Billionaires profit from the corona crisis

[Firestarter]

Life would be so much better when you had to pay more, had to go to multiple stores to find what you want, and had to rely on home spun wisdom from Grand Papi instead of being able to gain any knowledge you want for free with the click of a mouse.

It must be the wet dream of intelligence agencies to force us to pre-order anything we buy. Effectively mandating cash payments is already wonderful as Big Brother wants to know everything.
But forcing us to order (through the internet) gives them the opportunity to delay or make some changes to what dangerous thoughtterrorists buy (and anybody that doesn't bow down to Big Brother is dangerous to say the least).

Just wait until they forbid us to buy food at shops or restaurants, so they can neutralise all corona terrorists (premeditated murder by poisoning sounds a bit too harsh don't you agree?).
Of course a wonderful obedient slave like you has nothing to fear from the "authorities" (unless of course you've learned information that they want to keep secret).

It's really computer technology that has made man obsolete not to mention the billionaires even richer.
It's also computer technology that enables them to finally rid their brave new world of all those useless eaters, who complain that they actually have to work while the billionaires get richer while sitting on their a$$ all day.

This brings us the final solution that doesn't require expensive, inefficient wars, but thanks to real science being effectively destroyed in the 20th century, health care can and will drastically reduce the world population.

So this all leads to the 21th century version of "kill the poor".

[Firestarter]

The COVID-19 "pandemic" has made 50 pharmaceutical executives billionaires, with 28 from China.

The new billionaires include the co-founder of BioNTech, which helped develop the Pfizer vaccine, Uğur Şahin, and the CEO of Massachusetts-based Moderna Stéphane Bancel: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...lionaires.html


A video from Ben Swann, who argues that the billionaires will use their power to keep the economy in the coronavirus lockdown, as U.S. billionaires saw their wealth increase by $1 trillion since the pandemic was started.

[Krugminator2]

I

Of course a wonderful obedient slave like you has nothing to fear from the "authorities" (unless of course you've learned information that they want to keep secret).

Google delivers the average person around $17,750 worth of value each year. https://www.economist.com/graphic-de...p-using-google If happily using Google makes me an obedient slave, so be it. I say thank you to the geniuses who founded the search engine.

It's really computer technology that has made man obsolete not to mention the billionaires even richer.
It's also computer technology that enables them to finally rid their brave new world of all those useless eaters, who complain that they actually have to work while the billionaires get richer while sitting on their a$$ all day.

Here is an unpopular view. Rich people work a lot harder than the average person. And poor people as a group are usually lazier and/or more undisciplined. I know that doesn't fit in with the zero sum world of internet posters who think life is random and rich people are just lucky and poor people unlucky, but it happens to be true.


"Our data reveal that 62% of high-earning individuals work more than 50 hours a week, 35% work more than 60 hours a week, and 10% work more than 80 hours a week. Add in a typical one-hour commute, and a 60-hour workweek translates into leaving the house at 7 am and getting home at 9 pm five days a week. If we focus on the subset of those workers who hold what we consider extreme jobs (a designation based on responsibilities and other attributes beyond pay), the hours are even more punishing. The majority of them (56%) work 70 hours or more a week, and 9% work 100 hours or more" https://hbr.org/2006/12/extreme-jobs-the-dangerous-allure-of-the-70-hour-workweek

America’s highest earners work at least 60 hours a week—more than anyone else in the world https://qz.com/134064/the-industrial...rking-so-much/

Why High Earners Work Longer Hours https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/wh...k-longer-hours

[devil21]

Google delivers the average person around $17,750 worth of value each year. https://www.economist.com/graphic-de...p-using-google If happily using Google makes me an obedient slave, so be it. I say thank you to the geniuses who founded the search engine.

I wouldn't pay Google a red cent. I don't need to pay someone to control my choices and information. In fact, I use Google less and less because it's obvious I am not being served by their services, but rather I am serving their services. It's ridiculous how a search for a type of product on Google automatically pushes me toward another agenda-compliant big box store, while a search on duckduckgo.com yields completely different results. Google exists to perpetuate sales for the agenda-compliant Wall St darlings like Home Depot and Amazon and to limit what information is available.

Here is an unpopular view. Rich people work a lot harder than the average person. And poor people as a group are usually lazier and/or more undisciplined. I know that doesn't fit in with the zero sum world of internet posters who think life is random and rich people are just lucky and poor people unlucky, but it happens to be true.

It's hard work flying to Davos, staying in 5 star hotels while drinking 35yo scotch and eating wagu beef and truffle dinners after calling up Jay Powell when more money is needed to keep the zombie corp afloat for another year via an illegal Fed bond-buying SPV. How ever do they manage such a rough life? They're certainly much harder workers than the girl who stands on her feet outside in all weather conditions for 9 hours a day, 6 days a week taking Chic-fil-a orders from the rest of the lazy slaves.

"Our data reveal that 62% of high-earning individuals work more than 50 hours a week, 35% work more than 60 hours a week, and 10% work more than 80 hours a week. Add in a typical one-hour commute, and a 60-hour workweek translates into leaving the house at 7 am and getting home at 9 pm five days a week. If we focus on the subset of those workers who hold what we consider extreme jobs (a designation based on responsibilities and other attributes beyond pay), the hours are even more punishing. The majority of them (56%) work 70 hours or more a week, and 9% work 100 hours or more" https://hbr.org/2006/12/extreme-jobs-the-dangerous-allure-of-the-70-hour-workweek

America’s highest earners work at least 60 hours a week—more than anyone else in the world https://qz.com/134064/the-industrial...rking-so-much/

Why High Earners Work Longer Hours https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/wh...k-longer-hours

Perhaps you have a point, after all. It probably does take long hours to engineer and rig how to enslave the entire world. Touche'

[Okie RP fan]

Google delivers the average person around $17,750 worth of value each year. https://www.economist.com/graphic-de...p-using-google If happily using Google makes me an obedient slave, so be it. I say thank you to the geniuses who founded the search engine.

Yea, sure. Thanks to Google, much value has been brought to billions. I'll acknowledge that. But let's not act like they're angels and turn a blind eye to all of the other nefarious activities they partake in now. Activities such as search manipulation, propaganda, spying, etc. that I'm sure even you can't defend (and don't try because you won't be convincing anyone here other than yourself).

[r3volution 3.0]

Yeah sure whatever, they're great at having nice conversations with their wealthy friends and cronies!



The following thread (with more dubious posts by @Krugminator2) shows that the whole game is rigged.

Bezos, Zuckerberg, Blavatnik, Peter Thiel, Bronfman, Clinton and Kushner all on the same team: Bronfman-Clinton-Bezos-and-Facebook-insider-trading

I can't speak to their political views, and haven't (yet) read that thread, but...

...wouldn't it be nice, just for once, to have a political class which has some kind of skill beyond lying to rubes?

[Firestarter]

...wouldn't it be nice, just for once, to have a political class which has some kind of skill beyond lying to rubes?

It would be nice to have some politicians with class for a change...

The notion of a political class used by the ruling class to exploit the peasants, is slavery (that was supposedly abolished a long time ago).

[Firestarter]

According to CNBC, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is now the richest man in the world, with a net worth of over $185 billion. Reportedly Musk owned $27 billion at the start of 2020, with the skyrocketing Tesla shares making his wealth balloon.


Second richest in the world Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who was the supposed "richest person in the world" since 2017, is currently worth an impressive $184 billion: http://www.justjared.com/2021/01/07/...-in-the-world/

[Firestarter]

Oxfam's report “The Inequality Virus” shows that the wealth inequality between the global elite and the average individual will increase further in almost every country as the result of the corona "pandemic".
See 2 excerpts.
.

Oxfam’s report shows how the rigged economic system is enabling a super-rich elite to amass wealth in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression while billions of people are struggling to make ends meet. It reveals how the pandemic is deepening long-standing economic, racial and gender divides.
(...)
Rigged economies are funnelling wealth to a rich elite who are riding out the pandemic in luxury, while those on the frontline of the pandemic —shop assistants, healthcare workers, and market vendors— are struggling to pay the bills and put food on the table.

.
In April 2020, the UN World Food Program (WFP) reported to the United Nations Security Council about this "global humanitarian catastrophe".
WFP Executive Director David Beasley stated "821 million people go to bed hungry every night all over the world, chronically hungry, and as the new Global Report on Food Crisis published today shows, there are a further 135 million people facing crisis levels of hunger or worse. That means 135 million people on earth are marching towards the brink of starvation. But now the World Food Programme analysis shows that, due to the Coronavirus, an additional 130 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020. That’s a total of 265 million people".

This confirms that the effects of the worldwide lockdown "cure" is worse than the COVID-19 "disease": https://thefreethoughtproject.com/ne...ated-the-poor/


In October 2019, a large display in the auditorium where Event201 was staged suggests that the participants knew precisely what they were preparing for: "We need to prepare for the event that becomes a pandemic".

[Firestarter]

In a nice example of crony capitalism, people who donated £8.2 million to the Conservative Party in recent years, got awarded £881 million worth of UK Government contracts related to the corona "pandemic" (that's a nice 10,000% return on "investment").


Michael Ashcroft is the billionaire former Conservative Party deputy chairman, who since 2001 donated £5.9 million to the Conservative Party. Medacs Healthcare is owned by Ashcroft through the Impellam Group.
Medacs was awarded a £350 million contract to provide laboratory staff to the UK’s testing operation.

Sir Philip Hulme is co-founder, shareholder and a non-executive director of British IT company Computacenter.
In 2013, Philip Hulme donated £10,000 to Conservative MP Nick Herbert. Hulme's wife Janet also donated £100,000 to the Conservative party. On 15 November 2019, somebody called George Hulme also gave £50,000 to the Conservative Party, but it isn't clear whether they are related.
Computacenter was awarded contract worth £196 million for the provision of school technology equipment.

David Meller owns Meller Designs and has donated nearly £60,000 to Conservative politicians and the central party since 2009.
Since 6 May, Meller Designs was awarded a series of DHSC contracts worth at least £163.5 million.

Haraldur Agustsson owns Globus (Shetland) Limited, which has donated £375,000 to the Conservative Party since 2016.
In July, Globus won a £93.8 million contract for the supply of FFP3 respirators. Another firm in the Globus Group, Alpha Solway, won another contract worth £53 million to produce face masks for the Scottish Government, Globus was also awarded some other PPE contracts worth £11 million.

Scott Fletcher founded the ANS Group in 1996 and owns Lowry Trading Limited that ultimately controls ANS. Since 2014, Lowry Trading Limited has donated £240,500 to the Conservative Party.
ANS Group was awarded 4 contracts by the DHSC and NHS England since April 2020. ANS Group is working with Amazon Web Services.

Oluwole ‘Wol’ Kolade has made £678,000 in personal donations to the Conservative Party, since 2002, including in 2019 a £10,000 donation to Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock.
Kolade is the managing partner of Livingbridge, a global investment company that holds between 50% and 100% of the shares in Efficio Global Limited – the parent company for various Efficio subsidiaries.
Since April 2020, Efficio has won COVID-19 contracts worth at least £5.9 million from the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England.

Sir Peter Rigby is the founder, majority-owner and chairman of Rigby Group Plc, which donated £50,000 to the central party in 2019, and another £55,000 in 2017.
A subsidiairy of Rigby Group is Specialist Computer Centres (SCC), which won a contract worth £2.1 million.

Steve Parkin is the founder and executive chairman of Clipper Logistics. Parkin has donated £725,000 to the Conservative Party in recent years.
Clipper Logistics had won a £1.3 million contract from the Government to distribute PPE: https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/05/c...rus-contracts/
(https://archive.is/ZPSc1)

[Madison320]

Here is an unpopular view. Rich people work a lot harder than the average person. And poor people as a group are usually lazier and/or more undisciplined. I know that doesn't fit in with the zero sum world of internet posters who think life is random and rich people are just lucky and poor people unlucky, but it happens to be true.

I agree. Sadly there's only a couple of us left on this site that believe in minimal government, liberty and free markets. Most everyone seems to think corporations should basically be nationalized although they won't come out and say it directly. But if someone thinks we should randomly punish corporations with punitive taxes, antitrust lawsuits, minimum wage laws, discrimination laws, liability for stuff they don't post, etc, then they're basically saying the corporations don't belong to the owners, they belong to the government. This is known as fascism. That's where the govt "allows" people to "own" a business but the govt forces them to run it their way.

As Ayn Rand would say, socialism is just a more honest version of fascism:

"Observe that both “socialism” and “fascism” involve the issue of property rights. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Observe the difference in those two theories: socialism negates private property rights altogether, and advocates “the vesting of ownership and control” in the community as a whole, i.e., in the state; fascism leaves ownership in the hands of private individuals, but transfers control of the property to the government.

Ownership without control is a contradiction in terms: it means “property,” without the right to use it or to dispose of it. It means that the citizens retain the responsibility of holding property, without any of its advantages, while the government acquires all the advantages without any of the responsibility.

In this respect, socialism is the more honest of the two theories. I say “more honest,” not “better”—because, in practice, there is no difference between them: both come from the same collectivist‐​statist principle, both negate individual rights and subordinate the individual to the collective, both deliver the livelihood and the lives of the citizens into the power of an omnipotent government —and the differences between them are only a matter of time, degree, and superficial detail, such as the choice of slogans by which the rulers delude their enslaved subjects."

[acptulsa]

I agree. Sadly there's only a couple of us left on this site that believe in minimal government, liberty and free markets. Most everyone seems to think corporations should basically be nationalized although they won't come out and say it directly. But if someone thinks we should randomly punish corporations with punitive taxes, antitrust lawsuits, minimum wage laws, discrimination laws, liability for stuff they don't post, etc, then they're basically saying the corporations don't belong to the owners, they belong to the government.

Randomly?

Cute spin, but utterly false. Nobody here wants the federal government to own corporations. Nobody, and you damned well know it.

What people here have a problem with is the fact that corporations own the government. This, too, creates fascism, and you and Krugman II are the ones who seem fine with it.

[Krugminator2]

I agree. Sadly there's only a couple of us left on this site that believe in minimal government, liberty and free markets. Most everyone seems to think corporations should basically be nationalized although they won't come out and say it directly. But if someone thinks we should randomly punish corporations with punitive taxes, antitrust lawsuits, minimum wage laws, discrimination laws, liability for stuff they don't post, etc, then they're basically saying the corporations don't belong to the owners, they belong to the government. This is known as fascism. That's where the govt "allows" people to "own" a business but the govt forces them to run it their way.

As Ayn Rand would say, socialism is just a more honest version of fascism:

"Observe that both “socialism” and “fascism” involve the issue of property rights. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Observe the difference in those two theories: socialism negates private property rights altogether, and advocates “the vesting of ownership and control” in the community as a whole, i.e., in the state; fascism leaves ownership in the hands of private individuals, but transfers control of the property to the government.

Ownership without control is a contradiction in terms: it means “property,” without the right to use it or to dispose of it. It means that the citizens retain the responsibility of holding property, without any of its advantages, while the government acquires all the advantages without any of the responsibility.

In this respect, socialism is the more honest of the two theories. I say “more honest,” not “better”—because, in practice, there is no difference between them: both come from the same collectivist‐​statist principle, both negate individual rights and subordinate the individual to the collective, both deliver the livelihood and the lives of the citizens into the power of an omnipotent government —and the differences between them are only a matter of time, degree, and superficial detail, such as the choice of slogans by which the rulers delude their enslaved subjects."

Yeah it's crazy town in some of these threads.

All the ridiculous arguments used for censorship of tech companies and antitrust were literally the same arguments Ayn Rand was shooting down in 1963. America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business


https://courses.aynrand.org/works/am...-big-business/

[Firestarter]

Yeah it's crazy town in some of these threads.

All the ridiculous arguments used for censorship of tech companies and antitrust were literally the same arguments Ayn Rand was shooting down in 1963. America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business

Do you see anybody here calling for censorship?!? You are the one calling thread like these "crazy" insinuating that censorship is needed!

If blatant censorship doesn't work you can always derail threads by posting BS propaganda over and over and over again...

There isn't really anything like freedom of speech, when the big internet moguls - Google, Yahoo, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter - can simply block dissident views is there?
Of course this helps the billionaires to push for a new world order where the rich get richer and the poor get enslaved though debt...

Poor, poor "persecuted" billionaires!

The total net worth of the 651 billionaires in the US rose from $2.95 trillion (on 18 March) to $4.01 trillion (on 7 December) - a rise of 36%...

[Madison320]

Yeah it's crazy town in some of these threads.

All the ridiculous arguments used for censorship of tech companies and antitrust were literally the same arguments Ayn Rand was shooting down in 1963. America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business


https://courses.aynrand.org/works/am...-big-business/

That chapter should be required reading for people here. One of my all time favorites.

[Firestarter]

Trolls that derail threads should be banned...

Poor, poor "persecuted" billionaires!

The total net worth of the 651 billionaires in the US rose from $2.95 trillion (on 18 March) to $4.01 trillion (on 7 December) - a rise of 36%...

[Firestarter]

In another great example of crony capitalism, Alex Bourne was awarded £30 million in contracts, despite having no experience in medical supplies.
Alex Bourne is however the former neighbour and buddy of UK health secretary Matt Hancock.
See the 2 friends at Alex Bourne's former pub, the Cock Inn in Thurlow.


Both Bourne and Hancock have strongly denied that Bourne was awarded these contracts because he has friends in high places. But they weren't quite able to explain why Bourne was awarded these contracts.
This is especially strange as Bourne simply subcontracted 2 distributors to deliver test tubes that had pre-existing deals with the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

At first Bourne’s lawyers flatly denied that their client had any discussions with Hancock to get awarded these multimillion government contracts, but he was forced to admit that he had exchanged text and email messages with Hancock over several months.
Bourne admitted that he sent his first WhatsApp message offering his services on 30 March to Hancock’s mobile number in a message that started with: “Hello, it’s Alex Bourne from Thurlow”.

While Bourne’s lawyers still deny that Bourne and Hancock have a “close personal connection”, Bourne’s (former?) friend Sukhvinder Dhat said he had regularly seen Hancock in Bourne’s pub and claimed that Bourne and Hancock are “friends” and “buddies”: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...atsapp-message


The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has stated it is now "investigating" Alex Bourne's firm Hinpack.

Hancock on Sunday dismissed a court ruling that he broke the law by keeping details of COVID contracts secret.
Hancock argued it is “not true” that he had refused to publish these contracts, insisting it was just “delayed paperwork”: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-b1805330.html