"The 67 People As Wealthy As The World's Poorest 3.5 Billion" - link to Forbes article
67 people own more wealth than half the planet's population.
Imagine what the average quality of life would be if that wealth were more equally distributed.
No one needs even ONE billion dollars. But if our system had a cap so that a person had to divest his wealth after hitting that, or even better, restructure the cost of his goods or services and increase the rate he paid his workers, then equality would be more even.
There will come a day when humans are no longer required to work. When that day comes, and it's approaching far faster than most people think - it won't happen in my lifetime, but it might in some of yours - then humans will by necessity have to be taken care of.
To achieve that goal, there are two probable routes. One is to allow the status quo to remain, and see the rise of an Elysium type world where the UHNWIs ( link to Wikipedia UHNWI article ) own everything and the poor get the scraps of what's left over, having to fight for it in a Hunger Games world, or worse.
But the other route is more Star Trekesque: A world where people are freed from the drudgery of a 9-5 or even worse, a hot, hazardous job of rote work monotony that takes its toll on the collective human psyche, erasing creativity and dulling the senses.
Imagine a world where people are free to pursue intellectual goals that benefit humankind. There will always be those who scoff, but just a hundred years ago, the assembly line wasn't created, computer technology didn't exist, and women didn't have the right to vote (and still don't in some places).
Reality will probably play out somewhere between the two, but what might drive us as a race will be the climate change that we ourselves have set into motion. We may need every human who can to work on solving the problem while our automation builds, farms, and does the menial work now done by...well, in the US...immigrants.
I'd rather see a world closer to Star Trek than Elysium. But the 67 billionaires I cited earlier will fight that tooth and nail, as will other UHNWIs.
I count myself luckier than most, but I'll still fight for better. For everyone.
Showing posts with label class warfare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label class warfare. Show all posts
Friday, September 12, 2014
Monday, August 19, 2013
Response to Sanjay Sanghoee's blog on HuffPo
The current class war began January 20, 1981, the day that Ronald Reagan took office. He and Nancy made it a point to undo the populism that Jimmy Carter had brought to the White House, with Nancy infamously holding $5M cocktail parties while the country went through 3 separate recessions, all caused by what his former-opponent-cum-Vice-President George HW Bush had labeled 'Voodoo Economics' or what came to be known as 'Trickle-Down Economics'.
Reagan was a strong proponent of privatization and of limited government. You have to ask yourself why. Why do the wealthy want limited government? Is it just because they want lower taxes? No, that's not all. Limited government means limited power to oversee things like predatory lending, byzantine derivatives, shoddy work at top-tier prices, sub-standard materials in things like roads and bridges, and on and on. If they can get by on the cheap, they pocket the difference. If they can get by without that pesky guy from the Labor Bureau looking over their records, they can pay people whatever they want and pretend they only worked half as many hours, thereby pocketing the tax difference.
Take every "white collar" crime you've heard of from Martha Stewart's insider information to defense contractors underbidding and overcharging. Make 10,000 copies of each crime, then mix them all up and scatter them piecemeal all over your list of corporations. That's what privatization will lead to, but it will conveniently skip that annoying indictment and prosecution process and won't lead to jail, but to a new cabana in the USVI.
Privatization is the glue that binds class warfare as well as the engine that powers it. If the wealthy own it, the government can't very easily control it, and when they own every-damned-thing, the government will be a toothless tiger.
Remember what the poet John Donne said, and think about it in a privatization context: "If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were."
When we allow a single piece of public property that should remain in public holding to pass to privatization, America will be the less.
Reagan was a strong proponent of privatization and of limited government. You have to ask yourself why. Why do the wealthy want limited government? Is it just because they want lower taxes? No, that's not all. Limited government means limited power to oversee things like predatory lending, byzantine derivatives, shoddy work at top-tier prices, sub-standard materials in things like roads and bridges, and on and on. If they can get by on the cheap, they pocket the difference. If they can get by without that pesky guy from the Labor Bureau looking over their records, they can pay people whatever they want and pretend they only worked half as many hours, thereby pocketing the tax difference.
Take every "white collar" crime you've heard of from Martha Stewart's insider information to defense contractors underbidding and overcharging. Make 10,000 copies of each crime, then mix them all up and scatter them piecemeal all over your list of corporations. That's what privatization will lead to, but it will conveniently skip that annoying indictment and prosecution process and won't lead to jail, but to a new cabana in the USVI.
Privatization is the glue that binds class warfare as well as the engine that powers it. If the wealthy own it, the government can't very easily control it, and when they own every-damned-thing, the government will be a toothless tiger.
Remember what the poet John Donne said, and think about it in a privatization context: "If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were."
When we allow a single piece of public property that should remain in public holding to pass to privatization, America will be the less.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Karl Rove and class warfare
Ever since Karl Rove's involvement with the GOP began, there's a trend in campaigns he touches where the candidates deny or denigrate a negative issue within their own policies or ranks by projecting it onto their opponents.
So when Romney/Ryan/Republicans talk about class warfare, they're merely attempting to move that failure from their brand and rebrand it Democratic. Sadly, it works when you also own a media outlet watched by the vast majority of your party's supporters. But to those not so close to the trees that they can still see the forest, it's a puerile tactic.
The same goes for wealth redistribution. While it's a conservative ideal to move wealth upward, they fear any downward redistribution, even when that redistribution is simply paying the middle and working classes living wages.
Their belief is that by being proactive rather than reactive, they control the ball and hence the game. But telling a lie before the fact doesn't exonerate the liar, it merely doubles down the offense by virtue of premeditation.
So when Romney/Ryan/Republicans talk about class warfare, they're merely attempting to move that failure from their brand and rebrand it Democratic. Sadly, it works when you also own a media outlet watched by the vast majority of your party's supporters. But to those not so close to the trees that they can still see the forest, it's a puerile tactic.
The same goes for wealth redistribution. While it's a conservative ideal to move wealth upward, they fear any downward redistribution, even when that redistribution is simply paying the middle and working classes living wages.
Their belief is that by being proactive rather than reactive, they control the ball and hence the game. But telling a lie before the fact doesn't exonerate the liar, it merely doubles down the offense by virtue of premeditation.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Response and agreement with a friend's Facebook post
You're right. Arch-conservatives have long had the goal of privatizing every part of government they could so that they could profit from it. They duped social conservatives like evangelical, fundamentalist, and extremist christians into voting for them with the God-Gays-Guns scheme and it worked. It was a propaganda program that Joseph Goebbels would have been proud of, and it's still working for them today. You have to hand it to them, they did their demographic and psychological research. You can pretty easily divide humanity into 2 groups, when thought about in this way, Thinkers and Believers. Believers are the type who want to...believe...in things rather than do the skeptical work of research, no matter how simple that might be. Thinkers are skeptics, not accepting everything at face value until they've had a chance to research it. So, the arch-conservatives went after the Believers - christians. They made it SEEM like they were pro-god, pro-gun, and anti-gay. In reality, they couldn't have given two shits about god, guns or gays, they just wanted a voting bloc who could elect their proxies to office in order to establish the conservative agenda. Again, you've gotta hand it to them, it worked...beyond their imaginings, at that. Now they can sit back, throw a handful of money at this or that campaign and have their work done for them by people who actually believe that they're better off with a privatized government. But when ALL roads become toll roads, when ALL schools are for-profit, when ALL medicine is pay-upon-receipt-of-services, when credit is denied to everyone (the wealthy don't need credit), and EVERYTHING you do requires payment at the time you need it...it will be too late to do anything about it because the police will be on the side of the wealthy...for that matter, they already are. Just take a look at what's happening with Occupy Wall Street at this very moment. Arch-conservatives want no middle class. They want but 2 classes: Theirs, and the workers who do their bidding.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Income parity and class war
Patriot Day 2011 - I've been sitting here this morning watching the coverage of the sad reminder of the first attack by an alien force on the sovereign territory of the United States since Pearl Harbor. I spent 13 years in the military, in service to my homeland. I had an odd journey through the military, beginning as an enlisted infantryman in my state's National Guard, going on to Officer Candidate School (OCS) and a commission in the Infantry. After 5 years, I had the opportunity to move to the Army Reserve in a teaching position, then after my full 6 years were up, into the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR). But I wasn't done, I wanted a tour in the Regular Army, so I again enlisted rather than seeking to have my commission reinstated because I wanted to choose where I went and what I did. Young officers usually have no choice in the matter, but because of enlistment guarantees, and a generous bonus, I was allowed to choose my first duty station as an enlistee. Throughout my career, I raised my right hand and swore to protect the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic, a total of 5 times, and I still hold myself to that sacred oath.
And that's what I was thinking about this morning as I watched the sun rise over Manhattan. We're faced with threats from without and threats from within. At least the external threats are known: Al Qaeda, the Taliban, others who wish harm on our citizens. The internal threats are far harder to sound because they come from us, from the body America.
But we can, if we remove the blinders from our eyes which prevent us from seeing the immediate and familiar, suss out the cancer which gnaws us root and bone. It can be a challenge, an agony, because the enemy, we're told, should be our paradigm. Our internal national enemy is the disparity between the super rich and the rest of us.
Greed in any form is bad. Amazingly though, we've been told that it's good to be greedy. It's a noble purpose to seek wealth. Increasingly we're told that charity is bad. During the GOP Presidential debate, last week, several candidates came right out and said that we need to cut off assistance to those who need it, that charity causes poverty. Jesus said that, right? One would imagine that he did, or at least these characters think so, since each and every one claims to be a staunch Christian, to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, and to accept him as their personal savior. Or were they lying for the sake of political expediency?
I was reared as a Jehovah's Witness. Trust me, it's a cult, regardless that they protest to the contrary. But one thing that you can't take away from them - they study the bible. Evangelicals and other Christian Fundamentalists claim that Witnesses don't use the right bible, but the fact is that the Jehovah's Witness' 'New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures', the bible that they had translated using the newly-found Rosetta Stone as a translation guide, something that all other bible translators are now doing, is a much more accurate translation than the problematic King James Version.
Growing up in that religion, I read the bible. Actually read it twice from cover to cover, and probably a third and fourth time by chapter and verse. Jehovah's Witnesses read their bible regularly, they read it to understand it and not just be able to quote by rote. They have certainly misinterpreted it, but it is a modern translation in modern English and any reader should be able to understand it clearly, unlike the poorly translated KJV.
Having read it and studied it, even though today I am an atheist, I have a pretty good grasp of what it was that Jesus was trying to teach his disciples. Recurring themes were love, forgiveness, and charity. Nowhere I read of his teachings did it mention greed, wealth, or revenge, but you wouldn't know it from his modern followers. In fact, greed, wealth, and revenge seem to be their bywords, their mantra, their New Ideal. I can't purport to know why his followers have missed the message, but I have some ideas.
First and foremost is ignorance. Agreed, I'm rusty on the bible's specifics today, even though I still get the general gist. But so many who claim Jesus as their savior haven't really bothered to read his teachings. Instead, they keep a bible by their bed and they read a few passages late at night after they're already drowsy, they take them out of context because they don't bother to read entire stories or chapters and they soon forget the morals of the stories if indeed they even understood them anyway. It's alarming how many think that popular sayings like 'A penny saved is a penny earned' come from the bible rather than from popular folklore. So I suppose it should be no surprise that these people sit in a building at least once a week and listen to their religious leaders tell them what to think. It's the very definition of propaganda. Tell a story (or lie), keep telling it, keep swearing to its truth, and if anyone should question you about it, scream it...because SCREAMING ALWAYS PROVES YOUR VERACITY...RIGHT?
Of course not. But it's a tool they use. And that's part of my second point - propaganda. Adolf Hitler and his henchman Joseph Goebbels, his Reich Minister of Propaganda, were masters of the Big Lie. They believed that for a lie to be believable, it needs to be a big lie, it needs to be repeated, and it needs to grossly distort the truth.
And that's what I was thinking about this morning as I watched the sun rise over Manhattan. We're faced with threats from without and threats from within. At least the external threats are known: Al Qaeda, the Taliban, others who wish harm on our citizens. The internal threats are far harder to sound because they come from us, from the body America.
But we can, if we remove the blinders from our eyes which prevent us from seeing the immediate and familiar, suss out the cancer which gnaws us root and bone. It can be a challenge, an agony, because the enemy, we're told, should be our paradigm. Our internal national enemy is the disparity between the super rich and the rest of us.
Greed in any form is bad. Amazingly though, we've been told that it's good to be greedy. It's a noble purpose to seek wealth. Increasingly we're told that charity is bad. During the GOP Presidential debate, last week, several candidates came right out and said that we need to cut off assistance to those who need it, that charity causes poverty. Jesus said that, right? One would imagine that he did, or at least these characters think so, since each and every one claims to be a staunch Christian, to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, and to accept him as their personal savior. Or were they lying for the sake of political expediency?
I was reared as a Jehovah's Witness. Trust me, it's a cult, regardless that they protest to the contrary. But one thing that you can't take away from them - they study the bible. Evangelicals and other Christian Fundamentalists claim that Witnesses don't use the right bible, but the fact is that the Jehovah's Witness' 'New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures', the bible that they had translated using the newly-found Rosetta Stone as a translation guide, something that all other bible translators are now doing, is a much more accurate translation than the problematic King James Version.
Growing up in that religion, I read the bible. Actually read it twice from cover to cover, and probably a third and fourth time by chapter and verse. Jehovah's Witnesses read their bible regularly, they read it to understand it and not just be able to quote by rote. They have certainly misinterpreted it, but it is a modern translation in modern English and any reader should be able to understand it clearly, unlike the poorly translated KJV.
Having read it and studied it, even though today I am an atheist, I have a pretty good grasp of what it was that Jesus was trying to teach his disciples. Recurring themes were love, forgiveness, and charity. Nowhere I read of his teachings did it mention greed, wealth, or revenge, but you wouldn't know it from his modern followers. In fact, greed, wealth, and revenge seem to be their bywords, their mantra, their New Ideal. I can't purport to know why his followers have missed the message, but I have some ideas.
First and foremost is ignorance. Agreed, I'm rusty on the bible's specifics today, even though I still get the general gist. But so many who claim Jesus as their savior haven't really bothered to read his teachings. Instead, they keep a bible by their bed and they read a few passages late at night after they're already drowsy, they take them out of context because they don't bother to read entire stories or chapters and they soon forget the morals of the stories if indeed they even understood them anyway. It's alarming how many think that popular sayings like 'A penny saved is a penny earned' come from the bible rather than from popular folklore. So I suppose it should be no surprise that these people sit in a building at least once a week and listen to their religious leaders tell them what to think. It's the very definition of propaganda. Tell a story (or lie), keep telling it, keep swearing to its truth, and if anyone should question you about it, scream it...because SCREAMING ALWAYS PROVES YOUR VERACITY...RIGHT?
Of course not. But it's a tool they use. And that's part of my second point - propaganda. Adolf Hitler and his henchman Joseph Goebbels, his Reich Minister of Propaganda, were masters of the Big Lie. They believed that for a lie to be believable, it needs to be a big lie, it needs to be repeated, and it needs to grossly distort the truth.
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