This investigative report would not have been possible without the expert and professional research and contributions by:
Irina Tsukerman is a US based national security lawyer, geopolitical analyst, and strategic consultant with expertise in information warfare and hybrid threats. A graduate of Fordham Law School, she advises governments, serves as a Board Member of The Washington Outsider Center for Information Warfare and is widely recognized for her research into foreign malign influence, elite capture, and the strategic use of disinformation by authoritarian regimes.
A Bay St. financier who made excellent contributions and research and wishes to remain anonymous.
Both of these researchers and contributors corroborated each other’s research and facts.
The author, one of those radical left people you hear about, people that think radical ideas like public universal healthcare, public education, public water, sewers and hydro are good public policy. A 33-year retired hydro worker who was a union activist who led the successful province wide campaign stopping Mike Harris’s sale of Hydro One, wrote the union bulletin and in retirement became a freelance writer for Free.
You can see his work at https://muckrack.com/paul-kahnert/articles
Introduction
Never in the history of humanity has such extreme wealth been accumulated by so few. While at the same time never have so many suffered from the deprivation of food and housing insecurity. Never have so many children of the world suffered such food insecurity and poverty. Child poverty which was supposed to have been eliminated in Canada by the year 2000, is now worse than ever. Never have so many human beings been displaced by wars, economic depression and the climate crisis. Hundreds of millions do not have access to safe drinking water or electricity, including many first nations in Canada. It might rightly be called a pandemic of greed.
According to Forbes magazine, 2025 was the first time the number of billionaires in the world exceeded three thousand now at 3,028. Just nine of these billionaires control companies valued in the trillions. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Tesla, Broadcom, and Taiwan Semiconductor. Nvidia just became the first company in history to be valued at over $5 trillion. The US has 902, China has 516, India has 205 and Canada has 67 billionaires.
The planet is also in big trouble. The oceans are dying. The world’s forests are on fire causing dangerous air conditions for everyone. CO2 levels continue rising, the permafrost and the last ice sheets are melting fast.
While billionaire climate crisis deniers decry the facts from scientists calling these facts fabricated and false. These billionaires also employ fake experts with no expertise in climate science to challenge the facts of legitimate scientists and create internet conspiracy theories that the climate crisis is not real.
The facts are that over 90 per cent of the world’s scientists agree that human activity is causing the climate crisis. Despite the facts, the use of gas, oil and coal continues to increase. How was this allowed to happen? How did we get to this level of extreme wealth, extreme deprivation and environmental destruction?
The Robber Barons
There was another time in history when massive wealth existed alongside widespread poverty. A time when acquiring and accumulation of greater and greater wealth by the few was the main goal. In the nineteenth century, Mark Twain wrote a book titled, The Gilded Age chronicling this concentration of wealth by the few, the political corruption, unethical methods and abuses of the working class to get it.
The journalists of the time called them “Robber Barons,” a deliberately derogatory term. In turn the Robber Barons called journalists who criticized them “Muckrakers,” a term that originally was used to describe lower class people who raked and shoveled manure out of horse stalls. Charles Dickens, creator of the character Scrooge, also wrote at the same time. Dickens never used the term Robber Baron but was a powerful critic of the wealthy in his novels and many essays of the wealthy’s excesses and abuses at the time.
In the nineteenth century there were no labor laws and regulations, no health and safety laws or regulations and no environmental laws or regulations.
Wealthy industrialists took full advantage of this complete absence of laws and regulations to maximize profits and their personal fortunes.
There were about 19 Robber Barons in the US. The biggest five and their net worth in today’s dollars were: Andrew Carnegie steel magnate, $309 billion. J. D. Rockefeller Standard Oil, over $340 billion. JP Morgan banking and investments $50 billion but a huge three per cent of GDP at the time. Cornelius Vanderbilt shipping and railways $200 billion. John Jacob Astor IV, real estate, who died famously as the richest man on the Titanic about $150 billion.
The age of the Robber Barons was marked by complete control and monopolization of industries. Market manipulation was common. Particularly by J.P. Morgan and the elimination of competition by any means possible. This was also an era of unprecedented political corruption with many politicians being bought and paid for. This corruption was achieved by big campaign donations, outright bribery, and lobbying, resulting in policies that often-favored big business over the public interest.
Their methods included the exploitation of labor with very low wages, no benefits and very unsafe working conditions. They also ruthlessly and brutally fought against the formation of unions hiring thugs to beat up and even murder union organizers.
The Robber Barons hired Pinkertons, a private police force formed in 1850 in Chicago to infiltrate unions, beat up and even murder union activists. Anywhere there were protests and strikes, Pinkerton men showed up to protect capital by force.
During this time, the Robber Baron industrialists and their bought government politicians also frequently ordered the National Guard and police alongside Pinkertons to suppress dissent, particularly during labor disputes and political reform movements.
The 1892 strike at the Carnegie steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania escalated into a violent confrontation between striking workers and Pinkerton agents who were sent to protect strike breakers and property. Ten people were killed including seven workers and three Pinkerton security guards. Several more people were killed and many more were injured when the National Guard was sent in.
In the 1892 Idaho Coeur d’Alene Strike, violence erupted when it was found out that a Pinkerton agent had infiltrated the union and reported on their activities to mine owners. The conflict started when company guards shot five strikers. This led to the miners disarming the guards and forcing over a hundred strike breakers out of town. Federal troops were then deployed and martial law was declared and 600 miners were arrested. In the Colorado labor wars of 1903 and 1904, the Western Federation of Miners clashed with Pinkerton thugs.
The governor sent in the state militia and declared martial law and the Western Federation of Miners union was defeated. In the 1913-1914 Colorado coal field war the Pinkertons alongside the national guard and other employer groups, participated in forcefully evicting striking miners from their camps. On April 20, 1914, the Colorado national guard which had been called in to maintain order, attacked a tent colony, committing the Ludlow Massacre, killing 21 people including women and children and looting and burning the camp. Afterwards 11 women and 2 children were found dead, suffocated in a cellar where they were hiding for safety.
Federal troops were finally sent in to restore order. The Ludlow Massacre sparked outrage and turned public opinion against the mine owners. The Ludlow Massacre is the most powerful reminder of the brutality workers faced when confronting capitalism in their struggle for workers’ rights.
Robber Barons also controlled the media of the day, owning most of the newspapers and the Western Union telegraph company. Robber Barons knew the power of the press and used their newspapers to attack and undermine anyone who opposed them, including individuals or groups who opposed their ruthless monopolies, and unethical business practices. They often published negative stories about muckrakers and spread rumors to silence their opponents and sought to control and shape public opinion as much as possible.
The Robber Barons often called muckraker journalists, “socialists” just like today’s oligarchs, and dismissed them as radicals and “enemies” of the American system. Robber Barons used the “socialist” label to deflect criticism from the muckrakers and their investigations into the unethical and often illegal practices of wealthy businessmen.
Even though the media was largely owned and dominated by wealthy businesses, investigative journalist muckrakers were able to get their work published. These journalists found a way to get published in independent publications and magazines that were not owned or controlled by business interests. Occasionally, some of the aligned newspapers did publish investigative stories that exposed corruption and wrong doing, seeing that it sold newspapers and took the risk of publishing, as long as it did not threaten their profits. Some muckrakers also took to self-publishing.
At the height of the Robber Baron era, Canada’s largest newspaper, the Toronto Star owes its very creation to the actions of a conservative apologist of Canada’s wealthy.
In a labor dispute, William Findlay Maclean, who owned the Toronto News, locked out 21 printers. Those 21 printers, just eight days after being locked out formed, The Evening Star, which went on to become the Toronto Star.
The Star’s very first edition editorial on November 3, 1892, contained these paragraphs: “This is the age of gold. There were never so many men engaged in a mad chase after fortune. Many of these are not particular how they attain their object, of what wrong they may do encompassing all the wealth which labor produces. Redress will come in time. But it will have to be struggled for, resolutely and uncompromisingly.”
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