A Pox On The Rich

During a commencement address this week, Michael Bloomberg announced that he’s spending $500m to help the United States move closer to a carbon-neutral future. We should be very grateful that Bloomberg isn’t running for president: the money he’s pouring into Beyond Carbon will fund some great and necessary work, like his injection into the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign several years back. But it would be much better for the planet if billionaires like him didn’t exist at all.

As Axios recently reported, the 1% and the world’s biggest companies have more money than they know what to do with, and they’re either hoarding it or pouring it into things like stock buybacks to make the wealthy even wealthier. Hedge funds and private equity funds are snapping up privatized public goods like water and electricity, while rich households are spending their extra cash on asset managers who’ll help them place bets on the next Theranos. Corporate profits have grown as wages have stagnated, all while some of the most useless and destructive parts of our economy balloon.

After the Great Recession, successive rounds of quantitative easing poured trillions of dollars into the global economy, and low interest rates have made credit easy to come by. These factors – and the fact that we place virtually unlimited faith in the prudent investment decisions of corporations and the wealthy to plan out our economy – leave as their legacy a bloated tech sector and fracking, a disaster for the climate that was unprofitable before we bailed out the banks.

The result of all this has concentrated outrageous levels of wealth at the top of the income bracket as global temperatures rise. Before the financial crisis, the top 1% held a collective $15bn in cash. Today they’ve got almost $304bn. And while the yachts and frequent flying habits of the wealthy are a pox on the planet, so is the fact that they now have more money than ever to throw into world-wrecking investments, buying off politicians and lobbying for their pet causes – namely, to let them keep doing more of the same.

You can read the rest @
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/10/billionaires-climate-change-michael-bloomberg

I agree. The super rich are interested mainly in their own fortunes, while the rest of us are finding it hard to live on the crumbs they leave for us. This system is broken, and it's not obvious whether it ever can be fixed.