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Showing posts with the label wealth

The Qatar World Cup

The bigger picture in this article is not big enough. While nurses and other workers go on strike in Britain, for example, one has to compare the social value of a professional football player to a nurse and their incomes, and how such obscene injustice has become acceptable and normal. The world Cup and the champion leagues are a capitalist industry run on the 5 basis of competition and profit. The question of class, exploitation and ideology are also at play. Money’s chokehold on modern football Related “We are all complicit in the system” in one way or another. We clap and cheer. We succumb to amnesia. We fill in our day with hypocrisy.

Not Innocent of the Crown’s Crimes

Man must assert his native rights, must say ;  We take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway;  — Shelley, an English poet     Separating the “human” from the institution, and the “family” from the “monarchy” has long been a successful tactic in preventing searching scrutiny of the institution. She faithfully served the British imperial project Related Insurgent Empire

Wealth and Tax Havens

“Drawing on newly published macroeconomic statistics, this paper estimates the amount of household wealth owned by each country in offshore tax havens. The equivalent of 10% of world GDP is held in tax havens globally, but this average masks a great deal of heterogeneity—from a few percent of GDP in Scandinavia, to about 15% in Continental Europe, and 60% in Gulf countries and some Latin American economies. We use these estimates to construct revised series of top wealth shares in ten countries, which account for close to half of world GDP. Because offshore wealth is very concentrated at the top, accounting for it increases the top 0.01% wealth share substantially in Europe, even in countries that do not use tax havens extensively. It has considerable effects in Russia, where the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore. These results highlight the importance of looking beyond tax and survey data to study wealth accumulation among the very rich in a globalized world.” Macro

Studying Monkeys and Humans

 

Human Rights and Economic Democracy

A good piece as usual by Joseph Massad. However, I think he is doing a disservice to socialism by calling what existed in the Soviet Union and elsewhere before 1990 a ‘socialist world’. Economic democracy is the missing link in the struggle for human rights
Note: I am not from the Socialist Party. It just happens to agree with "Nationalise the Banks."
England " In Stockton-on-Tees, those living in the wealthier areas can expect to live as much as 18 years longer than those in the more deprived parts of the town. Life expextancy is 64 for a man. That's the same as Ethiopia." They must be those lazy people, smoking and drinking all day and who cannot go on a bike and look for a better job. How are they supposed to be healthy, shopping at wholefood and doing yoga?  Dying young in Stockton – England's most unequal town
There is a book sweeping the popular media at the moment.  It’s called  Factfulness .  It purports to argue that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the world is becoming a better place.  Poverty is falling, life expectancy is rising; health levels are improving; people have more things and better services.  Even violence and wars are in decline. This is a hoary old message... Rising world inequality
A ruling class that has allowed all this and squandered wealth at home and abroad (enriching Western cities, for example), while their Arab-Muslim brothers and sisters suffer under economic development, poverty and different sorts of oppression, should be overthrown. The next Arab revolution must be socio-economic or it will not change the fundamental. Dubai's upper middle-class  
" Once debts have been subtracted, a person needs only $3,650 to be among the wealthiest half of the world’s citizens. However, about $77,000 is required to be a member of the top 10% of global wealth holders and $798,000 to belong to the top 1%.  So if you own a home in any major city in the rich North on your own and without a mortgage, you are part of the top 1%.  Do you feel rich if you do?  This just shows how poor the vast majority of people in the world are: with no property, no cash and certainly no stocks and bonds!" The vast majority? They are just losers; the are uneducated, they don't know how to be entrepreneurs .. . New figure reached by annual Credit Suisse global wealth report

Education, Meritocracy and Class

"Perhaps the central function that meritocracy plays — complete with SAT exams and other presumptively objective testing mechanisms — is in normalizing the growing class disparities in money, power, and resources. Top universities have been the essential building blocks of our new Gilded Age, facilitating the transfer of wealth and opportunity from one privileged generation to the next — and doing so while cloaking the extent to which today’s meritocratic elite are really the beneficiaries of a modern version of an "old boys’ club." And this applies to elite universities in general, "[H]igher education is a profound instrument of social power, one that can project values independent of state and corporate demands and offer its students and community members a space for their own cultivation. The dilemma is that our universities, in particular our elite ones, are doing less of this work and far more of the invisible work of class reproduction. " Meritocra