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Dear Rich People, your money will not save you [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-12-13
According to last April's Forbes Magazine there are 2640 billionaires in the world. There are an additional 128,000 people who control $50Million or more. These 130,000 (.016% of population) account for more than 50% of all the wealth and income in the world, more than the 4 billion people combined at the fiscal bottom.
Climate Change
You, that comprise the global economic top 10%, cause 48% of the greenhouse gases changing our climate. American oil and gas producers knew about climate change in the 1970’s. They could have started then investing in green energy technology and, by today, the entire world would be much closer to mitigating the climate disaster that is upon us. Those corporations could have been the heroes and would now be more valuable than Amazon.
Instead, the leaders of those companies denied the science. They waged a disinformation campaign designed to discredit the evidence so they could continue to make short term profits. Air pollution kills 7 million people every year.
Now we are careening toward the cliff of our own extinction in a flaming Lamborghini of your making, gas pedal to the floor, spewing our own demise from the tailpipe.
As if that is not enough.
The Sackler family knowingly continued to sell and distribute OxyContin claiming it was non-addictive while it laid waste to our lives and our families. They continued to hawk this narrative until massive lawsuits forced them to stop. More people died in America last year from opioid overdose than by guns and traffic accidents combined.
The NRA, as the lobbyist for gun manufacturers, has stymied, for decades, common sense legislation that would prevent the growing epidemic of gun violence in America. Last year guns were the leading cause of death in children.
A Norfolk Southern train filled with toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, OH because safety measures were cut back to increase profits. They set fire to the derailed train cars spewing deadly pollution over the entire area. They first offered the town $1Million to let them off the hook. Pressure from the Department of Transportation and public outcry forced them to commit to complete clean up and compensation for the residents. Class action lawsuits are in the works. It will take decades to know how many residents will die. Regardless of the number of Norfolk Southern derailments since, they continue to lobby against more stringent rail safety regulations.
These are just a few examples of your egregious callousness toward your fellow homo sapiens. You do not care how many people you slaughter to enrich yourselves and your stockholders.
Poverty
According to the UN World Global Compact, a full 10% of the world’s 8.1Billion people live in extreme poverty on what amounts to less than $1.90 per day. That number is encompassed within the 25% of population the World Bank says live in social poverty.
Poverty exists, not because people are lazy or refuse to work, but because you refuse to pay the very people generating your enormous income a living wage. Without regulatory restraint, you would still be working 6-year-olds 7 days a week 12 hours a day for a pittance, no paid time to heal while sick or contagious. When they got too old or feeble to work, you would toss them off your payroll without means like unwanted food scraps. “They should have thought about this day,” you will say. That is not creating wealth. It is simply theft combined with the insensitivity it takes to intentionally sentence people to slowly die.
Poverty provides you with a workforce willing to work very cheaply without time off, take abuse without quitting, and on any bizarre schedule you impose. You do everything within your power to make sure poverty continues because it is good for your bottom line.
Rather than stop stealing us blind and killing us incrementally with poverty and poisonous pollution or murdering us rapidly with your carelessness and disregard, you spend enormous sums bribing politicians, buying elections, supporting wanton dictators, and backing repressive governments around the globe to make sure you continue to enrich yourselves at the expense of absolutely everyone else. You are the deep state, the swamp that must be drained.
As everything, everywhere gets hotter without mitigation, one or more of three scenarios will boil to the surface.
Scenario 1
Global tempers will rise like the temperature. With each temperature uptick the probability increases that a rapacious dictator or an American fascist you financially support will mistakenly conclude that using nuclear weapons is necessary. Apocalypse will ensue.
Scenario 2
Goaded by climate disaster with underlying greed driven human activity, we face a dwindling fresh water supply and a rapid decline in the insect population whose continued coupled crises will cause a collapse of the global food supply. The collapse of civilization will follow.
Scenario 3
As temperatures rise, the wealth gap continues to grow. When a modern-day Robespierre becomes sufficiently annoyed by the weather and that gap, he will direct a wholesale slaughter of you, your family, and your friends. It will render the French Revolution an insignificant skirmish. This is not a matter of if, but when.
Any of these storylines will make your money and assets worthless, your opinion empty of influence. If you do not turn your focus to our collective situations, some of you may die naturally but your children certainly will not. If humanity survives the coming cataclysm, your only enduring legacy will be that you caused this to happen.
This may be your last opportunity to become part of the solution instead of the entire problem.
Respectfully yours,
[END]
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