Robert Reich: Davos Is The Source of All Our Ills

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Fri Jan 24, 2020, 04:44 AM - Edit history (1)

'Robert Reich: Davos Is The Source Of All Our Ills,' Truthdig, Jan. 22, 2020.

As the Senate debates Donald Trump’s future, chief executives, financiers and politicians have assembled in Davos, Switzerland, for their annual self-congratulatory defense of global capitalism. The events are not unrelated. Trump is charged with abusing his power. Capitalism’s global elite is under assault for abusing its power as well: fueling inequality, fostering corruption and doing squat about climate change.

Chief executives of the largest global corporations are raking in more money and at a larger multiple of their workers’ pay than at any time in history. The world’s leading financiers are pocketing even more. The 26 richest people on Earth now own as much as the 3.8 billion who form the poorer half of the planet’s population. Concentrated wealth on this scale invites corruption. Across the world, big money is buying off politicians to procure favors that further enlarge the wealth of those at the top, while siphoning off resources from everyone else.

Corruption makes it impossible to fight stagnant wages, climate change or any other problem facing the vast majority of the world’s population that would require some sacrifice by the rich. Popular anger is boiling over against elites seen as irredeemably greedy, corrupt and indifferent to the plight of most people struggling to get by. The anger has fueled uprisings in Chile, Spain, Ecuador, Lebanon, Egypt and Bolivia; environmental protests in the U.K., Germany, Austria, France and New Zealand, and xenophobic politics in the U.S., the U.K., Brazil and Hungary.

Trump’s support comes largely from America’s working class whose wages haven’t risen in decades, whose jobs are less secure than ever and whose political voice has been drowned out by big money. Although Trump has given corporations and Wall Street everything they’ve wanted and nothing has trickled down to his supporters, he has convinced those supporters he’s on their side by channeling their rage on to foreigners, immigrants, minorities and “deep state” bureaucrats...

Read More, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/robert-reich-davos-is-the-source-of-all-our-ills/






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[DanieRains]

1. First To Rec

Big Money Buys Politicians Worldwide.

And they don't pay anything to help the planet. Oh, yes, maybe a crumb here, and a penny there while they literally buy countries.

The 1% has 150 trillion in wealth.

Suck on it suckers!!!

[Duppers]

2. It's about greed and it's about oil, as Rachel Maddow states

in "Blowout," her new book.

Rachel Maddow pinpoints the root of all evils: The fossil fuel industry

The fossil fuel industry has warped democracies, poisoned people, fostered corruption and ruined the environment, writes Rachel Maddow.

Her new book, “Blowout,” takes on the fossil fuel industry or, as one person she cites puts it, the “excrement of the devil.” This is not — and who would expect it from Maddow? — an “on the one hand, on the other hand” type of journalistic endeavor. She states her thesis at the outset: The oil and gas industry “is the most consequential, the most lucrative, the most powerful, and the least-well-governed major industry in the history of mankind.”

...The industry is so rich, so “ginormous,” so intertwined with every aspect of our lives and the lives of everyone on Earth that, if you follow the dots, it explains how almost everything in the world works — ultimately, she warns, it will “fatally injure the whole freaking planet.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-root-of-all-evils-the-fossil-fuel-industry-says-rachel-maddow/2019/10/03/14273cd6-de1a-11e9-8dc8-498eabc129a0_story.html

Rachel said on her program that this was not the book she intended to write when she began investigating this administration's connections to Russia. She began to realize it was about oil, that "all roads led to the oil" and gas, as she put it.

So, how can we ever utilize alternative energy sources when we so obsessed with oil and fossil fuels? It's almost like a religion - the PTB cannot see the light and move on.

[appalachiablue]

3. Thanks for the post, the immense worldwide system that dominates

for how much longer