News & Articles

The plutocrats are planning to plunder the public
When is “enough” enough? 

Even with all the billionaires serving in the administration of a billionaire for four years, it will not be answered. To establish a standard, I will use the CEO of Blackstone, the world’s most colossal private equity firm that pays Steven Schwarzman much more than enough. 

In August of 2024, he threw a housewarming party for 200 guests at his $27 million French neoclassical mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, the home of many American billionaires. He considered it a “cheapie.” 

Let’s compare it to his 70th birthday celebration at his Palm Beach, Florida, estate, which turned out to be more expensive than the $10 million he spent to celebrate his 60th birthday at the same magnificent mansion. That celebration was a symbol of Wall Street excess which led to the global financial disaster of 2008. To be exotically different, it featured gondolas from Italy, acrobats from Mongolia, and a huge cake in the shape of a Chinese temple. Billionaire David Koch of the famous Koch political machine which has spent billions on Republican PAC campaigns, thought it was “brilliantly stimulating.”

Schwarzman has bought two more homes in Newport, paying $44 million for the 40,000 square feet beach mansion named Miramar, which has 22 bedrooms, 13 full bathrooms, and a seven-bedroom guest house on the property. Later, He also bought the place next door called Ocean View, which has 15 bathrooms. Well, you never know when you will need another place to urinate, defecate and shower. He also owns vacation homes in England, Jamaica, Palm Beach, Saint-Tropez and the Hamptons.

And he doesn’t even come close to being the richest person in the world. 

How about a general strike? It’s time for the 1% to make their own coffee
My French relatives have solved a lot of their political problems by pulling off a general strike until the wealthy and the government surrender and do what the citizens and farmers tell them to do. With what is happening in the Divided States of America, it’s time American workers living below a living wage withhold all services until living wages are paid to all workers. 

The Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology Living Wage Calculator has determined living wages for a family of four in all states. It’s easy to figure out the four people, two adults and two children in a family, must be paid to make a family living wage. 

In Mississippi, for example, a family must make a combined $90 an hour to provide a good life for the family. That’s the lowest in the country. However, in Hawaii and Massachusetts, a family must earn $150 an hour to enjoy an average life. In Minnesota it’s $123 an hour; in North Dakota, $101 an hour. 

And remember, the top 10% can’t put 300 million people in prison. As most of the grocery stores are owned by billionaires on Wall Street or on superyachts, if hungry, raid the stores and warehouses. 
My ancestors learned this in the 1789 French Revolution when the rich cake-eater Queen Antoinette said: “Let them eat cake!” The problem was the French citizens had no bread to eat. She said it just before her lips and head ended up in the guillotine basket below the device affectionally called the French Razor.

White House sign: Trump Temple General Store, Bribery and Law Office
King Donald puts the Trump brand name on towers, golf courses, estates and planes he believes he owns although they are mortgaged to the hilt. I would not be at all surprised if he put a huge sign on the roof of the White House in his second term telling the world he is 24/7 ready “to make an artistic deal” at his store, the “Trump Temple General Store, Bribery and Law Office.” 

His mall will contain merchandise and memorabilia covered with the Trump name, jewelry, religious artifacts like personally signed $1,000 Bibles, clothing, $500 gold sneakers and $100,000 wristwatches. Bribes will be accepted only in the Oval Office for security reasons. 
He wants to move the family’s Manhattan Mob crime office from the Trump Tower to Washington, where the world’s billionaires have rented, leased and bought the government of the Divided States of America. 

This is where trillions of cash is distrib-uted to “investors” in the business of politics. 

Will King Donald want to match Vladimir Putin’s 25 or so years as dictator of Russia? His sons have shown some skill in grifting, and with Donald, Jr. at 51, Eric at 44, and Barron at 22 in 2028 could be – Oh, my god, “NO!” 

The second richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, is paying a lot of income insurance to the nation’s biggest grifter by giving him $1 million for the inaugural show. He paid $40 million to Melania so she could be executive producer of her documentary, which, no doubt, will win an Oscar. 

Experienced producers of documentaries have estimated that Bezos paid about $35 million more than necessary. Gee, was he “investing” in something else? 

Corporations have already given King Donald $80 million for the King Donald Presidential Library Fund. In that his toddler vocabulary suggests he has never actually read a book, what will his “library” feature? Coloring and picture books? Melania’s documentary? Split videos of the largest crowds in presidential inaugural history? Will it have a special wing to feature the millions of lies he has written for social media and spoken at press conferences and broadcasts? 

Ex-White House lawyer Ty Cobb said: “Trump’s efforts to profit this time are much bolder. Everything he does is either to be vengeful or accumulate wealth, power, and adulation.” 

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who must have an expensive bed in the Lincoln Bedroom or in a room next to the Oval Office, paid $277 million to walk in Trump’s shadow – or put Trump in his shadow – and that act just emptied a couple pockets of change.

Lucky had to go to the mattresses to defend the mob’s territories
Fred Trump and son Donald learned how to make a buck from Sicilian Mafia crime families – the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese families that actually ran New York City for half a century. 

Remnants of the Mafia families still are active in New York City and surrounding areas, but their power was somewhat reduced by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (referred to as the RICO Act), passed in 1970. 

Certainly, Fred Trump and his second son Donald learned how to commit many property and personal crimes from the experts who controlled prostitution, gambling, Prohibition activities (bootlegging booze), protection rackets, narcotics, construction and tax avoidance. In the first half of the 20th century the five major crime families often fought over territory. They often fought each other called “going to the mattress” as described by killing each other in their businesses or on the streets.

In the late 1940s I started to follow the career of Lucky Luciano, born in 1896 in Sicily as Salvatore Lucania, because he was the “Big Boss” of the Mafia crime families and often made the headlines by arranging assassinations of other leaders in the New York area. 

He was a gangster early and late and spent six months in jail when 20 for selling heroin. He was good at his job of directing the Mob’s criminal activities. He was so good, four mobsters from rival gangs took him for a “one-way ride,” beat him, stabbed him repeatedly with an ice pick, slit his throat ear-to-ear and  left him for dead on a New York beach. He was lucky to survive – so for then on, he was called “Lucky.” He has quite a bio.

When I was in Havana, Cuba, in 1956, courtesy of the U.S. Marine Corps, Luciano was running a world-class casino and nightclub that attracted the rich from around the world. He had been deported to Sicily by the U.S. because of criminal activity. 

The casino also attracted Marines, so we spent some nights there, enjoying musicals and dancing shows that rivaled Broadway. Lucky died in bed in 1962. He was an interesting guy and makes an interesting read.

Back to reality with Bernie Sanders – not King Donald’s reality show
The old socialist Bernie Sanders, the longest serving independent in the Congress, is hitting the road again to tell the truth about the economic inequality in the Divided States of America, the richest country on this perishable planet. His incontrovertible facts to educate the MAGA cult — and the Democratic National Committee: “Today, 60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck; millions are earning starvation wages;85 million are uninsured or under-insured; young people can’t afford the cost of college; 25% of seniors live on $15,000 a year or less; we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth, and we have a major shortage in low income  and affordable housing.” 

“Here are the policies we must establish in the history of the richest country in the world:

1. Health care is a human right and must be available to all regardless of income.

2. Every worker in America is entitled to earn a decent income. We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage and make it easier for workers to join unions.

3. We must have the best public educational system in the world, from childcare to vocational training, to graduate school, available to all.

4. We must address the housing crisis and build the millions of units of low income and affordable housing that we desperately need. (We have 800,000 homeless per night.)

5. We must create millions of good-paying jobs as we lead the world in combatting the existential threat of climate change.

6. We must abolish all kinds of bigotry and continue to fight for a nation based on the principles of economic, social, racial, and environmental justice, we must also lead the effort against Trump’s reactionary legislative agenda.”

A message from a very rich heiress who has enough
Marlene Engelhorn: “For the very few rich people like me, capitalism still seems beneficial, but it has always been a system of violence and deprivation for the many nonrich. I was born into a family worth billions and inherited my first multi-million dollar fortune at just 30. Several financial advisers, whose only job is to manage my family’s wealth, appeared and offered to ‘manage’ my share. They seemed to have only one belief – wealth must grow. And it may consume everything to do so. When I asked how much was enough, so I could distribute excess wealth, they didn’t understand. They repeated: ‘Wealth must grow. There’s never enough.’”