This is called oligarchy: government of, by, and for the billionaire class.

[Uncle Joe]

Link to tweet

The share of wealth held by the Forbes 400 more than doubled from $1.27 trillion in 2009 to nearly $3 trillion this year. That marks a significant increase encouraged by a combination of sliding tax rates, stock market growth, and the economic recovery, according to Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

(snip)

Zucman, an economist who has consulted with the Warren and Sanders campaigns, noted the staggering amount of wealth that the richest 400 US citizens — or roughly 0.00025% of the American population — has built up over the last decade in a Sunday tweet.

Link to tweet

(snip)

Many economists say that decades of income tax cuts in particular have led to the increasing concentration of wealth atop the economic pyramid and contributed to the accelerating inequality within US society, now at a record high according to the Census Bureau.

[JoeOtterbein]

1. K n R ! Thanks for posting!

[appalachiablue]

2. K/R

[lonely bird]

3. This is unsurprising.

The political economy is built to achieve this type of results.

[MasonDreams]

4. Money can't buy me love.

Did you hear Gates say he would be worried if the govt took 100 B. Like his life would change at all if he had only 5 billion dollars left. That's 5000 chunks of one million dollars each.
Like he would be renting out the extra bedroom, carpooling, and cooking for himself Saturday night.

[BigmanPigman]

5. I heard that.

Meanwhile I pay 25%, more than him, and am almost at federal poverty level...life is so fair in the good ol' US!

[H2O Man]

6. Recommended.

[C Moon]

7. The billionaire class is full of mentally deranged people.

[BeckyDem]

13. True that.

[tiredtoo]

8. We have been living in an oligarchy for some time now.

Unpleasant as it may sound to some money is running this country. Not sure if we can break this hold or not. Must all continue in our efforts to do so as long as we continue breathing.

[NurseJackie]

9. Remind me again why we're supposed to hate Bill Gates?

He's one of the bad-guys becauuuuse....?

[betsuni]

10. Remember, Democrats must never be given the benefit of the doubt, especially if they're billionaires

because some money is very very bad and instantly, magically corrupting. Like that Democratic woman whose donation of $470 to Bernie Sanders was returned because her husband is a billionaire. No exceptions. Except ...

"I don't think anyone seriously believes that because I wrote a best-selling book and it made money ... that I've changed my views, and you'll now hear me saying, 'Gee, maybe we want to give tax breaks to millionaires.' I don't think you've heard me say that."

No Democrat has said that. Zero Democrats voted for Trump's tax cut.

[The Valley Below]

11. His history of bad haircuts?

[Kurt V.]

26. thread winner?

[Uncle Joe]

12. Love or "Hate" of any individual has nothing to do with it being a dysfunctional oligarchic system.

[BeckyDem]

14. +1. Its the policies, they are designed for them, the ones who don't need a thing.

K&R

[redqueen]

16. Why is criticism of the politics which has enabled this unsustainable, unjust

accumulation of wealth framed as hate for someone?

That is some very interesting spin

[ChubbyStar]

20. My Maytag washing machine doesn't spin that much

Curious, no?

[NurseJackie]

23. Haaaaaa!

[Humanist_Activist]

18. His company stole the code and ideas from CP/M, repackaged it as MSDOS, his Mom helped him make a...

deal with IBM to market MSDOS as the exclusive OS for IBM compatibles, and the rest, as they say, is history.

[TidalWave46]

15. Then lets put another guy in there....

Who cashed in at the end of his political career.

Does he get how bad his own sloganeering is?

[questionseverything]

17. i do not begrudge someone who came up with a great idea being rich

but why do they have to be assholes about it?

look at amazon, seems like working at their warehouses is torture, why is that necessary?

it seems like it is never enough for these guys

how many yachts can you ski behind at once?

[Humanist_Activist]

19. All of them were lucky, not brilliant, that's the thing, they are assholes because...

they feel entitled, and they feel entitled because they got lucky.

Bill Gates had connections through his mother to IBM, which lead him to the deal of the century in marketing MS-DOS.

Jeff Bezos parents basically were an endless piggy bank for his ideas(most of which failed), until he found one that stuck.

Elon Musk leveraged his families fortunes(from emerald mines in South Africa that they owned) in investing in the predecessor to Paypal along with other wealthy people, and made a large fortune from that. He also bought out Tesla(he is NOT a co-founder).

Mark Zuckerberg took a preexisting idea(social media), added some scripting to it to make a network for college incels to complain about the women that wouldn't date them.

Their luck is basically being in a position of privilege, usually due to coming from wealth. None of these are rags to riches stories, these are stories of wealthy people getting wealthier. Its actually quite difficult for people of certain wealth levels to reduce that wealth, and their descendants generally expand on that wealth as a matter of course. Wealth attracts more wealth, as it were, particularly in capitalism.

[TheRealNorth]

29. So true

History is littered with rich people who did not do anything but take someone else's innovation and figure out a way to market/make money from it.

[brooklynite]

21. Income envy will keep Sanders' base intact; it doesn't seem to add anything to it.

[betsuni]

22. Russian oligarchy okay, tho.

[Uncle Joe]

24. Bernie Sanders: We must end global oligarchy

(snip)

Here in the United States, the top one-tenth of 1% owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Incredibly, according to a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies, three of the richest people in America -- Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett -- now own more wealth than bottom 160 million people in our country.

But this is clearly not just an American issue. It is a global issue. While millions of people throughout the world live in dire poverty, without clean drinking water, adequate health care, decent housing, or education for their kids, the six wealthiest people in the world as ranked by Forbes Magazine own more wealth, according to Oxfam, than the bottom half of the world's population, 3.6 billion people.

(snip)

Even before these revelations, we knew that tax dodging by the wealthy and large corporations, not just in the US but globally, was taking place on a massive scale. In 2012, the Tax Justice Network, a British advocacy group, estimated that at least $21 trillion was stashed in offshore tax havens around the world. In other words, while governments enact austerity budgets, which lower the standard of living of working people, the super-rich avoid their taxes.

(snip)

Now is the time, in the United States and internationally, for people to come together to take on the greed of the oligarchs. We can and must create a global economy that works for all, not just a handful of billionaires.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/13/opinions/oligarchy-paradise-papers-bernie-sanders-opinion/index.html

[betsuni]

25. He should vote for sanctions against Russian oligarchs then. It's his job.

[guillaumeb]

27. Recommended.

The reality, versus the US corporate media myth of a booming economy.

[Newest Reality]

28. Bingo!

It is like most of us have a tube in our veins through which we are being sucked dry of our life blood.

This culture has been molded to uphold a fantasy of worth and productivity by the wealthy that makes their status, (dirty word: class) more meaningful and valuable than the common folk who struggle to survive while the entire pyramid that generates the unheard of fortunes rests on their shoulders.

The culture has to change that view and start to understand that we are being cajoled, even forced, into enabling wealth addicts who are generally don't know what enough means or care how their need for a constant fix negatively impacts the entire culture and the citizenry. That's where it transcends ideas about being unfair to them. This is a looming crises in itself for the nation at large and not a trivial matter. There have been more primitive, (are we that advanced in certain ways or just biased) cultures that have figuratively disappeared "overnight" due to their elites commandeering everything for themselves until the people they depended on for the goods and labor had nothing and could no longer survive.

In the most altruistic sense, there have to be barriers and disincentives in place or you can be sure that the statistics that a small number of wealthy people and families will own EVERYTHING on the planet, (yes everything) within a few decades at the current rate of inequality. That makes you pause and think about that outcome and a world of renters subject to the elite rentiers where existence itself is owned, operated and purchased from a few, or you are out. Imagine nobody but the upper-class owning anything.