JIMMY DORE—Elon Musk – you either love him or hate him, but probably for all the wrong reasons. Despite his reputation as a genius entrepreneur, free speech warrior and opponent of all things woke, Musk is, above all, a rapacious billionaire oligarch who made his money thanks to connections to the military-industrial complex and the deep state. It’s no wonder he’s repeatedly confirmed in tweets his love for the FBI.
PLUTOCRATS
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Elon Musk is rare among the mega-rich in that he has multitudes of superfans who love every move he makes. And the Musk aficionados provided the loudest cheers when the Tesla CEO reported he would be purchasing Twitter, and possibly bringing back the principle of free speech to social media. But those cheers were no doubt misguided as Musk is unquestionably a tool of the establishment and not that rare sort of billionaire looking to upend the existing system controlled by Wall Street, military contractors, Big Pharma and other powerful interests.
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Chris Hedges: Monarchs Belong in the Dustbin of History
43 minutes readCHRIS HEDGES—Monarchy obscures the crimes of empire and wraps them in nostalgia. It exalts white supremacy and racial hierarchy. It justifies class rule. It buttresses an economic and social system that callously discards and often consigns to death those considered the lesser breeds, most of whom are people of color. The queen’s husband Prince Phillip, who died in 2021, was notorious for making racist and sexist remarks, politely explained away in the British press as “gaffes.” He described Beijing, for example, as “ghastly” during a 1986 visit and told British students: “If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”
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Switzerland’s Secretive Banking System and the WEF’s “Great Reset”: First in “You’ll Own Nothing and You’ll be Happy”?
26 minutes readPETER KOENIG—Switzerland is home to a number of highly dubious institutions and organizations. Take the World Economic Forum (WEF) – the unelected NGO, with its unelected master, Klaus Schwab, based in Cologny, a suburb of Geneva. This unelected but dirty-rich body of “luminaries”, with tax-free status, pretends to decide over our future, the future of the world, and literally, the future of mankind. Once a year, mostly in the second half of January, the WEF unites some 2000 to 3000 oligarchs and wannabe luminaries in Davos, Switzerland, to ruminate (often in secret chambers off the madding crowd) on how to make the world a better place. No, not for us the people, but for themselves, the elite.
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The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Tyranny or Revolution
20 minutes readCHRIS HEDGES—It is essential to understand the pathologies of the uber-rich. They have seized total political power. These pathologies inform Donald Trump, his children, the Brett Kavanaughs, and the billionaires who run his administration. The uber-rich cannot see the world from anyone’s perspective but their own. People around them, including the women whom entitled men prey upon, are objects designed to gratify momentary lusts or be manipulated. The uber-rich are almost always amoral. Right. Wrong. Truth. Lies. Justice. Injustice. These concepts are beyond them. Whatever benefits or pleases them is good. What does not must be destroyed.