Original Post Date
2020-05-05 06:55 PM
Original Body
Bonanza is Cansa, by Kimo Umu
Since early January of this year, the covid-19 virus has continued to surge through the country. Many who are impacted first are the people without homes struggling to make it to the next day.
In the United States today 78 percent of households are living paycheck to paycheck. 20 percent of these individuals have a net worth of zero and below. I suspect this includes the homeless, impoverished and immigrants.
I know this from the firsthand account of my experiences with poverty along with others like me. While Jeff Bezos is filling his pockets full of ________ this community of mine suffers from the lack of assistance.
Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet own as much wealth as the bottom half of all households together. Plus the amount these people are making has increased ever since Donald Trump's inauguration.
Jeff Bezos has made up to ten billion dollars. While his previous ex-wife Makenzie Bezos has made upwards to 3.5 billion dollars. This also includes, Elon Musk CEO of Tesla, whose wealth has increased by 5 billion dollars.
How did they make all this money? This is maybe to the due to the fact that these billionaires' taxes were lowered by 79%. From 1980 to 2018, taxes paid by these billionaires assessed from their wealth was decreased by 79% and is still decreasing till this day.
There is a solution floating around, saying to unleash a stimulus package. Meaning we give a percentage of our tax money to corporations and while some don't have a home, we will still need to pay our taxes.
This solution sounds like the poor people's led solution without all the privatization. The "Stolen Land and hoarded resources redistribution" is a solution to the problem of poverty.
Here, I can hide it no longer. I am a part of this courageous organization against the war on poverty. The United States has put a gap between the rich and the poor.
The idea is fueled by the fact that this country was founded on colonization. A need to conquer and dominate while others suffer. Or as it's known, the scarcity model.
We find consulting those with wealth and convincing them to contribute to those in need is a modern-day form of decolonization.
Though it is not easy to try to find an answer to the problem it is still better to try. Even though many of these billionaires are not directly responsible for the declining economy their act of standing by like nothing is wrong is the problem.
How the Rich get Richer: COVID-19 SPECIAL EDITION, by Tibu Garcia
In nature, there is a balance, an ecosystem. You can see an example of this ecosystem anywhere if you look close enough. This is how it should be, yet capitalism and the greed of men and women who thirst for power make this balance impossible. Capitalism allows those greedy people a way to profit off of the less fortunate, to feed off of them in a way that doesn't make sense in the natural order of things and upsets the balance. This has been an issue throughout human history, and now due to an epidemic that affects both classes of wealth, it is thriving. Billionaires who should be helping keep their fellow humans alive and safe are watching them die, hiding their wicked grins behind charity donations and tax write offs, but it is obvious to me that these people who stand at the top, most of them being born already three fourths of the way there, gain in massive ways from our suffering.
“Between March 18 and April 10, 2020, over 22 million people lost their jobs as the unemployment rate surged to 15 percent. Over the same three weeks, U.S billionaire wealth increased by 282 billion, an almost 10 percent gain.”, that was from the Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes, and Pandemic Profiters report by the Institute for Policy Studies. This quote sums up the unfairness and imbalance of the system that keeps us all down. When we, as poor and indigenous people, are suffering through a deadly disease, the richest in this country not only do nothing to help us, but they make us suffer more in order to make more profit
Homeless people's tents and belongings are still being sweeped, people who can't pay rent are still being evicted, even though the primary reason they can’t pay rent nowadays is because they lost their job, being deemed “non-essential” workers, by the very companies who are profiting from all of this. In an apartment complex owned by Raj Properties, 37 tenants are being evicted due to unpaid rent when the County of Alameda has a Eviction Moratorium in place, meaning a law that allows tenants to not need to pay rent in this crisis if they are unemployed.
Some of the companies that are seeing the most influx of profit are companies who solely operate online. Now that most of the United States are cooped up in their houses in the era of technology, the online shopping industry, led by Amazon, is booming. Video chat companies like Zoom are also sharing the lions' worth in customers that are trying to stay in contact with family members that are unable to see each other in person. This is one of the many ways that companies like these profit from not only poor people, but middle and working class people.
At Homefulness, we have created a solution to this error in the ecosystem of life, and it is called the Stolen Land Hoarded Resources Tour and People Skool. The Tour goes right in the faces of the quiet, behind the scene oppressors, the real estate moguls and top earners in this country and tells them our story. We go to the richest places in the United States and tell them why they need to donate to our cause. We aren't begging, or pleading or asking or a handout. We are demanding reparations for the 500+ years of suffering their ancestors have put indigenous people through. Through Tours like those, and other workshops that we do as a part of Homefulness, we find wealthy people who have been profiting off of that system of oppression and want to change. We teach them what it means to repair, and what their ancestors have done that they haven't been taught.
I have noticed in my life that there are certain imbalances, a certain level of unfairness. I see the higher class in their ivory towers and wonder why I am not them. I wonder why I was born into poverty, and why I had to go through what I did and they didn't. I start to question, maybe the rich being rich and the poor staying poor is a balance, they consume us for greed and we work for them and stay under their thumb. If that is the way it is supposed to be, then I want to set out to change that. Using what I know about this uneven scale, I can change this twisted ecosystem that spits out anything it can't use, and treasures the things that are useless. The billionaires that are making money on people who have nothing are going to keep getting richer unless we have movements like Homefulness using the Stolen Land Tour to stop that from happening.
Billionaire Bonanza, by Akil Corrillo
The first article I read was Billionaire Bonanza which was an article explaining the wealth that well- known billionaires have. It brings up two main topics, taxes and how the pandemic is affecting their money. It brings up people like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett. According to the Billionaire Bonanza the wealth of billionaires has increased by 10.5 percent since Trump has become president. What's even more surprising is that just 23 days into the Covid pandemic their wealth had increased by 9.5 percent, which is a huge increase in such a short time.Meanwhile, an estimated 78 percent of households are living paycheck to paycheck, while 20 percent have zero or negative net worth. In addition there is the growing unemployment because of this pandemic and the possible recession. The taxes the billionaires pay, which is measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased by 79 percent, which just feeds the hoarding pigs of America. We will have trillions in debt after this pandemic and let's hope that the rich don't try to escape the rise in tax.
Last year the amount of billionaires rose from 607 people to 614. But their total wealth decreased from $3.111 trillion to $2.947 trillion. This year things are turning around for them due to the pandemic.By April 10, their wealth had surged to $3.229 trillion, surpassing the 2019 level. Jeff Bezos has been the one who has gained the most with his wealth increasing over $25 billion since January 1, 2020 and $12 billion since February 21st, 2020, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. One thing that stood out to me was, “Within 30 months of the September 2008 crash, most billionaire fortunes had recovered.”
The next article I read was Poor people help ‘rich’ people redistribute stolen inherited and hoarded wealth across Mama Earth by Vivi T, Poor Magazine. This article is about a redistribution tour Poor Magazine had. It's a tour in which one enters a wealthy neighborhood and educates people with money on what is going on and if lucky maybe some will choose to redistribute and help. People from all over the community and different activist groups all joined this tour. Corrina Gould of the Sogorea Land Trust was part of this and educated everyone on the land they live in and what they do to help. It seems like they were successful in getting one guy to email them and start helping Poor Magazine by distributing his wealth. It was only one person out of the bunch of houses they knocked on put at least its progress.
After reading these two articles I felt like they were made to be read one after the other. The first one is about the mass wealth these billionaires have and how they profit out of almost anything. The next article was about solutions Poor Magazine has done to try to redistribute this wealth to help people in need. After reading these articles a couple things are clear, this system is not made for everyone and is clearly biased. I also learned that wealth means power and power means control. It's obviously not fair that there are families without a home or food but then there's billionaires with 6 homes and 10 cars. Something that commonly happens with rich people is that they get bored with their money and start to spend it on useless things like sending a tesla to space. This made me think of the times I would watch mythbusters with my dad and in one episode they destroyed cars and my dad would say “They should have given me that car” I always thought it was funny but now it's more clear on what he meant. This is where the word “Hoarding” comes into play. I always have wanted to make a lot of money, it's always been a dream. I've seen my family stressed out about it, moved a whole lot (luckily never homeless) and I also hated the fact that we couldn't afford things that everyone else at school had. These are things I've always wanted to escape. I also have to take up the responsibility of sending money to my family in Guatemala every month and it's something I'm prepared to do regardless if I'm rich or not, obviously it would be better if I'm rich.