I never listen to Rachel Smalley because why would I? If you want Kate Hawkesby, listen to Kate Hawkesby, you’re not buying the warehouse budget version of Kate Hawkesby, are you?
Choosing to even listen to Kate Hawkesby removes the knockoff version of the sweatshop with the same fervor as people who go to polo clubs and refuse to wear crocodiles or buy housing in a suburb next to a suburb where a council tenant lives.
That said, the odd column pops up that requires a degree of scrutiny, and Rachel’s post this week on TodayFM cheering for billionaires reads more like a Tinder profile for corporate CEOs.
She shits on Oxfam’s latest report showing inequality rising sharply and calls for a property tax on wealth to lift billions out of poverty…
The richest 1% of people have amassed nearly two-thirds of the wealth created over the past two years, Oxfam says
… getting the plutocracy (which has benefited from the collective stability of our society and economy to amass vast wealth) to pay more taxes to lift every person on the planet out of poverty is apparently unacceptable to Rachel …
What is unfortunate about Oxfam’s report is the tone in which it is delivered. His solution is to tax the rich. Tax, tax, tax. Oxfam believes this is how you will tackle skyrocketing inequality around the world. She wants governments to introduce a one-time wealth tax and a windfall tax to end greed. She wants a permanent tax increase for the richest 1 percent of the world’s population – at least 60 percent of their income and an even higher percentage for multimillionaires and billionaires.
She doesn’t like the tone and thinks useless dumb countries will squander the resources a wealth tax would generate???
In 2010, the 388 richest people owned more wealth than half of all humanity on earth
By 2015, that number had been reduced to just 62 people
In 2019, only 26 people owned more wealth than 3.8 billion people.
And in 2021, 20 people owned more than 50% of the entire planet.
And last year the richest man in the world bought one of the most important social media platforms.
But Rachel wants the police to sound like we’re demanding payment from the billionaire class to end the misery of consumer culture on which they have built their empires of suffering?
The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger, and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the greatest psychological civil war ever fought against one another.
We’re just hormone-secreting fleshbags addicted to dopamine, the rewards of fat, sugar, salt and sex in a cultural landscape of individualism above all else where we sing sweet secret lies to ourselves in order to make sense of a world around us , which is scary and in constant entropy .
Meanwhile, the planet is burning and every aspect of our existence is being monetized for big data to sell us more things we can’t afford. We are alienated and numbed by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every step we take are all designed to suck money to a minority class that sits above us, while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more available.
If Elon Musk can afford to lose $200 billion, he can afford a damn wealth tax!
Why am I reading Rachel Smalley?
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