Some people might think it's a ridiculous conversation, but for the sake of the planet we need to talk about ending capitalism.

And when consumers care, capitalism does too. Businesses create stuff. In the process of creating the stuff they intend to offer, they also create a sweet medley of things that are decidedly less good. The list here is long, and we’ve heard it before, even if we’d rather pretend we haven’t.

“I think there was a common thread among all of us,” says Sheldon Yellen, CEO of Belfor, “that we really are just everyday people, wanting to do everyday good.” This quote is from back in 2013, when Yellen, an incredibly wealthy man and reputed former mobster (Forbes estimated his net worth at $320 million back in 2017) was sitting at a table with other leaders of large American companies.

To understand how some companies have lost their souls, consider what happened after a bank in the US stiffed a customer before Christmas.

One of the biggest ironies of the right-wing trope accusing socialists of wanting “free stuff” is that in reality, the entire capitalist economy would immediately collapse if it couldn’t continue to rely on free stuff. Without free or artificially cheap access to things like natural resources, care work, labor and a whole array of other elements, capitalism could not stay afloat. In fact, the only way that capitalism was ever able to even emerge was through a process of “primitive accumulation” — where things like slavery and colonialism were utilized to extract free labor and resources.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has defended the existence of monopolies in business while also denying that Apple has a monopoly in any sector. In an interview with Nikkei Asian Review in Tokyo on Wednesday, during which Cook discussed a range of topics including Apple's treatment of competitors, he said a monopoly "by itself isn't bad if it's not abused."

A new Gilded Age has emerged in America — a 21st century version. The wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia, where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) targeted Netflix in a tweet, accusing the company of paying less in federal income taxes than the cost of a monthly subscription.

One of the biggest ironies of the right-wing trope accusing socialists of wanting “free stuff” is that in reality, the entire capitalist economy would immediately collapse if it couldn’t continue to rely on free stuff. Without free or artificially cheap access to things like natural resources, care work, labor and a whole array of other elements, capitalism could not stay afloat.

Some Caribbean nations have seen an increase in cruise-related revenue through policy changes and simultaneous investments in their ports. While development and investment in the cruise industry may help spark the economy and reduce inequality, it could also exacerbate environmental issues.

The next decade is likely to see higher prices and interest rates and a reversal of globalisation, but also a reduction in inequality and increased climate action, predicts one of the world's biggest banks.

Facebook, Google, Uber, Amazon - the biggest names in technology - are all in the same business: spying on you. But what does this mean? Author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff traces the currents that led us here and asks how human freedom can be saved.

The US’s historic economic expansion has so enriched one-percenters they now hold almost as much wealth as the middle- and upper-middle classes combined. The top 1% of American households have enjoyed huge returns in the stock market in the past decade, to the point that they now control more than half of the equity in U.S. public and private companies, according to data from the Federal Reserve.

The founder of one of the world’s largest hedge funds has slammed capitalism as “broken” in a post published on LinkedIn yesterday. In the post titled The World Has Gone Mad and the System Is Broken, Bridgewater Associates founder Raymond Dalio explained that current economic and market forces are driving the growing gap between the rich and the poor.

It looks like President Obama and Wall Street bankers will just have to agree to disagree on their status as "fat cats." Early in his presidency, Obama famously described bankers who received bonuses during the financial crisis as "fat cats," a diss that set off years of tit-for-tat recriminations and undermined his relationship with financial titans.

Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff is calling for the establishment of a “new capitalism” that’s paid for in part by taxing billionaires like himself. In an op-ed in The New York Times published Monday, Benioff said businesses should focus less on profits and more on their impact on society, while using their power to help advance important causes, like the creation of a national privacy law and fighting climate change.

Marc Benioff says "capitalism, as we know it, is dead," and it is time for a new form of capitalism that focuses more on societal good. "That new kind of capitalism that is going to emerge is not the Milton Friedman capitalism, that's just about making money," the billionaire co-CEO of Salesforce and owner of Time Magazine, said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco Thursday evening.

Income inequality last year reached its highest level in more than half a century, as a record-long economic expansion continued to disproportionately benefit some of the wealthiest Americans. A key measure of wealth distribution jumped to 0.485 in 2018, the Census Bureau said Thursday, its highest reading since the so-called Gini index was started in 1967. The gauge, which uses a scale of 0 to 1, stood at 0.482 a year earlier.

In the same way that Capital in the Twenty-First Century transformed the way economists look at inequality, Piketty’s new book Capital and Ideology will transform the way political scientists look at their own field.