• Photonic@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    It’s not just Europe where the major fuckery started in the 1970’s.

    To quote Thomas Piketty:

    Since the 1970s, income inequality has increased significantly in the rich countries, especially the United States, where the concentration of income in the first decade of the twenty-first century regained—indeed, slightly exceeded—the level attained in the second decade of the previous century. It is therefore crucial to understand clearly why and how inequality decreased in the interim. To be sure, the very rapid growth of poor and emerging countries, especially China, may well prove to be a potent force for reducing inequalities at the global level, just as the growth of the rich countries did during the period 1945–1975. But this process has generated deep anxiety in the emerging countries and even deeper anxiety in the rich countries.

    So the Epstein Class in rich countries are doing whatever they can to get as much out of the system before China and possibly India leave them all in the dust. Oil wars are a means to that end, as is addictive social media and AI replacing employees. Squeeze the public until the very last drop before the system collapses.