Fight our real enemy

When you are the richest of the rich, life is damn good. Your employees and servants fawn over you. Politicians and the media bow and scrape to be in your presence. The wealthy can buy a small army of lawyers and accountants to deploy tax shelters and loopholes to evade and avoid taxation.

Here's how it’s done in America. The top 25 hedge fund managers in 2013 collectively took in $24.3 billion. For starters, that gives them an average income of $467,000 an hour. They make as much in one hour as the typical American makes in nine years.  The "carried interest" loophole, allows billionaire hedge funds and private equity managers to avoid billions in taxes that the rest of us have to make up. By allowing these billionaires to declare ordinary income as capital gains, this loophole drops their top rate drops from 39.6%, to 20%. Their carried interest loophole reduces their taxes about $4.8 billion a year. That’s enough to hire 175,000 pre-school teachers a year or 76,000 registered nurses. Instead, it goes into the pockets of just 25 billionaires. We can see most clearly the effect in the decline of public sector employment. This job loss makes the delivery of every public service more difficult. It means longer lines, larger class size and fewer infrastructure repairs. The rich don't see this as a serious problem, after all, their money circumvents any need to wait.

The smokescreen of "individualism" allows the "winners" to feel good about their greed and  blame the "losers" for all their own problems. Some express surprise over how the wealthy elites apparently have little to no guilty consciences about their privileged statuses relative to the masses of people living lives of quiet desperation. It's not surprising at all. Historically, the elites have lived their lives of affluence in the face of poverty with no shame whatsoever. This is why we must abandon efforts to appeal to the elite’s better natures and instead direct action at the belly of the beast.

As one of the early Robber Barons once said "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." (Jay Gould) There are 5 Corporations that own 90% of the media ( AOL/Time Warner, Disney, NewsCorp/Fox , Viacom and NBC/Comcast.) and they tell you what to believe with lot of lies and misinformation. 

The Super Rich prey upon the rest of us. The wealthiest 0.1% (1/1000ths) of households (about 140,000 of them) hold $20 trillion in wealth. That is 22% of total U.S. personal wealth. This is up from 7% in 1980. If their share again triples over the next generation (and according to Thomas Piketty, it is possible and probable unless countervailing taxation is introduced) then in another 34 years, 1/1000ths of households will hold 66% of total wealth. In 1928, the top 1% of families received 23.9% of all pretax income, while the bottom 90% received 50.7%. In 2013, the bottom 90% earned 53% and the 1% got 22% of the income.

Taken from here