I argue that today’s billionaire and centimillionaire class operates like a malignant force—hoovering resources, rigging tax policy, and converting life into a subscription economy—while wages stagnate and basic human needs go unmet. I connect the policy lineage from Nixon → Reagan → modern right-wing economics to a massive, decades-long wealth transfer, then outline a hard reset: wealth caps, 100% tax above a threshold, ending buyback-fueled executive bonuses, and breaking up financial monopolies.
Chapters:
00:00 – The diagnosis: extreme wealth as a societal “cancer”
03:00 – “Life as a subscription”: extraction everywhere you look
05:00 – Lessons from history: concentration precedes rupture (France as a caution)
07:00 – End buybacks-as-bonuses; stop rewarding executive extraction
09:00 – Close: reinvest in people—education, science, social services; reverse the funnel
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Music Credit: Good_B_Music
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Left in Exile Outro
Left in Exile Intro
Transcripts
Dr. Jim: [:
When you look across the globe right now, there are 3,300 billionaires in the world. The next tier down the cent, a millionaires people with a hundred million dollars or more in net worth. That number accounts for 30,000 people across the globe.
hat did they look like in the:
In the US in the 1970s and in the globe in the 1970s, there were fewer than five billionaires in the world. There's no data in terms of sent a millionaires.
By the end of the:
their policy has always been offshore jobs.
that period of time from the:
when you consider those numbers.
about the US alone, prior to:
And [00:02:00] when you compare and contrast that to the post Reagan era, what have you seen in terms of the middle class? The middle class has been hollowed out while the 1% has had net worth go through the roof, there's a clear indication of what has been happening. And when you look at today, what do you see the average American dealing with?
The average American is working multiple jobs. And even with that. Their income growth hasn't kept up with inflation, but you see productivity and all of the other economic metrics go through the roof. Stock values are up, company valuations are up, productivity is up, but employee wages has remained flat and it hasn't kept up with inflation.
What that means is that for the average worker, no matter how hard they work, they're getting pushed further and further behind because the value of their dollar doesn't meet the demands of the economy.
ss, engineering and economy, [:
9 million people around the world die because of starvation. That's a problem that could be easily solved by reallocating the assets that the billionaires are hoarding.
You have almost 4 million people who are dying because they lack access to clean drinking water. Again, a problem that could be easily solved by confiscating what the billionaires are hoarding.
tion policies, at the child, [:
When you're talking about an extraction area economy, the billionaires get paid. When you're talking about wars, the billionaires get paid. When you talk about child labor, the billionaires get paid. When you talk about prison labor. The billionaires get paid. Billionaires are making money hand over fist in public and private ways, and they have entire tax systems that built so that they can continue to accumulate more wealth.
That's not a sustainable path forward. When you think about the times that we are facing now.
And you look at previous revolutionary periods during the French Revolution, the wealthiest top 10% owned 70% of all the wealth that existed in France. And it wasn't soon afterwards that the working class, the peasants rose up. And tested out their guillotines on the aristocracy.
Now, [:
When you think about where we are today, the billionaire class owns 45% of all the wealth that exists in the world. And when you look at the richest 1% of the world, they own more in terms of wealth and resources than the poorest 95% of the world.
Those are staggering numbers and those numbers tells you that we're well past the time where the billionaire class and the sent a millionaire class needs to be rounded up and dealt with, and their wealth redistributed for the betterment of the world.
This is not a sustainable path and. What this calls for is a set of policies that make the billionaire and the sent a millionaire class go the way of the dinosaurs. They need to be extinct.
on can own. What should that [:
Everything above 30 million should be redistributed for the betterment of society, so what that means is that anything above that threshold gets taxed at a hundred percent.
We need to have that same standard when it comes to corporate profits as well.
What we've seen over the last several decades is that. Corporate policy and tax policy has been set up in a way where corporations can buy back their stocks and instead of reinvesting in their people and reinvesting and growing the company, they use those stock buybacks as a way to give bonuses to their executives.
And that's why you see executive and CEO pay go through the roof while the average workers pay has remained flat. That needs to stop.
most of the wealth in the US [:
Those companies should be broken up. Private equity should be broken up. Basically any company that is in the business of rent seeking where they're not actually driving value into the marketplace, they're figuring out new and creative ways to monetize on all sorts of stuff.
That entire class of companies should be eliminated,
and that's just a starting point.
The first thing that needs to be solved. Is the unequal distribution of wealth to the richest of us that needs to stop and it actually needs to be cut off and pushed back down to the middle class. Then what we need to do is a fundamental re-imagining of what society needs to look like.
social services is critical. [:
The problem is, is that the billionaire class and the Sent a Millionaire class has convinced the rest of us that it's in our best interest to give them tax cuts. How has that trickle down economy been working since the 1980s? We've seen the results. We've seen the results where the middle class continues to get hollowed out while the 1% continues to grow.
And that's a trend that needs to stop. And what that means is that when it comes to policy and when it comes to execution, we need to be ruthless about it. These billionaires and these sent a millionaires and the 1% are feeling entirely way too safe about the things that they're doing.
