The secret (oil funded) wealth of some of the richest folk (men) on the planet can mean just one thing? They don't give a fig for anyone they can't use? Given love of anything but self, is impossible?

And not changed one whit by a torrent of words or persuasive oratory or claimed religious affiliation!

Just the never ever performed actions or the decisions that can lift their fellow men from the grinding dregs of endemic poverty! And not any more difficult of allowing the peaceful use of thorium clear passage! Or even assisting that outcome in a not for profit paradigm!?

Perhaps they believe they can live forever or take their ill gotten gains with them beyond the grave?

And as someone who has visited the place and returned, not once nor twice but three times, I can attest!

They will scream, whine, whimper and beg forgiveness! Moreover, their pleas will fall on ears deafer than their own! And vastly more terrifying than being drowned, shelled, shot at or buried alive!

None of these billionaires are young! And with every passing day that final day of final judgement draws inexorably, another day closer!

Along with any remaining possibilities for a more benign outcome or second chance! I don't have any problem whatsoever, with money or wealth or it's truly honest acquisition.

Just the purloined profits of these pretenders and their all too common personal predilection!
Alan B.

If this were not so, things would be so very different in the homelands they claim to love!

And their wealth would avail them nothing if folks just stood up on their hind legs and said no!

But that's not what happens when the poor and downtrodden are poor and downtrodden and the very best reason to counter the perverse self serving plans of these folk, who believe they can survive even a nuclear holocaust.

At the end of the day, not all the gold in the entire world can buy an single minute beyond their already allotted time! And or avoid their day of final judgement.
Alan B.

An after thought; if any part of a national economy might be nationalized, it ought to be limited to energy, capital and essential service. Which as the people's property, ought to be operated as profit and risk sharing cooperatives, if only to keep them out criminal oligarchs hands.

Co-ops being the most cost effective form of free market private enterprise ever, that hardly ever gets too big to fail? And almost alone, the only free market, private enterprise model, routinely able to undercut publicly operated corporatised enterprise!

Moreover, the only private enterprise model to survive the Great depression largely intact! Where community co-ops abound, profits generated in that community stay in that community, generating flow on wealth for all of it!

A feature universally hated by the (idle) rich almost to a generic man! Because it effectively deals them and their preferred asinine business model out!
Alan B.

Most of this article is well written. But the first sentence is a complete non sequiter. Most oligarchs are the result of privatisation not nationalisation. And the primary cause is a lack of democratic accountability.

And Alan B, there's no point being so restrictive about what can be nationalized. Where nationalisation will clearly lead to greater overall efficiency, we should support it. Likewise with privatisation.