"Morbidly Wealthy": The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes from $405b to $869b since 2020—at a rate of $14m/hr—while nearly five billion people have been made poorer
Source: Oxfam
When you're told the economy is doing great this is what they mean. It's a bad message to send in an election year.
Bidenomics is working! Why aren't you people happy?!
Bidenomics is based in Reaganomics. Only it doesn't hand social program budgets so quickly to the religious ministries to spend on megachurches. The public hoped for a Social Democrat, but the establishment party chose another neoliberal. (In 2016 the Dems lost to an open fascist — with a majority, but losing the EC — because a conservative neoliberal woman President was too spicy.)
Even in the 1800s railrod barons owned all the candidates in the primaries. So we can't redistribute wealth by vote.
It does show capitalism gives us its true colors during the Great Depression. Our ownership class will gladly see us starve and freeze than give up their vast holdings. They'll hire armies and lawyers alike to keep wealth they cannot actually utilize (except to gain more wealth) even if it drives the human species to extinction.
And the longer it takes for the public to fight back, the higher the global catastrophic risk.
This, however, isn't to say we can choose revolution at any time. Violence remains unthinkable until the hour it is inevitable; until the hour we find our Mahsa Amini, we can only stir and wait.
Sadly this won't make them any tastier.
So what's your breaking point? What's society's?
Americans have been conditioned for nearly a century now to be far too comfortable to do anything. The fascists have learned their lesson, and this time they are much better at keeping people from caring until it's too late.
As anyone who has played the board game Monopoly can tell you, this is the point in the game where the game is effectively "over", the winner has been decided. That one player owns most of the board and the rest are hanging on with mortgages and selling off their houses and properties to hang on for one more turn and hoping to land on a space that doesn't bankrupt them. But we all know they eventually will.
So, when do we say GG, pack up the board and try something else?
GG? The game was rigged from the start. It's time to flip the table.
“Rigged” is human nature. There’s always people wanting to climb to the top of the heap and hoard anything of value and amass power. At no point in human civilization has this not been true. Kings, religions, merchants, even the criminal class. They all have people trying to place themselves in control to reap the money and rewards of others’ work.
You have to “un” rig the system with controls to prevent obscene collection of wealth and power; and even then it’s a continuous, non-stop battle to prevent the rich and powerful, and their sycophants and supporters, from constantly trying to find workarounds and/or undermine the system keeping them from their economic gluttony.
Makes me wonder what the numbers would be if we did tax brackets for capital property.
Like with incomes there's might be a standard deviation curve but people are considered at least diet rich in this country if they can afford to own a second home for whatever purpose.
Going up to three properties I'm pretty sure makes viewing it based on percentile pointless.
Not directly related to income tax, but I'm a big believer in having property taxed on an exponential scale. Start off quite low for your first property, a vacation home is still reasonable, but by the time you're much past that it becomes completely unreasonable to keep buying properties. Add a hefty multiplier for empty units on top of that, and you'd go a long way to fixing the issue with property hoarding.
E: sp
I believe a person/family should be allowed up to 3
Anything above that gets taxed in every way we can so you can and do make a profit, but its considered similar to other financial investments including risk.
Not sure how the loopholes would work if they own part with an ex, or kids, or single to relationship, but the general idea.
What's crazy is I pay around 45% income tax. And these people have their billions. How about anyone making less than 500k a year doesn't get taxed, and those fuckers pay.
The billionaires could have their tax attorneys make them look like they have no net income. It's a complicated game. If you tax their wealth, they'll just shift the ownership to a trust or corporation that they technically don't control. And that's assuming you could even find most of their wealth!
Really I think the answer is we need to try them for crimes against humanity and forbid them from owning any assets.
Rich people don’t keep their money in cash. It’s in assets - land, houses, businesses… They pay someone to figure out what they can write off. They also will know to the dime what the maximum amount they can donate and write off, distribute the wealth among family, and have access to all kinds of exotic financial instruments.
It's time to eat these motherfuckers
That's a hell of a lot of money to steal in just a few years. In under a decade, they'll all be trillionaires, and we'll all be trillions of dollars poorer.
Thanks Yoda.
This is the S&P 500, guess where they're starting this headline from? Guess what happened immediately before this report's "2020" start date.
Can't wait to read some idiot's argument on why Trump is the right guy to fix this lol
This is actually really funny
Lol. Lovely way to introduce that fact. Excellent delivery! Going to copy you :)
can we please just absolutely devour these “people”
was surprised that there aren't gps coordinates attached.
You mean Davos?
Man that's bad why aren't people doing something about this. Me then proceed to continue doomscrolling.
The problem (according to Das Kapital ) is that the owning class will fight back. Not all of them. Some realize that long-term capitalism requires keeping the working class happy (more or less) but well more than not. And as we learned with feudalism in the middle ages, it takes only one bad king to bring the ruin the works of ten of his predecessors. (It's a running theme in A Song of Ice and Fire )
So these recommendations are on the assumption that our governments are not already captured. The point of government is to serve the public good and the US has been trying to go back to that for over a century (since the Great depression, which escalated the desire to try something else, all the while the Soviet Union was doing just that.)
Our plutocrats have more resources by which to keep hold of our current governments, even as industry pollutes the air and drives us toward extinction.
Please don't perceive the Soviet Union as serving the public good. It was a well played (albeit it was 1950s 1960s, easy to write your own narrative) fascism that only benefitted Stalin and Moscow, while keeping the usual fireworks expense needed to sate the masses (just as in capitalist America) at a minimum. They murdered good people left and right, because they weren't obedient. They murdered good and bad people because they had money they wanted.
They were no different from Nazis, in that Moscow wanted to russify the world. They did it in a more "tolerant" way, you could say. Doing their genocides slowly. Immigrating ethnic russians over decades. But make no mistake, Lebensraum for ethnic russians was executed without much pondering. Killing, burning, destroying anything that was in the way.
Some "visionaries" were allowed to build some architectural projects or other, for the people, as long as they adhered to the party's rule, kept the fake narrative going. This was an easy way for a person without honor to have his name written in stone. Repeat for all subcultures.
Firstly Marx and Das Kapital are not the Soviet Union. The USSR was an attempt to make communism work, much the way that the United States was is was (is no longer) an attempt to make democracy work.
US constitutional framers made a lot of mistakes and concessions: failing to end slavery and the chattel status of women, using first-past-the-post elections and embracing a two party system, using the electoral college as an intentional sabotage of popular democracy by which the ownership class could undermine a popular vote creating early precedence the US is only a democracy as far as oligarchs can control it.
So when railroad barons in the 19th century were able to assure they got to choose who got to run in the primaries, even then, the people got to vote for elite-picked officials, and public-serving governance was already sabotaged.
At the time of the Great Depression (1929-1939), communism was looking pretty good to the people because we were living in cardboard boxes and eating flour paste and shoe leather and Hoover and the industrialists thought this was fine. (🐶🔥) So if you notice a lot of things going on today seem familiar and rhyme with history, yeah, you're totally right. This isn't our first rodeo.
In fact, our industrialists balked when FDR pushed the New Deal, which was a stopgap to give capitalism another chance. Some of our oligarchs were already looking to overturn democracy for fascism. Even then, a PragerU-style an anti-communism campaign (delayed a bit by WWII) was created and pushed onto kids. The stuff on YouTube isn't new. It's the same stuff put on reels and shown to me when I was in school in the late 70s / early 80s, just updated and available faster.
Let's also remember the Red Scare started with Wilson, who sought to isolate and sabotage communism in the Soviet Union weeks after the October Revolution much the way the monarchist coalition of Europe turned on France after its revolution in 1789. So communism never really had a chance but to establish ad hoc hierarchies which leads to corruption.
I'm not a political scientist. I can't say how well the Marxist model can work, but that it hasn't really ever had a chance what with industrialists hating on it the way monarchists hated on democracy. But then, here in the States, democracy never had a chance because it was sabotaged from the beginning. But we do know from both stories that plutocrats and aristocrats will always try to reinstall itself and sabotage efforts to partition and dissipate political power, as it has done continuously for the last few centuries. And whenever they seize power, public serving governance is the first casualty of corruption
(I talk about some of the easy fixes our framers could have made in the US to make democracy here more robust. Brains smarter than mine have come up with robust election reform packages that have been made and updated for decades now, with a snowflake's chance in Hell of actually getting pushed through state and federal legislatures. Short of change by force, the US is already fucked.)
Yes, awful things happened in the USSR. But we actually talk about those while we're still refusing the discuss the awful things still happening in the USA. We don't like to talk about the people we don't like to regard as people, and what we continue to do with them. And I think it's just as tankie to disregard the wrongdoing done by the US as it is by the USSR, by post-Soviet Russia or by China. Or by anyone, really. We're all the baddies.
And that said I'm not going to throw out Marx because of Russia any more than I'm going to throw out Hume because of America.
But make no mistake, Lebensraum for ethnic russians was executed without much pondering. Killing, burning, destroying anything that was in the way.
Hey now. That's not quite accurate. A great deal of thought went into it when the leadership realized that the Greens (peasant militias primarily organized for mutual defense against pillaging aka "requisitions" by the Red and White armies), the presence of anarchist societies allowing voluntary association (like the Makhnovists in Ukraine, and ethnic groups with strong identities or cultural individuality would interfere with the Central Commitee's absolute power over the populace.
Great. I think the rest of us were made poorer, with stock market going down a lot, inflation and high energy prices.
But who cares right.
Stock market grew 12%ish last year. Additionally, the health of the stock market isn't a meaningful measure of how well the average citizen is doing, it's mostly for the wealthy and elderly.
Plenty of people care about a lot of things. I believe the modern problem is we can't seem to stop talking and stop forgetting until we're collectively reminded about it all sometime later. I'm wondering how long until it becomes too much. Because it appears everyone is tired of it snd yet so little action also appears to be taken.
People don't have power so I think that's why no action is taken too. What are we gonna do, vote....
"Morbidly Wealthy"....."Economically Obese"..?
Doesn't morbid mean - dangerous for life? As in those parasites are looking more succulent each day. LOL
These are all paper gains if they would never be able to realize that money in reality.
Yeah but to achieve this paper gains I would wager a lot of people have been screwed out of their real money
You can use paper gains as leverage for loans against the gains and get that sweet liquidity to pay for underage escorts at Davos
You still have to pay taxes on whenever you need income to pay those loans
Oh be quiet. I bet you believe in pizza gate
Just see how much they claim to be worth when we finally get a wealth tax.
In their pockets flation
Eat them!
Go ahead... right behind you
"richest men" Hmmm.
Ok, so … Biden’s economic policies are worse than Trump’s were?
This is a cherry picked headline based on the stockmarket crashing immediately after covid/lockdowns hit. Its a good thing that Biden's economy has fully recovered since then. There was no guarantee that we wouldn't be in a depression after the lockdowns. The fact that the economy and stock market are back to normal after covid is not a bad thing, despite the scary sounding headline.
"When the firefighter arrived, 50% of the building was burned. When they left, 70%."
Under your logic, firefighters used gasoline to burn the other 20%.
Remember, any time you see this headline, they're cherrypicking the date to after the richest men lost 50% of their wealth in the Stock collapse immediately after covid/lockdowns hit.
Thank goodness Biden is doing so much to combat this
If you really believe in the words that you preach, get off your screens and onto the streets. There will be no peaceful revolution, no war without blood. You can say I'm just a fool that stands for nothing. Well, to that, I say you're a cunt.
r/Iam14andedgy
sugma
Whoa whoa whoa dude
"Morbidly" doesn't work in this context
Why not?
morbid /môr′bĭd/ adjective
- Given to or characterized by unwholesome thoughts or feelings, especially of death or disease.
"read the account of the murder with a morbid interest."- Of, relating to, or caused by disease; pathological or diseased.
"morbid changes in tissues."- Psychologically unhealthy or unwholesome.
"a morbid fear of heights."- Not sound and healthful; induced by a diseased or abnormal condition; diseased; sickly.
"a morbid condition; a morbid constitution; a morbid state of the juices of a plant."- Of or pertaining to disease or diseased parts.
"morbid anatomy"
Other than the fifth definition here, these all seem reasonable to me.
It is morbid for society. This is completely unsustainable.
Wealth can be considered a disease. If you really want to get pissed off, Google "affluenza"
Ah the yearly Oxfam cherry picked data. For this one, they say "since 2020" but really this is "since Mars 2020 when the stock market was crashing and hitting incredible lows", which helps inflate their click-baity figures.
Musk’s wealth went up in 2020. So did several other billionaires. The ultra wealthy don’t obey the same rules you and I do, and they’re still making billions when the world is shit.
Doesn't change anything to Oxfam doing cherry picking.
Since March 2022? The start of the Financial Year Boundary month of march? That march? I wonder why they chose such a random month.
/s
Yeah, I feel bad for those billionaires, too. You know what, I think they deserve a tax break.
In totally unrelated news, can you believe those left wing communists want paid maternity and paternity leave. That's going to cost $12 billion annually.. have they not seen the national debt?! It's all just an excuse because no one wants to work anymore.
You mean the two month stock market dip which has since not only recovered but the market following has heavily outperformed anything before 2020 and was fully abused by those in power who used their insider information on the COVID pandemic to trade just before the dip hit the markets? That stock market crash? I mean, I bet. Those 2 months are totally going to skew the numbers.
so what you’re saying is that when the stock market is crashing and hitting incredible lows, us plebs lose money and the rich lose significant less? make a profit?
that just points to a different and related problem that still supports oxfams conclusion
if everyone lost money at the same rate, we’d all be worse off… the problem is the wealth gap got larger; not that everyone lost money
Do you really want to get between the angry people with the guillotines and the object of their wrath?
Universal healthcare now, paid for by the top 5 wealthiest people in the country. If they don't want to pay it, they can spend until they are #6 or below.
Guillotines for anyone taking action against universal healthcare.