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
The sky also happens to be blue. That gotta be news too.
Edit: Okay, having read the summary, it seems like they have proved causality between growing economic inequality and democratic backsliding. Which yeah, most people could have guessed, but now we have a fancy bunch of paper that says so.
So tired of this tbh - I just don’t understand how anyone thinks wealth consolidation to few could be a good thing.
Even if you ignore ethics and assume the billionaires are benevolent - it’s just a bad investment to invest majority of resources to a small number of investments. Does any successful large project hold 99% of their investments in few projects? It’s absurd.
It makes absolutely zero sense no matter how you look at it unless you’re truly full in on delusion that benevolent dictators exist and are impossible to corrupt or overtake.
“But what if it is me someday!!!???” - some guy with 5 kids making $30k/year.
In other news: water is wet.
I would love to have that as a poster.
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.
I couldn’t agree more and had exact the same experience.
In my case I was actually in the Finance Industry when the 2008 Crash happenned and seeing what was done (the state unconditional saving Asset Owners by sacrificing the rest, in constrast with the whole Free Market stuff I had been reading on The Economist for almost a decade) and their take on it, really opened my eyes to the complete total self-serving bullshit of not just The Economist but also the whole edifice of Free Market Economics (a skepticism further boosted by me actually starting to learn Economics - especially Behavioral Economics since it’s the only “Mainly Science rather than Politics” part of it and my background is party in Physics - and deepening my understanding of the Finance Industry as I tried to figure out the Why and How of the Crash).
That shit is Politics hidden behind a veil of Mathematics purposelly misused in a way eerily similar to how I saw pricing for over the counter derivatives being done in Finance: designing models so that they yield the desired results under certain conditions and further controlling their output by feeding them with cherry picked inputs and then presenting the output of the models as “Mathematical proof” that things are as as you say they are, so basically circular logic with some complex Mathematics in the middle to hide their true nature as unsupported claims.
It’s pretty insidious Fake Science stuff if you don’t have a strong background in Science and access to the right information to pierce through it.
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
Great to see the workings of those keen minds. Rich people a threat to liberal democracy, who knew? I mean except everyone that lives outside billionaires colon.
Not just rich people, also stupidity is a threat to democracy but how to fix it?
Rich people are a very solvable problem, so let’s focus on problems we can solve first okay?
Who knows, maybe the other problems will be easier to solve without billionaires making them worse!
ALL the rich people, right? Including pootin and Pooh bear?
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.
I’ll drink to that! Or anything really.
I’ll drink to drinking to anything!
Cheers!
🍻
Trust me there are people who even using the best education they stop being stupid is like it is in their genes.
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.
They’re on the mgtow instance. All they know is Nazi talking points and misogyny.
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.
While true, they are the minority. That is not an argument against education.
The rich are the root of stupidity weaponized against liberal democracy, working people, and the common good.
Fixed by organization, innumerable groups federated on a main forum outside silicon valley’s control cooperating on what we agree on in public and private ways as we see fit. With clear moderation rules appealed to a jury of peers to prevent govt, bus groups getting their hooks in and ratfucking it all.
but how to fix it?
Better education.
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.
What does destroyed mean to you?
Razed to the ground and the ashes salted, to then be rebuilt better.
You’re suggesting we burn our respective countries to the ground, full on civil war and complete destruction, fracture of civil society, starvation and economic collapse, with no guarantees about who, when or what will step into that maelstrom of human suffering, other than your assurances that it will be better than what we have now.
Sorry, but I’m skeptical that you have a reasonable way forward.
Why would you salt the ashes if you intend to rebuild? You’re aware that that makes land inarable for generations, right?
deleted by creator
Um, what? That’s not at all what I was suggesting…
😱🤯
Well let’s get on it folks
chop chop
