With a net worth of $97 billion, capitalism has been good to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and he thinks it's a good system. Still, "There's no free lunch here. You'd have to collect more money," Gates told CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Sunday.That money should come from rich people in the form of higher taxes, he said. "As you go about doing this additional collection, of course you want to be progressive. You want the portion that comes from the top 1 percent or top 20 percent to be much higher," Gates said.

Christmas may seem like a distant memory, but retailers won’t forget it in a hurry: it was the worst on the UK high street since 2008. Marks & Spencer and Debenhams saw sales fall, while the likes of specialist retailer Halfords and discounter B&M also struggled. Even that most Christmassy of stores, John Lewis, is forecasting a dive in profits after discounting to keep up with competitors. Put simply, the British high street is a horror story just now. Debenhams, founded in 1778, has seen its share price drop more than 90% over the past year. HMV has gone into administration for the second time in six years and is seeking a buyer.

Of course this has been happening for years, but as you will see below the numbers have dramatically escalated during the early portion of 2019. Our landscape is already littered with countless numbers of hollowed out stores and abandoned malls, and it is about to get a whole lot worse. Retailers were hoping that a strong holiday season would turn things around, but that didn’t happen. In fact, we just learned that retail sales in the United States suffered “their biggest drop in more than nine years” during the month...

“Millions of middle-class Americans are just one missed paycheck away from poverty,” reports Aimee Picchi for CBS News. Picchi adds that four in ten are considered “liquid-asset poor,” which is defined as lacking “enough savings to make ends meet at the poverty level for three months.” For a family of four to live at a poverty-line income for three months would cost $6,275. Again, four in ten households have cash savings that fall below this amount.

The tenacious refusal of the world’s business and political leaders to heed the warnings of climate scientists about global warming raises the stark possibility that it may already be too late. The tipping point beyond which concerted preventive action becomes impracticable is just 12 years away, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s all the time the IPCC scientists give us to keep the global temperature from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius.

People in the United States and other developed countries are losing faith in the capitalist system to improve their lives, according to a new global poll commissioned by the World Economic Forum, published on the eve of its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

Dahr Jamail, staff writer at Truthout, has been writing about the global emergency of climate change for nearly a decade. In his new book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Destruction, which is being released today, Jamail shares his firsthand accounts of returning to beloved spaces in the natural world. He observes the drastic ways in which they’ve been destroyed due to humanity’s relentless burning of fossil fuels, and mourns over how many of them are unlikely to recover over the duration of human existence.

What if it’s not we who are sick, but an entire society that is incompatible with humanity’s social needs?

We’ve heard for decades that socialism has a body count. But how does it compare to capitalism? Mike Davis discusses Stalin, Mao, and the staggering holocausts of capitalism’s nineteenth-century heyday.

America is falling behind when it comes to leadership, and it's pretty much directly correlated to how we value people with technical brains. They aren't given enough power, so much of the American way of the last 50 to 60 years or so has been marginalized by middle management types. The reason, Eric Weinstein argues, is that these types don't trust the smarter and more technical minded men and women.

We are facing deep-rooted climate, social, and environmental crises. The current dominant economic system cannot provide solutions. It is time for system change. For Friends of the Earth International this means creating societies based on peoples’ sovereignty and environmental, social, economic, and gender justice. We must question and deconstruct the capitalist logic of accumulation. The climate catastrophe is interwoven with many social and environmental crises, including oppression, corporate power, hunger, water depletion, biodiversity loss and deforestation.

Extending recently approved spending increases and tax cuts would create an “unsustainable” fiscal outlook, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report published Wednesday.

It is the largest payout over allegations that Johnson & Johnson's talc-based products cause cancer.

Another example of capitalism selling out the poor

Ana Stankovic on the un-tragic wrongness of Marx’s thought.

America’s favorite board game is reflecting the economy we live in.

A crash course in social democracy.

Nowadays, there are a lot of articles being written about the collapse of retail in the USA. Some people blame Amazon and online shopping, but that is only a trivial part of the problem. $1,355,610,000,000 of consumer spending is missing from the demand side of USA spending, and that should be kept in mind whenever you read an article about retail going through hell. The big boom in retail in the mid-20th century was thanks a strong middle class. Conversely, the collapse of income of the middle quintiles of income must lead to a contraction of retail. Consider these charts:

Is there someone, sitting in a comfortable chair somewhere, flipping a coin from time to time, deciding what happens in the world? By Puzhong Yao.

The work of saving the planet is not technical, it’s political. By Benjamin Y. Fong.