Inequality is driving everything

The Trading Game

 

Ana Ramirez de Arellano 'Skyscraper Madrid' Flickr creative commons.

 

 

Gary Stevenson, 2024, The Trading Game, Penguin Random House, UK.

'We thought the banking system was broken, but fixable. We thought confidence had collapsed, but would recover. But what was really happening was that the wealth of the middle class — of ordinary hardworking families — and almost all the world's largest governments — was being sucked away from them and into the hands of the rich. Ordinary families were losing their assets and going into debt. So were governments. As ordinary families and governments got poorer, and the rich got richer, that would stream the flows of interest, investment and profit from the middle class to the rich, compounding the problem. The problem would not solve itself. In fact, it would accelerate, it would get worse.'

'... it would grow out of control. It wasn't a crisis of confidence ... It was inequality. Inequality that would grow and grow, and get worse and worse until it dominated and killed the economy that contained it. It wasn't temporary, it was terminal. It was the end of the economy. It was cancer.'

'The rich get the assets, the poor get the debt, and the poor have to pay their whole salary to the rich every year just to live in a house. The rich use that money to buy the rest of the assets and then the problem gets worse every year. The middle class disappears, spending power disappears permanently from the economy, the rich becoming much ... richer and the poor, well, I guess they die.'

The people of America feel that something terrible is happening to them that they cannot control so they fall in step with an angry man and become the useful idiots of the master of doublespeak — Trump.  A 'big, beautiful' domestic policy bill is passed. 'I liken it to a death march through a series of choices that nobody really wanted to be making' said Oren Cass who is the chief economist of the right-leaning think tank American Compass. The bill cuts taxes for the wealthy, increasing government debt, which is partly off-set by taking food away from the children of the poor. 

As Gary Stevenson discovered when through being smart (everyone thinks that if you come from a poor background that you are stupid) and getting a place at the London School of Economics, no one really understands economics. The people who study economics are almost all from privileged backgrounds. What could they understand?

There is an awful lot of swearing in the book — pages of print could have been saved. People swear a lot because they are angry and they feel powerless. But there are also elegant sentences, 'I was finding it increasingly difficult to separate my contempt for Rupert from my face.' '... he wore glasses more alive than his eyes, with a soul that seemed yearning for death.' 

It was during his time in Japan, that Gary Stevenson began to increasingly suffer the effects of losing his humanity because money had become his world. There are beautiful descriptions of his time in Japan trying to save himself in a country that embodies polite restraint. 

He understood that it is essential that the problem of inequality be addressed.

GarysEconomics YouTube 

Brian Wilson - Love And Mercy (Live At The Royal Festival Hall, London,...

Not hot

“One year ago our Country was DEAD, with almost no hope of revival,” he wrote on his Truth Social site on Sunday, the six month anniversary of his second term. “Today the USA is the ‘hottest’ and most respected Country anywhere in the World. Happy Anniversary!!!”

Living down under, America lives a day, my yesterday, that I wake up to early the next morning, and I cry. An eight-year old bully in the school yard playing at being president, isn't engendering respect. It fills me with grief as he smashes everything that humans care about and that gives our lives meaning. 

Cat Stevens - Peace Train (Peace Train lyrics on screen)

The Quilters

 

There is a room in a maximum-security prison in Missouri, USA, where men who have committed violent crimes design and sew beautiful personalised quilts for children in foster care.  

As one of the quilters expressed it: 'A lot of these kids have been told they're never going to amount to anything. They'd never be any good. For them, this is my chance to give them something to say "Hey, we care about you!"' 

The Quilters is the second documentary from independent filmmaker Jenifer McShane who is committed to using film to open minds. Her first documentary Mothers of Bedford revealed the impact of incarceration on jailed mothers and their children. To make the film she visited Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for four years.

Through the Restorative Justice Organization these men serving long sentences, or having no release date, attend the sewing room from 7.30 to 3.30, five days a week. Their good behaviour has earned the trust invested in them to take care of and always return at the end of their shift the sharp tools that they use. They learn skills with patience and attention to detail and have a chance to develop their creativity and be good and helpful to each other. The sewing room becomes a place of peace. They are always thinking of the children for whom they are doing the work.  

Tulsi Gabbard warns of threat of nuclear holocaust.

https://x.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1932368919039459348

In the video she says, 'As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before political elites and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tension between nuclear powers.'

It is reported that President Trump said that her discussion of nuclear annihilation would scare people and that officials should not talk about it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/us/politics/trump-tulsi-gabbard-iran.html 

When leaders cause chaos and destruction, ordinary people act on their inherent goodness and kindness to others.

Hotels and hostels have advertised free shelter.

A father and daughter handed out drinks to people waiting in a long line for gas. 

Others delivered water to those stranded on the roads after their GPS-guided maps stopped working in the blackout.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/world/middleeast/iran-internet-blackout.html 

https://x.com/abdolah_abdi/status/1935312207480533055 

 https://x.com/abdolah_abdi/status/1935312207480533055https://www.instagram.com/reel/DLDOOiSoFpO/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet 

https://x.com/abdolah_abdi/status/1935312207480533055https://x.com/abdolah_abdi/status/1935312207480533055 

 

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