YSK that 158 families, the 0.01%, make up 50% of US Presidential Campaign Spending.
Just 158 families have provided nearly half of the early money for efforts to capture the White House.
"mainly selfmade wealth"
That doesn't exist, let's stop fucking pretending it does.
What they really mean is that they didn't inherit their immense wealth, which means there was a time in their lives when they weren't obscenely wealthy.
they didn’t inherit their immense wealth
Except even that doesn't hold up under close scrutiny. A big component of the market cap of any Fortune 100 company stems from equity and debt held by the generationally wealthy, typically through family funds managed by private equity groups. Amazon and Tesla aren't worth $1T without the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Adelsons and the Waltons bidding up asset prices. Microsoft doesn't exist today without Bill Gates's mom sitting on the IBM board of directors and handing her son the contracts for their 1980s OS. Hell, Berkshire Hathaway is owned by the sons of a Congressman and a federal judge, respectively.
What's more, the biggest source of market capital is inevitably government contracts. You can't tell me that Michael Dell is "independently wealthy" when the bulk of his fortune came via the Texas public school system buying all his company's computers. Particularly when the governors, legislators, and board members making these decisions are (a) big shareholders of the Dell corporation and (b) legacy scions of wealthy Texas families.
To them, poor is probably like just a few dozen million USD.
I made all my money myself. After I graduated from private school with my personal trainer and one on one tutoring and my car I didn’t have to work for and my apartment I didn’t have to pay for I definitely earned my first job myself. I mean, my dad didn’t interview with his good friend from the country club, I DID! Give me the credit I deserve! I am a self made man!
So another way to look at it is that by eliminating a few thousand parasites, we can reshape our political landscape...
Just 158 examples
And this article is 10 years old. It has gotten so much worse.
Whenever I see the 1% or 99% numbers when discussing wealth inequality, this fact is the first thing that comes to mind. We need to use decimal points to get to the real ones in power. 1% contains a lot of people who have money, but are still out of the loop as the rest of us, or as Carlin said, "not in the Club". They are millionaires, but like they say, the difference between a million and a billion is about a billion.
And that's US - many Americans are in the 1% in worldwide numbers, with rough income numbers being around half a million income. Again, they may or may not be comfortable depending on their expenses, but having money doesn't mean you have power. It's the .1 that is the beginning of that, and the .01 is moving the pieces for everyone.
(The numbers are just estimates, there's gray areas everywhere, the point is the top people want us to be yelling at the top middle and ignore what they do.)
Bingo. My entire circle is 1-5%ers, we are privileged and comfortable and not saying we're not part of the problem. But we're powerless. Start by eating the richest, by the time you get to me I'm going to guess there won't be a problem any more...
“Powerless”, but how many sets of guns/armor can your circle buy? 1000? 10,000? They’re still astonishingly poor and closer to homelessness or kidnapping to El Salvador than being rich. Better to pick a side in the class war, and doing nothing is picking oppression. Eating the rich also includes non-rich wealthy class-traitors.
Care to help payoff some of my medical debt?
Exactly. Millionaires aren’t the problem. That’s why I can’t stand these thought-terminating clichés like “eat the rich.”
Someone with even several hundred million to their name is dirt poor compared to billionaires.
When people say eat the rich, I think they generally mean to start from the top.
Millionaires aren't rich, they're "well off". (Or maybe not even, it's possible to have 1M+ in assets and be struggling financially)
Being rich is a completely different lifestyle. Like you never even think about money, and get people to do your grocery shopping and stuff. Megayachts and private jets, etc.
Citizens United was the final straw in the downfall of America democracy.
It's been inevitable since.
Unless it's overturned it's over, and I don't think they can overturn it.
Citizens United
Corporations have been 'people' since the 1886 USSC decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad.
Yet somehow, unlike most people, they've escaped having to go to jail when they commit crimes. I'd call that an unfair advantage.
I'll believe a corporation is a "person" when Texas (or Alabama, Florida, South Carolina etc) executes one of them
THIS ARTICLE IS FROM 2015 A DECADE AGO IT HAS ONLY GOTTEN WORSE SINCE THEN
Should figure out where they live and protest on their street instead of burning down the local 7/11.
The only access to them is media in the backroom or private event held by rich asking what do you think of protests on main street because you can't get close to their property and if you can they are probably in another house
The rich aren't accessible, but their property sure is awfully flammable.
An oligarchy is what America has been for over a decade now officially. Every politician is bought and sold, told to vote on every bill by the companies lobbyists that line their pockets. Every vote is controlled by mass propaganda on every network and every corporate social media.
But we're a democracy, right?
158 families isn't much to feed 300 million starving people. We need rules on who gets to eat the 0.01%
Fuck that. First come, first serve. Get it if and while you can.
theres a literal golf course behind these mansions lol
Golf is such a perfect rich person sport. It wastes a ton of space, destroys local wilflife, the hardest part is done by the caddy (i.e. not the rich person), and at the end you feel like you accomplished something, but you've done absolutely fuck all other than show off your expensive shit.
We should eat them all
If my math is correct 158 families would be around .00005%. They have no clue what life is like for the average person yet they have so much influence. Gross.
And they all have addresses.
The way to return democracy to the people is to limit the involvement of money. First step is to repeal "Citizens" United, the law that officially sold the US government to corporations and the wealthy under the guise of Freedom (as usual). Second, organizations (including but not limited to corporations) should be outright banned from political compaign contributions. Organizations aren't citizens. They can't vote. They shouldn't be allowed to pour money into elections.
It's not enough to reform campaign finance. We need to destroy the class of people behind this. We need to really wage class war, a class war of annihilation.
We need a national wealth cap. 1000x median household income. Anything more is taxed at 100%.
I agree with those ideas too.
Income isn't how theyre taxed, but I get your point.
Let's start with stopping Billionaires. Once someone gets to $999,999,999 they are awarded a plaque that states something along the lines of "Yay, you won Capitalism (or, frankly, corporatism)" and force them to divest themselves from all companies and stocks etc and live on their ranch in Aspen and live off the almost Billion. Any income that ends up topping their financial worth over a Billion is taxed at 100%
People talk about the Harambe timeline, but Citizens United is when the shit started going sideways.
It's going to take the boondocks saints taking these people out one by one like Luigi before anything meaningful happens. They only care about their life, let's remove it from the equation.
In the end, when Trump is certified as the modern day hitler, these families need to be held accountable…. Like the soldiers of the concentration camps.
There are only a few outcomes that would lead down that road, and while I hope for one of them, I am pretty convinced they'll all die happy and rich in their warm beds of old age after getting lots of plastic surgery and riding on lots of jets and jetskis
wasn’t there some billionaire that ran for president, spent hundreds of millions and got like <1% of the vote?
Yeah Michael Bloomberg bought his way through the rest of the primary debates then when it came time for the primary vote nobody wanted him.
That's the one!
Bloomberg spent nearly $1 billion on his three-month presidential campaign
So my next question is:
Just 158 families have provided nearly half of the early money for efforts to capture the White House
Just how effective is advertising in the presidential race when you can spend a billion and go no where?
Perot did pretty well on his runs iirc. But I don't think he's the one you were talking about.
Yep sorry it was Michael Bloomberg
Fuck scotus. John Roberts is the most damaging traitor in American history.
They visit each others mansions so they can make sure they are still keeping up with the other billionaires.
if the people went after the wealthy first, they could use the spoils to fund the revolution
Gotten worse since 2015.
Tax them bitches
Yes, and so what? $5.5 billion was spent on the 2024 presidential election. That's very little. There are individuals capable of spending more than that. So if spending more could actually affect the outcome in a significant way, why wasn't much more spent? Surely the difference between Harris and Trump is worth more than just a few billion dollars to some person or group with that much money. My conclusion is that while some amount of money is necessary to run a campaign, even the relatively small amount being spent now is so far past the point of diminishing returns that spending more isn't worth it even to billionaires who could easily do so and care a lot about the outcome.
I think you have lost all sense of how much a billion is from it being thrown around so much. 5.5 billion is an enormous sum of money. Think of how much 1 million is, then imagine spending that 5500 times. It's an obscene amount. Sure, some people have more wealth than that, but it's still an absurdly large amount.
OPs username checks out
This is bad because it means if you want to run for office, your campaign is mostly floated by this tiny group of people. $5.5 billion sounds small until you realize that breaks out into millions of dollars for any individual campaign. Unless you're rich enough to ante up (and repeat that every election cycle), you'll never play the game.
More isn't spent because it doesn't need to be, not because it isn't effective. The policy goals of the 0.01% are basically in lock step, why would they bid against each other? Regardless of the raw number, the average politician has to equally weigh their representation between the needs of the 0.01% and the 99.99%.