of the worst droughts Europe has ever suffered”.

“Golf has no place in a world without water,” said a statement from the group, which uses direct action to underline its warnings about the dangers to the planet.

…

“Just one hole of a golf course consumes more than 100,000 litres of water a day to maintain the surrounding green,” XR said, citing figures from the Spanish NGO Ecologists In Action.

…

Experts say parts of Spain — which is the world’s biggest exporter of olive oil and a key source of Europe’s fruit and vegetables — are the driest they’ve been in a thousand years, with the prolonged drought depleting reservoirs to half their normal capacity.

…

Extinction Rebellion said it was part of a series of international protests “targeting the richest 1 percent of the population” through their golf courses, private jets and high-end cars to make clear that “the rich and their leisure activities that waste essential resources are a luxury we cannot afford”.

…

It should be clear – if you bother to engage your brain – that the climate crisis is already affecting inflation and the cost of living crisis. Less precipitation (rain) and disrupted weather [patterns] through climate change mean less crops and increased prices in the supermarket for your fruit and veg, vegetable and olive oil, all those goods made from wheat, corn, beans, etc. The Capitalists will tell you it’s all because of the war in Ukraine. Bollocks, climate change is adversely affecting crops everywhere, Ukraine is not the only place growing crops. Climate change is affecting everyone now.

It’s also noted that the rich are specifically addressed targeted.

Related: Climate change crisis: Golf courses on borrowed time as Earth’s weather patterns become wilder

Continue ReadingClimate activists block holes on Spanish golf courses over water use

Starmer, Reeves, Streeting, Khan, Sarwar party with Murdoch

Spread the love

Original article republished from the Skwawkbox for non-commercial use.

Contempt for ordinary people paraded again

Image of Rupert Murdoch, Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting and Rachel Reeves, participants at Murdoch's summer party.
Keir Starmer, his mini-me Wes Streeting, the dire Rachel Reeves have partied with S*n owner Rupert Murdoch and a string of Tories at his ‘summer party’, including Rishi Sunak, Suella ‘ship them all to Rwanda’ Braverman, disgraced former Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi and ‘Scum’ hacks:

The contempt of Starmeroids for ordinary people has long been on show, with Starmer writing repeatedly, and Reeves and Streeting at least once, for Murdoch’s ‘Scum’ rag despite its lies, racism and its decades-long smear campaign against the victims and survivors of the Hillsborough disaster.

So great is the arrogance of the Labour right that they no longer even bother to try to hide their billionaire fetish and barely even try to pretend that they have the needs of ordinary people remotely at heart. No doubt the apologists for the ghoulish regime will roll out their tired excuse that the party needs to appeal to the hard-right readers of the S*n, but appealing to the millions who need real change is clearly an idea that has been passed through the shredder repeatedly to make sure the interests of the rich and powerful are not threatened.

Original article republished from the Skwawkbox for non-commercial use.

Continue ReadingStarmer, Reeves, Streeting, Khan, Sarwar party with Murdoch

Left Foot Forward

Spread the love

Catching up with articles published by Left Foot Forward, an excellent UK political blog.

Government caved to wealthy landowner lobbying in U-turn on public path access

Thérèse Coffey gave landowners what they wanted, putting at risk public access to thousands of miles of historic paths

Public access to thousands of miles of historic paths in England could be lost due to a government U-turn, following successful lobbying by wealthy landowners.

An investigation by openDemocracy found Environment Secretary, Thérèse Coffey, U-turned on a government commitment to remove restrictions on registering a claim to protect lost paths in England, after receiving a letter from landowners.

…

Via a freedom of information request, openDemocracy revealed that Thérèse Coffey’s U-turn came after a request was made by the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), who represent owners of rural land, property and business.

The letter expressed ‘concerns’ about the complete removal of the cut-off date due to land managers ‘uncertainty’ over what they referred to as, ‘frivolous claims of historic rights on their land holdings’.

The letter then asks the MP to consider a new deadline of 2031, shortly followed by Coffey announcing the government U-turn, which appeased the landowners request. It seems it didn’t take much to sway the minister in the interests of the wealthy, at the expense of the general public.

…

Labour has failed to stand against the Tories’ attack on the right to protest

Image of Keir Starmer sucking up to the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum, Davos
Image of Keir Starmer sucking up to the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum, Davos

Green Party peer Jenny Jones gives her account of the parliamentary battles over the Tories’ protest laws

Last night, the Labour Party made a disastrous misjudgement that will impact on hundreds of thousands of people attempting to protest and exercise their democratic rights in the coming years. By failing to support my Fatal Motion that would have stopped serious disruption being defined as anything “more than minor” Labour have managed to alienate lots of their natural supporters. 

Many of the 64,000 people who signed the petition asking them to act like an opposition, are now wondering why Labour let them down and why the media don’t report this stuff?

Perhaps Labour felt that they could sit this one out and no one would really care. After all, political journalists and media organisations like the BBC very rarely report on anything that isn’t a Blue/Red clash. So many issues and viewpoints are excluded simply because they don’t fit this cosy Blue/Red duopoly. The narrative was that if Labour wasn’t backing the Fatal Motion then it wasn’t worth reporting on and all my attempts to generate coverage were met with silence, with the honourable exception of James O’Brien on LBC and the Guardian.

What Labour under estimated is the power of social media and influential commentators like Carol Vorderman and Marina Purkiss. The Vlogger, Peter Stefanovic reached over a million people with his first video outlining what was going on. He explained the constitutional issues in a way that the BBC’s one attempt at coverage failed completely to understand, as our state media bought the government narrative that this was a law aimed at Just Stop Oil.

Meanwhile, Labour’s regret motion, a loud tut tut in parliamentary terms, led to a Daily Mail front page attacking them for supporting Just Stop Oil. The result is that many voters see them as a pointless and feeble opposition, while the government label them as on the side of disruption.

…

 Left Foot Forward News

Post-Brexit border charges will further increase food prices, industry leaders warn

The Government has made clear its intention to implement full border checks on food imports from this October.

There could be further increases in food prices yet, even after UK food and drink price inflation hit a 45-year record of 19.2 per cent in March, as a result of new border checks caused by Brexit.

It comes after the UK government this week published proposals to charge a flat-rate inspection fee of up to £43 on each consignment of food coming from the EU.

The decision to impose full border checks on food imports from the bloc, will hit smaller firms harder, industry leaders have warned.

Shane Brennan, the director of the Cold Chain Federation, told the Financial Times that the proposals made little sense, especially given that the government was actively discussing imposing price controls on UK supermarkets to keep down the cost of food.

He said: “It is crazy that one week the government is holding a crisis meeting in Downing Street to discuss out-of-control food inflation and the next is willing to nod through a multimillion new import tax on EU food imports.”

…

Former Eton Master admits ‘failure’ in educating ‘entitled’ Tories

Image of Oxford's Bullingdon Club including Boris Johnson
Oxford’s Bullingdon Club including Boris Johnson

‘They have harmed the ‘very fabric of the country’.

Finally, someone has called a spade a spade. A former Master of Eton College has admitted that the school failed to rein in entitled Tories such as Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Kwasi Kwarteng, whose sense of entitlement has harmed the ‘very fabric of the country’.

In a scathing letter to the Times, John Claughton, who was a master at Eton from 1984 to 2001, said that the school, which has educated 20 Prime Ministers, now had a mission to ‘ensure that its pupils are saved from the sense of privilege, entitlement and omniscience that can produce alumni such as Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Kwasi Kwarteng and Ben Elliot and thereby damage a country’s very fabric.’

Claughton goes on to add: “Sadly, I failed in that purpose.”

…

The Sun forgets its owner’s taste for luxury travel in dig at Rachel Reeves’ business class flight to US

The newspaper didn’t dwell on Rupert Murdoch owning an $84 million private jet.

In a week dominated by yet more Tory sleaze and scandals, the right-wing media must have been desperate to dish some dirt on the shadow cabinet. Sure enough, The Sun came up with the goods, taking aim at Rachel Reeves’ trip to the US in business class.

The Murdoch-owned newspaper did not hold back in reporting that the Shadow Chancellor had been accused of hypocrisy for ‘taking the posh seat while attacking Rishi Sunak and the government for luxury travel.’ Reeves informed the newspaper that no taxpayer money was used to fund the trip, and that a donor paid for it. 

This in itself contrasts to the Prime Minister’s luxury travel which has been funded by the taxpayer. In March, Sunak decided to travel to Southampton and back to London by air rather than by car or train. The PM’s official spokesman confirmed that the helicopter trip was funded by the taxpayer.  Even the Sun had to reference the criticism the Prime Minister came under for the taxpayer-funded helicopter flight to Southampton.

… [Read more to get to Murdoch’s jet]

Continue ReadingLeft Foot Forward