400 Families Own Half of Americas Wealth – Part I

400 Families Own Half of Americas Wealth and this is why they feel entitled to remake America to suit their needs.

Those 400 families, along with the too-big-too-fail banks, are America’s oligarchy. You can challenge the oligarchy in small, but significant ways. Pull your money out of those banks and stop buying the Top 400 families products and services, like Valero Oil or Angel Soft toilet paper. We can starve the beast if we do it collectively. The Koch brothers know this and thus are attacking all collectivist targets: unions, public education, civil rights, EPA, Social Security, Medicare, and any other public institution that empowers the middle class AND interferes with their money making. Thus, we are hearing this called what it is, class warfare.

Michael Moore was on Rachel Maddow last night and was visibly shaken by the events in Wisconsin – the illegal vote to strip union workers collective bargaining rights. He repeated what he recently said at a Wisconsin protest:

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer “bailout” of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

Former IMF Chief Economist, Simon Johnson, in 2009 characterized the 2008 financial collapse as THE QUIET COUP. Click here to read this important article.

If you know nothing about the world economy, this will bring you up to speed quickly. It is a sobering look at reality.

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

What is Oligarchy?
The oligarchy is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people. These people could be distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, corporate, or military control. The word oligarchy is from the Greek words “ὀλίγος” (olígos), “a few” and the verb “ἄρχω” (archo), “to rule, to govern, to command”. Such states are often controlled by a few prominent families who pass their influence from one generation to the next. Source: Wikipedia

Related: America is Not Broke