Economic Inequality

[blumenkraft]

Yes, i was wondering which thread i should post it, Sidd. Absolutely fits in both.

[nanning]

Sorry, here I go again .
America is not a country. It isn't even a continent. It doesn't exist.
The country is the U.S.A.. Of course everybody knows that but names and language are important. That's all.

One would think that the very rich, who are seen as very successful, would not need to trample all poor and deprived people. This says a lot about their collective psyche and group culture. It is simply evil and insane. The very rich feel supreme but are obviously not happy. They are hardly human anymore. It is clearly never enough and the very rich have all the power.
Socialism is their enemy. High morality is their enemy. Human rights is their enemy. Whistleblowers are their enemy. Jezus is their enemy. Truth is their enemy.

The very rich are destroying the beauty of living nature everywhere. But strangely they build their large estates in places surrounded by beautiful (manicured) nature. That is insanely contradictive. Do they like living nature or not?
Completely mad are these 'successful' people. That's the truth. The most powerful people on Earth are cuckoo, crazy, wetiko. They've lost all sense of reality and truth in their very rich group's 'bubbles', and are living in their own nefarious fantasy worlds where the only valuable things are money, influence and vainness.

[Tom_Mazanec]

So, nanning, I am a United Statesian? 

[blumenkraft]

America is not a country.

That's correct and i agree. But i'm not the one who came up with the slogan. I only added the asterisk.

[nanning]

Tom, you could call yourself a North-American.
Someone from the United Kingdom (U.K.) is called a Brit or Briton (wikipedia).
You could use the demonym from the state you live in. e.g. if you live in Utah you call yourself a Utahn or Utahan (wikipedia).

Or, instead of calling yourself American, you could say that you are from the U.S.A. .
United Statesian is good as well, maybe change it to Unitedstatesman?

[sidd]

Re: top 10%

This is in reply to a post in another thread

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/

sidd

[Aporia_filia]

Mr. Piketty publishes a new book. It looks like again he's clearly pointing out the obvious.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/19/capital-and-ideology-by-thomas-piketty-review-if-inequality-is-illegitimate-why-not-reduce-it

"His premise in Capital and Ideology is a moral one: inequality is illegitimate, and therefore requires ideologies in order to be justified and moderated. “All history shows that the search for a distribution of wealth acceptable to the majority of people is a recurrent theme in all periods and all cultures,” he reports boldly. As societies distribute income, wealth and education more widely, so they become more prosperous. The overturning of regressive ideologies is therefore the main condition of economic progress."

[sidd]

Living with those living on the street: van Buren at the American Conservative:

"NYC is home to 70 billionaires, more than any other American city ... the city also has the highest homeless population of any American metropolis, close to 80,000 and growing. The number of homeless single adults today is 142 percent higher than it was ten years ago, and currently at the highest level since the Great Depression."

"Public libraries are one of the facilities shared with the over 64,000 homeless who sleep at night in the gulag archipelago of NYC’s vast shelter system. Most of the shelters are only open after dark, leaving residents to find somewhere to physically occupy between 7am and 11pm. Since there is no daytime plan, in bad weather they take over the libraries. "

"Not homeless but damn poor, 400,000 reside in taxpayer-paid permanent (permanent as in multi-generational, grandmas passing squatter’s rights to grandkids) public housing. Conditions are literally toxic in these “projects,” as well as crime-ridden and just plain Third World crumbling."

"These urban stories are only about a part of the homeless population. The others are bent beyond existing systems, so severely mentally ill they are driven out of the coffee shops and shelters. They’re inevitable in a society without healthcare constantly adding to a homeless population smoothing over the bumps of the street with alcohol and opioids."

"At the Fulton Center subway station, problems with the mentally ill homeless reached a point where wire rope was installed to eliminate places to sit. A team of rent-a-cops make the homeless stand, wandering through the space waking up those who tumble ... Most of the city’s such privately owned public spaces employ guards not against crime per se, but to enforce rules such as how much baggage the homeless can bring in."

"NYC stores invest in barbed grates the homeless can’t lay on comfortably (the hostile architecture of protrusions and spikes that make it impossible to sleep on a park bench or wall are pretty much sculpted into the architecture of the city"

" We’re a society built around economic inequality. We’ll all just have to learn to navigate our way through."

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/in-new-york-city-homeless-is-where-the-heart-is/

sidd

[sidd]

Where does wealth come from ? Power dictates how it is measured

MacFarlane at opendemocracy:

"Britain is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Net wealth is estimated to stand at around $500,000 per household ... British workers are now 29% less productive than workers in France, and 35% less than in Germany. How can this discrepancy between high levels of wealth and low levels of productivity be explained?"

" something can only become an asset once it has become property – something that can be alienated, priced, bought and sold. "

"When the United States finally abolished slavery in 1865, people who had formerly been slaves ceased to be counted as private property. As a result, slaveowners lost what had previously been their prized possessions, and overnight over half of the wealth in the southern US essentially vanished ... the amount of labour, capital and natural resources remained the same. What changed was the rights of certain individuals to exercise an exclusive claim over these resources."

"aggregate wealth is not simply a reflection of the process of accumulation, as theory tends to imply. It is also a reflection of the boundaries of what can and cannot be alienated, priced, bought and sold, and the power dynamics that underpin them."

"some goods and services are provided by private firms on a commodified basis, whereas others are provided socially as a collective good ... Where a service is provided by private firms (for example, healthcare in the USA), shareholder claims over profits are reflected in the firm’s value – and these claims can be bought and sold, for example on the stock market. These claims are also recorded as financial wealth in the national accounts."

"However, where a service is provided socially as a collective good (such as the NHS in the UK), there are no claims over profits to be owned and traded among investors. Instead, the claims over these sectors are socialised. Profits are foregone in favour of free, universal access. Because these benefits are non-monetary and accrue to everyone, they are not reflected in any asset prices and are not recorded as “wealth” in the national accounts."

" rules that favour capitalists and landlords over workers and tenants, such as repressive trade union legislation and weak tenants’ rights, increase returns on capital and land. All else being equal, this will translate into higher stock and property prices, which will increased measured wealth. In contrast, rules that favour workers and tenants, such as minimum wage laws and rent controls, reduce returns on capital and land. This in turn will translate into lower stock and property prices, and lower paper wealth."

" in both scenarios the productive capacity of the economy is unchanged. The fact that wealth would be higher in the former case, and lower in the latter case, is a result of an asymmetry between how the claims of capitalists and landlords are recorded, and how the claims of workers and tenants are recorded. While future returns to capital and land get capitalised into stock and property prices, future returns to labour – wages – do not get capitalised into asset prices. This is because unlike physical and financial assets, people do not have an “asset price”. They cannot become property. As a result, it is possible for measured wealth to increase simply because the balance of power shifts in favour of capitalists and landowners, allowing them to claim a larger slice of the pie at the expense of workers and tenants."

"ever since neoclassical economics replaced classical economics as the dominant school of thinking in the late 19th century, economic rent has been increasingly marginalised from economic discourse."

"The fact that houses are not lucrative financial assets, and renting is more secure and affordable, means that the majority of people choose to rent rather than own a home in Germany – and therefore do not own any property wealth."

"we have known since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo that land is not a source of wealth, but of economic rent. The trillions of pounds of wealth amassed through the British housing market has mostly been gained at the expense of current and future generations who don’t own property"

"German capitalists and landowners have less bargaining power than they do in the UK, while workers and tenants have more power. While lower shareholder returns and house prices are reflected in the OECD’s measure of wealth, better pay and conditions and lower rents are not."

"Embedded in the definitions of all economic statistics are value judgements about what is desirable and what is undesirable, which in turn shape the way we think about the economy. At the moment, the way we measure the wealth of nations mainly reflects the fortunes of capitalists and landowners rather than workers and tenants. Britain looks wealthier than Germany on paper, but this does not reflect the lived reality for most people. "

"objective metrics often have ideological assumptions baked into them."

"paper wealth has in many places become decoupled from productive capacity"

" the distribution of wealth has little to do with contribution or productivity, and everything to do with politics and power."

https://neweconomics.opendemocracy.net/distribution-wealth-little-productivity-everything-power/

sidd

[sidd]

Can't afford medical care ? Beg !

Johnson at commondreams:

"eight million people in the U.S. have started a crowdfunding campaign to help pay for their own or a member of their household's healthcare costs"

"GoFundMe is becoming one of the most popular insurance plans in the country."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/19/barbaric-8-million-americans-have-been-forced-start-crowdfunding-campaigns-cover

sidd

[sidd]

Deep dive into USA wages and inflation: Cass at manhattan institute

"BLS reports that medical-care prices have risen 93% from 1999 to 2018;[20] but during the same period, the average family health-insurance premium has increased by 239%.21]"

" A new car, according to BLS, costs no more in 2018 than in 1996 ...  Typical cars that a family might consider for their primary vehicle are illustrative: the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for a base-model, four-door Toyota Camry increased by 40%, from $16,800[23] to $23,600;[24] MSRP of the lowest-cost minivan, the Dodge Caravan, increased 47%, from $17,900[25] to $26,300.[26]  ... BLS reports these prices as flat because today’s base-model vehicle has many more features than one did 20 years ago"

"AAA reports that in 2018, the total cost per mile (averaged across all vehicle types) reached 59.0 cents, up from 42.6 cents in 1996—a 39% increase, which is substantially lower than the BLS private-transportation estimate for price levels."

"BLS reports that the price of telephone hardware fell by 81% between 1997, the data set’s start, and 2018 ... how much must be spent to keep the family connected in modern society. "

“the cost of living is a real concept, and changes in the cost of living will occur even in a world without money. It is a description of how difficult it is to buy a particular level of well-being."

"an affordability perspective, which emphasizes whether people are able to support themselves on a contemporary wage at a contemporary standard of living. From that perspective, standard inflation understates the challenge that rising prices may pose to households "

" If health-insurance premiums rise because conditions present in 1% of families can now be treated with new and extremely expensive procedures, prices have not increased for inflation purposes. But 99 out of every 100 households that have to pay more for their insurance will never experience any perceptible change in the quality or quantity of their health care ...   the gains are present only on average and are concentrated in a very small fraction of the distribution."

"median spending on actual health care for a family of four (two adults, two children) has risen [1999-2017] from $2,122 to $4,380"

"In 1985, the basket cost totaled $13,227, which, at a weekly wage of $443, would require 30 weeks of work to cover. In 2018, the basket cost totaled $54,414, which, at a weekly wage of $1,026, would require 53 weeks of work to cover. This is a problem, as there are only 52 weeks in a year."

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/reevaluating-prosperity-of-american-family

Read the whole thing. Carefully. And the appendix.

sidd

[nanning]

From:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2020/feb/25/conversations-from-calais-the-posters-sharing-migrant-voices-with-the-world

'Conversations from Calais'

[nanning]

continued..

[nanning]

continued..

[sidd]

Wage went up ? You got screwed !

“I have to live with my family because I can’t afford rent on my own. I don’t have health insurance. I’ve had a rotting tooth in my mouth for years that I haven’t been able to receive treatment. I’ve applied for Medicaid in Virginia and every time I’m told I make too much money, and Target has told me I don’t qualify for their benefits because I don’t get enough hours,”

"Target workers have noted a drastic reduction in scheduled hours and significant increases in workloads as Target has increased their minimum wage "

"Target reported record share prices at the end of 2019. CNN Business ranked Target’s chief executive officer, Brian Cornell, their top CEO of 2019"

“The last time they raised it, they cut our hours, so I’m basically making less than I was before they raised it to $13 an hour,”

"weekly schedule change from full-time, over 30 hours a week, to less than 10 hours in January 2020"

"“My higher-ups still expect us to get the same amount of work done in a fraction of the time.”

“I was full-time, 40 hours a week as a receive. My hours were cut down to 27 hours a week in 2019 ...  I lost my benefits after averaging less than 30 hours a week and they didn’t seem to care. I couldn’t live on it."

"“This year I am losing my health benefits in March because of cut hours and I recently found out I am pregnant so I’m stressed out about it all. I am given eight hours of work to do in a four-and-a-half-hour shift and expected to get it all done,” they said. “I went from 40 hours a week to 15 hours in January 2020.” "

"consistently hear from our team that they’re satisfied with the pay, benefits and experiences they receive from Target,” said a Target spokesperson "

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/27/target-cuts-hours-leaves-workers-struggling

sidd

[sidd]

Piketty interview at tocqueville21:

"everything I have done over these past twenty years has been about the history of inequality. "

" human societies always have imagination in the way they structure an economic system. "

"every society—and to some extent every individual—needs to have an opinion on justice, to justify the existing structure of equality or inequality. I think we need to take these justifications seriously, even though they are sometimes self-serving or hypocritical. "

"Very often you form these views on the basis of your experience of class position, but sometimes you use what you see in the trajectory of your family, or in the trajectory of your country and other countries. Sometimes you read books or exchange ideas. But ultimately you need to be able to describe what you can own in society: Can you own natural resources? Can you own other people? Can you own knowledge? Can you own buildings? How are these property rights exerted, and what are the powers of the different stakeholders in this relation?"

"The other issue is the system of frontiers: What are the limits of the political community? What kind of relations do you want to have with other political communities? How do you treat foreigners? "

"there are always—at any given class position or level of economic development—alternative ways to organize property."

"This entire process of modernization has gone through a much more diverse set of trajectories than what is typically envisioned in the feudalism-capitalism transition story, and this diversity is very important in order to analyze the prospects today for inequality at both the national and global level."

"All sorts of trajectories were possible, but the one that was indeed taken has elements of the “sacralization of property,” in the sense that people replaced one religious principle with another."

"Another example which I think is even clearer of this phenomenon appears at the time of the abolition of slavery and the issue of whether slave owners would receive financial compensation ... the question was financial compensation to slave owners, rather than slaves."

"it would have been fairer to compensate slaves, rather than to slave owners, and to pay this compensation with a tax—a tax not just on owners of slaves but also other large property owners who benefited from the entire slave system. Addressing slavery in this way could have led to a democratic deliberation about the right level of inequality of property and how to limit the concentration of property in a few hands. But this is exactly what Tocqueville wanted to avoid; it’s exactly what the so-called liberal thinkers—who were in effect the very elite, proprietarian thinkers of the nineteenth century—wanted to avoid."

"There’s an ideology where no matter the number of zeros in someone’s net worth, wealth is always good and cannot be questioned in any substantial manner ... people prefer to sacralize property rights—whatever their level, wherever they come from. We don’t want to know where Russian oligarchs got their wealth, but now that they have it, we say they should invest it in Europe or the US as much as they want, with no limit. I see this a big limitation on our ability to solve other problems, such as rising inequality, global warming, the diffusion of knowledge, the protection of public knowledge, and the preservation of natural resources."

"People who want to equate liberty with private property usually have a political agenda, which is to protect the private property and liberty of a small group of people ... they were shocked by my proposals for a tax on billionaires, but they were even more shocked by the proposal for an “inheritance for all” of €120,000 at age 25. They were very concerned about what all these children of the lower and middle classes would do with this money, and what constraints we would need to put on how they could use it to avoid. They were afraid this would reduce their work incentives. But these same people have no problem with the fact that some people at the top inherit millions, or tens of millions, of euros ... This kind of view of liberty in fact is very elitist and authoritarian, and restricted to a very small group of people."

"You need to limit the concentration of property at the top—not only at the time of death, but also on a yearly level. This is what allows us to avoid extreme concentration among billionaires, and also to pay for a universal capital endowment, or “inheritance for all,” which I believe would go a long way towards changing power relations in society. "

"One of the most damaging effects of this multiple-elite, Brahmin Left-versus-Merchant Right political system is that it has left the bottom group completely out of the system for quite a long time. This is not going to change in one election. It’s going to be a long-term process. "

"the only other option is to be extremely cynical and say that since these poor people will never vote anyway—and when they vote, they vote for racist candidates—we don’t care at all about them. I think there’s this temptation today in a big part of the Democratic elite in the United States,"

"If you just take oil resources from the ground or fish from the ocean, you get positive GDP, but you produce zero national income. If in addition, you burn the oil, you increase the world temperature and make the Earth unlivable, and so if you put in the right value for the carbon emissions, you actually produce negative national income rather than positive GDP."

" If you have only environmental indicators without any income, or wage, or wealth indicators, then it’s going to be very difficult to build the sense of economic and social justice that we need if we want to solve the global warming problem. Look at the carbon tax issue in France and the reaction from the gilets jaunes ... the Macron policy package, which consisted of increasing energy taxes on the vast majority of the population in order to pay for tax cuts for the top one percent of wealth holders. Of course people went crazy over this! "

https://tocqueville21.com/interviews/thomas-piketty-capital-ideology/

I will have to read his new book.

sidd

[nanning]

Thank you very much sidd for your very interesting posts which contain much appreciated critical information.

[blumenkraft]

This is what happens if you allow billionaires to even exist:

Bloomberg Spent $233,333 an Hour to Lose the Presidency and Wage a Class War

Link >> https://newrepublic.com/article/156743/bloomberg-spent-233333-hour-lose-presidency-wage-class-war

[Tom_Mazanec]

blumenkraft:
I am waiting for the first trillionaire.

[blumenkraft]

And i'm waiting for the revolution, Tom. 

[Tom_Mazanec]

And i'm waiting for the revolution, Tom. 

Which do you think will come first?

[blumenkraft]

Woah, good question.

Yours might be more likely because Americans never learned how to use guillotines on their oppressors ...

[sidd]

Unseeing hunger: Moore reviews "Hunger: The Oldest Problem" by Martín Caparrós

"Hunger preys not just on those alive now, but also on those who are yet to come. "

"Systemic hunger is about the failure of our food systems and the fact that one half of the world is eating the food of the other half. This is not new."

"those who suffer most are the poor, and they are already hungry."

"Saying that our food systems are in crisis does not move the debate along at all and changes nothing. "

"How the hell do we manage to live knowing these things are happening?"

"Caparrós is angry. I am angry. But our anger matters not. There are no answers to world hunger in the book. There couldn’t be because the status quo depends on there not being any"

"It is a question of will. We produce enough food to feed everyone, and yet we don’t."

https://literaryreview.co.uk/feed-the-world

sidd

[TerryM]

^^
I imagine that many who have never considered the possibility of being deprived of food will look back and weep as they recall meals left half eaten.
Terry

[Tom_Mazanec]

TerryM:
I always try to eat every thing in the meal.
When I was a kid my father left a chicken out to thaw for cooking the next day and I got sick that day and couldn’t eat it. I got into a fight with him when it went too long and had to be thrown out. I felt so guilty wasting that food. Another time at work my eyes were bigger than my stomach and I took more than I could eat...feel bad about that too.

[TerryM]

Tom
One of the few harmful memes that my parents missed passing on was the "Eat everything on your plate" schtick. "Think of the starving children in India" was absent from our dinner conversation, possibly because both parents had lived through the depression with little change in their relatively affluent lifestyle.


As an adult I experienced more than one period of extreme deprivation, but facing hunger as an adult leaves fewer scars than those who experienced it as children. As an adult I could see that my problems were brought on by my own decisions, and was able to recognise that better decision making would result in better outcomes.
A child recognises that others are in control, and when faith in the competency or generosity of others is lost the psychic scars can cut deeply.


Eating after you're sated is childishly wasteful, and it leads to a fuller waist - something few of us wish for or need.


Terry

[Tom_Mazanec]

TerryM:
The priest at my parochial school told us that the Jews were killed in the Holocaust because they wasted food as children.

[wili]

Tom wrote: "The priest at my parochial school told us that the Jews were killed in the Holocaust because they wasted food as children."

Thanks for sharing how fucked up your childhood was. I'm sure all of us have some kind of horror story like this in our past.

But it prompts the question: If you (as I hope you do) now recognize how utterly fucked up such a statement was, why do you continue to totally and utterly trust the same source of authority when it tells you that all women must be required to totally give up the autonomy of their own body, risking potential death, for the possibility that a pregnancy will come to term and produce a kid?

I'm assuming you have two healthy kidneys, right? Do you think the state (or church, or any other authority) should have the right to take one of them from you at any time against your will on the off chance that it may save someone's life who needs one?

If not, then your support for the church's rigid anti-abortion position is entirely without logic, reason or morality.

Just sayin'...

[oren]

Wili, while I resonate with you, Neven has very clearly requested to avoid abortion discussions on this forum. Plenty other places on the Internet for that.

[wili]

Ah, missed that. Thanks, oren. I will refrain.

[kassy]

We shouldn't have to pay for Jack Dorsey's $40m estate when it crumbles into the sea

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and the payment service Square, recently bought a place here for $21.5m – next door to his $18m present home. The 0.62 acre compound is recessed from the street and perched on a cliff overlooking the beach.

...

And that’s where things get interesting, because cliffside living has become an increasingly risky proposition in California. Warming ocean temperatures are whipping up stronger surfs and more brutal winter storms, causing cliffs to crumble ever faster into the sea. The consequences for thousands of cliff-top houses such as Dorsey’s could be catastrophic. Still, @Jack’s bet isn’t a bad one: depending on when the house goes over the edge, it might well be the rest of us that gets stuck with the bill.

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and the payment service Square, recently bought a place here for $21.5m – next door to his $18m present home. The 0.62 acre compound is recessed from the street and perched on a cliff overlooking the beach.

 The Clean Water Act was a staggering bipartisan achievement. Now Trump is gutting it
Blan Holman
 Read more
And that’s where things get interesting, because cliffside living has become an increasingly risky proposition in California. Warming ocean temperatures are whipping up stronger surfs and more brutal winter storms, causing cliffs to crumble ever faster into the sea. The consequences for thousands of cliff-top houses such as Dorsey’s could be catastrophic. Still, @Jack’s bet isn’t a bad one: depending on when the house goes over the edge, it might well be the rest of us that gets stuck with the bill.

...

When the town’s mayor proposed a “managed retreat” from the coast, home owners and local realtors revolted: the proposal would have effectively taken their homes off the market, cutting them off from potential profits. (Owners does not mean residents: about a third of Pacifica’s housing stock, including many of the most threatened buildings, consists of rental units.) So instead of a managed retreat, the city is taking money from the public coffers and using it to protect property investments by building sea walls and replenishing eroding beaches with trucked-in sand, among other measures.

...

It will go something like this: as houses become astronomically expensive, insurance payouts become astronomically large. In response, in threatened areas, private insurers will cancel coverage, or multiply rates to the point of unaffordability. The state will be forced to step in to stabilize the rates, and keep the land valuable, which will likely involve something like the National Flood Insurance Program, which subsidizes flood insurance provided by private insurers and underwrites the full extent of their losses.

The racist dimension to this wealth transfer must not be overlooked. Fewer than 55% of California households own their dwelling and only 42% of Latino households and 33% of black ones do. Non-urban space, open space, and at-risk space in California is today particularly white, or at least white-owned.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/08/california-climate-crisis-jack-dorsey-home

One more remark.

A couple off years ago a study showed that California could safe either the cliffs or the beaches but not both.

When you protect a coastline you need an integrated approach because if you strenghten place X that might increase erosion in place Y etc. I don´t think there is actual state wide planning, or national level planning so just a bunch op haphazard measures which might interfere with eachother.

[blumenkraft]

Some good tweets:

@jackcalifano

The reason your healthcare is tied to your job is because the people who own this country view you as a machine - they will only fix you if they can still make a buck off you.

@ColsBols

hey remember when the panama papers came out and revealed that all the rich people in the world are part of enormous criminal conspiracy to dodge taxes and hoard stolen wealth in offshore accounts and literally nothing happened

@marwilliamson

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." John F Kennedy

@CinnamonGhoul

Hope we never forget about this year. A year where during a worldwide pandemic the elderly people of America refused to vote for the guy who wanted to give us free healthcare, even though they are the ones most susceptible to the virus.

@JasonReidUK

If you're upset about regular folk hoarding toilet paper, wait till you hear about how a tiny percentage of rich people have hoarded most of the world's wealth

@LiberalCEO

Joe Biden was against gay marriage as recently as 2012. Pete endorsed him.
Joe Biden said abortion wasn't a woman's right in 2006. Klobuchar endorsed him.
Joe Biden opposed busing. Kamala endorsed him.
Joe Biden is an architect of mass incarceration. Booker endorsed him.

Edward Abbey

Growth for the sake of growth Is the ideology of a cancer cell.

Who knew a jew traveling the country offering free healthcare and exposing the dangers of extreme wealth would be so unpopular with the followers of jesus....

[Tom_Mazanec]

The Post-Coronavirus World Will Be Far Worse Than the Pre-Coronavirus World
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/03/29/post-coronavirus-world-will-be-far-worse-than-pre-coronavirus-world/

Signs, especially in the United States, are that the post-coronavirus-plagued world will have even more inequality of wealth, within each nation, than existed prior to the plague. Billionaires are demanding to be included in the bailouts by their governments; and, because billionaires financed the careers of the successful politicians who won seats in their country’s legislature, those demands are almost certain to be complied with. Only the least-corrupt nations will be able to recover fully from the current plague.

[nanning]

https://phys.org/news/2020-03-poor-people-greater-financial-hardship.html

"Poor people experience greater financial hardship in areas where income inequality is greatest"
  by Princeton University

 Excerpts:
"Our work shows that hardship increases for low-income individuals by reducing their ability to rely on their community as a buffer against financial and other related difficulties," said co-author Elke Weber, Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. "This suggests that stimulus measures designed to address the economic and social fallout of the coronavirus should focus on reducing the existing income and wealth gap in our country."

The study was an interdisciplinary effort led by psychologists and economists using data analysis strategies across disciplines.

The researchers conducted eight studies looking at more than one million people across the United States, Australia, and Uganda. Their work included an instrumental variable analysis, lab experiments, online studies, and field work.

Their findings were as expected: Across all countries, the greater the economic inequality, the harder the financial hardship for those with the lowest incomes.
..
'Trickle down' you say?

"In light of COVID-19, stimulus bills could help address some of these issues, while financially helping the most vulnerable."

Let's see what'll happen. Expect the complete opposite


One gets rich(er) by:

• not sharing
• showing less empathy and removing your conscience
• not wanting to pay tax
• enclosing yourself in a bubble of rich(er) people
• moving poor people out of sight
• lowering ones morality to find justification for your actions
• using P.R. (lies) to hide your real motives

If you're really successful, you might buy celebrity-ness and poor people will look up to you. Might even see you as a saviour.

[blumenkraft]

Bri Is Right To Question Kamala Harris - Debunk w/ Ben Burgis

[kassy]

A look on the other side of economic inequality and also how the interplay between business and academia is lets say not optimal. Science should be independent and not be expected to deliver immediate gains or tied to those.

Short story: Eric Weinstein at Joe Rogan telling about an old discovery by his brother Bret on a specific type of lab rats used a lot in the USA for medical tests. Due to the breeding program these rats are not like normal wild type rats which is supposed to be the animal model used. This will lead to all kinds of problematic outcomes in medicine testing. (And this might be one reason that a bunch of medicines that did well initially (in rats) failed to translate later on).

So basically the program optimized for breeding rats which lead to a huge waste of research dollars (It underplays the reaction to toxicity). The original research was from 20 years ago. So basically they have been selling a fraudulent or not optimally labelled product for two decades.

Also ties in to academia, peer review and basically people protecting there interests.

Short simple version from Joe Rogan podcast:

Bad News for Science: America’s Lab Rats May Be Mutants



Long version with the two brothers:

Bret Weinstein on "The Portal" (w/ host Eric Weinstein), Ep. #019 - The Prediction and the DISC.



ETA: In the breeding part i typed rabbits instead of rats so changed to rats.

[sidd]

David Sirota on free COVID treatment in the USA: Fear is the key

"in a political system owned by billionaires, workers are only permitted to get the absolute minimum amount of free health care that may prevent them from infecting billionaires."

"they and their families are indeed personally jeopardized by that grocery worker being unable to afford COVID testing and treatment"

"that same affluent political class opposes Medicare for All because they cant get cancer from poor people"

"the peasantry is only allowed to be given the minimal amount of free health care that makes sure the gentry don't get infected—nothing more. "

" the rich and powerful will only act out of fear, never out of a sense of moral solidarity"

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/07/top-sanders-aide-david-sirota-explains-why-billionaire-class-will-support

sidd

[blumenkraft]

Some good tweets:

@public_archive

Only in the US does "liberate" mean
"go back to work."

@Joshua4Congress

The biggest fraud of the century was
getting people who own no capital to
think they are capitalists.

@existentialcoms

America is a country where billionaires
find it cheaper to finance elections to
get people in who will cut their taxes
than to just pay the taxes. This is called
democracy, apparently.

@LReichennek

Funny how all the consumers
and workers staying home brings
the economy to its knees and
the "job creators" aren't keeping
things running with their amazing
boot straps.

Almost as if it's the people at the
bottom who create wealth.

@timmarchman

Congratulations to Joe Biden for
successfully arguing that a better
world is not possible!

@jackcalifano

Remember when half a dozen senators
committed insider trading and profited
off a fucking pandemic and 24 hours
later everyone forgot about it just
pretended it never happened?

@afronerdism

Fuck all this "essential retail workers are heroes"
bullshit. Essential retail workers aren't heroes,
they're hostages. They want to go home. They want
to be safe. But they can't because they'll literally
starve to death on the streets because without their
jobs they'll be homeless with no healthcare and no
food. We have a society that treats a certain class
of people like shit and yet society literally couldn't
function without them. It's infuriating that they can't
even get decent pay and healthcare.

@chadloder

The concentration of wealth is
staggering.
Let's say you earned $2,000 an hour
and worked full-time from the birth
of Jesus Christ to today.
And let's say you never paid taxes
and saved every penny.
You'd have around $8.3B today.
There'd still be 30 Americans richer
than you.

[TerryM]

^^
All the tweets are excellent. I particularly appreciated the one asking for higher wages & decent healthcare for the retail workers we're so dependent on.
Terry

[kassy]

A covid story which belongs here:

My daughter sent this to me, and while I was reading it, my wife mentioned (during a TV commercial and not knowing what I was reading) if I knew about the Holifield article.

Racism and COVID-19 in Tallahassee

Commentary by Edward Holifield | April 16, 2020
Read more articles in Healthcare

Tallahassee, FL - Faulkner warned us that the past is not dead; it is not even past. In 1948 Laurie Dozier Sr., with a group of white male friends, started Tallahassee Memorial Hospital (TMH). No Blacks were allowed even though Blacks paid a utilities tax that funded the hospital. Some Blacks who were denied admission died as a consequence.

Now we have COVID-19. Blacks will die disproportionately from this too. TMH requires those tested at the Northwood drive-through testing facility to have a doctor's prescription. TMH knows that poor people who are disproportionately Black often have neither a doctor nor health insurance.

Mark O'Bryant, the Tallahassee Memorial Hospital CEO, says that these people should go to Bond, knowing that Bond is horribly underfunded. Of the three testing sites established by TMH, none is in Frenchtown, South City, or in any neighborhood in the Black community. This despite the fact that it is the Black population that suffers the most mortality from the ravages of this virus.

O'Bryant departed from the truth when he said that Black people could simply go to a doctor in the TMH residency program if they needed a doctor. Really? The TMH Family Practice program limits both the uninsured patients and the patients on Medicaid in its residency program. This despite the fact that TMH enjoys a dollar-a-year lease agreement with the city of Tallahassee that allows TMH to control more than a billion dollars’ worth of assets owned by the city. These include the buildings and the land that TMH sits on.

It’s a great business model if you can get it. Meanwhile O'Bryant is paid more than $1 million a year for a hospital that is rated "D" for patient safety. All this while paying no taxes on this nonprofit institution.

There were more than 47,000 people in Leon County with no health insurance the last time I checked. A sales tax initiative back in 2006 would have produced $18 million a year to support the uninsured. Bryan Desloge and his political opponent Will Messer spent $600,000 between them to kill it. The Chamber of Commerce made absolutely sure it would not pass. So did the Northeast Business Association.

Black infant mortality has remained off the charts when compared to whites. Deslodge used the term "million dollar crack babies" when discussing black infant mortality on Gary Yordon's Usual Suspects television show. I was going to give Desloge a pass on that until he failed to publicly denounce the racism and xenophobia of his fellow Republican Donald Trump.

As Black people, we need to know that we are on our own. Dr. Andrea Friall, a Black vice president at TMH, states that if the hospital becomes overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, the hospital will use a triage model "that would take into consideration the best chances of surviving."

In Chicago, where 30% of the population is Black, 70% of the deaths from COVID-19 are Black.

In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, where 27% of the population is black, 81% of the deaths from COVID-19 are Black.

Because Blacks have a disproportionate amount of chronic illness - including asthma, hypertension and diabetes - they will be out of luck. All other things being equal, the last remaining ventilator will go to a white person who enjoys all the privileges, including health care, that a white skin has to offer.

Edward Holifield, M.D. is an activist and physician from Tallahassee, Florida. He is a longtime advocate for people of color in the Tallahassee area, particularly in the fight against Black infant mortality and racial discrimination in health care. He can be reached at ewholifield@yahoo.com.

--
Tallahassee Community Action Committee (TCAC)
Work With Us For Our Next Win!

My daughter added a note:

Update since this article was written-

They’re opening up a Covid19 testing site at the FAMU Stadium (in Southside, predominantly Black Tallahassee) starting this Friday, Because of Dr. Ed Holifield’s article, published by Fight Back! News.

The local paper won’t touch Dr. Holifield’s writing, hasn’t for decades. He’s been blackballed by the power holders of local health policy; they and their lackeys ignore him as a matter of policy when he speaks up against racism in healthcare.  But thanks to some TCAC members having a longer-than TCAC’s existence relationship with Fight Back! News, Ed can get published and amplified.

[sidd]

Money for life: schwarz at nytimes

“You don’t want that leg set by an E.R. doc at a local medical center. You want it set by the head of orthopedics at a hospital in the city.”

“I feel badly that I have the means to jump the line,”

"Dr. Shlain’s Private Medical group does not advertise and has virtually no presence on the web, and new patients come strictly by word of mouth. But with annual fees that range from $40,000 to $80,000 per family"

" for virtually everyone else, the typical wait to see a doctor is getting longer."

“You have no idea how much money there is here,”

" “When I’m at a country club or a party and people ask me what I do, I say I’m an asset manager,” Dr. Shlain explained. “When they ask what asset, I point to their body.” "

"the Park Avenue Suite costs $2,400 per night"

"No one here has a regular doctor anymore."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/business/economy/high-end-medical-care.html

sidd

[blumenkraft]

Comedian Eviscerates The Government's Failed Response To Covid

[vox_mundi]

^ ++

[nanning]

'Heads we win, tails you lose': how America's rich have turned pandemic into profit

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/26/heads-we-win-tails-you-lose-how-americas-rich-have-turned-pandemic-into-profit
  by Dominic Rushe and Mona Chalabi


 Excerpts:
Some of the richest people in the US have been at the front of the queue as the government has handed out trillions of dollars to prop up an economy it shuttered amid the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the billionaire class has added $308bn to its wealth in four weeks - even as a record 26 million people lost their jobs.

According to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive thinktank, between 18 March and 22 April the wealth of America’s plutocrats grew 10.5%. After the last recession, it took over two years for total billionaire wealth to get back to the levels they enjoyed in 2007.

Eight of those billionaires have seen their net worth surge by over $1bn each, including the Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, and his ex-wife MacKenzie Bezos; Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom; the former Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer; and Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX technocrat.

The billionaire bonanza comes as a flotilla of big businesses, millionaires and billionaires sail through loopholes in a $349bn bailout meant to save hard-hit small businesses. About 150 public companies managed to bag more than $600m in forgivable loans before the funds ran out. Among them was Shake Shack, a company with 6,000 employees valued at $2bn. It has since given the cash back but others have not.

Fisher Island, a members-only location off the coast of Miami where the average income of residents is $2.2m and the beaches are made from imported Bahamian sand, has received $2m in aid.

The banks that were the largest recipients of bailout cash in the last recession have also done well, raking in $10bn in fees from the government loans, according to an analysis by National Public Radio.

“The rules of the economy have been tipped in favor of asset owners against everyone else,” said Collins.

By 2016 – seven years after the end of the last recession – the bottom 90% of households in the US had still not recovered from the last downturn while the top 10% had more wealth than they had in 2007.

Throughout the recovery, stock market gains disproportionately favored the wealthy. The top 1% of households own nearly 38% of all stock, according to research by the New York University economist Edward Wolff. Even before the coronavirus hit, homeownership in the US – a traditional source of wealth growth – was well below its 2004 peak.

For black and Latinx Americans, the situation is worse. The black-white wage gaps are larger today than they were in 1979.

Meanwhile, billionaires have been unable to put a well-heeled foot wrong. Billionaire wealth soared 1,130% in 2020 dollars between 1990 and 2020, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. That increase is more than 200 times greater than the 5.37% growth of median wealth in the US over this same period. And the tax obligations of America’s billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased 79% between 1980 and 2018.

So when the pandemic struck, those at the apex of the wealth pyramid were better positioned than ever to take advantage of the chaos. The rest, not so much.

Collins has been studying income inequality for 25 years and has seen the really rich win victory after victory. But even he was surprised by how quickly America’s billionaires have turned pandemic into profit. “I still get shocked,” he said.

[sidd]

How they rob you: 1MDB and Goldman Sachs

"A Swiss whistleblower who leaked damning evidence of the scheme to the media was arrested in 2015 by Thai police on trumped-up charges. He signed a forced confession and spent eighteen months in jail. At least one Malaysian official investigating the crime was murdered, his body stuffed into an oil barrel and encased in concrete. Well-remunerated international legal and PR firms worked to suppress public knowledge of their clients’ misdeeds by lying to the media and threatening litigation. Coursing across the globe, the money reached many distant corners, including both the Obama and Trump campaigns. Former British prime minister Tony Blair was on the payroll of one of the conspirators for $65,000 a month"

“Using prestigious, brand-name gatekeepers is often the key to pulling off complex financial crimes,”

"murdered by two of Najib’s bodyguards, who then destroyed her body with plastic explosives. One of them, who was scheduled to be hanged, confessed that the minister himself had ordered the killing."

"the sale of $1.4 billion worth of bonds; $126 million was immediately siphoned off "

"Seven hundred million of that sum, disguised as the repayment of a loan—which didn’t actually exist—was then wired to a private Swiss bank account "

"New York law firm White & Case crafted the legal paperwork. Respectable banks, such as the Swiss branch of J.P. Morgan and Coutts (where Queen Elizabeth II keeps her money), handled massive transactions without asking too many questions,"

"Najib helped himself to $1 billion, including $681 million wired into his personal bank account in March 2013 for the urgent purpose of financing his 2013 presidential campaign. Thanks to the money, he eked out a narrow victory"

" paid Paris Hilton to attend his parties at $100,000 per bash. Other high-dollar outlays included private jets, $100 million properties, and a $250 million yacht"

"the firm’s executives in London had discerned the rich pickings to be had in Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, whose vast sovereign-wealth fund lay in the hands of managers whom Goldman coolly assessed as displaying “zero-level” financial sophistication. ...  the Libyans ...  were out $1.2 billion, while Goldman took home fees totaling as much as $350 million ... the Libyans sued on grounds that they had been misled, but an indulgent British judge let the bank off the hook"

"In September 2009, when Leissner recommended Low for an account with Goldman’s private-wealth bank in Switzerland, the internal compliance office summarily rejected the proposal on account of the mysterious provenance of Low’s wealth. Notwithstanding this emphatic red flag, according to the Wall Street Journal, Lloyd Blankfein met personally with Najib, Low, and Leissner just two months later at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City to discuss future deals. This was the first of no fewer than three meetings that the CEO reportedly had with Low. In 2012, seemingly oblivious to any possible “reputational consequences,” the bank embarked on a series of three major deals with the Malaysian conspirators"

"in May 2012 Goldman sold $1.75 billion in 1MDB bonds, mostly to unwitting mutual funds in Asia, creaming off $192 million for itself ... Goldman’s enormous cut, 11 percent, was as much as two hundred times the customary rate. A few months later, the bank sold another $1.75 billion worth of bonds, with a similar whopping rake-off for Goldman. Then, in March 2013, only ten months after the first bond sale, Goldman launched Project Catalyze, the third and largest deal, a $3 billion bond issue, purportedly for “energy” and “strategic real estate.” According to U.S. prosecutors, nearly $300 million went to Goldman, while $681 million sped to Najib"

"Over the course of a year, Goldman had earned $600 million from its deals with Low, a man whom its own internal watchdogs had warned was highly suspect"

"White was the national vice chair of President Obama’s reelection campaign, raising at least $500,000 for the race, and he went on to serve as a cochair of Obama’s Inaugural Committee. In 2012, he received a $10 million “consulting” payment from a firm owned by one of Low’s business partners, one who had played an integral role in the Goldman-brokered bond deals. Additional millions were channeled from the fund into DuSable Capital, an “energy and infrastructure firm” co-owned by White and Pras Michel, a former member of the hip-hop group Fugees whom Low had met on the party circuit. (According to a 2019 federal indictment, Low sent Michel $21 million, much of it to be laundered into a number of Democratic campaigns."

"there was little sign of construction on the solar plant, but 1MDB nonetheless paid DuSable a handsome $69 million for its 49 percent share in the project."

"Trump also praised his visitor’s commitment to fighting terrorism—a point that surely gratified the 1MDB chief, given that Najib was claiming this as the very reason he had received a cool $681 million as a present from the Saudis. One month later, Michel sent Broidy at least $6 million from an account controlled by Low"

"The Malaysian people ... will be spending almost half a billion dollars a year in interest and principal on 1MDB’s debt—which includes the bonds sold by Goldman—until 2039."

"“Goldman’s position is that a ‘rogue’ banker lied and fooled all of the smartest, highest-paid bankers in the world; all of Goldman’s risk, compliance, legal, and audit systems and controls; and all of Goldman’s management.”  "

"Goldman’s motion asserts that Blankfein and company were kept ignorant of criminal goings-on by their subordinates"

" It’s a big swamp."

https://harpers.org/archive/2020/05/the-malaysian-job-wolf-of-wall-street-1malaysia-development-berhad/

sidd

[blumenkraft]

[kassy]

I don´t like these pictures. They are presenting the story in a too simple way.

It´s not like the long articles sidd posts provoke much discussion but reading them you at least learn something.

FWIW the statement in the right picture is not true but at least there was a fight.

[blumenkraft]

Kassy, this is how the world works now. In the internet age, you need short and pregnant memes to bring your message across. Memes are a mighty tool you better use if you want to change public opinion in your favor.

[nanning]

blumenkraft, that is not how my world works and, I think, also not how the world of the majority on this forum works. Also not how the scientific community works. Are you yourself clear about who's world you think is 'the world'?
I agree with kassy above.

[blumenkraft]

I'm referring to a world with the internet vs. a world without.