Conservative groups spend $1 billion a year in an effort to discredit climate science and stop action to cut greenhouse gases. Billionaires, not just oil and mining companies are involved, routing their cash through trusts and tax exempt “charitable” organisations to secure anonymity. (The Guardian Weekly, 03/01/2014)

These people are subverting democracy. Such people are always with us, but you can’t avoid being reminded of how European nations in the 1920s and 1930s were subverted by facism, while ordinary, decent people stood by and did – nothing.

The attitude of Epicurus to the harmful political shenanigans of his era was to eschew politics altogether. To do so in those times was an option because the power of the rich relative to the man in the street was relatively modest. Now we are all so inter-connected and baddies can amass so much information about us and do so much harm with indecent sums of money that we cannot so easily escape unnoticed into an Epicurean garden. Somehow or other we have to change the culture of fawning on the super-rich and falling for the lie that “they did it all by themselves”, and are intrinsically superior to the rest of us. Instead, we should tax them fairly, because they are not taxed fairly now. They are entitled to their views, not to the disproportionate power of sleazy and secretly dispensed money.