Times today…From real news sources, Buckley’s last 40 years and 30 trillion for the uber rich

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Oxfam estimates that over the last decade the world’s richest 1 percent have gotten 34 trillion richer. The Top three thousand top billionaires have earned 6.5 trillion of that expansion of wealth. How did they managed it?

Last night I watched a PBS series about the world today that focused on supermarkets and how they became the source of obesity by pushing high sugar cereals to children in the past and the scaffolding making todays thirty million slaves prisoners of food corporations that used to take Mexican food harvesters for granted….before Trump’s efforts to drive up food costs by kicking out all the undocumented picking our food for starvation wages. Its worse elsewhere. Shrimp farming across SE Asia left poisoned plastic lined pools which are leaching into the farmland surrounding them. The shrimp are now fed by “trash fish” which are dredged up in nets that rake the seabed like land mines destroying vast swaths of seabed so that the shrimp can be fed the ground up fish and we can buy what once was food for the rich dirt cheap.

And on NPR today there was a story about how Trump is doing his damnedest to open deep sea bed mining for cobalt and Nickle to similar dredging where it will be similarly out of sight and out of mind despite the fact that at the moment neither metal is in huge demand.

And if I’d depended on Fox News I’d have missed the book review of the 1000 page history of the conservative star of my youth William Buckley. ‘Buckley’ it says is the richest account yet of an enthralling and maddening conservative icon. The reviewer says the books chief deficiency is not telling us what Buckley thought of the Republican Party as it slid into the grip of Donald Trump. This review is why I like book reviews. It spares me 1000 pages of reading with a pretty good thumbnail sized summary.

And last night the rich were highlighted in the Chapter I read from the Hamilton book. Hamilton’s brilliant policies have turned the new nation’s federal government into an engine of economic growth through bank lending and government bonds. They have also unleashed to sort of greed that we saw in the Gilded Age and we see today with Jeff Bezos being driven from his wedding in Italy because of his billionaire excess.

Author Ron Chernow writes of Hamilton who is surprised twice by the excessive speculations of even his friends which will undermine his policies and elevates his war with Thomas Jefferson and the South, “He hoped businessmen would have a broader awareness and embrace the common good. But he was so often worried about abuses committed against the rich that he sometimes minimized the skullduggery that might be committed by the rich.”

AMEN!

About the author

Harry is a ferociously good natured eccentric in Duluth Minnesota who detests traitors dressed up as Uncle Sam. You can find somewhat better edited writings of his at the Duluth Reader "contributors." page. The URL is:

https://duluthreader.com/contributors/h/84/284-harry-welty