This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
They need a ride in a tumbrel…
No kidding. Aristocrats to the lamp-posts! It will be fine.
Scott Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from you and me.”
Ernest Hemingway: “Yes. They’ve got more money.”
Apparently, also pretty vulgar.
A Columbia Journalism Review reporter described how when she asked Scaife why he funded conservative causes, he replied: “You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here.” He also told her she was ugly and had bad teeth.
Thank Heaven for South Dakota Dynasty Trusts and the SD state legislature’s ending of the Rule Against Perpetuities.
Ah, Andrew Mellon!
The only Secretary Of The Treasury who had three Presidents serve under him
Next time I watch a PBS programme I’ll be sure to not watch the pro or epilogue credits.
Having said that; excellent article! Many other industrialists and bankers could have been included but still, it’s a good rundown of history to the present.
Here’s a related story.
Excerpt:
Years ago, rich investors learned that if they team up to acquire cheap land, get it overvalued by an appraiser, and then promise not to develop it, they can make millions. Ever since the practice started, Republicans and Democrats have tried to curb this practice, which cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $9.2 billion in 2018. And as Democrats try to pass their expansive social spending bill—the Build Back Better Act—they finally have an ideal chance.
“The starring villain in Roosevelt’s crackdown on aggressive tax avoidance was the Mellon family, which controlled banks, aluminum production and oil interests.”
Fun fact: Banks, aluminum and oil were merely side interests. They made the bulk of their money from that noted line of haberdasheries: Thornton Melon’s Tall & Fat Stores.
They pay “armies” of accountants and lawyers millions of dollars to avoid paying taxes. So their money circulates amongst the rich 1 to 3 percent. Whereas if they paid taxes that tax money goes to government programs to help the lower classes. Which then gets conveniently tarred by Republican legislators as socialism.
Wait, there’s one more layer: religion. But I’m tired. Y’all know its a nifty circle they have going. They don’t see how dirty and ugly it all makes their souls.
yes “souls.”
They were wrong. Just recently, one of Scripps’ great-great-grandsons posed on Instagram in shirtsleeves, holding stacks of cash, his arm festooned with diamond-encrusted watches. Private jets and a fleet of Lamborghinis ferry him between a mountain getaway in Aspen and a gun range in Miami, where he shoots a gold AK-47.
I know it’s the least important, outrageous thing in this article. But oh the vulgarity.
Imagine having that kind of money and still needing to show off with multiple jeweled watches. He can murder all the animals he wants with his gold gun. He’ll never fill his empty soul.
trying to imagine a fleet of lambos to drive across country. Mmm driving.
ETA: My car is EPC broken, but if I had a fleet of Lambos…
Alexis de Tocqueville had a useful perspective on hereditary wealth, in particular Chapter 18 of his magnum opus, “Democracy in America,” viz
"No great change takes place in human institutions without involving among its causes the law of inheritance. When the law of primogeniture obtained in the South, each family was represented by a wealthy individual, who was neither compelled nor induced to labor; and he was surrounded, as by parasitic plants, by the other members of his family, …who led the same kind of life as himself. …
No sooner was the law of primogeniture abolished than fortunes began to diminish and all the families of the country were simultaneously reduced to a state in which labor became necessary to existence; several of them have since entirely disappeared … Wealthy individuals …no longer constitute a compact and hereditary body, nor have they been able to adopt a line of conduct in which they could persevere and which they could infuse into all ranks of society. …;" see http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/DETOC/1_ch18.htm
NB: That was then (1835), this is now, and the wealthy have succeeded in fully resurrecting their status and power via corporate, estate and trust law with the bonus that divisibility of modern financial assets now allows lesser scions of noble houses access to the same legally protected, intergenerational trough that was once the exclusive right of firstborn; e.g., soon the majority of super-wealthy in the United States will not be entrepreneurs, they will be heirs ( http://crookedtimber.org/2015/12/22/piketty-and-the-australian-exception/ )
This information, and then some, is elaborated upon in much greater detail in the excellent book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, by Jane Mayer, published in 2017.
