cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/57305272
Total billionaire wealth in the EU reached €2.4 trillion by late November, exceeding Italy’s entire GDP of €2.2 trillion and approaching France’s €2.9 trillion economy, a new Oxfam report found.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20260118190308/https://euobserver.com/health-and-society/ara3abf5ee
Capitalism is a threat to democracy.
But thanks for getting on nearly the same page, Oxfam.
No shit!
Most of the words ultra-wealthy are verifiably sociopathic. Capitalism literally rewards those who posses the least empathy, the most.
It’s more than that. It’s a feedback loop. Having distance from the consequences of your actions encourages sociopathic behavior. Power such as wealth is the easiest way to create that distance, even if you don’t want to
I believe Plato pointed this out in The Republic.
He thought the richest citizen needed to have no more then 5x the wealth of the poorest citizen or you would inevitably slide into oligarchy.
We crossed that threshold so long ago that you can make 5x the poverty level and still not be able to afford a house.
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0 isn’t real, it is a social construct created by big math.
You add by 0 and its still the same… what?
You subtract by 0 and its still the same… why?
You multiply by 0 and you BECOME 0, the heck?
You divide by 0 and its… big not even a number just a concept… sure buddy!
No shit bro for real?
Recent high-profile acquisitions include Jeff Bezos purchasing the Washington Post, Elon Musk buying Twitter (now X), and Patrick Soon-Shiong acquiring the Los Angeles Times. A billionaire consortium also bought significant stakes in The Economist.
In France, far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré has transformed CNews into what critics call the French equivalent of Fox News. In the United Kingdom, three-quarters of newspaper circulation is controlled by just four wealthy families.
This is amazing. News and communication in the internet age was supposed to be democratised publication and agency to the voice of the average person, and it is to a small extent, but for the most part society was just like
I was a longtime reader of The Economist, but over time as I grew older and presumably wiser, I found it was not what it pretended to be.
It loves to cloak itself in the legitimacy of rigorous economic research and neutral data driven positions, but it is really thinly veiled opinion pieces driving ideological neo-liberal economics. It’s a mouthpiece for billionaires to persuade educated laymen on a particular brand of **politics under the guise of the certainty of rigorous economics, while practicing ideological pseudo-economics.
I cancelled my subscription a decade ago. I still read Public Library copies from time to time, but I find it obnoxiously disingenuous and dangerously lopsided with terrible conclusions. On rare occasion I find something ellucidating, I’m left to wonder if I can trust the source, or was it ideologically driven data fabrication or just a rare tossing the dog a bone for credibility.
Your post is a succinct summary of the “study” of economics. It’s just supporting a conclusion in exchange for taking a bunch of bribes and cherry-picking data to support your argument.
I suspect the only time the US got close to representative government was the New Deal era. Most people just live their lives and don’t think in ideological terms. The ones that do are considered “too into politics” and usually believe in reform because it requires less of them than the alternative. Anyways, how about that bread and circuses?
So when are we going tondo what about this?
This. Has. To. Stop.
We cannot allow a single person or family to control a single news organization, let alone multiple. Anyone who thought that was a good or even okay idea has been, and continues to be, delusional.
We’ve been pointing this out ever since the concept of currency became a thing, but I’m sure we will learn our lesson this time and stop doing it. This can’t just be how it will always be until we drive ourselves to extinction stuck on this miserable rock, Right?
Hey, the rock is fine, we’ve made society a miserable place. The pack is calling me…
Not a very good actor, but seems like a good person and he’s funny. He worked hard to be where he is so sure “the rock” is fine.
Not just rich people, also stupidity is a threat to democracy but how to fix it?
The stupidity is happening because it benefits rich people to fill the world with stupid people. Stupid, gullible people are the key to their endlessly growing profits and wealth extraction.
We already know how to solve stupidity. We have always known it. Education has been one of the core pillars of human civilization since antiquity. It wasn’t the first man to discover fire who changed everything, it was the person who discovered how to teach the next generation to control fire at least as well if not better than they originally did.
Education has not failed us. Education has been sabotaged and dismantled. By rich and powerful people, for their own purposes.
First we get rid of those rich and powerful people who have set themselves against us, then we rebuild everyone’s education and if we’re lucky, we might get to move on with our civilization eventually. Nobody promised it’s going to be easy. But it is necessary, if we wish the human race to continue, and traditionally we’ve been pretty stubbornly invested in that.
Trust me there are people who even using the best education they stop being stupid is like it is in their genes.
I know people who have intellectual disabilities who are some of the loveliest and most caring people I’ve ever met. Intelligence does not dictate a person’s capacity to be a productive and caring member of society. Empathy, however, is a skill that can be taught to all but a few who are clinically psychopathic. Intelligence is not a marker of a valuable member of society - empathy and compassion are.
Get that Nazi shit out of your brain. We all have reactionary ideas like this imbedded in us from growing up in western society. So, please, I beg you, purge that “it’s in their genes (blood)” and “iq” shit from your brain. It’s just a modern version of “blood and soil” even if you didn’t mean it that way.
At first I thought they meant it like “nepo babies going to ivy leagues remain stupid and out-of-touch,” but on second glance I think you’re right. Yikes.
One reason that people are stupid is because rich people need slave labor, so they set up a system where people don’t learn to think for themselves.
This makes me think, there is some kind of “system creationism” philosophy in the far left that is not unlike the Christian one. Thinking that some all powerfull entity (or group) created/designed the situation by itself rather than thinking it is the result of extremely complex historical chain of events and balance between groups and environments. By extension it leads to thinking that somehow removing the powerful entity magically solves the problem.
Rich people are a very solvable problem, so let’s focus on problems we can solve first okay
ALL the rich people, right? Including pootin and Pooh bear?
What makes you think that Pooh is rich?
Racists like to compare President Xi to a yellow animal.
Again, let’s focus on problems we can solve first. That means taking the beam out of our own eye before we go around criticizing the motes in others, or however that parable goes. We have far worse problems in our own home.
