Tag: billionaires

America’s Billionaires Collectively Control the Hegemonic U.S. Imperial Government

On September 13th, two very grim reports about the world’s future were published, one by America’s Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation, and the other by America’s Gallup polling organization; and both are data-based — as Melinda and Bill Gates expressed it in their joint Introduction to their new report, which is titled “The Future of Progress”: “We are data people, and this is a data report.”

Bill Gates’s essay there is titled “We need to change how we think about world hunger”, and opens:

“In February, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine interrupted the flow of grain from Europe to Africa, creating another humanitarian crisis on a second continent.”

Melinda Gates’s essay is titled “Gender equality depends on women having power, not just ‘empowerment’”, and opens,

“Economic progress for women is stalling worldwide — and COVID-19 is not the only reason why. But frankly, blaming COVID-19 alone would be a cop-out. We have to ask harder questions: Why do gender-neutral events like pandemics have gendered effects? And why, after decades of high-profile efforts to improve the lives of women and girls, is equality still generations out of reach?”

Both essays focus on different topics, but neither focuses on the chief driver of increased economic inequality itself, which is fundamental to everything that they discuss:

Its chief driver is their own and fellow-billionaires’ imperialism and the resultant soaring taxpayer-funded military-weapons-manufacturers’ and extraction-industries’ profits that derive from the resulting unique advantages that these billionaires derive from the empire that the Government that they and their fellow billionaires control for their own special economic benefit.

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Body Found in Tennessee Confirmed as Missing Heiress Eliza Fletcher

Memphis police confirmed Tuesday that they found the remains of teacher Eliza “Liza” Fletcher, who was reportedly abducted last week

The police department wrote on Twitter that “the deceased victim that was located yesterday in the 1600 block of Victor [street] has been identified as 34-year-old Eliza Fletcher, a teacher who was also the heiress to the Orgill Inc. hardware fortune.

The development comes after Cleotha Abston, a 38-year-old male, was charged in connection to Fletcher’s kidnapping and with tampering with evidence. His DNA was found on a pair of sandals near her disappearance, police said.

Authorities wrote Tuesday that Abston now faces additional charges, including first-degree murder and first-degree murder in perpetration of kidnapping. Previously he was charged with aggravated kidnapping and evidence.

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Memphis jogger abducted on street, bundled into SUV is billionaire heiress

The Tennessee teacher who had been kidnapped while jogging early Friday morning is actually the heiress to a billion-dollar company.

Eliza Fletcher, 34, is the granddaughter to hardware magnate Joseph “Joe” Orgill III, whose wholesale family business, Orgill Inc., is described as “the world’s largest independent hardlines distributor with annual sales of $3 billion,” according to the company’s website. Fletcher’s family is now offering a $50,000 cash prize for information that leads to her rescue, according to the Daily Mail.

“We look forward to Eliza’s safe return and hope that this award will help police capture those who committed this crime,” Fletcher’s family said in a statement.

Orgill Inc. is a privately owned business and employs over 5,500 people. Fletcher is married to Richard “Richie” Fletcher III and a mother to their two children, according to the outlet.

In response to Fletcher’s kidnapping, her husband had “reportedly lawyered up,” according to reporter Melanie Moon.

Fletcher was last seen in a pair of purple jogging shorts and a pink top at around 4:20 a.m. on Friday morning before she was pushed into an SUV by an “unknown individual,” Memphis police said in a press release. She is approximately 5’6″ and 137 pounds with brown hair and green eyes, according to the release.

The suspect in this kidnapping is a man in a dark-colored vehicle and was traveling westbound on Central Avenue, according to police.

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When Billionaires And The Government Work Together To Control Information

Facebook restricted visibility of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 election after receiving counsel from the FBI, according to Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“So we took a different path than Twitter,” Zuckerberg said during a Thursday appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. “Basically the background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”

Zuckerberg said a decision was made to restrict that information on Facebook’s multibillion-user platform. He said that unlike Twitter, which banned the sharing of the article entirely, Facebook opted for the somewhat subtler option of censorship by algorithm.

“The distribution on Facebook was decreased,” he said, adding when pressed by Rogan that the decreased visibility of the article happened to a “meaningful” extent.

As we’ve discussed previously, censorship by algorithm is becoming the preferred censorship method on large Silicon Valley platforms because it can be done to far more people with far less objection than outright de-platforming and bans.

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Purported Free Speech Champion Elon Musk Writes Article for Chinese Censorship Bureau Magazine

Tesla billionaire Elon Musk wrote an article for a magazine produced by the chief censorship bureau of Communist China, despite being a self-described “free speech absolutist.”

The world’s richest man penned an article in the July issue of China Cyberspace, a magazine produced by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the top internet regulator, responsible for enacting the strict censorship apparatus of the regime in Beijing.

So central to the power structure of the Communist Party, the director of the CAC, Zhuang Rongwen, is also the head of the Propaganda Department, and it is a subsidiary of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, of which Xi Jinping, himself, is the director of.

While the CAC is mostly involved in laying out the censorship agenda of the government, it also has the ability to purge material directly, notably being at the head of Operation Qinglang (cleansed and uncontaminated), launched in 2021 to crack down on non-state run media entities, such as social media users and citizen journalists from posting “harmful” material on the Chinese internet, which is itself already heavily censored.

The decision by Musk to choose to write an article for a magazine produced by the CAC comes in direct contrast to his self-described status as a “free speech absolutist” and his persistent criticism of censorship in the West, namely on social media sites like Twitter. However, it perhaps demonstrates the lengths to which the Tesla founder will go to maintain a cosy relationship with China, a key country for the future expansion of the electric car company. It also provides further proof for Donald Trump’s claim that Musk is a “bullshit artist.”

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Billionaires, Hollywood Celebrities Join Call to End Public Plane Tracking After ‘Climate Criminal’ Backlash

Billionaires, Hollywood celebrities, and climate activists share fame, fortune, and a profile they work hard to control. All of which is why so many are calling on a public company not to track their flights and expose their carbon footprints.

AFP reports flight-following websites and Twitter accounts that offer real-time views of air traffic are on the end of regular pushback ranging from complaints to gear seizures by those who would rather their movements are not in the public domain.

One U.S.-based group alone gets dozens of “requests” each year to stop posting aircraft flight movements, according to its organiser, Dan Streufert.

“We have not removed anything so far. This is all public information. And I don’t want to be the arbiter of who’s right and who’s wrong,” added Streufert, founder of flight tracking site ADS-B Exchange which can track any flight from a private individual to a politician, star, activist or member of Royalty.

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Biden’s National Security Adviser Admits YOUR Tax Dollars Are Paying for the Upkeep of Seized Russian Yachts.

President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan revealed that the U.S. federal government is using taxpayer cash to maintain seized Russian yachts, according to a report from Insider. The accidental admission – caught on a “hot mic” – came during an event at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) on June 16th.

Sullivan – who many suspect is compromised by the Chinese Communist Party – was speaking with Richard Fontaine, chief executive officer of the CNAS, about the White House’s effort to seize Russian assets including yachts amidst the ongoing war in Ukraine when he made the remarks.

In a livestream video of the event uploaded to YouTube, which has since been deleted, the pair’s personal conversation before the publicized discussion portion of the CNAS was included.

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Soros Prosecutors Run Half of America’s Largest Jurisdictions

George Soros spent more than $40 million in the past decade to elect scores of liberal prosecutors in half of America’s largest jurisdictions, many of which are now roiled by crime.

The Democratic megadonor has backed 75 so-called justice reform prosecutors through direct contributions, PACs, and other third-party entities, the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund revealed in a June report. Though many had little prosecutorial experience when elected, they represent 72 million Americans in some of the nation’s most populous municipalities. Ten Soros prosecutors, including Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner (D.) and Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon (D.), received $13 million in just the last four years, going on to win races where they had vastly outraised their competition—sometimes by as much as 90 percent. In each race, Soros was the single greatest donor to the campaign.

“Our study shows for the first time, Soros’s funding and installation of these district attorneys is fundamentally dismantling the criminal justice system as we know it,” Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund president Jason Johnson told the Washington Free Beacon.

The report discloses the power progressive criminal prosecutors wield in the American justice system—and the potential effects of that influence on crime. The FBI in 2020 reported its highest single-year increase in homicides—a 30 percent jump from the previous year. A year later, 12 cities, including Krasner’s Philadelphia and Soros-backed district attorney José Garza’s Austin, Texas, broke their all-time homicide records. According to the report, more than 40 percent of homicides and a third of all violent and property crimes in 2021 occurred in jurisdictions run by Soros prosecutors.

From cities like Seattle and Los Angeles, to wealthy suburbs near Washington, D.C., to provincial counties in Mississippi and Wisconsin, the prosecutors have radically overhauled bail laws and pursued lightened sentencing in an effort to reduce incarceration. Soros began his quiet effort to remake America’s criminal justice system in 2014, donating $50 million to the ACLU for justice reform activism. He followed up in 2016 by funneling more than $3 million into seven local campaigns, including to Cook County district attorney Kim Foxx (D.), the controversial Chicago prosecutor known for dropping charges against Jussie Smollett, who committed a hate crime hoax.

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ELON MUSK IS NOT A RENEGADE OUTSIDER – HE’S A MASSIVE PENTAGON CONTRACTOR

Elon Musk’s proposed takeover of Twitter has ruffled many feathers among professional commentators. “Musk is the wrong leader for Twitter’s vital mission,” read one Bloomberg headline. The network also insisted, “Nothing in the Tesla CEO’s track record suggests he will be a careful steward of an important media property.” “Elon Musk is the last person who should take over Twitter,” wrote Max Boot in The Washington Post, explaining that “[h]e seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.” The irony of outlets owned by Michael Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos warning of the dangers of permitting a billionaire oligarch to control our media was barely commented upon.

Added to this, a host of celebrities publicly left the social media platform in protest against the proposed $44 billion purchase. This only seemed to confirm to many free speech-minded individuals that the South African billionaire was a renegade outsider on a mission to save the internet from authoritarian elite control (despite the fact that he is borrowing money from the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia in order to do so).

Musk has deliberately cultivated this image of himself: a real life Tony Stark figure who thinks for himself and is not part of the established order. But behind this carefully constructed façade, Musk is intimately connected to the U.S. national security state, serving as one of its most important business partners. Elon, in short, is no threat to the powerful, entrenched elite: he is one of them.

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