Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1097-1099 +

Oxfam released a report showing that the richest 85 people in the world own as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion combined.

Harper's Weekly Review

Could a billion or two people march on Davos?-Some Guy

We are all on the game; some of us are just smarter at concealing it. I have a book on my shelf by the Americans Mark Zepezauer and Arthur Naiman called Take the Rich Off Welfare. It glares down at me whenever I think of writing about poverty. It shows how well-heeled Americans, starting in the Reagan years, cornered the lion's share of public spending. They had capital depreciations, fiscal reliefs, muni bonds, fuel subsidies, bailouts, price supports, cultivated waste and tax frauds. It was called "wealthfare".

This was no leftwing tract. It merely pointed out that "wealthfare costs the American taxpayer some three and a half times the cost of welfare for the poor". The relentlessness of the rich lobbying Congress for tax breaks and subsidies meant "the US government today functions mostly as a huge Robin Hood in reverse".
The truth is we are all living on Benefits Street
Simon Jenkins
The Guardian, Tuesday 21 January 2014
[emphasis JS]

I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.
Oscar Wilde
De Profundis