Bob Lord

Remember a few decades when Leona Helmsley scoffed: “Taxes are for little people”?

Well, the Supreme Court just expressed similar feelings about little people, at least as donors to political campaigns. The Supreme Court lifted the lid on the number of campaigns and PACs to which a donor may contribute. The limit per campaign, $5,200, still is in place, but the global limit at the federal level is gone. After today’s decision, in today’s unequal society, contributions of under $1,000 will be meaningless in campaigns for Congress.

Here’s the math:

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Ben Franklin warned us long ago:

“They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”

Here’s the warning we should be hearing from the Hobby Lobby fiasco:

Those who accept economic injustice to temporarily advance social justice will achieve neither economic justice nor social justice.

The BlueMeanie posted on an absolutely chilling article that appeared in Salon a few days back: Hobby Lobby’s secret agenda: How it’s quietly funding a vast right-wing movement.

The lesson we should be learning from the activities of Hobby Lobby’s owners is that economic injustice and the extreme inequality associated with it ultimately is inimical to social justice.

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Last fall, I made a prediction about how concentrated our wealth would be 31 years from now if the trend of the past 31 years continued for another 31. I had intended to wait a year before checking to see how things were progressing, but curiosity got the better of me and I peeked.

It’s ugly. The further concentration of our wealth that I thought would take 31 years may not even take half that long. By all appearances, the horrific wealth concentration of the past 31 years is not just continuing, it’s accelerating.

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I have a new post up at inequality.org, A Third of a Trillion for Three Families. Here are a few excerpts, but please click through and read in full if you have a few minutes:

Some of our billionaires seem to recognize the unseemliness of this intense concentration of wealth.

These billionaires have joined together to take the “billionaires’ pledge.” They’ve made a public, but non-binding, promise to leave half their wealth to charity upon death.

We have plenty of other billionaires who won’t even make this token gesture.

On that front, three families stand out: The Koch, the Walton, and Mars households. Their combined net worth: a cool quarter-trillion dollars or so, according to the Forbes magazine list of the 400 wealthiest Americans released this past September. But a more recent survey, the Bloomberg billionaires index, has their collective wealth much closer to a third of a trillion.

[snip]

The collective wealth of the entire populations of some of our states can’t
match the wealth of those three families.

[snip]

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