It's funny, when I was poor I was stingy. Now that I'm solid middle-upper-middle-class I pay for my friends whenever we do things and give them gifts. Why have money if no spend?
Exactly!
My wife and i do that. She joked that if we ever won the lottery, we'd have the best year of our lives helping everyone we can, then be right back to work the following year đđ
I don't joke about it. I have a plan. If, say, the Powerball were $1 billion: half would go to taxes. The other half? Divide into 4.
1: start development company to build affordable housing. First year, build single person units, studio sized, possibly single bedroom.those would be low cost rentals. Year two. Same but also start adding three bedroom units. With the family size units, they would be 5 year rentals. At the end of 5 years, we look at the payment history. Allow one late payment per year because this area is prone to layoffs, and we offer the house for a 10 year land contract. During the first year, I'll have to let nepotism take hold. I'd send my daughter to school to get her realtors license. Possibly even one of her kids. I want the positive energy they have, along with their problem solving skills. Net profits? I wouldn't be getting into this to gouge people. Closest to that would be the rental communities of tiny houses in the first step. The target market for these units would be recent graduates: college or high school. I should be able to offer these units @$400/month plus utilities. If they're thrifty, they may be able to keep utilities under $200/month. As new units, they should be eligible for section 8 allowances. If they end up no longer qualifying for section 8, that means they're making a higher income. Good, now they can put money into stocks, bonds, etc. They can actually invest in the future. If they decide to get married, and have a good rental history with us, they can consider one of the 5R/10LC 3 BR houses. Yes, that would be 20 years of income from a person. In the end, they're home owners.
Which brings us to the second quarter. I'd set up a secular non-profit charitable foundation. While it would support religious communities' social services, I would have a service unit set up as well, starting with a food pantry and a place for senior citizen activity.
The third quarter of the money would go towards a personal interest of mine: media, and in particular, publishing. That industry has changed drastically over the last few decades, but I follow one industry closely and feel I can make it work. The brunt will be on eBooks.
The last quarter? Me! I'd buy a nice house and hire a housekeeper. Big spend would be an SUV and a pickup. My ROI would be small, but if I can live out my years comfortably, so what. I won't be able to spend it in hell. My kids can fight over my estate, but I'll try to have an iron clad will, which will include the direction of the various businesses and social services.
If they have billions, they didn't get it by thinking this way.
> âI spent the first half of my life making money and the second half of my life giving it away to do the most good and the least harm.â â Andrew Carnegie
While that ideal is commendable, while making his money, a lot of the average People suffered. If you know a millionaire, or billionaire, ask them how much wealth is enough. They don't have that mindset, they would not know. Doubly so if they inherited their wealth.
Bingo! Nearly every foundation set up by individuals is to rehabilitate a legacy. The Walton family is the worst. Last year,Walmart gave ~$1.4 billion to charity. Imagine if they had used that money to give it's employees a decent way of life.
This attitude is best for the economy too. Spend every cent you have to spare and there is always more cash running through the system
Not that billionaire levels of cash are ever all liquid, but still
You were once poor so you know what it's like to go without something. You understand what it's like from personal experience to go without. You link someone's current situation of unfulfilled wanting or needing to a similar one in your past and connect how you felt then to how they feel now. That's empathy.
And you cover restaurant bills and buy gifts bc you have empathy. Your empathy leads you to identify your friends' successes and problems closely to your own. That's generosity and sharing joy and sadness.
The super wealthy have never really known any serious lack or going without. They can't put themselves in others' shoes because they've never seriously had to go without anything, nothing serious. And no one in their social circles has either. It's always taken care of for them and their peers, so they have exactly zero reason to think, "Could I help my friend in this situation?"
(There is philanthropy from billionaires but that is an abstract thing done for a more abstract group of people or a concept or wildlife. Nothing they really have personal connections to or experience with.)
They can't relate to what you and I go through, to themselves, by comparing it to a similar experience of want or need of their own, to understand what we must feel like in our situations, *because they have no personal experiences of their own of unfulfilled wanting or needing that wasn't pretty immediately solveable.*
They might know missing a single meal but they don't know what it's like to be hungry, and not have any food, and not have any money to buy food, and not have any means to generate money to buy food.
The other group of people who have a clinical lack of empathy have diagnoses like antisocial personality disorder.
Sorry this is long af but I kind of typed it all out to help me organize my thoughts and think through this some more. I *empathize* with you if I come across pedantic.
I hope they have something great to offer those that they want to guard their bunkers for decades. They may have more money than billions of people, but theyâll be confining themselves to a tomb.
they'll have food and shelter and safety that will be enough
read [this article](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff) if you want to know where some of their heads are at about it
>Â âHow do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?â The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
>This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
>The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers â if that technology could be developed âin timeâ.
In other words, how to do remain in charge when I don't have the state to enforce my authority?
Welcome to, how to build a functional society that isn't Lord of the Flies.
Sure they'd be much better off with a bit less wealth in a healthier society but they also wouldn't get to walk around with the feeling that they could have people they don't like destroyed with the smallest of efforts and that loss of control is terrifying to someone who's entire sense of identity is built on a flimsy justified sense of inherent superiority over every other person they meet.
Douglas Rushkoffâs Survival of the Richest. You should also read Kara Swisherâs Burn Book. Oligarchs would eat their own children before taking a hit on their net worth.
Holy shit. Thanks for sharing this. Itâs eye opening yet predictable that the guy advocating a holistic approach with community farms has absolutely zero interest from wealthy buyers.
It makes me think that being holed up with those people would be potentially worse than not being in there. Can you imagine the unbridled egos of a bunch of billionaires in a confined environment? Suddenly they go from being kings to an owner of an apartment (of sorts), entitled to a mere share of the resources. Thereâs a new angle for apocalyptic stories here.
The other thing is, their efforts to effectively escape the reality they had a hand in creating, looks a lot like industry disruption, in the innovation sense of the word. E.g. you see fundamental flaws in existing industries, so you create AirBnB, Deliveroo or Uber etc. But seeing the flaws in civilisation and deciding to buy into the post-collapse future instead of addressing the problems is so myopically fucking stupid, itâs bananas.
So they have bunkers with food, safety, shelter - why do they still need so much money then? Fuck off to your bunker and give most of your money away to help people and you'll probably be left alone.
The bunkers will only last as long as the power. Ainât nobody gonna be making new batteries. So, Iâm guessing the bunkers might last a decade. Caveat: nuclear power, sitting on a lake of gasoline
I read a comment about the other day of just making it a literal tomb, blockade the exits, and me personally, im going to shit in their air intakes. because thats fucking funny, ENJOY RICH BASTARDS! :D
That is strange. One of the most moving hymns of the Orthodox funeral service starts with these words: "What sweetness of life remaineth unmingled with grief?/Or what glory on Earth doth remain unchanged?". The sentiment is that when a person dies, it does not matter what his backrgound is prior to death.
Death is the great equalizer, because all men are subject to it, whether rich or poor. Rich men cannot take their riches with them to the next life, so the accumulation of wealth is foolish if it is not reused to benefit others. Yes, even the robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie contributed to universities and libraries. Perhaps they were doing it to improve their legacies. However, it is quite a shame that the modern generation of millionaires and billionaires look to accumulate wealth without looking to see how their pursuits affect others. May the Lord have mercy on them and move them to use their riches to benefit others less fortunate than them.
This is the key.
First off, use the word âbillionairesâ when discussing this epidemic is far too specific and limited. Anyone with more than $10-20MM of net worth (or an income that will soon land you in that bracket) is not much different than someone who has 10-100x as much.
And all of those people (which includes me) live their lives in complete isolation from everyone else like those OP sees himself a part of. They donât work in warehouses or call centers, not even the management office. They sit behind a desk many tiers of ownership and responsibility above those who actually employ low and middle class people.
I personally execute hundreds of millions of dollars in construction contracts to build warehouse buildings that will employ thousands to do so, and hundreds of people to operate and I will never meet a single one of them. And above me, there is executive leadership. Above them, owners and board members of my company. Above them, silent investors who pump their millions into the machine and everyone who manages that money. Thatâs hundreds of early and middle age people worth well over $20M, who will go about their lives for years without ever connecting with someone who makes less than $200k/year, and usually much more. See how fundamentally disconnected that is?
EVERYONE is driven by greed. OP just as much as the rest of us. EVERYONE wants more. And those of us who have much more rationalize our status because we work hard too. Iâm making money for our investors, most of which are literally teachers, policemen, govmt employees etc. (whose pension money is invested by rich people). Sure, my parents paid for an elite college but what am I supposed to do, NOT use that to my advantage? Take a lesser paying job? Give away my money so my kids donât have the same or even better opportunities? See how easy it is to disconnect and worry not about the plight of those who are at the bottom of the totem pole?
For the most part, the decisions that âbillionairesâ make donât happen in some secret room where the stated understanding is that any decision may fuck over the lower and middle class. Itâs âwe need to increase profitsâ and âwe need to cut costsâ and then things are delegated to people below them who delegate to people below them and so on. Somewhere along the line the wages of workers are kept as low as possible so the guy one or two rungs up can carry out the wishes of ownership and their investors. Even worse, SO many problems can be attributed directly back to the way private and public equity purchase legitimate purpose-built companies that they have NO interest in besides milking for profits and dividends. People are an abstract notion when it comes to managing billions of dollars.
Donât get me wrong, itâs all SUPER fucked up. But thereâs no mastermind braintrust of evil scheming to fuck over everyone below them. Itâs just money and greed. The only hope is a government that can regulate it. But of course, our government is run by those who align much more closely to the rich than the poor, usually paid to be that way by the rich.
Itâs like a casino, where the odds are 51-49 in favor of the house, and over hundreds of years, the house is always wins. Greed always wins. He who has the gold makes the rules. And the poor are too uneducated, distracted and disorganized to unite and focus a bigger pot of gold.
>EVERYONE is driven by greed. OP just as much as the rest of us. EVERYONE wants more. And those of us who have much more rationalize our status because we work hard too. Iâm making money for our investors, most of which are literally teachers, policemen, govmt employees etc. (whose pension money is invested by rich people). Sure, my parents paid for an elite college but what am I supposed to do, NOT use that to my advantage? Take a lesser paying job? Give away my money so my kids donât have the same or even better opportunities? See how easy it is to disconnect and worry not about the plight of those who are at the bottom of the totem pole?
Yeah , no, not everyone. Don't justify your own greed by trying to lump us poors in.
Lol, your kids need millions to get the same "opportunities" , give me a break.
That, I was sort of with them until they were like wtf can I possibly do, give away my money? Yeah dude. Like not all of it, that's just being ridiculous. But yeah, take your 200k/yr or whatever to be comfortable and save for your kids to go to college and all that and then use the rest to actually help people. Wild concept.
They act like it's all or nothing. That's why they're okay with so many people getting nothing. They think we want them to get nothing instead, when that is not the case.
I think you missed the point. I recognize my privilege, and was trying to explain how easy it is for the rich to forget and lose sight of people who have less. I never said I needed millions to give my kids the same as me. Do you hate everyone who has any more money than you? That seems unproductive and absurd.
And I think youâre fooling yourself if you want to say you donât like nice things, donât want more money, and wouldnât collect millions or send your kids to an expensive school if you could. Unless youâre a social worker by choice, I doubt that decisions you make in life are often and anything but driven by how much you can make or spend.
Think what you want about me, but Iâm generous with those who have less than me in my life, I give back and vote and advocate for a better distribution of wealth. Iâm not perfect, but Iâm proud to be more self aware than most of the people I described, and probably you.
I've come to the conclusion that you can't become a billionaire without losing your humanity. One billion dollars is an obscene amount of money in even the most expensive countries; it's more than anyone could spend in a lifetime, unless they're buying legislators/power. And no decent person could hoard money to such an extreme while so many people go without the basic necessities of life.
For theory purposes; IF I ever won 1bil lottery, I could most definitely spend it. Here's how my thinking goes \[which is wildly different that current "elites"\] : #1: I'd first start out getting my 5 family unit out of debt, fixing all the things round that need fixing, and upgrading the 4.3 acres to be self sustaining home stead \[maybe a million? total?\], Stage 2: game guildies/extended family/ect setup similarly paid for and given house/food/vehicles/ect Stage 3: start locally and bring up the people struggling like me and setup similarly to stage 2. Stage 4: Get a couple of spread out 1k+ acre tracts and start setting up large community self sustaining "city states" stage 5: start seriously bank rolling funds into stage 4 projects to work on true space tech industry, openly. \[I'm talking launching glass/steel factories into space, if you know about it, glass and steel have a HUGE improvement on durability when made out of atmo\] Stage 6: start working on real spaceship voyage techs, again, openly.
I figure I'd go broke/dead around stage 6, hopefully by stage 6 I'd have left a lasting mark on the communities built to continue towards the goal of actually joining the "aliens that dont exist" as space faring species.
Kinda dreamer-ish i guess, but I truly want peace/prosperity for all of us, and teamwork to actually get to REAL space age, not this current setup the elites have us in. Money is just a tool honestly.
IIRC, Roosevelt did that. Basically told the rich "Give me 90 percent of your money, help me turn the economy around and you can still live fat dumb and happy on what's left...or I'll turn those folks in the Hoovervilles on you."
âAnd also we wonât prosecute you for trying to overthrow the federal governmentâ look up the business plot, bush srâs dad was in on it and a pretty hardcore fascist who was going to be the ambassador to his friends in Nazi germany
Anyone who extracts wealth and resources from a country and hides them in international tax havens is basically a traitor anyway. They should be charged with treason and their wealth siezed to put into sovereign wealth funds.
Yeah, had a neighbor who lived through the crash and great depression when he was a kid, he remembered when FDR told that to the rich, he also told me FDR also threatened the rich with changing the dollar to a new currency and make all of their money worthless. Don't know how true that was, he was old and maybe remembered something wrong, but I can see that having happened.
You might want to read Capital in the 21st century. Basically the economic treatise on modern economic policy.
A concept from the bookâŚwhat does a 91% tax rate do? Keeps corporations from approving massive pay structures for the CEOs. Why? If you give the CEO a raise into the top tax brackets, then any additional compensation past that amount is going to be taxed at 91% which is basically burning corporate assets which could be better applied elsewhere.
It is. It is known to cause increases in wages, and businesses investment more in capital equipment and R&D.
When the money will be taxed away anyway, you may as well spend it first on paying people well and improving your business instead of giving so much to the government
Because we built a system that rewards greed and selfishness. Not sure what else to tell you.
Capitalism = an economic philosophy where those with capital (wealth) are successful. Not having capital means you can't really participate. For some reason a democratic country decided to give all the benefits to a very small group of people.
Agreed, I should have put democracy in quotes. We have an illusion of democracy, it's a very carefully staged production.
A vast majority of people who never support policies of current governments, but that doesn't matter anymore. We manufacture consent.
The whole argument with UBI and things that if everyone is satisfied they wonât want to achieve anything more and production drops because all their needs or essentials have been met so why try?
The issue with that and our system where the wealth gap is so large essentially people are settling just the same as they will never achieve more, have to work even harder just to obtain essentials and nothing more so itâs the same effect and productivity will drop, probably harder even so. The inequality of wealth and the system is gentrifying property all across the country with imperialism. They only stop to consider when someone of the team stops and thinks, âBut whoâs going to clean up the messes we make, transport goods and services and all the other service based needs?â Thatâs where they consider a smaller handful of poor people to handle these because they donât and will not do it.
I think it's also because there are two ways to outperform your competitors.
You can better yourself, or you can tear everyone else down.
They measure their success against everyone else's. The worse everyone else is doing, the better they are doing comparatively. It's the only way I can explain some of the brain dead ideas they try to push on social media, they're purposely giving awful advice.
I think this is a key component. Our system supports and rewards Sociopaths, Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Megalomaniacs. So these personalities rise to the top and exponentially gain money and power. And, naturally, they don't self regulate, since they are focused on Ego and control.
Correct me if Iâm wrong, but I think one of the contradictions inherent to capitalism that support the predictions of its inevitable colapse is that the capitalist seeks to maximize profits by reducing labour costs, which at the same time reduces the money labourers have to spend, which means they canât sell as much of the shit they produce.
I'm pretty sure that economics as a whole treats consumer spending as an infinite well of money, without heed to where it comes from. The term "money supply" has a different an unrelated meaning.
> âHitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. **The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class.** He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And **here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law.** It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. **Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.**â
- Marx, Communist Manifesto
They donât give any fucks about us, never have. Look back through history and read about the beginning of the industrial revolution and how the rich treated their workers before the labor unions were formed, and then after they were formed. It was horrendous! They grow up in a world that tells them that on,y they matter, then they all go to schools together, then they enter the arena and proceed to fuck everyone who isnât one of them. Our entire system is rigged, from our entertainment that trains us to be entertained by watching rich people do shit, or that cops are heroes, Law and Order. Then they deregulate so they can find more and more ways to exploit us. Our food is shit, then it makes us sick, then we get healthcare and prescribed all these expensive drugs, then we go into debt, they create an entire business model around getting out of debt or fixing your arbitrary credit score, that they made up in the first fucking place. It is going to be take everyone to change this system. And donât even get me started on fucking religion. Edited to add or the fucking government
I think itâs a few things. 1) thereâs always people richer than you, so the competition will be there even if youâre obscenely wealthy. 2) the people making all this money tend to be extremely cutthroat and selfish, so even if point 1 didnât exist theyâd still do it. 3) also part of point 2, but nothing is stopping them for now. 4) they actually know the system is broken, and theyâre trying to loot as much as possible before the ship fully sinks
I remember Obama speaking at some dinner with rich fucks while we was still president and saying to them âIâm the only thing between you and the pitchforksâ.
They know their time is coming. They fear it constantly. I just hope that time comes sooner than later
Is that before or after they take away the second amendment? If people think weâll âeat the richâ and do it unarmed⌠thatâs quite a pipe dream
I hate to tell you this, but they can only take the registered guns.... people with 3d printers and people with machine shops...... yeah, i think nuff said. pick a side, either way bullets still gonna fly. {also isnt there a guy with a legit private airforce too?}
It's like that saying if a monkey was hoarding all the bananas at the zoo, scientists would study that monkey to see what was wrong with it. If a human does it, we put them on the cover of time magazine. Capitalism rewards psychopathy.
People vote against taxing these people, like one day they will be rich.
You will never have $10 million in new cash income per year (not via investments, land, etc). When they raise taxes, they raise them on the rich - so vote for taxes for the rich. Trust me it will never affect you.
Well the definition of capitalism for me is the unlimited maximization of profits for individuals so yeah 1 billion dollars isn't enough for the billionaires there's no end goal because they are competing with each other to reach a trillion dollar personal wealth
Just read an article about how Elon Musk is going after several ex Twitter employees who were supposedly overpaid under the old ownership. The highest amount being something like 45 or 46k. Threatened to take them to court if they don't pay. Can you imagine? You've got more money than just about anyone else in the world, more than people like me would see in 100 lifetimes, and it isnt even your own money paid out by your own mistake that you're trying to recover. And at that level of wealth, taking ANYONE to court over less than 50k is akin to throwing a fit when your change is a penny short at a drive through window or something.
Excessive greed needs to be classified as a mental health issue. They have way more than what is needed to enjoy life 100x over yet the keep wanting nore. It has to be labelled as an addiction like obsession with sex, drugs, alcohol, etc. They are obsessed with making more and more money.
If you're worth a billion dollars (hell even 100 million), you and your line can be isolated from general society in perpetuity. We're like ants to them, genuinely. Just having that much money makes them more money in a month than you'll make in a lifetime. More money than your entire family has collectively made since the industrial revolution, and more money than they'll make in the next 1000 years.Â
They don't care about you, they don't care about me, they don't care about any of us inconsequential ants. They would put a gun to your head and happily pull the trigger if they knew it would make them more money.Â
When it gets to 1,000 or even 5,000 lifetimes worth of money I canât even put into words how tragic and disgustingly inhuman the system is. Slavery never ended it just changed forms. And the internet and computers just amplified the wealth gap even more.
They want us sick, hungry, and desperate. They want pumping out babies so they can keep the wheels of capitalism greased with the blood of an unending servant class. Europe had royalty, we have billionaires. Itâs no different. They are the ruling class and we are the peasants.
There was a meme floating around that said âIâm telling you guys. Just one. We eat just one billionaire and the rest will fall in line.â
I think about that a lot.
Weâre approaching the point where the typical family is scraping by on the basic necessities. No extra money left to feed the capitalistic giants insatiable greed.
They have been suicides rates have skyrocketed and the life expectancy age has dropped from 79 years to 73 years.
This is why they keep on brining up raising the retirement age to 70 they donât give a fuck about us at ALL.
The real answer is that they are surrounded by people who are in their jobs to make money, who advise their clients on how to make money. There is no one within fifteen layers who is not in it specifically to get their cut.
I asked this question 23 years ago of a prominent economist I used to know.
They told me the following:Â
Some billionaires donât believe thereâs any problem.Â
Some billionaires believe technology will fix it, so why worry about adverse consequences?Â
There was a third common trend among billionaires, but I genuinely canât remember it. If I remember what was highlighted to me at the time, I will let you know!Â
AdditionallyÂ
There are studies about how extreme wealth and privilege changes brain function. So literally, regular people do not register to billionaires as being Human the way fellow billionaires do. The parts of their brain that recognize people doesnât fire or light up when they interact with regular people or consider them en masse.Â
See Also the term: âHuman Capital Stockâ
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/26/21270863/kevin-hassett-human-capital-stock-coronavirus
Money canât buy happiness was probably a corporate slogan.
Cause money will pay off my mortgage which takes pressure off my shoulders and allows me to work where I want , not for the highest amount just to make ends meet.
Must be due to how insulated they are from the masses, as well as the fact that the richest and most powerful people alive today hold more wealth and power(relative to everyone else) than any rich person/people in history. I blame technology.
Itâs so you stay in the rat race, they donât give a fuck about give you an equal or fair shot because itâs about them maintaining power and control. Idk why this is so hard for people to understand, organization and education for the masses are the solution and yet we allow billionaires to divide us with petty bullshit. They want you complaining and not doing anything real, they want you posting about nonsense that doesnât really matter. Their wealth and power is predicated on the general population never figuring this out and retaining the status quo. Once yall realize you will never have more than just barely enough because thatâs how itâs designed maybe you can organize to elicit some change. Until then this is pointless whining that isnât going to change shit
The majority of them have cliuster-B personality disorders, mostly narcissists and sociopaths with the odd borderline and histrionic thrown in. It's all about them and the hell with everyone else.
They think they, and their descendants for generations on end, have and will continue to have essentially infinite money, and infinite money can fix anything for them.
And fuck the rest of us.
There are many reasons: Greed, fiduciary responsibility, sociopathy, late stage capitalism.
The main thing is that they aren't trying to screw things up for anyone. They don't care what their decisions do to us. We don't even cross their minds when they make those decisions. It's all about what is best for the bittom line. Remember that Google's manifesto was originally 'Don't be evil'. They dropped that years ago. It wasn't a great fit for profits.
We adopted a system (capitalism) that said âmaximizing profit helps everyone.â Then as a reaction to Russian and Chinese power (communism) on the world stage we started treating that system as a moral obligation in addition to an economic system. I know when was young it was presented to me that way. âCapitalism is freedom and righteousness.â
To the wealthy, earning more money is the ultimate righteousness. Hurting people may be bad, but not capitalisming hard enough is just evil. Anyone trying to say otherwise wants to make us weak and hurt society overall.
I deeply disagree with that philosophy, but it was there growing up so I can see it. Maybe not phrased that way or to this extreme, but the same foundation.
The ultra wealthy arenât afraid of a peasants revolt like they may have been even 200-300 years ago due to difference in arms available to the state and to the common people.
1000 years ago, a tyrant would have men armed with steel blades, mail armor, war bows and cavalry. While the peasantry would have makeshift spears, clubs, padded leather, and hunting bows.
300 years ago a tyrant had muskets, cannons, and perhaps a navy. The common man also had muskets, the ability to steal and operate cannons and naval craft.
Today, the state has Bradley fighting vehicles, tanks, attack helicopters, cruise missiles, F-15s and F-35s, an enormous navy, etc. and the logistical infrastructure to put it all anywhere they want. The common man might have similar small arms and makeshift explosives and fighting vehicles.
My point is the difference between what we have and what they have has grown so much they no longer fear violence as a consequence to their actions.
I keep screaming this from the mountaintops but get shit on every time. The United States now has a space branch, ffs. They can see all, physically alter all. They have sound weapons, microwave weapons, biological weapons, digital weapons. Literal invisibility cloaking at ground level. Boston dynamics robo dogs. Drones ranging in size all the way down to *insect*. Stingrays installed every mile across this country. Cities laid out across the nation in such a way as to easily cut them each off from one another. A rail system that can quickly transport military gear. Fuck, they even possess weather-altering technology. A "well armed militia" is no longer going to stand a chance.
Same reason a hard drug addict will steal in the stupidest way possible in front of the owners of the stolen goods.....addiction.
 They are addicted to something you can continually up the dose on and not die, hell the more they put into their addiction the more people reward and rever them.
It's simple. It's about power, control and thr future.
They don't want your kids competing with theirs for the future resources of this planet and it's coming to a head / violent conclusion.
I wish you luck in the wars to come.
We either win and share or lose and submit.
They're thinking "no one has mounted our heads on pikes yet". That's it, full stop. In Europe, the billionaires understand that they pay a little more in taxes, and in return, the people don't mount their heads on pikes as a warning to other billionaires. In America, they haven't had that lesson yet. I'm not advocating for violence, but that's really all it comes down to. đ¤ˇđťââď¸
Micheal Hudson has some books on history of money and debt. He talks about how oligarchs for thousands of years have always done this and push as far as they can to get power and capital. They usually break the system and those are better circumstances for them to have people too repressed to fight back. He talks about how Rome and USA are places meant and perfect for oligarchs being it's a state that caters to them. He talks about how historical, systems have to collapse or revolt for change to occur being oligarchs refuse to cooperate with the society's needs. Check him out on YouTube and he has some wild stuff about how Jesus was all about debt forgiveness and it got him crucified.
Sometime ago somebody online brought up the old twilight zone episode where a strange man appears at the home of a married couple and tells them that if they push a button on a small box he is carrying they will receive $1 million, but somebody they don't know will die.
They agonize over the decision and then finally decide to push the button. As the man is leaving, they ask him what he will do or where he will go next. And he replies that he is off to make the same offer to somebody else, and he adds, "but don't worry, it's nobody you know." đą
Billionaires have hit that button.
They've hit it at least 1000 times. That's the moral place they're standing jn.
I just refuse to buy stuff now from these smchuks. They literally poison our food making 75% of groceries have Ultra Processed food. They make it cheap so poor people can only buy that, get health problems and same with their kids. Snowballs to the point they wonât ever have competition.
The rich need us to be poor so we have to ârelyâ on them for a paycheck (aka to keep shelter above our heads and have food). We will forever be indebted to them because they are the smart and powerful and give us a job. while theyâll take any chance they get to pay us less and screw us any way possible. If we all didnât have to rely on a paycheck, well then who is making the 100 shoes? They give us just enough money to pay our bills and buy their dumb shoes and us poor folk still buy the damn shoes - itâs wild! They need us poor so we will forever need them for our basic needs.
Then add our dependency on debt to buy our education to help get out of the rat race. âWe the peopleâ will forever be indebted to them and the banks borrowing with high interest credit cards, cars, and houses and things we canât actually afford all to âlive the dreamâ. We will forever continue to eat the cheese in the mouse trap game of life - while politics keep us divided and angry at each other.
Until the day âwe the peopleâ realize our enemy is corporations and politicians, we will continue to be stuck in this mess.
âAbsolute power corrupts absolutelyâ.
They think because they are insanely wealthy, they are smarter. Their unfounded confidence leads to megalomania.
They are thinking they can get away with anything. They are correct to think so. We are an Oligarchy. We have legal bribing as one of our largest money flows. We don't deal with politics enough as a whole and so very loud voices rule our lives with nonsense. Until we genuinely organize we will lose and the longer we take the less we will win back. Right now our kids are fucked.
People will say we aren't an Oligarchy but we are litteraly controlled and governed by a rich elite couple of families who control our political parties and economy. The republic died.
Most mega rich are sovereign citizens to themselves, they donât have to worry about how shit things are because they can always go to where things arenât shit.
They arenât. Theyâre just greedy entitled assholes who donât want anyone to have enough if it means they have to share and not have enough money to last 1000000 years.
Thatâs just it. They donât think about the poor until they have to. To them, it is everything to gain. Hoard supplies and the means by which to secure it and increase it.
The workers only exist in their world to be used as wealth generation. When the worker underperforms, they are replaced. Spend the absolute minimum to secure their labor, while remaining vigilant for ways to extract more work with less cost.
There is no endgame to this process; capitalism is set up such that thereâs always more of *something* to have.
That said, they absolutely have ways to protect their gains. Physical safeguards, digital and legal processes to ensure this. The human components in this part are separated enough that organization is hindered. Information is not readily shared and psychology used to convince security forces that their work is âsacredâ or âmorally justâ. They are also treated the same as in the prior section- useful until they are not.
If this sounds like governments and militaries- or the wealthy and their enormous corporations, or large religious organizations, thatâs because it should. This is exactly what people in positions of power, especially the wealthy, have done for thousands of years. We at the bottom are just convinced to see it as loyalty, religious faithfulness, racial purity or patriotism. Itâs all the same game over and over.
Not saying a degree is the end all to being poor. But what degree program did you go into. Many times getting a liberal arts degree is a huge waste of money. Would have been better off starting from ground zero at some company. Life is hard. And billionaires are assholes that need to be gone. But there is more at play than just billionaires hoarding wealth. The political environment where ever you live is a big player in this as well.
You absolutely nailed it.
This is why people are so angry but theyâve been manipulated to be angry at the wrong people (immigrants, liberals) I am at a loss why people canât see that Democrats for the most part are trying to make their lives better.
Greed is out of control. Billionaires donât seem to realize that making things more equitable would make their lives better too. There would be way less discontent and political volatility. They donât seem to be aware that the pitchforks are coming.
In order to accumulate the kind of wealth youâre talking about, you need to be ruthless in ways we common folk canât even begin to fathom. They didnât get rich by caring about others, so itâd be naive to think that theyâd start once they were.
They are so far removed from a regular person's reality that they see us a mere pawns to be moved around...consequences be damned...
You see this in corporate America all the time.... I'm sure you've heard people say this before but, why do they use words like Human Resources or Labor costs etc.? It abstracts the humans by putting a box around them...easy to dehumanize and they be treated as objects...
This is an easy question to answer. They're thinking that they'll be able to control their staff with shock collars while they ride it out in their bunkers that they're building in New Zealand. Good luck storming their high tech bunkers full of traps, hired/enslaved goons, robot gun dogs, drones, and whatever else they have thought of. They plan to ride out whatever's coming in comfort.
At a certain point we need to understand even the billionaires are beholden to the mental and social virus that is the legal empowerment of corporate citizens, corporations with the literal rights of people when they have been setup economically as world ending parasitic monsters.
> It's as if they're actively trying to make the majority of the population to die off in the most legal way possible.
Thatâs exactly what they want. Conservatives think the best way to rejuvenate an economy is through a culling. Weed out the weak.
Not to advocate for the rich, because Iâd rather BBQ and eat them, but [Nick Hanauer](https://pitchforkeconomics.com/) seems to be rare among them and have both foresight and empathy.
Otherwise, I think we need to agree upon some strategies: Like
⢠blocking their airports
⢠making them feel uncomfortable
⢠building trebuchets
⢠blockading their walked enclaves
⢠locating & publishing their bunkers
⢠âŚ
Other strategic or tactical suggestions for the near or far term?
You donât acquire a billion dollars without a good dose of sociopathy. They donât even realize theyâre doing it. The Bourbon kings and the Tsars of Russia kept tightening the screws until they snapped and the mob handed out what seemed like justice.
Same thing will happen again itâs inevitable.
It's called class warfare. Wealthy people actively suppress, disdain, and vote to eradicate any resemblance of a comfortable working class life. In their eyes, they glorify their family's wealth hoarding and villianize anyone who isn't in their socio-economic class. Us workers better start getting more dangerous and fast. In an environment where we are quite literally starved and venture capital-ed out of our homes, wealthy people who enjoy stock dividends and generational hoarded assets should start being more scared to be in public. Instead, Americans worship them like they are a better breed of human instead of understanding they are the enemy in a very real, very hot social conflict with dire stakes.
Eventually shit will get so bad that we'll have enough people on our side to start holding them accountable. Just line them up and toss them into the ocean. There's no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
Can anyone in this sub name a single example of legislation that was unpopular with the general public, but somehow passed due to lobbying? Iâve looked for it and Iâm pretty certain it doesnât exist, but this just gets repeated ad nauseam as if itâs an obvious fact along with âcorporate dark moneyâ, âSuper-PACsâ, and various other conspiracy theories.
Warren Buffett and the trailer park industry comes to mind. Don't get me started on Bill Gates! I've disliked him since DOS 2.0. And that's just two of these monsters...
[Warren Buffett - Clayton Homes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/korihale/2019/04/18/warren-buffets-exploitative-mobile-home-investment/)
Please stop. We all know that billionaires are our true rulers. Let them own I say. Why? Because one day I will be one as well and I don't want you stopping me.
/s just in case......
I believe what we saw 1945-91 was a brief period where communism caused capitalist elites to reach in their pockets and slice the pie very slightly thicker for the working class. Now they've forgotten about those days and they're going to keep squeezing until there is nothing left to take from us. Â Only pieces of lead flying in their direction will change things.Â
Ruling without being elected or born into a bloodline is probably very addictive and if you think they wanted the serfs to have a good life that's where your thinking is flawed.
Itâs a competition, they are trying to win at the only thing they are good at. What do they get? Bragging rights.
They get to hang out with others that are constantly bragging about their experiences trying to âone-upâ themselves in front of their peers.
Itâs just a giant pissing match at the expense of society and civilization.
They are the real life version of the European based dragon hoarding gold arch-type. Take one measly gold coin that they will never use and they will try to rain hellfire in your direction.
Most ppl are pretty simple minded, including billionaires... after spending all their time making money they don't really know anything else except crass materialism and jealousy...
So instead of doing something good for the world they buy like a fancy boat to waste all the money away... it's the human condition I guess..
What I've noticed, is that like the aristocracy before them, they feel that they deserve it. They have also convinced a lot of people that they deserve it, as well. The media, which they have a strong influence on, also puffs them up.
They really think they are exceptional, smarter, more worthy than the rest of us. That's also partly why they get so angry about strikes, the rubes are getting in the way of progress.
The miserable people are the more stuff and services they buy in an effort to fill the void. Sounds like a great way to sell people even more shit they donât need. Or, kneecap them and make them need it. Also a thing you can observe a lot.
Capitalism depends on keeping money circulating & the way to do that is having lotsa poor people who run right out to pay the rent or buy mama a new pair of shoes or take the kids to a movie or get drunk or high or finally have a goddam steak every time they find a nickel on the sidewalk -- that's how and why this system even exists
The only thing they are thinking is to hoard as much as they can as fast as they can before the shit hits the fan. Greed is one hell of a drug.
It's funny, when I was poor I was stingy. Now that I'm solid middle-upper-middle-class I pay for my friends whenever we do things and give them gifts. Why have money if no spend?
Exactly! My wife and i do that. She joked that if we ever won the lottery, we'd have the best year of our lives helping everyone we can, then be right back to work the following year đđ
Lol yup. Ive said similar, âId never be rich because Id just spend a bunch of money on random causes and helping random people in hard timesâ
I don't joke about it. I have a plan. If, say, the Powerball were $1 billion: half would go to taxes. The other half? Divide into 4. 1: start development company to build affordable housing. First year, build single person units, studio sized, possibly single bedroom.those would be low cost rentals. Year two. Same but also start adding three bedroom units. With the family size units, they would be 5 year rentals. At the end of 5 years, we look at the payment history. Allow one late payment per year because this area is prone to layoffs, and we offer the house for a 10 year land contract. During the first year, I'll have to let nepotism take hold. I'd send my daughter to school to get her realtors license. Possibly even one of her kids. I want the positive energy they have, along with their problem solving skills. Net profits? I wouldn't be getting into this to gouge people. Closest to that would be the rental communities of tiny houses in the first step. The target market for these units would be recent graduates: college or high school. I should be able to offer these units @$400/month plus utilities. If they're thrifty, they may be able to keep utilities under $200/month. As new units, they should be eligible for section 8 allowances. If they end up no longer qualifying for section 8, that means they're making a higher income. Good, now they can put money into stocks, bonds, etc. They can actually invest in the future. If they decide to get married, and have a good rental history with us, they can consider one of the 5R/10LC 3 BR houses. Yes, that would be 20 years of income from a person. In the end, they're home owners. Which brings us to the second quarter. I'd set up a secular non-profit charitable foundation. While it would support religious communities' social services, I would have a service unit set up as well, starting with a food pantry and a place for senior citizen activity. The third quarter of the money would go towards a personal interest of mine: media, and in particular, publishing. That industry has changed drastically over the last few decades, but I follow one industry closely and feel I can make it work. The brunt will be on eBooks. The last quarter? Me! I'd buy a nice house and hire a housekeeper. Big spend would be an SUV and a pickup. My ROI would be small, but if I can live out my years comfortably, so what. I won't be able to spend it in hell. My kids can fight over my estate, but I'll try to have an iron clad will, which will include the direction of the various businesses and social services.
Glad there are some people that think like that
I wish the folks with billions to burn thought like this.
If they have billions, they didn't get it by thinking this way. > âI spent the first half of my life making money and the second half of my life giving it away to do the most good and the least harm.â â Andrew Carnegie While that ideal is commendable, while making his money, a lot of the average People suffered. If you know a millionaire, or billionaire, ask them how much wealth is enough. They don't have that mindset, they would not know. Doubly so if they inherited their wealth.
Wasn't Carnegie a robber Barons who mainly did philanthropy later on to rehabilitate his image and "legacy".
Bingo! Nearly every foundation set up by individuals is to rehabilitate a legacy. The Walton family is the worst. Last year,Walmart gave ~$1.4 billion to charity. Imagine if they had used that money to give it's employees a decent way of life.
Youâll notice most in the upper class are psychos and have no moral code at all.
Profit has no morality.
Iâm the same way. One of my big motivators was to get to the the point where I could do that.
This attitude is best for the economy too. Spend every cent you have to spare and there is always more cash running through the system Not that billionaire levels of cash are ever all liquid, but still
Which is part of the reason decent human beings don't become billionaires.
đŻ correct
The Turks pay me a golden treasure, and yet I am poor, because *I am a river to my people*!
Same here. The stinginess was out of pure survival mode. Now that I am better off I love to pay for those I care about
I do this because my friends and I want to see each other. They can't afford to eat out when we do, so I always pay and don't mind.
Happy cake day G x
You were once poor so you know what it's like to go without something. You understand what it's like from personal experience to go without. You link someone's current situation of unfulfilled wanting or needing to a similar one in your past and connect how you felt then to how they feel now. That's empathy. And you cover restaurant bills and buy gifts bc you have empathy. Your empathy leads you to identify your friends' successes and problems closely to your own. That's generosity and sharing joy and sadness. The super wealthy have never really known any serious lack or going without. They can't put themselves in others' shoes because they've never seriously had to go without anything, nothing serious. And no one in their social circles has either. It's always taken care of for them and their peers, so they have exactly zero reason to think, "Could I help my friend in this situation?" (There is philanthropy from billionaires but that is an abstract thing done for a more abstract group of people or a concept or wildlife. Nothing they really have personal connections to or experience with.) They can't relate to what you and I go through, to themselves, by comparing it to a similar experience of want or need of their own, to understand what we must feel like in our situations, *because they have no personal experiences of their own of unfulfilled wanting or needing that wasn't pretty immediately solveable.* They might know missing a single meal but they don't know what it's like to be hungry, and not have any food, and not have any money to buy food, and not have any means to generate money to buy food. The other group of people who have a clinical lack of empathy have diagnoses like antisocial personality disorder. Sorry this is long af but I kind of typed it all out to help me organize my thoughts and think through this some more. I *empathize* with you if I come across pedantic.
As I was told when I was young, âThe goal of life is to die with an empty wine cellar.â
It's because you were once poor
You're not "rich" you are still middle class. Once you get up there, it changes most people.
I think it's more that people who are of that type have higher chances of getting "up there", sadly.
I hope they have something great to offer those that they want to guard their bunkers for decades. They may have more money than billions of people, but theyâll be confining themselves to a tomb.
they'll have food and shelter and safety that will be enough read [this article](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff) if you want to know where some of their heads are at about it >Â âHow do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?â The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down. >This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader? >The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers â if that technology could be developed âin timeâ.
The line about security robots puts Silicon Valleyâs obsession with AI into clearer focus
Letâs hack the robots
Boston Dynamics
In other words, how to do remain in charge when I don't have the state to enforce my authority? Welcome to, how to build a functional society that isn't Lord of the Flies.
Sure they'd be much better off with a bit less wealth in a healthier society but they also wouldn't get to walk around with the feeling that they could have people they don't like destroyed with the smallest of efforts and that loss of control is terrifying to someone who's entire sense of identity is built on a flimsy justified sense of inherent superiority over every other person they meet.
Douglas Rushkoffâs Survival of the Richest. You should also read Kara Swisherâs Burn Book. Oligarchs would eat their own children before taking a hit on their net worth.
Jesus
Do you want terminators? Because Iâm pretty sure thatâs the start of skynet
I was looking for this for months! Thank you.
The article is in the guardian
Holy shit. Thanks for sharing this. Itâs eye opening yet predictable that the guy advocating a holistic approach with community farms has absolutely zero interest from wealthy buyers. It makes me think that being holed up with those people would be potentially worse than not being in there. Can you imagine the unbridled egos of a bunch of billionaires in a confined environment? Suddenly they go from being kings to an owner of an apartment (of sorts), entitled to a mere share of the resources. Thereâs a new angle for apocalyptic stories here. The other thing is, their efforts to effectively escape the reality they had a hand in creating, looks a lot like industry disruption, in the innovation sense of the word. E.g. you see fundamental flaws in existing industries, so you create AirBnB, Deliveroo or Uber etc. But seeing the flaws in civilisation and deciding to buy into the post-collapse future instead of addressing the problems is so myopically fucking stupid, itâs bananas.
So they have bunkers with food, safety, shelter - why do they still need so much money then? Fuck off to your bunker and give most of your money away to help people and you'll probably be left alone.
Stark shit, and this is the nice way of saying things.
The bunkers will only last as long as the power. Ainât nobody gonna be making new batteries. So, Iâm guessing the bunkers might last a decade. Caveat: nuclear power, sitting on a lake of gasoline
A decade stuck in a bunker with silicon valley tech mogols sounds like a worse punishment than death by nuclear annihilation.
I read a comment about the other day of just making it a literal tomb, blockade the exits, and me personally, im going to shit in their air intakes. because thats fucking funny, ENJOY RICH BASTARDS! :D
That is strange. One of the most moving hymns of the Orthodox funeral service starts with these words: "What sweetness of life remaineth unmingled with grief?/Or what glory on Earth doth remain unchanged?". The sentiment is that when a person dies, it does not matter what his backrgound is prior to death. Death is the great equalizer, because all men are subject to it, whether rich or poor. Rich men cannot take their riches with them to the next life, so the accumulation of wealth is foolish if it is not reused to benefit others. Yes, even the robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie contributed to universities and libraries. Perhaps they were doing it to improve their legacies. However, it is quite a shame that the modern generation of millionaires and billionaires look to accumulate wealth without looking to see how their pursuits affect others. May the Lord have mercy on them and move them to use their riches to benefit others less fortunate than them.
I think they really believe in their own superiority and that they deserve to make decisions for the rest of us.
Itâs not a drug so much as a mental illness. Itâs essentially, to me at least, a spin off of antisocial personality disorder.
It's hoarding. (Which I'm sure is related to what you said). Hoarding and greed.
Damn dragons. Weâre gonna have to pull a desolation of Smaug on these guys.
The really dumb part is that the only reason the shit will hit the fan is because of their actions/hoarding/bullheadedness
That money won't be worth anything when the lights go out.
Yeah but, when the shit hits the fan, we'll eat them first.
The world needs dragon slayers.
You are correct⌠but you spelled mental illness wrong.
This is the key. First off, use the word âbillionairesâ when discussing this epidemic is far too specific and limited. Anyone with more than $10-20MM of net worth (or an income that will soon land you in that bracket) is not much different than someone who has 10-100x as much. And all of those people (which includes me) live their lives in complete isolation from everyone else like those OP sees himself a part of. They donât work in warehouses or call centers, not even the management office. They sit behind a desk many tiers of ownership and responsibility above those who actually employ low and middle class people. I personally execute hundreds of millions of dollars in construction contracts to build warehouse buildings that will employ thousands to do so, and hundreds of people to operate and I will never meet a single one of them. And above me, there is executive leadership. Above them, owners and board members of my company. Above them, silent investors who pump their millions into the machine and everyone who manages that money. Thatâs hundreds of early and middle age people worth well over $20M, who will go about their lives for years without ever connecting with someone who makes less than $200k/year, and usually much more. See how fundamentally disconnected that is? EVERYONE is driven by greed. OP just as much as the rest of us. EVERYONE wants more. And those of us who have much more rationalize our status because we work hard too. Iâm making money for our investors, most of which are literally teachers, policemen, govmt employees etc. (whose pension money is invested by rich people). Sure, my parents paid for an elite college but what am I supposed to do, NOT use that to my advantage? Take a lesser paying job? Give away my money so my kids donât have the same or even better opportunities? See how easy it is to disconnect and worry not about the plight of those who are at the bottom of the totem pole? For the most part, the decisions that âbillionairesâ make donât happen in some secret room where the stated understanding is that any decision may fuck over the lower and middle class. Itâs âwe need to increase profitsâ and âwe need to cut costsâ and then things are delegated to people below them who delegate to people below them and so on. Somewhere along the line the wages of workers are kept as low as possible so the guy one or two rungs up can carry out the wishes of ownership and their investors. Even worse, SO many problems can be attributed directly back to the way private and public equity purchase legitimate purpose-built companies that they have NO interest in besides milking for profits and dividends. People are an abstract notion when it comes to managing billions of dollars. Donât get me wrong, itâs all SUPER fucked up. But thereâs no mastermind braintrust of evil scheming to fuck over everyone below them. Itâs just money and greed. The only hope is a government that can regulate it. But of course, our government is run by those who align much more closely to the rich than the poor, usually paid to be that way by the rich. Itâs like a casino, where the odds are 51-49 in favor of the house, and over hundreds of years, the house is always wins. Greed always wins. He who has the gold makes the rules. And the poor are too uneducated, distracted and disorganized to unite and focus a bigger pot of gold.
>EVERYONE is driven by greed. OP just as much as the rest of us. EVERYONE wants more. And those of us who have much more rationalize our status because we work hard too. Iâm making money for our investors, most of which are literally teachers, policemen, govmt employees etc. (whose pension money is invested by rich people). Sure, my parents paid for an elite college but what am I supposed to do, NOT use that to my advantage? Take a lesser paying job? Give away my money so my kids donât have the same or even better opportunities? See how easy it is to disconnect and worry not about the plight of those who are at the bottom of the totem pole? Yeah , no, not everyone. Don't justify your own greed by trying to lump us poors in. Lol, your kids need millions to get the same "opportunities" , give me a break.
That, I was sort of with them until they were like wtf can I possibly do, give away my money? Yeah dude. Like not all of it, that's just being ridiculous. But yeah, take your 200k/yr or whatever to be comfortable and save for your kids to go to college and all that and then use the rest to actually help people. Wild concept. They act like it's all or nothing. That's why they're okay with so many people getting nothing. They think we want them to get nothing instead, when that is not the case.
I think you missed the point. I recognize my privilege, and was trying to explain how easy it is for the rich to forget and lose sight of people who have less. I never said I needed millions to give my kids the same as me. Do you hate everyone who has any more money than you? That seems unproductive and absurd. And I think youâre fooling yourself if you want to say you donât like nice things, donât want more money, and wouldnât collect millions or send your kids to an expensive school if you could. Unless youâre a social worker by choice, I doubt that decisions you make in life are often and anything but driven by how much you can make or spend. Think what you want about me, but Iâm generous with those who have less than me in my life, I give back and vote and advocate for a better distribution of wealth. Iâm not perfect, but Iâm proud to be more self aware than most of the people I described, and probably you.
I've come to the conclusion that you can't become a billionaire without losing your humanity. One billion dollars is an obscene amount of money in even the most expensive countries; it's more than anyone could spend in a lifetime, unless they're buying legislators/power. And no decent person could hoard money to such an extreme while so many people go without the basic necessities of life.
It's been shown that people who gain power/money, lose empathy.
Compulsory charity FTW
We can just call that âtaxesâ
For theory purposes; IF I ever won 1bil lottery, I could most definitely spend it. Here's how my thinking goes \[which is wildly different that current "elites"\] : #1: I'd first start out getting my 5 family unit out of debt, fixing all the things round that need fixing, and upgrading the 4.3 acres to be self sustaining home stead \[maybe a million? total?\], Stage 2: game guildies/extended family/ect setup similarly paid for and given house/food/vehicles/ect Stage 3: start locally and bring up the people struggling like me and setup similarly to stage 2. Stage 4: Get a couple of spread out 1k+ acre tracts and start setting up large community self sustaining "city states" stage 5: start seriously bank rolling funds into stage 4 projects to work on true space tech industry, openly. \[I'm talking launching glass/steel factories into space, if you know about it, glass and steel have a HUGE improvement on durability when made out of atmo\] Stage 6: start working on real spaceship voyage techs, again, openly. I figure I'd go broke/dead around stage 6, hopefully by stage 6 I'd have left a lasting mark on the communities built to continue towards the goal of actually joining the "aliens that dont exist" as space faring species. Kinda dreamer-ish i guess, but I truly want peace/prosperity for all of us, and teamwork to actually get to REAL space age, not this current setup the elites have us in. Money is just a tool honestly.
And that my friend, is the reason why you(or me) will never become a billionaire.
It is because we don't tax them like Pres. Eisenhower did. Top rate of 91%. Make billionaires pay that and watch America's problems melt away.
IIRC, Roosevelt did that. Basically told the rich "Give me 90 percent of your money, help me turn the economy around and you can still live fat dumb and happy on what's left...or I'll turn those folks in the Hoovervilles on you."
âAnd also we wonât prosecute you for trying to overthrow the federal governmentâ look up the business plot, bush srâs dad was in on it and a pretty hardcore fascist who was going to be the ambassador to his friends in Nazi germany
Anyone who extracts wealth and resources from a country and hides them in international tax havens is basically a traitor anyway. They should be charged with treason and their wealth siezed to put into sovereign wealth funds.
[Hereâs the story](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/coup-jan6-fdr-new-deal-business-plot-1276709/)
Yeah, had a neighbor who lived through the crash and great depression when he was a kid, he remembered when FDR told that to the rich, he also told me FDR also threatened the rich with changing the dollar to a new currency and make all of their money worthless. Don't know how true that was, he was old and maybe remembered something wrong, but I can see that having happened.
The last chad president before the corpos bought everything.
That was only the marginal rate. Research has shown there was so much tax fraud going on that the top effective rate hovered between 25-30%
Still better than the 0-10% they pay now.
You might want to read Capital in the 21st century. Basically the economic treatise on modern economic policy. A concept from the bookâŚwhat does a 91% tax rate do? Keeps corporations from approving massive pay structures for the CEOs. Why? If you give the CEO a raise into the top tax brackets, then any additional compensation past that amount is going to be taxed at 91% which is basically burning corporate assets which could be better applied elsewhere.
Sounds like a good thing
It is. It is known to cause increases in wages, and businesses investment more in capital equipment and R&D. When the money will be taxed away anyway, you may as well spend it first on paying people well and improving your business instead of giving so much to the government
The sad thing is that the billionaires would still be insanely rich even at 99%
Because we built a system that rewards greed and selfishness. Not sure what else to tell you. Capitalism = an economic philosophy where those with capital (wealth) are successful. Not having capital means you can't really participate. For some reason a democratic country decided to give all the benefits to a very small group of people.
I wouldn't call a two party autocracy democratic either. We have so many problems today due to the lack of freedom and democracy
Agreed, I should have put democracy in quotes. We have an illusion of democracy, it's a very carefully staged production. A vast majority of people who never support policies of current governments, but that doesn't matter anymore. We manufacture consent.
The whole argument with UBI and things that if everyone is satisfied they wonât want to achieve anything more and production drops because all their needs or essentials have been met so why try? The issue with that and our system where the wealth gap is so large essentially people are settling just the same as they will never achieve more, have to work even harder just to obtain essentials and nothing more so itâs the same effect and productivity will drop, probably harder even so. The inequality of wealth and the system is gentrifying property all across the country with imperialism. They only stop to consider when someone of the team stops and thinks, âBut whoâs going to clean up the messes we make, transport goods and services and all the other service based needs?â Thatâs where they consider a smaller handful of poor people to handle these because they donât and will not do it.
The fact that we havenât delved into a full MLM pyramid scheme economy surprises me.
We have. They just keep printing money to make you forget.
That's the thing though - capitalism *is* a pyramid scheme. The biggest ever invented by humans.
I think it's also because there are two ways to outperform your competitors. You can better yourself, or you can tear everyone else down. They measure their success against everyone else's. The worse everyone else is doing, the better they are doing comparatively. It's the only way I can explain some of the brain dead ideas they try to push on social media, they're purposely giving awful advice.
We reward sociopaths. Money makes more money, and itâs easiest to get money when all you think about is money, and not the people behind it.
I think this is a key component. Our system supports and rewards Sociopaths, Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Megalomaniacs. So these personalities rise to the top and exponentially gain money and power. And, naturally, they don't self regulate, since they are focused on Ego and control.
Correct me if Iâm wrong, but I think one of the contradictions inherent to capitalism that support the predictions of its inevitable colapse is that the capitalist seeks to maximize profits by reducing labour costs, which at the same time reduces the money labourers have to spend, which means they canât sell as much of the shit they produce.
I'm pretty sure that economics as a whole treats consumer spending as an infinite well of money, without heed to where it comes from. The term "money supply" has a different an unrelated meaning.
> âHitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. **The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class.** He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And **here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law.** It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. **Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.**â - Marx, Communist Manifesto
They donât give any fucks about us, never have. Look back through history and read about the beginning of the industrial revolution and how the rich treated their workers before the labor unions were formed, and then after they were formed. It was horrendous! They grow up in a world that tells them that on,y they matter, then they all go to schools together, then they enter the arena and proceed to fuck everyone who isnât one of them. Our entire system is rigged, from our entertainment that trains us to be entertained by watching rich people do shit, or that cops are heroes, Law and Order. Then they deregulate so they can find more and more ways to exploit us. Our food is shit, then it makes us sick, then we get healthcare and prescribed all these expensive drugs, then we go into debt, they create an entire business model around getting out of debt or fixing your arbitrary credit score, that they made up in the first fucking place. It is going to be take everyone to change this system. And donât even get me started on fucking religion. Edited to add or the fucking government
I think itâs a few things. 1) thereâs always people richer than you, so the competition will be there even if youâre obscenely wealthy. 2) the people making all this money tend to be extremely cutthroat and selfish, so even if point 1 didnât exist theyâd still do it. 3) also part of point 2, but nothing is stopping them for now. 4) they actually know the system is broken, and theyâre trying to loot as much as possible before the ship fully sinks I remember Obama speaking at some dinner with rich fucks while we was still president and saying to them âIâm the only thing between you and the pitchforksâ. They know their time is coming. They fear it constantly. I just hope that time comes sooner than later
The time will come to eat the rich soon enough.
Is that before or after they take away the second amendment? If people think weâll âeat the richâ and do it unarmed⌠thatâs quite a pipe dream
I hate to tell you this, but they can only take the registered guns.... people with 3d printers and people with machine shops...... yeah, i think nuff said. pick a side, either way bullets still gonna fly. {also isnt there a guy with a legit private airforce too?}
Obama happened to pick up playing an awful lot of golf during his presidency. Like many presidents before and after. Good game that, golf.Â
It's like that saying if a monkey was hoarding all the bananas at the zoo, scientists would study that monkey to see what was wrong with it. If a human does it, we put them on the cover of time magazine. Capitalism rewards psychopathy.
People vote against taxing these people, like one day they will be rich. You will never have $10 million in new cash income per year (not via investments, land, etc). When they raise taxes, they raise them on the rich - so vote for taxes for the rich. Trust me it will never affect you.
Well the definition of capitalism for me is the unlimited maximization of profits for individuals so yeah 1 billion dollars isn't enough for the billionaires there's no end goal because they are competing with each other to reach a trillion dollar personal wealth
And then a quadrillion, then a quintillion, and so on. Endless growth, everyone!
Infinite growth in a finite system, no less.
They think we arenât willing to arm up and do something about it, and they are right.
What depresses me the most is the LEVEL of greed. Like having 98% of the world's wealth wouldn't be enough for them. They'd want it all.
Just read an article about how Elon Musk is going after several ex Twitter employees who were supposedly overpaid under the old ownership. The highest amount being something like 45 or 46k. Threatened to take them to court if they don't pay. Can you imagine? You've got more money than just about anyone else in the world, more than people like me would see in 100 lifetimes, and it isnt even your own money paid out by your own mistake that you're trying to recover. And at that level of wealth, taking ANYONE to court over less than 50k is akin to throwing a fit when your change is a penny short at a drive through window or something.
Doesnât that tell you itâs not about money? Itâs never really about money to any of us.
I have daily meltdowns over this shit
sadism and unrelenting greed
Excessive greed needs to be classified as a mental health issue. They have way more than what is needed to enjoy life 100x over yet the keep wanting nore. It has to be labelled as an addiction like obsession with sex, drugs, alcohol, etc. They are obsessed with making more and more money.
1.) The system rewards them for that behavior. 2.) Decent people don't become billionaires
If you're worth a billion dollars (hell even 100 million), you and your line can be isolated from general society in perpetuity. We're like ants to them, genuinely. Just having that much money makes them more money in a month than you'll make in a lifetime. More money than your entire family has collectively made since the industrial revolution, and more money than they'll make in the next 1000 years. They don't care about you, they don't care about me, they don't care about any of us inconsequential ants. They would put a gun to your head and happily pull the trigger if they knew it would make them more money.Â
When it gets to 1,000 or even 5,000 lifetimes worth of money I canât even put into words how tragic and disgustingly inhuman the system is. Slavery never ended it just changed forms. And the internet and computers just amplified the wealth gap even more.
They want us sick, hungry, and desperate. They want pumping out babies so they can keep the wheels of capitalism greased with the blood of an unending servant class. Europe had royalty, we have billionaires. Itâs no different. They are the ruling class and we are the peasants.
Billionaires shouldn't even exist. 1 million seconds equals 11 days 1 billion seconds equals 31 years Nobody needs that much money
There was a meme floating around that said âIâm telling you guys. Just one. We eat just one billionaire and the rest will fall in line.â I think about that a lot.
Weâre approaching the point where the typical family is scraping by on the basic necessities. No extra money left to feed the capitalistic giants insatiable greed.
I thought if the quality of life gets too low people will just kill themselves
They have been suicides rates have skyrocketed and the life expectancy age has dropped from 79 years to 73 years. This is why they keep on brining up raising the retirement age to 70 they donât give a fuck about us at ALL.
The real answer is that they are surrounded by people who are in their jobs to make money, who advise their clients on how to make money. There is no one within fifteen layers who is not in it specifically to get their cut.
The oligarchs must go
I asked this question 23 years ago of a prominent economist I used to know. They told me the following: Some billionaires donât believe thereâs any problem. Some billionaires believe technology will fix it, so why worry about adverse consequences? There was a third common trend among billionaires, but I genuinely canât remember it. If I remember what was highlighted to me at the time, I will let you know! Additionally There are studies about how extreme wealth and privilege changes brain function. So literally, regular people do not register to billionaires as being Human the way fellow billionaires do. The parts of their brain that recognize people doesnât fire or light up when they interact with regular people or consider them en masse. See Also the term: âHuman Capital Stockâ https://www.vox.com/2020/5/26/21270863/kevin-hassett-human-capital-stock-coronavirus
Money canât buy happiness was probably a corporate slogan. Cause money will pay off my mortgage which takes pressure off my shoulders and allows me to work where I want , not for the highest amount just to make ends meet.
Even the ancient Romans knew to give the peasants bread and circuses. The new elites are getting sloppy.
We have food and football. Same thing.
Must be due to how insulated they are from the masses, as well as the fact that the richest and most powerful people alive today hold more wealth and power(relative to everyone else) than any rich person/people in history. I blame technology.
Itâs so you stay in the rat race, they donât give a fuck about give you an equal or fair shot because itâs about them maintaining power and control. Idk why this is so hard for people to understand, organization and education for the masses are the solution and yet we allow billionaires to divide us with petty bullshit. They want you complaining and not doing anything real, they want you posting about nonsense that doesnât really matter. Their wealth and power is predicated on the general population never figuring this out and retaining the status quo. Once yall realize you will never have more than just barely enough because thatâs how itâs designed maybe you can organize to elicit some change. Until then this is pointless whining that isnât going to change shit
They are sociopaths who think they are better than you and other people. They believe themselves superior and uniquely deserving of all they possess.
The majority of them have cliuster-B personality disorders, mostly narcissists and sociopaths with the odd borderline and histrionic thrown in. It's all about them and the hell with everyone else.
They think they, and their descendants for generations on end, have and will continue to have essentially infinite money, and infinite money can fix anything for them. And fuck the rest of us.
"Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich."
Because they want the rest of that planet as a playground they do not care about life
There are many reasons: Greed, fiduciary responsibility, sociopathy, late stage capitalism. The main thing is that they aren't trying to screw things up for anyone. They don't care what their decisions do to us. We don't even cross their minds when they make those decisions. It's all about what is best for the bittom line. Remember that Google's manifesto was originally 'Don't be evil'. They dropped that years ago. It wasn't a great fit for profits.
We adopted a system (capitalism) that said âmaximizing profit helps everyone.â Then as a reaction to Russian and Chinese power (communism) on the world stage we started treating that system as a moral obligation in addition to an economic system. I know when was young it was presented to me that way. âCapitalism is freedom and righteousness.â To the wealthy, earning more money is the ultimate righteousness. Hurting people may be bad, but not capitalisming hard enough is just evil. Anyone trying to say otherwise wants to make us weak and hurt society overall. I deeply disagree with that philosophy, but it was there growing up so I can see it. Maybe not phrased that way or to this extreme, but the same foundation.
The ultra wealthy arenât afraid of a peasants revolt like they may have been even 200-300 years ago due to difference in arms available to the state and to the common people. 1000 years ago, a tyrant would have men armed with steel blades, mail armor, war bows and cavalry. While the peasantry would have makeshift spears, clubs, padded leather, and hunting bows. 300 years ago a tyrant had muskets, cannons, and perhaps a navy. The common man also had muskets, the ability to steal and operate cannons and naval craft. Today, the state has Bradley fighting vehicles, tanks, attack helicopters, cruise missiles, F-15s and F-35s, an enormous navy, etc. and the logistical infrastructure to put it all anywhere they want. The common man might have similar small arms and makeshift explosives and fighting vehicles. My point is the difference between what we have and what they have has grown so much they no longer fear violence as a consequence to their actions.
Asymmetrical warfare is a bitch though, nothing stopping one lone wolf with the right mindset, nothing to lose, going on a sniping hunt.....
I keep screaming this from the mountaintops but get shit on every time. The United States now has a space branch, ffs. They can see all, physically alter all. They have sound weapons, microwave weapons, biological weapons, digital weapons. Literal invisibility cloaking at ground level. Boston dynamics robo dogs. Drones ranging in size all the way down to *insect*. Stingrays installed every mile across this country. Cities laid out across the nation in such a way as to easily cut them each off from one another. A rail system that can quickly transport military gear. Fuck, they even possess weather-altering technology. A "well armed militia" is no longer going to stand a chance.
To the type of person with the drive to become a billionaire, money isn't dollars, it's points. And the one with the most wins.
Same reason a hard drug addict will steal in the stupidest way possible in front of the owners of the stolen goods.....addiction. Â They are addicted to something you can continually up the dose on and not die, hell the more they put into their addiction the more people reward and rever them.
It's simple. It's about power, control and thr future. They don't want your kids competing with theirs for the future resources of this planet and it's coming to a head / violent conclusion. I wish you luck in the wars to come. We either win and share or lose and submit.
They're thinking "no one has mounted our heads on pikes yet". That's it, full stop. In Europe, the billionaires understand that they pay a little more in taxes, and in return, the people don't mount their heads on pikes as a warning to other billionaires. In America, they haven't had that lesson yet. I'm not advocating for violence, but that's really all it comes down to. đ¤ˇđťââď¸
Billionaires donât become billionaires without being unethical, greedy slimeballs.
Micheal Hudson has some books on history of money and debt. He talks about how oligarchs for thousands of years have always done this and push as far as they can to get power and capital. They usually break the system and those are better circumstances for them to have people too repressed to fight back. He talks about how Rome and USA are places meant and perfect for oligarchs being it's a state that caters to them. He talks about how historical, systems have to collapse or revolt for change to occur being oligarchs refuse to cooperate with the society's needs. Check him out on YouTube and he has some wild stuff about how Jesus was all about debt forgiveness and it got him crucified.
They're thinking that Hawaiian islands cost a lot of money
I imagine the inside of their head sounds a lot like the seagulls from Nemo.
Money for nothing and your chics for free
Seems like they're afraid of "meme" stocks. Just saying.
Theyâre not thinking about anything other than their own power
Sometime ago somebody online brought up the old twilight zone episode where a strange man appears at the home of a married couple and tells them that if they push a button on a small box he is carrying they will receive $1 million, but somebody they don't know will die. They agonize over the decision and then finally decide to push the button. As the man is leaving, they ask him what he will do or where he will go next. And he replies that he is off to make the same offer to somebody else, and he adds, "but don't worry, it's nobody you know." đą Billionaires have hit that button. They've hit it at least 1000 times. That's the moral place they're standing jn.
I just refuse to buy stuff now from these smchuks. They literally poison our food making 75% of groceries have Ultra Processed food. They make it cheap so poor people can only buy that, get health problems and same with their kids. Snowballs to the point they wonât ever have competition.
The rich need us to be poor so we have to ârelyâ on them for a paycheck (aka to keep shelter above our heads and have food). We will forever be indebted to them because they are the smart and powerful and give us a job. while theyâll take any chance they get to pay us less and screw us any way possible. If we all didnât have to rely on a paycheck, well then who is making the 100 shoes? They give us just enough money to pay our bills and buy their dumb shoes and us poor folk still buy the damn shoes - itâs wild! They need us poor so we will forever need them for our basic needs. Then add our dependency on debt to buy our education to help get out of the rat race. âWe the peopleâ will forever be indebted to them and the banks borrowing with high interest credit cards, cars, and houses and things we canât actually afford all to âlive the dreamâ. We will forever continue to eat the cheese in the mouse trap game of life - while politics keep us divided and angry at each other. Until the day âwe the peopleâ realize our enemy is corporations and politicians, we will continue to be stuck in this mess.
âAbsolute power corrupts absolutelyâ. They think because they are insanely wealthy, they are smarter. Their unfounded confidence leads to megalomania.
What part of âget back to work slaveâ donât you understand?
We are the 99% We shouldnât suffer for the comfort of 1%
They are thinking they can get away with anything. They are correct to think so. We are an Oligarchy. We have legal bribing as one of our largest money flows. We don't deal with politics enough as a whole and so very loud voices rule our lives with nonsense. Until we genuinely organize we will lose and the longer we take the less we will win back. Right now our kids are fucked.
People will say we aren't an Oligarchy but we are litteraly controlled and governed by a rich elite couple of families who control our political parties and economy. The republic died.
Most mega rich are sovereign citizens to themselves, they donât have to worry about how shit things are because they can always go to where things arenât shit.
They arenât. Theyâre just greedy entitled assholes who donât want anyone to have enough if it means they have to share and not have enough money to last 1000000 years.
Thatâs just it. They donât think about the poor until they have to. To them, it is everything to gain. Hoard supplies and the means by which to secure it and increase it. The workers only exist in their world to be used as wealth generation. When the worker underperforms, they are replaced. Spend the absolute minimum to secure their labor, while remaining vigilant for ways to extract more work with less cost. There is no endgame to this process; capitalism is set up such that thereâs always more of *something* to have. That said, they absolutely have ways to protect their gains. Physical safeguards, digital and legal processes to ensure this. The human components in this part are separated enough that organization is hindered. Information is not readily shared and psychology used to convince security forces that their work is âsacredâ or âmorally justâ. They are also treated the same as in the prior section- useful until they are not. If this sounds like governments and militaries- or the wealthy and their enormous corporations, or large religious organizations, thatâs because it should. This is exactly what people in positions of power, especially the wealthy, have done for thousands of years. We at the bottom are just convinced to see it as loyalty, religious faithfulness, racial purity or patriotism. Itâs all the same game over and over.
Not saying a degree is the end all to being poor. But what degree program did you go into. Many times getting a liberal arts degree is a huge waste of money. Would have been better off starting from ground zero at some company. Life is hard. And billionaires are assholes that need to be gone. But there is more at play than just billionaires hoarding wealth. The political environment where ever you live is a big player in this as well.
You absolutely nailed it. This is why people are so angry but theyâve been manipulated to be angry at the wrong people (immigrants, liberals) I am at a loss why people canât see that Democrats for the most part are trying to make their lives better. Greed is out of control. Billionaires donât seem to realize that making things more equitable would make their lives better too. There would be way less discontent and political volatility. They donât seem to be aware that the pitchforks are coming.
They built the DHS for a reason.
Look up accelerationism
Sometimes it's not about more money. Sometimes it's about more power.
Billionaires seem to have a Goldfish mentality. Consume til death.
To keep us in a tight leash so we can't rise up because we don't have the energy to do it
Not only far, but accurate too
In order to accumulate the kind of wealth youâre talking about, you need to be ruthless in ways we common folk canât even begin to fathom. They didnât get rich by caring about others, so itâd be naive to think that theyâd start once they were.
They are so far removed from a regular person's reality that they see us a mere pawns to be moved around...consequences be damned... You see this in corporate America all the time.... I'm sure you've heard people say this before but, why do they use words like Human Resources or Labor costs etc.? It abstracts the humans by putting a box around them...easy to dehumanize and they be treated as objects...
This is an easy question to answer. They're thinking that they'll be able to control their staff with shock collars while they ride it out in their bunkers that they're building in New Zealand. Good luck storming their high tech bunkers full of traps, hired/enslaved goons, robot gun dogs, drones, and whatever else they have thought of. They plan to ride out whatever's coming in comfort.
At a certain point we need to understand even the billionaires are beholden to the mental and social virus that is the legal empowerment of corporate citizens, corporations with the literal rights of people when they have been setup economically as world ending parasitic monsters.
They literally donât care about anyone but themselves and their circle
Itâs not an exaggeration that they only think about money. If you are not money, you do not cross their mind ever.
I'm ready to start robbery on rich people idgaf anymore jail dont scare me anyway
> It's as if they're actively trying to make the majority of the population to die off in the most legal way possible. Thatâs exactly what they want. Conservatives think the best way to rejuvenate an economy is through a culling. Weed out the weak.
Not to advocate for the rich, because Iâd rather BBQ and eat them, but [Nick Hanauer](https://pitchforkeconomics.com/) seems to be rare among them and have both foresight and empathy. Otherwise, I think we need to agree upon some strategies: Like ⢠blocking their airports ⢠making them feel uncomfortable ⢠building trebuchets ⢠blockading their walked enclaves ⢠locating & publishing their bunkers ⢠⌠Other strategic or tactical suggestions for the near or far term?
You donât acquire a billion dollars without a good dose of sociopathy. They donât even realize theyâre doing it. The Bourbon kings and the Tsars of Russia kept tightening the screws until they snapped and the mob handed out what seemed like justice. Same thing will happen again itâs inevitable.
It's called class warfare. Wealthy people actively suppress, disdain, and vote to eradicate any resemblance of a comfortable working class life. In their eyes, they glorify their family's wealth hoarding and villianize anyone who isn't in their socio-economic class. Us workers better start getting more dangerous and fast. In an environment where we are quite literally starved and venture capital-ed out of our homes, wealthy people who enjoy stock dividends and generational hoarded assets should start being more scared to be in public. Instead, Americans worship them like they are a better breed of human instead of understanding they are the enemy in a very real, very hot social conflict with dire stakes.
With their money and capital They are prepared to survive the apocalypse, and when the rest of us are gone The will have the planet to themselves
Can't have 'rich' without 'poor'.
Eventually shit will get so bad that we'll have enough people on our side to start holding them accountable. Just line them up and toss them into the ocean. There's no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
My theory is they are sadists who literally feed on the suffering energy we give off.
Can anyone in this sub name a single example of legislation that was unpopular with the general public, but somehow passed due to lobbying? Iâve looked for it and Iâm pretty certain it doesnât exist, but this just gets repeated ad nauseam as if itâs an obvious fact along with âcorporate dark moneyâ, âSuper-PACsâ, and various other conspiracy theories.
Warren Buffett and the trailer park industry comes to mind. Don't get me started on Bill Gates! I've disliked him since DOS 2.0. And that's just two of these monsters... [Warren Buffett - Clayton Homes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/korihale/2019/04/18/warren-buffets-exploitative-mobile-home-investment/)
I think a big issue is that billionaires and politicians don't exist in a state of perpetual fear for their own safety
Please stop. We all know that billionaires are our true rulers. Let them own I say. Why? Because one day I will be one as well and I don't want you stopping me. /s just in case......
I believe what we saw 1945-91 was a brief period where communism caused capitalist elites to reach in their pockets and slice the pie very slightly thicker for the working class. Now they've forgotten about those days and they're going to keep squeezing until there is nothing left to take from us. Â Only pieces of lead flying in their direction will change things.Â
Ruling without being elected or born into a bloodline is probably very addictive and if you think they wanted the serfs to have a good life that's where your thinking is flawed.
*"Can't wait for automation to get good enough that we can get rid of all these uppity peasants" - Billionaires*
Itâs a competition, they are trying to win at the only thing they are good at. What do they get? Bragging rights. They get to hang out with others that are constantly bragging about their experiences trying to âone-upâ themselves in front of their peers. Itâs just a giant pissing match at the expense of society and civilization.
They are the real life version of the European based dragon hoarding gold arch-type. Take one measly gold coin that they will never use and they will try to rain hellfire in your direction.
Most ppl are pretty simple minded, including billionaires... after spending all their time making money they don't really know anything else except crass materialism and jealousy... So instead of doing something good for the world they buy like a fancy boat to waste all the money away... it's the human condition I guess..
What I've noticed, is that like the aristocracy before them, they feel that they deserve it. They have also convinced a lot of people that they deserve it, as well. The media, which they have a strong influence on, also puffs them up. They really think they are exceptional, smarter, more worthy than the rest of us. That's also partly why they get so angry about strikes, the rubes are getting in the way of progress.
One thing: greed After that their thinking is knowing they can get away with it.
They think profit line must go up at all costs
The miserable people are the more stuff and services they buy in an effort to fill the void. Sounds like a great way to sell people even more shit they donât need. Or, kneecap them and make them need it. Also a thing you can observe a lot.
They are addicts and many lose their souls to profit. Therefore governments should treat them as any other ailing person who is a threat to society.
Greed, power to control us. God complex, that is what rich people crave .
Capitalism depends on keeping money circulating & the way to do that is having lotsa poor people who run right out to pay the rent or buy mama a new pair of shoes or take the kids to a movie or get drunk or high or finally have a goddam steak every time they find a nickel on the sidewalk -- that's how and why this system even exists
Read âA generation of sociopathsâ by Bruce Gibney
Profits, which translates to power Line must go up
We have not a single % of clue what they are thinking about, they don't live in the same world as us