I had an interesting civics class today on freedom of speech. I was prepared to talk about governmental restrictions on speech, and we did cover that, but what we really zeroed in on was E;pm Musk. No great surprise there: he's been all over the news because he's now a trillionaire (... yeah) and actively advocating race wars in Europe (... double yeah). But I was really impressed by two questions that came up:
1 - Having trillionaires is bad enough, but did it really have to be that guy?
2 - With so much inequality, how can the conversation free speech is for ever really happen?
Free speech in the constitutional sense is of course about the government. They can't lock you up for what you say. And even there this group had Thoughts, probably because they're mostly recent immigrants and the Trump admin. targeting people advocating for Palestinians for deportation has also been in the news. Legally, no one's guaranteed a soapbox, much less an audience.. But at a more general level, there's this whole question of why we let people say hurtful, hateful things that often boil over into real-life consequences like with those riots in Belfast. Or even more generally, with people having to hear who they are be insulted just as they're going about their daily lives.
The answer is because it's good for us as individuals and as a society to actually discuss things with people we disagree with. It's how we find the best solutions, and it's how we both feel heard and see how what we believe and say impacts other people. But that all depends on actually listening to each other and their being a context where discussion, reflection, and change is possible. Just yelling at & past each other is something else entirely.
And when one of the worst person in the world gets to scream the worst ideas in the world to some of the other worst people imaginable, just because he's now almost incomprehensibly, definitely obscenely rich? And particularly because he bought up the algorithm that gets his words out to the rest of us? That's really not what James Madison had in mind.
Anywho, Elon Musk is equal parts infuriating and depressing, and I'll have a proper news roundup on him next week. For now, I mainly just wanted to say some people out there get it, and it did me good to hear them say it. Well done.
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World Cup Ticket Prices: A Mirror Reflecting Broader Economic Inequality
The Ripple Effect: How Ticket Pricing Impacts Your FutureThe soaring prices of World Cup tickets aren’t just about soccer; they highlight a fundamenta...
Spending one million dollars a day it would take 1,000 days (approximately 2 years and 9 months) to spend a billion dollars.
If we left every billionaire in the US with just a billion dollars each and divided the rest (about 19 trillion, trillion with a "t", dollars) between the 50 states and 14 territories each would get around two hundred ninety-six BILLION dollars.
Divided beyween the country's 3143 counties and parishes each would get about $6,000,000,000 (six billion dollars).
Divided between households that earn less than $250,000 a year each household would get roughly $153,000. One hundred and fifty three THOUSAND dollars per household.
Only citizen adults every adult citizen would get around $78,000.
Only adults roughly $70,000.
Only among US citizen residents each would get about $65,000.
If divided by the entire population of the US *each resident* would get close to $54,000.
Note: I am rounding down.
And the billionaires would still be billionaires. Meaning they would have enough money to spend a million dollars a day for two years and still have millions upon millions upon millions of dollars.
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Latest World Bank (an institution controlled by the US and western capitalist countries) data says the share of the population living in extreme poverty, based on the quality of life your money can buy you, is higher in the US than China.
Aaaw these poor Chinese; they don’t have the freedom to be homeless, lacking in universal health care, to eat non-nutritious food and pay exorbitant prices for utilities and the daily necessities of life like transportation, information technology and clothing.
This is not a glitch or an accident; this is the point of capitalism - to inexorably concentrate wealth in the hands of a tiny minority and to increasingly immiserate the masses. The ultra rich and the ultra poor are necessary conditions of a system which cannot survive without generating inequality.
That’s why the existence of socialist countries are seen as a “threat” to the west. Hence the never ending wars all aimed at suppressing development in the global south - from North Korea and Vietnam to Cuba, Angola, Burkina Faso, Nicaragua, Grenada, Syria, Iraq, Iran and dozens more, all initiated by the US and NATO for the express purpose of forcing countries into capitalism in order to keep them poor and dependent.
The day Americans realise en masse that without the existence of a powerful socialist formation like the Soviet Union (USSR was forcibly collapsed because of traitorous, western-backed comprador leaders AGAINST the wishes of the vast majority of Soviet citizens) nothing has been able to force the US to provide decent wages and conditions, will be the start of wisdom in that country for what true democracy and freedom really means - in reality not in the abstract. In fact the fall of the Soviet Union has been a tragedy for the entire global majority. For details on how see Pawel Wargan’s The Neoliberal Holocaust in Peace Land and Bread.
As the scales of a lifetime of anti-communist indoctrination start falling from western eyes expect to see a lot more anti-China propaganda and war mongering against China for this reason and this reason only.
