MEDIAWATCH: Rachel Smalley is a very weird cheerleader for Billionaires

Look.

I never listen to Rachel Smalley because why would I do that? If you want Kate Hawkesby, you go listen to Kate Hawkesby, you don’t buy the Warehouse budget version of Kate Hawkesby do you?

Choosing to listen to Kate Hawkesby in the first place removes the sweat shop knock off version with the same passion as people who go to Polo clubs declining to wear crocs or buy housing in a suburb next to a suburb that has one social housing tenant in it.

However, the odd column pops out that demands a level of scrutiny, and Rachel’s post this week on TodayFM where she cheerleads Billionaires reads more like a Tinder profile for Corporate CEOs.

It’s weird.

She’s shitting on Oxfam’s latest report showing that inequality is soaring and demands a basic tax on wealth to pull billions out of poverty…

The richest 1% of people amassed almost two-thirds of new wealth created in the last two years, Oxfam says

• • Since 2020, the richest 1% of people have accumulated close to two-thirds of all new wealth created around the world, a new report from Oxfam says.
  • Taxes must be increased for the ultra-rich as a “strategic precondition to reducing inequality and resuscitating democracy,” Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International said.

…making the Plutocracy (who have benefitted from the collective stability of our society and economy to amass huge wealth) pay more tax to lift every person on the planet out of poverty is apparently unacceptable to Rachel…

What’s unfortunate about Oxfam’s report is the tone in which it’s delivered. Its solution is to tax the rich. Tax, tax, tax. That’s how Oxfam believes you will address skyrocketing inequality all over the world. It wants governments to introduce a one-off wealth tax and a windfall tax to end profiteering. It wants a permanent increase in tax for the richest 1 percent of the world’s population – taking at least 60 percent of their income, and an even greater percentage for multi-millionaires and billionaires. 

…what?

She doesn’t like the tone and thinks feckless dumb countries will waste the resources a wealth tax would generate???

In 2010, the 388 richest individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth

By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals

In 2018, it was 42

In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.

And in 2021, 20 people owned more than 50% of the entire planet.

And last year the richest man on Earth bought one of the most important social media platforms.

But Rachel wants to tone police the way we demand the Billionaire class pay to end the consumer culture misery they have built their Empires of Suffering upon?

The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.

We are but meat bags secreting hormones addicted to dopamine rewards for fat, sugar, salt and sex in a cultural landscape of individualism uber alles where we sing sweet secret lies to ourselves to make sense of a world around us that is frightening and in constant entropy.

Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.

If Elon Musk can afford to lose $200billion, he can afford a fucking wealth tax!

Why am I reading Rachel Smalley?

Why?

 

Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.