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Inequality - Blog Posts
This isn’t right. It’s time to raise the wage.
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Hard to rise, and harder to fall: Poor college grads stay poor about as much as rich high school dropouts stay rich.
Cinderella is (still) a heroine
Recently Keira Knightley mentioned that she doesn't allow her children to watch Cinderella, because "she did nothing and waited for a man to save her". Because she isn't "feminist" enough. Emma Watson too made about the same comments a few years back when she rejected the role of Cinderella. To be honest, I was extremely disappointed with both actresses's interpretation of the character, a bit more with Watson, because she is a UN ambassador for women. Cinderella is a domestic slave in a male dominated society. She's an orphan, her remaining(all female too! ) family appears to be financially unstable, and yes, she's a servant. Do you know how many women are actually in the same position today? MILLIONS. Moving on, with one of my favourite quotes about Cinderella: she didn't ask for a prince. She asked for a dress and a night off. She had every right to be at that ball, she even worked hard to be there, and yet her stepmother and sisters still found a way to sabotage her. Enter deus ex machina: the fairy godmother. Because social services didn't really exist at the time. She gets to the ball, she has fun, she even gets to meet the prince, and yet when her time is up, she just goes home. She doesn't beg anyone to take her in, she doesn't ask the prince to save her. Why? Maybe she's still too traumatised and scared to actually escape. Maybe she thinks she isn't worth that much anymore. So, home she goes, back to cleaning and cooking. This is where I'll stop narrating. This is enough. This is a story that has been true, is still true, and sadly will be true for countless young women. So, Keira and Emma, please tell me: what is a "strong woman" supposed to do when faced with poverty, abuse and has no access to education, welfare or even just a better job? Why does Cinderella have to be a role model, when she is in fact a victim? All these women in sweatshops, in the fields, in the kitchens of rich men's mansions, would really like to know: I'm I not "good enough" as a woman?
Note To Society #27
Racism absolutely exists, and there are thousands of articles and videos out there that prove it. Before arguing that a minority (especially one you aren’t a part of) doesn’t suffer from discrimination and oppression, do your research and educate yourself. Just because you don’t experience it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
Today is Equal Pay Day. On average, a woman in the U.S. has to work until today — March 25th — to earn what a white man was paid in 2024. 🪙🙅🏽♀️💵
And the gender wage gap is even worse for women of color. Compared to white men:
💲 Latina and Native women earn 58 cents
💲 Black women earn 66 cents
💲 White women earn 80 cents
💲 Asian American women earn 94 cents
If you care about wages and pay inequality, the politicians WE elect can create policies to address it. Make sure you are registered to vote right now at WhenWeAllVote.org/check.
The Economist | Land-shackled economies: The paradox of soil via @theeconomist
Klimaungerechtigkeit
[...] da wir gelernt haben, »unsicher« in der Wissenschaft mit »keine Ahnung« zu übersetzen. Das Gegenteil wäre korrekt.
Es gibt kein brisanteres Beispiel dafür, dass ein Wort in der Wissenschaft eine andere Bedeutung hat als in der Alltagssprache und welche weitreichenden Konsequenzen das nach sich ziehen kann.
Was es zu retten gilt, ist nicht das Klima oder die Menschheit. Es geht schlicht und einfach darum, die Würde und Rechte der Menschen – und zwar aller Menschen – zu retten.
Das wird gerade von jenen nicht verstanden, die argumentieren, das Klima sei auch früher schon mal so warm gewesen und wahlweise die menschengemachte Klimaerwärmung daher kein Problem sei oder die gegenwärtige Klimaerwärmung gar nicht menschengemacht wäre. Insbesondere letzteres, also die Frage nach den Verursachenden, verblasst im Kontext des Zitats zu einem irrelevanten Aspekt eines gesellschaftlich relevanten Problems, das es dringend zu lösen gilt. Die Frage nach den Verursachenden gewinnt jedoch enorm an Bedeutung, wenn es darum geht, eine verantwortliche Rolle bei der Lösung der Gerechtigkeitskrise zu übernehmen und den am stärksten Betroffenen zu helfen.
Der kolonialfossile Klimawandel ist daher im Wesentlichen weder Klimakrise noch Klimakatastrophe [...], sondern eine Gerechtigkeitskrise. Diese Gerechtigkeitskrise durchzieht die Geschichte der Menschheit und findet nicht erst statt, seit der Klimawandel ein Thema ist. In Kombination mit den Auswirkungen des Klimawandels hat diese Gerechtigkeitskrise jedoch eine neue Dringlichkeit und globale Dimension erreicht, die nur mittelbar mit Physik zu tun hat.
Die menschengemachte Klimaveränderung mag zwar ein naturwissenschaftliches Problem sein. Die Herausforderung und damit auch die Krise, die sich daraus ergibt, ist jedoch eine gesellschaftliche.
Dies ist zum einen dem Selbstverständnis der meisten Naturwissenschaftler*innen geschuldet, die sich als »neutral« und damit außerhalb politischer Zusammenhänge sehen – was in meinen Augen eine Illusion ist. Daher klammern viele Forscher*innen eher politisch konnotierte Inhalte wie Schäden und Verluste von vornherein aus ihrer Arbeit aus.
Dieses Zitat kann man direkt mit meinem Post What and how we research in Zusammenhang bringen.
Otto, F. (2023). Klimaungerechtigkeit: Was die Klimakatastrophe mit Kapitalismus, Rassismus und Sexismus zu tun hat. Ullstein.
Black-on-Black crime is merely a deflection from the real problems at hand. End of story.
Stay safe and educate! ✊🏽
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The truth about Wealth
I need people to spread this around. I'm leading the post with this because I feel it's so important. -
I'm reposting this information here and not in a reply to someone because I think it's something people need to understand about how the rich stay rich and get more rich. If you read through it, I think you'll be as angry as me.
We'll use David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Discovery, as an example. His salary in 2021 was 3 million. His compensation package was 240 million, including 12 million in dividends. 4.4 million in a monetary bonus, with the majority of the rest in stock options.
Stock options, for those who don't know, are not actual stocks but a guarantee that you can purchase the stock at a pre-set price, the value of it when you got the option. It means that in the future, you can pay the original price but you get the current value.
So while you technically don't "own" that money yet, it's still there. Usually, people will hold on to these until the value of the stock is at a very high rate and then cash in and put that money elsewhere. They can literally double and triple their earnings or more! All this while also avoiding paying taxes on it because until they cash in, it's only speculative money.
But here's the real kicker. The super wealthy don't pay for anything from their actual money. That would involve spending money they own. Instead, they take out low interest bank loans using their wealth as collateral. So they don't have money on hand that they "own" which is money the govt can tax them on, instead they work on "borrowed" money which is considered an expense and can be written off.
So they can keep their money in locations where it's safe from government taxation, but still use it whenever they want while claiming that actually they have no taxable income beyond their deliberately "low" salaries. In the meantime, they're able to accumulate more wealth, simply shifting the money from one nebulous tax-free bunker to another to avoid paying the government.
And don't get confused because "income" and "wealth" are not the same thing, but the vast majority of people in the USA don't realize this because they don't ever have the opportunity to accumulate wealth so they think it's the same thing, but it's not.
Income is what you earn in a year. Wealth is the value of what you own that carries over from year to year. Rich people don't have their millions in the bank, they have it in properties, in stocks, in other things where the money is used to generate more money for them. People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don't have billions of dollars in bank accounts, they keep it in other assets that generate more money from them. The assets of a billionaire are literally so vast that it's virtually impossible to spend money faster than they're making it through passive means.
Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, gets most of his wealth in these things, that's why talking about salary is useless, because Bob, like most rich assholes, doesn't want money. Money can be taxed at a higher rate. He wants assets.
And that's why it's especially insidious that they try to compare themselves to us, to frame their personal profits as though it's the same as the income that hourly or even salaried workers get. We can understand the concept of earning money. "Earning" money is something that we do in the lower classes. But don't be fooled by them. They don't "EARN" money. They don't work for the vast majority of their money. They don't even USE their own money to pay for their day to day lives.
So any attempt to compare a slash in their oncome to anything they do to our pay is calculatedly false and meant to try and make people who don't know much about wealth sympathize with them. "Oh those poor billionaires, they work for that money" . Except they don't. Their assets generate more wealth and they live off of money borrowed from banks and other entities so they never have to touch their own vast fortunes.
You could literally slash the pay and benefits of people like Bob Iger and David Zaslav down to zero and the assets they already have would still generate millions of dollars on a yearly, or even on a monthly basis. They wouldn't have to change a single thing about how they live.
So don't fall for it. Don't ever fall for their "we're just like you, we'll suffer if we don't keep even more money" bullshit. They're trying to play on our human sense of compassion, when they have none to give us in exchange.
Please, if you found this at all informative, spread it around. I'm not writing these things for personal validation, I'm writing them because I feel education is important for people to understand WHY things are the way they are and to know the real issue
This is the kind of thing that has always been cloaked in vague language so the layperson doesn't understand it. We need to spread this information and make it known to everyone. We need to KNOW the details of what we're fighting in order to win.
Image credit: Stephen Shames, Asleep in Car, from series Outside the Dream Child Poverty in America, c.1985 Source: letaobloquista
American Dreamer
The mist on windows hides the grubby face Lit softly in some dream
Big dreams Among the brown bags And beer cans
The rusty sagging car A leaky vessel For anyone’s dreams Big or small
I turn my head Going by.
-Skye