In this interview with Omar Ocampo, researcher on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, we examine why wealth of the very rich has increased by hundreds of billions of dollars since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Furthermore, we discuss the implications wealth concentration and even tax deductible donations by billionaires have on our society. Lastly we surface the short and long term solutions that policy makers and movements can pursue to improve the system.
Omar is a researcher for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts Boston with a B.A. in Political Science and holds a Masters in International Relations from the American University in Cairo. His thesis focused on the politics of international oil and humanitarian intervention in Libya. Prior to joining IPS, Omar was an intern for Congressman Stephen F. Lynch. He later entered the nonprofit sector where he worked in direct human and social services.NOTE: The title was edited to $434 billion on the 22nd of May 2020 at 1457. Previously it stated $400 billion. Source: https://inequality.org/billionaire-bo...
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East German reactions to capitalism
“Freedom for what? To buy a pornographic magazine?” might just be the most cutting, succinct, ruthless criticism of capitalism I’ve seen in a while.
They’ll rob you of your sovereignty, of your culture, of your labour, of your dignity, but they’ll always give you enough options to dull the pain. It makes them money, after all.
- Marko Milojevic & Tvrtko Balić
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"Even Europe is an unremarkable event on the way to a more serious outcome, that of the disappearance of collective sovereignty. And we can start to see the formation of a typology other than that of the passive or even manipulated citizen with now the image of the hostage-citizen, of the citizen hijacked by those in power. Hostage taking has become the very form of terrorism today, a democratic form of state terrorism."
~ Jean Baudrillard, 2005
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"When the Fatherland is in danger, everything is allowed except not defending It."
- General José de San Martín
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"Violent confrontations with antifascists gave the Nazis a chance to paint themselves as the victims of a pugnacious, lawless left. They seized it.
"It worked. We know now that many Germans supported the fascists because they were terrified of leftist violence in the streets. Germans opened their morning newspapers and saw reports of clashes..... It looked like a bloody tide of civil war was rising in their cities. Voters and opposition politicians alike came to believe the government needed special police powers to stop violent leftists. Dictatorship grew attractive. The fact that the Nazis themselves were fomenting the violence didn’t seem to matter.
"One of Hitler’s biggest steps to dictatorial power was to gain emergency police powers, which he claimed he needed to suppress leftist violence.
"In the court of public opinion, accusations of mayhem and chaos in the streets will, as a rule, tend to stick against the left, not the right.
"This was true in Germany in the 1920s. It was true even when opponents of fascism acted in self-defense or tried to use relatively mild tactics, such as heckling. It is true in the United States today, where even peaceful rallies against racist violence are branded riots in the making."
- https://theconversation.com/how-should-we-protest-neo-nazis-lessons-from-german-history-82645?fbclid=IwAR2zaOnNMiv_ltrvaeQ51xNa8bEC2tTOzrEhT9UG05m9WGYVSJanKR17xvA
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10 Reasons Why Africa Will Never Forget Thomas Sankara
1. He sold off the government fleet of Mercedes cars and made the Renault 5 (the cheapest car sold in Burkina Faso at that time) the official service car of the ministers.
2. He reduced the salaries of well-off public servants (including his own) and forbade the use of government chauffeurs and first class airline tickets.
3. He redistributed land from the feudal landlords to the peasants. Wheat production increased from 1,700 kilograms per hectare (1,500 lb/acre) to 3,800 kilograms per hectare (3,400 lb/acre), making the country food self-sufficient.
4. He opposed foreign aid, saying that "he who feeds you, controls you".
5. He spoke in forums like the Organisation of African Unity against what he described as neo-colonialist penetration of Africa through Western trade and finance.
6. He called for a united front of African nations to repudiate their foreign debt. He argued that the poor and exploited did not have an obligation to repay money to the rich and exploiting.
7. In Ouagadougou, Sankara converted the army's provisioning store into a state-owned supermarket open to everyone (the first supermarket in the country).
8. He forced well-off civil servants to pay one month's salary to public projects
9. He refused to use the air conditioning in his office on the grounds that such luxury was not available to anyone but a handful of Burkinabés
10. As President, he lowered his salary to $450 a month and limited his possessions to a car, four bikes, three guitars, a refrigerator, and a broken freezer.
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"We tend to associate the idea of concentration camps with their most extreme instances – the Nazi Holocaust, and the Soviet Gulag system; genocide in Cambodia and Bosnia. But the disturbing truth is that concentration camps have been widespread throughout recent history, used to intern civilians that a state considers hostile, to control the movement of people in transit and to extract forced labour. The author Andrea Pitzer, in One Long Night, her recent history of concentration camps, estimates that at least one such camp has existed somewhere on Earth throughout the past 100 years.
"The definition of a concentration camp is sometimes fuzzy, but at root, such camps represent a combination of physical and legal power. They are a way for modern states to segregate groups of civilians by placing them in a closed or isolated location via special rules that are distinct from a country’s main system of rights and punishments. Many have been set up under military jurisdiction – by the British during the Boer war, for instance – while others, such as the Soviet gulags, have been used in peacetime to deal with social “undesirables”.
"Cruelty and the abuse of power have existed throughout human history, but concentration camps have not. They are little more than a century old. The earliest began as wartime measures, but on numerous occasions since then they have become lasting features. They are a product of technologically advanced societies with sophisticated legal and political systems and have been made possible by a range of modern inventions. Military technologies such as automatic weapons or barbed wire made it easier for small groups of officials to hold much larger groups of people captive. Advanced bureaucracy and surveillance techniques enabled states to watch, count and categorise civilians in ways they couldn’t have done in earlier eras. As Pitzer writes, such camps “belong in the company of the atomic bomb as one of the few advanced innovations in violence”."
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