"That one man could accumulate such a fortune, much less be willing to spend it on a company for #ideological or #personal reasons, was a testament to the world's widening wealth #inequality. This simply wasn't what the elite did with their money. To buy and operate a global corporation for one's own pleasure was unheard of. Musk was breaking the rules of what it meant to be rich."
#CharacterLimit - How #ElonMusk destroyed #Twitter - "Bring that Cattle" Chapter - PP. 139
![A man [Elon Musk] in a red and black armored costume poses triumphantly with his arms raised, while a woman [Musk's mother] in a stylish black outfit and short platinum blonde hair smiles beside him. The background features a blue wall with "Heidi Klum Halloween" promotional text.](https://files2.mato.social/media_attachments/files/114/404/024/519/929/153/original/cbf0ca5e65d7e7de.jpeg "A man [Elon Musk] in a red and black armored costume poses triumphantly with his arms raised, while a woman [Musk's mother] in a stylish black outfit and short platinum blonde hair smiles beside him. The background features a blue wall with \"Heidi Klum Halloween\" promotional text.")
Land reform is an essential part of Scottish Independence
An opinion piece.
https://www.thenational.scot/politics/25114298.ariane-burgess-land-reform-bring-power-back-people/
http://archive.today/2025.04.25-101323/https://www.thenational.scot/politics/25114298.ariane-burgess-land-reform-bring-power-back-people/?
(archive of article)
"A few days ago, Federal Reserve economist economist Ricardo Marto published an important paper on what happened to the economy in the period after Covid struck. What he found, after crunching numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, is that there was massive redistribution of wealth upward, from working people to big business.
According to Marto, domestic non-financial corporate profits doubled, to $4 trillion a year. As a percentage of total economic output going to profits, they went from 13.9% to 16.2%, while the labor share modestly declined.
There are two other disturbing elements in the paper. First, these profits went to reward shareholders in the form of dividends, not to investment to build more capacity. And second, profit levels have remained elevated. Throughout the pandemic recovery period, economists were vehement that profit increases did not reflect increased concentration, and that increased profits were temporary. Yet this research shows that such assumptions were wishful thinking.
Indeed, the most serious domestic policy failure of the Biden administration was allowing their economists to aggressively avoid addressing this shift upward in wealth from working people to big business. And now let’s fast forward to the current moment. We are in a trade crisis, and this crisis has some echoes of the post-Covid supply chain mess. And I suspect Donald Trump might be repeating Biden’s mistake.
This new crisis, of course, is the one that’s been wrought by Trump’s own abrupt tariff policies."
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-monopolies-could-exploit-the
Non Working People can go fuck themselves though, thanks Chancellor! /s
This looks well interesting on factors contributing to emergence of #inequality, comparing the difference between #land limitation and #labour limitation. The latter is more likely to maintain equality (and it's also more likely to be matrilineal/matrilocal probably), while shifts from labour to land scarcity would generate inequalities (not least gender).
In the US, the super-rich get even richer. https://www.commondreams.org/news/19-richest-us-families
https://www.cracked.com/article_46285_no-middle-class-family-can-live-like-the-simpsons-anymore-census-shows.html “While the median income of families has risen, inequality means that fewer people have that amount of money.” #Simpsons #housing #inequality #shortage
Folks, please don’t be so hard on Labour.
It’s not easy laying the foundations for the UK’s upcoming fascist government. (The Democrats should know; it takes dedicated effort.)
They’re working as hard as they can as it is to ensure the UK follows in the footsteps of the US.
@NorthantsGreens Labour are even saying the Two Child Cap is 'popular...can you imagine?!
Labour really need to be taught a lesson in the May elections.
They're saying the 'Two Child Cap' is popular amongst us voters!
I'm not religious, nor am I really a huge fan of the Catholic church, but Francis was a far better than average Pope.
He pushed the church in key ways I hope the next Pope will continue and expand.
Especially it matters that he called for urgent and decisive action on human-caused Climate Change.
It matters, too, that he sought paths to acceptance and inclusion of diversity.
I liked that he was a humble man, rejecting trappings of wealth, critical of his church's hoarded wealth, pushing for financial transparency, and focused on helping the poor. He seemed to want to be peer of, advocate for, and inspiration to regular people. Anyone, Catholic or not, ought admire such.
The contrast is especially apparent from the US, where the sitting administration makes frequent appeals to religion for exactly the opposite reasons, to profit upon the poor for the sake of the rich, to undermine and deplete what meager wealth they have (again in service of the rich), and to sow seeds of intolerance and distrust.
‘The more unequal the society is, the more severe the climate disaster’
"We are now on track to a three-degree world, which is still a world we absolutely do not want to live in...Capitalism as we know it now would be unviable. We are on track to tear it down by accident." Climatologist Friederike Otto
>>
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/19/climatologist-friederike-otto-the-more-unequal-the-society-is-the-more-severe-the-climate-disaster
#ClimateBreakdown #FossilFuels #disasters #insurance #inequality #ClimateCrisis #floods #bushfires #habitability
Tweet by Sen. Bernie Sanders:
U.S. Oligarchy - 2025:
Elon Musk owns as much wealth as the bottom 53% of U.S households.
The top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90%.
Real weekly wages are $30 lower than 52 years ago.
60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
Yes. We can do better than that.
Interesting confirmation of what we'd been suspecting. "Austerity, they found, is the key variable: without it, less-educated people are no more likely to vote for rightwing demagogues than highly educated people are. In other words, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are busily handing their core constituencies to Nigel Farage."
https://www.monbiot.com/2025/04/14/the-urge-to-destroy/
#austerity #UKpolitics #inequality
I'll generalize this. "The more unequal society is, the more severe the disaster".
This goes for climate, healthcare, housing, economy, ...
Equality is a form of resilience. Although disasters can be equalizing (see Rebecca Solnit - A Paradise built in Hell), true billionaires / multi-millionaires will extract themselves from rebuilding a community by virtue of being supremely isolated and protected.
‘Our moral intuitions about merit and personal worth are changing.’
an interview with Marion Fourcade about her book "The Ordinal Society" co-written by @kjhealy: https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/04/23/from-uber-ratings-to-credit-scores-whats-lost-in-a-society-that-counts-and-sorts-everything/
As The High Pay Centre suggest, following Green Party policy, a cap on CEO earnings would likely be pretty popular.
Where that cap might be pitched is between the £213k income that people seem to think indicates you are wealthy, and the 20 times average pay (around £700k) that most people think should be the maximum CEOs are paid!
Will it happen? not with this political class... but yet another reason to think about voting Green?
h/t HPC newsletter
"Income from financial assets even among those 5-10% of the world population and 40% of Americans who receive it, is extraordinarily skewed toward the rich. Inequality of financial income is not like inequality of labor income. It is much higher. For example, labor income (before taxes) Gini in the United States is typically around 0.55; capital income Gini is above 0.9. The same is true for virtually every country in the world. Income from financial assets is like wealth: it is disproportionately received by the very top of the distribution. In the United States about 90% of all different financial instruments and assets are owned by only 10% of the richest Americans (see Ed Wolff, “A century of wealth in America”, Kuhn, Schularick and Steins, “Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949-2016”). Thus, saying that 40% of Americans have some income from financial assets is somewhat misleading because most of them have very little of it—and just a few receive the Gargantuan share. Which means that we should be even less worried if the stock market goes South.
So to summarize: there are several reasons for cheering up the decline in the stock market: it reduces wealth inequality by obliterating the wealth at the very top; it does not affect the incomes of most people (60% of Americans and 90-95% of the people in the world); and among those who are affected, it is la crème de la crème who lose the most and thus they are de facto taxed (a policy which otherwise is difficult to implement)."
https://braveneweurope.com/branko-milanovic-the-stock-market-fetish
#SCOTUS has been redistributing our civil rights and giving more to the rich and powerful.
“They’ve disenfranchised the marginalized while making it easier for the corrupt to commit crimes. The gap between the two tiers of justice is growing as fast as the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us.”
