“The Democratic Party is now the party of the rich. Eight of America’s ten most affluent counties voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, in most cases by a large margin. In Fairfield County, Connecticut, the hedge fund capital of the world, Hillary won by nearly 20 points. In Nantucket, she won by more than 30 points. In Aspen, Hillary won by more than 45 points. In Marin County, the privileged enclave across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, Hillary Clinton’s margin was greater than 50 points. In Manhattan, by contrast, Trump won less than 10 percent of the vote. In the District of Columbia, he got 4 percent, a smaller proportion than third-party candidates and write-ins combined.

Historically, most highly paid executives voted Republican. No more. In the weeks before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton outraised Donald Trump 20-to-1 among people on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that hedge fund owners and employees donated a total of $27.6 million to the Hillary Clinton campaign and affiliated groups. When the category was expanded to include “similar private investment funds,” the Journal found that seven financial firms alone donated $47.6 million to Hillary.

Trump received a total of $19,000, about the price of a used pickup. Employees of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon donated to Hillary over Trump by a margin of 60-to-1.

George Soros was on the leading edge of this trend. Long before he became famous as one of the biggest Democratic donors in history, Soros was best known for getting rich by betting against national currencies, notably the English pound. Soros was considered such a rapacious and unethical practitioner of vulture capitalism that liberal economist Paul Krugman once accused him of intentionally trying to provoke currency crises in order to profit from them.”

From Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution by Tucker Carlson

Warren Buffett with President Obama

Forbes: How Did The Democrats Become The Party Of The Rich?

“If you brought back either of the Roosevelts—Teddy or Franklin—from the grave, the most astonishing thing they would find is that the “malefactors of great wealth” have become the benefactors of today’s liberalism, and Democrats have become the party of the rich. In the economic crisis of the 1930s, the rich hated FDR. Most of today’s rich love Barack Obama—so much so that Washington D.C. area airports ran out of space to handle all of the private jets flying in the well-heeled for both of his inaugurals. Forget the “limousine liberals” of the 1960s and 1970s, sending their own kids to private schools while advocating forced busing for everyone else; behold today’s burgeoning class of “Gulfstream liberals,” who jet about the globe while fretting about global warming.

What accounts for this astonishing state of affairs, and what does it mean for our politics in this age of supposed concern over economic inequality?

To be sure, labor unions (along with trial lawyers) still provide the majority of the Democratic Party’s campaign funds and organizational muscle on election day, but it is the super rich of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, combined with the super rich of Hollywood, who command the priority attention of Democratic Party leaders these days. Of the ten richest zip codes in the U.S. eight gave more money to Democrats than Republicans in the last two presidential cycles. President Obama doesn’t go to union halls to host fundraisers; he goes to posh Wall Street townhomes, the Hollywood hills, or to Tom Steyer’s house in Pacific Heights. Steyer, a billionaire investor and wannabe George Soros, is the perfect model of today’s rich liberal, and shows where the balance of power on the Left rests today. Organized labor wants the Keystone pipeline built; Steyer, who imbibes deeply the green Kool Aid, is adamantly against Keystone. Note who Obama is siding with.

Yes, but haven’t many of the leading plutocrats, such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, embraced higher income taxes? Yes, they have, but one important fact has escaped notice: higher income tax rates will not touch the bulk of the fortunes of today’s plutocrats, for the simple reason that the great bulk of the accumulated wealth of Gates, Buffett, Silicon Valley and Wall Street consists of appreciated asset values—not ordinary income. Few seem to be aware that most of this wealth has never been taxed, and in the case of Buffett and Gates, who are taking advantage of the charitable foundation laws, will never be taxed. Even a return to Paul Krugman’s nirvana of 90 percent marginal income tax rates of the 1950s would do little to reduce the wealth gap in the nation.

At a time when the Democratic Party is moving leftward, away from Bill Clinton’s relatively centrist economic outlook, what explains the growth in the ranks of super-rich liberals? (Or, to flip the Thomas Frank title, what’s the matter with Connecticut?) It is worth noting that many of today’s leading liberal super-rich are not heirs of fortunes, like Stewart Mott and various Rockefellers of previous decades, whose liberalism could be attributed to personal guilt over unearned wealth. Most of today’s super rich liberals are financiers and entrepreneurs, like Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin. Liberal guilt is not entirely absent from the mindset of the new rich, as can be seen especially in the mindless mantra that the rich have an obligation to “give back,” as though they “took” something in creating wealth by serving the marketplace with dazzling innovations like computer software and internet marketplaces.

There are several parts to this story…” More

Big Money Gaslighting Young People Into Renting For Life

… every worker-bee stuffed into housing pods …