I hope this isn’t another redundant thread, but I looked and couldn’t find something equivalent to the thread at TOP. I do realize there will be considerate overlap with the Assholes thread but to my mind, hyper rich assholes play in a league of their own.
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Jeff Bezos’s Company (Amazon) Is Suing Washington State to Block His Newspaper (The Washington Post) From Reporting
Mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos owns so much stuff that his investments are effectively going to war with one another. Earlier this week, Bezos’s e-commerce company (Amazon) launched a lawsuit against a state government to retaliate against The Washington Post, which Bezos also owns.
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My money is on Peter Thiel.
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It does have his stank on it.
All these assholes are 10 year olds building tree forts and imagining killing their enemies.
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According to the Usborne “The World of The Future” books I had as a kid we were supposed to have underwater cities by now.
Ah well, maybe we’ll get our Spandex jackets this time.
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Well, we can dream.
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I think I’d be willing to settle for halving billionaires.
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Personally, there’s a huge leadership vacuum in the Democratic Party and Bernie’s one of the very people going out to talk to voters, in public rallies and and communities, not about personalities or his campaigns (he’s already said that’s over), but about ensuring that the message of social democracy doesn’t disappear. Remember how people mocked him for his monomaniacal focus on “the billionaires” as the problem, how out of touch and 1930s-ish it seemed? Doesn’t seem so out of touch now, does it? Where the establishment leaders of yesterday continue their private meetings with hedge funders and Hollywood celebrities, Bernie’s out there, doing what good organizers have always done: talking to working-class people. There was always a lot of shit thrown at him by people claiming he thought he was a messiah or a martyr or whatever, and the truth is, he’s remained pretty true to his basic mission, whatever you may think of it, which is not about himself but about the causes he’s fought for his entire life. Doing the work, as people like to say.
Politically, I think we really need to start developing our account of this “oligarchy” Sanders is talking about. To me, it’s one of the more promising developments in our political language. It’s got deep roots in the American tradition (I wrote about this in a review last year of Fishkin’s and Forbath’s The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, which I really recommend). I think it holds more political potential than other frameworks people have used.
As I’ve said a number of times, the great reform movements in this country always identified their opponent as a tangible social malignancy. Not just a government deformation but a comprehensive warping of polity and economy. The abolitionists didn’t run against the Democrats, they ran against the “slaveocracy.” The New Dealers didn’t run against the Republicans, they ran against “the economic royalists.” The Jacksonians (who called themselves and were called “The Democracy”) ran against The Monster Bank, not the Whigs.
Oligarchy is just such a fusion of polity and economy. But we’ve got to name it more specifically, not just in one person or party, but in its comprehensiveness. I don’t know what that name is. But it’s something we’ve got to start figuring out.
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Can you fix the spelling of “chronicles” in the topic title, please?
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Did not see that, now can’t unsee. Damn you! 
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Until recently I was able to edit topic titles, but my trust level must have been revoked. 
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And I never knew I had them. 
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Thank you!!!
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I promise to only use my powers for good … or at least for my own amusement.
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