“Cellphone location data shows where people are leaving home and coming near other people.”
We’re DOOMed.
““Cellphone location data shows where people are leaving home and coming near other people.””
“We’re DOOMed.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, perhaps not from that... But it can suck being playthings for THESE Guys:
(More from “Over There”...)
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Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich by
Chrystia Freeland – review
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/01/plutocrats-super-rich-freeland-review
Who is the richest person to have lived?
Given the impossibility of comparing chariots with private
jets, this is an absurd question. But it is still one
economists have sought to answer, with perhaps the best
measure – as defined by Adam Smith – based on annual income
as a multiple of the average wage of fellow citizens.
Their answer is not Marcus Crassus, whose fortune was the
same size as the entire government treasury of the Roman
Empire. His annual return was paltry for a plutocrat,
equating to the average yearly income of 32,000 Romans. Nor
was it those robber barons of the Gilded Age – Andrew
Carnegie, whose wealth peaked in 1901, took home the same as
48,000 typical Americans while John D Rockefeller’s vast
riches yielded an annual income equal to 116,000 of his
countrymen.
The wealth of these figures from history pales in comparison
with the strutting financiers of Wall Street, the geeky
billionaires of Silicon Valley and the grisly oligarchs who
plundered Russia. Trumping them all is Carlos Slim, the
telecoms tycoon whose £53bn fortune is equal to that of an
incredible 400,000 of his fellow Mexicans.
There has always been a gap between rich and poor but this
is just one sign of how the gulf has widened into a chasm
over the past few decades. Creaming off more and more wealth
is a new elite, a transglobal class of mainly self-made men
carving out unimaginable fortunes. They are the subject of
this timely and absorbing analysis by former Financial Times
deputy editor Chrystia Freeland.
Forget the 1% targeted by the Occupy mob. Freeland is
talking about the 0.1 per centers who look down with disdain
at the paupers scrabbling around on a few million a year.
She quotes another shocking sign of our times: three decades
ago the average American chief executive made 42 times as
much as the average worker; today this ratio is an obscene
380. And bear in mind the richer you are, the smaller
proportion of your income you tend to pay in tax, levels
diminishing even at the very top of the tree.
(The author is currently the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada)
Would You Recognize a Plutocracy If You Saw One?
A handy guide for understanding when a democracy ceases to
be particularly democratic.
https://inequality.org/great-divide/would-you-recognize-a-plutocracy-if-you-saw-one/
How can we tell when a democracy, or rule by the people,
evolves into a plutocracy, the reign of the rich?
Easy. We have a democracy when a political system can and
does make a good-faith effort to address the problems
average people face.
In a plutocracy, on the other hand, the political system
pays no more than lip-service to average people’s problems
and works diligently instead at protecting — and growing —
the wealth of the already wealthy.
By this simple standard, we Americans today unquestionably
live in a plutocracy. Our freshest slam-dunk evidence: the
record of the decade since the Wall Street financial crash
ushered in the Great Recession.
Almost exactly ten years ago, in late summer 2008, the
tremors that had been roiling the U.S. economy ever since
the housing bubble popped the year before turned into an
economic earthquake. The giant Lehman Brothers investment
bank fell into one yawning fissure. The giant insurer AIG
stumbled toward another.
“Citigroup appeared poised to go down next, with General
Motors and Chrysler to follow,” remembers the New Yorker’s
George Packer. “Everything solid in the American economy
turned out to be built on sand.”
No American born after the 1929 crash had ever since
anything like this. In quick order, about 9 million workers
lost their jobs. About the same number of families lost
their homes.
What happened next? Plutocracy happened next. The American
political system came rushing to the rescue of the same
elites whose frauds and financial manipulations had greased
the skids for the crisis.
Earlier this week, a triumphant Wall Street celebrated that
rescue, on the day the stock market reached a historic
milestone: 3,453 days of bull market, arguably, the New York
Times noted, the longest bull market in American financial
history.
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~Easy
“Cellphone location data shows where people are leaving home and coming near other people.”
We’re DOOMed.
*************
Leave your phone at home.