economic inequality

Recently, the ridiculous real estate company WeWork has faced intense scrutiny after their business model was absurdly overvalued and their CEO, one Adam Neumann, was exposed as an abusive boss as well as an overall crazy person. Investors from the Saudi royal family, companies like SoftBank and J.P. Morgan, and numerous venture capitalists poured vast sums of money into the company, fueling its overvaluation, which ran as high as 47 billion dollars.

If we make it out of the climate emergency, we may come to view the few decades usually described simply as the Cold War that followed the Second World War as halcyon days – at least relative to what we are facing now.
The Cold War was a power struggle between two economic empires for global domination – between the United States and its vassal states, including Europe, on one side, and Russia and its vassal states lumped together into the Soviet Union, on the other. The fight was between a US-led capitalism and what was styled as a Soviet-led “communism”.

I got my first job-- when I was still in high school-- working in a print shop. I started out as a minimum wage worker, making $1.15 an hour. The first time I realized I was, as the president of a division of TimeWarner, making $1,000,000 a year, I was astounded and even confused.

Despite the upbeat words from America’s billionaire president about the “economic miracle” he has produced, economic inequality in the United States is on the rise.

This map of Chicago from The Economist shocked me as the magazine makes the point that if you take a ride along Chicago's red line-- a rail service running north-south for 23 miles-- life expectancy varies by 30 years from one end to the other! Thirty years! In a developed country! In the richest country in the world!

A nexus of pure, unadulterated evil-- Trump and the AdelsonsSheldon Adelson bought the biggest newspaper in Las Vegas for 140 million dollars. His net worth is something like 32 billion dollars and he represents the interests of the far right Likud Party among Republicans in the U.S. His bribes to Trump are over $25 million. He gives immense sums to Republicans in Congress.

Yesterday, as soon as Bernie announced his wealth tax proposal-- something he's been working on long before he ran for president in 2016-- Thomas Kaplan was working to undermine its authenticity for NY Times readers by insinuating he was just trying to one-up Elizabeth Warren.

Over the weekend, the New Yorker, published an essay by Liaquat Ahamed which asks the question The rich can't get richer forever, can they? You might want to read it in the context of yesterday's post Being A Member Of The Elite May Be A Drag-- But Being A Slave Is Much Worse. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the U.S.

Charlie Hill, Oneida-Mohawk-Cree: “A Redneck told me to go back where I came from, so I put a tipi in his backyard.”

Roberto Savio confronts an era of greed, fear and “populocracy.” By Roberto Savio in Rome Inter Press Service When all is said and done, it appears that Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher who had a dire vision of man,…Read more →