Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

[JimC]

His company is pushing destructive coal mines in Queensland, on sacred ground to the local indigenous population. I hope this puts a spanner in the works...

[pErvinalia]

Yep. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and other executives were indicted by a federal grand jury in New York for allegedly paying more than $250 million in bribes to Indian government officials and concealing them from US investors. Between 2020 and 2024, the defendants agreed to make illegal payments to obtain lucrative solar energy supply contracts with the Indian government, according to the indictment. “The defendants orchestrated an elaborate scheme to bribe Indian government officials to secure contracts worth billions of dollars,” Breon Peace, US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement. —David E. Rovella

You’ve picked yourself up, and overcome impossible odds, you put in the work and gotten so far. But now you’re stuck, and you just can’t seem to break into the next level. The truth is, you’re probably just too darned straight. Welcome to the Criminal Billionaires Seminar: fear of consequences is a limiting belief, who’s still limiting your potential?

After all the worst that will happen is a fine of some millions, a negligible risk.

[Brian Peacock]

If you have $1bn and spend $1m a year it's going to take you 1,000 years to spend it all. But if you leave it in the bank and get 1% on it annually then you'll get to spend $10m in interest a year - $27,000+ a day. Even if you're taxed at 90% on that $10m you'll still get $2,700 a day or $985,500 a year.

A billion is more than enough to meet anyone's needs - and yet the billionaire class still don't seem happy with their lot and will seemingly even resort to crime, or just old fashioned manipulation and political fiddling to avoid taxation etc they can easily afford, to amass a wealth that's almost impossible to spend.

Clearly, after a point, money ceases to be a problem worth worrying about, at least in personal terms. So what's worrying these people really? What's motivating them? It's obviously something deeply psychological, and while they work out their issues we're all going to burn.

[Sean Hayden]

Sure, I think we all ponder that. But at that level they’re probably trading money for influence and playing empire.

[pErvinalia]

Ego and power.

[Sean Hayden]

Delta Air Lines
CEO Ed Bastian said the Trump administration’s approach to regulation could be a “breath of fresh air.”

Speaking to reporters ahead of Delta’s investor day, Bastian noted that President-elect Donald Trump campaigned saying he would take a “fresh look” at regulation and bureaucracy.

The U.S. Department of Transportation under Secretary Pete Buttigieg has issued a host of rules aimed at protecting consumers, some of which the airline industry has bristled at, including one this year that requires carriers to provide automatic cash refunds to travelers when an airline cancels a flight.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/20/delta-c ... ation.html

I'm always amazed--though I shouldn't be--at how badly the corporate world tolerates being inconvenienced, given how often they inflict the same on the rest of us.

Oh, and, Republicans and Democrats are all the same! lol, --sigh

[Tero]

Guy reviews book...thinking we are over Trump.

It is sometimes hard for caring human beings to believe that there actually are people — lots of them — who hate the idea of equality, democracy, and justice, and who fight for a jackboot world that is unequal, undemocratic, unfair, and unjust. It’s easier now, post-Trump. We know who they are, we know what they want, and we’ve had a glimpse of just how they would use power to keep people down. The ironic thing is that many of the bottom-rung infantry in the fight against justice are in the bottom percentiles of prosperity, but through the magic of authoritarianism they buy into a politics that benefits only the top 10 percent.

In the second half of this book, Piketty outlines his thoughts on what must be done if progress is to continue. Progressive taxation, with heavy taxes on the filthy rich, is essential, as is investment in education and health care. But Piketty describes many other ideas still to be invented — for example, a universal inheritance, in which the wealth of the super-rich is taxed to provide a modest “inheritance” even for the poorest, to be paid at the age of 25, so that everyone has the means of getting a start in life.

Piketty’s ideas, I believe, provide an important and pragmatic piece of a pretty much complete theory of politics and activism. That politics, acknowledging the advances of the Enlightenment, would be heavily based on John Rawls’ "A Theory of Justice." The next step is to consider William A. Edmundson’s argument that only democratic socialism can meet the requirements of "A Theory of Justice." From there forward, Piketty provides not only a historical base that justifies the need for a new kind of economics, but also the outlines of a blueprint on how to continue that work.

Foothills reviewing A Brief History of Equality by Piketty

[pErvinalia]

[Sean Hayden]

I like it. But you’d want to see spending across incomes, and maybe how much spending happened on credit…

I didn’t buy a thing.

[Sean Hayden]

[Tero]

Piketty was right.

[Tero]

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism Paperback – February 21, 2010
by George A. Akerlof (Author), Robert J. Shiller (Author)

Akerlof and Shiller reassert the necessity of an active government role in economic policymaking by recovering the idea of animal spirits, a term John Maynard Keynes used to describe the gloom and despondence that led to the Great Depression and the changing psychology that accompanied recovery. Like Keynes, Akerlof and Shiller know that managing these animal spirits requires the steady hand of government―simply allowing markets to work won't do it. In rebuilding the case for a more robust, behaviorally informed Keynesianism, they detail the most pervasive effects of animal spirits in contemporary economic life―such as confidence, fear, bad faith, corruption, a concern for fairness, and the stories we tell ourselves about our economic fortunes―and show how Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and the rational expectations revolution failed to account for them.

My view of the economy is the same as Terry Pratchett. So I got nowhere with this book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

[Brian Peacock]

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[rainbow]