The 8 richest people on the planet own as much as the poorest 4 billion. The idea that they worked harder to earn it is patently ridiculous. Can 8 humans do more work than 4 billion? Even if this handful of uber-rich lost 99% of their swag, they’d still own more wealth than 99% of the human race (Oxfam).
Meanwhile each member of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index made around $14 million a day in the last 6 months.
The average annual UK salary in 2023 is £33,402, which represents around 3 ½ minutes’ income for those top billionaires, and according to the BBC isn’t enough to qualify for affordable rent schemes in London.
Still think the rich work hard for their money?
… wages, that is, at least in the Church of England, where 2,000 members of Unite’s Faith branch are lodging a pay demand for the first time ever. The clergy want a 9.4% salary increase, because 1 in 5 of them had to rely on charity last year just to make ends meet. While Christians are generally supposed to venerate poverty, it’s a bit galling for them when the C of E has an investment fund worth a cool £10.3bn, at an average rate of return of 10.2%, which comes to almost £3m a day.
Religion is a racket to stop workers rebelling, and won’t even pay its own showrunners. And they claim it’s the source of human morality!
Why did America’s Food and Drug Administration approve an expensive antibiotic that was no better than a cheap generic? Because the FDA is an example of ‘state capture’ by commercial companies.
This is a problem that concerns conservatives as well as left-wing ‘radicals’ who still believe they can fix capitalism by undoing ‘state capture’ and decoupling profit from human welfare.
But the state was always ‘captured’, in the sense that it was created and paid for by the rich to mediate their business affairs. It’s not there for your benefit. A 2015 study concluded that ‘economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.’
If you’re under the impression that you pay for the state through your taxes, you might like to read this.
In the USA, around 34 million people, including 9 million children, are ‘food insecure’, meaning they go without or rely on food banks. Why can’t the world’s richest country provide enough food for its own people?
The answer of course is that it can, and does, and then throws it away. Why? Because poor people do not constitute ‘effective demand’, ie, they don’t have the money to buy it. The US throws away 40 million tons of food, around 30-40% of its entire food supply.
Capitalist profits are the only thing that matter, regardless of human needs.
Samuel Johnson called patriotism ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel‘, but apparently he only meant the opportunistic, virtue-signalling kind. Socialists despise all nationalism, because it props up the capitalist mindset and justifies wars. It’s also bloody silly.
This year, when Ukrainian tennis players draw matches with players from countries supporting Russia, they still play (because… money) but pointedly refuse the traditional end-of-play handshake. When Elina Svitolina narrowly defeated Belarusian Victoria Azarenka at Wimbledon, the usually respectful crowd booed Azarenka off court.
Blaming tennis players for what governments do – especially totalitarian ones – shows what a meaningless abstraction nationalism is. Meanwhile ‘evil’ Azarenka won’t be too upset, having clocked up $36m in prize money, while ‘patriotic heroine’ Svitolina has amassed $21m. New balls please.
Hachiko, a famous dog who has his own statue in Japan, waited every day for 10 years at a railway station for his dead master to return. He represented, says a professor from Hawaii, the ‘ideal Japanese citizen’ with his ‘unquestioning devotion… loyal, reliable, obedient to a master, understanding, without relying upon rationality, their place in the larger scheme of things.’
This of course is just how capitalism would like you to be too, a loyal pet who questions nothing and knows their place. All capitalist countries (and some like China which pretend to be otherwise) try to inculcate submission into their workers, for the continuing benefit of the robbing rich. It’s high time we turned and bit their hands off.
You might think inflation is bad locally, but in Argentina it’s 114%. Why? The state can’t raise tax revenue, but it also can’t borrow because it has repeatedly defaulted on sovereign debt so nobody will lend them squat. It could try to export more but successive isolationist governments have cut it off from global trade. So what did it do? It printed money. Since 2019 the cash in circulation has quadrupled.
‘Ah’ says the Economist podcast presenter, knowingly. ‘So it’s all this printing of cash that’s causing the inflation problem.’
Not a mention of workers’ wage demands causing inflation. Governments love to blame workers, but economics journalists know perfectly well what the reality is.
If you want to go on holiday with your friends to Spain, you may think that the correct approach is to book a group flight direct to Marbella. Not so, according to the Morning Star, who think that if an earlier flight is available for Belarus, you should seize the opportunity to ‘progress’ there, despite the fact that it’s nowhere near Spain and is also a miserable totalitarian dictatorship.
Anyone who wants to go to Spain, without so much as a ‘transitional stopover’, is failing ‘to take account of existing conditions ‘, as well as overestimating the general ability of workers to know where Spain is. Defined destinations are mere ‘blackboardism’. For real adventurers, anywhere will do.
Indefatigable as ever, Bernie Sanders has been railing against inequality in the USA, pointing out that just 3 people own more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population, which is 165 million people. ‘That’s not moral,’ he thunders, ‘that’s not right. That’s not what should exist in a democratic society.’
But the USA is not a democratic society, is it, Bernie? It’s a capitalist society in which the whole point is for the rich to get richer off the backs of the labouring poor, aided by a puppet government whose sole purpose is to enforce the status quo. Just like Britain, just like China, just like every country in the capitalist world.
Welcome to the class war, where morals don’t matter.
How would it be if there was enough to go round, so that nobody had to do without? Great, you might think. Surely that’s the whole point of productive industries?
Nope. Not in capitalism anyway, where the whole point is to produce profits, not product. If there’s too much product, the price falls, and so does profit. The solution is to cut production, even if people need your product.
Thus OPEC cuts oil production by a million barrels a day to keep profits high.
And a plant in Finland was so efficient the price per kWh fell briefly to zero. So they cut the power to users.
That’s capitalist logic for you!
