"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

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.

“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.

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.

I don’t think Bill is on the top 5 anymore after the divorce

This is actually really funny

Lol. Lovely way to introduce that fact. Excellent delivery! Going to copy you :)

You mean Davos?

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.

Large mobs and guillotines seemed to work fine a while back. Larger mobs and guillotines should still do nicely.

Oh be quiet. I bet you believe in pizza gate

You still have to pay taxes on whenever you need income to pay those loans

The second one doesn't really fit either I'd argue. Edit: good downvotes. It's literally a medical definition. Smartasses.

sugma

Doesn't change anything to Oxfam doing cherry picking.

Get off your soap box, I just pointed out that Oxfam numbers are manipulated.

Those two months do skew the numbers. Why do you think they specifically picked March and not January as anybody else would?

You can defend your opinions without having to manipulate the numbers.

You can even see the dip in Elon's networth in 2020 in this chart lol If they had started 1 month earlier, Elons net worth would have only 3x instead they cherry picked a date after Elon's networth had halved, so instead it 6x'ed.