8 August 2013 — Hipokrisy Monitor
Get to know your ruling class!
In the huge barrel of plutocratic arrogance rotten apples don’t come much bigger than Gina Rinehart, the cantankerous, cheap, and mean-spirited Australian mining heiress for whom Randian hyper individualism and the law of the jungle come as naturally as breathing.
The Forbes précis on this woman states,
Not only is this woman bad news for people, seeking their immiseration at every turn, but she’s poison on the planet, too, as she’s an active member of the oil/extractive industries club of prominent climate change deniers.
Earning about a billion dollars a year from the iron ore and coal projects she owns in Australia, Rinehart’s fortune of $17 billion makes her the richest person in the country and the No. 5 wealthiest woman in the world. In November, Rinehart, the consummate activist* billionaire, self-published a book calling for Australian workers to accept wages comparable to $2-a-day African workers, causing global consternation. Along with creating headlines for her continuing court battle with three of her four children, who she cut out of the family trust, she’s pushing for the northern region of the country (where the bulk of her holdings reside) to become a special economic zone with lower taxes and less regulation. 2013 SPOTLIGHT: Wannabe Rupert? Rinehart has been purchasing large shares in Aussie media companies Channel 10 and Fairfax Media, the only non-Murdoch broadsheet company in the country.
Forbes, nonetheless, is quite probably wrong about Rinehart’s actual net worth, since its computing method here is terribly conservative. (We care little, too, about the magazine’s Orwellian description of Rinehart as an “activist” for simply agitating through her billions to pay workers as little as possible, typical of the human scum she personifies.)
Rinehart’s push to lower the minimum wage should have been met with howls of indignation, and massive protests on all public spaces, not polite “consternation” as Forbes so coyly suggests.
Here’s CELEBRITYNETWORH.COM’s much more accurate assessment:
Gina Rinehart is an Australian mining heiress with a net worth of $18.9 billion. Gina Rinehart inherited the Hancock Prospecting from her father Lang Hancock. Many recent evaluations of her wealth put her at a net worth of more than Carlos Slim (~$74 Billion), as she owns her company outright with no shareholders. Her operations of coal and iron production are estimated to produce $10 billion in annual profits. When you put her privately held mining operations at a comparable 11-1 price to earnings ratio (as compared to similar publicly traded companies), her net worth could approach $100 billion making her not only the richest woman in the world, but the richest person in the world!
[SOURCE: http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/richest-billionaires/gina-rinehart-net-worth/ ]
WELL, THERE YOU HAVE IT. Quite a charming character. While you ponder this woman’s dubious credits for membership in a true democracy, keep in mind that she and her ilk are the constant objects of adulation and apologetics by the opinion-shaping buffoons of the corporate press, which only underscores the desperate need for a new type of truly democratic media.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Acid-tongued London curmudgeon BRANFORD PERRY, founder of Hipokrisy.net, is an occasional contributor to TGP and other leading political venues. Divorced now for several years from his long-suffering wife (his words not ours), his main company now are three lovely shelties and a rich library of dead poets and historians.
The New Dark Age 