America is now an oligarchy, where the concentration of power into the hands of a small group of the super-rich, Tech Lords, and monopolistic mega-corporations allow these elites to buy political influence and stomp on the rights of ordinary people.
China’s communist regime is sounding increasingly arrogant in the wake of the economic destruction wreaked by the pandemic that originated in Wuhan and could have been prevented by Beijing. China’s communist dictator Xi Jinping boasted in his New Year’s Eve address that China is “the first major economy worldwide to achieve positive growth” in 2020.
How did you fair this year, America?
“China’s economy is projected to grow by 2% in 2020 and by another 8.4% in 2021. By the end of next year, its economy is expected to be 10.6% larger than it was at the beginning of this year,” Axios reports. “By contrast, after shrinking by 3.6% this year and growing by a projected 4% next year, the U.S. economy is going to end 2021 just 0.25% larger than it was at the beginning of 2020.”
Much of this is due to China’s dominance of global manufacturing; and with the whole world still reeling from the pandemic, China is moving to solidify its monopoly on the world’s supply chains through expanded free trade agreements, including a new agreement with the European Union. The pandemic’s economic damage has also allowed China to buy influence in the Third World through its international infrastructure program known as the Belt and Road Initiative, which the U.S. government has criticized as imperialist colonization via a predatory debt scheme.
The super-rich broke new records this year, according to a report conducted by PwC and the Swiss bank UBC. The combined wealth of the world’s over 6,000 billionaires grew to $10.2 trillion in July. All of this happened at the height of the pandemic between April and July 2020, as average people the world over were hit by economic devastation, but the world’s billionaires increased their wealth by over a quarter to 27.5 percent, the Guardian reports.
Compare that to the estimated one in five small businesses that closed during the pandemic.
The Washington Post reported that over 100,000 U.S. small businesses – once the economic engine of the American dream – closed forever due to the virus. The pandemic devastated mom-and-pop businesses that were forced to shut down due to government lockdown orders that favored large retail chains like Walmart. These stores were allowed to remain open and rake in huge profits, increasing their monopoly power and driving out smaller competitors for good. This year Walmart increased its profits by nearly 45 percent over last year. The net wealth of Walmart founder Sam Walton’s heirs — Jim, Rob, and Alice Walton – each increased by nearly a quarter during the pandemic.
Workers gained little from this boom. Amazon workers received an extra 95 cents an hour and Walmart workers received 63 cents an hour as compensation over the course of the pandemic, while during that same period, Bezos’ income increased by $70 billion and the Walton family’s fortune increased by $45 billion, according to a Brookings Institute report.
Low-life Silicon Valley Tech Lords used the pandemic to increase their massive wealth and monopoly power, and they also helped get their preferred candidate elected to the White House.
Check this out.
Facebook, Google, and Amazon – companies control the flow of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives sue to online surveillance have leveraged your pain to build more wealth and monopoly power.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (whose net wealth increased by over 85 percent this year) deliberately censored stories about Hunter Biden’s corruption scandal in the lead up to the November election, and Google (whose 2020 third-quarter revenue increased by 14 percent year-over-year) suppressed the Google search visibility of conservative news such as Breitbart by 99 percent in 2020 compared to the same period in 2016.
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald notes that America’s founders would have rightly feared that this “economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political rights and legal equality illusory.”
Greenwald calls Facebook’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden stories “one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years,” noting that “this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.”
“These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency,” he adds. “Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.”