Capitalism creates socioeconomic inequality by concentrating wealth and power among a select few, perpetuates systemic oppression, inherently exploits labor which leads to alienation and a lack of worker autonomy, prioritizes profit over social needs, and exacerbates environmental degradation and resource depletion. We aren't the problem. Capitalism is the problem. #capitalism#inequality#exploitation#anticapitalism
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
(a thread of threads, quotes, and links)
This is a collection of writings and research concerned with how we got where we are today, which is in fact the story of what has been done to us, and what has been taken from us.
By "us" we're talking about "the 99%", "workers", "wage slaves", all non-owners of private property, "the poor", unhoused people, indigenous people, even plenty of people who swear by capitalism and identify as "capitalist" yet have no capital of their own and no serious hope of ever having any worth speaking of. In other words almost everyone except for the very few who have had the power to exploit us and shape our lives to serve their agenda. We're going to examine institutions and concepts that have deeply altered our world at all levels, both our external and internal realities.
By "here" we are talking about climate crisis and myriad other environmental catastrophes resulting from hyper-excessive extraction, consumption and waste; a world of rampant inequality and exploitation, hunger and starvation; a world of fences, walls, tollbooths, prisons, police, bullshit jobs and criminalized poverty; a world overrun with cars and preventable diseases; a world of vanishing biodiversity and blooming fascism; a world where "democracy" results in being led by some of the worst of humanity; a world ruled by an imaginary but all-powerful and single-minded god: Capital.
Our inspiration and structural framework for this survey is this quote from "The Prehistory of Private Property", an important work from political philosopher Karl Widerquist and anthropologist Grant S. McCall:
"After hundreds of millennia in which all humans had direct access to the commons, it took only a few centuries for enclosure, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization to cut off the vast majority of people on Earth from direct access to the means of economic production and therefore to rob them of the power to say no. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned."
Having just seen another casual allusion to 'this overcrowded isle', I think people who believe the UK to be over-crowded either don't understand the shape of population distribution or think the whole country looks like the suburbs of #London.
There may be an issue about the carrying capacity of this island, but on a purely spatial level its not overcrowded, the population is just clustered in a few places.
A less clustered population might also help re-balance regional #inequality?
It can be difficult to understand just how un-equal our modern human society really is.
We often talk about the 1% versus the 99%, but that’s not even close to an accurate ratio for the true scale of inequality — because the “haves” in our society (our owners, our rulers) do not possess a mere one hundred times more power and wealth than the rest of us. The disparity is FAR greater than that.
Through consolidation and monopolies and lobbying and bribery and corruption, within the past four decades the wealthy and powerful have achieved complete dominance over us and over the world we live in. It’s not an exaggeration to say they own and control virtually EVERYTHING.
They own the corporations. They own the resources. They own the governments. They own the major media. They own (most of) the Internet.
And what are they doing with all that wealth and power? Simple. They’re grabbing more. And more and more and more. They will never have enough.
In the meantime, while they continue hoarding, our owners are also working to convince you and me that everything is okay, that the status quo is just fine, that there’s nothing to worry about. They want to keep the stores open, the factories running, the airlines flying, and the cruise ships sailing.
The longer our rulers can keep assuring everyone that Business As Usual is the way to go, the more money they will make. And they believe (though it's likely a delusion) that with enough money and enough power, they and their descendants will be able to survive and even thrive in the 3°C to 5°C world of the future.
I’m not sure at this point if anything can be done about all this. It may be too late. But I hope I’m wrong.
“According to a recent poll, more than 70 percent of Britons under the age of 50 are indifferent to the coronation. Even so, a staggering 250 million pounds ($315m) of magicked-up taxpayer money will be spent on this single day even as thousands of nurses, doctors, teachers and other key public workers have been told for months there is no money in the coffers to offer them a meaningful pay rise.”
For those who might not know, following a week after the Russia-Ukraine wheat embargo, there are even bigger and ominous signs hinting at global food insecurity and the catastrophic agricultural crises coming our way.
India last week banned export on all non-basmati rice varieties.
I repeat: EXPORT BAN ON ALL non-basmati RICE varieties.
[Aside: export of basmati variety will continue, the demand for which is relatively small in India when compared to the nearly 15 major varieties of rice (it's home to at least a 1000 varieties) consumed by very large populations everyday(these are the ones which are now banned). Basmati is a "festive" and only occasionally consumed variety in India. It is largely exported to the richer nations, many of whom think it is the only variety of rice from India.]
Why is India banning rice now?
Answer: global warming.
What’s happening in India (and South Asia at large) should both terrify you and wake you up
Here’s more (facts? trivia? bothersome news? how the world actually works?).
Just in time for #Davos, here's 'Taken, not earned: How monopolists drive the world’s power and wealth divide," a report from a coalition of international tax justice and anti-corporate activist groups:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
No way! A European Citizens' Initiative to (1) tax millionaires to (2) finance a Green New Deal via EU Commission own funds, and (3) whose proponents are (check notes) the president of the Belgian Socialist Party, a Polish former Employment and Social Inclusion Commissioner and Thomas Piketty (@pikettylemonde), possibly the world's most prominent scholar of inequality.
investigative report tells how morbidly rich families, their companies, & their personal foundations are funding efforts to limit/restrict democracy across U.S.
Let’s get personal, shall we? I’ve been here a while now, and as I’m feeling quite comfortable at Mastodon, I’d like to share a bit more about myself beyond my passion for the climate and the environment.
To begin with, I’m a male, he/him, hetero, strongly supporting LGBTQ rights. I’m a baby boomer, born at 312 PPM 🌏, a United Statesian, although I lived in Europe (mostly Hungary) for several years, and traveled extensively for work before retiring in 2012. I’ve never been good at sustaining long-term romantic relationships, and I’ve finally settled into comfortable singlehood.
I like to say I’m made of contrasts.
For example, I’m rather funny and quite personable, but I don’t enjoy small talk and I hate parties. I currently live in the Bible Belt, but I’m an outspoken atheist. While I can easily fit into most social situations, I don’t feel comfortable around large groups and prefer being alone most of the time. I live near two huge military bases, but I detest the USA’s militaristic, troop-worshiping culture. I’m almost always cheerful, which masks my deeply felt existential nihilism. I’m a neat freak, but also rather lazy, preferring fun over work.
I’ll finish up with some hashtags to add flavor...
I don’t know why we’d stop at 2%, though. Make it a marginal tax rate just like on income tax, and tax anything over €1 billion at 90%. What do we say, 10% on wealth over €100 mil, 20% over €200 mil, and so on upwards?
We need to be better at recognising and showing everyone that all our interests are aligned - it shouldn’t be farmers against #JustStopOil or whatever; we should all be fighting #inequality and billionaires together. #WeAreThe99Percent
Its worth remembering that not the #rich are not all the same.
Katharina Hecht (LSE) notes that in' interviews with people with income in the top 1 & top 0.1% in the UK, I found that approximately a third of participants suggested that #inequality should be lower & many were supportive of the idea of higher #taxation for people like themselves in order to provide opportunities for others. In particular, the #NHS & the #education system were highlighted as in need of public funding'!
Once of the mai engines of non-elite #economic#inequality in the UK, is the 'bank of mum & dad'... even as first time buyers drip to their lowest number in a decade the rise of inter-generational support for this who can but increases, locking in the advantage of the capital-owning & forcing the young either to stay at home or navigate the trials & tribulations of private #renting.
And of course, this cements the structural advantage of those families helping their children...
Looking at the yawning gap in wealth inequality in France, Thomas Piketty recently observed: 'The idea that we just have to wait for wealth to spread doesn’t make much sense: if that were the case, we would have seen it long ago'!
We could easily make the same point about the UK.
We should be done with listening to the self-interested bleating of the rich; its unlikely a substantial majority would ever agree with action to end their privilege(s).
I’ve often complained that when the US “ended welfare as we know it” (in 1996) no one kept track of what happened to the people who were on welfare. How many lost their apartments? Became drug addicts? Went to jail? Died?
There’s no doubt in my mind all of these things happened as a consequence. But we’ll never know the numbers. People with money and power didn’t want to talk about it. They didn’t want to know.
While Nesrine Malik makes a lot of good points here about Britain's diminishing influence in the world (due to the problems we confront at home) by citing nominal GDP figures to say we're the 6th largest economy in the world, she misses the key indicator of our real economic status.
By not using GDP per capita - where we are ranked in the mid-to-low 20s - she misses a much more convincing & consistent economic context for her argument!
My spouse worked for a short-term rental company, an #AirBNB competitor, and wow did I hear an earful from them about the kinds of chaos these places can cause. One factor driving away the individual homeowner posting their extra 'crash space' online vs. the massive conglomerates is how little help the companies offer when something goes wrong (i.e. a renter sets off fireworks in your house while you're renting it out). Giant property owners can eat those kinds of losses and don't have sentimental attachment to their homes.
#Capitalism#Inequality#JobMarket: "Capitalists acquire assets through frugal saving, hard work, or coming up with groundbreaking ideas, they might argue. Why should society deny them the freedom to use their justly acquired assets to start a business or acquire shares in an existing enterprise?
The first problem with this argument is that many capitalists do not become owners through thriftiness or honest work. Many simply inherit wealth from their families. Others acquire it through defrauding others — tricking other capitalists, for instance, into investing in questionable or downright fake business ideas. Being lucky enough to have a rich parent, or shameless enough to deceive others out of large sums of money, shouldn’t entitle one to decide how society disposes of its wealth.
Occasionally one comes across a true rags-to-riches story, where a person starts out at the bottom of the class hierarchy and manages to scrimp and save enough start-up capital to launch a successful business or invest in others’. But it doesn’t follow from stories like these that the superrich should be given the power of job creation and all that comes with it. Even if a person works hard to become a capitalist, why should that effort be rewarded with the power to personally decide how society’s resources are used and to rule over employees as despots? No matter how they got there, it’s unclear why owners should be able to acquire enough wealth to dominate the political process and effectively make a sham out of our democracy.
Socialists say: they shouldn’t. Everyone should have equal opportunity to contribute to major economic decisions — including what is produced and how — and everyone deserves to be rewarded for the fruits of their labor, including the workers who are mercilessly exploited under our current system. We should stop simping for parasitic “job creators” and demand that their wealth and power be shared with everyone."
An economist named Blair Fix (@blair_fix) has written a piece illustrating the scope of our society's vastly growing inequality. Of course, you probably already knew about that, but he shows how bad it really is — and how it continues getting worse.
The rich get richer.
It’s a phrase that packs a lot of punch. It’s potent rhetoric, yet surprisingly accurate at describing how rising inequality plays out.
Of course, there’s nothing inevitable about the rich getting richer. We just happen to live in an age of growing corporate despotism.
The Forbes 400 got a lot richer over the last forty years. But so what? It could be that over the same period, all Americans got richer. In that case, it’s not particularly meaningful to say that the rich got richer. Everyone got richer.
Except they didn’t.
It turns out that unlike the Forbes 400, the average American saw little change in their net worth over the last four decades. Do you see what happened to the black line [below] which plots the net worth of the median American? That’s right … not much. For forty years, Americans’ median net worth hardly budged.
What’s fascinating about rich lists like the Forbes 400 is that their authors seem oblivious to what they’re measuring. While ostensibly celebrating ‘wealth’, these lists are actually a barometer for social inequality.
As it turns out, inequality is written everywhere in the Forbes data. When the rich get richer, it’s not just the Forbes 400 who pull away from everyone else. Within the Forbes 400, the stupendously rich pull away from the ultra rich, who pull away from the mega rich, who pull away from the considerably rich, and so on. At a certain point, we run out of adjectives to describe the hand of inequality.
Trans people are more likely to come from poorer backgrounds, study finds (www.thepinknews.com)
New research has revealed trans people are more likely to come from poorer backgrounds and have worse mental health.