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I wish I could encourage people not to just gloss over the words of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and pretend to be superior to her, but to really listen. To put the words together as they are really said and listen. No, she essentially didn’t say it’s immoral to be a billionaire. What she DID say is that building a world where 50 people control as much wealth as 3.8 billion—many of whom live in extreme poverty and will die painfully and pointless for lack of a few dollars worth of SOMETHING—is immoral.
We have commodified this planet. That’s easy enough to understand in the context of, say, real estate. To know that there was a time when you could have walked somewhere, claimed the land and built on it because no one owned it yet. But now every plot of land you can walk to today is owned by someone. That is easy to understand and we can easily see how that commodification functions. And how the people who got there first created an advantage over everyone else – an advantage that is now leveraged to render some people “homeless”.
It’s harder to realize, possibly, for other commodities. How businesses have taken ownership of fresh water supplies while people suffer and 780 million of them are at risk, today, of =not having enough clean drinking water to survive while almost 2 billion of them suffer from sanitation problems caused by lack of water that can cause disease and death. At least 3-4 million people die every year of water-related diseases while companies bid on fresh water supplies to governments who take their money and watch people die.
Imagine those same governments partitioning the oxygen in our atmosphere, selling it off to those same companies. If you were born into a family without many resources, you may not have much access to oxygen. For some people to have more Oxygen than they can ever use while some suffocate to death is immoral.
How do we have this conversation when some people want to fight so hard for the right to have so much?
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This post was written in response to a Marketwatch article. A version of this post was previously published on the author’s Facebook timeline and is republished here with permission from the author.
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