Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
And that’s the amazing thing about climate change. Because whilst it’s the greatest injustice in that those least responsible are the ones most impacted. Solutions to climate change that are fair are also the exact solutions needed to tackle economic inequality.
The national budget in any country is one of the key instruments a government can use to fight inequality and bridge the gap between the rich and the poor. For this reason, Fight Inequality Alliance Zambia has been carrying out a People’s Budget campaign in the last couple of months to advocate for a more equal budget that represents the needs of the majority poor and not the elite.
Ultimately, the voting system at the WB/IMF contributes to the perpetuation of global inequality. The system ensures that the very countries that became rich by plundering the global South during the colonial period are now, by dint of their plunder, empowered to determine the rules of the global economy in their own interests, indefinitely. Inequality begets inequality.
A meaningful strike in defence of the living world is, in part, a strike against the desire to raise our incomes and accumulate wealth: a desire shaped, more than we are probably aware, by dominant social and economic narratives. I see myself as striking in support of a radical and disturbing concept: enough.
Presidential candidates should take a pledge: The middle class should not pay one dollar more in new taxes until the super-rich pay their fair share.
Any gains in technological efficiency must be accompanied by an economy built not on growth, profit and self-interest, but care and responsibility if they are to be effective. This, not hipsterized eco-efficiency, is where we should channel our desires for sustainability—something that so many of us are so dearly committed to, and something that we all urgently need.
The debate about global poverty is important. But our collective understanding of this matter will only be served by intellectually honest and sincere engagement with the arguments at hand.
This is the basic argument of a book I have been lost in for the last 10 days: The Technology Trap, by the Swedish-German economist and historian Carl Benedikt Frey. His basic thesis is that this phase of the 21st century is turning out to be very like the early 19th, in the sense that technology is causing a great crisis of status, security and trust in institutions.
Six months ago you might have been hesitant to say the words. But thanks to a political season of bold ideas – and the furious response of the U.S. public to four decades of extreme inequalities of wealth and power – you can now utter the words in polite company. It is time to tax the very rich.
One of the main reasons we are concerned about inequality in the first place is that it allows rich people to exercise power over the lives of the poor.
If we had to choose one voice, one single slogan, to represent the pivot we’re now passing through, as Wen Stephenson suggests in the Nation, we might well pick the Czech playwright and ex-president Vaclav Havel and his notion of “living in truth.”
Episode 13, Band-Aid Town, returns to the premise of the show: the absolute batsh*t-crazy (lack of) response to the enormous, urgent challenges of the climate emergency, the energy transition, an economic system that’s destroying the prospects of a viable planet, and the growing racial and wealth divide.
