Disaster Capitalism


The median annual global income is currently £2,237, whereas the median annual UK income is £28,677. That may seem like a significant level of inequality, but really it’s not… because according to Oxfam, just 26 people now possess a total wealth equal to the poorest 50% of the Earth’s population.

Let’s put this into perspective. Jeff Bezos amasses wealth at the rate of £60,137,280,000 per annum. The average UK citizen would have to labour for over 2 million years to earn what Jeff makes in just one year. The average person in the world, would have to labour for almost 27 million years to amass that. That’s 134x longer than the 200,000 years or so that humans have walked the earth. This amounts to nothing short of economic tyranny.


But actually, it’s far worse than that. Setting aside the well publicised issue of global warming, there’s only 60 years of soil left, due to degradation caused by industrial farming. Even if we solve that, insect life is presently on a trajectory towards extinction, so will it even be possible to fertilise any crops? Then there’s the shortage of natural resources. Not oil – no there’s plenty of that. Stuff like copper. Most of the copper we now use is reclaimed. Soon demand will outstrip supply. Neoclassical economics assures us that price will regulate demand, but recent experience with fishing indicates that prices do not begin to rise significantly until scarcity becomes acute. So much for the theory that pricing saves the planet by efficiently allocating natural resources!

We have until 2040 before copper becomes scarce, but we’re scheduled to have exhausted our reserves of gold, silver, platinum, iridium, lead, zinc, and numerous other resources long before then. In fact tungsten is already scarce, and antimony is due to become scarce next year. Ultimately, many of the materials critical to the manufacture of the iPhone used to blog this, will no longer be affordable to anyone other than Jeff. And lets not get started on the environmental impact of fitting lithium-ion batteries to every car. Or that building wind farms is creating lakes of toxic waste in China. There’s “renewables”, and then there’s actual green energy.

To top it all, there’s the meat industry, which in hindsight is going to make every other holocaust, short of a nuclear one, seem like a school picnic. Oh… and there’s that too – the constant threat of atomic annihilation

The thing is, and here’s the dirty secret: it really doesn’t have to be this way. We’re strip mining the planet to line the pockets of people like Jeff, with exponentially more money than any human could ever possibly spend. Jeff could feast on nothing but truffles for the rest of his life, whilst heating his skyscraper by literally burning dollar bills… and he’d still die richer than he is now. Because bank interest. Not only is it wrong to be that greedy, it’s fucking futile attempting to spend it. Yet still they hoard.