we are well on our way to full blown Elysium
Yesterday Evening I watched Elysium. A 2013 film directed by Neill Blomkamp about a dystopian future where an overpopulated Earth is inhabited by poor, sick and overworked people. That lack access to proper hygiene, water, food and medical care. While the rich live in space on a rotating space-station (Elysium) where everything is seemingly perfect. Green grass, trees, big villa’s, and every house has a personal med bed that can fix just about every health issue that might arise.
Down on Earth some people work in factories that produce the same robots that are used to control and oppress the population. While others build robots that serve the rich people on Elysium. There is a corporate government hybrid that resides on Elysium with just a handful people who decide the fate of people on Earth. It is obvious that all resources are being siphoned from earth to Elysium. So that a minority of rich people can lead perfect lives.
Wealth disparity
Apart from the science-fiction part, with the space-station, rocket ships and med-bays, we are already living in a sort of Elysium world. Fewer than 60,000 people – 0.001% of the world’s population – control three times as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity. source. The wealth of multimillionaires had increased by about 8% annually since the 1990s – nearly twice the rate of the bottom 50%. The poorest half of the global population accounts for only 3% of carbon emissions associated with private capital ownership, the report calculated, while the wealthiest 10% account for about 77% of emissions. 81 billionaires have more wealth than 50% of the world combined.
These perversely rich people siphon of so much wealth from countries and communities that it becomes harder and harder to maintain a decent society that provides healthcare, education and good infrastructure for its people. More and more governments have to enforce strict austerity measures to balance the books. Average people have to pay the vast majority of taxes while billionaire and millionaires escape paying their fair part by constructing elaborate schemes to avoid taxation. They use a network of obscenely well payed highly educated people from prominent advice firms, bookkeepers, consultants, and lawyers. They also spend money on full time lobbying firms to influence lawmakers to prevent said taxation, create more lenient laws, to persuade governments to hand them subsidies and to escape enforcement of labour and environmental laws.
So not only do rich people siphon off wealth, to store where ever they like, to invest in whatever to like. (Obviously not in things that benefit the wellbeing of the populous at large, but only in things that immediately and directly provide even more capital for them). They also emit far greater amounts of carbon emissions, use far more mined resources and land. While simultaneously being the most insulated from the effects of climate change and water and air pollution. More and more they live lives entirely separated from our own. They fly on private jets, land on privately owned airfields, that own entire islands and neighbourhoods. They sail the seas on boats that are big enough to house an entire village. And most urgently dangerous they have an enormous influence on our politics. All across the globe rich people have more and more sway over the goings of politics. By directly funding political parties and candidates, by indirectly funding them, by using their bought media apparatus (Bezos owns the Washington Post, Rupert Murdoch. own the Times and the Sun, and Musk owns X). They fuel up discord in society, which puts pressure on sitting governments to abandon climate action, to reinvest in fossil fuels, to target migrants and to give way for more corporate investments. If you really want a sickening example of corporate encroachment in governments, read about Palentir. The panopticon system owned by the ghoul Peter Thiel is rapidly sticking it’s software deep into the inner workings of countries all over the world. NHS and Palentir Palentir surveillance tech Palentir secures billions in government contracts Palentir gets rich of the genocide in Gaza
Would they?
So ask yourself this: if the tech would be available to billionaires to live in space, far away from us poor pesky humans, to enjoy their wealth while continuing to destroy our planet for more profit. To have clean water and the best access to state-of-the-art healthcare while more and more of use are experiencing water shortages, and billions of people lack proper access to healthcare and good food.
Would they not? Wouldn’t every billionaire immediately emigrate to Elysium given the chance? Wouldn’t they fund and implement an army of AI robotic police and military on earth to keep the population in check? Hell yes they would. In a heartbeat.
So why do we let them? Why do we let them get this perversely rich right now? Why do we allow them their ridiculous carbon footprints? Why do we give them access to our governments? We should vilify and ridicule all billionaires, we should ban the hoarding of wealth and money, we should strive for an equitably distribution of good on earth. We should hold our governments responsible and demand transparency. We should have independently funded media to keep eyes on billionaire abuse and governmental overreach. And we should do everything we can to mitigate a growing climate disaster.
Tax the rich!
And if that does not work: