America’s wealthiest people are also some of the world’s biggest polluters – not only because of their massive homes and private jets, but because of the fossil fuels generated by the companies they invest their money in.
Redistributing the wealth of billionaires is already part of a good structural change, it’ll remove from them power they’d use to continue the exploitation of the people. You can substitute “crush” by destitute and incarcerate them if you’d prefer, as long as the wealth isn’t on the hands of the few anymore.
The moment they go above a certain amount and still act shitty, they are food.
I wouldn’t care about rich people if they just paid their workers, paid their taxes, looked at reducing the pollution of their companies, didn’t lobby against the public interests, and just were all around swell people.
The problem is that they aren’t, none of them are.
Either they become like that from being rich, or only awful people are moralless enough to become rich. But there isn’t a single good rich person.
Yup, the problem is firmly the system, but suggesting a worldwide change to socialism/communism is less “palatable” and believable by the average person.
So “eat the rich” is a decent compromise for a comment not intended to approach any sort of complex answer, while still being a move in a better direction than suggesting things to continue as they are.
Suggesting a replacement system is infinitely more palatable to me than another Reign of Terror followed by (presumably) the same mistakes. Revolutionary defense is fine, but we don’t need bloody revenge.
but because of the fossil fuels generated by the companies they invest their money in.
Lemme go ahead and roll my eyes here. Yes, American Airlines produces a significant percentage of the world’s greenhouse emissions. But they burn that fuel for the passengers, not just for the benefit of shareholders. Same with ExxonMobil, BP, etc.
Consumption is what drives pollution. Investments to profit off of that consumption is secondary.
Consumption driven by advertising based on Edward Bernays work, which explicitly intends to create fissures within people and then sell them cures to the fissures they created,m. Just disallowing advertising would have a substantial effect on consumption.
The picture they paint in this article, of the ultra rich with their private jets and yachts, does not align with the statistic presented in the title.
the wealthiest 10% in the US, households making more than about $178,000
I’m sure many of you know people in this group. Two adults each making 90k a year is enough to break into the 10%. And clearly they’re not flying around in private jets.
That’s true, but most of my social group fits into this definition and the majority fly commercial 6 - 12+ times a year, all around the globe, either for vacation or business travel. They almost all own personal vehicles, replaced every 5 - 10 years, well before the end of life of the vehicle. I live in Colorado and it’s common for this class to own/rent a second home or condo in the mountains and take multi-hour drives to those places on the weekend. Those lifestyle choices produce massive amounts of CO2 relative to individuals who otherwise live generally identical lives.
It doesn’t take extravagances like private jets to contribute outsized emissions.
Nobody said the “it ain’t much” part. What they said is that 180k isn’t enough to be chartering private jets. It doesn’t make you “ultra wealthy”. Upper-middle class? Yes. But people making that are waaaaay closer to a line cook than to Jeff Bezos.
I have been obsessed with The Matrix for multiple decades now and never knew that Neil Gaiman wrote a graphic novel about a guy pulled out of the Matrix to kill aliens. $50 hardcover collection on the way, thank you for sending me to see how far the rabbit hole goes!!
Probably because not all of the CEOs all of the enormous corporations, or leaders of the top polluting nations, are in that top 10‰. 10% is just a nice number to use, and I expect that if they went with 15 or 20% then the corresponding amount of pollution they’re responsible for would jump up significantly.
Jesus Christ. Do you know how much the US outputs compared to China and India? Educate yourself instead of following the group think. Seriously, the US is the only country on the planet that is actually going to achieve the Kyoto Agreement and we didn’t even fucking sign up for it. The US literally leads the entire fucking world in reduction of greenhouse gasses and development of green tech and you fucking clowns just sit here and bag on the rich… what a sad bunch of morons you are.
Not even the rich. Apparently workers earning $90k per year is enough to qualify as enemies to these people.
The rich aren’t people who work for a living. The rich are the bourgeousie who live parasitically off the rest of us. The people who can buy citizenship to nearly any country they desire. The people with multimillion dollars doomsday bunker communities.
They are pulling up the entire average they have 40% of. They are emitting 6x more than the bottom 90% per capita, so that 6x figure should have been the metric to focus on
How much money does the top 1% have and how much do you think it will cost to clean up the world? Those two numbers are not even within 3 years of global GDP dipshit.
Last year they increased their wealth by 8 trillion usd. Since 2021 their combined wealth is 42 trillion usd. (Thats twice as much as the rest 99% combined)
It is estimated that to fix the climate crisis it takes between 300 billion - 50 trillion usd. So they actually could do that.
And than there is the matter of comparing personal profit of a few. To the entire value produced by a country. Which is a really dumb comparison.
But you might know that the gdp of the us in 2021 was around 23 trillion.
This is true for almost anything. Major corporations, and the investors that profit off of them, pay so little in taxes compared to the average citizen. Instead, their money is devoted to lobbying and setting up careful corporate international glass houses so they don’t have to pay the taxes they should. We can push much harder on tackling social issues, but the top 10% don’t exist in society, they lord over it
They found the wealthiest 10% in the US, households making more than about $178,000, were responsible for 40% of the nation’s human-caused, planet-heating pollution.
This, and most of China's carbon emissions come from the production of goods for the rest of the world, so they're not the only ones "responsible" for those 50%.
So that's a household, meaning it likely is two adults working plus children. I would like to see this broken down more granularly - what percentage is due to the top 1% or top 0.01%, and is it due to investments or private jets, yachts, and recreational space exploration.
Facts. Good luck getting them to do anything about it. Nah, we’ll just stick it to the USA taxpayers and working classes. No more petrol cars, power equipment, gas stoves AC, etc. Oh, and you can’t own a single family home either with an acre of land. Nope. We can build a high rise apartment complex there instead. Anything else?
Yeah we should definitely keep doing what we’re doing. It’s been working so well. /s
Total farce indeed. That’s why all the world’s heat records are shattered to smithereens this year. Yep, we should absolutely focus on sucking Trump’s cock every waking second of every day because I’ll be goddamned if I care about anything but that. Yummmmmmmmm trump jizzzz, oh also dodge rams rule, especially the fact that you can place a kindergarten class in front of them and the driver not see them, plus CITIES ARE SCARY!!! How dare people move out of poverty and into a middle class life by moving to them!!! Don’t they know there’s minorities there!!! LiBrUl RuN sTaTeS aRe HeLlScApEs tHaT aLl GoT buRnEd To ThE gRoUnD bY bLM mArXiStS!1!1!1!1
/s
PS. CoMmUnIsM iS bAd, wHaTeVeR iT iS
PPS, you can go back to reddit now. People (or bots) with your disgusting ass 1830s viewpoints aren’t really smiled on here on Lemmy…
Me go back to Reddit? Whoa. Reddit is polluted with left wing crazies. No thanks.
Yes, blue states are cesspools of humanity. San Francisco has been destroyed by your precious left wing politics. Stores are leaving , chaining up products, etc. all because a certain faction of society just can’t figure out how to get it right and live like you’re supposed to. Im not a big fan of pickup trucks myself. Not sure where you got that from. But petrol cars must remain available as the electric wet dream of the greenies isn’t going to work and they know it. How’s the slave labor driven lithium mining going for those precious batteries? Uh oh!
Communism sucks. We all know what it is. Are you really still one of those people trying to sell that turd? Show me where communism has worked… provide a link. LOL.
Lol I couldn’t be as clueless as you even if I got a lobotomy.
Lemmy is founded and created by leftists and the entire fediverse concept is a very socialist idea. Some of the biggest instances are literally communist. I am not sure how you could possibly be here without noticing this… Meanwhile reddit has been overrun with alt right dipshits for years but you think the opposite lol
Yeah San Francisco has problems. Totally proves the left wrong!! /s There is a a reason you people always use that example. Out of hundreds of cities worldwide, it’s the only one you have. Doesn’t stop SF from being a highly sought after place to live with some of the most insane rent in the world. Because unlike your Podunk town, people actually want to live there. You don’t know it, but all you really said here is “I’m a huge pussy, afraid of cities because they contain black people and I’m pretty racist”_
I don’t give all that much of a shit about electric cars really but every major automaker is betting their companies on electric cars being the future. So, lol, yeah I’m sure some dipshit on the Internet is smarter than all of those companies combined.
What I’m making fun of you for regarding communism is that there are many morons out there without a fucking clue what communism is, but they’re still obsessed with it. You definitely seem to be one of them.
Hmmm. Reddit is way more left leaning and it’s is the center or center right people that get banned there. But, oh well.
Our Podunk town is quiet, friendly and doing quite well. We don’t want more people to come here, thanks. You act like that’s a problem. Amazingly, people like open spaces, limited noise, no WalMarts, etc. We even own an acre of land! Wow. Imagine that? But, please do insult us as your kind excels at. There are numerous blue cities that are in serious trouble. But, please ignore it. People and legit businesses are fleeing such places. Criminals are coddled, the police are hated, etc. OK then, enjoy the Wild West. This is what you wanted. Maybe you can personally house a few migrants and homeless dudes? Be part of the solution, right?
Communism is a guaranteed way for everyone to end up miserable. Just take a look through history. It isn’t hard to decipher why it’s unpopular.
Lol Russian trolls rarely get banned spreading lies (that you endorse), but yeah somehow that’s more leftist than a literal socialist platform. You must be new. You’ll find out that magats are not welcome here.
“We don’t want more people to come here” lmao… As if the racism-with-a-smile dynamic here isn’t the reason people absolutely do not want to move there. That and the economic wasteland that is small town America. I would know, I waited until I was almost 30 to gtfo of a hellhole like that. Over the years I’ve almost never heard of a story from someone from my high school who stayed in the area who didn’t die, ruin their lives with drugs, or go to jail. Even the rich kids followed this pattern for the most part, unless they moved away.
Funny you mention Walmart like that’s a city thing lol… “People are fleeing”. Yeah I’m sure that because the pandemic happened I’m sure that will undo 150 years of trending toward life in cities.
Yeah you can have your acre. I’ll take having employment options, culture, not being a fatass, and not just the false sense of security, an actual one. Crime is far higher per capita in small towns. Which again, my life is 1000 times better because I left. I don’t have to be poor and surrounded by misery, obesity, and insanely ignorant takes. I’ll never go back. But if that’s your thing enjoy it. Try not to get shot by a meth head in the middle of nowhere…
Lol just noticed that you are literally joined to a literal COMMUNIST lemmy instance. And you do know you’re not welcome, you’ve been here three weeks and have a lot of negative karma…
Now it makes sense that you’re here. You’re just here to talk about cOmMunIsM, which outside of China and your Lemmy instance, isn’t really even a thing in the world. All leftists usually want, at most, is more socialist policies.
Practically no one is wanting to destroy capitalism. Not because it doesn’t deserve to be or isn’t evil, but because we aren’t total morons who want to tear down a system without a good replacement for it. There could be some balance in the world if it weren’t for people like you…
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