Pity the rich?

Pity the Poor Rich
By Will Durst | July 9th, 2011 | 57 Comments

Raging Moderate by Will Durst

Allow me to offer up a few words in defense of one of the most maligned groups in America today. Citizens, who through a simple twist of fate, are routinely subjected to some of the most scathing condemnation and slanderous stereotyping in the annals of recorded history. Of course I’m talking about those unsung heroes of capitalism, the highly lubed pistons in the engine of our economy: the rich.
More:http://blog.cagle.com/2011/07/pity-the-poor-rich/

The more things change...


James Ottavio Castagnera: The Rich Remain Richer

SOURCE: Lehighton Times-News (5-20-06)

Last week the Congress passed a new tax bill. The law was enacted along largely partisan lines with Democrats denouncing the measure as yet another GOP-generated windfall for the rich. The statute, which President Bush says he anxious to sign, extends reduced rates on capital gains and dividends for another couple of years. Appropriately, the act, passed by the House on May 10 th and the Senate a day later, is entitled the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act. Net cost to the country’s coffers is pegged at $70 billion.

One website, calling itself “The Rational Radical,” rants that “the top 1% own 38.1% of the wealth in the country, the next 4% own 21.3%, and the next 5% own 11.5%. That is to say, the top 10% of the country owns 70.9% of this nation!”

This is nothing new.

According to author Kevin Phillips, who published Wealth and Democracy in 2002, the percentages of wealth held by the richest one percent of Americans between 1841 and 1860 were:

* Philadelphia – 50%
* Milwaukee – 44%
* New Orleans – 43%
* New York – 40 %
* Baltimore – 39 %
* St. Louis – 38 %
* Boston – 37 %

Fast-forward to 1890 and the rest of the country has caught up with Philadelphia with fully half the nation’s wealth held by the top one percent of American families.

In those halcyon days of Robber Barons, federal controls that came in mostly during the Great Depression era of the 1930s, weren’t even on the Congressional agenda. The late, great economist Robert Heilbroner in his classic The Worldly Philosophers describes a typical stock swindle of the second half of the nineteenth century. “A head-spinning example,” writes Professor Heilbroner, “was the purchase of the Anaconda Copper Company by Henry Rogers and William Rockefeller without the expenditure of a single dollar of their own.” Here’s how it went:

* Rogers and Rocky gave a $39 million check to the seller of the Anaconda properties on condition it remain untouched in a bank account for a specified period of time.
* R & R next set up a paper organization they named the Amalgamated Copper Company, using their own clerks a dummy directors, and then had Amalgamated buy Anaconda for $75 million in Amalgamated stock… conveniently printed for this very purpose.
* R & R next borrowed $39 million from the same bank where their check for a like amount had been deposited, using the $75 mil in Amalgamated stock as their collateral.
* Next they sold the Amalgamated stock on the open market, raising $75 million in cash.
* With this windfall they retired their $39 mil loan and pocketed $36 million as their personal profit on the deal.

Whew! If this echoes down the decades, reminding you, let’s say, of Enron… well, at least lots of Enron execs have been brought to justice. A multiplicity of class actions also are recovering at least a little of the billions out of which investors, employees and retirees were bilked.

Even Bill Gates, America’s wealthiest individual with assets surpassing those of some small nations, was forced to face up to a personal deposition in an anti-trust action a few years ago. In this regard, his experience mirrored that of John D. Rockefeller, who stood at the top of the American wealth pyramid a century earlier than Mr. Gates, and saw his Standard Oil broken up into seven separate corporations under the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. Like Mr. Gates, Mr. Rockefeller emerged from the legal ordeal as rich, or even richer, than ever.

Rockefeller’s PR response to attacks on his empire also prefigured those of Bill and Melinda Gates: he gave away big chunks of change to favorite charitable causes. One such cause was the University of Chicago, where a student jingle ran:

John D. Rockefeller,

Wonderful man is he.

Gives all his spare change

To the U. of C.

Proving yet again that the more things change, the more they remain the same, someone has posted “The Bill Gates Song,” appropriately enough on the Internet:

Netscape roasting on an open fire,
Apple begging on its knees,
Photo popping up on Time magazine,
Yes, Bill Gates dreams of days like these!
Everybody knows he's never fully satisfied,
Throws himself behind each task,
World dominion is his company's goal.
Well, hey, is that so much to ask?
He knows the world is in his sway,
We'll buy whatever software he might toss our way,
We'll surf his Internet, watch his TV,
He'll take us anywhere we ask him--for a fee.

[http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00037.html]

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Bob Dylan: I Pity the Poor Immigrant
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