According to Jeff Bezos, billionaires have a hard time finding ways to spend their money. In an interview with Axel Springer CEO, Mathias Döpfner, the Amazon head and richest person in the world called space travel the only way he could imagine using his vast financial resources.
But billionaires don’t need to go to space to spend their money. They have plenty of options right here on Earth. A good place for Bezos to start: actually paying Amazon’s corporate taxes.
The proportion of the world’s oceans defined as “dead” – containing such low levels of oxygen that very little marine life can survive – has increased alarmingly in the past 70 years, scientists have warned. The researchers, from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Centre, among other institutions, studied dead zones both in open waters and around coasts, and found that the former have quadrupled in size since 1950, expanding by an area roughly the size of the European Union. Meanwhile, coastal dead zones have grown tenfold, from fewer than 50 to more than 500 today. The deoxygenation of open waters has been linked to global warming: water holds less oxygen the warmer it gets. In coastal areas, dead zones are more likely to be caused by sewage and fertiliser run-off giving rise to algal blooms, which, as they decompose, suck the oxygen from the water. Writing in the journal Science, the researchers warn that if the problem isn’t addressed, it could lead to the “major extinction” of sea life.
Deeply frustrating, isn’t it? I wish one could actually do something about it, but it is a matter for governments, and there isn’t the will among many nations to take action. One can point to some man-made causes: crass ignorance about global climate change, over-population that ends up helping foul the seas; and over-fishing everywhere. It all seems overwhelming, especially since there is a sinister increase in the number of extremist, dictatorial governments who don‘t care. As individuals we can only do what we can do.
Epicurus, shocked, would ask, “The human race has done ….what?!”
If it seems to British people that there are more people sleeping on the streets these days than there used to be, they are right. Statistics published recently show that rough sleeping in England has increased for the seventh consecutive year: local authorities estimated that there were 4,751 people bedded down outside on any given night in autumn 2017, up 15% on the previous year. And it is no coincidence that the rise in rough sleeping began in 2010, the year the Tories started imposing austerity, reducing funding for homeless hostels and other support services, arbitrarily capping benefits, and raising rents.
A quarter of the rough sleepers are in London and a fifth of are foreign nationals. There are two sorts of rough sleeper: the transient homeless who get picked up and placed in at least temporary accommodation quite quickly, and those who suffer from a range of addictions and mental health issues. In the case of latter the difficulty isn’t finding them a roof, but keeping them under it. Then there is the much larger group of people languishing in poor, temporary accommodation all over the country.
Conservatives criticise Jeremy Corbyn for suggesting the purchase of 8,000 properties across the country to provide free housing for these people. Has he given any thought to “the perverse incentives that would be created by such a move?”, they ask. Buying more homes may not be the answer, but the Tory government needs to tackle the deeper causes behind homelessness. Back in the 1980s and early 90s the spike in homelessness helped bring about their electoral defeat by reinforcing the image of them as “selfish and uncaring”. The same could happen again. If Britons keep witnessing the “scandalous” sight of people sleeping outside in icy weather, they’ll turn their wrath on those who failed to fix the problem. (various news articles, including The Times and the New Statesman).
The British may think they have a bad problem but there were, according to Reuters and the Department of Urban Development, 554,000(!) homeless people in the United States in January 2018, a quarter of them children! 193,000 of these were living on the streets and had no access to shelters or safe havens. New York, Massachusetts, Washington DC, Hawaii, and California were the worst affected states. Of these DC is by far the worst (high house prices, a big black population and many very poor people).
Were Epicurus alive today I have no doubt he would consider this a disastrous reflection on a society which in many ways is so advanced, and in others so heartless.
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the richest part of Europe, recently held elections for the borough council. The elections were believed to be unpredictable because of a terrible tragedy that had occurred last year, where a public housing tower block called Grenfell Tower burnt down, killing 71 people. The tower burnt because it contained low-quality cladding. The council had been warned by residents that this was unsafe, yet chose not to take action. Although the fire was technically an accident, it was also a needless tragedy- it would’ve been avoided had basic fire safety standards been adhered to. And while the obvious story of the fire was one of the council’s neglect, it also showed how poor people are often treated by the wealthy.
As a consequence of the Grenfell Tower disaster, you would expect the council’s Conservative administration to be voted out of office due to a total abdication of responsibility. Not only did they fail to prevent the fire, they have since failed to permanently rehouse many of the tower’s former residents. But astoundingly, the Kensington and Chelsea Conservatives emerged from the election barely unscathed, losing only one councillor in a 50-member council. The opposition Labour party increased their representation from 11 to 13 councillors. And the third party, the Liberal Democrats, went from having 2 councillors to 1. But with 36 councillors out of 50, the Conservatives retained a comfortable majority. This was because most of the borough is very wealthy, and all of the wealthy wards chose Conservatives. Turnout was up considerably, which meant that some of the richer residents would have chosen to vote specifically to ensure the Conservatives retained their majority.
This is a perfect example of why many people question the basic morality of the super rich. Is paying a bit less in council tax really that much more important than holding people to account for an appalling disaster? Is it possible for a potential Labour council to be any worse than the incumbents? Most importantly, isn’t living in a fair society more important than enriching yourself? If the rich are as uncaring as the Kensington and Chelsea election results suggest, then perhaps radical steps must be taken to reduce their political influence.
Overall I don’t know whether its fair to say that the rich are uncaring. I don’t believe voting Conservative necessarily makes someone selfish- I’m just as sceptical of Britain’s left-wing parties as I am of the Tories. I certainly accept than many rich people, including in the United Kingdom, do not vote Conservative; the well-heeled London borough of Richmond upon Thames ousted a Conservative council in favour of a Liberal Democrat one the same day Kensington and Chelsea re-elected the Tories. Labour and the Liberal Democrats are increasingly popular amongst middle-class young people like myself, which is why the thriving university cities of Oxford and Cambridge no longer have any Conservative councillors. In socially liberal wealthy neighbourhoods in cities like Bristol, Edinburgh or Sheffield, liberal and left-leaning parties are entrenched.
The point is that in the context of the Grenfell Tower disaster, I think re-electing the Conservatives was a very callous and parochial thing for Kensington and Chelsea to do. I certainly hope groups like Justice for Grenfell hold the council to account, even if they can’t achieve electoral success. Were I the Labour Party, I would use the Kensington and Chelsea results as proof the wealthy only care for themselves, and so must be forced to contribute to the society that made them rich. The Conservatives may have won a local election in Britain’s wealthiest borough. But if they aren’t careful, they could lose the trust of the rest of the country.
The Washington Post, in today’s edition, states that Facebook estimates that there were as many 87 million fake accounts in the last quarter, a dramatic jump over 2016, when an estimated 18 million were judged to be fake. A large number of these accounts were created in such countries as Indonesia, Turkey and Vietnam. Not included in this figure are the duplicate accounts created by accident or by people who have private and professional sites. These latter two categories account for an estimated 10% of Facebook’s global user base.
“The troubling implications of Facebook’s global monopoly are at last becoming clear. The worst threat is to developing societies, which lack a free press or an independent judiciary to check the pernicious influence of social media. Now that its market in the West is approaching saturation, Facebook is assiduously targeting less developed parts of the world, where it often offers free connectivity as part of the deal to get its app.
“The result is that for many, Facebook is now the sole source of online information – and a far from wholesome one. In Myanmar, it was essentially the medium for the anti-Muslim hysteria that led to ethnic cleansing: the ultra-nationalist monk Ashin Wirathu, who was banned from preaching to crowds, used Facebook to broadcast his inflammatory propaganda. Sri Lanka’s recent descent into communal violence was similarly fuelled by provocative Facebook content. “Fake news affects elections in the West, but in the rest of the world it costs lives. And Facebook is often a carrier of it.”. (part-adapted from an article by John Naughton in The Observer, reproduced in The Week).
Maybe I am anti-social, but I am also far too busy to mess with Facebook. From time to time I am told that my eldest son is in Warsaw or Dubai, or some such place, but although I am proud of him for handling a good career so well and seeing the world while he is about it, I cannot get too excited. For one thing he is too busy to give me his take on Warsaw or Dubai, and what he did there, and I like to think that, like him, I am a doer, not a watcher or a follower. But these comments are simply a preface to a much more important observation: Facebook is turning out to be a malign influence in far too many places. We have had promise after promise from the company, mea culpa after mea culpa about bogus news and political manipulation. Facebook has become sinister and is too concerned about money and unconcerned about the use to which the service is put. It should either be policed firmly and effectively or be closed down – in the name of decency. It turns out increasingly that it has little positive social value. Talk to your friends and family, phone them, visit them look them in the eye, relate with them directly for heaven’s sake!
