Burn The Rich OR We All Die

Shuvo Shams
The Environment
Published in
2 min readJan 24, 2025
Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

I’ll start fanning the flames — come join this fire. May the sacred fire burn all the rich.

This happened before — remember the French Revolution? Maybe you don’t remember, but you’ve read about it, right?
It reached a point where people couldn’t eat, while the queen was spending on cakes. This is what’s starting to happen once again. And this time, between the people and the oligarchs, there’s a trillion-dollar army.

As I see Trump pulling out of the WHO — a lifeline for billions of poor people around the world — and another billionaire(Bloomberg) swooping in to pay the UN bill, I can’t help but notice: although his intentions are pure(!), he is still putting only a fraction of his money toward helping the poor.

Let me give you more context: Elon Musk alone could solve world hunger 30 times over. Let that sink in. Their “cakes” versus millions dying of hunger every year.

They could solve climate change too. It would take a trillion dollars each year from now to address it. At the COP conference, countries hesitated to spend this much, yet as of 2024, the world’s billionaires have a combined net worth of $14.2 trillion — an increase of $2 trillion from 2023.

Some estimates suggest we’ll need a total global investment closer to $2.4 trillion per year by 2030 to tackle climate change comprehensively. That’s just five years away.

So, in total, we’d need $12 trillion, and billionaires could still keep the change. And yet, we’re stuck. We cannot escape this conundrum without taxing the rich.

It’s a sad truth because countries have their own problems — they need to take care of infrastructure and people’s health. But this vast amount of wealth is stuck in the hands of a few.

So instead of paying up, the few are paying politicians like Trump to distract us from their own wealth, making us fight against each other. That’s why Elon is funding far-right, anti-immigrant parties. They’re saying, “You’re poor, and here’s why: immigrants.”

But it won’t stop at immigrants. First, it will be immigrants. Then, it will be any group of people who look different. Finally, it will be about blaming the poor. This is the pattern — it’s how propaganda has worked for years.

We need to understand that we must rise up against these oligarchs now.

I’ll start fanning the flames — come join this fire. May the sacred fire burn all the rich.

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Shuvo Shams
Shuvo Shams

Written by Shuvo Shams

Trying really hard to have one epiphany at a time in this dystopia.

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