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[americanliberation]

[americanliberation]

The Elephant Curve

it is crucial to understand that if "The main conclusion that can be drawn from the graph is that the global top 1% experienced around a 60% increase in income, whereas the income of the global middle increased 70 to 80%.", it means that the very wealthiest are extracting astronomically more wealth per capita from the rest of the world than anyone in the middle or working class. Think about it. If someone is "making" (aka taking) $10M income, their 60% increase is $6M. Since they already have multiple homes and cars, plenty of food and medicine, etc, it means they have millions more to spend on investing in ways to make/take even more money out of the system. Automating their businesses to increase profit while laying off employees. Lobbying governments to craft policies that benefit and subsidize their interests and socialize their costs onto the environment and society, contributing to think tanks to spread 'free market' ideology, etc. Let's look at the global middle class..."As our study defines it, people who are middle income, globally speaking, live on $10.01-$20 a day, which translates to an annual income of about $14,600 to $29,200 for a family of four. "So if you were making/taking $15k in income, and it increases 80%, that $1000 per month increase is going to get you what, exactly? Paying interest on student loans and credit cards. Paying exploding costs for medical care, childcare, and college for your kids, sending money back to the poor family that you came from. Maybe some nicer food and toys sometimes. At what cost though? Now there's no multi-generational family farm to go back to, and you're competing with the poorest billions of people to work harder and longer. Now you're completely dependent on employment to a company that is extracting profit from your labor and profit from its investments in collecting your rents and interest payments. Meanwhile, what has the top 1% done to earn this added power? Probably move money around in various markets rigged for the 0.01-0.1%. Inventing money in VC swindles. Things that add nothing at all to society or the world. The Elephant Curve graph tells a story of a civilization cannibalizing itself to produce nothing more than more empty mansions and large looking numbers in bank accounts.

[americanliberation]

Are Life, Liberty, and Happiness Luxuries?

I try to avoid mentioning politics on my own feeds, unless I've got something that I think is new or insightful to say, but this might qualify so I am posting it. Proposition 1a: Liberal or progressive politics are ideally the activism of Enlightenment values - which are roughly, "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" or "Liberty and Justice for All", "...all men are created equal...with certain unalienable Rights...Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". Proposition 1b: Enlightenment values are distinct from Authoritarian values of the Pre-Enlightenment type (Authority belongs to monarchs, nobility, agents of the church, etc) and/or the Anti-Enlightenment type (Some people are intrinsically inferior to others and are not entitled to life, liberty, or happiness). Proposition 2: The rapid spread of Enlightenment values has occurred concurrently with the spread of mercantilism/capitalism, science, technology, and industry, which have had enormous benefits and costs that have been unevenly distributed to different people around the world. There are good reasons for considering this concurrent relationship of P2 as a cause-effect relationship. There are also good reasons to consider it to be coincidental, or the other way around - with historical improvements in living conditions in Europe leading to Enlightenment values as reflections of, or justifications for the material benefits that were already growing (as a result of the end of the Bubonic Plague and the rise of military power to colonize less well armed societies, for example). Because of the historical coincidence of P2, Liberal or Progressive ideas are associated with luxury, and because of the cause-effect ambiguity of P2, it is possible to think of having "Left wing" or Progressive philosophy as an effect rather than a cause of growing up in relative privilege. Further, because many people have grown up in Liberal Democracies while at the same time being deprived of luxuries or even basic comfort and safety, it is easy to conflate the hypocrisy of those individuals who enjoy material privilege in Liberal Democracies at the expense of others less privileged with a hypocrisy of Liberal or Progressive views themselves. One of the goals of Conservative media (especially the Right Wing neo-media) is to try to reinforce that identification of Liberal values with the hypocrisy of spoiled, decadent people. Conservative-Republican politicians frame Liberalism that way - as a decadent luxury of the past that we (urgently) no longer can afford. The movie "The White Tiger" presents a main character who becomes a hero by turning against the wealthy elites that he was born by caste to serve, becoming a free man as a capitalist gangster. His narration includes the assertion that goodness, or being good is itself a luxury. Is this true, or do we make it seem true by polluting Enlightenment values with financialisation values that are ultimately anti-Enlightenment? Who and what does it serve to make a virtue of opposing anti-fascism?

[americanliberation]

Trickle Down, Siphon Up

https://slate.com/business/2014/09/distribution-of-average-income-growth-during-expansions-how-the-rich-conquered-the-economy-in-one-chart.html