The billionaires are some serious carbon hogs

Although, you know, they do so much for the rest of us

Climate change is everyone’s problem, but not everyone equally shares the blame for rising global temperatures. A new analysis from Oxfam reveals the outsized contribution from the richest portion of the world’s population.

The stunning findings, published January 9, show that the super-rich exhausted their annual carbon budget—the amount of CO2 that can be emitted while staying within 1.5 degrees of global warming—within the first 10 days of 2026. For the richest 0.1%, it only took three days. - Gizmodo

Don't count on the ultra-privileged for anything

There's still a lot of propaganda out there regarding the ultra-wealthy. Everyone should know better.

Billionaires have been minted at a dizzying pace in the last few decades — in 1987 Forbes counted 140, while in 2023 the tally was 2,640 — and we’ve now returned to the point in the cycle where enormous piles of wealth are passed on to the next generation. “This is how wealth dynasties are formed,” says Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the left-leaning think tank Institute for Policy Studies. The only thing that’s new in 2024 is that the piles of money are bigger than ever.

Not only are there more billionaires today, their average wealth keeps ticking up too, thanks to historic stock market returns. On top of that, heirs are receiving wealth transfers earlier in life, rather than waiting for the death or near death of a family member. All this underscores the truth that having money remains the best way to get more money. Perhaps there’s nowhere that’s truer than in the US, home to the most billionaires, despite the pervasive myth of hardscrabble, self-made entrepreneurs climbing to the top of the socioeconomic ladder. If you’re born poor, you’re likely to stay poor; if you’re born super rich, you’ll probably get even richer...

Don’t hold your breath for an onslaught of billionaire heirs suddenly giving their inheritances away for the betterment of society. One insight from the UBS report is that heirs tend to be much less interested in philanthropy than first-gen billionaires. A theory as to why, according to Collins, is that “the first generation has some confidence in their ability to create wealth,” while the second generation doesn’t. “We know that the second generation, third generation are more concerned about protecting wealth than creating it,” he continues. “They invest a lot in wealth defense; they invest a lot in lobbying.” That means opposing any wealth tax or income tax hikes on the rich, or fighting regulations that would close loopholes that have long allowed billionaires to minimize what they owe to the government. It’s a sign that “the tax system on wealth has become more optional,” says Collins. - Vox

States look to make the greedheads start to pay up

Yeah, a tough row to hoe, making this happen. But it would be so sweet, in a multitude of ways.

The super-rich have done phenomenally well over the course of the pandemic. Since March 2020, U.S. billionaires have increased their wealth by 50% and the world’s 10 richest men — led by Tesla founder and Twitter owner Elon Musk—doubled their fortunes in the same period.

Now, a coalition of state lawmakers from California, New York, Washington, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota and Hawai’i have announced a coordinated effort to increase taxes on their wealthiest residents.

The push is part of a new effort called Fund Our Future and is supported by the State Revenue Alliance — a group that coordinates political campaigns around tax justice — and SiX Action, a wing of the nonprofit State Innovation Exchange, which provides support to state legislators working to pass progressive policies. - In These Times

How to deal with pandemic profiteering

For anyone who doesn't have his head permanently up the billionaires' butts, this makes complete sense.

America's 651 billionaires have gained so much wealth during the coronavirus pandemic that they could fully pay for one-time $3,000 stimulus checks for every person in the United States and still be better off than they were before the crisis.

That's according to new research released Wednesday by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), groups that have been tracking the "pandemic profits" of U.S. billionaires since mid-March.

In the nearly nine-month period between March 18 and December 7, American billionaires gained more than $1 trillion in wealth as people across the U.S. lost their jobs, their businesses, their homes, and their lives to the pandemic. The collective net worth of U.S. billionaires now sits just above $4 trillion—nearly double the combined wealth owned by the bottom 50% of the American population. - Common Dreams

Pandemic profiteering should be a much bigger story

A lot of people seem to be just resigned to this. A lot of others apparently honestly believe that backing the likes of Trump is the way to change it. It's all really unfortunate.

As over a thousand people in the U.S. alone die each day during the deadliest pandemic in a century, plutocrats and their businesses are thriving like never before, in no small part due to a system rife with profiteering, opportunism, and worker exploitation. So says the report, entitled Billionaire Wealth vs. Community Health: Protecting Essential Workers from Pandemic Profiteers, which focuses on 12 of the most egregious pandemic profiteers—the "Delinquent Dozen"—who include the owners of Walmart and the CEOs of Amazon and Target.

These companies and their owners and executives have benefited from their "monopoly positions," the report states, but their success "hasn't translated into better pay or safer working conditions for the employees showing up to work in a pandemic." - Common Dreams