Saturday, January 27, 2018

#Greed is a #Sickness #Destroying the #World

The gorilla in the room is greed and Bill Gates - generous as he is - represents all that is wrong with our overly speculative casino like Wall Street model capitalism. The .01% of the planet (mostly USA) possess the majority of wealth and it has only grown exponentially in the last 20 years with the explosion of the worldwide multi-national, corporate, myopic, quarterly based economy that has only served to make the filthy rich 1% more filthy and rich. Historically, extreme stratification of society into the haves and have-nots is a recipe/precursor to bloody revolution. Yet we arrogant contemporary 21st century people think we are immune to repeating ugly and violent history. But the current flow of empires and negative geopolitics tells the real story. There are solutions such as enforced trickle down economics aka Universal Basic Income UBI - and some of the younger, not-so-out-of touch rich folks like Musk & Zuckerberg are for it and understand its urgency in the face of 80% of Americans (and many other educated, working peoples around the world) who did everything right and yet are 2 paychecks from losing everything. A UBI would allow the majority of hard working peoples who are not adept at being creepy capitalistic sharks a chance at peace of mind and so instead of fighting with their spouses about money problems/paying bills (90% of couples' fighting), which in turn negatively affects the entire family unit and eventually manifests in angry populist and nationalistic movements in society - with UBI they could instead spend more relaxed quality time with their families and maybe even get involved in their communities as in healthy democratic civic duty/actions. There is no balance to our current broken neoliberal system - which includes our corrupted Democracy where leaders spend 50% of their time on the phone raising money for the next election cycle in quid pro quo politics as usual in the post Citizen's United plutocracy reality where the rich are running the show and if you go by the state of nature - are dragging us all to hell in a hand basket - all for more profits. Greed is a sickness that is destroying the world and yet we put these ridiculously rich people on the cover of magazines and worship them like the false idols they are. The APA should list greed as a mental illness/disease that requires immediate treatment and/or the person should be institutionalized to protect the rest of humanity. God bless this greedy man made mess!