SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
martyb
on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:43PM
from the I-got-mine!-And-Yours.-And-Yours.-Annnnnd-yours,-too. dept.
from the I-got-mine!-And-Yours.-And-Yours.-Annnnnd-yours,-too. dept.
The 1% grabbed 82% of all wealth created in 2017
More than $8 of every $10 of wealth created last year went to the richest 1%.
That's according to a new report from Oxfam International, which estimates that the bottom 50% of the world's population saw no increase in wealth.
Oxfam says the trend shows that the global economy is skewed in favor of the rich, rewarding wealth instead of work.
"The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system," said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Only 1% of World's Population Grabbed 82% of all 2017 Wealth
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 261 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
squatcho, n.:
The button at the top of a baseball cap.
-- "Sniglets", Rich Hall & Friends
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 27 2018, @02:34PM (23 children)
Abso-fucking-lutely. We've strayed way the hell off the path. That's not a good reason to go advocating in favor of a system that has proven its unfitness every single time it's been attempted though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday January 27 2018, @03:15PM (12 children)
What then?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 27 2018, @03:37PM (6 children)
How about just attempting to get back on the path? It's got one hell of a proven track record as opposed to anything else.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday January 27 2018, @04:11PM (5 children)
Can you give us a time when we were "on path"? And it might not hurt if you defined "path".
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 27 2018, @04:52PM (4 children)
PATH="lacking the things I agreed put us off of the path"
We've never been perfectly on-path. No nation ever will. We've been a whole hell of a lot closer than we currently are though. Perfection is not the goal; improvement is.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday January 27 2018, @05:20PM (2 children)
PATH="lacking the things I agreed put us off of the path"
:-) Cool
We've been a whole hell of a lot closer than we currently are though.
Ok. Give me a time. please... The suspense is killing me
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 27 2018, @06:40PM (1 child)
Depends on which bit you're talking about.
For lack of corruption and anti-trust issues? You only have to look back as far as the 20th century.
For fewer/weaker government granted monopolies you have to go back farther. Patents and copyright alone went insane in the 20th.
It goes in ebbs and swells but achieving something better than we have now is not a herculean task.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday January 27 2018, @10:32PM
Ok, so now you again bumped into my old contention, better for whom? Sure it's easy to say some people were better off in the *old days*. But your implication is that the whole country was better off. What time period would you want to live?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday January 27 2018, @08:50PM
I bet taxes and social benefits were a bit higher than they are now when we were a bit more "on the path".
Hint: the above conditions absolutely do not equate to "a system that has proven its unfitness every single time it's been attempted".
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27 2018, @03:48PM (3 children)
The system will crash under its own weight because these big fish will always reach for something just a bit too far out of their grasp. That is not the worst of it though, like previous instances in history, the excesses of the tsars for example. will help breed totalitarianism like the leninist interpretation of the marxist myth of communism. To be fair though marx 'did' have some valid criticism of the crony capitalism of his day. a type of capitalism that these wealthy people LOVE and that we are on the path of remaking. his solutions were pretty bad though.
These people will come in and claim to have a one size fits all cure, the people tired, frustrated and angry will seize upon it.
A properly running capitalist based, because the version that was laid down in the wealth of nations is similar to the fairy tail marx lays out in his solution, just at the opposite spectrum. Is one where it's easy to be poor, but very hard to be wealthy and stay that way. If the blood of a capitalist system is money. Then the way it is now is similar to a person about to have a heart attack due to a clogging artery, an aneurysm due to the pooling of blood in a blood vessel in the brain, and deep vein thrombosis due to the pooling of even more blood in the legs.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 27 2018, @03:52PM (2 children)
Outstanding first paragraph. The second one is hard to read though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fustakrakich on Saturday January 27 2018, @04:19PM (1 child)
He's saying blood money should be more evenly distributed throughout the system to avoid gangrene. The analogy works.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 27 2018, @04:53PM
Quite witty. Cheers.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 27 2018, @05:22PM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Saturday January 27 2018, @03:52PM (3 children)
OK, so if someone points out that the communist countries didn't implement pure communism, then it's a "no true Scotsman" argument, while if someone points out that the capitalist countries didn't implement pure capitalism, that's merely "we strayed from the way."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27 2018, @04:14PM (1 child)
Western nations have had hybrid, liberal governance since the end of WW2.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @09:45AM
So have the Eastern too. Yet both these facts are irrelevant here.
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 27 2018, @04:54PM
Nope. I don't ask for perfection, only its earnest pursuit.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27 2018, @06:44PM (2 children)
I keep looking for this mythical person advocating the US go full communist. I have yet to see a single instance of it.
More likely you are using that as a red herring so you can advance your own ideology. When asked for more specifics down the thread you fall to pieces. Go fuck yourself you intellectually bankrupt asshole. Oh, you could also just be an idiot conflating a variety of concepts together with no regard for the actual facts.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday January 27 2018, @07:49PM
First bunch I came to:
http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/Should_the_United_States_become_a_communist_country [createdebate.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @12:45AM
Among the folks here, I'm closest to the mark.
I don't think that USAians will be ready for full-on revolution until a significant number of them get a taste of collective ownership via Democracy in the workplace.[1] [democracyatwork.info]
I advocate for Socialist worker-owned cooperatives, consumer co-ops, and credit unions to get that awareness going.
[1] Smaller downloads here; descriptions are typically better at the link above [kpfa.org]
.
advocating the US go full communist
That would be the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. [google.com]
Pacifica Radio presenter Michael Slate is a member.
He gets 1 hour a week on air. Webcasts archived [kpfk.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 27 2018, @08:58PM (2 children)
There is no pure capitalist system on earth, just as there is no pure communist system on earth - these are only labels, both ideals are implemented somewhere in the middle.
One major factor that addresses corruption for any system is transparency - and that's something that Scandinavia seems to be leading the world in, we should strive to beat them in that area. Transparency exposes illegality, injustice, corruption and waste, until these thing are exposed they will not be addressed or corrected.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @01:03AM (1 child)
The big thing they have there is effective labor unions, going back over a century.
When recovering from The Roaring Twenties and The Great Depression which followed that, IWW and other unions as well as The Communist Party of the United States were instrumental in getting system reforms in USA.
In northern Europe, The Working Class didn't allow their gains to be neutered by Reactionaries as happened with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and subsequent state and federal legislation in USA.
The lesson is to stay informed and keep your guard up.
Reactionaries never give up; when you defeat them, they always regroup and try again.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 28 2018, @12:38PM
The US did quite well by the Taft-Hartley act. The US government shouldn't be interfering in that way in labor-employer disputes.