Listen to a reading of this article:
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The concept of “wealth hoarding” has gained traction in the wake of the Occupy movement and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, the idea being that billionaires are amassing treasure like mythical dragons in the same way someone with a hoarding disorder amasses newspapers or clothes.
It’s an understandable way of looking at the problem. The capitalist class is indeed grabbing up a greater and greater percentage of the wealth that’s being generated by the working class, and it just doesn’t make sense that someone would need billions of dollars when you can only drive one car at a time, wear one pair of pants at a time, eat one meal at a time, etc.
For normal people, the idea of wealth is associated with security, so once your family’s needs are met and their future is secure it’s hard to understand the impulse to keep amassing wealth far beyond that point without it being driven by some kind of compulsive neurosis. The fact that they pour so much money and energy into manipulating political systems to ensure they aren’t forced by taxation to share more of their wealth with the public makes them look even more like compulsive hoarders.
But this notion of vast wealth as a hoarding behavior misses the mark. And no, it isn’t because billionaires are awesome beneficent job creators whose wealth is being used by banks to grant people loans for homes and businesses and making the world a wonderful place to live.
It doesn’t work to think of the very rich as wealth hoarders because what they are doing has very little in common with the behavior of a compulsive hoarder. A compulsive hoarder gains nothing from their behavior, which generally ends up being self-destructive and socially alienating. It costs them everything, and gives them nothing. Their behavior is born of neurosis, and is entirely irrational.
The so-called wealth hoarders are not amassing wealth at the expense of others out of neurosis, and the motives driving their behavior are perfectly rational. They’re just a lot more depraved and a lot more uncomfortable to think about.
The ruling class continually extracts wealth from the public not so that they can become wealthier than they already are, but to keep the public from having that wealth. They’re not worried that they’ll be unable to support their needs in the future if they don’t extract another billion dollars, they just understand that the wealthier everyone else gets, the less their own wealth matters. They’re not wealth-hoarding, they’re wealth-obstructing.
Wealth is a zero-sum game, as is its good friend power. The more power everyone else has, the less power our current rulers would have over us. This is why so much energy goes into ensuring that votes have as little effect as possible on the operations of the state and making sure everything stays the same no matter what the public wants.
Imagine if ordinary people started having as much influence over the direction human civilization will take as war profiteers, oil tycoons, globalized wage slavers and Silicon Valley plutocrats. Imagine if the working class had enough disposable income to begin funding grassroots political campaigns, building their own media networks, or even funding think tanks and NGOs to advance their own interests like plutocrats do today. Imagine if everyone could afford to work less and relax more, and finally start learning about what’s really going on in the world.
Wealth is meaningless if everyone is wealthy. Power is meaningless if everyone has power. The kings of our day have a vested interest in keeping everyone poor and powerless, because if everyone is king, then no one is king.
This is why our status quo systems work the way they work, and this is why you see a convergence of interests from such groups as corporate plutocrats, plutocrat-owned politicians and media, the arms industry, and military and intelligence agencies. These groups all have a vested interest in preserving the status quo and the ability to put that agenda in place, so they’ve fallen into a natural, de facto alliance with each other toward that end.
Workers around the world: lost $3.7 trillion in the pandemic
Billionaires around the world: gained $3.9 trillion in the pandemicIt's the biggest one-year wealth transfer in history, yet somehow barely anyone is talking about it.
— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) March 25, 2021
It’s why we’ve seen a historic upward transfer of wealth during the Covid pandemic, with billionaires raking in trillions while ordinary people struggle with unemployment and soaring prices. And it’s why that transfer of wealth has been happening for decades since long before Covid. In a system where money is power and power is relative, a ruling class naturally emerges which needs to suppress the wealth and power of its subjects in order to continue to rule.
Rulers do not historically give up their rule voluntarily, so we can expect this continual pattern of wealth obstruction via wealth extraction to continue until people get tired of being kept poor and powerless by those who benefit from their poverty and disempowerment and use the strength of their numbers to force the emergence of a more equitable system. We can also expect our rulers to do everything in their power to prevent this from happening, including propagandizing the public into accepting the status quo and believing that anything better is impossible.
Drastic change in the not-too-distant future does seem to be inevitable, though, if only because we’re headed toward environmental collapse or nuclear winter if we don’t rise to the revolutionary occasion first. Humanity’s self-destructive patterning is in a race with our better angels, and right now it’s anybody’s race.
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52 responses to “If Everyone Is King Then No One Is”
Very insightful, Caitlin. Thanks!
‘Drastic change in the not-too-distant future does seem to be inevitable, though, if only because we’re headed toward environmental collapse or nuclear winter if we don’t rise to the revolutionary occasion first.’
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This herd of cats is not rising to a revolutionary occasion.
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A good title for MY next article.
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A Revolutionary Occasion
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Now there are more reasons to be a socialist than ever.
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Make the change or let it happen. What are you going to do?
An interesting – and relevant lmao… – interview between Brett Weinstein and Michael Shellenberger about what would we humans do, if we had to deal with a spent fuel pool fire. Would we fight it, or run for the hills?*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy6oGiwwDag
Mr. Shellenberger believes that in all scenarios, we would fight it, because when a crisis hits, humans can always be found that are willing to sacrifice themselves like samurai, and these people are known as firefighters. Mr. Weinstein, on the other hand, isn’t so sure about this, in fact I would say he’s downright skepitical of this claim, and also points out, rightly I believe, that if a firefighter drops dead before he can engage his hose, is he fighting a fire, or is he a dead man lying on the ground?
Also a topic that was almost up for discussion, but not quite, is something that has interested me for many years.What would happen if 6 spent fuel pool fires were simultaneously raging out control smack dab in the middle of Ukraine. Would this in fact lead to the Death of Europe, as President Zelensky claimed back in March?
Note: What is so fascinating about this subject, is how little we know. One of the things I deeply respect about Brett Weinstein, even though he is – at least as far as I’m concerned – by far and away the world’s leading expert on spent fuel pool fires, despite this he wants to learn more, because he is also fully aware, he doesn’t know jack shit.
Too funny. Too insane actually. What Brett is running into, is the same problems I’ve been running into for 20 years, which is basically, not only does nobody know a goddamn thing, or claims such, but the idea that someone would want to know is considered rude beyond all accepable tolerances.
*Like everyone wanted to do at Fukushima, wanted to skeddadle they did, but were shamed out of it at the last minute by one man, Plant Manager Masao Yoshida.
Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) was a momentary leap of congruence in the innate conscious mind of one individual (Rene Descartes), and his recognition that there existed an infinite, elevating, evolutionary separation between it, and natural animal instinct.
Apparently these faculties are not on a continuum with physical matter!
The ‘inner space’ of conscious is not derived, necessarily, solely from organic matter, neither is it alone of natural physical substance. It is not a specific component of physical matter. It is not of a solid state; it has no finite organic boundaries.
The full awareness of the infinite depth, and expansiveness of one’s own inner conscious state, seems to be of only fleeting duration. It is not a constant, in that it ebbs and flows; as in expands and contracts continuously. Apparently, its expansive growth in evolutionary terms is not uniformly exponential – developmentally.
What has come of the scientific theory of an ever expanding Homo sapiens sapiens’ conscious state of mind since this one philosophers discrete recognition (1596–1650) of one momentary flash?
WE ARE THE ALIENS, in that we do not seem to recognize that mutual conscious animation extends beyond our individual selves, and is in the reality, a universal, on a finite planet, never mind in the infinite cosmos.
On a societal level overall, it appears to have disappeared, without trace. Without its resuscitation, and continuous in-depth critical thinking functioning, humanity is doomed to go the way of other, now extinct, animal species.
Ambrose Bierce: “Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum – “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.”
Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
Agree with I believe to be the central premise. The finite vs the exponential is not a fair fight.
Caity, what you call the capitalist class, you are describing what I refer to in my writings as the billionaire sociopaths. It’s not the type of neuroses that you discussed. It’s simply the fact that they don’t care about anyone or anything except themselves, To paraphrase George Carlin, roughly three decades ago, they want everything for themselves and nothing for you. George warned us about quite a few heinous things that were happening and would get even worse but, to quote him, “Nobody seems to notice; nobody seems to care.”
The reality is that almost all regular people are caught up in the demands of their own lives, with little time to pay attention to anything else, because they’re working longer hours than ever and trying to figure out how they will be able to afford things as simple as the nutritious food their families need in order to survive and the spiraling price of healthcare/insurance.
No matter what term(s) we use to describe them, the need to amass wealth and power beyond even double or triple of what anyone could need is actually borne of a deep-seated personal insecurity. They are afraid that someone may take it a way and that, as a consequence, they’d have o idea how to fend for themselves and survive. So, it only stands to reason that someone who is only-self centered and wants it all for him or herself, will try to get it all. In addition to all their other reasons, they are afraid that someone will come along and take away what they have. Nothing will stop them, just as nothing stops a school bully, until some one or more stand up to them, punch them in the nose and says, ‘Now get out of here and never comeback until you learn how to treat other people.
@Newton Finn down below: Well that’s two different things and precisely at the root of the beef I have with rabid “climate changers”! Climate change HIDES the real thing: the pollution, the plundering, the garbage patches in the oceans, the expropriations of tribes in the Amazon by ruthless corporations, the Round Up scandals (giving cancers, killing insects, especially bees). All that and more makes a line in the news while climate change is front and center, pushed by “experts” who are finally discovered to depend on grants from governments and are enrolled by the IPCC, an inter-governmental panel whose decisions are ultimately political (i.e. corporations led) with only scientists for show. At the same time, you have other scientists whose signatures have been added on IPCC documents they never signed and they had to get at them for weeks to have their signatures removed. Or they’re victims of smear campaigns. They get lousy Wikipedia entries. All that doesn’t smell good to me. Doesn’t smell organic. It’s like this Sam Harris character saying “of course there was a conspiracy to deny Donald Trump the White House in 2020!” And everything went. The end justified the means. Saying Hunter’s laptop disclosing deals incriminating his father was Russian disinformation? Fine! “Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared,” he said. Orange Man Bad, therefore we don’t want him in the White House, therefore anything goes. Is this guy really holding the moral high ground against Orange Man Bad? I think not!
It’s like you sentence a guy to death because you think he deserves it (which is only a fantasy of yours until you prove it) and then you fabricate and plant evidence to justify your decision.
Now climate change is the easy scapegoat for everything. Your child is obese? It’s not due to the crappy stuff you feed him or medical drugs, it’s climate change. He has myocarditis, strokes, autism… It’s not the Covid vaccines. It’s climate change. Death of soccer players has increased fivefold after vaccination to the point that Wikipedia has given up listing them? Climate change. Insurance companies have doubled the indemnities they paid last year to people hurt by the vaccine? Climate change. A burglar broke into your house and stole the beautiful pearl necklace that was left to your wife by her dear granny? Climate change. A guy with two grams of alcohol in his blood ran over your unsuspecting dog with his car? Climate change.
Sorry but that’s not how a functioning society works. I’d rather take a chance on this because I think that is bad? No. That’s the science that guys like Fauci want people to follow but it’s got nothing to do with science. It’s got to do with big bucks.
So let’s separate the grain from the chaff, give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, to pollution and plundering what belongs to pollution and plundering and to climate change what belongs to climate change.
The panic is rising for the climate change denialists! Could it be because we have more than a dozen once in 100 year events taking place simultaneously on this planet, and several others that are in the once every 500 year category? Lmao … So predictable. When the going gets scary, the scared will kill the messagers and then curl up in a ball.
Pascal, you still haven’t explained to me how the big oil companies here in the US, with the science departments at Texaco and Standard leading the way, layed all the groundwork – and did all the heavy lifting – on modern climate science throughout the 1950s and ’60s, to only then, starting right around 1970, begin a 50 year program to sow the seeds of doubt – or outright deny that climate change was real – in the publics mind, along with EVERY OTHER CORPORATION on this planet?
A multi-billion dollar 5 decade long propaganda campaign we now know all about?
And again, explain to me why Shell and BP are being sued by their shareholders, for not informing them that their science departments had concluded, in secret, that we will see temps 5C hotter by no later than 2050, but informed their shareholders instead that 1C or thereabouts was what they were planning on?
Big Oil baby! You wanna be climate change denier, you gotta kiss their ass and attack at em at the same time!
As for those of us who accept the 5th grade science of climate change, I’ve met many thousands, and not once have I run to anyone who is not equally concerned with the so called “enviroment issues,” because it is the same goddamn thing!
You must be talking to ghosts, either that or you are swallowing whole messages being brought to you by the likes of the Koch brothers and Big Fossil. Tucker and Fox, and 100% of the Republican Party of the United States.
And please, don’t try throwing your people at the WEC into my camp. They’re all yours, pal, and always have been. 50 years of climate change denial, and tens of billions of dollars spent, is not erased because they’ve now switched gears here in last few years, as they smell a new opportunity to profit off the mayhem they’ve always known is coming.
Note: Where do think 40% of civilizations carbon emissions end up Pascal? That’s right, in the oceans, and it’s killing them dead via acidification. Overfishing, an existential threat to ocean life all by its lonesome, is actually this instance, just the weaker twin.
The oceans also trap more than 90% of the latent heat generated generated by mankind’s industrial blast furnace.
The oceans are the only carbon sinks that matter. That puny little Amazon carbon sink you may have heard about, the one that recently flipped to being a carbon emitter? Don’t sweat it.
One of the reasons I have nothing but contempt for climate scientists. They will do anything to avoid discussing the biggest threats, because they’ve been either forced, or coerced, to do so by their corporate masters.
“And please, don’t try throwing your people at the WEC into my camp. They’re all yours, pal, and always have been”.
I always enjoy a discussion in good faith but I’m sorry to have to say that you’re way out of line here.
As well as here: “You must be talking to ghosts, either that or you are swallowing whole messages being brought to you by the likes of the Koch brothers and Big Fossil. Tucker and Fox, and 100% of the Republican Party of the United States”.
I never listen to any of those people.
Besides, implying that I swallow propaganda hook, line and sinker because I’m too dumb to make up my own mind by doing my own research is downright insulting, which is not nice.
The post is elsewhere. Is there some deep state conspiracy that prevents you from responding to posts in the normal way?
Is there some deep state of incomprehension within your mind that doesn’t allow for understanding “see reply up there for space”?
You insult me every time you bring up climate change. You claim people like me are such morons they fall for a hoax perpetrated by um … well, that part is always left unclear.
Which is even more insulting. Who has altered my mind to such an extent that I believe this children’s fairy tale called climate change?
Also, are you saying that the 10,000 hours of my life I have put into this subject has been wasted?
And that is my point Pascal. For 50 years all the darkest and MOST POWERUL forces that I am aware of have been claiming climate change isn’t real, and yet now I am told I am aligned with those same forces, because I have malign purposes to make everyone ride bicycles and freeze to death in winter.
Again, answer the questions? Big Oil was at the forefront of the science, and then spent the next 50 years covering their tracks. This is an incontrovertible fact.
Why?
And two, the science departments at oil companies like BP and Shell don’t give a fuck about climate politics. Is it hoax, is not a hoax? Irellevant. They have one purpose, and that is to ascertain the facts to best of their scientific abilities, relay the data up to the top of corporate chain, so the execs can make the best informed profit driven command decisions.
And those science departments resources and global cohesiveness dwarf those of the scattered climate science community, who might get a 1 million dollar grant to go study a forest here, beg and receive a 2 million dollar grant to study a glacier there, and never seem to have a clue what the big picture actually looks like as a result.
The greatest mea culpa ever uttered, “faster than expected,” which over the last 10 years has become the go to postion of all the feckless cowards we lump together and call climate scientists.
How could we possibly have predicted that a 72 degree Fahrenheit temperature anamoly would occur on this planet before the year 2,500? Well, if any of them had been following their own science, in the aggregate, it shouldn’t have been the slightest bit of a surprise what happened in BC last spring.
It wasn’t to me, put it that way.
Just you know, there is peer reviewed paper* (unknown to all but a handful) that has 3C as the extinction level temp. But once you get to 4C, you are talking dozens of papers, and 5C, well, I think everyone with a brain knows what that means.
5C by 2050 Pascal. Is it any wonder the shareholders at Shell are suing? They were told the shitstorm was coming for their grandchildren, not for them.
And their pissed.
*Strona and Bradshhaw.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35068-1
The paper is not so much about temperature, as it is about the catosrophic biodiversity loss that will attenuate temperature increases, due to a myriad of contributing factors. Ain’t that something? I mean, who would’ve ever thought that the annihilation of our biosphere might also be of concern to one track climate fuckwits like me.
Reply to Pascal below.
To answer briefly:
1/ I never threw ad hominem at you and never implied guilt by association which are unpleasant sophistry tricks used by activists of all descriptions. Not my cup of tea.
2/ The climate change hoax is based on computer modelling and computer modelling is bullshit as we’ve seen first hand in the Covid hoax and the predictions of Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson. Personally in this matter, I trust what I see and what I see doesn’t change. Even in this particularly hot summer according to the media, I’ve had 33ºC on my balcony and 27ºC inside like every other year and this has been the same all my life. And I don’t give a damn what tall tales all the Bill Gates-financed Neil Fergusons of the world will come up with.
Capitalism just isn’t working. Firing cannons at a nuclear power plant is OK but buying oil from Venezuela is morally reprehensible. Call it what you will, our system is crazy.
“Capitalism just isn’t working.”
It’s working really well for Pfizer.
The American populist Huey Long, running for president (before his providential 1935 assassination by one of those “motiveless” types, removed the only threat to FDR’s triumphant reelection), wrote a campaign song with the words “Every Man a King.”) When told that this phrase might be considered “sexist,” Long immediately changed it to ‘Every Man a King and Every Gal a Queen!”
“…………we can expect this continual pattern of wealth obstruction via wealth extraction to continue until people get tired of being kept poor and powerless by those who benefit from their poverty and disempowerment and use the strength of their numbers to force the emergence of a more equitable system.”
Groundhog Day yet again!
Just exactly HOW are the masses of average people going to “use the strength of their numbers to force the emergence of a more equitable system”? Very specifically, are 80+ million US voters going to CONTINUE to vote for an R or a D when they enter a voting booth in November of 2022 and November 2024? If they do, they should expect absoultely nothing but More Of The Same until the following election (Groundhog) days.
My brother-in-law takes seriously the bumper sticker slogan that “He who dies with the most toys wins”.
He actually told my wife that her cancer treatment was bad for the “Economy”‘.
Of course, that was the end of our Thanksgiving dinner, him having provoked an outburst of rage from me directed at him.
The wealthy may appear to be human but they really are dead inside.
https://covestreetcapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/cncartoons021011-5441-1024×768.jpg
Great take! I’ve known some very rich people. Using the term ‘billionaire’ is a bit like ‘the ’60s’, an arbitrary division. One comment said it’s about status, which is a type of power. Studies show that more money creates less empathy without increasing happiness. I’ve seen the career competition of total dollars earned. I’ve listened in on billionaires making racist jokes around the campfire and denigrating the poors. Are these sad folks just psychos or would most people become the same if they were great earners? I know some whose motivation is to create generational wealth for descendants they’ll never know. I’ve also walked into the homes of old hoarders, stacked with newspapers and trash, and had to call in a caseworker. That’s incredibly sad as well. Many types of illness and motivations caused by our lovely system of competitive advantage.
A very interesting article, Caitlin – as always. I agree it’s incorrect to describe the billionaire as “a hoarder”, suggestive of a mental health issue. But there is a delusion there nonetheless: the motivation is power, but power is an illusion.
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/
Call it greed. Call it injustice. Call it eccentric monstrosity and a foundation of all corruption across the globe. This isn’t about being rich. There has always been the rich throughout history who didn’t want world domination and oppression of the the less savvy. I too, wanna be rich but please, I wouldn’t want to control others around the world, telling them how to chew and swallow their. That would be damn unwieldy and burdensome. Why would anyone who is sane enough want to do it, its a mystery and folly of the highest order. The danger of this modern phenomena of wealth-ism is that they think they own the earth and all that is upon it. No wonder there are calamities all over.
Not specifically on funding. Website – (https://clintel.org/about-us/) solicits donations and has a group of “friends” that provide a required min donation. The1000 or so signatories seem to be well credentialed. Everything to me looks credible with the objective to do science not religion…S
Ozymandias
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
I think it’s all about exclusivity. People who suffer from a feeling of low self-worth NEED the feeling of exclusivity to feel special and important more than healthy individuals.
What a lot of nonsense. It is correct to point out the difference between ‘Hoarding’ and ‘Collecting’. Hoarding is a Psychological protection of the fear of having nothing. It is a compulsion, whether it is money of baseball cards.
Collecting is accumulation for a purpose. Wealth and all possessions have one of two values, function or status signals. The wealthy obviously have all the functional needs met, shelter, food, security, clothing, transport, recreation etc. so any further accumulation is for status. The only reason to go to a very expensive restaurant and eat minuscule portions of extravagantly prepared Avocados is to ‘show off’. The only reason to have 300 pairs of shoes is to demonstrate wealth to your friends and admirers (ask my wife).
At some point it becomes a competition, which is why it is reported that this on or that one is the “richest” billionaire. Sure a comfortable bed is nice, but you can only sleep in one at a time, and quite honestly, you are more healthy sleeping on the floor (which is why Japanese and Chinese are so fit into their hundreds) but a rolled up tatami and a sleeping bag do not tell others how wonderful you are, whereas Hugh Heffner’s 20ft bed obviously means he is someone special.
The wealthy are all “Emperor’s Clothes’ victims and we continue to ooh and arrr like idiots.
In my youth I had a old neighbour who told me “It is going to rain tomorrow.”. It didn’t, but he repeated “It is going to rain tomorrow.” every day he repeated it but living in the Namib, it never did.
So I didn’t bother to listen to his nonsense once I had established that everything he predicted never happened.
Yet millions of fools continue to believe the “Climate Change’ idiocy even though every single prediction has failed. The newest is that in the year 2,500 unless we stop using cars, the sea will rise by 20ft because Antarctica will melt !
I don’t mind people being stupid, except that it destroys my quality of life right now.
Goddamn Lemmings forcing me to run along with them at gunpoint.
The only downside to the internet is that anyone at all can use it. Even empty-headed chumps like you who just have to say something even if it makes no damned sense at all.
Yes, yes, yes!
” They’re not wealth-hoarding, they’re wealth-obstructing.”
Exactly right.
The middle-classes of the West, especially the massive one here in the US, began to fly too close to the sun (kings), and therefore had to be destroyed.
It’s all about separation, and best way to separate is to suck all the wealth away from those below you, and where it goes isn’t all that important, but if ends up adding some meaningless points to your blowout scoreboard, bonus!
In other words, the New World Hoarder (aka WEF) is made of dis-hoarders?
A healthy middle class has the freedom to care about social issues, which is what brought the whole social revolution of the 1960’s on. Suddenly, young people dared to enter the political arena to press their demands for a better quality of life… labor rights, environmental protections, food and safety, healthcare rights, then later women’s and gay rights. Nixon was the last president to pass environmental laws due to people pressure so they made an example of him.
The decision was made in the 70’s to carve away at the middle class in order to make people focus more on self-preservation (the “me” generation) of the 80’s. Workers were being squeezed and forced to become more competitive as capital flight caused labor breakdown in the US. Financialization and privatization were the west’s downfall.
“Nixon was the last president to pass environmental laws due to people pressure so they made an example of him.”
Yeah they did. They could’ve impeached and convicted him
for bombing Cambodia, instead they got rid of him for engaging in the type of “crimes” Presidents these days commit every day before breakfast.
I mean, come on, abusive of power, obstruction of justice, failure to co-operate with Congress? Lmao …
It sent a dual message I think to incoming Presidents. We now make available to you all sorts of executive powers – and retirement pleasures – your predecessors were not blessed with in the past, so have at it (!) and enjoy (!), but remember, but if you attempt do anything that might benefit the American people in the aggregate, you will be eliminated … in one way or another.
Yea. Environmental groups actually cared about pollution back then. Big business neutered them quite effectively with Climate Change. They dont care about the environment anymore, just getting CO2 out of the air. It started a green cottage industry complete with carbon credits while basically giving heavy industry a free pass. It amazes me how people cannot see this.
George Galloway calls the Beltway indoctrination process “treason,” and I concur. (1:27)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7XdUdL4ys0
“Neo-liberalism, by definition, is treason,” is a kindergarten truism I’ve been pointing to for about 15 years now.
And if I were to look at the 535 members of Congress, only one would I point to and say without hesitation, “that man is not a neo-liberal (!), ” and that would be Bernie Sanders.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Bernie though, he did afterall, talk my kind of talk, but for all I know, it’s possible he’s been playing me for a fool these past 40 years.
He used to be a pretty good bullshitter, but he doesn’t even keep up a pretense anymore.
First of all:
Environmental Collapse is unavoidable by now. All of our elites have tried to persuade us, that we are on the most optimistic scenario of future projections. Tunrs out, when you do nothing but lip service, that isn’t what you get and we appear to be on the most pessimistic possible outcome. That means that we know by now for a fact, that we WILL at least get that 4°C increase in global temperature, but since we do not completely stop greenhouse gas emissions right now, that won’t be the end point.
This means, that roughly half the earths population will die (at least) along with a large part of our biosphere.
Second:
My proposals for the wealth inequality:
Establish a ceiling. Set a ridiculously high limit for the amount of wealth a person can own on this planet, like say 100 million $/€. If you get there you can no longer get anything, but have to live off that. If your fortune is in companies, those get ruled by the government, thereby ensuring correct taxation and putting production means in public hands like Marx demanded.
Remove elections. Parliaments get filled by randomly drawing people, who have to serve the common good for some time. Larger budget decisions can no longer be made by single entities, but need to be put to the scrutiny of (other) randomly drawn anonymous people who get to decide. The number of people must be proportional to the size of the propsed budget.
The idea is obviously to put a hard limit on the amount of power one can have and spread responsibility on pretty much everyone.
Also, i strongly support Caitlins idea of inversly proportionate privacy or proportionate transparency.
“Remove elections. …The idea is obviously to put a hard limit on the amount of power one can have and spread responsibility on pretty much everyone.”
Bravo! Share that power out! Direct Democracy is indeed where we should be heading. Peoples’ Congresses are a far better idea than letting those afflicted with the power/money disease rule over us. We don’t need to concentrate power in fewer hands as Lord Acton points out, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”. However, should we arrive at a referendum based political reality then it becomes all important as to what the referendum question actually is. How about having a general meet or moot 4 times a year in dedicated local festivals to have a jolly time and also to discuss matters important to the locality & beyond. These would be networkable. The truth is that we don’t actually need professional politicians. Administrators, yes, but politicians NO!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy
“That means that we know by now for a fact, ”
Nope, not a chance!! That devalues the rest of your quite reasonable comment sadly, you pop into my mind as a global warming idiot. Go spend some time on Wattsupwiththat, or one of the many ‘anti-global-alarmists’ sites and you will see there is plenty of evidence that man, CO2 and methane have nothing to do with climate.
Currently the Southern hemisphere is half a degree colder than their 1980s baseline.
Meanwhile, random selections for those in power is an excellent idea, just like picking a jury in your murder trial. We have the the technology for the public to vote on major issues. We could have inverse privacy… but all these things rely on the public picking up their pitchforks and killing enough politicians to change the minds of those left.
That’s difficult, for as Caitlin pointed out, those in power now come from many walks of life and their common link is their common interest in keeping us poor. They invented the Welfare State to keep the poor happy, and it will be extremely hard to change that into an uncertain future.
@KP: Now this is blasphemy! How can you not believe what the media, who wouldn’t lie to us to save their lives and have never done so, tell us about global warming?
How can you not understand that if there is something sacred that the presstitutes would never lie to us about, it is global warming?
I bet if we pushed you a little, you might even say that if something is peddled tirelessly by the media’s front pages – like the Covid crap for two years -, it means there’s money in it for some big shots – because paper costs money. And nothing could convince you otherwise while it’s common knowledge that Pfizer only doubled its profits thanks to Covid vaccines sales. I’m sure you easily triple or even quadruple your salary or pension every year, don’t you? So what’s a mere 100% increase?
And it is universally known that Al Gore, who peddled the shit that an English tribunal later called inaccurate stuff on nine points is now living in a tent on skid row along with the other carbon billionaires!
The media tirelessly look for the truth to tell it to their readers regardless of anyone’s interest. That’s a fact! For instance, after years of extensive research, they’ve discovered that in the summer, it was hot. Who benefits from that? Nobody! It’s just a fact that they found out, carefully hidden in the Library of Congress behind Dick Cheney’s authorization for torture in Guantanamo and Obama’s decision to extend the war zone after nailing his Nobel Prize certificate on his toilet wall.
But it was particularly hot this year because of CO2! The media tell you for Christ’s sake! And if you say that this also happened (and worse) in the past when there was no fossil fuel-related CO2 emissions…
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/44011/did-the-the-hampshire-advertiser-publish-an-article-about-many-droughts-in-eur
… you’re a Trump supporter (that includes the whole cortege of usual smears).
The above article was re-published in 1852 in the Hampshire Advertiser from an original published in the Galignani’s Messenger and was shared by an Australian politician named Craig Kelly on his Facebook page.
Kelly’s Wikipedia entry says that he “has been widely criticised for spreading misinformation on social media. He has given a platform to numerous conspiracy theories and has propagated climate change denial and falsehoods regarding COVID-19”.
Falsehoods regarding Covid-19! Can you imagine? The mother of all crimes! Like Malone, McCullough, Raoult, Fauci – no, not Fauci. I bet he said the jab didn’t stop transmission and all the horrors you can hear on the Jimmy Dore show!
And you can trust Mammon-run Wikipedia’s “fact-checkers” to know razor-sharp the difference between conspiracy theories born anonymously – which are worthless – and the ones peddled by CIA mouthpieces like the New York Times and the Washington Post which are meant to make money for Wall Street in general and the MIC in particular!
Apparently, Kelly deleted this Facebook post. What some people will come up with to avoid being crucified by the globalist mob, I’m asking you…
I wish you and KP would stop confusing everyone with facts.
Last fact I heard: climate change (used in this case as a synonym of global warming gone a bit off with time) is causing children obesity. Not the lockdowns which kept them at home for months eating chips and candies! Climate change! Like it’s well known that if your child lies in the hot sun on the beach and you weigh him afterwards, you’ll see that he’s put on ten pounds. And that’s on a good day! So you’ll have to buy him an ice-cream to make him lose them. Double scoop if you want him to slim twice as fast :o)
American educational system is designed to prevent people from growing up to become wealthy and powerful, or happy, that is for sure.
Maybe that’s why many billionaires dropped out of college.
When you said, ” For normal people…it’s hard to imagine the impulse to keep amassing wealth” I immediately thought, “It’s understandable if you remember that they are keeping up their status over everyone else” and you got there in a couple of paragraphs.
And I’ve been telling everyone who bleats about rushing to the voting booth in November: “We won’t vote our way out of this.” I’ve been advocating a stronger stance for months, if not years.
The problem that I see is exemplified in Bilbo Baggins respons in The Hobbit: “Adventures! Nasty uncomfortable disturbing things! Make you late for dinner!”
Americans will watch people in Sri Lanka or India go into the streets in their millions, and it’s an interesting show on the news. The idea that *we* could go into the streets? No one wants to be late for dinner.
The excuse will be “I don’t want to be like Black Lives Matter.” (Which became more grist for the propaganda mill.)
I keep giving the same advice: Watch How to Start a Revolution DVD documentary (it’s not what you think) and read From Dictatorship to Democracy, the book by the late Dr Gene Sharp. You can buy a copy on eBay.
A few people have taken me up on it. We need a critical mass to get it done. (And if you want to reply to me, don’t bother until you have done the hard work of looking at the material.) He tells us how to do it. It won’t be fun, but necessary. Or we’ll keep going down the sh!tter.
Gerry Mander is my name; redistricting is my game….
Gerry Mander is my name;. Redistricting is my game
Love your passion and fiery perspective. Wonder if you have looked much into counter narrative of the climate change orthodoxy. Like Covid-replete with gaslighting. FYI
https://clintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/WCD-version-06272215121.pdf
Always good to consider alternative viewpoints, especially when the prevailing view is so dire. Do you know the sources of the funding for this group? Also always good to consider that.
Not specifically on funding. Website – (https://clintel.org/about-us/) solicits donations and has a group of “friends” that provide a required min donation. The1000 or so signatories seem to be well credentialed. Everything to me looks credible with the objective to do science not religion…S
We all should hope that these dissenting voices are right. But should we, who are not climate scientists, bank on that? Where does the greater danger lie? Clearly, IMHO, our way of life seems to be killing the global ecosystem, if not via CO2 emissions, then by good old fashioned, ever-increasing, plundering and pollution.
See replu up there for space