The brutal class war shows up every day in our headlines. So does climate change. What do they have in common? Billionaires-- people who should not be allowed to exist. It is far too dangerous to allow any one person to have the power that billionaires wield.
Today the top headlines focus on
1- how unaffordable rental housing has become. Housing Secretary: "the worst rental affordability crisis that this country has ever known"
2-How government programs made it profitable for banks and hedge funds to invest hundreds of billions in creating a rental single home industry that could overtake private ownership: Main Street Meets Their Wall Street Landlords
and
3- How heartless cities are brutalizing the homeless. Fort Lauderdale may now lead the Country In Heartlessness Towards The Homeless
War has been declared against you. Back in 2004 Bill Moyers told an audience in Washington DC, that "there's a class war, they started it and we're losing."
The thing about very big operations, like billionaires, is the make great targets and are not nimble. That's why Russia and the US lost in Afghanistan. We can beat billionaires. But we have to get together to do it.
Believe me, billionaires are even worse than you think they are worse than the Koch brothers. For example, there's Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir of the Mellon bank family. He funds the most obscene projects, like Marc Morano' s climate change denying Climate Depot, and many of the right wing's biggest think tanks.
Scaife has been a general in the class war for decades, probably funding dozens of right wing operations to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Dynasty money-- massive, billion dollar inheritances-- should be the most vulnerable flank that the ninetynine percent attack in the class war, a war that must aim to end the existence of billionaires. When I say end the existence of billionaires, I am talking about a conversion process-- converting billionaires to millionaires.
The best way to get a start on converting billionaires to millionaires and erasing them from the planet is to fight hard for a "dynasty tax" that takes the billions from billionaires when they die and that does not allow the money to be passed on to their heirs. Mellon Scaife is an heir. If there was a dynasty tax in place, he would not have had the resources to fund the toxic projects he's funded. There are hundreds, maybe even over 1000 people like him in the US. I'm not calling for taking away all the money from wealthy families. But put a limit on it-- say $20 million. That's enough to live a comfortable life on. What kinds of libertarian fools would argue that there should be no limits on how much can be left to elite, privileged children who did not earn the money?
It is time that we raise these issues with every elected official. Make it a litmus test. Like the wandering slaves from Egypt who had to go through two generations in the desert, put an expiration date on the money and power of billionaires. That's a first step. We also need to make it illegal to become a billionaire-- and it can be done.
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