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Wealth

Community Economies: Reframing Wealth Building

January 11, 2024 Thomas Klaffke, Resilience. , , ,
Our current wealth-building system is based on individualism and therefore elitism. We’re totally focused on this idea of competition, on “beating” the opponents and gaining leverage against others to “win”. Those who outrun their competitors “lead” the race and therefore become the “leaders”. Society envies those who “made it”, who, through gaining competitive advantage, made a fortune and can now enjoy status, power, and independence points that seem almost unreachable for the ordinary person who feels stuck in the daily rat race. “The dominant narrative around leadership in many areas of the world centers individualism over solidarity.

In The World’s Wealthiest Country, Housing Should Be A Human Right

January 2, 2024 Kazmyn Ramos, Scheer Post. , , ,
Too many of us have to depend on sheer good luck to make it — especially when it comes to putting a roof over our heads. We grow up hearing that hard work alone will lift us above the hardships we’re born into. But many of us also watched as our parents worked two and three jobs, relied on extended family to watch us, and still struggled to afford stable housing. Far too many of us are living that same struggle ourselves. It’s not that we aren’t resourceful. My grandmother, who barely scraped by with factory work and countless odd jobs, pulled together with neighbors who supported each other through a mutual aid network.

We Have, In Africa, Everything Necessary To Become A Powerful, Modern, And Industrialised Continent

October 6, 2023 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , , , ,
In his 1963 book, Africa Must Unite, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, wrote, ‘We have here, in Africa, everything necessary to become a powerful, modern, industrialised continent. United Nations investigators have recently shown that Africa, far from having inadequate resources, is probably better equipped for industrialisation than almost any other region in the world’. Here, Nkrumah was referring to the Special Study on Economic Conditions and Development, Non-Self-Governing Territories (United Nations, 1958), which detailed the continent’s immense natural resources.

Open Veins Of Africa Bleeding Heavily

December 12, 2022 Ndongo Samba Sylla and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Inter Press Service News Agency. , , ,
The ongoing plunder of Africa’s natural resources drained by capital flight is holding it back yet again. More African nations face protracted recessions amid mounting debt distress, rubbing salt into deep wounds from the past. With much less foreign exchange, tax revenue, and policy space to face external shocks, many African governments believe they have little choice but to spend less, or borrow more in foreign currencies Most Africans are struggling to cope with food and energy crises, inflation, higher interest rates, adverse climate events, less health and social provisioning. Unrest is mounting due to deteriorating conditions despite some commodity price increases.

That’s Enough Monarchy For Now, Thank You

September 10, 2022 Craig Murray, Consortium News. , , ,
No doubt millions of people felt a heartfelt attachment to the queen, which will be displayed fully in the next few days. But the anachronistic nature of monarchy is also fully on display, in the obvious absurdities and pantomime procedure, with Heralds Pursuivant and royals buckled with the weight of their unearned medals. Yesterday some BBC stenographer had to type with a straight face the strapline “The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge Are Now the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and Cambridge,” which would even 50 years ago have already been absurd enough to be a line in a Monty Python sketch. Still more absurd is the millions in feudal income that goes with that title, all real money paid by actual ordinary people as feudal dues.

The Rioters Weren’t All ‘Blue Collar MAGA’

January 11, 2021 Erin Corbett, Refinery29. , , ,
In the aftermath of the violent siege of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, the FBI and D.C. Police are asking the public to help identify people who planned and participated in the attack. Like clockwork, many people have been quick to assume that those involved in the attack were either rural white working class people, or antifascists pretending to be Trump supporters. Of course, neither of these assumptions could be farther from the truth, and the actual rioters were a varied group of people — all galvanized by President Donald Trump. While some liberals have either ridiculed the rioters they call “blue collar MAGA” — blaming the white working class, without ever contending with the fact that the majority of Trump voters were actually wealthy...

To Tackle Inequality, We Need To Start Talking About Where Wealth Comes From

February 27, 2020 Laurie Macfarlane, Opendemocracy.net , ,
The studies, one commissioned by Trust for London and another by Tax Justice UK, explore public attitudes towards wealth based on focus groups held across England. Both found that most people are relatively content with people getting rich, and that attacks on the wealthy are often viewed negatively.

Three Things You Should Know About Trump’s Racially-Motivated Immigration Wealth Test

September 4, 2019 Jackie Vimo, Nilc.org , ,
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently published its final set of regulations on “public charge,” which amount to a racially-motivated wealth test on immigrant families and individuals pursuing a healthy, stable future in the U.S. DHS finalized this rule against widespread public opposition, having received 266,000 public comments on it, the overwhelming majority opposed to its implementation. If the new rule goes into effect, it would devastatingly impact millions and dramatically reshape our immigration system...

The World’s Wealthiest Family Gets $4 Million Richer Every Hour

August 13, 2019 Staff, Bloomberg.com , , ,
The numbers are mind-boggling: $70,000 per minute, $4 million per hour, $100 million per day. That’s how quickly the fortune of the Waltons, the clan behind Walmart Inc., has been growing since last year’s Bloomberg ranking of the world’s richest families. At that rate, their wealth would’ve expanded about $23,000 since you began reading this. A new Walmart associate in the U.S. would’ve made about 6 cents in that time, on the way to an $11 hourly minimum.

Fixing The Crisis Of ‘Runaway Wealth’

November 28, 2018 By Bob Lord, Otherwords.org , ,
The next Congress faces a stunning array of challenges — on health care, gun policy, climate change, you name it. One crucial challenge starved of attention, however, is what I call runaway inter-generational wealth. That’s where the wealth of a country’s richest families snowballs from one generation to the next, unconstrained by living expenses or taxes, causing an ever-increasing share of national wealth to concentrate at the top. America has experienced this problem for decades now, and last year’s tax act is certain to make it worse. For the first time since the estate tax was enacted a century ago, rich American couples can pass $22 million to their children entirely free of federal taxes.

Canada Is Richer Than The US, According To A New Wealth Ranking — In Fact, The US Doesn’t Even Make The Top 10

November 13, 2018 Shayanne Gal and Hilary Brueck, Businessinsider.com , , ,
The United States is home to more millionaires than any other country in the world. But whether the country is truly the wealthiest in the world depends on how you measure. A report released by Credit Suisse in October says the US is "in the lead" when it comes to global wealth. But a closer look at the numbers in that report reveals a different story. While it's true that wealth in the US is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, it's not the richest when you compare the average amount of wealth per adult. That prize goes to Switzerland, as you can see in the map below.

Billionaires Made More Money In 2017 Than Any Other Year In History

October 29, 2018 By Jake Johnson, Mintpressnews.com , ,
“The past 30 years have seen far greater wealth creation than the Gilded Age,” the UBS annual billionaires report says. During a year in which so much of the world faced deep poverty, the corrosive effects of austerity, and extreme weather caused by the worsening human-caused climate crisis — from devastating hurricanes to deadly wildfires and floods — one class of individuals raked in more money in 2017 than any other year in recorded history: the world’s billionaires. According to the Swiss bank UBS’s fifth annual billionaires report published on Friday, billionaires across the globe increased their wealth by $1.4 trillion last year — an astonishing 20 percent — bringing their combined wealth to $8.9 trillion.

America 2018: Even More Gilded Than America 1918

September 28, 2018 By Bob Lord, Otherwords.org , ,
It took 100 years, but America has returned to its unequal past. With a vengeance. The year many consider the height of the Gilded Age, when John D. Rockefeller’s wealth was at its peak, was exactly a century ago, in 1918. By that time, Rockefeller had amassed about $1.2 billion — the equivalent of $340 billion today. America’s economy and aggregate wealth were much smaller in those days, which made Rockefeller a truly towering figure. Just over a decade after Rockefeller’s fortune peaked, the Great Depression put an end to America’s first Gilded Age. America eventually recovered from the ruins of the Great Depression and made huge strides toward economic equality. Between 1945 and the early 1970s, circumstances for all Americans, rich and poor alike, improved.

Stop Warehousing Wealth In Charity Funds

August 3, 2018 By Chuck Collins and Helen Flannery, Inequality.org , , , ,
Over the years, the IPS Program on Inequality and the Common Good has examined the ways that extreme inequality effects philanthropy.  In 2016, IPS published the report Gilded Giving: Top Heavy Philanthropy in an Age of Extreme Inequality, which looked at the rise of mega-donors and the decline of small-dollar donors, and the risks of both for a democratic society. In that report, IPS briefly examined the rise of donor-advised funds (DAFs) as a mechanism for holding funds for later donations.  At that time, in 2015, the largest recipient of charitable donations in the U.S. was the United Way, an enormous public charity that had traded that top spot back and forth with the American Red Cross for decades. 

Five Powerful Families

July 18, 2018 By Bob Lord, Inequality.org ,
Five powerful families? Is this about the mafia? No, for these five families, it’s not la cosa nostra, “the thing of ours.” Rather, it’s la cupidigia nostra, “the greed of ours.” And it’s their greed that’s killing our democracy. Six hundred billion dollars approximately equals the budget for the United States Department of Defense for an entire year — enough to pay, feed, and house over 1,000,000 active duty service personnel and 800,000 reservists, operate close to 1,000 military bases, pay 750,000 civilian personnel, and fund all military equipment purchases. That $600 billion also equals the combined wealth now hoarded by just five American families — specifically, the Walton, Bezos, Koch, Gates, and Mars clans. The Walton family alone has a combined net worth estimated at $150 billion. The poorest of the five families, the heirs of the Mars candy fortune, hold about $90 billion.
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