America's 651 billionaires have gained so much wealth during the coronavirus pandemic that they could fully pay for one-time $3,000 stimulus checks for every person in the United States and still be better off than they were before the crisis.
That's according to new research released Wednesday by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), groups that have been tracking the "pandemic profits" of U.S. billionaires since mid-March.
In the nearly nine-month period between March 18 and December 7, American billionaires gained more than $1 trillion in wealth as people across the U.S. lost their jobs, their businesses, their homes, and their lives to the pandemic. The collective net worth of U.S. billionaires now sits just above $4 trillion—nearly double the combined wealth owned by the bottom 50% of the American population. - Common Dreams
Showing posts with label pandemic profiteering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pandemic profiteering. Show all posts
Friday, December 11, 2020
How to deal with pandemic profiteering
For anyone who doesn't have his head permanently up the billionaires' butts, this makes complete sense.
Saturday, November 21, 2020
Pandemic profiteering should be a much bigger story
A lot of people seem to be just resigned to this. A lot of others apparently honestly believe that backing the likes of Trump is the way to change it. It's all really unfortunate.
As over a thousand people in the U.S. alone die each day during the deadliest pandemic in a century, plutocrats and their businesses are thriving like never before, in no small part due to a system rife with profiteering, opportunism, and worker exploitation. So says the report, entitled Billionaire Wealth vs. Community Health: Protecting Essential Workers from Pandemic Profiteers, which focuses on 12 of the most egregious pandemic profiteers—the "Delinquent Dozen"—who include the owners of Walmart and the CEOs of Amazon and Target.
These companies and their owners and executives have benefited from their "monopoly positions," the report states, but their success "hasn't translated into better pay or safer working conditions for the employees showing up to work in a pandemic." - Common Dreams
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