MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin is spending billions of taxpayers’ rubles on 20 luxurious residences, 43 jets and four yachts, a top opposition leader claimed Tuesday.

All heads of state use government property and funds for presentation purposes, but Boris Nemtsov says Putin’s lifestyle is far more lavish than his Western counterparts.

In the report released Tuesday, Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, estimated that the maintenance of Putin’s residences, jets and cars alone costs $2.5 billion a year.

“Putin has been mistaking government property for his own for a long time,” Nemtsov said. “This is an insolent, cynical and luxurious lifestyle at taxpayers’ expense.”

Putin’s press service was not immediately available for comment Tuesday but his spokesman had earlier words on the report.

“All of this is government property and Putin uses it all legally as an elected president,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the RBK daily on Monday after parts of the report had appeared online.

#eat the rich

chemicalfreelife:

GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS:  Which Corporate Behemoths are Working to Block *Honest Labeling* of GMOs?  A Who’s Who List of Offenders.

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These companies don’t want GMOs labeled in California

Here’s a visual breakdown of the 20 companies that have put the most money into fighting California’s Prop 37. Can you guess who’s at the top?

Read more.

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Microsoft doesn’t want GMO food labeling? OH WAIT! I forgot Bill Gates is an owner of a large amount of Monsanto stock, since he thinks they can solve all of Africa’s problems with their poison.

Democracy was created in Greece. Good to know that the powers that be see this and are trying to destroy Democracy’s birthplace.

#eat the rich

An easy graph to explain how fucked we are thanks to the banks manipulating the Libor total.

“Give a man a gun, and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank, and he can rob the world.”

I’m no cannibal, but I still think we should #Eat the rich

Shocking new evidence is coming to light that reveals a criminally organized cartel of bankers have been systematically and methodically cheating the Libor scores on a global scale, affecting almost every financial market in the entire world.

Libor is the rate at which banks charge each other for lending and borrowing. Each and every morning these rates are exchanged between global banks, and shocking new evidence is revealing that banks have been faking these credit scores in order to cheat the system. This is corruption to the deepest core of the global banking system.

Despite these ongoing expansive revelations of massive fraud and corruption, no banks in North America have been forced to face repercussions. In England, however the scandal has hit hard, with Barclays Bank’s last week beginning the fall of the mighty ‘too big to fail’ banks that could be the first of many more dominoes to fall in rapid succession from one corner of the globe to another.

The question remains - when will the people of North America get interested enough, or angry enough to hold these bankers accountable?

#eat the rich

As I’ve written before, Bayer’s neonicotinoid pesticides, which now coat upwards of 90 percent of US corn seeds and seeds of increasing portions of other major crops like soy, have emerged as a likely trigger for colony collapse disorder. Watch this NBC News report from last week linking bee kills in Minnesota to Bayer’s highly profitable product.

Meanwhile, the Columbus Dispatch reports similar bee die-offs in Ohio farm country, with beekeepers there, too, pointing the finger at Bayer.

The death cult wants all the bees to die, because then no crops will be pollinated, and then most of humanity can die, just like the rich pricks want us to.

When all the food is gone, I’ll eat the rich.

Over 1000, 1-percenters are meeting at Waldorf Astoria (April 23-25), for a major farmland investment event that will decide the fate of millions of Africans.

Dubbed as “the next big thing in finance” some of the largest hedge funds, private equity groups, university endowment managers, and other high rollers will meet to discuss how to continue to make money from food and water shortages. The event is organized by HighQuest Partners, a heavy hitter in the hedge fund market of big agro, bio-tech and bio-fuel companies. Entrance fee to attend is a mere $3,000.
These money managers are there because they are promised to make more than 25% return on investments in areas of the world where there exists incredible food insecurity. In 2009 only, nearly 60 million hectares of arable land – an area the size of France – was purchased or leased, 70 percent of it in Africa. It’s impossible to acquire that much of land without the continued taking of land previously held by small indigenous farmers. That number has only been increasing as more and more land has been leased off to companies and governments in Africa – by corrupt dictators, that have no moral qualms about displacing millions from their ancestral lands. On their website, HighQuest partners brag about representing $3.5 trillion in aggregated institutional assets and 25 million acres under cultivation in 2011 alone. This year they are expecting to double. BTW 25 million acres is the size of Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts combined together, OR 11 times the size of Yellowstone National Park.  
Please join in solidarity with food justice activists, Environmental ORGs, OWS groups, African students and communities in exposing these cabal of evil doers -that their “next big thing in finance” is nothing more than the next financial bubble with far more ill-consequences for humanity and the planet.

Day of Action: April 24 2012
Where: The Waldorf-Astoria
301 Park Avenue. NY, NY

#Eat the rich

occupyallstreets:

Chicago Police to Use LRAD Sound Cannons at NATO Protests

Police in Chicago are preparing to deploy controversial sound cannons against protesters at the G8/NATOSummit next month. The so-called Long Range Acoustic Devices, or LRADs, emit painful and potentially harmful tones over long distances.

The device was created for military use, but it was deployed against protesters for the first time at the 2009 G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh. The American Civil Liberties Union later filed a lawsuit on behalf of a bystander, Karen Piper, who said she suffered permanent hearing loss, while the American Tinnitus Association said Pittsburgh protesters had been “acoustically assaulted.”

They compared the sound pressure to what armed forces might face from an improvised explosive device. Massive numbers of protesters are expected in Chicago when the summit begins next month.

Source

Mikash - All aboard the Police State Express! First stop, sound cannons, followed, I’m sure, by their other new microwave toy that makes people feel like they are on fire, ADS, or Area Denial Systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System

#eat the rich

“It’s nasty,” Mr. Doak complained to CTV News last week. “She’s defined a group, not by culture or by language, but by how much money it makes, and she wants to get rid of them.”

Yea, it’s nasty alright. It’s nasty that citizens of this country who make hundreds of thousands of dollars get to get away with treason against the people through economic warfare. The sooner we start thinking outside the box, and finding ways to fight back, the better.

#eat the rich

theamericanbear:

[Despite] what you might have learned, the transition to a capitalistic society did not happen naturally or smoothly. See, English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?

But in order for capitalism to work, capitalists needed a pool of cheap, surplus labor. So what to do? Call in the National Guard!

Faced with a peasantry that didn’t feel like playing the role of slave, philosophers, economists, politicians, moralists and leading business figures began advocating for government action. Over time, they enacted a series of laws and measures designed to push peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-support.

“The brutal acts associated with the process of stripping the majority of the people of the means of producing for themselves might seem far removed from the laissez-faire reputation of classical political economy,” writes [economic historian, Michael] Perelman [in his book, The Invention of Capitalism]. “In reality, the dispossession of the majority of small-scale producers and the construction of laissez-faire are closely connected, so much so that Marx, or at least his translators, labeled this expropriation of the masses as ‘primitive accumulation.’”

Read whole →

(h/t azspot)

Funny, Humanformat and I were arguing about privilege yesterday, with s/he saying that “White Privilege” was the source of all of our ills as a society, but here’s another story that proves me right in saying that it’s “Rich Privilege” we need to worry about. The peasants in this story are all from Britain, and the rich there forced the poor to slave away in factories instead of living off the land as they had for centuries. This is a direct consequence of the Rich lashing out against the Poor to ensure they stay rich. The white man were the ones doing the oppressing, but they were also the ones being oppressed.

TL;DR   The rich are the ones who take away your freedoms, and if you claim it’s “White Privilege”, you’re allowing yourself to get caught up in a meaningless banter over race. We’re all people, all humans, all enslaved by a rich upper class that thinks that we are ALL sub-human.

Eat the rich.